Pinnacle bosses acess too time consuming

I just killed my first pinnacle boss (Not counting sekhemas and chaos, both killed before). I did Xesth (With the new 5 respawns, THANK GGG BECAUSE THE FINGER FLICKED ONESHOT ME TWICE).

I feel it takes WAY too long to farm for entry to any pinnacle fight. I am getting 3-5 delirium splinters and 10 breach fragements per activity. Thats nothing for the 300 required.

After doing like 7 maps with towers boosting breach fragments, I got 55 and thought "I have divines to spare and its EA, I just wanna experience a pinnacle boss" so I bought most of the breachstone.

THE MAP AND BOSS ARE AWESOME I love it! But if I did the whole map in my 1st try on it, it means my character can do T15s and bosses and breaches at a reasonable speed. Yet I feel the drops to access pinnacle encounters are not reasonable for how long it takes me if I farmed for them.

Is this just a feeling of mine?

I sell all the entry keys now, because frankly, the trash drops and rng is not worth it to run. You make more selling the keys than you do from any drops

You can get a lot more splinters with proper boosting, usually 30+ per map which means about 10 maps to get a breach stone which seems fine to me.

To get a lot of simulacrum splinters you need to instill maps, not do maps with mirror on them.

And you can farm both at the same time!

Being time consuming is likely the goal, given it is a 3-4 month league rotation

Knowledge of the individual mechanics will take time. This is the most contentious part of it all, imo. Poe 1 players went into this game start with a large advantage in understanding how to scale these mechanics and layer them with each other.

There is such a large discrepancy in player knowledge right now. Couple that with spoon-fed builds and farming strats over the years (giving players access to content faster), and many players inability/unwillingness to either read or test out how things interact leads this interpretation that Pinnacle encounters should be easier to reach. What that time-gate is, depends on the individual player.

Having some previous knowledge certainly did help me progress through each of the separate atlas trees quicker. However, i did spent time testing out different combinations of atlas point allocations.

I will not mention Ritual, because this one is 100% RNG gated and hopefully sees some changes to how you access the pinnacle fights.

Breach, on the initial 2 points, does take some time to reach 300 splinters. I think my first stone was made after maybe 15-17 maps. But soon as you get those first points the time taken drops to 6-10 maps, then the next 5-6, and so on.

Delirium, like you, i was only seeing at best a few splinters on each mirror encounter. I didn't even consider that the maps could be instilled. Once I realized that, then it became similar to Breach in the time it took to make the encounter set.

Expedition, while not 100% RNG gated like Ritual, is still in a bit of a rough spot, where you need to drop logbooks first, then have the chance to see the boss within them.

Assuming everyone is seeing the Beams of light to indicate where Citadels are (unless there are some outliers with a weird atlas generation) and they know you get a number of fragments based on the waystone % chance on the map you insert (ie: 2 frags with around 400% waystone chance, 3 @ 800, 4 @ 1200) collecting these pieces while running the other content, i think, is in a decent place.

Then we have the builds. Not every type of mechanic will end up working well with certain builds. Most will be doable, but take much longer. A smaller AOE or single target build is just not going to work well with Breach. Or a smaller area like ritual is likely not going to function well with most of the glass-cannon builds since it only takes that one hit to stun you and you're done.

Assuming the same basic Dev mind-set applies from POE 1 into POE 2, this game will always be about layering different mechanics that suit the build you are running.

Currently, we need more of the end-game mechanics to really see how it will all come together, but if people are unwilling to put in the time to learn them (or wait until some streamer puts out their videos explaining how to make use of the mechanic), these people will not have as good of a time as they should. Not to mention, by the time a streamer puts out these videos, any trade-focused players will have already missed the boat, since the markets ususally shifts faster then they can take advantage of that new information.

Thank you for your reply. All of it was insightful and I can agree with most if not all points.

I didn't know instilling gave you splinters. I thought you could not get neither splinters nor instilled emotions. So I guess the "learning gap" is wider than I thought. Maybe I will give this a try!

My feelings now that I have received your feedback is double.

First, the gap from "just doing them" vs "optimizing them with knowledge" is much bigger than I thought. I still believe that "Knowing that you should kill the boss once, get two atlas points and then its easier" is not knowledge but weird endgame design, but whatever.

Secondly, as GGG stated the endgame is lacking and some builds much stronger than intended, so I get a bit bored of repeating maps and more maps with the same things and my speed of pinnacle content access is slower than others twice: Via knowledge and build. So if I want to keep a particular build going and enjoying making it myself, I should learn more about the rest.

Thank you for your feedback!

New meta is just picking up 3+ splinters, no one has time for the clicking simulator

I got 300+ splinters on some maps..

You can go to Alva and buy the keystone to access any end game bosses, just click the exchange currency function on Alva.

That's intentional. Pinnacle content is designed to take time. It's in the game to keep the "no lifers" busy.