My primary goal in path of exile over the last year has been completing the challenges in the 4-month leagues. While it has been very satisfying to meet this goal in the 3 sets of challenge leagues thus far, I have found several aspects rather disappointing, primarily stemming from the mutually exclusive nature of "playing the 4-month hardcore league" and "Completing all of the challenges".



Achieving 8/8 in Anarchy/Onslaught was relatively easy. It was very wealth based - so I spent much of my time trading and farming docks with low-life RF spark totems; leveling to 85 strictly by docks farming; a notable change from the previous 6 months where I had spent almost all of it mapping and maintaining a rank of top 1-5 in hardcore. At the time, the only truly difficult unique was Shavronne's wrappings, so looting one as a drop basically insured getting 8/8 and I finished completing the challenge roughly 2 months into the league. Unfortunately, because of the way the challenge is organized, dying in the 4-month hardcore league with a challenge unique disables it from the item challenge - so I switched back to the permanent hardcore league for a few days. After seeing the completely barren hardcore league, I left for a few weeks while I waited for the challenge leagues to end.



Nemesis/Domination introduced a far more difficult unique item challenge, requiring almost all of the top-rarity unique items - and further compounding the difficulty by adding extra level requirements for those unique items to drop. (Void battery/Voltaxic/Thunderfist to name some, required ilvl 75-77). Unfortunately, the relative scarcity of players running high level maps on hardcore meant that some of the items simply did not exist on the league (top rarity unique items that players do not attempt to chance and only drop in high level maps meant that there were not enough people capable of farming the content required for those unique items). I spent weeks trying to hunt down thunderfist, devoto's, respite, and the taming, but eventually it all worked out. I spent the first 3 months running high maps and building wealth, though I never actually looted any top-tier challenge uniques. As a result, I spent the remainder of the time trading and liquidizing everything to acquire the remaining uniques; which I completed roughly 2 weeks before the end.



Invasion/Ambush came with a new mechanic to limit the number of challenge completions, coincidentally ending the opportunity to hunt for the challenges on the 4-month hardcore league. The "atziri's disfavour vaal axe" drop is so rare that the resources did not exist to safely attempt the challenge on invasion. To give a rough estimate of the numbers involved:



Chance of Sarn having the corrupted zone: 1/8

Chance of the corrupted zone to drop "sacrifice at midnight" (The main item required for atziri): 1/20

Chance of Atziri of dropping "Mortal Hope" (The main item required for uber atziri): 1/40

Chance of Uber Atziri dropping "Atziri's Disfavour": 1/50 to 1/100



The accumulation of these factors means that in order to reliably produce the limiting unique for the vaal item challenge, hundreds of players need to farm the corrupted zones to produce the base item required to eventually reach uber atziri and loot the axe. After meeting that requirement, thousands of atziri runs need to be successfully completed, a very risky proposition on hardcore. But supposing this requirement was met, only then does uber atziri become part of the equation. Perhaps the most successful uber atziri slayer on invasion, Havoc, still ended up dying twice in his 24+ kills. Finally, even assuming a player was skilled enough to survive (or reroll several times) to accumulate 50-100 kills of uber atziri, it's still tossing a hundred-sided die and praying it just happened to land on the jackpot. I decided that reaching 8/8 was a higher priority than playing on the league I most enjoy, so I gave up and attempted it on ambush instead. This turned out to be the correct decision, as even after killing uber atziri 70 times, I still never looted the disfavour. I ended up trading months worth of currency for the axe as time was running out.



Unfortunately, while the problem is clear, I think the solution is much less obvious. After pondering and discussing the issue with friends, the best alternative we could come up with was something like "change the level challenge from (level 90 ambush + level 90 invasion) to (level 95 ambush + level 95 invasion), and reduce the volatility of uber drops." but without the RNG barrier, it may still may result in more 8/8 than is intended.



Finally, to reduce the disincentive to challenge hunting in the 4-month hardcore leagues, keeping record of challenge items from slain hardcore players would help tremendously. A more ideal solution would be moving characters from hardcore challenge leagues to softcore challenge leagues upon death so that the massive timesink of building/gearing a character for content like atziri isn't erased upon death (another huge disincentive), but at least keeping record would be a step in the right direction.



I appreciate that the challenges are not meant to be easy, nor are players entitled to complete all of them, but I still think the method of limiting 8/8 could be organized in a way that did not heavily penalize hardcore challenge hunters.



It would be much more enjoyable if the next pair of challenge leagues did not mean prioritizing between completing the challenges versus playing the hardcore league - or prioritizing between using challenge uniques versus permanently banishing them to the stash for fear of losing a challenge requirement. IGN: Dominion / Clamor