Beating Nemesis without rares or uniques
" CI is a very specific build choice, but you're right - it can't really be pulled off right now without gear. I think CI needs a tweak, like a buff of the ES nodes after it and maybe a notable after it that changes status effects to be based on ES instead of Life. That would remove the need for Unwavering or the specific unique items, and ease the need to find so much ES on gear. Otherwise if you're not going CI you still have lots of options. My Storm Call Shadow is level 70, in Act 3 Merciless. I have about 2500 HP and shit for armor, but I use block/dodge/evasion and I almost never get hit. I've only made one trade ever, so it's not like I'm enabled by godly gear. We'll see what happens when I start mapping, but I'm really enjoying the character so far. I don't have the fastest clear speed, and I have to stay on my toes, but I find that challenge fun. [EDIT] For what it's worth, here's my build: SCShadow No Iron Reflexes, no MoM, no Scion wheel of life, and so far only one (completely avoidable) death on that character. Last edited by Eight88#0861 on Dec 20, 2013, 6:06:44 PM
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is there a proof anywhere for what the te claims? no? ok then i dont believe it.
chatterbox Neurotypicals are the worst thing this planet ever experienced.
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" No, YOU are missing the point. Beating the game has literally ZERO to do with finding "uber" gear because the storyline questing is so trivial. Even if he succeeds, it doesn't mean that drops don't suck. Doing 100 piety runs and logging finds is more towards proof that drops don't suck, not what OP is doing. " Sorry, I forgot to mention Skele Totem + Anything. Storm call gets a lot easier when nothing is moving. Anything low life: Shavronne's or Chaos Res Gear, both high tier Cast on Crit: Almost requires a 6 socket, these are supposed to be like finding jesus the way people rant about how noone but the most elite should have them Crit Based LA: Voltaxic or die to reflect, high tier Ground Slam: Marohi or High Dmg Rare, otherwise so slow to kill anything, decently high tier Anything CI: Dream Fragments and Eye of Chayula, not super high tier, but still need both or death city Anything Dagger/Wand/Staff based: Good luck finding a good one since hybrid stats, better off crafting, which is a top tier only thing Ele Cleave/Reave: Soul Taker or no mana. High tier. etc. Could you run a lot of these without said items? Sure. You are gonna suck ass in maps though. You know, the place where you are most likely to find the items you need. Furthermore, how many build enabling uniques are almost unachievable for anyone that plays under 3 hours a day? Too many. The 99% totally have build customization. They'll just grind for 5 months/10 hours a day before finding the build unlocking item they need. Or they could sit in trade for eons not actually playing the game. Or they could just run the build unoptimized without the item and progress/grind 10x slower than anyone with it, further hampering their ability to get any further items they may need. It's a clusterfuck. Unlimited build customization if you want to suck is the bottom line. OP is proving nothing here. The part of the game that he is playing has such an abysmal chance of dropping anything decent. Lets see him grind maps, where you actually have a shot at finding decent stuff. You know, ACTUAL end game. Let's see just how long before anything high tier actually drops when he is going through a map every hour because of shitty clear speed from shitty gear. Maybe he'll die of boredom and prove my point. |
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" I dunno..what you're describing is playing the game. It sounds like what you want is to be able to find everything you need to clear maps efficiently as you rush through Normal/Cruel/Merc. But if the whole point of clearing maps efficiently (read: steamroll without paying attention and no danger of lost life) is so that you can find what you need to...clear maps efficiently, why would you bother with maps at all if you had all the drops you needed come to you by playing through the storyline? It just sounds like the current design of this game isn't your idea of fun. |
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" You are actually quite observant. I like to make powerful characters and I like to slaughter armies. It pisses me off when I enjoy a game up to the point where they gate my progress with drop rates or some other asinine mechanic just to draw the game out. I played D2 for years upon years and there was 0 gating there. Meph runs for 5 hours? No prob. I didn't mind the grind as I could almost guarantee I would find something valuable/useful. Now, I digress: Imagine if PoE was actually designed around making a lot of powerful characters instead of taking forever to make one powerful one: - Drop rate improves for higher tier items, gap between common and rare shortened for both uniques and higher tier currency. *Note that it says improves. This doesn't turn the game into Voltaxic hand-out sessions.* With that one change: 1) Gap between Rich and Poor lessens as currency can actually be found and traded for items much easier and quicker than now. Since only higher tier items' frequency is changed, it doesn't scale the whole economy down. 2) Since an item's strength isn't tied to it's rarity, it becomes easier to balance and make the game more challenging across the board for all players. 3) RMT site usage driven down since players can actually find items instead of spending days trading to acquire them. 4) More characters means more Microtransactions. I know, personally, that I literally cannot stuff any more MTX onto my main and don't have any incentive to roll another character since everything is currently being dumped into that one. 5) Players become more knowledgeable across the board since everyone is experiencing more characters. 6) Players stay entertained longer as they can just switch characters when they get board of using one. 7) Other "high-end" or "prestigious" items can be added for those who enjoy grinding long and hard for something to hold over others, such as (but not limited to): a) find-only microtransactions b) find-only skins c) multi-tiered uniques (raw stats get better, but at least the lower tiered ones open up build options) d) ultra rare base items with better stats (with expensive formula to upgrade standard items to, to prevent the currency paradox) etc. Might dump more in a separate thread, but you get the idea. Now, this doesn't mean that it's going to rain Crown of Eyes' and Kaom's. It just means that acquiring the 20+ exalt items becomes easier. You could rely on Storm Shield dropping from Mephisto (in D2) if you run him enough times. You can make no such assumptions in PoE. That's what the goal of this change would be; to make GRINDING for items an option, just like trading. Right now, you trade hard or die miserable and poor. |
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" hmmm, you can already do that... lol. It must suck when your entire wall of text is based around this fallacy. Kinda makes you realize, how much time you wasted writing all that? |
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Lots of discussion.
Everyone must be done christmas shopping and going back to check If I'm dead. I'll address several comments that have been made a) Can't Find shit for gear I think I made this pretty clear in several logs (specifically my rant on trading) that you do not find your own gear very often, you find other peoples gear. How long do you think the 5link that I purchased would sit in the shop if I didn't come along? A very long time. I've been on the other side of the trading ladder: my level 80 on HC standard sells junk to noobs. It takes a very long time for anything to get sold, even if its a good item because in this game you have very specific gear needs. You want a certain base item, with certain mods, at a certain price/quality ratio (for instance even if I find a chest plate on the base item you want, with the rolls you want, the rolls may be extremly high and so they are out of your price range). I think I've demonstrated pretty well that you can find pass-able items on a budget. While a white 5 link chest piece (later crafted into a mediocre blue) may not be the ideal thing to do merciless with it's working out. A lot of players go shopping for extremely top end gear and are disappointed they have to pay an exalt or even more. Those are not your items, they are someone elses items, maybe you should buy a 5 link instead of a 6 link or one with worst rolls. You need to plan your budget. If you are middle class you don't go to a place selling luxury cars and ask for 90% off. You go to a place that sells economy cars. b) Only build is health stacking In MtG you always run around 20 land In an RTS you always create worker units In chess you always start by advancing your pawns and knights In PoE you always stack health and max your resists There are some exceptions to these (CI doesnt stack health, some chess plans are bishop heavy, theres some mtg decks that run 2 or less lands) but these are just core elements of what a successful strategy has. My storm caller build runs almost nothing but life/resist rolls on her gear yet I have max resist and a sizable life pool. If I can do this with just 2 mods on gear. If I was running rares with more than 2 mods I could get what stats I wanted: crit, damage, item find, mana, block, extra armor, etc. I'm not running any fancy gimmick where I perma freeze everything, double spell totem, or have an endless horde of zombies. Just an extremely generic build. I run many utility skills like molten shell and relay heavily on my custom flasks but many other builds can use these things. My node path is actually pretty offensive heavy compared to most builds. My level 80 templar has only around 5 offensive nodes in his entire tree. I get an impressive 120% increased damage from my tree as a well as around 11% cast speed, eventually I will add shock chance to my arsenal of offense. If I can manage to get enough life/resist with shitty magic items that many players wouldn't even pick up up off the ground than those of your with rares/uniques should easily be able to match my defenses AND do whatever customization you want. c) Mapping and end game. Some people have a certain obsession with a mythical thing called 'end game' where the game suddenly becomes way more skill based and everything becomes fun and awesome. There is no such thing. If 'end game' was so awesome than the developers would just make you do it at the start and not waste 95% of the budget on making the leveling process. 'end game' is sort of a mantra that players chant to silence opposition "it gets better at end game" "wait till end game" "once I get to end game" Its a terrible play style to skip over all the joys of the leveling process so that you can grind piety over and over again as your only activity. It reminds me of people who play a game like super metroid, follow a strategy guide, beat it in a day, and than complain it wasn't that great. Not only have you completely ruined your play experience but you have spoiled yourself and can never experience it properly (or if you were to watch a mystery movie but read a comprehensive summery of every plot twist before seeing it) Some of us though are just bored with the leveling process and muddle with the terrible 'end game' because we have nothing else to do. For those you who have never done mapping here is what it is like: you have a slider that goes in 2 directions. One direction makes the maps easier but give less drops the other makes it harder but give more drops. You want to have the highest 'drops per minute' without killing yourself. It gets a bit more complicated than that and theres some tricky resource management involved. But its basically an optimization puzzle. The developers want to appease all their players to make the most money. There is a certain group of players who will chew through content faster than anyone and will be obsessive with having the highest numbers they can. To appease these players the developers made 6 links incredibly hard to get, uniques like koams and shavs that almost never drop, and top-end rolls on rares that are seen as often as bigfoot. These Godly items are not for us common folk, they are not even for me. They are for only the most dedicated shit-sockers in the game, and if you've seen someone run a map using these things you would know its like they are using a cheat code. d) Reflect Reflect is one my favorite mechanics in the game because it forces you to change your playstyle so much (at least when it actually hurts you) Casters such as myself do not worry about reflect when our resists are maxed. Bow users/melee folk that do hybrid damage (like infernal blow) also do not need to worry. Physical folk just use a warlords curse, life leach gear or stack a bunch of armor. Once you get into mapping and there can be multiple sources of reflect (the map could have a reflect mod and the enemies have their own) or your DPS is just outrageously high from GGG than it becomes more of an issue. There are many ways around this, having a trap skill, a totem, a second skill (if your main skill is cyclone maybe you should also get a glacial hammer for physical refelct) If all else fails you just need to play more defensively, attack a bit than heal up with potions. |
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" Yea, if you sit in trade chat for a month straight. Unless I misunderstood you, which would be easy since you provided nothing constructive to explaining why its a "fallacy." It's only time wasted if posts, such as yours, are the only ones that respond to it. |
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" a) The whole "finding someone else's gear" is exactly the problem. Spending time spamming trade chat is insanely more profitable than actually grinding for gear. You find just enough currency to start flipping and you sit in chat for months. You even said it yourself "It takes a very long time for anything to get sold." I, much like many if not most others, enjoy actually playing the games we choose, not almost exclusively playing businessman in them. Yes, you can play the game with shit gear. You can also "beat" the game with it. This is known. But who in their right mind aims for mediocrity? Why don't you just beat the game in whites if being powerful isn't fun? Whatever answer you give for that is probably going to be the same answer I give for anyone saying not everyone deserves 6l's. b) Dead DPS don't. I agree there, but saying that just because you are doing fine with Health/Res blues doesn't mean "using the extra stats on rares" is easy. It is much harder to get desirable stats on rares because they drop much less often, cannot be rerolled cheaply, and are much less available from vendors (if at all? don't think I've seen one). Finding a rare with Health/Resists with the inherent defensive mod you need is hard enough, yet the mods on top of that are supposed to be some huge boon? Did you forget how many throw away stats there are? c) Yea, End Game. The best you got vs. the best the opponent has. For you, it seems, the fun is in leveling. For others, such as myself, the fun is in being a badass. Hard to be a badass when you aren't at your best possible (i.e. leveled). With the changes I proposed, the end game gets a lot more interesting as you have a lot more equipped builds to throw at a much more evenly difficult end. You also have the goal of finding gear (which you really don't do now, you trade for it, you said so yourself) for your other characters. The players such as yourself that enjoy leveling can still level and be happy. Who loses here? d) Reflect is a lazy developers difficulty. Then again, there isn't much room to allow the player to do much since desynch is an issue. It's kind of the only option left. I completely disagree with you here, but this is for another thread, imo, as the topic always turns ugly. |
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" It doesn't matter what I explain. Your kind will never agree with me. Even if I prove you wrong, you're still right. I'd have more success arguing with russians then with you.I don't even speak russian!!! There's always some excuse, whether it's trading, grinding blah blah blah. People already have high end characters, and it doesn't take "forever" to make one. Some have more then 5 characters "very powerfull ones". Yes there are items in game that you need to put work into getting. You are not entitled to them. It's how the game is built. If you don't like it, there's other games out there who will give you just that. If you were to increase drop rates, by how much will you increase them? out of the 2mil ppl that play I'm sure each and everyone of them will have a different % rate. It would be impossible to agree on. You joined this game based on the premise that you are entitled to every gear in game. Maybe they should make it so that you can get to level 60 in 2hours. Maybe add a daily quest that can give you kaoms... That's not the philosophy of this game. The game is not built around smashing your head on the keyboard to get to the mystical land of "late game" with yolo god gear. Then smash your head on the keyboard in 20man raids until the carrot on the stick gets updated in the new patch or expansion. That's the most lethargic game design ever, it's beyond fucking stupid!!! |
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