More Good news GGG... plus 1 bad news

This is a follow up to continue from my first post: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/428803.

Our Anarchy trio is up to the Cruel Merveil boss battle. We made the Lunaris Temple run, crushed Kole (my female witch playing friend died once) and we showed Piety that she is no match for a good trio (a 2 handed sword wielding Marauder tank, a hot fire elemental Witch, and a fire/ice elemental archer Duelist) and killed her very efficiently. As I expected my PoE newbie friends died a couple of times and I am still clean (0 deaths) and we are still having fun.

One (of many) things I notice that PoE (and TL2) does 100% better than D3 ever did is that during an act ending boss battle (in this example act 3 Piety) the arena that the battle takes place in has columns or other objects that I can hide behind when needed. With Piety my archer is weak on cold resist so any time she shot the multiple ice spear type of cold arrows at me I could duck behind cover until she went back to her normal size. The final Diablo 3 battle takes place in an arena with no objects to take cover behind and only good kiting skills and luck keeps you from dieing.



My 2 new to PoE fiends are learning the ins and outs of the PoE crafting system and my female witch playing friend has crafted a good (for level 42) rare wand. One aspect of the PoE crafting system that has been discussed at great length that she negatively commented about was the way RNG works in PoE. She found better gloves last night but they were not of the correct colors so we gave here some Chromatics to supplement her own so she could try to get the color combo she wanted. After burning through 20 orbs and not getting the 3 colors she wanted she turned to me and said that the GGG devs need to learn a thing or two about statistics and that the way RNG works in PoE (in her view it's not working properly) as the number of sockets an item has increases the chance that a Chromatic orb will give the desired color combination goes up exponentially. We know that increasing difficulty is to be expected as we level up (working as intended). We also want a greater challenge so that PoE won't ever become boring because we find it too easy. But the crafting system is one part of PoE that is not working very well right now and I hope that the devs. are planning to improve it by October.

I've read other posts stating that the RNG with chromatics is skewed so that it's not an equal random chance of RGB for each socket and it's been stated that Witch is skewed toward blue, Marauder toward red, and Ranger toward green. I'm not sure about that but I do know from personal chro. use that chest and helmet armor seams to favor red and blue, bows favor green, wands favor blue, etc. which does suggest that the RNG of chromatics is skewed based on the character class. Further info on this is needed or better yet if a GGG dev can explain this to clarify the confusion (or post a link to the answer if already stated).

edit: I told my friends I had posted months ago favoring a chromatic system where you only rolled new colors on the empty sockets so that the ones that you have a gem in can stay that color and focus on changing some of them. That method is probably best for the casual players but I'm sure the HC crowd would naysay all day about it and defend the current RNG method as "working as intended" and should not change. Since us non-hardcore players don't have and probably will never have enough quantities of crafting gems for any serious bouts of crafting then making changes to ease the process and be less quantity demanding and tedious would be very welcome.

We'll defeat Merveil tonight and move on to Act 2 (once we get past the monkey business zone).

In Cruel what's the consensus, should we kill all 3 bandits or is there a bandit reward that is better (post 0.11.1d patch)?

Thanks for reading my post and to date we're still having fun and haven't felt the grind, grind, grind fatigue yet.

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Arrowneous wrote:

The final Diablo 3 battle takes place in an arena with no objects to take cover behind and only good kiting skills and luck keeps you from dieing.

just for the record...the diablo fight has 2 big crystals in the middle of the room that you can use to line of sight

It is known that item socket color chances depend on the base item.

A pure str item (e.g. str armor, pure str maces) favour red (it is possible to get green and blue but less likely), int items favour blue and dex items green.
Hybrid items (e.g. daggers - int/dex) should have equal chances for the two colors of their requirements and less chance for the third color (so the dagger i gave as an example favours green and blue sockets)

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skinnay wrote:

"

Arrowneous wrote:

The final Diablo 3 battle takes place in an arena with no objects to take cover behind and only good kiting skills and luck keeps you from dieing.

just for the record...the diablo fight has 2 big crystals in the middle of the room that you can use to line of sight

I remembered there was some thing there but that it wasn't anything you could hide behind.

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Sony_Black wrote:

It is known that item socket color chances depend on the base item.

A pure str item (e.g. str armor, pure str maces) favour red (it is possible to get green and blue but less likely), int items favour blue and dex items green.
Hybrid items (e.g. daggers - int/dex) should have equal chances for the two colors of their requirements and less chance for the third color (so the dagger i gave as an example favours green and blue sockets)

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense but also means that using chromatics on that item is not going to give us the desired results and as "working as intended" it may be from the devs view it still means if you wanted for example 2 blue or green sockets on a chest or helm that is strength based it is going to require a large amount of chromatics. It gets even worse in the fusings crafting department. I read last week of a player burning through 2000 fusings and never got a 6L armor. First, it's staggering to me that you can amass that many playing and buying (without RMT), second that some one would actually want to take the tedious time to apply that many fusings to his armor, and third that he wasn't pissed off and rage stop long before going that far.

So my < 1 month PoE player friend's observation on the difficulty of crafting a color/link combo desired for that item going up exponentially in difficulty is a correct assessment (even for a newbie player). The desire here for me (and hopefully many others) is that crafting be less quantity demanding or that GGG seriously ups the gem crafting orb drop rate.

rolling off colour combos is possible, just takes a lot more chroms usually. Examples off offcolour stuff I wear (hold alt to view sockets without mouse hover)






some of those took a lot of chroms, others came quite easy. the more sockets you have the harder it gets to pin them all down to what you want. For example I have a freeze pulse witch who wears this




but when it came to making my new lighting witch I needed 3 blues, 1 red and 1 green, I just couldnt trust that was ever going to happen with chromatics on pure armour so she has this armour



its not ideal, the energy shield goes towards mana with eldritch battery so its useful, but Id have taken a pure armour chest any day if it wasnt for the socket colours.





ev/es, yet i got 3 reds, does happen but you might spend 300 chroms replicating it.

Lastly we have an exercise in extreme chroming to show anything is possible



when I change my normal gear for my magic find gear my auras stay 'on', no need to recast them because they are in the same sockets. This is why I chromed RRGB on ev gloves then chromed GGRB on armour boots, not only did I chrom them 'off' but I chromed them to exactly the same socket colours in the same positions. This took a lot of chroms, an awful lot, but no RMT or forum gold trading took place to make it happen, so take faith a honest farmer can do this with a self found chrom stash.

Thanks for the post. You have some nice armor.

I play PoE as a recreational activity and I'll never have the time required to be a hardcore player. That's ok for me but by GGG setting the bar to the extreme height that it's at currently that places most crafting options way our of my reach (even with my 6'4" height). I and others have suggested to GGG that they expand the leagues to include new permanent ones that aren't quite so demanding of a persons time to be able to do crafting (higher crafting orb drop rate). Every time the hard-ass hardcore purists smash these posts for being anti-hardcore or that the company is called GGG for a reason and grinding is first and foremost what PoE is. I would never suggest the PoE lose it's grittier feel and play style (I tried TL2 last year, loved the loot and boss battles, didn't care for the art style and hated the lack of a meaningful storyline). To even suggest that GGG expand the leagues gets a swift response from the hardcore players saying it will ruin the economy or fragment the player base. Never once have I seen a post with any view like mine that suggests that with more leagues (more play style choices) the market for PoE will be expanded offering millions more the opportunity to play "their way" which should increase microtransactions and be good for all. It's always the other view. Maybe I'm all "wet behind the ears" on the whole arpg world of players and GGG has the statistics to back up their reasons for making PoE a niche arpg but an influx of new players (fresh meat) I would think would be good for the GGG financial bottom line.

I'm not condemning GGG for what they have created. I think it's great and their player support is the best I've ever experienced. As a beta game I'm keeping a very wide open mind and waiting to see in what direction GGG takes their flagship arpg game and come October we'll all see the fruits of their labors.

edit: spelling

Our fifty+ trio battled Merveil last night and are now well into Act II Cruel. Our witch noticed that Merveil was vulnerable to fire and so we all used our fire attacks plus threw all our minions in her face (13 by my count) and she went down faster than a WKRP in Cincinnati turkey being thrown out of a helicopter. Oops, I guess I watch too much tv. Anyway, she died extremely fast and that is very good as it means we are becoming skilled PoE players (oh no... not another learning experience!) and working as a team. In all my dozens of solo Merveil battles I never took time to read her info on strengths and weaknesses. Stupid me. It was the astute observation of our witch that showed us how to defeat her quickly. I guess I should find a safe place during an act ending boss battle to read the boss info to know which attack strategies will be the most effective. This sounds like common sense and it is but during my solo HC boss battles there is little time to think about such things with the focus on staying alive and killing that boss creature dominating my thoughts.

We had to stop last night at about 10:30 pm EST as we were normal for a couple of hours but suddenly and unexpectedly we experienced severe lag while in the Chamber of Sins. We couldn't account for it's cause but when I almost died from desync while trying to kill a necromancer I said "that's it I'm done for tonight". While Anarchy is not HC I still am death free and am personally trying to see how far I can go in our trio play without my first death and playing while having Internet lag is stupid so the near death desync experience last night got my attention fast and I immediately quit.

My marauder playing male friend was analyzing our wireless connections (our Internet link passes through 6 Ubiquity 5 GHz radios to reach our fiber link) after we quit but hadn't determined what caused the lag but it was definitely not GGGs fault. I'll say it again, it was not GGGs fault that we experienced severe desync. Most PoE players have no knowledge of how the Internet functions and yet the devs get dumped on all the time by the ignorant players with their rage posts and "I quit" garbage posts. How the Internet works and the fact that it works as well as it does 99% of the time is pretty amazing considering all the companies involved and millions of pieces of hardware required to get data from point A to point B and back. GGG is doing their best to come up with better game communication methods to keep the PoE client and server game session in sync but there are many, many times that desync is beyond their control and for the Internet ignorant players to always bash GGG on this has gone way beyond irritating and needs to stop.

I'll be playing my HC solo elemental/necro Templar this morning and I'll see if all is normal again. I know it is frustrating to live where you experience major Internet lag to the PoE servers but everyone needs to take a break when this happens and don't continue playing when you know there is high Internet latency. If your Internet connection is always high latency due to your physical location and/or you have a lousy ISP then that's a shame but GGG simply can't fix all hardware communication problems with clever software programming. No one can.

ya I can appreciate what you are saying regarding drop rates and play time balance. I get that pain too, I got 2 characters to maps in Anarchy and just went back to standard because I was sick of running out of chroms, jewellers etc all the time and being left with broken gear etc.

Im not a big trader, what I have in standard took a long time to build up and get to the point where I have characters who can go a destroy content at extreme pace with quantity gear on to get a few stacks of chroms in a realistic time frame. I have a lot of stuff in my stash, theres always something that can be traded if worst comes to worst.

Without it things can be a real drag. There have been calls for self found leagues where drop rates could be boosted. I probably wouldnt play it but I can see the attraction and if people want it then great. Ive not read any of the details on the discussions but I would imagine it makes the issue of being able to party and share items a problem, which is an important factor. Maybe some way to link 6 players together at camp just after hillock so that nothing external to them can come into their games but they can trade together, along with no shared stash between characters on the same account? I dunno.