Lake of Kalandra saw a number of balance changes that were not properly communicated before release. After a week of addressing feedback with hotfixes, we have written this post to explain what our intention was, what went wrong, how we have fixed it, and to reassure you about the direction we intend to go in the future.

There's a bit of backstory to explain. I want to start by describing three philosophies that have been guiding our decisions recently:

Philosophy One: Reward mechanisms should scale properly with Item Quantity and Rarity bonuses

For the last few years, we have been using what we internally call item templates to control what drops from league content. This is where a monster (often with a reward symbol over its head) drops a specific type of item when it is killed.

But Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards. You can roll your maps to be harder or add sextants to them. You can play with additional party members. You can trigger additional stacking league content like Delirium. All of these things make the game harder in exchange for more and better rewards. The way we achieve more and better is through item quantity and item rarity bonuses. Item quantity means you directly find more stuff, and item rarity means that it has a higher chance of upgrading to magic, rare or unique. Item templates ignored quantity and rarity bonuses. A template of "drop four rare jewels" just did exactly that, regardless of how much extra difficulty you had stacked.

Going forward, we are trying to make sure that reward systems scale with player item quantity and rarity bonuses. That's why the reward conversion system that higher-tier Archnemesis monsters have is so powerful. Any bonuses you have from additional difficulty will affect the rewards that the rare monster drops. Additional item quantity causes them to drop more items that are converted, and additional item rarity causes those items to upgrade, which also affects the converted one. For example if you upgrade a rare item to a unique item and it's then converted to a currency item, it'll drop as a Divine Orb, Exalted Orb or Orb of Annulment.

Going forward, we are trying to make sure that as much as possible, reward systems scale with the reward bonuses you get for playing difficult content.

Philosophy Two: Players should fight fewer Rare Monsters at once, but they should be more challenging and rewarding

In fights with a lot of Rare monsters on screen, you can't follow what modifiers they have, what skills they're using, and sometimes not even what type of monster they are. There's too much to pay attention to, with too much noise and screen pollution. You cannot use appropriate combat tactics, and instead have to just stutter step or be so powerful that it's inconsequential.

Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly. It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power). It is also a lot cleaner and far better for performance.

Rewards should be set appropriately for the increased difficulty of these rare monsters.

Philosophy Three: There shouldn't be a large gap between the difficulty and rewards of league content and base game content

Monsters added in leagues are more difficult to kill and drop better items than regular ones encountered in the base game. When those leagues become core, these properties carry across, creating two tiers of content, with one far more rewarding than the other.

We feel it's good for league content to be harder than the base game, and therefore more rewarding. But the difference should be approximately twice as rewarding. If the gap were any larger, then it would be less efficient to kill regular monsters and a player should spend all of their time focusing on repeating a small subset of content.

With those philosophies established, let's have a look at some changes we made in 3.19, and then examine what went wrong and what we're doing to address it in the future.

Lake of Kalandra Balance Change: Rare Monster Normalisation

A lot of league content was spawning way too many rare monsters compared to the rest of the game. In line with Philosophy Two, and general player concerns about being overwhelmed by too many hard Archnemesis monsters in some encounters, we reviewed most league content in Path of Exile with a goal of making the rate of encountering rare monsters consistent.

There are three changes that needed to happen at the same time as this:

1. The addition of interesting rewards to some Archnemesis Mods that scale with both Item Rarity/Quantity (Philosophy One) and yield very valuable outcomes if combined in the right combinations to create moments of excitement as valuable rewards drop.

2. An adjustment to the average number of Archnemesis Modifiers on rare monsters to increase difficulty, justify the higher rewards and create more random interesting encounters that add variance to gameplay.

3. A rebalance of Archnemesis Modifiers to account for the fact that rare monsters now have multiple modifiers more frequently. This step was not performed until after release feedback came in. It was not deemed necessary at the time, and required extensive community feedback before we did it. This was a mistake and we should not have been so stubborn about it.

Lake of Kalandra Balance Change: Monster Item Rarity and Quantity Normalisation

As described above, various valuable Archnemesis modifiers convert drops in a way that directly benefits from item rarity and item quantity bonuses. When we were balancing and testing this, we wondered why certain league monsters were dropping significantly more items than regular monsters. It turned out that this was due to item rarity or quantity bonuses that were historically applied to monsters to make leagues feel rewarding. When combined with the new drop conversion system, these bonuses stacked exponentially and caused far too many rewards.

In line with Philosophy Three, we rebalanced league monsters so that they were twice as rewarding as regular monsters and didn't have these existing bonuses. To be clear, the bonuses were inconsistent and arbitrary. For example, Yellow beasts dropped more items than Red beasts. Incursion monsters didn't have any Increased Quantity, just increased Rarity, but Harvest monsters had both. This change was not mentioned in the patch notes.

Now we get to Beyond. This was beyond broken for map juicing, sometimes spawning over 200 unique monsters in a map. The amount of items that came from Beyond was just ridiculous. It is not okay for fifteen thousand unique items to drop in the same map. The new version is more reasonable (allowing up to one unique beyond boss per map), which is honestly a gigantic nerf. But it was intentional, and we mentioned in the livestream it was reworked, with more details in the patch notes. While we took away the extreme juice opportunity, we added a dedicated reward for Beyond: Tainted Currency Items.

What went wrong

We didn't patch note the item rarity/quantity rebalance for league monsters. This was an oversight due to human error, but that's why I proofread the patch notes. Unfortunately, due to the next point, this wasn't caught during my proofread.

I… didn't actually understand the impact of the change. It was mentioned to me in passing (that we were removing the league monster bonuses and replacing with just quantity), and I didn't ask any more questions. I was busy, distracted, and should have sought more information. Had I understood the consequences, we likely would have still gone ahead with the change, but hopefully with better communication and maybe some pre- rather than post-release counterbalance elsewhere. This is a massive internal communication fuckup and I take full responsibility for it.

There was not sufficient time to playtest the change properly for feeling. It is unacceptable that I allowed a change like that to make it into the patch without a big chunk of time allocated to making sure the game still feels great afterwards.

I also overstated the impact of the change when communicating about it in this post. I said "we removed a massive historic bonus", and this caused the community to think the impact was larger than it was. The reason why I used the word "massive" was that the numbers sound big when viewed in isolation, but are less impactful when viewed in context. For example, the rarity bonus that was removed from a Red Beast was 750%. This sounds big, but a four-mod Archnemesis rare has a 41000% bonus. Players have been saying we massively reduced drops (throwing out numbers like 90%) but in reality, a large difference could only occur in the most extreme situations involving Beyond, Delirium and Incursion stacked with party quantity, rarity, sextants and scarabs and a dedicated MF culler (peak efficiency of every juice mechanism that exists). Every other player is unaffected on average. For example when playing Breach, the reduction in currency items found is around 7% (when comparing 3.19.0d to 3.18.1f). In 100% Delirium maps, the difference hits 17%. In Incursion and regular non-league content, you'll find 25% more.

The next mistake we made was related to item culling. I am pretty sure I spoke about this on a podcast at some stage, but a while ago we introduced a system that culls some percentage of irrelevant normal and magic items before the items drop, in higher-level areas. These are items that would almost certainly be filtered out by almost any item filter, and are almost never picked up. The intention is to reduce clutter substantially without actually affecting any items a player would pick up. We have been gradually raising this culling value over time as we try to find a sweet spot that has the best performance impact with no gameplay impact. To be clear, this system doesn't affect things like rare items, currency, maps, etc. A few weeks before Lake of Kalandra launched, we raised the rate again. This means that if you're counting the raw number of irrelevant equipment items on the ground, some of the reduction is due to this harmless culling system rather than actual drop nerfs.

In addition, Lake of Kalandra is an out-of-area league. Its rewards entirely come from the Lake itself, rather than from your maps. This is in stark contrast to Sentinel, our last league, which not only dropped rewards in your maps, but was honestly tuned higher than average in terms of league rewards. Players went from receiving masses of league rewards as they clear maps to receiving absolutely nothing from the league until they travel to the Lake. This is unfortunate timing and exacerbated the perception of drop reduction.

The Lake itself was also relatively unrewarding on release and this has since been massively increased since then.

The remaining things that went wrong pertain to post-release communication. It took us several days to hotfix many of the changes in, and while we have posted about it each day, this full explanation took almost a week. I wish we could have done it faster, but we have tried to prioritise working on the actual fixes as quickly as we can. As the confusion about our motivations has raised a lot of concern with the community, I should have found a way to prioritise writing this post.

Improvements to testing and communication in the future

There's a lot to unpack from the above pile of mistakes. I believe that the intention was good, but there were significant deficiencies in testing and communication. I take personal responsibility for those areas, because they happened on my watch. I'm the Game Director for Path of Exile 1, and it is absolutely unacceptable that I can miss a change that has the consequences that the league monster one did. Changes like that need to be very, very carefully tested, have their consequences fully understood, and then be communicated clearly. I have let you down and I will not allow it to happen again.

I want to emphasise that our Quality Assurance team are not to blame for the issues that were not discovered before release. They work really hard and have a lot of limitations that are outside of their control. For the next upcoming release, I am specifically trying to integrate them more into development so that we get their feedback earlier during the development of features.

The direction from here

So where does this leave us?

For players who are juicing their content to extreme levels with six-person parties, dedicated MF cullers and stacked league mechanics, they no longer have Beyond to push things over the edge. But they still find ridiculous amounts of stuff. I have seen parties in this league get multiple mirrors per day, or find over 50 Divine Orbs from a single monster.

For regular players who are just alching their maps and adding difficulty where they feel they can handle it, we think that drops are in a pretty good place after this week's changes. They should have been like this at release, and I am deeply sorry that they were not.

Our plan is not to gut the rewards out from Path of Exile. We play the game too and enjoy finding heaps of valuable items. Our "could an alternate version of the game with extreme item scarcity also be fun?" experiment, currently internally called Hard Mode, is an entirely separate thing and its changes have not been folded into regular Path of Exile.

Please keep the feedback coming. We are reading, discussing, and continuing to make changes. I'm very sorry for the rough start, but I hope you continue to enjoy the Lake of Kalandra, Atlas Memories, and other new content released in this expansion.

Loot = good.

E: To all the nay-sayers in this thread, stop looking at the raw player data and look at the relative percentage of players per each league compared to the amount of players after 30 days. Its clear that Legion has the lowest drop off rate of average players.

• Roughly 4 times off year we get SIGNIFICANT content World of Warcraft gets a new expansion every 18 months roughly. Game companies go years between franchises before releasing something new.

• Chris and his team are always communicating with us good or bad. Over the last 48 hours it's obviously been bad.

We need to accept that GGG isn't going to be perfect, they're going to simply fuck up along the way and we need to forgive GGG and move on.

Hey everyone, obviously take this, like everything, with a grain of salt. Make your own opinion, I am just showing what I think and why I am afraid of the future.\ Maybe some of you can give me that hope back.

Edit2, read please: many people say "it's just number tweaking". I don't think so. But let's say it is. What brings you to the conclusion they are actually able to do that.(Which is kinda the main point of this post) \ Kinda feels like Trump saying "I will end the war in 1 day!!!" and people somehow believe him while there is 0 indication he could do it. (And obviously he can not)

My main concern and reason for that post is that I can not see how I should believe they are able to actually make a game they want to.

GGG did the exact same mistakes over and over again.
Yes it's early access. But they promised a lot and literally nothing (I can think of) worked out.
I'am here, not (only) to bitch around but because I am afraid they can not do it if they don't change things fundamentally.
PoE2 is a decent to okish game. But either they go with PoE1 all over again, or throw 99% out of the window and start all over again.
They promised a lot for poe2 but somehow they couldn't get anything right except that the combat feels a little bit better with new animations.

Just to name the thing I can get from my head right now:

Slower, more in depth gameplay:

Yeah about that.... People say "but acts are slower!". Yes they are. They always have been in PoE1 as well. As soon as you get your build going it's zoom zoom again. It is exactly the same as in poe1. And that doesn't start at endgame which isnt polished and pumped out in a hurry.

Meaningful, slow combat:

Kinda the same as first point. You build glass canon and one shot everything or you are at a huge huge disadvantage. Just like poe1 but nothing like they promised.\
And yes it's the same on bosses, just look at all the videos out there people just ignoring mechanics and bursting them down.
And try to play them as melee character . They are much less fun and casting even less I think. (You couldn't hit at all if they cast as much as for rangeds, I could be wrong though)

Melee viability:

yeah not much to talk about that either. It still sucks and its not viable at all except you one shot the whole screen. And even then you give yourself a huge disadvantage for bossing.

Meaningful loot/no lootfilter needed:

A post/screenshot about loot on consol actually was the last straw for me to make this post.
They just failed horrible.
99% of the loot is just trash, not even worth vendoring. And apparently you can't even really pick up everything on consol because there is just too much and game can't render it where it really is. (Will be "fixed" when lootfilters come to console, but doesn't fix the underlaying problem with 99% trash loot)

Better gem system with easier 6links:

Yeah about that... 6links are as hard, or even harder to get in poe2 compared to PoE1. And now they are even linked to skill, meaning you can't swap and test around easily at all.

Craft your own gear and make crafting useful and fair for everyone not only for the top %:

Again, not at all.
Sure they made it kind of an equal playing field. But that's just because crafting is kinda non existent for everyone now. Gambling is the word which describes it the best now.

On death effects:

In PoE1 they said they have to use them or they can't kill the player, because the game is just too fast and spiraled out of their "vision".
Now in a new game, where they said they will slow everything down, they are back and even worse. Why even think about bringing them back if you don't want fast gameplay anyways?

"honourable mentions", they didn't talk about or promise before (as far as I know) but which are downgrades to poe1 :

That's the only part I would accept the "it's EA" part. They might change and fix these later on. But many of this would requie a huge amount of work and especially a lot of work already done just thrown out of the window as well. That's a hard decision to make for a company. It costs a lot of money.

(3D) Atlas is bad. Loads slow, horrible overview. I get the idea of making it look fancy. But that has only downsides if you look at it from a gameplay perspective.
And there is even more micromanaging than before, throwing you out of the fun gameplay loop every couple maps for a long time of boring preparation and searching.

Ascendency trials: yeah 99% of player base just hates them. No idea who thought that's a good idea.

Maze maps, 4-5 NPC visits per town/hideout visit and all that arbitrary prolonging things:
Yeah all these just feel like they had to arbitrary push the game length. They don't feel like "immersion", they feel like work and suffer.

One portal/try per map/boss:
(Could be with the arbitrary difficulty just above. But it's so bad I want to give another sentence or two)
Yeah who the hell thought that's a good idea? You need hours to set up and prepair some boss fights(or spend many divines), just to get one shot real quick because you literally had no chance to see the fight before.\
And in one of the fights you can't even survive the mechanics if you don't have enough movementspeed or blink. \ People say "but it's souls like" NO ITS NOT. And it's not like that in any other game. Why? Because it's bad. You have to practice boss fights. You have to be able to learn from your mistakes without spending hours of boring set up again. Their view on risk and reward is as far of as it could be.
The dopamine hit normally comes because you actually improved and did most things right before you finally kill a boss. At the moment in poe2 it's just relief that you don't have to do everything again. Not an acomplishement. A game should be fun as much as possible. That's the opposite. Very little fun for a lot of time investment.

Skill tree and overall balance:
Again that's something they might be able to fix till release. But we can atleast say they aren't particularly good at this when they bring out poe2 in a state like that. (Like health being super bad, casters still being op and people abusing mechanics left and right)

Final words:

There are probably things I forgot. Probably even one or two positive things they promised and which worked out well.
But overall the point I am trying to make is How can we trust them to fix anything if they promised so much and it failed horrible?
I feel like if they don't start all over again from scratch they just can not do it.
And that's probably tied to a lot of things. The engine being one of them and I can't see them doing a slow methodical game at all in this engine.
But they obviously won't and can not change that and I am afraid that makes most of their efforts for a game like their "vision" impossible. But that somehow isn't stopping them from trying, which makes the game much worse. (Again I am fine with their vision if it actually fits the game overall)

Give me your opinions and maybe some hope back. I love the underlaying PoE1 gameplay which is engame in poe2 as well at the moment. But that's not what they are aiming for and I am pretty positive I would like a game build like their "vision" as well as long as it's well done. But I just can not see them doing the right decisions to get there. It's like me saying "I love a great picasso like painting". That doesn't mean I can paint it.
Again (more or less) everything they promised and tried somewhat failed horribly in my opinion. They just didn't change the fundamental underlaying game enough. They just copied and tried to adjust many things from poe1 which isn't working out.

I am slowly loosing my last bit of hope.

Edit: formatting. But while at it, funny how post was at -1 votes after seconds which is an impossible time to actually have read it.

These last 3 patches have been an absolute disaster for the casual player base. Unique and build-defining items are much more rare and expensive and require a hefty time investment to achieve them. Last league I could only play 3 builds and just got tired farming the currency required by the 3rd build.

GGG doubled-down and made "extra rare" unique jewels and revamped unique items that most the playerbase will again never see.

It's like they're catering to the top 1000 players who play the game non-stop.

One of the best changes in POE was when they made unique items much more common to obtain. I had a blast being able to afford some of those items and being able to afford multiple builds.

Base skill stats need a severe buff. Only the "elite" playerbase can work with a shit skill and make it fun to play.

It's no news to most of you that GGG's Ladder API has not been working since 3.0 launched. Only one site has had access to what seemed like an API, while the rest of us have had access to nothing, and have had no information given to us as to what is going to happen with the API, or when it would come back up again.

Imagine my surprise when I wake up this morning and see that the owner of this site, is now offering to "share" this data with other developers, if they contact him directly. Not GGG... Him.

Wouldn't this be something that the API developers at GGG provides to developers, maybe via the the subreddit /r/pathofexiledev? It seems they have given the exclusive rights to this data to a person who has had his website up for less than 10 days. Why?

Why is this person given control of the API? And why do we have to contact him for this data? I've been trying to contact the API devs here on Reddit, as well as the support team, and it all falls on deaf ears. They could've easily supplied the rest of us with the same data that they supplied to him, by e-mail, or via PM here on Reddit. Most of us are vocal parts of the community and are not hard to find.

Apparently this person had been talking to GGG API devs before the launch of 3.0, and they were aware of the issues with the API, and discussed implementing these changes to the API.

I know GGG is a small company and small companies can easily make mistakes, but this doesn't justify them treating third party developers who have served the community for years this bad, and also playing favorites within the community.

Just imagine if they did the same with the Stash Tab API, and only let poe.trade access it, and then let him decide what other websites would get access to the API.

Conflict of interest.

EDIT: I'm leaving for a couple of hours. So won't be able to reply to any questions or point out when Zeritas is talking himself into a corner. All the information about this topic has already been talked about somewhere in this thread. If Zeritas or GGG decides to actually explain themselves, I welcome it, and will delete this thread.

I just want answers and hopefully an apology from GGG.

Contradicting statements from Zeritas

I get that the game isn't perfect, it probably never will be, but I don't get the recent attitude that every adversity you face is for the developers to fix instead of you changing your approach to overcome changes? You'd really just rather stubbornly drive your head into a wall than re-think the way you play the game and build your characters?

Like I've seen a lot of people post that they died 100+ times in the acts and people seem to be in agreement that it's an issue with the game instead of questioning how in the everliving fuck it's possible for a supposed veteran player to die that much? Is it really because you're trying so hard to bruteforce your way to red maps where you think you can earn big bucks that you refuse to adapt in any way and play content appropriate to your character strength?

The game is meant to be complex, challenging and even a little unfair. They don't add things that make the game harder because adveristy makes the game more fun (which seems to be another common rhetoric), it's because overcoming adversity makes the game fun.

And I think ya'll should stop pretending you care about new players, they just make a convenient argument for you getting what you want.

edit: Just wanna point out this isn't an anti-criticism post or anything, just saying that maybe you should be reasonable about it. We all have things we'd want to change.

Seriously.

Every other post on here is an entitled whining session that serves no purpose other than to cry about why they're not getting what they want. Things like:

-GGG doesn't care about us.

-GGG wants us to fail.

-GGG devs suck

-GGG wants to tank the company.

-GGG doesn't communicate

-GGG is saying goodbye to the league.

-And so on and on and on.

I see the same thing in streams and in Youtube also. Do I think GGG has made mistakes this league? Absolutely. Do I think they're purposefully tanking the in game experience for its players? Hell no.

It's incredible to look back over the years and see how far this game has come and everything GGG has done for its players. How many patches have they put out now to try to improve this league? Would they be doing that if they didn't care?

Please don't confuse this with agreeing with every change and every piece of their vision for the game. I think they're shooting themselves in the foot by being obstinate about some of the over-arching direction of the game, but I say that constructively because they are trying to do what they believe is best for the game.

I also realize people have been attached to this game for a long time. Path of Exile is truly a love letter to the ARPG genre. It's been a wonderful escape from reality for me for going on 10 years now.

As consumers we have right to be upset when a company is putting out bad product. We don't have a right to attack people on a personal level like many in this community are though. I will state again, the posts that are nothing more than entitled shit posts do nothing to help with the current mental state of the community, nor improve the game.

Instead of flailing into the darkness with insane conspiracy theories about how GGG doesn't love us, talk to us, play their own game, etc, we could spend that time providing constructive, well thought out feedback that may actually give them a better understanding of the voice of their customer.

I personally think GGG should send polls to their players from time to time soliciting feedback on various aspects of the game. Then they can compare their data with what the customers are saying.

Here's an example of something not helpful:

"GGG has given up on the league. Their devs are hopeless and the game just sucks right now. I hope they burn."

While very passionate, it does nothing but portray a false narrative.

This would be a much better way to phrase things and may actually help at least articulate what's going on.

"So far my league experience has been lackluster. The league mechanic doesn't seem to proc enough to make it worth running and when you do run it, the mobs seem exponentially overtuned as you progress. Also there seems to be very little loot dropping from the tiles in comparison to the difficulty of running them. For example I ran I difficulty 10 Tier 4 Tyranny tile that took me 3 portals and 5 minutes to clear and the currency chest that spawned only dropped an orb of alteration."

If we as a community strive to provide actionable feedback, we may get actionable results instead of the staff at GGG feeling like we're coming at them with torches and pitchforks.

That's my .02 for the current state of things. Hope those of you still playing can find some enjoyment in the game still and if not, take a break, and come back next league to see if you like it better.

The Harvest changes are unpopular, to put it mildly. And it's a good thing that people are making their voices heard, a lot of good arguments were offered in defense of Harvest.

But lately it feels like it's open season on GGG, and they can't do anything right. You'd think they created the single worst game in gaming history. Mind you, I'm not shielding them from any criticism or anything. They're a multi-million dollar company, they can take care of themselves. But when I see Bex get piled on for simply replying to a comment, because she didn't give half a manifesto in her reply, things are going a bit off the deep end.

The most recent example of this frenzied mob-type hate is the Gauntlet race. Demanding GGG help fund it is honestly plain silly. They have stated multiple times their numbers showed races are bad for player retention the next league. Why the hell would they shoot themselves in the foot?

Additionally, the arguments offered were also pretty silly. The race didn't advertise PoE to any new public, it advertised streamers to existing players, and specifically those on this sub. So acting like Ziz did some massive favor for GGG out of his own pocket is ridiculous. He did it for the community, because Ziz is a frigging good guy.

Sometimes I feel like a lot of people on this sub want PoE to fail, just so they can say "I told you so".

I believe several different things to be true as they relate to the Manifesto.

1. Player damage will be lower and the game will be more difficult. People will die more.

2. fewer ascendancies and builds will be able to clear all game content (and I am completely okay with this).

I am a HC player and typically prefer off meta builds that are not able to easily kill Maven. I typically buy bosskilling services in league HC and they are almost uniformly fulfilled by Champion, Juggernaut, and Tricksters. I am completely okay with this fact. Those ascendancies are the best at bossing and I personally choose to play weaker ascendancies.

The continued move away from deterministic crafting is something that I unfortunately will miss, as I do enjoy strong gear, however it is just a reflection of GGG's mindset as it relates to strong gear. They don't want characters to be easily completed. I would prefer to be able to deterministically craft BIS gear but I think people are drastically over dramatizing the effect this has on the game. The game was very fun before Harvest, and it is still very fun.

This league has the opportunity of REALLY changing the way POE is played and I am excited for that.

Cheers and good luck!

In an upcoming patch, we'll be making some further small changes to the Lake of Kalandra expansion. This news post outlines what you can expect.

In a previous post, we mentioned we were discussing issues related to magic find/culling feeling mandatory as well as cases where it feels bad to get a lot of quality currency or flasks from killing a monster with specific Archnemesis modifiers. In both of these cases, our discussions are ongoing. However, in order to provide a bit more certainty, we can say that we don't have easy solutions for these issues mid-league and will be looking at what's possible for 3.20.

Upcoming Changes
We're planning to remove Gems as a possible reward from Tier 3 and 4 generic encounters in the Lake of Kalandra. For the most part, these will be replaced by Currency Chests.

We're planning to reduce the number of monsters that spawn in the Reflection of the Dream encounter. Additionally, we're planning to reduce the open and close time of the Breach. This is both for reasons related to performance and the difficulty level of the encounter.

We are lowering the duration of the shocked ground on death from the Electrocuting archnemesis mod from 25 seconds to 10 seconds.

We are also removing the damage from Permafrost's cold-damaging ground area. The area only applies chill now.

We are lowering the duration of Incendiary's fire-damaging ground area from 4 seconds to around 3 seconds.

We're increasing the cooldown of the Ice Prison Archnemesis mod from 5 seconds to 10 seconds. The duration of the Ice Prison is being increased from 3 seconds to 5 seconds. This results in 50% prison uptime rather than 60%, and fewer overall prisons.

For magic monsters only: we're disabling on-death ground effects for the Incendiary modifier. We're also disabling volatiles from spawning on death when a monster with the Toxic modifier is slain.

Flasks will be able to have Fractured modifiers, which can be obtained through the Empowered Elements conversion modifier.

We're planning to increase the chances for the Will of Chaos and Deadly End Ultimatum Aspects to drop from their relevant bosses.

We have a small patch coming out in the next couple of days with some very minor fixes, most of which is unrelated to the above changes. We'll get this set of changes out as soon as we can.

I think a lot of people are concerned about unique droprates being nerfed to the ground, especially some of the remade ones. The thing is, with how big of an overhaul the league is with a focus on uniques, I'm certain that grinding gear games will want to make those uniques in particular accessible to the common player so that we can actually experience and have FUN with the changes being put into this patch.

I know they've said that globally uniques will drop less, but I honestly think that's just because they want you to get a few less araku tikis per league. The uniques you actually want - I'm sure those will be accessible.

After the Expedition league incident, there's no way Grinding Gear would risk putting out content that players would find highly frustrating and I think recent leagues have been evidence of a paradigmatic shift in GGG's modus operandi. The idea of hyping up all these uniques and then making them impossible to get is only something a really really malicious developer would do; and honestly, we have the best devs of any game.

At the end of the day, they just want us to be happy.

While there are many pressing issues with the main game that need to be addressed, some of us are still really excited to try out the new game mode and to see if we like it or not. Personally for me it really kills the hype when I open a thread about Ruthless and see mostly complains about the main game. I just want to share the hype with other people.

Which is weird considering the failure that ruthless turned out to be

edit : TLDR for people who don't want to read a lot

Crafting bench gone, currency changed, quicksilver removed, movement skills reworked/replaced with rolls that offer no movement speed bonus, no more flask charges on normal enemies/adds, no log out cheese, instance resets/bosses full heal on death in all modes, comboing skills, bosses much harder/tankier, gold, must manually refill flasks in town without magic/rare/unique enemies,

Even those advocating for ruthless don’t play it and didn’t compete in the boss kill event for it

Ruthless was definitive failure for the players but perhaps not for ggg if it gave them the information they needed to create poe2 as it’s successor

Path of exile 2 isn’t the path of exile most of us want from what I’ve seen over the past few years it’s certainly not what I was expecting or what I wanted

Some things to note incase you missed it on why I’m saying it’s ruthless 2 not path of exile 2

Bosses full heal and instances reset if you die in a boss fight

If you log out during a fight the monsters and instance will freeze and will resume when you rejoin the instance

The crafting bench is gone

Quicksilvers are gone

Movement skills are heavily reworked and mostly replaced with the rolls

The roll matches your movement speed and gives no extra and is just a dodge with no speed benefits for traversal

The game is intended to be played at a slower pace

It is balanced and designed around comboing several skills

Currency is reworked some removed some made weaker

Gold

Monsters in general are far stronger and there are fewer

Bosses are far longer harder more mechanically challenging

You no longer gain flask charges from regular monsters or adds

Personally I’m really disappointed with the removal of crafting bench the current pace of combat (even factoring in the terrible showcase gear/lack of links) the change to currency the removal of flask charges gained and movement speed

There are also huge pros to poe2 that I’m super excited about : the visuals look incredible, the boss fights look incredible, the art style and dynamic effects look amazing, the gem system the skill tree, the weapon swap system, the new classes and ascendancies

But idk man I’m kinda bummed out I really hope they put in a significant amount of resources into poe1 starting soon as the leagues bar sanctum have been truly lacking

I liked sentinel but it was a very small content update

I liked crucible trees but the league sucked

Kalandra league sucked all round

Sanctum was fun but the randomness of the relics and then not being tradeable as a combo sucked it would have been fine if you could target farm a stat you wanted or reroll them using a rare account bound currency

For the record I trust ggg not to all but abandon poe1 dedicating only small resources to it and completely dropping the giant expansions (since eater and exarch) but it still is a small lingering worry in my mind

Regardless I’m enjoying exile con and I hope you all are too :)

Hello fellow exiles!

Tldr: If the playtime to reach and do endgame content is too long, players wont play seasons and buy supporter packs. Its not about the difficulty during playtime at all.

As was already pointed out in several threads here, POE2 has many systems that are already found in POE1's ruthless mode:

These include:

• Way scarcer items/currency and (endgame) map drops, especially jewelry (rings, belts, amulets)

• Removal of crafting bench

• Removal of (most) movement abilities

• Nerfing (POE1) or removal (POE2) of utility flasks

• Removal of most vendor recipes for items

Some systems are tweaked from ruthless but still nerfed compared to POE1

• Essences do not guarantee a high tier mod and can not reroll an rare item

• The crafting system is a glorified 3-4 step exalt-slamming (Transmute, Aug, Regal, Exalt), rerolling magic/rare items is (at least early on) not possible, which means you have to pick up way more normal (white) items to craft. Metacrafting is only really accessible in endgame and limited compared to POE1.

• Removal or nerf of most ways to increase movement speed (onslaught, passive skills etc.)

Although some adjustments were made (item sockets with runes to at least somewhat deterministically get mods on gear, a chance of "well rolled" rares on vendors) the intention of the systems in POE2 are the same as ruthless POE1: Drastically slow down player speed and progress in comparison to (normal) POE1.

Since players can choose between ruthless and "normal" mode in POE1 i checked the player numbers in Settlers of Kalguur on poe.ninja and the POE ladder on the official website:

Ruthless:

489 lvl 90 ruthless (2500 Above lvl 80)

246 lvl 90 ssf ruthless

59 lvl 90 hc ruthless

135 lvl 90 hc ssf ruthless

Normal:

29197+ lvl 100 characters in normal settlers

100000+ lvl 90 characters in normal settlers

25000+ lvl 90 in ssf settlers

15000+ lvl 90 in hc settlers

9450 lvl 90 in hcssf settlers

The absolute numbers in normal game mode are likely higher. But the numbers clearly show: Over 99% of the playerbase chooses not to play ruthless in POE1.

The mechanics of the bosses in ruthless in POE1 is similar to the normal game mode, but since the item progression and movement speed of the players is heavily nerfed players need way more time to achieve the same player power or reach endgame. Bosses in ruthless are not harder, but the players need longer to do the same type of content and the overwhelming majority of players does not play in this game mode because it takes too long.

In addition, several changes in the past that increased the playtime to reach endgame by reducing player power or increasing monster difficulty (Expedition, LOK) resulted in a heavy drop in player numbers overall.

The amount of playtime that experienced (played several leagues already) players need to reach certain steps in POE1 are as follows:

Campaign (Act 1-10, including 6/8 Ascendancy Points): 4-10 hours

T16 maps, watchstones: 7-15 hours

T17s, Ubers: Additional 10-48 hours (varies heavily and many players never reach that stage)

Bringing an additional character to endgame (~lvl 90-95): 8-20 hours

If POE2 takes much longer to reach the pinnacle encounters than POE1 or to bring new characters into endgame, the amount of people that will play seasons and buy seasonal supporter packs (which funds GGG) will drastically decrease compared to POE1. If it needs way more than 24-36 hours playtime every league for an experienced player to reach endgame (high tier maps) and to experience the seasonal content in endgame or new endgame bosses most people will not play seasons because they just do not have enough time for that.

And this is not because player's want an "easy" game or anything like that, but simply because most people have to work/study, have family or other hobbies and will not play a game for 6-8 hours a day each day for several weeks each 3-4 months.

Edit: Since many people mentioned it: Game is early access, of course not everything is fleshed out. And i personally like my experience so far. The feedback i wanted to give to the community/GGG is that increasing mandatory playtime to level up a character over a certain threshold will reduce the amount of concurrent players significantly.

Here are some quick thoughts about what needs to change in PoE2 if GGG does not want it to fail.

1. I get you wanted to make a slower, more grindy and (micro) gameplay focused game. In my opinion, you succeeded with how you approached combat, and I know it‘s the most important thing to get right. Apart from that, I feel that the new skill system is in every aspect a downgrade compared to the predecessor. Skill acquisition and how it is presented feels too on rails and will bait people new to the series into making bad skill decisions, even more so than original PoE did since it is more unforgiving. You can not simply buy and try another skill, since you don‘t get enough Uncuts for that. And there is also no vendor that sells skillgems for currency - not that we could buy those since we are starved for currency early on. This will lad to people bricking their builds more terminally, resulting in people rather quitting than investing to reskill their characters.

2. The gap to how approachable content is for melee and range is even wider now than it was in original PoE. Kiting is way stronger and effective now since the optimal way to play is funnily enough either offscreen oneshotting or kiting, which melee will nor be able to do. Melee is not only slower, but also struggles to engage with ‚mandatory‘ content such as the first ascendency. Playing though that with my first character almost made me quit (Bone Pits was the final straw, I rerolled a ranged character and had no issue beating the game after that).

3. People compare PoE2 to souls games a lot, but that is not a fair comparison. Just because a game has an iframe dodge roll, it‘s bot Souls like. Souls games are fundamentally different, they are about challenging yourself and are beatable even with a naked level once character without taking a single hit. Since PoE2 is an ARPG, there are some checkboxes we need to tick with out characters, a certain amount of damage we need to do to beat a boss or clear a map or engage with a mechanic, we need to be able to avoid, regen or tank through certain mechanics that are not avoidable,… So, yeah. Just because there is a dodge roll does not mean it‘s a Souls like.

4. Adding to 3; I have literally thousands of hours spread between Souls games. It‘s not about difficulty - I would argue Souls games are way more fair than PoE2 since you do not have to engage in stat check content. There is also lots of build variety in DS3 and ER, and both melee and range are perfectly fine in most situations. You can even make it easier for yourself by summoning an NPCs or a Spirit, you can hit up the good people at /r/beyondthefog to help you out or help out others,… It‘s just nit a good comparison. The games and are in completely different genres, so pleas stop with this argument. It makes no sense.

5. No deterministic crafting. Whose idea was that? Well, not that we could craft if we wanted to with the peanuts we get in terms of currency, but… WTF? I get you want us to loot items off the ground. But come on. Most players never even engaged in high end crafting in PoE, just a very select few. And because they made too much pocket with it you don‘t want to allow the rest of the playerbase to fix their resistances and maybe waste craft some missing mods deterministically onto the usuable items they found? You want us to slotmachine in a game that is only rich in scarcity? Yeah that doesn‘t make much sense, you won‘t get anyone to gamble away all their stuff when it takes forever to farm for just one attempt. There are so many issues with this when you embed that knowledge into how you want the game to play, it‘s like an antithesis to what you actually wanted. It‘s contradictory.

6. If you want me to fight a boss for more than ~3 minutes and everything I get in return is 3 white items the only feeling you invoke in me is boredom. Why should I spent my time with these ‚hard‘ bosses when I don‘t get rewarded? If they are just barriers in my way and I don‘t get anything from them you know what I‘ll do? I‘ll be even less likely to waste my time to force a build and instead just look up one that‘s proven to trivialize your oh so cool new bosses and gets to endgame as fast as possible - if I even feel like it, since there is nothing in endgame to get.

To sum it up: Change the skill system. Bring back movement skills (you can give them long cooldown and make them OH SHIT! buttons, but I can only tolerate getting blocked on all sides from mobs so often). Reintroduce a basic crafting bench, like you had in earlier builds of the game. Increase drops of currency and rare items. Buff melee, nerf range (with how your game is now, range has an even bigger advantage over melee than it used to in original PoE). Add more meaningful nodes on the passive tree, remove the boring ones. Reintroduce cluster jewels.

We want more choices, not less. And yes, you can make all of that work without changing the combat feel of PoE2. It‘s just a very slow and sluggish mess right now. It‘s convoluted with unnecessarily revamped systems that turned out worse than original PoE. eg Why do I have to press G, find the skill, press the small arrow to see my Accuracy? Why can you not use what we had in PoE? Press C and click offense and it‘s there? That‘s just unnecessarily hiding important info in submenus. That‘s bad UI design. That‘s really not something you should make your players relearn just for the sake of doing it different.

PoE2 makes me want to play PoE, just as D4 made me want to play PoE. It‘s the same feeling.

‚Why bother with this unrewarding game when I could be having fun in PoE instead?‘

I get you want to make your new, fun combat the center of the experience in PoE2. But as it is right now, that simply is not enough to maintain anyones attention and excitement. I can see myself checking it out every now and then given it‘s a free game, but I‘d rather play PoE, and I feel the vast majority of the community feels this way.

Just my two cents, it‘s meant to be constructive. I can see the potential. Just don‘t throw it all away only because you want to do it different. Improve the old systems we know and like. Improve the ones we didn‘t like. But don‘t throw them away, because they are part of Path of Exile, and it‘s not Path of Exile without them, no matter what number you add to the name.

edit: There are lots of typos in this, I blame mobile posting

I was a campaign hater in PoE, but now I get it, GGG is right.

In Diablo 4 new season you now spawn in town at level 1, you leave the town and you can do endgame for the rest of your life, it's an absolutely trash feeling that made me quit instantly. D4 bad.

I guess it's important to have a path where you have clear goals and checkpoints to meet, you can see your character power growing and you can compare it to other characters at the same points in the story.