Good Morning Folks! I am still terribly bummed about the Path of Exile news, but yesterday I knocked out an achievement that I have been working towards for literal years now. There is an achievement called “Beginner’s Luck” for getting a drop from the beach at the beginning of the campaign, an area that cannot be returned to once you have exited it. So essentially I have had a character named BelginnersLuck parked there and every now and then I run down the beach kill Hillock and then log to another character. I got to level 8.5 in doing this and effectively have every single item at yellow rarity from repeating this process over and over. Unfortunately I did not get the drop that is unique to Hillock, but I did at least get something meaning that I can stop this nonsense.
Pohx released a video yesterday sharing his disappointment about Path of Exile, and then handling it in the best way. Since folks really wanted a fresh start, he set up a private league that is up to 9500 players currently. I have no clue if he will keep expanding the size of the league because it gets rather expensive, but good on him for making a player run event happen since GGG does not appear to be willing to do something official. I was expecting them to do Endless Delve or something that they have done in the past to give the POE1 player base something to focus on. I missed my opportunity to apply when there were openings to this private league, so I doubt I will be able to participate in a few hours when it goes live.
I’ve taken a bit of a break from Diablo IV as there is a lunar new year event about to start right around the corner with various experience and drop bonuses. I’m in the phase of the game where I just need to spend a lot of time grinding, and I figure there is no point in doing that until I can earn the cosmetics from this event and also have some of my progress sped up slightly. I still do not feel super powerful yet in Season 7, and had been slowly accumulating a full set of gear so that I could have an alternate Blood Wave build to play with it. On the 4th I am sure I will be back and grinding that out, and hopefully finishing my seasons journey.
I’ve also been back playing some Guild Wars 2, and at least popping in and trying to do dailies and chip away at my weeklies. It is always extremely comfortable going back to Guild Wars 2. I probably should work on the Janthir Wilds story since I have not done the second part. Additionally there are holiday events going on there which could be lucrative. I could also start work again on one of the various legendaries that I have parts for. I picked up the kit from the dailies shop for Kudzu, since I really like using Longbows on a few of my characters. The weapon also deeply reminds me of Rhok’delar from World of Warcraft.
A new season dropped in Dwarven Realms as well, and with it comes a complete overhaul of the generally awful passive tree. I am sure at some point tonight I will be in the game playing that, so that I can talk about it on the podcast Saturday. I really want to probably do a bit of research because I know there is some sort of a spin to win build, and I am interested in seeing what that takes to build weapon and skill wise. I am not even sure if there are proper build sites for this game or not. I have always just winged it and been relatively successful, but like I said I do want to know what weapon grants the whirlwind-like ability.
I’ve also been fighting some sort of respiratory crud for the last few days and am running a low grade fever. So more than anything I am probably going to be chilling on the sofa and trying to coax cats to snuggle. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, because I am super tired of this week.
Good Morning Folks. It is a bit of a rough day for the Path of Exile community. More specifically it is a rough time for the folks who were Path of Exile 1 players looking forward to the 3.26 League. While there were not hard dates surrounding it, comments made by the development team around the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access indicated that we could expect the next league to land late January or Early February. We are now in that window and there has been a growing unrest among the player base hungry for information about the next league. The new trials for Path of Exile II are almost universally loathed by the community, causing an surge of Izaro memes. One of the biggest is a thread that has been doubling the number of images of Izaro every single day until we get news regarding the launch date of 3.26.
We can’t really work on POE1 3.26 until 0.2.0 has shipped. And being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks as well.
Jonathan Rogers
We got that news… and it was not good. It turns out that Path of Exile 3.26 is not coming anytime soon. Effectively the entire Path of Exile team has been pulled to help resolve the massive issues with Path of Exile II. I think a lot of my poor sentiment over this is being influenced right now by the fact that I am reading Play Nice, the book about the downfall of Blizzard by Jason Schreier. I just finished the passage last night where they talked about how World of Warcraft effectively consumed every available resource from every other team in the company. It certainly feels like we are seeing something similar playing out with Path of Exile II as it is consuming all available attention as the game that put Grinding Gear Games on the map suffers.
During the 2019 Exile Con presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson talked about how they were concerned about splitting the player base, and why they were planning on making Path of Exile II as a content expansion to the original game. Over the years of pandemic era silence this scope was changed, but effectively Chris Wilson’s prophecy has played out. There are a lot of players that did not really enjoy Path of Exile II, a largely group that I am part of that did not like it as much, and then a whole slew of players who were brand new to the franchise and have no clue what they are missing. The choice to focus on a game that is in Early Access, is a purely financial choice. Path of Exile II sold better than they expected and still has peak concurrency higher than some Path of Exile leagues. However for many it also feels like a Betrayal of the promises that Path of Exile was not going to get lost in the hype.
It is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date they are returning to it.
Chris Wilson
As a result… players on the subreddit are taking to using the company’s own words against them. It does in many ways feel like in the push to get Path of Exile II out the door, they have backpedaled on a number of the core tenants that they talked about in this widely viewed 2019 GDC talk. For the outsiders who were never part of this community prior to the launch of the early access, this probably seems odd. The thing that you need to understand is that we were effectively promised that the development of Path of Exile II would not cause the development of Path of Exile 1 to slip.
The release cadence that made Path of Exile the game that it is today is essentially built around the concept of four releases per year. Two would be larger releases, two would be smaller releases, but effectively every three to four months the player base had another league to engage with. The entire flow of Path of Exile centers around the league launch, and then also the fall off of the game after a month or two depending on how successful that league was. At the time of writing this the current league, Settlers of Kalguur launched on July 26th, 2024 and is 188 days old. Prior to this the longest league was Crucible, another league that was pushed out due to work on Path of Exile II at 130 days. They have not been able to hit the target cadence since 2021 with the Sentinel league, which I can only assume also has been impacted by the development of Path of Exile II.
Back in October, I gave Jonathan Rogers a good deal of credit for the communications and transparency when they had to push back the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access. The thing is… this video format of him sitting in the interview suite delivering a fireside chat, only really works so often. This is the fourth of these that I can personally remember, talking about unfortunate events and delivering a public address over whatever issue happens to be going on. What we need is better communication before the train derails. Even in this video he as much indicates that he knew that they were not going to hit the target for 3.26 before they left on holiday break. That is the point where you should have opened up to the community. Many of us were excited to have a new Path of Exile League on the near horizon, and as such it didn’t quite matter so much that the current state of Path of Exile II was pretty shitty. It was “early access” after all, and we had a better game to get excited for soon.
The other thing that really hurts is the loss of Bex, the long time community manager for Grinding Gear Games. She’s been gone since August of 2023, but has never really been replaced in the types of interactions that she had with the community, nor the regularity of communications. We’ve also had the inexplicable loss of Chris Wilson, the previous figurehead of Grinding Gear Games and to the best of my knowledge the last time we heard from him was at the release of the Necropolis league. I get that Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers have stepped up into their roles as leads of Path of Exile I and Path of Exile II respectively… but it still feels weird to not hear the iconic and much memed line anymore: “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games”.
So what do we know? We know that the teams are actively working on Path of Exile II 0.2.0 and we do not have a release date for that, but it will be a massive balance patch that comes with a league reset. Since no timing has been announced yet, I figure that is probably at least a month if not two out. We also know that they will not begin work in earnest on Path of Exile 3.26 until that has launched and that it has been given a few weeks of burn in. So I figure at this point the earliest we will see a new Path of Exile league is April potentially May. In April, the Settlers league will be over 260 days old at that point… so they need to at least throw us some sort of bone. Now is the time for them to dust off some major event like Endless Delve to give players something to focus on while they wait. The NecroSettlers Event was not terribly well received, and that league is effectively dead. I looked to see if I could find a pseudo-six-link helm yesterday and there was exactly one for sale… and it was 260 Divines.
In a perfect world, Eleventh Hour Games would use this opportunity and timeline slippage to slide in and launch Season 2 of Last Epoch. I do not think that is likely, but unfortunately that also means that 3.26 and Season 2 are likely going to be landing around the same time. If I have to choose between the two games I am going to be playing Last Epoch. I don’t want to have to make that choice, but I feel like I am way more excited about the endgame changes coming to the monolith, even though we don’t exactly know what they are. No matter what GGG rolls out with 3.26, it will not be anywhere near enough to make up for the year long Settlers league. This whole sequence has been a real hit to my faith in Grinding Gear Games as a whole. Again… like I said at the top I am reading Play Nice the book about the downfall of Blizzard, and I am honestly seeing some themes playing out here as well. I hope they can pull out of this, but they are essentially spending the goodwill of the player base right now.
Anyways… are you impacted by this announcement? Do you even care about Path of Exile 1? Drop me a line below.
Morning Folks! The truth of Diablo IV is that it is not necessarily the most compelling game on the planet, but it absolutely nails one aspect. It is easy, seamless, and non-punitive to group up and do content with your friends. I think above all else that is the main reason why this is going to remain in the rotation of games for me, because it gives a good meet up destination for me and Ace to hang out and slaughter demons together. I love Path of Exile, but it feels bad to group with other players. Everything about the calculus of grouping makes it feel overly punishing, whereas Diablo IV has nothing but benefits when it comes to hanging out with friends. Ace had a bad day, and I also have not had the most wonderful week so far… so as a result we decided to hunker down and burn through a bunch of bosses last night.
That really is the biggest benefit of Diablo IV, that grouping especially when it comes to bossing is a force multiplier… not necessarily in the time to kill but definitely in the access to loot. I took a screenshot of my materials tab before the night and at the end of the night, and we burned through so many bosses it was silly. We gave up on Varshan though, because after four trips to vendor/salvage it just felt silly to keep going given how largely unrewarding that boss feels. Essentially we did the rotation of Beast in the Ice, Varshan, Grigoire, and Zir first so that we would then have more summons for the two best bosses Andariel and Duriel.
Going into the night I really only wanted two things. I needed a good Ancestral copy of Ring of Mendeln, and a good Ancestral copy of Blood Moon Breeches. Thankfully I walked away with multiple copies of both so that I could spend some painstaking time evaluating all of them to determine which one I would end up using. Additionally I think I picked up a few good copies of every Necromancer specific unique just in case I needed to swap builds at some point. I might try and kit out a full second set of gear and try Blood Wave, since it is so relatively easy to swap between builds now thanks to the armory. Essentially if you need uniques… you need to be running the summoned bosses because that seems to be the only reliable way to get them. Ace got my luck and walked away with two Mythics, and unfortunately I walked away with none… but last league I think I got 5 to their 2 so we will call it even.
I wish I had a good count of just how many boss summons we did last night, but I did not keep track. I know I carried Ace through a 50 Pit before the evening so we could attempt to farm on Torment 3… which was doable but just went a bit too slow and we bumped it down to T2. At the end of the evening I drug them through a Pit 65 so that they could begin to play with Torment 4. Past that we did run a 10 Wave Infernal Hordes on Torment 3, just so we could stockpile some obducite to masterwork the ancestral uniques we got. It was a pretty great night and essentially wall to wall boss and monster killing. No better way to soothe the soul.
I’ve knocked out three objectives on the final tier of the Seasons Journey, but I swear that this season seems to be much harder than the previous one. I seem to be able to run open world Torment 4 content without much issue, but Nightmare Dungeons seem a bit rippy at times. I am either immortal… or getting one-shot with little room between. There is an objective where you have to kill 50 Elites in Nightmare Dungeons without taking any deaths. Similarly there is a one that requires opening 25 of the roots from the events… in 15 minutes that is going to be hard as hell to get done. Everyone is out there spamming those things and you don’t get credit when someone else opens one. It is going to be rough getting through this one, and it might be something that I do once the season has died down a bit.
I am pretty sure Ace walked away with every unique but one, which is pretty decent considering I think that specific build requires a bunch of uniques. They did get what felt like 20 different copies of the ring that they needed, at least one of which was double ancestral. I got a wild quad ancestral necklace, which sadly I have no use for… but still cool to see. This is honestly what I wish Path of Exile 1 or 2 or even Last Epoch could be. All three of those have various punitive reasons why grouping up is occasionally butts. Diablo III and IV though… its all good and honestly better the more people you can pack into an event. The only negative would be the sheer amount of time and running back to a vendor that would be required to do four different players worth of summon materials. It would literally take an entire afternoon to cycle through a similar payload of four players worth of mats. It essentially took all night… around three hours maybe, to do all of our summons for six bosses.
I still feel like I am probably starting to wind down a bit. I want to start ratholing decent ancestral gear so that I can build an entire second set of gear and try blood wave. As much as I do not love the concept of a minion-less Necromancer, I still feel like I owe it to myself to try this season’s god build. Pure minions should get better at some point soon hopefully, because right now the Ring of Mendeln is not interacting correctly with several other legendary items, keeping the stack of multipliers from happening on minion damage. I will say it is kind of butts right now if you happen to die in any content, because there is no easy way to get back your minions unless you left a stack of corpses laying around. This is also a problem I have had in Last Epoch, except there you have to summon them all painstakingly one at a time. Path of Exile II really has the right idea by making your minions summon automatically. At a minimum in both Last Epoch and Diablo IV there should be a channeled button that will summon up all of your minions at once so that it isn’t something you can realistically use in combat, but it does allow you to get back to fighting shape easily.
I hope you are also finding some comfortable distraction from the bullshit that is happening in the real world. I am not blind to it, I just figure it is better for my mental health not to engage right now. Enough information is filtering through to know that shit is really bad. Please do not take my lack of engagement with it as a sign of not caring. I care about you and your safety, and if you need me I am only a message away on the plethora of platforms that I have an account on. I am still checking everything sporadically, but I am also denying them my undivided attention.
Good Morning Folks! Since I did not do my normal weekend recap post yesterday, I figured this morning I would start out with a bit of a progress post on Diablo IV Season Seven. I have to admit… I am starting to run out of steam. I had a pretty great first week, but now I am reaching the point where I am not really as driven to keep moving forward. Minions Necromancer seems to have stalled out at Torment III, and I am struggling to push it up to something that feels halfway decent at Torment IV. I could of course swap to Blood Wave of one of the more powerful builds with zero minions… but I have been stubborn. Like I said last week… a Necromancer without Minions is basically just a shitty Mage.
Really the core problem that I am dealing with is not being able to get the drops that I need to progress the build. I am kitted out in full Ancestral gear, and honestly well rolled items at that… but the challenge that I am having is that I cannot get the Ancestral Uniques that I need for the build. I’ve got copies of the normal mode versions, and in theory I should probably try rearranging my gear in a way so that I could equip them and give that a shot to see how it feels. Largely across the board Ancestral drops feel like they are way less common than they were last league, and this feels bad. More than that it does not feel like I am having much success target farming the items. In theory Ace and I were talking about doing another round of boss summons this evening, and if I get lucky that would solve my problems.
I’ve completed the Battle Pass and unlocked all of this seasons cosmetics. I generally pay for the cheap version of the battle pass without any acceleration, because generally speaking the seasonal cosmetics are pretty freaking great. I am not entirely certain what I think about this armor set, but the weird raptor-horse thingy is pretty sweet. One thing that annoys me about the Battle Pass, is that since the cats are only available through the expansion… the seasonal tracks never seem to include any cosmetics for them. This is the problem with splitting features between expansion and core versions of the game, and seems like a bad design overall.
Where I am stalled out however is on the Season Journey. I’ve reached the final step called Destroyer, and every single objective requires Torment IV to complete. Since I cannot reliably run much of anything on Torment IV, that means I am pretty much hard locked. Then the final steps will require me to do copious farming while sitting on T4, and luck into a few edge cases like having two legendary shrines appear in a single Roothold. Maybe I am feeling a little more charitable to the streamers that I felt abandoned this season too soon, because honestly… I was just a bit slower reaching the point they must have on day one or two. I am not sure what is wrong with the season, but something feels off now that I am out of the super fun leveling phase.
I did however take down Lilith so that was a positive step forward. Last season I got hard carried by Ace on this fight, and this season I was able to one-shot it. This means I have my resplendent spark, so that if I can ever complete the seasons journey… I will be able to craft a mythic unique. Part of me is wondering if I should have gone with Spiritborn. Truth be told the core problem that I have with Diablo IV is how spammy it feels. Maybe I am just too used to one or two button builds in Path of Exile, but it is highly annoying that I need to spam six abilities every time they are off cool-down. I could always use the numlock trick, but that feels cheesy. Especially after getting used to the more combo based system of Path of Exile II… Diablo IV spammy combat feels odd.
I admit… I am not 100% certain how much longer I am going to keep poking at this. I should at least try a respec to something else before giving up the ghost. I am not sure what happened, but in the last two days the fun levels have diminished significantly. It was great so long as I felt like I was regularly knocking out objectives, but once I stalled out… it made me start to evaluate the type of combat that I was actually doing.
