Path of Exile Producer Explains Kalandra Loot Changes, its He Wasn’t Paying Attention
extremely unpopular changes made to Lake of Kalandra item drops and rewards. According to Wilson, the changes were made to ensure that the reward system scales appropriately, that players don’t fight too many rare monsters at once, and that the gap between the difficulty and rewards of League and non-League content isn’t too great that it forces players to concentrate on League content alone.
“Path of Exile is a game about opting-in to more difficulty in exchange for more rewards,” the producer said. “You can roll your maps to be harder or add sextants to them. You can play with additional party . You can trigger additional stacking league content like Delirium. All of these things make the game harder in exchange for more and better rewards.”
That being said, Wilson explained that they still want players to pay attention to what they’re doing and employ the right combat tactics instead of just stuttering through hordes of mobs or simply spamming attacks and abilities without thought.
“In fights with a lot of Rare monsters on screen, you can't follow what modifiers they have, what skills they're using, and sometimes not even what type of monster they are,” he explained. “Fewer, more difficult rare monsters help you pay attention to what is happening, assess it, and act accordingly. It gives you an opportunity to employ counterplay and for your playskill to actually matter (rather than relying on pure character power). It is also a lot cleaner and far better for performance.”
As for the content’s overall difficulty, Wilson said that, “It's good for league content to be harder than the base game, and therefore more rewarding. But the difference should be approximately twice as rewarding. If the gap were any larger, then it would be less efficient to kill regular monsters and a player should spend all of their time focusing on repeating a small subset of content.”
Wilson, however, itted that he wasn’t paying enough attention when he was informed of the changes and apologized for any miscommunication and confusion it might have caused. “As the confusion about our motivations has raised a lot of concern with the community, I should have found a way to prioritize writing this post,” he said.
“I… didn’t actually understand the impact of the change,” he confessed. “It was mentioned to me in ing (that we were removing the league monster bonuses and replacing with just quantity), and I didn’t ask any more questions. I was busy, distracted, and should have sought more information.”
“There was not sufficient time to playtest the change properly for feeling,” he added. “It is unacceptable that I allowed a change like that to make it into the patch without a big chunk of time allocated to making sure the game still feels great afterwards.”
Wilson concluded the blog with a promise to improve testing and communication in the future. He also assured players that the team is already working on adjustments to ensure that loot drops feel rewarding and asks players to keep sending in their s.
