Development Manifesto - Challenge League Post-mortems - Forum

I missed out on some challenge leagues, but perhaps it helps out to say what motivates me to stick to 1 league:

Time constraint. All wealth accumulated in 1 league. I don't trade, I barely use my guild for aid (not that it is that active, orsonius I saw you left :*( ), I got 1 support gem I ended up not using. Without trading things just take a lot longer in this game, the game is far more difficult. To add to that I try interesting thematic builds, which are not always FOTM builds and thus can be slower to acquire wealth.

Upon my POE return I was a bit skeptical, but since the game in my absence has moved into the right direction I went for the supporter packs, while not even being a fan of the current packs.

The biggest contributors that impact the game in a good way are:

1. No more desync.
2. Smarter fights and less "die from unavoidable 1 shot/ reflect."
3. Nice new quality content ( act 4).
4. Crafting options for the self-found, no longer trade obliged to get somewhere. That said the really hard content is still lurking behind a trade wall if you consider both normal playing hours and self found.
5. Gem distribution changes by vendors.

This league I chose to go for the standard league, where I could die. I don't think I will go back to any hardcore league since I had more room to experiment and try to get past content with subpar gear in a few cases still.

Things I would love to see improved are:

1. Just free up the gems at vendors. I made two characters to go past lvl80 and still have no clarity. I know I can run the right character up to brutus, but that just seems as a clumsy design choice.

2. Game has become too complex for new players. I think overall progression feels better than it use to do, so that improved, but you got so much content that I feel running around with a dictionary.

3. Make fights smarter. I don't want to read a list of mods on a mob, make it visually evident what is there and what is going on. I did notice a lot of the bloodline stuff does have visual indicators, the right way to go!

4. Crafting and currency drops. The most interesting crafting options regal orbs and exalts are far too rare. There is a gap in POE where most often you sit on gear that isn't there or usable yet and you want to spend these orbs on it, but they only drop once per 2/3 weeks, so you can't. The masters slightly filled this gap, but I feel the gap is still there. I rather would see an option for more incremental improvements to gear. Allow us to roll those mods, but put the gate on improving the gear and rolling it high? I am talking about an armor piece with 1k armour, 70+ life, 2 resists around 20% and as self found I have to need to spend currency on such items but the currency does not exist.

5. Masters and hideout resetting in new leagues? I heard you can band up to get them leveled faster,.. but again this is just clumsy at some point I will just stop making an hideout and stop leveling masters and find myself most likely not playing PoE.

6. Challenges. I got 6 or so that are 1 away from completion, but I just can't find the rogue exile/ monster/ unique/ vaal zone in map to finish them. For some I have to delve myself into the PoE wiki to figure out where drops what and I got my limit on how often I want to visit it. I wish I could see within a zone what objectives I could complete there as a start to improve the design and make this more friendly towards new players.

7. Position of melee. At one point melee got a buff which made them more playable, but after that it seems melee has fallen off the grid again. I don;t feel fortify works that well for melee. Yes it helps, but alongside keeping up endurance charges the system is clunky. At some point you need to attack/ deal damage to maintain crowd control. The difference between fortify melee and fortify non melee is that melee needs to keep it up during combat within in range of all damage, thanks to whirling blade it is possible to get it up by gaining distance between your enemy. It sort of comes down to: gets fortify for the brawls VS gets it during escape. Anyways melee can use some love, not by giving it more AOE or range, but by going back at the drawing board, what is melee?

Last edited by Ozgwald#5068 on Feb 22, 2016, 2:32:48 PM