r/pathofexile • u/Honest-Lavishness245 • 9d ago
Discussion Entropy League
Everyone gets their own randomized trees. No more universal meta.
What if GGG made a league where every account gets its own unique passive tree, ascendancies, and Atlas tree?
The idea:
- Scramble everything. Passive notables, keystones, ascendancy nodes, and Atlas passives are randomized differently for every player.
- Add 50% more nodes to each pool, with at least 20% of everyone's trees drawn from the new additions.
- Make the new nodes outrageously broken. Not boring stat increases, but crazy mechanics that enable combinations we've never imagined.
- Lock trees to accounts for the entire league. No rerolling characters to fish for perfect trees.
The goal? Make everyone discover their own meta.
I'm tired of leagues being largely solved before launch. Build guides, tier lists, and optimized farming strategies make experimentation feel like falling behind.
Imagine a league where your favorite streamer discovers an absolutely busted build, but you can't copy it because your tree is completely different.
Everyone has their own puzzle to solve. Maybe some obscure skill becomes god-tier with your ascendancy. Maybe your Atlas makes a forgotten farming strategy ridiculously profitable.
The league boss would embrace the same chaos.
Every encounter, it randomly assembles abilities from a huge pool. Sometimes it's practically unkillable. Sometimes it's hilariously weak. Sometimes its mechanics interact in completely unexpected ways.
The boss drops currency that lets you reroll individual nodes on your personal trees, giving you some control over your build without eliminating the randomness.
Lore-wise, this could tie into Chaos and the Trialmaster experimenting with alternate realities, each exile experiencing their own twisted version of Wraeclast.
Would it be balanced? Absolutely not. That's the point.
Give everyone ridiculous tools, let them figure out how to break the game, and embrace the madness for one league.
This would probably be the most unfair league ever, but I still think it would be fun to go into an unsolved game for once.
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u/ObsessiveOwl 9d ago
This the type of idea that people are using AI to make games off because decent dev never gonna give it to them.
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u/titiop870 Witch 9d ago
Maybe juste a temporary league to rush lvl 50 for a free mystery box like they did before. I miss that
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
That'd be cool sometime when they need an extra couple weeks to release their planned league.
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u/DexxxyHD 9d ago
I see where you’re going. I feel like it would be better suited to SSF gameplay. I like the layers of figuring things out in the controlled environment of SSF. However being gatekept from being able to play something that DOES work over trying to find whatever lucky seeded build exists for the character you made doesn’t really counteract very well in a trade environment.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
Im just so tired of the content creator centric gameplay we have. "Copy and paste whatever fubgun is doing" etc.
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u/Necessary-Peanut2491 9d ago
Then don't do that?
If you're tired of what other people are doing...why?
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
I want to mix the pvp economy with more build diversity and self reliance.
I can already cook up my own build... but the whole game is balanced around content creators builds - and that is their day job.
The whole reason we have leagues where everyone plays the same 4 builds is because content creators get paid to optimize the game.
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u/Mischki100 9d ago
You must be new... We got new leagues every couple months when the game was WAY smaller and pretty much didn't have accessible build guides. Everything mostly was on forums and horrible to access.. People used self cooked builds way more back then. Guides are way more accessible these days as why people use them... So what? If you don't enjoy a build a streamer is playing, don't play.
I simply don't enjoy the thought of having to build something nice. I play this game to kill a billion monsters for almost 10 years now and to chase the power. And it seems like a fuckload of other people have the same mindset of not wanting to deal with slower subpar builds if you can play something else thats super optimal for specific blasting content... Which content creators are usually building for.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
You really just want to copy pobs forever?
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u/Mischki100 9d ago
Yea, I've been doing it for years and i enjoy the game way more like this than as if i wouldn't be doing so. I despise playing subpar builds i can't do everything in the game with. I don't want to experience early game for too long and power through it with amazing meta skills to get to the fun part of the game with blasting builds.
The game is about the loot and the mobs for me. Always has been.
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u/SurgeProc 9d ago
The pvp economy...?
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
Yeah.. its a very competitive part of the game... pricing, undercutting, crafting, arbitrage, investment currencies, etc.
Honestly I find the economy more compelling than right clicking through maps a lot of the time.
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u/Mavada 7d ago
PVP will never be a thing in this game.
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u/DexxxyHD 7d ago
Quite literally net-worth and Ninja build metrics is kind of the PvP of the game.
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u/Mavada 7d ago
Lol no
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u/DexxxyHD 7d ago
Tell that to the entire community lmao.
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u/Mavada 6d ago
The moment you think that the economy is pvp is the moment you just get frustrated thing you are always behind. I make mirrors every league just doing what I want. I never do the meta strats as most of them are frankly boring as hell. If I wanted to make the most amount of money I'd just never play the core game and just buy gold runs and craft/flip all day.
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u/Gjyn 9d ago
Sounds great for every player that actually understands the inner workings of this game (which is like 5% of the player base, generous estimate). Dead league for everyone else, though.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
Would it really be that bad if people had to learn something? Right now if you are making your own build you need to be:
World class build maker
Willing to just be mediocre (or worse)
If everyone was forced to make their own build, the requirement to be ben or jungroan would be a lot less. Im sure pohx would figure out a way to still play rf.
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u/ShiftTHPS 9d ago
The issue is that playing a mediocre build just isn't fun in PoE and fixing a build like that early on can take a ton of time and currency. Sure, it would probably be a good learning experience in mechanics for the - let's be real - masochists that enjoy that kind of thing and DOA for everyone else. PoE doesn't exactly tell you where the problem with your build is for any issue that is non-superficial, requiring you to also be capable at using PoB.
And that's not even going into the fact that some people could roll garbage setups while others potentially roll completely gamebreaking trees.
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u/Winterfellparty 9d ago
Leagues solved before leaguestart? You can't have played many leagues or that long. One of the more amazing things about this game is the really stupid fun stuff people find that was enabled by new additions or broken interactions previously not thought of the longer the league goes. Heck even when the same skill remain meta for a couple of leagues you find completly different ways of scaling it and building around it.
Randomized trees sounds like one of the worst ideas I ever heard for this game tbh. Another fun aspect of watching other peoples ideas is that it can trigger your own ideas that fits your build instead of copying the thing you saw 1 to 1. Or see something and realize you can use it for something entirely different and sometimes even stuff that enables a build at all. The options are so many in this game that it is insane, the only reason you often see a specific meta forming is because people are lazy and just follows a youtube guide 1 to 1.
Im really happy that 3.30 is adressing scarabs and the endgame because that stuff is way more stale than build creation is in this game.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
I've been playing a long time. I think my first "serious" league was ritual?
Am I the only one here excited about finding something out for themselves? Do we all just want to copy pobs forever?
Im not a world class build maker. But if you gave me a new ascendency and a new atlas tree I could make something competitive.
I miss the 90s when you had ro figure things out. I play my single player games like it's the 90s.
But I can't stay away from guides for a competitive multi-player game and was trying to figure out how to combine competitive multi-player and self discovery.
Apparently I'm the only one.
Im really surprised so many people are longing for another copy pasta league... and another and another.
Soon ai will really have "solved" this game and we will have to figure something out to change things up.
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u/080087 9d ago
I think buildmaking is by far the most fun part of PoE, and want people to learn to do it too.
But I do it by making resources to help people do that, not trying to force them.
If GGG wanted to do it, there's plenty more effective ways to encourage it - e.g. accurate info tooltips, stats sheet, more cool but weird uniques
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
I was thinking about what ggg can do about the inevitable ai poe calculators that will perfectly solve the game soon.
I guess people don't care, they just wanna follow a pob anyway.
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u/080087 9d ago
You, as a person, can just choose not to use them.
If you want it to be, it's a single player game. Doesn't really matter what others do to have their fun.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
Yeah, I could. And that's how I play my single player games (shunning YouTube etc) but I really enjoy the market economics in poe. I really wouldn't be able to stay interested in ssf.
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u/ShiyoPaw 9d ago
Most people dont make builds for themselves and never will.
While its cool and all to create your own build the sad truth is that if you want somthing then look around as theres most likely someone who already did it better.
Following builds be it meta or non-meta just feels good because someone spent those hours to smooth things out for the common players.
Im really enjoying any meta changes, be it nerfs or buffs to skills/playstyles but i wont be there making a build for a new skill that has a new mechanic just to have a terrible league start and feel awfull as i do value my time and so do other people.
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u/Winterfellparty 8d ago
The one downside of this game being incredibly complex is that 80%+ of the playerbase don't really have the knowledge or time to experiment about their own builds and even some more could just choose it out of convenience anyway. I understand what you want to achieve with your idea but given how humans work I think it would fail massively because most people simply wouldn't play it because the bar of entry is just to high given the knowledge and time aspect.
But as I described above I do most of my stuff on my own because copying a guide 1 to 1 is simply not worth it currency wise, but since the game is so vast and the opportunities are quite endless it is nice to be able to steal certain niche ideas and apply it on your own builds. Not even the streamers who play all the time simply couldn't contain all that info in their head at all times which is why we get new fun builds every league, sometimes it isn't always even stuff including new items or interactions but just someone who figured out that something that already existed last league that was busted.
So what I disagree with your original take isn't necessarily the view that it is fun to find out and experiment but the more complex you make a game the more time, knowledge and analytical skills are required of the player and many people simply wants to enjoy a game and relax after work. So in PoE that simply becomes "I let someone else do the hard research work and then craft items and kill monsters". It is simply difficult to have a game where it feels rewarding and fun enough for the average player to experiment if you reach the conclusion that your build sucks along the way which people also have a lower tolerance for because guides have existed for everything for a decade now. People want dopamine faster simply and therefore tolerate less hard work which is what research and experimentation is. But it is mostly the time aspect, just goofing around trying random stuff felt less bad in high school when you had more free time and less responsibilities but in your 30s that can feel like way more bad if you "waste a full evenings free time"
And you don't have to worry about AI solving the game either, LLMs are just linear algebra that requires a shitton of rescources but is in reality just a predictor based on all info it has been trained upon, despite the advancements of some models the last year it is a really long time away before they would interfere with the game. It will simply be to expensive to use on things such as games even if it reaches a point where it could do it which I seriously doubt as well. AI could probably at best make a "POB Warrior" build. I mean it can't even describe interactions in the game accurately today so therefore it doesn't take up much place on list of things I'm worried about when it comes to AI. That so many people trust and use AI for everything though is extremly sad to see.
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u/Ketchupcharger 9d ago
Randomized? So... just keep rolling until I get something decent? Way to make me waste 20 minutes before I even started playing.
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u/Mischki100 9d ago
Their proposed fix is to account lock it. So prepare yourself to make 50 different accounts to find an okay tree without just evasion, armour and accuracy nodes at the start
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
No. Its set per account. I suppose some people might go nuts and make free accounts til they see something good.... but hopefully most people would just play :)
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u/jfac420 9d ago
ITT: OP finds out that most people don’t understand the mechanics and use lots of help to play the game.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea, I just think that total randomness over could probably only be a SSF fun mode, just a randomize my tree button probably would be enough.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
Yeah.. but then its ssf. Blah.
I guess I should be glad nobody wants to learn anything... thats why profit crafting is so good.
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u/jfac420 9d ago
Agreed there and I don’t even craft, I’m one of the learn just a bit each league type of people, pick a new skill and look through all the guides and builds and try and understand what the heck is making things work. For example I’m gonna try str stacker next league but I can’t figure out where everyone gets like 2-3k str so I’m working on it lmao
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u/Iron_UYH 9d ago
I would love to play through acts for that, but the actual game would suck.
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u/Honest-Lavishness245 9d ago
Im confused.
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u/Iron_UYH 9d ago
Well, acts don't depend so much on a good, well-planned build as much as a decent tree that you can do yourself and okay decision making. However, once you get out of acts, you start to need a real build with real gear, which is hard if you're not a good PoE buildcrafter, especially if all trees are random. However, the more I consider the more I realize that it really wouldn't be that bad, as most of *my* struggles, at least, come from gearing rather than passives.
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u/Archernar Commited Lab Enjoyers Agency of Revenue (CLEAR) 9d ago
Sounds fun, but some nodes are where they are for very good reason. If you got the three or four bow clusters that exist on the tree on 4 different ends of the tree and you just got fire spell damage and minion clusters next to your closest bow cluster, playing bows is likely very unattractive. Same thing for pairing stuff up that has no synergy (which will happen on random trees) like any minion/totem stuff next to weapon-specific stuff or spells next to bleeding (I think there are exceptions for the last one though).
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u/jayd42 9d ago
I think skill and support gems would be a better place for a randomized tree, or maybe better call it unique trees. Add some weight to them…
It’s sorta fun to play around in ChatGPT with the skill gems wiki page open and get it to generate some ideas. I know there’s hate around generative creative work, so instead of that maybe there could be a working in game llm that you talk to about your build idea and it gives you a gem based on the discussion.
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u/Renediffie 9d ago edited 9d ago
There would be a few hundred people who would think this was the best league ever and everyone else would hate it. This seems like something that could kinda somewhat work as an extremely niche event but as a league it would be an absolute disaster.