Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Angthoron]

Considering they're seeming to eventually have plans to add guild support, won't be too surprised if they add raiding in some form.

Did a Race on Sunday, went 2-man with a friend, had no idea what to expect at all but we did pretty well, got to 23 without dying in a relaxed manner, Marauder/Ranger combo. Got lucky and got 2 uniques, too - a hat with 20% base resists and additional 20% on low health, for the marauder, and a ring that gives cold resist and freeze immunity (omfg, best ring ever?) that went to the Ranger. Had no desyncs, and as a shield/defense marauder, I had very few situations where I felt at all threatened. Slow killing though, ugh - much thanks to random drops being cleavers, when I was building a hammer mainhand stuntank. Boo. Good cleavers, too.

Will try to make a 6-pack next weekend if I have the time.

 

[LeJosh]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSc6wTmFOlY

These videos are pretty cool for ideas, hosted by GGG.

 

[Gregz]

I'm still enjoying the game, doing maps and stuff, but I don't have such a strong desire to try out any new builds now. I'm wondering if the staying power is less than I hoped for, here. The race schedule is a big disappointment for me thanks to time zone issues and the fact that there are way too many long races and not enough short ones. Then, on top of that, my first race experience was total shit thanks to desyncs.

I'm getting the same feeling, the endgame feels very empty. You have to spend currency to upgrade 71+ maps with chisels/alchs/chaos rather than them progressing naturally, and the death penalty becomes very severe past Lvl 80. A single death past 80 can take hours to recover from.

 

[dibens]

videos are pretty cool for ideas, hosted by GGG.

The videoseries indeed present many cool builds, but a good portion of them, especially CI ones don't look at all viable after the nerfs and reworks. The one you linked is waaay to squishy and has shitty aoe to boot.

A single death past 80 can take hours to recover from.

Aw, you poor thing. :hcelitistfag:

 

[LeJosh]

I wasn't impressed by that build either, there are a few others that were good.

It seems like they just nerf the builds as soon as they're submitted, defeating any point to the series.

 

[Castanova]

A single death past 80 can take hours to recover from.

Aw, you poor thing. :hcelitistfag:

I honestly think it's harder to die in softcore at 80+, lose hours of progress, but still continue with the character than it is to die in hardcore and simply start from Normal Act 1 all over again. It's harder to stay married than it is to screw new chicks every night.

 

[Gregz]

Yep

 

[Kane]

Once you go softcore you go tranny. Stay a man, stay hardcore.

 

[Stabwound]

The problem with hardcore mode in this game is that you mostly just build as defensive of a build as possible and play as slowly as safely as possible. There isn't any real strategy involved, and 95% of the deaths are due to getting 1-shot or desyncing/disconnecting if you're paying any attention at all. You can avert almost all risk by playing in a 6-person party where everyone just jizzes their most powerful rainbow in every direction and everything melts before your eyes.

Having said that, I find default mode in these kinds of games to be even more pointless and boring these days. Grinding for the sake of grinding was fun when I was 13, but not so much anymore.

What would really advance the genre is, instead of having a linear story you progress through, having an open world with areas that vary in difficulty, type of equipment needed, etc. Something like a 2D Morrowind with the loot system of PoE would be awesome. Sacred and Sacred 2 are open world ARPGs, but both are shit and had some of the most ridiculous level scaling ever (in Sacred 2, if you levelled up during a fight, so would the enemies you're fighting. ROOFLES)

 

[Raapys]

How's that actually any different though? Yeah sure, I guess you could choose which areas to do first and whatnot( though PoE arguably lets you do that in some cases anyway), but you'd still need to finish them all. And though you have to go through PoE's( and Diablo's ) areas linearly the first time, after you've been through them you're free to choose based on what level they are and what type of enemies they have.

As for hardcore, meh. Maybe if there were no desyncs and I had my internet connection to myself. But with the huge amount of desyncs going on, as well as people streaming movies and shit on my line, there's simply no way I can bother with the frustration that would accompany it.

 

[DakaSha]

I have had literally only a single issue with desyncs and that was before i knew what i was doing and would have likely died anyways. The game has some kind of safety measure to prevent unfair deaths. I live in fucking hawaii. the middle of the pacific and havent had any problems.

Quite frankly i think people just like to blame the internet instead of their self in 90% of cases

 

[Aothan]

although it is probable to expect lag issues to be commonly faulted for what was in effect the specific result of player actions there are also plenty of instances where lag displaces characters or distorts the sequence of events. I have both default and hardcore characters and can more or less already tell where my hardcore character will transition leagues - Vaal's overheard. This attack is telegraphed and I'm reasonably sure even has a creaking sound to signify the beginning of the attack, but more often than not the animation omits the intermediate sequence and/or my character is treated as being somewhere under the point of impact even after using leap attack on sight of the arm lifting. There is also the entirely frequent non-registering attack on a creature that has come through a doorway and is standing near a wall. This always indicates that I am about to be warped somewhere, usually on the other side of the wall where the creature was apparently waiting all along, with a legion of conspecifics.

The problem with hardcore mode in this game is that you mostly just build as defensive of a build as possible and play as slowly as safely as possible. There isn't any real strategy involved, and 95% of the deaths are due to getting 1-shot or desyncing/disconnecting if you're paying any attention at all. You can avert almost all risk by playing in a 6-person party where everyone just jizzes their most powerful rainbow in every direction and everything melts before your eyes.

this is much truer than it should be, hard(defensive)core undermines so many assumptions about the game's challenge and balance for difficulty when characters that build almost exclusively around life and defence can clear rooms in moments with minimal effort. It is an issue that brings into question ideas about skill and strategy at the supposedly advanced levels of play, it would also seem to be related to your comments about the genre as a whole. For those who played the original Diablo years before Diablo II it is difficult at times to derive satisfaction out of a mode of play that is either essentially the same as it was many years ago (alas), or in the case of aforesaid balance and design issues a little too easy to regress to a simplified state of play - and thus determining the communal aspects of these games (such as your character's innovation and prowess etc..).

there are a lot of issues combined here, that aside though the new spider-spark animation is just great, I'm suddenly much more impressed with the aesthetic options GGG are introducing. Although I don't dislike the weapon illumination effects I thought they were surprisingly simple for a game model that is going to become largely reliant on microtransactions for cosmetic options.

 

[Raapys]

I have had literally only a single issue with desyncs and that was before i knew what i was doing and would have likely died anyways. The game has some kind of safety measure to prevent unfair deaths. I live in fucking hawaii. the middle of the pacific and havent had any problems.

Quite frankly i think people just like to blame the internet instead of their self in 90% of cases

Nah, I think you'd notice it if it were happening to you. I do think location matters, as some people seem near oblivious to the issue, but personally I have it almost constantly. Mind you, it's not 'bad' constantly, it's just there. Say, teleporting a few meters here, an enemy suddenly upon me without ever having approached( and without flicker, obviously), some guy I'm attacking doesn't take any damage and suddenly disappears. These happen dozens of times in a single end-game map, even while the 'latency'( press F1 to see) is a nice, fine line with no significant spikes. Normally it doesn't matter much since the desyncs aren't bad. But sometimes, I'm teleported into a group of 10 rhoas when I was one screen away just a half-second earlier. Or I start losing lots and lots of hp with no attackers near, only to teleport a second later into a completely different room filled with skeltons casters. Stuff like that.

It's definitely far worse indoors though. The client prediction system doesn't like obstructions, so if it gets out of sync it *really* gets out of sync.

 

[DakaSha]

I notice it happen to me all the time and it never results in a dangerous situation.. just like the hundreds of high level characters out there

 

[Raapys]

Well, guess you're one of the lucky ones. I've one char at lvl82 and another at 74, and it's happened plenty of times that I've been teleported into rooms filled with enemies. Usually it still doesn't end badly, but sometimes there's little you can do except alt-f4'ing.

 

[Revenant]

Don't be such pussies. Roguelikes are expected to have unfair deaths - you can always imagine that a lag death is "a rock falls on your head. You are dead".

 

[Gerrard]

Roguelikes are expected to have unfair deaths

No, they aren't. Roguelikes are expected to have deaths resulting from the players mistakes, not from shitty programming

 

[dibens]

I get quite frequent desyncs lately. Thankfully, popping a granite+quicksilver and running the fuck away has kept me out of the trouble so far.

Also, Summon Skeletons+Spell totem; I can't recommend this enough for any hc character out there- it's an absolute game changer.

 

[empi]

Shouldn't Alt-F4, escp+exit is more instant ;p

And yeah I always granite+quicksilver+hp pot when desynching badly, and desync hasn't killed me in OB, a couple to computer/internet crashing though

 

[Castanova]

I did a map the other day. It was kind of boring even though I found some OK loot, including two more maps. After logging off, I haven't played since and I haven't really thought about it. I think the game may have lost its luster almost entirely.

 

[Raapys]

It happens. I usually play these games exclusively for some time, then need a few weeks/months to recharge my aRPG batteries. Also feels good coming back to more content than when you left.

 

[Aothan]

one of the concerns I have for Path of Exile is the prevalence of highly effective builds that are too easy to play for a hack n slash that is meant to be challenging. Consequently substantial quantities of the playerbase will exhaust the game's content in the space of a few weeks with little sense of challenge and gradual accomplishing. This obviously is not to say power builds have not always existed but the internet gaming culture has developed since the time of Diablo II and become a lot more organised around these activities so that it is now entirely normative for players to expect to be told how to play. Path of Exile is designed to promote creative play but never curtailed these types of influences through effective balance. It is a great example of the genre but has probably allowed too much convenience define the 'end-game'. On the other hand, I'm shocked that so many players report being too overwhelmed to play because the skill tree is too complex or find the game too challenging. From a business perspective I suppose GGG had to make compromises (the simplified design of the skill tree was pivotal in my opinion) but I'm left to wonder if the effects of the most obvious examples of power building will undermining long term community interest.

 

[abija]

There is a simple reason why new players find the game challenging. You get a huge passive tree that provides endless possibilities but unless you get EHP (which is boring as fuck and probably very few new players will do it) you're bound to fail. And even the most well thought out glass cannon builds do not work in this game, twitch gameplay is way too unreliable and the skillset lacking anyway (and summoners/dual "totemers"/16:1 ratio ranged chars are not glass cannons btw).

 

[Aothan]

I'm referring to the players who are daunted to continue playing in the starting levels because elaborate skill choices are too daunting for them. That's a really strange phenomenon that has become evident in some of the issues new players report as undesirable and what prompted a series of revisions to the skill tree to make it more conveniently streamlined and easier to visually map.

as to the game's challenge, it is true that in later difficulties and in the transition to maps the present design almost exclusively focuses on overall level of health but I'm generally of the opinion that most issues about challenge stem from an expectation of not in fact experiencing any real challenge to a character's routine of level and act progression. If a player cannot progress from one area to the next and transition throughout the acts it is held the game is too challenging and this I think is a difference between GGG's original vision of the game and how they have been recently modifying design to better accommodate the playerbase. The coming melee 'fix' will underscore GGG's direction at this time, personally I don't think melee needs to be fixed so much as the silliness which almost completely undermines the intended challenge be suitably balanced. Unfortunately that is not something that is likely to change so instead melee will also be improved to a similar capacity.

 

[Angthoron]

How are they going to fix melee anyway?