On December 30 2024 21:00 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: I just finished my first playthrough (as a cold sorc / stormweaver / intelligence build) - completed act 3 cruel in the mid-60s and then played the endgame's waystone tier nodes until level 70 and stopped. I mostly enjoyed playing through the 3 normal acts and 3 cruel acts, but I just don't understand the post-game grind and atlas map - it seems boring and monotonous.
I'm looking forward to trying the ranger/deadeye/dexterity next, and then probably a melee/strength character for my third playthrough. I'll probably do the same thing: try to beat the regular game before level 70, play a few rounds of the endgame to get to 70, and then move on.
Any advice for a new ranger/deadeye/dexterity build?
Following up: While I don't think that the ranger is as fun as the sorc, the ranger is definitely playing the (early, at least) game on easy mode. Act 2, level 22, just got my ascendancy / beat the trial on the first try, and I've died a total of 0 times so far. No deaths in act 1, and none in act 2 so far.
Yeah, I've seen both played and range early looks to be cheating. Merc and Monk are kinda difficult lol. I'm in act 3 with Monk and it's a tiny bit easy but I'm in the middle of the mobs banging the bell like a deranged person.
Just got my next 2 points and I just got into Cruel. Not sure I wanna run this whole thing back but I'll at least get into Act 2 before I decide to abandon and play something else.
About halfway through Act 3, still on my SSF minion/chao infernalist. Having a blast still, especially trying to balance getting minion nodes versus chaos. I know I'm probably not playing optimally but just trying to take in the game on my own. I am absolutely in love with how beautiful the game is. I also realized the parallel between POE2 and D2, literally act 2 are deserts and act 3 are jungle lmao.
Cons: REALLY wish more exalted orbs would drop for me so I can craft more because I feel a little starved for gear experimentation. That being said, every yellow that drops I get a pretty fucking excited that it might be good; sadly 80% of the time it's not what I am looking for.
Hate on death effects
Overall wish enemies would not respawn on death
Wish maps and checkpoints would stay instead of random generation upon exit so that I can more efficiently re-farm prior bosses. I love the boss fights and want to do them more, and as SSF I feel I need to farm them for some gear
having little bits of crafting would be fun but idk if they have the right design for that. I enjoyed fiddling with gear in Last Epoch a lot more. PoE2 combat / atmosphere is great but itemization and crafting idk
Just finished Act 3 on Cruel and started maps/atlas. I have no idea what I'm doing in there. I go in and almost immediately die. So probably a combo of skill + gear. I dunno if I'll stick with doing maps over and over. I enjoyed the game (Got 2 uniques before I hit 30 and I've just been using those (Also got about 6 uniques in stash that I can't use but I don't want to get rid of them yet)).
Might take a break and come back in a few months. See what's been changed and what hasn't.
might be elemental resistances or total effective hit pool (HP + energy shielc). Ele res cap is 75%, its pretty hard to hit without trading for some gear tho
personally I found campaign the most fun, got bored in mapping pretty quick
On January 05 2025 01:55 EchelonTee wrote: might be elemental resistances or total effective hit pool (HP + energy shielc). Ele res cap is 75%, its pretty hard to hit without trading for some gear tho
personally I found campaign the most fun, got bored in mapping pretty quick
Yeah once this build I'm following took over, it made the game almost laughable. Invoker Ice Monk hits pretty hard. So that was fun and it was intriguing to see it play out. Now I'm just like, what next. Luckily I have other games I can play on PS5 til later. It's a crazy beginning to the year for games, so I'll probably degen on Dynasty Warriors in a few weeks.
On January 05 2025 01:55 EchelonTee wrote: might be elemental resistances or total effective hit pool (HP + energy shielc). Ele res cap is 75%, its pretty hard to hit without trading for some gear tho
personally I found campaign the most fun, got bored in mapping pretty quick
Yeah once this build I'm following took over, it made the game almost laughable. Invoker Ice Monk hits pretty hard. So that was fun and it was intriguing to see it play out. Now I'm just like, what next. Luckily I have other games I can play on PS5 til later. It's a crazy beginning to the year for games, so I'll probably degen on Dynasty Warriors in a few weeks.
I made a cast on freeze comet sorceress, minion infernalist and now I'm leveling up an ice monk myself, but half-heartedly. I fully believe any day now, GGG will awaken from their holiday slumber and bring judgement day upon us sinners killing like 75% of the builds, including that very ice monk so I'm not too invested into rushing him to maps and level 70+.
I'm still going to play PoE2 until Monster Hunter: Wilds releases in February then take a long rest from PoE2.
On January 06 2025 14:10 EchelonTee wrote: godspeed, friend
has there been any communication on post holiday patch? feels like its been a while
I think the devs are just coming back from the holidays. If the next patch comes quickly, it will probably just address a myriad of bugs that are still in the game, together with some quick nerfs to the OP skills. My guess is a balancing patch will come quite late given the bigger issues with ES vs Armor, and underwhelming melee builds will probably require re-design of some of the core mechanics.
I rerolled a deadeye and the endgame clearspeed started to feel like poe1 again. The difference between my minion and lightning arrow builds is night and day even though I spent similar amount of currency on both chars.
Some interesting things I've learned about the end-game in trade league after a few hundred hours:
Currently the strongest build for the end game is a gemling legionnaire with stat stacking and all the rich players are playing it. Jewelry with high stats are expensive and worth keeping/selling. I suspect this will be nerfed in the coming days as the speed and power of the build is simply ridiculous.
Chaos Sanctum: I run this using my minion infernalist and the whole run takes about 10-15 min at the highest difficulty. A couple of the boss rune drops can sell for quite a bit of currency and was pretty profitable.
Trial of Sekhemas: I personally find this trial to be very profitable to run because two of the relic drops (desperate alliance is 1+ div, and the last flame is 40+ divs). Deadeye is extremely efficient at this trial, I've been doing the runs in about 30 min on max difficulty, with relics maxing out honor resistance and the ability to see more rooms. This lets me plan the route efficiently. Party invite for the final boss can be sold for around 1 divine per invite if you are strong enough to carry people looking for their final ascendancy points.
Atlas: In the late game when farming t15+ maps, the priority goes quant > # of rare monsters > rarity (assuming you already have 100+ on gear). It turns out item rarity does fall off significantly and isn't the stat dictating the loot explosion. Breach is OP because of the sheer number of mobs coupled with the quant prefix on the tablets/keys.
An efficient way to do maps is to unlock all the towers in an area by traversing the bad layout nodes first, then applying tablets to the towers when only open layout nodes are left. This ensures the bonus gets stacked on the good nodes. A trick is to open a bad map node with a low tier key and simply closing it without doing the map. This marks the node as attempted even though it is incomplete, making it impossible to get new bonuses from tablets. I'm personally not a huge fan of the atlas atm, I hope they update it so it isn't as cumbersome to traverse due to the infinite layout design.
Deterministic Crafting: still possible via the ritual omens. You can activate two omens at the same time (example: whittling + sinistral erasure) to re-roll the exact mod you want most of the time. These are extremely expensive in trade league now as people doing mirror service are paying stacks of divines for them.
As a final note: I've got 2 chars over lvl 90 and still haven't found a single citadel. I've also seen people who ran out of connections, as well as nodes that have nothing connecting to them. The overall design of the atlas is quite poor and will need a lot of revisions in EA.
Thanks for the update, Glacierz. How's the, uh, vibe for other people?
(not in EA, and have been flat out with family/work etc so haven't been paying attention - very difficult to get an overall sense of how things are feeling from a distance from e.g. Reddit)
I stopped playing awhile ago. I was logging in with the mentality of "well, maybe it'll get fun once I progress further" and while playing I'd just be listing things in my head I wanted to be different. At a certain point I accepted I just don't like this game right now. Maybe I'll revisit it in a year if some major changes have been made.
ngl, the world atlas feels like a worse version of Last Epoch's Monolith farming. Those felt more fun to navigate and I liked the varied objectives. Not as much aspirational content, but a lot better in the early mid stages
New patch announcement is out. Looks like no major balancing changes until they reset the league, many QoL improvements though, including the long waited rune-swap in gear.
Instead of removing the tower mechanic like most people were asking, they doubled down on it and made more versions of the tower... I still don't know if that's worth spending high tier waystones on it unless league mechanics can spawn on them.
I enjoyed the full interview but the breakdown is nice yea. As more-or-less expected things'll be status quo and slow as they work on and roll out content, but we knew that and that's all fine with me.
EPT
