POE: The Best of Games and the Worst of Games

Not to mention that there's no real place in Cruel to grind for good gear due to how poorly paced Dominus is compared with Piety. Because while Piety has counterplay, what's the counterplay to exploding Dominus minions in his first form, and then having to facetank him in his second because of the blood rain?

Basically the dominus fight is "do as much damage as you can to him, burn a TP, recharge potions, lather, rinse, repeat, pray you don't run out of potions".

And it isn't about rerolling, either. A decent build will be able to get through normal and most of cruel without too much trouble. But once you get to cruel scepter of god, you hit the brick wall known as the loot requirements.

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Hilbert wrote:

While I can't find the full post. I am against gearchecks I prefer clever AI's.
I think that level 78 content should be doable by level 78 characters!
In CB you could do level 69 maps with level 69 characters but after 0.11.0 it's more likely a level 78 character will instantly die from Ancestral Bond by Dominus first form.
Gearchecks come from MMORPGs to earn money from the ingameshop or delay gameplay for subscriptions.
PoE gains nothing from Gearchecks.

I second this.

In this game there is a bit too much emphasis on the same boring vanilla rare items which should have life and resists ... Personally I wouldn't build my game around those as necessities. Ensuring that all mods are equally valued, would bring a lot less player whining.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

I actually like the crafting system... it's what makes the game fun in the first place. But players who "need the best" find it "an abomination". Here's the thing... no one needs the best. You don't need 6L. You don't need your rares to be optimal. You don't need an item so good that the million players will all give you stuff just to look at it.

The crafting system allows you to dream of this stuff, and makes it next to impossible to obtain it. It's doing it's job perfectly. Yes, it's frustrating. If it weren't, you wouldn't value the items you could create. Yes, it relies entirely on luck. What else would you have it rely on? Skill? What skill?

I think that if you look at it... crafting in PoE is it's strongest point.

Your "bad" points are comments on your (and most players) playstyle... not on the game. If you were to play self found HC, you would find the game a lot more fun. You don't sit in town trading. That's the abomination. You find items all the time. You craft items occasionally. And you die, and get to play the game again. It's fun. You've turned the game into a job and are complaining it's not fun. Learn to have fun.

This. The craft is perfect as it is, maybe a few tweaks? I dont know, but this guy is 100% correct.

On the other part, yes, we need more "fun" stuff to drop.

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johnnysd wrote:

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CirePadela wrote:

In response to the OP there is an idea i'd like to throw out there.

That is, when it comes to finding loot items they currently drop with random properties that any lesser level item may have. So you might find a level 66 rare weapon but it may only have mods that a level 14 can have at best. This means as the item level increases so too does the chance for it to have even more crappy mods that you never want to see. This makes crafting all the worse as you then have to gamble at trying to get one of the higher item mods (if you know what to look for) in a gigantic pool where no only are you wading through different mods you don't want, but ones that are too weak as well.

There is no current incentive to even attempt crafting because of this unless you've got a full page of orbs to spend on an item and even then it may be questionable.

I think a solution GGG may like ( as opposed to changing the current system entirely) could be to instead make higher level items only draw out of a minimum level mod pool. So for example a level 66 weapon can at worst only draw mods from item level 40 mods and up. Who knows, we might actually start seeing good gear more often if they did this.

Let me just say, i love this game and just making new builds and trying to reach level 100 is enough to keep playing. I don't need what feels like an artificial time sink in order to stick around. In all honesty it's driven me to frustration and taking lengthy breaks from playing because of it instead.

I can see the merits in that, but what you describe is exactly what GGG wants to avoid because over time there would be a glut of awesome items in the economy. Keep in mind in domination and normal, good to great items NEVER go away, so the average level of gear gets better and better.

The ideal is to find a way that provides continuous minor upgrades and interesting items without flooding the economy with the best items. D2 solved this through additional item types such as gems, jewels, charms, runes, set items, class specific items, horadric cube upgrade recipes etc, so even if you didnt find better gear for the character you were playing you still found cool stuff.

I'd disagree. While there may be some creep I would doubt it would ever be over abundant. The reason why is for myself as example have 7 alternate characters. Last night I spent about two weeks worth of farming to try and get one of two mods i had hoped for and never got one. Two weeks down the drain for a single piece of gear to replace the same weapon i've been using for a month that i had found halfway through Cruel. That's just once piece of gear one one character. Never mind the other six.

I suppose I could always third party pay for a new weapon because I don't see much other choice in trying to get a better item. I don't want to, but considering my time to play is finite and this "crafting" system is undeniably awful I don't feel that i have too many options.

for a game that use no real currency and aiming forward for trading, surely this game has gone in the wrong direction. people hoard their rarer currency item, not to use it on their item but to buy other item in the market. it create it's own gold.

what i can suggest is make all currency item have same drop rate and quality use. one currency should not superior to the other. and since there is 3 main stat, int, dex and str, the currency item differentiate with it, like alteration orb of int give you random mod of int based stat like max mana or energy shield. and add monster specific item, gear recipe and unique set item.

and stop nerfing, add harder game content rather than nerfing, that way more people will get challenged to play more not leave the game because their build get splattered.

I'm probably going to get crucified for saying this, but as a casual player I really like the loot/crafting system as it is.

Good gear (I mean, gear that can take you through merciless to mid-maps) is cheap and plentiful. Great gear is a bit more expensive. Godly gear/exceedingly rare uniques are rediculously expensive and will not be seen by most players, period.

I think what GGG is fighting most is player expectations -- they see the possibilities, and assume that they will be able to achive those possibilities. When it turns out that those possibilities are beyond their reach due to their own lack of time/trading desire or acumen/farming ability, the rage begins.

In most games, the godly end-game gear is FAR more accessible to the majority of the player population. That doesn't mean PoE is broken, just different. And I like it -- I enjoy having long term goals (get that ilevel 79 Harbinger 6 linked and over 300 dps!) as well as short term goals (try new builds, run maps/new content, dip my toe into races or pvp).

I've been here since OB and as far as I can see the game has enough to keep me playing for ages.

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estu87 wrote:

for a game that use no real currency and aiming forward for trading, surely this game has gone in the wrong direction. people hoard their rarer currency item, not to use it on their item but to buy other item in the market. it create it's own gold.

This really. Why use an exalt which will probably give me +11 Dex or lower item requirements instead of an actual useful mod? I just feel sorry for newer players yet to figure this out and feel cheated later on when they get to Merc.

I think that a lot of the problems that people express with this game come from a desire to be competitive and that's totally valid.

However, as a single player game, where you're just overcoming your own personal challenges, there is no other ARPG on the market that offers the same enjoyment that POE does, at any price point.

This game could have been a full retail price release and I'd still be spending countless hours late at night trying to get the next piece of gear or the next passive or the next slot link.

I get that there is a multiplayer component to this game. Maybe I'm more forgiving because I remember playing my games for hundreds (some games got thousands!) of hours before the widespread advent of the internet. And POE is more than amazing at just that task.

Also for all the claim against being pay-to-win. Stash microtransactions IS pay-to-win.

Why? Because Chris stated that this game is about trading and the economy. And because that that storage is incredibly important because it is an integral part of those elements for traders throughout history.

1) Having more stash space makes account and characters more efficient.
2) It reduces the amount of time it takes to make a trade, you don't have to change account to advertise and make a sale.
3) It gives you far more inventory space before you have to make a clearance sale to vendors.
4) It gives you more space and time to do all those chaos/regal orb recipes.
5) It minimize the amount of time you have to spent in Town, especially with Premium tab because you have more organized inventory need far less time to decide how to organize your stash.
6) It allows you to find your items quicker
7) It greatly improve your ability to complete achievements like collecting and KEEPING all those special unique thanks to more space and easier trading.

It is the difference between moving to another house by packing your stuff inside your car and constantly traveling back and forth, to renting a moving truck to move all the stuff at once.
It is the difference between two civilization. One have a advance storage technology like refrigeration and thus could afford to store resources like food over the long term. While another civilization have only a simply silo/warehouse and thus have much shorter window to utilize their resource before they either rot away or quickly lose their value.

Time is Money in Trading and Economy, and if Chris' vision is that POE be a trading game, stash is definitely pay-to-win.

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plasticeyes wrote:

THIS THIS THIS
The vendors in trading of exiles are worthless as you start getting close to merciless. not too bad in normal, but normal's freaking easy.

WHY WHY WHY do the vendors not have rares ?

When I played Torchlight 2 the vendor items leveled nicely. Sometimes as I was beginning to have trouble with gear I would find something consistent with my level. Not GG, not OP, just enough that I could make it through the next couple of levels without getting dying all the time.

And could we please, please stop pretending there is no currency in this game. Oh how I wish this game did have gold, and I might have a chance to buy something wortwhile from the vendor, instead of some joker who thinks that an ammie with quantity and flat damage is worth 3 ex.

BTW, I notice that no one is mentioning the elephant in the room which is RMT. It's destroying the ability of people like me to enjoy the game. It's _extremely_ difficult for me to find the gear I need, and I'm not looking for Kaom's either.

Not to mention, Vendor ONLY refresh their inventory upon level up. Therefore they quickly become even more useless as if they didn't already start to plummet in value as soon as you advance through normal.

With all those things you can't control in this game, I'm surprised GGG haven't implement this:
1) You have a random chance of obtaining 0-2 passive points on level up.
2) Each time you create a character, the passive tree is randomly generated.
3) Your body parts is randomly attached to your body upon character creation.