Right before PoE2 EA. Nothing special here realy, i’m just jerking ego and flexing.
Not rly impressed tho, i mean i was knocked and died on 38-40 few times (was playin my least played class - psyker). But Fortunes of War in V2 on Cata before DLC careers have arrived was much tougher, spent like 3 evenings with premade party swaping characters and changing builds.
Grinded Havoc with randoms in two days (i skipped like 5-6 ranks maybe).
Carnival was 40, but it was easier than 39. 39 was Gloriana with 4 mods. On 40 i think it was only 3.
Extremely narrow meta, depending on the map - if there are airlock doors (like on smelter for example) it’s much more efficient to skip blobs and rush, since Havoc applies toughness/hp penalties you wouldn’t want to pull out mobs just to have fun.
Dome, smite, relic, trauma, purgatus, flamer and high mobility melee - everyone runs with knife or DS, are extremely strong in this mode. Melee ogryn with charge is fine if there are relic, either way can be tricky to farm toughness under gunners shooting x2 times faster.
It’s anticlimactic for DT, this mode has 0 replayability value, it’s a one time puzzle you need to solve in terms of wich weapons and abilities are viable. People will just switch back to Maelstrom and play builds they like.
Oh unique thing is you have 2 bosses at once, scab officer and regular monstrosity and horde on top of them. Since officer is easy to kite, it’s better to kill monstrosity first, especially if it’s nurgle beast.
Only 4 mods!?.. But i though the whole point of havoc was to have an increased number with every few levels…
Thank god i didnt even try to do it. that would’ve had been so disappointing…
I was hoping the last mission would be a tsunami of modifiers. Like, pox, hounds, snipers, hi-G, monster specials, nurgle blessing, extra specials etc etc etc all packed into 1 insane mission for the mentally deranged to try winning.
There is a hidden modifier that decreases your HP and toughness pool. So you can say it’s 5 max? Also i have a feeling there are more hidden modifiers, like mobs have more HP, maybe it’s my halucination but i feel ragers were tanky af.
There were moments of huge ass waves of them, like it’s partialy only scab+mostly melee condition.
Control weapons and abilities aswell as aoe things rule cause of those two things i mentioned above.
I mean it was intense, cause hordes spawn fatser. And on 39 i think it was vent purge with snipers plus 3 Havoc unique modifiers. But what i’m trying to say, Havoc isn’t about war of atrition when you are constantly on the edge of dying, it’s about moving fast as 4 and doing objectives as faster as you can. And it’s not gonna be new Maelstrom, like Maelstrom replaced regular Aurics. It can be fun, but only once.
On havoc, i havent reached 40 yet but i have reached the final tier bracket, so i think I’ve pretty much experienced what they were going for with it. It really isn’t anything crazy, I think balancing changes plus the ability to simply choose our own modifiers would have been way more fun.
Not only that, cause your HP and toughness are caped lower than in normal runs game incentives a certain playstyle. And it also partialy kills items part in the build.
Like no wonder if some people can beat it with anything if they are good enough, but the difference between running knife/ds vs eviscerator for example in Havoc is too huge. Most people will feel being forced to run S tier stuff, instead of solid A. You probably will always have situations when in Havoc people say “can you take X weapon Y ability pls”
Also you don’t need to loot materials/books, so there is no slowedown phase. Ammo and nades are plentiful.
I prefer more methodical combat where you can’t escape and need to be careful with your tools aswell as resource management. In DT overall movespeed and CDR are so boosted, that you can’t be realy punished by the game.
Like yeah sometimes you can fked up placing dome or just cast it without real need, but overall there will be no tragedy, you just keep spamming dome every 5 meters. You never have “wish i haven’t wasted it back then”
GTFO is a good example, once you started door alarm, you need to survive waves. In DT you can skip combat by placing capsules fast enough. I don’t get the idea to move fast through the levels as much as you can to be efficient in the combat focused action game.
On top of that Maelstrom conditions have more variants.
Congrats with the milestone, I’m only at lvl 25 for now. The gamemode is extremely random, there’s basically no attempt at balance or steady progression through the difficulty. You can get a really difficult map with Lights Out that’s nearly impossible due to many open spaces or you can get an easy map with smaller areas no additional modifiers, both on the same Havoc level.
Also this mode narrows down usable builds even more due to all the restrictions, with Vet’s VOC being the strongest option when the other two ultimates were already considered to be weaker by the community or Zealot’s relic being almost mandatory. It’s also impossible to know which weapons fit each modifier the best, because there’s nowhere to test them under same rule sets and you have limited tries to try different builds, so you have to always bring your safest option. Also say goodbye to weaker weapons like normal shotguns and non-meta autoguns, because of ammo bags and ammo crates giving less ammo.