For skels, yeah, not for zombies though, at least from the builds I’ve seen/used (though I’m far from being good at this stuff). Zombies seem to be your meatshields; you don’t expect a ton of DPS from them. Skels and stuff are your big hitters.
Another community art post. The Einhar and Cassia ones really caught my eye.
New league is Expeditions. I completely missed this part of the announcement so I can’t really comment on it and the Q&A isn’t revealing much. I’ll have to watch the announcement trailer in a bit.
The league is really nerf league. There’s a ton coming, which is not unexpected because of the power creep and it sort of feels like they’ve been trying to figure out how to do it for awhile now. Seems likr the idea is to get eople to not just stack damage gems but use more utility supports, but all that’s coming for now is nerfs to the big damage supports. Sounds like the elague mechanic will not go down the road many have of late by massively inflating health pools as a way to deal with the overall creep.
Flasks are changing dramatically. This is probably good; I see people cuss the flasks mechanic but it’s a great system that’s just long past needing to evolve. Apparently there will be special currency for flasks that rolling it ont he flasks not only generates random properties but either makes the flask trigger automatically based on a condition (e.g. getting ignited) or makes it so that using the flask turns off charge regen but you get boosts to the effect/duration. I didn’t entirely understand this part. Will we be rolling random trigger effects (that sounds horrible) or will it be catered to the type of flask? Not known yet.
I doubt I will play it though. I have come to loathe the current atlas implementation, although there have been a couple of really awesome leagues that came out during it. And I think I am going to need the next overhaul (probably Q4 this year but who knows) to come out to get me back in.
Also, they’re bringing back the battle royale game mode in 15 minutes and for most weekends for the next few months:
Edit: Hmm, Royale seems nice but needs some key bugs fixed.
The nerfs sound like they’re rebalancing a lot of things, but the biggest content rework is Act 1 for now. Sounds like everything is supposed to be more interesting and difficult, countered by the monsters not noticing and attacking you from as far away so that you’re in a more focused battle. They’re promising the same kind of thing for roughly one more act every 3 months going forward.
I just watched this video about the league:
My biggest takeaways:
- Expedition mechanic has you blowing up sites to free mobs/chests. You have some agency about how much you blow up (reminds me of the Legion mechanic). New special splinters/etc, and 4(?) new traders who all use different mechanics. One guy will barter, one guy lets you buy an item and upgrade it a number of times, and more stuff I can’t recall. Oh you can find books that let you go on expeditions where you can fight new bosses. They are introducing a new mechanic called Ward, which is a shield which absorbs your first hit, and is then inactive for 5 seconds. And then it’ll do it again. There are items that transform changes to energy shield into changes to ward so you can play shenanigans there.
- player power nerf and revamp of Act 1 to be more difficult.
- 19 new gems - one per Ascendency. Some of them look crazy. The Summoner one gives you a new pet, the Reaper, who wants to be your only summon - he consumes other summons to get health. There’s also crazy things like a way to modify totems to link more(?) spells, one example shown was a leap slam totem, that does actually jump around. You can now cast a skill that directs ballistae to fire at your target and only fire when you do, so ballista can now be used to focus fire. Lots of interesting gems.
- flask changes as described above, with the goal to do away with flask piano. Flasks will also gain fewer charges in acts 6-10, and even fewer in maps. They want to make flask use more rare and impactful. Some flasks were redesigned. Flasks that remove a condition do not grant immunity unless they actually removed the condition in the first place (so don’t randomly spam the flask).
- triggered skills now use mana for the triggered gems
- battle royale mode
- now 3 tiers of supporter packs, a new higher level one that gives you more stuff!
I could see being in for pogo totem, but this whole rebalance thing is for sure going to take a couple leagues to bake.
What was the brouhaha with a streamer queue?
They were sponsoring various streamers (both usual PoE ones and other big streamers) last league to play the game on launch. Unlike in the past, they gave them the ability to jump the queue to get into the servers under the assumption that (1) the queue would be fast enough for everyone else like it usually is, and (2) that it would be bad if sponsored streamers on the front page of Twitch were not showing gameplay right at launch.
The reason it blew up is that the queue broke and most people were stuck for hours (at least once various coinciding bugs caused them to disconnect and have to run through it again) at first instead of several minutes like usual. They had multiple overlapping issues including a database problem and only a minority of the community got in, but most of the bigger streamers got in. To make it even worse, many of the streamers didn’t know they were jumping the queue, the company thought it was no big deal and just flagged it on their accounts.
Afterwards they admitted it was the wrong way to do things, promised not to do it any more, and within a few days had all (I think) of the queue problems fixed up.
Expedition league launched today!!
In addition to a new league and new mechanics, there are a multitude of changes, including
- 19 new skill gems
- massive nerfs (described by GGG as nerfs so not whining!) to many damage support gems, to make other gems more viable
- retuning of the game to be harder (they have re-balanced Act 1 only at this point.
- lots of other changes, go check the interwebz for details!
I hate to be a whiner, but… making the game harder in Act 1 feels like a really dumb move. I don’t object to generally making the game more difficult but they should have started in Act 10 and worked backwards. In Act 1 you don’t have gear, good skills, mobility, or much of anything. And tell the truth, I feel like the first act was already pretty hard and did not need to be adjusted (Brutus? Merveil? they are not a cakewalk for many players). Try meleeing the dude you have to kill for the medicine chest - it’s brutal. For the record, he killed my player I think 6 times. It’s stupid to make Act 1 punishing for players, it’s not fun to have crappy gear and to get killed by a boss when you’re just starting.
Sounds like yet another case of the developers mistaking the loud minority of devoted, I-only-play-this-game enthusiasts for the majority of their players.
Nah, they’ve just hit the point in any long-running game where mudflation becomes an overwhelming problem and are dealing with it.
Weirdly, they nerfed a number more more/strictly utility gems which seems to fly in the face of getting people to use mostly damage gems. Also, I have a feeling people are mostly going to stick to the usual setups simply because everything is going to be harder and the game is already a one-shot fest in places in end game. Unintended consequences. But we’ll see.
I don’t know that this is true, but it sure seems like GGG may have been too caught up in the PoE2 demo feedback (which was hugely positive) from the last ExileCon, and that’s why they decided to focus on Act I first. I think it’s weird; if the Act I overhaul proves popular it’s going to make Act 2-3 feel flatter for new players. I’m more surprised they weren’t doing at least a couple of acts at a time.
They’ve been talking about needing to do something about power creep for a couple of years now (while continuing to stick to their “let’s power up players ~X% amount every league”).
I’m surprised it took this long to get around to it. I can only guess that they have a timing planned that leads up to the PoE2 launch.
I always assumed they would use PoE2 to cut mudflation, but when you think about it this is smarter-- you want to rip that bandaid off well before the major expansion/sequel, you don’t want that pain associated with what is essentially a major relaunch for PoE.
Now that I’ve completed Act 1 lemme respond to myself in a non-ranty way:: the early game is a bit tougher but I didn’t find Brutus or Merveil that much more difficult. And by that time I had more of my build fleshed out, so their difficulty didn’t feel terrible.
One thing I didn’t mention before was that they’ve revamped the boss encounters, not just made them tougher. A couple got new models and are much better looking. The Brutus encounter now reminds me of the Butcher from Diablo.
I still think they need to do a better job of helping new players through Act 1 - if you know what you’re doing by the time you get halfway thru Act 1 experienced PoE players probably have linked gems and multiple attacks, so they can cope. It’s the newbies that will more likely get destroyed.
In the end I feel they need to ramp down the difficulty of the monsters you fight when you’re below level 5 - the guy on the beach, the one that shoots flame spells on the beach, and the frost guy you kill for the Medicine Chest. The rest of the bosses seemed ok to me.
I’ve also done a few of the Expedition encounters and they are managable at lower levels, if you have some room to run when it gets too heated.
Yeah, those very early bosses have always been some of the hardest - your is non-existent and Lord knows what equipment washed up on the beach for you.
I’d probably be sneaky and do some kind of soft ilvl scaling for just those guys, maybe up through Merveil actually, were I God-Emperor.
Then I’d light like 80% of the layers of the RNG burrito on fire and replace them with something fun ;)
I played last night for the first time in years. I finished act 1, and did a little bit in act 2. It feels better than I remember, but I still feel like Diablo is smoother/more responsive. I’ve been playing a ranger and caught up already with my Templar from the last time I played. I need to watch a guide about the expedition stuff. I don’t know if it is all about clearing the waves and using that artifact stuff to get loot from those people, or if there is something else as well. The ranger feels like a demon hunter to me, especially since I have a ballista totem gem and a fire totem gem. I think I might even have some idea what I’m doing this time with the gems. The skill tree is still daunting to look at, and I’m probably being horribly inefficient.
I have to admit, I’m kind of intrigued. Maybe even enough to come back to the game. Which is funny, because it was already too hard for me, which is one of the reasons I stopped playing it.
You’ve succinctly described 99% of PoE. :)
I’m having too much fun exploring Genshin Impact to dump any time into the early days of the league this time around. I may check it out in a couple weeks once they’ve done the inevitable first big re-balance patch.
Probably a good move @ineffablebob as I have heard the Reaper skill is pretty underwhelming. It’s a 0.95 second cast on a 4 second cooldown. Also it seems the Spectre has no elemental resists, which is… an interesting choice.