Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.
Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.
Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.
To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.
So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.
This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.
The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.
I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.
I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.
This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.
The post My ARPG Hours Played appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Welcome back to more of my Path of Exile nonsense. Hopefully, you enjoyed the brief intermission of cats, but unfortunately, I am still knee-deep in this season and have more things to say about it. Crucible as a whole has been a bit of a weird experience because the season mechanic is a bit of a dud. Sure you can do some wild things with the talent trees on weapons and shields, but you either need deep pockets to outright buy finished weapons from the trade league or an unlimited amount of time and patience to sift through the piles of utter crap trees to craft one that is even halfway decent.
This is a video from Spicy Sushi… which is an hour and six-minute long highlight reel of an over ten-hour long stream where he attempted to craft a mirror tier Elemental Bow by combining various Crucible Trees to get a perfect path of five nodes. Of note… a good chunk of this stream features someone else leveling bows looking for the nodes he needs and then feeding them to him directly… and then later outright buying bows from the trade league that has the stats he is needing when that person goes to bed. The sheer amount of work required to force your way into a perfect crucible tree is completely unfathomable and during ALL of that time… there is still no real loot to speak of associated with the Crucible mechanic encounters. So it is not shocking that most players are just hard “hoping” out of the content and instead focusing on what is maybe the best “standard” league state that the game has had so far.
For my part, I am loving where things are going with my Explosive Arrow Champion build. I’ve said this a few times in various conversations, but had I experienced the level of enjoyment that I am having now back in Sentinel League, it might have been this class that I bonded with as the best league starter rather than Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Nothing will ever be as “tanky” as my Juggernaut, but that strength comes with the weakness of being relatively slow to progress through similarly tanky content. I now fully understand why Zizaran was such a huge fan of this build, because once crafted correctly it really is an extremely tanky feeling character… with the caveat being tanky for DPS purposes and not the Juggernaut style of “I can just stand in everything”. I still need to be cautious and dodge mechanics that I don’t need to take. I also need to spend some time sorting out what I want as my pantheon tree… because I’ve not even devoted any effort to that. I would also like to figure out a way to become ailment immune at some point… but for now, I can rip through T16 maps and happily farm up sulphite for my delving expeditions on the Juggernaut.
When I recorded the last video with my EA Champion, there were some heavy caveats to that video. Firstly the character was effectively three days old and as such was only level 78 and had not a single gem leveled all the way to 20 or higher. Secondly being 78 means I was missing a ton of passive nodes, and when I built the character I tended to lean more heavily toward defensive ability rather than DPS ability just to make the leveling process easier. The end result was a competent character at T16 maps but a bit of a slow one. Last night I recorded an update video showing off what it feels like today now that I have recolored my bow, swapped out for some awakened gems, and also put on thirteen levels worth of passive points. The difference is quite remarkable and as I invest more points into a cluster jewel setup I think it is only going to get better over time.
More specifically the Large and Medium Clusters that I am going for should provide me the following traits.
Tempered Arrowheads
Bow Skills have +6% to Damage Over Time Multiplier
Bow Skills have 10% increased Skill Effect Duration
10% increased Duration of Ailments inflicted while wielding a Bow
Calamitous
10% chance to Freeze, Shock, and Ignite
30% increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills
15% increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments
Martial Prowess
20% increased Attack Damage
6% increased Attack Speed
15% increased Global Accuracy Rating
20% increased Damage with Ailments from Attack Skills
Blowback
10% chance to Ignite
Ignites you inflict deal Damage 8% faster
Cooked Alive
15% chance to Ignite
Enemies Ignited by you have -5% to Fire Resistance
Currently, I have the first three online in my build and they are active in the video above. The next passive point will allow me to slot my medium cluster jewel and then the next several after that should give me Blowback and Cooked Alive. I have no clue if I am reading Path of Building correctly, but it seems like this is easily my highest-damage build so far. In the grand scheme of things, EA Champ seems to be a happy medium between the feel of my Toxic Rain Pathfinder and my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. If I devoted the resources to scaling either of those they could easily do a good deal more damage than they currently do… but I am able to deal that level of damage while also feeling extremely sturdy.
As happy as I am with the current state of the Path of Exile sandbox… I think I still want to see where exactly Diablo IV is at. This weekend there is a big “Sever Slam” event where they are trying to stress test the servers and show off some of the changes that they made in the game since the last round of beta. For me… this is going to essentially be the last chance of this game to really grab me. I did not really enjoy my time playing the open beta, and my hope is that the gameplay feels a bit more punchy and fast-paced than it did the last time around. I am not holding my breath, but this weekend I am going to be at least giving it a shot. Since I played Barbarian and Necromancer last go-round, I will probably play the same two classes so I can compare and contrast how it feels.
Tomorrow I am taking the day off, not necessarily for D4 but because my wife has the day off. I am still not sure if I will feel the desire to blog in the morning… so if this is the last you hear from me this week I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and a wonderful mothers day.
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Good Morning Friends! I entirely blame Ashgar for pointing out that this stash tab MTX existed… which I then had to pick up because it looks hilarious. Essentially as the video shows, the dragon’s hoard grows in size based on how much currency you have in whatever tab you have currency affinity turned on for. My guess is it is based on TOTAL currency and not actually the currencies that are actively used in trading… aka Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, and Divine Orbs. From what I can tell my stash has now reached whatever has been deemed as the “maximum size”. This will be interesting to see in future leagues as it grows. We don’t really have much in the way of currency in the guild stash, so that tab is relatively small by comparison to my personal stash.
Yesterday I decided to record another one of my dumb videos showing off generally what it looks like to run content on my latest build, the Explosive Arrow Champion. However after last night, and several rounds of tweaks… namely in my skill gem setup… things go MUCH faster. I’m extremely impressed at just how tanky a Champion feels. Like when I was going through the Sentinel League with my poorly built version… I just assumed my definition of tanky was not quite what Zizaran’s definition of tanky was. However now that I’ve played a properly crafted EA Champion… I have to say it is not terribly far off the general survivability of my Juggernaut. I could absolutely see building a version of this that can do all of the content in the game, including deeper delve. Now I am just trying to increase my damage numbers.
This led me to spend a stupid amount of Chromatic Orbs last night trying to get my bow successfully recolored to RRRRGG. Best as I can tell… the way I have my bow built puts it somewhere in the 10 to 20 Divine Orb range… would absolutely be the latter if I put a decent crucible tree on it. I could have however gotten something workable in the correct colors for about 1 Divine Orb and saved myself a lot of heartache and frustration. Instead, my stubbornness kicked in and I burned through roughly 3000 Chromatic Orbs last night. The hardest part about this… is finding anyone willing to actually sell you Chromatic Orbs. This is true with any of the smaller currencies to be honest because most players don’t want to mess with trying to sell you an entire inventory worth of crap.
In truth, if you factor in my earlier coloring phase with this damned bow, I’ve probably spent about 4500 Chromatics on it in total. Originally my intent was to go for a RRRBBG bow, and I ultimately settled for RRRBGG because that is what I landed after burning through about 1500 Chromatics. However, in its final form, I really wanted RRRRGG, to which I went to the trusty Vorici Chromatic Calculator. This morning unfortunately I realized that I was using it wrong last night. The numbers that I was typing into the calculator were based on what the CURRENT requirements of the bow were with gems slotted into it. What the calculator expects however is for you to input the base requirements… so there is a massive difference between trying to color 106 Str 179 Dex 55 Int bow… and trying to color one with nothing but 179 Dex on it. I burned through about 1600 Chromatics before I got fed up and started doing yolo 3R crafts… which is apparently what I should have been doing all along.
There are a lot of parts of Path of Exile that I have noped out of entirely because of information overload. One of these is the common practice of using Forbidden Flame and Forbidden Flesh jewels in your passive tree. Effectively what this does is give you an extra ascendency point, and in order for it to work both jewels have to contain the same ascendency notable. Basically, when choosing my last points I went back and forth between the one I chose that effectively gives me a cheat death mechanic and the one I am allocating through these two jewels. Two points for what seems to be at least on paper a significant damage increase seems like a good trade-off. The other major tweak that I made last night is that I picked up a few Awakened Skill Gems for my bow Explosive Arrow Configuration. This is what that six-link looks like now.
Explosive Arrow – Level 21 – 20% Quality
Lifetap – Level 19 – I will finish leveling and quality it up at some point
Elemental Damage with Attacks – Level 21 – 20% Quality
Ballista Totem – Level 19 – I will finish leveling and quality it up at some point
Awakened Deadly Ailments – Level 4 – 20% Quality – Still needs one more level
I would have liked to have gone for an Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks… but those were in the 20 Divine Orb range so we will settle for this and hope maybe I get one to drop through Maven invitations.
So while I realize currency exists in the league to be spent on improving your gear… after my recent round of upgrades to my three main builds of the league… and the dumb Explosive SRS side project… I probably need to chill out for a bit. I’ve not run the numbers through Exilence in a while but just eyeballing my currency tab in the last six days I’ve spent roughly 1086 Chaos Orbs, 2 Exalted Orbs (spent on crafting slams), and 2 Divine Orbs (1 spent on crafting a bow)… for a grand total of just shy of 5 Divine Orbs. So other than the dumb amount of currency I spent buying Chromatic Orbs… I have to say overall every bit of it was spent in a way that made the builds more functional so I can’t say I am disappointed. However, it is weird to definitely be in a phase of “investing” in builds rather than generating currency. That said I took almost 10,000 Chaos Orbs into Standard when the last league ended, and I am fine not being in that situation again.
The post Forbidden Flame and Flesh appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I seem to have made yet another character in Path of Exile, this time I went down the rabbit hole of the Explosive Arrow Champion. I created a brand new duelist after work on Friday evening and by Sunday mid-day I had finished the storyline, assembled some gear, and was actively farming Tier 16 maps. It was a bit of a whirlwind leveling process, but in truth, I could have gone much faster if I actually wanted to. I spent a few hours putting on levels during Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 largely to allow me to sort out my gearing before making the final push for Kitava. This is yet another one of my thought experiments and serves largely as a way of testing my knowledge of the game to this point. During my Ghosts of Leagues Past post from last month, I talked about struggling in the Sentinel league with this build and then going back in this league and realizing that I had no clue how to layer defenses.
I know I have talked about POE.Ninja before in the context of it being the neutral arbiter of prices in the Path of Exile economy. However, I do not think I have talked about it as being a central clearing house for high-end player profiles. You can go out there and see exactly how active players are building their characters so for example if I wanted to look at a Champion playing Explosive Arrow I can easily narrow my search to that. It is very clear that the Champion variant of this build is not exactly “in meta” given that only 11% of Champions are using that ability and only 34% of players using Explosive Arrow are Champions. The vast majority currently seem to be playing Occultist as their ascendency, but for this thought experiment, I wanted to recreate the conditions of my very first attempt at playing a league character.
I can’t say that I followed any single guide in its entirety. I largely leveled my Champion as Caustic Rain and then shifted to Toxic Rain when that became available, and then finally around act four shifted my ballista totems over to explosive arrow. There are a handful of guides out there that I sifted through over on the official forums and poe vault but this one is probably the one I drew the most inspiration from. Even then I spent a good deal of time sifting through builds on POE.Ninja to see what players were actually using as their final setup at level 100. At this point “Belsplosions” is only level 78, so still missing a number of easy points but feels extremely good. I remember balking at Zizaran calling this build “tanky” but now I realize that I just did not understand enough of the fundamentals of Path of Exile to be able to build it in that manner.
While leveling I held off on a few key notables until I had assembled something resembling my final gear state. Essentially I did not want to mess with Elemental Equilibrium until I was finished gearing and could guarantee that I was dealing no fire damage with my totems other than the explosion. Essentially now my totems deal Cold, Lightning, and Chaos damage and then the explosion of course deals Fire Damage after having been debuffed against it. For defenses I am sitting at 79% Evasion, 82% damage reduction from armor, and 100% spell suppression chance which when combined with the Cheat Death mechanic built into Champion “First To Strike, Last to Fall” which heals me 25% of my life anytime I reach “low life” and my cast on damage taken setup for Immortal Call… it takes an awful lot to kill me. My major weakness however is the fact that I currently only have roughly 3200 life, which I need to solve at some point.
As far as gameplay goes it feels extremely smooth. I have a hextouch setup with mirage archer, frenzy, and greater multiple projectiles that keeps up my fenzy stacks while cursing enemies with flammability while also running around and constantly dropping my six Explosive Arrow totems. If things seem to be taking a while to die I drop an Arcanist’s Brand with Flame Surge and Infernal Cry which covers them in ash and blankets them in burning ground. This is mostly a bossing and metamorph thing but I occasionally also throw it into a large pack just to help whittle it down a bit faster. While the time delay of the explosive arrow doesn’t feel as good as say Toxic Rain for full screen clears it still feels good. I am not sure how many maps I ran last night, but I turned on my auto screenshots while doing a Crimson Temple to snag some screenshots.
As far as the gear I am wearing… it is a mix of a bunch of exceptionally cheap items and a handful of items that cost me over a divine. Firstly there was the Rain of Splinters Gem, which for a pretty nicely rolled one was 1 Divine Orb by itself. Then there was my crafted bow… which cost 1 Divine Orb as part of the crafting process… and then roughly another Divine trying to get it six-linked and in the correct colors. I didn’t get EXACTLY the colors I wanted… but I decided to call it good enough because I was tired of trying to buy Chromatic Orbs through the Bulk Trade site. In a perfect world I would have not done this out of order… and gotten the colors correctly by bench crafting sockets on the item rather than trying to brute force it at the end with Chromatics. Other than the Bow and the Unique Jewel… I have maybe 80 Chaos in the entire character. I had the Dyadian Dawn laying around but you can pick up one at least as good as the one I am using for 1-2 Chaos Orbs.
Basically, this little thought experiment worked. It proved to me that I understand enough about defensive layers at this point to be able to revisit a character of mine from past leagues that absolutely did not work… and make it fully functional. I feel like my days of questioning whether or not I was choosing poorly when it came to a league start are behind me now. I feel like I should be able to make ANY character in the future work knowing what I know now. I am not sure how to fully express how good that feels. Path of Exile is this insurmountable climb when you are at the bottom staring up at the summit filled with people zooming through maps seemingly immortal. While I still have quite the climb ahead of me… I at least see the path and am confident that I am not going to go over the edge and plummet into the valley below.
This of course means I am contemplating doing other dumb things. Wintertide Brand is an ability that I have loved in the past, and would really like to see if I can make a build work for it. The play of choice seems to be Occultist as most of the folks playing a pure Wintertide Brand build seem to be going with that ascendency. The big challenge will be to see if I can reverse engineer something resembling a viable POB from the various profiles I have access to. I am contemplating turning my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer into a Cold Dot Wintertide Occultist, and then liquidating the gear that I no longer need for that build. This could force me down a path of a side project I had already been working on… which is to find a Champion Kite Shield with the node that allows you to sell it for a Unique… aka Aegis Aurora. I am not sure if I am going down this path of madness yet.. but knowing me… this is probably a thing that I am going to do at some point.
As for why I am still seemingly so easily amused by Path of Exile Crucible league… even when I don’t really love the league mechanic itself? Who knows! I am going with it until my brain decides that it is no longer getting enjoyment from this process. I hope you all have a most wonderful week and for me… I am hoping mine is more tolerable than the last few.
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