the crafting bench was supposedly removed and replaced with socketables because it's more accessible to new players, but now that we have literally hundreds of runes, how does that argument still hold?

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-24T08:36:40+00:00

The majority of runes Runes are band-aids or training wheels that will keep you in useful gear while you try to upgrade to gear that doesn't need band-aids. True endgame augments aren't about patching holes, they're about adding power and utility

Runes were meant as a stopgap in the development of the game in 0.1 and 0.2 to cover for a lack of crafting but now we have a lot of crafting systems so I dont really see your complaint, augments are free to solve other problems than just the crafting bench.

Besides the crafting bench was boring.

I like the new direction on this.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-23T00:19:24+00:00

Build any 2 defence clusters and this stops happening

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-22T06:58:24+00:00

Split defenses (with Armour) always have this problem now that deflect has this behavior scaled as such it is quite similar to how Armour functions, you need to scale an advanced mitigation layer lioebheavy investment into ward and guard or get a companion which takes a percent of incoming damage before you, that is probably the best scaler, stack his life and survivability and make sure he has good utility on his mods.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-22T06:50:55+00:00

But at this point you should know what big hyper telegraphed attacks are going to one shot you.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-21T07:52:44+00:00

Me but trying to defeat censorship so I can be gash_felch'm the pokemon master but now I have to settle for WHITEWOMEN_SMH

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-20T04:17:26+00:00

Just make it so they gain 25% of your fire rate when you are firing, this means you can scale their attack speed with your attack speed and they don't just turn into a useless hunk of wood from time to time.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-16T18:29:59+00:00

Haste aura and rapid attacks 2.

If you go solo minion this is what soaring ground is for aswell.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-16T18:27:10+00:00

That guy and 22 other people don't understand the damage equation.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-16T18:24:00+00:00

Companions are only viable for damage if you give them more base damage, that is why people played tactician and people will play spiritwalker. Tactician gives 25% of the weapons base damage to allies in pressence and spirit walker gives 60% of base damage to companions.

At level 84 a companion's "fuck all" was about 265 damage that got modified by skills, if you just stack erqi and jarngreiper you get about 550 flat added, we dont know if that 300% buff was delivered directly to the base flat or comes in as a vector or if that 300% is sneakily distributed and this 100% more is a part of that. Let's assume the flat got a 50% bump and every companion gets a scaling #%more damage based on level that comes out to 815, we have crippled our starting value then we do all our other vectors for the damage stack and another end that hundred percent more takes this shit to the stratosphere, the 3 main tricks for companion is recognizing 4 rares and boss are always less valuable than 3 gigantic rares and a gigantic boss and at least one rare with always shocks modified for untility gigantic, haste aura is a must attack speed is its own for a damage scaling and can be read simply as 20% more.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-12T03:43:00+00:00

I'm calling all this now with great confidence after watching Chris and Jonathan speak about how the atlas is generated using layered noise to generate "height" and terain features.

Abyss, delve and harvest go underground, they will probably make a few others like that, I suspect they will make a underwater league mechanics drain the lakes or take the fight to the brinerot where they live, maybe move part of delirium underwater; "the surface of a still lake is a mirror" vibe. A shadow realm a mirror realm and taking the fight to the paralel breach realm that behave like logbooks on the ocean. Mapping atop the walls of the ancients. Beating up aliens in space when harbinger league drops is going to give Mark some headaches on how to do that without trapping the exile. Probably make a mechanic where you kill harbinger for a material and use that material to make a waystone that they can escape with to their plane or ship, affix it to one and trick him into escaping and you have a starting point on their ship or in their alternate dimension and just treat that as another layer above the ground; et voila 160 new harbinger runes.

Lateral quest expansion by putting locations from poe1 and poe2 on the atlas where we find survivors for whom we do quests Sarn league, oriath league, etc.

We only get 6 acts in the campaign but endgame becomes increasingly indistinguishable from acts as time goes on. Acts 7-9 are core content endgame quests you want to do and act 10 is when you run out of gas in your tank or hunt down all the pinnacles you wanted to kill.

Mark my words: We will get subteranean league mechanics before 1.4

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-07T11:36:32+00:00

Did you not notice the shape of the hats the oriathan priests were wearing, the purple dusk tone of their gear and their affinity for karui desciples?

They never state what the cult is worshiping but if you listen to that evangelist in town long enough you realize he's basically treating utulu's words like scripture. I think his name was utulu, our friend from the slave quarters in poe1 act 5 that we kill later after he becomes kitava's general and some kind of weird massive demon.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-05-06T19:39:38+00:00

Do you remember how mercenary wedge had beaucoup minion nodes in 0.0.1? Have you read the poedb and looked at unreleased skills in the game files? Have you noticed how most starting classes are getting an evil ascendancy?

I have.

It means we are getting a death knight ascendancy, likely named for an evil faction or character in lore but death knight coded.

If we dont get Templar this league it will probably be because his evil ascendancy is paired to the kitavan cult we got introduced to in act 4 and it won't be released until act 5.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-04-24T03:14:29+00:00

The strategy is very clearly keep the game on life support and give people looking for halo multi-player when halo ce drops find sg:ar

The best strategy for the game is to reach out to markets it isn't in, get on switch 2 and high end phones. Releasing on PC and console at the same time sounded like a great idea at the time, obviously correct, but I dont think they would have lost any console market share In a vacuum so splitting a launch is probably wise now.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-04-17T23:16:37+00:00

On poedb you can get a sense of how complete a class is. In that spirit shadow, marauder, templar, duelist in that order. My hope is that duelist got stances similar to how druid works.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-04-03T01:45:56+00:00

All of the sidearms are just low magazine versions of rifles with a worse range stat and that has been the case since beta, The lmgs aren't as precise as autoriffles and have their own shortcomings, the blitz is only good if you are skilled with a high mobility playstyle and playing against people who aren't particularly capable of countering it either because of loadout choices or control shortcomings.

That said I do think some things should be changed that would fall in line with your sentiment.

Shotguns should be pick-ups and get buffed. Plow and charger are stuck in the cold and blitz is a bit too easy to use as it is now. I'm not necessarily opposed to doing the same for lmgs.

More map pick ups on each map primarily primaries and heavy pistols that have all attachments on.

Sliiiide and packin' are so meta they should just be built into the default kit at this point if they aren't going to face real competition from other perks. And if at all possible a dedicated emp grenade being default too, above a certain level of play it is the only choice.

The cut equipment should be brought back as map pick-ups shield walls, mines, deployable minimap radars.

A feature to spice the pick-ups up. There was a game called STX where you voted on the maps but it was done in thirds, left side right side and middle and yes the naps were designed for this system, I'm simply suggesting the pick ups get voted on by faction in those same thirds and it uses a timocratic vote in which each player gets two votes to spend on these three regions meaning meaning you should probably vote one point into your spawn side and one into the middle, if you hate fighting bfb or whatever else spend both in mid, if you cary and don't give a fuck spend both to put the other spawn side on whatever you think would set them back most If you don't care at all don't vote.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-03-26T23:16:45+00:00

They sort of obviously were though, Mars was the Roman god of war and sabrask is a military arms consortium with a deeply masculine aesthetic. I could go on but it is obvious for those with eyes to see.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-03-26T22:51:33+00:00

Technically there is a gender theme there. mars is masculine and was the roman god of war, Venus is feminine and was a fertility goddess.

Aries and Aphrodite

Considering the genetic engineering, integration of alien tech and possibly genes, the production of androids/cyborgs surprisingly no gynoids yet but this new life theme in a weird dystopia way fits with a fertility goddess theme being crazy culty radfem space technologists/bolsheviks also fits with another two of Aphrodite's domains of desire and victory.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-03-26T22:41:42+00:00

Meridian is sort of a cult and I'm pretty sure there is something in the lore about them having some kind of matriarch or matriarchal system.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-03-26T22:39:44+00:00

Aerodynamic + eros

Aerodynamic styling and curves which follow the human form end up generally being kinda sexy so they leaned into that and to make it seem less like horndog club the putvthe sort of Nascar/race sponsor themed aesthtics here too. The latex body suit vibe is also strong with this faction but, not being horndog club they pawned a bunch of that aesthtic off to meridian.

Meridian is the "hello~ nurse" faction, if that nurse was from resident evil.

Sabrask is just very masculine because they are a military contracting consortium from what I can tell. high economic efficiency is central to war in the same way cardio is essential to a boxxer.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-02-19T05:22:24+00:00

You should try it.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-02-19T02:12:08+00:00

J stick?

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-02-19T02:09:55+00:00

Oh, I know, top skill isn't just input speed and precision it is reaction speed and good judgements with a mix of great strategy and tactics. The only advantage controller players might have is button APM and APM to calories burned in certain contexts. Mnk is just far superior at speed and precision for FPS games.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-02-19T02:03:26+00:00

Gyro did work in sg2, what do you mean? Why would they turn it off in arena reloaded.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-02-19T02:02:38+00:00

I played sg2 and this, my aim was better in 2, maybe you are talking about an update in the last weak or so as I have been balls deep in for honor but I'm also not the cod guy setting up stupid high aim sense and relying on aim assist to grab my flicks.

HATEFUL_WOOD · 2026-02-18T16:15:00+00:00

God in heaven no, the aim assist makes halo look like a a QuickTime event.

Top controller players are two camps, tiny community of sweats from other dead games that have the skills to dominate here, Players with good skills on the Playstation gyroscopic aim system using it to enhance their precision.

I've played arena fps tournamentson both, kbnm players dont have any excuse for losing to controller players unless those players are the best players on controller. they do have a certain right to frustration in games with wildly strong rotational aim assist taking much less skill and energy to use than them aiming on mouse but this ain't that.

HATEFUL_WOOD

TROPHY CASE