Development Manifesto: Delirium Improvements

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Elendarulianreo wrote:

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Item Drop Vacuuming: No, sorry!

The reality is, if you don't solve this problem, the league is a failure, full stop. I'm not sure I buy the "we can't drop that many items in one place" reasoning given that drop vacuuming is in place for 6-node delves. Either way, right now players' options are:

-Stop to pick up loot and risk dying to death effects and straggling rare mobs.
-Kill stragglers, wait for death effects to finish, then pick up loot and quickly run out of time.
-Ignore loot and backtrack later.

The first option is not viable, and if you can't vacuum items to facilitate the third option, then the only fix is to enable the second, which means removing the delirium timer. Really, this solves every issue, including the interactions with past content, as well as the hugely disadvantageous indoor layouts (e.g. Maze map).

Agreed. Remove the timer and the people who want to zoom zoom can ignore 99% of all drops and old league mechanics and people who want to take their time can do so without being punished for it.
Make the difficulty as you progress deeper into the map be the factor that limits you, not time.

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In addition, even if we wanted to, it's not really even practical to vacuum an entire map worth of items and drop them in one place.

The entire point of the creation of item filters and the nerfs to IIQ was to make stuff like this viable, and I'll also as an added example direct you to Blight maps.


Also, unrelated to that, the drops for cluster jewels and and delirium orbs are so inconsistent.

I noticed something in the post.
You said you added the on-death effects so that powerful builds can't trivialize the mobs. What about everyone else? Don't balance the game based on the top 1% of players, please.

Re: item drops - I get why you don't like the idea of item vacuuming but I hope you don't actually think any amount of extra time actually addresses this issue. Racing against the delirium timer is a big part of this content, so unless you give us so much time as to trivialize this concern entirely, we're gonna use any extra time you give us "for picking up items" to push further and have more of a buffer if we run into a dead end or big gap between packs or whatever. Then we'll still have to backtrack and it will still be a frustrating experience.

There's just no way to have "race against the clock" content like this that involves covering large distances on the map, have loot drop from mobs as we go, and not run into this problem. If you think stopping to pick up items between packs is an essential part of the gameplay loop you want to encourage, you need to STOP MAKING THIS TYPE OF TIMER GATED CONTENT. These two things are mutually exclusive.

Remember Soren Johnson's game design adage: given the chance, your players will optimize the fun out of your game. That's what's happening here - the optimal way to do Delirium content is to wait till it's over and then backtrack for loot, which is not fun and frustrates players. It seems the solution you'd like to see for this is for players to pick up loot as they go - fine, then you need to change the content mechanics so that play style becomes optimal, or at least not clearly very suboptimal.

edit: and I forgot to mention, the problem goes beyond the fact that stopping to pick up items means less time to actually clear packs and build the Delirium meter - it's also rather dangerous with all the scary on death effects. Consolidating those mobs into clearly telegraphed packs may help with that, but for now at least there are multiple independent factors all encouraging the 'race through the map without stopping' approach.

edit 2: and there's absolutely no reason splinters can't be vacuumed up. Going back and implementing a system similar to the one you made for meta organs last league would make existing splinters less annoying as well

Thank you very much for listening to us and improving the new league within days/weeks. You guys are just amazing. Looking forward to the performance improvements, keep it up guys.

<3

"For those interested in why we use On-Death effects in content like this, it's because they are a viable way of making monsters that are killed instantly have an effect on players, and they aren't trivialised by clear-speed. Few to no other mods we can put on these monsters make any difference normally because they are eradicated by powerful builds in seconds. We're going to be toning these down, either way."

Not sure if someone mentioned, but for certain builds its not a big deal, and that is the problem, specially for melee.

I dont think we need all loot vacuum, but if possible do it with the Simulacrum Splintes would be nice, they drop alot (since its 300) and thats the main problem of picking up all the time, currency we are used to pick up but even breachstones splinters i usualy ignore bcz its 2 much work to pick up and the simulacrum splinters are even worse in this scenario.
Well, tldr> vacuum the splinters as a reward in the end instead of dropping randomly all the time

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For those interested in why we use On-Death effects in content like this, it's because they are a viable way of making monsters that are killed instantly have an effect on players, and they aren't trivialised by clear-speed. Few to no other mods we can put on these monsters make any difference normally because they are eradicated by powerful builds in seconds. We're going to be toning these down, either way.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Killing players like this is having an effect it seems to be pissing them all off!

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zeels90 wrote:

Here's my feedback:
- League mechanic is not rewarding at all. Pushing a Delirium all the way to the boss (Level 6-7) and getting 5-8 rare rings feels HORRIBLE. Especially compared to Metamorph (A league I LOVED).
- Considering how the entire map is consumed - it's boring to fight the same monsters - in the same patterns over and over again. I'm already getting tired of it. What would be great are unique mobs, variety of monsters in Delirium and maybe clickable chests for extra rewards? Like legion chests?
- The workflow of Delirium is to rush rush rush and then you're forced to go back through the map and loot everything. I found the manifesto's wording kind of insulting to long term players. I know what a loot filter is and even with expert knowledge of the game lost time looting in Deliriums (not like the rewards I miss out on matter anyway). You can't vacuum? Fine. But figure something out - nobody wants to backtrack through a map. There has to be a more intelligent way of pushing players to rush and not have to slog through the map back tracking.

'+1' from me, mainly for the last point.

I can understand no loot vacuum, but it still doesn't change the fact that having to choose between exploring less Delirium and backtracking to pick up items ruins the entire league concept for me. I suspect whatever improvements you have won't change it, I'll just do challenges, quit, and the league will end up being classified as 'meh' on my list, somewhere near Torment. Well, not each league is for everyone and this one proabably is not for me. *shrug*

Metamorph was very fun though. Really liked it.

Oh, and mist. I love the mist. Exept when I want to see a ground skill under it. (;