Path of Exile
- Thread starter Jim Russel
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
kitsune
Golden Knight of the Realm
- 624
- 35
Well, one of the challenges is to level to 85, you have to do that one yourself. Besides that, you can probably get boosted or buy achievements (people are already selling divine shrines)
I am having a blast so far in the league. After poopsocking the entire weekend I dinged 80 last night before logging off for bed. It's so easy to make currency as well when you play an incinerate build (block uberdan variant) because you hardly need anything - no sockets, no shizzle. Just go nuts. I'm hoping to try Atziri tonight and it should be perfectly doable
After playing what I found "fun" moreso than what's strongest in the meta, I must say it feels great to go full on cookie cutter. The difference is night and day, since incinerate is unlimited in power without any talent tree investment. Just put everything into life and block and voila - immortal at your service
I am having a blast so far in the league. After poopsocking the entire weekend I dinged 80 last night before logging off for bed. It's so easy to make currency as well when you play an incinerate build (block uberdan variant) because you hardly need anything - no sockets, no shizzle. Just go nuts. I'm hoping to try Atziri tonight and it should be perfectly doable
After playing what I found "fun" moreso than what's strongest in the meta, I must say it feels great to go full on cookie cutter. The difference is night and day, since incinerate is unlimited in power without any talent tree investment. Just put everything into life and block and voila - immortal at your service
Balroc
Molten Core Raider
- 1,064
- 229
Yeah, fuck it. As much as I want the golden armour, I don't have time. One thing I realized in the short time I played yesterday is how shitty it is to level as anything that isn't flame totem/firestorm. Maybe it's just me but I couldn't stand anything else.
If anyone can toss any Elreon jewelry into the stash for the 1 month SC league, I'd greatly appreciate it as it would make leveling less crappy for me. Thanks!
Haven't played since before 2.0, up to 67 on a dual flame totem witch on 1 month sc league and I'm so surprised with the game, everything has been improved, no sync issues and the new content really makes the game flow much better. Act 4 is great, bosses are like atziri in mechanics, really impressed. Toss me an invite on garzite if anyone is playing.
Zaphid
Trakanon Raider
- 5,862
- 294
I'm more underwhelmed by the 1MSC league actually, there were constant lag issues and Beyond monsters sometimes make the game freeze for me, so getting raped out of the blue is definitely not fun. When you can get more than 1 Beyond boss per map, you need to be very careful to not lose more xp than you get, or maybe I'm just bad, but single ping spike can kill me. My playtime during the week is quite limited, so I pretty much gave up on the achievements.
I managed to get 15/20 challenges, doubt I'll be able to get the helmet mtx but it's no big deal. Dual flame totem is pretty safe so, haven't had much trouble, just getting to the 70s is showing the flaws in the build and its not as good. I died probably 50 times killing merc Malachai last night.
Regardless it's nice seeing the new content. But I have no interest in really rolling another build when the league is over in less than a week. Any news on the next league?
Regardless it's nice seeing the new content. But I have no interest in really rolling another build when the league is over in less than a week. Any news on the next league?
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I finished it but the lvl 85 one was really fucking annoying to me, I usually stopped playing when I reached maps, but I didn't map the last 1month which was lvl 80, but this time I had to grind a lot of maps to get to 85. And I also stopped playing when it was Beyond and the all mods weekends, shit was just fucking annoying. I finished when tempest without beyond started. The other achievements I thought were very easy to get, just the lvl 85 one took forever.
I did die a stupid amount of times around lvl 50-60 too when I was doing merciless questing and shit, as well as early maps when beyond started. Eventually though I stopped dying. Played Reave dager+shield ranger, it was kinda nice. Great thing about dagger melees is you can entirely skip the whole looking for the right rare and just do uniques after uniques. The damage scales well anyway and once you reach hmm, 62 I think it was, you get a Bino for like 20chaos and you're set until 90+. Bino is so good, it does good damage and makes you tanky as fuck with the regen.
I did die a stupid amount of times around lvl 50-60 too when I was doing merciless questing and shit, as well as early maps when beyond started. Eventually though I stopped dying. Played Reave dager+shield ranger, it was kinda nice. Great thing about dagger melees is you can entirely skip the whole looking for the right rare and just do uniques after uniques. The damage scales well anyway and once you reach hmm, 62 I think it was, you get a Bino for like 20chaos and you're set until 90+. Bino is so good, it does good damage and makes you tanky as fuck with the regen.
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5 week temporary league announced to bridge the gap between when the current Flashback leagues end, and the upcoming 3 month leagues start.
Darkshrine event:
Sounds like it could be fun the screw around in and not take too serious.
Darkshrine event:
Today's news post is about the experimental Darkshrine events that we are running from November 2 to December 7. There is both a Standard and a Hardcore event, and they bridge the gap between the Flashback events and the upcoming new challenge leagues.
__________________________________________________ ______________________
A few weeks ago, we realised we had a problem. The Flashback events would be ending on the 2nd of November but there would still be five weeks after that until the next challenge leagues could be released.
Since all our developers are busy working on future content, there would have to be a gap where Standard and Hardcore would be the only leagues running. We weren't really happy with that.
Back in the good old days of Closed Beta when both the company size and player expectations were smaller, we used to be able to throw together some content and have players testing it in a short amount of time.
So I decided to see what I could throw together. Could I put together a fun league entirely by myself in a week?
We had a look at some of the past ideas for challenge leagues that had been rejected. One of them in particular stood out: Darkshrine.
The idea behind Darkshrine was that the player would encounter shrine-like objects in the world that they could put a rare item into to sacrifice. Depending on what item was sacrificed, there would be some kind of interesting effect. The more powerful the item, the better.
You might get a powerful buff for the area. An item in your inventory might be modified in some way. Hard monsters spawned in the level. The monsters in the level might even start fighting each other. It should be unpredictable at first and hopefully surprising.
Darkshrine was a challenge league idea that we rejected in the past because it had two problems. The first was that it probably wasn't substantial enough for a full three/four month league on its own. The second was that we thought it might be a bit oppressive for all the new players that we get for a fully-marketed challenge league release.
Neither of those are problems for a fun and short league like this, designed for experienced players.
So over the last few weeks I've been working on Darkshrine. It has been a lot of fun coming up with ideas for the league. I also haven't had a chance to work on gameplay for a long time now so getting back to that has been an enjoyable experience. I really hope you enjoy it.
I want to stress that there is a lot of content reuse in this league. I couldn't make new bosses or art by myself! You should expect some of your favorite mechanics from past leagues like the Corrupting Tempest to turn up as Darkshrine rewards. Any stat or mechanic that looked like it could be a cool Darkshrine outcome was thrown in.
There is a lot of interesting variety there though, so I think people will have fun finding out some of the crazier Darkshrine effects. In no other league will all the monsters in the level be spontaneously set to 1 life. Or an inconspicuous barrel somewhere on the level have a unique item put in it.
Don't always expect it to be fair. Darkshrines are capricious and arbitrary.
Event Times: (displayed in your local timezone)
The events will start at: Nov 02, 2015 1:30 PM (CST)
The events will end at: Dec 07, 2015 1:30 PM (CST)
Prizes:
The following microtransaction prizes are being randomly given to players who reach various level thresholds in an event. There is a separate prize pool for each event:
100 random players who reach level 30 will receive the Skin Transfer Bundle (10)
70 random players who reach level 40 will receive the Steam Powered Portal Effect
20 random players who reach level 50 will receive the Lightning Skull helmet skin
20 random players who reach level 50 will receive the Arctic Skull helmet skin
20 random players who reach level 50 will receive the Infernal Skull helmet skin
20 random Players who reach level 60 will receive the Seraph Wings back attachment
10 random players who reach level 70 will receive the Steam Powered Armour Set
5 random players who reach level 80 will receive Demon King Armour Set and Demon King Horns
In addition, the top twenty players (from each event) by experience will receive an alternate-art Demigod's Beacon.
We are also inviting community members to post videos or screenshots of crazy encounters that they experience in the Darkshrine events. At the end of the event we'll pick our favourites and award additional microtransactions to those winners. On the day that the events start, we'll also post where to make these submissions!
In the Hardcore event, dead hardcore players are eligible for prizes. The single highest level character in each event on your account will be considered. If you play with multiple accounts, we will use the highest character from between them. GGG Staff members are not eligible for prizes.
Path of Exile - Lead Programmer
__________________________________________________ ______________________
A few weeks ago, we realised we had a problem. The Flashback events would be ending on the 2nd of November but there would still be five weeks after that until the next challenge leagues could be released.
Since all our developers are busy working on future content, there would have to be a gap where Standard and Hardcore would be the only leagues running. We weren't really happy with that.
Back in the good old days of Closed Beta when both the company size and player expectations were smaller, we used to be able to throw together some content and have players testing it in a short amount of time.
So I decided to see what I could throw together. Could I put together a fun league entirely by myself in a week?
We had a look at some of the past ideas for challenge leagues that had been rejected. One of them in particular stood out: Darkshrine.
The idea behind Darkshrine was that the player would encounter shrine-like objects in the world that they could put a rare item into to sacrifice. Depending on what item was sacrificed, there would be some kind of interesting effect. The more powerful the item, the better.
You might get a powerful buff for the area. An item in your inventory might be modified in some way. Hard monsters spawned in the level. The monsters in the level might even start fighting each other. It should be unpredictable at first and hopefully surprising.
Darkshrine was a challenge league idea that we rejected in the past because it had two problems. The first was that it probably wasn't substantial enough for a full three/four month league on its own. The second was that we thought it might be a bit oppressive for all the new players that we get for a fully-marketed challenge league release.
Neither of those are problems for a fun and short league like this, designed for experienced players.
So over the last few weeks I've been working on Darkshrine. It has been a lot of fun coming up with ideas for the league. I also haven't had a chance to work on gameplay for a long time now so getting back to that has been an enjoyable experience. I really hope you enjoy it.
I want to stress that there is a lot of content reuse in this league. I couldn't make new bosses or art by myself! You should expect some of your favorite mechanics from past leagues like the Corrupting Tempest to turn up as Darkshrine rewards. Any stat or mechanic that looked like it could be a cool Darkshrine outcome was thrown in.
There is a lot of interesting variety there though, so I think people will have fun finding out some of the crazier Darkshrine effects. In no other league will all the monsters in the level be spontaneously set to 1 life. Or an inconspicuous barrel somewhere on the level have a unique item put in it.
Don't always expect it to be fair. Darkshrines are capricious and arbitrary.
Event Times: (displayed in your local timezone)
The events will start at: Nov 02, 2015 1:30 PM (CST)
The events will end at: Dec 07, 2015 1:30 PM (CST)
Prizes:
The following microtransaction prizes are being randomly given to players who reach various level thresholds in an event. There is a separate prize pool for each event:
100 random players who reach level 30 will receive the Skin Transfer Bundle (10)
70 random players who reach level 40 will receive the Steam Powered Portal Effect
20 random players who reach level 50 will receive the Lightning Skull helmet skin
20 random players who reach level 50 will receive the Arctic Skull helmet skin
20 random players who reach level 50 will receive the Infernal Skull helmet skin
20 random Players who reach level 60 will receive the Seraph Wings back attachment
10 random players who reach level 70 will receive the Steam Powered Armour Set
5 random players who reach level 80 will receive Demon King Armour Set and Demon King Horns
In addition, the top twenty players (from each event) by experience will receive an alternate-art Demigod's Beacon.
We are also inviting community members to post videos or screenshots of crazy encounters that they experience in the Darkshrine events. At the end of the event we'll pick our favourites and award additional microtransactions to those winners. On the day that the events start, we'll also post where to make these submissions!
In the Hardcore event, dead hardcore players are eligible for prizes. The single highest level character in each event on your account will be considered. If you play with multiple accounts, we will use the highest character from between them. GGG Staff members are not eligible for prizes.
Path of Exile - Lead Programmer
Sounds like it could be fun the screw around in and not take too serious.
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Well tbh most skills do that fine. What you want is for every skills to be equal in a low support low gear low skill points environement, which isn't going to happen, there's always going to be way better skills for leveling without any investment in them due to how skills and supports are designed to work together.
That said, it's pretty fast to get to 60 or even 70, and the difference gained from even leveling 50% faster using a better skill is actually a really small amount of time. It's kinda like leveling in D3(though longer), sure you can grind halls of agony over and over and level really fast but you could instead do bounties and level slower but have more fun(if bounties are your thing, or rifts) and ultimately, you'd only be losing like 2hours.
In PoE, you'd only be losing like 4-5hours or whatever if you decided to level with something other than firestorm/flame surge. You can still use flame totem in any build and you don't really go for dual totem for leveling anyway so I don't consider a main leveling skills, it's similar to using 2 quicksilvers while lvling and shit imo. Still, 4-5hours is like nothing, you're not saving a lot of time. You can absolutely level with every skill, you just lose some efficiency, in some cases quite a bit and in some others not that much. It's especially true if you're not doing racing-like leveling with super optimization.
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I don't know if it would, it'd prevent weapon based classes from having a single target and an aoe skill for example since supports are quite often the same, which would mean the single target skills would always get cut, further making them irrelevant. That's really the main actual application of such a limitation, other than running several triggers off the same stuff but that wouldn't increase diversity, you'd just use different(less effective) triggers or simply remove the skills or self cast them.
I don't think diversity is bad atm, there's a lot of good builds, it's just a lot of people like the cookie cutter shit even if it's only marginally better. There's some atrocious shit too, but a lot of stuff performs well enough or has decent tradeoffs like increased survivability or harder to reach potential max damage(for example arctic blast is good if you can get stuff stuck against a wall and provides additional defenses via chilled ground everywhere over other skills, so it's a good tradeoff for a HC char).
Zaphid
Trakanon Raider
- 5,862
- 294
Well, they just got an extra month out of filler content.
The game is definitely getting better with lockstep and the skill gem changes, the temporal leagues have added a lot of variability even to standard, however I wonder how many people struggle to get to the endgame to have some fun. If you are leveling your 10th+ character, there's literally no reason to not try to get over with it as fast as possible, leading to just spamming the same skills and quicksilver flasks, then getting the important keystones that make your build, setting up your gear and your central 4/5/6-link. Having fun for about 10-15 levels between 70 and 85, before any further progress gets too tedious or time consuming. I'm investing 5-10 hours of bore just to have fun for ~20 hours it feels like.
I also hope they have some solution for trading, since the current system is straight out of D2 and I don't mean that as a good thing. It's been reduced only to a major annoyance due to all the third party stuff the community was forced to hack together, since trade chat/lfg are almost useless. Even if they put in some currency AH and not straight up item trading, I would be pretty happy.
The game is definitely getting better with lockstep and the skill gem changes, the temporal leagues have added a lot of variability even to standard, however I wonder how many people struggle to get to the endgame to have some fun. If you are leveling your 10th+ character, there's literally no reason to not try to get over with it as fast as possible, leading to just spamming the same skills and quicksilver flasks, then getting the important keystones that make your build, setting up your gear and your central 4/5/6-link. Having fun for about 10-15 levels between 70 and 85, before any further progress gets too tedious or time consuming. I'm investing 5-10 hours of bore just to have fun for ~20 hours it feels like.
I also hope they have some solution for trading, since the current system is straight out of D2 and I don't mean that as a good thing. It's been reduced only to a major annoyance due to all the third party stuff the community was forced to hack together, since trade chat/lfg are almost useless. Even if they put in some currency AH and not straight up item trading, I would be pretty happy.
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The new bow skills look boring as fuck, but the chaos spells and physical spells look pretty interesting and love the curse support to contest heralds/offer good options for builds that didn't benefit from heralds as much(like vulnerability aura for chaos damage stuff instead of elemental). New league looks pretty solid. And obviously interested in the balance changes. They said they're announcing the expansion stuff at the end of next week too I think.
Korrupt
Blackwing Lair Raider
- 4,832
- 1,228
You're right Pyros, I just read the expac announcement is tonight which is pretty crazy. I feel happy every time I buy supporter packs or donate to these guys, the rate they churn out patches and content embarrasses D3 as much as I love it and play it also.
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Eh, I think the D3 team does a good job considering they're probably smaller than the PoE team by a fair amount at that point. They release pretty good patches regularily, just no expansions anymore.
And yeah they confirmed expansion details coming in a few hours, like 2 or 3 or so.
And yeah they confirmed expansion details coming in a few hours, like 2 or 3 or so.
