My Glacial Progress In The Path Of Exile Endgame

There is no game I've put more hours into than Path of Exile. I've been there since the beta, played the game when it only consisted of three acts, and I'm still playing today's version with its ten story chapters and a weird Pokémon league. At this point you'd think I'm a hardcore veteran, who has seen, done and achieved absolutely everything. Instead, I'm still leveling my very first character in a masochistic relationship with one of the hardest games I've ever played...

Once upon a time there was an early beta of Path of Exile. January 2013. You could play cool characters like the brawny, hulking marauder or the agile, wisecracking duelist. I tried those for a bit and enjoyed them, because they worked more or less the way I expected. Then I noticed the comically oversized skill tree and the skill gem system and realized that, basically, every character can learn to use every skill there is, so I immediately wanted to do something silly and exotic, maybe even break the game a little. So I rolled a witch and thought, you know what, let's have her dual-wield claws and rip enemies to shreds in melee combat. Because throwing fireballs and lightning just seemed so boringly obvious for a witch.

Then came the zombies.

Of course the game didn't care about my plans and just dropped me a "summon zombie" skill during my first minutes of witch gameplay. Turn a corpse into an undead minion that fights your enemies for you. A couple hours later I was surrounded by pet zombies, skeletons and spectres, all of which came from the repurposed corpses of my enemies. Some more hours after that and I had raised my character's strength some more. I was now rocking heavy armor and shield-charged into hordes of enemies, pummeling anyone into the ground who wasn't getting torn to shreds by my undead minions. It was the coolest thing I had ever done in a hacky, slashy action RPG.

I immediately fell in love with PoE's skill system. Slap a fire damage support gem on those zombies - boom! Fire zombies! Skeleton minions with a nasty triple attack. Ghost wizards, who could be upgraded to shoot five fireballs at once instead of just one. Every skill, spell, special attack and minion could be customized and upgraded in fun and exciting ways! Okay, I definitely wasn't breaking the game or doing anything super exotic, but being a heavy warrior-type with tons of undead pets was still incredibly cool.

I added more and more minions over the years.

Back then the game pretty much ended after three acts. You killed the guy who got you exiled, he utters some ominous words as he kicks the bucket, then you could do it all over again on the higher difficulty levels. And that was fine. PoE felt about as "long" as Diablo 2 and was heavily inspired by it. I didn't feel like anything was missing, I played it on all difficulties and ultimately stopped again, because I had seen it all. 

Then came a new fourth story chapter. And then endgame maps. Literal maps. They dropped as items in high level content, then you could use them to enter deadly monster-infested areas, which were more difficult than the regular story bits, but also rewarded you with more experience and better loot. That stuff was fun, but also prohibitively difficult. Sure, endgame was now a thing. But basically, they could have slapped a sign right over the entrance. "You must be this meta to play." Anything but the most ideal (or broken) builds would just perish. And receive a harsh 10% experience penalty on death.

And thus began the grind.

I didn't want to start over with a "meta" build. I didn't want to spend all day trading for "best in slot" items. I started to grind out levels. Went from level 60 to 70. From 70 to 80. And started completing endgame maps. But PoE is deceptive with this stuff. You have a good run, then another, you feel that you've finally overcome that brick wall, that annoying progress-stopper, only to get curb-stomped by another pack of elite baddies or a particularly nasty boss. And with one quick death, all the progress you've been gaining that day is wiped out. And that's because I'm too much of a pussy to play hardcore, where death means death. That way, you lose everything.

Then came the ascendancy classes. Upgrades to all playable characters, which allowed them to specialize in completely new ways. Turn your ranger into a survivalist, who draws her powers from healing potions, of all things. Upgrade your duelist into a hulking slayer, who stays alive by draining the life from his enemies. And of course one of the specializations for the witch was necromancy, so I knew where I was headed. There was just one problem: Izaro's Labyrinth.

Welcome to being completely fucked.

Imagine a labyrinth, where you have to fight your way through room after room after room, trying to find the correct path to the final boss. Choosing the wrong path will lead to dead ends or a super nasty optional boss. The place is also full of traps. Floor-spikes shooting out of the ground to impale you, floor panels heating up to burn you to a crisp, gigantic swinging blades swinging to chop you to bits and all that sort of thing. Of course, the place is also crawling with some super high level monsters. If you die, teleport home or disconnect, you have to start over from the very beginning. And you must complete it in order to choose your ascendandy class. In fact, if you want to get the maximum amount of ascendancy points to full utilize the powers of your new class, you most complete the labyrinth not once, not twice, but four freaking times!

Until this day, the labyrinth is still the most divisive content in PoE. Because suddenly it's no longer about killing monsters. About having a good build. It's about timing, being able to read and avoid the traps and about having a decent enough connection, that doesn't kick you out while you're only halfway there. Super. So now I was spending all of my time completing the normal, hard and super-hard labyrinth versions. I have yet to complete the "uber" or "endgame" labyrinth, because I'm currently 80% into my level and I don't want to reset my experience to zero by repeatedly dying down there. I'll get my level up, then finish the highest difficulty setting once and for all. I hope.

Right after I'm done with the story, which suddenly contains more than twice as many chapters as before.

After inroducing ascendancy classes, the developers came out with a huuuuufuckingge update, which raised the previous four story chapters to a whopping ten. The game was suddenly twice as big and you could easily hit level 70 just by completing the story. Making progress actually became easier! Meanwhile, the Shaper, the final boss for the game's hilariously difficult endgame map system, received an overhaul and was now battling a new entity, The Elder, over map control, resulting in all sorts of deadly new monsters and mechanics randomly appearing all over the maps. So on the one hand it got a lot easier to get to the endgame, characters could become stronger than ever before and the challenges just got a whole lot more... um, challenging.

For over a half decade now, I've been playing the same witch, tweaking, editing and dicking around with her build. I'm finally using dual claws like I planned to back in 2013. Progress is so ridiculously slow, gaining a level-up at this point can take me anywhere between 5 days and a whole week of extensive play, depending on how many times I die. There are people, who grind their way from zero to the level-cap in a matter of days, especially when using the most popular builds and powerful items, while I'm crawling along at the pace of a snail with my own gear and build. Then there are people who absolutely lose their shit over the fact that, for the vast majority of players who make it this far at all, the game basically stops at level 90. Because at that point you get so little experience when you level up, the only way to realistically level up is to play content at such a high difficulty, that most less than perfect builds will be absolutely crushed, causing them to lose much more progress per death than what they could possibly ever hope to gain.

Maybe I should go back to Dark Souls. That was nice and easy...

I should hate this game. And in a way, I do. I hate the pressure when I'm close to gaining a level. Knowing that I could fuck up at any moment, lose god knows how many hours worth of progress when I die. Worst case, I'll get furstrated, throw myself at whatever killed me to get revenge and just die again. And again. Ruin everything. 

But you know... it feels pretty damn rewarding. You hit this roadblock, this brickwall, a point where you feel like you cannot possibly get any further. You have the ideal build, the best gear, you can't possibly get past this boss or that map. And then you sleep over it. Come up with new ideas. Change some stuff around. And what do you know, that seemingly impossible part of the game suddenly isn't so bad. Until you crash and burn at the next, more difficult obstacle. It's a fucking chore. It's insanely punishing. It's like a horrible job that nobody even pays you for. And I keep coming back.

I hate the experience penalty. I hate the stupidly oversized skill-tree, which is a dumb, fucking gimmick that should have been removed and consolidated into something more useful years ago. I hate having to re-think my build over and over, having to adjust to a game, that only gets more difficult and every harder to beat as time progresses. And yet, I hope it's never going to change. I never hated a game the way I hate Path of Exile. And I'm so fucking hooked, it's not even funny.

-Cat