2962

There are no more difficulty settings. When you hit act 5 you are given the resist penalties for the first difficulty (and creature levels in early zones increment), then after act 10 you get the second set of resist penalties (and creature levels increment again).

I made my guy hardcore but went to zero effort to stay alive. He died at the first trap preparation thingie. No big deal, started right back up in regular league.

2963

Thanks stusser. I was thinking back to '13-'14 when I last played and how I seem to recall starting anew with tougher difficulties. Maybe I was reading old posts on the official site that talked about them too. But that’s an interesting development. Explains why my [previously] strong Ranger character suddenly started getting wiped out in Act 5 lol.

2964

I just looked it up and you start taking a lot more damage immediately upon finishing act 5, when the -30% resist penalty comes into effect. During act 5, there’s no penalty at all. After finishing act 10, it’s a -60% total resist penalty. But at that point you’re into the endgame anyway.

You used to start over, yes. But actually what they did in the new expansion was just act 5-- only act 5 is completely new. Acts 6-10 are retellings of acts 1-5 from a different perspective and maybe timeline. So they feel partially new, but cleverly re-use the content.

So acts 6-10 are your first “start over” and thus difficulty spike. And at that point you move on to maps and other endgame stuff, your second difficulty spike.

2965

I won’t swear to this as I haven’t died in a hardcore temp league in a while but someone said that if you die in a hardcore challenge (temp) league, your character goes to standard (non-temp). So if you want to advance in the current challenge league and are not confident in your ability to survive, don’t roll hardcore challenge league.

By default you start out in the softcore challenge league.

2966

You know what, I think you’re right! I just checked on the website and my character is in the standard league, not the harbinger. That’s a bummer. I wonder why they did it that way?

2967

It has always been that way.

2968

Sigh. Oh well.

2969

If you want to verify the league you’re in while playing (without the website), you can check on the character selection screen or open the map in-game (Tab by default). For the latter, look at the text block in the upper-right corner of the screen. It should tell you one of “Standard”, “Hardcore”, “Harbinger”, “Harbinger Hardcore” (or “HC” instead of “Hardcore”.) If you picked solo-self-found, it should include “SSF” on that line (and you can leave SSF without losing access to the league, BTW.) If you ever enter a race or event league, it would indicate which one there.

2970

I’d guess it has something to do with the economy. Prices vary greatly between hardcore and standard. Since some people enjoy racing to 100 in these leagues I’d imagine that if you started in hardcore harbinger, you could do something like buy some exalted orbs cheaper than what they’ll go for on standard harbinger, it would give you a leg up in the race.

2971

Thanks! After dinner tonight I took my summoner from the Belly of the Beast to the Templar Court. Malachai and company weren’t much trouble but I fear that things are about to get pretty hairy, especially has she has <1.5k Life. She did just get pupper master, and I guess the extra zombie is defense as well as offense, but the next life node I want is 3 points away on the path to purity of the flesh. I guess I could temporarily take one or two of the +5% nodes below constitution, but those don’t lead anywhere I’d planned to go. maybe settle for finding better evasion and try to dodge a lot?

2972

This weekend, tried multiplayer for the first time. Loot sharing is a bit weird. Something drops, and everyone can see it, but the person it drops for can pick it up. And then 5 seconds later, everyone can pick it up. And sometimes you’re not looking at the ground because it’s a big fight, and you don’t see if something dropped for you or if it was grayed out at first.

So what is the etiquette?

2973

I suppose, but they could be less opaque about it. The game has been out and popular for years, this is the sort of thing you’d think they would fix.

2974

The party leader can switch to permanent or free-for-all loot allocation if it’s not working well for you. (See here)

2975

Yeah, default setting is a temporary exclusive period.

2976

I dunno, if you didn’t have much trouble with Malachai then you’re probably in good shape. That’s the hardest part of the game for me (thus far, halfway through A6). I had little trouble with anything in Act 5 until the very final boss, and even then I’m pretty sure it was mainly my unfamiliarity with the fight that led to my only death thus far.

2977

I hope so, but in the beta I took 2 SSF HC characters into A5 and had 1 RIP to Innocence and the other to Kitava. They both had to run around a lot vs. Malachai, maybe a bit longer than the summoner did, so she probably has more offense- is there a way to convert the tooltip info on SRS into the DPS that’s displayed for other skills?

2978

Not to my knowledge. I’m sure someone out there has a calculator…there’s one for everything in PoE, it seems…but I’ve never cared enough about the exact numbers on the spirits to track it down.

2979

Take with 2.6 grains of salt - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xoB9xGVfZJOZqjq2dzwG_6UvPf46A9-21-in3Brq3Zc/edit#gid=698817856

2980

Level 52, Kitava down, Re-animated Brutus down, Tukohama down. One unlucky death to Kitava on a meteor strike/x-blast thing, so the defences seem a bit better now. I noobily over-levelled by CWDT gem though, so need to fix that up.

Only rocking 1800 odd Life/ES, though that is bolstered by Mind over Matter. 75% mana reservation with Disciplne and Clarity, but regen is already extremely good and will only improve once I get off my ass and run normal lab to get the first couple of Heirophant points allocated.

SRS now with Spell Echo and Phys to Lightning - I need to change that as they won’t be benefiting from my lightning% passive investment. They do alright though - I can clear trash just with them alone and they are a handy booster and distraction against single targets and big pack. Dual spark totem is still pretty strong, but will investigate with faster projectiles.

Need better gear and to address my resistances, but just not getting much in the way of decent drops. Just not seeing that many 4L’s, even for a base to build on. :(

2981

With my new hardcore harbinger league Shadow, I did manage to get Fire Nova as suggested in the build linked by @Bateau.

Wow, Fire Nova is something I’d never tried before, and it’s strong right from the beginning. This is not something that gets strong slowly over time. And honestly, his passive tree path doesn’t even lead to that many nodes about Mines, it’s mostly all about going all over the tech tree for some mine nodes and some area of affect nodes and a bunch of life nodes. So pretty much the strength of the build is not in the passive tree, but in the Fire Nova Gem itself. That’s the kind of build I like!

I almost got killed though. The new version of the chick you fight at the end of Act 1, the one that turns into a different form, she’s become really tough now compared to last time I played the game. She does a ton of cold damage in her first form. So my big advice to hardcore players for Act 1: Try to find cold resistance as much as possible.

I was out of health potions completely, running around laying fire traps and shooting frost blades at her as much as I could (I didn’t have Fire Nova mines yet, it was a quest reward for killing her). If I’d gotten hit one more time it would have meant another dead Shadow. But I got her. And once her first form dies, you get some health potions back.

The whole “running around dodge attacks from a boss” part of the game is really unsatisfying using the mouse by the way. When I’m doing that against Mathael in Diablo 3, it’s much more satisfying because it’s with a controller, and you can use the dodge move as well. When you’re just clicking areas on the screen in PoE using your mouse, it’s much, much less satisfying, and much easier to misclick and make a mistake (like when I died doing that weird Ascendancy Trial against all those spiked blades on the ground).

Anyway, what I’m saying is that the way they’ve designed the ascendancy trials and boss fights, I’m actually looking forward to the Xbox version of this more now, since it should be more satisfying to play those areas with the controller.

EDIT: Btw, why am I playing the PC version again instead of the Xbox beta? Because there’s no Harbinger league on Xbox for some reason. They just have standard and hardcore in the current beta. The Harbinger enemies make the levels a lot more interesting, even though I agree with @Misguided about the inventory clutter they’ve added being annoying in this league.