Good Morning Folks. I had to go into the office yesterday so I skipped blogging, and then after all of the interacting with people that happened… I crashed early around 8pm. This is a photo of Gracie to make up for not having blogged yesterday. She does this thing where she sits on my router and screams at me… while staring awkwardly at me. She often does this when I have decided I cannot handle her crawling all over me and wallowing on me and need to push her off to get something done. I think this is her way of sulking. It generally cracks me up quite a bit when it happens, because clearly she is mad at me and wants me to know it… by going just far enough away from me that I will be certain to see her and the staring daggers. I am not a good daddy clearly.
I’ve finished the Path of Exile 2 campaign on my bear and am now in maps, and I have to say… this is the point where POE2 ceases to be quite as enjoyable. The campaign is a heck of a lot of fun, and mapping is not. Mapping just feels tedious, because all of the rewards for a given map are contained within a handful of rare spawns… and missing one of them, feels like you are missing most of the loot. So I always arrive at this point where I am roaming around the map looking for the last rare so I can go and beat the damned boss and move on with my life. It is one of those situations where a bunch of subtle decisions have gone into this game, and make it so that mapping is just not really any fun. Its the limited portals, the general lack of loot, the lack of a decade worth of leagues, and the fact that when I do die in POE2… it happens immediately and what feels like completely randomly. It feels like the only way you can make a character feel tanky… is by investing everything in energy shield, because all other defensive layers feel like shit.
Then there is also the problem that the league mechanic feels like crap. There are a bunch of think piece videos floating around about what is wrong with the league mechanic, but ultimately I think it boils down to something very simple. I spent a bunch of this past Keepers league in POE1 deep diving into the existing Incursion mechanic, and my core problem with it has always been that it takes you out of the flow of the rest of the game. What I wanted for Incursion 2.0 was for it to be less fiddly and faster to complete than the original. Vaal temples are not that, and they are way more fiddly and require way more care and feeding. We all sort of thought we could run 60 maps and then do all of those saved up mechanics in a single temple session, but it doesn’t really work that way. Everything is six token chunks and it always feels like I never have the right connectors to make things work in the way that I want them to work. I think ultimately this mechanic needs to be simplified so that there is a single pathway tile, a single power up tile, and having some measure of control over how much of the temple resets on an architect or atziri kill. Then there is the problem with the fact that the rewards were cool while leveling… but quickly feel like crap when compared to the needs of mapping. Hopefully they can fix it, but I figure it won’t be until well into the new year at this point.
In other news the Destiny Rising christmas event is a heck of a lot of fun. You essentially have a version of the crucible but you are throwing snowballs instead of using weapons, and effectively it feels like lobbing grenades at everyone. There is also a crafting mechanic where you build snowmen from the resourcces that you gain every day from doing snowball fight matches. At some point there is going to be a sparrow racing component that unlocks, but right now… this makes up for how shitty the halloween event was. I’m having a lot of fun just yoloing my way through snowball fights, and I would love for something silly like this to return more often in place of the existing pvp modes.
I am also playing some Diablo IV and having a lot of fun on the Paladin class. I am going all in on thorns damage, and I am not sure how long this archetype will hold up, but for the moment it feels great. I am nearing level 60 and will start working on paragon levels shortly. I’ve done one of the capstone dungeons and it felt like it was twice as long as it should be and sort of overstayed its welcome. I need to actually figure out my build, because at the moment I am not really focused on much of anything but leveling. The replacement for powers seems fine, mostly because one of them drops experience orbs which is helping me level faster. I love paladin and crusders in the Diablo franchise and the game immediately got better for me with the addition of this class.
Lastly I thought I would share a photo of the final state of my paint racks. I have been printing these for what feels like ages at this point and essentially this will provide storage for 80 pots of Pro Acryl paint. Each of them has a removable drawer for general hobby storage and are going to line the back of a table in one of the upstairs offices that I will be turning into a hobby room. Now I am going to focus on printing out some other general stuff, like I made a brush rack over night and will probably start working on printing out a wet palette today. At some point I am going to have to actually order the damned paints though, but am effectively doing the prep work for setting everything up. I am hoping to get a lot of the work done on the actual office over the christmas holiday days off. I am really happy with how good the cabinets look, and am going to effectively velcro them together I think so they don’t slide around.
I hope you are having a wonderful week. At some point I have to figure out this whole Christmas thing… because I have done next to nothing for the impending holiday. This year without my spouse it just does not really feel like it matters all that much.
The post Gracie Glowers appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
In 2005 the Elder Sage Druid Alamo taught us that “CAT DURID IS 4 FITE!” a meme preserved by our dear friend TAGN. The thing is Path of Exile II added the druids, but they did not add a cat form. As a result… “Bare Also 4 Fite”. In truth when it came to World of Warcraft druids, I almost always played bear form for the defensive benefits, and spent most of my time leveling as bear so I am already used to fighting in that form. Alamo would be saddened by my disregard for their sage advice. On Friday the latest patch dropped for Path of Exile II adding 0.4.0 and the Last of the Druids content update, and the Fate of the Vaal league. I was pretty amped for this content drop because the footage that came out after the announcement from ZiggyD looked amazing. Grinding Gear Games has been trying super hard to make us interested in combo gameplay, but up until this point it felt very forced… and not like said combos were really that beneficial.
Druid changes that, and in truth had I been able to play this class from the very start I think I would have been able to grok their design goals. Effectively most of the gameplay for Bear Druid is about mauling your targets until runes light up on the back of your character telling you that your next slam is empowered, and then hitting Furious Slam to devastating impact. However there are mechanical benefits to doing this one two step because Bears effectively have two states, standing on two legs, and down on all four. Furious Slam has the text that adds a 0.4 second delay if you are not already standing. Maul on the other hand gives you a really fast way of standing, and thereby bypassing the built in delay of furious slam as your character stands up. So you are mauling not only to build up the empowerment but also because you can literally cast it faster than the delay built into the slam. This synergy between attacks feels really good, and then throwing in pounce as a movement ability that also primes the ground with fissures for you to exploit with your slam, even feels better.
Collectively in practice it means you are throwing out all sorts of nonsense onto the ground and then slamming on top of it to make big explosions, and the gameplay feels amazing. You can finish off trash mobs with maul without much issue, but it still feels amazing to do a big slam that causes half the screen to explode and also ignite things in the process. This is only going to feel even better as I lean more heavily into area of effect and damage numbers, and hopefully at some point switch to demon form via the Fury of the King Talisman. Really the ease of switching between Bear and Werewolf forms and the abilty to add in pounce as a gap closer as you move around the battlefield is really great. I find myself sprinting constantly as well, because the recent changes to how that mechanic works with stuns, means that I can pretty safely get into pounce range before triggering a heavy stun. The way that bear feels almost makes me want to try playing it with a controller.
The secret sauce of the animal forms though is making sure you are always using the highest damage Talisman that you can get. This is a new two handed weapon type and essentially you want to get one with as much physical damage as you can find on it. Elemental damage is nice, and you are going to get some baked on elemental conversion into your attacks, but like playing a Warrior Slam build, you want as much phys as you can get baseline to bump up your numbers. Essentially I saved all of my gold so that each time I moved into a new level bracket I could gamble for a base to attempt to craft on. I also got super lucky in getting a few rather tasty rare drops like the one above. What also helps massively is that the Vaal temple league mechanic gives you access to Betrayal style crafting benches that are just effectively free Regals and free Exalts. So you can in theory drag a few decent bases in with you when you start a temple and then hopefully exit with a new crafted weapon.
I went back and forth as to what I would start as, and ultimately landed on trying to yolo my way through a Druid and ultimately choose the Shaman ascendancy. I think in theory you can probably build a better Titan or Smith of Kitava that is a bear, but the pathing is a bit more contorted to get there. The area you start as a Druid has a bunch of really good early nodes that help progress you through Act 1 and 2 without much issue. This is quite possibly the MOST melee character, and I would have thought that would make Trial of the Sekemas a pain in the ass, but honestly I steamrolled through it. Similarly when I got access to Trial of Chaos I steamrolled that as well. At some point I am going to need to try for a third ascendancy, but for the moment I have chosen Reactive Growth and Avatar of Evolution which helps a bit when it comes to converting physical damage to elemental damage, and also giving me a bit of a buffer against elemental damage in general. For my third ascendancy point I will probably pick up Wisdom of the Magi and its defensive node, and then if I can do a fourth ascdendancy decide of I want to respec and go into Furious Wellspring or if I just pick up Turning of the Seasons instead.
The thing about Druid is that we did not have the passive tree ahead of the launch of the game. This means that NO ONE had any guides available ahead of time, and honestly if they did… they were completely suspect due to not really having any proper information. It was seemingly reasonable to maybe map out a Titan or Smith start with the class, but Druid was a total crapshoot. Because of this I utilized a wonderful functionality within POE.Ninja that shows a heat map of what talent tree choices most of the player base was choosing, and as such effectively crowd sourced my build. How this works is that you essentially choose the primary skill that you are interested in using, and in this case you can either choose Maul the default bear attack or Furious Slam. This then will show you a lit up tree featuring every build that is currently on the ladder and the warmer the color the more often something is chosen. For example almost EVERYONE is pathing down to pick up Primal Rage, regardless if you are starting Druid or Warrior as your base class.
As a result you can see the tree that sort of evolved out of the wisdom of the crowd. One of the primary deviations that I made from the norm is that I picked up Prism Guard and the nodes surrounding it, because I plan on going heavily into armor investment in the final version of my build. Damage shifting is one of the most powerful abilities in Path of Exile 1, and while that exists to a lesser extent in Path of Exile 2… there is the ability to make armor apply to elemental damage amd for the cost of 4 nodes you can get a baseline of 60% of your armor is applying to elemental damage, which you can then increase by making sure you get that stat on some of your beefier armor items like the chestpiece. Will this make me super tanky? I have no clue… because I have not played a melee character since this stat package was introduced. I am hoping it will however and if you look at Hardcore more folks are picking up that node there in the heat map.
I’m having a lot of fun with the Bear though and am now working my way through the second of the three interlude missions, and just about to wrap that up. The real proof of how well the build works is going to come when I start mapping. I think it is going to feel pretty solid though, because the higher the density the more the explosions seem to really work out. I need to probably spend some time fine tuning my support gems because I am not sure anything I am using is actually optimal. That again is another useful thing about POE.Ninja is because you can look at a bunch of the highest performing builds and see what they are using for abilities. This really is how I make characters these days, is I end up looking at a lot of what other players are doing with the abilities that I want to use in my build, and then sort of make decisions based on that data. That is ultimately how I have ended up with some of my favorite custom characters like my FreezyBoom nonsense, which is absolutely not on meta in the least.
So far I am enjoying this league this most I have ever enjoyed any Path of Exile II league, and have shifted from begrudgingly playing the game… to genuinely having a blast. The other aspect of the druid that I like a lot is all of the unique dialog options that happen while you are playing through the campaign. There is even an interlude that happens when you release the spirit of his dead wife during one of the sequences in the game. Genuinely really find this character enjoyable to play, because his reactions are not dissimilar to how I would react to some of these events. At this point Path of Exile II might legitimately have the best campaign from any ARPG to date. I really hope that they find a way to make the interludes stick around in some form of another because I find them really enjoyable as well. I like the whole concept of revisiting the first three acts to help with with further issues as you are somewhat building an army to fight the beast.
Since I started this blog post with one meme, I will end it with another one. I hightly suggest you check out the Druid review from Josh Strife Hayes. It is pure nonsense.
The post Bare Also 4 Fite appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We are down a Thalen this week but continue chipping away at our massive backlog of discussion topics after taking two weeks off due to holiday and illness. We start off with some talk about Dwarven Realms Season 5 and how it allows you to get all the loot without gating your access. From there, we talk about Star Citizen and how it has mostly kept all of its promises during the 2025 release schedule. Most of us have been playing Guild Wars Reforged, and we talk a bit about how much better the game looks and what we are playing. Grace discusses a Vampire Survivors like that has building sim functionality in the very long-named Monsters Are Coming! Rock & Road. Bel has ventured forth into the realm of FDM printing and talks about various lessons learned. Lastly, a quick topic as Bel shares that the POE2 bear is really good, but so is the recently shadow-dropped Paladin in Diablo 4.
Good Morning Folks. On Tuesday the 10th Season dropped for Diablo IV and I have been spending a good chunk of my time playing a Pulverize Druid. I am still mostly in my leveling build phase, but that is largely for lack of reasonable gear drops which I will talk about later. I would love to tell you how many hours I have played, but there is no equivalent of the /played command in this game, nor is there a stats panel like we have in Diablo III. Once upon a time there was a third party tool that filled in this gap, but it seems like either they have stopped supporting it or Blizzard asked them to take it down… because it now simply redirects to the D4 page on Battle.net. I’d sat out the last few seasons, and in my mind that makes me think that must have been sometime last year. No… I last played during season seven… which was January of 2025. It feels like maybe they are speed running seasons… and should maybe stop and have a think about this pacing.
If you are coming to this blog post having not played Diablo IV since launch, you probably only want one question answered. Is Diablo IV Good Yet? That is a complicated question, because I can definitely with resounding authority tell you that it is no longer an objectively bad game. The classes seem relatively balanced, at least in the fact that there is a long list of class builds that are performing well. However, would I consider the game to be “good” when judged against other ARPGs? Then probably not. It is a flawed experience and continues to spend its time creating disposable content without really adding anything to the game that really feels like it moves the needle forward. In fact there are a few things that they have done that actively feel like a step backwards. They no longer refer to things as “powers” but in truth the new Chaos perks shown above… are just a rebranded versions of temporary powers. What I would love to see is the game introducing content that adds more things to do permanently to the game, and not just a less than three month long temporary chase.
So the first problem that I find with this game is that gearing is a bit of a mess. What I mean by this is that I can relatively comfortably do the World on Torment 3, and Bosses on Torment 2… and have long passed the point where any piece of gear that is not ancestral could possibly be useful. Ancestral gear… even at T3… feels exceptionally rare. In fact I can’t really feel any difference in loot availability between T2 and T3 other than the fact that I can speed farm T2. At some point during the seasons that I missed, they flatted the gearing to remove the awkward step of getting Sanctified gear… but also apparently made Ancestral gear feel a bit like unobtainium. It was a few days until I had reached a point where every non-Unique item that I was wearing was Ancestral. This was legitimately a thing that used to take two or three runs, not multiple days worth of fruitless grinding to get to.
Worse than this… I am probably 40 hours into the game at this point… maybe more… and I have a single item that I would consider to be worth investing time and effort into upgrading. Everything else I am wearing… is utterly disposable. What I really need are some Ancestral versions of the other Uniques that my build wants… and while I have run countless copies of the bosses that supposedly drop them. I maybe see a single Ancestral every three to four runs… meaning almost everything I loot is utterly useless. By this point in previous seasons when I was still actively playing the game, I was hunting for Mythics or looking for more perfect versions of Uniques… not struggling to find the items needed to actually make the build function. This frustration is compounded by the fact that the game lacks anything really resembling a proper trade system. You can shout into the void in the trade channel and might possibly get a response, but generally speaking the amount of gold that someone is asking is just stupid. It is not like gold is actually useful in the game, as I am sitting on 150 million right now… but because it has no real value it just seems to be a wild number that people throw around with folks trying to sell things for 500 million.
I am slowly chipping away at the seasonal quests, and have made it up to the Champion level which requires Torment III for everything. I still feel like I need to get a bit stronger before I tackle some of the bossing on this one, and while I have done a Pit 50… the boss on it was a bit painful. Technically I am still running the leveling version of the build, and should likely at some point swap over to the proper setup. I was trying to find the last few pieces of gear as Ancestral before doing this, but in theory I could do it right now I suppose and see if it makes a difference. The new Chaos Rift content is not terribly enjoyable, and the fact that we do not have a new helltide like mechanic to farm makes everything in the season feel slow. I still do not love Helltide in general, but I like the alternate versions of it like the Vampire or Witch themed ones we have gotten in previous seasons, because they seem way more focused.
I am also not the biggest fan of what they did to the battle pass, where it is technically four separate battle passes that have to be unlocked individually. You gain Favor which seems to roll out pretty quickly enough, and then spend that favor to unlock items on the passes. The whole segmentation of this system feels like it was explicitly designed to make players spend more money unlocking it. While I am sure Blizzard will refer to this as “content” it very much feels like taking the same small amount of butter and trying to spread it over way more slices of bread. I will be honest… I was feeling pretty charitable about this season until I sat down and started to write about my individual feelings about various components of it. This is going to come across as a hit piece on the game, and I really do not intend it to be… it is a fun but ultimately flawed gaming experience.
They did get me to spend some money, because a few days into this season they introduced a series of Starcraft themed skins, similar to the World of Warcraft theme ones they released in the past. They coaxed me out of some money then to buy the Lich King skin… and this time around it was Raynor and Corrupted Marine skins. The game is a gorgeous game, and they do create a bunch of really cool cosmetics for it… but it also clearly tells me that they are spending way more effort on the cash shop than they are the rest of the game experience. Diablo has been Fortnite-fied where the gameplay loop is largely kept the same, but you are presented with a constant drumbeat of nostalgia bombs, begging for you to open your wallet and give them some of your money. I am a sucker… I suggest you not be one. I blame Destiny 2 and Gacha games for slowly grinding down my resistance to this complete bullshit.
I think the biggest challenge that I am having right now… is I am not really sure what I should be doing to get over the humps I am dealing with and move on to Torment IV. There is no clear thing that I need to be farming to improve my chances at getting the gear that I need. Maxroll has a boss loot table guide, and in theory I need to be targeting those, but given that again… any item that does not drop at Ancestral is useless… it does not feel great to farm bosses. I think the two biggest outliers that I need are an Ancestral version of Insatiable Fury which drops from Grigoire… which means I need to farm stupid amounts of Helltide to get more summons. I also need an Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which drops from Varshan… which is largely farmed through getting Tree of Whispers caches. I am doing lots of both… but they are somewhat mind-numbing and the key drop rate is pretty low. Nothing feels worse than seeing the items technically dropping… but without Ancestral rarity… once again making them not worth my time even picking up really.
This is one of those times where Path of Exile and having access to a functional… and now automated… trade economy is a mass improvement. I could save up resources and pick up the items that I am missing, and maybe start selling off some of the items that do drop that I have no use for in order to fund those upgrades. More than that, I feel like Path of Exile is a bit easier to tell what is wrong with your character, and why you can’t do higher tier content. Granted that just might be my level of familiarity with the game. Builds in Diablo III and IV both work on gimmick interactions between abilities, that cause wild exponential scaling to amp up your damage, and in order to trigger that… you need very specific items in specific slots with specific stat combinations. Last Epoch is quite possibly the best game for gearing because you can get up and running really quickly, and then it becomes just a matter of perfecting your gear over time rather than making it super hard to find the pieces that you need.
So to the original question of “Is it Good Now?”. I would say honestly it is good enough to have fun with it. There are frustrations, but you can at very least make it through the campaign without having to deal with them. Everything that I have talked about in this post with disdain… are end game issues. You should be able to at a minimum get to Torment 1 with very little effort. I was doing that almost immediately after dinging level 60. Everything else is just how willing you are to grind it out. I used to have a lot of fun grouping up with my friend Ace and chain running bosses… but that is pretty much a nonstarter these days because everyone has to spend boss mats in order to get loot, so there is no longer that force multiplier that there used to be. Once the 0.3.1 patch drops in Path of Exile II, I will probably be back over there testing out the endgame changes. I am enjoying playing a Bear Druid, but not so much that the next thing that interests me would not immediately pull my attention away from the game. If Destiny Rising did not have clear caps on how much you can do in a given day… I would likely be over there playing it instead of grinding here.
The post Ancestral or Bust appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
