I have no idea what I’m doing with the Synthesis stuff yet, but I will say that:
a) The launch went remarkably smoothly. No crashing or downtime (yet).
b) The memory fragment things seem to be balanced for about level 20-ish. Died multiple times when I ventured into them in Act 1, but been doing fine since about midway through Act 2.
ED seems incredibly smooth to level with. I’m on a +1 wand (vendor recipe) with a 3L and still mowing down stuff at level 50. I look forward to getting 4 more ascendancy points for trickster, the eva/es combo will be very interesting to see in action.
No regrets about not picking occultist.
I have to start my traditional technique for playing in the new POE league.
- Research all the builds I’m thinking of
- Agonize over my choice but finally pick a build that is interesting or different
- Level it to 40
- decide I don’t like it very much
- Go back to a build I’ve played 50 times before and play that one
Got to get started!
One of things that always gets in my way of starting a new league is having to do the labyrinth again. I’m really sick of that place. Leveling up Masters again doesn’t fill me with excitement either.
I’m down with resetting to L1 with an empty stash, but the above has just gotten tedious and repetitive after all the hours I’ve put into the game. I haven’t played in the last several leagues, I assume nothing has changed on that front?
I really hate the labyrinth and most of the time I usually hold off running it the first time in till I am way over leveled for it. And even then half the time I bleed out from getting stuck on spikes. So I hear you!
As for the Masters, they changed that around few leagues ago. It’s a different mechanism now but I’m not familiar enough with it that I can tell you how it works. I believe there is a new dude who gives you missions and the rewards from those missions have items that can be identified that unlock recipes? Like I said, I’m not that familiar with it!
That was changed completely, you now have to hunt down recipes out in the world and I think even in maps. Some are gated behind tough encounters such as bosses. Overall it’s a MUCH better system, especially since you get a full list when you begin so you can quickly check where the stuff you’re interested in is located.
There’s also something called crafting bench now which automatically switches between correct mods when you put any item in it. Much much muuuuuuuuuch better than obsessing over which crafting station you need to go to to put mod X on item Y.
The lab unfortunately still sucks ass. But I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way, the power boost it provides is so huge that it has to be gated by something extremely annoying to do lol.
In other news, level 60 ED trickster using a +1 chaos wand that I made on the Beach at level 2, and a bunch of such bad rares that I’d legit be ashamed to link my character. Screens still evaporate for some reason (cough powercreep cough).
I most definitely resemble this remark with my 50-ish necromancer. Only in act 7, been taking side trips through the memory lanes. Terrible drops but it doesn’t seem to matter as of yet. Barely looked at my resists, don’t think any have hit the cap yet. Did die a couple of times in the memory nexus, when masses of mobs spawned right at the entrance to a fragment, but pretty sure no gear would have saved me from that mess.
Playing dominating blow/Herald of Purity and wow, it almost doesn’t matter what else I do because those two together (used to be Molten Strike then Smite on main attack until I got to Dom Blow) just murderize everything.
To be fair I did buy a Brightbeak because it’s an endgame-ish weapon for this build anyway, so that’s helping the OPness but still. Woof.
I started playing a storm brand character and everything is melting in front of him also. A word of advice: going into a memory at level two is a bad idea! I think I lasted one second
Trying out a bane/soulrend occultist. Finally starting to melt stuff after first ascendency. Never done a high ES build before, so hopefully the squishy feeling will go away soon.
I just hit maps and I’m loving this character. Natural 40% movement speed (after boots) is awesome, as is very fast attack and cast speed. Still lots of room for improvement, I’m using a 4L with leveling gear, but the mapping is still fun. Having some defense (evasion) is also very nice to have on a caster. Maybe next time I’ll try MoM only and maybe pair it with acro and phase acro, but MoM+EB seems to work well enough. Small gameplay sample (total cost for gearing the character to be halfway ready for maps was ~6 or 7c):
What is with GGG and over designing league mechanics? This is the nth one in a row where it’s exponentially more fun to let the poopsockers poop their socks while ignoring the actual league stuff until it gets unfucked 1-3 leagues later.
Agreed. I stared at the memory map for a couple of minutes and I still don’t fully understand how it works. I’m also losing memory fragments in maps as soon as I zone in because the wall is already all around me - not sure if this is intended or a bug.
I honestly wish they’d drop some mechanics, it seems like the last 8 leagues or so all got rolled into the main game. It’s a little overwhelming. On the other hand it does make the leagues last a bit longer I suppose.
And as usual, it’s incredible how they consistently manage to come up with new unique mechanics - and bend the engine to their needs every time. It’s absolutely amazing.
And a final note - if anyone has a ‘at least 3 sockets of same colour’ recipe I’d need a craft because I already wasted 150 chromes on a 2 socket recipe and it didn’t work lol. Please message me ingame at bati_synthesis.
If you’re getting kicked out instantly, that’s probably just the blue memory goo moving too fast right at the start. They seem to want you to jump right away. Then you often get ambushed. After that it’s not quite as difficult.
Here’s a good guide to what some people have figured out so far if you want spoilers:
I dunno, I like having new craziness to explore every league. It always feels crazy hard at first, then you learn the mechanics a bit, and then it’s only moderately hard.
Agreed. I’ve run across maybe 2 or 3 fragments that seemed impossible - things like the flooded mine tileset with all possible routes almost immediately cut off by the goo, which is probably a bug in the generation algorithm. But 95% of the time, as long as you hit a quicksilver flask and move a screen or two away from the entrance right away, there’s plenty of open space.
Not yet, still on 2 myself. I’d love to see a tweak to the delve, seems to take forever to get to a decent depth. Or maybe that’s just my bad luck on the mine map, I keep having to spend my sulfite going sideways trying to find a way down.
Ooh, good idea. Here’s my (still fairly terrible gear-wise) zombie Necromancer. I spent about the same to start on maps, with full elemental resists even. Zombies are still fine, in case anyone was wondering.
The main difference from my previous summoners is that I’ve stolen some ideas from this guide: put some points into curses, and am using Charged Dash for movement/applying EE/triggering Holy Relic/cursing with Enfeeble. Really liking Charged Dash for this use case, since it works much like Shield Charge but you can also teleport with it if you hold down the button for a bit. The only downside is you can’t use a wand, but there’s lots of sceptres and such out there that are just fine.
Zombies looking safe as ever. It’s good that the early game and map transition is now easier than it used to be, I remember dreading level 70 and spending an hour or two on trade just to get geared up for maps.
On my end I managed to get some upgrades as well, switched to a 5L staff, got my last two ascendancy points and pretty much doubled my damage in the process. Here’s a short t4 map run (unfortunately I don’t have anything higher):
Definitely one of my favourite characters so far, it’s agile, has some defense (12k base eva), 6.5k ehp with little effort, insane sustain during mapping and ED + contagion make for a very chill experience, especially if density is high. I still have to buy Witchfire but I’m too lazy to convert my currency so it will have to wait a bit.
Also to anyone looking to get the last two ascendancy points I recommend you kill Izaro today, it’s very easy (portals + fonts). Killed him at lvl 80 on a 4L with Argus + both encounter keys lol.
Huh, just learned that if you fall into the memory darkness in a decaying nexus zone, there’s sometimes enough space elsewhere in the zone to keep running. It’s not instant-fail like the normal zone’s memories seem to be.
Also, Unleash seems good and very interesting, and Bane is pretty powerful even splashed in a non-chaos-scaling build (for leveling at least.)
So how are you guys liking the league mechanic? I’ve been more or less skipping the whole thing - not a fan of having to interrupt my mapping to go into a separate area to run some convoluted shit. I swear one of these days PhD courses for Path of Exile will appear and people will sign up for them just to be able to decipher the game’s mechanics.
And between incursions, syndicates and even delve there are too many distractions already.
When I first leveled I stared going into the memory fragments. And then over the weekend I spent about an hour in the Nexus trying to get to some memories that had special chests in them. Even though I had maybe a dozen memories to use as building blocks, I still couldn’t quite get to the ones I was interested in (needed a left and an up not a right and an up!). Plus then when you revisit the memories you’ve placed you’re slowly using them up, so if you fiddle around too much (like I did) you start having to replace memories along the way, etc. So I’ve started skipping them in my leveling.
I also am a bit confused about loot. When you go into a memory “in the wild” you get all the good loot you found at the end - it’s dumped at your feet. When you go into a memory in the Nexus that sometimes happens but it sometimes doesn’t happen. I got used to just blasting by look, accepting that at the end it’d show up, but that wasn’t true in the Nexus.
Also, synthesizing seems like a lot of work for not great returns (you have to have the same base type item for all 3 spots, right?)
As for all the other mechanics
- I spent a little bit doing a Delve when it first opened, because I’d never really done it before.
- Ran the only Breach I saw (triggered it by accident)
- Kill beasts whenever I’m in a zone for it
have not seen anything else