My 40/40 Review of Mirage and 3.28

Wowee I'm done with challenges already, did em all myself and joined my friend's uber boss kills because I was too lazy to do them. AND shaders are loading a bit faster now with the game installed on my external USB SSD which is somehow faster than my internal SSD that has Windows on it lmfao


But anyways, here's my thoughts on this patch.
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The league mechanic:

Pretty fun when it copies stuff, but the actual mirages themselves have barely any loot from the djinn caches, even stuff like the wish for cache of stacked decks doesn't drop a lot. I was expecting 10-20x not 1-2 of them to drop when I click it lol

Like yeah the coins of skill,knowledge and whatever the red one was drop sometimes, they sell for a lot now but those are pretty rare. I have gotten 1x Fracturing orb and 1x Divine Orb so far from clicking every djinn cache I see while fullclearing mirages. So even if you click all the chests its pretty rare to see any good loot. This feels like a case where they were too scared to make the league mechanic too rewarding, which sucks.

Yeah I know the point is that it copies your other stuff, but Mirage feels really empty and pointless when you're just rushing maps for challenge completion like me and you have all league mechs except Settlers and Heist blocked on your atlas. Maybe it feels better if I put a bunch of strongboxes in my maps who knows, I might try that after I get some more RAM soon since this game eats it up even more this patch for no reason.

Like the only actual fun,good wishes are too rare. Yeah Fountain of Wealth,Golden Volatiles are fun and give a fuckton of gold when you do volatiles+blight/breach but the rest of the wishes are useless. Stuff like "bronze cache of jewels" shouldn't even appear in t16 maps. Imo Bronze caches should appear in white maps, Silver in yellows and Golden caches much more often in red maps. And the "cache of currency" wish also never dropped anything notable, like give it a decent chance to drop divines please.

The "map boss is acoompanied by random member of the maven Feared invitation" wish is fun, but I literally only ever got it once in 8000 map tiers of mapping while checking every single mirage. Make the fun wishes more common.
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This patch in general and the new endgame:

Hoooly its such an improvement, mapping is the best its ever been. No longer do I need to buy voidstone carries to rush to get my 4 voidstones, because they ain't required now. All you need is to do Eagon's quest and exarch+eater to get 2/4 then you can start putting your generic Tier 16 maps onto your favorite map(even if its a lower tier and not transformed to to t16 yet on your atlas) its so amazing. I actually did all my voidstones solo for the first time ever lmao

The change where you now get the voidstone after killing Shaper then Elder instead of having to grind for Uber Elder fragments is amaaaaziiing. Now it doesn't take forever, now I can just save up 4x Elder and 4x Shaper guardian maps, and get that voidstone myself. That is the voidstone that I exactly wanted them to change and make easier to obtain because it was too grindy, and it happened. So I'm very happy with this change.

Also favorites map system being gone is SO nice, now I don't need to do a bunch of maven invites and endgame bosses just to unlock my favorite map slots, then favorite a map, then be forced to do bad maps until lots of my fave map drops, then stockpile it, then try and sustain it. That's all gone, this new mapping system is SO much more streamlined I loooove it. I can just take any generic T16 map and run whatever map I want, and at any point in time I can swap to a different map to spam all day. Its perfection. Before this patch 4 voidstones were mandatory when you got to t16s so I had to spend my chaos buying the other 2 stones, now that's no longer necessary. The endgame progression and farming your favorite map feels so much nicer now.

Astrolabes seem good, though would be nice if that Keystone would instead delete influence from far away,outside->inward so that it never severs your blob and doesn't delete any maps from the influence.

Also the vault rewards after completing an astrolabe make no sense, one time I completed all the Abyss objectives in almost every single map except the final map in my whole blob, and the vault only had 2 choices of items?? I have no clue how you're supposed to get like 4-5 choices, so I just started ignoring those objectives and opening the vault with the minimum 1 item in it. Those may need a rework or more clear explanation in-game of how they work, what they reward exactly,what you need to do in order to get more choices in the vaults etc. because right now its confusing.


Nightmare maps are actually doable now, I did them all with 175% quant by myself by just using Stability Scarab. Because they're lvl83 now, the hp and damage scaling on the bosses in there is lower which means not everything oneshots me anymore, so with enough portals I can even corpse-rush my way to victory against the Ziggurat Catarina bossfight yaaay


And finally, I think they've actually fixed gold drops even for alch&go casuals like me. I've looted over 10 mil gold since leaguestart lmao

I don't know what they changed, because I'm doing the exact same thing I've always done every league yet I'm swimming in gold. For the first time ever I was able to use Kingsmarch mappers, feed them all my t16.5 and Nightmare maps and got sooo many divines and uber fragments to sell from that, along with other random currency like harvest juice. Its sooooo good. Yeah Mirage wishes for golden volatiles/fountain of wealth definitely help, but I get like 100k from one of those. Its definitely more than just that. So yeah gold is in a good spot right now, hope it stays how it is. My town is sitting comfortably with 1.5 mil and I got 3 mil gold on my character.


So yeah, pretty fun league mechanic but the real highlight of the patch is the huge endgame rework and t17s becoming easier,t16 versions of themselves with less build-bricking mods being able to roll on them. And having lots of gold to run my town now, its so nice.


Edit: Oh and can we please have the golden completion circles around unique maps back into the game? I just finished my whole atlas(yes even Untainted Paradise and Hall of Grandmasters solo'd) but the unique maps just look so bad on it without the circles around em. They're just a 2-d image slapped onto the atlas lol, I dunno unique maps just look weird and bad without those completion circles around the map. No idea why they were removed randomly.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

Wowee I'm done with challenges already, did em all myself and joined my friend's uber boss kills because I was too lazy to do them.

I don’t think buying carries or relying on help is the same as being lazy, one’s just a condition, the other’s an ability.

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Pashid#4643 wrote:

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

Wowee I'm done with challenges already, did em all myself and joined my friend's uber boss kills because I was too lazy to do them.

I don’t think buying carries or relying on help is the same as being lazy, one’s just a condition, the other’s an ability.

What carries? I did them all myself. My friend was kind enough to let me join his uber kills, we both play the same totem build. That's not "relying on help", that's the power of friendship!

We can both do ubers, and I have more damage and hp than him, I was simply too lazy to do em myself. Did a random uber exarch and dropped 3 div gloves when I happened to get 4 fragments from my kingsmarch mappers, these bosses are a joke when I can trivialize all their mechanics and kill them in 1 phase with my build.

You know what other challenge I can trivialize thanks to Mirage? The 175% quant nightmare map one by just getting the boss arena copied and rolling the perma Divine Shrine+Echoing Shrine wish lmfao, my friend actually got that on a Citadel map and we just both entered the arena and sat on the boss getting hit by every mechanic, and completed it for the challenge. Love stuff like that. I even hit lvl99 while in a Mirage thanks to that divine shrine wish lmao, with only 50 deaths too which is a new record for me!

I'm super happy the challenges are getting easier,less RNG and more casual-friendly. And GGG is finally listening to people's complaints about the 500 armor set rewards, next league they promised to give us 4 unique MTX's and then rotate between armor sets and other things every league. They're listening to the majority of the playerbase. There's no shame in getting carried for uber bosses or other content that's designed for 0.1% of builds. In fact its a huge part of this game's trade economy and community.


Can't wait to get cool stuff like portal effects and pets again for completing challenges.

Anyway, I'm super excited for Last Epoch season 4 at the end of march. By then I should also have some more RAM gifted to me, which is gonna be a very nice upgrade. Who knows I might get a whole new PC as a gift, or a new GPU. I have no clue, I might be pleasantly surprised.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

What carries? I did them all myself. My friend was kind enough to let me join his uber kills, we both play the same totem build. That's not "relying on help", that's the power of friendship!

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

There's no shame in getting carried for uber bosses or other content that's designed for 0.1% of builds. In fact its a huge part of this game's trade economy and community.

They’re not part of the economy, but I do appreciate you clarifying that you ended up getting carried after all.

That said, the content isn’t designed for just the top 0.1% of builds, any build has the potential to reach that level. What’s more accurate is that it isn’t designed for the bottom 0.1% of underperforming builds or below-average players.

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Can't wait to get cool stuff like portal effects and pets again for completing challenges.

Hopefully next league, cause we don't need more mediocre armor sets.
Current rewards make it already hard to push for challenges and I honestly might don't even bother with them for the first time, cause Crimson Desert looks more appealing than doing boring challenges for a boring skin.

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Anyway, I'm super excited for Last Epoch season 4 at the end of march.

Better be good.

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By then I should also have some more RAM gifted to me, which is gonna be a very nice upgrade. Who knows I might get a whole new PC as a gift, or a new GPU. I have no clue, I might be pleasantly surprised.

Keep in mind that Ram alone won't improve your performance by a lot, especially in PoE which is more demanding on cpu power, not ram. But it’s good that you’re slowly letting go of your decade old land filler system. It deserves its retirement :)

That was a good read and it seemed like solid feedback.

I haven’t been playing much because I’m working away from my gaming rig but the feedback of Mirage is similar to what I experienced.

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Pashid#4643 wrote:

Keep in mind that Ram alone won't improve your performance by a lot, especially in PoE which is more demanding on cpu power, not ram.

It will because right now the game takes up to 90%+ of my ram for no reason this patch. Getting more will let me actually open other things like my browser and obs and so on. My CPU ms is constantly at like 4-10 anyway during gameplay, its my GPU that has higher ms so an upgrade to that will pair perfectly with my processor lul

Also what are you on about? I'm not abandoning my PC, I'm gonna upgrade it with parts that I get gifted by people bit by bit, and even if I get a completely new one I will save this one and treat it with care and respect. Calling it the words you did is just rude and mean to the PC, it has served me wonderfully for all the years I've had it. It's allowed me to play any game I want, whenever I want. That's the very definition of abundance. I'm never throwing it away, I would just save it, or repurpose parts or give it to someone who can use it with care for their own needs.


Also I'm playing LE Season 4 regardless of what anyone else thinks of the game or the season lmao, to me its just a nice fun casual arpg. With good QOL too like auto-sort inventory.

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TIGRElaranja#2163 wrote:

That was a good read and it seemed like solid feedback.

I haven’t been playing much because I’m working away from my gaming rig but the feedback of Mirage is similar to what I experienced.

Probably a good idea since the in-game economy is a bit of a mess right now, in a few weeks prices of things might have stabilized.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

but Mirage feels really empty and pointless when you're just rushing maps for challenge completion like me and you have all league mechs except Settlers and Heist blocked on your atlas.

This is why feedback like this is so........off.

It's coming from a player who actively avoids playing the game. What possible insights could a player like this provide?

Even the main thing that draws this player, challenges, are bought and paid for. Even the thing that is his main driving force for coming back league after league....and he even skips that. What actual "gameplay" or "mechanics" are left to be judged fairly based on full experience and interaction?

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

but Mirage feels really empty and pointless when you're just rushing maps for challenge completion like me and you have all league mechs except Settlers and Heist blocked on your atlas.

This is why feedback like this is so........off.

It's coming from a player who actively avoids playing the game. What possible insights could a player like this provide?

Even the main thing that draws this player, challenges, are bought and paid for. Even the thing that is his main driving force for coming back league after league....and he even skips that. What actual "gameplay" or "mechanics" are left to be judged fairly based on full experience and interaction?

If you read the first line of my post, you'd know I did all of them solo this time since they were so easy I didn't need to buy carries.

I have every right to review the league and patch, just as much as any other player. Especially after I've done hundreds of maps while grinding challenges in only a week.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

It will because right now the game takes up to 90%+ of my ram for no reason this patch. Getting more will let me actually open other things like my browser and obs and so on. My CPU ms is constantly at like 4-10 anyway during gameplay, its my GPU that has higher ms so an upgrade to that will pair perfectly with my processor lul

It will help you with your browser issue, but it will not improve the performance of both PoE or LE as both are thirsty for cpu power, not ram, in which case your current cpu is the bottleneck, not ram. Game play you will not notice a difference.

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Calling it the words you did is just rude and mean to the PC

Did your PC gain sentience, start speaking in an AI voice, and develop feelings? Because that’s concerning.

But no, it is what it is, old, obsolete, weaker PC components are just landfill waste. To be fair though, they shouldn’t be treated like that. They’re hazardous e-waste for the environment, and honestly way better off being recycled for all the useful metals inside instead of just becoming another piece of junk in a massive pile.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

This is why feedback like this is so........off.

It's coming from a player who actively avoids playing the game. What possible insights could a player like this provide?

Even the main thing that draws this player, challenges, are bought and paid for. Even the thing that is his main driving force for coming back league after league....and he even skips that. What actual "gameplay" or "mechanics" are left to be judged fairly based on full experience and interaction?

Well said.