Path of Exile

Sinzar_sl said:

Playing hardcore just doesn't seem worth it to me. I understand the extra thrill it can provide, but it seems the way it forces you to grind to overlevel everything in the name of safety would be less fun than just playing normal and taking the occasional death.

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You don't really have to overlevel anything, or at least not by much, and you would do the same in merciless on softcore because the death penalty is quite rough. I guess you could cheese it by getting a level then going to do whatever so you don't lose any xp since you just lvled, but otherwise you wouldn't fight Piety at 52 or whatever the fuck even on softcore. The amount of grinding I do personally on HC is fairly limited to complete the game(well other than dominus cause derpy fight on merc). I generally don't grind anything in normal or maybe like 3-4 sarn/3-4docks runs if I'm somewhat behind or I can get a good notable keystone in the tree before piety/dominus, in cruel I only end up grinding sarn/docks again to make sure I have enough for act3 bosses/progression, in merciless I grind felshrine for a few levels(which is still fast at that point, like 30-40mins worth of grinding or so) and then grind sarn/docks for a bit too. That's about all I need, I do piety at 65-68 or so, which is basically on level, iirc piety is 68. If you have 3k hp and capped resists, piety isn't hard. Not like do whatever the fuck you want easy either, but as long as you play it safe the fight is fairly predictable(other than the stupid bug I had on my summoner, if you get that shit you're fucking dead unless you can facetank her but that's not every build).

The grind comes after, to enter maps. While on softcore you could farm piety for a couple of hours then go straight into maps, you're likely to be grinding into 75+ before you start doing maps on HC just because you don't want to roll shit maps and rolling hard maps is risky as fuck unless you have a solid amount of health. But again, you don't really want to die on softcore so it'd make sense to do the same and a lot of people do.

An interesting thing I noticed though from playing Domination for a bit is how for this season, they decided to make the softcore unique league mechanic something that makes the game easier, while for Nemesis they made one that makes the game harder. Means there's a bigger gap in difficulty between the 2. For Onslaught/Anarchy, Onslaught was a harder mod than Anarchy, but Anarchy still was a step up in difficulty compared to normal softcore, while Shrines are basically an easier version of softcore, they do spawn a bunch of mobs but once you grab them it's a rapefest, and they seem to have doubled the duration on them too which I don't remember reading in the notes.

Well they added Purity of Fire which apparently would give +4%max fire at lvl 20, which with +50% aura effects would push it to +6% and with the Vitality cost reduction to 40%, might make it fairly viable to run RF again I'd say, but I don't really know the details. Seems mostly the same build but you get more max resist than you did before to compensate for the fact you take more damage now.