Bateau
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Actually in current meta most of fast mappers skip boss fights. Most are conveniently separated in their designated rooms so you can easily skip them and the few that are mixed with the rest of the mobs have easily recognizable layout around them so you know when it’s coming up. Either way, mapping can mean just blowing through thousands of mobs if that’s what you want.
Mapping in PoE is in practice no different to running rifts in D3. In fact, PoE did it first, well before RoS launched.
Killing bosses is only strictly necessary once per map in order to expand the atlas (which allows access to new map areas). After that they are easy to avoid completely in the majority of maps, unless you want the extra drops. There are naturally some bosses that are trivial for build A, but will wreck build B, so it becomes an exercise of using your knowledge to only farm bosses that are worth your time and less of a danger to your build. Unlike D3, skipping bosses on subsequent map runs is completely legit.
In regards to boss battles and learning their mechanics, I don’t see how PoE is all that different from any game that has bosses. Every boss in every game has a trick or mechanic or sequence of attacks that, once learned, can make the fight far, far easier. It’s just how they are designed. Bosses in PoE, I’ll grant, are more mechanically complex than D3 and are often built around telegraphed attacks that really, really need to be dodged (hence the requirement of a reliable mobility skill in PoE), but they are not really indecipherable. If the first time you went into a new boss fight, you spent your time just moving around and not getting hit, you’d learn a whole lot more than what we all typically do - ie try to face-tank them until we get one-shot then curse that the fight is unbalanced! I am habitually guilty of doing the latter all the damn time! :)
Fuck Kitava though. Particularly the second time around!
Most of them aren’t that bad unless you get map modifiers that make them crazy. Heck I’d say that the rogue exiles that pop up randomly on maps are worse than the “bosses” most of the time. I think the map system is pretty cool.
Well it’s about freakin’ time!
Moved on to Act VI and completed one little side quest. That final battle of Act V was a disaster of death after death so it took a bit of the wind out of my sails. My Elementalist is level 50 and I’ll likely go back and continue playing her from time to time, but decided to start a Marauder for a change of pace. Looking forward to some melee after all that spell casting.
fdsaion
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Time for my first summoner build then!
And lets make it ES to make it challenging for this day and age!
There was an announcement about the timing of the end of the Harbinger League and I’m wondering, what happens to the characters you have in a league when the league ends? Does it work like D3 seasons? Do the characters retire? Just thinking that I may not want to invest a bunch of time in new characters if they are all going to be wiped come Dec.
I got my Marauder to Act 2 then started a Ranger and Templar. I have to say that I like the mechanics of range (my Elementalist and Ranger) over the melee of the Marauder and Templar so far. Still waiting on those stash sales.
Sadly, they get dumped into the Standard leagues. So if you were in Hardcore Harbinger, you get dumped into Hardcore. If you were in Immortal Harbinger, you get dumped into the Standard (Immortal) league.
What this basically means is that your character and all the carefully arranged stashes from all the characters are suddenly also dumped into the Standard league’s stash as “Remove Only” stash tabs, which means that if you’ve played in a few leagues, you have pages and pages of these Remove Only stash tabs eventually, and it’s all a big mess.
Basically, I don’t play in Standard or Hardcore leagues anymore, because I can’t stand to look at their stashes. Just thinking about the amount of boring bookkeeping I’d have to do to clean all that shit up stresses me out.
Just pretend the character got erased, and never look at their stash.
Can I have your stuff? :-p
Ah, thanks. At least they still exist to play if I get attached to a character, even if they aren’t in a league anymore. They really don’t like making the stash all that friendly, that’s for sure. But hey, for a free-to-play game, this is pretty incredible stuff.
I purchased the premium tabs bundle, and I name (and colorize) my tabs the same in all leagues. So when a league ends and the tabs get sent to Standard or Hardcore, I see a bunch of similarly named tabs (except that a lot of them are remove-only). This makes transferring stuff to the normal tabs pretty easy.
I also end up selling most of the non-great uniques and the leveling gear and the “maybe I can transmute this into something good” gear tabs from the league I was in - and since I know I do that, I tend to not amass too much crap when I play in a league. When in a league I mostly only use the following:
Currency
Essences
Divination cards
Misc - for quality gems, vaal gems, jewels
Flasks
Maps
Jewelery
Uniques1, Uniques2, etc, as I find them
One tab for each character, where I stash gems and gear I don’t want to sell right away, or stuff I want to use on the character when I can.
It’s pretty easy to consolidate the Custom tabs - dump contents into my inventory, then dump them into the special tabs. It’s the ones I have to think about that I avoid doing!
Of course, after all that, I hardly play on Standard or Hardcore at all, so part of me wonders why I bother doing all this. It’s because I COULD do it, honest, I could!
Usually it’s been long enough that I get the colors wrong. Plus I always end up naming them slightly differently. I usually have a Jewelry tab. And then one for Chest pieces, that I sometimes call Armor, sometimes Chest. There’s usually one I call Head, Hands, Feet, or sometimes Helm Glove Shoes. I usually never find enough Uniques to justify a unique tab.
Short little interview article with GGG. Nothing new in there, but it does highlight the development approach.
New development and doing what’s right for the game rather than what increases monetization. Very much what keeps me coming back.
Same here. That’s why I keep buying more tabs even though I don’t need them. Also I doubt I’ll ever reach level 50 for any character.
Ha, that sounds like managing the stash is a game in itself. Yipes. I’m still trucking along with the original four tabs until those stash sales come along and I see what I can get.
Went back and played some of my Elementalist, now at 52. She killed her first minor god and grabbed a god power as a reward. Not surprised that this game keeps tossing new levels of character customization and development at me. If Blizzard ever checks out PoE, they can learn a lesson or two about how to make characters feel unique.
Managing the tabs isn’t horrible… the great thing about POE… as usual another great thing, is that the tabs don’t ever go away (unlike the loot emails you get in Diablo 3 when a season ends). So you don’t have to reorganize things on any kind of schedule, just when you have a little time to kill and you feel like it you can go in there and transfer stuff from the remove only tabs to the permanent ones. So it’s not an onerous burden.
I’m bummed that I burnt out so hard on my BoR/Facebreaker/brotems berserker (broserker?). Easily the most powerful character I’ve ever made, but good god the totem playstyle is so booooooooooooooooooooring. Also I get annoyed at having to grind out maps I’ve already done. Also doing software dev bootcamp for 70+ hours/week has curtailed my exile time significantly. Ah well.
Also, Standard leagues are for suckers.
I’m up to 80 with my blocking Inquisitor, based on the Lazy Pally build that’s been around for a good long time. Pretty sure it was around all the way back to beta, and I’ve played a version of it in a couple of older leagues. Tons of block is still a very viable defense, though some things will still be pretty rough to handle (I’m looking at you, poison clouds). And the damage starts to suffer around level 70, unless you’re willing to spend a ton on really top-tier weapons. Nonetheless, it’s a fun build and I highly recommend it as a league starter or for newer players.
I’m considering the super-lazy RF silliness if that hasn’t been patched out for the next league. Though given my burnout on the fairly lazy brotem style, that’s maybe not a great idea. Could do something 'splody like the CoC Quillrain thing I failed at a while back, I dunno.
I’ve leveled a pretty traditional bow build with a Ranger (around level 50 now). It’s been easy as pie. The guild stash has a couple of good bows available you can use when leveling up. All I use is Tornado Shot and a Siege Ballista as abilities, but I’m starting to have to move around a lot so I don’t get clobbered, so it’s sort of an active playstyle!
