Path of Exile

[vor_lord]

Ok, I've a few hours invested in an Anarchy bow ranger now (my initial idea after a minute of looking at the tree was to go with Point-Blank + Iron Reflexes, and picking up lots of +%evasion and +life nodes).

Onslaught melee was unpleasant from the very beginning. I'm much happier with this, though of course I've already screwed up my first build. It's a throwaway idea that probably sucks. Rain of Arrows is so good in the early going. I've been using mostly Rain, with Puncture+Poison on dangerous mobs (plink and run).

In particular in these games I've always wanted to make characters that slow/freeze (cold damage in this case). But I need to get a better handle on the game, and elemental damage seems trickier to wrap my head around. So hence the physical damage bow ranger.

The good:

• Passive skill tree is very flexible and interesting
  
• Many degrees of freedom in character design
  
• Combat continues to get more and more interesting
  

The bad:

• Inventory tetris (seriously?? one of the worst ideas to keep from diablo)
  
• Scrolls of wisdom (identify scrolls) -- ditto
  
• Crafting/currency -- this is confusing and distracting to a beginning player
  
• Terrible load times (I measured 3 minutes 47 seconds between clicking the icon and actually being able to log in). Something is messed up. Sometimes level load times are a bit long, but it's that initial startup of the game that is so annoying.
  

Overall I'm feeling myself starting to get sucked in. I really want the load time issue resolved -- is anyone else having this problem?

[MonTy]

I really want the load time issue resolved -- is anyone else having this problem?

I've heard of this defragmenter fixing the load time for many people. I've personally never had an issue. BTW, if you read a few posts down from the root post, you'll see the developer praising the program.

[vor_lord]

I really want the load time issue resolved -- is anyone else having this problem?

I've heard of this defragmenter fixing the load time for many people. I've personally never had an issue. BTW, if you read a few posts down from the root post, you'll see the developer praising the program.

Thanks MonTy. I will try it, though the developer indicates you don't get much benefit unless you have patched many times. My install is new. It could be that I am running on an ext3 filesystem, and there is something it doesn't like or some bottleneck. I've not seen this with any other games, but it is a possibility.

[Frag]

Onslaught sure emphasizes the issue with melee; survivability. I found normal difficulty moderately hard, had to be a level or two above zones, but I was still cruising along. The Cruel came along. I was five levels above Brutus, had five endurance charges, Max Res, Enfeeble, and he still almost took off half of my life in one hit. That means if I desync or if he crits twice, I'm done. So back to Ledge farming. Got some upgrades, and tackled him again. It wasn't easy, but he went down. Things will only get worse, so essentially you'll have to grind for hours when you're already five plus levels above the zone, in order to barely scrape by. While Range has the same health, same defenses, same or better DPS, and doesn't have to actually be next to the enemy to hit them. After playing Onslaught, I'm crying for a larger melee buff. Not damage like the last melee buff, but survivability.

With that said, I'm still enjoying Onslaught. Aside from the wacky turbo/lethal races, it's the hardest mode I've played. It's a serious challenge with an empty stash. Should be interesting to see how far my melee build can go.

Agreed on all points, and after losing a 54 LA Duelist to walking away from the keyboard, I'm back to melee as the game is more or less the same for Ranged (excepting fast+fast+FAST) but actually Median level difficulty for melee.

[shoju]

The GGPK Defragmenter is a GODSEND. I love it. I actually donated to the guy's thing after using it.

[Frag]

The GGPK Defragmenter is a GODSEND. I love it. I actually donated to the guy's thing after using it.

18 mb saving is a godsend? /unimpressed

[LochnarITB]

I'm running the defrag now to see what it gives. I've been patching for a year and a half so I'm hoping for a good result. However, the GGG game guys in the thread did say that they defrag in-house so I would assume an uninstall and a redownload/install would clean it up too, along with other files.

[edit] 51 MB saved and a feeling of significant load time improvement.

[LennyLen]

Purely out of curiosity, what sort of machines are you guys running? I did a fresh reinstall of the game about 6 months ago when I bought a new SDD, but since then I've just patched. The game takes about 15 seconds to get to the login screen for me from when I run it.

edit: I tried the defragmenter for the hell of it, and it shave a couple of hundred Mb off. It doesn't seem that significant considering the size of the .gppk file, but it did drop my loading time down to 8s.

[shoju]

I'm running on a Sony Vaio Laptop, it's about 2 years old. it's a web dev type laptop, so the card is a little weak. But, It takes me ~20-45 seconds to load.

[vor_lord]

The defragmenter crashed for me. So I had to restore the unaltered GGPK.

4min of startup is too much. I'm going under the theory that it's the ext3 driver for windows, but would have to go to some considerable effort to rearrange my system.

[shoju]

Wow... I've never had the defrag crash on me. I've had it take for freaking ever, but never just up and crash. I would definitely submit a report to the guy who made the defrager on that one.

[LochnarITB]

Purely out of curiosity, what sort of machines are you guys running?

ASUS laptop - almost 3 years old - slow hard drive - ~ 1 minute click to login

[Frag]

Brand new (as of April) Newegg special super-computer for home. All 2nd-gen (excepting GPU ) parts, overclocked. Have a HDD, but PoE is installed on Raptor HDD.

[LennyLen]

Brand new (as of April) Newegg special super-computer for home. All 2nd-gen (excepting GPU ) parts, overclocked. Have a HDD, but PoE is installed on Raptor HDD.

What's your loading time?

My PC is a home built machine I got most of the parts for about a year ago, with a few extras added in January. It's a 3.2Ghz i7-3930 with 32Gb 1866Mhz RAM, an OC 4Gb GeForce 680, and a 512Gb OCZ Vector SSD that has OS and all software running from it. I have about 8Tb of secondary HDDs for data.

[Frag]

Just tested five times, load time was +/- 6s.

[shoju]

The GGPK Defragmenter is a GODSEND. I love it. I actually donated to the guy's thing after using it.

18 mb saving is a godsend? /unimpressed

It's more about the load times, and the fact that the Defrag allowed me to play the game post .10b patch, which completely fubar'd many installs.

Pre .10b my load times were getting astronomical, even zoning.
10b made the game fail to load.
I tried everything that GGG told me to do. Nothing fixed it. So, I was faced with either another complete download of the game, or defrag.

Defrag saved me.

[shoju]

Gotta say, the new uniques left me feeling..... a little underwhelmed. I guess the 1h'd sword is pretty good, actually, really good, but it's one of those that is so good it will make everything else for that build seem bad.

The rest of the uniques just... "eh".

[LennyLen]

If anyone around lvl 70 in standard league wants to run some maps, I'm starting to stockpile a few. They're all level 66, but this one looks promising:

[MonTy]

Gotta say, the new uniques left me feeling..... a little underwhelmed.

I made a separate post about the Uniques last night. I don't really agree, I would be excited to get three out of the four. I love mana fixing items and that sword has very good dps. The flask is interesting, certainly decent for map play where +maximum elemental resist would negate a ton of damage.

I think the chest is pretty bad. It shares a base item type with arguably the most powerful item in the game, so a lot of people are going to be disappointed when they realize the chest is not a Shavronne's Wrapping.

If anyone around lvl 70 in standard league wants to run some mapspromising:

My 82 would be down to run some maps. I can supply as well, if you ever need. I'm mostly playing Onslaught but I'd like to take a break and play a standard map or two. Feel free to shoot me a message if you see me in-game.

[shoju]

I have my witch in Standard, I'd run with. As long as you are ok with me bringing a party of 20+ dead guys with me.

Don't get me wrong, the ring is "good", but it just doesn't "wow me"

The sword, Again, good, but it doesn't "wow me" it seems like another haphazard attempt to fix melee. ZOMG LOOK AT THIS SWORD. IT FIXES MELEE. Maybe that's not how they approached it, but after seeing their "Fixes" for 5l/6l, and the stupid Eternal Orb, It wouldn't completely surprise me.

The chest is downright awful. I would NEVER use it. But then, On ES chars, I find I run a lot of auras.

And the flask is too limited, too low level, etc.. for me to even bother with. It's a flask.
On my summoner, It's going to replace either my Granite Flask, or my Animation Flasks. I'm Resistance Capped, I'm CI, and I run CRAZY Mana Regen.
On my Templar, I'm already well ahead of resistances with his passive tree (god the templar tree is awesome), I have a total of 65 usable mana after auras, again, crazy regen.
MAYBE on my Ranger. MAYBE. But then, I'm not sure if I could take the hit of using a hybrid flask.

To top it off, it's just silly to try and use. The II buffs only work while you are gaining health and mana. So, you have to time it, so you are down health or mana, and then hit this, and then be able to kill whatever it is you are trying to kill before the buff expires, for arguably not much return in terms of %. But then, I'll be honest. If Swirly Overvalues IIR IIQ, I undervalue it. AS in. I don't care if I have it or not.