The Death Penalty and XP Gains in PoE 2 my feedback after 400+hrs

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Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

Then they can play something else. Devs designed it and have made it clear that its staying in the game


Which is good

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Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

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shiraha19#6298 wrote:

The thing is not all players want them.

Players will want growth and to maximize their characters. That's literally the point of playing a game and if they can't do that they will naturally quit and give up.

Then they can play something else. Devs designed it and have made it clear that its staying in the game


Which is good

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frazency#2974 wrote:

Sorry not meant to brag, but it's funny how you guys are complaining about XP penalty so much while I'm just like ... What, I'm lv 90 already? But I've just played for a few hours after campaign, lmao. And I'm not even following the "meta" builds of ES/MoM/CI/Spark or ice strike monk etc.

https://imgur.com/uphknVp

XP Penalty is fine, just don't die. Learn to play the game better, farm currencies to upgrade gear, then you'll level up even faster than you'd imagine, instead of focusing on XP only. Your power is 99% from gear, 1% from level. If you have good gear/build, you will level up 10x faster than others, and not dying. Again, learn to play the game better if you're dying so much that you can't even level up.

And it will only get better because they're adjusting monster damage, build diversity, improving visual clarity, add more gems and supports into the game. If you're giving up just after a few dozens of deaths, then you're too weak for this game actually.

A few leveling tips:
- Always use the Omen to fully heal you when you reach low life (30%), it's cheap as 6-8 ex.
- Always use the Omen to reduce XP penalty to 2.5% instead of 10% after lv 90. They're quite expensive, about 60-80 ex.
- Always use the Thawing charm. It gives immunity to freeze, and freeze is what most likely will kill you if you get it.
- Aim for maps with prefix, never do maps with suffix "Monsters deal X% more damage", "Monsters deal X% damage as extra Y damage", "Monsters penetrate X% elemental resistance", "Players are cursed with elemental weakness" or "players have - X% maximum resistance" unless you're confident of not dying.
Since you know, 50% resistance receive double damage (50%) from 75% resistance (25%).
- Read map mods and categorized them into doable and not doable maps. Depend on your build, avoid maps with "increased elemental threshold" (which means you'll have a hard time apply poison/bleed/shock/ignite/freeze on mobs) or "monsters have increased move speed + attack speed/critical hit chance + damage" or "players have less energy/life regen" etc.
- Maps with burning ground is dangerous. Also, maps with shocking ground will debuff you with 20% more damage taken, which literally means reduce your HP/ES by 20%.
- After lv 90, you MUST have a good defensive build, but also still have to maintain clear speed. You will be swarmed if you don't have enough dps to clear, but you will be one-shot sometimes if you don't have enough defense.
- Acrobatics/MoM/CI helps a lot. I'm not following ES, but you might find some guides everywhere on Youtube on how to improve your ES. Acrobatics with 75-80% evasion with enough clear speed allow you to get hit only a few times per maps, but you still need HP/res/dmg reduction to avoid one-shot. Also you'll want to have blind/maim on your herald, mark/curse on your aura (cast on X, blasphemy, etc.) to reduce damage and speed of dangerous mobs.
Armor might be better after next patch though.
- If you don't have CI, 75% chaos res is almost a must to avoid one-shot sometimes. Chaos damage hurts.
- If you don't have enough damage to one-shot everything, or don't have enough AoE to do screen-wide clear, try to rely on ailments to disable them. As mentioned above, blind/maim/mark/curse. Chill, Freeze, stun, eletrocute also are very good in disabling mobs, not letting them to hit/cast spells on you before they die.
- Never stay in one spot, keep moving. Never backtrack where you killed the mobs. For on-death effects, instead of waiting, move straight through them and backtrack to loot again after you've clear the whole breach/area (Of course only when you're fast enough). It's much safer than kill > loot > kill > loot. You'll almost never get hit by on-death effects if you just keep moving past the dead mobs, because they have delays. And most of the off-screen skills of mobs will just miss you because you moved.
- Higher movement/attack speed definitely helps.
- Stacking breach tablets and maps with "Increased Experience gain" help.
- If you are focusing on EXP, get the passive nodes on Atlas tree with Shrines, they help a lot in clearing the maps and sometimes you can get the Enlighten Shrine which gives a lot of extra exp. Save it for later, clear the map, come back to take it then run to the closest Breach. Bam, level up.
- Area level is important. If you're strong enough, do T16 maps in nodes with +2 level (some people called this T18 - with irradiated and corruption on the map node). And white/blue T15 map gives much more experience than fully corrupted T10 map, especially at lv 80+. If you're not confident, you can even run white/blue T15 maps with good mods on it, instead of risk to die running fully juiced ones.
- Learn which map is small and which map is big, which map is good for breach and which map is not. Use good waystones on good map nodes only, don't waste them.
- Learn how certain types of mobs have special trait, not just mindlessly clicking on everything clickable. Like mushroom monsters which are the only ones that will go boom after death almost without any delay, so don't walk over their corpse. The green skeleton warriors that will shoot chaos bolts to you if you shoot projectiles at them from range, so don't spam click but walk near to them first. Etc.
- Don't blindly follow "meta" builds on Youtube if you don't understand it. Some builds are purely on offensive because they are only bossing and they can one-shot them, or they know the game well enough to avoid getting hit at all while doing maps, or they're just recording the runs where they don't die and they don't care if they die sometimes. Because recording them one-shot something will always give more views than recording them not dying. But to level up, you need to not die, not one-shot bosses.
- Better run lower tier maps and not dying and farm for currencies to upgrade your gear to be stronger to run higher tier maps, than just headbutt into high tier maps when you're still weak and risk of dying and lose XP/lose mechanics on map node/lose drops on the ground.
Same as citadels. Better run 100-200% waystone maps on them, and receive 1-2 fragments instead of run 400-500% waystone maps on them and die.
If you take the risks, don't complain if you die.
If you want to be good at the game, put some effort to it.

This turned out to be much longer than I intended to, sorry for the wall of text lol.