Good Morning Folks. One of the long running themes of this blog is how much I like the concept of reoccurring posts. Another running theme is how bad I am at actually following through with them. One of these series was “Regularly Playing” where in theory I update the sidebar of my blog with the current crops of games that I am playing on the regular that then show my account information when you mouse over them so folks can find me if they so choose. The general idea is that you have a list of games that you are likely to hear information about advertised on the front page… even though we all know that I tend to fixate on a single game for weeks at a time before jumping to the next one. However behind the scenes I am flipping back and forth between games as my mood hits me.
The core problem with this is… my updates in this series tend to happen way less often. The idea was to have a monthly roundup of things that I was playing but what it ends up being instead is a semi-yearly truing up of the sidebar. For example my last update in this series was June 27th of 2024… when I acted as though I would now make it a regularly feature of the blog again. We can all see that this did not happen. Before that the last update was during the great blur in October of 2022. This is funny given that at least part of my claim to fame is being a consistent blogger. Anyways… I am not making any false promises here but I did think it was far past time to crank out one of these posts and to more importantly update the damned sidebar.
Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
Some of these categories only really make sense if I am doing this on the regular, but we are going to attempt to make one of these happen regardless.
To Those Remaining
Diablo IV – PC
After being very frustrated with the launch state of Diablo IV in 2023, it has honestly turned in to a pretty decent game. This has more or less taken the place of Diablo III as being that short term game that I am happy to play for a week or two before finishing everything up that I want to finish and moving on with my life. It also has some of the easiest group game play out there, and while it lacks the depth of Path of Exile it is a fun time to be had with my friend Ace as we tackle the seasonal journey. I am not saying this is a phenomenal game, but it is far from “bad” at this point and is honestly pretty damned great if you are interested in some super chill ARPG fun. That is not to say that the game does not have problems… all of which can be chalked up to the shitty design practices of Blizzard. Ace and I have a joke about Blizzard design philosophy. They give you this super sweet kitten that is loving and adorable… but it has permanent explosive diarrhea. They have some really cool ideas, but they always come with some shitty downside to them.
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Being brutally honest… were it not for the fact that I own a home on Cactuar… and extremely hard world to get housing on… and had lost said home from not logging in previously… I would likely not be actively playing Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much in the mindset of playing Final Fantasy XIV during an expansion… and then at the end of an expansion right before the release of the next expansion. The rest of the time I am just paying yearly rent for the privilege of home ownership. I know this is dumb, and I know that I should stop doing this… but I keep doing it anyway. I think my mind might just be broken when it comes to the traditional MMORPG gameplay model. I enjoy them when I enjoy them… but struggle each time to get reconnected and back into the normal rhythms of logging in daily and treating it as my only game. I also really hate gearing… which is weird given that used to be one of my favorite aspects of playing MMORPG expansions.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
Guild Wars 2 on the other hand… is designed in a way that makes me love it. It has way more of an ARPG design aesthetic and it is so easy to drop in and participate in some epic feeling content… and then tag out without letting anyone down. I love large world group content and I love doing things like WVW where I can just blend in with the crowd and not have to give a shit about human connections. For me it is largely a solo game… that just happens to have lots of friendly and helpful people also playing it. Everything about the design model for this game rewards players for doing the right thing and stopping to rez players or help them out. When you see other players doing something, it is always a positive and a force multiplier. The long tailed grinds also give you projects to focus on when you want to play more seriously. Right now with the way my mind works, this is hands down the best MMORPG.
Last Epoch – PC
Last Epoch is going to be the best ARPG on the market at some point. This is just a fact. It has the best class design, and the best itemization and crafting already. What it lacks is endgame content, but given how solid the foundation is it is only a matter of time before they gather up enough to make this game into a proper rival of Path of Exile. Ten years down the line we will be thinking about EHG and Last Epoch in the same manner that we do about GGG and Path of Exile. I am extremely excited for the upcoming Season 2 launch on April 2nd, and with it a focus on more endgame content as well as a bunch of interesting crafting options. It looks like this is going to be landing in a lull in other games, but I would give up a Path of Exile league start to play this next season. If you have read this blog for the last few years you would know what a bold statement that is for me, given that I practically play every single league and event that comes out for Path of Exile.
Path of Exile – PC
For years when someone has asked me what my favorite video game is, I have always answered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night without missing a beat. While I still love that game with all of my heart, I have to admit the true answer is Path of Exile. I started taking this game seriously in 2019 and since then it has effectively dominated this blog for months at a time. During that time I have dedicated over 250 posts to this game and will likely keep doing so each time new content releases. It is a very hard hill to crest, and getting engaged in the game is going to take a lot of effort and research… but once you finally reach a point of comfort with it the endgame potential is limitless. Each new league also radically shakes up the game and changes how you need to interact with the character building process. I’m easily over 4000 hours into the game… and still feel like a beginner at times. There are almost no games on the market with the level of depth that Path of Exile offers.
To The New and Returning
AFK Journey – Android
One of the things that I am trying to do with this post is be a bit more honest about the games that I am playing. I almost never talk about mobile games on this blog. I think the only ones that I have actually ever really talked about at length are Pokemon Go and Dragalia Lost… the later of which is no longer even in operation. I had more or less stopped playing mobile games because my old Razer Phone 2 was performing so poorly that it almost was not worth it. However when I swapped to my OnePlus 12R, it opened back up the world of mobile games and I started adding them into my pre-sleep rotation. Essentially every night for the last year I have played a little bit of AFK Journey and find it an extremely enjoyable daily activity. I am not a big spender when it comes to games like this, but I have given them a few bucks here or there namely if there is a cool looking costume on their $7 pseudo-battlepass system. Essentially I level up my characters and play a round of all of the various battle modes and whatever events happen to be going on and when sleep claims me put it away for another day.
Monster Hunter Wilds – PC
I know this game has only recently come out, but playing it has made me remember all of the things I loved about Monster Hunter Worlds and how much it dominated my life for a point in time. There are around 150 blog posts that I have made over my time playing that game, and I can already tell that this is going to be a regular rotation for me for awhile. At a minimum I want to get geared up so I can start participating in the event quests as they get released, because Monster Hunter games have some wild collabs and some interesting cosmetic gear to collect. Now that I am in High Rank I am getting back into the swing of finding my own fun in the game and setting my own goals rather than following the main story quest. This is honestly my preferred method of playing and I am glad I am past the forced section of the game. I’m just about to HR 20 and looking forward to collecting the REAL version of the Arkveld armor that I am wearing in the above image.
Path of Exile II – PC
I had so many hopes for Path of Exile II, and honestly… it satisfied almost none of them. I am not actively playing this game but I know with the impending release of 0.2.0 I will give it another spin to see how much I want to keep playing it for the long run. Recently returning to Path of Exile 1 though… has made me realize just how lacking Path of Exile II actually is. Right now there is a battle for the soul of this game happening and depending on how it goes… will ultimately determine if I write this off in the long run. Right now the core game feels like a sluggish mess for anyone not playing one of four builds that are actually functioning pretty well. Even those builds take specific gear and a lot of levels to really make them feel phenomenal. Grinding Gear Games needs to do some real soul searching with this one and determine what sort of game they want it to be. If it is a cumbersome souls-like experience, then I am out. If they improve the leveling experience, add some decent movement abilities, and fix the endgame… then maybe it is going to be a great experience. I am thankful however that they split this game from Path of Exile because at least that game is largely in a great state.
Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket – Android
I will be honest. I am the wrong generation for Pokemon in general. I played Pokemon Blue a few years after it came out on a Gameboy emulator but did not play another game until Pokemon X and Y released. I watched my fair share of the Pokemon cartoon because it was playing while I was getting ready for work. I played some of the early WOTC version of the Pokemon TCG, but only because it was released by WOTC and briefly popular with the MTG community before the kiddies invaded the card shops. I am too old to really be in the core audience for Pokemon. However I do like opening card packs, and have a basic understanding of the card game mechanics. Essentially every night I open a few packs of cards as part of my nightly mobile gaming routine. I occasionally play some hands of the game against the NPC opponents. Calling this a game for me… is questionable. I am not going to spend money on virtual packs, but I do like opening virtual shiny cards every so often… but it will never mean quite as much as if something like this existed for Magic the Gathering that was mostly just a pack opening simulator. If Arena gave me two five card packs each day… I would probably be playing that.
To Those Departing
Diablo III – PC
This one hurts a little bit to admit, but I think I am mostly done with Diablo III. With the release of Diablo IV, this game went into true maintenance mode. There will be no new seasonal mechanics coming out, and since the launch of Diablo IV they have simply been rotating through previous seasons. Diablo IV is finally in a state where playing it mostly feels like playing a fancier version of Diablo III, and as such has completely replaced the niche that this game filled for me. Instead of Ace and I getting together for D3 season launches, it is now D4 seasons. This game will always hold a very special place in my heart, and I am sure every so often I will fire it up again just to revisit it… but there are just better ARPG experiences out there. I am sorry my old friend, but it is time we officially parted and I stop pretending that I am every going to truly play you with the same vigor again.
Fallout 76 – PC
I really love this game, but just have not really been in the mood to play it. I am not sure when I uninstalled it… but prior to that I was only logging in to collect daily freebies. I would absolutely play this again in the future, but never really got into the seasonal loop of this game. I also never leveled anything all the way to the upper levels to be able to participate in the “reindeer games”. I deeply respect the game that this has become, and were I playing on console I would probably be way more into it than I am. However given the choice between mindless grinding in Path of Exile and mindless leveling in Fallout 76… I just always chose Path of Exile. If I had a regular group of friends to play with, it would probably be different but this as a solo experience is not near as exciting. If the AggroChat crew started playing again I would likely happily reinstall and join in the nonsense.
World of Warcraft – PC
Like I said for Final Fantasy XIV… I am just not in the right mindset for playing MMORPGs these days. I enjoyed playing through Dragonflight, but it never really caught my attention as anything other than playing through the Main Story Quest. I loved Pandaria Remix, and when the next one of those type events drop I will probably be back immediately. I attempted to play War Within but never made it out of the first zone. I have all of the social reasons in the world to be playing this game as some of my oldest gaming friends are happily playing it… but for whatever reason it just doesn’t scratch the itch anymore. That is not to say that World of Warcraft is probably in the best state it has ever been since at least Legion, if not Wrath of the Lich King. It really is peak Warcraft, but I think I have just outgrown it. When I think fondly of this game I think about specific people and a specific point in time when it was the center of my world… not the actual game itself.
Wrapping Up
I would love to tell you that it won’t be another year before I sit down to write one of these posts. I am still very much an ARPG gamer and will probably continue to cycle through whatever active season/league happens to be going in between Diablo IV, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, and Path of Exile II. I also find myself with way more affinity for games that are ARPG-adjacent like Guild Wars 2 and now Monster Hunter Wilds. The drop in nature and largely single player focuses progression really hits the spot for me, and will probably continuing doing so for a long while. I marvel that there was an era when I used to raid three or four nights each week and arranged my schedule happily around the schedules of others. I miss playing with other people regularly, but I think I might just be too far gone to ever adapt to doing it again. I am an old gamer that has become very set in my ways at this point.
I hope you all are having a great week and have a good weekend ahead of you. For me… I plan on spending most of it in Monster Hunter Wilds and hope to catch up with some of my friends and do some hunts together.
The post Regularly Playing: March 2025 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.
I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.
I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.
Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.
What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.
I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.
Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.
Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.
The post A Jumbled Mess appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.
What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.
I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.
I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.
I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.
I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.
The post First Apothecary appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was a hellacious day for me, and today I am off… so since I did not get a chance to blog I am dropping a mega topic on you. Mostly this is something that I had been kicking around in my head for weeks but I simply did not feel like I had the time to devote to the topic during my normal morning blogging window. We are going to talk about Path of Exile and how the scope and complexity of that game has completely changed my viewpoint on what exactly the term “Endgame” means. At this point in the Settlers of Kalguur League, I am mostly in a game mode of wrapping up challenges, and honestly could in theory walk away happily at any point. Did I complete everything in the league? Absolutely not. Do I feel the need to complete everything in the league? Absolutely not. This morning’s blog post if anything is a post about coming to terms with not being able to do all of the things, or more so realizing that I don’t actually want to do them.
Sentinel League – July 2022
This journey is going to be illustrated as we walk through the last several leagues of Path of Exile, and how my perspective changed during each of them. While I first played Path of Exile in 2015, it was not until July of 2022 that I actually beat the ten-act campaign. I have fuzzy memories of playing during Delve, Heist, Expedition, Breach, and Scourge… and getting several acts deep into each of those characters but never really grasping the game to the level of being able to make it all the way through the end of Act 10. So basically my “Endgame” was beating the campaign… an activity that I now consider so trivial that I level characters for fun. I felt a real sense of accomplishment for getting that far into the game and in spite of not really having a clue what I was doing landed on a love for the ability Wintertide Brand.
Kalandra League – August/September 2022
The Lake of Kalandra League was the first time I was actively playing the game and prepared on the day the league launched. During Sentinel, I had spent time playing Explosive Arrow Ballista and also half-assing my own thing with Wintertide Brand, and given that I liked the brand playstyle so much I decided to explore Storm Brand. I found a guide and attempted to follow it, and then set my goal for that league to complete my atlas… which is all 115 Maps with bonus objectives including the ten unique maps. My “Endgame” in the context of this league was accomplished on September 12th, and honestly… I did not play much more than that. I had a rough time in Kalandra and part of it was how rippy some of the mobs were and other parts were how clueless I was about how one should actually build a character. In either case, I did not have as much fun as I hoped I would have, and damned near swore off the game until my friend Ace got excited for the next League Start. However, I definitely felt like I had reached the Endgame because getting through 115 maps… on a character that was not even vaguely close to having elemental resistance caps… was a challenge.
Sanctum League – December 2022/January 2023
As I said above, this is the league that I almost did not play. I set forth intending to learn how not to die and in doing so I embraced my old friend Righteous Fire for the very first time and learned the goodness that is Pohx. This was the league where I learned that Elemental Resistances were not suggestions, but the absolutely hard requirement to survive in maps and if possible you wanted to do something to increase your caps. I also learned one of the ways you can build a character that feels tanky and unstoppable. This is also the first league that I played where I absolutely hated the league mechanic. There are so many “Sanctum Enjoyers” out there, but running around and never getting hit is not a gameplay style that I enjoy. My player fantasy is to be an unstoppable juggernaut that bulldozes over top of the enemies… and RF with its constant reliance on Shield Charge really fits that fantasy. My endgame was getting through all 115 maps, and while I did not make a post about accomplishing that goal it happened at some point around December 27th. Apart from not dying… I branched out and played with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… cementing my love of SRS going forward. I had a freaking blast and it was during this league that I think some of the levers of understanding clicked into place that would serve me well going forward allowing me to build not just one character that worked, but at least four of them in a single league.
Crucible League – April/May 2023
Crucible was the first league where I was pretty much the only person in my friend group actively playing the game. This meant more than anything, that I needed to invent my own goals because the friendly competition of knocking out objectives was missing. In Sanctum I dabbled in Delve and had quite a bit of luck with it, deciding that it would be my core focus for Crucible. Again we had a league with a lackluster mechanic, and as such I kept my head down and focused on learning how to make currency that was needed to fund building characters. “Delve Provides” is the motto of Jorgen a YouTuber that almost exclusively covers Delve content, and Crucible is the league where I put that into practice. Trading became something that I tolerated to something that I actually enjoyed doing and as such in many ways, it became my endgame for this league. During Sanctum I had managed to hit enough of the challenges to earn a tiny totem pole for my hideout and as such I knew that I wanted to do at least 19 of them in order to earn another one… which has since then become basically my goal for every league. During the tail end of Sanctum, I recorded a few videos to highlight my point of what felt good and why Diablo IV did not at all… and that turned into me recording videos talking about various side projects and builds during the Crucible league.
Ancestor League – August/September/October 2023
For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided to league start something other than Righteous Fire. This was a mistake. While I was able to zip through the campaign extremely quickly on my Lightning Arrow Raider build… I struggled quite a bit with survival when I hit maps… more specifically the transition between yellow and red maps and getting my first two voidstones. So a few days into the league… I was running up a Righteous Fire Juggernaut and essentially starting over. I eventually came to love the Lightning Arrow gameplay style, but greatly preferred running it on Champion. Trial of the Ancestors was another league where the mechanic was sort of meh… enjoyable but also did not really seem to have much of a point to running it. So I focused my time on getting better at mapping and starting to deep dive into various league mechanics like Legion and Breach on a bow character. I also created a staggering eight characters during this league, my favorite alt of which was probably the SRS Guardian. My endgame was learning league mechanics that I had not really dealt with before… and also getting a totem pole.
Affliction League – Bel League – December 2023/January/February 2024
My friend Ace HATES trading. It isn’t so much that they hate buying items… they hate the way Trade is implemented within Path of Exile and the required interaction with other players. During Ancestors League they decided to go Solo-Self-Found which essentially walled them off from the rest of us. In Affliction League I proposed that we start a private league that would take trading off the table, but also allow us to share resources with each other. So as a result “Bel League” was born, and it was simultaneously one of the most enjoyable Path of Exile experiences, and also deeply frustrating. This is also the patch where they largely wrecked Righteous Fire in its previous state, so as a result I decided to try out Boneshatter, a build I had never played before… making my endgame learning how to play this dumb thing in a Semi-SSF environment where I could not buy my way out of problems. Mechanically being able to share resources with other folks felt amazing… but in all cases, there was only so far I could reasonably take a build before running into a wall that was lack of resources or lack of crafting knowledge. We kept the private league going for 40 days… which maybe was overstaying its welcome. When it dropped both Kodra and I went nuts with the economy and funding dumb builds. He got a Mirror of Kalandra drop, and this was the first league where I bought both a Mageblood and a Headhunter. So my endgame shifted from Solo-Self-Found sentimentality to breaking the dumb state of the economy wide open and building some truly broken characters.
Necropolis League – March/April/May 2024
Necropolis League was simultaneously a bad league and one of the best leagues. The League crafting mechanic was dumb and overly complicated, but the sweeping game system changes allowed for an environment where you could do some truly dumb things while mapping. In past leagues, I had reached this point where characters many times where they were comfortable enough, but I never really micromanaged my way into hyper-optimizing them. During Necropolis my “endgame” was seeing how far I could push my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which ended up requiring another Mageblood… but since so many of these were being created I got it for the super low price of 50 Divines. I spent so much time exploring the interactions with different combinations of scarabs, and this is also the league where I accepted that I don’t actually like “Bossing” and just bought a carry for my last two voidstones… the ones that take a stupid amount of time… so I could enjoy T16 mapping for the majority of the league. The endgame goal that I was not expecting was that I would ultimately hit 34 out of 40 challenges completed and get a massive totem pole for my hideout.
Settlers League – July/Current 2024
Now we are here during the Settlers League and I have to be honest… I am not sure what my endgame looks like as of today. Last night I pushed down to 400 Depth in Delve and knocked out my 19th Challenge for the league earning me a totem pole for my hideout. I’ve done a few T17s this league which was something that I could not accomplish during the last league. I’m level 98 and am trying to decide if I want to go ahead and make a push to hit 100, something that I have only accomplished before during Crucible and Necropolis. I would love to get my Widowhail build working… because right now it is doing more than enough damage but also completely unable to survive for more than five minutes when something gets the first hit in. If I can take that build to a comfortable state, my endgame goal might be grinding out the currency to buy it a Headhunter because of the two chase belts… I feel like Headhunter is way more interesting than Mageblood. I also want to try building some sort of bleed-based Gladiator since that is the new hotness so I will likely be running something up to do that. At this point, I have explored most of the endgame systems in Path of Exile and have firm opinions on what I like and don’t like. One thing I have not done is really dive into Blight Ravaged maps so maybe I will set that up as my new endgame goal… to reach a point of comfortability running them.
Endgames Shift Over Time
Essentially the entire point of this lengthy post was not necessarily about a trip down memory lane covering the last three years and Eight Path of Exile Leagues. Instead, it was to set up the notion that you should have a personal Endgame and you really should not allow the opinion of others to color your enjoyment. When you spend time on Reddit, YouTube, and Twitch… so much of the discourse around Path of Exile specifically tends to be about finding the most efficient way to print currency and “getting rich”. I’ve been fairly wealthy in this game, with enough currency to buy anything I wanted… and I gotta admit that is not a goal that I care about. Instead, I have to carve out personal goals that make me happy, that are things I actually care about and that I can focus on.
I have come to realize that this is true regardless of the game. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV and I am doing the things that I personally enjoy. Some of that involves raiding, but also I am not pushing myself to dive in deeper than I want. I remember back in World of Warcraft feeling like an absolute failure when our raid was not progressing as quickly as the others on the server. I felt the need to “keep up with the joneses” and personally blamed myself when we were not able to. I’ve reached a point where “Endgame” is whatever I want it to be. For some games, it is just getting through the campaign and then walking away happily until more story content is released, and in other games, it is trying to consume every last drop of goodness. Being able to set your own personal endgame that is not beholden to the progress of others feels like a requirement to play games like these and not drive yourself insane trying to keep up.
It took me years to get a SkyScale in Guild Wars 2, and I am super happy that I completed the grind… that also greatly improved my enjoyment of the game. However, I did not really feel like I was missing out on something all the time I spent not paying attention to it. When you face a game with over a decade’s worth of content that is still relevant… it becomes impossible to try and immediately encompass all of it. So Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, and Path of Exile all live in these bubbles of having way too much stuff going on to really try and zoom to the end of it without missing a beat. As such I have personally found it all the more important to determine my own goals and decide what I considered reaching the endgame to be in all of those cases. I’ve also given myself the flexibility to revise what those goals are over time.
What lodged this in my head the other day was watching the process a friend of mine has been going through with Path of Exile. They were overwhelmed and were in that state before finishing the campaign. Thing is… there is no rush. There is no real forward push saying you have to complete this much content in order to feel validated. Sure you will miss out on things… but the journey I have been on started in July of 2022 and each new league taught me important lessons that I have built upon to reach the point where I am today. I stopped playing on the Steam client during the last league, but at that point, I was at 2500 hours… and I have very easily put in another 500 hours after that. Path of Exile is the sort of game where even after 3000 hours I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and as a result, there is no way any player is going to do everything in a single go.
The Endgame is what you make of it, and your personal Endgame journey is just as valid as anyone else’s.
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