Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[set]

Path of Exile has a few developer diaries buried from when they were CB. http://pathofexile.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Developer_Diaries

As for people who dislike the game, the reasons to dislike it are simple:

1. Desync - Some people just can't handle dying in HC to lag.
2. Active Skills - Some people don't find the current active skills fun.

That's pretty much it, from what I can gather. A few people criticize how the passive tree is "take all life nodes" but that's a temporary concern I imagine will be rectified in the long term.

If you liked Diablo 2, I don't see how you couldn't like PoE, save for the above two issues.

There is a third common issue, "The game is too slow." But I consider anyone saying this to have stopped playing at level 5, probably have ADD, and are likely casuals who want instant gratification.

 

[subotaiy]

The so called "crafting"(very low probabilty of succes wich forces you to spend hundreds or thousands of orbs) and the way trading is implemented are the things that drag this game down, allthough it gets annoying only at the maps part (end-game), especially if you play solo.

Also, the way difficulty is increased is kind of questionable: increase enemy damage, hp instead of AI; that, combined with the desync part(wich is guaranteed for incresead moving speeds or increased speed abilities) discourages any kind of builds based on evasion and fast reflexes from player's part. There's indeed a reason why the most viable builds, especially in HC, are based around stacking life and spamming a ranged combination of skill+supports and pure melee is discouraged (again, I'm tlking about th portion from Act 3 Merciless onwards, since until then the game is relatively easy).

That being said, this is still by far the best loot-whoring game on the market atm.

 

[made]

Been almost a year since I last played this, time to give it another spin and see what's new.

 

[set]

The so called "crafting"(very low probabilty of succes wich forces you to spend hundreds or thousands of orbs) and the way trading is implemented are the things that drag this game down, allthough it gets annoying only at the maps part (end-game), especially if you play solo.

Also, the way difficulty is increased is kind of questionable: increase enemy damage, hp instead of AI; that, combined with the desync part(wich is guaranteed for incresead moving speeds or increased speed abilities) discourages any kind of builds based on evasion and fast reflexes from player's part. There's indeed a reason why the most viable builds, especially in HC, are based around stacking life and spamming a ranged combination of skill+supports and pure melee is discouraged (again, I'm tlking about th portion from Act 3 Merciless onwards, since until then the game is relatively easy).

That being said, this is still by far the best loot-whoring game on the market atm.

Maps can be improved yes, but the current system is a massive advancement over D2 and D3 in terms of the end game, D2 after a fashion was about reaching 100 without dying by grinding the same areas over and over with little/no variation; maps are much different in that regard.

Calling it "crafting" is misleading. The current systems in PoE are ways to acquire slightly better items than what you had before, to tweak great items you find into amazing items - not to make amazing items from scratch. You won't do that without spending a lot of currency. I do agree that "crafting" can be further improved with more mechanics. If I'm level 30 and still using a level 5 chestpiece, I can find a white one and "craft" it into something that will let me survive until I actually find a good chest piece -- or I can save up all my money to buy exalts and turn some end-game chest into the best thing ever.

But neither of these reasons kill the game's enjoyment, like desync or a dislike of active skills might.

 

[JohnTheRevelator]

Melee as useless as always?

 

[made]

Dunno, was fine last I played. Made a new summoner witch this time around, see how that goes.

Anyone have Summon Skeletons gem btw?

 

[Ninjerk]

Just got to Act 2, Ranger is pretty fun so far just rounding up enemies and running circles until they're arranged for split arrow death. Any other playstyles particularly fun?

 

[set]

Just got to Act 2, Ranger is pretty fun so far just rounding up enemies and running circles until they're arranged for split arrow death. Any other playstyles particularly fun?

Dual wield spectral throw with daggers is kind of fun, at least for the novelty of throwing knives. Firestorm was massive buffed, so that might be fun to use now. Crit Lightning Arrow is kind of broken with ranger, since there are some really nice crit clusters lying around. Leap Slam witch with +AOE is kind of fun. Cleave Duelist can be interesting, if you find the right items and bulid correctly. Blood Rage with claws can get ridiculous life leech (20%+) especially with CI. Power Charge on crit with any high crit weapon or spell is always pretty amazing when you get it going. Searing Touch + Allflame cloak can get you enough burn damage on a Templar to OHKO enemies with motlen shell burn (add in ele prolif for extra fire)... Low life builds can be crazy if you get enough more multipliers going. Facebreakers used to be silly, dunno how it is now, but you could practically OHKO bosses with enough added physical damage from items. Bear trap may still be crazy good with high crit mult. I've heard multiple traps can be fun, with the right supported traps. Dual totem ice spear can be interesting. Dominating blow with the right set of supports that effect you and the minions you create has strong synergy. Added cold damage was buffed, so ice shot + added cold damage + hrimsorrow gloves on ranger has a really powerful synergy - you can do almost entirely cold damage and get a lot of powerful freezes going on with ele prolif.

Just look at the support gems and try to think of ridiculous combiantions. Like, explosive arrow plus quill rain was ridculous for a while, if you really shoot for it, Quill Rain can reach over 25 APS.

Minions are kind of boring until you get toward the end game, unless you really enjoy having hordes of dumb monsters following you around.

 

[Ninjerk]

Just got to Act 2, Ranger is pretty fun so far just rounding up enemies and running circles until they're arranged for split arrow death. Any other playstyles particularly fun?

Dual wield spectral throw with daggers is kind of fun, at least for the novelty of throwing knives. Firestorm was massive buffed, so that might be fun to use now. Crit Lightning Arrow is kind of broken with ranger, since there are some really nice crit clusters lying around. Leap Slam witch with +AOE is kind of fun. Cleave Duelist can be interesting, if you find the right items and bulid correctly. Blood Rage with claws can get ridiculous life leech (20%+) especially with CI. Power Charge on crit with any high crit weapon or spell is always pretty amazing when you get it going. Searing Touch + Allflame cloak can get you enough burn damage on a Templar to OHKO enemies with motlen shell burn (add in ele prolif for extra fire)... Low life builds can be crazy if you get enough more multipliers going. Facebreakers used to be silly, dunno how it is now, but you could practically OHKO bosses with enough added physical damage from items. Bear trap may still be crazy good with high crit mult. I've heard multiple traps can be fun, with the right supported traps. Dual totem ice spear can be interesting. Dominating blow with the right set of supports that effect you and the minions you create has strong synergy. Added cold damage was buffed, so ice shot + added cold damage + hrimsorrow gloves on ranger has a really powerful synergy - you can do almost entirely cold damage and get a lot of powerful freezes going on with ele prolif.

Just look at the support gems and try to think of ridiculous combiantions. Like, explosive arrow plus quill rain was ridculous for a while, if you really shoot for it, Quill Rain can reach over 25 APS.

Minions are kind of boring until you get toward the end game, unless you really enjoy having hordes of dumb monsters following you around.

The build I've been looking at involves crit, crit knockbacks, and point blank (and maybe reaching far the left for blood drinker). A couple questions, though: are vampiric effects only gained through passives? Also, I read something to the effect that critical chance only exists between 5 and 95%, but that critical passives modify the critical chance of the weapon (such that they don't stack additively)--my question is this: is it possible to get too much crit from passives? I got Pressure Points, and it's near two 25% critical chance nodes, but there's seriously crit sprinkled all throughout the ranger area.

 

[set]

You may want to try this build out before it gets 'fixed'. Or at least, Cast on Crit, in general.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/706896

As for your questions, you can get life leech from gems and as mods on accessories, weapons and uniques. There's also a few passives for it (one for life leech is by Marauder, one for Mana Leech is by Shadow). You can get life on-hit from mods on weapons and uniques and passives (two near Marauder and I think there's one Claw node with it) and support gems - life on-hit doesn't work with spells, life leech on the support gem will work with spells, but there is no mod for spell life/mana leech yet (there maybe a unique for it, but I don't think so). If you want to get the most life leech, pick Shadow, grab the claw passives, get some claws with +life leech spawned ontop of the innate life leech, get a couple uniques with +life leech, then run Blood Rage and a life leech support gem on your attack skill. A guy in my clan has 28% currently, he doesn't even need life flasks.

With regards to crit, you have base crit, usually 5%. If you get +100% increased crit from the passive tree, you have 10% crit chance. If you use Critical Weakness curse, it's now 15% I think (it gives a flat 5% at rank 1, though I don't think it applies to your base crit chance). If you get something with 6% base crit and apply 100% increased crit chance, it becomes 12% base crit. Going to +200% increased crit will only make your crit 18%, and so on.

Critical hits are tied to the accuracy mechanic, because evasion "secretly" reduces enemy crit chance. If you would otherwise miss, your crit will let you score a normal hit, if you would otherwise crit, evasion may lower your crit to a normal hit. I don't know how this works exactly, but it does. Your opponent can never have 100% evasion, a level 1 character has a 5% chance to always hit somebody. Only thoguh keystones can you give up your innate 5% chance to evade. Crit is thus capped at 95%, but may be effectively 100% against people with "cannot evade" - but I don't know this for a fact. Minimum crit chance is 5% - and this is what's tricky - if you have something with below 5% base crit, it has 5% base crit, but when you increase the crit chance, it will use 4% or 3% (that base chance, I don't think there's a skill below 3% base other than ones that have 0% crit chance and cannot crit on their own, like unarmed attacks) increments instead of 5%, so the base there only applies to increases. It's not a good system for new players to understand, that's for sure.

It's also worth mentioning that evasion in PoE is deterministic. It's not random, if you have 50% evade chance, the game tracks hits by your opponents - a single opponent will miss 5 out of 10 hits, always. The game tries to prevent too much streakyness (unless you really do have a high evasion chance), but there is a little randomness in when the hits and misses will occur. Crits, however, are totally random, or at least, that's how they were the last I read a post from Qarl about it. This is why Ondar's Guile is totally broken and why evasion is really strong, you can achieve 95% evasion chance with 50% base evasion chance vs projectile attacks (And using grace, it's rather easy to get 50% evasion chance vs enemies your level) - this effectively makes you almost immune to ranged crits.

 

[KazikluBey]

As for your questions, you can get life leech from gems and as mods on accessories, weapons and uniques. There's also a few passives for it (one for life leech is by Marauder, one for Mana Leech is by Shadow). You can get life on-hit from mods on weapons and uniques and passives (two near Marauder and I think there's one Claw node with it) and support gems - life on-hit doesn't work with spells, life leech on the support gem will work with spells, but there is no mod for spell life/mana leech yet (there maybe a unique for it, but I don't think so). If you want to get the most life leech, pick Shadow, grab the claw passives, get some claws with +life leech spawned ontop of the innate life leech, get a couple uniques with +life leech, then run Blood Rage and a life leech support gem on your attack skill. A guy in my clan has 28% currently, he doesn't even need life flasks.

Life leech is capped at 20% of your max health per second, unless you have the Vaal Pact keystone, below Duelist, which makes life leech apply instantly. The reason your friend doesn't use life flasks is because he can't due to Vaal Pact forbidding their use.

 

[set]

Oh well sure, if you get VP or Ghost Reaver, life flasks are given up for sure, but life leech isn't capped at 20% of your max life - that's just the rate of its effect. You can't recover more than 20% of your max life per second without VP, but if you leech 10k life and you have max 1k life, you will receive 200 hp/sec until that 10k leech is used up. The leech is never "wasted", it's just not instant.

If you get a high life pool it also doesn't necessarily matter all that much, even if it's capped at 20%/sec 28% life leech doesn't necessarily mean you'll reach that cap if you're attacking at intervals slower than 1 second.

 

[made]

Well, little has changed. Char system is awesome as ever, gameplay itself still boring as fuck. And trading is still a major pita even with all the 3rd party tools available. Why not just make a centralized AH?

 

[set]

Because ARPGs are about items. Getting items, finding items, using items, comparing items, et cetera

Once you introduce an expeditious way to find, acquire and speculate on items, they lose all value. It's a rush to the bottom, except for highly rare items which will quadruple in price because of inflation (because the rich item-sllers will quickly get richer).

Valueable things are valuable because they are not abundant. If you don't invest time into acquiring an item, whether it be trade or farming, then items have no value - finding one has diminished value. An AH also significantly kills competitiveness, they'd have to shorten leagues to one-month long because an AH would become a dumping ground for items and the the temporary league would be satured with shit too quickly.

An AH is just a bad idea in every respect.

GGG has plans to simplify trade - so that it is easier to arrange trades and execute them, but a full-blown AH will never happen for the above reasons.

Also, how would an AH work? There's no "accepted" form of currency exchange and there's no monolithic currency that everybody wants. Some people want Exalteds, some want Chaos, some want Fusings, some want items for items. PoE is a barter economy by design; an automated AH would never work without introducing gold.

PoE's active skills are slowly progressing. Flame Blast is a pretty interesting new spell.

 

[Aothan]

whilst there is no absolute currency Chaos orbs have come to dictate the Nemesis market, with most rarer orbs still reliable as a general currency for their relative ratios to the aforesaid orb. I do generally agree with the point that there is no absolute currency yet the main concern could be how such a feature would superimpose a currency system and thus render the market into a much more rigid state than, as you mention, how it was designed to operate.

what is interesting about this current state of the economy is that it is quite different from earlier examples of an emergent economy, where previously all value was related to Gemcutter Prisms. It was not clear to me why they were held to be so valuable so as to define the market, now I'm curious as to what ('finally') brought about change to what is ostensibly at least a more natural selection for regularising values.

there is also another very good reason for not introducing features that would systemise values, which is that these processes keep in-game economies (I mean what develops within the time span of different leagues) 'dynamic' for longer periods of time. Again, the observable differences between earlier instances and those now occurring as with persisting discrepancies (ratios for Chaos orbs compared to Alchemy and when possible Scouring orbs..) ensures a relatively accessible economy for most players up until a point. There is the excessive pricing issue that is coming to the fore, for example the multiple Exalted requests or even the ten or more Chaos orb requests for items that are not clearly in that price range.


also wanted to say the latest patch update for various fire spells substantially improved my already feasible spell-focused Templar. So much so I am presently opening a third or fourth pathway for more flexible long-term development options since there is little need to select passives that would increase the power or effect (cast and area of effect) of Fireball just yet. Playing with fireball and thinking of the support combinations that could be used it has dawned on me some skills can be supported in two or more different skills sets. For example Fireball is presently supported with Knockback to slightly delay the time it takes for creatures to either move into melee range or to be able to use their abilities from range successively. However, if it works, I would really like to combine Fireball with Point Blank for whenever creatures are in close range. So whilst disinclined to oversimplify how characters play (there of plenty of streams of high level players with empty skill slots who use the same or a limited number of skills exclusively) combining the same skill with two or more sets for different skill combination effects seems like an interesting method for adjusting skill diversity.

Flame Blast seems really powerful to me, it is the type of skill that can work just as well as approximately one and a half Fireball volleys but with less casting time and greater situational precision. The trick is estimating where creatures will converge and not over relying on the full cast effect, as Flame Blast is still effective with less than ten cast charges prepared.



this post is way too long but is anyone else intended to play in the week long league coming up ? I would like to and if I do will take the opportunity to revisit my staff Templar, this time with a greater emphasis on staff proficiency and less focus on aura effects.

 

[made]

Also, how would an AH work?

The same way trade works now: you set a B/O that people can meet or enter their own offers and after a set amount of time you pick the one that suits you most (or not).

It would just circumvent the need to browse 3rd party websites and forum shops and spam trade for hours on end with a centralized in-game UI.

 

[set]

So you don't want an AH, you want a store.

There is no way for an AH to work because there's no way to bid or incrementally bid vs your item unless currencies have standard exchange rates - and they don't.

I mean, you could run an auction house in PoE, but it'd require a human to manage the bids, there's no way you'd want a machine to make decisions on whether you want two exalts for ten thousand wisdom scrolls, one hundred alts vs a couple fusings. With the way the PoE economy works, an alch is worth .5 chaos one day, it's woth .3 chaos the next. There's no right way to handle automated exchange.

 

[made]

Call it a store then, but gief.

Let the seller specify what currency he accepts; exalts and chaos seem to be the default for gear anyway. Limit it to the standard league if it somehow breaks the competitive ones.

 

[set]

There's no "somehow" about it. All you need to do is look at any ARPG or MMO ever. PoE would be no different, if you let people receive items with the click of a button. You have to make it so getting the "best item" is more complex than simply clicking a button. You should at least have to find a trader, negotiate with them, and compete with other people. Otherwise, a store or AH becomes a literal dumping ground for shit nobody wants/uses - but this results in everything but "perfect" items from losing all value. A "nice" magic item becomes worthless, because a "nice" rare item can be obtained from the instant-gratification-store with zero effort. With the current ineffeciencies of the means of trade, players will vendor or stash items they are not using, instead of trying to waste their time selling them to people.

It's pretty pointless to discuss this, because the developers have outlined these same reasons before and have promised they will never put an automated AH/store system in PoE. Ever. Going against that promise would be very bad for them.

What they do plan to do is allow out-of-game trading (like what Steam provides, though they won't be allowing you to trade PoE items for Steam games or anything like that, their site will have its own out-of-game trade web application, that also might be put on mobile devices). Something like this will make forum-based trading more streamlined and less obnoxious. But their intention is for that to be the mainstay - you will find somebody's store page, PM them - they can be at work and answer your PM during their lunch hour or something, then trade you via the website's trade client. This makes trading faster and shopping more streamlined, but also means it's still a manual process (though doubtlessly people will try to automate this, I'm sure GGG has measures in place to try and prevent that).

 

[made]

What they do plan to do is allow out-of-game trading (like what Steam provides, though they won't be allowing you to trade PoE items for Steam games or anything like that, their site will have its own out-of-game trade web application, that also might be put on mobile devices). Something like this will make forum-based trading more streamlined and less obnoxious. But their intention is for that to be the mainstay - you will find somebody's store page, PM them - they can be at work and answer your PM during their lunch hour or something, then trade you via the website's trade client. This makes trading faster and shopping more streamlined, but also means it's still a manual process (though doubtlessly people will try to automate this, I'm sure GGG has measures in place to try and prevent that).

That's pretty much how it works now.

http://poe.xyz.is rarely lists the B/O though so you end up PMing all those people only to find out they want 100 ex for a 5l rare.

 

[DakaSha]

That horrible shit in your sig offends me

 

[Ninjerk]

^

 

[made]

Blame DU, 'twas his idea. This is the future, son.

 

[aron searle]

I can't believe we have a 250 something page thread bitching about Diablo auction house 3, then twits say they want an auction house in POE.

Fuck off.

 

[Grunker]

I can't believe we have a 250 something page thread bitching about Diablo auction house 3, then twits say they want an auction house in POE.

Fuck off.

Eh? How is the concept similar in any way? The reason the D3 AH sucked was a) you could use real money and b) you could convert anything to a standard (gold) and just spend that to get whatever you wanted. Your road to the items you wanted were just: farm gold -> get item, or just pay from your account. As such, the farming/loot running lost all meaning in D3, and that's what these games revolve around.

An AH in PoE would require trading. It depends on the quality of your drops what you can trade for.

I don't personally care that much since I don't trade, but I have an extremely hard time seeing what the plus of only being able to trade via Forum/Chat is. You're going to have to explain that one.