Difficulty Curve Problems

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DrakeMorden wrote:

But, ultimately, if the answer is "Well, you need several years learning the game mate" that is a bit of a barrier to entry.

You don't need several years. If you don't want to learn at all, you can just copy other people's builds, there are thousands in the character subforums.

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zagibu wrote:

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DrakeMorden wrote:

But, ultimately, if the answer is "Well, you need several years learning the game mate" that is a bit of a barrier to entry.

You don't need several years. If you don't want to learn at all, you can just copy other people's builds, there are thousands in the character subforums.

That came out wrong, and wasn't quite what I was trying to imply.

I'm spending a lot of time on the wiki checking spell effects and game mechanics already.
But the learning curve on this is surprisingly harsh and contains a lot of little things that ain't obvious on the first pass. Like, the importance of biasing a build towards using a single color of gem simply to make fitting it into equipment that much easier. The only real way to find that out is to go there and do it.

I have tried to learn the mechanics behind the game. Yes, there is stuff I don't yet know. But there will be. Partly because there are so many levels of complexity or through simple oversight/misunderstanding or other reasons. I've been binging on this thing a bit, and got well over 100hrs of play already.

...and I'm still finding the difficulty curve is a damn crapshoot. One moment I'm breezing it, the next i'm getting my ass whooped like a redheaded stepchild. It ends up feeling quite arbitrary and random which isn't a fun net result.



Which all brings me back to the point I was trying to make with that comment.
If the feedback is that I need to know more about the game mechanics than I already do - that's actually quite a high bar.


So yeah. If where we are at is:
"I keep dying and I don't know why!"
"Could be one of a brazilian reasons mate. If you don't know, why do you expect any of us to when we wern't there?"
"Oh. Well, I guess that makes some sense."

No "It's a dumb question but have you checked X, Y or Z?" or "Which area did you say it was? Yeah, I had some issues there. Try A, B or C." just "Heh. Yeah, it's complicated. So much so that nobody can help at a distance due to too many moving parts."
Then that still leaves me pretty much roadblocked at Act Six and with a lots wasted time and effort behind me trying to figure out a game that I want to be able to enjoy but has ultimately turned out to be rather frustrating and seemingly random. It's a surprisingly bitter pill to swallow.

I already told you what your general problems are. You simply don't have enough life and resistances. If you don't want to change this, or can't, simply go find another game, because this is as far as you will get with those values.

Get this shit fixed before you lament about difficulty curves and damage spikes. THEN, when you still die occasionally from a bad situation, you have to right to lament about it all day, because it's still a problem, but it's not your problem right now.

Ta for the quick reply. It is appreciated.

I thought I had bought myself some life and elemental resistance.
In the Duelist tree, there is only one notable Max life passive I havn't bought yet.
There are a few in the Marauder tree that I have just branched into that I havn't got to yet.
Yes, I could have a bit more max life - but if I did, I would have nothing else.

It's similar story for resistances. It isn't like I have skipped straight past +resistance buys. All the one's I've hit I've bought. I could have bought more if I really tried but would have had to sacrifice a lot to do it (including max life). And, you know, I've just taken a significant hit to them so they are going to be a bit shifty at this point in the game.

Where do I get more from? Equipment? I'm struggling to find stuff that has reasonable base defenses and supports the gems I want - I don't think I am in much of a position to be picky on what powers it has.

Like I've already told you, you can run a Purity of Elements aura and use a Bismuth flask to temporarily fix your resistances until you find proper gear.

Also, up to a 4 link, sockets don't really matter, because you can change them without investing a lot of currency to whatever you need. So don't vendor items with good life and res just because they only have 1 socket.

Zagibu is right you´re lacking resistances, life and damage on both characters (especially resistances)

If you like making your own builds you should get inspiration from other players and I can only recommend you to use Path of building planner.

You will probably fail in creating your first several characters though (it´s the hard way how to learn the game or you can just copy paste the builds from others).

Look at your slayer.

First of all you were tricked a bit here ...
According to content update 3.0.2 patch notes there were fixed a bug that could cause some standard characters to receive resistance penalties earlier than intended.

I guess your main attack is cleave so you should get supporting gems that fit it.
I would take any damage related gems (f.e. maim, chance to bleed or concentration effect) instead of knockback.

There are more things to do but it´s a bit more complicated (check character section on the forum and LF cleave slayer to get inspiration about things)

Tree is not so bad but you have taken some passives that have low benefit for your build such as Versatility.
You should take Resolute Technique that will solve your problem with hit chance forever.

I understand that new poison/bleed mechanics are too complicated for new players. I call it a "noob trap".
You can´t scale all type of damage (poison, bleed, initial hit damage) at once.

I would scale initial hit and a bit of bleed later for now.

You will need some leech sooner or later, Vitality Void passive lays on your way (I would take 0.4/0.4 mana leech node for now).

Equip:

As we told you before you got main problem with resistances.

Do you have problem with trading? If not use http://poe.trade/ to buy stuff from other players.

You can get your upgrades pretty easy for low price.
I guess you have some currencies such as chaos orb, orb of alchemy, alterations etc. (check their ratio at http://currency.poe.trade/ )

You can search for specific stuff there (just choose the league, fill some information you´re looking for and click search)
About selling stuff you can get some info here: https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Poe.trade_tutorial

There are also lots of nice videos on YT etc.

You should replace Belt, boots, gloves and weapon at first.

Try to cap your resistances (to 75 except chaos for now)

LF these stats: (don´t spend too much, you can buy some nice pieces of gear for a few alchemy or 1-2 chaos orbs, depends on stats..)

Weapon: - buy cheap

Belt: - you can buy this cheap and overall great belt:

Boots: - some movement speed, 50+ life, 40-60+ total resistances or 30+ singl resistance (prefer 4 linked)

Gloves: 50+ life 60+ total resist or 30+ singl resist (attack speed or min/max physical damage is nice bonus)

If you´re still lacking resistances use purity aura (you will need good cold resistances in act 6).
At least one of your flask should have staunching affix (remove bleeding) and get 1 flask with remove freeze.

I think there is an assumption I have a lot more resources to throw at this problem than I actually do.

Maybe it's because most players active on the forum are naturally veteran players who have spent ages learning the technicalities of everything and all the little tips and tricks.

It's easy to forget that not everyone has that skillset to draw upon - nor should, imo, everyone be expected to. Skills need to be learned, and everyone needs to start somewhere.

I'm pretty much flat out of jewelers/chromatic/fuse orbs at this point, which makes optimizing equipment tricky. I'm getting them at a rate such that tweaking even one item is a BIG resource investment - I'll get to do a couple of times per act.

The flask is an interesting example of this - it didn't occur to me that I would have needed one right before I did so I wouldn't have saved it (going instead for HP heals with handy magical effects) and they don't reliably spawn in traders so I can't just go out and buy one. It will be something for me to keep my eyes open for in future (as it will be dirt cheap when/if I ever see one for sale), but doesn't help solve the problem right now.

That said, reminding me "I said to look at your life and resistances." did actually do the trick. Fire/Ice prot auras and some cheap rings did do the trick. Thanks again.
...now I'm wading through the next areas and back to being an unstoppable god of slaughter again. What was I saying about a lack of middle ground? ;)



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My slayer is actually actually around Bleed - i just hasn't quite got as far as maximising it yet. Big, high damage physical attacks that spawn DoT effects for high aggregate damage. It seems to be one of the few readily available damage multipliers in the game, and has some handy benefits like opponents possibly falling dead as I run away from them. Of course, pretty much everything is more complicated than it seems. But high physical damage numbers have handy side effects with knockback/stun and that part seems to be working quite well. It's understanding the 'blink and you die' thing.


So his primary attack is Heavy Strike. It currently has Bleed and Poison linked to it, and as I get more links it should gain things like Ruthless, Melee Damage and Better Crits.


Secondary attack is, as guessed, Cleave. I preferred Sweep but Cleave spawns Fortify effects through a jewel so Cleave it is. This is built for crowd control. It's currently got Knockback, Faster Attacks and Multistrike on it, but I might be better off with things like Stun or Charge on Stun/Crit.


Defense is mostly Cast On Damage Taken spawning Ice Golem, Molten Shell & Temporal Chains.

Vengence, Ash Herald, And Ancestral Warcheif are in the mix as well.


Versitility was bought simply to get the Int. It was right next to a whole load of other interesting ones and I needed more Int to let gems progress. I might sell it back later on when I have got more Int from other places but 40 stat points with 20% accuracy, 4% attack rate & 4%mana cost reduction seems like a strong buy in it's own right. There are ascendancy picks that don't do that much.

Resolute Technique won't work for me. As I understand it, Bleed effects don't stack so I want big single hits rather than lots of smaller ones. Crit effects seem like a neat way of getting that peak damage up - but that is all a way off yet.


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I don't have a huge problem with trading,, but I would really rather be playing the game than talking about it. As a new player I don't have a guild or circle of friends to trade with, I don't have much in the way of trade goods to sell and whilst I have tried to get my head around the core rules mechanics I can't say I have done the same for the equipment list.

Besides, because trade goods and consumable items are the same thing it's not like I have much to buy with either (although I have been trying not to use the bigger currency items for this reason). It's one of those things that hasn't happened yet - as you can see, I'm still trying to learn/understand other aspects of the game. It's not like there is an in game trade post or anything - it all seems to be driven by out of game tools like this forum which makes it feel distinctly additional rather than a central gameplay aspect.


One of these days the huge wall of text posts will stop, honest!
Thank you all for your understanding, support and patience.

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DrakeMorden wrote:

Resolute Technique won't work for me. As I understand it, Bleed effects don't stack so I want big single hits rather than lots of smaller ones. Crit effects seem like a neat way of getting that peak damage up - but that is all a way off yet.

In fact bleed can stack if Crimson dance key node is allocated.

On the other hand poison won´t benefit much from big hits bcos its mechanic (stackable without limit; ofc it´s limited by duration and such ...)

It´s possible to build around crit but most of the crit nodes are located in Shadow´s and Ranger´s area and/or not associated with Axes.
It will be not effective without many crit nodes and/or expensive crit gear.

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Rakiii wrote:

In fact bleed can stack if Crimson dance key node is allocated.

On the other hand poison won´t benefit much from big hits bcos its mechanic (stackable without limit; ofc it´s limited by duration and such ...)

Crimson Dance will let me stack bleed, yes.

But it also halves the base bleed damage AND removes the extra damage from them moving (ie knockback from the Heavy Strike or from running after me if I leg it)...which can make it close to breakeven.

A single bleed event deals full damage right from the start, without needing to build multiple hits as for Crimson Dance. Ruthless blow? That will be my bleed for a little while then.

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It´s possible to build around crit but most of the crit nodes are located in Shadow´s and Ranger´s area and/or not associated with Axes.
It will be not effective without many crit nodes and/or expensive crit gear.

Critting isn't essential. It's a 'nice to have' thing that plays into other objectives/strengths. Bleed will take the highest damage event whilst it's happening, so crits are a kinda bonus of extra bleed damage on top of extra crit. Naturally I want all I can easily get, but I don't feel the need to sacrifice too much to get them.

Much like Knockback or Stun really. Both are handy advantages of aiming for peak /attack damage rather than pure DPS but other things are more important.

It's even possible I might sell back the Axe skills and go for a sword so I can use Viper Strike and really go to town on DoT effects.

...but I think that's complicating a simple problem.
High Damage, bleed bonuses, try not to cock anything else up - I hope that is a simple enough concept to be fairly doable and fairly robust to minor mistakes in build/play.

To be honest, all damage dealing ailments are meh at best in 3.0. You are almost always better off simply scaling hit damage.