Rising awareness about Path of Building unintended negative consequences.

I wanted to share my story here, thanks for reading it.

It has been about 2 years from now on since I have deleted my Path of Building out of curiosity. It all stared as a fun project to see how the game would feel like without it. Before that I was a PoB user like anyone else, since we all are being told that a third party program is required to play the game. But it never really made sense to me. In every other game we play we login -> play the tutorial -> have fun. So I was wondering why do we need multiple hours of "making builds" before we even start playing? Why would be PoE different then other game? 2 years later now, I know the answer. No, it is not different from other games. More than that, if you would really pay attention to the campaign, you would find a more efficient ways that are much easier to understand than PoB. I will leave that as an empty statement, because that would require me to write entire guide here and that is not what I wanted to talk about. Maybe next time. Guys, Path of Building is the worse nightmare for PoE. It really is. And you will not understand that there is a problem until you remove it from your PC and take the PoE campaign seriously.

First there is a day and night difference in fun experience and knowledge depending if you learn from PoB or the campaign. I can't explain it better you need to try it yourself and give it at least a months to notice it. But the fact is I have played maybe around 15k hours PoE before deleting PoB. And in the past 2 years I have learned so much more about the game like never before. That I can tell you.

So why did I learn more about the game when I did not use PoB? What makes the difference? I was looking for answers for my experience. And there is a principle of the human brain. Human brain is an efficient organ, when given external memory (PoB), it stops paying attention (PoE campaign). This made so much sense to me. Because that is exactly what I have experienced. Just think about it. If you solved the game before you login, why would you need to pay attention to anything in PoE campaign tutorial. And as you can imagine that can not be a good thing, if players do not learn the game based on the games tutorial and learn it from a third party tool. It makes absolute no sense. This does not happen in any other game.

Another downside of pushing PoB onto new players in every guide is that PoB increases the entry barrier to the game. How many people are out there wanting to try PoE, but because they have been told you need to learn a third part tool for 1000 hours before you can make a your own build? The fact is the same people who push PoB onto new players, are also the same people who tell them to not to pay any attention to the PoE campaign. I am wondering what is the estimate financial loss for GGG because, content creators who don't know any better are pushing PoB onto new players and as usual others are following them. Never questioning.

There is more to it, but this two are the main ones. The PoE community needs a wide discussion about the negative consequences of PoB and learning the game the right way from campaign. There is a lot to discover. The PoE campaign hides it secrets well. As it should. Path of Exile was designed to be played forever. I have solved the big puzzle. So I want everyone else to know, that there is a lot more to PoE then you can imagine and the first step to find it all out is to remove PoB from your computer.

The problem is that the devs have made a masters degree in poe a requirement to even play. You have 15k+ hours you said in poe, that means you "should" know the pitfalls of the game. You can view the game like a running trail, except with landmines, punji traps, wild aggressive animals, people with guns trying to shoot you, ohh and you put a blindfold on.... POB just gives you a map to try and help you not kill yourself trying to get to the end of the trail. Ohh and the Devs even regularly nerf rewards hiding these pitfalls even further and making it even harder to play.

People don't want to play trash, they want something relatively decent. Why should they waste the first month of the league finding out what they planned or wanted to try is a complete waste of time, putting them even further behind people that use pob.

A lot of people that play will simply get frustrated with stupid nerfs or horrible changes to skills and just quit.

Lets also be real here, you didn't get better without POB, you just no longer see how much worse you are, you embraced the "feels" without concrete evidence to support it. If you have nothing to compare to then you are the perfect little snowflake.

My point is that there are very fundamental mechanics that have not been discovered because PoB makes you not pay attention. You absolutely don't need a masters degree. Anyone with the ability to count to the number 20 can make a perfect build in game. All PoB players see on the tree are numbers. They can't differentiate that the tree actually has 6 different sections and what they are. It is not understood that the passive skill tree skill tree is based on a mirror that alters things. The thing is if you understand that tags are path of exile fundamental budling blocks and you know how to organize them with a simple copy paste method. Suddenly the game is easy. You have freedom to play anything. The meme that poe needs a degree is stupid.
Also, because of the freedom you gain from knowledge that you earned by paying attention to the campaign makes you indifferent to nerfs. You will be able to play anything and make it work.

I'm laughing so hard right now after reading this, I can't even.

hoho *sips coffee*

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AllMasterKing wrote:

My point is that there are very fundamental mechanics that have not been discovered because PoB makes you not pay attention. You absolutely don't need a masters degree. Anyone with the ability to count to the number 20 can make a perfect build in game. All PoB players see on the tree are numbers. They can't differentiate that the tree actually has 6 different sections and what they are. It is not understood that the passive skill tree skill tree is based on a mirror that alters things. The thing is if you understand that tags are path of exile fundamental budling blocks and you know how to organize them with a simple copy paste method. Suddenly the game is easy. You have freedom to play anything. The meme that poe needs a degree is stupid.
Also, because of the freedom you gain from knowledge that you earned by paying attention to the campaign makes you indifferent to nerfs. You will be able to play anything and make it work.

This is an incredible minimization, to what ends, I have no idea.

I have been critical of GGG for outsourcing significant game information and details to 3rd party sources, not because they are not needed, but because they are essential to understanding of the game. The reason some of these tools were created in the first place, was in fact, because the game does a shit job of explaining and helping players. This is widely known by both developers and players. Mark admitted as much speaking on the new player experience just this past league announcement webcast. They know it's bad, and so do we.

On PoB specifically, the PoE in-game tooltip is not only wrong most of the time, it's incredibly misleading when it comes to scaling. Without PoB players have literally no way of know if adding some gear is a DPS upgraded or not, whether a support gem is better over another, is +1 skills better than % damage multipliers, or flat damage and % damage?, what impacts their EHP, to what degree. It's truly a horrific mess.

Hell even the most basic terminology is hard to understand. From More & Less vs. Increased & Decreased, to what the fuck does "nearby" even mean? Mitigation conversions from Physical to Elemental, Conversion orders of elemental damage scaling, how dodge works with evade, what spell suppression actually means, and a fuckton more.

That's not even to mention the various noob traps with skills and passive tree selections. Adding Glancing Blows to your build without other layers for example can be a death sentence. New players screw this up all the time. It seems like a no-brainer selection at first glance, but it really isn't.

Or can you imagine starting the game and picking one of the lower performing skills without the understanding of scaling? It's a total, unmitigated disaster. Honestly I'd have to say if PoE isn't the worst game in terms of onboarding / new player experience, I don't know what is. Trial and Error without feedback or game information is a terrible way to learn, if they even do at all. Often times a newer player dies, and they don't even know why. (shit sometimes I don't even know, and just assume it was a crit and maybe a flask or molten shell wasn't up. You think a new player with no information will understand this? No fucking shot.)

Jesus we haven't even talked about crafting lol. Even the best players refer to Craft of Exile (or similar) before attempting a serious craft, let alone know what is even possible from an affix on a given item, in addition to the tiers available based on item level.

THE GAME EXPLAINS NONE OF THIS.

I've seen this with my own eyes asking a friend to try the game a few years back. I've told this story before, but I was shocked at the sheer amount of questions that seemed obvious to me, but even more shocked at the questions that didn't get asked, simply because you wouldn't know to ask in the first place. There is absolutely no way I would recommend this game to anyone at the moment, let alone a friend or someone I knew.

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AllMasterKing wrote:

They can't differentiate that the tree actually has 6 different sections and what they are. It is not understood that the passive skill tree skill tree is based on a mirror that alters things.

Nothing personal, but why does this remind me how Terrence Howard tried to explain that 1 x 1 = 2.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Hell even the most basic terminology is hard to understand. From More & Less vs. Increased & Decreased, to what the fuck does "nearby" even mean? Mitigation conversions from Physical to Elemental, Conversion orders of elemental damage scaling, how dodge works with evade, what spell suppression actually means, and a fuckton more.

I struggled so much with this when i was new and that was like 7 years ago. Absolutely embarrassing how we still dont even have proper values in descriptions. Its like one of the first thing every game does when it leaves alpha and enters closed Beta, clean up all the item descriptions and make the game convenient to play. The main reason everyone must use POB is because nobody wants to do complex math to figure how much of a stat an item or passive will actually grant.

GET DOWN

Makes build without POB, basic mechanics but decent gear: 1.2 million dps, get squashed.

Use PoB, check PoENinja, copy mechanics, use Adorned shennanigans: 57 million dps, easygame.



I agree POB is terrible, but for the opposite reason you describe. My experience suggests making a functional build without it is folly. Even the population and in different ways best build-creators out there, Steel, Mathil, Ziz, all use POB.

So you can't say GitGud when players 10x better than you are using the tool. The people who are much, much better than you also use PoB.

I think you saying anyone can create a good build without it is absolutely, dead wrong.