Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Padre]

Poison as in lightning to chaos conversion. Was thinking primarily about voltaxic.

Poison support and passives seem unchanged.

Those notes are rather conservative. Was thinking they would nerf some things like CoC or frost wall. Things that have been broken for a long time. Oh well. Time to roll a CoC char I guess

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[Zdzisiu]

Poison as in lightning to chaos conversion. Was thinking primarily about voltaxic.

Poison support and passives seem unchanged.

Those notes are rather conservative. Was thinking they would nerf some things like CoC or frost wall. Things that have been broken for a long time. Oh well. Time to roll a CoC char I guess

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You confuse poison with chaos damage, those are two different things. Chaos damage was nerfed due to the nerf to conversion rates on items, but poison as the thing that actually double dips and has the damage over time effect was not nerfed at all.

You can poison with any kind of damage if you use the poison gem, or maybe an item, its independent from chaos damage.

Im still thinking about Witch/Shadow frostbolt/vortex build, will wait to see the ideas other people float around the internet.

 

[Padre]

I'm a dumbass. You're right. I confuse poison and chaos because poison deals chaos damage.

Frankly, I've never played such char so I know very little what works and what doesn't with poison support gem.

Will you all be playing HC in the upcoming league? I know Orma will bitch and whine but will still roll a char

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[Goromorg]

I expect I won't have much time to play, so I'll probably stick to the standart prophecy.

 

[Zdzisiu]

Damn, I did some testing on standard with freeze pulse setup with random gear and the sound of the crits and the freezed mobs left and right is great, Im half tempted to try a freeze pulser in Prophecy now.

 

[Carceri]

Played a freezing pulse witch in perandus and yeah that sound is addictive as hell. Not the sturdiest character ever, but surprisingly it can handle a lot of things.

 

[Aothan]

I'm going to give the new league a try, the new Lacerate skill looks interesting, and in light of previous comments it appears to be similar to Freezing Pulse but with a melee mechanism

 

[Zdzisiu]

Pre-patching for prophercy has just begun. Steam will update in a few minutes too.

Prophecy starts in less than 3h.

Edit: Holy hell, GGG seriously optimised the loading times. It now takes me less than a second to load to login screen on an ssd.

 

[varangos]

I look forward to the improvements, my loading times between zones could get up to half a minute.

 

[Padre]

I've have had some weird sound issues lately with POE. My item filter sound was very quiet, same goes for dialogue sound volume. I hope those new changes to the sound system fix that.

Oh and loading time is almost instant now. Holy shit.

 

[made]

Woah dudes, the load times! XD Did they fix strongbox freezes too?

Turns out my FB duelist only has access to crap ascendancies for the build. Berserker looks much more useful. Maybe I could level just one more char...

 

[Padre]

Strongbox freezes fixed too. Sound got fixed for me too.

The prophecies are a little fun addition to the game for now. Nothing major but not as irritating as Talisman/Perandus.

 

[made]

Strongbox freezes fixed too.

Not for me. And now the game also freezes at the start of maps, presumably while it's loading assets.

Shield Charge/FB is great tho, clears faster than the Ice Crash build I used before. With all the extra deeps from Berserker I can dump more points into defenses and make him tankier than ever.

Did they do anything at all to address the power creep brought on by ascendancies?

 

[Padre]

Nothing that I know of. In fact after 2 days I'm rolling through tier 5 maps. Made a 5link armour, found a 5link staff and transmuted it to to give me +2fire gems and 9% cast speed. After that I've found Pledge of Hands and I'm trying to 6link it.

With the Commander of Darkness and Mistress of Sacrifice I can cast 5 srs per second. Flesh offering lasts for around 8 seconds with only 2-3 corpses consumed. And during that, my movespeed is at 145%. Srs last for 11 seconds. Merci Dominus died in around 5 seconds in his second form.

Right now all I do is farm coins. Their drop rate is shit in maps but I need them to get rid of all the shitty prophecies.

A tip though. When you get a Jeweller's Touch prophecy, be very sure to fulfill it in the right difficulty. I've made a mistake like that and lost my shot at 5 linking Pledge. Now hoping I will find another one.

All in all this xpack is super fun and the load times are godly. There are some slow downs, especially when I'm moving too fast but loading the game takes 1 second - that alone is making me happy.

I think they've buffed Masters occurrence in maps too. 2/3 of maps contain a master. Did around 30 maps now. And all I get is Vagan and Tora. He is lvl 6 and I don't even have him in my hideout.

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[Doesn'tmeananything]

All in all this xpack is super fun

I really don't understand this. Prophecy has to be the phoniest GGG have ever let themselves be. Prophecies themselves are a quite tacked on concept (see also labyrinths): the most efficient way to deal with them is to ignore them entirely all the way to merciless - with the tedium of levelling unaddressed, again - just to sift through heaps of filler in order to get the 'good' ones, which in the end are simple shortcuts. All the sound improvements boil down to preloading, and I'd rather have everything preloaded when the game starts rather than these annoying slowdowns at the beginning of certain maps that you happen to chain. The end-game labyrinth is a particular spit in the face, after people clearly expressed their hate for trials, ascendancy points being locked away behind a mind-numbing gauntlet, and the whole concept of traps in this kind of action game.

The general disappointment is indeed real. Many players, including high profile veterans, die and simply quit the game 3 (!) days in the league. The aforementioned points and the stale meta cause people to seek other games because there's nothing to look forward to here.

This streak of bad challenge leagues is very worrying.

 

[Saark]

I am genuinely curious who you're referring to when you say that high profile veterans already left the game after dying once, because out of all the more famous streamers every single one is still playing/releveling after they died/got bored of elementalist flameblast.

The same goes for people complaining about the "power creep" and how the game has gotten too easy. Have any of them actually done uber atziri, an 8mod core or the pale council? And if so, did they do it with something else than the absolutely most broken builds that were available during that time? Because I seriously don't get people complaining about the game becoming too easy when they played voltaxic LA/VMS/chaos spark/bladefall mines the last 2 leagues, and are probably running ele flameblast right now. There is enough challenging content available (and if the game is so easy acquiring enough currency to chain it shouldn't be an issue either) or better yet, there is enough complexity in this game that you can just theorycraft a build yourself that is actually fun to play especially when it turns out that it can handle red maps just as well as the aforementioned meta builds.

Prophecy certainly is one of the least intrusive leagues when you as a player choose to ignore the mechanic, but it can provide a nice change in pace when you're sick of doing the same maps over and over by providing some additional content. Same argument applies to the new trials/lab, if you think they are tedious just don't do them. Few builds actually require 8 points to work, and you still have the option of buying the trials and even get boosted through the lab if you feel like doing something else than running 2 minute gorges 8hours a day subtracts from your gaming experience. On the one hand you complain about the game getting stale, yet you refuse to partake in the new content?

I personally enjoy prophecy so far, I could do without Torr Olgosso in every single fucking strongbox but hopefully they'll get to fixing that one soon. I'm also fairly annoyed that I am playing an AW summoner and was hoping to test the new chest, but there hasn't been a single one yet on either PSC or PHC but multiple ones on SC/HC.

Edit: Oh and regarding the stale meta... It certainly is stale, that's why Etup is #1 on HC with ancestral melee totems and a lot of people are rerolling their super-boring flameblasters into equally as good shield chargers. Nothing new to see here at all.

 

[Goromorg]

Torr Oglosso has a fancy leap slam animation.
Can I have this one too?

 

[Saark]

Some of the old animations are quite fancy, yeah. He also has the old chainmail skin which makes him look even more ridiculous.

 

[Doesn'tmeananything]

Streamers won't abandon the game on which they've built their viewer base just after a major content update. Players who don't have a stake in that (including people who play with said streamers) are leaving. The ladder certainly reflects that.

Trying to deny power creep by rallying people to do the fraction of top-end content (which in essence is a gear check) with hipster builds is downright stupid. The real game is mapping and it's never been this easy.

The whole idea of the game is in finding the most efficient combination of skills, items, and passive tree variations. The devs, by their admission, assure the fluid nature of these combinations by tuning different elements regularly. The problem is that there haven't been a major shift for a long time now, only reactive changes here and there. If you enjoy RPing and intentionally gimping yourself - that's great, but you're missing the point.

And there's nothing nice about going to a random place in a random act to kill something that poses no challenge and to get no reward (including bad uniques). It's busywork, as is the labyrinth. Innocuousness of the new content is not a positive factor when there's nothing else new and interesting about the game.

Torr Oglosso has a fancy leap slam animation.
Can I have this one too?

It's the default duelist 2h-sword animation.

 

[Goromorg]

Developers in GGG aren't very hardcore action rpg players themselves, it seems that they don't have much time to play their own game during the course of developing. For this reason they trust static data to make balance changes but very efficient players who dedicate a lot of time to the game are always ahead of devs and for them game always will be unbalnced. For GGG adding content to the game is a primary goal, fixing bugs is secondary and balancing content is a third-rate goal.

Remember that we are talking about ex indie devs, not about some monstrosity like activision blizzard. Even a big companies often struggle with balancing.

Though some things like double-dipping for example are very apparent, I don't know why they didn't gave the same ability to double dip for melee damage. Game won't become less unbalnced anyway.

 

[Saark]

Trying to deny power creep by rallying people to do the fraction of top-end content (which in essence is a gear check) with hipster builds is downright stupid.

I'm not denying that a power creep exists, when players get buffed and monster don't there obviously is one. I was simply trying to move the conversation to the very real issue of people complaining about the game being too easy when these very people specifically avoid the hard content out of fear or convenience. Why chain red maps (which is very much doable even if a lot of people claim otherwise) when you can run gorges all day? Why do merc lab when 4 ascendancy points is all you need for your build? A lot of people are to this day afraid to even do the museum trio, which is a T2 map, not to mention stuff like terrace, orchard, village ruin etc. The underlying issue is that people had no choice but to do that content a year or two ago because the highest map-tier was much lower and doing what nowadays is a t9 map was garbage XP back then.

The whole idea of the game is in finding the most efficient combination of skills, items, and passive tree variations. The devs, by their admission, assure the fluid nature of these combinations by tuning different elements regularly. The problem is that there haven't been a major shift for a long time now, only reactive changes here and there. If you enjoy RPing and intentionally gimping yourself - that's great, but you're missing the point.

The whole idea of the game is to have fun. If you want to find the most powerful build and do all the games content with that and nothing else, D3 is right around the corner. PoE and its complexity enables you to do exactly the opposite which is why I personally still come back to it every league for close to 3 years now. You cannot complain about the game becoming too easy when you specifically build your character around the very concept of making it easy, hoping that the devs realize what you did and taking your toy away.

And there's nothing nice about going to a random place in a random act to kill something that poses no challenge and to get no reward (including bad uniques).

Noone is forcing you to. I like to have some variety between chaining maps so I spend an hour doing random prophecies for shits and giggles every once in a while. Got a perfectly rolled astramentis (30c), two rares exploding into ~10c of currency and a 5s/5l jeweler prophecy today, aswell as finishing up two chains for council fragments. Maybe I'm just playing a different game than you, I don't know. When I finish my fragments and do the trio to sell the bow for 10+ exalts I'll let you know how unrewarding these prophecies are. Or I die, which is more likely, and I'll let you know how challenging it is. Either way, I'll have fun.

It's busywork, as is the labyrinth.

It's also called game content. Levelling a character is also busywork because having to go through all 4 acts 3 times (well, not all of them) before you can map takes a bunch of time and could also be removed then, right? Afterall it's just busywork.

 

[T. Reich]

Doesn'tmeananything Just another shitposter like tyrannosaurus rex (or whatever his name was).
If you don't like the game so much - quit playing it. You aren't forced to play it and you aren't payed to do it either.
Your bitching on some forum isn't going to change anything for sure.

 

[Aothan]

I don't know if this is intentional, although it probably has been discussed on the official forums, but the skill Lacerate has unusual range for a 'melee' skill, having about a third extra length of distance to Frost Blades. So in effect almost half-way across the screen

 

[T. Reich]

Probably intentional.
It's hard to compete with EQ and Reave otherwise .

 

[Doesn'tmeananything]

stuff

Finally. I wondered when would 'fun' and 'D3' come up in this discussion.

Honestly, it's fine that you're sitting in your corner with a screwdriver making another scooter, but the game has flown away on a space ship a long time ago. Since 1.0 the game has been developing vertically, not horizontally. Your 3 year cred belies your lack of knowledge in theorycrafting. A while before ascendancies the builds had become very homogeneous, and skills had been released with the sole purpose to supersede older ones (an example is mentioned just above this post). The game's flooded with trash uniques, which defeats the point of unique items entirely. All this lead to the current state of the game, where you're actively discouraged to build diversely. This is an action game - the only way to gauge builds is by their content clearing speed, and the scales are heavily tipped in favour of certain skills. Choosing alternatives is making a conscious decision to create an inferior character with no way to compensate for all the drawbacks.

These design principles segue into the latest leagues. Instead of expanding on core systems in an interesting way, you're simply provided various ways to circumvent parts of them. The fact that you're happy with that and at the same time ready to paint D3 as an antithesis to it should make you suspicious of your reasoning.

There's just no way around it: prophecy is badly designed. It's uninspired and full of menial tasks with a few jackpot scenarios peppered in. You can either safely ignore them or mindlessly port around acts hoping to get something good, which in turn would allow you to get stronger with avoiding playing the game at its best. It's low risk - high reward, the worst correlation between the two for a game.

Also, if not removed, levelling should be fundamentally redesigned. It's a chore: you pick a levelling skill and go through the same content three times, then make a transition to your real build before maps. It can't be described as anything but a waste of time.