Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.27, aka the Keepers of the Flame league and it looks pretty freaking awesome. This is the first time they have revisited a previous league theme, and this time Breach is getting a significant rework. The interesting thing about this, and some of the things from the patch notes… is it seems like they really want to make league mechanics distinct and their own thing. During this league they have effectively clawed back all of the other leagues that could drop breach mechanics, and are making players focus on breach specifically if they want to farm any of these resources. Similarly they clawed by the nodes for Delve that allowed players to passively generate azurite, which makes me wonder if we are seeing more of a design ethic at play. As a Delve aficionado this means that my resonators just go way more valuable and I am on board with this, since players are no longer going to be able to skip delve and passively get them.
Breach itself looks really interesting. There are effectively three versions of Breach that are going to be available. There are scenarios where the hive has already set up shop in a zone and you have to burn down their fortifications and then fight a breach lord. There is a version where it is similar to the current form, but once you have filled a bar through killing breach enemies it locks open and spawns tougher mobs in the center. I love the whole concept of it locking in place, because the fleeting nature of breach was the one thing I didn’t really like about it. I notoriously hate being on a timer. The last version is more of a breach citadel which feels like it is going to be something akin to the way Abyssal Depths feel. Rarely there will be this bonus content that spawns in that you can tackle, and I am pretty on board with this conceptually. I mostly look forward to doing Breach in every map, because Breach rings themselves have been entirely reworked to be similar to how they are in Path of Exile II. This means that we are most likely going to be getting most of our really good resist rings from Breach this league.
The borrowed power system for this league are Grafts, which will allow you to equip two new item slots that do various things. More specifically they showed off these as triggering specific cast attacks, or granting you new spells, or even just passively casting some ability over and over while you are clearing content. These seem like they are going to be really great a low levels, but might peter out as we get into the endgame. Mostly it is going to be interesting to see what all is available here, because if you can have grafts taking on some of the conditional defensive buffs like Molten Shell, it might give you more freed from socket pressure. You start off with one graft socket, but at some point you can end up with two of them. Mostly interested in seeing how these abilities augment and change the way existing builds play.
Similarly there are new ascendancies going in with this patch called Bloodline Classes. You will unlock these by beating various bosses and they will offer you an alternate progression system. Essentially you will use your normal ascendancy points but can spec into alternate abilities. There are a lot of ascendancies that have two to three really phenomenal notables, but at least one choice that you just sort of have to wing and choose the next best thing. We have only seen three of the ten revealed, and I am interested to see how these change existing specs. This feels like the sort of thing that might stick around in some permanent form going forward, because this alternate ascendancy concept is something that they have played with a few times, and tying this to clearing bosses feels like the final evolution of the concept. I also think this might be super beneficial when combined with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels that allow you to get back anything you might skip from your base ascendancy to get new powers.
Another really interesting system going in is the Genesis Tree which is a crafting system that allows you to “birth” uniques, itemized rares, and currency by spending points to skew the results. At first glance this looked a lot like the Weavers Tree from Last Epoch, but instead of socketing items in the tree to get improved chance of drops, you are spending points to skew the results towards generating new items. I think it is going to be interesting to see how easy it is to craft for example a really good elemental bow with this system, since we got a bunch of interesting bow attacks to play with this league. Mostly I think I am going to use this system in an attempt to fuel alternate classes later in the league, as opposed to a progression system for my main build. It seems like it is going to take a lot of investment before this actually becomes really useful. I am however wondering if there are going to be some cracked out alternate versions of Cloak of Flames available through this system, since there is a method of generating uniques with one of the attributes replaced on them with something new and different.
Probably the thing that I am looking forward to the most however is the new trade system. I was already generating most of my league wealth through the currency exchange, and I don’t really see that changing. However I am probably going to dive deeper down the rabbit hole of trying to trade things like Einhar Beasts and other incidental things like that, which always felt too cumbersome to actually trade. For buying items… it is so much nicer just to port to a hideout and buy the item off the vendor than trying to wrangle someone to actually respond. Additionally it is a really good feeling to log in after being gone for awhile and have a stack of currency waiting on you. This tends to benefit the really hardcore you can exploit markets first, and the super casual… who get very cheap items once those markets have crashed. I don’t expect to get rich though this system, but it will be less painful to pawn my shit and in turn buy the stuff that I actually need.
At the core… we got a bunch of interesting stuff and so far it does not feel like the builds that I cared about were nerfed. Righteous Fire did not get any buffs, other than potentially making Nebulis sceptres as a mid league option if they are cheap enough. I will still be able to play good ole predictable RF in order to fund other build ideas. The biggest things that ate nerfs were the entire concept of BAMA aka Blink Arrow Mirror Arrow. It is still possible to play it, so it did not get the nuke from orbit that Hexblast Mines did last league where they effectively said “no, we don’t want you playing those as mines anymore”. Trickster ate some nerfs, but honestly the class feels still perfectly viable. There is enough interesting stuff going on like them leaning into the Physical damage archetype for wanders, that might produce some really interesting builds.
They added a new Bow ability called Conflagration which is essentially Rain of Explosive Arrows. You can get this from playing a Ranger in Act 3 by killing Gravicius, and it looks really interesting. I think this is probably going to be my second build of the league once I have stabilized and built up a base of currency through playing Righteous Fire. I think you will self cast instead of totems, and lean hard into dealing fire damage. I do wonder what it would feel like to have a double six link setup with you self casting Conflagration with maybe Mirage Archer support, and then have a totem setup with Explosive Arrow similarly to how one plays other bow builds. I don’t think you try and do the elemental equilibrium nonsense, because I am not sure what damage you deal other than fire first. You should probably want something converting fire damage to another element though so you could run Trinity support. Anyways it is worth theorycrafting something out. I would probably play this as an Elementalist maybe to get buffs from the golems… which did eat a nerf but they are still phenomenal. Alternately you could do the Champion thing, which I think might still work.
One interesting change that SirGog pointed out in his patch notes review video, is that Hardcore is getting a bit of an upgrade. Namely when you die in Hardcore Leagues, your characters will transfer over to Softcore Leagues instead of transferring to Standard. This is pretty huge for someone who might want to start out with the challenge of Hardcore, but then convert to a Softcore character when they eventually die. Additionally if a player just gets tired of the sweaty gameplay, they can chill out in softcore with the current state of their character. As he pointed out there used to be a lot of weird stuff going on in Hardcore where the Standard players would manipulate the market to get items that were valuable in Standard then take a death and transfer items between the leagues. I think this is a net positive for players in general, but I am still not really at all interested in Hardcore anything. I did my brief Hardcore Minecraft run, and it was fun… until it wasn’t. I also participated in Gauntlet and made it to Act III, but was pretty damned happy when I finally died because I was not enjoying being that nervous all the time.
I am fully amped for this new league and am contemplating taking off next Friday so that I can play with purpose as soon as it goes live. I will likely be grinding it pretty hard throughout the weekend, and seeing if I can hit maps relatively early for my pacing. This is the benefit of having no real life, is that I can go hardcore into something like this. Earlier in the week is the drop of the new Guild Wars 2 expansion, so I am hoping I can wrap the story there before league start so I can give this my undivided attention. I will probably be juggling Guild Wars 2, Destiny Rising, and Path of Exile for awhile, and may end up talking about progression in all three. The other thing that I do find tempting is minions, especially since Spectres got a massive quality of life improvement. However in truth I am probably way more interested in Bows as my second character, but depending on how long I stay engaged I might end up rolling something minion focused as well.
Are you going to be playing Keepers of the Flame? If so what are you leaning towards as your league starter? Drop me a line in the comments.
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Good Morning Folks. I don’t have any fresh screenshots because I forgot to fire up ShareX yesterday after a system reboot, and as a result none of the times when I attempted to hit Print Screen did it actually do anything. We are currently having a maintenance downtime for Destiny Rising and the patch is buffing Estela, which seems wild to me given how powerful she already is. It is also ending the current wheel of fortune event, and bringing back the Morgran’s Hunt event, which should in theory give us another free exotic. Ace and I hung out a little bit but I was feeling out of it so we didn’t do anything particularly challenging. We ran with their spouse a few times, but unfortunately realized that you can only get credit for running with a new light… once per person. Still though it is always good to run stuff with people and it always counts towards the pack challenges for running together. We still sadly have yet to find a stronghold, so I am starting to give up on those.
Apparently Destiny Rising is getting a version of Festival of the Lost, but sadly it is a really stripped down version from what I can see. There is no trick or treating in haven, like there is trick or treat in the Destiny 2 Tower. There is going to be a seven day limited sign in event, and something that starts on the 30th where you collect a resource called amber to turn in for goodies on a storefront. It seems like the paper masks from Destiny 2 are making a comeback in some form, and at a minimum there will be a hive pumpkin mask. I am all on board more events happening, and I remember remarking the other night that I wished Festival of the Lost was a thing in Destiny Rising. It was always my favorite event in Destiny 2.
What I am really pumped for however is the Path of Exile 3.27 reveal stream which is happening at 12 pm PDT today on Twitch. If you watch for 45 minutes you will get this hiveborn themed spider pet. Throughout the week they have been dropping some significant quality of life buffs. Not only does it appear as though the asynchronous trade from Path of Exile 2 is arriving in Path of Exile 1, but we are also getting free identification. Previously they had patched this in later in 3.27 but it still took Scrolls from your bank. This new version is going to cost nothing, which is great. There are a bunch of little things to like the fact that Rog in our hideouts will allow us access to the disenchanting interface which was 90% of the reason why I ever went to Kingsmarch last league. Another huge one from yesterday is that you can now itemize Beasts without having to buy the Bestiary Orbs. This is pretty huge because I usually have a tree running Einhar just to try and farm up Black Morrigans to six link gear.
The thing that came out over night is that the Assassin’s tree was reworked, and features the ruthless style node for poisoning which was actually way more effective than the normal mode. SirGog released a video going into the changes more in depth, and I highly suggest checking that out if you are interested. I do wonder if we will get any weird builds like poison tornado shot from this ascendancy rework. It is on my least favorite side of the tree, so it is unlikely that I am rolling anything with Assassin. However I am hoping we see some cool builds with it because in the current trade league, only 0.5% of players on the ladder rolled something on the Assassin ascendancy, and it has been that way for several leagues. So something needed to change, and I am hoping this breathes new life into the class for buildcrafters.
The thing that does concern me however is that we have gotten a bunch of really great quality of life improvements, and part of me thinks that this is just to brace us for the massive nerfs that are incoming. So long as Righteous Fire and Chieftain are viable, I am probably going to roll that again because I love the play style. I had a lot of fun with my Storm Brand of Indecision Golemancer, but that build was entirely being propped up by the fact that I could have a Doryani mercenary following me around and debuffing targets by -200% lighting resistance. I would love to see some other brand build thrive with whatever changes are coming. Additionally I am really interested to see what the spectre rework is going to look like, and how it impacts Summon Raging Spirits. There has been some talk of making thorns actually a viable build in Path of Exile 1, so it will be interesting to see if that happens. Whatever the changes are coming… I am here for it.
I had a really great Mercenaries league to be honest. I got a bunch of good drops, ran a ton of maps, and knocked out enough achievements to get a fancy totem pole and a set of cosmetic gear. That is really all I can hope for. I created to characters that were extremely powerful and fun to play. When this league starts next Friday, I am looking forward to doing it all over again. Expect this blog to swap from mainly being about Destiny Rising to mainly being about Path of Exile again for awhile. I still plan on doing dailies in Destiny Rising, and meeting up with Ace at least once a week to knock out some of the harder content that is fun to group together doing. I am trying to coax them back into Path of Exile, but I am not sure that will actually take.
Are you going to be playing Path of Exile 3.27? What are you looking forward to from the things that we have seen so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Festival of the Lost and Impending POE Reveals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I did not blog yesterday because I had an exceptionally busy day… and just never quite got around to it. Last night my friend Ace and I made a date to group up and do some of the more difficult content in Destiny Rising. I find this way more enjoyable than rolling completely random, because we can at least coordinate slightly over Discord while playing. There was a moment last night… that is probably only hilarious to the two of us… but I will relate it anyways. We had just cleared a room… and Ace and the Random player had rushed off… and I did not realize it and over voice coms I hear “Okay, Have Fun!” in a very bright voice. At first I thought Ace was talking to me, but no… their spouse was leaving to go off to a Gunpla event and we have just gotten used to leaving Discord with mics open. I thought they were telling me that I needed to stop wasting time and catch up… and then we spent the rest of the night laughing about this moment and repeating the phrase over and over.
We are deep into the endgame and essentially get a very limited amount of serious mode runs each week. Everything in the challenge difficulty range requires a challenge key, and we get three of these a week… with the ability to spend actual money or the pull currency to get a few additional keys. So essentially last night we ran two Grandmaster mode strikes to reap the rewards for the week. If anything I think this is WHY the player activity is dropping off in the game, because you quickly get pigeon holed into a state where you only really get to play once per week. I think a lot of this needs to be reworked massively, because NetEase really needs to decide if they want this to be a successful game or not. It is good enough to completely replace Destiny for most of the player base, but the pinnacle rewards and limited chances at the hardest content in the game… really pump the brakes on the fun factor.
That is not to say that there are not still fun activities to do. Yesterday I learned that I could bank up the rewards from Singularity Chaos mode and then claim them after the run faster. This is especially good for those situations where you are farming it, but you just want to claim the basic rewards for the limited chance of being able to get an exotic artifact. I wish there was something like this that we could do with a chance of dropping exotic weapon mods. They are way more fiddly than artifacts, but are also way harder to actually get. I am guessing this Reward Retrieval screen exists for pretty much any activity, so that you don’t accidentally forget to loot the chest and then get locked out of that loot forever. It is wild that I am as many hours deep in this game as I am and I am still finding weird quality of life tweaks. For example… did you know that you can shoot heavy ammo bricks with your weapon to pick them up? This is a thing, and it saves you the effort of running over into danger to pick one up.
We continue to progress our pack really quickly, and honestly… I am shocked that we are moving as fast as we are. The highlight of yesterday is that one of the people that I was in the random pack with actually joined after I invited them. They seemed pretty cool, and maybe I have actually made a friend in this random assed grouping system. I’ve had a few conversations with players and they have mostly been good. Someone poked fun at me last night for running laps around Haven, because it is a thing I have done since Dalaran when I am hanging out on voice chat and idling. They admitted that they do it too, and now we have added each other as friends. Maybe my days of meeting random players is not as over as I thought it was, considering that I have also recently made some random friends in Guild Wars 2.
We also managed to get the materials to upgrade our Hangar to the next level. Essentially everything but the very back of the hanger now looks pretty nice. The second floor is still a bunch of random panels, and I am guessing that the next major upgrade will fill in this area. I have to be honest… I never really roamed around the Hangar before so I am not sure what one looks like when it is fully progressed. I am not even sure if the Wanderer packs had the ability to upgrade anything. I am really hoping at some point we unlock the Pack emblem so that we can customize that somewhat. We continue to search for strongholds, but are having zero luck in finding any. I wonder if this is gated by guild level or something, because we have unlocked MOST of the ??? clusters and they never end up being a stronghold.
I finally got enough currency to make my first level 85 weapon, and I went with Trinity Ghoul. I also upgraded it by consuming a duplicate copy of the weapon, and now need to acquire 100 of the exotic currency so I can claim the final catalyst level. This is another one of those really long grinds, because you ONLY get the currency from Grandmaster activities and there are very limited sources of the exotic leveling currency. So all of this becomes the really long tailed grind of the game. I think maybe they need to be a bit more open with this stuff, and maybe make all of the vendors reset weekly rather than once per month or once per season. There needs to be a way to get this stuff rather than spending your limited currency each day on gathering up a handful at a time.
Another thing that I did while hanging out on voice, was several of the heroic legendary missions for various characters so that I could do the requirement of completing one in under 7 minutes. I did this on Gwynn, Wolf, and Ning Fei, and the only things keeping me from finishing silver on both of them… is the ability power levels… which require me to get more of the currency that can ONLY be gained when Calamity Ops resets. Again… there are just too many things that take too long to reset. If this reset every week, we would at least have a shot at hell in getting enough currency to upgrade a character, but the problem is you need 6 of them for the final upgrade tier and you only get 4 from Calamity Ops. The cadence of things is just a bit off and they really need to tweak this. Many of these things are standard Gacha trappings, but if they care about the North American player base… then they maybe need to tweak them a bit.
I do worry that maybe Destiny Rising has lost their chance, because generally speaking you only get one shot at the opinion of players. There are a lot of folks who tried and bounced once they realized that the Pinnacle rewards system was going to be a thing. The only real option to win them back is to release a massive patch down the line that tweaks everything, giving the game a bit of a comeback story. Destiny streamers have given the game a ton of good press, especially around the raid race. So I am hoping we get more content dropping soon, so that it will coax a bunch of players back to the game. It is worrying however because they are merging the servers so that all of them will be available for queuing for activities together. Hopefully this improves the fact that there are just some activities that are hell to get a match for right now.
The biggest challenge facing the game right now is that you are rapidly pushed into a scenario where only certain activities will get you any progression. Since most rewards take 20 Pinnacle currency, and you get 120 per day…. that leaves you with six things that you can do. Those six attempts are going to get spent on Master/Grandmaster activities, Legendary Campaign, or Gauntlet until you have gotten your 3 bonus rewards per week… and then probably not that anymore. So that means that everything else… Shifting Gates, Morgrans, etc are not going to be easy to get a group for. Hell we have even reached a point where Iron Bar takes 15 minutes to form a group on the weekends… which is wild because it is one of those activities that is ONLY available at a limited time. If you put a rare chance of getting the resources that we actually need from these activities that are effectively dead… and put it on the basic reward pool… you will have players queuing for them constantly.
I know there is a major patch coming in 2026, so hopefully some of this will be addressed then. I am still having a lot of fun, but once Path of Exile 3.27 drops on the 31st I am likely going to be logging in and doing my dailies to keep progressing the guild and then meeting up with Ace once per week to do the limited content.
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Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a bit odd. I spent a good deal of time out in the garage working on reorganizing things. Right now I am trying to clear the south side so that I can put up shelving there, which will allow me to organize everything that I am moving. Saturday night however I found out that my folks fridge went out, so I was up there after editing podcasts and got the joy of wrestling the fridge out of where it had sunk down into the linoleum over two decades. I’ve reached the point where I am not stronger than my father… probably always was… but it is still just a disappointing realizing how much weaker he has gotten over the last several years. Not that I am exactly Sampson or anything, and a lot of my strength is largely just me putting my weight behind things and pushing like the dickins. We got it moved out however, and Dad can now go shopping for a replacement. Thankfully they have a spare fridge, but it is just less convenient.
In the gaming world… I mostly spent the weekend playing Destiny Rising. My progress is starting to slow down a bit because effectively I am in a state where I largely need master/grandmaster activities to move the needle forward. I did get my third and fourth character to gold so I have pushed Jolder, Estela, Helhest, and Umeko through the hoops required to finish the gold medallion. At this point each one of these that I push up, is mostly just giving me points to spend on a talent tree of buffs on the ascension screen. These are largely things like buffing the exotic artifact and weapon mod drop rates. It is the weapon mods that I need the most right now. They are way trickier than any of the other exotic items because in theory you really want a weapon mod that activates a specific perk on a specific weapon. I put some dead mods into these characters weapons just to push their light up… but at some point I need to replace them with fully functional mods.
In order to participate in Master/GrandMaster level activities you have to get their light up to 64,000 and at this point I have managed to do that with three characters. The thing is you only get to run one GrandMaster activity once per character, so that means I can spend three keys per week getting significant upgrades. This past week Ace and I got together and ran them as a duo, and we should probably keep doing that. I wish we had a third really active player that was compatible with our times…. that also was as progressed as we are currently. Given enough time we probably will have. After doing Grandmaster Gauntlet Blitz… I would love to have a full team of six players, because it would be super fun to queue in together using proper squad tactics. At some point I might have to declare a “Destiny Rising” night, similar to how we have done with Guild Wars 2, but the challenge as always will be finding a night everyone can participate.
In other progression news… I have continued spending every last drop of free currency that I get on Helhest, and have now pulled four copies of her, giving me 3 talent points. At this point it isn’t so much that I am pulling for duplicate copies and thus talent points… and more that I really want to finish getting the parts to her artwork which unlocks a cool Ghost Shell and Sparrow. Helhest will just keep getting more and more powerful, the more points I unlock for her however. All of the points are pretty freaking great to be honest, and as much as like this champion I don’t really mind that I am effectively negatively impacting the next banner, since I won’t have a cache of points saved up to spend on it like I did this time where I had 5 10 pulls banked. I’ve just had better luck pulling for her than any other banner in the past though. I’ve beat pity by a massive amount each time.
In Pack news, we have ranked up the guild for the third time since we started it. This feels pretty freaking good considering we only have a handful of active players. I had hoped more folks would jump on this bandwagon, but I think the whole gacha trappings are a bridge too far for a lot of players. As is evidenced by my free account, you can pretty much get all of the stuff without spending a dime given that account already has every four star, and two of the five stars. Really that is more than enough goodness to play with and be functional participating in even the highest end content in the game. While I spun up that second account to make creating the guild a bit easier, I am kind of glad that I have it because it gives me a good pulse on what playing the game looks like if you do not spend a dime. So far the prognosis is extremely solid for someone coming in as a “zero spender”.
Another thing that I have finished is the Wheel of Fortune event that is going on. The weirdest thing about this… is that I am still collecting spins each day, even though I have nothing to spend them on. I kind of expected there to be some system that allowed me to cash these in for glimmer or something like that, but so far nothing that I can see. I am actually really close to finishing out this event on my second account as well. I am not sure what the math works out to be, but it should be pretty simple for anyone to complete this event just by doing dailies each day. Immediately following this is going to be a rerun of the Morgran’s event, which should in theory guarantee another exotic weapon… and the wording makes me wonder if it is a guaranteed unlock of one that you have not found before. It is specifically referred to as a “Precious Reward” which makes me think it has some custom logic applied to what sort of things it can give you over just a standard Exotic Engram.
Since we now have the firing range in our guild hall, we get to see one of the features which is a hall of heroes time functionality showing the highest scoring champions from the previous cycle. We did not do enough of a few of the things to quality, but Ace dusted me and is the only person showing up with their Helhest and Estela on display. In my wanderer pack guild I was often highlighted, so I have at least gotten to see my own characters in these holos in the past. At some point Ace just leapt past me in progression, mostly because they are way more focused on doing the right thing with their daily stamina as opposed to me… where I sometimes just like spending it on something trivial. I do find it weird why we don’t have anyone showing up for a few of the modes… but it might just be that Calamity Ops for example has a longer than weekly cycle.
To the laundry list of things that I progressed this weekend… add planetary reputation. I now have both the Red Sea Rift and Jiangshi Metro maxed out at 20. This means that instead of rewarding reputation caches I now get these bonus honor chests every 500 reputation. Weirdly it feels like they actually happen more often than those last few ranks of the reputation. Now that I have maxed them both though, there really is no difference between choosing the destinations, because they all give the same rewards. Since I like the Red Sea Rift a bit better, I will probably just keep doing this one each day. I’ve also maxed out world exploration on both areas, so there is nothing really new to find out there as I have found it all. I am really ready for them to add a new area to the game, and hoping it comes in soon with the seasonal reset.
I also finished up the main story quest on my completely free account, and have since pushed it to level 70. The biggest challenge I have with this account is trying to remember what I need to progress when. I am essentially working on getting a few different champions to bronze, but a lot of this is gated by the fact that I have not pushed up to level 80 yet. Right now I am alternating between grinding out artifacts, and doing things that will give me materials needed to upgrade my weapons from 70 to 80 when the time comes. I have Jolder and Ning Fei on this account, and will probably push them up first… and then maybe Wolf so that I have a champion of each element. If I pull Helhest, that might change the calculus a little bit. I also have Rossi-11 on the account and have been playing it quite a bit, but nothing really beats Ning Fei for speed clears.
This continues to be a phenomenal gaming experience. I actually played a little bit of Destiny 2 over the weekend… and I have to say that Destiny Rising just feels better. I am sure I will shift gears soon to the new Path of Exile league, but for the moment I am all in on space magic.
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