Subject: Feedback on League Mechanic Design Flaws: A Deep Dive into Sanctum (Part 1)

To the Grinding Gear Games Team,
Let’s cut to the chase. I need to address what I consider the most fundamentally flawed league mechanic in recent memory: Sanctum. Specifically, the design of Resolve is, in my opinion, a catastrophic misstep.
1. The Decoupling of Build Power and Clear Experience
The current Resolve system completely decouples a build’s inherent strength and clear speed from the player’s success rate. Instead, success is dictated almost entirely by whether a specific build archetype is "meta" for Sanctum.
For Melee builds, this experience is abysmal. It feels less like an Action RPG and more like a game of dodgeball where the primary objective is simply avoiding hits rather than engaging with combat mechanics. This design gatekeeps the content, ensuring that only a tiny fraction of players running highly specialized, niche builds who can tolerate the repetitive grind are willing to engage with it.
2. Reward Structure and Accessibility
I previously opposed the nerfs to Sanctum’s rewards, and here is why: The issue was never the absolute value of the rewards; it was the accessibility.
The previous system felt like a classroom where only the top 5 students received a cake, while everyone else got a crumb. The problem isn't that the cake was too big; it's that 95% of the player base, running standard or slightly optimized builds, could only scrape together a few Chaos Orbs (Chaos).
For the average player, finding a Sanctum Key in maps isn’t a moment of excitement; it’s a nuisance. Picking it up just to list it on the trade site feels like a waste of time—a QoL nightmare rather than a rewarding drop.
3. Misunderstanding the Roguelike Core Loop
It feels like GGG has missed the core pillar of a successful Roguelike mode: Kill -> Loot/Upgrade -> Get Stronger -> Push Higher Difficulty. This is the essential positive feedback loop.
Options like "Increased Fountain drops" or "Increased Gold gain" provide zero immediate positive feedback during a run.
Conversely, being forced to pick random, game-breaking Debuffs feels like dealing with flies—annoying and detrimental to the flow.
Players want Relics and buffs that tangibly alter gameplay feel, providing necessary defensive layers or damage multipliers to compensate for non-bis gear, allowing us to push higher tiers of difficulty. I strongly suggest GGG study the Roguelike design philosophy in Warframe (e.g., The Steel Path or specific incursions) where temporary power spikes allow diverse builds to succeed.
4. The Trap Mechanic Friction
Finally, let’s talk about the Trap rooms.
In single-player, completionist-focused games like Elden Ring, trap-heavy dungeons are acceptable because players traverse them once. GGG seems to have forgotten that PoE is an ARPG driven by farming loops.
Imagine a trap room that deals massive damage, cannot be destroyed, offers no reward for dodging, and punishes failure with a severe negative feedback loop (loss of Resolve/Progress). Now imagine facing this same room dozens, if not hundreds of times, over several farming rotations. It ceases to be a "challenge" and becomes forced friction. It is not fun; it is a tax on your time that players are forced to accept to access the rewards.
Conclusion
To summarize: Extreme difficulty breeds extreme homogenization. When a league mechanic becomes so punishing that the majority of the player base cannot engage with it meaningfully, it stops being a game mode and starts feeling like a part-time job reserved for a select few with specific tools.
If these points resonate with the team, I hope you will consider them seriously. We need to amplify the voice of the average Exile, not just the top 1% of min-maxers.
Regards,
A Concerned Exile

well sanctum got absolutely destroyed by the last batch of nerfs and i dont see anybody doing it for the new version.

uniques are kinda useless. helmet probably still has some play, amulet is bad and youre not dropping original scripture anytime soon.

so yeah its a currency print, but very bad one.

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fengnanhai#0223 wrote:

I strongly suggest GGG study the Roguelike design philosophy in Warframe (e.g., The Steel Path or specific incursions) where temporary power spikes allow diverse builds to succeed.

I'll explain The Steel Path for those who don't play Warframe in PoE-terms (since everything else is complete nonsense anyway):

Think of Mud flats going from zonelevel 4 to 84 and spawning one of five maven influenced map bosses (being able to drop their awak.gems but entirely devalued) on a 5 minute timer and a generic loot increase for anything below the rarity of a chaos orb. No scaling, nothing that would represent a roguelite and certainly not a roguelike in anyway. Nothing here influences what build you'd pick. You simply go with the heighest clearspeed which you already would do.

Warframe's build diversity is similar to Last Epoch. The overall game tuning is too easy for it to ever matter except for a few top-end missions at which point it becomes extreme cookie-cutter meta and people will repeatedly leave parties early until these conditions are met with defense being a dead vector and everyone just going for passive i-frames.

Fun fact: Warframe has worse power creep than PoE.

First of all, your forced interpretation is completely different from what I meant. When I mentioned referencing Warframe, I was talking about learning from their design philosophy—using buffs obtained from card draws to compensate for a build's shortcomings, thereby allowing players to experience a wider variety of playstyles.
As for your point about players not pursuing defense systems, that is a flaw inherent to Warframe itself. Why should we emulate their flaws?
Furthermore, regarding the so-called issue of players randomly leaving groups, in Path of Exile (POE), no one plays the Sanctum league mechanic in a party.
Finally, "numerical inflation" is not a drawback. It is simply a temporary buff, similar to "Headhunter." Does anyone complain that Headhunter steals too many buffs?

Well, now we know it's a bot.