Following up on Recent Feedback

Sentinel was my first time ever playing PoE . I couldn't understand that i've avoided the game all the years. I had so much fun the whole time, even when i died.

Kalandra feels strange. It's like doing one map after another for.. ? Yes. I dont know. For me its very hard now.

I'm a filthy casual so what I say doesn't count, but here is my 2 cents:

- HARVEST: Balance Harvest around Life Force + currency
- ARCHNEMESIS: Nobody likes Arch - gate the difficulty/rewards via the Atlas Tree and only have one modifier during the campaign for people to get a taste of things.
- LOOT: Nobody likes all or nothing loot. Again gate juicers by using the Atlas Tree more thoughtfully
- BUILD DIVERSITY: The campaign is trash after the first league-start playthough each league. Allow one FULL spec change per character to allow more non-meta builds to happen. Will have added effect of stimulating post-week 1 trading by having lots of good league-start items coming into the market. Will allow people who don't follow guides and find their build doesn't work the chance to try again within that class/ascendancy.
- KALANDRA: Good idea/poor implementation. Fix loot to make it equal to maps, if not more so given the time it takes to set everything up. I've played since launch and yet to have a half usuable ring/amulet from the mist.
- TRADE/FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS: Implement an auction house already! Do you know how hard it is to buy a single map, or a lower level item? While your at it, make a GGG-run currency exchange in-game so you can push people towards or away from content mid-league. I'd love to be able to find out that my 1000 Scrolls of Wisdom I got while levelling could be exchanged for x amount of Chaos to spend on item upgrades later in the league. I'll happily trade my half a dozen oils I get from Blight for Alchemy Orbs that I'll actually use.

TLDR; Fix Harvest, Archnemesis is trash, give us more loot, promote REAL build diversity, make Kalandra equal to or better than maps, fix trade. Simple.

Don't you know tft discord? Old harvest is tradable. What you said that reduce the power because it's tradable is really senseless.

"

interdicted wrote:

Chris should take this course of IPD.

Integrated Product Development (IPD) is a framework to help management and active project teams reach innovation goals. Originating in government systems, IPD is a management theory that promotes simultaneous integration of multi-disciplinary teams and concurrent engineering. By utilizing the life cycle concept of development and involving all team members early in the design phases, products are more customer-focused and achieve operability objectives with less rework and waste.

Bold of you to assume they want to satisfy customers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I only have around 520 hours play time.... but that is condensed into the last 7 weeks with roughly four weeks play in 3.18 and then playing a 150 hours or so in 3.19 over the past 12-13 days.

With 3.18 being my first league I don't have other patches to reference...
Trying to absorb all of the content that is POE took a few hundred hours and once I past a few critical milestones I was re-rolling Characters and dedicating time to farming strategies that were really starting to pay off.

For a new player switching from d2/d3 (with around 14000 hours combined playtime) this felt very smooth as the base game itself is to be honest kind of meh... but all of the added content that has been released really made me feel like there was so many end game options and I could farm what ever I found interest in with reasonable results, of course there were a few methods that were head and shoulders above the rest but that didn't bother me as I found my rhythm and went with it having so much fun killing everything in sight along the way.

I enjoyed the crafting mechanics - they were 180 degree's from the other ARPG's that I played where every item drop was randomized and the only thing that was deterministic was set / unique and rune word items.

Having the ability to skillfully craft the most powerful gear instead of having to hope and pray for a specific random non target farmable item felt really great and of course killing certain boss's especially the Uber Pinnacle bosses felt amazing when I would score a melding of the flesh or awakened gems etc.

The league mechanic was quite useful at target farming specific items or currencies and even a new POE player like myself could see that in tandem with the recombinators it was a very powerful synergy.

Moving into 3.19 I very quickly realized how spoiled we had been in 3.18 because it did not feel like the same game to me... it very much felt like the rules of play were drastically changed... the deterministic items had been beaten with the nerf bat and the loot Piñata's had been rolled into full effect (Solaris touch eg. 50 div drop mobs etc.)

Since the roll out of the subsequent patches I have found the following:

Unique item drop rates are getting better but just as in the last patch I ignore nearly 99% of them as they are just not useful even with the attempt to revamp them, some of the unique's gained a short lived rebirth but found themselves at the vendor screen very shortly after they outlived their usefulness.

possible solution = additional revamps and power level tuning of these items to make them competitive vs. many of the easily crafted rare items, as it stands right now any decent base item and some essences will > a unique almost 99% of the time... something to consider (no that does not mean nerf essences, okay forget I said anything)

The lake of Kalandra rewards in detail -

The lake is a very cool concept and I have run every single encounter since league start over 3 character, the rewards are getting better but I think a small increase in overall loot buff would be required to really draw people into this mechanic since it is out of map content that takes a fair amount of thought and prep time prior to engagement. I can understand the hesitation to go overboard with this based on the .01% of players who could abuse it, but for the average player it would be a huge QOL improvement.

All of the most common type eg. fire / lightning / brutal monkey etc. all feel very unrewarding and as you can tell by the numbers everyone is skipping these tiles if possible by using the exile option... this is not fun, please consider increasing the rewards of these tiles in harder difficulties to compensate for this and make these options more appealing.

Currently the legion rewards inside of the lake have been exceptionally lacking in comparison to the map version of the same encounter, in my small sample size of testing (around 50 of each in map , and 50 in lake) I have noticed that in similar monster level / difficulty they don't seem to drop the same amount of rewards.

Some of the encounters like harbingers in difficulty 12+ don't seem nearly rewarding enough compared to the difficulty... like if the lake event is harder then a pinnacle boss... players will expect loot that matches the difficulty of the content, if that's not the case they players will no longer engage with that content and seek the path of least resistance vs. largest reward, which currently is not inside the league mechanic but instead fishing for 1-2 rare mod types to be MF'd for huge currency drops.

You have already addressed the currency piñata's and really the solution should be to remove that loot option and instead reinvest that loot across the entire game platform... sprinkle a little love into each and every corner of the game so that no matter where you decide to farm you will be rewarded based on the atlas investments and your hard effort / time



Thanks for all of the continued efforts to fix what was broken during the patch rollout.


Cheers
Ret. Navy M. I.

I'm sorry but just remove Harvest already it's a distant faded memory of what it once was. The few remaning useful crafts can be put in the bench instead.

Or can anyone say that they enjoy the current version of harvest with a straight face?

As a long term supporter now, this league has just left me sad and disappointed.

The game I loved and spent thousands of dollars on is just dead. I have no drive to play the game/league for the first time ever. As normal I took a week off for the league launch, I played 2 days and then left town instead of playing and buying supporter packs.

This "vision" Chris has is going to a place I can't follow.

No King Rules Forever.

For rare harvest crafts, you already have a solution. Make a rare drop that gates the use of the rare crafts.

- just gave it a go today and its still shit!

- rewards 0 (dont know how people say its like the old drops)

- best drop i get was 1c from lvl 1 to 46!!!

- AN mobs with the right mods unkillable!!

- they one shotted me multiple times!

- game feels like work!

- it is 0 fun!!!

- i cant progress. ok i can but very slow!

i dont know who tested the games at ggg but they must be masochists.
i cant explain this otherwise. u fucked up ur game big time.

look at the retention, look at the streamers saying its shit, look at statistics ffs


the worst thing is i know they wont revert the changes and it makes me angry to know that poe2 will be the same shit. its so fucking sad to know that the game we loved to play ended up being torn apart by ggg.

In fact, there is a lot of imbalance in the game. Take at least the ability to move. We have a flame dash with 3 charges that have a CD, and a conditional shield charge that you can just hold down and roll across the map. I also want to mention defensive mechanics. You've brought suppress spell damage into play, but prevented any class from collecting it from the passive tree. Same with armor and block. At the same time, you nerf builds from league to league, forcing players to leave their favorite builds. And plus to this the constant strengthening of monsters and bosses. Here's an example of an uber version of bosses (level 85). If you don't have the highest level defensive mechanics. That is, a cap of block and suppression. These bosses for your build become simply unkillable if you do not have 50 million damage. And that's what you call complexity... It's called unbalanced game mechanics. My point is that you are buffing the content of the game, but not giving adequate character buffs (available to every class in the game)