At first, I thought the skill/leveling system would be amazing

Lol why is everyone dismissing the OPs claims when they're true? All he wants are for builds outside of HP stacking to be viable in HC. There shouldn't be one dominate way of playing the game.

Stop being a sheep.

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timed wrote:

I'm sure you could skimp on the life nodes. But you greatly increase your chances of getting 1-shot and losing 100s of hours.

There are players that are contradicting you claims. Please go talk to them about it. You are incorrect about this. This is ignorant at best.

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Aaronator wrote:

Stop being a sheep.

That wool over your eyes sure looks flammable...

i agree with op but about that level of magnitude. ggg could and should find way for everything to work, or at least bump armor & evasion mechanics.

That's one of the tough decisions you'll have to make in Hardcore, and one of the reasons that the leagues are such an exciting feature in Path of Exile.

In the normal Hardcore League, go ahead and stack hitpoints. In every game since Diablo II that's been the optimal decision, no matter how hard a designer tries to balance it out. Why? Because hitpoints are always there. They're not chance-based. They're not dependent on your resistance values.

The problem is that in that environment, the only factor kill speed will have on your success is that you need to kill packs before you run out of HP, and you need to kill packs fast enough to match your flask drinking.

Now let's take a look at a Hardcore Race League. Now you have to balance kill speed with survivability. If you don't have enough life, you fail. But if you gimp your kill speed too much, you'll also fail. So when you're optimizing a build, the passive choices become more painful. Can you survive the next level--and as you increase in level, your time between skill points grows--or should you invest in health? Now, granted, there's a lot more to winning a race than your passives, but that's also part of the fun.

But then again, your post reveals more about you than I think you realize: You're not in this game to experiment, discover, and have fun. You're here to recreate the "best/good builds," produced by the hard work of people who aren't you.

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MrChristo wrote:

My main HC build before open beat was a high move speed archer who used split arrow + ~90% pierce. I was pure evasion and only got enough HP to not get one shot. This really was not that hard to achieve and was easy to balance due to the fact that I had +45% life recovery from flasks as a key part of my passive build. I am actually in the process of reproducing this character right now (sitting at start of cruel currently) and would be further if I wasn't getting distracted by trying out other fun builds.

While I can admit this isn't as safe as staking hp and being nigh indestructible, I find it to be a lot more fun. Try using your imagination! Just because there are "better" builds, does not mean you can't find something that is much more fun :P

I thought like you once, till I took an arrow to the knee ( vaal laser on merci ) had 2.5k life and max res on my ele bow templar ( great build going to make it again at some point.

Then at that point I reaised you HAVE to stack life nodes to live end game and not get 1 shotted. Or walk into a wall of archers/mages around a corner and live.

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SenorPez wrote:

In the normal Hardcore League, go ahead and stack hitpoints. In every game since Diablo II that's been the optimal decision, no matter how hard a designer tries to balance it out. Why? Because hitpoints are always there. They're not chance-based. They're not dependent on your resistance values.

This is false because you're not considering how defenses like armor, evasion, and resists take your health pool and raise it to a much higher effective health pool.

High health with no defenses is just high health. What you see is what you get.

Moderate health mixed with good defenses is better than just high health.

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Aaronator wrote:

Lol why is everyone dismissing the OPs claims when they're true? All he wants are for builds outside of HP stacking to be viable in HC. There shouldn't be one dominate way of playing the game.

Stop being a sheep.

Because they don't think it's an interesting claim.

Having a buffer of life/ES to work with your other defenses is just normal. The prominent builds are not defined by their life nodes any more than they're defined by the +10 stat nodes. Spending points in the skill tree isn't made boring because of points spent on stats/travel/life because there's still a lot of decision-making regarding _how_ you do that to best support the strategic nodes and clusters that will enable the desired playstyle and gem combinations.

Next thing you can complain about resist stacking. Everybody is doing it!

THIS JUST IN: In Hardcore, most players stack the single most important stat for keeping yourself alive. Experts are divided as to what could cause such an unexpected trend.

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timed wrote:

I'm sure you could skimp on the life nodes. But you greatly increase your chances of getting 1-shot and losing 100s of hours.

I'm confused by this. While I've never been a HC player in any game, I've had quite a few conversations with HC fans over several games. When I ask what the appeal is the answer is always the same. Every single one of the HC players I've spoken to says that the appeal is the excitement over the risk of losing the character you've put hundreds of hours into.

Perhaps I'm missing something (a very real possibility), but it seems to me that if these people are to be believed then hardcore may not be the place for you.

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kuromahou wrote:

So people should not have the option to make their character overly survivable if they choose?

The problem is you can stack 200% life, all the rest into block and evasion and still not be overly defensive. life currently is the only way to migrate high damage hits and because armor does near nothing even more life is needed.