My final thoughts and closing out of Affliction league in Path of Exile. What a league. What’d you think?
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I'm trully glad for your achievement and enjoyment of the game but I feel PoE is not for me anymore. I'm just waiting for Last Epoch and I'll try PoE 2, hoping it will be different than PoE 1. I'm really tired of the 1 button specs that became the ultimate way to play and win the game. This is not engaging to me.
I sometime enjoy the levelling until level 60-70, the building of a spec, then it's the right-click grind and I stop playing for 3 month… And now I haven't played for more than 6 month because I find no motivation to do the same things again. Maybe I missed the best league yet but it doesn't even bother me…
I trully hope PoE 2 will be different in it's gameplay.
Is nice to see more PoE content for you, the OG! Also welcome to the 40/40 club too! 😎
It’s so good to see you having an open incredible time this league mate!
affliction league was pretty good. Only thing keeping it from being awesome is the affliction league mechanic.
I haven't played in a few years and saw these affliction videos so decided to try this league about 2 weeks ago. All other leagues the most I'd ever made was about 10ex/div and I'd stop playing after doing Shaper/Elder a few times. This league I randomly dropped a ventor's gamble while lvling and it sold for 75 div. First mageblood, first headhunter, first everything happened for me this league after like 10 years of playing as a super casual player. I used to run maybe 3 maps before I got tired but this league I'm running at least 5 maps a day. I know how ridiculous that sounds considering people run hundreds of maps a day but I like my slow af pace.
thougts
The problem with affliction is that GGG wants there to be end tier items beyond the insane mirror-tier.
Guys; we're not getting any younger. The time sink of POE is insane, and GGG is intentionally making it more of a time sink than it needs to be. This league closed a bit of that gap; but it's still ridiculous that they want so much of our time. We're already giving this game our money and time, and they want our blood, is my perspective. They add amazing content with the whisp and whisp skill tree that they turn around and state are being removed end of league. (Rucksack is single-handedly one of the greatest additions that does not add direct power to a character I've ever seen.)
The whisp tree completes the passive tree in my opinion. It becomes so close to perfect that you might as well call it perfect.
This league is praised by most; with the exception that we all admit that the whisps are a bit overtuned. I'm fairly certain most of us want the skill tree from whisps more than anything. Admittedly the whisps IIQ/IIR and currency are clutch, wanted, and amazing, but…let's face it, ggg hates fun and wants us to spend every waking hour farming their game.
I can not stress this enough guys; The time sink aspect is unacceptable. We all have roughly, on average let's say 66 years of living. Multiple by 12 month. That's 792 months of life. They want 3-4 months time per character…PER CHARACTER.
I'm just saying; life isn't forever, and if they don't cut back on the time sinks, I'm going to have to abandon this game, and I legit just spent $100 on new MTX. I just can't play a game that refuses to let the player win without massive time sinks.
Maybe the people using RMT have it right. Who cares if you get banned when you can pay $50 for a complete character someone else made? I'm usually 100% against RMT, but if GGG doesn't fix the time sink aspect; I have to either quit or start RMTing on new accounts.
Liked upon "ughhh beef" flex, keep doing what you do so well Ziggy
im so sad I cant play affliction with my work schedule 🙁 Glad to see so many people are having a blast!
ar from the best league, the mechanic was boring as it just made everyone run the same strat to get the same amount of loot to show it off with the same results. The economy was OUT of control and near the end, which is now and the last two weeks or so, if you weren't rich as fuck by doing the SAME bullshit everyone else was you couldn't afford much of anything. Also, people will expect this league to in a way set a bar for how people's power felt given the new items and being rich early on on top of the amount of loot, if we dont get the same or close to it next league which its a safe bet we wont because thats not normal…the game will feel terrible for a lot of people. As far as it going core i could see th eKing of the Mist fight and the jewel going core and of course being super rare as a new thing to compete with a watcher's eye.
Meanwhile D4 gets a $30 re color of the town portal that is also class-locked.
I found my first mirror yesterday. playing since closed beta april 2012. and my first level 100 FeelsStrongMan
This league was the most fun ive ever had – but it was the worst league ever by far as well. The fun in this league to most people was not related at all to the league and its shit economy, but to items accessability (to an extreme amount i must say). The wildwood sucks, the wisps sucks, the "getting the ascendancies" sucks as well. The sub ascendancies were really good for builds, but thats it.
This league didnt make a "different game economy"; it completely broke it. If u do not magic find, u are doing worse. Thats it. Its not a meta, its mandatory. "U dont need to magic find to get money" – you dont, youre right, but it means u are going to always be behind than those who do it. This league lost the "u cant play the game however u want" beauty that was poe.
A headhunter being lower value than a nimis, and a original sin being 2 MIRRORS (2000 div at some point) is not balancing, its bad. I do agree that this inflation is good for the commom player overall, building enabling and whatnot (me included), but this is just bad design. Items SHOULD be rare, or there is no value in getting them.
Overall, this build was the best fun ive had, but the worst poe experience as well. In about 2 weeks i just was completely bored with the league, but just kept playing because "i could do fun builds"
Although I casually played this league when I had time, I still got to T16 maps and learned a few new things about the game. I liked this league just not the mechanic running around blind trying to find wisps. It has been a blast
All content creators say "this is the best state the game has ever been in" every single league
Cause y'all delusional af.
All praise to being able to afford stuff and actually attempt crafts because currency is abundant while turning around and praising GGG for reigning in the economy in the next patch. It does not matter how "good" the game is, y'all gonna play even if GGG were to literally shit in your mouth. Which they have done PLENTY in the past.
Ziggy literally mentions addiction and no one cares.
"lifetime addict praises his drug for hitting the spot" Well. Fucking. Done.
It felt a little old after a few weeks of juicing, it sucks to feel that if you are not MF wisping you are literally losing currency. Had a blast with HCSSF and SSF though, i restarted 3 different times and went 7/7 on ubers on most of them. I guess the wildwood mechanic is pretty okay for SSF but i just dont see any reason to continue playing trade, i can understand its pretty good for casual players, but for myself I farm for multiple mirrors in a normal league anyway so it kinda killed the fun for me especially because the economy is just dead. I don't want to undermine the league though it was really fun for a few weeks, i wouldnt mind if GGG is on the path of making currency easier to get, it would definitely help players learn the game better, it would make me play less but its a way to get more players so i definitely would support it.
Honestly, I think it is absolutely the worst league I have ever played.
Everything falling from the sky just ruins it for me.
And I do not see how the league was engaging, you did something small, then mapped. We have done this for 8 years now.
I bought a Headhunter and a Mageblood this league. The most currency I’ve ever had in a league before was maybe like 50div/ex.
Guess I have to shoot for an Original Sin now.
Nope, not even close.
long comment warning
I think it's great everyone is able to interact with all content and kill all bosses etc. However, i think the main long term impact that people aren't seeing here is replayability. I will use my own experience here and say that i lost all enjoyment for the GAME after i did everything available, built some ridiculous characters and had a few mirrors sitting around ready to rot in standard. The reason chris has the philosophy of "the weight" that he does is for the sake of replayability and is what made PoE what it is today. It's the reason people still consistently play and still consistently have goals to achieve, and come back every league to give it a go. I never understood it and was with the crowd that disagreed all the way up until affliction.
I'll make a comparison here to survival and creative modes in minecraft, which most people have played. If you played survival and after you killed the ender dragon (or whatever tf the boss is these days) it turned on creative mode, would it even really be fun after that point? Where does the goal go after that? People build these crazy huge structures and railways that traverse the world and fight with huge odds to reach goals they've set and people go "wow, that must have taken a long time and effort". If someone was in creative mode and killed the ender dragon with a sword by flying around after it, it would probably be pretty pointless considering they're invincible and can fly.
When next league rolls around i think everyone is going to be super hyped to try out all the new stuff, but as soon as they steam roll the new content the rest of the content has no value because it's been replayed into oblivion – reddit will straight away post the player retention stats plummeting and say it's a shit league when really it's just the fact that there is nothing left to do. Often the response is that there isn't enough loot or "creative mode", when in reality if that was to happen two leagues in a row the retention would likely look the same. I think it's hard to set goals now like 500 delve or kill all the ubers when you've kind of already done it (50 times in a row presumably); the game just becomes a challenge completion time sink. I personally had nothing left to even do and couldn't come up with a goal that wasn't just solveable by throwing my unlimited currency at it continually. I know people hate nerfs, but it's the same concept where you're incentivised to try new things and test yourself to see if you can do it.
What makes this concept really apparent to me is ecstatic players celebrating they killed uber eater/exarch/maven etc for the first time after x leagues. They put in the effort, learnt the game, built a better character and took down a bigass boss. It had satisfaction and weight to it, they really tried for it and succeeded and everyone hits them with "gz!" or "wow nice bro!" in chat.
I understand that the general idea here is that all of the content should be accessible and completeable by anyone playing the game but if every single league is you kill all the ubers right away and mirror a few items there's nothing left to even do and the game will die out. The 10 div explosions we saw back in archnem blew people's minds the first time, like we all lost our shit collectively. Now a 50 div 200 scarab bomb is like 2 seconds of shock and then the realisation it's the 50th one we saw this week.
I was just really disappointed this time around with the state of drop rates and currency-fueled power creep. It felt pointless to make a new character when the experience was marginally similar to PoB (with the extra of you can walk them around a bit and simulate your 50 million dps before you get bored i guess): completely faceroll the campaign with minmaxed twink leveling gear and a mageblood ready to swap into at level 40-something, then sit in 5ways and buy an entire gear set for a mirror and a guarantee you can do any content you want. Nothing left to upgrade, no content you haven't already done. Why am i playing the game at that point? i might as well sit in PoB and slide all the mod sliders to the end because it's all completely feasible to find on trade or clown emoji server, and if not i can just sit and spam hinekora's locks on an item (like we're currently seeing with streamers chewing through hundreds on items) until i get what i want.
I genuinely tried out ruthless for the first time this league and i'm having more fun than i did in the base league. Every time something drops i get excited and want to share it, and everyone else is just as equally amazed as me. It feels like an actual ARPG and not just a sandbox. When i take down an uber it's going to REALLY mean something, and i think that's what is important. I'm not saying ruthless is the answer, because it's really not for everyone and that's completely fine, but the game genuinely needs to dial back because a repeat of this league will cause unfixable damage in the long term, and players need to stop pushing for that before they find out that what they're asking for isn't actually what they want.
Just my 2 cents.
For some reason which I can't put my finger on I didn't really enjoy it, still not sure why.
15:57 please for the love of god, you can finish this map from kirac with planar tactician notable you don't have to pay 135 divines for it
As a player that mostly plays SSF these days, but has played every mode on and off since beta, this is my favorite league ever. Somehow, the wisps made me engange with content I have been avoiding for a long time, like delve, and actually enjoy it as well.
Yeah been playing since legacy and this one just didn’t grab me for some reason. The wildwood for me was kinda meh, only using it to juice which I guess was the point of the league (magic find). Maybe just a tad burnt out but just so much loot, Diablo 3 memories 🤷♂️
I played from 2015 till 2017 and came back this league. It was like playing a new game, so much fun.
I don't think I'll ever play another league, I got everything I wanted in this one.
I can't imagine going back to play without mage blood and everything else. 🤣
To be fair – I was bored with this league after less than 2 weeks, mostly because of Abyss juicing – droping a Divine should be exciting, but after a week or so they felt like dropping Chaos Orbs
So the game finally awards the player enough currency to keep crafting or buy "dream" T0 build enabling items, what a Shocker that player retention went up. it took them quite a wile to evolve the game, Lets hope it can keep been this way, because if the next leagues don't have something similar we all know what is gonna happen and how bad the outrage will be. Lets hope they no longer wanna loose retention at the excuse of "experimenting with new mechanics" xdd
I have to disagree.
The League Mechanic is way to strong, resulting in chase items suddenly being worth more than a mirror…
Especially if you don't have much time to spent, it felt impossible to gain enough Currency to keep up with the inflation this league.
Yes, the new gems are awesome, but that has nothing to do with Affliction itself ^^
100% drop rate for that which was taken? nah.. should be the same drop chance as a watcher's eye
Totally agree with the economy this league. A lot of negative reviews fail to take into account all the ways you could make money through non-MF means and the average player could plan & get T0 uniques for once.
Transfigured gems were excellent, the mega overkill loot and ultra shit performance are both embarrassing.
I havent been able to play yet, but there is still like 2 months of the league afaik?
The league mechanic itself was pretty mediocre imo, but the game was in a really healthy state overall. I enjoyed it a lot. Tinctures and charms were a lot of fun to use and they enabled a lot of new builds
FLUTE ME TO 100
As an isolated league, the league was amazing, but this exuberance should stay the exception. Once every 5 or 6 leagues. The issue wasn't the increased amount of currency, although anybody who didn't want to run MF automatically was poorer than in any other league, but the unique drops. I got so numb to finding T0 uniques and it took a lot of fun out of the game for me. I found my first HH, my first MB and probably a copy of every single T0 item and it didn't feel earned at all. Especially since you could make MF characters that could deal with the juice difficulty easily. Being able to actually Divine my items use Metacrafting freely felt amazing though.
Also if I wanted to hover over 400 identical items every map, I would play D4.
I think for the future they should tone down MF a bit and decrease the base rarity of T0 uniques and Divines. If I ever drop a MB in a regular juiced map with a regular character it's gonna feel 1000 times better.
That's so funny. First league I've also gone 40/40, level 100 and 7 Uber's and I'm also playing Splitting Steel
Idk tried the strat for the first 3 weeks got 10k juiced whisp maps with full. Mf gear tornado shot and Barely dropped anythjng never got a mirror made all my currency just providing for others doing mf overall boring I don’t know what I did wrong quit the mf and did penance instead most I got was like 5 divs on a map idk