A self-found purist's feedback [Long]

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TheAnuhar wrote:

66-69 are expendable.

Something to note, as a self found player:

Always transmute and aug your low white maps before vending them up.

Look out for Massive, of Hordes and of Commanders.
These 3 mods each give 6 alch shards. Note that Labyrinthine and of Champions don't.

You will know how scarce alchs can be at times and these expendable low maps giving so many shards really help. A Massive of Hordes/Commanders will give you 12 alch shards to go towards alching higher maps that you would rather be running. 6+6 = 12. Or 6+1 (if you only have one of those mods + a random mod) = 7.

Maps which don't roll those high shard mods, when you vendor them up as blue, you will get an UNID blue which is well worth running as UNID at 69/70 lvl maps.

In the best scenario, you would get 18 shards ( let's say one alch ) for 3 low level maps .... where the vendor could give you one higher level map for it ( stacking them is not that difficult, so getting 3 of them .... ), and it would still increase your map pool instead of getting an alch ( since alch are like worthless imho .... ).

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Fruz wrote:

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TheAnuhar wrote:

66-69 are expendable.

Something to note, as a self found player:

Always transmute and aug your low white maps before vending them up.

Look out for Massive, of Hordes and of Commanders.
These 3 mods each give 6 alch shards. Note that Labyrinthine and of Champions don't.

You will know how scarce alchs can be at times and these expendable low maps giving so many shards really help. A Massive of Hordes/Commanders will give you 12 alch shards to go towards alching higher maps that you would rather be running. 6+6 = 12. Or 6+1 (if you only have one of those mods + a random mod) = 7.

Maps which don't roll those high shard mods, when you vendor them up as blue, you will get an UNID blue which is well worth running as UNID at 69/70 lvl maps.

In the best scenario, you would get 18 shards ( let's say one alch ) for 3 low level maps .... where the vendor could give you one higher level map for it ( stacking them is not that difficult, so getting 3 of them .... ), and it would still increase your map pool instead of getting an alch ( since alch are like worthless imho .... ).

Alchs really are not worthless from a self-found perspective.

When you are self found, what can alch do ? you alch something and after what ? you chaos it again until it's good enough to be used.
This is basically what happens. The only exception being low level maps on which like any possible modes ( but a few ones ) are still doable ( and I prefer altering those low level ones honestly ).

Its probably the setting of the game that urges people, myself included to do self finding.

The theme of the game is that you are an exile, so its natural that people would like to play as if theyre arming themselves with equipment that's been self scrounged off the harsh land.

I don't see why we couldn't cater to that.

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Nightmare90 wrote:

Alchs really are not worthless from a self-found perspective.

They aren't worthless, but they aren't particularly a great solution either.

Alchs are really nice, because they are basically a "choose your rare," but anyone who plays the game knows that there are too many ways for a rare to be utter crap, so alchs are a limited answer at best.

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It's absolutely as if they just hate self-found players and refuse to help them in any way.

It's really odd because they used to say they wanted the game to be playable both ways, and they used to advertise PoE as the game where you could pick any game mode within reason and have a league suited for it. There's clearly a huge demand from self-found players, the facilities are clearly there for effortless creation of new leagues, and yet they just won't budge.

It's like... this is the very game made to accomodate different playstyles and provide the less mainstream modes than what you're limited to in mainstream games, and they just decline to deliver it for no readily apparent reason. They've literally designed and avertised this game as the place where you can find such a thing, then promptly refused to provide it because they have some kind of personal disagreement with self-found play.

The same thing can be said for cutthroat leagues, craftsman leagues, and so on. Instead we get these extremely bland leagues with properties that barely affect gameplay, and no news whatsoever about paid player-made leagues or the game modes people actually want. PoE is a game where the developers are married to their vision and seem to not only refuse to deliver anything else but practically take offense at the notion that people would want something else.

GGG claims the game is like D2, but in reality, the game is what GGG's creators like or experienced in D2, and in case of the fundamental design decisions, its incredibly different to D2, and much closer to D3

None of these mainstream ARPG's (D1,D2,TQ,TL etc etc) had any concept of economy. Yes you could trade, but that was added in for fun factor and because of multiplayer, the designers never had any impetus to maintain an economy, or design those games with any economy in mind.

And although these games had RNG elements, things such as crafting and skill progression was completely deterministic, unlike PoE. When people say that PoE has extreme amounts of RNG, there not say that its too variant on on area, they mean its found absolutely everywhere that isn't the PoE login screen

The thing is, when you have so much variance, it pretty much forces players to create an economy to try and manage this variance, and economies are all about efficiency, so eventually it will gravitate to an AH style system

The fact that GGG doesn't want to make a self found league, means that their mindset is selfish and the fact that they live in a bubble, because the majority of D1 and D2 players didn't trade, at all, and if there was any trading, it was mainly "we just partied and you found that item, can we trade something for it"

It's a tough situation: GGG got where they are by catering to the most dedicated of players where having an uber grind is a selling point. Turns out they were successful enough they established a fairly large audience outside of their target.

Now they have to make the tough choice now of whether they will cater to more casual players, or shed player growth. It's like having 2 wrong choices, but they have to pick one.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

It's a tough situation: GGG got where they are by catering to the most dedicated of players where having an uber grind is a selling point. Turns out they were successful enough they established a fairly large audience outside of their target.

Now they have to make the tough choice now of whether they will cater to more casual players, or shed player growth. It's like having 2 wrong choices, but they have to pick one.

GGG got to this point for many reasons. For example, one of the reasons why D2 was such a popular RPG is because there were so many ridiculously broken builds (and by definition, if a build is broken its not a gear dependant, which goes hand in hand with the self found principle).

Problem is, that GGG always nerfs all of these builds, and they have to, in order to maintain and online economy, else PoE gets sweeped with inflation. None of these other ARPGS (barring D3, but D3's expansion is going to remove economy anyways) try to maintain an economy, which means that self found is a lot more feasible.

And this principle extends many ways, these self found OP characters often provide farm for the less OP builds (which could easily become just as OP, but in a different way and in a different stage of the game)

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FamousTrip wrote:

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Nightmare90 wrote:

Alchs really are not worthless from a self-found perspective.

They aren't worthless, but they aren't particularly a great solution either.

Alchs are really nice, because they are basically a "choose your rare," but anyone who plays the game knows that there are too many ways for a rare to be utter crap, so alchs are a limited answer at best.

Unless you are suggesting a series of chance and scour in order to get the higher level maps you are trying to progress to the rare stage to either run or chaos (which I would most certainly challenge as being a better 'solution'); I'm not really sure how you can challenge what was said.