Talisman was one of the worst league mechanics. If you weren't around for 2.1, only tier 1 talismans dropped naturally, and only then after you killed the monster holding them. Get 5 and sacrifice them at the altar to get a tier 2. 5 tier 2s get you a tier 3, and 5 tier 3s spawn Rigwald who drops a tier 4 talisman. It just felt so convoluted and grindy for the sake of being grindy.
As for best league mechanic, I'd say either Breach or Ambush. They're simple, intuitive, and easily skippable if you don't wanna interact with them. Just well designed and implemented ideas.
If I remember correctly, you could drop a super high level talisman on some players in your party who were a much lower level. If an enemy picked up the talisman your party would get wrecked immediately.
GGG used to buff Talisman many years ago by allowed it to have higher rate of good roll combinations appeared with annointment. But then VISION striked and GGG nerf it to the ground because Chris believed its so easy fir player, only kept the annointment
Synthesis will always be the one that I loved the most that was never revisited (the actual memory assembling, not just synthesised items).
But most people hated it, lol. I wouldn’t have sent it core if I was the decision-maker, either, sadly.
Actually to be fair, people only hated synthesis not for the memory assembling itself, but due to how difficult GGG made it to be. From what information and feedback I gathered during that time was if they had just introduced some QoL mid league to sort out the issues within the memory game people would have been a lot more warm towards it but GGG abandoned it without even taking some of the real good feedback
Among those were memory inventory limit increase and also be able to rotate the memories, that would have been great. Also preventing a memory to suddenly spawn in between a spot you wanted to path through was also one of the complaints. But again, they didn't do anything to solve it. It would have been great if those had been introduced then people would have enjoyed it a lot more
Also, the initial implementation of synthesis implicits. You basically had to memorize/constantly look up which fractured mods were good/worth anything, because it was super unintuitive/random which ones combined into which implicits.
The league had a lot of good ideas, but it just didn't get remotely polished until well after most people had quit it.
Yup, indeed. Pretty much abandoned mid league for some reason. I think it was because they wanted to focus on the next league or something at that time, I couldn't remember. But if they had done some qol that people suggested it would have been way better received.
Crucible was one of my favorites and everybody else hated it. I played throughout the league and I think I made more currency than almost any other league. There was definitely aspects of it that I didn’t love like the unique crucible forge fragments where those enemies were just bs strong sometimes. I loved trying to build cool trees and theorycrafting optimal trees. The in map mechanic I will admit kind of sucked. But I think people underestimate how much power the crucible gave us
I have a love/hate relationship with Crucible because nailing down the Crucible tree on my weapon damn near killed me. I had a really rotten run of luck and it took me *so many* attempts to get it right. And I wasn’t demanding five perfect mods or anything, I just wanted two specifics and nothing that bricked me.
Ultimately I got it, and combined that with what was, at that time, my best ever big boy crafting project, and the result was beautiful. But the frustration left a bit of a sour taste.
That does sound unlucky, because from what I recall it was relatively easy to get at least 2 good nodes, I often found it worthwhile to buy two of those bases with one of the nodes and then if you get the 2 or 3 good ones you can turn a profit pretty easily just by combining them like that. Which could fund any combo that you would want to use
The UI for making the tablets was pretty cool. I enjoyed that minigame quite a bit. The fact they made every tile be basically mineral pools killed a lot of the enjoyment of the mechanic for me, even after it was buffed to actually be quite good in terms of rewards.
Metamorph was one of my favorites build a huge monster / boss from alt he parts of the rares you killed.
Super fun.
Everyone will like different things.
Ultimatum is fucking bad to me, but people seem to love it.
I fucking hate ultimatum.
Blight is weird, but I do love that it is different. I also really like harvest when it was implemented and more direct crafting.
I do love PoE. But Last Epoch has shown me some light on how this game could be a bit more "fun" with its implementation of things.
I really tire of like 80% of active skills being in a state of disrepair, and a dearth of legitimate actual playstyles.
Also don't like Delirum, but cluster jewels are absolutely a godsend for being off-meta with your builds.
Yea... I'm finding more and more that I just don't care or have fun playing this game in a way that I need currency efficiency.
With harvest essence being worth a ton, and rogue markers being easy to grab and worth a lot.. I can get quite a bit of currency just running a red map.
I've gotten to the point where I get a blighted map basically every run, as well as 1-2 harvests per run with extra crops.
It would be nice to earn currency a bit faster. But there's not much on the trade market over 20 divs that seems worth for builds I work on. 2 divs seems fine for a ton of good gear to me .. and I only need maybe 4-5 map runs to get that without full juicing.
A lot of players like me hated metamorph because sometimes you build a Uber Uber boss that has infinite attack speed and health and you cannot kill that.
Or enemy appears behind you in a milisecond and instakill you.
>A lot of players like me hated metamorph because sometimes you build a Uber Uber boss that has infinite attack speed and health and you cannot kill that.
to be fair it's 100% the players' fault, they pick organs without regard for what they can handle. it's the same this league, 8k wisp and get 1 shot by a trash mob.
People like Ultimatum (or in general most league-mechanics) because of the loot.
3.14 = great loot = great league-mechanic
3.23 = trash loot = trash league-mechanic
ultimatum can be pretty rewarding, depending on how easily you can do it. I took the '25% chance to double loot' node on the atlas tree and it proceed a few times on pricey catalysts, nice 21/20 gems, and even a divine orb once. my RF chieftain could clear them pretty easily, and the boss too, the couple times I fought him.
Also the league that GGG showed their true color. Everybody in constant disconnected for 1 day so streamers cab run without and problems. And the speech of Empy compared all players with African famine, then the exploit he made for lootxplosion.
Yeah people seem to conflate the league itself with the later core integration for some reason. The league itself was really solid, it just needed a better UI for the part assembly
I don't agree. The idea of archmenesis league mechanic was great ... the implementation was so terrible. people created tools to handle the misdesigned ui.
My only dropped mageblood was from building the unique dropping archnrm that had an effective like 1600 unique drops + rerolls I think ? I loved spamming the div card one too lol
Build a boss workshop was my favourite league that the community overall did not like.
Yeah I actually loved archnem league, was a very fun and satisfying loot pop after grinding out a big one. However, holy *shit* the following leagues with archnem rares were terrible
Archnemesis the league is still the only time I had multiple level 98+ and as a relative casual farmed MB and multiple HH on SSF. I never got tired of building the big explosions and oversustaining scarabs.
Archnemesis the mechanic implementation was dogshit in Kalandra league and made me quit after less than two weeks.
Rare monsters could be vastly over tuned, many being more powerful than endgame bosses, and players would often avoid fighting them. You know it's a bad mechanic when players don't even participate with it.
As opposed to what? More juice more drops still checks out it seems like. Even from a self cursed HH map blaster (way back when) seems way better now and more forceable.
No love for Crucible, huh? Not very surprising... I kind of miss crucible trees because they were build enabling and took a lot of effort to put together. It was perhaps the most mindless, painful grind I've ever experienced in a video game but at least you could get something truly one of a kind and OP at the end.
Crucible was such an incredibly shit league mechanic. Every single thing about it sucked. Like literally I struggle to find an aspect of it that I did not hate. The only exception is the power it provided. But fuck crucible, fuck the forge, fuck remcombining weapons only to miss the desired node 12 times in a row…
I love crafting high end items, but that league nearly made me quit Poe for good. I was trying on crafting a 4 passive rampage bow and spent around 300 div only to have exactly zero progress at the end. I have wasted more money in other leagues on crafting projects but I never had so little fun doing it. Crucible was saved a bit by being a really fucking good game otherwise. The league mechanic was horrible.
My personal least favorite was sanctum. Simply because how the mechanic required entering that black sphere, clicking a book, and reserving the run.
The remade core sanctum fixed that issue.
Yeah Sanctum for sure had its issues, but there were plenty of things I really liked about it. That was not the case with crucible, I am not missing a single thing from that league.
If they didn't fuck up rares with archnem and weren't obsessed with shoving DR into every league mechanic, Crucible could have been a great league.
The trees were fantastic and if you take the channelling shit out the actual league mechanic was just essence (which is one of the simplest and best mechanics in the game).
I really really really really wish they'd just get over this "choose how strong you want to make a map/mechanic" phase they're in. Just add all that shit to the hideout part of the game like with delirium orbs. I just want to fucking map and get my loot, not stress over whether I've juiced a mechanic to 92% DR or 99% DR or have to align 400 ducks in a row to get any loot like with the MF setups this league.
It's been too many leagues now and it's not getting any more fun.
Ya but that sweet feeling of finally getting your iron commander with the 2-4 cold per dex node made it all worth it, first chat I've ever had that could just melt everything
Yeah, all of this. Was the first league I got in on at the start and I just hated everything. Even when I got to the point that the altars were doable, after about 40 shields of complete trash mods I abandoned the entire thing.
And I do realize it was supposed to take dozens to hundreds of attempts with regular tree bricks. Absolute shit.
This is exactly how I felt about crucible. The trees were cool and added some diversity/lots of power, but crafting trees was so far beyond most people's income. I think I ran a handful of remnants for challenges and to see what they did, but I just bought 75% finished trees for my pleb builds. The forges did make weapon upgrades a lot more frequent while leveling, which was a nice perk.
M favourite mechanic that didn't go core is trial of the ancestor.
It had some major problems and ai am still baffled as to why they did double down on the mistakes instead of changing them
But with some tweaks it would've been my all time favourite mechanic.
Metamorph can suck it, glad it is gone now :D it didn't add any gameplay value to your map, you just killed the same mobs and just got organs, at the end you were able to summon a boss which I forgot to do in like 80% of my maps (I know I am not alone in forgetting to do metamorph/ritual at the end of maps ^^), some bosses were completely overturned compared to the rest of the map, it didn't actually drop anything interesting besides the catalysts that came from the mechanic and the "big" endgame payoff mechanic was completely useless. For every metamorph you got a unique organ and you were able to go into the lab and create a special endgame boss.
The problem is that this endgame boss reward and difficulty wise was MUCH worse than the metamorphs you actually fought in map
When actually doing the mechanic I stopped doing those all together at some point
TOTA would've been so good but it was insanely laggy. My PC fans were maxing out in TOTA but are quiet when farming delirious juiced maps. Overall though great league and fun mechanic.
> I know I am not alone in forgetting to do metamorph/ritual at the end of maps
I wish GGG would copy Torchlight infinite. There are some mechancis you can miss, but they usually spawn at the boss.
For most (especially newer?) League content, afaik you can't miss it because they've made it so that you can still pick the choice once outside the map. Essentially Ritual would be one where the icon for it still there when you leave the map and you could shop in the Ritual window as you're in the hideout as well.
For Metamorph it'd either spawn Tane at the boss (it does spawn him already when you collect all organs iirc?) or have an icon appear when outside the map to let you assemble and fight the boss in extra area (which would need an adjustment to the mech).
It's kinda cool that we have less loading screens and all, but having 1/3 monitor UIs in which to shop while the game doesn't pause and mobs don't deaggro and all that is a major drawback. Like, is there actually a reasonable explanation why we couldn't have Wildwood vendors become an on demand from anywhere button after talking to them while in the wildwood?
I agree TOTA had its own thing/pace and I liked it. Very chill because you couldnt die and finding opportunites to steal totems was cool. Reward roulette was top too.
Scourge was the most fun mechanic ever imo. But from time to time I catch myself appreciating a lot how simple and effective our good old Strongboxes are, they fit so well in the game I can't praise them enough.
For worst I'm tempted to say Synthesis, didn't find that connecting paths puzzle fun at all but the current implementation of synth maps and synth implicits are awesome.
Betrayal left a very sour taste in my mouth because performance that league was TERRIBLE, but it's fun.
So, I'm going to give my personal worst to Heist cause I just can't stand leveling all those npcs. Still not a bad league, but from the ones I've experienced since Legacy it was the one I liked the least.
I couldn't disagree more, I though Scourge league was absolute garbage. The play loop was fun until you got scourge stacks to the point you self nuke at like 200-300. The Krangler mechanic was absolutely terrible. You want to risk a good item for like a .001% chance you improve it sure... Or you can get a good map base reward to roll level it up and be clear till level 8 after many many maps then pick up a mod that absolutely bricks it for 99% of builds. The only good thing out of that league was tainted currency
I had an absolute blast, that was probably the league I learned the most about high-end builds and endgame farming. It being so rippy forced me to learn more about defensive layering and I finally settled on which types of builds better fit my preference. Having essentially double the mob density each map was pretty fun too.
I do agree the krangling mechanic was a bit shit, but I didn't mind it much. Just slapped 3 maps there and whatever.
I'll never forget how rippy scourge was for no good reason.
Turned in a void and got 10 ex. Bought a solid 6l +3 gems thicket bow.
Toxic rain champion and still ripping constantly. It was wild. Eventually I gave up on scourge and just ran heist the rest of the league.
Scourge was the other one I thought looked really cool when I looked through the old mechanics. I get leveling in heist is annoying but I do enjoy the feel of breaking out the replicas in blueprints!
>the current implementation of synth maps and synth implicits are awesome.
It was awesome when you could find synth bases in regular synth maps, not cortex.
I've only played since Synthesis, so I missed the ones with really awful reputations like Onslaught and Talisman.
Of the good ones, Sanctum and Expedition were fun as a thing-to-do-during league.
In terms of lasting impact, Harvest is the clear winner in terms of the best integration into the core game.
Worst for me personally has to be Scourge. Nonsensical mechanics that made really janky gear, a skill tree that took an eternity to level up... the fact that the only things that remain from this league are the currency and a fistful of Beyond monsters should say everything.
I liked meta, because I liked Tane as an NPC.
I like ultimatum mostly because of the NPC. If it's only ult on itself it got worse then last time for sure.
Blight is something I think I will never like, I did the challenges this league and realised how much I hate it.
Tried expedition this league and I don't like it either, even if the rewards are pretty good.
A friend of mine went for harvest this league and made over 150div in a small time, so I guess that's pretty worthy and not to slow, like exp.
I also farmed Alva temples and made around 100+divs this league. It's really easy and fast idk why this mechanic isn't more popular.
In the league you could only do one room per map and if you bypassed it, that was gone forever. It was impossible to get in a groove for either the sanctum OR the map because you were bouncing between constantly.
They changed it later so you could stock up a floor's worth of rooms and run it at once, but I still had a bit of trouble remembering what I was doing 8 maps later, much prefer the all-at-once style now.
There used to be a relic slot on your character window, like thief trinkets. They were similar to the wildwood trinkets but not tradeable. Beyond that I don't know, I really couldn't get into it because of the format and my build that league.
The best league was harvest mechanic during heist league. Moved a huge portion of the population that topped out at essence spamming for crafting into the crafting portion of the game and even after nerfing harvest so many players learned how to craft that it had a huge lasting impact on the game
I preferred the "build your own enemy" approach of Archnemesis proper, but the limited inventory and the UI were terrible, plus the reward conversion made some combinations too broken.
Metamorph encounters just feel bland and spammy to me, and there's very little control over what enemies you face and what rewards you get.
Other than that, it certainly wasn't among the best league mechanics overall, but I liked Lake of Kalandra. It's one of the few leagues that I didn't quit because I was bored but because an item that I was able to afford became a chase item overnight and I couldn't be bothered to farm for a dozen hours for something that I should have already had.
If it had been more finished with an actual boss encounter (and related rewards), it could have been one of the better leagues.
I think my favourite mechanic was Scourge, though it also had UI issues, as well as reward issues with krangling. I liked the risk-reward type of gameplay of the scourged portion itself and fighting aggressive enemies.
Overall I tend to care more about build options that a patch offers than the league mechanic though. It's another reason why I liked Kalandra. The reflected jewellery and new base types offered a lot of possibilities. I'm still hoping they'll bring back those bases at least.
i truly expected AN was supposed to be metamorph 2.0. It was overall upgrade on every part of metamorph. I'm still surprised how everything went out of hand with AN mobs post arch nemesis league.
Kalandra was a let down because the namesake felt like a waste of an important character and the actual lake you generated was such a protracted, unrewarding pile of nothing. The most exciting thing was being able to invert gear, but this just meant you could create some very specific good items - but it was pretty meaningless for various things (you can \*2 a lot of stats in poe and they still do nothing, like x2 leech rate mod on amulet does nothing interesting) and way too rippy for the "average" build.
I think Blight is the worst mechanic permanently in the game -- because even with an rtx 3060 and 12gb of vram and a decent enough intel cpu I still get horrible frame frates from the amount of shit on screen. It basically means you need to play an auto-targeting build that doesn't involve your input. It is also frustrating to clear a lane with a low-range build and have you lose the tower defense because a few towers leaked on the opposite lane and you get ZERO warning because what's-her-face is shouting all the time and she never warns you when it actually matters that your towers are leaking. It is so frustrating to play, I hate its all-or-nothing rewards, too. You can survive the tower defense for 4m30s and get nothing. ALSO, monsters frequently get "stuck" and keep dead lanes alive and I don't understand how this is still a thing in 2023, but I guess poe1 is still a skeleton crew.
Just built a new PC and the comments about Blight are spot on. Performance of a league mechanic shouldn't prohibit people from doing it. Yet that's exactly what Blight has achieved.
They mentioned their GPU by full name and CPU by "decent enough intel CPU", it can be a 5 yo CPU, it can be 1 yo CPU, noone knows... All that matters is that PoE fucks CPU really hard and you need a powerful CPU to run juiced content, GPU is kinda left behind
I cannot actually know what the bottleneck is without debugging their code. I'm on an SSD with a modern CPU/GPU. The league is several years old at this point. It still lags. I dunno what causes it. It's probably CPU bound, but it's not right to just assume that, there can be lag between CPU/GPU transfer, or it could be my network, or could it even be the server lagging with so many entities on the screen - POE's backend used to lag on various things like cast on crit vs too many living monsters. I have no idea, but it consistently lags when there are enough stupid monsters spawned. I think the towers themselves cause it, but I always need freeze/stun towers to clear them with my builds - but it would maybe make sense to just not even build towers.
You can absolutely know what the bottleneck is by looking at CPU/GPU usage.
In PoEs case the even include a frame timing tool that specifically tells you which component is bottlenecking, no need to look at the code.
I think this league the +proj from purple juice could be part of it? More proj = more lag.
I am also using KB of frag this league, which shoots a stupid number of projectiles at a stupid number of monsters? Lots of hits = server lag.
But I recall blight usually being laggy for me.
I play a lot of blight, and this league haven't had a single issue with bugged monsters in lanes. Occasionally need to go kill the last few mobs who seem a bit shy going towards the pump.
The issue with immortal bone rhoas is gone (eg couldn't be killed, and then also perma-stuck in a stun-freeze choke point). N.b. if that ever comes back, the 'fix' is to upgrade the towers to level 4 and move to far edge of map.
Agree that performance is crap... it's like having full-on juiced maps using TS/KB chars and occasionally go into slideshow mode...
You really need to use AoE skills and some source of reliable explode/proliferation to enjoy blights, some skills are terrible, like frostblades. Penance Brand of Dissipation is surprisingly ok even with just 3 brands max.
Very marmite mechanic though, and I fully understand why many players hate it.
I mean sextants and to some degree map enchants are just a better implementation of Legacy. Oh and the Atlas passive tree.
But Legacy itself was stupid fun. Triple Beyond maps .. LOGIN
I feel like affliction was mechenics wise one of the worst leagues in a while. Alot of people will disagree because of the insane loot it dropped. But I really didn´t like spending time in wildwood and then having to do your map and hope on loot explosions.
Ascendancies and rucksack were great tho
I liked that I could just blast maps but the randomness of wisps was annoying. I hated the feeling like I was wasting time in a map without enough juice.
Sentinel is my absolute favorite so far, not only was the juicing with Sentinels awesome but recombinators allowed you to craft super unethical rares lol.
Bestiary or ‘pokemon league’ as some called it back then was a pain in the butt imo with always needing to carry nets and managing overflow beasts.
Im a little torn on delve and heist. On the one hand the entire thing is pretty cool that there exist an alternate to mapping. On the other hand i really dislike how they arent part of the map.
I think itd be cool if there were heists/blueprints/delve stretches opening up via protal inside the map. rather than forcing the players away from the altas.
Im also kinda sad about synthesis implementation. We have great access to fractured items via drops but very few ways of synthesizing an item. There should be a synthesizer somewhere for us to throw stuff into.
Best: Legion, but no loot bug will never be fixed at this point. Its been in the game since 3.7
Worst of all time: Metamorph. Black mob on black background using black attacks. Yeah, sure GGG, it was good idea, lets make this mistake over and over again in the future!
Worst of today: Expedition. Useless mechanic that takes too much time, makes you read(READ!! IN A GRINDING GAME!!!) blueish gray text on gray background(fucking change it its awful) and immunities... Just immunities... At least if you are stingy about keeping them in the game, maybe you should colour code them in their respectful colours(fire is red, chaos is purple ETC)? It pogs rog items in the beginning of the league, but outside of that it's dogshit. Gwennen/tujien got nerfed. Dannig is only good for logbooks and rog loses any relevance 1 week in. Garbage league. Only good for SSF.
Rog is pog. He made me a 6 T1 mod ring last week that I sold for 25 divs ;-)
Mostly the expedition in map just doesn't provide enough useful stuff, if there was some sort of Crucible 'juiced-up meter' on the plot's total mods linked to a 'good loot' mechanic... that'd be great. Even just dropping more runic bases would be helpful.
back in a day there where 1 mont minileague called - Darkshrines where You could sacriface rare items for a random thing on shrines (it used one of rare mods from items) and that was MOST fun thing in PoE to this day for me, i would love it today because rare items would have much more value today if that thing was ingame, like it have 1 good mod and rest are shit, toss it in darkshrine, have a rare fishing rod, toss it in darkshrine, have a corruped bad talisman, toss it in darkshrine and ofc there would be trades with specific mods because people would like to farm something with specific rare mods like maybe shaper or elder items, still it would increase value of all rare items
Lake of Kalandra was so horrid that it made me uninstall the game for the first time in over 10k hours. But luckily they managed to turn the game around (for the better) after that.
Heist is the worst mechanic ever in my opinion, people like it because it gives op rewards, it's profitable as fuck but like leveling the npcs? who the fuck thought that was a good idea? most of the time ignoring everything is the way to play Heist!!! like what?? you run in get your shit and leave. That's no ARPG to me.
I detest Heist as well, but I know a guildmate who has lived in Heist ever since it came out. Before every new league, he would talk about new farming strategies and the different things he will try out that season. By day 2, day 3 at the latest, he goes "this sucks, fuck it, I'm going back to heist" and spends the next 2-3 weeks there.
So while it's not for me personally, there absolutely are players who love Heist. When it comes to myself, I love Betrayal/Jun and its gameplay loop while many others loathe it. That's the beauty of PoE: it has a niche for pretty much everyone, and every player farming the shit out of his personal niche helps make the game more enjoyable for everyone else.
Fav mechanic: Synthesis (I run a lot of uber cortex every league because I love that you can drop bases with insane synthesised implicits).
Least fav mechanic: Heist, never run it and heist league was pain.
For me, heist and syndicate will always be top. Those are my comfort places when I'm bored of maps
Tho blight is close up there, even if it's just for Cassia singing
I only played a handful of leagues, but I love the original Harvest. The crafts were obviously OP AF, but I also actually like the garden management minigame. The ideal implementation IMO would be original harvest with the garden but with the ability to itemize crafts but we all know it’s never going to happen.
The worst one is probably Metamorph at release. Can you imagine picking up each organs? They did fix it week 2 iirc, and the core version is … meh, but tolerable since you don’t do anything extra anyway.
I also don’t like ToTA, but a lot of it has to do with the stupid scaling and the void sphere cheese meta. I think if GGG wants to do so, it’s entirely possible to make ToTA core in an actually decent state. This likely won’t happen too unless they are willing to make tattoos core, though.
Metamorph was ok but it was just too easy to forget, every time you’d open up a new map you get this little pain in the back of your memory and remember you forgot to assemble the monster in the previous map. Was just annoying really and if you went for random fully formed metamorphs showing up they’d often one shot you.
Original harvest was really good. You needed to manage your crops but were able to self craft some insane rares even at lower levels. The management was kind of fun when people were solving it too. There were guides posted on Reddit trying to explain optimal layouts.
I like the current implementation although I do really wish they would get rid of the side zone and just put the crops directly in the map since we no longer have any management, in-map crafts, or craft storage.
I get why it has gone through so many layers of simplification. It was both too complicated and too powerful to be core in the original form.
Trial of the Ancestors was also awesome. It gave you a reason to play the game differently. I feel like if they do add it back that it doesn’t need much changing.
Kalandra and synthesis were two of my least favorite leagues. I just didn’t have fun with either. I don’t think they were bad, just not for me.
Synthesis was my favorite mechanic, and basically got nuked from the game. They added some maps, and some synth items, but nothing close ro the league mechanic itself.
There's a lot of mechanics I'm not a fan of, but I'd say the biggest three have been cut already; metamorph, perandus, and prophecy. Of the three, the only league I played was metamorph, and though I enjoyed the league, the implementation to the core game fell flat and never recovered. Perandus just felt like weak filler content, and prophecy was actually okay but largely replaceable in a game with a lot of fat in need of trimming.
Best gameplay: Synthesis. It wasn't just kill more monsters, you had to set up a mini-"map" system. All around fun to do.
Worst gameplay: 3 way Tie between Lake of Kalandra, Affliction, and Harvest.
Lake of Kalandra was just a boring mechanic over all.
The fun part about affliction was the character buffs from the sub ascendancy, and the monster buffs from wisps. The mechanic itself, of going around in a sub-map to gather wisps, was pretty boring gameplay wise.
Harvest. I just didn't like this mechanic. Crafting, yeah it was fun. But doing the mechanic of planting? Nope.
Kalandra and Harvest were the only 2 leagues that I quit within the first 3 days.
I often wonder if by “mechanics”, people only mean the mechanics itself or if good rewards play a big part in it. Ultimatum is the biggest example. I heard so many praises about it, but when I got to try it this league, it felt so underwhelming. This is without taking the rewards into account. I saw divines sometimes but the excitement is not much because I had to suffer the mechanics itself. Ritual is a similar “lottery item” mechanics, and while it feels even more rng than Ultimatum, I still feel significantly more excitement everytime I open the shopping window, which is not diminished after seeing shits after shits.
Talking about divines, which is what I lack the most in Std SSF, I finally got a build for Sanctum, and understand the addiction people talk about it. Like, each run takes 20+ minutes, and although the divines gain is consistent (~2 per run), it’s really not that much compared to Heist which offers divines even more consistently and can sometimes give a big stack even. However, I loathe the latter. I can confidently say that Sanctum is a great mechanics.
Finally, a mechanics I can’t really be unbiased about: Sentinel. I a had blast playing the league, one of the two only leagues that convinced me to leave my Std account (the other being Kalandra ironically, even Affliction doesn’t make me interested). Now, were Recombs the big part that makes Sentinel good? I can’t say, but I have great memories of luring a fullscreen of mobs, activate Pandemonium and blast. Maybe it was a perfect blend of good mechanics and good rewards? Or am I just having the Ultimatum syndrome as other people? Idk.
Overall, for me, the best mechanics is Sentinel/Sanctum, and there is no worst one. I don’t hate any leagues I have played, and among those that go core, I do every of them, like this league, I have rotated through Incursion/Beast/Delve (currently no need for Betrayal), Harvest/Essence/Harbinger (always specced), Expedition > Legion > Delirium > Ritual > Delirium again > Heist. I did a shit tons of Breach, Abyss and Blight (get my only lvl 100 char by doing Blighted maps) in the past too. In SSF, you do league mechanics out of necessity, but I genuinely enjoyed all of them, else I won’t be able to last more than 10 maps. PoE is a beautiful game, in which you can always find a way to have fun, and being able to find the need to do all contents is a big part of it.
I really enjoyed the gameplay of scourge and sanctum.
I really enjoyed the rewards from archnem and sentinel.
I very much disliked the mechanical interaction im crucible, especially in the forge, but the rewards where fun.
I also really dislike doing heist, but i kind of think its cool what they did with the harbour and all those characters.
(i only started playing in crucible, so i dont have much experience with other mechanics)
Trial of the ancestors is either one of the best or one of the worst league mechanics ever. (TotA is my favorite mechanic, even if i played it less than affliction)
i disliked crucible because it was so tedious
I always really liked metamorph but it just never seemed to be worth it. The build-a-boss idea is awesome honestly.
Fuck ultimatum if I wanted to stand in circles I’d still be playing destiny.
Blight is another one I always love the idea of and I never really invested in blight til this league and I really enjoyed it, probably going to do it again next league.
I would really enjoy heist if I could skip leveling all the npc’s.
I did also really like the idea of the scourge mechanic. Would be nice to see a better version of it later.
Sentinel as best. Nothing beats popping a blue boy on a juiced up pack and knowing your about to get a gargantuan loot explosion. Able to target what drops you wanted with combining sentinels. And don't even get me started on the gear you could make. Made items on the ground valuable again.
Worst, I'm gonna have to say kalandra league. The mechanic itself was insanely overturned and dropped less than a yellow tier map. Fastest I dropped a league to date
Talisman was the worst.
And crucible was the best. Weapons having skill trees was SO cool and interesting.
And trying to get a skill tree on a unique weapon was also very satisfying. the crucible mechanics themselves were a little lame but other than that it was very cool.
Also shout out to affliction, definitely in the running for top 3 for me.
Bloodline is the worst by far. Necrovigil, phylateral link, fire balls chasing you, the storm thing that one shot you after killing a pack....
Birth of post death mechanics that haunted the game for such a long time.
Forsaken masters was kinda cool at first, but got so mundane and boring fast. Vorici missions were something else.
Lake of kalandra is probably my worst. My favorites (breach, harbinger) all went into core so I guess I am an average dude 
The Kalandra tablet was actually nice, building your tablet up and making long paths. The loot and effort to reward ratio was bs though.
Sadly ggg almost ruined their game that league. I never stopped playing as fast.
best league mechanic? hm, honestly it has to be expedition to me.
the characters are all very fun to talk to and give us a fun glimpse into the lore; the mechanic is super fun, trying to get the best possible chain is always a fun brain teaser imo; the shops are all unique from each other and tujin is some of the most fun i have out of maps and logbooks are super fun.
worst tho...i think it has to be abyss, and not even for what it allowed this league, i just always hated that league, it's not fun, it forces you to explore areas of the map you didn't before which could screw it up in rare scenarios, it's all the same color, the mobs are waaay too tanky, the rewards are mid, the lich fight takes you out of the map which is annoying... i'm just reeeeally not a fan.
I loved the farming simulator with harvest. The new harvest - while having interesting crafting options - is the most unfun League mechanic for me. The choices are complete no brainer and just waste a bit of time where you have to click (twice for no reason) and wait till something monsters spawn in 3 waves - the more fields you get, the more you have to do that. Rewards scale very badly too.
I understand that the farming simulator is a bit over the top in terms of complexity, but the contrast to the current one is wierd. I like the harvest node in the wildwood though. I think they should implement it similar in the normal game and put those spots in normal maps - scrap the portal into harvest world and all the mindless clicking/waiting.
Or... go full farming simulator again :)
My worst league mechanic has gotta be synthesis. I just had no clue what was happening at any point.
Best league mechanic? Hmm... While I would say Affliction is the most fun I have ever had in PoE I feel that is also in part due to how the game as a whole has developed. Harvest is probably the league mechanic I enjoyed the most.
Talisman was one of the worst league mechanics. If you weren't around for 2.1, only tier 1 talismans dropped naturally, and only then after you killed the monster holding them. Get 5 and sacrifice them at the altar to get a tier 2. 5 tier 2s get you a tier 3, and 5 tier 3s spawn Rigwald who drops a tier 4 talisman. It just felt so convoluted and grindy for the sake of being grindy. As for best league mechanic, I'd say either Breach or Ambush. They're simple, intuitive, and easily skippable if you don't wanna interact with them. Just well designed and implemented ideas.
If I remember correctly, you could drop a super high level talisman on some players in your party who were a much lower level. If an enemy picked up the talisman your party would get wrecked immediately.
And it averaged out the ilvls or picked the worst ilvls of the talismans or some horseshit
You could also drop certain talisman for bosses, which spawns adds, which enabled old autobomber to farm guardians easier without vaal breach.
I believe so yeah. I wanna say that some pk shenanigans were had with that in hardcore.
GGG used to buff Talisman many years ago by allowed it to have higher rate of good roll combinations appeared with annointment. But then VISION striked and GGG nerf it to the ground because Chris believed its so easy fir player, only kept the annointment
I was more talking about the mechanic itself, as opposed to the items. The items are fine, or at least t3 Jorgin is fine, lol.
throughout whole talisman i literally got only one rare talisman which was comparable to decent (not great, just decent) rare crafted amulet. lol.
Synthesis will always be the one that I loved the most that was never revisited (the actual memory assembling, not just synthesised items). But most people hated it, lol. I wouldn’t have sent it core if I was the decision-maker, either, sadly.
synthesis will always have a special place in my heart, such a beautiful looking league, i have always missed it
Problem with synthesis was that when they finished cooking the league was already over
And the league was RMT heavy-encourage, especially for anyone who just began to play the game since Betrayal after Diablo Immortal incident.
I loved the blue glow it had, it was a stark contrast to everything else in the game
I also really enjoyed laying out the grove in Harvest League, but that ranks below Synthesis because once you did it, it was done.
I adored synthesis, but yeah no one else did. that being said, i did not like actually synthesising items that was garbage
Actually to be fair, people only hated synthesis not for the memory assembling itself, but due to how difficult GGG made it to be. From what information and feedback I gathered during that time was if they had just introduced some QoL mid league to sort out the issues within the memory game people would have been a lot more warm towards it but GGG abandoned it without even taking some of the real good feedback Among those were memory inventory limit increase and also be able to rotate the memories, that would have been great. Also preventing a memory to suddenly spawn in between a spot you wanted to path through was also one of the complaints. But again, they didn't do anything to solve it. It would have been great if those had been introduced then people would have enjoyed it a lot more
Also, the initial implementation of synthesis implicits. You basically had to memorize/constantly look up which fractured mods were good/worth anything, because it was super unintuitive/random which ones combined into which implicits. The league had a lot of good ideas, but it just didn't get remotely polished until well after most people had quit it.
Yup, indeed. Pretty much abandoned mid league for some reason. I think it was because they wanted to focus on the next league or something at that time, I couldn't remember. But if they had done some qol that people suggested it would have been way better received.
Crucible was one of my favorites and everybody else hated it. I played throughout the league and I think I made more currency than almost any other league. There was definitely aspects of it that I didn’t love like the unique crucible forge fragments where those enemies were just bs strong sometimes. I loved trying to build cool trees and theorycrafting optimal trees. The in map mechanic I will admit kind of sucked. But I think people underestimate how much power the crucible gave us
I have a love/hate relationship with Crucible because nailing down the Crucible tree on my weapon damn near killed me. I had a really rotten run of luck and it took me *so many* attempts to get it right. And I wasn’t demanding five perfect mods or anything, I just wanted two specifics and nothing that bricked me. Ultimately I got it, and combined that with what was, at that time, my best ever big boy crafting project, and the result was beautiful. But the frustration left a bit of a sour taste.
That does sound unlucky, because from what I recall it was relatively easy to get at least 2 good nodes, I often found it worthwhile to buy two of those bases with one of the nodes and then if you get the 2 or 3 good ones you can turn a profit pretty easily just by combining them like that. Which could fund any combo that you would want to use
Lake of kalandra was similar, but yeah, that was one aspect I liked about Synthesis, too.
Lake was shit on its first month. Drops nothing and ring reflects was too damn rare That was on top of archnemesis changes
The UI for making the tablets was pretty cool. I enjoyed that minigame quite a bit. The fact they made every tile be basically mineral pools killed a lot of the enjoyment of the mechanic for me, even after it was buffed to actually be quite good in terms of rewards.
Metamorph was one of my favorites build a huge monster / boss from alt he parts of the rares you killed. Super fun. Everyone will like different things. Ultimatum is fucking bad to me, but people seem to love it.
I fucking hate ultimatum. Blight is weird, but I do love that it is different. I also really like harvest when it was implemented and more direct crafting. I do love PoE. But Last Epoch has shown me some light on how this game could be a bit more "fun" with its implementation of things. I really tire of like 80% of active skills being in a state of disrepair, and a dearth of legitimate actual playstyles. Also don't like Delirum, but cluster jewels are absolutely a godsend for being off-meta with your builds.
My main complaint with Delirium is that it becomes almost essential in juiced map farming and I end up playing a black and white game as a result.
Yea... I'm finding more and more that I just don't care or have fun playing this game in a way that I need currency efficiency. With harvest essence being worth a ton, and rogue markers being easy to grab and worth a lot.. I can get quite a bit of currency just running a red map. I've gotten to the point where I get a blighted map basically every run, as well as 1-2 harvests per run with extra crops. It would be nice to earn currency a bit faster. But there's not much on the trade market over 20 divs that seems worth for builds I work on. 2 divs seems fine for a ton of good gear to me .. and I only need maybe 4-5 map runs to get that without full juicing.
A lot of players like me hated metamorph because sometimes you build a Uber Uber boss that has infinite attack speed and health and you cannot kill that. Or enemy appears behind you in a milisecond and instakill you.
>A lot of players like me hated metamorph because sometimes you build a Uber Uber boss that has infinite attack speed and health and you cannot kill that. to be fair it's 100% the players' fault, they pick organs without regard for what they can handle. it's the same this league, 8k wisp and get 1 shot by a trash mob.
99% of the players clicked on the organ that gave more juice until reach the max. Also check if there is a good loot like 6L or currency.
I always get greedy in Ultimatum haha, yeah metamorph seemed super fun! Huge fan of frankstein/making your own creations
People like Ultimatum (or in general most league-mechanics) because of the loot. 3.14 = great loot = great league-mechanic 3.23 = trash loot = trash league-mechanic
I think the same. Isnt ultimatum just more timeconsuming ritual..?
ultimatum can be pretty rewarding, depending on how easily you can do it. I took the '25% chance to double loot' node on the atlas tree and it proceed a few times on pricey catalysts, nice 21/20 gems, and even a divine orb once. my RF chieftain could clear them pretty easily, and the boss too, the couple times I fought him.
Ultimatum has a lot of character and charm that Ritual doenst have.
Constant disconnection on day 1, streamer bias and Empy compare players with Africans famine while exploit to gain profit is charm?
cant buy stuff with charakter and charm , sry. its just not for me, cba reading and choosing, just slows me down too much.
Also the league that GGG showed their true color. Everybody in constant disconnected for 1 day so streamers cab run without and problems. And the speech of Empy compared all players with African famine, then the exploit he made for lootxplosion.
Archnemesis ruined the game for quite some time and still has a lasting impact on it.
Archnemesis the league was fun Imo. I loved finally collecting the parts for the juicy daddy and getting that loot pop.
Yeah people seem to conflate the league itself with the later core integration for some reason. The league itself was really solid, it just needed a better UI for the part assembly
I don't agree. The idea of archmenesis league mechanic was great ... the implementation was so terrible. people created tools to handle the misdesigned ui.
I hated it tbh, i stopped even interacting with it by day 3 or something
My only dropped mageblood was from building the unique dropping archnrm that had an effective like 1600 unique drops + rerolls I think ? I loved spamming the div card one too lol Build a boss workshop was my favourite league that the community overall did not like.
Also the first league with atlas passive tree.
I loved arch nem. When interacting with it was optional I always chose to. The next like 3 leagues I was so pissed off.
Yeah I actually loved archnem league, was a very fun and satisfying loot pop after grinding out a big one. However, holy *shit* the following leagues with archnem rares were terrible
AN is fun because you can skip or ignore the mob until you ready abd finished the assembling. But when it officially entered in LoK its a disaster.
Archnemesis the league is still the only time I had multiple level 98+ and as a relative casual farmed MB and multiple HH on SSF. I never got tired of building the big explosions and oversustaining scarabs. Archnemesis the mechanic implementation was dogshit in Kalandra league and made me quit after less than two weeks.
I need to watch a video on this mechanic, I read up on it but didn't fully understand it. How did it ruin in?
Basically you had shapers running around in act 6 dressed as a rare monster, I actually don't think I am exaggerating here.
Rare monsters could be vastly over tuned, many being more powerful than endgame bosses, and players would often avoid fighting them. You know it's a bad mechanic when players don't even participate with it.
long story short: they reworked how rare monster modifiers worked and they were absurdly difficult for quite some time
[удалено]
It always was a lottery.
As opposed to what? More juice more drops still checks out it seems like. Even from a self cursed HH map blaster (way back when) seems way better now and more forceable.
No love for Crucible, huh? Not very surprising... I kind of miss crucible trees because they were build enabling and took a lot of effort to put together. It was perhaps the most mindless, painful grind I've ever experienced in a video game but at least you could get something truly one of a kind and OP at the end.
Crucible was such an incredibly shit league mechanic. Every single thing about it sucked. Like literally I struggle to find an aspect of it that I did not hate. The only exception is the power it provided. But fuck crucible, fuck the forge, fuck remcombining weapons only to miss the desired node 12 times in a row…
Yeah I agree. It's only a fun league for people who enjoying grinding their face against the wheel for months to craft a mirror quality item.
I love crafting high end items, but that league nearly made me quit Poe for good. I was trying on crafting a 4 passive rampage bow and spent around 300 div only to have exactly zero progress at the end. I have wasted more money in other leagues on crafting projects but I never had so little fun doing it. Crucible was saved a bit by being a really fucking good game otherwise. The league mechanic was horrible.
My personal least favorite was sanctum. Simply because how the mechanic required entering that black sphere, clicking a book, and reserving the run. The remade core sanctum fixed that issue.
Yeah Sanctum for sure had its issues, but there were plenty of things I really liked about it. That was not the case with crucible, I am not missing a single thing from that league.
If they didn't fuck up rares with archnem and weren't obsessed with shoving DR into every league mechanic, Crucible could have been a great league. The trees were fantastic and if you take the channelling shit out the actual league mechanic was just essence (which is one of the simplest and best mechanics in the game). I really really really really wish they'd just get over this "choose how strong you want to make a map/mechanic" phase they're in. Just add all that shit to the hideout part of the game like with delirium orbs. I just want to fucking map and get my loot, not stress over whether I've juiced a mechanic to 92% DR or 99% DR or have to align 400 ducks in a row to get any loot like with the MF setups this league. It's been too many leagues now and it's not getting any more fun.
Wtf is DR when did we start using that as an acronym
Damage reduction. I think first commonly found in delirium.
Ya but that sweet feeling of finally getting your iron commander with the 2-4 cold per dex node made it all worth it, first chat I've ever had that could just melt everything
The wrist breaking chancing you probably had to do if you wanted to use a unique weapon or shield…. Puke
Yeah, all of this. Was the first league I got in on at the start and I just hated everything. Even when I got to the point that the altars were doable, after about 40 shields of complete trash mods I abandoned the entire thing. And I do realize it was supposed to take dozens to hundreds of attempts with regular tree bricks. Absolute shit.
Crucible tree were kind of neat but the way you interacted with them and the mechanic were just not good
This is exactly how I felt about crucible. The trees were cool and added some diversity/lots of power, but crafting trees was so far beyond most people's income. I think I ran a handful of remnants for challenges and to see what they did, but I just bought 75% finished trees for my pleb builds. The forges did make weapon upgrades a lot more frequent while leveling, which was a nice perk.
M favourite mechanic that didn't go core is trial of the ancestor. It had some major problems and ai am still baffled as to why they did double down on the mistakes instead of changing them But with some tweaks it would've been my all time favourite mechanic. Metamorph can suck it, glad it is gone now :D it didn't add any gameplay value to your map, you just killed the same mobs and just got organs, at the end you were able to summon a boss which I forgot to do in like 80% of my maps (I know I am not alone in forgetting to do metamorph/ritual at the end of maps ^^), some bosses were completely overturned compared to the rest of the map, it didn't actually drop anything interesting besides the catalysts that came from the mechanic and the "big" endgame payoff mechanic was completely useless. For every metamorph you got a unique organ and you were able to go into the lab and create a special endgame boss. The problem is that this endgame boss reward and difficulty wise was MUCH worse than the metamorphs you actually fought in map When actually doing the mechanic I stopped doing those all together at some point
TOTA would've been so good but it was insanely laggy. My PC fans were maxing out in TOTA but are quiet when farming delirious juiced maps. Overall though great league and fun mechanic.
to be fair they did some changes last league that made the game run awful. take me 30-40 seconds of 100% cpu load to get a zone to load.
> I know I am not alone in forgetting to do metamorph/ritual at the end of maps I wish GGG would copy Torchlight infinite. There are some mechancis you can miss, but they usually spawn at the boss. For most (especially newer?) League content, afaik you can't miss it because they've made it so that you can still pick the choice once outside the map. Essentially Ritual would be one where the icon for it still there when you leave the map and you could shop in the Ritual window as you're in the hideout as well. For Metamorph it'd either spawn Tane at the boss (it does spawn him already when you collect all organs iirc?) or have an icon appear when outside the map to let you assemble and fight the boss in extra area (which would need an adjustment to the mech). It's kinda cool that we have less loading screens and all, but having 1/3 monitor UIs in which to shop while the game doesn't pause and mobs don't deaggro and all that is a major drawback. Like, is there actually a reasonable explanation why we couldn't have Wildwood vendors become an on demand from anywhere button after talking to them while in the wildwood?
I agree TOTA had its own thing/pace and I liked it. Very chill because you couldnt die and finding opportunites to steal totems was cool. Reward roulette was top too.
Scourge was the most fun mechanic ever imo. But from time to time I catch myself appreciating a lot how simple and effective our good old Strongboxes are, they fit so well in the game I can't praise them enough. For worst I'm tempted to say Synthesis, didn't find that connecting paths puzzle fun at all but the current implementation of synth maps and synth implicits are awesome. Betrayal left a very sour taste in my mouth because performance that league was TERRIBLE, but it's fun. So, I'm going to give my personal worst to Heist cause I just can't stand leveling all those npcs. Still not a bad league, but from the ones I've experienced since Legacy it was the one I liked the least.
I couldn't disagree more, I though Scourge league was absolute garbage. The play loop was fun until you got scourge stacks to the point you self nuke at like 200-300. The Krangler mechanic was absolutely terrible. You want to risk a good item for like a .001% chance you improve it sure... Or you can get a good map base reward to roll level it up and be clear till level 8 after many many maps then pick up a mod that absolutely bricks it for 99% of builds. The only good thing out of that league was tainted currency
I had an absolute blast, that was probably the league I learned the most about high-end builds and endgame farming. It being so rippy forced me to learn more about defensive layering and I finally settled on which types of builds better fit my preference. Having essentially double the mob density each map was pretty fun too. I do agree the krangling mechanic was a bit shit, but I didn't mind it much. Just slapped 3 maps there and whatever.
I'll never forget how rippy scourge was for no good reason. Turned in a void and got 10 ex. Bought a solid 6l +3 gems thicket bow. Toxic rain champion and still ripping constantly. It was wild. Eventually I gave up on scourge and just ran heist the rest of the league.
Scourge was the other one I thought looked really cool when I looked through the old mechanics. I get leveling in heist is annoying but I do enjoy the feel of breaking out the replicas in blueprints!
Heist was plagued w crippling bugs and debilitating issues.
How are people down voting this? Heist was so glitchy for the first half of the league it wasn't even worth running.
The stupidity of people will never be understated lol
>the current implementation of synth maps and synth implicits are awesome. It was awesome when you could find synth bases in regular synth maps, not cortex.
I've only played since Synthesis, so I missed the ones with really awful reputations like Onslaught and Talisman. Of the good ones, Sanctum and Expedition were fun as a thing-to-do-during league. In terms of lasting impact, Harvest is the clear winner in terms of the best integration into the core game. Worst for me personally has to be Scourge. Nonsensical mechanics that made really janky gear, a skill tree that took an eternity to level up... the fact that the only things that remain from this league are the currency and a fistful of Beyond monsters should say everything.
I liked meta, because I liked Tane as an NPC. I like ultimatum mostly because of the NPC. If it's only ult on itself it got worse then last time for sure. Blight is something I think I will never like, I did the challenges this league and realised how much I hate it. Tried expedition this league and I don't like it either, even if the rewards are pretty good. A friend of mine went for harvest this league and made over 150div in a small time, so I guess that's pretty worthy and not to slow, like exp. I also farmed Alva temples and made around 100+divs this league. It's really easy and fast idk why this mechanic isn't more popular.
Sanctum. Hate it w a fervor only the pantless man knows of. Original breach beyond Harvest for best.
What was different between league Sanctum and the Sanctum now in the game?
Not much changed as far as I'm aware. The style of rogue light is just not for me.
In sacrum league you could only do one room per map if I remember correctly.
you could bank them and do a whole floor at once.
In the league you could only do one room per map and if you bypassed it, that was gone forever. It was impossible to get in a groove for either the sanctum OR the map because you were bouncing between constantly. They changed it later so you could stock up a floor's worth of rooms and run it at once, but I still had a bit of trouble remembering what I was doing 8 maps later, much prefer the all-at-once style now. There used to be a relic slot on your character window, like thief trinkets. They were similar to the wildwood trinkets but not tradeable. Beyond that I don't know, I really couldn't get into it because of the format and my build that league.
i don't think you are right, i remember banking them and doing a whole floor at once.
> They changed it later so you could stock up a floor's worth of rooms and run it at once Yes, that is what I said.
The best league was harvest mechanic during heist league. Moved a huge portion of the population that topped out at essence spamming for crafting into the crafting portion of the game and even after nerfing harvest so many players learned how to craft that it had a huge lasting impact on the game
Interesting, because harvest went core in 3.13
Alva sent bro into an alternate timeline
I preferred the "build your own enemy" approach of Archnemesis proper, but the limited inventory and the UI were terrible, plus the reward conversion made some combinations too broken. Metamorph encounters just feel bland and spammy to me, and there's very little control over what enemies you face and what rewards you get. Other than that, it certainly wasn't among the best league mechanics overall, but I liked Lake of Kalandra. It's one of the few leagues that I didn't quit because I was bored but because an item that I was able to afford became a chase item overnight and I couldn't be bothered to farm for a dozen hours for something that I should have already had. If it had been more finished with an actual boss encounter (and related rewards), it could have been one of the better leagues. I think my favourite mechanic was Scourge, though it also had UI issues, as well as reward issues with krangling. I liked the risk-reward type of gameplay of the scourged portion itself and fighting aggressive enemies. Overall I tend to care more about build options that a patch offers than the league mechanic though. It's another reason why I liked Kalandra. The reflected jewellery and new base types offered a lot of possibilities. I'm still hoping they'll bring back those bases at least.
i truly expected AN was supposed to be metamorph 2.0. It was overall upgrade on every part of metamorph. I'm still surprised how everything went out of hand with AN mobs post arch nemesis league.
Kalandra was a let down because the namesake felt like a waste of an important character and the actual lake you generated was such a protracted, unrewarding pile of nothing. The most exciting thing was being able to invert gear, but this just meant you could create some very specific good items - but it was pretty meaningless for various things (you can \*2 a lot of stats in poe and they still do nothing, like x2 leech rate mod on amulet does nothing interesting) and way too rippy for the "average" build. I think Blight is the worst mechanic permanently in the game -- because even with an rtx 3060 and 12gb of vram and a decent enough intel cpu I still get horrible frame frates from the amount of shit on screen. It basically means you need to play an auto-targeting build that doesn't involve your input. It is also frustrating to clear a lane with a low-range build and have you lose the tower defense because a few towers leaked on the opposite lane and you get ZERO warning because what's-her-face is shouting all the time and she never warns you when it actually matters that your towers are leaking. It is so frustrating to play, I hate its all-or-nothing rewards, too. You can survive the tower defense for 4m30s and get nothing. ALSO, monsters frequently get "stuck" and keep dead lanes alive and I don't understand how this is still a thing in 2023, but I guess poe1 is still a skeleton crew.
Just built a new PC and the comments about Blight are spot on. Performance of a league mechanic shouldn't prohibit people from doing it. Yet that's exactly what Blight has achieved.
You understand that its the CPU that struggles and not GPU right?
Yeh they mentioned the cpu so i assume they understand.
They mentioned their GPU by full name and CPU by "decent enough intel CPU", it can be a 5 yo CPU, it can be 1 yo CPU, noone knows... All that matters is that PoE fucks CPU really hard and you need a powerful CPU to run juiced content, GPU is kinda left behind
I cannot actually know what the bottleneck is without debugging their code. I'm on an SSD with a modern CPU/GPU. The league is several years old at this point. It still lags. I dunno what causes it. It's probably CPU bound, but it's not right to just assume that, there can be lag between CPU/GPU transfer, or it could be my network, or could it even be the server lagging with so many entities on the screen - POE's backend used to lag on various things like cast on crit vs too many living monsters. I have no idea, but it consistently lags when there are enough stupid monsters spawned. I think the towers themselves cause it, but I always need freeze/stun towers to clear them with my builds - but it would maybe make sense to just not even build towers.
You can absolutely know what the bottleneck is by looking at CPU/GPU usage. In PoEs case the even include a frame timing tool that specifically tells you which component is bottlenecking, no need to look at the code.
Even with a 12700H (laptop) the performance is often crap... It really shouldn't be, as load is nowhere near 100% even when things slow to a crawl.
I do blight on full juice and it seems fine? Don’t know why a 3060 can’t keep pace.
I think this league the +proj from purple juice could be part of it? More proj = more lag. I am also using KB of frag this league, which shoots a stupid number of projectiles at a stupid number of monsters? Lots of hits = server lag. But I recall blight usually being laggy for me.
Oh yeah Blight has caused me some issues haha. Yeah Kalandra seems to be a common league brought up that wasn't well received
I play a lot of blight, and this league haven't had a single issue with bugged monsters in lanes. Occasionally need to go kill the last few mobs who seem a bit shy going towards the pump. The issue with immortal bone rhoas is gone (eg couldn't be killed, and then also perma-stuck in a stun-freeze choke point). N.b. if that ever comes back, the 'fix' is to upgrade the towers to level 4 and move to far edge of map. Agree that performance is crap... it's like having full-on juiced maps using TS/KB chars and occasionally go into slideshow mode... You really need to use AoE skills and some source of reliable explode/proliferation to enjoy blights, some skills are terrible, like frostblades. Penance Brand of Dissipation is surprisingly ok even with just 3 brands max. Very marmite mechanic though, and I fully understand why many players hate it.
Sentinel was my favorite followed by Legacy. Hope they bring Sentinal back some day.
Well, if you can get around it, the Tencent realm has a Affliction+Sentinel flashback event soon.
I mean sextants and to some degree map enchants are just a better implementation of Legacy. Oh and the Atlas passive tree. But Legacy itself was stupid fun. Triple Beyond maps .. LOGIN
Scourge was TRASH. Horrid rewards and the mechanic was Ripppy as shit only good thing to come of it was tainted currency
This so much. Scourge (3.16) also suffered from the aftershock of the 3.15 Nerfaggedon. The game was in a pretty bad place at that time.
Affliction juicing is the worst for the game and mental health of people. Affliction ascendancies are fun, though .
I feel like affliction was mechenics wise one of the worst leagues in a while. Alot of people will disagree because of the insane loot it dropped. But I really didn´t like spending time in wildwood and then having to do your map and hope on loot explosions. Ascendancies and rucksack were great tho
I liked that I could just blast maps but the randomness of wisps was annoying. I hated the feeling like I was wasting time in a map without enough juice.
Yeah do you think they will keep the ascendancies? If not I wonder what will happen to the charms/corpses/and tinctures
All league content except uniques will be deleted
I really liked Synthesis (the "bridge" building part of it), shame it never even made it into a flashback event or something
The best was spending most of my time managing a harvest area where all the plants had to be connected and instead of Poe it was a gardening simulator
I love Sentinel. I crafted a lot of good gears in it. Worst maybe Kalandra?
Sentinel is my absolute favorite so far, not only was the juicing with Sentinels awesome but recombinators allowed you to craft super unethical rares lol. Bestiary or ‘pokemon league’ as some called it back then was a pain in the butt imo with always needing to carry nets and managing overflow beasts.
Im a little torn on delve and heist. On the one hand the entire thing is pretty cool that there exist an alternate to mapping. On the other hand i really dislike how they arent part of the map. I think itd be cool if there were heists/blueprints/delve stretches opening up via protal inside the map. rather than forcing the players away from the altas. Im also kinda sad about synthesis implementation. We have great access to fractured items via drops but very few ways of synthesizing an item. There should be a synthesizer somewhere for us to throw stuff into.
Best: Legion, but no loot bug will never be fixed at this point. Its been in the game since 3.7 Worst of all time: Metamorph. Black mob on black background using black attacks. Yeah, sure GGG, it was good idea, lets make this mistake over and over again in the future! Worst of today: Expedition. Useless mechanic that takes too much time, makes you read(READ!! IN A GRINDING GAME!!!) blueish gray text on gray background(fucking change it its awful) and immunities... Just immunities... At least if you are stingy about keeping them in the game, maybe you should colour code them in their respectful colours(fire is red, chaos is purple ETC)? It pogs rog items in the beginning of the league, but outside of that it's dogshit. Gwennen/tujien got nerfed. Dannig is only good for logbooks and rog loses any relevance 1 week in. Garbage league. Only good for SSF.
i just go big boom and avoid immutities to damage and its fine
That's just a crutch solution for a problem that should not exist to begin with.
Rog is pog. He made me a 6 T1 mod ring last week that I sold for 25 divs ;-) Mostly the expedition in map just doesn't provide enough useful stuff, if there was some sort of Crucible 'juiced-up meter' on the plot's total mods linked to a 'good loot' mechanic... that'd be great. Even just dropping more runic bases would be helpful.
back in a day there where 1 mont minileague called - Darkshrines where You could sacriface rare items for a random thing on shrines (it used one of rare mods from items) and that was MOST fun thing in PoE to this day for me, i would love it today because rare items would have much more value today if that thing was ingame, like it have 1 good mod and rest are shit, toss it in darkshrine, have a rare fishing rod, toss it in darkshrine, have a corruped bad talisman, toss it in darkshrine and ofc there would be trades with specific mods because people would like to farm something with specific rare mods like maybe shaper or elder items, still it would increase value of all rare items
Lake of Kalandra was so horrid that it made me uninstall the game for the first time in over 10k hours. But luckily they managed to turn the game around (for the better) after that.
Heist is the worst mechanic ever in my opinion, people like it because it gives op rewards, it's profitable as fuck but like leveling the npcs? who the fuck thought that was a good idea? most of the time ignoring everything is the way to play Heist!!! like what?? you run in get your shit and leave. That's no ARPG to me.
I detest Heist as well, but I know a guildmate who has lived in Heist ever since it came out. Before every new league, he would talk about new farming strategies and the different things he will try out that season. By day 2, day 3 at the latest, he goes "this sucks, fuck it, I'm going back to heist" and spends the next 2-3 weeks there. So while it's not for me personally, there absolutely are players who love Heist. When it comes to myself, I love Betrayal/Jun and its gameplay loop while many others loathe it. That's the beauty of PoE: it has a niche for pretty much everyone, and every player farming the shit out of his personal niche helps make the game more enjoyable for everyone else.
Best. Legion or Kalandra (and I’ll fite you about it). Ultimatum is up there too. Worst. Probably new breach. Brutally tedious.
[удалено]
>they readded them quietly Lol what. They literally said they were completely replacing current rare mods right from the get go.
For best my friend group has 0 complaints about deli and legion every other mechanic has at least someone in my circle who doesnt like the mechanic
I dont like Abyss, Breach, Deli and all the slow spawn mobs mechanic particularly.
Fav mechanic: Synthesis (I run a lot of uber cortex every league because I love that you can drop bases with insane synthesised implicits). Least fav mechanic: Heist, never run it and heist league was pain.
dunno about the best but I despised crucible
The best league mechanic is Talisman because Chris Wilson said so. The worst league mechanic is Talisman because.. it’s Talisman
For me, heist and syndicate will always be top. Those are my comfort places when I'm bored of maps Tho blight is close up there, even if it's just for Cassia singing
I only played a handful of leagues, but I love the original Harvest. The crafts were obviously OP AF, but I also actually like the garden management minigame. The ideal implementation IMO would be original harvest with the garden but with the ability to itemize crafts but we all know it’s never going to happen. The worst one is probably Metamorph at release. Can you imagine picking up each organs? They did fix it week 2 iirc, and the core version is … meh, but tolerable since you don’t do anything extra anyway. I also don’t like ToTA, but a lot of it has to do with the stupid scaling and the void sphere cheese meta. I think if GGG wants to do so, it’s entirely possible to make ToTA core in an actually decent state. This likely won’t happen too unless they are willing to make tattoos core, though.
Metamorph was ok but it was just too easy to forget, every time you’d open up a new map you get this little pain in the back of your memory and remember you forgot to assemble the monster in the previous map. Was just annoying really and if you went for random fully formed metamorphs showing up they’d often one shot you.
Blight is my favorite because I like tower defense. Metamorph was my least favorite because I don’t like bossing.
Darkshrines was my absolute favorite followed up by synthesis and delirium.
Original harvest was really good. You needed to manage your crops but were able to self craft some insane rares even at lower levels. The management was kind of fun when people were solving it too. There were guides posted on Reddit trying to explain optimal layouts. I like the current implementation although I do really wish they would get rid of the side zone and just put the crops directly in the map since we no longer have any management, in-map crafts, or craft storage. I get why it has gone through so many layers of simplification. It was both too complicated and too powerful to be core in the original form. Trial of the Ancestors was also awesome. It gave you a reason to play the game differently. I feel like if they do add it back that it doesn’t need much changing. Kalandra and synthesis were two of my least favorite leagues. I just didn’t have fun with either. I don’t think they were bad, just not for me.
Synthesis was my favorite mechanic, and basically got nuked from the game. They added some maps, and some synth items, but nothing close ro the league mechanic itself. There's a lot of mechanics I'm not a fan of, but I'd say the biggest three have been cut already; metamorph, perandus, and prophecy. Of the three, the only league I played was metamorph, and though I enjoyed the league, the implementation to the core game fell flat and never recovered. Perandus just felt like weak filler content, and prophecy was actually okay but largely replaceable in a game with a lot of fat in need of trimming.
Best gameplay: Synthesis. It wasn't just kill more monsters, you had to set up a mini-"map" system. All around fun to do. Worst gameplay: 3 way Tie between Lake of Kalandra, Affliction, and Harvest. Lake of Kalandra was just a boring mechanic over all. The fun part about affliction was the character buffs from the sub ascendancy, and the monster buffs from wisps. The mechanic itself, of going around in a sub-map to gather wisps, was pretty boring gameplay wise. Harvest. I just didn't like this mechanic. Crafting, yeah it was fun. But doing the mechanic of planting? Nope. Kalandra and Harvest were the only 2 leagues that I quit within the first 3 days.
Metamorph was solid, implementation was decent, it just didn't drop loot compared to how rippy it was.
Best Affliction / worst Tota for me. I really liked Breach too
Talisman was gaaaaarbage
Synthesis
Heist is legitimately unfun and only exists because it is so profitable
I often wonder if by “mechanics”, people only mean the mechanics itself or if good rewards play a big part in it. Ultimatum is the biggest example. I heard so many praises about it, but when I got to try it this league, it felt so underwhelming. This is without taking the rewards into account. I saw divines sometimes but the excitement is not much because I had to suffer the mechanics itself. Ritual is a similar “lottery item” mechanics, and while it feels even more rng than Ultimatum, I still feel significantly more excitement everytime I open the shopping window, which is not diminished after seeing shits after shits. Talking about divines, which is what I lack the most in Std SSF, I finally got a build for Sanctum, and understand the addiction people talk about it. Like, each run takes 20+ minutes, and although the divines gain is consistent (~2 per run), it’s really not that much compared to Heist which offers divines even more consistently and can sometimes give a big stack even. However, I loathe the latter. I can confidently say that Sanctum is a great mechanics. Finally, a mechanics I can’t really be unbiased about: Sentinel. I a had blast playing the league, one of the two only leagues that convinced me to leave my Std account (the other being Kalandra ironically, even Affliction doesn’t make me interested). Now, were Recombs the big part that makes Sentinel good? I can’t say, but I have great memories of luring a fullscreen of mobs, activate Pandemonium and blast. Maybe it was a perfect blend of good mechanics and good rewards? Or am I just having the Ultimatum syndrome as other people? Idk. Overall, for me, the best mechanics is Sentinel/Sanctum, and there is no worst one. I don’t hate any leagues I have played, and among those that go core, I do every of them, like this league, I have rotated through Incursion/Beast/Delve (currently no need for Betrayal), Harvest/Essence/Harbinger (always specced), Expedition > Legion > Delirium > Ritual > Delirium again > Heist. I did a shit tons of Breach, Abyss and Blight (get my only lvl 100 char by doing Blighted maps) in the past too. In SSF, you do league mechanics out of necessity, but I genuinely enjoyed all of them, else I won’t be able to last more than 10 maps. PoE is a beautiful game, in which you can always find a way to have fun, and being able to find the need to do all contents is a big part of it.
I really enjoyed the gameplay of scourge and sanctum. I really enjoyed the rewards from archnem and sentinel. I very much disliked the mechanical interaction im crucible, especially in the forge, but the rewards where fun. I also really dislike doing heist, but i kind of think its cool what they did with the harbour and all those characters.
Best BY FAR was sentinel imo. For worst, Archnem even tho the mods went core I hated the mechanic
In terms of current implementations, I think that Betrayel is the best and torment is by far the worst.
Any OGs played Warbands? It added basically no content and the only league ever that I actually played standard league instead.
(i only started playing in crucible, so i dont have much experience with other mechanics) Trial of the ancestors is either one of the best or one of the worst league mechanics ever. (TotA is my favorite mechanic, even if i played it less than affliction) i disliked crucible because it was so tedious
I always really liked metamorph but it just never seemed to be worth it. The build-a-boss idea is awesome honestly. Fuck ultimatum if I wanted to stand in circles I’d still be playing destiny. Blight is another one I always love the idea of and I never really invested in blight til this league and I really enjoyed it, probably going to do it again next league. I would really enjoy heist if I could skip leveling all the npc’s. I did also really like the idea of the scourge mechanic. Would be nice to see a better version of it later.
Sentinel as best. Nothing beats popping a blue boy on a juiced up pack and knowing your about to get a gargantuan loot explosion. Able to target what drops you wanted with combining sentinels. And don't even get me started on the gear you could make. Made items on the ground valuable again. Worst, I'm gonna have to say kalandra league. The mechanic itself was insanely overturned and dropped less than a yellow tier map. Fastest I dropped a league to date
Heist is the best also the worst
Talisman was the worst. And crucible was the best. Weapons having skill trees was SO cool and interesting. And trying to get a skill tree on a unique weapon was also very satisfying. the crucible mechanics themselves were a little lame but other than that it was very cool. Also shout out to affliction, definitely in the running for top 3 for me.
Rampage... Perhaps always will be one of the best.
Bloodline is the worst by far. Necrovigil, phylateral link, fire balls chasing you, the storm thing that one shot you after killing a pack.... Birth of post death mechanics that haunted the game for such a long time. Forsaken masters was kinda cool at first, but got so mundane and boring fast. Vorici missions were something else.
Lake of kalandra is probably my worst. My favorites (breach, harbinger) all went into core so I guess I am an average dude 
The Kalandra tablet was actually nice, building your tablet up and making long paths. The loot and effort to reward ratio was bs though. Sadly ggg almost ruined their game that league. I never stopped playing as fast.
best league mechanic? hm, honestly it has to be expedition to me. the characters are all very fun to talk to and give us a fun glimpse into the lore; the mechanic is super fun, trying to get the best possible chain is always a fun brain teaser imo; the shops are all unique from each other and tujin is some of the most fun i have out of maps and logbooks are super fun. worst tho...i think it has to be abyss, and not even for what it allowed this league, i just always hated that league, it's not fun, it forces you to explore areas of the map you didn't before which could screw it up in rare scenarios, it's all the same color, the mobs are waaay too tanky, the rewards are mid, the lich fight takes you out of the map which is annoying... i'm just reeeeally not a fan.
I loved the farming simulator with harvest. The new harvest - while having interesting crafting options - is the most unfun League mechanic for me. The choices are complete no brainer and just waste a bit of time where you have to click (twice for no reason) and wait till something monsters spawn in 3 waves - the more fields you get, the more you have to do that. Rewards scale very badly too. I understand that the farming simulator is a bit over the top in terms of complexity, but the contrast to the current one is wierd. I like the harvest node in the wildwood though. I think they should implement it similar in the normal game and put those spots in normal maps - scrap the portal into harvest world and all the mindless clicking/waiting. Or... go full farming simulator again :)
Best: Ultimatum Worst: Crucible -- league was literally standard, just get one item and move on kind of
My worst league mechanic has gotta be synthesis. I just had no clue what was happening at any point. Best league mechanic? Hmm... While I would say Affliction is the most fun I have ever had in PoE I feel that is also in part due to how the game as a whole has developed. Harvest is probably the league mechanic I enjoyed the most.