POE 2 speed slowed down. Yay or Nay ?

its visual cancer, i had no critique about mechanics

that aside, you gonna tell me this character has significant recoup numbers and its not the life gain on hit that is doing the heavy lifting?

There's a link in my bio that you can visit to read the build guide.

I'd say that 54-70% Recoup when you are getting hit for 30 damage roughly 500 times a second, with 1k Leech, 360 Life Regen and about 6 Life on Hit is enough to tank a Shaper Beam that deals about 4.9k damage per second. Wouldn't you agree.

Obviously you are outsustaining it.

But its also true that you are ignoring the boss mechanic which lets you get way with seeing less.

<reaction gif removed>

Or it could be that it's a mere side product of the build and I still know the fight well enough because I was there when Shaper was first introduced 8 years ago, lol.

What that has to do with anything is beyond me, and this is starting to go way off track.

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

1453R wrote:

what is the point in making an exact, one-for-one clone of Path of Exile 1 with absolutely no differences whatsoever between the two games save for a vaguely updated cosmetic coat of paint?

I don't think anyone is asking for a copy-paste kind of game.

But sequels often build upon what made the original game great. And while we may disagree on what makes PoE 1 great, or even if it's great at all, fast paced gameplay has been an integral part of PoE for almost a decade now. For A LOT of people, fast paced gameplay is a synonym for PoE and indeed one of the mechanics that makes PoE 1 great (IMO), not to mention one of the mechanics that actually makes PoE stand out from the crowd, where you have TONS of alternatives that are slower and more... "Tactical".

Don't get me wrong here, everyone understands why they'll make things different this time around, even Baumis does. But in a world of FIFA, Call of Duty, Assassins Creed or whatever, where developers sell MILLIONS of copies with the "same game with a new story and a fresh coat of paint" because players want it, it's a little bit ignorant to just sweep the idea under the rug as something meaningless.

I certainly can't blame players for being "afraid" that PoE 2 will lose something in the process - something the really benefited in making PoE 1 great. And GGG being deliberately vague with info/showcases regarding PoE 2 endgame and what kind of improvements we can expect for PoE 1 going forward don't really help... At all...

Been ruminating on this since you posted it, while the weekend was giving me guff. And I suppose it's the crux of the issue.

Different people have different things they think of as 'Core to the PoE Experience'. For me and many others, the core of that experience is depth of customization and buildability. Where Diablo 4 is a model kit with only one "right" way to build something, PoE is a Lego set that lets you play as you like.

For some people in that particular bucket, the current ceiling of character scaling and speed of play are an active detriment to what we perceive the core of PoE to be. What does it really matter that I can wring a couple million DPS out of a neat interaction I found with a few dozen chaos worth of gear when the rest of the game is tuned to the Streamer Memers who can manifest twenty Mirrors a day out of literally nothing and use the same half-dozen or so "YOU CAN ONLY DO THIS IF YOU HAVE INFINITE CURRENCY" scaling tricks every single league to take whatever they're doing to 10B pinnacle DPS and trivialize content it's increasingly impossible to see if you're not one of those players?

Yeah yeah, Baumis or someone else will be along shortly with "that sounds like a You problem to me". Sure. I suck at PoE. Roger. But so do a very large number of people, if the bar for basic competence in PoE is "can manifest twenty Mirrors a day from literally nothing and gear up enough to render every single encounter in the game utterly meaningless within three days of league start."

I mean, the last half-dozen posts are proof enough - someone else mentioned that a build being shown was 'visual cancer', and was told they're dumb and bad for not understanding what's happening. That's not true. I understand perfectly well what I'm seeing - I've watched enough Jousis videos to recognize a cascading CWDT loop when I see one. It's not about not understanding what's being seen - it's about hating that we're seeing it.

If PoE2 had gone the other way - if it had doubled down on the scaling and speed of play, to the point where trillions of damage was the norm rather than billions and movement speeds in excess of fifty times baseline character speed was considered the expected bar to meet, in a system where they were dropping most of the customization and Lego buildiness the game was previously known for? Then I'd likely be dismissing PoE2 altogether and frankly would probably be moving away from Path of Exile as a whole. In that respect I can understand where some people might feel some kind of way about Grinding Gear 'betraying' the thing they loved about the original.

It's why I don't really blame people for saying they're not interested in PoE2 - if the thing they love most about PoE1 was the absolute insanity you can get up to at the highest end of scaling, then yeah. The second game has nothing for them. I just wish people would understand that there is absolutely a market for "All of PoE1's Lego buildy coolness, but at like 10% of its decade-of-power-sprint bloated insanity." The success of the Soulslike genre as a whole shows there's tons of room in the market for slower, more deliberate games where you have to actually engage with what's on the screen. I'm excited to see where GGG's semi-hybridized approach lands, and I'm totally fine with other people being less excited. The less-excited people constantly castigating and badmouthing the more-exicted people is less okay.

I'm aware I've been guilty of the opposite in the past, and I am making an active effort to be better about it these days. No excuses, just some time for reflection and taking in a wider array of viewpoints. But I will never really be able to understand the active hatred people have towards PoE2, this idea that it's killing PoE1, when every indication we have is that Grinding Gear fully and strongly intends to support both games moving forward. It's why I keep telling people the game they love will be here. I can get the disappointment at not getting some of the promised improvements from 2019. I cannot get the definitive sense I see in so many people here that GGG is actively and maliciously trying to deceive PoE1 adherents about keepin their game alive only to bilk them for money prior to turning off the servers with a full-up Snidely Whiplash chortle. It is utterly baffling.

Do you know why people are so convinced the first game will die within a year of the second game releasing? because truly, I do not get it.

"

1453R wrote:

I understand perfectly well what I'm seeing - I've watched enough Jousis videos to recognize a cascading CWDT loop when I see one. It's not about not understanding what's being seen - it's about hating that we're seeing it.

Yeah, but no one asked. Jousis has a combined >13M views on YouTube. This super basic unedited video of mine has over 28k views, and my CWDT/COC builds on my old (deleted) channel were my most watched videos, with >40-80k views respectively, but clearly, people hate these builds so much.

"

1453R wrote:

The success of the Soulslike genre as a whole shows there's tons of room in the market for slower, more deliberate games where you have to actually engage with what's on the screen.

This is exactly what I meant in my earlier post. You keep using Souls-likes as examples, but it doesn't make any sense. You also previously mentioned Elden Ring, which actually has the overall fastest pace of the franchise and is also the most successful to date. Sekiro, Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 are all much faster than DS1 and DS2, but still slower paced than Elden Ring.

"

1453R wrote:

But I will never really be able to understand the active hatred people have towards PoE2

The same way I don't understand why you have to keep bashing my build of choice. I don't constantly bash one of your builds and label it "cancer" and "the literal worst", do I? It's actually incredibly annoying.

As I've said before, there's a difference between saying you don't like something and going out of your way to hate on it. You have done it again in this reply, too. Several times, in fact.

Sigh.

Baumis, I was not trying to throw heaps of shade. I rambled because I woke up only recently and haven't had my coffee yet.

I enjoy watching Jousis videos as much as the next gal. He's an entertaining presenter, his song covers are fantastic, and I like that he acknowledges the utter absurdity of what he's doing.

I would never play one of his builds. I would never use them to try and draw someone new into PoE. When I show my friends Jousis videos, it is with the explicit understanding that doing so reduces their desire to ever actually play PoE, and I show them those videos simply because Jousis is entertaining and they like laughing at the absurdity of these builds' existence.

Those builds are not aspirational content to me, or to anyone I've ever shown one to. They are circus attractions. They are funny-haha YouTube memes amusing to watch for a couple of minutes but exhausting to contemplate controlling for hundreds of hours at a stretch.

Does this mean I think less of Jousis, or of people who enjoy playing those builds? No. As I said to Phrazz, I've been trying to be better about being a cranky old biddy of late. I don't always succeed, but I am trying. When I think less of people, it's because they're exclusionary gatekeep-y assholes trying to claim anyone who hasn't cleared the 10B DPS mark and put Uber Maven on AFK Farm status Isn't A Real Path of Exile Player. or it's because those people are being jerks about the new direction PoE2 is going and accusing anyone who likes that direction of Not Being A Real Path of Exile Player.

You showed a gif of a cascading CWDT spellcast loop in action. A couple people saw it and said "yeah, this is what I hate about PoE1." That isn't "we hate you personally, Baumis". It's "this thing is a perfect example of why the original game simply isn't any fun anymore, and why I'm excited for what the second game is doing."

* * *

My favorite build I've ever made/played is a self-cast Stormfire Arc Ignite Elementalist, using the single best item I've ever personally looted in PoE.



I fire Arc into packs and watch rippling waves of flame incinerate my foes, spreading from my homing lightning in visible rivers of burning corpses. It uses a self-cast Hexbloom Flammability and Smite/Vaal Smite to enhance its electric flames at need. I experimented with some layered defensive mechanics I'd discovered on YT at the time, which give her enough durability to mostly deal with higher-end red maps so long as I'm careful. Trogdora is the only Standard league build I go back to and play at times just because playing her makes me smile.

I don't care that the build is terrible by Streamer Member standards. I care that it's the kind of build I could easily see myself reprising in PoE2 and having fun with all over again. To me, Burninatress Trogdora is always my go-to example of what PoE2 could be - I found a seriously cool item, looked at its modifiers and said "what can I do with this?", and ended up producing the strongest build I've ever personally designed since the days of Molten Strike being bonkers.

I can do that in PoE2, or at least such is my fond hope. Nobody can really do that in PoE1 anymore. Not unless they're a Streamer Memer with infinite currency.

"

1453R wrote:

...

I get where you are coming from, and some of your points are far from "far-fetched". I do somewhat disagree with some of your points regarding the scaling in PoE.

PoE is a game where you really FEEL the progression. You start out as a nobody and end up like a god. The "power fantasy" is something most players strive towards; be as powerful as we can be. PoE lets you be really powerful. Nothing wrong with that, unless the game gets balanced around it.

So the question will always be; is the game balanced around it? Or in this case; is the game balanced around going "super fast"? And to this question, there is no definitive answer. If we look at GOOD players doing T17 maps early in the league, they are going relatively slow. The same thing can we see in HC. And they have no problems doing the content at "lower" speeds. So here, the answer would be "no, speed is not required".

The other angle we can look at it from, is drop rates. Is it required to go fast to have a chance at getting the best items? This is where it gets interesting, as Chris has always been in favor of the "the more dice you roll, the more sixes you'll get" approach. And that approach is inevitable in an RNG setting. But do strats favoring "slower" builds exist? Yes. Expedition is still a VERY good strat.

So to me, the main problem here, is that the game LETS you go fast. That it doesn't cap your movement speed? That you CAN scale it too far, even though you don't have to?

---

And regarding PoE 2 and scaling... When the lead game director of PoE 2 has publically said that it's OK for the elite players to be a thousand times more powerful than the "regular Joe" (**), I wouldn't really expect PoE 2 to be much different when it comes to endgame differences, even though it will arguable be slower. But we'll see.

** I don't remember if the wording was "a thousand", but it was a BIG number. I'll search for the quote.

---

And regarding the "death of PoE 1"...

I don't think the game will die within the first year. But when is PoE 1 the most fun? At league launch when there's lots of people playing, lots of new stuff, trade is blossoming, chat is active, discords are active, forum is active... The community is active. The shorter this period gets, the faster the game will die. And now, PoE 1 has gotten a HUGE new competitor. Sure, they will alternate the leagues, but how many players will actively play both? Of course one of the games will suffer, most likely the oldest game.

Hell, we can even look at history here. How many games do not lose a major size of its player base when a sequel gets released? I'm sure Diablo 3 "still exists", but in a game centered around trade (like PoE), it isn't enough to just "exists".

"

Phrazz wrote:

snipped for brevity

I will say that over time my stance on "fast" has shifted. I know that historically that's been my gripe, but I've realized as time rolls ever forwards that what I hate isn't necessarily speed itself, but rather how absolutely unintuitive and awful everything is in PoE1 now.

You can build a character with 50+% additional footspeed and still be considered brutally slow by PoE Snobheads because you're not Shield Charging literally everywhere at +700% movement speed instead. Literally just walking is Inefficient and a Gross Suboptimization; you HAVE to use a travel skill for 100% of your movement, whether or not that travel skill makes any bloody sense for what you're doing. It's wild, and it drives me nuts because it's so counterintuitive that a skill used to slam into groups of enemies with a shield is considered a replacement for legs instead of...a skill for slamming into groups of enemies with a shield.

The economy is much the same, and the chief source of my woes with PoE1. You can't make money by playing PoE1 anymore. Not really. You make money by mass-farming some esoteric thing, then selling tabs full of 5k+ of that thing on TFT. Or through some other backwards, utterly counterintuitive "strategy" you can only ever learn by spending hundreds of hours watching Streamer Memers play PoE for you.

"Optimized play" no longer makes any remote sense and cannot be arrived at without deeply unintuitive, out-of-game methods, and the gulf between Optimized Play-ers and regular PoE1 players has grown so wide and unbridgeable that a strong majority of the game's endgame content is simply unreachable by anyone without 500+ hours of watching Zizaran under their belts.

Like, for all that the forum community likes to meme on folks like me for being lolterrible at PoE1? I've still defeated the Eater of Worlds and the Searing Exarch, which fewer than four percent of Steam players have done. I've dropped most of the game's endgame bosses at some point, I've gotten the achievable for 100%-ing the Atlas which includes doing all the corrupted T16 maps and most of the unique ones exempting the Hall of Frickin' Grandmasters. I am not "terrible" at Path of Exile...but the level the game is trying to demand everyone in it operate at is so far beyond what I can manage it may as well be on the Moon. I will never get to 10B+ pinnacle DPS within three days of league start with an easy, casual 500-divine "early game basic" budget, and that is now the level at which one is expected to be in order to be "a real Path of Exile player".

I know Jonathan's thousand-times statement seems like an endorsement of that division. But remember that a thousandfold difference between an actual new, kinda bad player running 50k DPS with a four-link Double Strike using dogshit effectively-random dropped gear and an "elite" player would be fifty million DPS instead. 50M is one thousand times higher than 50k...and 50M is still considered garbo dogshit Rookie Numbers by the PoE1 community. The "thousandfold" difference accounts for actually bad players, not just Non-Elite players like myself who can still crack a million total DPS in a goodly chunk of their for-serious builds.

That sort of scaling makes it incrediblyt discouraging to try and play the game, and often leaves me feeling like there's no point in doing so. I actually very much liked Settlers of Kalguur and consider it one of the strongest leagues I've played, but I didn't play for much more than a month and a half because why bother? I'm not gonna get anywehre, I'm not going to accomplish anything save getting into red maps the way I usually do. Maybe go after Eater and Exarch again, but who cares? That's not clearing thirty Uber fights a day in twenty seconds or less per fight, and that's the only bar that matters anymore.

My hope is that this is pulled back in PoE2 by a large amount, and even if it isn't? Well hell, for a while at the start at least the gap between Ordinary Player asnd Elite Player will not be so wide you can't even see across it. Nobody will have figured out all the blatantly counterinutitive 'optimizations' yet and there will be room for simply playing and experimenting yourself, doing cool stuff just because you want to do it.

There's no room for that in PoE1 anymore. Not unless you can casually farm up a couple hundred divines a day, and I simply cannot do that. So...oh well. Guess the game doesn't have room for me anymore. My only hope is the second one will.

"

1453R wrote:

I will never get to 10B+ pinnacle DPS within three days of league start with an easy, casual 500-divine "early game basic" budget, and that is now the level at which one is expected to be in order to be "a real Path of Exile player".

I know your post is filled by exaggerations, and that I (sort of) have to be OK with that, as we are on the internet after all. But it's hard for me to "decipher" where you are exaggerating, and where you are actually just mislead by what you call "real Path of Exile players".

To me, it seems like you're letting other people dictate your fun of the game. You never talk about the game forcing you to go fast or do "10B+ pinnacle DPS", you only talk about other people's expectations of you and your builds.

Every player with some knowledge can tell you that you do not need a travel skill - if you don't want to use it. The same player will also tell you that you do not need anything close to "10B+ DPS", unless you're trying to dethrone Steve at 50.000 depths, or doing the hardest Valdo's maps, both content that are made SPECIFICALLY for the Uber Elites.

10+ million damage, depending on your build (melee, DoT, defenses and so on) is in some cases more than enough to beat all Ubers - if you know the mechanics. And that amount of damage isn't that hard to reach. At least if you're a player that is dedicated enough to not just beat the game, the endgame, but also the Uber endgame. Steps upon steps added to make sure there are challenges for all kind of players, encouraging players to say "this is how far I got this league, and that's OK. Maybe I'll get farther next league, or maybe not". We don't have to beat everything to have fun in PoE, right?

But you've hard this a thousand times before, I'm sure. You can chose to ignore it and keep exaggerating the next time too, I won't judge you; it's still the internet. But I think it may make some people not take you're post seriously, as they may actually not understand the exaggeration, and actually believe that you 100% think you NEED a travel skill or "10B+ pinnacle DPS".

---

I do however agree that "just playing the game" is somewhat unrewarding as of late. If you're not running a scarab strategy, it takes way too long to really make an economical dent, so to speak. Personally, I very much like testing out different strategies, finding something I actually like doing. And one of the reasons I very much like ARPGs with an actual endgame, is because I like grinding. When I find something I find fun (Harbinger farming this league), I can do the same thing for hours and have fun every step of the way.

But that isn't for everyone, and I feel that the core game could be a little bit more rewarding, and that using 1-2 Scarabs wouldn't feel like "not worth it". How they'd manage this, though, I'm not sure.