Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I partook in some pre-patch degeneracy, and honestly, it wasn’t as overpowered as I was expecting. Yesterday a pretty sweeping patch hit, and one of the things that was broken by it was the Beetle farm. During Act II on Normal or Cruel difficulty, in the Lost City map, there was a waypoint right next to a rare mini-boss. If you had a method for removing the corpse, aka unearth, you could respawn at the waypoint and the mini-boss would be back up allowing you to kill it again and get the loot again. I farmed this for a few hours right before the patch and got three uniques, a smattering of currency, and a bunch of rares… which seems good but not overwhelmingly so. Apparently, folks have been farming this for the last week, and I can absolutely see them having a massive leg up on the market leading to some of the exalted orb inflation that has been happening.
This is very much a first-world problem, but one of the things that is killing me right now is the amount of stuff that has no proper place to go. We do not have a map tab, a fragments tab, or even a stash chest for expeditions like we would normally have in Path of Exile 1. This means all of this crap accumulates and needs to be manually processed into some semblance of a tab structure. The lack of a map tab is by far the most annoying because I really hate mapping in this unstructured manner. The other thing that grates at my nerves is the fact that Charms are effectively utility flasks, but do not fit into the Flask tab… which at the moment is largely a useless custom tab. Even if they can’t spend the time to work on the custom tabs right now, at least give us the ability to set affinity to a normal or quad tab just to dump things into it. I hate using a dump tab and sorting it out later, but I think if I am ever going to efficiently map I am going to have to lean on that strategy.
I did however spend a bit of time arranging my hideout to make it more efficient for mapping purposes. I need to do the same for the Guild Hideout since during the last patch they made it so we can actually get there. I will probably tweak the layout a bit but at a minimum, I have easy access to stashes, Doryani for identifying items, and Ketzuel for disenchanting all without really moving my character. I’ve only found Gwenin and Tujen from the Expedition NPCs but found it weird that they are all effectively Rog now. They all sell items and then offer you the ability to upgrade them, with each NPC focusing on a single type of gear. Gwenin is weapons, and Tujen is jewelry… I am assuming that Rog is armor and no clue what Dannig is. Dannig might still be the currency trader because I can see that being a useful thing to have to swap stuff around. I’ve not found any of the Expedition NPC inventory reroll currency so far, but they all have the widget at the bottom of the screen that allows for it.
I did not make a ton of progress last night, because the issues surrounding the rollout of the patch gave me a bit of a break in gaming during my normal operating window. I did work my way over to The Burning Monolith and got the quest to gather up the three keys to unlock it. I have no clue what the fortresses look like that it is referring to, but I am sure given time I will find them. Right now I am struggling to sustain maps and am weirdly getting mostly Tier IV or Tier II maps… but very few Tier III’s which is the step in the quest I am presently on. My friend Jarik gave me an infusion of various map levels this morning, so I can at least keep progressing tonight for a little bit. I’ve not played with any of the towers yet, so I might do that as well as I have a small stock of currency for them.
I made a little bit of progress on my Witch and it is now officially an Infernalist. It is wild how much easier everything is as minions than it was as Warrior. I rolled over the top of the Trial of the Sehkemas yesterday without even getting close to running out of honor. I think I maybe had at most 10% of my honor bar gone, which is wild given that I do not have a ton of hitpoints or energy shield on that character. I will probably make a run at my third ascendancy on my Titan tonight, as I have a bunch of 3-floor trials and I am curious how they feel now that I have some relics with honor resistance on them, and the changes that rolled in yesterday to reduce damage for melee characters. I feel like Trial of Chaos is always going to be cursed, so I might as well get used to Sehkemas because it seems the lesser of the two evils.
In other news, Neversink has released a new update to their temporary filter over on GitHub. Essentially the process of creating filterblade support for POE2 is going much slower than they thought it would be and still expect that their proper filter system is going to be about another month out. As such they opted to make some improvements to their first temporary filter to make life a bit better for us in the meantime. It is amazing what a difference it made for me personally when I started running a loot filter. It isn’t like I am actively excluding anything… but just the act of getting back the styling of loots and the “tink” sounds did a ton to improve my enjoyment of the game. Think of Neversink as the language in which I interpret the game, and playing without them… was like reading the mangled item descriptions on AliExpress.
In other other news… there is a fork of Awakened POE Trade that is gaining steam called Exiled Exchange 2. Essentially it is an attempt to adapt the existing structure of Awakened POE Trade and make it work with Path of Exile 2. I spent some time trying it last night because I admit I like the look of the Awakened interface more than I do that of Sidekick which is more patterned off of the Overwolf Overlay. The problem is… it is very much a work in progress and a lot of things about the interface were a bit too janky for my tastes. For example, for some reason any time I did a price check with Ctl+D it would strand the popup showing the item on my screen until I manually hit the [X] in the upper right corner of the window. For the time being, I suggest Sidekick at least until this has worked out some of its kinks. This also makes me realize that I need to spend some time updating my tools page, now that the game has actually been released and there are a number of properly supported tools out there.
The thing that…I don’t know, I guess “irritates” is the right word…me the most about PoE2 right now is that it basically looks exactly the same as its predecessor.
I mean, I’m sure the actual graphics are much better as you’ve said, and it also seems to feel very different while playing.
However, when I just look at screenshots I often can’t tell the slightest difference to PoE1. I’ve thought at the start of more than one of your recent posts “Oh, is he back to playing part 1 again?”.
I don’t know, for what’s supposed to be an actual new game and not just an update I would have expected more.