Giving away Onslaught/HC items since i'd no longer play!

Playing as a cleaver I accidentally forgot to replace my life leech gem... then I decide to go facetank merci piety as per usual. Three seconds in I'm down to about 10% life before I notice something is wrong, panic hit weapon swap and luckily my alt set of weapons are semi decent and have a life leech mod! Not only did I survive but I got some sweet rares to boot.

Also had to change the shorts before the next run D:

This isn't the best story in terms of it being awesome but one night I was drinking and playing PoE extremely late at night. I had just bought a really cheap lionseye off trade chat and was also stash clearing to the vendor. Well what happened next is pretty sad since I sold my lionseye to the vendor and went to bed, not even realizing what I had done until I woke up the next morning. Needless to say more drinking was in order.

After watching tons of racing streams I decided to try racing for a bit. No, sadly it didn't go very well. At the time I was fresh into hc and the races I tried ended up being a bit of a massacre. Slightly demoralized I gave up on them.

While watching helmann's stream he said he would be doing a viewer race. The guy won tons of races in s2, maybe I would have a chance, so I asked to join and I got a spot as a witch.

Let me shorten this a bit by linking something I still have in my favorites:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/381179

I got 5th place and 1st witch, and my first (and, so far, only) demi-god. I don't think I can put my excitement at the time in words, and neither can I get rid of this link from my bookmarks.

The race that followed I also got a spot in the party, this time as a ranger. I spent the whole race neck-to-neck with another ranger. I then stopped to go to the bathroom at act 2 and missed the ball seal thingy, leaving me behind the group. I then ripped while trying to get it (portal was already gone) ruining my chances at a second exalt. Nonetheless the whole neck-to-neck racing was just thrilling.

Recently I have managed to convince a couple friends to try poe. Since it was their first characters I knew it wouldn't be a good idea to throw them right into hc and crush their hopes and dreams, so I started over on sc together with them. After a few weeks of playing only when all of us were together and teaching them the game we have reached act 3 merciless.

Although I have reached merciless this is the first time I get to act 3 in it. My first character in sc only went through normal and act 1 cruel before I jumped straight into hc, getting rid of all my sc stuff.

Yesterday, however, we were doing crematorium for the quest and dropped our first map. In all the time I have been playing I had never seen either an exalted or a map apart from trade/global chat and streams. Playing with these friends we have already acquired both.

Now they are incredibly excited and want to get to mapping asap. They have been playing several more hours than they had before.

I am afraid I will not be able to convince them to start over on hardcore however, lol.

My story is long, but fun I hope and harrowing at the end.

Near when open beta started, but after I learned the game a little bit, I made my first "real" hardcore character: a claw witch. At the time, this was pretty crazy--nobody was playing claws because they believed them to be terrible, and furthermore nobody would use a witch for that, would they? But I saw all that life leech and figured I could make myself immortal as a CI dual strike claw witch. I did the theory-crafting and felt incredibly excited.

I leveled as a summoner up until that point, which was a pain because I didn't have the spec for it. Everybody said you should go to CI in merciless A2, but after grinding ledge for a little bit, freezing pulse was just not cutting it. So I decided to go to CI, waaaay before I should. About level 52. This means I had horrible ES items--Heck some of my gear wasn't even an ES base at all, but I was just so incredibly excited to play my unique claw witch that I had to do it.

I spent all my respec points, and got some ES gear. My DPS felt insane to me at the time, 2.5k tooltip DPS on dual strike! This seemed like enough damage to murder anything. I first decided to take it easy in twilight strand, and annihilated the zombies, facetanking Hillock with my insane life leech. So I think that it's time to go to ledge to farm up a little bit, because I felt immortal.

I clear a couple times in a party, skipping Kuduku because I hated him, but on the third time through I felt very confident with my character. That third time I decide that I can tank Kuduku with my leech no problem. I start hitting him with dual strike, leeching back the spark damage, but all of a sudden my ES bar just drops. I don't know what's going on so I whirling blades out as fast as I can, and as I'm desperately trying to get out of the sea of sparks that Kuduku makes I notice my ES: 0.

I freak out. I died. I lost all my ES as a CI user. I was completely and utterly defeated; my first hardcore character ever past cruel Act 1, already in merciless! All that effort I had, gone. I was too hasty, I should have waited like everybody recommended, but now it didn't matter. But in 4 seconds I notice my energy shield recharging. It must be a bug, I died, I had no ES. I'm confused for a little bit, trying to figure what's going on...and slowly, I smile. Indeed, I did lose all my energy shield, but as a CI user I have a little bit more: 1 life.

I was at exactly at 1 life as a CI user, on a Hardcore server nonetheless. I could not believe it. It was so unfathomably unlikely, but all I could do was take pride in surviving.

This is something almost nobody experiences, and something I never hope to experience again.