Think I'm finally done with PoE for good. After the 8th or so league of them just designing the game around rares which are nothing but horrendous damage sponges, it seems they simply don't care anymore about slowing the game down, or rather, making white and magic mobs feel threatening or meaningful again. When killing a map boss takes all of 5 seconds, but some superbuffed rare or metamorph is tanking uninterrupted damage for two straight minutes, something is seriously wrong. When the looming eldritch entity that is about to devour all of existence is quicker to kill than some random map boss that happens to have a bunch of nasty mods, then the game is badly designed.
The fact that these new rares spawn with random mods, some of which give them 5 endurance charges which translates into +75% all res and +75% physical damage mitigation, then that is just bad design. The game went downhill ever since they decided to jack up the mapboss and rare-mob health a few years ago, and never followed it up with buffing the other mobs as well. Instead the game continues to be all about oneshotting 99% of enemies, but also requiring high amounts of survivability and/or DPS to deal with the few enemies that dont die the moment they appear on your screen. Bosses are still designed around avoiding their mechanics, and thus they feel fine, but the HP sponge rares and mapbosses are just annoying as fuck.
Sadly, the last 2 game-expansions went further into that direction by making bosses easier on the outset, and allowing map-mods to affect them, making the bosses piss-easy unless you purposefully roll mods onto them that make them piss-easy still, but give them 10x the survivability. The best way to scale damage for almost all builds is the increase of attack/cast/trap+mine throwing speed, which adds a lot of visual clutter to the game, to the point where avoiding enemies regular attacks is almost impossible. So you build in a way that lets you tank all that damage, so you can just stand still and hold RMB until the enemy with more health than Sirus finally keels over to drop 3 Transmutation Orbs. Awesome.
This "big" expansion includes 4 new bosses, which are decent but also way too easy. A bunch of atlas passives, most of which are just old watchstone mods. The lack of new skills and a super boring build-a-rare league that is just straightup worse than metamorph in every single way doesn't really help either.
The game peaked with Delve, Betrayal and Synthesis, all of which offered unique and interesting systems with new bosses and well structured rewards. 2 of those leagues are still in the game years later. Meanwhile even the endgame content is getting recycled on a yearly basis now because none of the stuff they come up with is actually interesting or keeps people engaged beyond a few leagues, and half the 3month-league systems are just being scrapped altogether. Goes to show how little faith the new league design and mechanics inspire even within the dev-team.
