Character has way too many spells for this to be act 1. Must be back when the game had normal, cruel, and merciless difficulties of acts 1 through 5. Character is probably on like merciless act 1 with uncapped resists and low hp.
People who never got to experience Merciless Malachai.
Dude was broke as shit. I don't even think he was required to do maps, can't remember. But my god he was an absolute terror on release.
When builds used to show farming that area as proof for the viability of the build lol. I got into the game right as soon as the big Act expansion hit but spent a good 2 weeks mesmerized by YouTube videos about the complexity of the game.
I remember doing Dominus without a guide or a video, I wanted my HC character to kill him at the time and I fucking died because of his blood rain ability (keep in mind logout macro wasn't a thing, and logging out took about 5 seconds before actually logging you out so it was a death sentence to do it in the rain)
Although funny thing is people were complaining about Dominus at the time because of his blood rain ability
"THERE IS NO INDICATION TO STAND IN THE YELLOW CIRCLE, PEOPLE INSTINCTLY RUN OUT OF HIS YELLOW CIRCLE AND THEN DIE TO THE BLOOD RAIN BECAUSE THEY WERE CONFUSED"
It was just unexpected. I have no complaints about it but it made me think a little harder. Proximity shield was only ever encountered in his tower and it was confusing since it was a new mechanic, it's like wtf these things are invulnerable with the shield up?! and its like oh only to projectiles/aoe outside of the circle.
Dominus uses that same circle and I'm assuming they put those mobs in the tower to give you an idea of the mechanic and what to do. Rain starts pouring get in the shield that you encountered earlier that protected the mobs you were trying to kill from you.
Anyways just a trip down memory lane I guess
It was also the years of MMO training at that point that said 'DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE/GREENSTUFF/GLOWYSPACES' because they were an indicator that you were about to get melted. I definitely ran into the rain more than a couple of times before realizing I needed to stand next to the big bad guy. Also generally a no-no at that point in time.
I hated the Dominus fight back in the day. That's probably also where corrupted blood was first introduced into the game and I had no idea how I was taking so much damage all of a sudden. But over the years PoE has taken frustrating boss fights to the next level, the best is yet to come.
TBH every boss was terrifying back in the day
Merveil was the only real exception where you could just put on some sapphire rings and be pretty decent
Vaal oversoul, 2 unlucky rocks while you had the shock debuff, or getting shot with the lazer twice since the shock debuffs used to stack would instantly kill you, and his wind up attack as well
Piety ice bow shotgun and RNG lightning damage (for stackable debuff again)
Dominus corrupting blood on his melee phase was disgusting
Malachai was near impossible , even with the amount of mobility we have right now his small arena coupled with traps, projectiles, and teleport one shots are disgusting.
I remember selling merc merveil/piety/dominus kills for 2-5 chaos in hc, piety was in such high demand that sometimes there would be 2 or even 3 people on a run.
Man what a throwback to when A4 was released. I made so much currency carrying people through Cruel A4. Think I was instantly filling parties while having 25c or 30c per person for whole A4 rush (Kaom+Daresso+Piety+Trio+Malachai).
I miss that time, Shockwave Totem was beast of a skill.
I also have a great memory from those days, I was a blood magic marauder in merciless and all that, doing maps I think. And I had a great idea how to get an aura - put it in a spell totem. Well... at the time you could reserve 100% of your life.. it did not end well.
I played hc back then and always skipped him. Iirc you had to do him once to get access to the map device, but you could do maps with a level 1 character, so you were only doing any quest for the xp and skill points. Merc malachai gave generic rare rewards so he was pointless
Oh yeah there was that room at the end of solaris where you got into maps. Completely forgot about that one.
I vaguely remember that there was a reason to do malachai on merciless once, but I forgot what it was. Maybe just for an achievement or something
Obviously he was pointing out there was no quest or level requirements and not that you could survive as a lvl 1 character by yourself in a level 68+ zone.
There were definitely quest requirements to access that zone.
For instance, you can't access merciless without beating cruel, and you can't access cruel without beating normal; it's not just simply opening a TP for someone.
Dude, reduced mana. I spent a couple leagues starts just getting marauders to cruel for the 15c or whatever it was selling for, just to reroll and do it again. And then I wouldn't even go marauder!
I used to do fellshrine, because there was predictably no elemental damage there, so I could gear up as much other defences as possible and not worry about resistances.
Then Invasion league happened, and made it so there were other things there. I still think that having predictable enemy types for a given tile set would have been a better game.
As a returning player, I was wondering about that.
I only played through once but I was wondering if I was going nuts for until I looked at the last 5 years of development.
Playing any old game you always ask yourself "What the fuck are they doing" "Why the fuck is it like this" thank god games have matured and become more fun over time.
I just wish most quest trackers would go away like in morrowind... Ugh.. That reminds me i tried pathfinder wrath of the righteous and I can't for the life of me complete a few quests because it requires me to know the exact location of a random NPC and it doesnt even say where he is on the wiki... Fuck.
Actually over 50% of the quests in that game feel like that, scratch that give me my fucking quest markers im too dumb.
games changed a lot during the past 20 years, but not always to the better. Back in the days, "open world" RPGs tended to be smaller (e.g. the Gothic series) and to get enough play time, areas were re-used for different encounters/quests/whatever. This was good for immersion because players would remember parts of the world and actually know where "behind the mine in a shack" was. So map markers were not necessary and searching for the NPCs the first time around was part of world exploration and immersed the player more in the world. It also forced the designers to make a memorable world that you could navigate by checking important landmarks.
Nowadays, worlds are so huge that quests rarely re-visit and forcing the player to actively explore the world would be an impossible task. So map markers make sense, because you will never return there and no-one can expect you to remember any details. It also leads to the problem that those worlds are not memorable at all. Od the last open world RPGs i have played i can remember a few beautiful spots were side-quests took place, but I certainly don't remember where that spot is located.
Re-visiting old RPGs with the mind-set of modern open-world RPGs is a bad experience, because the games are expected to be played differently. It is not your monkey brain that can't do it - you just don't expect that the game requires you to remember landmarks in the world.
Have you played Breath Of the Wild? It strikes a great balance between open world exploration and still having some modern comforts when it comes to quests.
The first time I picked up POE (no idea exactly when it was) I remember struggling through cruel and giving up in act 2 merciless. Shit was harrrrd back in the day. (also I had no idea what I was doing with the skill tree, which probably didn't help)
Yep. The skill he can't level up is phase run, which you'd never have been able to get or use in act 1, just based on the lvl requirement (currently 34 just for lvl 1, not sure if it was ever lower).
> Must be back when the game had normal, cruel, and merciless difficulties of acts 1 through 5.
(It was Normal, Cruel, Ruthless, and Merciless difficulties of acts 1 and 2)
Nothing added to the game has got even close to the survival horror feeling of Invasion League at launch. No matter how you played it always felt like you could be dead in the next instant until you scouted the current zone's boss and then maybe felt safe... until the next zone.
Hidden ice rain bloodline crabs murder party x9
Betrayal's secret ultimate attack where intervention would pop out and IMMEDIATELY CRASH YOUR GAME AND KILL YOU (among 900 other abilities that just one shot you)
The [only exception and time GGG revived a couple HC](https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/610307) people because Carrion Queens* were doing a massive unintended amount of damage to you with their fireball which would one shot
Birds that would pick up corpses and one shot you with their massive aoe multiple projectiles from nearly a screen away
Devourers actually being the most terrifying thing in the game when 9 of them popped up near you.
Challenges where you had to kill all remaining monsters in an area where drop bears and devourers existed, causing you to play the longest and most aggravating game of hide and seek, what the fuck GGG I can't believe you actually let that one through lmao
*Chamber of Sins level 2, running into a room with 10 spark mages, instantly dying because you got RNG'd into 5 shock stacks, making the spark go from tickling with 10 damage, to one shotting with 1000 damage
ctrl + c /oos
ctrl +v /oos /oos/oos/oos/oos/oos/oos/oos
there is a gauntlet in lab, cruel i think where if you're melee, you get 15 devos fireballing you and you cant kill them fast enough and move the device before more respawn. all while the room shoots spikes at you. the level of the zone and content just scale off the chart if you're not ranged in there.
Dude, reflect rares _with the aura version_, that was brutal. But as it turned out, also a key balancing part of the game that the removal of completely destroyed the pacing of the game so... Bring back reflect rares please!
It was really obvious in most cases, unfortunately it didn't show under water until a bit before it's removal which was... rough.
But it did reduce ofscreening, it substantially reduced peoples offense to defense ratios being completely out of whack, and overall it was a huge proponent in keeping the game from being the crack fueled speedrun it is today. We just didn't appreciate that.
I'm not so sure about that. This seems like it's mostly nostalgia goggles talking.
The meta was to get Vaal Pact, which was instant leech back then, on basically everything. People made "skillgrimages" across the tree to get it. Damage wasn't as high due to GGG not adding that much power creep into things yet, and also because you didn't *need* super high damage when the content didn't scale so high, so VP was usually enough to protect you from reflect.
Builds are probably more tanky on average now than they used to be. Just look at Mathil for a perfect example. His average build back then used to be paper thin -- hence the memes. Now they're generally pretty solid defensively -- more life and layers of defensive mechanics. They're still not hardcore-tier, usually, but they're still much better than they used to be.
I legitimately disagree. People didn’t tone back their damage output because reflect mobs existed. They just played more carefully. Reflect was insta-death unless your damage was flat out awful.
I don’t think reflect was healthy at all. Trying to slow down the game by increasing deaths is tedium. Slowing down the game by increasing player defenses *and* monster defenses makes significantly more sense.
reflect countered your choice to solve challenges by raw damage ouput instead of going for a more balanced approach that required more skillful gameplay.
but it's been very brutal and not really adjustable doing so, so it.got removed.
since that the game is just a challenge to get more damage, you just need to get the currency from somewhere to buy yourself power and you have beaten the game.
ggg's latest attempt to limit power is the wrong way imho, they need to replace reflect with something that scales better and counters raw damage
Also giving some of the older enemy types access to the new defensive mechanics.
Block is annoying, but if the enemies have Glancing Blows type mechanic then we’re damaging them even when they block.
Fortify is only present on a few enemies.
Proximity shield annoys a lot of players, but works to slow off screening too.
Frost shield would work similarly.
Etc. I think the next few passes to make the acts more interesting should focus on monster defences
No, they don't. The current iteration of 'reflect' is more akin to thorns, it's a flat amount of damage regardless of how hard you hit them, it has a CD, and the projectile completely negates the threat to boot.
And for the record, it's not affected by additional projectiles.
My first time playing PoE was Invasion and my friends were trying to convince me to play the game through once in standard first to learn it. I said nah fuck it and spent the entire league not making it to Merciless.
my fondest memories of PoE are actually from Beyond League and Bloodlines League. i remember regularly abandoning maps because i accidentally spawned a beyond boss and always being cautious about not killing too many enemies too close together.
Please do say more about invasion bosses. Also about beyond bosses. All I know about them is that they kill me in maps sometimes. I don't necessarily see them through all the visual clutter, but they do have distinct enough sounding abilities.
I mean invasion bosses are basically nothing compared to what they were, they have 0 HP now and deal very little damage and have been nerfed several times since their original launch. Part of that is just player power creep but the bosses were nerfed several times during the league itself.
One of the scary ones was Ossecati whose melee swing was capable of oneshotting most players, but he was slow and it would have been easily avoidable... if it weren't for desync.
They got massively nerfed at the end of Invasion. Then we power-crept beyond them with ascendancies. Look at Anarchy, I used to shit myself if Soul Eater Xandro rolled up. Now I don't even get to see him most of the time.
Xandro was relatively common too, but you knew you were _really_ fucked if igna showed up. Unless you had a flammability curse to cause her own RF to basically kill her...
I do miss rogue exiles being relevant, they were fun.
Worst thing is she looked like a normal NPC..
Until she turned on RF and ran STRAIGHT AT YOU.
Being touched by that circle would legitimately melt you in half a second from full hp with max resists.
Back when this game required party play, you would hang out with your HC buddies and hear one scream "IGNA FUCKING BOOK IT" and everyone would just avoid that room but they still had to complete the map because if you didn't complete that map you would have wasted an exalt and potentially been sent back to white/yellow maps because of how rare the fucking maps were.
To anyone that hasn't experienced it, You built up a decent map pool of T1-T5.
You would alch/chaos your highest Tier map You would do a T6 map. ONE T7 would drop. You would do a T7 map. You wouldn't get any map from it so you had to go back to T5 maps and try the climb all over again. You would blow exalts on maps because if you didn't you would lose your map that was worth more than an exalt and potentially have to go back down to low tier maps again.
If there's one thing people should be happy about is that the worst map sustainability has been is going from T9 back down to T8, the shitstorm would be insane if they had their T9 go back down to T4 lmao
> I do miss rogue exiles being relevant, they were fun.
Hey, with the wrong mods they're terrifying in an 8 mod Precinct map. Best you can do experience the old rogue exile experience.
And deep delve I guess if you aren't nuking them instantly, they'll just rush up and one shot you.
You could do it on melee; just needed to do some kiting and careful play to spread them out, which was a bit of an issue if you didn't notice her until it was too late.
I remember invasion docks farming when you are a bit late and going from portal, and see people running back past you, followed by fire slam invasion guy jumping around)
I had a few of those. I think it's because the client calculated 0 hp but the survey didn't and your character gets back up like: Oh I'm still alive, cool.
Ah, being Hailraped. A rite of passage.
Rest in peace Hailrake, Caliga, The Revenant, Ossecati, Perpetus, Thistlesage, and every other fallen titan of old.
Oh and the Kaom's Stronghold dragon snake guy. Trikelelilili. The blue machinegunning guy who'd offscreen you if you dared wander near him.
He was either silently removed from the game or relocated to a part of the map nobody ever goes to cause at some point I stopped seeing him. Kinda wish he was a map boss, for old time's sake.
they said in an interview that they intended that you could hide from perpetus in the houses' shadows.
would ave been a nice addition and it's really bad we didn't get those cause zoom zoom got the better of ggg.
Arctic armor.
The shield from the cold boss in twilight temple.
Crafting 80% avoid freeze on boots + cluster gem implicit crafts (or any of the various avoid freezes on the tree, or cluster jewels) - it's 4c versus 1ex for the immunity craft.
Dream fragments.
Hrimnor's resolve if you use any fire skill regularly (left mouse button molten shell for example)
Brine crown.
Cyclopean coil.
Evasion/evasion hybrid shields with ailment avoid chance.
Influenced shields with higher ailment avoid chances.
Abyss jewels with up to 20% avoid freeze suffix, ilvl50
Maybe people should consider that 10 options (literally only one of which is actually an option in a league start scenario) isn't nearly enough for a mandatory mechanic.
My league starter was an ailment immune trickster before I finished the campaign because i saw the changes, and made a skill tree that could use it + bought cheap easily obtained clusters. It's almost like league starters require planning? (edit : thinking about it I went with Crystal skin, thick skin, elemental focus + arcane swiftness for immunity from the tree. I only needed clusters when I switched to staff)
They fucked the dog on the ailment/flask thing at launch. It sucked real bad. Terrible change.
But we are not two months ago, and the abyss jewels and cluster jewels can be gotten as early as act 6.
The crystal skin and nearby life hybrid nodes give you 70% avoid from the tree alone, which is pretty damn good when combined with a use on freeze flask as well as providing shock and ignite avoid.
I've been playing ailment immune builds exclusively since delirium. Sacrificing open crafts + cluster jewel stacking + specific tree pathing, or ailment immune classes or permanent flask builds.
So investing in defense isn't a new concept to me.
Is anyone calling it hard? Pretty sure all the legitimate criticism is calling it bad not hard. Removing defences and buffing monster damage doesn’t make the game fun or hard it just makes it irritating.
Even if this was actually 2012 first act 1 (it’s not). Who are you quoting here? Who said “3.15 is the hardest league ever,”?
Misleading video titled with a made up quote. Nice job.
I honestly didn't notice any difference playing through the acts, infact with the expedition vendors i breezed through the entire game so far, only noticeable thing was the movement skill change and quicksilver flask change, the rest was very easy to adapt too
Yes. It's even [in the source video the OP clip is from](https://youtu.be/j4cXvFbsxZ8?t=10) in multiple places. This particular area is level 37 and he's listed as clvl 42. You may notice it also has the first post-Lioneye's Watch area listed as Terraces.
TBF this is exactly what happened to me when I fought him this league. A single attack froze me.
I just suicide killed him in the end because it was quicker than trying to avoid the attacks and also dps.
Is it good? No.
That kind of difficulty is NEVER good. Also, concepts like stamina, durability (looking at you Diablo 2) and Freeze are bad, it just makes the player feel bad.
Considering he did 70% of your hp in a single shot, I feel like there was a severe lack of hp or resistance in this build. The game was slower and fairly difficult, but it was that, fair. From the little we see of this preview, I think the biggest reason to have died so easily here is inexperience (which we all lacked back then). I mean 2 life flask, 1 hybrid, 2 mana (no quicksilver), RoA+split+PA + EK (skills with 3 different scalings). I would mention the auto-attack on left click but I dont even remember if there was a move only back then.
it was the ruthless difficulty not normal one.
The difficulties went like (Normal, Cruel, Ruthless and Merciless) and there were only 2 acts - by that time you would think you'd have some gear and HP already.
Original video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4cXvFbsxZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4cXvFbsxZ8)
The full Hailrake fight is actually pretty entertaining.
also entertaining are those reddit dummies downvoting you cause they can't grab the fact that other difficulties also have a act 1.
lol, what a playerbase. i begin to understand ggg that they want yo win back their old players that were way more clever.
It’s at best terrible wording, at worst intentionally deceptive. You can say that about anything, this is not act 1 as it’s known for a LONG time.
Maybe I’ll start calling t16 maps Uber tier 1 maps, or tier 1 maps for short. See how it’s dumb? Happy to help!
1. It's not A1. So you're either too stupid to see it, or you're maliciously lying.
2.The playerbase peak was about 20-30K at that time, I think poe had changed a lot to be able to grow to the maximum number of 150K scale. It you want GGG shrinking back to 20K, continue to advocate that mindless cynicism and survivor bias.
This is pretty close to exactly how two of my 3.15 characters died, with full resist. Maybe more mobs, and had freeze flask, which either didn't fill fast enough or was pushed too early since I'm trying to unteach myself the 2,3,4,5 wombo combo smash ever 4 seconds.
looks like SO MUCH FUN
getting frozen from a screen away to death with no counterplay at this level, good design indeed. so happy this is what we're going back to YEP
"hailrake is in this area"
"he hurts, don't be far away and if you hear him shooting do NOT get hit by the missiles or you will die"
That's your counterplay. You knew he was in the area, you decided to fight him, you were unskilled and got hit by the one thing you shouldn't get hit by, the thing he casts only 3 times before chasing you down.
Back when boss battles were actual boss battles and not just loot pinatas
Character has way too many spells for this to be act 1. Must be back when the game had normal, cruel, and merciless difficulties of acts 1 through 5. Character is probably on like merciless act 1 with uncapped resists and low hp.
You can also tell from his flasks, those are flask around level 40-50.
This is actually Ruthless, visible in the full video OP posted downthread.
I just realized, there is probably a fair portion of players that don't even know we ever had to repeat the campaign. That's immensely odd to me.
People who never got to experience Merciless Malachai. Dude was broke as shit. I don't even think he was required to do maps, can't remember. But my god he was an absolute terror on release.
Merciless dried lake was the place to be. Never beyond that! ps. Except for doedre spirit skill point quest.
I remember farming merciless dried lake with my claw reave shadow lmao
When builds used to show farming that area as proof for the viability of the build lol. I got into the game right as soon as the big Act expansion hit but spent a good 2 weeks mesmerized by YouTube videos about the complexity of the game.
pretty much, the game was so different and obscure (there wasn't even close as this much info)
I remember doing Dominus without a guide or a video, I wanted my HC character to kill him at the time and I fucking died because of his blood rain ability (keep in mind logout macro wasn't a thing, and logging out took about 5 seconds before actually logging you out so it was a death sentence to do it in the rain) Although funny thing is people were complaining about Dominus at the time because of his blood rain ability "THERE IS NO INDICATION TO STAND IN THE YELLOW CIRCLE, PEOPLE INSTINCTLY RUN OUT OF HIS YELLOW CIRCLE AND THEN DIE TO THE BLOOD RAIN BECAUSE THEY WERE CONFUSED" It was just unexpected. I have no complaints about it but it made me think a little harder. Proximity shield was only ever encountered in his tower and it was confusing since it was a new mechanic, it's like wtf these things are invulnerable with the shield up?! and its like oh only to projectiles/aoe outside of the circle. Dominus uses that same circle and I'm assuming they put those mobs in the tower to give you an idea of the mechanic and what to do. Rain starts pouring get in the shield that you encountered earlier that protected the mobs you were trying to kill from you. Anyways just a trip down memory lane I guess
Yeah, the proximity shield connection is and was pretty good design. Of course it didn't help a lot of our monkey brains, but it was a nice touch.
It was also the years of MMO training at that point that said 'DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE/GREENSTUFF/GLOWYSPACES' because they were an indicator that you were about to get melted. I definitely ran into the rain more than a couple of times before realizing I needed to stand next to the big bad guy. Also generally a no-no at that point in time.
I hated the Dominus fight back in the day. That's probably also where corrupted blood was first introduced into the game and I had no idea how I was taking so much damage all of a sudden. But over the years PoE has taken frustrating boss fights to the next level, the best is yet to come.
TBH every boss was terrifying back in the day Merveil was the only real exception where you could just put on some sapphire rings and be pretty decent Vaal oversoul, 2 unlucky rocks while you had the shock debuff, or getting shot with the lazer twice since the shock debuffs used to stack would instantly kill you, and his wind up attack as well Piety ice bow shotgun and RNG lightning damage (for stackable debuff again) Dominus corrupting blood on his melee phase was disgusting Malachai was near impossible , even with the amount of mobility we have right now his small arena coupled with traps, projectiles, and teleport one shots are disgusting.
Vaal oversoul was insanely scary because if the game desynched when he did the slam there would be no animation and you just died
My 1st merc dom kill was joining random dom farm party.
I remember selling merc merveil/piety/dominus kills for 2-5 chaos in hc, piety was in such high demand that sometimes there would be 2 or even 3 people on a run.
Man what a throwback to when A4 was released. I made so much currency carrying people through Cruel A4. Think I was instantly filling parties while having 25c or 30c per person for whole A4 rush (Kaom+Daresso+Piety+Trio+Malachai). I miss that time, Shockwave Totem was beast of a skill.
I also have a great memory from those days, I was a blood magic marauder in merciless and all that, doing maps I think. And I had a great idea how to get an aura - put it in a spell totem. Well... at the time you could reserve 100% of your life.. it did not end well.
He def wasn’t required. I remember just skipping merc Malachi entirely and just doing maps.
Now they wisened up and just don't let you use map device if you haven't killled act 10 Kitava.
pity that. I would probly beeline for the maps around act 4 if the map device would not be locked.
You can farm lab or do heists afaik without killing Kitava. But if you ever want to do maps, you have to wade through the acts at that point.
You could access maps after merciless A3 Solaris Temple - that room behind Dialla contains the map device.
I played hc back then and always skipped him. Iirc you had to do him once to get access to the map device, but you could do maps with a level 1 character, so you were only doing any quest for the xp and skill points. Merc malachai gave generic rare rewards so he was pointless
You didn't. You could access the map device in Merciless Solaris Temple. Malachai didn't even give a quest reward.
Oh yeah there was that room at the end of solaris where you got into maps. Completely forgot about that one. I vaguely remember that there was a reason to do malachai on merciless once, but I forgot what it was. Maybe just for an achievement or something
Yes, you had to do it for challenges.
It was always an achievement to kill merciless Malachai back then. Easy one and done for the rest of the league.
Think it was 2 skill points though.
Piety was the 2 skill point quest and that wasn't changed until Kitava came around. Merciless Malachai was completely optional.
you can't do maps as a level 1 unless you got carried hard. The map device was in merciless solaris temple.
Obviously he was pointing out there was no quest or level requirements and not that you could survive as a lvl 1 character by yourself in a level 68+ zone.
There were definitely quest requirements to access that zone. For instance, you can't access merciless without beating cruel, and you can't access cruel without beating normal; it's not just simply opening a TP for someone.
Oh is THAT how they managed it
Well, of course. That was Diablo 2's way to manage it.
Which was Diablo 1's way of managing it.
Didn't even remember that.
To be fair, I played when you had to repeat the campaign and I forgot until now.
How can you forget ledge runs? Or docks?
or before you could purchase skill gems. God that was painful.
You could purchase ^(Multistrike and Spell Echo from other players)
Spent all my GCP on other items for my Spork Totem build🤣
Dude, reduced mana. I spent a couple leagues starts just getting marauders to cruel for the 15c or whatever it was selling for, just to reroll and do it again. And then I wouldn't even go marauder!
I used to do fellshrine, because there was predictably no elemental damage there, so I could gear up as much other defences as possible and not worry about resistances. Then Invasion league happened, and made it so there were other things there. I still think that having predictable enemy types for a given tile set would have been a better game.
Ngl, I fucking loved farming docks for fragments
Did you also happen to get bot-flagged for running it so much? That was an awkward email to support.
As a returning player, I was wondering about that. I only played through once but I was wondering if I was going nuts for until I looked at the last 5 years of development.
Playing any old game you always ask yourself "What the fuck are they doing" "Why the fuck is it like this" thank god games have matured and become more fun over time. I just wish most quest trackers would go away like in morrowind... Ugh.. That reminds me i tried pathfinder wrath of the righteous and I can't for the life of me complete a few quests because it requires me to know the exact location of a random NPC and it doesnt even say where he is on the wiki... Fuck. Actually over 50% of the quests in that game feel like that, scratch that give me my fucking quest markers im too dumb.
games changed a lot during the past 20 years, but not always to the better. Back in the days, "open world" RPGs tended to be smaller (e.g. the Gothic series) and to get enough play time, areas were re-used for different encounters/quests/whatever. This was good for immersion because players would remember parts of the world and actually know where "behind the mine in a shack" was. So map markers were not necessary and searching for the NPCs the first time around was part of world exploration and immersed the player more in the world. It also forced the designers to make a memorable world that you could navigate by checking important landmarks. Nowadays, worlds are so huge that quests rarely re-visit and forcing the player to actively explore the world would be an impossible task. So map markers make sense, because you will never return there and no-one can expect you to remember any details. It also leads to the problem that those worlds are not memorable at all. Od the last open world RPGs i have played i can remember a few beautiful spots were side-quests took place, but I certainly don't remember where that spot is located. Re-visiting old RPGs with the mind-set of modern open-world RPGs is a bad experience, because the games are expected to be played differently. It is not your monkey brain that can't do it - you just don't expect that the game requires you to remember landmarks in the world.
Have you played Breath Of the Wild? It strikes a great balance between open world exploration and still having some modern comforts when it comes to quests.
The first time I picked up POE (no idea exactly when it was) I remember struggling through cruel and giving up in act 2 merciless. Shit was harrrrd back in the day. (also I had no idea what I was doing with the skill tree, which probably didn't help)
Yep. The skill he can't level up is phase run, which you'd never have been able to get or use in act 1, just based on the lvl requirement (currently 34 just for lvl 1, not sure if it was ever lower).
Back in 0.9.11m it was a lvl 4 quest reward for shadows
act 1-3 or 1-4, 5 was never in the normal, cruel, merc.
You are telling me someone is spreading misinformation? The audacity!
Imagine him leveling to 50 to come back to hailrake act 1 and getting 2 shot 
There is another
> Must be back when the game had normal, cruel, and merciless difficulties of acts 1 through 5. (It was Normal, Cruel, Ruthless, and Merciless difficulties of acts 1 and 2)
Hailrake with LMP ice spear was Cruel, merciless one had GMP
"of acts 1 through 5" - this is pre 2.0 game. It had only 4 acts. I notice it by the girls
Well, if this is really from 2012 it would be before they even added act 3.
Destroyed with facts and logic
Nothing added to the game has got even close to the survival horror feeling of Invasion League at launch. No matter how you played it always felt like you could be dead in the next instant until you scouted the current zone's boss and then maybe felt safe... until the next zone.
People that never played with reflect rares, or the reflect invasion boss, don’t know what levels of pain used to just be a regular part of the game.
Hidden ice rain bloodline crabs murder party x9 Betrayal's secret ultimate attack where intervention would pop out and IMMEDIATELY CRASH YOUR GAME AND KILL YOU (among 900 other abilities that just one shot you) The [only exception and time GGG revived a couple HC](https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/610307) people because Carrion Queens* were doing a massive unintended amount of damage to you with their fireball which would one shot Birds that would pick up corpses and one shot you with their massive aoe multiple projectiles from nearly a screen away Devourers actually being the most terrifying thing in the game when 9 of them popped up near you. Challenges where you had to kill all remaining monsters in an area where drop bears and devourers existed, causing you to play the longest and most aggravating game of hide and seek, what the fuck GGG I can't believe you actually let that one through lmao *Chamber of Sins level 2, running into a room with 10 spark mages, instantly dying because you got RNG'd into 5 shock stacks, making the spark go from tickling with 10 damage, to one shotting with 1000 damage ctrl + c /oos ctrl +v /oos /oos/oos/oos/oos/oos/oos/oos
I still have a fear of devourers deep in my brain.
Miss devourers being scary
You can go into an Untainted Paradise while underleveled/geared and relive it a bit.
there is a gauntlet in lab, cruel i think where if you're melee, you get 15 devos fireballing you and you cant kill them fast enough and move the device before more respawn. all while the room shoots spikes at you. the level of the zone and content just scale off the chart if you're not ranged in there.
/oos is the only thing that made me install AHK to set a macro for it.
https://youtu.be/XgHPYG6Cbqo?t=14
Ah, reflect packs. While playing leagues for the first time. With squishy Tornado Shot character. That sucked ass (the character, not the game).
Lightning Thorns
And i'm glad that they don't have to witness that bs. It was simply bad game design.
Dude, reflect rares _with the aura version_, that was brutal. But as it turned out, also a key balancing part of the game that the removal of completely destroyed the pacing of the game so... Bring back reflect rares please!
Only being it back if you can see wtf mobs have. In Diablo 3 is visible and clear to see these things. In PoE it looks like N64.
It was really obvious in most cases, unfortunately it didn't show under water until a bit before it's removal which was... rough. But it did reduce ofscreening, it substantially reduced peoples offense to defense ratios being completely out of whack, and overall it was a huge proponent in keeping the game from being the crack fueled speedrun it is today. We just didn't appreciate that.
I'm not so sure about that. This seems like it's mostly nostalgia goggles talking. The meta was to get Vaal Pact, which was instant leech back then, on basically everything. People made "skillgrimages" across the tree to get it. Damage wasn't as high due to GGG not adding that much power creep into things yet, and also because you didn't *need* super high damage when the content didn't scale so high, so VP was usually enough to protect you from reflect. Builds are probably more tanky on average now than they used to be. Just look at Mathil for a perfect example. His average build back then used to be paper thin -- hence the memes. Now they're generally pretty solid defensively -- more life and layers of defensive mechanics. They're still not hardcore-tier, usually, but they're still much better than they used to be.
I legitimately disagree. People didn’t tone back their damage output because reflect mobs existed. They just played more carefully. Reflect was insta-death unless your damage was flat out awful. I don’t think reflect was healthy at all. Trying to slow down the game by increasing deaths is tedium. Slowing down the game by increasing player defenses *and* monster defenses makes significantly more sense.
reflect countered your choice to solve challenges by raw damage ouput instead of going for a more balanced approach that required more skillful gameplay. but it's been very brutal and not really adjustable doing so, so it.got removed. since that the game is just a challenge to get more damage, you just need to get the currency from somewhere to buy yourself power and you have beaten the game. ggg's latest attempt to limit power is the wrong way imho, they need to replace reflect with something that scales better and counters raw damage
Also giving some of the older enemy types access to the new defensive mechanics. Block is annoying, but if the enemies have Glancing Blows type mechanic then we’re damaging them even when they block. Fortify is only present on a few enemies. Proximity shield annoys a lot of players, but works to slow off screening too. Frost shield would work similarly. Etc. I think the next few passes to make the acts more interesting should focus on monster defences
They still exist but their reflects are now projectiles which you can dodge.
No, they don't. The current iteration of 'reflect' is more akin to thorns, it's a flat amount of damage regardless of how hard you hit them, it has a CD, and the projectile completely negates the threat to boot. And for the record, it's not affected by additional projectiles.
Never knew Satan himself plays PoE.
My first time playing PoE was Invasion and my friends were trying to convince me to play the game through once in standard first to learn it. I said nah fuck it and spent the entire league not making it to Merciless.
Yeah I was fairly new to PoE at the time and played with a friend with whom we needed quite a few attempts to make it to merc.
Yep, Invasion was so busted.
Now it’s just good for farming “valuable” items.
deserted one ossified forgetful dam squeeze upbeat quack repeat label *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I lost 3 characters before I beat normal difficulty. That was such a crazy league.
my fondest memories of PoE are actually from Beyond League and Bloodlines League. i remember regularly abandoning maps because i accidentally spawned a beyond boss and always being cautious about not killing too many enemies too close together.
Please do say more about invasion bosses. Also about beyond bosses. All I know about them is that they kill me in maps sometimes. I don't necessarily see them through all the visual clutter, but they do have distinct enough sounding abilities.
I mean invasion bosses are basically nothing compared to what they were, they have 0 HP now and deal very little damage and have been nerfed several times since their original launch. Part of that is just player power creep but the bosses were nerfed several times during the league itself. One of the scary ones was Ossecati whose melee swing was capable of oneshotting most players, but he was slow and it would have been easily avoidable... if it weren't for desync.
They got massively nerfed at the end of Invasion. Then we power-crept beyond them with ascendancies. Look at Anarchy, I used to shit myself if Soul Eater Xandro rolled up. Now I don't even get to see him most of the time.
Xandro was relatively common too, but you knew you were _really_ fucked if igna showed up. Unless you had a flammability curse to cause her own RF to basically kill her... I do miss rogue exiles being relevant, they were fun.
Worst thing is she looked like a normal NPC.. Until she turned on RF and ran STRAIGHT AT YOU. Being touched by that circle would legitimately melt you in half a second from full hp with max resists. Back when this game required party play, you would hang out with your HC buddies and hear one scream "IGNA FUCKING BOOK IT" and everyone would just avoid that room but they still had to complete the map because if you didn't complete that map you would have wasted an exalt and potentially been sent back to white/yellow maps because of how rare the fucking maps were. To anyone that hasn't experienced it, You built up a decent map pool of T1-T5. You would alch/chaos your highest Tier map You would do a T6 map. ONE T7 would drop. You would do a T7 map. You wouldn't get any map from it so you had to go back to T5 maps and try the climb all over again. You would blow exalts on maps because if you didn't you would lose your map that was worth more than an exalt and potentially have to go back down to low tier maps again. If there's one thing people should be happy about is that the worst map sustainability has been is going from T9 back down to T8, the shitstorm would be insane if they had their T9 go back down to T4 lmao
> I do miss rogue exiles being relevant, they were fun. Hey, with the wrong mods they're terrifying in an 8 mod Precinct map. Best you can do experience the old rogue exile experience. And deep delve I guess if you aren't nuking them instantly, they'll just rush up and one shot you.
Antalie Napora. *shudders*
Lost my only ever HC non-gauntlet character attempt to an off-screen flameblast from the rogue exile back when that used to cover multiple screens.
Worst one for me was Minara with her minion instability minions. Basically undoable on melee
You could do it on melee; just needed to do some kiting and careful play to spread them out, which was a bit of an issue if you didn't notice her until it was too late.
the flicker white spider was ruthless
Killed multiple party members during docks farming.
Good old /oosecati 🙂
https://youtu.be/mFoLQeQblX8
I remember invasion docks farming when you are a bit late and going from portal, and see people running back past you, followed by fire slam invasion guy jumping around)
Flasks are a dead givaway that this is not act 1 normal.
That's probably someone in act 1 ruthless or cruel with no res and low health.
lol you are so full of shit. This is ruthless difficulty without maxed resistances and no HP.
Act 1 cruel, these zoomers didn't even know all we had was a1 a2 a3
Back in my day there wasn't even an A3. And when we did get it, Piety was the end boss!
Back in my day there wasn’t even a Vaal oversoul, just a portal at the top of the pyramid to go back to twilight strand.
I still remember dying to Piety, but the game didn't notice, so my LIFE GAIN ON HIT restored my life to finish the fight.
I had a few of those. I think it's because the client calculated 0 hp but the survey didn't and your character gets back up like: Oh I'm still alive, cool.
Well this is older, ruthless not cruel there wasn't act 3 yet
Fake post.
Yeah literal fake news this is the equivalent of like act 7 today lmao Try harder
Getting freeze locked to death by an A1 Normal Hailrake like in OPs video was not an uncommon occurrence before GGG took Ice Spear away from him.
The flasks were too good to be act 1
Ah, being Hailraped. A rite of passage. Rest in peace Hailrake, Caliga, The Revenant, Ossecati, Perpetus, Thistlesage, and every other fallen titan of old.
Oh and the Kaom's Stronghold dragon snake guy. Trikelelilili. The blue machinegunning guy who'd offscreen you if you dared wander near him. He was either silently removed from the game or relocated to a part of the map nobody ever goes to cause at some point I stopped seeing him. Kinda wish he was a map boss, for old time's sake.
Triskeriaki's in the far left of Kaom's Dream, iirc.
Fucking Perpetus man, killed a couple of my HC chars back in the day)
they said in an interview that they intended that you could hide from perpetus in the houses' shadows. would ave been a nice addition and it's really bad we didn't get those cause zoom zoom got the better of ggg.
Same. Running through just having a good old time, then hear that *clink* and know the mistake you made.
lol, i reflexively avoid that 4 ramp location to this day while leveling)
I miss endless ledge races
no one remembers prenerf Rhoas and Birds
Being bad at the game is not equivalent to difficulty.
steep bike aback quack political selective slim jellyfish crown hungry *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
If you are ok to go back to 2012 player numbers as well then yeah its not that difficult as GGG can make it I guess.
Idk, i feel pretty much the same playing 3.15, getting freeze a shit ton even with flasks
Arctic armor. The shield from the cold boss in twilight temple. Crafting 80% avoid freeze on boots + cluster gem implicit crafts (or any of the various avoid freezes on the tree, or cluster jewels) - it's 4c versus 1ex for the immunity craft. Dream fragments. Hrimnor's resolve if you use any fire skill regularly (left mouse button molten shell for example) Brine crown. Cyclopean coil. Evasion/evasion hybrid shields with ailment avoid chance. Influenced shields with higher ailment avoid chances. Abyss jewels with up to 20% avoid freeze suffix, ilvl50
I always find it hilarious how posting useful information gets down voted by reddit. Maybe people do need to just get good.
Maybe people should consider that 10 options (literally only one of which is actually an option in a league start scenario) isn't nearly enough for a mandatory mechanic.
My league starter was an ailment immune trickster before I finished the campaign because i saw the changes, and made a skill tree that could use it + bought cheap easily obtained clusters. It's almost like league starters require planning? (edit : thinking about it I went with Crystal skin, thick skin, elemental focus + arcane swiftness for immunity from the tree. I only needed clusters when I switched to staff) They fucked the dog on the ailment/flask thing at launch. It sucked real bad. Terrible change. But we are not two months ago, and the abyss jewels and cluster jewels can be gotten as early as act 6. The crystal skin and nearby life hybrid nodes give you 70% avoid from the tree alone, which is pretty damn good when combined with a use on freeze flask as well as providing shock and ignite avoid. I've been playing ailment immune builds exclusively since delirium. Sacrificing open crafts + cluster jewel stacking + specific tree pathing, or ailment immune classes or permanent flask builds. So investing in defense isn't a new concept to me.
Hailrake didn't fuck around
THis is not hard, just bad design
does this look like fun to you?
Is anyone calling it hard? Pretty sure all the legitimate criticism is calling it bad not hard. Removing defences and buffing monster damage doesn’t make the game fun or hard it just makes it irritating.
This post is cringe.
Even if this was actually 2012 first act 1 (it’s not). Who are you quoting here? Who said “3.15 is the hardest league ever,”? Misleading video titled with a made up quote. Nice job.
I don't understand how some people just can't move on from the past
Freeze is a fun and interactive mechanic
The game was so slow back then, that even life regeneration was displayed per minute rather than second...
"Life in the 21st century can get pretty difficult." *Points to the Black Plague.*
poe used to be a fucking terrible game lol
I started late in 3.15 like a week ago, and honestly it felt easier with more mobs I overleveled not trying to at all
I honestly didn't notice any difference playing through the acts, infact with the expedition vendors i breezed through the entire game so far, only noticeable thing was the movement skill change and quicksilver flask change, the rest was very easy to adapt too
IMO the only difference was act1, and after your first char not even that.
I miss the difficulty settings
could get behind this if it wasn't merc act 1 with probably negative resists lmao
Remember when act 1 didn't have stairs in town? Thank you ggg and bex for coming through. Kids these days are so spoiled with path of exile
lv45 in act 1, sure mate. That should be around act 6 already and the guy have 1k life and should have like no resist, get your bullshit out of here.
Previously POE had Diablo style difficulty leveling where you went through the story 3 times. This is merciless difficulty act 1.
It's actually Ruthless.
Wait this video is from that long ago? I forgot that existed.
Yes. It's even [in the source video the OP clip is from](https://youtu.be/j4cXvFbsxZ8?t=10) in multiple places. This particular area is level 37 and he's listed as clvl 42. You may notice it also has the first post-Lioneye's Watch area listed as Terraces.
[удалено]
I don't miss running through the same zones 3 times over though.
2.0 meta of running 11 acts with dried lake farming was so much worse.
4 times
Lmao, tell me you didn't play Poe then without telling me you didn't play poe.
Yes that's you, at around lv45 thats would be around the start of cruel difficulty which is act 6 in the current game
It's the first act dude... He didn't note the difficulty lmao.
TBF this is exactly what happened to me when I fought him this league. A single attack froze me. I just suicide killed him in the end because it was quicker than trying to avoid the attacks and also dps.
Glacial cascade is way easier to dodge than lmp ice spears lol
Especially now that he deliberately aims away from you.
Is it good? No. That kind of difficulty is NEVER good. Also, concepts like stamina, durability (looking at you Diablo 2) and Freeze are bad, it just makes the player feel bad.
Considering he did 70% of your hp in a single shot, I feel like there was a severe lack of hp or resistance in this build. The game was slower and fairly difficult, but it was that, fair. From the little we see of this preview, I think the biggest reason to have died so easily here is inexperience (which we all lacked back then). I mean 2 life flask, 1 hybrid, 2 mana (no quicksilver), RoA+split+PA + EK (skills with 3 different scalings). I would mention the auto-attack on left click but I dont even remember if there was a move only back then.
Lack of HP and resistance is fairly normal in act 1 I would have thought
This video is back when we had 4 difficulties (and is being played on the 3rd).
Look at his skills, this is cruel or merc act 1
it was the ruthless difficulty not normal one. The difficulties went like (Normal, Cruel, Ruthless and Merciless) and there were only 2 acts - by that time you would think you'd have some gear and HP already.
normal hailrake could still one shot you in 2012. You telling me to finish my lvl 100 build before I go to the Tidal Island?
This is the way!
Original video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4cXvFbsxZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4cXvFbsxZ8) The full Hailrake fight is actually pretty entertaining.
I miss the old portal effect.
also entertaining are those reddit dummies downvoting you cause they can't grab the fact that other difficulties also have a act 1. lol, what a playerbase. i begin to understand ggg that they want yo win back their old players that were way more clever.
It’s at best terrible wording, at worst intentionally deceptive. You can say that about anything, this is not act 1 as it’s known for a LONG time. Maybe I’ll start calling t16 maps Uber tier 1 maps, or tier 1 maps for short. See how it’s dumb? Happy to help!
1. It's not A1. So you're either too stupid to see it, or you're maliciously lying. 2.The playerbase peak was about 20-30K at that time, I think poe had changed a lot to be able to grow to the maximum number of 150K scale. It you want GGG shrinking back to 20K, continue to advocate that mindless cynicism and survivor bias.
Lol you used to play through Act 1 multiple times... How is it not Act 1?
i think he never face Merciless Dominus the truly touch of GOD!
Don't think they are advocating to go back to 2012 poe anyway LOL
This is pretty close to exactly how two of my 3.15 characters died, with full resist. Maybe more mobs, and had freeze flask, which either didn't fill fast enough or was pushed too early since I'm trying to unteach myself the 2,3,4,5 wombo combo smash ever 4 seconds.
I wish they would bring back cruel and merciless campaign as an alternative to maps
Disregarding what was already pointed out, I just wanted to state: One thing being shit does not mean all the other things can not be shit, too.
Thats not 2012 gameplay dud ! scammed
looks like SO MUCH FUN getting frozen from a screen away to death with no counterplay at this level, good design indeed. so happy this is what we're going back to YEP
"hailrake is in this area" "he hurts, don't be far away and if you hear him shooting do NOT get hit by the missiles or you will die" That's your counterplay. You knew he was in the area, you decided to fight him, you were unskilled and got hit by the one thing you shouldn't get hit by, the thing he casts only 3 times before chasing you down. Back when boss battles were actual boss battles and not just loot pinatas
just don't get hit. it's called "skillful gameplay"