Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[T. Reich]

Got the unique tab at the start of the league.
Currently sitting at 423/910 uniques after a month of active play.
Did I get multiples of some, 10+ copies? Absolutely.
But I also got a bunch of rarer stuff, most of which I actually transferred to trade league and sold, because I'm a dirty Perandus Jew.
Most of the stuff I don't own are:
* league only uniques that you can't get easily in SSF, or at all, unless you play standard.
* fated versions youcan get via prophecies - some of these are pretty rare.
* boss-specific drops. Farmable Iif I cared about that sort of thing.
* really rare good unique drops.

 

[Dwemer Puzzle Box]

Holy fucking shit, as much as I love this league (at least compared to Synthesis), I think I'll break my laptop in half quite soon. I died over 10 times in one evening because of sudden lag spikes when Syndicate tried to invade my ass.

SURPRISE TEST OF LATENCY, EXILE



And honestly, the Syndicate stuff feels like the weakest part of the game right now. Wonder if they'll ever fix it or come up with something that doesn't make it a chore.

 

[T. Reich]

I have managed to minimise the lag troubles with Syndicate by doing/having the following:
1) SSD. If you don't have SSD for POE, you are fucked. Might as well not bother reading further.
2) If you have just started POE and are going to run some maps, better run delve or some master dailies other than Jun. That's beacuse POE keeps loading assets as you play, and the last thing you want to happen is for the game to start loading extra non-Betrayal assets as Betrayal spawns.
3) For the same reason, when you finally go into map that has Betrayal - do not rush it! The game is already preloading assets for the encounter, so you want to give it a bit of time to do that.
4) Watch the minimap! You will notice the Intervention spawn on the minimap before you can visually identify it on the screen. Gives you that extra second to identify them and to start unloading damage. Remember, syndicate mobs have been patched to not attack you for the first second or two after spawning. Use that time to deal as much damage as possible.

I don't think I've ever died to Syndicate this league, or maybe 1-2 times at most.

 

[Reinhardt]

I died to them once on glacier map. They always spawn ambush 2-3 steps from the map start. And for me glacier is the worst offender in case of

That's beacuse POE keeps loading assets as you play, and the last thing you want to happen is for the game to start loading extra non-Betrayal assets as Betrayal spawns.

 

[Gerrard]

Intervention has 99% chance to spawn the moment you click on a monolith or open a breach, I'm sure of it.

 

[Absinthe]

If you're really desperate, you can throw chance orbs at simple robes but that's just pissing in the wind. You'll probably end up with a Thousand Ribbons if you're "lucky".

Chances are usually used to try to craft league-specific uniques or extremely valuable uniques. Tabula Rasa is pretty much a waste of chance orbs. You'd be better off maxing item rarity and trying to craft Loreweave.

 

[T. Reich]

After playing for 2 months in SSF with my lightnnig trapper, I've accumulated enough noice melee gear, so I figured I'd give cyclone a spin (pun intended), to see what the fuss is all about.
Went zerker for that insano speed and damage it provides compared to the more vanilla slayer.
Leveled it to maps, geared it up, and... it's meh?

I mean, it's not bad (as far as my PoB tooltip standards are concerned - it's pretty good!), but considering the gear used, I expected more from it.
Then I found out why I'm disappointed - it's the Legion.

You see, with my trapper I can tag and clear most of the legion spawn with little trouble, even in t16 maps. Funnily enough, the limiting factors are my movement speed and trap throwing speed.
With cyclone, I PoB'd fairly higher tooltip deeps than on my lightning trapper, and MUCH higher speed, so I figured I'd see those rares popping like candy and clearing entire Legions in alloted time.

Well, shit. I don't.
In fact, I'd be lucky if I tag one side completely. Getting both sides decently (as in most rares+chests) is out of the question.
Moreover, with trapper those rares popped easily, so I figured they aren't tanky. Oh, was I wrong or what! The legion rares take ages to kill with my cycloner.
And when the time comes to killing the tagged mobs, trapper feels much better again, because it hits and runs, while cyclone needs to go in balls deep.

The new build also allowed me to compare the map bosses vs legion rares.
With lighgtning trapper, I would kill both really quickly, so I never figured their relative power level.
With cyclone, I kill map bosses somewhat slower, and I can't burst-damage as with trapper.
So, the relative tankiness of legion rares really stands out - they are quite often tankier than map bosses! That ain't good.

Talk about perspective.
Now I understand some of the complaints about the Legion mobs.

For comparison - here's the poe.ninja of the trapper. Here's the cyclone.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Well, I came back. Haven't played since like 3.00 I think. Love the new masters. I actually enjoy seeing them, unlike the old ones that you were supposed to grind in parties for 50 hours each league or something, and had retarded mechanics like 'Don't kill this enemy right next to these enemies you need to kill' and 'walk across the map thirty times with slow ass summons following you with bad pathing'. I love the incursion stuff, actually kinda butthurt I missed that league now, must have been awesome having that shit on every map. Delve is pretty good too, aside from being very bad for certain builds and balanced around ones made just for it, like the lab is. But it's just a fun set of mechanics anyways, even with flicker yanking me backwards into the darkness half the time. Having the loot splooge out after a bout of fighting is very satisfying in both cases. The syndicate stuff is cool too, I love pretty much everything about it. Einhar is the most boring one but I like the concept, just don't get enough captures to actually use the arena much, and the captures themselves are dull so far. Also, I'll probably end up just selling beasts since crafting your own gear in PoE is about as effective as building your own kitchen appliances irl.

Running a dual wield flicker build. Was originally planning on using impale with Champion, figured the flat phys + hitting 10 times per second was a good combo. But then I was looking for decent weapons at level 60 and found Rebuke of the Vaal, which went from like 300 dps to 850 dps this league. Sure, it's a rainbow shitfest, but who cares when the damage is THAT good. Now I'm thinking I should respec away from impale since the phys isn't that much proportionally (I think it's like 1/3rd of the hit or so with the strength bonus?) and try out the new slayer node that gives you max endurance charges to match frenzy. Getting 9 of both should be pretty doable, and that many endurance charges is pretty much like being immune to phys hits if you have even mediocre armor. Power creep in general is pretty crazy, you can just casually nab blind, onslaught, maim, all charge generation and phasing just through gear now with just rares instead of having to use some gimpy level 36 gloves or something.

The whole 'melee rework' feels fairly underwhelming to me tbh. Yeah, bopping guys on the beach feels better if you have a reasonably fast weapon (and worse if you have something slow and keep canceling you own hits) but in the end the problem with melee is the same: plenty of bosses just literally unavoidably hurt you if you stand near them. Usually with some degen shit on the floor or as an aura, so you can't even rely on fortify, block, evasion, or anything else to stick through it. So you might deal 20% more damage than a ranged build but can only spend 50% as much time attacking. Which isn't just worse for efficiency, but feels boring as fuck.

Worst part of the game is still trading. At least I've gotten my basic mapping gear done now, having to buy a dozen items when the game is done to fill all your resists out and replace your level 30 boots and shit is such a drag, took hours of browsing shit and messaging koreans and 2/3rds don't reply or reply 5 minutes later after you've bought something else. Maybe next league I'll do SSF and stick to it. Will have to play something that doesn't need much gear to get by like anything not melee or ES based. SSF does seem way more viable now with the fossils and shit at least.

Legion as a league seems pretty dull, just another 'pop the monster in a box' league. It's kind of hilarious how many versions of that there are now, and the best one is still the original. Everyone loves seeing a rare or unique strongbox. Activates instantly, you get to mod them if you want, some are actually dangerous (fucking corpse bombs and freeze traps ) and they keep all the loot in one spot. At least he legions are only once per map and give a decent chunk of loot, way better than shit like breach or essence or harbingers.

Is the next league going to be an interesting one? I know they have some kind of pattern with filler leagues to go with big gameplay changes or something, does that mean the next one is gonna be a cool league that adds a new master or something?

 

[Reinhardt]

I doubt it. They are preparing for 4.0.

 

[ArchAngel]

New masters are cool when:
1. It is your first league with them
2. You don't need their recipes for crafting for your build

Lets see what you think about them after two more leagues...

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

There are guys doing the challenge who bough 100s of items and still had dozens of locked recipes remaining, it's silly because the price is plenty enough to gatekeep the most powerful mods the rest are a matter of a few % in either offense or defense or easier gear management.

 

[Damned Registrations]

2. You don't need their recipes for crafting for your build

Like I said, crafting in PoE doesn't work. It's a currency sink. The currency cost of getting specifically what you want is astronomical even with the right recipes, barring the occasional fuckup they patch out in the next league so nobody can have a +3 skill bow for cheap any more.

Besides, still better than

Secondly, the favor gain is just laughable. 80 favor per point won in 1v1. A fixed 3.200 favor per daily done. Meanwhile, it takes a whopping 835.300 favor to reach level 8. Do you know how many days of dailies this is? Fucking 261 days. Nearly a YEAR of doing dailies to get this one guy to level 8. I don't think anyone has managed to get him to max in one league. The amount of points scored in 1v1 equals to 10.441 points to reach level 8 by 1v1'ing alone. This is fucking stupid, like, go ahead and ask the designer behind this if this was a good idea. And to put it even further into perspective: If you do a daily every day in a 3 month league, then you can scrap together 291.000 favor for him. The rest you will have to grind by winning 6.800 points in 1v1 matches. Again, fucking stupid.

If you don't like the new masters I'm pretty sure you're wearing some thick rose tinted glasses.

 

[abija]

Not exactly sure I follow. You say crafting doesn't work then your argument on old masters being shit is that it took forever to get the favor for crafting unlocks?
So basically new masters are great if you ignore crafting unlike old masters who were shit because of crafting?

Meh, I just wish they fucked off with trading and random on random on top of all the random. There's enough complexity in PoE that if they designed a way to plan a build and ssf farm it deterministic in a decent amount of time it would be a great game.

 

[Gerrard]

The unveiling system fucking sucks because there's a bunch of recipes that require items dropped from specific syndicate members.

 

[Damned Registrations]

New masters are great because they're loot pinatas with cool subsystems to tinker with. The old masters sucked because shitty crafting was all they could do and it was insufferable to even unlock that. I'd gladly run a hundred maps in a row with syndicates on them even if it gave no recipes at all. Alva's even better. How on earth can you complain about unlocking a giant map filled with great loot by doing sub missions that are just concentrated monster packs that dump all the loot at your feet, plus getting to customize the map for your build and whatever loot you'd prefer?

Or you can do Tora missions. Remember those? Following a janky quest compass across the map for no reward at all? I remember that shit. Remember checking their inventory each day in case they were selling an empower gem? Oh wow, the good old days.

The unveiling system fucking sucks because there's a bunch of recipes that require items dropped from specific syndicate members.

Oh wow, if only there were a way to farm specific syndicate members by exiling or imprisoning the ones you don't want to see and levelling up the ones you do want to see so they give more loot. That'd be great.

 

[Gerrard]

Yeah, if only that didn't interfere with actually using the syndicate for its rewards. If only they hadn't reduced the amount of syndicate encounters 10 times while also increasing the amount of unveiling xp required 2 times.
Have fun farming the flask mods.

Maybe you will have the member you need in the syndicate, maybe you won't.
Maybe they will appear when you kick someone out, maybe they won't.
Maybe you will get the encounter you want in the map, maybe you won't.
Maybe it will have the member you need, maybe it won't.
Maybe they will drop the item you need, maybe they won't.
Maybe the item will be the right type, maybe it won't.
Maybe it will have the mod you want, maybe it won't.
Maybe you will repeat all this until you fully unlock the mod you wanted, or maybe you'll tell Chris Wilson to fuck off.

 

[Damned Registrations]

So just to be clear, your reason for hating the new masters is that some OP mods that never existed before are rare?

Maybe, I dunno, do something besides autistically farm for one specific mod for one specific item in SSF?

"Ugh, new league sucks, have to farm so hard to get a headhunter, fuck chris wilson for making the game so shit"

 

[T. Reich]

As a player who routinely leveled all masters to max level ever since they got introduced in august 2014, here are my statements on the master revamp:
The new master mission system is much better than the old one - it's more fun, engaging and rewarding.
The new master leveling system is worse than the old one - it actually takes MUCH longer to unlock higher master levels, it's RNG-based (while the old one was deterministic), it rewards much less favour to buy decorations than the old one.
The new crafting mod unlocking system is MUCH worse than the old one - old one was determininstic, VERY easy to unlock the basic crafts, completely independent from the state of your mapping, and you could unlock the top crafts MUCH faster than with the new one.
The new system only got worse after Betrayal league ended.

I've written about these points at length here, and I'm not going to retype all that shit.
Unveiling is super-shit.

 

[abija]

So just to be clear, your reason for hating the new masters is that some OP mods that never existed before are rare?

Maybe, I dunno, do something besides autistically farm for one specific mod for one specific item in SSF?

"Ugh, new league sucks, have to farm so hard to get a headhunter, fuck chris wilson for making the game so shit"

The problem with trading is the same that it was in D3. It's fine for small playerbase, but once it gets to a critical point gear is too easy to get. PoE with trading atm is a joke unless you play hardcore. Not even progressed out of white maps and have enough currency to steamroll most content.
Meanwhile hardcore with their servers and "balancing" is just too frustrating. So yeah, SSF is the only way to actually enjoy some progression which is the main drive behind a game like this.

And this random on top of random and another layer of random just makes it very discouraging to pursue complex builds in ssf while being piss easy if you trade.

 

[SirSingAlot]

crafted myself a HoAg Cyclone maxblock amulet.

 

[SirSingAlot]

crafted myself a HoAg Cyclone maxblock amulet.

also maybe someone can help me brainstorming. so i would like to test The Golden Rule. as i am life and not CI, i cannot handle poison stacks that will. immunity from Pantheon will neglect the effect of The Golden Rule.
looking for a way to just take minimal poison damage if at all while still getting stacks

 

[Damned Registrations]

As a player who routinely leveled all masters to max level ever since they got introduced in august 2014

You're like some sort of alien life form to me. I'd rather swallow broken glass than do 6 of any of the old master missions in a row, let alone all of them, every day until they're capped. I basically did Tora and Haku and I think one other master's daily missions to unlock level 3 or 4 or something, and never touched them in maps. My crafting mods are patchy as fuck now, but I'm certain by the end of my run I'll have access to way more than I ever did purely by dint of actually doing all the missions I find.

The problem with trading is the same that it was in D3. It's fine for small playerbase, but once it gets to a critical point gear is too easy to get. PoE with trading atm is a joke unless you play hardcore. Not even progressed out of white maps and have enough currency to steamroll most content.
Meanwhile hardcore with their servers and "balancing" is just too frustrating. So yeah, SSF is the only way to actually enjoy some progression which is the main drive behind a game like this.

And this random on top of random and another layer of random just makes it very discouraging to pursue complex builds in ssf while being piss easy if you trade.

I can sympathize with this. You can't balance loot drops for both trading and single player at the same time. While I'd enjoy the progression aspect of ssf, it just fucks you right out of 90% of the builds in this game, which rely on very specific gear setups which are cheap to acquire through trade. I find playing off-meta, avoiding guides, and limiting how much I trade to a bare minimum (basically only selling shit worth at least 5 chaos and buying stuff like once a week) helps balance things a bit while still letting me play whatever build I want. In a perfect world they'd make SSF a binding league with way more loot and easier crafting access, but that'd kill their business model.

As for hardcore and the game being balanced around instant death, yeah, I've ranted about that a million times before. I like that delves get reset when you die or disconnect like labs do, I wish more parts of the game had mechanics like that instead of catering to the alt-f4 macro crowd, and if I could find a decent game where you can't pull that bullshit and combat was actually balanced around sustained skill instead of instant full heals on demand, I'd jump ship in an instant. Sadly the only such games I've ever found are korean whale farms.

 

[T. Reich]

As a player who routinely leveled all masters to max level ever since they got introduced in august 2014

You're like some sort of alien life form to me. I'd rather swallow broken glass than do 6 of any of the old master missions in a row, let alone all of them, every day until they're capped. I basically did Tora and Haku and I think one other master's daily missions to unlock level 3 or 4 or something, and never touched them in maps. My crafting mods are patchy as fuck now, but I'm certain by the end of my run I'll have access to way more than I ever did purely by dint of actually doing all the missions I find.

That's like 10-15 minutes tops. For all of them.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Really? Because Elreon alone would be at least 3 minutes just of his fucking timer. You're telling me you're doing each of 36 missions in 20 seconds? I don't buy it.

 

[T. Reich]

Elreon's longest timer is 1,5 minutes (wait for the mobs to spawn, so you can kill them all). If you get the "destroy the relics" mission, it's over in under 10 seconds.
Haku takes around 1 min tops - run towards the ancestor, then back. Sometimes, just back.
Vagan takes 30 sec tops if you're unlucky and got the dummies. Otherwise, it's a 1-5 second affair, depending on the shittiness of your build.
Tora takes from 10 to 60 seconds to complete, depending on whether you got the cave or the packs scattered around the mini-area.
Vorici can take up to 2 minutes. Sometimes you get a shitty layout+mission, so I can't blame anyone for not wanting to do it. Vorici's main value is getting to lvl6 for the fuse deal, anyway.
Catarina can be a PITA, and she has the biggest mission time variance. 1-2 min on average.
Let's count: 1+1+0,5+0,5+2+1=6 minutes to do the non-Zana masters, the generous amount. Can take longer is you're an autist, or much faster if you're lucky.
The rest is for Zana.