Path of Self-Exile
Browsing through my new-and-improved Steam library, I notice Path of Exile sitting there. Looking for something different, I download it and boot it up after like… damn, six years ago? My characters are still there, so I load up my Witch and…
Ain’t nobody got time for this.
…shut the game down.
I ended up going to some websites to look at what constitutes some good Witch builds. What I found were builds labeled “3.8| Stress Free PoE – COLD-HEARTED CURSER |Clear the Atlas w/ YOUR Items @ YOUR Pace (SSF & Co-op).” Sounds good. Let me just look at the video of its gameplay…
Oh. Just literally pressing one button and running around.
There were other builds, of course, but most of them were, shall we say, thematically similar. Plus, knowing that the above build is possible, what motivation would you have to do something else?
As it turns out, very high. Just in a different game.
Posted on November 11, 2019, in Miscellany and tagged Complexity, Path of Exile, Steam, What Am I Doing With My Life?. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
It would be possible to beat the game playing a build that you make as you go along, picking the stuff that sounds fun. You wouldn’t be on the bleeding edge of min/max, but you would have a build you find fun for you. Why not do that instead of spending however long researching a way to make a single player game NOT fun for yourself?
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Permanent mistakes + noob traps make research required for me to have fun at all. In my last post (6 years ago), I realized that zombies vs bosses was a bad idea, for example. If I had not researched that, yeah, minion-based builds are in fact viable later on, I would have concluded that I wasted my talent points instead of things being recoverable.
Trial and error only works when the errors are recoverable.
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Granted its also been a long time for me since I played PoE, but I don’t recall the base game being so hard that you needed to min/max. Pretty sure I was able to beat it with my first character putting points into whatever sounded fun.
That said I’m not the type to replay an ARPG over and over like a lot of people do with Diablo or whatever.
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I think with POE the real game is navigating the skill tree and picking your gems and otherwise just building a character. The actual gameplay is just there to benchmark what you built. I never found POE that interesting even at low levels, but clearly there is an audience for this sort of thing.
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