0.3.1 Feedback - Primary Topic: No Rares on Mini-map

Hopefully constructive criticism below, followed by a personal mood response to the removal of Rares on the mini-map. I waited until after the update to give my thoughts because dooming before I've even seen the content is a bad idea. Suffice it to say, it's as bad as I thought, and worse because of elements I didn't think of. I'm not interested in playing this league anymore. I would have burnt out eventually anyway, but this was a hard crash.

Context: I'm a mid-endgame, "casual" player. I feel like I'm the middle ground of the kind of players GGG talks about. I've been playing PoE1 for about 5 years, and been playing PoE2 since launch.
- I don't rush story.
- I play a build I want, adjusting as I go.
- I tend to look up some builds once I get to endgame because I'm never going to be aware of every skill combo or unique that would boost what I'm already doing, but I hate 1-for-1 copying builds.
- I usually only play one character in maps. If my first sucks in maps, my second is more meta so I can push further.
- I usually start in SSF to have some sense of satisfaction crafting my own stuff.
- I usually switch to Trade once I'm slowing down, because purchasing gear will let me make it to the highest stuff.
- I have middling success doing endgame bosses. Sometimes my build is meta enough to get to the highest content, usually not. I have yet to fight Arbiter.

Primary Points

Waystone Change
Before: I do 6-mod waystones for towers and particularly valuable maps, then 3- or 4-mod waystones the rest of the time.
Now: I have to do 6-mod waystones for every map or I'm only at 2/3 tablet additions, making all the below problems worse.

Before: Pack as much content into one map as possible, very funny.
Now: Not only is the cap on "amount of content" decreased, content crossover is decreased. No hilarious amount of overlapped mobs, so value per clear time goes down, Wisps don't get as strong/valuable, the Corruption and Item Rarity columns are less useful, etc.

Before: I can do a map with Expedition, Breach, and a Boss, and have the Unique tablet effects for all three of those on it, on top of other tablets buffing the mechanics, extra xp, rarity, quantity, etc.
Now: Can't have the effects of multiple unique tablets on the same map without giving up other tablets. This means you have to go all in on a single mechanic or you're just wasting opportunity.


Map Goal Change
Before: See Rares on Mini-map. That means I know where the best value of the map is, and also I'm less likely to blunder my way into one.
Now: No idea where the Rares are. Always gonna feel like I'm missing big value in the map unless I full clear.

Before: Killing Rares as the Goal. Have a very direct series of goals. It was the least I have ever felt like I need to full-clear the map. It was amazing.
Now: I gotta go back to following walls and guessing which direction to go to get to the Boss.

Before: Bosses feel special. Not hard to use tablets to get a boss on every map you do. (Not a boss on every map, just enough to ignore the ones that don't.)
Now: Still boss every map, but I have to burn through boss tablets to keep them actually valuable and interesting.


More personal rant
I hate walking into a map and blundering my way from pack to pack. It's such a subtle change, not having a Rare to walk towards, but it is everything. If there's a short side area, I either have to full clear it just in case or I have to accept that killing Rares is no longer the point and just find my way to the boss and leave. Half the time I'm tempted to not even bother finding the remaining side content once I find the boss. When I find a Wisp near a Rare, I want to be able to kill the Rare first so the Wisp goes farther and picks up more value. If there's a Rare with Haste and Mana Ring near an Abyss, I want to be ready to pull it away from the Abyss so I don't have to deal with an Abyss Rare with even worse mods.
In short: It helps me feel like I have a little more control over the map. Now I'm just blind again. Somehow, in little ways, that makes mapping more stressful, boring, and tiring. It's just not as fun.
Additionally, there are some bosses I despise, particularly if they're bad for my build. I don't want to have to either one-shot them or avoid that map forever because I'll guaranteed have to fight the boss. It sucks.

ANYONE WHO REPLIES TO THIS: Please keep it constructive. Personal is fine. Yelling doesn't help as much. Think of better ways this could have been fixed. I'll try to edit this and add some of those later.

+1

How you are not on GGG's QA team is beyond me. Some very good points made. I'm at the point of if the ATLAS Passive Tree setup worked in PoE 1, why not adapt it to PoE 2? I mean they brought the Passive Tree over and, in my opinion, made the passive tree A LOT better than what it is in PoE 1. Hopefully PoE 1 will have a heavy renovation done on its passive tree to match PoE 2's in many respects.

Your personal rant, hit me close to home. I feel like the game is telling me how to play, vs I, it. It's bad enough everything and the bathroom sink is RNG with little to no player agency for crafting, and very little information is even provided to new players of the game/genre. It's pretty bad. It's as if the engine is built first, and then the rest of the car.

Well said, OP. +1 from me as well.

+1

+1

bump

I get that 0.3.1 serves as a platform for testing on a mass scale, but it bums me out that this league is now essentially dead for me because of a dud set of changes. Oh well, hopefully 0.4 doesn't end up being a disaster.

+1

forcing boss is bad, not everyone wants to go for trashy boss loot.
rares are where the value is, so you're stuck hunting for rares on your maps.

feels terrible honestly.

They wanna make a soul like game so removing icon on maps is the right steps in their mind. I guess they’ll add a mod in waystone that covers you in darkness like in sekhema and then you’ll need light radius to counter it lmao.