Good Morning, Folks. I feel like Diablo IV right now is in a very good state. I know this because every time I log into the game in the new hub city of Temis, regardless of what time of day it is… it is freaking packed with players moving around and interacting with things. It does not hurt at all that they managed to launch for once during a lull in the other games. The last Path of Exile 2 league is from December, Path of Exile 1 from February, and even Last Epoch at this point is stale, having launched its last season in March. It feels like the normal time associated with playing an ARPG season is about three weeks, and all of the more popular games… are well past that. So if there was a perfect time to launch Lord of Hatred, they somehow managed to hit it, which is wild given that there were no delays around POE2 0.5.0, it would have been launching against it. Sure, the game legitimately is in a great state, but the timing has to have massively helped.
It is not like you can really use Steam to represent a significant portion of the Diablo IV player base. The game launched originally only on Battle.net, and most “Blizzard” players use that launcher. We don’t have accurate numbers for the folks on Xbox or PlayStation, so as a result, we have to rely on the general trends from Steam DB since it aggregates its statistics. You can see that on Steam it hit its all-time peak high four days ago, which is wild considerly that that high was reached after the official launch of the expansion. My personal guess is that enough good press and hype about the game had managed to saturate the latent player base to get the message that no… D4 was actually sort of good now. D4 Bad was a meme for so long, and I am happy to see that it has managed to more or less right the ship. It doesn’t have Path of Exile 2 numbers on Steam, but that makes sense as a much larger portion of the GGG playerbase plays via the Steam Client.
I’ve recently spent a lot of time working with the crafting system that exists in-game, and I have to say it is pretty phenomenal. The above are some examples of items that I recently crafted. In the case of the two legendaries, I started with a base yellow or blue ancestral item and worked it up from there. The fact that I managed to hit a quad masterworked chest is wild, but it is more than that… one of the masterworked stats got chosen when I did the final masterworking step at the blacksmith. The enchanting system is also extremely powerful for fixing problems with items. Are any of my items technically perfect? Absolutely not, but they are pretty damned good. Temerity, I managed to pull by taking an ancestral pair of pants, dropping it to white rarity, and then using the cube recipe to promote that item up to a Unique. The mace I managed to get as a drop already at Ancestral rarity. The recipe that I would really like to see, however, is something that will take a normal unique and upgrade it to an Ancestral, because I am struggling to get my last few required uniques to drop at that 900 item level.
Essentially, I am at the point where I just need to put my head down and grind. I need to work through so many runs of the Pit to level all five of my glyphs up to level 50, which is the break point for the legendary traits. At the moment, I can do a Torment 8 pit and am close to unlocking Torment 9, but it is a bit of a slog. The positive I went from running Torment 6 as my comfy speed run level to doing the same for Torment 7, so incremental progress. I feel like I am not that far from being able to bump up to Torment 8 as my baseline. Right now, I am struggling to keep enough materials and gold to masterwork everything, but once I do that… in theory, I should see a significant power boost as a result. Honestly, the best source of resources right now is via the Mercenary favor caches, so again, I just need to do some head-down grinding in order to put on some favor levels and get more caches.
Today, however, is all about the Path of Exile II reveal stream. I feel like there is an awful lot riding on this one, because 0.4.0 was not the best-received league, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit. They have been teasing all of these endgame system reworks, and I fear that they have cranked up expectations to the moon. They really have to stick the landing on this presentation, and it seems like they are pulling out all the stops. The Twitch drop that they announced yesterday is among the most intricate that I have seen them give away for free, so they are most definitely trying to get a bunch of eyeballs on the stream. I will be doing my best to tune in, but I am sure I will miss some of it as it happens smack dab in the middle of the workday. I am sure tomorrow I will be offering up my own commentary to the reveal, so if you care about such things, tune in then. Because tomorrow is a lab work and office visit day, my blog will be landing later in the day than normal.
The post Diablo IV Has Good Numbers appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks! Last night during sibling time with Ace, I ripped the band-aid off and respecced my Paladin from the Thorns Leveling build to the Arbiter Blessed Hammer build. As I had said before, I essentially hit a ceiling where I needed to do something to push things further. I could swing Torment 7, but that was a stretch, and as a result, I was just farming Torment 6 over and over because it was so much faster. Thorns used to be a really awesome build during the season that they introduced the Paladin, where you could more or less run around with impunity and watch things die around you. Now it is way more fiddly because you effectively have to bait mobs into standing around your very slow-moving blessed shields, which are dealing the majority of the damage. It was an amazing boss killer because you could drop the Ultimate and watch their health evaporate as you were dealing massively multiplied thorns damage to anything standing in that ring. Clearing, however, was a bit of a mess, and I suffered through it for a while…. but knew something had to change.
Before we get any further, can we stop for a moment and talk about how crappy it is to spec out paragon boards? When you have 163 points to spend, it takes forever to slowly work your way through all of them and connect up the boards. I feel like there should be some sort of system where you can import a Paragon spec via a string and have the game allocate the boards for you. That way, guide creators could post a minimal spec, and a full spec and then at least get you 90% of the way there with either. Since I do not have 300 points, I did what you usually do and spent time speccing through all of the rare sockets and legendary abilities, and pretty much had enough points to then go back and flesh out the first board completely. Nothing about this process is fun. It does make me appreciate and not mind respeccing quite so badly in other ARPGs.
It is always somewhat fraught to give up what is effectively a functional build… for the hopes of respeccing into a better build, but not quite being certain how things will shake out. Having never played Arbiter Blessed Hammers, I did not know if I would even like the way it feels. So it is always scary to take that plunge and give up what you are used to for the purpose of another build. I had everything that was required for the build except for a single item, the Argent Veil ring shown above. I managed to get it this morning off Andariel, but the build was pretty functional without it. I have a lot of room to grow gear-wise. I am effectively out of materials after building out my Warlock, so nothing of my gear is qualitied up and masterworked. In addition to that, I have zero ancestral uniques, so I will be focusing on farming up those items that I need. I’ve already cleared a pit 55, which is higher than I had managed previously, and I still have a ton of room to upgrade. My short-term goal is to get the build to a point where it is capable of farming Torment 10, and then hopefully get some mythics to move to the final form of the build.
What makes the build so great is its speed. This is very much in the speed farm family of builds, because the gameplay focuses on using a movement ability called Falling Star to leap between packs. This in itself does a good deal of damage, but you also bring your Blessed Hammers with you, so you are constantly dealing damage to stragglers and full clearing packs. Falling Star gives you the Arbiter effect, and essentially, the goal is to keep this up all of the time, which gives you a significant boost to the damage your hammers are doing. When you get to the boss of an encounter, you pop your Arbiter of Justice Ultimate and deal massive amounts of damage while also popping your auras and dropping consecration. All of this will deal so much more damage once I have something resembling the correct stats on my gear. I am probably going to farm a bunch of Infernal Hordes so that I can get materials to start enchanting and upgrading items.
All in all, I am pretty happy that I took the plunge. The build feels extremely strong already, and I am clearing content so much faster than I was when I was previously having to bait targets into my thorns damage. Truth be told, were I starting out right now, I would have leveled blessed hammers from the start. It just feels better to play than the current state of Thorns. Sure, I was able to farm bosses pretty easily, but it was at the cost of pretty much every other type of content. At some point, once I get my Paladin stabilized, I will likely return to the Warlock and see how far I can push its damage. Largely, I am just hoping to get something to a point where T12 content is comfy, so that I can knock out all of the seasonal achievements. My goal is to 100% the season and get that done before the Path of Exile II league drops at the end of the month.
Are you playing Diablo IV? What build are you running? How far into the Torment ladder have you managed to push? Drop me a line below.
The post Arbiter is Awesome 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.
Morning Folks! I am sure you are all probably sick of me talking about this build, but I think more than anything I am shocked it is still functional. I thought for certain that the wheels would begin to fall off as soon as I got deeper into Monolith Echoes. At this point, I am working on the level 75 Monolith and things still seem to be strong. In fact, as of this morning, I equipped a few new pieces of gear and the damage output seems to be even stronger. The only negative is that I feel like at some point I am going to have some survival problems. I have pretty bad resistance and not a ton of health. We struggle with some of the same problems as POE when you are trying to create a build with a bunch of uniques… you somewhat lack room for survival unless said uniques are already covering that.
I recorded a fresh video this morning of me doing a level 75 Monolith Echo, showing off what the gameplay looks like. For the most part I am just lighting everything that gets near me on fire, and that fire damage over time is eventually killing things. That which I don’t kill outright, my Manifest Armor minion or the trail of flame behind me tends to finish off. For those curious, I found out how to dump my build to Last Epoch Tools this morning, so you can see the current state of the build and the gear that I have equipped here. I would not follow directly in my footsteps though, because nothing I am doing is clean enough to be considered a proper build guide. I still feel like I need to rework most of my passives for example which is something I will probably do in the coming days.
I am still leaning heavily upon Firestarter’s Torch and the chance to inflict spreading flames. This does a lot of the work in making sure that everything is catching on fire. This morning I added Rahyeh’s Light which is a shield intended for a Judgement build but has stats that we care about and a heck of a lot of block chance and block effectiveness. I hope to find a version of this with Legendary Potential so I can maybe throw on all resistances or health on block. Sunwreath continues to do a lot of work in giving us melee ignite chance and fire damage over time. Sadly the flame reave lines are useless for us, but everything else works and again my hope is to stack on some sort of survival. Fiery Dragon Shoes are another new addition that gives us a bunch of fire penetration, and reduced bonus damage taken on crit… but the trade-off is it makes it so we get crit slightly easier. However, when we are crit it leaves a fire trail which is pretty slick.
All told I am pretty freaking happy being a walking inferno, and I am curious if this continues to scale as I level into empowered monoliths. I know there are some issues to solve here… specifically resistances and packing on more health and general survival… but for the moment I am having a blast having a super chill mapping experience. Last night I put on an audiobook and just kept my head down grinding through echoes all night. Mostly my goal is to pack on some more levels and start getting into empowered monoliths where hopefully I can finally test the build and see how longterm viable it is. Bossing is not amazing, but also not the worst thing I have ever experienced. Having 16 potions makes up for a lot of mistakes.
It isn’t like I stopped playing my Void Knight either. I am still using it to farm prophecies pretty regularly and working towards trying to get a handful of items with legendary potential to take that build to the next level. I’ve tried making a few legendaries and so far I have mostly wound up with duds that did not hit any of the stats that I had hoped for. This means that I need to farm up more legendary potential items and more exalted items to make additional attempts. This is probably where playing in the trade side of the cycle makes a bit more sense because you can just keep buying more items to try and craft into legendaries or simply buy the finished legendary rather than farming random content and hoping. The amount of loot that you get from Circle of Fortune though is outrageous.
Still having a freaking blast with this Last Epoch Cycle. Are you playing? If so what build did you go with? Drop me a line below.
The post Ignite Warpath in Monoliths appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
