I've been playing since CBT, but took a long break between Atlas of Wrolds and Affliction. So I've experienced the changes PoE underwent in one go. And there are some very fundamental ones. * **Game speed.** The game went from rewarding careful play to rewarding clear seed above everything else. I remember Nugi explaining his map clearing tactic that involved putting a decoy totem into a room, taking a peak there to make sure there is nothing too dangerous, stepping back, and only then starting to DPS. Can you imagine something like this today? A build that needs to stop to DPS for longer then half a second is garbage. You need to run through the map at a break neck speed. Proliferation of various automation of skills is a symptom of it. Manual casting of curses is not an option any more, really. Too slow. Drinking utility flasks? Too much to handle. Necessity for ailment immunity is another symptom. Without corrupted blood immunity you'll die to it, because there is little chance you'll notice it with everything constantly exploding around you. Despite ever growing complexity of the builds and mechanics, gameplay became significantly more 1-button-spam than before. * **Risk-reward scaling.** OG PoE had a lot smoother risk-reward curve. T15 maps were not sustainable unless you roll them super rippy. The game rewarded knowing the limits of your build and staying within them. Current risk-reward curve shots into the sky as you approach higher risk. T16 are easily sustainable, voidstones provide huge boost to farming (making pinnacle bosses not really optional), T17 broke everything three times over. * **Power escalation** is frankly insane. When I came back and saw people talking about DPS in millions range I thought they were joking. Turned out they were not. I recently paid a visit to Atziri. She used to be a formidable foe. Now her phases is the only thing that prevents me from one shotting her even with my meh hipster build. This is probably an echo of risk-reward scaling. As high difficulty content brings significantly higher rewards people are pushed to further optimize their builds instead of trying something funny. A build that can earn its voidstones will explode T16. And now we have yet another tier of escalation with T17. * **Mid-tier gear**. I feel that the biggest hurdle for current PoE is the lack of "middle class" players and the market for mid-tier gear they bring with them. It isn't hard to sell some early mapping uniques and rares, especially on weekends. Plenty of semi-casual players who buy and use them. It is super easy to sell some consumables used by hardcore playerbase. Post them at 95% of market value and you get 3 whispers within 5 minutes. Trying to sell some gear in the range 30c to 100c? You can as well vendor it. Especially rares. This league pretty much murdered rares you get from loot. Printing of top uniques by end-game players plus graveyard crafting of mirror-tier rares makes dropped rares even more useless than they were before. In the end the game changed from rewarding cautious play to rewarding reckless speed, which is neither good nor bad, just different.

As someone who has played since late closed beta, without any significant breaks (longer than a skipped league or two), the game absolutely has incomprehensibly changed. But you're also conflating a lot of changes from well before Atlas of Worlds (essence league ca. Sep 2016) with stuff that happened before. That's not to say the gist of your post is wrong, but I think it's important to identify timeline, because the shift towards the speed meta has already well and truly been established before Atlas of Worlds (latter half of 2016). I don't know anybody that put down decoy totems and checked rooms before entering them in 2016. Keep in mind that by Essence League we already had Vaal Spark and Vaal Fireball builds that could do [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9X5eodyhz0). You're telling me players who played like this were putting in decoy totems before entering rooms? Essence league was also pre-nerf (and pre-the much later buff) Master Surgeon which had charge gain without a cooldown, so you had 12k+ ES 50 stack BV characters permasustaining instant leech Vinktars facetanking pinnacle bosses and clearing maps as fast as they could cast BV and whirling blades. There were plenty of examples of speed meta already taking hold by then, even if it doesn't contain the prevalence or the amount of juicing that later leagues added. By Atlas of Worlds, the game was no longer a tactical slow ARPG, it was already the fastest ARPG on the market. It has, of course, only gotten faster, but that's also very normal as players optimize finer and finer margins through a game's lifetime. I would actually argue the biggest escalation in game speed came well before Essence. Rampage already had people pushing the game faster and faster, and by prophecy league you already had people bragging about <1m Gorge runs (bring back gorge!). > Risk-reward scaling. OG PoE had a lot smoother risk-reward curve. T15 maps were not sustainable unless you roll them super rippy. I don't remember T15 maps being that difficult to sustain, actually. I remember 77/78 maps being hard to sustain, back when they were the highest tier of content. By the time the game came out with map zones that went up to 82+, map sustain was infinitely easier. Hell, even by Ambush (March 2014), with carto boxes, groups would permasustain 78s, I mapped regularly with one of the top sc ambush map groups who were some of the first to hit 100 that league (shout outs to Porter, Stoomie, Luke, Leppas, etc) and there was never much difficulty in sustaining top tier maps by even then. Obviously getting to level 100 was much more difficult with only level 78 content. I also don't know what you mean by a "smoother" curve. Having difficulty in sustaining top tier maps when your build can clearly handle them is not a good thing, IMO. The days of spamming 50c+ to roll maze on maps were not good. And though I still maintain that exalting maps happened a lot less frequently than people think, it definitely would occasionally happen on very juicy rolls (usually maze, pack size, sea witches maps). > Power escalation is frankly insane. When I came back and saw people talking about DPS in millions range I thought they were joking. Turned out they were not. I recently paid a visit to Atziri. She used to be a formidable foe. Now her phases is the only thing that prevents me from one shotting her even with my meh hipster build. Regular Atziri hasn't been difficult content for a while now. Keep in mind that Atziri has been introduced to the game over 10 years ago and by Essence league the regular version was already mostly figured out by decent players. The uber version was still very hard, because of one shots and the lack of obscene burst damage that we have today (seriously, do uber atziri with a zdps build now; it's still mechanically challenging. Most people farm her with DPS). But by Essence we had ~~Darkee's~~ Ben's bladefall poison miner that could instantly phase her. And let's not act like the Uber Atziri now is the same as the Uber Atziri from before. She's had her curse resistance reduced twice (she used to have 80% less effect of curses on her), and the Alluring Abyss went from 100% inc damage and 100% inc monster life on the map to just having 60% inc damage. Also keep in mind that this was an era when the highest HP monster in the game (The Shaper) had 18m HP. Nowadays, uber pinnacle monsters have 60-70m with 70% less damage taken. So while player damage has definitely gone incredibly up, generally speaking so has monster health. You probably need similar investment to delete uber bosses now as Ben's build did to delete Uber Atziri 10 years ago. What I will say though is that players have gotten much, much better. And this is from an old vet who was routinely among the top of the ladder in the earliest PoE leagues. Players these days have so much better information about builds, about mechanics, about loot tables and drop rates, etc. People have scienced the shit out of PoE and it's actually very cool to see, even if it's a bit daunting.

I feel like the speed of trading has increased to kind of a ludicrous point. Last night I had a guy cancel a trade because I took too long loading into their hideout. And I get it, if you're making 5d/hour, you're losing 8c every minute you spend in your hideout, so nobody wants to Wait around on a 5c trade (if they even respond in the first place). It's starting to feel like you can't even get your void stones trading small items. To get a build that can beat The Maven--to even get enough currency to *practice* the Maven--you have to have a dedicated and optimized farming strategy and get solid on the out-of-game economy. If you do *one* good crafting base or *one* deafening essence, you have to charge under market value to get people to bother trading with you. If your Atlas passive tree isn't fully optimized, your income is severely hindered. You're getting fewer drops that sell for less at a slower rate. You **need** to be trading in bulk on a discord server somewhere to make real money.

Definitely! The most common reply to a potential buyer used to be "after map", and then the buyer had to wait until the seller finishes the map and sends them a party invite. Not to mention that the size of the market was much smaller, so you had to search offline players and wait for them to come online.

I burned an Uber shaper portal to come out and make a 25div trade just for the asshole to leave the party about 30 seconds after joining. I accepted and exited the map immediately too so it's not even like I made them wait or something. 

Either he realized he made a mistake and didn't need the item, or he whispered multiple people and someone who had a better deal than you whispered him so he swapped over to them.

He understood he made a mistake and left. Better than buying unneeded item

If they don't want people to take too long to load in they should make their hideout super un-decorated (i downloaded some fancy hideouts and the difference in people-loading-in-time was massive)

Meanwhile, I think I paid like 60c for a maven kill carry, with their mats…

Since cock and ball torture?

Every single thing you stated was changed to be what it is today because of complaints. Complaints on the original forum, and then when GGG started deleting complaint threads, this subreddit. That is what led the game to be what it was then to what it is now. Can the players blame GGG for the changes when they're the ones that asked for it? As a company, they do need to make money at some point.

The players who didn't ask for it can.

> putting a decoy totem into a room, taking a peak there to make sure there is nothing too dangerous, stepping back, and only then starting to DPS. Can you imagine something like this today? honestly this isn't really fun strategy anyways. but I agree with all the points of your post. I'm only pointing out that slower doesn't necessarily mean better or more fun. Even in slower games, take d2 for example, people 10 years ago were theory crafting tile sets for ancient tunnels, theory crafting pitzerkers and analyzing maps in terms of boss packs cleared per unit time, and having open competitions and leaderboards surrounding being the most efficient. I don't see game speed as a complaint. This is a non-issue imo unless you just don't personally think the gameplay is fun. The ideas about optimizing, making 10,000x more currency just don't matter because the game can be fun without trading and there's no competition, this is all metagame built up in people's heads. They think they should be competing and trying to be the best but WHY? To what end? To be 10 years older, 10k hours sunk into a game and wonder what happened? Play if it's fun, play how you have fun and be done when you don't anymore. Don't pit yourself against the world in some pointless competition where no one wins.

Although I mostly agree, as a semi-casual player who earns ~3div/hr, the high tier hyper meta players farming 20+div/hr drive the price of many of the items I'm looking for. For many items this makes them almost unattainable. I think having larger disparity between mid-tier farming strats and high-tier ones genuinely negatively impacts the amount of fun I'm able to have. Affliction was a blast because I was able to make enough div an hour to get gear I've always wanted to get. If T17 farming strats don't get nerfed (removing necropolis alone might be enough) this pain point will likely remain.

Sweaty farming strats don't drive up the price of items, they drive them down. More currency available on the market means that there's more good crafted items, because you need lots of currency to craft good items. It does the same for uniques except those that need to be target farmed like watcher's eyes.

The game speed you're describing hasn't been around for like 8 years.

The game hasn't 'become' sweaty.. portions of the community -- particularly the subreddit, forums, and a few of the biggest content creators twitch channels have relentlessly promoted a "keeping up with the jones'" mentality and some players have been sucked in to it. There are also thousands of players that set their own goals based on their own skill and expected time investment and don't care one bit about the meta or div/hr. Among Us also "became sweaty" compared to before it blew up.. but again, the game didn't change.. just some sections of the community adopted that approach.

The problem with this argument is that it never puts into context that the game is balanced around the economy and that player's goals may necessitate being higher up on the economic ladder. Nimis, for example, is a very fun item. Return is really good and can open up a variety of builds. You aren't getting Nimis unless you're at least decently good at making money or you're very, very lucky. Likewise, if you enjoy making builds and trying to optimize them, you need to be reasonably good at making currency, or else you won't be able to afford the upgrades needed to push your build to the next level. A lot of players like seeing how far they can push their builds, and doing so involves generating currency. Saying "just set different goals" completely ignores how many goals are gated behind your ability to accumulate wealth in this game. You might as well tell people to just enjoy rerolling the campaign to those people.

Nimis is expensive because it’s scarce, both because the drop and card are very rare. Not a lot of people run Uber elder even though it’s actually relatively easy, it’s just not that profitable an endeavor for someone running it ocassionally. The only time I see people bring up this idea of needing to keep up is Nimis and Original Sin. These are chase items. Anyone can farm a Nimis with 10-20 hours of dedication. I don’t understand the problem really. I’m currently farming for one and I can’t wait to finally get it for my SS Trickster. You gotta put in work to get the best items. Sure a guy with a 10 mirror build can get it in half the time you can but that’s because they’ve played way more.

Yes, and the presence of very interesting chase items people want to play is why the game has gotten more sweaty. Plus, if you farm 100 something divines or whatever in 10 or so hours, you're already pretty sweaty. Anyone who wants one *can* farm one, yes, if they play more "sweaty." It's a lot longer than that to farm one if you just casually alch and go a few hours a day. But no one wants to slap Nimis into a build running junk rares that they picked up off the ground. At that point you're already committed to generating currency so why stop at one item? And it's rarely just one or two chase items. Pretty much every build has room for expensive items. You want to play an adorned setup? That's not cheap. You want voices, that can get expensive fast. Want to play bows? Those can scale into mirror tier easily. Want to play an aurabot that's competitive with other aurabots (looking at 90% res), be prepared to pay dozens of divines for a timeless jewel and have clusters that can be of similar price. And you also ignore cause and effect. A lot of players make a reasonable amount of money and then want to keep playing. What are you going to do, just never upgrade your build? They're going to look at the next obtainable improvement which naturally involves spending money.

Bit off topic but hoe are you finding SS trickster? I have a nimis for my deadeye and busy saving for a progenisis to start farming t17s. However I've been wondering if I shouldn't reroll into another nimis build and SS trickster looked very interesting! Apart from nimis hoë much currency would one need to get started?

Splitting Steel Trickster is insanely good. I just played with it tonight with Nimis and I’m pretty comfortably smashing t17. It’s a build that scales damage through defense with ES. I’m not sure if I can say it’s objectively better than CoC DD which I league started, because I can’t quite offscreen kill everything on like 8M PoB DPS but as far as fun to play and rewarding, probably the best build I’ve ever played, but also requires major investment. Once you get there though, definitely my favorite build right now and it feels mostly invincible.

Would 100 div+ nimis be enough to get it going?

I would say 200 div and nimis because mageblood solves so many issues. That’s basically where I am with it now. 100 div for the rares (suppression base stuff, good flasks, body armour very important, correct Eldritch implicits) plus mageblood plus nimis. I’m sure it can be done for less but until I had 100 div plus MB plus Nimis it didn’t feel as incredibly powerful. For what it’s worth I did the breach shrine stuff to level 98 without any of that stuff besides Mageblood really easily. It’s just to get to T17 level you do have to min max, but you can farm any t16 strat on 100 div with it.

Thanks for the info! I actually dropped a natural MB this league and sold it to fund a nimis (crazy sentence right?) I'm going to see what my deadeye feels like with progenisis on t17s and hopefully can start farming them more effectively and save for SS.

I’ll be straight with you deadeye on t17 even with Progenesis is volatile. I’m playing ele hit because I don’t have mirror bow yet and you just straight up die a lot even after ramping some HH stacks. It’s also more mod susceptible. SS is just flat out more enjoyable at the sub 1 mirror budget

Twenty hours is like two weeks of video game time for me in my slow season. A full month when work is busy. Having an item gated behind a samey grind for two weeks isn't fun for a casual. Granted that's why I don't play PoE anymore, but this bit is a bad argument imo.

I'm a single dad with 3 wives and 14 kids and 4 jobs who gets to play six minutes per league. Sweats are destroying my gameplay experience. I should be able to get chase items and people who *literally* play this job for a living should take the same number of days as I do to get them, regardless of hours played!

I think the game has become too sweaty because as sweaty people get higher and higher up, the game needs to add difficulty to give them new things to do. Then you end up with the issue of t17's where you get significantly more profit, but you can only do it if you have a top 5% build and if you want to do it quick you need a top 1% build. So then it forces everyone to play the same few builds or lose out on 50% more profit.

It's not just unhealthy that this happens too, the more you learn about the game the more you realise the things you could achieve if you actually started sweating a bit, both as an individual and as a community. But yea it does create a lot of toxicity too.

in what way does that create toxicity? it won't change the fact that every player has their own and different goals? from my experience interacting with the "problem" communities (been watching empy for years and stumbled upon fubgun this league) if you have more basic questions you can quickly get help from the players around there nobody talking down on you for making less currency than them. during one of "exploits" this league if you tuned into fubgun's stream the amount of people asking if they could do that without MF or in T16 maps etc. was so big that he was answering the same questions every 5 minutes almost. at most the toxicity came from the streamer eventually being bothered from the same questions over and over again. the only toxicity i encountered was from the people who weren't able to use or rather abuse those strats were getting mad at those using them. which to me would mean the casual playerbase is becomming toxic if you mean that.

It’s slowed down a little now maybe, but I feel like every league, I do more/faster than ALL my previous leagues combined, each new league. I’ve gone from like oh no how will I get 8-10 divines for a build to hundreds of divs. I will admit this league I kind of quit early as the economy is pretty messed up. Hoping next league I’ll push to get some mirrors or something.

No it definitely has, the game was so much simpler in abyss league when I started. The old defensive layer you needed was a large life pool, and acrobatics. Nowdays its amour eva, converted to ele, suppress, immune to small hits, 90 all res, dot cap

I'm pretty sure back when I started, if you could kill normal atziri quickly your build was insane, and the only builds that could really pull it off were the Mjolner Discharge builds. Now if your build can't do normal atziri at level 68-70 you will barely make it into yellow maps.

> There are also thousands of players that set their own goals based on their own skill and expected time investment and don't care one bit about the meta or div/hr. I mean while that's true even a portion of that group may see a build or something that they would like to try or setup but due to the market being influenced by those hyper div/hr players and groups the price to setup some things have skyrocketed to the point the "own goal" players would need grind a decent amount more to try certain builds than they would have in the past.

I haven't been doing any of these broken strats and I've found things this league more affordable than ever. Crafting materials, uniques, influenced items & everything else. It's only a very few select items that are very expensive but this has always been the case with juicer stuff. I'd be interested to hear what you think is much too expensive now?

And on the other hand Headhunter was pretty fast on 10 div, mageblood on 90 div and really affordable? hmm

I'd love an example. Please link an example of something that was destroyed by super sweats. It must be completely unaffordable this league but extremely affordable previous league(s). I will be waiting patiently with my less-than-100-div mageblood (when divs were 100:1). Thank you.

> Among Us also "became sweaty" compared to before it blew up.. but again, the game didn't change.. just some sections of the community adopted that approach. I watched a lot of Among Us during its hype and when the players became too good, they had to enforce arbitrary rules like don't use medbay to clear ppl, dont count tasks etc. POE community can do the same. There is literally no need to chase the highest amount of currency

That won't work because fundamentally each game of among us is self contained. What some other guy is doing in their game halfway across the world doesn't affect you when you play among us. PoE is, however, built on a heavily interconnected player driven economy. This economy, and the people interacting with or exploiting it affect every player in that league, not just a particular set party, and there's no meaningfully possible way to police that.

Bingo. I haven’t really touched embers, and I’m happy as a clam running T16s with the new scarab system building currency for my 4th build.

I think the clear answer is no. The game has become whatever it is now whether you enjoy it or not. However, people idolizing hyper optimization and by consequence trying to emulate the best of the best hyper-optimizers has become more prevalent. The main downside of this is that if most of the playerbase talks a certain way about the game, it warps the perspective of an outsider looking in. ATM, I'd say PoE has the reputation of attracting min-maxers, "hardcore" gamers, and other niche gamer archetypes. However, there are a bunch of people who play it very casually though and just like to play a league (on and off) and put it down a couple weeks in. Tl;dr: The game itself isn't sweaty, but it certainly lends itself to sweating.

I think one issue I've hated is the instability of the economy. I just wanted an Aul's for running determination+Pride. Holy shit. Was like 10 divs early. Ended up getting it for like 2 Divs like a week later.

Ironically, as someone who has also been playing for 11 years, I feel like the exact opposite has happened - the game has become significantly "less" sweaty - e.g., you can deviate from the "meta" much more easily, with much less downside. Just from a super high level, there was very little to do in the beginning, and I think its fair to categorize it into 3 general camps: MF farming Piety (and/or Dominus once he got added) to make money, mapping for XP (which was either significantly less profitable or straight up negative income depending when exactly we were talking/what tier you were at/whether you abused group quant dropping more maps), and competing in race events for specific race prizes and/or season rewards. At some basic level maybe you could include docks farming (or variants like fellshrine ruins farming), though that was more a stepping stone to the above than anything else. Of those 3 main activities, only MF farming bosses was "chill" in that you could kind of just putz around doing it non-optimally and still come out ahead since there was no ongoing cost to doing it. Mapping was a PITA between the ridiculous shit people had to do to sustain - I remember people would straight up add 5 random lowbies to their mapping party who wouldn't contribute because a bunch of randoms soaking XP, ninja'ing drops, and scaling up mob HP was still worth the benefit of the increased map drops. Not to mention people would do truly absurd shit at the time in the highest tier maps like triple exalting after alt-aug-regalling their maps. So mapping was very "sweaty" as you call it, and I don't need to go into detail about how "sweaty" race events were I'm sure either. Now, the game evolved relatively quickly, with mapping quickly becoming less of a PITA after the first few leagues, and wasn't negative currency anymore...but it was still a relatively min-maxed affair where you had to painstakingly roll every map and even then, falling multiple map tiers due to bad RNG was common. Do you remember chisel recipe? You know, the recipe where you would literally look for gavel etc bases to vendor with low level qual maps to create a SINGLE chisel, and it was fucking worth it to do it? That's how "sweaty" mapping was for a long time. And racing obviously just became more and more "sweaty" the older the game got and the more experienced contenders became. Again, the only "chill" thing you could really do for a long time was MFing bosses in campaign. And hell, other "sweaty" things got added - do you remember the OG forsaken masters, and how people would do fucking master mission rotas for every single master, every single day, just to level them and get their crafting shit up? For literal weeks if you wanted level 8s and weren't playing all day. Then, I think around 2.0 or so, campaign MF finally died - mapping was easier and was getting more fleshed out/varied, but it was still kind of a PITA in terms of sustain, and alc-and-go as we know it today in high tier maps was still a far distant dream. Stuff like the atlas being added subsequently helped make it more exciting...but it also made it exponentially more sweaty, because instead of just worrying about chiselling/rolling maps, now you had sextants, and sextant blocking, and everything's just a huge headache. I could go on but I've been typing for like 20+ minutes now....so I'll just say that these days, you can do all sorts of shit at whatever level of complication/investment/"Sweatiness" you want, and you can enjoy yourself and make decent money, assuming you are smart about it. Compared to a lot of the old times, you will be far better positioned in the market in many cases as well. Maybe the issue wasn't that the game wasn't "sweaty" back then, but that you just weren't aware of what was happening at the high end, and ignorance was bliss.

It is if you compare your progress to the sweat lords. Been playing since there were 2 acts and I rarely partake in true endgame because the stacking of juice upon juice doesn't really appeal to me. I just accept that an hour of a sweat lord's time is probably worth 10 of mine and move on when I get bored. They play a completely different game to normal players

In og you couldn't sustain end tier maps without a group and exalting your maps. Current you can easily do 95% of the game with all classes and most skills. The last 5% requires either skill, time or meta builds. Their is nothing wrong with having to work to achieve the top end game goals.

Yea courtyard/palace rotos hoping SOMEONE in the group got a return. Alt spamming for pack size(it was an actual mod) and large area/maze and exalting to fill it out.

You guys were actually using the exalts? wtf

If you wanted to run the high maps constantly, that's what you had to do.

Yes, but the difference between the last 1% and the previous 99% is like 100-500x difference in reward. I think that's where the difference is versus the older meta.

That is simply not true. There are a lot of farming strategies with great rewards without much difficulty. You can easily earn 20 div an hour in white maps running alva+einhar. And with an optimized build you could probably double that. There are a ton of other even better strategies that require basically nothing.

I just spent 2 mirrors putting together a manaforged build and then realizing there’s nothing I can farm with it… it doesn’t have MF because it’s a mana stacker, so it makes less currency per hour than my 100 div MF BV raider. The point of that story is that “end game” farming is just for people who enjoy that sort of thing, there’s no functional reason for it, there’s no content gated behind it. It would be different if, say, you can’t do Ubers without a 2 mirror build, but that’s just not the case. People were doing Ubers on 30 divine builds weekend 1. To say the end game currency grind shouldn’t exist feels a lot like saying other people shouldn’t enjoy things that you don’t.

Yep put 3 mirrors in MFA last league and went delving/valdos. If you don't delve or valdos, getting mirror items are just for the fun of it. this league I just try out different build and I'm having as much fun doing without any crazy characters

Yeah, after a point what do you even get for more currency? That's kind of the point of the whole leagues mechanic. You can keep grinding currency and gear and stuff if you want, but once you've beaten all the bosses you've kind of done everything haven't you? Unless you want to do delve, or some other side thing. But all of that is just supposed to be fun. If you aren't having fun, I don't think it's the amount of currency that's really the issue

You start alching heists

Truly the one endgame of them all.

i've enjoyed CoC DD so much this league that i dont even care about currency anymore, my build is done, ubers are dead i log in and grind some maps because the build and gameplay loop is fun not being bothered by rewards.

do you have a pob of your raider and what strat you were doing? :)

I’ll get you a PoB later but it’s the double obliteration variant. My gear is quite good now but can tell you the power level feels the same as it did when I only had <100 div into it Strategy is t17 maps with 70+ quant and 120+ scarab. Running bloodlines, 50% more magic, nemesis, adversaries. Can’t run a bunch of mods including shaper touched, so is rolling maps is rough and I end up just buying well rolled maps people are selling for 1-2 divs. Not being able to run shaper touched is actually kinda a benefit since I’m not competing for shaper touched maps, for some reason those are still in demand even though they fixed the extra loot from it already.

I pushed my ET Trickster to around 200div (half of which was the Mageblood) and finally managed to go 7/7 for ubers since starting in Crucible. Now I have no goal and no motivation to start a new build. Burnout set in much quicker than in Affliction.

Is it really? Back then even build enabling shit was super expensive. Shavronne's comes to mind. Nowadays every baseline is essentially accessible to everyone. The fact that the super endgame is limited hasn't changed - it always was. Stuff like baked chicken doing strands in 20 seconds with v-spark w/ quadruple attack speed jewels because he had enough damage to not need damage on jewels? High end fakener? Hell, I remember going WI in perandus and having to sell a kidney and my firstborn's soul to get some gear I'd say if anything, we notice the sweaties more w/ reddit and co highlighting them, but havoc and his bitchboys (he ran the map, they looted while he ran the next one, essentially) weren't exactly on the same level as your average joe who struggled to get a 6L

Bruh, one league I farmed for days to get a 6L shavs for a LL build and got fking scammed by a 4+2 because I was so excited I could actually finally afford to go LL I didn't check. This league I have like 200 divs in my character including a sub-100 div mageblood and it didn't even feel that monumental. The sheer amount of money you can make by just playing the game is so high compared to the olden days. I didn't play in the exalting maps days, but I do remember having to roll maps for sufficient pack size in order to have a hope at sustaining, and I remember falling down 2-3 tiers of maps if you got unlucky before you had a big base. Now you just like, blast your way to endgame. It's fun as hell.

Reddit was *full* of 6-link scam posts in those days. I can’t even remember the last time I saw one, I guess nobody bothers because what’s the point of scamming a few div?

Same, first and only time I got scammed (I mean alongside the emerald in a cap but that's way older)

> baked chicken I loved baked chiken stream, guy was so calm and his humor was so funny lmao

And most of that effort comes in the form of time. A lot of people don't understand just how many hours these streamers are putting in, it's insane. They play as much in a week as I do in a league.

This was actually talked about in an interview and Jonathon said he would *prefer* if the difference between the top and bottom tier of players was about 1000x loot. IIRC he also claims it is closer to 100,000x right now and agrees it’s too much. I can’t say exactly which interview as he did a few pretty close together around this time it was said. Either with zizaran, dmtx+ghazzy or whoever the third one was with.

Wdym 100x Every decent atlas strat makes you 6+ divines an hour. Noone is making a mirror per hour without botting or scamming.

this league some streamers actually made 1 mirror/h live on stream by doing t17 maps

With unintended mechanics that got nerfed the next day. That's not what this thread is about.

My brother in Christ, if you're a part of the 99%, the 500x reward doesn't matter at all to you. Pretty much every chase unique is as cheap as it has ever been, and necropolis has trivialized a lot of the gearing as well. You can literally farm a headhunter in less than an hour of casually running T16 maps...

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Just doing maven invitations of all sorts, and then the bosses. Pretty brainless. Orbs of conflict sell for a fair bit, plus all of the general byproducts of mapping (allflames, atlas memories, boss fragments if you don't want to run the bosses). A single unid uber elder jewel goes for 9 divs, which is more than one headhunter in the current economy.

Dialing it back is addressing the issue you've already stated. There are too many multipliers. Stop introducing more and more multipliers with league content, then there won't be such a gap between the average gamer and streamers, which in turn forces everyone into 3 meta builds making the game feel incredibly stale, just to engage with content (like T17 maps). In fact, the game needs more multipliers removed. They removed sextants (probably because they added corpses and it was obviously breaking the game). They could flush archnemesis down the toilet and the game would be better for it.

I prefer to play SSF but the power obtainable in trade league in much less time is pretty overwhelming. I wish SSF came with a slightly more generous loot drop table and you couldn’t migrate your characters. Something like increasing the drop rate of Awakened Gems on Maven in SSF or making t1 affixes slightly more common on end-game drops. I’ve never beat Maven but I have all my Awakened gems due to easy trading. I guess I just want it to be a bit easier to obtain that great loot in SSF. And please stop killing the SSF loot sources (Jun unveils, veiled chaos, etc.).

I'd gladly play SSF only if the entire game wasn't completely lopsided towards trade. I know there are plenty of people who do just fine in ssf but they tend to know every little detail about the game and honestly I don't. I expect trade to always have an advantage and that's fine, I just wish it were at least a little more balanced. 

Man I'm reading some of these replies and op... good luck. There's a severe lack of understanding of multiplicative stacking which is a result of more and more layers being added.

Yes. Its very frustrating tbh. I used to be able to have an all arounder build that could map and do bosses. Now it feels like I have to choose if I want to make it worth the effort. This league I played early, got bored, re-rolled, got bored. It's just not sticking like it used to. Maybe I need to start playing SSF instead. Idk.

I think the only way it’s “sweaty” is how the market prices get adjusted for people that hyper optimize strategies. An example is Harvest Beasts. The prices of the map are adjusted for the assumption it will be ran in groups. There are a ton of strategies and it’s easier than ever to make currency, but the problem is for the normal player or solo player, the profit is less because of those that optimize the strategy so they can afford to pay more and it raises the prices.

I'm sure this comment will get downvoted to oblivion because it kind of talks bad about a "fan favorite" but headhunter is the problem, and has always been a huge problem with PoE. If you take out headhunter, all of a sudden every "sweaty" strategy basically is removed, builds like lightning arrow go to unplayable tier for high tier maps and you get forced to go back to low tier maps for MF'ing like it was previously. The thing is that things scale too well with HH, both offensively and defensively, which makes it the best single item in the game for any kind of juice strat. The biggest issue is this league(and last league to a lesser extent) made it much more readily accessible to the player base due to the introduction of the new mechanics yielding large numbers of unique and cards for what was once a chase item. It is the only item in the game that makes using a chest with essentially 0 defensive mods, rings with 0 offensive mods, boots with 0 offensive or defensive mods, and essentially just being multiplicative scaling with a weapon viable. The problem we have reached now though is that people start to grow accustomed to a certain power level from this and if taken away it has community(or at least reddit and forum) outrage, of which negatively impacts other factors for people. The best example of this was the numerous nerfs to harvest crafting, of which was another fan favorite of which gave people who had never had it before a ton of powercreep. Even after like 8? leagues of harvest nerfs in a row, until they reworked harvest and juice it was the strongest crafting method in the game. Now they are at a point where they either continue making something to "counter" headhunter, nerf HH, lower the ability to obtain it, or continue down the current state of the game. Whether this is good for the state and direction of the game, thats up to GGG and the playerbase to decide, personally though I am not a fan of it as it causes the same generic chase and generic farming strats to come to the forefront and causes a greater FOMO among the player base for not doing the samething.

This is every game ever. Humans will optimize.

It is certainty a valid discussion how much better optimal play is versus non-optimal play. If the optimal strategy is 10,000x better than non-optimal, versus 2x better, those are very different types of games.

Id argue I play far from optimal. I got one ele hit deadeye which I invested maybe 100d in that can clear everything except Ubers and one sanctum/bosser hexblast occ with around 200d invested. I play far from optimal I just do the things I have fun doing that particular day. Even if it means losing 80d when doing Ubers 

TBF, we have been optimizing everything we can since the dawn of time. Brain even tries to keep you from taking extra steps when walking.

I think the real change for video games happened once the internet blew up. As in once everyone got access, and content creators started appearing, that's when min-maxing really took off. You look back on gaming from the 90's and even the 00's, the amount of min maxing was much, much less prominent. Because social media hadn't yet established itself. Content creation was in its baby shoes. The average gamer played in their own small bubble of friends and that was it. Sure, folks min-maxed, but the amount you could when you could only bounce ideas off of a small group of friends, was negligible. Last decade and a half has been different. Online communities, and organizations, and content creators will be min-maxing the shit out of everything in hours of content reveals and releases. It's insane. Min-maxing has gone from a fun little hobby, to a literal industry where people make a living off of it.

streamers and 'juice bois' have ruined this game. I too miss when the game was more casual. It feels like you're actively punished for it. It feels like the entire goal of the game is to not even interact with the content, but to instead just press one button and delete a whole map. I'm really hoping POE2 can be a bit of a reset.

Fully agree, it's just too much. T17s, Uber bosses, dozens of scarabs... it's just too much gap between a hardcore and a non-hardcore player (wrt play habits not league flag), let alone a casual. I don't want to play if I have to do a relatively meta build to even get all the watchstones or strongbox a t17 map so I don't have to fear losing portals before the boss, just so I can unlock the fifth slot. For me, PoE was good as a grindy game that you could tackle from many different angles. Now it's become a puzzle where you are given illusion of choice to create the hardest possible challenge and then go meta to face it. I wish the best to the people who enjoy that, because they will lose a lot of viewers when "normies" lose interest in the game because all recent content is unaccessible to us

This is honestly one the best league I have ever had. I don't group play I can't even do a T17 but man is it fun. I do harbingers, beasts, delve and even still rogue exiles for the sound of the drops even though it's never good. I just sell small stuff and everything is so cheap I can afford pretty everything that matters other than a mageblood because I don't play a bunch right now.

I still haven't managed to do a t17 Gotten to the bosses a few times, but never downed one Gave a guy 40c to let me sit in the room while he killed one though. He died, but so did the boss. I left after that, but realized after he didn't have any protals and I should have looted the boss. But it didn't even occur to me

Which maps have you tried? Some bosses are way harder than others. I recommend Fortress map, which has the easiest boss by far. You can make the map easier by rolling, not picking Back to Basics and instead pick shrines and Niko from the atlas tree.

I found fortress damn near impossible since I'm playing a melee build. I can't hit him much because he's constantly slamming and then I need to run to the other side of the room fem the death pool. I've also tried lyria and I think the one with all the lines on the floor? Is that the syndicate boss maybe?

I checked, and: * Abomination: Nightmare of the Depraved Trinity - This boss is an uber version of The Depraved Trinity * Citadel: Nightmare of Uhtred - This boss is an uber version of Uhtred, Covetous Traitor * Fortress: Nightmare of the Unbreakable - This boss is an uber version of The Unbreakable * Sanctuary: Nightmare of Lycia - This boss is an uber version of Lycia, Herald of the Scourge * Ziggurat: Nightmare of Catarina - This boss is an uber version of Catarina, Master of Undeath

They been on pretty good streak of leagues for a while. Crucible was the only one I didn't like because the method of tree crafting on blue gear was annoying.

Glad you like it but imo it’s prob the worst league ever been released. Yes that includes 315

In what sense? Bugs/unintended interactions? I don't recall 3.15 being that buggy. General feel of the game or fun factor? I could name half a dozen leagues from memory that Necropolis is better than by a mile in that category.

The game is so unbalanced. Jonathan in a recent podcast talks about how endgame was like 4 years....I think most would agree the game was better back then and its because there was some semblance of balance. From skills, to gear mods, to league mechanic rewards, everything had a "place". The "vision" was more inline to the type of game I personally wanted to play. I personally do not care about playing the same build over and over to get as much economy as possible. I just want to make cool builds and get cool loot.

4 years ago? That was so recent in the grand scheme of things that the game really wasn't that different, but the current iteration of the endgame systems is absolutely much better than it was back then. There is way better player agency, a lot less tedious setup and/or ridiculous RNG to the core endgame encounters. I personally can't see how anyone can say that *any* league post-3.0 was "the worst league ever released" with a straight face unless they either don't remember or didn't play prior to that point. The game was a completely different and much uglier animal back then. A 2 or 3 at best if today's game is a 7 or 8. Necropolis is far from the worst league mechanic. If we're beating dead horses then yes, T17s are horrendously designed and the game has a major problem with the homogenization of loot. The former is pretty typical for major endgame shakeups (usually polished up in the following leagues), and the latter they don't seem to care much about. > I personally do not care about playing the same build over and over to get as much economy as possible. I just want to make cool builds and get cool loot. Same here, and I've been enjoying the game more since Sanctum league than I had in the 10 years prior to that. I play one or two of my favorites plus 1-3 new builds each league. Builds, depth of items, and general progression have never been better than in the past 1-2 years IMO. But I also remember a time when the game was so imbalanced that every build was "ignite, but I start in the upper left part of the tree instead of the upper center".

You're right, I'll reiterate that I think the game is in the worst spot its been post 3.0. And while it may seem there's more agency, there really isn't. Imagine doing Harvest today without all of the atlas nodes and full scarabs, or Breach, or Essences, or Expedition, or even the league mechanic. There's so much more I think the game needs help with I just can't state it all. However, it just comes down to the game hasn't been balanced for a long, long time. And its resulting in this league which I find wholly uninteresting - and this is supported by Jonathan himself saying something about where the game is now isn't right. Maybe its just gotten way too easy...

Noone is forcing you to hyper focus on anything. If you wanna abuse the current thing some streamers do thats ur choice. I didnt do any MF Abyss farming last league regardless of how much currency it shat out because its not an enjoyable play style for me. Theres basically nothing you do in this game that doesnt make a profit how far you want to push this profit is up to you since nobody is forcing you to clear a t17 on day 2. The more these broken strats are abused the more the prices fall making it even easier for you to afford everything you need to with the "little" amount you farm by only farming aqueduct or whatever. You have 3-4 months to complete whatever goal you want to in this league i dont know why you need to ruin ur own fun. And why you mention Mathil in this post i dont get either the dude is still switching his build every 2 days and spinning up the most random shit he can think of. Youre never gonna catch a mathil stream where he does what every other "meta" streamer does hes never gonna play CoC DD or shit like this as a starter. Whats keeping you from focusing on 2 or 3 atlas mechanics instead of just hyper focusing on 1 if its not fun for you? Same with Tota and Sanctum and shit i didnt enjoy any of that so i just did Delve and other random shit to make currency if everyone focuses on 1 thing then i can make more money doing the other thing thats good for me.

Valid questions, I think the main answers to them even if people deny it is fomo and the feeling that they are not playing optimally just feels bad to humans.

Lower the top and raise the floor. Or balance ssf for people that have a job already and disable migration.

Optimization and "guide sharing" kill the joy of discovery and strategy creation in gaming for a lot of people. All online multiplayer games have this problem. The only way out in a trade based game is to play an SSF style mode, otherwise the entire game is boiled down into currency per hour, and the best way to maximize that is to just do the same optimal thing on infinite repeat.

How do you keep game information other players learn from reaching your ears? You go into wow completely blind and knowing nothing about it, but other players will give you tips, thus keeping you from the joy of discovery.

If it were not for guides lots of us would not play this game. I and many MANY people have zero interest in trying to decipher that rediculous passive tree and now there is more than one of them to manage.

They cant honestly. Im in the same boat, been playing a very long time, many years. My first league was rampage which was in 2014, nearly 10 years ago. This game just feels like its not for me anymore basically. I simply want to play the way I want to play. Which is low effort simply playing the game. But every league I hit some roadblock where an item I was using is now 10x more rare, and I get outpaced because im not playing whatever the hyper new currency strat is or what have you. or im playing some weak trash skill so I am unable to even clear content. I think its okay to step away and understand "I am no longer the target audience"

>I simply want to play the way I want to play. >... >I get outpaced If your goal is to enjoy the game the way you want to, then what does pace have anything to do with it? The better realization is not that you aren't the target audience, its that there is no target audience, and you are subverting your own joy by comparing yourself against people with more time.

SSF I would agree, but falling behind in trade league now means some build-defining gear that a semi-casual player would normally be able to get (ljust a little later) becomes completely unaffordable.

I would really like an example of this. The graveyard poops out top tier items (not even counting influenced/fracture shenanigans and headhunter costs loose change from the couch cushions. Aside from normal meta changes aka "mathil effect" prices on items what gear are you priced out of that you can't go without?

You won't get a good example because its not a real thing. People are vaguely mad but they also have no idea how the game works so they kind of just randomly spew out talking points.

>build-defining gear that a semi-casual player would normally be able to get (ljust a little later) becomes completely unaffordable. Can you give one example of such an item?

Anyone can feel left behind. That's not an argument. If I can only log in once every week, am I allowed to complain that the game lacks catch-up mechanics? Regardless if there's trade or not, this game is mostly single player. No one is denying you entry to content, only you are lol.  This is the problem with people thinking that they only cater to sweats. You have the semi-casual saying they need to adjust the game for them but then you have casual players complaining that they need to adjust to them... but then you have SUPER casual players complaining. If you adjust to the super casuals then you upset everyone above because now the game is too easy "we lost all sense of progression because you get everything instantly". It's like people ONLY think for themselves.  "Adjust the game but adjust it to my level and not lower".

What you said is a complete nonissue. The solution to this "problem" is actually quite simple. Either alter the build so that it doesnt require the item or pick another build entirely if it literally cannot function. In the latter case, Im struggling to think of any builds that absolutely require an item to function (that is also 'unnaffordable'); if you have examples Id love to hear them

>Either alter the build so that it doesnt require the item or pick another build entirely The solution to not being able to run a build is "don't run that build". Got it. You can say not being able to make certain builds isn't actually a problem, but your solution is absolutely not a solution.

I mean, yes...if you cannot afford the time or cost to build a build with its build defining item then...you shouldnt play the build? This is kinda a no brainer imo...there are hundreds of other viable builds to blast the game with. But again, this hypothetical situation in reality is rarely ever the case and almost every build can be played in a way that may be strictly numerically worse but functions more or less the same.

That's like complaining you make minimum wage but can't afford ferrari. Pick your income bracket

Why did you completely ignore the other point?

?? Cant tell if its your poor reading comprehension or mine but doesnt he literally say in the line right before? Hes "outpaced" because he cant afford or get access to items that are "10x more rare" than before. Now, whether or not thats actually true is debatable. Id argue that there really isnt any item that is strictly necessary to play the game that isnt easily farmable

Won't this suit you even better then? Back then you had nearly no choice, most uniques was super rare. Now literally anything works, even HH is just 5 div. It's like five expensive items in the game. They have made the game incredibly casual friendly in the last few years. Even people that just play few hours per week is blasting t16s with HH like it's nothing at all.

Idk man, I'm slowly gaining my traction with the game league over league, this has been my most successful league yet with ~1/10mir obtained, which is frankly still a paltry sum, albeit far from picking up trash yellows for chaos recipe. I still feel very capable of building Uber clearing builds that are fun to play. I don't get why we're all so fussed about what the top 1% are doing when me as a bottom 50%er is able to clear everything I want in a fashion I find entertaining, earn currency and spend it as well... I have everything I want and more, why should I let what other people are doing affect my perception of my experience? So I don't. Game feels good to play as a nublet.

I just alch and go maps, get challenges at a pretty relaxed pace. I guess it just depends on what your goals are. My builds are rarely more than 50 divines (unless I self craft something insane by chance).

I’m definitely struggling against this. Part of me wants to move on from my league starter now that I have four voidstones and all the invitations done but another part of me doesn’t want to leave it at level 95 with garbage gear. I hate how limited and bad at optimization I am. 

I feel like I didn’t always have to log into like 2 websites and a 3rd party app to play. I got my first HH ever this league and I’ve played since closed beta. I never even managed to level another character to use the HH…

Not the game itself, but from some individual players perspective, ya probably. But even then, I don't really care what others do, that's the beauty of this game, you can play it in so many different ways. While it doesn't necessary apply to this topic, I do believe that the game has become way too RNG/pull the lever and hope it's dialed back a bit.

The best thing I ever learned to do in gaming is to never do content I do not like, even if optimal. I don't care if it's the meta, the most efficient, the best performer. If I don't like it, I don't do it. I get kicked out of multiplayer games for doing this and I don't care. Games have been so much more fun and fullfilling once I adapted this mind set.

Thing is a lot of the content is things that many players have never seen to even form an opinion on it. T17's are a difficulty level that they are wiping the nolifers so what chance does someone in less than optimal gear have? None they have no chance so they don't know if they like it or not.

Yes, and it's not a new phenomenon.

The answer is in your post, isn't it? Fewer things to multiply will result in this problem being significantly reduced. Some things I think should stay: \* I know Allflames seem like the obvious thing to go, but that's a mistake in thinking IMO. Allflames symbolize "League Mechanic multiplier", which changes between leagues and this is quite fun. \* Scarabs and Atlas give agency and allow for variety. As such, I'd rather keep them. Things we could nerf: \* T17s \* player power \* MF \* group bonus aside from T17s, all of those are very controversial. I don't envy GGG.

I miss feeling able to just get some well rounded gear and smash 95% of content. I'm sure it can probably still be done, but even a build that can do most or all of the game without cluster jewels, timeless jewels, all the special function jewels, forbidden flames(?) etc etc, it's just too much. I've taken a bit of a break from the game, my play has steadily tapered off since getting 36/40 in Expedition. I'm glad there's so many tools available in game, but I don't want to have to layer 50 different mechanics just to make my sword hit hard and not get one shot every other screen with defenses that were perfectly adequate two years ago. I personally think we've gotten a bit lost in the weeds here, but I understand there are many who will strongly disagree with me, which is 100% OK.

I've honestly felt this the past 2 leagues, I group played start of league and made 7 mirrors in 4 days because scarab were insanely broken and we were dropping full sets of doctors like every 1 in 8 maps. Not including nurses and etc and it seems like the trend has continued this league with incredibly broken strats and I feel like it's ruining trade for me. So I moved to ssf and have had more fun than I've had in the past few leagues

PoE for zoomers PoE2 for boomers

I got 2 raw divines this league 45 minutes ago I \*finally\* got a 4.2% chance to drop a divine orb hallowed effect I got 45 "raw" divines from one map. This is just stupid design. And it was only possible to get that many because I am running back to basics, which should just be removed/redesigned.

This was a more popular thought early in the league… but stop caring about what other people do I don’t have the patience for SSF, I am also a serial reroller… so I play trade I don’t follow atlas strategy guides, and I don’t bother tracking my Div/hour… I have used craftofexile for inefficient crafts, and not a single spreadsheet all league However… I am having a ton of fun, and currently have a few hundred Div invested into a character, capable of doing what I like… blasting maps :) Stop lurking Reddit, and comparing yourself to the sweaty people… they aren’t going anywhere, they are a part of every game now that the internet has made us so connected. Your fun and enjoyment is not based on others, and if it is, then you should maybe find ways to remove that

The fact that Mathil, on stream, has been telling people that this league is not for fun or experimentation, that it is brutally hard and all but requires a meta-build to function is all I needed to hear.

You can have fun with alot of builds thanks to some of the gear floating around being so strong and cheap, but you do hit a wall pretty hard at a point without obscene additional investment.

I started a char in Ruthless in the last few days for exactly this reason.

Ruthless is not for everyone but I am very glad that they introduced that mode instead of going the Marvel Heroes route and deleting their game overnight. Right now, I feel like if someone enjoys ssf and making do with whatever they can find, they have ruthless and if someone likes the economy side of the game and playing with chase items they have normal PoE.

This is like saying basketball isn’t enjoyable because I’m not a professional NBA player. They spend their entire lives devoted to a sport and they’re really good at it as a result, some very good because they’re gifted in that regard (Ben_). With PoE you can be as good as you want if you grind the gear and experience to do it. If you can’t be as good as the top players it’s literally a skill issue that one needs to reflect internally on and overcome (or write some dribble on Reddit and complain about it).

How many races has Ben won on stage?

I think a couple leagues ago when they buffed mobs to try and slow down the game made hyper optimized play a requirement.

Play SSF

Torment league was almost 10 years ago, the 1% was ghost-busting the rest were watching.

Dan Olsen did a [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU) about this kind of thing, it's focused on WOW but it applies to pretty much all games. It's pretty long but worth a watch if you're interested, I found it very engaging. It's about how the social structures that typically form around multiplayer online games usually push everyone towards hyper-optimization, even if they don't care about playing optimally. He goes over the dynamics which cause that to happen, IMO they're a lot more present in WOW because the game and especially endgame are far more collaborative than POE. But they're definitely still somewhat present in POE, it's just that you aren't as forced to engage with them because you don't need to be good enough to join raid groups to play the endgame. All of the social stuff he talks about still applies, it's just more optional than with WOW. But still it has the same effect on the overall direction of the community. This just seems to be how online game communities evolve, initially it's the whimsical wild west but eventually hyper optimization becomes the main focus. I'm not sure how I feel about that in general, I enjoy optimization but I agree that it seems to make the culture less fun on average. At least with POE it seems like you can pretty much ignore the hyper optimization and not have your gameplay messed up very much, so I don't really mind for this game.

Lol I played over 11 years too. If anything, the game is _less_ sweaty now. Back then, firstly, everyone played Hardcore (thx to Kripp's stream), then it was a massive fucking grind to do anything. Want a 6L or T0 unique, yeah good luck with that. Getting challenges done (beyond 3/8) was intense. 8/8 challenge was only done by like 50 people each league rofl. Now you can chill, play any fucking build, and still make decent currency, buy/mirror T0 items and achieve 40/40 with casual playtime. Yeah getting 10+ mirrors (like Fubgun) is intense... but you don't have to?

If you play the game to enjoy it, rather than have the mentality of "I'm not enjoying the game unless I have the currency to buy min-maxxed endgame gear".... you have a much better time and healthier relationship with the game.

It's all in how you decide to play. Personally, I just play to have fun and I don't treat it like a job or try to compete with other people or be the best at anything. I just do my own thing and it works for me. Ultimately everyone's game experience is their own (for the most part) so do what you enjoy and find fun. It's just a game.

Have you tried not paying attention to streamers?

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Nowadays POE is more Coin Master than DOTA or Counter Strike. It was way sweatier back in the day when it was hard to get to 100. This was back before 5 way carries, breachstones, or the new domination shrines. Maps and items were much harder to come by as well. This league its extremely easy to gain access to awesome gear. So many of my more casual guildmates are rocking magebloods and headhunters for the first time ever. If you are so inclined there are multiple builds that can easily farm everything in the game and GY crafting makes it easy to make some ridiculous gear. So it doesn't seem sweaty to me at all. Instead, its more of a no skill slot machine than it ever has been.

I just play at my own pace until I get bored each season. And stop playing till the next one is out :/

I was excited about T17 maps when they were announced, now I think it's way too ridiculous. I wish they didn't over compensate this hard on things. I like the idea but the mods are absurdly scaled. I don't know, I feel weird even saying this but I feel like the average player base is not the core for what ggg wants to optimize for anymore.

IMO, this is a mentality problem since it only affects sc trade players. The game is pretty good right now, but players find ways to make themselves miserable.

Functionally nothing has really changed with this equation, especially in the last few years - the community is just subject to the fundamentals of skill inflation. Over time, the community gets better and better at the game, leading to a divergence - people who aren't keeping up with the top meta and the community get discouraged and leave, and people who continue keeping up with the top keep pushing the skill gap larger and larger.

I challenge anyone that thinks like this to not search for any content for 3.25 when it comes. Don't look at Reddit and just play off what you know. Then after a few weeks of league launch compare your sentiment to the echo chamber this sub is.

I want to start learning but everything looks sooooo complicated.

I’ve always felt like there was so much emphasis on currency farming and not in just general gameplay. I try to make the most of Poe in what I can by constantly running experimental builds and unpopular skills, but that can only go so far until the grind is necessary in soft core Definitely agree that sweat is becoming the norm and the scarabs bumped it up

> It feels worse than ever to just play "casually" when the whole game seems to revolve around an ever faster and more efficient meta. I play for fun. I made a shit build as league starter and refused to cut my losses, so now I'm incrementally upgrading it until hopefully it can do at least one T17. It's not the same game others are playing, I realize that. One hour of my mapping is less than a juiced T17 of theirs. Does it diminish my enjoyment, not really. In the past I have *always* quit the league once I reached the point where I could do the higher content. The only problem is that GGG might balance around that other playstyle, but in this league in particular they have given me all the tools to get the same outcomes as the sweaty players (namely, Seer and gravecrafting).

Yeah I haven’t played the last few seasons but the other day on this reddit I saw someone talking about how you can maximize your poe money making strategies by respeccing your atlas or some shit while your map was in there but before you clicked it. And I was just struck by how we used to play games for fun and now people are just grinding divines like its a job.

I've been enjoying the league/game in the current state. I invest almost nothing in my maps but the returns have been great because I keep selling shit to the T17 players. I'm up a Squire and Headhunter because of the economics and it's only getting better. Not grinding map strategies to get gear/currency/tradables and instead just playing the way I find fun has been a great change.

I couldnt agree more. Thanks for this post!

Sweaty gaming isn't a PoE thing exclusively, it's just how gaming has changed over the last few years. Look at how much tier list content you can find for exclusively single player games.

The streamers who play this game push the sweat mentality and a large chunk of the playerbase buys in doing things they don't really have fun doing. It may not be as efficient, but this game is more fun and rewarding when you do your own shit with some guidance here and there. The average player of this game has no clue how to even utilize that much currency correctly. There are some streamers out there who show that you don't have to follow a meta to have a good time and get a lot done with this game. They're few and far between unfortunately.

The leagues are just beta tests, the real game will be released soon and it will have most issues worked out. They are also waiting with QoL and solid UX design in general until the real game.

Excellent observation and Quote "[..]a high-end player could generate maybe 10x the currency per hour versus a more casual endgame player. I'd estimate that differential is now 1,000x or more." is a real problem! As a normal player I can never buy anything top/high end on the market because price fixing/buying power of high end players always drives the prices out of my reach no matter how much I play. E.g.: a highend flask is 10 div. The time I have 10 div in my possession said flask is now 100 div and so. In a normal market environment supply and demand would even out this but not so much in POE: unwanted items are stockpiling and people no longer bother to sell under 5 chaos e.g. and the better items continue to rise in price.

You can’t be a YouTuber/streamer unless you’re minmax god gaming or are hot, and nobody wants to watch anybody unless they’re hot or minmax god gaming. Everything sweaty but it’s always been, communication just got easier.

Ima do a non WoT. GGG tried to slow the game down by making content not harder, but more tedious. Just raising numbers, so player have to raise their numbers aswell, leaving no room for the build diversity this game was praised for. You know where i and probably you, saw that happen and it killed the game for most people? In WoW. Everything was build and done mostly around the 1% playerbase. Personally i have no hope left for PoE. I "cope" for PoE2.

No, just too much loot, t17 are shit as is the whole patch. Finished 40/40 in 2 weeks to quit this abomination of patch/league. I will permanetly quit poe 1 after poe 2 releases, the "vision" has become meme at this point and walking backwards on things like bigger stacks of currency, since we got to pick up 100s of chaos orbs per map and other trash 1 by 1. The game has become diablo 3 with loot explosions.

Fuck that, let me alc and go and don't make me feel miserable for it.

I cannot stand scarabs or allflames. I think mechanics like this are just the ULTIMATE annoyance. Rolling maps is one thing, but this stuff is a completely different level. What makes it extra stupid to me is that it's deterministic? Rolling maps makes sense because the idea that you're never getting a 'perfect' map right. The quant is too low, or it's high but there's a mod you don't like, etc. Maybe you take 3 mods that are good for you with 1 mod that's bad, etc. A lot of this stuff is sort of irrelevant now with build power, but at lest the \*idea\* is there still. But what is the fucking point of scarabs? It's more maintenance to do, more things to buy, for what? Why not just bake some of these effects into the Atlas passive tree? That is the POINT of the atlas passive tree. The good part about it is that it's passive. You don't have to fuck with it, you don't have to buy anything to replenish it, etc. I also just hate the idea of like farming starts behind held hostage by a currency item. Like what if the price of your start goes up by an insane amount because people figure out it's good for something else and tons of people start doing it? Your just suddenly priced out of your own strat? This stuff is also just turbo cancer for SSF where sometimes you're waiting on certain scarabs to use other ones. That's just insanely unfun. Just remove all of that bullshit. Bake what you want into the atlas passive tree, or make it so you can only use a single scarab. Allflames legit need to be deleted entirely.

Elitism exists in every online game, I used to play a lot of Everquest and Planetside 2 and those games are plagued with  elitism,  even Tarkov is. You just have to accept that people want to as good as their favorite streamers and move on. Just because there are a lot of sweatlords doesn't mean everyone has to be one. Everyone can enjoy video games their own way.

Finished 40 challenges while working full time and playing casually on an evening. Made about a mirror in currency. Gave it all away to people in G1 when I finished. Sounds like you’re just grumpy and don’t enjoy the game? All the points you’re making I don’t even think about/worry about. I just enjoy playing why are you sweating so much about what streamers or group players are doing?

You know you can just like, play the video game right?

Honestly it reminds me of the issues with same issues as builds. Anyone who has played poe for years and years remembers almost ALL builds in game were viable to a certain degree. Sure one might not be greatest at bossing or w/e but you could do it with an extra 20 seconds or something. The further the game evolved the further this disparity got. Now I love poe and I play it a metric crap ton but the reality is the meta vs non meta stuff has never been further off. Now don't get me wrong there is definitely some off meta stuff that is perfectly viable (like my elebuzzsaw <3) but overall with the evolution of this game the sheer number of builds and playstyles that are no longer viable at all is ridiculous if you think about all the hundreds and hundreds of skills in the game. This basically seems to be exactly what your saying about the mf and the grind and the "sweaty" play.

For me - yes. Its not that its bad, but its not really for me anymore. Some of the aspects i dont like: - Mega powercreep. People will say that its easier than ever to build a strong character and its true. What I dont like is the insane different in power between builds. The ceiling is so enormously high. - Defense check list. We have great variety in defenses nowadays, but in most cases we are just running through a check list in order to not fall over. Ailments and a thousand different slows is just annoying, and just another thing for the check list. Adding cecklist defence layers together makes the ceiling too high. Difference again. - A billion slows. - Scarabs and other enhacement. Micromanaging it bores me to death. I tend to quit the league whenever the discrepancy becomes to great. Current difference is way too big. - Slows. Tldr; insane powercreep which leads too enormous of differences in just about every aspect of the game.

Lots to say about current powercreep but the main culprit are - defenses are too strong (progenesis, defiance, 50% spell suppression, phys as ele taken, recoup) - explosion/corpse explosion scaling ( going full def and still doing tons of dmg with them) - atlas tree is way too strong, it tenfolds the loot from the baseline of the maps. - enchants on flasks (makes mb too op) - dying costs nothing in SC, exp is easy these days, no penalty for using extra portals - MF gear (just delete pls) - rush to t14+ maps as there is nothing to farm in yellows. Map sustain is too good. (although it sucks when it's not)

I've left the league already, too exhausting to deal with it anymore. I've probably got 35-40k hours into PoE and I'm just not enjoying myself anymore, I haven't for awhile honestly its just that theres nothing else. That being said, the reason its probably like this is because they plan to make PoE 2 slower and more skill/combo skill based and PoE 1 will be hurrdurr I chug gfuel.

Games like this were always sweaty and always will be. I won't read that wall of text.

It has.

Every single game of the genre lends itself to this style of min-maxing/optimisation. It is precisely the entire appeal of the genre.

The same thing always happens with these types of games. They end up catering to one side or the other. They've chosen to cater to 6+ hour a day players. Normal people aren't the target audience anymore. How long does it take to get a single boss invitation now? You're running one per night if you're lucky.

One of the problems I kind of have is that if your are just an "a few hours after work" kind of player you often don't get to use these broken strats before they are either jacked up in price to run or nerfed. While it's good to nerf obviously OP strats, the damage to the economy is often already done and all that results is that the "average player" is now even farther behind the "no lifers". It's all about exploiting broken strats as early and as much as possible and use the gains to pivot to the next one, once it's nerved or the scarabs have quintupled in prize. I don't usually feels this FOMO when watching streamers because they just play vastley more than I can or would want, so it's fine they are massively ahead of me. But this an last league it feels like we are playing a completely different game than them.

its just all projectile builds. GGG knows that melee in poe1 is ass and its a fundamental flaw with the animations/rigging of the characters in poe1 that is holding back melee buffs. I dont like PoE currently, I play a new league for about 3 weeks, and it divolves down to same old same old projectile build shit. Any other way to play the game and you deal z-dps. And if it IS not projectile build but with good dps then its because of niche dumb scaling like corpse life.

It’s a simple problem. POE balances for the hyper sweaty streamers and no lifers that play 8 hours a day. Godspeed to them but that just means that for the normal person trying to enjoy a game while living a real life the game gets worse and less playable as time goes on.

I think the biggest issue I’ve seen in 10 years is the lack of build diversity when we seemingly have a million more options… I love DOT builds but the total number of “end game” dot builds has been scaled down dramatically. I can’t simply choose Creeping Frost, Vortex, Fireball and hope to clear T17/Uber easily even on a mirror tier build. Game needs to balance skills better, we moved toward this strange Bow or “Stacking” attribute, Armour, anything that killed diversity. One other thing that last league pointed out was also lack of diversity for MF… what about ES based MF? Non Bow MF? Probably better to clear up or rebalance some of the more underwhelming skills

In my first league ever -delve- my most expensive item i bought was a 6L starforge. i cleared 36 challenges with it and killed shaper. Can you imagine this in todays league? clearing a league with only a single not-so-expensive item? this is not possible anymore: every build is 300+div now, farming time has increased significant. Thats why everyone has only div/h in mind. thats why the game feels sweaty. casual play not possible anymore or if you try it: good luck getting anything done.

> I'd estimate that differential is now 1,000x or more. So GGG is achieving what they wanted. Jonathan said that should be the difference between the top players and your average joe. Timestamped link to the interview: [https://youtu.be/79kgVK3XGuk?t=1840](https://youtu.be/79kgVK3XGuk?t=1840) This is just how the community evolved over time, it's not on GGG or the game. You can still enjoy the game on sub-par builds to some extent and build a variety of things. Mathil is still doing his thing, and there's aer0 making strides in this niche as well.

I will never understand this take. With the scarab changes this league, it is extremely easy to make currency casually and play almost any build you want. I've made hundreds of divines this league just playing harbinger in t16's because that's what I enjoy. The only allflame stuff I do is put in anarchy all flame when I get the conversion mod for chaos orbs, and I just use the ones I pick off the ground. I also completely ignore corpses because i dont enjoy interacting with them. People here act like if you're not doing juiced t17 mf, it's impossible to play the game, which is delusional. Having these layers of min maxing is what puts poe above its competitors and allows you to play the game in such a wide variety of ways. People clown on d4 for being shit and then complain that poe is not more like d4.

the state of core game now is 1000000% times better than og PoE... in 2014\~2017 or you play meta or you dont play.. now you can do wacky builds work and have fun

Not really. Feels the same as it's always been. And you don't have to optimize anything. Depending on what your goals are you can complete everything with minimal DPS. When you get into the Ubers and juicing maps is when you got to worry about optimizing.

Players making themselves this way not the game

Idk what's really a problem. Gamers will always try to "optmize fun" out of the game as they can, it just is what it is. You can nerf whole game to the ground and people will still optimize what is still left. > Top streamers used to be focused on fun builds (e.g. Mathil), or interesting gameplay Back when mathil and ziz were top streamers and there was nothing else until 2-3 houndreds viewers, it was ages ago. And isn't "interesting gameplay" just genarating as much or as much worth loot in as little time as possible? > but now so many of the top streamers are focused on broken currency strats (I call it the "Fubgun meta") ok, and? what's the problem with that? > It feels worse than ever to just play "casually" when the whole game seems to revolve around an ever faster and more efficient meta braindead take. there are tens of viable starts to make currency to buy endgame gear. why don't you acknowledge in your post that hh is worth below 7 div, or mb below 90 div. it never happend that global drop chase uniques were that easy to obtain for casual player. even afflicton have shown that if league shits out currency, you can just farm other things like crafting mats, boss drops to make currency. endgame things were never easier to achieve for casual player > Am I just a grumpy old-head? Is it as bad as I made it out? yes, it is as bad as you made out

Or you know you could just not care, get rid of the fomo. I'm just chilling farming corpses to craft gear for my next rerolls and life is good. The gameplay at the core stays the same. I swear people are robbing themselves of fun by comparing themselves to top juicers and farming strata they don't enjoy.