Partly unfair and frustrating game design

I remember complaining about not being able to get past the Vaal Oversoul in Normal. Really. Killed off my first five or six characters.

Now I can do him without anything but drops. He's a non-issue. The game hasn't changed (much). I learned to avoid damage. People from D2&3 don't understand this basic mechanic, because in those games you couldn't avoid an attack. If it targeted you, you got hit. So items and character abilities were needed to take care of it. Here, you're expected to learn the fights and not take hits that will kill you. Learn. Adapt. Don't expect the game to change for you.

"

Nephalim wrote:

Part of the game's longevity and player retention revolves around making it hard to get to level 100 so you keep buying stash tabs despite loot being generally worthless and the number of collectables increasing each patch.

To be honest, it took players years to get 99 at D2 and without bots it was not even possible during a season. It is in theory, much easier to get 100 at POE, but it requires cheap tactics and exploits, like log out macro´s, farming shaped strand, exploiting the atlas ...

The current design of XP loss is also not very good, especially if we are forced to use those exploits like the macro or must destroy the atlas. In the end, one shot kills, don´t belong to ARPG´s, they are a part of shooters and MMOs.

ARPGS are played for fun, to get a quick joy and not to read tactics and watch tutorials on YT. In all my years at Diablo, I did not watch a single video about boss tactics, as everyone could kill them.

POE has too much of an MMO for me, I feel like back at WOW Vanilla, where one wrong step was your dead. While I loved Vanilla WOW, I just expect something else from an ARPG. I enjoy the map system, the passive tree´s, but if you get hit and die, without a chance to survive, then this just annoys you.

The current league is my most successful, as I reached map tier 15 SSF, which is quite an achievement in my opinion. But I could be three or four levels higher, without the XP penalty.

ARPGS used to be about casuals win slower and nerds win quicker, but POE seems to be about only nerds win and casuals can´t.

I still enjoy the game, the content we get every few months is amazing for a free game, only HOTS a MOBA offers similar quality to it´s playerbase. But as much fun it is, as many things could be improved to make it a better experience for everyone and why nerds can´t see that, is beyond me.

Get good bro

"

soloman_kane wrote:

I have rarely played a game with such weaknesses in the game design and because its not a generell problem, but happens only sometimes, its even more frustrating.
There are several situations build into the game, which result in a 100% chance to die and to lose the accomplishments of hours of playing.

There are sudden appearances of super mobs which can not be killed with your skills nor can you outrun them or do anything about it to escape. The situation is out of hand, doesnt depend on the skills of the gamer anymore. Its like an admin pushes a "you are dead" button. These mobs often have unique skills, which simply cause you to die, regardless of your personell skills.
I wonder, why so much frustration is build into the game.
From a psychological point of view the result is, that, when you get frustrated within a game (and a games purpose is fun, not frustration), the chances that you are willing to pay for it by buying stuff in the shop drastically decrease.
At the end of the day a game should make you feel as if you have accomplished something and not just lost your experience points and found nothing of value. This way it feels just like a waste of time, which is the worst experience a game can offer.
The receipe of the success of Diablo was the constant progress the gamer experienced within the game. Finding constantly something of value, a bit better than what he already had, was one of the reasons.

I'm going to preface this that I am not "very good" at the game, but I have been playing a long time. The PoE wiki is your friend (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Path_of_Exile_Wiki).

This is very much a case of "Learn to Play". At some point in this game you will hit a "wall". That wall can be limited by your character or yourself. From reading the previous posts and looking at your character, it is a little bit of both.

I think a lot of people have already replied with some constructive criticism, so I will try to keep this short.

Looking at your lvl 86 Elementalist, it is all over the place. First of all, you are trying to use too many uniques on your character and it is holding it back. Do you know about resistances and the difficulty penalties (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Resistance)? I noticed that your gear is severely lacking in resistances and you are also not using a Purity of Elements. The goal with (almost) every character is to cap resistances at 75% in merciless difficulty. Players even go farther to overcap so that they are still capped with cursed with elemental weakness.

Good uniques: Doryani's Catalyst and Rathpith Globe. Your rings and belt you should get rid of.

Next, you are an ES character without stun immunity (http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Stun). This is almost asking for death every area you go into. Since you have a lower life pool, you are stunned more easily.

On to your skills: you have zero defensive skills. You have offense, offense, and more offense. Try sticking with 1 skill supported for AoE clearing and 1 skill supported for single target. Most people can over lap the AoE skill on easy bosses and not be bothered. Try investing in curses, mainly blasphemy until you know how to play effectively. Temporal Chains, Enfeeble, Warlord's mark. These all help survivabilty. For a defensive cast when damage taken, try CWDT > Enfeeble > Vortex.

Next is your skill tree. There are a few nodes right away I noticed you don't need. The nodes to Ghost Reaver. The nodes for Assassin's Haste jewel. The nodes to the templar area jewel. Also, you are slightly investing in crit. Crit is normally an "all or nothing". Going halfway just hurts your character.

These are just a few things I picked up on. I am not trying to criticize you as a person. I am just looking at your character and pointing out a few things that could improve your quality of life.

"

MarloStanfield wrote:

"

potis wrote:

If people dont believe that the game tries to kill you when you are near the level you are delusional.

No surprise when are at that last 5-10% of the level suddenly a map you are facerolling throws you something that tries to 1 shot you, multiple times out of nowhere.

I even do white maps or plain magical maps when i am at 95% and things still might manage to kill me out of nowhere.

While the double beyond -11% player resitances + monster damage+ attack speed +onslaught+extra damage couldnt, that white mob at the white map suddenly did 6.5k damage..

Yeah okay, "learn the game".

Its just the fake way of difficulty, if everything 1 shots, game is hard.

lol typical mentality of the modern gamer

"It couldn't possibly be my fault I screwed up, I'll clutch at straws to blame something else"

Try switching off Netflix on the 2nd monitor when you hit 95% maybe?

LOL, this is typical thinking of the newer players. I know because I've been here in Wraeclast form the beginning and gone through that phase while learning to play PoE:



Bob (pet Kiwi) and I have seen all that GGG has coded into PoE through all bad times (PoE:The Desync Years) and good times (Perandus League: Cadiro Perandus = Santa Claus of Wraeclast) and one thing prevails, all lesser builds that don't have enough life/ES/armour will run into a high crit dps unique, champion, or boss that can one-shot you. The spikiness of the high crit single shot damage of some creatures is very frustrating. But with a bazillion build paths where one build is one-shotted and dies another build could maybe tank the damage and kill that creature. And that is exactly how an arpg is supposed to be. We learn by playing.

If anyone wants a walk in the park arpg there are plenty of other game choices. This is PoE and it's supposed to be uber hard in the high level maps and that's why 90% of players will never ever reach the Guardians or The Shaper. GGG wants there to be challenges for most players forever so stop now if this isn't the right arpg for you. Those that are still playing from the beginning (including me) have reached a knowledge and skill playing level where we don't want GGG to water down the top end difficulty challenges. They are "just right", softening them would be the wrong thing to do, and GGG agrees with this thinking so PoE will stay this way.

PoE 3.0.0 will change the balance significantly. I'll need to go with a tank build for sure. Besides the new 6 through 10 levels content I'm eager to see whether GGG still has their creativity and add 3 or 4 new skills that are truly new (like when we got channeling skills) and not just a variation on a reworked existing skill. Time will tell and I'm sure the "balance sucks" posts will be fast and furious at the beginning.

"

soloman_kane wrote:

See, its very likely that I played these kind of games before you were even born and I played them all successfully

This is where the thread ends lul.

You just can't convince this kind of person of anything other than what they already believe.

Lots of people have been playing games a long time buddy your not special in that way. My first games were on Atari.. yet I don't feel the need to barf my experience onto others...

Like everyone says, if you slow down and learn the mechanics and for god sakes get some defense in your build you will stop dying as much to things that not many others are dying to. Defense first in this game...

@OP: I took a look at your current character and I think you are simply lacking defensive layers. You have a decent chest and the other ES items are not terrible either, but while ES is currently better than life because you can stack a lot of it, it needs other forms of mitigation to really shine.

First and foremost: You have nothing to prevent stuns on you! The game mechanics just check your HP which is 1 so you will get stunned constantly on a CI build. Use Chayulas or Vlayrium for that. I suspect you getting stunned all the time is a big factor of "surprise" deaths.

Second: You don't seem to have grabbed Vaal Pact while relying on leech? It is the single biggest reason CI is so good at the moment as it will instantly heal you back up whenever something hits you. (Not sure Fireball can actually sustain a leech based build but that is another story)

Third: What's up with your gem setup? All I see are 3 or 4 linked CWDTs with fireballs in them. Not only does that not deal any real damage, CWDT is also usually used as a defensive mechanic with something like Immortal Call. Flame totem seems useless too. It won't deal any real damage either. I could see a point in using it with curse on hit maybe? Then you might want to consider a defensive curse if you have troubles staying alive. Temp Chains or Enfeeble come to mind.

When I see you using Mana Leech in your 6 link setup I would actually recommend Warlord's Mark though which will also help with Vaal Pact.

Also Increased Burning Damage? How do you make sure you actually ignite enemies? Relying on that little bit of crit you specced into? Doesn't seem very good to me.

I am just trying to give you a few pointers where you can improve and looking at your build there is still a ton for you to learn. Most of all how to put up a proper defensive setup. That will get rid of a lot of random deaths. You were describing the Beyond Unique with Flameblast giving you troubles for example. Do you have your resistances capped at 75% after penalties? Also overcapped so they will still be maxed out when you run an ele weakness map? There is just so many factors that can make the game more difficult, but I promise you you can learn almost all of them.

I hate dying in this game too so I figured it out step by step and by now have a build that pretty much cannot be killed. Also you can run from any mob if you use proper movement skills. Last but not least you have a immunity period when entering a map so mobs cannot actually kill you right away unless you start clicking around before the game has even loaded for you ;) See, the more you know.

Edit: Well now it took me forever to write this and someone already beat me to it :P

what is describes in op's post is just exactly what make this game so great : a huge randomness in encounters and synergies with game/map/mobs modifiers.

it can go both ways : you can end up in horrific situations. you're running "casually" an elemental weakness multiproj map with onslaugh mobs and then abaxoth pops randomly, you're in a pretty terrible situation.

you can run monstruous treasure, have a corrupted strongbox sextants, have mirrored items mod on boxes, and drop multiple six link high ES vaal regalia with good mods (happenned to me this league) that sell for multiple exalts each...

frustration and powerlessness in the first encouters of difficult bosses/situations later result in great satisfaction when you retun with another character and better knowledge and just destroy it.

The OP's post is just one of an infinite number of examples of the wussification of our progressive society. Instead of being PROACTIVE and having a healthy attitude of "I'm going to learn from this, adapt, and overcome - challenge accepted," he goes extreme REACTIVE by whining about game mechanics that others already explained how to handle.

A dead giveaway of a special snowflake is complaining about fairness. Fairness is an illusion and those that think it's possible to legislate fairness prove they have no clue how the world and universe actually works.

A reactive person who curls up into a fetal position at the first sensation of stress is no doubt missing an unbelievable amount of opportunities for advancement both in their personal and professional lives. A reactive person who makes wildly false claims about the game and developer's intentions regarding level of difficulty and casual nature that should not require research, resourcefulness and perseverance is just the nail in the coffin on this guys embarrassing argument.

Most players know in fact that the game developers wanted to take the training wheels off that come packaged in most games these days; and in doing so, it attracted a much higher average intelligence player base compared to mindless rinse and repeat 15 minute skirmishes the likes of World of Tanks or World of Warships. The complexity of POE acts as a natural filter to weed out people who lack emotional intelligence attributes like patience, perseverance, stress management, conflict resolution, resourcefulness, self-awareness, personal accountability, self-reliance, etc. People who have these soft skills or enjoy strengthening them enjoy games that don't spoon feed you. People who have these soft skills understand that rewards are so much more meaningful if the challenge is more substantial.

Companies when buying an enterprise software solution are often advised to buy the one that off the shelf does 95% of what they need it to do instead of buying one that has a feature they really like but have to spend millions on programmers to get the rest of what they need. Same applies to gaming. Find the game that suits you best. Don't play a game that piques your interest but then complain about some of the core fundamentals that won't change because of a whiny rant.

Step 1: Drop the reactive, beta attitude. It's grossly unattractive. Especially to women.

Step 2: If you want to truly find enjoyment in this game, take personal accountability by doing the research and maybe even join a guild and TS server where you can learn from more experienced players hands-on. This will also help with your social skills that all betas could really benefit from.

Step 3: Go back to that mob with your newly acquired knowledge and tools and pwn it.

Step 4: Sit back and take a moment to reflect that you have gone through a rite of passage and pat yourself on the back.

"

VGLance wrote:

The OP's post is just one of an infinite number of examples

Triggered. Quit it. Quit it exponentially.