Path of Exile

My beef with PP is mainly just the person who made it. Even being objective I still think it is more deserving of a swing of the nerfbat than other items that got toned down recently, like Shimmeron getting ruined while PP was untouched is batshit insane. I think it's worse than even the original version of Bisco's too.

You could try a Herald of Agony build of some sort, assuming the skill gets left as it is for 3.5. Can mix it up with bow stuff like RoA or Toxic Rain if you prefer a more active playstyle than the full minion version I used.

I was gonna league start with Arc Totems. I have never played Poet's Pen before; if it doesn't get nerfed I was gonna try it out. I don't know if I can get a Zerphi's or not and I cant decide between the arc/lightning warp or volatile dead versions. 2345

Starting build will depend on what the new league will bring us...but I'm kinda itching for cyclone. Maybe some of the new/re-vamped spells. Don't have a goal yet...maybe do more group play. Solo is a bit boring, but wouldn't mind having a core group to roll with to see what that's like. My bunnyboy, Mr. Deathwing, and Wizardcawk get first dibs!

Captain Suave said:

Cool. I'm not impressed by the substitution of invective and hyperbole for actual discussion. All you've said so far is "Fuck you, you're wrong and stupid" and not made any points beyond angrily asserting that was I said isn't true. I'm sorry that I don't think the game is as perfect as you think it is. Carry on.

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Because you haven't made any points beyond "this is bad game design because I say so" while completely missing the bigger picture, which is wrong and stupid.

Maybe I’m missing something - D3 is all about sets. Can take about the same amount of time to make a set work for its 2-3 actives on D3 as rolling a fucking new character on POE because you got a cool drop that makes a different set workout.

I guess I’m not seeing it...I played a thorns crusader last time I played d3. I ran from room to room clicking one button. Here I’m smiting and dom blowing (hah) from room to room. My skill and reflexes absolutely matter.

I will say I don’t feel the control is as tight. But fuck, the engineers are the only people at blizzard that still know what the fuck they’re doing.

Playing a cyclone build in PoE compared to a whirlwind build in D3 is night and day. Diablo's graphics and controls trumps PoEs. Even though I played the hell out of PoE the controls always felt clunky compared to D3's.

Strossus said:

i swapped to a templar, and have been smiting my way through things, need a good 4 red socket armor soon, but so far no dice, havng fun am low 40's now in act 4

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I put some stuff on page 6 of the gstash for you, if you are in the delve league.

Captain Suave said:

Regardless of your play style, stacking passive attributes isn't as fun as compared to managing active skills. You're free to disagree there, and that's fine.

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Define your terms dude - you seem to be using "play style" to mean "combat play style". PoE's game play actually includes two major categories: combat play style and build generation. Each of these can further be subdivided into things like movement, pacing, active ability micromanagement, inventory control, creating trees vs. copying trees, and on and on. Furthermore, these two aspects of play are inseparably related with passives significantly altering combat play style. When you use "play style" the way you do it is dismissive of everything that is not combat play style as not game play. This is why your comment makes no fucking sense, and people are (correctly) treating it like hand-waving.

To build on this, we could split kills/clears into two "checks" a skill check for combat play and a build optimization check for build generation. If you're watching "pros" and highlight reels you are filtering for only players who have the ability to meet the skill checks, so what a huge surprise that most of what you see them doing is optimizing build generation. Note that I said "most". Your comment is dismissive of the massive amount of players who don't meet the various skill checks and die for non-build optimization generation reasons, including the pros whose comments in threads and on streams you hand-waved away.

And this leads to why you are getting the type of responses you are on this board. Missing aspects of a discussion when putting forth an argument can be due to lack of understanding or error, but when it is done in a consistent way that just happens to support only your position it's probably disingenuous and definitely stupid.

Springbok said:

I finally downloaded this and got into it over the weekend - playing standard league to get my bearings while waiting for the next league to drop (a few weeks maybe?).

Wanted an easy noob build and went Templar/Arc/Ball Lightning. It's a ton of fun, though it's movement is really slow. Shit just explodes all over the place. Game is definitely fun, but lacks some of the polish you see in Diablo - at this point though, fuck Blizzard. This game is free, I've felt no need or urge to spend a $ (though I probably will if for no other reason than to support the developers), and it's really fun and dark. Story, I'm not even sure who or what I'm talking to half the time but I guess I've never played these games for a story

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Game at higher levels is much much faster than D3, you should keep going =)

You should re-roll on Delve, whatever you end up doing there will get rolled into Standard at the end of the league.

End game can mean a lot of things. Here are some of the things people do at "end game".

Run T16 maps and Shaper/Uber Elder. The ladder of which is probably the most challenging, normal content.
Go deep in delves.
Run a mapping strategy to hit certain divination cards and farm currency, usually with a MF build (item quantity to hit those divs)
Run Uber Lab for enchants and other gear.

Lowball said:

Define your terms dude - you seem to be using "play style" to mean "combat play style". PoE's game play actually includes two major categories: combat play style and build generation. Each of these can further be subdivided into things like movement, pacing, active ability micromanagement, inventory control, creating trees vs. copying trees, and on and on. Furthermore, these two aspects of play are inseparably related with passives significantly altering combat play style. When you use "play style" the way you do it is dismissive of everything that is not combat play style as not game play. This is why your comment makes no fucking sense, and people are (correctly) treating it like hand-waving.

To build on this, we could split kills/clears into two "checks" a skill check for combat play and a build optimization check for build generation. If you're watching "pros" and highlight reels you are filtering for only players who have the ability to meet the skill checks, so what a huge surprise that most of what you see them doing is optimizing build generation. Note that I said "most". Your comment is dismissive of the massive amount of players who don't meet the various skill checks and die for non-build optimization generation reasons, including the pros whose comments in threads and on streams you hand-waved away.

And this leads to why you are getting the type of responses you are on this board. Missing aspects of a discussion when putting forth an argument can be due to lack of understanding or error, but when it is done in a consistent way that just happens to support only your position it's probably disingenuous and definitely stupid.

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See, that's part of an actual discussion. If I was abusing terms (unintentionally, I assure you) and being vague over important differences, it's much more useful to point that out. Thanks.

I was trying not to dump a massive wall of text on my first few posts with a paragraph defining every term I used, but that was clearly the wrong approach. You're correct that I was talking about moment-to moment "combat play style". I didn't mean that to be dismissive of the rest of the game, rather just to make a more narrow point. I do see how it's easy to read my posts the other way, and that's on me. What I meant was that, moment to moment, PoE demands relatively little from the players in terms of "Do I use this now or do I use this later?" decision-making due to the constant hp/mana availability that comes from the rate-based resource model. Other mechanics common to the genre (cooldowns, controlling the space of play with walls, aggro management/CC, etc.) are either not present or are underwhelming/ineffective compare to the alternatives of min/maxing one active skill and killing things faster. D3 is a game with enough other flaws that I don't play it any more, but for the most part every build had small stable of skills of varying availability with distinct mechanics (yes, you can make different builds with different mechanics, but that's not the same thing) from which the player was drawing on an ongoing basis, many of them with a builder/spender resource paradigm, and to me that feels better in a "combat play style", flow-state kind of way.

Anyway, it appears that I am badly wrong. I'm willing to entertain that and reevaluate. I appreciate those of you willing to engage constructively.

Captain Suave said:

What I meant was that, moment to moment, PoE demands relatively little from the players in terms of "Do I use this now or do I use this later?" decision-making due to the rate-based resource systems and lack of cooldowns, and it seems like other mechanics common to the genre (controlling the space of play with walls, aggro management/CC, etc.) are either not present or are underwhelming/ineffective compare to the alternatives of min/maxing one active skill and killing things faster.

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Which is totally wrong, just go watch videos of the pros play and try to copy exactly what they're doing. End-game encounters take tons of time to learn, and how you build your character to complete that content is 100% based on your "do I use this now or do I use this later" decision making ability. Further, staying alive is 100x more important and harder than dealing damage, and the slightest mis-click will leave your character dead because it means you didn't control your space, manage your aggro, or use crowd control properly.

James said:

how you build your character to complete that content is 100% based on your "do I use this now or do I use this later" decision making ability

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Totally honest question, just to be sure we're talking about the same thing. What active skill/abilty/resource use is there that comes at the cost of not being able to do it later in a well-constructed build? I don't mean the mechanical sense of "Do I attack now from this position or use my movement skill to get out of the way of the giant beam of death?", rather "If I use ability A now I can't use it for a while due to resource constraints" or "Using ability A now forces me to use ability B and/or C before I can do A again". (Flasks do fit that description, I admit.) I can't really recall seeing a build where the resources aren't at an effective steady state averaged over >0.5s, unless you're talking about life/ES and they're about to die.

cooldowns and resources management.. So.. Vaal skills, flasks, and charges.
Flasks in PoE are incredibly powerful, and the very definition of what you are asking. Timed use to use during specific events. such, as dropping aoe blind, or aoe healing ground. or phasing.

Vaal skills of course as well, exactly that. Timed and resource use for mega evade, or massive shock application, or army of minions. Recent change combining base skills and vaal skills makes THESE even easier to work into builds. I personally try to run vaal cold snap in cwdt now. Free frenzy charges from base cold snap being constantly procced, on kills. Then vaal cold snap, on call manually casting.

General CD skills in poe... eh... they are not balanced well. I'll give you that one. Either you can burn charges to remove the CD, or they suck complete balls, and are near useless, due to the CD.
Frenzy/end/power charges. End charges have a few decent uses as use on call. refill. Frenzy/flicker basically works only when you have options to fill up constantly.

Rampage.