Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.
Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.
Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.
Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.
There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.
After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.
The post It’s Getting Better appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.
Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.
Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.
Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.
There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.
After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.
The post It’s Getting Better appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks. Well… I did not actually stop playing Path of Exile II. I am a deeply stubborn human being at times, and I kept pushing forward and have managed to get things into a semi-viable state. Warrior right now is probably the most functional class in the game. Until yesterday 9 of the top 10 spots on the Hardcore leader-board were playing the Smith of Kitava. Now several Lich builds have snuck into the top 10, now that the chaos dot contagion tech has become more common. Conversely there are only three Huntresses in the top 100, and the first one of those is sitting down at spot 21. Not that I play Hardcore, but you can generally use it as a gauge of the success and viability of builds more than you really can the softcore characters.
So how did I reach a point of viability with my build? Essentially it was the second set of ascendancy points that pushed me over the edge, and had I realized how much of a difference this would have made I probably would have chosen these as my first points. Basically I farmed a decent normal body armor from Act 3, and kept farming until I had enough socket and quality currency to attempt a corruption. I did not win the one in four, and got nothing added to my chest piece but it has still worked well enough. That 5% life generation was just enough to take the edge off my incoming damage and give me time to react with a health potion when I started taking shotgun damage. What has been frustrating however is just how much time I have spent vendor shopping for quality and socket currency. Essentially each time I ding a new level I bounce back to all of the act vendors looking for anything I can salvage… so I can hopefully set up for my next upgrade at some point.
This largely set me up to finish Act III, and in truth things were pretty easy from that point forward. That is not to say it was not tedious. Essentially my gameplay is Leap Slam and then when I land hitting Boneshatter to blow everything up. Now that I have some leech on my weapon I can sustain my mana reasonably well, and I am no longer having to survive on potions alone. That really is the point at which both Path of Exile 1 and 2 start to feel decent, is when you can automate your regeneration of life and mana to the point where you ONLY have to care about potions to deal with large hits. Potions are awful and have always felt bad, and I hate it when you are struggling and just have to keep downing one after every fight. Doryani took forever, but it was reasonably easy… so essentially my only real roadblock was Viper and once I had some regeneration I managed to push through that without much issue.
Last night I picked up a pair of Trampletoe boots off trade for one exalt, and I have been using these to pretty solid effect. Yes these were nerfed so that they do not do the massive chains that they used to. However this does not really matter because it gives me a second bit of explode so that when combined with my Herald of Ash it essentially blows up most packs. The only thing that I have to stop and fight is rare mobs, which mostly just mean I have to throw out a single perfect strike. I’ve managed to get into a pretty good rotation of leap slam/boneshatter repeated forever. The only things that I really have to watch out for are poison and chaos damage… both of which completely shred me because I have zero chaos resistance. At some point that is going to be something I focus on… hopefully with my next set of armor upgrades.
Now that I have gotten past some of the mechanical frustration… we are left with the loot frustrations. This game feels largely unrewarding. My POE1 brain gets excited when I see a rare chest in a zone… and then upon opening it all of the dopamine drains rapidly out of my system when I get two blues and 15 gold. Note… I am not filtering out any loot here. I am running Filterblade but was simply not getting enough loot that I backed off all the way down to the softest filter, which only serves to shrink the font size of items that it deems worthy of filtering out. When I killed Doryani at the end of act 3, he dropped 2 rare items, 2 magic items… and around 100 gold. The loot just feels so phenomenally throttled, that I am not sure what the heck is going on. This is why I hate magic find as a stat… because it is clear that the GGG folks are assuming that we are stacking it and throttling loot by default to make up for having this stat in the game.
At this point I am level 52 and heading off to Fight Count Geonor at the end of Act IV. I’ve been following a relatively generic boneshatter tree and at some point I will respec a bit to be able to pick up Giants Blood and go Two Handed Hammer and Shield. I am really interested in some of the build tech that OneManaLeft is using, that Carnarius also used a bit towards the end of last league. Essentially they drop Leap Slam and pick up Blink so that you can blink from pack to pack and then mace strike to explode the packs. You can check out Connor’s POB for the full version of the build. As I get more currency I am going to start shopping trying to pick up an Infernoclasp which I will eventually need to hit 90% fire resistance. If nothing else it will serve as a pretty decent belt for the time being… but as of right now the prices are all over the place.
Am I having fun yet? The jury is still out on that one… I am having less frustration than I was having so for the moment that has to count for something. I still feel like there are deep problems with the design of this game. Do I think it is as simple as Chris Wilson good Jonathan Rogers bad? No… not really. Games are not the product of a single person, and no matter how much the community points this out does not really make it true. It does feel like GGG does not understand their own game however, nor really understand what made Path of Exile so great. They are trying to build a different game, but right now… they are whiffing in empty air because this is not working. The longer the game goes on… the more it is clear that the original design is not going to be the thing people actually want to play for the long run. I fully expect that as soon as Last Epoch launches its second season… Path of Exile II is going to be a ghost town.
At some point today Zizaran is supposed to be sitting down with Jonathan Rogers for an interview about the Dawn of the Hunt league. I am going to be extremely interested to see how this shakes out, especially given that Ziz has rated this league 4 out of 10. I am hoping that GGG goes through with the interview because quite frankly, Ziz is probably the person who is going to be the most respectful towards them, and they cannot avoid the bad press if they were to cancel it. Tonight I will be wrapping up Geonor and moving on to Act 2 Cruel, so we will see if the “better” continues.
The post Better But Not Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I did not do a blog post on Friday because I just was not feeling it. I hoped maybe the new Path of Exile II league that launched that afternoon/evening would pull me out of my funk. In truth it did… but it replaced sadness with rage. When the game launched I wrote at length about what I considered to be the problems with that game, and I remember Zizaran specifically stating in one of his videos at the launch of the game that what we were playing, was the worst state the game would ever be in. At the time it helped me put some of my own feelings into perspective and I thought sure… it can only go up from here. I chose a more meta build and then honestly had quite a bit of fun getting through maps and farming quite a bit in the endgame. I only got to level 94 on my Minion Infernalist, but that seemed reasonable enough and mostly I just got bored of the very limited state of the end game.
I thought the first release of the game needed some work. Essentially there were four builds that were viable, and I expected those to eat the nerf bat, but hopefully others would be buffed up to reach a point where we had a dozen or so viable builds instead. This is something that they absolutely know how to do… because builds like Penance Brand of Dissipation have eaten massive nerfs… but still remained completely viable choices if someone just happened to enjoy that particular play style. Hell my own love of Righteous Fire and the number of drastic changes in the way it is built over just the few years I Have been playing… is proof positive that balance changes in Path of Exile 1 have mostly been about pruning the outliers. In theory if we had more viable builds and more endgame variety… this league could have been a banger or at least something that I would enjoy to tide me over until Last Epoch.
The day before the patch was set to launch we got a post outlining the changes… and it was nothing but wall to wall nerfs. So much so that it did not just bring builds in line… but absolutely decimated almost every even vaguely halfway viable build from the first league. Warrior was probably the least impacted, but a lot of the things that made them powerful boss hunters were destroyed. Hammer of the Gods now requires you to build up a resource rather than just having a cool down. So we thought it was bad, and admittedly we were warned by Jonathan that it was going to involve a lot of nerfs. What we were not prepared for… was this was only the tip of the iceberg. The nerfs went so much deeper, to the point of builds that seemed viable from these patch notes were themselves untenable when the game actually released.
Were this just a me thing… it would be one thing. However every streamer has effectively come out and talked about how this is the worst update they have ever played. Wudijo seems to be enjoying himself, but he is so damned good-natured that he could not even muster venom over the worst Diablo IV patches, so that checks out. The core POE streamers are all various shades of miserable. Steelmage is generally a super chill dude, but in an impromptu podcast with Zizaran he talked about how generally miserable he has been. Empyrean has just bailed on the league entirely, and others appear to simply be playing because it is financially beneficial for them given that there are twitch drops active. I watched a friend of mine yesterday who seemed to be in good spirits… but watched her and her partner spend 30 minutes dying over and over to the Dreadnought in act II.
I am currently playing what is apparently the strongest and most meta build out there… a generic bone shatter warrior that I have ascended into Smith of Kitava. My damage output is reasonable, but it feels like I am wearing tissue paper for gear… when I have just shy of 1000 health, 1500 armor, and capped elemental resistances at 75/75/75 at level 45. I get interrupted constantly when trying to attack and the only thing that seems to feel halfway decent is Leap Slam to Bone Shatter… with Perfect Strike for harder mobs. However I effectively have to wait until I have stunned something to actually get one of the Perfect Strikes off successfully because otherwise I keep getting stunned out of the channel. White mobs in Path of Exile II, feel like bosses in Path of Exile I in the amount of damage that they are dealing.
There have been numerous points where I have rage quit out over the weekend. The first was dying over and over to these stupid chests in Act 1 at level 5. Why in the hell these things are so murdery at such a low level is beyond me. I suffered through Act 1 on Friday and took out Count Geonor and started on Act 2 before getting frustrated and playing some Path of Exile 1 instead. On Saturday morning I started off with succeeding at the Trial of the Sehkemas and ascending and then chipping away at Act 2, eventually beating it before the end of the night. Once again I had to go play something else because Act 3 was annoying me. Doing anything in the game just feels cumbersome. It isn’t so much that it is challenging, because that denotes it is something that learning from mistakes would improve. Instead it just feels like I am being bludgeoned by a thousand little cuts, each one sapping more joy from me.
Last night’s rage quit moment was Viper Napuatzi, a boss I have never had trouble with in any previous incarnation of this game. Essentially I was getting ripped to shreds by the poison, and my perfect strikes were doing nothing. I seemed like I was able to get her down to around half health and then there health bar would stall out and never dip any lower. I tried this fight a half dozen times before logging out and playing some Last Epoch. I had to do something that felt good for awhile to dull the annoyance and frustration of Path of Exile II. At this point you are probably asking yourself.. “Bel why the fuck are you still playing?”, and in truth I do not have a good answer for you. I would say I am doing it for the content… but that would be a lie. I am doing it because I hate the concept that this fucking game ground me down into the ground, when even as much as I did not enjoy it at times previously… I still pushed through it and figured out a way to have fun. I keep thinking that if I beat my head against this wall hard enough, I will eventually grow numb to the rage.
This morning before sitting down to write this I managed to complete the Trial of Chaos and got my second set of ascendancy points. So much about this stupid Trial seems to be getting a good batch of RNG and getting one option out of three that does not completely fuck over your build. More than that for my build, it also requires that I do not get the Chimera as the final boss… because that fight ends up being a comedy of errors as you have to traverse this gigantic fucking map with the hope of it sticking around long enough in one location to actually get a hit off before it flies off again. Now I need to spend a lot of time farming materials so that I can outfit a reasonable white chest-piece… socket it, get it to 20% quality, and then attempt to corrupt it for a third socket so I can assign those ascendancy points.
This morning they released a “What We’re Working On” post… but honestly I think I am too bitter to read it at this point. To me it just reads like them attempting to justify the decisions that they made which have led us to this point. There have been enough negative Steam reviews to have flipped the game into mixed rating… with 66% of recent reviews being negative. As frustrating as the campaign has been… I am now seeing statements from streamers that the endgame is even worse. Kripparian talks about running a six mod rare map with stacked rarity on gear and on the keystone… and not seeing a single rare item drop in the entire map. It has felt like both experience gain and loot has been nerfed in the campaign, and I have never before felt like I needed to go farm previous areas just to get levels, but I have been actively doing that in this play through. Unless something significant changes during the course of this league, it will probably be the last that I play for Path of Exile II. There are just better ARPGs out there and I am frankly having more fun still in the Legacy of Phrecia temporary event than this mess.
Right now I am giving it until the start of Act IV before I truly give up. That is of course if I can figure out a way to beat Viper in Act III and move on to Doryani. If not… or if the game does not improve in the cruel difficulties like it did previously… I guess I will just be playing around in Phrecia until Last Epoch drops on the 14th. My level 100 Righteous Fire Scavenger has reached a point where I am pretty easily farm T17 maps and was able to faceroll my way through Sirius over the weekend. It seems like a lot of players are back in Phrecia because the sheer volume of trades that I was getting pinged about was extreme. Mostly I chuck every jewel I get into a 20c tab and it is effectively a constant ping of players wanting this gem or that. Legacy of Phrecia legitimately has the most diversity of builds that I have ever seen in a Path of Exile league. Unironically this temp event that they just threw together… is maybe one of the best leagues they have ever created.
Anyways… did you try and play Path of Exile II this weekend? What were your thoughts? Am I completely off base in my rage and it seems fine to you? Drop me a line below.
The post The Worst Path of Exile League So Far appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
