Brand new to POE, why is there EXP loss post 80 & EXP gating?

As title states, I'm brand new to POE this season but got really interested and invested into it and fell in love with the passion and creativity that the development clearly had creating some of the content this game has to offer. Sincerely - hats off, I have been impressed.

That having been said, while exploring the remainder of the end-game content, (obviously not at the highest level said content has to offer) I noticed that I was sitting at 0% exp at lvl 80 which seemed unlikely to be accidental as I been grinding a few maps, in addition to the fact that at some point certain content stops giving you exp. Quite literally the second I found out you lose exp for deaths I uninstalled the game and will not be looking back, and it feels like a damn shame and wasted potential.

This game has limitless hours of content to offer, legitimately, but the fact that you would be punished for dying in such a crippling way, your entire day's worth of hard work potentially gone in 5 minutes is too debilitating of a mechanic for me to want to continue. EXP required per level already assuredly goes up per level so the grind becomes more tedious as you progress, and there are plenty of other things to grind and barriers of entry, namely personal skill level, that this mechanic simply doesn't make sense to me. Moreover it flies in the face of what the game encourages you to do, which is challenge yourself. There are a large number of in-game events that reward you for performing very quickly such as incursions and...I'm sorry I don't know what they are called but the gray mirror 'portal' event. You can give a bad player a level 100 char with a meta build and he or she still won't be able to engage with difficult content either way. This type of punishment also discourages people from experimenting much with new builds or off-meta builds with the implicit knowledge that they will already be at a corresponding disadvantage compared to their peers. Lastly, there are always going to be either client-side or server-side latency surprises which in this game, from what I can tell, can within the span of a second and half or less yield a death from either misplay or just rubberbanding into a mechanic.

It seems also very ostracizing to stop exp gain entirely depending on the content you're doing. Assumedly the EXP/Level is already going up, why punish someone who wants to continue to gain character power if they prefer playing lower-difficulty content. This isn't me, specifically, but certainly there are a group of people who would prefer to just do some easier content and just play their slot machine or farm some currency and slowly level up.

Personally it just seems too steep a price for something so omnipresent in a game like this and it's just far too off-putting. Sorry for the rant if this isn't a novel point of conversation, just figured I had to get it off my chest because I really feel saddened by it's being in this game I so recently fell in and out of love with.

TL;DR: EXP gating and EXP loss on death seem insurmountably ostracizing and counter-intuitive to a game that offers so many different ways to play and content of so many varying degrees of difficulty.

I get it but this is one of those things that is a very deeply rooted part of the game, the only way they could get away with removing it outright or even flat-reduction would probably be with the addition of an easy-mode.

The only other way i see exp loss changing in the core game mode is for a system where you can buy protection from exp loss to a limited extent, the cost of that protection would be your time or some kind of currency specifically for that content.

Ultimately you would still lose out with the above idea, you just wouldn't see your bar drop as much or at all and then the item gets consumed.

Several things, but first to answer the question: essentially diablo had it, so poe must have it too (that seems to be the mentality of the game makers).

If you are dying at lvl 80, you need to improve your build. Likely your defenses are very bad. Generally 3/4 (or more) of everything you invest in is defenses if you want to reliably live. You need a dmg skill that is fine with investing so much in defenses. Game has been like that for years, unfortunately. I believe the defenses of your average build look like this atm:

1. max out resistances, increase ur max cap if you can.
2. get a high hp pool (5k+) or energy shield pool (7k+)
3. use determination and molten shell (on dmg taken)
4. use glancing blows or spell suppression
4.a) use shield with HP/energy shield on block and use glancing blows
4.b) get high spell suppression (aim for 100%)
5. reach elemental ailment immunity (shocked, frozen and chilled is a must)
6. get some curse effect reduction, e.g. from a flask or the tree
7. you need some sort of sustain too, e.g. leech or regen; a lot of it

For the dmg skill, its probably best to look up builds online. 90% or more of the skills are just a dead end that cannot deal with the current state of the game (without insane investment, in some cases even with insane investment).

If dying at 80 means all your day of work is deleted, you must not be running maps. At lvl 80 you should be able to run yellow maps and get a level up in like an hour or less. Assuming you are deleting screens with your dmg skill (how poe was made to be played in the last few years, with current attempts to slow the game down).

Losing exp to dying should only become a problem for your build after 95. Maybe even later, considering you can sustain t16 maps without much trouble atm. 10% exp loss is really not much until 99. And even then there are strategies to level up very fast (pure breach stone rotations I think are best).

Overall, you need more knowledge of the game judging from your comment.

Having said all that, your build must be insanely tanky to not die to utterly random bs that occurs once a few hours. Especially in rippy content (the grey mirror you mention is delirium, it can be very rippy at high layers).

Its simple - if I want to level up I just run blue maps with 0 damage modifiers. My tree is build in a way that this doesn't prevent me from getting good loot, its just slightly less and the overall experience is not as fun.

It's a bad game mechanic and always has been. Just because it was always done this way doesn't make it good.

It's especially awful in this game due to the nature of BS incoming damage. Random Deaths happen all the time in this game.

"

SolomonKain wrote:

It's a bad game mechanic and always has been. Just because it was always done this way doesn't make it good.

It's especially awful in this game due to the nature of BS incoming damage. Random Deaths happen all the time in this game.

But (hardcore aside) random deaths aren't a problem. They're part of leveling up. The important part is that your gains outweigh the losses. When they don't anymore, you've maxed your level, and that's fine. Not everyone is supposed to get to 100.

Obviously OP is doing something wrong, because leveling from 80 to 90 is super easy nowadays, but getting to a point where you die enough to not level up anymore is intended game design, and I don't think it's bad.

Meaningful deaths teach you stuff. Like I shouldn't fight the Ghetto boss because she is too dangerous - elemental attack damage, a thing I cannot mitigate properly, if I want to level up. No death penalty teaches you...what exactly? Oh, I died and lost one of my portals, the horror!

It’s actually good for the game. It’s feedback about the quality of your build relative to the difficulty of the content you’re doing. If you are dying too much to gain xp at level 80, that means your build needs improvement. If you’re brand new this shouldn’t be any surprise because the learning curve is steep and you’re unlikely to be super successful on your first character.

I will also add that PoE is a game with an insane number of choices and for those choices to be interesting, many of them have to be bad. When you reach the limits of your build and can’t realistically improve it, XP loss is also a way to show you that you’ve made some bad choices and should try to build a better character next time.

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Vesuvius079 wrote:

It’s actually good for the game. It’s feedback about the quality of your build relative to the difficulty of the content you’re doing. If you are dying too much to gain xp at level 80, that means your build needs improvement. If you’re brand new this shouldn’t be any surprise because the learning curve is steep and you’re unlikely to be super successful on your first character.

I will also add that PoE is a game with an insane number of choices and for those choices to be interesting, many of them have to be bad. When you reach the limits of your build and can’t realistically improve it, XP loss is also a way to show you that you’ve made some bad choices and should try to build a better character next time.

Yep. Preferably one of the few meta builds because everything else is not allowed to experience endgame content.

POE nowadays for me is fun until red maps. Then you realize the skills you are using make it impossible to build for defense AND dps. At this point iam out for next league.

"

Frostride wrote:

Several things, but first to answer the question: essentially diablo had it, so poe must have it too (that seems to be the mentality of the game makers).

If you are dying at lvl 80, you need to improve your build. Likely your defenses are very bad. Generally 3/4 (or more) of everything you invest in is defenses if you want to reliably live. You need a dmg skill that is fine with investing so much in defenses. Game has been like that for years, unfortunately. I believe the defenses of your average build look like this atm:

1. max out resistances, increase ur max cap if you can.
2. get a high hp pool (5k+) or energy shield pool (7k+)
3. use determination and molten shell (on dmg taken)
4. use glancing blows or spell suppression
4.a) use shield with HP/energy shield on block and use glancing blows
4.b) get high spell suppression (aim for 100%)
5. reach elemental ailment immunity (shocked, frozen and chilled is a must)
6. get some curse effect reduction, e.g. from a flask or the tree
7. you need some sort of sustain too, e.g. leech or regen; a lot of it

For the dmg skill, its probably best to look up builds online. 90% or more of the skills are just a dead end that cannot deal with the current state of the game (without insane investment, in some cases even with insane investment).

If dying at 80 means all your day of work is deleted, you must not be running maps. At lvl 80 you should be able to run yellow maps and get a level up in like an hour or less. Assuming you are deleting screens with your dmg skill (how poe was made to be played in the last few years, with current attempts to slow the game down).

Losing exp to dying should only become a problem for your build after 95. Maybe even later, considering you can sustain t16 maps without much trouble atm. 10% exp loss is really not much until 99. And even then there are strategies to level up very fast (pure breach stone rotations I think are best).

Overall, you need more knowledge of the game judging from your comment.

Having said all that, your build must be insanely tanky to not die to utterly random bs that occurs once a few hours. Especially in rippy content (the grey mirror you mention is delirium, it can be very rippy at high layers).

Im saying he did the right thing, better on lvl 80 than lvl 90+, because of less frustration. The exp loss is the biggest fail on this game imho. Its fun game, but it wont let you test and try, all that is not meta build is meant to fail. There are tons of skills and talent tree is awsome but in real game most of this is garbage. For me the exp loss is makeing the game total trash.