PC Gamer unveils Descent race events

I had loads of fun with Season 2. Can't wait to see what Descent will be like!
I just wish we could keep what we find- but I think it's understandable for the sake of balance that you can't let that happen with this new race format.

GG GGG!

The screen and the title could remind me of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_%28video_game%29

We get pyramid areas with several stairs and try to find a real exit, some exits lead to secret passages which offer better drops while sacrificing time.

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Edit: I don't get it because everyone seemed to really like the 135 signature event, seems like almost universally it was liked. I would get it if there was say 25 135s and 25 of the new race, but this to me is like scheduling 15 4-hour party races before season 1, and we saw after the second 4 hour race why how that was a very disliked format.

On what assumption was it liked? Regular racers?
I hated it on several races I just got my 3-5 points and quit after 15 minutes.
Several of my friends hated it.
Good racer friends participated in 1-2 won their demi and never participated again in one.

A simple example:
1h solo
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390325 31 pages

135 min solo:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390326/page/1 24 pages
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390318 17 pages

3h party
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390327 19 pages


1h fixed seed:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390351 24 pages

2h fs
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390352 19 pages

3h fs
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390353 15 pages


12min Turbo(lower riprate since it's only the start)
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/390321 24 Pages


It clearly shows longer races are disliked by the majority of players and it's understandable.
Some average player who needs 1h for act1 is already 30min behind wb abusers at the a1 time and 25 min behind rushers with good loadtimes( 5-7 level.)
After 90 min rushers are at the end of act2 already while average players are at weavers, so average players decide to grind western forest->No chance of winning.


Now those players get an advantage and common racers get competition they desired and all you do is cry "RNG Races omg 40 BLAMT like RNG races"

Reminds me of 1h ct party races, where you complained that "Randoms shouldn't win demis" but those "Randoms" actually killed 4-5 of your party of 6 so it was an equal match and not the common bad mannered. "1 player in instance let's gangrape him"

Can we at least keep currency? lol.

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Sheriff_K wrote:

I assume it's randomly generated zones back to back. And the concept of op gear, up all chars whiped at end, is very interesting.

No one keeps their 1hr-3hr race chars anyway :P

I wonder how they'll go about Skill Gems. o_0

Working off the assumption that this is a designed part of the "testing" of Beta, I'd think that GGG would want some players in act 3 merciless and possibly even maps to check the balance. 50 events = 50 hours, which seems a bit low to get lots of players into act 3.

I'd wager that GGG will have these as faster leveling events with the XP and skill gems jumping up rather quickly so long as a player kept descending and fighting.

My hope is that once GGG has this balanced out, there will either be some take away items that can only be found in those descent dungeons, or else season award items (at reasonably obtainable point levels)that can only come from descent runs.

This has the potential to be very fun and exciting. They could tune the descent dungeons to be extremely challenging and slaughter just about everyone who wasn't cautious or skilled or lucky if they push too far too fast.

Monsters from the upper levels that players skip or run by could descend to the lower levels to hunt the player down. With a temporary league, GGG could push the testing envelope much further than they could with characters that they promised never to wipe.

They could test all sorts of things such as new items, new skills (Avatar of Chaos anyone?) and new monsters in the descent league.

Whatever happened to this guy for instance?

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Whatever happened to this guy for instance?

Should spawn in Forest iirc but the abilities had a bug so it's on the To Do list for act2.

Sounds pretty cool.

I like the sounds of the format in general; make it 2 hours with fixed map seeds and monster spawns and it seems pretty much perfect. The change from running a1-a3 norm over and over is very welcome as well.

The rest of my feedback is in this thread, which was made before the announcement went up:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/430812

This sounds pretty awesome, but my first impression is that one hour seems too short for something like this. Hopefully you'll have some two hour versions as well.

Sounds awesome. Patiently awaiting these.

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Hilbert wrote:

Now those players get an advantage and common racers get competition they desired and all you do is cry "RNG Races omg 40 BLAMT like RNG races"

Reminds me of 1h ct party races, where you complained that "Randoms shouldn't win demis" but those "Randoms" actually killed 4-5 of your party of 6 so it was an equal match and not the common bad mannered. "1 player in instance let's gangrape him"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect