Less than a day left of the gauntlet and what a rollercoaster it has been!

This race has been so so special. The brutal mods, combined with a ruleset for the race forcing people to kill the bosses with the same character they are levling with for points, has been a success story. No culling characters, constant battle of gathering enough gear, keeping focus and staying away from dangers only to risk it all vs hyper buffed bosses has been a blast to follow.

People may joke around with how "easy" the game is but in this gauntlet most people don't make it past the few first acts. Getting to maps might seem like an impossible task yet the best players still manage to get to the end game and kill off all the content. In an insane struggle against their own minds they try to delay the hardest bosses as long as possible without falling too far behind the others. Others take huge risks in a desperate attempt of stressing the rest into doing the same.

Just a little over 1 day before the gauntlet ends Darkee(Lightee) does the ultimate push and kills Uber Atziri and Uber Elder and with that completes every single boss that awards points in the race. Along with being level 99 that just about secures the win since the probability of anyone reaching level 100 in this race is now slim to none. What a mad man!

The race is far from over though! Money is up for grabs for placement and now the people with perhaps less optimal gear will throw themselves at the bosses. It will be a blood bath. It will be entertaining.

My only complaint is: Too many ED tricksters! :D Good thing the winner is different spec. Pity that spec is VD necro :P Big respect to those that dared to go for melee specs and big F to all the totem users and bow specs. Those builds just don't get close to the needed survivability to compete with such mods combined with hardcore setting.

Thanks to the organizers and the community for supporting it.
*Happy viewer*

darkee made everyone in this race look like a complete joke imo.. the guy doesnt even play poe full time hes busy getting world first in wow most of the time

"

yamface wrote:

darkee made everyone in this race look like a complete joke imo.. the guy doesnt even play poe full time hes busy getting world first in wow most of the time

I don't know about joke. Goratha was giving him a good fight for it and looked to be winning before the insane push happened. There are many people that deserves praise from this race. To me Zizaran's comeback after dying was a display of how wrong the haters on reddit have been about the old racers/streamers. Yes, he still died but I feel he proved that he still is a major contender for top placements in the longer races. Some of the "unknown people" were giving it a good try and some of the softcore people(like Mathil) had impressive runs even with limited play time.

It will always be easy to say that the winner is crushing the others, but I think the race has been way too close to claim such a thing.

"

arknath wrote:

It will always be easy to say that the winner is crushing the others, but I think the race has been way too close to claim such a thing.

It wasnt close at all but ok whatever. Darkee is a full 8 points ahead of the next player. Rushing bosses at the last day has always been a thing for races in this format. It happens in the china race too. It's intentionally done that way to maximize the preparation. Darkee had this in the bag the whole time.

The next player in rank is goratha.. and he couldnt even kill any of the uber bosses in regular ssfhc. I've seen his death broadcasted a few hours ago when he tried practicing. He has no chance of killing those bosses in a private league that has those kinds of damage mods.

And again, this is all aside from the fact that darkee doesn't even play this game full time. Everyone else he's "competing" against is a literal nolifer for poe and nothing else.

"

yamface wrote:

"

arknath wrote:

It will always be easy to say that the winner is crushing the others, but I think the race has been way too close to claim such a thing.

It wasnt close at all but ok whatever. Darkee is a full 8 points ahead of the next player. Rushing bosses at the last day has always been a thing for races in this format. It happens in the china race too. It's intentionally done that way to maximize the preparation. Darkee had this in the bag the whole time.

The next player in rank is goratha.. and he couldnt even kill any of the uber bosses in regular ssfhc. I've seen his death broadcasted a few hours ago when he tried practicing. He has no chance of killing those bosses in a private league that has those kinds of damage mods.

And again, this is all aside from the fact that darkee doesn't even play this game full time. Everyone else he's "competing" against is a literal nolifer for poe and nothing else.

What are you talking about? He killed uber atziri in prac. He died on his ssf hc char when he went again with 1 link ED and 1 link blight and dropped aspect of crab to make the fight tougher (watch the vods)

wow that sure sounds reassuring, his 1 link blight, which still does almost 1 million dps, died to a boss that was designed around 500k dps builds.. im sure he totally has a chance when he fights the real boss with every lethal damage mod in the book when the time comes /s

he doesnt know the fight, get over it :|

i liked the rip clips.

Keep in mind that the performances you're seeing in this race are also strongly assisted by the power of Harvest crafting. We're not gonna see performances like this again next time, unless GGG overhauls crafting once more to provide similar levels of power. Which, given their decision on Harvest, I doubt we'll ever see.

"

Exile009 wrote:

Keep in mind that the performances you're seeing in this race are also strongly assisted by the power of Harvest crafting. We're not gonna see performances like this again next time, unless GGG overhauls crafting once more to provide similar levels of power. Which, given their decision on Harvest, I doubt we'll ever see.

That just means they can just readjust the race to better fit not having Harvest Crafting.

That and Darkee is kind of an amazing player and is capable of gearing without Harvest crafting anyway. He was the first to get the Sirus 8 kill back when the fight was way more unknown and the storms can brick the fight.

For most of us the gauntlet has only been like a rollercoaster in that you have to wait in line forever and you don't even get to ride it because the ride shuts down. In my opinion, any officially supported event should never be unequal in ability to participate, especially when GGG provides prizes and it is hailed as a community even yet most of the community who have registered for it never got to join.

To be fair, most of the blame lies with GGG for their greedy monetization of private leagues, which don't require inherently extra server capacity over the main league, yet require additional costs per extra player rather than just a cost to handle the creation of them. Also, the slowness to respond on raising the cap for players, as well as continuing to demand payment for size, for an open and beneficial-to-them racing event.