You know, I had a lot of fun with this season of Diablo. Until I didn’t. Then I started playing this. There’s no true ending to these games after all, so why not play until you aren’t having fun, then move on?
Yeah you’re right, that’s the right attitude to have. It’s just getting harder and harder to look at each game independently of all the other games I’ve been meaning to play. Anyway enough about me, maybe I’ll take this digression to the backlog thread.
Diablo3 is certainly much more approachable. It’s great that any class can use any gem, and the nigh-infinite diversity in customization with support gems is super-keen, but experimentation, exploring the various abilities, has a high cost due to needing specific gear that not only has the right attributes and base type but the right number, color, and linking gem slots!
I think a far better system would have been to disassociate gem slots from equipment and just put them in the UI.
Similar criticism with the passive tree, which remains frickin’ ridiculous. Yes I know you old hands understand it and love it, but it is extremely intimidating to newbies. Scares them off the game. It’s full of non-consequential, uninteresting nodes with +10 to some skill, or +25% hit chance, or whatever. That shit should all be ripped out and every point you spend should be meaningful.
One thing I noticed in the Passive Skill recently that I’d never noticed before is the search function. It’s really a godsend. So for example, if you have an archer build, you can search for “bow”, and any node with bow in the description will glow brightly. And you can keep this on permanently. You don’t have to erase bow, you can leave it in the search box. Similarly for things like “Mine” or “trap” or other search terms.
And they glow with a pulsing action, so it’s really easy to see which nodes they are, and you can zoom out and see where all the “Mine” nodes are on the whole passive tree and then zoom in.
It’s criminal that I didn’t know about this until recently though. It really should be part of the tutorial.
It wasn’t there in-game until a few months ago. It’s a crying shame that it took so long to get it in the game :)
The skill sockets, links and the arcane passive skill tree are part and parcel of the game’s draw. The strategies involved in all of these make it unique. Thank god there’s a game company out there that isn’t dumbing down the essence of their game to appeal to the LCD crowd. Many players feel D1 and D2 are better games than D3. In hindsight they may be right. Ease of making it to the “end game™” and changing the skills of your now meaningless PC “skill caddy” on a whim remove some of the strategy and replay interest to focus on the endless whack-a-mole action. But I do suppose the proof would be in the bottom line, so who’s to say. Only that I appreciate the approach of PoE in nearly every respect.
Huh. I think I’ve just been called a lowest common denominator.
Pfft. Whatevs. Hardcore casuals unite!
Actually he was referring to fans of the group LCD soundsystem. I’m kind of tired of companies catering to that fanbase too.
I’ve played a lot of both POE and D3, and the one thing that stops me from coming back to POE as often, is that I can’t just fire up the game and start playing. D3 is great in that respect, and every time I’ve done that, I’ve made a build as I leveled based on what happened to drop.
I know if I come back to POE, before I ever set foot in the game, I’m going to have to spend an hour trying to figure out what build I want and plan it all out in advance. This becomes a catch 22 where there is a bunch of new stuff in the game.
I like both games, but I really have to be in the mood for POE, whereas D3 I can always just fire up, start a new character, and see where it goes. Even with all the hours I’ve put into POE, there are still a bunch of things that are fairly obtuse and unclear to me, and the passive forest still makes me go cross-eyed.
They are both great games, but I may just be getting too old for all the bother of POE lol.
I like that - about as apt a description of my play style as any I’ve heard.
OK, I can get behind that. Buncha hipsters.
Actually got my first map (other than Vaal sacrifice bits) in Act 8 today.
Realized earlier that at this point in the game, small differences in resistances are a big deal. I did the moon/sun orbs tonight. 75% fire res = facetanking fire boss and laughing at other enemies. 60% cold/lightning = not being able to stand still during boss fight and feeling like every group of enemies were a threat.
Yeah, PoE resist design is dumb as ever.
It’s a linear scale, so at 60% resist you’re taking 1.6x the damage that you would at 75% – 0.4 = 0.25 * 1.6 and it goes downhill rapidly from there.
0.5 = 0.25 * 2
0.6 = 0.25 * 2.4
0.7 = 0.25 * 2.8
Get capped, and then get weakness capped (for when you’re in a map that has “players have elemental weakness” or you run into an enemy that curses you with same or Conductivity or Flammability or whatever), is what I’m saying here.
Incoming damage is balanced around players at res cap. Anything other than that is…
…playing with fire.
I don’t have a problem with the design, but I hadn’t seen much fire damage in a while, and my resists are unbalanced right now (way over cap on fire vs under on the others). I was taking heavy damage more frequently and thought it owed more to general defenses than to resists. It’s not always obvious to me what kind of damage I’m taking.
Well, I managed to make my first trade in PoE. I used the POE Goods site/tool which seamlessly connected me to the seller in game. That was amazing. With a tool like that I would doubt that an official auction house would be necessary.
I shelved my characters and started a new SSF melee paladin. He got through Innocence and Kitava with only a few deaths, while facetanking them both. It’s pretty horrible to eat all those golden balls when you’re playing melee.
But let me tell you, those dudes in Act 6 that throw down those scorching ray fire totems. Holy crap does that damage build up fast. Especially considering my fire resistance is now at about 40%. I have struggled all the way through normal and now in what is a essentially Cruel difficulty to get my resistances up (have done all the forsaken master missions I’ve run across also, but most of them are still between level one and three). Have not had great drops, and in fact all the unique that have dropped have been terrible. As a result I’ve been going through currency like mad trying to get better gear, with limited results. About the only things that have been dropping with regularity have been decent weapons.
Act six seems like a little step up in difficulty, however, I just switched from ice crash to blade flurry, which I believe I will use until and through the end game. So maybe I just need to level up the blade flurry gem.
Yeah, resists can be a real challenge. I’ve been running around for a while now with cold and fire capped, but lightning in the 30s.
Cruel Lab is down. Coming up on level 66 and nearing the end of Act 10. I’m trying to get my health up a bit for the final boss (about 3300 currently). Lightning resist is going to be a problem after that fight, as I’m already 25 from cap.
And, traded for a new belt and a new ring, and the lowest of my elemental resists is now 110, so I’m ready for the second resist drop. Between those and the fact that physical damage doesn’t even tickle, I should be good to go for the moment.
I picked up a new weapon yesterday for a pittance (Kaom’s Primacy…paid an alch) because it was only a 3-link, but it was a huge dps upgrade. I figure that’s a decent starter for endgame until I can get something better.
This game would be drastically different playing solo, self-found
Look, I know it’s sub-optimal, but Quad Totem Ball Lightning with GMP and a Rain of Splinters is just too much fun!
That looks like a blast. I’ve been trying to decide on what to try next and was very much thinking of the “fills the screen with projectiles route”. What’s “sub-optimal” about it?
Meanwhile, my Juggernaut breezed through the Kitava fight (forgot to switch my pantheon to the fire damage one or it would have been even easier) and is cruising through early maps.
Greater Multiple Projectiles is kind of sub-optimal from a pure damage perspective, but brilliant for screen-wide AOE. The way BL works is that each orb cast has an AOE and every 200ms it zaps an enemy inside it’s AOE. Technically you want as many slow moving projectiles from separate casts as possible to proc multiple zaps against mobs in overlapping AOE’s. GMP adds multiple orbs per cast, so their AOE overlaps don’t proc multiple zaps against the same enemy, which combined with the damage reduction of the GMP itself is sub-optimal compared to the Slower Projectiles gem I slot in for bosses.