Hardcore and why you should play / try it

I will never play Hardcore! It is too easy / not thrilling enough. I will try to explain this. Here's a quote from the OP to begin with:

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There is a thrill to almost dying to a a Mob and then finally killing it. It also keeps you on your toes always trying to improve. Walking into a bossfight knowing that it is you or him, even if you know this boss is easy, it kinda makes you a bit edgy

For the record, the above applies to softcore almost as much. Death at level 80 is extremely punishing; amounting to several nights play being wiped out. Just wanted to point that out.

The thing is in hardcore, you plan not to die. You carefully over-level everything, and carefully take tons of survivability nodes and gear. You are basically trying to avoid a fight unless there is a very good chance you will win it. This is the opposite of softcore, where you don't give a damn and dive in against all the odds; take on anything regardless. The thought of holding back till I'm fairly sure I will win a fight is not in my mentality....CHARGE IN and TRY IT!!

Hardcores don't seem to understand the following bottom line:

Winning a fight where you expected to die is far more thrilling than winning a fight where you expected to live.

This results in softcore players dicing with death far more often than hardcore players. Every minute on Merciless I'd drop to 5% or less HP and just squeak out of it alive. THAT is constantly thrilling, versus hardcore thrilling once in a blue moon when Vaal did something unexpected.

So on softcore you lose less on death than hardcore, sure, but you come close to losing it much more frequently. That's why softcore is more thrilling.

For me, ofc.

Its an interesting point that you loose XP in Softcore and yes this makes it in PoE different to Diablo for example. And sure hard progress is gone...

(and we cauld argue about it if XP loss is at any point a penalty, if you stand blank because you lost so much XP well this would be in my eyes a kind of penalty but this all is about personal opinion)

...if you die in high level but one thing stays. Your Hero is still there ours is gone. Away and will never come back. You just adjust your play and I appreciate your post and I am glad that we both think the same about the different gamestlye for SC & HC. In fact we share the same opinion in the end. How you play is how I played SC long time ago, how I discribed it and its nice to see people still playing it this way. And in HC its flipped, a lazy way to describe it but well lets keep it this way.

Just one thing, when we first time go into a fight, the real first time to a certain white / blue / yellow / orange or boss we don't expect to survive because we never ever did it. We don't know we just think we are ready. After the "world first" kill its more of a grind thing but still we have to care. I know I beat every Zombie pack with closed eyes till now but I have still to take care. Something crazy can always happen. I think we have to take this into our consideration. First time normal act 3 going into the last part (sry I am not the type of guy remembering names of bosses well, never was) this "butcher" ass grabbed me and just straight away oneshooted me. I had zero problems till him but damn this bastard, second time I went there with basically 3 times more defense then I needed and last time I killed him I took much more corners and killed him with a more "just enough" tuned char that i can progress fast but still save. This it how it works for me, each repetition is kind of new because I play a bit more greedy. Simply because I want to catch up to my old point as fast but safe as possible.

Why you shouldn't play hardcore -

Because its an online game full of lag, connection problems, desyncs, and 90% of the hardcore community are elitist jerks.

/thread.

I would have no issue with playing HC is a single player offline game which doesn't have any of those problems.

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flab wrote:

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bhavv wrote:

Why you shouldn't play hardcore -

Because its an online game full of lag, connection problems, desyncs, and 90% of the hardcore community are elitist jerks.

/thread.

I would have no issue with playing HC is a single player offline game which doesn't have any of those problems.

I have no issue playing HC with any of those issues, and more. I do quite well too.

Good for you that you live somewhere with decent internet. A lot of people don't.

200 ping is better than my 300-600 ping spikes in a shitty part of the UK.

People should absolutely not play HC in its current state. I died at lvl 72 due to a desync. I was in a map with 5 other people and I was happily shooting from range nowhere near the monsters. All of a sudden I am dead and in the middle of the pack of monsters. So please OP tell me again what fun there is in HC when you have done nothing wrong for 72 levels and end up dying because of a DESYNC?

Until they fix the issues with desyncs, loading screens and spell effects making your game run at 5 fps in a 6 man party even with a high end pc, I see absolutely NO reason to play HC.

Average ping 300-600. Maximum ping spikes 4000-6000.

Desyncs every few minutes.


Multiple minute pauses and DCs happen for me every 5-10 minutes on most days.