Good Morning Folks! At least I hope it is still morning by the time I get this blog post out there. This thread is a bit out of ordinary for my normal post, and you are essentially getting a stream of consciousness rant about things that I think need to be improved in the game. Generally speaking I take more effort to shape my arguments, but this is pretty much just raw snippets of feelings. It might lead you to believe that I hate Path of Exile II. I would not have spent the last two hours randomly jotting things down if I hated the game. In fact I think that depending upon the path it takes… Path of Exile II could be the best ARPG in another few years eclipsing the greatness that has been the original Path of Exile. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on here. I think the game has “good bones” to borrow a term used by home renovators. However in its current state there are a lot of things that are just not working.
I feel like I also have to preface this statement, that at this point I have spent almost 200 hours playing Path of Exile II since its launch. I have leveled a Titan to level 78 and have since shifted to an Infernalist which I have taken to 88 and continue pushing it forward. I have played the worst class and one of the absolute best classes, and the experiences were wildly different. A lot of my early complaints about Path of Exile II just do not exist when you are playing a well designed class. I also feel like it is important to state that I have around 4000 hours played in Path of Exile 1, and started seriously playing in the Sentinel league and have made it to the endgame in every league since then. I’ve built a bunch of different viable characters even though I fell in love with Righteous Fire and keep playing those each league as well.
I’m also not really expressing a lot of radical opinions that I have not seen bandied about in the Redditsphere. However I felt like it was time to unburden my soul with a good rant. I am not even going to make the pretense of trying to break up the block of text with images. You are warned… big damned wall of text forum post mode has engaged.
One Portal Softcore Is Bad
Okay, this is probably the thing that annoys me the most about Path of Exile II. I was fully on board with the concept of the bosses resetting their health back to full after failing to kill them. What I was not on board with was still spawning six portals, but removing your map after dying once. This just feels awful and even now that I have finished unlocking all of the atlas points… and whether or not I complete a map no longer matters at all… it still feels atrocious. For those not indoctrinated to Path of Exile, there is already a game mode called hardcore that is an optional challenge where you effectively lose your character… or at least it transfers to another league… when you take a death. I do not play in that game mode for a reason.
Runes Are Bad
In Path of Exile II, we lost access to the crafting bench and instead got the rune system where we can socket in an item and gain some additional stats on an item. This is bad for a few reasons. Firstly this choice is permanent, and unlike the crafting bench, you cannot change your mind and put on something more useful when you no longer need that 12% resistance to a single stat. Additionally, 12% just feels like it isn’t enough to matter in some cases.
What I would like to see is a few things. Firstly I would make it so you could socket over top of an existing rune destroying the first rune and replacing its stats. Second I would really like to see multiple tiers of runes just like we had multiple tiers of bench crafts. The game has the reforging bench and should be used more often. I envision three tiers of runes, and each one requires you to reforge three of the previous tiers to make it.
Gold Feels Meaningless
Right now there is not a reasonable gold sink. I feel like lowering the respec costs was the right thing to do, and it should be almost free to change your character. This is something that was unnecessarily punishing players at low levels. Even in Path of Exile 1, you eventually reached a point in progression where you had more Regret Orbs than you knew what to do with, and respecs were effectively free. What gold lacks is something fun to do with it, that you actually care about. Right now the only real option is gambling, and gambling is a mistake… a massive mistake.
What we are really missing is Kingsmarch, because that was the piece that made gold feel good in the Settlers of Kalguur league. Maybe this is eventually something that is going to be implemented, but for now, it feels just as useless as gold felt in Diablo III, where it was just a number that constantly went up and that you had nothing really to do with it. What I would love to see is some additional vendors added to the game that sell a limited stock of items for gold. For example what if you had someone similar to POE1 Tujen that sold random currencies and you could haggle with them trying to get the price of gold down? There just needs to be something fun to do with it.
Most Maps are Not Well Designed
One of the hallmarks of Path of Exile 1 mapping was that it had a lot of really great maps. While everyone pretty much universally loved some of them, there were various niche maps that other folks loved and were perfect for specific builds. For example, I love Toxic Sewers, but that map is going to suck for any build with a lot of damage projection. The problem that Path of Exile II has is that almost universally they are filled with super tight corridors with way too much collision forcing you to get hung up on things constantly. The maps themselves are also massive in scale and take way too long to complete. There are a handful that are great, but because of the meandering nature of the endgame… you are constantly stuck choosing the lesser of two evils while figuring out how to path around. Vaal Factory can die in a fire.
Mapping is KinDA Boring
Right now Path of Exile II mapping suffers from the same problem as the Last Epoch monolith. There just isn’t enough interesting stuff going on in the maps. Partially this is due to the fact that we do not have over a decade’s worth of league content infused randomly into the maps. However, it is more than that. Right now it feels like the only mobs in the entire map that matter are the half-dozen rare spawns. Once you have killed those, there is little to no reason to keep clearing the map. They are legitimately the only mobs that have a reasonable chance of dropping anything worth picking up. Occasionally you can get maps dropped from white packs, but nine times out of ten these will be a map that is at least 10 tiers too low for you to actually care about.
Rarity is Mandatory for Fun
Related to this last point… right now it feels like Item Rarity is a mandatory stat for you to stack to make mapping feel interesting. This means EVERYONE is magic finding 100% of the time, or feeling like they are making no progress. I feel like this stat needs to be removed from the game entirely and come up with a more creative way to add it back in. Maybe rarity is a sliding scale, which can solve the one multiple portals thing. Maybe maps start out with a high base rarity and that drops each time you lose a portal. Rarity exists on the Atlas tree and I feel like if they buffed that slightly they could remove it entirely from gear and the game would be better for it.
Item Drops Don’t Matter
One of the points that Jonathan stated repeatedly in interviews is that they wanted to make it so that loot on the ground mattered again. This is a goal that they have entirely failed at. Loot for the most part is just as bad as it ever was in Path of Exile 1, the main difference is we are getting way less of it and as a result have a way lower chance of ever seeing anything that is worth picking up. I thought maybe the Tiered loot system that they introduced would be something similar to the “well-rolled” concept that some of the league mechanics in Path of Exile 1 awarded. For example in the Settlers mechanic, you wound up getting some extremely solid drops with decent resists and stats that you might actually care about. I’ve seen a bunch of Tier 5 drops in maps, which is the highest tier in the new system of drops, and almost all of them were worthless. Most of the pieces of gear had zero resistances, which is effectively a requirement in this game since resists in general feel so much harder to get. The best loot in the game appears to be on the vendors because they seem to actually be generating loot with that well-rolled formula.
Crafting is Not Crafting
Right now it feels like we have the Duplo version of the crafting system from Path of Exile. I was by far not a crafting genius, nor did I think it was great that you were effectively required to use Craft of Exile to figure out how to make anything. What we got instead is a total crapshoot where quite honestly… if you don’t end up with the two best stats you can possibly get while it is still a magic item, it is not worth progressing at all. Crafting is effectively picking up a bunch of bases, throwing a transmute and an aug at it… and if you did not hit the jackpot you throw it back on the ground or vendor it. For the average player I do not feel like it is really a system worth even engaging with unless you are being masochistic and rolling the Solo-Self-Found lifestyle.
Greater Essences are Unobtanium
We were sold this vision of being able to use essences to guarantee two stats on an item, and that this was going to be part of the common crafting routine for players. Essences spawn fairly infrequently in maps and the campaign, and when they do… you are very unlikely to get anything but lesser essences which require the item to be white before you start. In my entire time playing Path of Exile II I have seen a single greater essence. I polled my friends who are also playing and they have each gotten one a piece.
There are a few things I would like to see changed with the system. Firstly I would like to see Lesser essences changed so that they can be used in place of either a Transmute or an Augment, aka they will add a single stat to either a Normal or Magic item. Similarly, I would like to see Greaters changed so that they will make a magic item a rare and add an affix, or work like an exalt and add it to an existing rare item. This is going to make the guaranteed stat that an Essence can provide way more valuable because you can use them on an item that already has some potential. Next similar to my suggestions about Runes, I would like to see it so that you can reforge 3 Lesser Essences into 1 Greater Essence of the same type. This means that players can actually work their way up to crafting with Greater Essences rather than hoping on the one-in-a-million drop.
Six Links are Harder to Get than they were in Path of Exile
Another thing that we were told repeatedly, is that the design of Path of Exile II should make it much easier for folks to reach their goal of having multiple abilities as six-links. This is a lie. Greater and Perfect Jewelers orbs just don’t really exist. I’ve not seen a single Five Link, and I sure as hell have never seen a Six Link. Similarly, I have seen streamers who can seemingly get Perfects but have not seen a Greater and therefore still are using Four Links on everything. It would be amazing if you had a system already in the game that was built around combining things… and getting higher-tier things. You guessed it… I would once again love to see them use the damned Reforge Bench to let us combine 3 Lessers into a Greater, and 3 Greaters into a Perfect.
Use the Reforge Bench for Almost Everything
Similarly, I would love to see this concept carried forward into pretty much any place where it would make sense. Do you have too many level 14 Uncut Gems but need a level 15? Bam through the magic of the reforge bench and the standards that have already been set out with way stones… combine 3 gems to get a gem of a higher level. If they add other tiered systems in the future… then bam… make them work through the reforge bench. Hell, I would even love it if they added in Recombinating Rares through the Reforge Bench. Was it too broken to make binary choices as to which stats got kept in the final product? Probably… but it would be way harder to game the system if you required three input products. It just gives players another thing to do with the rares that drop on the ground that are not good enough to actually use…. which are most of them.
Give us the Chinese Auction House
I know this is a big ask and one that will not be given… but trading feels worse in Path of Exile II than it was in Path of Exile. The currency exchange pretty much reset my expectations for how trading should work, and now I would like to see this carried forward into other aspects of the game. Buying things from players is awful. This morning I tried to buy a level 19 Uncut Spirit Gem because I had not found any yet and was getting tired of waiting. I had to message 30 people before I finally got one to respond. The Chinese server already has instant trading, where the item is pulled from the player’s stash and given to you. Make this a thing and make it cost gold… giving us another reason to earn gold. POE1 trade is something I am fond of… but it is a fucking mess and incomprehensible for anyone new to the game. All of my friends reach a point where they cannot seem to progress their builds because their gear sucks… but they refuse to cross the line into turning into a proper trading degen… but also have no problem using Auction Houses in MMORPGs. It is time to move away from this nonsense and just give us a system that actually works well.
Energy Shield Feels Mandatory
Right now the only defensive layer that actually feels good is Energy Shield, and this is in large part because it exists on the tree. Energy shield is different from all of the other defensive layers because it is effectively a replacement for player health. As such by removing health from the passive tree… and quite honestly watering down all of the other defensive layers… the only really viable way of playing in the endgame is to invest heavily in Energy Shield. The answer is not to nerf Energy Shield… though I know they are probably going to do precisely that as soon as they get back from holiday break… the answer instead is to buff the other defensive layers so that they actually feel like a reasonable option. Armor right now is royally fucked, and so is Health and Life Regen. Recoup works fine, but is not enough on its own… and Block while great is entirely too fucking cumbersome and requires picking up every single node on the tree to make it viable.
Build Diversity is Bad Because Classes Feel Bad
Playing as a Warrior felt reasonable enough… until I felt what it was like to play the game as Infernalist Minions. Similarly, yesterday I talked about Alkaiser’s change in religion once he stopped playing Warrior and switched over to Invoker. Essentially there are four builds right now that feel good, and as a result, the players who are sticking around are migrating to them. This is not that these are wildly overpowered builds, but instead just the type of gameplay that people want to play. I fear that they are all going to be nerfed into the ground, when the opposite approach should be taken. Look at what these classes are doing and what makes them fun to play, and then start reworking and buffing the other classes until they can do the same thing. Stampede Explode actually felt pretty good, but was due to a bugged interaction… maybe you should have made that bugged interaction actually a thing instead of fixing it.
Give us Old Ambush
The current state of stongboxes is awful. Instead of popping the box and getting a bunch of spawns that you can clear in a few minutes… it starts this annoying timer causing waves of mobs to spawn in the vicinity eventually leading to a rather anemic amount of loot. They are just not worth doing in their current state because they both take too long, and are way the hell too unrewarding. Strongboxes in Path of Exile 1 are something people actually try their best to add into most Atlas strategies because they feel like this tight little dose of dopamine and are actually fairly rewarding. I have no clue who dreamt up this change, but it needs to be reworked entirely.
Decouple Trials from Ascendancy
I feel like Trial of the Sehkemas and Trial of Chaos are perfectly fine optional content. However I feel like they should not be required to ascend your character. Sanctum was deeply polarizing and favored specific types of builds, and I feel like Sehkemas suffers from all of these problems. Similarly asking a player to do four floors to get that last ascendacy is asking them to commit to potentially a multi-hour gamble instead of what felt like 10-15 minutes to get through a Labyrinth. Trial of Chaos just needs to be deleted honestly… but I can see how some players and some builds might like it. It similarly feels miserable to do. The Ascendancy is a big part of the player identity and I feel like it should almost be free. Right now the Trials feel like the Dungeons in Last Epoch, something you do exactly once before moving on with your life and realizing there are far better uses of your time.
Dodge Needs Phasing
So the changes to dodge roll are better, but I still feel like dodge rolls need phasing. Mob collision is not fun, and especially awful given how claustophobic a lot of the areas are. Ritual for example always seems to spawn in the worst possible places giving you a tiny corridor to fight in. I took a death this morning just because I had no way of getting through the wall of mobs around me, and my minions were being blocked by geometry. It just feels super bad and at least having phasing on dodge roll would help a bit in these scenarios. In a perfect world I would remove all mob, player, and minion collision because none of that is enjoyable in the least.
Atlas Progression Feels Bad
One of my favorite things to do in a Path of Exile League was to slowly work my way through unlocking the 115 out of 115 map nodes. Each time I cleared a new map with its bonus objective, I got what felt like an immediate jolt of possibility as I was granted points to shape my endgame Atlas. Right now the entire process of progressing through the Doryani tiered quests just feels bad. Like I see how you end up in this scenario… you had 115 maps to clear in Path of Exile one, so dividing this out into 10 per white map tier, 8 per yellow map tier, and 6 per red map tier for a total of 120 maps seems equivalent. The problem is the player agency and benefits of your effort… really are not felt at all until you reach red maps. At a minimum you have to slog through 10 completely unrewarding tier 1 maps before you get any points to spend, and then only have two to do anything with. I know they purposefully paired down the Atlas tree to 30 points, but right now it does not feel good in the least. I am not sure what the answer is, but this is not it.
Do Unique Maps Exist? What Biome is this Map?
I’ve cleared a bunch of maps at this point and have purposefully branched out into a bunch of directions looking for additional content and have not stumbled onto a single unique map yet. More than that I have only actually found one hideout thus far. On the other hand… I have seen over fifty copies of the Augury. I feel like maybe there needs to be some work on that randomizer. Additionally I would love it if it were easier to tell immediately by mousing over the node what biome it belonged to. Like if you find a Crypt in the middle of a grassland… is it part of the Grass biome? I have no clue. I should be able to know that information just like I was able to immediately tell what biome I was in during Delve. I mean they have this information, so it should just be a matter of presenting it to us.
Citadels are too rare and as a result valuable.
Honestly this is a problem that I had with Path of Exile 1, but I am seeing it play out again in Path of Exile II. Right now it is too hard to find the Citadels that are required to summon the pinnacle boss, and as a result… when I do find one… I am absolutely going to sell the token that it drops because it is not worth the risk of attempting the fight as compared to the potential value of the item on the trade market. I also sold invitations in Path of Exile 1, because it just was not worth my time to take the risk on the fight that might not even drop anything I can use… when I can just sell the item and get currency that I can in turn buy the item I wanted. I feel like this is not the calculus that GGG probably wants its player base to have, but by making invitations annoying to farm… this is the reality that they have created.
Boss Maps Need Reworked
So when GGG talked about boss maps and them being a bit rarer… I pictured that it would be a map that was just a boss arena, and then have a much harder version of a campaign boss that you fought that would then be more rewarding. That is not at all what they ended up being. Right now I would love to see these changed so you just spawned into the Boss Arena and that the Atlas tree buffed them significantly. Give them a new pool of loot that they can drop or have it so there is a guaranteed chance of getting a decent unique from them or something like that.
Give Normal Maps the Steamroll Bosses
Isolating the bosses in their current state to ONLY be on boss maps feels equally bad. I would like to see the current version of map bosses shifted to just appearing in every single map, and leaving them at their current power level. One of the things that POE2 lacks right now is the player agency that POE1 had, and I feel like further separating bossing from mapping is going to benefit everyone. Mapping should be a chill time, and bossing should be the more sweaty tryhard experience. The people who care about challenge and difficulty, are the folks who chase uber uber pinnacle bosses. Let the rest of us have reasonable chill and predictable mapping.
If We Can’t Have Custom Tabs… give us affinities.
The current state of the game and all of the various currencies that used to have custom tabs in Path of Exile 1, that no longer do… is a bit maddening. By far the worst of these offenders is the lack of a map tab. I know custom tabs require a lot of work, but in theory the affinities that you already had coded should require less work? If we can’t have the proper tabs yet, please at least give us the ability to set up tab affinities so that we can quickly shunt loot into the bank without flipping between a bunch of tabs. Right now loot management feels awful, and please GGG throw us a bone here.
Remove Tower Maps
Conceptually I like the idea of Towers, and honestly I have enjoyed using them to buff the maps in the vicinity. I don’t feel like they are the ideal replacement for scarabs but I am willing to roll with it. What I do find maddening however is constantly needing to waste a map on running the exact same tower layout over and over. In an ideal world you would remove the tower map entirely and just make it so that pathing to a Tower unlocks it and allows you to begin using it. There is nothing interesting about the process of running this same map over and over, but unlike a lot of the voices in the community I don’t necessarily hate the Towers themselves.
The post Path of Exile II Rant Thread appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Today has gone a bit differently than planned and as a result, I am a bit later getting a blog post out the door than normal. Yesterday I decided to fully embrace the Crab and picked up the last two armor pieces that I was missing from the Blue Crab armor set. I figured this was a fitting visage since I am trying to build tanky in a game that feels like it mostly rewards overwhelming damage output. In theory, though I am on a trajectory that should give me that overwhelming output at some point in the future.
Without really meaning to, I have wound up on an adjacent trajectory to ConnorConverse/OneManaLeft. Essentially I am going down a path of dealing ignites and making things explode on stun, and plan on eventually going down the path of Hammer of the Gods and making it do massive damage with an even bigger ignite. For him, it appears to be working, and for me, I have reached a point where my build no longer feels quite as dumpster-tier as I originally thought. Warriors are in a rough spot where it feels like you have to struggle for an act and a half before you really get enough points for things to come online completely. It probably did not help that I was level 42 and did not have an ascendancy yet.
For years I have said that the most annoying part about leveling a character in Path of Exile 1, was doing the Labyrinth. It is not fun content, but I was wrong to complain… because the alternatives in Path of Exile II are even worse. This morning I managed to finally get through the Trial of the Sehkemas which is effectively Sanctum, and only because I am so defensively geared at this point and have such a large hitpoint pool that I was able to mostly shrug off the damage. I originally had planned on going down the path of Trial of Chaos which unlocks in Act III, because in truth I did fairly well at Ultimatum as Righteous Fire.
The problem with this theory is that Trial of Chaos is so much worse than anything Ultimatum ever dumped on us. In Ultimatum the zone denial abilities are mostly just nuisances because in Path of Exile, we are able to gear defensively enough to mostly shrug them off. In Trial of Chaos, you have to deal with at least twice as many incoming attacks from these, and they deal infinitesimally more damage. I just tried again before sitting down to write this post and chose the lightning turrets, because the alternatives were far worse. What I was not expecting was to get to the boss and effectively have twenty different turrets shotgunning me at the same time.
I suppose I will keep slamming my head against this until either I pass out or learn to enjoy the pain because currently, I am getting nothing from my ascendancy without a second set of two points. At first, I thought I would pick up a different notable, but that wound up bricking my build. So I spent literally all of the gold that I had to respec into the 20-slot bag because it was innocuous enough not to cause any actual harm to what I was doing. That means however that while I am ascended and a TItan, I am also getting zero real benefit from it until I get another trial done and pick up the +50% to all small nodes ability that should be the ultimate payoff.
All of this frustration aside… I have to say that I am really enjoying Act III so far. I’ve reached what is effectively the halfway point and have been loving the adventures in Vaal temples thing we have going on. While I did not really like doing Incursion, I’ve always been a fan of Alva as a character. I was happy to see her playing a larger role in the second game and quite possibly the larger story arc of Path of Exile as a whole. My character also finally feels good to play, which is a huge thing. I still take the occasional death to something stupid, but I pretty much made it through all of the Act III bosses one-shotting them, save for this fight… which required me to learn some of the tells and mechanics a bit more than simply dodging.
I am also really loving the setting and the lore. One of the Act III themes is a remix of one of the jungle themes from the first game and it is delightful. The whole explorer’s vibe is great as well. Oswald has a Death Journal where he has cataloged all of the horrible manners in which people have died in the jungle. This one was probably my favorite. I’ve already been spoiled on the fight that comes at the end of this Act and I am not necessarily looking forward to it. The end-of-act bosses are massive pains in the ass and just feel like they are giant bags of hitpoints. I helped out a guildie with Geonor this morning and it seems like when you group up with another player, the zone is set at the maximum level of the highest player. As such Geonor didn’t do a ton of damage to me, but it took forever to chip away at his health.
The loot changes that rolled in yesterday have made a significant difference, not just in the quantity of rares but the quality of them. I managed to pick up this amazing Chestpiece as a drop out in the world, and immediately spent artificers orbs on it to swap over to it. I also picked up a decent enough upgrade for boots and swapped to those, but I do wish it had movement speed on them. I am contemplating swapping out my chest for a Wandering Reliquary, mostly because the life recoup seems like it would be really strong even though I would be losing some overall life pool.
I also picked up a few more uniques yesterday taking my total to five. The gloves seem really good, and I might do something to build around them for a second warrior at some point. The mask seems odd more than anything, and given how hard it is to get elemental resistances it seems like a really bad idea to take minus any amount. In Path of Exile this would be a trivial downside and easily geared around, but here… that seems like a fatal mistake.
At this point, I am some 40 hours into the game and slowly plugging away at it. By this point in any other league, I would be halfway through completing my Atlas. This is the thing that concerns me the most about the design decisions that were made for Path of Exile II. I cannot see myself wanting to play this as a seasonal game. It will be interesting to play once… but I am not going to be willing to spend this amount of time just to get “started”.
The post Missing Izaro and Hating POE2 Trials appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Today has gone a bit differently than planned and as a result, I am a bit later getting a blog post out the door than normal. Yesterday I decided to fully embrace the Crab and picked up the last two armor pieces that I was missing from the Blue Crab armor set. I figured this was a fitting visage since I am trying to build tanky in a game that feels like it mostly rewards overwhelming damage output. In theory, though I am on a trajectory that should give me that overwhelming output at some point in the future.
Without really meaning to, I have wound up on an adjacent trajectory to ConnorConverse/OneManaLeft. Essentially I am going down a path of dealing ignites and making things explode on stun, and plan on eventually going down the path of Hammer of the Gods and making it do massive damage with an even bigger ignite. For him, it appears to be working, and for me, I have reached a point where my build no longer feels quite as dumpster-tier as I originally thought. Warriors are in a rough spot where it feels like you have to struggle for an act and a half before you really get enough points for things to come online completely. It probably did not help that I was level 42 and did not have an ascendancy yet.
For years I have said that the most annoying part about leveling a character in Path of Exile 1, was doing the Labyrinth. It is not fun content, but I was wrong to complain… because the alternatives in Path of Exile II are even worse. This morning I managed to finally get through the Trial of the Sehkemas which is effectively Sanctum, and only because I am so defensively geared at this point and have such a large hitpoint pool that I was able to mostly shrug off the damage. I originally had planned on going down the path of Trial of Chaos which unlocks in Act III, because in truth I did fairly well at Ultimatum as Righteous Fire.
The problem with this theory is that Trial of Chaos is so much worse than anything Ultimatum ever dumped on us. In Ultimatum the zone denial abilities are mostly just nuisances because in Path of Exile, we are able to gear defensively enough to mostly shrug them off. In Trial of Chaos, you have to deal with at least twice as many incoming attacks from these, and they deal infinitesimally more damage. I just tried again before sitting down to write this post and chose the lightning turrets, because the alternatives were far worse. What I was not expecting was to get to the boss and effectively have twenty different turrets shotgunning me at the same time.
I suppose I will keep slamming my head against this until either I pass out or learn to enjoy the pain because currently, I am getting nothing from my ascendancy without a second set of two points. At first, I thought I would pick up a different notable, but that wound up bricking my build. So I spent literally all of the gold that I had to respec into the 20-slot bag because it was innocuous enough not to cause any actual harm to what I was doing. That means however that while I am ascended and a TItan, I am also getting zero real benefit from it until I get another trial done and pick up the +50% to all small nodes ability that should be the ultimate payoff.
All of this frustration aside… I have to say that I am really enjoying Act III so far. I’ve reached what is effectively the halfway point and have been loving the adventures in Vaal temples thing we have going on. While I did not really like doing Incursion, I’ve always been a fan of Alva as a character. I was happy to see her playing a larger role in the second game and quite possibly the larger story arc of Path of Exile as a whole. My character also finally feels good to play, which is a huge thing. I still take the occasional death to something stupid, but I pretty much made it through all of the Act III bosses one-shotting them, save for this fight… which required me to learn some of the tells and mechanics a bit more than simply dodging.
I am also really loving the setting and the lore. One of the Act III themes is a remix of one of the jungle themes from the first game and it is delightful. The whole explorer’s vibe is great as well. Oswald has a Death Journal where he has cataloged all of the horrible manners in which people have died in the jungle. This one was probably my favorite. I’ve already been spoiled on the fight that comes at the end of this Act and I am not necessarily looking forward to it. The end-of-act bosses are massive pains in the ass and just feel like they are giant bags of hitpoints. I helped out a guildie with Geonor this morning and it seems like when you group up with another player, the zone is set at the maximum level of the highest player. As such Geonor didn’t do a ton of damage to me, but it took forever to chip away at his health.
The loot changes that rolled in yesterday have made a significant difference, not just in the quantity of rares but the quality of them. I managed to pick up this amazing Chestpiece as a drop out in the world, and immediately spent artificers orbs on it to swap over to it. I also picked up a decent enough upgrade for boots and swapped to those, but I do wish it had movement speed on them. I am contemplating swapping out my chest for a Wandering Reliquary, mostly because the life recoup seems like it would be really strong even though I would be losing some overall life pool.
I also picked up a few more uniques yesterday taking my total to five. The gloves seem really good, and I might do something to build around them for a second warrior at some point. The mask seems odd more than anything, and given how hard it is to get elemental resistances it seems like a really bad idea to take minus any amount. In Path of Exile this would be a trivial downside and easily geared around, but here… that seems like a fatal mistake.
At this point, I am some 40 hours into the game and slowly plugging away at it. By this point in any other league, I would be halfway through completing my Atlas. This is the thing that concerns me the most about the design decisions that were made for Path of Exile II. I cannot see myself wanting to play this as a seasonal game. It will be interesting to play once… but I am not going to be willing to spend this amount of time just to get “started”.
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Good Morning Folks. I have to admit I have been largely radio silent on social media about Path of Exile II, because as you might be able to tell from yesterday’s post… I am not exactly certain what to think about it. I had hyped myself up quite a bit going into the release of Early Access, hoping that my love of Path of Exile would translate into a great time playing the sequel. I think ultimately what I was expecting was a much higher fidelity version of Path of Exile, not necessarily a retread of the Ruthless mode as we got. I’ve asked myself a few times… “Are You Having Fun?” and honestly I am not sure what the answer to that question is yet. I am stubborn as hell and I keep progressing with the same build because in theory, it is starting to work.
Up until this point, all we had seen from GGG was some nerfs of specific over performing skills, but nothing to really address the core of my complaints with the game. This morning we saw the first movement, but I am not really certain it is enough. Essentially instead of adding phasing to dodge roll like the players have been asking… they are doing some fiddly nonsense of lowering the player size to 0 for the sake of collision, meaning if there is a gap at all no matter how big, you should be able to roll out of it. Similarly instead of stopping the nonsense of maps respawning when you die in them… they are making it so we can teleport between checkpoints and adding new checkpoints at the boundaries of various zones within the map. They are making improvements, but not necessarily the improvements I would have made. Time will tell what we might see as a result of this. You can check out the broader statement about planned updates, as well as the pieces that they rolled in over night that did not require a restart.
I hit a hard wall yesterday, and it is the same wall that I watched Jorgen battling on his stream over the weekend. Essentially the Boss at the end of Act 2 is a massive step up in difficulty, especially for melee players… though based on the experience of my friend Ace it might not be a cakewalk on other play styles either. Essentially I was running out of resources and while I could get to the final phase of the fight, it felt like I had to perform perfectly and was just not dealing much damage to the end boss. It seems like this is intended, and that they expect fights to drag on forever as you slowly whittle down a giant bag of hitpoints. I got so frustrated that I had to walk away for awhile.
Instead of walking away entirely, I spent some time playing a Ranger. I’ve played a few alts so far for various reasons, but sometimes going back and playing the extremely well-designed first act helps to clear my mind. I am getting MUCH better at making my way through that content and I find that I am starting to focus on efficiency as I clear my way through the objectives much like I do in POE1. I think it was Ash who made the comment that we felt the same way about the first game until we got better at it, and maybe he has a point because subsequent alts are going so much more smoothly than my first outing. The end of the act boss is still a massive pain in the ass no matter what character I am on. I still do not love their boss design this time around but I am adjusting.
For years now I have been a member of the Cult of Mouse Steering since my friend Ace tipped me off to the idea. I wrote a post about it awhile back, but essentially the idea is that you bind force move to W and then steer your character with your mouse cursor, similar to how you might control a third/first-person game. In Path of Exile, this meant that I had to give up a keybind, but I gladly did it just to play a more comfortable control scheme that did not trigger RSI quite so badly. With the Ranger in Path of Exile II however, it made a lot of sense to try out WASD because it allowed me to easily backpedal while firing off attacks and strafing to the side to keep from getting surrounded. The thing is… it felt pretty great and even when I swapped back to playing my Warrior later that evening, I decided to keep rolling with that control scheme. It turns out a lot of the weird targeting I was experiencing was a side effect of the forced move scenario locking in a target direction, and while it is getting addressed with an upcoming patch it does mean that WASD became a bit more predictable for firing off abilities.
Another thing that happened yesterday is that I decided to engage in the Trade Economy. Much like every player… I have been struggling to find upgrades and it had been quite a long while since I updated my weapon. I did not want to give up the +2 Level of Melee Skills, but I did want to find something that was capable of dishing out a bit more damage. I had come into a few Exalts recently so I spent one buying a new mace and spent a second one picking up a shield with quite a bit of armor and life on it. Lastly, I happened into a Plate Belt with a high armor roll and managed to actually craft that into a decent item using one of the few Regals that I had managed to get. These three items were a significant upgrade to my stats.
I also spent a bit of time last night grinding out some more levels and also speccing and respeccing points until I landed on what I feel like is a good combo of abilities. Resolute Technique I think is critical to my build at this point, because I am not really doing anything to try and gain accuracy and at least that guarantees that I am always going to hit my target. Additionally, I have armor break on heavy stun, and some points into aftershocks and damage recoup of physical damage prevented. You can check out the current state of my tree here, but for the moment I plan on building into the rest of the mace node and maybe going up into the ignite node above it on the tree. I am also contemplating going and getting the Heavy Stunned Culling Strike node. For the moment clearing trash feels pretty great because Herald of Ash combined with aftershocks means I am exploding things quite effectively.
Eventually, I returned to making attempts on the boss and it was completely wrecking me still. I was running out of resources, so I decided to stop trying to do as many big attacks as possible. While it might seem counter-intuitive, I knew I did not have the DPS to rush this boss down quickly and would have to batten down the hatches for a long fight. What I started doing was using a lot more basic attacks to jab at the boss here and there and then setting up a big combo every six seconds, when fist of war support was up so that I would pour all of my efforts into a really big attack and then just spend the rest of the time dodging and poking at the boss. The thing is… this actually worked and I managed to down the boss with almost a full mana flask and about half of my life flask still available. Maybe this is the intended play style for this game… just accept that the encounter is going to take forever and try and reserve your resources as much as possible.
So now I have made my way to Act III, and the final new act in this Early Access client. I will start working my way through that tonight, but I managed to clear to the first town at least last night and take out all of the bosses in the first area. So far it felt fine, and while I was having to deal with a lot of poison mechanics I managed to make it across the zone without taking any deaths. I did get a third unique drop, which is I believe still three more than Ace has seen. I thought while I was having show and tell this morning I would show off the uniques that I managed to pick up. By the time I got Hoghunt it was pretty much useless for my warrior but when I rolled my “BigBonk” alt I used it for quite a well to great effect. Blackgleam Quiver is something that I am using on my Ranger and I am not entirely certain if it is good… or if I am just using it for the sake of using a unique. Last night I picked up Igniferis off the beach of Act III, and it is a weird item. Essentially it takes your Regen and multiplies its effect… but makes it so you only get healed every 4 seconds. I could legitimately see this being an interesting item if you have heavy defensive layers otherwise.
So at this point… I have not given up on the game, but I do feel like it has a long way to go in improving before it is a truly great game. I am coming to accept that I am not going to be in maps anytime soon, and hopefully, by the time I get there, we have a few more patches that tweak the difficulty curve of content. I am somewhat proud that I am sticking with my yolo character design, and that it is weirdly working. I probably need to go more into Ignite since I am never going to crit, but for now moment to moment gameplay feels significant smoother than it did. Bossing is still going to be a bit of a pain in the ass for a long while, but so long as I can keep slowly chipping things down I think I might be able to make it through the remaining acts. I am hoping the improved currency drops really do make a difference and give me more access to better gear as I go up in difficulty.
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