Act 4+

There are only a few areas of merciless that have any meaning what so ever to the game. The rest of them are just fill. I'd love to see the numbers on usage.

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RubySydell wrote:

I prefer cruel difficulty WAY more than normal or merciless. It feels just right. Maybe make the difficulty between cruel and merciless because merc just isn't very fun for me.

Its extremely tedious and all your gear decisions come down to elemental resistance > ALL in most cases.

It kind of kills a lot of options when you can either roll the build you want, or not get wrecked by anything with an elemental attack which means all your gear and passives need to counter act -60% to break even and then get up to 75% or more to survive comfortably.

That's 135% times 3 elements = 405% total res mods needed. You can obviously haul around multiple different rings so its not so bad.

Cruel for me is that medium ground between embarrassingly easy (normal) and where the game stops being fun regularly (merciless).

Well I should say that I like it in the act 3 cruel-act 2 merciless range. I'd keep maps as hard as they are so that more people are happy. I didn't have much map experience but they seemed pretty balanced other than a few bosses being patently ridiculous.

there are no map bosses that are patently ridiculous. there were some invaders and exiles, which have both been nerfed quite substantially. there are DEFINITELY some bosses/uniques that if facetanked, seem patently ridiculous. but with instant hallowed flasks, granites, elemental flasks etc... there is no boss that you can't take. what i LOVE about this game is how laughably customizable it is, down to giving you the option to temporarily boost whatever you're deficient in. curses = lifesavers.

-60 to all resists for the "end game" difficulty isn't outta this world. I had crap crap crap gear up to lvl 77 (4 link only) and was still maxed on resists and had a healthy life pool and was doing maps (lvl 69 maps mind you, nothing crazy high since the xp penalty is less than 2%)

-60 to all res has been the case for at least the diablo series, and isn't an insane penalty considering how stupidly common decent gear is imo (even without farming bosses), how ridiculously active trade chat is (having scored a few INSANE deals myself) and how shockingly specific you can be on poe.xyz.

THERE ARE PLENTY of resources in place for you to succeed.

personally i hated this game due to no GOLD/PALLADIUM/other distinct currency?! and the massively intimidating (or intimidatingly massive?) skill tree. but now i don't think i'll stop playing it til they stop updating it.



imo they should do somewhat like WOW does, offer a starter char, or some test drive chars, or make builds more public and accessible as i feel like there is a STEEP learning curve. but then again i came from diablo/hellgate london/torchlight so i'm not used to infinite skills/combinations/buffs like the WoW crowd :D