What are opinions on the new league? My reaction to the league video etc was to start playing Last Epoch again! But I’m sure some people are playing, right?
Yeah levelled a toon for the forst time in probably 4 leagues or so. Crucible is pretty fun, probably one of the more engaging mechnics in a while, in that you kind of really want to use it and grow your weapon’s power, rather than running past the event to complete whatever else it was you were doing (maps, campaign, etc).
Also, power creep but in a good way!
For the first time I got a character to lvl 90 today, after playing the silly game casually for over 10 years I think. (Bane Occultist, SSF, started her in Archnemesis and slowly kept working on up). Yellow maps still providing the best balance between xp advancement and xp loss risk from getting my squishy tush beat to paste.
Compared to all my other standard chars lvl 80+, Bane/Soulrend seems too easy.
/ PurpleReignSillhouette
I had something - maybe a beast - drop two for me yesterday evening or early this morning. I hadn’t seen that before until you posted about it.
This is the most I’ve played since Heist. After they went to that watchstone to change regions system, I only had like 3 leagues I played deep into (including whatever was going when they swapped to that system). I liked it on paper but I hated it in practice.
But once they finally changed the Atlas from that I found I was still feeling a bit of burnout and malaise. It’s taken me awhile to come back around but I loved leveling a bow character this league (in fact I’ve done two because I wanted to redo my passive tree to the point hat it was going to be too expensive and it was such a breeze to level one).
I may do Bane next because it’s one of my favorite skills. But I have quite a bit of work still to do on this LA Raider (and wealth to build up, although hey a divine dropped today).
My least favorite part of the game for sure.
There is nothing in the game that makes me hate it faster than dying in the fucking Lab to something stupid, undoing 45 minutes of work that wasn’t even fun to begin with. I don’t usually rage quit games, but man, fuck this place. Tying it to such important class passives is so irritating.
Heh, yeah, I rage quit the game there and haven’t been back since. It’s a shame because I otherwise love the game. I wonder how many players they’ve lost due to it?
How long are you guys taking to run lab? I just use poelab to get that daily layout and speedrun those bastards. First two don’t take more than 10 min and third no more that 15 or so. I don’t often run uber since I could never find all the bloody map trials, but it seems they have changed it now so you only need an offering.
I doubt it takes me terribly long but I hate every minute of it since it focuses on some of the worst aspects of the game. And when you factor the multiple runs with each character over the past decade, it’s a LOT of Labyrinth. So much so that I just don’t play the game anymore.
I’ve never completed it. I had just come back to the game after a long layoff and they had added the lab requirement while I was away. I made it into the lab, had no idea what it was or what I was doing there and died 3 or 4 times over an hour or so. I was so pissed off I just said fuck it and quit and haven’t been back.
What is lab? Is that the area with all the spike traps? I think I lost a hardcore character or two there so I never tried it again.
Yeah, the labyrinth certainly has spike traps. I remember those little bastards.
Yeah it’s the area you get access to where you progress through a multi-stage fight with a boss, while navigating a ‘labyrinth’ between stages. It’s a mandatory part of levelling, since it gates the class ascendancy specialisations, which are build defining. You have to run lab 4 times at increasing difficulties at during levelling to unlock all eight available ascendancy tree points.
Sure, it can be annoying and hopefully POE2 does away with it, but as a POE fan I hate to see people missing out due to despising lab so much. Once you grok it, it is very easy to speedrun if all you want are the passive points.
I always approach it between 3-5 levels over-levelled so the boss is a relative cakewalk, use poelab so I know excactly where I am going, don’t fuck around with other rewards in there (keys, chests, guardians, Argus, etc), and equip one of the movement skills that trivialise any of the trap sections (Flame Dash, Leap Slam, Lightning Warp/Arrow)
It’s not the difficulty that puts me off, it’s the fact that it’s incredibly unfun and I’ve been forced to do it a thousand times. I’d rather just play something I enjoy instead.
Granted, Lab isn’t the only thing that puts me off PoE these days, but it’s definitely a roadblock when I try to muster up enthusiasm for a new league. I have alt-itis like crazy so it’s not just completing it the 4 times with one character I’m faced with, it’s 4*n.
Amen.
I love POE, have put a ton of hours into it. It’s almost the perfect game for me as my favorite thing to do is create alts lol. This one aspect of the game just kills it for me though.
If they were smart, they’d sell lab competitions for 5 bucks per, I’d happily pay it.
And after you have the passives, you get to hunt for elusive helmet enchants. Or spend obscene currency to buy one.
Are those passives really awesome or something? It didn’t seem like it would be worth almost certainly getting your hardcore character killed for.
Yes. They are typically build-defining. In HC, it’s typical to run the labs later and with more survivability gear so as to make it where it’s a high percentage play. The DoT traps, in particular, can be nasty if you’re not prepared for them. Movement skills and mitigation go a long way, though.
The helmet enchants aren’t quite so “absolutely must have”, but they are very, very good and are a big part of taking an end-game build to the next level. By that point, a HC character is strong enough that the lab isn’t really super dangerous, but it is incredibly tedious.
They’re some of the largest effects you can get for a character, yeah. Build defining is right, as @ReptileHouse put it.
I don’t know, I got two HC characters killed there and that was enough for me. Build defining or not, if I’m killed by traps, I have to start a new character and kill crabs on the beach yet again.