It definitely has potential. Just early on with just flame dash and no mov speed boots its been a bit rough. And ive noticed the aoe on them can clip through walls and floors.
Oh and the loot so far doesnt feel like absolute dog shit so that is nice.
I made a +1 chaos gem, +chaos dmg mod wand a min ago.
So I've never tried leveling with an actual melee instead of pseudo-melee stuff with decent aoe and range, and man, the game really just does not give a single fuck about these builds being viable to level, huh.
Putting aside things like chill mod packs being a death sentence, I keep drowning in adds I barely even realized were spawning in boss fights before.
Man... did you ask for multiple Heist unique mobs mixed with other of the most annoying of the annoying mob types.... but you cant be hit by their attacks in limited spaces of which some you cant dash over? Well you did now!
And...
I havent been to strict on the league mechanic but the second boss seemed to have a single hit 200+ dmg shatter move. Not sure how to dodge it but it looked strange. So we will see next time heh. I went from full 2/3 to dead
First impressions of the league mechanic aside, I'm not sure any of the designers at GGG have ever played a roguelike or understand what makes them fun. There are some... very strange decisions here that will need to change for this to be fun in the long term.
Yeah it is seemingly same ol unpolished turd league mechanic. There is no power growing in this. It is just a gauntlet not really a rogue like. And a couple of the "boons" dont really do anything. Like the 40% less damage doesnt seem to make you take less resolve dmg. Any of the really useful ones screw you over twice heh. The rez one I got only rezes you at half resolve. It also halves your total resolve so you cant heal it back up with fountains after. AND it removes another random boon. All this while im sitting there at 40% less move speed and mobs give less coins etc etc etc.
The whole point of a roguelike is that either synergies between boons have to exist, or you need to make the boons individually powerful enough that they are able to break the run in half. But as it currently stands, you're not able to do that and the merchant also doesn't sell anything good. So there's no possibility to have a good run, it feels like.
Once again, GGG designing something where they're afraid to give the player any sort of power and they fail to realize that it makes the game not fun when you do that.
Steam: Spawnbroker
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
The whole point of a roguelike is that either synergies between boons have to exist, or you need to make the boons individually powerful enough that they are able to break the run in half. But as it currently stands, you're not able to do that and the merchant also doesn't sell anything good. So there's no possibility to have a good run, it feels like.
Once again, GGG designing something where they're afraid to give the player any sort of power and they fail to realize that it makes the game not fun when you do that.
Right. PoE is inherently counter to the current roguelike design philosophy. I don't have as much experience with older entries into the genre, but every modern one I've played seems designed around the idea that you combine a couple of different powers to build something ridiculous and then take a nap. This is like the antithesis of Chris.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I honestly can't tell if it's subconscious contrarianism or just bad luck, but it feels like I can't play an ARPG without gravitating to bad builds.
"boy, this sure is rough" i think as I play my 2h sword witch and try to choose between double strike and cleave.
It doesn't help that what shapes my appreciation for the feel of skills tends to be the drawbacks and inconveniences, like preferring to have to aim a cone rather than having a 360 aoe.
I honestly can't tell if it's subconscious contrarianism or just bad luck, but it feels like I can't play an ARPG without gravitating to bad builds.
"boy, this sure is rough" i think as I play my 2h sword witch
you're doing it right
there is almost certainly a very solid Voidforge Elementalist build template up for grabs this league and I fully expect Mathil will get around to it at some point. leveling that could be a pain as a league start, once you have access to a couple of common uniques it gets easier. if I was forcing this I'd probably make a hard left turn to Ancestral Bond and use Warchiefs with golem stacking until I had stuff like Crown of Eyes, pouring everything I found into making the best weapon possible until VF. or do something ignite based with maybe Consecrated Path or even Sunder with ignite prolif.
I used to play a lot of Raging Spirits Necromancer leveling with (or even using into endgame) a Queen's Escape. Witch With Big Sword is a lifestyle
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I honestly can't tell if it's subconscious contrarianism or just bad luck, but it feels like I can't play an ARPG without gravitating to bad builds.
"boy, this sure is rough" i think as I play my 2h sword witch and try to choose between double strike and cleave.
It doesn't help that what shapes my appreciation for the feel of skills tends to be the drawbacks and inconveniences, like preferring to have to aim a cone rather than having a 360 aoe.
I've tried playing so many big sword witch builds. It just looks so cool.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
If I were someone who speedran through acts, I imagine I'd be pretty pleased with the uniques that've dropped for me thus far. I'm running around the Docks at 167% movespeed before flask courtesy of Wanderlust, Thrillsteel, and Foxshade.
I'm having a fun time with the league so far, but that's possibly because I'm playing a trap build.
Thinking about the sanctum some more, I think it's like....almost there. They just need to do some balance passes and change some of these negative modifiers and I think it'd be pretty fun.
Everything else about this league is great so far. Rare monsters are fun again and the atlas tree shakeup is great. Loot seems to be in a great spot as well, they added some additional rare monster rewards. Loot goblins still exist, you just don't know when they'll happen, so it doesn't encourage weird gameplay like calling in a magic find person to kill one monster.
Steam: Spawnbroker
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
Thinking about the sanctum some more, I think it's like....almost there. They just need to do some balance passes and change some of these negative modifiers and I think it'd be pretty fun.
Hades is one of my all time favorite games, so I am probably judging by too high a bar, but GGG doesn't have any idea on what makes a good roguelite. Their idea is keep all the punishing stuff and none of the rewarding power that makes progression possible. Also, anemic rewards because they're GGG.
I saw someone say "this is about as rogue like as heist was a stealth game"... and I think that is very apt.
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BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I mean, ARPG's have always felt vaguely roguelike adjacent anyways? Drop random gear, try and pick up a collection with generally complementary stats? It's just that the "path" doesn't ever change.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
I mean, ARPG's have always felt vaguely roguelike adjacent anyways? Drop random gear, try and pick up a collection with generally complementary stats? It's just that the "path" doesn't ever change.
I mean, there's a straight path from Rogue->Angband->Diablo->PoE. It's just that modern Rogue-likes come from Rogue without any of the other steps.
I think I've figured out the secret for running Sanctum in Acts. Basically, save up rooms, then go back to an earlier area, ~10 levels below your level, and run the floor from there. That way, you have a significant level advantage over the Sanctum enemies.
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Euphemonitsudemo sagashiteiruyodokka ni kimi no sugata woRegistered Userregular
edited December 2022
I mean the issue is that a roguelite is not an ARPG. Yes there's some degree of metaprogression in Hades, but my 20th run doesn't have me doing 10x the damage (actually more than that), on top of the relic metaprogression which makes longer runs in sanctum a lot more consistent. Like I understand the argument that it feels bad to progress through the sanctum mostly dealing with maluses (personally I don't mind it), and I'm not saying people have to like it or that it's well designed. But I don't think it's wrong that an ARPG is going to be about metaprogression from building up your character, not stacking random buffs during the course of the run. You don't need the power within the run to make progression possible when you do 15mill dps straight from the start and even bosses die within 1.5 seconds. Character progression far outpaces the difficulty scaling.
Now, having said that, it's clear that this mechanic greatly rewards dps first and foremost, then movespeed+ability to dps while moving. It is hugely disproportionately punishing to a huge swathe of builds. It was INCREDIBLY obvious that this is how it was going to go, and I don't say that to defend GGG. I mean that it was obvious that they would fail to balance resolve, and they did.
It's a bummer too because GGG's recent league mechanics have been going away from being Pure Clearspeed. Basically all the recent leagues have had no timer. Older leagues like Incursion, Legion, (to a lesser extent) Delirium were REALLY bad about this, probably worse than Sanctum in terms of punishing builds. I thought we moved away from this!
There are also a LOT of bugs with sanctum right now. For example: don't buy the "next item free" boon until you're done shopping. If you buy it then it something else from the same merchant, you lose the boon but still pay full price. Deli mirror also progresses when you're inside the sanctum pre-room and you can lose your rewards in there. The final boss also sometimes doesn't open the rewards room door.
(also apropos of nothing i think mf should straight up be removed from the game but i understand this is a controversial take)
(also apropos of nothing i think mf should straight up be removed from the game but i understand this is a controversial take)
honestly MF % gear is really dumb and just a diablo throwback. especially in this game that has put so much effort into "crafting" materials and has so many systems that generate items like harvest/heist/et.al.
but it seems like GGG has generated so many items and mechanics over time that they have long lost the ability to actually juggle all the balls in the air in a meaningful way.
You'd think that Sanctum would be a great mechanic for hardcore players, what with the not dying as a failure state. But from my early attempts: you'd be wrong. Building into defense gets you nothing, and every room turns into a Sirus fight where you're dodging everything because you don't have the overwhelming DPS to instantly phase the fight.
I completely understand why they ignored defenses for the purposes of Resolve and it's for two reasons. One is that the most engaging fights in PoE are the ones with well-telegraphed abilities you have to respond to. The second is that defensive/recovery scaling can get so wildly out of hand that it becomes virtually impossible to make a single enemy sufficiently deadly to every possible defensive archetype (and if this becomes achievable then it encourages players to build into slow-but-invincible characters that just ignore enemies altogether)
(While the reverse of the latter is true - you end up feeling encouraged to build such overwhelming offense that stuff dies before it's a threat - it seems like players kind of ... enjoy that? And you can design some ways for monsters to still be threatening, although it's telling that any time GGG does this players cry about it endlessly. On death effects, lingering ground effects, boss invulnerablility phases, these all exist to stop the entire game from becoming an idle clicker. But I digress)
So Resolve: in order for it to matter you have to limit recovery and limit the ability for defenses to mitigate it. Which as a design philosophy - a correct one! - is at odds with the other design philosophies of PoE. Melee characters often rely on mitigation and recovery - such as Fortify and leech - as crucial tools in order to engage enemies safely. Totally useless in Sanctum. Channeling skills require a decent amount of defense to allow you to stand still long enough to do damage and that is just not sustainable.
There are other rough edges to get caught on. If you rely heavily on charge generation or flask uptime, you can struggle in Sanctum until your build is fully online with the rare and expensive methods of sustaining those without killing packs of monsters. Headhunter can get fucked (I've been anti Headhunter for nearly a decade, and even I think it's had a hard time lately). If you're an MTX fan your greatest enemy will be yourself and your ludicrous skill effects obscuring hazards.
Balancing this thing around defenses working would be a hell of an undertaking. Almost every solution I can think of opens up an avenue for abuse to where runs could become impossible to fail - and I'm a huge fan of content having meaningful failure states (it's why I play Hardcore). It kind of feels like if there's a middle ground at all, it's a razor edge. Clearly they thought of this with Resolve damage being lower at close range and at least some abilities leaving a dead zone melee range (a lot of PoE boss fights end up being directly easier at close range, it's kind of neat) but it's still balanced way too hard against defense for what I think are eminently understandable reasons.
I love my tanky builds where I do some kind of jank in order to get just enough damage to scrape by, and Sanctum is making that feel real bad. But then again I've rarely met a punishing game mode I didn't kind of like so I don't exactly hate it. It's very deliberately skewed towards the types of builds the majority of players prefer and that aren't really compatible with HC.
My favorite part of Sanctum is that "40% decreased movement speed" is a minor affliction.
The thing most likely to make me reset the entire run is considered a minor affliction, which are things they want me to opt in to taking or they might force me to take just by entering a room.
It does feel like you need to think about keeping your pathing options open in the event you get offered a run-killing affliction with no way around it. If you're just thinking about the room right in front of you that seems all too likely
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
Ran into a rare mob in a T1 map that must have the bonus to give out gem XP since every single one of my skill gems levelled at the same time. More of that please.
Yeah but that has been the "mantra" for a bit now. Stealth nerf to drops. AN becoming defacto affixes with no increased benefits (as we saw later nerfed rates). And many more.
Incidentially as a person who has issues with wrists im having a grand time with popcorn srs and it wasnt too bad to get going and with one lucky drop im in all my base items i need to be in.
Grabbed the red MTX for Reave to give it a try without being annoyed by its weird transparent default look, it seems way better than anything else in its melee-ish niche?
Too good, almost...
Seriously there's something wrong with me where I'm like hm this is really good, let me swap some gems around on PoB to see how it'll perform if it's not weird enough to just be a SNS occultist and I desperately need to switch to Blade Flurry or Charged Dash or something.
Got the Sanctum completed first time, which got me 3 divine orbs, which should let this build actually work in red maps. (I do have some Chronicles I should sell as well, but I'm hoping to wait a bit longer for the market to actually pick up; right now they're just going for 50c.)
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
I wound up finding a divine in A8 I’ve spent more time actually trying to get mapping gear than getting to maps now
I got maps yesterday after a really dumb rip on my Poison Concoction Occultist starter (to a Vaal side area boss that tallied several kills on me back in Invasion / Beyond when the meta was to farm Docks in Merciless until you could kill a t1 map boss safely, so this was darkly hilarious). The build mostly died because I had just accidentally leveled Steelskin past the CWDT level and hadn't caught the support gem up so the bleed didn't get removed. Also I had basically no physical mitigation. Which ... I know people play HC without much in the way of that but for me, because I'm bad, that's just a recipe for disaster.
So I started a Necro and leveled with Absolution until I switched to SRS in Act 8. I planned on switching as soon as I got Unleash but Absolution just trucked everything so I stuck with it until rare mobs started to get sketchy if I stood still for too long. Fighting them for for the chance at loot explosions is great, but honestly I was mostly looking forward to the gem xp bonus. I had level 18 gems in Act 8. That's with killing rares actively and doing Sanctum so I was overleveled a bit as you usually are if you stop to do league mechanics, which is never a bad thing in HC.
(The gem xp bonus kind of feels like a thing that came out of the development of Ruthless. Hear me out: gems level slower there specifically because they're a source of power for spell- based builds in particular, anything with a flat damage modifier, because items [the primary axis of progression for attack builds] are also more rare. Since rare mobs often spit out better items, it makes sense to have them progress gems faster too. And since that bonus caps out at 20 it has a limit right around the time spell builds start looking for sources of + gem levels on gear to progress. So it's a natural fit into the new reward system)
Anyway, my gear on beating act 10 was just trash. Like I found some great corrupted 5 links with completely unusable socket colors so SRS is on a 4 link, with two of those being Unleash and Melee Splash, so it's like a 2 link for damage. Kitava died fast (prefiring 20 SRS which don't wander off target is OP) but map bosses and stuff like Syndicate members take fucking forever to die. I only had 3.8k life going into maps and 7k armour with Determination up. And -19% chaos res which is super fucking sketchy. PoB says I have 450k dps but that's only 30k per SRS and they're fickle about sticking to targets. Also uptime even with Unleash isn't great, though it'll be better once I get Mistress of Sacrifice from uber lab.
Somehow I cleared all my white maps for atlas passives. I even cleared a couple rare t6s but then I did an Alva mission in an easy map and couldn't clear the room before the timer ran out so that's kind of a barometer for a build being garbage. It's a slog. The good news is that gear upgrades will push my damage to reasonable levels quickly, but I might be camping out in t5 maps and Delve for a while to try and make that happen.
The build totally wrecks Sanctum though. I got to the 4th floor boss with it on the first run and lost to not understanding the mechanic (sometimes league mechanics teach you things about the boss fights before you get there - thinking about Abyss and Breach here - but this one throws a new thing at you in the last room) and then won on my second try. And third, where I got offered 2 divines as a reward for beating the Sanctum two rooms before the end on a dominant run so that was neat.
I wasn't entirely wrong before about the Sanctum being bad for Hardcore builds but it turns out to be the exact kind of league that a Hardcore player trains for every time they play PoE. Intuitive awareness of threats and knowing where not to be at any given moment is part of not dying. Minion builds are well suited to this since I can poop out a couple spirits quickly and just keep booking it while they peck things to death (slowly).
I'm looking forward to having actual DPS.
AresProphet on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
edited December 2022
remember to identify your items folks, sometimes they are pretty good!
Yeah I am happy mapping is fun cause the league continues to be shit design. Skull pile tiles in the last zone really? Many of the mine/bomb traps have their radius hidden by ground... ok....... ok yeah still buggy with poor "roguelike" picks from store (red map runs in sanctum) etc... Well then made time to get to last boss to see it and not only is it badly designed (having to try to position in this game for attacks is incredibly dumb) but for us color blind individuals its insanely rough to see what is going on. Especially for us nerds playing a build that generates burning ground. I dont consider "well just play" even remotely valid logically. I shouldnt have to change what I play. Can see why its already reaching 50% less population on charts.
Yeah at least mapping is mostly fixed. On that identify front had a near perfect gloomfang i forgot to price and some nob tried to PM me "offer 5c" lol.
Hm, I saw someone saying that they acknowledged how loathed ancestral totem placement as a universal foundation for melee is in a Q&A recently and that they were looking at it.
I wonder if the 3s totem buffs linger mastery bandaid is what they had in mind as a solution or just a temp measure.
On that note, I realized that while my occultist cold reave character works fine enough, actually placing 1-2 totems+2 curses+exposure (and resummoning a dead golem I guess, if I really want to waste some time) for anything tough will drive me insane--it's bad enough with 1 totem, 1 curse, and frost bomb atm. So I'm looking at my options for automation at the expense of maximum throughput now. Not that I can afford to lose much throughput.
Heraldry jewel passive is a cheap fix for exposure, though weaker than frost bomb. elemental weakness gloves would be a pain since I'm reliant on hrimsorrow and that starts at 1 div for corrupted ones with bad sockets. I thought maybe hextouch-frost bomb-curses, for one click to handle the three but with a 2sec delay, but I guess hextouch guts curses so that's a pretty substantial loss? Heraldry and bane?
fake edit: Honestly after screwing around in PoB for a while I think the Frost Bomb hextouch option might be best after all. guess it depends on how that delay feels.
After a lot of not playing Templar, Marauder, or Duelist while mostly playing skills that'd be best served by them, I decided to make myself play them and mess around with skills I've not done much/anything with. Started with Marauder and slams.
It was strange being able to stand face to face with Brutus and Ground Slam him into the dirt. Sunder is actually quite satisfying, never tried it because all the slams blur together in my mind and most of them look kinda silly. It took me a second to understand why Volcanic Fissure wasn't just Molten Strike with a slam tag, it's kind of interesting.
I'll probably end up stopping wherever their unique lines run out, which I think is Act 4 for everyone but Templar and Duelist?
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
That's a hell of a modifier, pulled 4 out of that map so now I can afford some gear.
I know it's like, antithetical to the way the game is meant to be played, but I'm having a lot of fun with Sunder+Pulverize+Fist of War with Intimidating Cry as Marauder.
So of course I went and threw together a cold elementalist version for next time...
Stats without flasks, guard skills, or buffs we wouldn't have in a boss fight:
14.2k ES
18.5k evasion with Ghost Shroud
Ignite/Shock/Freeze immune and chill resistant (-58% effect without flasks, over 100% with)
1700 ES regen
8300 ES recharge - 5000 if you take Wicked Ward for easy bossing
8 million pinnacle boss DPS (we'll talk about this)
Can tank a 21k physical hit - without armour
Theory:
We convert life to flat ES using Ghostwrithe and Presence of Chayula. We then use Esh's Visage to let our ES handle chaos damage for us, reserving as close to (but not at or over!) 50% of our life for an extra aura (in this case, Arctic Armour). We then stack as much int and %ES as we can cram in on our passive tree and gear to get the biggest ES pool possible, and then use Ephemeral Edge to turn that into flat maximum damage. Combine that with the Lightning Mastery "Lightning Damage with Non-Critical Strikes is Lucky" and our damage is through the roof. To compensate for the glacial attack speed on Ephemeral Edge, we use an attack skill that ignores attack speed entirely: Blade Trap. With traps, we naturally pick Saboteur for a bunch of defensive and utility bonuses.
Practice:
This build absolutely slaps. You throw traps then walk away while they blend everything to a pulp. You can preload 19 traps for 25 million cumulative damage during boss preload/phase changes, or for popping Essences and Harvests. Your margin for error with over 14k ES is absolutely massive, you can blunder into mechanics that are designed to oneshot all but the tankiest builds and walk away to recharge. You have obscene recovery and avoidance, to the point where your ES globe doesn't even move during most t16 maps.
The playstyle is: throw traps into packs, move, loot. The burst damage of even the first few hits deletes white and magic monsters, and it takes especially tanky rares to require any thought to positioning or dropping a curse or Bear Trap for extra damage. Preload for things that you can predict and they just vanish. If you do take damage, run around for ES recharge to top you back up - it will take about 3.5 seconds of not getting hit to go from the verge of death to full again, and if you take Wicked Ward you can reliably tank non-oneshot mechanics as long as you juke long for the 1.8s it takes for recharge to start. You recover a Softcore build's worth of hit points every second for four seconds with Wicked Ward, and have AA to make that go even further. Every now and then a rare mob (usually from Expedition) has the Fuck You mods it needs to survive your burst damage - you can either face tank it and just throw, or kite it through a field of spinning death throwing ahead of you as you run and mixing in Bear Traps to slow them down. It's an infrequent occurance.
In red maps, you want to avoid No Regen and Reduced Effect of Auras - with Ghost Shroud, and with Grace being such a huge chunk of your evasion, your ES pool will take a big hit. Reduced evasion/suppression maps are sketchy, but doable. I sometimes reroll maps with 3-4 big damage mods (turbo, crit, gain phys as extra) out of an abundance of caution because Hardcore, but given that I probably gained 15 atlas points from doing unidentified maps I may be playing it more safe than I need.
Leveling:
I leveled with Blade Trap and some assorted 1c leveling weapons until 78 (Ewar's Mirage! Tempestuous Steel! Hyaon's Fury! the classics), at which point I put on the four core uniques (total cost of less than 1 div, on a 5 link Ghostwrithe). With over 8k ES out of the gate and something like a million DPS while held together by chicken wire and hope, it cruised through yellow maps, into reds, and started knocking out atlas completion before level 90. This build was completing unidentified corrupted red Kirac missions in Hardcore. As long as I didn't have a No Regen mod, it was safe (well for a little while Elemental Weakness was sketchy, but I could see that one immediately at the portal and make a jewel swap to compensate). I'm not entirely sure I saw my ES bar move significantly until I did a Baran fight with AoE + frenzies and just face tanked him to death.
Gearing:
The gear curve feels great, since you have 6 non-unique slots to play with (5 once you can solve resists without boots, so you can put on Atziri's Step) for stat, resist, spell suppression, and accuracy requirements. I was making 100-200 ES upgrades a few times a day, eking out a little more damage and defense at a constant pace. Getting the balancing act right, trying to minmax each slot with the best possible affix for whichever stat is especially pleasing. I ended up with a 25c helm that's, uh, worth a lot more and then ran 60 uber labs to get the enchant - which is remarkably lucky. I 6 linked a backup Ghostwrithe after maybe 800 fusings for even crazier damage. I bought a couple of 1 divine jewels to maximize my ES, damage, resistance, stat, and chill resistance as best I could - the HC trade market has more in common with a yard sale than Amazon. You can make good use of both ES and life modifiers, though you get more out of ES a T1 life roll is usually better than having 3 ES-only rolls.
You can even upgrade your uniques - Esh's Visage has a pretty big range on its ES and resist and life rolls, so its always worth looking for better versions. Same goes for Ghostwrithe and Atziri's Step, you turn Evasion and life into ES thanks to your uniques and masteries, so they're more than just a slightly bigger ES pool. Hillock crafts on your armor also add damage! Tempering catalysts on Presence! Harvest enchant and a Hillock craft on EE! Eater/Exarch implicits! Double corrupts! You have so many small but meaningful upgrades that you're never quite done, and you can look back on a day of mapping and trading and crafting to see your ES pool - and by extension your damage - be meaningfully higher without having to dive into PoB. Immediate feedback is great
Solving accuracy and mana reservation were my two biggest balancing levers, and I ended up in a spot where I had enough mana to throw traps endlessly and still have a big enough chunk left for Immortal Call to go off; I use it as a Pavlovian "it's time to juke" indicator at this point. You can use a couple of mastery points until you get there - the one for life reservation until you get alt quality Arrogance at a high level, and the one for Discipline until you have enough int, levels, and cost reduction on Blade Trap to get incremental unreserved mana to the right point - and eventually reallocate those to better uses. The next project I worked on was a Synthesized %int belt, but after close to a hundred Essence of Spite I didn't end up with anything usable and kind of gave up - a Spite-rolled Stygian and a really solid Abyss jewel (preferably 6-stat) might even outperform that at the high end. I was chained to the one I had by resist/strength requirements and my inability to find better rings. See how it all interplays! It's great!
DPS:
The actual damage math is complicated. PoB tries to calculate Blade Trap's DPS by multiplying average hit by throw speed. What that ignores is that Blade Trap rotates 4 times by default (5 times with the helm enchant), hitting twice each rotation. In addition, both Swift Assembly and the Trap Mastery allow you to throw additional traps - they're independent rolls, so you can see a maximum of 8 traps in one throw - and the Saboteur Ascendancy allows some of those traps to activate a second time.
What this means is that calculating DPS sort of depends on how you define a "second." I settled on "one second of time spent standing still throwing traps" which doesn't quite extrapolate to long periods - the active trap limit will means that you're eventually overwriting existing traps with lucky extra trap procs - and depends on the enemy standing within those traps for their duration (which is a little over two seconds after activation, and close to five if you're relying on the extra activation procs). The alternate quality on Blade Traps extends this time, but I haven't modeled it. Given that the only safe way to play Hardcore is a hit-and-run style, I'm ok with these assumptions: if I stand still and throw traps for one second, and the enemy stands in those traps for their duration, they will receive about 8 million damage. But the number will, in practice, be lower than that often and higher than that on occasion.
It also depends on Bear Trap being up and Conductivity being down, so the "burst damage at start of fight" assumption is a bit generous. But it's not hard to maintain those. I was toying with getting an Increased Duration support on both Bear Trap and Immortal Call but couldn't quite budget the socket - I think I'd rather aim for dual curse so I can have Elemental Weakness too, if i can settle on a passive tree I like with that
It's still more than enough damage, especially given how many boss fights are designed to limit your damage uptime by making you dodge. While this build has the defenses to just not dodge it's far safer to do so and rely on getting the traps out in short bursts. A fast trap throw time helps a lot here and I prioritized it for a while over better damage stats, but there aren't really enough sources of it.
Conclusion:
This build is the most fun I've had with PoE in years. It destroys everything I've thrown it against - no ubers or Maven yet, the latter more for lack of experience and I'm not sure it's uber-capable in HC. Softcore, maybe though! It's not a tens of millions of DPS flavor-of-the-month build, but it's super forgiving, exceptionally tanky, easy to get started, and smooth to map with.
Got a WoC Inquisitor through acts to have done it. Even his updated story is just voicelines, no personalized tidbits like earlier acts, like he's yelling about being excited that Innocence is good again and that they can fight together but Innocence's last dialogue is still talking about how he knows the exile hates him and wants him gone. I like Inquisitor as an ascendancy but more than any other I don't think I can play Templar seriously--no matter how much you dress him up it can't hide his weird animations.
Next up is Duelist or Shadow. Need to decide on decent iconic builds for them for getting through acts. Don't mind going a bit slower to be a bit more 'on brand' for the class, so I'll probably do strikes for duelist.
Shadow feels like harder to pin down for what's iconic for him, like wanding and spells and poison and traps all seem roughly as appropriate to my understanding of him.
Posts
Oh and the loot so far doesnt feel like absolute dog shit so that is nice.
I made a +1 chaos gem, +chaos dmg mod wand a min ago.
Putting aside things like chill mod packs being a death sentence, I keep drowning in adds I barely even realized were spawning in boss fights before.
And...
Once again, GGG designing something where they're afraid to give the player any sort of power and they fail to realize that it makes the game not fun when you do that.
Right. PoE is inherently counter to the current roguelike design philosophy. I don't have as much experience with older entries into the genre, but every modern one I've played seems designed around the idea that you combine a couple of different powers to build something ridiculous and then take a nap. This is like the antithesis of Chris.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
"boy, this sure is rough" i think as I play my 2h sword witch and try to choose between double strike and cleave.
It doesn't help that what shapes my appreciation for the feel of skills tends to be the drawbacks and inconveniences, like preferring to have to aim a cone rather than having a 360 aoe.
you're doing it right
there is almost certainly a very solid Voidforge Elementalist build template up for grabs this league and I fully expect Mathil will get around to it at some point. leveling that could be a pain as a league start, once you have access to a couple of common uniques it gets easier. if I was forcing this I'd probably make a hard left turn to Ancestral Bond and use Warchiefs with golem stacking until I had stuff like Crown of Eyes, pouring everything I found into making the best weapon possible until VF. or do something ignite based with maybe Consecrated Path or even Sunder with ignite prolif.
I used to play a lot of Raging Spirits Necromancer leveling with (or even using into endgame) a Queen's Escape. Witch With Big Sword is a lifestyle
I've tried playing so many big sword witch builds. It just looks so cool.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
Oro flicker, HoWA charged dash, dominating blow/hop, consecrated path, and I'm sure others I've forgotten.
Speaking of melee witch, this is outrageous. It's unfair.
Thinking about the sanctum some more, I think it's like....almost there. They just need to do some balance passes and change some of these negative modifiers and I think it'd be pretty fun.
Everything else about this league is great so far. Rare monsters are fun again and the atlas tree shakeup is great. Loot seems to be in a great spot as well, they added some additional rare monster rewards. Loot goblins still exist, you just don't know when they'll happen, so it doesn't encourage weird gameplay like calling in a magic find person to kill one monster.
Hades is one of my all time favorite games, so I am probably judging by too high a bar, but GGG doesn't have any idea on what makes a good roguelite. Their idea is keep all the punishing stuff and none of the rewarding power that makes progression possible. Also, anemic rewards because they're GGG.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I think I've figured out the secret for running Sanctum in Acts. Basically, save up rooms, then go back to an earlier area, ~10 levels below your level, and run the floor from there. That way, you have a significant level advantage over the Sanctum enemies.
Now, having said that, it's clear that this mechanic greatly rewards dps first and foremost, then movespeed+ability to dps while moving. It is hugely disproportionately punishing to a huge swathe of builds. It was INCREDIBLY obvious that this is how it was going to go, and I don't say that to defend GGG. I mean that it was obvious that they would fail to balance resolve, and they did.
It's a bummer too because GGG's recent league mechanics have been going away from being Pure Clearspeed. Basically all the recent leagues have had no timer. Older leagues like Incursion, Legion, (to a lesser extent) Delirium were REALLY bad about this, probably worse than Sanctum in terms of punishing builds. I thought we moved away from this!
There are also a LOT of bugs with sanctum right now. For example: don't buy the "next item free" boon until you're done shopping. If you buy it then it something else from the same merchant, you lose the boon but still pay full price. Deli mirror also progresses when you're inside the sanctum pre-room and you can lose your rewards in there. The final boss also sometimes doesn't open the rewards room door.
(also apropos of nothing i think mf should straight up be removed from the game but i understand this is a controversial take)
honestly MF % gear is really dumb and just a diablo throwback. especially in this game that has put so much effort into "crafting" materials and has so many systems that generate items like harvest/heist/et.al.
but it seems like GGG has generated so many items and mechanics over time that they have long lost the ability to actually juggle all the balls in the air in a meaningful way.
I completely understand why they ignored defenses for the purposes of Resolve and it's for two reasons. One is that the most engaging fights in PoE are the ones with well-telegraphed abilities you have to respond to. The second is that defensive/recovery scaling can get so wildly out of hand that it becomes virtually impossible to make a single enemy sufficiently deadly to every possible defensive archetype (and if this becomes achievable then it encourages players to build into slow-but-invincible characters that just ignore enemies altogether)
(While the reverse of the latter is true - you end up feeling encouraged to build such overwhelming offense that stuff dies before it's a threat - it seems like players kind of ... enjoy that? And you can design some ways for monsters to still be threatening, although it's telling that any time GGG does this players cry about it endlessly. On death effects, lingering ground effects, boss invulnerablility phases, these all exist to stop the entire game from becoming an idle clicker. But I digress)
So Resolve: in order for it to matter you have to limit recovery and limit the ability for defenses to mitigate it. Which as a design philosophy - a correct one! - is at odds with the other design philosophies of PoE. Melee characters often rely on mitigation and recovery - such as Fortify and leech - as crucial tools in order to engage enemies safely. Totally useless in Sanctum. Channeling skills require a decent amount of defense to allow you to stand still long enough to do damage and that is just not sustainable.
There are other rough edges to get caught on. If you rely heavily on charge generation or flask uptime, you can struggle in Sanctum until your build is fully online with the rare and expensive methods of sustaining those without killing packs of monsters. Headhunter can get fucked (I've been anti Headhunter for nearly a decade, and even I think it's had a hard time lately). If you're an MTX fan your greatest enemy will be yourself and your ludicrous skill effects obscuring hazards.
Balancing this thing around defenses working would be a hell of an undertaking. Almost every solution I can think of opens up an avenue for abuse to where runs could become impossible to fail - and I'm a huge fan of content having meaningful failure states (it's why I play Hardcore). It kind of feels like if there's a middle ground at all, it's a razor edge. Clearly they thought of this with Resolve damage being lower at close range and at least some abilities leaving a dead zone melee range (a lot of PoE boss fights end up being directly easier at close range, it's kind of neat) but it's still balanced way too hard against defense for what I think are eminently understandable reasons.
I love my tanky builds where I do some kind of jank in order to get just enough damage to scrape by, and Sanctum is making that feel real bad. But then again I've rarely met a punishing game mode I didn't kind of like so I don't exactly hate it. It's very deliberately skewed towards the types of builds the majority of players prefer and that aren't really compatible with HC.
The thing most likely to make me reset the entire run is considered a minor affliction, which are things they want me to opt in to taking or they might force me to take just by entering a room.
Incidentially as a person who has issues with wrists im having a grand time with popcorn srs and it wasnt too bad to get going and with one lucky drop im in all my base items i need to be in.
Too good, almost...
Seriously there's something wrong with me where I'm like hm this is really good, let me swap some gems around on PoB to see how it'll perform if it's not weird enough to just be a SNS occultist and I desperately need to switch to Blade Flurry or Charged Dash or something.
So I started a Necro and leveled with Absolution until I switched to SRS in Act 8. I planned on switching as soon as I got Unleash but Absolution just trucked everything so I stuck with it until rare mobs started to get sketchy if I stood still for too long. Fighting them for for the chance at loot explosions is great, but honestly I was mostly looking forward to the gem xp bonus. I had level 18 gems in Act 8. That's with killing rares actively and doing Sanctum so I was overleveled a bit as you usually are if you stop to do league mechanics, which is never a bad thing in HC.
(The gem xp bonus kind of feels like a thing that came out of the development of Ruthless. Hear me out: gems level slower there specifically because they're a source of power for spell- based builds in particular, anything with a flat damage modifier, because items [the primary axis of progression for attack builds] are also more rare. Since rare mobs often spit out better items, it makes sense to have them progress gems faster too. And since that bonus caps out at 20 it has a limit right around the time spell builds start looking for sources of + gem levels on gear to progress. So it's a natural fit into the new reward system)
Anyway, my gear on beating act 10 was just trash. Like I found some great corrupted 5 links with completely unusable socket colors so SRS is on a 4 link, with two of those being Unleash and Melee Splash, so it's like a 2 link for damage. Kitava died fast (prefiring 20 SRS which don't wander off target is OP) but map bosses and stuff like Syndicate members take fucking forever to die. I only had 3.8k life going into maps and 7k armour with Determination up. And -19% chaos res which is super fucking sketchy. PoB says I have 450k dps but that's only 30k per SRS and they're fickle about sticking to targets. Also uptime even with Unleash isn't great, though it'll be better once I get Mistress of Sacrifice from uber lab.
Somehow I cleared all my white maps for atlas passives. I even cleared a couple rare t6s but then I did an Alva mission in an easy map and couldn't clear the room before the timer ran out so that's kind of a barometer for a build being garbage. It's a slog. The good news is that gear upgrades will push my damage to reasonable levels quickly, but I might be camping out in t5 maps and Delve for a while to try and make that happen.
The build totally wrecks Sanctum though. I got to the 4th floor boss with it on the first run and lost to not understanding the mechanic (sometimes league mechanics teach you things about the boss fights before you get there - thinking about Abyss and Breach here - but this one throws a new thing at you in the last room) and then won on my second try. And third, where I got offered 2 divines as a reward for beating the Sanctum two rooms before the end on a dominant run so that was neat.
I wasn't entirely wrong before about the Sanctum being bad for Hardcore builds but it turns out to be the exact kind of league that a Hardcore player trains for every time they play PoE. Intuitive awareness of threats and knowing where not to be at any given moment is part of not dying. Minion builds are well suited to this since I can poop out a couple spirits quickly and just keep booking it while they peck things to death (slowly).
I'm looking forward to having actual DPS.
remember to identify your items folks, sometimes they are pretty good!
Yeah at least mapping is mostly fixed. On that identify front had a near perfect gloomfang i forgot to price and some nob tried to PM me "offer 5c" lol.
I wonder if the 3s totem buffs linger mastery bandaid is what they had in mind as a solution or just a temp measure.
On that note, I realized that while my occultist cold reave character works fine enough, actually placing 1-2 totems+2 curses+exposure (and resummoning a dead golem I guess, if I really want to waste some time) for anything tough will drive me insane--it's bad enough with 1 totem, 1 curse, and frost bomb atm. So I'm looking at my options for automation at the expense of maximum throughput now. Not that I can afford to lose much throughput.
Heraldry jewel passive is a cheap fix for exposure, though weaker than frost bomb. elemental weakness gloves would be a pain since I'm reliant on hrimsorrow and that starts at 1 div for corrupted ones with bad sockets. I thought maybe hextouch-frost bomb-curses, for one click to handle the three but with a 2sec delay, but I guess hextouch guts curses so that's a pretty substantial loss? Heraldry and bane?
fake edit: Honestly after screwing around in PoB for a while I think the Frost Bomb hextouch option might be best after all. guess it depends on how that delay feels.
Well that explains that, was wondering if I was just obscenely unlucky
It was strange being able to stand face to face with Brutus and Ground Slam him into the dirt. Sunder is actually quite satisfying, never tried it because all the slams blur together in my mind and most of them look kinda silly. It took me a second to understand why Volcanic Fissure wasn't just Molten Strike with a slam tag, it's kind of interesting.
I'll probably end up stopping wherever their unique lines run out, which I think is Act 4 for everyone but Templar and Duelist?
So of course I went and threw together a cold elementalist version for next time...
https://pastebin.com/8KFKtutj
Stats without flasks, guard skills, or buffs we wouldn't have in a boss fight:
14.2k ES
18.5k evasion with Ghost Shroud
Ignite/Shock/Freeze immune and chill resistant (-58% effect without flasks, over 100% with)
1700 ES regen
8300 ES recharge - 5000 if you take Wicked Ward for easy bossing
8 million pinnacle boss DPS (we'll talk about this)
Can tank a 21k physical hit - without armour
Theory:
We convert life to flat ES using Ghostwrithe and Presence of Chayula. We then use Esh's Visage to let our ES handle chaos damage for us, reserving as close to (but not at or over!) 50% of our life for an extra aura (in this case, Arctic Armour). We then stack as much int and %ES as we can cram in on our passive tree and gear to get the biggest ES pool possible, and then use Ephemeral Edge to turn that into flat maximum damage. Combine that with the Lightning Mastery "Lightning Damage with Non-Critical Strikes is Lucky" and our damage is through the roof. To compensate for the glacial attack speed on Ephemeral Edge, we use an attack skill that ignores attack speed entirely: Blade Trap. With traps, we naturally pick Saboteur for a bunch of defensive and utility bonuses.
Practice:
This build absolutely slaps. You throw traps then walk away while they blend everything to a pulp. You can preload 19 traps for 25 million cumulative damage during boss preload/phase changes, or for popping Essences and Harvests. Your margin for error with over 14k ES is absolutely massive, you can blunder into mechanics that are designed to oneshot all but the tankiest builds and walk away to recharge. You have obscene recovery and avoidance, to the point where your ES globe doesn't even move during most t16 maps.
The playstyle is: throw traps into packs, move, loot. The burst damage of even the first few hits deletes white and magic monsters, and it takes especially tanky rares to require any thought to positioning or dropping a curse or Bear Trap for extra damage. Preload for things that you can predict and they just vanish. If you do take damage, run around for ES recharge to top you back up - it will take about 3.5 seconds of not getting hit to go from the verge of death to full again, and if you take Wicked Ward you can reliably tank non-oneshot mechanics as long as you juke long for the 1.8s it takes for recharge to start. You recover a Softcore build's worth of hit points every second for four seconds with Wicked Ward, and have AA to make that go even further. Every now and then a rare mob (usually from Expedition) has the Fuck You mods it needs to survive your burst damage - you can either face tank it and just throw, or kite it through a field of spinning death throwing ahead of you as you run and mixing in Bear Traps to slow them down. It's an infrequent occurance.
In red maps, you want to avoid No Regen and Reduced Effect of Auras - with Ghost Shroud, and with Grace being such a huge chunk of your evasion, your ES pool will take a big hit. Reduced evasion/suppression maps are sketchy, but doable. I sometimes reroll maps with 3-4 big damage mods (turbo, crit, gain phys as extra) out of an abundance of caution because Hardcore, but given that I probably gained 15 atlas points from doing unidentified maps I may be playing it more safe than I need.
Leveling:
I leveled with Blade Trap and some assorted 1c leveling weapons until 78 (Ewar's Mirage! Tempestuous Steel! Hyaon's Fury! the classics), at which point I put on the four core uniques (total cost of less than 1 div, on a 5 link Ghostwrithe). With over 8k ES out of the gate and something like a million DPS while held together by chicken wire and hope, it cruised through yellow maps, into reds, and started knocking out atlas completion before level 90. This build was completing unidentified corrupted red Kirac missions in Hardcore. As long as I didn't have a No Regen mod, it was safe (well for a little while Elemental Weakness was sketchy, but I could see that one immediately at the portal and make a jewel swap to compensate). I'm not entirely sure I saw my ES bar move significantly until I did a Baran fight with AoE + frenzies and just face tanked him to death.
Gearing:
The gear curve feels great, since you have 6 non-unique slots to play with (5 once you can solve resists without boots, so you can put on Atziri's Step) for stat, resist, spell suppression, and accuracy requirements. I was making 100-200 ES upgrades a few times a day, eking out a little more damage and defense at a constant pace. Getting the balancing act right, trying to minmax each slot with the best possible affix for whichever stat is especially pleasing. I ended up with a 25c helm that's, uh, worth a lot more and then ran 60 uber labs to get the enchant - which is remarkably lucky. I 6 linked a backup Ghostwrithe after maybe 800 fusings for even crazier damage. I bought a couple of 1 divine jewels to maximize my ES, damage, resistance, stat, and chill resistance as best I could - the HC trade market has more in common with a yard sale than Amazon. You can make good use of both ES and life modifiers, though you get more out of ES a T1 life roll is usually better than having 3 ES-only rolls.
You can even upgrade your uniques - Esh's Visage has a pretty big range on its ES and resist and life rolls, so its always worth looking for better versions. Same goes for Ghostwrithe and Atziri's Step, you turn Evasion and life into ES thanks to your uniques and masteries, so they're more than just a slightly bigger ES pool. Hillock crafts on your armor also add damage! Tempering catalysts on Presence! Harvest enchant and a Hillock craft on EE! Eater/Exarch implicits! Double corrupts! You have so many small but meaningful upgrades that you're never quite done, and you can look back on a day of mapping and trading and crafting to see your ES pool - and by extension your damage - be meaningfully higher without having to dive into PoB. Immediate feedback is great
Solving accuracy and mana reservation were my two biggest balancing levers, and I ended up in a spot where I had enough mana to throw traps endlessly and still have a big enough chunk left for Immortal Call to go off; I use it as a Pavlovian "it's time to juke" indicator at this point. You can use a couple of mastery points until you get there - the one for life reservation until you get alt quality Arrogance at a high level, and the one for Discipline until you have enough int, levels, and cost reduction on Blade Trap to get incremental unreserved mana to the right point - and eventually reallocate those to better uses. The next project I worked on was a Synthesized %int belt, but after close to a hundred Essence of Spite I didn't end up with anything usable and kind of gave up - a Spite-rolled Stygian and a really solid Abyss jewel (preferably 6-stat) might even outperform that at the high end. I was chained to the one I had by resist/strength requirements and my inability to find better rings. See how it all interplays! It's great!
DPS:
The actual damage math is complicated. PoB tries to calculate Blade Trap's DPS by multiplying average hit by throw speed. What that ignores is that Blade Trap rotates 4 times by default (5 times with the helm enchant), hitting twice each rotation. In addition, both Swift Assembly and the Trap Mastery allow you to throw additional traps - they're independent rolls, so you can see a maximum of 8 traps in one throw - and the Saboteur Ascendancy allows some of those traps to activate a second time.
What this means is that calculating DPS sort of depends on how you define a "second." I settled on "one second of time spent standing still throwing traps" which doesn't quite extrapolate to long periods - the active trap limit will means that you're eventually overwriting existing traps with lucky extra trap procs - and depends on the enemy standing within those traps for their duration (which is a little over two seconds after activation, and close to five if you're relying on the extra activation procs). The alternate quality on Blade Traps extends this time, but I haven't modeled it. Given that the only safe way to play Hardcore is a hit-and-run style, I'm ok with these assumptions: if I stand still and throw traps for one second, and the enemy stands in those traps for their duration, they will receive about 8 million damage. But the number will, in practice, be lower than that often and higher than that on occasion.
It also depends on Bear Trap being up and Conductivity being down, so the "burst damage at start of fight" assumption is a bit generous. But it's not hard to maintain those. I was toying with getting an Increased Duration support on both Bear Trap and Immortal Call but couldn't quite budget the socket - I think I'd rather aim for dual curse so I can have Elemental Weakness too, if i can settle on a passive tree I like with that
It's still more than enough damage, especially given how many boss fights are designed to limit your damage uptime by making you dodge. While this build has the defenses to just not dodge it's far safer to do so and rely on getting the traps out in short bursts. A fast trap throw time helps a lot here and I prioritized it for a while over better damage stats, but there aren't really enough sources of it.
Conclusion:
This build is the most fun I've had with PoE in years. It destroys everything I've thrown it against - no ubers or Maven yet, the latter more for lack of experience and I'm not sure it's uber-capable in HC. Softcore, maybe though! It's not a tens of millions of DPS flavor-of-the-month build, but it's super forgiving, exceptionally tanky, easy to get started, and smooth to map with.
Next up is Duelist or Shadow. Need to decide on decent iconic builds for them for getting through acts. Don't mind going a bit slower to be a bit more 'on brand' for the class, so I'll probably do strikes for duelist.
Shadow feels like harder to pin down for what's iconic for him, like wanding and spells and poison and traps all seem roughly as appropriate to my understanding of him.