Heist Escaping - Constant Death

Plus Whitering step plus flame dash

To quote Nenet:

"There is no speed great enough to escape death."
"The dead own nothing and feel nothing."
"Time passes through us like a ghost."
"Painfully. Yes."

Capiche, Exile? :)

Its not that mobs are over tuned... The issue is that you are playing in very tight quarters. with maneuverability gone your a sitting duck. AOE attacks will destroy you.

Its like trying to do a legion encounter on dungeon map... Your asking for it.

Some classes are built for this but most are not. BAD DESIGN...

GGG should have went with a larger play area that is fair to all classes. Not the garbage that this is...

NS

i bet they test the game with godmode on so they think its all easy and just release its pile of shit

or


+ your favourite blink skill :-)

If your having to bypass/avoid content this again shows bad design.

I think most of us that play this game want to engage with content that is challenging.

Heist zones should have been designed larger and not set up with choke points with large numbers of aoe mobs.

Poorly thought out and poorly implimented.

NS

"

Cyzax wrote:

or

+ your favourite blink skill :-)

I feel for those struggling with the league.

I was really struggling up until today, and wasn't enjoying the league at all due to regular deaths, but I've just finished about 8 hours of heist grinding ilvl 80 to 82 heists without a death and killing my way back to the entrance. At level 95 its netting about 31mil xp per hour during contract rotation .. so about 75% of my mapping xp, which I'm ok with given the amount of looting.

I'm going to finish off my level to 96 before doing he same on the ilvl 83 heists, although I did run two ilvl 83 Grand Heists without too much problem.

What's made the difference was getting my lions roar, and crafting a vuln ring today and getting into a routine.

Layered defence is crucial:

Making sure I pop my flasks and use enduring cry when its up ( second wind and alternate quality 30% increase warcry speed mean it can be used regularly in the middle of a pack whilst attacking). So with flasks(pretty much 100% uptime), 7 end charges, enduring cry and pantheon, I have somewhere around 75% phys reduction not even taking into account armour.

I nearly always have flesh and stone on sand stance for the blind and damage reduction, only switching to blood stance to take down a singular rare/unique that I can move around if its particularly tough.

I'm immune to stun and most slow affects. Corrupted Blood immunity on Jewel, Flasks with Warding, Grounding.

I have Steelskin on left mouse button .. nearly 3k life buffer, uptime of 3.5 secs and cooldown of a little over 1 sec. I don't have enough armour to make use of Molten shell, and I prefer the shorter cooldown of Steelskin for using it on left mouse button.

Constantly moving and attacking is absolute necessity, especially in robot heists, as the big slow exploding balls, and the Sirus lasers are one shotters .. this is where having dash on second wind also comes into play, constantly moving and attacking in a circular pattern around a group of monsters.. and if you see a big ball windup or a laser its dash-dash at an angle adjacent to the source so you can take them down.

The knockback from lions roar is a huge help as long as you have a big enough AOE and you constantly move. You don't have to move much either unless trying to dodge an AOE. Movement is basically just one step between attacks .. its enough for most monsters attacks to miss you. I'm tempted to try this with heavy strike if I can get a second weight of the empire, as the move-attack-move-attack playstyle takes into account knockback

And avoid synergistic map damage or damage reduction multipliers.. these will get you killed no matter what your build is. run -max res with added crit on a map with lightning or cold added damage?...you won't get very far.

I'm now getting a better appreciation of Heist as a real all round test of a build, and having adjusted my build to deal with it, has given me a lot of satisfaction and is turning my opinion of the league from mostly negative to mostly positive. IF they fix the NPCs, the CTDs, and bump the ilvl on the items from reward chests, then for me the league will be great.

I do think the heists are overtuned quite a bit for lower tier people. They feel fairly spooky to me if I alch and go on monster level 83 and I am at 6.5k hp 3.3k mana (30% mom) and that's with totems distracting/killing while I run spamming flame walls as I go :P I complete like 95% of them but oh boy they can get me low even when jetting through. For monster level 83 that should be a fair risk though. for monster levels 75 and below the damage needs to be toned down though. Lvling gear will not be enough to survive them unless the player is very clever with movement patterns and usage proper flasks/ end combined with movement skills etc.

Doing Heists is like riding a train in India... too much small spaces for so many people in it.
No matter the tier of the player, protections or gear. Eventually you will take one shot Sirius like from nowhere in the middle of the train and leave all experience and loot behind. U wont even see what hit you in that "rave crowded rooms".
Keep your heists GGG.

I don't mind the difficulty. I generally don't finish the contracts. Instead, I just go through and open the chests, stopping and exiting before the alert level bar is filled. Then it just becomes an easy loot run.

I find so many Rogue Markers while playing the game that spending them on failed contracts isn't a bother. I look at it as exchanging a worthless commodity (markers) for currency and items which are useful. If the chest loot was junk, it wouldn't be worth it. But I'm finding five- and six-linked uniques in random contract chests, not even Grand Heist chests.

As others have said, it's an impossible game to balance. If they balance it for casuals, the vets and streamers all say it's too easy and leave. That is who drives the marketing of the game so naturally GGG will cater to them. If casuals complain about difficulty, nobody cares. But if Ziz or mathil or whoever says the game has become so easy that they can finish it with Tabula and without coming close to dying, it will hurt the numbers.

It is also influenced by how much you care about dying. In Diablo 2 and Titan Quest, a death was a big deal to me, it marred my gaming session. In PoE, I just shrug. If I die twenty times in the session, that is just how the game is. Almost everything that isn't the core game (i.e. Metamorph, Blight, Incursion, Syndicate, Delve, Delirium, etc) will frequently kill you unless you play the game for a living and have learned how to avoid it. So why get bothered by it?

I accept my limitations. I can't do Merc and Uber Lab, they are too difficult for me. And I start dying so often at around level 80 that I rarely progress beyond that, the XP penalty from deaths prevents it. So I plan my builds around level 80 with only four Ascendancy points because I'm unlikely to get beyond that. It means I'll never do Sirus or Shaper or whatever but... so what? There is loads of fun to be had in the lower-level content so that's how I approach it.