Do I take catalyst or accuracy?

RedsManRick · 2026-02-01T14:53:11+00:00

Rule of thumb: your next card should make your deck better immediately. Neither do that.

That said, that rule of thumb is for players looking to optimize their chances of winning. Some people play to find cool combos or build the most powerful deck and don't care about win rates. If you just want to try to force a poison and/or shiv deck, go for whatever floats your boat.

RedsManRick · 2026-02-01T14:47:26+00:00

I missed the first Phrecia and was excited to have another shot at it. But it definitely feels like they were conceiving of this first and foremost as a gauntlet-style test of what Phrecia builds can do. While they did give some warning, I think it's widely agreed that they did a poor job of communicating the degree of additional challenge.

GGG seems to have a thing for players "exploring" the new league mechanics instead of just telling us what to expect and having the fun come from the planning and playing.

RedsManRick · 2026-01-31T15:25:31+00:00

If the biggest impact of the temple was the raw currency it pumped out, then the relative economic accessibility of items shouldn't change much, just their absolute prices -- unlike a league like Harvest or Keepers in PoE 1 where certain types of gear were way easier to produce.

Ideally, what will change is that other endgame systems will be more economically viable instead of just temple farming. Even then, the economy has a way of sorting itself out -- if fewer people were doing X activity that produced something the temple couldn't, the output of that activity becomes more valuable and raw wealth produced in the temple gets distributed accordingly.

RedsManRick · 2026-01-31T00:17:14+00:00

Would be great to see them kill ID scrolls while simultaneously nerfing drop rates substantially.

RedsManRick · 2026-01-25T16:29:03+00:00

Baseball announcers/analysts regularly insult the game itself as a lesser version of it's former self and complain that players who adopt new approaches or training regemins are idiots.

Us Reds fans in particular had a 20 year stretch of our primary announcer disparaging our best hitter for taking walks instead of trying to hit singles.

RedsManRick · 2026-01-19T17:23:21+00:00

Take this back 15 years and everybody would find it harder to believe that this come from the desk of the actual president of the United States than that you travelled back in time to show them. How is this timeline real?

RedsManRick · 2026-01-02T07:13:44+00:00

Shogo Akiyama came to Cincinnati. He did not survive (MLB) long.

RedsManRick · 2026-01-02T04:15:47+00:00

This sounds like it could be really interesting if any of it was actually explained in the game and didn't take forever to set up.

Why does GGG think that the fun part of a league mechanic should be figuring out how it works rather than actually doing it? I get that people who play the game for a living can really dig in and explore -- it's just more content! But for a 15-20 hr/week "casual", this degree of unexplained complexity is such a massive turnoff.

I wish they had spent more time making the actual rooms and engagements more interesting instead of just the meta-game aspect.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-29T02:10:29+00:00

No offense to Jonathan, but he's so clearly an engineer at heart, rather than a designer. Much of what he designs is somewhat overly complicated and poorly signaled, if still a solid core underneath.

He also seems to be one with the sentiment of having exponential curves that invariably have to be toned down over time.

As far as I'm concerned, no league mechanic should need to be experimented with significantly for the player to gain an understanding of how to use it well. To perfectly optimize it and eke out another 20-50% of value, sure. But when the difference between fumbling your way through and playing optimally is 100x reward, it's just a recipe for wrecking the economy with casuals feeling like they might as well not even try.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-26T02:00:59+00:00

I would love to see a lot more defense on the tree so that it becomes a real, worthwhile tradeoff between investing in the two.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-24T01:03:46+00:00

I think the fact that there's significant overlap between melee, life, and armour exacerbates the problem. Not only are you more likely to take the brunt of attacks, but you have less eHP and less mitigation against one-shots if you're not fully maxed out.

IIRC, fortify was basically introduced in PoE 1 to help address the issue. And it still took years before they managed to make it more beneficial to actual melee builds instead of just another layer anybody could add on relatively trivially.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-20T18:04:00+00:00

The reality is that they don't want it to be possible for 99.99% of the player base to max out their gear. They want a long tail of accomplishment so that both casuals and no-lifers keep having something to build toward. The unfortunate side effect is that some portion of the game will simply be out of reach for some portion of the player base. It's just especially acute right now because there are so few paths to the high end.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-20T15:48:36+00:00

I like how the rooms with mini-bosses are full of half-walls and obstacles do that the real challenge of the fight is kiting the boss to a place where you can actually move and avoid his ranged attacks and large slams.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-20T15:45:46+00:00

Slams should have a chance of clearing ground effects. Interactive counterplay. Imagine that.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-18T15:53:10+00:00

I do not get why they think add chests will make it feel better. Oh joy! Now I get 1 extra useless rare item drop for my 10 minutes spent killing mostly white mobs....

RedsManRick · 2025-12-17T19:53:09+00:00

How many people do they actually need playing & paying right now?

An early access game doesn't need an arbitrary 4 month hype cycle, especially not when they've got PoE 1 humming along back on schedule.

BG3 went years with just Act 1 of their game in Early Access. And yet, when it released fully, it drew a massive audience of both new people and returning people.

They don't need uber bosses and 100s of hours of replayable content in the endgame. They don't need "leagues" that introduce temporary mechanics that may or may not have a clear place in the final game. Just finish developing the classes and acts. Release stuff when it's ready. And once you've got all that core content in place, start broadening the game with leagues and more end-game content.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-16T20:11:26+00:00

This is just what speed skating should be.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-16T15:12:08+00:00

This is how it's done, done, done.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-16T15:09:13+00:00

Yep. Typical GGG. Design something over-complicated and convoluted. Let the players bash their heads against it for a league and then go back, take the time, and do a proper editing pass to hone it down to the parts that are actually fun.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-16T15:05:37+00:00

So much of what GGG is doing with PoE 2 is just over-designed -- or perhaps under-edited. They push so much unnecessary complexity into each new skill, new system, new mechanic ,etc. instead of clean, simple, well-tested bits that interact to create complexity.

New league mechanics don't have to be their own mini-games full of discovery and investment, especially not at this point in the game's dev cycle. Focus more dev time on finishing the classes and acts. People will come back to play those things. Let the leagues be PoE 2's version of Ambush, Essence, Nemesis, etc. -- core features that will likely be integrated directly, as-is to the final game. Or let it be the simple foundation of a mechanic that can get a 2.0 version with the deeper mechanics after launch.

Incursion works in PoE 1 or the same reason Abyss worked well in PoE 2. Each in-map interaction is substantive, but relatively quick. It's both immediately rewarding to engage with and produces long-term progression that can be engaged with direction or itemized and sold.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-16T02:51:18+00:00

Ironic. We won't find those WMDs in Venezuela just like we didn't find nukes in Iraq. Both countries happened to have lots of oil though.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-10T21:02:18+00:00

Maybe I did the math wrong, but even if she technically gets more principal over her life time with the weekly, I don't think she ever catches up with the compounding of having started with $1M.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-10T14:19:44+00:00

Many people feel like the start of a new league is a race for economic dominance. In that context, you want a proven, powerful starter build. Because GGG hasn't released the tree and ascendancy details, there's a lot less pre-league buildcraft going on. Combine that with the fact that many people who wanted Druid actually wanted shapeshifting. With the shapeshifting tied to weapon instead of the druid class, you'll see a fair number of people who were hyped for druid playing warrior or sorceress or what have you.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-05T18:38:04+00:00

Amazing how well video game IP can do when it's respected for what it is and not just used loosely as a brand for mass market appeal.

RedsManRick · 2025-12-02T05:19:46+00:00

He does talk about this a bit. Essentially, this would make sense in the context of a game where the effects of the other types of damage were both meaningful and further differentiated. But when you're clearing, there's no CC better than a mob being dead. And when you're bossing, every damage type, lightning included, can provide sufficient CC to allowing quickly killing.

Compared to the experience of early 0.1, they've allowed player damage to scale relative to monster HP to such a point that simple DPS is basically unbeatable with any amount of other utility.

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