When Path of Exile II was released into early access I had a pretty clear vision. I wanted to play a big tanky character that ran around with a two-handed weapon and a shield. I struggled to get this off the ground because starting off as the Warrior is pure misery. However given enough bashing my head against the wall I managed to make it work, and when I stumbled onto Stampede late in the build the rest of the game went much more smoothly. I used Stampede for clear and Hammer of the Gods to one or two shot bosses and life was sublime. However Stampede ate a pretty big Nerf, and it was already a janky mess to play and I just lost steam in trying to push forward. I made it to the end of white maps before I was lured away by one of my alts.
It was a night and day difference playing an actual “on meta” build and was able to pretty much steamroll the campaign. There were a few bosses that I had to take two attempts at, on December 20th when I last made a post I was just starting Act III Normal, and on the 23rd I cleared Act III Normal and progressed into mapping. I started out pretty slowly, but without really doing any work to fix my gear I was able to pick up where my Titan left off and started ripping through maps so much faster than Stampede ever could. The thing is… I was weirdly tankier, or at least felt it as Grim Feast allowed me to gather up some 11,000 Energy Shield over the course of a map. I’m now chipping away at Tier 13 maps and have done a couple of T15 maps which is the highest natural unmodified map tier available in the game. During all of that time, I think I have taken a single death in a map, and that was after doing a full clear and getting credit for it and going back to try a very rippy ritual.
Since we have no Path of Building II, I took some time this morning and input my build in the Maxroll Build planner tool so you could follow along if you so choose. Basically it is derived from the standard maxroll build, but instead, I decided to lean into a unique which is just fun to use. Corpsewade are low-level boots that have the effect of casting Decompose on any corpse that your character walks in the vicinity of… and honestly, the range is pretty wide for triggering this. So what this means in practice is that I am actively poisoning packs of monsters that I am fighting and occasionally either my Flame Wall or the Molotov cocktails that my Skeleton Arsonists are throwing will ignite the cloud of poison causing it to explode for more damage. Packs of monsters die extremely quickly, and this has continued to be true as I have progressed into upper mapping levels.
The biggest challenge of the build is that I am running two unique items and as a result giving up a chunk of potential stats from each of them. My resists are in a reasonable state with 73/69/75 elemental resists and 59 chaos. I am giving up a ton of life by using Ghostwrite to convert 50% of my life to flat Energy Shield, which I then buff further with the passive tree. I’ve contemplated giving up my “Fart Boots” as I call them and going with some 30% movement speed Energy Shield boots with a lot of flat life on them to push that conversion further. I could also go Armor/Energy Shield instead which would help to give me a bit more of a lead in the armor department for when hits finally land. Right now I am anointing Mental Perseverance which takes 10% of my damage out of Mana. I tried running with Mind over Matter and it was a bit much and largely the 50% reduction in mana regen made it too hard to keep mana sustained. 10% is just enough to help blunt the damage a bit.
The biggest challenge that I am dealing with is map sustain. You would think running a T15 map would not yield T1 maps… but you would be wrong. In fact I rarely get maps to drop that are of sufficient level to keep pushing forward. I need T13s right now to keep my quest going, but at the moment I have two T14s before having to slog through lower-level maps and praying for those unicorn high-level maps to drop. This feels REALLY bad, especially considering that I am investing in every map drop node on the atlas tree and also running as many towers with additional Waystone chance on them as I can. I do not want to have to buy maps from trade, because buying maps feels so awful. The only way to do it efficiently is to engage with those third-party community discords, and I would just rather not.
The other problem with mapping in Path of Exile II is effectively the same problem running the Monolith in Last Epoch. Unless you get some bonus content to show up, it feels bad to clear your way through a map. Then there is the ever-present threat of a single death causing you to lose all of the things that are buffing the map to make it feel halfway decent in the first place. There just isn’t enough going on and really when you kill the rares you might as well port out and call it done as opposed to full clearing, because it is super uncommon that anything of consequence drops after that point. Packs of blues really are useless, and only serve to slow down your progress. Loot in general feels like it is in a bad place if you are not stacking mass quantities of rarity. Essentially… right now mapping is pretty boring.
At this point, I feel committed to seeing it through and getting all of the normal atlas passive points by completing all of the red map quest objectives. Even those feel way less exciting than they did in Path of Exile 1. Essentially in POE1, you had to run every map at least once while completing the bonus objective in order to get your 115 out of 115 atlas completion. Here in Path of Exile II for the white map tiers, you have to complete 10 maps, yellow 8 maps, and red 6 maps… and it sort of feels like you are always trying to choose the lesser of evils when it comes to map layouts. The individual maps themselves are just worse than Path of Exile 1. They are all far too cluttered and cumbersome to clear, and always end up with a situation where you missed a rare near the beginning of the map and now have to backtrack all the way through the entire maze of tight corridors in order to go kill it.
At some point I am probably going to do a follow up to my blog post talking about the things that need to change in Path of Exile II. By then I will probably be closer to 200 hours played and feel like I will have a more nuanced take on the game. Right now I feel the same way about Path of Exile II as I do Last Epoch, where both are good bases to build upon, but that it is probably going to take at least two more years before either game is truly “great”. The coming months are going to be interesting because I feel like there is going to be a battle waged in the community for the soul of the game. Depending on how that shakes out, is going to ultimately determine how much time I will spend focused on this game going forward. I am having fun on the Infernalist Minions build but it is very sad just how different of an experience it is to my Stampede Titan build was. There will always be outliers… but right now we have a scenario where four different builds are fun ti play and the rest of the game is a mess otherwise. My ultimate fear is that GGG is going to Nerf the four builds that actually feel good to play, instead of buffing the hundreds of potential builds that feel like shit.
The Streamer Alkaiser has been mister “Warriors are Fine” up until this point, often saying that folks were struggling due to a skill issue. Recently however he rolled a second character and decided to go down the very meta path of the Monk Invoker, and it has been telling how fast he has essentially changed his tune. On basic gear he said in the above video that he feels tankier and stronger in every possible way on the Invoker as compared to the Warrior. The thing is… this isn’t just a warrior thing. This is effectively everyone who is not playing the meta builds for Invoker, Infernalist, Stormcaller, or Deadeye. SirGog highlighted this problem in a recent video where effectively those four builds make up some 85% of the total pie of the top progressed players in Path of Exile II. Everything else feels worse to play, and everything else has a harder time trading power for item rarity to make the drops feel more meaningful.
Anyways, like I said I have a post in me at some point where I talk about all of the core problems I see with the game, but for now I am progressing through the endgame on a character that has less than a week played on it.
The post Goodbye Stampede and Hello Minions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
