Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[T. Reich]

Dark pact zerker with vp kappa.

 

[Saark]

Turmoil is all fun and games until someone shoots 50 frostbolts into Graveblood and PKs the remaining 3 people on his team after 25hours of non-stop play.

 

[Zdzisiu]

New expansion details:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2030521

4 new active gems, 6 new supports, 32 new maps.

War between the Shaper and The Elder.

Some corruption like shit on the Atlas.

New Shaper/Elder rare items with unusual modifies.

Abyss league. Some fucking mole people popping from the underground or some shit. Get their jewels while they are hot!

 

[Cyberarmy]

These guys need to be stopped!

 

[Gerrard]

Where were you when Vaal Pact was kill?

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[ArchAngel]

I plan to play only one character to try out new Lightning Tendrils. Probably a crit Inqusitor that will be using CI and ES regeneration as a defense mechanic.

 

[Hyperion]

 

[Saark]

Re-organized atlas.

 

[Hyperion]

Hope they shuffle the Atlas every League, tbh. I can already see shaped Underground Sea and Jungle Valley being the common ones.

 

[SirSingAlot]

Breach 2.0 league....that might be tempting to play this league after Garbinger

 

[T. Reich]

Breach 2.0 league....that might be tempting to play this league after Garbinger

Superficially (especially combat-wise), the basic Breach mechanics are not at all different from Harbinger, or Perandus, or Ambush, or Domination.
You come upon a place where a bunch of moderately-strong (in average) mobs is concentrated (or will be once you trigger an event). Subsequently, you utilise an aoe damaging skill to destroy this pack of mobs to claim rewards.
The differences are in:
1) whether you specifically need to start an encounter (Amb, Bre), or it's already there (Dom, Per, Har).
2) whether mobs appear all at the same time (Dom, Amb), or they appear gradually (Bre, Har), or something in between (Per - the starting pack is there, but the mobs will respawn until the necessary kill count is reached, or you kill a unique guardian if they had been there).
3) amount of loot granted by the encounter, and all the relative ratios connected to that (risk-to-reward and reward-to-time-spent in particular).
4) The additional difference is also in the additional league content that can be gotten out of encounters (the fat man and his manor, beachhead, breachlord domains), or lack thereof (Amb, Dom).

As such, usually claims pertaining to this or that league being "better" or "worse" compared to others of its type are subject to one's tastes and meta at the time of the league - basically unsubstantiated taste preferences.

Given, that we know next to nothing about the Abyss league mechanics apart from "packs of monsters will appear from a small designated area", I'd reserve my judgement until the actual release. Because so far, the league sounds like a glorified

 

[Ismaul]

A game about killing monsters has a mechanic where monsters appear for you to kill? It's an outrage! An absolute failure of the imagination!

 

[T. Reich]

Your point being?

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Ismaul]

Your point being?

That I agree with you.

It's obvious that every league meant to challenge players will involve some form of extra monster packs appearing in a certain way, with incentives to interact with them such as exclusive drops. The rest is down to quaity of execution and player preference.

The criticism of it being samey is unwarranted, as it attacks the core gameplay for what it is rather than its execution, and would therefore be valid for the whole game. It's like saying that GGG has no imagination for putting a boss at the end of a new act / map. It's like being bewildered that a new act has mobs to kill rather being a 2D side-scroller. Hence, my sarcastic comment.

 

[Hyperion]

for change id rather have heroes spawn, like in invasion.
Mob are getting repetitive as you stated

It's getting repetitive because, unlike Grim Dawn or pre-2.0 PoE, player damage quickly outscales enemy life, and they pose little to no threat. Compare that to things like Dranghoul Enforcers, Flesh Hulks, or Chthonic Harbingers from GD, which can very easily chunk your ass, and even kill you with their on death explosion (harbingers). Remember the butthurt caused by pre-nerf Devourers, and Skeletal Spark Mages? Remember when certain builds couldn't kill Xandro because of his STUPID life regen when he was critical? Remember the Summoner cunt's exploding minions that absolutely obliterated you if you were close? Or when Vickas, and Natalie Portman could shotgun you with their projectiles? Even the Shield Charging, Viper Strike broad was deadly if got 3 or more stacks on you. The only Exiles who pose any threat whatsoever are Ultima Thule (guy with Shaper-themed Frostbolt), and the Kinetic Blast bitch, and their heads are probably next on the chopping block since they killed a streamer once or twice.

GGG has been listening to a lot of player feedback, and is slowly making changes to address some of them. If they do too much at once, they have another hissyfit storm like when they nerfed CoC, or Charges. They shook up the Atlas because of the complaints of Shaped Strand meta, people bitched about single target melee skills, (hopefully) Ancestral Call will do something about that. After 3.0 came out, people threw a shitstorm about the cartoony, out of place armor graphics from the Supporter Packs. Most of them have been toned down considerably, especially the light / cloth armor styles. They complained about the loot system, said there's no point in ID'ing 95% of rares - introduced an entire expansion revolved around identifying rares again. They complained about Breach being the pinnacle of the series, being locked behind Zana 8 is bullshit - their next league is basically Breach 2.0. Though I will say, Abyss looks a lot better than the purple diarrhea of Breach. Gigantic hole in the ground with enemies crawling out? Sure!

All I can say is, post on their forums or sub-reddit with some carefully thought out explanation or post and hope it starts to gain traction about the lack of danger from enemy packs and maybe they'll do something if it stirs up enough discussion. Right now, my main complaint isn't that map bosses have too much life, but there's too much disparity between the boss and regular enemies. I'm tired of clearing maps in 2 minutes and hoping for some random big drop. There's grinding, and then there's mindless grinding, and that isn't what I fell in love with in 2012 after D3 bent us over and fucked us all in the ass.

Hopefully during 3.1 the lemmings FINALLY catch on and start clamoring for a passive tree rebuild because it's the most stale part of the game right now. No major shakeups since 2.0 is ridiculous. Unfortunately, due to the mental disorders of its current playerbase, they can never make changes quickly enough that the game doesn't become boring horseshit if you follow the "meta." Alas, the autism train has no brakes for these people, and it has derailed many moons ago.

 

[T. Reich]

It's not to say that GGG haven't tried different approaches, even if they were unremarkable or plain badly implemented in hindsight:
1) Boss-type enemy injection - Anarchy, Invasion, Warbands, partially Essence, potentially Torment and Beyond.
The biggest criticism of this type of leagues came from either scrubs who couldn't pass the gear checks during these encounters, as well as from "efficiency" people who often opted to skip the encounters for messing up their loot+exp/hr ratios. The main issue with these leagues is always - "how do we make the league's feature (boss-grade encounters) ubiqutous yet attractive enough to warrant player's interaction with them?"
2) Same game, but harder - Onslaught, Nemesis, Bloodlines.
No wonder all of these were HC-only leagues. No extra reward, only extra challenge. This type of league will probably never happen again, because leagues are supposed to appeal to the largest portion of the player base, and the modern PoE player base is mostly casualfags+, who fancy themselves "hardcore" for playing PoE (somewhat warranted), yet loathe to take on extra challenge without being commesurately rewarded.
3) Hunting for special gear - Essence, Talisman.
It's pretty damn hard to make a league "work" purely on this principle. Essence did things right by not being a purely this type of league - it mixed things up with potentially boss-level encounters. It wasn't enough, though. Talisman's pitfalls were horrible RNG, excessive grindiness, and fairly limited appeal overall, as well as lack of overall challenge (talisman mobs and bosses were all pushovers).
4) Modifying the game world rules to force or enable certain player behavior - Prophecy, Warbands, Tempest, Torment, Beyond, Rampage.
Prophecy sought to introduce a wide variety of "quests" and special encounters. I think its only serious drawback was being rough and unpolished. This game feature has a LOT of potential still, but it has to be carefully balanced to make more prophecies interesting to do at all stages of the game, and making those prophecies worthwhile to do, and making them not break the flow of the game. I really hope GGG will eventually find time and effort to give Prophecy a proper balancing, I really loved the concept.
Warbands and Tempest had an interesting feature of enabling the players themselves to influence the odds of certain things appearing. The problem was that the warband mobs were too tanky and rare, and that the unique rewards were either too rare, or plain hidden among trash. Frankly, the upcoming expansion's theme is very reminiscemt of Warbands. In hindsight, Tempest was also sort of a test run for cartographer's sextants, except with less player control.
Torment was supposed to have players "herd" the ghosts for increasing challenge and rewards, but the ghosts' atrocious AI and criminally low rate of spawning made for one of the weakest leagues overall.
Rampage was simply giving players a "turbo" button. It's just plain not enough. No extra challenge, no special rewards, just an extra incentive to go zoomzoom. The league had to have something else.
Beyond, IMO, was the best of the leagues to date. It gave players both the added challenge (tough beyond mobs, including boss-tier encounters) and rewards (dat exp and drop density potential). It was both mandatory in nature (it was a HC league after all), and yet it offered means to voluntarily scale the density of the feature - herding mobs into the "killing fields" to increase the likelyhood of Beyond spawns, and in later expansions also insanity known as double/triple-beyond, which could be further overdriven by rolling+running high pack size maps and/or adding sextants.

And then there was Legacy, but it was basically a "craft your own Frankenstein's monster league in a bottle", and it was not too well implemented, though it was definitely the most feature-dense league.
I suppose, we can also remember the Darkshrine mini-league (would go into group #3), but I considered it a travesty.

 

[Ismaul]

Hopefully during 3.1 the lemmings FINALLY catch on and start clamoring for a passive tree rebuild because it's the most stale part of the game right now. No major shakeups since 2.0 is ridiculous.

Vaal Pact just got nerfed and replaced near the leech wheel in the duelist area. It's no longer instant leech, but a x2 multiplier. Could change a lot, might even be combined with a slight nerf on reflect.

Sure it's not a passive tree shakeup. I don't know if GGG wants to do one, the current one has seen much iteration and it wouldn't be right just to trash it, with the balance problems that would come with a move like that. Right now they've prefered adding to it, as we've seen with the Ascendencies and the Pantheon system (and you could argue that jewels are the same). They might prefer continuing in that direction. They might eventually think that it is necessary to change it up when it becomes seen as stale by players, but I don't expect them to do it before. We might even see some iterative work on what's already there first, such as a new Ascendency per class, or an expansion that shakes up the Pantheon system as some story event interacts with the gods.

 

[ArchAngel]

Hopefully during 3.1 the lemmings FINALLY catch on and start clamoring for a passive tree rebuild because it's the most stale part of the game right now. No major shakeups since 2.0 is ridiculous.

Vaal Pact just got nerfed and replaced near the leech wheel in the duelist area. It's no longer instant leech, but a x2 multiplier. Could change a lot, might even be combined with a slight nerf on reflect.

That sounds even better for the self cast DP Berserker I made in PoB during 3.0 that focused mostly on high life and didn't go crit so he went towards Vaal Pact through Marauder and Duelist parts of the tree instead of through Templar and Witch like most versions did. Unless they do a big nerf on DP and/or Berserker this build might be even more powerful.

 

[Ismaul]

Unless they do a big nerf on DP and/or Berserker this build might be even more powerful.

Given that was played the most last league, one might expect it.

 

[SirSingAlot]

Acuity/legacy Vinktars get nerfed or price spike as they will be the only insta leech sources after VP gets changed?

 

[Hyperion]

Berserker gets nerfed, Bow Slayer becomes the meta is all. Not that big of a change since projectiles are already insane.

 

[ArchAngel]

Unless they do a big nerf on DP and/or Berserker this build might be even more powerful.

Given that was played the most last league, one might expect it.

Well that Vaal Pact nerf is already a big nerf for a Berserker.

 

[Zdzisiu]

I recently respeced one of my standard chars into a Meatballs Cyclone and that shit is ridiculously fun. It like ZOOOOM and fiery balls everywhere, everything dies. And due to the Slayer leech it really hard to kill by anything except stupid boss design that makes the bosses Immortal for some time and you cant leech and die.

The damage of cyclone+shitload of meatballs is also surprisingly good.

Would recommend for anyone looking for mindless fun and roleplaying as a roomba.