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Seems like since the last announcement monster packs have been lowered in high tier maps dont know about the other tiers but that doesnt matter the loot quality and quantity seems the same but the maps seems so empty now big an boring the dont seem to hold the same xp either for this Iam pissed high tier maps aren't cheap either I just hope iam wrong about all this or you put it back the way it was thank you

I don't like the pathing in this game when using a movement skill, your character too easily gets stuck on the smallest thing.

It makes the game feel clunky.

New player feedback, over a month and a half in; sorry, this is definitely tl;dr but maybe GGG reads this thread.

Normally I'd have extensive remarks on the peculiar design decisions, particularly PoE being an odd hybrid ARPG-MMO, and the asinine trade system. But the Trade Manifesto makes very clear that the lead dev is a crackpot with some weird obsessions about multiplayer, so there's really no point in discussing it.

Other issues where feedback might be productive:

1. General gameplay

A. Why is SSF gated behind Act 3? It makes sense to gate the Scion, but choosing SSF is reversible so why not allow new players to go right in?

B. Innocence for melee characters is ridiculously difficult. That would have been a brick wall for my first character (tanky sword & board gladiator), but PoE's weird design choice to *not* have bosses reset on character death allowed me to eventually get past. Innocence starting to lie towards the end of the fight was interesting - seems in character, makes sense for a villain to do that, but dying because he said "I am the Storm" instead of the usual "I am your God" while dropping the Super Projectile was quite frustrating at the time (he was off-screen when it happened, so I couldn't see what he did until Shield Charge had brought me fatally close). Anyway, this encounter clarified why there are all those threads complaining about melee - ranged characters can just breeze through like any other act boss fight. It's only melee who get totally screwed by that big energy shield they can only hit for a few seconds at a time before having to run off to avoid the next mechanic.

C. Aside from Innocence, melee actually seems sort of OK in PoE. The problem is that no character should be able to wipe entire screens full of mobs at once, and many/most ranged/caster characters in PoE can. That's an obviously wrong game design choice, but from what I understand it's always been that way and won't change, so I guess that's another nutty design choice we just have to live with.

D. Death penalty - not a fan. Death is already penalty enough; why be a dick about it? Add a death counter to the character sheet if you want to rub it in; don't take away xp. Any RPG challenging enough to be interesting will kill a player's first character many many times. And since PoE doesn't have a combat log to look at, the player often won't even know why they died, which obviously makes it hard to learn from the mistake. If the point is to reinforce the soft-cap on leveling in the 90s, make the death penalty zero below level 90 and whatever you like above 90 (could make it 100%, i.e. each level up must be deathless, for all I care).

E. I'll break this into its own section for emphasis. Not having any way to know why my character just died (and to repeat - this is a tanky gladiator, so it's not lack of life, resistances, armor, or block chance) is *extremely* irritating. Sometimes it's obvious, like "Izaro just pasted me", but usually it's not - "something inexplicably dangerous was in that big pack of trash mobs I was mowing down in this map I've done without issue before", for example. In that example my guess is that maybe a yellow mob with physical reflect could explain the result, but I don't know what (if any) visual cue this game gives for reflect, and if there was any it wasn't visible through the usual combat graphical effects.

F. Related point - either don't disable auras on death, or don't auto-activate auras on login.

G. One point of confusion is that it's hard to understand what parts of the game require every character to unlock them, what are unlocked for all characters in the same league, and what are unlocked for all characters regardless of league. Delve is a nice example of this, with the mine being shared but sulphite not.

H. Itemization - the fundamental point of ARPGs, the reason they differ at all from the larger category of RPGs, is hunting for loot to upgrade your gear. PoE does a rather bad job of this all around. The amount of loot that drops is so enormous that using a loot filter is basically required. Yet even among the drops that pass the filter to be seen by the player, almost nothing is useful (in fact, very little passes the much lower bar of being worth picking up to vendor). And on the third hand, a character can get through the campaign just fine with low/mid level items once they do find ones with decent affixes - the only exception being weapons for attack-based characters. This all contrasts unfavorably with other ARPGs where you need to upgrade gear pieces every few levels, but decent stuff is constantly dropping.

I. Crafting. Pretty decent for the use case of adding a bonus to an already decent item. Terrible for the use case of building up a useful item from a promising white base. The RNG of acquiring crafting mods seems a bit excessive too. The Delve ones (socket color/links) are fine, but maybe I only say that because I like to delve so of course I got them soon after qualifying to see them. Most of the rest are from unveiling, which is painfully random, to the point that at the end of the league I'm pretty sure there are still some I don't have, and I know for certain that there are useful mods that I would very much like to rank up. But there's reliable no way to do that, it's just all RNG all the time (like so much of this game, apparently)...

J. Movement skills don't always work for some reason. The most common cause of death for my second character (Contagion/Essence Drain Occultist) is when she refuses to Flame Dash out of trouble. Spamming the Flame Dash key sometimes works but that's an imperfect workaround. When I hit a movement skill in an RPG, I expect my character to move - it's confusing that this doesn't always happen in PoE.

2. Specific aspects of the game

A. Betrayal - not a fan. Syndicate members are (with one partial exception, above) the most dangerous opponents a character will face before endgame. When every Syndicate member is more dangerous than Kitava (or map bosses, depending on where a character is in the game), that's a clear indication that something is badly unbalanced. If there were a "Migrate to Standard SSF" button next to the "Migrate to Betrayal" button, I'd click it. The crafting unveilings are nice, but that's not worth the constant interruptions to the flow of the game. A minor additional objection is that there should be three options - I've had to walk away from the choice of interrogate (when another member had just pushed the safehouse to 100%) or wipe all rivalries.

B. Delve - really fun, I wish sulphite were more common, and shared between characters. I'd rather push the shared mineshaft down using my alts since they're around the right level, but only my main has sulphite so he had to faceroll down himself getting almost no xp for his trouble.

C. Einhar's beast stuff - eh. I capture the beasts when they show up but haven't bothered trying to do beastcrafting.

D. Prophecies - did a bit on my non-SSF character, mostly wasted or things I couldn't do (or didn't understand what I was supposed to do, possibly). I've started dabbling with it again but it's another mechanic that didn't really grab me.

E. Incursion - pointless; I'd disinvite Alva from my hideout if I could (can't seem to reclaim her in the decorations interface). Four visits to the past with my gladiator, ran around killing everything I could find, first saw a boss on the third visit, managed to fight one for a bit the fourth time but didn't even come close to killing him. Saw a Stone of Passage drop a second or two before the third visit ended, obviously didn't have time to do anything with it. Total waste of a remarkably small amount of time. Less pointless with my occultist, though still not great; sometimes she can kill a boss and/or get and use a Stone, sometimes she can't. I'm really not a lol420speedrunz!!!eleven! type of player so I doubt I'll bother with Alva even on characters who do have decent clear speed.

F. Abyss - fine, aside from Betrayal intervention attacks interrupting. Now that I've seen some uninterrupted Abysses, yeah, they're OK. Not a big deal, but it adds a bit of variety.

G. Breach - see Abyss. :) Not sure what happens when one gets 100 of those shards, but breaches are so rare and drop so few shards that I'll almost certainly never find out...

H. Maps - difficulty seems to ramp up rather quickly. Syndicate went from "tougher than Kitava, but manageable" to "serious risk of death (and 10% xp loss)". Pretty clearly a gear issue; has been much smoother since getting a couple really nice gear drops. And I've finally managed to lock the Syndicate in research where they belong - was starting to think only Intervention could spawn in maps... Also, Niko only providing one sulphite node on his daily map is terrible. Should be three nodes like he normally does in campaign zones. Map sustainability and progression are irritating. I only get to do Niko's daily once or twice a week because he keeps showing up on maps I don't have and Zana doesn't sell. I guess the idea is that we endlessly grind the maps we do have, and eventually a new and/or useful map will drop to allow a bit of progression.

I. Pantheon upgrades are confusing. There's no indication that they're locked behind an extremely rare drop until you kill the boss of a relevant map and wonder what you were supposed to do to "capture" the boss... I'm surprised that there isn't even a divination card method to acquiring these Divine Vessel things, it's just pure RNG.

J. Support - very good. Had an issue during a sale, they responded promptly and effectively. :)

K. Labyrinth - as an older player, I dislike trap-avoidance games (slow reactions). First lab was easy on all characters, second was a gear-check, not bad after finding a better sword. Third lab, yikes! One-shot with almost 3700 hp and max elemental resists (and 65% block, but I guess Izaro doesn't do blockable attacks?). Try again in the high 80s I guess and hope the additional %life nodes make it doable. Fourth lab is looking highly unlikely... :(

L. Synthesis previews - haven't been paying close attention, but if it's "Incursion, Part Blue", see above for what I think of Incursion. Hopefully as ignorable as Incursion, if so. Betrayal going core could be really bad - I haven't seen anything about a giant nerf-hammer hitting the Syndicate members, and since Intervention is always one of the three encounters if the Syndicate appears in a zone that means one can't just ignore them or shut them away in a research lab. If I understand correctly the Atlas resets - not a huge deal yet since I just got started on the Atlas, but if they do a reset every three months even for Standard that will kill my interest in PoE fairly quickly. Hopefully I've misunderstood something.

Edited to add:

Post-league merge to standard leaves much to be desired. First impression was that I'd lost everything but characters and inventory - Delve gone, Maps gone (expected), Bestiary gone, Navali gone, crafting recipes gone. According to another thread, most of that will come back when the next league starts, so it's not quite as rage-inducing as it seems. However this seems rather cocky on GGG's part. Why have this 4 day window when we de facto can't play PoE (I mean, seriously, no crafting? No Delve? WTF?) and might get sucked into other games?

The new music score is awesome!
Great work.

My first impression was not very nice, i'm on stantard and got my main char reseted, re skilling cost me -200 life and +1000 ap so ok but those map resets are killing it...Please keep old maps and just add new paths and tiles and whatever.When ppl stay in standard is because they want to keep prgressing and its not very nice to wake up the next morning and see your atlas which was at whatever only with the uniques(nice that you guys kept them...).Also that map tab thing...not being able to store our old maps is no nice at all...

PS:what's up with this new uber lag thing?Can't play the game since the new patch...

edit: lag went away after reinstalling the game

Best regards

My first impression is one of frustration, disappointment, and anger. Grinding Gears obviously does not care about people who play Standard League. Once again, I cannot use the 226 maps I have sitting in my maps tab. Oh, and I can't store any maps that drop, either, because I have maps from last league in my tab. And if that isn't bad enough, the devs have been so busy making functional graphics shinier that they still have failed to remove old, remove-only map tabs from previous leagues. I find this level of disregard for users and general incompetence at fixing bugs pathetic. I cannot see myself spending any more money on this game until it gets the support it needs instead of insipid bells and whistles like more music.

I'm less than 1 month old into the game but here's my honest feedback, since i liked this game a lot and deserves all the effort i can muster for a wall of text:

the new league mechanic, aka: the memory map and memory fragments needs a lot of polish

1) The memory fragments that spawn during normal game play are actually interesting and fun, there are a few enemies that love to hit you for a lot from off-screen but i hope they won't be that punishing later on


2) The memory map is punishing, confusing, clunky and un-intuitive


a) the memories are limited to 10, they can't be placed in inventory(that i know of) and they can't be rotated, which leads you to never having the pieces you need to make "roads" for those rewards more than 3 maps away

b) The "portal" to go back to the nexus bugs out if you don't have a clear line of maps connecting to the nexus, which makes me alt+f4 to go back if anything goes bad on my treasure runs (which almost always happens)

c) The memory map can only be checked on SOME instances of your treasure runs or in the nexus, if you have a 4-5 map road and you forget where is your exit and take a wrong turn it measn the end of your treasure run adn a bunch of lost memories(you sometimes use the "T" shaped maps to do traverse since the control over your memories is bad as i mentioned above)


3) The rewards are inconsistent, they are less in quantity to stuff like delve

a)the fractured items are awesome, they are a normal rare with a extra modifier, its RNG as any rare but you can get interesting stuff like double bonus to some stats

b) when you have a decaying memory if the item isn't covered by the blue creep by the time you're done you won't receive it, which leads to you trying to pick stuff and risking a lot more the failure

c) synthesized items are RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG, all those "cool base items" showcased might as well be unicorns on how hard and inventory-intensive the whole endeavor is, there are no ways to really influence the outcome, i thought that the placement would be a cue or that you could mix fractured with non-fractured



Every thing else is awesome or i lack the knowledge/perspective to give feedback


PS: i thought that i'd be a tab sale this weekend, i'm waiting for it to buy my first supporter pack and tabs

my experience with this league was dogshit to say the least.
decay in nexus ruin all the desire visit it ever again. after around 10 runs i never used it again,it just not worth wasted time not to mention 0 fun only pain.

managing all the tiles is a nightmer. having more than 5 active tiles is (placed memories) clusterfuk.
next to no tiles to build from (allowed pool is too damn small) so i'm LITERALLY FORCED like after 3-4 maps to do synthesis or skip the mechanics completely because game says so.

apprantly i'll have to skip league mechanics completely,and that's the first time in 7 leagues i'm doin' this. this should tell HOW bad this league was thought up and realized

Hi GGG,
The impression of going into the blue zone is just amazing, the slowdown, the visual effects are awesome. Thank you for all the work done and for making us train the hair.

Regarding maps and stash map tab, when a league ended about 4 months ago, everyone reported the inability to put newly dropped maps into their existing map tab as a bug that needed fixing. Then we learned to remove all maps from the map tab, right-click and set it to the Betrayal series. Okay, I thought that was going to be a one time thing due to some upgrade, but now it has happened again with the end of Betrayal and the beginning of Synthesis.

So, I now have some maps still left over from whatever series the map tab got set to by default when I bought it (I tried to play as many of them as I could so as to free up space in other stash tabs, but I still have a handful that were too difficult for any of my characters to survive so they didn't get played) and a large number of Betrayal series maps, none of which fit into the Synthesis map series, all the while newly dropped maps only fit in the Synthesis series map tab.

I hope this is not going to become a regular thing with the end of each league. It is inconvenient, time consuming, irritating, wasteful and gives me a feeling of defeat and futility at trying to get to the center of the Atlas.

F R U S T R A T I O N