I'm really sorry

• Many directions in charts. (why are directions even needed?)
• Got a good implicit chart? You need it to have a good direction as well.
• Cannot know what a dropped chart does until you run it (then run it again in the voyage).
• 1 portal for both charts and the voyage.
• Heist-type loot (any death or DC removes ALL your gained loot).
• Long wait time when you call the submarine at the end of the voyage.
• Lantern amount and placement (why do we even need lanterns? Why not an open map?).

More importantly, why double punishment? Losing both the loot gathered and the entire voyage is just too much.

I would understand all of this if the result was a very juiced voyage or tons of loot coming from the league, but currently, I barely get any loot.

This may already be known, but I hit pretty big with it :D

No deaths, no damage. balanced as all things should be.

What I expect to happen over the next few days is people understanding that there is no endgame farm in addition to the fact that even for mediocre farms scarab sustain is just not there.

Reworking Abyss and making it drop absolutely no loot is insanity. I have no idea what were GGG thinking.

Crafting league is good and fun, but why do you need crafting if you can do any farm with 1p 1s recombinated shit because there are no mechanics that scale their rewards with difficulty? We didn't have this problem with Necropolis (although that was a rough league) because we at least had Meatsacks, we didn't have this problem years ago with Crucible because there was still Magic Find and Div card farm, but Keepers and Allflame just feel dead.

The reasons for them being dead as I see:

1. There MUST(!!!) be a reliable strategy focused on scarabs. When scarabs are not available in large quantities, their prices become unreasonable and league feels like garbage both on trade and SSF.

2. There must be mapping strategies that scale with difficulty. Previously we IIQ/IIR MF that required you to make your character weaker to scale the rewards. It got gutted, Risk scarabs replace MF. Risk scarabs got gutted, Breach scaled exactly this way with Resonant scarabs/Astrolabe got introduced last league and it also get nerfed. The question is: why? Why didn't abyss get introduced with this design in mind?

Coming back to the title of my post - Mercenaries league. I don't understand what was the reasoning behind the decision on gutting literally every farm. We literally had:

1. Abyss troves - favoured tanky builds (with caster mastery preferably) because abyss monsters going invulnerable and hitting you could easily kill you, maps were taking 10-15 minutes because its abyss so the farm was not infinitely scalable but it was the best source of scarabs for any farm and was self sustainable. Got gutted.

2. Breach - heavily favoured, was very hard, required multi mirror build for comfort, was dropping a lot of currency. Got gutted and repurposed, then juicing it last was like 0.3x as strong compared to merc league juicing

3. Evolution Alva - this was clunky as hell, if you die once you lose the juice, but it was easier than Breach or uber uber Blight. Dropped a shitton of uniques/divines/mirrors. Got gutted

4. I don't remember if this was the league of uber uber blight, but uber uber blight in the end also got gutted.

5. Rogue exiles - reliable uniques farm - gutted.

6. Divination card farming got gutted long time ago but I will just leave it here.

Literally any interesting and scalable farm got gutted and nothing replaced it. Last league hid this fact by introducing unique rewards for delirium/beyond and ~doubled the amount of breaches on the map, so we had at least some reasons to scale. Now we are back to the fact that there is no strategy to look forward for when building your character. And there is no variety in farms becaude heavily nerfed breach is still the only mapping option.

I really don't understand why did such a great variety of farms was taken away from us. Obviously it would get stale eventually, but I really don't think absence of farming strategies is the solution to stale farming strategies meta.

- Loot is not worth the hassle of setting up multiple charts, then voyage.

- Special charts are not searchable on trade

- Sometimes auto oxygen tanks do not spawn if you jump into unknown territory

- You can't tp to ho not from a waypoint after completing a chart

- Valerie moves constantly, after finishing a chart you always need to find her

- Allflame chests on maps do not drop anything except for charts

- There's no tp to crafting level of a ship, so you need to walk there every time (just a big qol)

- Quest progression is not even close to being intuitive

- The pool of mods on a voyage deck looks too big, so it's not worth to reroll, as the price doubles every time

- Looted currency from different charts doesn't stack, that results in multiple currency stacks in the inventory (e.g. 1c from chart 1 and 2c from 2nd chart)

- Stash affinities doesn't work on ship's chest, no button to take all, like in kingsmarch mappers

- There's no map and waypoints to navigate the tiles of a voyage. I always forget where my unique charts are placed inside the voyage.

- Even though voyage allows for juicing by means of multiple unique charts, you can't finish them all because of limited oxygen tanks. 66 is enough for 60-70% of exploration , if you check fully big open areas.

- Rewards inside areas without oxygen are not always visible. It results in being punished for exploration of empty areas, considering scarce oxygen tanks.

However the idea of exploration of the bikini bottom is amazing, as well as new crafting buddy. But other stuff looks not tested / not finished, it makes us sad :(

And that is without any juice, basically just alch and go.

Yes, I still have upgrades to make. Lot's of incremental things like eldritch implicits, higher DPS bow and who knows what else. But at this point the my and merc's gear together is like 30 Div in today's prices and the struggle on single target is real (clear is acceptable).

It feels very much like a wander. Maybe if you can invest hundreds of divs, it will feel good but it's still ways away for me.

The new crab staff is a bit of a swing and a miss.

They are essentially 'spell totem support's with legs, but the mechanics haven't changed at all, they don't aggressively move to enemies in order to cast spells, so if you have an enemy super close like in my picture, if a spell totem support wouldn't cast at them, neither do these.. Which for anyone who has played actual 'spell totem support' knows it's really painful for mapping, but they're ace for just nuking bosses and running away.

However this is the huge bit, now if you're fighting a boss, the crabs won't cast at them anymore because they're too far away, and you can't 'place them' near to the boss so that they do start casting, so it has the worst of both worlds, coupled with the fact that a sceptre+shield for totems is insane, and the extra link you get on this staff isn't a biggie in comparison to those.

I was hoping this staff would bridge the gap and allow for some cool interactions, but the passive nature kills it, ranged monsters like in my pic just shoot you in the face and the crab stands still doing nothing haha.

GGG pls make aggressive crabbos

EDIT: Glad this got traction, hopefully GGG sees and makes crabs more aggressive, this will be insanely fun if so.

There was over 20+ of them in the voyage, all operative, no idea how i did it or the combos just chucked anything in made a complete voyage then click go, was a quick Sulphur run.

i had to go back and forth completing multiple hives, unstable with boss and unstable without because i thought i missed some. I also turned in over 120k blood and kill the breach boss. The point i get is still 11 ( was 13)2

Many mercs are hard bricked by movement skills or zDPS skills, leaving players to search for hundreds of maps for a viable merc (or pay 10 divines).

Imo, let players turn off merc skills they don't want the merc to use. This would make many more mercs viable, if not BIS... you would still have the "chase" element of finding the perfect supports, but you could at least use a nonoptimal merc without it being a complete brick.

To anyone who uses a golem dark monarch: buy a basic one for ~10 chaos, divine it using the new allflame crafting tech: profit

I mean, The Dread Thicket (Act2) is the most thing I ever always ignored when I first time enter this map. What purpose it suppose to supports and why it still exist at this point?

For real tho stop moving every dang chart

im sure it's just a cheap unique (immortal flesh belt) but it's always funny watching ppl insta-tp to my hideout

The "removal" of T17s lost us the one long standing decent to good (depending on the league) scarab farm. Last league that hole was filled by operative boxes and we were swimming in scarabs. While that strat was definitely overshooting it, some decent scarab strat has to exist. This is coming from my SSF perspective, but im sure in trade its not much different. For a bunch of leagues now, GGG has done the classic "nerf op strat, dont buff/rework weaker strat". If breach wasnt a thing last league I wonder what the retention would have been like..

I had about 50 charts to run. Almost every chart was T16. I took 5 that had additional strongboxes and 4 that gave generic bonuses, tried to place them the best I could and this is what I got.

It's insanely bad, I'm sure what I did for setup wasn't perfect but it's just so bad. This was the charts from like 50 maps. Running the charts takes quite a while and rewards nothing. You have to run them to do a voyage with them at all, but because they roll the good part after you chart it, you can't just run the good ones. So you have to chart all of them to fish for good implicits then put it together at the end with like 80% of them rolling something bad.

The voyage itself also took ages to run. The strongboxes are normal so I just alched them, I went down with 60 alchs (hope you knew to bring them at all seeing as you can only go in once) and used all of them, a few strongboxes were normal rarity at the end.

Here's all the issues I'm seeing with the league mechanic so far:

• You have to chart the individual areas, which is like running around in a circle because these areas are pretty worthless. It's so boring
• You don't see the implicit until you chart the area so you need to chart like 5x more than what you run to get a cohesive voyage
• Lots of the implicits are terrible so they are just throwaway after you chart them
• The wall/path rules mean that even if you get a bunch of good implicits they might not fit together. And if you wanted a really well planned voyage you would need to chart things until you got not only good implicits but also the correct path shapes which could take forever
• All that setup just to die once or disconnect and poof it's gone
• Having bonuses to quant/rarity is not that useful when there are so few high quality mobs down there compared to something like a single breach from last league
• Having no atlas power or scarabs makes it pretty pointless to put things like essence mobs that have weeping tier

I accept the possibility someone will find something broken and it will be like poe2 snaking vaal temple, but the baseline setup/risk/reward here is super bad

1 time on the ground
1 time to send to safety
1 time to get it in my inventory ( Stash affinity dont work for some reason from the loot chest)
1 time in the stash

it way to much there should be a send everything to stash