Path of Exile catch-all

Some Questions:

I would like to throw a couple of bucks at the devs because the game is pretty awesome. Stash tabs look like the best ones to get for a beginner. Which of the many, many stash tabs should I get? Ideally, something that makes it easy to sell and organize stuff.

For the mouse clicks, is there a recommended setup for those who have 2 mouse buttons and a scroll wheel?

Premium stash tabs will let you name and color your tabs for sorting and selling purposes. The special tabs, I'd definitely get the Currency one (Orbs, whatever they call it) and maybe a Quad tab for, well, storing lots of stuff in one tab. (I have one for Armor and one for Weapons. I also use regular tabs for each different type of weapon and armor, but I'm a packrat...)

I use the mouse wheel click as the middle button click. Makes it easier. I also only put stuff that is automatically triggered, or only needs to be fired up once at the start of a run on that button, so I don't have to worry about hitting it repeatedly.

The currency tab is definitely the first one you should be looking to get.

Currency and map tabs. Then I'd focus on a couple of quad tabs and all the other special tabs. Look at your stash, see what takes the most space and go from there.

So as someone completely new to this game, what type of items should I be picking up to take back to town and sell? It seems I need white items to get Identification scrolls to find out what all my magic items are. But picking up white items means my inventory is quickly filled and returning to town every 5 minutes. Do I need to identify every blue+ item I pick up? Or do I only identify the ones that I think I'll use?

I generally only pick up blue items early on, and only yellows and oranges after those start reliably dropping. It’s usually not worth identifying something unless it looks like it might be an upgrade that fits your play style. Either way, you’ll soon be drowning in scrolls so don’t sweat it early in the game.

At the moment, some stash tabs are discounted. They often are, but still - might be a good time to get a few.

As for vendoring items, at the very start I pick small white items (one handers), but pretty quickly you want to stop doing that. Instead focus on picking up magic and rare items, if you sell them unidentified, you get orbs which sell for a lot more wisdom scrolls than whites. Rares you want to identify for potential upgrades if they are in the weapon type you need, otherwise, sell unidentified. Just identify those you might want to use - regardless of the tier of rarity.

GGG announced some major changes to Synthesis and the Nexus specifically. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/vi...
For me, this doesn't change anything as I really dislike everything the Nexus has to offer and I don't plan to engage with it any further. But for those who enjoy it, the changes sound great.

Malkroth, do think also about installing NeverSink or some other loot filter. That will leave the white junk unlabeled, and it will color and sound code more useful stuff for you. Makes life a lot easier.

I'm a packrat, I identify tons of stuff I'm not going to use (maybe another character later might want it, you never know) and I only pick up blues at the start of a league. All else is yellow and above, all the time. And I'm still swimming in scrolls, especially ID scrolls. So don't worry. You'll be fine.

So I am at about Level 17 or 18 with my ED Trickster build. Right now, between contagion and siphoning trap, I am mostly walking through everything. I just picked up Essence drain, so I look forward to seeing how it helps.

Remember, you can shed skill gems from the early game if you want to. ED and Contagion are a classic pair, of course, but if you find something else that you think supports the combo better than siphon trap, don't be afraid to try it out. (Siphon is great, too, don't get me wrong. But you can evolve a build over time as better options come in.)

Any tips for getting through the early game? I have now started to play PoE maybe 3 times, but each time, I play for one night and never come back for a second session. I have thousands of hours in Diablo, D3 and especially D2, so it seems like this should work for me.

What's stopping you, Jarpy?

Let's see... You get an attack gem and a support gem to work together, right on the first beach. Then you can start to collect armor and weapons, first blue, then yellow as you can. You build your tree to support the gems you have (and the ones you want in the future), and you can buy new gems from a vendor in each town, and new ones become available every few levels, at which time you should be thinking about adding new attacks, defenses and supports where they would enhance your basic attack skill(s). It'll take till 31 to start getting some of the fancy skills, and by 50, your build should have a direction and the basics in place (to give you an idea of pacing).

Try not to have more than one "type" of attack. If you depend on a channeled or repeated keypress attack, don't have another one of those types. Instead, add in some summons - totems, minions - or auras, enhancements, defenses, stuff that can be set in place for a time before you pull the trigger on your main attack. You'll find that even though the *idea* of a fire/ice/lightning mage is cool, if you have three short-duration attacks, you'll do less damage switching between them than just reinforcing and spamming one in the midst of an aura or effect field. (Some things work together, like ED/Contagion, but they are usually "fire one, spam the other" or similar.)

Select your gear to enhance your skills and fill in gaps as needed. By the time you do the small island and grab the medicine chest, you should have better gear than you got at the start, and maybe a new gem or two. At that point, you should be more powerful than needed for Mud Flats, and you can keep that up for the next few areas without a problem if your drops are at all decent.

Does that help?

Thanks, yes. I particularly appreciate the tips on when to expect the character to start really taking shape (around 30 and 50). The Witch I just started is now level 18, which I think is the highest I've made it so far.

I think the advice from the conference call was also helpful: keep pushing and move fast. Even doing that, I am right on the level of the content. I suspect I was badly over-levelled on my previous attempts. My big confession this time is that I haven't spent a passive point yet. The combat feels pretty balanced though, so I imagine I'll feel pretty over-powered for a little bit when I spend them all in one go. Could be fun for a while.

Quad Tab is discounted to 120 points.

What’s your reasoning in not spending your points as you get them, or at least in groups of 2-3? I can’t see the benefit. For one, being over-leveled by a few levels is normal and helps you move faster through the content. For another, it helps to think out a build beforehand, and crucially to see how you like it, before you get to 30 or 40 or 50. Third, many of the resistances and Life enhancements you will need come from passive tree nodes, in addition to gear, so you won’t have a good feel for stat issues as they develop (and can thus be reversed by undoing one or two choices).

I suspect this also leads to the idea that “the game begins at level 50”, or something like that, which misses the point that the early game has its pleasures, *including* those times when you just absolute crush everything at high speed for a level or two as your gear and skills change. That can be fun too. There’s more to the game than the end-game. Most of my characters have never reached 60, and yet I still have had fun with them.

So I’d encourage you to build as you go.

Jarpy wrote:

My big confession this time is that I haven't spent a passive point yet. The combat feels pretty balanced though, so I imagine I'll feel pretty over-powered for a little bit when I spend them all in one go. Could be fun for a while.

You'll be stuck not making it past the trials if you don't spend points...

There's a more subtle danger, too. As I mentioned, resistances, Life, and some bonuses important to builds (like Minion stuff, or damage enhancements, or movement speed) come from Passive nodes. Without those, and probably without realizing it, you'll select your gear to make up those gaps.

The problem with that is that once you dump a ton of passive points into the mix, your gear will become unbalanced for your build. It's guaranteed, and of course finding suitable gear during your climb (and *knowing* that it's good gear, even if it doesn't look like it) is an important art. With passives in play, you can get an early four or five node and even if it's missing one or two desirable elements, you can fill those in with passive choices and lock in part of your build, so you can learn how it plays and level up the gems. Without that, you'll be always looking for gear *specs*, rather than slots, and sometimes that's the absolute wrong choice for the long run. (Specs can be changed...)

For me, it's harder to try to find multiple great pieces of gear at a particular level, than it is to accumulate them over time. You could buy them, I guess, but that brings back the question - if you're going to just buy your gear set, why wait with the passive allocations, since you'll have a decent idea of how your build should turn out to complement your gear?

Just some thoughts. My take - enjoy all the phases of the game and use what you have at any given time to its fullest extent. That creates its own metagame of adaptation to the partial build stages you go through before your character really blossoms, and encourages you to really think about the Passive tree and its elements, which is really the core of the metagame.

So, how does the memory nexus work, exactly?

So, how does the memory nexus work, exactly?

Very poorly IMO. I'm completely ignoring the league mechanic. You do the memory things and you get a puzzle piece with links where you activated the memory stabilizer things. You then fit those pieces in trying to link up the static memory or award nodes. Then you run from the centre through the nodes to the reward node that inevitably instantly decays and leaves you grumpy for wasting 10 minutes trying to get there. That is assuming that a node didn't spawn in the meantime to block where you were trying to go in the first place.

You can make new items by putting them in the synthesizer thing, but you need to take a six month course on how it all works to have any chance of producing anything useful IMO. You also probably need to spend more currency and time than it would take to just trade for a comparable item in the first place.

I'm trying to figure out how I'm ever going to do anything meaningful with the betrayal content. I'm finishing up tier 3 maps and have about 3 percent in each of the safehouse things. I'm going to be lucky to make one of them 100% by the end of the league.

OTOH I'm really enjoying Demi's Lightning Trap build. It's a little squishy and slow until you hit level 68 and get a tinkerskin armor, but after that it really takes off.

Found this video that makes it a lot clearer.

There are some changes coming to the nexus soon. For me, it's still not a mechanic worth engaging with, but for those who aren't like me, the changes are quite welcome.

The GWJ podcast crew are all very positive on Path of Exile. Is Path of Exile an ARPG that would convert a non ARPG person? I typically find games like Diablo and Torchlight to be fairly boring because it seems like they don't require much thought. Click on things and they die. Now that may be a balance thing - many ARPGs force the player to start off on such an easy difficulty that there isn't any challenge and the game gets boring quickly. For me to find it fun, there needs to be some type of mental or action based skill required of the player. Is Path of Exile the one that can change my mind of ARPGs? Thanks!

robc wrote:

The GWJ podcast crew are all very positive on Path of Exile. Is Path of Exile an ARPG that would convert a non ARPG person? I typically find games like Diablo and Torchlight to be fairly boring because it seems like they don't require much thought. Click on things and they die. Now that may be a balance thing - many ARPGs force the player to start off on such an easy difficulty that there isn't any challenge and the game gets boring quickly. For me to find it fun, there needs to be some type of mental or action based skill required of the player. Is Path of Exile the one that can change my mind of ARPGs? Thanks!

Not sure about conversion, but personally i find Torchlight exceptionally boring to the point i could care less about their offerings in Torchlight 2. I'm still a fan of Diablo though. I would also argue that to be 'successful' with the end game of any ARPG is challenging. Just getting to that point can be tedious.

PoE is interesting and complex, but the loop for any ARPG is to mow things down with a click of a button. The complexity and challenge comes from the multitude of ways to make that happen.

robc wrote:

The GWJ podcast crew are all very positive on Path of Exile. Is Path of Exile an ARPG that would convert a non ARPG person? I typically find games like Diablo and Torchlight to be fairly boring because it seems like they don't require much thought. Click on things and they die. Now that may be a balance thing - many ARPGs force the player to start off on such an easy difficulty that there isn't any challenge and the game gets boring quickly. For me to find it fun, there needs to be some type of mental or action based skill required of the player. Is Path of Exile the one that can change my mind of ARPGs? Thanks!

No.

But also, what ran said.

Do you need to play a lot of hours before PoE pushes back? With the 0 cost of entry I could always try it, but I don't want to spend 10 or 20 hours to realize it still hasn't gotten to the point where it gets interesting and requires some skill of the player.

I did enjoy Victor Vran (even though it wasn't great or anything) because of the dodge button. It made the game more engaging and at least made me feel like I needed to have some type of skill in avoiding attacks. Requiring skill can come in many forms - I just need there to be something.

Also I guess there needs to be some decent feedback for failure so the player can make sense of things and adjust their strategy. Otherwise it feels like the player is just randomly trying things.

There can be some keyboard/mouse skill elements, like some of the teleportation skills, and the timing of potion and active skill use, but that’s not the strong point of the game. The idea is to be able to keep up the slaughter and advance through all sorts of different enemy types, so the focus is on your build and gearing. Further, the onslaught tends to present tipping points due to various vulnerabilities the player may have (poor resistances, low armor, low life/mana, poor gear) and that means that the game tempo tends to be “I’m fine, still good, still okay, DEAD” as you get overwhelmed.

So like other ARPGs, and unlike Dark Souls and similar, the focus is on the build. Execution in combat is largely a matter of maintaining your attacks and non-passive defenses, rather than using your own physical mouse and keyboard skills to win. (Although when to use skills and potions introduces a bit of that latter element.)

Honestly, the game is an *excellent* chill-out game, that can be made MUCH harder by starting a character in the one life mode (“hardcore”) with solo self-found looting. For ARPGs, limiting loot and evaporating your character on the first death is about as hardcore as they can get.

I hope that helps. Path of Exile has more depth than Diablo 3; it uses a different skill system from Grim Dawn, but I tend to put the two together in my mind. Diablo 3, for me, is an excellent game, but it really is one where you can turn off thinking while you play. PoE and GD, you do have to consider your build, because you can’t un-build like in Diablo, so there is some more thought.

But all of them are designed to offer you the constant quick hit of slaughtering hordes of opponents. The skill comes in recognizing where your build is going wrong and fixing it.

Hopefully that helps. They just might not be for you, and that’s fine.

robc wrote:

I did enjoy Victor Vran (even though it wasn't great or anything) because of the dodge button. It made the game more engaging and at least made me feel like I needed to have some type of skill in avoiding attacks. Requiring skill can come in many forms - I just need there to be something.

Direct control of your character is what makes Diablo 3 on console my preferred way to play. I can't go back to click to move. It's so hard to play ARPGs without direct control.

Isn’t it click-to-move on pc?

Thanks for the description Robear.

Robear wrote:

Isn’t it click-to-move on pc?

Diablo 3 is, or are you asking about a different game?

I installed this yesterday and my kids let me play for 3 minutes or so before they wanted to watch the next episode of Avatar. What I saw makes me want to keep playing. I enjoy the game play loop (for awhile) so I am happy to keep playing.