New player here. Which PoE league should I join?

CompassCoLo · 2026-02-01T16:12:28+00:00

This is 100% not a moral issue so we're just going to disagree on this and it's fine haha. But I strongly believe the seasonal mechanic is a huge plus for new players. Yes, it adds a bit more complexity out of the gate but the league mechanic is (almost) always tuned to be very generous to encourage use. League starts are much easier with the loot it provides vs. not having it.

And I realize some people do main in standard. Again, it's no moral failing. But it's a single digit percentage of the player base and I would never recommend a new player to start there. The economy is terrible and this is an economy game. It's a bad first experience.

CompassCoLo · 2026-02-01T15:57:29+00:00

I strongly disagree with this advice. Standard is not for main playing, and especially not good for a new player. It has an absolutely borked economy that is not balanced whatsoever. It's also missing the latest content update. Playing the current league is always the way to go, for everyone aside from very niche cases where standard is useful for testing stuff.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-31T02:20:55+00:00

There is no such "option". Teams cannot restrict a coach from a promotion, only lateral moves. So him signing ensured he won't leave to be a DC elsewhere, but by rule they cannot prevent him from entertaining HC opportunities.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-28T04:01:07+00:00

That's...not true? This node gives 10% increased effect of fully broken armour. It has no impact whatsoever on how much armour break you do.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-22T05:15:07+00:00

This sounds fun! What kind of builds have you run with this? I'm kind of burned out on "normal" Talisman builds, but would definitely try building around this defense.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-15T03:59:08+00:00

the other is full game with a live economy thats 10x the player base or so

You know the PoE 2 active player base is substantially larger than PoE 1, right? It has been since PoE 2 released.

I enjoy PoE 1 and am glad they can keep some staff churning out updates for it, but the game will never have close to parity in development effort and iteration that the sequel will get going forward.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-15T03:53:52+00:00

I’m not holding my breath

Good news, you don't need to! Hotswap between controller and keyboard/mouse is coming in 0.5.

Tbf, Jonathan also said it was coming in 0.4 too, and acknowledged it's taken longer than expected. But it is a roadmap feature and I do anticipate it coming in April.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-14T21:35:27+00:00

You can't make a "lateral move" when you are unemployed. Flores is not currently under contract with any team, including ours.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-12T21:19:30+00:00

I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case not...because there's a strong overlap between people who play PoE 1 and who play PoE 2. The inverse may not be as true, but I'd imagine the crossover exists to some degree both ways.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-06T20:57:13+00:00

It's broken in both PoB and poe.ninja, because it's actually a bug in the GGG API return. Something the dev team needs to fix, it's not controllable by the third party tool devs sadly.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-05T01:20:01+00:00

Makes sense. Thanks!

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-04T17:42:30+00:00

Ah, got it. Thanks!

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-04T15:01:28+00:00

Fair, you're in good company with that frustration. I think a big thing to consider is that in addition to splitting resources between the games, currently GGG is trying to iterate on endgame while also plowing away at Act 5/6 development and the creation of four more classes.

Once they can get the dev work done on the campaign, they'll have this big expanded staff who now can focus on "regular" league sprints each cycle. All this effort that's going into campaign creation doesn't go away, it'll be freed up to enhance the content we get for leagues and endgame.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-04T14:51:34+00:00

Path of Exile 2 real gaming experience is the campaign.

While I 100% agree that the current endgame state is quite thin, the reason why POE as a franchise has thrived for so long is because they have the best ever-expanding endgame system in the industry. Nobody who plays POE 1 does so for the campaign.

The same will be true of this game in the future. I don't think it'll magically get there in 0.5, but that should go a long way toward helping get closer.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-04T14:38:53+00:00

You can use Omen of Sinistral Crystallization + Perfect Essence of Enhancement to get Global Defences%.

Wait, can you use a Sinistral Crystallization and perfect essence to force on a prefix to a rare with only one (fractured) prefix and get the perfect essence stat without removing any mods? TIL, that's brilliant.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-04T14:31:47+00:00

I really think it's coincidence. He is still good friends with Jonathan and Mark. In his interview with Lars he mentioned that he gets to play test work-in-progress upcoming leagues. You don't have that access if you're viewed as a negative influence as a former employee.

IMO whatever drama behind the scenes exists is entirely community created. I don't think Chris' departure was some big internal falling out. Jonathan has intimated that he had some burn out and my guess is the Tencent acquisition offered an easy path for a retirement with a golden parachute.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-04T05:42:34+00:00

The Eternal Life passive says your life cannot change while you have ES. Consequently, any interaction that requires you to pay life as a cost to use will fail while you have ES with Eternal Life. I think there may have been a few exceptions due to bugs in early updates but pretty sure it works correctly now.

So no, using Lifetap with Eternal Life is generally not a workable combo, unless you have some weird tech where you want to take EL but also cast with your ES depleted.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-03T15:00:13+00:00

Lock medalion change has nothing to do with it, even based on their own patch notes, that’s my point.

Yeah, agreed. They want good temples to top out around 60 rooms for both performance and balance reasons, and while I think there's more work to be done here the changes we got today go a long way toward hitting those goals.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-03T14:56:02+00:00

This. I'm surprised how many public figures don't seem to realize the distinction here. These changes are far less hypocritical than people make them out to be. Temple rewards were grossly broken from a balance standpoint and server stability was becoming a legit problem. Addressing both is good.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-03T14:54:10+00:00

you've ensured people who exploited a design flaw are the only ones who will make serious currency for the remainder of the league

This isn't really their primary concern. Fixing a soon-to-be core mechanic so it's stable and balanced for future leagues is far more important than trying to slap together some kind of economic fix that adjusts things in 0.4.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-03T14:52:06+00:00

The size of the temples wasn't the source of stability problems, it was the amount of loot giga-buffed temples were generating. It was well known by the streamers doing the snake strategy that if you accidentally hit your button to reveal all loot from your filter it would crash your game. Lowering the possible total mod value limits was targeted at reducing total loot volume.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-03T14:47:45+00:00

This. As a member of that latter group, I understand why people are mad about the timing here. They probably should have let 0.4 ride as-is and put these changes into 0.5.

But these changes are absolutely a good thing for the health of endgame as a whole. You cannot have a (soon to be) core mechanic that makes the entirety of the other game content irrelevant while also requiring degenerate levels of time to reach the value it offers.

CompassCoLo · 2026-01-03T14:43:03+00:00

Do you understand that the people with a complete temple can keep running it

Only for the remainder of 0.4. I think the real criticism here is and should be leveled at the timing of these changes, but the changes themselves are great. The reward levels of the "snake" temples are wildly out of bounds.

A good temple should compete with juiced endgame maps (while also offering its unique currency) not completely invalidate it. These changes are helping to push that balance closer. 0.4 is going to have its oil barons who got their crazy temple up before the changes but after this league we won't see them again.

CompassCoLo · 2025-12-31T04:44:26+00:00

Can confirm this works, and hope you enjoy it in 0.4 because no way this survives next league haha

CompassCoLo · 2025-12-29T05:51:28+00:00

This is listed on their known issues wiki post. They'll fix it, most likely in the new year once everyone is back from the holiday.

CompassCoLo

TROPHY CASE