Please educate me, why does anyone consider PoE to be "hard"?

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NeroNoah escribió:

The game is going to become harder, :)

I can't wait.

You will find the challenge you seek, I am sure of it, but for now... stick to the path, Exile Todarius! :)

Hard to get the items you want, not hard to play.

PoE is not Dark Souls, or kaizo mario. It's not a pure execution based game, and since gear, gem and tree is your character's ability to survive and deal damage, not your execution, it can make you feel like you're never in any danger as long as you prepare well. But it's easy to prepare for the different encounters of the game since you learn it during your first playthrough in normal which doesn't require any preparation (because it's kind of a tutorial).
The skill of a PoE-player is in the knowledge of the game. For example, you said "chos resist is useless except for the second form of the last boss". Well, nothing deals chaos damage there. Absolutely nothing. You thought it was chaos damage but it was actually bleeding mechanic.
And when you're reaching the endgame, that knowledge becomes really valuable, cause you have to apply it to every "new" encounter in maps, generated more randomly. You can encounter rare mobs with reflects, or crit leaper mobs, or rogue exiles, or tormented spirits, or bloodline mobs (which can then spawn a beyond mob), etc... You can have multiple different mobs on the map, like multiproj, additionnal damage, curse on your character all the time, or even league affix. And you have the "fixed" boos map, which, even if most of them are alts of actual "leveling" bosses, you have to discover. And every single of those things combine to each other.

You can enter a room that's full of mob because there is a shrine, leaper that jump onto your head and almost instakill you because the shrine is a diamong one (crit), while an exile boosted by a spirit is spawning exploding minions at speed light around you. That happened to me earlier, i got out barely alive of the room and only because I almost always have a finger on my lightning warp and my seething flasks.

And that's where PoE difficulty starts to become obvious. If you're taking one map to grind 10% average xp at a certain point, and you die once every map, u don't level up at all. And i'm only talking softcore there, but I'm usually an hardcore player. If you die at level 80 because you made ONE mistake or got trolled by a sick affix combination, you're dead. And u have to grind again from the start.

All in all you're right, PoE isn't a very hardcore game itself. It's the challenge that you decide to compete for that will bring the difficulty. Wanna beat the game in normal? Easy. Wanna beat dominus merc in hardcore? Starts to become a real challenge. Wanna hit 100 in hardcore? God damn, chuck norris challenge :p

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Todarius escribió:

irrelevant

You are level 45. You can't judge POE's difficulty yet so I would suggest to not even try..

This thread. My sides.

PoE has a reputation as a 'hard' game because afaik a large part of the playerbase is playing hardcore (as opposed to other titles, were most people stick to the easy game modes) where one death means you have to start over. Softcore is very forgiving in terms of death in the early levels, giving no experience penalty in normal and only 5% in cruel, which you'll farm within a few minutes. It is also a lot more complicated then say Diablo 3 in terms of skills/talent tree and customization of your char. Although it may seem to you that the logical nodes are relatively close and that there is a clear path to take, this isn't necessarily right. I used to pick everything that was close to my starting area, but many builds dart around the whole tree to pick up specific nodes and keystones that are the most beneficial for them.

That said, as an experienced ARPG player you shouldn't have to many trouble progressing until A3M, where (as others have already said) it will be determined if your build can be successful or not. When I started I had a arc char and made it until A3M with relative ease, just to discover that I get oneshotted by most of the harder mobs and I can't do anything if I'm not in a group because I built full glass cannon. But yeah, the first two difficulties aren't really daunting if you play softcore. Most experienced player go through them within a few hours when they level up a new char.


@the discussion with the 5% that get to maps - that's really no big suprise. Just look at the steam achievments for any given game and you'll notice that only a fraction of players make it until the end. I just looked at Dishonored for an example - I think it was a full prize game and was quite liked among the press. Only 75% of the people who bought it completed the tutorial (!), and only slightly more then 5% completed the whole story.
PoE is different then Dishonored in regards to the pricing - it is f2p. That means that Dishonored can make a pretty beginning and slack at the end, it doesn't matter, everyone who plays it has already paid for it. But do you think the guy who starts a char, gets to level 12 and never touches PoE again will spend money on it?
The 5% of the endgame players are also the most active and the most likely to spend money on it, thus making it only logical to cater to them. Sure, a nice beginning is important to not scare people away, but the longevity of a game is decided by the active players.

€:

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And re: orbs, up to Chaos orbs isn't RNG at all, that's just farming rares and using recipes/vendors/masters. Regals can be farmed too, but that's definitely not in the cards for the vast majority of players.

So other than that, you have Blessed, Divine, Exalted, Eternal, and Mirror that are pure RNG (I think, assuming my memory is behaving).

I don't think you know what RNG means. It stands for Random Number Generator and means that the drop chance is random and not certain. Chaos can be 'farmed', but which item drops is still determined by RNG. Every orb drop is based on RNG, no matter if you can obtain it through recipes, because the things for the recipes are also dropped by RNG. A counter example would be a quest that awards you with orbs, but this doesn't exist.
Also you can get a divine orb if you vendor a six-linked item and you get two exalted, five regal and one divine orb if you vendor a Mirror. ;)

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Todarius escribió:

as one who has played single-player arpg's for almost two decades now, that PoE is the very first game of the genre that has made me want to actually finish the ride three times. I've got toons sitting in Sacred 2 and Titan Quest that are only in their second "ride", and I've been playing them on and off for years without ever wanting to finish the "third ride" before moving on to a different game.

You have played ARPG's for two decades and still never managed to beat any of them and you think you are in the position to call a game out on its difficulty?

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Manocean escribió:

This thread. My sides.

this

Yay GGG is increasing the difficulty with 2.0

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ItsRay escribió:

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Todarius escribió:

as one who has played single-player arpg's for almost two decades now, that PoE is the very first game of the genre that has made me want to actually finish the ride three times. I've got toons sitting in Sacred 2 and Titan Quest that are only in their second "ride", and I've been playing them on and off for years without ever wanting to finish the "third ride" before moving on to a different game.

You have played ARPG's for two decades and still never managed to beat any of them and you think you are in the position to call a game out on its difficulty?

Exactly this. I thought, by now, it was common knowledge for any ARPG-fan that we aim for the final difficulty mode, anything prior is for casual players who just want some easy fun after work. (No offense)

"Easy to learn, hard to master."

I'd say out of your examples Titan Quest might be the hardest. Sacred 1 and 2 still have obvious imbalances that are way too easy to exploit (even when using the Community Patches).

But nothing is coming even close to PoE's difficulty and complexity.