Home » My 2020 Path of Exile gaming experience, as an SSF player

My 2020 Path of Exile gaming experience, as an SSF player

January this year I started playing Path of Exile, it’s an action Role-Playing Game (RPG) that’s famously known to be the real heir of Diablo 2. It is Free to play, the paid items are either for the improvement in Quality of Life on playing the game or for cosmetics and skins. It’s a Player vs Monster niche game, there’s a PvP system but you won’t hear anyone playing on it.

Some of the unique characteristics of the game are:

  • No currency. But the economy is very alive, very alive that people are creating websites/apps for the sole purpose of making the trading easier. The way it works is that players barter items usually using “crafting orbs” which are consumable items to change the attributes of an item.
  • Luck or Grinding factors importantly on the game. Just talking about this feature would take a lot. But to give an example:
    • An example of “crafting orb” is a Transmutation Orb, when you kill a monster, there’s a chance that this orb might drop (this crafting orb is not as rare as the other ones). If you want to consume or use an orb, you will right-click it and left-click on the item that you want to apply it to. For the Transmutation Orb, it makes a “white” item (pure without modifiers) into a “magic” item. A magic item can have up to 2 modifiers. And these modifiers are what makes the item strong. Which modifier and the numeric value of that modifier are all completely luck/probability-based. If your character is Spellcaster, the melee or physical modifiers might be useless for you, so you might want to reuse another orb. And even if you got the type of modifier you need, say “37% increased Spell damage”, you would still need to worry about the “numeric value” because you can still possibly achieve “75% increase Spell damage” so you might want to use another orb until you get the correct modifier and a relatively high numeric value. You will need to worry about this combination to all of the modifiers you want to apply to your item. An item can have up to 8 modifiers.
  • People regularly plays from scratch. Path of Exile releases major changes every 4 months which are called leagues. These leagues have their own specific features or contents, some of which might be added to the game in the future. When players started playing a league, they start from scratch, everyone starts from level 1 without any item, then after 4 months, the league ends, the player’s characters and items are “merged” into the permanent league (which nobody plays), then a new league will be released, and players will play from scratch again.

I have actually played the game before back in 2014, I played the game with my online friends when it was still being distributed by Garena. Then I kind of played the game on-and-off, for ~2 days, every time I feel like it (or when I saw their ads).

Playing as Solo Self Found and why?

Solo-self-found (SSF) is a league which players would join if they do not want to trade or party with any other players. This means you’re on your own, if the character build you want to play requires a specific item, you will have to find it for yourself, which is why SSF characters don’t rely on specific items but rather play the game with the gears they have found.

Playing SSF sounds unenjoyable right? Since trading is a feature of the game and so why limit yourself to enjoying that feature too? Well, I have 3 main reasons why I don’t like trading:

  • Trading takes alot of time. Appraising the cost of an item, putting your items for sale, interacting with people trying to trade requires too much time. And based on my experience, the only way to actually get good gears is to keep killing monsters, which would be hampered by trading.
  • The economy is controlled by clans. Just to give a quick summary on this point, a streamer named Empyriangaming plays the game always with his clanmates on party mode. The loot drops are actually multiplicatively better when playing on a Party, as PoE will increase the difficulty of the monsters but making the rewards a lot better. Just on the current league, Delirium, Empyriangaming got Head Hunter, an extremely rare and highly sought for an item in the game, within just a week of playing the game with his clanmates. Imagine how many sales of Head Hunter in the game are actually profiting these clans and in turn flipping and manipulating the economy with their wealth.
  • A better sense of achievement. You might feel like you have the rarest item in the game, but if you’re playing trade-league, none of these really matters. Playing trade-league, you don’t have an excuse on why you still have crappy gears or why you don’t have HeadHunter since apparently, you can get it in just a week.

My Build

I always wanted to play as a melee on the game and hopefully its something easy to play with so that the game is something I can enjoy on a stressful day. So I ended up with playing as Cyclone Impale for the 2 leagues that I played.

Metamorph League

When I started playing back in January, it was almost 3 weeks before the end of the Metamorph League, but I was able to enjoy it without pressure since I am on SSF mode. The biggest thing that happened to me in the game is my acquisition of the rarest item in the game, the Head Hunter:

I reached level 95 and waited for the next league.

Delirium League

They released Delirium League last March 13. I did not enjoy it so much so that I quit before reaching my target level of 95. The first 3 weeks of the game was very frustrating to everybody, the performance bugs and unbalanced content is very offsetting. To give an idea with these two:

  • Performance bugs – my FPS actually drops to 4fps often when I run the Delirium content and randomly when playing the game, which is very annoying because dropping frames means you cannot play the game means monster are free to attack you, then you lose the 10% experience you have been griding since the morning. I actually blame this performance bug on why I experience BSOD on my PC, which won’t boot up for 2 days until I have to manually troubleshoot it. They fixed it after 10 days of suffering. It makes you wonder if these people actually test the game before releasing it.
  • Content – running the content from Delirium is unrewarding and risky, which is the complete opposite on why players are playing these temporary leagues. It took them 2 weeks before they were able to start fixing this. It makes you wonder if they were even playing the game or they just slam these content to the game and be done with it.

3 weeks since the start of the league and right after reaching level 94, I quit. It’s probably better to play these leagues 1 month before the end so that you can be assured that most of the problems are fixed.

Conclusion

Path of Exile is fun, it actually exceeded my expectation, I did not even think I would enjoy the game since its just Player vs Monster, meaning you are only beating NPCs/computer. But I think the luck-based mechanics in the crafting is what is addicting since there’s always something enjoyable on gambling. But it might take some time for me to play the game again, I honestly think it’s better to just enjoy watching the streamers play the game instead of actually playing it.

Numbers

  • I spent a total of $70 on the game since I started playing it in January
  • My Metamorph stats:
    • /played – 13 days, 11 hours, 37 minutes
    • /deaths – 276 times
  • My Delirium stats:
    • /played – 9 days, 13 hours, 38 minutes
    • /deaths – 269 times
  • You can view my Path of Exile profile at https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/ZiriusPH/characters