PoE for average players?

Archmage does not work with totems.

It literally says so right on the skill gem.

Please stop saying things which are factually untrue.

So I looked there are 140 points of dex nodes in the tree I can take without going out of the way if I need them as a spell totem templar. As Caribbeanpirate has said, archmage doesn't work with spell totem, please write what the gem says so I know you read it. Finally if you want to use a soul mantle fine but a kikazaru soul mantle route is just one you can take it is by no means necessary.

"

ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate wrote:

Archmage does not work with totems.

It literally says so right on the skill gem.

Please stop saying things which are factually untrue.

You are right, I always call archmage to arcane cloak for whatever reason.

"

nutchman wrote:

So I looked there are 140 points of dex nodes in the tree I can take without going out of the way if I need them as a spell totem templar. As Caribbeanpirate has said, archmage doesn't work with spell totem, please write what the gem says so I know you read it. Finally if you want to use a soul mantle fine but a kikazaru soul mantle route is just one you can take it is by no means necessary.

Yes, I meant arcane cloak all this time, disregard that as i always confuse those 2 names for whatever reason.

Also send me a PoB with a spell totem build then just so I can take a look.

"

Elhazzared wrote:

That being said, I wouldn't dismiss just peak players as not being a measure of playerbase size.

If players don’t quit but play less you’ll see less concurrent players.
Everyone plays more at league start. That’s why you see drop in amount of concurrent players. Even if nobody has quit, you’ll see the drop.

"

Elhazzared wrote:

If you take a look at it on one day of the week and again on the same day of the week on the next week, if you are not losing players then the numbers should look fairly the same.

No! First few days of a new league are the most important ones! If you play a lot first days you progress faster and accumulate more wealth! That’s why many people play much more the first week.

"

Elhazzared wrote:

But if you compare prior to delve leagues and the last 4 years, the percentage loss on concurrent players is much higher now than before, As I said, roughly 50% in the first week now vs roughly 50% in the first month before.

Delve league was in 2018. PoE became more popular after 2018. New players have different behavior: they play less and quit early.

"

Elhazzared wrote:

build guides wherever you go you see budget builds usually being 1 div at the lowest and sometimes the "low" budget builds you see them asking for like, 10 divs which is more than the average player will ever see in an entire league even if they are the kind of players to keep playing despite not being able to overcome the gear wall. Now on this point, compared to before a budget build didn't go higher than 10c and some were like, 1 or 2c budget builds capable of clearing nearly all content except things like elder or uber lab confortably.

1. You looking at wrong guides, should look for league starter builds. There’s no budget, you get what you can get and progress the atlas.

2. Currency emission is higher now. You get more currency naturally while playing the game.

"

wkernel wrote:

If players don’t quit but play less you’ll see less concurrent players.
Everyone plays more at league start. That’s why you see drop in amount of concurrent players. Even if nobody has quit, you’ll see the drop.

Not to that degree and the fact of the matter is that there is still a HUGE discrepancy between now and 6 years ago when the game was in a good state.

"

wkernel wrote:

No! First few days of a new league are the most important ones! If you play a lot first days you progress faster and accumulate more wealth! That’s why many people play much more the first week.

That's relevant only for the absolute top players. Average players aren't in maps before day 2, most not even before day 3. That is to say average players don't actually play like they have no life in the first few days because they can't get into maps quickly enough nor make currency fast enough to take advantage of the sellers market.

"

wkernel wrote:

Delve league was in 2018. PoE became more popular after 2018. New players have different behavior: they play less and quit early.

Yes and no. PoE had 2 surges of popularity. The first was in 2016 with Ascencion which brought the game up from being a niche for the hardcore players to a game that even the average player could play and have success. After that it kept slowly gain players, even after 2018 where GGG started to reverse what made the game popular. The second surge was in 2020 with covid and people being at home, bored out of their mind. You will actually notice that the 2 first leagues immediatly after covid the player retention also increased just because people were stuck at home with nothing to do.

"

wkernel wrote:

1. You looking at wrong guides, should look for league starter builds. There’s no budget, you get what you can get and progress the atlas.

2. Currency emission is higher now. You get more currency naturally while playing the game.

1 - The builds I meant are league starter builds. That much should already be extremely obvious. You say there is no budget but that is false. There is always a budget. Even league starters sometimes have uniques that are build enabling, any build has a need to fill resistances and other defensive layers which again, has a cost. Every build regardless of being a league starter or not has a budget to it. League starters normally are lower on the budget and preferably can be scaled up to high budgets so that it's isn't just a currency farmer which you then need to make a new build to make use of said currency. However as I said, even league starters have a minimum of 1 divine to get going and sometimes as far as 10 divines.

2 - Currency emission has the POTENTIAL to be higher. I am going to disregard new league mechanics as some tend to be more lucrative and some not so much. Going simply by what is guaranteed to be there in core there is potential to get more, for example expedition is potential for more currency, delve is potential for more and so on but potential isn't always realised. It requires investment into it for it to be realised. The league where I made the absolute most currency was during Delve League and when I say most I mean by a margin that can't even be compared to any other league. I probably made over 50 ex (back then it wasn't divs that were valuable) and I even had the best wand for cold casters in the entire game. It wasn't mirror worth but nothing up for sale even came close to it and I crafted it though I mostly got lucky with it.

Also in case you don't know, base currency drops have been nerfed severely since then. Some time after delve GGG nerfed the drops on currency. to put things into perspective, I normally got 1 ex every 2 days or so just in pure drop. After the nerf which the way we are now I'll find a pure drop maybe once a week, more likely closer to once every 10 days if I play the same amount of time. Obviously this is assuming you are running red maps at least.

So while you have potential for more with side content, realistically you are default dropping FAR less value now than you were in 2018. Add to that being able to have a build that for 10c you could run practically all content, 20c if you count a tabula. You only needed better gear for some side content or pinacle content which at the time was elder.

"

Elhazzared wrote:

What GGG fails to understand or at least pretends not to understand is that the average players are out of the game in the first week of the game, at least the overwhelming majority anyway and are treating the players who are still playing after 1 month as the average but those are not the average, those are for the most part the extremely good players.

I stopped reading right here.....you can't be an "average player" if you aren't even playing the game. If you quit in a week, you aren't even a PoE player because....you aren't playing PoE.

OP and every response sounds like someone who refused to "learn" how to play the game for (potentially) years and blames the game for all their shortcomings.

PoE is....not that hard. Unless you are completely new to aRPGs, and even then it probably takes less than a month to be able to understand enough to figure out basic gearing, stat management, and most damage scaling.


If you are quitting the game after a week, it is not a problem with the GAME: the game is healthy and there are hundreds of thousands or millions of other people playing. It just means that YOU don't like the game. That's fine, you don't have to! There are many games I don't play, that doesn't mean the game should have to be rewritten because I don't play it.