I almost quit...But I did not

Greetings,

I play this game since about 6 months now. I read a few messages of people who find the game hard and want to quit. I would like to just put my 2 cents to give some encouragements to those who think to quit:

- The lab: It took me A LOT of practice to be able to do the lab and be able to negotiate the traps. But once you get it, labs are easy. My advice:
- practice and do not mind to die.
- Go to the opposite direction of the moving traps.
- Load up with one +3000 armour and 3 instant pots with remove bleeding, 1 movement potion.
- The Epiphany for me was when I got a THICC JUGG toon. I found out that high armour and high life regeneration made the traps very easy.

- Character: Like almost every new player, I stated with a spell based character (witch). I died a lot. Then I tried a Templar and died almost as much. Again, my epiphany was when I decided to make a low cost Sunder duelist. I still died, but he game time experience and the class made my deaths a lot less frequent. When I made a THICC JUGG, my deaths were very seldom. My last character made it to all the story line with only 2-3 deaths. I remember with my first two characters, I could barely do one map without a death.

- Understanding the mechanics: My next Epiphany was when I watched the 2 videos from Engineering Eternity on damage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhAompSttsU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5WV-MoCQHQ. Once you understand that, you will die a lot less. The second point is to understand the bosses attacks: Once you know the attack is coming, you can move away and not get the brunt of the hit.

- It took me a while to understand how important are the potions. You will cut your deaths by 70% and raise your DPS a lot if you learn to use potions.

- I felt that I was poor and I could never make currency. Currency is money: Once you think you will play this game for a while and give it a shot, buy at least one currency tab and one premium stash tab. Managing currency will be a lot easier and with the premium stash tab, you will be able to sell the two most easiest things to sell: Cards and prophecies. For each one of those, just do a price check and make some chaos. Hoarding unique items is almost worthless because you can buy most of them very cheap in standard. In leagues, you want to sell those ASAP because they lose value with time. Bottom line: You do not need to spend tons of dollars in stash tabs to enjoy the game. Personally, the only things I keep is two of each unique one-handed weapon, one of each 2 handed weapon, one set of gloves, boots, belt and head gear for when I level a character. (P.S.: Now I almost exclusively use poet's pen to level a character).

- There are 5 recipes that I always use: The 2 chaos, The 3 colored links, The chisel, The 40% gemcutter and 40% glassblower bauble and the 6 sockets for 7 jeweller's orb.

- I do not craft. It is a choice I made a while ago. I simply use my currency to buy what I need (not what I want). When I have a lot of low level currency, I find a buyer on currency.poe.trade (or if I get better price with NPC vendors). It is easy to buy a good +maximum life 6-link armour with good armour or good ES under 100 chaos. If you are poorer, just buy a 5-link for under 10 chaos.the

- My number one money making is the cards and prophecies. My number 2 is the skill gems level 20. In a few days, with the second set of weapons, you can raise gems to level 20 and sell them for quite a few chaos. If you do that with 6 gems at 10 chaos each, it is 60 chaos. Not a lot of money for a veteran, but for a new player, it is quite nice. If you check the pricing on poe.trade, you may choose those who sell for the most and make more chaos.

- My last 2 cents : I will not give you all the reasons, but if you are tired to die, I would suggest that you try the THICC JUGG build (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hn40A0geuY)and tweak the tree to make it a Sunder (If you cannot afford the swords and the jewel, the gloves are not mandatory). It is not the fastest map clear or fastest boss killer. But it will be very cheap and you will be able to enjoy most of the content almost death free, you will understand a lot of the game mechanics and make currency for another character type for later play.

I know those advises are basic and may not apply to all players "taste". But it took me a lot of struggling to get at that point and I almost quit the game. I am not a new player in AARPG style games at all. I watched a lot of videos and asked a lot of questions here. With all the research I did, my game play really boil down to the aforementioned points. I hope it will help any new player and if there is an important point that I missed, feel free to chime in.

Thank you

bump

newbs, read that!

ps: i like that positivity in that post.

Your tipps are nice and all but they don't really solve the underlying problems. Yes, you can make a tanky as fuck Juggernaut to reduce your deaths but what if i don't want to die all the time AND don't want to play a juggernaut/Champion? What if i want to play a witch or a dead eye or stuff like that? My templar has 5,6k life, capped res, IC, Arctic Armor and Warlords Mark for Leech so i have quite a bit of defensive investment but it feels like it's for naught. I might as well play with 3k life without any def as i can't tank a moskito bite with it. You literally need Juggernaut levels of defense to not get otked by just about everything.

Dodging Boss mechanics is nice and all, i don't have a problem with an obvious telegraphed attack having otk potential if it's avoidable, but often enough, it's not. Take izaro for example, dodging his attacks in the first 2 encounters is easy enough here it's fair if he can otk. But in the third this is no longer the case. 90% of the area is filled with traps that can kill any non juggernaut char in an instant. You can't even move out of his meele range without getting into trap territory. Dodging all of his attacks and all the traps in a 5 minute long fight is possible i guess but incredibly difficult and for a new player it's borderline impossible. With all the shit going on they will get hectic and make a mistake which means instant death. Heck i still get hectic against izaro after doing him like 20 times because he can do so much damage and there is so much shit going on the screen.

The other thing are rare mob affixes. Some of them do hilarious amounts of burst damage. Normally you would have to read the affixes of every mob before engaging them but with the speed of this game if you hover with your mouse over an approaching mob to read it's affixes your dead long before your done reading.

I like having challenges in a game and i like the fact that this game is challenging, but at the same time it just feels lame and frustrating at times because your forced into lose/lose situations where you have to dodge an otk move but to do so you have to move into some area effect that will otk you just as much. Or Situations where you get killed from full live in a split second without even knowing what hit you. These are my personal favorites.

You need to have a very high frustration tolerance if you want to play this game, if you don't have that your probably better off quitting.

Excellent, excellent and excellent.

You've put a lot of thought and work into this post and your character. There are a lot of good tips here guys. This post will speed up your progression for sure!

Fine job!

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Your tipps are nice and all but they don't really solve the underlying problems. Yes, you can make a tanky as fuck Juggernaut to reduce your deaths but what if i don't want to die all the time AND don't want to play a juggernaut/Champion? What if i want to play a witch or a dead eye or stuff like that? My templar has 5,6k life, capped res, IC, Arctic Armor and Warlords Mark for Leech so i have quite a bit of defensive investment but it feels like it's for naught. I might as well play with 3k life without any def as i can't tank a moskito bite with it. You literally need Juggernaut levels of defense to not get otked by just about everything.

Dodging Boss mechanics is nice and all, i don't have a problem with an obvious telegraphed attack having otk potential if it's avoidable, but often enough, it's not. Take izaro for example, dodging his attacks in the first 2 encounters is easy enough here it's fair if he can otk. But in the third this is no longer the case. 90% of the area is filled with traps that can kill any non juggernaut char in an instant. You can't even move out of his meele range without getting into trap territory. Dodging all of his attacks and all the traps in a 5 minute long fight is possible i guess but incredibly difficult and for a new player it's borderline impossible. With all the shit going on they will get hectic and make a mistake which means instant death. Heck i still get hectic against izaro after doing him like 20 times because he can do so much damage and there is so much shit going on the screen.

The other thing are rare mob affixes. Some of them do hilarious amounts of burst damage. Normally you would have to read the affixes of every mob before engaging them but with the speed of this game if you hover with your mouse over an approaching mob to read it's affixes your dead long before your done reading.

I like having challenges in a game and i like the fact that this game is challenging, but at the same time it just feels lame and frustrating at times because your forced into lose/lose situations where you have to dodge an otk move but to do so you have to move into some area effect that will otk you just as much. Or Situations where you get killed from full live in a split second without even knowing what hit you. These are my personal favorites.

You need to have a very high frustration tolerance if you want to play this game, if you don't have that your probably better off quitting.

You are right with all you say. I just wanted to point out to newcomers that you can build a character with almost no currency and have a character that can farm easily the labs or do almost all content. I am sorry, but with all I read and my experience with a few characters, THICC JUGG is the cheapest and easiest character to play and to farm lab because the traps are a nightmare to new players (Just read all the complaints on boards). The Eternal lab is a very good source of wealth and it is fun when traps are not an issue. The high armour, regen and leech of a THICC JUGG makes it very easy. Using that type of character, a new player can get used to traps without the high frustration of dying in the lab. Once you do a few labs, make a few currency in it, understand a few game mechanics going to a build less tough and more expansive is funnier.

Another example, It took me a while to understand those simple skills links (Working on helm enchant, it is not used in a sunder setup):

I use Blasphemy (I am raising maim here, it has NO relation with the setup. .

For an experienced player, it is sophomoric. For a newcomer, with the amount of "stuff" to learn about the game, it is overwhelming. I am sure many remember the darn upgrade that makes a gem too high for CWDT or a CWDT setup that does not do what you intended because your grasp of the game mechanics is misunderstood.

Or, how many newcomers could that setup work? Honestly, I am not even sure it works, I still need to test it. hehehehe

Finally, I read so many times in posts that newcomers do not use potions. Myself, I began to use other potions than healing and mana potions with basic magic attributes only after about 3 months of play. Now almost all my characters use something ressembling at that with a minor adjustment per character or mapping:


Thank you

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Your tipps are nice and all but they don't really solve the underlying problems. Yes, you can make a tanky as fuck Juggernaut to reduce your deaths but what if i don't want to die all the time AND don't want to play a juggernaut/Champion? What if i want to play a witch or a dead eye or stuff like that? My templar has 5,6k life, capped res, IC, Arctic Armor and Warlords Mark for Leech so i have quite a bit of defensive investment but it feels like it's for naught. I might as well play with 3k life without any def as i can't tank a moskito bite with it. You literally need Juggernaut levels of defense to not get otked by just about everything.

Dodging Boss mechanics is nice and all, i don't have a problem with an obvious telegraphed attack having otk potential if it's avoidable, but often enough, it's not. Take izaro for example, dodging his attacks in the first 2 encounters is easy enough here it's fair if he can otk. But in the third this is no longer the case. 90% of the area is filled with traps that can kill any non juggernaut char in an instant. You can't even move out of his meele range without getting into trap territory. Dodging all of his attacks and all the traps in a 5 minute long fight is possible i guess but incredibly difficult and for a new player it's borderline impossible. With all the shit going on they will get hectic and make a mistake which means instant death. Heck i still get hectic against izaro after doing him like 20 times because he can do so much damage and there is so much shit going on the screen.

The other thing are rare mob affixes. Some of them do hilarious amounts of burst damage. Normally you would have to read the affixes of every mob before engaging them but with the speed of this game if you hover with your mouse over an approaching mob to read it's affixes your dead long before your done reading.

I like having challenges in a game and i like the fact that this game is challenging, but at the same time it just feels lame and frustrating at times because your forced into lose/lose situations where you have to dodge an otk move but to do so you have to move into some area effect that will otk you just as much. Or Situations where you get killed from full live in a split second without even knowing what hit you. These are my personal favorites.

You need to have a very high frustration tolerance if you want to play this game, if you don't have that your probably better off quitting.

I play exclusively HC.

For character that you know they don't have good defenses, you must play defensive game. Avoid bad situations at all cost (slower progress) or have massive dmg so you kill everything immediately.
Shadow / witch are basically leveled so that you stay low, do easy content until you are ready and have a good gear.

But anyways if at the end your character is not having a good defenses or very high DPS, then likely it's not a good build.

P.s.: I'm more on side of defensive setups with still possibly like 200K DPS. :-)

"

Baharoth15 wrote:

Spoiler

Your tipps are nice and all but they don't really solve the underlying problems. Yes, you can make a tanky as fuck Juggernaut to reduce your deaths but what if i don't want to die all the time AND don't want to play a juggernaut/Champion? What if i want to play a witch or a dead eye or stuff like that? My templar has 5,6k life, capped res, IC, Arctic Armor and Warlords Mark for Leech so i have quite a bit of defensive investment but it feels like it's for naught. I might as well play with 3k life without any def as i can't tank a moskito bite with it. You literally need Juggernaut levels of defense to not get otked by just about everything.

Dodging Boss mechanics is nice and all, i don't have a problem with an obvious telegraphed attack having otk potential if it's avoidable, but often enough, it's not. Take izaro for example, dodging his attacks in the first 2 encounters is easy enough here it's fair if he can otk. But in the third this is no longer the case. 90% of the area is filled with traps that can kill any non juggernaut char in an instant. You can't even move out of his meele range without getting into trap territory. Dodging all of his attacks and all the traps in a 5 minute long fight is possible i guess but incredibly difficult and for a new player it's borderline impossible. With all the shit going on they will get hectic and make a mistake which means instant death. Heck i still get hectic against izaro after doing him like 20 times because he can do so much damage and there is so much shit going on the screen.

The other thing are rare mob affixes. Some of them do hilarious amounts of burst damage. Normally you would have to read the affixes of every mob before engaging them but with the speed of this game if you hover with your mouse over an approaching mob to read it's affixes your dead long before your done reading.

I like having challenges in a game and i like the fact that this game is challenging, but at the same time it just feels lame and frustrating at times because your forced into lose/lose situations where you have to dodge an otk move but to do so you have to move into some area effect that will otk you just as much. Or Situations where you get killed from full live in a split second without even knowing what hit you. These are my personal favorites.

You need to have a very high frustration tolerance if you want to play this game, if you don't have that your probably better off quitting.

What you describe is mostly a l2b ("learn to build") problem. The game is designed so that unless you min-max the "right" things in the "right" way you will probably end up with a weak build. You dont have to stick with a certain Ascendancy though - all Ascendancies can be built so that they can easily facetank Izaro if he doesnt have Conduits/Essences - and both can be disabled in the first/second stage. For that you need to invest in the "right" defenses though. Being able to get both offense and defense into the same build requires this min-maxing l2b.
And for a new player it is almost impossible to do this without either following somebody elses build or doing extensive research on the web. (And I dont think this is good design either - but this is how it is.)