Path of Exile

Arbitrary said:

As a very inexperienced player the Syndicate has been a source of frustration through most of the league. I can't get through the larger forts at all (can't get the doors down, when I do the clouds don't go away anymore, the dudes themselves are murder), I can't complete a lab under time, and I can't handle them when they pop out for ganks. It's in my best interest to wait until it rotates around to a lab and then never go in and leave them rotting there forever.

It's not that I'm totally helpless. It's that I sometimes do fine or do fine for long stretches and then hit a patch where I just have no idea how things are going so badly. The death penalty is a significant deterrent (especially after having been coddled for many years) and it's just better for me to bail on that whole part of the game. I know I'm the newb and I'm 100% sure most of what is going wrong/badly is my sucking but without a death recap it's hard for me to even know what the hell happened a lot of the time.

I like the game a lot, I want to try some other things, and I feel that the game is very fair and patient with me up until I'm dropped into the mapping stuff with a legitimate death penalty and the Syndicate on my anus.

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To be totally fair, most leagues are very hard to the inexperienced player. Invasion was hard for *everyone*. Incursions were so hard to ever complete fully until you were really geared up or had a nice clearing build. Temple was okay, but still pretty hard. Breach would bum rush you. The abyss mobs were rape face. Delve was an exception, because you *always* had the option of picking your difficulty so the "difficulty" of Delve was never fully realized.

Also, do not forget that no class/build in PoE is good at *everything*. If you're an amazing boss killer (eg: Double strike jugg) syndicate is going to be lolezmode. And it is, even before they nerfed it (save for Tora). I don't think I've ever died to the syndicate this entire league other than while leveling up and not really geared or gemed in the slightest. But incursions on the other hand will give you some trouble (I fully clear incursions about 75% of the time, but that 25% on a shit layout or bad mobs screws me). Meanwhile, Arc Totems will clear maps twice as fast as I can, clear out incursions 100% of the time, but probably have issue on some bosses, especially ones like the lycan in Lair, or Chimera T16 map.

This game encourages multi-builds, to the point where you can go into a map on one character, clear it minus boss, pop a portal, log out, log on your boss killer, and kill the boss easily. The portals dont go away, your'e welcome to switch builds in the middle of a map.

This really isnt anything new, it's just the generalized nature of PoE. The streamers that have a build that wtfsteamrolls everything are heavily invested into those builds, and have countless amounts of experience even among most of us here.

Where they failed with Betrayal, was explaining the system further and in more detail. They have an Abyss tutorial out there, which honestly doesn't require one. Why not incursion and betrayal? They needed to have that to really explain the league mechanics. They also really needed to fix the bugs around 2 syndicates dying on top of each other and being unable to pick the one you want. I also find they were way too vague with the descriptions of what everyone does. They should simply tell you. Just say it. Don't beat around the bush, otherwise you create a system where someone creates a chart, and everyone prints it and references that instead of whats in game.