Good Morning Folks. As of this afternoon we will have had access to the Legacy of Phrecia event for a week. At this point I am level 94 and have mostly reached a point of stability with my build. Sure I would like to craft a new sceptre and am on the look out for a few specific jewels, but all in all Scavenger RF works pretty well. However I am not going to talk about any of that this morning, and am instead going to share my thoughts about the new Idol Based Atlas system. This entire event was touted as ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, and this idol concept was originally something that was abandoned in favor of the current Atlas tree system… which admittedly is damned near perfection. The first few days I was pretty hype for the idols, but now I have reached a point where I absolutely see the limitations and understand why this did not see the light of day.
The good about this system though, is that early maps feel amazing. You get a large number of Idols which allows you to cobble together something that mostly works. During White and Yellow progression I was essentially getting Delirium, Harvest, Niko, Essences, and Strongboxes every map… and Ritual, Expedition, and Betrayal pretty freaking often. This is way more content than you would normally have access to during early maps when you don’t really have that many Atlas points to spend. This makes the early game feel amazing… but you eventually reach a point where it starts to taper off.
By the time you are in yellow or red maps, you have quite a few points to spend on the tree which means that you have pretty much every node available for at least one league mechanic, making that single mechanic extremely juicy. In truth I tend to build trees that synergize with different abilities that are all on the same side of the tree. For example I might have a Ritual, Einhar, and Beyond tree as they all exist within a few nodes of each other so that by the time you near the end of your Atlas you have 100% chance for all of those mechanics and have a bunch of nodes that buff them so that they produce better stuff. I tend to be an “Alch and Go Andy” when it comes to mapping strategies, and I juice to extreme levels with the most expensive scarabs and most carefully rolled maps. I drop a map in the atlas, hit go, and then run with whatever content the device gives me.
For the heaviest juicers however… the Idol system is probably much better. For example Life Without Pants is a YouTuber that I enjoy watching content from, and he talks a bit about his strategy that centers around Harbingers. Essentially through the use of the Idols he can force something like six harbingers on a single map, always convert them to harbinger bosses, cause them to drop whole currency instead of shards, and then cause their cool down to be much shorter so you can complete each individual harbinger encounter much faster. Similarly Fubgun is running a strategy where he forces 36 Rogue Exiles onto his map and then uses Scarabs to juice that up considerably so that he can produce Affliction league levels of drops when you combine that with Ritual.
The problem that I have with the Idol system however is that it essentially forces you to go “all in” on a single strategy. Either you can cobble together something like I am running where it ups the chances of a bunch of different league mechanics to spawn, or you carefully craft a single mechanic and then juice it to levels that have never been possible before. The existing Atlas Tree lets you do a handful of of complementary mechanics really well, and I think makes the entire experience feel a bit better as a result. As someone who cannot bring themselves to skip mechanics when they appear on the map… it feels bad to do a bunch of mechanics with zero investment in them. Nodes that I thought might be good on their own like Crop Rotation, actually feel awful when you don’t have the rest of the points in the tree to buff it.
I think part of what makes the Idol system feel extremely bad is the fact that you are almost required to deal with massive amounts of very small specific trades in order to get an individual strategy working. Everything I am running I have cobbled together from the dregs of my bank. If you were wanting to run a hyper specific strategy though, you would need to trade for a bunch of specific rolls on idols… and then deal with the frustration of not getting answers from most of the traders because 1 Chaos trades are not worth stopping mapping for. If you want to bump things up to the next level, you are also probably going to be spending time deleting idols through the recombinator as you try and get a single item with four usable stats on it. This is graveyard crafting levels of tedium… which is again why I am mostly just yoloing my way through the system and trying to make something that feels halfway decent. This is yet another league that proves Path of Exile needs a fucking auction house already.
As glad as I am that the Idol system was left on the cutting room floor and we have our beloved Atlas tree instead… I have to admit that given the choice I would take this immediately over the systems in Path of Exile II. Everything about the Atlas tree in that game is awful, and it is entirely too focused on bossing. Bossing is just a subset of the Path of Exile 1 endgame, and most people… are not really focusing on it. Idols would go a long way towards patching the problems with that game’s system and forcing specific mechanics onto every map instead of the poorly designed precursor tablet system. Conceptually I like the exploration system because I enjoy it in Delve, but it just does not really work as a replacement for mapping. Part of the payoff of leveling and fully unlocking your atlas tree… is the agency to focus on only the mechanics that you want to focus on. You never really reach any of that payoff or any of that agency in Path of Exile II… which feels like the team missed that core tenet of the first game.
Phrecia has been a really interesting experimental league, and it was announced today that it is being extended by a month. I really like chaos pop righteous fire, and I would absolutely play something like this again in the future. Which admittedly makes me wonder what it would be like to play one of the witch based righteous fire builds at some point in the future. I do think that a lot of the ideas behind the Idol system in this league event could benefit Path of Exile II. Right now the endgame does not really work and feels way too far removed from the near perfect loop of game play that exists within Path of Exile’s endgame. All of POE’s problems center around on-boarding the player and gear acquisition for non-traders and non-crafters but the virtuous loop of the endgame was not something that should have been abandoned. Path of Exile II feels a lot like Destiny 2 did at launch… where it feels like they forgot all of the lessons that the previous game had learned. I am onboard for trying out quirky ideas in event leagues until they figure out how to make Path of Exile II feel a bit better though.
The post The Idol Based Atlas appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. As of this afternoon we will have had access to the Legacy of Phrecia event for a week. At this point I am level 94 and have mostly reached a point of stability with my build. Sure I would like to craft a new sceptre and am on the look out for a few specific jewels, but all in all Scavenger RF works pretty well. However I am not going to talk about any of that this morning, and am instead going to share my thoughts about the new Idol Based Atlas system. This entire event was touted as ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, and this idol concept was originally something that was abandoned in favor of the current Atlas tree system… which admittedly is damned near perfection. The first few days I was pretty hype for the idols, but now I have reached a point where I absolutely see the limitations and understand why this did not see the light of day.
The good about this system though, is that early maps feel amazing. You get a large number of Idols which allows you to cobble together something that mostly works. During White and Yellow progression I was essentially getting Delirium, Harvest, Niko, Essences, and Strongboxes every map… and Ritual, Expedition, and Betrayal pretty freaking often. This is way more content than you would normally have access to during early maps when you don’t really have that many Atlas points to spend. This makes the early game feel amazing… but you eventually reach a point where it starts to taper off.
By the time you are in yellow or red maps, you have quite a few points to spend on the tree which means that you have pretty much every node available for at least one league mechanic, making that single mechanic extremely juicy. In truth I tend to build trees that synergize with different abilities that are all on the same side of the tree. For example I might have a Ritual, Einhar, and Beyond tree as they all exist within a few nodes of each other so that by the time you near the end of your Atlas you have 100% chance for all of those mechanics and have a bunch of nodes that buff them so that they produce better stuff. I tend to be an “Alch and Go Andy” when it comes to mapping strategies, and I juice to extreme levels with the most expensive scarabs and most carefully rolled maps. I drop a map in the atlas, hit go, and then run with whatever content the device gives me.
For the heaviest juicers however… the Idol system is probably much better. For example Life Without Pants is a YouTuber that I enjoy watching content from, and he talks a bit about his strategy that centers around Harbingers. Essentially through the use of the Idols he can force something like six harbingers on a single map, always convert them to harbinger bosses, cause them to drop whole currency instead of shards, and then cause their cool down to be much shorter so you can complete each individual harbinger encounter much faster. Similarly Fubgun is running a strategy where he forces 36 Rogue Exiles onto his map and then uses Scarabs to juice that up considerably so that he can produce Affliction league levels of drops when you combine that with Ritual.
The problem that I have with the Idol system however is that it essentially forces you to go “all in” on a single strategy. Either you can cobble together something like I am running where it ups the chances of a bunch of different league mechanics to spawn, or you carefully craft a single mechanic and then juice it to levels that have never been possible before. The existing Atlas Tree lets you do a handful of of complementary mechanics really well, and I think makes the entire experience feel a bit better as a result. As someone who cannot bring themselves to skip mechanics when they appear on the map… it feels bad to do a bunch of mechanics with zero investment in them. Nodes that I thought might be good on their own like Crop Rotation, actually feel awful when you don’t have the rest of the points in the tree to buff it.
I think part of what makes the Idol system feel extremely bad is the fact that you are almost required to deal with massive amounts of very small specific trades in order to get an individual strategy working. Everything I am running I have cobbled together from the dregs of my bank. If you were wanting to run a hyper specific strategy though, you would need to trade for a bunch of specific rolls on idols… and then deal with the frustration of not getting answers from most of the traders because 1 Chaos trades are not worth stopping mapping for. If you want to bump things up to the next level, you are also probably going to be spending time deleting idols through the recombinator as you try and get a single item with four usable stats on it. This is graveyard crafting levels of tedium… which is again why I am mostly just yoloing my way through the system and trying to make something that feels halfway decent. This is yet another league that proves Path of Exile needs a fucking auction house already.
As glad as I am that the Idol system was left on the cutting room floor and we have our beloved Atlas tree instead… I have to admit that given the choice I would take this immediately over the systems in Path of Exile II. Everything about the Atlas tree in that game is awful, and it is entirely too focused on bossing. Bossing is just a subset of the Path of Exile 1 endgame, and most people… are not really focusing on it. Idols would go a long way towards patching the problems with that game’s system and forcing specific mechanics onto every map instead of the poorly designed precursor tablet system. Conceptually I like the exploration system because I enjoy it in Delve, but it just does not really work as a replacement for mapping. Part of the payoff of leveling and fully unlocking your atlas tree… is the agency to focus on only the mechanics that you want to focus on. You never really reach any of that payoff or any of that agency in Path of Exile II… which feels like the team missed that core tenet of the first game.
Phrecia has been a really interesting experimental league, and it was announced today that it is being extended by a month. I really like chaos pop righteous fire, and I would absolutely play something like this again in the future. Which admittedly makes me wonder what it would be like to play one of the witch based righteous fire builds at some point in the future. I do think that a lot of the ideas behind the Idol system in this league event could benefit Path of Exile II. Right now the endgame does not really work and feels way too far removed from the near perfect loop of game play that exists within Path of Exile’s endgame. All of POE’s problems center around on-boarding the player and gear acquisition for non-traders and non-crafters but the virtuous loop of the endgame was not something that should have been abandoned. Path of Exile II feels a lot like Destiny 2 did at launch… where it feels like they forgot all of the lessons that the previous game had learned. I am onboard for trying out quirky ideas in event leagues until they figure out how to make Path of Exile II feel a bit better though.
The post The Idol Based Atlas appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We are back this week and only actually down one person which seems great for the holiday season. This week we start off talking about Toad’s Item Factory which is a multiperson minigame in Super Mario Party Jamboree and Kodra talks about his experiences playing it with his kiddo. From there Tam shares his experiences with Nine Sols, which is in theory a game he should like but is not quite there. Several of us have made it to the Path of Exile II Endgame and as such we discuss some of the issues with it, the most glaring being the whole One Portal Problem. Kodra has started playing Warhammer 40,000 Martyr which is honestly prompting Bel to reinstall and check it out again. Finally, Tam talks a bit about the major changes that have gone into Star Citizen with the opening of a whole other star system with the Pyro update.
Good Morning Folks! I’m getting to the point where I think I am almost “done” with Diablo IV, at least until the next season rolls around. This is the inevitable place that I end up with seasonal model games like this and depending on how engaging they all have different cycles associated with them. In Diablo 3, Last Epoch, and Diablo 4 I pretty much get a few weeks out of them before deciding I have run out of things that I actually care to do. Path of Exile gives me at least a month, maybe two, before I start to lose interest. This is not a failing of the games mind you, this is just the way that I play them. I love fresh starts and I have a lot of fun during the gearing and leveling phase, and then progressively less fun as I accomplish whatever goals I set out for myself. Thankfully we have reached a point where there is almost always another ARPG just about to fire up so that I can hop into it with much glee.
There are a handful of items that I want to check off the list before I move on completely. Ace is far better at this sort of tedium gaming and has long since completed all of these. Essentially I need to finish grinding out Reputation for Nahantu so that I can permanently increase my Obol cap for all seasons from this point forward. I also want to finish gathering up the Tenets of Akarat so that these stay unlocked in future seasons as well. I had started down this path shortly after finishing the campaign, but many of them were bugged and could not be completed. Both of these are sort of the fodder for a lazy weekend afternoon, and I have plenty of time to knock them out before the next season starts in January.
The other thing that I want to complete just for the sake of doing it… because there are probably seasonal titles associated with it… is completing the final level of the Zakarum Remnants grind. This has been the absolute worst reputational grind in any Diablo IV Season. What I think I will probably do is churn through a bunch of Nightmare Dungeons on T4 as I have an achievement for doing those that I have yet to complete. I believe I get another shard of “unobtainium” used to craft mythic from completing this reputation. I might grind out some Undercity Rune Tributes in an effort to compile six copies of every rune so that I can potentially target craft other mythics given that we ran over 100 bosses this weekend and saw zero as opposed to the five from the weekend before last.
You can tell that I am mostly done with a season because I started taking on stupid side projects. The Tree of Whispers is essentially the Bounties system for Diablo IV, and at any given time there are a bunch of objectives around the world that reward varying numbers of whispers. The best ones are the ones that reward five at a time, as you need ten in total to get a bounty cache. Interesting tidbit that my friend Eliyon pointed out, is that you can farm these caches on one character and then have another character benefit from opening them. I believe he was thinking in terms of passing gear, but it turns out you get quite a boost of experience from opening them as well.
So as I am likely to do… I set forth on a totally degenerate play pattern and spent good chunks of the weekend farming Whispers Caches, only to flip over to my baby Barbarian and have him open them. It is honestly shocking how fast you can amass a huge stack of Whispers Caches and in truth, it is pretty damned fun popping around the map completing various bounty objectives. I always used to like running bounties in Diablo III, and it turns out I still enjoy that same sort of gameplay in its newer sibling. I was even doing the PVP Objectives because in truth… no one is out there actually PVPing. No matter what the loud faction of PVPers say… ARPG players do not give a shit about PVP. I could kill the boss for 5 whispers and then cleanse the blood shards that I got for a few more… and make it back to town all without seeing another soul. I did this several times, so it was not like it was a fluke, literally no one cares about PVP.
I wish I had kept better count of the total number of caches that were required to go from around level 7 when I started all the way to level 60 at which point I inherited all of the Paragon points I had accumulated on the Spiritborn. Quick mental math would tell me that it was between 20 and 25 caches in total that I had to farm, which honestly was not that bad. The first few caches gave me ten levels or so per cache… then it settled into about a level per cache until 53… at which point I started getting slightly less than a level. At 53 I farmed up eight caches which took me to 59 1/3, and then I proceeded to farm two more caches just to make sure that it would push me over the line. The cool thing about this process is that by the time I hit 60, I had pretty much gathered up all of the aspects that I would need for the build. Were I smarter I would have specifically kept out the best legendaries while leveling, but I was not that smart and ran around in a bunch of random uniques for a bit until I got things straightened out.
The only annoyance with this method for leveling is that you have to unlock Torment levels on the new character. I assumed as soon as I dinged 60, I would be able to flip over to Torment 1 and start rolling. However, I had to complete a Pit 20 in order to unlock that difficulty level. While I was at it I went ahead and tried Pit 35, the gate for unlocking Torment 2 and was able to do that just fine. My build does not really feel stable enough to push on to Torment 3, and in truth my Double Swing Twisters build is mostly a transitional build. The new Barbarian hotness is Mighty Throw, but it requires a specific unique called The Third Blade in order to make it function, something I have not seen drop yet. For now, Twisters works well enough for any content I would want to do on T1 or T2.
So thanks to my degeneracy, I find myself with two characters at max level and geared this season. The challenge there is that I feel like it isn’t necessarily pushing me to play more. I still feel like I am winding things down significantly. There is one more thing that I would like to try, since we used to pull up alts for each other in Diablo III by running Greater Rifts, at some point I want to see how effective that is by running an alt along with a Pit Run. This is mostly kicking the tires at this point, because I can’t say that I actually want to play additional characters. There is an achievement for having a level sixty of every class, so depending on how fast this process works it might be worth doing just for that.
Anyways… all of that said. Diablo IV still has problems, but it has finally reached a point where I can universally recommend it for folks who enjoy the seasonal model of ARPG gaming. The story for the expansion is still sort of shit, but the endgame gameplay loop is great.
The post Stupid Alt Tricks appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
