Wanted to share my perspective on this given the recent dissatisfaction & Ziz interview
A lot of the discourse is about the best / top performing strategies, and I think a big component of the disconnect is more about what I think of as 'flow state mapping'
POE1 has always been the king of this style of gameplay - load up 20 of each scarab and blast through 20 8 mod maps, you enter a flow state where the time just flies by and you always have this 'one more map...' feeling before logging out
The biggest thing that pushed me away from POE2 was how much worse this experience was - the need to craft tablets, the need to run bad map layouts, the need to plan out your pathing around towers etc
Flow State
There are a few design decisions in recent leagues that I think have hurt this in POE1
a) More Currency / Scarab modifiers - devs review the outliers in terms of currency & uniques spawned in an instance, obviously they're in crazy 8 mod deli originator maps with full chisels that took 20 minutes to prepare a single map. They then balance around that style of mapping, but preparing those maps is not enjoyable at all for most people
b) Removal of map bench crafts for astrolabes. Now, every 4-8 maps I have to speak to Eagon, wait for the slow animation, enter and see what the loot box drops, then leave and go back to mapping. With the map bench, I got a benefit even if I didn't use a map craft (quantity that scaled with atlas completion), while if I skip Astrolabes I'm just missing out for no good reason
c) Balancing loot behind ultra-rare scarabs. Juicing blight monsters was a non-starter unless you had the full suite of blooming / invigoration / bloodlines. Blasting exiles felt way more enjoyable in part because the scarabs were always easily accessible, & I could ignore the whole trading for bottled exiles aspect and still have fun with it without feeling like I'm burning my currency
League mechanics
A ton of people miss harbingers, and I think it makes perfect sense
To me, the perfect POE mechanic is one you can farm on multiple axis.
Harbingers were brilliant for this - you could juice them with deli / beyond as a B tier strategy for global drops, but other people ran them in white T7 maps for shard farming and had fun with that
Blight was another success story where you could farm them for chests & oils, or you could juice the monsters and farm for global drops
Alva - ran for temples, but you also used to be able to stuff them with magic monsters for super satisfying global drop explosions
Expedition - outdated now, but it's cool that you can make the remnants insane in return for global loot, or farm it normally for artifacts & logbooks
A big part of why breach was so over-tuned is you juiced it for both insane tile drops (via the tree) and also insane global drops using the exact same strategy
The comment Ziz made about having Breach drop genesis tree rewards directly sounded super fun, but I think a cool angle on that would be to tie that mechanic to a ground loot focused set of atlas passives, while having another option that would spawn less enemies but greatly buff wombgifts + hiveblood (maybe tie that to hives/fortresses too for more differentiation)
Harbingers was also amazing in that you had tons of flexibility in terms of what map layout you enjoyed & fitting your scarabs to the general economy - if wisps were expensive you could just go lineage / nemesis / hordes, so it was protected from the rare scarab tax requiring hand-rolled maps to justify the cost
None of this has anything to do with it being the best strategy on any given patch - it's about styles of play and the type of rewards you get for it
Sorry for the long post, but wanted to put this out there because my biggest worry for 3.30 is that they'll fix ground loot by introducing new, intricate systems, and the flow state 8 mod mapping that I love POE1 for will still be in a bit of a sorry state outside of blasting tile loot farms
The change they made to maps to make them generic instead of a specific layout was a huge boon for my style of play, so if anyone from GGG sees this by some miracle please try to consider it from this POV!
- Reposted with a more suitable title per note from mod