Path of Exile

[crowabunga]

I'm partway through act 2 and I'm rescinding my previous assertion: this isn't even fun on the first playthrough.

It isn't even hard, since I'm ranged. There hasn't been a single boss that took more than 15 minutes over all attempts, and most go down with no deaths in less than 5 minutes. But the maps are huge, the "trash" mobs slow to kill, and the loot mediocre. It's a real shame, because I have enjoyed all the bosses I've fought, it's just that the juice isn't worth the squeeze getting to them.

Combine this with my previous still-held belief that the area presentation is poor compared to Grim Dawn, which Crate really gave a sense of "journey" thanks to GD's contiguous, narratively rich world, and there just isn't much of a drive to keep playing. I could keep klunking away at enemies with my crossbow, comboing between three different ammo types in a cycle, whilst backtracking and circlestrafing like every encounter is out of a bad Doom slaughtermap, but why? I need to waste hours of my life to get to the good parts of gameplay, I don't feel any build progression or power progression to make clearing the trash mobs any better, don't get enough gear or XP from trash mobs to make fighting them worthwhile, and take no joy from the barebones world "exploration".

To be fair, you don't get much exploration or gear progression in PoE1 campaign, either, and PoE1's mechanics are dogshit compared to PoE2's skill and movement system (WASD is great and I hope it gets backported), but in PoE1 you do get occasional power spikes that then taper away, creating a nice tempo of struggle and dominance, and you can clear trash quickly as you run towards the actually interesting encounters.

---

I see a lot of comparisons (and mockeries of the comparisons) to Dark Souls, but Dark Souls this ain't; if PoE2 was "Dark Souls but isometric" I'd be all over it. No, Dark Souls is completely engaging to me: I'm locked in, for better or worse, by the exploration, the careful (and dickish) enemy placement, the fights that rarely exceed 1-on-4 and are essentially a series of duels, the secret-hunting, and the risk-reward of Soul management. In contrast, PoE2 requires just enough of my attention that I can't zone out and grind while listening to a podcast, but neither is it adequately engaging to be enjoyable as a sole focus. It is an exercise in tedium. Dealing with campaign maps reminds me of fevered dreams in sickness, when my brain sluggishly cycles a single concept over and over again while I'm stuck in a twilight state of consciousness, my mind's eye held open to continuously experience a single, pointless notion indefinitely, with the only payoff being the moment of waking - "backtrack ammo swap fire ammo swap reload strafe ammo swap reload"... Well in this case, my waking moment was uninstalling the game and going back to my DS1 playthrough.

 

[Endlosung]

Is there any Kiwi guild? Unless you need to spend some crazy amount of points to create one

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

From just a very quick internet search, seems like there's no Guild mechanics in PoE2 yet. People were trying to make their PoE1 guilds register in PoE2 and I saw someone on reddit speaking as though they were a dev, saying "Guilds just aren't a priority for us right now. It's not something most of the playerbase engages with".
I'm assuming Guilds won't be a thing until after the other half of the game's features (Classes, Skill Tabs, Story Acts) are all done.

 

[Croaking Spider]

Whoever decided that the first opportunity to get your Ascendency needed to be Sanctum should be shot out of a cannon. Sanctum is already a pretty build-reliant mechanic in PoE1 and the only people who claim to "enjoy" it are all people running the same hexblast mine offscreen clearing build. The rewards can be nice, but the general consensus among people I know is it's ass to play. The rewards are the soul reason to force yourself through it because it's a miserable experience otherwise. There's no way the devs all sat down at a table and not a single person said "hey, most of our playerbase fucking despises Sanctum, maybe let's not tie it to ascendencies." I had to come back 5-6 levels overlevelled to clear it on my Lightning Deadeye Ranger and I'm dreading attempting it on my monk.

The second ascendency trial being Ultimatum doesn't sound bad in theory, but it feels like they took out all the "easy" modifiers and stuffed it full of the ball-busting run enders. Again, kind of weird to have ascendencies tied to yet another RNG-heavy mechanic. Ultimatum works when you can actually participate in the opt-in/opt-out risk reward, but having to get through it and praying you don't get fucked by ridiculous mods is kind of shit from a progression standpoint.

I never thought I'd say it, but the new ascendency trials actually makes me appreciate Labyrinth now. I can't say I really "like" doing Labs on new characters, but at least Izaro has some cool voice lines and the lab itself was manageable. I've died a few times in silly ways to floor spike corridors and eating Izaro slams, but at least I had a grasp of what I was doing and how to get around it if I failed once or twice. At worst it was a DPS check, but at least it didn't require me to manage an honor pool through both all the rooms AND THE BOSS.

 

[Nottafed]

I played through to the end of act 1 and intend to start over as a ranger. Never played Poe1. I am enjoying it so far but it will need some adjustments for sure before release. Loot is... Not good.
Real great story so far. Runs perfect at 4k dlaa with a 4070ti super. Audio is very nice, have had a few crashes, they mostly went away moving back to the studio driver from nvidia, but could be placebo

 

[Burning Bridge]

I'm doing the game duo with a friend, and the scaling for multi is so much harder than solo, it's actually crazy. Bosses that I solo in a few minutes take 10+. Magic mob packs take multiple reloads to take down. I encountered an armoured regen mob that was completely unkillable. I swear that the bump for mob HP is more than 100%, and I think they get defenses on top.

 

[crowabunga]

Sanctum is already a pretty build-reliant mechanic in PoE1 and the only people who claim to "enjoy" it are all people running the same hexblast mine offscreen clearing build.

Not true! I did run it with Hexblast, but I also ran it with my 200+ Div Flicker Strike OP bullshit build I made after dropping a raw Mageblood.

You're also right that I didn't enjoy it, I just enjoyed the Divines it printed.

 

[I'm Retarded?]

POE2 kicks ass, I really don't get the criticisms here. so far I've pushed a witch, ranger, and sorc through act 1 and monk is my next project. people on the steam forums keep saying every fight is spamming dodge roll, I barely use the thing. some boss attacks are clearly meant to force a roll but I get way more mileage out of simply timing attacks and staying mobile. as for the loot, it feels almost perfectly tuned, upgrades roll in just about exactly when you need them and you can use excess gold to gamble or buy base items to craft with. there's so much less loot grabass than every other ARPG, it almost feels like the old Diablo II style where individual drops actually matter more often than not, unlike POE1 where you need a loot filter just to be able to see your screen, or Grim Dawn where every item is a horrible maze of 200 affixes. I love both of those games dearly, but loot noise has become one of the most obnoxious parts of the ARPG genre, and POE2 is clearly making an attempt to solve that, and succeeding. that said, the balance clearly needs some work - the sorc felt a little underpowered, witch about right, but ranger absolutely dominates everything including bosses. most of my friends are playing mercenary and steamrolling through the game even faster than I am, so I imagine it's just a ranged physical class thing in general. the already high base damage you have as ranged coupled with socketing runes on your weapons really scales your damage ridiculously, something casters cannot do.

 

[Lurkerish Kandor]

I'm having a rest from playing Monk after getting him to Ogham, the second town (still in the 1st Act).
Switched over to having a proper go with a Summonmancer, and holy shit the difference is like night and day.

There is almost absolutely no doderolling going on here, because the Witch is relatively distant from fights. I have not been actively directing my summons at all, only remembered to use the Skele Archer's poison bomb thing a couple times, but they're doing a fantastic job of proactively being an obstacle for enemies and they mulch through mobs. Unearth is great because it deals damage AND summons allies from corpses, there's also passively maintained skeletons, and I'm aware there are more things like Zombies later. Frostbomb is being a great auxiliary spell because of the Slow and the damage.
Overall, playing as a Necro feels like playing Overlord with better minion AI, or playing some kind of Moba. It's much more relaxed, but you aren't left feeling like a useless-for-combat party-support character.

Having a look at the Passive tree, I'm thinking longterm with this character (who won't be the Bloodwitch) I'm gonna head downwards on the tree, see if I can spec into Strength a bit more, and try to turn her into some kind of Anti-Paladin who has a hammer, Armor/EShield, and summons.

I have a feeling though, part of the reason I'm enjoying her so much more is that the very start of her passive tree has MANY double-duty Spell DMG+ and Minion DMG+ nodes early on. I'm tearing through the game with her 5x faster than with the Monk, and I'm pretty sure that's because she's having her DPS go up twice as fast as him and she doesn't need to be in harm's way most of the time. The only enemies that have given me any kind of trouble as a necromancer have been Lachlan and Draven, because they're the only enemies that have blatantly ignored all my summons and used their long reach to attack me directly.

Edit: After having beaten the King in the Mists in Freythorn and seeing how much easier it was as a Necro, I'm actually thinking I've completely fucked something up or misunderstood something with that Monk, so I'm going to restart him.

Edit 2: Okay yeah, definitely fucked up that first Monk attempt. Hadn't realized at that point that when you go to Cut a support gem, clicking on the Skills to the left of the new popup gives you different options. I must have been Cutting all my gems from Quarterstaff Strike's and Glacial Cascade's support options and had a fucking terrible build.

 

[Vic Viper T301]

Currently very annoyed at running into an ice boss that can erase my health from full in a split second and is constantly creating back to back to back AOE ice waves and giving me basically no opportunity to attack ever. One hell of a difficulty spike. I've gotten multiple rings and charms or whatever they're called with fire and lit defense but nothing for ice and then they throw this shit at me.

Edit: Ok this boss really sucks, as melee there is only one move he does that gives any window for me to hit him and he has this thing where he fucks off into the mist and you just have to wait a whole minute for him to come back, fuck whoever thought this was a good idea.

 

[Nottafed]

Whatever they changed yesterday morning, loot is much better. I am actually able to utilize the crafting system now to get items I need. Didnt have to wait to level 14 to even find a white bow. I think I am level 10 now and back at the executioner and have a decent gear setup where every pack doesnt feel like a chore.

 

[Croaking Spider]

Whatever they changed yesterday morning, loot is much better. I am actually able to utilize the crafting system now to get items I need. Didnt have to wait to level 14 to even find a white bow. I think I am level 10 now and back at the executioner and have a decent gear setup where every pack doesnt feel like a chore.

They added loot drop quantity increases with rare monster modifiers and buffed some of the currency drop rates. The difference is definitely noticeable. They've also capped the amount of gold drops you can get from bosses so you won't have 1 white item and 8 gold piles drop anymore.

They've got some other quality-of-life fixes coming down the pipe soon, such as the ability to teleport between checkpoints on the map. Dodge roll is also getting "buffed" in the sense that your player size "scale" will be decreased when you roll so you can still get through gaps without getting body blocked as often. Players are also getting the ability to push small mobs when you roll. For being not even a week in the EA, props to GGG for getting this stuff dealt with quickly. It gives me a little faith they'll keep working on things and dealing with issues when they pop up.

Spoiler: Patch Notes from PoE Forum

Hi everyone. The launch weekend has been a blast. We've really enjoyed seeing all of you get your hands on the game and finally try out the project we have been working on for so long. But now that the launch weekend is over it's time for us to look at the feedback and make some changes. There are lots more things coming. The list in this post are some of the things we felt needed to be more urgently addressed. Some of these changes have already been deployed without a realm restart, others will be deployed in an upcoming patch. Dodge Roll Changes​ A lot of players have expressed frustration about being trapped in by monsters. While it is intended that monsters are able to trap and kill you, we felt that the frequency of this was a little too high. We will be deploying the following changes in an upcoming patch: Player size is now set to Zero units while dodge rolling instead of One unit Some smaller monsters can now be pushed while dodge rolling. This includes monsters such as the Adorned Beetles in Keth. This should result in getting trapped less often. Note that you can still be trapped. A player size of a zero can still not phase through monsters, but it can get through even the smallest gap between them. Checkpoint Changes​ A lot of players have been reporting that it can be tedious to need to retread areas of maps in order to get back to objectives that they already found. We will be deploying the following change in an upcoming patch: Clicking on a checkpoint will allow you to teleport to other checkpoints in the area that are explored on your minimap Checkpoints have been added to all entrances and exits of zones to allow for teleportation A Checkpoint has been added to the midpoint of the first Dreadnaught area We will be making further adjustments to checkpoint positions as we continue to gather feedback. Item Changes​ One of the major problems that players have been experiencing is feeling that the game is not rewarding enough. This is an area that we have to be very careful when adjusting because it's very hard to reduce drops if we increase them by too much. We have identified a few key areas that we believe will significantly improve the experience that players are having. Rare Monster Changes​ We felt that Rare monsters were not rewarding enough. This didn't affect the campaign as much because there are more Unique bosses, increasing the overall amount of drops, but it's especially noticeable when playing in the endgame where Unique monsters are less common. In particular, the reward that you were getting for the increased difficulty of rares wasn't lining up. We have deployed the following changes: Rarity bonus per rare mod has been doubled +10% Quantity bonus per rare mod Increased the chance of rare monsters inherently having more modifiers as you progress through endgame These changes will cause rare monster rewards to naturally scale up as you get to higher levels because the number of mods a monster can have increases throughout the campaign and into endgame. In addition, many other forms of map juicing will indirectly cause rare monsters to have more mods as well, increasing the rewards of these other mechanics too. Also note the change below to make sure each map has a minimum number of rares which will also increase the average number of rare mods, and thus increasing drops further. Currency Changes​ We felt that players were not getting enough of certain currency either in the early game, or to sustain adding mods to maps. We have deployed the following changes: Regal orb drop rates increased around 40% Disenchanting of six mod rares to give two regal shards instead of one. Lesser Jewellers orbs drop rates increased around 33% Reduced the drop rate of Chaos Orbs slightly as they are less valued and so that it doesn't consume so much of the "rare currency" drop pool. This causes currency such as Exalted Orbs to increase somewhat. Gemcutter's Prism drop rates increased by 500% Gemcutter's Prisms now increase quality on gems by 5% instead of 1% Map Mod Changes​ Like with rares, we felt that players were not being rewarded enough for the difficulty that was being added by map mods. We have significantly increased the value of all prefix map mods. We have changed all map prefix mods, but some example changes we have deployed are: Rarity mods have been increased by 2.5x Quantity mods have had extra rarity added to them (This is now in a later patch) We removed the bottom tier of some mods You are much more likely to roll modifiers that affect drops or pack size rather than less useful mods In addition, it has been identified that some areas are not being affected by the "Increased Number of Monster Packs" mod as they should be. We will be fixing these maps to work correctly in a later patch. "Unlucky" Drop Protection​ One of the major issues we have identified are outlier "unlucky" drops. A single Unique boss dropping badly, especially early on can significantly affect your character. We have deployed the following changes: No more than 50% of an Unique monsters drops can be gold Act Bosses and Map Bosses will always drop at least 1 rare The first of these changes is more significant than it first appears because players can't see the difference between "normal" and "rare" gold piles. You will get more equipment and currency items which can take more advantage of the rarity increases that unique monsters provide. Click to Move​ There was an issue where the "Move Only" command was namelocking. This would often result in your character confusingly attacking in an unexpected direction while holding down this action. We have deployed the following change: Move Only no longer namelocks Endgame Maps​ A concern for players in endgame maps is accidentally missing Rare monsters. In addition, many maps did not have the number of rare monsters that they should have had. We will be making the following changes in an upcoming patch: Rare monsters now appear on the minimap when there are 200 monsters remaining, instead of 50 Many maps have had additional rare monsters added to them to make sure that there are a minimum number in every map type. Over the coming weeks we will be continuing to work on map layouts and monster density issues in maps. Conclusion​ We will be posting patch notes for these changes when they're deployed. For a full list of what's just been deployed, check out the patch notes here. There are still a lot more changes to come, these are just some of the changes that are fast for us to make. We will be continuing to monitor feedback and adjusting things as we go.

 

[Quioui]

I have mixed feeling about PoE 2 so far. The WASD movements, graphics, sound design are all amazing. The boss fights feels very satisfying when you finally beat that jerk after a dozen attempt where you feels yourself improving, and it's an interesting departure from PoE 1's 'intentionally die to refresh your mana flask' playstyle.

On the other hand the 20h+ campaign with giant areas, low movement speed, no travel skills where you repeatedly use 4+ ability and are incentivized to full clear any monster on your screen to avoid dying from the over tuned damage of regular white monsters is... eh...

At first I thought it would make for an amazing contrast with end-game player's power, but the more I progress the less optimist I am. I am down to using 1-2 abilities + a trigger gem to clear packs and only get to disregard the danger of white mobs thanks to my AoE freezes.

I dislike the skill tree, there is barely anything exciting and most relevant nodes are behind 5+ travel ones. The gem selection feels small and limited, hopefully this is will improves a lot as they add the missing classes, but for now it feels like you're being rail-road'ed into playing one of a few possible build for your class, an insult to PoE 1.

Crafting in the campaign feels terrible and void of player agency, crafting orbs being common in the campaign was a complete lie. Gold respec is at least 2x too expensive and you can't even play the economy to buy regret orb, you have to pick up and vendor any piece of gear you see to generate enough gold.


Over all it's not a bad game if you only intent to ever play 1 or 2 characters, and there is a lot of potential to make something amazing and extremely replayable à la PoE 1 if GGG wants to. I just don't know that's the direction they're headed when that's the game they released after many closed play-testing and the feeling of 'no fun allowed' I get from the interaction restrictions and many 'one upside for one downside' present on the tree nodes and support gems.

Whoever decided that the first opportunity to get your Ascendency needed to be Sanctum should be shot out of a cannon. Sanctum is already a pretty build-reliant mechanic in PoE1

Yea it's baffling. Running out of Honour shouldn't forfeit your attempt at getting your Ascendancy. Either have running out of honour prevent you from opening any reward chest or allow people to kill the boss and ascend no matter their Honour gauge as long as they have >1 Honour when entering the boss room.
Some builds rely on getting hit to increase their damage, or have a play style that make receiving occasional hit a non-issue in most other circumstances. But now it's a deal breaker gate keeping an important part of your character power and build identity WTF.
I was fine with it as first as it's "Only one of three ways to get Ascendancies" but their balancing of Ultimatum isn't any better and the 3rd way isn't in game yet.
I recommend waiting to be closer to lvl30 before doing the Act 2 Trial of the Sekhemas.

(WASD is great and I hope it gets backported)

Never happening, PoE 2 had its animation rigging made to handle it. One big reason they even started on PoE 2 is PoE 1 rigging system wouldn't let them do what they wanted. I sure hope we do get the Pause ability many have been asking for since Ultimatum League tho.

 

[crowabunga]

PoE 2 had its animation rigging made to handle it.

They could always just make it look like shit with my char moonwalking everywhere when WASDing, not like you can see what's going on anyways.

 

[Pattern Juggler]

Took about 15 tries to get the second ascendancy thingy done. It's wholly down to luck and not skill.

Game becomes far more enjoyable with it done though.

 

[Endlosung]

Took about 15 tries to get the second ascendancy thingy done. It's wholly down to luck and not skill.

Game becomes far more enjoyable with it done though.

Good thing you didn't do the third sekhema trial before the patch. You have poison darts in the boss room, and it turns out they were doing 3x the damage over time and only 2/3 of honour resistance applied to it.

 

[Burning Bridge]

I got to the Viper fight in Act 3, completing the two ascendancies, before noping out. With my previous knowledge of Path, I can already see how boss fights are gonna go. The hardest fights are gonna be Maven on steroids, full of invulnerability phases and dodging bullshit waiting to get your damage in. I saw the Doryani fight through a friend, and that one is a much easier fight.

ETA: The manticore fight for my second ascendancy was easily the least fun I've had killing a boss in this game. It wasn't hard even, it was just chasing the bastard down and then running from his flame breath. His arena is huge with a bunch of Z-axis movement, too.

 

[Haramburger]

Poo 2 bad, Poo 2 dogshit

 

[Endlosung]

ETA: The manticore fight for my second ascendancy was easily the least fun I've had killing a boss in this game. It wasn't hard even, it was just chasing the bastard down and then running from his flame breath. His arena is huge with a bunch of Z-axis movement, too.

Yeah, I don't like that fight as well, shame because it was actually fun when you fight her in the Chimeral Wetlands. PoE 2 heavily incentivizes stun (or freeze/shock), more so than PoE 1. 4th ascendancy fight is also cancer lol, don't even go there without 30% ms boots.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Just got to Act 3 last night. No guide, just previous PoE experience guiding me as I build an Arc-lightning-Sorc. I have my eyes on a 1 divine unique amulet to help with my mana problems as well as bolstering defenses.