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. This is a topic that I am really frustrated and sad to have to bring you, because I thought Diablo IV was well on its way to an epic redemption arc. By the time the Vessel of Hatred expansion rolled around, Diablo IV was in a pretty great state when it comes to the sandbox aspect of the game. Mechanically the classes felt pretty solid and the expansion added a whole slew of new activities. Season 6 mechanically was somewhat forgettable, but there was so much other stuff going on with the game that we mostly lost focus of the season itself in the midst of everything happening with the expansion. Season 7 was quite possibly peak Diablo as it represented the closest we have seen to the ideal flow of the game. The game still really lacks anything resembling a proper endgame loop, but the leveling and gearing aspects of the game were spot on.
The seasonal mechanic was essentially a retread of the most successful season ever… Season Two and the vampire themed Bloodtide. This new “Witchtide” as I called it represented a super fun repeatable mechanic that made leveling and gearing feel amazing. So much so that it essentially eclipsed every other bit of content in the game. Similar to Diablo III, it took about a week to get geared and capable of tackling Torment IV the highest difficulty and at that point it was mostly just hanging out and running bosses, which always felt amazing because you could pool your resources with your friends and get a ton of loot out of it. All they really needed to add is something resembling a proper endgame with something akin to an Atlas of Worlds from Path of Exile, or a Monolith from Last Epoch and the game would be rocking. Add in some more chase items and and varied repeatable endgame system and the game would have been on good footing.
However this week we got the Campfire Chat for Season 8, and it seems as thought Blizzard is unlearning everything that they have learned and largely fucking everything up. Basically when you lack a proper endgame loop… what do you do? Release incremental upgrades to the game that keep adding more functionality until you reach a critical mass of so much content that the player never lacks something to do? Fuck no. You release another season with a borrowed power system and slow everything else down as to delay the inevitable point of boredom behind a more tedious treadmill. You can see the entire live stream here, or I would instead suggest just watching Raxx’s breakdown video. I am going to talk about some of my points of frustration from the presentation.
What do you do when you don’t have enough bread and too much toast? Well you spread it thinner of course. As such Diablo IV is having its leveling curve slowed down significantly. Why were players leveling so fast? Because of the Witchtide and how perfectly repeatable that endgame loop ended up being. Without that… the leveling curve would have been considerably slower, but it does not seem like the team realized that. Instead they are planning on slowing down the entire progression curve so that you spend more time in the doldrums of the mid-levels instead of zooming to the level cap and then spending the rest of your time working on actually building out your character. Essentially in a seasonal model the level cap is the beginning of the game… not the end of it. The slower you make leveling, the more folks that are just going to give up before they finish it.
It is weird how people can look at the same statistic and take wildly different things away from it. 50% of players made it to Torment IV, which to me seems like a wild success of the game as a whole. Torment IV is again… to me, the beginning of the real game. That is when you can farm things the most efficiently and get the best loot rewards. The fact that 50% of the players made it to that point seems like a real win. The team however wants Torment IV to be an aspirational goal… and that number to be around 10% so as such are cranking up the difficulty curve. Again… when you lack an endgame you have to slow things down so that players don’t realize they have nothing that they are grinding for. Diablo IV has a lot of disposable treadmills, that are not that fun in themselves. They have vehicles for generating loot, but no real fun mechanics that are sustainable in the long run. There is no Betrayal, or Heist, or Delve, or even no surprise content like Essences, Legion, or Breach that make the mundane aspect of playing the game feel more exciting. They have awful mini-events that have no real payoff and apparently the act of leveling is the reward in itself.
We were also apparently getting gear too quickly… so they are slowing that shit down as well. Once you hit level 60.. everything that drops that is not an Ancestral drop is useless. Most of your time dealing with loot is looting things that do not matter at all. They say that they want Magic and Rare items to matter, but in order to do that… Magic and Rare items have to be competitive with Ancestral Legendary items. When your game is effectively collecting the right stat sticks with the correct Legendary Aspects on them… the more stats you have on an item the better it is going to be. In Path of Exile Magic and Rare items can be competitive because they have systems in place to make them competitive through Unique items that have specific parameters and a robust crafting system that allows you to turn exceptionally well rolled Magic items into a Rare with perfect stats on it. Slowing down the acquisition of the Legendary items needed to get your build online is going to feel awful. It legitimately feels like they do not play their own game and most definitely do not play the other games in the same market.
Quite possibly the worst change is one that is hidden behind something that adds real quality of life. Obtaining the right widgets to summon a boss is sort of annoying, and you always end up with a lopsided and mismatched number of items. So limiting it so that every boss is keyed off a single item is a great change. However making it so that you only get loot if you have one of the boss keys… is fucking awful. Additionally it is slowing down the loot acquisition of uniques that are required to make builds work. One of the highlights of the last several seasons has been when Ace and I have pooled our boss materials together and did an entire evening of nothing but summoning bosses chasing the ancestral uniques required to make our builds feel good. It was an amazing feeling because you end up drowning in loot because every summon I did paid off for Ace and vice versa. Now we are going to get half the amount of loot, because in order to get ANY of the drops from any given summon we are going to have to pay our own boss materials. I get that this is designed to fix some hypothetical problem with random strangers not paying their way in boss summoning groups… but wildly fucks over the more likely scenario of friend groups pooling their resources.
I can’t really complain about the seasonal power mechanic because it seems like they have taken to heart the lessons learned from the vampire event, and then reinforced recently with the witchcraft event. Being able to pick and choose which abilities you want to buy is a good model and it appears that there is a currency to spend on unlocks that let you target which abilities you need for your build. However my core complain with borrowed power systems is that they are fleeting and are throw away content. In a game that is lacking content, it feels wildly inappropriate to squander resources on something that does not stick around the bolster the future of the game. This is not how you turn the tide of there being “nothing to do” when you finish leveling. This is why you end up with this design path of slowing things down, because you simply do not have enough content to soak up player attention. You are wasting resources and creating a temporary heatsink for a fire that keeps raging season after season.
All of this feels so much worse because it was released on the same day that Last Epoch dropped this phenomenal trailer. They get it. They get that they need to invest time in broadening the game and making interesting things for players to do once they have finished leveling. Similarly Season 7 was overshadowed by the release of Path of Exile II Early Access. Thankfully Last Epoch Season 2 lands on April 2nd… a few weeks ahead of the reason of Diablo IV Season 8. By the time the season of summoning Belial hits, I will be otherwise engaged and am I guess fine with this one being a stinker. If you are a Diablo IV player, I highly suggest you check out Last Epoch. Unfortunately there is no console version but the PC release is $35 and worth every penny.
I am legitimately really saddened to see that Diablo IV is going in the wrong direction now. I had a lot of hope for the game. Season 7 was a freaking blast and I was legitimately looking forward to spending a week or two playing Season 8 once Last Epoch Season 2 died down a bit. At this point I am probably going to take a hard pass and see if they can pull their heads out of their collective asses by the time Season 9 rolls around. I guess I should be thankful for all of the stuff we are getting in Last Epoch Season 2, and how damned good the Legacy of Phrecia event has been in Path of Exile. On top of that I am still having a lot of fun hunting monsters for parts that seem almost impossible to get. I have plenty of shit going on, but it sucks to see Diablo IV going off the rails. For the last year I had been a cheerleader for the game actually being pretty solid, against a sea of D4 bad memes. Sure I criticized the hamfisted nature of the Vessel of Hatred campaign, but the game-play was solid.
Hopefully they see the error of their ways when this rolls out and no one shows up. I was shocked at how few people were actively playing Diablo IV Season 7… but I can’t see that anything they have announced is going to draw much interest. The ARPG zeitgeist is likely to be playing Last Epoch still, and by the time that fire dies down Path of Exile II 0.2.0 will drop… and then hopefully shortly after that Path of Exile 3.26.
The post Diablo IV: Cooked Not Cooking appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks. I have to fight the urge to open with morning, because by the time I end up posting this it will be afternoon. Yesterday was a weird schedule which meant that I never got around to posting anything, and then this morning… I sat in front of the screen and was just not feeling it. I am very sensitive to my routines and when they are off… everything in my life is off. I had to be in the office very early yesterday, and then today was a snow day and as such my wife is home with me… essentially throwing off my normal patterns. You know how when a washing machine gets off balance, and the longer it goes the worse it gets? I feel like that is me with my routines… and the further I stray from them… the less that is right with the world. Which is weird because growing up I used to always think of myself as being highly adaptable.
The pandemic and the transition to remote work… has meant that in many ways I just don’t force myself to operate in uncomfortable parameters anymore. When I am forced to be in person… it is almost like trying to use a muscle that has atrophied from lack of use. I get so damned drained that when I do make it back home… I am just mentally dead. I was never an extrovert, but I’ve also stopped fighting against my weird tendencies and pretending I was perfectly normal. However when I am in person again, I feel like I have to fake it and push myself out there in ways that I am just no longer used to. Essentially this combined with the break in my routine did a number of me. Suffice to say… I just have not felt like putting pen to the virtual page and spawning forth a blog post. Granted it is probably weird that I just devoted two full paragraphs to get to that point.
Last night I finished up the first book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and it was a delight. Essentially what if you had Duke Nukem… but lovable and begrudgingly caring, thrown into Smash TV but its a dungeon crawler… and forced to fight for his life as a namely corporation attempts to convert the Earth into raw resources while using Humanity as extras in reality television. Combine with that the fact that he entered this dungeon with a cat named Princess Donut, who developed the ability to talk… and cast magic missile… and hilarity ensues. I started the second one and it is just as great as the first one, so I highly suggest checking this out if you have it available.
I’m still futzing around in Path of Exile, but not taking it super seriously. I really enjoy this build, but also feel like I don’t really have access to enough currency or even items available in the private league to fix the problems the build has. I have made it stable, but the survival is definitely a thing that I struggle with. Essentially any time I take any manner of damage over time it is a struggle because I am not recovering enough life through regeneration and don’t have access to leech due to the way the build works. I tried the whole Mind Over Matter thing for awhile, but honestly it just caused more problems than it was worth. It would lead me to run out of energy shield… which I am using as mana… causing me to have to run around hoping to get clear and free long enough for my energy shield to start regenerating. It feels easier to just watch my health with a potion and top off whenever I take a hit. I’ve gotten my evasion up to a little bit over 70% and wish I had a way to make it lucky.
I’m also keeping close tabs on the Legacy of Phrecia event league and some of the information coming out is pretty freaking wild. I can see a bunch of different builds that would be interesting to create, but am still leaning towards trying a Poison SRS league start. The Paladin shown above looks interesting, as does the build that focuses heavily on stacking heralds. I’ve always loved the interactions between heralds and could see that being extremely fun. It still looks like we are a few weeks out and will likely be happening in March… which will be a fun time and I will likely have run out of gusto for it before Last Epoch Season 2 drops in April. At least I am hoping it plays out in that manner because if I have to choose between this and Last Epoch I am going with Last Epoch.
I feel like the sort of thing that I am doing is not really interesting for anyone but myself. I am doing super chill mapping and delving while listening to audiobooks, and the combined total is delightful. I am pretty pleased with how easy it has been to farm cluster jewels. This has turned into a not-insignificant profit center for me. I’ve been dumping these into a 20 Chaos tab and selling quite a large number of them. I am probably selling them cheaply, but it is pretty easy and does not require any thought. It isn’t like I am getting spammed for any of them, which is usually the sign that you are WAY too cheap. I hate the thought of price gouging someone, especially in a pretty chill private league economy. However 20 chaos is pretty much the least amount of currency that I am willing to stop what I am doing in order to go sell an item for.
Anyways… I am still alive. I am just off balance from a few weird days. I am sure at some point I will get back to normal and regain my gusto for morning blogging. Gracie was super snuggly last night… as see in the photo at the top of this post so that helped a bit.
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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.
