Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[ArchAngel]

My ranged characters run with 6000 to 7000 ehp. Even with that they sometimes get "one shot". One shot to me is all damage that comes so fast you have very little chance to react to it. Often it is not a real one shot but a bunch of enemies shooting at you at once and murdering you in less than 1s. Or it is some exploding shit fired from off screen that is just one part of the clusterfuck that screen effects, enemies and lag produce in this game.

I would not even try to go into melee without 8000+ ehp.

You probably use the term wrong, 8000 ehp is a joke. If you mean ehp = hp + es (which is wrong), then you are bonkers the other way around. You throw around trade league end game values as being required for mid low tier maps ...

ehp for me is pure life or life + mana (with Mom) or es (with CI) or any other combination of life, mana and es.

 

[Perkel]

doing spring cleaning in standard giving away maps randos and this happened.
Dude probably didn't know what is going on and for map i wanted to give him for free he gave me his white armor he was wearing and stuff.

 

[Eyestabber]

So based off what you guys are saying, it's literally the same thing median was: boring early game, fun mid-to-late and then all fun is ruined late game after the game realizes it exhausted its potential for challenge and now we're entering "retarded bullshit" territory.

Problem is that D2 had somewhat interesting setting/story to carry me through the early slog while the entire world of PoE is uninspired beyond belief. I thought picking this game up would spell doom for my productivity, but...nope. Gonna take it slow and hope things become interesting after a while.

BTW, I'm currently just hoarding all my uniques. Are they actually worth something to another player? Could I MAYBE use these uniques to get a big (ger) axe for my dude?

I mean, I recently crafted one, just messing with the currency crafting system, nothing serious or researched. Just picked up a base, upped quality till 20% and used an orb of alchemy and BOOM: my DPS fucking doubled. That's when I kinda felt disappointed, because the game was already braindead easy BEFORE I made myself a new axe. And getting killed by shitty floorspikes in the boring ascension labyrinth doesn't feel like the game "beat me", I was just clicking and spamming health pots. Sadly, they didn't heal fast enough...

 

[Perkel]

Best part of POE is theory crafting when you get new uniques or rares with weird mods that can enable suddenly completely new builds you didn't think before. If you are new player you should play it for a while.

 

[SirSingAlot]

STD player here.
was waiting for new endgame content.
chose one of my "remove only" map tabs to upgrade all maps....joke is on me, lost a few hundret of them. its bugged and they disabled the option now
well, whatever. started to open atlas, placed corrupted legacy map to unlock all maps again..
tadaaa....there we are grinding through white and yellow maps like its my job.

fkc, just wanna slam gear with those new influence exlated orbs

 

[Baron Dupek]

GGG has embraced this mantra: “Everybody has a testing environment. Some people are lucky enough to have a totally separate environment to run production in.”

 

[Zeriel]

I actually really liked the story in PoE Act 1-4. It was kinda similar to Diablo in some regards, but with a unique reason for everything existing, a really cool universe. Then 3.0 happened and there's Act 5-10 and it all goes full retard mode, with most of the fundamentals of the world retconned, nothing makes sense if you think about it at all. Really made me lose faith in them as writers.

 

[Eyestabber]

So I'm thinking of maybe dropping some $ for stash tabs. Do these guys make Xmas sales on their microtransaction currency?

I just did my first experimenting with the player market today. And I'm still feeling stupid for all those fully linked whites I sold to NPCs

 

[Zeriel]

Perkel plays SSF, he doesn't have much choice.

Either you do enough damage to deal with content or you take life and compensate with gear.
Personally I find life to be overrated.

I had 3.5K in Act 7 SSFHC... he definitely has a choice, he just doesn't invest in HP. Which is fine for softcore, you can die and it doesn't matter.

 

[Saark]

Then 3.0 happened and there's Act 5-10 and it all goes full retard mode, with most of the fundamentals of the world retconned, nothing makes sense if you think about it at all. Really made me lose faith in them as writers.

Not sure what you're talking about here, but it ties in pretty well with the established story from the first few acts and the over-arching storyline that preceded it.

You're returning to Oriath where you originally got exiled from. You get to hunt down the people who sent Dominus/Piety to Wraeclast. As always you fuck things up big-time without meaning to, so you gotta deal with Kitava all of a sudden. By having Dialla contain the rapture devices energy in Act 4, instead of causing another cataclysm like Atziri or Malachai did, you instead go and kill the beast. Unbeknownst to you, that sets free all the gods that just toy with regular people for their own personal benefit. So you gotta hunt those assholes down so mankind may have a chance at some peace for a change.

Powerful/beloved humans ascended to godhood a long time ago and used humanity for their own purposes, so Sin decided to put them into hibernation by creating the beast. Atziri, Malachai, Dominus and plenty of people before that tried to use its powers to ascend to godhood themselves, but since the Beasts purpose was to keep humanity "clean" of such ambition, it just lead to a cataclysm each time instead, creating a new blank slate for humanity until the cycle repeated itself. The people that survived this rapture were turned into the Undying that you meet in Act 3. You're just the first one to break the cycle and actually kill the beast (which you hoped would bring an end to the Corruption). But in turn you set free the gods to use humanity as pawns once more, so you gotta clean up the mess you left behind. Turns out its either corruption or submission to the gods. The first will lead to an endless cycle of rebirth until a new ambitious human arises to try to use the beasts power, which then raptures the world. The latter will lead to humanity becoming slaves to the gods. Sin believes it is better for mankind to choose their own path, so you recreate the beast.

I fail to see how any of this is a retcon to what happens in acts 1-4. I do agree that the story told in Act 5 and onward is much grander, but it already started in Act 4, which set up the entire thing. The players character constantly believes that the things hes doing are for the betterment of themselves or mankind, but is constantly confronted with fucking things up, cleaning up the mess, only to fuck things up even more immediately after again and again. The old endgame storyline was similar in that regard, and with Conquerors we might actually move towards becoming an Exile that fixes shit for once, which will tie into PoE 2s storyline.

 

[Zeriel]

The gems are only supposed to have power because of the Beast. With the Beast dead, they shouldn't work at all. There's also lots of things in the previous acts, especially monsters, that only exist because the Beast is going wild, after it died or went into hibernation those things should have quieted down (i.e, most undead, most gemlings, etc). Those are pretty minor gripes and you can handwave them once you understand acts 6-10 is just them reskinning a lot of maps and using them as a campaign, but there's way sillier stuff, like the timeline of the Beast and the Gods making zero sense in regards to the established timeline and history before 3.0 was added.

I'll give one basic example: Sin created the Beast and the Beast ate the Gods power. Why then is Sin talking about hanging out with Arakaali and being seduced and trapped by her? She shouldn't even exist after the Beast is created, and we already know the Beast existed in the early days of the Vaal because Doryani specifically calls it as such. There's plenty of other examples like this, the events don't mesh at all.

The Gods just don't fit into the setting and seem like they came from another game. The whiplash in flavor between Acts 1-4 and Acts 6-10 is huge in my opinion, but of course everyone has their own take.

Act 5 is mostly fine. If the story ended there I'd consider it cohesive.

 

[RuySan]

Everytime I return to this game I feel I'm crashing a party at 5 am where half of the people left and the other half is drunk. And I don't know what I should do.

Luckly they don't reset the passive tree anymore, they just give us the option to do so. But I'm staring in act 4, with some new quest about going into a mine and follow a mine cart and recover some kind of minerals. I just decided I don't have time to learn any of this shit and went to play another game.

 

[Gerrard]

So I'm thinking of maybe dropping some $ for stash tabs. Do these guys make Xmas sales on their microtransaction currency?

I just did my first experimenting with the player market today. And I'm still feeling stupid for all those fully linked whites I sold to NPCs

I don't think they've ever had a sale on the currency itself, they only ever have sales on the actual store items.
And even then most prices are so fucking outrageous that even if they did a 50% off (which they don't) it would STILL be outrageously expensive.

 

[Zeriel]

The utility stuff is not priced as badly as the cosmetic stuff. Sure it's outrageously expensive compared to a game where basic options like turning off animations for auras would be free, but compared to 65 dollars for a pair of wings...

 

[Absinthe]

Best part of POE is theory crafting when you get new uniques or rares with weird mods that can enable suddenly completely new builds you didn't think before. If you are new player you should play it for a while.

Huzzah. Fury Valve + Vaal Spark + Fork Plus = Sporkmageddon. You can also do Vaal Fireball and Split Arrow. Iron Commander bow + Rain of Splinters jewel + Ballistas with Barrage support or Shrapnel Balliistas. Minion builds also go crazy once you give them Awakened Chaos Damage. Summon Raging Spirits can enjoy Awakened Added Fire Damage too.

 

[Eyestabber]

The utility stuff is not priced as badly as the cosmetic stuff. Sure it's outrageously expensive compared to a game where basic options like turning off animations for auras would be free, but compared to 65 dollars for a pair of wings...

Yeah. Got myself the starter pack with 1 regular tab + 200p. Bought a currency tab and upgraded a regular into premium. Seems to be enough for now.

 

[Shadenuat]

The gems are only supposed to have power because of the Beast. With the Beast dead, they shouldn't work at all

I am one of the rare people who listened to npcs at least first time I played the game, studied glass windows and liked laurels + roman eagles + solar symbols but I don't think developers care for their story that much.

 

[Sharpedge]

The gems are only supposed to have power because of the Beast. With the Beast dead, they shouldn't work at all

I am one of the rare people who listened to npcs at least first time I played the game, studied glass windows and liked laurels + roman eagles + solar symbols but I don't think developers care for their story that much.

The characters (shadow, witch, templar, etc) all also had back story written for them initially, reasons why they were exiled, etc. Before they added A4, I think they at least somewhat cared about the story. From A4 onward though they just threw it all into the fire.

 

[Zeriel]

The gems are only supposed to have power because of the Beast. With the Beast dead, they shouldn't work at all

I am one of the rare people who listened to npcs at least first time I played the game, studied glass windows and liked laurels + roman eagles + solar symbols but I don't think developers care for their story that much.

I played in closed beta, then took a long vacation until Act 4, and went through the whole story. First time I played there was virtually no story and lore, but I was really impressed with the 2.x state of things, it actually did the story the best of all the ARPGs I can think of in modern times. Hence why I sound so bitter after A6-10. I concur with Sharpedge, I think they just started caring only about pushing leagues out quickly and the meta of players who ignore all of that stuff.

There's a very interesting talk about Path of Exile development by Chris Wilson at Gamasutra I think it was, a lot of what he says and does is pretty based, but the moment where he talked about their league dev cycle... really opened my eyes to why things are the way they are. For various production reasons, that "3 month league dev time" is actually more like 4-5~ weeks. With that kind of breakneck schedule I'm unsurprised that things like story cohesiveness slip through the cracks over time.

PoE 2 will solidify it for all of us I suppose, we'll see if this is just an accident of them being rushed and they return to form with something that's been worked on for years, or whether this is actually an intentional direction and they just don't care about it anymore as a priority.

 

[Eyestabber]

I for one think the early writing is also terrible. Something, something, Empire, other empire, shit happened, zzzzZZZZZ, OH, LEVEL UP!

 

[Saark]

Just gonna leave this here.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qITRlGECYUfU67SpFhdMiXDXDOruKi1S/view

 

[Perkel]

I for one think the early writing is also terrible. Something, something, Empire, other empire, shit happened, zzzzZZZZZ, OH, LEVEL UP!

POE lore is great. And there is plenty of if you actually bother to listen and read. It is one of the highlights of game.
I too was kind of annoyed by act 5-10 new take. It kind of ruined a lot like POE1 ending where it took out most of misticism out of game. Only thing i think left is kallandra case which is still mystery but aside from that everything is spelled out killing the fun.

 

[Eyestabber]

Had some more experience with the market. Holy shit, low level characters really have no business consuming currency. I blew like 5 chaos on a new axe only to later find a much better one for like 2c.

Is there even such a thing as crafting "leveling gear"? Every time I bought something the powerspike was YUGE and I think 2c was the most I ever spent.

 

[Jaedar]

Is there even such a thing as crafting "leveling gear"? Every time I bought something the powerspike was YUGE and I think 2c was the most I ever spent.

You can and arguably should craft some flasks with freeze immunity, bleed immunity and move speed. If you really haven't found any rare rings for 30 levels buying one from a shop and spending an alc on it is also not a bad idea. But in general you really want to buy basically all your gear and never craft (I guess the exception is the true uber gear pieces that will take dozens of exalts to craft).

 

[Alpan]

Flasks can be bought too. The only kind of crafting a pre-Maps character should do is remedial crafting via Helena in the Hideout, to shore up attribute requirements or resistance caps. That may be slightly more economical than finding and buying relevant leveling gear.