EA Feedback

Wanted to play something new this patch, saw thunderstorm sorc build so played it till some ~endgame

Campaign was the best as always, temple was a welcome addition, overall great experience.

Going through map tiers was harder than last patch in terms of map sustain: planned to save tablets, but without waystone quant tablets mapping was unsustainable, and i wasn't failing any maps, just about 30-40% of map bosses didn't drop any waystones, and there were no map drops from rares either, so i mostly progressed from vendor maps and reforging. Well it's not like i was short on tablet, but i still much prefer previous patch where map drop was guaranteed from the last rare/boss.

First time playing after endgame rework, i'd say endgame is in pretty decent shape currently, there're some different viable strats (did some essence farming, felt good as a starting one); no preparing tower overlap = no travel maps = no longer feels like trolling not playing fast build. My biggest grip atm I'd say is during those long grind session playing all the narrow labyrinth maps start to feel really tiring really fast (favorite map mechanic when? :) )

Now the league mechanic in the endgame is... well, yeah. It's a miss for me.

While setting up temple for atziri was easy enough, farming bosses in poe is too much of a gamble for me and i generally never do it. I know it might look weird saying this while playing a game with so much random mechanics, but i do not like gambling. I always choose strats that give consistent predictable outcomes over the ones with huge variances.

But alright, you can theoretically set up temple for consistent rewards after a big time investment of building it up with those linked upgrade chains? In principle, something like settlers league (which was my most played league in poe1) where you build your settlement over few weeks and finally you can start getting those mirror shard shipments. Except in settlers i was always progressing my settlement, and only conditions of setbacks were either failing to kill the kidnap boss, or you decided to ship above crew capacity. Both of these you had influence on the outcome. There was also some random crew dying chance afair, but it was very minor.
Temple building on the other hand feels very... random :\ No, I'm sure if i play long enough till lucking into chain going where first rooms will be more or less protected from rng then i can start building it further and eventually I'll have a very profitable temple, it's just... i tried building temple all evening yesterday and by the end of the day my temple was in worse shape than when i started, only because of bad rng. I was so done with it i uninstalled :) It's not that i dislike hard games (my #1 game is nioh2), and it's not that i dislike complex building games (i have >1k hours combined in factorio+satisfactory), i just really don't like gambling; hopefully next league will be less aggravating for me