I need a grave digger hi s here with another lot video, and I wanted to do a bit of a retrospective on Necropolis League. It has been a while now since it came out, and uh, yeah, I want to have an overview, and we spent a lot of time on it. I think I played roughly 550 hours of Necropolis, and it has been a very long League. A lot of people playing, especially this late is n la la, and the reception of Necropolis has not been super positive, which maybe be a bit strange considering it was a bit of an endgame expansion more than we've seen in other leagues. We got a lot of stuff we were looking for: new Pinnacle content, new bosses, new ways to test our characters, new crafting, new Atlas trees, returnal tattoos, and more. Ma said it really well: it was a burn fast and die young kind of league. So where did it go wrong? Well, let's find [Music] out. So for Necropolis, first off, what went wrong the most was the league mechanic itself. It started in a really

bad State. And we can explain how it worked. It was split into two separate parts. It had an in-map mechanic, and that was every map in Zonia open came with a list of monsters you can interact with in many ways. Honestly, I thought this was going to be the worst thing ever designed, and this was actually really good. I really liked it, so I was massively wrong here, which is I love being wrong. It's great. The all F members was cool. This is something I would love to see in the main game, although not every league because it does get a little bit tedious, and it is nice to just be able to open them up and blast. But the all members were really cool. You can pick up rewards and overall just get more loot, and you can like get additional strategies like removing really scary monsters like Sten Revenant. We'll talk more about this later, but very cool mechanic for hardcore. It birthed a ton of new farming strategies, and maps in general were harder and more challenging, which honestly was pretty

cool. The Lantern mods could be built wrongly or overtuned. Extra eight projectiles on a bad monster if you like. If you were just running and going, you couldn't really do this on Hardcore. But like, there are some monsters that were just Ultra death with eight additional projectiles. The coffins spam your inventory and your stash. I had to buy additional quad tabs. This was quite bad. And while this was not the initial design of the league, I think we really felt the pressure of stash tabs. Maybe upping the number of pay to win in the game a little bit because it was. It was. It was quite bad. Um, a lot of the all Flames were not really interesting and very like filler that you didn't care about. And the good outcomes were quite rare, especially after the Nerf. The Divine Lantern mods. It was is a little frustrating how it worked with um in the start of the league. People were just fishing from Maps like throwing in a map, seeing if there was anything there. And if there was nothing, they would just

open a new map, and we were fishing for divine mobs. After that, they nerfed it and made it super rare, so nobody found it anymore, pretty much. So, like we said, a lot of new farming strategies, and this was some of the most degenerate [__] we've ever seen. We did get both Divine herb fishing, nameless Seer fishing, and so much abuse with like meat bags, monstrous treasure abuse. Some of it was fun, and some of it was like, Okay, this is a little bit too far. And it felt like a game of wack-a-mole with the devs, where we were finding crazy [__] to abuse, and they were nerfing and repairing it. But what this ended up doing was creating really weird holes in the economy where streamers like myself were able to get ultra-rich and abuse it, and people who maybe weren't able to keep up, especially people that aren't twitch viewers, uh, were not able to keep up, and then maybe see like a strategy like 2 or 3 days.

later and they're like hey I saw your video about the strategy. Is it still working? He like no it's nerfed. You're poor. Sorry the crafting mechanic. Okay it popped up on the loot filter so that means that it's worth something, right? I we'll catch you guys all next League. Obviously the management was awful but let's talk about the good things first. Making low to mid Tier gear was very approachable. The new crafting options were like really fun and interesting. Crafting has been nerfed a lot and it did come with new uniques like the pis Jewel with in Natural Instinct was really cool and yeah really interesting stuff here but honestly the crafting mechanic was in my opinion what ruined the league the most. Hoarding the coffins suck like I said it was a ton of stash space needed. They should have given a lot more free space. Uh this is a huge pay to win issue in my opinion. I think I have like 22 quad tabs now. I have like $2 or $300 worth of stash.

tabs, which should not be needed. You did need the majority of these. This was not like needless hoarding that you do when you're new at a game and you don't know what to keep. It was like wow, I end up needing most of this. Setting up the graveyard sucks, and it did feel like a bit of a waste not crafting with a full graveyard. Like, I was very little where I like, oh, I only need to use like 10-15 spots. It was like, well, I'm stupid if I'm not using all of it. It took a long time. Like, I remember doing it quickly one time, and it took me 40 minutes to set up a craft. So, it felt like so much busy work. It was not very enjoyable. It was too powerful, obviously. Like, back in the day, I made Torment Ren like a crazy 700 DPS ax, and it was such an exciting moment. People still say Undisputed like it's a very Hallmark Path of Exile movement. Oh my [ __ ] banket [ __ ].

banket and that axe would you could literally make four in 10 minutes 15 minutes. Like it's very unexciting giving people this much power this easily. Like I I think it's good to have power but it shouldn't be this careless scarcity in a game is good. And a lot of people say like, Oh, but it's isn't it great that the Casual players are running around with lots of cool stuff. Yeah, I think that's really cool now and again. I think we have better examples of this being done well with re combinators where I saw so many casual players having really cool stuff and uh really enjoying it with still having really good player retention. I think the fact that you could literally make a perfect character easily this league. I don't think many people would say like this was it right. I think we see this in the player retention uh being able to make a perfect spine well like on softcore it ended up if an item doesn't have synthesis implicits it was useless and.

even on Hardcore, it was like I made like four literal perfect triple-tier one elib BOS, like 1400 DPS. Another thing that was really bad was the way it was like double, and kind of triple, influenced items. This should never exist. And double influence with fracture, like double fracture mods. In my opinion, you should never ever be able to get more than one fracture on an item at maximum too, but you should never be able to get more than one fracture, and you should never be able to have fracture and influenced. I think this makes gear completely stupid. Yeah, less is more sometimes. Most people ended up using like the calculators to try to really like precisely make crafts. I did try yoloing it a few times, and that was a bit of a waste. There was also like no in between with the crafting. You either got complete garbage, we'll catch you guys all next League, or a basically perfect item that you would never replace. What feels really good for me in Path of Exile and what, in my opinion, is

when you always have a next goal in sight. When you always have something that you're working towards, and that's why crafting leagues in the past have been really nice, and why Harvest was so well received because you always had something you were working towards. You weren't necessarily always making your perfect item right away, and you were always like stepping stone. Like, Okay, I'm going to make this, and now while my next item upgrade is maybe 2 hours away, and then the next one is 4 hours away. But whenever it gets to the point, it's like, Okay, I've made my item. Now the next upgrade is 100 hours of grinding away. Then a lot of people are like, Well, what am I really playing for? So, I would say the league itself, not so great. Really didn't like it. It was like a fun for a week kind of thing. This would have been a very cool like temporary League, like a one-month League experiment. Now, a new thing for this league was that the atlas tree had League mechanic points, I think.

that was ending up basically being mandatory. I think all my trees had these points. I'm not against the idea of a league mechanic having points, but it should be changing the way you approach the league entirely. It should not be anything to do with increased drop rates or increased making the mechanic better. It should be just an entirely like this changes the way the mechanic works if it should exist. So that was not good. Now there were other things this patch as well, a big feature that came was a huge expansion to the end game and to the atlas. And we did get a lot of really cool quality of life stuff this league. It was really good stuff that was coming to the league, right? The base game is increasingly better than before. So if this was more like a regular 3mon League, like yeah, it was not a banger, but it would have been pretty fine. Obviously, like a lot of the contention is that it's such a long League. It's not a nice League to have for this long.

they changed how you got the five-slot map device, which is changing again next League. It was in tier 17 maps, which I didn't like. I thought that was really bad. You get it so late, and tier 17 maps are insanely hard. They are harder than Ubers, which was not supposed to be the case. They were marketed to us as something that was supposed to be a stepping stone to the Uber bosses. They were way harder even when I had a perfect character and I've done a lot of tier 17s. Like obviously when content is new, it is infinitely harder. I remember the first time I saw Ben do the Maven, I was like, I will never be able to do this. Now it's like the easiest fight ever. Even Uber Maven is incredibly easy for me. So when you are able to do something repeatedly, it will become easier. The tier 17's, however, ridiculously hard after I've done 300-400 plus of them, and it did end up killing a perfect character of mine. Now I really do like

the idea of tier 17s, they just need to be a lot easier. Some of the monsters in them, I'm so worried about, without off Flames like revenants, some of the lightning Golems, the goats. Like there were like six to 10 different monsters that were just like death for hardcore, that you would be terrified of. Like you could not do Abomination with revenants, you would have to like do this weird like I see a monster like slightly off screen, let's try to kill it off screen. Like it was just really really weird if you're actually playing with revenant because they do so much damage, they're instant, and they just mechanically work weird. And I'm not a huge fan of corpse, um, like death mechanics anyway. A lot of the concept is good, they wanted to get rid of respecing or Atlas every time you wanted to do tier 17s and stuff like that. Like I really like tier 17s, I don't like that Uber are behind them, the current system.

not it the loot from the bosses was a bit weird as well. Both tier 17s and Ubers, I think Ubers need a lot better drops, and the normal ones need a bit better drops. Honestly, I think six uniques per boss, with more of them being good. I know it's maybe not ddd's job to police whether an item is meta or not, but there are some items that are just so incredibly bad with like such insane Niche uses that it's like, yeah, like I see where this can be used, but that's not really going to be a thing. Also, ashes and Omni could probably be, if it's going to be Uber drop, it could probably be back to its original power, but honestly there were there were some bosses where I felt like both the normal and Uber version were both not worth farming. I do love the addition of the utmost that was very cool, and honestly one of the best things ever. I'm so happy that's in the game, very cool on me that another huge change was the removal of

seance and fusing the caravan sexon system in one, while introducing lots of new and rare scarabs. This was absolutely amazing, so amazing. Now, obviously, there were a lot of abuse with scarabs and yeah, a lot of a lot of problems with this was that there were so many changes right. That is what happened to this like, there were so many changes and the game is so large at this point. It is impossible for people, even if like even like people like me that have 25,000 hours in the game. It is impossible to predict every single change right impossible for the devs to keep on top of that. I think the new tier 17 bosses, they are mechanically awesome. They're really, really cool. It's a great way to reuse some older things and they were extremely profitable. They did create a bit of a weird Gap in the economy where people that could farm this were in like 10 100x ahead of somebody that was you know just before able to do like Ubers in tier 16s like cuz especially in

hardcore. Very few people could farm tier 17s, and less than five people were able to do the abuse cases. This is the richest I have ever been in the league by far. Like, I'm always going to be an outlier, but it has never been this stupid and this ridiculous. Um, so I think it created like a really stupid power balance between people who know Life the game and are able to do the hardest content and people that can't. I don't think it's fun to be this far ahead. It was just stupid and unenjoyable. Scarabs had an economy centered around them, however, which was really cool. Um, so there were really cool things too. They had the new uning Mission Keystone, which is 20 Atlas points for free early that you can get rid of later. Um, that was very cool as well. I did like using that early. Now the biggest mistake here was tier 17's having modifiers. Modifiers are, in my opinion, really bad, and if you're going to have modifiers, they should be

very specific with very specific design. Like, for example, Maven memory game has four additional Cycles. Or Maven memory game is 50% faster, right? It should be very tailored. Or the xar balls have 30% projectile speed. Or the xar balls, the stage is longer. Or there's a mini boss in the xar stage. And then increasing the Rarity of the unique you drop. Like that makes sense. But like the way the roles worked on tier 17s and being first unrollable, that was hell. They ended up being a really weird chaos syn. Nothing about tier 17s being rollable was good. I hope they are not rollable next League. I hope they are white. I hope they're just tier 17 white maps with like they are a certain way that they're intended to be balanced. The corruption aspect was really weird. Just chaos bam was not good. Yeah, it just failed to be the middle ground between tier 17 and Ubers. And it made Ubers quite inaccessible. Getting an early F slot map device was really

nice thing so people ended up having to buy the unlock from other people now because of the way the magic find and stuff ended up working. This patch like early I was one of the first people to find like good magic find methods and the first methods weren't super abusive very strong but they were like oh you know I could understand why it wasn't getting nerfed and then a further method was found and then it was nerfed overnight cuz it was like breaking the economy like in hours kind of thing like common uniques like tier 3 tier 2 and tier one ended up being worth very little and you ended up just the chase uniques like Head Hunter Mage blood even Head Hunter became very cheap like it was only like Nim Mage blood per Genesis ended up being very expensive and then you had like anything else was worth nothing was it fun when nothing is worth anything cuz I find like I know people give jdd a lot of [ __ ] for like weight and scarcity but aren't they right like

it's not fun when like you can't have everything being fun and easy to find while also having valuable drops, right? Like, they are at odds with each other, like they're they are on to something. I remember the first shavs I ever dropped, right? I never dropped one. It was super rare, and I did drop one when it was kind of rare, and it was a really exciting moment for me. Whereas, like, you know, dropping three or four shavs a map does not make it exciting. Well, now shvs is not in a good spot at all, but that's besides the point. Hopefully, you understand what I'm trying to say here with having everything just pour out and be completely easy to get is not good for the game. So, a very mixed and complex patch, a lot of problems. I think it was like just a very bad state for GDD to be in with so many changes. There wasn't much they could really do. I almost want to rate it lower than Colandra Le Leag, but the problem with

kundra League was not so much the league mechanic itself. I think the league mechanic of kundra was fine. The problem with which what made kandra even more unenjoyable was the base game was so bad. Whereas at least here, the base game had like so many really cool things, but there were so many other problems with the league mechanic and abuse cases, and it just made it very unenjoyable. So I would probably give this a five out of 10, maybe six, five or six out of 10. It was a very Uno unenjoyable leag. I'm really hoping the next league is a blasting League. I'm a little bit worried that we're going to get another complicated League back to back. I'm a big fan of complicated League blasting league, so like brain dead blast like last epo's current league mechanic is one of the best things I've ever seen. Very simple. Simple is good sometimes. I don't always want a complicated mechanic either way a bit of a ranty video SK.

will probably cut out a lot of what I said um for the good. Yeah, hopefully you guys like the video. Let me know what you think and my Off the Mark here. Am I on the mark? Either way, this is how I felt about the league. Thanks for watching. So if you like the video, very excited for the new league and try to die less than I do.

Was Necropolis REALLY that bad?

I'm Zizaran, Path of Exile & ARPG content creator since October 2015.
I stream daily on www.twitch.tv/zizaran

