Incline Path of Exile 2 - now available on Early Access

[Israfael]

I view what players are doing with ES as a kind of loophole where the developers forgot to close, which was exacerbated by bad itemization.

It might as well be the VISION, who knows, but it's definitely not freeform gameplay that POE1 provides, where you can be both a zhp zoom-zoom character or uber tank that is essentially unkillable by almost every attack (i.e. my https://pobb.in/ZtpEcuNOb5k2 latest SSF character). It was one of the biggest allures of PoE1 as compared to D3 or some other games - 'play as you want instead of play as we want'. Also, the trade will always push the community towards zoom-zoom, "press one button, whole screen dies" builds because they allow you to farm the maximum amount of currency / gear (and in poe2 this is compounded by the fact how rarity works atm).

Its a bit tricky because high percentage reduction actually gets increasing returns from a lot of damage, and you get higher returns the closer you are to hardcap

I'd say they just mindlessly copied the old poe1 formula without taking into account that you have more% aura in poe1 (which was nerfed recently) and the other defensive layers that are dependant or tied to armour (molten armour, aegis procs or other things).

 

[tritosine2k]

I'd rather have quality time deciding on salvageable aspects of the game and it's rather fun (not to mention I wouldn't touch this reVISION with a ten feet pole).

trade will always push the community towards zoom-zoom, "press one button

It would be funny if >ivl78 item, influence etc means the item is prone to break/krangled. But that would alienate certain audience I guess. Also chase unique modifiers are available sooner but archetype dependent they used to do this for spectre soul-eater gem but then it became all too convenient to handwave stuff away bcuz 2 is coming anyway merged endgame etc lul. Also fiddled with the opposite pathfinder charge gen > Mage blood.

 

[TedNugent]

It was one of the biggest allures of PoE1 as compared to D3 or some other games - 'play as you want instead of play as we want'.

That's my biggest problem with this game as it is.

Weapon skill lockouts, attribute lockouts, fucking RNG up to the gills with every single line item on every single piece of gear with every affix. Then they stripped resistance from the passive tree, so you're basically stuck with RNG on rings and affixes for resistances, which is why I had to end up dropping from a decent cold resist to almost nothing to accommodate a gear upgrade.

Then the ascendancy lockouts.

Then the gem selection, you have maybe 2-3 obvious choices and the rest are all over the place. For example, I don't want to make a fucking fire build, but a lot of the gems and mace skills are really making it hard to avoid, and I have to avoid elemental damage affixes like the plague because its basically a dump stat for my build.

Another thing, too, once you get to a high enough level, you can't just throw on a couple of evasion pieces to get some evade due to the level up malus, so you HAVE to go deep to get any benefit whatsoever.

At least block is well situated in the tree and mostly a matter of how deeply you spec into it.

This is one reason these god damn RNG loot pinata circuses are inherently annoying, especially without specific uniques you can target for a build as a known quantity.

I would be happy if I simply had a node somewhere that let me pick up a couple of percentage points of base resistances so I could free up a few affixes. Anything that doesn't have a resistance affix or two on gear basically goes in the trash.

I don't know how many times I've used a regal or a few exalts on a ring and gotten trash like mana, elemental damage, or just shitty rolls. Kind of an unpleasant part of the experience to be honest.

Its one reason I kind of prefer dungeon master style games with hand picked loot in a specific location with a curated progression curve instead of this RNG setup. It makes for a more graceful progression curve and consistent difficulty as a designer intended instead of this wild west auction house metagamer economy stuff. What's sad is, if I actually decided to trade, I could probably break the difficulty curve in the opposite direction. What a mess.

 

[abija]

Don't forget 1 support limit, if you want to mix it up using 2 similar skills, fuck you.

 

[ArchAngel]

Playing sorceress from the start (Act 1) is brutal. Even spark plus firewall combo does not do good damage. Some boss battles that I won fairly easy with Witch even with super clunky and fast dying minions with this character were much harder. Even when I win it is barely.
It is fun lol.
At least enemies are slower than in end game and even if I cannot kill them in few seconds it feels better.

 

[blessed king of longing]

Don't forget 1 support limit, if you want to mix it up using 2 similar skills, fuck you.

i was kinda surprised they hit us with that, at least gemling merc gets to reuse two of each

 

[tritosine2k]

Ackshuually Damage control on :
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3635574/page/2

The way armour works is pretty much the same as in PoE 1.

Unfortunately, PoE 2 does not have the multiple defensive layers that PoE 1 has to supplement the shortcomings of armour.

TLDR; Armour won't help against big lightning hits so Doryani's isn't really viable on anyone that isn't infernalist (due to flat conversion reduction from ascendancy).

20% of Lightning Damage taken as Fire Damage

Foot the bill + Protect dumpsterfire

 

[TedNugent]

Converting elemental to armour sure is a brainlet move.

Is there anything that can:
Bypass resists consistently
Ignore resists

Apart from equipping that piece of shit chest on yourself?

Resists, unless they have a specific % of bypass, AFAIK, apply across the board unlike every other damage avoidance or mitigation by default and therefore have increasing returns up to hard cap.

Of course, they could easily make resists subject to the same penalty as armor, and make big hits simply ignore your resists. That would sure be fun...

You'd have a great time playing like this poor sap that built around that chest piece learned. Working as intended. Way to self nerf.

 

[tritosine2k]

Once upon a time it was quite good you didn't have to pull up 3+1(chaos) resists but 2+1.
And provided equivalent of extra 4-5-6 support gem because ele penetration.
There used to be talisman for total or partial lightning conversion (so armour wasn't a default a choice).
This stuff not working as it supposed to be is like a Kalandra league flop on its own.

 

[ArchAngel]

Haha, game just dropped me +3 spell levels, % spell damage and extra damage as cold freezing shards staff mid way into Act 2. I respeced from lightning to cold and now I freeze stuff and blow them up with cold snap. Even bosses get frozen in 5-10 hits now. This SSF run is now going to go better than if I traded :D
Also had an early 15% movespeed boots drop (back in Act 1).

 

[Matador]

Ackshuually Damage control on :
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3635574/page/2

The way armour works is pretty much the same as in PoE 1.

Unfortunately, PoE 2 does not have the multiple defensive layers that PoE 1 has to supplement the shortcomings of armour.

TLDR; Armour won't help against big lightning hits so Doryani's isn't really viable on anyone that isn't infernalist (due to flat conversion reduction from ascendancy).

20% of Lightning Damage taken as Fire Damage

Foot the bill + Protect dumpsterfire

What a shitshow. The best way they could manage to "fix armor" in PoE1 is to let you convert physical damage to elemental because resistances actually work?

And now they have even more incentives to fuck armor so people don´t trivialize their Souls like bosses and campaign encounters, which are in fact well designed. But energy shield is broken good probably because some dev like his witch, but maybe they will also nerf energy shield because

This genre is doomed, the power gap between lvl 1 character and endgame one is too wide to have elegant design solutions. In Dark Souls a level 1 with bad gear can beat the last boss with patience and skill, but it´s also very hard to make a character that trivialize the boss completely. Here is mathematically impossible. I don´t know how they are going to fix incompatible systems in their game.

Now they can go Blizzard way with level scaling so the action gameplay is not completely braindead but making buildcrafting less important, or let the builds show their power without restraint and having braindead action.

 

[abija]

Their bosses are well designed but trade or some lucky drop allows bypassing most mechanics. In which case... does it even matter? Does it matter they have such an impressive diversity of enemies when they just get erased?

Slowing down the game meant allowing some actual combat, ttk > 0. They didn't change anything about that, just made everyone slow until late parts of the game so you have mindnumbing gameplay at slower pace...

 

[ArchAngel]

You guys are needlesly negative. Wait until release version for that. First lets see what they plan to do about the problems.
Lets see if that leak from developer was true and they just give up with their current lead going away or if they put more effort into the game.
For 30$ I could live playing the 6 acts with 6 to 12 different characters once and forget about it. Hopefully they make acts 4-6 way harder than current Cruel is.

 

[Matador]

You guys are needlesly negative. Wait until release version for that. First lets see what they plan to do about the problems.
Lets see if that leak from developer was true and they just give with their current lead going away or if they put more effort into the game.
For 30$ I could live playing the 6 acts with 6 to 12 different characters once and forget about it. Hopefully they make acts 4-6 way harder than current Cruel is.

I didn´t meant to be too negative. If I didn´t care for the game I wouldn't be here. I think the game has great aspects, it has great potential and had fun playing the campaign.

It would be a shame that they don´t fix those gross problems.

 

[tritosine2k]

Physical as element is for hc trade league and minion is for checkbox feature.

2022. aug. 23. — Ghazzy pointed out that GGG has been silently making undocumented changes to minion builds every year for the past 8 years he has played

These guys just didn't play starcraft and it's getting glaringly obvious.

 

[TedNugent]

You guys are needlesly negative. Wait until release version for that. First lets see what they plan to do about the problems.
Lets see if that leak from developer was true and they just give up with their current lead going away or if they put more effort into the game.
For 30$ I could live playing the 6 acts with 6 to 12 different characters once and forget about it. Hopefully they make acts 4-6 way harder than current Cruel is.

Its not an early access problem, it's a few deeply embedded design problems. In fact, you can actually see where they spent their time building bedrock systems and baking them into the underpinning. Tweaks before release or balance changes are one thing, but systems likely won't change without mountains moving, especially with half the content literally unfinished (classes, weapons, skills, gems, acts 3-6, endgame, etc).

The systems are what they are and likely won't see radical improvised changes, especially as they're working on introducing half a dozen classes and ascendancies into the game while its actively being played.

They'll be spending the overwhelming percentage of their development time in implementing the missing content. Anything else will probably be balance tweaks and bug fixes

 

[Israfael]

Wait until release version for that.

Currently they are trying to mate an adder to an udder, as we say here. They say that they want to slow down the gameplay and make it more 'thoughtful' and at the same time they keep POE1-like economy and encounter design philosophy that literally forces you to clear the maps as fast as possible to keep up with the trade treadmill. So, if you want to play slow in non-SSF environment, you are actively punished by both the economy part of the game (because you'll stay forever poor unless you get T0 unique dropped somehow) as well as pure gaming oriented aspects of it (scarcity of loot at low tiers of maps, uber-strong rarity scaling which just makes the gap between the apex players and the others grow faster and faster). Also, if they actually want PoE2 to be 'isometric soulslike', they've misread Fromsoft games, in which death is not an instrument to punish the player, but just a reset switch on a puzzle. Here even paid streamer/nolifers complain that the one death portal thing is just not conducive to learning, imagine spending dozens of hours to farm the shards for the uber boss and then die to it immediately as you have no idea about mechanics. This alone pushes the community towards zhp oneshot bossing builds which guarantee that you won't die to the unknown mechanics.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

It's the schizo development cycle that they've always had, expecting something new from a non-learning animal etc, etc...

 

[ArchAngel]

In my leveling frost sorceress I've learned that frost wall is OP boss killing skill. I do not see this skill surving the banhammer in its current state. All you have to do is debuff boss cold res and then spam frost wall (with cascade support) on top of it until they go frozen, then attack some more until frost goes away and then continue spamming frost wall until the boss dies. Larger the boss, it dies faster. I killed Act 3 boss in like 20s lol (it would be faster if he didn't have phases). The trick is that bosses automatically break wall pieces as they move and each little piece then explodes and does good damage.
Build is bad for clearing but good for bossing

 

[tritosine2k]

instrument to punish the player, but just a reset switch on a puzzle.

Spawnfest left& right
Call a spade a spade

Meanwhile I lost 15 div on AG for fun. Wildwood + expedition then on lag+reflect map. When was the last time you lost gear.
At least lvl100 guys that get "voided" do it.

 

[Israfael]

Meanwhile I lost 15 div on AG for fun. Wildwood + expedition then on lag+reflect map. When was the last time you lost gear.

No idea, I play SSF, not some pussy trade mode. I've lost three or four AGs with doppelgangers and some other stuff, you calculate how much was that worth. Anyways, this fear of loss is actually what drives people to 1HKO builds that guarantee that your time/currency investment won't be lost (not that ubers drop anything useful, I think i've killed each like 20 times this long league and I've got nothing apart from ashes and apostate, both of which I don't need)

 

[tritosine2k]

If you'd lose gear rather often maybe it'd make you revisit T12-14 and other than T0 uniques but the game is deliberately a hoarder's delight, whether you are on trade or not. Besides RNG craft biases for trade too, juice too etc.

 

[Zeriel]

I view what players are doing with ES as a kind of loophole where the developers forgot to close, which was exacerbated by bad itemization.

It might as well be the VISION, who knows, but it's definitely not freeform gameplay that POE1 provides, where you can be both a zhp zoom-zoom character or uber tank that is essentially unkillable by almost every attack (i.e. my https://pobb.in/ZtpEcuNOb5k2 latest SSF character). It was one of the biggest allures of PoE1 as compared to D3 or some other games - 'play as you want instead of play as we want'. Also, the trade will always push the community towards zoom-zoom, "press one button, whole screen dies" builds because they allow you to farm the maximum amount of currency / gear (and in poe2 this is compounded by the fact how rarity works atm).

Its a bit tricky because high percentage reduction actually gets increasing returns from a lot of damage, and you get higher returns the closer you are to hardcap

I'd say they just mindlessly copied the old poe1 formula without taking into account that you have more% aura in poe1 (which was nerfed recently) and the other defensive layers that are dependant or tied to armour (molten armour, aegis procs or other things).

They did the same thing in PoE 1. Life sucked, ES was OP. It took them like 6~ years to finally fix it. And they didn't do so by buffing life, for the most part. In fact, things like original Kaom's were nerfed for giving too much life.

I think they just like it; like all their dumb design decisions that keep re-emerging despite them making a big fuss about "learning" and "fixing" them. On-death explosions, volatiles, melee being garbage, etc.

 

[ArchAngel]

I view what players are doing with ES as a kind of loophole where the developers forgot to close, which was exacerbated by bad itemization.

It might as well be the VISION, who knows, but it's definitely not freeform gameplay that POE1 provides, where you can be both a zhp zoom-zoom character or uber tank that is essentially unkillable by almost every attack (i.e. my https://pobb.in/ZtpEcuNOb5k2 latest SSF character). It was one of the biggest allures of PoE1 as compared to D3 or some other games - 'play as you want instead of play as we want'. Also, the trade will always push the community towards zoom-zoom, "press one button, whole screen dies" builds because they allow you to farm the maximum amount of currency / gear (and in poe2 this is compounded by the fact how rarity works atm).

Its a bit tricky because high percentage reduction actually gets increasing returns from a lot of damage, and you get higher returns the closer you are to hardcap

I'd say they just mindlessly copied the old poe1 formula without taking into account that you have more% aura in poe1 (which was nerfed recently) and the other defensive layers that are dependant or tied to armour (molten armour, aegis procs or other things).

They did the same thing in PoE 1. Life sucked, ES was OP. It took them like 6~ years to finally fix it. And they didn't do so by buffing life, for the most part. In fact, things like original Kaom's were nerfed for giving too much life.

I think they just like it; like all their dumb design decisions that keep re-emerging despite them making a big fuss about "learning" and "fixing" them. On-death explosions, volatiles, melee being garbage, etc.

Melee isn't garbage, monk invoker is one of the 3 top characters. It is just warrior mace skills that suck.

 

[abija]

You'd hate your life playing monk as actual melee... War isn't melee either if you want to clear even remotely decently. They didn't improve shit. If they put the new graphics in PoE1 we would have a 1000x better game atm.