A somewhat new player's review of Path of VexOhmIstDol

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RagnarokChu wrote:

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Self found isn't short sited, in fact self found is the staple of the best aRPGS (including D2!), its just included be default!. Most people play aRGP's to find gear self found, not to participate in an online economy, because if people want to do that, they should play an MMO, because it does that job a lot better than any aRPG (PoE or otherwise)

PoE, like D3 minus RoS, is balanced around an economy, so self found league makes perfect sense

Also if GGG wants to put their foot where their mouth is, they really should stop readjusting the max level whenever new content gets added, like they did to 3X. 3X should have increased the max level for content to something like 71 (lunaris was 68 at the time), instead what GGG did was they reduced lunaris down to 66/67 and the new content (3X) is 67/68, which is precisely the opposite of what they should be doing

It is short-sited, because self-found would imply that you "don't trade and only solo." But then complain about how other people that can trade is unfair. If you don't need to trade in the default game with tons of more content, stuff like runewords, even more early game Legendaries/sets. Why do you need a "self-found" league when you can just fix the base game in a way that is beneficial to everyone.

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RagnarokChu wrote:

Most people play aRPGs to find loot, and many people in fact do enjoy trading? D2 which apparently many self-found people herald as an amazing self-found game, conveniently ignore that trading was massively and ridiculously popular to the point it had one of the biggest if not biggest RMT markets in existence with one of the most shitty trading systems in existence (don't get me started on how shitty trading in D2 was, it makes PoE current trading system look like a automatic AH).

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xardas149 wrote:

I was a very activ diablo 2 player for a long period of time and kind of well known in the german scene of this game and basicly did and saw everything in this game.Writhing guides, doing several selfbuild Chars who ended quite strong, placing 4. at Europe Ladder for the first Baalkill on hell after ladder reset and what not. There are several big points of the OP which are not truth at all and i want to give a detailed watch on that.

Op starting of the difficulty and where he sees the problems in POE compared to D2.
What he dont mention:
-Iron Maiden Curse in A4 was basicly a free death for a meele champ in diablo. You could play around it sure, but if you never died to it you never played the game realy. I played the game for years before they finaly removed it. In Poe you can easy get a plan to deal with reflect mobs which is much fairer
- As he mentioned the glooms/souls he kinda forgot about ancients ( not scary for highend builds, overpowerd as fuck for many selffound builds),randomly overpowerd mods on baals last vave and so on. Nilatkas Corpse Explosion even killed you randomly even with the highest gear.
-Even Resistenze in D2 was a real problem if you played selffound, cause they could be IMMUNE to your dmg and you needed a halfway decent equiped Merc to handle it. Sure you could go Dual Elements and never rly get your "main" build to full potencial, while if just lowers your dps in POE.


The Lootsystem:

I have to admit i had to laught a bit when the mentioned the sets and how he praised them. Sure, they were perfetly fine ( besides the paladin set which was "kinda" crapy besides for 1 build), but you wouldnt never get it together by finding it yourself. Every one of those Sets had at least very rare Part which had a horrible dropchance. Sure you could trade for it, but thats the same as trading for a 5linked which kinda "bad" rolls, which will just do the job--> same as it was in diablo 2.
The Runewords were good. Thats sure. But there are several low Uniques which cost next to nothing and the overall skillgem system lowers the need of a equivalent to the runewords by far.
The best example is how much eaier you get a rare weapon just by finding which gets you furter in the game compared to diablo 2. Selffound Meele at diablo 2 was a real pain sometimes, cause your dmg was nearly 90% based of your god damm weapon.
( PS: Bitch please, mention dmg whirlwind/dual-wielding and names beast/Ebotdz instead of dual grief... come one dude rly? this aint pvp bro).
I guess i dont have to go onto the save farming zones cause here it is more of a lack of knowledge of the OP then anythign else.

And about the steady progression in itemization if just a terrible joke. Diablo 2 was ALL about Uniques and Runewords. Rares could only in rare places/situations even come close to thier Unique/Runeword counterparts.
For example--> Go and do math to get a Rarebow to match Windforce or the Auraruneword ( forgot the Name right now). It was "nearly" possible to reach those 2 but the bow had to be out of this world. Dont get my started on Enigma, Grief and things like that. The only weapon to even match Grief was Death, another Runeword which was also "quite" expensive, but doable.
Compared in Poe: Lionsglare is a awesome good bow which costs more then enough, but can be worse then rare bow, even if that rare has to be also be godlike.

About the crafting: There were some special case where the craft was kinda nice ( the Knockback for Bowamazon is maybe the best example yeah), but other then that they were mostly used for 1 thing mostly---> godlike faster casting pvp amuletts to get to the stupid made up caps for caster casting which you had to reach.
Other then that it was all about Runewords and Uniques.
I cannot stress enough how much PoE is doing it better. Sure crafting with Exalts and what not is expensive, but this is the endgame every diablo player dreamed of--> go for equal unique godlike rares to make your char rly something special and not the Shaco, Hoto, Enigma, Spirit, Arach, double soj, maras, call to arms + boots Hammerdin copy paste items which you could throw on every necro and sorc aswell....
Btw: In Diablo EVERYTHING was junk besides the standard uniques/sets and higher runes. You could just fill your WHOLE inventar which charms and leave enough space for the cube cause you never keep more then the little space inside the cube to have enough for the loot which was "worth" to be kept.

The Trading in a game like this is a such big topic, you can never get close to understand all about it and give an opionion on it with such few words. You may dislike the way a game like this becomes to some extend to a economy game but there is a reason a side for diablo 2 trading became one of the biggest forums in the whole internet.
For everyone who dislike it there are at least the same amount of people who like it.
I wont go deeper on this, cause i had to write 10 times the amount of this post, but i can tell you as a person who was very rich on diablo 2 it was a big reason which keeped me playing.
Just one thing has to get out there:
PoE is so much better at giving you currency to afford things. Even the lower Orbs are usefull enough to give them a "worth" and the chaos recipie you mentioned.
Besides beeing an intelligent trader outside of the game what did you acutally in diablo 2 to make currency?
You either went for Hellfiretorches, selling out spots for übertristram leveling ( which was fixed at some point 2009 or 2010) and rushing chars rush classic diablo to do the act 4 quest for the runedrop or use your travincal gold barb and spend hours in the gambling bullshit. Each way was very far away from the "normal" gameplay or rather just broken as fuck ( tell me Übertristram Leveling wasnt just dumb as fuck) and the classic rush thing didnt even get you exp for your real char.
In Poe you just play the game, do maps and bosses for exp and getting a steady and reliable amount of currency.

Desync: Well it is hard to tell if it is that much worse in Poe, but shit you desynched in Diablo 2 for real. I mean the paladin charge, barb frenzy, teleport, the assasin movementabilites. All this shit made you dsynch like hell besides random desynchs which happened from time to time.
I mean Pvp in Diablo 2 was a pure mindgame. nearly everything could became invisible through desynch. Hammerfields, fireballs, boneskills and basicly EVERY GOD DAMM MISSILE. You didnt played what you "saw", you played what you had to expect and "feel".


Plot: Diablo 2 had nice vids for the time which gave a nice flavour. Thats it. The story itself has no more depth then: oh this are the evil demons from hell, better kill them. Basic Hell vs Heaven.
The Music in Diablo 2 was better yeah.. but the be honest this is the least important point ever. When you grind for a longer time you start listing to your own music, talk to friends in teamspeak and shit. At the end no one gives a fuck, sorry to say it that hard.


I had to break the starting post down in each of his points to show how wrong the Op is that Diablo 2 did anything better at all.
At some points POE is just plain better, some points are just a preference point ( the economy part of those games mostly) and some points can be addressed, but arent as bad as OP stated it to be.

PS: I know my english sucks..xD

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CapitalPunishment wrote:

Also...notice once again a dev response and he dodged the desync topic....desync is above anything else the biggest issue with the game. without question.

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Erik wrote:

IlyaK1986:

Thanks for the feedback. What do you think about the newer tracks that were added in act3x (Gardens, Library and Sceptre of God)?

We have only had a composer work on PoE tracks during brief times during the development so in a way we have had much less than one dedicated composer. Recently we have been able to get a composer that is working on a on-going basis to make new tracks and improve old ones. One of the goals with the act3x tracks, and even more so with tracks for act 4 will be to incorporate memorable melodies.

BTW, if someone were to stumble upon Kaom in a future expansion of PoE, I am sure he would be very dangerous.

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master's in statistics (and a bachelor's in optimization)

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deteego wrote:

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RagnarokChu wrote:

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Self found isn't short sited, in fact self found is the staple of the best aRPGS (including D2!), its just included be default!. Most people play aRGP's to find gear self found, not to participate in an online economy, because if people want to do that, they should play an MMO, because it does that job a lot better than any aRPG (PoE or otherwise)

PoE, like D3 minus RoS, is balanced around an economy, so self found league makes perfect sense

Also if GGG wants to put their foot where their mouth is, they really should stop readjusting the max level whenever new content gets added, like they did to 3X. 3X should have increased the max level for content to something like 71 (lunaris was 68 at the time), instead what GGG did was they reduced lunaris down to 66/67 and the new content (3X) is 67/68, which is precisely the opposite of what they should be doing

It is short-sited, because self-found would imply that you "don't trade and only solo." But then complain about how other people that can trade is unfair. If you don't need to trade in the default game with tons of more content, stuff like runewords, even more early game Legendaries/sets. Why do you need a "self-found" league when you can just fix the base game in a way that is beneficial to everyone.

Because economically speaking, you can't, or more accurately, its practically unfeasible for GGG without changing what their game is. This has been debated over and over again, and even Chris mentioned it himself on streams. Balancing the game around trading/economy is antithetic to balancing it around self found play.

In order to balance a game around self found play, you need to design the game around self found play, which means ignoring trading/ecnonomy. If you design the game by ignoring external variables (like the possibility of getting much better loot by trading), you can easily fine tune the game for self fround progression, as you have a much smaller scope of variance to account for.

Chris even said this on the stream, when someone suggested to include AH into PoE, he said he would have to lower drops even more to take into account the ease of trading that AH provides (although in my opinion we already have AH's for this game, but thats another discussion). The point is, when you deal with people trading and economies, it becomes incredibly difficult to balance for self found progression, typically this is reserved to MMO's, who have much larger teams, development and player bases. WoW has a balance team that is mangnitudes in size of PoE's entire team size just to work on these issues. More importantly, MMO's have much more content, and many different ways to level and progress, where as aRPG's just focus on killing monsters

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RagnarokChu wrote:

Most people play aRPGs to find loot, and many people in fact do enjoy trading? D2 which apparently many self-found people herald as an amazing self-found game, conveniently ignore that trading was massively and ridiculously popular to the point it had one of the biggest if not biggest RMT markets in existence with one of the most shitty trading systems in existence (don't get me started on how shitty trading in D2 was, it makes PoE current trading system look like a automatic AH).

Unfortunately, many of these people live in a delusional bubble (Chris included), where they thought that trading was "common" place in D2. Fact: It wasn't. The vast majority of people that played D2 didnt trade, and if they did, it was the "I was playing with friends and a good spear dropped which I picked up, do you want to trade it for something since you are an amazon" kind of trading (which is nothing like PoE trading)

Remember, D2 was one of the most played and highly rated games in history, it literally had millions of players. So even through trading communities were large in D2 (10k?), they were nothing compared to the total amount of people that played

Things like j2jsp were a speckle of sand in the grand scheme of things, they game was never designed around trading. D2 was literally made like a multiplayer of D1, and what they meant by multiplayer was that it was online, and you could play it with friends, and they just threw in trading because they could.

Heck a game with an artificial 100k gold cap in trading can't claim to be designed with economies in mind.

I mean, in any case, the reason why most people didn't trade is because they didn't need to, since the game was, you know, designed and balanced around self found progression, clear majority of players got the items they needed to progress right up until the end of the build, unlike PoE

Like I said, I see no issue in making a separate self found league, and Chris's attitude should be the same. That way you can have one league that is balanced for economy, and one for self found progression, and those leagues won't influence eachother at all

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RagnarokChu wrote:

The issue is the underlying mechanics for a self-found league don't even exist in the base game, so making a self-found league is pointless when the base game wouldn't even support it well.

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deteego wrote:

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RagnarokChu wrote:

The issue is the underlying mechanics for a self-found league don't even exist in the base game, so making a self-found league is pointless when the base game wouldn't even support it well.

What underlying mechanics?

The only thing that makes the game a non self found league is the attitude of GGG, there aren't any fundamental mechanics in the game which would make it hard to be self found.

GGG could easily add some new orbs, or make the orbs more deterministic, and any of those measures are easily feasible because they have already been done

If you are arguing that the fundamental mechanics of the game prevent self found league, then by extensions, leagues such as nemesis and things such as races would not be possible

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RagnarokChu wrote:

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deteego wrote:

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RagnarokChu wrote:

The issue is the underlying mechanics for a self-found league don't even exist in the base game, so making a self-found league is pointless when the base game wouldn't even support it well.

What underlying mechanics?

The only thing that makes the game a non self found league is the attitude of GGG, there aren't any fundamental mechanics in the game which would make it hard to be self found.

GGG could easily add some new orbs, or make the orbs more deterministic, and any of those measures are easily feasible because they have already been done

If you are arguing that the fundamental mechanics of the game prevent self found league, then by extensions, leagues such as nemesis and things such as races would not be possible

If you can admit that there aren't any fundamental mechanics in the game which would make it "hard" to be self-found then why would there be need to be a self-found league when they can still add MORE mechanics and additions to the game that would improve solo-self found no trade and everyone in general?

They CAN easily add new orbs, more vendor recipes, more items, item sets, more early game items, more content late game to smooth out the curve. That don't require a self-found league to be done, until all the above is added in and the game is still not doing it's job. Then maybe a self-found league might be viable.

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Necrogue wrote:

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master's in statistics (and a bachelor's in optimization)

Yet he's doing Lightning Arrow Ranger. The most cookie cutter of all builds.


The hardest hitting Physical damage being spells vs Evasion is very true though. This is why most players take IR even though it dumps your evasion from dex.