Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Kjaska]

No matter how much people bitch about trade, none of them leave the game for it. The most common criticism I hear from people who leave is 1) re-doing the campaign and 2) my godlike build got nerfed and I can never again reach that level of power.

No matter how much people bitch about trade, as long as Chris is still CEO they won't implement an AH. You can thank D3 for fucking up that concept for everybody else. Some other game would have to implement it in a very good way for GGG to ever reconsider their stance.

 

[Jaedar]

No matter how much people bitch about trade, none of them leave the game for it.

I left trade leagues because of it, does that count?

 

[ArchAngel]

No matter how much people bitch about trade, none of them leave the game for it. The most common criticism I hear from people who leave is 1) re-doing the campaign and 2) my godlike build got nerfed and I can never again reach that level of power.

No matter how much people bitch about trade, as long as Chris is still CEO they won't implement an AH. You can thank D3 for fucking up that concept for everybody else. Some other game would have to implement it in a very good way for GGG to ever reconsider their stance.

I usually leave leagues when it comes time that I need to start trading a lot. I usually try to go SSF as much as possible and try to buy 1-2 things (usually uniques if builds need it). When it comes time to start replacing most of stuff through trade I usually just quit the character and league.

 

[Reever]

LSF so boring today, that the PoE drama spilled over: https://old.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/comments/wr0gnb/path_of_exile_streamers_having_beef_bc_of/

Rue attacking someone for their shit build? Must be a day that ends in Y.

 

[Perkel]

Saw video of new expansion. Rares change seems to be huge shift toward better game. I wish though they would do that not just for rares but for all monsters. Cut monster packs in half and buff their life by as much then reduce their damage and voila you solve or improve multiple issues at same time :

- overpresence of AOE
- melee combat
- lack of visibility
- lack of challenge low-mid game
- 1skill meta

 

[Kjaska]

10700 in the queue. It popped so early this time.

LMAO at the harvest changes. So much player power just shaved off. Divines are going to be sooooo expensive. Day 2 reddit will be filled with crybabies.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Reforge keeping prefix/suffix gone
dang

 

[ADL]

Saw video of new expansion. Rares change seems to be huge shift toward better game. I wish though they would do that not just for rares but for all monsters. Cut monster packs in half and buff their life by as much then reduce their damage and voila you solve or improve multiple issues at same time :

- overpresence of AOE
- melee combat
- lack of visibility
- lack of challenge low-mid game
- 1skill meta

Unfortunately their current fanbase will definitely flip the fuck out and GGG will inevitably revert many of the good changes that would eventually contribute to an awesome Path of Exile 2 release. Their players like the zoom zoom clear speeds, the visual clutter, the unnecessary loot drops, the enemy density and the 1 skill combat meta. A good implementation isn't enough. No matter what they do they're gonna bitch. How do you change a live game that people have been playing one particular way for years without pissing off the people currently playing it? Especially when these changes will have to take place over the course of many league cycles.

I don't follow GGG that closely but do they have the balls to do it?

 

[Lim-Dûl]

It's not about balls. How many disappointed D4 fans can they capture with less zoom zoom? How many PoE fans will they lose with less zoom zoom? etc etc

 

[Jaedar]

I think GGG are moving towards less 1-skill meta. Just look at poison, the lightning gems added this league and so on. I think the gem change planned for PoE2 will also impact it hugely: currently an aoe 6L will always do more dps than a single target 4L and you can often only fit one 6L, but in poe2 you may very well have several 5Ls at least, which provides greater opportunity for multiple specialized skills beating one general skill.

I also think they do want to make it less zoomy, but it is a legitimately hard thing to do when the game is about "making numbers go up", since zoom is the natural outcome of high numbers (and if you nerf numbers too much the game becomes unplayable for newbies and casuals).

I'm going to play an elementalist "new gems" build, using spellslinger to proc lightning conduit so I can get 2 button gameplay with galvanic field and power siphon. Hopefully it's going to be fun.

 

[Perkel]

imho without changing fundamentals they won't fix 1skill meta. There are several reasons for this problem not just sockets.

- AOE damage is the only thing you need. In game where AOE isn't the king you need at minimum 2 skills to handle both single target and groups as one can't be efficient for both.
- zoom zoom. Any skill that can't be used to kill screens of monsters instantly or reworked into that is automatically not efficient and thus worthless unless you larp. Only way to fix that is by killing zoom zoom gameplay. When you slow down game more skills open up for use as more tactics is involved than quick finger and watching where you go. Good example of that problem are mines. On paper they sound great but in practice they are shit because whole game is tuned around zoom zoom. This is also important for skill combos. Skill combos can work only in system when you have time and need to do combos. Like creating fire field kiting enemies into it and then setting off via second skill in exposion.
- Primary power of skill comes from 3 different sources (gear, tree, sockets) which means that you have to ^3 focus on alligning all of those 3 to maximize skill effectivness which also means ^3 more specialization. In such system building both fire and ice wizard like in say D2 is night impossible because the cost of lack of specialization is literally milions of damage and difference betwen being able to play end game maps or not. This can be avoided by various mehanics like unique which say increases power of next element by 50% of your last atack or other shennenigans like that and POE does that at times but that requires you to find specific unique if it exist in ever expanding loot pool.
- design of monsters. They are just horde that comes after you without much tactics. There are some enemies that require tactics like blockades in heist, burrowing enemies but those are complete minority and only tactics you need for 97% of game is kill before their model shows up on screen. That can be adressed with hp boost and damage reduction so players would have to actively fight them.


----------------

Imho 1skill meta is important problem but the most important problem for modern POE is just complete lack of good loot. It transformed from loot game into effectively mining/farming game where you daily farm/mine some shitty currencies in order to get something you actually want down the line sometimes in future.

It is both fundamental problem and growing problem at the same time. One fuels the other and vice versa.

- Main defenses in game divide armor into 6 different combinations. You have 3 main defenses and combination of them. That means effectively most of armor in game is divided by 6 in what you actually find worthwhile to pickup.
- Game is highly specialized in what you use as a weapon. Which means further weapons are divided by number of weapon types.

Now add to that calculation various different influences, how loot can spawn etc. and you quickly realize that finding actual upgrade without crafting is basically night impossible after first two acts. So gameplay from this point becomes interaction between various league mechanics in order to get at least some loot you can trade but barely use yourself, it starts to feel like work rather than fun game. You work for some hours of future you think you will have fun.

Last year i replayed diablo 1. And this was effectively eureka moment for me for ARPGs. Sure i did play it back in the day but i did not "understand" it. Game is for sure dated in some aspects but there is one aspect that is easily far better than any arpg i know. Loot. It is not deep loot system in fact it is pretty simple one but the way it acts and how much power it provides is amazing. Moreover you are not showered in loot. Most of your loot are magic items and rares ARE rare. When they drop though you check almost every item because rolls on those can very by huge margin. You can in principle find magic ring at start of the game with such good rolls that will last you for whole game. Loot in this game feels like genuince reward. When you see loot dropping you feel "fuck year" instead of shit now i need to pick up all thos shitty currencies, bilion of loot and nothing in it.

POE simply outgrown its fundamental design and it is tearing itself apart at limits. Sure train can go longer and they can redo parts of it but they can't adress fundamental issues without releasing separate game, and that we know with poe2 is out of the question.

Similar thing could happen to D2 if developers decided to expand say amount of skills in game with unique loot and rolls for them to the point where finding any good loot would be impossible as % chance to get what you want goes down with every new item,

In POE now you either larp and choose to be inneficient or you zoom zoom. There is nothing in between. And i am not even talking about standard or theorycrafting. I am talking about just using game knowledge and SSF.

 

[Baron Dupek]

wtf you need 2 login for trading on poe site? what sorcery is this
also hot take - people don't zoom-zoom because they're dopamine addicts/popamole lovers/zoomers
they zoom-zoom is the most efficient way to run maps and fastest way to gain currency compared to "conquering" heavily juiced maps, which requires knowledge&resources first

 

[Jaedar]

also hot take - people don't zoom-zoom because they're dopamine addicts/popamole lovers/zoomers
they zoom-zoom is the most efficient way to run maps and fastest way to gain currency compared to "conquering" heavily juiced maps, which requires knowledge&resources first

Why not both?

Also, the challenges this league seem fairly reasonable? Feels like you should be able to get like 10-20 just from playing around in white/yellow maps and then spending some currency to trade for some rare items/completions. I'm actually feeling a bit motivated by these, although I'd have to migrate away from SSF to trade for a lot of them.

 

[Kjaska]

Rolling a squishy Elementalist to start a league with defence nerfs was a mistake. A lot of power was lost. GGG was sneaky about it, but Harvest is basically unusable for mid-tier progression. I hope all the "wah, game is too easy and progression is too fast" cucks are happy (ofc you'll never hear them say a positive word about it). Unlike last league, Kalandra isn't helping much. If anything I feel more bad because I mastermind my tablet into a nice snake form for max difficulty, only to get raped by some random 3-4 mod rare at difficulty 10+. The items I have been getting from her are interesting but useless to me at the moment. It feels like I should be in 100% suppression gear already in late white/early yellow maps, except I need gear from red maps to get it.

Lightning Conduit is so-so. It has giga dam, but it has multiple issues. The clear feels clunky and slow compared to other bossing builds in the past. The impact of the skill feels flacid compared to the damage. You're deleting monsters, but it doesn't feel good compared to something like CF Glad explosions or a juicy Detonate Dead. It's also not very good for Expedition, where I hope most of my mid-tier power will be coming from this league. It's also bad at clearing Legions, where I was hoping to get my clean 6-link from.

New Scourge feels like they implemented it at 300 stacks. They feel 3-4 times more tanky and dangerous as regular enemies. And they drop jack shit. I killed one of the bosses and he dropped 1 tainted chrome. Waow. GGG is so stingy when it comes to implementing base content.

btw: perkel is a retard who hasn't played this game in years and has no idea about the meta. My skill bar is full and if I have to add one more active button, I would have to go to the secondary hotkeys. Same goes for other starter builds like Rage Vortex, any Ignite, Summoners, Traps. Don't listen to him.

 

[Jaedar]

New Scourge feels like they implemented it at 300 stacks. They feel 3-4 times more tanky and dangerous as regular enemies. And they drop jack shit. I killed one of the bosses and he dropped 1 tainted chrome. Waow. GGG is so stingy when it comes to implementing base content.

To be fair, 1 chromatic is more than the old beyond bosses used to drop

A lot of power was lost. GGG was sneaky about it, but Harvest is basically unusable for mid-tier progression.

This sucks a lot. I got my first 5L from harvest the last two leagues.

btw: perkel is a retard who hasn't played this game in years and has no idea about the meta. My skill bar is full and if I have to add one more active button, I would have to go to the secondary hotkeys. Same goes for other starter builds like Rage Vortex, any Ignite, Summoners, Traps. Don't listen to him.

I'm inclined to agree. There are still 1 button gameplay builds, but most builds these days are better with multiple buttons.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Progressing campaign into atlas feels terrible without being meta cuck and doing autistic gear and tree check, white maps are full of spunk on the floor and all sorts of whatever degens and ailments that life flasks can't keep up with coupled with hasted monsters and offscreening projectiles, guess this is the culmination of their efforts to re-balance the game.

 

[Saark]

Done with the game, fuck GGG. Archnemesis should've never made it core, let alone be slapped onto every single fucking league mechanic in existence. Nicely done. Love being able to zoom through the game for 99,9% of the time but then some jank-ass archnem mod combination makes it onetap you from offscreen through multiple layers of defense, or takes longer to kill than the rest of entire fucking map.

I'm all for slowing down the game, but not by making individual monsters tougher than pinnacle bosses. Not even tougher, just HP bloat, andi t only applies to a handful of monsters, not the entire game. New mechanic is fine, if a bit unrewarding, but its decent currency and doesn't take long if you skip all the mechanics that add rares to it. Because all rares have Archnem mods. Give me the new atlas and atlastree with pre-heist gameplay, and I'll gladly pay 50€ a month for it.

 

[Kjaska]

Heist actually OP. I was looking for a decent 5-link in the only Armaments Blueprint I had and this beauty appeared. Scraping for gear upgrades in fucking Heist. This is how bad things currently are. Crafting has been nuked back into the Stone Age.
I'll be honest and say that this slower progression isn't so bad actually. As long as you are still able to find upgrades. The big issues is that so much has been removed and without real warning. Coming into this league after Recombinators is like quitting heroin cold turkey. The dismay throughout the community is palpable. If you can afford one of the new reworked uniques (Dialla's is 8 Divines on trade, lmao), you're probably doing fine by now and having some fun again. But everybody else is getting their shit pushed in by 4 mod rares. Or 5+ mod, if it's an Empowered Minions one.

I'm saving my itemized Lakes for now in hopes GGG buffs the rewards soon. It's not like I'm missing out on anything in there, since there is no hope of actually finding an upgrade there right now. I haven't been able to listen to much lore so far, but I suspect that this isn't the real Kalandra. I think this might be just a reflection of the real one, like a Horcrux of some sort. Left to watch over the Lake. One of the lines reminded me a lot of Severance, the show about people splitting off a personality that goes to work in their stead and is only active inside their work place while their real self is "asleep".

I think now there can be no doubt that GGG's goal is to slow down the players as much as possible without losing them. But the way they go about it seems erratic. IMO it would have been much more elegant to have done the Harvest changes last league already, when we still had Recombinators to offset the loss.

To be fair, 1 chromatic is more than the old beyond bosses used to drop

The old beyond bosses didn't take ages to kill and you could get multiple per map. You could combine their spawns with Sextants that affect Unique Boss drops for great value. The old Beyond would also spawn a lot of rares and magics which would scale well with whatever Magic Find you were running and the map quant. The new ones are not worth the risk. I hope their drops get buffed or else I'm rolling over that mod for the rest of the league.

This sucks a lot. I got my first 5L from harvest the last two leagues.

You can try combining an Empowered Minions/Empowered Elements rare with a Soul Eater/Magma Barrier inside a Metamorph. This yields clean 6-links according to a source. I haven't tested it yet, but I'm not blocking Metamorph until I do.

My big issue with Archnemesis rares is that it feels unnatural for mobs like this to exist, even in the setting of Path of Exile. Players have to deal with drawbacks all the time when seeking power. IRL organisms can't freely evolve into perfect Xenomorphs either and have to deal with a reality of trade-offs. IMO Archnem mods should have a penalty as well. Speed, max HP, healing maluses would make it more thematic and less annoying to deal with. Imagine a Juggernaut rare that is still unstoppable, but has to build up innertia first and is slow to turn.

 

[Jaedar]

I'm saving my itemized Lakes for now in hopes GGG buffs the rewards soon.

They probably will. They almost always end up buffing league rewards these days, as they're often underpowered on launch.

Also my idea for spellslinger lightning conduit didn't work, so now I'm just going storm brand to deliver shocks. Probably going to have to drop galvanizing field too, to make room for other gems, and to not have 4 button gameplay, that's 1 too many.

And yeah archnemesis leads to some real bullshit, hf running into enemies that are practically immune to your skills. I think the idea was good, and it worked well as a league mechanic since you could just skip the bad ones (or put them on inherently weak mobs/soft maps).

 

[Saark]

And yeah archnemesis leads to some real bullshit, hf running into enemies that are practically immune to your skills. I think the idea was good, and it worked well as a league mechanic since you could just skip the bad ones (or put them on inherently weak mobs/soft maps).

I dont mind the archnemesis mechanics themselves. The problem is that each of them also adds a bunch of other mods onto the mob, including copius amounts of increased health and damage mitigation, which can quickly lead to monsters that take 95% reduced damage from all sources. One of my friends who has gotten 4 separate characters to 100 in Sentinel, and another 5 in Archnemesis, on Hardcore, just mentioned that he still doesn't know what half these mods are.

 

[ArchAngel]

I'm saving my itemized Lakes for now in hopes GGG buffs the rewards soon.

They probably will. They almost always end up buffing league rewards these days, as they're often underpowered on launch.

Also my idea for spellslinger lightning conduit didn't work, so now I'm just going storm brand to deliver shocks. Probably going to have to drop galvanizing field too, to make room for other gems, and to not have 4 button gameplay, that's 1 too many.

And yeah archnemesis leads to some real bullshit, hf running into enemies that are practically immune to your skills. I think the idea was good, and it worked well as a league mechanic since you could just skip the bad ones (or put them on inherently weak mobs/soft maps).

I am doing Glavanizing field as my main, applying shocks with Arc but if I am able to make my character fast enough I will switch to Shock Nova and use Shield Bash to move between packs. Trickster.

 

[Tacgnol]

So there is a double whammy on loot this league. Unique droprate nerfs and GGG made an undocumented change to item quant and rarity.

A bunch of bosses and rares had a hidden bonus to item quant and rarity which GGG has removed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/wuid4v/what_were_working_on/

According to POE DB these bonuses were generally around the 1200% mark.

Explains why there is fuck all build enabling uniques on trade. Also somewhat hilarious GGG knew there would be massive backlash so didn't bother to document the change.

 

[Cyberarmy]

How the mighty have fallen

Edit: Mega LoL, even their forum post (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3296718) which usually consist of 2-3 pages of "Nice, Yay, YESS!" or similar responses from whales is now %99 negative posts :D

 

[ERYFKRAD]

How they might have fallen

Bro you had a "y" missing in your post. Fixed it for you.

 

[Perkel]

So there is a double whammy on loot this league. Unique droprate nerfs and GGG made an undocumented change to item quant and rarity.

wut ? they openly stated that uniques will not be dropping as much anymore. It is right in trailer.