Do you think Path of Exile 3.21 Crucible League is a successful POE league? In terms of pure player numbers, it is. But Crucible League features in general failed in many ways. And here are five failures I think Crucible League have.
1. The Forge Of The Titans
The first failing slice of Crucible League you might not have noticed, unlike the other glaring issues, is the non-randomized, completely standard layout and content of the Forge of the Titans.
One of the league’s core repeatable features is the remnant system, essentially two tiers, are extremely difficult endgame maps, housing Crafting Benches that can alter Crucible Passive Skill Trees, Crucible specific monsters, POE Currency and all the unique Crucible mini bosses.
Every single time you visit this map, it’s exactly the same. You zip down an extended ramp that concludes at a Crucible Forge and a huge Titan statue or a petrified Titan. The mobs you encounter along the way and the modifiers they carry are different every remnant.
But the actual environment is the same. This is a shocking design choice, especially in a game like Path of Exile. The developers boast a supremely refined map randomizer. We can play the same map repeatedly. And while it might use the same textures, the environment itself can be entirely different.
Alongside all the other possibilities inside our maps, this can make every map unique. Every remnant is almost entirely the same. It leads to boredom very quickly on what could have been an amazing addition to the extremely long Crucible League.
Here are a few simple additions that could have drastically helped remnants become replayable.
Incentive To Clear Remnants
First, give incentive for players to clear the remnant and not rush to the crafting at the end by adding POE Items with fully unveiled Crucible Passive Skill Trees to the drop tables of every rare and unique monster in the remnant.
Instead of racing to the end of the remnant, players would now actually seek and get excited by slaying the monsters on the map.
Randomize The Layout
Second, randomize the layout.
Remnants could still be ramps over a vast bubbling sea of lava. But they could be longer, more twisted, and contain other environmental objects to help each remnant be unique.
Add Custom Past League Content
Third, add the possibility for other custom league content to spawn in remnants.
Not every type of league content needed to be in remnants, but Delirium, Essence, and perhaps a unique Crucible Strongbox would have been sweet. This leads me to an idea: I hope GGG pursues in the future once work on POE 2 concludes and leagues become the focus again.
Here’s the concept of the combination of league mechanics in future leagues. What if remnants had a chance to spawn a Delirium Mirror with a Crucible reward type? How about a Crucible Essence monster that dropped an Essence that could be used to slam a weapon with a focused Crucible Passive Skill Tree? How about a Crucible Strongbox that could drop a fully unveiled and fully leveled max-sized Crucible Passive Skill Tree or a host of rare remnants?
Grinding Gear Games has a wealth of awesome ideas to pull from the past to use in present and future content. They need to take advantage of that.
2. Crucible’s Area Mechanic
The second failure is the Crucible area interaction mechanic itself.
In the Crucible League, every area includes an interactable Crucible Forge. Players can use it to add and then further unveil and level up passive skill trees on weapons and a select unique helmet.
Sadly, the mechanic to do this is extremely clunky. Instead of being a slider or a simple click and go difficult selection, players need to sit and channel a difficulty slider for many seconds. Along with you channel, the harder the encounter is, and the more experience your items pass its skill tree receives.
This is too bad. It could have been a slider or it could have been a simple, easy, medium, hard, deadly multiple choice selection. Instead, it’s a channeling mechanic that is clunky almost every time it’s touched. Sometimes the channeling UI covers your character. Other times, monsters attack you while channeling. If you accidentally click out of the channeling circle, you end the channeling early.
Overall, the area mechanic is poorly implemented and adds too much friction to the game. Lots of people still playing the league don’t interact with it anymore, which sucks.
GGG wants us to use this mechanic. I’m not sure why they’d implement it this way, especially given past similar mechanics and their implementations. Of course, interacting with something with this powerful should be risky. But the risk shouldn’t be standing still and getting killed by monsters.
There have been some quality of life additions to the charging mechanic, such as the ability to see which tier of difficulty and experience gain we’re charging to. But it’s still incredibly janky to work with. With Crucible likely ending on August 15th and ExileCon 2023 so close, there’s zero chance there will be any other changes. Crucible is staying as it is right now.
3. Unneeded Crafting Complexity
The third failure is the unneeded crafting complexity. In the beginning, Crucible required plenty of trial and error when it came to its weapon leveling and crafting. Of course, some of this is great and often encouraged. The discovery process is vital in games like Path of Exile.
But standard necessary futures, like the ability to unallocate Crucible Passive Tree nodes with an Orb of Scouring, needs to be outlined in-game or hinted at strongly.
Additionally, what removes and what doesn’t remove a Passive Skill Tree from an item also wasn’t known and had to be discovered. Some people love this trial and error. Others who don’t use tools or read guides online are likely to be frustrated by inconsistencies like this.
Those proponents will probably enjoy the game even more for the sheer amount of complexity in Path of Exile. But more clarity and a bit less complexity will allow more players to access all the deep systems, like the Crucible Crafting Path of Exile offers.
4. No New Pinnacle Boss
The fouth failure is a major gripe on my end as it’s one of my favorite parts of POE. Crucible introduces no new Pinnacle Boss.
Truly, I really wanted to fight that petrified Titan at the end of every remnant. Joining the ranks of Blight and Metamorph league as an update that definitely should have introduced a new huge boss to the game.
Crucible added a very tiny amount of content compared to past expansions. It’s obvious GGG was and is all hands on deck with Path of Exile 2, ExileCon 2023 and the expansion following Crucible, which is POE 3.22.
Given the lack of chunky new content in Crucible, I’m hoping for an absolute banger with POE 3.22.
5. Crucible’s Legacy In Standard
The fifth point is less of a concern with the league itself and more about its Legacy.
Crucible weapons are responsible for some of the most powerful items and therefore characters in the history of POE. A few of them are fading onto your screen presently. Even for non-crafting masters like me, we can forge absolutely insane weapons with the Crucible mechanic, provided we need to buy POE Currency in advance. These item passive skill trees add tremendous power to our characters. At the top end of the player base, the sky’s the limit.
Assuming Crucible does not go core, its weapons will be among the best ever in Path of Exile. However, I’m thinking item passive skill trees will be a core mechanic sometime in the future whether with the release of POE 2 or a future league.
Standard is going to be flooded with all of these incredible weapons. Those who don’t have them on Standard will never get items this powerful in Path of Exile unless something changes drastically with the item crafting system.
Core Path Of Exile Is Great
Despite these five glaring failures of the Crucible League core Path of Exile is in an absolutely incredible place for most of the player base.
POE 3.21 had the highest start of league player count in the history of Path of Exile, both due to the core game’s excellence and external factors like the ARPG hype around Diablo 4.
Many weeks in, it’s still comparable to POE 3.20 The Forbidden Sanctum in terms of retained player count, meaning it’s also beating almost every other past expansion, too.
Happily, GGG recently announced that the possible release date of POE 3.22 is August 18th (PDT). Hope POE 3.22 can be more exciting!
