In a nutshell: pretty bad. I find that the current league is very bug prone to the point of game breaking. Two weekends in and I feel that this league is pretty subpar in terms of the overall vision of how the game should be moving towards. The thing is that I’m not the only one currently frustrated.
The Nexus memory part is just not well designed in terms of how one is supposed to interact with it. Just clumsy UI along with the unfriendly aspect of forcing players to run all the way from one spot to the area they want to reach makes me suspect that this league mechanic will probably not make it into core. Also, the lack of direction in trying to find memory nodes while the memory decays just feels downright awful.
And if it did go into core, the real issue is that the sheer number of masters will confound the ability to farm the areas you really want/need. Already, getting the right nodes and knowing what they should do feels silly. If anything, all you’re really doing is just getting XP and hoping that something good drops while chasing down memories. There’s really no fun game mechanic to truly differentiate this from most of the other masters content.
With Syndicate in core, I’ve already encountered some pretty game breaking bugs. For instance, if you don’t conclude an encounter with a Syndicate member, it seems to put a flag that prevents you from starting a new encounter. Sure, you’ll have the useless minions attempting to slaughter you, but the only thing worth fighting are the main members themselves. I think it’s silly that GGG decided to force a mechanic that makes you choose an action in order to continue moving forward with a random mechanic in the first place.
Also, I’ve read how many players are complaining on the frequency of these masters encounters. Most notably Syndicate seems to be the worse one. The way I see it there’s only one way to handle masters: get rid of the RNG aspect and turn them into a Zana mod.
I’ve mentioned this idea on various forum posts or even here I believe. But I really believe that something that’s just a past league mechanic should have its appearance depend upon RNG entirely. The thing is that there’s zero reason to use this format since old league mechanics already can be added using Zana.
In fact, I think what they could do is combine both what they have now and including them as Zana mods. In this manner, players can farm what they want and how they, providing them the best of both worlds. I mean, if you’re concentrating on getting double corruptions, then there’s no reason not to be able to purchase a Zana mod. If you’re going for deep delves, then do the same.
I have a suspicion that the game is going to get into a worse state because of too much uncontrollable RNG at this rate. It might be that there becomes too many flags that make it impossible to QA. The last two leagues felt very unpolished and this one really didn’t do anything that past leagues did any better.
Also, the whole fractured/synthesized items are silly to me. While the potential is there, the implementation as it stands is pretty bad. I feel that a better solution would have been to take how Veiled Mods would become craftable once a person unlocked them. The idea of implicit mods being good sounds exciting but just finding the right items and class to make them worth anything is a huge hassle. You’re better off just fossil crafting elder and shaper items.
Something I wonder is if GGG really knows their target audience or if they want to grow beyond 5-10 streamers over on Twitch. It feels that the game is catered to a very small percentage right now and to get into the top tier stuff the amount of grinding would force one to quit anything else.
At any rate, I enjoy the rest of the game and the things outside of this league. But the league itself is pretty much trash. Honestly, if it weren’t for my friends playing online, I probably would have switched to standard just because the core game feels better at this stage.