Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back in full force and continuing our adventure through the second part of the Games of the Year 2025 podcast. We cut the list in half, giving us fifteen games that we were talking about in each episode. This is not necessarily a numerical list, but the titles that appear later in the shows did get more votes. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks. Today we mostly return to our regularly scheduled gaming content. I’ve been playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, mostly because I feel like I am maybe done with Path of Exile II for the moment. My jumpy Fire Bear build works amazingly well, and has completed most of the content in the game except for the most tryhard hardcore content. I have no real interest in doing any of that, just like I have never had much interest in doing it in Path of Exile. So instead I have shifted gears to working specifically on trying to get 34 of 40 Challenges in the Keepers of the Flame league. Since my Righteous Fire Chieftain is pretty much as blinged out as I can get him…. I have opted to start working a bit on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, which was not a thing… prior to me doing it I think. It has been freaking potent as far as characters go and I would honestly do this over and over if I had the option. Unfortunately a lot of the power of the build is coming from Foulborn Uniques, specifically the double explode Berek’s Respite. I hope this shit goes core.
I had been trying to finish the challenge that requires you to run 50000 quant worth of maps. However on a whim I decided to see just how well my Ice Trapper could do at the Bolstered Breachlords challenge. I had knocked out one of the three conditions, and I figured since I do so well at Hive Fortresses I might as well give it a shot. The thing about the Ice Trap build is that it essentially freezes the entire damned screen. You know what is really good defensively? Freezing the entire screen when you are facing a boss. Sure enough I was able to effectively keep the “It that was” bosses locked down for the entire fight and kept them from firing off any of the specific abilities that I was not supposed to get hit by. After my second hive brain, I managed to complete Bolstered Breachlords and with it my 34th challenge of the league. I am not sure if I am going to try and knock out any more challenges at this point.
The real thing that I am chasing is getting the same sized totem pole for my hideout. I have been collecting totem poles since the Sanctum league, and when Necropolis league happened I was able to get 34 of 40 challenges. After that it has sort of set a benchmark for me in my league journey, and now that is my ultimate goal is to be able to get the same size as I have previously gotten. I doubt I will ever be a 40 of 40 andy, at least not without paying for some of the ubers… which is not a thing that I want to do. Please note when I talk about paying for carries in Path of Exile, we are not talking about real world money. There is a thriving business of people who make bossing specific characters and then spend the entire league doing nothing but carries for Chaos or Divine Orbs. There are a lot of places where you can get access to this but the most common is The Forbiddden Trove discord. I specifically hate doing The Maven fight. I CAN do it… have done it more than once… but I hate the fucking “simon says” round and as a result I almost always pay for that carry to get my last voidstone.
In my travels of completing my last challenge of the league I happened to get a Hinekora’s Lock to drop, and these were at that time going for 147 Divine Orbs. I don’t really NEED the Divines right now since I am winding down the league, but I figured I would rather than the Divines in standard than the Lock. For reference at this point in the league a Lock effectively sells for Mageblood money. It is not like I need a Mageblood for anything however, because I do not want to shuffle the gear on either of my characters to try and make room for it. I still stand by my statement that a Mageblood is the least interest of the high priced items, because it mostly just allows you to cheat things on your build, and doesn’t really add anything interesting to the mix. Given the choice I will always build around a Headhunter instead, because it actually does something interesting mechanically. Though in truth I rarely play the type of builds that can benefit from either of those.
In other Path of News… we are getting a redo of The Legacy of Phrecia event and I am pretty pumped about it. Instead of using Standard as the baseline we are getting all of the bells and whistles that come with the 3.27 Keepers of the Flame league. Phrecia was one of my favorite events last year, and honestly it was hype enough that I put it on my games of the year list. Essentially every normal ascendancy is replaced by 19 new alternative ascendancies, and what is wild about this version is that we will also have the new bloodline ascendancies… which will create some truly wild combinations. I have no clue what I am going to be playing, because I am waiting on the patch notes to drop that explain some of the updates that rebalance the state of things in the last running of this event. Everyone is assuming this will mean some nerfs for Scavenger and Ancestral Commander because they dominated the last round. Scavenger for example made it trivial to get 90% of physical damage converted to elemental damage, because you could stack that cloak of flame node with an actual cloak of flame. Anyways this one starts on the 29th and I am fully expecting to be mainlining this event for awhile.
Last night I spent a bit of time in Destiny Rising, because due to all of the shit going on in my life we did not get to do our normal “Sibling Time” night on Tuesday. We knocked out a couple of rounds of Grandmasters, and unfortunately learned the lesson that you can in fact run with characters that have run out of stamina… but you do not get the Grandmaster rewards. We got enough to Calamity Ops to not be relegated, which we are calling good and then finished up with some Morgran’s Hunt. I will still need to do another 5 key run, but that should be easy enough before the reset. We have found two Strongholds for the week, but I know I have expended resources on three accounts… so that is probably all we are going to find. I know I need to spend some time running The Expanse this weekend so I can get some fruit and progress for the upcoming reset next week.
As far as the other news in my life… I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support that I have received. It is honestly overwhelming. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown yesterday at one point when out of the blue and without warning I was scheduled for two diagnostic tests that I do not remember the doctor mentioning. I of course immediately expected the worst… but then later called their office only to find out that no they did not have the biopsy results back and that these were just part of the standard procedures to look for anything else that might be going on. I still know next to nothing other than I have cancer, and at some point it has to be removed. I am just hoping that the snowmageddon we have barrelling down on us, is such that I can get out Monday for those diagnostic tests. I am trying desperately to hold my shit together in the meantime while my nerves eat away at me. I go between being largely fine and resigned to whatever is going to happen, to being a basket case.
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Good Morning Folks! After giving you updates on my life… it is time to roll on into the rest of my year in review topics. I legitimately do not know how many of these I have, but I have stalled long enough. This morning I am going to talk about the games that were important to me during the last year in either a good way or a bad way. This list is not going to look anything like most 2025 in review lists, because I do not play a ton of new games. I play an awful lot of ARPGs and treat each season as though it were a game launch. This wildly skews the sort of results that I have in this scenario. I am also this time sort of loosely grouping the list into less important to more important, but not necessarily a strict order.
Path of Exile II: The Last of the Druids
This is probably the most recent of the games I am going to talk about it, and I am still more or less playing it. On December 12th, Path of Exile II released a big update that launched the Last of the Druids and Fate of the Vaal league. In it they gave us access to the first of the Int/Str hybrid classes the Druid which has ascendancies for Shaman and Oracle. More important than that, they gave us access to the primal ability tree and the talisman weapon that allow us to turn into a Bear, Wolf, or Wyvern. I’ve been deeply critical of Path of Exile II up until this point, seeing it as a bit of a mechanically worse version of Path of Exile that just happens to have better graphics and a better user interface. Playing Bear Druid, and specifically Demon Bear Shaman is what really pushed me over the edge to truly enjoying this game. It is fun as heck to hop around the map causing big explosions with my fat bear ass. The game still has problems… and will continue to have problems for a very long time… but this gameplay got me hooked.
Slormancer
Slormancer is a little 2D sorta isometric view roguelike arpglike game that is a heck of a lot of fun. I did not play this game anywhere near as much as I should have, but I hope to remedy that in 2026. I did play it enough however to want to talk about it. The mechanics of this game are just really fun, and it reminds me of what if you took Rogue Legacy and turned it into an ARPG. I mostly played the knight character, but the archer was pretty fun as well. This really wants to be played with a controller though, and is ideal for television gaming. Once I get off my ass and figure out what I want to use as a proper Steam in the Livingroom setup, I will probably be playing more of this. If you have not checked it out and like any of the types of games that I eluded to in this post… check it out. It’s a heck of a lot of fun for $20.
Dune Awakening
I have such wildly mixed feelings about Dune Awakening. This is going to be a game that goes in my disappointments of the year pile. The AggroChat folks and friends decided to play together on a private server that Tam rented for us as we all got started, and I feel like that is the correct way to play this game. It is unfortunate that it requires someone shelling out for a server, and it is even more unfortunate that it does not grant you private access to the shared open world pvp deep desert. What killed this game for me though… was upkeep. You are required to play a certain amount of this per week in order to generate enough fuel to keep the shield on your base active, or your base slowly disintegrates over time. This feels really fucking bad. Namely because I got busy with various events while playing this game… and then had the death of a spouse which knocked me even further out of whack with ever getting back in. Once I lost everything, there was no point in me going back. I would love to see a pure PVE sandbox version of this game that allows you to set custom rules on a server by server basis for things like upkeep. The game itself has gone from a peak concurrency of not quite 200k players to an average of 8k…. so I think maybe it did not work quite right for a lot of players.
Hellclock
So what if I told you there was a game… loosely based on the real world events surrounding Brazil’s War of Canudos… that took place in the aftermath of the abolishment of slavery, but also somehow involves exploring dungeons and killing zombies and shit? Hellclock is a deeply odd and stylistic roguelike ARPG where you have a fixed amount of time to explore on each run, and once you run out of time everything winds back and you get to keep any powerups that you purchased during the previous run. The cyclical nature of the game is deeply satisfying and you get various tools to extend your runs as you get better. I did not play anywhere near enough of this game but again I think it is prime fodder for once I sort out my Steam in the Livingroom setup. I have to solve my wireless network woes before I really do that unfortunately because I have my old gaming rig hooked up in the livingroom, the connectivity speeds are complete ass. I’ve also not really figured out a good keyboard and mouse option, and there will be games that I don’t necessarily want to play with a controller. Anyways NONE of that is about Hellclock, which is just a universally interesting game.
Titan’s Quest II
Titan’s Quest II had quite a number of updates throughout the year and I spent several days really getting into the game and checking out what it had to offer. I landed on the decision that I do not really enjoy playing a melee class in the game, but dig the heck out of playing ranged. I played a sort of icicle archer thing that worked really well, and honestly the game itself is just gorgeous. The fights are pretty interesting, and this is very much a worthy successor to the first game, which in itself was a worthy successor to Diablo II. If you like ARPGs in general or you were ever a fan of TItan’s Quest, then I suggest checking it out. They are continuing to release updates for the game as it is still in development so if you would rather play it once it is finished, then this might be a game to put a pin in and check back when the 1.0 release finally happens.
Abyssus
This game is a heck of a lot of fun to play with a friend, and Ace and I spent a bit of time playing this game and should probably at some point return to it. I think Destiny Rising more or less stole the place in our gaming lives that this took up for a bit. Essentially Abyssus is a wave based arena shooter rogue-like… about exploring the depths of an underwater dungeon. You and your friends take on waves of monsters, get loot, and work your way down to fixed boss fights at specific floors. The deeper you go the harder it gets and the more varied the environments become. Big Nautical-punk vibes with this game because you are both wearing these diving suits while you wield your big damned guns and kill things. The further you go the more points you get to configure your build and control your weapon load-outs, but a lot of options unlock symmetrically as you reach certain floors giving you a mix of guaranteed upgrades and choice based upgrades. I am not sure this game would be fun solo, but it was a blast with someone hanging out on voice chat.
Path of Exile – Mercenaries of Trarthus
Mercenaries of Trarthus was a challenge league that ran in Path of Exile from June 13th to October 27th and represented the first new content we had gotten in almost a year since the launch of Settlers of Kalguur the previous year. First it was just amazing to get some new content in the game, but more than that it introduced Mercenaries and I have always loved those sorts of mechanics in ARPGs. One of my favorite aspects of Diablo III was building out my companion to buff the things that were weak in my build, and that is largely what players did in order to make some truly busted builds. The real meta of the league was doing some sort of build that could apply large amounts of Lightning damage, and then using Doryani’s Prototype on your mercenary, to debuff all of the mobs in your presence to have large amounts of negative lighting resistance. I think the build that I ran as my second in the league managed to get close to -300% Lightning Resistance while dealing a ton of damage with Storm Brand of Indecision. It was thoroughly busted but lord did I have a lot of fun playing this league.
Monster Hunter Wilds
There will be some of you who do not remember just how much I got into Monster Hunter World when it released in 2018 both on the original PS4 release, and later when it came out on PC in August of that same year. I had never really mainlined a Monster Hunter game despite trying to dabble in them on the mobile platforms, but this game sucked me in and stole so much of my time. Monster Hunter Wilds was a return to the same style of game as Worlds and when it launched I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it. Sadly I did not really stick around as much as I thought I might, but that does not discount the fact that I had an awful lot of fun playing it. I probably would have played it more but every time Ammo, Sita and I tried to group up I started having network problems. Capcom… has some of the shittiest grouping systems ever, and if they got someone from a western live service game to come unfuck their game interface… I think folks would be around far longer. I only put in around 60 hours, but it was 60 hours well spent.
Last Epoch – Beneath Ancient Skies
On August 21st Last Epoch dropped a pretty signfiicant update with Beneath Ancient Skies which added a whole new chapter to the game and a new league mechanic hunting down primal monsters and chosing to evolve them making them more difficult and rewarding. I had a really fun league with this game, but ultimately I burned through it pretty quickly. I played a Fire Minions Necromancer build and then ultimately hopped on the Thorns damage train for quite possibly the stupidest build I have ever played in any game where I am just nuking the entire screen with thorns damage. The new act was a lot of fun and it is probably the best content they have added into the game to date. The primal league mechanic was also a lot of fun, and each time this game expands it keeps getting better. I think the challenge for me is that I “finish” with the game way faster than I do with Path of Exile. I reach a point with my builds where I have seen everything that I really want to see and really pushing to the true pinnacle content of the game requires more hours than I really want to dump into it. That is not a failing of the game and more a case that it still needs more years to cook before it will be as rich of an experience as Path of Exile has.
Path of Exile – Legacy of Phrecia Event
Earlier when I talked about Mercenaries of Trarthus, part of the reason why that league was so damned much fun is that it had been a literal year since we last got a new league in the game. So much of GGG’s time was being devoted to the care and feeding of the fledgling Path of Exile II, that the POE core felt ignored. That is not to say things were not happening, we had a few fun private leagues like the Pohx League event, but there was one thing that probably took the cake. Almost as a shadow drop, Grinding Gear Games gave us the Legacy of Phrecia alternative ruleset event where every single one of the 19 Ascendancy classe were replaced. It was wild to play through this and I played a Righteous Fire Scavenger… which is the alternative version of the Scion. It was so much fun, and now this game mode exists as an alternate ruleset that you can use to create custom leagues. There is part of me though that wishes at some point all of the Phrecia ascendancies go core and become just alternate options allowing us 38 different ascendancy choices in the game.
Destiny Rising
Destiny Rising is essentially my game of the year…. but it does not get the top slot for reasons I will talk about later. This is a gacha game from Net Ease that remixes the tried and true Destiny format, but also makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable in the process. There is no reason why I should be loving a Gacha game as much as I am, because I thought Genshin Impact broke me of that. However… Destiny Rising is shockingly fair when it comes to its Gacha mechanics. I have 3 accounts, 2 of which I have spent zero money on… and they both feel like I have plenty of things to do without having spent a dime. The whole three acccouints thing is largely because I am trying to maintain a guild when there are really only two or three of us that are actively playing. That is a whole other discussion. If you ever loved Destiny at any point in the past, you owe it to yourself to check out Destiny Rising. It is so damned much fun and really streamlines what made that game great. If you DO end up playing… hit me up because we certainly can use some more active players in our guild to do dailies.
Guild Wars 2 Fractal Incursion Event
My “Game of the Year” really goes to more specifically an event of the year. In September, Guild Wars 2 shadow dropped an event called the Fractal Incursion. This added a new feature to the game which allowed you to randomly queue for Fractals, giving the game what it needed so badly… a more modern group finder. Not only did they do this… they bribed the fuck out of us to run tons of them by providing a path to a piece of legendary armor, and also giving you a pathway to get said armor for every single weight class in the game. The end result was that Lion’s Arch specifically around the Mists portal was busier than at any point I have ever seen in this game’s history. The above screenshot was taken one morning when I was working on my blog post… so completely off peak hours for either EU or NA and it was STILL packed. Better yet we are going to be getting a version of this same group finder for a combined version of Raids and Strikes later this year. This has breathed so much new life into Guild Wars 2, and prompted us to have some really fun Thursday night fractal groups as we all chain ran them trying to get through the achievements. Absolutely the highlight of my gaming year, and on the 13th I believe we are getting a return of the Fractal Rush event so looking forward to that as well.
Those were my games and gaming events of the year. I am sure it looks pretty different than the lists for most people. I did not really play much in the way of single player experiences this year. I hope to remedy that in 2026, but who knows where that will go. My happy place tends to be listening to an audiobook while plugging away at a mechanically interesting but narratively devoid experience. Even for this coming year my games list will be the games that I played, not necessarily the games that came out so at some point when I finally do get around to beating Clair Obscur it will probably make a list. Anyways. Were there any unusual games that made your personal Games of the Year list? Drop me a line below.
The post 2025 in Review: The Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I am still playing Path of Exile II, and shockingly still having things to say about the game. I expected that I would be full on engaged in the Last Epoch Season 2 propaganda machine by now. For any you are interested however Steelmage posted a pretty fun video that attempts to explain all the things about Last Epoch while he was playing it. Over the weekend I reached a point where my build finally started to feel pretty comfortable. Essentially I leap slam into a pack of mobs, infernal cry, and then boneshatter to cause a screen wide explosion augmented by herald of ash. When it comes to boss time I alternate between Perfect Strike and Hammer of the Gods until it is dead. I can’t do any of the one-shot shenanigans but can pretty effectively dispose of most encounters. I need more strength so I can get a bigger hammer with more physical damage on it, but otherwise I am doing pretty great.
I’ve mostly been focused on finding Corruption Nexuses to cleanse so that I can keep bumping up my tier of maps and getting more atlas passives. At this point I have cleared a T9 Nexus and am trying to find my way to another one so I can clear it and bump up to T10. Map sustain has been pretty reasonable and fighting a boss I believe guarantees that you will always get one tier higher, giving you a fairly predictable way to keep moving up. I’ve found a few maps on my atlas that require specific tiers of maps, namely The Copper Citadel requires T15 or higher, and the Megalith requires T11 or higher. I’ve also found a Kalandra map and it did not seem to have any specific requirements, but also has little to no relation to the version of that map that we got in Path of Exile 1. Mostly it is just a pretty tileset that grows as you move along the path with an altar at the end that gives you a special item base.
At this point I have unlocked 20 of 40 Atlas passives and have mostly focused on waystone sustain, adding additional rares to my map, and then diving into rogue exiles making them more likely to wear strength gear and more likely to have unique jewelry (rings, amulets, and belts) equipped. The biggest complaint that I have with the Path of Exile II Atlas is that it feels like I really don’t have much player agency. I’m roughly halfway through the Atlas progression and by now in a Path of Exile league I would have some sort of defined strategy that I am following, influencing a specific type of content to show up more frequently… and honestly by this point probably have at least two mechanics guaranteed on every map. It is just really hard to target farm specific mechanics for resources because Tablets feel totally random in the type you get, and there is nothing like a Scarab that you can use to force mechanics onto each specific map. For example I really need to farm a ton of Expedition, but it is a total crapshoot which maps I am going to have access to that mechanic on.
So much of the Path of Exile II design has been about removing player agency and re-introducing pure dumb luck. This is pretty much the opposite of what players generally want, and once you learn the systems in Path of Exile you are able to radically influence the randomness in a manner that fits the results that you are trying to get out of it. So I get that the passive tree from POE1 might be a bridge to far for the POE2 systems teams… but I posit that maybe it is time to port over Idols. Right now there is a limited time event happening in POE1 called the Legacy of Phrecia, and one of its features is to remove the existing Atlas Passive tree and introduce in its place a series of Idols with randomly rolled attributes. You cannot pinpoint things quite as easily as you can with the Atlas tree, but stacking enough of these allows you to at least shape the outcome of your maps. This truly is a better system design than the current Atlas in Path of Exile II and I am somewhat hoping that maybe Idols as a concept was a test for improving mapping.
In other news I “crafted” if you can use that word… what I consider to be my ideal normal chestpiece for my build. I had been picking up every Ornate Plate base I could find and specifically I got lucky and got a three socket corrupt on a perfect 2.5% life regeneration item. Other than that I have also upgraded my Xoph’s Blood amulet to a non-corrupted version and added the Titanic enchant to it for 5% more strength. At some point I picked up a slightly better version of Infernoclasp, which represents the only other unique that I am using with the build currently. I picked up a couple of new rings and got one of them to 20% Chaos Modifiers which essentially fixed my resists to the point of allowing me to drop the Chaos Resistance corruption I had on a previous chestpiece. My next big expenditure of currency is going to be buying enough Fire quality currency to max out 40% on the Breach ring, which might be enough to cap my fire resistance at 90%.
Currently I have 89% Fire Resistance, and 76% for Cold and Lightning. If I ever manage to ascend again I will pick up the point that makes max fire res account for lightning and cold and then be at 89/90/90 and should be able to push up Fire that last point either through quality on the breach ring or picking up another +1% max jewel socket. I’ve been pushing up my block chance and am now at 53% with my next pick adding another +12% and the ability to get life back on block. I am just shy of 200 life per second regen which feels pretty comfortable, and my armor is in a decent place… but I could always use more of it. What I need now more than anything is strength… so that I can start using the higher tier bases for my two handed maces.
In a perfect world I want a Fanatic Greathammer, but the base Strength requirement for that is 212… which gets multiplied by Giants Blood for a total of 636 required Strength. There is no way for me to get to that without going down to pick up Polymathy. So either I need a perfectly rolled hammer with maximum reduced attributes… or a lot more passive skill points. It seems like the lowest I can reasonably get is 137 Strength from 35% reduced attributes which would still require me to have 381 Strength. I am pretty commited to my next choice and other than that I am 12 points away from being able to reach Polymathy, which means I will not be able to get there until level 93. Realistically… there is no way in hell that I hit that before Thursday and the launch of Last Epoch, so without radically shifting my tree I am going to be stuck where I am for awhile. What is even sadder is that even AFTER allocating all of those nodes I will only be sitting at 442 Strength so would STILL need to find a reduced attribute roll on my mace.
Loot still feels fairly anemic, but I am usually finding one or two exalts per map now. I’ve had a few good tinks and at this point I have found two Twilight Reliquary Keys and two raw Divine Orbs. I used one of the Twilight keys just to see what luck I might have, and pulled a 1Ex mace from it… so I sold the second one for 18 Exalts. I’ve spent one of the Divines on getting a better Xoph’s Blood that I could enchant, and am shopping around for various upgrades with the second one. Technically I have seen three Divine Orbs, but one I got during the campaign that I cashed into Exalted Orbs to help with some early gearing. What this game really needs is Harvest crafting… the ability to change resistances on gear and the ability to spam craft items that are skewed towards a single needed stat. That really is my primary method for attempting to craft gear in Path of Exile 1, and would love to see something similar here. Then again… I could not reasonably get Harvest on every single map to even farm the currency so maybe there are multiple problems with that statement.
I’ve reached a point where I am legitimately enjoying myself… but that said… I am so fucking ready for Tombs of the Erased on Thursday. The systems of Last Epoch are just better designed than the systems of Path of Exile II. All that was lacking was the endgame and I am hoping the Weaver faction and itemized “maps” are going to solve that last piece of the puzzle. I will probably fanboy out a bit over the coming week sharing “why you should play” type posts. So unless something drastic happens over the coming days, this is probably going to be my last Path of Exile II post for awhile.
The post The Altar of Randomness appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
