Pure Frustration

I've been playing this game for years. I still cannot make a build on my own. The game is so obtuse that anything beyond the campaign takes university masters degree level of time investment to learn.

There's nothing straight-forward about the mechanics in this game. Half of the mechanics don't even make sense. Things like evasion for example. You would think that in a game of RNG, evasion would be RNG. But it's not. Who would even know that if they didn't look it up? (For those who are unaware, there is a guaranteed failure rate to prevent lucky and unlucky streaks)

The fact that you have to go on a 3rd party website to find out how the game works is not only ridiculous, but on top of that the sites are never up to date. Even when they are, they're community written for the most part. So you never know if what you're reading is even true.

It's the most frustrating gaming experience I've had over the last 8yrs give or take. I'm pretty good with numbers, and probably unsurprisingly to you, I'm also a software developer. So I'm usually pretty good at analysis, and figuring out mechanics, and putting builds together. But not in PoE.

Now, all of that said, I can live with that. The game is still fun at its core, despite the visual diarrhea that spams the screen at end game.

What does make me want to uninstall the game is the random 1-shots from no where, and the combination of mods on monsters that pretty much do not allow for any kind of counter play. Rares that are literally harder than any of the end game bosses. That is just mind blowing to me. Like you can take away all the visual clutter, and you still can't see it coming most times. Rares that will literally teleport on top of you, and have seemingly little to no cool down on the ability. So you try to get away, and bam they're on top of you again.

It's just absolutely crazy to me that you can max out your defenses, and still get 1-shot by random rares. Or have 2-3 rares spawn too close together, and boost each other to the point where they 1-shot you, AND they move faster than is humanly possible to respond to.

You know, having 90% phys mitigation, 80% evasion, 100% spell suppression, max resists. It means nothing. That's literally just a starting point in PoE. On top of that you also need some kind of like CWDT setup, and damage conversion to further mitigate, increased max resist, etc.

It has gotten to the point where the best setup is to just go full offense, and run cast on death + portal. Because the amount of resources you spend on defense just hamstrings your ability to kill things. The longer it takes to kill things, the more you die. So unless you want to stand there for doing 3 dps against a mob with 10mil hp, what's the point to it?

Even if we put all of that aside, you still have the other problem which is that you have to craft all your gear. Nothing that drops is worth wearing at end game. You may as well remove all the drops, and just have it drop currency and white bases. This is the only ARPG I've played where you don't get upgrades off the ground. Go take a look at most of the filters players use at end game, and you'll see they pretty much ignore everything that's not a specific few uniques, and crafting currency. Then you wonder why people want Harvest back to what it was. You think maybe it's because people don't enjoy the current crafting system?

There's nothing fun about holding shift and spam-clicking an item for 20mins until you get a mod you want. Then having to manipulate an obtuse system to ensure you don't lose the roll via things like beast crafting methods. That's just the starting point. Crafting is basically its own game at this point. Then you turn around and add more stats to the stat pool, making it even harder to craft good items. Most games I love to craft. PoE I hate crafting. I think it's actually the only game where I actively avoid crafting as much as possible. Like where's your insurance system that people don't get unlucky/lucky streaks in crafting? It was fine to put it in evasion, but what about your other RNG based systems? Doesn't exactly scream consistency does it?

You know what really kills my motivation in PoE the most? Experimentation is frowned upon. It's not fun to try and make new builds, because you have to spend hours just leveling up a new character, or spend a ton of resources to unspec a previous one. It's literally punishing to experiment, because it costs you time or currency each and every time. There's no offline mode where we can build and test things. There's Path of Building (which always has bugs) but it doesn't let you actually feel what the build is like.

Then you have the trade system. Do I even need to talk about this? I think we all know how it feels to try and use that. Its the reason I play SSF most leagues.

Anyways, I'm going to stop there. I'm sure people are going to flame this, but I don't care anymore. After so many years of trying, I just give up.

Maybe Lost ark could be interesting, you can swipe your way to victory.

totally get you.

i really hate that this game started out promoting it self as a game where you were classless and that you were free to explore different builds.

it started that way, but ended up where if you cant do at least 4-5mil dps your build is shit.

you've been here 8 years and cant get your build to work. i m in a similar situation except i've cleared most content (ignoring deep delving). i m down to the last few final encounters before fully clearing the game (softcore).

i wont say i fixed my build. its mainly because i farmed a lot and have access to a lot of legacy gear.

what i can tell you is that having 4-5k hp should be enough if you have sufficient dps.

my build is not improving by my own volition, despite GGG reworking things and nerfing my build in different ways, at the same time it opened up new avenues to make my build work.

i recommend taking a look at purity of elements, it now grants immunity to elemental ailments. i would also say spell suppression is almost compulsory. its real good. determination has been reworked so it also grants flat armor.

this game really is out to kill you.

having "sufficient" defences is not 10k hp. instead, sufficient defences is "enough hp to kill the enemy".

but yeah, i m with you on experimentation is frowned on. the good players would simply shit on you for not having an optimal build. git gud etc. sometimes for some players they're right. the build the players have are really shit where theres zero defences and fixing needs to be done. but at times the game mechanics are just BS to deal with using certain skills.