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[frostshotgg]

Atziri is nowhere near as bullshit of a fight as Malachai. She has a large barrier of knowledge before you can run her (Mirrors and immunities in split phase say hi), but once you can she's pretty damn fair.

Malachai is the worst boss in the game design wise, by a very, very large margin. He suffers from the usual "Absurd anti-melee mechanics in a cramped arena to force you into melee" that many of the bad bosses do, but turned up to 15 on a 10 point scale, then has a lot of other issues on top of that. Let's go down the list.

• Horribly, horribly cramped arena
• One shot slam
• Degen ground that covers the arena
• More floaty degen things that stack with the other degen
• No downtime to recover
• Horrible hitboxes on everything
• Unavoidable damage

And the biggest offender of all, the fucking color palette. My god the color palette is pretty much Stalin. I have no idea who greenlit a fight that's entirely red and brown on red and brown background, with some more red all over the place, but my god is it impossible to see.

[nenjin]

I know how to do the Malachai fight "right" but as a melee without broken damage it takes. For. Fucking. Ever. Extended periods of just running around waiting for shit to disappear. The hearts are the worst because it takes everything about the fight and goes "Now stand in one place for a really long time. Go on, do it fucker." The hearts probably have a million HP between all of them and just...ugh. I can stand the fight up until that point. It's horseshit but my build could make due. But then the hearts show up and it's just mindnumbing repetition of "Charge --> Attack a few times --> Charge out --> Throw some swords --> Evade --> Charge..." where your first bad judgment call may well be your last.

Still, I think the Piety fight preceding that in some ways is a worse fight. I hate the mandatory "and now you must run X fast in Y pattern or die instantly" mechanics. You can flask through a couple of those but that's it, and you're fighting in a damn closet by comparison to pretty much all boss fights, where spawns at the start actively get in your way.

Which is why I'm not thrilled to see that attack make a return at all. That attack might actually be worse in a larger room than a smaller one.

[aristabulus]

Atziri is nowhere near as bullshit of a fight as Malachai. She has a large barrier of knowledge before you can run her (Mirrors and immunities in split phase say hi), but once you can she's pretty damn fair.
...

I dunno, having to look up detailed spoilers (or wasting rare tokens repeatedly on observation/lemming runs) so you can know what tells to look for is still bad.  Different flavour, same orifice.

re: Malachai details, yeah, that all sums up what I hate about it.... can't see what the hell is going on half the time, and even if you can, good luck having somewhere to run to.  :/

I know how to the Malachai fight "right" but as a melee without broken damage it takes. For. Fucking. Ever. Extended periods of just running around waiting for shit to disappear. ...

My recollection of my 2H Melee duelist basically mirrors that.  Didn't die quite as much because he was very passively tanky, but it took a long time to get good damage windows.

[nenjin]

Once I started hitting mapping I gave up wanting to discover stuff in PoE organically. At least boss fights. Maps are too finite and precious to waste them trying to learn a fight. Better to read about it then actually learn versus dying a half dozen times in frustration before you figure out what's going. I'm sitting on 4 Atziri fights right now but am still trying to over level as much as possible so the fight sucks a little less. To be honest I think I'm just afraid of going in and finding out my build doesn't cut the mustard for that fight. Mostly I get by with a ton of defensive stacking and life leech and fights take as long as they take. But whenever there's a DPS threshold to meet, I usually fall well under it. You generally know you have a real dps problem when all it takes is a shit rare combo with life regen and/or Soul Eater to ruin your day.

[frostshotgg]

I mean at some point there's going to have to be stuff that isn't quite kosher from an immediate visibility perspective, or at least without having a paragraph explanation. I wouldn't object to a bestiary of sorts, that would honestly be super neat, but that's not happening any time soon.

As it is, Atziri is fairly benign. The Vaals are entirely fair game, they're a boss you've fought before with maybe one new attack that's a skill the player has access to. The Trio is pretty visually obvious what each of them does. Atziri herself has a lot of really well telegraphed stuff that gives you plenty of time to react like flameblasts and stormcalls. The one part that's not great is the split phase but at some point you're going to learn by trial-and-error what each of them do, and as long as you don't immediately go full ham and try to kill them, you get a chance to read the mods on each of them that tell you immunities and that the mirror one reflects.

[Kanil]

Still, I think the Piety fight preceding that in some ways is a worse fight. I hate the mandatory "and now you must run X fast in Y pattern or die instantly" mechanics. You can flask through a couple of those but that's it, and you're fighting in a damn closet by comparison to pretty much all boss fights, where spawns at the start actively get in your way.

I personally don't mind Piety's whirling death beam. I just hate that she has so much HP that you end up seeing it a dozen times.

I suppose that's typical for PoE, the bosses go on way too damn long. Actually, the more I think about it, for a game where big numbers=difficulty, I kinda like Piety's whirling death beam, because it's different. Not quite Vaal Oversoul actually enjoyable boss fight different, but it's something.

[Aklyon]

No legacy drillnecks is a bit mean I suppose, but its been Superior Quiver for ages now, it was gonna happen eventually.

Also, they may or maynot have finally fixed the perandus mobs of laggy doom.

[nenjin]

Got through Merciless Lab last night with my 73 Blade Flurry DoT Assassin. That's the lowest level I've yet beaten the lab with. I sort of broke down and compromised and made a character around BF rather than just adopt it on my Scion tank.

And it's pretty damn good, even after all the nerfs. Superior to most melee skills on its face, anyways. It'd actually compliment my Scion's build, it just I dunno...feels cheap as hell after I got that far with just the classic melee skills.

Anyways, my Shadow is Energy Shield/EVA. I know, I know. The meta says I'm a fool and I'll get wrekt'd scrub. So far though, sub Level 80 it's been totally doable. Yeah, there are some nasty one shots out there, and for all the trash people talk about Armor, when you have none and take a hit on your health it's fuckin scary. But in general good reactions and judgment can make it work. I was dreading Izaro Merciless and it's true, his mortar blasts will pretty much kill you (I'm 2.8k Life/1.3k ES something right now) in one barrage with any amount of damage missing or curse debuffs on you or whatever. But supplement with a little fortify, enduring cry....and you make up the difference pretty well. I more or less had Izaro beat the first time I fought him. Then I proceeded to get disconnected about 4 times, 20 minutes apart, from the Lab despite having rock solid latency. Then GGG brought the realm down to replace a database and tanked another run. Then I DC'd again. >< After like 3 goddamn hours of trying to beat Izaro Merciless, mostly through no fault of my own, I finally beat it. Guess he must have rolled the "Shit Servers" mod that day.

Really enjoying my Shadow more than I expected. It's the first character I made in PoE back in Open Beta and I haven't been back to him in years. But after playing a heavy shield tank for long, it's kind of liberating to not only do a shit load of damage but also not have to stand and deliver for it to happen.

[nenjin]

Checked up on my PoE patch notes since they're releasing a lot of manifestos right now in the lead up to FoO.

Spoiler: Witness the nerf! (click to show/hide)

We'll be making a large number of changes to Energy Shield and other defences as part of the Fall of Oriath Beta. This manifesto aims to explain why we've decided to make changes to Energy Shield, and what these changes will be.

Why was a change required?

The Chaos Inoculation Keystone let Energy Shield entirely replace Life as the resource that made up a character's effective health pool, rather than just augmenting it. Because Energy Shield comes inherently on Intelligence-based equipment and has multiple mods that increase the value from the equipment, we saw a far greater growth in Energy Shield values from well-rolled items than we did life bonuses.

This factor, as well as other factors like the increase to Energy Shield from Intelligence and the power of the Discipline Aura, meant that with very well rolled items, a player could achieve colossal values of Energy Shield. We've seen characters reaching over 25,000 Energy Shield while still having the damage output to sufficiently complete all of the content in the game, compared with the 9,000 Life that a very heavily invested Life character with perfect items could reach.

In addition, the Vaal Pact, Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath keystones could be used to compensate for any situation where the build found itself lacking, with the small exception of Life Flasks.

The combination of a huge effective health pool and complete access to recovery mechanics removed almost all of the challenge from the very toughest encounters in the game.

To solve this problem, we've made some changes at certain points that reduce the power of Energy Shield at the very end of the game, without undermining it at lower levels.

Reductions to levels of Energy Shield
All local Energy Shield modifiers on items, as well as the base Energy Shield of items, have been reduced at higher levels. Very low-level items will see a slight increase or no change, scaling up to a 33% reduction at the highest tier of modifiers.

Below is a screenshot showing a comparison of similar items before and after the change.
VaalRegaliaBefore VaalRegaliaAfter


Because of Armour/Energy Shield and Evasion/Energy Shield equipment, we've had to apply this change to the local percentage modifiers on all other armour types as well. To compensate, all inherent values of base Armour and Evasion Rating on equipment are now greater at higher item levels.

We've also increased the defences granted by all Body equipment at higher levels by 20%.

These changes will not apply to already-rolled modifiers, but will apply to existing base types. Rerolling items with an old value will update it to the new values.

As a consequence, the Energy Shield values on many unique items have also been updated.
ShavsBefore ShavsAfter

We've also reduced the potential to increase Energy Shield from other sources.

    Chaos Inoculation no longer has a multiplier to Energy Shield on a notable behind the keystone.
    Elreon can no longer craft 5 to 20% increased Energy Shield on Rings. There are other crafted mod changes as well, mentioned below.
    Discipline now provides a lower value of base Energy Shield, up to 33% lower at level 20 of the gem. It now also provides 30% increased Energy Shield Recharge Rate.


After all of these changes, players will still be able to reach significantly higher values of Energy Shield than life. Current estimates are that a build that balances offence and defence and is well-geared can reach around 15,000 Energy Shield.

Vaal Pact, Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath
These keystones provided huge bonuses to Chaos Inoculation players without much of a downside. In the Beta, we'll be trying out some extreme changes to Vaal Pact and Ghost Reaver. We'll be iterating on these changes during the Beta.

Vaal Pact
This keystone will no longer affect Energy Shield in any way. It will only apply to Life Leeched. This is because the higher effective health pool provided by Energy Shield trivialized some encounters where Vaal Pact let you restore all of your pool in under a second, if your damage was sufficient.

Ghost Reaver
This keystone had a huge downside for characters specialized in both Life and Energy Shield, as they could no longer leech any life, but had no penalty for pure Energy Shield Chaos Inoculation characters. Because of this, we've now added a multiplier to Energy Shield Recharge Rate to the keystone, so players will be trading Recharge Rate for leech.

Zealot's Oath
This keystone currently has no changes to it, but we may be trying out changes during the Beta.

Master Crafting
We've made some adjustments to Master Crafting values. Most notably, local flat bonuses to Energy Shield now have a more powerful higher tier modifier. The goal of this modifier is to make it easier to craft worthwhile Energy Shield items, making it easier to start using Chaos Inoculation or hybrid Life-Energy Shield items.

As mentioned above, you can no longer craft % increased Energy Shield on Rings. We've greatly reduced the cost of this mod so that it is cheaper to place on Amulets.

Here are the values of the new craftable mods available from Haku:

    +27-34 to Maximum Energy Shield can be applied to all Armour Slots
    +35-45 to Maximum Energy Shield can be applied to Body Armour, Shield and Helmet
    +56-69 to Maximum Energy Shield can be applied to Body Armour and Shield


Below is a screenshot showing an example of the above mods.
HubrisNewCorrected

New Item Modifiers
We're also going to be adding a series of new modifiers to items, and replacing what can be rolled on some hybrid armour to both improve Life values and to increase the total defences on hybrid armour.

All armour will have a new Prefix modifier that can be rolled that increases flat defences (Armour, Evasion, or Energy Shield) and grants a small value of added maximum Life.

    18 to 23 Life and +14 to 20 Armour/Evasion Rating OR +8 to 10 Energy Shield
    24 to 28 Life and +21 to 42 Armour/Evasion Rating OR +11 to 15 Energy Shield
    29 to 33 Life and +43 to 95 Armour/Evasion Rating OR +16 to 25 Energy Shield (Not on Gloves and Shields)
    34 to 38 Life and +96 to 120 Armour/Evasion Rating OR +26 to 30 Energy Shield (Only on Body Armour)


Below is a screenshot showing a body armor with both a maximum Life modifier and the new Armour and maximum Life modifier.
LifeNew

We'll be changing flat added defence mods on multi-defence armours as well. Previously an Armour/Energy Shield item could roll both flat local Armour and flat local maximum Energy Shield as separate mods. These pieces will only be able to roll a combined mod that has both of those stats, at 75% their value. This means that Hybrid armours will have a lower potential rating of an individual defence, but better total defences. We'll be keeping a close eye on this change during the Beta as it grants a lower effective health pool for Energy Shield characters, but the bonus defences may compensate for this when used alongside other pure Energy Shield items.

We're also going to be adding a series of new suffix modifiers to rare body armours to give them something more rewarding. Body Armours that grant Evasion will be able to roll additional Dodge Chance. Body Armours that grant Armour will be able to roll additional Physical Damage Reduction, and Energy Shield armours will be able to roll additional Energy Shield recharge rate. We may be adding other interesting modifiers as suffixes to other item slots during the Beta, if this is successful.

As you can see, there are a lot of changes to Energy Shield, as well as item defences in general. We've gone for an approach that adjusts a wide variety of factors, so we're relying on the Beta to give us time to evaluate how this affects different aspects of Energy Shield builds. We're looking forward to seeing how these changes evolve during the Fall of Oriath development and beyond.

You can spot the ES/CI build players right now in the manfiesto thread by how hard they're freaking out. Personally, having never played ES/CI (just a poor man's ES build for my Witch), I'm looking forward to someone else feeling the pain of life builds like I do right now. I still predict it will outperform life builds, but now at least I don't have to hear about people face rolling content that face rolls me, like I'm the asshole for not playing ES/CI.

[frostshotgg]

large ES values were a bit ridiculous, but I think they hit CI too hard. ES does have its downsides, and the "Life is technically better than ES" comment a dev got lambasted for still holds true. Point for point, Life is more valuable. The break even point has been, in my experience, around 1.5 times before ES starts to feel better. If entry level CI gear only leaves me at 6k and it's exalts plural to get above 9k, that just seems like too much pain and absolutely not worth it. Characters who had 25k ES before had dumped unreasonable amounts of currency into their builds, and scaling that down so much seems likely that CI without a moderate fortune to spend will just be miserable.

[Aklyon]

CI will sort itself back out eventually, what I'm interested in is where will all the people who relied on VP for their ES combat regen go. Since it seemed like half the time leech was holding some aggressive builds together.

[nenjin]

Heh, think I'll wait a day for the shit storm to settle and some mandatory bug fixes to happen. Prime Time in PoE can be a bit of a shit show, so prime time on the biggest content update they've ever done is probably going to be a nightmare.

[RoguelikeRazuka]

After a years-long break I've recently started playing PoE again, and now I want to take a slightly different approach to get good at it rather than I used in my first attempts -- do you think it's worthwhile or viable trying to figure everything out purely on your own through trial and error, that is not playing or even looking up (maybe rarely) other people's builds, not consulting anyone or anything other than general tips and guides and the wiki for reference? Just picking a character and play style that I like and trying to forge a build from scratch? I mean, when PoE was first launching, everyone played it just like that (I guess), so why can't I do the same now that the new league has started?

I used to play PoE on a regular basis in 2013-2014, when I tried to learn things via following various builds made by other people for various characters and play styles, and trying to gather valuable or useful information from reading their guides and playing their builds, but that failed.

[nenjin]

I'm a Solo Self Found player. I've made it up through T9 maps in the end game strictly under my own steam, and the wiki, at Level 88. I'd occasionally read someone's build and cherry pick a couple cute gem combinations (like Tempest Shield + Blind), but other than that I've never tried to replicate someone else's build, nor do I think that sounds remotely fun in a game as expansive as PoE. All my character builds are made by me, with some informed reading on some threads on the PoE forums but no point for point copying of gear or skill tree choices. A lot of my builds work because I've found decent enough uniques and Lvl 70+ yellow gear to support them, but that's pretty much every build in PoE. The only thing I've ever traded to get in PoE was a Shield Charge gem back before you could just buy gems from quest NPCs. I sell the occasional duplicate unique for a couple of Chaos now and then, otherwise I do no trading.

So yeah, I'd say it's totally viable if you have the time to put in to it, and are willing to table or shelve a character until the right gear is available to them.

RE: Fall of Oriath. What a mess for standard players. The entire expansion was already beaten when I logged in. They took away a large chunk of my skill points and locked them behind dumb side quests. So upon logging in and spending 30 mins remapping skill points, I just had to go each one of the acts, collect my rewards for the main quests and run some low level crap to get my missing points back, so I could end the expansion exactly where I started. What fun, what thrills.

So I have no idea what happened in the story. I ran down a couple of the story bosses just to see them, smooshed them and kinda went "meh." Talked to some of the story characters before I found myself scrolling through their dialog without paying any real attention. Mostly I was just jumping from act to act with no real sense of why, and little ability to care.

So thanks GGG. Always appreciate the standard love. I know their attitude is "Just make a league character bruh and replay the game for the 40th time!" but I can't be fucking assed. Also, the entire story seems pretentious as fuck. Even more so than the rest of PoE. I get who Sin and Innocence are, I just don't get why they take up so much of the story and their dialog with each other is particularly abominable. At least with the other characters in the story there was a direct connection between why they're opening their mouths and the game you're playing. Sin is literally just there to be a writer's mouthpiece (because of course "you can't harvest the power of the gods yourself so let me create a NPC tag along who does it for you") and it's not even a particularly good one.  Also, why does it feel like every other normal human NPC in PoE is a sailor, a ship's captain or a smuggler? We got those two new smuggler characters that show up in all acts with, I swear, some of the cringiest voice acting PoE has ever offered. The chick in particular makes me feel like I need to take a bath after listening to her talk.

The gods too, who are supposed to be ya know, bad ass gods? Barely get any treatment other than "Hey go kill this guy." One of them doesn't even have a quest per se that I could find. I noticed there was a zone I hadn't explored after clearing the FoO and found the boss there, that I retroactively got a reward for after defeating. Their models aren't that amazing and some are even recycled assets, nor are their fights that cool. The areas don't feel like they're under their sway at all, they're gods in name only. Oh and one of the new Pantheon bosses straight up DCs you from the server at the same point in his fight, every time.

I've tolerated PoE's writing and story up until now but even I don't have the patience for FoO's self-indulgent tripe. The whole thing has MAGNUM OPUS stamped across it in 40 foot high letters, only it isn't that good.

All in all, I'm underwhelmed by FoO. Other than the new tilesets and a couple of new enemies, it mostly feels like recycled trash regurgitated into another 5 acts. I wasn't expecting the moon, but about the freshest thing in the expansion to me is the enemies who now launch an attack when they die by default, or the changes to Volatile Blooded enemies. The Pantheon System seems like a joke, yet another extension to the mapping system with a non-scaling pay off that most end game players will have wrapped up in a month.

I like the continuity now of kill Malachai --> watch Oriath Burn --> kill the gods --> become the Ascendant Emperor. That's a nice personal story arc for your character. But that's about the only fluff I find interesting in the whole mess.

Also this league seems like one of the laziest. An entire league to farm for shards of existing currency, or shards for new some currency that, other than the Mirror of Kalandara or w/e, seems mostly like junk.

If there is one silver lining to me in FoO, it's that the difficulty curve in PoE is now finally feels reasonable. I had exactly zero troubles with any of the major fights (I didn't fight Kitava so, maybe she's as ridiculous as pre-FoO Malachi was.) Granted my main is pretty OP for story content but still. I was expecting some GGG style difficulty spikes and didn't find them. Which I'm happy about. I feel like the real ball breaking content should be in the end game anyways, not in the lead up to the end game.

[Kanil]

If there is one silver lining to me in FoO, it's that the difficulty curve in PoE is now finally feels reasonable. I had exactly zero troubles with any of the major fights (I didn't fight Kitava so, maybe she's as ridiculous as pre-FoO Malachi was.) Granted my main is pretty OP for story content but still. I was expecting some GGG style difficulty spikes and didn't find them. Which I'm happy about. I feel like the real ball breaking content should be in the end game anyways, not in the lead up to the end game.

The amount of times I got instagibbed by the bosses playing through acts 7-10 is really the opposite of this experience, and is easily my least favorite part of the expansion.

That the game drops maps, gives me a map device, and then tells me "go bury Kitava in your corpses first" adds to my frustration. To think Merciless Act 4 was an upgrade, if for no other reason than that you didn't have to actually bother with it.

At least I don't have to do it again any time soon.



Also, considering how much I dislike act 4, act 9 is actually reasonably enjoyable. This surprised me.