Path of Exile

So it's obviously hard to make a judgment call this soon but my hype is around a 2/5 and might sit this one out.

Primary reason is i see the tower defense going 1 of 2 ways, a chore that you're forced to micromanage for longer / map than i'd care for with a clunky and ugly UI and finicky clicking or something you just breeze through so its in affect no different from breach or legion and while i enjoyed legion the simplicity got stale. I realize i might seem impossible to please but those are my feelings and prediction.

-Anointing seems Very powerful for the amount of effort and risk you take, lower risk (no risk actually) than vaaling for example for an extra curse. So it is powerful but not extremely so in the grand scheme of things just compared to the cost/risk its obviously powerful but is it worth playing this league for it?

-I like and don't like the QoL master changes. The reasons its nice are pretty obvious i think but i fear it might enhance the feeling of a daily quest grind since they shove it in your face, kind of depressing. (btw should totally save your white/yellow/red niko dailys for T5/10/16)

-Just personally i don't find myself too attracted to any of the presented archetypes.

I'll follow all the announcements up to release cause i do love this game and the theorycrafting etc but i burned out a bit on actually playing it/farming currency

If you could've queued the Blight events like the master missions (odds are this will be one of their 3-week-in changes people clamor for) I'd be way more for it. The TD will definitely interrupt the gameplay flow for fast clearing builds. All the QoL shit looks amazing. I've played summoner for like 5 leagues and they were definitely hurting for more action keys. The new skills hopefully will allow you to toggle on stances for them or something to make them focus fire a boss or just go kill everything. Kind of a Inc AE/Conc AE type setup but for your goons. I know they literally said that's what they added, but we'll see in what form it takes shape exactly.

Chris said Raider was supposed to be worked in 3.8 and he confirmed it is. He said they're getting number changes, but not a complete re-work until 4.0.

The notable stuff is cool, I wonder if that means they've weighed notables with values since the oil shit is tiered. What really shines to me about that is you can finally try and get that awesome 2hand sword node from Ranger area as a Inq or Berserker or something. Stuff that are really good, but would've made you path another 15+ skill points just to get.

Overall I think a lot of people are very concerned with the TD stuff. PoE just works better with braindead stuff like abyss/breach/legion. Hell, people even complained about Incursion being too hard to master. I'm definitely playing, but I really hope this doesn't end up like Synth and just completely die out 3-4 weeks in.

50/50 now. I have two builds I’m interested in trying, neither of which are involved in any re-work mentioned. Maybe I’ll try those two and be done in 3-4 weeks.

Well, the announcement is like, 25% of the excitement. Then like 15% is the little trinkets they drop until patch notes day. Then it's ALL about them patch notes. Skill changes, unique changes, reworks, allll the good stuff.

And of course, watching the 8 hour VOD of drunk Mathil reading the patch notes.

Are people really that happy for another bar? I mean, I guess it’ll be nice to just tap some keys for all the auras then go back to mashing my kill button, flask button, and my movement button. Maybe my curse button....

I'm pretty burned out on PoE. I bailed out quick on the last league. Nothing particularly wrong with it either. Just, felt like hitting up some other games, and working through my backlog.
I'm not sure I will touch this one.

Caeden said:

Are people really that happy for another bar? I mean, I guess it’ll be nice to just tap some keys for all the auras then go back to mashing my kill button, flask button, and my movement button. Maybe my curse button....

Click to expand...

I'm not, poe has just about the right amount of buttons for my taste but I get that there are plenty of people who can maintain and accurately hit 10 or more buttons playing at the pace of a game like this. I cannot pull that off if my hand or fingers have to reposition. Q through T and side mouse with a "cough" button "cough" for flasks.

The thing that I really did not like seeing were icons all over the damn place which bring up menus which then need to be chosen and clicked. From the video it seemed like that was going on while mobs were attacking and just looked ponderous. I do not want fast and accurate clicking of icons and then icons on a skill wheel to be considered skillful gameplay. I'm pretty skeptical that we won't be able to just eviscerate every mob on screen anyway though. The league will end up pretty unpopular if people have to rely on those pillars all the time which will undermine the hell out of their character.

Pyros said:

Yeah although TD with ARPG works decently well, there was that kinda meh ARPG called Van Helsing Adventures or whatever it was, they made like 3 or 4 of these and they had a TD system to build your base up and it was pretty fun. I don't know how well it'll work in this though since PoE is way faster paced so it might be hard to keep track of shit, but honestly kinda don't give a shit also.

Click to expand...

Tower defense, one of my least favorite genres. The Adventures of Van Helsing 2 opened with a big Tower Defense section and I noped and uninstalled it immediately - what I had to do in 1 was already too much and the second game STARTED with it.

! suppose I could just ignore it and enjoy the QoL upgrades, as others have stated. But DAMN SON, this is the least interested I've been in a league release maybe ever.

A big thing people seem to be missing about this TD is that mobs only attack things ON the blight vines. So, you won't be attacked if you're not on them. Except at one part of the video I saw a mob wander off it to go beat on the guy, but maybe if you hit them first they can come off. If not then it shouldn't be that bad for most people. Just position yourself accordingly. Totems will probably destroy, but it seems like the actual towers will do basically all the damage. You'll just need SOME damage to finish off the mobs early.

I like that the oil recipes will be set and have no random element. A free passive will be interesting. The 13 secret passives might include some of value.

League mechanic looks like shit, master change is very nice. Oil recipes seem like they could result in anything from minor powercreep to massive powercreep depending on how good the uniques you can use them on are. Just being able to automatically put +1 curse on an amulet (or any other good one if you don't need a +1 curse amulet) for free is pretty strong and now there will be +2 curse amulets (assuming whisper of doom is one of the available keystones)… This is going to free up tons of potential skill points from suboptimal pathing to grab certain keystones.

I'm sure i'll play it when it launches but if it's as unfun as i'm thinking it's going to be then I might not stick around very long, unless it's a mechanic I can just flat out ignore.

Looks like a good match for my planned arc totem starter. I actually planned a character in PoB for the first time and came out to about 5mill DPS as a Scion with arc totems and nothing crazy gear wise...dunno if I want to do that or just a regular hiero though.

People liked cyclone not just because it was OP. It was easy to start a map and cyclone thru it then out and do whatever you want, another map, dick with the stash or whatever. So popular now let's add a tower defense game in the middle of mapping.....wut? I don't want another league I have to watch videos (ZiggyD) in particular to figure out how the basics of the league work.

Having said that I'll probably wind up playing after some of the early stuff is figured out just because I don't have anything else to do now. So they have that going for them lol.

bigmark268 said:

Oh man I wonder if that old caster skeleton build may become crazy sauce

Click to expand...

Did that to 95 with that big pledge of hands. It was very face roll.

So I guess make a starter build and maybe switch over once the dust has settled on what skills off the tree you can put on an amulet. Hate to start a build and invest heavily into it only to find nothing really fits into it or your backup build has the best one.

Pyros said:

I mean you can always just add more life to that shit. They've shown Golem's Blood which is 10%life and 1.6% regen, so I think you'll be able to find something regardless. Obviously Whispers of Doom looks like one of the strongest one if not the strongest, but if it does exist it'll probably require 3 of the most rare oils, costing dozens of exalts to make.

Waiting for Necro rework reveal and potential minion rework before I pick my stuff but probably leaning towards zombies/skeletons/carrion golem, looks like the basic stuff, makes use of the new summon, should be strong regardless of changes and can use the new conversion gloves on it.

Also doing some quick maths, aren't we going to get pretty much every notable? If we assume they only work with individual vials per recipe, then it'd "only" be 220 permutations so I guess they'd be handpicking them, however one of the screenshot shows 2 of the same vials in the combination UI and if we can actually use several of the same vials, then it'd be ~80million permutations which obviously means everything will work, it'll just require finding the correct vials.

Click to expand...

According to the pcinvasion article, it's 364 possible, including the 13 secret passives.

edit: looked at the math. x^3=364 -> x = ~5.38 different oils unless there are more possible outcomes for amulets than the article says. That also assumes it's a combination of 3 only.