Race Season 6 Impressions

Hey guys, Season 6 is over and its time for another review of things happened. Beware, Wall of Text ahead! Lazy people might skip to the tl;dr below ;)

Lets start with the good stuff, shall we?

Descent Champions
Still having a lot of fun with this race format. Season 5 we saw not many Gravicius-Kills overall and by now peeps seemed to master it and kill him. Nice impression and I enjoyed these races a lot. But still, there are some points which need improvement:
1.) The Brute - This guy is a good example for how desyncing issues ruin game experiences. As far as I see it, he is a bit faster than Normal Brutus and he also seems to berserk as his Life goes lower. These mechanisms lead to Teleport-Brute as soon as he goes 10% and lower. Killed me some race characters out of desyncs. Suddenly he stands behind me, suddenly i get hit by a ground slam happening a half screen away from me - I think everybody has his Brute-Story. So please get a fix around it - it just sucks getting smashed by something that didnt happen on your client.
2.) Freezing Chamber - Simply put: I don´t like it. Double QS and MS-Boots make a huge difference. Too much of a difference. And since it´s quite random hitting Freezing Chamber or not (correct me if I´m wrong) I think it provides a too huge buff for those finding it. I´d prefer one QS for everybody (after Rukuku or such) and one QS and MS-Boots on Freezing if you hit it. Just a bit more balance.

Signature Races
I enjoyed these really a lot in this season. In previous seasons i really never like Fixed Seed races but I learned enjoying the game feeling of recurring Fixed Seeds. Nice Sig-Race, but I don´t want to see it again as Signature too soon. Not much negative points to say and a very personal opinion of mine.

Race Rewards
Yep, enjoyed em a lot. Thumbs up for the selection, kept me motivated.

Fracturing Races
Well, that was a crazy story. First of all - quite some crazy fun going on. I didn´t participate in the FBLAMT, but all those copies of enemies added a new dimension of danger i enjoyed. Was funny, but needs some improvement! Brackets were broken - most players of Seasons 6 will acknowledge I guess. And Fractures yielding absolutely no rewards is also some kind of design mistake. I really don´t know what would be most fun - a fracture yielding XP or loot or both? That´s the job of GGG and I would be happy to see this feature reworked - cause it rocked! But only if it gets some kind of rework, first release was crazy funny, but also very tedious and awkward.

1-Week-Domination
Well that was a blast! A 1-week-Softcore race was a nice experience after all that strain of "staying alive" in usual races. Brackets were quite reasonable. But still I am kinda scared about some gamers who seem to "work" on races like these with 12h+/day. And frankly said that´s really not good for anyone doing it like this. Anyway, the race was fun and I really enjoyed this one.

Schedules
Yes, finally something good on the schedules. At least for European players. It wasn´t perfect. There were gaps, some weird stuff happened (like only 20 minutes break between two longer races) but overall it was better than Season 5. Much better. Keep it up like this, made me quite happy to see that our opinions did change something.

Our racing community
This hasn´t to do so much with Season 6 but it´s definitely worth saying. I really enjoy how this community growed and how things work out by now. It´s amazing how professional racing happens by now and how much of an E-sport flavour this game has. Something no other Action-RPG managed to create! And I enjoy it, enjoy watching those top 10 runners always getting a bit better as I grow getting better - it´s really a fun thing and worth saying.

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But where there is Light, there always are Shadows! Lets proceed with those annoying problems this Season had:

Turbo and Desyncing Issues
Nothing really new and I already wrote about it last season. But it has to be done again and again. Turbo Mods don´t work well with the game while the desync issues linger about. It seems like sped up monsters fuck up the client-host-connection a lot which leads to various teleportations, invisible hits and other really deadly situations. An experienced player learns to foresee those "desync-triggers" and learns to master the situations with those problems. But as soon turbo hits the screen it gets worse to manage. Doable, but a lot less fun.
I don´t want to say that Turbo is unplayable or too hard or anything. I just want to point my finger on the fact, that mastering Turbo has much more to do with mastering desync than with the game. And this feels awkward and even a bit wrong. And I will repeat myself for those next Seasons to come if I must ... ;)

Race Progression vs. Act 3 expanded
Most races end on the docks. And that´s about it.
No other zone in Act 3 yields a bitter risk/reward ratio. So it has to be done if you want to win the race.
But why do the racers don´t progress? Because too many quests have to be done on the way. Much running without proper XP-Rewards. This would be absolutely bearable if it helps you winning the race - but the risk/reward ratio gets quite worse as soon as you hit ebony barracks.
After that point, Act 3 shows his teeth and can provide quick death with desync-Shield Bashers and those Arcmages. But this is only where the fun starts. After Lunaris things can get even worse with Evangelists and the other stuff incoming. And Dominus himself? Well, I think players are always a bit overexaggerating, but this Bossfight isn´t as balanced as Piety´s fight is. End of the Line.
Right now there are really not much players which progress over Docks. And this is something really stupid to happen - I think many players can´t stand the Dock-Farm anymore and would gladly do something more challenging. If the risk/reward ratio was good. But it isn´t.
My only idea of solving the problem would be the removal of the bridge ward in Act 3. This would allow racers to progress to Ebony Barracks without doing the long run over Crematorium, Sewers, Sewers Waterway and Solaris. But would that really be good? I don´t know, its just my only idea for this problem so far.
But please GGG - give us something to break free of this Dockfarm-Procedure as only late-race possibility!

Spectral Throw vs. The rest of them Builds
Last Season I was asked on my review why I didn´t concern ST (Spectral Throw, ST further on) in any word. Well it was because I hadn´t had the time to see it´s impact on the Metagame of the races. But by now I guess ST has become quite a dominating build.
The problem we´ve got is easily pointed out by comparing a Driftwood Maul with a normal Bow.

The starting Crude bow has his low base damage, because he is a ranged weapon. That´s the way bows are designed in this game - lower dmg for the sake of safety of ranged attacks.
And then lets look at the Driftwood Maul - a starter 2handed weapon The Driftwood Maul has a very high base damage compared to the Crude Bow, because he is slow and needs melee - so it has a right to hit like a truck in comparison to the Crude Bow.
But here comes Spectral Throw, turning the Driftwood Maul into a ranged weapon! Yes, it loses 40% of its base damage but pfff - who cares? Even 60% of a Driftwood Maul are a lot more than a Crude Bow by itself.
(Please forgive me that i was too lazy to sort the exact numbers out - maybe Tarkleigh in Lions Eye can tell you more about the details ;) )

And this simple comparison leads us to the core problem. Spectral Throw turned something into a safe ranged weapon what never was designed to be a safe method.
The hype goes as far that many players mule that Spectral Throw to their Ranger, Shadow, Duelist or whatever to be able to compete with other ST-Users.

Is it just the hype? Are other racers like me just too lazy to come with something new?
I don´t think so. I really don´t know how any other starting build should be able to compete with a skill that allows massive AoE-Damage, high kiting capabilities and insane synergies between weapon and skill like ST at the moment.

I really don´t want to say that ST is a bad skill in any way. But his ratios are just plain broken. I hope this problem will get fixed. But not like Ele-Cleave was "fixed" - ST is just too much of a fun skill to completely overnerf it. I don´t know how that should work, but I guess that´s GGG´s job anyway.

ST was the most dominant skill in Season 6 and many top 50 players had their success with this skill. Me included, I really had a blast with this skill. But it makes me sad seeing so few other variants around.

Rude Names in Race Ladders
Well, I really need to add this. It´s not much of a problem, but sometimes it makes me sad that this game has no filter in the character creation which would prevent some "creative" names which only consist of random verbal rudeness.
Even writing about this makes me feel a bit narrow-minded, but it hurts my eyes whenever I see someone with clear verbal abuses in his character name hitting the leaderboard. I mean, this kind of language gets kicked out of every forum, every ingame chat and so on. But in leaderboards it´s okay?
I hope that I am not that narrow-minded on this topic like i feel right now, but it simply had to be said for me.

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tl;dr
I enjoyed Descent Champions, Signatures and 1 Week Domination a lot. Schedules were working a lot better for Europeans than in S5. The growing expertise and growth in numbers of the racing community makes me happy. Fracturing was fun but definitely needs rework (rewards/Point Brackets)

I disliked the continued desync-issues, especially in relation with speed mods (Brutus). ST has become a very dominant build which restricts diversity in the race community. Race Progression after Docks is too hard and not rewarding enough to progress - so people tend to stay on Docks until Level 40 if they must.

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So here we are, Season 7 is coming up I guess.
I´m looking forward to it. I´m not looking forward to CT - I simply don´t like this format. When I wanna do PvP I´ll be playing a PvP-related and focused game. But heck, as long as other peeps enjoy it like this - have a blast, Season 7 will be better than Season 6 for you guys.
I didn´t miss CT at all, but thats my personal opinion.

It always baffles me how the people criticising docks farming in normal races are the same people who "just love" Descent Champions, which ultimately is just Halls Farming + General.

So many people in this community holding that stance and it's just absolutely mind-boggling to me.

I would argue that Descent:Champions is the worst race type by a landslide, because ultimately, it was designed as a race mode but utterly failed because you are forced to farm in that mode aswell, if you kill the final boss as quickly as possible (that's what the race should be about, if anything) you simply won't win against people who farm halls and kill the general alot later.

It's not a race it's just a farming simulator and I would argue the only reason people like it so much is because of the insane amount of loot they get, that's all.

It's such a crap format, especially the gear check zones near the end are just bad game design.

Personally I have no interest in playing Descent: Champions ever again.

But to me this whole docks/descent champions discussion just shows how hypocritical this community is. It's sad actually.

As for skill balance, all they have to do is buff cleave to pre-nerf level, to give classes a viable alternative to spectral throw (though it would arguably still be worse than ST) and make templar more popular. Nobody is playing templar these days, it just calls for a cleave buff.

edit: Another thing that makes Descent:Champions completely broken is that the gear check zones near the end heavily favour classes that have passive resist nodes in their tree (scion, marauder for example), all other classes have to rely on finding resist-gear whereas the classes with resist passives can ignore that aspect of the race almost entirely. Which is part of the reason why scion is so consistent in that race, you just won't die to gear checks, given that you have resist-passives like crazy.

But like I said I haven't played Descent:Champions in ages and I have no interest in playing it ever again, there is just too much wrong with that "race".

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SlixSC wrote:

It always baffles me how the people criticising docks farming in normal races are the same people who "just love" Descent Champions, which ultimately is just Halls Farming + General.

Farming docks for an hour and a half =/= 30 mins or Inner Halls 1-3 which have different monsters and force you to itemize differently to survive. As well as prepare for the last boss.

Ah, it makes sense now.

Well what a rage. Only for liking a race format Slix doesn´t like. Amazing.

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terrex wrote:

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SlixSC wrote:

It always baffles me how the people criticising docks farming in normal races are the same people who "just love" Descent Champions, which ultimately is just Halls Farming + General.

Farming docks for an hour and a half =/= 30 mins or Inner Halls 1-3 which have different monsters and force you to itemize differently to survive. As well as prepare for the last boss.

Ah, it makes sense now.

How is that any different? Descent Champions is only 1 hour, most docks races are 3 hours. In the signatures people farmed docks for less than 30 minutes mostly. So if anything, given the length of the races there is significantly more farming in Descent:Champions than there is in normal races.

And that's only one of the reasons Descent: Champions is poorly designed, I've mentioned others aswell.

And I'm not raging, I've made arguments as to why Descent:Champions is a horribly designed race, if you have no counter arguments then fine, but that doesn't mean that I'm "raging".

The only real difference is that Descent:Champions is relatively new and thus people aren't yet tired of playing it, but it has the same problems as normal races and some are even amplified. You might not see it yet, because it's still a relatively new race format, but in a few seasons people will get sick of it and eventually see the flaws in it.

fracture race, only race worse than descent champions.

"

And I'm not raging, I've made arguments as to why Descent:Champions is a horribly designed race, if you have no counter arguments then fine, but that doesn't mean that I'm "raging".

Well those are simply two different angles we look upon the game. I agree to you in many points, but you are quite offensive in your arguments - thats why I sense some rage in it.

I really wonder why those people who are doing best in races are so uncomfortable with many race formats. I mean, why is not liking Docks-Farm hypocritical? I really just don´t get it.

But anyway - you have your opinion, I have mine. And I had a lot of fun during Descent:Champions - and I have fun during Dockfarming. The point is, that I am interested in the evolution of these races - make em better and stuff. And pointing out how horrible and lackluster and desperate everything is doesn´t sound too optimistic.

Anyhow, hate these races a bit more, I like em if they fix some of the stuff in time.

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SlixSC wrote:

edit: Another thing that makes Descent:Champions completely broken is that the gear check zones near the end heavily favour classes that have passive resist nodes in their tree (scion, marauder for example), all other classes have to rely on finding resist-gear whereas the classes with resist passives can ignore that aspect of the race almost entirely. Which is part of the reason why scion is so consistent in that race, you just won't die to gear checks, given that you have resist-passives like crazy.

But you are really just competing against your class, no? I mean, the person who finishes #1 overall does get a whopping 3 points that you could do away with, but other than that there is no muling and you are completing against your class. So while you are correct about the resists, it doesn't really have much of an effect on outcome, except for 3 points.


At OP - The Brute has Souleater mod. He doesn't get faster as he gets damaged, he gets faster if you kill the skeletons he summons. Kill enough of them, and yes, desync will end you.

Freezing chamber is not random in so much that it spawns in the same zone every time. There will always be two exits in that zone. It is the same situation with finding the obelisk of faith or the chamber of greed. Where it spawns is based on the map template, and since you can't practice champions to figure out all the different templates, finding it can sometimes be a real pita.

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Celandrion wrote:

"

And I'm not raging, I've made arguments as to why Descent:Champions is a horribly designed race, if you have no counter arguments then fine, but that doesn't mean that I'm "raging".

Well those are simply two different angles we look upon the game. I agree to you in many points, but you are quite offensive in your arguments - thats why I sense some rage in it.

I really wonder why those people who are doing best in races are so uncomfortable with many race formats. I mean, why is not liking Docks-Farm hypocritical? I really just don´t get it.

But anyway - you have your opinion, I have mine. And I had a lot of fun during Descent:Champions - and I have fun during Dockfarming. The point is, that I am interested in the evolution of these races - make em better and stuff. And pointing out how horrible and lackluster and desperate everything is doesn´t sound too optimistic.

Anyhow, hate these races a bit more, I like em if they fix some of the stuff in time.

You misunderstood what I said. I'm not saying disliking docks farming in and of itself is hypocritical, it is only hypocritical when people simultaneously argue that farming Halls in Descent: Champions for 30 minutes isn't a problem.

The only reason people are content with farming Halls 3 in Descent: Champions but hate farming Docks in normal races is the fact that Descent: Champions is relatively new as a race and thus people aren't yet bored of farming the same places over and over again, but give it another couple seasons and most people will finally realize how boring that is.

The old descent, despite all it's problems, was much better because there was alot less farming and you couldn't finish the race before time ran out. Had they fixed mob density problems the race would have been absolutely fine. But instead GGG just removed the race for good and replaced it with Descent: Champions, which is just absolutely terrible as a race.

And you are right, I am not very optimistic, but that's simply because I have no reason to be optimistic. Skill balance is worse than ever before and instead of fixing known problems GGG are pushing out more new content (which will come with it's own problems) in the hope for some publicity and an influx of new players and almost ignoring some of the very obvious problems with their game.

GGG at this point is more interested in bringing in new players rather than satisfying and improving the game for the players they already have (some of which paid them alot of money, because they believed in them).

This game to me is a bubble that is bound to explode eventually, the more content they add without fixing some of the problems of the content that's already here, the more new problems they create. In a sense it's a bit like a pyramid scheme. Who's already here gets left behind, all that counts for them is publicity (via new "expansions") and more new players.

Eventually, if they keep ignoring already existing problems, PoE will have too many problems for people to actually give a shit about this game.

I mean season 6 was already a joke as far as I'm concerned, so many people I know (myself included) quit racing temporarily.

If you want me to be positive about this game I want to see some actual improvement, not bandaid fixes and new content, that's just a cheap way to satisfy the masses short-term, but those "tricks" don't work on me.

I want the game to be as good as possible and you don't achieve that by ignoring existing problems whilst adding more and more content (which come with their own set of problems).

This plan GGG have of adding more and more content is a bad idea, not in the short term maybe, but in the long term they will piss enough people off to be left with no player base at all.

Why aren't doors and doorways fixed, why haven't they fixed ST or Cleave for 2 seasons now, when are they finally taking care of maphackers (and I quote Chris: "massive banwave incoming" - a few MONTHS ago), etc......

All I see are problem being IGNORED, GGG have a chance to prove me wrong with the next patch, but I'm gonna be honest here I don't think for a second that any of the real problems this game has will ever be adressed. Some of these problems are known for months and years now, so please tell me, why should I now expect change?

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reboticon wrote:

But you are really just competing against your class, no? I mean, the person who finishes #1 overall does get a whopping 3 points that you could do away with, but other than that there is no muling and you are completing against your class. So while you are correct about the resists, it doesn't really have much of an effect on outcome, except for 3 points.

It would have if Descent: Champions was actually a competitive race and 80% of the player's weren't Scion. Because then whoever wins their class ranking would be decided based on who lucks out on more resist gear and can thus farm the last few zones more efficiently, it doesn't seem like a problem right now, because as far as I can tell (with the exception of Scion) there aren't more than 2-3 competent players per class that actually still play Descent: Champions, but if Descent: Champions were a competitive race format the problem would be extremely obvious for all classes that don't have resist passives in their trees.

I mean just try and farm Halls 3 with 10% lightning resist in one Descent:Champions and then 60%+ in the next, the difference is huge. The only classes not really affected by this would be Marauder and Scion because they always have passives to make up for that difference, at least somewhat.

i went to halls 3 once as witch... one-shotted at first arc bitches pack
take my time at halls1, stayed at halls 2 --> #1 witch