completed the first half of the campaign! fighting (and scripted-losing against) the boss gave me a permanent -30% reduction to all my resistance stats, which i can't help but think just looks like them slapping a big bandage on early-game balance issues during development. since everyone just plays seasonal leagues i'd imagine players are generally okay with massive balance changes so maybe that's not the case. standard really sounds like a no-man's-land of bloated stashes, broken builds and power creep, makes me sad to think my character will inevitably be banished there for eternity a few months from now. fate worse than death

i've been taking my sweet time so far but that's quickly changed now. turns out Part 2 is largely the same areas and essentially a replacement for the difficulty setting, only with new story that i'm still not paying attention to. zephieheads know how it pains me to skip RPG dialogue but what am i gonna do, NPCs will talk to me about "Sword" and i don't know what that is dude i'm just here to shoot guys. plus it's become totally mindless since i started following a skill tree build and i'm itching to get back to a point where everything on my screen doesn't disappear when i right-click. i tried to follow a more in-depth beginner guide and off the bat i was hardly recognizing anything, then i realized it started from after the campaign. i'm itching to become a beginner

it brings me no joy to announce i have spent money on a free-to-play game. i probably don't have need for them yet but i couldn't resist the allure of extra stash tabs with cleaner organization, which people say are mandatory for endgame. i thought i got owned at first because you can buy points, but you can also buy "supporter packs" which give the same value in points plus extra cosmetics. so i bought $40 worth of points alone and coulda gotten a lot more with it buh!! but it turned out i can use those purchases to upgrade to a supporter pack. i didn't really need more points but. for another $20 i could get more along with the $30 and $60 packs. don't look at me i don't deserve to be looked at

i didn't even want the cosmetics i just felt like i was owed them. it actually embarrasses me to wear stuff in a video game that says nothing but "i spent money". may as well wear a big paper receipt. oh you spent money to have that on your screen, that's cool i'm looking at it on my screen now too and getting the same experience as you for free. this is my paragraph where i own myself for something i just admitted i did. also after spending $60 on a supporter pack i found out the game is owned by Tencent so that's great glad i could support them. anyway i bought this guy for 50 cents' worth of points because all the good pets (birds) were $10+

this is something my build has been heavily based around, and it has been tougher than it should be for me to keep it up. there were times when my life was within 10-20 of my accuracy and i would panic equip something with plus accuracy instead even if it was worse overall. i was sorely mistaken when i assumed following a build would relieve me of having to do basic math

killed diablo finished the tutorial no i still don't know how to play this game. i'm worried to keep going because i don't have an idea of what loot is worth keeping, what if this helmet that looks like garbage is actually part of a super secret vendor recipe that gets me a million dollars in real life

i kinda hate my character. she says the dumbest things after story events it makes me wish i played a silent protagonist, or there was some kind of character customization instead of me just playing as the Predefined Ranger from Path of Exile. i'm assuming if i played a more intelligence-based class the dialogue would be better. she'll enter a graveyard and go "The home of the bones... It's a shame what happens to us all. But I must do what's right"

endgame endgame [banging on table] more trees more trees more trees!!! i once again attempted to play this game stoned the other day thinking yeah i've finished the tutorial i know what's up, but then maps happened, and a hundred new gameplay and crafting systems happened. since reaching this point i feel i've been spending as much time on the PoE wiki than playing the game. i had a rule on weekdays to not play video games before 6pm but i found myself spending most of my time before then Reading about them instead

i rapidly go back and forth between "i really want to know this game in and out" and "a time-wasting toy on my computer is not worth all this effort". and sometimes i'll load a tier 1 map into the portal doohickey i vaguely know how to use and say well how bad can it be if i don't know everything right off the bat. and then i get thrust into some new roguelike thing i've never seen before and can't make heads or tails of, so i back out of that and head to the boss instead and it kills me in one shot. i see people say "i've played this game for 2,000 hours and i still don't understand it" and i'm not entirely 100% sure i want to be like that

maps are going well

started to feel like i was hitting a wall due to only kinda sorta following a guide, until the other night i rapidfire got, what i thought were big nice cool gear upgrades. so i was very exicted to play all day yesterday and finally feel as though i were progressing, instead of just continuously pulling the slot machine lever that is the map device. highest map tier i've been able to do reliably so far is 5. was like sweet 25k DPS i'm so freaking power....until i saw someone in chat talking about how their build sucked because their DPS was under 2 million

some things i have since learned: i'm having to pay attention to the very particular way this game words its stat modifiers on an item; "more" of something is multiplicative, "additional" something is additive. i have not come across a "more" mod yet and i don't know how to get them. also the "25k DPS" i got from my in-game character stats window which is apparently a hack fraud liar's window, and i need to be using Path of Building, a third-party build-planning program, for everything instead

i'd downloaded Path of Building before, loaded my character into it, saw a bunch of buttons and numbers and said cool well i'll see how far i can get before i have to buckle down and figure out what i'm looking at. and i'm thinking now is when i'll have to buckle down. i thought this was a spreadsheet game before but now it's time to spread the sheets into overdrive. i see people refer to PoB as its own beast entirely, almost its own game sort of, and PoE is just a skinnerbox version of it with nice graphics. doesn't sound appealing! doesn't really sound like video games to me

in other news i found out about the /deaths command

playing Hardcore in this game sounds insane. every death is near-instant 100% to 0%. and from what i've read it's not just because i'm bad, that's simply how the game is, and apparently it's a result of the game being balanced around players being able to instantly logout with a single button press? very frequently am i up against mobs thinking, this is nothing, until immediately it's everything