Atlas

Ancients Did Return

by

Good Morning, Folks. I did not blog yesterday because the entire day was a hot mess. I did not sleep Monday night due to severe nausea, and then spent Tuesday mostly attempting to make up for that fact with several naps. Chemo is some bullshit, do not recommend. I had every intention of blogging yesterday, but it did not happen, so you are getting a mishmash of what I would have said yesterday, with some additional focus from what little I played yesterday. To stop beating around the bush, last Friday was the launch of the 0.5.0 Patch for Path of Exile II, signalling the start of the Runes of Aldurr league and the Return of the Ancients content update. I started a pure Minions character like I said I was going to, and honestly… it was a bit of a mistake. In theory, you probably should level for the first several levels as something other than minions because everything is awful until you pick up Raging Spirits from Freythorn. I was stubborn and did not… and I also attempted to make Skeletal Arsonists work, but seemingly they have been nerfed into oblivion. You can see the current state of my character here.

This league start was a bit of a mess, if I am being perfectly honest. They once again did a free weekend for Path of Exile II, which had the benefit of giving them a massive spike in concurrent players. It also seemingly taxed the hell out of the infrastructure, and I spent a lot of time staring at this screen waiting for the zone to load. I can’t 100% be certain this was due to the influx of non-paying players because there was also a massive patch that happened to land right around the end of the free period. Whatever the case, when the free period ended… all of these woes went away. It was also a weird league start for me because of chemo and the low energy that I have… I struggled to focus on the game in quite the same way that I would have normally. I did not make it to maps, for example, until yesterday, which is quite a bit slower than I think I have done in other leagues. Most definitely compared to my Path of Exile times, when I am usually in maps by Saturday evening or at the latest Sunday morning. It is not like I am racing anyone, and I managed to snap up the uniques that I needed pretty cheaply, so it is not like my slow speed stopped me.

I am not really following a build guide, but instead mostly just chasing all of the really good minion nodes in the Witch/Templar area of the tree. I am only using two uniques with the build. The first I picked up really early on is Enfolding Dawn, and I think I gave a single exalt for it. The main reason we are using it for our chest is that it is pretty much the only way to get 100 spirit easily on a chestpiece, and we need that for summoning minions. The second piece is a mace called Trenchtimber, and we are exclusively using it because it has +2 minion gems on it. Literally nothing else about the unique matters really. You cannot dual-wield sceptres, or if we could, we would immediately drop this item. We are still very much in a world where plus gem levels matter more than any other stat in the game. The nice thing about rune forging in this expansion is that you can improve low-level uniques to be higher-level ones. I have done this to the chestpiece but not the mace, because, as I said, the mace is just a stat stick, and the upgrade has too high of strength requirements.

I’ve had some good luck. First off, I ended up getting a drop that sold for 4 divines, and that helped me fund a lot of my early gear. Since then, I have seen my first raw divine drop in maps, so that is always exciting. I’ve been using Scalpel for price checking, but honestly, I might switch back to something else because so far the pricing portion seems to be worse than what I saw with POE1. I might also just scale up the UI to make the elements show a little easier. It has been pretty accurate pricing-wise, because I have been able to price items based on its suggestions, and they eventually move. The economy is always the aspect of Path of Exile in general that is the trickiest, and also something that I have enjoyed more and more the deeper into the game I get. I know for Ace, the economy is the thing that causes them to bounce the hardest, and I wish that were not the case. At some point, I will probably attempt to perfect my gearing, but for the moment, I have 75% resists for chaos and all elements, and that seems to have made me pretty solid.

The new atlas has been pretty freaking cool so far. One of the big problems that I had with Path of Exile II up to this point is how aimless the endgame felt. That is no longer the case, and every time you interact with a league mechanic NPC, it launches its own quest chain, wanting you to do specific content for them to level up that mechanic. More than this, you can acquire Atlas passive points so much easier now, and the new passive tree feels infinitely more enjoyable than the previous one. I am just getting started, but I have already reached the point of pretty chill mapping. For the moment, I have gone into shrines to make them appear more often and also give me bigger buffs. Currently, there is no way to respec your Atlas tree, so I have been very careful not to choose anything that might end up bricking my progress. This version of the Atlas is so much better than what we have had previously, so I feel like, more than anything else, this gave us something that is viable for the 1.0 release at the end of this year.

While I groused a bunch about this on the podcast, the worst part of Path of Exile II is the first few acts. Once you get your build online, the game becomes pretty great. I feel like they should not make Act 1 anywhere near as rough as it is. Sure, there will always be builds that can one-shot everything, but the baseline build should not struggle to take down bosses. There have been so many times that one of us could not get through Geonir with our build and had to call for help to get a carry. Luckily, that was not me this time, but it is most definitely still a thing. For me, the boss that I personally struggle with the most is the Act 2 final boss, Jamanra. Once you get to Act 3, though, your build tends to have more than enough power to push through anything. I just think the early acts of this game need some tweaking, because I am sure there are a lot of folks who bounce before they reach the break point.

All told, I am pretty happy with this league so far. Minions have ended up being extremely powerful, especially the gas arrows from the skeletal snipers. That command ability is causing me to dive into some of the passives that I have never done before to increase command ability damage. I do, however, want to roll a second character and play with the Pokémon aspect of the Spiritwalker. I am happy enough with my current build, but the nonsense going on with the monkey seems too fun not to play along. They have said they do not plan on nerfing anything with companions mid-league, so in theory, I should be safe enough to build that second character. The challenge is that I am not really looking forward to going through the campaign again.

Have you been playing the Path of Exile II new league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

The post Ancients Did Return appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Ancients and Warlocks Oh My

by
Good Morning, Folks. Yesterday, we got the teaser trailer dropped for the next Path of Exile II league/expansion, and it was extremely brief. More importantly, though, the community has been clamoring for some sort of notice as to when it was dropping. Folks take off work for these things, and in many cases need a decent amount of notice to get the time off. The good news is we are getting a reveal stream on May 7th. The bad is that the league itself is not dropping until May 29th, which is a significant delay from the original intended “every four months” pace of a POE1 and POE2 league. There will be gnashing of teeth, especially among the folks who only play Path of Exile II about this delay. For the Path of Exile diehards, SirGog announced yesterday that he was going to do some sort of a private league, and those are usually interesting. I’ve participated in one of these leagues before, and in that case, everything dropped scoured so you were forced to craft your own gear. It was interesting in an academic sense, but if that ends up being the case again, I am likely going to skip it.
The trailer shows a giant megastructure rising up out of the ground, and I personally think what we are seeing is somehow representative of the new atlas. This has been a feature that has been promised for a while, because the Delve-like Endless Atlas has generally been poorly received by the playerbase. As someone who loves Delve… I have to say that for whatever reason, when you apply this same concept to mapping, it just does not work. At least based on player behaviors in Path of Exile 1, folks tend to gravitate to a few map layouts that they really like and then run them over and over. Truth be told, the new way that the Atlas works in POE1 is brilliant, and I would love to see something like that translated over to POE2. I think the concept of Endless Atlas is cool, but I would love to see it as a side content. The reason why Delve works so well is that any given node only takes a few minutes to run, whereas every map in POE2 feels like it takes an eternity. It would be cool if they translated the Endless Atlas over to a sequence of micro objectives, building a sort of Delve 2.0 in the game with clearly marked rewards on each of the nodes.
Since POE2 is so far out, that has pretty much cemented the idea that I am going to be diving into Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred when it drops on April 28th. Yesterday Blizz released the opening cinematic, and I am maybe more interested than any of the Akarat nonsense has given me to this point. Right now, unless something drastic changes, I plan to try out the new Warlock class when the expansion drops next Tuesday. That is a chemo day for me, but generally speaking, I feel okay for the first few days after the poison is delivered… and then go downhill drastically as I approach the weekend. If, for whatever reason, I do not vibe with the Warlock’s particular form of summoning minions, then I will probably fall back on playing a Paladin. I think I will dig this expansion more than previous ones because I have figured out how to macro multiple abilities to the same button on my G600 mouse, given that D4 tends to be “spam every button on cooldown” gameplay, and I can reduce that madness to a single click. I did this with the most recent Last Epoch season and it worked swimmingly.
I am honestly vaguely excited about Lord of Hatred, because it seems like Blizzard has made some significant steps in the right direction to turning this game into something that has some lasting draw. The big problem that I have had up until this point with D4 is that leveling is generally pretty fun, but once you hit the end game… it feels boring and repetitive, and they ruined the one thing that was actually fun. Ace and I used to group up together and pool our resources and do a bajillion boss summons for drops… and they recently made it so that you only get loot if you are providing materials. The force multiplier of playing with friends stopped functioning, and as a result… we mostly just stopped playing together. Wudijo is pretty much one of the diehard Diablo creators, and he has released a bunch of information once the press embargo was lifted. He released another short video this morning showing off the new map overlay, which is pretty huge. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about D4. You could not simply toggle the map overlay to stay on, rather than having to keep manually popping it up.
In the meantime, nothing has really been hitting gamewise for me, so I am back to playing Last Epoch. I contemplated rolling a Warpath Void Knight, but instead have gone back to leveling my Fire Aura Spellblade. I keep chasing slightly better gear, so that hopefully I can improve my survival. Ward feels way squishier than Health and Regeneration/Leech. It just seems like all of my ward evaporates at exactly the wrong time, and Omen windows seem to be the hardest content for me. Essentially, I have gotten to the point where I clear everything else in the echo but the Omen, and then do that last so that if I die, I have at least completed the echo and can move on with my life. Right now, I am farming the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline in an attempt to get a better pair of Frostbite Shackles. I love the new corruption system, but I refuse to “yolo corrupt” items and risk not having a copy… so I want multiple copies to play with. I could also use more copies of Last Steps of the Living for the same reason. Anyways, time for me to wrap this up and move on with life. Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV expansion when it drops next Tuesday? Are you looking forward to the Path of Exile II League and bummed by the delays? Drop me a line below. The post Ancients and Warlocks Oh My appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Importance of the Journey

by
I love Last Epoch, but one of the things that I have lamented for a while is that there just does not feel like there is enough to do in the game. So as a result, I have a couple of good weeks and then bounce because I run out of things that I actually care to do. On Tuesday nights, Ace and I have what we refer to as “Sibling Time” and more often than not lately it just ends up with us hanging out and chatting while we are doing out own things. Ace has been enjoying Path of Exile more than normal, but also was talking about how much they were looking forward to Last Epoch. At this point, I dug out my old lament, which led to us trying to dissect why it is that Last Epoch does not have the staying power that Path of Exile does. After some back and forth, I think we landed on the “why” behind this statement.
Ace and I have had a lot of bonding moments over the years. There is a natural back and forth between a tank that I always played and a healer that they always played. There is also the bonding of growing up in oddly similar circumstances, despite being in wildly different states. However, I would say probably our most pivotal bonding experience was a shared love of Diablo, and quite frankly, were it not for them and the fun that I had playing Diablo III Seasons, I would probably not be the ARPG junkie that I am today. I will always be deeply thankful for them indoctrinating me into the cyclical nature of Diablo III Seasons, and quite honestly, it was an event that I looked forward to more than pretty much anything else on the gaming calendar. I cannot say with any certainty which season was the first season we did this ritual together, but it became sacred.
So much of this experience centered around the Diablo III Seasons Journey, which was a series of achievements that ultimately unlocked some sort of cosmetic item. Generally speaking, this was some sort of a pet or a portal effect, and in the grand scheme of modern MTX, it was rather meager. What it did more than anything was give us something to focus on other than just grinding mobs and explosions of loot. Sure, we only got a week or two out of a Diablo III season, and by the end of that first weekend, we would have 90% of the list checked off, but it did force us to do some outliers in order to complete everything. This is what Last Epoch is missing, some sort of long ranged goal that we can focus on during the season and that pushes us to do specific content in order to knock out individual achievements.
I’ve also realized that is really what changed regarding my interaction with Path of Exile. Starting with the Sanctum league I started caring about trying to complete league challenges. This was an easy carryover from Diablo III, since I was already in that mindset, and for each league from that point forward, I have purposefully tried to get enough challenges completed to earn the little totem pole for my hideout. It started with just attempting to get one at all, to now where I am specifically trying to finish at least 34 of 40 each league, so I can earn the same size as I have in the last several leagues. I’ve never actually completed 40 of 40, because it involves doing a bunch of bossing, which is not really something I enjoy, given that bossing characters are different from mapping characters. It still gives me something to focus on and has pushed me outside of my comfort zone and forced me to learn a bunch of leagues’ worth of content that I had never interacted with previously.
Even Diablo IV has something similar in the form of the battlepass, and while I have issues with its specific implementation… it still gives a long tail to the league. There are specific things that you can focus on doing in order to unlock a sequence of cosmetic items. They made it worse since, in order to do most of these, you have to pay money to unlock them, but it still exists in one form or another. Last Epoch does not have something like this. Sure, Last Epoch has a ladder, but I am not the sort of competitive player who gives a shit about this sort of thing. What it is missing is some sort of long grind that has a destination in mind and rewards some sort of bauble for doing so. There is a certain measure of bragging rights in being able to show off your pet from a season, years later, after it is no longer available. Not that Last Epoch MTX are generally that great… it still would give me a bit more focus towards pushing down to specific levels in the Monolith, completing dungeons, or something that would push me out of the standard practice of playing for a few weeks and then going right back to Path of Exile.
Right now, the closest thing that Last Epoch has is the Forgotten Knights path of killing Harbingers and fighting Aberroth. However, this is often something that you can do in a single weekend with a good enough build and does not really require you to go out of your way in order to accomplish it. I feel like this is the equivalent of unlocking your Atlas and Voidstones in Path of Exile, and less a destination and more the starting place of the “true” endgame. I feel like Last Epoch really needs something that will take a few weeks to chip through in order to keep us grinding well past the natural expiration date of one of their seasons. I’ve jokingly said that I really like grinding and loot explosions, but it seems like the thing that really keeps me engaged is a series of tasks to tick off. I think this is in part why I love daily quests so much, because it gives me a reason to play the game and something specific to focus on without having to make any real decisions for myself. Similarly, this is why I have engaged in so many Legendary gear grinds in Guild Wars 2, because it gives me an overarching goal to focus on. Last Epoch really needs something more than trying to get slightly better gear, and I am hoping that, at some point, they give us some equivalent to all of these systems that I talked about today. All of that said, I am still really looking forward to the launch of Last Epoch Season 4 when it drops on the 26th of this month. However, I still expect to mostly play for a few weeks and then go right back to Path of Exile. The post Importance of the Journey appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Explosive Searing Bond

by
Good Morning Folks. Last night I fell into a book and sort of forgot that the world existed. The book is a complete and total mess, but it is a compelling one… that I might talk about at some point. I spent the night largely playing Path of Exile, and attempted to go downstairs in the hopes that I would have cats snuggling with me. Gracie took the bait, but sadly, Josie did not. I’ve been careening towards destiny when it comes to the medical side of things, and I think I am just about out of hope that we have a shot at the easy path. I will probably talk more about this in another post at some point, once we have a predetermined path that I know for certain we are going down. However, today I am going to an orientation class on chemotherapy, and how to take care of the port they will be installing into me… so none of these things are doing especially good things for my current mental health. Neither is the book that I am consuming, but at least by falling into another world, I am not having to think about myself and my issues.
Yesterday, one of the big changes that I made with my character was that I replaced all of the jewelry that I had been wearing in order to fix my glaring Chaos Resistance problem. Since I got a +2 gems corrupt on my books, that took away my reliance on needing All Skill/All Fire Gems on my Necklace, allowing me to open up the suffixes to get some chaos resistance on it. Mostly, I needed Dex, Int, and Chaos Reists and was willing to sacrifice just about anything else to get them. One of the rings comes with some downsides, but since I do not care about evasion rating, and that is a negligible amount of phys damage that I am adding to anything hitting me… it was worth it to get the massively elevated stats the ring otherwise comes with. This also pushed me to 400 strength, which is the next breakpoint of the increased damage per 100 strength implicit on my gloves.
Another big change that I made yesterday was that I swapped the colors on my helmet and switched over to the new Searing Bond of Detonation gem. This is pretty interesting and I patterned my gems off some of the other people playing this ability. I really need to swap my helm at some point for one with Burning Damage on it, but for the moment thing seem to be pretty solid. The place that I really notice this is clearing in Delve because I am constantly dragging laser beams behind me that deal burning damage to everything that gets close to them. Bossing also seems much faster than with Fire Trap, because I set down six totems and they all explode at the same time. I am not entirely certain this is going to have the top end that Fire Trap can reach, but it is certainly fun to play with for the moment, and it is easy enough to recolor my helm if I want to swap back to Fire Trap. I went with Less Duration for the imbue mostly because it was one of the cheapest options that actually did anything. Since I am self exploding the totems by oversummoning them, it isn’t like the duration actually does much… but the more multiplier does.
If nothing else, it is entertaining to see all of these totems making cool patterns as I run around the map. Searing Bond, in general, is such a weird ability, and the fact that they all explode means I no longer really have to care about totem placement. I think with the normal version of this, you want to create a crisscrossing box pattern so that the beams hit as many targets as possible. All I really care about is that every third summon, I am causing all six to explode. The baked-in negative of this abiltiy however, is that I am lifetapping a heck of a lot of damage, which is a noticeable hit when I summon something. Once I pushed up into the 6k for max health, this cost seemed far more negligible and seemed perfectly fine. Unfortunately, the jewelry swap, though, was a hit to some of my total regeneration, but I could upgrade my immortal flesh to get that back. All in all, I am pretty happy with the state of the build, but that said… I am feeling a bit of wanderlust, and I think before long, I will probably roll a second character of the league. I am not entirely certain what I want to be playing, but I will sort something out. Holy Hammers still is calling my name. The post Explosive Searing Bond appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.