Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.
Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.
Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.
Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.
There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.
After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.
The post It’s Getting Better appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yes I am still screwing around with Path of Exile II… in part because I don’t really want to get engaged in another game since Last Epoch Season 2 launches next week. There has been further fruit from the Zizaran interview, namely in the form of a patch summary post for the upcoming 0.2.0e patch. They are tweaking a bunch of things, namely the monster speed for a bunch of encounters during the campaign to even out the difficulty curve a bit so that you are not just rushed and stun-locked until death. This is probably a good thing, especially if I ever decide to level my minions character. That said it is probably too late for me to benefit because around Act 4 I managed to get my build online and stable enough to not really have any more problem pushing through the campaign.
Fairly early yesterday evening I killed Doryani for the second time and progressed into the endgame proper for Path of Exile. Taking on Viper the second time was really no big deal and so much easier than the first time I faced her. Quite frankly the hardest thing for me the second time was the molten smith fight thing, because I just was not doing much damage to him and he kept getting back into the lava flow and healing. I finished him off within a few frames of the end of the path. I could have fought in the lava for a bit but not terribly long. The further into the campaign I got however, the less rewarding everything felt. Rares became more Rare… and currency that matters… aka Chaos, Exalt, and Alchemy all but dried up entirely. I picked up a pair of unique gloves that I was able to sell for a Divine Orb, which I immediately converted back into Exalts so that I could afford some upgrades.
This morning I recorded a quick video of me clearing a map… with quick being a relative term because it took about 10 minutes to full clear all of the rares. The gameplay style is rather slow and plodding but stable as I leap slam into a pack and then boneshatter as soon as I land and if all goes well… blow up most of the screen. I had to drop some area of effect nodes to path over to blood magic to fix my mana issues, but I will be slowly picking those back up as I gain more levels. All in all it is a more stable gameplay style than my character was last league, but it feels infinitely slower because leap slam in Path of Exile II feels sort of awful. Based on the interview though… I still feel like I am probably moving faster than the intended gameplay speed. I need to drop my Trampletoe boots and pick up something with as much movement speed as I can get.
I talk about this in the video, but right now the worst part about the game is how unrewarding everything feels. This represents the loot from my juiciest map yet. The only reason why I got so much stuff is because I found a unique strongbox that spawned seven different rare mobs in a row with each getting stronger than the last. Most maps… are more akin to the one I show off in the video with one to two rares maybe dropping and a handful of bubblegum currency. I realize I am only running tier 1 waystones so far, but still… I swear it feels like it was more rewarding last league. I think that is the core problem with the state of the game. Everything feels sluggish as hell, but at the same time unrewarding so you begin to question why the fuck you are even playing. That is not a question you want your players asking.
One thing that I do have to give them credit for however is that the transition into mapping was a bit more smooth than it was previously. I remember there being a sizeable jump in difficulty between late campaign zones like the Aggorat and your very first T1 Waystones, and that bump is largely gone now. My only real complaint is how slow the combat feels and how little reward we are getting for it. I think I just happen to be playing a tanky enough character that the Rogue Exiles are not really that big of a deal. I’ve watched plenty of videos of folks being harassed by them, but it seems like maybe Warrior from last league is the baseline for the power level that they want classes to be at. We were the slugs last league, but sort of feel like gods as compared to most of the other classes now. It took awhile for my build to really come online, but once I got enough survival and especially after swapping to Giants Blood it has been pretty comfortable.
There is one build that I am super interested in, just not sure if I am interested enough to completely respec my warrior. One of my all time favorite ARPG builds is the “stop hitting yourself” Invoker Thorns Crusader from Diablo III. This is really the ultimate super chill build to play an ARPG with, and is directly related to my love of Righteous Fire in Path of Exile. I love building super tanky and then watching mobs effectively break themselves on my armor. Thorns seemingly is now a viable archetype in Path of Exile II, and most folks seem to be playing this with a Spear and Shield. Mathil also released a video yesterday talking about his own take on the concept. It seems REALLY interesting to me… and might be something I visit after Last Epoch runs its course… pending there is not a 3.26 league in Path of Exile at that time.
All in all… my character is very stable and I should be able to progress through maps without much issue. However a lot of the new has worn off with this game, and what we are left with is a game-play experience that is just not that fun.
The post Slow and Steady But Unrewarding appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a wild ride, but I feel like I need to do some filling in of details for any readers who are not aggressively online and part of the Path of Exile community. Zizaran is essentially the gold standard for what a Path of Exile content creator can be. He is active in the community and known as one of the go to places for well crafted and easy to follow guides. Additionally he has a good rapport with Grinding Gear Games and has partnered with them to run a series of event called The Gauntlet where the rules of the game are changed to make an extremely brutal hardcore rule set environment that serves as a very short event league. He stays away from various community drama posts and just keeps his head down doing his thing and supporting the community in his own way. He is not exactly known for hyperbole and when he does come down hard on something… there is good reason.
Yesterday he hosted an interview with Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts of Grinding Gear Games. Note… this was something that was arranged well ahead of the launch of the Dawn of the Hunt league and in theory would normally be a victory lap to talk about all of the good things about it. However given the overwhelming anger and frustration from the community about the changes that went in with 0.2.0 and the current state of the game… this put Zizaran in the unique position of having a platform to discuss those frustrations. Legitimately I do not think there is anyone else in the community who could have played this role, because no one really has the institutional clout to create a scenario where they are both trusted by the players and trusted by the developers.
One of the frustrations that I have heard time and time again from the community is the question… who was this built for? We got a pretty clear answer. Note this is me attempting to clean it up a bit because there were an aggressive number of “ums” and “likes”, and repeated false starts to statements in the YouTube transcript. However here is something that Jonathan said during the interview that really just hit me the wrong way.
Every night I go home and play… I like do test runs of everything right, and if we made it so that there wasn’t any challenge for me in act one, I wouldn’t play the game anymore. But that isn’t helping anyone, right? I need to keep playing the game every night to actually enjoy myself It’s like if I’m not enjoying myself, then it’s like how can I even develop the game correctly? So on some level, it has to be fun for me, and I know that if you get to the point of having everything just be trivial, it’s like, well okay, why am I even playing this anymore? So there has to be some level of challenge.Jonathan Rogers – Grinding Gear Games
So essentially… we are playing an aggressively tedious game because that is the way that Jonathan likes it? That is probably not fair, but it certain comes off that way. The beginning of the interview was deeply combative with one moment happening where Jonathan was trying to talk over Ziz and answer a question different than the one he was asking… with Ziz having to ask if he could please finish what he was saying. Jonathan apologized at the end of the interview for the way he was behaving, and I think that Mark stepped in to de-escalate things pretty well which allowed for some genuine and meaningful conversation to happen. I genuinely do not feel like if it were anyone other than Zizaran sitting across the interview from them… they would not have taken things quite so seriously. In a previous interview with Ghazzy and Darth Microtransaction, there were a few moments where it felt like Jonathan was straight up shutting down lines of conversation and presenting an impassible wall.
What is probably most impressive about this whole situation is that it has led to direct intervention. This morning I woke up to find that over night another post was made to the Path of Exile forums. Essentially it is outlining some direct changes that they will be implementing this week, and some other changes that they are investigating to determine the correct fix. Does this resolve all of the problems? Absolutely not. However, it does start the process of remedying what went wrong with 0.2.0. After listening to the discussion I do feel like a lot of the problems with this league have been in the “unintended consequences” column or from simply trying to fly a bit too close to the sun. We did not get any patch notes until the day before the league dropped, and even then it was missing details and some of the details that were included were just frankly incorrect. I feel like they set a deadline… and then did not have time to get everything locked down before they pushed the release out the door, creating a bunch of unforced errors in the process.
What has not done them any favors with the fans… is the fact that their release squashed the already scheduled launch window for Last Epoch Season 2 on April 2nd. Eleventh Hour Games did the best thing for them and rescheduled it for next week… but especially given the fact that Dawn of the Hunt was not ready for release… it is only adding to the frustrations. Given the broken state of the Path of Exile II, I can only imagine that Last Epoch is going to have one of its most active season launches yet. I really hope for their sake that the servers are nice and stable and that there are no economy breaking bugs this time around. Talkative Tri had an interview with EHG yesterday and some of the things that are coming in this season seem freaking amazing, and are direct answers to some of the minor squabbles I have had with the game.
So another piece that is coming up as part of this discussion is a bit of information that I assumed was common knowledge… but is apparently not. There has been a pretty regular refrain from Reddit wishing for Chris Wilson to come back and save the game. Thing is… from at least January of this year he has had no involvement with Grinding Gear Games. The incorporation documents on the New Zealand Companies Office was updated to remove Chris Wilson. In late 2024, Tencent acquired the last 20% of Grinding Gear Games making them a solely owned subsidiary and my guess is that Chris’s exit timeline happened around that point. I think he probably stuck around for the launch of Path of Exile II, to do some press for the game if needed, but almost everything for the last year involved Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts doing the heavy listing. I think the very last “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson, From Grinding Gear Games” that we got was during the Settlers of Kalguur league announcement. However even during that content reveal it was mostly Mark that did the bulk of the work.
One of the details that came out surrounding Grinding Gear Games stomping on the release of Last Epoch Season 2, is the statement that they had to launch now and that there was no way around it. In one of those situations of timing never being worse… yesterday the Dawn of the Hunt Mystery Box trailer came out as well. For those who have not been around Path of Exile, these are loot boxes that show up a few days after the launch of a new league and feature a bunch of microtransactions with no chance of getting exact duplicates, so if you spend enough money you are ultimately going to get everything eventually. What makes them better than normal loot boxes however, is at the start of the next league they all go up on the shop as individual purchases meaning that there isn’t much reason to ever chase the gacha highs.
My personal guess is that the “must launch” part of this ties to needing the financial income that a loot box series brings, and needing to be able to guarantee those earnings in the second quarter of 2025. I am uncertain what fiscal year scheme that Grinding Gear Games uses, but it is pretty common for Fiscal years to run July 1st to July 1st so that the financial close does not take place over the extremely fraught Christmas/New Years holiday weekends. In theory it might simply be that they needed to realize the profits from this loot box during this fiscal year in order to meet some arbitrary goals set forth by Tencent. Whatever the case… it sucks because they clearly were not ready and did not test things enough to push Dawn of the Hunt out the door. We are already seeing significant fall off in the player numbers, and potentially any remedies that they have made to this bad launch are not really going to make much of a difference at this point. The steam numbers show a fall off around 100k concurrent players in only a few days.
Anyways… I am personally still plugging away. I have gotten enough strength through the tree and gear to finally swap over to a Giant’s Blood build allowing me to pick up the additional defenses of a shield. I shopped around and spent my single solitary exalted orb on a shield with 40% block and roughly 500 armor. Yesterday I wrapped up Act 5 and am nearing the halfway point for Act 6. So in theory within the next few days I should be venturing forth into maps. I had my first waystone drop this morning when I popped in for a bit to record some screenshots, that I did not end up using today. Sometimes blog posts develop a mind of their own, and this one was more about the larger Path of Exile II situation.
At the end of the day I want to thank Zizaran for seemingly getting through to Grinding Gear Games yesterday. It is my greatest hope that we continue to see improvements and that maybe by the time 0.3.0 happens we will not have a massive regression in the enjoyment of the game.
The post Thank You Zizaran appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I did not do a blog post on Friday because I just was not feeling it. I hoped maybe the new Path of Exile II league that launched that afternoon/evening would pull me out of my funk. In truth it did… but it replaced sadness with rage. When the game launched I wrote at length about what I considered to be the problems with that game, and I remember Zizaran specifically stating in one of his videos at the launch of the game that what we were playing, was the worst state the game would ever be in. At the time it helped me put some of my own feelings into perspective and I thought sure… it can only go up from here. I chose a more meta build and then honestly had quite a bit of fun getting through maps and farming quite a bit in the endgame. I only got to level 94 on my Minion Infernalist, but that seemed reasonable enough and mostly I just got bored of the very limited state of the end game.
I thought the first release of the game needed some work. Essentially there were four builds that were viable, and I expected those to eat the nerf bat, but hopefully others would be buffed up to reach a point where we had a dozen or so viable builds instead. This is something that they absolutely know how to do… because builds like Penance Brand of Dissipation have eaten massive nerfs… but still remained completely viable choices if someone just happened to enjoy that particular play style. Hell my own love of Righteous Fire and the number of drastic changes in the way it is built over just the few years I Have been playing… is proof positive that balance changes in Path of Exile 1 have mostly been about pruning the outliers. In theory if we had more viable builds and more endgame variety… this league could have been a banger or at least something that I would enjoy to tide me over until Last Epoch.
The day before the patch was set to launch we got a post outlining the changes… and it was nothing but wall to wall nerfs. So much so that it did not just bring builds in line… but absolutely decimated almost every even vaguely halfway viable build from the first league. Warrior was probably the least impacted, but a lot of the things that made them powerful boss hunters were destroyed. Hammer of the Gods now requires you to build up a resource rather than just having a cool down. So we thought it was bad, and admittedly we were warned by Jonathan that it was going to involve a lot of nerfs. What we were not prepared for… was this was only the tip of the iceberg. The nerfs went so much deeper, to the point of builds that seemed viable from these patch notes were themselves untenable when the game actually released.
Were this just a me thing… it would be one thing. However every streamer has effectively come out and talked about how this is the worst update they have ever played. Wudijo seems to be enjoying himself, but he is so damned good-natured that he could not even muster venom over the worst Diablo IV patches, so that checks out. The core POE streamers are all various shades of miserable. Steelmage is generally a super chill dude, but in an impromptu podcast with Zizaran he talked about how generally miserable he has been. Empyrean has just bailed on the league entirely, and others appear to simply be playing because it is financially beneficial for them given that there are twitch drops active. I watched a friend of mine yesterday who seemed to be in good spirits… but watched her and her partner spend 30 minutes dying over and over to the Dreadnought in act II.
I am currently playing what is apparently the strongest and most meta build out there… a generic bone shatter warrior that I have ascended into Smith of Kitava. My damage output is reasonable, but it feels like I am wearing tissue paper for gear… when I have just shy of 1000 health, 1500 armor, and capped elemental resistances at 75/75/75 at level 45. I get interrupted constantly when trying to attack and the only thing that seems to feel halfway decent is Leap Slam to Bone Shatter… with Perfect Strike for harder mobs. However I effectively have to wait until I have stunned something to actually get one of the Perfect Strikes off successfully because otherwise I keep getting stunned out of the channel. White mobs in Path of Exile II, feel like bosses in Path of Exile I in the amount of damage that they are dealing.
There have been numerous points where I have rage quit out over the weekend. The first was dying over and over to these stupid chests in Act 1 at level 5. Why in the hell these things are so murdery at such a low level is beyond me. I suffered through Act 1 on Friday and took out Count Geonor and started on Act 2 before getting frustrated and playing some Path of Exile 1 instead. On Saturday morning I started off with succeeding at the Trial of the Sehkemas and ascending and then chipping away at Act 2, eventually beating it before the end of the night. Once again I had to go play something else because Act 3 was annoying me. Doing anything in the game just feels cumbersome. It isn’t so much that it is challenging, because that denotes it is something that learning from mistakes would improve. Instead it just feels like I am being bludgeoned by a thousand little cuts, each one sapping more joy from me.
Last night’s rage quit moment was Viper Napuatzi, a boss I have never had trouble with in any previous incarnation of this game. Essentially I was getting ripped to shreds by the poison, and my perfect strikes were doing nothing. I seemed like I was able to get her down to around half health and then there health bar would stall out and never dip any lower. I tried this fight a half dozen times before logging out and playing some Last Epoch. I had to do something that felt good for awhile to dull the annoyance and frustration of Path of Exile II. At this point you are probably asking yourself.. “Bel why the fuck are you still playing?”, and in truth I do not have a good answer for you. I would say I am doing it for the content… but that would be a lie. I am doing it because I hate the concept that this fucking game ground me down into the ground, when even as much as I did not enjoy it at times previously… I still pushed through it and figured out a way to have fun. I keep thinking that if I beat my head against this wall hard enough, I will eventually grow numb to the rage.
This morning before sitting down to write this I managed to complete the Trial of Chaos and got my second set of ascendancy points. So much about this stupid Trial seems to be getting a good batch of RNG and getting one option out of three that does not completely fuck over your build. More than that for my build, it also requires that I do not get the Chimera as the final boss… because that fight ends up being a comedy of errors as you have to traverse this gigantic fucking map with the hope of it sticking around long enough in one location to actually get a hit off before it flies off again. Now I need to spend a lot of time farming materials so that I can outfit a reasonable white chest-piece… socket it, get it to 20% quality, and then attempt to corrupt it for a third socket so I can assign those ascendancy points.
This morning they released a “What We’re Working On” post… but honestly I think I am too bitter to read it at this point. To me it just reads like them attempting to justify the decisions that they made which have led us to this point. There have been enough negative Steam reviews to have flipped the game into mixed rating… with 66% of recent reviews being negative. As frustrating as the campaign has been… I am now seeing statements from streamers that the endgame is even worse. Kripparian talks about running a six mod rare map with stacked rarity on gear and on the keystone… and not seeing a single rare item drop in the entire map. It has felt like both experience gain and loot has been nerfed in the campaign, and I have never before felt like I needed to go farm previous areas just to get levels, but I have been actively doing that in this play through. Unless something significant changes during the course of this league, it will probably be the last that I play for Path of Exile II. There are just better ARPGs out there and I am frankly having more fun still in the Legacy of Phrecia temporary event than this mess.
Right now I am giving it until the start of Act IV before I truly give up. That is of course if I can figure out a way to beat Viper in Act III and move on to Doryani. If not… or if the game does not improve in the cruel difficulties like it did previously… I guess I will just be playing around in Phrecia until Last Epoch drops on the 14th. My level 100 Righteous Fire Scavenger has reached a point where I am pretty easily farm T17 maps and was able to faceroll my way through Sirius over the weekend. It seems like a lot of players are back in Phrecia because the sheer volume of trades that I was getting pinged about was extreme. Mostly I chuck every jewel I get into a 20c tab and it is effectively a constant ping of players wanting this gem or that. Legacy of Phrecia legitimately has the most diversity of builds that I have ever seen in a Path of Exile league. Unironically this temp event that they just threw together… is maybe one of the best leagues they have ever created.
Anyways… did you try and play Path of Exile II this weekend? What were your thoughts? Am I completely off base in my rage and it seems fine to you? Drop me a line below.
The post The Worst Path of Exile League So Far appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
