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[nenjin]

I get that the last boss shouldn't be a pushover, but I feel like GGG might just be trolling their userbase.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The 4 Arenas in Dassero's Dream? I mean....fuck me. I don't know if Mercliess scales up other factors of it, but it was I kid you not, wall to wall enemies.





I didn't get pics of the last arena at full spawn, but, I basically had to enter, hit Abyssal Shout, swing twice with my AoE melee attack, and then die. After doing this 10 or more times, finally, the weaker guys died off enough I had some space to shield charge like mad around the area, throw down Temporal Chains and Spectral Blade for the next 6 minutes, or until my potions would run out and I'd die. What's not pictured there either are the 3 to 4 stacks of Frenzy each mob was carrying around after some of its guys start dying. The last room was 1 Unique and 2 Rare monsters and at least 2 uncommon packs of those archers who stack poison on you. It was the most ball-breakingly unforgiving thing I've seen in this game. Worse that the Dominus fight.

It could be trolling, but surely it's bad design to spawn you into the same spot every time you enter an area, for exactly this scenario. I don't know who this level of challenge is really aimed at, because it ain't the casual player of PoE. It seems more in line for people who play Leagues and have all sort of silly broken gear. I did some casual reading for what it takes to reach Lvl 90+, and it just kind of seems to agree. The XP loss, which is what gives PoE an edge to its gameplay, could make the game almost Dark Souls-esqe in its challenge (now that the netcode is more or less fixed.) But then GGG goes one, two, or three things over the top to just make it a death march to get anyhwere or do anything. At least solo. One of the people that has reached 100 did say something to the effect of "they need to rethink how grinding works for endgame because it's difficult to nigh impossible to pull off solo short of tens of thousands of hours played, without dying."

The unique mob that broke my will to play today was the Bone Queen. At 2000 HP + ~600 ES, a single barb from her aoe spike thing does ~1600 to ~1800 damage to me, with about 55% damage reduction. I don't know if the attack is Physical or Chaos. If it's Chaos I can understand why it's killing me. But if it's physical....fuck me. For how fast she throws those attacks out, I'd need to be several orders of magnitude tougher to even have the chance to whittle her down.

It kills me because, aesthetically I've come to dig how PoE has continued to develop. There's a lot of cool ideas and execution in Awakening's story and environments too. But the higher level gameplay is the real Nightmare the game references. Watching an hour's worth of grinding go up in smoke after a death or two that took split seconds to occur just kills my desire to play.

[kcwong]

I get that the last boss shouldn't be a pushover, but I feel like GGG might just be trolling their userbase.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The 4 Arenas in Dassero's Dream? I mean....fuck me. I don't know if Mercliess scales up other factors of it, but it was I kid you not, wall to wall enemies.





I didn't get pics of the last arena at full spawn, but, I basically had to enter, hit Abyssal Shout, swing twice with my AoE melee attack, and then die. After doing this 10 or more times, finally, the weaker guys died off enough I had some space to shield charge like mad around the area, throw down Temporal Chains and Spectral Blade for the next 6 minutes, or until my potions would run out and I'd die. What's not pictured there either are the 3 to 4 stacks of Frenzy each mob was carrying around after some of its guys start dying. The last room was 1 Unique and 2 Rare monsters and at least 2 uncommon packs of those archers who stack poison on you. It was the most ball-breakingly unforgiving thing I've seen in this game. Worse that the Dominus fight.

It could be trolling, but surely it's bad design to spawn you into the same spot every time you enter an area, for exactly this scenario. I don't know who this level of challenge is really aimed at, because it ain't the casual player of PoE. It seems more in line for people who play Leagues and have all sort of silly broken gear. I did some casual reading for what it takes to reach Lvl 90+, and it just kind of seems to agree. The XP loss, which is what gives PoE an edge to its gameplay, could make the game almost Dark Souls-esqe in its challenge (now that the netcode is more or less fixed.) But then GGG goes one, two, or three things over the top to just make it a death march to get anyhwere or do anything. At least solo. One of the people that has reached 100 did say something to the effect of "they need to rethink how grinding works for endgame because it's difficult to nigh impossible to pull off solo short of tens of thousands of hours played, without dying."

The unique mob that broke my will to play today was the Bone Queen. At 2000 HP + ~600 ES, a single barb from her aoe spike thing does ~1600 to ~1800 damage to me, with about 55% damage reduction. I don't know if the attack is Physical or Chaos. If it's Chaos I can understand why it's killing me. But if it's physical....fuck me. For how fast she throws those attacks out, I'd need to be several orders of magnitude tougher to even have the chance to whittle her down.

It kills me because, aesthetically I've come to dig how PoE has continued to develop. There's a lot of cool ideas and execution in Awakening's story and environments too. But the higher level gameplay is the real Nightmare the game references. Watching an hour's worth of grinding go up in smoke after a death or two that took split seconds to occur just kills my desire to play.

It's been like that since it's first added in beta. People have been saying the chickens' physical damage is way overtuned yet it stays this way in release. My only way of surviving that was to play a summoner (SRS, Skeleton totem and Zombies); I felt my melee characters were doing 0.1% damage of what is required to clear that room (who's just fine in all other places).

In beta I asked global chat about how to survive that; the answer I got was to create new instance until I get a room full of those dogs instead of chickens.

[Aklyon]

So, they're working on making A4 less difficult again. Also disconnection fixes and some loading spikes fixes. This is coming in a few days.

This is the entirety of the relevant news to the thread, unless you play in tempest league, which is also getting some adjustments, or warbands, which is just getting some drop increases.

[Rex_Nex]

Act 4 has some serious issues. I'm glad we have it, but it has issues. Obviously with the difficulty, but it also just feels crazy amounts less polished and fleshed out than the earlier acts. I don't like how it throws lore figures at you left and right, most of the time without even the smallest tinge of hype or excitement. It's just you placed in a tiny room with people like Doedre, Maligaro, Shavronne, Voll etc. They have like one or two lines of voice (or 0, in shav/doedre's case), three or four different attacks, and just keel over dead one after another. I think it's a little odd that Merveil was given ten fold as much buildup as all four of those combined. At the very least, Doedre/Maligaro/Shavronne shouldn't just be sitting in an empty clearing in the Harvest, they should have their own little gateways like Kaom/Daresso do that open into, say, a lab/grand library/whatever the theme may be.

Daresso and the entire arena sequence was done well enough that it feels like two-third of Act 4's budget was on him alone. Kaom's dream wasn't quite as good; the enemies were interesting (adoratotems ftw) and the boss fight is neat, but the areas themselves are really boring. It's like an endless jog through the Plains of Despair in Diablo 2's act 4. Give me something else to do other than walk down a path and click lore objects. My last complaint is that Act 4 is notably shorter than the previous acts, which screams "we ran out of time/budget".

I've been enjoying myself, currently have a Reave ranger and a Flame Totem templar, up to the early maps. Flame Totem is notoriously overpowered, but I honestly like my ranger more. The clearspeed is almost twice as fast, even with bad gear. The only issue is that Abyssus makes staying alive pretty difficult, and all the best ways to stay alive (Lightning Coil, Taste of Hate, etc) are super expensive in Warbands. Still, she attacks ~10 times per second (Really! I'm surprised the game doesn't bug out.), has full screen AoE, and whirling blades at this level of attackspeed is the best mobility skill in the game. Can go from one side of Dried Lake to the other in 7 seconds or so.

[kcwong]

We have more serious problems than just the legendary figures disposed like garbabge... there are lots of reports about bad connections.

My email to GGG:

Hi GGG Support,

I use the Singapore gateway from Hong Kong. I'm not using WiFi, my ISP has an optic fiber to my desk and my top speed is 1T. The usual ping is close to 50ms and pretty stable.

I just went inside Belly of the Beast. Last time it bumped me off to Australia doubling my ping. This time I stayed in Singapore realm, so I finished all the mini-bosses and went into fight Malachai. The ping went up to 133. I checked that I was still in Singapore realm, so I thought I could do this.

I managed to finish the whole fight under that ping. Then I picked up the loot and noticed the ping kept shooting up. I portal back to down, checked that I was still in Singapore realm, but the ping didn't stop. It kept going up to several hundreds, and eventually, packet loss, and kicked me back to login screen.

I logged back in right away, but my portal was already gone (was this an evidence that my instance crashed?). I proceeded to sort the loot I managed to grab, and got kicked to login screen once more.

I did a WinMTR trace (SG.login.pathofexile.com) afterwards. The result is different from what I got last night, which was around 50. Now I got an average of 86.

*Snip screenshot*

There are multiple big threads in the forums about the same issue. Please tell Network Layer to fix their problems, and inform us on the official forum about the progress.

Since it's weekend I'll wait for a reply next Monday.

[Aklyon]

So theres some new pets again.


...also theres a whole lot of people who weren't expecting metamods that say they will prevent x would actually prevent x until removed with the remove master mods thing. Neither of these are actually news, but I thought I'd save time for anyone who for some weird reason looks here for poe news instead of their site. There was some fixes too.

[kcwong]

...also theres a whole lot of people who weren't expecting metamods that say they will prevent x would actually prevent x until removed with the remove master mods thing. Neither of these are actually news, but I thought I'd save time for anyone who for some weird reason looks here for poe news instead of their site. There was some fixes too.

More details about that... the metamod didn't always work like that. Before a scouring orb will remove the meta mod as well. Then without being announced metamod will survive scouring.

And a big issue people have is that this secret was not well-known, but a certain guild profited much using this knowledge. A GGG staff is a member of that guild, and this guild also housed a number RMT users in the past (they were banned).

[Neonivek]

So is there still autohit enemies in this game? or did they finally remove them to put the skill back into the game?

[Aklyon]

So is there still autohit enemies in this game? or did they finally remove them to put the skill back into the game?

Hm?

Also from what I could tell kcwong, its not that the effect changed, its that no one bothered to experiment and tell people. And oh noes, someone succeeded in an ingame economy. Its not like all their success will just be dumped into standard eventually, where they won't make anything off it because theres already a dozen eimilar items. (or hardcore, but I couldn't be bothered to care about the league of permadeath if I tried)

[Sergius]

Well, PTW since I used to play this game a while ago.

[kcwong]

So is there still autohit enemies in this game? or did they finally remove them to put the skill back into the game?

Hm?

Also from what I could tell kcwong, its not that the effect changed, its that no one bothered to experiment and tell people. And oh noes, someone succeeded in an ingame economy. Its not like all their success will just be dumped into standard eventually, where they won't make anything off it because theres already a dozen eimilar items. (or hardcore, but I couldn't be bothered to care about the league of permadeath if I tried)

What I've read is that they made 27 mirrors and 20k exalts out of that kind of crafting... and what's fishy is that a GGG staff is in that very guild. No one knows about the metamod changed to work like that, until someone gloated about their new-found wealth.

I play self-found mostly, and have only bought 4 pieces of build-enabling uniques since I started playing in open beta. Which is to say I don't care about the in-game economy at all.

What I do care about is GGG staff's integrity... I am still waiting for GGG to respond to any of those threads.

[Aklyon]

They (specifically, Bex) did reply to all four threads. All of them were directed to the manifesto post, and the manifesto post summarizes down to shooting down all claims of 'broken economy' in one shot and the same kind of 'not clearly documented because it was for people to find out' answer vendor recipes and new uniques have.

[kcwong]

Bex's reply is about the recipe and economy, but one question remains: did GGG staff leak the information to his guildmates?

Also, this is the first time I heard about a GGG staff publicly playing with normal players. I would expect GGG staff to never inform anyone of their real identities... they should have their GGG staff account doing their jobs, and their own personal account that should never be linked to their staff status.

[cerapa]

Bex's reply is about the recipe and economy, but one question remains: did GGG staff leak the information to his guildmates?

I think it would have been a fairly normal thing to test. Just add the metamod and scour, see if "can't be changed" is also "can't be removed". I don't see why it's a thing that needs leaking.

The problem AFAIK is that a person said that it didn't work. There was no change, it worked from the start and people lied about it. Not many people are going to waste their exalts on testing something that has already been said not to work.

EDIT: Hell, it's literally in the goddamn manifesto.

But someone says that this was changed in 2.0.0 to work differently?

This isn't true. We coded it with this intention, tested it, released it and players have been using it. We checked the code today and it hasn't changed during that year.

Please note that there is incentive for people to mislead others if they find a secret recipe or crafting trick.

There wasn't a change. People are angry about something that didn't even happen.

[Aklyon]

Are you expecting the staff play their own game in secret, kcwong? That would be stranger. And if they want to reveal themselves, then sounds like its up to them.