Today I felt post-league depression for the first time - 40/40 Challenges Review of Necropolis

5400 hours in this game, I'm just your average softcore andy who plays the same build every league and can't make his own original build so I follow PoB guides.

This league wasn't any different, I started, I did all my progression, bought most of my gear by the end of week 1 and finished 40/40 challenges within 2 weeks.

I'm by no means someone who goes zoom zoom or uses any complicated atlas strategies, I roll my maps one by one and I use the default neversink filter and take like 10-20 mins per map just looting. So all these weird exploits people were doing I had no clue about, and seems like they patched them way too late since the economy is totally broken now(headhunter is 5 divines loooooooool). Items like The Squire shield I remember being over 100 divines is now only 60c. Insane stuff, sure it makes it easier to try out different builds and some uniques are cheaper, but there's negatives too.

Since that change they made where you can chaos spam T17s now chaos orbs have gained more buying power because they're more valuable for rolling your T17s so divine orbs dropped to only 100c for a few days(now they're around 130 as of typing this post). It was really weird seeing people trade me 2 divines and 50c for a 2.5 div item, felt surreal. I think this change also means that everything will cost more divines since they have slightly less value compared to chaos orbs? I'm not an economy expert in this game so maybe someone can comment on this.

Wowie time to talk about the league mechanic!

Gravecrafting is boring, I did a few items using the whole graveyard and min-maxed it as much as I could, using +50 modifier tier rating in rows/columns with increased effect, using certain types of corpses next to a corpse that increases effect of that type(like an undead corpse next to one that increases effect of adjacent undead corpses), even used corpses to craft additional item/mirrored copy. The best things I made were 2 Imperial Bows with some nice ele damage T1 rolls and they both only sold for 1 divine each even when 6-linked. To Deadeyes that were lvl70 and had just gotten to maps. My gravecrafts that I spent so much time and effort putting together and dealing with walking around that zone and its UI were only good enough for builds that had just gotten to maps. I mean that's just horrible. Suffice to say I completely ignored the corpses and gravecrafting the moment I was done with all challenges associated with them. The only time I picked up any corpses was when the "20% chance to craft additional item" one dropped because its expensive or any unique Perandus corpses since that jewel can be good.

Allflames are kinda fun, some of them have nice rewards but again people just haaaad to abuse the currency one and exile one and break the economy even more. Exile allflame got nerfed and from costing 2-3 divines it went down to 10c lol. Though I will say the feeling of a bunch of allflames stacking up in your inventory/storage and you're just waiting for the "right" map to use them in with maybe a high density pack or an 8-mod map feels weird. Feels like sometimes I'm forced to use up a bunch of them because I don't have 20 quad tabs to dump these things in. Ofc I don't pick them all up since there is no vendor recipe with them, I ignore ones like Abyss because I just don't like that mechanic, yet they still pile up pretty quick. I wouldn't mind if allflames made it into the game along with all the necropolis uniques, but gravecrafting is just watered-down boring harvest and I just don't think its good at all.

Also in all of my maps while doing 40/40 challenges I never once saw the divine orb chance devoted mod, not before the nerf and not after the nerf. So I guess I didn't "win the lottery" and never got to print a bunch of divines in a map. Weird design is all I can say about stuff like that.


So after I was done with challenges I started really min-maxing my build, getting uniques with corruption implicits, getting a 6-link Soul Mantle with a double-corrupt implicit which cost me 80 divines. Getting 21/20 gems. Sure I could farm 60 more divines to get lvl6/20 quality awakened gems but I've lost all my motivation, and I'll explain why below.


So now I have 3 nice atlas trees, 2 fun strats, one being harvest crop-rotation farming with imbued harvest and the other being a generic eater of worlds modifier effect tree to farm boxes,div cards and harbinger and I basically either use the card farming tree on any 8-mod cemetery(hoping for a brother's gift drop) or use the harvest one any time I get a Horned Scarab of Awakening(I get like 10k harvest juice on average every map and its pretty fun). I have things I can do. But I have nothing else to spend my currency on, I tried 2 different builds already and didn't like them at all, I've done the campaign 4 times this league which is already 3 more times than usual. My 3rd atlas tree is a generic one where all league mechanics are blocked except Heist, and I'm fully specced into some Heist stuff for high value contracts, 10% chance for blueprints to drop fully revealed. And the rest of the tree is just red influence, all guardian map drop nodes, Thorough Exploration for fun because my build has insane boss dps, and the rest is scarab drop nodes and vaal side area nodes to get free uber atziri fragments so I can farm The Feared more often. I use this tree on any corrupted cemetery that doesn't turn to 8-mod(basically this is my alch&go tree for any regular map). If it goes 8-mod, I use one of the other 2 trees.


And today I realized I'm just playing standard, I'm not interacting with the league at all because imo it just sucks. So why play, why map, farm currency for what exactly? Gambling a House of Mirrors card for the memes? My build is at its utmost peak atm, even a heist amulet wouldn't be an upgrade because I actually need the attributes from my citrine amulet to wear all my gear. I don't even need dps because 200+ mil guardian dps is good enough for me, especially since I dont touch uber bosses or T17s. Oh while we're at it, let's talk about that!

T17s have failed completely with the intention of their creation being to "bridge the gap between uber bosses and regular endgame content". They do not. They're wayyy harder than uber bosses, I've done 5/7 ubers during ToTA league and I have done a grand total of 1 T17 this league(before all the changes they made to them) and it was a Fortress map, the easiest of them all. I had to buy carries when doing the challenges for them. So now any time a T17 drops I'm like "Welp I guess I'll wait for them to stack up in my map tab then sell them in bulk for some divines." So essentially T17s have accomplished nothing.

Why you may ask? Let me compare the before and after for you:

Before T17s - I do alch&go mapping and any time an eater/exarch invitation drops I instantly sell it because I don't feel like doing uber bosses since they're rippy and only allow 6 portals, and the loot from regular bosses is too cheap, so the best thing to do is sell your invitations for 200c each right?

After T17s - Well my build can't do these maps, they have too many mods that brick specific archetypes, and mods like "monsters are shaper-touched,awakener's desolation in fortress is very funny, maven interferes with player and she just infinitely heals the boss ha-ha" etc. you get the point. The bosses only ever drop 2 fragments, and only some of them are expensive.(and I'm not even taking into account the possibility of running out of portals, at that point you're guaranteed to lose currency) The moment you open a T17 map, you're losing the potential currency it could have sold for, and if you use a Horned Scarab of Awakening to make it easier that's another 70 chaos invested.
I will never make a profit off them because I'm not some giga-perfected mirror build, so the best choice for me is to.. say it with me now. Sell it! Just like the exarch/eater invitations ha-haaa.



And now I'm here, done with the league because its basically Standard and I have no goals or anything to save up currency for anymore. And the new T17s just suck aswell, I can't enjoy them or farm them for their cool amazing rewards that they added because someone thought it would be very funny to add Valdo's mods to them.

+1

very nicely summed up.

I didn't even try going for 40/40, did that in Tota and Affliction. It was fun then and the league was nice to engage with and rewarding too.

Gravecrafting feels like gambling with few extra steps. Deterministic crafts(recipes?) need ultra-optimized layouts, with high investment(makes sense), but damn could it be more tedious? don't wanna engage with it at all,

Bad UI/UX, corpses take up a whole lotta space, corpses have types(why?!), maps are littered with unwanted corpse billboards I don't wanna click on, and have to go corpse hunting on the trade site for the right corpse you need, with level, type, mod, and whatnot etc.,

and to earn anything worthy of some value, you gotta do the most broken strategy at that time before a patch note comes in. But my build never got to that point at all, with me being stuck in white/yellow maps salvaging scraps that are worth a whole zero buck. even the rarest of rarest unique that used to be worth something is now dirt cheap, feelsbadman.

"

iParadoxG wrote:

+1

very nicely summed up.

I didn't even try going for 40/40, did that in Tota and Affliction. It was fun then and the league was nice to engage with and rewarding too.

Gravecrafting feels like gambling with few extra steps. Deterministic crafts(recipes?) need ultra-optimized layouts, with high investment(makes sense), but damn could it be more tedious? don't wanna engage with it at all,

Bad UI/UX, corpses take up a whole lotta space, corpses have types(why?!), maps are littered with unwanted corpse billboards I don't wanna click on, and have to go corpse hunting on the trade site for the right corpse you need, with level, type, mod, and whatnot etc.,

and to earn anything worthy of some value, you gotta do the most broken strategy at that time before a patch note comes in. But my build never got to that point at all, with me being stuck in white/yellow maps salvaging scraps that are worth a whole zero buck. even the rarest of rarest unique that used to be worth something is now dirt cheap, feelsbadman.

Yeah also corpses hiding loot in maps and being annoying is another bad thing lol.

And if you do plan on going for 38 challenges its super easy this league, at least the armor set looks cool and has nice effects. There aren't any super grindy or RNG-heavy challenges and you can buy carries for all the ones that are uber-boss or t17-related. Or Cross-Contamination since that one is always annoying.

"

Toforto wrote:

And if you do plan on going for 38 challenges its super easy this league, at least the armor set looks cool and has nice effects. There aren't any super grindy or RNG-heavy challenges and you can buy carries for all the ones that are uber-boss or t17-related. Or Cross-Contamination since that one is always annoying.

*cries in HCSSF*

The conditional stuff is what I'm mostly worried about. Sadly ripped my last character to a volatile meatsack

At least made for a fun clip https://clips.twitch.tv/RacySourCormorantKAPOW-IvdeU1fwkDZl8sep

"

ArtCrusade wrote:

*cries in HCSSF*

The conditional stuff is what I'm mostly worried about. Sadly ripped my last character to a volatile meatsack

At least made for a fun clip https://clips.twitch.tv/RacySourCormorantKAPOW-IvdeU1fwkDZl8sep

Ouch, I thought the shaper-touched would kill you but it was just archnemesis exploding molten orb lol. That orb must deal damage based on the mob's hp, and meatsacks have so much ridiculous hp that they had to do a hotfix patch recently to fix an integer overflow bug(meaning they were having more than 2 billion hp).

It‘s a unique T17 mod called Volatile something. And yeah, it seems to be based on monster HP. 😂

"Volatile Core"


https://poedb.tw/us/Volatile_Core#VolatileCoreVolatileCoreUberMap

It does not scale with monster HP, it just deals an absurd amount of damage. :^)

"

Scarletsword wrote:

"Volatile Core"


https://poedb.tw/us/Volatile_Core#VolatileCoreVolatileCoreUberMap

It does not scale with monster HP, it just deals an absurd amount of damage. :^)

Good to know GGG are making absurdly unfair mods like this, I also love the "cannot be dodged,blocked or suppressed". Extremely hilarious. Its name is also just so creative "UberVolatileExplosion". Man I can't wait for uber campaign in 4.0, and Uber Act 10 Kitava.

The league is utter trash. I took the handful of nodes to lessen the league's impact on my mapping so I can pretend it doesn't exist, only the mapping still feels awful now because the drop-rates of everything farmable outside of T17's has been nerfed into oblivion.

With all the loot and scarab changes, even affliction would have felt much worse. If this is the direction they want to take things I should just take my money somewhere else.

"

Toforto wrote:

"

Scarletsword wrote:

"Volatile Core"


https://poedb.tw/us/Volatile_Core#VolatileCoreVolatileCoreUberMap

It does not scale with monster HP, it just deals an absurd amount of damage. :^)

Good to know GGG are making absurdly unfair mods like this, I also love the "cannot be dodged,blocked or suppressed". Extremely hilarious. Its name is also just so creative "UberVolatileExplosion". Man I can't wait for uber campaign in 4.0, and Uber Act 10 Kitava.

This is peak POE design.