Hey Friends! I hinted yesterday that I would be saving my thoughts about the league start for Lake of Kalandra in Path of Exile until this morning. So far I have been honestly having quite a bit of fun, but also have yet to get to the true endgame. Last night when I logged I had just entered Act 10 and was sitting at level 70. I feel like my character is dual-wielding “Fourth of July Sparklers” since I am running wands with my build. Seeing how much I enjoyed the gameplay style of Wintertide Brand, when it came to this season I was looking for something that would feel similar. So while I could not find an Inquisitor build focused around that skill I did find plenty of people reporting success with Storm Brand.
I talked about this a little bit the other day in my post going over a few options for league start, but I am following the specific build created by YouTuber/Streamer Velyna. If Pohx’s Righteous Fire build is the gold standard for what a POB should look like, this is several steps below that on the completeness meter but still worlds better than the explosive arrow ballistas build that I followed in 3.18. The POE Vault guide is pretty solid and I have mostly been following it apart from dipping into Path of Building to look at the tree every now and then. There are some things that I would have done differently about the build, namely choosing more defensive earlier as opposed to stacking them on at the end. This could simply be that Velyna is a much better player than I am, but there were some moments that I felt significantly squishier than my semi-homebrew Wintertide build from last season.
The seasonal mechanic this time around is pretty fun. It is focused on building a map using a device called the Mirrored Tablet, where you get to choose what sort of encounter you want to appear on each “Square”. This creates an almost roguelike experience of running through a map that has a certain degree of predictiveness. Each zone seems to have one of the mirrored tablet pedestals in it, and as a result, you end up being able to run a lot of these as you level. It honestly slows down the process of burning through the acts but ends up making it so you are overleveled most of the time if you are taking advantage of each map. The rewards are not amazing, and honestly feel less so than even the sentinel mechanic from the last league. Loot aside, I am enjoying myself when I run these maps but also seem to take a lot of random deaths… especially as you zone into a new map segment and get gunned down by every single mob in that segment all at once.
The biggest thing that I have noticed about the league is some weird loot problems. One of the changes going into 3.19 was that was announced it was discussed that fewer uniques would be dropping and that overall they wanted loot to drop less often but feel more significant when it does. I think most of us just assumed that entire statement was in relation to uniques only, but it feels like someone turned the spigot of loot down to a trickle. The biggest thing for me is that I seem to be struggling to get certain kinds of currency and then finding others way more often. Like at this point in the league I have more chaos orbs than I did the previous season but am missing so many other kinds of currency and struggling to keep up with things like Alchemy, Binding, and Chromatic making trying to get the right slots on the right gear a bit harder.
At first, the community thought that there must be some sort of obvious bug taking place and that Grinding Gear Games would be quick to patch it in. However, it seems like the loot drops are intended and potentially due to this previously undocumented change.
The second reason is that we removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters. We replaced it with a moderate (2-3x) increase to item quantity, to offset the fact that they often have more life than regular monsters and some cannot drop maps.Chris Wilson – Grinding Gear Games
The post this was announced as part of has apparently been downvoted more than any other post in the history of the subreddit. So much so that it is now pinned to the top of the Path of Exile Reddit so that folks can actually find it, rather than having to sift through the entire history of Reddit threads before getting down to it at the very bottom. The community is very restless and frustrated, and honestly, I get it. I don’t condone some of the extremely toxic stances being taken on the matter, because I’ve already seen more than a few open threats.
I think another aspect of the frustrations seems to be the continued focus on ArchNemesis mods on rare or higher encounters. It is my understanding that when this went in with 3.17 it was not very well received. I know during my time in 3.18 it was a constant source of gnashing of teeth among the community threads that I was reading as I was attempting to get into the game. With 3.19 the changes seem to have only exacerbated this frustration. I am linking the above video as an example of what one of these encounters with multiple stacked ArchNemesis modifiers looks like. I am nowhere near the level of this player but I have to admit… nothing about that encounter looks enjoyable to me. I think what makes it even worse however is the fact that when it does drop loot… it isn’t really better loot than would have dropped previously.
Right or wrong, I think this is what the average ARPG player wants when they kill something… a giant explosion of loot. To borrow a term from Bellular… it is the “bing bing wahoo” aspect that keeps us banging on these loot pinatas, and last expansion doing harder content absolutely felt like I was getting a constant dopamine drip of interesting loot around every corner. I’ve not made it there in this season but in theory tonight I should run my first maps, and if they are anywhere near as sad as I am hearing from the community… I am not sure how successful I will be in my push forward. I had so many hopes for this league and we have a gathered group of players… dozens of people ready to experience it. The problem is there seems to be something fundamentally flawed with the league and it also appears to be in line with the vision that Grinding Gear Games has for the future.
It seems as though universally even the content creators who are normally the most positive about this game, are down on the Lake of Kalandra expansion. This is somewhat depressing as a newer player and one who had been extremely excited for this new adventure. All of that said I am still having an awful lot of fun, but we will see how long that fun lasts if I run into some of the issues I am reading about starting maps. I am hoping that Grinding Gear Games issues a new update soon, to address some of the issues that the community is feeling. So far patch 3.19.0c seems to do little to address many of the core problems that have been reported.
If I were them, I would be going line by line through the logic surrounding loot and trying to figure out if maybe something got unintentionally modified. There is some really strange stuff going on, for example, this Redditor reports getting 57 flasks dropped from the same rare mob. While I have not seen that exactly, I did get 12 flasks off the same rare mob the other night myself. So it feels like maybe something is going bonkers with the logic tree that might be causing some of the behaviors that have been exhibited. I can go a day without seeing any alchemy orbs and then might get six to drop off the same encounter. The end result seems to be “less loot” but I am not sure if the goal of making loot feel more significant has been accomplished. In theory, since there are several of us playing, and we tend to pool our resources we might be fine in the long run. I have a feeling I am going to need those Chaos Orbs though to purchase items from the market because I am most certainly not finding a lot of useful loot so far.
The post Lake of Kalandra League Start appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I’ve been playing an exceptional amount of Path of Exile since I last posted, but I am not going to talk about that this morning. Instead, I am going to talk about a few disconnected topics. As payment for passage, however, I am sharing a cute picture of Gracie conked out on a blanket laying on my desk. When we first got her she was hassled quite a bit by our eldest cat Mollie, and as a result, she would scream her head off any time she needed to go potty… and we would walk with her up to the litter box and guard her while she did her business. Thankfully we have moved past this and she comes and goes freely from the upstairs bathroom where the litterboxes are at. However, she has started screaming at us for different reasons.
For example Friday evening I was playing Path of Exile and my wife was exhausted, and as such went to bed early. Apparently, my wife and I going to bed at different times is a capital offense in Gracie-land. I had moved from upstairs on Teamspeak to downstairs chilling on my laptop, and it was not long before Gracie was running around screaming at me. At first, I thought she wanted attention and I tried to coax her into laying on my legs like all of our cats seem to enjoy doing. She was having none of this and continued to scream at me until I agreed to shut down my laptop and head to bed. Then when I got to bed… it wasn’t enough and she took to screaming at me until I finally laid down in the position she wanted me so that she could curl up in the hammock of blanket that forms between my legs.
Last night we had a repeat performance of this whole sequence, as my wife went to bed around 9 pm, and shortly thereafter Gracie was telling me how improper this all was. I held out until around 9:45 when I finally gave up and went to bed. At which point she seemed to be satisfied enough to let me choose my own position in the bed and not demand the leg hammock. However the moment I decided to put down my phone and actually go to sleep… she hopped over to my legs and started purring. This is essentially going to be our life now.
In other news, I watched She-Hulk last week and am looking forward to more episodes this week. We really are living in this golden age of comic book media. The thing is that not every show has to be the literal best thing ever because we get so many different snapshots of the same comic book world. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy She-Hulk because I absolutely did, but more that the pressure that I am placing on each individual show is a bit lowered because we are getting so many of them. The CGI work was greatly improved from those early trailers that had a deep uncanny valley problem. I think the big thing I am looking forward to in shows like She-Hulk is a fleshing out of the world, and that not everything has to be building towards some major crisis. That is in part why I am looking forward to a lot of the Star Wars series as well because they are putting more content in the world and expanding it.
In other other news… for some reason, I have decided to start watching Bleach again. Well, I know the reason… and it is because the seventeenth season is about to be released after a massive gap. Why I am starting over from the beginning because I could not remember exactly where I left off in the story. To the best of my knowledge, it was somewhere during season 13 of 16… but it had been well over a decade since I last watched bleach and as a result, the rewatch is probably warranted. For those who are curious, the entire series run is now on Hulu of all places. Like so many fighting anime… it had become extremely formulaic in the late seasons but starting from scratch makes me remember why I loved this show so much in the first place.
I think part of why the first three seasons worked so well, is that there was a lot of “emotional payload”. There was this epic adventure that involved a suicide mission to save a friend, and because of this, it felt like there was so much more riding on the line than just fighting baddies. After the third season, it takes a turn into the formula of meeting a new super powerful enemy… that requires learning a new fighting technique in order to defeat. I am wondering how this is going to feel watching it play out in fast forward rather than waiting a week between the encounters. So far the pacing has seemed more enjoyable chain watching the show as opposed to constantly waiting for the next episode to land… and then having it be half retracing what happened the week before. The new show lands in October… but I have no clue if I will be able to watch all 200+ episodes of the series in order to be ready for it.
The post A Loud Cat appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight is a bit of an odd show because it is in fact our 400th episode of AggroChat. If you had told me in April of 2015 that we would still be doing the show in 2022… I probably would have given you some side-eye. However here we are and for the most part, AggroChat has above all other things… been a time that the seven of us hang out every single week in the lead-up to the show and events that often spawn after the show. Last week after the show we kicked around the idea of doing something special, which ended up materializing into a Question and Answer session.
Huge thanks to our listeners who gave us some questions on the spur of the moment. The complete lack of planning… absolutely fits the overall theme of AggroChat as a show. We had a lot of fun answering the questions so who knows… maybe we will do another one of these at 500 or 600.
Topics Discussed
It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.
Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.
I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.
Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.
Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.
Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.
If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.
If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.
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