Path of Exile: Party Race

I didn't set an alarm but I still managed to wake up for 3pm on Sunday in order to run the party race thing. It was set to be an hour long and was both hardcore and turbo. Hardcore meant if you died you were eliminated; turbo meant that all of the monsters moved, attacked, and cast spells 60% faster. This didn't seem so bad for the most part but it did make it a lot easier for cold damage mobs to stun lock someone who wandered off alone...

The max party size in Path of Exile is 6 and we ended up having exactly 6 people show up which was convenient. 1286 characters gained experience this time which was a big dip from the more than 4000 in the first one I did. The party did much better than I did as I finished in 445th place on my own but our little team had Tom in 48th, Robb in 50th, Snuggles in 56th, me in 57th, and Kilan in 58th. Oh, yeah, and Sceadeau in 516th, and 695th, and 1179th, and in dead last at 1286th. Turns out getting stun locked and killed is bad news and catching back up is not plausible.

We did learn, however, that the guild gets a shared stash during this thing. So Sceadeau was able to run around in his own game picking up crafting materials and sticking them in the bank for us. Which makes me wonder if this is possible in the solo versions or if the guild stash is disabled there. I feel like it should be, but maybe not? It also makes me wonder if the winning strategy is going to end up with lots of people not trying to go fast but trying to find loot to prop up the main team of players. Maybe that team should be a single person, even? I don't know if being in a group is a net benefit at the highest tier of play. I certainly did better in a group but I did have a lot more personal experience with the game in general by that point, and I'd even planned out most of my skill points in advance. I did have to read the quest rewards though which has to be wrong.

I decided to take a look at the points for these things to see how it worked last season.  I found a 1 hour party with a bunch of weird mods but it had a scoring table... Finishing first overall is worth 3 points. Finishing in the top 20 for your class is worth from 10 to 1 point. You get bonus points for reaching a certain level with 13 being the highest. (Kilan was 12 but the other 4 of us did make it to 13!) Then there are points for being the first person to do certain things. Kill a boss first or clear a zone first, that wort of thing. They get announced in game which is nice.

There is also a table of unique loot that was awarded at the end of the season based on your total points earned. Getting just 7 points would have been worth an awesome low level amulet!

Looking at the class standings it looks like we all would have gotten 12 points except Kilan who would have gotten 9 (level 13 seems really important) and Sceadeau would have gotten nothing at all since none of his characters actually lived. There were 162 events last season and the overall winner had 1290 total points. So assuming we could have somehow played in all of them we were on pace to win! (Playing in all of them seems really inconceivable.) I did notice that there were some races last season that lasted a week which seemed really interesting...