Good Morning Folks. Friday was the start of a new league in Path of Exile II, and with it came a lot of hype from the trailers leading up to the release of it. The skill gem system was getting a massive rework and the abyssal mechanic from Path of Exile 1 was getting reworked and implemented in this game. More important than all of this a new asynchronous trade system was going in, which hopefully resolved the friction of trading items with other players. I figured I would start a Warrior and go crossbows since I had pretty good luck doing that at the end of the last league. The patch notes came out on the 20th and everything looked pretty solid. However these patch notes were woefully incomplete and over the next several days leading up to the 29th… they kept dropping more updates… most of which were nerfs. Days before the launch they broke the interaction that I was going to use to level… which was essentially armor break and armor explosion with crossbows.
I went forward with Crossbow Warrior anyways figuring I could at the very least limp through the first act. Essentially there are three cosmetics available for completing the first act. The first one you get for making it off the “beach” and into town. Another you unlock for killing the Rotten Druid in the Grim Tangle, and the last for clearing Act 1 and killing Count Geonor. I struggled so freaking hard with Geonor… more so than I have ever before… enough that I ultimately had to throw on a mace and cut some slam gems in order to get through the encounter. There are a number of clip channels devoted to Path of Exile 1 and 2 content, and it seems like the streamers were not having a great time either. The above video starts out with a comment from Raxx where a friend of his stated “I’m Clicking around on random streamers and it doesn’t look like anyone is having fun”. After having watched a handful of this videos it seems like this was pretty much the case, with a lot of folks ultimately re-rolling when their original build idea did not work out. Team Empyrean is already done with the game after struggling with grouping issues and general frustrations deciding it was just not worth it to keep going.
Essentially there is a tale of two game experiences happening and once again we can use POE2.Ninja as a gauge of what is happening. Right now if you filter by 90+ players… 73% of them are playing Deadeye as well as 70% are playing Lightning Arrow with another batch playing some sort of Tornado shot. Worse than that, not a single other Ascendancy has double digit numbers of players… with the next highest being Blood Mage at 9%. If you stumbled into one of the builds that is working, you are having a good time. If you are not playing one of those builds however… the game is pretty freaking miserable. I personally re-rolled and gave Raging Spirits Infernalist a go since this was a build that I had a lot of fun with my second character after release, and I had heard minions were in a pretty good state. My friend Eliyon is playing some sort of Sorceress build that seems to be working pretty well for him. However there are just a lot of players that are not having fun out there… especially some of the streamers who are new to this genre and only playing because they were paid to play by Grinding Gear Games. Maybe this was not the patch to showcase the game with a free to play weekend.
This is a bit sad because Abyss actually adds a lot of fun to the mapping experience. It is pretty freaking rippy, and on my Crossbow Warrior I wound up dying to it quite often. However if I treat it with respect on my Minions character I can clear them without much issue and get some really good rewards from the Abyssal Troves that spawn. More than that there are some fun interactions between Abyss and Essences where if an Essence monster spawns inside of an Abyss you get special Abyssal crafting essences. The changes to the way that Essences work were also welcome in that getting them during the campaign feels like something worth using, because they are effectively just a equivalent to a Regal Orb that comes with a guaranteed stat on it. Gearing has felt a bit easier and while I struggled on the Warrior… it was not for lack of items dropping.
More fun than the Abysses themselves, are the Abyssal Depths that can spawn in your maps. These are essentially a whole new map layout that comes with a few rare bosses and access to a bunch of troves scattered through the layout. All of which feel extremely rewarding and worth doing. I got my first Lesser Jeweler’s Orbs from the Abyss mechanic for example, and I’ve seen plenty of clips of folks pulling Divine Orbs and Perfect Jeweler’s Orbs from these layouts. The Abyss monsters can be pretty brutal though, so it is equally likely that you just end up dying to some bullshit mechanic and losing all of the loot. There is one specific Abyssal monster that seems to entirely ignore my minions and spends the entire time chasing me as I am backpedaling while trying to keep my raging spirits summoned. Thankfully my Arsonists carry me pretty freaking hard and so long as I keep dodging they will eventually kill the stupid things.
The thing that shocked me though is on the Infernalist I breezed through my first two ascendancies. Sanctum was super easy and honestly the sprint mechanic makes the death crystal timer thing trivial. Since the monsters all have a “wake up” animation when you get to them in, you can just run past them pending you do not collide into them. In all of these escape trials I largely skipped all of the combat and just ran from crystal to crystal until I cleared the level. What shocked me ven more though is that I got a really good sequence of choices in Ultimatum and was able to knock that one out as well. I will very likely go with Sanctum to get my last two ascendancy points, but that is going to be something I put off for awhile because the last two choices will probably hinder me more than help me until I get some good gear.
One of the things that has annoyed me quite a bit is that Trade is not working out like we were told during the presentation. In the features discussion it was indicated that the gate for trade was having a hideout, and that if we had a hideout already from previously leagues we would be able to interact with it immediately. That is not the case. You have to get to Kingsmarch in Act IV before the system will unlock, meaning that while we can access the UI elements… they are entirely useless until you rush through the campaign. This only further serves to make things worse for players who are struggling… because they have also taken away the currency exchange from the previous zones. So if you are struggling and cannot quite get your build off the ground, you can’t spend the meager exalts that you have gotten to buy gems to improve your situation… and instead are better off just rolling another character.
At the moment I am not really following a build guide, and just sort of yoloing my way through the various minion clusters that I have used previously. This seems to be working for the moment. At some point I am going to have to start investing in defenses but that is a future me problem and not a current problem. I should be able to get through the campaign in my current state and as far as ascendancy points I picked up the Hellhound first and gave it poison support and armor break through corrosion which seems to be working well. Since my build is mostly doing fire damage, I opted to go with Bringer of Flame since ignites are much harder to get than they used to be after the changes they made to how that whole thing works. This node use to require Pyromantic Pact… and now that it does not it seems universally great pending you care about igniting things. I will go for Altered Flesh next, and then might respec to go down to half life reserved and get bonus spirit and energy shield through Beidat’s Will and Beidat’s Hand.
Right now I am running with 4 Arsonists, 3 Skeletal Warriors, and can summon 12 Raging Spirits at a time. I went ahead and picked up Bind Spectre so that I can hopefully gain one of the Vaal dudes that everyone seems to be using since I am nearing the end of Act III. There are apparently 3 types of Vaal Guard and the one that we want is the one that throws green fireballs. You can keep disenchanting your gem each type if you wind up getting the wrong one. As far as gearing goes… I think I am going Armor and Energy Shield bases either that or a mix of pure bases of either. I would not mind having some armor counts towards elemental damage items. I’m also not sure if I can stack block as a defensive layer or not, or if that will cost way too many points on the tree to get a useful amount. Right now I am mostly surviving by not getting hit and letting the overwhelming damage my minions deal carry me.
I am actually enjoying myself now that I swapped characters, and the crafting mechanics that come along with Abyss have been pretty cool. There is a whole version of the veiled orb that allows you to unveil a modifier on your items, and they all seem to be pretty solid options so far. They also drop often enough that I have felt like I could actually use them rather than hoard them for perfect items late in the game. I will at a bare minimum play through all of the new content, but I am not sure how deep into mapping I am going to get. The whole tower chase thing feels pretty hollow, and that seems to be when most of the folks begin petering out. At bare minimum I want to be able to play around with the trade system so I will know what to expect when it comes to Path of Exile 1. I’ve actually come to the point where I enjoy the trade economy and I can only see how this is going to improve things.
Are you playing Path of Exile II? What did you end up rolling? Are you enjoying yourself or did you rage quit out in frustration? Drop me a line below.
The post Tale of Two Game Experiences appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning folks. I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II while also alternating between it and Last Epoch. I am playing Minions builds in both games currently, and seem to be going through a phase where that just seems to be what I want to do. There are few things more satisfying in an ARPG than running around with a giant mob of NPCs that do your bidding. The Necromancer was one of my favorite characters in Diablo II for this reason, and when that character was launched in Diablo III I had a few seasons where I played it there as well. Biggest happening of the extended weekend is that I spent nine divines on a new sceptre. Essentially I wanted something with at least level 19 Skeletal Warriors on it, because to the best of my knowledge there are none available with level 20 on them. I am not sure if this is even a thing that can roll, but upgrading from 18 to 19 should still be a significant boost.
When I started running a Storm Mage I had to drop one of my Arsonists to make it work, and while this worked great for Rares and tankier packs… I noticed it negatively impacted my overall map clear. As such another benefit of the sceptre swap was that it gave me enough spirit to pick back up another Arsonist. Additionally I had enough left over spirit to add a second cleric, which seems to greatly improve the sustain of my minions. My poor little cleric worked overtime healing up my minions and having a second one just spreads out the total healing. Basically everything seems to just have an easier time staying alive which is good, especially given that my infernal hound is eating a portion of damage dealt to me.
Today however is the launch of Season 7 in Diablo IV and I plan on popping in tonight and giving it a shot. Raxx released his tier list for characters and right now has Necromancer as number one. Generally speaking his tier lists are fairly accurate or at least present relatively sane early data. The thing is I was already leaning heavily towards playing a Blood Wave Necromancer during this league since I appear to be in minion mode right now. The fact that they look like they are going to be in a good place is only really gravy on top.
I’ve MOSTLY played Barbarians in Diablo IV, because generally speaking I prefer to play tanky characters or big bonk characters when given my druthers. However Barbarians have been in a bit of a mess this entire time and they feel kind of awful to level. I’ve always been partial to Necromancers, but to the best of my knowledge have never actually played one through the endgame. A bunch of mine got pushed up to level 50 when the expansion dropped, but I am not certain I have ever actually organically taken one of my characters to paragon levels as a Necro. I figure this is a good opportunity to give it a shot. I’ve also never really played a Rogue either and at some point want to play some sort of a bow build.
I’ve had more than a few complaints about Diablo IV since its launch. That said I have never understood the false dichotomy of needing to hate Diablo IV to love and appreciate Path of Exile. D4 has been in a bit of a mess but by the time the expansion launched it was in a pretty decent state. Is it a brilliant game? No. Is it a fun game? Yes, within specific parameters and for a shortish period of time. I’m kind of ready to be playing something other than Path of Exile II, because there are also a lot of things about that game that I do not like. Unfortunately 3.26 is nowhere in sight, so that means I am more than happy to hop on the next train that leaves the station… which means Diablo IV Season 7. If I can get a few weeks out of it before this particular brand of gum loses its flavor, then I will honestly be extremely happy.
The post Minion State of Mind appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I took quite possibly the longest break I have ever taken with my blog over the break. It was good, and honestly I should allow myself to do this a bit more often. It isn’t necessarily that I did not want to blog, but more that I did not want to have to summon forth something worth talking about. I spent a lot of the break listening to audiobooks and grinding away in Path of Exile II, which is an extremely comfortable existence for me. This morning I am going to talk about a few things that I have landed on. I’m still mostly playing my Minions Infernalist and am enjoying the largely chill methodology of mapping. I can go days without taking a death, which makes it feel pretty similar to my experiences with Righteous Fire characters in the baseline game.
Even in the baseline game I am not what you would call a “Juicer” aka someone who buys optimized maps or optimized scarabs in order to run the most content dense and optimal mapping experiences. I am instead what would be referred to as an “alch and go andy”, where I greatly prefer running whatever maps happen to roll when I throw an Alchemy Orb at a white map, and then utilize whatever scarabs happen to drop. This is also the way that I have been playing Path of Exile II, where I am relying entirely upon drops in order to keep “map sustain” going. The thing that I have learned is that in order to do this, you really need to target Boss maps, because they seem to have a much higher density of T15 map drops. Bosses seem to be guaranteed to drop two T15 maps, and then during the course of the map you will often see one or two more T15 maps meaning that a single boss map can sustain four or five other maps worth of content. I am also getting enough Precursor Tablets in order to essentially cram one of them into every single Tower that I come across.
One of the things that I loved about Path of Exile, is the Delve alternate game mode where you spent your time spelunking through the mines looking for treasure. The Path of Exile II endgame atlas borrows a lot from this concept with everything being a bit more exploration based than the traditional Atlas progression. Delve for me was a game mode about finding the best possible nodes, and more specifically chasing the three Cities and the boss fights that could spawn in them which were capable of dropping some of the specific items that came from that game mode. As such my POE2 Atlas strategy has been about trying to find the three Citadels that can spawn, each of which containing a boss fight, as well as keeping a look out for any interesting unique maps that happen to spawn along the way.
Essentially Iron Citadels contain the boss fight from Act 1, and spawn in segmented off plots of farmland. You will often see the worked fields appearing on your map and the gothic buildings well before you actually arrive at the Citadel. Weird quirk of this specific Citadel is that they often spawn in clusters where I have seen three of them within a few towers distance of each other. Stone Citadels contain the boss of Act III and seem to spawn often butting up against mountain ranges. You will usually see a number of steppe pyramids and ziggurats in the near vicinity. The Copper Citadel spawns exclusively in the desert and contains the boss of Act II, and it will be in a larger swath of desert as opposed to sandy coastal regions. In this case you will see grayish green tents surrounding the few nodes closest to the Citadel.
Why am I chasing these Citadels? Well for one they drop specific fragments that are required to summon the Uber boss. However given the current one portal state of the game, I have zero interest in attempting the boss. Instead I am using these Citadels as a way of making pretty decent spikes of currency. The Copper Citadel seems to be the rarest, which is vetted by how much more these fragments go for as compared to the others. The most common seems to be Iron Citadels in part due to the fact that they often spawn in clusters. However I am guessing that the Stone Citadel can do the same thing given its fragment is just as cheap. Essentially running around 150% Rarity, I am pulling 5 to 10 Exalts per map run and then when I find a Citadel I get a rather large payday with the bosses often dropping two fragments each given that I can run them with my Atlas tree that buffs up their level.
Essentially I am running an Atlas that adds +3 levels to every single map boss that I encounter, as well as trying to stack as much rarity from the tree. I am specifically also adding some pack size nodes and ones that cause one rare in my map to duplicate. Basically I am trying to add as many rares to the map as I can, which is why I am also dipping into the Essence nodes just a bit, which means that I usually have one of those on each map. The only things in a map that drop any loot worth mentioning are Rares and Uniques, and as such trying to stack as many of those as possible really helps out. One of the interesting things about the node that doubles one of the rares, is that it occasionally also triggers on bosses giving me two copies of the same boss to fight at once. This can get a bit dicey at times, especially for bosses like the Miller which often like to time their attacks so you are essentially having to dodge from two different things at the same time.
Other than that I have leveled up an Invoker and now have it in maps as well, which makes my third character capable of mapping. I am trying to fix some of the survival issues with this character, namely that it is so much squishier than my Infernalist. I am probably going to respec the entire tree at some point and follow one of the other build paths that I have seen. I am running the Polcirkeln ring which means I do not necessarily have to run both Heralds to make big pops happen. This allowed me to pick up another defensive aura which helped, but also… given that I am having to charge into packs of mobs there is just a higher likelihood of taking random deaths. I’ve gotten used to my fart boots on the Witch consuming corpses and effectively making me immune to on death effects. I am pretty sure that all of the deaths I have taken on the Monk thus far have probably been triggered by something happening after I exploded a pack of mobs.
I am really interested to see what happens this week as GGG comes back into the office. I fully expect there to be some significant patches happening. We are essentially interesting a period of time which is the battle for the soul of the game. Either they are going to claw back the power that players have found dragging the game back down into its Ruthless roots, or they are going to lean into the play style that players seem to want. Ruthless is the least played game mode for a reason, and I for one am hoping that we see significant buffs to the under-performing classes and only the lightest of nerfs to the classes and abilities that are performing well. If they nerf my minions character, I am probably done with the game because quite honestly… nothing else feels good enough to keep me around.
The post An Unjuiced Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I decided to do something a little bit different… or at least different from what I have done recently. Occasionally I record videos of gameplay to illustrate a point, and this morning I spent time recording myself running a map on my Infernalist Minions character as well as running a map on my Titan Stampede character to contrast the different in how they feel. I’ve effectively completely abandoned the Titan other than occasionally running t10 or so level maps on it to clear some of those out. I should in theory try and figure out how to fix that character and make it more enjoyable. It still largely works, but armor is way less effective of a defensive layer right now as energy shield is.
In the first video I run a T16 map, which is a t15 map that has been buffed in monster level with irradiate up to what folks are calling Tier 16. Similarly a T17 would be a map that both has corruption aka beyond monsters buffing up its monster level as well as being irradiated. The thing is I can happily do those while having a half specced boss atlas also buffing up monster level of those encounters. I’m using a combination of life converted to energy shield, a small amount of armor, and 68% block chance which all together make the character feel relatively tanky. I can clear content so fast at least compared to the Titan, but nowhere near as zoomy as some of the builds like Sorcs and Rangers are able to do.
Then you have my Titan which I was running a T11 map and had to hit my health pot several times during rare encounters to stay topped off. Essentially the playstyle is that I stampeded across the map, trying to explode the majority of the packs and then when I encounter a rare or a boss I pop infernal cry, and then hammer of the gods… and throw up active block while waiting on the hammer to land and effectively delete the target. This is great… unless the mob moves out of the Hammer of the Gods target area or I have to fight two tanky things back to back. At that point I have to rely on Perfect Strike which has a long windup in order to take out the extra monsters. There is a point in the video where I get pushed out of Hammer of the Gods by a Rare so you can see this happen in realtime.
The other big problem with the game right now is how important rarity is as a stat. I currently have 79% magic find on my Infernalist and I did not see a single Divine Orb drop until I had at least 50% and I did not se any Greater Jeweler’s Orbs until I bumped up to 79% getting my first ones while recording the podcast on Saturday. More than that I am seeing way more Exalted Orbs dropping at a given time as well as seeing some of the better options in things like Ritual. I’ve picked up two of the Vaal Omens that sell for roughly a Divine on the currency exchange. It feels really bad that a piece of gear is not good, until it has rarity on it. On the flipside, however you can sell so pretty whack items so long as they have high rarity on them.
The biggest problem that I still have with Path of Exile II however, is the one portal problem. This is not that big of a deal for me personally because I can go an entire day doing back to back maps without taking a death. However there still are the random deaths that come out of nowhere… and it makes it feel even worse when you are not used to barely limping by. My friends who should be joining me in mapping bliss… are having trouble getting started due to repeated deaths and losing maps… and now having a ton of map sustain to keep throwing maps at the problem. Map sustain is definitely an issue, but for me it is mostly lack of getting T15 maps to drop. I never see them unless they come from a rare or a boss, and most rares… don’t seem to drop them. Essentially when I am getting low I do a lap around the map looking for bosses which have a pretty high likelihood to drop two at a time so that I can restock a bit.
I found an Untainted Paradise, which is the only unique map that I have seen so far. I ran it because might as well, but was disappointed at how little experience I actually got from it at 90. Among our friend group I think I am the only one who is actually having fun with this game. Almost everyone else has stalled out significantly and is just not making significant progress. Essentially there is a group of folks who managed to get to maps, and then struggled. There is another group of folks who hit Act II Normal and had trouble pushing through that. Right now the current state of Path of Exile II is not great, and is potentially more difficult to make progress in than the first game was. This gives the game a feeling of potentially being even more elitist than the first game, because it requires a lot of prior understanding and willingness to engage heavily in trade to really make significant progress.
Anyways! Are you still playing? How far have you managed to make it? I am curious among my readers who is actually still engaged and having fun, and who has checked out waiting for future patches? Drop me a line below.
The post Infernalist vs Titan POE2 Mapping appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
