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

"

SilentSymphony wrote:

GGG cant figure out where to draw the line between casual and the "getgud" you speak of and instead of moving forward actually chose to drive casuals backwards this patch for some reason.

Make new content to appease the try-hards and stop literally spinning circles.

this kinda sums it up on how i feel GGG is lacking, which is properly defining their content, to me content should be:

Aspirational = optional content that not all players can do but should be rewarding if players can do it

Optional = content that you don't lose out for not doing. perfect example is blighted maps. can get good rewards but nothing that you cant get from not doing it.

Reasonable/expected = stuff that players are expected to clear and thus have important rewards gated behind the content. a good example is uber lab for last few ascendency points.

GGG has demonstrated that they CAN make new content that is reasonable/expected but can be scaled up to become aspirational such as the new exarch/eater bosses. the bosses are well designed that learning their moveset can be enough for a weak but reasonably skilled player to kill em.

unfortunately we have things like maven/other invites which should be aspirational content due to how unbalanced they are. unfortunately they do not fit in my definition of "optional" as atlas passives/watchstones are gated behind such content.

"

Many abilities simply cannot be improved upon after a certain point with the traditional methods, even on specific ascendancy that seem to augment and improve those same abilities.

There's a few paths you can take to diverge or restructure builds around uniques or very specific rares, but in the end you'll end up needing an item like HH or MB to make a good portion of abilities strong enough for clearing or boss viable. Not saying HH is a good bossing tool, just saying it needs to be an item along that same caliber to produce the same results as everyone else who reaches that overarching power point.

Overpowered items introduced that shift the way a game is played, is one thing. BALANCING and reducing power to everything else in order to allow those overpowered items to take precedent, is crippling to the overall structure of potentials within a diverse system of potentials.

ESPECIALLY when power isn't augmented or shifted, like what happened to melee strike and MANY AOE abilities.

There are many viable builds of the past that simply got killed by the nerfs. Completely killed. No way to make them viable to t16 without a broken unique or high craft rare which oftentimes costing much more. Let alone bossing with those builds. I can name quite a few builds this happened to off the top of my head, and I'd find the same results bottom lining them with current crafting options and build specific uniques.

It's no surprise hh/mb are chase items as they are meant to be. Gotta look forward to something.

As for builds, I don't think they should be gutting builds people feel fun. What they seem to be doing is they seem to want people to do new builds every league. Why? I don't know.

But offmeta builds and complaining about getting one-shot or asking for an easier game are really not the same thing.

If a player is having a hard time given the amount of time spent, it's not GGG to be blamed but the player himself. And if POE is too hard, just play something else. I personally think endgame should be a lot harder (not campaign) while they can come up with easy mode for casuals... instead of hard mode (i play only trade league where majority resides)

"

LiMA6 wrote:

It's no surprise hh/mb are chase items as they are meant to be. Gotta look forward to something.

As for builds, I don't think they should be gutting builds people feel fun. What they seem to be doing is they seem to want people to do new builds every league. Why? I don't know.

But offmeta builds and complaining about getting one-shot or asking for an easier game are really not the same thing.

If a player is having a hard time given the amount of time spent, it's not GGG to be blamed but the player himself. And if POE is too hard, just play something else. I personally think endgame should be a lot harder (not campaign) while they can come up with easy mode for casuals... instead of hard mode (i play only trade league where majority resides)

It feels like shit when you've been grinding for hours, only to die and lose that time to something random and completely unpredictable.

Sure you can say the user is at fault. They chose something far too difficult for their build, or their build isn't defensive enough, or their character isn't damaging enough, or enough life, or enough this, or enough that. You can always say these things, and you would probably be right. This doesn't necessarily mean the mechanics behind the underlying problems are universally capable of being strong enough to deal with these most powerful threats. You can't even say that every single gem is capable of ending up in end-game without specific sets of highly expensive gear and specific optimal passive trees.

I can safely say, that some builds, have humongous power gaps between the point of reasonable attainable goals, and the power of a headhunter or mageblood. There is NO small gap here. There is no minor increases after a while. You can experiment until you're blue. You can respec or regem all you want. You can buy clusters to fill the gaps. You can juice your life your jewels and your entire equipment all you can until you hit a point. It won't MATTER if your character simply isn't strong enough to deal enough damage to one of the bosses or ubers.

It won't matter what-so-ever if you juice yourself into a completely mega-beast and end up in the same boat as you were, because you simply wanted to use a specific ability.

The end results stay the same. You end up needing to change the way you play in an EXTREME way more often than not, all because you aren't following the potentials of those same broken required items for those particular types of builds. It's always the same. There's no escape from it.

You must strive for certain items, with certain passive clusters, with certain masteries, with certain goals in mind. If you aim too high, you're going to get burned on most builds. ESPECIALLY melee builds. You're going to struggle no matter what when trying to build melee builds beyond a certain point unless you build a specific way, with a specific set of items, with a certain amount of critical, with a certain amount of over the top juice, with a certain level of caution for every single thing you do.

There's no megaforms of this without megajuiced items or items like HH or MB. There's no useful forms of melee without large amounts of AOE and a 900+ dps weapon or something that costs upward of 80 ex like a squire.

THIS, is a serious bottleneck. There is a huge power gap between the end of rational gear, and the attainment of something huge with melee builds.

Even the most optimal of optimal crit builds with strike, will fall victim to the SIMPLEST of currently optimal cheap builds. There's no middleground.

I'll tell you this much. And I don't mean it in any offensive way. Stop blaming other stuff, just look into fixing your issues. I can give you 20ex (I don't care about currency anymore), please just fix. And link your build and we'll see how to fix it.

If you're expecting to have a good game with something like heavy strike, you're in for a world of pain. That's not to say it cannot be optimized. Making melee builds work well are usually for those who know what they are really doing.

I'd only assume not only are you using melee, you never optimized it nor have the gear.

HH/MB power gap is indeed big, their pricetag gap is also big. But, just like any build, if they serve good functionality, they come with huge value. Take the current new meta for example, that cwdt loop build, you need to use a stygian belt for that, and for all t1's that's well over 120ex as I was told.

And you said it yourself, indeed you need to change the way you play, so change it. I found many things not working for me across many leagues. I complained my setup is trash and so on (to myself) and changed to something that works. It doesn't get any harder than that.

Now, speaking of melee, if you're gonna do endgame stuff, even non-melee builds suffer when not well geared. If you refuse to gear yourself well, well, why play this game at all when its all about getting better and better gear?

If all you wanted to say was melee builds are underwhelming, just say so, not complain about other stuff. Yes many melee builds are less potent than others. Eras for them will come and go.

In fewer words: if you wanna play melee build and refuse to gear well, you are the problem, not the game.

"

LiMA6 wrote:

I'll tell you this much. And I don't mean it in any offensive way. Stop blaming other stuff, just look into fixing your issues. I can give you 20ex (I don't care about currency anymore), please just fix. And link your build and we'll see how to fix it.

If you're expecting to have a good game with something like heavy strike, you're in for a world of pain. That's not to say it cannot be optimized. Making melee builds work well are usually for those who know what they are really doing.

I'd only assume not only are you using melee, you never optimized it nor have the gear.

HH/MB power gap is indeed big, their pricetag gap is also big. But, just like any build, if they serve good functionality, they come with huge value. Take the current new meta for example, that cwdt loop build, you need to use a stygian belt for that, and for all t1's that's well over 120ex as I was told.

And you said it yourself, indeed you need to change the way you play, so change it. I found many things not working for me across many leagues. I complained my setup is trash and so on (to myself) and changed to something that works. It doesn't get any harder than that.

Now, speaking of melee, if you're gonna do endgame stuff, even non-melee builds suffer when not well geared. If you refuse to gear yourself well, well, why play this game at all when its all about getting better and better gear?

If all you wanted to say was melee builds are underwhelming, just say so, not complain about other stuff. Yes many melee builds are less potent than others. Eras for them will come and go.

In fewer words: if you wanna play melee build and refuse to gear well, you are the problem, not the game.

As much as I appreciate the offer of 20 ex to help me out, I don't want it. I've already managed to kill a great deal of the bosses with my totems build. Fixing a sweep or a cyclone slayer, which is my primary build, is going to take the majority of my currency that I've already accumulated using mr extremely low cost totems build.

5 leagues ago my slayer was great. Currently my slayer caps at around tier 14 due to the high price tag or craft price tag for axes. I could use sword but I've always preferred axe slayers, all of which seem to only work to a point and then require expensive watchers eyes, clusters, and a great deal of defensive and leech. They generally die because of some random thing hitting you due to cyclone basically either tickling or hitting a threshold where it hits for chunks instead of tickles, which seems to be entirely arbitrarily up to the RNG system mixed with the phys overwhelm and the penetration. All of which would be avoided if the damn things just died.

I could go omniscience + fire convert for this, but it feels like a copout of my original build concepts, which were phys damage, impale, and crit. I'm currently prototyping some rage concepts with slayer and it feels okay but still gets capped around tier 10 due to the limited DPS.

It's not like I'm not here trying to fix the problems y'know. I'm just hard pressed for how long it can take to fix those same builds that used to work. I've basically thrown the old one in the blender and moved to high hit sweep just to deal some knockback and stun mitigation, which is okay but falls victim to problems and cannot boss. Just like the cyclone, you have to hit a certain threshold before it starts to become effective, or you dump a ton of currency into powerful augmentative rares and uniques.

I've got plenty of currency to work with, it's not about currency. It's about time and testing, both of which are in short supply because I'm running extremely short on patience. Especially when POB says the numbers should add up, I throw them into testing, and yet I still tickle bosses. Even after checking the values thoroughly. On top of that I generally get splatted by random explosives or high elemental hits, which can be mitigated with high defensive traits and lots of leech, but you can still get smacked by random high hitting attacks that are very difficult to evade, especially when dealing with bosses.
-----------------
MY JOURNEY this league, involved this path. I chose one of my old builds that used to work, found out they don't work due to changes, tried to repair it, gave up on it and built something that has been known to work this league. I gave it my own touch and my own style, then it became my build. About 60% mine.

So I killed the majority of bosses, and came here to interject my opinions of the current end-game. Genuinely the experience I had and the direct emotional responses to how I felt while doing it.

I know for certain if they start changing a bunch of melee shit on a whim like they did with mage shit, they're going to end up with a clusterfuck of huge aoe melee clearing the entire end-game in rapid rates.

The best unique axe is just, ass. It's honestly substandard on every level. Voidforge and it's counterpart are both far superior to atziri's axe. Everything under Atziri's barely works, even with the proper builds. BARELY works for tier 11-14. It's almost always because you either don't hit hard enough and you tickle the enemies, or you hit too hard and you're too damn slow so you get killed randomly.

At that point you're better off just using sword to farm a decent 900 dps+ rare axe.

And I am happy to engage in a meaningful conversation with you (unlike some others).

I cannot blame you for expressing your feelings, and I am also expressing mine about what you have said. I still stand firm that you chose a difficult build, and tried to use old ways when much has changed and then dislike spending a lot of time/$ on it. It's just a recipe for disaster.

At least one of those must change. I do hope for you and others they will give melee builds some love next time.

"

LiMA6 wrote:

I'll tell you this much. And I don't mean it in any offensive way. Stop blaming other stuff, just look into fixing your issues. I can give you 20ex (I don't care about currency anymore), please just fix. And link your build and we'll see how to fix it.

If you're expecting to have a good game with something like heavy strike, you're in for a world of pain. That's not to say it cannot be optimized. Making melee builds work well are usually for those who know what they are really doing.

I'd only assume not only are you using melee, you never optimized it nor have the gear.

HH/MB power gap is indeed big, their pricetag gap is also big. But, just like any build, if they serve good functionality, they come with huge value. Take the current new meta for example, that cwdt loop build, you need to use a stygian belt for that, and for all t1's that's well over 120ex as I was told.

And you said it yourself, indeed you need to change the way you play, so change it. I found many things not working for me across many leagues. I complained my setup is trash and so on (to myself) and changed to something that works. It doesn't get any harder than that.

Now, speaking of melee, if you're gonna do endgame stuff, even non-melee builds suffer when not well geared. If you refuse to gear yourself well, well, why play this game at all when its all about getting better and better gear?

If all you wanted to say was melee builds are underwhelming, just say so, not complain about other stuff. Yes many melee builds are less potent than others. Eras for them will come and go.

In fewer words: if you wanna play melee build and refuse to gear well, you are the problem, not the game.

Keep playing skele builds, according to you and the poison conconction guy the melee player is always a noob

skele builds would need a massive buff for me to play it again. right now, it's complete garbage. am so glad i got rid of it.

Meanwhile trap builds can overlap damage and minion builds are untouchable but melee splash gets taken out of jewels for melee

"

LiMA6 wrote:

skele builds would need a massive buff for me to play it again. right now, it's complete garbage. am so glad i got rid of it.

Garbage how? I'm running skellies (because everything else for summoner is a joke now) and can comfortably do all content just fine. Mapping is the only serious drawback, taking me 2-5 minutes to complete a map.