Share Your Path of Exile Memories With Us!

#1 Piety and Dominus runs

Piety and Dominus runs, were more or less the begin of everything for me at least.


Was a total noob with only few hours played, joined a public board called piety split runs [Insert some fake Magic find value here] and had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do at all. The next day I was able to pretend to be the new Flash (ironic obviously, I was a bit faster but still too slow).

Kept going like that for a while, learned a bit more about economy thanks to awesome players I met during this, and generally had a lot of fun too.

A bit later it also introduced me to theorycrafting and building characters, with dedicated purposes (I tried to build the fastest character for these runs, it was useless because others members couldn't catch up anyway and I had to wait for them, but at least I had time to drink my coffee and could now pretend to be the new Flash (took a lot of efforts and I was probably still slow). Note that there were much less options than now to achieve some decent speed. We are talking about 2013.

Those parties were natural, engaging and fun. Giving players some good times at all, what else to ask from a game?

#2 Level 100 (Harbinger league)


I often saw comments from GGG back in days saying if 100 was too easy it would drive players away from PoE, I never agreed with that and it's still the case today.

Was building some characters during Harbinger league and was totally bored by the league at all; almost ready to wait for the next one. Then I ended with an half decent and very fun wander. I then decided to use my time wisely (of course it wasn't) and to keep looking for some xp.

Started to look for a random group and see how far I could improve this with some cool folks, ended that I landed in a group with a very old friend I played with years before in piety/dom runs (at this moment I knew it was too late).

From that point I discussed with him as he was often going for 100, asked few questions and told him I had only few days vacations left and I needed to setup an emergency plan to reach level 100.

Went bed few mins after, bought few packs of water next morning, prepared some food in advance for the next coming days and that's it I was ready to go! my friend too. We abused our social skills to always have peoples with us and manage them the best we could (because at that point it was looking like management really).

And yes! there was a lot of build diversity. (According to history there were only wander in this league, this is plenty wrong.)

At 99% xp I decided to remove all my gears and run a bit behind the group and that's it a moment later it happened, I was level 100 and I JUMPED FROM MY CHAIR, OPENED A BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE, KNOCKED NEIGHBOORS DOORS, THEN RAN 5 MILES WITH MY POE T-SHIRT.
No I'm kidding, I just went to bed again because this took a bit of time and vacations were ending 4 hours later.
I can tell you that the day at work was much harder than getting to 100.

#3 Bringing new players to PoE

Not a memory and mostly an habit, but I always recommend the game to external players. I noticed a lot of them have generally no idea what is PoE at all even with the giant reputation of the game I think it fails a lot at catching non-RPG players even these days (unsure why).

Most of them doesn't stay super long the first time, and then come back few months later trying again and then stay (unsure why but probably because I'm terrible at teaching things).

I think showing a game like PoE, with the amount of content it has these days, is a very important thing for new players, helping them you know? It's also good for learning more things yourself.
Bonus: It's really fun to see innocent players joining discord/teamspeak channels claiming they will be 100 by the end of their first day.

#4 The act 5 announcement turning into whole new acts


It was lot of joy, at this moment I was totally bored by the game and it clearly renewed my interest for it. Fantastic move really.

#5 Creating the Crash Clan

Creating this friendly guild/group was my one of the best memories and achievement so far (Trust me achievement is the appropriate word here). Between early 2013 and guild creation I met a lot of awesome people on PoE, one day I tought it would be a good idea to gather them all in the same place.
The decision had nothing to do with searching them one by one in this very aesthetic and ergonomic ingame friendlist, I swear.

A lot of them were already in guilds, or we wern't talking much anymore because you know life is life we all grow up have adult responsibilities and blahblahblah (so yeah we don't always play the same league at the same time for example).

But then they almost all accepted from tiime to time (The two that said no had shitty RnG for months, and it's still the case up to this day).
To be honest we almost never played in group or whhatever after this because PoE doesn't really ask us to do so, we just share some jokes in chat and occasionally share some stuff, advices and that's it.
No stressful ambience, if someone stop for three leagues and come back he know he will always have a home here.

#6 The prophecy ******* unique box challenge

Short story, I started this league and absolutely wanted to get my 40/40, but also to get it under three or four weeks solo play and without any external help (This was a really stupid idea).

I think I kinda achieved the 39/40 in this timeline but never had the chance to find an unique box or chance one (Trust me I tried).
Guess what? I tried and failed horribly and then asked for external help.

After few days calling PoE RnG by all possible bad words and showing my despair trought few forum post I decided to give up and to post again on forum if someone was willing to help on this.
So someone sent me a message in chat, he didn't even asked for anything and I gave him more or less all I had left in stash in exchange. That's an happy end with two happy players. We kept contact since that.

There are many others memories and I decided to avoid bad ones because world is already fucked up enough like that.

As you can see, these are not really tied to loots or fantastic achievements, and more about a player normal journey at all. And I'm happy to be that player. These days I will admit my interest for PoE is almost gone and this, because:

#1 I started to build my very first game and I take it to heart (Nothing impressive just some 2D plateformers (Because ... Eh well we are not going to turn this into a 2D/3D fight, not today).

#2 PoE is partly responsible of #1 and once it's done I will add it in this memories list.

#3 I'm not super satisfied with a lot of the past leagues.

#4 I hate this game more than I love it. Because it would take approx 17 lives to finally test and achieve everything existing in it.

I will however be happy to spend more time when PoE 2 will be released, and share some new memories for it much much later without a doubt.

Keep up the great work!

Heli

It's more recent, but it was super fun. We were delving as a party of 4 going very fast and listening to eurobeat. We were almost constantly laughing cause it was sort of a "keep up" game as I was leading the party with high movement speed and some of the party members were near dying all the time.

I remember playing a summoner, repeatedly. Thinking I had to use all blue gems, as my zombie / spectre / skeletons were blue. That's how it worked, right?

I also remember refusing to run certain maps (looking at you anything with goat men) or certain bosses, because if things got past my meat shields I would get one shot.

I remember the safety of getting back to the Twilight Strand after completing a difficulty (no matter if the last boss was from Act II, III, or IV).

I remember them adding GULLS to the Ledge. My pure, unbridled squishy summoner fury. Why, WHY would they add these horrific things that could bypass all my glorious meat shields?!

I remember blue packs of devourers in Act II, that would stalk you. I still hear my own piercing screams.

I remember drop bears, and the horror they produced. I played a summoner for a long, long time, okay?!

I remember the many, many (un)intentional PKs in maps that I (specifically) didn't make too hard for a friend's build. Cackling in whatever voice chat was available, as one or both of us fell over to something stupid. Somehow, dying when in a party is far funnier than alone. There's a reason I don't play hardcore.

In all, I remember many, many years of enjoyment from the game, and I look forward to many to come.

I remember how GhazzyTV was just a nobody, doing Map Carry for groups for 4 fusings @Standard. With his snapshoted Zombies Build. Back than Standard was a fun place to play PoE, with a ton of new players, doing full party runs with random people. True multiplayer game that was...

Gamer gf playing POE with me, starts humming and singing as we slaughter monsters! OMG, humming happy tunes! Good stuff.

Entering the Labyrinth for the first time!! I was SO TERRIBLE at Labyrinth at first! Saving my souls Vaal Summon Skeletons for Argus, and having him wade through them like they weren't there (!!) A *lot* of kiting and then ... "You killed my Argus!" :-) The first few times I beat Izaro, my heart was racing -- I was so afraid of getting killed and starting over! (And despite all the hate you get for it, the Labyrinth is still awesome!)

Before that, playing a Templar looking at the Templar's Ascendancy classes for the first time, and thinking "meh. Some good ideas here, but nothing here really speaks to me." Then, when the Witch Ascendancy classes came out, looking at Elementalist and thinking "!!! Holy cats! Every skill here is MADE OF WIN!! Who *wouldn't* play this?!?" (Many, many people as it turns out, but the Elementalist sang to me).

My first build that really, really worked, when boss fights went from "Okay, persevere, you got this, Don't forget to RUN!! Run, hit, run! We'll whittle him down eventually!" To "Oh -- is the fight over already? That went well."

And finding a Cospri's Will in Act 6 (!!) at the bottom of a Strange Barrel :-)

I first heard about Path of Exile when reading a forum post on Gamereactor. The game was still in closed Alpha at this time but there were a few videos and interviews to enjoy.
After a while some Youtube channels got access to the game and posted videos. I remember enjoying Tales of Lumin's videos back then while waiting for my chance to try it.

And then it happened, I went to this site and there it was, the Beta Invite Timer showing my name as the next veteran to get a key for the game. I took a screenshot of that moment and still have the image: https://imgur.com/a/2bTirdi


Some things I remember from the Beta was the introduction of the snakes in Act 2. The chat was full of players getting killed by this new unexpected threat.

Back then, Merveil did not have a phase two, so I also remember when encountering that for the first time and how again the chat was full of players talking about how cool but super difficult she had become and how you now needed to team up to defeat her.


So it have been a lot of fun to see how things have been added to the game and changes made to areas. Very impressive work.

Memories from past to present.
- learning the hard way on first build that damage isn't everything and maxing resists matters
- Seeing La Toucan in chat and praising it
- Seeing a corrupted toucan and chanting Vaal
- First beat down of Uber Atziri
- Helping out a noob by telling them to max out resists (end of my noob-hood?)
- Watching the world change as we know it from 4 acts to 10
- First ass whooping by Shaper
- Making a build that shouldn't work but somehow does
- Making up reason not to take wife to dinner on a Friday night so I can start a new league (repated several times)
- Playing POE most of the day while 'teleworking' during COVID

I started in 2011, and you "had to" play HC back then (I switched to SC later), and I played in all leagues since they have started being a thing, but obviously the most memorable moments are coming from the earlier years of POE:


- Hailrake was a scary thing, and I think most people died to him on their first playthrough, before dying to Brutus on their 2nd playthrough.
- When I first encountered Bleed in Act 3 Marketplace (and died running away), I thought it is the coolest monster mechanic ever created.
- My wife's tried to switch to CI with her first ever character (SC) in Cruel, so she had pretty a rough start.
- You actually had to hover over all rare monsters to see what they do, because their abilites were dangerous back then. When you understood what they did, you were amazed by the great mechanics GGG came up with, and it seemed fair dying to those.
- You could make "good" money on carrying people through Curel Vaal Oversoul, and Merciless Weaver.
- Maps were terrifying at first, we felt that we have to farm ledges, fellshrine, docks, library, whatever the current meta suggested before entering them.
- You actually had to test what your build could achieve (no POB), and it was a lot of fun.
- I participated in a lot of stupid chorma lotterys.
- It was resonable to use exalted orbs on high level maps, because there just were not many of them.
- I used 10 or so eternal orbs on crap before realizing its actual value.
- It was normal typing /oos to avoid dangeourous desync a couple times on every map in group play especially.
- Since tittyb*tches were scary, my mind was blown away to see that you can just stand in front of them w high level Arctic Armor (it had huge mana degen).