Breach League 2.0 Review - *UPDATED -- NOW WITH MORE SALT!*

After rage quitting on day 1 due to a Breach killing me via a disappearing wall preventing a Flame Dash -- Then killing me again when I got gangbanged by swarming mobs while I was frozen in Act 1 -- I skipped playing PoE altogether over the rest of launch weekend. Because I'm addicted, I started a new character and made it to maps on Tuesday.

Part 1: The In-map Mechanic

I didn't engage in the league mechanic until level 47; then again a few levels later at ~53. I then skipped the league mechanic until maps. Since then: I've gotten a ton of loot from the Tree. I have killed a Breach boss. I've done two Breach Fortresses. I've done Neo-Classic Breach. And I've done whatever the 3rd encounter is called. This 3rd encounter ruins the game. Not the mechanic; the game.

This was my Shore map:



This was my Temple:



The Shore map was ~2/3rds Breach mechanic and the Temple map was ~3/4ths. This is not acceptable.

The walls in the mechanic are bad. The area the mechanic takes up is worse. Combined, the 3rd encounter makes mapping infuriating. If the walls were removed entirely, the mechanic would still be awful because it's overriding up to 3/4ths of the map. I do not want play a forced mechanic that consumes the majority of a map. Either make it opt-in like Delirium or straight up delete it from the game.

Part 2: The Tree

I felt some dissonance engaging with the tree. It is very rewarding. The crafting skill trees are cool.

And I don't like it.

I don't like it in the same way I didn't like Heist, Sanctum, and TotA. I'm clicking a button and getting loot. That's it. I don't feel like the reward matches the effort I'm putting in. Yes, I'm killing mobs, but by making the rewards tied to a different zone and a single click of a button, my brain rejects the dopamine hit. It doesn't feel like I'm earning the reward I'm getting.

Part 3: The Nerf Hammer

After Settlers released (in the wake of the Necropolis debacle), there was a part of me that hoped you would abandon PoE 1 for PoE 2 and just leave PoE 1 the fuck alone. The game was in such a good state and it felt so good to play and there were so many fun and rewarding end-game farming strategies that I worried any tinkering would ruin the game. Welp... Guess what.

The game is so much more fun with ample currency. The game is so much more fun with an abundance of scarabs. I don't know why you felt the need to obliterate access to both. Bring back Scarab of Edifice! Or Operative Strongboxes at the very least.

Part 4: It's 2025 and I Still Hate the Lab

I went into the league intending to play Lightning Conduit, but I kept dying while leveling. The first two times was to the league mechanic, but the rest of the time was to good ol' fashioned stupidity and bad play. So I switched to some sort of Holy Flame Totem/Flame Wall/Wave of Conviction ignite Elementalist homebrew that carried me to maps. Well, that was great for leveling, but Wave of Conviction was really struggling with the league mechanic. It just does not have the reach to keep Ailith from getting gangbanged by Breach mobs. So, I decided to switch over to Firestorm of Pelting, which, according to PoB, would have given me a 6x increase in damage and would improve my range.

I spent a couple hours on Tuesday and another couple of hours on Thursday trying to get Firestorm of Pelting. I spent THE ENTIRE DAY on Wednesday farming Lab. Two Uber-Lab runs and innumerable Merc Lab runs later, I got ZERO re-roll same gem options at the Font. I don't know how you'd fix this and maybe I'm just whining, but I really, REALLY don't like it.

Anyways... See you all next league. Maybe. Probably. Most likely.

[EDIT] Tl;dr: If you don't like the league mechanic, the most frequent event is so big and so ubiquitous that it becomes impossible to ignore. Farming strategies in mapping have been nerfed to the point that they cannot compensate for enduring a league mechanic you dislike. [/EDIT]

Hi, I just want to tell you, I really like your diagrams. Keep up the great work! (thumbs up)

Also, I agree with you. It's just very... intrusive? I love the tree, but I don't love the way to get its resources.

Anyway, I uninstalled PoE1 and PoE2, today. I'm playing Titan Quest II* and Grim Dawn, now. I just find them more fun. After that, I think I might play No Rest For The Wicked.

Edit: After playing Titan Quest II today, I had a nagging feeling that PoE2 is not the ARPG of tomorrow. Maybe Titan Quest II is a better example. The reason I say that is because PoE2 seems to feel pressured to be PoE1, in terms of mob density, loot, crafting, etc. However, Titan Quest seems to be happy to do smaller, slower engagements. The loot drops are slow, and it feels like SSF in PoE. That's good, because I end up valuing what loot I do get (in TQ2). Again, I'm not saying TQ2 is the ARPG of tomorrow. I'm just saying that TQ2 is maybe going towards it more so than PoE is.

Warning: Now with more salt

As expected, the changes to the walls in Hive did nothing to improve the encounter.

I have maybe the best geared character I've ever had in SSF -- by level 90 and before I got a single watchstone -- and I feel nothing. As much as the phrase gets memed on now, I feel no sense of pride and accomplishment. I clicked a button and got an insane pair of boots. I clicked a button and got a solid six-link with life and res. I clicked a button and got +1 All Gems. Woohoo.

This is the most frustrated and angry I've been since Kalandra. Which wasn't that long ago, but it's shocking to feel this way again so soon after. Yet another debacle. Outside of the past two leagues, it feels like GGG has been a never ending chain of debacles since 3.15. Is there any way to revert back to 3.26? Or 3.25? I would have preferred Settlers have never ended than deal with this patch.

The duality of man lol

I think this is one of the most fun leagues I have ever played in my 13 years of PoE :)

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ampdecay#1924 wrote:

The duality of man lol

I think this is one of the most fun leagues I have ever played in my 13 years of PoE :)

I'm glad you enjoy it. I know I'm in the minority in my opinion. I don't expect that to change. I do enjoy the new iteration of classic Breach (and Fortress, to a lesser extent -- sans walls), but a huge chunk of my problem is that there's no real way for me to enjoy the rest of the game right now. There have been a lot of league mechanics that have been released over the past few years that I just did not like, but I could avoid them and still enjoy the game/league because they were always opt-in. This mechanic is not opt-in. The Hive encounter (and its walls) frequently takes up half a map or more. And since I don't know which encounter I'm getting before entering a map, there's no avoiding it.

As for the tree... Well, if people enjoy the tree, that's just going to have be a difference of opinion.

Good work with the write up and diagrams.

The tree being as rewarding as it is only makes sense when its fuel mechanic eats your map and extends time spent in it by a large degree. Don't hate the tree :) What it spits out is totally "deserved", you pay half of each map and half your playtime to fuel it.

If we had this mechanic as is but also with less rewarding tree the potential fallout would make the current fallout look like a nothinburger in comparison.

Those map images have a disturbing amount of useable non-purple space. The devs better get on that so we can fully enjoy the new breach throughout our entire map.

I love the effort and thought you have put into this vs. a wall of run-on sentences with no punctuation.

I am kind of in the middle tbh. I find myself progressing better each league and actually feeling it, but I have noticed a significant difference in currency but I can't figure out if that's because of mercenaries conditioning or what...