Signs are starting to point to it being the time to dust off those copies of New World and return. At the tail end of August, the New World team released a list of things that would be coming in the Brimstone Sands update to the game, and now that update is available on the public test realm. Last night I spent a few hours roaming around the updated new player experience and found it all shockingly improved. From the moment you start the tutorial, there are a lot of things that have changed. For starters, you are no longer fighting generic drowners, but instead corrupted mobs. There are some much upgraded visual indicators of what you should be going to next, and once you land on the beach… almost everything has been revitalized.
An immediate staggering example is a fact that gone are the generic shipwrecks that all looked interchangeable. Instead, each of the four ships you visit during those first few quests has its own look and feel. This one for example has been damaged by corruption, but there is also one that looks like it was attacked by the Angry Earth, though none of them are present. That ship is filled with boars, reminiscent of Edengrove, and gives a bit of flavor of what happens when nature takes over. Most of this is cosmetic, but what is completely new is the fact that Isabella is introduced and is whispering to you through corruption very similar to the Old Gods of World of Warcraft. This ties up so many loose ends as to what exactly happened when Thorpe blasted us with that bolt of corruption in the tutorial and introduces players to Isabella rather than having her pop out of the woodwork later on.
There seem to be a number of “quality of life” improvements as well. For example, there are stray weapons laying all around those early shipwrecks giving you quick access to seemingly every weapon. The Greatsword for example is brand new to this patch, but I found one laying on the beach ready for me to use. The weapons themselves have a slight glow to them in order to make them easier to see for new players. This is huge honestly because previously it could take a dozen or so levels before you would find one of the weapons you were wanting to use as your primary. This whole setup reminded me quite a bit of Coldharbour in Elder Scrolls Online and the room that effectively had one of every weapon type ready for the player to pick up.
Then there is Monarch’s Bluff, which is no longer a ramshackle town and is instead a properly fortified outpost. This change alone is staggering, and instead of generic conquistador types… this town is following the Arthurian story that they added into the game since the release of the game. Supposedly Everfall has also had a significant facelift, and more towns are planned for future patches. The goal is apparently to make each town look truly unique and have its own merits rather than just the central location. This plays into other “quality of life” changes they have made since the release of the game like making the cost of fast travel largely inconsequential and opening access to storage in every town freely from any other town.
I’ve been poking my head back into the game periodically off and on since release, but it had largely fallen out of focus with my time spent in Path of Exile. I have to give credit to YouTuber Demone Kim for releasing a series of videos about the changes. In the video linked above, he does a naked run to Brimstone Sands and the capital city specifically. It looks straight out of Assassin’s Creed Origins/Odyssey and seems to be massive in scale. I spent most of last night playing around with the new weapon, the Greatsword which feels very much like Cloud’s Buster sword so far. You can spec into a tanky tree or a DPS tree, so it will be adding new tanking options to the game which is great. I feel similarly they probably now need to work on some more healing options because right now it feels like Lifestaff is the only truly viable endgame option.
We started talking about it last night among the AggroChat crew and might consider picking a server and starting over from scratch. The new player experience is different enough to warrant this. Yeah, it would suck to lose all of the progress I had made on my main character on Valhalla, but it seems like a lot of the leveling processes are way more forgiving. I was gaining harvest levels at lightning speed last night while picking up random things. Additionally, it felt like the loot was considerably more generous when it came to crafting reagents as well. At some point in the past, they flattened the reagents so that there is only one kind of sandpaper, flux, or thread… etc. So from the first minutes on the beach, you are getting materials that will serve you later in the game.
The more I think about it, the more I think I am going to start from scratch again. I don’t know the release date yet, but since it is up on the PTR currently I would assume it is “soon”.
The post New World Revitalization appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I had a wild ride of bouncing around in several ARPGs before finally settling into the grind in Diablo III. This season there is an item that drops called an Angelic Crucible that can turn any item into a Primal Ancient, but it also gives the item a special ability. The problem with this system however is that you get one of three random enchants each time you use it. I think I have gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen of these items so far and out of those I have gotten 1 Wrath of the Berserker power, 1 Whirlwind power, and all of the others have been for Hammer of the Ancients. However last night on my final run before going to bed I finally pulled the Whirlwind power I was hunting for.
I’ve been contemplating stockpiling them and running up a Demon Hunter so I can play with those powers as well. I am hoping that the items persist after the season for non-seasonal play, and if so… then I have the desire to build out a set for each of the powers on Barbarian and maybe Demon Hunter. I’ve heard the Crusader abilities are not that great, so I might take a pass on those. Essentially those are the three classes that I spend more time playing than any others. It would have been awesome if one of the Crusader sets buffed my favorite thorns build, but alas it is not to be. The whirlwind power is really nice because it is a much stronger pull than we have ever had in the game before, and you can just sorta drag things along with you as you spin to win.
In other news, Torchlight Infinite is now up on Steam, and you can request access to the playtest. I’ve had access to the android version of the game for some time now, and it was pretty solid. Unfortunately, the PC version seems to be the most “mobile port” game I have seen. There are very few configuration options and you are stuck to using the default keybindings which are Left Click to move, Right Click to attack, Q to heal, and WERF for special attacks. My default setup for ARPGs is to set Force Move to W, and then steer with my mouse. I find it so much easier than the constant repetitive clicking required for click to move and I am hoping given time that they add in some keybindings.
The main reason why I did not play more on Android is the fact that it currently does not have controller support. I attempted to use a controller through steam last night and this appears to still be the case. I am very interested in this game, but only if either the controller support is solid or they add some keybinding options. Until then it might as well not exist. Your mileage may vary however and if you are interested in checking the game out, it appears that they are just letting people into the playtest immediately. I clicked the “Request Access” button and got instant access to download the game and try it out.
I’m starting to fall into a funk with Path of Exile. Have you ever played a game where it feels like you missed the golden era when it was amazing? That is how I am feeling about Path of Exile. I’ve seen so many videos of people flying through maps and getting explosions of loot left and right, and I can’t seem to ever reach that level. I am in the doldrums of red maps which vacillate wildly between extremely easy to clear to being painful deathfests. I ran into a boss last night in one of the Vaal Corruption Rifts, that had 8 ArchNemesis modifiers on it… and it legitimately took me over twenty deaths before I finally downed it. The only thing that I could do was kite the mob while dropping Storm Brand behind me. I eventually drug it to the start of the Rift so that I could at least resurrect and get back into the action quickly.
I could roll something else and try another build… but there is no guarantee that will work any differently. At this point, I have tried Explosive Arrow and Wintertide Brand last league, and went with a supposedly tried and true Storm Brand build this league… and found both lacking. Maybe lacking is the wrong word, but would require so much currency investment to bring them to the level that would allow me to run content in a carefree manner. I just don’t think that Path of Exile is ever going to be that game for me, and as a result may never replace Diablo III. I love chain-running content over and over in Diablo and picking up loot, then resetting things and going again. In Path… everything feels like it has a cost associated with it… either opportunity cost or a very real cost. I don’t love that feeling.
In Diablo III there is this virtuous cycle of running Nephelem Rifts to get Keystones, and then running Greater Rifts for levels and rewards. It feels good and continues to feel good the deeper you go into the gameplay. You earn gear that helps you move faster through the Nephilim Rifts and go higher in difficulty level in the Greater Rifts… which causes you to earn more rewards and level your gems higher. All the while allowing for easy drop-in gameplay so you can hang out with your friends while doing this, or better yet help them get gear in the process. In Path of Exile, the cycle seems to be focused on making “currency”, and then using that to fund buying better gear on the trade league instead of just doing things for the sake of doing them.
Then there is the problem that I have to effectively make a decision if I care about progress on the atlas or if I care about making levels. I sacrifice levels for the sake of grinding out progress, or I sacrifice any forward momentum for the sake of farming experience. Then there is the hope that I will gain enough currency and map drops through doing the content that I can sustain continuing to do the content. I am always teetering on the edge of not having enough Alchemy or Scouring orbs, with the latter pretty easy to buy from vendors… but the conversion rate is somewhat painful and I feel like I don’t get enough of the feeder currency to make up for it. Then there are chisels… which have a fixed Chaos cost on the vendor and I don’t feel like I get near enough drops.
Essentially while mapping I always feel like I am on the verge of not having enough of something to keep sustaining that activity. In Diablo III it is not very far into the season that I feel like I have either more resources than I could ever spend or easy access to acquire those resources. I am not sure I will ever reach that point with Path of Exile. There will always be subtle friction of not quite having whatever it is that you need, in order to do the things you want to do. The answer is to engage with the trade economy… but I don’t find ANY of that fun. Accumulation of wealth has never been a key goal in my life and once my bills were paid in real life, I stopped caring about making more money. I just think mentally I am not wired to succeed in Path of Exile, and I am concerned that I will keep trying to make it into Diablo III.
I am rapidly losing hope after getting engaged with Path of Exile, that the “sequel” is going to really be a game for me in the long run. With the Torchlight Infinite PC test having its own levels of frustration, I guess I now pin my hopes on Diablo IV giving me a happy medium between the type of gameplay that I do enjoy in Path of Exile, and the virtuous cycle of fun grinding that I have in Diablo III. I am hoping that luck shines upon me and that I get into the Diablo IV testing process. I am not holding my breath, as the person who threw their thumb on the scale and apparently got me into Dragonflight Alpha/Beta is no longer with the company.
The post Whirlwind Powers Activate appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I’ve spent the entire weekend being paranoid because my wife and I had both been sickly for the last week or so. We assumed it was allergies, but Saturday night my wife took a COVID swab test, and came up positive. Thus far mine have come up negative but I am having what I am not sure are symptoms or not. Basically, I feel like I got hit by a truck and everything aches… almost like when you have the flu. Other than that most of what I am experiencing is just general “allergies” or “hay fever”. My wife had to scramble and prepare for a sub for this week as she is out until Friday. I find it highly unlikely that I do not have COVID unless she just had a very light viral load. I feel pretty lousy, and as a result, spent most of the extended weekend chilling out and playing a mix of Diablo III and Path of Exile.
I’ve talked about it before but my goal for this season has been to clear the atlas map. At this point, I am sitting at 83 out of 115, and the majority of what I have left in front of me is red maps and uniques. I’ve been trying to farm whatever I could from Kirac, but once we entered red map territory the requirement of having to have a corrupted map has made him less than useful. Essentially I seem to be alternating between grinding low-level maps for experience and pushing progress because deaths really hurt. That is probably one of the most annoying things about Path of Exile is how brutal death is to your leveling. There have been so many maps where a chain death spree reduces whatever progress I made to nothing.
Shocking to probably no one that has been around my blog for long… I created a spreadsheet to track our progress. That way the handful of us that are playing together can tick off maps as we clear them. The theory is we can also maybe share the wealth if someone is missing some gaps in their progress and we have maps that can fill them. Group play sucks… but it is worth it to help someone complete a hole in their maps. It took me forever to finish out yellow maps and I would have struggled to finish out white maps were it not for some help from Ace. It has helped me at least to feel like I am making forward momentum, ticking off each map as I finish it.
I’m finding it shockingly lucrative to run just white and yellow maps without any modifiers, and I think in part that is thanks to my Atlas tree. Right now I have gone hard into Essences, Strongboxes, and Expeditions. The only things that I have shut off completely are Breach, Blight, and Metamorph. Those are just league mechanics that I do not enjoy. Blight is essentially tower defense and I have always disliked those sorts of encounters. Metamorph in its current state just does not feel worth my time given that the bosses you end up creating are super tanky and take forever to kill. Breach might be cool but with a brand build I always end up getting overwhelmed and dying to those mechanics when I get overwhelmed. My favorite mechanic is probably still Expedition, which is in part why I have gone so hard into it with the tree, and haggling seems to be a solid source of cool stuff.
One of the cooler things that I have encountered in my running base maps, is a unique strongbox. A pretty tanky boss spawned out of it and dropped a few unique items as a result. Strongboxes used to be pretty dangerous but I have managed to get a Divine Vessel drop and picked up the “cannot be frozen” trait from the Brine King. I either need more divines to drop or more vessels to drop so that I can finish collecting abilities for my Pantheon. I think since I made quite a bit of progress over the long weekend, I will probably focus the next few days on running maps for experience so I can pour on a few more levels. I’ve reorganized my passive tree quite a bit to gain some tankiness and I am working my way toward the Armor and Energy Shield mastery cluster to add a bit more. It was shocking to me how much of a difference swapping out my level 19 Storm Brand gem was for a level 21 corrupted Storm Brand gem. I’ve got an item as well that increases all of the levels of lightning gems by one, so a 22 gem seems to just deal much more damage as a result.
I’m still having quite a bit of fun, but I am trying to ease back a bit on the pushing… because I am afraid I will just get frustrated. On the podcast this weekend I came off a lot more negative on the game than I expected to. I do fear that the vision that Grinding Gear Games has for the future of the title is going in the opposite direction that I would prefer. I play ARPGs because I like the power fantasy of crushing maps full of enemies and getting randomized loot as a result. There is a dopamine hit when you wreck something and watch a rainbow pinata of loot explode out of it. Path of Exile however seems to be on a path of making a more difficult and slow-paced game, which makes me hope that maybe Diablo IV will be the game I am looking for. Last Epoch also seems really solid right now and I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with it. The challenge there however will be whether or not the group gameplay is good.
The post Tracking Atlas Progress appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! What happens when we have a few weeks’ worth of Path of Exile discussion bottled up? Well, apparently we record a two-hour-long show! Bel was completely oblivious to how long we were recording in spite of the entire crew trying to warn him. First, we have a few quick topics about Return to Oz and the launch of Ooblets on all platforms including Nintendo Switch. From there we dive into a long discussion about our thoughts relating to Path of Exile and how the Lake of Kalandra league has gone. We have different points of entry from those of us who have been grinding away at maps and those who have yet to finish the campaign. We also attempt to scare Kodra who thinks he has seen a lot of systems so far… but has yet to unlock half of them.
