>decide to try PoE
>want to learn and build on my own
>open skill tree
>get overwhelmed
>stop playing
>decide to try PoE again
>this time look up guide
>get bored because following guides is boring
>stop playing
am I moronic?
>decide to try PoE. >want to learn and build on my own. >open skill tree. >get overwhelmed. >stop playing
Yees
>am I moronic?
yes
but also these arpg type of games are absolutely terrible
>but also these arpg type of games are absolutely terrible
why?
They just are ok, shut up dont @ me again
ok, sorry
Because they appeal to some of the most backwards and self-destructive impulses in the human brain and not a single developer in the genre seems to try to restrain those tendencies, instead taking them to their logical conclusions and making infinite grinds which essentially trap you into playing forever with addictive bullshit.
can't talk about other games, but I can talk about Poe
If you play alone and if you ever reach the endgame you'll realize you need to put as many hours into it as a full time job and this is not an exaggeration
that being said, if you have the time and once you know the game (like 2k hours in) doing ssf can be quite rewarding
Why bother with that when you could instead play an ARPG which is explicitly designed around SSF rather than bashing your head against drop rates that are based on item fungibility
I got sucked into it in a strange part of my life
once you know how shit works there really isn't any challenge left in trade
when you have that much free time to play, safe can feel rewarding once you get your shit going i guess
just zoom in on the tree and don't worry about the rest until you get there
Just play a skill you think looks cool. Then start putting points that you think would go well with it.
Play a freezing pulse build, put points into ele damage/cold damage. Choose witch cause she can play as an elementalist.
You can simplify a lot of the heartache of not knowing how to build your character by simply thinking a bit about
and then get hardstuck at yellows
Yes, but by that point you'll understand a lot more about the game and have enough currency to start swapping points around.
the first couple times I tried to play this I ended up planning builds more than playing (quit around ~20) but I finally played a low item mode and actually played much more finally, it's decent
just play, don't worry about the perfect build, there's too much for that
just pick like 1-3 major things you want in the tree and work there in some sort of sensible manner
I just played my first league ever with this Necro build it was a lot of fun. Much better than D4
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3351307
Yes. There's nothing overwhelming about the skill tree. If you need life get life, if you need damage get damage. Simple as that
Nah. The onboarding is fricking terrible. You either need a NEET-level of time on your hands to work shit out or someone to tripsit you. And the average person willing to help you get started is going to be one of us autistic chimps with 40,000 hours played who will just be no fun to play with.
Best idea is to just 1-to-1 copy a popular youtube build. Googling builds will lead you to terrible, moronic shit put out by RMT sites to increase their traffic. Not even joking there.
Game isn't particularly hard, but it's definitely daunting.
>the game isn't hard, but you need to be mentored by another player or use a build
to do what?
The vast majority of your power comes from gear, which while a guide can tell you what you want, it doesn't give you the gear. Find a skill you like, see if there is a build to give you a good direction in the skill tree, and play. Preferably SSF, since it limits your gear options and makes all the choices you make while gearing more important.
>stop playing
How could you be moronic if you made the right choice?
PoE is shit.
t. 12k hours
>am I moronic?
yes, but for installing a glorified slot machine
there's a common misconception that the skill tree is overwhelming, while in reality the item bloat is
once you spend 10 minutes in the skill and overcome that feeling of being overwhelmed, you'll begin to realize that it's nothing but a +EHP frickery
it doesn't matter if there are 100s of nodes there, because you'll only use about 5 or 10 different ones, most of which are just extra resistances, +life or +armor or some extra damage variant, minions, totems, and aura buffs
the actual difficult part of the game is knowing ALL uniques and mods that are in the game, because without that, you won't be making an "end game" build anytime soon
on the skill tree you'll maybe take 2 or 3 major nodes that will have a slight to major impact on your build's performance, the rest is nothing but mod and skill synergy
AND once you know all this, you realize that playing the game is a complete fricking meme, and you're better off playing the game in PoE Builder where you can simulate builds, because the actual game is less of a game than the simulator, unless you enjoy being one shott by a stray missile that's coming from off screen at mach 9, and if by some miracle you manage to survive that, you'll die to some invisible shit that deals 90k damage/sec which was spawned by a rare enemy which you just melted a second ago
don't play PoE
You still haven't posted your ruthless characters bro.
Considering that uniques are mostly just midgame items that are a easy stopgap and that true power comes from rares with affixes from specific sources. The real complexity comes from knowing the crafting process needed to get those items.
yes
The real complexity is from playing 12 hours a day for the first week of a league with a trade b***h so that you can get your exponential wealth growth going
Because if you don't do that then you get to play a cheap/effective basic b***h meta build and frick your creativity
Just play HC and sell Kitava carries for the first couple weeks
if you arent playing SSF you arent even human to be quite honest and sincere with you
SSF is true brainrot mind poison
The drop rates are balanced around the economy, which is fricked for a lot of reasons, but the natural consequence of that is that if you're playing SSF then you get to experience an altogether different level of grind and creativity limiting bullshit than even a normal player.
>because the actual game is less of a game than the simulator, unless you enjoy being one shott by a stray missile that's coming from off screen at mach 9, and if by some miracle you manage to survive that, you'll die to some invisible shit that deals 90k damage/sec which was spawned by a rare enemy which you just melted a second ago
Everything this guy said is correct but this is a highly salient point. PoE's endgame is not a game, you're not engaging with traditional gameplay mechanics like dodging shit or executing combos or positioning things - the people who are still doing these things are BAD at the game.
The game is entirely played in the builder, and what happens is you take the thing you've created in the builder, buy the gear and then you "play" the game like you'd test a car prototype on the racetrack, and it's the same racetrack despite having the appearance of a video game. Everything kills you; the builds that resist death are a pinnacle of wealth the vast majority of players never ever reach because they're too busy playing this game like a video game.
I second the suggestion, do not play PoE. True endgame PoE is being a stockbroker, taking your funds to prototype or outright buy a tank that can brainlessly drive through an open field with lava puddles. Anybody who is playing the game like a conventional video game is legitimately playing the game inefficiently and quite possibly wrong.
Nail on the head.
ARPGs are a shit genre because, as it has developed over the years, the aim of the game has specifically become NOT playing with the game. If you're actually interacting with mechanics then your build is shit and you are shit. This was always the logical conclusion which these games were going to reach, and developers have done absolutely nothing to try to solve this fundamental problem, instead just racing each other to the bottom, doing everything possible to turn themselves into vampire Survivors with extra steps.
what an absolutely moronic fricking statement. this is the same logic people use in Morrowind when they deem it unplayable because they can't help themselves but abuse alchemy and vendor exploits. who says that interacting with mechanics means that your build is shit. so if you don't minmax to the core, then you're always playing the game wrong? is there even a way to play a game wrong so long as you're able to finish it? who comes up with this shit? PoE is perfectly beatable with a "normal" build you don't need to copy some autistic streamer's 1 button map explosion build
It would be moronic if there was anything else to these games, but there isn't, it's just an exercise in becoming the screenclearing unkillable godmachine so you can spend 2000 hours grinding shitty drop rates and layers of RNG bullshit for a few percentage points of speed or damage or whatever.
The entire point is that you can't 'finish' these games. It's a slot machine you play forever. PoE is worse than most because it is explicitly balanced around the idea of item fungibility and economy, meaning that even if you want to ignore the multiplayer aspect and treat it as a solo game, it is still there, shitting down your throat.
I mean to be honest, all trading functions like this, in all of these games. I never, ever traded anything in any ARPG. I don't even need to play "SSF" mode as some sort of abstinence. I am actually repulsed by the idea
>it's just an exercise in becoming the screenclearing unkillable godmachine so you can spend 2000 hours grinding shitty drop rates and layers of RNG bullshit for a few percentage points of speed or damage or whatever.
I mean sure, some people play like that. a lot of people do it. but I don't play the game like that. they are very open ended game in terms of what your goal is. I either play them like Grim Dawn (beat all difficulties with a character and that's the end of that character), or just try to beat the hardest content in a game like PoE with a build I make. if I win, great, if my build fails, time to start a new character. I have a friend who only played like this hardcore and never reached far into the end game because his main interest was to see how far his personal builds go
Mate if you are playing an ARPG for a hundred hours and then put it down forever, you are not the target audience, you are the outlier.
I also want to add. The purest goal in this game is to not read a single line of text in the game. Monster modifiers don't matter, area modifiers don't matter, boss novelty doesn't matter. Anybody who has to read something because they have to avoid it is poor and/or stupid.
Likewise actually acknowledging the content on the screen isn't something you should be doing. You shouldn't care if there's a death puddle or missile coming for you - needing to acknowledge those things again, means you are poor and/or stupid. Peak gameplay is achieved if you pretend you're just looking at a black screen with a minimap overlay and you do only three things: walk, press one of your death buttons (maybe three for bosses), and cookie clicker the loot.
Peak gameplay is achieved by scrolling through microsoft excel rows until you reach a number which satisfies you
I miss my sanctum league hexblast mines trickster, it was literally no reading ever and borderline immortal.
>Anybody who is playing the game like a conventional video game is legitimately playing the game inefficiently and quite possibly wrong.
what goal do you think they have that they aren't achieving?
What part of "playing the game for fun" requires you to be a scholar?
fun builds are locked behind endless grinds
to grind efficiently you need to play in an unfun way
that's just, like, your opinion, man
Imagine playing trade. Don’t complain, when you willingly play the worst version of the game.
moron
>don't play PoE
I'm not reading this guy's novel, but I concur with his final words. Don't do it, dude.
No chaos res or what?
>Red pill
I never understood why they completely destroyed entire play styles. All in the name of a serious pixel economy that gets deleted shortly after or ignored entirely by a portion of the player base? You can only pity everyone and yourself for not playing builds when they were at their height. Same goes for items. All the good stuff will never come back, and it shows that games as a service were a mistake. With this game in particular.
are cosmetics tied to particular characters in any way? if so, I found your reason
kek everything you said is incorrect, keep getting filtered
keep coping piggy
>get overwhelmed
>not getting excited
Weak.
in a dangerous-to-society kind of way
Just put points in places that sound cool/powerful for the build you want to create and try and get as far as you can. Don't worry about following guides or getting all the way through the campaign during your first playthrough. There are 10 full acts that aren't short. You will learn a lot and be better equipped to make a decent character during the next league/whenever you feel like playing again.
That is what I did as a PoE newb and had a blast.
This
All guides just tell you to get all these rare items that you might not even ever get during your run through the acts. Frick that, you get the most fund by trial and error build making
Is there any point playing standard PoE between leagues?
its a way of living for casuals who dont have time to play to endgame every league.
Yes. The passive tree is a scam. Its just made to look complex but you're still putting most of your points in Life/Vitality just like D2.
not true, my build has only 76% increased life and 0% es
t. white mapper
t. crybaby elitist homosexual
man, all you PoE haters with 2000 hours into the game must fricking HATE how people who care less can have more fun with it than you
this is you
yeah that looks like a fun time playing PoE, what about it?
something about that webm making you feel all your ladylike emotions? what a shame.
I just posted a random webm and you megaspergs had a meltie trying to psychoanalyze it
lol
>I-I'm not mad
>you're mad
>I was just posting a webm ignore the part where i brought emotion into it by asking if it made people mad, that didn't happen, I just posted it
I am GLOWING with the feeling of superiority right now. Please, continue
>I'm not a moron-brained autist obsessing over a game to the point of ruin
>for daring to say that, here's a webm that only an obsessed sperg can parse
lol
lmao
nothing like a path thread to make me feel better about myself as a human
game name?
Dota 2, character name is juggernaut
Build?
what's wrong with this? aside from it being incredibly slow. or is that the point?
unironically more cool shit here than anything ive seen in d4 lol
Flicker strike? That was fun
The only thing I really dislike about this webm and PoE in general is playing potion piano. I don't really know how you'd change the game to make things like life potions something you use when you get low on HP when your life pool jumps from 100% to 10% back to 100% in the span of a second already and the utility potions are either 100% uptime because you're killing things so fast or not a very powerful buff because you're killing too slow and thus they're empty most of the time.
I'd kind of like a survival mode for PoE where your life pool was increased 100x, but your life potions only refilled when going back to town or from killing rare/unique mobs and things like leech were massively limited. I think while it wouldn't stop some people from zooming through maps, it might encourage some players to more methodically progress through things because the damage you take is semi-permanent until you waste a portal going back home to refill your life and potions.
look up instilling orbs
>Life doesn't matter!
t. Casualshit who gets boosted by a Party.
Op is a gay, no news here, the problem is that you want to play a game the correct way, that is gay as frick, you will never really enjoy a game.
Step 1: you decide on what you'll be using, i.e. armor/eva with 2h axes
Step 2: you find relevant nodes on the tree, i.e. life, armor, eva, 2h, axes
This is pretty much it until you start involving specific uniques with weird requirements or scalings, or janky shit like varunastra
yeah, what the frick are you not accomplishing in-game that you felt required a guide? When you select the "wrong" passive skill, what's your punishment?
What are you so fricking afraid of? Learning a game's systems and how they work for the build you want? Taking ten seconds longer to kill a boss because you don't have the same 1% increase to fire damage that the leaderboards demand?
>it gets good after 100 hours i swear
one of those games, otherwise look at the big nodes and aim towards one at a time since those will change your gameplay or buff you in noticeable ways, then get filtered by act 10
I started playing poe yesterday, the scary skill tree is really just +10something or %type of damage, good items do look like a b***h to get tho.
Build a ton of Life, modify yourself a anti-Bleed and anti-Freeze flask in Act4 and cap your resists to 75% (except Chaos) by Act 6 and you should be fine even with otherwise crappy build. Shitty damage only starts becoming a problem by the time you hit Red Maps.
OP is a coward. Not a moron. When I first played it there was zero information about how to play because I played when it first came out, in addition there was much more pressure to have a good build because it was harder and you were forced to make longer commitments (vendors had very few gems and they only sold level 1 versions if they sold it at all). I just started experimenting and took the character as far as I could. Than I made another character and took that a bit further. Literally anyone can do this. Literally anyone, including the moronic. The moronic will just get less far and do it slower. But that's the entire point of the system, it's learn and develop. If you don't like that idea you shouldn't play a game with a character builder, you should play a game that just has pre-built stuff so you can just pick from a list and now what you are getting into.
Someone just tell me a fricking good arpg
victor vran
Grim Dawn
Last Epoch
Path of Exile (Legion league and earlier)
Last Epoch when it comes out never lol
>enemies kill you in 2 seconds if you dont block regardless if youre naked or wearing full plate
>almost no skills make use of percentage modifiers meaning they quickly become worthless if you dont pump the shit out of them
Fun game but its kind of a mess from a gameplay perspective.
>am I moronic?
yes. take whatever pills for adhd
No. I put about a thousand hours into PoE. It’s good for the niche audience that wants a D2-like, but anybody pretending that every ARPG on the market is obligated to conform to this giga autistic level of detail is the real moron. Most people would rather do anything else than spend thousands of hours figuring out the basics just so they can start theorycrafting on their own. I mean shit, at that point, just go play chess or learn guitar. Anything is a better use of your finite time on this earth than playing PoE if you don’t absolutely positively fricking love PoE.
>spend thousands of hours figuring out the basics
>absolutely positively fricking love PoE.
I have loads of hours into PoE, have almost never even touched "endgame" shit, and had plenty of fun doing it.
Didn't need to be enamored with the game nor turn it into a profession. I click ground and enemy go poof into blood and number go up haha
Not everybody feels this way. PoE is a slog unless you enjoy a particular build, have friends to play with, or are deep into theorycrafting. The average person is genuinely better off with D3 (D4 in five years when it’s out of beta).
>PoE is a slog unless you enjoy a particular build, have friends to play with, or are deep into theorycrafting.
none of the above, moron. anons LOVE to cram the casual PoE players into a box with them for some fricking reason, and you need to stop.
I like the idea of ARPGS and I like having lots of options to keep it fresh. PoE went further by introducing new items and mechanics all the fricking time. I found it nearly impossible to beat every act (or the acts 3 times as it used to be) before a season ends.
I'm sorry that you can't accept casual players exist, but we do, and I'm sick of "you either don't play PoE at all or you spend 20 hours on a wiki before you even log in to see what this season's title screen looks like"
>you need to stop telling me I’m a moron for playing a hardcore game casually
No.
>PoE is better because it has tons of mechanics
Ask anybody who understands the game well enough for their opinion to matter, and they’ll tell you the game is overdesigned. Even people who stream the game professionally like zig or asmon admit it. More mechanics aren’t a clear indicator of a superior game, especially when over half are superfluous at best, boring required grindfests at worst.
>redditspacing
God I can’t stand this board anymore. You’re all such sensitive homosexuals who can’t fathom being told you’re wrong without getting visibly offended and writing a novella in response. Your take is bad, newbie. Enjoy pretending to love PoE even though you don’t know what you’re doing because Ganker told you that you’re supposed to like it.
asmon is not a poe streamer
He has thousands of hours streamed of them playing PoE which means he’s more qualified to comment on the quality of season mechanics than some random moron who discovered PoE last week, grinded through the campaign, and decided the game was holistically better than other ARPGs.
moron
he does not engage with pinnacle content, does not make his own builds, does not engage in crafting, does not engage in trading
his opinions on the game are irrelevant, because he has no opinion, he never has and never will fully experience the game
Agreed. I wouldn't be surprised if he coasts off donations by this thousands of followers never having to ever actually get good when Magebloods and Headhunters are just handed to you.
>he hasn’t grinded out the endgame, therefore he can’t make any comments about whether there’s mechanic bloat
not that guy by you can’t be this moronic
he's not qualified to make comments about mechanic bloat because he has never interacted with each mechanic to its full extent
disingenuous c**t
>c**t
I’ll never understand why people get this mad over innocuous comments. PoE has thousands of hours of content, and it doesn’t take seeing the totality of the content to identity that there’s feature bloat. One could say that the fact that there’s thousands of hours of content at all makes the feature bloat self-evident.
>innocuous comments
He was called a moron, with no supporting evidence. He responded appropriately and gave an explanation, which is more effort than was offered.
Goalpost moving c**t.
moron
I’m glowing with superiority. Stay mad.
That's the vibe I get. Someone asks for help in PoE because they feel fat and diabetic and some fat and diabetic person offers comforting advice and says it's okay to have another bag of potato chips because they've been on the skinnerbox and don't see any problem with it.
And when someone actually gives the difficult advice that's honest about how to stop being fat, they'll get screamed at for being "elitist" and whatever other language. I don't get it either, it's like the Internet has become this place where excellence doesn't matter and it's okay to be incompetent. It's fine if you're fat and happy with it, but fricking telling someone who is clearly dissatisfied with being fat to be content with being fat is so fricking counterproductive for the greater whole, it creates a bedrock of incompetent users rather than competent users and nobody fricking wins.
It's the same when the elites b***h about problems in the game. The problems are fricking real but the fat useless slobs in the game are like "I don't engage with that content so it's not a problem elites etc etc." At the end of the day there isn't a cohesive message and the game becomes just a little more diabetic and fat for everyone for no real fricking good reason because the fat diabetic morons just love the friction just that much.
Probably, but that has nothing to do with whether you like PoE or not
If you need a guide to make a build that can clear the campaign you might be too stupid for videogames
if you read the thread, you'd find everyone is talking about clearing the ultra-endgame shit and they don't consider beating the story to even be playing the game
every PoE thread is like this without fail
define "ultra-endgame shit"
whatever a "red map" is, I would assume
I've never been there, and never needed to "theorycraft" or "grind efficiently"
you definitely don't need a min maxed build to clear red maps
well you're obviously asking the wrong person, I don't know what to tell you. I thought it was very clear I'm not an endgame tard and have no idea what it entails, hence my absolute BAFFLEMENT at this "PoE requires all this work" bullshit that permeates every single thread
I'd say you're pretty average
Can someone link me a build that doesn't rely entirely on getting the perfect israeliteels, uniques and rares for your exact setup somehow? I wouldn't be looking up builds to copy if I knew how to get that shit!
I don't mind recommendations but a lot of this insanely specific gear is unattainable to me in the sense that I am not willing to grind enough currency to afford it.
Watch any guide made by people who play ssf and HC (Don't have to play these modes yourself). in SSF the scarcity makes builds simpler and HC forces builds to be better. I can promise any new player that if you follow a Softcore players build you will quit the game.
>you need to plan out your build using this online tool and these videos
>you have to go to these specific areas for the best chance at these items
>you MUST do this and you are COMPELLED to do that and you HAVE TO do this other thing
>and that's why i hate the game and it's shit and no fun to play
>"well i just play it and have fun"
>NO
>NO THAT IS WRONG
>THAT ISN'T THE FUN CONTENT
>press enter twice
>live rent free in some schizo's head for eternity
despite not leaving a legacy behind, i will still be remembered
very touching
It's possible, you just need experience doing this shit and plenty of energy. I never follow the guide, made my own PoE build, and my build as it was progressing and I was reading forwards up the branches led to complicated shaman weaving after I saw elemental equilibrium on the tree, along with all the edits that come with refocusing. The worst part was actually when the super saiyan specilization trees started to be considered and I had to wonder if I was better off just meming totems and my heart kinda sank that I'd maybe wasted my time, but the build ended up being kino, covered all bases.
Just one piece of advice I needed was: you will have your Chaos resistance shot to death with a permanent debuff in the late story and make sure you get to at least x% resistances. The game has ways to knead it out everywhere, you can do your resistances in pots if you're a madman type of thing. It's not really so difficult, but only if you enjoy this as an aspect of the game itself. If you don't have enough interest in this as a feature then it's impossible to get right on the first try without advice.
When the devs make it easy and simplify the talents: you can be absolutely certain, that that day, like every other game, would've been the day that PoE died.
I'm too stupid to even clear Act 1 of D2R on hell and got carried by a crusader. I imagine PoE is way out of my league.
I don't know why im not doing any damage. I know it's unrelated but I dont know where to ask tbh.
Don't feel bad, my first time me and my buddy got to hell difficulty it took us almost an hour to kill Corpsefire because neither of us understood anything about the game. It wasn't until around 2005 or so I finally sat down and forced myself to figure things out to the point of knowing how combat mechanics work and why I wasn't killing things.
I don't know what character you were playing, but my advice is to get a source of amplify damage if you're a physical one like a Barbarian, zeal Paladin, or shapeshifting Druid (You can get amplify damage on wands with charges in shops, or you can find some unique items that have a chance on hit to cast it), lower resist if you're a sorceress, or play something like bone spells Necromancer (Generic "Magic" damage that's not resisted by very many things), Berserk Barbarian (Deals a split between physical and magic damage, I think there's exactly one enemy in the game that's immune to both at the very end of act 5 on hell difficulty), Vengeance Paladin (You do elemental damage of all three types, at least one will get through especially if you use Conviction to back it up), or just finding a weapon like Baranar's Star which does a lot of elemental damage in addition to physical damage on hit.
By the time you get to hell difficulty, you need to have a way to deal multiple types of damage or be able to reduce enemy resistances to the point you can wound them (Conviction Paladins and Amplify Damage/Lower Resist Necromancers). A trap of a lot of builds is to pump all of your skill points into improving a single skill like Fireball because nothing is immune to fire in normal and its rare enough in nightmare you can get by with using weaker spells to take them down.
Thanks for the info anon
Don't be afraid to literally completely frick up everything there is to frick up. Game has plenty of ways to back out of things and reset. Play tankier builds so you don't get oneshot by things you don't understand and then when you figure out the game a bit more you can start dropping defense.
The game is mostly about knowledge that you get by having fun and playing the game for a while. It is also the only game in which from start to finish everything you do matters which appeals to my autistic brain.
yes
>am I moronic?
Yep, you're too dumb
>open thread about to seethe about pillars of eternity
>find out its path of exile
i was going to rant about how shitty the plot was
you are
but so am i
i had sorta the same experience
yes, simple as
Man, all the shilling for this F2P slot machine is pretty gay. You can tell it's shit just from that alone.
To subject yourself to PoE you are abandoning any self respect.
In order to succeed in the endgame you will either trade and/or follow a build guide to clear all content.
There isn’t one human on the planet who has cleared SSF without using guides.
Ever since LoD created minmaxing in the arpg genre it became a dead genre for addicts instead of people who enjoy atmospheric rpgs.
Diablo 1 remains the only Arpg you should play if you’re looking for a game that respects your time as a customer and doesnt treat you like a rat in a box doing tricks for treats.
>There isn’t one human on the planet who has cleared SSF without using guides.
where do these fabled guides come from then? the sky gods?
>There isn’t one human on the planet who has cleared SSF without using guides.
what about the people that made the guides. dumbass.
no, people that play poe are moronic
Why does every single build that's "good" result in some glowie random colored shit circling the character and some AoE nova either fired or emanating from the character that's repeatedly spammed? What kind of fricking "gameplay" is that???
Hi OP, I make my own builds and hate the idea of guides. You can play just fine without this until very late game which is where minmax matters. I'll give you a quick rundown of the process without overwhelming you with autism;
1. Use a builder app to track your damage and stats: https://pathofbuilding.community/
2. Decide your main skills and fill out the passive tree to your liking. Just assume you'll have 90~ points by endgame (Level 80 + 10 quest points)
3. Items can make or break a build, so at the very least you should pick a weapon type and figure out the rest as you go. If you pick a unique item just make sure it's affordable (like less than 5 Chaos Orbs)
4. Try to get all your resistances to 75% or close to it. Also make sure you have some form of survivability in your build. In most cases this just means having a few thousand HP.
Most other stuff is not that important IMO, at least not until you are doing T18 maps.
Follow meta guides on your first league. When you've grasped a better understanding of stuff, you can start planning your own ideas for a build
I come back to this game every season and play for 1-1.5 months maybe longer if I get lucky with currency. It's usually always fun enough
what's the point of having a complex skill/tree in a game if people are going to look at a guide anyway?
It offers flexibility and variety anyway. You can use any skill with any class but you have access to different ascendancies and starting points on the skill tree. You can viably use most skills with all the classes but you will likely end up changing things in a build to suit your starting point and ascendancy, which might even end up changing which keystones you pick, which weapon you use and so on.
>oh boy i can't wait to play [build]
Umm actually [build] was played by 0.8% of the players last league so we nerfed it to the ground, you now have to wait between 3 to 18 more leagues for it to be playable again.
You COULD still play it but we both know you are an idiot for doing so. Oh you think it's fun to play [build] despite all the nerfs? You idiot. You stupid fricker. You stupid fricking moronic idiot, have a nice day. Dumb frick. I bet you still play spectres you cuckold. Now we will nerf it AGAIN, you NEVER defy us we are GGG and we control the vision, you are nothing but a wallet.
Has anyone made an offline/private server that has drop rates without trade bullshit in mind? I have zero interest in associating with Chinese
I played a necro to90 in ultimatum. Beating Sirus was challenging but I don't understand endgame loot at all, and things like delve or heists feel fun but I know they're not "profitable" and I don't really want to just buy gear. Beat Maven too, but just felt like "what's the point of going any farther?" Vampire Survivors feels like the same gameplay with less work to get there.
no
it's bad game design
>Play Diablo 1 as a sorcerer
>Get stuck wasting all my money chugging mana potions
>Barely any spell drops
This sucks.