Positive feedback from a casual SSF player

There is a lot of dooming on this forum, so let me post my positive perspective on leveling and playing a druid from campaign start to farming T15's this past week.

- Progression feels smooth and simple with minimal game knowledge required (check vendors / use orbs on drops / collect zone-relevant resists). I had a great time in the campaign bouncing between bear and wyvern.

- Wyvern trivializes all of the campaign bosses with empowered oil breath and then empowered flame breath when you unlock it. The stun buildup on empowered flame breath in particular is extreme and quickly and easily stuns all the bosses while delivering extremely strong damage with mediocre gear. I bring this up only because it felt extremely overpowered to me while I was doing it. I like being overpowered, but this required zero setup. I killed all of the campaign bosses in a single full rage bar channel of flame breath, and never interacted with any of their boss abilities. (I do not know what any of act 4 bosses do, since I stunned and killed them before they were able to do anything).

- The way primal skills interact with each other is fun and interesting, and they have excellent synergy with the passive tree, especially weapon switch passive tree. Discovering how strong it was to have an 'attack' tree and a 'warcry' tree that you switch between was very enjoyable. Werewolf in particular is incredibly satisfying and reactive to play, weaving in forward and backward leaps is engaging and rewarding. Well done!

- Current tools for SSF are 'adequate'. Targeting expedition was a viable way to acquire strong-enough gear for progression to the point where I can blast juiced T15 maps. The recombinator works quite well for the typical hoarding that happens in SSF. No longer is something completely bricked if you rolled a bad stat, you can use it as recombinator fodder. Expedition NPCs are working perfectly for SSF gear progression, with ritual and abyss rounding out the crafting possibilities. Overall I had fun and was engaged for roughly 40ish hours, I've hit a soft of soft wall now where its just pure RNG/luck for finding and crafting a better weapon, but that's fine. It happens in SSF.

- Perfect jeweler / greater jeweler drop rates are just right now. I found more than enough of both to get my build going quickly once I got into maps. I don't know if I was just lucky, but the drop rate was just right for me (compared to last patches). Before this patch, pjeweler drop rates were one thing making me anxious about playing SSF, but no more.

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Primal skills impressions for mapping:

Wyvern - Not viable due to channeling requirements for the best skills resulting in being stunned out of their startup window/being vulnerable to the array of ground effects while attackings. Felt very bad to try and map as Wyvern except spamming empowered rend. Channeling skills were suicidal to use in any 'juiced' situation. Against bosses or powerful rares there were often situations where a swift boss attack would 'knock' me out of oil barrage or flame breath. In content like ritual or abyss with huge amounts of spawning monsters, channeled skills with only a frontal aiming area felt like suicide. I dropped wyvern for mapping. It might be strong on bosses you can kill in a single channel of flame breath, but beyond that, generating power charges in boss fights is annoying and gimmicky.

Bear - Quite viable and scales well, HOWEVER, I cannot see anything going on at all due to the amount of fire, explosions, rifts, and jagged ground. It's very strong, but in 'content', I couldn't see any dangerous ground effects and often completely lost vision on things like purple plant homing missiles. I found the screen clutter to be excessive, annoying, and ultimately it led me to switching to werewolf.

Werewolf - Freezes everything on the screen forever, including bosses. Absolute joy to play and to figure out how to scale. Managing ice fragment detonations is interesting, and personally I found building rage to spend it on lunar blessing duration to be fine. Requires no charge generation gimmicks to function, scales very well with multiple types of spirit gems, and has several interesting interactions with support gems. Overall my favorite shapeshift by far. Perfect for map content due to large scale freezing with no channel/windup requirements.


Plant caster - didn't try it


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Shaman ascendency

Apocalypse felt useless to me. The fact that it has so much downtime (buildup doesn't begin till it ends), made using it feel bad. The random targeting and anemic damage (at the time I was not geared), felt bad. I'm sure there are ways to turn it into a powerhouse, but my initial impression was NOT GOOD, WASTE OF POINTS, WHY DID I TAKE THIS? At that point in the campaign I was doing weapon swap caster/shapeshift stuff, and apocalypse was totally disappointing. I will circle back to try it again someday as a caster, but tl;dr 'pressing the button didn't make something cool happen'. Again, just initial impression was disappointment compared to the spell name.

Rage branch was interesting. However, the functionality of the ascendency can be reproduced with a spirit gem, and generating rage feels very easy on its own. The power here was nice, but it doesn't compare to other options. I can see multiple ways to use the extra rage it grants, but none of them warranted actually investing into the regen.

I would rather be....

Invincible due to avatar of evolution. Now this is what an ascendency should be. The adaptations and physical damage reduction here are excellent. So good. Perfect interaction with armor -> ele mechanic and amazing in all situations. Felt the power immediately, appreciated it forever. This is one huge reason to play Shaman. I can not imagine ever picking something else.

Spirit from charm slots: such a great idea. Risk/reward as a minor ascendency node, but with huge power. I love running high spirit cost builds and this as the engine for that playstyle was perfect. The options that this opens up were tremendous and tons of fun, especially in SSF when you can get a bit experimental when you are trying to fill gaps in your capabilities along the way. Feels great when you get the right spirit stats on your gear to support a really ridiculous array of spirit skills and supports.

Bonded runes/idols: has some quite powerful interactions. Definitely the endgame 'pick' for most due to some of the things you can do with it once you've got the gear and idols. I'm not using it yet because my gear isn't quite there and I don't have the idols I need.
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Conclusion: I had fun, would play again, will continue to play and try and finish the league content / 10. The game feels much smoother/higher quality/less janky than the first couple patches I played. The changes to support gem limitations made it much less frustrating, much more interesting to play around with.

This is a pretty good SSF experience, and it was continually rewarding to engage with the content and then spend the resources from it to get gear to continue progressing my character. Any time I focused on a particular goal (Make a better ring / make better boots) I was able to actually accomplish that in a reasonable non-frustrating time frame.

However! I did begin skipping vaal temple, since it is NOT rewarding and WAS a huge waste of time compared to trying to get more expedition parts/coins to roll new gear. I liked the idea of 'build your own adventure', and had fun the first few times I did it, and having an easy source of quality for gems/gear early on was handy. That fell off quick, and the architect was very buggy to fight.

I suggest decoupling vaal temple entry from the map the players are in, and instead giving us a soul core upon reaching 6/6 we can use to plug into something in our hideout to open the gate ourself. I simply found myself preferring to stay in the map and finish it up, then (UGH) do the temple again. Temple is something that a player would want to prep for with items they intend to roll/corrupt/etc, and so it should be a summonable gateway they create themselves.

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Thanks for your hard work

today I beat the arbiter ssf

overall I had probably one of my best SSF experiences in poe1 or 2 this league

Very well thought out and glad to see a positive post in a sea of negativity.

Just remember you are not alone. There are tens of thousands of us having a blast. Don't let the forum bring you down.

I'm glad you had a great time SSF and appreciate the positive feedback from your point of view. I would like to challenge you tho... Play a spec that isn't broken OP and see if the view stays the same. There is a massive disconnect from the players in this game because of the massive and I mean MASSIVE strengths between builds. Some are playing the same build you are and wanting either massive buffs to enemies or nerfs bringing it down. As you can see from what I am challenging you with, if you buff enemies, low tier builds only go lower. If you nerf the damage of the wyvern build then you upset people who are having a good time with where it is at the moment. It is a catch 22 for sure.

Leads me into saying this for like the 100th time on here... buff the lower performing / used skills and ascendancies so you can actually have a baseline to balance enemies off of.

Anyway, all that aside. Glad you had a blast. One of these days I will do a full SSF run myself.

I'm really enjoying Atziri's Temple in SSF. :)

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Konried#2763 a écrit :

Targeting expedition was a viable way to acquire strong-enough gear for progression to the point where I can blast juiced T15 maps.

Dude how do you even "target" expeditions. I barely get any in the wild and there's no tablets. Prior to 0.3.1 you could actually "target" the mechanics, but now it's just luck.

I also got extremely unlucky and spent the past two days, about 2 million gold, probably around 100-200 regals and exalts, the few artifacts i got from expeditions, some omens and what not trying to get a better xbow than the one i got in early interludes. Finally i slammed an alch and there was it, my ~800 dps boomstick.

It wasn't a pleasant experience. If you go through hundreds of bases and the one affix you need just refuses to show up it can almost make you quit.

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onetruelai#7327 a écrit :

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Konried#2763 a écrit :

Targeting expedition was a viable way to acquire strong-enough gear for progression to the point where I can blast juiced T15 maps.

Dude how do you even "target" expeditions. I barely get any in the wild and there's no tablets. Prior to 0.3.1 you could actually "target" the mechanics, but now it's just luck.

I also got extremely unlucky and spent the past two days, about 2 million gold, probably around 100-200 regals and exalts, the few artifacts i got from expeditions, some omens and what not trying to get a better xbow than the one i got in early interludes. Finally i slammed an alch and there was it, my ~800 dps boomstick.

It wasn't a pleasant experience. If you go through hundreds of bases and the one affix you need just refuses to show up it can almost make you quit.

I'm not sure what you mean.

You use expedition precursor tablets, and then do expeditions till you have some log books. Then you select which location for the artifact you are trying to stack up on.

It didn't feel like luck, and the game starts you out with an expedition tablet the first time you do it (pretty sure this happens with all the different contents).

As for weapon crafting, I always select essences on the atlas tree and then go from there. You can easily craft an 800dps talisman fairly reliably with essences and perfect orbs.

Part of SSF is selecting a build that is SSF friendly. If your build doesn't function without a very rare combination of affix that is difficult to solo craft without lots of resources, then you're going to have a bad time. Shapeshifting fortunately doesn't have that problem, and works with pretty much any amalgamation of high tier dps stats.

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Soulsniper1313#7576 a écrit :

I'm glad you had a great time SSF and appreciate the positive feedback from your point of view. I would like to challenge you tho... Play a spec that isn't broken OP and see if the view stays the same. There is a massive disconnect from the players in this game because of the massive and I mean MASSIVE strengths between builds. Some are playing the same build you are and wanting either massive buffs to enemies or nerfs bringing it down. As you can see from what I am challenging you with, if you buff enemies, low tier builds only go lower. If you nerf the damage of the wyvern build then you upset people who are having a good time with where it is at the moment. It is a catch 22 for sure.

Leads me into saying this for like the 100th time on here... buff the lower performing / used skills and ascendancies so you can actually have a baseline to balance enemies off of.

Anyway, all that aside. Glad you had a blast. One of these days I will do a full SSF run myself.

There have always been differences in potential build strengths in path of exile. There has always been a buff/nerf patch cycle.

It is up to the player to decide if they want to gimp themselves with a low potential skill setup that requires niche gear to take off, or play something strong that is easy to build around and enjoy.

That being said 'screen/boss freezer' is already an existing archetype in this game. There are many different ways to create a character with long duration high potency freezes and herald of ice screen shattering, it's not something new that werewolf does, neither is burst damage windows during a big freeze.

I gravitate towards freezing gameplay in SSF because typically I cannot power through with ideal gear, and being able to do big 'setups' is a nice way to not rely on raw sustained output.

Dude, a casual player is someone who works for 8 hours, play aprox. 2-4 hours and then it goes to sleep for like another 8 to 10 hours. They have a life besides this game.

I play casually, with two characters ( on standard vaal league ) and i am in act 3 with both of them. There is no way, you all played "casually" this is not, and will be not a "casual game".

And from my point of view, casual players are thrown out of the window, because in "standard running league" they will get the worst deals, so there is not point playing that mode. Maybe with some "friends" for fun and level/gear up faster.

The best decision for a casual player is to play standard, non-league content or maybe SSF non-league content.

Besides, the game is EA for now, no PvP, no real "competition" ... besides the drag races that GGG makes just to see how players ruin campaign and speed up maps to never complete it. Something for "the speed-runners" as you say.

And let me tell you about speed-runners, most of them ... like 89% their playstyle is not casual.

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onetruelai#7327 a écrit :

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Konried#2763 a écrit :

Targeting expedition was a viable way to acquire strong-enough gear for progression to the point where I can blast juiced T15 maps.

Dude how do you even "target" expeditions. I barely get any in the wild and there's no tablets. Prior to 0.3.1 you could actually "target" the mechanics, but now it's just luck.

I targeted expedition in my 0.3 SSF run, which included a lot of time after 0.3.1. I'm not sure whether temple is better in 0.4, but it's different, so I'm targeting temple for now.

To target expedition, set explosives so your first remnants are for quantity and quality of either monster drops or chests. Then, whichever one it is, make sure the rest of your explosives are on those. Drops from Runic monsters? Make sure you're unearthing lots of runic monsters. Same for chests.

I found it better to use the expedition currency to fuel the recombinator, instead of trading with the NPCs.

Off topic, but the runic tablet drop rate seems fixed, so that's probably viable in SSF now.