[Megathread] Path of Exile

[Gorsameth]

What keeps you guys playing as you get further into the game?

I got my char to this point: https://pastebin.com/aUeR9zCC

and I'm honestly just out of steam. I haven't done uber elder yet, but shaper and elder weren't any more difficult than the rest of the game, which wasn't difficult at all. There's nothing to lead me to believe that uber elder will be much different, maybe I die to a one shot mechanic I don't know about a couple times and then kill it anyway. At which point, what do I even do? Apparently the only thing I need more damage for is 5 way legion battles which isn't worth doing without headhunter.

I could complete the last few unique maps I'm missing on my atlas purely for the sake of it, but to what end?

Making a new character honestly doesn't sound all that fun with how shallow combat is. Insta-gibbing everything on the screen with a different color ability doesn't really change up the experience much if at all.

So yeah, I'm curious what keeps you guys going once you get up to this kinda point?

The answer is, you don't really imo.
PoE, being free to play and season based, is a perfect game where you dive in with a new league, play until your bored and then leave until the next league comes around.

[Baconeggcheese]

The answer is, you don't really imo.
PoE, being free to play and season based, is a perfect game where you dive in with a new league, play until your bored and then leave until the next league comes around.

I just have a hard time imagining playing something this shallow a 2nd time around when a new league drops unless the next league mechanic is something a lot more involved than Legion's "kill as much stuff as you can within this timer!".

People are apparently getting thousands of hours out of the game, I'm curious what's keeping them hooked.

[bloodwulf]

I just have a hard time imagining playing something this shallow a 2nd time around when a new league drops unless the next league mechanic is something a lot more involved than Legion's "kill as much stuff as you can within this timer!".

People are apparently getting thousands of hours out of the game, I'm curious what's keeping them hooked.

Carrot on the stick loot grind or Personal goals (Kill Uber Elder, Killer Uber Elder Deathless).

Typically ARPGS are focused on your own path to enjoyment. POE in particular have a few easily quantifiable goals (get all the league challenges for free MTX, make X profit) that people can stick with. Diablo 3 had similar MTX tied goals (get wings etc) but did little to change the game each season. The players that play for 1000+ hours are likely the players going down the crafting rabbit hole. There is huge personal satisfaction in crafting your own "chase" item.

[Baconeggcheese]

Carrot on the stick loot grind or Personal goals (Kill Uber Elder, Killer Uber Elder Deathless).

Typically ARPGS are focused on your own path to enjoyment. POE in particular have a few easily quantifiable goals (get all the league challenges for free MTX, make X profit) that people can stick with. Diablo 3 had similar MTX tied goals (get wings etc) but did little to change the game each season. The players that play for 1000+ hours are likely the players going down the crafting rabbit hole. There is huge personal satisfaction in crafting your own "chase" item.

Yeah I was playing SSF in trade league just using trade to sell things off since I wanted to have my first experience with the game be more natural instead of just buying my way into overgearing. I was waiting for a wall to come before I started using trade to optimize. I was mid way into yellow maps when I felt like that wall was never going to come so I decided to start optimizing then, was at around 6-700k dps I think at the time? Most people told me to just get an atziri's disfavour to start out with, but since from what I understood I already had enough dmg to "beat the game" I decided it'd be a lot more fun to craft my own weapon with the currency I had built up.

Bought a like 3c elder ezomyte axe and ended up crafting + 6 linking this thing:


Which doubled my damage up to just shy of 1.3m dps. Which is where I kind of hit the wall of "there's no reason to go after more gear because I can trivially do everything now". I feel like it was way too easy to get to this point, I see dudes making like 5mil dps builds n stuff but that just seems almost pointless.

Like at least in D3 the gameplay was there, you'd push greater rifts and mechanics started mattering again as you inevitably pushed to your characters limits and you had to play differently depending on your build and all that. In PoE though, you basically just 1shot entire screens with a different color skill, and then you get more gear to 1shot entire screens harder.

edit: Not trying to shit on the game either I had some fun with it. I just feel like I'm missing something with how high on a pedestal this game gets put these days.

[bloodwulf]

Yeah, POE lacks a Greater Rift type mechanic, Delve is close, but to be fair, Greater Rifts are just Increase Health and Damage by X%. POE is a game that most people just play in chunks. For me its about 2-3 weeks, then wait for next league. Synth was about 5 days, Legion was 4 weeks for me. I typically follow a pattern, make league starter, get enough currency for better build, make better character, respec league starter, kill all content, quit. Nothing wrong with this, but i can see how people will find a distinct lack of hook.

[Gorsameth]

I just have a hard time imagining playing something this shallow a 2nd time around when a new league drops unless the next league mechanic is something a lot more involved than Legion's "kill as much stuff as you can within this timer!".

People are apparently getting thousands of hours out of the game, I'm curious what's keeping them hooked.

They stay hooked because they like killing as much stuff as they can as fast as they can.

If your getting bored I would say quit, check back when the next league starts and see if your still getting bored. And if so, then your done. It happens in gaming.

[imabanana]

Legion is one of the leagues I quit the fastest really, played on and off since 2014 and over 2k hours. People complained about Synthesis "power creep", but that only affected a minor number of players who could already clear everything. In Legion the cyclone changes were very overtuned (GGG admitted this more than once on reddit poe sub, but won't change it mid-league when used by half of playerbase) and led to a much bigger power creep issue imho. Everyone can obliterate everything in game with very little gear, ignoring most mechanics (including Legion) and half-arsed build. Damage AND survivability took a gigantic boost for all melee.

League mechanics are also pretty broken imho, with a few builds being totally OP (ED/cyclone for the most common, but stuff like vaal arc and a few others that can clear full legion in a few seconds with extremely low budget), headhunter totally wrecking Legion-specific farming economy, and timeless jewels being a mess to trade.

Despite playing since (almost) forever and sometimes a lot in some leagues, I'd never been to 36 challenges before. Got to it on second week in Legion, with nothing else to look up to. Synthesis was far from perfect (that Nexus was a complete mess), but at least it had good challenging stuff to aspire to, and it didn't take a single day to see all league content, it was literally the only league I ever played until the final day.

I really hope next league (or 4.0) either brings some actual challenge back, or at least some hard to get to endgame content.

[WoWGoneBad]

I HATE UBER LAB...................

that is all end rant

[Edge-]

I HATE UBER LAB...................

that is all end rant

What's killing you, traps?

[WoWGoneBad]

What's killing you, traps?

I could not let go of my gotta find them all mindset and yes kept dieing to the spinning rotators of death

BUT I am happy to say that I just completed it and GOOD riddance to that place lol

[Wildmoon]

Is this game ded yet? Why ARPG are so ded?

[Cracked]

Is this game ded yet? Why ARPG are so ded?

They are very much alive but with the progression in most of them, they have very short playspan. I fail to see why a brain healthy person would spend more than a week playing PoE after each league release, it's all the same with a small twist here or there. So then the game becomes dead for most players again.

[Wildmoon]

They are very much alive but with the progression in most of them, they have very short playspan. I fail to see why a brain healthy person would spend more than a week playing PoE after each league release, it's all the same with a small twist here or there. So then the game becomes dead for most players again.

Dunno, seems like the genre is becoming more and more niche.

[Coldkil]

Dunno, seems like the genre is becoming more and more niche.

It's only because the game that should have made it more "mainstream" (i think all games are niches until someoone makes a truly good one that gets the interest of players of all categories) = D3 went down the drain really fast. On the other side you have plenty of valid ARPGs but they tend to cater towards the more hardcore fanbase and gravitate towards solid but "old" design choices.

PoE is a great game but requires a significant amount of effort to get past the start (then it becomes way better over time); others like Grim Dawn while extremely solid is still tied to the D2 legacy that everyone loves and basically draws away lots of modern gamers by the gameplay pace, oldish graphics and so on.

I'm not criticizing any of the games. I just think that until we see a "WoW" arpg that manages to attract lots of people and keep them hoooked, we're kinda dealing with this.

[Gorsameth]

It's only because the game that should have made it more "mainstream" (i think all games are niches until someoone makes a truly good one that gets the interest of players of all categories) = D3 went down the drain really fast. On the other side you have plenty of valid ARPGs but they tend to cater towards the more hardcore fanbase and gravitate towards solid but "old" design choices.

PoE is a great game but requires a significant amount of effort to get past the start (then it becomes way better over time); others like Grim Dawn while extremely solid is still tied to the D2 legacy that everyone loves and basically draws away lots of modern gamers by the gameplay pace, oldish graphics and so on.

I'm not criticizing any of the games. I just think that until we see a "WoW" arpg that manages to attract lots of people and keep them hoooked, we're kinda dealing with this.

My ideal world would be a combination of D3's "Casual" friendly gameplay with PoE's Leagues to shake things up every few months.

[Ashnazg]

My ideal world would be a combination of D3's "Casual" friendly gameplay with PoE's Leagues to shake things up every few months.

Isn't POE's gameplay super casual friendly?

[Edge-]

Isn't POE's gameplay super casual friendly?

Gameplay, sure. Mechanics and systems, no. The skill tree, the way gems work and a pretty obtuse way of handling stats make it pretty new player unfriendly, even if they've played many ARPG's.

[endersblade]

Isn't POE's gameplay super casual friendly?

It's one of those games that's easy to pick up, hard to master. You should be able to at least get through the first 5 acts without having ANY knowledge of the game at all. Just experimenting with loot, gems and your skill tree. The difficulty ramps up in the last 5, and the final boss is one hell of a skill check, but once you get past that, dealing with maps is fairly easy, especially if you don't run anything but white and blue quality maps.

I have a friend that plays this game off and on, and has done so sporadically for years. I cleared the campaign long before they broke it into 10 acts, so he's been on maps for a while now. Still a complete noob. Looking at his gear and gems makes me cringe lol. But he still has fun. Obviously the term 'mapping' really doesn't apply to him...he's really not in it to 'git gud', he just blows off some steam on occasion.

So yes, it CAN be a casual game in the sense that you really don't have to min/max to enjoy it. But risk = reward. If you don't put a lot into it, you won't get a lot out of it. And yes, the first time you look at your skill tree, it WILL make you hyperventilate lol.

[kail]

Isn't POE's gameplay super casual friendly?

Nothing complex about any ARPG's gameplay (from what I've played), it's the knowledge involved that gets super complex. Sure you could melee cleave or split arrow your way out of the campaign, but the mapping is where bad build suffer.

I don't think any other arpg incorporates the level of stat depth and endgame progression that PoE does. You want a hack-n-slash game with plenty to learn? PoE has no contest.

[Coldkil]

My ideal world would be a combination of D3's "Casual" friendly gameplay with PoE's Leagues to shake things up every few months.

I anything, i'd like to see a WoW like world - with D3 combat and deep character mechanics (not at PoE level but i like the realm of possibilities where i can choose the skillset i want and improve from there).

M+ dungeon system you can tackle solo up to small party. No more fucking timed ladders - make ladders about a specific game aspect (in D2 was the race to 99, in PoE is race to 100 and lab clear times) so people doesn't feel forced into meta builds because that's the only objective to strive for.

EDIT: explaining better the M+ thing. I'd like to see actual dungeons in Diablo, with fixed drops and actual boss mechanics. Something you want to farm but you can try to get to higher difficulties for better drops (and here i mean literally +1 versions of the same loot). I'd like to see people being able to partially target specific drops. But then it's me.

One thing PoE hits perfectly is the fact that "meta" builds require more effort and are stronger but you can definitely do anything with any build made with some sense.