Path of Exile - upcoming F2P Daiablo clone

[crazy canuck]

I got it and took it for a spin. 

This is going to be a great game.  It is not near finished so don't get it yet.  But what they have finished looks amazing.

Starting with the character design.  This is the next gen Diablo II game I was hoping for.

First, passive skill selection.  Skills are based on the class you pick.   This is not PoE where class is just your starting point in a unified passive tree.  Like Diablo II the starting class matters. But instead of immediately choosing one of 3 skill trees for that class, there is one beginning class skill tree (the Class Base Skills).  There is are a number of interesting decisions to make in this skill tree and you begin to decide what you want to do well.  Later you get to pick to specialize in one of three class specific skill trees.  So now you have the Base Skills and your Specialized Skills to choose from and develop.  But then you also gain limited access to the trees you did not pick - you only get to develop the high level skills in the Basic and Selected Trees.  This give a large number of potential skill combinations and strategies.

Respecing skills is easy and gold based.  So you don't have to worry about making early blunders.

Second active skill selection.  You get an active skill tool bar and as you level up you get access to new active skills to put into the tool bar (you can also choose which active skills to bind to your left and right mouse buttons)  So far so much like Grim Dawn.

But think about the skills as the poe skills gems.  But instead of modifying them by adding supporting gems and the gems leveling in a linear manner, the active skills have their own unique passive skill trees!  So you modify the skill by developing its own skill tree.  The thing is you only develop a limited number of assigned skills (the number of which increases as you level and in the beginning you can only level one active skill)  the other skills in your skill bar can be used, they just don't have their own skill tree.

The active skill trees have synergies with other active skills and so the art of this game is going to be designing characters whose passive skills and active skill trees all work to create the kind of character you want to play - As you can imagine the number of possible combinations is large.

I can see myself having a number of characters in one class because each has been developed in a different way.  Respecing active skills is a bit more difficult.  You need to deselect a skill you no longer wish to specialize.  You will then lose the associated skill tree.  But you will then be able to level the skill tree of the new skill up to your minimum number of skill levels (which increases with character level) and it catches up to the level of your other skills pretty quickly (think of leveling a new gem in PoE except you dont have to start at level 1).

Third, items.  The itemization in this game is already fantastic.  Items affect every modifier in the game and the choices you make have a significant effect on game play.  I found myself making decisions lots of decisions about the tradeoffs of the benefits of various drops.

Fourth, crafting.  Items can have two suffixes and two affixes.  you get drops which can be used to forge all of those with specific modifiers.  In a huge QOL improvement, you can carry your forging mats with you without taking up inventory space. There is a button to move them from inventory to your forging inventory.  The reason a drop is first put into your inventory is that you might want to put it in your common stash for other classes to use if it is unlikely the current character will ever forge that particular modifier into an item.  Once it is put into your forge inventory it is there until used, or at least I could not figure out how to get it out.

The crafting system is fairly complex and I only played around with it a bit.  But I already like it much better than the poe version.  No need to memorize arcane hidden rules.  The game has helpful menus you can access which describes the processes involved.

I am looking forward to this game getting finished.
 
 

 

[Syt]

Been a while, but I got a char to level 90 again for a change; impale life leech cyclone slayer:

https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Syt1976/characters?characterName=Ferrum_Velox

My gear is not very optimized, so red maps are kicking my butt. I'm grinding for crafting mats in delve, heists, etc. and tier 8-10 yellow maps for now while listening to podcasts/audio books.

[crazy canuck]

The reveal starts in 3 minutes 

https://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile

[FunkMonk]

Yup PoE 2 looks great.

New league looks cool with the reworked rewards for all the different kinds of content but maybe I'll skip it this time. We'll see.

[FunkMonk]

Not gonna lie, the D2 remaster is looking pretty slick. Bunch of streams on twitch showing off the game in alpha and it already looks on point.

[frunk]

Yup PoE 2 looks great.

New league looks cool with the reworked rewards for all the different kinds of content but maybe I'll skip it this time. We'll see.

Been playing a fair bit of Grim Dawn, and been keeping my eye on Last Epoch.  PoE 2 looks awesome and the reward rework is long overdue.  I'll probably check out the league a little bit, but I don't plan to dive back in hard until the PoE 2 beta.

[FunkMonk]

Yup PoE 2 looks great.

New league looks cool with the reworked rewards for all the different kinds of content but maybe I'll skip it this time. We'll see.

Been playing a fair bit of Grim Dawn, and been keeping my eye on Last Epoch.  PoE 2 looks awesome and the reward rework is long overdue.  I'll probably check out the league a little bit, but I don't plan to dive back in hard until the PoE 2 beta.

I really like how Last Epoch is shaping up. I'm just waiting for them to release a little more content and their multiplayer side and then I'll pick it up.Then I'll just play that until the PoE 2 beta next year.

[crazy canuck]

I really like Last Epoch.  So much you can do with a character's skill development - and changing it around is relatively painless - especially compared to POE.  I think that is my biggest beef with it. 

[FunkMonk]

https://youtu.be/rEDc2BedHok

My thoughts exactly 

[crazy canuck]

That is funny - but also explains why I don't play the game - I have no idea what most of the mechanics he was talking about are

[Iormlund]

I actually like the stupidly arcane nature of it. 

Also: "Fuck that guy". 

[Iormlund]

Worst league launch ever for me, and I've been playing those since Betrayal. Went to sleep thinking shit would be better early morning  ... nope.

[FunkMonk]

Yeah their servers pooped out for most of launch day.

They're fine now. Just had an hour long session with no DCs and no lag.

[Iormlund]

Yeah, they had to bring the servers down shortly after that post and after that it was ok.

The shit storm in Reddit is insane, especially because there's a race to lvl 100 and prominent streamers had preferential queuing (which they actually didn't know about).

[FunkMonk]

Yeah apparently giving streamers priority in the queue during the server outages led to a huge backlash against GGG and accusations of favoritism and disregard for their player base.

Quite some fireworks on display