As a new player to POE, endgame is the worst experience in gaming ever

As the title says, I'm now a lvl 88 invoker monk, I don't have a stupid OP build. I don't have insane gear. I have 75%+ resistance to all magic classes besides in chaos which is on 60%. My evasion is 56% WHILE using the "Acrobatics" skill from the tree without I have around 12000 evasion rating. And otherwise I have 1713 HP 1730 energy shield. In my humble opinion, decent stats.

I'm now trying to do tier 12+ maps alone, I barely have any rarity increments on my gear so the droprate on everything is just horrendous.

And as I'm clearing maps that don't drop gear and barely give XP, I just get randomly one-tapped. Nothing I can do, just full health to zero in under a second.
Here are some examples of what I've died to:

Some pack that was increased in size from a waystone effect starts chain stunning/pinning me as they all finish their same cast simultaneously but just out of sync enough I cannot dodge roll enough abilities.

I walk into a tower map approaching a thunder shrine with ignite patches on the ground and the thunder one-taps me and I can't avoid the ignite patches because the space is too narrow and I need to reach the shrine to disable the effect. Literally died while drinking from my health flask. As the ignite effect already ate through my energy shield.

Two underground worms I cannot hit until they come above ground, pop up and oneshot me. Cannot predict where or when they will pop-up, just have to take it in the face.

A rare mob that casts a singular chaos beam one-taps me while standing at the outer edge of my camera and somehow I have to see that he has this ability in a list of 4 modifiers while he's among like a pack of other mobs that's trying to kill me.

A rare mob with mana drain, run speed buff, and frost explosion on death, chases me down because I cannot outrun it, I kill it by staying in the circle, he dies I get slowed and cannot get out of the explosion...

Rituals, oh how fun we'll just spawn so many mobs in a narrow space on you that you're locked in a corner while our tornado of rats runs you down or some chaos orbs blow you up. Sorry we also put these rituals in non-open spaces, so you'll have to deal with the 4 rock formations and the open hole near the center while you're barely able to dodge roll around the mobs already.

RIP, poof another 10% XP down the drain.

GG start again, go do another 10 maps that take 15 minutes to clear for 1% XP and pray you don't get one-tapped again.

I was on 79% towards level 89 and now I'm back to 53% today. 4 days in a row I made zero progression in over 20 hours played. And when I do lower level maps I don't find gear NOR do I get experience.
Every item I've tried to upgrade with the few orbs I've found have turned to literal dogshit. When I try to re-forge three items with decent stats they all turn into way worse items every time.

What's the fun in this game if you can only play it by picking a ultra broken build from an online guide, you don't come up with yourself that abuses some sort of bug mechanic from unique items/talents combined. And you have to gamble your gear to get upgrades or just straight up buy it from other players who have this game on farm mode.

I was hyped at Act 1 doing the wolf boss and all throughout the campaign I had a great time, and now I'm just fed up. The juice isn't worth the squeeze. Way too punishing and because of this I cannot even be bothered making another class.

My brother, you are playing one of the most OP classes and ascendancies in the game. You need to work on your ES, get meditate ascendancy skill probably, and work on not standing in stuff. You really shouldn't be taking many hits at all. Maybe you need to rework your tree for more ES/EV nodes. You should be able to get well over 2k easy with just a few exalt worth of gear. Add meditate to that, you'll have over 4k.

Are you running Ghost Dance spirit gem? You have to.
It's also nice to run Wind Dancer. Both will help you survive a lot.

And again, there's not much that should ever be hitting you anyway.

And don't use Acrobatics.

They didn't do any play testing. They seriously need to nerf enemy damage across the board. And get rid of XP loss on death.

and the game should play itself huh ? xD
Want a easy game go somewhere else xD

My God there are so many of these sort of posts from new players who are simply just bad at the game.........

This isn't d4... go play that if you want your hand to be held.

It is modern now for games to be released in 'alpha' versions, so the player base can 'test' the game for them......

Lot of credit card warriors in here

i dunno, i feel like the game is a bit overtuned and over punishing.


im a poe1 vet, i can handle it personally, its not going to make me quit and if everyone else loved it id be sort of fine with it, its whatever.

but i do think its probably a bit too much, i dont think we should dismiss posts like this. ultimately its a game, it should be fun. if its just too much stomp on your face with very little feeling of reward coming back then its just not that fun. it probably does need to lighten up a bit.

"

My brother, you are playing one of the most OP classes and ascendancies in the game. You need to work on your ES, get meditate ascendancy skill probably, and work on not standing in stuff. You really shouldn't be taking many hits at all. Maybe you need to rework your tree for more ES/EV nodes. You should be able to get well over 2k easy with just a few exalt worth of gear. Add meditate to that, you'll have over 4k.

Are you running Ghost Dance spirit gem? You have to.
It's also nice to run Wind Dancer. Both will help you survive a lot.

And again, there's not much that should ever be hitting you anyway.

And don't use Acrobatics.

Please stop with these vague you should be doing this and that posts, people are learning the game and this poster is 100% correct. If you are going to give advice then take the time to explain WHY they should be following it. Because how do they know if you are correct or are just some know-it-all who has no clue?

Their build is not your build and they may not be playing whatever OP build you are talking about. I mean I can literally play spark on just about any ascendancy to make it strong, half the ascendancies also have the option of running some form of minion build and it would be strong too.

The game is currently way overtuned at end game. This is very clear based on the few select builds that are able to clear content efficiently.

I agree, endgame is a grind, but not the rewarding kind. I wouldn't be upset if GGG just said that was the game they wanted to make, but that isn't what they said.

I feel like the thought process when GGG hears stuff like this, however, is "we're empathetic towards your struggle, but punishment is the point of our game. The punishment is a form of challenge that we want to make you overcome."

And it's like, ok, that's great and all, but that isn't what you said this game is, and you're not giving us the tools to meet that challenge.

Examples...

- it doesn't favor build diversity because there are only a handful of builds that can clear this stuff
- this is backed by the fact that only about 4 builds make up over 75% of builds
- GGG might say, 'well, those are farming builds'
- yeah, and those builds are popular because those are the only ones that are viable enough to get the currency to make other builds possible because you're not giving us good currency. It's gated behind drop rates and rarity. Which means people are either relying on buying currency from those people, or we're following a scripted build. None of those are fun options

And GGG will say 'well, we have to protect the integrity of the game so items and currency mean something'

- but you allow TRADING!!!! I can bypass your guardrails and pay-to-win this thing
- GGG will say 'that's not us', but it's like 'yeah, but you're allowing it'.

Which means people pay-to-win using 3rd-party stuff or out-of-game systems, which makes it feel clunky, or you grind-to-win, and it feels exactly like what you described; an unrewarding experience.

I just wish GGG picked what kind of game they want and was honest about it. The main campaign and end-game feels like 2 completely different games and I just want GGG to pick 1.