So I tried SSF HC Ruthless...

Hey,

I made a run through act 1 in SSF HC Ruthless, as a league start. Globally, it was a difficult experience as expected. Most bosses were hard fights and even some monsters were hard in pack.

I love that feeling, especially with items. Most of my items are white with one or two magic.

It could be fun, but there is a huge drawback which killed the fun for me: gem drop. You can't buy gem, you only get 2 or 3 gems as quest reward and no support at all. I got about 3 gem drops in act 1, but none of them could be used by my character.

A big part of the fun (for me at least), is to play with skill and support gems. But here, you can't even choose which skill you want to use. This game has so many skills that chances are very slim to quickly get the one you want, even on a small pool.
In my case, I wanted to make a fire caster marauder. But I didn't find a single spell gem, let alone fire one. I could have created a witch, play a bit, then gave all skill gems, but it seems to be against ruthless rules isn't it ?

Support gems are mostly out of the game as you will probably play most acts without any support as even if you find one support gem, it has to be usefull with your current gems and it is definitly not guarantee. And even then, you still need to be able to put it somewhere, a trivial task normally but not in ruthless.

Because you don't know what gems you will find, you can't planify a build. Let's say I put a lot of points into fire/burning but I only find lightning related gems.

Item scarcity (including currencies) already makes it difficult to have proper color/socket/link. So even if we could be gems, it would still be very difficult, but at least, you could plan a bit more you want to play. And more importantly, you could play with the game most interesting feature : gems and links.

In this current state, I would rather play SSF HC, sadly.

That is part of the "fun" in Ruthless... you can't plan your build, except maybe at very very high levels - cetainly not a first character. Instead you have to build around what you have. And it is enjoyable in a somewhat masochistic fashion, finding a way to work with whatever supports you drop.

I played through to yellow maps a couple of times last league, plus a couple of extra characters. The campaign works well, it's all doable, although A1/A2 are really quite hard as the mobs are tuned around 3L/4L skills which you simply won't have. After that it's more straightforward until A10.
But maps are more of a struggle: I never got the alchemies to claw through to T10s, could barely sustain at T7, and having seen only 2 Vaal drops all campaign (across both characters) I could see red maps weren't going to happen.

You do need to mule skill gems: that's not against the rules, it's very much within them. BUt it doesn't help with supports.
As far as sockets and links go, I never bothered: I waited until a usable 3L and later 4L dropped, then turned it blue/yellow according to available wealth. THta's alll that's practical.

(don't even consider the ****show that was Ruthless With Gold, with no gambling orbs accessible from vendors it was nigh-impossible to gear at all).

Ruthless is a good idea but the way it's done is half-arsed. Adding a neutered movement skill just shows the muddled thinking of those behind the mode.

Yeah, that's going to be a turn off for a lot of folks. My personal turn off is bosses gaining 40 percent health on player death combined with the gem drop rate. If it was one or the other I could probably handle Ruthless, but both is just too punishing to me.

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aigleborgne wrote:

Hey,

Because you don't know what gems you will find, you can't planify a build.

In ruthless you don't plan a buid but make a build with what you find.