Spring RTS Engine

smoth wrote:What happened to a happy middle ground.

Duke Nukem Forever.

Forboding Angel wrote:You are aware that there have been tons and tons of character wipes... right? Every time they new a new open beta all character data gets wiped and levels reset.

Characters were last wiped January 23, 2013. Since then there were no wipes. You have not played for at least 289 days. You have started playing yesterday again.

Hope you have more fun this time without a blood magic witch.

By the way, I recommend the new Domination league. It has a fresh economy.

smoth wrote:ad hominem

I made a humorous remark without using it as a basis for rejection.

smoth wrote:doesn't win any debates it only starts arguments.

I am not in a debate, which does not have a winner to being with.

SmoothGumdart wrote:

Forboding Angel wrote:You are aware that there have been tons and tons of character wipes... right? Every time they new a new open beta all character data gets wiped and levels reset.

Characters were last wiped January 23, 2013. Since then there were no wipes. You have not played for at least 289 days. You have started playing yesterday again.

You aren't terribly smart. I stopped playing POE on May 15, 2012.

SmoothGumdart wrote: Hope you have more fun this time without a blood magic witch.

I'm sorry, was that supposed to be clever? The point of the game and it's massive stargateesque skill tree is to try new things. The last thing I tried was a blood magic witch with high hp and super high hp regen which made it really hard to kill 70% of the time, and the other 30% was a crapshoot. Fun build though.

You said that there was an option to turn off xp loss on death when you created the character. I can attest that there is no such option and that you happen to be full of shit.

As I have stated over and over again... POE is fun until you flip over the difficulty and xp loss starts. Unfortunately, that level range is right around the point where the game gets remotely interesting.

P.S. Debates always have winners, and you're losing... badly.

Forboding Angel wrote:

SmoothGumdart wrote:at least

You aren't terribly smart. I stopped playing POE on May 15, 2012.

I said "at least".

Does this mean you have played for 3 or 4 days and then quit?

Forboding Angel wrote:You said that there was an option to turn off xp loss on death when you created the character.

I did not say that. Whoever did say that was incorrect.

Forboding Angel wrote:Debates always have winners

They do not.

SmoothGumdart wrote:

smoth wrote:ad hominem

I made a humorous remark without using it as a basis for rejection.

It could be implied that you were mocking him or whatever. I don't really care, the game doesn't seem like it decided to advance it's self beyond the issues I had with it. So I am outta this thread.

Next up:
What is better, a Playstation or an Xbox?

I did not say not losing xp is an option, someone else did.
(side note i cant use my old account cause i forgot the pass :/).
You only truly start feeling xp loss past level 80.
The game has changed a lot since closed beta, maybe it will be more to your liking now after it has been smoothed out a bit Forb.
Diablo 2 was very much the same as a comparison.
It was a lot stricter with viable builds and none viable builds could not finish the game...
You can get to 80 and roll a new character..Many do since going beyond that is really only "perfecting" your build but at this point you can do almost all content except the extremely rare level 75+ maps..
Rolling new chars is fun and having a toon around level 80 feels very satisfying to many players.
I guess its a matter of taste of course.
For me having the death penalty is not the big a deal but i can see why for some it would be.
I wouldnt mind having to reroll if i discover my current char is not up to snuff for highest content.
I'm in fact already rolling a new toon in parallel cause i feel like playing a necromancer.

I played obsessively for about a week or 2 iirc, took two characters up to lvl 75 or so iirc.but when I lost 90% of a level due to the xp loss on death after I had died 3 or 4 times on a really hard part, I said fuck that.

I played PoE in a very casual way and it was still fun.

I finished it once, or so I think (I killed Piety in her corpse-pile lair under the moon temple, there's another temple door to open but I guess it just return to start or something). I progressed without taking advice on how to build my char, without even caring about optimising anything. I just wanted to play the game, and not the meta-game, and so I did, enjoying the gloom, the fights, the visual effects, instead of trying to outplay the mechanics.

I'm not too keen on playing the same game over and over when I have hundreds of other video game at my disposal, so all the points about XP loss and merciless difficulty are irrelevant to me. They start to apply only after you're finished the 3 acts of the campaign several times again, at which point you're clearly not being casual anymore anyway.




Forb points about respec is a bit misleading, since one of the great things about PoE is that it doesn't have rigid skill tress like other hack'n'slash. The passive skill tree, which made PoE famous for being more like a thick and gnarled forest (as opposed to, let's say, Torchlight which has for skill trees only three non branching trunks) is, as its name says, just for passive!

Your active skills (spells, attacks, summons, auras, ...) are determined by the gems inserted in your gear, and you can swap gem in and out any time at no cost.

Even though I barely understood it, I enjoyed that PoE had more complexity to its skill & gear system than other games where it's just a matter of doning the best armor your level let you wear. Often I put on armor just because it had sockets with the right color and linkage, and a bunch of magic attributes that sounded good, even though I had no idea if it was really any good. I couldn't even tell in which way, or even if, an armor piece from Act 3 was any better than a similar one from Act 1.




As for the point about roaming mini-boss, not only the freedom of changing skill gems means you cannot be locked by picking wrong ones, but I personnaly found it interesting to sometimes meet hard monsters in open levels. It makes the game less dull, when you can unexpectedly encounter a challenging enemy. And if you're not up to it, it doesn't even matter, since unliked fixed bosses, nothing forces you to win over every "rare monsters" (though I still killed them all, for their phat loot).

I played this a bit with my fiancée. We were kinda looking for something Diablo 2 -esqueish to play together. However, Path of Exile has a few shortcomings, which I feel, kinda reduce its long-term fun.

Firstly, it doesn't seem that there are very effective ways to complement one other's builds. Party based gameplay seems to be best done so that everyone just tries to get as high solo DPS as possible. There aren't many "buffs" you can give to whole party and the essential ones for a build can almost always be done by yourself.

Without a clear separation of roles, parties kind of detoriate to 5 guys playing alone on the same screen instead of actually fighting together.

Secondly, it kind of lacks that Diablo 2 -kinda feel. Dunno what all is causing it, but somehow it feels a little cartoonish. You start on a quite pretty shore and fight a giant after killing a bunch of zombies and mudcrabs. Uh-huh. Then, the enemies didn't feel like they varied much. Sure, I'd get frozen now and then by some special spellcaster opponent, but by most, the opponents felt like copies of each other.

I know it might not be fair to compare to Diablo 2, but it's hard not to with this kind of games. In some parts, Path of Exile is quite well done and it could be more enjoyable for people who don't care about a cleaner separation of party roles as much as I do.

Well there are CC abilities and taunts and you can have a single person giving 7 auras to the entire party.
You can build chars that are pretty bad on their own but great in parties just people dont feel like they want to cause than it will be a pain to go out solo.
There are in fact even uniques that are specifically designed to benefit the party but are pretty weak overall if there isnt a party present.

Maybe with all these guilds poping up and more complex pvp on the way there might be more players making chars that are best utilized in team play.

Indeed? Hm. Well, I can't claim to know all the nuances of the game, but I could really see only a few auras that had more than marginal use and those auras could be gotten by a single character who needs them most.

If there actually is more ways to help out your party and have very party-based characters, that's cool.

Still, though - Does adding a marginal usability aura to a party help the party more than just doing maximized DPS on your own?

EDIT: Also if single character can give all useful auras to a party, doesn't that mean you'd only have one aura-based character and rest party members just doing maximized DPS by whatever means they want to? This is a bit in contrast to Diablo 2, where - if you don't count the highest level items with their auras and such - it was massive fun to play with friends and have all members support each other's abilities. You'd have a Vengeance & Holy Shield paladin in front breaking enemy elemental immunities, while a Berserker barbarian with Howls (+1 to all skills of party members etc) active would be running around taking single enemies down fast, a sorceress taking advantage of the broken immunities, necromancer doing Amplify Damage and etc.. I didn't get that kind of an every-member-in-party-is-useful feel from PoE.

Ok, so I bothered to beat act 1-3 as a witch this weekend in the standard league.

It was fun. Interestingly, the passive skill tree has much less emphasis than it did 1.5 years ago.

At that time, the little + 10 to str int dex made a HUGE difference, and while they still seem to matter, they matter less it seems (that may change as you get closer to lvl 50) and as a result the game seems to be a bit more forgiving.

The only time I died was when I got zerg rushed in dungeons (this game loves to do that lol).

Imo, one of the biggest downfalls of a game like this is how it is set up. It is made so you complete the game 50 billion times, which to me isn't that fun. I would much rather it be lain out so that by the time you beat act 3 the first time, you would be at lvl 100. Perhaps do a guildwars style ascension after each act to force levelups if needed. Or to make it more manageable, just set max level lower at like 40 or something.

That would have a few very desirable effects for me. First off, I wouldn't have sunk 50 hours into one character, so I wouldn't be sour about deleting them and starting over with a new class. #2, leveling that much that fast would be a lot of fun, and the game and items/gems already scale VERY nicely across vast levels as it is, so constant item switching wouldn't' be a particularly big deal.

I'm not convinced that I want to be bothered playing the exact same thing over again on a higher difficulty. I'm not entirely sure I see the point in it.

The first run through was very entertaining (and I expected nothing less) though.

Forboding Angel wrote:I'm not convinced that I want to be bothered playing the exact same thing over again on a higher difficulty. I'm not entirely sure I see the point in it.

Starting from scratch again can be fun. You could try the domination league with some other character that you're not familiar with.