Yesterday, we got the reveal stream for Path of Exile II 0.5.0, and it was wild. It was essentially an hour and nineteen minutes of back-to-back, constant reveals, some of which are super intricate. I feel like there is honestly just way too much to even begin to talk about, but I will attempt to discuss some of the high points. Essentially, at a high level, they are reworking every single endgame system that launched with the game in order to make it distinct from the Path of Exile 1 counterpart. Abyss was quite possibly their most successful league launch in Path of Exile II, and they have seemingly taken some of the core tenets of that mechanic and applied them to existing ones. Quite honestly… on some level, I hope we see some of these changes backported to Path of Exile. The new Ritual and Expedition, for example, look freaking awesome, and I cannot wait to play them and see how they feel.
One of the major disappointments from yesterday is that the community had worked itself into a frenzy that we were going to get the Duelist class, and potentially Gladiator ascendancy, and maybe something else. At a minimum, they thought one of the trailers leading up to the release of the content reveal hinted that we were getting swords. This did not happen, and quite frankly, during the Q/A they said that with all of the other endgame changes, there was never going to be any time to do a full class introduction. Instead, we are getting the Martial Artist for Monk, and Spiritwalker for Huntress. In both cases, they represent the third and final ascendancy choice for those classes. I am not that into the whole Monk aesthetic, but Spiritwalker seems really interesting to me because, in theory, it is a minion class? There is a whole tame beast mechanic that is going into the game that allows you to “tame” beasts that are bosses and then use them as what appears to be a spectre-like minion that fights for you. Here is hoping that these are actually powerful and not useless, like 90% of the spectre mobs end up being.
The sweeping endgame changes excite me greatly because the current endgame in Path of Exile II was a bit of a mess. When you hit maps in Path of Exile, there are some clear progression elements that lead you to do specific content in order to unlock the rest of your atlas. The Path of Exile II equivalent felt like it was essentially saying “ya know, do some stuff”, and then dumping you out into an infinitely expanding Atlas and hoping for the best. Now there will be directed quests that effectively lead you towards progressing every single endgame mechanic. On top of that, there is a proper Atlas Passive Tree… not some piddly little nodes that only unlocked as you did specific mechanics. It looks potentially twice the size of the Path of Exile Atlas Passive Tree, so I am sure there is some interesting stuff in there that completely changes the game. They introduced a ton of new endgame crafting systems as well, but all of that shit is mostly too complicated to talk about yet, and it will probably be years before we fully understand how to make the most of them.
The thing that probably excites me the most is something that I have wanted ARPG games to do for decades. Essentially, there is now a standardized build file format that encompasses everything about a build and its leveling progression. You will then be able to drop this .Build file in your Path of Exile II directory and access it in-game. This then highlights all of the nodes that are required for that build and gives creators the ability to attach notes to various elements in the game, to help players along the way in following the guide. The amount of time that I spend at the start of a league flipping between the game and a build guide up on another screen… is a lot. Effectively, this is no more, and I am almost certain that this functionality will be backported to Path of Exile. I imagine it will only be a short amount of time before Path of Building will spit out these build files, so that guide creators can use that as an authoring tool since they are already used to it. Additionally, they are adding in some rudimentary price checking via the in-game trade menu, but this does not look anywhere near as efficient as my current favorite Scalpel. I am hoping beyond hope that the author of that tool updates it to support Path of Exile II.
Another thing that has me SUPREMELY interested is this unique called The Raven’s Flock. If you have followed my escapades, you know two things for certain… I am a Thorns/Righteous Fire enjoyer in ARPGs, and I love me some Minion builds. This new unique seems to essentially be combining these two worlds together in a delightful way. Essentially, the Staff gives you an ability called Spiralling Conspiracy, which summons a flock of ravens that circle you, dealing damage over time to everything in the aura, similar to Righteous Fire. It supposedly scales off Minion damage because the Aura itself… are Minions. I already enjoy playing the various Necro-style builds in the game, but I cannot wait to try and build something around this nonsense. I wonder how well this will work with the new Spiritwalker ascendancy and the big ole beast minion that you can tame. I am sure Papa Pohx will figure out a build to make this all work, but in the meantime, I might start something like Bear, which hopefully is still a beast at farming maps. Then later swap to a character built around this unique once I actually have access to it.
I am honestly pretty freaking pumped for this upcoming league. If you are interested, I highly suggest watching the over-hour-long video because it was packed with information. If you need something a bit more condensed, Raxx released the above video where he sort of runs down the high points. Are you excited for Path of Exile II: Return of the Ancients? What was your favorite thing out of the many reveals? Drop me a line below.
The post Ancients League Is Gonna Be Wild appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! I did not realize this until pulling together the post this morning, but apparently, last Monday was the 12th anniversary of our podcast, and last Friday was the 17th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog. We have, in fact, been doing this for a while, it seems. Tonight, we start off the show staring into the black hole of equine abominations that is Horsey Game. From there, we talk a bit about the madness that is the challenge mode of Peglin brought by Act 4. After listening to Tamrielo talk about his Mage build in Last Epoch, Belghast was inspired to roll his own Fire Aura build, and we talk a bit about the weaknesses of the Spellblade in general when it comes to survival. Tam shares his initial thoughts on House of Hikmah, a beautiful artistic journey into the Islamic Golden Age. Finally, we talk a bit about the progress Kodra has made with his wolf pack build in Path of Exile, and Bel shares some thoughts about the amazing new overlay tool for the game called Scalpel.
Good Afternoon Folks. I know my blog is a bit of a mess at the moment, but yall are going to have to bear with me. I used to live my life based on a deeply predictable rhythm. I got up around 5:30, and was upstairs around 6 am, having done all of my morning chores like feeding myself, the indoor cats, and the outdoor cats, and even often doing something like starting a load of dishes or laundry. That process is so much slower right now because it takes me quite a bit of time to recover from pretty much every action. I am hoping that, given enough time, I will develop stamina again. I am already doing way better today than I was last week, and a lot of that was jumping through hoops to figure out exactly how much medication I need to maintain my blood pressure at reasonable levels right now. I’ve also found a few things that taste reasonable, and honestly, even kind of hit the spot, so my nutrition side is way more functional as well. My life has often been about figuring out and building routines… and this whole cancer/chemo thing is a giant wrecking ball to one routine and I am having to craft a brand new one out of the pieces that are left behind.
First off, huge props to Quelex for sharing with me some info on how to knock out one of the Gallant Grinding Goals extremely easily. Sure, it was a bit “spendy” because it required some specific popular scarabs, but over the course of four maps, I was able to knock out that bottom objective. I am now slowly poking my way through influenced maps with over 100% Item Quant, and also doing them in Astrolabe maps, so I can be knocking out two objectives at the same time. I am still using the Scarab/Domination/Legion Atlas that I threw together for the previous objective, because it drops plenty of stuff and goes pretty quickly. I figure around the time I ding 100, I will probably knock out the Influenced maps objective and polish off “GGG”. Then it is just down to slowly chipping away at Tyrannical Tiers and Sandswept Survivor, which are both easy enough but simply require a stupid amount of map runs. Atlas Astrolabes should also be finishing up while I am doing the influenced maps, but it mostly just requires me spending chaos to buy the astrolabes.
Mapping has been a really chill experience for me to turn my brain off and just exist. Last night I spent most of the evening watching shows and catching up on various things. I finished up on Season 2 of Fallout, and am pretty pumped with where things left off there. Fallout may be the single best video game adaptation of anything, because it nailed the universe so perfectly… without seeming to feel like it needed to retread ground we have already gone over in the games. After that, I started up Season 2 of Monarch, and thus far, that show continues to give me everything I want in a Godzilla franchise television outing. I am pretty sure that Apple TV might pay more for their shows than other platforms, because the VFX budget here is pretty amazing. At that point, it was getting late, and I figured I should probably turn in early, given that my body is still recovering from everything it is going through. I will probably pick up where I left off tonight and dive into more episodes of Monarch while I chip away at Path of Exile challenges.
Yesterday I talked about Scalpel, but I figured I would give a bit of an update. I have been 100% using it since then and now… I think I can never go back to good ole Awakened POE Trade. Firstly, the whole ability to manipulate your loot filter on the fly is really nice, and the only thing I wish that it did was directly integrate with my profile on Filterblade, so that I could use it to tick up and down the strictness. You can manipulate individual rules and currencies very easily, but yesterday I wanted to just escalate everything up a strictness tier, and still needed to go to Filterblade to do that. The best part about Scalpel for me personally is how good its price prediction tools are, which admittedly are simply relying on Ninja and the Trade API. Awakened POE Trade always tried to make a bit of a fuzzy recommendation, and it was always slightly wrong, and it relied on me looking things up manually most of the time. Scalpel solves those problems and seems like it is just going to keep getting better, the more functionality that is added to it. I need to sort out the Patreon information and give them some money, because I think I will be using this every single league going forward.
I went to my primary care doctor today, which is part of a monthly check-in that we have had since starting tirzepatide. I had to deal with changing how I am getting the meds going forward, but in truth, it should be much easier. I am desperate for a new normal and figuring out what that starts to look like. However, I realized in chatting with my doctor how different my life is going to look by this time next year. In theory, cancer should be far in my rearview mirror, and hopefully, they have pieced me back together into something resembling the original order of how organs connect. I am already down 50 lbs roughly since I started the journey with tirzepatide…. so I am going to be a completely different person than I am today. 2027… I need there to be no crisis of the year… because the death of my spouse last year, and cancer this year… are a decade’s worth of bullshit at once. I really want to travel next year, and figure out how to go see some of the people who matter to me deeply. I’ve lived my life long enough that various folks whom I have known for literal decades, and cannot imagine living my life without, are just amorphous “internet people”.
Anyways! Thanks for bearing with me as I construct a new normal over the course of the next several weeks.
The post Mr. House and Scalpels appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was “a lot,” and I have survived, but sleeping was a bit of a mess because of the pain. I’ve been working on a new side project in Path of Exile. It largely started because there is a new belt called the Screams of the Dessicated, and the gimmick is that you lose access to your utility flasks but gain at least one permanent shrine buff. Only some of these shrines have any real value, which means the market is flooded with a bunch of belts that the average player has no interest in. I was curious what a Greater Skeletal Shrine would feel like on a proper minion build, and right now, my favorite minion base is Servant of Arakaali… but you only get to play that during the Phrecia league. My second favorite minion base is Guardian, and as a result, I rolled a brand new character and started leveling so that I could play with the belt.
The other thing that I noticed is there are a limited number of folks building around a brand new Unique called Broken Elegy that drops from Saresh, the new boss of the Mirage league. I’ve completely yolo’d my build in its current state and have pivoted towards going down the staff block path, and running the new staff with Servant of Decay, another chestpiece that spawns a bunch of interesting minions that inflict withered on targets, which should buff my chaos damage. The only realistic way for me to get Envy on my build was to lean into Aul’s Uprising, and since the cheapest one already had Death Attunement on it, it allowed me to respec my tree a bit to free up some points. I went with a screams belt that gives me Greater Skeletal Shrine and Replenishing Shrine, the latter essentially replacing any reliance I might have on Clarity or Vitality. Lastly, I picked up a cheap minion gem helm that I have my utility minions in, like Animate Guardian, Stone Golem, and Carrion Golem.
I have no clue how well this is going to work. I need to hit level 78 and pick up some more dexterity somewhere before I can equip the chestpiece, and I am in Act 10, working through the final bits of the campaign. So far, however, it feels amazing. I am running Leap Slam instead of Shield Charge, and also running a Frost Blink so that I have my comfy two movement abilities setup. I leap into a pack, convocate my Sentinel of Radiance, and then start furiously summoning raging spirits as I also generate shrine skeletons and ceaseless flesh zombies from the staff. The Carrion Golem buffs everything, and minion jewels are making it so that everything has a decent chance to poison on hit… and the various stuff buffing chaos damage output is pretty much melting everything. Bosses especially just sort of evaporate right now, and my AG is running Asenath’s Gentle Touch, so corpses are also exploding, helping with the clear. The entire package feels really dumb, and I am curious how well the transition into maps is going to go.
It has been quite a bit since I last updated anything about Path of Exile, and over the weekend, I finished out my Atlas and got my Four Voidstones. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the current state of the new Atlas. For the most part I like it, but I feel like the fog of war needs to go, so that players can at least see where they want to go. When you start getting maps that you cannot run, because you cannot get to the node on the atlas, it is a bit frustrating. For example, one of my friends needed the six-link bench craft, and I had no clue where the Silo map was located, so I just sort of blindly fumbled around until I found it. Being able to easily swap between maps is pretty great, and I still need to finish doing a “blob” as they are being colloquially called in each of the quadrants for one of the quests. Unfortunately, Astrolabes seem to drop rather infrequently from map bosses, so I am going to have to ultimately buy some to finish out that quest.
The biggest upgrade that I have made to my Righteous Fire character is building out the Foulborn Red Dream setup, which involves buying the rather expensive gem, and then tattooing a bunch of strength nodes in the vicinity to instead be Fire Resistance. This, combined with everything else, really gives you a significant boost in life totals. My maximum life is now sitting at 8219, giving me an active pool of 7734 once you take into account my vitality arrogance setup. Realistically, I probably have enough sources of regeneration to comfortably drop vitality, but I just have not done so. The next big swap would be adding some clusters so that I could run Maelevolence, which would involve dropping vitality finally. I’ve not really felt like I needed to do this, so I have been lazy and not done it. I think I have the cluster jewels in my dump tab and could probably get it up and running without much issue. Maybe when I hit 100, I will do that thing.
Other than the Red Dream setup, the biggest upgrade is swapping my Immortal Flesh out for a Cord Belt. Cord Belts are a new base that drops from the Mirage content, and their big new thing is that it allows an anoint. So instead of using an Elder Stygian Vise, I sought out a Cord Belt with the same sort of rolls you normally look for. Everything else is mostly just getting better versions of things I already had, like I now have a proper Elder Helmet, slightly better corrupt for Cloak of Flames, and a full 10% Nebulis, which gives me 450% increased Elemental Damage. I keep getting slightly better regen gloves from the Breach Tree and swapping those out as I find them, then selling my previous version for some divines. My build can do pretty much anything I would want to do with it, including Nightmare Maps… so obviously the first thing I wanted to do was run up an alt, which gives you the Guardian I spoke about first.
All told, I am pretty happy with where I am in almost everything. My main tree is Niko, Ore, Harvest, and Breach and it feels great. My secondary atlas is Einhar, Ritual, Beyond, and Heist, which also feels great. I am thinking about setting up my third tree to be heavily focused on Legion, because there are incubators specific to the league mechanic that I would love to get, so I could start getting coins more regularly. Delve still provides, and Fossils represent my primary source of income right now. I am hovering around the 200 depth and going horizontal to look for bosses. I still need a Doryani map from the Vaal boss, and I am always down for taking out an Aul for some of the big-ticket items. Mirage league has been a blast, and Ace and I were talking about it last night, and how this is probably the furthest they have gotten. At this point, I am mostly focused on challenges so that I can hopefully get another fancy totem pole.
How has your league been going? Between all of the medical stuff that I have been dealing with, mine has been going a bit slower than I would have liked. Additionally, next week we have the release of the Last Epoch Season 4, and I will be spending a lot of time playing that at least for a week or so. I will also be getting adjusted to the routines of chemotherapy which might throw a monkey wrench in pretty much everything.
The post The Broken Elegy appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
