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.
The post Spare Keys and Spoiler Season appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Don’t Take Vacation for POE2 Early Access appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Goodbye Necro Settlers appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I gotta admit I am still reeling from last week but luckily I am off today… so it means I get an extra day to decompress. Since the world still feels like shit, I needed to retreat into some very familiar comfort gaming, and the Necro Settlers Event league in Path of Exile has fit the bill. This is a bit weird for an event league because there is no fixed end time, so it has effectively turned into a reboot of the Settlers League which I assume will end when that league ends. The league started on the 7th and at this point I am into mapping with a character that can probably get me all the way through t16s. I went RF Chieftain again because it is comfy and familiar and I know how to get it up and running without much deep thought. I am fully expecting to play a fairly scuffed character because event league economies can be a bit weird and limited.
Event leagues always have some gimmick associated with them, and this time around it is all of the normal Settlers of Kalguur mechanics with the addition of the Lantern of Arimor from the Necropolis league. They removed all of the negative modifiers from the pool and additionally since Allflames are no longer dropping… they are just being applied to your maps automatically. What has been interesting is that all maps of a specific tier for a specific timeframe will share the same pool of lantern modifiers. This means that joining a shared global chat is a good idea as folks tend to share when a certain zone is really hot. This creates massive fluctuations in the price of specific maps when they are running a desirable combo, and also creates a situation where Horizon Orbs are more useful than they have ever been in Path of Exile history.
All of this made getting through the campaign rather interesting. I was going much slower than normal, but also having random league mobs showing up in your maps made it a bit more challenging. An example of something that I saw is during Darresso’s Arena in Act 4 is that nothing but Suphite Golems was spawning other than the Dogs that come out of the various gates. The entire place from start to finish was just yellow golems throwing chunks of sulphite at me, which would be great if I were actually messing with Delve right now, but also kind of wild when you get shotgunned by multiple packs at the same time. I think it was Mudflats where I first encountered the Unique Gemling mobs that drop random gems, and there were a few times early on that I just ran from Meatsacks because they took too long to chew through.
The other really weird thing about this league has been its economy. There are certain lantern combinations that print massive amounts of chaos. I’m hearing that some folks with appropriate juicing are seeing upwards of 200 chaos in a single map. There are no real equivalent mods that drop Divine Orbs, which means that the currency conversion between the two is outrageous. For those who do not know normally you trade in the range of 200 Chaos to a Single Divine Orb, but over the weekend at one point it was trading 500 to 1. This has all sorts of trickle-down effects on the economy as a whole meaning that things that would normally be a 5 Chaos item are selling for 60 Chaos or higher. There are a lot of folks who have not caught onto this yet, because there are items priced at 1 Divine that are in no way worth effectively 400-500 Chaos.
Luckily though I have found plenty of raw chaos and items that I can sell easily for chaos, and it has allowed me to outfit myself in the basics of a RF Chieftain build. I’ve not gone life-on-block based yet, so am still rocking the Rise of the Phoenix shield to cap out my Fire Resistances. I’ve not done the last lab so right now I am sitting at 90% Fire Res and 80% Lightning and Cold Res. I am currently using a four-link Cloak of Flame but am outfitting my atlas to do the Einhar/Ritual strategy in hopes of dropping either an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan so that I can six-link it. I spent 70 Chaos on the chest specifically because I was looking for one that would be good enough to bother six-linking eventually. Luckily the Cloak is relatively easy to get RF colors on of BBBRRG. You can see the rest of my scuffed gear in this POB link.
Since I am off today, I plan on slowly chipping away at my Atlas and doing everything I can to unlock more points. I got a wildly lucky drop earlier where I opened a Unique map lockbox and got two that I needed. Sadly the third was the damned pvp map which is always a waste of time. I wish you could use Horizon Orbs on Hall of the Grandmasters in an attempt to get other unique maps. I will however happily take a Twilight Temple map since that is often one of the ones that goes for quite a bit later in the league. Path of Exile and honestly any ARPG is comfort gaming for me, and I needed this more than I realized. I was having plenty of fun with Veilguard but was essentially in the “chores” section of the game where I needed to do a bajillion sidequests so that I could comfortably move the main story forward. Essentially I was in the “hinterlands” again, and needed a bit of a break.
Are you playing Necro Settlers Event league? What are your thoughts so far? Would you want to see the Lantern of Arimor go standard? Drop me a note below.
The post Necro Settlers Event Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
