Steam vs Standalone?

Hey, first off, apologies if there's somewhere else I should be putting this thread. I figured Gen discussion would be a safe bet though.

So I have this game on Steam, but was wondering if there's any key differences in performance I would enjoy if I went with the standalone version found on this website. Specifically, I would be interested in improving the following:

1.) Patch times.

Maybe this is something I could tweak within Steam, but whenever PoE updates it takes forever and a day for Steam to complete the process. I'm thinking it has something to do with how Steam wants to backup stuff to the Cloud, but I'm not positive. Point is, last time a patch was deployed it took like half an hour for Steam to sort it all out. Are patch times significantly faster on the standalone client?

2.) Load times.

My PC was pretty baller for its time, but said time was several years ago. I'm thinking of upgrading soon, but for now I must make do with what I would call "mid-grade" specs (for instance, my GPU is a Gforce GTX 760 - again, not bad, for a several year old card). In the meantime, the load times I'm experiencing are less than ideal. After the GGG logo screen it takes about 10 seconds to load up the gateway login screen. First-time loading a character into the world takes a couple minutes before all the textures are fully loaded. After that, instance transfer screens generally take between 10 to 20 seconds.

I realize I'm playing on aging tech, but I can't help but wonder if a standalone client would improve the load times somehow. Like, if it doesn't have to call out to Steam, maybe it will process data packets faster? idk. Anyone have any insight here?

Obviously I could try it out myself but my hunch is my Steam profile for this game would be treated as a separate entity from whatever profile I would need to create for the standalone client. Is that the case, and if so, is there a way to ask for a "profile transfer" type of service? How would I go about initiating that process?

Thanks for any advice y'all may have!

1) Standalone is definitely better in this regard. I believe they're going to improve on how Steam updates PoE, but maybe not until PoE 2.

2) Neither client has an advantage here. Steam has no impact on how the client operates aside from potential Steam overlay issues, which is certainly not unique to PoE. PoE pretty much requires an SSD nowadays for smoother loading regardless of the client you use.

You can contact support@grindinggear.com for help linking your Steam account to a standalone PoE account if you need to.

I have a 3 (4?) YO i5 with a 1060 and SSD, and internet is pretty solid here. I don't notice much difference between the two. Patch time on steam is a little slower, but not enough for me to grumble or measure.

I would say if your steam updates take that long, it's worth trying the standalone.

To add standalone, you will need a different game account, which will need a different e-mail.

To link standalone to an existing Steam account all you need to do is contact support and provide them with an email address to link (plus whatever info they want for verification). It's important to have them link it since you already have characters exclusive to Steam. You'll lose them if you link it yourself, then you'll have to contact them anyway to fix that.

And the problem with PoE updates on Steam isn't necessarily related to speed, though that can obviously be its own issue too. Steam manages PoE updates differently than the standalone client, because it doesn't update the ggpk container contents on the fly (standalone does). Updates that modify the ggpk contents require the whole thing to be re-downloaded on Steam--all 20ish gigs of it.

Standalone doesn't have that issue.

I played PoE on steam for a year and standalone for 7 months.

1 - You will patch faster with standalone.

2 - You will load faster with standalone.

( Both 1 and 2 with HD or SSD )

I play on a average PC with 15-25 fps and i got lvl 100 on standalone, on steam i don't even wanna try.

aggromagnet said "You'll lose them if you link it yourself, then you'll have to contact them anyway to fix that". False, i linked my account myself and i can log in both on steam and standalone.

"Log into the Path of Exile website through Steam. Then go to Manage Account. You should find an option to associate an e-mail address with your Path of Exile account. Then you will be able to log into your account using the standalone client". I did this and it worked perfectly". For that i searched "link poe account steam" on google.

I was playing through steam now 4 years standalone. WAY BETTER THAN ON STEAM.

If you wanna upgrade your PC on the cheap, EVGA has a Midweek Madness sale starting every Wednesday at 12am. Its a crapshoot what might show up on there, but they have had 50 dollar 970gtx's, 150 dollar 1080s before. They are used, but its hard to beat that deal if you are on a budget if something actually shows up. More often than not, nothing of note shows up, but if you are just wanting to get something cheap to boost your PC, it doesnt hurt to check it out every Wednesday.

I was having all kinds of problems with frame drops, stuttering, and freezing. Once I switched from steam to the stand alone it all went away. Not to mention I got something out of it I didn't expect, my load times are now 10x faster.

I highly suggest at least trying out the standalone version.

run the game just fine in 2 man parties on win7 and old i7 / 8GB ram / ssd / gtx 1070 on a 1900*1200px output.

if you want to upgrade, always lookup the resolution you want to feed with your new equipment first. if you got a higher resolution, you need a better cpu/graphics card.

network wise, just prefer a cable connection to your router over wireless.

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there should be no differences between the steam and the standalone client when it comes to performance. game resources are the same, it's just a different executable.

if you run the steam version, you always have steam consuming memory in the background, but it shouldn't be worse than having some instances of firefox running.

in theory, you can run the standalone and the steam version from the same directory, just copy the standalone pathofexile64.exe into the steam folder and start it over a desktop link where you need to add a command line parameter --noPatch to disallow it upgrading the resource file (that would invalidate content.ggpk, you can only update the steam resource file by the pathofexile_steam.exe).

if you want to install the standalone version instead steam, just start the installer and close it when it "allocates space", then copy content.ggpk from your steam install into the standalone install folder, then restart the installer. saves you some gigabytes of download.

i would ever recommend running the standalone version cause update times are shorter, supporting the game directly does not make valve get a 30% cut from your support for nothing.

the only disadvantage is you are responsible for backing up content.ggpk yourself from time to time in case it corrupts while updating.

Steam is crap. The client updates too often and uses resources for advertisement.

Go Standalone.