Final verdict after three weeks?

7.5/10 from me (Settlers was a 9/10 for me.) I liked it a lot.

- Betrayal rework was barely an improvement. Some new really fun gambles but the difference between good and bad rewards is MASSIVE. The meta is going back and forth between "safehouses per hour" (this is ok) and "10-15 hour board setup to only run 3-4 people in safehouses ever" (awful.)

- Settlers going core reintroduced significant FOMO for me which was good and bad. It made gold drops feel great in maps but made me feel like I had to play when I didn't want to to keep feeding farmers (gold map groups alleviated this but it's not a solution.) Mappers and ore/bar shipping is functionally worthless but farming/crop shipping is so valuable that it makes you feel like you have to do it. I'm torn on whether to engage with Kingsmarch again in the next league. Simply blowing your gold at the gambler and on the currency exchange nets huge returns on its own without generating the bad feelings of letting your farmers run dry.

- Regular low juice farming feels amazing and you have a million options. Probably the best it has ever been. I didn't even feel the need to engage with high juice farming because I was having so much fun and still getting a ton of currency. PoE will always be the king of ARPGs unless they screw this up in the future.

- Mercenaries were cool. I still want to try to make a hybrid heist/merc support champion that can do both. It was nice to play a second character and have your merc carry you from level 63 onwards. 3 slots was not enough. If it's a technical limitation you should've been able to stash away more in a bullpen somewhere. It felt bad letting some guys go.

- I personally dislike a lot of T16.5 mods, just as I dislike them in T17s. The first room in the Theatre of Lies is rough with ground damage mods and shaper beams all over the place. Being able to play these mods in open maps doesn't feel as bad. This is just personal preference in how I like to play the game.

- I think all crafting currency other than scours should probably consume memory strands. Being able to free roll your base with fossils seems weird. I haven't engaged with crafting in a while so maybe I'm off base. Having to personally edit filters to tune memory strand item visibility and recombinator fodder visibility is annoying and I don't want to engage with it. Hopefully the community solves this if they haven't already.

I'd give it a borderline 8/10

A fantastic league mechanic. Engaging, empowering, and with just the right amount of RNG to keep it fresh and exciting.

A decent expansion mechanic. The new Memory threads are okay, edging towards good. Far from perfect, but the potential is there. It just needs work.

And, as always, I love a healthy dose of QoL.

It's just such a shame about the server issues. I can't begin to count the number of rollbacks I experienced, before being forced to play on a foreign 120ms server. Fixing these issues should be top of GGG's priorities.

I'm baffled that people rate the expansion and league this high. We went from Conquerors of the Atlas (Metamorph) and Echoes of the Atlas (Ritual) to this slop and people are eating it up willingly. No wonder the game is going downhill and the player numbers speak for themselves. I hope GGG gets the hint eventually and goes back to producing good content or starts focusing fully on PoE 2.

This half baked approach aint it, chief.

PoE2 0.2.0 > PoE1 3.26
I like Mercs, but game loop is just the same as all the leagues after the Heist league. No real gameplay updates for 5.5 years already.

"

Crîmnor#4334 wrote:

I'm baffled that people rate the expansion and league this high. We went from Conquerors of the Atlas (Metamorph) and Echoes of the Atlas (Ritual) to this slop and people are eating it up willingly. No wonder the game is going downhill and the player numbers speak for themselves. I hope GGG gets the hint eventually and goes back to producing good content or starts focusing fully on PoE 2.

This half baked approach aint it, chief.

You haven't even tried the league. Do you rate movies by trailers too?

"

dreamstate42#3955 wrote:

I'm currently falling out of love with PoE rather quickly. It feels like the game has now reached a point where everything is either "immortal all-destroyer" or "whoops, one-shot again," with nothing in between anymore. To me, this has finally become more tedious than fun, mostly because I just don't have the time to invest in PoE anymore.

I can't help but think that PoE has reached a stage where it barely holds together, with so many mechanics, systems, and stats interacting with each other that even GGG doesn't seem to know what's really happening anymore (or maybe it has been like this for years, and I just didn't want to see it?).

After almost a year without playing PoE, coming back to it has made the cracks much more visible to me, to the point where they overshadow the good parts.

This. This is my experience as well. I quit this league after ~2 weeks and I honestly can't say I had fun. It felt really tedious.

I feel like the game stats,mechanics and skills became so intertwined that GGG just doesn't know how to balance it anymore. You are probably right with that.

I think the league is okay. Mercenaries are a great addition, but their implementation needs some work. I do not like the process of hiring them (defeats the whole purpose imo) and I'm annoyed at how many bugged interactions exist currently. I had to adjust my Bleed build, annoyingly so, because the boots that make enemies count as moving do not work on the Merc.

Dancing Dervish is still bugged and doesn't double with the helmet.

Scorching Ray on Totems still doesn't apply additional Exposure. How many more years do we have to wait for this one to be fixed. 🙄

I have 1 build I'm currently "working on" from time to time, but I already feel a bit burned out. I was hoping for a variety of new skills or reworks of old unused ones, but we didn't get that. The handful we got are overall meh. Still waiting for a complete rework of Conversion Trap.

Overall, the new endgame felt a little weird to me. I barely paid attention to it, and how you interact with it could use some tweaks. I lost a juicy map because I clicked the Memory thingy Eagon had, even though I only wanted to look at what it is. I expected it to work like Maven Invitations, but alas, they do not. The new bosses were kinda fun, except for their latest rendition of an Innocence copy-paste boss and their reworked version of the Legion templar guy.

It definitely feels rushed. I expected a bit more after such a long and tedious league. Though I overall had fun most of the time in this one. I will give them that.

League is an 8/10 for me, would be a 9/10 if the server issues weren't so atrocious but I'll cut them some slack on that because they have no control over malicious actions taken by bad actors.

The Merc mechanic is lightweight and adds a wealth of value to how you play without bloating the amount of mechanics in maps, you don't feel forced to sink hundreds of hours into micromanaging them unlike Settlers or similar mechanics (Which I am personally not a fan of). The rewards that mercs drop are terrible, but honestly that's even more reason to find the one you want then ignore them in maps afterwards, fine by me :D

Secrets of the atlas as an endgame expansion has its ups and downs, but mostly ups. I'll note some of the downsides first though:

- Value prop of running the boss invitations vs just selling them is off. The good loot from them is so rare compared to how eye-wateringly expensive the actual invitiations are that it's not worth running them unless you are a rich giga juicer who can afford to run 100+ of them at once to beat the varience with the super rare drops (Spitballing here but you get what I mean).

- T16.5s are an amazing addition, but the memory skills may as well not exist. Half of them essentially do nothing, and the others are so cursed to use efficiently that it's often not worth the effort to even try. Would be better if collecting petals automatically blasted the memory skills out over the map rather than adding even more buttons to an already bloated interface.

Alright so, upsides:

- T16.5s are the perfect bridge to T17 maps. Less rewarding, but much easier to run and still good enough to start enabling "real" farming strats where you are dropping multiple div per map. This was solely the realm of T17s before which forced you to run extremely difficult mods on horrible layouts with no inbetween. The transition point to fully juiced T17s is still there, but you no longer have to patiently farm braindead T16 strats until you are powerful enough to challenge god in T17s, there's an actual middle ground.

- Memory strands are probably one of my favourite ever additions to PoE outside of the currency market. The potential to actually craft a lot of stuff with mostly T1 mods has been awesome this league, and I've been spending a lot of downtime between party play sessions just tinkering and making items worth tens of divines without all that much stress by just utilising items with base strand values and unravelling orbs as a final step. Strands have also massively reinvigorated the market for Lifeforce and Fossils, providing excellent money making methods for players who don't enjoy juicing. I cannot stress enough how much this one addition to the game has brought a lot of dead mechanics far more up to par with each other than they have ever been.

A lil' example of some of the stuff I've made with minimal investment compared to what would have been needed in previous leagues:



I've always enjoyed crafting, but this is the first time I've actually felt properly engaged with it, being tempted to regularly use things like veiled exalts, metacrafts, harvest beasts etc.

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Outside of the new stuff that's been added, the core game feels great too. Build variety is popping, there's a good number of different strats for farming, QoL is in a great spot; overall a great comeback after having the game dragged through the mud for a year while they tried to polish the turd that is PoE2.

Hopefully next league is more server-stable and continues to offer us great options for crafting and farming; if they keep up this momentum then the future looks bright.

1/10 (1 point because prev league was year ago)
Game is too easy right now and there is no end game. After 1-2 weeks nothing to do.
Bosses dead.
After the rework of ubers, their farming looks like a joke. MF is removed, only Abyss (which Settlers got tired of after a year) and boxes (also like Abyss) remain. All unique items cost zero except Mageblood.
What should people who actively play Poe do after 2 weeks in the game? Probably go to another game.
Even to assemble an interesting build, but for what purpose, what to do with it? The reason is the same lack of endgame
The new three bosses are a toy for the first day, the drops from them are disgusting and uninteresting. Farming invitations on them is disgusting conceptually.
Oh yeah, the whole concept of t17 is complete crap, I hope in 10 years GGG will get the idea to remake/remove them.

5/10 for me.

Basically the same as settlers, meta is the same, not enough changes for gems and scaling options.

Mercs are busted, but not just in your party. Some of them are so unbalanced they one tap you offscreen.

Betrayal rework is another fail. The first rework was already awful and made it a Catarina rush simulator, now it is even worse because you just set up Grav for gambling cards.

Better remove the mechanic from the game, bring it back to the drawing board, rework it entirely and make it a new league all together.