Please consider at least partially decoupling atlas mechanic juicing from pinnacle bosses

In the recent interview with Ghazzy and DM, there was a question about whether atlas mechanic trees should be gated behind pinnacles. I think the current system creates 3 problems:

1. The progression is really backloaded: One of the reasons the atlas progression in poe1 feels so good is that you can start specializing your atlas into the mechanics you like much earlier in progression. By mid yellows, I can choose to fully juice expedition, or Jun, and start getting character power from these mechanics, which then helps me progress to reds. You also start making interesting decisions in your atlas much earlier.

2. The current system couples the price of getting your atlas points with the boss drops. This seems like it will create lots of balance issues, if access to a boss needs to be rare because it has good drops (as it should), then access to any mechanic juicing will also be either very expensive (trade) or extremely annoying rng (SSF). Neither seems ideal. Ritual is a prime example of this, the drops are valuable enough that the entry cost is rare, but this makes getting any ritual points a very expensive or annoying endeavour.

3. If you decide you want to full juice one mechanic, and are trying to not buy carries, by the time you have a character powerful enough to do so, you've already basically trivialized 90% of the content of the game. There's not much content in the game harder than difficulty 3 bosses.

I would love for points that juice mechanics in maps to come largely from mapping based objectives, with maybe a capstone point coming from the pinnacle boss, and for boss kills to juice the rewards from the boss encounter. I know there was mention of pulling meta juicing of mechanics out of bossing, and I hope this is what it is referring to.

For an example, I think the arbiter tree works really well, because it just boosts arbiter drops, and it makes sense that killing arbiter improves his drops. Ritual and Simulacrum trees on the other hand do not work well. Audience with the King is far too rare to be gating your ritual points, and before you get 4 points in the delirium tree, it takes far too long to self farm 300 simulacrum splinters, as the first 4 points more than double splinter acquisition. It would make a lot more sense if we got these map juicing points from mapping, so we could then progress to the bosses more sensibly, with points from completing simulacrum only boosting simulacrum difficulty and rewards.
Last bumped on Jan 12, 2025, 8:46:20 PM

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