Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Peachcurl]

Frak. I'm addicted to this game again. Help me.

Anyways, it seems I'm currently on an exploding-minion spree.
I started with the engineer in Torchlight 2, then went for the Vivisector-sploder in W40k: Inquisitor. And now I arrived at a Minion Instability in PoE. There's something inherently joyful in making your own creation go boom.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

I've been playing like an absolute fiend too. Worst part has been the fact that after going a year+ without touching it there are a billion fucking new mechanics and alternate routes of progression added to the game, along with dozens upon dozens of new currencies. Best part is the combination of all this bullcrap and the fact that they apparently neutered the map system (At mid-levels at least) combined with the "Continual story" they did, it actually feels like you're playing THE GAME PROPER almost the entire time rather than just jerking yourself off for two difficulties. It's still super easy early on, but there's more going on.

Secondary worst part is because I absolutely detest trading in PoE so I'm playing solo self found which means I never get any uniques I can use, and I'm not skilled enough to know how to use the currency particularly well for myself. This hasn't changed my general feeling of "D3 is king of the casual clickers and PoE's king of the autism clickers" but PoE's gotten bumped up a few notches in my overall evaluation. If they could manage to cram PoE with D3's combat and remove 90% of the currencies and sub-currencies and sub-sub-sub currencies it'd be perfect, but as it is both games still stand as good examples of different extremes to me. And then almost everything else falls between the two and invariably doesn't end up as good. Still only played Grim Dawn once without either expansion and had an okay time but I always go back to D3 and PoE.

 

[Gerrard]

Man, this game just doesn't fucking work right on a mechanical HDD. When you enter a map for the first time after starting the game, it takes like 20 seconds for it to load models and effects. How is this even allowed.

Secondary worst part is because I absolutely detest trading in PoE so I'm playing solo self found which means I never get any uniques I can use

Just be lucky bro.

 

[Jaedar]

Secondary worst part is because I absolutely detest trading in PoE so I'm playing solo self found which means I never get any uniques I can use

Usually once you are blasting through the "post-story" content you tend to pick up a lot of uniques. Not often the ones you like, but you will find some. Seems like you'd be better off playing in a trade league as self imposed SSF and then occasionally powering through and trading whatever build enabling uniques you want.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Just be lucky bro.

Trying my best!

Seems like you'd be better off playing in a trade league as self imposed SSF and then occasionally powering through and trading whatever build enabling uniques you want.

I wish they'd make SSF a ghetto that doesn't filter into other leagues (Except dumping people in standard after the fact. Or making SSF-standard) and then up the number and/or quality of drops for people in it. Just to have the "If you want to be a lonely baby playing by yourself here you go bro" option.

 

[Jaedar]

I wish they'd make SSF a ghetto that doesn't filter into other leagues (Except dumping people in standard after the fact. Or making SSF-standard) and then up the number and/or quality of drops for people in it. Just to have the "If you want to be a lonely baby playing by yourself here you go bro" option.

That would be nice. Trading does kinda suck, but I much prefer it as a means of acquiring good gear than looting, identifying, sorting and vendoring 100s of rares. I don't do currency flipping either, so I spend most of my poe time being quite poor but having fun

I doubt it will happen but with the addition of spells to generate blades, there are no longer any skills that depend on copious amounts of shit being dropped, so maybe GGG will consider reducing the quantity of rares and increasing the quality.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Peachcurl]

It's safe to assume that you already switched off all the eye-candy, right? 3 years back I also had to play this on a brick, it worked. Of course, they may have changed things since then.

Anyways, there's no slim version (that I know of). They announced a mobile version (separate from the main game) a few months back, I think. But I don't think that's available.

 

[Renfri]

you can always wait for mobile version

 

[Baron Dupek]

is there some slim version of poe? I was forced to move to my old laptop that i played this game back in a day and... its not playable at all

Sounds give a lot of hickups, need to be disabled via config file (set values to "false", not zero).

 

[Jaedar]

Can someone explain to me what determines conqueror spawning/entering the maps and other weird stuff?

Seems that they don't drop watchstones if a watchstone of their color is socketed in the region. Also seems like there's some map tier restrictions but would be nice to get exact numbers.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Multi-headed Cow

You should really try Grim Dawn with the Grim Internals tool and Grimarillion mod. It's a sweet spot between Diablo 3 and PoE.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Multi-headed Cow

You should really try Grim Dawn with the Grim Internals tool and Grimarillion mod. It's a sweet spot between Diablo 3 and PoE.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep 'em in mind! I still gotta play the Grim Dawn expansions too, just been waiting for a steeper sale since I wasn't as wild about Grim Dawn. Part of that might've been bitterness from playing a summoner and, at the time at least, the pet and enemy AI was god-awful. 99% of enemies would ignore your pets and just run straight up your ass so despite playing a brainless and simple archetype every combat involved kiting which pissed me off.

Speaking of which, caved and did dropped out of SSF to trade for uniques. Not selling anything since fuck that noise, but buying some crap so I can be an even lazier bastard with my summoner is fine. Been pressing on longer than I anticipated with PoE, went through the whole story (I usually just quit part-way through hell but now they rejiggered it so the difficulty drops once you kill the final boss) and now I've been mapping for a fair few hours and having a decent time of it. Completely sidelined playing in the new D3 season for me. Might be because it's been a long time since I've played a satisfying summoner, and PoE necro isn't quite as silly as D2 necro, but it's been hitting the spot.

 

[Peachcurl]

I'm also tempted to quit SSF at the moment to buy a few key items for my build. It's a risk, because I often lose interest shortly after starting to optimize my builds with trade. And yet... huge improve in build efficiency at the cost of a few orbs that I can't make proper use of anyways... hard to resist that.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I've never traded for anything in PoE, which is probably why I bounce off the game once I hit lvl ~65 with any character.

. Part of that might've been bitterness from playing a summoner and, at the time at least, the pet and enemy AI was god-awful. 99% of enemies would ignore your pets and just run straight up your ass so despite playing a brainless and simple archetype every combat involved kiting which pissed me off.

Haven't played summoner in a while (with Grimarillion your options there will expand... significantly), but basically they've got pets now that draw aggro pretty well. Used to be that any sort of offensive action from your toon would draw metric fuck tons of aggro.

In any case, I've been enjoying the shit out of the game. Grima adds all the Diablo 3 masteries, all the Titan Quest masteries (massively expanded from their actual TQ skill sets) and about half a dozen originals for a grand total of 29 masteries. The D3/TQ ones have uniques, legendaries and new mechanics. Probably the only ARPG I'll ever need...

 

[Jaedar]

I've never traded for anything in PoE, which is probably why I bounce off the game once I hit lvl ~65 with any character.

Does this mean you've never beaten act 10?

I'm also tempted to quit SSF at the moment to buy a few key items for my build. It's a risk, because I often lose interest shortly after starting to optimize my builds with trade. And yet... huge improve in build efficiency at the cost of a few orbs that I can't make proper use of anyways... hard to resist that.

The terribleness of crafting with actual chaos orbs is not great. Alchemists are pretty bad too, but at least those are very useful for maps, strongboxes(if you can be arsed to interact with them at all) and the like.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Does this mean you've never beaten act 10?

I've beaten the story and gotten to maps. My Cyclone toon had no issues with low-mid level maps, but started running into durability problems L10 and up.

It's just dispiriting, because I like the collectibles side of things, and PoE only uses specific uniques as build enablers. The rest of your slots are taken by carefully crafted rares, and I couldn't give less of a shit about that side of things. The thing is that with a game like GD you can 'beat' the game and find the BiS items that will never not be BiS for that build. Whereas here, you've got an MMO that consciously cycles BiS stuff so that you're constantly on the hunt. There's no end. I enjoy the speed of the gameplay and the autistic side of character building, but the never-ending side of this game is just... I can't do it. Not for more than 10-20 hrs a 'season'. Normally, I take a year off between 60-70 hr periods of play.

 

[Jaedar]

The thing is that with a game like GD you can 'beat' the game and find the BiS items that will never not be BiS for that build. Whereas here, you've got an MMO that consciously cycles BiS stuff so that you're constantly on the hunt. There's no end. I enjoy the speed of the gameplay and the autistic side of character building, but the never-ending side of this game is just... I can't do it. Not for more than 10-20 hrs a 'season'. Normally, I take a year off between 60-70 hr periods of play.

Hmm. The way I usually play the game is at some point at level 70ish I buy a bunch of good rares (tier one or two life roll and some resists) and then I just use that for the remainder while I try to map my way to the final bosses (never got there before dying and not feeling like rerolling, but hey).

 

[Lone Wolf]

I don't know about you, but I really despise the fact that Life > All. I can't think of any build where the priority isn't Life -> Resists -> Everything Else.

 

[Peachcurl]

I don't know about you, but I really despise the fact that Life > All. I can't think of any build where the priority isn't Life -> Resists -> Everything Else.

There are other builds where you get away with less Life. Mind over Matter builds, CI/ES, for instance.

But in general, yes. I agree.

 

[Jaedar]

I don't know about you, but I really despise the fact that Life > All. I can't think of any build where the priority isn't Life -> Resists -> Everything Else.

CI builds do exist. But yes. Surviving lategame requires more than just life and resists, but it feels minor compared to capping your ele res and getting a 6k life pool.

It does make gearing a bit boring, invalidates most rares found in lategame (even those with influence mods and the like) and makes pathing in the passive tree a bit rote, there's a lot of life nodes you will just always take as long as you start on the right half of the tree.

 

[Gerrard]

Meanwhile at GGG

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Jaedar]

Physical damage spells + conversion + inquisitor were always silly good.

In other news, I got level 90 for first time today, feels good. But now I'm not sure what to do. Previously I'd have bought shaper keys but that's not an (attractive) option any more, and awakeners/sirius can't be forced the same way. And this character isn't really defensive/offscreen cleary enough to do red tier maps.

 

[Gerrard]

You realize that this doesn't even show the actual damage a fully charged beam does, right?