Month: December 2024

Definitely Early Access

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I was piddling around and running maps and saw clear evidence that we are currently in “Early Access”. I had started a Savannah map and cleared the entire thing… and noticed that the final rare was out of the bounds of the map. I moved around the entire map but there was no way to break out of the boundary and get there. Thankfully this did not brick the node, but I was afraid that there was something cursed about it particularly and worked my way around it leaving it open for the time being. It is very clear that Stampede Explode in my current form is not quite as powerful as it used to be. However, I can still clear reasonably effectively and did get some advice that I want to charge along side of a pack rather than directly at them for maximum efficiency.

There is also apparently a version of the build that still exists in its prior glory, but it involves massively investing in AOE nodes and giving up some of the defense. Since I just was able to hit the 75% block cap, I am hesitant to give that up. However this might be a future goal of the build once I can get my hands on The Surrender, for its life recoup. I need to work on my third and fourth ascendancy point, but I have just lacked the desire to bang my head against that particular wall. I still do not enjoy Sanctum and very much do not enjoy Ultimatum in its current state. I tried doing the Trial of Chaos on my Necromancer yesterday and failed brutally on the third area reminding me just how much that entire experience is a crapshoot tied to RNG.

I keep saying Necromancer instead of Infernalist, because really that is how I think of the build because I am very much a “Minions Matter” character. I spent most of yesterday evening playing it instead of the Titan because it is way more enjoyable and relaxing to play. I managed to get up to the Apex of Filth and the very last thing that I did for the night was kill the Molten boss. It took me two tries, but only because I was a bit too slow while moving out of a big leap slam. I had plenty of time left when I killed him because my Raging Spirits floated above the lava field and were constantly attacking him when he jumped back. I will probably wrap up Act III tonight, and start in on the Cruel acts.

I’ve been running the Necromantle the entire time I have been leveling my Necromancer and yesterday on a whim I decided to throw a Vaal orb against it. I managed to get 15% of Damage Taken Recouped as Life which seems really good because it seems to trigger even if that damage is taken by my Energy Shield and not from my life. Combined with Grim Feast overflowing my Energy Shield, this seems like it might actually be a pretty reasonable defensive layer going forward. I originally was just wearing this chest for leveling purposes, but it might stick around as a more permanent edition to my setup. The energy shield on minions is also pretty nice for their general survival and the 50% faster revive is pretty great in scenarios where a big attack wipes all of them out at once.

It is wild to me how I have moved in opinion from “I don’t think I actually like this game” from the 9th, to really enjoying it in its current state despite the glaring flaws. On some level, I think part of this can be chalked up to a difference in expectations. What I really wanted from Path of Exile II was a much more approachable version of Path of Exile 1, and what we got was too sluggish, too difficult, and honestly just too different for me to immediately like it. Now I have gotten used to it, and have been willing to accept that it isn’t going to be the same game experience. I should have known this was a thing, because I’ve learned not to give my opinion of my wife’s new hairstyles until I have lived with them for a few days… because my immediate reaction is always “change is bad”. There are still aspects of Path of Exile II that I don’t like, and I think maybe on Monday I will cobble together a piece that is essentially an updated version of the Good and Bad with how I feel about the game now that I have put over a hundred hours into it.

Sad Stampede and Angy Firebois

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It took every last exalt I had, but I have balanced out my elemental resistances capping them, and got my chaos up to something reasonable for mapping purposes. I would sure love to have chaos at 75% but for the moment that is just not in the cards. I really need to focus on getting through my third trial so that I can pick up crushing impact, which will make stampede much more effective. I have to admit though I have struggled to get into mapping. It is just so much slower-paced than the equivalent activity in Path of Exile 1 and feels less rewarding. This is probably entirely due to the class that I am playing, but Stampede is super jank when it comes to object collisions. I ran a map yesterday that was chock full of trees… all of them had collisions enabled, which made charging through them feel like I was a steel ball in a Pachinko machine.

There is also the challenge of Stampede Explode eating a pretty sizeable nerf with the most recent patch. Technically it was a bug fix, the end result is that it is doing much less damage. Armor Explosion Support was triggering too many times, leading to the entire process proliferating way more explosions than intended. Now without this, it feels like Stampede is considerably weaker, but still one of the better options for clear that the Warrior has. It is essentially either that or Cleave because the other options are way too cumbersome for hitting multiple targets quickly. Once I get my third ascendancy I will probably go down the path of Avatar of Fire as described in this build. Once I go Crushing Impact on my ascendancy it pretty much means that Boneshatter pops are completely off the menu, but everything else should be generating armor explosions a bit more easily.

All of that said, I spent zero time yesterday on my Titan and instead chilled out playing the Infernalist. I finished up Act II and started Act III and am pretty much still humming along easily. I did encounter a bit of a challenge with the Silverback in Act III, but this was only a problem because I approached from a direction other than where the checkpoint was. That boss is so aggressive that it will attack from what feels like halfway across the map. I feel like when you engage a boss regardless if you triggered the checkpoint, the act of fighting the boss should flag you for it automatically. Though I have to say I am nowhere near as annoyed reclearing content areas as the Witch was I was as the Warrior. Clearing is just so much easier because all I am really doing is running around and spamming flame walls as my angry children do all the work.

Essentially at this point I really want to get the Witch into maps to see if they feel better. Ironically I have the opposite problem that I usually do in Path of Exile, where I have built a very shitty mapper in the Titan but a phenomenal bosser. I can evaporate most bosses in one or two hits at this point, but the act of actually clearing the map is cumbersome as hell. With my Infernalist and my army of Raging Spirits, the clearing part is a breeze and the bosses are not terribly difficult… but just take forever to finally drop. However since I can damage from out of melee range, I mostly just spend my time avoiding the mechanics while my minion army slowly whittles it down. I probably need to do some proper research on what an endgame version of this build looks like so that I can start preparing for that because as soon as I hit Cruel acts I expect to breeze through the rest of the campaign and into maps.

My Kingdom for a Map Stash

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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 Necromantle

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve reached the point with Path of Exile II where I am alternating largely between two characters. You have my try-hard Titan Stampede Explode character that is progressing my way through maps, and then you have my way more chill Minion Necromancer Witch that I am progressing through Act II. It is amazing how much more chill the campaign feels now that I have gotten used to mapping. I am uncertain if I simply know the content better, that leveling minion is more relaxed, or by playing a lot of higher-level content I’ve reset the anchor for my new normal. Whatever the case I feel like I need multiple characters so that I can shift back and forth between them as my pace needs change. For those looking to play a Minion character, I am mostly following this guide from Maxroll.

Yesterday I decided that since I was seemingly going to run up a second character and take it somewhat seriously, that I might as well buy a few twink items along the way. The first that I picked up is the Necromantle, which is equipable at level 16 and is pretty much just a universally amazing summoner item. The defense for the item is definitely something I will outgrow, but giving my minions some energy shield and the ability to revive 50% faster is freaking amazing. I can legitimately see myself using this all of the way to the end game. I also looked into Dark Defiler, but it is a bit fraught as it drops at several different item levels with higher tiers of Summon Skeletal Warriors on it. Realistically I need to be swapping my sceptre every few levels to keep current pets, so I am probably going to pass on this item. The other item I have contemplated picking up is The Wailing Wall which is just a universally good defensive item. I would have bought it already but I am lacking in Strength, which is going to be an annoying juggling act as I need that to keep upgrading weapons as well.

Over on my Titan main, I have progressed far enough to be doing Tier 3 maps. In all of my maps run I have taken a single death… which made me fully understand how deaths work. They do not bar your progress as they had originally stated, but the node loses any benefits it might have and also eats the tablet that you were using. I still think this 1 portal stuff is bullshit because if I wanted to play in that manner I would be playing hardcore. I am hoping given time they will back away from it and give us back our six portals. We are still very much in a phase where deaths can happen randomly, and it feels annoying to lose XP and resources when you take one. I had spent most of my time clearing to the north but read that there was a quest I needed to start by finding a Fortress. So I found one off in the mists which I marked with a green circle and am beginning to work my way in that direction.

I found a reasonable option for a neck anoint and added it last night. I had to buy some Greed Destilled Emotions from the currency market but picked up three ire through running a delirium map. Essentially I am trying to get my block as high as I possibly can and between this notable and another one that I have already taken I am gaining both life and mana each time I block. This should help sustain quite a bit while mapping. I ended up having to put Lifetap on my Warcry so that it would not eat all of my mana before dropping Hammer of the Gods. I would absolutely go blood magic but I am not sure it is possible for me to stack enough life regeneration for that to be comfortable. Life in general seems like it is a massive problem for everyone, now that it does not exist on the tree.

In other news, we received notice of an upcoming patch that is tweaking a number of things. There are some buffs to Rolling Slam, so I will have to try it again after those go into effect. I am not sure what difference the buff to shield skills are going to do considering I think there are 3 and none of them are really proper attacks. I am holding off on trying to do any more ascendancies until the Trial of Sehkemas changes go in because it should be much easier for me as melee to complete that. The endgame balance and respec costs are both very welcome. All in all it should be a good patch, and given that I am thankfully not playing any of the abilities that were targetted for nerfs, I should not be hit terribly hard by any of it.

Another useful thing that I have found is a replacement for Awakened POE Trade. SnosME is not going to be supporting POE2 since he is not playing it, and does not really have the passion to try and figure out how it works. As there has been a new project that has sprung up called Sidekick which serves to follow in its footsteps and at least in theory appears like it should support both POE1 and POE2 going forward. Better than anything, it uses the same keybinds so your muscle memory should be able to carry along and keep doing the same thing you are used to with Awakened POE Trade. I just started using this and so far it seems to be doing exactly what I would want it to do. This is going to be hugely beneficial in attempting to pricecheck rares and uniques that I might want to sell.

I could grind my way through the early maps, but I am taking the entire process of the Path of Exile II endgame pretty chill. Right now it is all new, and I want to enjoy myself as much as I can. I am much happier with the game than I was, because I have finally reached a point of equilibrium thanks to some of the recent changes surrounding block, and the upcoming changes should only serve to make it easier for me to move forward. I need to spend some time working on my gear, but in order to do that… I need more currency. I greatly miss Delve and the stable source of income it provided in Path of Exile. I need to find my niche, but mapping strategies in general are way less predictable in this game.

How are you getting along in Path of Exile II so far? Have you made it through both the normal and cruel campaigns? How are you enjoying the endgame thusfar? Or are you instead still struggling to get through Act II and Act III and the walls that they often present to players? Drop me a line below.