[Megathread] Path of Exile

[lordlosh]

My 2 cent about POE 2 and POE direction it is going
Firstable i wanna said that this is personal opinion and how i feel and think about POE 3.9 and the so call POE 2.

I play the game from the very beginning with some big breaks of course.
Last time i hang around for about a less than a year, 7-8 months to be correct. I stopped in Betrayal.

I stopped for various reason. Mainly i was piss with the ridiculous outdated and pain in the *** trade system. Standard is just a dead league, and the game cycle all around reroll new character every few months and so.
To be fair i was very happy with Delve league and Delve mechanics as a whole. During Delve league, delving was great and its give the game various end game, not just regular maps.
But of course the DEVS totally destroys that with the next league and the time you need to collect Sulphite. They reduce Niko appearance
by probably 95%.
What i also don`t like in the game was the loot overall and boss loot.
I mean you just skip map bosses, because they can kill you obviously and they just drop nothing. The loot in this game is pathetic as well. The only thing you pick from the ground is currency.
90% of the unique are carp and you not even pick them.
The game is 90% grind, and 10% fun.
Not going to even mention the non existent PVP this game have.
Should i said how bad melee builds are? If we can even call them melee. Most so call "melee" skill are not truly melee, but rather ranged, projectiles or channeling which to me is not okay for "melee".
Thanks god the have game Double and Heavy Strike.
Should i even speak about the Power Creep and that you can`t not even see what your attack actually looks like ?
So i was quite frustrated and decide to quit and gift my acc to a friend, as i always does when i decide to take a break from POE.
Usually i invest around 100-200$ in packs/stashes.

This was the introduction, now on the 3.9 and 4.0 and the future of POE.

I was really hyped and wanted this to be game changing as Chris was hyping things big.

This is my fair review:

* Improved Engine - its obviously better, but not to the standard of 2019. Far behind Diablo 4, from what i saw.
* The so call new End Game, atleast from what i understand this is just another depth to the already existing End Game - Maps. Again zero variety in this.
* New GEM/Socket system - Is this even necessary ? I mean this just give more power and more speed. But anyway its changing current system to a new one. Can`t said i like it or not. It doesn`t matter to me.
* The entire progression of armour and weapons has been redone from start to finish, alongside entirely new character models and animations - this is spot on. I think the old skin and characters models was too outdated. I saw some of the new skins and to be fair i like them a lot more.
* 19 New Ascendancy Classes and changes to the Passive Skill Tree - This sound great and will add even more diversity and uniqueness to your build. I don`t have problem if this and that Ascendancy will be stronger, but all need to be viable, not like Berserker in the past, simply not usable at all.
* One Game, Two Campaigns - I love the story in the games, but Story is not a strong component in POE to be fair. They make this one to have another option to level up until maps, because the game circle around rerolling new characters in months or so. And to move through the same campaign every month or so is boring as hell.
But lets see if its new acts, or like the current ones, 10 act, 5 of which are the same, just different visibility and layout.

So my take on all this:

As far as build diversity, the new expansion/game will be way better with the new stuffs.
Improvement in the engines are not enough, but something is better than nothing.
* Not happy with the "new" End Game content, still almost zero variety here, and to me this is the most important thing that keeps me in a game. Some End Game Group Content would have been great, even Guild ones, but of course NO way.

* Change the current armor/weapons etc with new models, character animations and so on - this is great.

* As far as New Campaign, like i said i`m neutral to it. I like doing Story campaign, but POE campaign is not something to talk about it.
I would prefer some end game quests/objectives and daily quests or smth. like that.

What i hope they will add/change and not happen:
* Change to the trade system. The game loses me right there, no way in hell i come back with this trade system.

* The drop from monsters as a whole and from bosses. While its good to use trading and to get items this way, its also a lot satisfying to actually find items by yourself.
When i last played i actually didn`t find a single item, that any of my characters use. Items probably more than 500 exalted and all of them from trade. I dont think this is okay, as well as skipping map bosses, where bosses is one of the important things in any game.

* Power Creep - i expected something about this, and way to address it. But it`s obvious it will become worse and worse.

To be objective, there is some good things, but alteast for me a lot of stuff was not changed/add and this was crucial for me.

[Coldkil]

I got nothing from the stream but missed part of the first day.

Got nothing aswell.

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It's a big part of why I quit myself. Darting around with a movement skill while clearing the whole screen with the press of a button isn't very compelling gameplay to me. I mean PoE is still light years ahead of Diablo 3 almost every aspect, and I'm going to give PoE 2 a solid chance, but if the meta stays the same I doubt I'll stick with it for too long.

Eh, the point is that the speed meta is baked right into the game genre. You play to make your character stronger so you can farm content faster and more efficiently for more loot.

It's not going away. In PoE it's kinda extreme because given how you can pile up scaling mechanics on skills, the damage ramps up a lot towards the endgame reaching the "blink and destroy" nonsense. I'm playing a meta build for the first time (summoner) and it's literally a walking simulator. It's not really a balance issue, it's how the game works.

Anyway, you're not forced to play while running. I take time doing my stuff and basically don't care about anything else. I started trading this league and it's been basically selling uniques i find around if they're worth something. Don't even care iof the price is right, i just use the trade macro and post it.

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Somehow the new gem/skill system seems more complicated than the gear socket.system. especially because you still kinda do have gear that affects skills.

Honestly, I'm not sure about this change.

It's just way better. The system doesn't actually change much - they just disconnected the socket trees from gear. You get gear that has a fixed number of max sockets and that unlocks the correspondent tree. I suppose you can work on colors/link as usual but you can freely change an item without worrying about sockets/links colors.

We don't know the very specifics, but the idea is that you can FINALLY invest on crafting/rerolling/change gear without risking of destroying your build.

It completely removes a layer in crafting/dropping items. I also suppose you'll still need 1500-ish fusings to make a 6-link anyway, so it's not like you're dumbing down anything. Just separate the investments between sockets and affixes on gear.

Also: in the screen you have what item is associated to what skill. So something like "this weapon procs the socketed cold spells" will work normally as you socket the cold spells in the weapon-related tree in the skill page.

[LilSaihah]

RE the new skill socketing system;
The main thing that I'm not really sure about is using a Cast While Channelling gem with Ice Storm. You could make a big linkset using that but I don't know how it will work out now.

[Beefhammer]

You're arguing semantics. The new campaign starts 20 years after the first campaign. Story-wise it is literally a sequel. A continuation. I.E., 'tacked onto the end'. Of course you can just play campaign 2 and never touch campaign 1, that wasn't my point.

No I misunderstood your use of tacked onto the end. It reads as if PoE2 is just something you do after the original campaigns not as something separate.

[Odintdk]

Everytime I tried PoE in the past few years, whether it's some interesting looking season or friends happened to be playing it, I still couldn't get pass how the classes lack identity in that game. This eventually made me stop playing it everytime before hitting "end game" in that game.

Classes just seem to not matter much at all. Everybody uses mostly the same exact abilities for the same purposes (damage, movement etc), and then you have a super bloated skill tree which is shared by everyone, and is filled with small passive increases. The classes themselves only differed in their ascendancies, which are pretty small skill trees to be anything class defining imo.

Where in Diablo 2 and even Diablo 3, you used VERY different, iconic abilities/skills per class, had class specific sets (that were admittedly unnecessarily inflated in recent years), a wide variety of interesting class specific gear that heavily impacted your builds. I just feel far more attached to the class I'm playing in a Diablo game as opposed to PoE.

[Coldkil]

Everytime I tried PoE in the past few years, whether it's some interesting looking season or friends happened to be playing it, I still couldn't get pass how the classes lack identity in that game. This eventually made me stop playing it everytime before hitting "end game" in that game.

Classes just seem to not matter much at all. Everybody uses mostly the same exact abilities for the same purposes (damage, movement etc), and then you have a super bloated skill tree which is shared by everyone, and is filled with small passive increases. The classes themselves only differed in their ascendancies, which are pretty small skill trees to be anything class defining imo.

Where in Diablo 2 and even Diablo 3, you used VERY different, iconic abilities/skills per class, had class specific sets (that were admittedly unnecessarily inflated in recent years), a wide variety of interesting class specific gear that heavily impacted your builds. I just feel far more attached to the class I'm playing in a Diablo game as opposed to PoE.

Well, design choice. The investment on the tree looks small but it all piles up towards the end of the game and really pays off.

As for skills, the idea is that your class doesn't limit your skills choice. Any class can use any skill - how effectively though it may vary a lot. Sometimes the nodes you need on the tree to make a skill shine are very far, or it requires high off-stats.

It's all about how you work on your character. I think all my PoE character have way more identity than a D3 character which is just copy #534376345875 of all of the same class, because builds and playstyles are predetermined.

Anyway, personal preference. I plan to play the next D3 season since i want to try the new crusader set and it will take me like a week of casual play to do all the journey.

[Odintdk]

It's all about how you work on your character. I think all my PoE character have way more identity than a D3 character which is just copy #534376345875 of all of the same class, because builds and playstyles are predetermined.
.

Yes. Character identity, not class identity.

In Diablo 2/3 (repeating), you have Class specific and exclusive uniques, weapons and sets. You have exclusive skills and abilities that define a Barbarian from say Monk or Crusader. Even the character base stats upgrade differently while leveling. In PoE, classes may aswell not exist, and replaced with just having that one tiny ascendancy skill tree somewhere in the skill grid.

Sure it's fun to customize a caster to have a charge like mobility skill for example, but at the expense of the defining aspects of what makes each class it's own thing. You can't have both. I for one prefer the wide variety of abilities that each Diablo class have in their arsenal to choose from, but exclusively, over everyone having access to the same exact ability choices. I'm sure many others who chose and continued to play Diablo games over the years (even 2 Today) share the same opinion.

This is btw, without mentioning that gem sockets being used as primary abilities, come at the cost of having the option to actually slot them with stat/legendary gems or Runes like in Diablo games, which is another area to customize that is missing in PoE, alongside missing class uniques, sets etc.

[Coldkil]

This is btw, without mentioning that gem sockets being used as primary abilities, come at the cost of having the option to actually slot them with stat/legendary gems or Runes like in Diablo games, which is another area to customize that is missing in PoE, alongside missing class uniques, sets etc.

This is something that simply cannot work in PoE - way too many stats to roll on gear and tiers of affixes. Adding another layer of complexity is just going to hurt.

Anyway for PoE 2 they're removing sockets from gear; so the space for something like that to be implemented in future is there.

Regarding the Diablo vs PoE thing, it's just difference in design. I prefer one compared to the other but in the end, it all depends on how systems are designed. Even in D4 the class identity is really preserved, while PoE continues down the road of character uniqueness (which is not really that wide given some biuld staples are the same for everyone, depending on what you want to do).

It0s not that something doesn't work. It's just that both systems are really in plavce and put some constraints you cannot move much around - both work well imho.

In D3 the problem was/is that you don't decide on a build. You pick a class and a set and that's the way you must play. Fortunately in D4 it's going to be different.

[Fencers]

It's just way better.

I understand how it is supposed to work. I just don't think it is a simpler or more elegant system. We'll see though, I give GGG the benefit of doubt a lot. They haven't truly let me down yet.

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Classes just seem to not matter much at all.

Class matters, but not in the way you prefer it to be designed. The game is strongly orientated around skills, not classes. Class is relevant to how one progresses a skill or uses the starting point of a class to access X/Y/Z passive bonuses.

The game will likely never be built around Fireball only being the domain of the Witch or Cleave the specialty of the Duelist. If you find that singularity necessary, then the game will never appeal to you fundamentally.

[Marrilaife]

Some End Game Group Content would have been great, even Guild ones, but of course NO way.

And god bless it will stay that way. Let's not ruin another game with forced group content. You can play in a group, you can do bosses or maps or delve or w/e you want in a group of up to 6 players. Now content that is only made for groups and not doable solo? Hell no. 90% of online games are forced multiplayer, and it sucks when there's no escape / rest from being funneled into group play.

[kail]

Everytime I tried PoE in the past few years, whether it's some interesting looking season or friends happened to be playing it, I still couldn't get pass how the classes lack identity in that game. This eventually made me stop playing it everytime before hitting "end game" in that game.

Classes just seem to not matter much at all. Everybody uses mostly the same exact abilities for the same purposes (damage, movement etc), and then you have a super bloated skill tree which is shared by everyone, and is filled with small passive increases. The classes themselves only differed in their ascendancies, which are pretty small skill trees to be anything class defining imo.

Where in Diablo 2 and even Diablo 3, you used VERY different, iconic abilities/skills per class, had class specific sets (that were admittedly unnecessarily inflated in recent years), a wide variety of interesting class specific gear that heavily impacted your builds. I just feel far more attached to the class I'm playing in a Diablo game as opposed to PoE.

The ascendancies are effectively the different classes. More than one of them could certainly use the same skillset for popular abilities like Cyclone but they still offer very different bonuses. An ascendancy like a saboteur has clear intention in using traps/mines while a necromancer has clear bonuses for select minion skills. Other ascendancy options have special access to unique defenses or bonuses to armor/evasion/energy shield. To say the class doesn't matter is quite confusing when they help dictate a build. If we we're talking super early in PoE before there was ascendancies, I'd agree with you entirely.

Restricting skill to classes pretty much goes against the PoE idea where skills are actually a trade-able item. It also opens up the amount of builds that exist in PoE which is far more than any ARPG I've seen. Allowing my necromancer to use cyclone provides a nice Cast When Channeling to summon skeletons gameplay, it would suck if Cyclone was only limited to marauders and duelists.

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I understand how it is supposed to work. I just don't think it is a simpler or more elegant system. We'll see though, I give GGG the benefit of doubt a lot. They haven't truly let me down yet.

I don't know if it was answered yet, but will the jeweler's chance to six socket be the same? If so, it sounds like a massive nerf to the currency/luck needed to get a six-link.

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* Power Creep - i expected something about this, and way to address it. But it`s obvious it will become worse and worse.

They did address it when it comes to bossing, they are ultimately not a fan of how trivial content becomes but that's what happens with ARPGs in general. The best way to combat power creep is allowing the infinite dungeon content that has no difficulty cap. D3 has GRs while PoE has delves.

I even recalled the lead dev having a distate for the infamous Headhunter belt, which I agree with. But I guess there are people who can justify the "I can't die and clear 3x the screen" item, and GGG does react to backlash rather quickly.

[Onikaroshi]

RE the new skill socketing system;
The main thing that I'm not really sure about is using a Cast While Channelling gem with Ice Storm. You could make a big linkset using that but I don't know how it will work out now.

Shouldn't change the amount of links honestly

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I don't know if it was answered yet, but will the jeweler's chance to six socket be the same? If so, it sounds like a massive nerf to the currency/luck needed to get a six-link.

They did say it would be easier overall to get six links, but since you can get more, it will be about as hard to get a FULL run of six links (every socket can be a 6 link, so that's like 9+ total 6 links)

[Darleth]

Actually I didn't say that at all, my problem is that they waste time making story content (which is the most time-consuming thing they can do, design entirely new acts) when people don't play the game for them anyway. The first thing everyone does in PoE each season is bum-rush to the maps.

You can say that's not true, and I'll call you a liar, because I've not encountered a single person that cares about the story and campaign over the endgame. But instead of understanding that, they waste months of time hiring voice actors and designing new player hubs and quests for all of us to skip.

Well, Story is still an important part. Is it annoying to go through after you've done it a million times? Yes. I still prefer having an actual story instead of an immediately endgame-content mode like D3 has with adventure mode.

Also, I for one went through the story and read the dialogues on my first playthrough (both when it was only act 1 - 3 [later 4] and when act 5 - 10 came out). At least if its new and expands the storyline, I for one go through that content on my first playthrough. After that, it's obviously rushing to the endgame content and getting my build(s) done. Also been playing since around the end of closed beta, so there is that.

I even recalled the lead dev having a distate for the infamous Headhunter belt, which I agree with. But I guess there are people who can justify the "I can't die and clear 3x the screen" item, and GGG does react to backlash rather quickly.

Headhunter has nothing to do with "clearing 3x the screen". Headhunter doesn't magically increase your offscreening, it speeds it up. Builds in itself are the issue of doing that. Headhunter in itself is even a BAD item for bossing (in theory) if there are no rare mobs to kill. Headhunter should've been discontinued or nerfed heavily after Nemesis was done, but instead it never really got any changes at all.
It's just too good of an item for what it does for clearspeed, even with its rarity.

I understand how it is supposed to work. I just don't think it is a simpler or more elegant system. We'll see though, I give GGG the benefit of doubt a lot. They haven't truly let me down yet.

Might not be a simpler or more elegant system, but it solves one of the issues the current system has: upgrading your gear. Especially during leveling, where you want to switch your gear more often for better/increased stats, but actually cant because of sockets present and/or linked together, it would result in less damage. If anything, it makes upgrading items during leveling a lot less of an issue. It kind of solves the issue of "needing" a tabula rasa drop early on or farming humility cards for 15 levels in BA for example.

Everything else still needs to be seen obviously.

[Coldkil]

I understand how it is supposed to work. I just don't think it is a simpler or more elegant system. We'll see though, I give GGG the benefit of doubt a lot. They haven't truly let me down yet.

Ah ok, my fault then. I think it's way simpler in my mind though - any item category has X number of sockets where you can slot skills/meta supports. Every gem then has its own sockets where you put the support gems.

I see it very linear - but honestly it's also how i would have made the whole system in the first place.

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I don't know if it was answered yet, but will the jeweler's chance to six socket be the same? If so, it sounds like a massive nerf to the currency/luck needed to get a six-link.

We don't really know at this point. You have sockets in items and gems - but they are not linked, and at least on items they don't even need to be since they're just how many skills you can slot in the skill page for that item.

Also from the video: you can see skill gems having an X number of sockets. When you slot them in the skill page, all sockets are automatically linked. So from what i've seen now, fusings are basically useless and not needed. Chromatics have still use because you need determined colors for your setup.

Then, as an educated guess, i suppose sockets on gems will increase the more you level up your skill as a natural progression, but maybe up to a certain point? Then yiu can spam Jeweller's to get the 6 sockets.

We don't really know how it actually works as for now.

[madmossy]

Everytime I tried PoE in the past few years, whether it's some interesting looking season or friends happened to be playing it, I still couldn't get pass how the classes lack identity in that game. This eventually made me stop playing it everytime before hitting "end game" in that game.

Classes just seem to not matter much at all. Everybody uses mostly the same exact abilities for the same purposes (damage, movement etc), and then you have a super bloated skill tree which is shared by everyone, and is filled with small passive increases. The classes themselves only differed in their ascendancies, which are pretty small skill trees to be anything class defining imo.

Where in Diablo 2 and even Diablo 3, you used VERY different, iconic abilities/skills per class, had class specific sets (that were admittedly unnecessarily inflated in recent years), a wide variety of interesting class specific gear that heavily impacted your builds. I just feel far more attached to the class I'm playing in a Diablo game as opposed to PoE.

That's because PoE is much like society today. Why label people as male/female. When you can be absolutely anything you want. Yes even an attack helicopter if that floats your boat!

In PoE you define your class through the skills and abilities you use. So instead of mr generic intelligence stackin fire mage. You could be mr hulking great big karui warrior strength stacking iron will fire mage.

[Bjay]

My biggest gripe with PoE are the 1shot offscreen mechanics. It's incredibly frustrating to play hardcore at a very high level. In d3 however, the top world hardcore experience is in my opinion amazing.

[Edge-]

My biggest gripe with PoE are the 1shot offscreen mechanics. It's incredibly frustrating to play hardcore at a very high level. In d3 however, the top world hardcore experience is in my opinion amazing.

What offscreen mechanics? >.>

[kail]

What offscreen mechanics? >.>

Reflect I guess. There are certainly tanky builds that exist where any death comes down to you. If you want to play a Mathil-like build, being glasscannon is on you.

[Edge-]

Reflect I guess. There are certainly tanky builds that exist where any death comes down to you. If you want to play a Mathil-like build, being glasscannon is on you.

But reflect isn't offscreen, it's a modifier that you can easily avoid as long as you're paying attention to map mods >.>

[Baconeggcheese]

Honestly reflect shouldn't exist, there's really no gameplay aspect to that mechanic at all in this game. Either its there and you simply can't do the thing because you do that damage type or it either isn't there or you don't do that damage type or you have a skill that ignores it.