wolcen

at least till the next poe season

how good is wolcen now

it's buggy af

but if that doesn't bother you, it's fun

there's a few busted passives, a few broken passives, but they're already putting forward a patch for fixing several of them.

how is the progression

will I get some quality time out of it?

i haven't been to far into the endgame yet

🚽

so far i think it's interesting, but it's... not poe for sure

needs some polish

like, they launched with some passives giving 10% health regen per block chance, when it shoulda been 1%

is there anything comparable to POE?

i'm looking for something to play between poe leagues

i think this is a good candidate for between leagues, at least for now. i don't know how it's going to end up due to how rocky this launch has been.

but i can't think of any similar games

I've been playing median XL also but that is kinda low budget

d3? kinda meh

due to being made by a team of 5 volunteers

very meh

d3 if I play at all holds me for maybe 8h

wolcen has a very interesting resource/skill system imo

after that the only thing to look for is better ancient rolls for slots

super boring

like, toxic/rend/physical are all "material" damage and thus are buffed by %material damage, toxic and rend both apply ailments but ailments are only affected by ailment%,

phys has a chance to stun

there's also elemental damage types and occult damage types

I heard that casters suck in wolcen

frost/fight/lightning, shadow/sacred/something

which would disqualify it for me. I play only ranged and casters usually

they do, because the spells aren't scaling based on weapon damage

there's also... a huge disadvantage to not running a hybrid build

due to the way the resource system works

for example, running a pistol + a catalyst (ranger/caster hybrid) lets you use ranged attacks to generate willpower, and then spells to convert the willpower back into rage, creating a back and forth loop for constantly doing damage

but there's also uniques (and very rare magic rolls) that allow you to cast spells or use attacks without having to run the hybrid setup

for example, a 2h sword that adds lighitning damage to attacks and spells and lets you cast lightning spells

or a shield that lets you cast sacred spells

(aka a crusader)

i htink the game has a lot of promise, but, in it's current state it's very... basic

or limited

there's things like two abilites basically fulfililng the same role, but one does 20x the damage so you'd never use the other

and... casters aren't totally broken, they just don't scale into deep endgame yet. the hotfix they announced today looks like it might address that

looks like wolcen might be worth revisiting in a year

although by then I might be playing PoE exclusively

the last 4 leagues every single league had me engaged longer then the last

yup. this last league was a blast, first one i've hit 36 on since perandus

still a bit bummed out though that so much investment has to go into survivability now days, makes things like mjolnir coc cyclone not really doable for endgame

Eh

I think they'll revisit the one-shottyness

i hope so... that's the one thing that drives me away from the game the most

i make a build i really enjoy, then... just cant play it

I've just started seeing dying occasionally as part of the game

I don't really like that this league has hugely curtailed build diversity. Builds that can afford to dump 2/3rds of their points into tankiness are king

then i swapped over to a mana guardian and i'm invincable

as well as super low budget builds because they can heavily invest in tankiness in gear and jewels

yeah, 4 ex and i could facetank pretty much everything. craziest thing ever

I hope you saw the post on the subreddit where a managuardian with 26k ES, soft block cap, flasks up, 40k armor and meat shield support flayer spectres got killed in 2 frames from a clean start by a metamorph

not a rippy map, just a rippy metamorph

i didn't

i also wasn't anywhere near that tanky, i was 8k es, 60k armor, with the armor -> es on block shield

vaal temple al'aj metamorph with the physical rain of fire and he got shotgunned

so i sustained on blocking lots of small attacks, anything that didn't 1shot me healed me

I think mana guardians aren't the problem though

HoAG is

the same setup works with molten strike

just isn't as fast or good at clearing

molten strike doesn't reach anywhere near as much dps

i feel like HoA really should be more... poison based

basically the issue is the skill HoAG allows whatever is running it to go absolutely all in on defense while maintaining dps and clearspeed, while other skills need offensive investment

yea

but they're also designing the content with these massive defensive builds in mind it seems

you could call it power user myopia

like, how do you survive as a health based build in a world where you can get 8k es with very little investment, while getting anywhere close to that with health is way more expensive

they're balancing by the fact streamers don't have anything to do after 2 weeks when they play 16h+ a day

and the sustain for es is so much easier to obtain too

then there's LL

which obviously isn't even an option for non-es

I exclusively play life builds because I love my instant flasks, I don't usually have problems with survivability. This league I played a pseudo-hybrid 7.5k ehp life based bane occultist

all the ES came from a crafted chest mod and a jewel

i much prefer life based, but i just haven't had any luck with them last few leagues

either i can't put out enough damage/clear to be viable or i can't get enough life sustain

my CoC golemancer mjolnir build this league had more than enough damage, 6.6k hp, a ton of regen, but it just couldn't survive metamorphs worth a damn

#1 problem was keeping the golems alive, so i had to invest into that quite a bit, then once that was fixed, i pushed to higher awakening levels and couldn't keep myself alive

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What I think GGG needs to do is to give endgame bosses a form of mitigation that absorbs more damage the harder they get hit. Short of doing something like that they're never going to be able to balance around builds with so much DPS that they can delete bosses without making the boss so slow for most other builds that it murders diversity

Years of history have shown they either can't or won't adjust balance to reduce the spread between the most OP builds and everything else

i feel like there needs to be some form of... defense that only works for melee

like, maybe some kind of aura they could take that makes them as a whole unable to ranged attacks, but gives them defense to counter the fact that they have to be up in the thick of everything to do damage.

That might work, you'd still have minion builds using it; but would be less of a fail as a melee focused buff than fortify turned out to be

like, it could be tied to a new "melee" tag, some kind of leech specifically for melee

and maybe some passives to add a layer of defense to it

I still boggle that their play testers didn't realize that movement skills would utterly trivialize it for ranged builds

i like the idea behind vigilant strike for example, it could be as smple as melee attacks passively generating endurance charges

fortify was supposed to be a layer of defense for meele

@Magisch are you feeling any better?

a bit

I'm gonna make it, but will probably be out of comission for this week

@Magisch that's better than nothing I guess :)

hope it improves soon