Endgame

Endgame is still bad. MAybe it's just how bad endgame was previously and now i can't bring myself to repeat putting myself through a bad time... but endgame is... like it's understandable that you're not going to be able to make endgame how it's supposed to be while missing 33% of the game.... it's just like... if this is the plan for endgame for mapping to work how it currently works...

Not many people are going to stick around to map if mapping is just the most painful of slogs and random punishments and like really the plan for endgame better be a lot better than it is because i just rushed endgame only to find out when i got there that's it's not measurably better than it was previously. It's definitely not worse, i'm sure you made improvements but for me to find them i would have to put myself through that bad-timemachine to search for the fun and it's like, not worth it having to lose all my stuff again on mapping and get punished for trying some more so i'm out of things do to in the game and I don't want to play anymore.

The game is definitely worth playing the bosses are still great but i just can't abuse myself with the endgame experience after how much launch sucked my life away, even with a laser-monk.

So if the plan for endgame is to basically leave it mostly how it is, it's just going to be a suckfest. It's lacking in personality and the whole node system just makes it all feel so generic and half hearted like those slapped on battlefront global conquest missions or the warhammer campaigns where you had to take over the universe and thus fight 900 of the same stupid battles for no reason other than no one bothered to put more effort into developing the feature. Or the witcher 3 caches where it's just sail a gazillion times to find all the pointless crap it turns out you don't need to really hammer home that no one was going to spend another 6 months on making it worth it and make the game truly a perfect masterpiece.

So while the game's incredibly good at what it does right endgame is so wrong that i just can't even be bothered to try again because it was so bad the first time i tried and then the second time i tried in this latest patch all the gear i had crafted wasn't at all worth it and i got instakilled on a t1 map... so yeah like my build is maybe not good but could you at least ramp me up to getting completely destroyed? I just got here man.

So I don't even want to see the inside of the ziggurat because i've seen it so many times before and had such a bad time it makes me actually feel a little bit sick.

Nobody (i mean maybe some of you weirdos do) wants to fight a battle uphill vs odds they know are rigged to rig their own odds in fighting the rigged fight. it just feels bad overall and it's like your'e literally trying to corrupt me as a player when i'm trying to fight corruption and you're like nah, you gotta corrupt yourself. Could I rather just not please? I don't want to play a game that nauseates me, just for trying to give it a chance and I know it's getting changed it's just as it stands like... no bro. not like that.

I dopn't really know what constructive feedback i can even give on a feature that engaging with makes me feel queasy from the residual badness from initial release....

So all I can really say is if you somehow managed to make each fight feel less generic and like i was making progress and not just hurting myself by engaging with something that's basically the rice doubling on each square of chessboard scam with some extra steps... I have fininte time and so do other people. You have so many options to make parts of the game that don't have to be engaged with and you can always make that branching sidepath where i can avoid it but if you put the end directly through the branching tree where i gotta pokemon collect them all to be able to fight the endguy and i also have to work to pay for power and housing and your game and another 50 stash tabs for the latest whatever you shoehorned in to sell me another stash tab like, no I just don't want to do it and it makes me not want to play the game at all when i feel like i made all this effort on my guy only to reach a point where making more effort made me have a worse time.

There's a level of tolerance for bullshit and this is too far. Like with the wyvern firebreath when you make it such a pain to use and even with boosted bootspeed i get a cooldown on the firebreath and also can't dodge while flying??????? like where an i going to go to avoid something? the floor? I can fly. why would i do that? that's already a bad mechanic. and then that bad mechanic plus prop it up with gear that doesn't do anything.... and like what am i supposed to do other than not play it? Again this sounds really harsh as criticsm ebcause obviously this isn't some easy triviality to solve and my feedback isn't really hey i have a good idea that improves this bad thing, it just feels like to get that idea i would have to accept that this bad endgame idea could be salvaged and maybe it can't but how would i be able to find out without putting myself through the badtime-machine? I wouldn't so it makes no sense to me to do so so i can't even give feedback that can help because the vertical wall of you didn't use the right build for this in the giant infinity of builds with factorial 125 to the power of combination passive tree to find the ones that might make it past the giantbullshittium forcefield.

So obviously I can't really say anything that's helpful because i can't subject myself to the soul sucking again to be able to find a solution and it feels like having a giant ma to represent the world that has no sense of progression other than hey we made a dot clickable.... look how well you did.... here are more dots to make clickable.... so individually all the mechanics work but together it's like having peppermint icecream on your pizza with caviar and car tyres as a salad.

it does not feel [Removed by Support] at all to get through it and no amount of loot is going to make it feel rewarding. So the whole thing is a flawed bad idea from my perspective because it feels like a punishment to play it. so if I cant' get some sense of oh wow that was worth it from mapping when the only that was worth it is more rare pants.... it's not worth it.

Loot is a means to an end not an end. I want to beat the end badguy in an epic battle that's enjoyable. I don't want to super saiyan ultraspeed woow loook i broke the game he didn't even get to do the thing he was design for ie be fun to battle, again that's me personally, and i tihnk most people are also into a game being a fun time, not a break this for us simulator so you can flex how much of your time you wasted on pointlessness. And I know i'm not alone here.

so the bosses you made in this are mostly excellent, the mapping is ass, the general dross mobs are good enough until you randomly decided hey this specific mob that isn't a boss is going to have a random load of crap on it that makes it a random amount of fun to a random amout of completely unfun and stupid to deal with without reward other than pants+2 sockbuff. it doesn't feel good. it doesn't feel like getting corrected it just feels like here is your punishment for reason not worth figuring out in the heat of battle that's not going to allow any figuring.

Also having to have a solo self found as the way for a true experience just implies the rest of the experience isn't tuned very well... and i like hardcore as much as anyone but then coupling hardcore with garbage map of how many dustbins i gotta suck the juice out of to get to a level of resilience that allows me to swallow a lake of poison... like i'd rather not hey.

So there's a great game in here for sure. but there's not some amazing darksouls like gradual unfurling of this amazing experience, this is a run this stupid time padding maze with irritants sprinkled around it until you get to some substance that lasts a few minutes and then resubject yourself to running a pointlessly long maze also to get to some substance. and then the end is lie this maze is so long that it's a maze of mazes and your time? hah, no time for you sonny boy!!! here race this druid cause we're out of content.

it's weak sauce. okay. that's what it is so it's like weaksauce of a better sauce that was diluted because it's been artificually stretched to ''last longer'' instead of jsut being good in the amount that it has good substance. Like imagine someone gave you spahgetti and meatballs but for every meatball you had to eat 20 plates of spaghetti with the 1 meatball's worth of sauce diluted into the 20 plates. and then occasionally ever 20 plates of spaghetti you were given more meatballs than you could ever eat to the point that it wasn't possible to eat them either since you were already full of spahgetti and all the sauce had been diluted leaving the meatballs less than they could have been. and then after the meal someone kicks you if you can't eat all the meatballs fast enough or with all the sauce turned to 50x the strength the sauce should be so your reward could be a plate of normal spaghetti and meatballs that wasn't fucked up and was properly spiced and seasoned with the correct proportions, as your reward for all the fucked up previous versions. Would you want to do this? Probably not. So it's just like endgame is just bad guys. The whole idea isn't working. so maybe you're got some big way to make it work but right now it's just like, we built this this way as a depth filter good luck getting through the filter to the other end, congratulations you're the world's most boring person and or prisoner in solitary with nothing else that they even can do because literal chores like doing dishes and construction are more engaging than this.

Loot is not a carrot, loot is a way to get rid of sticks and if the entire endgame is a stick-tsunami with a disproportionately tiny number of carrots in the stick tornado that is only offset by the stick warehouse wallmart market then the entire loot system and game sucks as a whole because of it even if all the bosses are pretty damned good so you've got this really cool game with cancer and the cancer as it stands is winning. And we know you're doing what you can to cure it but it's still cancer and again maybe in like a month everything i type here woull be wrong and untrue but i get the feeling that some of the cancer is going to come right along for later for poe 2 second cancer boogaloo.

So running around pointlessly for hours through random mazes isn't a joybringer it's a time-dilator and while obviously you need a small amount of it having this be the main basis for the entire game is just anachronistic and again i am sure you can't get rid of this because it's basically the game but man you really didn't need to make it a core feature when you clearly have what it takes to make an excellent game but have for some reason chosen not to at the same time as putting the good parts in. so i really dn't know man like it's half way in half way out to try to be everything all at once and half of it is ruining the other half and again we haven't seen it all so probably there's areason for this but as it stands even engaging with endgame is a bad idea for anyone who did so previously because once burnt twice shy and i was starting to smell seared flesh for a second there so I did literally 1 map twice and both times i got randomly punished so nah. not even regular nah, hell nah. I'm not doing it man. You punished me for trying the first time properly enough that i know that the second time is jus straight up not worth it and unless there's a major event in acts 5 and 6 that undoes this i'm not doing it to myself thanks.

Also the whole you need a lootfilter to X this is just like.... you could you could make a mechanic where you pre choose a lootfilter item that prechooses what you're looking for from drops and then just doesn't drop the other stuff right? you could even make us have to pay to maintain it giving it a value for upkeep costs. There's no good reason for the majority of players to have to engage with this sort of thing and it's even worse that we have to go 3rd party just to be able to deal with it. And i am sure some ultrahardcores will disagree for whatever self immolative reason but it's just lame that you'll literally just throw more loot at my than my CPU can handle and be like this is fine. this is what we wanted this to be like because it wasn't handled in a gamified fashion, so you can literally sell a lootfilter stashtab this way and then lock drop types behind crafted filters that are crafted just how everything else works and i am sure people will REEEEEEEEEE super hard but sometimes things have to go a way that's not super popular to get ot a point where the whole thing makes senseother than we are trying to flood your pc's ram or stress test your CPU with unhandled garbage collection in our grabage generator. So not having your game mechanic be handled by something that's part of your own game... is like WUT? excuse me? Why? oh i gotta go and get something made by some other guy in a shed so i can see the floor. Right sure dude. oh and the floor can kill me? okay well it feels like you chose to take gaming back to 1994, except back then they'd also look at this and go, what the fuck is this shit? you can't sell this in this state, it's not a finished product. Yeah. We know. We accepted. it's just like just because we're dealing with it doesn't mean it is how it should be, and just because it's an alpah and you need to give the most hardcore ultrahardcore content doesn't mean the ultrahardcore content also has to suck, it can start out not being awful and then progressively get more awful but as it is it's like you're in the ziggurat now!!!! like no thanks man. you already proved to me the first time that this was the quitting time signal, and then when i came back to check the game was like NOPE.EXE GET WRECKED SCRUB (level 89 with rage wyvern druid and goodish gear for the lootlevel) don't come back until you're level 96 to do tier 1 waystones....

like come on guys. Again all the stuff you added in act 4 is pretty good. especially the whole delrium reveal and the treasure island etc but man...and even the epilogue was pretty good but i rushed to get to maps and then maps were like YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEET. straight back out the door to literally naytihng else, hey go play marathon for a less painful experience.

So endgame employs the bullshit assymetry principle as it's core game design philosophy. so maybe don't do that because overall it's a bad system that sucks. do a different thing that doesn't employ that ideology using the tools and assets you already made.

get gud.

just wait for 0.5 0.6 0.7

game is not finished.

literally go and get instasniped in marathon ranked losing all your gold gear for a better time.

GGG: We will deliver Endgame update that couldn't make it into 0.4.
This guy: Writes an essay anyways.

xd

i had no idea man.