WITCHPOE: I really don't like dishonest youtube essays. What I like even less is dishonest feedback for the best arpg ever made. You present this as a critique of the game when in reality you are not interested in playing the game and there is nothing else to it. If you didn't want this comment then you shouldn't have framed this as critique of the game. I even took the time to break it all down for you!

"Lose-More" You present 7 and a half minutes of critique breaking down an issue that is not real and you then say at the end of the segment "just a nitpick"

Can't agree with life regen being even relatively impactful when it comes to checking dps on any character. There are solutions to life regen and if you can't get any of the convenient options then just throw on a frost bomb gem temporarily to deal with a life regen situation. If doing this is genuinely putting such a strain on your character/map that you're bricking content, you aren't playing a bad build, you are playing one that fundamentally does not work. This is a consequence of that way you choose to play the game and is strictly due to your choice to play it that way. The game has power creep on both sides and characters are stronger relative to pinnacle content right now than they ever have been before and that is across more builds than anytime in the past. These arguments of how to spend 1 to 2 chaos orbs at a time or suggesting we don't have access to eldritch currencies to slam reduced life regen is just not correct and a dishonest way of looking at/presenting the "issue" you are tackling here.

"Lying maps"

You have an issue with the fact that the best builds are the ones that can run as many map mods as possible and suggesting that somehow build diversity on average is lowered by map mods and how they affect specific builds. I don't need to go any further than saying that build diversity is peaking in these last few leagues you are referring to. That is enough to prove that this just objectively isn't happening and isn't true. I am still going to go further though to get the point across. If the best builds are the ones that run all map mods, which pool of map mods are you referring to? You could be talking the generic regular map mods of 1-16 maps, t17 mods, ultimatum mods, sanctum mods, delve mods, valdo map mods. There are more than those sets and they are all different in many ways. There is no such thing as a character than can run every single mod in the game. That has been intentional design by GGG. There are SO many builds being played right now that are built for specific content and theyre amazing. I am currently on an armour stacking build which gets owned by a few of even the regular map mod pool but ask anyone that plays it if it's one of the best builds in the game and most will say it's THE best in the game. Lastly, your solution to this problem would be to eliminate map mods that can brick characters. This is infinitely worse because now you remove every single specialty build that was created for specifically these reasons. You are presenting a non-issue once again and you don't realize that your ideal solution would be the actual source of what would become a real issue.

sidenote: Your complaint of maven making fights just a "clusterfuck" is a skill issue. There's no way around that one, that's just what it is.

"Gold and settlers"

I don't disagree on gold being correctly implented in some ways, however, it is once again dishonest to present it in the way that you are. This "rich get richer" idea is nonsensical. I am getting really tired of people's takes on the settlers mechanic. Everybody is out here treating it like it's somehow different than farming currency from a different league mechanic. You spend time engaging with the mechanic. The more time you put in, the more you get out. The more you "juice" the content (in this case it's gold generation to hire good workers, feeding good maps to runners and disenchanting items) the more you will get out of it. Find me another mechanic that does not function the same way! It doesn't exist. It is not to be treated specially. It's not special, it's the same as everything else. If you don't want to engage with it, YOU DON'T HAVE TO. Also, gold does not translate to currency in settlers mechanic. Gold allows you to DO the settlers mechanic just like sulphite does to delve. Nobody would say the sulphite has a currency translation, it's about what you do in delve that makes you currency. You do not need to be a "high end juicer" to farm more gold than your town consumes. If you are doing alch and go t16s like you say you enjoy, play the game 4 hours a day and youre still making more than your town will consumes (granted you arent playing a non functional build that you decided can't possibly be your fault.)

sidenote: Settlers fomo isnt real and if you feel a sense of fomo, that's just dumb.

"T17 Bad"

I absolutely agree with the sentiment that t17 bosses should not be impacted by map mods. The argument, however, that t17's being a linear part of progression is somehow a bad thing is once against just dishonest and your understanding of this very basic concept is astounding. At what point did they release new pinnacle content in the entire game's history that was not considered a part of a linear progression? It's the hardest content in the game. If you want to "beat the game" then you have to beat that content. ??? What is the problem with this? The way you talk about how you just don't care to play the new 16.5 maps because, well , you just don't care or how you dont care about loot, you can get it anywhere, is so revealing of a person that does not even want to play what the game was made to do. You don't want to play Path of Exile and that's the end of it. You are presenting this so poorly and as though it's a critique of the game. It's not. This is you wanting to play something else and feeling sad about it. I won't say anything else here because you just doubled down on your previous fake issues to describe the issues of t17s.

"Armchair Game Dev"

First point you really make is that people are just going all in on damage as a way to solve the game. This is less true now than it ever has been before. There is a MASSIVE consideration for defenses on ANY build planning to do high end content. I agree with the sentiment of on death mechanics being unfun. Lower density content is extremely strong right now. Essence farming is something I regularly do and have made hundreds and hundreds of divines extremely consistently doing that. I can say the same for betrayal which got a really nice rework this league and is better than ever. Ultimatum can print currency for builds that are good at doing it. Heist is a gold mine that not many people want to touch (better value), casual delirium with scarabs(not difficult at all) will make you consistent good money, beast farming (if you can somehow enjoy it) is as consistent if not better than essences, delve is ~14-16div/hr in the current league and that's pre-600 depth. The list is longer but I won't continue because you get the point (i hope.) All the other solutions you provide are just lazy and addressing issues that don't exist.

If you want to delete this comment, you shouldn't.

Slipperyjim8: Gz on the Top Gun win.

RPGabe: I find that playing SSF helps remove FOMO almost entirely. It does restrict build options initially, but that will open up over the course of a league and you find interesting build enabling things for other characters.

iitroxic: I think my biggest issue with the endgame and has been ever since kalandra is how swingy your mapping feels, build can feel great swiping through every pack in a map until you find a cycling damage res soul eater rare and the gameplay grinds to a halt, which makes me feel bad if I don't 10x over the damage requirement to comfortably clear that content to make up for the edge cases where it becomes no longer comfortable from a combination of map mods and rare modifiers, this extends into t17s and risk juicing and I believe it entirely stems from the rework of the monster modifiers and it's failure

gentlehilt9750: Im new to poe but as time past I understand that the more seizure on screen happens the more i enjoy it.

harithrazak799: For me, playing poe is learning. Im still very new to this game(just got first voidstone) and i want to try and make my build work

elementalshu: It has been downhill ever since map mod effect landed. They chose to raise the bar on endgame instead of curbing the power creep. Ever since then, it has been less base-line loot, and more raw multipliers on modifiers that barely work at base value.

I feel you on this though. I went exclusively SSF halfway through Necropolis because I always felt pigeon-holed into the 1 farming strategy I enjoyed, that also made good money (and fuck those coffins). Can honestly say that my enjoyment of the game has gone up substantially. I am the only obstacle in the way of what I want to achieve now. All is well.

Keep your head up.

dante5526: absolutely nailed on Kigsmarch and gold, as a fellow town hater i would absolutely love to se the entire thing gone but giving it a real opportunity cost like you suggested would be a great compromise between this extreme and the ppl who love the meccanic, as it stands its just free loot for engame jucers for no particular reason (im one of them, I can afford a maxed out town no problem and i still dislike it, gimme the drops while i map, not as a reward for some iddle meccanic)

teddyrible: Kalguur is just an accurate representation of real life capitalism: the rich get richer, while the poor gets fucked. Personally I stopped after finishing T16s, because it gets really hard to manage anything with just 4 stash tabs :)

ArticulateArena: I waited a minth to plsy tbis league and am watchung currency guudes and question why i logged in. Its all the same bs as the last 4 years with the same mechanics i hate and now more bloat on top of that.

GrindinRyan: I think they felt that the players would completely freak out of they got rid of the auction house (I know I would have), and so that had to stay, and they also wanted there to be a cost to using it so gold had to stay. And I think they wanted something else in the game to require gold other than the AH, meaning Kingsmarch stays. I'm maybe one of the only 5 people who didn't engage with the town at all the entire year-long league, I'm just not interested in that time-gated mobile game stuff. Thankfully I've made a super strong build and can do all the content I want to do without engaging with it, I just have to accept I'm missing out on some income but then I don't really need it anyway

blahblahgdp: I feel like this kinda talk is split between two groups. The people who can actually farm that far and the vast majority just chilling under 100 div and our damage never trivializes anything so we have to build defence.

But like how you poe in one way so does everybody else. I dont know if ggg could ever get it in a solid place as poe has to constantly evolve seemingly

lordofchaosinc.261: Last league my icenova archmage steamrolled everything but this league all of my characters carry frostbomb around. Yes the regen is just that annoying. I even agree on the gold bit. I'm not even sure why they shoehorned that in but they're awfully proud it does so many things. Town progression could just count map/boss completion or monsters killed instead of having to fuel the town all the time with money.

The perfomance of the game is bad but I guess if they could fix it they would.

Can't really agree with the altars. If you're too lazy to read what's there and then brick the map I don't know who else to blame tbh. I just read it.

parsa8941: Hey, hi!

Omega juicer scum here;

Yeah, you have a lot of good points :)

hatiskalli1954: mark prevent enemies from healing keystone, problem solved.

mirrorimage2866: i agree

Smaxy_: I don't want to be mean or anything but I think I've never seen so many bad takes in a video.

vide6258: I absolutely hate the “risk meta”. Spending hundreds of divines to create what used to be an absolute unit of a tanky character only to randomly roll -max/ele-pen/less-defences and getting instagibbed by volatile cores in every other map feels like shit.

andyzaft8827: Pretty much how I feel about settlers and the gold situation. I also play very differently from most, I make one build per league, it either works and I can clear everything or it fails and I quit the league. I never played the same build twice since beta, slowly running out of things to play, even with all the new added skills. Also doesn't help that more and more builds can't do a lot of content, if you are not playing one of the handful meta builds that does a lot of damage while being immune to everything, then you are shut out completely or have to have teenage level reflexes to be able to avoid all the stuff even if you just toss in an extra scarab or two.

YoutubeStyleChannel: One of the biggest killers of games for me is raising the ceiling without a big enough focus on the beginning/middle. It starts a viscous cycle where the end-game players demand more and more as they slowly become the majority as non-endgame players leave.

Something GGG did that really annoys me is the degree of control the atlas/scarabs give players, take ultimatum for example, you have catalysts, inscribed ultimatums and the trial master boss. All of these are really fun, but each of them has a scarab to completely target farm them, taking away the magic, it is less of a mechanic, and more of a job.

I'm just lucky to be somewhat decent at crafting, so I can play builds/mechanics that aren't optimal, while crafting to supplement my income.

I do think gold/settlers needs attention, I've never had issues generating gold, but do play a lot. I HATE shipping, it's an amazing concept, but it's way too deterministic. I'd love to see ports only accept requested resources, and the rewards be more random (i.e ores/bars be useful). Perhaps going off your idea, you could only ship using shipping contracts

johnturtle6649: There really isn't actual rpg element to this game its just a hack and slash power fantasy loot pinata. Which is fine, but also ggg has literally no fucking clue what the word balance actually means.

And it's not complex either, it's convoluted. And if you don't know the difference, don't worry, neither does ggg.

pramadanaagsha3943: Hi! Enjoyable talk you have here, it helps when ur voice is soothing even when u rant lol. It's interesting you brought up several points that i can agree with while others i just don't feel even a smidge as you do. I agree wholeheartedly with your build-making section and how there are several checks that really not fun to engage with, or in poe case people just make a build that can ignore it. But your talking points about how t17 is bad is not really hitting with me.

Since its introduction i can count with my hand how many t17s i've run. Granted i never looked at how profitable they are, i only looked at if my current build can do it or not and whether i want to spent effort to make my build or a new one to be able to do it. It does not diminish my enjoyment of the game whatsoever and i never felt the effect of t17 being 'mandatory' as you point it to be. I always do t16 maps and kind of content with how OP i felt there. This profitability or t16 not being the best or not being endgame anymore never crosses my mind.

And another thing that kind of confusing to me. When i choose a build (i;m not a build maker just a guide user if its not that apparent), i use it for specific purpose. I never look at the build and felt that i need to make it do everything or speicifc thing but juiced to the max. If i follow a build and it can't be pushed to t17 its kind of fine to me. Maybe, in my mind t17 is just separate mechanic. Interact with it if i want, and build around it if i think it'll be fun, just like harvest, ultimatum, heist and other mechanic. And this also connected to your talking point about settlers. I use settlers recombinator when i need one. Craft 4 or 5 endgame ES armour piece and sold it for 40 divs or so. I use mappers too tho not fully staffed (only like 12 of them) and run them whenever i care to remember about it. And i did not use shipment a single time this league. Am i wasting money lying around? Maybe, but what do i care. I did not find the enough fun there to care about setting them shipment for success.

Sorry for the long text, just funny that i completely agree with ur point about game design early in the video and i just kind of desync with the next couple of talking points you speak about. In summary, i think many and i really think MANY of players just buy into the fomo. It controls them and how they would like to play. I'm not saying i'm immune to it, but looking at this maybe i'm not affected enough by the fomo to feel discontentment about how the endgame is shaping right now.

Sh00peh: Fuckin love cast on death portal. Ive run it just about every league for god knows how long. Why do you think you arent going to die? Take advantage and stop running the entire map when it happens.

mmmyummymmm: I play almost the same way. It's fun to me just making builds of my own. Sure i look at guides, but i will always do my own thing. About enemy life regen, there's a mark mastery where the marked enemy cant regen life. I like getting that if i can. Even if it's inefficient to path there, I'll get it lol. Gold is annoying af for sure. I'm already burnt out on the grind

AdeptPenguin: I think you hit on something i have been trying to put my finger on for a while. I am a hardcore gamer, and i love ARPG's but POE has always been difficult to enjoy. I think your whole its about having fun, made it click. I cant have fun if i am trying to get to maps with a excel spread sheet, or trying to min max every thing i dont even understand yet. I can see where if i was to have started playing this game from the time it came out and learning over years but as someone trying to understand 10 years of mechanics in say less than a year is a near impossible feat. Now i am ranting..Games are definitely supposed to be fun and thats difficult in poe.

Jul 20 2025

Buy POE Currency