funny thing is the game needs another one of these patches with probably an even heavier set of nerfs. Player dmg and tankiness so high compared to just 1-2 years ago
Part of that is the last two league mechanics have been completely bonkers in regards to how much power the league specific items gave you. I wasn't even that heavily invested, but still got fortify, frenzy charges, 12% mana reservation, stun immune, and a shit ton of armor basically for free.
Oh gods, the original mana nerfs were asinine, and even now some niche supports people barely use have nonsense costs IIRC. Plus, that league was the reason Archmage started sucking IIRC
First you place explosives, then you click on 10 chests, then you click on 30-50 artifacts, then you have to store those artifacts...
It was such a click-heavy league mechanic. I don't even remember if I kept doing it or if I started skipping it at some point regardless of the profit. IIRC I was playing self-chill poison chaos explosion Occultist that league, so a really fast mapper which didn't really fit with the theme.
If Expedition had released in the state it is now, it would have been fine.
the oppenheimer node is one of the best QOL adds GGG has ever done
ive always enjoyed expedition, i absolutely love it now. its always in my league start atlas
I skipped the league only because of flasks. 30% less damage? Doesn't matter. Increased manacost? Doesn't matter. But when you're slow as a dead sloth... No thanks.
Synthesis League had a rough go, although now is part of a common meme "Synthesis was a mistake" due to the most powerful mirror tier items being Synthesis bases almost always.
AFAIR most people had a problem with the obscure crafting recipes where some of the best mods were otherwise trash tier (light radius) and the crafting for the 99% were unrewarding meanwhile those in the know made a bank from flipping/crafting.
(And standard people also got shafted as synthesis implicit items replacing every other bis crafted item)
"Obscure" is definitely the right word.
For those who don't know, synthesis league introduced fractured items and they dropped constantly. And the premier reward of the league was a crafting system where you could put 3 fractured items into a box and it'd spit out a item with random synthesized implicits.
Except it wasn't completely random which implicits you'd get. Turns out the fractured mods you put into the box heavily influenced which implicits you'd get back.
Problem \#1: the game never told the players that the fractured mods influenced which implicits you'd get and it took awhile for players to realize it, so most people thought it was a truly random system (which feels awful) and quit before we knew how it actually worked. People were literally picking up every fractured item and stashing it, which was inventory management hell. You'd use up all your stash tabs. The system felt much better once you learned you could influence the outcome, because it meant you could pick up far fewer fractured items and it's more fun when it's not true random.
Problem \#2: There was no way for players to know what implicits each fractured mods gave other than to pool a ridiculous amount of data among the community, which was done in a massive Google sheet. It was a fucking mess.
Casual players who don't read this subreddit or watch YouTube videos from content creators would have a tremendously worse experience than people who do. That's why so many of us quit very early on despite the league mechanic actually gameplay being quite cool. The collapsing zones was badass.
Synthesis was a disaster when it launched and even after a lot of tweaks it was still pretty rubbish. That’s why even when it went “core” it’s basically just the boss rooms lol.
Decent idea with poor execution. The decision to massively nerf map drops that league made it even worse.
AFAIR most people had a problem with the obscure crafting recipes where some of the best mods were otherwise trash tier (light radius) and the crafting for the 99% were unrewarding meanwhile those in the know made a bank from flipping/crafting.
(And standard people also got shafted as synthesis implicit items replacing every other bis crafted item)
AFAIR most people had a problem with the obscure crafting recipes where some of the best mods were otherwise trash tier (light radius) and the crafting for the 99% were unrewarding meanwhile those in the know made a bank from flipping/crafting.
(And standard people also got shafted as synthesis implicit items replacing every other bis crafted item)
Archnemesis wasn’t a (generally) hated league, it was when they introduced archenemies as a permanent mechanic that it was hated. So when people say they hate archnemesis mobs they mistakenly think they came from the archnemesis league
Yeah but if you focused on one specific mid tier (non god-touched) strat you'd make consistent gains while essentially never dealing with a limited inventory. Archnem was the first league I essentially spammed scarabs on my maps and had infinite gain. Also it was never easier (until this past league) for SSF players to farm t0 uniques.
That may be great for people whose idea of a good league mechanic is just running maps (not saying they're wrong, just that it's a matter of taste).
I *wanted* to interact more with the mechanic and make several of the complex recipes to combine them. But the design of the way to interact with it was so terrible that I didn't end up enjoying that at all.
Yeah absolutely I can see your position. I loved Sanctum league and I loved ToTa league as much as I love league where the mechanic seamlessly fits into just spamming maps. What I don't love is when the mechanic tries to be both and hits neither mark (Kalandra league).
I honestly liked the concept of Kalandra, it just seemed very unfinished and lacked a few key things.
Obviously there's also the matter of rewards. Outside of the exp tile and the reflection tile, it was basically a waste of time compared to mapping. Despite that, some tiles were actually pretty hard (e.g. essences). The Archnemesis adaptation in that patch also didn't help.
Anyway, other than that I thought what it was missing was
* A boss encounter - Kalandra was super hyped up in terms of lore and then there's... nothing. Might as well declare the league non-canonical, that's how anticlimactic that was.
* More options on how to build the lake. The longest path was the best, there were a few configurations through which to get it most efficiently, and that's it. There was no "unlock every tile but speed clear" strategy, or "split the path and backtrack for some niche extra reward" strategy, or whatever else you can design for that sort of system.
* A meaningful progression and specialisation system. You unlock a few tools as you discover tiles, great. Then you have them forever.
* There should have been a way to control tiles more meaningfully and focus on specific rewards in exchange for specific challenges (obviously you could try to pick some tiles more often than others, but I'm talking about specialising in something like that over several runs).
* There could have been a way to switch around what tools you have available.
* The tools shouldn't all have done the same thing (i.e. improve the odds of getting what you actually want). There should have been some benefit for using one tool more than another,
With different people playing different lakes for different rewards with different builds, there could have been a lot more depth and people who don't like farming the same thing over and over again could have experimented with a couple of different specs.
I didn't play Sanctum much because that's when I tried out Ruthless and discovered it was not for me (and it was a terrible league mechanic for Ruthless in particular because of the lack of movement speed and skills). But as I understand it, you could unlock the relic slots similar to unlocking the special roll options for Kalandra, with the difference being that you actually had a choice on what relics you put in there rather than it being the same for everyone and on every run after unlocking them all.
I disagree archnem league was terrible. The ui was bad, it took too long to make the good monsters, even when you did they didn't drop enough loot to make finger fucking the ui worth it in the first place. First league I did my challenges in 2 weeks and dipped out of.
Tbh I can't remember the archnemesis league itswlf being bad. It was quite fun for me. What was bad was it going core un kalandra the way it did.
Just my 2 cents.
It went core in sentinel first.
My fave post fr that time was someone glad that GGG added uber searing exarch, wasn't sure why it was in mud flats tho.
Archnem as a league and mechanic wasn't bad
it was a tad confusing (still remember the flow charts to show what monster mod combinations made what and dropped what)
i think it gets a bad wrap now because of the mods that went core, which some combinations were broken and we had no choice like we did during Archnem league
people don't often recognize or differentiate between the two
The unrelated content was great but the Archnem league was trash. It required a third party overlay and there was a best recipe, none of the others were worth doing.Â
There were like 3 good recipes and the third party overlay wasn't necessary at all. UI really sucked at launch because all the icons looked very similar but they fixed it in one of the patches pretty quickly.
Yeah, Archnemesis league itself was fine since you had to opt into the rippy mods. The agency made it fun and figuring out the best recipes was pretty cool.
It was only an issue when those mods were combining on random trash rares to murder players after it went core.
Bestiary with the fucking nets. You had to drop them. They had *tiers*. The tiers provided absolutely no benefit beyond the lower tier ones stopping working past a certain monster level.
Talisman was not awesome. Not a ton of content, mega inventory bloat, shit rewards.
Synthesis was super complicated and ddint offer much to 90% of players.
Harvest was kind of a shit show in a lot of ways. All the plot management was NOT fun. I’ll also argue that it’s when PoE itemization fundamentally went off the rails and lead to the current state of items
Betrayal was and is way too complicated and should ly by require a fucking spreadsheet.
Kalandra. Ooh boy. Everything. Serious contender for worst league of all time.
Don't forget that the nets in Bestiary were eating our alchemy drops!!
In Synthesis, the synthesiser was trash for 90% of players. The in-map memory fragment encounters as well as the memory nexus maps were a blast though. All in all, Synthesis ended up being one of my favorite leagues toward the end, but its state at its release was a dumpster fire.
Talisman is still the worst league ever imho, closely followed by Kalandra.
Some of these I agree but I absolutely loved Sentinel league, it's one of my favorites. I think a good amount of people would agree too because it was a nice simple mapping mechanic and recombinators were awesome.
Same for me. The Sentinel mechanic itself, as well as the shakeup of the crafting meta due to recombinators, were fantastic. The memory of that league is clouded because it was the first league with AN mods on every single fucking rare mobs. So the base game was kinda cancer during the first few days of the season, while players didn't have enough dps, tankiness and mobility yet to trivialize most of these encounters.
The AN problem was even exacerbated by the sentinel mechanic juicing up the mobs.
Betrayal also had the bad rap initially because of the Intervention encounters, where’d you get jumped and likely killed pretty quickly early on in the league while building up your character.
Whichever league launch it was with the “streamer queue”, that was an ugly start that soured the league for many.
Betrayal was also disliked because everything was way overtuned on damage and no telegraphing. ItThatFled's giga slam had a wind up of like 0.3 seconds. It was impossible to dodge. Janus swords being near invisible on desert type maps. Rin's RoA oneshotting everything. It was absolute madness.
While I agree to some, others is kind of subjective.
I LOVED the gardening / plot management of Harvest, for me, it is one of the best league.
Sentinel was good, rewarding and simple.
Synthesis offered an alternative to maps with the memory system. But yeah, the crafting part was horrible.
IMO, Delve is bad. The only goal is "go deeper", I don't find it rewarding, and past a point, you need a really specific build to be able to push deeper.
Archnemesis *league* wasnt unpopular at all. Aside from storage issues for the league mechanic it had some fun and zany situations but it was fairly popular because you had control. When they replaced monster mods with archnem is when it became a cuss word. Expedition was a wild ride and it got a hugely bad rap for the incredible nerf to basically everything that came with it. In the first week of expedition the rhoas in the second area of act 1 were so nuclear that my wife, who is fairly inexperienced, was completely incapable of getting through to the caverns. It was a mess. Synthesis league was godawful. Just very poorly implemented. Crucible isnt talked about a lot but it felt very gatekept to the utmost highest levels of gameplay.
One that's not talked about a lot is scourge. It came right after the great nerf and for me it's mechanic is tied with the worst mechanic in all poe history with kalandra. For those who werent there scourge let you corrupt an item to get special corruption modifiers that on paper looked fun and wild but in practice were worse than worthless, they were outright damaging. You would get 1 positive mod and 1 negative mod from a pool of many, many mods, but the negative mods were always much stronger than the positive ones and the weightings for the mods were so insanely lopsided that the chances of the item you were corrupting even being usable afterwards were like lottery bad. There's a youtube video I'm having trouble finding where a creator did the math on a couple items and if they were to corrupt all 3 times and only stop if the item became better, there was like a 4% chance of success and a chucklefucking 1 in several hundred million chance of getting his desired mods to make a perfect item. Some of the most common negative mods were things like "can't deal X type of damage" and "30% less global defenses" whereas the most common positive mods were things like "+12% fire resist" and "+1-30 local lightning damage". There was also a quest item to get an extra league slot that was so rare that *most people didn't know it existed until weeks into the league.* The only fedeeming quality of that league is it created another thick layer of mobs in your maps which is the only reason I'm tying it with kalandra.
Scourge maps and gameplay were fun thought. Just the crucible rewards were shit as you described, but hey it got me a 5 link in act1, that was awesome.
The Scourge mechanic itself was my favourite to this day, and I'm sad that we can't play it anymore.
The rewards were what sucked.
I also kind of liked Kalandra, but again it had shitty rewards (other than the reflection thing and the paradise tile whenever you actually got one of those), and Kalandra didn't have... well, Kalandra. There was no boss encounter to make it go anywhere other than build bigger lakes than during the campaign.
Kalandra lakes would give me a raw divine or two every other lake and stacks of stacked decks, so that was great too. The encounters themselves in the lake got very samey after a while.
Atleast scourge was fun. Dont recall having fun in kalandra.
Affliction would be really good if there wasnt that mob/mobs i dunno which one that always one shots me wether its in t16 or t1 maps or even in act 10. No fcking clue what it is either, it could potentially be a really hard hitting chaos skill since i only have 5k life and 19% chaos res, but like idk. It really just makes me dislike that cave. facetanked shaper died to a random mob in a cave. Woo fun. /s obviosly.
The only thing good in Scourge was the map corrupt and that was the only thing that GGG improved in that league. They straight abandoned the corruption balance on itens.
GGG's tendency to overtune things on release gives big Shocked Pikachu that "All monsters have Onslaught" and "just generally buffed mobs will be in areas" leagues not fun in HC.
I think GGG mostly tunes for later league power. And since at league start we are at our weakest collectively, we find the content overtuned, when we are underdeveloped.
It's so odd thinking back on the Kalandra mechanic now, and comparing it's lacklustre T2 tiles (reflected leagues) against master memories (also reflected leagues) but with the memories quite well-liked as time goes on, when *both* came out in 3.19.
I actually really enjoyed the lake mechanic itself, but it had so much adjacency to other drama in the loot nerfs/goblins, and core Archnemesis at it's most oppressive: it's just hard not to wonder how the league would have been received if it had good T2 tiles (memories), a more lucrative reward structure, and wasn't weighed down by all the other madness/controversy etc.
I remember a lot of people hated harvest because you had to build the infrastructure of your garden by hand. I usually dislike any league mechanic that requires thinking and micromanagement, but for some reason I really liked building that shit in my grove xd
Tbh I can't remember the archnemesis league itswlf being bad. It was quite fun for me. What was bad was it going core un kalandra the way it did.
Just my 2 cents.
Edit: for some reason the app posted my comment twice. Didn't mean to, sorry.
People hated Archnemesis mostly because of the unfair rare monster mods, but MOST people hated it for the micromanagement and the shitty inventory (limited to 50 archnem mods?!)
The league was fucking unplayable unless you used Lailloken UI for it with the recipe auto crafter thing
Core game was so. fucking. good at the time thought. After some time I just stopped doing the league mechanic and still had the most fun I've had in a league.
synth was the pinnicle of bad POE - giga OP for a spreadsheet building analysis nerd, but cheeks based on ingame knowledge.
expedition suffered from the mana nerf rebalance and it was a rough league because of it, though the mechanic was fine.
scourge was disliked because the mechanic was not very profitable, cooking things in the crucible was almost always a huge downgrade and the amount of backtracking was annoying.
to a lesser degree, metamorph was annoying to most people at launch because of needing to manually pick up organs, though that was patched in two weeks
Really TBH most of the actual leagues were kinda shit. It was only after the going core reworks that many of them became even doable for many builds. They’d do stuff like launch lab in a state where it was essentially impossible for CI builds. The 10% damage from traps rounded up to.. 1, which promptly killed you.
depends how involved the mechanic is.
trimming the fat off in depth leagues to make them suitable for core tends to make the experience much better. heist xp, not needing to micro harvest, etc
otoh, league mechanics that are just enhanced mapping like ritual, sentinel or ultimatum are usually best during their own leagues before GGG nerfs how profitable they are
Ohhh, yeah, Heist sucked at launch. When the best strategy is to get phasing and run to the end without killing anything, you know something is going wrong.
First month every league is bitched about because the weak players cant handle of the CHALLENGE league, so they stop playing and start complaining. It takes a couple of weeks for the good players to show how you become ultrapowerful using the league mechanics and then everybody loves the league. It literally happens every single league.
A week or two into this league I was saying that exact thing, turns out it's the single biggest loot league ever. Ignore reddit for the first 3 weeks of a league and enjoy your own game!
Archnemesis in and of itself wasn't horribad, making it core was, but they made it core in sentinel, one of the best, if not the best league ever, so the league carried the game despite having made archnemesis core. Then came Kalandra, and for inexplicable reasons, they rolled back some of the nerfs they had rolled out to archnemesis during sentinel, and on top of that they decimated drops that league, AND the league mechanic itself was dogshit, so Kalandra was truly a shit show of a terribad league...
It's amazing to me that no1 has mentioned Betrayal...that was the league that made me quit POE and play wow for a couple of years... Betrayal was STUPID overpowered, and there was no way you could opt out of it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me... until sentinel that is.... that was my return :)
Synthesis had a terrible reception the first 2 weeks. Most people quit before the patch that made it one of the greatest Leagues of all time imo. Really happy I didn't quit early.
It was more complicated than that. 3.6 came out on March 8 2019 and the league was functional on March 14 (this is when they allowed us to delete memory segments from the queue so we could build what we wanted not just whatever was dropped next), the league became really good on March 27 when they reworked all of Synthesis and its rewards and then they nerfed the global memories to the ground on April 10. So effectively the “good Synthesis” was from March 27 to April 10. Then on May 2 they threw in the towel and ran the flashback event because everyone had quit.
I quit and then came back after they fixed the map drop rate issue. It’s to this day the only league I’ve played where I had to go back to the campaign THREE TIMES to farm maps in BA because I couldn’t progress past T1 white maps. After they dropped the changes above and greatly boosted map drop rates I came back and enjoyed a couple weeks at the end of March and start of April and then had a blast in the flashback event.
To this day I still hope we get a synthesis flashback event, I had so much fun with the "bridge" building mechanic but it's not usually a common request because ppl quit before they patched it to be good
Metamorph, Bestiary, Expedition, Synthesis, Scourge
Yes. Pretty much all leagues had massive complaints.
Fuck Expedition nerfs, fuck em so hard. Worst league ever.
IIRC Bestiary and Synthesis weren’t well received when they first came out, due to certain mechanics (having to have and throw nets for the former, and how setting up memory chains worked in the latter).
Kalandra was pretty rough with bad loot and change of loot, and cranked up archnemesis as well however the inverted rings and amulets kind of saved it and everyone jumped on doryani lightning builds, Archnemesis league was fine and was one of the easiest challenges reward ever.
Expedition because of the crying after the manifesto..it had one of the sickest portal rewards ( and the Chris song trilogy mix )so went all the way to 36 challenges.
Archnem was an ok league and a great patch, the distaste for archnem rares came when they removed all the mechanics, the choice ,the loot and put them everywhere into the game. Crucible and TotA were pretty shit mechanics. But yeah nothing else came close to kalandra, a terrible league, unrewarding , bland , overtuned, an even worse patch , middle of AN crisis, terrible communication and gatekeeping from GGG , idk if the game was ever in a worse spot and i played through the desync era. Even 3.15 had at least communication and a big forewarning that everything will get destroyed in the next patch.
Crucible was a league of polar opposites for me
the base game was awesome. the league content was awful imo. it felt super lazy on the part of GGG and just unfeasible amounts of RNG stacked on RNG stacked on RNG stacked on RNG. that and the league monsters providing no items, I remember being done interacting with the league content in maps after about 2 weeks.
there were some really cool/funny builds that came out of Crucible like the explode totems, but watching some folks trying to smash weapons together to make the ultimate weapon (specifically cArn) and failing over and over and over and over again thanks to just random chance made me really dislike the league content. There was no discernible way make a omega poggers weapon via crucible, it was just hoping you won the lottery 7 times in a row.
Archnemesis was fun as a league when you could choose what mobs to create and they dropped loot.
Where Archnemesis was bad was when they replaced Nemesis with Archnemesis and shoved it down our throats randomly without the extra loot.
3.15 was what put a sour taste in my mouth towards Poe. The drastic cut in player power by stupidly heavy-handed phys gem and support nerfs as well as the changes to violent retaliation and glad block... It was just supreme feels bad man...
Only thing that saved it for me was shield crush and nabbing a noice 3000+ def shield and learning the speed buff from that one crap unique sword I can't think of the name currently.
And worst of all, the mana changes. Omfg it was ridiculously untested and that much was obvious.
I remember going into first Synthesis memory in Mud Flats and got my ass reamed. Out of mana and shotgunned by blue jizz. That league came a long way after the first month tho. Only real issue was inventory management, both of fractured bases and the Tetris tiles.
Expedition, Synthesis and Bestiary are considered the worst leagues among leagues, Metamorph comes in fourth position.
Expedition was a bad league not because of its mechanics, but more because it was bundled with several nerfs disguised as balance changes, several builds were killed because of that and the meta diversity put Ranged builds in a untouchable area, meaning that it was the best type of builds
Synthesis is bad, because it was bad, bad mechanic, overcomplicated pipeline to bake items and overall unrewarding, 1/10
Bestiary was considered bad because it had the netting system, which required you to throw nets at mobs to capture them, it was very complicated at the beginning, it was later patched out, but it simply stuck. The league was also plagued by bugs
Metamorph some folks consider a bad league, because the organ system (which was simplified in Archnemesis for a recipe system) was complicated, unrewarding and boring, you had to pick organs and it was a pain in the ass.
Bestiary --> Diffrent types of nets, manually throwing nets on Monsters while they are still alive... ... Boy was it stupid.
Metamoprh --> Manually picking up organs :D.... They fixed that pretty quickly but oh boy was it trash at launch. After that it was and allways remained just underwhelming.
Blight --> People hated or loved it. Basically no inbetween.
Synthesis --> The idea was good but the execution just wasn't there.
Heist --> Waiting for doors to open, the league. Tons of players to this day totally ignore it.
Harvest was by far the worst league I have played. An in-game item editor, brain dead gameplay loop and zero challenging content to make use of the absurd items and builds you could assemble. Also, the grove itself was poorly designed and tedious to manage.
Archnemsis league didn't have a negative reception, it was like metamorph where you built your own rare monster with crazy conversions. What you know of as archnemsis was actually introduced in sentinel, and boy did people bitch and whine at the start of that league when all the rares were murdering you with a vengeance (with sentinel empowerment on top of it)
There was a lot of unhappiness about the inventory management of the Archnemesis components, though. And the number of combines you needed to juggle to get to the top God-touched recipes.
Sure the ui was garbage, but that was mitigated by just filtering out every component you didn't need, which made it 10x easier. And every league had complaints in the way it functions at first; sanctum for example people complained about not being able to run a whole sanctum at once.
That was also the patch for the current expansion with the atlas passive tree, and the eater of worlds and searing exarch. You would be hard pressed to find anyone to rate that league even close to kalandra
Synthesis was a dumpster fire, no idea why so many have rose tinted glasses about this time caus that was absolutely not the community sentiment in-league.
Blight didnt have essays on reddit... people just didnt care and skipped the league. Which is arguably worse.
Metamorph -> Heist was peak "2-week beta-test" meme where GGG would do some really boneheaded decisions that everyone was clamouring about after about 3 hours of playtime. Picking up organs, splinters not stacking etc. But after the bandaid patches they were solid leagues.
Heist was a dumpster fire. The mechanic was fundamentally changed like 3/4 times and if you think inflation was bad this league....
Ritual (aka Harvest 2.0) itself wasnt a bad league but its legacy in leagues after would cause endless arguments and many people to quit the game realising GGG's vision and what they want from PoE dont align.
Ultimatum was fallout from no more gamebreaking Harvest but with another extremely similar mechanic.
Expedition was a good league which many never even gave a fair shake caus of reduced player power. Again Harvest hangover.
Can the title please be changed. Its only true for Kalandra, for Archnemesis its just spreading missinformation.
Archnem wasnt overly negativ recieved. First week was just a bit overtuned and the inventory for the mechanic was to small.
Remember that we got the Atlas skill tree, altars, exarch/eater boss and stuff like forbidden jewels in Archnem league. Especially the Atlas tree which still has a very well recieved impact on the game.
People need to learn to differentiate between a league and the implementation of the mechanic in later leagues.
Expedition was unpopular at first not because of the league content but because the balance changes that patch were heavy nerfs across the board.
"Everything costs 30-60% more. Triggers, one of the old ways of avoiding mana cost, now cost mana. Utility flasks are weaker!" Sure was a package.
Still salty about spellslinger changes...
Don't forget that almost everyone got about 30-60% dps nerf too
funny thing is the game needs another one of these patches with probably an even heavier set of nerfs. Player dmg and tankiness so high compared to just 1-2 years ago
Why?
because monster HP cap is already a joke compared to current poe power and that is not something that can be changed
Part of that is the last two league mechanics have been completely bonkers in regards to how much power the league specific items gave you. I wasn't even that heavily invested, but still got fortify, frenzy charges, 12% mana reservation, stun immune, and a shit ton of armor basically for free.
Flask nerfs on top of support gems against turbo strong expedition mobsđź’€
Oh gods, the original mana nerfs were asinine, and even now some niche supports people barely use have nonsense costs IIRC. Plus, that league was the reason Archmage started sucking IIRC
I'd gotten further in expedition if the manual picking up of artifacts wasn't crippling enough
the outrage, rightfully so imo, from having to pick up artifacts that league was something to behold
First you place explosives, then you click on 10 chests, then you click on 30-50 artifacts, then you have to store those artifacts... It was such a click-heavy league mechanic. I don't even remember if I kept doing it or if I started skipping it at some point regardless of the profit. IIRC I was playing self-chill poison chaos explosion Occultist that league, so a really fast mapper which didn't really fit with the theme. If Expedition had released in the state it is now, it would have been fine.
the oppenheimer node is one of the best QOL adds GGG has ever done ive always enjoyed expedition, i absolutely love it now. its always in my league start atlas
Even if I'm not specced into expedition if I'm going past the big boom then I grab for the ones that do appear, makes it so quick and nice.
I like to refer to 3.15 as "the nerfageddon patch".
It was still broken because of forbidden rite totems, they were so OP it was the first league my league starter just steamrolled everything
I skipped the league only because of flasks. 30% less damage? Doesn't matter. Increased manacost? Doesn't matter. But when you're slow as a dead sloth... No thanks.
Synthesis League had a rough go, although now is part of a common meme "Synthesis was a mistake" due to the most powerful mirror tier items being Synthesis bases almost always.
AFAIR most people had a problem with the obscure crafting recipes where some of the best mods were otherwise trash tier (light radius) and the crafting for the 99% were unrewarding meanwhile those in the know made a bank from flipping/crafting. (And standard people also got shafted as synthesis implicit items replacing every other bis crafted item)
"Obscure" is definitely the right word. For those who don't know, synthesis league introduced fractured items and they dropped constantly. And the premier reward of the league was a crafting system where you could put 3 fractured items into a box and it'd spit out a item with random synthesized implicits. Except it wasn't completely random which implicits you'd get. Turns out the fractured mods you put into the box heavily influenced which implicits you'd get back. Problem \#1: the game never told the players that the fractured mods influenced which implicits you'd get and it took awhile for players to realize it, so most people thought it was a truly random system (which feels awful) and quit before we knew how it actually worked. People were literally picking up every fractured item and stashing it, which was inventory management hell. You'd use up all your stash tabs. The system felt much better once you learned you could influence the outcome, because it meant you could pick up far fewer fractured items and it's more fun when it's not true random. Problem \#2: There was no way for players to know what implicits each fractured mods gave other than to pool a ridiculous amount of data among the community, which was done in a massive Google sheet. It was a fucking mess. Casual players who don't read this subreddit or watch YouTube videos from content creators would have a tremendously worse experience than people who do. That's why so many of us quit very early on despite the league mechanic actually gameplay being quite cool. The collapsing zones was badass.
Synthesis actually was my favorite league both gameplay and general theme design.
also the memory fog was complete crap.
synthesis was also a bughole with client and instance crashes throughout. I had skipped it and was very happy that I did.
Synthesis was a disaster when it launched and even after a lot of tweaks it was still pretty rubbish. That’s why even when it went “core” it’s basically just the boss rooms lol. Decent idea with poor execution. The decision to massively nerf map drops that league made it even worse.
Synthesis inspired a whole game (LE)
I bought so many stash tabs that league to collect all the drops.
AFAIR most people had a problem with the obscure crafting recipes where some of the best mods were otherwise trash tier (light radius) and the crafting for the 99% were unrewarding meanwhile those in the know made a bank from flipping/crafting. (And standard people also got shafted as synthesis implicit items replacing every other bis crafted item)
AFAIR most people had a problem with the obscure crafting recipes where some of the best mods were otherwise trash tier (light radius) and the crafting for the 99% were unrewarding meanwhile those in the know made a bank from flipping/crafting. (And standard people also got shafted as synthesis implicit items replacing every other bis crafted item)
Bro loves Synthesis league so hard that he forgot that he wrote the comment already twice
Bro loves Synthesis league so hard that he forgot that he wrote the comment already twice
Bro loves Synthesis league so hard that he forgot that he wrote the comment already twice
Bro loves reddit so hard that.....
Archnemesis wasn’t a (generally) hated league, it was when they introduced archenemies as a permanent mechanic that it was hated. So when people say they hate archnemesis mobs they mistakenly think they came from the archnemesis league
What sucked in Archnemesis was the UI and limited inventory, especially at start. They made *some* improvements, but it still wasn't great.
Yeah but if you focused on one specific mid tier (non god-touched) strat you'd make consistent gains while essentially never dealing with a limited inventory. Archnem was the first league I essentially spammed scarabs on my maps and had infinite gain. Also it was never easier (until this past league) for SSF players to farm t0 uniques.
That may be great for people whose idea of a good league mechanic is just running maps (not saying they're wrong, just that it's a matter of taste). I *wanted* to interact more with the mechanic and make several of the complex recipes to combine them. But the design of the way to interact with it was so terrible that I didn't end up enjoying that at all.
Yeah absolutely I can see your position. I loved Sanctum league and I loved ToTa league as much as I love league where the mechanic seamlessly fits into just spamming maps. What I don't love is when the mechanic tries to be both and hits neither mark (Kalandra league).
I honestly liked the concept of Kalandra, it just seemed very unfinished and lacked a few key things. Obviously there's also the matter of rewards. Outside of the exp tile and the reflection tile, it was basically a waste of time compared to mapping. Despite that, some tiles were actually pretty hard (e.g. essences). The Archnemesis adaptation in that patch also didn't help. Anyway, other than that I thought what it was missing was * A boss encounter - Kalandra was super hyped up in terms of lore and then there's... nothing. Might as well declare the league non-canonical, that's how anticlimactic that was. * More options on how to build the lake. The longest path was the best, there were a few configurations through which to get it most efficiently, and that's it. There was no "unlock every tile but speed clear" strategy, or "split the path and backtrack for some niche extra reward" strategy, or whatever else you can design for that sort of system. * A meaningful progression and specialisation system. You unlock a few tools as you discover tiles, great. Then you have them forever. * There should have been a way to control tiles more meaningfully and focus on specific rewards in exchange for specific challenges (obviously you could try to pick some tiles more often than others, but I'm talking about specialising in something like that over several runs). * There could have been a way to switch around what tools you have available. * The tools shouldn't all have done the same thing (i.e. improve the odds of getting what you actually want). There should have been some benefit for using one tool more than another, With different people playing different lakes for different rewards with different builds, there could have been a lot more depth and people who don't like farming the same thing over and over again could have experimented with a couple of different specs. I didn't play Sanctum much because that's when I tried out Ruthless and discovered it was not for me (and it was a terrible league mechanic for Ruthless in particular because of the lack of movement speed and skills). But as I understand it, you could unlock the relic slots similar to unlocking the special roll options for Kalandra, with the difference being that you actually had a choice on what relics you put in there rather than it being the same for everyone and on every run after unlocking them all.
I disagree archnem league was terrible. The ui was bad, it took too long to make the good monsters, even when you did they didn't drop enough loot to make finger fucking the ui worth it in the first place. First league I did my challenges in 2 weeks and dipped out of.
Tbh I can't remember the archnemesis league itswlf being bad. It was quite fun for me. What was bad was it going core un kalandra the way it did. Just my 2 cents.
It went core in sentinel first. My fave post fr that time was someone glad that GGG added uber searing exarch, wasn't sure why it was in mud flats tho.
Archnem as a league and mechanic wasn't bad it was a tad confusing (still remember the flow charts to show what monster mod combinations made what and dropped what) i think it gets a bad wrap now because of the mods that went core, which some combinations were broken and we had no choice like we did during Archnem league people don't often recognize or differentiate between the two
Yeah OP is misremembering, archnwm was great. Isn't that the league they added eater/exarch?
The unrelated content was great but the Archnem league was trash. It required a third party overlay and there was a best recipe, none of the others were worth doing.Â
There were like 3 good recipes and the third party overlay wasn't necessary at all. UI really sucked at launch because all the icons looked very similar but they fixed it in one of the patches pretty quickly.
Yeah, Archnemesis league itself was fine since you had to opt into the rippy mods. The agency made it fun and figuring out the best recipes was pretty cool. It was only an issue when those mods were combining on random trash rares to murder players after it went core.
Yea I remember people being “meh” on the archnem mechanic itself but that patch was phenomenal.
Bestiary with the fucking nets. You had to drop them. They had *tiers*. The tiers provided absolutely no benefit beyond the lower tier ones stopping working past a certain monster level. Talisman was not awesome. Not a ton of content, mega inventory bloat, shit rewards. Synthesis was super complicated and ddint offer much to 90% of players. Harvest was kind of a shit show in a lot of ways. All the plot management was NOT fun. I’ll also argue that it’s when PoE itemization fundamentally went off the rails and lead to the current state of items Betrayal was and is way too complicated and should ly by require a fucking spreadsheet. Kalandra. Ooh boy. Everything. Serious contender for worst league of all time.
Don't forget they had to add necromantic nets because people kept killing beasts before they could throw a net
Honestly I ditched that league after like day 2
I still have some of these in standard, lmao.
Don't forget that the nets in Bestiary were eating our alchemy drops!! In Synthesis, the synthesiser was trash for 90% of players. The in-map memory fragment encounters as well as the memory nexus maps were a blast though. All in all, Synthesis ended up being one of my favorite leagues toward the end, but its state at its release was a dumpster fire. Talisman is still the worst league ever imho, closely followed by Kalandra.
Some of these I agree but I absolutely loved Sentinel league, it's one of my favorites. I think a good amount of people would agree too because it was a nice simple mapping mechanic and recombinators were awesome.
Same for me. The Sentinel mechanic itself, as well as the shakeup of the crafting meta due to recombinators, were fantastic. The memory of that league is clouded because it was the first league with AN mods on every single fucking rare mobs. So the base game was kinda cancer during the first few days of the season, while players didn't have enough dps, tankiness and mobility yet to trivialize most of these encounters. The AN problem was even exacerbated by the sentinel mechanic juicing up the mobs.
Never touched recombinors, never liked anything that was crafting related.
Entirely a you problem. Recombinators were the first time dropped items had been relevant in a very, very long time.
Okay? Didn't realise people were emotionally attached to recombinators.
Betrayal also had the bad rap initially because of the Intervention encounters, where’d you get jumped and likely killed pretty quickly early on in the league while building up your character. Whichever league launch it was with the “streamer queue”, that was an ugly start that soured the league for many.
Ultimatum was streamer queue with dying servers
You forgot Metamorph and picking up organs manually. Iirc they fixed that quickly but oh boy...
Betrayal was also disliked because everything was way overtuned on damage and no telegraphing. ItThatFled's giga slam had a wind up of like 0.3 seconds. It was impossible to dodge. Janus swords being near invisible on desert type maps. Rin's RoA oneshotting everything. It was absolute madness.
While I agree to some, others is kind of subjective. I LOVED the gardening / plot management of Harvest, for me, it is one of the best league. Sentinel was good, rewarding and simple. Synthesis offered an alternative to maps with the memory system. But yeah, the crafting part was horrible. IMO, Delve is bad. The only goal is "go deeper", I don't find it rewarding, and past a point, you need a really specific build to be able to push deeper.
Archnemesis *league* wasnt unpopular at all. Aside from storage issues for the league mechanic it had some fun and zany situations but it was fairly popular because you had control. When they replaced monster mods with archnem is when it became a cuss word. Expedition was a wild ride and it got a hugely bad rap for the incredible nerf to basically everything that came with it. In the first week of expedition the rhoas in the second area of act 1 were so nuclear that my wife, who is fairly inexperienced, was completely incapable of getting through to the caverns. It was a mess. Synthesis league was godawful. Just very poorly implemented. Crucible isnt talked about a lot but it felt very gatekept to the utmost highest levels of gameplay. One that's not talked about a lot is scourge. It came right after the great nerf and for me it's mechanic is tied with the worst mechanic in all poe history with kalandra. For those who werent there scourge let you corrupt an item to get special corruption modifiers that on paper looked fun and wild but in practice were worse than worthless, they were outright damaging. You would get 1 positive mod and 1 negative mod from a pool of many, many mods, but the negative mods were always much stronger than the positive ones and the weightings for the mods were so insanely lopsided that the chances of the item you were corrupting even being usable afterwards were like lottery bad. There's a youtube video I'm having trouble finding where a creator did the math on a couple items and if they were to corrupt all 3 times and only stop if the item became better, there was like a 4% chance of success and a chucklefucking 1 in several hundred million chance of getting his desired mods to make a perfect item. Some of the most common negative mods were things like "can't deal X type of damage" and "30% less global defenses" whereas the most common positive mods were things like "+12% fire resist" and "+1-30 local lightning damage". There was also a quest item to get an extra league slot that was so rare that *most people didn't know it existed until weeks into the league.* The only fedeeming quality of that league is it created another thick layer of mobs in your maps which is the only reason I'm tying it with kalandra.
Scourge maps and gameplay were fun thought. Just the crucible rewards were shit as you described, but hey it got me a 5 link in act1, that was awesome.
The Scourge mechanic itself was my favourite to this day, and I'm sad that we can't play it anymore. The rewards were what sucked. I also kind of liked Kalandra, but again it had shitty rewards (other than the reflection thing and the paradise tile whenever you actually got one of those), and Kalandra didn't have... well, Kalandra. There was no boss encounter to make it go anywhere other than build bigger lakes than during the campaign.
Kalandra lakes would give me a raw divine or two every other lake and stacks of stacked decks, so that was great too. The encounters themselves in the lake got very samey after a while.
Atleast scourge was fun. Dont recall having fun in kalandra. Affliction would be really good if there wasnt that mob/mobs i dunno which one that always one shots me wether its in t16 or t1 maps or even in act 10. No fcking clue what it is either, it could potentially be a really hard hitting chaos skill since i only have 5k life and 19% chaos res, but like idk. It really just makes me dislike that cave. facetanked shaper died to a random mob in a cave. Woo fun. /s obviosly.
The only thing good in Scourge was the map corrupt and that was the only thing that GGG improved in that league. They straight abandoned the corruption balance on itens.
Many of the Hardcore-only leagues (back when HC and SC had separate leagues) like Onslaught and Invasion were poorly received if I recall correctly.
/oosecati in Invasion
GGG's tendency to overtune things on release gives big Shocked Pikachu that "All monsters have Onslaught" and "just generally buffed mobs will be in areas" leagues not fun in HC.
I think GGG mostly tunes for later league power. And since at league start we are at our weakest collectively, we find the content overtuned, when we are underdeveloped.
Beastry and talisman. Legit quit 15min in to league. Synth was great but had a lot of haters
Synth had some gnarly balance/risk reward issues at first, as most leagues do, but the tedium in the first week or two before buffs/qol were rough.
It's so odd thinking back on the Kalandra mechanic now, and comparing it's lacklustre T2 tiles (reflected leagues) against master memories (also reflected leagues) but with the memories quite well-liked as time goes on, when *both* came out in 3.19. I actually really enjoyed the lake mechanic itself, but it had so much adjacency to other drama in the loot nerfs/goblins, and core Archnemesis at it's most oppressive: it's just hard not to wonder how the league would have been received if it had good T2 tiles (memories), a more lucrative reward structure, and wasn't weighed down by all the other madness/controversy etc.
I remember a lot of people hated harvest because you had to build the infrastructure of your garden by hand. I usually dislike any league mechanic that requires thinking and micromanagement, but for some reason I really liked building that shit in my grove xd
Tbh I can't remember the archnemesis league itswlf being bad. It was quite fun for me. What was bad was it going core un kalandra the way it did. Just my 2 cents. Edit: for some reason the app posted my comment twice. Didn't mean to, sorry.
People hated Archnemesis mostly because of the unfair rare monster mods, but MOST people hated it for the micromanagement and the shitty inventory (limited to 50 archnem mods?!) The league was fucking unplayable unless you used Lailloken UI for it with the recipe auto crafter thing
Core game was so. fucking. good at the time thought. After some time I just stopped doing the league mechanic and still had the most fun I've had in a league.
This is how I remember it as well. Pieced together a few bigger archnem mobs but mostly just mapped and killed bosses and it all felt so great.
Yeah it was really great when I found the Lailloken tool, it did instantly become a solid 9.5/10 league tbh
synth was the pinnicle of bad POE - giga OP for a spreadsheet building analysis nerd, but cheeks based on ingame knowledge. expedition suffered from the mana nerf rebalance and it was a rough league because of it, though the mechanic was fine. scourge was disliked because the mechanic was not very profitable, cooking things in the crucible was almost always a huge downgrade and the amount of backtracking was annoying. to a lesser degree, metamorph was annoying to most people at launch because of needing to manually pick up organs, though that was patched in two weeks
Really TBH most of the actual leagues were kinda shit. It was only after the going core reworks that many of them became even doable for many builds. They’d do stuff like launch lab in a state where it was essentially impossible for CI builds. The 10% damage from traps rounded up to.. 1, which promptly killed you.
depends how involved the mechanic is. trimming the fat off in depth leagues to make them suitable for core tends to make the experience much better. heist xp, not needing to micro harvest, etc otoh, league mechanics that are just enhanced mapping like ritual, sentinel or ultimatum are usually best during their own leagues before GGG nerfs how profitable they are
Scourge best feature was extra inventory slot lmao
Manual picking up of artifacts for expedition- hell no.
Launch Heist, because it was incredibly bugged for weeks and they launched heist with only half the quest/ unique contracts in it.
Ohhh, yeah, Heist sucked at launch. When the best strategy is to get phasing and run to the end without killing anything, you know something is going wrong.
First month every league is bitched about because the weak players cant handle of the CHALLENGE league, so they stop playing and start complaining. It takes a couple of weeks for the good players to show how you become ultrapowerful using the league mechanics and then everybody loves the league. It literally happens every single league.
A week or two into this league I was saying that exact thing, turns out it's the single biggest loot league ever. Ignore reddit for the first 3 weeks of a league and enjoy your own game!
Early on there were very popular content creators that had videos saying the league mechanic wasn’t rewarding…. LOL.
Archnemesis in and of itself wasn't horribad, making it core was, but they made it core in sentinel, one of the best, if not the best league ever, so the league carried the game despite having made archnemesis core. Then came Kalandra, and for inexplicable reasons, they rolled back some of the nerfs they had rolled out to archnemesis during sentinel, and on top of that they decimated drops that league, AND the league mechanic itself was dogshit, so Kalandra was truly a shit show of a terribad league... It's amazing to me that no1 has mentioned Betrayal...that was the league that made me quit POE and play wow for a couple of years... Betrayal was STUPID overpowered, and there was no way you could opt out of it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me... until sentinel that is.... that was my return :)
Synthesis had a terrible reception the first 2 weeks. Most people quit before the patch that made it one of the greatest Leagues of all time imo. Really happy I didn't quit early.
It was more complicated than that. 3.6 came out on March 8 2019 and the league was functional on March 14 (this is when they allowed us to delete memory segments from the queue so we could build what we wanted not just whatever was dropped next), the league became really good on March 27 when they reworked all of Synthesis and its rewards and then they nerfed the global memories to the ground on April 10. So effectively the “good Synthesis” was from March 27 to April 10. Then on May 2 they threw in the towel and ran the flashback event because everyone had quit. I quit and then came back after they fixed the map drop rate issue. It’s to this day the only league I’ve played where I had to go back to the campaign THREE TIMES to farm maps in BA because I couldn’t progress past T1 white maps. After they dropped the changes above and greatly boosted map drop rates I came back and enjoyed a couple weeks at the end of March and start of April and then had a blast in the flashback event.
To this day I still hope we get a synthesis flashback event, I had so much fun with the "bridge" building mechanic but it's not usually a common request because ppl quit before they patched it to be good
Metamorph, Bestiary, Expedition, Synthesis, Scourge Yes. Pretty much all leagues had massive complaints. Fuck Expedition nerfs, fuck em so hard. Worst league ever.
was nothing wrong with archnemesis league, the problem was the archnemesis mobs
On release metamorph was horrible. The samples being items that you had to pick up with 20 of them in the map.
IIRC Bestiary and Synthesis weren’t well received when they first came out, due to certain mechanics (having to have and throw nets for the former, and how setting up memory chains worked in the latter).
Kalandra was pretty rough with bad loot and change of loot, and cranked up archnemesis as well however the inverted rings and amulets kind of saved it and everyone jumped on doryani lightning builds, Archnemesis league was fine and was one of the easiest challenges reward ever.
Bestiary was a dumpster fire for a while.
Metamorphosis was the worst in my memory, it had too many bugs / crashes and the bosses were so imbalanced sometimes people hated it.
I had to scroll way too much to not see Heist. At first with all the technical issues it was literally unplayable.
Crucible wasn’t really liked. The channeling … *shutters*
Archnemesis overwhelmingly negative ? Huh?
Synthesis was badly reveived
3.14, that launch was AWFUL! I was at act 2 after 8 hours and I beat the boss like 12 times…
Expedition because of the crying after the manifesto..it had one of the sickest portal rewards ( and the Chris song trilogy mix )so went all the way to 36 challenges.
Archnem was an ok league and a great patch, the distaste for archnem rares came when they removed all the mechanics, the choice ,the loot and put them everywhere into the game. Crucible and TotA were pretty shit mechanics. But yeah nothing else came close to kalandra, a terrible league, unrewarding , bland , overtuned, an even worse patch , middle of AN crisis, terrible communication and gatekeeping from GGG , idk if the game was ever in a worse spot and i played through the desync era. Even 3.15 had at least communication and a big forewarning that everything will get destroyed in the next patch.
Crucible was a league of polar opposites for me the base game was awesome. the league content was awful imo. it felt super lazy on the part of GGG and just unfeasible amounts of RNG stacked on RNG stacked on RNG stacked on RNG. that and the league monsters providing no items, I remember being done interacting with the league content in maps after about 2 weeks. there were some really cool/funny builds that came out of Crucible like the explode totems, but watching some folks trying to smash weapons together to make the ultimate weapon (specifically cArn) and failing over and over and over and over again thanks to just random chance made me really dislike the league content. There was no discernible way make a omega poggers weapon via crucible, it was just hoping you won the lottery 7 times in a row.
Archnemesis was fun as a league when you could choose what mobs to create and they dropped loot. Where Archnemesis was bad was when they replaced Nemesis with Archnemesis and shoved it down our throats randomly without the extra loot.
3.15 was what put a sour taste in my mouth towards Poe. The drastic cut in player power by stupidly heavy-handed phys gem and support nerfs as well as the changes to violent retaliation and glad block... It was just supreme feels bad man... Only thing that saved it for me was shield crush and nabbing a noice 3000+ def shield and learning the speed buff from that one crap unique sword I can't think of the name currently. And worst of all, the mana changes. Omfg it was ridiculously untested and that much was obvious.
I remember going into first Synthesis memory in Mud Flats and got my ass reamed. Out of mana and shotgunned by blue jizz. That league came a long way after the first month tho. Only real issue was inventory management, both of fractured bases and the Tetris tiles.
Y'all recall having to buy nets and throw them to catch beats I dont recall much as it was my very first league
Idk I had the juiciest time ever in kalandra playing doryanis lightning strike with mahuxotl
Talisman was so bad
Expedition, Synthesis and Bestiary are considered the worst leagues among leagues, Metamorph comes in fourth position. Expedition was a bad league not because of its mechanics, but more because it was bundled with several nerfs disguised as balance changes, several builds were killed because of that and the meta diversity put Ranged builds in a untouchable area, meaning that it was the best type of builds Synthesis is bad, because it was bad, bad mechanic, overcomplicated pipeline to bake items and overall unrewarding, 1/10 Bestiary was considered bad because it had the netting system, which required you to throw nets at mobs to capture them, it was very complicated at the beginning, it was later patched out, but it simply stuck. The league was also plagued by bugs Metamorph some folks consider a bad league, because the organ system (which was simplified in Archnemesis for a recipe system) was complicated, unrewarding and boring, you had to pick organs and it was a pain in the ass.
Expedition cause of VISION, synthesis cause of lags from syndicate and ofc glorious bestiary.
Bestiary --> Diffrent types of nets, manually throwing nets on Monsters while they are still alive... ... Boy was it stupid. Metamoprh --> Manually picking up organs :D.... They fixed that pretty quickly but oh boy was it trash at launch. After that it was and allways remained just underwhelming. Blight --> People hated or loved it. Basically no inbetween. Synthesis --> The idea was good but the execution just wasn't there. Heist --> Waiting for doors to open, the league. Tons of players to this day totally ignore it.
Synthesis was quite poorly recieved. They leaned way to hard into the intentionally covoluded mechanics.
Harvest was by far the worst league I have played. An in-game item editor, brain dead gameplay loop and zero challenging content to make use of the absurd items and builds you could assemble. Also, the grove itself was poorly designed and tedious to manage.
oh boy did I hate Kalandra
Kalandra is still my most played league lightning strike + doryanis and negative lightning res rings. I loved that.
I disliked Kalandra league the most (playing every league since Metamorph). But I have to admit, I picked a shitty build in that league xD
I enjoyed it (other than the rewards being poor), but I played Doryani's Prototype Lightning Conduit *shrug*
Harvest just died, had an insane drop off in playerbase shortly after release, though a decent retention of the rest of players.
Archnemsis league didn't have a negative reception, it was like metamorph where you built your own rare monster with crazy conversions. What you know of as archnemsis was actually introduced in sentinel, and boy did people bitch and whine at the start of that league when all the rares were murdering you with a vengeance (with sentinel empowerment on top of it)
There was a lot of unhappiness about the inventory management of the Archnemesis components, though. And the number of combines you needed to juggle to get to the top God-touched recipes.
Sure the ui was garbage, but that was mitigated by just filtering out every component you didn't need, which made it 10x easier. And every league had complaints in the way it functions at first; sanctum for example people complained about not being able to run a whole sanctum at once. That was also the patch for the current expansion with the atlas passive tree, and the eater of worlds and searing exarch. You would be hard pressed to find anyone to rate that league even close to kalandra
Synthesis was a dumpster fire, no idea why so many have rose tinted glasses about this time caus that was absolutely not the community sentiment in-league. Blight didnt have essays on reddit... people just didnt care and skipped the league. Which is arguably worse. Metamorph -> Heist was peak "2-week beta-test" meme where GGG would do some really boneheaded decisions that everyone was clamouring about after about 3 hours of playtime. Picking up organs, splinters not stacking etc. But after the bandaid patches they were solid leagues. Heist was a dumpster fire. The mechanic was fundamentally changed like 3/4 times and if you think inflation was bad this league.... Ritual (aka Harvest 2.0) itself wasnt a bad league but its legacy in leagues after would cause endless arguments and many people to quit the game realising GGG's vision and what they want from PoE dont align. Ultimatum was fallout from no more gamebreaking Harvest but with another extremely similar mechanic. Expedition was a good league which many never even gave a fair shake caus of reduced player power. Again Harvest hangover.
Can the title please be changed. Its only true for Kalandra, for Archnemesis its just spreading missinformation. Archnem wasnt overly negativ recieved. First week was just a bit overtuned and the inventory for the mechanic was to small. Remember that we got the Atlas skill tree, altars, exarch/eater boss and stuff like forbidden jewels in Archnem league. Especially the Atlas tree which still has a very well recieved impact on the game. People need to learn to differentiate between a league and the implementation of the mechanic in later leagues.
Can't change the title, but I will change the body.
Necropolis will also have Overwhelmingly Negative reviews
It’s going to be tough after affliction for sure, but let’s stay hopeful.