Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Aothan]

I'll bring myself to use three orbs to deskill points in a day or two, so as to find out just how the armour affects life flask restorations, in the mean time I've started yet another Templar, this time with Elemental Hit. Seems very powerful, actually I'm sure the tool-tip is not describing the actual values (which seem much greater), but ah the mana costs..

 

[made]

I get like 1.2k from a Seething Divine on my Duelist (has Juggernaut passive), Belly and Meginord belt seem to make no difference.

 

[Aothan]

yeah I have just tried this, after realising to also remove Herbalism (could not properly differentiate overall results with life regeneration as well), and there is no effect on overall life healing. This is fairly disappointing to me, that is the basic reason I would want to use such a unique, otherwise it is primarily a life-based build specialist item. I'm sure it is quite good for those purposes, yet for someone as myself who designs around armour and evasion with these types of characters, the same amount of effective health could be obtained by trading for a rare with increased armour and evasion properties. For example just typing in broad values such as 400 armour and 300 evasion at a maximum level of 67 produces 99 results. Wow just going over those results I think I'm using the wrong armour for my playstyle >_<

that said, I've also been ridiculously lucky with life flask spam on more than a few encounters so far, but the same cannot be said for my recent Elemental Templar who played a bit recklessly up until this point and took more chance than necessary (kept running around it whilst having no remove potions) against a Living Blood. I think I'll start again simply for my fondness of using shields on Templars and gradually transition into Elemental Strike since the mana costs prevent a lot of other useful abilities in the early stages.

 

[Aothan]

was a bit too nonchalant when logging in a few days ago, after a week or so absence, only to unnecessarily send my level 70 hardcore Templar to standard. In any case I was at the point of concluding that armour+energy shield does not work very practically for staff characters. Even when incorporating Cast on Melee (Firestorm..sooner or later perhaps) the issue is the limited means to protect energy shield from taking damage.

with a shield the benefits are multifaceted, increased physical defences, additional defensive nodes, heightened resistances allowing for more emphasis on other attributes etc

 

[Rhalle]

In any case I was at the point of concluding that armour+energy shield does not work very practically for staff characters.

Despite GGG's intentions hybrid defenses of any kind in PoE don't really work.

Also: New one-month league on Teusday!

 

[bozia2012]

In any case I was at the point of concluding that armour+energy shield does not work very practically for staff characters.

Despite GGG's intentions hybrid defenses of any kind in PoE don't really work.

Also: New one-month league on Teusday!

Must... resist...

 

[set]

Armor/ES has little synergy, only with specific uniques.
Armor/Evasion is actually really good, but requires top tier gear.
ES/Evasion is okay. It's only good with like - if you're going to freeze stuff reliably for a few seconds it can be great.

In HC, you never want a slip up, so it's easiest to just pick one and min/max it.

 

[Aothan]

I find armour and energy shield feasible if possibly good if you can abide a preponderantly defensive playstyle, and emphasis with itemisation, and use a shield. The main issue, or at least one of the main concerns to be mindful of, is that (as Set mentions) if something goes amiss, and you lose your energy shield whilst still exposed to a situation that might send you out of hardcore, you have about 40% of what is typical life for other characters.

personally I enjoy the defensive style and feel but the meta aspects of the game might find it limited

 

[Aenra]

i liked their April fools joke:

Incident Report for April 1 Catastrophe

Path of Exile service was disrupted today by a severe bug introduced in a patch this morning. We would like to sincerely apologise for this incident and assure you that we will be taking steps to prevent similar problems occurring in the future. This news post is the incident report describing what went wrong and our expected timeline for resolving it.

During the week of March 23rd, one of our senior gameplay programmers was performing a routine refactor on our core skill code. In preparation for our upcoming expansion, changes were made to the functionality of Trigger Gems. The goal of the refactor was to improve the reliability of the gems that trigger spells on various conditions - Cast on Death, Cast When Damage Taken, etc. During this process, the names of the gems were entered by hand. Unfortunately, due to a combination of tiredness and the programmer's previously undiagnosed Toxoplasmosis infection, the word "Cast" was entered as "Cats" for these gems.

Unbeknownst to the programmer, the consequences of this small typo were severe.

 

[Saark]

Cats on crit is glorious.

 

[Cyberarmy]

Now that's how proper Aprils Fool is done!

 

[Norfleet]

Needs greater variety in cats.

 

[Saark]

So, in about 2hours and 30 minutes the announcement for the upcoming expansion will go live, and media outlets will start releasing their infos on it. Seems like a couple of pictures have been leaked already, the bosses look kind of amazing. Apparently the whole expansion is being treated as PoE 2.0, looking at the item-skins there seems to have been major improvements on the visuals for armour, weapons and probably even more.

http://imgur.com/a/EXvIK

Well, I'm hyped.

 

[Perkel]

Path of Exile: Awekening

TLDR shit ton of stuff + act 4, rewriten netcode

http://www.gamepedia.com/news/688-path-of-exile-the-awakening

 

[Perkel]

ACT 4 incoming. april 20 (starts beta access and league on its own)

They will remove desync completely for players with less than 150ms ping. They will also add more servers so this also should improve ping (for me currently 50-70)

ton of skills, 70 uniques.
Jawels for passive skill tree.

Honestly can't wait

 

[Damned Registrations]

Is removing the desync a thing they can actually do? Why wasn't it done earlier? Fuck, I love the game itself, but fear of losing a HC character to a desync totally soured it for me after a while.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Time to start playing PoE again i guess. Expansion looks awesome.

 

[Saark]

Is removing the desync a thing they can actually do? Why wasn't it done earlier? Fuck, I love the game itself, but fear of losing a HC character to a desync totally soured it for me after a while.

They changed the netcode significantly to allow for a deterministic lockstep mode that you can also find in pretty much any other action-rpg. It basically means that instead of moving instantly only to get set back a couple of meters if you get blocked you have a slight delay on your actions depending on your ping. This pretty much removes desync entirely (not only for you but for all monsters aswell). They also promised to greatly improve server structure by getting new ones, for example splitting the US between US West/East servers aswell as getting a couple of servers in EU and as far as I can tell one in HUEHUE too. The great thing about this is that you can simply opt not using the new mode if your ping is pretty high so the game still plays smoothly on your end but with the occasional desync. There will also be no issues in playing with the lockstep mode yourself, while others in your party dont. Playing across regions will most likely only be possible with the old mode though, but since its a simple option trading across server-regions will probably not be affected.

 

[Perkel]

I assume this is also in correlation to other stuff.

Part of the reason why for example shitty diablo3 didn't have problems like PoE was that D3 didn't calculate shit ton of stuff like PoE had to.

For example in D3 you have armor and life and you character never misses no monsters miss (circ via dodge)
Now compare it to PoE where you have life, energy shield, dodge/block, evade and both character and monster can miss their attacks multiply it by every monster trying to hit you and you have a lot more stuff to sync properly.


OS of current vs deterministic devs said on reddit that treshold is 150ms currently.
Also old way where desync is possible will be upgraded along adding new way to calculate stuff so generally either way this will be better.

As of ACT4 ton of awesome stuff but it is a shame that they couldn't get new weapon types.
I am not talking about new sword/axe/hammer thing but about spears, polexes, crossbows, javelins and so on.
Though passive skill tree/active gems is probably what holds them hostage

 

[Saark]

Well, desync was almost entirely caused by moving close to walls/doors/monsters. Since your client was ahead of the server, you moved past/through obstacles when you did in fact get blocked. The server then had to reset your position -> desync. Simply avoiding standing close to walls, not fighting in or through doorways and having a phasewalk potion made sure that you were almost never desyncing in the first place. /oos did the rest.

 

[Perkel]

Well, desync was almost entirely caused by moving close to walls/doors/monsters. Since your client was ahead of the server, you moved past/through obstacles when you did in fact get blocked. The server then had to reset your position -> desync. Simply avoiding standing close to walls, not fighting in or through doorways and having a phasewalk potion made sure that you were almost never desyncing in the first place. /oos did the rest.

It also happened if you fought with group of monsters that could block you.

 

[Zdzisiu]

Well, desync was almost entirely caused by moving close to walls/doors/monsters. Since your client was ahead of the server, you moved past/through obstacles when you did in fact get blocked. The server then had to reset your position -> desync. Simply avoiding standing close to walls, not fighting in or through doorways and having a phasewalk potion made sure that you were almost never desyncing in the first place. /oos did the rest.

It also happened if you fought with group of monsters that could block you.

Or if you fought with very fast moving monsters, like charging rhoas but then the monsters would be the ones desynced, not player character. But thats no difference for end user, because he still sees something that is not as it is on the server.

But anyway, PoE 2.0 shapes to be an awesome expansion, both on the content and QoL changes so I couldn't be happier, ok, I could, if they allowed me into the beta I would be even happier.

 

[udm]

They will remove desync completely for players with less than 150ms ping. They will also add more servers so this also should improve ping (for me currently 50-70)

Was getting tired of spamming the /oos macro on my Flicker builds every 20 seconds. Anyway full Reddit thread w/ dev response here: http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/324u94/rewrite_of_netcode_with_a4_to_reduce_dsync/

 

[abija]

Guess we'll find out if a) they were lying through their teeth about testing lockstep and being unplayable or b) poe will still have terrible netcode.
At least they nudged and there's some hope now. Though I don't really get why so much paranoia about their netcode. Just bite the bullet and implement authoritative clients.

Fuck, I love the game itself, but fear of losing a HC character to a desync totally soured it for me after a while.

I lost 3-4 chars to desync and wasn't even remotely as aggravating as fighting a pack of fast/charging mobs as melee. Use skill on closest, it gets synced at the back of the pack, use on 2nd same shit, rinse and repeat until I just leave the area in frustration.

 

[Aothan]

once again I'm interested in the coming 'new' Path of Exile, especially the revisions to uniques and new skill pathways and even gems for the skill tree. There is some possibility I'll elect to start with the Scion as a variation on the Templar, but that's assuming the transition to the Templar area does not require too many superfluous points.

edit: okay so it is an invite process, which could well delay playing the beta for sometime

I welcome the overall changes to "Arrow Dodging", but would vastly prefer the original name of this skill was also restored.

although no one mentions this the one skill I think needs to be changed (substantially) is "Resolute Technique", the skill notable which gives perfect accuracy. I understand this comes at an apparent requirement but that would only be the case if you are not focusing on increased critical chance.