Good Morning My Perky Pals… happy dawning of a new work week. In my semi-regular mental health updates… I did pretty okay on Friday. Dealing with the first anniversary of our wedding after the death of my wife… was mostly okay. I had a few tough moments but the day was not the soul crushing experience that I expected it to be. I am still glad that I took the day off and quite honestly… I might just start taking it off yearly just in case because sooner or later… it will catch up with me. This weekend I did dumb things and this morning I am going to tell you about them, since we did not record a podcast this weekend where I would have likely talked about it. Why yes that is me on the beach in Path of Exile… so buckle up friends.
The Gauntlet is an event run by Zizaran in Path of Exile that cranks up the difficulty of the game to stupid levels… and takes place in a Hardcore Solo-Self-Found environment. Meaning that you cannot rely on anyone other than yourself and if you take a death, your character is exiled to standard. I do not normally like the hardcore rule-set, nor am I the biggest fan of SSF either. What prompted me to join this madness? The Gauntlet is often supported by Grinding Gear Games which cooks up specific challenges that do not exist in other environments, and this year they added a unique MTX that can only be gained through playing the event. Essentially if you get off the beach and defeat Hillock, you are guaranteed to get a copy of the Merciless Gauntlets. If you get to at least level 5, your copy will have flavor text added to it indicating how far you made it.
What makes this extra challenging however is that a lot of the bosses have new mechanics. For example Hillock on the beach, is supported by The Maven and all of the nonsense that she does while witnessing a map boss can be done during this fight. Brutus is already a bit of a filter for new players, but when you encounter him in the prison you first fight a proxy… and then in the normally safe room… face a buffed version that has the canons on all four sides of the arena that can be found during the Hydra Guardian fight. I could have been like my friend Sloth and killed Hillock and then immediately killed that character to be done with it. However I could not bring myself to do this thing and I had to play things out for as long as they lasted… even though the whole experience is not really my jam.
I had experienced some of the mechanics when SirGog ran a version of the Gauntlet with Softcore rules as a custom league. However new and extra spicy this year is that when you face an end of act boss… you also face every single unique mob that can spawn in any of the maps of that act. This means you are fighting a literal gauntlet of enemies, that works similar to a maven witness in that if you do not kill them fast enough… they can start stacking up on top of each other as they spawn at fixed intervals. I managed to push through the first act boss, largely because Toxic Rain is really good at low levels and I got an early Goldrim drop from Hailrake that carried me super freaking hard. By the time I faced Merveil I essentially had capped resistances which was wildly overpowered for any fight, but especially the gauntlet since you needed to care about more than just cold resistance.
I named my character BelCantKillHillock because I legitimately did not expect to get off the beach. If you are so inclined you can see a POB of where I got and what gear I was wearing at the time of my death. I made it to the Act II boss and was presented with a decision. I could easily have backed out of the fight and come back when I was stronger… but instead I just decided to allow the death to happen. I played 5 hours and 21 minutes to get to that point, and while I was enjoying Toxic Rain overall… I was not enjoying having to play with my head on a swivel at all times. I figured once I cleared Act II it was only going to get worse in Act III. So instead of exiting to character selection and bouncing back in and throwing on a few levels… I just decided to let the death of attrition happen because I was having to chain flasks to stay alive to all of the nonsense happening on the Vaal Oversoul fight. I made it through the Gauntlet of Uniques without much issue, but the stupid stuff that was happening in the room kept grinding me down.
Being perfectly honest I am extremely happy with the level 27 death that is now enshrined in my glove mtx. I started out not expecting to make it off the beach, and then decided to keep playing until I was at least level 5 so I could get text on my gloves. Then I just kept moving the goalposts… could I get through Brutus… could I get through Merveil. Could I get past the bandits… and then ultimately could I clear Act II. By the time I reached the end of Act II though I was well past my point of caring about the event. All of this nonsense did lead me to run up a softcore Toxic Rain character and spend all of my currency on it… before realizing that my general problem with these characters is how squishy they end up feeling. That ability is phenomenal during the campaign, but requires way the hell too much investment to feel decent in maps, or at least as a second character after having played a super tanky righteous fire character for months.
Will I do this nonsense again in the future? Honestly I have no clue. I don’t actually enjoy playing in the event, but I did really enjoy watching streamers competing for various prizes on day one. I did not start until the morning of day two and even then only because there was an MTX to be had. If GGG keeps doing cosmetic prize support for these events… I will probably keep throwing my face into this particular wood chipper. That is so long as the bar of entry stays sufficiently low. I am not a member of the “hard content is my kink” club, and in truth I would rather play super chill content so that I can happily be listening to an audiobook while I play it. More than anything right now I am looking forward to the start of season three in Last Epoch on the 21st. I know Path of Exile II lands on the 29th, but I will probably not be done with Last Epoch by then, and if I do play the third pseudo-league in that game I will be starting much later.
Did you play any of the Gauntlet? How far did you make it? Drop me a line below.
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