Two simple/easy steps to make the endgame tower system feel significantly better

Really great ideas

One step: Scrap the whole fucking thing. The. Whole. Thing.

It becomes more frustrating and unruly with every node you clear. Everything they wanted to accomplish can be done with a much simpler system.

Doryani has employed 6 explorers who each find a biome to explore. You start at the entrance to that biome and find a tower. You run that tower to reveal the biome, which has roughly 8-10 nodes in it. They have a chance to contain a citadel, and between 2-3 of the nodes will contain bosses. Killing all bosses lets you tell the explorer to move on and find a new biome.

You keep the tablets, but this time you can place 4 in the tower and they affect all nodes in that biome. No more finding unicorn areas with 5 or 6 overlapping towers and having other areas with only 1 or 2 being utterly worthless. Everything now has 4. Number of maps affected by tablets can be reduced accordingly.

This preserves GGG's need of forcing you to do towers, travel nodes, etc. This preserves their precious tablet system, and now makes it less awful. This preserves our ability to juice AND removes having to run utterly awful maps (surely this cannot be a bad thing). This preserves citadels being random and having to run towers at a certain level to reveal them. This preserves their "1/4 of maps have bosses" notion. This preserves the hopelessly vague lore of "exploring corruption".

But what this kills is needing to scroll your map 17 times to find a node and condensing all the nonsense out and into a single screen.

There, I fixed endgame.

I like the second idea the most

Pathing meta will go from how many bad maps can you run without touching the good ones to how manh good maps can you run without wasting towers on bad ones.

Hope ggg sees this.

Step 3. Ensure all maps are linked so I don’t have to spend two week circling around to get to the final citadel.

But where is the "FRICTION", can't have change if it doesn't add more "FRICTION".

But the sound it makes when I activate it inside the map is one of this games treasures 😅 the sound crew needs a raise

Hmm i like all of those ideas.

Like the suggestions, but i am beginning to think towers overall are a meme. Did 5 towers yesterday around a citadel for 60% extra waystone drop to add on top of my 580% key just to die at the boss because i played like a chimp. The 10% xp hit to experience just before lvl 95 did not feel as bad as the time wasted clearing paths to towers.

You guys do your towers in whatever form. I'll just zoom to citadels until there's a better system.

would be great

Great ideas, but that doesn’t fix unlocking a tower and finding out there’s a massive ocean in the area you wanted to spend multiple divines in tablets. Also, at least doing breaches, if I’m using 4-5 towers I don’t need to run “bad maps” cause all of them end up having breaches. I feel like the problem is that there are a lot of bad maps anyways, specially around citadels which should be the best POI’s

Some of those tower map layouts would be sick boss rush maps.

I have a problem with precursor affixes. Whats the point to have options when in the end all you want is quant.

If you want to give players options to choose from than make them at least a viable option to choose from.

You dont need to run bad maps... Just skip them

Repurpose all, but completely remove Lost Towers. They're worse than Mire

Adding a boss that guarantee drops a waystone a tier higher would be the fix for me.

This would be better but I'd still have some issues.

I hate pathing on the map where I have to play maps I don't like. I have less gripes with the tower itself since I play high delirium waystones on them. Im just tired of pathing to all of them, and having to take detours just to go all the way around because for whatever reason a map didn't connect to my desired direction. Even with efficient pathing, I still have to play multiple maps I dread. It also takes forever to properly juice maps so even with a more automatic insert of the tablet, that still doesn't fix the issue of having to path all over the place.

If GGG want to keep towers, then let me select any map within range of an activated tower. For example, if another tower was within range of a tower I just activated, I could immediately activate that tower (I don't mind if I have to play the tower map), then I could choose a map close to another tower, path shortly to that tower, etc, then I'd have tons of juicy maps to choose from given they are within range of an activated tower. This, in my opinion, allows you to move more freely on the Atlas, play maps you actually enjoy, and fight more citadel bosses = more fun.

Even better idea,just bring back the poe1 system

No need to reinvent the wheel :(

The second solution I really like. But the first I'm not thrilled about. 

I think they could become rewarding if they had a disproportionate amount of magic and rares compared to normal maps. Could be interesting lore too that the towers attract powerful mobs. 

I think they're probably just going to kill towers all together tbh. Nobody likes them

It would be good enough if they would reward +1tier map and tablet at the end of each tower. Then there would be a valid reason to do them. But i also like your idea.

Every 20 maps grants a point to skip to any map node within player radius. To prevent bricking or to be used as desired.

Make the biomes larger and more impactful on maps.

Buff tablets by a lot.

Add random tower bosses that drop endgame fragments for something new? Maybe a pinnacle tower that can buff your entire atlas in some way.

Or hear me out. Just scrap the idea all together and only repurpose it later as a new delve of sorts.

This will always be true:

The problem with a good engineer is they will spend an inordinate amount of time optimizing a thing that shouldn't exist.

Another suggestion: Keep towers as they are but have them equiped with random tablets w. 2 modifiers.

If you want to change these modifiers you can run to the tower and put in your own tablet. Otherwise: just ignore the towers and enjoy the randomly juiced maps.

Pro: -super easy to implement because apart from rng tablet in tower nothing changes. -more rewarding for casuals who don't want to spend their sparse time with tower prepping. -power players can still tweak the towers for max juicing.

I want to be able to access my stash(map tab) from within the map overview.

I want to be able to highlight and go to nodes via search like in the passive tree.

I want a shortcut for "home" and "realmgate" etc.

Don't know how to solve this but I follow citadels on my map, so my map is veeeeeery wide, it takes me a minute to scroll from side to side and I honestly get lost sometimes. Ability to zoom out or have a minimap or something would help.

I like what Diablo3 did with increasingly harder rifts, I wish we could go past t17-t18 and keep pushing our builds to the limit. It would give more incentive to keep improving

What's funny about tower maps is that they're some of the best in the game and have a completion which isn't determined by killing rares.

Hell yes

I'd just say remove the waystones. Give tablets waystones mods. Give more towers.

I think GGG needs to rethink how we invest in the Atlas.

Personally I think we can keep the towers and their radius as is.

However, I would like to be able to link towers in groups. This will make it so their buffs will be shared, or maps become available even if you havent completed an adjacent map, or the drop rate of certain reward types is enhanced, etc.. It will depend on what type of tower and in what shape you link them.

Towers deteriorate and become ruins after a tablet is used. This will make them randomly pick between corrupting every map in their radius, or invert their current effect, or break their links to other towers, or something else that is fun and pushes us to explore the Atlas.

There should also be a "win-streak" that makes maps harder and more rewarding. The reward type can be chosen or influenced by the player.

There is so much unexplored design space. The Atlas is in EA, I think GGG will make it fun.

Then people would complaint that they are wasting their tower buff having to path through a shitty map.

Except for Sinking Spire, I don't mind the tower maps. Something like Bliss (or whatever it was called) could be a great regular map if made a longer.
My suggestions - clicking on a tower should show what tablet is into that tower too. Right now it only shows that on the maps. And it's annoying when I want to understand where each map gets its modifiers from.

Idk man I like running the tower maps. They're refreshing. They're really short and sweet. I usually throw my maps in there I was juicing but rolled a modifer on the last orb that I refuse to run on a regular map.

Unless it's the original tower map. Fuck that map. Even the updated version of it I don't l>r

Awesome ideas!

I’d like to add to this list:

1. ability to reforge t15 maps into higher levels.
2. a way to filter buffs and go to atlas nodes that have those quickly. It’d be great when you’re focused on farming rituals for example.

I think the endgame should be remade completely.

I actually like the tablet effect idea. Only thing is you might get confused with what you actually have on each map when you have 7-8 towers overlapping.

I think they want to do something more with towers. It seemed like that and strongboxes were 2 mechanics they really wanted to improve

I feel the whole system needs a rework. I know GGG likes friction but there is to much friction in mapping. The amount of time it takes currently to path into a new area with towers set the whole area up and the payoff. Mabey 5 good map layouts with 100-120 quant. You run those in about a hour.  And your back to hours of setup for the next 4-5 good nodes. Tldr. To much setup for what you get. 

So... straight up PoE1 sextants

Running towers is better than maps though. Why change that..lol

I had the same thought about making them apply to all maps. Simultaneously, make them less frequent but more powerful in other ways. You could increase scouting range, boost the number of tablets that can apply to the maps, boost the number of mods per tablet, and/or make them more rewarding to run. This would counter the tedium issue massively; it would be more exciting to find one.

I actually like the concept of towers at its core, but I agree there are issues. I would also like to say the layout change was a large improvement, and I don't think much credit has been given there. It certainly left a number of issues unsolved though, no doubt.

For me the 2 steps are Step 1: Ctrl A Step 2: Ctrl X

Sounded cool while reading it. Than i noticed this is literally sextants from poe1 and we got rid of them for a reason.

Don’t touch my bluff map

Good ideas but they need to scrap towers all together and come up with a better system for juicing maps. The entire mapping system needs a major overhaul, especially the current layouts.

Alternatively, make it so you run the tower without having to put a waystone in, the tower is always of a tier matching your character level, up T16.

I dont like the "non runnable towers", but the tablet charge idea is actually not a bad idea. Even if you could "reload" a tower after that so you could still juice every map but you would have to use multiple tablets. This would be great, it would remove the RNG nature of juicing, but cost more tablets in the long term.

Really love the second suggestion! GGG please see this post

Personal change to step 1: make towers beam's appear at entry, make the layout a normally juiceable size, let us put the tablet once map is completed.

Mesa is a cool layout (could be as good as Savannah if bigger) and I usually throw T15s with some low quat/+rare on it on the forever chase of having a divine drop on a tower while actually enjoying the map

Step 3: improve the algorithm for tower generation. I have clumps of 3-4 towers and then plains of nothing. I didn't want to stop doing league mechanics.

These seem like great changes.