Good Morning Folks! The amount of hype that I have going into Path of Exile II is honestly worrying levels. It reminds me a bit of the way I felt about World of Warcraft going into the launch of that game all those years ago. I now have it sitting in my steam library taunting me. Honestly, at this point, I just hope that the servers do not crater too badly. I fully expect things to be a bit borked because some comments that Jonathan Rogers made on a podcast with Ghazzy and DM yesterday indicate that the access key sales have far exceeded anything they had planned for. The level of excitement Jonathan has for the game is infectious and it is wild that he was just down to record for over two hours. If you do not have two hours… SylverXYZ did a 20-minute recap of everything that was discussed in the interview.
I should be getting a lifetime spend key, but I picked up one of the cosmetic supporter packs just because I loved the appearance. I cobbled together a pretty slick looking appearance setup for my Necro Settlers league RF Chieftain using it. Truth be told I think I am pretty much done with the Necro Settlers Event. The extreme inflation of that league is going to prevent me from really progressing my character much further than it currently is. Basically, all of the next major upgrades are priced out of my range. For example, the next obvious step would be to shift to the life recovery on block setup which has decently rolled shields running around 20 Divines. Annihilation’s Approach boots are around 2 Divines, and a decently rolled Elder pseudo-helm starts around 12 Divines. On top of that, pretty much every rare piece of gear would likely need to be swapped to balance out the stats from shifting items around. I would also realistically need to pick up a cluster gem setup.
All of that said… I am pretty happy with as far as I got on potato gear. I made my way through all 115 maps in the Atlas and unlocked the first two voidstones. In theory, I probably could have struggled my way through the last two but the amount of effort just did not feel worth it. I am far better at Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds than I used to be because I killed both of them deathless. When I hit level 95 and began running juicier t16 maps I started eating a lot of deaths. I think I mostly fixed that by shifting up my tree a bit to pick up 80% reduction in extra critical damage. Were this a normal league, I could have easily pushed this character further but I am pretty happy with how far I got with relatively little investment. Almost all of the gear save for my Cloak of Flames was stuff I picked up off the ground. I feel like the whole event was a rousing success.
This however has caused me to pop back into the normal Settlers league and start chipping away at some of the further challenges. At this point, I have 31 of 40 and I am not entirely certain how much further I am reasonably going to get. Challenging Competitors is probably doable, but I have never seen the boss that highjacks your maprunners and I keep failing to avoid the verisium lasers on the Black Knight encounter. Gear Grinding Goals… mostly is going to require me to hit 100 and then finish out another one of the stupidly painful goals. I’m roughly half of the way through level 99 and am running around with an Omen of Amelioration to blunt the impact of any deaths that I might take. I made an Abyss Atlas tree and probably need to focus on running around with it as that is supposedly a pretty efficient way to gain experience.
I’m also potentially back in Enshrouded for a bit, as my friend Ace has been talking about it lately. I am trying to run up a fresh character and this friends is the majesty of my night one hovel. Yesterday I cleared two Elixir Wells, upgraded the Flame one step, and gathered the Blacksmith, Hunter, Alchemist, and Farmer. Next up would be the lengthy trek out to go find the Carpenter. Most of my sojourns to this point have involved climbing up to the tower I cleared before getting the Blacksmith and then gliding down to near the locations. I am however abusing the hell out of the fact that you can log out in a shrouded area and it will teleport you back to base. So essentially I am playing similar to how I would play Path of Exile where I am bouncing to character select all the time. This has allowed me to go off into the mists and collect what I need and then efficiently pop back to town with my load of goodies.
I am not sure how deep I am going to get into the game, but I would like to experience some of the dungeons that Ace has found as a duo. I could always just grab my previous geared-out character for shenanigans, but it feels better starting from scratch.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This is ACTUALLY episode 501 and we have the entire crew. We start off talking about the Settle folks surviving what was effectively a category one hurricane and living without power for around 48 hours. From there Bel talks about finishing Dragon Age Veilguard and how the game has learned lessons from the Mass Effect 3 ending. Grace talks about their experiences with Enshrouded and starting the game from scratch. Thalen talks a bit about I am the Future and Ash shares his revisiting of N++ playing it co-op with friends. Lastly, we dive into the Path of Exile II Reveal Stream and all of the announcements surrounding the upcoming release of POE2 Early Access.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was an event from Grinding Gear Games that gave us the complete picture of what the Path of Exile 2 Early Access would look like. Essentially in two weeks, we are going to be able to play the game in a relatively finished state with a fully fleshed-out endgame. As far as ARPGs go… the king up to this point has been Blizzard with the Diablo series. GGG is gunning for that crown however and released a new opening cinematic for Path of Exile 2 that rivals some of the best. What is more, as an avid player of Path of Exile and its lore… I think I more or less know what a good deal of the elements that were introduced in the cinematic were. In fact, I have seen confirmation on at least one point… what the thing in the sphere was. I am not going to go into details on this however because I am hoping the story of the game will answer these questions for any players who are not lore fanatics.
More than that, the footage that we saw yesterday gives me hope that this is not an attempt at a soulslike. The previous footage was VERY slow and plodding… with what seemed to be unoptimized builds. Path of Exile is a game about player power and blasting through content… and this did not feel like that experience. However yesterday they released an updated gameplay trailer with what appears to be some optimized characters and while not nearly as fast as POE1… it felt like player power would not really be a problem. More than anything I was super interested in playing a largely shield-focused character that they showed off via the Warrior. The combat still feels chunky, but fluid, and I think it is going to be fun exploring the maps and finding all the hidden things. There are apparently hidden bosses scattered throughout the content that will unlock permanent upgrades for your character.
The presentation was roughly an hour and a half long and contained ZERO fluff. There are way too many things to talk about in a single post, so I am not even going to try. I highly suggest if you are interested either as an existing Path of Exile player or someone who has a middling interest in ARPGs and was going to give Path of Exile a shot with the second game… to spend the time and watch through the footage. Essentially POE2 is going to be a wildly different sort of game than Path of Exile has been up to this point, and probably that is for the best. There are a lot of mechanics that are going to be returning in one form or another, and even more that seem to be remixed combining multiple leagues worth of content from the first game into a single mechanic in the second.
Probably the single biggest change is how the Atlas of Worlds is going to work in POE2. If you’ve read this blog for a long while as I talk about my adventures in the game, you are probably familiar at least with the concept of Delve. Essentially it is an endless mine that scales both horizontally and vertically allowing you to effectively keep going forever… or at least to the maximum value of an int32. They are taking this endless concept and applying it to the Atlas of Worlds so that instead of collecting specific maps… you can just keep expanding out effectively forever and finding new content to run. Scattered throughout the map will be special nodes for bosses or other events as well as brand-new hideouts for you to find and conquer. This is going to radically change what the endgame is going to look like for players, and what “juicing” strategies are available. Essentially it seems like this is going to favor folks like me who are in team “Alch and Go” as opposed to folks who bought hundreds of copies of the same map and same scarabs and ran the same optimized strategy over and over.
I am pretty sure that my first character is going to be a Warrior and that I am going to go down the path of the Titan ascendancy. They introduced that there is a keystone called Giants Blood that is going to allow you to wield two-handed weapons in a single hand… so you can do the whole Titan Grip thing from World of Warcraft. My favorite version of this has always been the Two-Hander and Shield thing that you could do on the Crusader in Diablo III, and I will be attempting to recreate that feel with my Warrior. I already love Shield Charge and there was this attack that they kept doing during the footage called Stampede that looked amazing. If possible I am going to use something like Volcanic Fissure to mix in fire damage since I also have a deep affinity towards setting things on fire.
Other than the Warrior, I thought the Witch seemed really cool. I like that minions are going to be something that you do in addition to making actual attacks. The Blood Mage seemed really cool because I already love stacking as much health and regen as possible, and that ascendancy seemed like it would reward that significantly. It is going to be a bit weird that minions require spirit aka mana reservation in order to keep up and running, but it seems like Sceptres have been turned into the Minion weapon and will now provide a lot of spirit just for using them. The challenge is going to be balancing permanent minions taking up spirit reservation and defensive auras doing the same. My hope is all the health stacking of Blood Mage is going to offset the lack of defenses from auras.
The labyrinth appears to be gone, at least they did not show it in relation to unlocking ascendancies. Instead, you will have a choice between running the spiritual successor to Sanctum, or the spiritual successor to Ultimatum. For me, that choice is a no-brainer… I don’t particularly enjoy either mechanic but I would far rather deal with the Trial Master than never get hit. Every build that I create is designed to be tanky as hell, and able to soak damage… which is counter-intuitive to how Sanctum has worked where if you get hit… you lose a permanent stat that you cannot easily get back and when that stat goes to zero you fail. Ultimatum on the other hand is about being stupidly tanky and being able to deal with lots of incoming damage and souped-up monsters. Unfortunately, I think this will also mean that I might need to ascend later if I want to skip the “pseudo-sanctum”. I will give it a shot, but it is not my kind of gameplay.
All in all though… I am way more hyped about Path of Exile 2 than I have been at any other point. I had a lot of trepidation that they were going to take this too far toward the souls-like gameplay. It seems like that will not be the case. It seems like you can still revel in power fantasy and create super murder-y characters. I’m also really interested now to see where the story goes. Twenty years have passed since the previous game and I am wondering if our “exile” will play a role at all in the new story. I honestly wonder if the Ghost from the trailer is us since we unwittingly became the guardians of our world. The Elder, Shaper, and Sirius were all normal folks who transcended to godhood through external influences and I wonder if that is ultimately what happened to us as well after meddling in things we should not have meddled in.
If you are someone who has not played a lot of Path of Exile or someone who has not paid attention to the lore, then I highly suggest you check out KittenCatNoodle who have created a ton of lore deep dive videos.
The post Path of Exile 2 Early Access Hype appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. After wrapping up Veilguard I have now uninstalled the game to free up space for whatever comes next and am back futzing around with Path of Exile. I wrapped up my second voidstone and I gotta say… I am somewhat impressed at how much better I am now at doing these first two. It gives me hope that maybe at some point in the future the last two will be a similar cakewalk. I managed to take both down without taking any deaths which I think is a first for me. Searing Exarch is way more dangerous to my specific build, but I find that I hate Eater of Worlds way more. It is the charging the spheres phase that annoys me because inevitably one of the spheres overlaps some of the other nonsense that happens in the arena. I also hate being on a timer… it causes me to freak out mentally. I have some baggage surrounding being timed that I have never quite gotten over.
I am struggling a bit to complete my Atlas of Worlds. At this point, I am at 99 of 115 and am completely out of maps to run. This means I need to chain run maps that I have already completed in the hope of getting something that I can actually run. I have a lighthouse that I do not have credit for, but when I corrupted the map it ended up shifting to include no-regen which my build cannot run. I’ve contemplated trying to run it without Righteous Fire turned on… but that is still always risky as hell. Admittedly there are some times I just fail to brain and realize I am halfway through a map and never actually turned on RF… but that is the exception rather than the rule. I am not sure what is up with Kirac but it seems like his inventory is not generating new maps nearly as often as I would expect him to. I’m also the only one playing in this league from our guild and as a result, there is no map sharing happening in the guild bank. Generally speaking, there are always one or two maps that Kodra gets for example that I had not seen, which helps these dry spells.
I have enough currency that I could just buy my way out of the hole, but the trade market is already pretty dead at this point during the event. There were a lot of folks who only played that first weekend, never to return again. Thankfully the Currency Exchange is still hopping and I can move items pretty easily. I’ve learned that Goddess fragments are a great way to make some gold since they are selling for around 25 chaos each right now. I have zero interest in running lab, and even if I do to quality up my gems I am going to breeze my way through one of the free ones instead of tackling uber lab. Though I have to admit after years of repetition… I don’t mind lab anywhere near as much as I used to. I can pretty much predict instinctively where the doors are going to be and can zip through them pretty quickly these days.
This morning the venerable Sir Gog released a video and in it is the above screenshot from GGG on Twitter. It seems that the minimum buy-in for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is going to be the $30 supporter pack that is likely to be released during the Twitch stream on Thursday. This is going to happen at 2 pm CST and will have Twitch drops enabled which is usually wings or a cloak or something similar. There was some talk about lifetime spenders getting in automatically but I have not seen any specifics surrounding that yet. Honestly, I was probably going to buy something from the upcoming yearly supporter pack anyways so this really isn’t too heinous as far as I am concerned. Path of Exile has earned every dime I have spent on it in a way that most games have not.
In another randomness, I watched the first episode of the HBO Dune Prophecy series last night and I have mixed opinions. I have basically come to accept that this current Dune franchise is going to have to be taken as its own thing. The first movie was mostly a good adaptation of the original source material, but that second movie veered off into left field at the last moments becoming its own unique universe. As such I am mostly assuming that this pre-history series is going to do its own thing. Admittedly while I read the Brian Herbert Houses Trilogy, I never went back and read any of the Machine Crusade stuff. Maybe this is drawing directly from that and I just do not realize it. Whatever the case there was a “superpower” shown at the end of this episode that I do not remember existing previously in the canon. So yeah… I will be watching this but also taking everything with a shaker of salt, because the current vision for this franchise is a bit different than the novels.
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