3.12.2 Patch Notes Preview

Maybe it will be good in the end.

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SilentVelocity wrote:

Any chance of Vixen's Entrapment being made usable by Bane again or was this an intended nerf to Bane?

I would like to know that, too. Any confirmed informations?

You can tell that the initial intention of heist was that you'd fail more than you'd succeed. The problem with this philosophy is that some builds succeed exponentially while some builds succeed indefinitely and the majority of builds (your overwhelming player base) fail horribly.

There is no difficulty setting for PoE, so overtuning your content to contend with the higher-end builds will always render the mediocre builds completely useless which forces meta builds mandatory to participate. That is inherently bad game design.

The difference between running a terrible build in a map you aren't qualified for, and running heist is that:

1. The loot you do manage to find is yours. It doesn't drop on death.
2. You have 6 attempts per any map
3. Every heist map is a corridor, which significantly raises the difficulty when every encounter boils down to pin-point volley damage, door camping and chokepoints.
4. You don't have any room for error, which means you can't adjust your playstyle or learn from your mistakes. This makes heist a pseudo-HC encounter even when you're on a softcore league. Which continues to enforce the elitist meta-build mandate.

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Legchewer wrote:

I am also in favor of seeing the alert level from monsters increased in some way. I do agree that the way it was before needed some adjusting.

My experience was that I was sometimes able to avoid patrols, but there were also a lot of alert increases I had no control over, mainly with a large number of guards spawning into a reward room.

I think reducing alert level gains by half and increasing drops for rogue gear would have been enough of a change. If you had a build that wasn't optimised for heist (like summoner builds), you could utilise mainly alert reducing gear to be able to loot more chests.

Other builds could then maybe use those slots to improve drops themselves or speed up obstacle clearing.

Not every build needs to have the same level of success with every separate mechanic, the same way that currently some builds are better at running delves or lab. If heist ends up being a core game mechanic, it just means we have more options of progressing in endgame apart from maps.

After the changes, heists have lost almost all sense of tension for me (and they also lost the main part that made them unique from maps and temples). I really liked the league as it was before (if you can look past the bugs, at the mechanic itself). It just needed some finetuning to make the alert level and damage not as punishing.

Now you can go in, take your time to loot everything and even go back out before looting the final chest to almost completely negate any form of risk. That is not exciting to me. Even if they increase alert from chests so that we can no longer loot everything as easily, it will still not feel like an actual "heist", or even a robbery.

Here's hoping GGG will continue tweaking so that we can end up with a fun and interesting mechanic (which I know is still possible).

I fully support this, me and my friends always had our heart racing trying to escape with our pockets full of loot, now you just kill everything on your way there and have less monsters to kill you on your way back. It's too easy now.

First, thx for all of your work ggg.
With your last fix "no alert when u kill monsters" the league heist its totally boring and easy. At the beginin of the league when i was do heist was difficult and very funny, i love mechanics but now...is not a real challange. Fix again please!!!

Well im not worried about the changes and couldnt care less about if the alerts and loot changes make it easier or harder.

I just care about being able to ACTUALLY DO A HEIST TO COMPLETION and not have a crash to desktop... that is really all I care about at this point.

Originally I switched from vulkan to direct x renderer on the first few days and that solved most of my problems, then I got to about lvl 30 and started picking up the new people for heists and ive yet to be able to complete one without a crash since then, and im now at level 56.

Ive literally had 30-40 crashes in trying to do heists mainly it seems its when opening doors to special chests so I eventually gave up on that as just being impossible till fixes, and yet most of the time I can get to the goal chest area and ill crash opening the door to there or if I get real lucky I can actually grab the goal and start booking it for the exit!!

But inevitability somewhere before I get to the exit, a crash will happen out of nowhere.

I have tried switching renderers, ive tried to change my graphics settings (currently they are as low as you can possibly set them). Ive just kinda gave up on doing heists now after I broke down tonight and decided to give it another shot and did 6 straight contracts, each with a crash on every one of them and I got down to where I dont have enough coins to do anymore of them.

At the very least, dont take the coins till after the contract is done as right now ive had to wait to get coins from the story line twice because constant crashing depletes them like a bucket of water shot with a shotgun.

Anyway I feel like im playing an alpha version of the game and there is NO WAY IN HELL I would buy any MTX or extras when I basically cant play the league content anymore because of crashing.

finally

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cgexile wrote:

I guess when I say they failed I am referring to the comment made that I quoted about being unable to preserve the league identity and immersion by making it, again, mainly about ARPG loot and everything else that's more RPG oriented watered down even further. You're talking about some specific players complaining about their favorite build, I guess. To your point which is in response to a different argument, yeah I would agree you have to be mindful of the league mechanic when considering what build to play.

I do tend to point at those builds for being a major influence to why the mechanic was removed. It's not exactly a fair assumption but this change upsets me. I've never seen GGG cave so quickly on such a defining mechanic.

Seems like people want the Action and not the RP in Action-RPG these days. Devolving the genre into a hack n slash with loot.

EDIT: This doesn't even involve the now exploitable mechanics of just going into maps, grabbing chests and leaving without completing the main objective. Even if that didn't yield good rewards (which is does) it's a big red flag the whole mechanic of this league is now busted.

I'm right there with you on BG3 though. I'm a modder for DOS2 so I'll be there porting some of my homebrew classes and if it's not as painful as DOS2 maybe custom champagnes. This is the first time I've gotten to play a game since finishing my Conflux overhaul mod that took 7 months which is probably why I'm esp zealous about a different play style being added to PoE.

So, just a small reminder for people complaining about bugs and crashes and "lack of testing"

Game development is not easy. Path of Exile is a mechanics heavy game, where everything needs to be balanced around everything else. Simpler games that have been in development for years, by larger studios, often come with game breaking bugs on release, and there is ONE release, after years of development. Thing is, you only see the bugs that weren't fixed on release. Devs don't share the list of bugs that have been fixed before, I'd say that would be an interesting read, with the amount of mechanics implemented in this game.

Eventually, it is of course possible to fix vast majority of bugs, but with adding new content, and lack of removal of any old content, things break. Not everything is found, and if found, not everything is high priority enough to be fixed immediately.

So as it is, you can either have a stable and polished game with no or very rare new content, or you can have new, good content often, but there will be bugs. Except, there's a hitch. You can't. Because if there's no new content, there is no Path of Exile. While I personally wouldn't be opposed to slower release schedule, I understand that it is unlikely, and I also understand why is it unlikely to happen.

At the end of it all, GGG is a business that provides a service. Providing a service costs money. While game devs might love their job, they're not going to do it for free, because you kinda need to eat and all that. It is more acceptable to release a bugged content on time and take a week or two to fix issues (which in itself is amazing) than have a month delay. People have short memories. People will complain a little, but will be back in three months. But if there's no new release in three months, people won't be back for the release in six months. And before you go "I would!" well that's one. Unless you're going to personally fund the entirety of development, that's not much help.

So, GGG, thanks for great league and amazing job fixing the bugs. But for all that's holy to you, slow down on murdering Heist mechanics. It was fun the way it was before, I especially enjoyed the death stacks at the door, cause you know, it's fun outsmarting them. It's not difficult. Bring back death stacks, please. And rework alerts.

nice.