Feedback, Performance Bug Report & Suggestions

Want to start by saying that this is coming from my perspective playing the game on an Xbox Series X. I do have a mid to high end PC and have bought Early Access for that as well but I have not taken the time to play PoE 2 on there much. I also want to mention that I work in tech so some of the bug reports come with questions because I want to try figuring it out and see if there's a solution that may benefit others on the performance side.

Starting with Feedback, the league is fun and I think this is the most I've played since 0.1 & 0.2 as a whole. I think the Druid brings a broad amount of depth to the game and having had it pushed back for the finishing touches that it received shows it was a big labor of love from everyone that helped work on it. That said the league mechanic needs a few more touch ups that would really make it engaging and worthwhile without asking for buffs to loot, or completely throwing away the established gameplay loop.

Only confusion I have right now is understanding what rooms or tiles will be selected for deletion per run and what rooms can be blocked from deletion if at all to maximize the number of rooms I run at any one time. I don't know if we're meant to try to fill in the entirety of the temple but otherwise it's still a lot of fun.

Bug Reports:
General Mapping

I have 3 functioning and otherwise finished characters this league, 2 of which are Blood Mage. For one I have noticed a small performance degradation while running heavier content if I am killing a lot of mobs and moving along leaving Life Remnants behind if I am overfilled on my life total. I wanted to know if Life Remnants have a life span or decay when there's a specific number of them on the map or screen at any one time. During combat, it's hard to notice whether I've left them behind until after I've moved onward but in Abyss and Delirium content I do notice the game gradually slow down as more and more remnants are made. I have seen a smaller but noticeable slow down in Breach but it's a short lived problem.

The other time I notice this slowdown is on my other Blood Mage where I have both Life and Mana Remnants running if there's a lot of them left over throughout the area while I am trying to clean up mobs the game feels like it's trying to keep pace and struggling.

I've tested both with and without additional content in the map, and those 2 types of added content seem to provide the most noticeable performance hits. I don't believe having the remnants left behind causes an issue but it behaves like a free standing persistent buff that the player needs to collect and having the position, and count stored while there's chaos going on elsewhere across the map seems to add a growing performance hit.

Particle Lifetimes?

For effects that leave ground effects such as ice shards, do these have any sort of decay that cleans those up for resource management when mapping? I notice a similar slowdown in performance when running maps if I've shattered a lot of monsters in rapid succession that it starts to slow down a lot more. Also do ground effects left behind from skills have any sort of lifetime before being removed from the zone entirely if the player travels a specific distance away?

Vaal Temple UX/UI

In the Architects Console, if a player claims a medallion from the fight and attempts to use it while placing the reward rooms from completing the fight, it does not increase the maximum quantity of charges the player has to run the Vaal Temple. One possible solution I thought of is the interface should not show the medallions for rooms or charge increase on the right side of the screen when using the Architects Console in his chamber to prevent this from happening. Because the player can't place the additional rooms from that console other than the reward rooms themselves, this fix seemed less invasive. Also I have force closed the game, restarted the console from the home dashboard, and tried to change characters to see if this is a visual issue and I can confirm that the 2 times I did this it has not increased retroactively or otherwise from using it from his console.

Vaal Temple Performance

This is specific to entering a temple with Delirium active in the map and the temple has more than roughly 8-10 rooms and or 20+ total tiles placed. As mentioned above with the performance hit from having a lot of effects, map effects, and potentially remnants left behind in the map; how does the game memory manage when entering larger temples. The game runs just above 20-24FPS without Dynamic Culling enabled if I run into a temple from a map and moving between rooms feels like there is a strong delay in response from player actions. This is something I'd really like to test and see with my PC to really show if there is a strong memory hit both to the VRAM and RAM usage and provide results if that helps to narrow down for the team that works on tracking this.

Suggestions:
I wanted to stress that the league mechanic is still very fun and I've sunk a decent amount of time into it with my largest temple run being 20 rooms and 34 total tiles placed in that run ongoing. It's a great addition to bring more attention over to the Vaal and some of the dialogue entries found within the temple expand on lore I didn't really understand before with their civilization. Regarding the mechanic overall, engagement is a bit slower where other mechanics seem to have a much larger presence even outside of the league they were introduced into PoE 2 than the current mechanic with the Vaal Temple. I had a couple of suggestions that I think would bolster engagement without calling for huge buffs to loot or uprooting the core mechanic and starting over.

Charges Full Warning:
This is something that seems to be more of a common complaint among my friend group that is playing, but if the charges are full, there is currently no warning for the player that excess charges are lost if they do not place or otherwise run the mechanic after activating the alter. Having a warning when the charges are full as it happens would be a small detail that may help others who have put the mechanic aside but then go to choose to engage with the temple only to find the massive amount of maps where they collected the charges from taking down the monsters around the ruins had gone to waste.

Multiple Chances for Engagement:

Right now the mechanic pacing is good but for people like me that want to invest a lot time into it, having only one opportunity to interact with the league mechanic outside of the campaign feels really slow. From the livestream reveal I believe it was Mark that was mentioning that the goal would be to build up a large amount of charges within the temple in an effort to sink an hour or 2 directly into the mechanic. The gameplay loop for the temple feels amazing, but building up the opportunity to run it again becomes more punishing the more charges the player unlocks.

During the campaign when the player is getting their bearings with the mechanic and building up their character over time, because the zones feel smaller compared to a map, the time to engagement is shorter and a lot less likely to be missed. During maps, because the icon for the league mechanic is not immediately visible until the player has taken down the boss or reduced the overall monster count to below 50, the chances are much higher to miss while wandering within the map to engage with the mechanic. I don't think not having the mechanic icon visible at all times is the problem, but there should be either a level of incentive to engage with it at higher map tiers or increase the number of times a player can find the ruins to build charges faster.

The most amount of charges collected on 1 character that I have invested heavily into time spent on the league mechanic, the thought of having to clear 32+6 maps, is daunting and feels somewhat punishing if I want to spend a long time with the mechanic alone. Assuming the player does what I do which is build up the initial 6, enter the temple, place the rooms to empty the charges but does not activate the temple yet to go fill in the rest of the charges feels to me that this gameplay choice was to prevent the player from spending a long amount of time within the mechanic. Wanted to ask if the resource cost to have multiple Vaal Temple ruins in a map is too high to warrant having 3 of them in a map similarly to what Ritual offers, or bringing up Betrayal specific to console I believe which has 3 separate encounters within a single map. Referencing the interview that Jonathan Rogers did with Talkative Tri, he mentioned resource costs of having opaque objects being higher than having a solid single object in play. The reason for bringing that up is to not ask how resource division is allocated when maps are generated for Path of Exile, but if adding additional copies of the same mechanic creates a bigger resource cost and performance hit as a result.

The feedback I gave on a random post on Reddit going off about the mechanic I had mentioned tying the tier of map to the number of charges and overall difficulty of the mechanic. T1-5 being 1 charge, T6-10 is 2 charges, T11-15 for 3 charges, and T16 being 4 or 5 charges. On paper that ties the mechanic to the depth the payer is in maps but punishes players that aren't progressing the same pace as more experienced players would.

Another addition to this would be for the bosses that spawn randomly having them grant additional charges or currency that behaves like a soul core to bolster the charges at the temple. That dropped item could be treated like keys are in Sanctum so they're locked to the mechanic and not otherwise tradable currency. Or if it was an itemized option, this gives players that want more chances to play with the mechanic an option to buy it through currency exchange and or trade for the opportunity to charge up their temple quicker.

Last suggestion was to ask if there was any chance to tie in an Ultimatum-esc behavior since the temple is scaling risk versus reward like Ultimatum does. This could be implemented where if the player completes the wave of monsters and or takes down the boss they can risk another wave with scaling difficulty up to a maximum of 6 times, or until the player manages to fill in the visible indicators on the crystals that surround the Vaal Ruins device. This incentivizes the player putting more time into the league mechanic and allows for higher overall engagement with some of these suggestions presenting more player agency and time to construction the temple is either somewhat or greatly increased.

Room Upgrade Index:

Path of Exile 2 has a wide library of built in explanations that can be interacted with to explain what a mechanic does which has made the game far more inviting for me as both a long term player and yet still very inexperienced in a lot of areas throughout the game. One of the most common frustrations I see within my friend group and from reading the complaints in Reddit or coming from community members that interact with popular streamers; is that there isn't much of an indication what rooms will affect another beyond a color specific indicator. Maybe not within the time frame of this league but eventually could there be an option to hover or click onto a tile and have the options of what a room needs to be considered T2/T3 be provided to the player in some scope and or otherwise converted by another room. A lot of the guesswork that's being done on my part is ending up in a notebook as I work through the mechanic trying to scope out what rooms I want to prioritize and how to make a functional layout within the temple that scales risk and reward effectively while also making sure to capitalize on the provided space within that tile grid.

Tiered Currency Crafting Tables

The change that was done to allow the player to remove currency from the crafting devices within the temple is a great change. However there should be an opportunity for the player to remove higher tier currency from the crafting tables at a scaled or weighted chance if they otherwise don't need to use it or have anything with them that they can use the table on. Having the chance at a greater or even perfect regal or exalt would incentivize the player to interact with the benches beyond crafting for a small chance at more valuable currency.

"Tile Bank":

There's a bit of a rogue-like or rogue-lite mechanic feeling which is what feels really good with the RNG of getting to place rooms. That said, having the ability to store a set amount of tiles for a specific amount of time would really help with building out a temple. For example if I have a room I know I want to get rewards from but I don't have the upgrades for it, having the ability to take that tile and stash it until I either setup a path or draw the tile that I need to get a T2/T3 upgrade for that room to place it for a set time would greatly increase player agency when creating layouts for runs. For justification I think tying in a bank with the set amount of charges the player has collected from taking down the Architect would be a great way to increase engaging with the mechanic overall with breakpoints at 12/24/36/48/60 for a maximum of 5 tiles that could be held in addition to the tiles they place. A way to create a sense of urgency to use the tiles that are being held for later is making them eventually decay with time. Having a destabilization mechanic where the room held could only be kept for 1/3/5, based on how many additional charges unlocked, temple rotations of complete/incomplete runs of the temple would still push the player to eventually place the tiles rather than hoarding room tiles.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read any of this and I hope the team gets some much needed rest for the holidays!