I took a break from the Blade Trapper because it had a few things that annoyed me. Chiefly, upgrades were starting to get prohibitive - not so much a matter of currency as a matter of whether the items I want exist at all in Hardcore trade.
Anyway, I started blasting. Doom blasting! A streamer named Paak is widely credited for cracking the code on Impending Doom, combining it with Vixen's Entrapment for some incredible damage. I leveled a Champion version, reasoning that since the skill had such a high baseline of damage I could bootstrap my defenses with Champ being, well, Champ. The plan was to bowcast, using Misery essences on a cheap 6 link bow and bullding from there.
This ran into some issues. Impending Doom is chaos damage and the Doomblast build concept specifically leans into poison; without reliable Wither application or any applicable damage from the Champion ascendancy (or that part of the passive tree generally) the damage was less than half of that an equivalently geared Occultist gets. Plus it struggled to maintain ES, it's an EB build (all those triggered curses chew through 400+ mana per second) and ES leech, recharge, and regen all depend to some degree on how large an ES pool you have. Champ just didn't get enough from int and couldn't spare the points for more.
So I rerolled it as an Occultist, using Zizaran's tech of combining the new Eternal Damnation amulet with a 5L Loreweave to get enough defense to be comfortable. It's got a reliable amount of mitigation from that combo, plus a chunky reduction in enemy damage from Enfeeble and Temporal Chains. Even so, there's nothing comfortable about doing yellow maps with under 4k life in Hardcore. It was a harrowing journey until I got enough levels to bring that up to about 5k
Except ... It was sort of easy? The mana sustain issues lurked beneath the surface as it was entirely possible to run dry on ES - you know it because you'll continue to cast your main curse, using up what little you have left, and no damage will happen - but as long as I watched how much gas I had left in the tank the Doomblaster got into red maps without much fuss. I used a Balance of Terror with an "action speed can't be slowed below base value" mod and it just made everything so much simpler.
I eventually switched away from Loreweave and Eternal Damnation into a Glorious Vanity with Divine Flesh, picking up nodes for chaos damage leeched as life and some Wither application on hit (I hate Withering Step) and then lucked into a solid 6L base from a Chains That Bind set. Even at 4.8k life it does red maps with little drama. It clears your average map faster than my trapper, but it doesn't have anywhere near the raw defense or single target capability.
After toying with a few options for the Doomblaster, I wanted to do something different, and it's a bit of a work in progress. All I'll say for now is: there is power in B L O O D
Doing acts now (slowly, I'm distracted by WoW and Lost Ark) with a (vaal) double strike duelist and it's going remarkably well. I had it in my head that I didn't like relying on Ancestral Call, but I think I just didn't like molten strike, the only skill where I've ever used it much.
Having tried this years ago for almost an hour, picked the game up again and started a new character.
Not sure if i will stick to it or not.
But i do love how, for once, i am allowed to have useful amount of undead.
Sure it might not be quite an endless horde, but at 7 zombies, 2 spectre's (i think i am about to get 3rd one soon), 2 golems, up to 8 skeletons and how ever many wraiths i have at any given time with every damn passive skill buffind them i have been able to get is getting pretty close to unstoppable.
Nyysjan on
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
Well, I've put more time into this league than any previous since my altaholism hit hard, ended up at 38/40 and I don't think I can push beyond that. I am only 11/17 on that sanctum one and I'm probably not going to spam maps to try and get another 6 RNG boons, plus I just can't seem to put together a character that can finish level 30 simulacrum, I just get stepped on around level 25/26 without fail.
I started off using most of the Zizaran starter pack but branched out to builds by Pohx, Steelmage and a couple of other random ones, but in total there was:
- Exploding Arrow ballista champion that was my first ever to 100
- Seismic Trap saboteur which does huge amounts of damage but the mines mechanic just didn't feel good so that got abandoned around 92
- Cold DoT trickster which felt kinda slow and got abandoned at 89
- Righteous Fire jugg that just refuses to die as long as I don't do anything too stupid, feels bad in sanctum though so it doesn't feel good playing in maps since I have to just skip sanctums and all that loot
- SRS necro which didn't feel great
- Poison Conc pathfinder which was great to level and through yellow maps but fun fell off in reds
- Respecced necro to Pohx's Righteous Fire elementalist with EXPLODE™ which was just tremendous at maps, blight ravaged maps and all that jazz, but still terrible at sanctum for me.
- Respecced trickster to Toxic Rain which I have played before and forgot that I don't like it in endgame
- Respecced pathfinder to Steelmage's Doom Blast and it ended up even tankier than the jugg and everything changed as soon as I got the right gear and skills to make everything cost zero mana. Not great at sanctum though, so while it's good for bossing it's feels bad mapping since it has to turret which makes me lose too much resolve.
- Respecced elementalist back to necro for a run at a Poison SRS build by a streamer named BalorMage and holy smoke it is night and day different than the first time since everything just dies so very, very quick. It has less POB DPS than my champ, but melts bosses so much quicker and is fun in maps & sanctum.
- tried a CWDT Scion that is utterly ridiculous, if you like Vampire Survivors, this build is for you. Definitely not a league starter since it costs 20-30 divines to get off the ground, but once the CWDT loop is tuned right it just shreds anything in maps and a lot of bosses as well, though it is very much on the glass canon side of things.
I would have just skipped the league if they had left Archnemesis in so I think them getting rid of that and making the loot feel good again were big parts in the longevity of this one.
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Heh yeah not sure how in jest the comment was, but for all the times reddit may have been wrong about stealth nerf to loot drops, they were 1000% right about it with the nemesis stuff last time around. Hard not to be a little paranoid after that.
And for all of the crap reddit gets, the stuff they whine about often directly leads to league changes/improvements. We've had so many league mechanics launch incredibly undertuned, and that whining more often than not becomes next week's patch notes.
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
New league seems neat, though I was hoping for a couple new base line skills instead of vaal skills
The crafting mechanic is Nifty but also seems like something I'm too lazy/bad to get into deeply
The mastery changes looked cool though
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited March 2023
I was considering this league after some time off
Then they removed Onslaught, and they removed the vendor recipe for flat elemental damage to spells rolls for wands.
Good job making leveling even more miserable, GGG.
jungleroomx on
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
I don't mind the leveling changes. Losing onslaught support is meh, I barely used it.
The wand leveling stuff doesn't bother me. They added flat damage to wand implicits, so now everyone gets the wand recipe even if you didn't know it exists. It's a quality of life improvement for 90% of people who play the game.
I actually like these patch notes, I think the complaints are a bit overblown. Doing the race in ruthless is silly though, nobody is going to finish it.
Steam: Spawnbroker
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
I don't mind the leveling changes. Losing onslaught support is meh, I barely used it.
The wand leveling stuff doesn't bother me. They added flat damage to wand implicits, so now everyone gets the wand recipe even if you didn't know it exists. It's a quality of life improvement for 90% of people who play the game.
I actually like these patch notes, I think the complaints are a bit overblown. Doing the race in ruthless is silly though, nobody is going to finish it.
there are 100% people that will finish that race
theres a contingent of people that are crazy about ruthless
+1
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DaimarA Million Feet Tall of AwesomeRegistered Userregular
They added flat damage to wand implicits, so now everyone gets the wand recipe even if you didn't know it exists.
And you lose the wand spell damage modifier in the process, plus reduce the possibility of upgrades because they put it on a cyclic basis. You can't even get guaranteed lightning wand until Act 3.
Sounds really garbagey, tbh.
jungleroomx on
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
i mean spell damage is a jillion times less useful than flat, especially because, u know, witches start with fireball and their starting nodes and wands dont scale ignites but flat fire will so it was such a ruse for new players
i complained about that to them years ago hell yea im taking credit for this one
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
i mean spell damage is a jillion times less useful than flat, especially because, u know, witches start with fireball and their starting nodes and wands dont scale ignites but flat fire will so it was such a ruse for new players
i complained about that to them years ago hell yea im taking credit for this one
If I had a choice of being able to get spell damage AND flat damage of my choice in Act 1 via something the player has agency over... or losing guaranteed spell damage, having to wait until a predetermined point in the Acts to actually use the spells I want with a flat damage stat roll (That's less than the vendor recipe, btw) and making even more things RNG, I'm going with the former.
It's a pointless nerf that makes the game worse. It makes trudging through Acts 1-10, the absolute worst part of this experience for people who have seasons under their belt, even more of a chore than it was previously. And for nothing but to punish runners.
Yet again GGG tells the general fanbase to go fuck themselves so they can balance around .1% of players for .1% of the game.
The speedrunners are probably the worst of the group too.
I watched a speedrun video of a build I was trying out, and the guy was very very good at speedrunning. He also openly admitted in the video that he doesn't actually enjoy the game and just does it because he's good at it and it brings in the views. Its.....so crazy to me that anyone at GGG would care about anything people like that say or do. It's a mechanical joyless job to them.
Unfortunately listening to them and polling their communities for feedback (you know, the people who will overwhelmingly parrot what their favorite streamer says) finally turned it into a joyless job for me as well. Mission accomplished?
Jeez, what Chris Wilson had to say about melee being a low priority because it's a small part of the player base...
I'm not sure whether that or 'people have said that Ruthless would be a better default experience for new players' is more telling.
Wow. Yeah....maybe I should stop holding out hope that the good times will return some day. He really is just listening to the streamers and no one else.
Jeez, what Chris Wilson had to say about melee being a low priority because it's a small part of the player base...
I'm not sure whether that or 'people have said that Ruthless would be a better default experience for new players' is more telling.
Wow. Yeah....maybe I should stop holding out hope that the good times will return some day. He really is just listening to the streamers and no one else.
Most of what I've seen quoted from big name streamers didn't give me the impression Ruthless is for them
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I like the IDEA of a Ruthless mode. I like hard games. I'm currently getting my head slapped around in Sunbreak by 8* Afflicted monsters and I'm all giggles and smiles over it.
The problem is PoE doesn't give you the tools to deal with it. You have to take damage, that's just how the game works, and stacking difficulty on top of a "YEAH SOMETIMES YOU'LL JUST GET ONE-SHOT, SUCK IT UP" design philosophy turns this thing into a pure dice roll with extra steps.
I like the IDEA of a Ruthless mode. I like hard games. I'm currently getting my head slapped around in Sunbreak by 8* Afflicted monsters and I'm all giggles and smiles over it.
The problem is PoE doesn't give you the tools to deal with it. You have to take damage, that's just how the game works, and stacking difficulty on top of a "YEAH SOMETIMES YOU'LL JUST GET ONE-SHOT, SUCK IT UP" design philosophy turns this thing into a pure dice roll with extra steps.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not anti-challenge. Elden Ring was one of my favorite games in years, and I spend a lot of time playing super punishing old and/or janky games. Dying horribly in Kenshi is fun, and chasing an elk in UnReal World for an hour before passing out, drowning in a lake, and losing your character forever is great!
There's just something to be said for "Hey, remember how when you started playing the game there were 5-10 cheap and fun new builds every season to keep you engaged? Yeah sorry, you actually weren't having fun. You will be having lots more fun if you have to grind 40 more hours to achieve that same level of power relative to the content"
Actually, no, I'm good! It feels bad and like you have no respect for my time, when I'm a guy who was excitedly awaiting every league start, queueing up, and no-lifing the entire weekend and beyond having a blast back in the day.
Fiatil on
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I like the IDEA of a Ruthless mode. I like hard games. I'm currently getting my head slapped around in Sunbreak by 8* Afflicted monsters and I'm all giggles and smiles over it.
The problem is PoE doesn't give you the tools to deal with it. You have to take damage, that's just how the game works, and stacking difficulty on top of a "YEAH SOMETIMES YOU'LL JUST GET ONE-SHOT, SUCK IT UP" design philosophy turns this thing into a pure dice roll with extra steps.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not anti-challenge. Elden Ring was one of my favorite games in years, and I spend a lot of time playing super punishing old and/or janky games. Dying horribly in Kenshi is fun, and chasing an elk in UnReal World for an hour before passing out, drowning in a lake, and losing your character forever is great!
There's just something to be said for "Hey, remember how when you started playing the game there were 5-10 cheap and fun new builds every season to keep you engaged? Yeah sorry, you actually weren't having fun. You will be having lots more fun if you have to grind 40 more hours to achieve that same level of power relative to the content"
Actually, no, I'm good! It feels bad and like you have no respect for my time, when I'm a guy who was excitedly awaiting every league start, queueing up, and no-lifing the entire weekend and beyond having a blast back in the day.
Yup. The builds filtered down the longer you played and transitioning to one of those wild ass builds you saw on Poe Ninja like Power Siphon were the journey, but you never felt hamstrung as long as you slapped together something half decent in PoB.
New powerful builds would be found and things would be pretty good, the build forums active.
Now nobody even maintains those main Build indexes because nothing past the first page is even worth it.
I like the IDEA of a Ruthless mode. I like hard games. I'm currently getting my head slapped around in Sunbreak by 8* Afflicted monsters and I'm all giggles and smiles over it.
The problem is PoE doesn't give you the tools to deal with it. You have to take damage, that's just how the game works, and stacking difficulty on top of a "YEAH SOMETIMES YOU'LL JUST GET ONE-SHOT, SUCK IT UP" design philosophy turns this thing into a pure dice roll with extra steps.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not anti-challenge. Elden Ring was one of my favorite games in years, and I spend a lot of time playing super punishing old and/or janky games. Dying horribly in Kenshi is fun, and chasing an elk in UnReal World for an hour before passing out, drowning in a lake, and losing your character forever is great!
There's just something to be said for "Hey, remember how when you started playing the game there were 5-10 cheap and fun new builds every season to keep you engaged? Yeah sorry, you actually weren't having fun. You will be having lots more fun if you have to grind 40 more hours to achieve that same level of power relative to the content"
Actually, no, I'm good! It feels bad and like you have no respect for my time, when I'm a guy who was excitedly awaiting every league start, queueing up, and no-lifing the entire weekend and beyond having a blast back in the day.
Yup. The builds filtered down the longer you played and transitioning to one of those wild ass builds you saw on Poe Ninja like Power Siphon were the journey, but you never felt hamstrung as long as you slapped together something half decent in PoB.
New powerful builds would be found and things would be pretty good, the build forums active.
Now nobody even maintains those main Build indexes because nothing past the first page is even worth it.
Yepp. I've looked at all of the build aggregation sites in recent seasons and it's depressing. You get to like the 5th build and it's "that build you played 5 leagues ago but after a 50% DPS nerf". My favorite build guide aggregator was putting out fire build lists with about a dozen fun and easy to put together builds every league dating to when I started in Bestiary. Now he's just stopped and is writing guides for various niche games because the build lists and guides became the same builds but worse, and maybe a new build that's okay but wouldn't have made any of the old lists.
It's hilarious seeing some of the build guide authors on the forums scramble and write titles like Totally still viable and awesome in new league!, then you read the comments and see that it now takes 50x as much currency to achieve the "totally still viable and awesome" new version.
Fiatil on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
Jeez, what Chris Wilson had to say about melee being a low priority because it's a small part of the player base...
I'm not sure whether that or 'people have said that Ruthless would be a better default experience for new players' is more telling.
Wow. Yeah....maybe I should stop holding out hope that the good times will return some day. He really is just listening to the streamers and no one else.
Not really. A lot of streamers don’t want ruthless. Chris just has massive confirmation bias and continues to not understand or care what most people actually want
Jeez, what Chris Wilson had to say about melee being a low priority because it's a small part of the player base...
I'm not sure whether that or 'people have said that Ruthless would be a better default experience for new players' is more telling.
Wow. Yeah....maybe I should stop holding out hope that the good times will return some day. He really is just listening to the streamers and no one else.
Not really. A lot of streamers don’t want ruthless. Chris just has massive confirmation bias and continues to not understand or care what most people actually want
Oh yeah I'm comfortable with #NotAllStreamers if we want to go that way, but I've seen several that love anything that makes the game harder to give them more "content" to monetize. It's not all of them, but enough to feed into his confirmation bias.
Posts
Anyway, I started blasting. Doom blasting! A streamer named Paak is widely credited for cracking the code on Impending Doom, combining it with Vixen's Entrapment for some incredible damage. I leveled a Champion version, reasoning that since the skill had such a high baseline of damage I could bootstrap my defenses with Champ being, well, Champ. The plan was to bowcast, using Misery essences on a cheap 6 link bow and bullding from there.
This ran into some issues. Impending Doom is chaos damage and the Doomblast build concept specifically leans into poison; without reliable Wither application or any applicable damage from the Champion ascendancy (or that part of the passive tree generally) the damage was less than half of that an equivalently geared Occultist gets. Plus it struggled to maintain ES, it's an EB build (all those triggered curses chew through 400+ mana per second) and ES leech, recharge, and regen all depend to some degree on how large an ES pool you have. Champ just didn't get enough from int and couldn't spare the points for more.
So I rerolled it as an Occultist, using Zizaran's tech of combining the new Eternal Damnation amulet with a 5L Loreweave to get enough defense to be comfortable. It's got a reliable amount of mitigation from that combo, plus a chunky reduction in enemy damage from Enfeeble and Temporal Chains. Even so, there's nothing comfortable about doing yellow maps with under 4k life in Hardcore. It was a harrowing journey until I got enough levels to bring that up to about 5k
Except ... It was sort of easy? The mana sustain issues lurked beneath the surface as it was entirely possible to run dry on ES - you know it because you'll continue to cast your main curse, using up what little you have left, and no damage will happen - but as long as I watched how much gas I had left in the tank the Doomblaster got into red maps without much fuss. I used a Balance of Terror with an "action speed can't be slowed below base value" mod and it just made everything so much simpler.
I eventually switched away from Loreweave and Eternal Damnation into a Glorious Vanity with Divine Flesh, picking up nodes for chaos damage leeched as life and some Wither application on hit (I hate Withering Step) and then lucked into a solid 6L base from a Chains That Bind set. Even at 4.8k life it does red maps with little drama. It clears your average map faster than my trapper, but it doesn't have anywhere near the raw defense or single target capability.
After toying with a few options for the Doomblaster, I wanted to do something different, and it's a bit of a work in progress. All I'll say for now is: there is power in B L O O D
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Not sure if i will stick to it or not.
But i do love how, for once, i am allowed to have useful amount of undead.
Sure it might not be quite an endless horde, but at 7 zombies, 2 spectre's (i think i am about to get 3rd one soon), 2 golems, up to 8 skeletons and how ever many wraiths i have at any given time with every damn passive skill buffind them i have been able to get is getting pretty close to unstoppable.
I started off using most of the Zizaran starter pack but branched out to builds by Pohx, Steelmage and a couple of other random ones, but in total there was:
- Exploding Arrow ballista champion that was my first ever to 100
- Seismic Trap saboteur which does huge amounts of damage but the mines mechanic just didn't feel good so that got abandoned around 92
- Cold DoT trickster which felt kinda slow and got abandoned at 89
- Righteous Fire jugg that just refuses to die as long as I don't do anything too stupid, feels bad in sanctum though so it doesn't feel good playing in maps since I have to just skip sanctums and all that loot
- SRS necro which didn't feel great
- Poison Conc pathfinder which was great to level and through yellow maps but fun fell off in reds
- Respecced necro to Pohx's Righteous Fire elementalist with EXPLODE™ which was just tremendous at maps, blight ravaged maps and all that jazz, but still terrible at sanctum for me.
- Respecced trickster to Toxic Rain which I have played before and forgot that I don't like it in endgame
- Respecced pathfinder to Steelmage's Doom Blast and it ended up even tankier than the jugg and everything changed as soon as I got the right gear and skills to make everything cost zero mana. Not great at sanctum though, so while it's good for bossing it's feels bad mapping since it has to turret which makes me lose too much resolve.
- Respecced elementalist back to necro for a run at a Poison SRS build by a streamer named BalorMage and holy smoke it is night and day different than the first time since everything just dies so very, very quick. It has less POB DPS than my champ, but melts bosses so much quicker and is fun in maps & sanctum.
- tried a CWDT Scion that is utterly ridiculous, if you like Vampire Survivors, this build is for you. Definitely not a league starter since it costs 20-30 divines to get off the ground, but once the CWDT loop is tuned right it just shreds anything in maps and a lot of bosses as well, though it is very much on the glass canon side of things.
I would have just skipped the league if they had left Archnemesis in so I think them getting rid of that and making the loot feel good again were big parts in the longevity of this one.
league reveal 3/30 and league start 4/07
(Tweet image: chaos stacking to 20)
Teasing time!
are u insane
do u know how big those things are??? the work they had to do to hit 20????????????
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
Neglect? They will intentionally not put them in and reddit will be nothing but "omg stealth nerf to chaos what gives" for weeks
And for all of the crap reddit gets, the stuff they whine about often directly leads to league changes/improvements. We've had so many league mechanics launch incredibly undertuned, and that whining more often than not becomes next week's patch notes.
The crafting mechanic is Nifty but also seems like something I'm too lazy/bad to get into deeply
The mastery changes looked cool though
Then they removed Onslaught, and they removed the vendor recipe for flat elemental damage to spells rolls for wands.
Good job making leveling even more miserable, GGG.
If only it had a console release. It's kind of a bummer because there's not really any new big arpgs on console until D4 launches.
will be nice for making meme weapons while levlling tho
just ram in ur shitty rares and watch it make spaghetti
The wand leveling stuff doesn't bother me. They added flat damage to wand implicits, so now everyone gets the wand recipe even if you didn't know it exists. It's a quality of life improvement for 90% of people who play the game.
I actually like these patch notes, I think the complaints are a bit overblown. Doing the race in ruthless is silly though, nobody is going to finish it.
there are 100% people that will finish that race
theres a contingent of people that are crazy about ruthless
and all of them work at GGG
No no, don't forget the streamers who get paid to play the game 24/7 and constantly complain about it being too easy that GGG likes to balance around.
And you lose the wand spell damage modifier in the process, plus reduce the possibility of upgrades because they put it on a cyclic basis. You can't even get guaranteed lightning wand until Act 3.
Sounds really garbagey, tbh.
i complained about that to them years ago hell yea im taking credit for this one
If I had a choice of being able to get spell damage AND flat damage of my choice in Act 1 via something the player has agency over... or losing guaranteed spell damage, having to wait until a predetermined point in the Acts to actually use the spells I want with a flat damage stat roll (That's less than the vendor recipe, btw) and making even more things RNG, I'm going with the former.
It's a pointless nerf that makes the game worse. It makes trudging through Acts 1-10, the absolute worst part of this experience for people who have seasons under their belt, even more of a chore than it was previously. And for nothing but to punish runners.
Yet again GGG tells the general fanbase to go fuck themselves so they can balance around .1% of players for .1% of the game.
I'm not sure whether that or 'people have said that Ruthless would be a better default experience for new players' is more telling.
I watched a speedrun video of a build I was trying out, and the guy was very very good at speedrunning. He also openly admitted in the video that he doesn't actually enjoy the game and just does it because he's good at it and it brings in the views. Its.....so crazy to me that anyone at GGG would care about anything people like that say or do. It's a mechanical joyless job to them.
Unfortunately listening to them and polling their communities for feedback (you know, the people who will overwhelmingly parrot what their favorite streamer says) finally turned it into a joyless job for me as well. Mission accomplished?
Wow. Yeah....maybe I should stop holding out hope that the good times will return some day. He really is just listening to the streamers and no one else.
Most of what I've seen quoted from big name streamers didn't give me the impression Ruthless is for them
The problem is PoE doesn't give you the tools to deal with it. You have to take damage, that's just how the game works, and stacking difficulty on top of a "YEAH SOMETIMES YOU'LL JUST GET ONE-SHOT, SUCK IT UP" design philosophy turns this thing into a pure dice roll with extra steps.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not anti-challenge. Elden Ring was one of my favorite games in years, and I spend a lot of time playing super punishing old and/or janky games. Dying horribly in Kenshi is fun, and chasing an elk in UnReal World for an hour before passing out, drowning in a lake, and losing your character forever is great!
There's just something to be said for "Hey, remember how when you started playing the game there were 5-10 cheap and fun new builds every season to keep you engaged? Yeah sorry, you actually weren't having fun. You will be having lots more fun if you have to grind 40 more hours to achieve that same level of power relative to the content"
Actually, no, I'm good! It feels bad and like you have no respect for my time, when I'm a guy who was excitedly awaiting every league start, queueing up, and no-lifing the entire weekend and beyond having a blast back in the day.
Yup. The builds filtered down the longer you played and transitioning to one of those wild ass builds you saw on Poe Ninja like Power Siphon were the journey, but you never felt hamstrung as long as you slapped together something half decent in PoB.
New powerful builds would be found and things would be pretty good, the build forums active.
Now nobody even maintains those main Build indexes because nothing past the first page is even worth it.
Yepp. I've looked at all of the build aggregation sites in recent seasons and it's depressing. You get to like the 5th build and it's "that build you played 5 leagues ago but after a 50% DPS nerf". My favorite build guide aggregator was putting out fire build lists with about a dozen fun and easy to put together builds every league dating to when I started in Bestiary. Now he's just stopped and is writing guides for various niche games because the build lists and guides became the same builds but worse, and maybe a new build that's okay but wouldn't have made any of the old lists.
It's hilarious seeing some of the build guide authors on the forums scramble and write titles like Totally still viable and awesome in new league!, then you read the comments and see that it now takes 50x as much currency to achieve the "totally still viable and awesome" new version.
Not really. A lot of streamers don’t want ruthless. Chris just has massive confirmation bias and continues to not understand or care what most people actually want
Oh yeah I'm comfortable with #NotAllStreamers if we want to go that way, but I've seen several that love anything that makes the game harder to give them more "content" to monetize. It's not all of them, but enough to feed into his confirmation bias.