Path of Exile

The loot system is harsh in pubs, but I don't really play pubs for loot, I play pubs for safety on progression content. I grouped for Vaal and grouped for Piety because being in a group is like 200%safer than trying to solo those, what with all the targets and shit. Piety was a joke in a group, she just runs around like a headless chicken so she can never kill anyone(unless people have no health/low resists obviously) but solo she always targets you, as do all the random shit mobs in the room, which makes it a ton harder. Oh and you can use other people's portals for free instead of wasting a bunch of scrolls, plus she's not likely to regen ES when you go to town to fill flasks since there's people fighting her still.

Anyway on that disappointing note, I got my melee witch to Merciless, in which I found out I actually still have 75% lightning resist, but also only have 12%cold and 38%fire, as well as negative chaos(not too bad but still). This is gonna take a while until I get to an acceptable level since most of my gear already has resist and there's no good resist nodes anywhere near where I am. Also even shitty act1 mobs spike me down pretty harshly on crits, guess that's expected with an evasion build but meh. Still pretty fun, it's a bit like my monk in diablo3 inferno(pre nerf, like release month inferno), but actually playable, I don't have to sacrifice survivability for mobility, I get whirling blades at all times for "free", my pseudo ranged melee attack is actually good and I don't die that fast/have more self healing. Oh and my pet(I use Raise Spectre) is actually not a pile of shit like Mystic ally was, if I raise a curtain of doom from act3, it almost doubles my DPS. It's worth going to the area and grabbing one before going somewhere even. And finally, most important of all, I don't spend 10mins fighting a rare mob because it has retarded anti melee mods(arcane molten fast movement), in this I just stand my ground and slice the rare down like an actual melee class because my spec excels at 1vs1.

My issue with portals isn't the refilling flask. To be honest, that's pretty much necessary to even beat the bosses, there's no fancy health globes like in D3 or you can't buy 6stacks of health pots like in D2, your flasks only refill when you kill stuff so unless they add adds to every fight AND increase flask recovery rate by a decent amount, you end up in a situation where you run out of pots half way into the fight(or earlier depending on your build and your gear and stuff) and then you have to what, rely on passive health regen from items and passives only? Sounds fucking boring as shit and terrible mechanics. No I think that aspect is fine.

What I question about portals is being able to enter someone's else portal at basically no cost, so everyone opens a portal on a different side of the room and they never close unless someone hops into his own portal because of retarditis. But then he can just pop a new one so that's fine. I think you simply shouldn't be able to enter someone else's portal when a boss fight is happening. You can still enter their portal to get out to town, but you then have to use your own portal to go back in or get fucked on the loot. Quest credit issues possible with this sort of solution though, don't know if you get credit while in town, I haven't bothered trying when I was running brutus.

Another thing they could do is have a mechanic similar to maps to limit the portals on bosses. In boss rooms, you only can enter a portal so many times. Say 3times per player. So you basically get 3 refills of flasks and that's it. Maybe a small indication of how many portals left or whatever. Then once you run out, you can't go back in the room anymore unles you reset the instance. So you don't have the issue where builds with no regen get fucked, but you still kinda have to fight correctly instead of zone in, spam all your mana while spamming instant pots, TP out, back in rinse repeat and cheese stuff like that, or for example avoid every rock phase on vaal by TPing out.

Alchemist increases flask efficiency, not their charge recovery rate. Only Warlord's Mark, belt mods and the Perpetual flask mod increases how much you get from killing mobs I believe, maybe something else I forgot. Passives for flasks increase the amount healed or how fast they heal. Anyway it's a non issue, I think it's fine if people go to town to refill flasks and it's actually annoying as shit so they'll build to not have to do it. The portal issue isn't necessarily flask related to me, it's just cheesy in terms of avoiding parts of the encounter. Refilling flasks is perfectly fine in my book, 1 TP scroll isn't a high cost but it adds up if you built like an idiot and your main nuke costs 280mana while you have no regen so you have to TP every 3mins.

Flank_sl said:

By the time you finish cruel it should be a non-issue anyway, as your character will become self sufficient (leech or regen). I don't think any of my closed beta character used more than 1 instant life and 1 mana/hybrid flask once they got to merciless.

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Most of my chars still use pots, rarely see a point in not using pots but sacrificing passives/sockets/auras(by lvling clarity) to achieve that. I mean, prepatch on softcore stacking 4-5diamonds sure, but since diamonds were removed what are you gonna stack anyway, nerfed granites? Seems underwhelming. My current melee uses 2 instant health flasks, 2hybrid flasks for mana regen and health regen over time and a granite for shitty moments(mostly it's for dropping a particular mob down in the middle of a bunch of other mobs, which is what granite is good at, mitigating many smaller hits).

Could I have much better gear that would help a lot? Maybe. But when using Lightning Strike which does fuck all physical dmg to begin with, I'd need a really large amount of leech to sustain it mana wise, and wouldn't life leech anything worthwhile unless using the support(which I do plan to use when I can find a fucking 4L of the right type). If I leveled Clarity, I could sustain it, but then I'd lose Wrath or Grace because I don't have a huge mana pool to begin with. And while I might be able to sustain it that way by reducing my usable mana pool to say, 60, then I wouldn't be able to use my curses or firetrap. Or I could put some points into +mana% passives or grab +mana gear, but at the end it's just a bunch of tradeoffs, I'm not gonna get sustain for "free" unless I happen to find an insane neck(it'd need to be an onyx, with health, all resist AND leech, as I don't think leech is worth dropping either of the other stuff on my current neck). And flasks are fine, they give me health regen too.

I think too often people focus on being self sufficient to remove the usage of flasks, but I don't mind using them, I wouldn't say I like it but I don't hate it either, so I don't care about making compromises to be able to only use utility flasks instead of regen flasks. Now Diamond flasks, that's another story, these were definitely worth giving up some shit to get sustain so you could stack diamonds, because they were so ridiculous(and also by increasing your dmg increased your leech so your sustain, 2 birds with one stone).