Good Morning Folks! I’ve had a bunch of friends asks me assorted questions about Path of Exile II, the supporter pack tiers, and what they should spend their cash shop points on. So I am doing what I do almost every time a bunch of people ask me the same question… create a blog post that will hopefully help many players. So the first question is whether or not the $30 supporter pack is “good enough” or if they really need something in the higher tier packs. Path of Exile does this weird thing where they sell supporter packs for the same face value as they sell shop currency. The cosmetics that are included in the various packs are just that, pretty things you can equip but have no real bearing on the game itself.
There are a few examples of cosmetics that grant you some nice-to-have ability. For example, I have a ring that keeps track of all of the currency items that have dropped on the ground since I equipped the cosmetic on that character. I have a map device in my hideout that I just swapped to recently, that keeps track of the number of White, Yellow, Red, and Purple rarity maps that I have run during that League. These do somewhat improve my enjoyment of the game, but they are not required to have by any means. The supporter packs have cosmetics in them that will go away at the end of the year when they roll out the next version of supporter packs. Similarly, the league-specific supporter packs go away when the next league starts. So if there is something that you absolutely feel like you have to have, there is a bit of time-limited FOMO surrounding it but it is not game-changing.
What is however fairly game-changing is the ability to purchase additional stash tabs. Once purchased these tabs carry forward for each league that you play, and when you start a brand new league you get an empty set to populate with items that drop during that event. When a league ends you get remove-only versions of these tabs in the Standard league so that you can retrieve your items. I have a lot of them, but I am also a massive packrat when it comes to gaming. I am one of those folks who install a mod to disable encumbrance in pretty much every game that has that concept. This is what I have spent the vast majority of my supporter pack currency on over the years and I have every specialty tab, as well as a number of quad tabs for storing things during the league. I recorded a video yesterday talking through my feelings regarding various stash tabs you can purchase, but I will dive into it in written form this morning.
If you bought the basic $30 supporter pack, that means you have 300 points to spend. First I would absolutely wait until there is a Stash Tab sale going on. In theory, these should occur every 3 weeks or have traditionally… which means if that schedule holds on Friday just as the POE2 Early Access is beginning there should be a Stash Tab sale going through that weekend. The three tabs that I would focus on as a brand-new player are the Currency Tab, Map Tab, and Premium Quad Tab. Currency essentially allows you to store 5000 of every individual currency type in Path of Exile/Path of Exile II meaning there is a heck of a lot of value in that one tab. Map Stash tabs are the second most valuable tab specifically in the endgame and I feel like similarly, the Tablet drops which replace Maps in Path of Exile II will likely fit into this tab. Premium Quad stash tabs are four times as big as normal tabs and also have the ability to sell items from them on the Trade website, which gives you the option to become a market baron later on.
Like I said you want to wait until these go on sale because you cannot buy all three for your initial 300 Currency at the normal prices. However, if you wait… you absolutely can. Generally speaking, the sale price is 20% off.
Stash Tab
Normal Price
Sale Price
Currency Tab
75
60
Map Tab
150
120
Premium Quad Tab
150
120
375
300
So off sale you are 75 points shy of being able to get the three tabs with your 300 points, however, while the tabs are on sale it works out to be exactly 300 points pending the sale is the standard 20% off.
So say you had bought the second tier of supporter packs and had 600 points to play with, here are the other tabs that I would suggest as useful. Essentially my methodology here is to choose the tabs that give you a lot of storage for things that are otherwise annoying to store in a bulk tab. Divination Cards are sets of cards that you can turn in for items, and this tab stores 5000 of each individual card type which is way more than you can stack in a single tab of any other type. Essences are going to be really critical for crafting in POE2 and again these store large quantities of each individual type of essence so well worth having. Fragments are similar in that most of these don’t stack in your inventory but will stack to large quantities in the specialty tab. Lastly, the Unique tab is something you are probably going to want at some point, especially if you are the type to hold onto uniques just in case you might have a build that needs one later.
Stash Tab
Normal Price
Sale Price
Divination Tab
50
40
Fragment Tab
75
60
Essence Tab
40
32
Unique Tab
140
112
305
244
So again if you wait for these tabs to be on sale, you can pick up all of this for that extra 300 points and then have some left over to play with. Essentially always wait to buy stash tabs until they are on sale because the sales happen on a fairly reliable basis. Again if the pattern holds, the next time they should be available is starting this coming weekend.
The cool thing about Stash tabs and cosmetics in general is that within reason, they apply to both Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I got some bad news yesterday that apparently guilds do not transfer between the games, so I will have to create a new copy of our guild in Path of Exile II, and similarly will need to rebuy the guild stash tabs. However like I said above… I am going to wait until the Stash tab sale before doing this so that I can stretch my points as much as possible. If you can wait, I would say a general rule of thumb is to never pay full price of any cosmetics because there are other reoccurring sale types that cover hideout decorations and skill effects as well.
The last bit of advice I would give you is to avoid the cash shop traps. Firstly they have blind loot boxes that you can purchase that give you a random cosmetic from a unique set of cosmetics for that league. They have built-in duplicate protection so that is at least nice, but if you are patient enough all of the cosmetics from these loot boxes go on sale as individual microtransactions during the next league, so roughly three to four months down the line. So if there is something specific that you want you can just pick that up rather than wasting your money trying to pull it. Lastly, the Stash Tab bundles are only a trap because once you get used to using Quad Tabs, you will wish that you had never purchased anything but those. The bundles are normal tabs, and there is no way to upgrade 4 normal tabs to a single quad tab at least not as of yet. The difference between Standard and Premium is that Premium tabs give you the ability to list items on the trade site from them. Essentially you are paying for the privilege of having that tab indexed by GGG so that you can list items from it.
I am hoping that this has helped someone out there because admittedly everything about Path of Exile and Path of Exile II… is a lot. The thing is that Grinding Gear Games is one of the few studios that I actively want to give more money. I feel like the Microtransactions really do get funneled right back into game content, because so many of the leagues are outrageously detailed. Even the loot boxes have some really interesting stuff in them, but like I said you should really focus on building out stash tabs for your account because those are things that are always going to be useful for the life of your account. Given that I exclusively play league content, and never play standard… having a fresh set of tabs each time a brand new event rolls around is super nice. You can also keep those remove-only tabs pretty much indefinitely so at the end of a league I just dump them in a folder named after the league that just finished and ignore them unless I specifically need something from them.
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Good Morning Folks! We’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern in the Path of Exile community wondering exactly when accounts would be flagged for early access for folks with a lifetime spend of $480 or more… aka the price of the largest yearly supporter pack. Apparently, that happened overnight and I was able to confirm something that I hoped would be the case. When the supporter packs went live last Thursday I bought one that granted early access and was wondering if I would also get a key from the lifetime spend. It turns out that yes I did and while my spare key was already spoken for, you might check your early access page to see if you also got a spare key. Essentially you consume the key on the key redemption page and then go back to your early access page and snag the Steam key so that you can register that and be ready to download whenever preloading begins. I appreciate greatly that I got a spare key instead of just flagging the account.
We are well engaged in spoiler season, and it seems like GGG is releasing a new video pretty much every day. The one that launched overnight was for Ball Lightning, Archmage, Sigil of Power… and Wildshards which answered a question that I was having about support gems. Essentially it has been stated that we only get to use a single support gem once per character, and there were a lot of gems that ended up being added to multiple links on your character. In Path of Exile for example Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support and Greater Multiple Projectiles Support were used universally to make abilities split into multiple attacks. It seems as though Wildshards is a special version of this that only works with spells which makes me wonder if we are going to get several different flavors of commonly used supports tailored to very specific use cases.
The venerable SirGog released a video yesterday with a VERY important reminder in it. Essentially it is presented as though it were going to be a tier list for ascendancies, but really… none of us know anything about what the game is going to be like and how strong specific abilities are going to play. There are a handful of starter tier lists floating around and they are all essentially nonsense. I know personally I am going to do something with a Titan and probably use Giants Blood the notable that allows me to use a Twohander in one hand… to do Twohanded Mace and Shield. I am diving into the player fantasy that I want for a character because I have always loved that type of character when a game allows me to play it. I know roughly where in the tree I am going to be heading based on some preview nodes, but I fully expect when I level up for the first time… that I am going to be spending thirty minutes looking at the passive tree to figure out how I want to path.
Another Jonathan Rogers interview came out yesterday, this time with Talkative Tri but I have not had a chance to watch it myself. I thought it might be useful to sort of catalog all of the interviews that are currently available with different groups of people.
So far these are the four that I am aware of, but there might be more out there in the broader community. What I noticed with a lot of these interviews is that it seems like they are branching out from the core of the insular community. DM for example is wildly popular with the Diablo IV playerbase and has a really broad appeal. Talkative Tri focuses mostly on trying to present a really positive viewpoint in games and is relatively new to the scene. Legendary Drops comes from a totally different community and only recently started playing the game seriously with Settlers. Essentially it seems like they are doing a good measure of outreach to try and connect with a broader base of players.
There were a lot of folks who were invited to some recent event in LA and apparently there was an embargo on the footage that they recorded there. As such pretty much each day there are new revelations about the passive tree. For example, this is a video focused on the Warrior and its tree that I will be at some point watching through to try and get a feel of who I am going to path when the game releases. I apologize for anyone who is not into Path of Exile, because this blog is pretty much going to me obsessing about the game until it releases and then gibbering madly once I finally do get my hands on it. As I said yesterday… I’ve not really felt this way since the launch of World of Warcraft with a game consuming this much of my mental focus.
I figure I will probably take the next two days off from the blog so for everyone who celebrates, I hope you and yours have a very Happy Thanksgiving.
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Good Morning Folks! I’m in a massive hype cycle for the early access launch of Path of Exile II next Friday. However, I would caution you my dear readers… to not actually take time off from work to play it. I’ve been watching something with a bit of trepidation, which is Path of Exile 2 climbing on the top-selling games list for Steam. Something important to know about this list is that this is based on the amount of cash brought in by that product, which is why the Steam Deck for example is eternally at the top of this list because it is a very expensive item. Another important thing to note about this list is that a large chunk of POE players… are not actually buying things through the Steam store. None of the purchases I have made for example have been through Steam and are instead bought on PathOfExile.com meaning that you are seeing a minority of the total amount being spent on early access for Path of Exile II.
I am fully expecting that when the game goes online at 1 pm my time… the servers will be a complete mess that is likely only to get worse as we roll into primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely going to attempt to play next Friday but I am also preparing for the worst. If Jonathan Rogers was saying during the DM/Ghazzy stream that the numbers were significantly higher than they were expecting… I would believe him given that the game moved from 5th on the high sales chart to 3rd since yesterday. As a veteran of many a bad MMORPG launch, I would just suggest you not blow any of that valuable vacation time until the first few weeks have stabilized a bit. I am about as hyped as anyone could be for this thing, but have a backup plan because I fully expect the game to be largely unplayable for the first 48 hours. Maybe GGG will surprise me, and I hope they do… but I am also giving them leverage to adapt without holding them accountable for the extreme hype levels.
I think a lot of this hype comes from the fact that for the most part, Diablo IV has been unsatisfying. It stirred up the desire to play an ARPG… but failed to deliver anything that holds attention for long periods of time. Path of Exile has been considered to be largely unapproachable by most players and Path of Exile II is in many ways an attempt to open the door to folks who bounced the first time they saw the passive skill tree. Do I think Path of Exile II will be casual friendly enough to gather the mass of disillusioned Diablo IV players? Probably not. However, there are going to be a lot of people who are amped to give it a shot and as such… given how well Diablo IV sold… we are going to see similar numbers throwing themselves into Path of Exile II early access. I think GGG knows this is going to be a problem and is scrambling last minute to sure up their infrastructure but no amount of load testing can really compete with the sledgehammer of millions of players battering down the gates and flooding the first few zones at the exact same time.
Please note that this sober advice is coming from someone who is chain-watching pretty much every bit of information coming out about the game and has rewatched the opening cinematic a disturbing number of times at this point. I am fully enthralled by the game at this point and am ready for the doors to open. However, as someone who has been in this position… taken time off from work in order to play a game that was largely in permanent maintenance mode for weeks… don’t do it. I am not sure there is a chance in hell of this being a perfectly smooth launch. Line up other games to play while waiting for the servers to right themselves. There is going to be plenty of time to play this game in the coming months and unless you are a hardcore racing type… really there is no rush to be there first. The economy is going to take weeks to sort itself out anyway.
Mostly I love you all and just want to limit your frustrations… and nothing amps up frustration more than making specific plans to do a thing and then having those plans effectively canceled by technical difficulties.
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.
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