[2022] Archnemesis Recipe Hinting

There has been a little confusion about how to discover Archnemesis Recipes, so I thought I'd post to explain how it works.

When designing Archnemesis, we realised there was a spectrum for how we could handle recipe discoverability. On one hand, recipes could be completely secret, not data-mineable, and would require weeks of community collaboration to discover them all. While we felt that this would have a cool sense of discovery, it didn't really fit with the fast pace of Path of Exile's league start, where players want to experience a lot of what a league offers in the first days.

On the other end of the spectrum, we could have zero secrets whatsoever, and just publish a full recipe list in the game client so that you immediately have full information. The problem with this approach is that it completely removes a sense of discovery for players who do actually enjoy expanding their knowledge of recipes as they play.

The system we came up with was designed with the following goals in mind:

• Players who want to use no external resources would not be told a list of recipes directly, so that they could gradually build their own list if they'd like.
• Players who don't particularly enjoy trying heaps of combinations would be able to see hints as to what recipes exist.
• Players would always be able to easily see whether there's a recipe that can be completed right now, so they don't miss one.
• As a consequence of the game client knowing the recipe combinations, they would be data-mineable which would allow for the community to share them with those who want to see a full list early. This is okay with us.

This resulted in two hinting systems:

• There are glowing borders around modifiers that can be immediately used in a recipe in this instance. The intensity of the border indicates whether it's a 2-, 3- or 4-part recipe. As you empower monsters in an instance and modifiers get consumed, the ones with borders will restrict down to just ones that can still finish recipes in that area. The intention is that if you consume any modifier with a border each time you get a choice, it'll always find you a valid recipe.
• Recipes you complete are tracked and displayed on the component modifiers. So once you have discovered it (either by experimentation, the above hinting system or looking it up), it'll permanently remind you that modifier is part of that recipe.

We feel that this compromise both leaves a bit of fun discoverability in there for those who enjoy that, and also makes it massively easier for players who just want to be reminded about what the recipes are.

In our internal playtesting, we found that recipes become pretty easy to remember (especially with the above hinting systems) and that there isn't much reliance on needing to check external lists unless you're trying to exhaustively plan some complex combination of rewards. And in that case, it's definitely worth consulting a list anyway to make sure you min-max it correctly!

Thanks for your kind words about this league and the launch. Enjoy!