Some questions about the upcoming season from a filthy casual.

Curious if enough info has been given on the upcoming season for anyone to be able to answer some stuff:

1. Is melee going to have more survivability? I know a pro player could probably perfect dodge rolling for it not to be an issue, but this season, I got to endgame in coop as a Witch and my brother was a Druid. He was doing more damage than me, but he also started getting oneshot a lot around I think level 75, which is part of why we stopped playing, the xp loss on death put him decently behind me.

2. Is xp loss on death being reduced/removed?

3. Is there a fire ascendancy for sorceress (or whatever they're called in this)?

4. Anything done to make alts easier to get into, aside from having a lot of currency and maybe stuff stashed from main?

5. Any changes to trials to make them less sweaty?

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JamesTheJames#2669 wrote:

Curious if enough info has been given on the upcoming season for anyone to be able to answer some stuff:

1. Is melee going to have more survivability? I know a pro player could probably perfect dodge rolling for it not to be an issue, but this season, I got to endgame in coop as a Witch and my brother was a Druid. He was doing more damage than me, but he also started getting oneshot a lot around I think level 75, which is part of why we stopped playing, the xp loss on death put him decently behind me.

2. Is xp loss on death being reduced/removed?

3. Is there a fire ascendancy for sorceress (or whatever they're called in this)?

4. Anything done to make alts easier to get into, aside from having a lot of currency and maybe stuff stashed from main?

5. Any changes to trials to make them less sweaty?

1. There are some changes to armors starting act 3 and some skill tree changes. For more information you'll need to wait for the patch notes.

2. Extremely unlikely.

3. Don't think there's one that's dedicated to fire.

4. They're making some changes to the campaign that might make it easier to get through the campaign if you know what you're looking for.
Not sure what kind of things you're hoping for.

5. Wait for the patch notes.

1. New ward mechanic might help survivability. Otherwise nothing really specifically mentioned about it. There will be balance changes with the patch notes that might help some here. Mostly though, defended in this game end up more complicated than just stacking a single defense, which may have been your bigger issue.

2. No. Most likely never, been in the game well over 10 years, they actively want it to exist. The answer to dying is supposed to be reducing difficulty and/or improving great. Exp loss is intentional to make you stop slamming your head against content above your pay grade.

3. No. Witch has infernalist which is the closest thematically. In general they tried to avoid having one ascendancy be explicitly for one play style and instead be more generic. So probably Stormweaver or Chronomancer are the best ascendencies for a fire sorceress.

4. Not much. The campaign will have some better breadcrumb trails in the environment that will help you find the next things a bit faster if you pay attention. Otherwise it's very unlikely they'll do anything else to speed or skip campaign. Funding alts with leveling Uniques is the way they intend for you to speed the process for subsequent characters.

5. Might slightly change numbers, but no, they're not changing in any meaningful way. For Sekhemas, just go buy Relics off trade super cheap to hit 75% Honor Resistance, and it becomes infinitely easier. Also you can just skip them and come back in 10 levels and trivialize it. That's what I do in both games; the power spike off the first ascendancy has never been worth making it harder on myself when I could just play another hour and make it easy.

Do we know yet if the new endgame quests will update for the whole party as you progress? I ask because I noticed when we got to endgame this season and had the tutorial quests, we had to do them for each of us, one person progressing it wasn't progressing it for the other.

Also the new currency will be Relics? From PoE1 stash tab MTX?

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JamesTheJames#2669 wrote:

Do we know yet if the new endgame quests will update for the whole party as you progress? I ask because I noticed when we got to endgame this season and had the tutorial quests, we had to do them for each of us, one person progressing it wasn't progressing it for the other.

Also the new currency will be Relics? From PoE1 stash tab MTX?

I haven't heard, but since PoE1 also works like that I would assume only the park leader gets endgame progression. Makes sense, as each player had their own atlas. But a bit of a push making casual multiplayer a bit less appealing.

No Relics are the things that already exist that you slot into Trial of Sekhemas to add different bonuses during your run. Honor Resist is the most important, because at 75% it means you only lose 1/4 as much honor from a hot as you do without it.

Not sure what PoE1 MTX you're referring to. The Relic stash isn't MTX, it was added free with the Sanctum league. The same stash exists in PoE2 for Sekhemas, but isn't MTX.

The new league currency is various forms of Runes.

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JamesTheJames#2669 wrote:

Do we know yet if the new endgame quests will update for the whole party as you progress? I ask because I noticed when we got to endgame this season and had the tutorial quests, we had to do them for each of us, one person progressing it wasn't progressing it for the other.

They said the endgame quest states will update for everyone in the map/group, except for bosses that need to be done in each persons individual world(can still go as a group)

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

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2. No. Most likely never, been in the game well over 10 years, they actively want it to exist. The answer to dying is supposed to be reducing difficulty and/or improving great. Exp loss is intentional to make you stop slamming your head against content above your pay grade.
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That is the answer GGG would like, but the sooner OP realizes the truth, the better. Poe is built such way that dying teaches you absolutely nothing.

First, you cannot assess enemy danger in the field, because same looking mobs scale from 50 random sources. Map 1, mob A hits like wet noodle, Map 8, same mob suddenly oneshots you. Even bosses eventually get RNG scaling as powercreep goes on.

Second, after death you cannot know what exactly killed you, cannot even know if it was just RNG combo or your stats were fundamentally inadequate.

Third, the work of buildcraft in poe is so large, that most players will just assume they died to RNG fluctuation and will resume playing without rearranging their gear or passives.

Exp penalty in current poe is nothing more than malicious progression blocker. Ever since poe became zoom-zoom-dead game, penalty became grossly outdated and never addressed problem.

The juxtaposition of calling a game braindead in one breath and calling out the complexity of buildcraft without any hint of irony is quite amusing.

I do agree the game could give better feedback on death causes. At the same time I've watched so many people put in a map without reading the mods, run a double ele damage crit map with ele weakness, then wonder why they died. It makes me wonder if anything would even help. Even after they die they don't read the map mods and see the +200% damage they added on top of the crazy huge crit multiplier they added. I also notoriously don't read anything on this game either though lmao.

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KaosuRyoko#1633 wrote:

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I also notoriously don't read anything on this game either though lmao.

Exactly, because it is humanly impossible:) Solo loot rates imply we run maps in the hundreds, and in poe2 we cannot chaos slam maps anymore. Imagine the hassle of sorting away those triple element + crit maps, no normal human will keep doing it forever.

Furthermore, even "safer" map can still bring surprises, because in poe mobs can roll critical hits (!). A few unlucky damage bursts, and player will just accept periodic death as given. And they definitely won't try to memorize danger level of countless area modifier combos at the given area level at the given gear at the given passives, etc.

Sometimes I wonder how GGG can ignore so many design holes for so long:)

4. Hoarding leveling gear is a feature of ARPGs, make use of it.

5. Trials are actual test to your character build, if your druid friend that's dying at lvl 75 think he can complete the full trial, he's wrong. People failing the trials need to take the hints.