Good Morning Folks. I pretty much played Path of Exile II in full degenerate mode this weekend. I took Tuesday off, which combined with Labor Day Monday gave me a four day weekend. I had family stuff on Friday when the league launched, but a good chunk of Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday I played the game. I beat the campaign early yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon getting into the endgame. Probably the best feeling in this game though is logging in to see that some of your stuff had sold and currency is waiting for you on the vendor. The only problem with this is that prices seem to be all over the place. You can find similar items being sold for 1 Exalt, 50 Exalts, 50 Chaos, and 5 Divines… so it is a complete free for all. I am pricing most of the rares that I pick up with any resists on it for 2 Exalts each, and they are selling slowly. I’ve yet to really git any big paydays but I sold a really nice pair of boots for 20 Chaos, which is the single highest item I have moved.
Act IV was phenomenal, and might legitimately be my favorite single Act in any ARPG. There are a bunch of things going on with this. Firstly I’ve come to love Kingsmarch after having lived with it for over a year in Path of Exile 1, and I am pretty fond of the characters surrounding it. Secondly I am a huge fan of the Karui in general after having played so damned many Marauders and listening to those voice lines for years. The other really nice thing about this content is that you can legitimately take it on in any order. The islands increase slightly in level as you clear them, so there is no wrong way to take it on. There is one island that is like a Microcosm of Oriath, and I think for story reasons that is probably going to be the one that I save until last because it flows nicely into the final area. I am in love with the Halls of the Dead and I really wish this had made it into the game as an ascendancy option.
The preludes are also really cool, and honestly I sort of hope these exist as optional side content going forward. There are some really cool stories being told here and I like the whole Bioware style “building forces” aspect of them. Essentially they revolve around three allied groups and in order to guarantee their support for the final invasion of Oriath… you need to help them clear some of their problems at home. I would love to see this continue forward and whether or not you do it… impacts some of the content in Act V. Like depending on how many of the preludes you clear dictates how hard some of the content is when we finally get to that act. Mostly I just enjoyed the stories and content areas enough that I would love to see them continue forward in some form. Each is mostly just a single quest chain with a few optional side areas, but all of them are really cool and worth experiencing… and FAR better than the cruel difficulty stuff.
I’ve made a few purchases in order to buff my spirit to summon more minions and stabilize my resistances. I only have 20% chaos resistance, which is something I need to deal with at some point. However for early mapping it feels fine. I’ve seen exactly one Divine Orb so far in the campaign or maps and I spent it on a slightly better rattling sceptre. The one I was using had +2 minions on it and had level 11 Skeletal Minions… and this one at least takes me to +3 and 15. I wish we could level up the gems associated with weapons, because it is possible to find a really well rolled sceptre early on… but have the minions it provides lag massively behind the rest of your gems. My survival is not amazing but also I am not taking many deaths with 1600 health and 2000 energy shield… both of which need to increase significantly. Ultimately I need to focus at some point on trying to get my third and fourth ascendancy completed. I hate the two trial options, but what I did last time was Sanctum for the third, and Ultimatum for the fourth.
The biggest thing plaguing my build is that I have negative amounts of visual clarity. Essentially I am spreading fire all over the screen through the combination of my own flame wall, skeletal arsonists, and vaal guards throwing bombs everywhere. Essentially it is a complete crapshoot if I am going to be able to see any effects on the ground. When I hear the unblockable effect sound I just sort of instinctively roll away from wherever the boss is hoping that I will be able to dodge it, and then hit potion hoping I can survive it if I actually get hit. This is not exactly great, but the minions deal so much damage that most fights are over very quickly and I can skip a lot of the mechanics. The world is literally on fire… and I guess I am the “This is fine” dog meme.
I encountered my first rogue exile in a tier 2 waystone, and it was wildly juiced. It dropped three unique pieces of gear, and a unique gem that had the ability to unveil four mods on it at the well of souls. Thankfully you only have to wait for the animation to play one time if you are unveiling multiple affixes on the same item. I was able to craft an item that gives me ailment threshold from my energy shield as well as some additional percentage energy shield. It is not a massive item, but I will absolutely use it until I snipe a cheap minion damage gem. That is one thing that I noticed… it is super important to run searches in the web trade site if you are looking for something very specific. No one seems to know how to price anything, and you can occasionally pick up some cheap items if you are running that on your second monitor. Nothing like that exists in the in game client, and it is also missing a lot of the fuzzy search options that you have on the POE1 trade site which I hope they add into it later.
I still don’t really love the current state of the Path of Exile II endgame. Towers are absolutely not the way the endgame should be working, but it seems like they are stumped on what to do with it. Basically I like the concept of the Endless Delve style mapping, but there are still far too many bad layouts available and no way to avoid them. If they keep to this style of content, then they absolutely need to introduce a favored map system that causes may layouts that you prefer to spawn more frequently. This would obviously be only impacting things that are still in the fog of war, but if you engage with the system enough it could feel much better. You would still have to run shitty layouts from time to time, but just being able to make it more common to have the layouts that you actually enjoy would be a massive improvement. I also don’t really enjoy the way atlas passives are unlocked, and it does not feel anywhere near as satisfying as running specific maps to get points.
All of that said. I do feel like the general state of the game is a massive improvement over where it has been. Sure there are some straight up bricked builds right now, and the general state of balance is awful. However it does appear that other builds are rising to the top now. When I made the post two days ago the level 90+ balance was sitting at 73% of players all playing some version of a Bow Deadeye. As of this morning that percentage is down to 56% and I expect this will continue to fall as people find other interesting things to play. I am only level 73 currently so I am not counting in the list and I figure there are a lot of folks who are just leveling more slowly that will eventually erode at that percentage. There are a lot of builds that are working, but I think what harmed this league so much is that none of the guide creators had any prior knowledge of what the passive tree was going to look like, or some of the interactions between abilities. So everyone effectively had to go into this blind, and those who gambled on following the way of the Deadeye won that gamble.
I thought I would have bounced by now, but after taking a break yesterday afternoon I spent the evening chilling out on the couch and slowly plugging my way through maps. I am actually having fun, which in itself is a massive improvement over how I felt about the game in the Dawn of the Hunt league. At some point now that I have more resources, I want to recover my Warrior and turn it into something useful. I have no clue what I will go with, but I might just try another attempt at a slam build and see if stampede aftershock works now. Sprinting MASSIVELY improves mapping, and while there is still a lot of backtracking being able to run at hyperspeed through the dead areas of the map is a big win. I still really feel like sprint needs to be its own keybind rather than just holding dodge because you end up with weird situations where you sprint when you don’t mean to, or dodge when you don’t mean to. It is as fiddly as Guild Wars 2 when you are using the default keybinds of double tapping a direction to dodge. If they just allowed us to set a separate keybind it would improve things considerably.
The biggest things that I am hoping for though, are not things in Path of Exile II. I am looking forward to the trade system being implemented in POE1, and I am really hoping like we got a better version of Animate Guardian… that we get this version of the spectres system. I really like fiddling with spectres at the moment and the whole pokemon aspect of them. I am hoping we get a version of that in the original game, because that would immediately improve all of my frustrations with minion builds in general there. Basically my feelings about Path of Exile II have improved and I think it is actually going to be a good game after all.
The post The World is Burning appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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. With the delay in Last Epoch Season 2 and the upcoming launch of Dawn of the Hunt in Path of Exile 2, it has had me thinking about Path of Exile 3.26 a bit. On March 4th we got an announcement that the Legacy of Phrecia Event was being extended to April 23rd. Additionally as part of this news post, we got a tentative launch window for the 3.26 League landing in June. This means that 3.25 will have lasted just shy of one full year, which is a pretty far fall from the 4 leagues of a year goals that Path of Exile used to attempt. Granted a whole new game has launched so I have to give them some credit.. but given that I am one of the folks who greatly prefers the original game to the sequel… it isn’t going to be much credit. It has made me start to daydream a bit about what 3.26 might look like, and this morning I am going to talk through some of my thoughts.
What Makes a League?
I guess for the uninitiated I should start off with what exactly a league entails. The best leagues feature some sort of brand new mechanic that has its own type of drops associated with it. In the Trial of the Ancestors they introduced tattoos, which allow you to sacrifice a travel node on your passive tree for some powerful buff. Additionally it came with a whole new autobattler style mechanic where you set up matches against various Karui Ancestors and were rewarded with drops based on your success. During Affliction there was this whole new realm that you went into before every map, that allowed you to wildly juice the outcome of that map. Additionally it introduced brand new secondary ascendancies that gave your character brand new abilities. Essentially the best leagues change the way you play the game… over the course of the league and also often introduce items that eventually get worked in as permanent updates going forward.
Settlers Goes Standard
By the time 3.26 drops, we will have had access to Kingsmarch for a full year. As such it would feel really freaking weird to lose access to it. In my perfect scenario we would retain full access to these systems in their entirety and effecting Settlers of Kalguur just goes Standard. Maybe streamline some of the leveling processes a bit and speed things up so it does not take quite as long to get everything online. I think almost everything included in Settlers was a pure win, and I would love to see it continue. Since this involves a lot of the characters from the Heist League already, I would love to see the evolve to fill both roles. Rogue’s Harbor has always been a bit of a pain in the ass, as well as a lag fest that often causes MTX to crash players out of the game. Having a solo instance that fills both jobs would be pretty epic. Once I leave the campaign… in truth I never want to see another player unless I am doing a trade.
Currency Exchange
If for whatever reason Settlers does not go standard in full… at a bare minimum the Currency Exchange must be carried forward. There is no way I can go back to trading currency through the trade website. This has been the single best quality of life improvement in the game full stop. Sure I would love to have better visualization into what people actually want, or the ability to post an item up for players to make an offer on it… especially if it is something that does not have a huge volume of trade. Even in its current form though it is a requirement going forward for the health of the game.
Recombinators
I also feel like Recombinators need to exist in one form for another going forward. Even if this is a machine that we place in our hideouts instead of in Kingsmarch, this is something that needs to stick around in the game. Recombinators give you a reason to care about amassing crafting bases… giving them value and making loot more interesting while you are mapping. Being able to work your way slowly towards a perfect item is a huge boon for a lot of players, specifically those in self-found game modes. I don’t fully grasp the ins and outs of this system, but I feel like once I get a firm handle on it I should be able to slowly work my way towards better gear, rather than hoping and praying for the right item to drop.
Replica Ascendancy
Given based on the volume of trade I am still seeing… the Legacy of Phrecia event has been a massive success. Adding nineteen brand new ascendancies to the game has been wild for class balance, and I would love to see some way of this continuing forward into the game. I’ve heard a bunch of ideas from having a rotation of ascendancies similar to the map rotation, to having some alternate method for ascending to the alternate versions. My favorite name for these was “Replica Ascendancy” and I am sorry that I do not remember who coined this term. I have had a freaking blast playing Scavenger Righteous Fire, and I am not sure if I would continue to choose it over my beloved Chieftain but it would still be nice to have options. Similarly there are a whole bunch of cool builds that have been enabled by the toolkit these new ascendancies have. I would be perfectly happy if 3.26 just had six different paths you could choose off the base classes and then two for Scion.
Mapping Idols
The other big change that the Legacy of Phrecia event introduced was an alternate atlas tree in the form of a series of itemized idols, and a grid that popped out of the side of the mapping device. The existing Atlas Passive tree is near perfection… but it would be exceptionally cool if the Idols moved forward in a limited fashion. What I envision is a 3×3 grid that allows you to fit in a limited number of idols to tweak your existing Atlas strategy. The limited grid would also limit your access to the most powerful abilities that can roll on Idols, and greatly limit the overall impact it has. In doing this I would almost suggest removing all of the nodes that cancel out league mechanics from the Passive tree, and instead limiting them to only exist as Unique Idols. It allows you to either buff existing strats, or splash in something that might be harder to get because you are on the wrong side of the passive tree.
Identification Vendor
Borrowing some quality of life from Path of Exile II… I would love to see one of the vendors have the Identification functionality that The Hooded One/Doryani provides. There were few things that I found myself missing from Path of Exile II, but this was absolutely one of them. I liked the flow of exiting a map, clicking on the vendor to identify everything… and then doing whatever else I wanted to do with the items. Surely this would not be that hard to implement, and it would be a significant quality of life improvement.
Item Salvaging
The other functionality from Path of Exile II that I would love to see implemented… that I think is probably reasonable without massive system changes is the Salvage Bench. The ability to salvage items for various currencies really changes the way that you look at items. For example there are a lot of times in Path of Exile that items drop with quality… but unless the item is rolled particularly well or a base that you care about… it is effectively useless loot. If you could instead then salvage that item to turn it into quality currency, it would make especially the early game feel much better. Similarly if you could convert magic, rare, and unique loot into fractional currency shards it would allow you another way of working up towards currency items that are actually useful for crafting purposes. Having more reasons to actually pick something up off the ground is a good thing.
Lantern of Arimor
Necropolis League was not exactly amazing. It introduced this whole itemized corpse system that you planted in graves, in order to craft gear. It was cumbersome as hell, and I do not want it to come back. However it also introduced the Lantern of Arimor, which was a widget that you could fiddle with at the beginning of a map in order to have some agency in the sorts of mobs and types of loot you might encounter. While this slowed down the action a bit, I also found it really enjoyable during mapping. Especially when you added Allflames into the mix that allowed you to substitute out a different monster type for something that would normally spawn on the map. If they brought this back I would prefer to have this as something that appears in the endgame and that you would have to specifically spec into in order to enable.
Bring Back Metamorph
One of the things that often happens during a League patch is the re-introduction of mechanics that have left the game for one reason or another. When Ultimatum was reintroduced, it caused Metamorph to get bumped from the list. I really liked fighting Metamorphs in maps because they were often worth quite a bit of loot. I did not however really enjoy the system where you built your own monster, because while rewarding this required you to exit the flow of the normal game. Since Ultimatum got the drops that traditionally came from Metamorph… and the mechanic was all about crafting monsters… maybe have this as an alternate source of the corpses that currently drop in Ritual that can be used as Spectres. Additionally I feel like the flavor of this mechanic would also make it a good place to reintroduce Allflames in lieu of monster parts. Have this be a map only mechanic and potentially add it to the number of alternate mechanic spawns, either that or implement it through Idols.
Weapon Passive Trees
Another thing that I think would be fun to see make a return, is the Crucible weapon passive trees. Essentially during Crucible every item had the ability to craft on a weapon tree, that could then spawn all sorts of nonsense on them. There was a whole forge mechanic that allowed you to merge together multiple trees similar to how things currently work with Recombinators and item affixes. My idea is to implement these but have them drop from a specific mechanic similar to how fractured bases drop. Instead of the channeling mechanic, make it so that they just level up through combat similar to how virtue gems do. Then the whole manipulation of items can be merged into the Recombination system. You could use that system to either manipulate the crucible trees if both items have one… or put the tree on the item base that you want. This just adds further depth to the crafting system and gives the mirror crafters more nonsense to make even more perfect weapons.
Primordial Blocks
This is a personal desire, and not necessarily a systems thing… but I really want Primordial Blocks to be in the league map rotation. For those who have not participated in many leagues before, essentially each league has a slightly different set of maps included with it. Primordial Blocks has been out of the rotation for a few leagues and I would really love to see it come back. It isn’t necessarily that I love the layout, but there is a Hideout associated with it that spawns exceptionally rarely… and it is my white whale. I have run countless copies of this map and have yet to get it to spawn, and I really want to give it another go.
I get that we are still several months away from 3.26 or even the beginning of early spoilers… but that in part is why I am creating this post now. I did not want my ideas to be tainted by the various prognostication that happens once the spoilers begin to flow. I legitimately have no clue what sort of big system GGG might implement for 3.26, but I wanted to at least talk through some of the quality of life and general systems that I would love to see return. What do you want to make a comeback with this league? What are some of the things that you would love to see implemented in Path of Exile? I would love to have a game pausing system, but I figure that is way too structural to ever actually get. Drop me a line below with some of your own thoughts.
The post Path of Exile 3.26 Wishlist appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we started with a single topic… and by the time we were finished ended up having to bump half of the assembled topics to next week in order to keep the runtime down. We start off with Bel talking about the bad news for Path of Exile players, and how there is no new league around the corner. He also talks a bit about getting sucked into the private league that Pohx created which has capped out at 20,000 players. From there Grace talks a bit about playing Heroes of Hammerwatch II and enjoying that. Kodra shares his thoughts about the Diablo IV Campaign thus far as he still is effectively in the first act. Grace and Ash share their experiences with Coridden a more narrative-driven action role-playing game. Finally, Kodra and Tam talk about their experiences playing Battletech and how Kodra is coming around to the idea of playing games for fun, rather than simply optimizing the strategy for winning.
