i just started playing PoE with a friend. we live on opposite sides of the continent, so generally we just game once a week for a few hours as an excuse to riff low effort jokes. what appealed to me about PoE is that it's free and that there might be some pvp bullshit to get into later if we want. i also like to meander my way through making builds as i play a character to suit me. last week my friend's older brother joined us, and like this guy is the antipode of my entire gaming vibe.

me: casual, personal, goof around, low stakes and make jokes. i love cheap games i can mess around in creatively for years and i have a rule against buying AAA rated games within their first year or two of launch, if ever.

him: games like 40 hours a week at least. "wife mad" is like a trope with this guy because he games so much. top of the line rig. many consoles. wants to rush through all content to max everything ASAP. owns every hyped as fuck game as soon as it comes out. honestly, i do not see how the way he plays is even fun for him. my friend and i will be laughing so hard our faces hurt about some stupid junk, and he's like just silent waiting for us to get back to the mission or whatever. because he's so busy?

anyway, as soon as he sees my like lowbie act 2 witch, he starts telling me i need to play it a certain way and make a certain kind of build and this and that. like just sucks all the fun out of the room. he was the same way in every game i've been in with him. like who are these people whose idea of fun is to micromanage other people? not to mention, a lot of the time he's wrong about shit, but he talks about everything like he wrote the code.

we're all in our 40s, so it really baffles me that he hasn't learned to not do this or be like this. also, i think it's people like him who write builds and create orthodoxy in games, and also in my experience, they don't know shit about fuck.

lol fair enough. What kind of builds do you run, then?