Path of Exile

  • 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

kitsune

Golden Knight of the Realm
624
35
Pyros_sl said:
Yeah I remember during closed beta I had the dual curses and Temporal makes him quite a joke then enfeeble to make sure the rocks don't do too much damage and it's easy peasy, plus unlike other fights, vaal constantly spawn shit mobs to raise zombies from, and if he doesn't smash the zombies right away, he takes stupid high amounts of damage since zombie DPS is like 10k each or whatever stupid number. I bet if you could see the zombie damage numbers in the tooltip, people would be crying nerfs all over, when you pay attention to them and they take a swing at a normal mob you can see they lose like 80% of their health even in merciless, and that's one zombie and one swing(and on my build I didn't even have any of the dmg% nodes other than Lord of the Dead). The problem of temp chains is without the perma curse, it's really pretty shitty since base duration is like 4.5secs and increases only to like 7secs, even with increased duration on it(which boosts the mana cost to fairly obscene amounts too) it only lasts as long as a normal curse at lvl 1, so you have to recast it over and over.

I'm gearing up for him with my explo arrow, I need to grind to 66 I think it is to grab all the health nodes I can reach easily. I'm already at 3k health and I still have 8x8% to take, so it should be easy. I'm also using a new idea specifically for him, I'm using a Cloak of Flames as my chest. Doesn't have any health, but it converts 20% of the physical dmg I take into fire, and since I run Purity and Elemental Adaptation, I have 85%(well currently 83%, need to lvl purity a bit more) fire so it reduces physical damage by a pretty good amount, more so than any armor I could get. Added benefit is I get 10% chance to ignite, which synergizes well with my build, I have 78% chance to proc ignites on Explosive arrow now, and it also lasts 45% longer from the cloak. Oh and obviously this time no fucking around, I have Enfeeble leveled and prepared and I'll be graniting the shit out of him, I'll replace my ruby with another granite so I have 2 and don't have to run out as often, and I'll do him solo so I can actually kill him fast and not risk too many shit. Just need to figure out if I want to use zombies or molten shell, shell is about 1.5k armor which isn't a big deal, zombie will take aggro from random shit mobs and tank lasers but need to be constantly raised since I will have only 3.

I'm fairly confident I'll crush Vaal this time around. Just need to grind out more levels in felshrine, at least with explo arrow it goes pretty fast.
Click to expand...
Zombies hit him really, really hard. Then he did one overhead smash and all of them died, but skelly totem and slow and steady resummoning of zombies made him a breeze. Never going to do that boss in a group again, he died so quickly when it was just me and it felt so much safer. Your build sounds interesting at least, good luck and just stay safe when the rocks hit. I had over 4000 effective health so I felt pretty safe this time. Only thing that got me worried was when I had my granite on cooldown, but npnp
 
Khane

Khane

Got something right about marriage
20,521
14,253
I wish I could play hardcore without the frustrating lag and rubberbanding I experience. I only play about an hour a day and at level 67 with max resists and 3400 hp (not sure what my armor is but I use molten shell and enduring cry) I still usually die once in that timeframe.

I'll be completely safe with maybe one or two mobs on my screen and then all of a sudden I'm right back in the middle of the pack I just ran from and can't move because the game is lagging so badly (I have pretty decent stun recovery and evasion so I'm fairly certain I'm not being stunlocked, because I never get stunlocked when I'm not rubberbanding like that). Not sure if it's my hardware or connection or what but yea... can't play HC like that. I get way too frustrated.
 
Vorph

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
11,576
5,383
I wish GGG would host their servers with Amazon Web Services like just about everyone else does. My problems aren't as bad as yours but I'm still desynced enough of the time that there's no way I could ever play HC either.
 
Seananigans

Seananigans

Honorary Shit-PhD
<Gold Donor>
13,864
34,725
This game is pretty damn fun. But fuck online games with unique naming requirements. Sitting here trying to make a ranger and I'm on name attempt number 30+ or so.
 
Neki

Neki

Molten Core Raider
2,726
397
Just got killed again at level 51

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!

We really need to get some forum members to setup some regular exp/loot groups since post normal, there seems to be lack of pubs going.

Remade new char with the name Neki_HC playing hardcore. Add me up if you want to group up
 
N

Nutron_sl

shitlord
712
0
I'm level 62 finishing up merci act 1. Done a couple of pubs and the ffa loot makes it HELL. you spend 90% of your time going into melee to try to grab chromatics/not get your loot stolen if you're a ranged. Whoever thought this was a good system has lost touch with reality... Make loot drop for everyone so everyone can see it = i can agree with...but have the pieces be reserved to ppl for more than half a second, and include whites..
 
Vorph

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
11,576
5,383
It's even annoying in groups with just friends, since once the 2 second timer expires there's no way to know who something was assigned to originally. For super rare shit we can just alternate, but for normal trash that you expect the RNG to end up with an even split on in the long run it's irritating.
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,260
2,383
Merc Vaal down, ezpz. 4300hp with my new build and some much better gear, I actually bought my first big piece of gear from someone, bought gems and small upgrades before but dropped 7GCP on these boots, they're basically perfect boots for my build, 30%movespeed, 25%cold/20%lightning(the 2 resists I need the most since cloak of flames is 45%fire on my chest and I get 15% fire from passives), 87hp which is decent enough and what really swayed me, 32dex which lets me get a skill point back so that's a pretty big deal. They're also eva/es with a small +es so I get 50mana from them from EB.

Fought him solo so adds and himself had less hp, took about 1minute and a half or so. I didn't even use Enfeeble cause I practiced a new strat in normal, which is basically playing in melee range, so rocks never hit me once the entire fight. It's mostly run around in circles around him and when he starts casting a new ability, drop 5 explo arrow into him+curse then resume running until he starts a new ability. Smash always miss since you're running in circles, laser most often miss, rocks can't hit in melee range and ice generally doesn't hit melee range either. He tagged me once with the laser on his last repop cause I was finishing adds and he lasered right away, but not a problem with 82lightning resist anyway. Other than that hit and a couple of stray chaos attacks from adds I took no damage, didn't use my granite or enfeeble. I'd say he's much easier like this than if you stay at range, as long as you don't get greedy and get smashed(same with brutus at range, very easy unless you get greedy and end up getting hooked).
 
Ryanz

Ryanz

<Banned>
18,901
52,944
GGG just announced season one for races + item rewards. Full post on the subject:

One of Path of Exile's most interesting features is the short term race event system. Today we are announcing the first season of race events (which runs from February 23-April 7, NZ time). There's a summary page with your progress towards the new season's exclusive rewards here. This news post contains a much more thorough explanation of how this system was designed and how it works.

Path of Exile's race events were really popular during the Closed Beta. We had half of the active server population turn up to play in certain events. Our first month of Open Beta was spent fixing immediate problems while we let the economies of the permanent leagues develop. We are now ready to start a full schedule of races.

A race event is a fresh league that lasts for anywhere from an hour to a week. They all take place in their own separate economies with new characters. Your existing in-game wealth doesn't help in these races - they test your playskill and luck. The leagues generally reward players who can level up quickly and place in the top ranks of their character class. There are also rewards for objectives like finishing side quests or full-clearing areas first.

Rather than running self-contained individual races, we've now structured the events into seasons. Season One starts this weekend (February 23, NZ time) and runs for just over six weeks (until April 7, NZ time). There are prizes for top-placing people in each race, prizes for people who achieve good results for a set of events in a season and prizes for people who finish at the top of the realm overall in a given season. Seasons of races help encourage players to play in multiple events and allow us to provide prizes that transcend individual events - giving players something meaningful and special to work towards over several days or weeks.

In past events we gave out orbs and other currency items as prizes. Because these items had a known value, this had an adverse effect on both the economy and the incentives to play races. If the prizes were low, races seemed unappealing. If the prizes were high, it became mandatory to participate in races to keep up with the inflation the orbs caused. We have avoided this in Open Beta by designing new custom prizes for race events. We still want them to be tradeable, but we want to let the market decide their value.

The prizes are a variety of existing unique items and a very upgradable base item type (Coral Ring) that all have alternate art in-game. These particular pieces of special artwork are only available from this season of race events - other seasons will have different items. While the power level of the uniques (and upgradable base ring) is relatively low, they have high trade value because of the exclusive icons. For example, most high level players have access to a Goldrim (unique Battered Cap) when they need to twink resistances on a new character, but few people will have the version with special collectable artwork. The items are itemlevel 100, which means that there are no restrictions on how they can be rerolled. Note that these items are not better in any way than the regular versions you'd find in game, other than the fact they have special artwork. The list of items that are prizes for the first season are shown on this summary page. The sockets and values of the mods on the items are random within the regular ranges. The specific values on that page are only for illustration.

Shortly after a race is over, you are awarded reward points based on your performance in the race. Please note that these reward points (please use the initialism RP if you want to abbreviate them) are not the same type of points that are purchased and spent on microtransaction items. These are two completely unrelated systems.
The season's prizes exist at various RP thresholds. You are awarded the prize as soon as you cross that threshold. For example, our first prize is awarded when you hit 15 RP, which will take a few events for a decent player (or one event if you're very skilled/lucky).

Season RP values do not carry across to the next season. Each season has a new set of prizes and is an opportunity for a fresh start. Your total reward points are still tracked as lifetime points which are eligible for other prizes as you participate in multiple seasons.

During the Closed Beta, we gave out Demigod's Presence unique amulets to the top players of each character class in an event. In the Open Beta, we're keeping this concept, but with a new item. For most short races, the top player of each class will receive a Demigod's Triumph unique wreath. Like all other race reward items, this helmet can be traded with other players.

We will also be adding a ladder of reward points for the current season. This ladder will show which accounts have the most points so far and will help us track who is due to win the overall season prizes. At this stage we're expecting to give alternate art Demigod's Triumphs to the top 20 people in the overall ladder of reward points for this season. Details of this will be announced when we have the ladder of reward points implemented soon.

There are prizes for reaching lifetime reward points thresholds as well. Lifetime reward points are not reset between seasons, so if you play in many seasons over the life of the game you'll be able to win some awesome rewards. We haven't yet announced the schedule of prizes for lifetime reward points, but it's coming soon!

We've put together a schedule of 109 events over 44 days, which start and end on a weekend. The events occur in four different timeslots which are chosen to hopefully give equal opportunities to players in America, Europe and NZ/Australia. We're looking to improve these times for subsequent seasons based on feedback. Most of the events are between 1 and 4 hours in duration. Two of the events last for a week and have other shorter events occurring at the same time. It's up to you to decide whether it's more important to go for success in the week long events, the smaller events that occur at the same time, or both. The number of events ramps up gradually over the course of the season so that players have more opportunity to catch up.

We understand that this system greatly favours players who play in more events. That's true of almost any sport or hobby. We've pitched the prizes so that there are still cool things to win even if you can only play in one event per week.

We reserve the right to change the number of reward points awarded for different objectives as we get feedback and data from early races. We may increase or decrease certain thresholds that reward points are granted at depending on what levels players get to. To be clear, I'm not talking about changing the thresholds for receiving the alternate art prizes - those aren't being modified once the season has started.

We have a lot of interesting league types coming soon. In addition to the regular set of party, solo, and turbo, we're discussing some other interesting twists. Burning Ground or Blood Magic leagues are the type of options that we're experimenting with internally to see what is fun in a race setting. We expect that most or all of the events in the first season will be in hardcore mode.

For a calendar of events and for information about the season prizes, please check out the Season One page.

We're really excited about this race system and the first season! I'm going to try to play in as many events as I can. Good luck!

-Chris, Lead Developer Grinding Gear Games

Calendar for the races + item rewards:

http://www.pathofexile.com/seasons


I'm really stoked for this, even though I probably won't have the time to participate in even half these events. Not to beat a dead horse, but this is the direction D3 should have been taking their game. Grinding Gear Games is being really smart with this approach to their ARPG. Without something like this in place the game will become stale in about a month or so, but with a season, with different races over an extemded period of time with item rewards and stat tracking it will keep interest in this game long past the point which most would have already moved on.
 
D

Dudebro_sl

shitlord
862
2
The game already got stale when it was discovered that every good build revolves around taking every HP node on the tree that you can. yawn.
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,260
2,383
There are balance issues though for the late late game, in terms of comparing the defensive stats. Health > Everything else basically at 80+. Armor and Evasion are both unreliable and not very strong and ES is virtually health but unless you have really great gear health is better due to the stupid chaos mobs they added in act3 that you find in maps with retarded mods(alchemists and lmp chaos snakes). There's also the fact that overall, you can absolutely skip every offensive nodes, only handpick a couple of the strongest one, and build everything else as defensive and still retain a good kill speed assuming you use the right abilities. Issue with damage scaling vs defense scaling on gear/passives, you get a fuckton of dmg from gear but not that much defenses, on the other hand you get fairly little dmg from the passive other than a few key passives, while you get a fuckton of defense. So you're kinda herded into the same type of build, at least when efficiency matters, which it does on HC in higher levels.

Lesser builds are viable, but for persistence in HC you're going to want to min max and that's where the issues show. Hopefully they've taken note from the few smart posters who analyzed all that shit and will make changes at some point, but it's a big load of work, they pretty much have to rework evasion and armor entirely I think, so they can nerf health/health regen. They also need to rework the entire mana system most likely, so it's at least viable to use a 5L without mana leech support and without using EB or Blood Magic keystones, which atm isn't really doable in the later levels even if you grab quite a lot of mana nodes(and that's not a fair trade vs picking one keystone).

They do have a bunch of stuff to do, but still I find the game pretty fun even though yeah my current char has basically at this point only 2 points in offensive stuff, Elemental Equilibrium and the AoE thing in the Templar starting area. 3 if you count resolute techniques. Next 10points or so are going into DPS stuff but that will still keep the ratio of damage:defense passives very skewed since it'll be like 14 out of 90 or something. Rest is resists, armor/es, mana regen, stats obviously and most of all as much health as I could grab.

Edit: Made a detailed guide to my current explosive arrow build on the official forums athttp://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/172483
 
Caliane

Caliane

Avatar of War Slayer
15,564
11,865
Ryanz_sl said:
GGG just announced season one for races + item rewards. Full post on the subject:

One of Path of Exile's most interesting features is the short term race event system. Today we are announcing the first season of race events (which runs from February 23-April 7, NZ time). There's a summary page with your progress towards the new season's exclusive rewards here. This news post contains a much more thorough explanation of how this system was designed and how it works.

Path of Exile's race events were really popular during the Closed Beta. We had half of the active server population turn up to play in certain events. Our first month of Open Beta was spent fixing immediate problems while we let the economies of the permanent leagues develop. We are now ready to start a full schedule of races.

A race event is a fresh league that lasts for anywhere from an hour to a week. They all take place in their own separate economies with new characters. Your existing in-game wealth doesn't help in these races - they test your playskill and luck. The leagues generally reward players who can level up quickly and place in the top ranks of their character class. There are also rewards for objectives like finishing side quests or full-clearing areas first.

Rather than running self-contained individual races, we've now structured the events into seasons. Season One starts this weekend (February 23, NZ time) and runs for just over six weeks (until April 7, NZ time). There are prizes for top-placing people in each race, prizes for people who achieve good results for a set of events in a season and prizes for people who finish at the top of the realm overall in a given season. Seasons of races help encourage players to play in multiple events and allow us to provide prizes that transcend individual events - giving players something meaningful and special to work towards over several days or weeks.

In past events we gave out orbs and other currency items as prizes. Because these items had a known value, this had an adverse effect on both the economy and the incentives to play races. If the prizes were low, races seemed unappealing. If the prizes were high, it became mandatory to participate in races to keep up with the inflation the orbs caused. We have avoided this in Open Beta by designing new custom prizes for race events. We still want them to be tradeable, but we want to let the market decide their value.

The prizes are a variety of existing unique items and a very upgradable base item type (Coral Ring) that all have alternate art in-game. These particular pieces of special artwork are only available from this season of race events - other seasons will have different items. While the power level of the uniques (and upgradable base ring) is relatively low, they have high trade value because of the exclusive icons. For example, most high level players have access to a Goldrim (unique Battered Cap) when they need to twink resistances on a new character, but few people will have the version with special collectable artwork. The items are itemlevel 100, which means that there are no restrictions on how they can be rerolled. Note that these items are not better in any way than the regular versions you'd find in game, other than the fact they have special artwork. The list of items that are prizes for the first season are shown on this summary page. The sockets and values of the mods on the items are random within the regular ranges. The specific values on that page are only for illustration.

Shortly after a race is over, you are awarded reward points based on your performance in the race. Please note that these reward points (please use the initialism RP if you want to abbreviate them) are not the same type of points that are purchased and spent on microtransaction items. These are two completely unrelated systems.
The season's prizes exist at various RP thresholds. You are awarded the prize as soon as you cross that threshold. For example, our first prize is awarded when you hit 15 RP, which will take a few events for a decent player (or one event if you're very skilled/lucky).

Season RP values do not carry across to the next season. Each season has a new set of prizes and is an opportunity for a fresh start. Your total reward points are still tracked as lifetime points which are eligible for other prizes as you participate in multiple seasons.

During the Closed Beta, we gave out Demigod's Presence unique amulets to the top players of each character class in an event. In the Open Beta, we're keeping this concept, but with a new item. For most short races, the top player of each class will receive a Demigod's Triumph unique wreath. Like all other race reward items, this helmet can be traded with other players.

We will also be adding a ladder of reward points for the current season. This ladder will show which accounts have the most points so far and will help us track who is due to win the overall season prizes. At this stage we're expecting to give alternate art Demigod's Triumphs to the top 20 people in the overall ladder of reward points for this season. Details of this will be announced when we have the ladder of reward points implemented soon.

There are prizes for reaching lifetime reward points thresholds as well. Lifetime reward points are not reset between seasons, so if you play in many seasons over the life of the game you'll be able to win some awesome rewards. We haven't yet announced the schedule of prizes for lifetime reward points, but it's coming soon!

We've put together a schedule of 109 events over 44 days, which start and end on a weekend. The events occur in four different timeslots which are chosen to hopefully give equal opportunities to players in America, Europe and NZ/Australia. We're looking to improve these times for subsequent seasons based on feedback. Most of the events are between 1 and 4 hours in duration. Two of the events last for a week and have other shorter events occurring at the same time. It's up to you to decide whether it's more important to go for success in the week long events, the smaller events that occur at the same time, or both. The number of events ramps up gradually over the course of the season so that players have more opportunity to catch up.

We understand that this system greatly favours players who play in more events. That's true of almost any sport or hobby. We've pitched the prizes so that there are still cool things to win even if you can only play in one event per week.

We reserve the right to change the number of reward points awarded for different objectives as we get feedback and data from early races. We may increase or decrease certain thresholds that reward points are granted at depending on what levels players get to. To be clear, I'm not talking about changing the thresholds for receiving the alternate art prizes - those aren't being modified once the season has started.

We have a lot of interesting league types coming soon. In addition to the regular set of party, solo, and turbo, we're discussing some other interesting twists. Burning Ground or Blood Magic leagues are the type of options that we're experimenting with internally to see what is fun in a race setting. We expect that most or all of the events in the first season will be in hardcore mode.

For a calendar of events and for information about the season prizes, please check out the Season One page.

We're really excited about this race system and the first season! I'm going to try to play in as many events as I can. Good luck!

-Chris, Lead Developer Grinding Gear Games

Calendar for the races + item rewards:

http://www.pathofexile.com/seasons


I'm really stoked for this, even though I probably won't have the time to participate in even half these events. Not to beat a dead horse, but this is the direction D3 should have been taking their game. Grinding Gear Games is being really smart with this approach to their ARPG. Without something like this in place the game will become stale in about a month or so, but with a season, with different races over an extemded period of time with item rewards and stat tracking it will keep interest in this game long past the point which most would have already moved on.
Click to expand...
Sounds pretty fantastic. Wish I had time actually try competing in them. ha
 
Khane

Khane

Got something right about marriage
20,521
14,253
Dudebro_sl said:
The game already got stale when it was discovered that every good build revolves around taking every HP node on the tree that you can. yawn.
Click to expand...
This is how ARPG's always start off when there is a reset. It's happened in every ARPG I have ever played.

Go defensive so you can stay alive in the harder difficulties until newer, better gear starts to flood the market. Top end pieces are always super expensive but it becomes easier and easier to find and buy gear that let's you go much more offensive.

So basically, when you have no gear you have to go defensive, when you start to get gear (stack life leech and life gain on hit for instance) you can start to go almost purely offensive
 
Caliane

Caliane

Avatar of War Slayer
15,564
11,865
But its not just a "go defensive" issue.
As pyros stated.
Health trumps everything.
Armor, Evasion, ES are inferior to health. Defensive stats on gear. are inferior to health. especially health passives.
this also creates a bit of an issue where str based chars have a bit of an advantage. getting damage and health from str.
Then access to iron grip/iron will/blood magic to circumvent that issue.
 
Ryanz

Ryanz

<Banned>
18,901
52,944
If any of you are interested in putting together an FoH group for these upcoming races or you just wanna group up for the permanent ladder (Hardcore of course). My in game name is Ryanz, just add me.
 
Xeldar

Xeldar

Silver Squire
1,546
133
Caliane_sl said:
But its not just a "go defensive" issue.
As pyros stated.
Health trumps everything.
Armor, Evasion, ES are inferior to health. Defensive stats on gear. are inferior to health. especially health passives.
this also creates a bit of an issue where str based chars have a bit of an advantage. getting damage and health from str.
Then access to iron grip/iron will/blood magic to circumvent that issue.
Click to expand...
+ damage skills which are strong without dmg nodes, allowing more hp node stacking. I'm looking at you Ethereal Knives.
 
Vorph

Vorph

Silver Baronet of the Realm
11,576
5,383
Caliane_sl said:
But its not just a "go defensive" issue.
As pyros stated.
Health trumps everything.
Armor, Evasion, ES are inferior to health. Defensive stats on gear. are inferior to health. especially health passives.
this also creates a bit of an issue where str based chars have a bit of an advantage. getting damage and health from str.
Then access to iron grip/iron will/blood magic to circumvent that issue.
Click to expand...
The strongest build I've played so far, and the one I would absolutely use when they get around to fixing sync issues enough for me to invest time into HC, doesn't have a single hp node taken.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.