I'm not going to claim I know what most Beyond players think about the league. I do know that HC players tend to be more...well, hardcore about things and thus may be more apt to like the challenge of Beyond, and/or look forward to getting to a point where their dps can match portal mobs.
That being said, I think it's telling that there's very little discussion about Beyond on reddit. I remember many folks posting pics of various Rogue Exiles they ran into or crazy Invasion bosses, or even Nemesis mobs. Before the patch came out many people were excited by the names of the various portal bosses, which were revealed beforehand. Yet today...most of the talk is about new uniques, maps, and various bugs.
One thing that struck me about the build up to this patch was the lack of any gameplay videos about the leagues. GGG released a video showing how the player housing works, but no rampage or beyond stuff was played through. I thought that was pretty weird, given all the stuff they showed for previous patches. I know they tested this league, I know there was a beta, etc...but I wonder what the feedback was like. Ultimately I think the league can be fixed with a couple changes (increase drops, decrease life regen/life pools on portal mobs) but first impressions are important...and they seem to have whiffed it.
Again, I'm liking Beyond outside of the drop rates. But I'm probably in the minority within this thread.
Beyond is an alright idea but with how much work is required to deal with the mobs and how random the portals spawn (I've gone over an hours seeing only 1 orb per pack at best, but all of a sudden, every kill is now spawning them in docks.), I don't see how I can control such a random element, other then kill a few guys, move a screen away to a clean area and continue. Maybe have a marker or something, like how a curse looks, to mark if the mob is likely to drop an orb so you can judge the chances of a portal spawning and can maybe thin out the pack in a different way to control where the orbs are placed. Or we could do the whole nerf those guys into the ground and treat them like normal white mobs or maybe buff their loot table a bit. That's how I see it so far.
And with that said, I think GGG has to come together and rethink how hardcore leagues are made from now on, because right now, it seems the softcore league has all the fun and interesting stuff while HC gets the punch in the balls. I don't mind HC being a bit tougher, that's kind of why people want to play it, including me, however, I don't always like taking on the tougher league only to be rewarded less for more effort. Last leagues had strongboxes for softcore but for hardcore they had invasion bosses that could kill you from off-screen before you even knew they were there (at the start). Softcore, with no real danger to their character, only EXP in later modes, were showered with extra chances for items from the boxes and from the mobs themselves. Hardcore on the other hand were flipping coins to see if they could survive the next step because an invader that was one of those off-screen killers could be on their map and you'd never know before it was too late Even after killing an invader, it never seemed like they were any better then a magic monster in terms of item drops and were a big waste of time to take on, near the start that is. Things did get better, the combined leagues and even now, showed how the invaders could pose a challenge but still be fair, even if they don't drop great stuff for the extra bit of work you had to put into dealing with them. I would like to see them balance out their extra risk with a bit more reward You know, some kind of light at the end to show that, yes, it's going to be more work then if you were in the softcore leagues but it isn't like we're gonna make you do it all for totally free, a small bone or two await you for all the extra effort. And that's kind of what I want from the HC leagues, I agree to take on a tougher mode but I expect to get a bit more out of it then softcore and I'm not talking about 2x the items or big stuff like that, small stuff is fine like maybe getting onslaught from some portal monsters? A better chance at currency drops on some? An increase of masters appearing for beating them? Something like that, something to show me that it wasn't all for nothing.
