Good Morning Folks. It is a bit of a rough day for the Path of Exile community. More specifically it is a rough time for the folks who were Path of Exile 1 players looking forward to the 3.26 League. While there were not hard dates surrounding it, comments made by the development team around the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access indicated that we could expect the next league to land late January or Early February. We are now in that window and there has been a growing unrest among the player base hungry for information about the next league. The new trials for Path of Exile II are almost universally loathed by the community, causing an surge of Izaro memes. One of the biggest is a thread that has been doubling the number of images of Izaro every single day until we get news regarding the launch date of 3.26.
We can’t really work on POE1 3.26 until 0.2.0 has shipped. And being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks as well.Jonathan Rogers
We got that news… and it was not good. It turns out that Path of Exile 3.26 is not coming anytime soon. Effectively the entire Path of Exile team has been pulled to help resolve the massive issues with Path of Exile II. I think a lot of my poor sentiment over this is being influenced right now by the fact that I am reading Play Nice, the book about the downfall of Blizzard by Jason Schreier. I just finished the passage last night where they talked about how World of Warcraft effectively consumed every available resource from every other team in the company. It certainly feels like we are seeing something similar playing out with Path of Exile II as it is consuming all available attention as the game that put Grinding Gear Games on the map suffers.
During the 2019 Exile Con presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson talked about how they were concerned about splitting the player base, and why they were planning on making Path of Exile II as a content expansion to the original game. Over the years of pandemic era silence this scope was changed, but effectively Chris Wilson’s prophecy has played out. There are a lot of players that did not really enjoy Path of Exile II, a largely group that I am part of that did not like it as much, and then a whole slew of players who were brand new to the franchise and have no clue what they are missing. The choice to focus on a game that is in Early Access, is a purely financial choice. Path of Exile II sold better than they expected and still has peak concurrency higher than some Path of Exile leagues. However for many it also feels like a Betrayal of the promises that Path of Exile was not going to get lost in the hype.
It is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date they are returning to it.
Chris Wilson
As a result… players on the subreddit are taking to using the company’s own words against them. It does in many ways feel like in the push to get Path of Exile II out the door, they have backpedaled on a number of the core tenants that they talked about in this widely viewed 2019 GDC talk. For the outsiders who were never part of this community prior to the launch of the early access, this probably seems odd. The thing that you need to understand is that we were effectively promised that the development of Path of Exile II would not cause the development of Path of Exile 1 to slip.
The release cadence that made Path of Exile the game that it is today is essentially built around the concept of four releases per year. Two would be larger releases, two would be smaller releases, but effectively every three to four months the player base had another league to engage with. The entire flow of Path of Exile centers around the league launch, and then also the fall off of the game after a month or two depending on how successful that league was. At the time of writing this the current league, Settlers of Kalguur launched on July 26th, 2024 and is 188 days old. Prior to this the longest league was Crucible, another league that was pushed out due to work on Path of Exile II at 130 days. They have not been able to hit the target cadence since 2021 with the Sentinel league, which I can only assume also has been impacted by the development of Path of Exile II.
Back in October, I gave Jonathan Rogers a good deal of credit for the communications and transparency when they had to push back the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access. The thing is… this video format of him sitting in the interview suite delivering a fireside chat, only really works so often. This is the fourth of these that I can personally remember, talking about unfortunate events and delivering a public address over whatever issue happens to be going on. What we need is better communication before the train derails. Even in this video he as much indicates that he knew that they were not going to hit the target for 3.26 before they left on holiday break. That is the point where you should have opened up to the community. Many of us were excited to have a new Path of Exile League on the near horizon, and as such it didn’t quite matter so much that the current state of Path of Exile II was pretty shitty. It was “early access” after all, and we had a better game to get excited for soon.
The other thing that really hurts is the loss of Bex, the long time community manager for Grinding Gear Games. She’s been gone since August of 2023, but has never really been replaced in the types of interactions that she had with the community, nor the regularity of communications. We’ve also had the inexplicable loss of Chris Wilson, the previous figurehead of Grinding Gear Games and to the best of my knowledge the last time we heard from him was at the release of the Necropolis league. I get that Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers have stepped up into their roles as leads of Path of Exile I and Path of Exile II respectively… but it still feels weird to not hear the iconic and much memed line anymore: “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games”.
So what do we know? We know that the teams are actively working on Path of Exile II 0.2.0 and we do not have a release date for that, but it will be a massive balance patch that comes with a league reset. Since no timing has been announced yet, I figure that is probably at least a month if not two out. We also know that they will not begin work in earnest on Path of Exile 3.26 until that has launched and that it has been given a few weeks of burn in. So I figure at this point the earliest we will see a new Path of Exile league is April potentially May. In April, the Settlers league will be over 260 days old at that point… so they need to at least throw us some sort of bone. Now is the time for them to dust off some major event like Endless Delve to give players something to focus on while they wait. The NecroSettlers Event was not terribly well received, and that league is effectively dead. I looked to see if I could find a pseudo-six-link helm yesterday and there was exactly one for sale… and it was 260 Divines.
In a perfect world, Eleventh Hour Games would use this opportunity and timeline slippage to slide in and launch Season 2 of Last Epoch. I do not think that is likely, but unfortunately that also means that 3.26 and Season 2 are likely going to be landing around the same time. If I have to choose between the two games I am going to be playing Last Epoch. I don’t want to have to make that choice, but I feel like I am way more excited about the endgame changes coming to the monolith, even though we don’t exactly know what they are. No matter what GGG rolls out with 3.26, it will not be anywhere near enough to make up for the year long Settlers league. This whole sequence has been a real hit to my faith in Grinding Gear Games as a whole. Again… like I said at the top I am reading Play Nice the book about the downfall of Blizzard, and I am honestly seeing some themes playing out here as well. I hope they can pull out of this, but they are essentially spending the goodwill of the player base right now.
Anyways… are you impacted by this announcement? Do you even care about Path of Exile 1? Drop me a line below.
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Good morning folks. I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II while also alternating between it and Last Epoch. I am playing Minions builds in both games currently, and seem to be going through a phase where that just seems to be what I want to do. There are few things more satisfying in an ARPG than running around with a giant mob of NPCs that do your bidding. The Necromancer was one of my favorite characters in Diablo II for this reason, and when that character was launched in Diablo III I had a few seasons where I played it there as well. Biggest happening of the extended weekend is that I spent nine divines on a new sceptre. Essentially I wanted something with at least level 19 Skeletal Warriors on it, because to the best of my knowledge there are none available with level 20 on them. I am not sure if this is even a thing that can roll, but upgrading from 18 to 19 should still be a significant boost.
When I started running a Storm Mage I had to drop one of my Arsonists to make it work, and while this worked great for Rares and tankier packs… I noticed it negatively impacted my overall map clear. As such another benefit of the sceptre swap was that it gave me enough spirit to pick back up another Arsonist. Additionally I had enough left over spirit to add a second cleric, which seems to greatly improve the sustain of my minions. My poor little cleric worked overtime healing up my minions and having a second one just spreads out the total healing. Basically everything seems to just have an easier time staying alive which is good, especially given that my infernal hound is eating a portion of damage dealt to me.
Today however is the launch of Season 7 in Diablo IV and I plan on popping in tonight and giving it a shot. Raxx released his tier list for characters and right now has Necromancer as number one. Generally speaking his tier lists are fairly accurate or at least present relatively sane early data. The thing is I was already leaning heavily towards playing a Blood Wave Necromancer during this league since I appear to be in minion mode right now. The fact that they look like they are going to be in a good place is only really gravy on top.
I’ve MOSTLY played Barbarians in Diablo IV, because generally speaking I prefer to play tanky characters or big bonk characters when given my druthers. However Barbarians have been in a bit of a mess this entire time and they feel kind of awful to level. I’ve always been partial to Necromancers, but to the best of my knowledge have never actually played one through the endgame. A bunch of mine got pushed up to level 50 when the expansion dropped, but I am not certain I have ever actually organically taken one of my characters to paragon levels as a Necro. I figure this is a good opportunity to give it a shot. I’ve also never really played a Rogue either and at some point want to play some sort of a bow build.
I’ve had more than a few complaints about Diablo IV since its launch. That said I have never understood the false dichotomy of needing to hate Diablo IV to love and appreciate Path of Exile. D4 has been in a bit of a mess but by the time the expansion launched it was in a pretty decent state. Is it a brilliant game? No. Is it a fun game? Yes, within specific parameters and for a shortish period of time. I’m kind of ready to be playing something other than Path of Exile II, because there are also a lot of things about that game that I do not like. Unfortunately 3.26 is nowhere in sight, so that means I am more than happy to hop on the next train that leaves the station… which means Diablo IV Season 7. If I can get a few weeks out of it before this particular brand of gum loses its flavor, then I will honestly be extremely happy.
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Good Morning Folks! I talked about Path of Exile II Patch 0.1.1 on Monday after its reveal over the weekend, but yesterday afternoon/evening it finally dropped. So of course last night I had to dip my head back into the game and check out what it felt like after the patch had landed. First I have to say the improved zoom level on the Atlas is pretty massive. This is only going to really be something for players who have reached maps, but being able to see more of the procedurally generated Atlas is pretty big. Additionally it seems like they have improved some of the general bugs. In the patch notes they specifically called out better load times which is true, but it seems like the rings of effect surrounding towers is rendering more reliably than it was previously.
Probably the biggest change is the ability to see the various Citadel maps through the fog of war. Sure enough I was close to way more of these spawns than I thought even though I had actually found several already. One undocumented change is that each of the beacons has a unique color so not only can you see the Citadel, you can actually see which one it is going to be with Iron being a Blueish Gray color, Copper Orangish Yellow, and Stone being traditional Vaal Red. I think this is going to go a long ways to normalizing the prices of the various tokens because now you will be able to clear towards whichever Citadel you are lacking. I need to do another Copper so that I have the tablets needed to make an attempt at the pinnacle boss so that I can hopefully clear the encounter and get my last two boss passives.
Another thing that I was surprised by was that all of the towers on the map that had not been completed, were effectively re-rolled. I thought I would not start seeing new towers until I reached portions of the map that had not been generated yet by removing the fog of war. Instead it seems as though all of the towers were randomized among the new maps, and quite honestly… this is a pretty massive improvement. All of the new layouts are so much better than the original tower save for the Vaal themed one… which suffers from the general “tight corridors” problem that all Vaal maps do. Even the old tower map has been improved significantly by moving it to the more open top of spires layout. This combined with the fact that minions instantly respawn when you get out of range now, cleared up a lot of the problems I had with tighter map designs.
More important than just improving the layout, it feels as though Towers in general are way more rewarding. I’ve gotten significant drops from pretty much all of them that I have completed so far. They seem to have better density of rares and surprise map mechanics like essences and strongboxes. So these might have gone from something you wanted to throw a trash map into just to get past them… to something you actually want to save good maps for. I ran a bunch of them with T15 maps as I am also now seeming to sustain them way better than I was previously. I’ve noticed a lower instance of low level maps dropping and a much higher drop chance of t12 and higher maps, with quite a few t15s each map that I run.
Augury is still Augury… and I think GGG missed part of the memo on this one. You can in fact now interrupt the levers.. but they still take three seconds to pull. Being able to dodge out of a bad encounter while you are pulling the lever is great and all… but maybe make them instant. Additionally at the end of the map it is super annoying that you have to wait for the doors to the central area to unlock. Maybe speed up the Vaal energy surge so that it moves faster than the player so that by the time they reach the door it is already clickable? Better yet…. just make flipping the third switch open the doors automagically. I get that GGG seems to be hung up on this whole immersion nonsense… but clearly we play the game differently than they do. I feel like we need to pay off someone within GGG to make it so that Jonathan and Mark ONLY get Augury maps while they are playing the game so this will get improved.
Another nice benefit is that maps now have checkpoints just like the campaign. This is pretty great for when you path all of the way to the end and notice that you missed a rare at the very beginning. This still feels like a bandaid though, and if they are going to stick to having rares as the map objective… maybe just highlight the rares from the moment you zone into the map? I feel like there are a lot of things that should just be on permanently on your map instead of having to get into range with them. When rituals, breach hands, strongboxes, and essences are all things that should be flagged on the mini map permanently so that you don’t have to worry if you have missed anything. By the time you get to maps the game is not about immersion but instead about efficiency… and maybe it should have different rules than the campaign does.
I am not exactly the best judge of this next point, but it FEELS like the game got a bit easier. It might just be that due to all of the map layouts improving and I am no longer having to fight with terrain collision near as much… I can just move around more freely and am less susceptible by getting stuck on some rock or tree. I took a single death last night, and honestly it was my own damned fault. I was trying to remove the ability on my left click and set it to punch… not realizing that it would swap away from my weapons if I ever used that. Sceptres do not have a default melee attack… and it flipped to gear set two which did not have any weapons equipped… desummoning all of my minions and I did not realize this until I was toe to toe with a monster… dealing zero damage… and getting wrecked. Other than that mishap I have felt pretty immortal even now that I have started putting layers of delirium on all of my maps for funsies.
Was this enough of a patch to make me dig back in for another three hundred hours? Probably not. I didn’t even make it the full evening without flipping back to playing my Necromancer in Last Epoch. The improvements are significant but I think I am probably tapering off my POE2 time until the next league reset. I will likely poke my head back in each time there is a patch, but for now I am in a holding pattern probably until Path of Exile 3.26 and will be playing some Last Epoch for a bit, and then diving into the next Diablo 4 league after that.
The post Path of Exile II After Patch 0.1.1 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday afternoon Grinding Gear Games released an announcement trailer for the changes that are going to be landing this week in Path of Exile II Patch 0.1.1. This was then followed by an over two hour long Tavern Talk with Darth Microtransaction and Ghazzy TV where they talked with Mark and Jonathan from GGG about the state of the game and the upcoming changes. We won’t know a lot of the specifics until the patch notes actually drop, but the announcement video itself is well worth a watch and is roughly 8 minutes long. If you do not want to sift through the two hour long Q&A the shortest summary that I have seen is from Raxxanterax. SirGog released a similar summary this morning where he talks about some of the specific ramifications of the changes as well. There is also a Reddit thread that bullet points the list of changes if you just want the TLDR version.
This morning I am going to share some of my thoughts about what are some of the major winners of this patch, and what are the losers thusfar.
The Winners
Juicier Maps and Map Identity
We don’t have details here but there are a batch of changes that are targeted at making the gap between the juiciest map and the worst map a bit smaller. Especially early maps, the entire process feels useless and you are not really getting much in the way of usable stuff until you are pretty deep. Specifically they called out improving mob density and making the overall rewards a bit better by default. Similarly they said that there was going to be some sort of specialization system so that maybe a specific map would have a hidden modifier that might make the chests extremely good, or have more essences etc.
Strongboxes are Improved Slightly
Strongboxes were just not worth running because they took forever to finish spawning all of the waves of monsters and had a significant built in delay between waves. This seems like it is being removed and instead of instant popping like POE1, they will spawn in more akin to an Abyss Spire from the looks of it. I am mostly okay with this. They don’t seem MASSIVELY improved, but seem like they are going to be better overall.
Less Visual Clutter and Better Visibility of Monster Effects
This one is pretty huge but they have made a pass to remove some of the ground clutter in maps and have made it so that it is much easier to see visual effects on monsters and their attacks. Specifically it seems like they are doing some sort of tech to render these effects over top of the other layers of visuals so that they will be much harder to miss. I think this is probably what was causing the “random death” problem that players were fighting with is that we simply could not see any of the effects that were being rendered due to all of the visual noise. This is also extending to Delirium Fog, so that you will actually be able to see what the hell is going on.
Better Tiered and Expedition Items
Tiered loot was bad, and apparently this was due to a specific bug in the way these items were being calculated. Some of the culling of lower tiers… actually kept affixes from spawning entirely that did not have higher affixes. Attack speed for example notoriously only has a few affix tiers, the negative… so did light radius. Who knows if this will actually make Tier 5 loot worth picking up but we will see. Additionally they are making changes to the rarity of loot that appears through expedition crafting, so hopefully that actually becomes a viable method for getting some early gear.
Citadels in the Fog
One of the biggest challenges for actually running the pinnacle boss was finding the damned Citadels. They are making a few changes here, the first being that they can spawn closer to the origin point than they previously could. Additionally you will be able to see a glowing spire of light out in the fog of war, so that you know what direction you should be working towards in order to get to a Citadel. This is pretty huge overall. I am not sure if this is going to cause the Citadel market to crash though, because I was making quite a bit of currency tracking these down, clearing them, and then selling the tokens.
Six Pinnacle Boss Portals
Related to this… the tokens might actually be worth using instead of just selling thing. Starting with Arbiter of Ash and eventually ALL of the Pinnacle bosses, you are going to get six attempts at the fight. As you move up in difficulty with the encounter you will get less respawn attempts, but everyone should be able to get six attempts at the zero difficulty. I will probably making an attempt on the Arbiter once, and then go back to selling my tokens because I am really not a boss-centric player. However since more people will be attempting the bosses… it should actually make the demand for tokens a bit higher than it currently is.
Atlas Zoom and Biomes
You will be able to zoom out further on the Atlas of Worlds so that you can see more nodes at a time. Additionally when you mouse over a node it will clearly indicate what biome that maps is in. This is something I specifically called out in one of my posts. I sincerely doubt anyone from GGG has ever read one of my posts, so I am certain this is probably something they were already working on. This is specifically tied to one of the Atlas passives that causes increased chances for specific types of drops in maps within that biome. It was really hard however to tell what map was in what biome.
More Boss Maps and Precursor Support
The design goal for the Atlas of Worlds was that one in four maps would contain a boss. This did not actually shake out, because some of the maps cannot have a boss attached to them. As such they have made tweaks to the spawn rates so that hopefully it will be closer to this one in four ideal. This seems like a good call because in truth it was really hard to find maps that had both Irradiation and Corruption to complete some of the boss atlas passives. Boss maps in general seem to just drop better loot, so they are probably the ideal things to run anyway. They are also adding precursor tablets that can add bosses to maps that do not have them, so that you can further juice your map by adding more of them.
More Tower Maps
The existing state of tower maps in the game is just bad. Most players wanted them removed entirely and the process of juicing maps to be reworked significantly. We are not getting that. However they are adding four new tower maps and improving the layout of the existing one, hopefully making the process of running towers feel less bad. I think the biggest problem right now with towers is that they just feel unrewarding since the towers don’t actually inherit any of the map buffs from other towers. Maybe the overall buffing of map rewards will fix this.
Runes Can Be Overwritten
This is one of those things that pretty much everyone universally was asking for, because it made gearing your character annoying… and a lot of items less valuable because they might have the wrong rune socketed into them. Essentially you reach a point in your builds where you are overcapped on resistances and could them dial back on some of the runes to add something more valuable like defensive layers and life. Additionally there are a lot of soulcores that are super powerful, but you won’t have access to these early on… meaning you can eventually swap out for these as you fix other gear problems.
Armor and Scavenged Plating Buffed
Armor is in an awful state and there have been a lot of videos expounding upon why this is the case. Apparently GGG agrees but specifically said that more needs to happen, but it would not be happening until they do an economy reset with a new league. However in the meantime they are buffing armor a bit and specifically buffing the spirit gem that is associated with scaling armor. We do not know the specifics here, but I am hoping it will be enough to actually make this a viable defensive layer.
No Major Nerfs
Similar to the above item, since they want to reserve significant sweeping changes for largely economy reset patches where they roll out a new league… there are going to be no significant nerfs to any of the existing builds. The only thing that they are nerfing right now are issues that impact server stability and performance. The various “cast on” abilities for example were legitimately crashing server instances so they had to tackle those immediately.
The Losers
No Major Buffs
Once again since they are not making sweeping changes without a league reset… all of the under-performing classes are likely to stay in the shitty state that they currently are. Darth Microtransaction actually went on the offensive a bit during the podcast and effectively made Mark and Jonathan agree that the state of Warrior was not good. This is unfortunately not changing and we will still have a game dominated by four builds… and if you are not playing one of them you are doing it wrong.
No Six Portal Maps
This appears to be a hill that they are willing to die on… but they do not want to give players back six portals for maps. A single death is still going to adversely impact the player and cause them to lose their waystone and the stuff that was on the atlas that made the map worth running. This feels bad and feels like a forced hardcore mode. They did however say that they think the penalties are a bit too strong right now because multiple problems are stacking on top of each other leading things to feel bad. They instead want to smooth out the mapping experience rather than giving players six portals.
No Map Tab… Yet
They said that they are working on it, but as of right now we are still not getting a map tab. This is probably the single biggest issue for me that makes the entire endgame experience feel bad. I consider there to be two tabs that are mandatory to enjoy the game… currency and maps, and having to try and deal with two quad tabs full of waystones and another overflow tab that I have in the guild bank… feels bad.
No Campaign Improvements
This again might be related to the lack of buffs for classes, but the campaign can be a bit rough for certain classes right now. It has some significant difficulty spikes that can crush the will of folks to move forward. GGG stated that they are pretty happy with the current state of the campaign, and I think maybe this is a loss. There are multiple levers that need to be flipped and maybe once the other classes are in a decent state this will no longer be an issue. At this point I have leveled four characters through the campaign and it was “fine”.
No Ascendancy Respecs
While not necessarily a hill that they are dying on… there seems to be a dumb amount of resistance to allowing players to respec their ascendancy class. This is something we were able to do freely in Path of Exile 1 and it feels bad not being able to do it now. Essentially right now it feels like there are certain ascendancies that are “noob traps” and if you chose them… you are just borked. This hurts the more casual players the worst because in its current state, it is exceptionally cumbersome to level more than one character through the campaign.
No Trial Improvements
Trials and the entire process of ascending is sort of bullshit right now. I hate it so much. During the Q&A it was specifically asked that if they thought the fourth ascendancy should be an endgame goal that the average player will never accomplish. For the most part GGG said yes. This is dumb. This feels exceptionally bad. I think the entire process of ascending needs to be rethought from the ground up and that Sanctum and Ultimatum should be optional content.
No Minion Collision Fixes
Right now minions fail to enter most doors, forcing you to wait on them to respawn next to you. This feels awful. Right now there are no major changes coming for minion collision problems. They are working on a solution but have not landed on something that actually works right yet.
No Phasing on Dodge Roll/Movement Abilities
This is still something that I feel like the game needs. Right now movement abilities and the dodge roll still get caught on mob collision and I feel like this is a poor design choice.
No Proper Auction House
I realize this is going to be something that probably never happens, but since we have the currency exchange it only further underlines just how bad the trade system in Path of Exile 1 and 2 are. The chinese players have had an instant purchase auction house for awhile… we need this for western audiences.
No New Gold Sinks
Gold feels useless right now and the current state of gambling feels awful. Apparently Gambling in the hideout was removed last minute due to an exploit of some sort being found. They are working on adding Alva back to he hideout with proper gambling support. However there still needs to be something else that we can do with gold.
A Mixed Bag
I think for the most part the changes are good. I still take umbrage with some of the design decisions that they are standing by. I am curious to see what the actual patch notes look like and what other hidden details are contained within them that they did not highlight in the announcement trailer. I think I am at the point of stepping away from the game until the next league reset. I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Last Epoch and it felt amazing. I think I am ready for a break from the mindset of Path of Exile 2, and I am most definitely ready for the next Path of Exile 1 league.
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