Good Morning Folks! Friday was the beginning of a new league in Path of Exile, and I spent most of the weekend grinding away at content. The biggest problem that I am having… is that I am enjoying the new Breach mechanic too much, and as such I went super slowly during the campaign. I only made it to Act 4 by the end of the first night, and it took me all of the day on Saturday to make it the rest of the way to maps. I was in my 70s during Act 8… so suffice to say that I was over farming the content. The only real benefit of pushing through the content quickly, is that you can make some early sales and also get some early deals on items that will eventually be far more expensive. I did manage to get enough early chaos to snag a pretty cheap immortal flesh that was well rolled, but other than that… everything was already inflated out of my price range by the time I hit maps.
Breach essentially exists in a few different forms. The main one works more or less like old school breach, except that once you kill enough encounters it will eventually stabilize spawning a new encounter in the center of the breach. These will either be Vruun the new mini-boss of the event, or several rare mobs. Quite frankly I find the multiple rares harder to defeat than the new boss because so long as you avoid his cyclone attack, he mostly just melts. The next version of the encounter is to defend Ailith, the new NPC for the event as she attempts to close the breach that has already managed to get a foothold in our reality. You essentially need to defend her against several waves of incoming attackers, and it is beneficial if you are careful when you burn your way through the breach walls to find her, because it is helpful to create chokepoints for the waves. The last version is the Breach Fortress, which puts you on an alternate map and makes you defend Ailith against 24 waves of spawns… with limited to no chokepoints to funnel the monsters. I’ve only managed to defeat one of these, and when you do… you have to rush back out through the maze and avoid walls that show up on your minimap in order to get out before the entire place collapses.
Breach itself, feels really rewarding, especially early in the league when you need pretty much everything. I am not exactly certain this is going to be the most juicy loot in the endgame, but it certainly feels good to just get a bunch of random stuff by closing one of these. Right now my favorite content is the unstable breaches, because I have enough damage to pretty reliably stabilize these each time so that I can farm the boss/rares that spawn once stabilized. More than anything though farming this content gives you Graftblood, which you can then use to spend on the Tree Tree mechanic as we referred to it Saturday during the podcast. I am not sure how this is going to shake out as I get deeper into progression, but I feel like the new version of Breach is going to continue to be beneficial. My only real complaint is that I wish I had some measure of control over which version of Breach I spawned. I greatly prefer collapsing breach and I feel like if we had tree support, we would be able to throw our thumb onto the scale as to which version we got.
I have not exactly figured out the “Tree Tree” yet, but it is really valuable while leveling to create five and six link chests. I got a relatively well rolled Six Link in Act 6 of the game, which allowed me to effectively power my way through the rest of the content with a fully fleshed out Righteous Fire. I am having a bit more trouble crafting items that are NOT chests… because it seems like I do not have enough control valves to craft the sort of items that I actually want. I have been trying to make a decent amulet, and it just does not feel like I really have enough control over it. What I am however producing is a lot of fractured amulet bases, which may at some point create something I could use to craft the ultimate amulet I am after. I have not been using the tree to print uniques or currency yet, because so far neither of those has produced anything good, and all of the foulborn uniques that I have seen are not really better than the baseline. I had hopes of a good Foulborn Cloak of Flames or Immortal Flesh, but none of the options seem to work well.
I am not generating much in the way of currency yet, so most of my gear is pretty crap. I did pick up a nice Immortal flesh and a decent Rise of the Phoenix, and then this is the six linked chest that I printed from the tree that is working very well. At this point I basically need everything… I need a good +fire levels amulet that I can anoint so I can start getting some endurance charges. I need decent boots and better rings, and to attempt to cobble together an elder helm. For the most part though at this very moment I am stable enough to keep pushing forward and I will fix all of these problems as I gather more resources and unlock more access to content. It always feels weird at the beginning of the league when you are poor and flying by the seat of your pants, but additionally I feel really strong for the crap state of everything. I am still running Purity of Elements which helps a lot, but at some point I will need to completely redo all of my gems to shift to the Purity of Fire version and then eventually drop the Phoenix shield for a +Life gain block shield.
The biggest part of this league are the grafts that you gain through doing breach and crafting them with the tree tree. Mine is specced to greatly favor Xoph grafts, and I am actively searching for better versions of Call the Pyre and Heart of Flame. Really the only truly important one of these is Call the Pyre which generates several fire tornadoes in front of me, which covers everything in Ash causing them to move slower and take more fire damage. This is a nice buff to both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap, and I can apply it easily through shield charge… which means that just charging around the map feels way more powerful than it used to. Heart of Flame on the other hand is essentially Molten Shell that you don’t have much control over. Any time I take damage, if it is off cool-down, it pops up a damage shield that will cause 80% of the incoming damage to go to the shield instead. I might start looking for an Hardening Uulgraft that gives Tender Embrace which causes me to regen life much faster when I hit low life, and also gain endurance charges.
I have picked up a well rolled Cloak of Flames, but essentially need either a shitload of fusings, an Omen of Connetions, or a Black Morrigan to link it. Getting it six socket with the right colors was relatively trivial given its low item requirements. Right now I have cleared 35 maps and when I hit 50 and get the alternate atlas tree I plan on speccing into Einhar and Ritual with that second tree to try and farm one of the items that quickly maxlinks an item. For the moment I am alternating between running maps and pushing delve so that I can eventually get down to a depth to start generating fossil crafting goods to sell. The tree tree is good at a few very specific things, but ultimately the bulk of crafting is still either going to need to rely on fossil crafting or recombination. Gambling and the Tree Tree are great at getting your build started, but once you need specificity you are back to the older crafting methods, unlike the Necropolis. Since you can no longer passively get recombinators, I have a feeling they will be in demand in the later weeks of the league.
All told I am having fun, but I don’t feel quite as driven as I have in past leagues. I am not sure if it is the simple fact that I no longer feel like I have to steal time to play. I have all of the time in the world since it is just me and the cats… and no one else to take care of. Gaming in general has become weird after the loss of my spouse. It was something I used to passionately do in bursts, because I knew someone was always about to pull me away from it. Now… I find myself taking breaks and walking away from it, just because I need to do so. I am having to make the pauses, because otherwise it just feels tedious. For example on Saturday I kept taking breaks to go work in the garage for a bit, which also led to the delay in getting to endgame. Figuring out how to do things… as just me… has been a bit of a weird trip.
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Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.
I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.
I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.
If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.
In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.
What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.
I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.
Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.
Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.
Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.
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Good Morning Folks. Yes I am still screwing around with Path of Exile II… in part because I don’t really want to get engaged in another game since Last Epoch Season 2 launches next week. There has been further fruit from the Zizaran interview, namely in the form of a patch summary post for the upcoming 0.2.0e patch. They are tweaking a bunch of things, namely the monster speed for a bunch of encounters during the campaign to even out the difficulty curve a bit so that you are not just rushed and stun-locked until death. This is probably a good thing, especially if I ever decide to level my minions character. That said it is probably too late for me to benefit because around Act 4 I managed to get my build online and stable enough to not really have any more problem pushing through the campaign.
Fairly early yesterday evening I killed Doryani for the second time and progressed into the endgame proper for Path of Exile. Taking on Viper the second time was really no big deal and so much easier than the first time I faced her. Quite frankly the hardest thing for me the second time was the molten smith fight thing, because I just was not doing much damage to him and he kept getting back into the lava flow and healing. I finished him off within a few frames of the end of the path. I could have fought in the lava for a bit but not terribly long. The further into the campaign I got however, the less rewarding everything felt. Rares became more Rare… and currency that matters… aka Chaos, Exalt, and Alchemy all but dried up entirely. I picked up a pair of unique gloves that I was able to sell for a Divine Orb, which I immediately converted back into Exalts so that I could afford some upgrades.
This morning I recorded a quick video of me clearing a map… with quick being a relative term because it took about 10 minutes to full clear all of the rares. The gameplay style is rather slow and plodding but stable as I leap slam into a pack and then boneshatter as soon as I land and if all goes well… blow up most of the screen. I had to drop some area of effect nodes to path over to blood magic to fix my mana issues, but I will be slowly picking those back up as I gain more levels. All in all it is a more stable gameplay style than my character was last league, but it feels infinitely slower because leap slam in Path of Exile II feels sort of awful. Based on the interview though… I still feel like I am probably moving faster than the intended gameplay speed. I need to drop my Trampletoe boots and pick up something with as much movement speed as I can get.
I talk about this in the video, but right now the worst part about the game is how unrewarding everything feels. This represents the loot from my juiciest map yet. The only reason why I got so much stuff is because I found a unique strongbox that spawned seven different rare mobs in a row with each getting stronger than the last. Most maps… are more akin to the one I show off in the video with one to two rares maybe dropping and a handful of bubblegum currency. I realize I am only running tier 1 waystones so far, but still… I swear it feels like it was more rewarding last league. I think that is the core problem with the state of the game. Everything feels sluggish as hell, but at the same time unrewarding so you begin to question why the fuck you are even playing. That is not a question you want your players asking.
One thing that I do have to give them credit for however is that the transition into mapping was a bit more smooth than it was previously. I remember there being a sizeable jump in difficulty between late campaign zones like the Aggorat and your very first T1 Waystones, and that bump is largely gone now. My only real complaint is how slow the combat feels and how little reward we are getting for it. I think I just happen to be playing a tanky enough character that the Rogue Exiles are not really that big of a deal. I’ve watched plenty of videos of folks being harassed by them, but it seems like maybe Warrior from last league is the baseline for the power level that they want classes to be at. We were the slugs last league, but sort of feel like gods as compared to most of the other classes now. It took awhile for my build to really come online, but once I got enough survival and especially after swapping to Giants Blood it has been pretty comfortable.
There is one build that I am super interested in, just not sure if I am interested enough to completely respec my warrior. One of my all time favorite ARPG builds is the “stop hitting yourself” Invoker Thorns Crusader from Diablo III. This is really the ultimate super chill build to play an ARPG with, and is directly related to my love of Righteous Fire in Path of Exile. I love building super tanky and then watching mobs effectively break themselves on my armor. Thorns seemingly is now a viable archetype in Path of Exile II, and most folks seem to be playing this with a Spear and Shield. Mathil also released a video yesterday talking about his own take on the concept. It seems REALLY interesting to me… and might be something I visit after Last Epoch runs its course… pending there is not a 3.26 league in Path of Exile at that time.
All in all… my character is very stable and I should be able to progress through maps without much issue. However a lot of the new has worn off with this game, and what we are left with is a game-play experience that is just not that fun.
The post Slow and Steady But Unrewarding appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! Yesterday I wrapped up my third character of “Bel League” and this is ultimately the one I originally planned as my “first alt”. Essentially, I wanted a low-pressure map blaster that I knew I could make work on minimal or easily obtained gear. Essentially the idea is to go Champion for survival and Lightning Arrow for ease of getting off the ground. I am more or less following the template of Belgladius, with some items that I used in the original Raider version of the build that was my Ancestor league starter. Primarily the build uses Shadows and Dust for rampage and unholy might as well as some additional Mana Leech, and Perseverance to turn my permanent fortify stacks into permanent Onslaught as well as a bit of Attack Damage since I am stacking both Armor and Evasion. In this specific build I am throwing in a Poised Prism because it is just a generically good quiver with some resists on it and The Taming which similarly fixes some resists and offers up a bit of elemental damage.
The biggest challenge that I find myself in currently is getting enough levels to finish out my tree and I am one level away from 78 which will allow me to actually equip the belt. I also need to sort out my Pantheon and at a minimum get the freeze immunity. One of the huge benefits of a character like this is that it slides into maps extremely easily. I’ve been grinding tier 5 maps to get some levels and am about to transition up into yellow maps. By the time I am in my 90s I should be ripping through Red maps without much issue and hopefully running red/blue altars for drops. Between now and then I really need to find myself a new bow because while I found a lucky six link along the way 566 dps will not cut it for long. Realistically I need something more in the range of 800-900 to really rip through the t16 maps.
I also probably need to find some better gear, because right now after raiding my vault… I am in an “aggressively fine” state. When I ding 78 I will be able to equip Perseverance, and then with a little harvest crafting, I should be able to balance out my resistances. This will still leave me far in the red as far as Chaos goes, but pending I am careful with map modifiers that should not really impact me heavily even in red maps. I would really like to see my armor and resistances a little bit higher, somewhere in the range of 20k so I will need to be on the lookout for good replacements to slot in. If I find two amazing rings, I might be able to keep the resists while also pouring on some chaos. My amulet is also pretty crappy but I am mostly using it to get some attributes I need to equip other items. If you are curious here is a POB I dumped this morning with the current state of my gear.
None of this really matters though because this is what it looks like to play this build… admittedly with a MTX that makes the Lightning Arrow a bit more vibrant. The biggest challenge is how much I need that Mana Leech because there will be times when I run out of mana while mapping and have to wait for the Leech to catch up. In theory, I should have -7 mana on my Amulet and Rings to make this build feel a bit more stable. It works well enough while you are rolling but definitely suffers from the “never stop killing” problem because when there are lulls in the density I start to bottom out my reserves. While I enjoy Boneshatter quite a bit and it feels good to map on it… this is really the gameplay I want when I just want to delete a bunch of surplus maps for goodies. I need to finish out the fourth lab at some point today, but I don’t figure I will have any issues with it.
So with Lightning Arrow coming online, I am very likely to fall into the old familiar pattern of zipping through maps quickly to gain sulphite and then spending that sulphite while delving on the Boneshatter Juggernaut. For the past several leagues I have preferred to have some sort of fast mapper character and then a delve character and alternate back and forth between the two. I am hoping to get my Lightning Arrow character at least to around 95. I am doubting that I will make the pivot into magic find like I did last league, but If I just happen into a couple of extremely well-rolled Ventor rings and a very well-rolled Goldwyrm I might alter those plans. I mostly hope to be able to juice the maps through the league mechanic and see what all I can get doing that and maybe blending in some delirium.
Anyways! I am off to get ready and go do some shopping. I hope you are all having a great week as we slide forward towards Christmas. I am technically “off” now but I had to pop in and deal with some work this morning. I am looking forward to the long break and finishing my fiftieth book of the year and hopefully having a bit of a much needed mental reset.
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