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This video was put onto Youtube, I feel most of you have already seen it.




Pretty much its a free to play game which has a very dark setting. There are currently 5 playable classes with a 6th still under development or something.

The skill tree is pretty nuts allowing any class to use any skill.

The company earns cash in the form of buying cosmetic items for your character.

I feel the vid covers better than I do but the text is just to give a lil taste of what it is since people may be at places not able to view youtube vids.

Getting it, As soon as I saw that skill tree, errrrr skill web

Looks pretty damn cool, will pick this up when it comes out.

I signed up for beta, it looks decent for a F2P. I need something to hold me until D3 hits. If I don't get into the D3 beta I will cry like a little girl who had her lolly stolen.

Nice to see Path of Exile getting some love around here!

I'm actually on the development team for this game - was hired at the start of this year, which has been a contributing factor to the lack of time for my cyberdaemon army.

If anyone has questions about the game other than "Pls can have keys?" I'll answer them to the best of my ability.

CodGod wrote:Nice to see Path of Exile getting some love around here!

I'm actually on the development team for this game - was hired at the start of this year, which has been a contributing factor to the lack of time for my cyberdaemon army.

If anyone has questions about the game other than "Pls can have keys?" I'll answer them to the best of my ability.

Yea I have a question(although not an all too serious one), Who designed the skill tree/web thing?? Its awesome looking and hopefully just as useful!

CodGod wrote:If anyone has questions about the game other than "Pls can have keys?" I'll answer them to the best of my ability.

"Can I has key" is different enough?
But seriously, as I usually play pure spellcasters I was thinking about witch as a first hero. Then I've noticed that top 6 players on the ladder are all witches. Is there such noticeable unbalance or just a coincidence? How does the team approach balancing issues.
I've played Starcraft 2 since the release and balancing seems to be a number one topic. Not the game, not the strategies but the "obvious" unbalance - ie. my army is the weakest and the rest are totally OP. (One game is no example but let's be honest - this situation is very common in PvP online games). The amount of drama and rage about this is huge even considering that collective IQ on the internet is close to absolute zero (Celsius). That kinda makes listening to the community a chore and filtering good messages from this whining crowd is an impossible task. Do you have a small and trusted group of people whose opinion you can actually depend on? You examine some gathered data and create statistics about PvP?
On the other hand what do you do with all the bitching. Do you try to try to post some informations or just plain ignore those people?
I know that it may be too early for this kind of problems, but maybe you already have some established approach or experience from previous projects.

pls can this guy i know called profdrwarthog a key?

johnscott10 wrote:Yea I have a question(although not an all too serious one), Who designed the skill tree/web thing?? Its awesome looking and hopefully just as useful!

I had a hand in what passive skills are available in the current tree, due to doing the work for the previous version of the tree. The previous iteration introduced a lot more passives (the side I worked on) and was really, really functional, but really hard to navigate. You could get heaps of different build by following different paths through the tree in different directions, overlapping at certain points, but it was really hard to work out where those paths actually were. The current iteration has been substantially rearranged since then - mostly by Eric, our lead artist, but with input from most of the team - to make it much easier to understand. If all you've seen is the video, then I can say it is a lot easier to navigate than that makes it look when you can see the icons on the skills and scroll around yourself, but it can certainly be overwhelming at first.
It's definitely functional, there are a lot of different builds you can get to, and thats quite hard to design in - things like being able to get all the sword passives and the one hand weapon passives, or the swords and two handed weapons, with or without things like shields, charges, armour, and so on which some players want and some don't.
In general not every apssive will be directly related to your build, but for the most part it's possible to get all the ones you want without getting any that aren't helping you in some way (+max life might not be exciting, but your character benefits from it - but a melee attacker shouldn't have to get spell passives just to move to where they want to be in the tree). This isn't perfect, and the current tree isn't final - we'll be improving things as the beta goes on.

Macok wrote:But seriously, as I usually play pure spellcasters I was thinking about witch as a first hero. Then I've noticed that top 6 players on the ladder are all witches. Is there such noticeable unbalance or just a coincidence? How does the team approach balancing issues.
I've played Starcraft 2 since the release and balancing seems to be a number one topic. Not the game, not the strategies but the "obvious" unbalance - ie. my army is the weakest and the rest are totally OP. (One game is no example but let's be honest - this situation is very common in PvP online games). The amount of drama and rage about this is huge even considering that collective IQ on the internet is close to absolute zero (Celsius). That kinda makes listening to the community a chore and filtering good messages from this whining crowd is an impossible task. Do you have a small and trusted group of people whose opinion you can actually depend on? You examine some gathered data and create statistics about PvP?
On the other hand what do you do with all the bitching. Do you try to try to post some informations or just plain ignore those people?
I know that it may be too early for this kind of problems, but maybe you already have some established approach or experience from previous projects.

Patch 0.9.2 just hit. Before said patch, Lightning based Witches with power charges and Shock Nova were broken (partially my fault - I bugged that skill good), melee in general was horrible compared to spells, and evasion (Dex) was a severely worse mechanic for damage mitigation than the other options (Armour for Str and Energy Shield for Int). As a result, the Witches ruled the ladder.

0.9.2 fixed the bug in Shock Nova which was making it broken and brought the balance of the skill down a notch, but it's still good. I suspect cold-based witches will be on reasonably equal footing with lightning for now, but we'll see. Fire will have to wait for more skills to be implemented to be really viable. The other major issues haven't changed - 0.9.2 fixed some obvious balance, but we're leaving the rest until we can do it right, rather than make knee-jerk changes without exploring the consequences.

0.9.3 is planned to be the "balance patch" which will iron out problems with evasion, bring melee up to scratch, and fix a whole host of other issues. Chris takes balance very seriously, and we want a lot of different builds to be viable for both PvE and PvP play. We get a lot of feedback from beta testers, which we do listen to, but we don't just change something because a few guys whine about it. There's a lot of balance stuff going on in the office at the moment in preparation for the 0.9.3 patch, which we want to get deployed to our alpha realm soon so we can start getting testing and feedback to make further adjustments before deploying to beta.
As for PvP, it's not fully implemented yet, so balancing around that hasn't started.

For a general overveiw of how balance is done, I reccomend Chris's Dev Diary entry on the subject - it's a little old, but a lot of it is still relevant.

As for keys, sorry guys, but I'm not supposed to just go around handing them out to anyone I meet on the 'net. Currently a random person signed up for the frums is granted beta access every 35 (I think) minutes -there's a countdown timer on the main site so people can watch this happen. Those who contribute to the forums have an increased chance to be chosen. In addition, Beta keys are randomly given to people in the beta to give to friends, and we sometimes pick people who we see being helpful and contributing to the community on our forums and grant them access as well. I have, however, gotten my own friends into Beta already so if I get picked to recieve a friend key, I'll probably bring it over here to Dakka - but no idea if that'll happen anytime soon.

There's no chance getting a key from the timer though, some people have 50 duplicate accounts, while I have just the one like a normal person.

MrH wrote:There's no chance getting a key from the timer though, some people have 50 duplicate accounts, while I have just the one like a normal person.

There are systems in place which prevent multiple accounts from counting for the timer. They can have lots of accounts, but it doesn't increase their chances.
Not going to get into what those systems are because a) I only know some of it and b) that information would help people find new ways to get around it.

@CodGod. Thanks, that was a bit too detailed for me. I haven't played yet so most of it was dark magic..
The diary was more what I was asking though..
Also I think you should work a bit on your internet homepage. It feels a bit lacking..

CodGod wrote:

MrH wrote:There's no chance getting a key from the timer though, some people have 50 duplicate accounts, while I have just the one like a normal person.

There are systems in place which prevent multiple accounts from counting for the timer. They can have lots of accounts, but it doesn't increase their chances.
Not going to get into what those systems are because a) I only know some of it and b) that information would help people find new ways to get around it.

Well it's not working, plenty of people with multiple accounts have got keys from the timer, there's threads on the forum naming and shaming those accounts.

I don't mind not getting key anyway. Not that I don't want it, but I intend to play with friends anyway so until everybody can play It's meh...
Oh, question: Is multiplier PvE better than Diablo2? In D2 the team never stayed together - it was not needed or even desirable. There wasn't any good synergies like in MMORPGs because every class must be able to run around on their own.
Is there any focus on trying to make PoE more team based or is it rather only single player adventure?

The game is intended to be playable by yourself if you chose, but the difficulty of the monsters increases with the number of players in the party, as does the number of drops. Trying to go it alone in a partied instance rather than sticking together will therefore be trickier.
The balance on that stuff isn't final yet, so I can't say how important sticking together and combining your attacks will be in party play, and I'm not really sure what the plans are with regards to this, sorry.