What would bring you back to Median XL?

I disagree about increasing trophy drop rates or making waypoints to bosses. People did 1 hour uldy runs back in the days and 300 laz runs to obtain a trophy, these felt like a real achievement. Then fragments were introduced, now people want it easier and easier every time. I will again suggest what I suggested X seasons ago, which is to make 2 versions of a boss: one which has a X% to drop a trophy fragment, and another one which is 5x harder with a X% to drop a trophy. Then I'll agree about having a waypoint to the harder version. The trophy is not meant to be obtained by everyone. You either spend the same time as everyone else to do it in multiplayer, buy it, or play singleplayer where you can have it 60 times easier to obtain.

I also disagree about having higher drop rates on MP. Drop rates are high enough at the moment. If anything, they need to be decreased instead to make progression slower. There is no reason to use transition SU's if you can obtain BIS items at the 2nd day of the ladder. If you want something to feel rewarding when obtained, then it needs to be a rare item. When it drops for everyone, it decreases its value over time, to the point where noone wants to buy it. In my opinion, removing the increased nodrop rates for SP was a big mistake. People who play SP fairly really need these drop rates to not waste their times. People in MP need the opposite - a lengthened ladder that doesn't end in 1 week.

One more thing I'm very annoyed about is the removal of EXP from multiplayer games. This was done in order to make the ladder more competitive, but now you can only be competitive if you play alone and ignore your friends, as they just slow you down and require you to run multiple runs of the same bosses. Also, leveling in rifts has become much more boring as there is no way to improve your exp gain. Holding right click in fauzt from 125 to 140 at ladder start literally makes me go asleep. Other lvl 130 areas which are promoted as "alternative" do not have high enough density to justify leveling in them. I really want to see some incentive to play with friends, and the only thing I can think of is to make a boss drop as many charms as the number of players it was started with, which would also improve the trophy farming everyone is searching for.

Most of what I wrote doesn't seem to apply to you or anyone who has thousands upon thousands of TG and is able to buy every item in the game. It is written for those who mostly farm their own gear solo, hence why I mentioned the part about SSF. I sold an item once this season, and haven't spent any TG at all. Not technically SSF, but I didn't rush off to buy anything either. I suppose however your point about Multiplayer vs Singleplayer has some merits. I would be content with a decreased nodrop on singleplayer, and would leave the people who want to be forced to trade to get their gear on multiplayer to this angle.

As for re-running charms, I have played many iterations of MXL, including Ultimative, and even pre-Ultimative days, and have never enjoyed re-running charms. To me it seems like a weird hill to die on that you want to call an achievement running the same area hundreds of times or glorify the old purify fight. Once you learn the mechanics for Uldy, I find it to be a chore to run it multiple times, the purify version was beyond tedious so I find it strange you seem to feel some nostalgia for this. And if you see it as an achievement, that's okay. But not everyone else sees it this way.

As for the XP part, we agree there. I don't care about competition on the ladder and frankly will probably play singleplayer because there's very little incentive at this point for me to play on multiplayer other than chat. Most people play in their own passworded games anyway, and I have no interest in trade. Some kind of incentive to play with friends is important, charm drops with player count seems like a good idea to me

Marrt wrote:In my opinion, removing the increased nodrop rates for SP was a big mistake. People who play SP fairly really need these drop rates to not waste their times.

Holding right click in fauzt from 125 to 140 at ladder start literally makes me go asleep. Other lvl 130 areas which are promoted as "alternative" do not have high enough density to justify leveling in them.

The 2 points that resonate with my previous frustration.

Things changed with multiplayer maybe explain why they remove /players setting for extra difficulty for better exp & loots in SP. It allowed you to steamroll all 3 difficulties, assuming you know what you are doing (yes, it does make the game imbalance, but i want something to save time). It also reduce nodrop iirc.

Unlimited Shared Stash like before with plugy

The thing I want to see comeback is reverting most of the bat assassin changes to its first iteration. Or at least revisited.

I am a huge lover of summoning classes and spent this season minmaxing unsummonzon and was able to beat up to T9 labs and had a blast on her. With exodia she was strong.

I miss the bat assassins bats that got 2x ways as baseline so I could get their pierce up to 200% and have an actual viable summoner late game who could fight and smash phoboss. I stopped before taking her further… I really wish her bats could SOMEHOW be strong like they once were.

There was few people playing her and compared to other meta builds I would t say she was OP. She had her quirks with needing weapon swap to Zul Kular tempest (the one with +ways for sin) to maximize bat dmg and pierce. Even with bat strike needing claws now and unable to weapon swap it would be hard to reach those high levels of pierce with the OLD way it was…

I want my batwoman back! Let’s revisit her as a viable summoning class and her uniqueness of being able to give high pierce to her pets was unlike other summoners. Very flavourful ^_^

Maybe add some dedicated drop pools? Similar to how some areas have a drop bias, maybe increase the chance for specific drops for specific elite mobs or bosses so you could at least grind those? Kinda just thinking of how borderlands 2 handled its legendaries and you could target farm a lot of them, if not all of them.

Also I loved the rat druid in one of the first seasons of Sigma. A shame it got nerfed further and further into the ground to the point. Some people made it work though it seems, I'm just not "skilled enough" as most people would describe it from what I've seen in the thread.

Increased in difficulty via mechanics similar to old butcher where you had to get boss into circle to do dmg.
And removal of these new gear check boss fights where you have to get specific amount of resists, amount of pierce if you want to damage, ect. Every char/build is forced into same direction, same gears, ect. Just boring outcome. Remember when QT needed some specific TUs + honorific combo to become immortal and get healed by his beam ? Don't do that.

And removal of those 1hit ko mechanics, boss fight lasts minutes and one mistake sets your progress back a mile. See no point in that - i can do dmg, i can survive 30s, why make it 10 min fight ?

In reality i do load single player once in a while .. when super bored.

Anonymous: wrote:Increased in difficulty via mechanics similar to old butcher where you had to get boss into circle to do dmg.
And removal of these new gear check boss fights where you have to get specific amount of resists, amount of pierce if you want to damage, ect. Every char/build is forced into same direction, same gears, ect. Just boring outcome. Remember when QT needed some specific TUs + honorific combo to become immortal and get healed by his beam ? Don't do that.

And removal of those 1hit ko mechanics, boss fight lasts minutes and one mistake sets your progress back a mile. See no point in that - i can do dmg, i can survive 30s, why make it 10 min fight ?

In reality i do load single player once in a while .. when super bored.

I agree that we need difficulty mechanics that cannot be overriden by lvling/gear. I find that the lvl/gear dependant difficulty ends up, as you say, pushing all builds in the same direction. I don't mind having a couple of "stat check" bosses, but when most endgame requires the exact same answer to a problem (I.E. having 90% all res while retaining a certain dps) this really hurts build diversity. Ideally, you'd want difficulty expressed in a way that can either be overcome by mechanic skills (git gud) or that can be countered by a plethora of strategies. For example, the only response to high tier labs is 90% all res. IMO, labs dmg should be susceptible to being countered in different ways (going all in on hp pool, or defense, or leech, or any other defensive stat or combination thereof)

In all honesty, I stopped playing mainly because after many many patches of requesting, there was never a proper stash solution similar to plugY implemented. I was tired of dealing with mules. The second reason was because the community wasn't what it used to be... no shout box, everything had to be nicey nicey (no more entertaining debates, negative cookies, and memes about people for example), and everyone left forum for discord and old players just stopped playing too. Thirdly would be how the game changed, for some of the same reasons you discussed here.

Since then I have found Path of Exile to be really fun and it scratched all the same itches with all the quality of life improvements. I find it difficult to return to Median now, but it'll always hold a special place in my memories. I still have a habit of looking through the forum every once in a while and updating my mystic orb post/miniguide haha. I appreciate the devs for carrying on Laz's legacy for so long though!! Cheers to that!

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