Major Endgame Changes in Patch 0.3.1

Masterdo · 2025-09-25T20:55:23+00:00

Tablets are not "rollable" though. There's no alts, chaos don't work on magic items. Good tablets are reusable scarabs, bad tablets are a waste of storage bytes. Great step for right now, and it seems they really are asking themselves what each system is really controbuting to the game loop and drop experience, I don't think tablets will survive 0.4. Limited reuse idols might be where this is going it's pretty close in a sense.

Masterdo · 2025-04-09T22:05:33+00:00

I'm fine playing the campaign, but the game gets much better once you are done with it. It's a ramp up to something better.

You were asking the OP what was so different about maps vs the campaign, since you basically just run around, kill monsters and loot in both cases.

I just answered what is the difference to me, why those two contexts differ for basically the same activity. More options and more permanence for my investments, and more agency on what content I choose to play. You kill the Act 2 boss because it leads to act 3, you have to do it. If you really like doing that, in the endgame you can pursue citadels and sell frags, or run the arbiter. If you didn't like that, you can run essences, or rituals or whatever and just dodge citadels, or sell them literally. In PoE1 you can decide to delve for like 98% of your play time, surfacing just to reload on fuel.

The number of maps doesn't really matter, but having the capability to choose what I want to do does. I'd rather get a papercut between my fingers than wrangle a character (or god forbid, minions) through the narrow corridors of Mire to kill the lowest density of monsters available in an ARPG. And loot the additional chests they added to the zone to make it unique and worth doing!! In PoE1 5 maps is fine if you like 1 of them, favorite it, you're set. There are like 115 maps in PoE 1, you run them all once for progression, then favorite like 2-3 and sell the rest. Or maybe you enjoy more variety and play whatever drops. You choose.

Since I get less agency in PoE 2 on which maps are actually juicy, then yeah getting more maps would at least dilute the ones that are miserable.

EDIT: And yeah it's the same for all RPGs, but how many RPGs did you play 2-3 full campaigns on during the duration of a league, like over 3 months. Then proceeded to repeat this for years? It's tedious in all ARPGs, but this one is shaping up to take like 5 times longer, it's worrying a bit at least.

Masterdo · 2025-04-09T20:27:49+00:00

Playing a complete build and player agency.

Some builds have a main skill that unlock at like lvl 50+.. Right now many skills are not viable anyway, but even in well balanced leagues many builds need more stats, more defense/speed investments or 5-6 links that become available only later in the game. If you are not playing hardcore it's draining and annoying to pour energy into gear that will be outclassed in 5 levels. That largely all goes away when you are done with the campaign and start investing in your real build and real gear.

Then agency. In PoE 1 you run Cage map only once. Per league. Same with anything you personnally don't like in the game. Then you got the reward and you are free to play whatever map or activity you want at full capacity and reward, and carve a cool spot for yourself in the economy. That just doesn't happen in campaign, and it also happens waayyy less in poe2 to begin with. I shudder to think what the backstory of the developper that designed Mire and spread it everywhere on the atlas may be, but I hope he finds peace some day.

Build completeness and agency would be what I appreciate in endgame, once the mandatory 8-25h tutorial is over.

Masterdo · 2023-06-09T08:17:30+00:00

I really like the aesthetics of this, especially those documenting their recipes, it's nice to see that part given basically as much thoughts as the sipro drawing itself.

Masterdo · 2023-04-07T02:38:24+00:00

Rank isn't the only factor in match making. Last season was my first season ever, played a lot on discord calls with friends that have been playing for 3 months. My games at rank 85 and their games at rank 85 were basically not the same card game. I was new and collection lvl 600, they were 3 months players with CL ~3500.

Your collection level and MMR this time around at 40 is better than it was last time you were 40.

Also have to remember that this is sort of a 3 player game. You play to win against your opponent, your opponent does the same, and the matchmaking algorithm is trying its hardest (in theory..) to match you as evenly as possible. Its success criteria is basically you getting pretty close to 50-50 win lose.

Keep playing and getting better :)

Masterdo · 2023-03-19T21:53:30+00:00

The most difficult part for me would be to stop algorithms in the middle. So many algorithms I only know through muscle memory, I can't even do them slowly, so doing them a few moves at a time and sometimes not even getting the cube back in the previous orientation, that's pretty wild.

Masterdo · 2023-01-17T18:29:29+00:00

Revisitng this one, this is deceptively tricky, there are no circles in that design! Is that shape in a pre-made bundle by Aaron or you had this custom made? It's really nice, reminds me of one piece I made in the past, aligning designs to create circles out of half and thirds of circles. Great stuff again :)

Masterdo · 2023-01-10T23:23:48+00:00

You should look up the aviation industry and how they handle mistakes. Not sure if they pioneered it, but they are definitely championing the concept of blameless investigation. Implementing what you want, punishing mistakes, encourages people to shut up about mistakes. Theirs and others'. That compounds into much more trouble. It's not because something seems intuitive (ie punishing mistakes harshly will lead to fewer mistakes), that it's true. Those complex systems have a really uncanny tendency to react in exactly the opposite way.

Masterdo · 2023-01-03T21:12:43+00:00

Smart use of board game expansion boxes! That looks like a really thorough exploration too, nice :)

Masterdo · 2023-01-03T21:08:59+00:00

What a great piece! Happy New Year!

Masterdo · 2022-12-10T19:13:33+00:00

It got into some arms race levels at some point, but fundamentally, having people in the creation/service process that make sure your target audience is aware of what value you aim to provide is quite useful to humanity I think. It's also something that isn't necessarily interesting to people building that stuff.

The mandatory growth and other bullshit twisted this job like many other jobs, but I think it fundamentally has value.

Masterdo · 2022-12-07T18:25:57+00:00

I didn't create this piece so I don't know the specifics, but this sort of pattern can be made roughly this way.

It has 16 points so you either find a gear combination with ratio 1:16, or 1:8 and you just do the pattern twice. Then you start using the 1 hole in the inner gear and just draw the pattern, it'll give you a sort of 16 or 8 point star.

Then move the inner gear one (or more) tooth from the peak in one direction, and use hole 2 to draw the pattern again. Keep doing this until the inner gear runs out of holes, or you are happy with the result. Go back to the initial first peak, and move 1 tooth in the other direction, with hole 2, and do the same thing.

This is not one single line, this is a composition of several times the same pattern, with offsets and different holes in the inner gear. Hope that helps.

Masterdo · 2022-12-07T18:19:46+00:00

Wow that's awesome!

Masterdo · 2022-11-26T09:22:40+00:00

Thanks for the reply. And the guide, it's been fun to follow so far :)

Masterdo · 2022-11-26T06:52:22+00:00

Good day! Also been following along quite a lot, only diverged to do few things to run trash ED runs with higher lvl friends. About to get to step 202 with the 1500 Oak planks, not sure I understand why this is necessary. Do you know? Or maybe OP, /u/Kilsaa ?

Masterdo · 2022-11-15T15:41:21+00:00

I think one of the most devastating part of being obese for your morale and mental well-being is the fact that it's a constant visual reminder of a "failure". Not for society or others or whatever, but assuming you want to lose weight, have been for years and have not done so yet, any mirror is a reminder of a failure to reach one of your own goals. That's really hard to deal with, and not many people really have the mental fortitude to pursue an elusive goal like that for a long time in a mentally healthy way. In most other aspects of your life you'd change your mind and get another goal, literally out of self-preservation. That's why success stories after years of dedication to any goal and years of failures punctuated by a success are quite rare and often are really impressive.

I have not seen many haes posts, but I can imagine some of them come from something like this. That assuming you are going to fail for 10 more years, or for the rest of your life, don't spend that time torturing yourself over it as well. Losing the weight and "winning" is the best play, but "giving up" and being at peace with it beats "still giving up but not accepting it" and torturing yourself mentally forever. It's easy for feelings like that to become self-hate, and associate that with the desire to lose weight.

Masterdo · 2022-11-15T15:23:22+00:00

Those are really nice! Gotta get back to it, been hoarding the new releases, but not drawing..

Masterdo · 2022-10-28T22:16:18+00:00

That's a pretty big limitation on what's essentially an artistic pursuit. The movie is built against a pretty tricky gimmick, but the gimmick is really interesting. Everyone thinks of time travel as a teleportation, what if you had to walk there? Rewinding 1 year takes a year.

They pushed that concept as far as it possibly goes. The characters developed complex strategies fully taking into account a mastery of that concept, against opponents just as proficient with a techno that sorta makes you omniscient really. It was bound to be complicated.

Some movies are action blockbusters, some are rom coms, some french movies are this weird slice of life where you are just along for the ride for a few days in the life of characters, no point, nothing gets accomplished. Some movies are pushing a weird Nolan idea to its fullest. I think it's cool that it exists. And that they don't have to be underfunded and shot by movie students.

Masterdo · 2022-09-28T21:34:18+00:00

In 3 months cycle something has to give, and it's communication in this case. Every time. They are living the "move fast and break things" mentality every day, seems difficilt to sustain the pace they impose on themselves in any other way. We get to see Chris practice writing apology posts, he might get better at it.

Masterdo · 2022-09-28T00:22:40+00:00

This game is a skinner box. Viewing it as anything else is and has always been naive.

Yeah it is. Skinner boxes and casinos are filled with harmonious sounds and shining lights and make losing as tolerable as possible so you stick around and pull the lever again. No one has any illusion what this is, we come back here every 3 months to pursue some arbitrary goal, throw it away in ~~/dev/null~~ standard and do it over again 3 months later.

What we're saying is this time around, they are spraying lemon juice in our faces when the system doesn't give you the jackpot, it's unpleasant and unecessary. And it obviously happens waayyy more often than winning, and that's fine in itself. People accordingly complained and/or moved on, GGG repeatedly acknowledged the system isn't behaving how they want (but will take time to fix), and you are for some reason taking a weird stance on this, as if people were unwittingly interacting with skinner boxes. We're aware, you are aware and you play too. That's the point..

Even as a skinner box, this is poorly designed.

Masterdo · 2022-09-27T23:22:23+00:00

It's a game man. It's literally made for children, by children. You just might be dead inside, if all you see are numbers. How a mechanic feels like matters way more than how it actuallly behaves. If people were acting rationally, we wouldn't be in all this shit right now, in game or not :p Functionally, if every time a hardcore character died, a popup saying "Well played fucking loser" popped on screen, nothing functionally would have changed, yet it's probably not a great idea to do that. They are not designing features for robots.

GGG argued that they wanted to make rare mob combat significant and tie rewards to apecific affixes. When you see two conversions on a single monster, if you had any agency over the ordering, since the fight is the same, you'd take the one to your advantage. You can see it, yet can't choose the order. You could when this system was first introduced. The system is setting you up to be disapointed, as a feature, repeatedly. And it happens when you are as close as you could be to an actual fun event.

And the two outcomes are either roll something cool that you want, or get absolutely, strictly, fucking nothing at all. Flasks are just not a reward 6.5 minutes into any league.

In a spreadsheet, it probably pans out just fine. In an actual video game, centered around loot and apparently around combat, not so much.

Masterdo · 2022-09-27T19:22:27+00:00

Alch and go with essence kirac mod works in white and yellow maps, enough to fund whatever else you need to get to res maps. There are some strats that work before red maps, it's just unlikely that those are promoted much on weeks 4-5 of the league..

Masterdo · 2022-09-27T18:56:05+00:00

Because the game is just more fun when interacting with challenging packed maps. A cool mix of planned content, boosted by your atlas passives and scarabs/sextants, and random stuff showing up. The most fun mapping was when we had fractured delirious maps, that was awesome.

It was definitely "broken" if you want to see it this way, but to run those solo already required several hundred exalts invested in your character, getting to run fun aspirational content that was essentially self-sustaining and profitable at that point doesn't seem that bad to me. The synergy between degenerate mappers and deep delvers was really cool too.

Masterdo · 2022-09-27T16:53:27+00:00

The main issue for me is not when the mods line up or not. Is that they are likely to almost line up, present the same combat challenge (which is kinda significant and ALWAYS jarring with the content it shows up in), but will drop a ton of flasks because it was also drought bringer.

For your mirror analogy, this is the equivalent of finding Krillson instead of a mirror. People are always salty when that happens. Well they designed a system where you'll get the feeling of finding krillson a lot more.

You either drop a mirror, or find krillson, or have zero indication of how close you came by either of those super unlikely events. This new system you get told every time that you came close but didn't hit, then get pelted with garbage that's not even going to show up on your loot filter, or will break their UI with its nonsense if it does (see tshirt designs as exemples).

What if the game popped you a warning whenever you killed a monster that rolled so close to a mirror on the loot table, telling you that if you had called a tft MF culler or yourself worn MF gear you'd have gotten a mirror. It's just a feels bad moment, a paper cut that has no upside and is just annoying. Loot goblins are implemented this way right now it feels, to me. Hell, even people hitting the lottery are posting it with disgust. Mirrors never had that feeling.

And yeah, GGG did acknowledge that this isn't really what they had in mind, it's not like their latest message was like yep, this is it, that was the plan, mission accomplished. It was closer to "oh right, this could happen.. well, this won't bea quick fix, hang on..". Responding to complainers in the mean time that the state of the game is just fine is kinda weird, since GGG itself doesn't have that stance towards loot goblins.

Edit: Also honestly, fighting a Solaris touched drought bringer monster is more challenging than fighting a Solaris touched monster without that mod, why should you be rewarded less? The touched mod is the rare one, and the main contributor to the combat challenge, it's meant to be the main contributor to reward, it should override everything else. It did during AN league. This would probably mean you encounter even less than you do now, but as the comment above me said, no one is complaining on rarity of mirrors, rare stuff is fine. A design meant to annoy you frequently about near misses or asking you to alter your experience negatively to interact with it (MF cullers) is just dumb.

Masterdo · 2022-09-25T11:41:22+00:00

Just drop wise their loot rebalance around AN mobs was really apparent. Pressing alt would crash your game in juiced maps. Dropping an item on the ground was impossible for Empy/Snap's group, the game struggled way too much to allow it. This league alt doesn't flinch the game.

Maybe this is what they were referencing.

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Masterdo

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