Path of Exile

Arbitrary said:

There's a stash tab sale every three weeks. Maybe next week?

In regards to Sanctum it changes pretty significantly once you start filling up your relic altar with these bad boys -

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The merchant can sell you anything so getting more looks lets you navigate all the RNG a whole lot better and interact with the mechanics of the league more easily. On an alright run I'm buying every single boon there is forcing subsequent appearances of the merchant to stock her inventory with relics, sanctified relics and major boons. If things are going super, super well you take divine orb rewards for completing the sanctum and then duplicate them 1x with the lesser mirror boon and then 3x more with its major boon equivalent.

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This is also the exact problem with the sanctum though. The relics completely trivialize it, but you need to be able to do the sanctum to get the relics. The baseline relics, at the very least, should have a small chance of dropping outside the sanctum so people don't need to create sanctum specific builds to create character power that will actually make sanctum runnable.

Once you get the right relics sanctum is so easy, on any build, its laughable. But before you get those relics it can feel impossible on certain builds. Rogue likes have incremental upgrades that eventually make it possible to progress and eventually clear over time while playing them. Sanctum doesn't offer this because of how RNG the relic drops are in the first place if you can't even clear the second floor because your build is shit for it and you have no relics.

And if you cant do sanctum you miss out on cool shit like this, which is why so many people love sanctum:

Yeah, that's the exact problem. Certain builds can get through it and once you're through it you're good, but I've been smashing my head against a wall and always peter out around mid-late 2nd floor.

It's also incredibly time consuming to create sanctums. Even if you have a 1 minute mapping strategy its still 31 minutes to generate all sanctum floors and that's without running the sanctum itself. So what motivation is there for someone who chose a build that sucks at sanctum to continue to run it when it takes that much time and they can't even generate any rewards from it?

They've kind of pulled the wool over the eyes of the playerbase with exactly how poorly implemented the sanctum is, in and of itself, by putting incredible rewards inside of it.

They had a shit league mechanic last league that at least allowed people to store and sell their stupid league mechanic maps. This league would benefit greatly from the same tech. Can't run sanctum? No problem, store and sell your sanctums to generate currency to create a build that can.

It's a very Path of Exile mechanic. Range tends to be better than getting up close and once you've got enough damage you don't have to interact much with the mechanics. I league started a Volcanic Fissure Totems Scion that was very decent but required standing a wee bit too close to things in the Sanctum combined with a lot of audio and visual clutter. I switched to Shockwave Totems on a Templar and the struggle with individual floors melted away. With the Sanctum no longer a struggle the relics start coming in. With the proper package of relics I've reached escape velocity from the gravity of the mechanics. The run I just finished up I was loaded up with every boon, half the major boons, max inspiration, an inventory full of relics with the opportunity to buy another dozen or so. I've stopped buying Urns and Censers but each the merchant offered was a chance for something crazy. The only reason I even got this far is because I've played a ton this league with a huge focus on the Sanctum itself. I don't log in to do any kind regular play. I log in to do a Sanctum run as quickly as possible while interacting with the maps as little I can to sustain.

This is only fun because I've cracked the Sanctum. During the campaign I gave up on halfway through the acts. I didn't really go back in at all until I was in the 90s with some alright damage. Getting yeeted out by flicker strike dude coming in hot from off screen felt awful. Just put in a ton of a time on a character that safely off-screens things AND get lucky on completely RNG relic drops. I've done a ton of the fucking things so far and I still am seeing suffixes and prefixes that are new to me with basically no chance of assembling a set.

I league started Cold Dot so sanctum was trivial right from the get go. Its an entirely different experience for people who league started like that vs. someone who thought they were going to rock the league with something like detonate dead that absolutely fucking sucks in sanctum.

The league mechanic is entirely counter-intuitive to ARPG gameplay. Its poorly designed and poorly implemented and carried entirely by the rewards it offers.

Khane said:

The league mechanic is entirely counter-intuitive to ARPG gameplay.

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A mechanic where you are incentivized to off-screen things with omega damage is very on-brand but I agree that this one leaves too many people out in the cold.

The rewards the Sanctum offers are definitely carrying but the other thing going on is the rest of the game is just better. The monster mods are less of a fuck, you can specialize more in to the shit you want to do with the modified Atlas and the general loot situation is improved. You can run with actual zero juice and make progress. The ground floor of the mapping game is just so much fucking better than last league it's unreal.

Arbitrary said:

A mechanic where you are incentivized to off-screen things with omega damage is very on-brand but I agree that this one leaves too many people out in the cold.

The rewards the Sanctum offers are definitely carrying but the other thing going on is the rest of the game is just better. The monster mods are less of a fuck, you can specialize more in to the shit you want to do with the modified Atlas and the general loot situation is improved. You can run with actual zero juice and make progress. The ground floor of the mapping game is just so much fucking better than last league it's unreal.

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Everything is better, totally agree. But sanctum is about running through rooms without getting hit rather than blowing up screens full of monsters. Off screen freeze blasting is just a product of bypassing the intended, counter intuitive design. Rogue likes and ARPGs are very different types of games. Shoe horning rogue likes into an ARPG is not good game design, but much like heist, it's acceptable for the playerbase because of the rewards. Heist is garbage. Sanctum is garbage. The players accept both because they can use those mechanics to reliably progress towards the things they would rather do.

Because I tend to be on minions the basic game play Sanctum encourages doesn't feel all that different from how I play normally. Stand waaaaaaay over here while my units do things waaaaaaay over there. I'm sure the people on Spark or different flavors of Deadeye feel about the same way but if I was a tanky boi the whole thing would suck ass. Show up with a dozen overlapping layers of defense and it means fuck all.

As far as it being a rogue-like it does a terrible job of being one.

Arbitrary said:

Because I tend to be on minions the basic game play Sanctum encourages doesn't feel all that different from how I play normally. Stand waaaaaaay over here while my units do things waaaaaaay over there. I'm sure the people on Spark or different flavors of Deadeye feel about the same way but if I was a tanky boi the whole thing would suck ass. Show up with a dozen overlapping layers of defense and it means fuck all.

As far as it being a rogue-like it does a terrible job of being one.

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It really is just a weird hybrid of two things that can't really coexist unless you half ass both and put game changing rewards into it to push the narrative.

Kirun said:

Yeah, that's the exact problem. Certain builds can get through it and once you're through it you're good, but I've been smashing my head against a wall and always peter out around mid-late 2nd floor.

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Same, even after switching to toxic rain. I figured it'd make it easier since I can run and dps at the same time better but nope. It's still shit. The flicker strike guy with the sword 1shots me half the time now that i'm doing red maps, some of the other guards 1shot me sometimes too. I lose inspiritation and resolve sometimes when I don't even see a single thing hit me for the entire floor. And my personal favorite, I got to the 2nd floor boss again earlier and after killing one of them, my character locked up for about 3 seconds while a giant ball of death flew across the screen and exploded on me. No clue wtf happened on that one but it made me super salty and now i'm probably just not gonna bother with it at all any more.

Flicker dude really can go fuck himself. It's like he's designed to give people a bad taste in their mouth.

The thing that I really dont' get about sanctum is you can't even run it with another character. I thought I would be sly and run my 8 maps, and just hop over to another build, but nope (even that would be convoluted).

Tanky builds have never been good in POE. Its a shame because the game becomes much more fun when you're actually playing the fights as they were intended instead of brute forcing them down with 100m dps.

Still with all the complaining I like it. It definitely is in its first form but with some tuning they could make Sanctum something really cool.

Sorry bros but this is a pure build/skill issue.

You need more damage, or more mobility, or more freeze, or more whatever. I cleared like 30 sanctums with ease with Smite, bosses included, so if a boring ass attack skill with no freezes/stuns can do it you can too.

If you're some RF cuck with omega slow damage then you need to stack your relics for resolve stacking and just be willing to take some hits.

ronne said:

If you're some RF cuck with omega slow damage then you need to stack your relics for resolve stacking and just be willing to take some hits.

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This is what I've been doing with my FB/COC build. Just stack resolve/inspiration and expect to get hit tons of times. I kill shit so fast now its usually just dodging the big telegraph attacks and traps that make or break my run.

Still want to try some type of EQ build in there but probably only got one more build in me this league if anything and want to make it good.

Curious anyone try playing this on steam deck, is it practical?

ronne said:

Sorry bros but this is a pure build/skill issue.

You need more damage, or more mobility, or more freeze, or more whatever. I cleared like 30 sanctums with ease with Smite, bosses included, so if a boring ass attack skill with no freezes/stuns can do it you can too.

If you're some RF cuck with omega slow damage then you need to stack your relics for resolve stacking and just be willing to take some hits.

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You should read the full conversation and understand the nuance of it. There are builds that literally cannot do Sanctum without full, good relic loadouts. Builds that are incredibly powerful in every other aspect of the game that absolutely blow in Sanctum. Detonate dead can't do Sanctum. This is a major design flaw.

It's cool that you can do Sanctum on a melee AoE skill that can scale beyond control as an Armour stacker with a 10c weapon. But that doesn't prove shit.

Literally everything you "suggested" was already covered

Died again on Ruthless in the top 10 to a DC at lvl 92 and think I'm going to call it a league. Ruthless is an interesting idea. It feels so much better than the regular game where every little thing has an impact. Gear you find really has an impact on your character for a long while. The sad thing though is that even there eventually you just want to filter out all the rares because they have such a low chance of being better than what you've found before. The 'fun time' of PoE where your character is progressing through found gear lasts much longer though. Boss fights, etc, are all so much more interesting where you have to worry about mechanics and how you are going to play through them rather than just outgearing them and skipping to the reward.

ronne said:

Sorry bros but this is a pure build/skill issue.

You need more damage, or more mobility, or more freeze, or more whatever. I cleared like 30 sanctums with ease with Smite, bosses included, so if a boring ass attack skill with no freezes/stuns can do it you can too.

If you're some RF cuck with omega slow damage then you need to stack your relics for resolve stacking and just be willing to take some hits.

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lol level 96 RF cuck checking in.

That being said I leveled a Poison Seismic trap character to maps but hated the playstyle, and now I am about in act 6 with an Exploding Arrow totem character that I like a lot better. As much as the EA totems have TWO pauses before damage (totem placement and then burn) I still prefer totems to traps.

The trap char was my first to finish a sanctum in high white/low yellow maps, and the EA totem character has been doing all the Sanctums while leveling and doing well outside of me being careless.

RF definitely sucks in Sanctum.

What maps does everyone have as favorites? What's kind of the defacto consensus on which are the best for currency?