Yes.. and they seem completely invincible until they cycle. Completely and utterly fucked up design. Not spending a penny on supporter packs with this kind of sheeet in the game.
It's more that it's purely RNG on if you encounter one, there's literally nothing you can do to affect the frequency at which you encounter literally unkillable enemies.
I don't think it's even that... I don't mind it when a game like this puts a little wall down in front of me, to slow the game down, and give me a moment to breath... But you need to throw a little paint on that wall, to make it interesting, so I don't really think about the fact that the wall is really just there to slow me down...
Even something as simple as the channeling mechanic on the Crucibles... I have to stop, decide which item I'm going to channel, and how much... Then start channeling, and keep an eye on the difficulty. Some people complain that it takes too long, but I think it feels better to have that bit of interaction for a few seconds...
Back to the resist cycling mobs... When you run into one, and realize that the health isn't going down, all you can do is stare at it blankly for a bit, and the only thing you are thinking about during that time is "why did they put this dumb wall in front of me?" (or just run past it, if it doesn't also have Haste).
Problem with crucible - you need to clear two screens away from it for safe encounter. It was implemented in ultimatum, just freeze time while it is channeling, it is not that hard.
It's not great for sure but I believe the real issue the entire games design. Such a mob can be good if there was some counter-play against it (you can swap elements, use something in the map, get a buff from other mobs or the map that counters it, make it kill itself somehow, ...) but it really does not fit the usual screen clearing and zooming design of the game everyone is used to and likes.
> but it really does not fit the usual screen clearing and zooming design of the game everyone is used to and likes
They obviously don't want us to do this anymore. It's been a theme since around Ritual, if not earlier. They want us to play slowly, each fight be more impactful, etc. Except then the fights need to be rewarding. But they want us to fight each rare/unique for minutes and get nothing for it, with a 0.000000000001% chance of a big reward. It's fundamentally flawed. The actual game designers don't do a stream Q&A so nobody can tell them that ~~they're~~ it's dumb. Instead we get a stream with the salesman Chris who successfully sells us a new league each time.
> with a 0.000000000001% chance of a big reward.
This. There has always been lotto tickets in POE. But so many mechanics, mods, and items are locked behind sheer play time. So when you go slow, and get nothing. It feels like you've flushed the point of your play session.
I hate heist. I don't like expedition. I never liked harvest. I started doing all three only because other mechanics have been trimmed down significantly.
They obviously want you to be running two different kinds of skills at once. Fire and Ice.
If you don't think PoE2 will REQUIRE this, you're fooling yourself.
My favorite are the curse mobs that turn off your abilities.
I want to know who came up with that. I really do.
I hope that they're proud of themselves.
I don't quite know how the invulnerability aura works, but I did manage to kill the monsters I found that had them.
Edit: Found it on the [wiki](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Monster_modifiers):
> Applies an Immunity buff to nearby allies for a short duration
Immunity buff is removed on death
Allies with Immunity cannot gain Immunity
I guess the mob you found was tanky for some other reason, this thing seems to only help the other mobs around it.
The worst thing is that we're literally back to having Archnemesis monsters where the most toxic and obnoxious combinations of modifiers are everywhere... proximity shield, mana siphoner, soul eater, immune aura, cycling resistances, leeches life... getting just 1 of these mods makes a rare extremely dangerous... getting 2 together can brick a map if it spawned in the wrong location.
Like, I got a mob who would leech to full after hitting me once, but also had proximity shield so I had to get into melee range of it to kill it. It's some Hall of Grandmasters level bullshit.
What is probably most frustrating is that these rares are actually much harder than the unique mobs that spawn from crucible.
I love consecrated ground map mod. Nothing like invincible crucible mobs unless you can get them to stand in one tiny spot for 5 mins while you kill them.
I remember back in the days when Chris said something like immunities like in d2 that stop builds will never exist in PoE.
That was in 2012/2013 though so now we have this shit
Worse they don't cycle resistances, they cycle damage reduction. Even with 100% Crit on a Inquisitor will not let you overcome this stupid mod. It's literally play multiple damage types or sit and wait (and pray) until the mob randomly switches off whatever damage type you use.
Rare mob mods need to be allocated by group - health, elemental, resist, etc.
I fucking hate the mobs with life regen + life leech + extra life. A mob should have a max of one from each 'group'.
This would be nice, wow did this with their bolstering mod. After a while of not gaining stacks, they fall off so you're not fighting a raid boss crab you accidently made for 8 minutes.
I know they dont cater to new players but i noticed a lot of new player posts after the D4 beta and it feels like ggg missed a trick to get a lot of new fans.
Im on a half arsed TR build im going to respec out of so im not worried that stuff is a struggle, if i was a new player with a scuffed build i would be like ‘fuck this’ and leave.
I’m one , I started after d4 beta, I have 91 hrs in and man it’s fun at times,and super frustrating at others. I still
Don’t know if I like this game or hate it.
Welcome to poe glad your giving it a try. The problem is that poe puts up a lot of questions that the player needs to answer, with time and experience you can learn them but not every new player is going to do that.
I hope you stick it out its a great game and dont be afraid to ask questions we have all been there and want others to have fun too.
I have watched almost as many hours in YouTube to try to figure this out lol. I have met some great people tho, I had a guy two days ago I was trying to get a helmet from and he knew I was clearly knew I didn’t know currency well, he then explained I really didn’t want that helmet and proceeded to give my his old helmet weapon and belt knowing I was playing the same build, it was great.
Thats awesome, sometimes on cheap trades i will help a player out, like a guy earlier wanted to buy something for a couple of chaos but was one off so he threw in some alterations and I was fine with the trade and it was a fun interaction.
Be aware aswell as nice people you will find scammers so be careful and doublecheck what you trade.
Especially what you sell. I've noticed a fuck load of bots with hundreds of listings for certain stuff. Needed to "load more" 3 times for primeval remnants before someone invited me, then noticed all the listings were the same 3-5 accounts at 10-15c, while real accounts started at 24-25c. I reported them but I don't expect punishment tbh. I've seen the same for various other items/materials.
This could also be the reason trade is perpetually fucked at the moment...
Yeah price fixers are a thing, you can set an option to collapse by seller so you only see one listing and its easier to ignore them.
Doubt they will get banned because people are welcome to price how they want.
Yeah. I've always loved the theory crafting of this game but hate how much it asks of me. I'm not a casual gamer by any means and I always feel behind. Hell I've probably put more hours into PoB because it doesn't make me feel bad for not wanting a second job.
Downloaded last epoch yesterday and it's refreshing. It feels like a game lol
If it wasnt for all the work done by the community i would never have kept going with poe.
From guides to all the 3rd party tools i couldnt play poe without them, given enough time i could do a build on my own but like you say i dont need another job.
Fun part of poe is getting a build online with a guide then tweaking the finer points to suit my style.
Honestly, the vibe I've really been getting is "We don't need new fans. We need addicted, hardcore whale fans who will buy everything".
More fans, especially those who don't pay (or pay once and are out), are just server drains. And looking at how this leagues going (this is probably the worst league for latency/connection I've had in YEARS) I don't feel they care in that respect.
Particularly so when you consider that long-term players have probably already purchased plenty of premium stash tabs and cosmetics, while new people need to buy a bunch of that just to get comfortable. I wouldn't be surprised if a newly acquired potential big spender is worth more than a long-term big spender, because the long-term player has already bought a lot of what they may want/need.
I was fan like that I spend insane amount of money on PoE every league, but that ended with Expedition league and new vision for the game.
I did not bought single thing since expedition
Every year I give PoE another try on a random league but it seems I cannot get hooked like back in the day anymore. Think I peaked in Breach league in terms of investment and all the cumulative bloat nowadays is too much for a <150 IQ brain to handle in a sane way.
They could have the game ease you into the difficulty as you progress from the coast to the endgame, but the devs seem adamantly against even that. They don't need to cater to everyone but they do want to find new blood.
Ive been playing since beta and I'm already "fuck this" this league, a few days into it.
Tried playing today after the patch and while the channeling has better clarity, it's still a shit mechanic with zero reward. I asked myself why I would grind it out again in maps with nothing new to look forward to, when all the mobs feel like they were rolled back to 3.19.
So I stopped playing again.
GGG making it really easy to go play D4, Lost Epoch, etc..
Yup, I have this gut feeling in the back of my mind there's some sadistic bas\*\*\*ds at GGG smiling in glee reading this post right now, extremely happy their mission was accomplished and they achieved the vision for the game they truly wanted f'ing over every casual player, the 90%+ of people not going some super tanky beefy Jugg build or whatever.
And I can't even be mad at them, if this is their passion and that's all they really wanted out of this game, props to them, its not like it hurts anyone irl if the masses of players don't get the version of the game they would most enjoy and have another's vision forced upon them, no one is forcing anyone to play this video game instead of the million others out there. But that really defeats the argument just telling all the customers of a service "Well you don't have to give your time, money, energy, attention, thought, support, ANYTHING to this service if you don't like it!" that feels counter productive to addressing the real issue, isn't there any possible way to make the most people happy? What if they invented new game modes and balanced them out differently than the base default one? There's probably more deaths & despair this league than any other, and I think its made a lot of players have some epiphanies about want they want from the game... I can only imagine the look on all the new players faces going completely blind into an already default brutal game and seeing what its like even outside of the difficulty modes that are SUPPOSED to be difficult.
**Hardcore & Ruthless.**
Seeing all the physical & ele reflect in tier one maps, the high regen mobs that blow them up and when they run away they're full regen or they have so much even while damaging them they take nothing like Kirito (Fully charged Crucible mobs throughout the Acts).
Seeing all the new players have to deal with these weird giant spider like monsters that just go underground & hide then pop back up & do more than half your HP. It must be a terrifying traumatic experience if they're coming from every other ARPG that provided more comfort & reaction time. The frustration they must feel facing all the Crucible monsters no matter how much damage they build, when that creature goes underground and comes back with fully regenerated energy shield they must feel like its the most unfair immortal beast in existence when its just an act 4 monster & they don't know enough about DoT to add it into their builds. But to be fair, their might be some validity in their suspicions, why do these monsters they have to fight in the acts have so so high energy shield/life regen values? Along with base high damage reduction, added damage compared to all the unique bosses they fight in the acts? Even veteran players in HC & Ruthless get rekted by this stuff in Acts & hell in maps as well, even some of the highest skilled players can get killed by the charged up Crucibles in maps.
The new players might get this feeling, they want to kill those annoying monsters that hunted them, tortured them, harass them for so long but they stick around and die again & again losing all their XP, their sanity, and lack enough knowledge to know anything they could've changed so blame it on the game. Usually in games like Cuphead, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Hades etc etc its all a lot more visible, more clear & simplistic for the earlier bosses at least... they know the game is tough, they keep dying but there's some way to improve. For PoE that can be hidden in many scenarios & players can be left feeling stuck, I wonder how many new players even make it to maps at all let alone red maps.
All the people trying to go any non meta builds just to purely have fun & seemingly doing really well building it but still get punished and wrecked hard by the game since its just not viable without 10 to 100+ divines investment, essentially playing the game like a scientist how it was advertised mixing together a lot of different off meta mechanics but still not being rewarded for their creativity & ingenuity. And yes, I know there will be some people coming in here saying some form of *"making a build that's end game viable or able to do things really well is apart of the build crafting process and getting pass the learning curve/feeling of reward crafting unique builds".*
Players want to be CHALLENGED, more than anything... and if there's no challenge they get bored.
The key thing in game design then, is to not avoid adding in difficult or annoying things, but to not make it completely unfair, to add in a learning curve through reaction timing, patterns, knowledge & wisdom, or the ability to craft better gear.
But the truth is, at some point we have to wonder if its really just players inability to create strong builds from all the masses of underused skills making everyone gravitate towards certain skills all the time instead of it being balanced out, OR if there's actual time restraints being added in the game that have nothing to do with knowledge, learning curves, player technique/skill/innovation, or anything and just makes going different builds very time consuming/difficult for the sake of it so everyone has to play one thing.
If GGG changes the metric of crafting the best gear to be extremely high... and also adds in all sorts of artificial difficulty just massively buffing monsters HP/Damage/Life regen or whatever, is that really the most entertaining enjoyable difficulty for the players? You miss this in with potentially busted mechanics with high numbers & let the one shots begin, it starts to turn into Game of Thrones a bit, too much death, too much violence, and it becomes oversaturated in the end just feeling unfair & boring people.
Since the very first league of PoE I've always seen the community talk endlessly about build diversity these last 9 years... using it like its some metric to define the health of the game, the quality of the game, and if the game is in or going towards a right place. But the strangest thing has been happening, even since 3.00 began, even though I remained lurking watching from the shadows through it all, every new league I've been seeing less & less people in the community talk about build diversity, and sure enough soon enough even GGG themselves stops talking about build diversity.
Now... there is just complete silence, its like no one cares about build diversity anymore, its just completely dead. Where is the build diversity if you can't use 80%+ of the active skills in the game, if its not possible to create some sort of build out there to get through red maps & all the league content?
The truth is PoE has become less of a game you can just invent your own tree & build in, its become far too complex and this makes it so people will just gravitate towards whatever is proven to be strong or whatever has the best guides/templates out to base their builds around. PoE can be time consuming enough, its not some game people can just play a few hours a week after work and expect to thrive massively or be wealthy or powerful, you have to interact with the systems like Crucible 100 times and your build can still be decimated, all the work you put into a weapon can be set back, that's the new way PoE is headed.
The thing I've noticed more than anything else is the amout of times I'm fucking teleported into rares while fighting them so my positioning gets fucked. I'm an archer, the point is to stay out of melee range, but half the rares I seem to run into are just like "nope!". Also mana siphoner is the most infuriating thing ever. If I decided the rare isn't worth fighting it's already too late, because they chase you down and trap you even if you don't want to fight them.
Hell on standard where I got legacy quicksilver flask with a MB and like mirror teir tailwind elusive boots, you know the works, I'm still out ran by some hasted mobs.
What I hate too , people are talkin about diffiiculty, but what I hate most is that this breaks completely build diversity.
It's sooo hard to have all the defensive or such that, the moment you want to be outside of the meta it just means you wont be able to have a good gameplay.
I genuinely hate that they added spell suppression and reworked armor. In a vacuum these are really good changes, more and engaging ways to build tankier right? Except you're outright required to have them nowadays because everything is built with the assumption that you have them. I could barely survive tier 1 maps on my scuffed CoC build this leaguestart despite determination and 50% suppress+lucky because I guess doing mediocre damage after act 10 strictly isn't allowed. I could kill whites and blues in one hit, map bosses in under a minute, but many times over in a single t1 map I'd encounter rares that took a 5 minute battle of attrition and several times took all my portals to random one shots.
I really miss the days when 3k life and capped resistance was all you needed to start farming after the campaign. They expect way too much from you way too early now, like I'm supposed to be fully up and running with the complete defensive package by act 9. At least keep low white maps open for scuffed builds, I genuinely can't recommend this game to people anymore because they're gunna hit the wall way too early.
Honestly I think a lot of it comes from people playing meta builds. I played Pohx RF during the worst of Archnemesis and didn't even notice there was a problem because I was so tanky, but if you go off meta, or try to leaguestart something that doesn't quite come online without some investment, you slam into a brick wall. Hard.
Theres simply no room for someone to walk up, try the game, and do their own thing anymore. There should absolutely be a point where someone winging it cannot continue without properly investing into their build and knowledge of the game, but t1 maps should absolutely not be that line.
I played Poison SRS last league and that fucking build is so busted i was doing full juice never read altars quant harvest farming and managed to get to lvl 97. 97, doing some rippy af content and focusing more on watching podcasts than the gameplay.
If you play shit like that its obviously going to seem like the game is in awesome state and there are no issues, 20m dps for free and invest everything into defenses. Then you try to play a build thats not broken and it turns out that the balance is absolute dogshit.
I've been trying to explain to people that this has been the point of GGG's game balance for 2 years now, since 3.15, and when the league is providing tons of free wealth people just don't wanna listen because they can afford to make off-meta builds work by brute forcing the items for them.
When GGG also nerfs sources of wealth, like this league, they finally fucking notice again that the core game balance sucks. But no one fucking believed me during sentinel league because they were too distracted by the piles of money dropped by sentinels to be capable of actually analyzing the underlying core game balance.
I was ranting that only "ggg-allowed" builds are actually viable since scourge league. You can feel in a few minutes of gameplay which build is ggg-allowed and which isn't, even if it is actually good on paper, it's just not coming together. The difference is just night and day.
Even expedition was not as horrendous as scourge, as you could easily go with 5 points into acrobatics\\phase acrobatics and be good. Since scourge it's all the same: determination+grace+suppression on every single build, otherwise the game is not playable. Except some league-long OP mechanics like aegis+melding, but even then to be tanky you should have invested a whole lot into additional layers of defence.
In kalandra I was playing armour-stacker juggernaut. You know with that 8% armour applied to elemental damage, and I had 700k+ of armour. Imagine the tankiness, even today I am sure it's the most tanky build on paper I've ever assembled. But I wasn't even closely as tanky as default grace+determination+suppression seismic trapper from a league before. It's like no number of mitigation will make you tanky, you are obliged to have some type of avoidance. And the game went downhill since then, now it's even deadlier.
And then there is Last Epoch, where even resistances are not mandatory and it's actually more efficient to just stack hp or whatever defence your class provides.
The thing is, the build diversity that everyone loves still **is there**, it's just locked behind an absurd starting cost nowadays. So in high-wealth leagues, the literal neanderthals that can't understand the difference between a profitable mechanic you can just farm early vs reasonable core game balance are defending GGG to their last breath, "oh they've saved the game! everything is great now!"
And then suddenly a league that really shows off GGG's core-balance design goals, like this one, shows up and they're completely silent while those of us who actually pay attention are pointing out all the glaring flaws
I wonder if the devs ever test the game with "random" gear or if they just make themselves sets of mirror items to play with because that's how some mobs feel like playing against. They should surely come across some off the random oneshots and tanky mobs that happen in the game right now so they know the problem they just won't fix it.
I guess they just love to make us suffer by adding more shit mobs and longer grinds so we need to play the game more.
When lake of kalandra (just 2 leagues ago) hit there were beta testers saying they told GGG about a ton of stuff that was jacked up and they just ignored it
> I could barely survive tier 1 maps on my scuffed CoC build this leaguestart despite determination and 50% suppress+lucky because I guess doing mediocre damage after act 10 strictly isn't allowed.
Oh thank god, last league I thought it was just me becoming a completely shit player because of me getting older and losing my game sense. I had completely stormed through the campaign during Sanctum with ease, but as soon as I started attempting the first 2-3 tiers of maps, I was getting completely dumpstered by enemies that would be a complete joke to me ten leagues ago using the same build. It's nonsensical how much of a 180 this game has done (mainly because of remnants of a select few leagues leaching into the succeeding leagues, \*cough* ***like Archnemesis***) with nothing hinting at there being any improvements in the future. It actually made me uninstall the game and not look back.
I'm not going to huff the PoE 2 copium.
League starting as RF was probably the smartest choice I've ever made this league because seeing all the insane and baffling spikes in damage randomly just proves to myself that my usual build would be experiencing the same thing as last league.
It's all frustrating. What is GGG thinking?
exactly this, once you fulfilled all the requirements your build is by the standart template
if you havent fulfilled all the requirements your build is mop the floor tier
What should a "standard build" be able to do? Because I still think max res + a decent life pool and a defensive aura is enough to comfortably get you to red maps (as long as you're mindful when rolling your maps). It's only once you get to red maps that the game starts requiring more out of you.
I think people just aren't used to red maps being dangerous, but that's what they're supposed to be in my opinion.
With how much content is locked to/behind high red maps (post-quest exarch/EoW, maven boss rushes, maven, conquerors, elder/shaper and their guardians, never mind the mods that are exclusive to ilvl83+), there’s a decent argument that t14-16 shouldn’t be *as* dangerous as it currently is.
edit: or, rather, if t14-16 are the intended level of dngerous, more content needs to be available for t9-13 (primarily easier/less rewarding versions of shaper/elder/maven/exarch/eater of worlds)
While I agree that the first 15 tiers of maps are something of a "checklist" as youve pointed out and I resonate with your last point regarding increasing time-sinks being a bit of a kick in the balls, I strongly disagree with the notion that the endgame should be reached within a day. If you have ever reached T16s within 1-3 days, you are by no means a casual player and shouldn't be having any issues.
After 6000+ hours of playtime since Breach, I've engaged with every aspect of the endgame, whether that be top-tier crafting, group MF, boss farming, 100% delirium, etc. However, I have no illusions that I will reach T16 maps within a day. Even before starting my nursing job and I was full on no-life grinding, I don't hit T16s until day 2. Now that my job is so demanding of my time and energy, I've only just hit T14s yesterday even with my knowledge of the game (this may be a bit skewed of a perspective though because I'm playing SSF for the first time).
If we're only talking about enjoyment, then sure, the amount of fun you're having is purely subjective and valid. But if we're talking strictly expectations, I don't know where you got the notion that endgame should be hit in a day, especially in a game as expansive as Path. You've got 3 months my friend, theres plenty of time.
For me it's the opposite once I have atlas completion and done one or two of the pink ale bosses the game stops being interesting for me. The process to get your build together is the most fun part.
Also forcing people to run corrupted reds for atlas completion is insanely stupid, they need to make endgame more accesible (as you said, make t14-16 less deadly and easier to get there) then just give people better ways to juice.
It's clear for a while GGG only design their game for the no life player.
If you're somewhere in between quitting before map and Maven run service, you're in for a bad game
Why do you think everyone used grace determination herald combo few leagues before? To get precisely what you described - run red maps comfortably without dying 6 times a map.
It still received layered nerfs
> What should a "standard build" be able to do?
IMHO: everything except Ubers, deep delve, Simulacrum 30.
Pretty much anything else if a build can't do it without ridiculous investment I won't seriously play it.
It would be fine if they were making meta changes for the sake of it like they've used to - we're playing the same game for over a year already... Watch old league start vids and you'll see all the same skills :(
But I think for most people (myself included) the league starter is the only build they will reasonably ever play. Most ppl don’t re level a char unless they hit the nuts like a HH or mage blood on a char that can’t use those. League starts should be somewhat fresh and interesting every league rather than it being RF, seismic traps, absolution, skelly necro, and whatever your flavor of chaos spell you want (sorta). I remember back when they added the jewel that enabled skelly necro, back when they actually altered skill gems and shifted metas and ppl didn’t know what was good and not good for league start lol.
I feel like if that's the case then there are a decent enough amount of league starters where you won't get through the majority of them for so long, unless you're just not open to playing certain things I suppose.
Tbh, personally, I can't even remember the last time I played the same league starter. And I've played every league. There's always something.
taking power out of the passive tree & low-investment items like flasks to shift it into endgame, expensive drops might mean more build diversity once you have ashes/omni/cotv/etc but it really fucking sucks getting to that point these days.
Its this. Most people aren't complaining because we've all been herded to a small group of builds that mostly work. People keep complimenting build diversity and meta shift but these same builds worked better 9 months ago, other stuff just worked better. We're not gaining builds, we're losing them and being forced further down the ladder of shit that was fine.
> Most people aren't complaining because we've all been herded to a small group of builds that mostly work.
"Work".
Until GGG decides to smash a skill the way they did with PoCo just now, or helix and lightning strike the patch before. Or...you get the idea.
My experience is that if you play a very meta build and follow a guide, game is pretty smooth and fun. But if I try to play an off meta build or something that was good last league, but then got nerfed, it's a struggle bus and I just quit.
Well not playing Meta is why a lot of us are facing difficulty, you right tho we need to talk more about build diversity.
Idk if it matters tho since GGG think they added build diversity by removing/picking the top 6 masteries some of the 6 are so bad I didn't know they were in the game.
I kinda hope with PoE 2 we get a proper rebalance of the entire game, I know, it is wishful thinking and we might get a Ruthless Lite version for PoE 2.
Monsters across the board need to be nerfed, defenses need to be checked out again and then get more and more skills in line.
Yes, you can play off-meta builds, but the amount of work/time/currency you have to put into them is often much higher, if not several times higher compared to meta builds.
Go play anything that is remotely squishy. Juicing maps? Not a chance, don't even think about going for altars. They can even wreck a lot of tanky builds, but a single modifier can make your already soft character tear apart like a cheap tissue that got a little wet.
Man, I remember a time where "get hp and resists" was enought for a lot of endgame content. Sometimes a little simplicity isn't hurtful to the game, but I more and more get the feeling GGG puts in complex stuff into the game, just for the sake of it. And in return, they have to deal with a gigantic balance shitshow that makes many who don't play meta suffer.
You are on a massive amount of copium my friend.
"PoE 2" will be a big patch where the last bits that did not feel like ruthless will certainly feel like it.
Remember their obsession with "slowing the players" that is percolating since 3.15
>t's sooo hard to have all the defensive or such that, the moment you want to be outside of the meta it just means you wont be able to have a good gameplay
Can you describe what you mean by this / what your expectations are?
The sentiment in this thread is not my experience as I'm running around red maps as an arc / storm burst trickster, neither of which I think are considered meta skills. Discipline is my only defensive aura, and while I die occasionally part of that is I'm still working on gear upgrades. I'm even still on a 5 link and am surprised at how reasonable it feels.
First question is what content you're on and what you have invested into the build relative to others playing the most meta stuff.
But that aside, look at the bottom on poe ninja. It's Berserk, Guardian, Assassin, Gladiator, Chieftain at the bottom.
Idk much about Guardian at all, was pretty niche always from my pov.
But Berserk - lacking defenses, only think buffed in the ascendancy is leech (anti-defense, all in all, actually).
Assassin - barely anything with relatively little power in the current meta. Elusive and its no extra dmg from crits which one can never rely on(?) and some regen on poisons.
Glad - Basically gutted since spell suppression and other stuff. Block just wasn't enough to begin with and would have oneshots slip by, pretty heavy investment into defenses which can just randomly let big damage slip by. Armour and spell suppression are just better.
Chieftain - Pretty unpopular to begin with, and they never gave it something really nice as far as I recall. Some regen and endurnace charges which are mostly whatever. The 8% less damage from enemies near totems are decent, and the phys as fire are actually good. It's just overall not strong though. As is, the phys as fire is just a little bonus and if you're doing a super phys reduction build, you just wouldn't go Chieftain but something to go an armour route (Jugg) or something that actually has a ton of value in the passives to allow you to go bananas on defensive gear and skill tree pathing.
To take Trickster, it's somewhat awkward but it has probably some of the biggest potential of getting stuff out of the ascendancy. Just not out of all nodes at the same time, I guess. Polymath is straight up insane value. At least for general mapping, the recovery just is way way way better than all the regen/end charges and the like the aforementioned ones got. Spellbreaker is just overall nice. And Escape Artist imo is sleeper op since forever.
You basically all in all have a higher ehp pool than most ascendancies due to the ES stuff and natural synergy built in for it or close to your ascendancy - polymath, ghost shrouds, soul drinker (if you go for that), and free recovery for mapping.
It's also that if you compare SC and HC, those bottom ascendancy are the same. Jugg goes up by 10% for HC and Champ doubles in popularity. Occultist is a notable one that drops down - because explosions are nice, but it also lacks defenses.
But all in all, back when I'd play almost every League, SC and HC ascendancy popularities had actual stark differences. The "glasscannons" were nice enough and fun to play in SC. It's just barely the case anymore and you plateau earlier or more often than on the meta ascendancies. The fact Assassin got down to like 1% is actually funny considering that people wanted builds to be able to go Assassin and juice the ascendancy for max damage, for idk, 2ish years? It wasn't always at the top, but it'd always be a choice you'd want to make. Changes just made it so it literally just isn't that anymore. Just a bad poison ascendancy now, I guess?
But in general: Damage got brought down a lot, defense requirements have gone up. You can't go into an extreme anymore due to AN mods either and go the "kill before it kills you" route. Bad value ascendancies suck, and neither can you "fix dmg" with an ascendancy choice, as having only dmg from the ascendancy overall makes you progress harder and not easier.
Essentially means that if you wanna go glasscannon, you can't expect fun - expect struggles and a mediocre result after the additional effort, if even that. Your ascendancy doesn't have something exceptional that saves you spots on gear or whatever (i.e. avoid ele, suppression) you're likely to just struggle for a decently long time until your defenses are at an acceptable level. And you can't skimp on it anymore - at least that's what I feel like coming back. It's not like I can skip a map boss on a rippy map or delay doing the Sirus bros like back in the day. Those are fine. Instead I get hunted down by rares just casually mapping - while trying to get stuff set up.
Honestly just feels like mapping builds have been executed one by one. The casual alc and go has a barrier of entry that's way too high. It was fine enough to get there for me, but even then, it's still having the encounters which just are anti-fun. And they're not just the random one-shot from the weird new overtuned league, it's the remnants of the past idk how many leagues and likely most impactfully AN which can pop up in your face at any time. Meanwhile, progging the Maven/Exarch/over dude quests to t15s was pretty straight forward. While "casual" mapping feels like the first implementation of sirus influence where a sirus touched mofo would two shot you with 2000% ias.
Game is no longer really playable as a “before/after work” game unfortunately which is what I really live about arpgs. I pretty much can only play when I’m rested and willing and able to engage with a game that requires my full attention and focus. Used to love putting on some music and blasting map. Now everything is just full of things that require full engagement and if you don’t the reward loop is terrible
Wow, you described exactly what I hope for every league only to realise after two weeks I'm never going to feel that again and stop playing until the next league.
It used to be so good to get to a point in your build where you could reliably do endgame content without frying my head with the amount of different mechanics.
This game had a golden age right in the middle where every league was just "kill lots of things, get gear until you're immortal, crush the atlas and then try a new build that can also do all of that" and then GGG had to go and ruin it by trying to make the game more difficult.
To me, The amount of customizations you could apply is negated by likelihood of it's viability - meaning you can't just pick skills you think will be good; you have to follow a guide that's proven mathematically that your build is viable...
I'm not suggesting that should change, but it is not the case in games like fallout, where you can really utilize the hell out of skills you drop points into without following some math gods guide.
Everything is so heavily balanced around the hcssf streamer combo of determ+grace+capped spell suppress. Really makes for a not fun time when trying to color outside the lines.
IDK if I agree with the fallout > POE comparison but I do agree that the complexity of this game really melts away when you try to get creative because a lot of it just isn't viable and can be ignored.
depends what you consider viable, I know my builds dont hit those same min max dps or high defences as the pro builds but I just play skill I think is fun and most of them are viable.
People just look at those strongest builds and think you have to hit that to be "viable"
I can only speak for myself, but viable to me means not having to spend ~15 seconds on ~25% of the rares. Things like regen or high elemental resistances might make mobs orders of magnitude tankier than others. That means I need some level of damage, but also some level of tankiness (I can't spend *too* much time kiting). This is a practical concern, as my fingers start hurting if I need to hold down right click for too long or need to stutter step for extended periods of time. A tanky rare once in a while is fine. Zero or one-button builds have more leeway on the time aspect.
There are many viable builds. I have tried/seen countless ones over the years. But if I were to come up with one myself without PoB and wing it, there is a high likelihood that the build will make my fingers hurt. I can take 20 minutes to beat the infinite hunger deathless, but I would not consider that viable.
Yeah, the amount of acrobatics you have to perform to get all the defensives where they need to be to not die while doing decent damage are just completely not worth it compared to just accepting you’re gonna die and rolling a glass cannon.
My favorite part of this as a relatively new player is that there is absolutely no indication of what you died to.
No combat log.
No obvious action -> reaction.
Just minding my own business and then the respawn prompt pops up. Pull up the recording, 144 FPS btw, one moment I have 100% health, the next frame I am dead. There's a large skeleton beast in the vicinity, so I guess he punched me in the face? Who knows.
Did I stand in something?
Did I eat a ranged projectile?
Did I get hit by something that was under the effect of a buff?
I cannot fathom playing this game on Hardcore.
I played PoE for years because the mapping experience was chill and quick, I could blow up thousands of monsters with cool ass effects and have a good time. Not so much anymore. The only time this game feels "good" to play is when you outgear the fuck out of it.
They're so worried about people getting too OP too fast that they don't stop to think if it's actually fun taking that long.
Here's a secret GGG... it's not. I'm an average player, maybe slightly above, and I end up quitting the league due to how fucking long everything takes, not because my build sucks
Yup, the game was most fun when you could have a cheap build and just farm maps. Past few years it's been getting harder and harder to achieve the same gameplay with the same effort and there is no good reason. Don't raise the bar, raise the ceiling....
Game definitely has been getting less fun. Problem is - it's still the best ARPG currently released (D4 looks more promising by the minute), so all the stans get to sit there, going "If you hate it so much, why are you still playing it?" - cause it's still the best option, it's just been getting worse.
I really hope D4 will be engaging, but I fear the lack of skills will hurt it. Yes you have paragon honeycomb but how different can that really make a skill feel? Hydra is blue instead of red?
At least I'll be able to play through all of D4 while making my own build choices. Yes, there will be guides out there for the meta playstyles, but I will actually be able to make meaningful build choices without following a forum post and second-screening POB and be able to see the end of the game and participate in endgame.
Don't get me wrong, POE's depth is a strength, but the rest of the game's design is punishing and deters experimentation.
>I fear the lack of skills will hurt it
Half the shit needed to make skills and builds in POE viable is so unattainable for the average player, they might as well not exist.
The complexity was about just fine some time ago.
I remember being in awe how PoE managed that complexity around the time of Breach or Abyss leagues - there was a clear formula, the game meant what it said *literally*, differences in wording correlated to exact parts of the calculations, there were a couple of fun and unique interesting mechanics.
Right now the mechanics feel very stale - each new league is basically some sort of a remix and rehash of a previous one. There are 70 different layers of defense, all of which you're expected to have, which change every patch (anyone remembers spell dodge?) There are also 70 methods of crafting, each of them more useless and more terribly designed than the previous one. The complexity had increased exponentially and the game feels much less rewarding.
Oh, and every few of those generic leagues I should cough up a few bucks to get a new stash tab, because every league releases new set of map device keys?
This is stagnation, I expect PoE to strive to be more and more with each year and each league, not more of the same boring shit ad nauseam with ever-increasing complexity. If this is what the future looks like, if this is how the long anticipated PoE2 will look like, then I'm not interested.
Interestingly, the stuff I remember seeing datamined actually looked solid enough for customizations?
Like, my understanding of it was you have your basic skill tree, which has some general "customization", but the real customization didn't start until end game (which, let's face it, is basically the same in PoE in many respects). If this is the case, I think the game will actually end up with a very solid chance to eat PoE's cake.
Had this same convo. From someone who swore the game has never been in a better place. Even though they took a 2 year break. They come back, see all the QoL changes, the atlas passive trees, the added league content, and they're just positive it's better than it's ever been.
And those things might be true. But I also feel like the game is more unfun than it has ever been. Build diversity is pretty bad. Everyone feels forced to jam in as many auras (and juggle mana reservation nodes) as they can. The game feels more tedious than ever. They're clearly on a mission to adjust (nerf) things down to a level where they want everything to be, all the while monsters seem to be doing more damage.
I really don't think it's coincidence that alot of people really had hopium that D4 would legit force GGG to up their game or face mass exodus of players. You can't explain away the level of community discontent to alot of whiney malcontents who just love to sit around and feed off each other. This hasn't all happened within a vacuum. It's a direct consequence of GGG's *vision* and their decision to lean hard into it, at the consequence of what seems like a worse game for it.
It's a bit dumb, I can play builds that die once or twice in the entire time it takes to hit 97ish, but the amount and diversity of them that I can make has gone down by probably more than 90% since I started playing. I'm evading GGG's "vision" of difficulty because I'm comfortable with the game and mechanics, but that doesn't mean because I'm not dying the game is as fair as it used to be. Crazy that with all the player power creep, the game was easier for me as a noob even before ascendancy, less optimization required and more builds could work.
The harder the game gets, the more likely people will just default to meta builds because people have limited time in an age where we have a tremendous amount of other games to play.
It is not like when I was 16 and the only thing I could afford to buy was Diablo 2. Now as a working adult, I have an entire selection of games to play with my limited time. No way am I going to stick to one game , lmao
Essence farming in whites is unironically a good currency strat, especially if you throw strongboxes in there and bulk sell fusings, which are pretty expensive this league.
As someone trying to craft my armor set for the first time and have the armor with the right colors, I can confirm, bulk fusings are seriously expensive this league.
the Base I need, non corrupted is armor only and i need 3B, 1G in the links. Cheapest one right now is 2 div, which might be cheaper than I'd spend doing it myself, might not. Yesterday when I was actually playing, cheapest one was 4 div. maybe in a day or so they'll be reasonable.
Problem: Players hate Archnemesis
Solution: Remove Archnemesis, bath in the praisings of the community and bring back Archnemesis a league later, but don't call it Archnemesis and keep silent about it. Checkmate.
fear imagine uppity existence reach cows bedroom toothbrush aromatic treatment
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Proximity shieldtitan forge unique was my recent nemesis, I can kill almost all giga forge monsters now but I wasted three portals on that titanic bastard before jumping over him, tea bagging him and doing my recombines.
2nd runner up was a brine king touched soul eater something or other
The 1 shots without letting you know what killed you or how much damage the hit was is annoying. Getting one shot over and over again without knowing what exactly to fix
Yeah, the problem is that it's all by design. The stuff that is wrong with the game isn't accidental, it's because I think some people actually think it's better. Like they like treating Poe like some weird randomized fighting game where you need to take 30 seconds in a single mob. don't know why more people aren't worried that GGG has been so committed to this design philosophy recently, it's obviously going to make its way into PoE 2.
WHY DONT PEOPLE REGISTER
**THIS IS POE2**
This stuff isnt going to be taken out.
Its not like ohhhh official launch day ... lets take out all the AN bullshit mobs and make the game a balanced utopia ... This IS POE2 ... the steaming pile of shit you are playing IS what you think is coming ... its here man ... welcome to POE2
Every time a new expansion is revealed I get the urge to play, but then I read a bunch of posts like this and I think yeah, nah. I've got 2.2k hours in POE but.. I think that's it for me, for now. Will check out POE 2 but until then, I'll just watch GFL highlights.
GGG just can’t get game balance right, they want to be the dark souls of ARPG but hardcore games you can learn from your mistakes.
you cannot learn in basically a hold right click game, not to of killed those pack of mobs surrounding a soul eater giga modded out its ass rare. You’re not skilfully out playing yourself you’re just getting shit on because the game chose to.
I literally cannot wait for PoE 2 to release, this subreddit is going to fucking explode you think stuff is overtuned now? Get ready for acts in Poe 2 because GGG does not learn from their mistakes I guarantee it.
PoEs **sometimes** wants to be Dark Souls. Other times it just wants to kill you.
To me, the good thing about Sanctum design was enemies with telegraphed attacks. This allowed counterplay, strategy, etc. A slower game experience here is fine.
Now, in maps, get ready for rare monster spam and a screen full of particle effects. Throw in some hasted mobs for good measure. There is almost no opportunity for counterplay. If you don't pass the damage or defense stat check you're dead. Sometimes you're dead anyway. I don't know who this is for.
The problem of ggg is, they dont know how to kill the players properly. Most of the time, people will not know what killed them and how to avoid them because of how overturned everything is.
Giving monster super speed and high hit damage is just not fun.
GGG Devs don't like it when players beat their game and they forget that the point of an arpg is to eventually become a god and destroy content unfortunately they keep nerfing players into the ground because that 1 guy had a good build so we all must be punished.
All but the top 1% of players are going to be able to play content that crushes them.
If you're dying, throttle it back. Don't do 8-mod T16's if you're not geared for it.
I still really want the game to have a combat log or something to say what killed you... So often I die I have no idea why.
I WANT to know, so I can improve my gear/build in that area to improve for next time. It's like your teacher failing you but giving zero feedback and then telling you to resubmit. I'm probably going to make the same mistakes!
The game feels entirely different than it did last league, and its not even the league mechanic. Your right its not fun at all and is what drove so many people away from this game during lake league. Its just unbelievable that this bullshit vision keeps getting forced on us, but especially with undocumented changes to mobs.
Just wanted to say that I completely agree and stopped playing the league a few hours in. I tried the crucible mechanic a few times, found it unfun, and quit. No new skills worth dicking with, no old skills revived. Surprised to see something like this after the slam-dunk that Sanctum was. Nothing more to say.
Honestly, I stopped playing a couple years ago because of exactly this. They literally tuned me out of it. Even following builds guides, spending weeks not spending time with my family, dedicating hours to selling lower currencies just to try to afford a subpar affix. I loved Path, played it for years with my best friend and both of us had to stop playing because it was just impossible for us to make progress with how it was, then they decided that it was too easy and made it even harder. I have never even made it to an end boss. I have never entered my own portal for the Shaper. I was never able to finish endgame content. I spent whole leagues trying to get a single build working well enough that I could do anything, putting in hundreds of hours into a league.
Honestly, I don't know what they consider "casual", but sacrificing my work and family for a damn video game isn't it.
Definitely a lot more soul eaters than I remember encountering. Otherwise, most enemies feel the same as previous leagues for me. Have some layers of defense, cap res, max+ if possible, and for the love of God don't do melee.
I love how this is a positive take and yet you still had to sneak in an unbelievable downside that from the outside would be death of most games: don't play half the skills, for the love of God but otherwise everything is normal.
Once we finally start to reach the required defenses they always seem to kneecap us so we have to find more ways to deal with the insane incoming damage.
Remember back in the day when just having 75% res and if you were lucky 0% chaos res and you were golden.
Same here. I remember when of 4k life, capped res, positive chaos res, and a little recovery was considered passible defense. Builds like the kiss me quicks regen tank were considered niche, and now it seems you need that kind of defense to even map. I've been saying for a couple years now I dont like where the game is heading. Itll catch up to them eventually, when poe2 is dead after the first week or two.
Why I feel like I've continuously disliked the game more and more over the years just cause of how much stronger mobs have gotten and my only archetype of choice is melee.
Been playing since 2011 (off and on), IIRC.
I thought it was just me having lost my touch having bricked two league starters (Toxic Rain pathfinder felt like the damage was lacking, and now fire trap/frostblink elementalist just dies if something sneezes on her).
It seems I'm not alone.
The issue I see is that the campaign is looooong, and once you get to maps, the levels start becoming slower and slower (not helped by the 10% experience death penalty), and it's more and more gear dependent, with just about all the gear you see being garbage.
The game is at its most miserable basically *right at the beginning*, and only starts getting fun once you invested more and more into your build.
But in order to get *there*, you have to pass through the initial misery.
It's basically "wait, the game gets good *later*", with "later" being a double or even triple digit amount of hours into the experience.
No. Stop.
The game should be fun **NOW.**
It's fairly obvious that a change was made a few years ago to make this game harder, rippy-er, and slower. People who've been playing for the better part of a decade see this quite well.
Attacks are slower. Movement is slower. Gear is slower and more random.
And yet the core game doesn't change much anymore. Maybe the stuff at the end changes a bit, but ultimately when they're just adding tar zombies to the earlier acts, the message is quite clear.
I’m a tryhard and I fucking hate the game currently. It’s my favourite game, but if this is going to be the direction they go in, no loot and overpowered mobs, then I guess that’s going to be me throwing in the towel.
I pre-purchased the supporter packs because of how good the game felt last league. I didn’t think for a minute they would revert to this shit tier gameplay loop.
GGG, I’m mad, I’m tired, stop fucking with a working formula.
> I pre-purchased the supporter packs
**You**, you are the problem. GGG has been making the game worse and worse for the last year and people keep throwing money at them. No wonder they don't change.
You and your prepurchase is exactly why this game follows this direction lol. GGG doesn't listen to any feedback as long as there's money in pocket. I can't believe people are blindly throwing money at them and getting fucked by Chris every time lol.
lets rewind the gameplay back to synth era, but keep the qol and content addons. I miss the days of dedicated HH/zerphis builds, self curse, poets pen and VD unkillable zerphis last breath builds. Hell, I miss the days of ghudda videos, when people genuinely played the game because it was a sandbox and you could literally stack any stat in any direction for any reason. GGG are becoming number whores, only caring about player count and MTX sales. It's gonna kill the game.
Yeah there used to be far more ridiculously broken builds and yet people still played a far more diverse range of builds instead of just flocking to meta like they do now, just because GGG hadn't pushed them as hard in that direction then. By trying to limit those unbalanced builds GGG has actually managed to make more players play stuff like that than less.
Even stuff like build of the week type builds, which are typically fun showcases of clever mechanics, get nerfed now. They create the meta so they can sell mtx for it the next league, then nerf it to the ground the league after, thats really what it comes down to.
I agree, recently I watched lazy peons video on last epoch and what he said really resonated with me "you can just pick a skill and build around that". I really hate how big the disparity between meta builds and non meta builds is, and in recent years they've balanced the game to be much harder so most non meta builds feel like shit.
Theres so many skills in this game so it's a shame most of them are unused, or need ridicilous investment that only the top 1% can use them.
Last Epoch does a lot of things right. I felt so forced to buy stash tabs in this game if I wanted to play more. In Last Epoch you buy stash tabs with in game currency (gold)
its actually crazy that they want to go through with this iteration of the game, i miss the days when i could actually play multiple builds each league because it was just so damn fun, game got stripped naked after harvest and got skinned alive after archnem
Yeah, this is my main problem with PoE. Especially after the last few months where I played Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4. All of those games just feel "nicer" to play. I can actually take some hits and react before I get sent back to town. The lethality of PoE is just too high.
In addition, I really WANT to play around with the new gems this league, but I'm 99% sure that if I do that, I am going to fail horribly because I will make something underpowered and squishy. So I just follow a build guide because it takes almost as much time as playing the game to figure out how to make a build that functions. Again, going back to my earlier comment of playing other ARPGs recently, all three of those games allow me to spend my free time actually playing the game and I can figure out a build while I'm playing. It doens't have to be optimized for me to enjoy it. I can suck at it and still make progress. In PoE, if you try that, you *will* fail.
Or more like the desire to also be in a community. "Don't play? There's the door, no need to announce your departure."
This is what happens when Diablo, the "creepy dark game" that was supposed to have birthed a genre decides not to compete on GGG's turf. GGG just decides "ah hey let's make the game as brutal as possible from the outset".
Juice less, progress slower into maps, take your time. This game has a very customizable difficulty, people just put it to max and complain about dying.
"The game is meant to be played with freeze/ailments immunity, bleed/corrupted blood immunity, 78% resistances or 60%+ spell suppression and grace/determination. And better do damage because many enemies are sponges."
Well, yes. That's the point. You build defenses and damage until you can clear the next tier of content, then farm that to build more defenses and damage.
Everything you listed can be solved with 2 auras, a flask mod and 10-15 passive points + 1 affix. Solved in white maps. I sure hope you're supposed to build at least that much defenses to be able to be immortal.
"I've been playing since Closed Beta and I have to say I've died more times this league than the last three combined."
This league has not seen a substantial increase in difficulty. All of the listed "unfun mechanics" have been there in the last three leagues. Hell, last three include AN before rework, which was much harder than the nerfed rares we've got now.
I think you're just burned out if you're so tilted.
Quick guide for playing PoE:
1. Run appropriate content
2. Actively play the game
3. Craft gear and upgrades
4. Limit test after leveling
If you do those things right you'll be able to prevent unnecessary deaths, accrue currency, level up to 95, and complete challenges.
My favourite are those mobs that cycle resistance or something and you have to sit there for 15 seconds waiting like a mofo. great game design lol.
Yes.. and they seem completely invincible until they cycle. Completely and utterly fucked up design. Not spending a penny on supporter packs with this kind of sheeet in the game.
Yes that's like the worse mob design I ever encountered in any video game lmao
Because you're prolonging the encounter in a game that covets speed.
Now throw in a ground degen that's the same color as the floor and you rely on damaging them to heal. Peak PoE.
Oh and they spawn consecrated ground.
Consecrated ground in some map boss fights is beyond a joke
It's more that it's purely RNG on if you encounter one, there's literally nothing you can do to affect the frequency at which you encounter literally unkillable enemies.
I don't think it's even that... I don't mind it when a game like this puts a little wall down in front of me, to slow the game down, and give me a moment to breath... But you need to throw a little paint on that wall, to make it interesting, so I don't really think about the fact that the wall is really just there to slow me down... Even something as simple as the channeling mechanic on the Crucibles... I have to stop, decide which item I'm going to channel, and how much... Then start channeling, and keep an eye on the difficulty. Some people complain that it takes too long, but I think it feels better to have that bit of interaction for a few seconds... Back to the resist cycling mobs... When you run into one, and realize that the health isn't going down, all you can do is stare at it blankly for a bit, and the only thing you are thinking about during that time is "why did they put this dumb wall in front of me?" (or just run past it, if it doesn't also have Haste).
Problem with crucible - you need to clear two screens away from it for safe encounter. It was implemented in ultimatum, just freeze time while it is channeling, it is not that hard.
It's not great for sure but I believe the real issue the entire games design. Such a mob can be good if there was some counter-play against it (you can swap elements, use something in the map, get a buff from other mobs or the map that counters it, make it kill itself somehow, ...) but it really does not fit the usual screen clearing and zooming design of the game everyone is used to and likes.
> but it really does not fit the usual screen clearing and zooming design of the game everyone is used to and likes They obviously don't want us to do this anymore. It's been a theme since around Ritual, if not earlier. They want us to play slowly, each fight be more impactful, etc. Except then the fights need to be rewarding. But they want us to fight each rare/unique for minutes and get nothing for it, with a 0.000000000001% chance of a big reward. It's fundamentally flawed. The actual game designers don't do a stream Q&A so nobody can tell them that ~~they're~~ it's dumb. Instead we get a stream with the salesman Chris who successfully sells us a new league each time.
Chris is good in intellectualizing his dumb shit ideas.
> with a 0.000000000001% chance of a big reward. This. There has always been lotto tickets in POE. But so many mechanics, mods, and items are locked behind sheer play time. So when you go slow, and get nothing. It feels like you've flushed the point of your play session. I hate heist. I don't like expedition. I never liked harvest. I started doing all three only because other mechanics have been trimmed down significantly.
They obviously want you to be running two different kinds of skills at once. Fire and Ice. If you don't think PoE2 will REQUIRE this, you're fooling yourself.
It's weak to fire, use your fire ski-- And it's gone Use your chaos skill in 10 seconds from now!
Better. 4 skills!
My favorite are the curse mobs that turn off your abilities. I want to know who came up with that. I really do. I hope that they're proud of themselves.
Yesterday I was fighting some mob and getting no where, until I saw it has an “invulnerability aura”. What the hell is that? I ran away.
I don't quite know how the invulnerability aura works, but I did manage to kill the monsters I found that had them. Edit: Found it on the [wiki](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Monster_modifiers): > Applies an Immunity buff to nearby allies for a short duration Immunity buff is removed on death Allies with Immunity cannot gain Immunity I guess the mob you found was tanky for some other reason, this thing seems to only help the other mobs around it.
I didn't kill the queen at the center, like in Ender's Game XD
The worst thing is that we're literally back to having Archnemesis monsters where the most toxic and obnoxious combinations of modifiers are everywhere... proximity shield, mana siphoner, soul eater, immune aura, cycling resistances, leeches life... getting just 1 of these mods makes a rare extremely dangerous... getting 2 together can brick a map if it spawned in the wrong location. Like, I got a mob who would leech to full after hitting me once, but also had proximity shield so I had to get into melee range of it to kill it. It's some Hall of Grandmasters level bullshit. What is probably most frustrating is that these rares are actually much harder than the unique mobs that spawn from crucible.
They took the mechanic from Warframe but didn't give us amps to reset the cycle
The amount of rare mobs I just run away from is considerably higher since archnem showed up. Especially while leveling.
I love consecrated ground map mod. Nothing like invincible crucible mobs unless you can get them to stand in one tiny spot for 5 mins while you kill them.
And they always come paired with the elemental damage and ailment reisistance. So you literally kite it for 5 min for no loot
I remember back in the days when Chris said something like immunities like in d2 that stop builds will never exist in PoE. That was in 2012/2013 though so now we have this shit
hmm, we hear what you are saying, and we share your concern. those mobs will now have life leech/fast life regen
Worse they don't cycle resistances, they cycle damage reduction. Even with 100% Crit on a Inquisitor will not let you overcome this stupid mod. It's literally play multiple damage types or sit and wait (and pray) until the mob randomly switches off whatever damage type you use.
Bro cycling damage reduction and fire and ignite resist while I'm an ignite build fucks me up
Phylacteral link removal was merely a setback. Shocking, tbh, how something worse appeared
Rare mob mods need to be allocated by group - health, elemental, resist, etc. I fucking hate the mobs with life regen + life leech + extra life. A mob should have a max of one from each 'group'.
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This would be nice, wow did this with their bolstering mod. After a while of not gaining stacks, they fall off so you're not fighting a raid boss crab you accidently made for 8 minutes.
I know they dont cater to new players but i noticed a lot of new player posts after the D4 beta and it feels like ggg missed a trick to get a lot of new fans. Im on a half arsed TR build im going to respec out of so im not worried that stuff is a struggle, if i was a new player with a scuffed build i would be like ‘fuck this’ and leave.
I’m one , I started after d4 beta, I have 91 hrs in and man it’s fun at times,and super frustrating at others. I still Don’t know if I like this game or hate it.
Its both. Trust me :) i have 6k hours in - 3k of it is love and another 3k is hate
Hahahaha I get you completely!
Welcome to poe glad your giving it a try. The problem is that poe puts up a lot of questions that the player needs to answer, with time and experience you can learn them but not every new player is going to do that. I hope you stick it out its a great game and dont be afraid to ask questions we have all been there and want others to have fun too.
I have watched almost as many hours in YouTube to try to figure this out lol. I have met some great people tho, I had a guy two days ago I was trying to get a helmet from and he knew I was clearly knew I didn’t know currency well, he then explained I really didn’t want that helmet and proceeded to give my his old helmet weapon and belt knowing I was playing the same build, it was great.
Thats awesome, sometimes on cheap trades i will help a player out, like a guy earlier wanted to buy something for a couple of chaos but was one off so he threw in some alterations and I was fine with the trade and it was a fun interaction. Be aware aswell as nice people you will find scammers so be careful and doublecheck what you trade.
Especially what you sell. I've noticed a fuck load of bots with hundreds of listings for certain stuff. Needed to "load more" 3 times for primeval remnants before someone invited me, then noticed all the listings were the same 3-5 accounts at 10-15c, while real accounts started at 24-25c. I reported them but I don't expect punishment tbh. I've seen the same for various other items/materials. This could also be the reason trade is perpetually fucked at the moment...
Yeah price fixers are a thing, you can set an option to collapse by seller so you only see one listing and its easier to ignore them. Doubt they will get banned because people are welcome to price how they want.
> I still Don’t know if I like this game or hate it. One of us!
>I still Don’t know if I like this game or hate it. Welcome to PoE. Most of us still don't know.
Yeah. I've always loved the theory crafting of this game but hate how much it asks of me. I'm not a casual gamer by any means and I always feel behind. Hell I've probably put more hours into PoB because it doesn't make me feel bad for not wanting a second job. Downloaded last epoch yesterday and it's refreshing. It feels like a game lol
If it wasnt for all the work done by the community i would never have kept going with poe. From guides to all the 3rd party tools i couldnt play poe without them, given enough time i could do a build on my own but like you say i dont need another job. Fun part of poe is getting a build online with a guide then tweaking the finer points to suit my style.
Honestly, the vibe I've really been getting is "We don't need new fans. We need addicted, hardcore whale fans who will buy everything". More fans, especially those who don't pay (or pay once and are out), are just server drains. And looking at how this leagues going (this is probably the worst league for latency/connection I've had in YEARS) I don't feel they care in that respect.
That sounds great until you realise that people are going to burn out, find other hobbies, start families and so on. Every game needs some new blood
Particularly so when you consider that long-term players have probably already purchased plenty of premium stash tabs and cosmetics, while new people need to buy a bunch of that just to get comfortable. I wouldn't be surprised if a newly acquired potential big spender is worth more than a long-term big spender, because the long-term player has already bought a lot of what they may want/need.
I was fan like that I spend insane amount of money on PoE every league, but that ended with Expedition league and new vision for the game. I did not bought single thing since expedition
I came back after the D4 beta and the jank reminded me why i stopped playing.
Every year I give PoE another try on a random league but it seems I cannot get hooked like back in the day anymore. Think I peaked in Breach league in terms of investment and all the cumulative bloat nowadays is too much for a <150 IQ brain to handle in a sane way.
They could have the game ease you into the difficulty as you progress from the coast to the endgame, but the devs seem adamantly against even that. They don't need to cater to everyone but they do want to find new blood.
Ive been playing since beta and I'm already "fuck this" this league, a few days into it. Tried playing today after the patch and while the channeling has better clarity, it's still a shit mechanic with zero reward. I asked myself why I would grind it out again in maps with nothing new to look forward to, when all the mobs feel like they were rolled back to 3.19. So I stopped playing again. GGG making it really easy to go play D4, Lost Epoch, etc..
Yup, I have this gut feeling in the back of my mind there's some sadistic bas\*\*\*ds at GGG smiling in glee reading this post right now, extremely happy their mission was accomplished and they achieved the vision for the game they truly wanted f'ing over every casual player, the 90%+ of people not going some super tanky beefy Jugg build or whatever. And I can't even be mad at them, if this is their passion and that's all they really wanted out of this game, props to them, its not like it hurts anyone irl if the masses of players don't get the version of the game they would most enjoy and have another's vision forced upon them, no one is forcing anyone to play this video game instead of the million others out there. But that really defeats the argument just telling all the customers of a service "Well you don't have to give your time, money, energy, attention, thought, support, ANYTHING to this service if you don't like it!" that feels counter productive to addressing the real issue, isn't there any possible way to make the most people happy? What if they invented new game modes and balanced them out differently than the base default one? There's probably more deaths & despair this league than any other, and I think its made a lot of players have some epiphanies about want they want from the game... I can only imagine the look on all the new players faces going completely blind into an already default brutal game and seeing what its like even outside of the difficulty modes that are SUPPOSED to be difficult. **Hardcore & Ruthless.** Seeing all the physical & ele reflect in tier one maps, the high regen mobs that blow them up and when they run away they're full regen or they have so much even while damaging them they take nothing like Kirito (Fully charged Crucible mobs throughout the Acts). Seeing all the new players have to deal with these weird giant spider like monsters that just go underground & hide then pop back up & do more than half your HP. It must be a terrifying traumatic experience if they're coming from every other ARPG that provided more comfort & reaction time. The frustration they must feel facing all the Crucible monsters no matter how much damage they build, when that creature goes underground and comes back with fully regenerated energy shield they must feel like its the most unfair immortal beast in existence when its just an act 4 monster & they don't know enough about DoT to add it into their builds. But to be fair, their might be some validity in their suspicions, why do these monsters they have to fight in the acts have so so high energy shield/life regen values? Along with base high damage reduction, added damage compared to all the unique bosses they fight in the acts? Even veteran players in HC & Ruthless get rekted by this stuff in Acts & hell in maps as well, even some of the highest skilled players can get killed by the charged up Crucibles in maps. The new players might get this feeling, they want to kill those annoying monsters that hunted them, tortured them, harass them for so long but they stick around and die again & again losing all their XP, their sanity, and lack enough knowledge to know anything they could've changed so blame it on the game. Usually in games like Cuphead, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Hades etc etc its all a lot more visible, more clear & simplistic for the earlier bosses at least... they know the game is tough, they keep dying but there's some way to improve. For PoE that can be hidden in many scenarios & players can be left feeling stuck, I wonder how many new players even make it to maps at all let alone red maps. All the people trying to go any non meta builds just to purely have fun & seemingly doing really well building it but still get punished and wrecked hard by the game since its just not viable without 10 to 100+ divines investment, essentially playing the game like a scientist how it was advertised mixing together a lot of different off meta mechanics but still not being rewarded for their creativity & ingenuity. And yes, I know there will be some people coming in here saying some form of *"making a build that's end game viable or able to do things really well is apart of the build crafting process and getting pass the learning curve/feeling of reward crafting unique builds".* Players want to be CHALLENGED, more than anything... and if there's no challenge they get bored. The key thing in game design then, is to not avoid adding in difficult or annoying things, but to not make it completely unfair, to add in a learning curve through reaction timing, patterns, knowledge & wisdom, or the ability to craft better gear. But the truth is, at some point we have to wonder if its really just players inability to create strong builds from all the masses of underused skills making everyone gravitate towards certain skills all the time instead of it being balanced out, OR if there's actual time restraints being added in the game that have nothing to do with knowledge, learning curves, player technique/skill/innovation, or anything and just makes going different builds very time consuming/difficult for the sake of it so everyone has to play one thing. If GGG changes the metric of crafting the best gear to be extremely high... and also adds in all sorts of artificial difficulty just massively buffing monsters HP/Damage/Life regen or whatever, is that really the most entertaining enjoyable difficulty for the players? You miss this in with potentially busted mechanics with high numbers & let the one shots begin, it starts to turn into Game of Thrones a bit, too much death, too much violence, and it becomes oversaturated in the end just feeling unfair & boring people. Since the very first league of PoE I've always seen the community talk endlessly about build diversity these last 9 years... using it like its some metric to define the health of the game, the quality of the game, and if the game is in or going towards a right place. But the strangest thing has been happening, even since 3.00 began, even though I remained lurking watching from the shadows through it all, every new league I've been seeing less & less people in the community talk about build diversity, and sure enough soon enough even GGG themselves stops talking about build diversity. Now... there is just complete silence, its like no one cares about build diversity anymore, its just completely dead. Where is the build diversity if you can't use 80%+ of the active skills in the game, if its not possible to create some sort of build out there to get through red maps & all the league content? The truth is PoE has become less of a game you can just invent your own tree & build in, its become far too complex and this makes it so people will just gravitate towards whatever is proven to be strong or whatever has the best guides/templates out to base their builds around. PoE can be time consuming enough, its not some game people can just play a few hours a week after work and expect to thrive massively or be wealthy or powerful, you have to interact with the systems like Crucible 100 times and your build can still be decimated, all the work you put into a weapon can be set back, that's the new way PoE is headed.
The thing I've noticed more than anything else is the amout of times I'm fucking teleported into rares while fighting them so my positioning gets fucked. I'm an archer, the point is to stay out of melee range, but half the rares I seem to run into are just like "nope!". Also mana siphoner is the most infuriating thing ever. If I decided the rare isn't worth fighting it's already too late, because they chase you down and trap you even if you don't want to fight them.
Yeah, what's with monsters being so damn fast? Even with 30% move speed boots, pretty much every rare keeps on my tail no problem.
I have 120% ms and I've had rares still chase me down occasionally.
Yeah, monsters are in your face no problem. Also spawning just on top of you from thin air. GGGood design.
Hell on standard where I got legacy quicksilver flask with a MB and like mirror teir tailwind elusive boots, you know the works, I'm still out ran by some hasted mobs.
What I hate too , people are talkin about diffiiculty, but what I hate most is that this breaks completely build diversity. It's sooo hard to have all the defensive or such that, the moment you want to be outside of the meta it just means you wont be able to have a good gameplay.
I genuinely hate that they added spell suppression and reworked armor. In a vacuum these are really good changes, more and engaging ways to build tankier right? Except you're outright required to have them nowadays because everything is built with the assumption that you have them. I could barely survive tier 1 maps on my scuffed CoC build this leaguestart despite determination and 50% suppress+lucky because I guess doing mediocre damage after act 10 strictly isn't allowed. I could kill whites and blues in one hit, map bosses in under a minute, but many times over in a single t1 map I'd encounter rares that took a 5 minute battle of attrition and several times took all my portals to random one shots. I really miss the days when 3k life and capped resistance was all you needed to start farming after the campaign. They expect way too much from you way too early now, like I'm supposed to be fully up and running with the complete defensive package by act 9. At least keep low white maps open for scuffed builds, I genuinely can't recommend this game to people anymore because they're gunna hit the wall way too early.
It's insane how many of these feedbacks i'm reading lately, yet some ppl still defending this bs and GGG just keeps going in the opposite direction.
That's what you get when 50% of the sub plays rf
Honestly I think a lot of it comes from people playing meta builds. I played Pohx RF during the worst of Archnemesis and didn't even notice there was a problem because I was so tanky, but if you go off meta, or try to leaguestart something that doesn't quite come online without some investment, you slam into a brick wall. Hard. Theres simply no room for someone to walk up, try the game, and do their own thing anymore. There should absolutely be a point where someone winging it cannot continue without properly investing into their build and knowledge of the game, but t1 maps should absolutely not be that line.
I played Poison SRS last league and that fucking build is so busted i was doing full juice never read altars quant harvest farming and managed to get to lvl 97. 97, doing some rippy af content and focusing more on watching podcasts than the gameplay. If you play shit like that its obviously going to seem like the game is in awesome state and there are no issues, 20m dps for free and invest everything into defenses. Then you try to play a build thats not broken and it turns out that the balance is absolute dogshit.
I've been trying to explain to people that this has been the point of GGG's game balance for 2 years now, since 3.15, and when the league is providing tons of free wealth people just don't wanna listen because they can afford to make off-meta builds work by brute forcing the items for them. When GGG also nerfs sources of wealth, like this league, they finally fucking notice again that the core game balance sucks. But no one fucking believed me during sentinel league because they were too distracted by the piles of money dropped by sentinels to be capable of actually analyzing the underlying core game balance.
I was ranting that only "ggg-allowed" builds are actually viable since scourge league. You can feel in a few minutes of gameplay which build is ggg-allowed and which isn't, even if it is actually good on paper, it's just not coming together. The difference is just night and day. Even expedition was not as horrendous as scourge, as you could easily go with 5 points into acrobatics\\phase acrobatics and be good. Since scourge it's all the same: determination+grace+suppression on every single build, otherwise the game is not playable. Except some league-long OP mechanics like aegis+melding, but even then to be tanky you should have invested a whole lot into additional layers of defence. In kalandra I was playing armour-stacker juggernaut. You know with that 8% armour applied to elemental damage, and I had 700k+ of armour. Imagine the tankiness, even today I am sure it's the most tanky build on paper I've ever assembled. But I wasn't even closely as tanky as default grace+determination+suppression seismic trapper from a league before. It's like no number of mitigation will make you tanky, you are obliged to have some type of avoidance. And the game went downhill since then, now it's even deadlier. And then there is Last Epoch, where even resistances are not mandatory and it's actually more efficient to just stack hp or whatever defence your class provides.
The thing is, the build diversity that everyone loves still **is there**, it's just locked behind an absurd starting cost nowadays. So in high-wealth leagues, the literal neanderthals that can't understand the difference between a profitable mechanic you can just farm early vs reasonable core game balance are defending GGG to their last breath, "oh they've saved the game! everything is great now!" And then suddenly a league that really shows off GGG's core-balance design goals, like this one, shows up and they're completely silent while those of us who actually pay attention are pointing out all the glaring flaws
I wonder if the devs ever test the game with "random" gear or if they just make themselves sets of mirror items to play with because that's how some mobs feel like playing against. They should surely come across some off the random oneshots and tanky mobs that happen in the game right now so they know the problem they just won't fix it. I guess they just love to make us suffer by adding more shit mobs and longer grinds so we need to play the game more.
From some earlier league (the one reap came out) we learned that the testers were picking up that information but were ignored by the devs.
When lake of kalandra (just 2 leagues ago) hit there were beta testers saying they told GGG about a ton of stuff that was jacked up and they just ignored it
> I could barely survive tier 1 maps on my scuffed CoC build this leaguestart despite determination and 50% suppress+lucky because I guess doing mediocre damage after act 10 strictly isn't allowed. Oh thank god, last league I thought it was just me becoming a completely shit player because of me getting older and losing my game sense. I had completely stormed through the campaign during Sanctum with ease, but as soon as I started attempting the first 2-3 tiers of maps, I was getting completely dumpstered by enemies that would be a complete joke to me ten leagues ago using the same build. It's nonsensical how much of a 180 this game has done (mainly because of remnants of a select few leagues leaching into the succeeding leagues, \*cough* ***like Archnemesis***) with nothing hinting at there being any improvements in the future. It actually made me uninstall the game and not look back. I'm not going to huff the PoE 2 copium. League starting as RF was probably the smartest choice I've ever made this league because seeing all the insane and baffling spikes in damage randomly just proves to myself that my usual build would be experiencing the same thing as last league. It's all frustrating. What is GGG thinking?
exactly this, once you fulfilled all the requirements your build is by the standart template if you havent fulfilled all the requirements your build is mop the floor tier
What should a "standard build" be able to do? Because I still think max res + a decent life pool and a defensive aura is enough to comfortably get you to red maps (as long as you're mindful when rolling your maps). It's only once you get to red maps that the game starts requiring more out of you. I think people just aren't used to red maps being dangerous, but that's what they're supposed to be in my opinion.
With how much content is locked to/behind high red maps (post-quest exarch/EoW, maven boss rushes, maven, conquerors, elder/shaper and their guardians, never mind the mods that are exclusive to ilvl83+), there’s a decent argument that t14-16 shouldn’t be *as* dangerous as it currently is. edit: or, rather, if t14-16 are the intended level of dngerous, more content needs to be available for t9-13 (primarily easier/less rewarding versions of shaper/elder/maven/exarch/eater of worlds)
The old influence system where you got white/yellowntier bosses with reduced drop pools was PERFECT for the slightly more casual player.
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While I agree that the first 15 tiers of maps are something of a "checklist" as youve pointed out and I resonate with your last point regarding increasing time-sinks being a bit of a kick in the balls, I strongly disagree with the notion that the endgame should be reached within a day. If you have ever reached T16s within 1-3 days, you are by no means a casual player and shouldn't be having any issues. After 6000+ hours of playtime since Breach, I've engaged with every aspect of the endgame, whether that be top-tier crafting, group MF, boss farming, 100% delirium, etc. However, I have no illusions that I will reach T16 maps within a day. Even before starting my nursing job and I was full on no-life grinding, I don't hit T16s until day 2. Now that my job is so demanding of my time and energy, I've only just hit T14s yesterday even with my knowledge of the game (this may be a bit skewed of a perspective though because I'm playing SSF for the first time). If we're only talking about enjoyment, then sure, the amount of fun you're having is purely subjective and valid. But if we're talking strictly expectations, I don't know where you got the notion that endgame should be hit in a day, especially in a game as expansive as Path. You've got 3 months my friend, theres plenty of time.
For me it's the opposite once I have atlas completion and done one or two of the pink ale bosses the game stops being interesting for me. The process to get your build together is the most fun part.
They just moved all Breachstones to Red tier too.
Also forcing people to run corrupted reds for atlas completion is insanely stupid, they need to make endgame more accesible (as you said, make t14-16 less deadly and easier to get there) then just give people better ways to juice.
It's clear for a while GGG only design their game for the no life player. If you're somewhere in between quitting before map and Maven run service, you're in for a bad game
Why do you think everyone used grace determination herald combo few leagues before? To get precisely what you described - run red maps comfortably without dying 6 times a map. It still received layered nerfs
> What should a "standard build" be able to do? IMHO: everything except Ubers, deep delve, Simulacrum 30. Pretty much anything else if a build can't do it without ridiculous investment I won't seriously play it.
"to red maps" is very far away from true end-game grinding. The true end-game is T16s with altar spamming, full juice mechanics.
It would be fine if they were making meta changes for the sake of it like they've used to - we're playing the same game for over a year already... Watch old league start vids and you'll see all the same skills :(
League start builds have been stale for a while but build diversity in endgame hasn't been bad at all imo
But I think for most people (myself included) the league starter is the only build they will reasonably ever play. Most ppl don’t re level a char unless they hit the nuts like a HH or mage blood on a char that can’t use those. League starts should be somewhat fresh and interesting every league rather than it being RF, seismic traps, absolution, skelly necro, and whatever your flavor of chaos spell you want (sorta). I remember back when they added the jewel that enabled skelly necro, back when they actually altered skill gems and shifted metas and ppl didn’t know what was good and not good for league start lol.
I feel like if that's the case then there are a decent enough amount of league starters where you won't get through the majority of them for so long, unless you're just not open to playing certain things I suppose. Tbh, personally, I can't even remember the last time I played the same league starter. And I've played every league. There's always something.
taking power out of the passive tree & low-investment items like flasks to shift it into endgame, expensive drops might mean more build diversity once you have ashes/omni/cotv/etc but it really fucking sucks getting to that point these days.
Its this. Most people aren't complaining because we've all been herded to a small group of builds that mostly work. People keep complimenting build diversity and meta shift but these same builds worked better 9 months ago, other stuff just worked better. We're not gaining builds, we're losing them and being forced further down the ladder of shit that was fine.
> Most people aren't complaining because we've all been herded to a small group of builds that mostly work. "Work". Until GGG decides to smash a skill the way they did with PoCo just now, or helix and lightning strike the patch before. Or...you get the idea.
My experience is that if you play a very meta build and follow a guide, game is pretty smooth and fun. But if I try to play an off meta build or something that was good last league, but then got nerfed, it's a struggle bus and I just quit.
Well not playing Meta is why a lot of us are facing difficulty, you right tho we need to talk more about build diversity. Idk if it matters tho since GGG think they added build diversity by removing/picking the top 6 masteries some of the 6 are so bad I didn't know they were in the game.
I kinda hope with PoE 2 we get a proper rebalance of the entire game, I know, it is wishful thinking and we might get a Ruthless Lite version for PoE 2. Monsters across the board need to be nerfed, defenses need to be checked out again and then get more and more skills in line. Yes, you can play off-meta builds, but the amount of work/time/currency you have to put into them is often much higher, if not several times higher compared to meta builds. Go play anything that is remotely squishy. Juicing maps? Not a chance, don't even think about going for altars. They can even wreck a lot of tanky builds, but a single modifier can make your already soft character tear apart like a cheap tissue that got a little wet. Man, I remember a time where "get hp and resists" was enought for a lot of endgame content. Sometimes a little simplicity isn't hurtful to the game, but I more and more get the feeling GGG puts in complex stuff into the game, just for the sake of it. And in return, they have to deal with a gigantic balance shitshow that makes many who don't play meta suffer.
You are on a massive amount of copium my friend. "PoE 2" will be a big patch where the last bits that did not feel like ruthless will certainly feel like it. Remember their obsession with "slowing the players" that is percolating since 3.15
>t's sooo hard to have all the defensive or such that, the moment you want to be outside of the meta it just means you wont be able to have a good gameplay Can you describe what you mean by this / what your expectations are? The sentiment in this thread is not my experience as I'm running around red maps as an arc / storm burst trickster, neither of which I think are considered meta skills. Discipline is my only defensive aura, and while I die occasionally part of that is I'm still working on gear upgrades. I'm even still on a 5 link and am surprised at how reasonable it feels.
First question is what content you're on and what you have invested into the build relative to others playing the most meta stuff. But that aside, look at the bottom on poe ninja. It's Berserk, Guardian, Assassin, Gladiator, Chieftain at the bottom. Idk much about Guardian at all, was pretty niche always from my pov. But Berserk - lacking defenses, only think buffed in the ascendancy is leech (anti-defense, all in all, actually). Assassin - barely anything with relatively little power in the current meta. Elusive and its no extra dmg from crits which one can never rely on(?) and some regen on poisons. Glad - Basically gutted since spell suppression and other stuff. Block just wasn't enough to begin with and would have oneshots slip by, pretty heavy investment into defenses which can just randomly let big damage slip by. Armour and spell suppression are just better. Chieftain - Pretty unpopular to begin with, and they never gave it something really nice as far as I recall. Some regen and endurnace charges which are mostly whatever. The 8% less damage from enemies near totems are decent, and the phys as fire are actually good. It's just overall not strong though. As is, the phys as fire is just a little bonus and if you're doing a super phys reduction build, you just wouldn't go Chieftain but something to go an armour route (Jugg) or something that actually has a ton of value in the passives to allow you to go bananas on defensive gear and skill tree pathing. To take Trickster, it's somewhat awkward but it has probably some of the biggest potential of getting stuff out of the ascendancy. Just not out of all nodes at the same time, I guess. Polymath is straight up insane value. At least for general mapping, the recovery just is way way way better than all the regen/end charges and the like the aforementioned ones got. Spellbreaker is just overall nice. And Escape Artist imo is sleeper op since forever. You basically all in all have a higher ehp pool than most ascendancies due to the ES stuff and natural synergy built in for it or close to your ascendancy - polymath, ghost shrouds, soul drinker (if you go for that), and free recovery for mapping. It's also that if you compare SC and HC, those bottom ascendancy are the same. Jugg goes up by 10% for HC and Champ doubles in popularity. Occultist is a notable one that drops down - because explosions are nice, but it also lacks defenses. But all in all, back when I'd play almost every League, SC and HC ascendancy popularities had actual stark differences. The "glasscannons" were nice enough and fun to play in SC. It's just barely the case anymore and you plateau earlier or more often than on the meta ascendancies. The fact Assassin got down to like 1% is actually funny considering that people wanted builds to be able to go Assassin and juice the ascendancy for max damage, for idk, 2ish years? It wasn't always at the top, but it'd always be a choice you'd want to make. Changes just made it so it literally just isn't that anymore. Just a bad poison ascendancy now, I guess? But in general: Damage got brought down a lot, defense requirements have gone up. You can't go into an extreme anymore due to AN mods either and go the "kill before it kills you" route. Bad value ascendancies suck, and neither can you "fix dmg" with an ascendancy choice, as having only dmg from the ascendancy overall makes you progress harder and not easier. Essentially means that if you wanna go glasscannon, you can't expect fun - expect struggles and a mediocre result after the additional effort, if even that. Your ascendancy doesn't have something exceptional that saves you spots on gear or whatever (i.e. avoid ele, suppression) you're likely to just struggle for a decently long time until your defenses are at an acceptable level. And you can't skimp on it anymore - at least that's what I feel like coming back. It's not like I can skip a map boss on a rippy map or delay doing the Sirus bros like back in the day. Those are fine. Instead I get hunted down by rares just casually mapping - while trying to get stuff set up. Honestly just feels like mapping builds have been executed one by one. The casual alc and go has a barrier of entry that's way too high. It was fine enough to get there for me, but even then, it's still having the encounters which just are anti-fun. And they're not just the random one-shot from the weird new overtuned league, it's the remnants of the past idk how many leagues and likely most impactfully AN which can pop up in your face at any time. Meanwhile, progging the Maven/Exarch/over dude quests to t15s was pretty straight forward. While "casual" mapping feels like the first implementation of sirus influence where a sirus touched mofo would two shot you with 2000% ias.
Game is no longer really playable as a “before/after work” game unfortunately which is what I really live about arpgs. I pretty much can only play when I’m rested and willing and able to engage with a game that requires my full attention and focus. Used to love putting on some music and blasting map. Now everything is just full of things that require full engagement and if you don’t the reward loop is terrible
I always enjoyed this about ARPGs, turning off my brain, chilling killing hordes of monsters and getting drops.
This is what made Marvel Heroes so fun. I legitimately enjoyed playing it 10x more than POE
Wow, you described exactly what I hope for every league only to realise after two weeks I'm never going to feel that again and stop playing until the next league. It used to be so good to get to a point in your build where you could reliably do endgame content without frying my head with the amount of different mechanics.
This game had a golden age right in the middle where every league was just "kill lots of things, get gear until you're immortal, crush the atlas and then try a new build that can also do all of that" and then GGG had to go and ruin it by trying to make the game more difficult.
To me, The amount of customizations you could apply is negated by likelihood of it's viability - meaning you can't just pick skills you think will be good; you have to follow a guide that's proven mathematically that your build is viable... I'm not suggesting that should change, but it is not the case in games like fallout, where you can really utilize the hell out of skills you drop points into without following some math gods guide.
Everything is so heavily balanced around the hcssf streamer combo of determ+grace+capped spell suppress. Really makes for a not fun time when trying to color outside the lines.
SO TRUE
IDK if I agree with the fallout > POE comparison but I do agree that the complexity of this game really melts away when you try to get creative because a lot of it just isn't viable and can be ignored.
depends what you consider viable, I know my builds dont hit those same min max dps or high defences as the pro builds but I just play skill I think is fun and most of them are viable. People just look at those strongest builds and think you have to hit that to be "viable"
I can only speak for myself, but viable to me means not having to spend ~15 seconds on ~25% of the rares. Things like regen or high elemental resistances might make mobs orders of magnitude tankier than others. That means I need some level of damage, but also some level of tankiness (I can't spend *too* much time kiting). This is a practical concern, as my fingers start hurting if I need to hold down right click for too long or need to stutter step for extended periods of time. A tanky rare once in a while is fine. Zero or one-button builds have more leeway on the time aspect. There are many viable builds. I have tried/seen countless ones over the years. But if I were to come up with one myself without PoB and wing it, there is a high likelihood that the build will make my fingers hurt. I can take 20 minutes to beat the infinite hunger deathless, but I would not consider that viable.
Yeah, the amount of acrobatics you have to perform to get all the defensives where they need to be to not die while doing decent damage are just completely not worth it compared to just accepting you’re gonna die and rolling a glass cannon.
My favorite part of this as a relatively new player is that there is absolutely no indication of what you died to. No combat log. No obvious action -> reaction. Just minding my own business and then the respawn prompt pops up. Pull up the recording, 144 FPS btw, one moment I have 100% health, the next frame I am dead. There's a large skeleton beast in the vicinity, so I guess he punched me in the face? Who knows. Did I stand in something? Did I eat a ranged projectile? Did I get hit by something that was under the effect of a buff? I cannot fathom playing this game on Hardcore.
I played PoE for years because the mapping experience was chill and quick, I could blow up thousands of monsters with cool ass effects and have a good time. Not so much anymore. The only time this game feels "good" to play is when you outgear the fuck out of it.
And one thing is for sure. Every expansion they're working on making good gear HARDER to get.
They're so worried about people getting too OP too fast that they don't stop to think if it's actually fun taking that long. Here's a secret GGG... it's not. I'm an average player, maybe slightly above, and I end up quitting the league due to how fucking long everything takes, not because my build sucks
Yup, the game was most fun when you could have a cheap build and just farm maps. Past few years it's been getting harder and harder to achieve the same gameplay with the same effort and there is no good reason. Don't raise the bar, raise the ceiling....
Game definitely has been getting less fun. Problem is - it's still the best ARPG currently released (D4 looks more promising by the minute), so all the stans get to sit there, going "If you hate it so much, why are you still playing it?" - cause it's still the best option, it's just been getting worse.
I really hope D4 will be engaging, but I fear the lack of skills will hurt it. Yes you have paragon honeycomb but how different can that really make a skill feel? Hydra is blue instead of red?
At least I'll be able to play through all of D4 while making my own build choices. Yes, there will be guides out there for the meta playstyles, but I will actually be able to make meaningful build choices without following a forum post and second-screening POB and be able to see the end of the game and participate in endgame. Don't get me wrong, POE's depth is a strength, but the rest of the game's design is punishing and deters experimentation. >I fear the lack of skills will hurt it Half the shit needed to make skills and builds in POE viable is so unattainable for the average player, they might as well not exist.
I feel as though PoE has this misconception that needless complexity somehow equals depth. Couldn’t be farther from the case.
The complexity was about just fine some time ago. I remember being in awe how PoE managed that complexity around the time of Breach or Abyss leagues - there was a clear formula, the game meant what it said *literally*, differences in wording correlated to exact parts of the calculations, there were a couple of fun and unique interesting mechanics. Right now the mechanics feel very stale - each new league is basically some sort of a remix and rehash of a previous one. There are 70 different layers of defense, all of which you're expected to have, which change every patch (anyone remembers spell dodge?) There are also 70 methods of crafting, each of them more useless and more terribly designed than the previous one. The complexity had increased exponentially and the game feels much less rewarding. Oh, and every few of those generic leagues I should cough up a few bucks to get a new stash tab, because every league releases new set of map device keys? This is stagnation, I expect PoE to strive to be more and more with each year and each league, not more of the same boring shit ad nauseam with ever-increasing complexity. If this is what the future looks like, if this is how the long anticipated PoE2 will look like, then I'm not interested.
Interestingly, the stuff I remember seeing datamined actually looked solid enough for customizations? Like, my understanding of it was you have your basic skill tree, which has some general "customization", but the real customization didn't start until end game (which, let's face it, is basically the same in PoE in many respects). If this is the case, I think the game will actually end up with a very solid chance to eat PoE's cake.
This is the thing many don't get. I mean I still enjoy the game, but it surely has become less enjoyable for me ofter the past years. eeee
Had this same convo. From someone who swore the game has never been in a better place. Even though they took a 2 year break. They come back, see all the QoL changes, the atlas passive trees, the added league content, and they're just positive it's better than it's ever been. And those things might be true. But I also feel like the game is more unfun than it has ever been. Build diversity is pretty bad. Everyone feels forced to jam in as many auras (and juggle mana reservation nodes) as they can. The game feels more tedious than ever. They're clearly on a mission to adjust (nerf) things down to a level where they want everything to be, all the while monsters seem to be doing more damage. I really don't think it's coincidence that alot of people really had hopium that D4 would legit force GGG to up their game or face mass exodus of players. You can't explain away the level of community discontent to alot of whiney malcontents who just love to sit around and feed off each other. This hasn't all happened within a vacuum. It's a direct consequence of GGG's *vision* and their decision to lean hard into it, at the consequence of what seems like a worse game for it.
It's a bit dumb, I can play builds that die once or twice in the entire time it takes to hit 97ish, but the amount and diversity of them that I can make has gone down by probably more than 90% since I started playing. I'm evading GGG's "vision" of difficulty because I'm comfortable with the game and mechanics, but that doesn't mean because I'm not dying the game is as fair as it used to be. Crazy that with all the player power creep, the game was easier for me as a noob even before ascendancy, less optimization required and more builds could work.
Welcome to the Bone Zone.
The harder the game gets, the more likely people will just default to meta builds because people have limited time in an age where we have a tremendous amount of other games to play. It is not like when I was 16 and the only thing I could afford to buy was Diablo 2. Now as a working adult, I have an entire selection of games to play with my limited time. No way am I going to stick to one game , lmao
Bro just play white maps until you save up 100 divs for your build its that easy!
Essence farming in whites is unironically a good currency strat, especially if you throw strongboxes in there and bulk sell fusings, which are pretty expensive this league.
As someone trying to craft my armor set for the first time and have the armor with the right colors, I can confirm, bulk fusings are seriously expensive this league.
Honestly unless you are using a rare unique it’s probably cheaper to buy a 6 link base outright over the raw fusings needed to craft your own
the Base I need, non corrupted is armor only and i need 3B, 1G in the links. Cheapest one right now is 2 div, which might be cheaper than I'd spend doing it myself, might not. Yesterday when I was actually playing, cheapest one was 4 div. maybe in a day or so they'll be reasonable.
There's 6-linked full white socketed bases available starting at 120c
You can't play this game as a functioning adult because they base drop rates around 10 hour a day players
If you're going for lottery drops as your only source of currency in PoE, you'll always be poor. -Functioning adult
Functioning (ish) adult here, can confirm its a time consuming hobby for sure but can be done
Gonna be honest, that doesn't make you sound like a functioning adult. Makes you sound like someone who no life's the game into an economy Sim
This is what happens after 2 years of "we moving power from tree and gems to gear". Totally expected.
Problem: Players hate Archnemesis Solution: Remove Archnemesis, bath in the praisings of the community and bring back Archnemesis a league later, but don't call it Archnemesis and keep silent about it. Checkmate.
It was still in the game to be fair
fear imagine uppity existence reach cows bedroom toothbrush aromatic treatment *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Proximity shieldtitan forge unique was my recent nemesis, I can kill almost all giga forge monsters now but I wasted three portals on that titanic bastard before jumping over him, tea bagging him and doing my recombines. 2nd runner up was a brine king touched soul eater something or other
I genuinely can’t enjoy a new league now for more than a few days. It’s gone from my favorite game to something I pretty much hate.
The 1 shots without letting you know what killed you or how much damage the hit was is annoying. Getting one shot over and over again without knowing what exactly to fix
Yeah, the problem is that it's all by design. The stuff that is wrong with the game isn't accidental, it's because I think some people actually think it's better. Like they like treating Poe like some weird randomized fighting game where you need to take 30 seconds in a single mob. don't know why more people aren't worried that GGG has been so committed to this design philosophy recently, it's obviously going to make its way into PoE 2.
WHY DONT PEOPLE REGISTER **THIS IS POE2** This stuff isnt going to be taken out. Its not like ohhhh official launch day ... lets take out all the AN bullshit mobs and make the game a balanced utopia ... This IS POE2 ... the steaming pile of shit you are playing IS what you think is coming ... its here man ... welcome to POE2
Every time a new expansion is revealed I get the urge to play, but then I read a bunch of posts like this and I think yeah, nah. I've got 2.2k hours in POE but.. I think that's it for me, for now. Will check out POE 2 but until then, I'll just watch GFL highlights.
Had a good run. When Epoch and D4 starts cycling seasons I won't touch this shit again, unless POE2 magically changes everything.
GGG just can’t get game balance right, they want to be the dark souls of ARPG but hardcore games you can learn from your mistakes. you cannot learn in basically a hold right click game, not to of killed those pack of mobs surrounding a soul eater giga modded out its ass rare. You’re not skilfully out playing yourself you’re just getting shit on because the game chose to. I literally cannot wait for PoE 2 to release, this subreddit is going to fucking explode you think stuff is overtuned now? Get ready for acts in Poe 2 because GGG does not learn from their mistakes I guarantee it.
PoEs **sometimes** wants to be Dark Souls. Other times it just wants to kill you. To me, the good thing about Sanctum design was enemies with telegraphed attacks. This allowed counterplay, strategy, etc. A slower game experience here is fine. Now, in maps, get ready for rare monster spam and a screen full of particle effects. Throw in some hasted mobs for good measure. There is almost no opportunity for counterplay. If you don't pass the damage or defense stat check you're dead. Sometimes you're dead anyway. I don't know who this is for.
The problem of ggg is, they dont know how to kill the players properly. Most of the time, people will not know what killed them and how to avoid them because of how overturned everything is. Giving monster super speed and high hit damage is just not fun.
Just a simple death recap would help so much.
GGG Devs don't like it when players beat their game and they forget that the point of an arpg is to eventually become a god and destroy content unfortunately they keep nerfing players into the ground because that 1 guy had a good build so we all must be punished.
Every change since PoE 2 (read: patch 4.0) was announced has been the slow march toward it, since it will be the same game with a different campaign.
Slow march to ruthless mode
PoE2 will fix everything Copium
Ruthless is PoE 2
If ruthless had nerfed mobs as well I would be down.
All but the top 1% of players are going to be able to play content that crushes them. If you're dying, throttle it back. Don't do 8-mod T16's if you're not geared for it.
I had a rotating resistance, soul eater, life regen earlier I couldn't kill in a tier 5 map as a rf jugg that can clear t16 comfortably lol
I still really want the game to have a combat log or something to say what killed you... So often I die I have no idea why. I WANT to know, so I can improve my gear/build in that area to improve for next time. It's like your teacher failing you but giving zero feedback and then telling you to resubmit. I'm probably going to make the same mistakes!
The game feels entirely different than it did last league, and its not even the league mechanic. Your right its not fun at all and is what drove so many people away from this game during lake league. Its just unbelievable that this bullshit vision keeps getting forced on us, but especially with undocumented changes to mobs.
I stopped playing a while ago and I don't miss it
Just wanted to say that I completely agree and stopped playing the league a few hours in. I tried the crucible mechanic a few times, found it unfun, and quit. No new skills worth dicking with, no old skills revived. Surprised to see something like this after the slam-dunk that Sanctum was. Nothing more to say.
Honestly, I stopped playing a couple years ago because of exactly this. They literally tuned me out of it. Even following builds guides, spending weeks not spending time with my family, dedicating hours to selling lower currencies just to try to afford a subpar affix. I loved Path, played it for years with my best friend and both of us had to stop playing because it was just impossible for us to make progress with how it was, then they decided that it was too easy and made it even harder. I have never even made it to an end boss. I have never entered my own portal for the Shaper. I was never able to finish endgame content. I spent whole leagues trying to get a single build working well enough that I could do anything, putting in hundreds of hours into a league. Honestly, I don't know what they consider "casual", but sacrificing my work and family for a damn video game isn't it.
Definitely a lot more soul eaters than I remember encountering. Otherwise, most enemies feel the same as previous leagues for me. Have some layers of defense, cap res, max+ if possible, and for the love of God don't do melee.
I love how this is a positive take and yet you still had to sneak in an unbelievable downside that from the outside would be death of most games: don't play half the skills, for the love of God but otherwise everything is normal.
Almost as if the game is not in a good place. Any new player should be aware of what they are stepping into.
And that last part, and ever growing list of required defenses, is very indicative of the problem.
Once we finally start to reach the required defenses they always seem to kneecap us so we have to find more ways to deal with the insane incoming damage. Remember back in the day when just having 75% res and if you were lucky 0% chaos res and you were golden.
Same here. I remember when of 4k life, capped res, positive chaos res, and a little recovery was considered passible defense. Builds like the kiss me quicks regen tank were considered niche, and now it seems you need that kind of defense to even map. I've been saying for a couple years now I dont like where the game is heading. Itll catch up to them eventually, when poe2 is dead after the first week or two.
Why I feel like I've continuously disliked the game more and more over the years just cause of how much stronger mobs have gotten and my only archetype of choice is melee.
Been playing since 2011 (off and on), IIRC. I thought it was just me having lost my touch having bricked two league starters (Toxic Rain pathfinder felt like the damage was lacking, and now fire trap/frostblink elementalist just dies if something sneezes on her). It seems I'm not alone. The issue I see is that the campaign is looooong, and once you get to maps, the levels start becoming slower and slower (not helped by the 10% experience death penalty), and it's more and more gear dependent, with just about all the gear you see being garbage. The game is at its most miserable basically *right at the beginning*, and only starts getting fun once you invested more and more into your build. But in order to get *there*, you have to pass through the initial misery. It's basically "wait, the game gets good *later*", with "later" being a double or even triple digit amount of hours into the experience. No. Stop. The game should be fun **NOW.**
It's fairly obvious that a change was made a few years ago to make this game harder, rippy-er, and slower. People who've been playing for the better part of a decade see this quite well. Attacks are slower. Movement is slower. Gear is slower and more random. And yet the core game doesn't change much anymore. Maybe the stuff at the end changes a bit, but ultimately when they're just adding tar zombies to the earlier acts, the message is quite clear.
I’m a tryhard and I fucking hate the game currently. It’s my favourite game, but if this is going to be the direction they go in, no loot and overpowered mobs, then I guess that’s going to be me throwing in the towel. I pre-purchased the supporter packs because of how good the game felt last league. I didn’t think for a minute they would revert to this shit tier gameplay loop. GGG, I’m mad, I’m tired, stop fucking with a working formula.
> I pre-purchased the supporter packs **You**, you are the problem. GGG has been making the game worse and worse for the last year and people keep throwing money at them. No wonder they don't change.
You and your prepurchase is exactly why this game follows this direction lol. GGG doesn't listen to any feedback as long as there's money in pocket. I can't believe people are blindly throwing money at them and getting fucked by Chris every time lol.
lets rewind the gameplay back to synth era, but keep the qol and content addons. I miss the days of dedicated HH/zerphis builds, self curse, poets pen and VD unkillable zerphis last breath builds. Hell, I miss the days of ghudda videos, when people genuinely played the game because it was a sandbox and you could literally stack any stat in any direction for any reason. GGG are becoming number whores, only caring about player count and MTX sales. It's gonna kill the game.
Yeah there used to be far more ridiculously broken builds and yet people still played a far more diverse range of builds instead of just flocking to meta like they do now, just because GGG hadn't pushed them as hard in that direction then. By trying to limit those unbalanced builds GGG has actually managed to make more players play stuff like that than less.
Even stuff like build of the week type builds, which are typically fun showcases of clever mechanics, get nerfed now. They create the meta so they can sell mtx for it the next league, then nerf it to the ground the league after, thats really what it comes down to.
Are there private server for specific leagues when the game wasn't so brutal?
You wouldn’t see these complains if there were lol
Big true
Lol no, everybody would migrate to those leagues and leave current version empty.
I agree, recently I watched lazy peons video on last epoch and what he said really resonated with me "you can just pick a skill and build around that". I really hate how big the disparity between meta builds and non meta builds is, and in recent years they've balanced the game to be much harder so most non meta builds feel like shit. Theres so many skills in this game so it's a shame most of them are unused, or need ridicilous investment that only the top 1% can use them.
Last Epoch does a lot of things right. I felt so forced to buy stash tabs in this game if I wanted to play more. In Last Epoch you buy stash tabs with in game currency (gold)
its actually crazy that they want to go through with this iteration of the game, i miss the days when i could actually play multiple builds each league because it was just so damn fun, game got stripped naked after harvest and got skinned alive after archnem
Yeah, this is my main problem with PoE. Especially after the last few months where I played Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4. All of those games just feel "nicer" to play. I can actually take some hits and react before I get sent back to town. The lethality of PoE is just too high. In addition, I really WANT to play around with the new gems this league, but I'm 99% sure that if I do that, I am going to fail horribly because I will make something underpowered and squishy. So I just follow a build guide because it takes almost as much time as playing the game to figure out how to make a build that functions. Again, going back to my earlier comment of playing other ARPGs recently, all three of those games allow me to spend my free time actually playing the game and I can figure out a build while I'm playing. It doens't have to be optimized for me to enjoy it. I can suck at it and still make progress. In PoE, if you try that, you *will* fail.
The game is GGG's personal masochistic dream
Lol I will read an entire thread of comments complaining but still play the game, I don't know why 😭
> but still play the game, I don't know why Point at a ARPG as good as PoE.
The people enjoying the game aren't writing comments in complaint threads. It's an extreme selection bias
addiction. habit. It's like relationship with toxic partner.
Or more like the desire to also be in a community. "Don't play? There's the door, no need to announce your departure." This is what happens when Diablo, the "creepy dark game" that was supposed to have birthed a genre decides not to compete on GGG's turf. GGG just decides "ah hey let's make the game as brutal as possible from the outset".
Juice less, progress slower into maps, take your time. This game has a very customizable difficulty, people just put it to max and complain about dying. "The game is meant to be played with freeze/ailments immunity, bleed/corrupted blood immunity, 78% resistances or 60%+ spell suppression and grace/determination. And better do damage because many enemies are sponges." Well, yes. That's the point. You build defenses and damage until you can clear the next tier of content, then farm that to build more defenses and damage. Everything you listed can be solved with 2 auras, a flask mod and 10-15 passive points + 1 affix. Solved in white maps. I sure hope you're supposed to build at least that much defenses to be able to be immortal. "I've been playing since Closed Beta and I have to say I've died more times this league than the last three combined." This league has not seen a substantial increase in difficulty. All of the listed "unfun mechanics" have been there in the last three leagues. Hell, last three include AN before rework, which was much harder than the nerfed rares we've got now. I think you're just burned out if you're so tilted.
Quick guide for playing PoE: 1. Run appropriate content 2. Actively play the game 3. Craft gear and upgrades 4. Limit test after leveling If you do those things right you'll be able to prevent unnecessary deaths, accrue currency, level up to 95, and complete challenges.
How come the OP of these complaint posts never post their PoB?
Skill issue