What's YOUR Story?

My story :

I always been interested in PvP when it comes to video games, i started early with diablo 1 and quickly headed to diablo 2 when it came out, i got addicted to the PvP aspect of the game and was quite dedicated to it. I played d2 pvp for many years and i have to say it was a lot of fun, i learned a lot about how to micro in such games and how to maximize a pvp build in an arpg game.

When diablo 2 lost its popularity i gave all my gear to new players and quitted the game. Now path of exile came out and i suddently got the memories back in my head of when i was playing d2, i really felt in love with poe and that's when i first tried the game in closed beta back in 2011.

At first there was no PvP in poe, but since it was simply the perfect copy of an old game i used to love i couldnt pass on it and kept playing it for a long time until they added PvP to it. At that moment i knew that was what i wanted to do and started to sell all my pve gear with no exception. So when PvP got implemented i started with a life based caster, it wasnt very good at first but i really liked the fact that there was so many spells to try out. At this time there was already a small community with old retired players who dont play pvp anymore. And i kept making my life based caster better and better until the day i bought a shavronnes wrappings and dediced to try low life.

Shortly after aquiring shavronnes i met a guy called templarthefall ( known as shadowthefall now ) and we helped each other making a low life crit caster build for pvp while making a 100% dedicated pvp guild known as ICU, came up with good results as everyone might remember both of us playing righteous fire low life EK back in the days. At that point i knew PvP was the only thing that kept me going in poe. I worked hard and ammased better gear for the build over time, many whole tree respecs, so many things tried, every spell possible has been in my shavronnes so far in pvp. From old RF EK to shotgun fireball to freezepulse shotgun, firestorm, icespear, and even 100% righteous fire degen build and so much more.

Low life crit caster has been nerfed a lot of times over patches and i always adjusted no matter what the nerf was, in fact it got nerfed more than buffed. I never really tried to make multiple builds for pvp, i knew that if i perfect out one it will bring better results than making 2-3. I never gave up on my low life crit caster and improved it a lot over these 5 years of pvp, which resulted in a really strong character that you cannot simply pull off in a week. It's years of work and perfection and thousands of regrets used to come up with. I also met so much good people that i will also never forget, even the ones who arent playing amymore.

Low life shav crit caster is one of the hardest build to perfect in PvP and i'am glad i never gave up on it, it is where it is now and its such a good build that it survived trought all these nerfs and meta changes until now where i have to adjust again a bit with ascendancy.

Credits to thefall who always worked hard with me to make both of our casters so strong, many nights and years have been spent in these and i will probably never make another complete pvp build like this.

Thanks.

I usually play in the arena as Jorge. Those of you who spend time in Sarn will remember the firestorms landing on your head. (Sorry)

How I got into PvP:

I was chilling in Sarn Encampment one day, looking at the notice board. I tried PMing this dude to see if he was still selling those chaos orbs. 15 seconds later I got an "invite".

I thought it was a party invite to go and trade.

Turned out to be a PvP challenge. I didn't even know the game had PvP. :(

Next thing I know these 2 Duelists (it was a party of 2) are going at me with Double Strike and Viper Strike.

I was toting 78% block chance and a pretty decent stun club, so I just sat there amused as they tried chipping away at me.

My block chance was so high because I was running the game on a laptop from 2005 - so I needed an insurance policy if (and when) the game dropped to 3fps or less.

I won the match and they called me a "blocker fag".

The rest is history.

I started playing not long after the release of open beta, the game was a new type for me, I didn't play arpgs before poe I think. I didn't play pvp for a long time, I just gathered gear, I played the first challenge league, Anarchy, I made a lot of 6Ls, thats how I made most of my currency, but after that league I stayed mainly on Standard, since it was more comfortable with all the gear I had.

I saw pvp the first time at Hege and Aux I think, it looked very fun. At this point I was already doing good on my own in pve, I made a CI Discharger, and other casters, learned the details of the game. I saw pvp has a separate knowledge base, and how much more it matters what people play, that's why I got interested.

I was trying to minmax my CI Discharger gear, I bought a +1 6S voll, and I started to slowly save up the 1500 fusing and vaal orb to 6L it. Around that time the pvp patch hit with the pvp season and the ladder, and I knew more people are getting into pvp, so I wanted to try too.

I bought a good +1 chest for cheap, which was not 6Ld, and I still had the vaals and fusings saved up for the Voll. I knew my main character is not suitable for pvp, but I had a CI Arcer, so I was first trying pvp on that. I had good gear, so I did ok. I was happy with my matches, I was surprised how easy it was to progress on the ladder, but I had some opponents, that I couldn't figure out at all how to beat. I decided to spend the vaals on my new CI chest instead of the Voll, because I thought it would be suitable for a wider range of builds, and mainly pvp:



After pvping for a while, when I was over the hype of the new content pvp meant in the game, I took a break because I felt I didn't have much fun, I couldn't achieve more with this build, and I wasn't committed to try something significantly different.

In the 2.0 patch I made a CI Whispering Ice character for pve, that I also tried in pvp, which went pretty well compared to the little effort I put into it.

At the time of the 2.1 patch, after trying a couple of builds in pve, I really wanted to get back into pvp, and was thinking what build could do well. I was literally searching my stash tab for level 21 gems to get an idea of what I could use, and that's how I started using Spark. As I was doing it on my own, my build wasn't too op at the start, because I didn't maximize projectile speed and duration, I only used one wheel from the tree, and the projectile gem. After seeing the complaints on the forums of what other sparkers do, I switched to the projectile speed gloves, and the duration gem, and realised those are straight damage buff for spark in 1v1, and they work much better.

Chest is so sick

I've been playing LLD and HLD POE pvp, since before it first came out in the fall of 2012, in closed beta.

The busiest I've ever seen pvp was right after the open beta release at the beginning of 2013. The 1v1 and 3v3 queues were jammed the first month or two, then participation fell off a sharp cliff. The gear check is the major obstacle to POE pvp participation, IMO. Crafting certainly didn't help.

A lot has changed. The "cancer" builds come and go, until someone gets smart enough and one ups one other, and/or small/large nerfs occur.

My first major build was probably Firebitch, a crit EA build made in the summer of 2013, right after the 1 to 2 month cold to fire bug/exploit. So... I have to laugh when people say they "invented the first viable EA build in pvp". Not that it's a contest or anything. :p

I've since been playing around with summoners in pvp (zombies/skeles then SRS when it came out) and wanders, off and on the past couple years. SRS has made them somewhat more viable. The changing of the reflect punishment curse was a disappointing nerf. Was hilarious watching the crit melee and EK'ers one shotting themselves. :)

I personally find the pvp in POE quite addicting, which is why I've deleted my account a couple times now. Deleted a legacy Kaom's, which broke a lot of people's hearts. lol

Never been much of a fan of pve hence my usual lower character level.

haha deleted a legacy kaoms, you maniac

I started playing in the domination league in november 2013. I keep playing PoE because PoE is the only quality game I know that allows me to truly craft my own class with the huge array of building blocks it provides. I've never been a real powerplayer and if I consider something unfun I'm quick to say "screw you guys, I'm going home", Cartman style. In the same sense, if my mind gets obsessed with a concept build that cannot do certain content, I will still make that build and that content can screw itself.

My story consists of a sequence of build experiences where after each iteration I had become more knowledgeable and basically better at the game.

My 1st character was a freezing ice nova witch, which stranded in cruel act 3. I had made 3 mistakes: ice nova was an incredibly bad skill at the time + I used whatever money dropped on items + I did not trade so all my gear was pretty damn bad.

My 2nd character was an axe wielding tanky build, intended to go wings of entropy. But it stalled in low maps because I was unable to afford a better weapon. A better weapon would have costed maybe 20 chaos at most, but since I was so bad at keeping currency, I was completely bankrupt all the time and thought it was ridiculously expensive :)

My 3rd character was an incinerate block character with tabula rasa. I must have dropped an ex to be able to buy it. While on my 3rd character I met a few people which formed the foundation of my current guild, joined them and together we progressed further into maps than each of us had ever done before. I tried pvp in sarn arena a few times but got destroyed utterly every time I tried it.

My 4th character was a concept build with block ungil coc that I made at/after the end of domination to test my next leagues build.

My 5th character was my ambush character: the first Kalli, called Kalligulla. Initially I used block dual ungil coc with projectile spells. Towards the end of the league I switched to dual wands and coc discharge. This was the first character that I could kill some people in pvp with. But as you know pve barrage does not make a pvp build.

My 5th character was Kalliandrata. A freeze everything witch in rampage.
My 6th character was a Herald based screen covering multicurse ice nova rampaging character, that I made in Rampage cause my witch wasn't very good at rampaging. This has been one my most fun characters to play and this character made me fall in love with lightning warp as main travel skill on spammy builds. A lot of the elements that made this build great, I would bring back for my first build project where pvp was a main focus from the start. Unfortunately this rampage character too was bad in pvp, because it had a ramp up time for which a good supply of squishy mobs/players was needed.

After Rampage came Torment with the pvp patch, but after having played Rampage too much, I was a bit burned out on the game, my guild did try to entice me to play more, by throwing a shavs and other stuff at me in temp league. I did try a few different builds, melee marauder, elemental bow ranger, scion support. But in the end forcing myself to make these new builds in torment burned me out even more and I ended up taking a long break. I did try the standard 1v1 pvp during Torment, with my at the time various barrage coc discharge setups, but I had incredibly bad experiences with opponents who were just grinding up the queue as fast as possible.

Some time after Torment had ended I came back to the game on a sunday, I found my builds miraculously intact so I tried queuing for 1v1 pvp with Kalligulla, who was at the time setup as tanky barrage coc discharge. I had the great fortune to have returned on a Leo 1v1 daily day and I met a great variety of builds that day and basically had a blast pvp'ing for hours on end. I continued pvp'ing regularly in the 1v1 ladder, but got pretty fast to the point where I could recognize matches as either guaranteed win or loss. And my build was very was easily countered by cwdt frost wall, tempest shield, no leech modifier, ... So after some time I wanted to do more in pvp.

That's when I started crafting my first build with pvp in mind, for which I used my Kalliandrata character. A flameblaster: super fast lightning warp, EE, multicurse, huge fast charging flameblasts, huge burn potential, tempest shield block with life regen + charging up molten shell+cwdt curses by using the self punishment of scold's bridle, where I managed the self damage by usage of arctic armor.
At the time it was the fashion to play flameblast in pve with silly small proliferate circles, where people procced many little flameblasts on mobs while staying safely on the edge of things. I wanted to make the opposite flameblast build, where I'd charge up massive flameblasts very quickly and then warp right into the middle of pack hammer and anvil style. I had an absolute blast making and gradually improving this build in both pve and pvp. I also got a lot more in depth knowledge about what worked and what didn't.

When fighting people in pvp you learn a lot more about what makes their builds then when you fight alongside them in the rushgame of pve. One of the builds that intrigued me most at the time was the traps of Barrettlightfifty, which functioning I just could not understand. So I promised myself I'd make a trapper when I saw a build opportunity.

Then 2.0 hit and arctic armor got fundamentally changed, breaking my scold's interaction. Proliferation got overnerfed, breaking my pve experience. Spell echo no longer worked with flameblast, slowing down my blasts. The innate ignite chance got removed, ... My flameblaster was broken beyond repair. Unfortunately at the same time my herald ice nova character got trashed as well with the nerfs to added herald damage + notable on the tree. So I made a tanky life based bow coc character in Warbands. Life based with cheap gear in the PA league basically meant that I could not pvp for most of the duration of Warbands.

About halfway through Warbands another build theory crafter in guild linked a perfect Tremor Rod and said he had bought it for 5c. The weapon looked very strong to us and we could not believe that there weren't more people using it apart for SRS, so we had a good supply of top bases to start linking+flipping them and thus we decided to make builds for them. That is when Kallihun, my arc miner was born, on which I pvp'd in Warbands and in standard since the end of Warbands.

The story isn't actually finished, but it's plenty long already, so stopping here.