Last Epoch – Many Dead Friends
Hey Folks. This is an extended weekend for me due to MLK Jr day here in the United States and as such I am getting a much later start at sitting down to write words. Additionally it also happens to be inauguration day, but we are not going to talk about that part. I’m still very much spending my time playing ARPGs and have reached that point with Last Epoch where I am not quite powerful enough to push my way into empowered monoliths with zero friction. I essentially am slowly working my way through objectives and can’t roll over the top of maps in quite the same way as I was up until this point. Everything is great… until I start losing minions… at which point it becomes a battle of attrition as I attempt to keep summoning minions and hope I can distract the baddies long enough for them to be killed before they notice me standing in the background.
Last Epoch – Empowered Monolith
To be fair, this feels like something every build goes through in that level 80-90 range where you have completed Normal Monoliths but are still below the optimal level for level 100 Empowered Monoliths. I am sure I could fine tune my build to make this go a bit more smoothly, but for the moment I am using five minions and zero support spells. I am also struggling with mana issues which I need to figure out a way to solve because I cannot really spam my exploding zombies. I am generating quite a bit of ward and I wish I had access to something like Eldritch Battery in this game. Overall I feel much sturdier than my average version of this build thanks to the additional ward. I am not super great at bossing however because the minions just can’t grind them down as fast as I would like. I am also missing a bunch of uniques from the bog standard minions build… namely I have burned through around 60 Runes of Ascendance in an attempt to get an Aaron’s Will with zero luck.
Path of Exile II – Fourth Ascendancy
I’ve also been playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II, even though I largely thought I was finished with it. Yesterday I managed to complete my Fourth Ascendancy, so I am pretty happy with that. I ran a Trial of Chaos and after the nerfing of the Tornado boss it seems pretty reasonable. I did buy the 3 tokens required to fight the Trialmaster off the currency exchange, because I did not really feel like grinding level 80 Trials in order to collect all three parts. Everything went smoothly… until my cat walked in front of my keyboard and then I realized that I could not pause the game during a boss fight. So I rapidly shooed Gracie out of the way in time to dodge a boss attack. Overall though it seemed very doable.
Path of Exile II – Arbiter of Ash
What was NOT doable… was the Arbiter of Ash fight. I assumed this would be just as free as Xesht was on zero difficulty. That was not the case and all of the attacks were very much oneshot mechanics. I feel like I either lack the dps to phase the boss fast enough, or lack the movement speed to be able to complete the encounter. There is this phase where you have to run between safe bubbles that are very much like the meteor attack from FFXIV, and I simply was not fast enough to hit them all. Similarly there is a diagonal attack that you have to find the safe spot in, and I was just not fast enough to be able to move between these if I got one on the far edge of the screen and then the next one on the opposite far edge. Basically I wasted three tokens trying this fight and will now just sell them on the market like I was previously… especially since the price of all three tokens has gone up significantly.
Path of Exile II – Lucky Raw Divine Orb drop
I’ve respecced my character a bit gaining way more life and energy shield… dropping a few points of block and then mixing in a Skeletal Storm Mage to debuff everything with shock. I had to sacrifice one Arsonist but the mix seems to work really well as everything appears to be dying much faster now. The biggest difference is on Rares where my boots are poisoning them, the storm mages are shocking them, and then I am keeping them ignited with flame wall… which keeps the shock from dropping. I am curious how this feels for bossing as I have not really done many since the swap over this morning. I also need to start shopping for a Sceptre upgrade because I would really like to at least get my skeletal warriors up to 19 instead of the 18 version that I am currently using. Additionally it would be really nice to get some more spirit in that slot.
Diablo IV – Season of Witchcraft
For the moment I am having a pretty good time alternating back and forth between Last Epoch and Path of Exile II, and I know tomorrow I will be spending time leveling something in Diablo IV as the new seasons starts. Overall the Season of Witchcraft seems to be a partial reboot of the Vampire season which was quite possibly the best season so far. Leveling through the “bloodtide” was a heck of a lot of fun, and as such I fully expect to level almost entirely through the new witchcraft map mechanics. I am not sure if I will be playing a Spiritborn again or returning to my old standby of Barbarian. Since I am seemingly in a minions state of mind, I might try running up a Necromancer and giving that a proper shot. Whatever the case I fully expect this to distract me for awhile, or at least until we get another Path of Exile II patch.
Contrary to popular belief, Diablo IV is in a pretty good state these days. It took over a year and a major expansion to get there, but it is pretty fun for a week or so. It essentially is a more modern version of Diablo III at this point, and I am on board with that.
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Good Morning Folks! I talked about Path of Exile II Patch 0.1.1 on Monday after its reveal over the weekend, but yesterday afternoon/evening it finally dropped. So of course last night I had to dip my head back into the game and check out what it felt like after the patch had landed. First I have to say the improved zoom level on the Atlas is pretty massive. This is only going to really be something for players who have reached maps, but being able to see more of the procedurally generated Atlas is pretty big. Additionally it seems like they have improved some of the general bugs. In the patch notes they specifically called out better load times which is true, but it seems like the rings of effect surrounding towers is rendering more reliably than it was previously.
Probably the biggest change is the ability to see the various Citadel maps through the fog of war. Sure enough I was close to way more of these spawns than I thought even though I had actually found several already. One undocumented change is that each of the beacons has a unique color so not only can you see the Citadel, you can actually see which one it is going to be with Iron being a Blueish Gray color, Copper Orangish Yellow, and Stone being traditional Vaal Red. I think this is going to go a long ways to normalizing the prices of the various tokens because now you will be able to clear towards whichever Citadel you are lacking. I need to do another Copper so that I have the tablets needed to make an attempt at the pinnacle boss so that I can hopefully clear the encounter and get my last two boss passives.
Another thing that I was surprised by was that all of the towers on the map that had not been completed, were effectively re-rolled. I thought I would not start seeing new towers until I reached portions of the map that had not been generated yet by removing the fog of war. Instead it seems as though all of the towers were randomized among the new maps, and quite honestly… this is a pretty massive improvement. All of the new layouts are so much better than the original tower save for the Vaal themed one… which suffers from the general “tight corridors” problem that all Vaal maps do. Even the old tower map has been improved significantly by moving it to the more open top of spires layout. This combined with the fact that minions instantly respawn when you get out of range now, cleared up a lot of the problems I had with tighter map designs.
More important than just improving the layout, it feels as though Towers in general are way more rewarding. I’ve gotten significant drops from pretty much all of them that I have completed so far. They seem to have better density of rares and surprise map mechanics like essences and strongboxes. So these might have gone from something you wanted to throw a trash map into just to get past them… to something you actually want to save good maps for. I ran a bunch of them with T15 maps as I am also now seeming to sustain them way better than I was previously. I’ve noticed a lower instance of low level maps dropping and a much higher drop chance of t12 and higher maps, with quite a few t15s each map that I run.
Augury is still Augury… and I think GGG missed part of the memo on this one. You can in fact now interrupt the levers.. but they still take three seconds to pull. Being able to dodge out of a bad encounter while you are pulling the lever is great and all… but maybe make them instant. Additionally at the end of the map it is super annoying that you have to wait for the doors to the central area to unlock. Maybe speed up the Vaal energy surge so that it moves faster than the player so that by the time they reach the door it is already clickable? Better yet…. just make flipping the third switch open the doors automagically. I get that GGG seems to be hung up on this whole immersion nonsense… but clearly we play the game differently than they do. I feel like we need to pay off someone within GGG to make it so that Jonathan and Mark ONLY get Augury maps while they are playing the game so this will get improved.
Another nice benefit is that maps now have checkpoints just like the campaign. This is pretty great for when you path all of the way to the end and notice that you missed a rare at the very beginning. This still feels like a bandaid though, and if they are going to stick to having rares as the map objective… maybe just highlight the rares from the moment you zone into the map? I feel like there are a lot of things that should just be on permanently on your map instead of having to get into range with them. When rituals, breach hands, strongboxes, and essences are all things that should be flagged on the mini map permanently so that you don’t have to worry if you have missed anything. By the time you get to maps the game is not about immersion but instead about efficiency… and maybe it should have different rules than the campaign does.
I am not exactly the best judge of this next point, but it FEELS like the game got a bit easier. It might just be that due to all of the map layouts improving and I am no longer having to fight with terrain collision near as much… I can just move around more freely and am less susceptible by getting stuck on some rock or tree. I took a single death last night, and honestly it was my own damned fault. I was trying to remove the ability on my left click and set it to punch… not realizing that it would swap away from my weapons if I ever used that. Sceptres do not have a default melee attack… and it flipped to gear set two which did not have any weapons equipped… desummoning all of my minions and I did not realize this until I was toe to toe with a monster… dealing zero damage… and getting wrecked. Other than that mishap I have felt pretty immortal even now that I have started putting layers of delirium on all of my maps for funsies.
Was this enough of a patch to make me dig back in for another three hundred hours? Probably not. I didn’t even make it the full evening without flipping back to playing my Necromancer in Last Epoch. The improvements are significant but I think I am probably tapering off my POE2 time until the next league reset. I will likely poke my head back in each time there is a patch, but for now I am in a holding pattern probably until Path of Exile 3.26 and will be playing some Last Epoch for a bit, and then diving into the next Diablo 4 league after that.
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Good Morning Folks! Since Path of Exile II is awaiting a patch, I figured I would spend some time doing something else. Sunday I started an Acolyte and turned her into a Necromancer going down the path of doing a fairly common minions build since that is what I played almost 300 hours of in Path of Exile II. It is wild just how comfortable Last Epoch is compared to Path of Exile. While the game is lacking at the endgame, and hopefully the big April patch will alleviate that a bit… the leveling experience is so freaking cozy. By my play session last night I was starting in on Monoliths and having a grand old time with my army of horrible children.
I played quite a bit in September when they did the Cycle Refresh and had gotten my Circle of Fortune faction up to rank 11. This made leveling a new character feel amazing, because I was constantly getting really interesting items. More than that the Nemesis system feels phenomenal at low levels because you are regularly getting pretty interesting unique items turned into legendaries with random stats attached to them. The only negative about the Nemesis systems… is that it makes all of the other content feel significantly worse. Rogue Mages for example need a rework because it feels like they only drop Clutch Plates for a 77 Honda Civic Hatchback… which is awesome if you need one of those but otherwise pretty forgettable.
Some of the items that I am seeing from drops are wild. Path of Exile II wanted to make loot on the ground matter and failed miserably at that, but honestly… that is precisely the state of Last Epoch right now. This is an item I picked up off the ground… that has 3 Tier 6 affixes… one of which sealed so that i could in theory roll off one of the other affixes trying to get something with better synergy. Granted I don’t plan on playing a character that needs any of those things, but it is still a wildly compelling item. Given enough time spinning the randomizer I will start seeing items that DO have the stats that I want on them. The fact that I can target specific monoliths for specific gear slots… and also throw Runes of Ascendance at random items use that trying to get the Uniques that I want. I feel like I have so many options to either farm perfect loot, or perfect less than perfect loot.
Right now I am mostly wearing a bunch of weavers will items, because they were handy and often have interesting results. I’m also running two Hollow Fingers which give me extra skeletons. I had one with two legendary potential and attempted to turn it into a ring with Minion Health and Minion Damage, but unfortunately hit flat health instead. Still a reasonable item to use but not necessarily an ideal item. That is one of the things that I dig about Last Epoch is that you can get to a pretty reasonable gear state easily, and then slowly over time attempt to improve upon it by making more Legendary items or lucking into some really tasty drops.
I am sure when the POE2 patch drops I will be back over there testing out the changes, but for the moment I am living my best life in Last Epoch. This game is so damned good, and really… once it has the amount of content that Path of Exile does… it is going to be the easy winner for my attention. I am definitely looking forward to April and the next Cycle where they are supposedly focusing on the endgame entirely. The monolith is a good core, but it just needs more surprise content to borrow a term from the POE2 patch announcement over the weekend. Monoliths feel great when you have a Nemesis, Rogue Mage, and a loot chest… and feel pretty awful when none of those spawn. The more of those little doses of joy that they can pack into the mapping experience, the better the game is going to be.
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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday afternoon Grinding Gear Games released an announcement trailer for the changes that are going to be landing this week in Path of Exile II Patch 0.1.1. This was then followed by an over two hour long Tavern Talk with Darth Microtransaction and Ghazzy TV where they talked with Mark and Jonathan from GGG about the state of the game and the upcoming changes. We won’t know a lot of the specifics until the patch notes actually drop, but the announcement video itself is well worth a watch and is roughly 8 minutes long. If you do not want to sift through the two hour long Q&A the shortest summary that I have seen is from Raxxanterax. SirGog released a similar summary this morning where he talks about some of the specific ramifications of the changes as well. There is also a Reddit thread that bullet points the list of changes if you just want the TLDR version.
This morning I am going to share some of my thoughts about what are some of the major winners of this patch, and what are the losers thusfar.
The Winners
Juicier Maps and Map Identity
We don’t have details here but there are a batch of changes that are targeted at making the gap between the juiciest map and the worst map a bit smaller. Especially early maps, the entire process feels useless and you are not really getting much in the way of usable stuff until you are pretty deep. Specifically they called out improving mob density and making the overall rewards a bit better by default. Similarly they said that there was going to be some sort of specialization system so that maybe a specific map would have a hidden modifier that might make the chests extremely good, or have more essences etc.
Strongboxes are Improved Slightly
Strongboxes were just not worth running because they took forever to finish spawning all of the waves of monsters and had a significant built in delay between waves. This seems like it is being removed and instead of instant popping like POE1, they will spawn in more akin to an Abyss Spire from the looks of it. I am mostly okay with this. They don’t seem MASSIVELY improved, but seem like they are going to be better overall.
Less Visual Clutter and Better Visibility of Monster Effects
This one is pretty huge but they have made a pass to remove some of the ground clutter in maps and have made it so that it is much easier to see visual effects on monsters and their attacks. Specifically it seems like they are doing some sort of tech to render these effects over top of the other layers of visuals so that they will be much harder to miss. I think this is probably what was causing the “random death” problem that players were fighting with is that we simply could not see any of the effects that were being rendered due to all of the visual noise. This is also extending to Delirium Fog, so that you will actually be able to see what the hell is going on.
Better Tiered and Expedition Items
Tiered loot was bad, and apparently this was due to a specific bug in the way these items were being calculated. Some of the culling of lower tiers… actually kept affixes from spawning entirely that did not have higher affixes. Attack speed for example notoriously only has a few affix tiers, the negative… so did light radius. Who knows if this will actually make Tier 5 loot worth picking up but we will see. Additionally they are making changes to the rarity of loot that appears through expedition crafting, so hopefully that actually becomes a viable method for getting some early gear.
Citadels in the Fog
One of the biggest challenges for actually running the pinnacle boss was finding the damned Citadels. They are making a few changes here, the first being that they can spawn closer to the origin point than they previously could. Additionally you will be able to see a glowing spire of light out in the fog of war, so that you know what direction you should be working towards in order to get to a Citadel. This is pretty huge overall. I am not sure if this is going to cause the Citadel market to crash though, because I was making quite a bit of currency tracking these down, clearing them, and then selling the tokens.
Six Pinnacle Boss Portals
Related to this… the tokens might actually be worth using instead of just selling thing. Starting with Arbiter of Ash and eventually ALL of the Pinnacle bosses, you are going to get six attempts at the fight. As you move up in difficulty with the encounter you will get less respawn attempts, but everyone should be able to get six attempts at the zero difficulty. I will probably making an attempt on the Arbiter once, and then go back to selling my tokens because I am really not a boss-centric player. However since more people will be attempting the bosses… it should actually make the demand for tokens a bit higher than it currently is.
Atlas Zoom and Biomes
You will be able to zoom out further on the Atlas of Worlds so that you can see more nodes at a time. Additionally when you mouse over a node it will clearly indicate what biome that maps is in. This is something I specifically called out in one of my posts. I sincerely doubt anyone from GGG has ever read one of my posts, so I am certain this is probably something they were already working on. This is specifically tied to one of the Atlas passives that causes increased chances for specific types of drops in maps within that biome. It was really hard however to tell what map was in what biome.
More Boss Maps and Precursor Support
The design goal for the Atlas of Worlds was that one in four maps would contain a boss. This did not actually shake out, because some of the maps cannot have a boss attached to them. As such they have made tweaks to the spawn rates so that hopefully it will be closer to this one in four ideal. This seems like a good call because in truth it was really hard to find maps that had both Irradiation and Corruption to complete some of the boss atlas passives. Boss maps in general seem to just drop better loot, so they are probably the ideal things to run anyway. They are also adding precursor tablets that can add bosses to maps that do not have them, so that you can further juice your map by adding more of them.
More Tower Maps
The existing state of tower maps in the game is just bad. Most players wanted them removed entirely and the process of juicing maps to be reworked significantly. We are not getting that. However they are adding four new tower maps and improving the layout of the existing one, hopefully making the process of running towers feel less bad. I think the biggest problem right now with towers is that they just feel unrewarding since the towers don’t actually inherit any of the map buffs from other towers. Maybe the overall buffing of map rewards will fix this.
Runes Can Be Overwritten
This is one of those things that pretty much everyone universally was asking for, because it made gearing your character annoying… and a lot of items less valuable because they might have the wrong rune socketed into them. Essentially you reach a point in your builds where you are overcapped on resistances and could them dial back on some of the runes to add something more valuable like defensive layers and life. Additionally there are a lot of soulcores that are super powerful, but you won’t have access to these early on… meaning you can eventually swap out for these as you fix other gear problems.
Armor and Scavenged Plating Buffed
Armor is in an awful state and there have been a lot of videos expounding upon why this is the case. Apparently GGG agrees but specifically said that more needs to happen, but it would not be happening until they do an economy reset with a new league. However in the meantime they are buffing armor a bit and specifically buffing the spirit gem that is associated with scaling armor. We do not know the specifics here, but I am hoping it will be enough to actually make this a viable defensive layer.
No Major Nerfs
Similar to the above item, since they want to reserve significant sweeping changes for largely economy reset patches where they roll out a new league… there are going to be no significant nerfs to any of the existing builds. The only thing that they are nerfing right now are issues that impact server stability and performance. The various “cast on” abilities for example were legitimately crashing server instances so they had to tackle those immediately.
The Losers
No Major Buffs
Once again since they are not making sweeping changes without a league reset… all of the under-performing classes are likely to stay in the shitty state that they currently are. Darth Microtransaction actually went on the offensive a bit during the podcast and effectively made Mark and Jonathan agree that the state of Warrior was not good. This is unfortunately not changing and we will still have a game dominated by four builds… and if you are not playing one of them you are doing it wrong.
No Six Portal Maps
This appears to be a hill that they are willing to die on… but they do not want to give players back six portals for maps. A single death is still going to adversely impact the player and cause them to lose their waystone and the stuff that was on the atlas that made the map worth running. This feels bad and feels like a forced hardcore mode. They did however say that they think the penalties are a bit too strong right now because multiple problems are stacking on top of each other leading things to feel bad. They instead want to smooth out the mapping experience rather than giving players six portals.
No Map Tab… Yet
They said that they are working on it, but as of right now we are still not getting a map tab. This is probably the single biggest issue for me that makes the entire endgame experience feel bad. I consider there to be two tabs that are mandatory to enjoy the game… currency and maps, and having to try and deal with two quad tabs full of waystones and another overflow tab that I have in the guild bank… feels bad.
No Campaign Improvements
This again might be related to the lack of buffs for classes, but the campaign can be a bit rough for certain classes right now. It has some significant difficulty spikes that can crush the will of folks to move forward. GGG stated that they are pretty happy with the current state of the campaign, and I think maybe this is a loss. There are multiple levers that need to be flipped and maybe once the other classes are in a decent state this will no longer be an issue. At this point I have leveled four characters through the campaign and it was “fine”.
No Ascendancy Respecs
While not necessarily a hill that they are dying on… there seems to be a dumb amount of resistance to allowing players to respec their ascendancy class. This is something we were able to do freely in Path of Exile 1 and it feels bad not being able to do it now. Essentially right now it feels like there are certain ascendancies that are “noob traps” and if you chose them… you are just borked. This hurts the more casual players the worst because in its current state, it is exceptionally cumbersome to level more than one character through the campaign.
No Trial Improvements
Trials and the entire process of ascending is sort of bullshit right now. I hate it so much. During the Q&A it was specifically asked that if they thought the fourth ascendancy should be an endgame goal that the average player will never accomplish. For the most part GGG said yes. This is dumb. This feels exceptionally bad. I think the entire process of ascending needs to be rethought from the ground up and that Sanctum and Ultimatum should be optional content.
No Minion Collision Fixes
Right now minions fail to enter most doors, forcing you to wait on them to respawn next to you. This feels awful. Right now there are no major changes coming for minion collision problems. They are working on a solution but have not landed on something that actually works right yet.
No Phasing on Dodge Roll/Movement Abilities
This is still something that I feel like the game needs. Right now movement abilities and the dodge roll still get caught on mob collision and I feel like this is a poor design choice.
No Proper Auction House
I realize this is going to be something that probably never happens, but since we have the currency exchange it only further underlines just how bad the trade system in Path of Exile 1 and 2 are. The chinese players have had an instant purchase auction house for awhile… we need this for western audiences.
No New Gold Sinks
Gold feels useless right now and the current state of gambling feels awful. Apparently Gambling in the hideout was removed last minute due to an exploit of some sort being found. They are working on adding Alva back to he hideout with proper gambling support. However there still needs to be something else that we can do with gold.
A Mixed Bag
I think for the most part the changes are good. I still take umbrage with some of the design decisions that they are standing by. I am curious to see what the actual patch notes look like and what other hidden details are contained within them that they did not highlight in the announcement trailer. I think I am at the point of stepping away from the game until the next league reset. I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Last Epoch and it felt amazing. I think I am ready for a break from the mindset of Path of Exile 2, and I am most definitely ready for the next Path of Exile 1 league.
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