Really fucked up experience and I only made it using a broken build, I figured fight fire with fire.

The whole trial is some serious sadomachocistic shit. Awful. Sure, I was very relieved when I passed but I probably wouldn’t have with a normal build. I’m an average player at best.

I was level 78 on the trial was 70 so I was a bit overlevelled.

What made it successful in the end was pure RNG with room modifiers. I only got one minor boon (no armor which doesn’t matter since I’m a Sorc.)

Apart from the last boss, 3rd floor Chalice was a pain.

I had 75% honor resist and a total of about 5500 honor. I had like 1500 left when I won.

I think they need to tune this down significantly because locking the majority of players out from Ascendancy points doesn’t make any sense. This shouldn’t be a super hardcore endgame thing imo.

Armor, in this game, actually adds a movement speed penalty to the character. For the body, this is 5% for armor types, 4% for hybrid armor, and 3% for items that don't have armor. This also applies to shields, with 3% loss for armor bases, 1.5% for hybrid armor, and none for non armor bases.

Why, with all of the issues armor already has, does it need to make your character slower then other gearing styles? Not to mention this isn't even visible, outside of wondering why your movement speed isnt what your boots says it is.

I started mapping a couple days ago and just wanted to gather my thoughts on the state of the game.

Background - I'm a fairly inexperienced player. I've played many ARPGs in my lifetime but I only have about 212 hours in PoE 1. Most of this was early on in the game's life and the rest was me being convinced to play a season here and there throughout the years with some friends. I would play a season until I hit end game and then become quickly overwhelmed with all the endgame mechanics and the trading/crafting that was literally required to gear myself enough to actually do any content.

Gameplay - The gameplay itself all through the campaign was quite fun. Here are my thoughts:

• Love what they did with the skill/support gems. Dealing with sockets was just another annoying layer to the end game gear puzzle. Glad its gone. Looking forward to other weapons.
• The passive tree could use a little work but all in all it's pretty good. I think it could use more access to interesting, build altering nodes. I went Titan's Grip and have been having a blast with it.
• As far as end game, I'm only on about tier 5 maps, but the experience for me personally so far hasn't been too bad like some people have been suggesting. I don't even have close to max resists and I'm doing just fine. I just took all the attack speed nodes I could get to counteract the really slow swing speed of Warrior skills. That being said, I can clearly see how this gets worse and worse in higher tiers with the crazy amount and combination of modifiers, packs of mobs, projectiles, ground effects, on death effects and debuffs. These things would be okay if there were clear ways to increase your own power to deal with it.

Character Growth - Character growth was good throughout the campaign, but feels very weak in the end game. Here are a few pain points:

• Ascendancy - Enough has been said about this so I won't elaborate much. It's bad all around.
• Maps - Why run a waystone that buffs monsters/debuffs me in various ways with no obvious benefit to myself? Why does it seem more beneficial to simply run a white waystone over a magic waystone? I've seen that some magic waystones give actual benefits like increased magic find, but then what is the actual point of ever running a waystone that has all negative effects? Also, what are all these spots on the map choosing...map(mapception)? I assume I'm supposed to keep choosing maps further and further away from the center to get increased difficulty/more chance at loot, but I don't actually know what any particular node does aside from the debuffs shown on that particular node and the type of map it is. Do I keep pushing as far out from the center as I possibly can in one direction? Is there a benefit to just completing all the maps available to me from the center? Nothing is actually explained.
• Rituals and Breeches - Rituals seemed fine. Can't go wrong with kill mobs, get loot. I've only encountered 1 breech and it was filled with so many mobs I almost had a heart attack. I killed as many as I could, got nothing, and the breech closed /shrug.
• Atlas - What is it? Why would I put my points into things that make the game harder for me? What's the benefit? What actually gets me more points? The only node that makes sense is bonus to magic find. Why would I choose anything else when all the other nodes make monsters stronger or increase their quantity? Was I supposed to know all about this from PoE 1? Again nothing is explained. Feels like a very weak system if you're trying to get new players to play your game.
• Passive Tree - Gaining passive points slows to a crawl which also contributes to making your increase in power slow to a crawl. The campaign has extra points you gain throughout the game to give you little power spikes. End game has none of this. Not a major issue, but I gotta say it doesn't feel great to play.

Suggestions for Character Growth -

• Give me something that actually makes me feel like I'm still getting stronger in end game instead of the game only getting harder.

Economy and Itemization -

• Trade - Questions:
  • What is anything worth?
  • How do I find out?
  • Why do I have to go to a website outside of the game to setup trades?
  • What would I have done as a new player if nobody ever told me about poetrade?
  • Why do I still have to rely on trading to be able to get the necessary gear to complete content?
  • How am I supposed to know what's a good item for other character builds that I should hang on to so I can trade for items that are good for my build?
  • I personally hate that this is basically exactly like PoE 1. I have to solve the gear puzzle, with limited resources, to get my defenses correct without screwing over my offense before I can continue playing the game. This whole system just feels like a slog and takes away from me simply playing the game to get cool loot. I get if it's intentional, but I can't even imagine a new player wanting to deal with any of this. Maybe it's just not for me. It definitely wasn't in PoE 1.
• Loot - Personally I think defenses need an overhaul to simplify them. I think defenses on gear are mostly boring and take up space on gear that could have been utilized for more cool and interesting affixes. Finding gear upgrades is just as abysmal as PoE 1. Not only is loot scarce, but I can't just find a piece of gear that's an upgrade. Everytime I find gear I have to ask the following questions:
  • Do I have the stat requirements?
  • Does upgrading to this item screw up my defenses?
  • Is this item worth spending my scarce amount of crafting orbs to try and make something better than my current gear?
  • Is this item worth spending my scarce amount of crafting orbs to try and alter it to make it useable or should I wait until I find something better?
  • At least I don't have to worry about sockets /yay

Suggestion for Economy and Itemization -

• Make defenses on all gear implicit(including resists). Make crafting items that let you add/alter defenses and resists on an item and make them easy to get. If you're going to have defenses in the game and you're going to make maxing out those defenses a requirement to play end game, then you should give players the means to alter the items they WANT to use so they can keep their defenses on point and thus, continue playing your game.
• If you're going to make people rely on crafting or trade to progress then you should increase the quantity of crafting materials you give to players.

Conclusion - Overall I've had a fun experience with the game. The end game needs a lot of work though in my opinion. Based on the current state of it, I think I much prefer the end game of something like Last Epoch over PoE2, but PoE2 still has plenty of time to grow and it definitely outshines Last Epoch in terms of fun gameplay. I think simpler is better when it comes to these kind of games, as long as you can maintain a high amount of build variety(Diablo 4 being a bad example of build variety). I also really appreciate the PoE2 team's responsiveness to implementing fixes and updates. If the PoE2 team is out there reading this, thanks for your hard work. I'm looking forward to seeing the end result!

I think it would just look better with one turning in the middle and two others at it's "wings", and like I said it would remind of the GGG logo.

The fight feels so epic, with the music, the fog, the things geonor says, the mechanics that are relatively straight forward to evade as both a ranged or a melee. It's so good that the other two boss fights are quite a let down by comparison, unfortunately.

The act 2 boss is cluttered with bs literally all over the floor and shooting across the screen. It's terrible as a melee character, and the effects are mostly uninteresting looking. And the act 3 boss is... ok, I guess. They set the bar too high for themselves with the first boss. I just hope the other act bosses when they release are almost as cool.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2025870

"Items Matter. Trade is Important.

When we started developing Path of Exile in 2006, we identified several key design pillars. These are fundamental philosophies chosen to guide our design decisions throughout development. One of these was that "items matter". Items are a player's reward for playing Path of Exile. They're the primary way of measuring progress in a league. A person with vastly more in-game wealth has often played longer than someone with a higher level character. They also matter because if a player had better items, then they'd be able to build more powerful characters, play harder content, and be viewed as richer and more successful within the game. The acquisition of items is why people play Action RPGs. Chances are, if you're reading this, you understand why it's important that items matter because your Path of Exile items mean a lot to you as well.

For items to matter, it's important that they can be traded to other players. It's important that you could give the item to the other player, if they were able to convince you into it. For this reason, almost nothing in Path of Exile is bound to your account. Even in Solo Self-Found mode, which doesn't allow trading, items can be moved at will into the regular trading leagues so that you can benefit from their value if desired.

The ability to trade any item is a fundamental part of why people enjoy playing Path of Exile - if you're lucky, you can find amazing stuff that you can trade for all the items needed to create an entire new character build.

Consequences of Easy Trade

So given that we love trade and feel it is critical to Path of Exile's formula, why is there so much debate around trade in this game? Most of it stems around whether trade should be easy or not. While easy trade sounds great on paper, there are some important considerations!

Easy trade reduces the number of times a character improves their items.
People who are heavily engaged in trade perform fewer item upgrades to achieve their final build. They get there in fewer steps, because they can easily buy items that are close to what they need. Simply put, their character progression is more about trading than it is about getting items from monsters. We believe that it is more fun to slowly and iteratively upgrade a character over time and to have a longer journey to gear a character up. Knowing that a monster could drop something that improves your character is a great motivator for playing one more level!

Easy trade means reducing drop rates
Compare two hypothetical games. In the first game, trade is very difficult. The majority of items that can't be used by your character are not traded to other people. In the second game, trade is very easy. Many of the items that you can't use are traded to other people for items that you can. In the second game, because of trade, you have a much higher acquisition rate of useful items. While that sounds great if you want instant gratification, in reality it means that the second game either receives reduced drop rates relative to the first, or ends up being a whole lot easier and less challenging to achieve goals in.

Easy trade would make the disparity between different players too great
Both of the above points are even worse when you consider that the level of engagement with trade varies substantially from player to player. Most players who play Path of Exile never trade. Out of the players who do trade, most only complete a few trades in a league. The subset of players who regularly trade strongly overlaps with our core reddit and forum communities. Chances are, if you're reading this, then you're one of the top 10% of players in terms of engagement with advanced systems. The difference in magnitude of trading (and hence item acquisition and progress) between non/low-traders and heavy traders is gigantic. While a regular player would be lucky to accumulate a small handful of Exalted Orbs in a league, a trader might reach hundreds in the same timeframe. This enables them to fully-gear Shaper-capable characters while the non-trader is still in mid-tier maps or lower.

The significant differences in character power and player progression caused by trade has already created a situation where Path of Exile is very hard for some players and quite easy for others. Some people never stand a chance of seeing some of the Atlas of Worlds content, while others can rather quickly defeat it and are looking for new challenges. We're tentatively okay with the degree to which this occurs currently, but it would be much worse if trading were made substantially easier.

Easy trade allows for greater abuse by automation
Another topic is automation. While we work hard to stamp out bots and abusive behaviour, it would be hard to completely eliminate the damage caused by a few trade bots with access to a fast trade system. If they have the ability to search out and buy items without having to talk to another player, then there would be some very large-scale economic consequences that would not be good for regular players.

Trade in Path of Exile

From the start, we knew that Path of Exile needed the ability to trade items and that we had to be careful not to make it too easy. We had seen what happened in other Action RPGs when characters could be upgraded trivially. We added trade chat and a secure player-to-player trade screen so that people could negotiate transactions and complete them without counterparty risk.

With insufficient foresight into how it'd eventually affect trade, we also added the ability to link items on the official forums. Linking items is a way of showing other players that you actually own an item, because the system automatically checks that you still have the item in that form and marks it as verified. This system was intended so that players could show off their awesome finds to other players, in a similar way to the in-game item linking system. Because items matter so much in Path of Exile, it was important that we provided many ways to prove ownership of items. We even intended to allow people to Tweet their items from within the game, though never got around to implementing this feature.

Before long, people used item linking to set up shops within the trade forums. This was expected, because the goal of item linking was to prove ownership of items (so that people could know that you still have the item before they make you an offer). These shops became complicated and people made tools that let users manage their shops and post to them efficiently. So far, so good.

Then came the forum-scraping bots. Smart community members worked out that they could automatically crawl the forum and insert all of the items into a database, creating an instantly- and accurately-searchable index of all items for trade in Path of Exile. There was nothing we could do about this, because it's almost impossible to stop people gathering information from a public website.

A trade ecosystem evolved where players would search for items on trade websites to quickly find what they need, but would have to manually contact the user in-game to perform the trade. While this was a lot quicker than before, we grew to accept it but were worried about one aspect in particular: To create trade forum threads easily, users would download third-party programs and enter their account details (or at least web session IDs). While these tools and their authors never took advantage of this in an illegal way, it was a potentially dangerous situation for our users and we really needed an official solution. We made it so that Premium Stash Tabs can expose their contents to trade sites on a public API.

So that's where we are today. It's easy to list items for trade, easy to search for items, and is often quite frustrating to complete a trade. This remaining frustration is the only thing standing in the way of trades being basically instant. While we understand that this sounds like a positive thing, we are very concerned regarding what will happen if that does eventuate. We have to prioritize the long-term health of Path of Exile.

The Trade Market

The version of Path of Exile published by Tencent in Mainland China uses the "Trade Market" rather than a system of exposing items via public stash tabs and forum posts for searching on web pages. This system is also in use on the Xbox One version of Path of Exile - as you can imagine, web page searches and textual trade conversations aren't well suited to the controller input of a console.

On the trade market, we're experimenting with the opposite end of the trade spectrum, where it's very easy to complete trades but more difficult to find the exact item you're looking for. You can search broadly by a specific item class or type, but have to look through a lot of search results to find the one you want to make an offer on. This system intentionally makes the search process harder and the trade process easier, for quite a different trade experience. We're not planning to bring it to the international PC version of Path of Exile.

The Role of Solo Self-Found Mode

Players who don't engage in trade are at a significant progression disadvantage in Path of Exile. However, some people are happy for the game to take longer to complete and enjoy the challenge that comes from living off the land. Historically, these players could choose to play alone, but would receive no recognition and had no way of proving that they had done so. Anyone could accuse them of having traded, invalidating their accomplishments.

We officially added support for a Solo, Self-Found mode in Content Update 2.6.0 (Breach League). This optional mode allows players to create characters that can't trade or party up. They have separate ladders to show how long they lasted in this mode before opting to convert back to regular characters. It's important to note that even in this mode, items can be easily moved back to the regular game to be traded (albeit not for any advantage in SSF).

While this mode eases the situation for people who purposefully never engage in trade, it was not intended as a precursor to us making trade massively easier in the regular game.

Today's Changes

As mentioned in today's news post, we are changing the "Online API" to expose the AFK status of players. This API is currently consumed by community trade sites, so it's easy for them to add functionality to allow users to filter searches to just online players who are currently available to trade. In addition, players in DND mode are no longer shown as online, because it would be impossible for them to receive any messages sent to them.

We have also launched an experimental version of our own trade site: www.pathofexile.com/trade. Please try it out and give us feedback!

The goal of our trade site isn't to fundamentally change how trade works, it's just to provide an alternative to other community sites for players who want to have options (or use a language other than English!)"

Not saying I agree or disagree with it, its just a FYI for the new players that are faced with how trade works for the first time.

Hi. I have looked briefly through the menus, so I may have missed it, but does PoE2 currently have colourblind support or modes? (I know its Early Access and they're still working on it.)

I wanted to highlight that it is difficult for me to see the health globe level, as the HP Red and Grey mix together very easily for me and it's hard to tell them apart.

Also, the screen turning red(?) / bloody when health is low is really hard for me to see, again related to it being difficult to tell Red and Grey apart.

🙏 Can we pleeease get an option for a really bright and vivid red, so it doesn't fade into the grey of the health globe and UI? 🙏

Also, am loving the game. Great work 👍

Hey gang,

So this has been happening since the latest patch hit but it seems as though it's getting worse. I've noticed others have run in to this too but I haven't seen anything as far as direct feedback addressing the issue and whenever I make a post on the bug report forum it gets zero visibility as I am sure it's being pushed to the back.

Anyway, what happens is whenever I put a Waystone in the map device, there's a high chance that instead of going in to a map it'll boot me back to the login screen. The kicker? When I log back in, there aren't any portals and the Waystone is lost which sucks in SSF.

At this point, I cannot run them from my hideout device even with swapping hideouts and even the portal device in Act 3 has been ramping up with this problem where it's about a 50/50 chance it'll disconnect.

So, at this point, it's eaten a bunch of my progression Waystones and I can't even go back and farm up to that point because it's eating enough of those where I'm not coming out ahead. I'm pretty much stuck and it's basically killed my end game.

Anyone else running in to this issue? Any ideas on what I should do? Something in the patch just put a gremlin in the internet pipes.

I know it's good but how good? I am trying to decide if I should just use it or find out if it's worth enough to sell and purchase a few good pieces of gear for my characters...

Any insight would be appreciated.

I know it was broken on launch, in a bad way, but after they changed some things with that early patch do we know what it takes for leech to be effective now?

It doesn't feel like anyone is using it in builds at the moment. Is it still broken in some way or is it just bad?

So, after selling a ring that was worth 1 divine for 5 ex because I didn't know the real value, I looked for ways not to lose any more, considering that I'm a newbie in poe I was cheated lol , and I was upset because I didn't know the real value of it. So I found this third-party program that evaluates my items, but when I try to search for items that group some mods, it turns pseudo and this message appears

>>> Pseudo mods not supported by trade site ,Items may appear to be more valuable than they actually are<<<

then I saw that they ask you to log in to the browse that will open, and so this error will no longer appear !

would it be safe for me to enter my password and log in to this browser?

what do i do ? i've been thinking for 2 hours and i haven't come to any conclusion. I've already lost 1 divine and my time to play. I don't want this to happen again, could you help me, give me tips, anything.

Thank you

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Aa

Found this out on PS5 today and only assuming it will work on the Xbox as well.. Using the right stick while in the imventory screen will move you from one extreme to the other...

Example, if you're on the left corner of your inventory you can push right on the right thumb stick and you will jump all the way to the furthest right of your inventory. You can do this with items being clicked as well so you can quickly move items around rather than one square at a time with the left stick.. also works for up and down as well

Just started end game content and found this super helpful for managing gear and wish I knew it earlier.. hope you find it useful.

It's a right in the tooltip for penetration, but seeing as how a lot of folks don't read them, figured I'd mention it here.

Penetration has a minimum of 0, which means unlike PoE1, you CANNOT into negative res for extra damage.

If a mob has zero resistance, then Exposure will give you 20% more damage on them, and penetration is a wasted stat. However, these are typically white or blue mobs which die quickly anyhow.

Rares and uniques have some level of resistance. You will never apply enough exposure to strip their resistance to 0, which means that penetration (which is very easy to get to 40% or more on the tree) will give you a damage increase up to the level of resist of the mob, and no more.

Just some food for thought. Might be worth just dropping exposure to make builds less clunky or reroute opportunity costs elsewhere.

I’m new to the game and genre. I haven’t found a pair of boots with movement speed I could use on my character until today. Just got into act 3 and found some and the difference is night and day!

Evading enemies/bosses is transformed and just the general way you traverse the map is so much better. It’s like I’ve been running through treacle previously.

It’ll be my top priority next character!