Hard Lessons from Settlers Necro - Scarab rework

I have been playing this game on an off since it came out of beta. I won't pretend to have played every league but I do come from a time where the docks was endgame grinding.

Over the years I have noticed a continued trend. Which is to constantly make the lower end of the game less rewarding. The constant power and defense creep needed over this time has left so many archetypes behind with no realistic way to make them viable.

The beauty of PoE has always been not only its depth but also its width in player expression. From being able to choose what to grind, or having many different builds to play. Since Sentinel, I feel this has heavily been curtailed. With constant nerfs to the base rate, alters and demands deeper defensive layers. No longer can you make a skeleton and zombie necro, or an arc witch and feel like you are getting meaningful progression at the same clip as the meta builds.

With the constant nerfing of league starters like SRS Guardian, EA champ etc. The player base has coalesced even harder into a meta. The demands for making it even into T16s maps from both damage and defensive perspective have increased.

All of this wouldn't be game-breaking but then we come to the scarab rework. I will give praise for finally removing sextants from the game. However, when the rework of the scarabs came it deeply broke the core gameplay loop. While the base rate nerfs have essentially made the game progression curve even more exponential than it was before. As no longer do you get the mats you need to even attempt to craft decent enough pieces to push into T16s without using your portals as a defensive layer.

The prime example of this is how many nodes were ripped off the atlas to put onto a scarab just to pad them out. Nodes like Essence are a tier higher being taken from the tree and put onto the Essence scarab of ascent. Ritual is another one where most of their scarabs used to be on the tree.

By removing these nodes from the tree coupled with the base rate nerfs so many mechanics now require a full set of scarabs to even make semi semi-viable to self-farm. The raw currency nerfs have also made it to where you will bleed yourself dry of even chaos just by using the map crafting option.

Most of these problems are plastered over by an economy. However, designing all of the base rates around those playing at the upper end of scaling has drastically decreased the fun of those that are not. No longer can you self-sustain a strat especially if it is best farmed in lower-tier maps. Whereas before the rework it was very easy to spend a day or two farming something like essences so you could self-craft your way into higher tier content.

So now we get to Settlers Necro. Without the market to take up the slack from these design decisions over the past 2 years the game feels like such an unbearable slog to put time into. Not due to anything other than the abysmal drop rate of scarabs in low-tier maps which are now mandatory to achieve the same level of farm before the scarab rework. Since most of the good nodes are now moved to a scarab. No longer can you pair two mechanics together to progress through the game on your own. Even with full map explicit, every scarab node you can grab the drop rate is so low and the scarab pool so bloated that there is no way to reliably farm these things on any build that can't just walk into T16s in trash rare gear. Thus limiting the number one strength of POE, player agency.

Since the introduction of T17s and the rebalancing of the drops to accommodate them, this problem has only gotten worse but I will save the T17 tirade for another day.

I am hopeful that after PoE 2 is out we can get a full look and rebalance of the progression curve in PoE 1. Currently, you spend so much time in lower-tier maps farming on a lot of builds you are pushing level 95 by the time you have enough mats to attempt a craft you need to raise your defensive layers or damage to move into T16s. Though you still won't have enough scarabs to even levage a farm there.

I am not asking for it to rain currency or for the progression curve to be a straight line. Just to get some of the exponential scaling to move closer to the initial value instead of the constant shifting of the minimum of the radius of curvature further right while the exponent value increases at the same time.

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Moregaze#2933 wrote:

With the constant nerfing of league starters like SRS Guardian, EA champ etc. The player base has coalesced even harder into a meta. The demands for making it even into T16s maps from both damage and defensive perspective have increased.

Not sure which rock you live under, but both of those builds are still alive and some of the best early league starters, as they require 0 uniques to clear all non-uber content in the game.

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FalkenRaiding#1068 wrote:

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Moregaze#2933 wrote:

With the constant nerfing of league starters like SRS Guardian, EA champ etc. The player base has coalesced even harder into a meta. The demands for making it even into T16s maps from both damage and defensive perspective have increased.

Not sure which rock you live under, but both of those builds are still alive and some of the best early league starters, as they require 0 uniques to clear all non-uber content in the game.

Look at this forest.

You - "But what about this one tree right here?"

scarab rework was a huge success

it made players "spend so much time in lower-tier maps farming on a lot of builds you are pushing level 95 by the time you have enough mats to attempt a craft you need to raise your defensive layers or damage to move into T16s"

it was precisely the goal. not your fun, not your enjoyment or making memories you can share with your kids.

the goal of pretty much every change - including this awful city - is to make you play for longer.

and they have nailed it. still some issues remain - aka 'do it easy builds' but dont worry, they will nerf that in due time


sure, they could make you play for longer by making alts - but that is not an option. the game is precisely designed so making alts is the stupidest thing to do. you need 100s of unlocks - veiled items, recipes, atlas. you cannot do that while in campaign. you also make literally no money in the campaign.

that is already set in stone, you are to play ONE build and play it for months - and scarab rework facilitates it perfectly. unless you want to play 'scarabless' - but that option is quite deep into the atlas (and you miss out on A LOT of money)

The only major flaw with the current system is the disconnect between rewards in t17 and every other map tier

Because scarabs go farther in t17 they fuck the price of every other map tier so anyone with a functioning brain will save their meaningful scarabs for t17 running or sell everything for raw currency to other people running t17s

Which functionally removes most scrabs as a mechanic for all but the upper crust of people capable of reaching and comfortably farming the post end game of poe.

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Saltychipmunk#1430 wrote:

...

Right now there is a total of only 4 scarabs out of more than 100 scarabs that are not worth using outside of T17s:

- Preservation
- Glittering
- Bloodlines
- Awakening (technically still T16 viable with harvest, twist of fate, risk)

Is that really an issue if it's only 4 scarabs?

I don't see a problem with the current T1-16 farming and yes scarabs are hard to get early, however once people start farming T17 the market is flooded with scarabs and you can easily go do whatever content you want to..

HOWEVER, I totally agree that T17 is a bad implementation to the game.. the difference of farming juiced T17 efficiently vs T16 juiced is out of this world... it's 10-20x the loot in T17 maps, so you feel compelled to only do T17, because T16 isn't even close to as profitable..
T16 is all RNG mechanics like random div card drops etc. While T17 is consistent farming for scarabs, currencies, T0 uniques etc.

Also, I think the scarab system sucks.. Not because of the concept itself, but rather that what you said, that we can't go for 2-3 different mechanics in the same map.. You have to go all in on ONE strat alone, be it map farming, boss rushing, harbingers, expedition etc.

What they could do however, would be to buff scarabs by combining them, however making them a bit rarer.
So instead of you running 4-5 different ambush scarabs while some of them can also be used 3 at a time, making NO room what so ever for other scarabs, if you wan't to be efficient and juicing content, you could now go with 2 different ambush scarabs, 2 expedition scarabs and maybe 1 harbinger scarab, and you won't feel like you've lost effeciency in juicing a specific content..

For sure scarabs and T17 need a rework or a redesign of sorts...

"

Ritual is another one where most of their scarabs used to be on the tree.

…. None of the ritual scarabs EVER existed on the tree

Selectiveness was a sextant and that’s it.

None of them were ever on the tree

Heist Scarabs when GGG?


We want our enchanted contracts back.

I don't know if it was the scarabs or the div card changes but i tried to farm alleyways and scribed it to other maps for the fourth vow card and found 2 house of mirrors from stacked decks and never got a single fourth vow card all league.

This is an ssf problem, it was just wild to me that card was so rare.