Is 3.28 Steve League ?

New Pinnacle boss at 65,535 depth. I hope this league is a heater, the last one was just OK, it missed the mark for me.

"

Phrazz#3529 wrote:

As long as this league doesn't contain breach walls or a genesis tree, I couldn't care less.

hey, cmon. The tree was great. The walls not so much obv.

I love when SSF gets semi buffed, like with the tree or with the shipments from kalguur where you get an easy 6 link base at some point.

Also, i don't really know where delve comes from? isn't that just the entrance to the vault, as in, "yay, we got a new vault pass for ya!" maybe i don#t get it xd but that would be my interpretation, haha

Hopefully there wont be any easy-game mechanics
Getting multiple 6-links in acts is boring, this is not gachagame

"

H3rB1985#0551 wrote:

Breach will be quite the opposite if they don't remove the walls, fortresses and blight 2.0 encounter. Bet money on it that it will be the most blocked league mechanic in 3.28

Is that so?

I would venture a confident prediction that the reality may prove quite the opposite. If the new Breach goes core, the tree will be 100% get nuked. That much is guaranteed. And since the current loot is largely locked behind that tree, the encounter rewards would inevitably be reworked and redistributed by default.

Assuming Foulborns are integrated into the base encounters, there will certainly be players farming breach for those drops, alongside those who do not mind the mechanic in the slightest.
Once the tree is gone, it becomes a simple question of profitability. The vast majority of players operate on a div per hour metric with tink brain efficiency, and if the returns are strong, they will run it without hesitation.

Personal dislike is not a reliable benchmark for predicting how it will perform once standardized and rebalanced for core integration.

And to be clear, my previous point was about a Delve rework.

"

Strickl3r#3809 wrote:

hey, cmon. The tree was great.

Great? As a one-off mechanic belonging to a league? Sure. But as a core mechanic, making every item from every other mechanic/drop in the game obsolete? Suddenly not so great.

They SERIOUSLY have to stop making every "good" item drop from secondary machanics and take a real, hard look at the core drop pool.

Every mechanic that "prints" very good items is bad for the CORE game, especially in the long run. It's not like they're going to update old mechanics to be on par, and every mechanic they add in the future has to compete with it, creating a clusterfuck of power creep.

So we're back to league specific, temporary mechanics that works in the short term. Lets keep it that way and say goodbye to them.

"

Phrazz#3529 wrote:

"

Strickl3r#3809 wrote:

hey, cmon. The tree was great.

Great? As a one-off mechanic belonging to a league? Sure. But as a core mechanic, making every item from every other mechanic/drop in the game obsolete? Suddenly not so great.

They SERIOUSLY have to stop making every "good" item drop from secondary machanics and take a real, hard look at the core drop pool.

Every mechanic that "prints" very good items is bad for the CORE game, especially in the long run. It's not like they're going to update old mechanics to be on par, and every mechanic they add in the future has to compete with it, creating a clusterfuck of power creep.

So we're back to league specific, temporary mechanics that works in the short term. Lets keep it that way and say goodbye to them.

I am with you here. Core drop rate needs to be significantly better without being able to scale it into oblivion.

However, if the game is how it is these shorterm item printers are just really really good for ssf, so that is why i do like them. Obv, they cannot jsut go core like that and be the number one item printer forever, that would be lame.

"

Strickl3r#3809 wrote:

Obv, they cannot jsut go core like that and be the number one item printer forever, that would be lame.

That should be obvious, but it's far from obvious to many players. Just look at the whole Harvest timeline.

It's time they added a mechanic that lets you influence the drops IN your maps, not a secondary mechanic that forces you to farm X resource to MAKE an item OUTSIDE of your maps. I would be all for a core, Genesis-like tree that influenced DROPS from killing monsters.

If they added all Genesis tree notables as currencies you spend on your maps to influence the random loot, I'd welcome it.

"

Phrazz#3529 wrote:

It's time they added a mechanic that lets you influence the drops IN your maps

We have kind of seen this pattern before. A solid example was Affliction league, which pretty clearly showed that stacking too much juice onto maps through heavy engagement with a league mechanic just is not a great idea. The same logic applies to item editor style leagues like the current Genesis tree, Necropolis, or Harvest. When players are given that much control or that much reward scaling, things can spiral out of balance very quickly.

On the other hand, leagues like Scourge, Delirium, or Crucible are good examples of what a more balanced approach looks like. They all added meaningful juice in different ways, but none of them turned into a full blown item editor or pushed map rewards so far that every run felt like an uncontrollable loot explosion. Even Archnemesis, despite all the criticism it got, arguably held together better than Affliction did in terms of overall balance.

The upside is that whenever GGG experiments with these extreme concepts, whether it is outlier reward scaling, heavy crafting control, or giga juiced mapping, they get direct feedback on what is too much and what is too little. Over time that kind of trial and error tends to pull things back toward a healthier middle ground.

"

VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

We have kind of seen this pattern before. A solid example was Affliction league, which pretty clearly showed that stacking too much juice onto maps through heavy engagement with a league mechanic just is not a great idea.

I'm not really talking about juice, but a way to alter what drops in a semi-deterministic way, like for instance the Genesis tree. No matter what out-of-map mechanics they introduce, having good item drop from killing monsters will always be more... Fun.

"

Phrazz#3529 wrote:

having good item drop from killing monsters will always be more... Fun.

This would represent the worst possible outcome if a system similar to item editor leagues were applied to loot itself. Imagine a world in which every rare monster drops a near perfect or outright perfect rare item in every single map. The immediate thrill might feel intoxicating, but the long term consequences would be catastrophic.

Such a change would unravel the very fabric of progression. It would backfire in precisely the same manner as item editor leagues, only on a far grander scale. Entire league mechanics built around crafting currencies would lose their relevance almost overnight. Delve would struggle to justify its existence, as fossils and resonators would become trivial in the face of effortlessly acquired near flawless gear. Harvest would be reduced to little more than a gambling novelty and a source of weapon enchants. Essence, once a cornerstone of targeted crafting, would fade into near total obscurity.

The result would mirror the hollowed out economy and progression curve seen in item editor environments, but magnified across the entire game. When perfection becomes commonplace, aspiration disappears. When crafting becomes unnecessary, a foundational pillar of the item system collapses.

Given that the majority of the item ecosystem is designed around incremental crafting, experimentation, and investment, the current balance feels entirely appropriate. Systems are functioning as intended because they preserve the journey toward power rather than handing it out fully formed. Introducing what amounts to an item editor through map drops would not enrich the experience. It would simply replicate the same hollow effect as an item editor league, only without the pretense of being experimental.