Final verdict after three weeks?

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Kraxiloth#7346 wrote:

Not sure if this is the game for me anymore.

ARC Raiders is coming in October. Completely different genre, but if you liked the Lost Planet games back in the day like I did, you will probably like that one, too. I watched a super long review of the game and I'm kinda pumped now.

Settlers went on for far too long, the game kinda lost me. And PoE Deuce is just not my cup of tea. Same problems, different colored shit.

First league I've quit before even finishing my atlas. Absolute disappointment especially after 7 years of Settlers, but sadly not unexpected.

5/10 tops.

The whole disconnect bullshit lasted for 2 full weeks, the league mechanic was absurd with its bullshite one-shots.

The new bosses are a joke.
The new lore is boring at best.

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Fapmobile#0758 wrote:

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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?

To be fair, the trailer and reveal already gave away everything there was to know about the league. It’s one, yes, literally one extra enemy per map that hands you a bandage player power package along with currency. It was pretty clear from the start of the reveal that this wasn’t going to be some deep, game changing mechanic.
So honestly, I can understand why some players didn’t even bother.

You don’t need to burn your hand on a red glowing stove top to know it’s hot. If you’ve been around long enough, you can pretty easily tell when a league has depth, and when it’s just surface-level fluff based on the reveal itself. Some people calling that out isn’t them being negative, it's just experience talking.

And yeah, the other user’s right, leagues used to have actual systems to explore, new layers to engage with, things that made you rethink builds or approach content differently. This one just didn’t have that at all. I skipped it too, not only because of the early server issues, but because nothing about it gave me that usual itch to dive in again.

Now, to be fair, I did try the expansion content on standard, and yeah, the new bosses were fun and the new maps are a nice transition between T16 and T17. But that’s kind of where it stops. It didn’t feel like an expansion in the way we’ve had before, the kind that redefined how we play the game or shook up the endgame loop. This felt more like a small patch disguised as something bigger just to build hype. In reality, most of it feels like reused systems or content that was probably already built for PoE2 and repurposed here to fill the gap.

It’s not bad, but when you compare it to past expansions that actually changed the game, this one doesn’t come close. It’s more of the same loop with a few new bosses sprinkled in, not something that makes you rethink how you approach the game or feel excited to try something different.

And honestly, if you’ve been around since they introduced the current Atlas system, you’ve pretty much already played through every path and passive setup at least once. Even the addition of Settlers doesn’t change that, it just feels like another small gimmick added onto a structure that’s long overdue for an overhaul.

At this point, I’d honestly welcome it if they just nuked the entire Atlas passive tree and replaced it with the Idol system from the last event. Even that would make the endgame feel fresh again, and that kind of says it all.

fun league

PoE1 is terrible, couldn't get past level 2 last time I tried, just thinking of redoing all the endgame shit I've done countless times before.

I play SSF, EU and controller.
Been having some fun occasionally since launch, but overall a 4/10 league for me.

Here's the bad stuff that stuck out the most:



What league mechanic?
No idea what the league mechanic does, the one where you pick up petals, other than a cloud spreading from the character. The buttons have no description or help, and they're inconveniently hidden behind 2 simultanous shoulder button presses, then a click on the button, then a click on one of 4 buttons behind that.

Still while holding both shoulder buttons of course. Not so great for us who use controllers due to RSI, it's just a not-gonna-happen button combo to use more than once an hour. Not so great either with no hints about what it does - even the icons tell us nothing. How this got through testing or even one person testing it saying that it was fine, is amazing. The fact there's TWO large platform where controller is the primary means of playing the game makes this truly unbelievable.



Spectres are still bad, but worse on controller.
In SSF it's kind of a pain to get corpses for spectres. I HATE ritual, but am forced to do it, as normal spectres from killed enemies are just useless.

On controller it's taken up a notch. I've lost them countless times, not to them dying, no, but randomly putting on an item, losing a requirement and boom, spectres gone.

Especially fun in Kingsmarch, as they're just gone, not even corpses on the ground. Also lost quite a few by them being overwritten if you accidently hit the spectre skill button - it'll happily target a corpse many screens aways.

So after many hard lessons here, my spectre controller rules are:
- Only change gear in hideout - never ever accidently (hah), anywhere, press the wrong button which immediately equips the item, killing your spectres. So pretty much don't open your inventory unless in hideout.
- ALWAYS remove the skill from any of the controller's button, even the layered menus. One accidental click during a fight and you spectre is overwritten with something useless.
- NEVER open inventory or change gear in Kingsmarch. If the spectres end up on the ground, they're gone.
- NEVER press Summon Spectre unless you intend to use it and summon something. You CANNOT cancel it - if you just want to use it to see what corpses are on the ground, forget about it - it WILL summon when you let go of the button - any combination of going into menus etc. will not cancel it. Only surefire thing is to alt+tab then close the game.
- If you need to get a new spectre in your rotation, be in hideout and go away from anything clickable. Put Summon Spectre on a controller button (you did remember not to have that skill on your controller, right?). Take off Summon Spectre gem, put it back on. Hope they died where you can target them, and summon the ones you need, THEN move away to another place in hideout (4-5 screens away), activate the corpse and use Summon Spectre again. Most of the time it'll summon the right one, but no guarantees.

And most important tip for SSF + controller + Spectres: Don't.


Animate guardian
They made an awesome league mechanic in the Mercenaries.. Why oh why did they not do the same for Animate Guardian? Sigh.. I have no idea what mine wears now, but at least it's no longer lost when it dies. I guess I should be happy with what we got, it just seems like such an obvious thing to implement alongside mercs.


SSF only chat
I really miss the SSF only chat. Why the chats were merged I have no idea. I usually turn off chat now, because why would I want to hear about someone looking for help killing something, someone wanting to trade something, and 1000 gold sellers. I. Cannot. Trade. It's irrelevant noise and the SSF chat was nice and completely ruined when they were merged. Still, on controller chat is not an option, but it was nice reading what fellow SSF'ers had to say.


Controller got some fixes and tweaks - Now 1% less bad!
Controller is okay for running around and killing stuff. Just don't expect to use many skills or be proficiant in any way. Still some skills that are unusable due to targeting. Slightly better in POE2 but still subpar for <current year and other ARGPS>

Feels like the button bindings could be better (understatement). It's hilarious we have the double-layer (both shoulders held) for event-specific stuff, taking up like 16 controller bindings, when they're empty 90% of the time, and they can't be bound to. POE2 did it better, slightly. Not well, but better.

Currently I have my auras and less used stuff bound to be used with the 2nd weapon set, but switching to it is painful (RSI). Stick click is the worst place to put something so important, in fact stick click should be the very last thing to bind anything to. Just let us rebind everything, it's not hard. Really.

And what's up with the crazy default shortcuts (of course unchangable)? Left stick click + left direction button to search? Have you even tried to press that? Yea no, you need to move your right hand to the left side to click the left directional button. Same for other places like in atlas. If you have a keyboard handy, ctrl+f activates search, which is great - but doesn't do it everywhere. So many inconsistencies. It's like it's made by 4 different people who have no idea what the others are doing, nor do they talk to eachother.

Lots of places also feature nice tooltip information, e.g. gem skill stash. But want to browse around in your stash and read what the gems do? Let's place the big text box over your selection, so you can't see what you're selecting nor what you're moving to + let's make it unpredictable what gem will be selected next when you press a directional button. Also let's hijack the should buttons that usually allow quick navigation to corners - just for this stash tab. Most stash tabs have different inconsistencies.

The UI and inventory management is still horrendous. I wish the developers would just play an hour or two of Diablo 4 / Last epoch and see how it can be done rather successfully.

Inventory management with controller is still comically inconsistent. You should be able to predict where your cursor goes when you press a direction, but you can't. Put your selection cursor anywhere in a big stash tab with random armor, and tell me where the cursor lands when you press e.g. up. You can't. Throw in different behaviour depending on that stash tab you have open and it's impossible to navigate with any speed or confidence and it's impossible to build up reliable muscle memory as it's sooo inconsistent.


Servers aren't that expensive, but competent people are
EU servers are bad. Especially at peak in the evenings. From what I read, so are other regional servers. I'm now playing on US servers, it's a bit better with higher ping, rather than 10+ rollbacks/day, random disconnects etc. SO MANY MAPS LOST. So much loot I was happy about getting .. only to be rolled back. And so many deaths to 5-10 second freezes in the middle of fights - boom, it catches up, dead. DDOS attacks my rear-end, what a ridiculous excuse even for the fact DDOS is easily mitigated these days if you're at least a little competent. My money's on some hastily coded features to get the league out the door, hogging increased resources coupled with a bit more demand than usual. Also no one would be DDOS'ing for 3 weeks straight only during peak hours..



Well crap, I thought I'd spend a few minutes writing what came to mind, but ended up longer than I wanted, even got "security token expired" message when posting - but thanks for reading if you got this far.

Besides the new bosses and some QoL changes, I hate it.

T17 prison is boring and small.

Also, ditch the god damn Memory Lines. What a dumb mechanic.

Literally nobody likes running terrible layouts.