What difficulty scaling?

A year to two ago, I thought POE was one of the greatest random-dungeon crawler RPG's available. I got really into the game, and hit a wall at some point and gave up. If you asked me a few days ago why I quit playing back then, I couldn't tell you.

Fast forward 2 years later, and a group of friends and I recently decided to play it again. This time around I picked a Ranger since I heard they were pretty popular and fun to play. I enjoyed the game up until level 60 and got into Merciless... Then I remembered why I hated this game and quit a couple years ago. There is no difficulty scaling! There isn't a progression of harder and harder mobs until you eventually reach a point where everything is a challenge. Instead, this is what I get:

Start an area at 0% exp, level 61. Blow through group after group of monsters. I take little (if any) damage and clear entire screens of mobs at a time. My build is working well and I'm having a great time. I get up to about 60% of a level. Oh hey look, the quest mob I need to fight - BAM. DEAD. I just got 1-shot the second they appeared on my screen. Oh well, it happens, lets try again... Run up there to take a shot at the mob - BAM. DEAD.

Rinse and repeat, and I'm back down to 0% exp because every rogue exile or quest mob I meet can instantly 1-shot me and there isn't a damn thing I can do about it. There is just no difficulty scaling in this game. Either you breeze through everything, or you get 1-shot before you even can see what kills you.

So, maybe I'm missing something. Does anyone else run into this? I've had the same problem on my Scion and Templar a few years back, and now I get annihilated on my Ranger once I'm in Merciless difficulty and level 60+. WTH?

At the risk of sounding like a major douchebag, it really sounds like a new player problem.

This game is chock full of random mechanics that work in strange and arcane ways. That's why, up until a year or 2 ago, it was marketed as a game "by hardcore ARPG players, for hardcore ARPG players." The "hardcore" has since disappeared from the front page, but the complexity remains.

The most likely cause of speeding along barely getting scratched, then suddenly getting one shot, is not having enough resistances. The game in Merciless is more or less balanced around you having capped resists (75%); note that this is a defense that scales rationally, which means that if you have 50%, which feels like it's just a little bit behind 75%, you take double the damage of someone who has 75% resists.

A second possible cause is if you have a very fast-Hitting build; there are two mechanics that can really wreck you there. The most common is Corrupting Blood, which accumulates 1 per Hit (Orange monster) or a chance of 1 per Hit (Purple monster), which means if you deal 5 Hits a second, you stack them up very, very fast. It's a Bleeding effect, which is Physical Damage over Time on you. The vast majority of players just know to carry around a flask of Staunching for just this occasion because there is almost no other way to remove it.

Otherwise, there are a lot of telegraphed strikes from enemies that hit really hard, but you have to learn to recognize the telegraph. For example, Flameblast (the expanding fire circle), is something you never want to stand in. Flame/Frost/Storm Bearer Bloodliens (Purple) monsters, after they die, leave a ticking time bomb that's very visible and that you never ever want to stand in.

If frustration hasn't caused you to leave, maybe you can give more details about your character and what you were doing up until point of death? A lot of us around here are helpful, and once in a while someone pops in who is "helpful" - aka they reply with a standard-issue "git gud n00b" :P

I'm following NeverSink's Ranger guide (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1041989), and I mostly use Tornado Shot and Lightning Shot (with 5 stacks of Frenzy). I've slightly modified his passives tree to pick up some more of the defensive stats like Max Life and regens.

I do actually have a flask that removes bleed effects, so I'm good there. I can dodge attacks I see coming, but there are many that you can't.

For example, one of the most frustrating fights was Piety in Act II - Crematorium. She had some lighting pillar attack that would hit you without warning. No matter what I did in terms of skills, hiding around corners, etc. - she killed me the second that she came onto my screen. I got killed numerous times before I finally called in a higher level friend to help me beat her.

The rogue exile that killed me 10+ times had a teleport ability. He would teleport to me and very quickly swing at me. One hit from his club and I was dead.

Evasion tanking doesn't mean jack once you get into Merciless. You can dodge 90% of all attacks, but all it takes is one swing that you don't dodge and you're dead.

Evasion is kind of a funny mechanic. For endgame optimisation and balance purposes, you need a large buffer behind Evasion in order for Evasion to do anything. The reason being that if the game were balanced around Evasion + small buffer being comfortable, then Evasion + large buffer would be completely invulnerable by comparison. Furthermore, Evasion (but only Evasion) in this game isn't RNG over long-period fights, it's periodic. It uses an "entropy" system where every Hit attempt adds its Chance to Hit to your counter, and you only get Hit if the counter exceeds 100 (or 99, depending on how you count), and then the counter loses 100 points. In practice, this means that if someone has 50% hit rate against you, it will always go Hit, Miss, Hit, Miss.

But that's only for Attacks against Evasion - there's no way to get entropy against Spells. Dodge is fully pseudo-random, so you can get screwed by RNG there.

In the endgame, if you want to play pure Evasion, you definitely have to stack Life (or, for the advanced, ES), and it is massively helpful to stack other defensive mechanics as well, namely Enfeeble, although Arctic Armour also helps.

Evasion in the endgame is possible - I've run a pure Life Evasion build through T10 Maps with damage modifiers deathless - but it takes investment in defense, like 99.999% of the builds in this game.

If you'd like, can you unhide your characters? (For some reason, GGG auto-hid everyone's characters ~1 year ago). Just click your account name in the upper left part of the page above your character portrait, and then click Privacy settings on the right.

As Adghar said, try to cap your resistances. Cruel Piety is joke with 75% lightning resist. You can tank her pretty easily.
Rogue exile who use teleport, hmm, two of these guys come in mind for me. One of them use spark, he cast pretty fasat and can fill up the room with many projectiles. They are deadly even if you're capped on lightning resist. Try to wait for pauses when he doesn't cast and get him few swings, then evade for some time and repeat. Second exile, who uses teleport uses Storm call and Ball lightning abilities. Try to evade storm calls (blue circles on ground) and not to get very close to him, because ball lighning will wreck you. He try to teleport right on you, but you have like 0,5s gap and you can use blink arrow and evade him. While he try to take down your clone, try to attack him and repeat until he dies.

All three encounters you mentioned use lighning damage as main source of damage, so try to check your lightning resistance in merciless town. Take some resistance flasks with you, they are really helpfull against these types of enemies.

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Blade_Master wrote:

All three encounters you mentioned use lighning damage as main source of damage, so try to check your lightning resistance in merciless town. Take some resistance flasks with you, they are really helpfull against these types of enemies.

Yeah, I forgot about this. Topaz/Ruby/Sapphire Flasks are great for elemental resists due to the +6% max res on them.

+6% max res may not seem like a lot, but it uses the same rational scaling I mentioned earlier - going from 75% res to 81% grants 24% less damage, which is the same as 31.57% more EHP - meaning it takes 1.316 times as much damage of that Element to kill you as before.

If you are getting one-shot, the first two things to check is if you have capped your resistances and if you have enough life. There are very few bosses that can actually one-shot a well-built character, and none of those attacks are instant.

A character with 76% lightning resistance takes about 300-500 damage per hit from Piety's lightning storm in Crematorium. If you are truly getting one-shot you have a serious lack of lightning resistance and possibly life as well. It's possible you're getting hit two or three times in quick succession but still that shouldn't kill you.

NeverSink's build guide has 85% increased max life on tree at that point of the game. At level 61 you have 770 base life from levels. Assuming you have decent life rolls on most of your gear, you should have around 1000-1200 total base life. Together with the increases from tree your total life pool should be around 2000. Maybe more since you said you've customized the tree to pick up more max life. Do you have that? If not, either your gear is bad or you've omitted some life nodes.

At that point of the game every character should have capped elemental resistances. Step out of town in merciless and check your defensive stats from the character sheet. Are all elemental resistances at 75%? If not, acquire better gear with more resistances or use a purity of elements aura. After you've rectified any problems on these two fronts you shouldn't get one-shot anymore (beware of Kole when you get to Lunaris Temple though; luckily you don't have to kill him and can just run past).

It is called Merciless for a reason. :P It shows you no mercy.

And yes, well, PoE doesn't have typical difficulty scaling. It is composed of many interacting mechanics that if generated together can lead to some very strong enemies. Rare monsters alone are full of these, then you have maps, bosses having telegraphed one-shots and so on.

There is so much to learn in PoE - learning by your mistakes is (sadly, or not) probably the most effective method. :P

First, about crematorium Piety: iirc she screams before casting lightning storm. Still hard to notice at some times, I agree. The key is moving all the time so even it is cast right on your head you just move out before it start hitting.
Second, you haven't said what was that unique enemy, or at least in which area that happened. If that was Triskeriaki then you rage is 100% justified.

Hey take a look at this general beginner guide.
http://poematetips.getforge.io/
It's not a specific build guide, just a collection of various tips to understand the game and what's actually happening behind all the flashy explosions.