Good Morning Folks! Yesterday Grinding Gear Games released the full reveal of all of the major nodes for the twelve ascendancies that will be playable in the Path of Exile II Early Access. This is critical because at least in this first release, players will be unable to respec their ascendancy. Generally speaking, you don’t have to be super certain which direction you are going to be going in Path of Exile, because you can always change ascendancies at a later date. You will still be able to move points around, but shifting from Titan to Warbringer on the Warrior class for example would require you to roll a brand new character. This has been a point of contention for veteran players, Zizaran specifically in his recent interview with Jonathan asked for them to release the full ascendancy information ahead of time.
Right now my game plan is to go Warrior and rush the Regen/Armor cluster marked with number one. We don’t have a complete build tool yet, but a number of the nodes have been data-mined from the various videos that were released of the last LA Streamer event. So far this seems to be the best tool available with updated information, and where I pulled the above screenshot that I took into photoshop. The next goal is to pick up the one-hander nodes at #4 and then head down to pick up all of the mace nodes at #2. Then I will path down to #3 and hopefully be able to pay the strength requirements to swap over to Giant’s Blood which will allow me to run the Two-Hander and Shield setup that I plan on going permanently. I will likely have some abilities set up with this configuration, and then others will be swapping over to a dual-wielding Two-hander weapon swap. Once I get Giant’s Blood I will be dropping the Onehanded nodes at #4 and picking up the Twohanded nodes directly across the path from them.
However, I am stuck with which of the two Warrior ascendancies to go with. All of this time I have said I was going Titan, but one of potentially the best nodes is buried behind a fairly awful one. Hulking Form seems really strong because this will not only give me a 50% increased effect on the attribute travel nodes but also all of the small nodes that give other benefits throughout the tree. Like I said though, it is buried behind Colossal Capacity which is a nice quality of life, but otherwise useless node. I also want Crushing Blows and a 40% More multiplier against Heavy Stunned enemies, but taking Hulking Form would force me to bypass some of the other good nodes like the ones that cause Slam skills to gain Aftershocks.
All of that said… the Warbringer tree is looking pretty tasty as well. Namely, there is a potentially wild node called Imploding Impacts that lets your Armor break attacks go into the negatives, increasing the amount of damage dealt with your attacks. This morning however SirGog pointed out that unless the damage calculations have changed for Armor, there is the potentially to break the game. I am also a big fan of Warcaller’s Bellow which causes corpses around you to explode when you do a Warcry and Greatwolf’s Howl which removes the cooldown from Warcries in general. There are also a bunch of block-related nodes that might be good because I am absolutely going after some block on the tree to allow me to passively shed damage. Basically I want high armor, high regen, and high block to attempt to create a pretty tanky character.
In other general Path of Exile II news, they released an announcement yesterday that preloading will be available on Thursday aka Tomorrow at 7 pm CST. This is specifically for the standalone client, but I would expect that it should be available through Steam shortly after that point. I am not sure if I will do the Standalone client or the Steam client. Right now I am running POE1 with a separate client, but have been contemplating moving back to the Steam client just to have better time played tracking. Hopefully, this gives folks enough time to download if they have slower internet connections. Essentially they were playing a game of chicken so that they could hopefully release the game without giving time for folks to data-mine the hell out of the client before it goes live.
Lastly, they released a video yesterday as well showing off a series of Twitch drops, and a promotion with Twitch for gifting two subs to a streamer. I will likely do this thing because the Chimaera pet is kind of adorable, in that so hideous it is cute kind of way. I will absolutely be farming the Twitch drops as I often do, even though none of them are particularly exciting to me save for the pet.
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Good Morning Folks! We’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern in the Path of Exile community wondering exactly when accounts would be flagged for early access for folks with a lifetime spend of $480 or more… aka the price of the largest yearly supporter pack. Apparently, that happened overnight and I was able to confirm something that I hoped would be the case. When the supporter packs went live last Thursday I bought one that granted early access and was wondering if I would also get a key from the lifetime spend. It turns out that yes I did and while my spare key was already spoken for, you might check your early access page to see if you also got a spare key. Essentially you consume the key on the key redemption page and then go back to your early access page and snag the Steam key so that you can register that and be ready to download whenever preloading begins. I appreciate greatly that I got a spare key instead of just flagging the account.
We are well engaged in spoiler season, and it seems like GGG is releasing a new video pretty much every day. The one that launched overnight was for Ball Lightning, Archmage, Sigil of Power… and Wildshards which answered a question that I was having about support gems. Essentially it has been stated that we only get to use a single support gem once per character, and there were a lot of gems that ended up being added to multiple links on your character. In Path of Exile for example Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support and Greater Multiple Projectiles Support were used universally to make abilities split into multiple attacks. It seems as though Wildshards is a special version of this that only works with spells which makes me wonder if we are going to get several different flavors of commonly used supports tailored to very specific use cases.
The venerable SirGog released a video yesterday with a VERY important reminder in it. Essentially it is presented as though it were going to be a tier list for ascendancies, but really… none of us know anything about what the game is going to be like and how strong specific abilities are going to play. There are a handful of starter tier lists floating around and they are all essentially nonsense. I know personally I am going to do something with a Titan and probably use Giants Blood the notable that allows me to use a Twohander in one hand… to do Twohanded Mace and Shield. I am diving into the player fantasy that I want for a character because I have always loved that type of character when a game allows me to play it. I know roughly where in the tree I am going to be heading based on some preview nodes, but I fully expect when I level up for the first time… that I am going to be spending thirty minutes looking at the passive tree to figure out how I want to path.
Another Jonathan Rogers interview came out yesterday, this time with Talkative Tri but I have not had a chance to watch it myself. I thought it might be useful to sort of catalog all of the interviews that are currently available with different groups of people.
So far these are the four that I am aware of, but there might be more out there in the broader community. What I noticed with a lot of these interviews is that it seems like they are branching out from the core of the insular community. DM for example is wildly popular with the Diablo IV playerbase and has a really broad appeal. Talkative Tri focuses mostly on trying to present a really positive viewpoint in games and is relatively new to the scene. Legendary Drops comes from a totally different community and only recently started playing the game seriously with Settlers. Essentially it seems like they are doing a good measure of outreach to try and connect with a broader base of players.
There were a lot of folks who were invited to some recent event in LA and apparently there was an embargo on the footage that they recorded there. As such pretty much each day there are new revelations about the passive tree. For example, this is a video focused on the Warrior and its tree that I will be at some point watching through to try and get a feel of who I am going to path when the game releases. I apologize for anyone who is not into Path of Exile, because this blog is pretty much going to me obsessing about the game until it releases and then gibbering madly once I finally do get my hands on it. As I said yesterday… I’ve not really felt this way since the launch of World of Warcraft with a game consuming this much of my mental focus.
I figure I will probably take the next two days off from the blog so for everyone who celebrates, I hope you and yours have a very Happy Thanksgiving.
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Good Morning Folks! I’m in a massive hype cycle for the early access launch of Path of Exile II next Friday. However, I would caution you my dear readers… to not actually take time off from work to play it. I’ve been watching something with a bit of trepidation, which is Path of Exile 2 climbing on the top-selling games list for Steam. Something important to know about this list is that this is based on the amount of cash brought in by that product, which is why the Steam Deck for example is eternally at the top of this list because it is a very expensive item. Another important thing to note about this list is that a large chunk of POE players… are not actually buying things through the Steam store. None of the purchases I have made for example have been through Steam and are instead bought on PathOfExile.com meaning that you are seeing a minority of the total amount being spent on early access for Path of Exile II.
I am fully expecting that when the game goes online at 1 pm my time… the servers will be a complete mess that is likely only to get worse as we roll into primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely going to attempt to play next Friday but I am also preparing for the worst. If Jonathan Rogers was saying during the DM/Ghazzy stream that the numbers were significantly higher than they were expecting… I would believe him given that the game moved from 5th on the high sales chart to 3rd since yesterday. As a veteran of many a bad MMORPG launch, I would just suggest you not blow any of that valuable vacation time until the first few weeks have stabilized a bit. I am about as hyped as anyone could be for this thing, but have a backup plan because I fully expect the game to be largely unplayable for the first 48 hours. Maybe GGG will surprise me, and I hope they do… but I am also giving them leverage to adapt without holding them accountable for the extreme hype levels.
I think a lot of this hype comes from the fact that for the most part, Diablo IV has been unsatisfying. It stirred up the desire to play an ARPG… but failed to deliver anything that holds attention for long periods of time. Path of Exile has been considered to be largely unapproachable by most players and Path of Exile II is in many ways an attempt to open the door to folks who bounced the first time they saw the passive skill tree. Do I think Path of Exile II will be casual friendly enough to gather the mass of disillusioned Diablo IV players? Probably not. However, there are going to be a lot of people who are amped to give it a shot and as such… given how well Diablo IV sold… we are going to see similar numbers throwing themselves into Path of Exile II early access. I think GGG knows this is going to be a problem and is scrambling last minute to sure up their infrastructure but no amount of load testing can really compete with the sledgehammer of millions of players battering down the gates and flooding the first few zones at the exact same time.
Please note that this sober advice is coming from someone who is chain-watching pretty much every bit of information coming out about the game and has rewatched the opening cinematic a disturbing number of times at this point. I am fully enthralled by the game at this point and am ready for the doors to open. However, as someone who has been in this position… taken time off from work in order to play a game that was largely in permanent maintenance mode for weeks… don’t do it. I am not sure there is a chance in hell of this being a perfectly smooth launch. Line up other games to play while waiting for the servers to right themselves. There is going to be plenty of time to play this game in the coming months and unless you are a hardcore racing type… really there is no rush to be there first. The economy is going to take weeks to sort itself out anyway.
Mostly I love you all and just want to limit your frustrations… and nothing amps up frustration more than making specific plans to do a thing and then having those plans effectively canceled by technical difficulties.
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Good Morning Folks! The amount of hype that I have going into Path of Exile II is honestly worrying levels. It reminds me a bit of the way I felt about World of Warcraft going into the launch of that game all those years ago. I now have it sitting in my steam library taunting me. Honestly, at this point, I just hope that the servers do not crater too badly. I fully expect things to be a bit borked because some comments that Jonathan Rogers made on a podcast with Ghazzy and DM yesterday indicate that the access key sales have far exceeded anything they had planned for. The level of excitement Jonathan has for the game is infectious and it is wild that he was just down to record for over two hours. If you do not have two hours… SylverXYZ did a 20-minute recap of everything that was discussed in the interview.
I should be getting a lifetime spend key, but I picked up one of the cosmetic supporter packs just because I loved the appearance. I cobbled together a pretty slick looking appearance setup for my Necro Settlers league RF Chieftain using it. Truth be told I think I am pretty much done with the Necro Settlers Event. The extreme inflation of that league is going to prevent me from really progressing my character much further than it currently is. Basically, all of the next major upgrades are priced out of my range. For example, the next obvious step would be to shift to the life recovery on block setup which has decently rolled shields running around 20 Divines. Annihilation’s Approach boots are around 2 Divines, and a decently rolled Elder pseudo-helm starts around 12 Divines. On top of that, pretty much every rare piece of gear would likely need to be swapped to balance out the stats from shifting items around. I would also realistically need to pick up a cluster gem setup.
All of that said… I am pretty happy with as far as I got on potato gear. I made my way through all 115 maps in the Atlas and unlocked the first two voidstones. In theory, I probably could have struggled my way through the last two but the amount of effort just did not feel worth it. I am far better at Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds than I used to be because I killed both of them deathless. When I hit level 95 and began running juicier t16 maps I started eating a lot of deaths. I think I mostly fixed that by shifting up my tree a bit to pick up 80% reduction in extra critical damage. Were this a normal league, I could have easily pushed this character further but I am pretty happy with how far I got with relatively little investment. Almost all of the gear save for my Cloak of Flames was stuff I picked up off the ground. I feel like the whole event was a rousing success.
This however has caused me to pop back into the normal Settlers league and start chipping away at some of the further challenges. At this point, I have 31 of 40 and I am not entirely certain how much further I am reasonably going to get. Challenging Competitors is probably doable, but I have never seen the boss that highjacks your maprunners and I keep failing to avoid the verisium lasers on the Black Knight encounter. Gear Grinding Goals… mostly is going to require me to hit 100 and then finish out another one of the stupidly painful goals. I’m roughly half of the way through level 99 and am running around with an Omen of Amelioration to blunt the impact of any deaths that I might take. I made an Abyss Atlas tree and probably need to focus on running around with it as that is supposedly a pretty efficient way to gain experience.
I’m also potentially back in Enshrouded for a bit, as my friend Ace has been talking about it lately. I am trying to run up a fresh character and this friends is the majesty of my night one hovel. Yesterday I cleared two Elixir Wells, upgraded the Flame one step, and gathered the Blacksmith, Hunter, Alchemist, and Farmer. Next up would be the lengthy trek out to go find the Carpenter. Most of my sojourns to this point have involved climbing up to the tower I cleared before getting the Blacksmith and then gliding down to near the locations. I am however abusing the hell out of the fact that you can log out in a shrouded area and it will teleport you back to base. So essentially I am playing similar to how I would play Path of Exile where I am bouncing to character select all the time. This has allowed me to go off into the mists and collect what I need and then efficiently pop back to town with my load of goodies.
I am not sure how deep I am going to get into the game, but I would like to experience some of the dungeons that Ace has found as a duo. I could always just grab my previous geared-out character for shenanigans, but it feels better starting from scratch.
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