New here with very few short questions, thanks much

Hello all,
I just heard about PoE and after spending a few hours perusing the website, I decided to join. I am very intrigued. Since I haven't played the beta, I am confused about two things.
- First, it seems to me on the Items page that there are not that many "mods" available on items. But the claim is that there are "infinite" numbers of unique possibilities. What am I not understanding?
- I have never played FF7, which apparently also had itemized skills, such as PoE seems to have. I am familiar with more "traditional" games which have skills tied to a progression of some sort, or at least the character itself (such as in Fallout, where there were no "classes", just skills to buy). I'm confused: If skills are itemized, why have classes at all? Why not combine skills as one sees fit (e.g. Fallout), wouldn't that allow for even more flexibility? What am I not understanding about the advantages of having classes and itemized skills?
More questions about itemized skills: Can I lose my skills (by losing my gems)? If my character is level 20, say, and wants to "switch" skills by replacing the gems, will the character start out anew, or be weaker and have a difficult time in obtaining high levels in his "new" skills?

Finally, one question that simply interests me: As a 45-year old with family, I am not interested in playing online with others too much, I won't have time. I am interested in single-player. (I enjoyed Diablo 2 single player as well.) I realize this game is geared to a multiplayer audience, but will single player be viable? Will there be a "campaign"?

Thank you in advance

"

onomastikon wrote:

Hello all,
I just heard about PoE and after spending a few hours perusing the website, I decided to join. I am very intrigued. Since I haven't played the beta, I am confused about two things.
- First, it seems to me on the Items page that there are not that many "mods" available on items. But the claim is that there are "infinite" numbers of unique possibilities. What am I not understanding?

"not many mods" means they won't put more than 6+1 property on an item. So you will only ever find a 6 "mod" item. but there are 30 or so "mods" to chose from. So your actual combinations is pretty high. 6^30 or so. Their philosophy is to make every choice meaningful, so you won't find an item with 10-20 mods because if you had two of those it would be impossible to compare them.

"

- I have never played FF7, which apparently also had itemized skills, such as PoE seems to have. I am familiar with more "traditional" games which have skills tied to a progression of some sort, or at least the character itself (such as in Fallout, where there were no "classes", just skills to buy). I'm confused: If skills are itemized, why have classes at all? Why not combine skills as one sees fit (e.g. Fallout), wouldn't that allow for even more flexibility? What am I not understanding about the advantages of having classes and itemized skills?

all classes are identical except for where they start on the passive grid. There is enough redundant stats on the grid that you can pretty much think of class selection as really being gender selection, and nothing more (unless you are a marauder).

"

More questions about itemized skills: Can I lose my skills (by losing my gems)? If my character is level 20, say, and wants to "switch" skills by replacing the gems, will the character start out anew, or be weaker and have a difficult time in obtaining high levels in his "new" skills?

yeah, pretty much. but you will always have a secondary weapon slot so you can level gems before you actually start using them.

"

Finally, one question that simply interests me: As a 45-year old with family, I am not interested in playing online with others too much, I won't have time. I am interested in single-player. (I enjoyed Diablo 2 single player as well.) I realize this game is geared to a multiplayer audience, but will single player be viable? Will there be a "campaign"?

Thank you in advance

You can do fine solo. There is currently a disjointed sampling of soundbites for a story via voice acting, but I am quite interested to see how the story actually fits together Even if you solo, I would recommend trading in the orb market in beta to get a feel for the relative currency values so you can jump in on a trade with a small bit of education whenever you so chose.

Thanks much for that reply.
Regarding "infinite combinations" and replayability, yes: I meant the number of mods available from which to choose. I do not mean having 20 mods on one item, I meant the pool from which these mods come. Diablo 2 had a lot more variety than 30, if I recall. The mods in PoE so far do not seem to be the most creative aspects of this game. THanks for your time.

"

onomastikon wrote:

Thanks much for that reply.
Regarding "infinite combinations" and replayability, yes: I meant the number of mods available from which to choose. I do not mean having 20 mods on one item, I meant the pool from which these mods come. Diablo 2 had a lot more variety than 30, if I recall. The mods in PoE so far do not seem to be the most creative aspects of this game. THanks for your time.

I do agree itemization could use a little work, but so far I have no complaints. If they add any more mods, it will make finding a "good item" extraordinarily difficult.

So far, uniques are doing an effective job of adding variety to itemization.

Fair enough, thank you for the replies.

I'm a solo kind of guy, I hope that will be ok, the rest of the game looks promising indeed.

May I ask: In the FAQ, it says

"

At the moment, you will need a Graphics Card with Pixel Shader 3.0 or higher, and a CPU that supports SSE2.

I am not computer savvy. I do not know what Pixel Shader 3.0 is, and how to check if my card will support it. I do not know what SSE2 is, and how to check if my CPU supports it. Can someone help briefly? Thank you.

"

onomastikon wrote:

I am not computer savvy. I do not know what Pixel Shader 3.0 is, and how to check if my card will support it. I do not know what SSE2 is, and how to check if my CPU supports it. Can someone help briefly? Thank you.

If you just tell us your graphics card and your cpu specs or maybe even just the age of your computer I'm sure we can find the info for you.

"

Finally, one question that simply interests me: As a 45-year old with family, I am not interested in playing online with others too much, I won't have time. I am interested in single-player........ I realize this game is geared to a multiplayer audience, but will single player be viable? Will there be a "campaign"?

Im 53 and female and play most of the game solo, odd times with random people and a bit of time with my husband (who is atm not as good as me at the game)
It's very easy and fun to solo and I have jumped in a few "races" as a bit of variety.
Having got to "Cruel" level with a character (running about 5-6 characters for variety and testing of building characters) we find it even more fun at that level.

For harder bosses etc just join up with a group and get them to smash it lol

:)

Thanks much!

Currently, my laptop is dying, I do not know if it was the move to the USA whcih is killing it. Windows will no longer respond (Windows 7 Home Premium). This is a 3-year old Sony Vaio laptop with a Core Duo P8700 2.53 GhZ CPU, I have 6MB of RAM, and there is an ATI mobility card in it I think it is 4650, I cannot see how much discreet memory, I actually wrote these things down the last time I could get it running. Currently writing from an old XP machine with integrated graphics I use as an emergency work backup.

So far, I have enjoyed SP games more often, since I do active martial arts and other "real life" things for interacting with other humans, and when I am on the machine, I will frequently need to get up, answer phone, deal with kids, etc., and have found that I have NEVER played an online game (no matter what genre or type) without annoying people who find my sudden abscences for "unimportant" things bothersome. I like games where there is a "pause" button I can hit, go away for 15 minutes or 1 hour, and come back. I realize PoE may not be the perfect fit, but I do enjoy a dungeon crawl, but it really must be at my pace. I hope that makes sense.
THanks much

Your CPU uses:
SSE2 SSE3 Supplemental SSE3 SSE4.1

Your GPU uses:
<=Shader 4.1

So everything is ok.

"

onomastikon wrote:

Thanks much!

Currently, my laptop is dying,

Make sure you're plugged in. When playing an intensive game like PoE on a laptop, it generally needs a power source to directly draw power from or there will be performance issues.

"

6MB of RAM

I think you mean 6GB, if it were 6MB you wouldn't even be on a modern web browser :P

Other suggestions to boost performance: Disable anti-virus while playing (a hassle, I know, but anti-virus programs suck your computer dry of resources while running in the background), close all other applications, cntrl+alt+delete and kill any unnecessary background processes.

Your laptop's specs don't appear to be very good. Make sure you're playing with shadows off. You have a decent amount of memory, if it's 6GB, so your processor/video card are probably bottlenecking things.

Playing solo is perfectly fine. You can even turn global chat off if you want to and pretend you're playing off-line. There are many bonuses to playing with a group, but Chris has stated they want solo play to be no worse or better than group play.

Also, I would advise you to stay away from group play, as your computer may not be able to handle other players spamming certain spells/skills in combination with your own attacks.