For what it's worth with the armour, there's a passive specifically for what you want called Iron Reflexes, which turns all your evasion into armour. It's probably 20-25 slots deep though depending on how direct you go to it.
Yes, I know. After I get to the cluster I'm going for after the one I'm going for now, reaching Iron Reflexes will be (if I recall correctly) a matter of 3 points. But I was aiming for the opposite, honestly (high evasion, medium armour and shield), because I get a lot of shield-related good stuff now and (unless I'm mistaken) it's easier to keep the shield up if you aren't hit at all (I haven't paid attention to whether you can dodge if your shield is up, honestly, if it goes down I'm usually against a swarm or a miniboss and thus I don't have time for tests). Though the opposite drains the armour so I doubt I'd go for either (instead I'll probably just spend these few points on a resistance cluster or on a mana cluster). But so far it's good. At level 9 I have a DPS of 37,2 (I don't know if it's decent, but without any points spent in any damage-enhancing passives I think it is surprisingly good), with the ability to go at twice that value for a few seconds (and much more if I empty the mana flask, which I've never even done before; the closest I got to that was using it once in my fight against the necromancer, because between me having to use Cleave on his minions and trying to hit him as hard as I could I needed to do it not to run out of mana). And I love the flask system, by the way. It's similar to the decent belt system from the old Diablo 2, but because flasks can have magical effects too it's somewhat deeper, and the fact that you don't need to refill your stacks every visit to the town but instead just need to keep your tempo going to get a refill means more dynamic gameplay (not that I use these often, since I have a rare amulet of regeneration with +4 health per second and some bonuses to resistances [cold, to be specific], evasion, and shield; but they are definitely useful)
You know, it would also be pretty neat if people couldn't sell their gains online for real money... WHEN SUDDENLY BLIZZARD REAL MONEY AUCTION HOUSE HATERS GONNA HATE WE GONNA BE RICH AND EVERYONE HATES... etc. I do quite enjoy how the same cycle of "Gee, it'd be nice if we had X" -> "X got implemented?" -> "Company Y are sellouts, scoundrels and ruining the game" echoes throughout every iteratively designed franchise/game.
@ armor/evasion: I think Evasion works while Energy Shield is active. Monsters can definitely miss while it's up, so I assume they miss more often. Random thing I learned from the wiki (and could have learned in game if I pressed C more often): All chestpieces reduce runspeed by 4%, except for pure-armor and armor/shield, which reduce by 8%. Armor/evasion, Evasion, Evasion/shield, and Shield are faster. As for offhand shields, Tower Shields (the 2x4 inventory killers) have a 6% penalty and are pure armor; every other shield (including the Armor/Shield shield) is 3%.
Recently finished Normal and started on cruel. Word of warning to those still working through normal, the last two bosses in act 3 are stupid and terrible and you'll probably want to bring help. If you're insistent on soloing them, a reliable, massive source of chaos damage is pretty much a must, as well as near-capped if not capped elemental resists of every type. I did them in a duo and basically resorted to zergrushing, they really need some tuning.
Well I meant an auction house in the traditional MMO sense, where you can put items for sale for in-game currency (in this case probably orbs only or else it would be ridiculous.) That said, I don't really have a problem with being able to sell items for real money in this type of game. I don't think Blizzard's implementation was good, but I kind of see a parallel to playing TCG's and selling rare cards you find. This might be a derail though.
Well, there is the trade channel, if that's what you want. Sure, less an auction house and more a crossroad bazaar with people shouting and nothing being organized, but I think it fits the game. After all, it's not like there's anyone out there who would care about spending time to make everything organized, for as long as things don't start exploding spontaneously. Oh, also this... Did any of you have any luck with matching rare items' names for vendor recipes? I already have a full stash page of rare items I don't necessarily care about, but I'm sort of afraid to sell them because you can make alchemy orbs if you sell three rare items with the same name at once (the alternative being much simpler, but requiring me to farm armorer's shards at a rate of about 27~34 per orb, which isn't really hard but is not something I tend to do as it takes as much time to make one as it does to make one transmutation orb [and I love alchemy orbs, so it's a dilemma for me]) and so I'm asking if anyone had the luck or if it's better not bothering. PS. Defeating Brutus when your only ranged attack is a trap skill and you are as resilient as a styrofoam is fun; I'm better-geared now thanks to a few skill gem drops, though.
This game sounds awesome. Tell me. How do you plan out your passive skills? I have played with the tree/pathway, and it is monstrous. There are no respecs, correct?
No total respecs, anyway. And how do I plan it, well... I just keep the image of what I want, going for the clusters which I will be able to get which will help me, and go with the flow.
You get something like 18 respec points (on 111 passive points) and you can get more by getting rare orbs but it's gonna be costly. They have a good skill planner on the official site. http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/
Uninstalled. Too many things getting on my nerves, and the community is about the worst possible. I honestly never really liked the genre much in the first place, got tired of TL2 as well. Oh well. I did however purchase a preorder of Omerta: City of Gangsters over on gog.com.
The good news is you can use it to pull any point that wouldn't break your connection to another part of the skill tree, so if you realize you made a mistake early on when branching down into something else or just decide that, hey, you'd rather specialize in axes than maces, they're handy for that. It would be nice if a full respec was possible but I can't imagine the pricetag it would have considering how hard it is to get individual respec points.
I have found 2 of the respec orbs so far and haven't had any internet in over 2 days so haven't been able to find any more yet.
I've found one of the orbs, and still have the two respecs from act 1, unused. I haven't played in a couple of days now (been doing/playing other things, but I'll probably start playing again... soon). I'm curious if anyone has tried to arrange or negiotiate a trade with another player, and if so, how'd it work out (or fail to work out)? I'm kind of hesitant about biting that bullet to solicit trades.
Oh well, they are easier to get once you get to act 3. Because then it's just the matter of spending enough time on grinding act bosses (and later also maps) with some "+magic find" and "+drop rate" modifiers (adding appropriate support gems to your most-used attack is a good idea too, as that means for as long as you have mana to go, your drop rates are good enough). Sure, you might need to get some source of scrolls of wisdom (no clue about that, but there are players willing to give stacks (sometimes even multiple) of these for a single higher-tier thing like the gem enhancer or even the flask enhancer (I'm talking about "Gemcutter's Prism" "Glassblower's Bauble", respectively); heck, offer enough weapon enhancers and you might convince a low-level player to bring you stacks of these because they tend to gather everything and after being offered a guaranteed upgrade instead of random-chance-based one some go for the deal (I once even did, though in my case it was because I knew not to ID magic items and so had one full stack of these scrolls when I saw the offer). That being said, they are still rare, of course, as one of these is worth (I think) 64 orbs of augmentation; still, gathering enough rare items to make 64 orbs of augmentation tends not to take too long if you have combined bonuses of about +50% drop rate and +100% magic find (one boss run tends to give an average of 1,8~2 rares (that is, if you only think about rares, because with a source of scrolls of wisdom you can also ID magic items to double the income in orbs of augmentation, and the occasional orbs/gems/scrolls/superior items are a really nice touch), and depending on the boss it might take as little as 3 minutes per single "run to the boss/fight/go to town/reset level" thing. Now getting back to the playing itself, I now have a level 32 dual-wielding evasion-centred duelist. I feel, for a lack of better wording, like a Radiant Wizard without "spells" spells forced to fight in melee. At least 84% chance to evade projectiles and the 20% dodge helps, but when I get hit it takes a lot out of me (still, it's fun since boss fights are a little frantic instead of being a simple "let's whack away while drinking a potion every 7 seconds because I'm a melee character and he can't kill me" thing, and there is the constant pressure even normally which means it doesn't become boring [did I ever mention I'm a masochist when playing games?]). The trading system is really good, in my opinion (not to even touch the whole "barter only, no gold" thing, which is the icing on that strawberry cake [I like strawberries, in case you were wondering about the comparison] from my perspective). The way it happens, you say the price (or the other player does) or you say what are you willing to pay (or the other player does), and then you meet and trade normally. Usually that means forming a temporary party so that you (or the other player; the one of higher level tends to be the one moving as to avoid a situation where you can't get to the meeting point because you still haven't unlocked it) know where the person you trade with is and move there. Then, when you see each other, you just send a trade query (which has to be accepted by the other player, but that's to be expected). What happens then is that you get a window in which both of you place your things, and then you accept, with the transaction being finalized once both of you do. However, you can only accept it once you hover over all the items offered to you (and the same about the other player and the items you are offering), and if you accepted and any one of you changed anything you need to accept again. That means the only thing making it possible to be "ninja-scammed" when trading is via one's own illiteracy, because if you need to see all the info regarding items in the final version of the trade in order to get through with the trade, you might as well read that and make sure everything is working as intended.
That's pretty good, the hover thing. I read that you can also trade directly through the forums and the items get transferred ingame automagically, but I haven't tried it.
Well, that's for people who can't spend enough time in the game to get what they are looking for, or have a lot of stuff they think would sell and don't want to spam the trade chat. And it is possible. Since the data from the servers is accessible (read-only for the player) after you log in, they [the developers/admins] can change it remotely if you have a trade deal going on the forum.
