Hitting 100 in POE

"

Turtledove wrote:

Spoiler

I have a tendency to modify the statement that it is easy for anyone to hit 100 slightly. I would tend to think that anyone that has the skill to hit level 95 or 96 should have the skill to hit 100. The big challenge for folks that can hit level 95 or 96 is the boring rule that you have to avoid risk of dying for so long on your character. Full disclosure though, I have not ever been tempted to grind on a character for so long to test this theory.

I had.

I played my main character that reached 100 for a long time, >190 days of real playtime - created since 1.3.0 - and I have amassed around 1.350 deaths (with a "few" hundred due to cast on death experiments before 1.4.0)...

If I reached 100, ANYONE can. It's simply a problem of determination and perseverance...

The amount of grinded EXP to get my main to 100 was acquired versus all content that I could manage, but due to me playing my own dual wielding RT "real melee" build (until they reworked Static Strike, killed it's single target damage and was forced to swap to Smite at least), everything above Shaper/Elder was more of a PITA than enjoyment - timers should be reworked to account for us casual n00b hoarder scrubs that enjoy the game on "Uber Hard mode ON" ^^

I also died enough times at level 99 to go from 99 => 100: 3, you read it right, 3 times - from the deaths, about 9 were due to my stubbornness to play PoE on "every week before and after a league hits", a few were due to a dual Abby that I finished after 4-5 tries, and about 2-3 legit deaths due to "one shots", and 1 disconnect.

The funny thing is that for the last 40% I simply said "@#&* it" and ran Beachheads in the most relaxing leveling experience you could expect for leveling from 99 to 100...

Even funnier is that I'm confident I could always get another level 100 character, easier and incomparably faster, but I tend to enjoy my personal builds and RT melee, so much more than ranged/cast playstyles...

As a matter of fact, any proper character can manage decently rolled - not too easy, not too difficult - T16, heck, even alched and go, with Vaals only on suicidal mods to have a chance to change them (or scour/alch Vs chaos + Vaal)... Since the power creep hit around 3.0, red tier maps are the new "decently difficult" content... And with the help of Heists and Delve to get more experience at around T16 map level, as viable alternatives, it's manageable to level these days...

The main question is why don't TencentGGG reward with proper EXP the "real end game" encounters past Shaper??? That is the real conundrum...

personally i hate games that force you to just grind out the last levels that take way to long.

Instead the leveling should have no death penalty but you can only level to 95.

To get the last few levels you need to complete certain tasks.

So 1 point for killing The Elder.

1 point for killing Sirus 8.

1 point for killing Shaper.

1 point for killing Maven.

1 point for killing any 4 of the sub bosses, So any of the Bestiary Spirit Bosses or Abyssal Liches or Atziri or Beyond Bosses or Breach Lords or Delve bosses or Synthesis bosses or Catarina, Master of Undeath or The Vaal Omnitect.

By doing this then you know a player has beaten most of the bosses to get to level 100 rather than just play it safe and grind easy maps etc until 100.

That's actually a pretty reasonable proposal - earn the last few levels through killing end-game bosses, remove the death penalty. Sounds fun to me.

certainly a viable alternative, at least.. but i guess they have started rewarding players for beating this content now, albeit not in terms of passive tree points and levels..

"

So I've been around for a long time but I never cared about hitting 100

I don't trust anything you said becausese you type like an impatient 7th grader on AOL instant messenger.

It's amazing how many people are shortsighted in this thread...

Instead of raging at the system in place, OFFER NEW SYSTEMS. If you get rid of the death exp penalty, whats the point of dying? As others have mentioned, if death is nbd then the only goal of builds would be pushing as much damage as possible because who cares about defense or balance.

ARPGS and RPGs in general need to have some system that penalizes the player for dying. There is no durability in PoE, so we can't have item damage. There is no "gold" so we can't lose gold on death. The only thing left is exp, so that's what we lose.

Would you rather drop all your gear? Drop a random item from your stash? Please don't bring up the portal thing because it has already been said: if you use all 6 portals, you shouldn't be doing that content in the first place. That isn't a real punishment for your build.

I realize that I just ignored my own advice to offer a new system, but I personally feel that the exp penalty is the current best way to approach this issue. Just like in other games, if you keep dying in content you GRIND easier content until you can survive the harder stuff. It's amazing that this staple of grind-based rpgs seems completely lost on some of you who want to be able to play all content at all times with no risk...

Exp loss on death is fine, it is by all accounts necessary, whether you care to see why or not.

I leveled to 100 again this league, solo, just running maps + Niko scarab then delve > repeat.

--

The only comment I have is that 99 > 100 takes too long(It literally took me 8 or 9 days with 0 deaths), the 'nerf' they did a while back was blatantly too much and balanced around full group Chayula rotas, as a nice screw you to solo players.

By 50% I'd kind of had enough, but with 5 days fully invested I couldn't just throw that away.

--

The issue with leveling post 98 is that you either go all in or not at all. There are so many risks associated with even mid-tier content, however remote they may be, that one d/c, crash or star-aligned crit setting you back a whole day of exp is just too much of a gamble. You are therefore pretty much forced to either rota or do 'safe' trivial content for days. That leaves little room for 'fun'.