Friends, it is three days until the start of a new Path of Exile league, and I find myself doing what every Exile does… pouring over build guides and trying to figure out what path I am going to take for my league start. If you were not around a few months ago… Lake of Kalandra was the first league that a number of us poured our heart and soul into with a day-one start. This was maybe one of the worst leagues in modern history and struggled with currency drop and general survivability problems. While I actually enjoyed the Lake mechanic mechanically, it seemed needlessly brutal and random at times. As far as leagues go it has been shown to have had the worst player retention numbers of any league to date. I had contemplated just swearing off 3.20 but they seemingly know how to hit me straight in the feels.
The league mechanic this time around is The Forbidden Sanctum which is a rogue-lite that takes place within Wraeclast. It sounds like you will be earning currency each trip into the dungeon that can be used to gain buffs for subsequent trips slowly building out a talent tree of a sort. I like rogue-lites quite a bit and have spent plenty of time playing games like Rogue Legacy and Hades. Putting that inside of the ARPG-style gameplay that I am already addicted to… may prove to be my ultimate lure. However, until the trailer dropped I had not even been really contemplating this league which puts me weeks behind in the planning process. So this morning I am going to talk through some of the builds I am contemplating starting with.
Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut
Pohx is hands down the best guide maker I have ever seen in the Path of Exile community. He has his entire website wiki devoted to just giving you information to support his already amazing Path of Building guides. The big change this time around is that Inquisitor either took some direct nerfs or got caught up in other nerfs and is maybe going to not be the optimal way to play Righteous Fire. As a result, Pohx seems to be pouring most of his effort into a Juggernaut build and I am largely on board with this. The pros are a comfortable leveling experience with clear direction on what I should be doing which maybe be the sort of low-stress chill start I need.
One of my all-time favorite playstyles in Diablo III is the Whirlwind Barbarian and its “spin to win” mechanics. The closest thing to really doing this in Path of Exile is Blade Vortex and this guide seems to be extremely detailed. The only problem with it is it involves math… and optimizing blade uptime because really you need to be able to maintain 10 blades at all times to pour through content. Other than that the build and guide seem pretty straightforward forward and it also seems like it would be easy to get gear for it even at the high end. All I really want is something that can complete red maps easily to farm for currency and this seems to be able to do that in spades. I have never played a Witch in any form so this is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone.
Zizaran’s Explosive Arrow Champion
Explosive Arrow Champion is back and Zizaran is once again suggesting this as a league starter. The positives are that I have already played this build before and understand the fundamentals. The negatives are that Zizaran for being as good of a YouTuber as he is… actually sorta writes shitty POBs. He takes for granted that players that are reading his content are going to just understand various concepts, and while I have been around Path of Exile semi-seriously for three leagues now… there are still a lot of core concepts that I do not fully grasp. It will be an uphill battle to sort out what he is saying versus what he is actually meaning. However Grace played this last go-round, and I have played it the time before… so I do have some knowledge that I can draw on.
Velyna’s Spectra Shield Throw Raider
This build looks like a hoot, flat out. I love bouncing shields and it looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. However Velyna seems like a super nice person, but trying to follow one of her guides is sort of awful. I played her Stormbrand last go-round and had all sorts of survival problems that I ultimately had to venture way off the path to fix. Watching this guide video, it sounds like so much of this build hinges upon a super specific shaper base helmet craft… and I am just not sure if I want to go through that nonsense. The stormbrand build eventually ended up being extremely fun to play, but it required me to spend a heck of a lot of currency to get there. So I am deeply gunshy about following Velyna into the breach again.
Ghazzy’s Dark Pact Necromancer
Going completely off the rails I am also sort of considering the Dark Pact Necromancer. Ghazzy really cares about minion builds and is one of the better guide makers for that specific style of play. I have never played a minion build in Path of Exile other than having a random Golem up just to provide a buff. Minions took a massive hit last league and the more traditional builds seem to be not as functional as they once were. This build however focuses on basically using your minions as a bomb to spread Dark Pact which drains minion health but causes chaos damage explosions. It sounds like it might be a fun playstyle but again this is going way out of my comfort zone since I have never played a witch in any form before.
Basically, I have three days to sort out what exactly I want to go for. I think all of the above would probably be a strong league start or at least be viable enough to get through a few labs and into early maps. Probably the top contenders for me at the moment are good ole Righteous Fire or the spin to win Blade Vortex build. I would 100% go Blade Vortex for certain, but I also know I suck ass at trying to maintain the uptime of something on a specific cast pattern. I know when I was splitting steel, I would always find myself out of shards because I was forgetting to make them. Fortunately, it sounds like this doesn’t actually damage my survival and is more than it would harm my clear ability… which is fine. I am okay taking a slower map clear if I screw up rather than taking random deaths.
Are you going to be venturing into The Forbidden Sanctum? If so what build are you looking at running? For those curious about the minutiae, you can check out the current patch notes here.
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Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.
Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.
Cyberpunk 2077 – PC
While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.
Diablo III – PC
I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.
Fallout 76 – PC
Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.
New World – PC
If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.
Path of Exile – PC
I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.
Torchlight Infinite – PC and Android
I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.
Tower of Fantasy – PC
I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.
World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC
I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.
As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.
NDA Game – PC
Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.
The post Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It is Monday and as is often the case you are about to get a rundown of the nonsense I have been up to recently. What started out as me poking my head into Cyberpunk 2077 looking for something to hold my attention, has turned into a proper replay of the game. At this point, I am starting to get closer to the endgame, and combined with the very excellent Edgerunners anime I am deeply engaged with this world right now. In theory, this will be my second full playthrough of the game, but I have started it over several times in the past without really gaining traction. I can’t say I am making all that many different choices than I did the time before apart from the inherit options that change from playing a femme V.
I am extremely happy with the wardrobe options that were patched into the game with the most recent update. Essentially now I no longer have to choose between looking cool and being functional. In my previous playthroughs, a lot of my early focus was trying to find the decent-looking gear that I could just keep upgrading. Now I basically throw on whatever item is better and ignore what the hell it looks like because I am always wearing this wardrobe outfit. I also really like that you can now go to any ripperdoc and just change your appearance on the fly. I’ve not actually done this because I am pretty happy with my current V, but having the option is nice nonetheless because I really did not love my original V appearance after a while… and mostly wore a mask as a result.
I also made a bit of progress in Diablo III Season 27 this weekend. As always I am keeping my season tracker on D3Resources updated to show where I am in the process. Basically, I am down to the stuff that is less fun to do… aka complete 3 conquests, complete a set dungeon, and extract a bunch of cube powers. I cannot believe that so far I have found six cow sticks but not a single puzzle ring, which means I have yet to get a Greed kill for that achievement. I started farming bounty caches in case I want to do the dumb and easy method for getting Avarice. I need to sort out which of the other conquests I am going to go for. I really really hate set dungeons, but at some point, I need to buckle down and get that completed so I can move on with my life. Basically, I have enough crap in my stash to do the extractions because I tend to hold onto a bunch of crap until I have finished the set dungeon given that I am never quite certain what set I will be going for.
I continue to poke my head into Path of Exile, but my stays are shorter each time I do. Playing both Diablo III and Path of Exile at the same time… I have come to realize that I enjoy the gameplay of Diablo more and the loot chase of Path of Exile more. I hate the process of getting geared in Path of Exile, but once you are geared… the loot grind remains slightly more exciting. There are so many aspects of PoE loot that could be added to D3 to spice things up a bit. Like imagine that you had a chase item, that was the equivalent of a Chaos Orb that would take any item and turn it into an Ancient version, or a similar item that was like a Divine Orb that would turn any item into a Primal version. I also think D3 could benefit from officially having an SSF mode that you could turn on and get unique rewards from. We’ve seen seasonal items like the Angelic Crucibles that come in and change the way the game works and it would be cool if more of those stuck around and continued to flesh out the loot chase.
Finally, I am still playing some New World every day. Mostly I log in and farm enough resources or craft enough items in order to get 3 gypsum bags and the gypsum you get from an aptitude chest. Then I port out to Shattered Mountain and craft two gypsum casts for whatever gear I am working on leveling. In doing this gradually I have capped sword, shield, spear, hammer, great axe, hatchet, and all armor slots to 600 expertise and am now working on void gauntlet and blunderbuss. This feels a little pointless given that my intent is still to reroll as soon as the timetable for the launch of the Brimstone update is a bit more certain. Mostly I am fine with it taking a little bit because I am hoping my friend Ace finishes their move so they can join in the reroll nonsense properly. I think my goal in the reroll is to level up Armoring and Weaponsmithing up to 200 so that I can make another set of Voidbent armor, mostly because I like the look of it.
The post The Edgerunner Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I think I have reached a point with Path of Exile where I am done with it for the moment. I accomplished what I set out to do and completed all 115 nodes on the Atlas tree. I could push further, but my gameplay lately has been more frustrating than it has been successful. We talked about this on the podcast over the weekend, but for all of the things that I love about this game… there are an equal number of things that I greatly dislike. Not the least of which is XP loss on death, and it feels like I either need to grind safe things to protect my XP gains… or throw caution to the wind and do more challenging content. However regardless I have to make this choice of do I go for content that feels meaningful, or I go for the remaining skills on the passive tree.
I am not entirely certain I will be doing a Path of Exile league start again for a while. I had some fun, but it was more that I was driven by a specific purpose that allowed me to temporarily overlook the bad aspects of the game. I am uncertain why the design of Path of Exile is specifically punitive in nature, but it seems to be a common theme among ARPG enthusiasts. Where I would prefer if games just let you respec as often as you want, and that the core loop of the game be chasing loot not painting yourself into a corner and then having to deal with that frustration.
I spent a good chunk of time playing Last Epoch as that game is nearing the opening of wider multiplayer testing. While playing I also spent quite a bit of time listening to interviews with the development team to try and get a feeling for how punitive they feel a game should be designed. While they are less open than I would have liked, they seem to land more on the side of the player than Grinding Gear Games does. One of my early frustrations with the game was the gender-locked class design, but apparently, that is still on the table. Based on one interview they apparently want to expand the gender options but that would be after the finishing of the remaining class specializations. I am fine with waiting, but I am hoping when they take this pass they also open up some more character customization options.
I am really enjoying the Sentinel Class because it allows me to play something tanky feeling… while also maintaining access to Whirlwind. Essentially right now it feels like a blending of my two favorite Diablo classes the Barbarian and the Crusader. The only thing that could improve this feel is if buried somewhere there is a talent that lets me equip a two-handed weapon with a shield. For the moment the game feels very much like a weird love child of Chrono Trigger, Diablo, and Path of Exile. I really dig the crafting system so far because it is way more deterministic than that of Path of Exile, and even more open to changing things around than that of Diablo III. It seems like given enough attempts it would probably be pretty straightforward to gear out a character in this game.
Another thing that I really dig is how straightforward the loot filter is, and how they seem to be committed to putting guides in the game, instead of trying to make you rely on third-party sites. The only negative so far is that respecs are nowhere near as free as I would like them to be. They are not as punitive as Path of Exile, but you do have to roll things back a single point at a time which appears to cost gold. Changing your specialized skills and the trees associated with them seems to roll back experience with that skill. This means you would ultimately end up needing to re-level them to get them back to the place where you were previously. This isn’t much different than changing up your skill gems in Path of Exile but is still less open to modification than Diablo III would be.
All in all the game looks really good, but the proof will ultimately be in how the multiplayer game feels. That is ultimately what has killed my long-term enjoyment in Path of Exile. It isn’t really a game that I can sit down and play with my friend Ace in the way that we could Diablo III. Grouping in PoE is actively punitive, and you can’t just easily drop in and ride along for some chill gaming. Everything in that game also seems to be focused around trade value, and as such the gear that drops appears to mostly be shit and you are instead focused on gaining currency to then buy the items you actually need. It seems like based on the conversations I listened to… Last Epoch seems to not want this to happen. They want the trade to be free enough that if an item drops while your buddy is offline, you can give it to them… but to keep third-party trade from being the primary source of items.
I also spent a good chunk of my weekend poking around in the New World PTR. I’ve been playing a bit more with trade skills and verifying that you do in fact level a ton faster than you did previously. Across the board, your level gains are much faster as a character than previously. I’ve barely scratched the surface on Cutlass Keys and am almost level 40. I’ve been trying to push up trade skills a bit honestly as a source of gear. Since the PTR does not represent the actual live environment, there is nowhere near as much stuff on the trading post… and as such getting gear upgrades has been a bit of a challenge. I figured instead I would see how far and how easily I can level Armoring. This is a grind I have completed on live with my current main, and I am wondering just how difficult the 150-plus grind is going to be. Getting Smelting and Weaving to 100, just sort of happened automagically without me really trying and I am getting very close to the first major break point of 100 Armoring.
I am really looking into this patch dropping because it seems like I have convinced most of the AggroChat folks to try rolling again fresh on another server. We’ve yet to determine WHICH server yet, but likely whatever the lowest pop East/West server there is. I think there will be a sizeable influx of players for the Brimstone Sands patch. The new content appears also appears to be dropping items that can level your expertise, so that grind may also not be as bad as it once was. I’m thankful Demone Kim is back on the grind and knocking out often times multiple videos a day. I am not really spending any time testing Brimstone Sands content because I want that to be fresh when I complete my restart.
That was largely my weekend. Did any of you do anything fun? Drop me a line below telling me what you got up to.
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