You should at least play until you get a feel for the support gems. Furthermore, once you reach the 3rd difficulty, enemies will start spraying Chaos damage like it's Happy Hour on Ladies' Night. I had to respec quite a few passive nodes on my necro build to adapt to that, effectively going from a high HP and medium energy shield (ES) character to an ES-buffed character with Chaos Inoculation (passive skill that makes you immune to Chaos damage, but causes your HP to be reduced to 1)

That's what I love about PoE, there's a couple of game/character altering skills.

I've been enjoying the beta quite a bit. The skill gem system is pretty neat, and I'm only just starting to scratch the surface with what the support gems can do. The passive skill tree is also particularly nice, and really appeals to my desire to carefully plan out my characters in aRPGs. Unfortunately after running smoothly for quite a while the game starting giving me random bluescreens every hour or so. I'll see if I can pass along the details of the crashes to the devs along with dumps that were generated following the crashes, but I think I'll be setting this aside for the time being, and hope that they get the client to be a bit more stable by the time they go to open beta.

Did any of you buy extra stash tabs? I'm thinking of buying 3 more, in addition to the 3 I already bought (which will give me a total of 10). 7 stash tabs is really not enough :(

No, and I'm not sure I need as many as you seem to have, but I think this is one of the better store purchases. They're in no way stingy with tabs, but I tend to want a few more than default.

Trust me, when you're trying to hoard Alchemy orbs, you'll need a lot of stash tabs :P

More people really need to play this :(

Any idea what the numbers were for OB, I remember the last one was only 55K.

No idea man. Dont' think they released the numbers for the last OB.

I dont know if they actually release them, just a dev came on during the stress test and said 55K was the highest number on.

Don't get too excited now, but...

It looks like 0.9.13 will roll next week! \o/

I'm in the beta, but I'm waiting until they upload act 3 and make characters 'permanent' before I really invest any time in it. The brief moments I had with it did seem pretty good, however.

So, seems I missed the party. Due to loving every second of TL2, I've just started looking into PoE, and it looks pretty awesome. However, I keep paying to get beta access to these games, then finding out all the extra stuff I paid for is completely pointless, and it gets frustrating.

I'm also a bit frustrated by their current pricing. I know this is going to make me sound like a complete ass (and I might be), but I generally like to have the "best" of everything. If I think I can't afford the "best" or "most complete" version of something, I simply don't get it at all. Yet the "best" version of this seems to be $1000 which I'm not paying for a free game I've never even tried. So which one of the many slightly absurd price points should I go for? I was thinking about the Silver thing because the bird looks cool, but I'm not quite retarded enough to spend $100 just to get a digital bird that doesn't actually seem to do anything. Or does it? I don't know, and seems I can't find out without buying it.

Any clues anyone?

Edit: The gold bird looks even cooler :/

I backed the Silver tier. No regrets. Game is awesome, and the devs are really committed to making the best game they can. The kiwis are purely for aesthetic purposes only, but they're very nice to have around, because firstly, they sing for you in battle (it gets very depressing without their constant chirping when clearing dungeons), and secondly, it's just cool to have a pet kiwi run around with you in town when everybody else doesn't have one.

It's a free game, but I can tell you that even in closed beta, the quality of the game doesn't show it. It's that professionally made.

Also, the kiwis are actually freebies, in a way. Whatever you pay for the items (sans shipping) goes straight into your account as item shop credits. If you buy the beta access tier at $10, you get 100 credits. The beta access is just their way of thanking you. How cool is that!

Between TL2 and PoE, I actually prefer PoE slightly more. TL2 has crunchier, meatier combat, but PoE's skills system really blows the competition out of the water (well the competition that I have played, at least). You won't know it until you try it for yourself, seeing is believing, yadda yadda.

Thanks for the tip. Again, I know this will make me sound like a complete tool, but I didn't want to be running around with a silver pet if everyone else has a gold one. I take it from what you said that most people don't? Also, how straight foorward is the whole thing? Some of these games confuse the hell out of me, one of the things I like about TL2 is that I always have some idea of where to go and what to do. I never tried D3 (or D2) so can't use that for comparison.

Edit: And what do the in game credits actually get you? It says it's not pay to win, which is a shame as that's the only way I ever win anything :/