Temple frustrations from a Og
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You do not change a mechanic this drastically in the middle of a league. Full stop.
Second, there is absolutely no reason to bring this mechanic into the core game. Especially not in a watered-down state. I started this league late, roughly a month in. I finally had time to sit down and engage with the new Temple mechanic after hearing nonstop praise about how incredible it was. I did my usual setup, started building my temple properly, learned the routing, learned the Spy Master chains, and used the well-known corner and Russian strats to push progression. I got my Spy Master chain to the first corner. And that is where progression completely died. For weeks now I have been hard-stuck in that same corner. No Spy Master to continue. No locks. No armories. No garrisons. No smithies. Or I get mass deletions that undo hours of progress. Sometimes it is one of those issues. Sometimes it is all of them stacked together. But the result is always the same: zero forward movement. This is not a “casual player” issue. I wish it were. I would love to say I only played an hour or two a day and just got unlucky. That is not the case. I have been playing from roughly 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. most days. I am a few hundred hours deep into this mechanic alone, and I have essentially nothing to show for it. I have made maybe 20 divines total from my temple in that entire time. Let that sink in. Hundreds of hours. Twenty divines. I am a PoE 1 alpha player. I understand how this goes. I understand how mechanics get “adjusted” once they are approved for core. Reward multipliers get reduced. Access gets throttled. Path rooms increase. Valuable rooms become rarer. Special NPCs spawn less often. Crystals drop less. Everything that feels good gets quietly shaved down by percentages until it barely resembles what made it fun. And that is exactly why this mechanic should never go core. If it already feels this punishing now, while it is supposed to be showcased and exciting, then the version that survives into the base game will be miserable. Reduced crystals. Reduced rewards from rooms. Increased dead paths. Fewer real choices. Fewer meaningful rooms. Spy Masters, garrisons, smithies, golem works and anything rewarding will proc far less often. Anyone who has played this game for years knows this pattern. What makes this especially frustrating is that the idea itself is genuinely cool. The concept of building a long-term temple, planning routes, chaining influence, and scaling rewards over time is great. That is why this hurts so much. The execution completely undermines the concept. At this point I cannot even pretend this is a skill issue or a knowledge gap. I know the mechanics. I know the strategies. I did the work. And after all that, I have completed maybe a tenth of what my temple is even supposed to become. That is not challenging. That is not engaging. That is not rewarding. That is just exhausting. This is, without exaggeration, one of the worst things you have ever done to a mechanic. Especially one with this much potential. If the plan is to nerf it further and push a diluted version into the main game, please just scrap it entirely. Because if this is the direction Path of Exile 2 is going, then I am done with PoE 2 and PoE in general until the game stops being designed around removing fun. Last bumped on Feb 2, 2026, 10:37:08 PM
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Agreed. Hope it does not become a core mechanic.
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https://youtu.be/pEfV92oNLYU?si=yIZOxLD0mRXsIcl0
Check this out if you are struggling with finding spymasters. You need to know how to manipulate the temple for the room you want to spawn. TLDR: you need to have at least a lvl1 spymaster to signal the game to give you the chance for another one for upgrade. The more lvl1 you have the higher the chance. The game will always give you rooms that can connect, so if you have more rooms that can only connect to spymaster, you will have a higher chance. Exploit early exploit often bozos.
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OMG we're in early access, they should be changing things waaaay more than they are right now.
Test things out, that's literally what we're here for, and make changes based on feedback. |
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No, you clearly did not read what I said, so I am going to spell this out in terms of the actual mechanics.
My issue was never “I did not understand how Spy Masters work.” Spy Masters level up when you lock them. They do not stay at level one. That is understood. The problem is that without a garrison, a Spy Master will always be assassinated, regardless of whether the previous Spy Master was level 1, 2, or 3. Protection is binary. If the garrison is gone, the assassination happens. And here is the part people keep glossing over. If your temple deletes the garrison that was protecting a Spy Master, the assassination still triggers. Even if that deletion happens after the Spy Master was already established. You do not get a grace window. You do not get compensation. You just lose the Spy Master. That exact scenario is what broke my progression. Yesterday, I started with a Spy Master. Corner was completed. I was moving out of the corner and setting up the second chain. Before I could even get the next Spy Master, the temple deleted backwards all the way to the garrison before the corner. That deletion immediately invalidated the protection state. After that, I finally got a lock. Then I went four hours without seeing a Spy Master at all. Not even offered. It never showed on the temple. All I got was a medallion. Once I placed that medallion, I was able to lock it for about four runs. During those runs, I did not see a single garrison or armory to protect it. So even though people love repeating that “the temple gives you what you need,” that is objectively not true. There are far too many players reporting the exact opposite. Extended dry streaks. No defensive rooms. No progression rooms. Or mass deletions that invalidate hours of setup. This is not bad planning. This is not misunderstanding the system. This is structural RNG failure combined with post-nerf spawn weighting. And the community already knows this. Multiple players have shown that post-nerfs to Spy Master appearance rates and the quick temple crystal tech have made fully snaked temples borderline unrealistic. GGG clearly does not want players completing optimized temples, and the data backs that up. When multiple layers of protection are required but the game can simply refuse to offer them, that is not a puzzle. That is a slot machine with a fake skill ceiling. Which is why this mechanic should not go core. GGG is approaching this entirely backwards. Instead of fixing the underlying contradictions in the system, they are throttling access and calling it balance. And this ties directly into the larger issue with Path of Exile 2. In its current state, PoE 2 is an unambitious waste of space. There was no justification for spending millions to create a separate game when the same goals could have been achieved by upgrading PoE 1’s engine, improving visuals, and porting in the new campaign and systems. Instead, we got a watered-down second game that is terrified of letting players succeed. People keep hiding behind “early access,” but we are already running leagues. That means the core philosophy is already set. This is not a prototype anymore. The foundation is here. And so far, the majority of changes have been nerfs. Not innovation. Not bold divergence from PoE 1. Just slower, stingier versions of systems we already understand. PoE 2 is not aggressively moving away from PoE 1. It is aggressively sanding down anything that feels rewarding. So no, this is not about refusing to change things. Change is good. But changing systems mid-league, gutting progression paths, and relying on RNG to invalidate correct play is not evolution. It is erosion. Do not bring this temple mechanic into the core game. And if this is the long-term design direction, then there is no reason for PoE 2 to exist at all. |
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for the guy talking about early access.
When I talk about a lack of aggressive innovation, this is what I mean. I never expected to be mapping in Path of Exile 2. We already have that in Path of Exile 1. Mapping is solved. The Atlas is solved. Iterating on it forever is not innovation, it is maintenance. When the developers talked about an endlessly generated endgame built around towers, I genuinely believed we were getting something fundamentally different. I expected a true endless space. Something more like a boundless region where towers acted as anchors or checkpoints, places where mechanics were injected into the environment rather than selected from a map device. I expected movement through space to matter. I expected long-form progression where you chose how far to push before stopping, branching, reinforcing, or collapsing the structure behind you. What we got instead is just a larger Atlas. Functionally, this is still mapping. It is still node-based. It is still segmented. It is still about running content in small, self-contained chunks with modifiers layered on top. Calling it endless does not make it meaningfully different when it behaves exactly like a bigger version of what already exists. That is not just disappointing, it is a massive waste of assets and development time. The distance between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2 should have been enormous given how the developers talked about it. Instead, the gap feels surprisingly small. Visually it is nicer. Systems are slightly restructured. But philosophically, it is the same game, just slower and more restrictive. And this matters because for years the messaging suggested something bolder. I am not asking for comfort. I am not asking for familiarity. I was fully prepared to lose mapping entirely. I was prepared for a radically different endgame loop. Something that justified a second game rather than an extended overhaul. What makes this even harder to accept is that the changes we are actually seeing are not ambitious changes. They are nerfs. Nerfs to progression. Nerfs to rewards. Nerfs to consistency. Nerfs to player agency. When adjustments happen, they are almost always reductions, not expansions. Yes, version 0.5 will almost certainly bring endgame changes. But let us be honest about what those changes will be. They will be changes to what already exists. More tuning. More restrictions. More balance passes. Not a fundamental rethinking of the endgame structure. That is not the same thing as true change. And this is not coming from someone who wants the game to fail. Quite the opposite. I am deeply invested. I have been giving this company money since alpha. I am invested not just financially, but emotionally and philosophically. I want GGG to succeed. I want them to lead the genre again, not cautiously trail behind their own past success. That is why this feels so frustrating. Right now, I am not seeing bold decisions. I am seeing fear of letting systems breathe. Fear of letting players succeed. Fear of breaking away from Path of Exile 1 even while claiming to build something new. Innovation requires risk. What we are getting instead is restraint. And restraint does not justify a second game. If the long-term plan is just to keep sanding down rewards, tightening progression, and reusing the same structural ideas with new labels, then Path of Exile 2 does not need to exist. Path of Exile 1 could have absorbed all of this with an engine update and a new campaign. I am criticizing this because I care. Because I expected more. And because after years of promises about transformation, what I am seeing looks far too much like hesitation. |
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" Well thought out response and I agree. Here is what just happened to me. I've spent over a hundred hours building a streamers temple. Heavy RNG that I was fighting against the whole time. First time I looped the snake and tons of spy masters broke. I eventually rebuilt it. I made another error with locking and then spend another 40-50 hours fixing those mistakes. Eventually, I got it to a really good shape today and was seeing light at the end of the tunnel. So I can start farming the temple instead of just building it. While I was finishing up my temple, a friend needed help with jade Isles. I accepted the invite and told him i'll be right there, let me finish my temple. So after the last few rooms, I exited and went to go put locks on my rooms. Guess what? The last few rooms of both snakes just vanished. I couldn't believe it. I knew this was a bug cause I heard it happened to others but it's surreal when it happens to you. I spent over 150 hours easily with this temple and to see it brick like this through no fault of my own. I can't even rebuild it back because I have overlapping rooms and that snake requires chaining rooms you cant chain twice and use sac chamber. Anyways, I helped my friend and Alt-F4 right there. A week's worth of hard work and progress down the drain. I lost 5 rooms, yeah not a big deal but those were corruption chambers and thermatruge or whatever. I just didn't have the heart to continue. This game has layers and layers of RNG and it's very punishing to the players. I realize I was not having fun and this game was like a job. In fact, I am going to join you as well and decided to quit. The inflation of this game always makes me feel like I have to farm and I am running behind and also I agree all the devs do is nerf rather than bringing the other skills to where they should be. Things get more and more restrictive. They delete builds after showcasing them in build of the week. I never felt a game had worse odds than a casino but this is it. It's less of an ARPG and more of a slot machine. I've quit the game for good and wouldn't recommend it to others until they give some player agency and respect player time. And they rely far too heavily on 3rd party soruces to do the documentation and all the heavy lifting. I have to go to poe2db to craft anything. Path of building for making changes to my build. Temple is watching YouTube videos and using a planner. Market/item checks are also 3rd party. POE2 gets a pass at most things because visually and artistically it looks great. Best in the genre. But the mechanics and the systems below are all gambling systems with heavy RNG and it's too punishing for players. So for now I've quit POE2 and I hope when the game is released they do make it better and you can actually have some progression. |
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