POE2 made me realize that HARDCORE community exists because POE2 didnt

Played HCSSF forever in poe1 but at some point you need to actually learn the endgame bosses, and I don't mean with logouts. Now I see HC as something to do once I'm completely done learning in SC.

I tried playing Harcore once and I almost immediately died.. HC is not for everyone, i struggled so hard on the final boss fight of act 3, cant imagine how it even feels to play it on Cruel tho..

All hardcrore is, is a ladder and a "look at me" attitude. Same as ssf.

I've been a dedicated hardcore player for many years, since D2 in fact, and when I began my POE1 journey, way back now, I expected to go HC as well. However, learning the game is always SC for me, as I want to see what the content of the game is all the way through a few at least at first.

POE2 HC is a tough prospect, given the invisible ground effects and the number of nearly untraceable one shots. That said, I returned to HC in POE 2 today after levelling 4 SC chars and am loving it.

It's not that decisions feel meaningless, for me, though that's part of it. It's also that, once I hit endgame, I tend to get bored once the balance of action and narrative is so heavily skewed toward action. However, making it there in HC, given the state of the game, would be an exciting achievement and the visceral, intense one-shot-at-this feeling replaces, for me, the narrative immersion I miss once I have concluded the campaign.

One thing makes me laugh though. Even on the SC side, I still save and organize a bank of my old gear, even after I plan no more alts who might want it. It's an HC habit to never chuck something good enough to wear, once you manage to find better. Ten minutes later you might be dead.

That sort of forward planning takes the sting out of HC for me. Instead of levelling a single char, I am levelling a team, a party, sharing everything. One soul across multiple incarnations, endlessly caught in a looping existential crisis in this fantastical world, chasing meaning through power.

Yeah ... see? The weight of decision, the finality drives intensity and the intensity lends itself to the imagination, which in turn feeds narrative. lol, or it's just me, but ...

I'm betting it's not.

The only reason I don't HC is my interwebs sux :(