Tried it. It's boring as fvck! The turbo races are at least challenging at times but this is just a luke-warm version. A pain that never ends. Due to more mob damage the pace is slower and the gear requirements to progress higher. Only for masochists. Anarchy? Oh, you get a rare mob with different skills and slightly better (but still useless) loot 3-4 times per character that you level to merciless. Some of them even have pets! OMG!!! The rogue exiles are too rare to make it interesting and don't drop enough quality loot to bother. I think farming the totem in Ledge merciless will yield better loot in 20 minutes. What we needed was a better desync prediction and a good trading system. What did we get? Two lack-luster, over-hyped leagues and a script that types /oos every so often when sh!t really hit the fan. Sorry, not impressed.
You sound mad jessep. Men: Onslaught & Hardcore Women, Children, & Jessep: other modes. Hard facts. GOML you know I love you
I feel no shame for playing normal Alot of people I know that play hardcore play it like normal, then alt F4 when they are about to die then proceed to say it takes more skill
I am. Important core features are once again delayed for half-assed leagues. Please. Play a solo turbo race and show me how far you get. Onslaught is boring by comparison. Fight Brutus and Merveil when you are underleveled, only have the gear you found on the way and they move and attack 60% faster. Yeah, 60%, not the carebear 20% you have in Onslaught. :lol: Get on MY level, son! :ugeek:
<3 And watch out for Vaal and Kole in mercy. You have very little time to dodge after they telegraphed their smash. Enfeeble, Temporal Chains, Enduring Cry and Immortal Call should be your close friends now. I wish Enduring Cry was not that annoying. It really makes me want to go back to ranged.
Btw, the turbo races you speak of the mobs do not move faster, they only attack & cast faster. In Onslaught they attack, cast, and move faster *cough* scrub *cough* :twisted:
So, how it onslaught going? I don#t think I'll be back to play PoE till they do something about trading and that desync. I still don't get how they could nerf life and resistance caps. It was the only thing that would give you a chance to survive desync or might give you enough time to log out if connection poop hit the fan. A bit more armor won't do a thing in high level areas. It honestly feels a little bit to me as if they have given up on improving on desync. The new solution is to resync more frequently instead of making better predictions and extrapolations. That's not a solution, that's like applying painkillers to make the symptoms more bearable. Now look at the leagues: Default was renamed to Standard. Why even care? I think it's because the word 'default' has more negative connotations than standard. GGG has realized that it is their bread and butter league. Sure, they planned it as sink for the HC eco and were not really that eager about listening to the SC players. PoE was supposed to be that edgy, cut-throat, tough-as-nails Dibablo 3 killer for true hardcore gamers. The game with a stable economy based on crafting orbs that can keep going for at least a decade, right? I guess somebody ran the numbers and Chris & Co came to the conclusion that they really need the money from those softcore players or they can take their ten-year-plan and use it as toilet paper. What about hardcore? It will live on. There are always players who play for the kick of losing their character and rerolling. Some of them don't even mind if the death happened due to desync, disconnect or a server crash. I think a very large number of former HC players just moved to SC after their character died to random BS though. Why bother? The HC eco will go down the drain just like SC only slower. Goldfarmers, multiboxers and botters will make sure it does. But the new leagues show where GGG puts its focus now. Hardcore became a small box you can tick. The money makers are Standard and the two 4 month leagues that will save the oh-so-holy economy. Standard gets the rogue exiles. I expect quite some work went into that. Hardcore gets a map mod that took like 5 minutes to copy and adjust from the turbo races. So why is onslaught not +60% like turbo? Because the 1 week turbo race showed that it really uncovers the shortcomings of PoE. Desync will be rampant. You can only hope to survive in endgame content if you have a strong team and run specialized builds. Like focussing on Immortal Call. It's the only thing that can stand against desynced map bosses and their pets. So it gets toned down enough that you can brag about it but it doesn't break high level content too much. But waste expensive engineering cycles on making some HC specific content like anarchy? I think that will not happen for a long time.
In my experience the latest change to the network model helped tremendously, besides it's not "resyncing more often" it resyncs aggressively when specific triggers are met (ie. stun, ie. stagger) It's not the end-all complaints fix some people hoped for but it'll have to do in the mean-time. The point about trading stands the system is far from usable and could use a lot of work. However I don't quite agree with your projections, while I'd like to know precise distributions of players the game still features >10k concurrent players on average (according to Chris Wilson on Reddit), which is quite good for some random indie with little to no marketing. Any bigger ARPG had the split between the SC and HC holding platform (aka the standard leagues outside races and challenges) with everything being thrown in there after the challenges/races end. Diablo 2 did that for years, introducing new challenge only content only to then introduce it after the things ended. The hardcore economy will develop in a seizably different way due to less introductions of new equipment, except for trash that was stashed away. It will behave similarly to Softcore for the majority of time though purely because people imitate the behavour and builds they see/read being put out by the noLife crew. Or as deezy would put it: umad jessep?
I'll be mad until they release a trading system that doesn't require me to track down an item with 3rd party tools, use other 3rd party tools to find out his ingame name and then hope that he is online/hasn't quit the game yet. It took me 3 days to get an upgrade for a helmet last time I traded. How long did it take Deezy to buy his bow? 2 weeks, more? That's unacceptable. You can't rely on finding the necessary gear to progress in HC. You don't find enough crafting orbs to craft the items you need. After the life nerfs CI is the big thing, which has even higher gear requirements than a normal build. Players need more orbs, better drops or a powerful, fast trading system. You can't put in one gear check boss after another and not give the players a way to get to the gear they need. That's horrible game design.
The good ones have a way to get the gear you need. Like a trading system that isn't from 1990. If the closed beta testers had not protested you would still have to throw stuff on the ground to trade.
To use MMOs for a second to suit my argument. Stuff that's actually useful is bound on pickup so you can't trade it, at least WoW does it that way. Surely the rather obvious perception of the gear checks could be dampened by a real trading system, I don't disagree there. Let's hope they hurry up with their web-based trading system they are dreaming about.
