I trust GGG

 After reading most of posts it is just GGG listening only to elites and no-lifer masochists who claim that PoE is too easy (same old same old). I wonder if most of The Awakening beta testers were of the elite no-lifer and/or masochists camp such that they didn't give GGG any feedback that act 4 monsters/bosses were over-tuned and too uber in damage dealt. Or did GGG pull more shenanigans on everyone and increase damage dealt by 25% just before going live with PoE 2.0? I wonder if GGG looks at the Tempest ladder and sees 255 players in the 90s (many dead in there) and thinks "we are happy with the damage dealt in act 4 and maps with act 4 monsters". Does GGG just ignore the 100s of thousands of players that hate where GGG set the damage dealt bar? There are smart ways to increase the difficulty of act 4 without needing to just increase damage and one-shot us out of most of our builds. If damage is that much then GGG has just killed build diversity for 90% or more of possible "fun to play" builds by rendering them non-viable. Way to go GGG... way to go (read this with maximum sarcasm and disgust please)!

 After reading these posts I'm glad I called off my summer trio of PoE 2.0 party play with my 2 BFFL. We tried to party play in summer of 2013, started with success in Normal, but then they got serious bummed out in Cruel with rogues that they needed to skip (I was ok) as they were dieing because they were newbies and had no build knowledge yet. Finally did skip some rogues and others but that really soured them on PoE as a hardcore arpg. By end of summer 2013 they were out and I continued my solo play.

 If GGG wants to acquire new blood and make long time players happy then they've got to stop listening to the few hardcore elite masochists and others that clammer for "more harder please". There has to be a better way (there must be) of ramping up the difficulty factor in act 4 (and any future acts) without one shotting most of us to hell and beyond in the name of being "hardcore". Power creep is sapping "fun to play" right out of PoE.

"

johnKeys wrote:

now you're just bragging, Snorkle.

of course you won't feel a thing with a level 90+, Mirror-geared character built for utmost Hardcore-viability on the tree and insane DPS using a weapon 99.99% of the players can only dream of.

but a mere mortal like myself, can tell you Merciless Kaom hits like a ton of bricks, and Merciless Daresso is manual-dodge-or-die (which btw makes him a really fun fight in my opinion), and Piety will hug a wall then 1-shot the shit out of you with that death ray of hers.
Malachai? we all know how he looks like even on Normal. now multiply that tenfold, because I can honestly say I had an easier time fighting Palace Dominus and even Atziri.
those are end-game bosses my friend. Malachai is a content boss...

that's experience gained with a bunch of characters in their level 80s and late 70s. meaning mid maps at least, before The Awakening came out.
therefore the content IS harder.
my complaint is, most of it is hard for all the wrong reasons: maxing out damage on a basic attack, rather than creating better AI and better attacks, making stuff "cheat" with skills that really don't work like that (see Desert Map Boss + Mirror/Blink Arrow), overwhelming with crap instead of making packs that synergize, and so on.

I heard Warbands do just that: synergy. threat of enemies working against you as a team. fkn awesome.
but if their spawn rate in Normal and Cruel is as low as I think it is, I really don't see a point in taking a char to Merciless in a league almost identical to Standard 2/3 of the time, when I already did. in Standard.
where is the added value?

I dunno man, I feel like the gear is over hyped. A boss doesnt do less damage to you because u have a mirrored weapon and a 6 link, if youre just standing there and he cant damage you its just about having capped resist, armour, evasion, block and life regen, thats it. All the talk of expensive gear doesnt factor.

Im on xyz right now searching, here is what it costs...


1900 armour chest = 1 chaos
devotos devotion hat = 20 chaos
266 armour boots = 1 chaos
450 evasion gloves = 1 chaos
390 armour belt = 1 chaos

thats it, 24 chaos worth of gear, the hat u can get a rare with almost the same armour and evasion for a couple of chaos. Thats what it costs to get the same defenses as my 2H ranger who can just stand in front of merciless Kaom for an hour only pressing enduring cry and still be at 100% life, no immortal call involved. Doesnt matter if I have a mirrored weapon, Im not even attacking him I just stand there, Im not even proccing fortify.


Its got to do with people choosing the wrong gear, the wrong passives and the wrong auras. If a 1900 armour chest costs 1 chaos why are people wearing 800 armour chests? Because they think armour doesnt matter, same reason they dont spec armour passives, same reason they die all the time and then complain GGG made the game too hard. Why are they running haste + hatred and not grace + hatred? Why did they not invest in endurance charges? Why did they not spec into beast amounts of life regen?

People arnt even trying, its all there, all the gear and the nodes to make stupidly tanky characters are there and people just make defensively bad characters, ignore all the opportunities presented to them and then say its GGGs fault that they died. Sure, first time u get to merciless A4 on day 3 of a new league that gear is not for sale... and you can go into maps before u even go to A4 and farm for the currency and gear until you either find it or it becomes available. If I can basically afk kaom and darresso with that gear then with gear half that good you can easily beat them without much danger.

If you are ranged then u cant spec as much defense as that, so you need the skill to kite and not get hit as much, thats now the trade off.

we both know the formula of armor when mitigating physical damage, and everyone else does too.
that's exactly why a 1.9k armor chest can be so affordable - there is little difference between it and a 800 armor chest, when taking that one big hit.

guaranteed mitigation is the real solution: Endurance Charges. Immortal Call. Soul Of Steel Notable. Jewels that roll % phys reduction...
or just do what you do, and take a "Lightning Coil"-style piece of conversion gear, then cap the appropriate resistance.
this is what makes you Tanky, Snorkle. not Armor.
Armor is, was, and always will be total fkn garbage, when dealing with anything bigger than the average monkey.
the only reason it is so popular right now, isn't because it changed for the better. it's because Evasion got butchered.

as for the Mirrored Weapon - that's definitely a difference maker.
your average boss fight lasts exponentially less time than mine, because DPS.
longer boss fight = more room for mistakes.
but honestly, I actually like that when such "lose focus, get punished" mechanic is done in good taste.
it's not, in cases like Malachai. he one-shots you with half his moves, and semi-one-shots you with everything else, while constantly filling the screen with crap that often makes it feel like playing a Bullet Hell game at 5 FPS.
that's not a fair boss.

Snorkle i got one shot by a bunch of cobras in a lvl72 map, stacking a ton of chaos resist alongside keeping up resistances for lightning coil is pretty hard. Im also not to worried about it but my glass canon high dps melee rangers/shadows really dont seem viable in 2 and i see a lot of ppl saying the same things in threads. Meanwhile ranged still has many advantages etc, i think i will take my high dps ranger and just make it magic find with lockstep and bm whirling blades/leap slam killing rares and boss on low level map has never been easier.

I will say this iteration of PoE is pretty boring. Things I want to do I can't. And you are almost certainly pushed into specific defensive options. GGG stated they were bringing more defensive options for casters.....And there defensive option for melee is the required fortify gem.

I don't get it sometimes, they remove mandatory stuff just to replace it with mandatory stuff.

"

johnKeys wrote:

we both know the formula of armor when mitigating physical damage, and everyone else does too.
that's exactly why a 1.9k armor chest can be so affordable - there is little difference between it and a 800 armor chest, when taking that one big hit.

guaranteed mitigation is the real solution: Endurance Charges. Immortal Call. Soul Of Steel Notable. Jewels that roll % phys reduction...
or just do what you do, and take a "Lightning Coil"-style piece of conversion gear, then cap the appropriate resistance.
this is what makes you Tanky, Snorkle. not Armor.
Armor is, was, and always will be total fkn garbage, when dealing with anything bigger than the average monkey.
the only reason it is so popular right now, isn't because it changed for the better. it's because Evasion got butchered.

as for the Mirrored Weapon - that's definitely a difference maker.
your average boss fight lasts exponentially less time than mine, because DPS.
longer boss fight = more room for mistakes.
but honestly, I actually like that when such "lose focus, get punished" mechanic is done in good taste.
it's not, in cases like Malachai. he one-shots you with half his moves, and semi-one-shots you with everything else, while constantly filling the screen with crap that often makes it feel like playing a Bullet Hell game at 5 FPS.
that's not a fair boss.

nah man, armour is good, so is evasion, trust me you think Id be using it if it wasnt good? I was using it before 2.0, still using it, still good. all the big hit = armours shit stuff is just hype, the reality is its solid. If people dont know armour and evasion are good, thats probably where theyre going wrong with their chars.


the mirrored weapon = shorter boss fight... ya sure, but when I can stand in front of a boss without moving for 24 hours and still be at 100% life what does it matter how quick I kill him? What room for mistakes? Merciless Darresso and Kaom cant kill my armour characters, literally, they cannot kill them, I could go in there with a white rusted sword from act1 normal and default attack them to death over a period of 5 days.


I uploaded a video for you, this is a char who stacks armour, evasion, life regen and 5 endurance charges...


http://plays.tv/video/55b185e20fcb07836e


its a shield user, his shield has 1440 armour, same as a lioneyes shield u can get for whatever, 10 chaos or less. Im not using devotos hat here, u can get the same defensive stats this character has for 20 chaos spent total in standard league. The 6 link and the 550 pdps sword are nothing to do with how much damage Im not taking in that fight, fight duration is completely irrelevant because Im not even attacking him for 90% of the video.


youre looking at 19,600 armour, 42% block, 5 endurance charges, 10,000 evasion, 400 life per sec regen. 20 chaos spent on gear u can do this and its excessive, you dont even need this much defense unless youre grinding 76+ maps. Thats what were talking about right? A4 merciless and map difficulty? This char cant just stand there in front of lvl77 bosses like this, but if youre playing melee and you cant take this sort of punishment from merciless kaom how do you expect to survive those maps?

If your characters can just stand in front of kaom like this then great, gg, you can probably beast maps when youre actually fighting back and you got no problems. If not and ur finding the game pretty hard right now maybe you should reconsider what you think of armour + evasion because theres no lightning coil here, no fortify, no taste of hate, no immortal call etc.

I have immortal call on a level 20 cwdt that I use in maps, I have a second cyclone that procs fortify, I have a taste of hate, iron skin granite, life pots etc and how tanky do you think I am when Im actually using those things in high maps? Pretty damn tanky. I dont notice this new difficulty spike on this char because my defenses were already excessive, not because I have lots of orbs but because thats how I built the character. How do you think I got 20k armour without using iron reflexes or determination? By speccing armour on the tree and getting that 2k armour chest rather than the 800 one, by getting the belt that had 390 armour rather than the one with higher resists and life etc. If I took IR I wouldnt be able to have 10,000 evasion which is as big a part of it as the armour, evasion is awesome for melee.

If people find endgame as melee way too hard they just need to rethink how theyre building their characters imo. Its not like this marauder is immortal, he can be killed by high maps with very dangerous mods if you dont play carefully but at least hes making a go of it and actually using the defenses on offer. If you want a shot at lvl82 double boss turbo kaoms with 100% extra damage as lightning and shocking ground while ur cursed with something horrible then you have to completely trivialise lvl69 merciless kaom, which isnt actually as hard as people are making it out. The new difficulty isnt unreasonable it just requires you to use the defenses they put in the game.

I think it looks good snorkle, didnt watch the whole vid so was hard to tell all your gear, however the build also seems to fit the current meta. Its def given me some ideas as a ranger (hard to decide to keep dual wield even though bino regen is op). Also hard to get that much life on either the duelist or ranger tree, which does fit that ggg are shoehorning builds.

Ah my bad i see you are a ranger... facepalm day

The greater the incoming physical damage, the lower the % of physical mitigated by Armour, but a higher flat value of physical damage mitigated by Armour.

Here's an equally valid way to look at Armour:
1. Divide the total Armour by 10
2. The result is the flat mitigation against "infinite" physical damage
3. As incoming physical damage decreases from "infinite," the flat mitigation decreases in a way such that the % mitigation increases

Also, if you'd like to calculate your physical oneshot threshold, the formula is:
(sqrt(L^2+0.4*A*L)+L)/2
Where A=armour and L=life

Thus, your Armour EHP multiplier against one-shots can be calculated with
(sqrt(1+0.4*A/L)+1)/2

For Snorkle's character that's a 1.24x EHP multiplier against physical one-shots. Without factoring in Endurance charges.

can you elaborate, Scrotie?

what is "infinite" damage? a constant stream of small hits, or a single burst?
also, if you mitigate X damage from a 10X hit, that's less than X+10 damage mitigated from a 20X hit - but if you had 10X life total, you are dead.

also, does the "multiplier" mean if for example Snorkle has 100 life he needs to take a 124 damage single hit to get 1-shot?

"

johnKeys wrote:

can you elaborate, Scrotie?

1. what is "infinite" damage? a constant stream of small hits, or a single burst?
2. Also, if you mitigate X damage from a 10X hit, that's less than X+10 damage mitigated from a 20X hit - but if you had 10X life total, you are dead.

3. Also, does the "multiplier" mean if for example Snorkle has 100 life he needs to take a 124 damage single hit to get 1-shot?

1. Burst. EHP is higher against multiple hits
2. If you mitigate X damage from a 10X hit then you have about 11X armour. Against a 20X hit you'd mitigate about 1.04X damage. Wtf on that +10 dude. Also, your small hit deals 90% max life damage, of course if you double that it'd be a one-shot.
3. The formula of the EHP multiplier has base life in the equation, so it changes if Snorkle only has 100 life, but otherwise yes, you multiply EHP multiplier by life to get EHP.