[Megathread] Path of Exile

[Fencers]

I think I am just really bad at mazes. The labyrinth is a real pain in the ass for me to run. I wish it was just for the enchants and I could go about my ascendancy business without running through it every new character.

Yea, I watch the daily videos. I am not seeking advice on the maze- simply lamenting the fact a piece of content I do not enjoy is somewhat required.

[Iamanerd]

Have any of you guys been having performance issues with the game? I see people on reddit and the poe forums talking about lots of issues from crashes to them not being able to run max settings anymore. I haven't had any issues for the most part other than when 2 Perandus chests are next to each other I"ll get a dip in frames.

[Redblade]

A few crashes early on but after they fixed the perandus mobs it's been as usual, basically only ground effects raping my FPS.

Edit: I'm sitting on a i7 with 970 card though so not like I'm trying to run it on a toaster which would cause far greater problems.

[Fencers]

Have any of you guys been having performance issues with the game?

Ice Crash and and a few other spell effects cause my aging laptop to stutter but overall performance is decent in non-boss areas.

I struggle to kill Dominus and Malachai due to the spell effects. Sometimes I even RIP on these bosses because I just can't move. But I just have a pretty terrible laptop at this point. I can't really kill Dr. Doom in Marvel Heroes either for the same reasons.

[Lysah]

As it stands now you can MF dried lake for a few days and buy enough coin to flat out buy any offer you want.

Nah, you can't, because you have to get a Cadiro to sell you the item first. As I have yet to see him sell an item even worth one exalt, it doesn't matter if I have 500k coins. The best I could do is sell the coins to people and use the chaos to buy the items I want.

And I don't know what HH sells for, tbh, I just named something rarer-than-t1 because even as mjolner slowly turns into a 1c unique, there is a new set of items that are insanely expensive and provide something to strive for if you feel so inclined.

Actually, I've been disappointed with Perandus so far. The packs are a pain in the ass, lag a lot, and Cadiro himself shows up once every 30 maps offering a 1c unique that costs way too much or a league specific piece of garbage nobody would ever want ever. The only thing keeping me from saying it's flat out bad as a league is the tiny bit of hope I feel every time I see him that makes the game a little bit more exciting.

On the plus side, I love the Labyrinth. It's an amazing place to level, and I jump in it the second I can in normal and cruel on every character.

I do still crash all the time, several times a day, hoping there are more fixes coming.

[Redblade]

Nah, you can't, because you have to get a Cadiro to sell you the item first. As I have yet to see him sell an item even worth one exalt, it doesn't matter if I have 500k coins. The best I could do is sell the coins to people and use the chaos to buy the items I want.

He's not that hard to spawn, read one account of a guy who had 3x Shav's offers so far for example.

And I don't know what HH sells for, tbh, I just named something rarer-than-t1 because even as mjolner slowly turns into a 1c unique, there is a new set of items that are insanely expensive and provide something to strive for if you feel so inclined.

No there isn't, HH is a single item and even that is only worth a fraction of what it used to be as it's growing more and more common. The closest you get after that would be Skyforth/Voll's Devotion and even they are not that expensive anymore. Currently in PSC there are 74 items above 20ex and I'd say at least half of them are trolls or over priced enough to never sell. To make a deeper analysis you'd have to do complex searches to exclude some 6L items and what not.

Edit: At least when there is multiple high end items it helps prevent market manipulation, when there is only one or two they will be manipulated in to costing far more than they would otherwise. As can be seen with HH right now.

[Lysah]

But it's like Hermanni said, if everything is proportionally cheaper, it doesn't matter if HH used to be 80 exalts and now it's 20. You can't sell a t1 unique for 15 exalts anymore, either, so it's just as hard to farm that 20 as it used to be to farm 80.

I'm pretty sure getting tier 1 or better uniques from Cadiro is still ungodly rare. Maybe not as rare as the item itself dropping, but I'd wager anyone who got 3 shavs offers is just lucky.

[Redblade]

But it's like Hermanni said, if everything is proportionally cheaper, it doesn't matter if HH used to be 80 exalts and now it's 20. You can't sell a t1 unique for 15 exalts anymore, either, so it's just as hard to farm that 20 as it used to be to farm 80.

This is a flawed argument as it ignores the fact that currency in PoE are consumables and are used for a wide variety of other things.

I'm pretty sure getting tier 1 or better uniques from Cadiro is still ungodly rare. Maybe not as rare as the item itself dropping, but I'd wager anyone who got 3 shavs offers is just lucky.

I had an exalt, consuming dark a couple of times, taste of hate. While consuming dark isn't T1 it used to be rare enough that you wouldn't expect to get that offer twice in a week at least. You clearly underestimate how many good offers he pumps out. And finding him isn't even hard as you can force it though running a small linear zone over and over, added benefit it coins farming.

[Lysah]

I had an exalt, consuming dark a couple of times, taste of hate. While consuming dark isn't T1 it used to be rare enough that you wouldn't expect to get that offer twice in a week at least. You clearly underestimate how many good offers he pumps out. And finding him isn't even hard as you can force it though running a small linear zone over and over, added benefit it coins farming.

But no Shavs, huh? Interesting. Guess we both just must be unlucky since everyone else is getting 20 Shavs an hour.

And how many people actually USE exalts in this game? Maybe a dozen at most outside of the very occasional master crafting and yolo exalting?

[Vespian]

To chime in; The economy has been one of my main gripes for a long time. To be clear, I'm not looking for phat loot-explosions around every corner, but I did like the Diablo 2 principle the most of all, compared to D3 or PoE. PoE has too much currency, D3 compensated the lack of personal drops + RMAH with the other end of that world, it now throws unique after unique at you.

I don't feel comfortable with either. I want my experience to have purpose, so I loved the fact that bosses in D2 had an increased chance to drop items up to a certain ilvl, which meant you knew where to go to get certain items, since certain bosses dropped specific types of whites more than other types and with the increased MF on said bosses, you basically invested (a lot) time in loot versus progress (progress is relative of course, because past lvl 94 you're basically only leveling to level). And obviously Pit runs and similar.

In D3/PoE everything drops anything, albeit with completely different odds, and neither appeals to me. I want specifics, directions, targets. A hunt.

That said, the total lack of selffound in PoE literally kills the game for me. I rarely trade anything. I'm highly in favor of limiting trade for selffound chars, as a nod to Redblade, but I do think they need to come up with a way to make the game appeal to that audience. They would be stupid not to. Perhaps make a permanent selffound league, with limited trading, Idk, but as long as I have to invest time into market values with all these different currencies, constantly changing, it seems more like work than a game to me.

[Lysah]

I think a lot of experience with games like d2 comes from just community growth. Back when most of us played d2, there was virtually no online community, d2jsp was all you had and even it didn't really get big until years and years after d2 had been out. It was hard to build up to end game gear because it was very rare and very expensive, and 99% of the drops you got were utter trash. It still felt good to MF, though, because pretty much 100% of boss kills dropped uniques for a well equipped character, even if they were all garbage (isenharts again woo!). Uniques aren't that common in PoE, but the same exact principle applies. The thing that has changed is the ability to just shop online and buy everything instead of finding anything yourself.

However, this still existed in d2 if you decided to use d2jsp. I could still deck out a 100% geared trapsin with enigma, infinity, and anything else I feel like buying for 100fg tops, the price of one average anni. Go channel surfing for a few hours in the clone hunters IRC and you'll have a full best in slot character in a day. Yet, we give so much credit to d2 for an active and engaging economy? PoE is far better than d2 is, d2 was ruined from the beginning by bots and dupes. The difference is that we had less access to that stuff than we do to PoE's economy because of sites like poe.trade. Like I said a couple of posts ago, the issue here isn't with game design, it's with us. We actively choose to participate in tools that give us instant access to the inventories of thousands of other people and then bitch that the game is too easy. And some people still want an in-game auction house.

Div cards are supposed to provide a "hunt." I do think they dropped the ball with this one in trying to prevent them from impacting the economy, they're all just waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fucking rare.

[Vespian]

I think a lot of experience with games like d2 comes from just community growth. Back when most of us played d2, there was virtually no online community, d2jsp was all you .............
Div cards are supposed to provide a "hunt." I do think they dropped the ball with this one in trying to prevent them from impacting the economy, they're all just waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fucking rare.

I agree with most of what you say, but you have it a bit skewed. Get a Sorc with a base set of resistances (which you didn't really need, because manual dodge) and a set of armor with 5xtopaz and go run Mephi. You will find crap, but you will also find Shako, etc. And that's your baseline right there. D2, like with all games, I played selffound. I literally made 2x Call to Arms runeword in my life and that's it. There are uniques I have never seen. Its economy is irrelevant in a comparison to PoE, it's the impact of the economy on the principles of trade and droprate, that make it a completely different game, a superior game (D2).

[Lysah]

How is playing PoE and D2 self found different? You can find crap and good items playing PoE as well. The only real difference is a focus on farming bosses vs just farming. Everything in D2 is painfully rare or rarer than anything in PoE, the top runes make mirrors look like common casual drops. The big benefit d2 had was community created mods, including mods that buffed drop rates for single player fans, and I do wonder if everyone I see that mentions playing self found installed such a mod and then forgot about it when they talk about how great d2 was. I don't think, at any point, did the d2 devs consider trade communities when balancing drop rates. Video game development was still quite young back then, and I'm 99% sure they just yolo'd everything. The evidence of this is stuff like Zod's initial 1 in 800+ million drop rate from very specific mobs in the game, or top tier uniques only being droppable from Baal, essentially, at a drop rate that made them equally impossible to find.

If you ask me, where d2 really excelled was its ability to capture us into enjoying the game for its own sake. You didn't NEED specific uniques and fantastic rares with perfect life and resists to make your build work. A naked sorc could clear hell if you were careful enough, gear just made the game easier. And the end of the game was still difficult enough to give people something to strive for. The equivalent for PoE would be us farming ledge to level 80 while looking for loot so that we could survive act 4, like people used to run andy/meph before they went on to try baal runs.

[Redblade]

But no Shavs, huh? Interesting. Guess we both just must be unlucky since everyone else is getting 20 Shavs an hour.

No Shav's no, Taste of Hate is T1 as far as I know though...and I made very little effort to get offers. You see while running high level maps for some 8 hours yesterday I got 3 offers, running Solaris 1 for 30 min after that got me 4 offers. If you actually chase offers then they are not that hard to force.

And how many people actually USE exalts in this game? Maybe a dozen at most outside of the very occasional master crafting and yolo exalting?

What are you talking about? Exalts are used for master crafting and yolo exalting...there is really no other purpose for the orbs existence. And tons of people do just that.

I don't feel comfortable with either. I want my experience to have purpose, so I loved the fact that bosses in D2 had an increased chance to drop items up to a certain ilvl, which meant you knew where to go to get certain items, since certain bosses dropped specific types of whites more than other types and with the increased MF on said bosses, you basically invested (a lot) time in loot versus progress (progress is relative of course, because past lvl 94 you're basically only leveling to level). And obviously Pit runs and similar.

In D3/PoE everything drops anything, albeit with completely different odds, and neither appeals to me. I want specifics, directions, targets. A hunt.

This is something I think PoE would benefit from doing, that way they can make some items scarce by challenge instead of pure RNG. It would also enable them to cut back on total amount of loot dropped while still retaining about the same amount of relevant loot. On top of this they could make white high level bases a bit more uncommon in the process as a means to buff the income potential for those maps.

That said, the total lack of selffound in PoE literally kills the game for me. I rarely trade anything. I'm highly in favor of limiting trade for selffound chars, as a nod to Redblade, but I do think they need to come up with a way to make the game appeal to that audience. They would be stupid not to. Perhaps make a permanent selffound league, with limited trading, Idk, but as long as I have to invest time into market values with all these different currencies, constantly changing, it seems more like work than a game to me.

Well the Perandus mechanic with Cadiro would have worked as a nod to the self found players if the coins wasn't tradeable. That's where they went wrong in my opinion, sure some more items would be traded from this but as they buffed drop rates in the past a fair few times it's not like they couldn't afford to nerf the rates slightly to compensate.

I'm not against getting the best of both worlds but the developer has to want that and add the restrictions necessary in order for it to work.

Div cards are supposed to provide a "hunt." I do think they dropped the ball with this one in trying to prevent them from impacting the economy, they're all just waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too fucking rare.

It's the same issue here, it's that they won't restrict them from being traded. It comes down to a choice, either you make the cards rare enough that thousands of players farming them won't have too much of an impact or you make them non-tradeable forcing the players to farm their own full set.

I really think the game could benefit from loot tables as mentioned, that way they could even make leveling uniques more rare unless you level or farm low content. Something that in the end would be good for the economy as well as more items would hold some type of value, instead of us having 80% of the uniques be worth 1 chaos or less.

[Lysah]

What are you talking about? Exalts are used for master crafting and yolo exalting...there is really no other purpose for the orbs existence. And tons of people do just that.

Actual crafting, which not very many people do because not very many people can afford it. Even master crafting at the exalt level is too expensive for a vast majority of the player base, 99%+ I would guess. Only the top few hundred players have the kind of exalts lying around that they can just piss 5 of them on a staff to get +3 gems, out of tens of thousands of players. For the other 99%, exalts are just a currency that translates into trading.

@Rest
PoE already tried gating high end uniques behind high map levels, as well as adding exclusive content (atziri), none of it has been very meaningful. Dory's was the best weapon for spell casters for a while and it was stupid and I don't think very many people actually enjoyed that as a mechanic of the game.


I think the issue with tradeable coins is that they want the league mechanics to actually impact the economy substantially. It changes the fundamentals of the game, otherwise you would have a league that is basically standard but gives you some free shit occasionally. Instead we have people releasing videos on how to farm coins for profit because it's a gateway to enjoying more niche and expensive builds. For self found Cadiro to have an impact he would have to show up basically every single map you loaded offering brodeals on tier 1 and rare uniques all the time. There are simply too many items in the game for Cadiro to offer them all and specific ones not be insanely rare.

Even with tradeable coins the league hasn't impacted me much. I bought an exalt for 2k...that's about the most "fun" I've had with it. So far it's given me a couple of uniques I otherwise wouldn't have gotten at all and wouldn't have missed, and a small amount of currency. I've probably farmed about 8k coins total this past week and that's barely enough for a t1 unique if I hadn't bought anything yet, sitting on 3300 or so right now so I couldn't afford shavs even if it popped up. And I still play quite religiously, though I have "wasted" a lot of time on alts (four characters in maps now).

[Vespian]

How is playing PoE and D2 self found different? You can find crap and good items playing PoE as well. The only real difference is a focus on farming bosses vs just farming. Everything in D2 is painfully rare or rarer than anything in PoE, the top runes make mirrors look like common casual drops. The big benefit d2 had was community created mods, including mods that buffed drop rates for single player fans, and I do wonder if everyone I see that mentions playing self found installed such a mod and then forgot about it when they talk about how great d2 was. I don't think, at any point, did the d2 devs consider trade communities when balancing drop rates. Video game development was still quite young back then, and I'm 99% sure they just yolo'd everything. The evidence of this is stuff like Zod's initial 1 in 800+ million drop rate from very specific mobs in the game, or top tier uniques only being droppable from Baal, essentially, at a drop rate that made them equally impossible to find.

If you ask me, where d2 really excelled was its ability to capture us into enjoying the game for its own sake. You didn't NEED specific uniques and fantastic rares with perfect life and resists to make your build work. A naked sorc could clear hell if you were careful enough, gear just made the game easier. And the end of the game was still difficult enough to give people something to strive for. The equivalent for PoE would be us farming ledge to level 80 while looking for loot so that we could survive act 4, like people used to run andy/meph before they went on to try baal runs.

The fact you reference mods and D2 online play in one breath is enough for me to claim that you never actually played it.

[Redblade]

Actual crafting, which not very many people do because not very many people can afford it. Even master crafting at the exalt level is too expensive for a vast majority of the player base, 99%+ I would guess. Only the top few hundred players have the kind of exalts lying around that they can just piss 5 of them on a staff to get +3 gems, out of tens of thousands of players. For the other 99%, exalts are just a currency that translates into trading.

I'm sorry but anyone can make a few exalts fairly easy and I'd say far more people use them than you seem to think.

@Rest
PoE already tried gating high end uniques behind high map levels, as well as adding exclusive content (atziri), none of it has been very meaningful. Dory's was the best weapon for spell casters for a while and it was stupid and I don't think very many people actually enjoyed that as a mechanic of the game.

It's because they still have the same rarity and are gated behind i-lvl, loot tables would have to change how rarity is set in the first place. It would give them the means to say "item X needs to drop more" and adjust it individually. There was/is nothing wrong with Atziri, it's actually really good content. The problem is how they gated access to her instead of making the drops not guarantied.

I think the issue with tradeable coins is that they want the league mechanics to actually impact the economy substantially. It changes the fundamentals of the game, otherwise you would have a league that is basically standard but gives you some free shit occasionally. Instead we have people releasing videos on how to farm coins for profit because it's a gateway to enjoying more niche and expensive builds. For self found Cadiro to have an impact he would have to show up basically every single map you loaded offering brodeals on tier 1 and rare uniques all the time. There are simply too many items in the game for Cadiro to offer them all and specific ones not be insanely rare.

Which would be fine is you had to farm the coins your self as the choice to buy or not would actually be meaningful. As it stands now you can sell the offer if you can't afford it or just buy coins if you don't have enough when you get the offer. This is why it's so harmful for the economy as most good offers are being accepted thus increasing supply at an insane rate.

I know I use Shav's as an example a lot but it's because it's something I searched for a lot every league and thus know the prices of. This league there is about twice (online) as many being sold at any given time compared to last league and the price is about half of last league. So a fair assumption is that Cadiro effectively doubled the "drop rate" of Shav's. This is on top of the 4x T1 drop rate buff a few months back which solved the issue with some uniques being rare enough to end up costing 100+ exalts, something I can agree with being too rare.

So again, my problem isn't the 4x buffed rate or Cadiro, it's the combination of them that makes the whole economy very flat.

[Cyclone Jack]

The fact you reference mods and D2 online play in one breath is enough for me to claim that you never actually played it.

"...community created mods, including mods that buffed drop rates for single player fans" is true. There were a ton of mods, and they could be used in multiplayer, they just couldn't be used while on Battle.Net. There were a number of B.net-only drops and bosses that non-B.net players had to enable via mods. Luckily, most of these were simple to enable.

- - - Updated - - -

I know I use Shav's as an example a lot but it's because it's something I searched for a lot every league and thus know the prices of. This league there is about twice (online) as many being sold at any given time compared to last league and the price is about half of last league. So a fair assumption is that Cadiro effectively doubled the "drop rate" of Shav's. This is on top of the 4x T1 drop rate buff a few months back which solved the issue with some uniques being rare enough to end up costing 100+ exalts, something I can agree with being too rare.

Well, part of that increase could also be due to the improved trade mechanics on stash tabs. I know even I have been tempted to set up a trade tab, but then I remember I'd have to pay attentions to whispers and stop playing the game when someone wants to trade. EDIT:: I'm not saying it's a huge factor, but it is a variable.

[Vespian]

"...community created mods, including mods that buffed drop rates for single player fans" is true. There were a ton of mods, and they could be used in multiplayer, they just couldn't be used while on Battle.Net. There were a number of B.net-only drops and bosses that non-B.net players had to enable via mods. Luckily, most of these were simple to enable.

- - - Updated - - -



Well, part of that increase could also be due to the improved trade mechanics on stash tabs. I know even I have been tempted to set up a trade tab, but then I remember I'd have to pay attentions to whispers and stop playing the game when someone wants to trade. EDIT:: I'm not saying it's a huge factor, but it is a variable.

I'm aware how D2 worked, thanks. As I said, no mods on BNET.

[Vespian]

And the person you called out didn't say they were used on BNET either. So basically you goofed.

We're comparing on equal grounds, it's implied and not just vaguely.