Nice Balance

I got a Mageblood the second week. This should have been a fun and easy league. It isn't. It sucks and it isn't fun, I still lose all my portals on every map despite having a character worth more than a mirror. With Mageblood and Aegis Aurora I should not die to random bullshit running through a map. The only thing I am missing is an Impossible Escape with Imbalanced Guard. I even took the atlas tree node that lowers monster damage. I am still randomly erased. What is this game? I have killed all the end game bosses except uber elder and I don't think I am going to bother. My friends have all quit because they can't even do maps since they can't afford an Aegis or Mageblood lol. This game requires too much time investment for little reward.

What hope do the players without insane gear have to get anywhere?

If it isn't a survivability issue, it's a DPS check. When I try to meet one, I fail the other. IT FEELS BAD, CHRIS.

I wanted to do Blight with the new atlas tree system, but it was so fucked from Juggernauts and Assassins and Invulnerable and whatever else, the Assassins are still in, and the others are only gone in Blight MAPS not random Blight encounters, so it's still a problem.

I really thought this was a good game. I told other people they just had to get past all the third party apps and websites necessary to play it, get used to following some streamer's build because there's no way you can make your own viable build, it'll be fun after that.
But it isn't. I don't remember when it was. Maybe I've had rose-colored glasses on for years.

I've been away a few leagues, I thought I'd come back and have a good time at the start of summer. I got a FUCKING MAGEBLOOD. I was certain I'd have a good league and enjoy myself. I was a complete fool and I wish I could refund all the MTX I bought for my skills and such after acquiring the Mageblood and thinking I'd get some nice effects since I'd be playing a while. What a joke. Greatest item in the game, so powerful, but still nothing against random rare mobs. I have never experienced such intense whiplash--it was so exciting when a MAGEBLOOD dropped in Heist and I had to escape with it for it to truly be mine, it got my heart racing, I had trouble sleeping that night because I was so excited. Only to have it so quickly turn to ashes in my mouth. I'm no better off than anyone else playing this game. Chris Wilson should be ashamed of himself and his failed vision. ARPGs are supposed to be about building power and incremental gain. Not Path of Exile, huh? It's just endless pain all the way down. The confusion about what killed you never gets resolved.

P.S.
A pre-emptive "fuck off" to any git gud posters.

"

Nyraeus wrote:

My friends have all quit because they can't even do maps since they can't afford an Aegis or Mageblood lol.

It's just the way you have to do things these days if your game is knowledge gated and you want to give players some challenge. Back when the playerbase wasn't a social network hivemind you could set the baseline lower, but nowadays they kinda have to assume that someone in yellow maps will be following a decent guide so their character is unlikely to be a dysfunctional mess with more unlinked dumpsterfire-tier skills than can fit on action bar.

Sure, GGG could lower the baseline to unlinked dumpsterfire skills at zero budget on a barely functional character, but should they? You can still do yellow maps on 4-link not-total-junk skills as long as you got a decent character and a handful of chaos to rub together. I think that's fairly reasonable.

Unfortunately, some skills ARE total ass, and melee is overall in the saddest state we ever saw it in, when compared to other options. I hope it's taking this long because they want to make melee feel as befits a modern game instead of just slapping a few numbers on it, but hell if I know what they're thinking. Anyway, derail.

and all that because GGG is obsessed with 'if players complete a character, they will quit the league'

well.. if it takes 6 weeks for a 'normie' to get to ubers - sure

but before GGG started the artificial inflation of time required it wasnt the case

people (normal people, not streamers) could easily complete several chars per league and still have fun, playing, experimenting, messing around

someone at GGG decided (probably some poorly constructed formula in excel did that) that enough is enough and they have bloated the game to the bursting point

end result is what we have now - expected time tax measured in weeks, necessity to play good builds (it has nothing to do with skill nor knowledge as some players like to think) and general discouragement to experiment. experiments in POE take A LOT of time to complete nowadays - because to even approach endgame you have to tick OH SO MANY F.. boxes.

that theory that POE will die once normal people can finish a character in a week is truly harming the game.

Really fishy, agree with the sentiment but not with the platform.

"

sidtherat wrote:

and all that because GGG is obsessed with 'if players complete a character, they will quit the league'

well.. if it takes 6 weeks for a 'normie' to get to ubers - sure

but before GGG started the artificial inflation of time required it wasnt the case

people (normal people, not streamers) could easily complete several chars per league and still have fun, playing, experimenting, messing around

someone at GGG decided (probably some poorly constructed formula in excel did that) that enough is enough and they have bloated the game to the bursting point

end result is what we have now - expected time tax measured in weeks, necessity to play good builds (it has nothing to do with skill nor knowledge as some players like to think) and general discouragement to experiment. experiments in POE take A LOT of time to complete nowadays - because to even approach endgame you have to tick OH SO MANY F.. boxes.

that theory that POE will die once normal people can finish a character in a week is truly harming the game.

Maybe, sid, but without the data we can't know for sure. If their data said that 80% of players were playing only one character per league even when the game was more experiment-friendly, you'd really get better retention if you extended that 1 week per character to 2 weeks than whatever you could do to the remaining 20%.

Well, even if those remaining 20% of experimenters were playing five times as long, after the first week the economy would look like it does on console because you'd lose the critical mass.

Dunno, they're probably expecting the experimenters to move to standard, just like you did.

"

Nyraeus wrote:

I got a Mageblood the second week. This should have been a fun and easy league. It isn't. It sucks and it isn't fun, I still lose all my portals on every map despite having a character worth more than a mirror. With Mageblood and Aegis Aurora I should not die to random bullshit running through a map.

It sounds like your expectations were that you should just be able to ignore content and be entitled to a zero-effort ride by getting a single rare drop item. One of the interesting parts of trade-league play is trying different things to overcome obstacles. You'd be surprised how much a low-effort or low-cost-to-trade flask can completely change your survival rate, or even going with some rare but not "all tier 1 mods" items to boost your ability to survive until you can offload.

I have a character that I invested less than 4ex in at the league start, mostly gearing from found items and I've invested less than 10ex in over the course the league so far. I'm running 150-250%+ juiced modifier T16s and /rarely/ if ever die. If I die, I know it's because I've put myself in a really difficult situation (such as, incredibly juiced map modifiers nerfing my regular layer of defenses while boosting monster damage).

There are some outright unbalanced situations and there are still devestating buggy boss encounters (I'm talking about YOU, SIRUS DESYNC) but overall you can gear, talent, and play casually without "dying in every map"... and you can do it without wearing all "mirror tier" gear. You will likely need to grind up the content-appropriate gear or tweak some skills on your skill tree or even use better flasks but I'm sure you'll figure it out. You have a Mageblood so your options available in a trade league are vastly improved compared to "most people", who don't have that amount of potential currency / powerful items.

For starters, I don't see ANY spell suppression on your gear. You don't even need to cap spell suppression to start seeing a vast change in survival and damage reduction.

Looking at your character a bit deeper, without any buffs you have:
- 0% evasion
- 0% Spell Suppression
- 4.7k life
- 2.6k es but only a 263 max es leech/hit, and a full 2s recharge delay
- 75% block chance
- 75% spell block chance


Good luck.

i find it funny that your flasks are not aligned correctly for the mageblood...

From the two above me OP has a
Git gud problem.

“I got mageblood I should be invincible” lmfao

Good on you guys for calling out this poster. Lord knows the feedback section needs more of this.

I have 4k life and no mageblood and my build can stand inside groups of sentinel empowered monsters.

Mageblood wont turn a build with mediocre defenses into an immortal build, especially with that flask setup you currently have.

Current build conception revolves around

- Nothern skilltree and the juicy aura nodes connected with it also because north is strictly superior than dirty south skill tree
- Melding Flesh for 90 max res
- Glancing Blows + Tempest Shield for easy 75/75 (thanks to nothern skill tree)
- Chaos Inoculation for broken 1 skill point Chaos Immunity
- Aegis Aurora because its perfect with Glancing Blows and Melding Flesh
- Determination+Flasks for Armour (no actual armour gear)
- Divine Shield to round it off with broken Regen

Add Spell Suppression if you are in HC.

Current pinnacle build design shows CI supremacy over life pretty much even on lower budgets. The trees look mostly all the same with slight variations depending on skill gem used.

In short balance sucks pretty hard.