In 2005 the Elder Sage Druid Alamo taught us that “CAT DURID IS 4 FITE!” a meme preserved by our dear friend TAGN. The thing is Path of Exile II added the druids, but they did not add a cat form. As a result… “Bare Also 4 Fite”. In truth when it came to World of Warcraft druids, I almost always played bear form for the defensive benefits, and spent most of my time leveling as bear so I am already used to fighting in that form. Alamo would be saddened by my disregard for their sage advice. On Friday the latest patch dropped for Path of Exile II adding 0.4.0 and the Last of the Druids content update, and the Fate of the Vaal league. I was pretty amped for this content drop because the footage that came out after the announcement from ZiggyD looked amazing. Grinding Gear Games has been trying super hard to make us interested in combo gameplay, but up until this point it felt very forced… and not like said combos were really that beneficial.
Druid changes that, and in truth had I been able to play this class from the very start I think I would have been able to grok their design goals. Effectively most of the gameplay for Bear Druid is about mauling your targets until runes light up on the back of your character telling you that your next slam is empowered, and then hitting Furious Slam to devastating impact. However there are mechanical benefits to doing this one two step because Bears effectively have two states, standing on two legs, and down on all four. Furious Slam has the text that adds a 0.4 second delay if you are not already standing. Maul on the other hand gives you a really fast way of standing, and thereby bypassing the built in delay of furious slam as your character stands up. So you are mauling not only to build up the empowerment but also because you can literally cast it faster than the delay built into the slam. This synergy between attacks feels really good, and then throwing in pounce as a movement ability that also primes the ground with fissures for you to exploit with your slam, even feels better.
Collectively in practice it means you are throwing out all sorts of nonsense onto the ground and then slamming on top of it to make big explosions, and the gameplay feels amazing. You can finish off trash mobs with maul without much issue, but it still feels amazing to do a big slam that causes half the screen to explode and also ignite things in the process. This is only going to feel even better as I lean more heavily into area of effect and damage numbers, and hopefully at some point switch to demon form via the Fury of the King Talisman. Really the ease of switching between Bear and Werewolf forms and the abilty to add in pounce as a gap closer as you move around the battlefield is really great. I find myself sprinting constantly as well, because the recent changes to how that mechanic works with stuns, means that I can pretty safely get into pounce range before triggering a heavy stun. The way that bear feels almost makes me want to try playing it with a controller.
The secret sauce of the animal forms though is making sure you are always using the highest damage Talisman that you can get. This is a new two handed weapon type and essentially you want to get one with as much physical damage as you can find on it. Elemental damage is nice, and you are going to get some baked on elemental conversion into your attacks, but like playing a Warrior Slam build, you want as much phys as you can get baseline to bump up your numbers. Essentially I saved all of my gold so that each time I moved into a new level bracket I could gamble for a base to attempt to craft on. I also got super lucky in getting a few rather tasty rare drops like the one above. What also helps massively is that the Vaal temple league mechanic gives you access to Betrayal style crafting benches that are just effectively free Regals and free Exalts. So you can in theory drag a few decent bases in with you when you start a temple and then hopefully exit with a new crafted weapon.
I went back and forth as to what I would start as, and ultimately landed on trying to yolo my way through a Druid and ultimately choose the Shaman ascendancy. I think in theory you can probably build a better Titan or Smith of Kitava that is a bear, but the pathing is a bit more contorted to get there. The area you start as a Druid has a bunch of really good early nodes that help progress you through Act 1 and 2 without much issue. This is quite possibly the MOST melee character, and I would have thought that would make Trial of the Sekemas a pain in the ass, but honestly I steamrolled through it. Similarly when I got access to Trial of Chaos I steamrolled that as well. At some point I am going to need to try for a third ascendancy, but for the moment I have chosen Reactive Growth and Avatar of Evolution which helps a bit when it comes to converting physical damage to elemental damage, and also giving me a bit of a buffer against elemental damage in general. For my third ascendancy point I will probably pick up Wisdom of the Magi and its defensive node, and then if I can do a fourth ascdendancy decide of I want to respec and go into Furious Wellspring or if I just pick up Turning of the Seasons instead.
The thing about Druid is that we did not have the passive tree ahead of the launch of the game. This means that NO ONE had any guides available ahead of time, and honestly if they did… they were completely suspect due to not really having any proper information. It was seemingly reasonable to maybe map out a Titan or Smith start with the class, but Druid was a total crapshoot. Because of this I utilized a wonderful functionality within POE.Ninja that shows a heat map of what talent tree choices most of the player base was choosing, and as such effectively crowd sourced my build. How this works is that you essentially choose the primary skill that you are interested in using, and in this case you can either choose Maul the default bear attack or Furious Slam. This then will show you a lit up tree featuring every build that is currently on the ladder and the warmer the color the more often something is chosen. For example almost EVERYONE is pathing down to pick up Primal Rage, regardless if you are starting Druid or Warrior as your base class.
As a result you can see the tree that sort of evolved out of the wisdom of the crowd. One of the primary deviations that I made from the norm is that I picked up Prism Guard and the nodes surrounding it, because I plan on going heavily into armor investment in the final version of my build. Damage shifting is one of the most powerful abilities in Path of Exile 1, and while that exists to a lesser extent in Path of Exile 2… there is the ability to make armor apply to elemental damage amd for the cost of 4 nodes you can get a baseline of 60% of your armor is applying to elemental damage, which you can then increase by making sure you get that stat on some of your beefier armor items like the chestpiece. Will this make me super tanky? I have no clue… because I have not played a melee character since this stat package was introduced. I am hoping it will however and if you look at Hardcore more folks are picking up that node there in the heat map.
I’m having a lot of fun with the Bear though and am now working my way through the second of the three interlude missions, and just about to wrap that up. The real proof of how well the build works is going to come when I start mapping. I think it is going to feel pretty solid though, because the higher the density the more the explosions seem to really work out. I need to probably spend some time fine tuning my support gems because I am not sure anything I am using is actually optimal. That again is another useful thing about POE.Ninja is because you can look at a bunch of the highest performing builds and see what they are using for abilities. This really is how I make characters these days, is I end up looking at a lot of what other players are doing with the abilities that I want to use in my build, and then sort of make decisions based on that data. That is ultimately how I have ended up with some of my favorite custom characters like my FreezyBoom nonsense, which is absolutely not on meta in the least.
So far I am enjoying this league this most I have ever enjoyed any Path of Exile II league, and have shifted from begrudgingly playing the game… to genuinely having a blast. The other aspect of the druid that I like a lot is all of the unique dialog options that happen while you are playing through the campaign. There is even an interlude that happens when you release the spirit of his dead wife during one of the sequences in the game. Genuinely really find this character enjoyable to play, because his reactions are not dissimilar to how I would react to some of these events. At this point Path of Exile II might legitimately have the best campaign from any ARPG to date. I really hope that they find a way to make the interludes stick around in some form of another because I find them really enjoyable as well. I like the whole concept of revisiting the first three acts to help with with further issues as you are somewhat building an army to fight the beast.
Since I started this blog post with one meme, I will end it with another one. I hightly suggest you check out the Druid review from Josh Strife Hayes. It is pure nonsense.
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Good Morning Folks! This is another one of my “progress reports” for the Keepers of the Flame league as I work on wrapping up various challenges. If this does not interest you in the least, then today’s blog post might be a complete skip. Tomorrow I will probably have some stuff to talk about The Game Awards and the things that got announced there. However for the moment I am in a pattern of trying to wrap up what I can wrap up so that I can be ready for Path of Exile II League start tomorrow afternoon. The biggest one that I knocked out last night was Grueling Game Grinds, which is the one that has a bunch of sub components, one of which is hitting level 100. I ended up knocking out the invitations option, and I was able to buy up a bunch of super cheap blackstar invitations for 1 Chaos each and burn through them to finish that up.
Another big one that I completed through cursed means, is that I managed to finally get one of the crafting benches with a Hinekora’s Lock in it. Expensive Extravagance requires you to do a bunch of high dollar crafts in order to get credit for specific items. Since I will not be doing any mirror crafting, I have been trying to figure out the cheapest way to finish this nonsense up. If you are lucky, the various Betrayal league crafting benches count towards using these currency, and through doing that I managed to knock out most of them. I had one left and another achievement that I have been working on involves doing a bunch of high end specific league encounters. So I was farming 4 wing Blueprints in Heist and managed to pull several tailoring orbs as a result. Since I did not have a reason to use these, I just sort of threw it at any item I had sitting in my bank. That was essentially 250 chaos down the toilet, but it did finish up the achievement.
Another one that I knocked out was Aggravating Antagonists which involved fighting various endgame versions of league bosses. Most of these are really hard to force… so for my final one I opted into doing one of the level 83 versions of Izaro. The cheapest goddess emblem was Dedication to the Goddess at 40c, so I went with that version. I admit that I have never done one of the higher level versions of the Labyrinth, because I never really needed anything from it. I’ve chain run the normal offering versions before trying to get transfigured gems, but I think in the total of all of my runs of POE I have maybe only ever had one or two of the enhanced offerings drop. I almost NEVER run the in map events, because they always feel like a waste of time once I have my 4th ascendancy and especially since the offerings drop constantly down in Delve. I guess that is one of the things that I like about the challenges is that they force me to do things that I have never done before.
The biggest thing that I probably have left to do, as in the most time consuming… is Legendary Leagues. I need to figure out how best to complete this and see if there are any that can reasonably be brute forced with scarabs. I am running mappers, but it seems like only the 100% completion maps are the ones that count towards the achievement. I could probably buy some Blood-Filled Vessels from the trade market and brute force the Ritual one without much issue. I also need to figure out what the minimum number of emblems I need to run into rder to get the right item level for Legion’s Domain of Timeless Conflict since that is pretty easy overall as well. Simulacrum is time consuming but also fairly easy to complete and would just involve me buying 3 more tokens off the market. So between all of that I probably have a path forward. I wish I knew a way to force T4 Harvest Seeds because that would be a cakewalk if I could do that one.
I am getting close to finishing the Destructive Play achievement and should be able to wrap that while doing some of the other things that I need to do. I wish I had paid more attention to the item quantity when I did some of the other maven witnesses, because as a result I am going to have to redo The Formed, and did Incandescent and Elderslayers last night. I still am doing the quest version of the Zana fights so I need to burn through those so I can start witnessing them for The Remembered and the final piece The Feared. I hate doing the t16.5 content because t17 map mods are pure cancer, so I have been putting those off. There is another achievement for doing a bunch of 16.5 maps, and I have a ton of those banked that I can start chipping away at that. Mostly I am trying to see how far I can get to wrapping things up before Friday, because I am not sure how much effort I am going to be willing to keep putting in once I roll over to another game.
Anyways. If you have made it to the end of this blog post you have a lot of fortitude, especially if you are not actively playing Path of Exile. I hope you have been having a good week. I am not sure what is going on with me because I had another night where I went to bed at 8:30 because I was falling asleep on the sofa. If my body wants rest thought I am determined to give it to it.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday over lunch I pushed my character over the level 100 line and forever secured its place in the pantheon of folks on the ladder for 3.27. Now I have reached the point in the league where I no longer give a shit about taking a death, which means I start doing riskier things. I had banked up a bunch of Aul fights, that I burned through last night… before sadly realizing that they were not actually counting as Pinnacle encounters. This is a bit of a weird thing in Path of Exile, because they use this term liberally to mean a bunch of different things, and in the past Aul absolutely would have counted. However in this league Aul is part of a different group of encounters that unlock bloodline ascendancies.
I had run all of these that I could easily run, and was down to just needing one more of this bloodline ascendancy fights for knocking out the Bloodline Boons challenge. This morning before sitting down to start writing my blog post I did a 15 wave Simulacrum and wrapped it up. The other options are way more tedious to get to including Lycia or the really variable boss fights like Olroth, that is something you are only going to see if you are farming a lot of expedition. Weirdly I was shocked that so far I had yet to get any of my shipments interdicted by the pirate dude, which I need for another one of these challenges. I might start running mappers because there is another one of the challenges where I could chip off a meta achievement by collecting rewards from 30 maps.
Grueling Game Grinds is ultimately the big lengthy grind, at now that I have hit level 100 I only need to complete one more meta achievement to knock that one out. For the moment I am planning on doing Invitations because it has synergy with some of the other challenges that I am working on. If Aul would have counted as a Pinnacle boss for the sake of this achievement, the 12/75 number would have been considerably higher. I could in theory do a bunch of Elder fights, which are without a doubt the easiest of the pinnacle bosses. However I think the fragments are still a bit expensive at this point, and I hate running Elder Guardian maps since you don’t get credit for Maven Witnessing a map boss on those.
Speaking of synergy, that is another thing that I am slowly chipping away at is doing Maven Witness maps with Destructive Play active. I really wish that they would change the way Destructive Play works, so that you can chain run the same map over and over and keep getting new bosses witnessed. This is the reason why I never do Maven content is because I prefer to run the same map layout over and over for consistency sake, and have my favorite map slots set up in a way so that I can produce large quantities of one of two maps that I alternate back and forth between. For example I am running a lot of Tropical Island, but producing a truly prodigious number of Strand maps while running down through my stockpile of Islands.
The other side effect of doing Destructive Play is that I am working on building a Feared invitation along with knocking out the various named invitations that reward atlas passives. I forgot about the 70% quant achievement, so there are a few of these that I am going to have to do over again. I’ve successfully run feared before, but I am not sure I have done it on anything other than that one deeply broken penance brand character from a few leagues ago. It will be interesting to see how well this goes. Really the only thing that I have to worry about too much is Sirius and his physical damage over time nonsense. I am curious if I can buy a bunch of cheap Polaric invitations or something like that to burn through the rest of gear grinding goals.
Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can in the next two days because I figure once I start down the Path of Exile II rabbit hole, it will dominate my attention for awhile. I did not last very long in 0.3.0 so I might find myself returning back to POE1 pretty quickly, but I am hoping that will not be the case. I think some of the things that are happening with Bear and Fire Damage are right up my alley. I am hoping it is pretty fun, because I did enjoy being a big poison bear in my last D4 league. Other than that… I have to admit I have had a bit of an itch to give Warframe another shot. Then there is my backlog of single player games that I have not touched in ages… which is only increased by the fact that Ash sent out the form for our games of the year show this morning. This is the challenge with me and these type of respective shows… is that in truth I mostly play forever games.
What prompted the Warframe desire though is a conversation I had with Ammo about it the other night, and then this morning seeing Ironmouse doing the best Warframe song, We All Lift Together at the Streamer Awards. If you have never seen the original Warframe animation video for this, you should absolutely watch it first so that you can appreciate the effort that they went into with the backgrounds and such for the Streamer awards. Who knows if I will give it another go or not.
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Good Morning Folks. My wreath was perfect… until it wasn’t. Around 3:30 yesterday afternoon I had to run into the office for a moment, and when I left the house the wreath looked beautiful. When I got back around 5:30 it looked like the image on the right side. Essentially there is a short period of time where the light streams through our glass storm door at exactly the right angle that it heats up the metal of our door handle. This is not something I had really thought about before now, but apparently it also heats up the door frame area enough for the PLA that I printed the wreath out of to warp beyond all recognition. At first I thought it was a mechanical failure in one of the joints that could be fixed, but upon further inspection it is like the thing just sort of stretched and warped uncontrollably. For now I have a deeply surrealist wreath, and I am kind of curious what it does over multiple days… but for future knowledge I guess I probably need to print the frame out of ABS which is way more heat resistant. It was a massive bummer, but at least it looked cool long enough to take a photo of it.
I had an extremely busy day, and when I finally got home legitimately I crashed pretty hard after eating the takeout that I picked up on my way home. I attempted to grind a bit in Path of Exile but by 8:30pm I was falling asleep in my chair, and decided to head to bed. I tossed and turned quite a bit, and had a rather fitful night where I was either too hot or too cold and could not really seem to regulate my temperatures. I did make it a bit further into my quest for level 100 and am roughly 1 pip away from dinging. In theory if I stay awake long enough tonight… I should be able to push through to level 100, or at least get considerably closer. I am still fighting whatever unnamed death flu nonsense that I picked up. My boss is a few days behind me and is also struggling, even though to the best of my knowledge we did not infect each other. The cough has been the worst part and I just go into these coughing fits where I struggle to recover gracefully. Today is supposed to be the holiday party in the office, but I dropped off the cookies I was bringing last night so that I did not have to be around people, and am otherwise skipping out today because I don’t feel comfortable hacking and coughing nonstop around others.
Tam introduced us to Where Winds Meet last weekend on the podcast and a few of us have tried it out. So far… I am not really vibing with it. He indicated that they had resolved the beard problems that I have with most eastern fantasy games… and I am not entirely certain about that. This was the best beard I could get, which is reasonable, but nowhere near as majestic as I would have liked. Mostly it feels very much like a Ghosts game, and I am not sure when the MMORPG elements come online. For the moment it feels like I am playing an entirely single player adventure game with mildly souls-like roots, and that is find and good…. but I am not entirely certain if I care enough about it to keep playing. If anything I think my time would be better served playing Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, or catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I at a minimum wanted to fire it up and check it out, and it is a gorgeous game… just not sure if it is one that is going to flip the appropriate centers in my brain.
So the other night I got distracted when I was going out into the backyard and feeding tripod, and apparently never actually locked that door. So I slept the entire night with it unlocked, where anyone could have walked into my bedroom. That creeped me out to the point where I had to scrub through my backyard camera just to make sure no one did anything untoward. At which point I found out that I have a bunch of Raccoons who have apparently been climbing the pole up to the second floor deck off my wife’s office. I have no clue what they are doing. There is nowhere into the house up there, and no access to any crawl spaces or anything… but it seems like they are just having fun climbing around. They were specifically doing it when the wind-chimes were going crazy so I wonder if they were going up to investigate that. I figured if nothing else you could see cute Raccoons doing Raccoon things.
I am bummed about the wreath, but it is what it is. This is all learning experiences as I shuffle forward into my first attempts at 3D printing.
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