Being a mediocre player gets you nowhere in POE

damn i feel bad now. the max char i had was like lvl85 and i've been playing sinse 2013.
and i dont feel nothing like you lol. i always play hc and i already got used to seeing my chars die and rerolling. i just play for the "build" as soon as i get all the points i want. i do a couple of maps and thats it. time to reroll before the char dies again.

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鬼殺し wrote:

I admire the OP for outright saying they're a mediocre player, here of all places. Join the fucking club, man. Hell, I'm probably less than mediocre, given I make mistakes *and* I choose to play things that are already at a handicap from the start.

Meanwhile, I see them saying they're a 'mediocre' player and then I check their profile and they're an arc totems heirophant with 6-linked Soul Mantle and dual Shimmerons.

That's not bloody mediocre, or if it is then I'm the shittest of the shit.

I'm stumbling around at level 80 discovering that Cast on Crit is fucking USELESS when you're only using one spell since the trigger has a shared 0.5 second cooldown.

If you can find people to play with who are really good at the game, it will rub off on you. Their habits, tips, attitude, everything. I'm benefiting from that. What took the longest was being confident enough to mingle, as I was pretty damn mediocre for a long time. I'm still not great, for sure, but getting there.

I can't emphasise this enough.

There's probably a psychology term for the effect, but for now "rubshoulderistic heuristic"?

well you could just play juggernaut or hierophant and not die.

When you get up into the 90s, you have to make a decision. Because the game really grinds to a halt at that point.

You need to pick one of the OP builds. You probably need to stick to the easy maps, and the easy bosses. You shape your atlas to just do the easy stuff. You probably have to start watching map mods.

Honestly its just not fun at that point. Unless you are monitoring the maps, shaping the maps, you are gonna have an errant death here and there. There is nothing wrong with it. It happens. If you are taking chances, like just alch and go every map, even the reds, shit happens.

I think you may just have a warped sense of perception watching Hardcore streams where they are playing the top builds, farming the same maps, ad nauseum, to level to 100.

Your average gamer is not gonna have fun doing that. Its more fun to attempt those bosses. To do every layout. To do builds you find fun, and possibly being squishy from damage, whatever.

I can make it to like 94 tryharding and at that point I give up on leveling. Sometimes even lvl 92. At that point, each random death basically stops you from leveling. And they happen. Just some mods make that one boss on that one map hit like a truck. Maybe you roll into a crit buffed pack and it jus destroys you.

91-94 is about teh cut-off for a lot of people. Even everyone's favorite build maker, Mathil, doesn't play his characters past what? 92? Cause the gameplay at that level just isnt fun anymore. You take a chance and you die welp there goes an entire day's worth of work possibly. And taking chances is what makes the game fun.

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shaunika90 wrote:

well you could just play juggernaut or hierophant and not die.

He is playing Hierophant. And Hierophants die all the time, ask Ziz or Havok.

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鬼殺し wrote:

erd: I've experienced osmotic improvement with other games. Especially MMOs, but also in strategy games and currently Warframe. But not in PoE. I think that the game told me, from the start, 'find your own path', baked into me very early on that I wasn't going to do this any way but my own. Playing with others in PoE was a bit like that RP I mentioned in the other thread. Other people just get in the way of me doing my own thing, and I punish them for it one way or another; in PoE, usually by not keeping up.

Oh, and I'm really into using curses as a core part of my builds, which rarely works well for others.

"usually by not keeping up." Haha, yeah. I will add that mostly I play by myself and the osmosis is mostly in being around others in chat, in guilds, and some playing together.

It's a shame that for so many "party" means "run off to the other side of the area as fast as possible without a word". Many people are way too fast for me.

I do hope you had a character called Captain Haddock.
http://tintin.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Captain_Haddock%27s_Curses

I think there might be a happy medium of some osmotic improvement and some going your own way. Just so many people are limited by our own beliefs about how much we can improve. Streamer culture is such a shitheap.

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erdelyii wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

erd: I've experienced osmotic improvement with other games. Especially MMOs, but also in strategy games and currently Warframe. But not in PoE. I think that the game told me, from the start, 'find your own path', baked into me very early on that I wasn't going to do this any way but my own. Playing with others in PoE was a bit like that RP I mentioned in the other thread. Other people just get in the way of me doing my own thing, and I punish them for it one way or another; in PoE, usually by not keeping up.

Oh, and I'm really into using curses as a core part of my builds, which rarely works well for others.

"usually by not keeping up." Haha, yeah. I will add that mostly I play by myself and the osmosis is mostly in being around others in chat, in guilds, and some playing together.

It's a shame that for so many "party" means "run off to the other side of the area as fast as possible without a word". Many people are way too fast for me.

I do hope you had a character called Captain Haddock.
http://tintin.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Captain_Haddock%27s_Curses

I think there might be a happy medium of some osmotic improvement and some going your own way. Just so many people are limited by our own beliefs about how much we can improve. Streamer culture is such a shitheap.

I also play this game by myself even with my best bud playing. Honestly, mapping together just isn't fun. I dont find this game, D3, or any games of this top-down Arpg fun to group in. I dunno why. I actually get a road hypnosis feeling where I get physically tired spamming my abilities into some blob of mobs and skill effects. So I just cannot even duo maps, and by the nature of the top down perspective, you always feel behind.

On the Warframe example, its the only game in this genre where I dont mind playing with people and have more fun doing so. I would consider Warframe an Arpg in some sense. I've tried to theorize why I dont get the same feeling in that game in a group of 4 that I do in PoE/D3/D2. I'm guessing a lot of it has to do with the FPS/Aiming aspect of the game, and it just feels more fluid with everyone doing their own thing and you can actually SEE them on your screen even if they are off shooting something else, akin to that guy who blazes 5 miles into a map in the opposite direction. Probably has something to do with the mission-type aspect of hte maps instead of the clear everything aspect of PoE, too. For the most part you all hover around an objective like bees.

I've been thinking about reinstalling Warframe. Maybe I will.

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鬼殺し wrote:

That doesn't sound fun to me. Is it? If not, please do something else. ;)

It's honestly not that terrible, this thread just caught me at a low moment.

Even without the cast on crit; my character is still a blade vortex assassin, it's just now my idea for a blade vortex character that wouldn't have to constantly stop to refresh their blades, (even if they dealt lower damage overall) was one I'd had at the back of my mind for ages and it was annoying to realise the concept was dead.

Rest in peace, super-shreddy-cyclone.

But to be fair, a lot of this is my own fault.
I've a definite masochistic streak, it's one of the things that brings me back to online forums.

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DoubleU wrote:

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Aoikazega wrote:

most of the twatch streemers probably obtain their swimming pools of exalts with real currency for PoE currency trades and/or most likely bots.

Ok tinfoil hat off please.

At least some amount of high-end currency and items on the market, comes from bots and RMT. It is a well known problem PoE had for years, despite GGG's best efforts to fight it.
So while only a handful of Streamers were actually caught and banned, I think it's safe to say a majority of them obtain these botted/RMTed stuff through regular trade or friend donations, or friend of a friend etc'.
Without knowing it.

@OP, I'm also over 40 and never had a single character above level 90. And I've been here for years.
I guess it is a matter of knowing one's limits. And then you can play around them like using party rotations and whatnot, to give you more bang for the buck (exp per hour) and make each mistake less painful.