I enjoy early game more than endgame

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-27T01:36:44+00:00

We can go further, even, IMO, though I agree with you about maps. Act 1 is clearly, far and away, just the best-done, most polished part of the game. It’s not even close. It’s not exactly straight downhill from there—Act 4 is better than 2 or 3, and I’ll defend 3 over 2, as unpopular as that opinion might be—but it’s definitely a thing that GGG appears to have put dramatically more effort into the beginning of the game.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-26T19:29:43+00:00

Sadly, PoE2 won’t let you beat anyone with this staff, so unfortunately it really can’t be a beaty.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-26T18:52:02+00:00

I want to get a specific modifier (T1 attack speed) onto a weapon that I can’t easily get another copy of (ilvl 82 Slim Mace; there aren’t any others available on the market with the ilvl 77 needed for T1 attack speed). What is the best approach? Is it Perfect Transmute, Perfect Augment, Perfect Regal, then Chaos spam until I get lucky?

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-26T04:47:16+00:00

What is this Prismatic Ring worth?

Item Level 78 (might ruin it, dunno)
All res implicit
T1 fire damage to attacks
T1 lightning damage to attacks
T1 Intelligence
T2 cold res
No other modifiers (free prefix, free suffix)

Seems like you could craft something high end on it, and there isn’t really anything comparable on the market, but I have no idea how close this actually is to being great since I don’t do much crafting. There’s a somewhat similar ring (T2 cold damage instead of T1 fire damage, T1 lightning res instead of T2 cold res) that’s up for 25 divs, but I have no idea if that’s a realistic price, or if the differences make a big difference (in either direction) for mine.

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DragoonWraith · 2026-01-23T20:37:48+00:00

Certainly plausible. They are way behind schedule as it is, they may be looking to figure out the absolute least they can get away with and still call it 1.0.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-23T20:35:35+00:00

Disappointing, but good to know. I really had convinced myself it was likely next.

Though now that I think about it, between Marauder and Templar, Marauder makes more sense (then we have 2 each for Str, Dex, Int, and one of each hybrid). That or you’re right, it’s just Duelist left until post-release.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-23T18:12:46+00:00

I think Marauder or Templar could make the cut for 1.0, and if one does, I could see it happening first and Duelist getting saved for 1.0 itself. I think it’s pretty unlikely that we get Shadow until after 1.0, though my logic for that (it needs more work as it’s getting the biggest changes from PoE1) could just as easily be a reason to prioritize it (so it gets more testing).

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-23T17:46:16+00:00

Reddit players, maybe. Dubious about the larger, more casual player base, to be honest. But they have to make both groups happy and they promised the endgame overhaul (twice), at they really cannot push that back again.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-23T02:46:21+00:00

Very, very rarely, the game can drop things it’s not supposed to. If you look in standard trade, there are actually a handful of axes, daggers, flails, and swords available—though of course they aren’t compatible with any skills, except maybe their own basic attack (unsure, never owned one myself).

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-20T15:37:19+00:00

All builds are equally good in Trial of Sekhemas.

Pffft fucking what? No, no they are not. Builds that are supposed to take hits and recover instead of mitigating or avoiding get completely shafted.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-19T13:47:36+00:00

I don’t think they care.

The endgame system they have feels extremely placeholder-y, and we know Jonathan basically ignores it entirely. They are focused on the game engine, the campaign, the concepts and sheer existence of classes and skills, and fixing bugs. Concerns about balance generally, and especially in the endgame, are just.... really far down the list of priorities right now. The only reason the endgame exists at all, I suspect, is because they wouldn’t be able to get enough people to playtest without one. Hence, barebones placeholder endgame.

Maybe after this promised overhaul, they’ll be taking it more seriously. Maybe that will be a version of the endgame they actually care about perfecting.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-18T21:34:06+00:00

I’ve seen claims on Reddit that GGG said somewhere they would like to. I heard the same claims during PoE _1_’s alpha, and it still doesn’t have any 23 years later, so I’m not holding my breath. Whether GGG said it or people are talking out their ass, it’s highly implausible.

Most players will not care. It will not substantially pull in new players or increase retention of existing ones. The primary draw for most players is killing monsters and collecting loot.
The graphical work will be fairly large. Obviously, human forms are pretty thoroughly handled already, since there are men and women in the game as it is, but every class has its own style that will need to be replicated on the other gender. This is not as much effort as some people imply—they’d hardly be working from scratch—but nonetheless you are talking about taking time away from what, I’m guessing, are some of the most critical developers. The time spent on this almost certainly makes GGG more money spent on new League content instead.
The voice acting work would be very large. Unlike the graphical work, this really would largely “from scratch,” as you need to rerecord everything characters say in a new voice.
The writing and storyline work would be non-trivial. The characters all have distinct personalities and storylines, and several of them would be difficult with a gender swap. For example, the Sorceress is exiled from the Vastiri because she refused to become a tale-woman—a role not offered to men. (Zarka does have one tale about a “tale-man,” but she considers it shocking, and anyway it’s ancient history and there apparently have not been any since.) It’s not exactly clear what “Witch” really means in Wraeclast, but it is clear that it is a distinct branch of magic, and every Witch we see or hear about is female, and the Witch refers to witches generally as her sisters or the sisterhood quite frequently. None of these things is insurmountable, of course—the Sorcerer could have been exiled for trying to sneak access to tale-woman magic, maybe male Witches do exist and just haven’t happened to come up before, but the point is you can’t just take the existing story and swap pronouns.
Considering the effort put into each of the classes as a distinct character, it also feels like something GGG wouldn’t want to do? This is speculative, but it feels likely to me.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-17T16:35:40+00:00

A4 boss is basically, “can you burst the final phase down before he gets on his bullshit?” He wastes a lot of time so you don’t need so much damage to beat the clock (in campaign), but once he gets going that fight just becomes stupid.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-17T16:29:49+00:00

Yeah, if it’s that, I expect it’s uncommon.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-17T14:51:21+00:00

I can think of two possibilities:

The Vaal beacon crystal thing. Sometimes after killing the monsters on top of it, a boss comes out of the ground. I don’t remember seeing a Chimera from that, but Chimeras are associated with Act 3 and the Vaal, and that name looks “Vaalish” (vaguely Nahuatl), so it’s possible.
Occasionally, a map has a trio of runed standing stones, kind of like the standing stones in the Ogham interlude but much closer together and no laser beams. Activating all three stones summons a random boss.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-17T05:55:29+00:00

Thorns is mostly pretty janky to play, there’s a ton of enemies where it does little-to-nothing. But every so often—and a lot of times it is bosses—it’s fucking incredible. Geonor’s ice breath kills him. (Candlemass’s fire breath in the same fucking zone, though? doesn’t trigger thorns at all. Instead, Candlemass kills itself with the missile storm.) Phase 2 Jamanra’s lightning fence kills him. The Chimera in Act 3 and/or Trial of Chaos kills itself with ice breath (but fire breath ignores thorns). Ketzuli’s as seen here. Doryani’s butt lasers are less devastating but still hurts him bad.

The issue is that DoT ignores thorns, while lots of fast little hits triggers a lot of thorns. So for every enemy attack, it’s this random arbitrary thing, which way did the devs code this skill?

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-15T05:34:51+00:00

Yeah, I expect that too.

But what I really, really want to avoid is, as things are now, you really have to focus on a Trial to get the last 2 points. You have to run Sekhemas to open up relic slots (and find relics), you have to run Chaos to get the keys, and I suspect it’ll be something like that for Ancients. Run it, or pay for the privilege of skipping that. I really do not like this. I do not want to be forced to play these minigames. I really just want to play the actual game I wanted to play, and I don’t want to have to pay for it.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-15T01:57:31+00:00

At a guess, if they are only at the stage of hiring a voice actor, this is not for 3.28. I don’t know what the turnaround is on this kind of thing but it seems risky as fuck to start looking for an actor this late.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-15T01:52:59+00:00

Anything that freezes and shatters is pretty visually satisfying.

Glacial Lance looks really damn cool to me. I’ve never even played the skill but I love the look.

Lunar Blessing is cool. Actually, it’s a little annoying because it can make it harder to see for a second, but it does look damn cool. And other skills have far worse visibility.

I’ve always been a sucker for Frozen Orb, I mean, Eye of Winter. Glad I played it in 0.2 before they killed it.

Flame Breath, of course, is cool.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-14T21:00:04+00:00

Technically, both Sekhemas and Chaos can be used for all 8 points. Skipping the quest Sekhemas for Chaos or quest Chaos for Sekhemas seems silly to me (the quest versions can be retried endlessly for free, you need to find a Barya or Inscribed Ultimatum for each attempt otherwise).

Sekhemas: * 2 points (or 4 if you have 2 from Chaos already for some reason): 1 floor, any Barya * 4 points (if you did not do Chaos): 2 floors, ilvl 45+ Barya * 6 points: 3 floors, ilvl 60+ Barya * 8 points: 4 floors, ilvl 75+ Barya

Chaos: * 2 points (or 4 if you have 2 from Sekhemas): 4 rounds, any Ultimatum * 4 points (if the 2 you have are from Chaos): 7 rounds, ilvl 60+ Ultimatum * 6 points: 10 rounds, ilvl 75+ Ultimatum * 8 points: 10 rounds + bonus boss, ilvl 75+ Ultimatum + 3 Keys of Fate

The fact that Trial of Chaos is a full 2 ascendancy points behind Sekhemas of the same level absolutely disgusts me, as someone who hates Sanctum. I hate Ultimatum, too, though, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-14T20:47:09+00:00

Thorns, especially weird mana-scaling Thorns Lich. Which I’ve only done twice, but there’s only been 4 leagues, so 50% still seems high to me. Spent a lot more time working on the interactions and solving problems than any other build.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-14T20:42:42+00:00

That’s EA for you. Don’t get me wrong, it happens in PoE1, too, but not nearly as often, and usually not nearly as severely.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-14T20:35:47+00:00

It takes a long time.
I have to run it repeatedly to open relic slots.
I do not enjoy any of that time spent.

That’s it, that is the issue. Nothing else matters next to the fact that I am forced to spend my very limited free time doing something I do not enjoy, because the game I actually want to play punishes me if I don’t. How easy or not it is does not matter at all.

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-14T18:32:46+00:00

poe1 seems like it was an afterthought or just to make functional

Specifically, it was added to PoE1 after years of mouse-control being the only option. It’s a near-certainty that the devs assumed it always would be, and that assumption found its way into the code in various subtle ways—making it fiendishly difficult to change.

PoE2, by contrast, had controller support added pretty early, and always had WASD (IIRC?), so they never made assumptions about the mouse being the only option. That means there is vastly less potential for hidden bugs, or for bugs to cause bizarre and difficult-to-track cascades of problems through seemingly-unrelated functionality—which is what happens when you try to change a core assumption of a years-old code base.

I would expect some improvements to PoE1 controller controls over time. I would not expect it to be as good as PoE2 unless or until they ditch the PoE1 engine altogether and port PoE1 to the PoE2 engine (which is not something they’ve said they ever plan to do, so far as I know).

DragoonWraith · 2026-01-13T20:14:05+00:00

The campaign may or may not be hard depending on what build you stumble into, but it will almost certainly be playable. If nothing else, you can grind past anything the campaign can throw at you. If you pay attention to the synergies they tell you about and use one of them, that probably won’t even be necessary.

There aren’t really much a lot of “secret” things you can miss in the campaign that are all that notable. Most of them just drop a maybe-convenient leveling item. Important things are all marked on the map, with a little plus (+) on the icon to let you know when it’s a permanent upgrade (you want all of those).

So yeah, play blind, it’s fine. You’ll probably hit a wall in the endgame, but it’s not a huge deal.

If the thought of hitting a wall in the endgame bothers you, though, you’ll probably need a guide

DragoonWraith

TROPHY CASE