[GUIDE] HOW to play PoE 2 & 1 RAW without 3rd party tools and premade builds
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DISCLAIMER
This is just an exagerated way to play blind and without tools. But you can learn when you should use tools and content creators to improve your game experience. I personally sometimes use PoB tools for theorycraft before league launch and its an incredible tool for learning skill mechanics and interactions; I use filters from filterblade; And the wiki.(No trade cause I'm SSF player and when i play trade i trade like the Neanderthal did) For content I only watch PoE official stuff and some comments from the elderly streamers on the patch notes just to make sure i'm not missing any critical change. No build guide or anything beyond patch notes. I do not use all of these always thats why I know the game is playable without them. WHY??? Just creating this as a response to the other thread the guy thinks you cant do anything without a guide in the PoE games. Lot of us know that its not true but if you are new to the community and see the size o things on these games.. prob you are scared. And thats the point... 3rd party tools are means to sooth our fear and anxiety of FOMO and not performing the best possible way. The problem with this is that you stop playing the RPG part on aRPG and keeps only the action and, on PoE, the economy aspects of the game. So if you're tired of being just a bot for the rich 1% gamers economy and want to just enjoy the game in its entirety come along. Its not a fast journey to start but soon you'll be less stressed and enjoy the process a lot more (if you like RPGs... you can play just for the economy or action feel and have fun... dont panick! people can have different desires) A feedback for GGG is that if the passive tree was put on a Town/Hideout device, then you would not feel forced on the decision making on skill points in such a pressure. This means less utility for veteran, but easier on the new players and 3rd party tools/guides addiction the community goes through. (they probably already thought about this and prob have reasons to not going this way or anything similar) INTRO So to play these games RAW you need to understand the type of game youre going in. Its all about building up the Character sheet ("C") through gear and passive tree. What we fear is that the next corner a boss or rare monster will be unbeatable by us and to prevent the frustration we use guides and tools to plan our strats. But the problem here is that you not even faced a problem yet and you already wants to know how to solve it. Pay attention to the game and understand whats killing you. This is tricky in PoE1 and is where the wiki can be really close to feel mandatory, but if you're really into playing raw you just need to investigate your Character Sheet on what you're short on. THE ART OF PLAYING RAW MENTALITY
Spoiler
1 - NO RUSH. ignore the community until you are ready for the comparison on progress and power. Focus on enjoying yourself with the toy that is these games.
2 - Its a game about problem solving like a puzzle. Forget about day1 you having the best character ever made. The focus is that every new character/league will be an building up on your expertise on the game mechanics and interactions. Really fast you will realize that your characters are dealing way easier with lots of challenges. 3 - FEAR NOT. Explore what the game presents you with. There are too much things going on so just focus on what you have on your hands. 4 - Accept your level of understanding of the game. This means you wont pick for your first playthrough complex mechanic interactions. You're going to play whats obvious to you without context beyond what the game show you. You'll be surprised on how things starts to make sense when you are ready to understand them. Like reading an ascendency node can be really overwhelming if you dont even know what skill you are using yet. 5 - Accept what is the challenge the game has that you didnt overcame yet. Instead of someone telling you how to beat Atziri in PoE1 try to find out how you can do that alone and accept that this is your current goal. Each challenge you learn how to overcome you'll be closer to mastering the game and get new challenges and objectives. The person who creates a speedrun route first need to beat sections of the game and gain knowledge to understand how to optmize. So you can only find solutions for what you played and learned before. If you know how to beat Kitava Act10 in PoE1 than you can start plotting a campaing opmization for yourself if you find it funny to solve problems. 6 - Dying is not a bad thing, its just the game telling you need to investigate on what is preventing your progress. Not always is the char tree or gear, sometimes you need to understand how to drive the character better around some types of challenges. GENERALIST RPG KNOWLEDGE
Spoiler
1 - A character is made up of 3 main things: Resources, Offense and Defenses. In PoE specifically this goes crazy cause there are mechanics that interact in ways that make them capable of functioning beyond their scope sometimes. But in general it follows this too. You need your resources to stay alive and produce Offense, while your Defenses are ways to keep your resources protected/sustained.
2 - If you die a lot and can't go any further no matter how hard you try, this means you need to improve one or more of those three areas. There are builds that focus on being so Offensive that challenges dont even have time to touch their resources. And others focus on many defenses as a way to survive longer. And there is balanced ones. In PoE1 you generally need a minimum of defenses to be able to survive since you can be surprised by many sources of danger that is unavoidable otherwise. This type of distribution of power on a character that usually tells in RPG communities if a character is a Tanker, DPSer, Support, etc. But in PoE, since its not a mainly coop experience, all characters are meant to have minimum thresholders, so you can't go full damage and ignore completly your other stats like you can do in other RPGs. 3 - the goal of this type of RPG is to overcome challenges and explore the mechanics and how they interact. After you pass the phase of just overcoming the challenges you start to replay and explore how you can face this challenges in different angles or if there is a way to cheese the challenges. Its totally a problem solving game. So like in D&D you need to read a lot of things in game to try to understand what is doing what. In general its easy to understand each mechanic individually and after you get comfortable you naturally will start to find patterns and ways to mix and match your accumulated knowledge. POE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE
Spoiler
1 - Defensive layers: you generally wont have one source of defense. Like focus only on armour or only on evasion. You need to have other mechanics that overlap the base defense so you can have failsafes. From skills that protect you to entirely new mechanics like Spell Suppression. You need to stack at least 2 or 3 basic layers to be able to survive. And the way to go about this is to understand what are the weakness of your character gameplay. If you're on melee range and have low mobility you need to compensate that you are vulnerable alot of the time. So even grabing a mobility skill can be a defensive layer for your character.
2 - Resistances: you are expected to have all 3 elemental resistances at high percentages during your progress in PoE1 and prob PoE2 will follow this too. At midgame you usualy aim for 50% on all resistances. At Atlas you are looking for 120%-150% overcap to make sure curses and other effects dont lower your resistances to dangerous levels. (better investment on gear, not so good on passive tree to be chased after but can pick things that are close to interesting others) 3 - Life: you need to have enough life to be able to survive an surprise hit,crit or just a mistake on maneuvering. So if things are killing you with just one hit you should look for Life. (good investment on passive tree) 4 - Passive Tree Tags: look at your skill tags and search them on the Passive Tree search tool at the top of the UI. Do the same for your defenses and Life. DEALING WITH CHOICES
Spoiler
1 - Its all about exploration. This game is trial and error mixed with controlled enviroment testing and other nerdy things that you can come up to enjoy. So its a complex toy. Take your time and explore it. Smash it, break it, use it for drawing, use it as an walking sim, anything. Just play. Stop trying to solve problems you yet dont have. The problems you need to solve are the ones your character is facing right now at act1 not the one he will face at Atlas. After replaying the game (much like in D2 era) you will find your own shortcuts and funny strategies. The game will feel more cozy and you will make it your own personal space with this approach.
2 - Choices have meaning on your character construction, but you can prioritize things by how permanent/hard to change they are. So experiment alot with gear and skill gems. On the passive tree look for big nodes and route to the ones that matters to your character tools. You can route the fast way or just make a mental plan of how to reach it while grabbing other interesting nodes. SAVE YOUR SKILL POINTS. I usually let them accumulate for like 3-7 and then decide how to use them. Theres little chance that a one point will change your character so drastically to save it from doom. 3 - Mistakes on passive tree are way less punitive than you think if you follow the guidelines i said before about respecting the tags of your skill, defenses and resistances. You just brick a character completly if you really use nodes that makes no sense for your skill tags. And above all.. feel the game.. it will tell you gradually and naturally what you are lacking. Most of the problems can be solved through gear and skillgems. 4 - If you are stuck open your character sheet and analyze it. How things are working together. And look at your gear. Try to farm magic items and/or XP if you are struggling. Probability that you overcome the challenge is really high. And if not continue to investigate the situation.. you will learn a lot from it and become better at PoE. 5 - To pick a character class start by choosing what looks nice or what looks like is going to have a action style that suits you. After you pass the phase of experimentation on these classes you will understand what to choose based on your own experience and desires instead of others telling you. 6 - To pick a main skill taste how they feel as they appear during campaign and choose the one you find most interesting mechanically or visually. In PoE1 ANY skill is viable for general gameplay and the main themes of a skill are more important than the individual skill. So if you pick a physical damage slam and build your character around it you will easily swap into any other phys slam and prob will just need to adjust fewer things than if you are changing from phys to an elemental skill. Hope this help someone... lol I'm just yaping not meant to be anything really deep and super serious. I'll come back to this later maybe. Anxious for PoE2 EA... so good going totally blind.. PoE1 i fell to the trap of reading too much and consuming too much content so its great to be able to apply the things i learned on my PoE1 relationship and just relax and enjoy the new game. EDITS
Spoiler
1 - Added disclaimer to highlight things i actually do and bring to the post the comment about using PoB to study mechanics
Last edited by rocetti#2906 on Dec 5, 2024, 2:36:20 PM Last bumped on Dec 5, 2024, 2:03:16 AM
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going in blind on poe is like a college kid entering a heart surgeon's room to finish the surgery
"Path of Exile's engine is currently modern, lean and fast." - Chris Wilson, September 19th, 2019
"It looks like we broke something with 3.10.0. We don't know what it is yet." - Bex, March 16th, 2020 |
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there is no life in danger here. its just a game allow yourself the power of comit mistakes and be imperfect
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I could not agree more with the OP.
POE1 has such trivial combat mechanics (especially before mapping) that 95% of the game is your build. I would prefer to actually play 95% of the game, not eliminate it. My biggest issue with POE1 is the expensive respeccing, because I'd rather improve my builds by playing the fancy 3d POE client than by playing the 2d spreadsheet Path of Building client. That said, Path of Building can be a good tool to explore your own ideas about build possibilities, and learn how the damage maths work (on the "calcs" tab).. because without it we would all be just guessing with a ton of trial and error. Though I still would probably do that over PoB if respecs were cheaper. Hopefully POE2 gold respecs will be cheap enough that we can all easily iterate through experience in the game, on a single character, without re-rolling the same class because that's cheaper than respeccing. If they hit that balance, it'll be a huge win. |
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