How does everyone feel about the new Descent Flameblastions(Champions)?

Hey everybody, I am just sharing my personal experience so far and my own opinion.

For starters, I really like the new tidied up areas and the fact the side areas are going to be in most cases near the middle of the designated zone. This is very nice, it gives you a general sense of direction on where to be after your desired XP goal is achieved. This can allow your path flow to be much smoother and avoid dead ends, backtracking or just the feeling of not having any idea where the exit is. This in the eyes of competitiveness is great that all players are given the same information and can plan around it.


Next up is the trim of 20 minutes from the race time. This right here is what broke the race for me personally.

My take on the old 1 hour Descent Champions was that players were to choose when to progress, when to go back and clear more monsters to get more XP before advancing. This allows for a skill gap in the sense that players are tested in their knowledge plus experience of the areas, the race and racing as a whole. I wouldn't always advance to the next area as soon as I found the exit, depending on my current level and XP I would go back and try to find a few more packs. Mid race I found myself falling maybe 1-2 levels behind because I took a bit of extra time to be more thorough so my XP wouldn't catch up later on and run out of monsters. Generally would place in the top 3 for Scion.

With the new Descent Champions I have no time to even take a few steps backwards. It's a 1 way path. This isn't a bad thing except for only a few classes / setups will consistently be able to reach General with average RNG. The trim basically forces players to kill faster to be able to advance to the next areas quicker, you have to rely more on magic monster RNG and pack size RNG itself to keep you up to par on experience. Even with good weapon crafts it will still be a struggle for non witch/templar users to finish this race with a General kill. I am not saying it isn't possible I am just saying you need a lot more luck in your crafts / drops. This takes out so much of the enjoyment of this race, knowing that I have say 1 in a 20 chance to kill General based on my weapons damage which is completely out of my hands. Sure you still need to survive and actually make it there, you still need some fire res for him... But you wont even make it to him most of the time without having the output required to clear through the zones. Removing a crucial skill set that was accustomed to this race and replacing it with RNG in magic pack / pack size / weapon crafts and drops to me is the worst thing that could happen.

Now for the sword......... This unique is so busted. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/942405 for more of a discussion on the two new uniques. I feel like the sword just buffed witch/templar even more and the Shadow potentially gets left behind again. Glacial Cascade cant compete to Flameblast users in most cases. It's disheartening to think that we are stuck with this for the whole season.


The season is still new, we still only have a couple of the new DC under our belts but watching VODS and putting tons of thought into it, one of my old favorite races now is the same feel of a 3 hour party.

This is all just my experience and opinion. I would really love to hear others. Thanks for reading.

Race was 80-100% determined by pack rng before. Shortening it made things much worse, increased RNG impact on everything.
Flameblast was OP even before 100% buff. It was OP in previous season, where pack rng for witch was the only important thing. Now this 2x swords buffed it even more. Flameblast was better than anything for racing. Now it gets buffed. Rest skills is just dumpster. Take freeze pulse for example, try take down brute with that and then try to do it with flameblast. Its like 3 minutes of pain vs 5 seconds of 2-shot.
And sweetest thing is that this RNG fest is now a signature race. I would call it path of wrong people that responsible for race design. Path of RNG. Path of Balance.
Killing gravicious before was very important. Killing it as witch was possible with eyes closed. Pretty easy as marauder if you dont get screwed by weapon. Hard as duelist cus you not only depend on weapon rng, you also NEED 2-3 pieces of gear with fire resist, not mention lighting res to even get there. Hard as scion, weapon rng as always, 1-2 pieces of fire resist and nice mana potions. Very hard as templar and ranger cus you need insane gear, almost impossible as shadow cus you need flameblast or st drop at first location. Now when race is shorter, killing grav is much harder for those who dont have flameblast. You dont need any extra skill or reaction to be able to do that, all you need is fine weapon, sick density, sick hp+fire/lighting gear. Exp reward for killing grav is much more important. This creates situation when anyone have chance to set unbeatable record with crazy rng, like almost lvl 27 as flameblaster or 26 as melee, if stars align.
Inb4 EL as next season's sig race!

As a shadow racer, my biggest gripe with this race is that the shadow record will be set by some guy who gets flameblast to drop at level 10. I strongly believe that gem drops should be disabled in all races because of this.

Dual swords glacial cascade actually feels pretty strong; at least on par with EK. But as you said, there's no way it can compete with flameblast as can be evidenced by witch/templar records.

My (biased) opinion from a witch point of view:

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terrex wrote:

Next up is the trim of 20 minutes from the race time. This right here is what broke the race for me personally.

(...)

Removing a crucial skill set that was accustomed to this race and replacing it with RNG in magic pack / pack size / weapon crafts and drops to me is the worst thing that could happen.

I agree with you when you say that they reduced the "time management" skill aspect of DC. Knowing how much time you need on average on the last zones so you know when to progress or farm more.
The problem is: lets assume that you always had time to full clear the last 3 zones and kill grav...
Then you have the "time management" skill of knowing how much time you take (on average) to clear those 3 zones so you adjust/farm more earlier zones appropriately.
But then it will all come down to density. Each zone is +2 levels higher. Getting good density on the last 3 zones will matter way more than you going out of your way to farm more in zones 6-10 levels lower.
The density problem is a combination of both not being able to reset zones and not having enough farming time in the race to normalize this layer of rng.

Personally, for flameblasters, this is the problem. We are still figuring out how much time we need on average for the last 3 zones. I would say around 20m but its too early for me to tell. Once people do enough races and figure it out, it will all come down to density.

So you either have a class that can't farm the last 3 zones and kill grav consistently, which means a random drop one race that will make you able to kill grav will probably be a record winning race.
Or you can consistently kill Grav which means you just pray for good density.

Note that before this season, you would look at DC as a single race, a "lets have fun for the lolz" endless ledge type of rng race. And thats exactly what that race should be.
Things change when its the signature race and you now look at it from a set of races over an entire season.

GGG should have known better after the original Descent.
Many people including me made several posts on these forums why DC would be a terrible choice for a signature. Of course, im not a streamer and im not a supporter so i guess it doesnt matter...

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terrex wrote:

Now for the sword......... This unique is so busted. http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/942405 for more of a discussion on the two new uniques. I feel like the sword just buffed witch/templar even more and the Shadow potentially gets left behind again. Glacial Cascade cant compete to Flameblast users in most cases. It's disheartening to think that we are stuck with this for the whole season.

I and im sure many others realized that the sword is completely broken just looking at the stats without even trying it in practice.
And i was actually in shock when i saw that you could even get two of them. My brain just stopped and I stared at the screen for 10 seconds.
I refuse to believe GGG didnt predict the outcome this sword would have with flameblast.


I would prefer if the sword didnt exist for the sake of the density having a lesser impact on records for flameblasters.
And even though the sig records are per class, i do agree that we should strive for having all classes as balanced as possible.
But keep in mind, if the sword/flameblast didnt exist, the problems you (as a non flameblaster) are experiencing with DC would still be there.

In the end, signature races are what they are. You try to do as many as you can hoping you get the one race where you play well and enough RNG stars align to get a good result.
Obviously some race formats are better than others for that.

At this point, i expect anything. I won't be surprised next season if i see an endless ledge or 12m burst signature because people that do 10 races per season don't like >1h+ no special mods normal races.

It is pointless to provide feedback to people that allowed not one, but two of those swords to make it into the signature race; a starter item so broken that you never need anything else for the entire race. They don't read anything other than what they want to read, and the things they implement, they do not test. If this was season 1, maybe 2... I could understand.
Keep up the good work race division of GGG.

Also dont forget that racers who are capable to set the record is like 0.5% of all people who play them. So their opinion versus masses opinion, which one wins? For people who still have fun in this race, who never killed gravicious, who rarely even get to him, who dont race much, for them this race is still fun and now its more of it. They dont care about records, they race for fun and this is what they got.

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jstq wrote:

Also dont forget that racers who are capable to set the record is like 0.5% of all people who play them. So their opinion versus masses opinion, which one wins? For people who still have fun in this race, who never killed gravicious, who rarely even get to him, who dont race much, for them this race is still fun and now its more of it. They dont care about records, they race for fun and this is what they got.

I 100% agree with you. The problem is that it defeats the concept of signature races.
I think they were created precisely to cater to racers that take it a little more seriously.
There's plenty others races you can do in a season if you just want to have fun.

The possible solution for this is to move this fun non-competitive races (descent, d:c, any el's, burst, exiles everywhere, blamts) to separate fun seasons, dense races, no points, just fun.

I think that would be a bad idea. No one would do those races. I do think "fun" races should award points and prizes.

For me, only the signature should be as competitive as possible.

But some people actually care about top 20 overall demis so i guess people's opinions will differ...

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tagpt wrote:

I think that would be a bad idea. No one would do those races. I do think "fun" races should award points and prizes.

For me, only the signature should be as competitive as possible.

I think 50 minutes would have been a lot more reasonable, more time for other builds / classes to catch up. Or to be honest just leaving it the way it was at a one hour race. The extra time just gives the leeway for other builds that aren't flameblast to progress. Too dependent on RNG for weapon crafts and drops with attacker builds.