Hey Friends! I hinted yesterday that I would be saving my thoughts about the league start for Lake of Kalandra in Path of Exile until this morning. So far I have been honestly having quite a bit of fun, but also have yet to get to the true endgame. Last night when I logged I had just entered Act 10 and was sitting at level 70. I feel like my character is dual-wielding “Fourth of July Sparklers” since I am running wands with my build. Seeing how much I enjoyed the gameplay style of Wintertide Brand, when it came to this season I was looking for something that would feel similar. So while I could not find an Inquisitor build focused around that skill I did find plenty of people reporting success with Storm Brand.
I talked about this a little bit the other day in my post going over a few options for league start, but I am following the specific build created by YouTuber/Streamer Velyna. If Pohx’s Righteous Fire build is the gold standard for what a POB should look like, this is several steps below that on the completeness meter but still worlds better than the explosive arrow ballistas build that I followed in 3.18. The POE Vault guide is pretty solid and I have mostly been following it apart from dipping into Path of Building to look at the tree every now and then. There are some things that I would have done differently about the build, namely choosing more defensive earlier as opposed to stacking them on at the end. This could simply be that Velyna is a much better player than I am, but there were some moments that I felt significantly squishier than my semi-homebrew Wintertide build from last season.
The seasonal mechanic this time around is pretty fun. It is focused on building a map using a device called the Mirrored Tablet, where you get to choose what sort of encounter you want to appear on each “Square”. This creates an almost roguelike experience of running through a map that has a certain degree of predictiveness. Each zone seems to have one of the mirrored tablet pedestals in it, and as a result, you end up being able to run a lot of these as you level. It honestly slows down the process of burning through the acts but ends up making it so you are overleveled most of the time if you are taking advantage of each map. The rewards are not amazing, and honestly feel less so than even the sentinel mechanic from the last league. Loot aside, I am enjoying myself when I run these maps but also seem to take a lot of random deaths… especially as you zone into a new map segment and get gunned down by every single mob in that segment all at once.
The biggest thing that I have noticed about the league is some weird loot problems. One of the changes going into 3.19 was that was announced it was discussed that fewer uniques would be dropping and that overall they wanted loot to drop less often but feel more significant when it does. I think most of us just assumed that entire statement was in relation to uniques only, but it feels like someone turned the spigot of loot down to a trickle. The biggest thing for me is that I seem to be struggling to get certain kinds of currency and then finding others way more often. Like at this point in the league I have more chaos orbs than I did the previous season but am missing so many other kinds of currency and struggling to keep up with things like Alchemy, Binding, and Chromatic making trying to get the right slots on the right gear a bit harder.
At first, the community thought that there must be some sort of obvious bug taking place and that Grinding Gear Games would be quick to patch it in. However, it seems like the loot drops are intended and potentially due to this previously undocumented change.
The second reason is that we removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters. We replaced it with a moderate (2-3x) increase to item quantity, to offset the fact that they often have more life than regular monsters and some cannot drop maps.
Chris Wilson – Grinding Gear Games
The post this was announced as part of has apparently been downvoted more than any other post in the history of the subreddit. So much so that it is now pinned to the top of the Path of Exile Reddit so that folks can actually find it, rather than having to sift through the entire history of Reddit threads before getting down to it at the very bottom. The community is very restless and frustrated, and honestly, I get it. I don’t condone some of the extremely toxic stances being taken on the matter, because I’ve already seen more than a few open threats.
I think another aspect of the frustrations seems to be the continued focus on ArchNemesis mods on rare or higher encounters. It is my understanding that when this went in with 3.17 it was not very well received. I know during my time in 3.18 it was a constant source of gnashing of teeth among the community threads that I was reading as I was attempting to get into the game. With 3.19 the changes seem to have only exacerbated this frustration. I am linking the above video as an example of what one of these encounters with multiple stacked ArchNemesis modifiers looks like. I am nowhere near the level of this player but I have to admit… nothing about that encounter looks enjoyable to me. I think what makes it even worse however is the fact that when it does drop loot… it isn’t really better loot than would have dropped previously.
Right or wrong, I think this is what the average ARPG player wants when they kill something… a giant explosion of loot. To borrow a term from Bellular… it is the “bing bing wahoo” aspect that keeps us banging on these loot pinatas, and last expansion doing harder content absolutely felt like I was getting a constant dopamine drip of interesting loot around every corner. I’ve not made it there in this season but in theory tonight I should run my first maps, and if they are anywhere near as sad as I am hearing from the community… I am not sure how successful I will be in my push forward. I had so many hopes for this league and we have a gathered group of players… dozens of people ready to experience it. The problem is there seems to be something fundamentally flawed with the league and it also appears to be in line with the vision that Grinding Gear Games has for the future.
It seems as though universally even the content creators who are normally the most positive about this game, are down on the Lake of Kalandra expansion. This is somewhat depressing as a newer player and one who had been extremely excited for this new adventure. All of that said I am still having an awful lot of fun, but we will see how long that fun lasts if I run into some of the issues I am reading about starting maps. I am hoping that Grinding Gear Games issues a new update soon, to address some of the issues that the community is feeling. So far patch 3.19.0c seems to do little to address many of the core problems that have been reported.
If I were them, I would be going line by line through the logic surrounding loot and trying to figure out if maybe something got unintentionally modified. There is some really strange stuff going on, for example, this Redditor reports getting 57 flasks dropped from the same rare mob. While I have not seen that exactly, I did get 12 flasks off the same rare mob the other night myself. So it feels like maybe something is going bonkers with the logic tree that might be causing some of the behaviors that have been exhibited. I can go a day without seeing any alchemy orbs and then might get six to drop off the same encounter. The end result seems to be “less loot” but I am not sure if the goal of making loot feel more significant has been accomplished. In theory, since there are several of us playing, and we tend to pool our resources we might be fine in the long run. I have a feeling I am going to need those Chaos Orbs though to purchase items from the market because I am most certainly not finding a lot of useful loot so far.