Good Morning Folks. Yesterday we got a bit of news from Eleventh Hour Games that they would be delaying the launch of Last Epoch Season 2 from April 2nd to April 17th. This is to create some distance between their launch date and that of Path of Exile 2 and its first league on the 4th. This whole situation is frustrating because multiple sources have stated that Eleventh Hour Games was in communication with Grinding Gear Games regarding their choice of April 2nd making it an extreme dick move to schedule their own start two days later. I entirely feel like GGG is in the wrong here… but there also may be some external forces at work that we do not know about.
Whatever the case this is probably the right decision for Eleventh Hour Games. As stated in a Zizaran video talking about this situation, it is rare that people go back to a game after the launch… so that would likely mean folks would play Last Epoch for a day or two… if they even gave it a shot at all, and then would flip to Path of Exile II and never look back. I am disappointed mostly because right now I care far more about Last Epoch than I do Path of Exile II. I do not think that there is going to be enough in the upcoming patch to really shift the trajectory of POE2 enough for me to truly enjoy it more than the first game. I might be shocked on the 27th when they announce all of the content, but in truth I mostly just want to get my hands on the redesigned endgame for Last Epoch.
In the meantime I am still playing quite a bit of the Legacy of Phrecia event. In theory I should hit level 99 tonight and I am starting to pick back up and work on some of the challenges that I never completed from Settlers of Kalguur. I’m cycling between Delve and mapping and still only have two of the four voidstones unlocked. I should probably work on that, but I hate the process of grinding for the fragments required to attempt Maven and Uber Elder. The whole bossing system in Path of Exile feels bad to me. I feel like there should be quest support for all four voidstones like there are the first two so that you can knock these out in a relatively straightforward fashion. At some point I should probably try out a T17 again to see if I can complete that, but my build is not exactly great at bossing. Generally speaking I just do not enjoy that side of the game and the whole process of getting access to the fights.
I have burned through a good chunk of my reserves of gold and dust in order to start up a bunch of mappers. One of the league challenges from Settlers that I never knocked out was running 200 t14 or better maps at 100% success rate with mappers, and I figured I might as well start chipping away at that since I am still playing. If I can push to level 100 and complete the rest of those maps that will knock out one more of the challenges and potentially give me a bigger totem pole for my hideout. In truth Path of Exile is just a comfortable activity for me to spend chill evenings listening to an audiobook, and has kind of become my default gaming activity. I hate that among the AggroChat folks, I am the only one who seems to have really reached that point with the game.
I am also still pushing forward with Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon because I hate having a “did not complete” in my list. I swapped over to the Soundbooth Theater version of the audiobook and it is infinitely better than the one I was listening to earlier. There is a significant difference between being read a book out loud, and having someone act out a book… and at this point I have become spoiled by the later. This is a brutal story… in content… and in just how much graphic detail is put into it. I am not sure I would ever suggest this to someone else, but it has enough of a hook into me that I am going to see it to its conclusion. Effectively this is Hostel style torture porn, and my kink does not run in that direction.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have the entire crew this week. We start off the show with Bel explaining to Kodra the weird faction war currently happening in the Path of Exile Reddit. Bel also talks about his experiences so far with the Legacy of Phrecia event. From there we talk a bit more about Avowed now that Tam has had a chance to play it. Kodra shares his experiences with Civilization VII talking about how wildly different of a Civ game it is. From there he also talks a bit about Pigment and his ambitions to speedrun it. Ash shares his thoughts about Dynasty Warriors Origins and Tam discusses a Steam recommendation find, Deliver At All Costs.
Good Morning Folks. Sometimes I sit down before you to talk about what nonsense I have been up to lately. Other times I act as an internet anthropologist and document weird things that I am seeing happening in games and their communities. This morning we are going to be wearing that second hat as I talk about something that is currently going on with the Path of Exile Reddit. While Grinding Gear Games hosts a proper forum, I would say that the beating heart of the community is likely the Reddit, and recently there was a thread hatching a plan to buy up all of the Sanctum Tomes available at the launch of Legacy of Phrecia and deleting them… thus spawning the Anti-Sanctum Alliance. Shortly thereafter Captain Lance spawned the concept of the Sanctum Rushers United later turned into Sanctum Runners Union to attempt to counter this plan.
The battle lines were drawn and folks started chipping their hat in with either side. For example Neversink indicated that he would be hiding tomes from everyone’s filters and throwing support to the ASA. This was hopefully a joke, but it was taken seriously enough that folks started posting the code to highlight tomes so that people could restore it to their filters. Then came the propaganda from the SRU both on the Reddit and in the form of YouTube videos. Various streamers in the community started throwing their hats into either camp for example Zizaran is a known Sanctum enjoyer. I personally hate Sanctum and would happy throw my hat into the ring with the ASA, but in truth I will probably just hoard the tomes until Kodra wants to run them… since he is a friend and also a Sanctum enjoyer.
If you have ever questioned if the devs at Grinding Gear Games read the Reddit… this should be proof positive that they do. They even got in on the action and posted a poll on Twitter asking which side the exiles will fight for. At the time of writing this the ASA is winning by a decent margin, and between the time I took the above screenshot and looked as I sat down to write this… the poll has crossed 14k votes. Sanctum generates stupid amounts of Divines per hour, for the folks who have built characters designed specifically to run it. I would be perfectly happy if it just went away… and it seems sad that Sanctum went core… but we also lost Metamorph which was a mechanic that I did enjoy greatly.
The battle lines were cleanly drawn for a short amount of time between two opposing forces… but in truth Path of Exile style folks decided that they were not necessarily represented by either side. This spawned the creation of all manner of other “organizations” representing other favorite league mechanics.
ASA – Anti-Sanctum Alliance
SRU – Sanctum Runners Union
CHB – Crop Harvesting Bureau
COD – Children of Delve
SSS – Simulacrum Secret Service
CLEAR – Committed Lab Enjoyers’ Agency of Revenue
FBI – Fungal Bureau of Investigation
OM – Order of the Mist
KGB – Kalguuran Group for Business
AGI – Alch and Go Industries
BBC – Big Breach Coalition
WETA – Wraeclast Engineering and Temporal Architects
SIH – Sitting in Hideout (doing one map per hour)
CASUAL – Cards and Sometimes Unique Acquisition Lobby
IRS – Institution of Rogues & Smugglers – Redacted
The meme above is right… things are in fact getting out of hand. This though… is probably part of why I love this community. It is completely nonsense and will take something to the extremes… but like the Toucan and Krangled it just becomes part of the culture.
If you have read this blog for any length of time… you will know which faction I truly belong to. In the wise words of Jorgen… Delve Provides. This is the mechanic I keep going back to over and over because I really do enjoy Delving down in the mines more than pretty much anything else. I love the endless scroll of nodes and finding a comfortable level to set up and start farming. Even with my recent Ice Trap Trickster from Pohx League… I am back down in the mines seeking treasure. When I do not Delve I just miss the generic bubblegum currency that it produces in addition to all of the unique stuff that comes from down there. My role in Path of Exile is to provide the stuff that comes from Delve to the people who choose not to partake, and truthfully… I think choosing any role and dedicating to it will lead to decent currency gains.
In other more important news… yesterday the Map Stash tab was finally released for Path of Exile II, and the game instantly became more playable. I managed to snag one of the Guild early in the morning while the weekend stash tab sales were still going on. Then I spent what felt like an eternity trucking waystones from quad tabs over to the new map stash tab with affinity. I am not really playing much Path of Exile II, but I am certain this will be a welcome change whenever I do return. The map stash can hold 576 waystones of each tier with room for the corruption only tier 16 as well. Anything that makes the process of storing loot faster is very welcome. What we need now however is the Fragments tab, because the Maps tab does nothing for our tablets.
The Legacy of Phrecia event starts at 12pm PST on Thursday the 20th… so I have until then to figure out what the hell I am going to play.
The post The Exile Faction Wars appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Since I finished the season in Diablo IV, I am now much more focused on Pohx League. I am very only likely to be dipping my toes back into Necromancer fun times when Ace wants to play, and particularly as we work on some of the seasonal objectives for them. In Pohx League I rolled something that was completely new to me, and it has been shockingly fun. I had never really played a Trickster before, or honestly gotten anything based on the Shadow class to maps. I’ve also not played a pure traps build even though Righteous Fire derives a lot of its damage based on Fire Trap. Ultimately I set out wanting to try a Trickster and then found a build that seemed like it might be enjoyable with that Ascendancy and rolled with it.
This build my friends… is ludicrous. I’ve never played anything with this level of full screen coverage. Sure my lightning arrow and later elemental hit of the spectrum builds could off screen enemies, but nothing to this point has ever just blanketed the entire screen in death. Yesterday I made some significant tweaks to the build and migrated to the “final form” and shifted over to Ice Trap of Hollowness. This is an alternate version of Ice Trap that comes from the Labyrinth that essentially scales up the area of effect of the traps, so that there is a dead spot in the center but MUCH wider coverage. It also has a much shorter time to trigger on its own, which makes it prime territory for some shenanigans.
Essentially to exploit the benefits of this alternate version of Ice Trap, we swap so using the Sunblast unique belt that makes it so enemies cannot trigger your traps, but allows you to throw 2 additional traps and explode on their own significantly faster. A perfectly rolled Sunblast is 75% reduced trap duration, but I was only able to afford a 61% one in Pohx league given the limited market. Since Tinkerskin works exclusively based on when traps are triggered, this means we need to move away from that chest and the most common choice is to go with a Carcass Jack for the additional Area of Effect and Area Damage scaling. The end result… is just truly silly for map clear because you essentially hit the entire screen at once.
More important than that, since I can easily have 17 traps up at once there is quite a lot of overlap which leads to shotgunning. The trick however is that you need to dance around the screen to limit the amount of mobs that are in the dead spot in the center that deals no damage. For bossing it is pretty straightforward to swap back to using the normal Ice Trap but it does mean having to take a moment to swap out your primary gem. I’ve never really loved gem swapping, but it does make enough of a difference to be worthwhile and will be even more so if I can get a slightly better roll on my Sunblast belt. What is nice about this build is with the swap it is both an extremely fast mapper and a pretty competent bosser. If you are curious I dumped a POB of the state of my build.
The only thing really lacking with this build is general defenses. I have enough layers to keep me from getting one shot, but I do have to hit my potion way more often than I would care to. There are a lot of things that I ultimately need to do to scale up the defensive layers, but the biggest one would be a load more evasion. Right now I have around 65% evasion and 90% lucky spell suppression combined with around 3500 hit points and 1700 energy shield. The only thing that is really going to one shot me is chaos damage, because I still have negative resistance in that department. Essentially the build is good enough to probably finish out the Atlas and unlock a few of the boss encounters, but would really need to find better versions of almost every rare slot in my build to make it feel a bit more comfy. Were I playing in a normal trade league this would not be a problem at all… but in a limited time event league there just isn’t a ton of stuff available for prices that I can afford.
I think much like it was in NecroSettlers, my first goal is going to be unlocking my full Atlas. When I get my third passive tree I plan on building it out to be Ritual and Einhar for the purpose of trying to farm either a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to turn my five-link into a six-link. I am pretty happy with the state of my build craft in Path of Exile, where I can make a character function without trade intervention more or less. I still like trading for specific upgrades, and I like selling random stuff as well… but I like knowing that I can mostly get a build off the ground and capable of mapping on my own. I will likely never be a big crafter, nor someone who dives deep into market manipulation… but I do like that I can be fairly self sustaining. That is a pretty huge thing coming from the very rocky starts that I had back in Sentinel and Kalandra leagues to where I am today.
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