Monk of Embers (Elemental Fire Monk) GGG I'M SORRY!!

I will start with the fact that I am an old-school player, with Lands of Lore being my first memorable RPG. Not many moving parts, to be fair, but the story and the characters kept you enthralled. As with most of those games in the genre, moving into Neverwinter, Baldur's Gate, etc., it was the story that led you to explore. It was the story that dropped the clues to where your journey should lead.

Beyond all the POE2 hype (I never played POE1 to any degree I could comment on), I have been mainly disappointed. I may be a seasoned player, but I am not an AARPG expert. I've played a wide range of games over my gaming life, but two key things keep players engaged: the 'fun' factor (after all, we use gaming to escape into a realm of enjoyment) and progression or betterment. POE2 fails at these two basic points.

Last night, I actually played the first few maps of POE1 for the first time, as I really needed to step away from POE2. The contrast was striking. Within a few minutes, I was adding skills to weapons, building my meager gear, adding skills that helped me survive, and managing to navigate the map and story easily. Wow, three hours later, I had to nudge myself. I was actually having more fun in this legacy version of POE than I had in the last few days grinding the lovely maps of POE2.

I know this is early access, I know there will — hopefully — be huge changes before release, and I know some games are just not for everybody. But they can be. There was talk of this being the entry point to ARPGs for new players of the genre. Ouch. This will be the source of many of your negative reviews; they are suffering right now. I have 'suffered' over these last few days, and it wasn't 'fun' at all. Key words that come to mind: frustration, tiredness, boredom, relief, sadness, anger, rage, helplessness.

I'm not denying I made life difficult for myself; I chose to be a Monk whose main focus was the Element of Fire. A 'Monk of Embers,' if you will. Having no previous knowledge of the game, I had no idea of the rod I was making for my own back. My farming until now — mid Act 2 — has been trying to boost power while struggling to engage mobs on the highest level I can to make the most of XP. To even attempt any bosses, I have needed to be 4+ levels above the area minimum. To date, I have not been able to defeat all the end-of-area bosses myself — Praetor, Wolf, and Titan — a friend had to jump in to assist. Also, a Monk built following the linear path for weapons and skills.

This is a single-player game because the moment you request assistance, the game/boss, etc., just gets harder, which defeats the object of having somebody join you. In my opinion, mob difficulty should only increase once you have 3 or more in your party. This would encourage more team play and enable people to share the experience without any XP loss.

The backpack size and having to spawn a portal every 5 minutes is time-wasting, frustrating, and an utter waste of my gaming time. You have no choice early game but to pick up everything to sell, and 80% of your playtime is traveling back to town. Pure stupidity. It's a game; give me a ludicrously sized backpack I can upgrade. In my short time in POE1, I had changed my kit, added 5 skills, and felt prepared before I hit the fourth area. In POE2, you are wearing level 6 items when you are level 20, as nothing has dropped or appeared in the trader that is better than what you are wearing. This isn't to say the level 6 gear piece is good; it's that everything else is just trash.

I upgraded a couple of items which were good enough to use, but found myself hoarding upgrade items to use on a piece that would feel like I was wasting them as it just took so long to swap gear out. That being said, a friend got a 50% rarity boost on an item that kicked in if his health was 'low' as another item deemed 75% 'low health.' He was posting up unique after unique, which just made matters more unbearable.

What needs to change to improve?
Your little friend, rock, kiwi, needs to be a scrap carrier. Anything you deem to be scrap after you pick up goes to him and is considered sold, meaning you only fill up your backpack with items you want to keep. You can retrieve items from him but only before you traverse back to camp. Then all 'scrap' is locked in and sold, and you can spend a few minutes sorting your keepers.

Remove all 'unidentified' items below Rare and Unique, which have to be identified every time. You can use the hooded guy to identify if you have scrolls of Wisdom in store or you pay him gold to cover the cost of a scroll.

Have a skill level choice on bosses or a buff that costs XP gain or drop loss. Having to farm boring maps over and over again just to try and gain some passives to help get past a boss is just soul-crushing. Most people don't have half their life to play a game. They want to move through, enjoy the story, and move on to another game — sorry, but that's the reality. Most will leave this game unfinished with a negative review.

Or even a 'skip Boss' option so you can carry on with the story. What does it matter? How does this impact anybody else if I choose to forfeit my drops and XP from a boss just to continue?

At the end of the day, it's about choice, and this game doesn't give you any. Do or die.

I think beyond everything else, I'm disappointed. I had a group of friends ready to roll in and play, and we've all been playing separately and struggling while relying on our highest-level player to assist with boss fights. Just seems broken and not what was intended.

I'll take a break but will struggle on and hope that my Elemental Monk will finally get a fire-based quarterstaff and be able to hold his own with the rest of them.

Thanks for reading.

Sorry but you made things tough for yourself going fire monk. Especially in EA the classes seem to be shoehorned into specific elemental/weapon combos, disjointed passive tree doesn't help either. Monk, being dex/int hybrid, is ice/lightning damage, almost all of quarterstaves skill gems being ice/lightning should be enough of a clue. Going fire is simply unviable and probably the major reason for your frustration.

Like Tempest Bell + Ice Strike/Tempest Flurry is pretty much enough to do all 6 acts. My main dps skill for two first acts was basic attack with cold infusion and I don't think I've ever had boss HP bar last longer than 1-2 minutes. Still had multiple deaths on some since defenses are rough at the beginning when you're 2-hit by most bosses but tighter movement and better gameplay always did the job.

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tinmei#3775 wrote:

Sorry but you made things tough for yourself...

You are 100% correct. I got well into Act 2 and the Monk to Level 30. It was hard, I mean it was gruelling at times trying to get through boss fights that would last well over 4 to 5 minutes if I didn't get smashed... and I usually ended up getting smashed anyway. It was hard.

So I bit the bullett and started a new Character as a friend was also starting. I chose Warrior as I'd heard it wasn't the best and I wanted to see the contrast between the Monk I had been struggling with for 5 days.

OMFG!!!

I steamed through the first 3 maps.. I even went into red vale just to get the spawn point and ended up clearing it... I said to a friend in Discord 'Oh jesus I just cleared Red Vale at Level 5' then realised the area is actually a level 5 area. ^^ I think my Monk was level 8 or 9 before I could clear that.

We then joined up with another friend - so 3 of us - and ran through and completed Act 1 in about 2 hours, out of all of us I was smashing it, almost had max support gems on about 8 different skills... Jesus, it was liek I was playing a different game.

I feel like an absolute fool. I just wonder how many people are suffering the same experince on other characters simply because the build is not following the slightly desginated path for skills..?

There is no doubt my initial experince was tarred by my own choices, but there was nothing preventing me from doing or supporting the choices I made to keep me at the same power as I should have been.

Hopefully the Monk will get an elemntal fire tree, and it won't be a fringe build.

GGG I take it all back... I'm sorry.

It's not just the monk.

Fire damage is terrible for everyone. Ignite is useless and there's also no secondary Ailment for Ignite. Shock get Electrocute, Chill gets Freeze. If you look over at the top tree all the Fire nodes are worse than Lightning / Cold. Fire it setup to fail.