Player Retention & Build Variety/Balance

I dunno about skill balance honestly. I kept playing because its the first and only league I've played where 100d is actually achievable without playing 25h a day. The only real unatailable item in the whole game is Temporalis and you can have fun without it easily.

Headhunter? Easy to get for everyone. Vertex +4? A possible goal for pretty much every player too. A good rare with defenses and resists? Hey you can do that quite realistically.

I think having access to my first Headhunter ever is what made this league fun for me. Without that I doubt I'd have played as much as I did.

Na man... I'm just playing because I can actually make Divines this league doing ANYTHING and it feels AMAZING.

The only people upset by this league are the top 1% of players who totally min max builds and that look for the perfect gear pieces at 500Div a pop.

I've been able to try over 40 different skills this league (literally! Insane!!) and have tried all farming methods.. so for me it's been the ability to just do so much more because of all the currency. It's such an enabler to the broader 99% it's amazing. I hope every league is like this

Retention is higher because there is harder content in the game (juiced temple) so it takes people longer to clear that content and "complete" the league.

have been highlighting that a variety of currency-making strategies being viable as the main reason. I'd like to argue that the main reason retention is at an all time high is build variety/balance

Nah, not for me personally. I started with EA release, and it soured me so hard on this game. None of the builds I actually wanted to play were possible, and the available content was dull and not a lot of it. I rejoined this league to give it another chance, and Act 4 alone made a huge difference for me because I've never seen it before. On top of that, a lot more skills were added, more items were available, and so on.

I'd say the extra content is what made me stay, not the "build variety" that we like to refer to, as that has been very stale from what I've seen. cough cough CoC Comet for one. The top 4 classes on PoENinja SC make up 56% of all classes right now. The bottom 5 Ascendancies don't even break 5% (it's 3.2%). That's just sad. I blame Comet, not CoC itself, and GGG's terrible changes to energy gain and trigger gems, achieving the exact opposite effect of variety. They should have added trigger cooldowns as they did in PoE 1, and I'm amazed they never did. That decision alone is baffling. You can't have proper balance that way, you only shaft everyone else who wants to try off-meta stuff.

I.e. I tried to make a Seismic Cry CoC build work with the new Warcry nodes that give you the ability to apply stacks of Critical Weakness. Easy 10 stacks. It only didn't work out because of the energy gain changes that now force you to use hard hitting skills to generate more energy (which I learned of after the fact). I pumped up the skill's damage and level where I could, even using Birfurcated Crits to reach ~70k hit damage. It still wasn't enough. I was getting procs, but I might as well have self cast the skill at that point, the damage consistency was so bad. Terrible. And it needn't be.

E: typo

For build diversity, it definitely has never been better. Theres still some dud skills, but you can build pretty much anything and find a way to make it work. Not sure if that directly effects the player retention rate, but at the very least it has made us off-meta enjoyers have a good time

I always like to make extra characters to see how certain ideas work out in a league start environment, and havent had any moment of "yeah this does not work, rebuild" yet this league

So I play pretty much one build only, hideout warrior lol. And this was the most fun league for me by far. And a big part of that was because of class balance, all sorts of items were profitable to craft. Despite all the dinguses crying “login deadeye, deadeye league again” at start - there was demand for pretty much everything.

Crafting got worse, but I found profit to be higher because GG items weren’t guaranteed. I could deterministically craft a 6mod, all T1 Ammy last league for cheap. But that meant the ROI was less cuz everyone else could do the same. It felt more rewarding getting lucky with a slam or two or hitting your whittle early.

Gotta say... I don't find many builds at all appealing. So many are just different flavors of hurr durr, I presses the button the screen turns to aoe abominations. Nothing is terribly engaging or interesting... yet. Got a long long way until builds are actually interesting to dive in to.

I think it's also because Temple is an attainable end game for everyone, it also ramps in difficulty and provides ramped rewards so it's a way to play the game and use the level of reward your currently making to improve the build and then make the Temple harder. It also allows more casual players to use currency to try crafting because we know we can get more divines so slamming an item to improve etc is ok.

Just play the game as you want? You dont need crazy unique items to beat the game, and all the bosses? I think this is where so many people get lost in the ARPG genre. Nothing is calculated against having those insane 500 divines uniques. You can quite literally beat the endgame bosses with yellow items my dude.

I kept playing because I can get 4 div a map easily and the the best I want only costs 20 div. I've played a lot and this is my first league getting a hh