Important constructive feedback <3

Was hoping that when mercs were going ON hiatus that base quantity would get a slight buff to compensate for the loss in pseudo party play and we would be addressing how aggressive some of the t17/t16.5 map modifiers can be.


Basically as to why players feel like they are getting less drops across the board, they are forgetting they had pseudo-party play with mercs, so they were getting more currency/quant/rarity added on.


I believe getting less drops hurts casual players the most though, because the serious grinders will get what they want regardless of drop rates or how hard something is to craft.


Not sure if they are already working on this, but maybe consider having an alternate merc exclusive effect for unique items that only benefits them, so the gear is still usable normally but can't be leveraged to provide crazy overpowered buffs when equipped on a merc, specifically.


Ideally, players would still feel like their overall power was increasing a bit when mercs + grafts become available in the same league, while also getting balanced out by you not being able to leverage specific gear combos which were trivializing the entire game with 3 items.

Maybe there wouldn't be a need to reduce the effects of some of the more egregious mods, with the addition of mercs + grafts, it would be a significant increase in power which would allowed more average players to be more competitive in higher tiers of mapping.


Making t17 a bit easier to handle would have been a good call temporarily, but still I appreciate that t16.5 does in a roundabout way answer that problem, by giving weaker builds access to currency/scarab/maps % scaling.


Also, the tree of genesis making player power easier to obtain and easier to experiment with things as well, so you don't need to put as much effort into deciding if you want to try out a build.

You can get a lucky base from the tree to craft with, or potentially find a half-decent starter set to use which would have previously costed multiple divines in a trade setting.

Overall I like how things turned out, but I do believe it could have been better, not saying it was bad overall; just that some things could have been done in slightly different ways and I think it would have been more well-received.

Sounds like rambling to me. You just admitted that you don't need to run tier 16.5/17 for currency yet you want to make them easier? Why? After all the point of a better gear is to tackle harder content. It's ridiculous to want it easier so you can farm it for......what exactly? There isn't any content beyond that.

That wasn't a complaint it was more-so a suggestion and there is niche content beyond uber bosses and juicing t17's, the HOGM and deep-delve, which nobody does except for bragging rights

I do also understand the genesis tree, along with asynchronous trade helps make things more available to people, which means players can get better builds rolling much easier than before and that also does solve part of that problem with build diversity.

T17's are not really "hard" for anyone who has been playing the game for thousands of hours, players will roll over mods they can't do, anyways. But lowering the barrier to entry and making t17 bonuses more accessible was the goal of T16.5's in the first place.

I'm just saying that some of the mods could be less oppressive and that would allow more builds to be competitive within those spaces without buffing any individual skills, or ascendancy nodes since mercs (when they come back), will give players more ways to scale power again and grafts also do as well.

I think certain strats do have good gains still on the high-end, maybe not as good as with a merc giving free quant lol, but they don't feel like they compete with easier strats still. GGG had addressed this themselves in a post that I hadn't seen yet prior to making this one, so I am glad they are at least listening to their player-base.


TLDR: I'm saying to make some of the more aggressive t17/t16.5 mods more playable, so more average players can be competitive within that space and bring base quant/currency/rarity up a little, to compensate for taking away the free quant/currency/rarity mercs were providing, then removing it when mercs come back, so things feel consistent.

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Not sure if they are already working on this, but maybe consider having an alternate merc exclusive effect for unique items that only benefits them, so the gear is still usable normally but can't be leveraged to provide crazy overpowered buffs when equipped on a merc, specifically.

For this to work they would probably have to create a whole slew of merc items similar to heist equipment, while I can see this on paper, I can't see it working long term.

Also, as far as T17s and that, with the power creep added from this league as far as grafts, T17s should be a bit easier for you.

Personally I don't think the game is overly difficult in most aspects because I have thousands of hours over the years, I just assume most average players don't have the luxury that most long-time players do; which is knowing exactly what to do and when to do it, or how to effectively interact with mechanics to get the desired outcome.


It is a lot easier now than it used to be, that's for sure, GGG has especially eased up on the more grindy aspects in a lot of ways over time. Which is great for the games longevity and getting more players in the door who might not have been interested previously.


They did really quickly add a lot of foul-born unique items, which was sort of where the idea behind that came from and they seem to be playing out fairly well in use, opening the possibilities for messing around with some new builds.


More specifically I was thinking about some of the broken item combos mercs could use, because they would just be abused again when mercs are reintroduced and that would let some items retain their initial use-case, but it would feel sort of cheesy to only do certain specific items and not revamp more of them.


It also would feel kinda cheesy to immediately recycle the same item gimmick, so I'll give GGG that it is a tough situation for them to balance mercs without completely reworking how some unique items function, which also would suck too because they are used in other builds and it might be "the lesser of two evils" so to speak, to just change how they work while equipped on a merc.