Praise for Idols

Just wanted to say that I absolutely loved idols and really hope they make an appearance again, even if only as an option for private leagues. I had an absolute blast in Phrecia, particularly once I realised they could be recombinated despite the "unmodifiable" tag. I played the following private league with idols with half a dozen friends and spent almost every waking moment of it absolutely hooked.

I think idols offered a significantly better experience than the Atlas for a few reasons:
Simplicity - You slap in an item with 1-4 mods and it does exactly what it says on the tin immediately, no having to deal with pathing towards desirable nodes on another intimidating, sprawling passive tree for often barely-noticeable improvements.
Power - Even a poorly-optimised idol set offered far outsized rewards compared to the Atlas, making everything feel a little more attainable, particularly in a small private league. I've always had the most fun and put the most hours into leagues where end-game crafts feel more accessible, and these last two events were anything but an exception.
Longevity - Putting together a basic idol set from drops is very straightforward, but with the recombinator (and trade, if you're into that) it opens up endless possibilities for gradual improvement of your farming setups throughout the course of a league. This part in particular felt way more rewarding than just shuffling points around the Atlas tree.


My only criticism would be that the events weren't long enough, I would've loved an extra month or two to squeeze even more juice out of them!
No other notes, just a big pat on the back for whoever came up with the idea for idols.
Last bumped on Jun 11, 2025, 6:41:17 PM
+1

idols have their cons (mostly: some combos were ABSOLUTELY stupid) but the general feel of progression and control was much better than atlas

they also made loot pool interesting. it gave me that feeling of 'look, something potentially nice just dropped!' instead of filtering out every rare item and 95% uniques. that was the loot that POE really lacks (unless you think that farming bases for recombinator counts)
Some of the combinations were definitely a bit silly, but in quite a few cases that got me farming mechanics I've ignored for years just to see the silliness in action. I concede some of them were maybe a little too silly, though.

Definitely agree on the loot aspect, I can't remember the last time I got excited for a rare drop, but those conqueror idols really got the ol' dopamine flowing!
I didn't like all the reading required to get your best combinations, but i played ssf. I wasn't interested in recombing them either. I was sick and tired of building towns at that point. Gauntlet not going into hcssf settlers really gave me the shaft.

Just my preference but I give idols 5/10 and that is probably too high if were being honest. by the time you got to really just blasting everything in the game you finally got idols that were somewhat close to the power of the tree for 1 mechanic. Blending mechanics on the same idol wasn't all that easy.
I don't really see having to read as an issue in a game with this much text, but being able to use the stash search to look for mods was far preferable to the passive tree search where it's almost impossible to see which nodes are faintly flashing unless you're already looking directly at them.

Agreed the recombinator being locked behind town upgrades definitely made it a bit of a slog, I spent most of the first week of the private league just grinding to fully upgrade the disenchanter and the recombinator. Fortunately that won't be an issue again now Settlers is going core! Many idol mechanics didn't really require any recombination to start seriously juicing them, though. In a lot of cases you just had to focus on one or two mods to make interesting things happen.

I feel like idols really made the game feel more personalised, as well. With the Atlas you know there's loads of other people running pretty much exactly the same setup, but you can have a dozen different idol sets and know the chances of having an identical setup to someone else are basically 0.
trading for them was abhorrent but that's what you have tft for. plenty of people were selling ready farm templates, for a bit of extra price for convinience (but not very much, my ultimatum farm was 80 div total on tft and buying them individually would be something about 70-75)

i preferred idols over atlas tree cos with idols you could truly specialize in a farm. With the tree you dump half of your points into throwaway nodes like more scarabs, more quant, more rarity, more map mod effect (which is quant). Actual farm strat is like 30 points. Rest is garbage generic stuff and pathing.
Difference of opinion. Whenever you're trying to optimize more than 1 mechanic together you're reading through hundreds of these idols in 7-8 quad tabs trying to find the best mixture of each shape to maximize both the sizes and the way the mechanics are i.e 100% spawn and whatever % other things you want. Its extremely tedius.

As long as they stay in private leagues idc. If they add them to the core game they need to be 1 liners and you get the atlas passive tree as well.

In my opinion.

Think back to your first day of playing poe1 and trying to read all the skill gems and shit. Its really annoying.

TFT is a trash discord for trash interactions.

Not everyone wants to spend 80% of their 3-4 hours a day scouring tft and trade.
Last edited by Lonnie455Rich#2087 on Jun 11, 2025, 6:42:08 PM

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