I am really thinking in quitting this game after 5-6 years

Ok, I am almost giving up.

POE is now almost about having a build that one shots everything or tanks everything, and even here, you can die to random stuff.

Instead of having fun, I feel tired and tense while playing, because you have to pay attention to everything, trying to calculate your way to maps, then after, trying to randomly get your Challenges to get some cosmetic stuff...

Really, this game could be more relaxing, not hard from Act 1, where you are starting to play the game, and want a good experience.

To be honest, I am not sure why I keep playing this...

I don’t believe PoE was meant to be an easy game, save for if and when you grind out a godly set of gear on an already high-performing build. Maybe then and only then it should be easy. Of course you could always just play at a deliberately lower progression point to control the game difficulty as you see fit. Quarry runs, anyone?

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sbowen223 wrote:

Of course you could always just play at a deliberately lower progression point to control the game difficulty as you see fit. Quarry runs, anyone?

They nerfed those.

Hope you can still have fun. If you can't it's probably best to move along.

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TiamatRoar wrote:

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sbowen223 wrote:

Of course you could always just play at a deliberately lower progression point to control the game difficulty as you see fit. Quarry runs, anyone?

They nerfed those.

They didn’t nerf it in respect to the point I was making.

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sbowen223 wrote:

I don’t believe PoE was meant to be an easy game

Diablo 3 started out as "not an easy game". Without trading or using the real money auction house, you'd get to act 2 on inferno (hardest difficulty), and then you'd just start instantly dying. Then you'd basically need to overgear the acts to get anywhere in most cases, and then it turned into "buy your gear from the auction house or quit playing."

And people quit playing.

Some time later, that whole first iteration of Diablo 3 was completely scrapped as absolute garbage.

Diablo 2 was never hard. Diablo 2 was about the grind. You'd put thousands of hours into it, doing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of meph runs, baal runs, cow runs, pindle runs, pit runs, and so on. At no point was there a brick wall where you'd just keep dying over and over again.

And Diablo 2 was incredibly popular.

Where did this idea that a Diablo clone should be like Dark Souls, where you die constantly and get punished harshly for it, even come from? It definitely has nothing to do with Diablo 2. And, arguably, it has nothing to do with fun.

Is Chris trying to make Path of Exile into a second coming of the first iteration of Diablo 3? Because it's definitely starting to feel like that. Very much the same kind of feeling of hitting a brick wall and starting to just constantly die at some point.

All we need now is a real money auction house, or just a shop where GGG sells amazing gear for real money, and the transformation will be complete.

The game really isn't that difficult, but I really wish they would reverse some of the early progression difficulty decisions. New players already have a terrible time no knoung about resistances, how support gems work, etc. Even elites can be trapped into specific leveling builds due to certain play styles being horrible without some investment into the tree or outright inaccessible until several Acts in. I'm also a huge fan of reworking many of the trash unique by giving all bosses individual loot tables (guess that is a Diablo thing...).

USually I hate just blindly following the meta, but this is THE league to do it.

Bleed Gladiator SST and several ascendancy FR totems just squashes stuff. Yeah GGG will nerf it next league but I think they are probably terrified of nerfing on top of the hardcore round of recent nerfs.

Personally, i am playing a bit but withholding funds until I feel GGG is designing around the player fun in the game, not their vision of the game they want to build.

Why pay when they explicitly state they are building around their vision even if most players dont want it (exactly what Chris said "We wont build a game we arent proud of even if it means higher player counts and retention"). Ok, but then why piss on your players and expect money....

If it's not fun anymore, go elsewhere.

I was talking to a friend about this game. We're science nerds and I do a fair amount of "PoB" type number crunching in biostatistics. We both have a background in diabetes research and cardiovascular physiology.

I mentioned to him, "Okay so you know how it's established that exercising muscle improves glucose uptake independent of the insulin and insulin receptor pathway? --Yeah, he said. --Well this game just dropped a patch that says 'Exercise does not bypass the insulin receptor pathway and cannot be done without insulin action'."

That's pretty much all the explanation he needed to understand the guiding principle behind this game - arbitrary catch-22s to force a high opportunity cost choice on players.

(IN case you're wondering, regular exercise is absolutely crucial to stabilizing and even reversing type 2 diabetes. If you take it off the table, many patients face a lifelong dependence on expensive and life-altering treatments. It also gives patients a sense of self-determination and confidence. Take that away and patients learn they are at the mercy of their medication regimen or strict dietary compliance. It's very much like getting one-shot, they don't feel there is anything they can do to improve their own lot.)

It doesnt bypass it, it just uses the glycerin. Then muscles continue to use it on recovery.

So basically you think the patch made it so exercise is useless and only natural insulin production will reduce glucose levels?

I am not sure if you accidentally made you analysis in reverse, of if you think the latest patch makes self improvement impossible?