Good Morning Folks! I’ve had a bunch of friends asks me assorted questions about Path of Exile II, the supporter pack tiers, and what they should spend their cash shop points on. So I am doing what I do almost every time a bunch of people ask me the same question… create a blog post that will hopefully help many players. So the first question is whether or not the $30 supporter pack is “good enough” or if they really need something in the higher tier packs. Path of Exile does this weird thing where they sell supporter packs for the same face value as they sell shop currency. The cosmetics that are included in the various packs are just that, pretty things you can equip but have no real bearing on the game itself.
There are a few examples of cosmetics that grant you some nice-to-have ability. For example, I have a ring that keeps track of all of the currency items that have dropped on the ground since I equipped the cosmetic on that character. I have a map device in my hideout that I just swapped to recently, that keeps track of the number of White, Yellow, Red, and Purple rarity maps that I have run during that League. These do somewhat improve my enjoyment of the game, but they are not required to have by any means. The supporter packs have cosmetics in them that will go away at the end of the year when they roll out the next version of supporter packs. Similarly, the league-specific supporter packs go away when the next league starts. So if there is something that you absolutely feel like you have to have, there is a bit of time-limited FOMO surrounding it but it is not game-changing.
What is however fairly game-changing is the ability to purchase additional stash tabs. Once purchased these tabs carry forward for each league that you play, and when you start a brand new league you get an empty set to populate with items that drop during that event. When a league ends you get remove-only versions of these tabs in the Standard league so that you can retrieve your items. I have a lot of them, but I am also a massive packrat when it comes to gaming. I am one of those folks who install a mod to disable encumbrance in pretty much every game that has that concept. This is what I have spent the vast majority of my supporter pack currency on over the years and I have every specialty tab, as well as a number of quad tabs for storing things during the league. I recorded a video yesterday talking through my feelings regarding various stash tabs you can purchase, but I will dive into it in written form this morning.
If you bought the basic $30 supporter pack, that means you have 300 points to spend. First I would absolutely wait until there is a Stash Tab sale going on. In theory, these should occur every 3 weeks or have traditionally… which means if that schedule holds on Friday just as the POE2 Early Access is beginning there should be a Stash Tab sale going through that weekend. The three tabs that I would focus on as a brand-new player are the Currency Tab, Map Tab, and Premium Quad Tab. Currency essentially allows you to store 5000 of every individual currency type in Path of Exile/Path of Exile II meaning there is a heck of a lot of value in that one tab. Map Stash tabs are the second most valuable tab specifically in the endgame and I feel like similarly, the Tablet drops which replace Maps in Path of Exile II will likely fit into this tab. Premium Quad stash tabs are four times as big as normal tabs and also have the ability to sell items from them on the Trade website, which gives you the option to become a market baron later on.
Like I said you want to wait until these go on sale because you cannot buy all three for your initial 300 Currency at the normal prices. However, if you wait… you absolutely can. Generally speaking, the sale price is 20% off.
Stash Tab
Normal Price
Sale Price
Currency Tab
75
60
Map Tab
150
120
Premium Quad Tab
150
120
375
300
So off sale you are 75 points shy of being able to get the three tabs with your 300 points, however, while the tabs are on sale it works out to be exactly 300 points pending the sale is the standard 20% off.
So say you had bought the second tier of supporter packs and had 600 points to play with, here are the other tabs that I would suggest as useful. Essentially my methodology here is to choose the tabs that give you a lot of storage for things that are otherwise annoying to store in a bulk tab. Divination Cards are sets of cards that you can turn in for items, and this tab stores 5000 of each individual card type which is way more than you can stack in a single tab of any other type. Essences are going to be really critical for crafting in POE2 and again these store large quantities of each individual type of essence so well worth having. Fragments are similar in that most of these don’t stack in your inventory but will stack to large quantities in the specialty tab. Lastly, the Unique tab is something you are probably going to want at some point, especially if you are the type to hold onto uniques just in case you might have a build that needs one later.
Stash Tab
Normal Price
Sale Price
Divination Tab
50
40
Fragment Tab
75
60
Essence Tab
40
32
Unique Tab
140
112
305
244
So again if you wait for these tabs to be on sale, you can pick up all of this for that extra 300 points and then have some left over to play with. Essentially always wait to buy stash tabs until they are on sale because the sales happen on a fairly reliable basis. Again if the pattern holds, the next time they should be available is starting this coming weekend.
The cool thing about Stash tabs and cosmetics in general is that within reason, they apply to both Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I got some bad news yesterday that apparently guilds do not transfer between the games, so I will have to create a new copy of our guild in Path of Exile II, and similarly will need to rebuy the guild stash tabs. However like I said above… I am going to wait until the Stash tab sale before doing this so that I can stretch my points as much as possible. If you can wait, I would say a general rule of thumb is to never pay full price of any cosmetics because there are other reoccurring sale types that cover hideout decorations and skill effects as well.
The last bit of advice I would give you is to avoid the cash shop traps. Firstly they have blind loot boxes that you can purchase that give you a random cosmetic from a unique set of cosmetics for that league. They have built-in duplicate protection so that is at least nice, but if you are patient enough all of the cosmetics from these loot boxes go on sale as individual microtransactions during the next league, so roughly three to four months down the line. So if there is something specific that you want you can just pick that up rather than wasting your money trying to pull it. Lastly, the Stash Tab bundles are only a trap because once you get used to using Quad Tabs, you will wish that you had never purchased anything but those. The bundles are normal tabs, and there is no way to upgrade 4 normal tabs to a single quad tab at least not as of yet. The difference between Standard and Premium is that Premium tabs give you the ability to list items on the trade site from them. Essentially you are paying for the privilege of having that tab indexed by GGG so that you can list items from it.
I am hoping that this has helped someone out there because admittedly everything about Path of Exile and Path of Exile II… is a lot. The thing is that Grinding Gear Games is one of the few studios that I actively want to give more money. I feel like the Microtransactions really do get funneled right back into game content, because so many of the leagues are outrageously detailed. Even the loot boxes have some really interesting stuff in them, but like I said you should really focus on building out stash tabs for your account because those are things that are always going to be useful for the life of your account. Given that I exclusively play league content, and never play standard… having a fresh set of tabs each time a brand new event rolls around is super nice. You can also keep those remove-only tabs pretty much indefinitely so at the end of a league I just dump them in a folder named after the league that just finished and ignore them unless I specifically need something from them.
The post Path of Exile Stash Tabs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! The weekend before last I had put up most of the Christmas decorations, but on Saturday I finally got our little tree up. Essentially we have a very small tree on top of the entertainment center because the cats have yet to figure out how to get up there. Prior to that I just had the tree skirt and runner with my two goofy little snowpeople. It is especially sad that the Christmas season is shorter this year because I do love hanging out downstairs with a laptop and seeing the cycling lights out of the corner of my eye. For years we did not do any sort of a tree and then at some point, I got tired of this, and for the last decade or so we have done a small tree on top of the entertainment center to feel festive without the cats attempting to climb it.
The box to the left of the tree in the above picture is the only gadget that I bought in the Black Friday nonsense. I hate airing up tires. I’ve always been annoyed that the process was not as simple as dialing in an air pressure and then having the tire inflated to that pressure and it shutting off. In my brief roaming around I found this doodad, and have now used it and it works beautifully. Essentially it is roughly the size of a double-thick battery bank and you set the pressure on the readout, hook it up to your tire’s valve stem, and then start it, and it will shut off whenever it reaches the desired pressure. Yesterday afternoon I used it and it really was as simple as it sounded, It used about 1/3rd of its battery capacity to air up four tires that were low due to the temperature drop.
This is going to be one of the longest weeks in history, as I anxiously await the beginning of Path of Exile 2 Early Access. I’ve been trying to distract myself with POE1, but I am uncertain that it is really working. I did however get a wild drop of div cards. Not that any of these are terribly valuable, but I came across a Diviners Lockbox and had the bit where I can open it an additional time… proc five times in a row. I would like to hit level 100, but I still have like five pips worth of experience left to go and it is coming so slowly either through maps or delve. I thought about starting a brand new character, but I am not sure it is worth the effort given that I am going to abandon it rapidly.
I’ve also been playing a lot of Starfield, but that is way more of a janky mess than I remember it being. I have no clue WHY I stopped playing it. My guess is a POE League or something similar. Whatever the case it has been on my radar to start back up at some point. I’ve played about 40 hours on this current playthrough and am starting to get into territory that I no longer remember in the main story. As is always the case with any Bethesda game, the side content feels way more engaging than the main story. I talked about this on the podcast over the weekend, but there is a mental disconnect between how good this game looks… and how dated the systems and interactions feel. This is very much Skyrim in outer space, and if you had told me this was a total conversion mod I would probably believe you. It feels like there is about a Skyrim’s worth of content, but it is spread out across many planets that are devoid of any interesting spots save for one or two highlighted ones.
I’ve also encountered a number of frustratingly glitched-out quests. For example, I was trying to join the Freestar Rangers and did one of those janky follow-the-NPC missions. Upon getting into the room… the escort seemed to have forgotten why she brought me to the room because the Marshall that I was supposed to be talking to was busy in the corner reading a book. The NPCs won’t interrupt each other so we sit in this eternal dance of a quest being completely stalled out without a way to get past it other than using a console command. There are also weird interactions with your companions. For example, the companion that I married… will say things like “I saw this and thought of you” and then proceed to hand you 603 Credits. Why that specific 603 credits reminded her of me… no fucking clue.
Then there are things that are cool but also superfluous. For example, at some point, they added dune buggies to the game, so that every time I land my ship it is outside waiting on me. The thing is… every quest lands me a few feet from the entrance to the POI, so there is never much reason to use the vehicle. I could of course wander off and go explore the planet, but also I know that there is nothing of any interest other than the fixed POIs that have already been labelled on my map. It is a game with epic amounts of fast travel so that nothing actually feels like you are really exploring space or the planet’s surfaces. I feel like I want to finish the MSQ at least once, and I enjoy some of the moment-to-moment side quests… but this is very much not a great game. It does not deserve a lot of the ire that it has been given, because everything is hyperbole in online discourse, but it also doesn’t really work.
The post The Waiting Game appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We had a show where we were not certain we were going to record… and then suddenly essentially had everyone but Ashgar. Bel has been revisiting Starfield and talks about what a weirdly offputting game it is. From there Bel and Grace talk about their experiences with Dungeon Clawler which is essentially Peglin but with a Claw machine instead of Pachinko. Kodra has ventured forth into Veilguard and finds the pacing and structure a bit odd, so we talk about that and how it contrasts with the only Dragon Age game he has ever played, Origins. Tam talks about all of the stuff that has been going on this year in Star Citizen and how the free-fly event is less spectacular than previous outings. Tam also shares his experiences with Stars Reach Alpha and how he is not entirely certain what that game is trying to be.
