So...recently I was kinda bored and decided to install Path of Exile again.
I got a lil bit to type about that. If you aint got time you're reading the wrong post.
A lil backstory: a couple of my brothers got me into Path of Exile back in 2013 when Anarchy league was running. We had played D2 LoD, Median XL mod, and Titan Quest LAN for years, but Path of Exile was unhackable and looked pleasingly challenging... ~3 years of nerfs, stupid skill tree allocations, QQ and ragequitting later, I'm the last one of us playing and I ragequit for a reason I've since forgotten halfway through Talisman league in Q1 2016.
Back to recent events...Beginning of September, I reinstall this game, on my now-ancient, relegated to dusty-garage-duty PC (Q6700@3.4, 4GB DDR2-900, RX460) and decide to tackle the mess that I know is my Stash box in regular ol scrubcore. No Delve for me, I got my fill of underground games back in the dark DOS days of text input. Oh yeah, baby, Read-Only tabs everywhere and legacies that I didn't even know turned legacy, for better or for worse. Over 30 tabs of crap to move around. 10 characters over L80 who have nothing allocated on a skill tree I don't exactly recognize anymore. Well, shit, first thing first: Stash. Baby steps.
3 weeks of OCD-level hair-thinning tab-juggling later (ended up buying currency tab, fragment tab, essence tab, map tab and 12 more prem tabs), I'm at the point where I can research just what in the blue heck is even going on anymore. The 10-Act system is a welcome change over doing 3-4 Acts 3 times, but holy smokes there is a lot of running! Modern items and jewels are on another level of awesome and Standard no-lifers are more rich and elitist than ever. Buddha forbid you post your 2% off perfect legacy item without some mealy-mouth no-lifer shitting on it and posting something 1% better and with some "Enchant" you never even heard of.
There's a lot of neat new game mechanics tho, and after rebuilding one of my Whispering Ice builds and totally sucking ass, I decided to follow a forum build for my second time ever, using said staff. This staff has a spell that does damage based on your character's Intelligence, which I find to be a fun game mechanic. I see new guys post in chat that they have problems staying alive, when they have less life points than I have Intelligence points. Occasionally I try to point that out to a noob that I think might get the point, but it's just pissing against the wind.
You can put a wholke lot of thought into this game, Path of Exile is no joke. There are over 1200 nodes on an enormous skill tree that you'll never get more than ~121 points for. That's assuming you can make it to L100. Well, 1-98 is halfway to L100. Once you're leveled in the 90's, a death might lose you a few days or a week of progress. Good times. Hope to share my misery with some like-minded folks sometime! Shhot me a message.