PoE for average players?

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Felix44 wrote:

What you need to understand is that POE always was and always will be a game that requires investment (research into game mechanics) in order to be playable. The difficulty floor/ceiling has been fluctuating and over the years it's opened up more to casual players and this is fine. But it will never be a game that you can play without investing into game knowledge.

This is important because it's the reason why a certain chunk of players are excluded as non relevant. If you're not willing to make the investment this game isn't for you and you will very soon realize this and move on to another game. So you are essentially not relevant because you are not the target audience. The "average" player is the majority of the target audience, and this is true for any game not just POE.

You personally are a different case because you are willing to invest to some degree, but you are a minority of the target audience, not the majority. Again, your perspective is skewed and untruthful simply because you lack knowledge of the game and imagine difficulty that isn't there. Skill has nothing to do with it - POE requires a ridiculously small amount of mechanical skill. RIDICULOUSLY small. A 70 year old guy with cataract could play it successfully from a mechanical pov. This isnt a MOBA.

What you call "skill" is in fact game knowledge. Like the knowledge that you would absolutely be clearing red maps with the gear in the picture below. UNLESS, of course, your build is absolute shit, which is why you should be following a build guide if you don't want to invest enough time into game knowledge to make your own. If you're not following a build guide this entire conversation is completely pointless.

If you are following a decent guide you really do need minimal gear to clear red. And crafting is, again, extremely easy. You do not craft for profit because you are not at the level of crafting for profit. You craft because it's cheaper than buying. And crafting for red maps is, again, very easy and cheap. You can argue with me all you want, difference is I've done it and you haven't, so I would actually know, unlike you.

Go to Craft of exile, take a T1 lightning resist fractured helmet, spam greed essence on it, see how many tries it takes to get a decent helmet for red maps. I guarantee it's less than 5. So you need to buy the base - that's gonna be about 10c for T1 resist, 5 greed essences worst case (you could get them for ¬20c if you're willing to go T2) and a regal orb. Plus whatever the cost of the benchcraft if you still have a slot. So the absolute maximum cost of this craft is 25c ASSUMING you have none of these resources to begin with.

Repeat for all slots until you are resist capped. You can swap resists with harvest.

If you have a good weapon you don't need additional offense on your gear for red maps. But judging by your "weapon is the cheapest" and "can get an upgrade for 10c" I'm guessing you don't really know what a good weapon should look like. Or you're playing some weird thing that's really non dependent on weapon.

A 5L is enough for red maps, you don't need a 6L (I don't think I've ever cleared bosses on a 6L except when I had a tabula). Some builds can only do with a 4L even.

I don't really know where your problem is, but I can tell you for sure it's not where you think it is. You're talking about performance pre-delve, but there was hardly any content to clear back then. The endgame boss was what, Dominus? Pretty sure you can still beat Dominus.

If you a follow a good build guide it will tell you exactly how to get your midgame gear (how to craft it that is) for a very low budget. To give some examples - SRS can clear red comfortably for 1 div budget. EA can do the same. Frostnova FB archmage - same I played it last league. LA - same. There are probably many others that I'm not remembering.

If you have a specific case - build, skill, gear - that you can show me that we can discuss on, I'd be happy to help you. This was genuinely the reason for my initial post. I have no interest in having the 100th "game is too hard/only rich no lifers and cheaters can play it" argument. I am interested in helping players make the game easier and more enjoyable for themselves.

I'll start by saying that while I am a minority in the average players because I have significant knowledge (and I do not claim to have excellent knowledge by any means, just vastly more than what most do) of the game systems, I will say the overwhelming majority of the average players at least have sufficient knowledge of the game. They understand how mechanics are interacting with eachother if only because their build is explained to them. They understand how resistances work and overall they understand about secondary layers of defense like blocking, spell supression and so on. We are not talking about players who are dying and not progressing because they don't understand what is happening and how to overcome it. They understand it quite clearly, they are dying cause their layers of defense are not enough for the content they are doing. They are maybe not doing nearly enough damage thus giving the enemy more time to attack them. They understand that the way to overcome this is by getting better gear but better gear is expensive and the maps they are able to confortably run do not generate suffient rewards. That being said with the flippers on the market the more profitable things are the more expensive they make things so it's hard to actually put a stop there unless GGG actively does something that guarantees that players can keep progressing smoothly to red maps which is what I am advocating. This could be with better crafting, more player power, nerfs to monsters, making flipping not viable, etc...

I always play good builds (well almost always, sometimes I take a risk on something that looks potentially good but I'm not counting those as being GGGs fault). To give you an idea of builds I've done recently. I've tried some totem archmage builds (which were not my thing, I like totems but I hate archmage). I've tried some of the meta ballista builds. I've tried several minion builds, from skeleton mages (back before they were nerfed into oblivion) to SRS (granted the SRS was a very long time ago and they are much better now) to zoomancers, even zombie builds back when they used to be good. I only skipped specter builds because sadly I only got more invested into minion builds after they were nerfed quite badly.

Now I disagree than anyone can easily play PoE on a mechanical standpoint. While this point I'm about to make i know I am significantly bellow the average, it does illustrate the point quite well. I don't use flasks other than life flask or rarely a movement flask for backtracking. That's because I don't remember to use them and I will have to look at the keyboard to press the keys. Same thing if I have a temporary activation skill like a vaal skill for example. I don't remember and if I do, because they are not part of the keys I normally use they are not in muscle memory and they don't get used. On top of that even if I automate flasks I need constant pauses, whether to look up gear, or drink water or (pardon my frech) scratch my ass. There is constant pauses and I also don't move very fast through maps (nor do I treat the HO like lava). While the average player will handle more key presses better than me, overall their efficiency is also not going to be much higher and a lot of the times, not dying means dodging something and I doubt your 70yo cataracts player will have the required reflexes to dodge it. I'm not even 40 and I don't. Heck I haven't had the skill for quick reactions since my late 20s.

Now, In spirit of being fair, I went to craft of exile to try out what you told me to do. Overall, I get something usable every 10ish atempts. Best cases it takes 6 but worst cases it took 26. Now let's look at it from this angle. You have to buy 1 helmet with a fractured usable affix. i went for 50 str cause it's likely the harder thing to hit so I only need now 2 resistances and the life is guaranteed by the essence. The cost of the helmet alone is going to be probably more than the chaos I will have upon reaching maps. The cost for each essence is also going to be high. I could make do with t3 essences but even those are going to be a few chaos per essence early in the league and from my tests, lower tier essences seemed to take more atempts to get me usable items although that was probably just RNG being RNG.

I still don't see a piece being less than 50c like this but let's play by your costs and say it costs 25 to 30c. That's still 1 item. I need gloves, boots, belt, rings, amulet and probably a shield. If we assume early on around 80 to 100c for a div, we're looking at a div just for 3 pieces (amulet and rings have more leeway usually).

Now I don't know about you, but if I don't get lucky with a div drop during the campaign (and I usually don't), I trend to finish the campaign with less than 10c and needing to replace either all or almost all items to go into maps. Even a tier 1 map is significantly harder than the campaign especially with mobs hitting far, far harder in the resistances and well, part also comes from the last res nerf when killing kitava, reason why I make sure to have the 3rd lab done before killing kitava, before more nerfs happen to res.

What I mean by my weapon is the cheapest is that you can often find really good weapons for cheap. A lot of the times you can find weapons with about 200% damage increase, good cast speed and even 100% crit chance for 1 or 2c. Yeah, they don't have +1 to gem level but they are already going to give more DPS than the +1 gem level with a ton of stuff. For minion builds getting a decent cheap weapon is harder I will agree on that but caster weapon it's so damn easy.

5L isn't great to do high tier content. The only acceptable level of damage is things need to instantly die the moment or your minions attack it and if you don't have a 6L you are taking huge risks by letting the enemies live for longer than necessary.

I'm not gonna tell you about a specific build to look at. Currently I'm, like most people, waiting for builds to come out since the trees changed which means there is going to be alterations to many builds whether big or small.

I can tell you I'd like to try doing a spark totem build (without archmage!) but I'm not expecting that to be good. I expect it to do well up to early maps and then quickly start to fall off. But there aren't many spell totem guide creators and the ones I know always goes for the same things so I might have to see if I can take something and run away with doing some changes and see if it works. What I'd probably try and do seriously this league would be a minion build, probably start with that as a way to also get currency to then do the funky spark totem build (though I am sure I'm not going to be able to earn currency to even take the minion build anywhere).

Maybe I'll try the elemental SRS. I normally use Ghazzy for minion guides as he's one of the best creators and does very well at trying to give budget builds with options to go to higher budgets too but he didn't update the elemental SRS build, he mostly kept the poison up to date which is also through necromancer. So I might have to look elsewhere.

If you want to also talk to me about ways to improve the ability to say, get to red maps and start doing them you can add me on steam, same name. it's a lot faster to talk like that.

@Glorfndel01

I don't consider my time wasted when debating something as long as whomever is debating it is doing so in a mature and constructive way which so far is what has happened (and I've seen a lot of the opposite in the PoE forums which is why I am pleasantly surprised that it didn't happen here). That being said the main recipient for what I write is GGG. They really need to address what are actual average players and what is needed to get them to actually even play their game.

I absolutely agree with the OP and her comments regarding game difficulty and the average player.

I have been playing this game since early days before the first Atziri challenge was added to the game.

1. Let's take some of these Opposing views on the average player. I had always heard the average player craps out when hitting maps. I think everyone in the thread agrees that someone picking up the game is a newbie. I would say someone that has played 3 or 4 leagues is probably an average person depending on how much outside support they get with builds, trading, free gear etc.

2. Let's now talk about builds. All builds can potentially get you to yellow maps but not end game content. Thing about builds is that GGG is constantly changing and nerfing skills, gear, skill trees, etc. So the wonderful easy build of last league (which there never is one by the time the average player finds it) has usually been nerfed.
Also, the people that write builds/streamers have a wonderful habit of bragging about their latest gear, but like most/all build writers and streamers, exactly how they came into said gear is never explained rendering the build idea worthless.

3. IMHO no one can succeed in this game without learning how to trade and to amass game wealth. This takes time to learn and goes hand in hand with at least understanding some crafting. Many things can be said about game experience, but to hit end game you have to have a certain ability/familiarity with trading and crafting.

4. One thing that hasn't been discussed is that one needs to learn how to beat certain maps and bosses. You can have the best gear in the game, but without the knowledge of how the map/boss actually perform, the player is doomed to keep dying until the necessary experience is gained. Conversely those with a bunch of experience can wear sub-optimal gear and perform exceptionally well under certain conditions.

5. The difficulty of this game is significant due to its plethora of different sub-games: Delve, Heist, etc. If I hadn't been playing so long I don't think I would take it up again. This coming league looks like it has a ton of changes - best of luck to all players.

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Elhazzared wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Spoiler

This is absolutely not true and has literally never been true at ANY point in PoEs history.

If you can't clear white maps with under 5C invested per equipment slot your build is unbelievably bad, full stop.

Here's the gear I had when I hit level 90 in HCSSF, when I was clearing tier twelve and thirteen maps to test out SRS Guardian before recommending it to some friends who are playing the game for the first time this league:

And this is HARDCORE. You could use far worse gear than this in a softcore league and be fine.

Does this look like multiple divines of gear to you?

Admitedly no, but I doubt I'd be clearing red maps with that kind of gear. The SRS are only on a 5L (granted a cheap corrupted 6L isn't hard to get) and with that kind of gear I expect your ability to survive is mostly limited to your minions drawing aggro because you have low HP, around the 3K and capped elemental res. What that would mean for me is that if the enemies chose to ignore all my minions and attack me, I'd die very fast. If the enemy has AoEs or attacks with penetration and so on, good chance they will be hitting me too which means I will die rather fast.

Maybe it's ok for you to die every now and then or maybe you're good enough of a player that it never happens, in my case I'd be dying every now and then at very least and that is not really fun, it definitely saps the will to keep playing if I keep dying. The occasional but very rare death is fine, dying every now and then isn't. This is why I used to love playing freezing pulse totems, they would freezing everything they attacked if not outright oneshot anything they attacked and since i had a combined mana and HP pool I could still take the ocasional hit which would make the build very sturdy. Of course that is now in the trash with all spell totems save for ice spears which has horrible clearing and even then that requires archmage.

So first and foremost: I do not have low hp, and I do not die "every now and then" because this is a HARDCORE SOLO SELF FOUND character, which you can see if you mouse over the items.

Here are my defensive stats:

4900 life, 1000 ES
74% attack block, 75% spell block
Immune to freeze (Brine King), Immune to shock (Tempest Shield)
23k Armor, 10k Evasion (without flasks)
35k Armor, 13k Evasion (with flasks)
Over 1200 net life regen per second
Global 28% less damage taken from hits (Radiant Sentinel)

I've got those defenses, with those terrible items you could get for 1-2 chaos each in a trade league, and enough damage to easily clear early red maps.

That's what me and Felix are trying to tell you: the things you are saying are objectively untrue. And it's okay to be wrong! But when it's pointed out to you, and not just pointed out but PROVEN, you need to stop saying the things which you now know are untrue and go arm yourself with knowledge before you continue to spread disinformation.

I'm not trying to flame or start fights here, but it's extremely important that you understand this. Based on everything you've said in this thread, you do not have (in your words) "significant knowledge of the game systems." I would say you have substantially below average game knowledge, because the things you "know" are not true. I don't know who told you the things you believe, but they were not correct and unfortunately they have really set you back quite a bit in your understanding of this game.

Have you played Necropolis 4 months?

The gear I am talking about is for RED maps. NOT white maps. You are referring to it as - quote - "need 100c to 1diving just to start mapping". No you do not. You need 10c to start mapping because all you need are close to capped resists and some damage.

You need around 1 div to survive and be able to complete red maps on a decent build.

If we assume you have found at least one good item on the ground (which chances are you have) it will cost you around 1 div to craft the rest of the items to be able to map in red COMFORTABLY. If you get to red maps without at least one divine (not necessarily pure div) you are doing something wrong.

Just from chaos recipe alone if that's your only revenue stream you should be able to get this amount going from white to red.

There are other factors, sure - if you're gonna do T11 on a lvl 65 char you're prob gonna have a bad time on 1 div gear (just an example). But overall, if you have the most absolutely basic knowledge of the game and crafting (again, MOST basic) you will be able to run red on a very low budget.

Going to your example - you wanna buy a fractured T1 strength, that's gonna cost you. Go for a T2 instead. Or go for a benchcrafted strength roll on 2 items with open suffixes. All you need for red maps are:

1. Capped resists
2. Decent life (3.5K if you're ok to die at least 1-2 times per map, 4K+ to comfortably survive)
3. Decent dps (to be very honest I'm not sure what a good number would be here, but I'd say a decent meter is you need to kill trash mobs in less than a second on a T16. Anything less than that is bad)

Some defenses are always nice, but you'll passively get those anyway. Spell suppression is by far the best defensive layer, but also the most expensive, however you can do with 50% in red (here is a assuming that you get at least that from gear and tree, which most builds will have if you're following a guide that isn't total trash)

What my point is here, is you do not need as much as you think to run red maps. Very likely you are focusing on the wrong things, which are also expensive instead of trying to go for cheaper items which give you more value even if you don't see it. I'm gathering this from your analysis - 4 good high tier stats on one item is MORE than you need in red maps. 3 is enough. You either get 2 + 1 benchcraft or 3 + 1 benchcraft max. You try to fill what's missing from jewels for example, or skill points - if you, say, lack 20 dex for an important skill gem and can't get it on items, respec something that's relatively useless and take a +30 dex temporarily.

You need to be able to adjust and adapt. I don't play on steam but I can add you in game when the league starts and I'll be happy to help you wherever I can.

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Elhazzared wrote:

Coming back to the present, you have 40 to 50% player loss in the first week alone and it's all down to average players being unable to progress.

You’ve got this “40-50%” from concurrent players data. It means amount of players who play at the same time. People start playing, let’s say 8 hours a day, down to 1-2 hours a day: that means less people play simultaneously, but it doesn’t mean half of them quit. They continue to play in different time.

So your assumption about “average players” is false.

Anyone who wants to, can utilize his brain to get past yellow maps.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

So first and foremost: I do not have low hp, and I do not die "every now and then" because this is a HARDCORE SOLO SELF FOUND character, which you can see if you mouse over the items.

Here are my defensive stats:

4900 life, 1000 ES
74% attack block, 75% spell block
Immune to freeze (Brine King), Immune to shock (Tempest Shield)
23k Armor, 10k Evasion (without flasks)
35k Armor, 13k Evasion (with flasks)
Over 1200 net life regen per second
Global 28% less damage taken from hits (Radiant Sentinel)

I've got those defenses, with those terrible items you could get for 1-2 chaos each in a trade league, and enough damage to easily clear early red maps.

That's what me and Felix are trying to tell you: the things you are saying are objectively untrue. And it's okay to be wrong! But when it's pointed out to you, and not just pointed out but PROVEN, you need to stop saying the things which you now know are untrue and go arm yourself with knowledge before you continue to spread disinformation.

I'm not trying to flame or start fights here, but it's extremely important that you understand this. Based on everything you've said in this thread, you do not have (in your words) "significant knowledge of the game systems." I would say you have substantially below average game knowledge, because the things you "know" are not true. I don't know who told you the things you believe, but they were not correct and unfortunately they have really set you back quite a bit in your understanding of this game.

Well, to be fair I actually tried to look at your character and it said profile is private so I couldn't actually look it up, so I estimated the average HP that would have from my own characters, whether necromancers or hierophants which generally have access to the same HP nodes as they use trees that go over similar areas and the HP present on the gear. That I estimated around 3 to 3.5K If you have 4.9K with that gear, I'm not sure how or all of those defensive layers with that kind of gear. I would like a PoB to that so i could have a look cause it looks a bit too good to be true with that kind of gear in the current state of PoE but I am willing to happily admit I'm wrong if shown how it is being archived.

That being said I do think it is disingenuous to say someone's knowledge of the game is bellow average just because they couldn't guess what your HP value was based only what what they saw on the gear when in all fairness, the majority of builds using that gear and going after the usual HP on the tree which normally is, everything you can get your hands on maybe skipping 1 or 2 less valuable nodes at best.

I did admit my crafting knowledge to be lacking but almost no one has crafting knowledge in PoE, that is something a tiny fraction of the playerbase has because it is incredibly hard not to mention you need an equal amount of market knowledge to fully make use of your crafting knowledge. I am however well versed in most PoE game mechanics.

@Felix44

The gear you talked about for red maps is technically the minimum gear for white maps. We're talking about gear that covers resistances, covers stats, covers a bare minimum HP gain and some movement speed so I don't feel like walking over a tar pit. Actually movement now may be a lot easier with the new bandit quest rework since it's only 1 point trading for 8% movement speed.

Now the reason I'm saying that there is a gear wall is because generally minion builds and totem builds with this level of gear (80 life on most gear, 60 on rings, probably nothing on chest cause I always assume the chest to be tabula or equally bad in terms of affixes corrupted chest for the 6L) I get around 3 to 3.5K life at the absolute best and that means even on yellow maps I'm dying far more often than I am confortable with. And this is already using the gear that you consider good enough for red maps.

@wkernel

No I don't got this from concurrent players data. This is number of players that played the game that day and to go further than that. Steam only care if you clicked the play button. It doesn't cares if you actually played or if you were even in the game fore more than a second. It is total players on a day by bay basis.

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Elhazzared wrote:

Now the reason I'm saying that there is a gear wall is because generally minion builds and totem builds with this level of gear (80 life on most gear, 60 on rings, probably nothing on chest cause I always assume the chest to be tabula or equally bad in terms of affixes corrupted chest for the 6L) I get around 3 to 3.5K life at the absolute best and that means even on yellow maps I'm dying far more often than I am confortable with. And this is already using the gear that you consider good enough for red maps.

I am so confused, Did you get no stats in the tree? Do you have no res on anything but rings, are you trying to use the tabula through maps? I have made a ton of spell totem builds that make it to endgame on 50c or less, typically my most expensive piece is the spirit shield with +1 totems, but I am at tier 13 to 16 before I get it.

I been saying it for a decade already. PoE need a difficult setting. People like us who just want to kill stuff and loot stuff, and dont have the required 17 hrs a day to git gud.

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Marinxar wrote:

I been saying it for a decade already. PoE need a difficult setting. People like us who just want to kill stuff and loot stuff, and dont have the required 17 hrs a day to git gud.

The game wasn't made for people like yourself.