My personal experience and feedback for Keepers of the Flame and 3.27

Keepers of the Flame – General Impressions

This league brought a noticeable amount of quality of life improvements and better performance. The game simply felt more comfortable to play overall. I really hope Path of Exile continues pushing optimization forward, especially in the endgame.

For example, during Mercenaries League it was practically impossible to run Blight or Infinite Legion. The game would either crash or the screen would flicker, and by the time visuals came back, our characters were dead and the encounter was over.

This league, that problem was completely gone. Yes, we still lag, but at least the content is playable now. I hope GGG keeps pushing in this direction.

Please GGG, continue improving performance, you're on the right track.

League Mechanic Feedback

I loved Foulborn uniques. They were incredibly fun, some were even build enabling, and that’s exactly what PoE1 has always meant to me. When I started playing ten years ago, I thought: “Wow, I can make whatever build I want. I can mix and match and create something unique.”
Foulborn uniques captured that feeling perfectly.

However, as good as the Foulborn concept was, the actual league mechanic felt grueling.

There was barely any difficulty.

Nothing scaled into the endgame.

Rewards weren’t worth the time investment.

From an economic perspective, stopping your map to run the Breach encounter felt pointless.

From a fun perspective, it quickly started to feel like a chore.

Stabilizing the Breach was the only encounter that felt genuinely enjoyable, killing monsters freely is simply more fun than protecting something. (Blight works as an exception because it is a tower-defense with a clear identity to it.)

A "Hordes" mech could have been better if the player were the thing being protected, but the content was far too easy for that to have any real impact.

I hope the mechanic gets improvements in upcoming patches, especially around scaling and rewards.

My personal suggestion would be to merge Rogue Exiles with Breach-like mechanics. The whole theme of the Hive is about merging and unifying flesh, so it fits perfectly.

And come on, you can’t tell me a miniboss named “It That Was Xandro” wouldn’t be absolutely sick.

The Ugly

People named this the “poverty league,” which isn’t entirely accurate. It felt more like ground loot got butchered so tile loot could shine.

But the dopamine — the simple joy of killing a ton of monsters and being rewarded — just wasn’t there. Combined with an unrewarding league mechanic, the overall experience felt pretty underwhelming.

And now, the thing I’m BEGGING GGG to improve…

PoE’s netcode is very old and extremely fragile.
Either the netcode cannot keep up with modern PoE, or the servers are frequently overloaded, maybe both.

This month alone, almost every region suffered from lag spikes, disconnects and instance instability

(For the record, I didn’t personally have issues with rerolls, but some players reported them, not sure how true that would be.)

But my god…
even the tiniest bit of instability feels horrible in Path of Exile.

If there’s one thing I hope GGG focuses on before anything else, it’s this.

Please GGG, let’s tackle networking and server stability next.

Closing Thoughts

I love this game with a passion, and I want to watch it improve and grow, I have nothing but praises to sing to GGG and their amazing work with this game, we are just a few steps away from actual perfection.

I hope you accept my feedback. It comes from my personal experience, and I’m sure many players will relate. And if others disagree, that’s totally fine too.

Much love.

EDIT: I completely forgot to talk about Bloodlines.

I found them a bit underwhelming. I was expecting something more exclusive or identity-defining, not just gimmicky mechanics or average alternative power boosts.

Chaos Bloodline is the one exception, it actually felt unique, and some genuinely cool builds were able to center themselves around it.