What games are you playing and why?

I'm not sure I'm going to keep playing for all that long due to a variety of issues... but for now, I've got a templar that's going to evolve from 2h fighter to eventually be a ranged spellcaster. A witch I'm going to restart... a ranger I didn't like, and a marauder I'm considering going bowrauder with(with a nice helping of Iron Grip).

 

Installed last night.

Would really love some levelup tooltips for gems, so you can see if it's about to gain a stat requirement you can't match. Beta suggestion! Also can't see stat requirements of magic+ equipment until you ID it. Or stats of summoned monsters. All of that will presumably be wiki'd at some point, but unless you're explicitly trying to be a "not knowing is half the fun!" roguelike, they should try to minimize alt-tabs. Edit: Ok the "cant see reqs until ID" thing was either a one-time glitch or me not paying attention, because I can see it now.

A minor cool thing you don't often see in games like this; if you fire a projectile at a guy and it rolls Miss, it will pass through and roll hit/miss on the monster behind it. In most games they just cease to exist as soon as they reach a guy, hit or miss.

Less cool is lootable Corpses are apparently tall enough to block an arrow/fireball. And you can detonate Barrels (or corpses) from a distance if you manually fire projectiles (potentially avoiding traps), but left-clicking them pulls you into melee range to kick it so it explodes in your face/zombies chew your face.

7 levels so far, found 1 TP scroll, about 4 ID scrolls (and some fragments from white weapons), one gem (a second copy of Ground Slam), 1 rare. Couple potions.

 

More POE impressions. Overall it's fun to smash zombies and take their stuff, but there are a lot of minor+ annoyances:

-Secret requirements, continued. Every gem I've seen so far has upon leveling up gained 3-13% damage, at the cost of 0-25% mana cost, 1 character level requirement, and 0-16 stat requirements. There's no way of knowing without making a (irreversible?) levelup, or checking the lolbeta Wiki. I feel afraid spend any skill points, in case one of my spells suddenly becomes unusable and I need to rush somewhere down the tree to get "+10 to use your crap" rather than "+something fun/interesting". I would vastly prefer being able to just delay the gem levelups, so I can use the good level 1 version until I have enough +useyourcrap points to safely get the +6damage version...but if you don't spend your gem levelup, IT STOPS GAINING EXPERIENCE. So in the offchance that the gem at level 7 secretly gains "+3% damage AND +47% aoe" or something, I don't want to kill monsters with "stuck" gems either. The whole thing is just frustrating and stressful rather than "yay I'm getting stronger". Other games suffer from the +mana problem (d2 for example you often left your main attack at level 1 until you got some mana leech equipment; but once you got that equipment you could immediately spend the skill points you were saving, rather that here where you are now allowed to go kill 347 zombies to put ONE more gempoint...), but I've never known any to say "Congratulations, you killed your 700th zombie! You can no longer cast your spell at all."

-Inventory tetris. Backpack is 12 squares wide, 5 squares tall. Weapons can be 1x3, 1x4, 2x2, 2x3, 2x4. So you can fit 6-18 in your inventory (18 requires 6 of them to be Claws). All armor other than superrare belts and jewelry is 2x2, 2x3, 2x4, so you can only fit 6-12 of those (but Helmets/Gloves/Boots are the same size as Claws, so they can take the slots below your knives/smallswords/smallaxes/smallclubs/smallmaces/mediummaces/wands/bows). At low levels you have to sell 15 of them to buy a Town Portal scroll. Items laying on the ground expire in about 15 minutes. If you're one of those people who likes to sell everything to Brax even in pre-Pocket Dimension days...yeah, not fun. Probably more fun when items sell for a Town Portal scroll each, assuming that ever happens (cough Torchlight cough).

-Currency in the game as alluded is in ID scrolls/TP scrolls/Item rerollers/etc. Which is cooler than gold and goldsinks. But it also takes inventory. Oh and when you sell stuff, it puts all of your new currency in new stacks, so you have to manually combine it with your current stacks. And you can't see what something sells for until you drag it to the merchant window.

-Chatbox. 2 times I played, the chatbox properly locked itself if you scrolled up to read previous comments. The other 5-ish times I played, the chatbox continues to scroll whether you are at the bottom or not. So if you're trying to click on a name to report/mute someone for spamming 800 N-bombs per minute...there's only a 28% chance their name will hold still. And speaking of N-bombs, there appears to be no name filter at all, so this colorful commentary is often coming from someone NAMED after sexually explicit activities. I've been on the net long enough to be hard to offend, but it's still ANNOYING to see "[genetalia][violater]" flooding the chatbox with comments just as bad as his name (and not being able to mute him the first dozen tries).

-Weaponswap. In d2, Torchlight, and Torchlight 2, your weapon swaps remembered your right-click hotkey. So you'd W, rightclick, W, and tada, your Holy Shield was refreshed with +5 bonus; or W, Rightclick until 3 Magma Lances reduce the boss's armor to 0, W and continue Pbolting for 7 seconds; etc. Here, the rightclicks are shared. If you have an axe in your primary and a bow in your secondary, you have to manually change the rightclick each time you press X, otherwise you'll stand there getting eaten by zombies while your character says "I KANT DU THAT WIT DAT WEHPUN". Or you just accept the fact that one of your weapon swaps will suck, and map all of its hotkeys to QWE or something, while the weapon you want to be convenient will get the blessed solitary rightclick slot. Or pretend it's D3 where there are no weapon swaps at all; but at least here you can use it to store a 19th and 20th vendor trash!

Ahem. Again, the game is pretty fun, and has some very interesting innovations; I'm just giving my honest opinions on why on earth they would say "yeah repairing your stuff wasn't fun so we removed that" but then made you unable to know if you could cast an "upgraded" spell or to fit more than 6 shirts in your backpack.

SIX.

SHIRTS.

 

I can't get Path of Exile to run. I have Windows XP and didn't have any previous versions. Every time I try to run it I get the login screen and enter my email and password. Then if I try to choose a gateway or click to remember the password it crashes to my desktop. Until they get this fixed, I'm outa luck.

 

Most of the issues that people are having are totally legitimate (I can't tell you why you can't get it to run though). But here's some stuff I've learned:
1. Pick up all of the scrolls/orbs and anything else that's a single square in size. DO NOT pick up any OTHER common items (unless you plan to enchant it).
2. I initially had the same problems with not knowing that leveling up a gem would make it unusable. For some reason that stopped happening to me. I don't know if this is a change they just implemented or what, but when a gem leveling will make my equipment unusable, it prompts me instead of clicking on it to level, to right-click to dismiss it,

You CAN always remove the gem from your gear. But unfortunately, as I discovered also, you need to have some awareness of the requirements for your gems at each level and prepare for that. IT is a bad design choice, imho. But it's not one that can't be worked around (it's dumb, because it makes you totally dependent on the wiki).

It would be nice if that character builder would give you warning signs based on gems and their levels. The website already has access to your gear, so why not enable it to tell you at what point during your build process will you have to drop the gem (if ever) so that you can make adjustments.

BTW, my strategy now is to take a bunch of stat increases early on my Marrauder. I only wanted to add some Dex but it's actually giving me more int, simply because of how the web is laid out. So far It looks like I won't have any issues for a very long time (if ever) because of how slowly my Cleave skill is leveling. Once I get a stat buffer, I'll work on the stuff I really want in my build.

/edit If the Beta wiki is correct, the dex requirement on Cleave never gets over 48 and I'll have that easily in only a few levels, without having to count on gear bonuses.

 

I think I'm kinda stuck at the prison at level 11ish. I was dying a bit in the zone before the prison, but now its just ridiculous. After so many deaths, I think I need to take a break from the game. There's a point where a game turns from challenging and frustrating to simply frustrating, and I'm right at that edge.

 

Or perhaps it just requires a different approach or a party or at least two people (in the latter case it would still be pretty bad, though).

 

As I understand it, it's not that hard to screw your build up. You may also be undergeared/undergemmed...
We should friend up and do a gaslamp group sometime. Pick up groups kind of suck because of the hectic ninjalooting mechanic.

 

Well, I got the game to play for me. It was my third party sound card. I plugged in a pair of Logitech USB headphones and it works fine now. If not, the only way to get it to work would have been to add the --nosound (Yes, it needs both --'s) option to the shortcut on my desktop/start menu. So I am currently playing a Ranger.

 

I kind of know that I have good AC, but horrible dps, and need to increase my energy shield most likely (it's probably all of the elemental/magic damage that I'm taking). It's not that I'm undergeared, but that I purposefully made a defensive build with a serious achilles heel. Those two zones are when magic damage really takes off, and I'm seriously unable to handle that.

Least I'm fairly sure that that's my issue. But it doesn't mean that I made mistakes (although that's certainly possible). It's all that lightning damage combined with the fact that I can't outlast anyone with my pitiful dps.

 

Gear/gems. You'd be amazed what some +damage gear does for your dps. Or some better attacks, or some support gems(for example additional lightning damage support gem requires lvl 8, gives 1-7 added damage per hit on lvl 1).

 

Or forming a party with "us". We'd probably screw it up and die in a blaze of glory, but it's funnier to do it as a group.

 

Apparently some assholes are DDoSing the servers...
https://twitter.com/pathofexile/status/295041693059805184

 

Yeah it disconnected like 3 times in a row earlier, one of which involved a rollback, and now is down entirely :/

 

There should be a bounty on people like that. Dead prefered.

 

Oh and my highest level character is a templar named Cerebrawl, lvl 15. He didn't have much trouble with the prison, so I too could help there. However it's about bedtime for me, I gotta get up for work in 8 hours.

 

Oh well, that's much better than me.

Because I only have a level 1 duelist. Please refrain from asking "what?".