I was really looking forward to the postmortem instead. The last few SC leagues have been SOOO close to adding a whole lot to the gameplay of the game, but instead have been dead fish.

Torment: Another layer of difficulty/reward to really test characters beyond what map mods currently allow. I still get ecstatic when a ghost goes into a map boss, exile, or equally tough mob. Some of the fights have been the highlights of even this league. But the frequency of this happening, however, makes encountering a Tormented usually a disappointment. Their AI (especially for melee) and pathfinding usually results in little impact. Their frequency is equally abysmal, making those exciting moments only occur maybe 2-3 times in my time playing a lvl 92 character in Warbands. Then there's the difficulty/reward dynamic where it's better to push the mob through trash than get the exciting boss fight.

Torment promises great difficult ramped up encounters with rewards to match, but fails to deliver (a theme with GGG's design and implementation).

Warbands: This league has suffered the same design flaws and failures. It promised to give incentive to run lower tier (in level, difficulty, layout) maps by offering coordinated packs of mobs that offer a challenge and potential reward of crafting bases that could be BIS. It'd break up the monotony of playing the same "best" map over and over and go explore less popular zones.

This league, I got excited to run 4 dot maps. I'd often wait for one to show up on the tracking site to even fire up the game. I'd save my higher tier maps waiting for them to become 4 dots. But unfortunately, even after the spawn rate buff, the time I'd wait for 4 dots, especially at non-peak hours, was FAR too long. The mechanics of manipulating the Warbands is completely un-intuitive and inconsistent (wth is crypt always 4 dots??) and really punished those stuck behind the mid tier map wall. The extra loot as a MF character was nice (I don't follow people who feel like they don't drop anything...). Difficulty was underwhelming except for Warband Leaders, which often just were elongated endurance fights. And then there are the Chaos Leaders who I saw when they first released almost twice in a row, had a ton of fun, and never again all league.

And I was excited to try my hand at trying to mastercraft an awesome Redblade helm (had 3-5 drop all league), but so few dropped I never had the numbers to let RNG fall in my favor with a Regal Orb. The glove's mod is laughably bad, as it gets outclassed by a Aurseize at a fraction of the realistic crafting cost (and even with Aurseize's drop rate plummet), and this is from a build that has 100% flask uptime and could have really benefited from an actually appealing affix. The boots seemed fine, but still so few drop to realistically give a good opportunity to craft something decent.

In the end, the design promised a way to encourage diversifying where player's played (breaking up monotony, building wider map base) in exchange for a fun crafting opportunity (a side of gameplay few but the uber elite get to dabble in). Even though I played by the "rules", I feel mostly burned for doing so. I didn't get to have nearly as many exciting Warband encounters as feels justifiable and I never got to really dabble in the crafting metagame in a rewarding fashion. In the end, I got some extra Chaos/Regals from vendor recipes and a map base that didn't progress cause I was trying to be patient and wait for the 4 dots (if I ran it, you can be sure what would be Conquered the next rotation, fueling my regret).

So in the end, GGG has great ideas on how to expand the game. Ways to add rare but challenging/fun encounters. Reasons to try new less popular/efficient endgame areas. An introduction to meta crafting and not just using POE.xyz for linear upgrades. But with each of these, GGG has been WAY too timid and the palyerbase is left with blue balls and a feeling that the league was a failure in implementation, or worse assuming the design itself was bad. Again, GGG seems to fail to learn from previous mistakes, which makes me that much less excited to try new leagues outside of rerolling in a fresh economy for the 13th time, which is starting to wear thin.

GGG please don't continue down this path. You have good ideas. Be aggressive with your league changes. Rebalance the frequency much faster (people have been airing grievances all league). Make it feel like a once in a lifetime opportunity to take part in something awesome for a few months, not a glorified Standard. Make every play session have at least 1 moment that makes you excited to play the next time, or better keep playing now. Something ridiculous for streamers to make highlight reels of. Make playing POE fun. Not just the theory crafting behind a character or grinding currency and flipping items, but the gameplay and experience itself fun.