This end game grind is excruciating and I don't like it.

"

jewdas12 wrote:

i do wish more skills were better for sure, some of them are just terribly outdated in the current game. However it is not nearly as grim as some want to make it out to be, and if you leverage everything at your disposal quite a lot of things work

This is true for sure, most things work if you put enough into it

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

This wasn't always the case though, I've only played a meta build once or twice by accident basically as I actively avoid them when I can but I have a wealth of experience with weird and less used skills.

Id disagree strongly. One of my pet projects was trying to make lightning tendrils work for years.
It never really worked out no matter what, except when explody chests existed for a brief moment.
Now Id just slap on Omni plus Inpulsas and be done with it.

I would agree there used to be less skills that simply didnt work or werent great but if you are implaying there were none, I have to disagree.

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

Like the fact you believe this is part of the damage GGG have done over time, Players used to meme about heavy strike being garbage and nobody could play it for example but I did and it was good, now they meme about shit and it really is.

I dont perceive it as "damage done" but rather as opportunity costs. They keep adding harder and more challenging stuff because they have to in order to keep up with the powercreep they are also introducing. Thats what PoE is.
If they didnt do that this game would be much less appealing.

Skills lacking mechanically are the first ones to suffer. Because now the player has to invest more than before to overcome those mechanical issues just to keep up - not even to improve the build.
While other builds will scale much more smoothly and can take advantage of newly introduced powercreep more easily.

Sometimes this can carry a skill that wasnt viable before like the above mentioned lighting tendrils, sometimes it doesnt.

The only other option GGG has is nerfing everything really hard across the board and basically reset the powercreep. All of it.
Id welcome it but I dont think it would be a wise move. Nerfing Harvest and the outcry following the 3.15 nerfs would be nothing compared to what would happen if GGG dared to reset everything.

There is nothing GGG can do and not lose.
They cant stop introducing powercreep and they cant reset the powercreep either. So they keep adding harder stuff on top of what we already have and some skills not being viable for everything is a logical consequence. Ive made my peace with this.

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

Keep in mind i'm a HC player with a plenty of experience though so my idea of whats "balanced" is based on the framework I play in.

Obviously yeah. Im looking at it from a SC trade perspective and naturally this alone makes a ton more builds viable than it would be the case in HC SSF for instance.

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Orbaal wrote:

Im looking at it from a SC trade perspective

I don't feel like you can do that while also calling it SC.

"

Orbaal wrote:

There is nothing GGG can do and not lose.
They cant stop introducing powercreep and they cant reset the powercreep either. So they keep adding harder stuff on top of what we already have and some skills not being viable for everything is a logical consequence. Ive made my peace with this.

I'm quickly trying to adapt to this, with some difficulty (like everything else POE these days). The biggest problem I see currently isn't even the grind; it's the gear progression.

With trade being the primary gameplay mode, even gating incredible gear behind logical points - bosses, high-tier maps, specific challenges/content - doesn't actually restrict that gear if a player is willing to farm currency and buy the damned thing. This means that targeted drop farming can't be too deterministic or the economy crashes. And so GGG is stuck trying to design ever stronger endgame chase items while unable to stop those items from being bought by players who would never see them drop. So player power goes up, and GGG makes the game harder overall. This kills underperforming skills that might have been just good enough earlier and likely confuses newer players who wonder "Why is that skill even in the game then?"

At this point, I think the ratchet can only turn in one direction, toward ever more extreme time commitment by players to clear new endgame content. Whether this is a positive or negative depends, I suppose, on the playerbase. And whether it continues depends largely on who is buying MTX to a significant degree.

its not just about making the game harder or easier its about having a good route for new players to turn into average players and then into good players and beyond.

They made higher tier maps harder for casuals to access this patch by a lot when in the previous system there was a much less steep incline now there is a literal wall for a lot of people at lower skill levels.

I don't want the game to get easier I'm in favor of it becoming harder in many ways but the journey to that level of difficulty needs to be better for the future of teh game and in a sense some lines drawn between what is for casuals, experienced players and even pro-players(content that isnt intended for teh general population to ever beat)

endgame should be harder.

its the campaigns that should be easier to be more welcoming to new players.

"

RedHenrik wrote:

"

Orbaal wrote:

There is nothing GGG can do and not lose.
They cant stop introducing powercreep and they cant reset the powercreep either. So they keep adding harder stuff on top of what we already have and some skills not being viable for everything is a logical consequence. Ive made my peace with this.

With trade being the primary gameplay mode, even gating incredible gear behind logical points - bosses, high-tier maps, specific challenges/content - doesn't actually restrict that gear if a player is willing to farm currency and buy the damned thing. This means that targeted drop farming can't be too deterministic or the economy crashes.

Ill have to disagree here.

The new atlas system is granting access to insane crafting power very early on and I took advantage of this. Granted, crafting isnt exactly straight forward in this game and does take a good amount of time to wrap your head around the process but once you did, its very easy to craft "good enough" gear.
Clearly Im not talking about mirror tier and not even topend gear - just good enough to clear the entire game or at least up to T16s.

Consequently I can create a ton of builds requiring less than 100c investment - if that - to clear everything including T16s.
Allowing me to farm whatever I need to push for more, if thats what I want to do.

Im far from the only one being able to do that and the market did crash - big time.
Essences? Dropped by a lot because everyone had easy access
Timeless jewels? Dropped by 90% (!) after week 1
Maps? Worthless except a handful very rare unique maps
Simulacrum? Dropped from 1.5ex to 30c at some point because too many people were farming Delirium
Scarabs? Most of them arent worth selling just like Essences unless you sell huge amounts in bulk.
Etc etc the list goes on.


Point is: As long as you start out with a build NOT requiring anything special to function, you can easily get to T16s and chain those forever.
If you can do this, you automatically get access to 2 Voidstones, turning about 1/3 of the atlas into T16s and sustain T16s w/o any issue and that allows you to farm whatever it is you need to fund your second build.

This second build (whether you reroll or respec) should be the one tailored towards taking on the content beyond T16s, if thats what you wish to do. The first one is just vehicle to get into a position allowing you farm what you need.
In my experience a lot of players are unfortunately starting out with the wrong build, also trying to skip natural progression, are focused on the wrong stuff and then hit the wall real hard.

It doesnt have to be that way. All it takes would be asking for advice, swollowing the pride standing in the way and simply follow advice given by more experienced players achieving whatever they want every single league.

This is 100% a L2P or gitgud issue - not trying to insult anybody. It really isnt that hard to do once you know and understand what and why and when to do.

"

LiMA6 wrote:

in any game you play, a meta exists because that's what people figured to be strong. for majority of games, once you go off-meta, in many cases ur not gonna do good unless you really know what you're doing.

im playing an offmeta build in poe, and im doing ok.

if someone doesn't know what he's doing, wishes to put little effort and time.. you can't be expecting good results for a difficult game like poe, and if its so difficult and one doesn't like it, i just help but wonder, why play it?

What is you time and effort requirements to finish the game with an average non meta build ?

Cause you can farm all day every day and don't see the end because you can't have what you need unless trading...

It is too much for GGG to spend the time working on a viable solution where you can upgrade your gear in a deterministic way instead of throwing unbalanced content and giving only bones to chew to 80% of the players ?

Layers of RNG kill the fun of this game entirely.

PoE was a good game at one point, now it is just more powercreep on top of powercreep but only for those that can achieve exalt tier of gear, for all others, well they can eat dust...

"

Andrius319 wrote:

Its ussually somewhere at lvl 90, gem lvl 19-20, and at this point every further upgrade costs at least 5 exalts (which includes fusing to 6link). It feels worse with weaker builds, like not progressing.

I really dont feel like picking meta builds to "cheat" for victory, most of the time i look for whatever looks interesting rather than for power. Maybe this is the culprit.

6-Linking your Eclipse Staff costs 2ex and a few C's at the worst, if starting to build fusings from 0. Upgrading your amulet would cost 10c.

Etc, etc... Rationalizing your build wouldn't cost anything but a few minutes.

Most of player's struggles with POE's upgrades comes from ignorance and lazyness, the real true issues from this game.

It's like another guy named "Marxedone" or something in this thread, he complains a lot, yet you can instantly feel he doesn't understand a lot of things, but hey, if something doesn't work, IT HAS to be something else than us, right ?

Funplayer, another thing you can try when the endgame grind just gets too grindy is to play standard. It is much easier to put in just a few hours a week in standard and still feel like you're making at least a little bit of progress.