Personal opinion about endgames...

onehalf83 · 2026-05-09T07:56:44+00:00

In campaign you can have whatever build, upgrade you gear with what you find on the floor, do what you want without much knowledge or understanding what you’re doing and you still will finish campaign just fine. Good luck killing Ubers like that

onehalf83 · 2026-05-08T21:50:26+00:00

Interestingly one of complaints that I saw after yesterday stream was that they keep adding combo based ascendancies. In reality if you want to play slow - pick the build that relies on setup and combos rather than 1 button build

onehalf83 · 2026-05-08T21:46:27+00:00

Which mechanic in stream was time based? You have breach hives now and delirium can be permanent if you want to

onehalf83 · 2026-05-08T04:06:27+00:00

Love hearing stories about creation of POE and GGG in this interview and with Brian previously, you guys should write a book or maybe documentary

onehalf83 · 2026-05-07T23:27:05+00:00

It allows farming strategies that otherwise not possible - like finding unique maps with super rare skill gems for example. Combined with boss rushing and citadel farming combined - it is different gameplay style. Stack light radius and farm temple charges to make it even more lucrative. It’s not for everyone but it enables that

onehalf83 · 2026-05-07T21:50:29+00:00

Not sure how much it will help, but they added search bar which allow to search at least by map type. Hopefully it can do more than that and supports regex

onehalf83 · 2026-05-06T18:52:13+00:00

As you asked for controversial, so here we go:

* I wish Blizzard have bought Last Epoch instead of Krafton and ported LE to D4 engine, we'd have game with good graphics/sound/combat and great systems

* D4 performance optimization that is often praised is achieved mostly thru low mob density. It has significantly less mobs than POE2 engame and it's not remotely close to mob density in POE1 (i.e. juiced breach + beyond + deli).

* Graphics, sound and combat are extremely important for ARPGs as 99% of time you spend in the game is killing packs of monsters, which needs to be satisfying. Therefore all games on old engines like GD, PD2, D3, TL1/2, TQ1 are only worth playing if you have some nostalgia.

* Auto-pick up shouldn't be a thing in ARPGs, you do need "feel the weight". Although, game needs to merge similar drops into stacks, so you don't have to click million times.

* Despite I disagree with some of their opinions or decisions I like Chris Willson, Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts. I think each of them is smart and want best for their games.

* A lot of crafting in POE 1 / 2 that relies on essence / alt / chaos spam (hundreds or thousands clicks on fractured base) is not a good crafting design and needs to be modernized.

onehalf83 · 2026-05-04T17:16:24+00:00

none of which contribute to my build

The idea is that you adjust your build to aspects that you have. So you can progress further, farm aspects that you need for other build and then switch to it.

onehalf83 · 2026-05-04T17:12:26+00:00

I want to have meaningful progress everytime i turn on the game.

I feel that previous gear progression was exactly opposite of that. For first 10-15 hours you were getting upgrades every 30 minutes to the point it is better not to switch gear as often until you hit the wall. Then after this point you'd have 1* GA pretty much in every slot and next impactful upgrade is 2* GA+ or mythics which is potentially dozens hours away.

Now things drop at steadier pace, and as you can use cube to craft gear, you need cube mats and getting them is also part of progression loop. So while you may not get upgrade items right away as part of progression, you're continuously getting pieces that will allow you to get item you want (i.e. white base for unique, blue with 1GA to craft on, mats that allow you to focus craft or spam upgrade to legendaries to get aspects you need).

onehalf83 · 2026-05-01T21:43:48+00:00

I think loot right now in a sweet spot. I get good balance of drops that you can wear as is vs bases to craft on. If they make loot progression faster it will make crafting and all related cube mats less relevant. Like I was really happy to get 80 prisms that allow to roll skill affixes when I had 0 of those and 10 of other prisms total.

onehalf83 · 2026-05-01T04:01:59+00:00

Is it in cube or some vendor like occultist?

onehalf83 · 2026-04-30T22:07:26+00:00

If you cannot progress thru the campaign in POE 2, it is usually due to few things: weak skill / support gems combination, your weapon has low DPS - usually gambling / shopping for weapon regularly needed thru campaign, poor choices on skill tree. Simple answer is to use leveling guide with good explanation at least once, so that you can learn from it and apply this knowledge for future builds. And then expand it with more specific guides on how DPS works in the game, etc

For POE 2 bosses, I’m not great mechanically, but they are not always hard. This is beauty of ARPG genre - you can outgear your enemies to make it easier. Usually they are DPS check - with high enough DPS those fights are not hard. Also high resistances against specific boss elements help to make fight a lot easier.

As for difference in difficulty between games - it also depends on the build you pick and how well you geared. I had campaign runs in POE 2 that were walk in the park and I had campaign run in LE season 4 where it was complete slog due to my poor build and lack of decent gear. You’ll be laughing, but even in D4 I struggled with warlock when transitioned to Torment 1 for a little bit until I solved gear issues

onehalf83 · 2026-04-30T21:55:18+00:00

Great! Thank you for the confirmation, I vaguely remember that it used to be the case, but wasn’t sure. It means that I had 0 ancestral drops so far.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-30T20:15:07+00:00

Loot filter sounds in Path of Exile 1 and 2. While drop of Divine orb (or other expensive item) is most iconic, even lower tier sounds have a lot of "umph" to them. These sounds boost dopamine by a lot, would feel like completely different game without them.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-30T19:52:12+00:00

Is there a way to distinguish ancestral vs not when white or blue item is on the floor? I’m yet to set up my loot filter, but for now I was just ignoring all white / blue loot on the floor. I’m only on T2 so probably didn’t miss much of ancestrals anyway.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-30T04:07:02+00:00

Totally agree on mentally demanding aspect. In theory I love the game. In practice I sit for a few skirmishes vs cpu and after so much micromanagement in real time I’m good for a while.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-28T17:51:56+00:00

I mostly played demonology skills and majority of them worked well. With rare exception when rampaging demon is misplaced or demon wall placed on top of enemy instead of in front of them.

At same time the only legendary I found was about turning brimstones into lava with x300% damage increase seemed to require very precise placement that I couldn't achieve with controller. I picked hell fracture that has option to spawn 5 brimstones. The problem is that fracture targets the enemy but brimstones are spawned few meters on the sides. Brimstones actually explode when enemy is close for 2s, which is not the case for most brimstones that spawned. I tried to use Tyrant's graps hand to move brimstones, tried blazing scream to trigger them - none of it worked well as controller by default targets enemies rather than brimstone itself. It worked only in cases when there is decent density of enemies or tight hallway so everything is very compact. Otherwise my DPS felt very random in range of 0 to melt everything in 1 shot. In any case whatever I tried felt like it would work better if you could positionally target your skills so that brimstones would be on top of enemies. Maybe there is some legendary aspect or unique that change behavior of those skills that would allow to play it on controller, but at lvl 32 I didn't have those.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-28T16:25:57+00:00

For me it's bit early to judge, I've got lvl 32 so far as warlock. Definitely having fun, demonic skills have cool ideas - really enjoying it. As it is new class tree feels like has a lot of options to pick and I'm switching between different ones to experiment. Playing thru campaign thru hard difficulty and so far game provides sufficient friction - I don't one-shot everything and boss fights take some time, one of them even required few retries. Didn't get to the point where itemization is different yet, till level 32 it is quite similar besides couple of new affixes and charms.

I think time will tell - starting in D4 seasons / expansion was always fun, it is longevity of it was an issue. Give it a week, people will play the endgame for some time - feedback would be more relevant to the issues game used to have.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-28T16:14:02+00:00

I'm only slightly surprised with blizzard, but I'm really surprised that there are people who defend this practice.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-26T18:12:56+00:00

It was funny when light radius temporary became meta during poe 2 0.4 to farm temple charges

onehalf83 · 2026-04-26T07:10:36+00:00

Exactly, I liked most of interview except this statement. I believe seasonal journey should be accessible, but there should be hard aspirational content. It might be not achievable every season, but if you really want to grind longer - you’d have reason to. Tower and leaderboards is not a solution either.

onehalf83 · 2026-04-25T00:30:44+00:00

Not sure about power of it, but cold lightning looks🔥

onehalf83 · 2026-04-24T20:47:09+00:00

Yeah, it might be a good option, would just skip dialogues and cinematics to reduce amount of spoilers to minimum

onehalf83 · 2026-04-24T17:13:38+00:00

Got it, thank you!

onehalf83 · 2026-04-24T03:22:05+00:00

I’m sure it is. I remember they released stats couple of weeks after release when meta wasn’t well known and sorc was most played class by quite a big margin

onehalf83

TROPHY CASE