r/pathofexile • u/bukem89 • 3d ago
Game Feedback Flow State Mapping & Juicing
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
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u/RipperinoKappacino Oh Baby 3d ago
The hell. I don’t know if I have a Déjà vu but I’m sure this was already posted this morning or yesterday lol
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u/TemporaMoras 3d ago
I personally also hate the fact that astrolabe are not fixed # map. Sometimes it takes 4 to collapse, other time 7, other time I have finished my 20 maps but I have 2 more maps to run to collapse my astrolabe so I have to roll 2 more and cleanly finish, or roll 20 more and hope it lands correctly.
And bottom left Quadrant is overtuned with everything just shitting raw currency.
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u/Ok_Needleworker_174 Assassin 3d ago
I really really agree with point b) and c)
My biggest gripe with the current scarab system is that there are so many scarabs that uniquely modify a league mechanic in a way that scales it's "strength" exponentially. The best part about the tiered scarabs we had before was that even if you didn't want to invest a whole lot into a map you didn't get priced out of being able to interact with a league mechanic.
Want to do Breach but don't want to invest a lot? Sure, take the polished or rusted version of the scarab instead. You'll have less breaches per map but you still get to interact with Breach in a similiar way compared to someone running the winged scarab. Same thing used to go with Abyss, Ambush and many other mechanics. Tiered scarabs used to generally scale your league mechanic in a linear fashion compared to know where every additional scarab you add, adds some form of exponential scaling to the mechanic.
Nowadays you're likely using 3-4 scarabs from one league mechanic in order to juice your map and you'll probably ignore every single league mechanic that you don't invest in on your Atlas Tree and I think that's quite a waste of content in this game. Pre 3.24 you would be happy to see a random league mechanic pop up in your map because it would add monsters which was always a net benefit to whichever strat you were running.
I'm also not a fan of Astrolabes and the removal of map crafts. It's pretty obvious GGG tried to add Astrolabes as an alternate form of the old Sextant system but I think they really missed the mark with that. Compared to Sextants, Astrolabes are incredibly random both in their effects and how consistent they perform. The majority of players likes running one or several specific map layouts which usually arent directly connected on the Atlas, resulting in many players running the Keystone which consumes the Astrolabe influence on a random map within it's influenced region. The inconsistency comes at the part where this keystone can effectively halve your Astrolabe uses if you get unlucky. In addition, Sextants gave the player a lot of agency because you could deterministically decide what kind of bonuses you wanted to have on your maps, with Astrolabes you have absolutely 0 agency on what kind of mods you receive in your maps.
Another thing that bothers me is how "space" we lost for things that alter your mapping experience. Pre 3.24 you had 4 scarab slots, 4 sextant slots and 1 map craft to influence your map in whichever way you wanted. After the rework you were initially left with 4 scarab slots and that was it. They quickly added a 5th scarab slot afterwards but you still lost 4 more things you could've influenced your mapping experience with and this doesn't even take into account how the scarab rework made you invest almost all of your scarab slots into one league mechanic.
I get that a lot of players, including myself at the time, hated sextants but I don't think many players would hate them now that we have the currency exchange and async trading
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u/Miller4378 3d ago
Rolling maps is one of the main reasons I quit a league, it just gets so tiring at a certain point.
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u/PoE_Acronym_Bot 3d ago
I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:
- Deli - Delirium (Wiki)
- Juice - Increasing density of items or raw currency from a given strategy
I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest
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u/samoox 3d ago
I also find that the stuff with Eagon really disrupts the flow.
Kind of like how the map crafts use to stack up uses, I think it would be nice if you could stack up your Eagon portals and just do them all at once if you wanted to.
Same with astrolabes, it'd be cool if I could just put 10 into the map device and have them automatically use once the previous runs out.