i made a mistake yesterday. what happens pretty often is, i'll think "i want to play Diablo but not Diablo" and my first instinct is Path of Exile. then i'll go down a rabbit hole of reading about how complex and overwhelming the game is for new players, and after a short while the desire to play Diablo but not Diablo passes. this sort of thing happens with quite a few games but Path of Exile definitely takes the crown for most "maybe i should try this out oh but i don't know" moments

what always put me off most is the notion that i have to follow a GUIDE to a TEE or i will DIE in REAL LIFE. apparently freeballing my build i will almost surely hit a wall where i just can't progress anymore, and it's never worth collecting currency that lets me respec over straight up starting again. but first off let me get this out of the way

tree is large. people weren't lying when they said "path of exile has a very big skill tree" -- it has a very big skill tree. generally the way i play RPGs is i simply put skill points into whatever i am vibing with most at any given point in time, and that's what i'm going to do here too, at least my first time around. i will have a play around see What's What and then when i get stuck on Act 2 decide if i care enough to learn how to play this game

it's fun :) i've only played a few hours but i'm glad i didn't dive into any longwinded wiki pages beforehand. i very much enjoy getting a new upgrade or materia and going ooh i didn't know this was a thing i could do actually. i'm definitely wasting a lot of time looking through babygear drops on the ground and making micro-upgrades but i'm having a good time doing it. i'm also definitely inflating my perception of how long it would take to build up a second character after inevitably screwing up my first by doing this but it's whatever

i'm playing Solo Self-Found mode which maybe makes the game even more needlessly confusing for a new player but it's how i would play every online game if given the option. i figured otherwise it would eventually get to a point where most every grind in the game gets consolidated into a single grind to just make money. of course i say this as if i know absolutely anything about how money or grinding works in this game. hmm let's see how people are generally making gold. oh "gold" was only added to the game literally a few days ago okay

gold is used for some town management side thing that was added in this league. cool! cool? don't know how it fits into the rest of the game so i can't say. no microtransactions at least so i'm thinking cool with an exclamation mark. also as an aside i think it's very funny this game straight up calls them "microtransactions" at every corner, i don't think i've ever seen a game do that

here's my new guy Darkstink i just captured. i fought some creatures which unlocked the ability to unleash them in some sacrificial combat ritual arena to upgrade something? pretty regularly is this game showing me new UIs for mechanics i've never seen and cannot figure out how to use. i was just crawling around in a dungeon at one point and suddenly i was doing some tower defence segment? at least i think that's what was happening. whatever it was i quickly failed at it and an NPC chewed me out for it

on Act 3 now and starting to wonder if most of the builds are for super ultra endgame stuff, because it's been pretty easy so far. frankly i'd be fine with just getting to see the entire game this run and not be too concerned with obtaining +43655% Smelly Resistance. i did get one or two-shotted by this Act 2 boss but i respawned right outside and it hadn't recovered its health, so i just ran back in and pressed more buttons

what i do is i right-click to shoot a bunch of arrows, ok, then a Green Me appears above my head and continues doing the same. then i drop a totem that slurps up corpses on the floor to heal me. then i middle-click somewhere which teleports me over there, and leaves behind another me (not green this time) who stands around shooting guys. this is how i make my way down the path of exile, 20% of the time. the other 80% of the time i just right-click and things die. i could probably be studying my skills better but it's working for me. eight hours in i found out i have a second hotbar

ignore the guy in chat i unlocked a nice cozy forest home :) had to kill a few dozen hellmonsters and clean up their entrails but i can place down all these decorations to cover up the parts i couldn't clean

these guys just showed up i don't really know who they are. i'mma be honest i have Not been following the story if there is one, because it's delivered too awkwardly for me. the voiced lines are so slow and they're accompanied by massive walls of scrolling text that i can't read ahead because the voice is still two paragraphs behind aaah!! this is a game to be played through 50 times so i'll have plenty of opportunity to go back and pay more attention. all i know is i got banished to some beach for doing something bad (downloading Path of Exile)

Act 4 boss was a lil tricky! had me zip zoomin all over the place. i did this the other day and it was the point i decided ok, the game is now asking anything at all of me, it might be time to dig into some guides and nip some things i'm unwittingly doing horribly wrong in the bud if possible. didn't really play for a couple days because i wanted to wait until i could get high and make a day of it. if i had smoked weed in the past three years and remembered what it was like i would've known how bad an idea that was. or i just wasn't expecting even the basic beginner gudes to be so heady

before anything else yes i am using a loot filter now. my god. just downloaded the most popular "default" one so maybe i'm missing good drops but i don't know what good drops look like anyway

level 50 and currently digging into Path of Exile Deadeye Lightning Arrow League Starter Beginner Build Guide New Player Friendly Settlers League 2024 Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur 3.25.0 Shoot a Bow. was planning on posting a pic of my skill tree beforehand for all the exileheads to make fun of but i forgot and started respec-ing already oopsie. turns out it's waaay easier to respec early on this league with gold so this was kind of the perfect time for me to start playing this game weewahoo. i don't regret playing blind at first, i think it's very useful to have absolutely any context for all the stuff i'm reading. that being said a guide is now absolutely necessary since,

i absentmindedly clicked this button in the options. the button looked the same as the other checkboxes. i didn't read the little 'i' tooltip first. there was no confirmation window. i just clicked it and now tutorials are turned off forever. you know some people will say, oh PoE is too hostile to new players. and i would say well i don't think complexity is bad necessarily but maybe it could do better at explaining certain things. and then this happens. i was sat in stunned silence

i'm into this game, is where i'm at. but i get "into" a lot of things that i completely lose interest in after a week, and being "into" this game asks a lot more of me than those other things. plus since it's a "the game starts at the endgame and nothing before that means anything you weren't even playing a video game up until now technically" type of game, i want to see if i'm at least also into that endgame before i break out the concerta and get all sweaty about it. and literally because concerta makes me sweat