Good Morning Folks! When I sat down yesterday to write my blog post, I fully expected to wind down Path of Exile II. I was just not having much fun, and everything felt more than a bit tedious. However yesterday I started having fun again, and as a result I am back with a vengeance. The endgame is still not amazing, and the speed at which you move through maps… also not super amazing. However the core problem that I had with my build is that my bear bro felt a little squishy. I was trying to go hard into Armor and quite honestly… Armor as a mechanic in Path of Exile II is still pure shit. Up until this point the answer to this problem was to go for Blue Health Bars… aka Energy Shield, and from what I understand that is still a perfectly viable option in spite of league after league of them attempting to nerf it. Armor however remains shit, because armor is only really useful against small hits. I did not want to go Energy Shield… so instead I fell back upon familiar ground and opted to try what fixes this problem in Path of Exile 1.
That’s right folks… I bought a pretty dress. Cloak of Flame is the core item that you end up building around as Righteous Fire Chieftain in Path of Exile 1 because it offsets a bunch of your physical damage to elemental damage, which 90% max res can handle nicely. Even with 75% resistances, damage shifting still makes a massive difference when it comes to whittling down those big hits into something reasonable. The Shaman ascendancy gives me 5% phys taken as each of the elemental resistances and the Cloak of Flame I picked up had 50% phys taken as fire for a total of 65% of my physical incoming damage shifted to some sort of element. Then on top of that I have a bunch of the opposite direction which allows my armor to apply to elemental damage. I doubt these double dip, but it does at least help with smaller elemental hits and allows me to mostly shrug those off. This setup massively improved the squish factor and now made mapping feel pretty chill. I still do not have capped Chaos resistance so I still have to dance around anything purple or green in my map, but I am no longer getting oneshot anywhere near as often as I once was.
So I have been roaming around the map and playing the game of seeking out corrupted nexus areas so I can keep getting more atlas passives. At this point I have completed at least the first tier of atlas passives in all of the league mechanics, and periodically take on the harder bosses for the guaranteed chance of getting a waystone upgrade. I am mostly running T4 maps at the moment, but as soon as I can get a few T5s I will be moving up. The waystone drop chance still feels abysmal, and they really need to do something to help give us better map sustain. It feels like I am getting more tablet drops than waystone drops, which I need far fewer of since they all now last 10 rounds. I did find two Moment of Zen near the start of the maps but I am going to hold onto these until I can get up into higher tier maps. I believe the uniques that drop out of these are influenced by the tier of waystone that you feed into them.
I am finally starting to generate some currency and saw my first two raw Divine Orb drops. I am pulling 2-3 Exalted orbs from each map and am fairly regularly seeing Chaos orbs. The loot does not feel overwhelmingly good or anything, and the Vaal Temple still sort of feels like crap, but there is a patch coming this evening I believe to address this. I did manage to pull some unique tablet called Unforseen Consequences that sold for 6 Divine Orbs, which was nice. I will be honest any time I encounter something that sells for that much, I just can’t bring myself to actually run it. The same goes for super rare scarabs in Path of Exile 1, I would rather have the currency than to use them, because my build is not optimized to get the maximum amount of outcome from such things. The way in which I play these games, will always mean I am funneling resources to the highest tier of players, and not actually consuming them myself. Probably the most expensive thing I have used are those Scarabs that were forcing a temple to drop every map and they were around 120 chaos per stack of 20, but I was generating more than enough currency in the Keepers league to fund those.
The real highlight of yesterday is that I found a copy of the Fury of the King Ashbark Talisman that fell within my available Divines. At the start of the league these were going for 25 Divines or more, but I snagged this one for 6 Divines. The only negative is that I still need two more levels before I can equip it. This will also require me to rework my tree a bit to get the most out of it, however I don’t really have much use for my stash of gold so this is also not a big deal. For those who are not in the know this is the Talisman that converts your bear form into a sort of Balrog looking thing. A few days ago Palsteron released a video about this unique. Essentially this will also end up with me dropping pounce from my build because the unique comes with Molten Crash which serves as a movement/attack ability. I am really looking forward to this swap up.
Basically solving the squish factor, made me start really enjoying the game again. Funny how that works. So I figure I will be with this until I push my map tiers up a bit, and start trying to take out some of the other bosses. I need to figure out which trial I want to focus on because I need to get my next two ascendancy points. I hate both Sekemas and Chaos… and desperately want this game to bring back the Labyrinth. However I feel like they will probably fuck it up somehow because there is way too much bullshit going on in this game in general. There are way too many “damage only on tuesdays” stuff going on as they are attempting to be clever. This game would be infinitely better if I was not required to push six buttons to make anything happen. All of that said… I am finding fun in what I am doing. For the most part I leap around the map and then do a big slam to cause packs to explode. This works great until I encounter a boss, but at that point I have to piano key my way through a bunch of abilities to set up a walking calamity which nukes it from orbit.
I wish Two Handed Warrior felt half as good as Bear does.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.
I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.
Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.
After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.
What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.
What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.
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