New Patch Review: Good intentions but Horrible Execution

This patch probably marks the end of the league for me. Definitely the most I've played of a league in the first 3-4 weeks.

Overall it almost makes me miss towers. Precursor sustain/crafting is a horrendous and continuous chore. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, pun intended. I was thinking it felt good when I was running some map nodes in my old prejudiced areas but leaving and going into new territory unveiled how bad it feels. The tablets need to have more uses and more juice to make forging and collecting them feel worth it. Also this would have been a great time to introduce a stash tab for them as the entire organization of these things is another chore in and of itself. I'm glad I don't have to find overlapping towers but tbh I never really had to before. I just patched from tower to tower looking for citadels and juiced along the way and that was enough. Now it just feels like half as much effect from the tablets, more investment to get them feeling decent, and a lot more work overall

Removing rare entirely from the map was an enormous L. I liked the idea of making some maps smaller to speed up the mapping, but removing rare has doubled or even tripled the time I end up spending per map which feels bad when the drops aren't all that great. Maybe they could be enabled after the boss is killed? But entirely removing them was a horrible decision.

I didn't understand the patch notes description of what they did to evasion but it's clear it was a tremendous nerf for evasion based players. This is also increasing my time in map, the fact that I cannot interface with the enemies as directly and have to play a much more cautious approach because evasion was gutted. Also a kind of strange decision when they went to great lengths to buff it specifically because the feedback led them to conclude evasion was the weakest defensive layer. They made it actually great, so their decision was to nerf it mid league, which results in either creating/respecing your build into pure ES or just not playing for the rest of the league. Continuing on with your level 95+ characters with pure evasion simply doesn't feel worth it and is night and day from pre-patch.

I think if they could unveil the rares, allow both tower and map tablet juicing while figuring out a good way to sustain and organize these items, and restore evasion to its former glory that this would all lead to a positive reception from myself, and I think many other players.

I will likely play through the weekend just to further these some things but otherwise this is a downgrade, even with the good intentions of removing towers. Right now the only way I see to be truly profitable is to rush citadels for fragments and juice rituals for increased chance of omens. Everything else seems like a waste of time.

Any discussion is welcome.

(Sorry in advance for any typos. I'm doing this from my phone)