Waystone juicing is the new item crafting

So, nothing new here. This seems to be the general sentiment around map juicing. I just wanted to condense what I've seen and agreed with as general feedback for mapping.

On one hand the devs are doing all they can to streamline item crafting; on the other waystones are absolutely out of control. I remembering a while ago when someone was unable to enter a map because its text was taking up all the screen. Of course it was an outlier, but I believe it is a symptom of an actual issue in the game.

We aren't out of beta yet and a map can get: 6 affixes, instilling, 6 more affixes from each tower and even more random lines from corruption/cleanse. This already strongly discourages any mechanics that could add on top of these.

Aside from instilling, all these mechanics also have many RNG layers and, at least when it comes to waystones, too many bricks.


I personally don't mind the towers themselves, but precursor tablets are horrendous in design. While being fairly rare they are also riddled with filler mods and their ranges are also way too wide to provide a consistent experience.

Proposed solution: rework precursor tablets into something like scarabs in PoE (more interesting, sharper mods); make it so two towers cannot overlap.


Second point is that rolling waystones is an absolute pain: the only real mod that anyone cares about is rarity/quantity; most other prefixes' value hinges on this stat and without it a map is essentially half as good as it should be. Suffixes are technically useful to provide more waystones to roll in the first place, but have quite a few bricks (should be addressed next patch, nice). On top of all this Vaaling is extremely strong while being as unpredictable as ever. What this does is push further ahead players who have the liquidity (and patience) to classify and roll many maps at a time.

Proposed solution: yep, you guessed it, bring back PoE1 affixes. Loot quality should be tied to map difficulty, not one's willingness to roll tens of bricks at a time. Also let us 3:1 T15s.


Last, general point: there are too many multiplicative mechanics. I might be wrong here, but the general consensus seems to be that player, atlas and waystone rarity/quantity multiply each other, giving extremely explosive results to the players who are willing to maximise all three at the same time. Personally I believe having a more linear system would still make each investment worthwhile without shutting the average player out of the endgame economy. Rarity in general seems to be a pretty obscure mechanic; even just a clearer explanation of its behaviour would be greatly beneficial to how the community approaches the game.

Very well said on all counts, the prefix/ suffix system makes easy maps with quant/ rarity ideal and rewards glass cannons over rounded builds

If "rarity as a stat" is a hill to die on at least tie quantity to difficulty

It has become a little silly. Basically a wall of text when I hover over any map now and I'm not even trying to "juice" I play SSF I just slot 3 tablets per tower.

The readability will improve a little bit as per 0.2.1g notes.

I hope GGG doesn't lose track that too many mods on towers eventually means they all become kinda "meh". Aka loss of "impactful design" approach.

I don't know what Scarabs are, but I thought it'd be neat if you have like smaller stones each with a certain effect that you could slot together. But this could result in more inventory tetris.

I think what they need to do eventually is get back to the basics and simplify the tablets.

If each tablet had a single mod now, I think it would improve the game. It would make towers more meaningful, as well as being more strategic about where to use certain tablet combinations.

As it stands now I just dont care I slot Breech/Irradiation/Ritual or some other combo it all looks the same in the end : huge wall of text when I hover over maps.