Path of Exile

Good Morning Friends! It has been a few weeks and I thought I would give a proper blog update on Gracie and how she is settling in. For most of this week, she has been on “free roam” mode with the complete reign of the house. I am slightly sleep deprived because we have yet to learn when sleep time is supposed to happen, and occasionally have fits of activity overnight that wake us up. That said she tends to sleep snuggled between the covers between us, which is perfectly fine with me. In the grand scheme of things, it has been a pretty smooth transition and Mollie/Josie are doing a fair job of adjusting. Yesterday is really when things started to feel like normal again with far less cautious stalking around the house for fear of attracting the attention of the tiny terror.

Gracie herself is also way less likely to spend every moment of every day with a human being. So the negative means that I am not getting this sort of attention right now. It was fun while it lasted, but also extremely detrimental to actually getting anything done. Josie and Gracie appear to be developing a friendship, or at least there is more playing with each other that involves less hissing and puffed tails. Mollie has oddly been more stoic about this, which I thought was weird given that she is naturally the more skittish cat. However, then I realized that she has been through this before and realizes that “mommy and daddy” will still love her even though there is a new addition. Josie was the last new addition a few years ago, and as such, she is not sure what to think about any of this.

We are starting to settle into what feels like the new normal. Josie is back to sleeping on my legs overnight while Gracie sleeps up at the head of the bed between us. Mollie is back to spending almost all of every day with me in my office and requesting periodic pet breaks. Gracie alternates between sleeping downstairs in the hammock and screaming at the top of her lungs for attention because she doesn’t see any human beings around her. She has an exceptional set of lungs for someone so small, and she also seems to be completely fearless which makes any time we have to open the front or back door anxiety-ridden. All of this said though, I think we picked an exceptionally sweet kitten and are now batting two for two from rescuing animals from the local animal welfare. We’ve always gotten animals through third-party rescue organizations in the past, but I have to say our animal welfare seems to do a great job with their animals and socializing them.

Finally, in some gaming news, I have officially entered Act 10 but did not manage to get through it last night before sleep claimed me. I am going to need to spend some effort trying to sort out gearing because I am most definitely feeling much squishier all of a sudden. Additionally I checked my guide and I am no longer using the correct combination of skill gems. Basically, I am once again under some socket pressure and now need I believe an RRGGBB item to socket my preferred skill chain into. Mostly I just am trying to get up to maps because my friend Grace has managed to rocket past me… and finished the main story over lunch yesterday. I think we are ultimately trying to determine if the league start experience in Path of Exile can fully replace our traditional Diablo 3 fun time. In another quick footnote… I am grinding away on Blaugust stuff and am hoping to make a big announcement soon. The post Gracie and the New Normal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yesterday I talked about one of the two games that I spent most of my extended weekend playing, and this morning I am going to talk about the other. Of all of the things that you could have predicted about 2022… I did not think that it would be the year that I got into Path of Exile. This game is exceptionally daunting, but also as you start to ease into it… it becomes more and more engaging. Once I got over the hurdle that was the passive tree, I’ve been engaging with the almost overwhelming number of systems. At this point, I am sitting in Act Seven of Ten and it feels like many of the league mechanics are scattered through the second half of the game, specifically starting up when you revisit Lioneye’s Watch in Act Six. I’ve attempted to play this game numerous times, and I absolutely remember a season when Gwennen the Gambler factored into the league mechanic heavily for example.

I’ve switched from using Splitting Steel to the final configuration of this build which focuses on Explosive Arrow and turning it into a Balista Totem ability. My main spell link looks a little something like this:

• Explosive Arrow
• Balista Totem Support
• Elemental Damage with Attacks Support
• Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support

Balista Totem turns Explosive Arrow into an attack that drops something akin to the Demon Hunter Sentinel on the ground that fires Explosive Arrows for a period of time. Elemental Damage support makes it so that the Arrows that they fire utilize any elemental effects that I have on my gear, and Lesser Projectiles just makes them shoot more arrows at once, which is helpful for wave clear.

What took me so long to switch over to the final configuration is that I did not realize a key truth that I am going to share with you now. Guides will refer to items in shorthand as needing a GGRR or a GRR item meaning that you need those colors with linked slots. However, I was taking this as a completely literal statement, where I needed a Green gem linked to another Green gem which is linked to a Red and then linked to another Red. As a result, I had filled up a stash tab full of items that I thought would not work, but might be able to reroll the color order on at a later date. Essentially links work in both directions, and you can have support gems on either side of your main attack. Meaning that GGRR, GRRG, RGGR, or GRGR would have all worked for my purposes. Essentially as a result I had waited for some 20 levels before swapping over to the build I should have been running.

The gameplay feels much different, and admittedly nowhere near as cool as being Magneto all the time… but still enjoyable. Essentially I run around the battlefield making sure I have all four balistas up and running and bathing my enemies in explosive arrows. The build works off a specific interaction where I keep up 3 stacks of frenzy, curse the incoming packs to take more fire damage with Flammability… then each current triggers Elemental Equilibrium. Essentially EE is a keystone in the Passive Tree that makes it so that when you deal damage with one element, it debuffs the target to take more damage from the other two. Between my Skitterbots and Balistas they are applying Cold and Lightning damage, which causes them to take more fire damage… so when the secondary effect of Explosive Arrow fires… aka the explosion… it nukes everything. This can be improved when I find some six link items, but for now it is pretty badass to watch it all work.

Lastly, I am far from an expert in Path of Exile and quite honestly I am way deep in novice territory still. However, I have added a new page for Path of Exile to my Game Tools menu. Right now as I find things that I consider to be beneficial, I am going to be placing them on this page. If you are also taking this journey with me, I will be adding links to everything that I am actively using like the Loot Filter I run, build sites that I am reading, and miscellaneous tools like Path of Building. I am slowly in the process of converting all of my link lists over to individual static pages like this because I personally find it a bit more usable. It allows me to give some explanation for each tool rather than just a disconnected list of links. The post Explosive Arrow Balistas appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The core problem with Path of Exile is the passive tree and its cyclopean nature. That in itself would not be a massive problem if the game supported some sort of reasonable respec system. The problem there is that it does not… I am 37 levels into the game and I have acquired six “refund points” which means every decision that I have made needs to be tactical and planned. I have an army of functional alts in this game, in large part because I made decisions that were too hard to undo without really knowing what the overarching picture I should be going for looks like. In Diablo III I am used to playing in a way where I level with whatever build I happen to make work as I go… and then completely respeccing at the end game into a specific structured build. Path of Exile on the other hand essentially requires you to find the build you want to play… and commit to it entirely. This level of required research really make the entire experience out of reach for a lot of players that simply don’t want to box themselves into a corner before they even start the experience.

As part of my recent foray into the Diablo Immortal quagmire, I ended up familiarizing myself with a number of the Path of Exile YouTubers who also gave it a spin. This leads me to watch a few videos from Zizaran’s PoE University series. I have this habit of listening to long-form YouTube videos thrown up on the second monitor as though they were a podcast. So when I saw a video proclaiming that it was “Everything Explained” I fired it up… only then realizing that it is legitimately 7 hours long… and this is only the first part. I by no means watched the entire thing, but I did listen to the first hour or so of gameplay and it piqued my interests enough to give out the build that he was playing in the video a shot. I liked the idea of playing a steel-slinging magneto character and thought the entire “steel” magic line was a cool idea and seemingly provided a gameplay style similar to that of the D3 Demon Hunter.

If we are going to talk through the Path of Exile rabbit hole in its entirety… we have to get into Path of Building. For those who are uninitiated like I was… Path of Building is a third-party open source software designed for trying to keep track of your build and how you should be expanding it at each phase of the game. For example, the build that I am working off divides the passive tree into 9 distinct phases and presents you with an ever-expanding footprint as you work through them. So when you are building to level 12, you are only shown those first 12 nodes… then you bump up to 32 nodes, etc until you eventually end up with the convoluted masterpiece that is the key part of what turns people off from the game. Often times there is a notes tab that explains the decisions you should be making along the leveling process, what gems you should be using, and what gear you should be seeking out.

• Path of Building
• Splitting Steel/Explosive Arrow Champion Duelist build

The other component that I think is important to starting this game is being able to put yourself in the right frame of mind. I’ve mostly played games with classes that more or less align to the holy trinity of roles, with some pretty clear assumptions as to what type of gameplay provides. If you see a class called the Marauder, and it is a big hulking brute of a guy… then I assume that is the melee/tanky class. If I see a character called the Duelist, I assume that is the rogue type character. The truth is these names associated with classes or even the choice that you make… doesn’t necessarily intrinsically shape your character. All characters have access to the same passive tree, with the key difference being where they “start” on said tree. So it is best to think of the classes as something along the lines of this.

• Marauder – Pure Strength
• Ranger – Pure Dexterity
• Witch – Pure Intelligence
• Duelist – Strength/Dexterity Hybrid
• Templar – Strength/Intelligence Hybrid
• Shadow – Dexterity/Intelligence Hybrid
• Scion – Pure Hybrid… Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence

The other thing that I have had to effectively “unlearn” is the importance I place on gear. Right now I am level 37 and wearing a level 6 chest piece, not because I have not had access to better-itemized chest pieces… but because I’ve yet to come across another item with Green/Green/Red with linked sockets. All of the abilities that you use in Path of Exile come from Skill Gems, and these can be connected up in different ways so that they provide wildly different effects. Right now I am using Splitting Steel as my primary attack and it is being augmented by Vicious Projectiles Support and Chance to Bleed Support. This is my core combo and gives me the ability to shatter my weapon into steel projectiles that ricochet across the battlefield and deal significant damage while having a good chance of inflicting massive bleed damage over time debuff. I am now seeking a Red/Red/Green/Green item so that I can build into Fire Arrow damage that this build eventually targets, but I am experiencing something that the community refers to as “socket pressure” where I am not able to find an item with the correct arrangement of linked sockets.

The thing is there is enough flexibility in this system that players more seasoned than me… would be able to pivot their build on the fly to work with what they have been given. For me, I am mostly following the build dogmatically, at least until I understand the impact of different nodes on the passive tree a bit better. I have a nice 4 link item, and the game gives you rare items that will reroll the colored gems… but I have yet to reroll to a RRGG like I am wanting. Truth is that I am not reaching the limit of what I can do with my initial GGR Splitting Steel combo, so I figure I have time to find the item that I actually need. The only problem is right now I am building into options in the passive tree that are giving me no real current benefit. That has not however stopped me from having a freaking blast playing this game.

As an outsider who is not already bought into the Path of Exile community, the game has a number of problems. I think the two largest however are the frustratingly obtuse nature of the passive tree overwhelming players with choice, and not giving them a free pass at changing their mind without rolling a brand new character. The second problem is that Act 1 is objectively not good. It shows off the most uninteresting parts of Wraeclast and it is painted in the drab color palette of the first quake game. This is not doing the game any favors when it comes to indoctrinating new players. Those who manage to push through this rough exterior and devote the necessary homework to learning the game… absolutely love it. However, for years I was one of the ones that bounced almost immediately. Now I find myself starting to lean towards the “omg this game is brilliant” spectrum.

The other thing that I absolutely love is the fact that after I got to a specific point in Act 2… I unlocked a Hideout. This is effectively ARPG Player Housing and I am hooked. I’ve also seen that there is guild support, but I am not sure what that even entails. I know there is Guild Hideout support as well along with a guild stash, but I have not gone down that rabbit hole given that I am playing alone. I am not going to undersell the amount of work that I had to do in order to arrive at the point I am at, in understanding Path of Exile. I am also not trying to say that I fully understand the game because I am extremely novice in my knowledge. However, I do feel like the game is more approachable with the right research, and once you get the ball rolling… there is an extremely fun experience to be had. Right now I am loving it and I look forward to seeing what the rest of the game gives me. The post Path of Exile Rabbit Hole appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.