Good Morning Folks. I contemplated not doing a blog post this morning, because I was not really certain what I would actually talk about. I am still knee deep in Path of Exile Legacy of Phrecia event and enjoying myself greatly. Yesterday I talked about some nonsense I was doing with a Headhunter to enable me to wear a Defiance of Destiny amulet, and then also deciding to pick up a Mageblood while the getting was good. I think the problem that I have long had with the Mageblood is that it enables builds that would not be able to function without it. There are so many builds where they are effectively using one belt slot and their flask slots in order to fix all of their elemental resistances. So it is hypocritical of me that I am essentially going down that path. One of the things that I have not liked about playing Scavenger Righteous Fire is that it seemed too painful to get to 90% all res. I am not there… but using a Mageblood allowed me to get considerably closer.
I spent a good chunk of time farming up flasks down in Delve. Delve provides many things, but it is really easy to get a bunch of level 83+ flasks for the purpose of rolling whatever you want on them. I had a set of 3 Charges per hit flasks that I was using, and I did not want to roll over the top of those, so instead I set out to farm a new Quicksilver, Ruby, Sapphire, and Topaz flask because I had been pretty bad about actually rat-holing these as I found them in the deep below. I rolled them for 70% increased Effect… save for the Sapphire where I gave up as I was running low on currency and did not want to buy more from the market. If I was trying harder I would have shot for Increased effect on all of the flasks as well, but for now I have it on Ruby the most important as over-capped fire resistance turns directly into life regeneration.
While this did not take me to 90 all, it did take me to 90/88/88 which is far better than I was sitting at previously. I have so many defensive layers right now between max block with life recoup, the 25% life recoup before damage taken from the Defiance of Destiny, 80% of all phys damage taken as fire which is then reduced by 90% resistance. Essentially I no longer need armor and just to make things more comfortable I resolved my Freeze and Chill immunity with the flasks so that I could drop Brine King and go back to Lunaris in my Pantheon. Similarly since I am immune to all bleeding I dropped Ralakesh and swapped over to Abberath to make myself immune to Burning Ground. The only elemental ailment that I am not immune to is Ignite and having 60% reduced duration seemed like a good idea. I can soak it with my 90% resistance so it really was not a big deal even before the Mageblood swap when I was sitting at 85%.
Another thing that I plan on playing with is Dawnbreaker. Getting one with 20%/20%/20% generally costs in the neighborhood of a Mageblood, but I managed to pick this one one that was someones “bricked” corruption. Essentially I am losing the 20 Life implicit, getting +2 socketed minion jewels that is essentially useless… but it cost 1.5 Divines… so I can live with it. Essentially equipping this shield would mean I am losing my 5% life recoup on block, but would allow me to take 100% of physical damage as Fire Damage, and at the same time convert 20% of Cold Damage and 20% of Lightning Damage to Fire Damage as well. This means I am contemplating changing out both of my rings to drop the Cold and Lighting resistance that I am gaining from them and stacking nothing but Fire Resistance since the degeneracy of my Mageblood is capping my resistances with flasks. This is essentially why that stupid belt is so powerful… it allows you to shift around stats to something more powerful for your build.
I am roughly half way to level 100, and as a result I have officially deployed my loss prevention strategy. This means giving up two inventory slots so that I can always have with me an Omen of Death-Dancing and an Omen of Amelioration. Essentially the idea is that Death-Dancing will kick in during a near miss to keep it from turning into a death… and then if you do actually end up taking a death Amelioration is going to severely blunt the amount of lost experience, and as a result reduce the amount of time it will take to gain it back. I have a few of each farmed up, but even if I have to start buying these… it would be 40 Chaos well spent just as an insurance policy.
Swapping over to this set up, lost me some damage. I had to drop Oriath’s End, but I will probably pick it back up once I hit level 100 and no longer care about taking deaths. I plan on dropping my Life Flask at that point and it would give me back a third mode of exploding things. Basically my goal now is to hit level 100 and then start trying to farm t17s and other things where I might actually take deaths. For the moment I have swapped over to running Toxic Sewer and City Square for my mapping combo, and am working on trying to get it to a comfortable point of sustaining them. I was running Defiled Cathedral until I got the Nameless Seer to show up, so that I could scry Apothecary on Toxic Sewer. I got that last night so I am in process of swapping over the maps I run. Essentially all of my T14 and T15 maps are going to my mappers as I whittle down that achievement.
I am shocked that I am still having as much fun as I am, given that I only rolled a single character for Phrecia. That said I am looking forward to the 27th so we can see what they have been cooking for Path of Exile II, and then after that the launch of Last Epoch Season 2.
Good Morning folks. We are on the cusp of a new Last Epoch and Path of Exile II league and I cannot stop playing the Legacy of Phrecia event. What is probably even more wilds is that I think right now, there are more Path of Exile players than Path of Exile II players. It is really hard to prove this however because the majority of POE players do not use the Steam client. I switched to the standalone client some leagues ago because there is almost always a delay in league start because of the patch having to go through the Steam QC checks. However the 24 hour peak for POE2 is 35,015 and for POE1 21,117 and in the past they have stated than less than half of the players use the Steam client. Anyways I would believe it given how much trade volume I am seeing in small 20c trades. I can’t complete a map without someone pinging me for an item, which is way more active than a league normally is a month into it.
One of the things that I am chipping away at is the Gear Grinding Goals challenge for successfully running 200 t14 or higher rare maps to 100% completion. In truth I never really spent much time on the mappers when Settlers of Kalguur launched, but have seemingly hit my stride. I should probably finish upgrading my mappers all the way to level 10s, but for now I seem to be able to complete maps pretty solidly. I upgraded my last two voidstones over the weekend and as such I have a backlog of lower tier maps to consume, now that I only really care about t16s. As of this morning I have 50 more maps to go, and then I am sitting at level 99 and am mostly grinding out level 100. Getting this challenge won’t really move the needle and I will need to figure out something else to do to get another totem upgrade. I am hoping that I will actually encounter Sasan now that I am actively running mappers so I can knock out one of those associated achievements.
The thing about keeping your mappers running all the time is that you can also keep your disenchanter going pretty much all the time. More than that however they occasionally return some really nice stuff. I’ve gotten several 21/20 gems and while I did not have the mental fortitude to actually snap a screenshot of it… they brought me a Hinekora’s Lock. Admittedly when I got this, I did not realize the windfall that it actually was. I’ve gotten these to drop before during the Ancestors league and back then it was maybe 20 Divines. I was able to sell mine for 140 Divines. The Reddit regularly has pictures of folks having their mappers bring back a Mirror of Kalandra or even a Mageblood.
The only problem with getting a huge amount of currency this late in the league… is that I pretty much have already upgraded everything that I really needed for my build. I could of course have bought a Mageblood, and technically still can given that a reasonably well rolled one is going for roughly 110 Divines. However when it comes to chase uniques… I have always felt like my favorite is Headhunter. This is a belt that I have used many times on bow builds to help buff up both my damage output and my survival while mapping. However I have never actually used one on a Righteous Fire build… and in truth it would also solve another problem that I have been having in that I could not really juggle my stats in order to add in a Defiance of Destiny. So I spent 10 div on a well rolled Headhunter and 10 div on a well rolled Defiance and have been playing with both for funsies.
I lost quite a bit of regeneration but still have around 1300 health per second which is still enough to maintain righteous fire without any issues. However in general I have been able to hit nowhere near the numbers I am used to as Chieftain where I am only stacking Fire Resistance and can hit something around 2000 health per second. Basically Headhunter just makes any other build feel better as you are effectively getting a ton of buffs any time you kill rare monsters. The best of these is of course Soul Eater… and the worst is the one that gives you a Flicker Strike like effect that teleports you to the nearest rare monster. However since I care about being up close and personal with things… the flicker strike nonsense is way less harmful than it is with a glass cannon bow build. The only time it gets really dangerous is when I am delving… and it decides to teleport me out into the darkness.
Earlier I said that I did not initially buy a MageBlood, but could afford one anyways… so this morning I decided to go ahead and do that. I am not one of those people where the acquisition of money in general is an endgame unto itself. Currency in Path of Exile is only useful in that I can buy things with it that I will likely never actually see drop on their own. I am legitimately not sure what Mageblood number this is now… but I think my third? I think it might be my sixth Headhunter, and fourth Defiance of Destiny… because of all of the Tier 0 rarity uniques that is the only one that I think I have seen drop on its own. I am legitimately contemplating swapping over to a resistance flask setup because that would give me close to 90% fire resistance and around 85% for all of the other resistances. Regardless having a Mageblood gives me more options than NOT having a Mageblood.
Long story short… Legacy of Phrecia has been a pretty great event for me as a whole.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We were out last week because Bel’s world was burning and all of the smoke was killing his lungs. This week we start off with a discussion about the Eleventh Hour Games and Grinding Gear Games situation as GGG pulls a Blizzard and ambushes the Last Epoch Season 2 launch. From there we talk about the chill tea shop gameplay of Wanderstop, telling us that sometimes it is a good idea to stop and relax for a bit. Tam and Kodra played through Wanderstop and talked about how it has evolved the already great co-op gameplay of It Takes Two with a much better story. Ash and Ammo talk about diving into Xenoblade Chronicles X as it just was re-released on Nintendo Switch. Bel talks a bit about Gunlocked which attempts to be the Vampire Survivors of Bullethell Shooters… and fails in interesting ways that will hopefully be addressed in the sequel. Bel also shares his initial thoughts from the Titans Quest II playtest, and Tam shares his thoughts about what he is seeing about Dune Awakening.
Good Morning Folks. With the delay in Last Epoch Season 2 and the upcoming launch of Dawn of the Hunt in Path of Exile 2, it has had me thinking about Path of Exile 3.26 a bit. On March 4th we got an announcement that the Legacy of Phrecia Event was being extended to April 23rd. Additionally as part of this news post, we got a tentative launch window for the 3.26 League landing in June. This means that 3.25 will have lasted just shy of one full year, which is a pretty far fall from the 4 leagues of a year goals that Path of Exile used to attempt. Granted a whole new game has launched so I have to give them some credit.. but given that I am one of the folks who greatly prefers the original game to the sequel… it isn’t going to be much credit. It has made me start to daydream a bit about what 3.26 might look like, and this morning I am going to talk through some of my thoughts.
What Makes a League?
I guess for the uninitiated I should start off with what exactly a league entails. The best leagues feature some sort of brand new mechanic that has its own type of drops associated with it. In the Trial of the Ancestors they introduced tattoos, which allow you to sacrifice a travel node on your passive tree for some powerful buff. Additionally it came with a whole new autobattler style mechanic where you set up matches against various Karui Ancestors and were rewarded with drops based on your success. During Affliction there was this whole new realm that you went into before every map, that allowed you to wildly juice the outcome of that map. Additionally it introduced brand new secondary ascendancies that gave your character brand new abilities. Essentially the best leagues change the way you play the game… over the course of the league and also often introduce items that eventually get worked in as permanent updates going forward.
Settlers Goes Standard
By the time 3.26 drops, we will have had access to Kingsmarch for a full year. As such it would feel really freaking weird to lose access to it. In my perfect scenario we would retain full access to these systems in their entirety and effecting Settlers of Kalguur just goes Standard. Maybe streamline some of the leveling processes a bit and speed things up so it does not take quite as long to get everything online. I think almost everything included in Settlers was a pure win, and I would love to see it continue. Since this involves a lot of the characters from the Heist League already, I would love to see the evolve to fill both roles. Rogue’s Harbor has always been a bit of a pain in the ass, as well as a lag fest that often causes MTX to crash players out of the game. Having a solo instance that fills both jobs would be pretty epic. Once I leave the campaign… in truth I never want to see another player unless I am doing a trade.
Currency Exchange
If for whatever reason Settlers does not go standard in full… at a bare minimum the Currency Exchange must be carried forward. There is no way I can go back to trading currency through the trade website. This has been the single best quality of life improvement in the game full stop. Sure I would love to have better visualization into what people actually want, or the ability to post an item up for players to make an offer on it… especially if it is something that does not have a huge volume of trade. Even in its current form though it is a requirement going forward for the health of the game.
Recombinators
I also feel like Recombinators need to exist in one form for another going forward. Even if this is a machine that we place in our hideouts instead of in Kingsmarch, this is something that needs to stick around in the game. Recombinators give you a reason to care about amassing crafting bases… giving them value and making loot more interesting while you are mapping. Being able to work your way slowly towards a perfect item is a huge boon for a lot of players, specifically those in self-found game modes. I don’t fully grasp the ins and outs of this system, but I feel like once I get a firm handle on it I should be able to slowly work my way towards better gear, rather than hoping and praying for the right item to drop.
Replica Ascendancy
Given based on the volume of trade I am still seeing… the Legacy of Phrecia event has been a massive success. Adding nineteen brand new ascendancies to the game has been wild for class balance, and I would love to see some way of this continuing forward into the game. I’ve heard a bunch of ideas from having a rotation of ascendancies similar to the map rotation, to having some alternate method for ascending to the alternate versions. My favorite name for these was “Replica Ascendancy” and I am sorry that I do not remember who coined this term. I have had a freaking blast playing Scavenger Righteous Fire, and I am not sure if I would continue to choose it over my beloved Chieftain but it would still be nice to have options. Similarly there are a whole bunch of cool builds that have been enabled by the toolkit these new ascendancies have. I would be perfectly happy if 3.26 just had six different paths you could choose off the base classes and then two for Scion.
Mapping Idols
The other big change that the Legacy of Phrecia event introduced was an alternate atlas tree in the form of a series of itemized idols, and a grid that popped out of the side of the mapping device. The existing Atlas Passive tree is near perfection… but it would be exceptionally cool if the Idols moved forward in a limited fashion. What I envision is a 3×3 grid that allows you to fit in a limited number of idols to tweak your existing Atlas strategy. The limited grid would also limit your access to the most powerful abilities that can roll on Idols, and greatly limit the overall impact it has. In doing this I would almost suggest removing all of the nodes that cancel out league mechanics from the Passive tree, and instead limiting them to only exist as Unique Idols. It allows you to either buff existing strats, or splash in something that might be harder to get because you are on the wrong side of the passive tree.
Identification Vendor
Borrowing some quality of life from Path of Exile II… I would love to see one of the vendors have the Identification functionality that The Hooded One/Doryani provides. There were few things that I found myself missing from Path of Exile II, but this was absolutely one of them. I liked the flow of exiting a map, clicking on the vendor to identify everything… and then doing whatever else I wanted to do with the items. Surely this would not be that hard to implement, and it would be a significant quality of life improvement.
Item Salvaging
The other functionality from Path of Exile II that I would love to see implemented… that I think is probably reasonable without massive system changes is the Salvage Bench. The ability to salvage items for various currencies really changes the way that you look at items. For example there are a lot of times in Path of Exile that items drop with quality… but unless the item is rolled particularly well or a base that you care about… it is effectively useless loot. If you could instead then salvage that item to turn it into quality currency, it would make especially the early game feel much better. Similarly if you could convert magic, rare, and unique loot into fractional currency shards it would allow you another way of working up towards currency items that are actually useful for crafting purposes. Having more reasons to actually pick something up off the ground is a good thing.
[EDIT] – After a conversation with Ashgar
Ash remarked that there are in fact vendor “recipes” for a lot of this stuff. I think my point is that the salvage ratios from Path of Exile II, feels more generous than the vendor “recipes” from Path of Exile 1. Maybe this is entirely a “feels” thing and there may be no numerical proof of this. Salvaging things for whatever reason feels better than selling them.
Lantern of Arimor
Necropolis League was not exactly amazing. It introduced this whole itemized corpse system that you planted in graves, in order to craft gear. It was cumbersome as hell, and I do not want it to come back. However it also introduced the Lantern of Arimor, which was a widget that you could fiddle with at the beginning of a map in order to have some agency in the sorts of mobs and types of loot you might encounter. While this slowed down the action a bit, I also found it really enjoyable during mapping. Especially when you added Allflames into the mix that allowed you to substitute out a different monster type for something that would normally spawn on the map. If they brought this back I would prefer to have this as something that appears in the endgame and that you would have to specifically spec into in order to enable.
Bring Back Metamorph
One of the things that often happens during a League patch is the re-introduction of mechanics that have left the game for one reason or another. When Ultimatum was reintroduced, it caused Metamorph to get bumped from the list. I really liked fighting Metamorphs in maps because they were often worth quite a bit of loot. I did not however really enjoy the system where you built your own monster, because while rewarding this required you to exit the flow of the normal game. Since Ultimatum got the drops that traditionally came from Metamorph… and the mechanic was all about crafting monsters… maybe have this as an alternate source of the corpses that currently drop in Ritual that can be used as Spectres. Additionally I feel like the flavor of this mechanic would also make it a good place to reintroduce Allflames in lieu of monster parts. Have this be a map only mechanic and potentially add it to the number of alternate mechanic spawns, either that or implement it through Idols.
Weapon Passive Trees
Another thing that I think would be fun to see make a return, is the Crucible weapon passive trees. Essentially during Crucible every item had the ability to craft on a weapon tree, that could then spawn all sorts of nonsense on them. There was a whole forge mechanic that allowed you to merge together multiple trees similar to how things currently work with Recombinators and item affixes. My idea is to implement these but have them drop from a specific mechanic similar to how fractured bases drop. Instead of the channeling mechanic, make it so that they just level up through combat similar to how virtue gems do. Then the whole manipulation of items can be merged into the Recombination system. You could use that system to either manipulate the crucible trees if both items have one… or put the tree on the item base that you want. This just adds further depth to the crafting system and gives the mirror crafters more nonsense to make even more perfect weapons.
Primordial Blocks
This is a personal desire, and not necessarily a systems thing… but I really want Primordial Blocks to be in the league map rotation. For those who have not participated in many leagues before, essentially each league has a slightly different set of maps included with it. Primordial Blocks has been out of the rotation for a few leagues and I would really love to see it come back. It isn’t necessarily that I love the layout, but there is a Hideout associated with it that spawns exceptionally rarely… and it is my white whale. I have run countless copies of this map and have yet to get it to spawn, and I really want to give it another go.
I get that we are still several months away from 3.26 or even the beginning of early spoilers… but that in part is why I am creating this post now. I did not want my ideas to be tainted by the various prognostication that happens once the spoilers begin to flow. I legitimately have no clue what sort of big system GGG might implement for 3.26, but I wanted to at least talk through some of the quality of life and general systems that I would love to see return. What do you want to make a comeback with this league? What are some of the things that you would love to see implemented in Path of Exile? I would love to have a game pausing system, but I figure that is way too structural to ever actually get. Drop me a line below with some of your own thoughts.
