Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[ArchAngel]

Am I only one that don't like this change. I would have prefered a global life buff instead and a minor ES nerf. Life builds are currently not fun to play. Average life character will have up to 5k life, random deaths with that shit is way too high.
Only VP nerf is really good. People with godlike damage depending only on instant ES leach need to go. And unlike life builds their energy shield still regenerates on its own.

For me I think I will still go CI + ZO.

 

[Hyperion]

Vaal Pact needs to be removed from the tree altogether. Instant leech is too strong to be so readily available. Should be locked behind an item like Acuities, or another item with a MAJOR downside. Ghost Reaver needed a nerf for the strength it provided, which was increased exponentially when combined with VP. It's really the only Keystone that adds a significant level of power that came with no downside for CI builds. ES needed more than just a minor nerf because of how trivial it made the entire endgame. It needed to be slashed down on multiple levels. Did they cut it down too much? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do know buffing things up to the strength of something else that's overpowered is a shitty M.O. to live by exemplified by something like WoW. Or even the last 2 years of PoE. The fact GGG saw this happening and had the balls to take action makes me respect them a bit again, even if it did take too long. I only hope they don't cave to the ONSLAUGHT of crying that's going to come Day 1 Hour 0 of the Beta.

I doubt we'll ever go back to the speed of the game when Fellshrine runs were endgame farming, but this is certainly a step in the right direction. Cooldowns (with the addition of larger range) being added to movement skills should be next on the agenda. Blink Arrow should be the norm rather than the exception - they should be used for tactical maneuvers during lab runs, boss fights, or crafty terrain traversal, not plowing through content at quadruple the normal run speed.

 

[deama]

I just read the ES changes.
About the decreasing ES on items part, is this going to also apply to shields? So all items? Or just chests/boots/hands/helmet?

EDIT: Also, how will this effect unique chests?

 

[Quatlo]

(...)

Cooldowns (...)

No fuck no, we have way too many cooldowns as it is, cooldowns have no place in hack and slash games, they are pure fucking cancer that slows the game without any actual reason.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Blaine]

Wait, no one posted this yet?

In any event I pulled my salt wheelbarrow up to /r/pathofexile and haven't yet been disappointed.

The dead league and 3.0 changes coming have killed my interest in playing until it actually drops. No sense in planning out more builds that will be outdated in a month or two anyway.

 

[Quatlo]

>15k ES instead of 20k ES
>NURFD INTO TEH GRUUUND

Reddit fucking never disappoints. Why are you frequenting that crappy site in the first place man?

 

[Blaine]

Reddit fucking never disappoints. Why are you frequenting that crappy site in the first place man?

Where else am I going to get my salt supply and saved Twitch excerpts of streamers dying for really stupid reasons?

 

[ArchAngel]

>15k ES instead of 20k ES
>NURFD INTO TEH GRUUUND

Reddit fucking never disappoints. Why are you frequenting that crappy site in the first place man?

20k ES is for some builds with very expensive gear. Those are at best 1% of the players. But achieving 10k now will be hard. My 11K ES guy will now drop to 7.5k ES if their 33% nerf is correct. Fuck that. That is already within random oneshots* territory.
And I was able to play some cheaper 7k ES builds for a while in the past, those will drop to less than 5K now making those builds beyond useless (and they were already not viable as life builds).
All this is going to do is make everyone want better gear than now making most builds too expensive and unreachable to standard players.
Unless they nerf monster damage in end game this is going to kill their game.
But lets see the beta, I will be keeping a close eye on how this progresses, and I will not waste my time anymore with this game if I don't like what I see by the time 3.0 hits.

*what I mean you can get ganged by enemies and die within a second. Usually a combination of stun or shock or onslaught + enemies. Or some boss crits you.

 

[Jason Liang]

Well I had a busy day:

1. Sold my Anima Stone for 235 c (27 c profit)
2. Bought Primordial Might for 180 c, Harmony for 16 c and Eminence for 1 c to make another Anima Stone
3. Bought a Primordial Might off Trade channel for 1 ex (90 c + 10 vaal)
4. Sealed and sold Twice Enchanted for 10 c
5. Bought 3 Carnal Armors with T1/T2 +ES rolls, one with +123% ES/EV (600 EV/570 ES) to wear when my witch gets to lvl 71, the other two to Exalt later (One with +300 EV, the other with +99% ES/EV, both still missing 1 prefix) for 3 c and 2 fuses
6. Found an Ancient Reliquary Key in Dried Lake. This would be my second but my first got rollbacked.
7. Vaaled my Prism Guardian, hoping to get Grace skill implicit. Got +1 skill instead (currently priced at 5 ex)
8. Sold 10 belts for 2 c

Since there are 2 more months of league and I'm done now with the 6L Sire of Shards, if anyone wants to play around with it I can leave it in the guild stash (just don't sell it, I'd like it back after league ends). And if anyone wants the +1 Prism Guardian just let me know.

I'm thinking that the hybrid ES chests will be better deals right now than Regalias. You can get chests with 2 near perfect prefixes that should be worth 50 c for 1-5 c, and after the nerf they should be affected less than Regalias.

 

[Blaine]

20k ES is for some builds with very expensive gear. Those are at best 1% of the players. But achieving 10k now will be hard. My 11K ES guy will now drop to 7.5k ES if their 33% nerf is correct. Fuck that. That is already within random oneshots* territory.
And I was able to play some cheaper 7k ES builds for a while in the past, those will drop to less than 5K now making those builds beyond useless (and they were already not viable as life builds).
All this is going to do is make everyone want better gear than now making most builds too expensive and unreachable to standard players.
Unless they nerf monster damage in end game this is going to kill their game.
But lets see the beta, I will be keeping a close eye on how this progresses, and I will not waste my time anymore with this game if I don't like what I see by the time 3.0 hits.

*what I mean you can get ganged by enemies and die within a second. Usually a combination of stun or shock or onslaught + enemies. Or some boss crits you.

It's a hard thing to balance, I suppose.

Players can and will develop strong builds incorporating very good (but not amazing/perfect) gear, and if these builds can avoid death pretty much all of the time in the endgame, then the game becomes a bit of a joke... which it sort of already was. Effortless speed-clearing of maps, near-instantaneous defeats of Uber Izaro and other bosses, et cetera were pretty damned common to see.

You might be thinking, yeah, but those are often veterans and experts, except for the dudes who just copy-paste meta builds. Thing is, GGG appears to balance the game around min-maxing veterans and experts, which means that random cheesy deaths out of nowhere are a lot more common for people who aren't yet min-maxing veterans.

There are so many enemies and particle effects on the screen in maps that even with a 144Hz monitor and G-Sync, I still don't really know what's going on half the time. I don't mind dying, but I want to know what happened so that I can learn from it. Occasionally I'll be completely out of range and sight of any enemies, no particle effects on the screen, and my health will just vanish. Probably it's some status effect with no obvious visual tell (not bleeding; I'm on top of that shit), but when am I supposed to hover over the status effect bar, which is already full of buff and summon icons, looking for details? When I'm feverishly flame dashing away from a huge group of enemies? After I've died and the icon has disappeared?

I hope they do some overall tweaking to the way in which difficulty is implemented. Even as a scrub, it's just plowing through until instadeath occurs because GGG needs spike damage instadeaths because otherwise veterans would never die.

 

[ArchAngel]

What they should have done is just nerfed top modifiers for ES gear, and left low and middle ones intact. It would let average players still be able to get to decent ES values while nerfing the crazy 15k + ES builds.

 

[T. Reich]

Fuck the "balance". We need fresh meta. If that requires dead ES, so be it. Won't be the first time in PoE's history, won't be the last (hopefully).

 

[Zdzisiu]

What they should have done is just nerfed top modifiers for ES gear, and left low and middle ones intact. It would let average players still be able to get to decent ES values while nerfing the crazy 15k + ES builds.

Just like this?

From manifesto:

"All local Energy Shield modifiers on items, as well as the base Energy Shield of items, have been reduced at higher levels. Very low-level items will see a slight increase or no change, scaling up to a 33% reduction at the highest tier of modifiers."

 

[SirSingAlot]

interesting aspect is that they dont actually buff life that much.
like yeah, you can roll hybrid + regular life mods on certain armour pieces, which will help, but if you need res on your gear as well, that will require more lucky rolls.

life builds wont be nearly as OP as ES is now, so this may slow down the clear speed meta at the same time and make high end content more difficult in general, which i like.
they just hit 2 birds with one stone

 

[ArchAngel]

What they should have done is just nerfed top modifiers for ES gear, and left low and middle ones intact. It would let average players still be able to get to decent ES values while nerfing the crazy 15k + ES builds.

Just like this?

From manifesto:

"All local Energy Shield modifiers on items, as well as the base Energy Shield of items, have been reduced at higher levels. Very low-level items will see a slight increase or no change, scaling up to a 33% reduction at the highest tier of modifiers."

Still means shit when even mid level mods are going to be nerfed a lot. And they are nerfing unique ES items as well and those usually work with lower base ES but better %ES modifiers. And globally it is being nerfed with removal of that 15% more passive and big reduction in mastercrafting mods. That affects low level and medium level item mods as well.

 

[Blaine]

Also, for caster builds that utilize ES in the "intentional" or "classical" way (i.e. with ES being additional "caster-themed" survivability on top of life, in the same way that armor is "warrior-themed" and dodge is "rogue-themed"), survivability will simply be reduced. My Firestorm build is like that. I have genuinely good (but not perfect) endgame gear on my character, and I'm still shy of 10k life/ES, because about 2/3 of that total is life. If they're just chopping ES off of gear, that character would simply lose 1,000 "hit points" because some people have min-maxed 15,000+ pure ES builds.

So, their solution to pure ES builds being hugely overpowered will also be a blow to perfectly reasonable hybrid life/ES builds.

Then again, who knows what other changes 3.0 will bring? Supposedly the gods shit will have an effect on progression.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Blaine]

let it gooooo

Fuck off, dude. It's the one and only time I've directly touched on the ES nerf, and my point is indisputable: Their proposed changes will drastically reduce ES across the board in the endgame, which will include completely non-overpowered builds that utilize only a few thousand ES. My conclusion is simply that I hope there are other changes in the pipeline to compensate for that in some way.

All of my experience with modern PoE comes from this league. I'm new to it all, and now I have to relearn everything (both economically and in terms of character building) because they're going to be rocking the boat in a big way. Pardon me for wanting to discuss it a little bit.

I personally approve of the meta ES shit getting the bat, because it allowed for facerolling the endgame, but PoE already relies on cheesy spike instadeaths for difficulty and I really don't want to see that get even cheesier than it already is for the average Joe.

 

[SirSingAlot]

i think ggg doesnt want the endgame to be a cakewalk anymore.
double dipping got the axe, ES got gutted for good.
that should at least make certain encounters and/or clearspeed in general slow down.

i like it.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Saark]

I hope there are other changes in the pipeline to compensate for that in some way.

There is. It's called the pantheon system. People already forgot about it since it was revealed quite some time ago, but you gotta remember that the pantheon-system is ENTIRELY defense focused. As stated in the manifesto there will also be a new life+es mod for es base armour types.

My only thoughts on the life/es changes are:
-good, shaking things up
-getting lowlife to work will be even harder (meaning more expensive) than it already is

 

[Blaine]

I hope there are other changes in the pipeline to compensate for that in some way.

There is. It's called the pantheon system. People already forgot about it since it was revealed quite some time ago, but you gotta remember that the pantheon-system is ENTIRELY defense focused.

Yes, I already mentioned that. I'm not sure how anyone could forget, since the big deity mural is a pretty significant part of the previews.

However, if these new defensive mechanics bolster both life-based builds and hybrid ES/life builds significantly, how will they avoid potentially "un-nerfing" the ES nerf? It's too early to tell.

 

[deama]

They should also add in a couple more passive point books to the 10th act right? Or at least 1?

 

[Saark]

However, if these new defensive mechanics bolster both life-based builds and hybrid ES/life builds significantly, how will they avoid potentially "un-nerfing" the ES nerf? It's too early to tell.

Thats what generally happens when people look at nerfs/buffs in a vaccuum, there's so much shit coming/getting changed in 3.0 that we just have to wait and see.