Vampires are Hunting You

Yesterday was the release of Diablo IV Season 2 and as I said I would… I created yet another Barbarian. I patterned this one loosely after my previous seasonal character because I though she looked cool. One of my favorite abilities from beta testing was Upheaval, but by the time the game launched it had been nerfed into oblivion and I was just too damned stubborn to realize that. Now however it has apparently been buffed and tweaked back into a viable state, so I am leveling with that ability and things seem to be going fairly smoothly. Admittedly I am only level 23 after a relatively casual night of play, and the game did not really begin to bog down in previous attempts until the 40s. I am largely following the path blazed by Maxroll and they have a decent enough guide to Upheaval.
The main content feature of the new season is the Blood Harvest. These are essentially the Helltide zones but better in every possible way. In a Helltide you fight to gain embers and then have to turn those embers in to unlock chests that reward gear. If you die at any point you lose half of your embers and the embers themselves disappear after a single Helltide event. Then there is an hour wait for the next Helltide to spawn in which you are twiddling your thumbs looking for something to do. Blood Harvests however are always up and while each one might only last an hour, the progress you gain in Blood Lures… carries over to the next event making it no big deal if you manage to catch the end of one. There are similar chests that show up around the zone and you can summon “Blood Seekers” which are special Elite vampires that drop keys for them. Additionally, there is a whole reputation system with whatever the Vampire Hunters Guild is called that unlocks various reward caches as you level.
The other side of this is that as you kill vampires you will occasionally gain a resource called Potent Blood, which then can be gambled on obtaining either new Vampire Abilities or powering up your existing ones. It costs 25 Potent Blood to spin the wheel and you are given a selection of three abilities to either unlock or devote some experiences to. The abilities get stronger as they gain levels and depending on the configuration of your gear you can have up to five different vampire powers active at the same time. While the Season 1 mechanic was pretty lame, this duo of Blood Harvest and Vampire Powers really does give this a more Path of Exile seasonal mechanic feel. Ultimately you will reach a point where you have capped out everything if you play enough, but it does feel interesting and meaningful to get potent blood that you can then pour into your abilities to keep making them stronger.
Where the seasonal mechanic fails… is that once again we have some required bag bloat. There are three types of seals that need to appear on your gear in order to equip items. Think Magic the Gathering casting costs… each ability requires a certain number of Pacts of a given type. There are items that you can pick up in the world that allow you to add a pact of a specific type to your gear and as a result, you always end up with four of your already very limited bag slots taken up by carrying around stacks of these consumables. The fourth type removes pacts from an item allowing you to start from scratch and make sure you have all of the right ones for your build. The deeper we go into the season, the more infuriating this is going to be because when you find an upgrade… not only do you need to make sure you have the right Legendary Ability imprinted upon it, but that it also has the correct combination of “mana symbols” for you to equip your abilities. While not as bad as “socket pressure” can be in Path of Exile… it still feels equally awful.
One interesting mechanic that I ran into this morning while popping into the game to grab some screenshots is what appears to be an “you’ve pissed the vampires off” mechanic. I was doing an event and during the middle of it I got a message scrolling across my chat box that said something to the effect of “The Vampires are Hunting You” and then I was overwhelmed quickly as several big chonky elite vampires spawned in to “whoop my ass”. I’ve not found much written about this, but it appears like there is some sort of “heat” system in the game where if you are killing too many vampires too successfully, the game is going to raise the stakes. I fought valiantly as long as I could but eventually, it became too much and I died… which seemed to reset the hunt allowing me to come back and finish the event I was already doing.
All in all, it definitely seemed like a step forward. Both the Blood Hunts themselves and the vampire abilities are fun enough to warrant chasing them… and they are doable from level one so they make this season feel immediately focused around the mechanics. From the sidelines however it did not seem to be moving the needle forward much in getting players to come back for the season. At launch I had over 200 friends playing this game and last night we were doing good if a half dozen other folks were logged in. Maybe folks are sitting back and waiting to see what those of us who committed to playing on day one report. I will say that mechanically the new stuff is enjoyable and so far I have not hated the experience of playing a Barbarian. I will have to see if the gameplay bogs down as I pour on more levels, but pending it keeps about the same pace and combat loop I am probably going to be enjoying myself for awhile.
The primary complaints that I have however are all related to performance. The servers did not feel stable… and even this morning there were times where things locked up and it was as though I was waiting for the server to catch up to me. There were numerous times throughout the evening when I crashed out of the client while teleporting or loading into a dungeon, and a few of those required me to open up the program manager and manually kill the client that was still stranded in memory. I’m hoping they will have some rapid patches that address these performance issues. The beginning of the evening was really bad and it lessened a bit as the night went on. However like I said even this morning… there were still moments where the client went unresponsive.
I still had quite a bit of fun though, or at least enough to keep me playing for a bit. Last season I got through the first four challenges and I am going to see if I can get a bit further. If you were waiting in the wings to see how this season went, then I figured you might as well pop in and check it out for yourself. I am sure before long I will have some of the same complaints that I always seem to about this game, but for the moment I am having a better time this season than I did last. The post Vampires are Hunting You appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Season of Blood Patch Notes

Good Morning Folks. Diablo IV Season 2 is on the very near horizon, and I feel like this is going to be a make-or-break moment for the game going forward. Diablo IV was easily one of the best-selling games Blizzard has ever created… but like a poorly sealed party balloon left out overnight, all of that hype has deflated. So much so that creators who have made their careers upon the Diablo brand… have started shifting focus to diversify into other games. The first season of the game was “not good” and now we have had two live streams talking about the future of the game and what we should be expecting for Season 2. Blizzard also dropped over 40 pages worth of patch notes shortly after the discussion.
I cannot deny that there are a lot of changes coming with this season. Several systems like Resistances and the concept known as Damage Pools are getting completely reworked. Additionally, there is a sweeping set of changes to the way that some legendaries and the paragon boards work in order to attempt to spur more build diversity. So I give the team a lot of credit for seemingly listening to some of the feedback from the players and then attempting to iterate on their design philosophy to address these. This also tells me that the player drop-off was likely even larger than I imagined because this is some significant “desperate to save the franchise” level of hustle. I do worry about what this meant as far as long hours for that team, but if they can nail this season and the changes I have hope for the brand.
One of the things to come out of these patch notes is an attempt to clearly tier the game into three phases… 1-50 campaign game, 50-70 sacred era, and 71-100 ancestral era. One of the big complaints that I had was that once you crossed into World Tier 3, anything that was dropping that was not Sacred quality was absolutely useless. This is being fixed by making any gear drops that are not of the maximum rank will instead drop as materials, which works similarly to how Diablo III Season 28 Altar worked. This seems like a really good change, and while you are in one of these tiers your level increases are going to keep raising the minimum item level so that you are in theory more likely to keep seeing better stuff. The idea is that you won’t move into World Tier 3, and immediately find the best loot you can possibly get for the next 20 levels, before moving into World Tier 4… and having the same impact once you equip your first full set of Ancestral gear.
I think the thing that concerns me the most about this plan, is that it spreads out the worst part of the game for me. I really hate the way gear works in Diablo IV. My “build” is less about making sure I have the right talent points chosen, or the right paragon boards assembled… and way more about making sure I have the correct legendary affixes attached to the right slots. Many of these cannot be pulled from the codex of power, which means that when an item drops… I cannot simply slot that item in and get an immediate boost of power without having to go back to town and scrounge around in my vault hoping I have a good enough aspect to pull from an item in order to make the new item actually useful. In Diablo 3 or even Path of Exile, the leveling process is extremely quick allowing you to stabilize the state of your gear quickly. After that you are just swapping out items on the very rare occasion that you manage to pick up an aspirational item that gives you a significant boost. While moving through the levels I fear that this is going to feel awful to keep shifting to marginally better gear.
The other problem I’ve had with both Season of the Malignant and now the Season of Blood… is that the “new content” that is being added to the game is borrowed power. Neither is expanding the scope of the game in a permanent way and instead giving you a neatly encapsulated seasonal chase that goes away as soon as the next flavor of the quarter mechanic rolls in. I hated the rut that World of Warcraft fell into by having a rotating series of mechanics that only mattered so long as that one expansion was live, and Diablo IV is heading down that same path. Sure you occasionally get a Path of Exile season like Crucible League where you have a borrowed power system in the form of skill trees associated with weapons, but I have faith that those mechanics will likely resurface again in the future in a more permanent form. For example, the Sanctum league introduced a whole rogue-like mode to the game, and while it was gone for the Crucible League it made its return during the current league as a permanent mechanic.
What the Diablo IV seasons are lacking is something that can realistically stick around and become a permanent fixture. Sure they are adding a few more boss fights in this league, and that is fine… but it doesn’t really do much to make me excited about grinding to 100 in order to complete them. Path of Exile has these pinnacle bosses as well, but it also has a lot of other ways that completely shift and change how you approach the game. Betrayal is an obtuse mechanic, but it gives you deterministic ways to modify your gear and obtain new abilities that you can’t get through other means. For example, I’ve been shuffling my entire board in an attempt to get Vorici into Research so that I can in theory get White colored sockets on one of my items, which eases socket pressure and allows me to shift my builds slightly.
This is just one example because there are countless mechanics that started out as the focus of a single League but eventually found their way into the game as evergreen content. I am a Delve-enjoyer, and I build characters for the purpose of being able to crawl through the darkness looking for interesting loot. Other folks might build entirely around the Breach league mechanic which opens portals allowing demons to bleed into our reality, which then in turn allows you to collect materials to fight specific bosses that award unique items. Over the last decade, there have been forty-one leagues, and each of them has left some permanent mark on the game as a whole. What I see instead with Diablo IV is a focus on creating disposable FOMO-inducing content… which gives me great concerns about the long-term success of the title.
None of this is to dilute the fact that the team has put in an awful lot of work on this second season. I hope it improves a lot of the problems with the game, and that subsequent seasons also continue to move that bar forward. It feels like we are sort of dealing with issues that should never have made it out of beta testing, but that is where we are unfortunately. There were just some poorly designed systems in this game that will need to be fixed in order to make the game better in the long-haul. I do have to say though… that the faith that Blizzard will put forth the work in order to improve the game is not really there for me. I worry that what we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction to the massive fall-off in players, and if Season 2 does not magically fix things… the game might just be abandoned entirely. All of this said I am certain I will poke my head into the season when it launches in a week or so to see how the game feels in its updated state. I think a huge thing for the life of this game is going to be erecting a PTR and letting players test the content as it is being developed. While Blizzard ignored a lot of the feedback coming from the community during the beta tests of the game leading into launch, I think they have realized that they did so at their own peril. The post Season of Blood Patch Notes appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome

Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.
The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:
  • One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
  • A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
  • A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
  • A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
  • A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.
The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.
The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.
We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.
I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues. All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship. The post Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Getting Started with Path of Exile

The launch of Diablo IV was a huge event, and it brought a lot of players who latently enjoy the ARPG genre out of the woodwork. Unfortunately, this mishandling of the game leading up to the launch of the first season has created a bit of a vacuum. If you survey the ARPG landscape you find many options with various benefits. Last Epoch, for example, shows a lot of promise but is still very much “in development” and lacks a lot of excitement regarding its endgame options. Grim Dawn feels a little dated, and while Wolcen has a great campaign it lacks a bit once you wrap things up. Path of Exile is by far the most complete package out there, but it has an extremely steep learning curve in order to get to the point where you feel comfortable with all of the concepts. For example, I am well over 1200 hours into the game and I still feel like I am just getting started.
The popular logic within the Path of Exile community is that new players should follow a build guide. I have done this thing… but quite honestly the “newbie” focused content isn’t quite “newbie enough” for someone just getting started with this game. The thing is Path of Exile has a lot of concepts that are fairly unique to this game. The problem is that a veteran of this game will just accept as common knowledge a number of concepts that you may have never experienced before. I feel like I am setting myself up for failure, but my hope is that I can help to bridge that gap. I do feel like the best way to play this game IS to follow a guide, but my goal will be to fill in some of the necessary 100-level coursework required to make it so that you CAN realistically hop into the game and follow a guide.

What is a League?

I am going to be addressing the new character creation process, but I am going to go a bit out of order. One of the first screens that can throw a player for a loop is this one, which asks you to make some decisions about your characters. Many ARPGs have the concept of a season and Path of Exile refers to this as a “League”. Essentially this is how the game adds new content, and there will be some form of a seasonal mechanic that lasts for somewhere in the neighborhood of three months before being replaced by another “league”. Currently, we are in the Crucible League and this adds a weird mechanic where you can add randomly generated talent trees to your weapons. When a specific league is over, everything migrates to the Standard league where your characters will reside from that point forward. Path of Exile has a wide variety of different game modes, and all of these started out at one point as “League” mechanics. If for example, Crucible was well enough received, it might at some point get reworked slightly and brought into the Standard league and as such become a permanent part of the game going forward. There are a number of optional challenges that make content more difficult. Hardcore for example is treated as a separate league where you only have one life, and if you die your character can migrate to either the Standard or current League mechanic. “Solo Self Found” or SSF is a special challenge that makes it so that you cannot trade items with players or have access to your guild’s shared stash. Ruthless is a relatively new mode where you have extreme item scarcity in your drops and player skills are not available on vendors and have to be found either from quests or drops. Generally speaking, I recommend players start characters in whatever League happens to be going on at the time and without any optional difficulty settings. Right now the Crucible League is taking place, and on the 18th of August, the next league will start. We find out this Friday what those league mechanics are going to look like. When a League ends, all of your characters are migrated to Standard and all of your stash tabs will be migrated intact as special “remove-only” tabs that allow you to withdraw items but not store new items.

What Class Should I Play?

This is the screen that allows you to choose what character class you want to play. This screen is a bit of a trap because if you are used to playing games like Diablo… your character class means something very specific. You might see the big beefy Marauder and think, that I need to choose this class in order to play a melee character. You might see the Templar aka the Old Man… and think this is going to be a cleric class and will heal people. You would be wrong, and I feel like this sets players up to make some wildly incorrect assumptions about the game. All classes in Path of Exile can essentially use every single skill available in the game. You can make a spell-slinging Marauder or a two-handed weapon melee-focused Witch. There are no hard lines drawn in the sand about what each of these can do other than the ascendancies… which is a rabbit hole we will talk about later.
Instead, it is best to think about the different classes in Path of Exile based on where they start on the passive tree. Please note… this is a wildly truncated version of the passive tree because I cannot really get a screenshot that has ALL of it in the same 16:9 aspect ratio image. There are six sectors to the passive tree and these are labelled based on the core stats that they tend to focus on. Often times these are referred to as “Pure Characters” and “Hybrid Characters”.
  • Pure Characters
    • Marauder – Strength – Starts in the South West Sector.
    • Witch – Intelligence – Starts in the North Central Sector
    • Ranger – Dexterity – Starts in the South East Sector
  • Hybrid Characters
    • Templar – Strength and Intelligence – Starts in the North West Sector.
    • Shadow – Intelligence and Dexterity – Starts in the North East Sector
    • Duelist – Strength and Dexterity – Starts in the South Central Sector
The Scion is a character class that you cannot start the game with until you have unlocked that character by playing through the campaign on at least one other character. The Scion is a bit of an odd duck in that you start in the dead center of the passive tree. It also has some other weird things going on in that it has a bit of a hybrid ascension path allowing you to choose from traits available of any of the other ascensions.
While your character class does not dictate the type of character you can build, it does however dictate what you have easy access to based upon the starting position. For example, this is my Wintertide Brand Occultist, which is based on the Witch starter class. I have spread out my points all along the top of the passive tree going both into the Templar and Shadow sectors to grab things that made the build work. There are a lot of nodes in the Shadow area that allow you to scale up damage over time, and then nodes in the Templar area that allow me to buff up the brand spells that I am casting. Almost all builds are going to travel around between multiple different regions of the tree as they seek out nodes that specifically bolster whatever build they are trying to accomplish.

What are Ascendancy Classes?

Starting in Act III of the campaign you will gain access to “Ascendancy Classes” which shift your character from the fairly generic starter class to something a bit more focused. Each has its own talent tree that is independent of the rest of the passive skill tree, and over the course of your leveling process, you will be able to choose eight different skill nodes in those ascendancy trees. They tend to lean in a specific direction for example if you really love Totem builds, then you might want to specifically check out the Chieftan Marauder ascendancy or the Hierophant Templar ascendancy. Do you really want to play a super tanky character that has a lot of defensive layers? Then you might want to check out the Juggernaut Marauder ascendancy or the Champion Duelist ascendancy. If you really love Minion builds… then, unfortunately, you are probably going to be pigeonholed into playing a Witch and then ascending into a Necromancer.
While the Ascendency class focuses the character in a more specific direction, it is still important not to try and think of them as being ONLY one type of character. For example, Toxic Rain is a very popular ability that causes poisonous rain to deal chaos damage to everything in an area. There are many ways to build this type of character and currently, there are at least four different meta builds for different ascendency classes. I personally played Toxic Rain Pathfinder which is a ranger ascendency, but Raider is also popular as well as Toxic Rain Trickster in Shadow, and Toxic Rain Champion in Duelist. When someone is building a character they tend to focus more on what ability they want to use and less on which specific character and ascension path that they want to follow. I love Righteous Fire and there are very specific builds for Juggernaut, Inquisitor, and Elementalist… that all have different positives and negatives.

What are Skill Gems?

One of the things that makes Path of Exile different from other ARPGs is the fact that you can socket any skill gem into almost any piece of gear and your character can immediately start using that ability. There are a bunch of caveats around that statement that we will dive into a bit later, but essentially the gems that you socket into your gear are what give your character different abilities. All gems essentially fall into one of two broad categories:
  • Active Skill Gems – These are abilities that can be bound to a key and are performed when that key bind is pressed or the skill slot is clicked. These fire off spells, swing weapons, cast buffs, or move players around the screen. They DO things… thus Active Skills.
  • Support Gems – These gems specifically modify Active Skill gems and change either how they work or the types and amount of damage that they deal.
Not all support gems can modify all active skill gems, and how this is determined is based on a “tag” system. In the above image, you will notice that there is a comma-delimited list of terms that appear in the first line of the skill. In order to use a Support Gem on Ground Slam for example, that Support Gem must include at least one of the following terms: Attack, AoE, Slam, or Melee. This is going to be true for passive skills and gear as well, but we will get into that a bit further in. Another key differentiator to get in your head is the type of active ability. Essentially everything is going to be one of the following:
  • Attack Skill – This is a physical attack and is the equivalent of swinging a sword, throwing a spear, or some other kinetic physical activity.
  • Spell Skill – This is the act of casting a spell or channeling your focus into something mystically.
This largely matters because the items you pick up out in the world will give you bonuses for different sorts of skills. For example, the Sceptre on the left says that it increases the Elemental Damage of the player by 40% so that specifically means that the tags of the skill have to have Fire, Cold, Lightning, or Elemental in order to benefit from that bonus. Similarly the Gauntlets on the right show that they add 11 to 17 Cold Damage to Attacks. In order for the player to receive this bonus, they have to be using a Skill that has the tag “Attack” in it. So scrolling back up in this case the gauntlets would give that bonus to someone using Ground Slam, but not someone using Holy Flame Totem. Often times you end up with gear with stats that you can’t necessarily use… because it is extremely rare that an item roll is perfectly applicable to whatever build you are trying to create.

What are Item Links?

The items that you pick up are going to have a number of sockets available, each of them with a specific color, and the possibility of having those sockets linked. There are also white sockets that allow you to put any color gem in them, but they are a bit rare so we are not going to get into them. In order for a support gem to apply to a specific skill, it needs to be “linked” to the socket that the active skill gem is in. Now this link does not have to be direct… for example, in the above image I have a chest with six links, and the very last green socket is still applying to the active skill gem which happens to be the green gem in the first socket. The order of the sockets does not matter in a link, only that they are linked. Folks tend to refer to items based on the color of sockets that are available. So in the above sequence of items, I would refer to them as RRRB, RRGB, and GGGBBR. More correctly folks often refer to things with a dash indicating the links so since the gloves above have two different two-links they would be referred to as R-R B-R.
You can change the color and links of an item but for the sake of being the most basic of primers… I am not going to dive into that at all. On the Scion that I have been leveling recently, I am using Armageddon Brand as my primary skill, and as such I am using it as my six-link. Essentially there are only two pieces of gear that can have six links. The most common of these is your chestpiece, but if your build can use a two-handed weapon you can have a second six-link there. Let’s dive into the chain of skills that I am specifically using with that ability and I will explain a little bit of the logic behind them.
  • Armageddon Brand – A brand is a type of spell that is fairly unique to Path of Exile, but essentially it is a magical disease that can spread between enemies. There are lots of different kinds, but this one in particular calls down a meteor from above that smashes into the enemy and deals area-of-effect damage. As such this spell has these tags: Spell, AOE, Fire, Duration, Brand
    • Swiftbrand Support – This skill essentially makes it so that brands apply their effect faster and then fizzle out faster as well. Essentially imagine dealing more damage over a shorter period of time.
    • Increased Critical Damage Support – Pretty self-explanatory, it increases the Critical Damage Multiplier for the spell. This bends the rules a bit because Arma Brand does not specifically have a tag that says “Critical” but it does have verbiage down in the body of the spell.
    • Concentrated Effect Support – This support gem makes it so Armageddon Brand deals more area damage, but makes the total radius where the damage is applied a bit smaller.
    • Elemental Focus Support – This will make it so Arma Brand deals more elemental damage, but can’t apply any elemental ailments. This is fine because most of our damage is coming from the meteor strike so that is what we want to increase the damage of.
    • Lifetap – This is a utility gem that makes it so any active skill in the link will cost life instead of mana. This is a common tactic that allows you to reserve your mana for other purposes and has the nice side benefit of giving you a buff to total damage after you have effectively damaged yourself to cast the spell. We won’t necessarily go into this… but you can also use Lifetap to give any Active Skill Gem the “duration” tag.
It is around this point that you are thinking to yourself “Gee Bel, that is a lot of nonsense to keep straight in my head” and you would be correct. Thankfully there is a faster way in the game to see what support gems work with which active skills. There will be a vendor in every act that sells skill gems that you have unlocked, as well as one in Act III in the Library that sells all gems that you have access to, and another one much later that does the same role. When you mouse over a support gem in the vendor inventory, it will tell you which skills you have actively slotted into your gear that it will be capable of supporting. For example, Generosity Support makes it so that Auras no longer benefit you, but instead affect your allies… which are anyone in your party or your minions. If you notice it tells me with a green checkmark that Defiance Banner, Determination, and Vitality can use this support gem… aka all of my Aura-based buffs.

Following a Guide or Yoloing It

Essentially there are two ways to play Path of Exile. The first is following a guide and trying to understand the thought processes that led to the creation of that guide. The second is to just get into the game and start making choices, knowing that eventually you will probably hit a wall and need to start over from scratch. I did not really come to love this game until I followed a guide… and even then it took me three leagues of semi-serious play before I felt like I really got a handle on how exactly this game works. Before then I made a lot of failed attempts to get into the game and created some pretty crappy characters in the process. This guide is less a guide trying to tell you how you should be playing, and more an attempt at helping you across the chasm of knowledge between where the guide creators think you are… and where you actually are as a brand-new player.
Like I said before, I am over 1200 hours into this game and there are still segments of the game that I have never experienced… and honestly may never experience. The depth is a huge factor for why I keep recommending this game in spite of the fact that it is so easy for a new player to completely drown in it. Having played and knowing what I know now… I do find a certain amount of merit in the “fuck around and find out” school of thought when it comes to a game like this. I think ultimately which path I would suggest you take, entirely depends upon you as a player. Are you easily frustrated when the journey comes to a hard impassible wall? If so then you would likely have a much better experience following a guide from someone like Zizaran or Pohx. However, if you are someone who loves to experiment and can accept failure and start over from scratch several times… then maybe your best option is just to roll something and go with it until you hit a wall.

But Can’t I Just Respec?

Technically the only decision that you cannot undo in Path of Exile is your starter class. You can respec your entire passive tree… all 124 points of it and even respec your Ascendency to choose another one. However, this is not as easy a thing as that sounds. During the course of the campaign, pending you do all of the side quests, your character will gain 20 Passive Skill Refund points. Generally speaking in order to do a full respec you are going to need to lean on Orbs of Regret that drop randomly in the wild. By the end of a league I have more of these than I can use, but before you get up and running… and can successfully farm content you will be strapped to get enough of these to reasonably change up a character. This is why the common logic is that if you hit a wall, and need to do more than minor tweaks to your character… you are just better off starting from scratch and carrying with your the knowledge of where you strayed from your objectives.
The world record for leveling through the campaign and getting to level 100 is roughly an hour. This is not something I could ever accomplish, but I can zip through the campaign and get to maps in about five hours. I’ve gotten to that point after playing many characters and realizing the flow of zones and some improved questing tips. Your first time through the ten acts of Path of Exile is likely going to take you multiple days. However, every time you do it… you get faster and I think before long I will probably be able to do it in around three hours. I’ve reached the point where I find leveling a new character to be one of my most relaxing activities, but it took me a while to get there. I know it seems daunting to start over, but the more often you do it… the faster you will get at zipping through all of the early activities.
Sometimes your accidents just lead you down paths you didn’t think to go… if you are willing to keep poking at it. For example, I started this dumb Scion character entirely for the purpose of beating Act III so I could get that achievement. I had no real plan for that character and am not following any sort of a build guide, and have already pivoted hard away from the skill that I was originally intending to follow. It has introduced me to Armageddon Brand, a skill I had never used and now like enough to consider properly designing a character around it. I consider that extremely valuable experience that came only because I gave myself the leverage to just start fucking around until I found a path to move forward. It took me a long time before I was willing to let go of the ladder and accept the possibility of a failed state. I am having a heck of a lot of fun, with a character that I never planned on caring about and gave the truly dumb name of “BelGlamRock”.

Barely Scratched the Surface

This is already a massive post… so I am going to wrap things up. As the heading says, I have barely scratched the surface of this game. I am not sure how many more guides like this I intend to create. The goal here is just to throw some terms out, explain them a bit, and give players a bit of an easier time starting the game. There are a slew of way more qualified guide makers out there that can pick up where I left off. I am looking forward to the announcements from ExileCon this Friday and the start of whatever the new league is on August 18th. I hope something I said helps you in your journey, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any specific questions. That is one positive about the Path of Exile community, is that generally speaking, most players are happy to help new folks get started. The post Getting Started with Path of Exile appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.