What Happened with Items

Ok, let's assume you are in good faith with item drops and with the forthcoming changes on AN mods...then what about harvest? An explanation is due.
The nerf there was uber-massive, both in terms of quantity and quality. Do you understand how important harvest was for non-hardcore gamers to even have a possibility of crafting starting gear? Following the (nerf)balance changes on drops and player defences, it became the only reasonable glimmer of hope to leave white maps without one of the same few meta builds or unreasonable time investment. Shifting currency drop weight on rare monsters with uncalibrated stacks of AN modifiers just exacerbated the problem. If your build is not capable of handling them, just say goodbye to the biggest chunk of loot (is the coming AN nerf accounting for this?).
Playing off-meta and experimenting is more frustrating now than it has ever been, and progression feels miserable at best. Approaching the game by self and learning without spoiling yourself with copy-pasted metas from streamers should be the core experience of any RPG, now it's mandatory. Are you really ok with this vision? I am not.

Loot is still scarce in white maps and incredibly tedious to get behind AN self-healing bullet sponges. Bring harvest back and you have a possibility to remedy to this mess of a patch, at least for normal players.
Completely remove that lifeforce cost idea and directly itemize the crafts from the horticoltural stations. Like it was before, but with much higher capacity at the harvest craft station. If you really want to keep some grind and progression, make the slots in the harvest craft station limited, with capacity upgradeable by lifeforce (in the same way as sulphite capacity can be expanded with azurite). finally, bring back the crafts that you unreasonably took away

Bye

No thanks

Its pain re-learning the D3 key bindings again after 4 years, but S27 here i come!

It disgusts me to see a compagny this good getting so much shit. Like seriously can we remember that GGG is the compagny that :
-has an entierly free to play game with new content every 3 months
-listen to feedbacks and change a lot of things with the players in mind
-admit when they made mistakes
-comunicate openly about pretty much all subjects
-take risks with the game

Those people here and on reddit just want PoE to become Diablo 3.5 and it's ridiculous. Fucking go outside, breath some fresh air, talk to real people i don't know but do something because it's getting really sad.

And i'm not whiteknighting, they fucked up on things, loot was too low, AN monsters were too hard, they didn't properly communicate on the rarity changes, i get that and i agree but still shitting on them when they are actively doing things to adress the problem without just reverting back to previous league, is just stupid and it's how you get compagnies to take the path of Ubisoft or EA, do you really want PoE to become a Ubisoft game ? If you do please quit the game i BEG you.

Anyway, have a nice day if you've read all of this and if you're still angry at GGG take time off the social medias, play another game, read a book but just stop being only negative and/or hateful on the internet, it's not healthy for you nor is it for them.

Next league should call Path of Exile : Guillotine. Take the game out and chop it head off.

First of all thank you for the post. It's always nice getting more details on what was going on behind the scenes and getting information about the stuff you guys are dealing with.

"

But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards. You can roll your maps to be harder or add sextants to them. You can play with additional party members. You can trigger additional stacking league content like Delirium. All of these things make the game harder in exchange for more and better rewards.

To be honest I can not really see this. So far doing maps felt like not getting anything at all. Alching and Vaaling a T11 map resulted in it being a deadly zone with mods I could handle in the past but having one random rare mob with a specific combination of AN modifiers on it can blow me up instantly for me not being able to react. It even goes as far as me being unable to sustain maps or progress to red maps at all because first I have to be lucky enough to even drop a map and second it has to actually be a map which is similiar to the current tier I am running and not 7 tiers lower.
For that reason I have been doing heist for the first time. And what do I get there? Doing a Lvl 67 heist contract bought from the NPC for 1chance and transmuting it I on average go out with at least 3c worth of currency + rare items - especially amulets and rings - for the chaos recipe resulting in me getting like 40-70 chaos across the 10 contracts I can buy from the NPC. Now how is this for me boring and nowhere near challenging content giving me better loot compared to running a map with an AN mob that one shots me before I even see it on my map and when killed drops 100 armourer scraps?

"

In fights with a lot of Rare monsters on screen, you can't follow what modifiers they have, what skills they're using, and sometimes not even what type of monster they are. There's too much to pay attention to, with too much noise and screen pollution. You cannot use appropriate combat tactics, and instead have to just stutter step or be so powerful that it's inconsequential.

Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly. It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power). It is also a lot cleaner and far better for performance.

I somewhat agree with this. For SOME encounters it makes checking their mods easier and less screen clutter makes it definitely better, but that really doesnt matter when fighting a Hasted AN with so much damage that it blows you up before you react. And even without AN monsters on screen I sometimes have to stutter step to not get blown up the mobs around me.
Like many people already mentioned some combinations of AN mods result in super deadly encounters with no reaction time at all. Now the only solid strategy one could have for them is to be fast enough with pressing the logout button. But then that would also mean skipping the map to not run the risk of dieing in there resulting in currency loss.

Many people probably saw this but nonetheless:
https://www.twitch.tv/carn_/clip/HilariousCovertGoatNinjaGrumpy-4btNQ6G84HxHpM9S?filter=clips&range=7d&sort=time

How on earth is this fair? Like yes logout is an option, but should it really be? For hardcore players it obviously necessarily is but for softcore players? I am getting frustrated of dieing at around the level 94 area because of the xp loss, now that guy dies on a hardcore character. I seriously can not understand how this can be the case of a fight where you come up with a strategy. Especially when this guys defensive layers are ridiculously high compared to a leaguestarting softcore character. For me thats not fun at all. What strategy can I use for a build relying on stationary combat with a low manapool against a hasted manasiphoning melee mob I wonder?
Maybe it would be nice to not just nerf some of the stats those mods give but also ban certain combinations from ever being created to not get the feeling ob being wiped of Wraeclast without an option to counter it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There has been a reddit post about you talking on Baeclast in 2020 where you said: We kill the item drops, we kill the game, in days.

At this very moment it exactly feels like this for close to every content in the game besides heist. At least for me.
I love loot and I love loot explosions. But if I can only have one of those I will 100% of the time take the first. Right now it feels like the majority of the loot lies in the loot explosions with an abysmal chance of hitting the jackpot like the one you were talking about with multiple mirrors per day and 50+ divines from one monster. Yes that must feel incredible. But the majority of the players will most likely never see something like that. And this unfortunately is truly unfun. At least for me.


Keep up the work though! Hopefully we can all reach a point that at least to some degree satisfies everyone (even though it is very unlikely)!

I have had a great time, I love the league and the changes with a little bit of tweaking should be totally fine.

I have spent a lot of money on Poe and played since closed beta, and I have never once felt like you didn't know what you were doing or that your heart wasn't in the right place.

It's really disturbing to me how entitled people act on the internet and how they immediately jump to being 100000% negative if they don't like something.

I think my only concern is that some archnem combos should be really rare or tuned not to be ridiculous and I felt and still feel fully confident it's being worked on. I've had zero negative feelings towards the league or the changes, the only negativity is coming from the absolutely caustic people disparaging you and the rest of ggg.

I hope you don't take the negativity to heart, your enthusiasm and passion for the game is a massive part of why it's so great. Don't second guess yourself because common haters on the internet are a penny a dozen. You did a great job articulating what the vision was and the issues with implementation and you deserve more respect from the community, unfortunately the negative people tend to be the loudest, it's easier to kill what you hate than make yourself vulnerable on the internet to save what you love.

Lastly I love the music, you guys hired another great artist, after many times at the lake I still love hearing it and how it progresses in the higher difficulty tiles.

Thanks Chris, and everyone behind the scenes at ggg, path of exile has been my favorite game since original closed beta and it still is! Having a blast

Someone that does know how should address Chris directly to make him aware it seems there are groups using external tools to quickly scan if an instance contains the most rewarding mobs.

Maybe it was reported already but going tru 70 pages of negative comments isn't for me atm.

While I can't prove it is really happening there's an app that advertise itself as capable of doing exactly this in some obscure forum. I can't and will not test if it works for obvious reasons but the whole situation is worth investigating.

This is quite similar to the arcanist box exploit that was popular between cheaters years ago - and so I'm baffled you didn't foresee the consequences of adding a random header to a server call that could generate massive loot but that can also be scanned from memory. They are basically fishing for it - if not now - someone will find the way to do so later.

Got not much to say about the post in itself. It is what I did expect but not what I was hoping for.

From speechless to demoralized :(

Best regards - I honestly still think you guys have the best 'integrity' of the industry (specially regarding the economic model) - but are also between the most stubborn peoples I have witnessed.

Risk/time vs reward has always been shit for most players. Now its even worse. And the balance is also a joke.

reading this almost gave me a migraine