I'm finally done with Path of Exile: Sentinel league.
Why finally? I don't think this league was great, of course it had many pros/cons, but I'm gonna talk about it later.
First let's write about my league start and how I was struggling for the first time.
As my starter build I've chose Corrupting Fever Champion made by Ruetoo. I wanted a character that can kill bosses,clear maps fast and be tanky. Not everyone might know what means starter build. Starter builds are supposed to be cheap to make, so you can fast progress into high tier maps without much investment. On a paper my build looked like a perfect starter. It was supposed to have 6mil DPS, over 6k life, capped armour, a lot of evasion and 90% max resistances. Unfortunetly the prediction was bad. In first two days cost of my core items was ridiculous. It never happened before, for example Poet's Pen wand cost was up to 1 exalted orb. After many hours of farming I managed to grab it for 80 chaos. Usually this wand should cost around 10 chaos. It was the same with many other items. I've spend 24hrs gearing up my guy until I figured out main problem. My build was supposed to use Ashes of Stars amulet, it was a core item to make my build work. The problem with that was that GGG (Grinding Gear Games) nerfed drop rate of this item without saying. It was literally impossible to get it. Its cost was ~50 exalted orb. This fact ruined my whole build. I needed to find a way to play this build in a cheap way. For like 2 days I had no idea how to get stronger, until the guy who made this build - Ruetoo figured out a way for a budget options. Well... it was budget before he figured it out. Just after he started playing those "new" items, they went up in price by a lot. Of course it was still a lot less than buying Ashes of Stars, but I struggled for like 3 days until I got my guy strong enough to clear full content in game. (excluding Uber Bosses). Afterwards I started farming content, but I made a lot of mistakes in choosing my strategy. Literally I did everything wrong. I choosed wrong influence (Eater of words) and choosed Expedition strat which was not really good this league. I kept playing my guy for 17 days. I managed to get 170 Exalted Orbs overall, which is a really bad score for me. Usually I was doing 300-400 exalted orbs per 14 days. I also managed to get to level 94 and then I got bored, because of the economy and all the bad decisions I made. I decided to quit the league. I hope the next league will I won't make the same mistakes, and tbh nobody could predict the nerfs/economy and stuff like that. Unlucky :(
Let's talk about pros/cons of the league and my overall opinion.
Pros:
- They added new Uber Bosses. I think its a really good thing. PoE was missing endgame. Now we have endgame, its really good change for players that want extra challenge.
- They changed challenges, giving us full skin set as a reward for completing them. They also made them harder.
- Servers were kinda stable, no lags or disconnects.
- They added new card "Apothecary" for Mageblood. Its kinda good thing, because u can farm this card, but it lowered price of Mageblood so gambling Gwennen is less profitable. I guess its both a pros/cons thing.
Cons:
- The new Uber Bosses were not so profitable to kill. I mean you can kill them for challenge, but there was no real reason to farm them for profit.
- They didn't make balance changes so there was a lot of overpowered builds. Of course I don't like to be a meta slave so I lost on it.
- Even tho they told us that there is no balance changes, they nerfed Omnisence and Ashes of Stars droprate to the point that many builds were not working. Like who can afford a 50exalts item just to make ur build work. (literally now we know to not start next league with a build that needs Omnisence or Ashes of Stars) but yea we were all jebaited by GGG.
- The sentinel league mechanic allowed players to craft insane items, for some it might be a good thing, but it ruined economy so fast, basically normal crafting methods were useless. I crafted so many good items and yet nobody bought them, because everyone was abusing recombinators to make top tier items for a budget.
- After 1 week of league price of Exalted orb was 170 chaos orbs due to ruined economy! Thats ridiculous. I literally had so much currency, so many logbooks and stuff but all that matters were big drops. I felt that this league you are either lucky and drop something worth ~50ex+ or you work like a slave to exchange your small currency into exalts.
- There was no news skills released, combine it with no balance changes. I felt like playing on standard.
I think thats gonna be it.
Nothing more to say about the league. At the beginning it wasn't that bad, until people figured out how to abuse the league mechanic to ruin economy. Combine it with no balance changes and we pretty much had another Standard league. See ya in next league guys and good luck to everyone whos still playing current Sentinel league!
Ashes of the Stars was a requirement for my build too. When I saw the price, I cried inside, lol. You did better than me though! I got like, three exalted orbs the whole time I played this League, haha! XD
haha there was like whole reddit crying about it lol. RIP all the Ashes of stars players :(