Path of Exile

If you don't use fast movement skills though you rarely desync. I mean you might lag/disconnect as usual with any internet game but desyncing is fairly rare. Still happens though, or sometimes mobs desync if you're kiting them so that's annoying but on my witch I barely ever desynced, mostly only when I was spamming phase run to go through maps(which if you do you want to stop every now and then and cast another spell to make sure you're not gonna rubberband 3screens back into a pack of mobs). On the other hand I can basically desync at will on my ranger by just using whirling blades 3-4times in a row. This is definitely quite stupid.

I hope they have it fixed for open beta but I'm not sure they will, it's probably not an easy fix, I mean they could force the client and server to send more info but that'd just kill their servers which they didn't build for that, so they're probably trying to find a better way to do it.

Hope they do a patch preview next week or something.

Btw if anyone needs I have a couple of keys. Send me a PM, I'll pick 2 people unfairly.

So Kripp lost the race by a pretty good margin. In the last day Dominion's group was chaining much higher level maps so they caught up easily and then beat him. Probably had the maps from the guy who died very close to Kripp and also Dominion played a fuckton more(some people bitch he was account sharing but who knows really, some people are stupid about how much they play) and Kripp wasn't very lucky with maps. Kripp fanboys are in tears and raging at the injustice, as expected.

Pretty fun race but if anything it showed how totems builds are retarded. Dominion's group leveling was like 2 double totems and 1 summoner, and the summoner was mostly using a skeleton totem to keep shit occupied while the other 2 used their damage totems from a safe distance to clear rooms without having to step into them. Kripp's group was a bit more involved but they still made massive uses of totems especially Decoy and they always had a double spark too.

joeboo_sl said:

Yeah, i got downvoted to hell on the PoE Reddit page several months ago for expressing my concern that totems were WAY overpowered. Sounds like that hasn't changed. I cleared an entire difficulty level without taking a single point of damage thanks to the totem build i had on my witch at the time.

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Well to be fair, pretty much every build can clear content without taking any DPS node at all. Most melees HAVE to do just that, besides taking stuff that's on the way to health nodes, the DPS nodes are once you have all your defensive shit done. The issue with totems is their range and damage, you can drop a totem all the way to the edge of your screen in the next room and it'll start clearing from there, if you're alone it might not live very long and be tedious but if you're in a group, dropping 4-5totems in a room will clear it without anyone even having to be in line of sight or in range of anything in that room. A single totem on a solo player isn't super insane, it's very good sure but it's not gamebreaking. 2totems on a single player starts being kinda stupid already. 4-5totems in a group is retarded.

I expect some nerfs anyway, not sure how they'll go about it though. Spell totem is the biggest issue but to a certain extent every totem is, a bunch of Decoys+Flame totems could clear rooms just fine, just probably slower than spork totems, but that means simply nerfing spell totems might not be the best solution. I think they need to add more totems nodes and reduce the baseline on health/castspeed/dmg, similar to summoned minions. You only get 3 zombies with the spell and they're very weak, even if you use minion health support they die super fast. However once you put points in all the minion nodes, which takes a ton of skillpoints since they're pretty spread out, your zombies are beastly, they do good damage, they tank very well and you get a ton of them. Totems on the other hand, you get one super strong right away, and you get a 2nd for a fairly small investment in most caster DPS builds.


Playing an Ethereal Knives crit witch atm, pretty fun spell. I have faster projectiles to increase the range and fork to icnrease the aoe, it does pretty shitty dmg when mobs are spread out and in small numbers, however as soon as they pack I basically one shot everything which is pretty fun. It's a really strong nuke and being physical means you don't give a fuck about resists or about taking elemental specific nodes, just general spell dmg% stuff. The downside is crits don't apply a secondary effect but that's ok.

bytes_sl said:

I haven't played my witch past the mid 40's, waiting for the open beta wipe. But aren't the people with really high-level characters simply outleveling the current endgame content by a large margin? With act 3 missing until the OB starts, everyone with a crazy high 70's character would trash whatever is out there right now anyway i'd think. So maybe that plays a part in the power of totems.



Is physical viable now? Haven't done a ton of reading about the mechanics behind the game, but i remember everyone saying physical is not going to cut it later on damage-wise, so everyone picks elemental weapons/nodes/skills.

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Well totems are strong regardless of your level, they're strong for leveling and for the hard maps. Levels don't really mean anything besides xp gain rate and the amount of skill points you have, there's no higher level = higher dmg type of formula. On top of that gear is capped, so doing a lvl 69map with lvl 62 gear even if you're lvl 80 isn't that easy especially when maps have effects to them so it's not just normal mobs but they can do +100%lightning dmg, move faster, you move slower, this kind of shit. The problem with totems is part damage which is too high(relative to your level, it's too high even when lvling imo) but largely the fact they can be dropped very far and have no cooldown, so they let you proxy your damage from a safe spot, which is insanely strong to do hard stuff safely.

As for the physical, my understanding of that consensus is that pure physical "melee"(I include archers here with rain of arrows/split arrow) are weaker than physical builds that also add elemental dmg mostly via auras(wrath/anger/hatred) or use split/pure elemental skills like lightning arrow and lightning strike. However spells don't benefit from those auras anyway so it's not quite the same thing, and EK benefits from spell damage % fine, just not elemental %, which isn't a big deal since the best % nodes are spell damage besides the 3 major elemental node of your element(2 in witch side and 1 in shadow side) which generally have lower prereqs and even out at not so great anyway. Arguably the same build with frost instead would be stronger due to freeze procs, but the difference in terms of damage output is very low and the coverage of EK is better than Freezing pulse for aoeing trash. So yeah it's viable, more than viable it's good, but it's probably not THE build. I don't really care about making the typical CI crit frost build everyone else makes though.

I hope they find a better way to deliver rewards though. How it happens atm(at least this race never done one before was the first one) is they create a char on your account with a stupid name, and then you have to run this char to the town. Now obviously the beach area isn't too hard, but it feels pretty stupid to have your rewards on a lvl 1 HC char you have to run through an area before you get the items. If you die for some reason(lag, desync, being retarded), your reward char goes to default league and the rewards are "lost".

Also an interesting factor about races is after they're over, they're "merged" into the normal economy server, so you can get really good deals from trading and shit during races. An example is you could buy Chain for like 2alch or chaos orbs during the event, but on live it costs more like 10-15alch and alchs are like 1.5/2chaos each too so that's even more than an alch on the race server. A lot of stuff was way cheaper than on live.

Tredge_sl said:

Mind linking this build? Been looking for something like this.

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That was what I had, maybe a bit less but that was the plan so far:
http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-s...IQB6UC40myLJw=

Future points would to get the crit/crit dmg templar node, then go toward the center of the tree under the witch starting area for more castspeed% and crit dmg%. Also Throatseeker node near the shadow tree that I skipped since I didn't have enough diamond flasks/crit yet and probably eventually respec out of the health nodes for CI. Could skip the health entirely on softcore but on HC you kinda need something. It's heavily inspired from Sl4y3r's CI crit frost build, only that I skip frost stuff for more general stuff. Also obviously this can be done as a shadow since the build goes all the way to the shadow start, but I find shadow shittier early cause you get dmg nodes and no mana nodes so you kinda need to run 3mana pots and you also don't get health nodes that quickly.

Stopped playing the char for now though and started a dual claw ranger, it's going pretty good, Vaal was a whole different experience as a melee(especially a fairly squishy one).

They're doing races like the next 5days or something, most of them look a bit boring but there's a 3h turbo HC solo race today(in 2hours) and there's a 1h HC solo race in a few days that look good. Bunch of 3h HC races too.