PoE is a Not Ready For Prime Time action RPG.  While it runs circles around D3 in game depth and variety of character builds that are possible it has a long way to go from OB to Gold.  Chief among playing issues are (IMHO):

1. Desync.  Everyone knows what this is so no need to elaborate.  The GGG dev team has a tough job in order
    to figure out a way to decrease this problem.  May the force be with them.

2. Character balance at the higher levels of difficulty.  It is widely known that ranged playing is safer/easier
    than melee. I know that GGG is working hard on this so hopefully soon we will see the rebalance patch.
    (My ranger dualist is still in HC at level 45 but I doubt I would have survived melee HC).  Yes, I know this
    is a high dev priority so don't take me to task for commenting about it.

3. Lack of experimentation orbs.   One of the best game features is to be able to take a white item and forge it
    into a very useful rare.  But if we have to play 100s of hours just to get a few Orbs of Alchemy or Exalted
    Orbs then this wonderful game concept it unavailable to all but the farming fenatics.  Most PoE players
    have a real life and can't play 40 hours or more a week.  Yes I know that PoE is envisioned to have a 10
    year life but we'll all be very bored and have moved on to other titles long before that if character building
    and experimenting is this limited. Also, the lack of real randomization with some of the orbs is also hurting
    gamers experimenting enthusaism.  I'm refering to the fact that Chromatic Orbs do not allow for an equal
    chance at getting the color combo you are wanting and are somehow weighted based on your character
    class.

4. Not enough vendor recipes.  All the white drops should add up to more than shards or fragments.  D3
    suffered horribly from the the lack of good vendor recipes for all the white and blue trash.  Let's not
    repeat that mistake here. 

5. And if we are to be able to vendor more whites and blues then we need a 6 row inventory.  There are
    numerous 3 space tall items and a 5 space high inventory is just way too limiting to be able to carry very
    much loot.

6. More shortcuts.  Dragging and dropping is fine but gets old real fast.  Having a shift-right-click to swap the
    equipped item with the one you are pointing to in your inventory or stash would be a good start.  I'm sure
    there are many players with good suggestions.  I'm still waiting for the devs to fix the primary/secondary
    weapon switch while I'm in sell mode. In buy mode it works.  (Minor annoyance in light of major issues.)

7. A way to set your own time on loot drops before they go public.  This has been talked about a lot so I hope
    GGG has heard the voices and is working out a solution so the leader of a group can set the time longer
    to give players a better chance to get their loot first or set it shorter to make for a faster playing pace.


Please don't get me wrong.  I'm not a flamer.  I think PoE is the best arpg since D2 and TQIM and can't be beat at any price.   What this small group of NZ indie's has accomplished is fantastic and first rate.  I hope they can continue to produce steller updates and don't get bought out by a huge company that has the wrong Wilson leading the dev team down the road to player's ruin in the the name of corporate greed.

Thank you GGG for all your hard work and devotion to the world of arpg gaming.



It stands to reason that a free to play game also means we have to put up with a bunch of lamo juveniles that have nothing useful to say.

One thing that initially stood out for me last year watching the interview videos and reading all the developer postings was the real passion these guys have for a serious arpg to carry on where D3 had stumbled and fallen so very badly.  I also thought that (maybe foolishly so) the GGG devs actively monitored the forums for player feedback (or at least received moderator feedback) and used all feedback information, both positive and negative, to help decide and plan what game features they needed to work on and set their programming resources accordingly.  

So maybe my comments will fall on deaf ears, maybe not.  I absolutely hated D3 because the "other Wilson" (hurray for his removal as D3 senior producer!) and company didn't give a crap about what players thought's were on enjoyment or lack of enjoyment (just don't ever tip over the cash cow).  That's why me and millions of other saps who were duped into buying D3 based on previous reputation for quality rpg's that were a blast to play have quit for good and no amount of new content is going to get me back as a fan.

Fast forward to March 2013 and PoE sets the bar high on an [b]"extremely fun to play"[/b] arpg.  This is great for both dis-allusioned D3 ex-fans and all arpg gamers.  I'd call it a win-win here.  Yet we all know that nothing is perfect and you can't please everyone.  GGG as with all entertainment software companies must always walk the tight rope to balance all player input and try to produce a game that will please the most people (excluding ... cough ... cough ActiBlizzard).  To do this they must hear and respond to the players comments and apply that knowledge to their current and future programming.  I know I'm not saying anything new here.  If you have a good idea that you think would improve PoE in the long run then please post about it.  That's what the foruns are for. 


Thanks for the thought provoking intelligent post Courageous.  I hadn't thought too much about whether PoE being free-to-play makes for a game that is being dissed or portrayed negatively just because it is free.  I'll need to read other posts on that aspect of PoE to understand what the concensis is (if there is one at all). 

I personally think that a free-to-play game shouldn't automatically get dismissed as not worth anything since is costs nothing.  I use variuos Linux distros that I think are better than my Windows 7 and so does Valve as they are working hard with Steam to make Linux the next gaming platform as Microsoft is going down the wrong path (as usual) with Windows 8 and gaming.  The Mint flavors of Linux work great on older laptop hardware and being free doesn't condemn it.  On the contrary, open source has created some of the best software.  So for GGG to decide to make PoE a free-to-play game doesn't ruin it.  If probably means that there more players that aren't as hard core as some one who decides to buy an rpg and as such are quicker to criticize it's flaws than point out it's good features. It may mean that the devs generate less revenue than they would it were a pay to play game (although coporate greed ruined D3 from the get go so money isn't always the answer to fixing game flaws).  If less revenue = less talent to fix bugs, fine tune,  and add new content to PoE then that is not good long term but what GGG has here and nowfor all to play is very good IMHO.   

All I was doing was adding my own feedback so the GGG devs can access another player's view of their masterpiece, nothing more, nothing less.  I believe that the door has to swing both ways and information is vital to a long successful life with PoE.  The more info we get from GGG on what parts of PoE are being worked on the happier we players are knowing we are not being treated like a mushroon and can decide how much of our entertainment time we want to devote to playing PoE.  Likewise, GGG can't move forward with PoE without knowing what we like/dislike about PoE so they can try to make us happier playing and will want to keep playing (I site D3 as the ultimate failure and developer disconnect from players concerns) knowing that we aren't wasting our limited gaming time.


Knowing ahead of time what the devs are doing is a little risky for them but great for the players.  It's a hell of a lot better than the whole D3 fiasco. My 2 friends and I had played D1, D2, and TQIT together years ago and he was enthusiastic about D3 so he bought 3 copies without waiting to hear the reviews. We didn't start playing until Memorial weekend so me missed out on the whole "error 37" server full nightmare but we still had many times that we couldn't get in because the servers were down for one reason or another.  Then after playing twice through and thinking it was a good game the nerf patches started showing up.  Then we reached the 60 level cap.  Then we hit the wall in Inferno in the Act II desert.  What a load of crap that was with the monsters literally steam rolling over us time and time again.  Talk about one shot hell! That was the most frustration in an arpg I had ever encountered.  The monsters ran several times faster than you could (even with the 15% speed increase boots) and Blizzard had the insane idea that after a short time of running away the creatures health would go back to 100% so there was absolutely no way to kill them.  Huge volumes of complaints and a later patch nerfed the monster damage and health regen so we could move on but that was another month or so delay.

Anyway the D3 devs missed the "fun to play" formula big time.  The vendors always had low level wares, the few recipes available resulted in worthless junk,  some recipe items such as "Leoric's Shinbone" required me to make the Leoric's Mansion run at least 40 times to finally get the damn program to roll properly and give me the fireplace with the logs (where the shinbone could be found).  Then add another 50 plus runs to get each of the other items (oh that's right, I had to buy the bell item), and finally the blacksmith made a recipe to allow me to get into a place called [b]Whimsyshire[/b].  By the time I had gotten there guess what ... that's right ... it was already nerfed and so the loot was garbage.  What the H were the devs thinking!  Massive amounts of effort and no decent rewards!  And I don't want to talk about the 100s of hours wasted and getting only 2 uniques and 0 set items.  The percentage chance to get a high level item to drop were so insanely low that I and millions of other players quit (permanently for me).  It's no wonder people created bots just to get anything good.

So the GGG devs are doing much better listening to player feedback to make PoE provide a better [b]"fun to play"[/b] experience.  Fixing flaws such as desync is required and I'm confident it will be less of a problem in the future.  Giving players [b]"the freedom to experiment"[/b] by tweaking the percentages on orb drops in order to aquire more of the orbs to be able to experiment more is still needed but without player feedback and an open dev team listening to our posts and tweaking the game accordingly this will never happen.  So you can criticize me all you want for my post but if we don't give our 2 cents then the devs won't know whether they have hit the fun to play bullseye or have missed the target completely.


The main problem with this orb and others that modify an item's stats is not with the orb's function but with the lack of a wiki or FAQ that lists the maximum a specific stat can have.  For example, I see TV ads all the time proclaiming that their produce is this % better or that % lower priced then their competitor but then don't say what they are comparing their product to.   If I buy a "light" brand of margerine that is 50% lower in cholesterol but then have no way to compare it to the base product to verify the company's claimed statement or 50% lower cholesterol then the info is pretty worthless.

The same is true for PoE.  We all need GGG (or someone with the knowledge) to post all the items and their maximum values for them.  Then when we get a ring or amulet or item that states 25% increased resistance to cold, fire, lightning, chaos, etc. we can look it up and see whether that is great, good, or only so-so because we can see what the maximum value that stat can attain for the item.

The other problem with certain orbs is that they don't have a high enough drop rate to useful in the first place.  If I play solo for 500 hours and only get 5 Blessed Orbs the drop rate is so low then the usefulness of that orb no matter what it does is lost for all but the 24/7 no-lifers or muti-boxers to ever aquire enough quantity of the orb to be able to experiment with it.  

Hey GGG,  as a solo player all the great orbs in the world don't mean anything if I can't get any with game playing time intertwined with my real life.  Same with support gems.   Dangle the "carrot on stick" in front of us all you want to keep us playing but if we don't get enough rewards for time spent playing then PoE will end up just as D3 did for me, history, and a bad memory.  I'd hate for that to happen as I really love playing.


The desync problem goes beyond normal Internet latency between client and server. There have been times when just one creature out of several will stop attacking me and my shooting it full of arrows does nothing to it, an obvious sign of desync. Yet another creature will walk right past the desynced creature and I'm shooting it and it does take damage and if that 2nd creature hits me I take damage. All while the 1st creature is in a desynced state. Then there are times in the dungeons or pyramids (any maps with rooms) that I can open a door, get in a desync state where the creatures come into the room I'm in but shooting them does no damage but does fill them with arrows, back way off until the server resets the creatures back to the room they came from, go to a different room and kill all creatures, then come back to this same room, go to the room where the desync first occurred, and have the same desync happen again. This doesn't happen too often thankfully but when it does the quickest way to break the desync loop I'm in (other than quitting) is to rush into the room past the creatures and shoot them from the other side of the room.

 Then there are times when desynced creatures stop completely and do nothing. If I stand still the creature will stay there motionless until I move. It's like the server is waiting for new data on my position to change before trying to update the creature position and won't resolve the desync until I move. That type of server/client desync can't just be because of Internet latency alone (or can it?). 

 My level 50 HC ranger dualist died to Oak in cruel difficulty due to wierd desync. Oak is a leap slammer boss but this time he was dissappearing for 2 to 4 seconds at a time. All the time he was visibile over the 4 or 5 minutes I was battling him everything was normal (no desync at all) then suddenly he would look like he was just about to leap and then dissappear for several seconds. I can move while he was gone and when he finally came back he was at the position of where he was leaping to. My character was not rubberbanded back to a previous location or anything, I continued to move normal without a sudden change in location so the server was tracking my position correctly (or so it seamed from my view). The desync from the client end was only with Oak. I haven't a clue what kind of desync that was where the server kept track of my position correctly but the client lost the boss location and the graphics engine just didn't display Oak at all. I have a fast Intel Core-i5 cpu (3.8 GHz), 8 GB ram, and a Radeon 6870 1GB video card on Windows 7 Pro so my hardware is more than adaquate to play PoE at HD full screen. Totally wierd.

 Due to the complexities of mutitasking 1000s of player sessions simultaneously the job (and headaches) the devs have to contend with means this is not an easy problem to resolve so all of us have to be patient and give GGG time to work on it and stop flaming over it. There are way too many posts from players who've had a high level HC character killed from desync and then rage post here about it. Please stop doing that. The devs. need useful feedback on this and not flaming unhelpful "fix it or I quit" types of posts. 

 Just like Tattoo from the old Fantasy Island series used to say "deplane, deplane" we as PoE open beta players get the priviledge of saying "desync, desync". Good luck to all PoE devs working on this part of the game. May the Schwartz be with you!


PoE Hardcore mode is a great way to add extra excitement to playing this arpg knowing that you are always just 1 death away from Default League (DL). It increases the adreneline flow when you attack large mobs and higher level bosses which IMHO increases play value. The downside is that just 1 mistake either by you or by desync and boom, hardcore game over!

 I've been thinking about this double sided problem for awhile and would like to offer a way that you can work your way back to hardcore mode when you die. PoE should have a mechanism that keeps track of the amount of experience you have when you die in HC. Then as you play that character in DL if you never die even once you should eventually be able to work your way back to HC by gaining enough experience points.

 For example, I'm playing my Shadow character and am currently at level 43 DL. I started in HC and when I got to level 32 I was in the Marketplace sewers and came upon the creature that throws explosive blobs at me. Since I have zombies I can distract it with them, run past the creature (I have +15% speed boots), and shoot it from behind to kill it. That strategy works well. Unfortunately, 1 time in a narrow pipe I did that, the creature continued attacking my zombies, and I got behind it and was shooting it. Then out of nowhere (from off the bottom of the screen) I was jumped upon by 4 of the large leaping frog like creatures. They unfortunately trapped me so I couldn't move out of danger, and even though I was firing everything I had and was pressing my flask keys I was dead in 2 seconds. Rats, I'm now back to default league on yet another character! This time I liked how my build was working so I decided to continue playing. I deliberately created a new "red shirt" HC character so I could get to my HC stash, load up on the orbs and gems I wanted, and then let it die to get these into my DL stash. Now I'm up to level 43 in Cruel difficulty level and haven't died again. 

 Wouldn't it be great to earn the right to get a character you've played for 100s of hours in HC with only 1 death to be able to get back to HC? I'm not sure what the quantity of experience gained in DL would be right to earn your way back to HC mode (I've come from level 32 to 43 so far) but I'm sure the devs could figure that out easily. When you've earned enough experience you would then be given an option from 1 of the NPCs in town to advance your character back to HC. Since it should be done just like a quest reward you would have the option to not use it and stay in DL as long as you liked (I'm assuming playing DL and HC have the same monster strengths so default isn't easier to play). The last part of this should be a minimum experience needed in HC for this option to be available. We don't want players dieing in HC too soon and then play through DL at too low of levels and then jump back to HC that way. Since I've never died in HC below level 32 and my other characters were upper 40s and 50s whatever experience is average for a level 32 character (or maybe 42 so more players will know the meaning of HC life) would be appropriate before this feature would be activated.


Besides chaos orbs it seams the most useful orb is [b]Orb of Alchemy[/b]. Here's my problem:

[b]1 alch[/b] = 1 regret = 2 scouring = 4 chance = 1 fusing = 4 jeweller = 2 alteration = 4 augmentation...
           = 4 transmutation = 7 portal = 3 wisdom

I get a headache just trying to fugure out this vendor nonsense.  I'm always up for a challenge but since we all get a boatload of good socketed linked white items the experimentation system fails completely with the inability to craft a decent amount of [i]alchs[/i] to use.  We all have boatloads of Orbs of Wisdom but the tedious way to get to an alch is just crazy stupid.

Come on devs plaese give us a better (easier) way to craft some alchs.

I currently have +22% iiq and +17% iir + a +40% item rarity support gem on my poison arrow attack.
I read a post of someone getting +92% iiq to do farming runs so I know I can do better with more time and luck to get better gear but the current way to craft an alch is just not worth the effort.

[u]Note:[/u] Of couse I'm clearly aware of the desires of GGG to make PoE have a 10 year run so giving too much too soon will mean we will hit the PoE maximums sooner but good grief. At least I have found 4 unique items in my 300 to 400 hours of playing so that clearly beats my efforts last year in D3.

Please, let's not turn this into an RNG rant yet again.  I'm sick of the "RNG is RNG and ain't it a bitch" threads.


I posted on 4/8/13 at 11:01 am that I was having a terrible time trying to defeat Crual Oak due to desync issues causing him to kill my Shadow archer by materilaixing on top of me without any leap animation shown:

[url]http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/321052/page/1#p2792018[/url]

We are all annoyed (pissed) about desync so no rehashing or flaming here please.  I post today to add my two cents to the positive feedback to the PoE devs.  I'm sure they get slammed every day with complaints about bug reports, play balance issues, flamers, trolls, etc. and don't really get complimented enough about the great work and labor of love that is PoE.  Here's why.


PoE is a diamond in the rough

I gave up using my level 49 Shadow to defeat Oak on Sunday so Monday night I tried again with a level 51 Dualist.  What a dualist you say? Vut according to Kripp and others a Dualist is a weak class to play.  I personally disagree as proof of my not only defeating Oak but making the Vall Pyramid run all the way through with 0 deaths and defeated Vaal shortly after midnight.  Why did my Dualist allow me to prevale where the Shadow had failed.  Several reasons are:

1.  I have 1098 health (Shadow only has under 800)
2.  I have +20% speed and got the [i]Leather and Steal[/i] passive to stop armor weight slowdowns
3.  I have good life regen at 26.1
3.  Mana regen + Clarity Aura = 35.0 mps regen
4.  All resists are above 50% with cold maxxed at 75%
5.  I got a spell totem and a fireball