It’s the only way to get your Ascendancy class. It’s not even that it’s hard, it’s that if you die or get disconnected, you have to start it over completely. Also there’s nothing fun about it unless you like mazes and traps and I can’t imagine anyone likes those things in an ARPG. Even its proponents can only muster up phrases like “it’s not that bad”. And it probably wouldn’t be if you didn’t have to run it multiple times per character. I could tolerate it once, but I absolutely hate doing it 4 times just to get all my Ascendancy points.
Beta not till June 7, 2024
The two games won’t be totally isolated from each other, though. Rogers added that in-game purchases will be available in both games, except where incompatible, and promised that this will be the case for as long as the games exist.
“Everything you have ever purchased or will purchase in the future will be usable in both games unless it’s hyper-specific to the content of one of them,” Rogers said. “You can’t transform into a bear in PoE1, so a reskin of your bear form isn’t going to work. But you absolutely can equip the awesome sword skin you got and use all your stash tabs.”
This is the way.
Watching the footage of PoE2 made me interested. The weapon swap per skill looked dope and the skill tree looked not insane, though that could’ve just been a tiny part of it.
If they keep mandatory Labs out maybe I’ll give it a shot.
Trailer looks gooooood!
Yeah, if there’s no lab, I’m in.
Woah, you can assign skill gems to proc using a certain weapon which will cause an autoswap to that weapon for that skill AND it also auto-reconfigures passive tree points! That’s mental.
Mixed reaction on this one. On the one hand, I bought waaaaay too many stash tabs, so it’s nice to hear those will transfer over.
On the other hand, I was really hoping they would do a Diablo 3 style inventory without inventory tetris, so that it’s controller friendly. So I’m kind of bummed that they aren’t going to get rid of stash tabs.
New Path of Exile (1) league starting August 18th. League mechanic has you competing in big dual-elimination tournaments by assembling teams of NPCs (and yourself of course). The fights appear to have some auto-battler elements to them.
That sounds kind of intriguing but then I think about having to start from scratch, do all the Labs again, build everything back up from nothing and I just get mental fatigue. :( I wish it wasn’t the case but after 1500+ hours with the game I just don’t think I can do leagues anymore.
The league thing is fundamental to Path of Exile and it works well for what it is, but I think I’ve just hit the point where I’d like to pick back up where I left off instead of starting over and over… and over. Anyone else feel that way?
EDIT: Sorry! I do not mean to sound like a downer in the thread, that’s not my intention. I was just a little intrigued at the announcement before the wall of fatigue or whatever slammed into place which disappoints me because I’d rather be thrilled to check it out. I’m jealous of everyone who can keep going back to the well over and over!
I see PoE by now as a drop-in-drop-out game. I play a league or two, maybe motivate friends to join, do a silly build that’s meta and then fuck off again. It can’t retain me for longer than 2-4 weeks and judging by league player numbers this seems to be a general case for lots of people.
And you don’t sound like a downer, it’s cool!
My main problem with PoE is that I just find non-hardcore in it too boring, but when I play Hardcore, I usually die at a weird damage spike pretty early on. And then the prospect of creating another character is too much, so I put it down again for a few years.
Edit: Oh that, and also the fact that I bought way too many storage tabs. That one is on me. I didn’t know the game didn’t have an elegant solution for tabs except to scroll through them until I bought too many, and by then it was too late.
Pretty much the same as @MioMoto for me. Play a couple of leagues on the trot for a few weeks each, then drop it for a while. I like mapping and innefficiently poking at the endgame storylines/bosses, so I usually try to speedrun the campaign, cheesing a couple of the campaign bosses, usually because I just neglect resistances until the final Kitava fight.
No worries from me - I completely understand where you’re coming from and I too suffer from a bit of that “been there, done that, I hate doing the Lab” syndrome that we all seem to be subject to. But since I haven’t played in maybe a year the thought of playing doesn’t make me recoil, and a lot of my time in POE is so called “cozy time” where I can just click and kill stuff and not worry a whole helluva lot about the plot or quests because I know where to go and what to do.
It’s interesting that even though I’m knee-deep in BG3 I’m somewhat wistfully looking at POE. Maybe as kind of mindless distraction to play while my wife and I watch the tube at night (I tend not to play BG3 in the evenings because I find it requires a fair bit of my attention and evenings are not the best time of day for that to happen).
I wonder if @ineffablebob is going to play. If he ain’t playing, ain’t nobody playing!
Nope, I’ve not been playing regularly for a year or more. Every once in a while I’ll pop onto a new league to try the mechanics, but that’s about it. Way too many other games to keep running the same multi-hour grinds through low levels and labs before you get to the cool stuff!
Decided to jump in for a little cozy fun, and so far I’m liking it. I haven’t played in quite a while, so even though the storyline and acts aren’t anything new, it still feels fresh, at least a little.
I’m playing an SRS Necro. It will eventually have poison and from what I read that is the new meta-though I haven’t played in so long it’s all brand new to me. I usually dump SRS after a while because when you’re fighting a tough boss, you often can’t stand still around and create skulls but so far it’s been pretty good.
I did try the league mechanic, the team battle thing, and I got to say I had no idea what was going on. Yeah, I know the objective said “destroy the other teams respawn pillars“ or whatever. But I sat and whacked at this one thing for what felt like 10 minutes And could barely damage it. Then I ran off to a different place and killed something and all of a sudden I’m the winner.
Usually when there’s a league mechanic, I said “I’m going to worry about this after I finish leveling“ and then a lot of the time I never get back to it. It feels like a big distraction when you’re trying to level up.
The ultimate goal in the arena isn’t to kill anything, it’s to left-click and channel on their pillars or have your teammates do so. However, when doing so, any hit will stun for maybe 3 seconds.
Teammates on defense don’t go after towers, those on attack prioritize fighting, and those on escort I think sort of follow your lead more or less. Flankers do go right for them when not being attacked.
Taking down a pillar will stop the corresponding enemy from respawning. Taking all their pillars wins the match. This is not by damaging them but by channeling on them without getting hit. Weirdly, some of them seem to have multiple health bars with no indicator, though this might be due to special battlefield items they put down at the start of the match or special abilities, not sure about that.
To see most of this in game, look for the info dump hover text from the little “i” icon next to the Start button near the bottom of the panel when you’re setting up the playfield map and team positions.
It can work well to just fight if your flankers and attackers can bypass the main fight while you keep them busy and can handle the back line defenders on their own to get to the pillars. Also, if you kill enemies quickly enough you do make up some ground since their respawn timers get slower the more they die.
I was able to almost win one tournament and get some nice levelling tattoos by act 3. If you want to get to endgame quickly though, it’s probably not worth the time.
I backed POE on the first crowdfunding round. I played less than 10 hours of it and put it away. I started last night and have matched that playtime. So many Qs but having fun
Feel free to ask questions, @Kadath - the game has really increased in complexity but to be honest, you can choose to ignore most of them and just have fun leveling through the 10 acts.
Also, ZiggyD has put out a video on the league mechanic. He described it as “complex and not well explained” and I agree (FYI, I did pore over the screenful-sized info tooltip that is purported to be the explanation so I didn’t go in completely blind, but even though there is a wall of text, I didn’t feel like I completely got it after reading).
