It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.
Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.
I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.
Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.
Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.
Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.
If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.
If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.