AggroChat

Too Many Greebles

June 4, 2026 by Belghast

I’ve been really impressed with my Minions build so far. At the moment, I seem to be able to just do some big chill mapping, as I am now making my way into yellow maps. Essentially, I just walk around casing flame wall, which then summons my raging spirits, while my snipers and vaal guards decimate anything that comes near. If you can solve the survival of a build like this, it rapidly becomes one of the most chill ways to do content. What surprises me is that it is reasonably good at both clearing maps and doing bosses, which I guess makes sense given that I spent so much time playing my minions build in the Mirage league. Essentially, once I solved resistances, everything else has seemingly been gravy. I would love more Life and Energy Shield, so once I finish up picking up minion nodes, I will probably try to buff those things a bit.

I think yesterday I figured out why I don’t enjoy mapping in POE2 as much as I do in POE1. It is that the maps themselves are not as well-designed as the maps in POE1. In order to make prettier maps, they have littered them with all manner of ground clutter that my character just ends up getting caught on. So it feels like I have to pay way more attention to pathing than I ever did in POE1. Sure, there are some tight corridor maps in the original game, but it feels like there are way more wide-open maps as well. Nothing really in POE2 is completely wide open, and it is much harder to do boss rushing strategies since the boss locations vary more than they did in POE1. I think they have tried to improve the mapping significantly, but it still feels like there are way too many choke points in maps, and too many greebles to get caught on.

Right now, I am working towards unlocking both of these nodes, which, in theory, will allow me to progress the central area. Everything in this area requires a t6 or higher map, so it is Yellow or better. It makes me think that once we open the other gates, it will be Red or better maps. What I dig the most about this version of the endgame is that it seems like every single map that I run in this area is giving me points to spend on the Atlas passives. The negative, however, is that there does not appear to be a way to respec your passives. I have no clue how many total passives that I get, but so far it seems like every single map run is giving me incremental progress, so it FINALLY feels as beneficial as mapping in POE1. That was another problem that I had with the old endgame: it required too much progress to get any points, and the points themselves did not feel anywhere near as rewarding as the POE1 Atlas.

I’ve actually rolled an alt as well because I want to play with the nonsense that appears to be the Spiritwalker. I’ve never played a Huntress before, so I am leveling it with a standard crossbow setup with the permafrost bolts, explosive grenade, and herald of ice. So far, it is pretty straightforward, and I am essentially following this pattern until I swap to Spiritwalker and can go tame my beast. I might swap things up earlier, though, when I actually get access to the game beast ability around 22. At that point, I would swap over to a minions hybrid and respec my tree to pick up copious companion nodes. I am not entirely certain I can do the specialization dungeon with crossbows, mostly because I have never tried it. I am doing well enough against both map clear and bosses, so maybe it won’t be too terribly hard. I still have to get through Geonor before finishing up Act 1, so that will be a determining factor for how long I stay with crossbows.

All in all, though, I am enjoying my minions build. The visual clarity is a complete mess, so thankfully, the minions mostly take care of everything. I am setting everything on fire, and then my vaal guards are making everything explode… so I can never actually see anything on the ground. That is the one thing that worries me as I continue leveling, because I will have to watch out for more ground effects. If I notice something shredding my energy shield, I usually try to move out to somewhere clear just in case I am standing in “the bad”. I am curious if any of you are also playing this league, and what your thoughts are. Drop me a line below.

The post Too Many Greebles appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ancients Did Return

June 3, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning, Folks. I did not blog yesterday because the entire day was a hot mess. I did not sleep Monday night due to severe nausea, and then spent Tuesday mostly attempting to make up for that fact with several naps. Chemo is some bullshit, do not recommend. I had every intention of blogging yesterday, but it did not happen, so you are getting a mishmash of what I would have said yesterday, with some additional focus from what little I played yesterday. To stop beating around the bush, last Friday was the launch of the 0.5.0 Patch for Path of Exile II, signalling the start of the Runes of Aldurr league and the Return of the Ancients content update. I started a pure Minions character like I said I was going to, and honestly… it was a bit of a mistake. In theory, you probably should level for the first several levels as something other than minions because everything is awful until you pick up Raging Spirits from Freythorn. I was stubborn and did not… and I also attempted to make Skeletal Arsonists work, but seemingly they have been nerfed into oblivion. You can see the current state of my character here.

This league start was a bit of a mess, if I am being perfectly honest. They once again did a free weekend for Path of Exile II, which had the benefit of giving them a massive spike in concurrent players. It also seemingly taxed the hell out of the infrastructure, and I spent a lot of time staring at this screen waiting for the zone to load. I can’t 100% be certain this was due to the influx of non-paying players because there was also a massive patch that happened to land right around the end of the free period. Whatever the case, when the free period ended… all of these woes went away. It was also a weird league start for me because of chemo and the low energy that I have… I struggled to focus on the game in quite the same way that I would have normally. I did not make it to maps, for example, until yesterday, which is quite a bit slower than I think I have done in other leagues. Most definitely compared to my Path of Exile times, when I am usually in maps by Saturday evening or at the latest Sunday morning. It is not like I am racing anyone, and I managed to snap up the uniques that I needed pretty cheaply, so it is not like my slow speed stopped me.

I am not really following a build guide, but instead mostly just chasing all of the really good minion nodes in the Witch/Templar area of the tree. I am only using two uniques with the build. The first I picked up really early on is Enfolding Dawn, and I think I gave a single exalt for it. The main reason we are using it for our chest is that it is pretty much the only way to get 100 spirit easily on a chestpiece, and we need that for summoning minions. The second piece is a mace called Trenchtimber, and we are exclusively using it because it has +2 minion gems on it. Literally nothing else about the unique matters really. You cannot dual-wield sceptres, or if we could, we would immediately drop this item. We are still very much in a world where plus gem levels matter more than any other stat in the game. The nice thing about rune forging in this expansion is that you can improve low-level uniques to be higher-level ones. I have done this to the chestpiece but not the mace, because, as I said, the mace is just a stat stick, and the upgrade has too high of strength requirements.

I’ve had some good luck. First off, I ended up getting a drop that sold for 4 divines, and that helped me fund a lot of my early gear. Since then, I have seen my first raw divine drop in maps, so that is always exciting. I’ve been using Scalpel for price checking, but honestly, I might switch back to something else because so far the pricing portion seems to be worse than what I saw with POE1. I might also just scale up the UI to make the elements show a little easier. It has been pretty accurate pricing-wise, because I have been able to price items based on its suggestions, and they eventually move. The economy is always the aspect of Path of Exile in general that is the trickiest, and also something that I have enjoyed more and more the deeper into the game I get. I know for Ace, the economy is the thing that causes them to bounce the hardest, and I wish that were not the case. At some point, I will probably attempt to perfect my gearing, but for the moment, I have 75% resists for chaos and all elements, and that seems to have made me pretty solid.

The new atlas has been pretty freaking cool so far. One of the big problems that I had with Path of Exile II up to this point is how aimless the endgame felt. That is no longer the case, and every time you interact with a league mechanic NPC, it launches its own quest chain, wanting you to do specific content for them to level up that mechanic. More than this, you can acquire Atlas passive points so much easier now, and the new passive tree feels infinitely more enjoyable than the previous one. I am just getting started, but I have already reached the point of pretty chill mapping. For the moment, I have gone into shrines to make them appear more often and also give me bigger buffs. Currently, there is no way to respec your Atlas tree, so I have been very careful not to choose anything that might end up bricking my progress. This version of the Atlas is so much better than what we have had previously, so I feel like, more than anything else, this gave us something that is viable for the 1.0 release at the end of this year.

While I groused a bunch about this on the podcast, the worst part of Path of Exile II is the first few acts. Once you get your build online, the game becomes pretty great. I feel like they should not make Act 1 anywhere near as rough as it is. Sure, there will always be builds that can one-shot everything, but the baseline build should not struggle to take down bosses. There have been so many times that one of us could not get through Geonir with our build and had to call for help to get a carry. Luckily, that was not me this time, but it is most definitely still a thing. For me, the boss that I personally struggle with the most is the Act 2 final boss, Jamanra. Once you get to Act 3, though, your build tends to have more than enough power to push through anything. I just think the early acts of this game need some tweaking, because I am sure there are a lot of folks who bounce before they reach the break point.

All told, I am pretty happy with this league so far. Minions have ended up being extremely powerful, especially the gas arrows from the skeletal snipers. That command ability is causing me to dive into some of the passives that I have never done before to increase command ability damage. I do, however, want to roll a second character and play with the Pokémon aspect of the Spiritwalker. I am happy enough with my current build, but the nonsense going on with the monkey seems too fun not to play along. They have said they do not plan on nerfing anything with companions mid-league, so in theory, I should be safe enough to build that second character. The challenge is that I am not really looking forward to going through the campaign again.

Have you been playing the Path of Exile II new league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

The post Ancients Did Return appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Mixtape Mondays: Te Amo Amor

June 1, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning, Folks! Happy First of June. This is a big month for me because it contains both my birthday and the birthday of my mom. We were a family of Geminis. This morning, I have another mixtape ready to go, and for those who are not already engaged in this practice… I love making mixtapes. They were a big part of my childhood since I had a dual tape deck stereo and made them for my friends, and occasionally for those I was attempting to flirt with. There is a science to the placement of songs, and my goal is to make it so that the entre composure flows from one song to another without having any abrupt shifts. Most of the time, I accomplish this and then post the result for my readers to listen to. At this point, I have thirty-one mixes, and my extra challenge is that I cannot use the exact same version of a song on more than one mixtape.

31 – Te Amo Amor

My girlfriend loves to sing Karaoke, and low-key specializes in singing love songs. I’ve got a few videos of her singing various things, and I think she is pretty damned good at it. So the other day, she was asking me what some of my favorite love songs were. Being the wannabe edgelord that I am, I cannot, of course, choose the standard fare. So this morning, you have a mix of the songs that mean the most to me that exist within the love song category. I am cheating by throwing in the Nada Surf cover of If You Leave, because I have already used that song in my love letter to 80s soundtracks called Tape Deck Held Aloft. The only truly standard love song is Brian Adams banger from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and it was included because it represents the song that I had my first slow dance to. I think the entire thing listens extremely well for being crafted out of such contorted objectives. The two most important for me are Lovesong by The Cure and Because the Night covered by 10,000 Maniacs.

Track List

01 – If You Leave – Nada Surf
02 – Always – Erasure
03 – Lovesong – The Cure
04 – Come Undone – Duran Duran
05 – Still Into You – Paramore
06 – I Miss You – Blink 182
07 – Just Like Heaven – Dinosaur Jr.
08 – Life Eternal – Ghost
09 – Eternal Flame – The Bangles
10 – Brick – Ben Folds Five
11 – Sexual Healing – Soul Asylum
12 – Because the Night – 10,000 Maniacs
13 – Let’s Stay Together – Seal
14 – Nothing Compares 2 U – Chris Cornell
15 – Everything I Do I Do It For You – Bryan Adams

Listen to it yourself

Another mixtape added to the archives. For those not in the know, a lot of times I will add the mixtape to the archives ahead of actually making the blog post. I have various beta testers who give things a listen through to let me know if I am crazy or not. I think this one is pretty good, but I am not one to really dwell upon the love song as a genre. What are some of your favorite love songs? What do you think would have fit well with this mix? Drop me a line below.

The post Mixtape Mondays: Te Amo Amor appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #570 – Hollowing Season

May 31, 2026 by Belghast

Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! We had quite the list of topics this time around. We start off with a bit of a postmortem on Zero Parades and how that game really stuck the landing. From there, Bel talks a bit about the upcoming final patch for Destiny and how it might have saved the game. Tam discusses his feelings so far about 007 First Light and how its Hitman DNA shows through while being a unique game and not a DLC. Many games were released this week, and we talked about some of them before diving into Mina the Hollower. We talk a bit about Esoteric Ebb, which is another game that shares some lineage with Zero Parades and Disco Elysium. Finally, we talk a bit about our league starts for Path of Exile II, and how the early game is a real slog. Kodra is having a much better time than Bel is, but they are both progressing towards the endgame.