Path of Exile

The movement speed from the tormented spirit possession from the league chests is so nice.

Uriel said:

The movement speed from the tormented spirit possession from the league chests is so nice.

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You can see the lessons they learned from Lake of Kalandra or even Heist. This could have been something like "message in a bottle" and you click it to get a chart and it does nothing else but instead they put a bunch of work in to the map mechanic part to give you reasons to want to interact with them.

Lake really was a half-baked piece of shit.

Penance said:

Did you take AlinitysToiletWater?

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No sir, I have my standards

As expected merc build is hella strong. This despite my merc being garbage. One thing that isn’t stressed enuf is what a pain it is to get a good merc, shit takes ages. Buying a good one is gonna get real costly

I like the mechanic except for the drowning part, I think it closes too quickly, especially if you're far away, and it needs more visual and/or audio cues.

Also, I think it would be cool if they added a merc bloodline, so you could get a perm merc with it on any class but maybe no ability to equip uniques or something.

I wuss out and backtrack before putting down the last lantern.

My day one up to yellow maps report on Luminary minions is all positives. I saw there's a huge salt thread on reddit about carry mercs but if you were showing up day one planning to flame link your way to victory you must not have actually played their native league. That's a reroll project. That's not a league start. As a super Animate Guardian utility buffer kind of thing mercs are sweet.

I drowned a few times early before I realized what was really even happening. In the campaign when you're slow getting in the water is almost certain death with how big the action speed penalty is, so you definitely gotta escape before the edges catch you.

Loot payouts are nuts in the campaign though. It gives you so much gold I gambed like 100+ wands in act4.

Yeah, I drowned in my first Chart, not knowing it starts to (quickly!) close immediately on the last torch, and now I just drop that last torch right beside the sphere.

The mechanic is okay, and you can gather a quad tab full of rares in record time just scouting the Charts, but scouting the charts and then making the map which then really just does 9 charts combined all over again..........it just seems a bit too time consuming and more like a chore. Maybe better at end game, will see I suppose.

League mechanic isn't that bad. I drowned once on my very first chart in the coast (the intro) because I didn't know what was going on and then it was too late to run between the bubbles once it shrunk just a little in 0.1 seconds flat with no flask or movement. Sometimes the bubbles seem to collapse in weird ways that could result in someone getting stranded but with frost blink (or your movement of choice) and quicksilver, i've managed to jump the gaps the couple times it could've been an issue.

Setting up the voyages is annoying. If you run a ton of charts and have more than the 9/9 to do a voyage then maybe it's slightly less annoying but who wants to spend 1-10 minutes piecing together the puzzles just so they can go do their grand underwater heistexpedition where you can't see the chests beforehand so just have to hope you hit the good reward spots for 10 minutes too.

I ended up sticking with wildstrike. Between allflame crafting and all the gold from league mechanic to gamble, I got a couple weapon upgrades pretty easily through a4/a5 (not quite done with a5). Got my first divine from a level 38 chart and have gotten a decent handful of chaos too. Also alterationed a lightning multi/spell multi jewel that I dunno if i'm gonna sell as a blue or regal myself, will have to look them up again tomorrow (was only 2 blue ones when I searched yesterday, 100c and 10div (lol drugs are bad) but didn't check rares at all).

zombiewizardhawk said:

Setting up the voyages is annoying. If you run a ton of charts and have more than the 9/9 to do a voyage then maybe it's slightly less annoying but who wants to spend 1-10 minutes piecing together the puzzles just so they can go do their grand underwater heistexpedition where you can't see the chests beforehand so just have to hope you hit the good reward spots for 10 minutes too.

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GGG fucking loves all their "setup" mechanics, but they're absolutely horrible to interact with 5,000+ times.

Deathwing said:

Captain Lance is coping so hard I'm wondering if he's trolling. He stumbles across a merc he wants, it turns into an uber pinnacle fight, he's all excited to showcase how much of an upgrade it is, runs a T11 showcase with underwhelming clear and single target. This is likely getting hotfixed, the disparity is far too great to leave for next league.

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I just started red maps and still have no complaints about going with a zoo style pile o' minions plus a support merc league start. I've been exploded a couple times by enemy mercs (as is customary) but I knew that was going to happen when I signed up for this. I thought support merc stuff was going to be OP before the league launched and I still think that is going to be shown to be true.

People getting baited by a carry merc league start is pretty unfortunate all around. During their native league carry mercs took investment and a precise array of skills and supports to be good. It wasn't a league start yet a bunch of content creators pushed it as one. It was on everyone's tier list. Right before launch ZiggyD had a video with footage of him going through the campaign as a Luminary. GGG made a video about Luminary builds. Reality then came crashing in - league start carry merc is not actually a thing. The second most popular ascendancy this league day one and day two was a lemon for most of the people playing it. The league mechanic is nowhere near as smooth to interact with as Mirage while being far more complex to get rewards from.

I'm having a good time and there's lots of stuff I want to tinker with but this is shaping up to be a league people do not regard fondly for the same reasons people didn't like Necropolis or Lake of Kalandra. When complex delayed gratification mechanics are good (rewarding) they're prone to forced optimization. Do it right and it's amazing. Do it half-assed and it's a waste of time. Experimentation risks wasting key resources so don't do that. Lake was on the other end of the spectrum where almost none of it was worth interacting with at all. There are two tiles worth looking for. Find them and make them as high level as you can. Fuck everything else. Last winter PoE2 had their temple league and it took a long fucking time to build your temple. When you did it was an economy ruining money printer.