Act 1 Difficulty for New Players (POV From Seasoned Player)

Preface - I've killed all content this league, gotten to lvl 90 in hardcore leagues, as well as level 85 in the Scourge Gauntlet and 62 in the Searing gauntlet. I started playing at the end of Delve league and was able to kill shaper in my first league (betrayal).


I think the difficulty of Hillock is a good indication of how the game will be for new players but the starting gems for scion/templar/marauder are so BAD. Can this please be updated or have mana costs lowered a tad?

The first few zones in Act 1 feels like complete trash on almost every melee skill.

What's the stats on new players who started duelist quitting if they pick splitting steel vs any other skill?

How many new players get to Mud flats and quit?

Do these rhoas really need to charge from off screen and do 30% hp + a stun? Is being stun locked through the entire zone something players need to learn?

Then you get into the Submerged Passage and get 30% chills + frozen if they weren't lucky enough to get any cold res.

I get you want to make the game hard but does it really need to be in the first few zones of the game?

Maybe thats what GGG wants for the new player experience but if I started playing this game in this current state I'm not sure if I would of made it to the end game.

agreed. they went way overboard.

oh and vines flinging spell phys damage dealing monsters that blend into background in act 2 are a solid continuation of wtf are u doin ggg.

i dont know if i m remembering this correctly, but once upon a time GGG actually made certain enemy skills be on shared cooldown.

for example the rhoa charging and ice lizard leap slamming the player. if ONE initiated that ability, the rest would not, thus players were not stuck in a stunlock or outright shotgunned.

this was in response to many players dying too much for said shotgun effects.

years later ggg decided to make the game hard again and removed this feature.

TBH i feel we NEED this feature, but it should be eased in. perhaps in early acts have the shared cooldown. but in later acts reduce this shared cooldown gradually till theres no shared cooldown. i m up for difficulty somewhat but it needs some easing in IF GGG wants to rope in new players. old players dont care. similarly stuns and freeze should not be a "perma" effect. new players getting stun/frozen locked are definitely not having a good time, especially with NO WAY to counter the effect. playing a melee strike skill which only hits one target really highlights this issue when fighting hellrake.

speaking of old players dont care.

a lot of people shit on quin for using a single target melee strike skill during exilecon.

he was doing so little damage that he's now fondly remembered by the term ZDPS. heck i actually forgot his name while writing this, i typed in "ZDPS Streamer" and quin was in the number 1 search result.

the problem should not be "oh you chose a bad starter skill"

the real issue is GGG should streamline skills somewhat. when poe was in openbeta, i would introduce POE to my friends and let them explore the game naturally.

NOW? i dont dare introduce POE. if they were to play this game they would need a guide, they would need a starter build.

i have years of experience playing poe and i exclusively play melee. i can say melee experience in poe can be rather disappointing.

i can bash a person in the face. deal tons of damage. but a mage can cast a spell, do similar damage but it affects nearby creatures.

i really resent that this game has things such as "starter builds".

All over I feel they should start with the challenging side of PoE only after the player has had time to prepare the character. Until then it's all just introduction.

I've been playing Tina's Wonderland and I think it's exemplary on how new players are brought into the world.

Mud flats is often mentioned I think because of the charging rhoa's, but I think the starting beach is even worse. The default is to attack the zombies. With some melee attack and no PoE experience the zombies can hurt and drain the player's flasks. It is literally better to ignore content from the start and run to Hillock with full flasks.

Could say the zombies teach a bit on how to circle around Hillock, but a new player better learn fast because if they don't they'll just be on the beach without flask charges. These zombies can even hurt. Just run to 3 of them and start melee and take 3 hits.

Just putting 1 of those armor stands next to the first tutorial zombie that drops the weapon that always drops a chest piece would already help much.

Have an NPC follow the player to Sarn a3 - a traveler that needs an escort that comes with a 15% resistance buff. Have that NPC explain some things along the way. Bring back that NPC much later. Hey, why not make it Kirac with his double atlas agenda that took an interest to make sure you get to maps.

And make a6 mud flats a rhoa bonanza, for all I care :-)

No rsistances, no layered defenses, bad skill tree pathing,has no life in any gear slots. Are you avoiding it on purpose? I don't avoid life armor on purpose because I play off meta builds.

This is a hardcore game made by hardcore team. Why should a fresh character have evything handed to them on a silver platter.

If you want to play PoE you need to EARN it. Being a pro, you can make hundreds of profitable trades an hour, the game is already too easy as it is. PoE is all about niche market for those who want extra CHALLENGE. So, you need to ask yourself: is this the game for me, or would i rather play a casual clicker game?

I can pretty much oneshot Hillock with right setup, all you need to do is balance your defenses and make a few pro moves like use flask. Might as well make an item editor it's raining loot jesus.

"

vmt80 wrote:

No rsistances, no layered defenses, bad skill tree pathing,has no life in any gear slots. Are you avoiding it on purpose? I don't avoid life armor on purpose because I play off meta builds.

This is a hardcore game made by hardcore team. Why should a fresh character have evything handed to them on a silver platter.

If you want to play PoE you need to EARN it. Being a pro, you can make hundreds of profitable trades an hour, the game is already too easy as it is. PoE is all about niche market for those who want extra CHALLENGE. So, you need to ask yourself: is this the game for me, or would i rather play a casual clicker game?

I can pretty much oneshot Hillock with right setup, all you need to do is balance your defenses and make a few pro moves like use flask. Might as well make an item editor it's raining loot jesus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNPH29DUPRY hardcore logout macro, such respect.

Im mad at chris for doing that, I beleived in him before that for what little that was worth.

Lol, poe hard.
Its not hard, pob is, craft of exile is harder too.

What do you find in poe hard? After build hurdle is cleared its just do what you can with what you got which is not much and hope for the best.

Well, i did post more for vmt80 calling it challanging game, i just found it funny.

I think that difficulty in poe is in the wrong places. Gameplay performance doesnt depend much on being skillfull.

"

Andrius319 wrote:

Well, i did post more for vmt80 calling it challanging game, i just found it funny.

I think that difficulty in poe is in the wrong places. Gameplay performance doesnt depend much on being skillfull.

There's not a lot of places to put skill testing in a game of this particular scale.

It's a small skirmish game, at best, and a 1up, but a very bad one, at other times.

It doesn't have the FPS perspective of souls games and other manual dexterity combat clickers. So combat, especially boss fights, can't ever be as richly granular and visuospatially challenging as those other games.

Does that make it a small focus skirmish game? Not really!

It doesn't have the support for macros and symbolic shortcuts that other skirmish games have. Imagine how much easier heist would be if it had a full NPC and auxiliary macro system like the fleet and patrol commands in say, Avorion, or even Starcraft or Age of Empires. Yes, those are long term building and RTS games, not set battle skirmish scenarios. But you can create set-piece tactical scenarios, and many have done so, in these 20+ year old games.

And yet running blueprints feels like you want hotkeys for jobs to be done in parallel. Having more than one type of minion feels like you really want hotkeys to manage traffic, rather than mashing convocation and deathmark and hoping they're listening, but only these guys and not those guys.

Add in connection problems, screen clutter, CPU intensivity, poor optimization, and over-ambitious content glut, and of course the game is absurdly difficult in all the wrong ways.

There's also the numbers problem. A typical map can have upwards of 700 entities, before even a single spell is cast. These entities all activate from farther away than they used to, meaning they are now loading AI and checking position and heading constantly. If they're just standing still in idle formation until you're practically on their heels, it lags less, ez game right?

Fewer entities overall, with much better AI (not necessarily more complicated or CPU-intensive, just add in some sort of self-preservation or something simple to keep players moving) and much better drops (these exist, we see them already in Heist, it's not rocket surgery) would be better for the game. Ez game? Sure, if by "ez" you mean the bulk of the challenge isn't coming from causing stutter and freezing your screen while thousands of entities all activate attacks and calcs at an instant.

Smaller packs, more focused combat - better for skill testing, better for your PC, better for the servers.

There are NO performance issues in PoE. We are performing just ok. Runnig 10 year old casual rigs is the problem not even SSD I can default attack Sirus NO MANA ISSUES at all. Just stop stand in fire. PoE is professional optimize I have like 12-button pro mouse and actually invest pro gamer rig with quad processor.

It is amazing how entitled people are, complaining with basically no chaos res at all. We've had so much new defenses and it's raining drops jesus left and right.

You don't NEED triple influenced items to clear all content in game. It is meant for dedicated players only who can actually default attack Sirus.