What is the Ultimate Goal of a Self Found Player?

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Perq wrote:

And no, gearing up through trading is not as easy as doing query on poe.trade. Same thing, again, and again. You need something to trade with. You can't sell - you can't buy.

This is true for expensive stuff, you need to grind of flip currency to buy it.

For stuff that costs from 5 - 20c and which allows you to progress well into maps, you don't need to specifically grind. You'll accumulate enough orbs through playing, doing small sales in chat & chaos recipe. I could easily fire up poe.trade now and buy me a 5L chest that I need in 1MHC, for a couple of chaos. Or buy the two acieves I still miss, by spamming trade chat for a few mins.

And when you start playing mid maps at 60%+ quantity, you will find items that sell and the trading game goes completely uninterrupted from there on (play maps, update shop, sell stuff). I Rampage I was really surprised, when I was already selling items 5 or 10 mins after posting them in shop.

The trading game is very easy, because people are lazy as fuck and buy everything: gems that you can get from killing Hillock, trash levelling rares that drop all the time, achivements that you can easily do yourself, boss kills... For people who like a medieval tycoon game, PoE is a godsend :)

Of course, I do buy stuff when I get cockblocked by RNG too much: orbs I need to play high endgame (because you wont loot as much orbs as you need to roll maps), maps sometimes but very rarely, gems (you can get to 80+ and still miss some gems), sac frags (because farming them is boring as hell)...

My ultimate goal is to have fun.

You can certainly plan if you have stuff previous characters found. You can also plan based on quest rewards like picking right class where gems you want are delivered guaranteed. Skill tree you can map too. Beyond that not much planning gear wise for self founder. But you get half ass enough stuff to self found to maps anyway as we almost all do it in new ladder with minimal or no trading.

To be GG like doing atziri and I think you must trade in any reasonable time frame unless you hit some jackpot drops/luck.

HC is a little different if you dont drop maxed resits and huge/ES life gear you probably are SOL without some trade and either hit brick wall or die.

Since trading trivializes the game I think the goal is prolonging the fun. That's if you enjoy a challenge. Other people enjoy steamrolling the game which is fine too.

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PitzerMike wrote:

Since trading trivializes the game I think the goal is prolonging the fun. That's if you enjoy a challenge. Other people enjoy steamrolling the game which is fine too.

Prelonging the grind part, when you have to get the gear, because you cannot progress, is pretty boring part for me. :@ I enjoy the challenge, I don't enjoy running ledge for 2 days.
There is challenge with trading, but it is placed somewhere else. Again, trading does not trivialize the game - it just moves it to the next step. If you enjoy grinding for items - cool. But don't imply that there is no other challenge then grinding for specific gear.

Depends on the player

I was playing solo selffound only until the Ambush league (~13 months) and my goal was to keep making better characters and to learn how to use my resources the most effective way

I started to trade (but not to flip items etc, just to buy what I need) and playing only in temporary leagues when Ambush started, because with my accumulated game knowledge I started to theorycraft advanced builds/synergies and felt very limited with build options