Being a mediocre player gets you nowhere in POE

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krizzexile wrote:

It starts around level mid 80 - I only play softcore, I know my limits - when I map and map, trying to farm currency, trying to level. My goal: seeing the "endgame". The T16 bosses, maybe beating the shaper.
Problem: I make mistakes. Many. Not, too many, but enough to prevent any progress. Sometimes I missjudge the situation, sometimes my reaction time is too slow (by a lot, I am 40+), sometimes I simply forgot the mechanic or the threat a particular enemy poses.
Well here goes another 10% exp. 2 hours down the drain. My highest char is 91. 10% here is like 4 hours of mapping for me and I try to play maps I know are somewhat safe. I know most of the "nope" bosses in the maps etc. However being a slow player also has another disadvantage: in the time you farm x currency for item y, the inflation already made item y two times x and so on.

Mm... I tend to agree.

I've never made it past 87. However, that's somewhat deceiving.

Steam allows you to look at Global Achievement stats. If you look at PoE, you'll see that only about 7% of the player base has ever broken level 80. Only about 3% has ever broken level 90. So, you may not have ever seen the Shaper, but you still are in the top 3%. It might not seem like it from reading this forum, but most players probably don't even know these forums exist.

Those Steam stats are of course from the entire history of the game, and they have gone up since acts 5-10 got introduced, but even if you limited them to the 3.0 and forward stats, I suspect you wouldn't see a huge jump.


I'd love to see the endgame, but I've never even made it to red level maps. And unless I switch over to Standard, I probably never will.

Meh ... anyway, I guess I concur.

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johnKeys wrote:

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DoubleU wrote:

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Aoikazega wrote:

most of the twatch streemers probably obtain their swimming pools of exalts with real currency for PoE currency trades and/or most likely bots.

Ok tinfoil hat off please.

At least some amount of high-end currency and items on the market, comes from bots and RMT. It is a well known problem PoE had for years, despite GGG's best efforts to fight it.
So while only a handful of Streamers were actually caught and banned, I think it's safe to say a majority of them obtain these botted/RMTed stuff through regular trade or friend donations, or friend of a friend etc'.
Without knowing it.

@OP, I'm also over 40 and never had a single character above level 90. And I've been here for years.
I guess it is a matter of knowing one's limits. And then you can play around them like using party rotations and whatnot, to give you more bang for the buck (exp per hour) and make each mistake less painful.

I'd say its more than some. Most of the items you used in D2 were botted. Most of the runes were duped. Runewords also rolled backed and duped. Game was heavily RMT influenced. People to this day still don't believe how bad it was. Probably tell you theirs was legit. Whatever. I watched my friend running a random shop sell duped runes 500-2k dollars a pop. Middleman buy 20k worth of duped runes at a time for resell. That's D2 how many years ago?

I fail to see how anything has changed since that time. Instead of mass rollback, bots, and dupes, we have indexers, price fixing, and bots. What makes PoE special is all that stuff is still valuable when the league ends, in standard, compared to Open Bnet.

It always amazes me how much people put their head in the sand over this issue. I guess they just don't want to believe it. It drops the veil of fair play they believe exists in their mind.

I will say nowadays popular streamers have enough zealot fanboys giving them stuff for free that they probably don't have to worry about it. This is one thing the "pros" back then didn't have. Not to mention they could list a white healing potion and someone would give them an Exalt for it.

I usually play a league till 93, die a few times on that level and loose the motivation since it destroyed hours of leveling.

I like playing a varity of maps, so i usually go with whatever map i get instead of shaping my atlas, but that kind of playstyle get's penalized very hard by the XP-Malus :3

Would like to have a medicore softcore league without xp malus on death. Would be so much more fun for me.

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Destructodave wrote:

I also play this game by myself even with my best bud playing. Honestly, mapping together just isn't fun. I dont find this game, D3, or any games of this top-down Arpg fun to group in. I dunno why. I actually get a road hypnosis feeling where I get physically tired spamming my abilities into some blob of mobs and skill effects. So I just cannot even duo maps, and by the nature of the top down perspective, you always feel behind.

I don't like grouping outside of getting rushed and being carried in baal runs. Given that it's probably been 10 years+ since I've done that.....

A lot of players don't get into the grouping mood in a game like this since a lot of the joy is finding something special on your own. However, a lot of the time to actually find something special you get herded towards mindless mapping and by that point the malaise overpowers any celebratory motion.

I would bet that the majority of us need to get the carrot off the stick sooner than later, which is my theory as to why that initial rush every league fades as the masses burn out.

If I played at breakneck speed mindless mapping I would have uninstalled weeks after starting up - no sense in accumulating virtual wealth if you never stop to enjoy it.

Perhaps somewhat belatedly: I'm aware that I'm not exactly a great player here. I've hit 90... once. My 'top tier' achievements include killing Atziri and Uber Izaro alone a few times - enough to be satisfied that I could do it if I had more patience. Barely pulled through Elder and a Lich on my first attempts, blind, and debated if I wanted to try further attempts. Still not sure. Tilted at the Pale Council windmill at least once, fairly convinced that MIGHT not be a giant worth my effort...

Been close to 90 a few other times, however, and my biggest piece of advice is to not let death be a discouragement. It sucks - most often when you aren't expecting it and you're not even sure what the hell blew you apart that particular time. I've also done most of my high-end runs in mostly junk gear, in 'paper doll' builds I imagine people would give me crap for. Notably, my top two being a LA-QotF* Assassin, a hilariously meme-y Nghamu Cyclone Ascendant, and a Flame Totem Templar from back when Ascendancy first launched.

You don't really need to be super-tanky to hit 90. What you need to do, however, is adjust your playstyle to shift where and how you take risk. If I'm actually pushing for the progression, I don't bother with 'risky' maps past 60% of my XP bar. Figure out fast what that means for you - which bosses you have trouble with, which ones you roll over, and dump the maps that give you problems fast after getting an Atlas completion for it to try and get better drops in general. Or save'em for days where you're not feeling too bad and can risk a bit of XP to try and get better gear. Run'em blue if you need to. It's a three-month league, and if you've accepted the fact you are 'mediocre' or 'average', you don't need to win any races here. You just need to finish so you can do better next time. It DOES get easier.

Use the human ability to iterate on past mistakes to fail better each time. And if you feel the heat coming down, don't force it. Don't get impatient. Don't get upset. Bail and do something that will actually be relaxing for a bit, even if that means just leveling an alt for a bit. At some point, it's better to lose a map that's giving you trouble anyway, then it is to undo hours of effort trying to make up for it. Playing frazzled is just going to make you die more often.

It's all risk management. You CAN do it. You just need time, and experience. Luck, mate.

(*Lightning Arrow/Queen of the Forest - it was focused mostly on high movespeed. Meme-y as heck, but damned if I didn't get chunked hard on occasion.)

(NOTE: Most reasons I don't push past 80 in a league is lack of patience or hitting my goals early and having no desire or drive to keep playing past that point. That is perfectly acceptable - play however makes you the most comfortable. Anyone that gives you crap for it's just a wad, anyway, and statistically would find SOME reason to continue being one regardless of your actual performance in any case.)

I have two lvl 90 characters this league and have gotten 1 'double corruption room'. You can't judge your expectations for your play experience based off what you see on reddit. Down that path lies madness.

Why do you care about leveling past 90 if your main goal is to see all the endgame content? I first killed uber elder at like level 83 last league. You just need a boss killer build. And shaper is way easier in comparison - you can easily kill him with 1 or 2 ex in gear (even less when closer to end of league) and a good build.

Most "bad" players are playing some shit hipster build that they either came up with on their own or did some "personalization" (hint: fucking up) of a good build guide. Making good builds is incredibly hard in this game. Like it's just really, really, really hard. There's NO shame in going for an OP meta build and following it exactly. Read it again: follow the guide EXACTLY. A bad build is an absolutely CRIPPLING problem in this game if you want to see the end game, while a good build lets a mediocre player completely crush content like shaper (however uber elder is a different beast, you will need good gear and mechanical skills as well).

No joke, his gear is way more expensive than what I have and he is complaining while I am doing 8 modded tier 15 maps. [Removed by Support]

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krizzexile wrote:

Problem: I make mistakes. Many. Not, too many, but enough to prevent any progress. Sometimes I missjudge the situation, sometimes my reaction time is too slow (by a lot, I am 40+), sometimes I simply forgot the mechanic or the threat a particular enemy poses.

I have those problems too from time to time and I am 28.
It started getting better with better builds and learning the content more and more.

For me the biggest killer is impatience

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Johny_Snow wrote:

No joke, his gear is way more expensive than what I have and he is complaining while I am doing 8 modded tier 15 maps. Thats pathetic.

I didn't want to get into that but... yes. He has way more currency than you need to easily farm shaper, but that build is a disaster. For example, curse immunity on a life flask with a soul mantle build... not to mention 3 life flasks...