I played 0.3 and… it’s still bad

These are my thoughts on the current 0.3 patch. I don’t care about fanboys — argue with me in the comments all you want, we all know you’ll bite on any banana GGG throws your way. But I’m sure many reasonable players will find this resonates with their own experience.


Let’s start with the good:

This is basically what 0.2 should have looked like, with a few nuances. At least we finally got some kind of pinnacle content, even if it’s pretty basic.

There’s finally some form of deterministic crafting, though with plenty of caveats.

The league is no longer just “one spear and its variants.”

That’s it for the positives, let’s move to the main part.

The issues:

- Bugs everywhere. Disappearing bosses, broken AI (monsters running away or getting lost in layouts), FPS drops, Delirium still unplayable. Bosses freezing in arenas, arenas not opening after boss death. It’s been 3 weeks since launch and none of this has been fixed — and it’s pretty critical.

- Sprint. GGG stays true to themselves: every feature comes with a catch that makes it borderline unusable. You get stunned by every random projectile. With intestine-like layouts you constantly run into walls. Blink tied to sprint is unplayable — after using Blink you auto-sprint, meaning you either smash into walls or eat a hit and get sent to Hevistand. And while Blink is on cooldown, you can’t sprint at all. Facepalm.

- Broken thresholds. Literally everything stuns you. I already said in 0.2 this was the worst possible nerf. Instead of smooth gameplay you’re just stutter-stepping from every hit.

- Slow debuff. Not only does it reduce movement speed, it also cuts cast speed. Easily the worst debuff in the game — only frustrates and annoys.

- Loot rarity and drops are broken. I’ve run hundreds of maps and most of the time I saw zero currency drops despite 134 rarity. Wisps are still a meme, same with exiles, same with strongboxes. Meanwhile I got way more currency just running Chaos Trials — almost every run gave me 40+ exalts, divines dropped regularly, and I won’t even mention the insanely overpriced soul cores that drop like candy.

- Bloated currency. One question: why? This only creates confusion and stash clutter. The fix is simple: if you want to add chances for higher-tier affixes, just add 1–2 omens that do that, without drowning us in junk. And because you can’t upgrade currency to higher tiers, low-tier currency tanked in value right from the start.

- Crafting. On one hand, GGG finally moved in the right direction. On the other - it’s still a degenerate casino. Mostly because half the essences and crafting orbs (for gloves, helmets, boots) aren’t even in the game. Bloated amounts of omens and essences exist only to make the slot machine slightly less slot-machiney. You nailed it with Expeditions, but messed up with odds — why not follow that direction?

- Defense mechanics. Once again, players aren’t allowed to just have fun. Acrobatics? Sure, but dodge gutted. Armor against elemental damage? Sure, but it’s inefficient. So the “best” defense mechanic right now is basically anything except dodge or armor (hi, Blood Mage).

- Skills. GGG promised reworks so every skill would be endgame viable. What do we see? The majority are still unplayable, with everyone running just 2–3 main ones. The rest either deal no damage or are just clunky messes.

Minor but still annoying issues:

- You can’t upgrade support gems, so your stash clogs with lower tiers.

- You can’t upgrade a skill in a meta skill — the system just doesn’t detect it unless you manually pull it out.

- Meta skills are nerfed too hard. 100 spirit cost kills build flexibility. Bring it back to 60–70. The consolidation into one meta skill was a good direction though.

- Still way too few jewel sockets on the passive tree. Bring them back like it was in 0.1.

Personal taste: I really disliked Atlas progression. Especially figuring out how to reach deadly bosses. Nobody explains it, so I ignored most of it. Boss atlas progression is opaque — you never know when you’ll get a point.

Intestine-like layouts. It honestly feels like you’ve locked your map designer in tunnels their whole life, because that’s all we’re getting — endless corridors and nothing else.

Conclusion:
I’m done with this league. Still raw, still unfinished, still GGG showing off their lazy programming skills.

Fanboys not welcome here. Everyone else — feel free to share your stories.

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ShaDarkLord#6528 a écrit :

Fanboys not welcome here.

I don't know if this qualifies as fanboy but I noticed that you said you ran hundreds of maps at 134% rarity and "most of the time" got zero currency and I'm just curious if there's a typo in there somewhere or you're seriously trying to make that claim.

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Kerchunk#7797 a écrit :

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ShaDarkLord#6528 a écrit :

Fanboys not welcome here.

I don't know if this qualifies as fanboy but I noticed that you said you ran hundreds of maps at 134% rarity and "most of the time" got zero currency and I'm just curious if there's a typo in there somewhere or you're seriously trying to make that claim.

It’s not a typo, it’s hyperbole. Of course I didn’t literally get zero currency across hundreds of maps — but the drops were so abysmal that it felt like nothing. Compared to Chaos Trials or delirium, the map loot is completely unrewarding. all my hundreds divines i made from trade, taking every 82 base from floor.


The one and only time I felt happy with loot was with a 600% rarity bot. That says everything about how bad baseline drops are.

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ShaDarkLord#6528 a écrit :

all my hundreds divines i made from trade, taking every 82 base from floor.

So, 100% serious question, but am I missing something about how to make 100s of divines from 82 base items without crafting currency?

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Kerchunk#7797 a écrit :

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ShaDarkLord#6528 a écrit :

all my hundreds divines i made from trade, taking every 82 base from floor.

So, 100% serious question, but am I missing something about how to make 100s of divines from 82 base items without crafting currency?

Some bases go for 5+ divs even

As for the post, honestly I don't agree with most of what was said. Bad map layouts is probably the only thing I agree with there

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iHiems#0168 a écrit :

Some bases go for 5+ divs even

We're talking about unmodified normal ilvl 82 drops?

Would you perhaps be willing to elaborate? Which bases and why and under what criteria?

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Kerchunk#7797 a écrit :

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iHiems#0168 a écrit :

Some bases go for 5+ divs even

We're talking about unmodified normal ilvl 82 drops?

Would you perhaps be willing to elaborate? Which bases and why and under what criteria?

Yea. Mostly exceptionals if we are talking about white bases, especially boots and gloves can go quite high and sell very fast

https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Rise%20of%20the%20Abyssal/EBBbbw00u5

But I believe he was talking about blue items too. Some items with some combinations can easily sell for 1 div+, some can scale as high as the white ones too, if not more

That's because those blue items can be used to craft items deterministically when they come with certain rolls. So instead of buying hundreds of white bases and rolling them with aug and transmutation orbs, people buy blue bases with the stats they want instead. It costs a little more to them, but it saves times when you're doing this kind of craft all day

Sometimes those can be quite specific since they will want specific stats that can be used to block others, copy with homogenising, fracture or whatever they're think of doing. Hence why they can go so high in price

Blue prismatic rings for example sell very easy with some half decent res rolls, but there are many others examples

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ShaDarkLord#6528 a écrit :

- Skills. GGG promised reworks so every skill would be endgame viable. What do we see? The majority are still unplayable, with everyone running just 2–3 main ones. The rest either deal no damage or are just clunky messes.

This is the big one for me. Cold and Fire casters were probably the most fun arpg classes I have ever played and in one patch they completely ruined all of it. Nerfed dmg , adding long cooldowns , limiting how many time skills can go off ect ... It is so bad I cannot even play the class anymore. The addition of infusions just made the class feel janky and ruined gameplay flow. Also they nerfed damage to try and force you to use them just to get back to where you were in the last patch.

I normally only play casters but since they are not fun anymore I tried other stuff. Shield charge was something I tried a bit in .2.0 and it was fun . So I tried that first. They completely ruined that also. The shockwave support gem does almost nothing now and the damage of the charge itself seems to do about 1/2 what it did last patch. I still had the build saved in PoB , so I used the same passive tree and same support gems ect .. and it just felt horrible.

The only thing I have tried that actually feels good to play is lightning arrow. I tried poison arrow first and that was awful. I tried a minion build which was fine when clearing but when you get to any boss they one shot AoE all the pets leaving me with horrible damage. That or if you use a zombie power charge build , the clear is amazing but the zombies die when entering a boss room and there is no way to spawn them while in there , and even if you could they'd just die to AoE right away anyway.

I know people complain about the game being a bit of a slog but for me I don't mind that so long as the character I am playing is fun to play and in the patch they removed that , it's not fun at all. Please remove infusions and/or put skills back the way they were last patch.

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iHiems#0168 a écrit :

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Kerchunk#7797 a écrit :

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ShaDarkLord#6528 a écrit :

all my hundreds divines i made from trade, taking every 82 base from floor.

So, 100% serious question, but am I missing something about how to make 100s of divines from 82 base items without crafting currency?

Some bases go for 5+ divs even

As for the post, honestly I don't agree with most of what was said. Bad map layouts is probably the only thing I agree with there

Then I’d say you’ve just been lucky. No bugged arenas with invincible bosses, no invisible mobs, no screen-wide visual clutter blowing up under your feet and insta-killing you? Either that, or you’re pretending it doesn’t happen. Same with sprint — unless you literally never touch it, there’s no way you can call that system fine. Getting heavy stunned by random projectile out of screen.

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Kerchunk#7797 a écrit :

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iHiems#0168 a écrit :

Some bases go for 5+ divs even

We're talking about unmodified normal ilvl 82 drops?

Would you perhaps be willing to elaborate? Which bases and why and under what criteria?

Find TFT channel in discord and check what people are selling. Right bases costs from 2 anuls up to 8-9 divines.