Winterheart, Event 45: Arctic Boss Kill

just killed malachai for the second time during this race. first time as dual fire totem templar and now as cyclone marauder.
3h 30min on templar
4h 5min on marauder

granted i spent almost an hour farming arcanist box in aqueduct just to roll decent gear everything except malachai was easier on the cyclone marauder. had to use tp twice to refill bottles on the last fight something i didnt have to do on my dual totem templar.

im hella impressed with goratha doing it in 3hours and 4minutes.

Great beard of Zeus, that was terrifying at end of act 4. Major props to top racers, the ice degen was unreal. ~4hour run with firestorm templar not really having much of a plan. Could maybe see taking another half hour off if I was going hammer down. No idea how 3-hours run is possible.

10/10, need new underwear.

This was my first "big race" and I enjoyed it very much; I somehow managed to complete the tasks but those clouds started to get really scary from A4 normal onwards, even worse than corrupted blood. It was very fun, hopefully the next season will have something like this.

to the designers of this race:
1. what was the goal-audience of this race? i.e. what kind of players
were you trying to attract. since:
A. youre giving out a looot of points for the race - this should attract casuals that wants to start racing
B. youre announcing it in news even, "new race try this" - this will attract casuals as well
C. youre putting 20 boxes in each zone - thats fun for casuals
now, compare this with:
A2. youre put in an unbelievably annoying dot which scales like crazy in a2-a4,
making all the fun with chests and perhaps chatting with friends about the race go away
- this attracts hardcore players which like big challenges
B2. youre putting these clouds in the boss rooms as well - also only for hardcore players

see what i mean?
you did something wrong here in the design, maybe you should consider what goal-audience you have first before you create it
happy to have some comments about this btw

Just finished up malachai using a flame totem / searing bond templar since I wanted to stay mobile. Most of Act 4 I was just spamming my anti chill quicksilver and sapphire flask and having to portal back any time I was empty, especially in belly and harvest.

6 am start time on a Friday is not ideal since people still have work and then come back to it. At the beginning so many boxes was great, but once you get far enough in where you have half a dozen cloud instantly drop in on you its hard to want to shuffle around enough space to want to pop them. It would have been better if they spawned a little bit away from you then wandered so you could see it coming and move accordingly.

Overall good race, just nerve wracking having to hope you don't get lagged down and die towards the end.

Awesome race. Stopping after Dominus because sleep.

Man, that ice degen in Act 4 (and tail end of Act 3) was brutal.

It was a good race; only real recommendation I could give is to judge people based on their /played rather than from when the league started. This incentives people who can't start right at the beginning to keep pushing hard, and the people who do show up for the beginning have those first-kill/clear points to keep them happy and pushing hard.

As a side note, Spectral Throw/Frost Blades/Wild Strike are probably not the best choices for races like this :p (although once I got Multistrike, Wild Strike was actually pretty good damage-wise)

Fun race idea. I wish i had a better computer, as I couldn't even make it to Brutus because the clouds lagged me out horribly.

Normally I don't like races because there is no point in competing with people who love racing.

However a single race to get half of the rewards including Whispering Ice without having to compete with the top racers was too tempting. ( Thanks to ZiggyD : his stream informed me how "lucrative" this race is and while I am at it thanks to ZiggyD also because his talk on a State of Exile episode made me chance a pair of Skyforth. Can only recommend checking out his Twitch stream :)

Once I got going I started to really enjoy this race. It started easy / fair enough, was managable until Act 4 where I luckily grinded all my gear to have everything I want ( resist cap, enough life and damage, a 4 link - and the hardest part - high movement speed as well ). Everything after Dried Lake was just run and dont look back. Stopping for loot or enemies would hurt so much that I stopped to and just ran for my life dropping totems inbetween. Enemies including Piety and Malachai were super easy and the Ice became my only enemy - it was a rather new and enjoyable experience - its the way RaizQT approaches every race. Kill, run, dont look back.

( I had 1.7k life, 3% life regen and as dual totem had time to dodge and still suffered hard )

I am glad I joined this race.

It was so well ballanced ( doable but very very demanding ) that I wonder how much time you ( GGG ) actually spent creating and testing this single race. It felt like it was not just something quickly put together but very thouroughly planned.

Well done.

Actually I wondered if outside of normal PvE and races there might be room for a third gametype - challenge runs. High risk, high reward challenge runs not against each other but just to reach certain very hard to achieve goals.

But if Labyrinths are going to be as ballanced as this race was it might become exactly that. So looking forward to it. I suppose the rewards will determine their success - to be honest the unique mods that have been revealed yet weren't too tempting but we will see.

Thanks for an exciting and rewarding race.

Edit : After reading some negative feedback and the reasons I realized that I was quite lucky with regards to RNG - if I hadn't found a Sapphire flask and a second Quicksilver flask and good gear to get high movement speed while also capping resists with high life and damage I would probably not have been so happy with this race's ballance.

Since flasks take a very central role in Path of Exile GGG might want to consider giving us earlier / easier opportunities to acquire / craft them.

Just finished as a Ground Slam/Heavy Strike Marauder, took me a long time, 6 hours 46 minutes. I really liked that this race had a 24 hour time frame, meant I could focus on work and not worry about rushing home to start it. Those clouds were nuts! I had 2,000 hp, max cold resist, and 130 hp/second, and they still were tearing me up in Act 4, even with a sapphire!

I got incredibly lucky on drops, which helped immensely. Dream Fragments and Vaal Ground Slam made it so I could open strongboxes without much fear, and that mallet carried me hard from Act 3 onwards.



I really enjoyed this race, and look forward to another like it next race season! I also am looking forward to there potentially being asynchronous races in the future; I've been unable to try a couple race types this season, such as the alt starts, due to it never quite fitting in with my work schedule.

Also, PureArctic, hot damn man, how were you surviving in Merciless? How were you getting around all the clouds? I'm guessing they were doing insane damage at that point!