0.3.1 feedback from a SSF player with 20+ days playtime this league

I want to thank everyone who pushed to get towers removed from the game - huge, huge improvement. The endgame mapping loop is vastly more appealing now without having to play the minigame of "what's the path of least wasted overlap to turn on my cluster." I am very glad that is done and buried.

I think the problems that necessitated the rare icons being put on the map, however, are still very major problems, and the rare icons, while they did need to go, were removed too early because those problems haven't yet been solved. Map layouts demand that you explore down a lot of forking roads right now to ensure you don't miss the abyss pit, the ritual altars, and other important content. I'm not talking about 100% completing maps, I'm just talking about getting the major stuff on the map. There is far more backtracking and wasting time exploring empty side rooms now as a result of the band-aid being pulled off, and the end result is that I feel more fatigued by mapping now.

Next, my SSF perspective - I have made as strong of a character as I want/need and my personal goals are to hunt down the few remaining items that I haven't found yet in the game, that being Rite of Passage, Palm of the Dreamer, and the three corrupted nexus boss exclusive uniques. So I don't really care whether loot as a whole went up or down with this patch; what I care about is that my ability to target a Rite of Passage for my collection has been neutered. Not only do I only get 5 runs of hunted bosses per unique Azmeri tablet that I find now, which is a massive reduction vs. slotting it into a cluster with a bunch of other overseer tablets, but now I also can never superjuice the maps that have the hunted boss on them. The best I can do is 30% quant (before atlas passive bonuses) and that will vastly decrease my odds at getting the big jackpot Rite of Passage drop that I've been hunting. Again, I don't care if Number of Rare Monsters is a viable competing strategy now, because that does not help me reach my personal goal in the game. So this patch feels like a major nerf to my endgame in this regard.

And I am very confused about the extra content like wisps, strongboxes, and shrines right now - in my many maps since the patch I can't seem to get more than one wisp to spawn, which also basically shrinks my chances at a rite of passage to infinitesimal odds. Was this an intentional change to limit wisps per map? Currently the atlas passives seem completely useless as a result.

When I discussed my issues with friends about checking down every hallway, they said "just leave after you find the map boss." My issue there is that on SSF, distilled emotions and good waystones are in very limited supply. Sure, I can leave when I find the map boss, but that's more Sim and more map prep and waystone rolling/sorting I have to do now per hour of mapping and that is a very bleak reality when there's NO batch reforge in the game still and NO convenient way to instil waystones, I can't even batch slam waystones I have to click ONE AT A TIME to apply exalted orbs to them which is just insane to me. Reforging tablets and slamming waystones takes me hours for one week of blasting and if I just leave when I find the map boss then this problem becomes even worse.

Finally, I am now soft crashing on EVERY map with the black screen and cog wheels, and often the game is not even paused while it happens so my character is getting hit even though I can't press any buttons. I have the latest NVIDIA drivers and everything. Looking on the forums it's a well documented issue happening to a ton of people and no fix in sight. It just feels like salt in the wound.

So in summary, Thank you for removing towers, this was an extremely good change, but I am feeling far more negatives than positives from this patch and I just wanted to share my experience. I will look forward to more updates and hope some of these things get addressed. Thank you for the hard work so far, GGG.

I played ssf for a bit but had to go back to sc league, as crafting and even targetting certain stuff was a challenge.

even in SC league. waystones are a massive issue when you aren't playing meta. I am unable to run "juiced maps" which is fine, and I accept as i am not playing meta. But being reduced to 1 waystone a map? which 50% of the time i can't use... cuz a modifier. yeah...

there needs to be some balancing.

Also.. non deli map with super boss with 10 million life... is a joke. pop deli and now they are 25-30 million. with all the extra modifiers.

This basically forces me to play meta as my build can't scale to kill those juiced bosses.

once agian, there needs to be some balancing done to let meta players be meta and ssf and or non meta builds still thrive.