The Atlas is Ugly and Needs Work

While I appreciate the thought process, in practice, it's just kind of ugly and troublesome.

The biomes don't really make sense so the colors are strange and look unnatural because of this.

After you progress far into it, it becomes a visual nightmare - finding where you left off, where notable maps are, etc. isn't intuitive.

Looking at a legend with 20 different icons just isn't very... good. If the idea was to make mapping more of an accessible experience to new players, well, the mark was missed. This is far more confusing.

If it's an unexplored map, why do we know what modifiers are on it? If there's a boss, if it's irradiated (wasn't aware there was nuclear radiation in PoE, but whatever), etc.?

The entire thing just doesn't really make much sense.

What is the point of the towers? Why not just give tablets charges, then let people use the tablet on waystones to add the effect?

There needs to be a simpler and easier way to make this all work. Why not just do something like this? No endless map, just a "hand drawn" map that shows us the biomes, what maps are within that biome, what bonus loot we can expect, etc.



You can still have the element of randomness in there, where it just picks a map from the map pool in the chosen biome. That way people can target farm what they're interested in a little better, but can't pick the exact map they want (because you don't like that). Instead of citadels, just make them a rare waystone drop or something. Maybe add them as a bonus drop to cities or something. Or maybe add additional biomes, like "Ruins" where powerful ancient artifacts, like a citadel waystone, would probably drop in.

Then if people want to do specific things, they can add those league mods via tablets to their maps. Just increase the drop rates on things like "Ritual Tablets" or "Expedition Tablets" etc.

Instead of physically "exploring" the atlas map, make the exploration part built into the maps themselves; don't tell people when there's bosses, if there's corruption, if there's expeditions, etc. Make it a surprise. Hell, why not use procedural generation for maps? The name of the map just tells you the visuals, what enemies are there, but the actual layout is somewhat randomly generated? Then it will never get boring, and nobody will complain about map layouts, because it's random anyway.

Thoughts? Am I stupid or crazy or both? I just know the current setup isn't doing it for me personally.

Yep, offered smth like that already somewhere. Tie "forest" biome maps to forest Atlas areas only. Mountains biomes must be only in mountains (and nothing else there, no "jungles" and other strange maps). Right now Atlas is a mess. It's as if they are all placed randomly. There is some pattern but it seems it doesn't work as intended.

And give us quests for each biome to solve. Smth like: here in this forest there lives Bad Witch. Find her and kill (or even dont' kill but TALK or make a potion with her help like we did in Act3 or whatever). And this forest contains like 10 forest maps. She is somewhere there. So when running these maps I at least have a feeling of some tangible goal instead of mindless terribly boring grind for the sake for Div/Per/Hours.

Or. Somewhere in desert biom expedition is attacked/surrounded by some bad guys. Help them (by clearing several desert maps) and get some expedition bonuses.

There's a lot of such stuff can be added easily. This will make Atlas alive and interesting.

map tablet:
5-10 maps in range will convert to "sandspit".

tablets with "5-10 (x) maps in range" will drop in "(x)" map

if you want sandspit farm sandspit. very easy - nothing to change to the atlas. everyones sorta happy.

I love delve and i LOVE the idea of infinite atlas. I would hate to see it scrapped.

The problem is that they took one element of Delve and then combined it with elements of PoE1 atlas, and the too aren't really compatible. In PoE1, you start a league, you do the initial atlas progression once, and then you just play the game. Notice how "doing initial atlas progression" and "playing the game" are two different things. The former is just the preparation.

Thing is, PoE is not a difficult game. It's not an engaging game. It has RISK but apart from certain elements like pinnacle bosses, no challenge. It's essentially a clicker. The "fun" comes from build making and destroying hordes of monsters with satisfying explosions and having loot drop (with satisfying sound of course).

Running low density maps with no loot to pick just has no fun element in it. And PoE2 forces you to do that "preparation" step with no loot or density all the time. You find a good spot, you lock bad maps, you path to towers, you clear the towers, and THEN you can play the game. Then you strip farm the spot and repeat the process again. So about half of your playtime is just wasted.

Again that wouldn't be a problem if the game was actually difficult or "slow and methodical" and every pack was a challenge, then the fun would come from overcoming that challenge even while you're pathing to towers, but this isn't the case and it's extremely naive to think that it ever will be.

Then of course there's a part where you are kinda forced to strip farm a spot once you've juiced it, otherwise you're wasting time. Which again removes player agency.

I say GGG should learn from delve, change how towers work, make biomes more meaningful, remove waystones and make risk/reward increase with distance. I'd hate reverting to finite poe1 atlas. Infinite atlas has potential, but in order to realize it it should get rid of poe1 elements, not fully embrace them.

My biggest issue with the Atlas in PoE 2 is it's too wide spread and chaotic. I would like it a lot more if it was like Trials of Sekhemas where you have path options within a subset, you constantly move in one general direction, and if you want to jump paths, you need to do it 1 room(map) at a time. Also, some fog so your pathing would change based on how far you can see ahead.

They could have 4-8 general directions from your home, North, South, East, and West; and North East, South East, South West, and North West. Perhaps there could be something special in each cardinal direction. If you wanna do X, go North. If you wanna do Y, go South. The special part of each direction could be a mystery too. You have to progress to discover it.

If you go North, you can never get to any other direction from that path. You can not venture into NE or NW from North. If you started doing North and wanted switch to South, you must start from the beginning of South's path and progress from there.

Just change waystones to maps, map nodes blank, delete biomes or make biomes apply boons/conditions so we can decide what to run. My two family members left because they had to navigate through endless map, doing maps they don't want to in order to place tablets inside towers to finally play what they enjoy. If you add map prep, tablet prep and finding area with enough maps there a lot of work for little fun.

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I read it and thought that taking PoE1 mechanic to PoE2 would be best idea. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.