Archnemesis Recipe Hinting

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On one hand, recipes could be completely secret, not data-mineable, and would require weeks of community collaboration to discover them all. While we felt that this would have a cool sense of discovery, it didn't really fit with the fast pace of Path of Exile's league start, where players want to experience a lot of what a league offers in the first days.

"While we felt ..."

Lead devs still bathing in Diablo and Diablo 2 "those days" nostalgia, while developing Path of Exile.

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[UI UX System explained] this compromise both leaves a bit of fun discoverability in there for those who enjoy that, and also makes it massively easier for players who just want to be reminded about what the recipes are.

Yes, I noticed the glowing borders at the start into Part 2 of the campaign ... BUT you also have to keep in mind the 'rush and pressure' (most people) people try to complete the campaign (the levelling experience) and experiment with the league mechanic in a rushed and 'brain off' way. This brain off way, rushing through the campaign, leads to having not even 10 minutes of spare time to sit down and look at the UI and noticing little changes over time (and maybe take mental notes or screenshots to review) like the glowing pulsating border colours.

tl;dr The UI-UX idea for Archnemesis, hinting at the recipes with different pulsating border colours, would stand on its own, if played in isolation, as a standalone game. But it can not hold its own when people look at it in haste while levelling yet another (competitive softcore trade league) league start. The pressure and weight of a league start buries the hinting system.

So, we got the technology in the form of map tab for years now, right? Why can't the archnemesis menu be like map tab? Tier one to five recipes which unlock and show up in the tier menu once discovered? Tier 1 being plain rdy to go ingredients while tier 5 being Innocence-touched etc. This is waaaay too dank. Without any UI help player is forced to sit on poedb for a minute, or five, each map checking what parts lead to what he wants and what is possible/available. I made a coloured/tiered google spreadsheet for myself for the most extreme recipes and let me tell you even with visual help this stuff doesn't get any easier for me to keep track of.

Just look at it. Even if the archnem box was 3 times the size it is still not enough, it would still feel bad. Why the limitation? We didn't have any limitation during harvest league, did we? And it was best thing ever, well not for the game in general but you know what I mean. You'd play for an hour or two without game loop being horribly screwed up, just horticrafting all the good stuff and worry about that stuff later. Then you'd make a 15 minute crafting session making it's own fun event thing out of it and be happy about it. Instead we got spreadsheet galore every single map completely breaking the arpg game immersion. I'm not saying make a archnem garden where we can go thru our recipes in bulk but at least some UI improvements so it doesn't take too long during mapping.

Quick glance at tier 3 subtab in archnem box, click on BrineKing-touched recipe and in a quick glance you immediately know if you got tier2 mats or not, if not then you immediately see if you got any tier1 mats for the tier2s, if not look at another recipe. Bam bam bam, 5 clicks later/10 seconds later you know everything and ready to blast.
There is way too many spreadsheets already for all the league mechanics.
Please GGG, I beg you, less poedb more PoE, thank you.

Archnemesis Recipes?

what that? what that good for?

Another league mechanic I totally missed?(again)

Just fucking tell us what the recipes are in game on the item tab. I hate spending time out of the game trying figure stuff out. Give us a list of of those we have used and a list of those we could make from the items we have in stock. The mechanic is great; the recipe system being hidden sucks.

Maybe you could make it make seeing the recipes optional in the options menu. That way those that love to "discover" them can do so. IIRC the in game tutorial can be skipped; or at least there is a screen hinting at that which shows up in the TS and I always click no.

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The intensity of the border indicates whether it's a 2-, 3- or 4-part recipe

Wow, that's a news for me. Taught that all recipes glow equally...

Anyways, when I'm played through acts I wanted to complete some recipes, only using parts when they are highlighted, so I've been skipping almost every AN.

But the thing is - if you only hitting those mods that is required for the recipe, you won't get a lot of rewards. It's hard to know is this exact mod worth keeping or I can use it right away.

And do you know what's good for systems like this? Color-coding. It's really hard now to understand all those icons in AN inventory. A lot of them looks the same and it takes a long time to go through all of them deciding what to use. Please make colored borders showing what type of rewards will we get from mod, combined through the recipe.

And yeah, any way to access AN inventory outside of actual encounter would be great.

I noticed the warnings about recipes and I think I've completed some by chance but I genuinely still don't know what the recipes do.

I only noticed borders appearing around the mods I had already used.

This system looks very far from straightforward to me.

"Please, larger inventory and auto-sorting button!" Yes, pleas!

There are 3-4 recipes I want to purse (put the ingredients aside)

Then there are some ingredients with undiscovered recipes, where I miss the other half (put them aside)

Next, I have a couple of finished powerful ingredients that wait for a correct combo to use them (put them aside, preferably by combo to remember the right sequence without excel and if I am ready to use it).

And finally, I have a bunch of "whatever" and "medium value" items, perfect for using here and now, or as an additional drop after the recipe. (put them aside)

And this all muddied by the stream of incoming, unsorted, ingredients.

Solution: At least expand the inventory, possibly split it (or auto-sort) into "Ingredients" and "reagents" (not usable in recipe anymore) or tiers.

Did I mention that I have a half of the space full and can not neither take them out to inventory to properly sort them and put back in (feels like playing Mystic Square) nor even open the window whenever I want (ie. while picking stuff up or hideout) and need to look for a statue to do it.

And a last minor annoyance: triggering the statues one by one. So I have a combo or recipe in mind and a messy inventory but cannot immediately use it like in the good ol' metamorph days. Again -> Excel or paper needed to keep track or at least more space to set the item aside.

Solution: Allow players to "queue" the ingredients in the window with rewards preview.


I have no idea how during the internal tests you were fine with 24(?) spaces... All in all, currently the player either will just throw random stuff at the statue and then the rewards are pretty meh, so they will shortly skip it or they have to manage and min-max inventory. I heard players really like that during the Synthesis league :D

It needs to be setup like a map/heist tab, and we need a list of discovered recipes.

"Players who want to use no external resources would not be told a list of recipes directly, so that they could gradually build their own list if they'd like."

I never understand why developers are fixated on ONE solution to this kind of conundrum where the ranges of possible solutions are bound to annoy the majority.

Why don't devs implement OPTIONS each player can select from .. every single possiblity outline in this GGG post could easilty have been made an OPTION, a full reveal, the int system, etc.

/sigh, it seems providing players options is simply not in game devs' repertoire of design decisions. :(

mod weightings needs a look at when 95% are the same 6 its kinda kills the fun