Path of Exile

haha, Ruthless mode! How did I miss this?

If you dislike endgame, dislike the feeling you just have to follow guides, try this and be forced to play your own way, with exrtemeley limited access to items, gems and crafting. Might be fun for the odd change!

That actually sounds pretty cool. After playing the D4 beta this weekend I was actually just thinking if it would be possible to make a game like there where worthless loot didn’t drop like crazy but what did drop was more valuable. Could a game like that still be fun or do we need the constant drop of loot to keep us engaged in these.

I don’t think the loot fountain is necessary. I would prefer fewer but more impactful drops and I guess that’s kind of achieved by using strict loot filters. If there is a constant stream of rewards for killing mobs, I’d like it to be in the form of currency or something similar that I can stack easily.

That said, with PoE being so much about the economy, inventory management becomes an intentional issue for players to deal with in the regular leagues. It’s not an aspect I particularly enjoy, but it’s a part of their design. I don’t think something like D4 needs it, though.

Fair point about loot filters which I use when they are available. Which begs the question why do these games do this? POE is a little different because of the economy and the ability to take common items and upgrade them but I’m playing Grim Dawn now and it didn’t take long for me to get to the point where I just ignore every yellow item that drops because they are useless to me. Why bother dropping loot that no one will ever use? To give me something to sell so I have money to spend in a shop that I’ll never spend money in? It’s really dumb and I hope it’s something that we see change at some point.

In most of these games, I feel the same way. Playing Last Epoch currently, there are reasons to still see blues and rares throughout the game as there are affixes you can pull off of them and otherwise use in the crafting system of the game. It comes with a robust filter to narrow down what you’re hunting for, though.

Nioh 2 is sort of a different genre, but it combined Soulslike with Diablo style loot. I found the loot there to be really annoying to deal with, and unfortunately that carried forward to their future games (Strangers of Paradise and Wo Long). It’s perpetually one of those things where I find myself asking that same question you just did “Why drop all this stuff no one will use?”.

It’s either a leftover vestige of the original Diablo, or the loot fountain thing does ping people’s dopamine dispensers. It doesn’t for me, unfortunately. I get more excited for the fewer, rarer, and better drops.

Favorite quote from that announcement:

Aspects like item scarcity and support gems being valuable really feel like the early days of Path of Exile, just without desync.

Path of Exile Crucible league starts in a week. Here’s the announcement trailer:

There is so much info I can’t even summarize it. Lots of changes. It’s overwhelming.

Shattered it’s Steam record today, hitting 211k online.

I still await the day they remove Labs so that I might enjoy their game.

I know the league mechanic works wonders for the hardcore fans, but things like having to run through the Lab four times per character and that sort of thing are big reasons why I don’t play anymore. Every time I think about giving a new league a go I think about that and nope out.

I’ve probably run the Labyrinth a couple hundred times and I’ve hated every single run.

I just use poe.lab to speed run them. Labs 1 and 2 take no more than about 10 min each and the 3rd run around 15. Usually I wait until I am over-levelled so they are essentialy pretty trivial (aside from traps).

This is what made me quit playing. I can’t see ever going back.

same here

Woah! Never had that happen before! 5x 6L’s dropped from a particualarly nasty red Einhar beast.

image
image

Crazy.

6 divines, nice.

Not anymore. :( They changed that recipe to give a bunch of fuses instead of a divine. Part of why divs and exalts have swapped places in the economy.

What are opinions on the new league? My reaction to the league video etc was to start playing Last Epoch again! But I’m sure some people are playing, right?

Yeah levelled a toon for the forst time in probably 4 leagues or so. Crucible is pretty fun, probably one of the more engaging mechnics in a while, in that you kind of really want to use it and grow your weapon’s power, rather than running past the event to complete whatever else it was you were doing (maps, campaign, etc).

Also, power creep but in a good way!

For the first time I got a character to lvl 90 today, after playing the silly game casually for over 10 years I think. (Bane Occultist, SSF, started her in Archnemesis and slowly kept working on up). Yellow maps still providing the best balance between xp advancement and xp loss risk from getting my squishy tush beat to paste.

Compared to all my other standard chars lvl 80+, Bane/Soulrend seems too easy.

/ PurpleReignSillhouette

I had something - maybe a beast - drop two for me yesterday evening or early this morning. I hadn’t seen that before until you posted about it.

This is the most I’ve played since Heist. After they went to that watchstone to change regions system, I only had like 3 leagues I played deep into (including whatever was going when they swapped to that system). I liked it on paper but I hated it in practice.

But once they finally changed the Atlas from that I found I was still feeling a bit of burnout and malaise. It’s taken me awhile to come back around but I loved leveling a bow character this league (in fact I’ve done two because I wanted to redo my passive tree to the point hat it was going to be too expensive and it was such a breeze to level one).

I may do Bane next because it’s one of my favorite skills. But I have quite a bit of work still to do on this LA Raider (and wealth to build up, although hey a divine dropped today).