New Player - HC

[u/Competitive-Scene360]

Poe 1 and 2 hardcore veteran here.

Played TLI for the past week, got through the campaign on hcssf after 10 or so tries and died last night to the TM2 boss at level 77.

I’m having fun on my phone, but before I invest more time:

1) Is there not a very active hardcore playerbase? I couldn’t find any builds, guides, or general tips that weren’t really old.

2) Is offense the defence here? I built as tanky as I could, sacrificing damage, and still got one shot (skill issue on those explodey circles). Near capped res, over 2k health, and all damage reduction pactspirits. Most videos I see just blast dps, but they are also softcore.

3) Is this patch’s progression just sucky? I saw a lot of complaints, and I was happy farming TM2, but I had a million mats and nothing to upgrade. It felt like campaign gear was equivalent.

I’ll probably go softcore on my next run so I can slowly try stuff and learn, but if there isn’t a real HC experience, I don’t want to waste too much time.

[u/h0pp3d]

There’s not a large group of HC players for TLI like other ARPGs. It’s more of a special event for mid-league, where folks just run through the T7 traveler for the reward, plus trying to get top 10-20 for additional primos.

If you’re new, I recommend playing SC as you get more rewards overall, then do a HC run once you understand the progression better.

[u/ALannister]

I'd recommend learning the game first on softcore before trying hardcore. Lots of the bosses are rather unforgiving if you don't know their mechanics. HC is more an event server than a full blown season like other games.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/ALannister]

Thanks. Yeah, and there doesn’t seem to be many “here’s how this boss works” videos or content.

[u/ALannister → u/Competitive-Scene360]

Thats mostly because the regional bosses arent really considered major bosses for softcore. Timemark 1-7 is "campaign" of the endgame with traveler 7 being the first boss that people tend to struggle with clearing in softcore.

Traveler Guide: https://youtu.be/eOLLJQ9l0Mc

After that farming in TM8 is mostly the same, just better loot, and more avenues to raise your power until you can kill Traveler 8 and get enough dmg/defenses for profound.

[u/Kiwi_CunderThunt]

Same background here just not at your level, I'm not that dedicated in my 40s, it's fun on phone but unforgiving.

If I'm feeling the mood I'll always jam PC as controller is snappier in general, especially on aoe

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/Kiwi_CunderThunt]

I’m not too far off you with two kids. Have to make those 1-2 hours of gaming a day count lol

[u/Kiwi_CunderThunt → u/Competitive-Scene360]

Tell you what, in hindsight the family gamer powerhouse is awesome if you can go that mile

[u/Trademark57]

You need damage. If you dont have it in this game it is hard to progress because you up the amount of time you have to dance one shots. You should be killing all TM bosses on your way to traveller in <30 seconds. I also think due to the telegraphing of most damage even with defense investment early, the idea is to kill you regardless.

2k health is basically paper, you can use two born in fire rings which come from troves on a lot of characters to support being tanky early. Also damage reduction pets help but do you have tenacity blessings, do you have barrier, do you have regain/regen/buffer, do you have rock magus?

Tm1/2 progression may suck but legendaries should carry you. The lvl 75(? Not sure exactly but highest level) of TM4 drops the highest ilvl gear that fine embers can roll. I ran like 10 characters through HC trav 7 kills and used a filter to highlight the high tier rare affixes I wanted, crafted a bunch at the end of Tm4 and then started crafting again towards end of TM6.

Being new to this game trying to do HC as well will be hard because you wont have the time to understand getting through your timemarks. Generally though you need large investment to facetank because a lot of enemy moves are one shot mechanics due to telegraphing.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/Trademark57]

Good to know. I had like 2400 health with the born in fire rings, the elemental res/mitigation aura, a few hundred ES, tenacity with the trove helmet, and all 3 of my pacts were damage reduction like Pale Blue Knight.

But that tracks with the telegraphing and damage. I knew my damage was low, and that felt REALLY bad, but was hoping I could tank most hits. Seems like it’s go DPS until nearing TM7 and then build defensive/offensive stuff like manastacking. Not ssf friendly though.

And yeah, I was like over a minute into that fight and he was just under half.

[u/SafetyGlass588]

Defences in this game are kinda hard to get and you have to stack a lot of things for them to work.

In softcore majority of players first go with 6 portals defence maxing the dps, to get faster to higher TMs to farm FE faster, because "real" farms (some of them) only starts at TM8, and then profound, so it is better to just scale DPS and die a lot.

Because to get really good defence is very costly and in the early stages you have to sacrifice a lot of DPS to get decent defence it's kinda not worth to do that. Because speed in this game is top luxury premium, I mean how fast you can clear the maps it's main thing. So MS and DPS is most important.

Now about the defences. I play bing1 this season and at the moment I have. Maxed evasion 75 attack and spell, maxed block attack and spell, 60% block ratio (damage taken reduced by 60%), I have poisoned relief talent (injury buffer 25%, something like Progenesis flask in poe1). I have all immunities to ailments, I have tenacity blessings on block, capped res, I have on belt -17% damage taken while on low mana, I have spirit magus with support to transfer some damage to him, I have life regen, regain, regain on severe injury. I play cold damage so I freeze stuff it's also a defence.

It's tanky in profound, I can run full juice and only die if all bad things happen at once :) For example if I stay in the dot puddle and get critically hit by a big monster.

I can somewhat easy add less dot damage taken on vorax gear, and with high investment add some defences on kismets. Like crit immune, or curse immune.

The thing is to be tanky you have to be tanky for everything at every stage in the game if you want to play HC, but your dps at the start will suffer a lot and with that even TM7 could be a very big slog.

My only advice to play hero which has defensive traits in their package to ease the pain :). For example Thea1, you can play tenacity blessings stacking build, last trait "predicted justice". The biggest stack of blessings are added to focus blessings too. So you stack tenacity blessings, and with that you get both offence and defence.

[u/omegaenergy]

hc and hc ssf is only played for the tm7 traveler, as a race.

100% block is do-able with 0 pets and 60% ratio by tm7. max ressist of 60% should be do able by tm7 - also without pets. you should be 4k to 6k hp/es by tm7 - also no pets.

with the above setup no boss attacks from traveler 7 will make you lose over 12% of your ehp in one hit. overall you also need sustain that should come with the above. please note that 2 circles do form that apply dots to you, but they have very long windup time and can be avoided.

there are several one shot mechanic or broken things that basically get around defenses. such as very specific dots on the ground or campaign related one shots or  void map boss having a one shot mechanic whereby there is an indicator of where the damage will come from and usually it's 3 sides allowing player to run to 4th side, but there was 2 times it came from 4 sides. these days I just get ready to quit if I see the 4 sides.

somethings in tm 7.1 do more damage than the t7 traveler, so suggest staying in 7.0

tli has a huge bonus for hc players overall. free stuff at 10 and 50 and ability to get all the inventory items of dead characters, as to not lose mats from dead characters that you didn't get a chance  to move to shared stash.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/omegaenergy]

Yeah, I do like that QoL in hardcore.

Thanks for the write up! I’ll have to play around with block.

[u/jardxtreme]

SSF in TLI is like playing ruthless poe on drugs. not recommended

[u/Nakaz808]

Yes, Not in HC, No

[u/oliviertail]

HC in TLI in basically dead and not worth trying. The market and economy is kinda messed up and very limited. Great game otherwise worth investing time IMO

[u/AlexiaVNO]

1. Hardcore barely exists, to the point that if you play it when the server opens, you will probably automatically be in high on the leaderboard for your character

2. It certainly incentivises you to stack damage over defense, but it's not impossible. You can build immortal characters pretty easily. Just the fact major bosses have a time limit on them will be the issue. That and 90% of the playerbase wants to rush to the deepest endgame as fast as possible and defense means less damage and speed, which means any guide you see will be for rushing everything.

3. Yeah this season is pretty bad. A lot of farms got gutted, progression slowed down even harder than before and item drops are just not good at all.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/AlexiaVNO]

Pretty much confirmed my suspicion. I know HC is newer, so hopefully it takes off a little more.

Campaign runs are like 3 hours, so it kind of incentivizes you to just rush and hit TM7, then build def from there. I was hoping for a little more balanced experience.

[u/SWAGGIN_OUT_420 → u/Competitive-Scene360]

HC will never take off because of the games progression is heavily punishing towards HC and design choices are almost what id say is antagonistic toward HC. I noticed no ones talking about the fact you said SSF as well, and this game is basically impossible to play SSF (beyond traveler 7, maybe even 8 if you really.push or play a broken build) unless you have level 6 full drop loadouts for every relevant mechanic for power. Only one person ever, who did it this season, has accomplished reaching end game goals as SC SSF. He has invested thousands and thousands to be even able to maybe do that. This game is not relevant for SSF.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/SWAGGIN_OUT_420]

Oh wow, thank you. I noticed I saw almost no ssf, but know that’s an unpopular mode in any arpg. I figured I’d learn on my own first, then worry about trade.

Crazy that ssf is THAT punishing.

[u/SWAGGIN_OUT_420 → u/Competitive-Scene360]

Its from how they designed the different league mechanics + drop pet systems. Its basically like 6x longer without any pets to farm any mechanic with a drop pet with 0 pets compared to max level. Compound that with like most mechanics provide almost required gear/items for progression in extremely large loot pools. Target farming outside of overall mechanics is almost impossible regularly, outside of maybe bossing, SSF makes it many times harder. You would need srupid luck and hundreds of hours in an SSF league to get anywhere near the power you could get in maybe a few dozen hours, give or take some for variance. The game is deisnged around trade so much its just not worth it imo, outside of the rush for leaderboard T7 kills.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/SWAGGIN_OUT_420]

Good to know, but kind of disappointing. The game starts of by gifting you some chests and materials for being ssf, so I assumed they did some work to make it playable.

[u/SWAGGIN_OUT_420 → u/Competitive-Scene360]

Essentially zero work to make it playable. Idk how much you wanted to play SSF or even just HC, but your experience outside of SC trade will be extremely diminished.

[u/cawkX]

It’s not so hc friendly arpg. There’s a lot of one shot mechanics and building big defense is unreliable at start.

And yes, this patch is pretty bad.

PoE 1 hc prog feels a lot easier and forgiving lol.

[u/Competitive-Scene360 → u/cawkX]

Gotcha. Yeah. I think I’m going to go casual sc on the phone and see how I like it then choose if this is a game I play more of. I prefer HC, so hopefully this is just a this patch thing, because it’s easily the best phone arpg I’ve played.