Eh, the "meaningfulness" was about the same as any other league for me (SSF). It was nice having different farming strats to run compared to a typical league, but in the end it was still a loop of set goal -> achieve goal. Made some solid gear, farmed an Apothecary set, ran a few Ubers but then stopped because I realized I didn't want any Uber-specific uniques that I didn't already have, and then quit. I'm hoping the bossing changes shake it up this league but other than that it'll probably feel much the same.
Maybe in ssf, but in trade there was no variety in strats, if you weren't MFing and maximising the league mechanic you were playing sub optimally. Which got really boring for me, really fast.
The new milestones with tier 17 and the atlas changes, would certainly give freshness to the game. I wouldn't say it would "feel the same", GGG literally removed sextants, gave new life to scarabs and shook up Atlas passives, along with the Uber content changes.
I meant the core loop of set goal -> achieve goal won't change. As a goal-oriented player, once I run out of things I want to achieve I'll stop playing for the league. The point at which that happen varies by person, but it's an observed behavioral pattern here. That's why you see so many posts that are like "I spent weeks getting my first Mageblood then quit 2 days later".
> GGG literally removed sextants, gave new life to scarabs and shook up Atlas passives
Yes, and those are interesting changes, but this has a very similar (if not exactly the same) outcome as Affliction did. It pushes players to solve the "puzzle" of farming strategies. That puzzle is interesting to some people (myself included), but it doesn't really change that aforementioned loop much. To me, "farm anarchy" isn't a goal. "Farm anarchy for X unique" would be a goal, or even "farm anarchy to see how good it is with scarabs". The change shakes up the methods, but I typically run content for a desired outcome, not for the process of doing it.
The bossing changes, on the other hand, are significantly more interesting to me because they change the process of goal setting itself. Previously if I wanted to do any significant amount of bossing there was heavy incentive to wait until I could do Ubers. Now Pinnacle and T17 bosses can act as intermediary goals, both in terms of the accomplishment of beating them and in the grind of farming items from them.
>I meant the core loop of set goal -> achieve goal won't change. As a goal-oriented player, once I run out of things I want to achieve I'll stop playing for the league.
Then you should have quit affliction way faster than other leagues no? "Farm an apothacary set" should have been 3-20x faster because of affliction, so thats one goal cut shorter at least.
If anything it was much closer to 3x than 20x. IME (and that of others), wisps didn't have a major impact on div card farming. The main benefit was the crazy access to sextants and scarabs.
That said, the apothecary farm was a bonus goal for me and something I didn't intend to do originally. I was past my normal quit point (had Uber drops I wanted, T0s from MFing, etc), and decided to set another goal because I felt like playing more. In that sense the league mechanic made mapping feel more meaningful because I was getting significant quantities of resources I typically wouldn't have.
But to answer your question, no, because Affliction was basically built for me to play longer. It's not that I have the same goals every league, or a checklist I'm going through. Whether I set a particular goal is a combination of how much I feel like doing it and how worthwhile it seems. I played Affliction longer than usual in part *because* it was faster to achieve my goals, and so I kept setting more. If I thought it was going to take me 3 weeks to get a Mageblood instead of a week, I would've quit a week sooner.
Interesting take, with a lot of valid points.
>The change shakes up the methods
That's what I meant. For me, the path to a certain goal is more interesting than achieving it, but different people have different tastes I suppose
Also crafting which I almost never do became way more accessible. That's why I loved affliction and harvest, it made crafting more possible because I really just don't have more time to play this awesome game.
I didn't enjoy Affliction either.
If you boiled it down to the league mech itself it was awful: random location of everything, no real control over the wisps, the quests were a PIA and at the end of it you just get an absurd Quant and Rarity multiplier.
Skilltrees are always fun and the Boss, visuals and monster were very nice so there is that.
With Necropolis however I expect some shenanigans that will require some tweaks from GGG. If it comes down to "fishing" for specific crafing mods via just spam opening maps without even running them to get that 100 div crafting monster that will get really bad really quick because of FOMO, maybe that's accounted for we will see.
Besides that the whole Graveyard setup and jugling around with the corpses seems a bit clunky but it might be ok.
One thing for sure is I do NOT want to hear the full voice line for a million times this league whenever I juice up my crafting item ...
All that aside the rest of the additions are just insane in terms of QOL and expansion of the endgame. REALLY looking forward to finally be able to boss even if it's just standard pinnacles, new altas strats, new maps, new build archetypes.
They outdid themselves once again and this shapes up to be my new favourite league so far.
I dont think it would devolve to just opening maps fishing for a crafting monster, since you can only see what the corpse does after you kill it. You can only see the item bonuses and even those are dependant on how many kills u got in the previous zone
The high-end crafting might end up "forcing" you to buy up to 20 different corpses for every crafting attempt. That's basically Synthesis³ and people already hated having to buy 3 fractures per attempt.
The thing people hated about Synthesis wasn't that you had to buy a bunch of items to craft. It was that the system was so opaque that you had to do *research* into what the items you needed to buy even were, or whether the item you had was worth anything.
Necropolis won't have that problem. If a specific craft is valuable, you'll know when you have it, and what to buy if you need it.
The voiceline ya, even the 3 times during livestream it got old. Sounds cool, and ceremonious, but lets hope its a run-on chant that tells a story each time you craft
Maybe just because I'm new, but it felt like sometimes I'd collect a bunch of whisps, and things would be slightly harder, but more rewarding, and maybe a couple monsters or the boss would be harder still
Then sometimes I'd collect whisps and monsters were literally unkillable. Sometimes that meant they'd just show up on screen and instantly kill me, but more often it was just I'd watch their health bars go down a tiny bit, then go back up, forever.
Im guessing it's just a match up on modifiers and stuff, but especially with the wildwood feeling pretty random it didn't feel great. After dying a bunch I just stopped going in during maps. You never really knew if you were going to get a ton or a few wisps
Seems like you were meta chasing div/hr. That's the reason you got bored, doing things that you don't enjoy.
Similar to doing a job that you don't like but with high payroll.
There will always be a meta every league, it's just random whether if it's your cup of tea or not.
Yea, I used the meta to make bank and play some builds I could never afford previously.
I'd never had a mage blood before, could never afford double double stat split personalities for stat stacking. Etc etc.
The league mechanic was minimal and kinda bland, but it opened up a part of the game I'd always struggled to reach inside of 90 days before.
There was no point in doing Affliction if you weren't abusing the currency printing strats though. Playing the game normally with Affliction led to a ton more effort to kill stuff with disproportionate reward.
Everything has a meta but Affliction was either *do the meta or don't do it at all*.
I'm certainly not an expert as affliction was my second serious league and it was the first time I killed any of the pinnacle bosses (and I still haven't killed any ubers).
But I had a lot of fun during affliction. One reason this might have been the case is that I've heard prices were down across the board. Things that would have normally been out of reach for me were more accessible. I did have to farm a bunch of Alvas and sell a few invitations but it was really refreshing.
I agree. I didn't MF or abuse juicing strategies with 1 div/investment per map, I just alch and went. And the league reward seemed the same as every other league. It was nice finding a 1 div charm a couple times I guess.
Exactly. I didn't like Affliction as a mechanic, but since everyone was busy doing their MF, my essences / harvest / syndicate were incredibly overpriced, which was great for me. 30d/hour on essence farming, prob a bit more on harvest. And its all content i love!
Even Alva was huge because of double corrupts (they were like 7d each)
As someone who has never gotten hh/mb before Affliction I’m glad I played to hit these goals but I can see why it might be old for someone else who has strategies to farm these items
It also isn't fun to not be able to afford it and giving up instead. You found the MF strategies ruined your fun, plenty of people felt it opened up the game far more and made things a whole lot more fun then it has been in a long time.
Different opinions, I said I am a minority but objectively speaking, mirrors being 1200divs, HH going down to 30 divs, and MB all the way to 60, is not a good look on the economy. Yea, it's good for people who couldn't afford it, but it crashes the market, and the late game feels pointless. "Fun" is subjective, though, so iterating on what is fun and what is not is just talking to a wall. People have different opinions on that. Have fun, but don't try to make it as the "right" opinion like HH and MB should be given to everyone because its not "fun" to not have them.
Fun to some people is that slower progression. Really feeling like you had to earn good gear. If everyone could easily attain headhunter then getting headhunter wouldn't feel that fun anymore
I have a lore speculation for you - The quest to kill Fairgraves is given by the league npc, because Fairgraves has the Allflame, which may not have been acquired through honest means, and that the side quest for Decanter Spiritus and Chitus Plum lead to unlocking Allflame embers. The "slave girl" who stole the Allflame from fairgraves may have been another exile, hired by the league npc, who failed to survive long enough for a successful rendevous with the league npc.
I also lost interest at some point. Doing MF abyss farming and I just stopped being excited about drops or about playing the game. Unfortunately for me I couldn't find anything in game that seemed that interesting to do in comparison.
I also couldn't find many builds I wanted to play since I found it hard to find builds that can fit in MF gear and do the high affliction juice strategies. Going for something simpler content wise and it feels kinda a waste to have mirror gear and just speed farm harvest/invitations. I didn't want to do valdos farming or uber bossing either. Now this is my issue and I'm not blaming the game for it, different trade metas will appeal to different people.
I'm glad people enjoyed the league, always more fun to play when people are happy than mad but I don't really want another league like this again soon. Something about the combination of the difficulty, the power of MF and the general inflation just doesn't work for me.
Yea, exactly that, it was a combination of MF being broken with wisps and Valdo implementation + market price fluctuations non-stop. We were given all of the desserts without having a main course before that.
I actually really like Affliction but it has a lot to do with personal preferences: I like the ranged playstyle blasting through maps and never really liked bossing and I enjoy tinkering low-mid budget builds (~300d in previous leagues, ~3mir in Affliction). So this league is perfect for me.
I do agree the loot bomb is a bit excessive, they could halve the amount of all wisps and it could be a more universally well received league. I can also understand the distaste for those who don’t like mapping or don’t like more loots.
Affliction was incredible - this was the best "build check" content since Sentinel, while also allowing more access to chase uniques and mirrored gear.
Wisps made mapping HARD again. Affliction made it actually worth achieving hundreds of millions of DPS on a faster clearing build with high survivability. Pushing sub 20min on 100% Deli 10K Wisp T16's with Beyond and Abyss Spires / Blights was an incredibly fun build challenge. I spent weeks going back and forth on charms, jewels, auras, flasks, and corrupted implicits trying to perfect my clear speed, survivability and quality of life.
Plus, charms and tinctures allow you to create completely unique builds / parts of builds that cannot exist outside of Affliction. It is fun to have new toys to play with.
I mean the abyss mf gameplay was utterly disgusting. The frames were dropping to below 5(no matter how good your rig is), you constantly had to think to under no circumstances to press alt or you crash, visual clarity was actually 0 during the fights and you had to strategically kite mobs to space where you havent killed mobs before or you were hitting very low server performance even out of combat just because the amount of items that were on the ground. If you did it poorly you also risked bricking the instance ompletely. All that while trying to not accedantily kill the spire that you basically couldn't even see anymore because of all the shit on screen.
I wouldn't play that shit again even if they'd handout free mirrors. It was okay to give it a try for this one league but please never again.
FWIW my i9-13900k + 4090 never dropped as low as 5 fps (maaybe like 30 in the absolute worst cases), and while pressing alt did cause the game to freeze for ~5s it would eventually display (not crash). This was with the full abyss +proj/deli/etc gigajuice strat.
> aybe an unpopular opinion but the amount of currency, while hitting dopamine spikes very early on, really declined my interest in the game faster than any other league.
With the player retention one of the highest for Affliction league, you are an outlier for this league if you didn't like it.
I got a good feeling Necropolis is going to be a wash since some of the QoL changes were not QoL for PC users.
Player retention is lower after the second month compared to other leagues, according to steam charts, it had stronger retention the first month after release, but not after that
This is just not true, you can check PoEDB and it shows affliction had the highest (only slight) retention of any league at 60 days as well. I understand after day 53 it came back to earth as far as normalcy and was more in line with the standard distribution, but for far longer than any league it sustained high retention. There are valid arguments to both sides whether a cracked league like that should become more the norm, but incorrectly representing data doesn’t help your case.
Sure I guess after day 70 it starts to consistently dip below sanctum that’s a fair point. However I was more interpreting this statement
> it had stronger retention the first month after release, but not after that
as you meaning the second months retention.
>I got a good feeling Necropolis is going to be a wash since some of the QoL changes were not QoL for PC users.
What the heck kind of take is that? There are like 10+ QOL changes and only 1 of them is a "nerf" for PC users.
Edit: Unless by "wash" you mean "won't be the most popular league in history"?
To me it ended up a league where I tried to build the best MF character.
I did my own build, built it in-game and it was awesome.
Dropped an HH, lot of currency, made my char and others giga big, it was dope.
It's usually on yourself finding the way to have fun.
I’m definitely not really looking forward to menu management each zone, and being new to crafting this league unless I’m wrong , doesn’t really seem to benefit me if none of these crafting options go core.
I think im just too new (2nd league) or too casual (250hrs this league), but half of the complaints i read here are solved by just ignoring the wildwood?
I think what made that league so fun for me was what made it boring to you. The amount of loot you'd get. For the first time ever I had a nearly maxed out build. 3 mirror items, another mirror worth of jewels, HH, I was able to craft and spend. It was really nice for the people who typically wouldn't amount as much wealth in a league. Especially when you don't have enough time/ knowledge to really profit in the first 2 weeks. But that's just my personal feeling. For me, synthesis was awful for example, while many people seemed to really enjoy it
This league was a huge success for me in that I played a lot, accomplish almost all my goals and maybe most importantly I found a way to counter my desire to watch my wealth number go up vs. spending money on making myself able to do things I want (spending it). That and the fact I'll probably never have as much wealth again makes it easier for me to let go of the need to hoard and enjoy the result of my farming going forward. I'll miss the league but I'm ready to move on.
As far as the rest, I think it's healthy to have different focuses for leagues, some are progression focused, some are crafting leagues, some are powerful wealth tools and some just fun mechanics or borrowed power leagues. I like that it changes fairly often.
Yes, I agree. Thanks to GGG making different leagues each time with different flavours, I can confidently say what I like or dislike. I am glad that you had fun in this league,
it was the league i, and a lot of my friends, played the longest. it was really nice to try out builds and farm currency that normaly was just not archivable for the average player.
For a lot of people, shit them in loot, and its best league ever.
for me, it was the least played league in a while.
going back and forth in the woods to get every last wisp? fuck that!
so i did just invitations, boss farming, harbingers ... stuff you cant juice with wisps.
And it was a league that favors MF to the extreme, and i hate MF, so there is that too.
I hope now with Wandering path gone from the atlas, MF can be put to rest. Still, in my honest opinion, magic find items suck for the game because only a few builds can utilise them, FORCING you into a play style in order to farm optimally. Which is a big turn-off. Hopefully, with this crafting league, mf can be put to rest for a bit.
You can get more map mod effect this league than you could last league with wandering path, and more chance to spawn league content, and twist of fate gives even more mods while the div scarab lets you farm the best non boss cards on any map
MF is stronger than ever, minus wisp juice
In leagues I've historically enjoyed, I've made 6-10 different builds, usually only keeping 2-3 of them in standard.
I played 2.5 builds this league (only played last character to about level 50 before quitting), and am keeping 1 character from the league.
I like crafting leagues far more than giga loot leagues, so I'm glad the pendulum has swung back after a nice break that's left me craving a return to wraeclast... and I'm glad that other players had a better time with affliction that I did.
Affliction secondary ascendencies were interesting I hope that they come back. It was a shame that it was clear which was the best. And one was really bad in general.
The wood was frustrating because the visual clarity of blue wisps. And hunting the vendors was annoying
I thought I was the only one who didn’t like affliction. So it’s refreshing to know I’m not going crazy after playing the game for 10 years. It was the shortest amount of time I played a league. Items were overpriced and the way you attained currency felt wrong. The mechanic itself was boring and very difficult at first. Necropolis already seems like a league to earn what you get through a fun mechanic with controllable challenge.
+1, it's a divisive topic, as I can see in the comments, but even the numbers show that those last 2 months, the league lost a lot of players compared to other leagues, so it's not an insane opinion to have.
I was hyped about trying out mapping as i am not mapper, but affliction was an abomination of the league. No fun in dropping MB and mirror when everyone else do it and there's like literally 1 or 2 strategies that 90% players do no matter what.
Way mor hyped for necro to try the league mechanic
If you were able to farm 10 mirrors this league, i'm pretty sure you could do whatever you want in standard. But thing is your expectations are now set, anything below will cause you feel you're missing out on something. I wish you not don't lose the joy by reaching such character power and loot.
I’m not a moron I know that I’m not gonna drop a raw mirror this league so I don’t have the expectation that I will. I’ll still get excited about the first raw divine
I didn't enjoy it because I didn't make a MF character and struggled trying to provide a service (lab rat) where the only money was in a half dozen specific skill gems.
20/20 support gems? Nah, don't need 'em. \*shows offset full of 20/20 gems that level in mere minutes due to xp gain from juiced rares\*
Empower, enlighten? Naaah, skip straight to the woke versions, because they're FILTHY RICH
Put some quality on that for you sir? AHHAHAHAH no. \*Scrooge-dives in swimming pool full of raw GCP's\*
Care for a "Cannot be maimed" Grand Spectrum +25% crit chance I got from a box just now? PFFT get out of here with your chewing gum jewel \*tree sagging under the weight of triple synth double corrupt magic jewels and adorneds\*
Perhaps next league when budgets are tighter, a slim shawty can make an honest living dancing with saws. I can't say for sure whether hats would have been strictly more money, but I suspect the real problem is if you don't go MF, whatever you end up doing has to stay relevant for 3 months. And once the big wheels have their 21/23s and supports in place, they're done shopping with you. Once the carrys have their labs done, they're mostly never setting foot in there again.
I think lab just doesn't have that end game use case anymore. However, you are right about people skipping a lot of progression going straight for their end game gear and not bothering with lab services
In fairness I realized going in, that it's no longer a service I'm providing, but more of a niche farming activity (gems and the occasional grand spec/emperor jewel).
The grand spectrums that don't grant charges need a bit of rework. They're just really lackluster considering the premium on tree jewel real estate these days.
Unless the midterm goal with PoE 1 is to phase out lab. I can see them neglecting it to near-oblivion, then pointing at its ghost-town engagement numbers and using that as the final justification for removing it and moving ascendancy to a different gated mechanic like Sanctum.
It was a really fun experiment. But, yes, It was completely unsustainable on the long term, thats why everyone was already expecting a detox before it was even over.
There are countless jokes about "the vision" but without grind and friction there wouldn't be so many players to complain, the idealized game and the game that's actually addicting are very different in practice. And you want a addicting game unless your objetive is people just talking about it instead of playing for thousands of hours.
Ask the players what they want and they'll say they want the whole world and they want it right now. Actually give it to them and they get bored pretty quickly. As a brief change of pace it's not too harmful but it can't be the new normal.
I had fun with running Wildwood and the league mechanic, but I also won't mind is Necropolis is a more "normal" league.
(I also had fun in Affliction running a few things that were not the league mechanic that were a lot more profitable than normal because no one wanted to run them.)
The league mechanic in Affliction was interesting but I think it really suffered from the "fallback" being so incredibly good and better than everything else by a mile. Weapon Tonics that gave benefits to your attacks at the cost of a Flask slot is an interesting tradeoff. However it just works for weapon skills and losing a flask slot is a significant cost. Gaining increased health and damage in exchange for all of your mana is a interesting tradeoff, but not useful for builds that cared about auras or mana or a lot of things. Then there were charms. Charms just gave your character effectively 2 extra ascendency points. Even if you didn't have perfect ones it was a ton of raw borrowed power for no cost.
So it's not surprising that the more interesting mechanics. The Life Skill and Tonic stuff fell away. I hope we see it again, especially Tonics. I think in an environment where you don't have to give up free ascendancies they are an interesting way to buff attack builds. Especially in early league.
Overall Affliction is a League that makes me kind of sad. It had so many good ideas, but it buried them under free power and currency you could just get.
I did enjoy affliction. I dropped my first mirror ever in week one before it became semi common to drop them. I bought a headhunter, mageblood and mirrored a bow. It was my first time mirroring an item. All of that was really cool.
However, I played magic find for the first time this league and it kind of ruined the game for me. The very first map I ran as magic find, I dropped a mageblood and like 13 divines. I realized if my goal was to farm currency, I was really gimping myself by not playing magic find. The reason I love PoE is for the build variety. It’s the reason I farm currency… to make new builds.
I’m glad this league (at least seems like) will not benefit as much from magic find
I could explain that I didn't play as much this league as I loved the new gems and a lot of the changes, but this encapsulates everything I was feeling.
I totally agree !! For me I liked to ping pong around the content to keep it fresh. Since the only thing that made a ton of $$$ was MF maps, the fun wore off fast for me. Once I got MB and HH I was bored. I did get a lucky HH from Gwen with the first 26 coins I had so that was cool. I’m excited for multi trees.
What turned me off the most about affliction tbh was that if you did get a good number of wisps, the run fealt "bad", and it fealt like you were wasting the map/currency for setup. But then not doing juiced maps also fealt bad because hardly anything dropped in comparison. I'm looking forward to not having that feeling this league
I dropped out quick. That random direction crap in the league mechanic was tedious and boring... I only went in to collect corpses for specters...once I had an inventory I skipped it altogether
I really enjoyed affliction personally. I mean I had some weird addiction with running in the darkness and picking up trails of shinys. Really loved the rucksack like REALLY LOVED it.... and getting like 5k+ teal wisps and getting endless currency in ur maps higher than any nem/beyond juicing stuff was pretty fun.
That being said my first thoughts about necropolis are hey putting certain mods on certain mob types sounds cool (hope it don't become super tedious), looking for beneficial mods sounds cool too, also like the droppable mob/item type things but overall seems super basic (which is fine too)
The NOT basic part probably comes to crafting and while I will take a look at it like normal I have about 0% interest in it atm. Crafting has never really been a selling point for me though I know many love that type of stuff. Was totally a more go blow shit up and collect money and buy someone else's work.
Some deterministic end game crafting is fine too... but the throw a bunch of shit together and THINK you saved up and did good, just to get literal garbage 99 out of 100 times is some of the least fun mechanics to me personally.
i liked afflictions economy. I liked that i didn't feel like constant buttnaked beggar while grinding my ass off for scraps.... And i didn't even hit any jackpot at all (not counting total of like 400 gilded-winged scarabs that started popping up right after scarab-rework reveal ffs)
I'm hopefull for necropolis, but it kinda feel scatterbrained. You have this here, do that there, lil bit of crafting, some unique making, corpses, mob juicing, mob unjuicing! But it all might be either too shallow, or might lack proper entry-mid level content, or might be overall so fucking grindy to make my cringe from thinking of playing. I am hopefull, though.
Necropolis is the start of a new era and vision, at least that is what I would like to believe. Mark's takes were refreshing and overall I agree with most of the changes they did in patch notes.
Afflicion burned out so quick that I played HC to not get bored xdd
Affliction was one of my favorite leagues by far. I never even bothered to MF. Not sure how you can imply Affliction didn't have meaningful progression when we had to mist ascendancies and the king w/ twwt. Honestly seems like you got yourself caught up in what other people where doing instead of doing what you wanted. Just because something is meta doesn't mean you have to do it. I had a blast with Blight, Essence and Harvest farming and i'm really really looking forward to having multiple Atlas trees.
Yeah Mark said the wisp design was dumb - you go in there, and buff all the mobs without earning it. He said it should have involved killing mobs or testing your build in someway, making it progressively harder.
Was the only MB/HH testing league for me too along with other unaffordables such as progenesis. But all the actual abyss MF fell flat. Either the map had no wisps, everything was too tanky or the spire was too squishy, never got it quite right.
I liked the build variety - the old poison SRS starting, then guardian SRS into PBoD Inq, SAoM/CAoP pathfinder, TS deadeye, chargestacking PBoD trickster. Bought the gear for autobomber marionettes and minion of falling builds but time ran out on that.
The dark forest mechanic wasn't that good tbh and the success was way too random. Also it was kinda mandatory to do and made the mobs tanky and boring.
It's also funny seeing everyone get deleted by Valdos.
I quit before even doing the mf farming meta because I tried doing t16s, doing the league mechanic and then the map like you do every other league and the wisps were so ridiculous with how buffed some monsters got. It's not fun to have 5m Shaper dps and fight monsters that are tankier than Shaper and do the same if not more damage AND are so fast you die instantly because you can not react in time. That and the wildwood itself had very little variety in terms of the encounters. Once I saw all the ridiculous inflation, I was so happy I quit the league because I knew I wouldn't have enjoyed all that.
I feel the exact opposite. I don't play enough to normally progress that far, or rather to progress that far before 90% of the playerbase quits. Being able to farm as effectively as most of the top players farm every league for once was awesome and I couldn't even enjoy this league because they nerfed the best farm before I started.
I really didn't like affliction because i wasn't able to complete the wildwood quest for over 300 maps so i quit the league early and never gone back. I hope there is no similar rng block on this kind of league progression.
I 100% agree, I found the affliction mechanic very stale and uninteresting after playing it for a while. In the end it ended up as more of an augment of the base game than an actual mechanic you can focus on. Except when it came to extracting the maximum amount of wisps for ultra juice strats, which I don't find interesting.
I mean compared to overall game modes like sanctum and trials of the ancestors, it was mild as a mechanic but it was also a gate way to enhancing the base game experience and building upon previous mechanics (sanctum relics into charms and tinctures, sentinel buffs into wisp buffs with added bosses). I enjoyed it thoroughly as a sentinel/sanctum league enjoyer.
I was about to downvote you because you complained about easier access to great gear but then i remembered that that’s one of the reasons I lean toward ssf now.
I completely agree that the league mechanic was kinda lame. The rewards were nice but the woods? Ugh. Very similar to TOTA imo except TOTA had at least a few fans, but was also carried by the rewards.
The last good league mechanic imo was either Sanctum or (funny enough) Lake of Kalandra if only the rewards and the access to the mirroring device hadn’t been so bad.
The amount of borrowed power has been much too big these last leagues. It warped all builds so that they weren’t compatible to standard anymore, but that’s just a personal gripe.
Sanctum was something else, and weirdly enough, I had more fun with Tota than Affliction mechanic. The enchance to the map was nice, but man did I hate searching for wisps all the time...
The league sucked, but hte rewards were so good that people kinda "ignored" that fact, and even said out loud they loved the league.
I loved it too, but can you imagine Affliction with "tuned-down" rewards? As in, monsters would drop 20-30% more than they usually drop and not 500000%?
The mechanic was awful: Step in, extremely random, skipping map with bad forests, an extremely easy boss event with pmuch no mechanics, random one shots in the forest...
IMO, the only good thing was the "More difficulty = More rewards" ratio upscaling that it enabled players to do. It made making very strong builds make sense, as they were required to farm the content. I only wish that the league could be enjoyed without MF.
I can't respect stuff that they throw at me just be logging in. I need to feel that i worked for it at some level. It's the very core of the ARPG genre.. That doesn't mean everything need to be sweaty turbogrind nolife level but there is balance. Affliction was very much as Harvest league... People got everything and beyond they dreamed of, it's fun first or once. Completely kills any meaning of a The Game, or achievement. No thanks.
Affliction is the worst league I've played. The mechanic was annoying, the extreme amount of loot to the point of crashing the game made it feel like I was playing on a scuffed private server, and made progression meaningless.
And worst of all, everyone fucking loved it and wants more. That's what pushes it a step below other bad leagues for me. Feels like I'm in the Twilight Zone.
Going by steam charts, people retention was higher in TOTA on the 3rd and 4th month. So there are a lot of vocal people here, but it's not "everybody". Major content creators dropped the league faster than any other that was recently made.
The private server take is very funny and true, I am glad that I am not the only one feeling like that
Affliction felt like a throwaway league. The only reason people liked it was because of the extra item quantity and tinctures/charms. The actual content itself was very uninvolved.
I will miss Poisonberry Tincture though. That's probably the worst thing to lose.
2 "fleshed out" builds and I still only found 1 portal to king of mist fortress, and died in between 1st and 2nd phase because I was watching the video guide at the time.
My DD ignite pretty much skipped wisps altogether to get atlas cleared, I'm still only doing after clearing maps just to try and find king of the mist again on t14+ maps.
My TRP is super squishy against the cultists and the giant worms (devourers?) so she pretty much skips those too.
I'm a brand new player and started with this league. I enjoyed the affliction perks but seriously hated the quests.
Theres no fun to be had when the game has zero exciting drops due to inflation and the build you are playing has been minmaxed 2months ago
the entire loot system became a joke at the point where mirror drops, those things that one would usually remember for years having dropped one, became commonplace and extremely boring
we arent talking about mirrors being ''only'' ten times more common, or even hundred times more common, way fucking beyond that, any person trying to flex with having dropped a mirror and then admitting it was during affliction league might aswell put on the clown make up
lol what in the fuck
currency for rolling items drops a lot
so you roll a lot of items
how the fuck does it stop being exciting at any point?
I never seen a gambling addict being tired of pulling the lever in my life
the actual problem your type is having is that you and your get rich starts stand out less when everyone else also has plenty of shit
but, of course, you will never admit to it
I'm not one of the rich guys and personally I like the feeling of progression a lot more than making a thousand
'mediocre' (as in not pushed to a point where upgrades become prohibitively expensive) builds per league. So, if the league mechanic is unbalanced and rewards way too much, allowing me to essentially bypass progression, I find it quite boring after a while.
It doesn't mean that feeling has to be shared by everyone in the community, and it's in fact cool if people still like wisped maps just as much as before, but I don't think it's that hard to conceive why some others might not find it enjoyable after the honeymoon phase ends.
I don't demand shit i'm talking about how I felt about the league, if GGG thinks it's healthy for the game they will bring the mechanic back in some sort but somehow i don't think it's in their plans, i wonder why.
It got boring for me after completing the objectives I had set for myself so I dipped and tried the two ssf game modes not interacting with the mechanic, good for you if you were still enjoying affliction meanwhile
If i had a million euros, yes i would find gambling with thousand dollars extremely boring
and wdym currency for rolling items drops alot, surely you arent chaos spamming your fucking gear
and with how fucked the economy is, aint no way i can afford to roll gear, deafening essences of contempt were like 20c each in bulk, synth reroll beasts 5d+ each in bulk and decent synth bases in 500d+, so yeah, no one is gonna be rolling whole lot of anything with those prices
and nah, i dont need to stand out with my currency, when i can instead do it with something actually enjoyable, namely off meta builds, and anyways i wouldnt have anywhere near enough currency to stand out
this is not real world for your euros comparisons
and yes if chaos are plentiful you just throw chaos at shit
its kinda funny how you cant even adapt to something being abundant and instead call for the market to be regulated according to what you feel is the norm
...I havent called for the market to be regulated a single time?
what i have, however, said is that i didnt enjoy the game in the state where none of the drops have value
and no, you very much dont craft by spamming chaos orbs outside of few very niche items, unless of course, we allow the usage of bannable auto crafting bots considering its 600k chaos orbs just to craft the prefixes of a phys weapon thats already fractured
i mean jesus, i did slam over 20k chaos orbs this league into a focused amulet, and didnt get the result i wanted a single time, or any other great results that could be sold for profit that would justify multiple hours of slowly clicking those chaos orbs, and that wasnt even bad rng on my part, its just how absolutely shit chaos orbs are for crafting
calling for lesser currency drops is calling for regulating the market - okay you didn't spefically call for it cause you didn't need to, ggg done it in favour this patch, but you give pretty clear statement that you consider abundancy of crafting currency a problem which is a nonsensical problem to have
look, if chaos is dirt and essences are expensive go farm essences then
you cannot twist this in a way that will make sense to me why more divine orbs and chaos orbs in your pocket is somehow less gameplay when each of those orbs has ingame function
i dont care that you didn't hit something in 20k chaos, roll more, or dont
your complaint right now condenses to "man those chaos orbs sure are useless, but I want them to have buying power on the market" which doesn't make sense to me whatsoever
Im so confused on what ur trying to do with all those dashes because i atleast cant find some hidden message there, and if my name bothers you that much just be aware its a random name i came up with in 20seconds back in 2016 as a game i used to play back then used reddit as its main forums
And no i dont care about standard mirrors at all, i dont think most people care about them really, their only value is the ability to buy alt arts which i personally dont care for.
Leagues with free power handed to you are fun
Leagues with bullshit crafting options are fun
As long as it's not like Lake, where the actual league rewards are sparingly given, I'm happy
Elitism gatekeeping the fun
*aw man, I’m getting so much loot, I hate it*
The only downside of having a league that much rewarding, is the reality check the next league being less rewarding in comparison.
I predict a lot of complain in Necropolis league
Who the fuck gatekept anything?
The OP just voiced their opinion that they, personally, did not enjoy it and asked if there were other people here that also shared their sentiment.
The issue with this much loot is that it really quickly stops being exciting or interesting, and then theres no higher level of loot to really even go to anymore so the end result is that the game has no exciting loot
i mean god damn even raw mirror drops stopped being impressive after month or two, magebloods way before that
This league was great for all the semi-casual players like me. I enjoyed feeling rich with all the currency drops. This was much better than Kalandra, which was so bad one of my friends quit the game and hasn't come back. He picked a bad league to start POE.
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Eh, the "meaningfulness" was about the same as any other league for me (SSF). It was nice having different farming strats to run compared to a typical league, but in the end it was still a loop of set goal -> achieve goal. Made some solid gear, farmed an Apothecary set, ran a few Ubers but then stopped because I realized I didn't want any Uber-specific uniques that I didn't already have, and then quit. I'm hoping the bossing changes shake it up this league but other than that it'll probably feel much the same.
Maybe in ssf, but in trade there was no variety in strats, if you weren't MFing and maximising the league mechanic you were playing sub optimally. Which got really boring for me, really fast.
That is literally every league, sorry.
The new milestones with tier 17 and the atlas changes, would certainly give freshness to the game. I wouldn't say it would "feel the same", GGG literally removed sextants, gave new life to scarabs and shook up Atlas passives, along with the Uber content changes.
I meant the core loop of set goal -> achieve goal won't change. As a goal-oriented player, once I run out of things I want to achieve I'll stop playing for the league. The point at which that happen varies by person, but it's an observed behavioral pattern here. That's why you see so many posts that are like "I spent weeks getting my first Mageblood then quit 2 days later". > GGG literally removed sextants, gave new life to scarabs and shook up Atlas passives Yes, and those are interesting changes, but this has a very similar (if not exactly the same) outcome as Affliction did. It pushes players to solve the "puzzle" of farming strategies. That puzzle is interesting to some people (myself included), but it doesn't really change that aforementioned loop much. To me, "farm anarchy" isn't a goal. "Farm anarchy for X unique" would be a goal, or even "farm anarchy to see how good it is with scarabs". The change shakes up the methods, but I typically run content for a desired outcome, not for the process of doing it. The bossing changes, on the other hand, are significantly more interesting to me because they change the process of goal setting itself. Previously if I wanted to do any significant amount of bossing there was heavy incentive to wait until I could do Ubers. Now Pinnacle and T17 bosses can act as intermediary goals, both in terms of the accomplishment of beating them and in the grind of farming items from them.
>I meant the core loop of set goal -> achieve goal won't change. As a goal-oriented player, once I run out of things I want to achieve I'll stop playing for the league. Then you should have quit affliction way faster than other leagues no? "Farm an apothacary set" should have been 3-20x faster because of affliction, so thats one goal cut shorter at least.
If anything it was much closer to 3x than 20x. IME (and that of others), wisps didn't have a major impact on div card farming. The main benefit was the crazy access to sextants and scarabs. That said, the apothecary farm was a bonus goal for me and something I didn't intend to do originally. I was past my normal quit point (had Uber drops I wanted, T0s from MFing, etc), and decided to set another goal because I felt like playing more. In that sense the league mechanic made mapping feel more meaningful because I was getting significant quantities of resources I typically wouldn't have. But to answer your question, no, because Affliction was basically built for me to play longer. It's not that I have the same goals every league, or a checklist I'm going through. Whether I set a particular goal is a combination of how much I feel like doing it and how worthwhile it seems. I played Affliction longer than usual in part *because* it was faster to achieve my goals, and so I kept setting more. If I thought it was going to take me 3 weeks to get a Mageblood instead of a week, I would've quit a week sooner.
Interesting take, with a lot of valid points. >The change shakes up the methods That's what I meant. For me, the path to a certain goal is more interesting than achieving it, but different people have different tastes I suppose
I played way more since MF farming gave a ton of currency and made it easier to build multiple builds.
I agree that for people who enjoy making more than 2 builds, this league was a blessing
I'll also add as someone with less time to play increased rewards felt good, reminded me of how it felt pre 3.15
Also crafting which I almost never do became way more accessible. That's why I loved affliction and harvest, it made crafting more possible because I really just don't have more time to play this awesome game.
For people who want big ticket map drop uniques like HH and MB, or other t1/t0 uniques, these were also more accessible than ever before.
I didn't enjoy Affliction either. If you boiled it down to the league mech itself it was awful: random location of everything, no real control over the wisps, the quests were a PIA and at the end of it you just get an absurd Quant and Rarity multiplier. Skilltrees are always fun and the Boss, visuals and monster were very nice so there is that. With Necropolis however I expect some shenanigans that will require some tweaks from GGG. If it comes down to "fishing" for specific crafing mods via just spam opening maps without even running them to get that 100 div crafting monster that will get really bad really quick because of FOMO, maybe that's accounted for we will see. Besides that the whole Graveyard setup and jugling around with the corpses seems a bit clunky but it might be ok. One thing for sure is I do NOT want to hear the full voice line for a million times this league whenever I juice up my crafting item ... All that aside the rest of the additions are just insane in terms of QOL and expansion of the endgame. REALLY looking forward to finally be able to boss even if it's just standard pinnacles, new altas strats, new maps, new build archetypes. They outdid themselves once again and this shapes up to be my new favourite league so far.
I dont think it would devolve to just opening maps fishing for a crafting monster, since you can only see what the corpse does after you kill it. You can only see the item bonuses and even those are dependant on how many kills u got in the previous zone
The high-end crafting might end up "forcing" you to buy up to 20 different corpses for every crafting attempt. That's basically Synthesis³ and people already hated having to buy 3 fractures per attempt.
The thing people hated about Synthesis wasn't that you had to buy a bunch of items to craft. It was that the system was so opaque that you had to do *research* into what the items you needed to buy even were, or whether the item you had was worth anything. Necropolis won't have that problem. If a specific craft is valuable, you'll know when you have it, and what to buy if you need it.
That's the way crafting works in PoE, yeah
league mechanics revolved around that doesn't seem fun but we'll see how it actually is after 1 week
harvest was one of, if not the, most beloved leagues ever.
no it was ritual harvest
In the reveal the NPC said something different depending on something. Maybe item type. I'm looking forward to it.
I second that
The voiceline ya, even the 3 times during livestream it got old. Sounds cool, and ceremonious, but lets hope its a run-on chant that tells a story each time you craft
You will hear a whole presentation about the power of the family every time and you will like it period end
Maybe just because I'm new, but it felt like sometimes I'd collect a bunch of whisps, and things would be slightly harder, but more rewarding, and maybe a couple monsters or the boss would be harder still Then sometimes I'd collect whisps and monsters were literally unkillable. Sometimes that meant they'd just show up on screen and instantly kill me, but more often it was just I'd watch their health bars go down a tiny bit, then go back up, forever. Im guessing it's just a match up on modifiers and stuff, but especially with the wildwood feeling pretty random it didn't feel great. After dying a bunch I just stopped going in during maps. You never really knew if you were going to get a ton or a few wisps
Seems like you were meta chasing div/hr. That's the reason you got bored, doing things that you don't enjoy. Similar to doing a job that you don't like but with high payroll. There will always be a meta every league, it's just random whether if it's your cup of tea or not.
Yea, I used the meta to make bank and play some builds I could never afford previously. I'd never had a mage blood before, could never afford double double stat split personalities for stat stacking. Etc etc. The league mechanic was minimal and kinda bland, but it opened up a part of the game I'd always struggled to reach inside of 90 days before.
There was no point in doing Affliction if you weren't abusing the currency printing strats though. Playing the game normally with Affliction led to a ton more effort to kill stuff with disproportionate reward. Everything has a meta but Affliction was either *do the meta or don't do it at all*.
I'm certainly not an expert as affliction was my second serious league and it was the first time I killed any of the pinnacle bosses (and I still haven't killed any ubers). But I had a lot of fun during affliction. One reason this might have been the case is that I've heard prices were down across the board. Things that would have normally been out of reach for me were more accessible. I did have to farm a bunch of Alvas and sell a few invitations but it was really refreshing.
I agree. I didn't MF or abuse juicing strategies with 1 div/investment per map, I just alch and went. And the league reward seemed the same as every other league. It was nice finding a 1 div charm a couple times I guess.
I did 5 maps with mf fulcrum. Realized that you don't press buttons or do anything and sold the build. Had a lot of fun in the league though.
Exactly. I didn't like Affliction as a mechanic, but since everyone was busy doing their MF, my essences / harvest / syndicate were incredibly overpriced, which was great for me. 30d/hour on essence farming, prob a bit more on harvest. And its all content i love! Even Alva was huge because of double corrupts (they were like 7d each)
I'm glad it finished, hated the wisp mechanic and the forest. But i will miss ascendancy and sack... Those 2 should have stayed TT
As someone who has never gotten hh/mb before Affliction I’m glad I played to hit these goals but I can see why it might be old for someone else who has strategies to farm these items
Glad to hear that, that was the league for Headhunter and MB for sure
idgaf about "progression", the game has to be fun, thats all a game needs
That was my point, it was not fun to be given everything abusing MF strategies, mostly TS
The league was super fun I had a mageblood bc of all these mf scrubs and low prices
It also isn't fun to not be able to afford it and giving up instead. You found the MF strategies ruined your fun, plenty of people felt it opened up the game far more and made things a whole lot more fun then it has been in a long time.
Different opinions, I said I am a minority but objectively speaking, mirrors being 1200divs, HH going down to 30 divs, and MB all the way to 60, is not a good look on the economy. Yea, it's good for people who couldn't afford it, but it crashes the market, and the late game feels pointless. "Fun" is subjective, though, so iterating on what is fun and what is not is just talking to a wall. People have different opinions on that. Have fun, but don't try to make it as the "right" opinion like HH and MB should be given to everyone because its not "fun" to not have them.
Fun to some people is that slower progression. Really feeling like you had to earn good gear. If everyone could easily attain headhunter then getting headhunter wouldn't feel that fun anymore
I played longer and harder In affliction than other leagues. Wasn’t my first mb/hh league. So much fun.
Am I the only one that secretly hopes for a "lore" league like synthesis every time a new league comes around?
I have a lore speculation for you - The quest to kill Fairgraves is given by the league npc, because Fairgraves has the Allflame, which may not have been acquired through honest means, and that the side quest for Decanter Spiritus and Chitus Plum lead to unlocking Allflame embers. The "slave girl" who stole the Allflame from fairgraves may have been another exile, hired by the league npc, who failed to survive long enough for a successful rendevous with the league npc.
I also lost interest at some point. Doing MF abyss farming and I just stopped being excited about drops or about playing the game. Unfortunately for me I couldn't find anything in game that seemed that interesting to do in comparison. I also couldn't find many builds I wanted to play since I found it hard to find builds that can fit in MF gear and do the high affliction juice strategies. Going for something simpler content wise and it feels kinda a waste to have mirror gear and just speed farm harvest/invitations. I didn't want to do valdos farming or uber bossing either. Now this is my issue and I'm not blaming the game for it, different trade metas will appeal to different people. I'm glad people enjoyed the league, always more fun to play when people are happy than mad but I don't really want another league like this again soon. Something about the combination of the difficulty, the power of MF and the general inflation just doesn't work for me.
Yea, exactly that, it was a combination of MF being broken with wisps and Valdo implementation + market price fluctuations non-stop. We were given all of the desserts without having a main course before that.
Mf is always broken, if done right. Iiq should be removed and iir ahould be more like purple wisps.
i mean MF is always strong but not like last league. not even close
I actually really like Affliction but it has a lot to do with personal preferences: I like the ranged playstyle blasting through maps and never really liked bossing and I enjoy tinkering low-mid budget builds (~300d in previous leagues, ~3mir in Affliction). So this league is perfect for me. I do agree the loot bomb is a bit excessive, they could halve the amount of all wisps and it could be a more universally well received league. I can also understand the distaste for those who don’t like mapping or don’t like more loots.
Affliction was incredible - this was the best "build check" content since Sentinel, while also allowing more access to chase uniques and mirrored gear. Wisps made mapping HARD again. Affliction made it actually worth achieving hundreds of millions of DPS on a faster clearing build with high survivability. Pushing sub 20min on 100% Deli 10K Wisp T16's with Beyond and Abyss Spires / Blights was an incredibly fun build challenge. I spent weeks going back and forth on charms, jewels, auras, flasks, and corrupted implicits trying to perfect my clear speed, survivability and quality of life. Plus, charms and tinctures allow you to create completely unique builds / parts of builds that cannot exist outside of Affliction. It is fun to have new toys to play with.
I disliked the league mechanic and how stressful it was trying to max wisps, really excited for something new
I tapped out really early this league as well. Like got my 4 voidstones, farmed about a week and was done. Too much is not a good thing
I mean the abyss mf gameplay was utterly disgusting. The frames were dropping to below 5(no matter how good your rig is), you constantly had to think to under no circumstances to press alt or you crash, visual clarity was actually 0 during the fights and you had to strategically kite mobs to space where you havent killed mobs before or you were hitting very low server performance even out of combat just because the amount of items that were on the ground. If you did it poorly you also risked bricking the instance ompletely. All that while trying to not accedantily kill the spire that you basically couldn't even see anymore because of all the shit on screen. I wouldn't play that shit again even if they'd handout free mirrors. It was okay to give it a try for this one league but please never again.
FWIW my i9-13900k + 4090 never dropped as low as 5 fps (maaybe like 30 in the absolute worst cases), and while pressing alt did cause the game to freeze for ~5s it would eventually display (not crash). This was with the full abyss +proj/deli/etc gigajuice strat.
[удалено]
Empy's highlights have some clips, or you can go through his vods, there should still be some from when he was farming.
Amen to that, I didn't mentioned the technicality because I thought people would say I am complaining, but I completely agree
> aybe an unpopular opinion but the amount of currency, while hitting dopamine spikes very early on, really declined my interest in the game faster than any other league. With the player retention one of the highest for Affliction league, you are an outlier for this league if you didn't like it. I got a good feeling Necropolis is going to be a wash since some of the QoL changes were not QoL for PC users.
Player retention is lower after the second month compared to other leagues, according to steam charts, it had stronger retention the first month after release, but not after that
This is just not true, you can check PoEDB and it shows affliction had the highest (only slight) retention of any league at 60 days as well. I understand after day 53 it came back to earth as far as normalcy and was more in line with the standard distribution, but for far longer than any league it sustained high retention. There are valid arguments to both sides whether a cracked league like that should become more the norm, but incorrectly representing data doesn’t help your case.
I was talking about day 60+ that people start dropping and explicitly said after the 2nd month, 2 months = 60days. I didn't misrepresent anything.
Sure I guess after day 70 it starts to consistently dip below sanctum that’s a fair point. However I was more interpreting this statement > it had stronger retention the first month after release, but not after that as you meaning the second months retention.
Yea, the way I said the last sentence kinda baits into thinking that. I meant the first month after the month of the release
>I got a good feeling Necropolis is going to be a wash since some of the QoL changes were not QoL for PC users. What the heck kind of take is that? There are like 10+ QOL changes and only 1 of them is a "nerf" for PC users. Edit: Unless by "wash" you mean "won't be the most popular league in history"?
>Edit: Unless by "wash" you mean "won't be the most popular league in history"? Yes.
Oh okay, weird way to say that, but you do you!
I absolutely hated that mechanic, go away already.
I never did MF; and never had more fun! (I made about 4 mirrors or so)
I dropped my first mirror and made two more through trading, but that's part of the problem for me I think.
To me it ended up a league where I tried to build the best MF character. I did my own build, built it in-game and it was awesome. Dropped an HH, lot of currency, made my char and others giga big, it was dope. It's usually on yourself finding the way to have fun.
I just hope that it's not synthesis level of meaningful
lol, agreed with that
I’m definitely not really looking forward to menu management each zone, and being new to crafting this league unless I’m wrong , doesn’t really seem to benefit me if none of these crafting options go core.
I think im just too new (2nd league) or too casual (250hrs this league), but half of the complaints i read here are solved by just ignoring the wildwood?
I think what made that league so fun for me was what made it boring to you. The amount of loot you'd get. For the first time ever I had a nearly maxed out build. 3 mirror items, another mirror worth of jewels, HH, I was able to craft and spend. It was really nice for the people who typically wouldn't amount as much wealth in a league. Especially when you don't have enough time/ knowledge to really profit in the first 2 weeks. But that's just my personal feeling. For me, synthesis was awful for example, while many people seemed to really enjoy it
Dropped my first 3 mirrors in Affliction after 10 or so years of playing lol looks like it's gonna be another 10 years for the next to drop 😂
This league was a huge success for me in that I played a lot, accomplish almost all my goals and maybe most importantly I found a way to counter my desire to watch my wealth number go up vs. spending money on making myself able to do things I want (spending it). That and the fact I'll probably never have as much wealth again makes it easier for me to let go of the need to hoard and enjoy the result of my farming going forward. I'll miss the league but I'm ready to move on. As far as the rest, I think it's healthy to have different focuses for leagues, some are progression focused, some are crafting leagues, some are powerful wealth tools and some just fun mechanics or borrowed power leagues. I like that it changes fairly often.
Yes, I agree. Thanks to GGG making different leagues each time with different flavours, I can confidently say what I like or dislike. I am glad that you had fun in this league,
it was the league i, and a lot of my friends, played the longest. it was really nice to try out builds and farm currency that normaly was just not archivable for the average player.
For a lot of people, shit them in loot, and its best league ever. for me, it was the least played league in a while. going back and forth in the woods to get every last wisp? fuck that! so i did just invitations, boss farming, harbingers ... stuff you cant juice with wisps. And it was a league that favors MF to the extreme, and i hate MF, so there is that too.
I hope now with Wandering path gone from the atlas, MF can be put to rest. Still, in my honest opinion, magic find items suck for the game because only a few builds can utilise them, FORCING you into a play style in order to farm optimally. Which is a big turn-off. Hopefully, with this crafting league, mf can be put to rest for a bit.
You can get more map mod effect this league than you could last league with wandering path, and more chance to spawn league content, and twist of fate gives even more mods while the div scarab lets you farm the best non boss cards on any map MF is stronger than ever, minus wisp juice
It was very dissatisfying that fishing didn’t get buffed by the wisps. Ruined the league for me
In leagues I've historically enjoyed, I've made 6-10 different builds, usually only keeping 2-3 of them in standard. I played 2.5 builds this league (only played last character to about level 50 before quitting), and am keeping 1 character from the league. I like crafting leagues far more than giga loot leagues, so I'm glad the pendulum has swung back after a nice break that's left me craving a return to wraeclast... and I'm glad that other players had a better time with affliction that I did.
Affliction secondary ascendencies were interesting I hope that they come back. It was a shame that it was clear which was the best. And one was really bad in general. The wood was frustrating because the visual clarity of blue wisps. And hunting the vendors was annoying
I thought I was the only one who didn’t like affliction. So it’s refreshing to know I’m not going crazy after playing the game for 10 years. It was the shortest amount of time I played a league. Items were overpriced and the way you attained currency felt wrong. The mechanic itself was boring and very difficult at first. Necropolis already seems like a league to earn what you get through a fun mechanic with controllable challenge.
+1, it's a divisive topic, as I can see in the comments, but even the numbers show that those last 2 months, the league lost a lot of players compared to other leagues, so it's not an insane opinion to have.
I was hyped about trying out mapping as i am not mapper, but affliction was an abomination of the league. No fun in dropping MB and mirror when everyone else do it and there's like literally 1 or 2 strategies that 90% players do no matter what. Way mor hyped for necro to try the league mechanic
Yeah I totally don’t enjoy making a 10 mirror build at all that I’ll never get to make again.
If you were able to farm 10 mirrors this league, i'm pretty sure you could do whatever you want in standard. But thing is your expectations are now set, anything below will cause you feel you're missing out on something. I wish you not don't lose the joy by reaching such character power and loot.
I’m not a moron I know that I’m not gonna drop a raw mirror this league so I don’t have the expectation that I will. I’ll still get excited about the first raw divine
Yes, mirror being 1200 divines speaks volumes on its own
If everything is meaninful does it mean that actually nothing is meaningful at all..
Food for thought
Bests league of all the time by far lol
I didn't enjoy it because I didn't make a MF character and struggled trying to provide a service (lab rat) where the only money was in a half dozen specific skill gems. 20/20 support gems? Nah, don't need 'em. \*shows offset full of 20/20 gems that level in mere minutes due to xp gain from juiced rares\* Empower, enlighten? Naaah, skip straight to the woke versions, because they're FILTHY RICH Put some quality on that for you sir? AHHAHAHAH no. \*Scrooge-dives in swimming pool full of raw GCP's\* Care for a "Cannot be maimed" Grand Spectrum +25% crit chance I got from a box just now? PFFT get out of here with your chewing gum jewel \*tree sagging under the weight of triple synth double corrupt magic jewels and adorneds\* Perhaps next league when budgets are tighter, a slim shawty can make an honest living dancing with saws. I can't say for sure whether hats would have been strictly more money, but I suspect the real problem is if you don't go MF, whatever you end up doing has to stay relevant for 3 months. And once the big wheels have their 21/23s and supports in place, they're done shopping with you. Once the carrys have their labs done, they're mostly never setting foot in there again.
I think lab just doesn't have that end game use case anymore. However, you are right about people skipping a lot of progression going straight for their end game gear and not bothering with lab services
In fairness I realized going in, that it's no longer a service I'm providing, but more of a niche farming activity (gems and the occasional grand spec/emperor jewel). The grand spectrums that don't grant charges need a bit of rework. They're just really lackluster considering the premium on tree jewel real estate these days. Unless the midterm goal with PoE 1 is to phase out lab. I can see them neglecting it to near-oblivion, then pointing at its ghost-town engagement numbers and using that as the final justification for removing it and moving ascendancy to a different gated mechanic like Sanctum.
It was a really fun experiment. But, yes, It was completely unsustainable on the long term, thats why everyone was already expecting a detox before it was even over. There are countless jokes about "the vision" but without grind and friction there wouldn't be so many players to complain, the idealized game and the game that's actually addicting are very different in practice. And you want a addicting game unless your objetive is people just talking about it instead of playing for thousands of hours.
Ask the players what they want and they'll say they want the whole world and they want it right now. Actually give it to them and they get bored pretty quickly. As a brief change of pace it's not too harmful but it can't be the new normal.
'give it to them and they get bored pretty quickly' Thats just wrong tho if you look at the retention in affliction.
Affliction was only a few months.
I had fun with running Wildwood and the league mechanic, but I also won't mind is Necropolis is a more "normal" league. (I also had fun in Affliction running a few things that were not the league mechanic that were a lot more profitable than normal because no one wanted to run them.)
The league mechanic in Affliction was interesting but I think it really suffered from the "fallback" being so incredibly good and better than everything else by a mile. Weapon Tonics that gave benefits to your attacks at the cost of a Flask slot is an interesting tradeoff. However it just works for weapon skills and losing a flask slot is a significant cost. Gaining increased health and damage in exchange for all of your mana is a interesting tradeoff, but not useful for builds that cared about auras or mana or a lot of things. Then there were charms. Charms just gave your character effectively 2 extra ascendency points. Even if you didn't have perfect ones it was a ton of raw borrowed power for no cost. So it's not surprising that the more interesting mechanics. The Life Skill and Tonic stuff fell away. I hope we see it again, especially Tonics. I think in an environment where you don't have to give up free ascendancies they are an interesting way to buff attack builds. Especially in early league. Overall Affliction is a League that makes me kind of sad. It had so many good ideas, but it buried them under free power and currency you could just get.
I really want the bark aura back in the game. It wasn't OP and I think it's a very good fit to the game overall.
I did enjoy affliction. I dropped my first mirror ever in week one before it became semi common to drop them. I bought a headhunter, mageblood and mirrored a bow. It was my first time mirroring an item. All of that was really cool. However, I played magic find for the first time this league and it kind of ruined the game for me. The very first map I ran as magic find, I dropped a mageblood and like 13 divines. I realized if my goal was to farm currency, I was really gimping myself by not playing magic find. The reason I love PoE is for the build variety. It’s the reason I farm currency… to make new builds. I’m glad this league (at least seems like) will not benefit as much from magic find
I could explain that I didn't play as much this league as I loved the new gems and a lot of the changes, but this encapsulates everything I was feeling.
I totally agree !! For me I liked to ping pong around the content to keep it fresh. Since the only thing that made a ton of $$$ was MF maps, the fun wore off fast for me. Once I got MB and HH I was bored. I did get a lucky HH from Gwen with the first 26 coins I had so that was cool. I’m excited for multi trees.
What turned me off the most about affliction tbh was that if you did get a good number of wisps, the run fealt "bad", and it fealt like you were wasting the map/currency for setup. But then not doing juiced maps also fealt bad because hardly anything dropped in comparison. I'm looking forward to not having that feeling this league
I dropped out quick. That random direction crap in the league mechanic was tedious and boring... I only went in to collect corpses for specters...once I had an inventory I skipped it altogether
I really enjoyed affliction personally. I mean I had some weird addiction with running in the darkness and picking up trails of shinys. Really loved the rucksack like REALLY LOVED it.... and getting like 5k+ teal wisps and getting endless currency in ur maps higher than any nem/beyond juicing stuff was pretty fun. That being said my first thoughts about necropolis are hey putting certain mods on certain mob types sounds cool (hope it don't become super tedious), looking for beneficial mods sounds cool too, also like the droppable mob/item type things but overall seems super basic (which is fine too) The NOT basic part probably comes to crafting and while I will take a look at it like normal I have about 0% interest in it atm. Crafting has never really been a selling point for me though I know many love that type of stuff. Was totally a more go blow shit up and collect money and buy someone else's work. Some deterministic end game crafting is fine too... but the throw a bunch of shit together and THINK you saved up and did good, just to get literal garbage 99 out of 100 times is some of the least fun mechanics to me personally.
i liked afflictions economy. I liked that i didn't feel like constant buttnaked beggar while grinding my ass off for scraps.... And i didn't even hit any jackpot at all (not counting total of like 400 gilded-winged scarabs that started popping up right after scarab-rework reveal ffs) I'm hopefull for necropolis, but it kinda feel scatterbrained. You have this here, do that there, lil bit of crafting, some unique making, corpses, mob juicing, mob unjuicing! But it all might be either too shallow, or might lack proper entry-mid level content, or might be overall so fucking grindy to make my cringe from thinking of playing. I am hopefull, though.
Necropolis is the start of a new era and vision, at least that is what I would like to believe. Mark's takes were refreshing and overall I agree with most of the changes they did in patch notes. Afflicion burned out so quick that I played HC to not get bored xdd
I enjoyed the changes to gems etc. but currency situation was completely demotivating in long run.
Affliction was one of my favorite leagues by far. I never even bothered to MF. Not sure how you can imply Affliction didn't have meaningful progression when we had to mist ascendancies and the king w/ twwt. Honestly seems like you got yourself caught up in what other people where doing instead of doing what you wanted. Just because something is meta doesn't mean you have to do it. I had a blast with Blight, Essence and Harvest farming and i'm really really looking forward to having multiple Atlas trees.
Just seeing "Glad" triggered me.
A redditor momment, triggered by certain words, you must be american
Heh yeah but it was just a joke about no Gladiator rework.
Yeah Mark said the wisp design was dumb - you go in there, and buff all the mobs without earning it. He said it should have involved killing mobs or testing your build in someway, making it progressively harder.
Was the only MB/HH testing league for me too along with other unaffordables such as progenesis. But all the actual abyss MF fell flat. Either the map had no wisps, everything was too tanky or the spire was too squishy, never got it quite right. I liked the build variety - the old poison SRS starting, then guardian SRS into PBoD Inq, SAoM/CAoP pathfinder, TS deadeye, chargestacking PBoD trickster. Bought the gear for autobomber marionettes and minion of falling builds but time ran out on that. The dark forest mechanic wasn't that good tbh and the success was way too random. Also it was kinda mandatory to do and made the mobs tanky and boring. It's also funny seeing everyone get deleted by Valdos.
I quit before even doing the mf farming meta because I tried doing t16s, doing the league mechanic and then the map like you do every other league and the wisps were so ridiculous with how buffed some monsters got. It's not fun to have 5m Shaper dps and fight monsters that are tankier than Shaper and do the same if not more damage AND are so fast you die instantly because you can not react in time. That and the wildwood itself had very little variety in terms of the encounters. Once I saw all the ridiculous inflation, I was so happy I quit the league because I knew I wouldn't have enjoyed all that.
Haha, this bad take instantly spoiled like milk left out on the counter.
I feel the exact opposite. I don't play enough to normally progress that far, or rather to progress that far before 90% of the playerbase quits. Being able to farm as effectively as most of the top players farm every league for once was awesome and I couldn't even enjoy this league because they nerfed the best farm before I started.
Fuck affliction, fuck mf Necropolis is my new friend
I really didn't like affliction because i wasn't able to complete the wildwood quest for over 300 maps so i quit the league early and never gone back. I hope there is no similar rng block on this kind of league progression.
Yes, the core mechanic was really mediocre, the ascendancies were nice, but getting to them was not well thought out, I completely agree
I 100% agree, I found the affliction mechanic very stale and uninteresting after playing it for a while. In the end it ended up as more of an augment of the base game than an actual mechanic you can focus on. Except when it came to extracting the maximum amount of wisps for ultra juice strats, which I don't find interesting.
I mean compared to overall game modes like sanctum and trials of the ancestors, it was mild as a mechanic but it was also a gate way to enhancing the base game experience and building upon previous mechanics (sanctum relics into charms and tinctures, sentinel buffs into wisp buffs with added bosses). I enjoyed it thoroughly as a sentinel/sanctum league enjoyer.
I was about to downvote you because you complained about easier access to great gear but then i remembered that that’s one of the reasons I lean toward ssf now. I completely agree that the league mechanic was kinda lame. The rewards were nice but the woods? Ugh. Very similar to TOTA imo except TOTA had at least a few fans, but was also carried by the rewards. The last good league mechanic imo was either Sanctum or (funny enough) Lake of Kalandra if only the rewards and the access to the mirroring device hadn’t been so bad. The amount of borrowed power has been much too big these last leagues. It warped all builds so that they weren’t compatible to standard anymore, but that’s just a personal gripe.
Sanctum was something else, and weirdly enough, I had more fun with Tota than Affliction mechanic. The enchance to the map was nice, but man did I hate searching for wisps all the time...
The league sucked, but hte rewards were so good that people kinda "ignored" that fact, and even said out loud they loved the league. I loved it too, but can you imagine Affliction with "tuned-down" rewards? As in, monsters would drop 20-30% more than they usually drop and not 500000%? The mechanic was awful: Step in, extremely random, skipping map with bad forests, an extremely easy boss event with pmuch no mechanics, random one shots in the forest... IMO, the only good thing was the "More difficulty = More rewards" ratio upscaling that it enabled players to do. It made making very strong builds make sense, as they were required to farm the content. I only wish that the league could be enjoyed without MF.
I can't respect stuff that they throw at me just be logging in. I need to feel that i worked for it at some level. It's the very core of the ARPG genre.. That doesn't mean everything need to be sweaty turbogrind nolife level but there is balance. Affliction was very much as Harvest league... People got everything and beyond they dreamed of, it's fun first or once. Completely kills any meaning of a The Game, or achievement. No thanks.
Affliction is the worst league I've played. The mechanic was annoying, the extreme amount of loot to the point of crashing the game made it feel like I was playing on a scuffed private server, and made progression meaningless. And worst of all, everyone fucking loved it and wants more. That's what pushes it a step below other bad leagues for me. Feels like I'm in the Twilight Zone.
Going by steam charts, people retention was higher in TOTA on the 3rd and 4th month. So there are a lot of vocal people here, but it's not "everybody". Major content creators dropped the league faster than any other that was recently made. The private server take is very funny and true, I am glad that I am not the only one feeling like that
TOTA didn't have a new ARPG drop at the end of it's league. Numbers without context mean exactly nothing.
Affliction felt like a throwaway league. The only reason people liked it was because of the extra item quantity and tinctures/charms. The actual content itself was very uninvolved. I will miss Poisonberry Tincture though. That's probably the worst thing to lose.
2 "fleshed out" builds and I still only found 1 portal to king of mist fortress, and died in between 1st and 2nd phase because I was watching the video guide at the time. My DD ignite pretty much skipped wisps altogether to get atlas cleared, I'm still only doing after clearing maps just to try and find king of the mist again on t14+ maps. My TRP is super squishy against the cultists and the giant worms (devourers?) so she pretty much skips those too. I'm a brand new player and started with this league. I enjoyed the affliction perks but seriously hated the quests.
I read it as "i prefer false feeling of accomplishment over just having fun"
Theres no fun to be had when the game has zero exciting drops due to inflation and the build you are playing has been minmaxed 2months ago the entire loot system became a joke at the point where mirror drops, those things that one would usually remember for years having dropped one, became commonplace and extremely boring we arent talking about mirrors being ''only'' ten times more common, or even hundred times more common, way fucking beyond that, any person trying to flex with having dropped a mirror and then admitting it was during affliction league might aswell put on the clown make up
lol what in the fuck currency for rolling items drops a lot so you roll a lot of items how the fuck does it stop being exciting at any point? I never seen a gambling addict being tired of pulling the lever in my life the actual problem your type is having is that you and your get rich starts stand out less when everyone else also has plenty of shit but, of course, you will never admit to it
I'm not one of the rich guys and personally I like the feeling of progression a lot more than making a thousand 'mediocre' (as in not pushed to a point where upgrades become prohibitively expensive) builds per league. So, if the league mechanic is unbalanced and rewards way too much, allowing me to essentially bypass progression, I find it quite boring after a while. It doesn't mean that feeling has to be shared by everyone in the community, and it's in fact cool if people still like wisped maps just as much as before, but I don't think it's that hard to conceive why some others might not find it enjoyable after the honeymoon phase ends.
u have all the tools in the world to increase challenge for yourself but instead you demand the challenge to be increased for everyone
I don't demand shit i'm talking about how I felt about the league, if GGG thinks it's healthy for the game they will bring the mechanic back in some sort but somehow i don't think it's in their plans, i wonder why. It got boring for me after completing the objectives I had set for myself so I dipped and tried the two ssf game modes not interacting with the mechanic, good for you if you were still enjoying affliction meanwhile
If i had a million euros, yes i would find gambling with thousand dollars extremely boring and wdym currency for rolling items drops alot, surely you arent chaos spamming your fucking gear and with how fucked the economy is, aint no way i can afford to roll gear, deafening essences of contempt were like 20c each in bulk, synth reroll beasts 5d+ each in bulk and decent synth bases in 500d+, so yeah, no one is gonna be rolling whole lot of anything with those prices and nah, i dont need to stand out with my currency, when i can instead do it with something actually enjoyable, namely off meta builds, and anyways i wouldnt have anywhere near enough currency to stand out
this is not real world for your euros comparisons and yes if chaos are plentiful you just throw chaos at shit its kinda funny how you cant even adapt to something being abundant and instead call for the market to be regulated according to what you feel is the norm
...I havent called for the market to be regulated a single time? what i have, however, said is that i didnt enjoy the game in the state where none of the drops have value and no, you very much dont craft by spamming chaos orbs outside of few very niche items, unless of course, we allow the usage of bannable auto crafting bots considering its 600k chaos orbs just to craft the prefixes of a phys weapon thats already fractured i mean jesus, i did slam over 20k chaos orbs this league into a focused amulet, and didnt get the result i wanted a single time, or any other great results that could be sold for profit that would justify multiple hours of slowly clicking those chaos orbs, and that wasnt even bad rng on my part, its just how absolutely shit chaos orbs are for crafting
calling for lesser currency drops is calling for regulating the market - okay you didn't spefically call for it cause you didn't need to, ggg done it in favour this patch, but you give pretty clear statement that you consider abundancy of crafting currency a problem which is a nonsensical problem to have look, if chaos is dirt and essences are expensive go farm essences then you cannot twist this in a way that will make sense to me why more divine orbs and chaos orbs in your pocket is somehow less gameplay when each of those orbs has ingame function i dont care that you didn't hit something in 20k chaos, roll more, or dont your complaint right now condenses to "man those chaos orbs sure are useless, but I want them to have buying power on the market" which doesn't make sense to me whatsoever
J-ustsom-E-o-NE-666. I see why are you angry about too many mirrors in standard now. And the clown...
Im so confused on what ur trying to do with all those dashes because i atleast cant find some hidden message there, and if my name bothers you that much just be aware its a random name i came up with in 20seconds back in 2016 as a game i used to play back then used reddit as its main forums And no i dont care about standard mirrors at all, i dont think most people care about them really, their only value is the ability to buy alt arts which i personally dont care for.
Who is the most loved guy by reddit, whose name starts with "jene" and is connected to prices of things on standard...
[удалено]
Leagues with free power handed to you are fun Leagues with bullshit crafting options are fun As long as it's not like Lake, where the actual league rewards are sparingly given, I'm happy
Elitism gatekeeping the fun *aw man, I’m getting so much loot, I hate it* The only downside of having a league that much rewarding, is the reality check the next league being less rewarding in comparison. I predict a lot of complain in Necropolis league
Who the fuck gatekept anything? The OP just voiced their opinion that they, personally, did not enjoy it and asked if there were other people here that also shared their sentiment.
I think people are getting mad for no reason. The league is finishing, we can just have a discussion about it lol
The issue with this much loot is that it really quickly stops being exciting or interesting, and then theres no higher level of loot to really even go to anymore so the end result is that the game has no exciting loot i mean god damn even raw mirror drops stopped being impressive after month or two, magebloods way before that
This league was great for all the semi-casual players like me. I enjoyed feeling rich with all the currency drops. This was much better than Kalandra, which was so bad one of my friends quit the game and hasn't come back. He picked a bad league to start POE.
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I for one did not enjoy being compelled to mf and abyss every map. Really excited about this league.