Good Morning Folks! Over the last week, I have felt like Gold Five telling my friends to “stay on target” any time they have been tempted to buy stash tabs. I knew this day was coming soonish because there is always another stash tab sale around the corner and it is never a good idea to buy them at any other time. So now is the time for you all to spend those cash shop coins that have been burning a hole in your pocket, and get some additional stash tab storage space. However, this has been way less of a thing with Path of Exile II because so much less loot is actually dropping. Additionally, prior to the launch of the game, I took a wild guess at which tabs would be valuable but had the fatal flaw that the Map tab currently does not exist in any form in the second game. I figure at some point this will change but for the time being… I gave you incorrect data as to which tabs would be valuable. This morning I hope to remedy that.
Essentially in Path of Exile 1 and 2, there are two types of stash tabs. There are those designed to store a specific type of item and have the ability to set affinity so loot automagically goes into those tabs. Then there are just bulk storage tabs that you have to organize manually. In the first category, after some 50 hours of playing Path of Exile II, there are only two that I find actually useful. That is the Currency Stash Tab and the Gem Stash Tab. We don’t necessarily get massive quantities of currency, but I value the ability to rapidly dump it into my stash and have it sorted into the correct bins. This is a tab that becomes more useful the longer you play. Gem Stash Tab is mostly because I get a ton of uncut gems and I prefer to have some magical bin to dump them into that sorts them based on various parameters. This is only really going to be a useful tab if you are going to spend a lot of time on alts like I often do.
In the other category, you have Normal, Premium, and Quad Stash Tabs. Normal and Premium are both 12×12 grids and the key difference is that Premium allows you to engage with the trade system and list items. Quad tabs are literally just 4 times the size of a normal tab and are trade-enabled by default. This honestly really is a matter of player preference. You can see individual items easier in the more “zoomed in” nature of the normal tab, but you can store a heck of a lot more items in a Quad tab but they also cost considerably more. In Path of Exile 1 the only real choice is to go to Quad tabs for everything because a lot of semi-useful loot is dropping. In Path of Exile 2 however… there really is not much that you would want to keep so could probably get along just fine with normal tabs.
I guess while I am talking about stash tabs, I will discuss the other four types that have a POE2 equivalent. The Unique Stash tab allows you to store a single copy of every unique item in the game. This is useful in POE1 where they drop like candy, but less so in POE2 where I have seen seven… and I am well ahead of most of my friends in that count. Flasks were way more important in POE1, and as a result this tab is like a vestigial appendage that no longer makes a ton of sense. You are not really going to be storing a ton of these so no point in buying a custom tab for it. Essences similarly in POE1 were a lot more common and had a lot more varieties. I have seen six total essences since starting the Early Access, and while I already owned a tab… there is no way this is worth purchasing now. Lastly, there is Delirium, which is a mechanic you will not even encounter until you have completed acts 1-3 and cruel 1-3 and start doing the endgame content. Definitely not worth having until you have a specific need for it.
The other thing that I have had friends ask me is how to donate points to your guild. Since guilds did not copy over from the first game, it also means that we did not get to keep our cache of stash tabs. I bought a single Quad tab just so that we would have some swap space for trading items between players, but was holding off on buying more until the sale weekend. Essentially this is way easier to do in POE2 and you open the Shop interface and then in the upper corner there is a button highlighted with a green arrow that allows you to donate points to the guild. This will then open an interface in the center of your screen with a slider and a donate points button also marked with green arrows. Essentially set the slider to the number of points you want to donate, and then hit donate and the guild leader will get a message indicating that you have donated points, and once accepted those points become available for them to purchase things for the guild with it. This is a oneway transfer and there is no way once accepted to transfer points back out of the guild bank.
As far as the game goes, I am nearing the end of Act III on my Titan, but last night I decided to have a bit more chill gameplay and spent time on my baby Witch. I’ve essentially gotten to the end of Act 1 and just need to storm the manor and kill angry dogboy. Summon Raging Spirits is such a massive improvement when that unlocks, and I went from sluggish clear to pretty much being able to move at full speed and decimate everything in my way. Bossing is a bit awkward, but hopefully, that will improve over time. I am essentially just cursing things and then spamming Fire Wall, with a bit of Unearth whenever there is a wave of adds to get extra explosive minions. Since we are in a time of Guides, I am loosely following the Infernalist Minion Army build.
I hope this weekend I will wrap up Act III when I am feeling up to a bit more stressful gameplay and move into Cruel difficulty. I am still enjoying Path of Exile II, but it is the sort of game that I can’t really see playing in a league scenario without at least a lot of watering down of difficulty. Everything is a bit too slow and sluggish for my tastes, and for the moment it feels like a “one and done” type experience.
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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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