As much as I wanted to like 1.3 there was just too much here that was a problem or has been a problem and was not addressed.
Let’s start with minions. In short, nothing really changed much, they hit about as hard as they used to and they are made out of wet paper as they used to. As it was extremely obvious even before playing, the minuscule buffs were not felt at all. Player side necromancers are a little bit more tanky but not significantly so and considering they were already extremely easy to kill due to there not being any serious built in defenses, those coming primarily from minions distracting the enemies and enemies still not caring and throwing AoEs at the player, it still feels quite bad.
Minions are still extremely dumb, they keep firing hitting a wall but not the enemy, meanwhile the enemies get to shot through walls and not give a damn because apparently that’s fair.
Infernal Shade continues to not have the most important QoL that it needs, being able to chose targets not affected by it instead of constantly refreshing on targets you don’t want it to refresh on.
New maps have areas that are just poorly designed like the new maps with those big blue flowers which have a projectile blocking footprint about twice as large as they are and again, they only block shots for the player and the player’s minion, the AI gets to happily fire through it.
Dread Shade was made bad for abomination requiring too much investment but made better for everything since it’s now possible to increase crit chance and multi in an area. Of course building an army of minions that are made out of wet paper has predictable results but what I’d call the most offensive thing about this is that Dread Shade was made to have an option to not degen and have infinite duration but in order to have it work in an area the player is forced to take a route that puts a permanent stacking poison dot, ensuring the minions die anyway when that is the opposite of the desired effect. It should have had a direct route that allowed bypassing both the self poison dot and the affecting single target.
As usual, EHJ is afraid of making broken things in minions only when they aren’t afraid to make anything else broken and so they keep what would be the majority of minion possible builds in the gutter. Something work to some extent but making sure there are more viable minion builds that can actually compete with top tier builds, that’s too much to ask, it’s too much to ask to even get army minions just doing 800+ corruption without dying.
For the new content, the hunt mechanic was poorly implemented in the monolith. Many times you don’t find the hunt because it just spawned in the opposite direction of the goal. Tombs were well designed in the fact that if there is a tomb it will be close to one of the objectives so you’ll always find it on the minimap. The hunts were not given the same treatment even though as the defining mechanic of 1.3 they should have been.
Small things that make no sense haven’t been addressed to this game. Things like spells cast from items still require the player to pay the mana cost even though the item is casting it, not the player. Things like, the ability to summon more minions or totems cost exponentially more even though they shouldn’t because the player is already paying for it with several points not being put into giving the skill more power so it’s basically forcing the player to pay twice just for QoL. To put this into perspective. Not other ARPG makes this, other developers all understand that this is a bad mechanic for players to invest into something and then not get a payoff at the end but EHJ is the only ARPG maker that does this which makes no sense.
The market is still not in a good place, having to go to a specific vendor to check out things, not being able to set up buy orders and so on. The trade is made to be as uncomfortable to use as possible because EHJ still resents to this day having had to give this to the players.
This leads into the CoF which is yet another problem. CoF is meant to help target farm but the reality is that it doesn’t helps because the time it takes to get items through the CoF makes it borderline unplayable for anyone that has a life.
And both of those options are painfully slow to level up so again, for anyone with a life, it takes forever to get to max rank so they can start farming at a reasonable rate with all the bonus or trade everything as they are supposed to. It doesn’t even makes sense to begin with that you give a trade option and lock trading behind being able to no life the game.
These are just some of the reasons why I stop playing LE so quickly. I rarely play LE for longer than a week and often I get to empowered monos while still being completely unable to do them because I don’t have the gear and some of the defenses are meant to come from grand blessings which can only be farmed in empowered monos.
It doesn’t matters how much LE wants to stay in the lane of being something in between PoE and D4 in terms of difficulty when it is failing to deliver in every single department to both the casual and the hardcore. Heck, I’m much more casual than hardcore and the fact is, PoE is still the better game for a casual player and that says a lot about how much EHJ is missing the mark.
In 1.2 I bought the big supported pack as the game seemed to be heading in the right direction and PoE 2 was taking quite the dump. Yet EHJ keeps failing to deliver and from now on I’m treating it the same way I treat PoE. I will not spend any more money until I see real improvements to the game that makes it much more desirable for casual players over PoE while not being the garbage that is D4.