My review after year break and why I will be leaving again.

First off you guys did an incredible job with this game. All of the improvements and additions to the game are fantastic. I love Act IV, hideouts, and new stuff from previous leagues. Your story line expansion is great! New gems and classes are awesome! The passive tree has been meticulously crafted and fine tuned now. Build diversity GALORE! I love spending hours building new ideas. Guilds? AWESOME! Great to finally have some sort of social framework being supported for this game.

Had a great time in HC Talisman league. Got several 40-60's and just got insta-gibbed on my 83 which was an extremely successful and well put together template.

Now the cons:

#1 reason for me taking a pass at the game again that I've put a few years into are the instagib mechanics that seem to constantly pop up just ruin HC:

1. Bearers. This just insta-gibbed me on an extremely tanky and geared level 83 template. I was swarmed by a large amount of beetles that were instantly one shot by me and then blew me up with 0 chance of reaction time or lack of skill involved. I had not had a problem with this mod on other monsters, but it is way over-tuned especially on the quick to die small monsters. Not fun given the time sink into currency and gear this game requires and the speed at which combat is played.

2. Blood Roil from bonespire talisman. Completely over tuned and insta-death to any class with lack of super high hp regen. I completely gave up on witches (her tree STILL has a terrible start with no defense nodes,lack of hp, phys res, and regen), rangers, and shadow. You instantly die on these classes. I lost 4 lvl 30-50's before I completely gave up trying those classes and built strictly for that one bs talisman.

3. Volatile Blood. Same problem as number 2 for those classes and even worse for melee's. Yeah you now have to have a mandatory 1 or 2 anti bleed flasks but that still won't save u on a character with less than 3% regen and is even hurts a lot on 5%+. You have 0 reaction time and die instantly on a lot of other characters.

4. The ridiculous trade system. No IG auction house still? Wow...at least some fellow players stepped up and made poe trade which is still inept in many ways but a million times better than spending hours every day in trade chat connected to your chest...

I like HC leagues. I get bored in normal because of the death penalty mechanic, inflated and ruined economy, and used to be repetitiveness.

I get frustrated to the point in HC where I see no point in playing due to the severe death penalty as a result of over-tuned game mechanics. Losing my character would be just fine. Losing my gear that can take months to years to acquire instantly, just doesn't encourage me to play. I'd be perfectly fine losing my character, the gear though...just can't stomach that. It's too ridiculous of a search and gear grind to lose all your gear. Having said that I'd absolutely hate for that gear grind dynamic to be taken out. I love the rarity of items and currency. Just my 2 cents. Awesome job with the game and I wish it continued success.

P.S. Diablo 3 kept my attention for 2 weeks. Please god do not ever dumb this game down like that one! Just fix the instagib stuff.

Block and spell block would solve alot if not all of your problems. Bearers are very easy to dodge. Purity of fire is used by many due to the high fire damage content.

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Caldoni wrote:

Block and spell block would solve alot if not all of your problems. Bearers are very easy to dodge. Purity of fire is used by many due to the high fire damage content.

Yeah I had thought bearers gave fair enough warning before this happened. On the smaller creatures like the beetles that swarmed me it was instant /shrug. Also how the small creatures are usually in large numbers and much tighter grouping makes them far more deadly. With my template I just died on I had solved all of my reason for death to the point it came down to skill or completely not paying attention. There was absolutely no way to avoid what just happened to me tho so it became the final straw. I didn't mind losing my character at all but the gear...yeah I definitely mind that shit. I think losing ur character is a perfect death penalty for HC but losing the gear too...too much given the gear grind.

Well if you leaving again that means PoE doesn't do much better job than D3 for keeping your attention.

Seems like D3's problem is that game got a too dumbed down itemization while PoE is too unrewarding to play.

1. I have no idea why u would die on bearer lol, it is soo easy to dodge that thing. You should check the mod of the monster b4 u attack. Sometimes backing off spread out them is the best way to deal with them.

3. Try damage overtime to kill them? A poe character should have Aoe + single target + dot to deal with different situations.

4. I agree with that. Since they do not want automatic trading, I gonna join the troll shop club and ruin the item listing/everyone buying experience (if they ever have one in-game like poe.trade)

Sounds like you dont read mob attributes. You have not even scratched the surface of the instagib-fest that goes on in maps if you think these paltry examples are bad.

Try going into a map and taking a crit from a random white mob who happens to have a few damage buffs from an aura and the map itself. Without proper mitigation methods you take many times over what your life total is. End charges, fortify, armour, evasion all need to be on and stacked at all times.

Its really funny to see how many times my Cast when Damage taken gem goes off when im in melee and i keep the threshold around 1500 for my setup and it goes off like a slot machine.

EDIT: true story: my lvl 86 ranger-cycloner (6.2k hp, fort, end charges) died to a phase-run sub phys aura yellow with power crits instantly.

Get ready to meet a bunch of Fans that will defend these mechanics to the bitter end.

But i have to agree with you on that one those things are just stupid but they are in the game and my only explanation why is because they are a bandaid difficulty so the game is not getting to easy until they can come up with something actually challenging and not just oneshots.

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Caldoni wrote:

Block and spell block would solve alot if not all of your problems. Bearers are very easy to dodge. Purity of fire is used by many due to the high fire damage content.

Bearers cant be spellblocked or dodged neither can volatile be blocked or dodged. Very certain on that.
But lets assume you could, there are at least 10-20 of them So you are dead anyway when standing in there.

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Rusery wrote:

Sounds like you dont read mob attributes.

I read as much as the game allows. The game is designed to where things run to you from even off screen at high rates of speed and deal high rates of damage. Combat is a high rate of speed. Taking the time to read every single mod on every single mob is entirely impractical in this game; although I do try. I read as much as I can, but mobs are almost always attacking you and there are often more than 4 different types of mobs on you at once with more than 5 different mods each. It is absurd in my opinion to expect people to be able to read all of this as if there is some pause function in this game where combat is often a split second. In this case they died instantly so there was no chance to ever read and no time to react. You simply cannot in this game stand still and let things pound on you while you read every single mod they have. If this was a game like old MMOS where the monsters don't even walk around and generally don't attack until you attack them then reading every mod on every monster would be practical. It is not in this game, however, and for those reasoning's I feel justified in leaving the game and also highlighting why. It's simply impractical.

The insta-gib stuff really holds this game back. It's bad game mechanics. They are so close to having a perfect game, that is challenging, rewarding, and fun. But these mechanics make it frustrating to the point of not wanting to play if you are a hardcore fan. In the boring softcore version it is not too big of a deal if you built a well rounded character.

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voodoojin wrote:

Get ready to meet a bunch of Fans that will defend these mechanics to the bitter end.

But i have to agree with you on that one those things are just stupid but they are in the game and my only explanation why is because they are a bandaid difficulty so the game is not getting to easy until they can come up with something actually challenging and not just oneshots.

"

Caldoni wrote:

Block and spell block would solve alot if not all of your problems. Bearers are very easy to dodge. Purity of fire is used by many due to the high fire damage content.

"

voodoojin wrote:

Bearers cant be spellblocked or dodged neither can volatile be blocked or dodged. Very certain on that.
But lets assume you could, there are at least 10-20 of them So you are dead anyway when standing in there.

Not to mention it seems as though my lvl 19 Enfeeble had 0 effect on the damage of the explosion after their death. I was a purely defensive character with an incredible build, my favorite yet. 5end charges up, 75% resists on all, 90% phys reduction, 4k hp, 300 es, good armor, good evasion, and good gear. Curses up were warlords, ele weakness, and enfeeble. Obviously none of the curses have any effect on the explosion after death and none of the defenses seemed to matter one bit...The mod is incredibly over tuned in many scenarios, mine being just one of them. If I were to take any more defensive nodes in my template I would do 0 damage.

At some point people need to admit these mechanics are bad, over tuned in many scenarios, and impractical game design in one such as this. I am all for hardcore, but I don't consider impractical and over tuned 'hardcore'. Geesus look how long it took them to tone down lightning thorns and it still can one hit people in an instant.

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Darkkrows wrote:

1. I have no idea why u would die on bearer lol, it is soo easy to dodge that thing. You should check the mod of the monster b4 u attack. Sometimes backing off spread out them is the best way to deal with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO3TBO7jLrY

yes, very easy ^^ - two people dodged it with "logout script" and ziz dies xD