Good Morning, Friends. I apologize for not blogging, but this seventh round of chemotherapy has pretty well debilitated me in both mind and body, and I am honestly barely holding in there. I got them to add an extra week to recover, so I am hoping that will make the final round doable. The main problem is that I am never fully recovering from one round before the next one starts. Anyways since I have been stuck on the couch most of this time, I have been playing a lot of both Path of Exile II due to the new 0.5 league, and more recently a lot of Path of Exile 1 due to the Phrecia event. I think I have landed on some of the reasons why mapping just has never felt as good in POE2 as it does in POE1. So we are going to go on a journey where I rant a lot, but I will try my best not to go too far off the deep end.
Too Much Ground Clutter
The biggest problem I have with POE2 maps is that they have too much bullshit on the ground that clips and blocks your model from moving. For example, the above picture is from POE1 and has plenty of ground clutter, but none of it blocks your model from moving freely. I have no clue why GGG decided to fuck this up by making the smallest of stupid items on the ground clip your model and block your progress. It feels extremely bad to keep getting hung up on terrain and not understanding which tiny object is doing it.
No Agency in Map Choice
In Path of Exile, you have complete control over the maps you run. If there is a specific layout that you enjoy, you can literally run nothing but that map for your entire league. This was even improved further more recently as they added generic maps per tier that you can just run with whatever map layout you choose. In Path of Exile II, you instead have biomes and maps associated with those biomes, and if you want to path through an area, you have no control over what maps you end up running. This feels like a massive step backwards and a universally worse experience. I feel like they were trying to go with a delve-like experience, but delve only works because it is micro bursts of activity.
Maps are Roughly Twice as Big
This is something that I have noticed coming back to POE1… the maps on POE2 are just too damned large. They are roughly twice as big as your average POE1 map, and as a result just take too long to complete. You spend so much of your time searching for those last few rares, or last mechanics, that it kind of ruins the super chill head-down mapping experience. It would be different if that extra space meant extra fun, but so much of it is just filled with generic packs that don’t do anything but block your progress.
Variable Number of Portals
This is one of those things that I personally hate, but no clue if anyone else does. In Path of Exile, you have six portals per map. It feels like about the ideal number of attempts, and honestly makes me willing to try maps at greater difficulty because I know I have a safety net to fall back on if I die. Path of Exile II, however, reduces the number of portals you have based on how juicy you have rolled your map, with each affix removing a portal. So it creates this situation where you are either playing one of the immortal builds of the league, or you are running all of your maps on blue. You can look at POE.Ninja and see that every league tends to end up with the entire player base running a specific immortal build. Right now, 23% of the player base is essentially playing the exact same martial artist build, with 15% playing the same Spiritwalker build. 12% are playing gemling legionaire in a few different spell damage configurations, and 9% are playing Fubgun’s Deadeye build. So roughly 60% of players are playing builds that are either effectively immortal or have so much damage potential that they are. I can’t say this is due to the limited portals, but it certainly is not helping. You can exist on a janky build in POE1… that is not really a thing in POE2.
Failing a Boss Wipes Your Map
Another insult-to-injury aspect of POE2 mapping is that if you do a boss rush strategy and fail to kill the map boss, all content on the map will be wiped. No more rares, no more mechanics, just a bricked map that you are likely going to have to redo. My natural path through these dumb maps is to work around the corner until I find a boss, kill said boss, and then use the guidance that gets turned on to find the rest of the content. God forbid you end up with a tanky boss that gets a lucky slam against you… Oftentimes, because you are getting hung up on bullshit ground clutter, you end up with a bricked map. It just feels awful. Mapping is supposed to be this relatively chill activity, and Path of Exile II has mostly ruined that. It is better than it was, but it still feels awful.
Atlas Passive Tree Still Bad
One of the big changes that came with 0.5.0 is updates to the Atlas Passive tree, and I admit it is a massive improvement over the Passive Twigs that we had previously. The problem I have, though, is that it fails at being an Atlas Passive Tree and mostly only allows you to impact things that don’t really matter. In Path of Exile 1, we have three Atlas Passive Trees, and each of them more or less allows you to force three league mechanics onto every single map that you run. This is phenomenal for your average alch and go player, and allows them to target specific clusters of league mechanics that work well together. The equivalent of this in POE2 is tablets… which end up being ridiculously expensive. So the general investment required to run specific league mechanics goes through the roof. Who cares how many lockboxes or spirits you can force onto your map when you cannot reliably force a league mechanic through the passive skill tree?
All of these are reasons why mapping feels worse in Path of Exile II. Do I think this post will change anything? Not at all. There is a clear design space that they are working on at GGG for POE2, and I think it just isn’t what I wanted. I just hope they continue to support the original game, because really, it is the one that I enjoy. POE2 is generally something I mess around with when I am bored more than anything else. It just isn’t as good of a game as the original.
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