Ended up catching some of the podcast and it was pretty good. Didn't agree with Chris on a lot which is fine, and it makes sense he's the kind of masochist into the "hard mode" where supposedly the idea is that even something as simple as a magic item with a low life and single res roll will be valuable. Hilarious that he talked about, "using your chaos to buy those" and then instantly corrected himself with "if you even have any chaos". That mode is absolutely not for me, but if they can keep it with fairly low overhead I think it's a great addition to the game. I'm just not confident that they can quad-track - standard, "hard mode", PoE 2, and BR all at the same time.
I liked a lot of what Chris had to say in terms of things the team wants to do, finding "good" fixes rather than just and easy one, and a lot of his responses, too. But I'll wait to see them implemented.
Fair amount of time was devoted to discussing Absolution as well and how it launched in such a terrible state. Apparently a few QA folks did flag the skill, but most said it was performing fine which is...concerning. It's still pretty trash even after the buff. I hear Chris on not wanting to do signed NDA's with the actual threat of legal consequences for alpha testers in order to get more folks into testing leagues early, but they really need more testers looking at this stuff to make sure Absolution/Reaper problems don't reoccur.
Honestly, it sounds like they've set themselves on a hellish production schedule to boot. Leagues sound like they still have fairly meaningful/significant work/balancing being done right up until they launch and managing time across even PoE/PoE 2/BR is increasingly challenging.
I get why they won't do it, but damn do I want to see another test of a 4 month league to see if them having an extra month to work on a league delivers similar results. I still think it's one of the better leagues they've launched overall in terms of quality, and not just the ritual mechanic.
Which speaking of, I'm finding myself already burning out hard on expeditions. They're just so...bleh. Not fun to set up/do, and most of the time I forget to even go to the masters to buy shit. Crafter guy can be stupid strong, but I've got terrible luck/am bad at it. Currency dude is FANTASTIC, I just never have any reroll currency. Gambler lady is pretty shit, but I've got a million reroll currencies so dumping a bunch for some decent bases in the hopes for an influenced item or a good unique ain't bad. Just disappointing since most of the time I end up with an inventory full of garbage.
It's got me thinking about league mechanics in every map overall and I'm honestly not a huge fan of it. I think it kinda burns folks out on that mechanic and makes it feel like you're obligated to engage with it. I've been loving how we can stack league mechanics since the Maven atlas update and juice up the content we enjoy most. I'd love to see that expanded, and league mechanics not being in every map but being more heavily weighted so you'll see them far more often. That way they still say a little bit "special". Ritual is a great example, as by mid-league I was pretty burnt on them and they were no longer "exciting". However now? Fuck yeah I'm going to take those Maven passives, and I get a little bit excited whenever one pops up in my map.
And I'll need to re-listen to this section, but it sounded like 3.17 will have some big endgame changes and they're thinking about everything from reducing the map down to 4 regions, reducing the overall maps down to around 100, and a few other things. This all sounds bloody great (as long as we can keep access to the existing Maven passives!). As more and more is added map progression feels more and more like an obligatory slog until you get to the "real endgame" of being able to farm/sustain T14+ maps with unlocked Maven passives so you can work on building up the currency/items needed to start running juiced content and uber bosses and shit.