Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a wild ride work-wise for me and this morning has been similarly wild but I have a bit of a gap and am going to try and bang out a blog post in the spirit of Blaugust. After I finished with my sixteen hour day I unwound with a bit of Path of Exile while listening to various YouTube videos. I managed to get my last round of memory altars and finish up Eldritch Expeditions giving me 35 of 40 for the league. The challenge here is the fact that memory tears aka the things that replaced atlas memories, are pretty freaking rare even though I have stacked up +40% chance on my atlas. There are a bunch of mechanics like this that I wish we had scarabs to force onto a map… like I would love to do that with Sentinel for example. I fully expect that Memory Tears are permanent, since they were part of an endgame expansion to the game and not necessarily tied to a league mechanic.
I would really like to knock out another challenge so that I could finish unlocking the cosmetic armor. The issue is that all of the remaining challenges are a pain in the butt. In theory the one I am closest to, also requires me to “get gud” as it were. Basically you have to complete the new endgame encounters while avoiding taking specific attacks, and quite honestly I am not sure what half of the effects that are called out are and would have to look them up. I made an attempt at Incarnation of Fear but failed to correctly identify which mechanic I needed to care about. Strenuous Summons is the easiest but also the one that requires the most grinding. Recollections Realized is pretty straight forward… I have more than enough memory influenced maps so it is just a case of running them. Then I would need to buy a bunch of boss tokens from the currency exchange and run those as well. All of that is doable even though I don’t really enjoy fighting bosses in Path of Exile. Any fight that takes longer than few seconds feels like a massive bore, and since I do not play bossing specific characters… they all take longer than I care to commit.
The reality though is that I am pretty much out of time. Tomorrow at 11 am the Beneath Ancient Skies season for Last Epoch drops, and at that point… I am pretty much going to stop playing Path of Exile for awhile. After Last Epoch has run its course, I will probably swap over and play the new Path of Exile II league. That means that if I do not finish it up tonight… it is highly unlikely that I will return after those two games to knock out another achievement before the next Path of Exile league in October. I am pretty amped about Last Epoch and I know that once I get back into the game, all thoughts about the Mercenaries League are going to fly out of my head. The one that I absolutely COULD complete tonight is the one that requires all of the boss summons, because it is simply me setting my mind to doing it and then acquiring all of the stuff to complete it. I am back up to just shy of 90 divines after my massive currency dump on my alts and I am sure I can probably afford to buy my way out of this problem.
The other major distraction is that today at 3pm CDT there is a Path of Exile II reveal stream with the upcoming Third Edict league. Over night however there were a massive series of leaks from a French publication outlined on Reddit. Sir Gog released a video that is essentially him going over the leaks on livestream if you are curious. I am only really interested in terms of seeing how much more is in this league than was released on that site, because it seems as though at some point during the publishing of this content Grinding Gear Games caught on and asked them to stop. During the stream today there will be Twitch drops so manage your lives accordingly so you can pop in and get a finisher effect. If the leaks are correct there are a massive number of changes coming to Path of Exile II that are going to fundamentally shift how the game plays. What really matters though is how it feels to play, and we won’t know that until the 29th.
Lastly we got a cinematic reveal for the next World of Warcraft expansion yesterday and I feel mixed about it. This trailer does not feel like Blizzard trailers usually do. It feels as though it came from a trailer house and not from the in house team that has done all of the amazing cinematics in the past. I know the Blizzard marketing team was recently dismantled… and I can’t help but think the uncanny nature of this trailer is a direct result. It could also be that I am further removed from the Warcraft fandom than I have ever been at this point. I barely played Dragonflight and I started War Within but never made it out of the first zone. There is a heck of a lot of cool stuff coming with this expansion, and my friends who are still engaged with the game seem to be excited. I can’t necessarily say I will not play it at this point, but I am also not nearly as drawn to it as I am for example with the new Guild Wars 2 content drop on October 28th.
Wrapping this post up. I am hoping that I can maybe squeeze out one more challenge before I put Path of Exile to bed. If I can do that, I can walk way with a clear conscience and not look back.
The post Out of Time appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
