Idol re-rolls are disgustingly bad (least for me) - getting good base rolled end game idols was pretty rough too. Amber I always had tons and tons from hours of troves and buying with bones or whatever but yeah. Idol re-roll rage was so real this season!
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Another nothing burger. “Rework of skeletons wasn’t ready.”
Rework of skeletons does literally nothing for it other than allow proper elemental choice.
Damage of minions are still a joke across the board. Minion survivability is still a joke across the board and of course, because we are all so jovial and fun, acolyte survivability is also a joke because we don’t want the minion to feel alone.
Meanwhile absolutely no mention whatsoever of fixing the issues the game has. Overtunned enemies everywhere, difficulty spikes that seem to have no end in sight. It really is a nothing burger and worse you treat us like we are idiots, sharing this like it was a great thing and it would change the game when nothing changed.
You are so afraid of changing what needs changing and putting any amount of power in the players hands that you no longer can develop the game. You see people quitting after a week and instead of reaching the logical conclusion that most people aren’t playing because they can’t progress you somehow seem to reach the conclusion of the less than 1% of the player base and streamer which is the game is too easy.
Honestly with all that is happening I do no see any reason to play at all. The game shows a complete lack of direction because you stopped making the game you stated you’d make to please the streamers and the people who are a bit too good at the game to get a hint that their suggestions is what is actively killing the game. You’ve broken your promise to never ask for anything other than selling cosmetics and you know what. No, will not excuse you for it. I don’t care if your new boss has control and you have to do what they say because you are the ones to let the game get to this state and had to sell out as a result. You are the ones who chose to despite not selling that well to over-expand the staff instead of going slower.
You are in this state because you put yourself in this place and you don’t even have the courage to take control back over your own game. Tell the 1% and streamers that no, they don’t get to tell you how to make your game, stick to the vision of making a game that is easier than PoE and harder than D4.
If you aren’t willing to put your money where your mouth is just close down, honestly I never wanted to see LE go but every time you send out any information it’s either bad news or changes that keep everything the same when the same has proven time and time again that it isn’t working. Just rip the band-aid already because it’s so much worse to have to read these news and see the game die a little bit more every single time.
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But Abom works!
That means we have not achieved full solidarity with our minions yet! 
“Works”.
Agreed, certain enemies and attacks - such as the dreaded whirlewinds - deal abhorrently high damage one-shots, especially in mid to high corruption. This is compared to every other enemy around those specific ones, so the one-shots come as a shock and are frustrating. I’ve not seen any acknowledgment, let alone fixes by the devs so far.
Edit: It’s just been brought up in todays 06.02.2026 Q&A stream.
I completely disagree here. Experienced players quit the game after a few days because they can’t progress as you said, but they can’t progress because the game is too difficult, but because there’s nothing left to do, no challenge (except Uber pinnacle boss) and no better items to reasonably farm (2T7 wall).
The game is too easy. I’m not a streamer. I don’t know why or how any returning player would face any difficulty, except for the spike damages. Players also left S3 in hordes because a new PoE2 league started, which is waaaaay more challenging. EHG is been dumbing down the game since before launch each season.
At this point LE is easier than D4. At least the higher complexity in skill- and passive tree’s is still present.
Anecdotal evidences: 5 friends that I had try the game quit before reaching endgame. Only 1 of them was experienced ARPG player, 2 don’t even play that often. As a reason they often mentioned something like “All enemies just fall apart, there is no combat at all, it feels “fleeting”, I can just stand in boss damage and don’t feel anything, there’s no challange” etc.
None of them quit because its too difficult, quite the opposite. I think EHG misinterpreting the numbers why most players quit before even getting to the endgame.
You’re beating a dead horse.
It’s the opposite. If they listened to experienced players, the game would not be as much in shambles. If they listened to blasters, they wouldn’t introduce the useless Echo Chains. I don’t know what feedback made them decided Echo Chains were needed in the form they are adding it. No blaster is running 2 random echoes just to get to 1 Nemesis Tower. They run 10s of Nemesis Towers, Troves and so on in a row.
The only streamer they listen to is Raxx, and that gave us some of the best QoL features, like force move, pick-up range or increased number of lootfilter rules.
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100% agreed with this paragraph there.
The game is piss easy. It’s easier then D4 in several regards and itemization is as straight-forward as it can get. Well… D4 improved at least in that aspect after their Affix rework… so that’s decently even by now.
The only ‘difficulty’ in the game is atrocious balance in every area. Campaign is a mess, builds are a mess, end-game is a mess, bosses are a mess.
What EHG needs to do is adjust progression properly. The only places where it upholds are Act 1 and half-way through Act 2 before it falls apart permanently and being all over the place.
I would argue balancing the core gameplay based on a single specifically chosen build to make it feel ‘perfect’ is mandatory by now. And then adjusting all builds according to this ‘lead build’. The ‘ultimate mediocre build’ basically.
One Act every 2 weeks should be more then doable instead of focusing on their broken release-schedule, it’s overdue since half a decade now and has never been done.
Yep, they got no clue how to interpret statistics properly. Sadly so.
They gotta put someone else into the position of evaluating the direction based on the available feedback… because whoever is in charge there isn’t doing a good job. Try someone fresh, play around with different people, create a bit of miniscule balancing mess to see which ones are received the best.
Yes, it won’t cause a good reception but it’s the only reliable way without actual knowledge (which they lack) to receive a proper outcome. Create said knowledge of they cannot parse it from existing games and their experiences.
I think anecdotal evidence (“mah bruh’s lefts yourz geames cus reasons”) is pretty weak from a statistical point of view, plus, and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed this or not, but people aren’t always truthful when they speak.
And it’s not like there’s an “I’m rage quitting because …” option in the exit interview that LE makes you do when you stop playing for a season. It would be nice, especially if there were some form of “truthiness weighting” that EHG could use to ascertain the reason why people aren’t sticking around rather than the reason they say.
This confuses me, isn’t that what PoE’s peak/desired gameplay (ie, when you have the gear to kill everything on-screen with a single click) is like?
Yeah? I know? I’m not talking about the lovely worthless words spoken inside the Forum, I’m talking about the actions based on conclusions from their internal information they can gather.
Hence either they didn’t gather said information at all (worst-case, would make them utterly incompetent).
Or they drew the wrong conclusions (which is less severe as it’s easier to fix, just a learning point which mandates the former to already exist).
And as you know and I state generally… I always give leeway with severty while taking into consideration the worst option existing. Life’s not as nice as to always default to the best-case situation… and it’s not so awful to always default to the worst-case situation. Hence we need to work with both simultaneously.
Yes, because you also don’t need that. You compare other products and overall sentiment existing in the sector as to why people stop playing, as well as to showcasing which players actually do keep playing, and then you compare and make a educated guess from that which might or might not uphold.
Luckily we got companies which have done exactly that for more then a decade by now, kinda is if we can hence proclaim specifics unless they’re disproven… rather then having to re-prove expected situations ‘just cause’.
Yes, as the end result of the progression.
It’s not the starting state which doesn’t change. By the time you reach this most people stop. No challenge.
I mean… that’s basic stuff… come on now. The core motivator for doing anything is overcoming adversity. To see a position of ‘I want to reach to that’ and moving there from a position of ‘I’m not there yet’.
I’ll once again bring the prime example of a well researched gaming area… which is creative survival games like Minecraft and Vintage Story.
Minecraft has a creative and a survival mode. Huge buildings in creative cause less ‘success’ for the individual doing it compared to doing it in survival.
Then we got Vintage Story which has a very punishing, slow and immersive progression method, everything is hard. And people perceive the feeling of ‘success’ much higher then comparatively in Minecraft survival.
So we got 3 states to compare to:
Minecraft creative - barely any feeling of success
Minecraft survival - decent feeling of success
Vintage Story survival - high feeling of success
Draw you own conclusions from how ‘success’ happens in our human psychology hence. We can argue about the bar to overcome, that’s individual… target audience. But we cannot argue about the baseline system existing which even creates the feeling as we know what is needed to create it from those examples alone.
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What I’m referring to is Mike said on stream that not even 80% or something of all players ever made it to endgame. Most of the players dropped off because of different reason, not because it was too difficult or too easy. However most of players that played each season until now are “veterans” that made it to endgame. At this point the low retention should be looked at.
The key-point is “when you have the gear” to kill everything on-screen.
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Yeah, which is why I said it, I just find it interesting that in PoE everything dieing quickly is a sign that your build is good but in LE everything dieing quickly is a sign that the game is “bad”/lacking/whatever. I just thought it’s interesting.
Yeah, but what do you need to do to achieve that?
You won’t be able to handle end-of-campaign mobs in Act 3.
You won’t be able to handle T16 mob when you finish the campaign.
You won’t be able to kill the bosses when you’re in yellow maps.
You’ll have your character die… many… many times unless you do proper itemization progression, which very few know how to do, most getting stuck for 1 month+ in early red maps, barely managing to run a single T16 without dieing.
It has a solid progression. You gotta invest effort to achieve the outcome.
In LE if we remove Aberroth and Uberroth?
From the second you enter Act 3… you never die with normal gameplay. There is no risk, there is no challenge, no normal mob provides any issue.
Heck… most campaign bosses are wet noodles without danger, even PoE 1 campaign bosses are more dangerous, and they’re by now pushovers majorly.
Mervil is dangerous, the Oversoul is dangerous, Dominus is well known for touching you to god , Kaom is a menace for many, Malachi is also quite challenging mechanically as it introduces the chaotic culmulating ground effects and massive repositioning. Innocence kills nearly everybody even when doing him the second… third… fourth time. The Brine King is a pure defense check if you’ve gone out of your way to DPS everything up to that point and became a glass cannon. Arakali needs once again positioning and is deadly with her orbs. Second time Deodre is really dangerous with reanimated Brutus. Lunaris/Solaris are deadly as well. Abomination is chaotic beyond end and then it culminates with a usual slog against Kitava.
That’s the common experience of a player. It’s not the top-end players or those with massive experience like me, I trivialize shit. But any baseline player struggles.
And it doesn’t end.
Where exactly do we struggle in LE?
I remember my first playthrough even, some random crap build, made a glacier mage back then, cause mage = cool, and I was a fool fool fool since I tried doing a black hole/glacier build, randomly choosing whatever just seemed interesting at the time.
The build sucked, it sucked so bad that any comparable build in PoE wouldn’t have made it past Act 5.
My first death was at Act 3, first major bossfight after all. Then the campaign stopped, that was my first playthrough of campaign, Act 4 wasn’t done yet.
Then my second character died once at General Harton. That’s it. Once again it ended after Chapter 6 since the Heoroth Act wasn’t implemented yet.
Then for my third character the Heoroth Acts (7/8) came. I died once to Spymaster Zerrick because my gear sucked and I didn’t even bother upgrading anything, just walked braindead through all content. And I died at Lagon a few times, which is the only reasonably dangerous content in the whole campaign.
And with Majasa coming out I wondered ‘what the heck are people talking about with her being so dangerous?’ when I realized I simply had capped my resistances like I did in PoE as a baseline during campaign… that invalidated her entirely. I was nigh immortal.
So where the actual fuck is this going? Do you wanna tell me the game which is objectively more difficult in nigh every metric is not interesting because stuff falls over easily?
Then what is LE? Beyond measure?
Because you’re right:
Yes it is.
Because you need to invest no effort at all to reach that stage. You can be mentally challenged and reach that point as the game demands no singular thought to be put into your gear. You can literally just pick up crap and go through the whole campaign without touching crafting even once. You don’t need to think about skills either since there is basically no choice for skills during the campaign. You pick your mastery and that’s mostly what decides what you’ll do. It shoves the skills you’ll need to use into your face, and if you divert then you might struggle… but as long as you’re at least testing out each skill shortly then you’ll be able to easily see which one is simply superior to the others with baseline functionality. Better then D4 where there’s plainly no choice… but compared to PoE where you gotta handle the skills, the synergies and the supports fitting for it accordingly with gear which fits it inside? A whole other level of build-choice and variety.
Yes, you can demolish everything… go and play friggin fireball for the campaign and tell me again.
Go and play Arc for the campaign without the guid and tell me again.
In LE you need no guide because everything is so easy that you’ll stumble into success, in PoE stuff is easy because you copy success from others. That’s the difference.
It’s a joke to compare em. One utter joke.
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It’s because in LE everything dies instantly (apart from champions and bosses sometimes) even without having the gear for it.
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That’s not quite true. I remember us both facepalming at a build one of the other forum users had been using after complaining about the difficulty of the game.
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I knew this would come.
There’s stages to it… being mentally impaired… and being unwilling to invest effort are two different things.
You can be the smartest person in the world but if you don’t raise a single finger it won’t do you any good.
And you can be dumb as a brick but overshadow half the population with an IQ of 70 because you actually do put tremendous work in.
Intelligence decides how easy you have it to reach any point, how fast you do it and how high your ceiling is.
It doesn’t excuse you from doing something at all.
Not with an IQ of 70 you’re not. You’d have significant issues with problem solving & that’s fundamentally what arogs are about, solving problems that the game throws at you, balancing scarce resourses (skill points, item stat budgets, etc), boss mechanics & the like. This isn’t a game where physical skills can compensate for a lack of intellectual skills, just kook at any of the posts by Mellow, he has learning disabilities & he really struggles despite putting an aweful lot of effort into the game.
It’s a fair point about “not putting effort in”, but the intellectual requirements are higher than you, possibly flippantly, think they are.
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70 is the threshold to intellectual disability itself, not impairment but active disability.
At that amount you are still taking school in most countries and actually are able to get through it with significant difficulties.
And the most important part? You can learn complex procedural processes. That commonly suffices to play the practical part of an ARPG… albeit to be fair, IQ and physical capability do correlate significantly (no direct causation has been found though, hence exceptions). So because of that it might become physically impossible as both together are too much of a hurdle to overcome.
Also I’m not talking specifically about Mellow, which showcases a learning disability, which can be anything plainly spoken. Learning disability are actually negatively correlated with IQ with the majority of people having them being above average IQ. The learning systems their brain needs though is fundamentally different from the norm, hence not fitting in modern learning environments.
But in case of Mellow’s situation I expect it to be actually low IQ as it correlates with the basis of it… but Mellow individually is another topic by itself. That’s the ‘lack of effort’ aspect because simple tasks weren’t done which would even lead towards the complex ones. Not to speak that comorbities like OCD are not doing him well as they interfere with information uptake. After all a strict narrow way of doing that has to exist or it becomes distressing… which is not really helpful in a environment which mandates adaptive behaviour.
You correlate learning disasbility automatically with IQ. Low IQ doesn’t mandate the existence of it… it just causes the capacity of the brain to be significantly lower. Processing speed and retaining information. Hence why someone who has a 130 IQ looks at something and starts doing and perfecting it in 10 minutes… while someone with 70 IQ has to have a written detailed flowchart and needs 2 weeks to learn the exact same thing.
Obviously it’s significantly in the way of solving the complex problems which you’re provided with in a ARPG, but LE is the easiest one of the ‘big choices’ on the market on one hand (plus a bit hyperbole from my side obviously) and hence there is a relatively easy script able to be followed, primarily limiting the capacity hence on the physical aspect of reaction time (which correlates heavily). But I talked solely about the mental part of information intake.
This confuses me. The second bolded part appears to either contradict or mean the first bolded part is effectively not likely to happen.
Not necessarily. My eldest is mildly dyslexic & autistic, he found learning spell/write very difficult despite putting in significant amounts of effort, so just because someone’s not getting much output doesn’t mean they aren’t putting much effort in.
Yep, unless you take the addendum into consideration:
Hence not the physical aspect.
Because you cannot make a game enjoyed by many people if it’s easy enough to even adhere to people which have borderline impaired physical ability.
It’s a impossibility when it’s based on fast reactions of any kind.
Compare it to a game for children, are you challenged by the physical demands of it? And if you’re not challenged… what is there to keep your attention as you got nothing to overcome?
Yep, you’re writing it right. Not necessarily.
In that specific case it happened nonetheless. Namely ‘Use the leveling guide first and only use other guides after passing that’, which was a simple individual task. That wasn’t adherred to, hence the complex task after wasn’t possible as the individual in this specific example didn’t do the prerequisite and hence was permanently confused… for obvious reasons.
The other part of your argument was tackled already in full. Just as I said, yes. Still, difference between learning disability (dyslexia, autism) versus IQ. They’re not the same.
If we wanna get into a bit more detail as you have personal experience about autism then you should be aware that the group of ‘high functioning’ (as it’s still often called, ‘Level 1’ would be more apt for modern description, ‘Asperger’s’ was the old description before ‘high functioning’) autism directly correlates with heightened IQ actually. The typical IQ there is between average and above-average, which means they’re above 100 median IQ, hence above the ‘baseline’ for first-world countries.
That’s based on increased pattern recognition and the lack of cognitive filters which mandate that a higher mental capacity is a necessity to function at a baseline level compared to a neurotypical person.
Yeah, but the mental part is ~90% of the game, if you don’t have the intellectual capability to grasp how affixes, skills, skill modifiers (ie, the skill tree) & the like interract to create an effective build then you might as well just be selecting things at random or rolling your face over the keyboard. I don’t think you get how big a roadblock that is because it’s not a problem for you (or the vast majority of people). And you’re just labelling it as “not putting the effort in”, which, TBF, is what most teachers did back in the 80s about people with learning difficulties (ADHD, autism, dyslexia, etc), they were just viewed as stupid, or difficult or lazy.
And you can’t do it for those with intellectual challenges either.
It can, yes, but not always (& not in the case of my eldest).
You underestimate how much physical capacity is necessary for ARPGs. Platformers and FPS are the highest-demand games for physical capacity, directly followed by RTS and ARPG’s, with depending on the type of ARPG it being more or less demanding.
You overestimate the need of knowledge for making builds in LE by quite a bit. Unless you combine absolutely unfitting stuff that makes zero sense (and hence also feels wrong to someone with low IQ, just not easily known why) you’re golden. You’re going to get through the game since it’s ‘sufficing’ enough. Mind you… that’s why I specifically stated only the mental aspect, with physical being within normal parameters.
You can play through (reaching empowered) LE as a melee with a weapon from the campaign you randomly picked up, which is 3 tiers below the max-tier for bases. You can miss nigh every synergistic point in the skill-tree for your abilities… and it still will be able to be played through. That’s where we get actually a form of difficulty. That’s the area where the game defines itself between being ‘easy’ or ‘not easy’.
Hence I can expect someone with a low IQ to be roughly equivalent in playthrough quality comparatively to my first playthrough after extensively playing the game. Hence for someone with low IQ and not a learning disability since those are still two different things.
If that’s your takeaway then I’m plainly spoken baffled 
I think you’re still conflating low IQ with a learning disability despite me making it abundandly clear not only which group I’m talking about but also specifically explaining the differences.
You absolutely can, for example a FPS is a prime example of a game-type which allows players of all mental capacity ranges to enjoy it as long as the physical one’s aren’t impaired.
Much like you have puzzle games which are the absolute opposite. That’s the issue qith quoting things out of the full given context. You forgot to include the ‘When it’s based on fast reactions of any kind’ part, which is not removable from the argument here as it’s the limitation.
It’s not the first time you quote the general statement without the given stipulations included with it. You cannot just remove em freely, they are mandatory to make sense of an argument.
That’s what happens with any group. Hence why I say ‘median’. You always have a upper and lower range of outliers. Not everyone with ‘level 1 ASD’ is an Einstein, and not everyone is borderline ‘level 2 ASD’ (more needs necessary).