Please make it faster to get to maps!

Maybe I'm just a slow player or bad or stupid or something but despite playing as fast as I can and referencing speedrunning guides, I still feel like it takes me forever to get to maps in a new league. It honestly keeps me from playing in a lot of leagues because between other games and my job, it's hard to convince myself to slog through 15 hours of the game to get to the part that I love.

I really enjoyed the acts my first few playthroughs and I was really excited when 5-10 were announced and I really enjoyed playing through them for the first time but it's just not what the game is about for me. I generally make my own builds, rather than following a guide, and I'm sure that slows me down but a huge part of what I enjoy in the game is theory-crafting a build and trying to execute on it, endlessly tweaking and number-crunching as I level it up, discovering it's weaknesses and strengths. Levels 1-50 can feel like such a slog when trying to do that. I enjoy the feeling of becoming stronger and growing my character but the early levels just kinda feel bad. I actually have numerous friends who have bounced off of the game because it just doesn't feel very good to play at first. You're slow, you have limited mobility, you die easily, etc...

TL;DR: please please please make it faster to get to the best part of the game

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drklrd wrote:

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SlowInternet wrote:

it's hard to convince myself to slog through 15 hours of the game to get to the part that I love.

[...]

TL;DR: please please please make it faster to get to the best part of the game

Top racers get to maps in ~5 hours, at league start SSF HC. I do about 7-8 hours.

Getting better at the game will help you cut down that time in half. How much do you play per league? 200 hours? even at 200 hours, 15 hours is ~8% of the time spent leveling. It's an insignificant amount of time considering a whole development of a character over a league.

I certainly know that other people can get there faster but that's with hyper optimizing for speed. I'd be really curious to hear from GGG about what the metrics look like. In a given league, what is the average time it takes a character to beat Act 10. I'm certainly not a top player nor am I even claiming to be particularly good at the game but I have gotten to end game content in multiple leagues. That being said, I'm still a relatively casual player, when I play, I play on the first day of the league but I'm not usually putting in 20 hours over that weekend or anything.

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drklrd wrote:

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SlowInternet wrote:

it's hard to convince myself to slog through 15 hours of the game to get to the part that I love.

[...]

TL;DR: please please please make it faster to get to the best part of the game

Top racers get to maps in ~5 hours, at league start SSF HC. I do about 7-8 hours.

Getting better at the game will help you cut down that time in half. How much do you play per league? 200 hours? even at 200 hours, 15 hours is ~8% of the time spent leveling. It's an insignificant amount of time considering a whole development of a character over a league.

Speedrunning any game is the exception, not the rule.

Or it would be, if PoE wasn't designed entirely backwards.

I usually don't rush "rush" on day 1, causal pace, interacting with league mechanic, doing side quests for quicksilvers, Golden Handjob and talk shit on global. It takes me around 9-10 hours nowadays, causual pace 1 hour per act (incl. act 1 :D

But that's day 1 of temp league.

If I do re-leveling, I think my fastest Blood Aquaducts was under 3 hours, decent pace of 20 minutes per act. But that's just no-bs, run run run, don't trade, don't do anything but push forward, 2 x 6L, 3x crafted quicksilver, onslaught on kill, smoke mine, rampage and 1k life at lvl 50 style of character.

It's from Zero to Hero game, so of course it feels and is slow at the start.

You can shave +50% of that time by just skipping league mechanic before maps.

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SlowInternet wrote:

Maybe I'm just a slow player or bad or stupid or something but despite playing as fast as I can and referencing speedrunning guides, I still feel like it takes me forever to get to maps in a new league. It honestly keeps me from playing in a lot of leagues because between other games and my job, it's hard to convince myself to slog through 15 hours of the game to get to the part that I love.

15 hours to reach maps? Fucking hell, there is plenty of scope for you to speed up that part of the process.

The 'pros' are reaching maps in 4 hours. Experienced players that make an effort can get it done 5-6 hours. For other players, 8 hours is a more realistic target that is pretty easy to achieve.

So yes, as you said, you are an incredibly fucking slow player if it takes you 15 hours to reach maps.

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SlowInternet wrote:

Spoiler

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drklrd wrote:

"

SlowInternet wrote:

it's hard to convince myself to slog through 15 hours of the game to get to the part that I love.

[...]

TL;DR: please please please make it faster to get to the best part of the game

Top racers get to maps in ~5 hours, at league start SSF HC. I do about 7-8 hours.

Getting better at the game will help you cut down that time in half. How much do you play per league? 200 hours? even at 200 hours, 15 hours is ~8% of the time spent leveling. It's an insignificant amount of time considering a whole development of a character over a league.

I certainly know that other people can get there faster but that's with hyper optimizing for speed. I'd be really curious to hear from GGG about what the metrics look like. In a given league, what is the average time it takes a character to beat Act 10. I'm certainly not a top player nor am I even claiming to be particularly good at the game but I have gotten to end game content in multiple leagues. That being said, I'm still a relatively casual player, when I play, I play on the first day of the league but I'm not usually putting in 20 hours over that weekend or anything.

You have no idea what you are talking about dude.

1. Hyper-optimising for speed is 4-6 hours. Reaching those times is difficult. 8 hours however, is not a difficult target to hit, and does not require any optimisation for speed or anything.

2. The game is not, and should never be balanced around the 'average' PoE player..fuck that would be grim, this game would have died years ago.

3. Stop looking for excuses. Start learning the game. You do not need to be a pro or do anything special to hit maps in ~8 hours. Plan out your build beforehand, if you don't know the routes/quests, then keep a guide up ready to go. Alternatively you can keep a video of tytykiller or someone else up and pause it as you go along.

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SlowInternet wrote:

Maybe I'm just a slow player or bad or stupid or something but despite playing as fast as I can and referencing speedrunning guides, I still feel like it takes me forever to get to maps in a new league. It honestly keeps me from playing in a lot of leagues because between other games and my job, it's hard to convince myself to slog through 15 hours of the game to get to the part that I love.

I really enjoyed the acts my first few playthroughs and I was really excited when 5-10 were announced and I really enjoyed playing through them for the first time but it's just not what the game is about for me. I generally make my own builds, rather than following a guide, and I'm sure that slows me down but a huge part of what I enjoy in the game is theory-crafting a build and trying to execute on it, endlessly tweaking and number-crunching as I level it up, discovering it's weaknesses and strengths. Levels 1-50 can feel like such a slog when trying to do that. I enjoy the feeling of becoming stronger and growing my character but the early levels just kinda feel bad. I actually have numerous friends who have bounced off of the game because it just doesn't feel very good to play at first. You're slow, you have limited mobility, you die easily, etc...

TL;DR: please please please make it faster to get to the best part of the game

Hello! I've got a few friends who used to be in the same boat as you (12-15 hour A10 completions), and the good news is that it's actually pretty easy to significantly speed up your time to get to maps in a new league. It doesn't even require you to get mechanically better at the game; in literally every case I've encountered, it's more a case of things you're doing strategically or tactically wrong than a situation of "just get good." TLDR, you're spending too much time not fighting. Anyway, here are the things I suspect are most likely to be your issues, and their solutions:

1 - DO NOT: spend too much time in town. This is a big one, and just about every single person on my friends list is guilty of this at some point or another in their POE careers. You should NEVER go back to town except when necessary for a quest, and even then you should only go back when the reward is something you need RIGHT NOW (quicksilver flask or new active skill gem). "Skill points, support gems, etc" can and should be mass-collected at the end of each Act. I usually wait until The Way Forward to collect my Fairgraves skillpoint, for instance.

2 - DO NOT: spend too much time levelling up. The second leading cause of wasted time is feeling the need to apply every single skill point as you get it, instead of waiting until you have 5-6 and then dropping them all in at once. I typically fill my passive tree in one notable at a time: if I'm starting as a Marauder, say, I don't bother opening my tree until I can get all the way to Warrior's Blood. Those minor nodes honestly don't have enough impact to be worth opening your passive tree every 30 seconds.

3 - DO NOT: pursue (specific) optional content earlier than it matters. I personally have never agreed with getting to Act 10 and then going back for every single optional quest; the time you save by skipping them you usually spend grinding the Blood Aquaduct anyway, since you'll get to Act 10 at around level 55 if you play like this. However, there are a few key things you can absolutely skip until later, and come back for when you physically move faster:
3A - Deep Dweller. Never, ever do this until after you beat the Warden and get a movement skill. The Flooded Depths takes about 1/3 as long when you can just blink across the rivers.
3B - Normal Lab trials in Prison, Crypt, and Catacombs. Skip these until you're ready to do your normal lab, since you either won't have a movement skill yet (Prison) or won't be going into that area for mandatory quests. Izaro is almost exactly as hard as Malachai, so I typically do my normal lab when I finish Act 4.
3C - Absolutely any quest which gives skill respec points should be skipped until you need those respec points. Usually, these aren't done at all: by the time you're lvl 80 and decide you want to change ascendancies, 2 regret orbs is usually worth more to you than the time it would take to go cleanse the Den of Evil
3D - Yugul. NEVER go to fight Yugul until you have some form of freeze removal/immunity, it's just one skill point and that's worth a lot less than the time you'll lose if you have to walk the High Gardens twice. Finish Act 8 and come back for this later.

4 - DO: Hunt the Great White Beast (most of the time). If you don't have a second quicksilver flask by the time you finish Act 1, it's definitely worth the 40-90 seconds it'll take you to enter the Den and kill the big bear for Yeena. Not only do you get a second Quicksilver flask to keep you in combat for a larger percentage of your playtime, this one is item level 15. The one you get from the Medicine Chest is only level 4. What's the difference? Well, kind of a lot: by level 15, utility flasks can roll the Chemist prefix for less charges used per sip and the Adrenaline suffix for bonus movement speed. Neither of these can appear on the lvl 4 flask, no matter how many Alts you use.

5 - DO: Learn the visual clues for the Act zones. There are way too many of these to list here, but almost all of the zones in acts 1-10 have clues you can use to navigate them more efficiently. They aren't actually random at all, and learning these tricks will collectively cut a lot of pointless wandering and retracing out of your Act 1-10 time. Engineering Eternity made a really good guide, but if you only know two you should know about these:
5A - The Act 2 Road. The outdoor areas between the Act 1 Prison and the Act 2 Broken Bridge are all directly connected by the road you first see in the Prisoner's Gate, and the waypoints are always along that road. So when you leave the Act 2 town, heading East along the road through the Old Fields will take you directly to the Crossroads. Following the road through the crossroads will lead you past the waypoint to the Broken Bridge. Following the road in the Broken Bridge will lead you past the waypoint to Kraityn's bandit camp. Going the other direction, you can follow the road through the Riverways to be led directly past the waypoint to the Western Forest, and follow that road all the way to the other entrance to the Prisoner's Gate. Bonus: the small stone path branching off of the main road at the Riverways waypoint leads directly to the Wetlands.
5B - The Lunaris Temple 2 stairs. ALWAYS go up stairs. If you go down stairs, you are going the wrong way. True in both acts 3 and 8.

And, that's really it. When the next league starts, if you can just keep those 5 tips in mind I guarantee you can shave multiple hours off of your entire run, even if you aren't playing any better than before. The common thread is obviously "always be fighting," which is a good personal mantra to have when questing.

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drklrd wrote:

[...] even at 200 hours [...]

I think this right there is one of the core reasons why people tend to talk past each other in this forum quite a bit. 200 hours isn't "just 200 hours", it is a huge investment of lifetime into a game. I mean, assuming I play the league for 2 months, that is more than three hours per day - on average! Every day, weekday or weekend, doesn't matter. I would assume that > 90% of PoE players in a league play for less than 200 hours per league.

That being said, I don't really have a problem with the time spent leveling, I also usually enjoy leveling, especially when the content of the new league ties in nicely with it. But I do have problems with some of the more dumb timesinks in the later game, and would vote for introducing a "casual league" in order for GGG to be able to cater more to all kinds of players.

No, i'm a "slow" player, it would take me the weekend to get me to maps (but then again i tab out a lot and have other stuff to do) and 2 days to end game is ridiculously short, and thats not even pointing out that you can get to maps in under half a day.

the rule of thumb is around 50 min per act. aka 8 1/2 hour for the story. we round up since we asume u trade/buy some nice items/links. -> 9 hours

I made a speedtest for myself 1 day ago and took me only 35 minutes per act (tested until act 5). but yeah thats not fun and very exhausting u dont even play the game, u basically just running to the bosses/quetss.

Its much more fun to join random groups at league start, you can share waypoints/portals quick and safe alot of time too. In heist league it only took me 5 hours to reach the mapping part, cause i did it with random groups (ingame group finder)