0.3.1 feedback on early and late endgame

My feedback is based on endgame gameplay of two characters: fresh level 66 SSF Invoker and level 98 deadeye on trade league blasting everything.

Early Endgame Gameplay (level 66 invoker fresh SSF):


The start of endgame felt much better than before 0.3.1. Only 6 maps in and i found a nexus, one breach which gave me a breach tablet and a tower that gave me a standard precursor tablet (irradiated). Zolin also gave me a breach tablet reward for quest progress. With just that, i was already able to put some juice into early endgame maps without having to set up multiple towers and going through travel nodes. The tower change is a huge win. By this time, i was doing t4 maps and reached level 71, after completing third trial (sekhemas).

With the orb of alchemy changes, i could easily do "alchemy and go" on both normal and magic waystones allowing me to set up 2 tablets with 3 portals.

After 8 more maps, i had another nexus done and found tablets for all the other main mechanics. By this point the character was at level 76 doing irradiated t8s with breach, while also having the choice to do ritual, expedition and/or delirium. With bosses on every map, sustaining and increasing waystone tiers was extremely easy and tablets were easy to get.

About difficulty i'd say it was fine for the most part with some very annoying tanky mobs and one shots here and there, mainly from abyss rares and bosses. Loot was okayish, i had more than enough to craft a few decent pieces of gear though i did have 47% increased rarity. For reference, my resistances were capped for fire and lightning, 57% for cold, 14% for chaos, 58% evasion, 1.2k life and 1.2k energy shield (total 2.4k) and 18k tooltip dps on ice strike before any other buffs.

As for the Monster Density/Packs Changes, at first i thought these would feel really bad but i think it does help you get started on the endgame, especially when you have bad campaign gear or your build is not fully online yet. I could be wrong but it also seemed to affect mechanics such as breach which made it a lot easier to start collecting splinters. That said maybe review some of these maps, i think for example Riverside felt too empty.

So, for early endgame 0.3.1 brought in some really good changes. But not everything was amazing. Some of it was pretty rough:

Extra Content UI: It is only showing content from your tablets. This felt really bad and might lead to missed rare monsters, delirium mirror, expedition or breach in dead ends, unless you backtrack. It also leads to some weird situations like if your only content is a breach and you find it early in the map then the orange checkpoint spawns before you even explored 20% of the map, which just makes no sense.

Rare Monster Icons: These not showing up basically gave me two choices: kill the boss and leave behind remanining rares OR search for them, which takes me back to 0.1 when players would waste their time backtracking maps into dead ends. This also seem to go against the nerf to some big maps like Savannah which was justified by "players spending too much time on these maps". Well, if you don't want me to spend a lot of time on maps, then why would you remove rare monster icons and extra content indicators? This is specially a big deal because loot mostly comes from rare monsters, so skipping or simply not finding them means you lose valuable loot on top of the already nerfed quant tablets.

Ground EFfects: These seem to have been reduced on lower tier maps but i noticed no difference on tier 15s. Hopefully it is a bug. But even on low tier maps chilled ground felt really bad and it is all about the chill magnitude at 30% which just makes gameplay feel miserable. Yeah sure there are nodes on the passive tree to reduce chill magnitude but even something like 30% reduced magnitude still makes you feel miserable.

Evasion and Monster Accuracy: Something feels off about it... it really didn't feel like a minor adjustment to the formula. Once again the game punishes the player for building defences while rewarding just raising your DPS to the stratosphere or making one shot builds. Not a big fan of these changes.


Late Endgame Gameplay (level 98 Deadeye trade league):


First thing i did after the update was to open my fragments quad stash tab full of tablets to transmute/Augment them for the new tablet mods and the experience was horrible with the huge numbers showing on the tiny tablets. This needs to be addressed or maybe just release the much needed fragments stash tab ASAP.

All the rough stuff i mentioned before from early endgame was also rough on late endgame gameplay: extra content UI, rare monster icons, ground effects (which seem to have not changed at all in t15s) and evasion. But another thing stood out to me: the amount of content on the map was very much lower. I assigned most of the points in shrines and strongboxes in the atlas passive tree and I went from seeing multiple strongboxes and shrines in 0.3 to seeing one of each or maybe even none of them in 0.3.1. The same can be experienced with wisps, essences and rogue exiles. The "lowered ceiling for amount of content" change per map felt really bad and made the already underwhelming atlas feel even worse as the points you invest into some of the mechanics are now subject to the amount of content ceiling.

Before 0.3.1 i tower juiced a lot of map nodes, with quantity of items on one side and experience on the other side. For obvious reasons, these maps felt amazing to run with 3 additional tablets and the new mod values. For the non-tower juiced map nodes, experience felt good with 5-20% increased experience (a x2 multiplier from the old tablets) allowing you to run up to 60% increased exp on every map before atlas modifiers, no towers no travel nodes. But for quantity of items it didn't feel as great, as these can only roll 4-10% now (a 1.4x multiplier from the old tablets).

I'm really not sure if only a 1.4x multiplier from the old tablet values is enough for quantity of items mod to make up for not needing to run travel map nodes and finding tower setups, but i can say this: it didn't feel good to play with such low quantity. And it gets worse when you can't even see rare monsters on your maps, since most loot will come from them anyway, so you either miss out on rare monsters or waste time backtracking to dead ends.

For the open layouts changes, like for example Bastille and Savannah, i really didn't like it. It really feels like a nerf to some great maps. Maybe the reason people spent more time on these maps is because they were amazing juicing targets. These were some of my personal favorite maps.

With all that said, i'm really happy GGG decided to do a mid league update to gather feedback, as this is the entire point of Early Acesss. Hopefully by the time 0.4 is released with new content, many of these issues will be fixed and the "mapping feel" can finally be in a great spot.

TLDR;

Overall early endgame feels much better

Great Changes: Orb of Alchemy, Towers, Map Device Juicing, Monster density/Pack size in low map tiers, mid league patch to test stuff in EA.

Bad Changes: Extra Content UI missing stuff, Rare monster icons missing, Ground effects still bad in t15s and way too high chill magnitude, evasion and monster accuracy, only 1.4x multiplier on quantity of items new tablet modifier (max roll from 7% to 10%), nerf to open layout maps.

Terrible Changes: lowered ceiling for amount of content on a map making atlas feel even worse.

Need fragment stash tab ASAP