Town Portal & Inventory

Hey all;

So I started playing PoE this weekend, and have been really enjoying it. I've got up to level 31 as a Ranger, and I love the depth of the stat system and the chunkiness of combat. And the gem & socket system is the best I've come across.

What I don't love however is killing monsters 10 at a time then having to teleport back to town because my inventory's full.

Yes, okay, I've read the stuff saying I need to be more selective about what I pick up, but from my brief experience with the economy, I've come to the conclusion that all rarities of items seem to be important when generating the more useful currency items such as portal and wisdom scrolls.

Now I could understand the limitations on inventory space if it were a driving incentive behind monetisation. One of the first things I did upon discovering the limited inventory space was load up the in-game store looking for options to expand my inventory.

But nope, there's nothing in the shop that helps with this, apart from extra stash space, which doesn't cure the problem of having to stop killing things every couple of minutes and portal back to town.

I guess I've been spoiled by other ARPGs in this respect, such as Grim Dawn's free town portal system that doesn't require any currency items, or game concepts like the Horadric Cube and its more modern parallels that allow you to recycle or break down unwanted junk loot into something more useful. Then there's Torchlight's companion system which sends your pet back to town to sell the junk you've collected, allowing you to continue playing.

All of these concepts and systems are leagues ahead of the incredibly restrictive ones in place for PoE.
I got home last night after work keen to continue where I left off, but after a couple of teleports back to town in the course of ten minutes, I just thought to myself "Why am I playing this? I'm spending more time recycling inventory junk than I am actually playing", so I stopped.

I've heard there's a Portal spell gem that drops, which might make things marginally more bearable, but it still doesn't address the core problem here: the game forcibly breaks flow thanks to the limited inventory system.

Sorry to come off overly negative with a complaint that has probably been raised thousands of times before, but I see a lot of potential in this game. This seems like it could be a relatively easy thing to fix and would massively improve the player experience.

Simply put : you are probably doing it wrong.

The only things in game that are worth picking up are : currency, rares, uniques, 3 colors linked, 6 slots items and 5/6L items. Blues are worthless, and if you really need to farm transmutation orbs, boss run on Merveil works wonder.

If you have a "basic" build (read : <50% MF), you only need to use a portal in average once/twice per map.

*Sigh*
How did I know the first reply would be from an entrenched community member who's more interested in playing a game for loot and theory-crafting than as an experience?

What I am saying is this:
The experience of playing is unnecessarily broken up by outdated game concepts which could be improved with a little development care and attention.

Defending the status quo when there are obviously better ways of doing things is idiotic.

In your eyes, I may be "doing it wrong", but can you not even conceive of the possibility that the existing systems could be improved by borrowing from some of the concepts in my first post?

First off, Portal Scrolls and Wisdom Scrolls are not considered the more useful currency items although they are essential and limited in the start of the game. However if you sell a Blacksmith's Whetstone or Armorer's Scrap, you get pure Wisdom Scrolls right off the vendor.


Now, your feedback is true and GGG needs to rework the beginning of the game to inform new players about their possibilities, I agree. Consider posting your feedback there, too: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/73088


Here some basic tips about loot because starting out in the game is difficult sometimes:

Currency Items: Gotta catch 'em all!

Rings and Amulets: They are small, useful for crafting and might generate some scraps or shards. Pick 'em up! Using Vendor Recipes you can generate many diverse Rings and Amulets according to your needs. Inform yourself about Vendor Recipes and you are ahead of your other newbie friends! :)


White items: Pick up 4+-linked items and items with 3 different socket colors linked to each other. You may also pick up good base items you might craft for an upgrade but this depends on your need for an upgrade. 4+ linked items are useful to create some neat leveling items. You can vendor the color combination to a vendor for a Chromatic Orb (Chrome). They are useful later on and early on as you can recolor sockets of your found or crafted items to your needs.

Quality items: Pick them up if you lack quality currency (like blacksmith whetstones or armorer scraps). Only pick up items which take less space (daggers, wands, any 4-space armor). If you sell items adding up to 40% of quality to a vendor, you get the according quality currency. Use this to generate Wisdom Scrolls and thereon Portal Scrolls by buying them for 3 Wisdom Scrolls each early on.


Blue items: Pick up potential upgrades for you, leave the rest if you got enough Orbs of Transmutations. They sell for 2 Transmutations Shards each, some Alteration Shards if you identify them prior to selling them to the vendor.


Rare items: Pick 'em up and identify them. If you don't need them, sell them to the vendor for good amounts of Alt scraps or even Orb of Alchemy scraps. You can also leave them in your Guild Stash if they are good, depending on your level on generosity and trust between your guild members.


Unique items: Keep 'em, they are often enough useful for either certain builds or for leveling your next character. They can speed up the leveling process of a char insanely. Your chance to get them is influenced by Increased Item Rarity (IIR) but realistically you'll get them only by defeating bosses as they have a higher base drop chance there.



This is how I get along easily but you can make it better yourself even more:

If you are extroverted enough, join public groups or create one. Say that you are new and need some assistance or just want to play together a bit. Groups get a substantial loot bonus in this game and have higher survivability because the damage can be distributed easily.

Either way join a guild, don't worry, you don't need to be communicative to be in one. Your guild members should be helpful and capable to help you a bit early on be it by giving you free stuff or farming together. Guild Stashes are a great place to drop off good loot that you have no use for or to get some out of it! <3

Learn the vendor recipes! http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Vendor_recipes
They are incredible useful, especially early on!

Check the Vendor for useful items or even items you can sell directly to him for currency (Chromatic Orbs for example!). Often enough players found their first 5 or 6 linked item at a Vendor rather than as a drop. ;)


It is sad that new players have a hard time to start in this game. It is also reflected in the Steam Stats (most players quit before killing the first boss!). Let us hope that GGG is able to make the early game experience better very soon.

If you need further assistance or help, don't hesitate to ask.
There are always helpful community members!

"

How did I know the first reply would be from an entrenched community member who's more interested in playing a game for loot and theory-crafting than as an experience?

You assume a lot here, i play only a few hour a week, far from being a fanboy.

The thing is : GGG choose to make the game heavyly economy based, so they had to limit the players ways to make "money". Games like Torchlight/Van hellsing/Grim Dawn don't give a damn about the economy, you can even cheat godlike items if you really want in Torchlight.

It's not that your complain is invalid in general, it's that it's invalid in THIS GAME, because the game designer choose to make economy paramount here. There are a lot of confort related options they will never make because of this. We (the players) have to adapt, that's all.


Also, if you really want a game focused on the "experience", try Van Hellsing and Van Hellsing 2, they have a great storytelling at that.

I want to add that the more currency and good base equipment you got, the less items you'll probably pick up later on. You got enough transmute and no new base items drop that could be a substantial boost to your equipment? Leave the blue items on the ground.

Early game and Currency Generation can be a hassle. You can circumvent it by accepting help from your veteran friends or even trading for simple currency if you got lucky enough to get some more rare, high level currency. :)

Thank you for the in-depth responses, and sorry I snapped a bit, but when you're new and can clearly see ways a game could be improved, being told "You're doing it wrong" can come off as somewhat rude.
I know I'm new, it's why I'm coming here to make suggestions, and highlighting my inexperience with a meme is unnecessary.

I obviously have a lot to learn about what converts to what. To that end, Nightmare90's post is incredibly useful.
However, I still think some kind of mechanism to allow for sale or conversion of items on the go would help disrupt play less.

Now I know mainly what I'm going for on my character, I have stopped IDing every blue or above and always sell them to the vendor unidentified. Only those items relevant to my build are kept (well, brown named items too). But because the drop rate is still pretty damn high, it doesn't take away from the fact that my inventory still fills up fast and I still have to teleport back to town a lot, stopping the flow.
And teleporting back to town necessitates a lot of Portal scrolls, which drop infrequently enough for me to have to resort to picking up whites to convert to Wisdom scrolls, which in turn I then convert to Portal scrolls. At a vendor. In town. Necessitating even MORE Portal scrolls. ARGH.

If they're not important economical items beyond their immediate uses, it strikes me as somewhat facile that Wisdom and Portal scrolls are expendable resources in the first place. Give us a free-to-use portal from the start of the game (possibly on a cooldown) and make all items already identified.

This would be a great start, and in addition, an item mulcher that negates the need to teleport back to town quite so frequently would be the icing on top.
After all, this is in essence what the vendors currently are: a means to convert one currency item into another. Allowing players to do this on the fly does not reduce the value of the resulting items. It just allows for a more seamless gameplay experience.

They are not important for the economy, but from my impression GGG is aiming at the players to having to put some thought into every single aspect of the game.
That would include which items to pick up and which to id, and finding your own balance between porting back to town and keeping on killing critters.

If I were you I'd stop picking up blue items. In the long run you will find that the orb of transmutation you get from 10 un-id'd blues is really not worth the hassle, not even in the beginning when orbs are rare, but especially not later on. So you might as well start ignoring them now. The only exception would be 1x1 - and maybe 1x3 and 2x2 - sized gear to fill up otherwise blank space.

stop picking up blues unless its something u feel could be an upgrade, and if its not an upgrade when uve id it, throw it on the ground. You are new to the game, when you understand it more, ull appreciate why things are the way they are.

What Jojas said. GGG wants your choices to have meaning. If you didn't have to make a choice about what to pick up, your choice wouldn't really be meaningful. You'd just pick up everything. You're running out of portal scrolls because you're going to town more often than you need to. You're running out of wisdom scrolls because you're identifying more items than you need to. Honestly, going through acts 1 and 2 in normal you can succeed with the crappiest gear, so you don't need to ID blue items at all. Heck, I usually don't put a chest on until act 2 because I don't like the movement speed penalty. Just be more selective about what you pick up. If you are near a waypoint or if you are going to town anyway (like to redeem a quest reward) then fill your inventory. If not, then just pick up things you really want. You shouldn't be picking up white items anyway unless they are chromatic.