Path of Exile

I was there when the first char hit level 8. I’ll never forget it. :P

Mfw Gorebreaker drops at level 13 and I’m playing a 1h gladiator. Good looking out, Rngesus.

edit: And at 28 Brightbeak dropped \o/.

I’m loving the abyss mechanics, the encounters are engaging and rewarding. Started an SSF essence drain/contagion shadow.

I’m quite enjoying the abyss mechanics as well, although I’ll enjoy them more once I figure out how the rare bats heal so quickly so I can avoid it happening.

All in all it’s been a great league thus far, although I died (playing SSF HC) in Act 5 to an exile, not where I’d expect to die. Any death before maps that isn’t to Innocence, Kitava, or abyss mobs is going to irritate me. Those I expect to happen!

I’m playing SSF HC this league, too. Because I’m a moron, largely, though also the fact that it forces you to be a bit more creative than “follow the build post of some good player” is a factor. You can all look forward to my inevitable post about how a game crash or disconnect killed my character!

Also, Sunder is ridiculous. Why did they even bother making any other melee skills?

Yeah, I’ve heard it’s pretty good (as in stupidly OP).

I’m not up for HC SSF, I’m doing regular SSF, using a SRS character. So far so good (in the middle of A3).

The only response I ever hear to this is “Sunder isn’t that great late game”. But it’s far and away the best melee skill early game; maybe the best overall skill as attested to by the fact that the top 3-5 in each league were using Sunder as their main skill. So it’s obviously good enough late game if they’re still using it and at the very least got them a significant lead over their competition.

I want it nerfed just so I see something else when I check out streams on occasion. It doesn’t actually affect my gameplay, but it does affect my Twitch enjoyment.

Looks like most of my play time this league will be over steam link, so I think it’s time to check out all these summoner QoL changes!

I don’t know if this is a change with this patch or an earlier one while I wasn’t playing, but it’s terrible…they eliminated the Hedge Maze and put the plum and Ascendancy Trial in the Imperial Gardens. So you have to run around in that giant maze-like zone to find those, instead of having a much smaller maze-like zone. Who thought that was a good idea?

Weird change. I did notice they moved the waypoint in the imperial Gardens but I didn’t realize more than that had changed.

I guess there’s some sort of break points in your characters progression. My SRS summoner went from feeling pretty under powered to feeling awesome. I think it was a combination of some extra minion and skill duration nodes, and using generosity+hatred. It still takes a little bit to get things rolling, but all of a sudden I’m knocking things over left and right again.

Sunder is nice but I’m using Cleave on my gladiator instead. Bleed explosions from ascendancy for aoe and free fortify from Overwhelming Odds.

So far it has been a very smooth leveling experience, I bought a 210 pdps axe at level 45 (for 3 chaos) and now at 50 I have about 3.5k dps (pure phys, no auras), 2.5k health and ~50% block chance. The tree I came up with also has a pretty nice spread so I always have either damage or health within reach and can just grab whatever I need.

I believe they did this because few people bothered with the Fairgraves quest. I don’t have any evidence for this other than personal experience, but I play the game a lot and talk to people about it and outside of SSF players almost no one bothers. Even many SSF players didn’t bother.

I’m not sure if I like the change or not; I had the layouts for the 2 zones down quite well so I could do the trial and Fairgraves quickly if I wanted. I still usually skipped Fairgraves even with the first character of a league who had to go in the maze to do the trial.

At the moment the new zone feels like a bit of a mess but if I can learn the layout or some zone indicators to figure out quickly where to go then I’ll probably like this condensing of the content. Currently ambivalent.

I did Fairgraves on every character. But that’s just how I roll. I’d feel weird leaving that out.

The gardens are laid out along a few main paths to the zone entrances intersecting at the waypoint. It seems like you always go north-west to the library, and the trial is near that (north?) Didn’t seem too bad, but of course I’ve only seen a couple layouts.

Skipping quests is weird, ya weirdos.

but the quest reward is a ring that you’ll be lucky is worth putting on now much less something that’ll last a while. In that time I can gain 2 levels and find another ring. Fairgraves is a cheapskate.

I think I did the Fairgraves quest once and have never done it again. Mostly because the plum was way the hell out of the way. Now that’s it’s been relocated… I’m still not doing that quest.

Regarding the talk about playing time above, I’ve been keeping an eye on my SSF character’s playtime; I’ve also tried to play somewhat efficiently (not min/maxing it but not dawdling along either). And that’s with only doing 5 or 6 forsaken master quests total (I’ve hardly seen them - skipped a number of Haku missions but have been taking all the others I see). At the 8 hour /played mark, my guy was level 40 and was hitting end end of A4. So streamers who get to level 70 by the 8 hour mark must be blazing (I’m thinking that they are using banked gear or favorable trading … I can’t be that slow!).

SRS SSF character is just steamrollin’ along, early in A5 now.

Holy shit Volley makes leveling bow toons fun. Volley + Ice Shot + Pierce is monstrous.

Also the RNG gifted me a Tabula Rasa for the first time in forever, so that’s fun.

I have been dawdling a lot at 8 hours only lvl 24. But I am playing supercautious hardcore as my first bow character ever, so I know I have no idea what I am doing and haven’t planned skills or tree at all beforehand. Maybe I should do that.

Edit: more than a dozen chars over lvl 90 already, hahah

Rip Cleave dream. Switched to Sunder because the clear speeds simply can’t compare. Also got a little lucky and dropped an exalt which I traded for Jack The Axe + Bringer of Rain. ~18k dps at level 68, needless to say I’m flying through the leveling process. One of the strongest league starts for me personally.