In Bestiary, crafting was arcane and confusing. Many of the recipes were sorta garbage, and interacting with the league mechanic was never terribly intuitive. It wasn't always clear where to find beasts you needed for your recipes, and so half your time was spent skimming the wiki for the appropriate combinations, then going to places where they should be and hopefully catching something. Maybe. In Essence, you run across a monster, battle it, and then use the item to create a useful piece of gear. Easy! The in-game currency is available at the professional online gaming house. The interested gamers can buy chaos orbs from those professional online gaming houses in the most affordable cost.

In Bestiary, you had to fumble around with nets, risking killing things before even seeing them. They did add in the necro nets later, but we all know how unpopular those were. Now, in Essence, monsters are held in stasis before you meet them, so you never have to worry about offscreening them. This is especially nice since it allows you to take a moment to look at the monster's mods, instead of risking your life trying to read them in the middle of a hectic encounter. Furthermore, instead of messing with nets, you just kill the beastie, they drop the item, and you use it. Very intuitive and convenient!

I know I'm bashing Bestiary a lot here, but I didn't hate the league. It introduced some neat concepts and you could tell there were some good ideas hidden in there. I'm just glad they took those concepts and refined them for Essence. It really feels like "Bestiary 2.0" and I'm really looking forward to playing it for the next few months!

We're all still here shitposting instead of just moving on to a different game. At the end of the day, PoE's a good game made by good people. Even a bad PoE league is better than most other games.

There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game.