The only way you could emulate a feeling in D2 if played as a kid, is to install the original game or the remastered version of diablo 2. PoE2 is its own kind of thing that does not come close to what diablo 2 was on its release. Diablo 2 was far ahead on anything else releated to arpg at the time.
Yeahh idk about making it into another campaign, without a clear campaign end the campaign stops mattering. I was hoping endgame felt more delve than it really does but really it's just a worse version of mapping so far, I'm not entirely sold on it yet. That being said they literally only decided to put endgame in on EA launch in early October so the fact we have an endgame at all is impressive to me and it makes sense that it's not quite as fleshed out as the rest of the game right now. It definitely needs a load of work before actual launch, but being a meaningful part of that process is essentially what you buy into a beta for. I think the worst part about it as it stands is effectively the lack of content on the nodes, I suppose they made it so the content spreads realistically as it would on full launch but a lot of the leagues are missing so the nodes rolling those missing leagues turn out empty and that feels bad. Then similarly failing a node, especially since the game is so unbalanced still, feels really bad when you lose your content that you invested in because you got 1tapped offscreen or got nuked by a poorly telegraphed ground effect. Might be better to give a loot quant or rarity penalty for each time you do fail a node rather than just make it a blank node. There are probably better solutions out there as well but either way making it blank isn't quite the right one I don't think. It's not Last Epoch where you just click a node and it shits out whatever you want, you have to invest in making content good in poe and losing that investment permanently over 1 single mistake in the entire map feels bad. It fails to achieve the sometimes jumpscare goal they've set for the game and turns it into a you're better on high alert 100% of the time kinda thing.
As a new Poe player hopping from campaign to endgame feels like graduating elementary school and then being dropped off at your college dorm room. Very jarring for me, and I don’t feel any real urge to do it sadly. I got to tier 10 and just got bored and rerolled.
The endgame is undercooked, with only 5~ months of dev time poored into it. Don't feel bad for not having a blast in endgame, it's far from perfect atm.
Like the person above me said, endgame is undercooked. Jonathan Rogers stated in several interviews that the endgame is the least tested part of the game. GGG is full of Michelin Star Chefs, they will cook up something phenomenal. Be patient and you'll be pleased.
It's sadly always been like that the type of gear you need for campaign compared to postgame was just different that never paid attention to the build in poe 1
Endgame is just PoE1 gameplay already, hopefully they tone it down to stick to their "vision" of more purposeful and meaningful combat instead of just blasting PoE1 style.
I don't see an issue with them staying loyal to their base. Entry level was an issue as I myself logged into poe1, looked at the talent tree and said NOPE and uninstalled. This game explained things better and has the best of both worlds.
LMFAO! Just a week ago the loud minority were crying that endgame was "too slow", now the general consensus is that we're back to PoE1 blasting. People really need to hold off on their impulsive judgments when they're still trudging through Act 2. // this isn't a sleight at you specifically OP, just saying this in general
Quick stash on a controller is bugged right now in places where you can drop items. It drops items instead, for example in trials where you have stash.
The patch to help melee in Trial of Sekhamas also applied to ranged aswell so it literally defeated the whole point of melee being worse than range with the honour system. The only way to fix it would be to give melee weapons a 50% reduction to Honour damage when wielded as currently it's so hard on melee and so easy on ranged.
It's is gambling for many players.. or foolish gambling, really. If you understand the market / base items / currency / possible outcomes etc, it then becomes "educated gambling." There is a massive difference in the two
You do realize that gambling is part of what makes these games work, right? GGG does it in an ethical way rather than loot boxes which translate into player power. It has to be random otherwise there is no dopamine hit when you do craft an item worth bragging about. If we could just craft what we want, when we want it's just monotony rather than winning at life.
if that's the case, poe 1 doesn't have crafting either, that whole thing is just gambling where you're occasionally able to stack the odds in your favor
@@dma736 last epoch did it right in my opinion, there is a random factor but there is also some control, also in poe 2 it is even more restricted than in poe 1.
Not really enjoying the auction house that is outside of the game.. and the fact that you almost have to use it to push end game reliably… furthermore most people I don’t think even know it exists
I am a father of two autistic boys that demand a lot of time, I love them and my wife, I love video games but since we have them we have to put something away and for me was the game I don't have the time, recently and because our boy's are doing fine I got the chance to get a steam deck, and one mother later path of the exile 2 came out, and feel like I haven't feel for a long time about video games, excited to make a new build and have some fun, yes it's just a little time I can take out I got so much fun, I won't change anything of my life, but for me it's definitely a game to make you feel good at my 42 year's old
Levelled up 4 character to past act 3. I genuinely don't think there is a big difference in difficulty between normal and cruel. What I do think makes it however feel huge is when you find a well rolled item in act 3, specifically a martial/attack weapon. It almost seems as if the modifiers on items in and around act 3 are way too strong for where they should be at that level. This at least was my experience.
That’s undeniably how they will do it. Otherwise if they’d release each act separately, they’d also have to remove one Cruel difficulty replay act each time a new regular act is added, making the campaign towards endgame all lopsided and weird. It also builds up way more hype by releasing all the final acts at launch as a way to mark the release of 1.0, it’s easier to do mainstream marketing around, etc. It’s all around just the way to do it.
Trials are cool, but the fact that they are mandatory for ascending is absolutely dumb. I was doing 4th ascendancy yesterday in trial of sekhemas and I can tell you last boss is just way over tuned, you need either a broken build or you need to invest hundreds of exalts to even have a shot, it actually made me frustrated a lot seeing how much life that boss has and I had a perfect run basically, I had almost no afflictions and I had all the minor boons that exist, literally all of them and I still only took 60% of bosses life and I just ran out of potions. And as a deadeye my last ascendancy is quite important, but even if not, it feels awful to say I will play with only 6 ascendancy points, shouldn't be like that at all, the only good(sarcasm) thing is that a lot of ascendancy points actually suck on most classes, which also needs to be addressed. All in all, I already put like 130 hours in poe2 and I love the game, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done, especially balancing in the end game, like many say it just feels like poe1 after you finish cruel difficulty and I think that should not be the case. I think it this game should be a bit more tactical in the end game like it was in the campaign, game needs to be different from poe1 else what's the point. Another thing is that games performance suffers so much in the end game it's actually scary, I had stable 60 fps (vsync enabled) all throughout levels 1-70 untill I started doing crazy builds and juicing, the game is having visual strokes, fps drops hard, it starts lagging even, I mean it is quite bad, not as bad as it sounds, but it is very substantial. Hope stuff will be ironed out
You make solid points knowing ggg they will address gamer criticism how they balance opinions like yours and of those whom want a game closer to poe 1 remains to be seen.
Very valid points and I applaud you for clarifying it's not as bad as it sounds. Half the community are doomsayers and the other half are doomsayer-haters. We need more open-minded discussions, not trash talk. Kudos for the well thought out critique.
same happened to me yesterday. was a breeze up until zarokh, he would have been a breeze too if he didnt have a fuckton of health. other than that i feel it was a fun fight, but the amount of hp he has, especially compared to the earlier bosses in the trial is nuts.
@@alexshtyn6336 I just want the game to be good and would be nice if it's different from poe1, I will probably still jump in to some poe1 seasons, I like that game too
@@matthewmcconaublaze7008 it's just the way people express themselves, that's mostly the problem, they make it sounds so bad that they forget its early access for that reason so it would be amazing after a year or so
sometimes i forget we are only 2 weeks in. while things do need to be changed i think some people ive seen talk about it like its been out for like 2 months and hasnt been touched at all
I agree - I prefer not to interact with trade. What's the point of playing/grinding if you're just going to pick your gear out on the marketplace? There should be a SSF mode that boosts gear drops substantially and allows us that prefer to find stuff in the wild to get what we want too!
the only bad thing right now are the crashes and failing to load textures... literally cost me my ascendency points just half an hour ago by crashing when the boss was at 30% HP
My biggest problem with the trial of the sekhemas, and Sanctum in poe1 is that it's GGG's attempt at a roguelike system, but it's built in a fundamentally different way than almost any roguelike I've ever played. Look at Hades, Slay the Spire, Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, any roguelike of the last 10 years, and they're all giving you player power consistently through the run, you're getting buffs, you're getting new cards, new tools to help you push through the progressive difficulty. Now look at Sanctum/Trial of the Sekhemas. Almost every single room gives you an affliction, and certain """minor""" afflictions are build breaking (how is "You have no evasion" a minor affliction when evasion is all the defenses Monks have) and boons are few and far between. I've had entire trial runs where I saw a single shop and 1-2 boon floors, and by the end of the trial I had 10-15 afflictions and maybe 1-3 boons. As someone who mostly plays roguelikes, Sanctum/Sekhema feels like GGG attempted to push into a niche I adore, but they did in the absolute wrong way. Roguelikes need a scaling difficulty, but they need to first and foremost provide player power to help push back against that scaling difficulty. Afflictions in every room feels antithetical to the entire roguelike progression system.
On the topic of Cruel being a stompfest, I think that's a non-issue tbh. Cruel being as easy as it is probably stems from the fact that all of the bosses throughout acts 1-3 were designed with the player's current level of power in mind. Geonor was designed with the idea that a level 15 player with mostly blue gear and level 3 skills would be in the arena with him, so when a level 50 player with level 13 skills and a full suite of rares with +gem levels and 105% increased phys damage on their weapons comes along, he's gonna fall over because he just wasn't designed with that player in mind. I think once cruel goes away and acts 4-6 come out, with their bosses designed for players having the toolkits generally provided in those acts, I think we'll see the difficulty curve stay a lot more consistent. I DO hope they address the endgame in some way, but also with how quick its development turnaround time was, I think we should be considering what we have now as a pre-alpha version of the endgame, it's a framework and likely the first or second major iteration of the system. We should be loud about it, we should give consistent, sometimes scathing feedback, because systems in their infancy like this NEED to be scrutinized. I'm confident that by 1.0 we'll have a much more consistent campaign experience and a much much more well thought out and put together endgame, and frankly, I can't wait to be here every step of the way to that.
My biggest issue has been the third floor of the first chaos trial getting bugged like 15 times in a row. The chaos machines would be placed too close to the elevator and would make it so the switch to bring the elevator down wouldn’t work. Took me 4 hours just to get back to the bird because of the bug.
Fun fact, I killed the 4th floor boss 3 times, 2 times with getting lucky with merchant in the room before and getting the immunity to dmg boon for the next room ^^
one thing i don't really see people suggesting for sekhemas are relics that let you see 1+ rooms ahead. just having one of those on top of resistance relics is quite helpful for picking safe/less harmful rooms.
My two cents about the trials: I think the main problem lies in the fact that the tokens are limited, expensive and perishable. In my opinion you should either get a "quest version" of the tokens until you complete them that's way more forgiving or let the trials be difficult but make it so losing all your honour only costs you the end of trial rewards, but you can still kill the bosses and receive the points for Sekhema and dying simply resets the round and loses the corrupted rares for ultimatum. Basically if you screw up but can defeat the content, you get your points. That way the people farming that content for money have the regular difficulty as GGG intended and the people that can't complete the content at the intended difficulty (or just don't like it) can brute-force it and move on to stuff they actually enjoy.
Another problem with the trials is that, as they were originally created for PoE, they don't consider the fact that we don't have movement skills on PoE 2, and that makes a hell of a difference, not only for sanctum. Edit: i think that the difficulty in endgame it's designed like that because people was scared of it being too slow, and they were pretty vocal about it.
My favourite thing about poe2 so far is crafting and how accessible it is. I think I interacted with the crafting systems more than I did in 2000 hours of poe1, and it felt great.
@@standylixgames7757 *IF* you know what to do: No. Fractured mods, Essence, Fossils and Meta Mods help you hugely on archiving the combination of mods that you want. This however is blocked behind a wall of knowledge that you first need to understand (and also currency). You need to know what "Weights" are. What "Prefixes" and "Suffixes" can roll on any given items. Which mods come from what mechanic exclusively. Etc. Etc. From the standpoint of a person that does not do a lot of crafting: It sure as hell looks like Pure RNG. From the standpoint of a person that does a lot of crafting: it's a lot less then you think it is. However, It costs time, currency and a good battleplan.
I realize there are probably far too many comments for you to respond, but--i do wonder how much of the transition to zooming is a result of the dodge rework. Even on a 2nd character with limited stash assistance (20k gold no items) i felt the new dodge allowed me to run and gun through previously dangerous situations. It put me in this strange place where i was glad everytime i didnt get surrounded and killed, but i simultaneously felt it made the game worse.
i am in the minority, i dislike the dodge change, but everytime i voice this, i am mobbed. i think ggg moved too quick on it. same with the rares IMO, currency needed to drop more, items needed to drop the same amount or possibly less at endgame.
@@TalkativeTri Dodge needed to be changed from the way it was. Surely you saw too many of the times getting were mobbed off screen into a really cheap death, no learning from it or skill expression other than kill or be killed asap (POE1 style). Devs even felt that playing themselves youd get trapped too often and it only got worse in maps, (breach would have been a nightmare come on) the dodge roll change like this is much easier than reworking all mobs and maps to have more resonable hit boxes and designs.
I think with the way maps currently are especially Breach, Ritual combined with having the objective be 'kill all rares' zooming was inevitable, very few people want to spend 10+minute per map getting little reward. Honestly what im feeling is the dodgeroll changed helped the most in Acts, maps its or be killled with rolling normally just slowing me down, or theres so many mobs I cant roll out anyway, which is what they wanted.
About the leaderboard meta. One thing to consider is diference in popularity and skill. If a class has a higher overall representation it could skew the data
I wish we could reset the atlas already. I'm lv80, and i've found no point of interest on the atlas yet. No "citadels", no "vendors", no "tainted paradise". No nothing. :S I'm thinking on rerolling just to push my luck on a new character. I've gone almost 30 maps in each direction and explored via every tower along the way. Nothing interesting as far as i can see. Yet.
The thing about the souls comparisons, poe2 does not allow you the infinite retries that souls games do. Poe1 having ridiculous 1 shots makes sense because the actual game is the damn spreadsheet. So you can just adjust the formula of your build and see what happens When you make player skill a factor into the gameplay, you can't rely on that, and need to make challenge geared towards the fact that players are going to practice boss fights, and need many many retries.
Honestly the endgame is good but those citadelles and stuff are impossible to find and there could definitely be more maps, but that will come with time
As far as ascendancy is concerned, just for the first one you have to do with ultimatum or sanctum, is make the options static. If they are static you can predict everything. In POE, The trials were always the same until it changed and then it would stay the same again until it changed again. It could actually be just like that too. I think that would be enough to make a big enough impact.
tbh honest, I think the biggest problem with people and the gear is actually finding enough gear and being able to craft them efficiently. I totally agree with you on the point about the Runes as this is a contention that I really end up steamed up about, allowing people to be able to remove or overwrite the installed runes is an awesome idea since PoE allowed you to remove gems that were installed as THEY were integral items to your character which is also the same in regards to Runes, they ARE INTEGRAL for our characters survival.
The trial of Chaos / ultimatum is a good ideia, I liked, just need some balance in the debuffs. But the trial of Sekehma just be just deleted or remove this "honor" shit. I hated sanctum and I hate this fucking Sekehma trial. One good ideia, in my opinion, would let the player choose between playing with honor against weaker mobs or with your own life / resistances against stronger mobs.
8:34 I've doing Warrior as my 3rd character, and tbh it's only about doing it later (10+ levels above the monsters) where it guarantees your success in completing the ToS almost having 90% of your honor still.
Great video! I totally get the PoE1 vibes from the endgame. However, I often feel like I'm just hopping on maps aimlessly without a clear goal. It’s like wandering around, completing towers to clear the fog, and maybe finding a hideout, only to realize there’s no direct path and I need to go around the island 🤣. Moving away from the origin usually leaves me disoriented. There doesn't seem to be a sense of progression like, 'oh, I am in yellow maps now,' or 'ok nice, I cleared all white maps.' This absence makes it tough to gauge where I stand in the game, which is a bit frustrating. Like you mentioned, maybe it's all a placeholder for now. But I really hope they give us more defined short, mid, and long-term goals for our map progression. It would make the journey through the endgame feel more rewarding and structured.
8:37 idk how viable this is, but i’m a close range merc and energy shield helped a lot in close combat. Hits on a shield don’t count against honour. So it may just want you to build different, but you’ll have to meet int requirements
I'm not using the Steam client either - although I keep wondering if there would be advantages to do so? I think Steam has something like precompiled shaders cache? Anyone else has these long delays sometimes when you toggle the world map?
the only issue I'm having is that my monk just randomly got bricked while i was trying to load into molten vault. just perma crashes when i try to load my monk but i can play other characters no problem. not sure if anyone else has experienced this and knows a fix but any advice would help i need my monk back T_T
I agree with most things in this video, been playing PoE1 since beta. here's my personal PoE2 feedback from 150 hours invoker monk. - Third ascension for sekhema needs to be 2 floors only, 3 floors is way too much time investment+RNG for someone who just wants their sub class to WORK. i had to spend 2 hours getting familiar with sanctum and the relics before i could pass my level 80+ monk through a lvl 69 sekhema trial. - The endgame map grind. The map tiles and bioms need to generate actual content. If you're going to make maps some wierd delve hybrid without fuel (massive win btw), get the delve encounters in there! There are so many possible events and things you could put on the sadly mostly EMPTY map spaces: Weapons, armor, bandits and other hostile encounters, rare beasts, merchants, jewelry, currency. - Boss tablets for laser towers, FROM boss maps. Reward boss hunters for bosshunting, i wanna hunt more bosses.
you are so expressive man it's actually so engaging and refreshing to watch a video that feels like it's being PRESENTED to me. like you could be a newscaster or something, the professionality and sincerity of how you communicate through physical expression makes for such great videos. video is also structured fantastically
Quick note: If you're going to show hate comments you might want to blur the idiot's name so that they can't accuse of you targeting them for harassment. Avoid headaches later.
Haha what? So they allowed to call him out, but when all he does is show what they said in a comment, it’s a problem? Comments are public for a reason. More people need to be blasted for bad behavior, just my opinion tho. Cheers.
The wild thing is that we're still missing 2/3 of the skills/ascendancies and 1/2 of the campaign/monsters/bosses and it already feels like a full sized game. I wish they had one of the sharp or stabby weapons ready for early access tho. Melee feels kind of wonky with just maces and staves. And once the flail comes out, everyone and their mom will be playing some kind of paladin/crusader/templar character.
I know for me, clearing act 2 on my witch and sorc was definitely a challenge that felt like it took a lot of skill. But I thought the balance was just tuned high, and it'show they wanted it. Then I got a sick hammer drop, and decided to try warrior again. I killed the act 2 boss so fast it didn't even get to do most of it's mechanics. Now it's clear to me that I am building my casters very wrong, because my warrior feels 10x more potent, and even the ToS was a breeze.
I don't think every map needs bosses. But since you can see it on the endgame map in modifiers, there should be more of them. My guess would be, unless PoE2 engame changes significantly in future, that you fight boss roughly 1nce in 5 maps.
I have absolutely zero worries that when they come back from the holidays, they’re going to hit the ground running with updates and fix all of these issues.
I think loads of people were wanting to get into POE for a long time ! I remember all the way back when D4 was releasing, I was trying it out. But it was complicated and had a huge barrier to entry, so now we are on it instantly! And its been alot of fun !
Hey Tri, regarding the current class balance i highly reccomend watching sirgog's video on it today. Its mostly magic find killing build variety due to prefix/suffix pressure.
I think the sekhemas trial being essentially the sanctum mechanic is like you either LOVE IT or you HATE IT, and the trial of chaos is "that fucking bird that I hate" in its purest form.
I agree on the difficulty. My first character was a sorc, and I struggled to beat every boss I came across. Now that I have a bit of knowledge about the game, I created a 2nd character, monk, and am now cruising through the acts.
I think it's not only the trial's, but losing the maps / experience / opportunity from ☠️'s when you're towards the endgame. I remember seeing earlier people were* also losing maps if for some reason you lagged out or the game bugged and when you logged back in that map was gone, idk if that's still the case. I kind of don't see the need for crafting, cause you can just get an opportunity for better gear through trade, and if you can go through trade for the gear then it effects the players experience to learn things as well. " Oh I'm having trouble getting through campaign / maps, let me see what's in trade " instead of also engaging in the other systems available.
This is such a good general take. Thank you. PoE1 will still be there. When I wanna zoom, I'll return to that. I want to be deliberate with my movement and struggle accordingly. Uniroincally. The dopamine hit for setting up something complicated with the right position in this game is unreal.
I'm not quite up to maps yet (A3 cruel) on my Chayula monk and A2 and A3 cruel have definitely been a more of a grind. Ive also played Invoker to A1 cruel. I think the Invoker is just plain stronger to the point where I can imagine maps being a breeze. I dont anticipate this on the Chayula monk. So the question remains...do they intend to balance everything up to the level of the invoker, or rein things back to Chayula level where you need to work for everything more..?
We have the game in our hands, but aren't fully aware of the roadmap of content to come. This plays a major role in assessing if a system needs work, or if we don't yet have the full picture. Devs were pretty clear about shifting gear from focusing on campaign content to end game system work so the early access would have more time sink available. While I don't think that effaces them from criticism of general game pacing issues, there's very little reason for them to put major effort into cruelty acts 4/5/6. It's unfortunate that maces were the first weapon released given they have the profile of slow area of effect slams, which has lead people to the assumption that melee is slow and tedious. Maces may be, yet we're missing swords/daggers/claws/spears/flails/axes and the suite of supports and skills that likely could assist in alleviating the current melee playstyle. Its worth asking when something in the game feels bad if its because its missing content, or if the content is just missing the mark.
22:28 @TalkativeTri Something to consider (given you asked to know if you are completely wrong 😛) is that your lists of top classes... EA has been a dynamic situation. Stormweaver for example got heavily nerfed on day 4, BUT it is important to understand that the nerf really had the biggest impact on stormweaver's ability to get through acts 4-6 solo. MoM archmage stormweaver was always going to require a different build than cast on freeze comet. but ALL of the people with stormweavers that made it to endgame before the nerf didn't have a painful and long grind through acts 4-6. Day 5-9 of EA had those stormweavers already in endgame theorycrafting the builds they needed to move into to survive endgame content (translation: T15 & T16) ... You don't have access to archmage until later so you don't have access to that power and scaling in acts 4-6. The point however is this... a lot of the top leaderboard players not only have access to more power (on ANY build) but also have access to grinding more currency, so they have crazy gear as well. Ziz has a minion infernalist build with base 10K energy shield (and with grim feast he can over cap his energy shield to 20K)... the gear he has though isn't available on trade and even if it was it would be like looking at gear that cost mirrors in PoE1. That is just an example, the same is true of the stormweaver builds etc. (think about how mirror tier geared builds in PoE1 just erase uber pinnacle bosses) SO I wouldn't think that those builds are just over powered or not balanced etc... they are geared to the teeth and are at the top of the leaderboard because of that (and hours played, etc). Also, those builds were always going to be great builds to start in PoE2 because they are great builds in PoE1... Archmage MoM ... stacking mana scales your defense and damage... um... it better be at the top or there is a problem lol. Finally, are you wrong? I think that would be a bit dramatic... no one needs to die on their sword over this... I think in the next content update when druid and huntress are released they will be at the top of the list too... because those same skilled players that play a ton will play them and take them to the top and gear those classes/builds to the teeth... A more interesting metric/Poll might be about which class people played and where did they stop playing or rerolled to a new character.
The thing is we all want something slightly different, for end game grinding as humans we are always going to try to get as efficient as possible. If you want it to feel slower just put on a junk weapon and it will feel like act 1 again. It''s just early access so I expect a lot of things to change over time,
So I played as a warrior, and I was really enjoying the quest to tank and the difficulty of acts. Each of the trials broke what I had achieved, and after running them tens of times I still had no luck. Even the honor resistance (which I wanted) was hard to get, and when gotten wouldn't fit the small space given. So I did Sekhema when I completed act 3, Chaos when I got into Cruel. However, the time setback and the hours of failure isn't a fond memory, and the trials themselves hold dread and hopelessness. Cheers
It's going to be hard to make PoE2 endgame feel more PoE2 imo. The character on that level unlock so much power. And build will get even more crazy with new skills and weapons released.
The reward for doing the Trials should just be your ascendancy points. I’d gladly sacrifice loot and other rewards in the Trials when getting your points in exchange for easier modifiers/lower monster damage while doing them. Once you have your points, ramp the difficulty back up
First 3 acts are best, because: A) you have no gear B) tree is underdeveloped C) no sudden cheesy power to take from. And so devs could easily balance it in a right way. But powercreep destroys late game and no matter how hard devs will try, it will be zoom-zoom-Poe1 always. Especially so when you can trade everything.
I think wariors are struggling so hard right now in sekhemas because they opted to only give us maces as an option. If there was only 1 weapon we can use I think it would've been wiser to give us swords where the skill animations are likely to be a lot faster because well, they're swords that's literally the best part about a sword that they can react more quickly than axes or maces. I understand that they want that slam playstyle to get some shine and I'm sure it'll be good to have some cool slams in your kit later on. But without a sword in the offhand it is very rough because the only build that doesn't require you to stand still and take it to the face for like 2 seconds, which is easily the dumbest thing to do in the entire genre of ARPGs, is a totem build and that's a very niche playstyle a lot of people, especially those specifically opting into melee because they don't want to be ranged, don't like.
Completed my third ascendency through the Sekhemas last night on HC. I've only done them on ranged/mage classes so I can't comment on them, but once I figured out how relics and sacred water works, Sekhemas actually was quite fun. I enjoyed balancing buffs and debuffs, though think they could still use some balancing. No evasion/ES/armour as a minor affliction, for example, is silly. Again, can't comment on melee, but for anyone who hasn't enjoyed it, I'd defintely encourage you to try the relic system more.
What i appreciate most about this channel. You keep yourself incredibly professional. But when you interview others you let them be as crude(not a bad thing) as they normally are (DM). Keep it up brother man!
Deadeye is good, simple, and doesn't have weird baked-in downsides. I haven't ascended yet, but I'm running Molten Blast and looking forward to getting Far Shot and Endless Munitions.
Dunno if i've missed the tip, but i've seen some people use items like identify or slamming orbs without having to click the orb or scroll each time after using it. Going like, bam bam bam bam SLAM! in sequence. What hotkey is that?
For my first POE experience I am glad that I did not choose solo self found or hardcore. Even as a poor, the trading helps with gearing. The first week or so as Mercenary was a little bit sadistic. The first playthrough of the campaign has you rolling around on the ground psychotically, because everything one shots you and there's nothing to do about it. Cruel mode is much easier, because you can have defenses up, so that only the most powerful attacks one shot you, and there's some forgiveness and you don't have to ace everything perfectly. Runes prevent you from upgrading your gear because they cannot be overwritten. So starting was hell, it took me about 115 hours to get through cruel. Now for maps, they have both losing the waystone and the experience penalty. The higher level waystones are priceless. I say keep the experience penalty, but delete losing the map you are in. Especially if every map is going to have a boss. So the only way to level in maps is to not die on a boss. Or delete the map and less experience lost on death, but provide more way stones. I'm still in tier 3 waystones. Just let us portal back to town as often as we need to off-load the loot. I hate the "crafting" because it is gambling and non deterministic. The "crafting" is the worst part of the game. If we're going to have to gamble for gear then provide lots more materials and remove the shit stats from the pool. I think after cruel or all 6 Acts, new characters should have all of the skill points by the end of the campaign at the start of maps. What's the point of having the amazing skill map if only a few people ever experience it. I want to try all the different skill paths, but will need almost a thousand hours to get there. I am not playing the trials of ascension again until I save up more keys and level up at least 10 levels above. I'm just not strong enough to go the distance. I hope the trials get nerfed.
infernalist can be way too tanky because some physical, cold and ligthning damage can be reduced with chaos and fire resistance specifically and also the dog that has like 12k hp takes 20% of the damage you would take instead of you, add a lot of energy shield, the spirit gem that make enemies drop more energy shield to overcap yours AND add energy/armor nodes and equipment and your character is basically a walking mountain that never gets into melee for too long. i've survived things that oneshoted my friends.
I hope when it's all said and done, the endgame feels more like the campaign. But considering the endgame we have was a pivot a couple months away from the launch, and cruel was just a bandaid to hold us over for the time being, it's pretty remarkable as it is. I think the idea of a map not having a boss is fine, but I think it should be more 50/50 for people who enjoy the bosses abd want to seek them out. I'm optimistic that we'll see some pretty impressive updates in Q1 2025, and I'm looking forward to what the full EA version will look like.
PoE is also available through Epic Games Launcher which is how I am playing it. I think one major aspect keeping the players in the game is how satisfying it can be to finish a combo in the game. I often have a short phase of low damage while I build up my combo (e.g. generating power charges with the monk) just to get a huge damage spike killing a lot of enemies at once. This is a skill I have to learn as a player, not just a stat of the character becoming better, so every time I pull of such a combo I have a small dopamine shot and stay motivated and keep enjoying the game. Also the bosses are really really well made. They are challenging and feel very different from the rest of the game. Beating them (at least the first few times) feels very rewarding.
I don't think there's so much a 'melee' issue, as there's a warrior (and Chonk) issue. Maces are too slow and don't really have the damage to make up for it. Their attack speed penalties to the skills should be removed, I think. Two-handers are already slower attack wise and almost every mace skill has an inbuilt time that can't be reduced, so it should probably be fine. The rune system I think needs three major things, beyond being able to be overwritten: 1 - Runes need to level (reforge 3 into a 'greater' rune), 2 - More useful affixes that are make or break on an item being on a rune (movespeed on boots, for example), and 3 - Make it so that runes can't be combined with base items that already have their related 'affixes' (so no combining a 20% MS rune with a 30% MS boots for 50% move speed). It basically functions like the old school crafting bench, but without eating up an affix.
Something I don’t understand about the trials is what constitutes a successful run to get my points. So last night I did an ultimatum for my 3rd set of points. It said I had to do 7 rounds. So after completing the 7th round I was just presented with another trial… the 8th round. No points. And at that point the modifiers were stacked so bad that I knew I couldn’t survive another round. Simply put it’s very hard to understand what gets you those points. And like you said the RNG is brutal. It’s a pretty bold move to gate the ascendency points behind two of the hardest league content activities from poe1. I love the game but would love to see things adjusted so that it’s easier to understand what I have to do to get my points…
I finished the 3rd trail today, while i had a good run it don't think everything was down to luck. I intentionally gave up rooms with good rewards because the rooms after those would suck. Just made a few good decisions making it so i had full honour and +25% max on top of it in the last fight.
The issue is that when you get great gear and have all your passives, you're going to blast. There's nothing they can do to prevent this, unless nerfing every part of our complete classes, which would be a terrible idea. ARPGs are meant to blast, they all end up that way when you get your complete class.
I agree with your take on power progression and endgame already feeling a bit too zoomy, but it's a tricky thing to get right. Feeling like your relative power level has not increased much from act 1 to endgame is also not great as it kind of defeats the purpose of an ARPG. What I would like to see happen is a dialing down of monster density in end game and upping their tankiness a bit to bring back meaningfull engagements.
I don't necessarily agree that crafting is bad from a systemic point of view right now. I've always felt that PoE 1's initial crafting orb system was very elegant and all the deterministic stuff they bolted on later made it feel bloated and opaque. A simple thing they could do right now is just up the drop rate of exalted orbs. It would open up a lot more crafting opportunities. Right now I'm sitting with a stash tab full of blues that have great initial stats to craft on to, but not enough exalted orbs coming in to do so.
When you finish cruel campaign it felt like: growing up. You know as a kid the world is full of possibilities. And then you end up in some 9 to 5. On repeat. Constant mapping. A few reskins of campaign bosses here and there. Mapping continues. Same thing over and over. Just like my adult life. Kinda sucks. Completed the character build at lvl 72. After that it really feels empty.
I get that whole bit about character power being locked behind the trails being a problem, BUUIUT if they hate that they're so different from the main game ... Well they're going to have to get used to it. This is path of exile, the same guys that made an entire 3 month league about auto battlers and tower defense AND city builders. If they're not comfortable trying new things then they might not want to run many of the leagues when they start coming out
Thing is being forced into these things with such a big punishment for not being able to/wanting to do them. POE1 had much less of that than POE2 (not talking about number of systems, obviously 2 has less). PoE1 maybe youd get less lootdrops but you didnt have to engage with the autobattler, tower defence, ect and still have a fun league majority of the time. PoE2 so far you are forced into many systems that feel vastly different and its limiting build variety and playstyle, it's not an amount of systems problem, that they'll fix, it's the being forced to engage with so many systems you may not like and not having choice.
@@MagicalMajestic i mean you do get 3 (maybe 4) choices for what you want to do to ascend, as you can in fact just pick one and do it 4 times to get all your points. and in poe1 you had to do the labrynth and that place was worse imo. traps dealt a percentage of your hp no matter how much you had. all in all it was still a vastly different experience from the rest of the game regardless
@latincristo I didnt notice that, to get my 2nd set I felt had to do ultimatum then Sanctum after for 3rd, no Ultimatum was giving me more points. Atleast thats how the game explains it. I mean lab wasnt a better gameplay experience, but felt way less RNG and punishing than Sanctum or Ultimatum. It was certainly different but having one system to push through not 2 is better IMO.
i want a fucking option to swap ascendancy...like being locked out to artificially force you to play more by leveling the same class a second time for another 20h is the best recipe for having people quit.
My experience was I rolled through cruel 1, 2, 3 with my eyes closed never taking damage and NEVER dying. To getting 1 shot in Tier 1 maps within 30 seconds everytime.
am i wrong for thinking there were going to have some kinda death recap in the game, i swore they said in one of the dev talks that we were getting somthing like that.
I really hope they let us change ascendency sub class, even if it's only 1 time. I work too much to grind another merc to lvl 50 just to switch to gemling. Followed a build that was Witch hunter then changed it up quite a bit to fit my play style and Gemling has all the perks I want now
To be honest I really take Tri's "Too fast at the end game" sentiment with a grain of salt. The thing is when a player is well versed with the game and is packed rich with "Legacy Skill", that players perspective is already skewed. There's a lot of others coming in fresh that don't know the ins and out of PoE2 or ARPG in general that will go on the natural curve of the game as intended and that pace and experience is their own to do. On the other side of the fence with the same Legacy Skill, I do believe Tri's statements is definitely agreeable. I'm there with him like 80% depending on what character or build I use in the game, tempo will surely vary.
I spent 30 min fighting the 1st floor boss on my warrior. I had a reduced 40% damage and a monsters have 50% more health afflictions but I also had high honor resistance. So it was a slog of zdps on both sides.
I feel like I am 16 years old again playing Diablo 2 when I play PoE2.
I just got that feeling recently when I discovered Grim Dawn. Really looking forward to play PoE2 once it releases.
When i was 16, my buddy got diablo 2. I said "that game looks like shit!" And then went home to play Final fantasy 10. My how times have changed.
The only way you could emulate a feeling in D2 if played as a kid, is to install the original game or the remastered version of diablo 2. PoE2 is its own kind of thing that does not come close to what diablo 2 was on its release. Diablo 2 was far ahead on anything else releated to arpg at the time.
100% this literally feels like peak video game to me rn
best way to describe it for me too haha
16:40 if you listen closely you can hear someone trying to get the 4th ascendency point with a melee char in the background
submitting my vote to make PoE2 end game similar to acts 1-3
Agree. End game is too much POE 1. I will stop playing with eaach new char at end of campaign if it continues tobe POE1 like at endgame
Yeahh idk about making it into another campaign, without a clear campaign end the campaign stops mattering. I was hoping endgame felt more delve than it really does but really it's just a worse version of mapping so far, I'm not entirely sold on it yet. That being said they literally only decided to put endgame in on EA launch in early October so the fact we have an endgame at all is impressive to me and it makes sense that it's not quite as fleshed out as the rest of the game right now. It definitely needs a load of work before actual launch, but being a meaningful part of that process is essentially what you buy into a beta for.
I think the worst part about it as it stands is effectively the lack of content on the nodes, I suppose they made it so the content spreads realistically as it would on full launch but a lot of the leagues are missing so the nodes rolling those missing leagues turn out empty and that feels bad. Then similarly failing a node, especially since the game is so unbalanced still, feels really bad when you lose your content that you invested in because you got 1tapped offscreen or got nuked by a poorly telegraphed ground effect. Might be better to give a loot quant or rarity penalty for each time you do fail a node rather than just make it a blank node. There are probably better solutions out there as well but either way making it blank isn't quite the right one I don't think. It's not Last Epoch where you just click a node and it shits out whatever you want, you have to invest in making content good in poe and losing that investment permanently over 1 single mistake in the entire map feels bad. It fails to achieve the sometimes jumpscare goal they've set for the game and turns it into a you're better on high alert 100% of the time kinda thing.
would love it or a nice middle ground
As a new Poe player hopping from campaign to endgame feels like graduating elementary school and then being dropped off at your college dorm room. Very jarring for me, and I don’t feel any real urge to do it sadly. I got to tier 10 and just got bored and rerolled.
The endgame is undercooked, with only 5~ months of dev time poored into it. Don't feel bad for not having a blast in endgame, it's far from perfect atm.
Like the person above me said, endgame is undercooked. Jonathan Rogers stated in several interviews that the endgame is the least tested part of the game. GGG is full of Michelin Star Chefs, they will cook up something phenomenal. Be patient and you'll be pleased.
@@matthewmcconaublaze7008 Exactly! I have no doubts they'll make it great, we just gotta be patient :)
It's sadly always been like that the type of gear you need for campaign compared to postgame was just different that never paid attention to the build in poe 1
I'm also new to POE. Not a "grinder" at all but love doing different builds in act1-3, huge variety in how the classes play, lots of fun.
Endgame is just PoE1 gameplay already, hopefully they tone it down to stick to their "vision" of more purposeful and meaningful combat instead of just blasting PoE1 style.
Word.
Jup right now the endgame is just a worse version of what we already have in PoE1, which is said since the gameplay in the story is amazing.
Agreed, It's kind of sad :(
I don't see an issue with them staying loyal to their base. Entry level was an issue as I myself logged into poe1, looked at the talent tree and said NOPE and uninstalled. This game explained things better and has the best of both worlds.
LMFAO! Just a week ago the loud minority were crying that endgame was "too slow", now the general consensus is that we're back to PoE1 blasting.
People really need to hold off on their impulsive judgments when they're still trudging through Act 2.
// this isn't a sleight at you specifically OP, just saying this in general
Quick stash on a controller is bugged right now in places where you can drop items. It drops items instead, for example in trials where you have stash.
I've had the same bug. About a 30% chance items just go to the floor instead of stash since act 2.
For me, it’s just every trial location. It’s fine in towns.
@@UnrealGeniussame
I think its when you're in areas you can attack and theres a stache
@@Jubumby i believe it's areas where you can't drop items, then they consider going to stash. It's trials and first areas before town.
The patch to help melee in Trial of Sekhamas also applied to ranged aswell so it literally defeated the whole point of melee being worse than range with the honour system.
The only way to fix it would be to give melee weapons a 50% reduction to Honour damage when wielded as currently it's so hard on melee and so easy on ranged.
It's NOT crafting it is GAMBLING, you have ZERO agency over what stats you roll. RNG is not crafting, it sucks balls to be sure.
It's is gambling for many players.. or foolish gambling, really. If you understand the market / base items / currency / possible outcomes etc, it then becomes "educated gambling." There is a massive difference in the two
Agreed.
You do realize that gambling is part of what makes these games work, right? GGG does it in an ethical way rather than loot boxes which translate into player power. It has to be random otherwise there is no dopamine hit when you do craft an item worth bragging about. If we could just craft what we want, when we want it's just monotony rather than winning at life.
if that's the case, poe 1 doesn't have crafting either, that whole thing is just gambling where you're occasionally able to stack the odds in your favor
@@dma736 last epoch did it right in my opinion, there is a random factor but there is also some control, also in poe 2 it is even more restricted than in poe 1.
I want the crafting bench back
Not really enjoying the auction house that is outside of the game.. and the fact that you almost have to use it to push end game reliably… furthermore most people I don’t think even know it exists
I am a father of two autistic boys that demand a lot of time, I love them and my wife, I love video games but since we have them we have to put something away and for me was the game I don't have the time, recently and because our boy's are doing fine I got the chance to get a steam deck, and one mother later path of the exile 2 came out, and feel like I haven't feel for a long time about video games, excited to make a new build and have some fun, yes it's just a little time I can take out I got so much fun, I won't change anything of my life, but for me it's definitely a game to make you feel good at my 42 year's old
Levelled up 4 character to past act 3.
I genuinely don't think there is a big difference in difficulty between normal and cruel.
What I do think makes it however feel huge is when you find a well rolled item in act 3, specifically a martial/attack weapon.
It almost seems as if the modifiers on items in and around act 3 are way too strong for where they should be at that level.
This at least was my experience.
weapons are at least 80% of your characters dmg, like it should be the only thing you upgrade to have a smooth acts run.
They should make the first relic you get for the trial give Honour resistance so that players know the stat exists.
I personally hope they don’t dripfeed acts 4-6 and they save them all for the official launch.
That’s undeniably how they will do it.
Otherwise if they’d release each act separately, they’d also have to remove one Cruel difficulty replay act each time a new regular act is added, making the campaign towards endgame all lopsided and weird. It also builds up way more hype by releasing all the final acts at launch as a way to mark the release of 1.0, it’s easier to do mainstream marketing around, etc. It’s all around just the way to do it.
same
@@CrossfacePanda Need to test the act
Trials are cool, but the fact that they are mandatory for ascending is absolutely dumb. I was doing 4th ascendancy yesterday in trial of sekhemas and I can tell you last boss is just way over tuned, you need either a broken build or you need to invest hundreds of exalts to even have a shot, it actually made me frustrated a lot seeing how much life that boss has and I had a perfect run basically, I had almost no afflictions and I had all the minor boons that exist, literally all of them and I still only took 60% of bosses life and I just ran out of potions. And as a deadeye my last ascendancy is quite important, but even if not, it feels awful to say I will play with only 6 ascendancy points, shouldn't be like that at all, the only good(sarcasm) thing is that a lot of ascendancy points actually suck on most classes, which also needs to be addressed. All in all, I already put like 130 hours in poe2 and I love the game, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done, especially balancing in the end game, like many say it just feels like poe1 after you finish cruel difficulty and I think that should not be the case. I think it this game should be a bit more tactical in the end game like it was in the campaign, game needs to be different from poe1 else what's the point. Another thing is that games performance suffers so much in the end game it's actually scary, I had stable 60 fps (vsync enabled) all throughout levels 1-70 untill I started doing crazy builds and juicing, the game is having visual strokes, fps drops hard, it starts lagging even, I mean it is quite bad, not as bad as it sounds, but it is very substantial. Hope stuff will be ironed out
You make solid points knowing ggg they will address gamer criticism how they balance opinions like yours and of those whom want a game closer to poe 1 remains to be seen.
Very valid points and I applaud you for clarifying it's not as bad as it sounds. Half the community are doomsayers and the other half are doomsayer-haters. We need more open-minded discussions, not trash talk. Kudos for the well thought out critique.
same happened to me yesterday. was a breeze up until zarokh, he would have been a breeze too if he didnt have a fuckton of health. other than that i feel it was a fun fight, but the amount of hp he has, especially compared to the earlier bosses in the trial is nuts.
@@alexshtyn6336 I just want the game to be good and would be nice if it's different from poe1, I will probably still jump in to some poe1 seasons, I like that game too
@@matthewmcconaublaze7008 it's just the way people express themselves, that's mostly the problem, they make it sounds so bad that they forget its early access for that reason so it would be amazing after a year or so
sometimes i forget we are only 2 weeks in. while things do need to be changed i think some people ive seen talk about it like its been out for like 2 months and hasnt been touched at all
I agree - I prefer not to interact with trade. What's the point of playing/grinding if you're just going to pick your gear out on the marketplace? There should be a SSF mode that boosts gear drops substantially and allows us that prefer to find stuff in the wild to get what we want too!
the only bad thing right now are the crashes and failing to load textures... literally cost me my ascendency points just half an hour ago by crashing when the boss was at 30% HP
This has been my experience too. I said something on reddit and was told it was a skill issue for not having better internet 😂
Same here
@@Smudge7Four I am convinced reddit is where people who hate themselves go to project their terrible opinions.
and that’s why you paid $30 to beta test the product. report the bug and move on
Dam unlucky only have hade 3 chrashes sense the start
My biggest problem with the trial of the sekhemas, and Sanctum in poe1 is that it's GGG's attempt at a roguelike system, but it's built in a fundamentally different way than almost any roguelike I've ever played. Look at Hades, Slay the Spire, Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, any roguelike of the last 10 years, and they're all giving you player power consistently through the run, you're getting buffs, you're getting new cards, new tools to help you push through the progressive difficulty.
Now look at Sanctum/Trial of the Sekhemas. Almost every single room gives you an affliction, and certain """minor""" afflictions are build breaking (how is "You have no evasion" a minor affliction when evasion is all the defenses Monks have) and boons are few and far between. I've had entire trial runs where I saw a single shop and 1-2 boon floors, and by the end of the trial I had 10-15 afflictions and maybe 1-3 boons.
As someone who mostly plays roguelikes, Sanctum/Sekhema feels like GGG attempted to push into a niche I adore, but they did in the absolute wrong way. Roguelikes need a scaling difficulty, but they need to first and foremost provide player power to help push back against that scaling difficulty. Afflictions in every room feels antithetical to the entire roguelike progression system.
On the topic of Cruel being a stompfest, I think that's a non-issue tbh. Cruel being as easy as it is probably stems from the fact that all of the bosses throughout acts 1-3 were designed with the player's current level of power in mind. Geonor was designed with the idea that a level 15 player with mostly blue gear and level 3 skills would be in the arena with him, so when a level 50 player with level 13 skills and a full suite of rares with +gem levels and 105% increased phys damage on their weapons comes along, he's gonna fall over because he just wasn't designed with that player in mind.
I think once cruel goes away and acts 4-6 come out, with their bosses designed for players having the toolkits generally provided in those acts, I think we'll see the difficulty curve stay a lot more consistent. I DO hope they address the endgame in some way, but also with how quick its development turnaround time was, I think we should be considering what we have now as a pre-alpha version of the endgame, it's a framework and likely the first or second major iteration of the system. We should be loud about it, we should give consistent, sometimes scathing feedback, because systems in their infancy like this NEED to be scrutinized.
I'm confident that by 1.0 we'll have a much more consistent campaign experience and a much much more well thought out and put together endgame, and frankly, I can't wait to be here every step of the way to that.
I got 30 hours on my Merc and my main Monk, I work 9-5 so only play a bit after work but I love the game.
My biggest issue has been the third floor of the first chaos trial getting bugged like 15 times in a row. The chaos machines would be placed too close to the elevator and would make it so the switch to bring the elevator down wouldn’t work. Took me 4 hours just to get back to the bird because of the bug.
any advantage to the official launcher vs steam?
No, no, no, no. Templar first! I don't want to hear anything about no druid or huntress. TEMPLAR!
I kind of agree. But I also want the spear skills that would probably released with Huntress. Although flails is also cool.
No, I want Marauder!
They've stated multiple times Druid and Huntress are next.
I want my long neck boy!
ES builds are BROKEN, this character is just waiting to dominate.
Fun fact, I killed the 4th floor boss 3 times, 2 times with getting lucky with merchant in the room before and getting the immunity to dmg boon for the next room ^^
one thing i don't really see people suggesting for sekhemas are relics that let you see 1+ rooms ahead. just having one of those on top of resistance relics is quite helpful for picking safe/less harmful rooms.
My two cents about the trials:
I think the main problem lies in the fact that the tokens are limited, expensive and perishable.
In my opinion you should either get a "quest version" of the tokens until you complete them that's way more forgiving or let the trials be difficult but make it so losing all your honour only costs you the end of trial rewards, but you can still kill the bosses and receive the points for Sekhema and dying simply resets the round and loses the corrupted rares for ultimatum.
Basically if you screw up but can defeat the content, you get your points.
That way the people farming that content for money have the regular difficulty as GGG intended and the people that can't complete the content at the intended difficulty (or just don't like it) can brute-force it and move on to stuff they actually enjoy.
Another problem with the trials is that, as they were originally created for PoE, they don't consider the fact that we don't have movement skills on PoE 2, and that makes a hell of a difference, not only for sanctum.
Edit: i think that the difficulty in endgame it's designed like that because people was scared of it being too slow, and they were pretty vocal about it.
My favourite thing about poe2 so far is crafting and how accessible it is. I think I interacted with the crafting systems more than I did in 2000 hours of poe1, and it felt great.
I personally feel the crafting in Poe 2 frustrating as there is no staregy pure spam currency 100% rng, and it’s 90% of the time disappointing imo
@@Aymeric91360 and the crafting in poe1 was not rng?
@@standylixgames7757It is RNG dependent. But you can influence it better in PoE, because of crafting bench and horticraft station
@@standylixgames7757 *IF* you know what to do: No.
Fractured mods, Essence, Fossils and Meta Mods help you hugely on archiving the combination of mods that you want.
This however is blocked behind a wall of knowledge that you first need to understand (and also currency).
You need to know what "Weights" are.
What "Prefixes" and "Suffixes" can roll on any given items.
Which mods come from what mechanic exclusively.
Etc. Etc.
From the standpoint of a person that does not do a lot of crafting: It sure as hell looks like Pure RNG.
From the standpoint of a person that does a lot of crafting: it's a lot less then you think it is. However, It costs time, currency and a good battleplan.
@@standylixgames7757 yea that guy doesn't know what he is talking about
What's the co-op like?
I realize there are probably far too many comments for you to respond, but--i do wonder how much of the transition to zooming is a result of the dodge rework.
Even on a 2nd character with limited stash assistance (20k gold no items) i felt the new dodge allowed me to run and gun through previously dangerous situations. It put me in this strange place where i was glad everytime i didnt get surrounded and killed, but i simultaneously felt it made the game worse.
i am in the minority, i dislike the dodge change, but everytime i voice this, i am mobbed. i think ggg moved too quick on it. same with the rares IMO, currency needed to drop more, items needed to drop the same amount or possibly less at endgame.
Im with u in the minority on both accounts.
@@TalkativeTri Dodge needed to be changed from the way it was. Surely you saw too many of the times getting were mobbed off screen into a really cheap death, no learning from it or skill expression other than kill or be killed asap (POE1 style). Devs even felt that playing themselves youd get trapped too often and it only got worse in maps, (breach would have been a nightmare come on) the dodge roll change like this is much easier than reworking all mobs and maps to have more resonable hit boxes and designs.
I think with the way maps currently are especially Breach, Ritual combined with having the objective be 'kill all rares' zooming was inevitable, very few people want to spend 10+minute per map getting little reward. Honestly what im feeling is the dodgeroll changed helped the most in Acts, maps its or be killled with rolling normally just slowing me down, or theres so many mobs I cant roll out anyway, which is what they wanted.
@@TalkativeTri shill n trash
About the leaderboard meta. One thing to consider is diference in popularity and skill.
If a class has a higher overall representation it could skew the data
Poe2 endgame is nothing like poe1 AT ALL. I'm sorry you're very wrong. Its extremely slow
And doesnt feel anywhere near as rewarding
I wish we could reset the atlas already. I'm lv80, and i've found no point of interest on the atlas yet. No "citadels", no "vendors", no "tainted paradise". No nothing. :S
I'm thinking on rerolling just to push my luck on a new character.
I've gone almost 30 maps in each direction and explored via every tower along the way. Nothing interesting as far as i can see. Yet.
fyi atlas is account bound atm so you would have to create a new account for a new atlas.
The thing about the souls comparisons, poe2 does not allow you the infinite retries that souls games do.
Poe1 having ridiculous 1 shots makes sense because the actual game is the damn spreadsheet. So you can just adjust the formula of your build and see what happens
When you make player skill a factor into the gameplay, you can't rely on that, and need to make challenge geared towards the fact that players are going to practice boss fights, and need many many retries.
Honestly the endgame is good but those citadelles and stuff are impossible to find and there could definitely be more maps, but that will come with time
As far as ascendancy is concerned, just for the first one you have to do with ultimatum or sanctum, is make the options static. If they are static you can predict everything. In POE, The trials were always the same until it changed and then it would stay the same again until it changed again. It could actually be just like that too. I think that would be enough to make a big enough impact.
tbh honest, I think the biggest problem with people and the gear is actually finding enough gear and being able to craft them efficiently. I totally agree with you on the point about the Runes as this is a contention that I really end up steamed up about, allowing people to be able to remove or overwrite the installed runes is an awesome idea since PoE allowed you to remove gems that were installed as THEY were integral items to your character which is also the same in regards to Runes, they ARE INTEGRAL for our characters survival.
The trial of Chaos / ultimatum is a good ideia, I liked, just need some balance in the debuffs. But the trial of Sekehma just be just deleted or remove this "honor" shit. I hated sanctum and I hate this fucking Sekehma trial. One good ideia, in my opinion, would let the player choose between playing with honor against weaker mobs or with your own life / resistances against stronger mobs.
Ultimatum is good untill you roll THE Bad bird.
Then you die in 10 seconds
The end
@@Barad-Dur_IsACapitalOfMordor HAHAHA I KNOW THE BAD BIRD AHAH! that mother fucker is hard! But the debuffs make it even harder.
Bro. The honor system is ass. And The debuffs in Ultimatum are ungodly overtuned.
8:34 I've doing Warrior as my 3rd character, and tbh it's only about doing it later (10+ levels above the monsters) where it guarantees your success in completing the ToS almost having 90% of your honor still.
I feel like a good solution to sockets is to allow artificers orbs to make a filled socket empty again, deleting the rune in the process.
Tri? Which filter are you using?
Great video! I totally get the PoE1 vibes from the endgame.
However, I often feel like I'm just hopping on maps aimlessly without a clear goal. It’s like wandering around, completing towers to clear the fog, and maybe finding a hideout, only to realize there’s no direct path and I need to go around the island 🤣. Moving away from the origin usually leaves me disoriented.
There doesn't seem to be a sense of progression like, 'oh, I am in yellow maps now,' or 'ok nice, I cleared all white maps.' This absence makes it tough to gauge where I stand in the game, which is a bit frustrating.
Like you mentioned, maybe it's all a placeholder for now. But I really hope they give us more defined short, mid, and long-term goals for our map progression. It would make the journey through the endgame feel more rewarding and structured.
8:37 idk how viable this is, but i’m a close range merc and energy shield helped a lot in close combat. Hits on a shield don’t count against honour. So it may just want you to build different, but you’ll have to meet int requirements
I'm not using the Steam client either - although I keep wondering if there would be advantages to do so? I think Steam has something like precompiled shaders cache? Anyone else has these long delays sometimes when you toggle the world map?
the only issue I'm having is that my monk just randomly got bricked while i was trying to load into molten vault. just perma crashes when i try to load my monk but i can play other characters no problem. not sure if anyone else has experienced this and knows a fix but any advice would help i need my monk back T_T
I agree with most things in this video, been playing PoE1 since beta.
here's my personal PoE2 feedback from 150 hours invoker monk.
- Third ascension for sekhema needs to be 2 floors only, 3 floors is way too much time investment+RNG for someone who just wants their sub class to WORK. i had to spend 2 hours getting familiar with sanctum and the relics before i could pass my level 80+ monk through a lvl 69 sekhema trial.
- The endgame map grind. The map tiles and bioms need to generate actual content.
If you're going to make maps some wierd delve hybrid without fuel (massive win btw),
get the delve encounters in there! There are so many possible events and things you could put on the sadly mostly EMPTY map spaces: Weapons, armor, bandits and other hostile encounters, rare beasts, merchants, jewelry, currency.
- Boss tablets for laser towers, FROM boss maps. Reward boss hunters for bosshunting, i wanna hunt more bosses.
you are so expressive man it's actually so engaging and refreshing to watch a video that feels like it's being PRESENTED to me. like you could be a newscaster or something, the professionality and sincerity of how you communicate through physical expression makes for such great videos. video is also structured fantastically
Quick note: If you're going to show hate comments you might want to blur the idiot's name so that they can't accuse of you targeting them for harassment. Avoid headaches later.
If they didn't want people to know who they were, they should have posted anonymously.
Haha what? So they allowed to call him out, but when all he does is show what they said in a comment, it’s a problem? Comments are public for a reason. More people need to be blasted for bad behavior, just my opinion tho. Cheers.
How can you target an anon?
Public comment, public shaming.
STATE OF WRAECLAST! Please make this a monthly thing!
The wild thing is that we're still missing 2/3 of the skills/ascendancies and 1/2 of the campaign/monsters/bosses and it already feels like a full sized game.
I wish they had one of the sharp or stabby weapons ready for early access tho. Melee feels kind of wonky with just maces and staves. And once the flail comes out, everyone and their mom will be playing some kind of paladin/crusader/templar character.
I know for me, clearing act 2 on my witch and sorc was definitely a challenge that felt like it took a lot of skill. But I thought the balance was just tuned high, and it'show they wanted it. Then I got a sick hammer drop, and decided to try warrior again. I killed the act 2 boss so fast it didn't even get to do most of it's mechanics.
Now it's clear to me that I am building my casters very wrong, because my warrior feels 10x more potent, and even the ToS was a breeze.
ok so my question is: 1500 HP on your char in T11 maps is enough? I have 1200 with lvl 50 invoker and it does not feel like plenty..
I don't think every map needs bosses. But since you can see it on the endgame map in modifiers, there should be more of them. My guess would be, unless PoE2 engame changes significantly in future, that you fight boss roughly 1nce in 5 maps.
I have absolutely zero worries that when they come back from the holidays, they’re going to hit the ground running with updates and fix all of these issues.
I think loads of people were wanting to get into POE for a long time ! I remember all the way back when D4 was releasing, I was trying it out.
But it was complicated and had a huge barrier to entry, so now we are on it instantly! And its been alot of fun !
Hey Tri, regarding the current class balance i highly reccomend watching sirgog's video on it today. Its mostly magic find killing build variety due to prefix/suffix pressure.
I think the sekhemas trial being essentially the sanctum mechanic is like you either LOVE IT or you HATE IT, and the trial of chaos is "that fucking bird that I hate" in its purest form.
My favourite thing about poe2 is that it's not replacing poe1.
We got both! It' like having my cake but eating it too 🎉❤❤
I agree on the difficulty. My first character was a sorc, and I struggled to beat every boss I came across. Now that I have a bit of knowledge about the game, I created a 2nd character, monk, and am now cruising through the acts.
I think it's not only the trial's, but losing the maps / experience / opportunity from ☠️'s when you're towards the endgame. I remember seeing earlier people were* also losing maps if for some reason you lagged out or the game bugged and when you logged back in that map was gone, idk if that's still the case. I kind of don't see the need for crafting, cause you can just get an opportunity for better gear through trade, and if you can go through trade for the gear then it effects the players experience to learn things as well. " Oh I'm having trouble getting through campaign / maps, let me see what's in trade " instead of also engaging in the other systems available.
This is such a good general take. Thank you.
PoE1 will still be there. When I wanna zoom, I'll return to that. I want to be deliberate with my movement and struggle accordingly. Uniroincally. The dopamine hit for setting up something complicated with the right position in this game is unreal.
I'm not quite up to maps yet (A3 cruel) on my Chayula monk and A2 and A3 cruel have definitely been a more of a grind.
Ive also played Invoker to A1 cruel. I think the Invoker is just plain stronger to the point where I can imagine maps being a breeze.
I dont anticipate this on the Chayula monk.
So the question remains...do they intend to balance everything up to the level of the invoker, or rein things back to Chayula level where you need to work for everything more..?
Very good video. Congratulations!
We have the game in our hands, but aren't fully aware of the roadmap of content to come. This plays a major role in assessing if a system needs work, or if we don't yet have the full picture.
Devs were pretty clear about shifting gear from focusing on campaign content to end game system work so the early access would have more time sink available. While I don't think that effaces them from criticism of general game pacing issues, there's very little reason for them to put major effort into cruelty acts 4/5/6.
It's unfortunate that maces were the first weapon released given they have the profile of slow area of effect slams, which has lead people to the assumption that melee is slow and tedious. Maces may be, yet we're missing swords/daggers/claws/spears/flails/axes and the suite of supports and skills that likely could assist in alleviating the current melee playstyle.
Its worth asking when something in the game feels bad if its because its missing content, or if the content is just missing the mark.
22:28 @TalkativeTri Something to consider (given you asked to know if you are completely wrong 😛) is that your lists of top classes... EA has been a dynamic situation. Stormweaver for example got heavily nerfed on day 4, BUT it is important to understand that the nerf really had the biggest impact on stormweaver's ability to get through acts 4-6 solo. MoM archmage stormweaver was always going to require a different build than cast on freeze comet. but ALL of the people with stormweavers that made it to endgame before the nerf didn't have a painful and long grind through acts 4-6. Day 5-9 of EA had those stormweavers already in endgame theorycrafting the builds they needed to move into to survive endgame content (translation: T15 & T16) ... You don't have access to archmage until later so you don't have access to that power and scaling in acts 4-6. The point however is this... a lot of the top leaderboard players not only have access to more power (on ANY build) but also have access to grinding more currency, so they have crazy gear as well. Ziz has a minion infernalist build with base 10K energy shield (and with grim feast he can over cap his energy shield to 20K)... the gear he has though isn't available on trade and even if it was it would be like looking at gear that cost mirrors in PoE1. That is just an example, the same is true of the stormweaver builds etc. (think about how mirror tier geared builds in PoE1 just erase uber pinnacle bosses) SO I wouldn't think that those builds are just over powered or not balanced etc... they are geared to the teeth and are at the top of the leaderboard because of that (and hours played, etc). Also, those builds were always going to be great builds to start in PoE2 because they are great builds in PoE1... Archmage MoM ... stacking mana scales your defense and damage... um... it better be at the top or there is a problem lol. Finally, are you wrong? I think that would be a bit dramatic... no one needs to die on their sword over this... I think in the next content update when druid and huntress are released they will be at the top of the list too... because those same skilled players that play a ton will play them and take them to the top and gear those classes/builds to the teeth... A more interesting metric/Poll might be about which class people played and where did they stop playing or rerolled to a new character.
Love this video!, your posetive style is really awesome. Poe2 hype!
The thing is we all want something slightly different, for end game grinding as humans we are always going to try to get as efficient as possible. If you want it to feel slower just put on a junk weapon and it will feel like act 1 again. It''s just early access so I expect a lot of things to change over time,
When he said there’s not boss fights in endgame like it is in campaign my heart broke 😔
So I played as a warrior, and I was really enjoying the quest to tank and the difficulty of acts. Each of the trials broke what I had achieved, and after running them tens of times I still had no luck. Even the honor resistance (which I wanted) was hard to get, and when gotten wouldn't fit the small space given. So I did Sekhema when I completed act 3, Chaos when I got into Cruel. However, the time setback and the hours of failure isn't a fond memory, and the trials themselves hold dread and hopelessness. Cheers
It's going to be hard to make PoE2 endgame feel more PoE2 imo. The character on that level unlock so much power. And build will get even more crazy with new skills and weapons released.
The reward for doing the Trials should just be your ascendancy points. I’d gladly sacrifice loot and other rewards in the Trials when getting your points in exchange for easier modifiers/lower monster damage while doing them. Once you have your points, ramp the difficulty back up
This and space marine 2 are the first games since dark souls that I’ve been this invested into everything involving it
First 3 acts are best, because: A) you have no gear B) tree is underdeveloped C) no sudden cheesy power to take from. And so devs could easily balance it in a right way. But powercreep destroys late game and no matter how hard devs will try, it will be zoom-zoom-Poe1 always. Especially so when you can trade everything.
i think the date of release near the holidays also contributes to the stable set of player numbers.
I think wariors are struggling so hard right now in sekhemas because they opted to only give us maces as an option. If there was only 1 weapon we can use I think it would've been wiser to give us swords where the skill animations are likely to be a lot faster because well, they're swords that's literally the best part about a sword that they can react more quickly than axes or maces. I understand that they want that slam playstyle to get some shine and I'm sure it'll be good to have some cool slams in your kit later on. But without a sword in the offhand it is very rough because the only build that doesn't require you to stand still and take it to the face for like 2 seconds, which is easily the dumbest thing to do in the entire genre of ARPGs, is a totem build and that's a very niche playstyle a lot of people, especially those specifically opting into melee because they don't want to be ranged, don't like.
Completed my third ascendency through the Sekhemas last night on HC. I've only done them on ranged/mage classes so I can't comment on them, but once I figured out how relics and sacred water works, Sekhemas actually was quite fun.
I enjoyed balancing buffs and debuffs, though think they could still use some balancing. No evasion/ES/armour as a minor affliction, for example, is silly.
Again, can't comment on melee, but for anyone who hasn't enjoyed it, I'd defintely encourage you to try the relic system more.
Found your channel from watching an Asmon reaction, great great content bro loving the POE2 coverage
What i appreciate most about this channel. You keep yourself incredibly professional. But when you interview others you let them be as crude(not a bad thing) as they normally are (DM). Keep it up brother man!
Deadeye is good, simple, and doesn't have weird baked-in downsides. I haven't ascended yet, but I'm running Molten Blast and looking forward to getting Far Shot and Endless Munitions.
Dunno if i've missed the tip, but i've seen some people use items like identify or slamming orbs without having to click the orb or scroll each time after using it. Going like, bam bam bam bam SLAM! in sequence. What hotkey is that?
For my first POE experience I am glad that I did not choose solo self found or hardcore. Even as a poor, the trading helps with gearing.
The first week or so as Mercenary was a little bit sadistic. The first playthrough of the campaign has you rolling around on the ground psychotically, because everything one shots you and there's nothing to do about it. Cruel mode is much easier, because you can have defenses up, so that only the most powerful attacks one shot you, and there's some forgiveness and you don't have to ace everything perfectly.
Runes prevent you from upgrading your gear because they cannot be overwritten.
So starting was hell, it took me about 115 hours to get through cruel.
Now for maps, they have both losing the waystone and the experience penalty. The higher level waystones are priceless. I say keep the experience penalty, but delete losing the map you are in. Especially if every map is going to have a boss. So the only way to level in maps is to not die on a boss. Or delete the map and less experience lost on death, but provide more way stones. I'm still in tier 3 waystones. Just let us portal back to town as often as we need to off-load the loot.
I hate the "crafting" because it is gambling and non deterministic. The "crafting" is the worst part of the game. If we're going to have to gamble for gear then provide lots more materials and remove the shit stats from the pool.
I think after cruel or all 6 Acts, new characters should have all of the skill points by the end of the campaign at the start of maps. What's the point of having the amazing skill map if only a few people ever experience it. I want to try all the different skill paths, but will need almost a thousand hours to get there.
I am not playing the trials of ascension again until I save up more keys and level up at least 10 levels above. I'm just not strong enough to go the distance. I hope the trials get nerfed.
infernalist can be way too tanky because some physical, cold and ligthning damage can be reduced with chaos and fire resistance specifically and also the dog that has like 12k hp takes 20% of the damage you would take instead of you, add a lot of energy shield, the spirit gem that make enemies drop more energy shield to overcap yours AND add energy/armor nodes and equipment and your character is basically a walking mountain that never gets into melee for too long.
i've survived things that oneshoted my friends.
I hope when it's all said and done, the endgame feels more like the campaign. But considering the endgame we have was a pivot a couple months away from the launch, and cruel was just a bandaid to hold us over for the time being, it's pretty remarkable as it is. I think the idea of a map not having a boss is fine, but I think it should be more 50/50 for people who enjoy the bosses abd want to seek them out.
I'm optimistic that we'll see some pretty impressive updates in Q1 2025, and I'm looking forward to what the full EA version will look like.
PoE is also available through Epic Games Launcher which is how I am playing it.
I think one major aspect keeping the players in the game is how satisfying it can be to finish a combo in the game. I often have a short phase of low damage while I build up my combo (e.g. generating power charges with the monk) just to get a huge damage spike killing a lot of enemies at once. This is a skill I have to learn as a player, not just a stat of the character becoming better, so every time I pull of such a combo I have a small dopamine shot and stay motivated and keep enjoying the game.
Also the bosses are really really well made. They are challenging and feel very different from the rest of the game. Beating them (at least the first few times) feels very rewarding.
I don't think there's so much a 'melee' issue, as there's a warrior (and Chonk) issue. Maces are too slow and don't really have the damage to make up for it. Their attack speed penalties to the skills should be removed, I think. Two-handers are already slower attack wise and almost every mace skill has an inbuilt time that can't be reduced, so it should probably be fine.
The rune system I think needs three major things, beyond being able to be overwritten: 1 - Runes need to level (reforge 3 into a 'greater' rune), 2 - More useful affixes that are make or break on an item being on a rune (movespeed on boots, for example), and 3 - Make it so that runes can't be combined with base items that already have their related 'affixes' (so no combining a 20% MS rune with a 30% MS boots for 50% move speed). It basically functions like the old school crafting bench, but without eating up an affix.
Something I don’t understand about the trials is what constitutes a successful run to get my points. So last night I did an ultimatum for my 3rd set of points. It said I had to do 7 rounds. So after completing the 7th round I was just presented with another trial… the 8th round. No points. And at that point the modifiers were stacked so bad that I knew I couldn’t survive another round. Simply put it’s very hard to understand what gets you those points. And like you said the RNG is brutal. It’s a pretty bold move to gate the ascendency points behind two of the hardest league content activities from poe1.
I love the game but would love to see things adjusted so that it’s easier to understand what I have to do to get my points…
I finished the 3rd trail today, while i had a good run it don't think everything was down to luck. I intentionally gave up rooms with good rewards because the rooms after those would suck.
Just made a few good decisions making it so i had full honour and +25% max on top of it in the last fight.
I feel like it's 2014 again bro, I am living and breathing Wraeclast again
The issue is that when you get great gear and have all your passives, you're going to blast. There's nothing they can do to prevent this, unless nerfing every part of our complete classes, which would be a terrible idea. ARPGs are meant to blast, they all end up that way when you get your complete class.
I agree with your take on power progression and endgame already feeling a bit too zoomy, but it's a tricky thing to get right. Feeling like your relative power level has not increased much from act 1 to endgame is also not great as it kind of defeats the purpose of an ARPG. What I would like to see happen is a dialing down of monster density in end game and upping their tankiness a bit to bring back meaningfull engagements.
I don't necessarily agree that crafting is bad from a systemic point of view right now. I've always felt that PoE 1's initial crafting orb system was very elegant and all the deterministic stuff they bolted on later made it feel bloated and opaque. A simple thing they could do right now is just up the drop rate of exalted orbs. It would open up a lot more crafting opportunities. Right now I'm sitting with a stash tab full of blues that have great initial stats to craft on to, but not enough exalted orbs coming in to do so.
When you finish cruel campaign it felt like: growing up. You know as a kid the world is full of possibilities. And then you end up in some 9 to 5. On repeat. Constant mapping. A few reskins of campaign bosses here and there. Mapping continues. Same thing over and over. Just like my adult life. Kinda sucks. Completed the character build at lvl 72. After that it really feels empty.
I get that whole bit about character power being locked behind the trails being a problem, BUUIUT if they hate that they're so different from the main game ... Well they're going to have to get used to it. This is path of exile, the same guys that made an entire 3 month league about auto battlers and tower defense AND city builders. If they're not comfortable trying new things then they might not want to run many of the leagues when they start coming out
Thing is being forced into these things with such a big punishment for not being able to/wanting to do them. POE1 had much less of that than POE2 (not talking about number of systems, obviously 2 has less). PoE1 maybe youd get less lootdrops but you didnt have to engage with the autobattler, tower defence, ect and still have a fun league majority of the time. PoE2 so far you are forced into many systems that feel vastly different and its limiting build variety and playstyle, it's not an amount of systems problem, that they'll fix, it's the being forced to engage with so many systems you may not like and not having choice.
@@MagicalMajestic i mean you do get 3 (maybe 4) choices for what you want to do to ascend, as you can in fact just pick one and do it 4 times to get all your points. and in poe1 you had to do the labrynth and that place was worse imo. traps dealt a percentage of your hp no matter how much you had. all in all it was still a vastly different experience from the rest of the game regardless
@latincristo I didnt notice that, to get my 2nd set I felt had to do ultimatum then Sanctum after for 3rd, no Ultimatum was giving me more points. Atleast thats how the game explains it. I mean lab wasnt a better gameplay experience, but felt way less RNG and punishing than Sanctum or Ultimatum. It was certainly different but having one system to push through not 2 is better IMO.
@@MagicalMajestic true lets hope the next mechanic they add has less rng
i want a fucking option to swap ascendancy...like being locked out to artificially force you to play more by leveling the same class a second time for another 20h is the best recipe for having people quit.
My experience was I rolled through cruel 1, 2, 3 with my eyes closed never taking damage and NEVER dying. To getting 1 shot in Tier 1 maps within 30 seconds everytime.
am i wrong for thinking there were going to have some kinda death recap in the game, i swore they said in one of the dev talks that we were getting somthing like that.
I really hope they let us change ascendency sub class, even if it's only 1 time. I work too much to grind another merc to lvl 50 just to switch to gemling. Followed a build that was Witch hunter then changed it up quite a bit to fit my play style and Gemling has all the perks I want now
That GGG call it a launch tells you they dont consider it EA. As a consequence we should critique it as a released game.
To be honest I really take Tri's "Too fast at the end game" sentiment with a grain of salt. The thing is when a player is well versed with the game and is packed rich with "Legacy Skill", that players perspective is already skewed. There's a lot of others coming in fresh that don't know the ins and out of PoE2 or ARPG in general that will go on the natural curve of the game as intended and that pace and experience is their own to do. On the other side of the fence with the same Legacy Skill, I do believe Tri's statements is definitely agreeable. I'm there with him like 80% depending on what character or build I use in the game, tempo will surely vary.
I spent 30 min fighting the 1st floor boss on my warrior. I had a reduced 40% damage and a monsters have 50% more health afflictions but I also had high honor resistance. So it was a slog of zdps on both sides.