Given POE dropping its “new league” on an important day here… How much does anyone wanna bet that POE is gonna drop its new Ascendancy Change mechanic on 4/16 or 4/17?
Who knows, they might drop it today, but i got my money on them dropping it on or day before LE league start just to be douches.
I have no doubt that they did NOT want to do ascendancy changes. I think they’ve said as much before. But they see LE as a real threat to them now, having lost a lot of players to LE since 0.2 (me included). Now they’re just changing up and copying to stay afloat.
You mean the ability to change ascendancy after initially choosing? You could do that with regrets in PoE since forever, sure its nice QoL but its nothing earth shattering. Its not going to have any meaningful impact on LE’s launch.
GGG really needs to stop labeling content updates in beta as leagues, its misleading as hell. They are nothing more than currency and gear wipes at this point.
There was and will not be a ‘wipe’ in PoE.
It’s solely a economy reset with the current stuff being brought over to Standard, nothing else.
You don’t loose anything at all.
Reset and wipe is interchangeable in this context, you play the new “league,” you start all over.
They don’t need to do a wipe in POE 2. Just put out D4 level nerf patches to match Jonothan’s “vision” after letting the game be fun for 4 months, and POOF! Most of the players are gone. Now all the fluffers can have all the economy they want. I’m sure the Chinese farmers will stick around for a while.
Sure. POE 1 would let you change your ascendancy, but they didn’t include that in PO2, and I’m fairly sure they didn’t want you to do that either. But, like Apple claiming they invented the NFC they copied from Android, here we are.
Now that I’ve been without POE 2 and played some LE, I’ve come to see how opportunistic GGG really is. They’ve got that false sense of authority that Blizzard had, and the same mentality of charging MTX for every little thing, including stash tabs. Their latest stunt is to have you link your Discord to GGG to get an MTX that only lasts TWO MONTHS.
The biggest thing I could say to POE 2 players on the fence would be…it doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to have GGG’s hands in your pockets for every little thing. You don’t have to accept them telling you how YOU are going to have fun. You can just walk away. There are other games that aren’t greedy like that, that focus on fun.
Or… you simply don’t since there’s no content locked into the ongoing league.
So if you don’t give a single shit about a fresh economy you don’t have to endure a fresh economy.
Kinda simple.
Hence no, no ‘wipe’ happened. A wipe enforces that stuff’s gone. It isn’t. It was purely a economy reset… and you can simply keep up playing without any major changes.
To be very fair… with the changes over those last days a hefty amount of the downsides have been handled again. Overall power level in the campaign is still shit (which is very bad) but end-game is actually in a better state then in 0.1.
Issue is getting there.
Jonathan actively said he wouldn’t want that… nonetheless they did it.
Hence it doesn’t matter further, it’s ‘solved’.
Which games would that be in the top-down diablo-clone style genre which offers a massive amount of depth?
Sure, with PoE 2 the core argument of crafting is not existent currently, hence why it’s plainly spoken easier to just leave it on the side… but PoE 1? There is no other game in the genre available which has gradual progression with basically a guarantee of succeeding (even with the RNG through crafting, you’ll get the result after all with the respective amount of tries) but also without enforcing you to pay for actual functional things in-game?
And no, the 30€ shelf-price need for stash-tabs is not a P2W thing, because you don’t need more at the guaranteed 50% off tab sale every 2 weeks. It’s basically the same price as LE, just in that case for 2 games at once, at least when 1.0 comes out.
LE struggles with crafting heavily, everything is a massive ‘all or nothing’ RNG hell at end-game. Progression though is nice!
PoE 2 struggles with progression heavily, and crafting, so not a great state, but also the newest game of the genre.
Torchlight Infinite is a P2W heap of crap.
D4 is a shallow mess which is fun once and never again.
D3 is a shallow mess which also is fun once and never again… but at least more fun then D4 long-term… well… short-term?
Then we got PoE 1, which is a disaster for newcomers but offers with knowledge (that’s too hard to acquire) a very very well-made and gradual progression. But you can’t see shit since it’s a mess of effects… besides that a good game though overall.
And then we have… oh… well… guess that’s the whole available ones existing! Grim Dawn for single player, also RNG hell for top-end gear (triple rares) though, but good amounts of side mechanics to get you through until you collect several of them. Chronicon is really miniscule size-wise before you’ve got 100% min-maxing, No Rest for the Wicked is another genre.
And then it’s basically already completely over.
So where to go? 
It’s still a sign that LE scored a hit on Jonothan’s “vision”. Honestly, I think Jonothan must have gone to the Brad McQuaid school of customer abuse.
Confusing, because it seems you can buy stash tabs for in game gold in LE? Am I missing something?
I’m not a crafting fiend, personally. However, I do like customizing my gear for my needs. I don’t need to be “uber”. Just good enough to get the job done. So far, in my albeit limited experience, LE seems to cover that a ton better than POE 2, and maybe on par or better than POE 1 (my memory is a bit faded on that game).
Yep and yep.
I like to look a little beyond it all. Try to get a grasp of the developer mentality. So far, I like what I’m seeing with EHG. I wish their team was bigger so the updates could come faster, but I get the feeling that they’re really fellow gamers trying to make a game that gamers will keep having fun with. Just my impression so far.
Yes, that you gotta pay up-front a shelf-price for LE while PoE is a f2p game which becomes properly decent went investing said shelf-price 
So kinda?
‘Comfortable’ progression in terms of crafting is best currently in LE, yes. High-end? Really awful though.
PoE 1 is a bit worse in the ‘comfort’ direction since it’s overwhelming you with options, but with knowledge far easier to achieve things then in LE, and without major breaks as well, something always has some form of value at least to either exchange or craft personally in SSF for a build.
Generally yes.
Albeit some decisions are… ‘odd’ to say the least, like the mastery respec.
I’m actually good with this, to be honest. It’s new player friendly, which is a type of customer LE needs to gear up more for. I think the high level people aren’t really going to do this very much, due to the amount of gold and the relearning of a new mastery. I liken that to when people would pay $1500 on ebay to buy a leveled up character. They’d go in a raid and have no clue what to do.
In the end, I don’t mind if player A changes their mastery. It has no effect on my gameplay, and might enable some streamers to put out more build guides for those in that market.
It’s more about the reduction in replay value for the game.
I’ve got nothing against it if LE would be satiated with content already… but that’s exactly the thing the game struggles with still, namely satiety of content. It’s got a solid build-up which works for the moment (but has some serious long-term issues which will creep up with extra content before long actually) but doing mastery respec is simply too early.
In 1-2 years? Sure! More then enough there to keep engagement for a longer period of time, but currently it’s a detriment for Legacy players as the top-end already is RNG hell, so the need to replay each mastery at least alleviated that a bit.
Without the replay for each mastery you’re ‘stuck’ in RNG hell right away though.
That’s trade right?
Whatever PoE2 will drop it will be playable after 1 month.
They nerf/hotfix everything and still ppl die all over the place.
No fun at all.
Jonathan said in the interview btw, that he would delay 0.2 for a week because of LE, but it would be 3-days week with holidays, and delaying by two weeks would be too much.
They don’t have too but the thing is, it’s EARLY ACCESS and have no idea why GGG can’t get that through their thick skull. They should have free respec weekends so people can test builds, find bugs and actually make the game better. It’s in BETA!!! let people TEST the game.
GGG is treating this as a fully released game instead of a game half finished that needs people to test it. Which is really driving people away with their monetization during it.
When they fully launch PoE 2 who cares if you can’t respec or if the game is drastically different from it’s current iteration. They just need to treat it like the half finished BETA game it is and open it up for testing. Just let players have freedom during the BETA.
Anyways while they are making some big adjustments GGG doesn’t understand why they had to make them and have a detachment of the commuinty and current reality. Which means they will make more mistakes.
No, the gradual crafting successes.
PoE had since basically ever a ‘checkpoint’ system for crafting.
Initially those were ‘Eternal Orbs’ which got removed in 2.0 as it was too deterministic and the masters with the crafting bench had taken over that via meta-modding already.
Basically whenever you got 3 T1 Suffixes or Prefixes you can’t ever loose them anymore unless you mess up… or go the one step ‘beyond’ by even exchanging a crafted mod with a fixed one in the hopes for a great outcome. This way a 5 T1 item is always guaranteed with time investment. A deterministic progress over time through acrued currency.
LE doesn’t have that, the crafting mechanic in comparison is a ‘all or nothing’ one, either it works… or it doesn’t and you need a new base. And the base is the issue to acquire in LE.
With newer methods you can even enforce to never loose the first 3 Affixes (Suffix or Prefix) ever via usage of the eldritch currency, which is quite rare and expensive though. Boots, Gloves and Helmets can be ‘primed’ towards either the Eater of Worlds or the Flaming Exarch, using a eldritch Annulment then only removes with guarantee a Prefix/Suffix without the need for a meta-mod even.
For rare mods which have a extremely low change a weakened state of the ‘Eternal Orb’ also is in the game, solely for Magic items, which allows returning always to at least that hard to get mod as the first checkpoint as well, so you can even start to acquire a 3 T1 Suffix/Prefix item.
If someone wants to start crafting then the easiest deterministic method to acquire a good outcome is a fractured essence craft. You go and acquire a fractured item with the right mod on the right base… then spam essences on it until the third Prefix/Suffix becomes the one you want, very reliable and replicable, and from there the follow-ups happen.
There’s also guaranteed outcomes via specific fossil-crafting combinations as well as Harvest crafts combined with ‘cannot roll attack/caster modifier’, some with a 100% hit-rate, others with a very high one.
It’s a distinct difference in the approach to acquiring top-tier items simply.
PoE 2 has nothing of that for example, it’s just tons of bases, spamming stuff on it and getting RSI for the same outcome.
That’s funny cause you basically summed every non-crafting-addict player’s experience with PoE’s crafting system…
It’s all wonders in theory, but in reality, we will lose them, because we will screw up without even knowing we are screwing up, because the system is way too cluttered and unnecessarily complex.
Crafting might be the biggest problem people have with PoE since ever, and no matter how many times you try to defend it, there is no magic happening and the system is not changing itself out of your insistence on defending it.
Sure, it might be great in theory, but in practice, it’s only good for nolife-crafting-blasters.
Oh, the system is problematic in many ways, mostly UI-wise.
It’s very complex without the respective tooltips, safety measures and QoL mechanics provided. Definitely not ‘top notch’.
But… function over form. I rather have a function provided then not having it simply to keep something ‘lean’. The crafting mechanic has been overdue to severe changes in QoL since years by now, GGG never did it, it’s a minus.
But plainly spoken… it’s still a better mechanic then what LE provides functionality wise. If I’m given the choice between a slot machine that never removes the winnings and one which is a ‘all or nothing’ method then I’ll always take the first. Simple as that.
We can talk about ease of usage, properly conveyed information and everything else after a system even exists
I think the point was rather that PoE crafting has plenty of fail states for the average user. There are many ways to mess up your craft halfway through it. Blocking affixes is something most users aren’t even aware of.
Taking your example, the average user might work to their perfect 3 prefixes case, but unlike happens with you, it’s quite likely that the next craft or two will delete some of them and they have to start over.
So yes, it’s true that PoE’s crafting method allows you to work on the same piece over and over until you get the result, for the average user quite often the craftings are effectively screwed over and are forced to reset over and over again.
Even in “expert” crafting guides, they often have you follow some steps and if it fails at one point, they advise to simply sell it and buy another base because it’s cheaper and easier than starting over with the same one.
So in effect, it ends up being the same thing for the average user. You’re either crafting on the same piece dozens of times, or you’re crafting dozens of pieces once.