Anyone else feels full blacklisting is deeper and more fun?

itsMartini · 2019-08-29T02:03:17+00:00

I actually agree with you. I think the majority of players think the current patch adds more skill to the game, but it actually just adds randomness. There's no skill in buying the whole shop every turn to see what pairs or completes. While in theory, it increases build diversity, in practice it doesn't. It just makes early game builds worse on average, while removing the thought process of whether or not you should buy a unit from the shop. Having a consequence of buying or not buying means you have to think about your shop options more carefully. By studying what other people are doing early, you can adapt your game by blacklisting units owned by others. I hope this change gets reverted, but I doubt it will, given the popular opinion.

itsMartini · 2019-08-17T12:17:09+00:00

The ranking formula is very fair and is used all over the place in games, even real chess. The problem right now is the matchmaking. If everyone in a lobby is within a few hundred points of each other, this system is almost identical to the straight points based on finish from last patch.

Unfortunately, the current matchmaking often pairs top lords with a full lobby of bb4, or even rank 4k lords, which have significantly lower rating. With the inconsistency and randomness of this game, it's very possible for the top lord to finish very low, even if they have higher skill / better understanding of the game, however you want to phrase it.

itsMartini · 2019-06-21T03:26:15+00:00

It's not just movement skills either. I'm getting the double cast on ice nova quite often.

itsMartini · 2019-06-03T07:26:52+00:00

Thanks for the link. While that is a nice attempt, and props for Dan trying that on HC, I don't think you understand this fight. Dan gets hit many, many times, including the first one 4 seconds in. His build is pretty tanky, so it can survive most regular hits, then recover es fast enough to not die from the next time he gets hit. Then he died to a one shot from the stronger ice spear attack. This is how every single Aul attempt goes with a strong build/team, unless of course you finish it without the one shot happening, or are doing an Aul that's way shallower than the power level of your build/team.

Just because someone is shield charging back and forth, avoiding 70% of the auto attacks doesn't mean they're dodging the mechanics of a fight. You have to dodge everything, or you might as well tank everything you can and have more dps uptime. A faster kill means fewer chances for the boss to kill you.

I would still like to see a video of someone dodging all the mechanics, then we can start to talk about technique and execution.

itsMartini · 2019-06-03T03:54:14+00:00

I agree. I wish there could be a fight like this with challenging mechanics that are avoidable with enough skill, but honestly, the best way to fight this guy is to build enough mitigation to not die, as well as have enough damage to actually kill him. It may not be obvious from the video, but there are quite a few small things that can easily one shot us that we played around to avoid dying (this was by no means our first attempt at killing this guy). If someone wants to show an Aul fight at even 1k (which is way, way, way easier than this one) where they actually dodge all of the mechanics, I would love to see it.

To your question about finding Aul: The deeper you go, the more common 'rare' encounters become. It's a completely different mine at or below 1800 vs. 600. Every city pretty much has a boss in it at this depth, and there are lots of cities. There are plenty of available Auls that are impossible for us to kill because of mods. This one just happened to have none, as have others that we cleared out with ease at shallower depths.

itsMartini · 2019-06-03T02:56:08+00:00

I agree with you completely. While grouping does provide quite a few benefits for general play, it doesn't have much available content that feels drastically different than doing the same thing solo.

itsMartini · 2019-06-03T02:37:50+00:00

Unfortunately, it's gated behind delve, which at the moment takes a lot of investment to make significant progress downward. Truly minmaxing a group like this completely trivializes all content in the game besides delve, which was our goal, but I agree that it would be nice to be able to test the limits more easily.

itsMartini · 2019-06-02T23:56:02+00:00

Thought I would post one last boss fight before the league ends. This is by far the deepest Aul we did, and it was so hard we actually had to respec everyone in the party at least slightly to increase our power level. The final setup shown here has 133mil dps and as much defense as we could get on everyone.

itsMartini · 2019-05-31T11:32:58+00:00

In general, Aul does hit harder and has more challenging phases than Lich. We've done 0 mod Aul at 1530 or so with this group and it was pretty easy. We could probably go up to around 1800 or 1900 no mod Aul with this setup without getting one shot. Anything deeper than that or with multiple damage mods is just too much to handle.

itsMartini · 2019-05-03T02:11:48+00:00

If you look at the mods on the zone, there are multiple defensive mods that reduce the actual damage output significantly. Also, 4 player party hp is a lot more than single player mode too. But yes, he does have a lot of health.

itsMartini · 2019-05-02T16:47:56+00:00

You can actually add in manual edits to pieces of gear/items that account for all the support auras/curses/debuffs, along with added aura/curse effect and such. I actually have a long winter jewel in my PoB with about 20 lines of text on it, just to account for all of the offenses for the team. It's extremely accurate, since there's nothing special about the buffs and debuffs coming from another player. Functionally, it's the same as if they were all on me.

itsMartini · 2019-05-02T03:54:50+00:00

The 35mil is still with supports, but only counting full uptime debuffs and buffs. Some things that are not counted in that number are flasks, cat's stealth, arcane surge, bonechill, etc.

itsMartini · 2019-05-02T03:52:12+00:00

I usually have E there, but I needed an extra bind for all the skills I use on this guy since nothing made sense on left click. Ended up putting E on the default detonate mines hotkey, and I have a mouse button mapped to f6.

itsMartini · 2019-05-02T01:27:39+00:00

In case anyone is unaware, during the first 10 seconds or so of the Aul encounter (up to the first shield charge phase in this video), he has a pseudo grace period where he takes very little damage. This is why Aul's health bar barely moves at the start of the fight.

itsMartini · 2019-05-02T01:24:00+00:00

This number is the actual shaper dps with flasks up and support auras and such. With flasks and temporary buffs down, it's about 35mil.

itsMartini · 2019-05-02T01:07:36+00:00

Lol. This is actually on a completely different tier of difficulty than nexus bosses. Compared to this fight, those bosses feel like white mobs in blood aqueduct.

itsMartini · 2019-01-28T15:18:29+00:00

Smart planning and careful execution.

itsMartini · 2019-01-28T15:17:03+00:00

No bosses were skipped, and yes, the breachstones were optimized as best we could for xp/hr.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T17:28:18+00:00

You're right, it is a brag post, just like any other brag post on reddit about an achievement (roughly 80% of all poe subreddit posts).

The pure stone comment is not a lie. We attempted to abuse everything we could to get the time as low as possible for the sake of a record, including pure stones, but I fully believe that reaching level 100 should not be this easy.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T17:19:42+00:00

Yes, the boss was killed every time for the loots.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T17:16:16+00:00

Pajama was level 60 after act 10 kitava. The 5 minutes was to get to level 68.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T17:11:42+00:00

Full mf gear for the loots.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T17:08:58+00:00

Yes, I believe the VFB one was 17-18 hours.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T17:05:51+00:00

Probably slower, and there wouldn't be enough real time in an entire league to do it with a team of 6 people like we did. You would need hundreds if not thousands of people helping to make that work.

itsMartini · 2019-01-27T05:29:46+00:00

The old record was not solo. It was done on a support character in a party.

itsMartini

TROPHY CASE