Welcome everyone!
As the title says I'm gonna talk about the current Path of Exile league 3.21 Crucible. I've played and streamed it on vimm for 10 days. I hoped to play for more than 14 days but this time it wasn't the case. Why? The league was extremly boring, there was a couple of good things about the league, but at the end it wasn't enough to keep me interested in playing for longer.
So what are the good and bad stuff about the league?
Good:
Meta was awesome, for many leagues we didn't see people playing bow builds, they usually were expensive and their damage wasn't that high without extreme investment. This league introduced a new mastery called "Vengeant cascade" that could be obtained by annointing it on an amulet. Basically because of this mastery, every build that used a projectiles was overpowered. Skills like Tornado Shot,Lightning Arrow or Spectral Shield Throw were incredibly strong. Without spending much I was finally able to play Lightning Arrow build. As I said that wasn't possible in previous league. If you wonder how does the new mastery looks here is the picture.
Btw. People are expecting this mastery to be either deleted or nerfed in next league, so if you want to play a strong projectile build do it while you can.New league mechanic was a disaster, but not completly. Honestly I can point it out as a good and bad part of the 3.21 Crucible league. So what is the league mechanic about? It basically allows you to apply a skill tree to weapons, including shields. It allowed people to get very strong, very early without any spendings. If you played an Omnisence build, you could even get a %Dexterity %Intelligence %Strength on a weapon. That additionaly made bow builds extremly strong, but not only bow builds. Every build in game was strong for a low budget. One shotting endgame content wasn't a trouble with this league mechanic. For those that are interested in PoE Crucible Passives Skill Tree head to http://www.vhpg.com/poe-crucible-passive-skill-tree/ . There is 264 pages of bonuses that the new league mechanic can grant.
I think thats it for the good things, I couldn't find anything else that was good about this league.
Bad:
As I said above the bad part of the league is especially league mechanic, obviously it allowed us to get strong without any investment, it allowed us to pump our weapons with many good passive skils but what else it gave us? Nothing. Once you applied passive skills to your weapon, you're done with the league mechanic. You don't have a reason to touch it again. Its not worth the time, you don't get any drops from this league mechanic. You just apply passive skills and thats it. For me and many people this Crucible 3.21 league felt like a Standard league. It wasn't much different.
Next part was an economy for some weird reason Awakened Sextants were so expensive to the point that people started listing items for awakened sextants instead of chaos orbs. We've been using chaos orbs in PoE for years as a main trade currency and it was really hard to buy stuff cause first u had to exchange chaos orbs for awakened sextants and then buy things for the sextants. Seems like a lot of effort to buy items right? Yea it was kind of trouble that annoyed me.
With all the strong characters there was still no new content, no bosses. Nothing. Whats the goal of making all those strong builds if there is nothing to go for? Let's dive into the past, do you all remember when Sirius came out? Or when maven invitations came out? Or when simulacrum came out? There was a reason to push our characters beyond limits. Now? There is no reason to do this. I think GGG should be already thinking about some more bosses and content, but I think they currently don't give a fuck about their game because they are currently preparing to release Path of Exile 2. I think thats their main goal.
This league market and Poe.trade site were extremly lagged. It was so hard to use the trade site to buy any items. Additionaly I was getting more disconnects and ping spikes than ever. I think its time to invest into a good servers and improve game performance, but as I said above I think we can expect that in Path of Exile 2.
There were not many good strategies to make currency, they reworked Breach, they reworked Abyss. But it ended up being complete trash. At the beginning you can do whatever to make currency, but later on you had not much choice, you either run boss invitations or flip market or pray for "The Apotecary" card drop. In previous leagues there were many more methods to make currency for solo players.
Party playing is too strong. This thing never changed. If you are playing in a group you make a tremendous amount of currency. It definitely should be changed, cause those that play in groups can manipulate whole market and that makes the solo playing way worse.
