Good Morning Folks. I wish my Canadian friends would come collect their geese. We have a gaggle of them that roam around my neighborhood and this past weekend they straight up blocked my progress trying to get back home. I slowly had to ease up on them and they eventually parted and let me through. I got out of the car and tried to wave them away… but that only caused them to hiss at me and stand their ground. If you have been reading the blog for awhile you will know that they also blocked my progress when I was trying to get back to the visitation for my wife because I forgot to bring her glasses. Last night they also briefly blocked my progress when I was going to a dinner thing. It seems like they exist to be a roadblock for whenever I need to be somewhere.
Yesterday was a lot. It would have been my wife’s 49th birthday and as a result we planned on having a dinner thing at 7pm at one of her favorite restaurants. She was basic and loved Olive Garden… what can I say. I think her ACTUAL favorite restaurant was Desi Wok an Indian/Desi place in Midtown Tulsa, but it has a super small dining room and could not have supported the big group that we had last night. I am not sure the actual headcount but it was somewhere around twenty people and I mostly did okay. In truth I was way more stressed by being around that many people at one time, but I took it in good spirits. I did not get out of there and back home until around 10ish… so I was exhausted and pretty much went straight to bed. My children aka the cats were super grumpy that I had been gone all night, but quickly assumed snuggling postures with me in bed as I did my dailies in the few mobile games that I play before falling asleep.
One of the things that I need to do is come up with a reason for me to get out of the house more, and honestly be more active. I am pretty damned sedentary and have been over the five years of remote work. One of the things that I used to do with my wife was go off on camera shoots, looking for various interesting things to photograph. I am a bit fan of urban decay and turning benign subjects into abstract ones through the photo lens. One of the things I hated about this however was the weird proprietary chargers that we had to use with our canon cameras. So I started out looking to see if anyone made a version of the chargers that used USB C. Instead I found something way more cool. These are some replacement batteries that you just hook up with USB C as though they were a power bank. I bought a pair of them to try out and maybe this will jump start my desire to get out and take some photos.
My friend from High School that keeps tabs on me has also said that they want to go out and shoot photos more so I might be able to convince them to join in the madness. There are a few places that I would not mind revisiting. For example Downtown Coffeyville Kansas was really cool the weekend we took a trip up there circa 2014ish. There is also plenty of stuff in and around Tulsa to take photos of that is interesting. I remember we made a trip out to Guthrie and that was pretty great as well. Mostly the camera was a good reason to go somewhere other than my home, and while walking around looking for things to take photos of… I completely forget that I am walking around and end up putting on a bunch of steps that I am unaware of until get home and realize how tired I am. I need distractions I think and this seems like a reasonable one.
Another distraction that I am heading towards is starting up collecting and painting Warhammer 40k miniatures again. I’ve missed this but have not really had the space for it. At some point when I find someone to donate the library of math books that my wife collected over the years, I will probably start turning her office into a hobby room. At some point I envision having 3d printers set up in there and a painting desk. In the short term though I have been watching stupid amounts of videos trying to determine how best to ease back into things. The same friend from High School has said we need to do a few painting nights rather than me making a rash decision with which of the dozens of paint lines that I want to buy into. They have a smattering of various paints so that I can get a feel for how each of them works. The hobby industry has expanded significantly since I last paid any attention to it… which was around the release of Warhammer 8th edition.
Prior to that I was a Rogue Trader through 2nd edition Warhammer 40k player back when we were in High School. I grew up daydreaming about having access to all of the things that I saw in White Dwarf magazine. We did not have access to a GW store of any sort, with I think the closest one being over five hours away in the Dallas Metroplex. What we did have access to were woefully incomplete product lines at various small comic shops, but we made the best of what we could get and had a lot of fun painting them. Quite honestly having a paint night with this friend is going to be a massive throwback to our high school days where I would go to his house and abuse the large collection of apple barrel paints to paint up my squads of beakie space marines from the 30 count plastic box.
I played some more Titan Quest 2 yesterday and rolled another melee character, this time going warfare and earth instead of warfare and storm. There is significantly more synergy there and I went hard on doing a fire based whirlwind character like I have done so many times in Last Epoch. It works well enough, but still feels a bit more clunky than I would have liked it to be. However I do think a lot of what I am reading as clunk is just the slower pace of this game as compared to Path of Exile or Last Epoch. There are two problems that I need to solve with this build, the first being mana regeneration and the second being some sort of either life leech or regeneration that will keep my health topped off when I encounter status effects that I will not be able to easily avoid since I am up in the face of everything I am fighting. My goal with any build is to make them so they are self sustaining in way that I never have to hit the health potion, or at least not without me taking some massive spike of damage.
One of the things that still annoys me is how there are cases where you do not care at all about the early tiers of abilities for a specific mastery. For example I rushed pouring my divinity points into Earth so that I could pick up the aura that would make every melee attack that I do deal fire damage, because the two spells that were in the first tier were useless for the sort of build I was going for. This is sort of the thing that I was saying when it did not feel like there was much synergy between abilities. Some abilities have ways to mutate them into other types of attacks… for example you can make Lightning Bolt be a spear attack which is cool… but it would have been cooler if you could have just made that work with ANY weapon attack. Part of the reason why Path of Exile 1 is so awesome, is that in most cases you can use any attack or spell with most weapon setups, giving you some really broad freedom in how you build your character. There is more flexibility here than in Path of Exile II for example… but it also really feels like they have a build in mind for each of the trees.
Anyways. I think I am tired of writing for this morning. I am still sort of exhausted from last night, not so much sleepy tired… but emotionally drained. I told my folks when I got home that it was awfully “peopley” in there, and my Dad laughed who is also a confirmed curmudgeon. I now need to figure out what all I missed yesterday while I was not working, and figure out how to pick up where I left off from Monday. I hope you all have a wonderful day and I will figure out something to talk about tomorrow morning.
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Good Morning Folks. Over the weekend Titan Quest 2 released into early access, which is effectively a paid demo client of the game that covers either the tutorial and first act, or first two acts depending on how the game categorizes these things. I’ve heard that the final game will be roughly five times as long as this current version and at this point I have put about eight hours into three different characters. I’ve had a bit of a fraught relationship with TQ2 thus far, because honestly… melee and bow characters felt a bit clunky. However since all of the streamers seemed to be playing the same build, I decided to give it a shot and found playing a caster considerably more enjoyable. The above screenshot is from an earlier test of the game back in March when I tried to play a melee character. Interestingly enough… my original character from that test was preserved into this early access period.
I think a lot of the clunk is due to the fact that we only have four masteries in the game, and not a lot of them have much synergy. In the original game your character was made up of any two masteries out of a total of eleven. In this game you have to carve out your character with only access to Warfare (Melee/Ranged and Weapon Damage), Rogue (Melee and Ailment/Crit Damage), Storm (Cold and Lightning Damage), and Earth (Physical and Fire Damage). I quickly decided that melee attacks felt a bit clunky, and with all of the required dodging… it might not be good standing in point blank range with encounters. However there really does not seem to be a lot of what I would expect to support bow attacks. There are a few options, for example there is a buff in the Earth tree that gives you an aura that deals more physical or fire damage, son in theory that could be useful. Half of the Warfare specific attacks though are point back melee attacks so that didn’t really work out either.
You are also juggling attributes which are required to equip various gear sets. You spend points in one of four primary attributes, and doing so levels at least two other attributes at the same time. So for example if you spend points in Knowledge, you are also gaining Cunning and Resolve. If you dump points into Vigor you are earning all three secondary attributes. On my caster character I have mostly alternated between Knowledge and Vigor with a few points into Might so that I could keep wearing the armor based caster gear called “Inlaid” as I moved up through the levels. Weirdly this was also enough points for me to keep using a melee two handed axe in my offhand. One of the huge positives of the game is that other than mastery choices, you can pretty much respec your character at any time either through going to a specific shrine and completely resetting your character… or through just hitting respec mode button at the bottom of the skills screen and spending gold to apply the changes.
I did not want to record a full version of one of my normal videos, but I did record a bit to show Ace last night how the gameplay felt. This is me tooling around in a higher level area than I am and killing fish people. You can see the Ice Shards gameplay style where I have poured points into both getting multiple shards and having the shards home in on targets. The content in the early access version of the game seems to end around level 20, and all of the areas are locked to a specific level range. I wandered up into level 15 areas when I was level 12… and it was mostly fine but things just took a long time to kill. I fought at level 18 boss at level 13 and it was also fine…. but again just took a long time to grind it down. It is a much slower game than the modern standard, which is either a good or bad thing depending on your point of view. I will likely try and play this when it goes live, but it will never be a primary game for me because I am too used to the speed of Path of Exile at this point.
This is very much a game in the same family as Path of Exile II, where it wants you to make methodical choices and dodge all of the attacks. You will never feel super powerful even on the lowest difficulty version of the game. The original Titan Quest was very much attempting to clone the type of gameplay that Diablo II had, and Titan Quest II is just a much prettier version of that same methodology. Either this sounds like a great time to you, or it does not. It will not compete seriously with games like Path of Exile, Last Epoch, and even Torchlight Infinite because that audience wants a much faster paced game. It will however be a very recognizable experience to anyone who played a lot of the original Titan Quest. If you want a slower and by reference grindier experience then this is probably right down your alley. My hope is that it feels less clunky the more masteries that get added into the package, because like I said right now there does not seem to be a lot of good synergy for buildcraft. The Elementalist Ice Shards build is so popular because it really feels like one of the few truly viable options if you want a specific type of gameplay.
The game world itself is really beautiful, and the soundtrack sufficiently haunting. The orchestral palette of the game reminds me a lot of The Witcher 3 with its mournful use of strings. There are a number of interesting locations, but most of what I have seen so far is large open fields, cliffs, and swampy regions which are lovingly rendered… but also somewhat generic. There are however a bunch of really cool touches like the foot tracks in the dusty roads, or places where a string of ants is crossing the path in front of you. It reminds me quite a bit of the sort of look and feel that the first game was trying to go for, and since the world is crafted and not generated… there can be a wealth of detail put into it. However this also means that much like an MMORPG, once you memorize the layout of the zone you will be mentally optimizing your pathing through it and ignoring all of these details on future playthroughs. I have already seen myself doing this with some of the early areas since I am three character deep into the tutorial.
Early Access was $24 right now on steam, and that seemed like a reasonable risk to take in order to buy my way into the game. I did not really enjoy the play test from March, but having shifted to playing a caster I am enjoying the experience much more. There are a few more side quests that I could do, but effectively at 8 hours in, I have completed everything that is currently in the early access release. If you were more dedicated to a single character you could easily complete everything that is to do in 5 hours or less. So really think of this as a demo of the game more than a true early access, and we have no clue what sort of release cadence they will have going forward. I don’t think there is much more content in this version of the game than the play test that was released six months ago. They expect to release the full version of the game in Q4 of 2026, so we still have a very long time until then. Honestly unless you are just burning to play this… I would probably wait until there is a bit more meat on these bones.
There is enjoyment to be had… but you are probably better off just playing Last Epoch Season 3 on the 21st, or Path of Exile II 0.3.0 on the 29th of the month if you are dying to scratch that ARPG itch. If you want a great single player experience, there is always Grim Dawn which is just about to release another expansion. If you can stomach a game that is a few decades old at this point there is also the original Titan Quest, but it has definitely got graphics and gameplay from its era. Buying into the early access gets you the final release of the game, so there is at least that which is a positive. We will also be able to test new content as it goes into the game, however I am not entirely certain how much of that I will be doing. I think it will probably be a solid game on release once it has had a bit longer to bake in the oven.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday Grinding Gear Games released the full reveal of all of the major nodes for the twelve ascendancies that will be playable in the Path of Exile II Early Access. This is critical because at least in this first release, players will be unable to respec their ascendancy. Generally speaking, you don’t have to be super certain which direction you are going to be going in Path of Exile, because you can always change ascendancies at a later date. You will still be able to move points around, but shifting from Titan to Warbringer on the Warrior class for example would require you to roll a brand new character. This has been a point of contention for veteran players, Zizaran specifically in his recent interview with Jonathan asked for them to release the full ascendancy information ahead of time.
Right now my game plan is to go Warrior and rush the Regen/Armor cluster marked with number one. We don’t have a complete build tool yet, but a number of the nodes have been data-mined from the various videos that were released of the last LA Streamer event. So far this seems to be the best tool available with updated information, and where I pulled the above screenshot that I took into photoshop. The next goal is to pick up the one-hander nodes at #4 and then head down to pick up all of the mace nodes at #2. Then I will path down to #3 and hopefully be able to pay the strength requirements to swap over to Giant’s Blood which will allow me to run the Two-Hander and Shield setup that I plan on going permanently. I will likely have some abilities set up with this configuration, and then others will be swapping over to a dual-wielding Two-hander weapon swap. Once I get Giant’s Blood I will be dropping the Onehanded nodes at #4 and picking up the Twohanded nodes directly across the path from them.
However, I am stuck with which of the two Warrior ascendancies to go with. All of this time I have said I was going Titan, but one of potentially the best nodes is buried behind a fairly awful one. Hulking Form seems really strong because this will not only give me a 50% increased effect on the attribute travel nodes but also all of the small nodes that give other benefits throughout the tree. Like I said though, it is buried behind Colossal Capacity which is a nice quality of life, but otherwise useless node. I also want Crushing Blows and a 40% More multiplier against Heavy Stunned enemies, but taking Hulking Form would force me to bypass some of the other good nodes like the ones that cause Slam skills to gain Aftershocks.
All of that said… the Warbringer tree is looking pretty tasty as well. Namely, there is a potentially wild node called Imploding Impacts that lets your Armor break attacks go into the negatives, increasing the amount of damage dealt with your attacks. This morning however SirGog pointed out that unless the damage calculations have changed for Armor, there is the potentially to break the game. I am also a big fan of Warcaller’s Bellow which causes corpses around you to explode when you do a Warcry and Greatwolf’s Howl which removes the cooldown from Warcries in general. There are also a bunch of block-related nodes that might be good because I am absolutely going after some block on the tree to allow me to passively shed damage. Basically I want high armor, high regen, and high block to attempt to create a pretty tanky character.
In other general Path of Exile II news, they released an announcement yesterday that preloading will be available on Thursday aka Tomorrow at 7 pm CST. This is specifically for the standalone client, but I would expect that it should be available through Steam shortly after that point. I am not sure if I will do the Standalone client or the Steam client. Right now I am running POE1 with a separate client, but have been contemplating moving back to the Steam client just to have better time played tracking. Hopefully, this gives folks enough time to download if they have slower internet connections. Essentially they were playing a game of chicken so that they could hopefully release the game without giving time for folks to data-mine the hell out of the client before it goes live.
Lastly, they released a video yesterday as well showing off a series of Twitch drops, and a promotion with Twitch for gifting two subs to a streamer. I will likely do this thing because the Chimaera pet is kind of adorable, in that so hideous it is cute kind of way. I will absolutely be farming the Twitch drops as I often do, even though none of them are particularly exciting to me save for the pet.
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Good Morning Folks! I’m in a massive hype cycle for the early access launch of Path of Exile II next Friday. However, I would caution you my dear readers… to not actually take time off from work to play it. I’ve been watching something with a bit of trepidation, which is Path of Exile 2 climbing on the top-selling games list for Steam. Something important to know about this list is that this is based on the amount of cash brought in by that product, which is why the Steam Deck for example is eternally at the top of this list because it is a very expensive item. Another important thing to note about this list is that a large chunk of POE players… are not actually buying things through the Steam store. None of the purchases I have made for example have been through Steam and are instead bought on PathOfExile.com meaning that you are seeing a minority of the total amount being spent on early access for Path of Exile II.
I am fully expecting that when the game goes online at 1 pm my time… the servers will be a complete mess that is likely only to get worse as we roll into primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely going to attempt to play next Friday but I am also preparing for the worst. If Jonathan Rogers was saying during the DM/Ghazzy stream that the numbers were significantly higher than they were expecting… I would believe him given that the game moved from 5th on the high sales chart to 3rd since yesterday. As a veteran of many a bad MMORPG launch, I would just suggest you not blow any of that valuable vacation time until the first few weeks have stabilized a bit. I am about as hyped as anyone could be for this thing, but have a backup plan because I fully expect the game to be largely unplayable for the first 48 hours. Maybe GGG will surprise me, and I hope they do… but I am also giving them leverage to adapt without holding them accountable for the extreme hype levels.
I think a lot of this hype comes from the fact that for the most part, Diablo IV has been unsatisfying. It stirred up the desire to play an ARPG… but failed to deliver anything that holds attention for long periods of time. Path of Exile has been considered to be largely unapproachable by most players and Path of Exile II is in many ways an attempt to open the door to folks who bounced the first time they saw the passive skill tree. Do I think Path of Exile II will be casual friendly enough to gather the mass of disillusioned Diablo IV players? Probably not. However, there are going to be a lot of people who are amped to give it a shot and as such… given how well Diablo IV sold… we are going to see similar numbers throwing themselves into Path of Exile II early access. I think GGG knows this is going to be a problem and is scrambling last minute to sure up their infrastructure but no amount of load testing can really compete with the sledgehammer of millions of players battering down the gates and flooding the first few zones at the exact same time.
Please note that this sober advice is coming from someone who is chain-watching pretty much every bit of information coming out about the game and has rewatched the opening cinematic a disturbing number of times at this point. I am fully enthralled by the game at this point and am ready for the doors to open. However, as someone who has been in this position… taken time off from work in order to play a game that was largely in permanent maintenance mode for weeks… don’t do it. I am not sure there is a chance in hell of this being a perfectly smooth launch. Line up other games to play while waiting for the servers to right themselves. There is going to be plenty of time to play this game in the coming months and unless you are a hardcore racing type… really there is no rush to be there first. The economy is going to take weeks to sort itself out anyway.
Mostly I love you all and just want to limit your frustrations… and nothing amps up frustration more than making specific plans to do a thing and then having those plans effectively canceled by technical difficulties.
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