It is no longer morning… and honestly, I have no clue why I have struggled to get blog posts out for the last few days. Whatever the case I had a bit of a lucky streak last night. After being largely unable to get a spot in either a Siege of Orgrimmar or Throne of Thunder raid for the last few evenings, I managed to knock both out in relatively short order. I am not sure if getting some jewelry pieces knocked out and bumping up my gear by a single level made my item level look more appealing… or if I just happened to luck into a more open-minded group. In both cases thought I joined when there were very few party members and maybe have just lucked into strong teams. Siege went pretty much flawlessly and I was surprised by just how fast the entire run went.
Throne of Thunder felt a bit more challenging, namely, we struggled a bit with Dark Animus. This was mostly due to the fact that it was VERY hard not to kill everything at the same time and in doing so blow the entire raid up. We had to each choose a robot and solo it… until we finally got it down to a few robots and finally merged them into the big one. Damage never seemed to be an issue, but I did feel sorry a bit for the healers who had to keep up with us. Going through all of this has made me realize that Pandaria really did have a number of very solid raids in it. I think the only reason why it was ever remembered less than favorably is because of how long it was between Siege releasing and Warlords finally coming out.
At this point, I have every slot unlocked for all of my alts going forward, and I think I might be calling it good for this character. I can’t really see myself pouring the bronze into upgrading every slot, so it is likely that I will pop in each day, kill the world bosses, and do the daily quests. I’m already powerful enough to pretty much do anything I might want to do in the open world, but also feel like now is a good place to start tapering down my playtime on this character at least. Blizzard has come out and said that they do not plan on reducing the amount of gold required to upgrade characters all the way to the maximum, and I can’t see myself being willing to grind the 600k Bronze or so that are required to upgrade everything.
I’ve shifted focus over to my Drenden Tauren Paladin character and have been shocked at just how fast I am pushing through the levels. After finishing up Jade Foreset I am basically sitting at level 53. I can see finishing out the leveling process and then maybe doing dailies on two sets of characters to pick up the rest of the cosmetic gear that I want. At this point I have bought three pages worth of mounts and have a few more of those to pick up, and then I will start snagging gearsets that interest me.
I think the part that has been most interesting is all of the random groups I have gotten in, and how I am way more comfortable listing my own groups. I would love this newfound focus to carry over into other games, because I would absolutely love to start using my commander tag a bit more in Guild Wars 2. Weirdly I feel way more confident in leading things in World of Warcraft, because of the scope of what is needed is so much more clearly defined. I still think group gameplay in Guild Wars 2 is a confusing mess, and I am uncertain I will ever truly grasp organized play in that game. At a minimum I would love to be comfortable doing strikes and fractals and getting them started on my own, rather than waiting for that Unicorn of a group to form itself.
All of this return to Pandaria has made me realize how far I have fallen. I used to be the person who was comfortable enough in crafting my own groups that I wrote a guide on doing so. Now I just hate the thought of taking responsibility over others in a video game. I miss being that guy though who was willing to take on that mantle. Mostly because I miss having groups available on demand rather than waiting around for them to form. I need to work on that, and I need to get over my performance anxiety. I would ultimately be a happier person if I did so.
In part, I blame the “D4 Bad” meme that became so prevalent that there are entire AI-generated meme channels about it, but recently I’ve come across a number of think pieces diving into whether or not 3.24 aka the Necropolis League was good or not. Technically Necropolis is not over and won’t be officially finished for another month or more, but it is essentially done as evidenced by the player numbers and how the prices of everything are increasing as they do when the availability of items dries up. Let’s look at just the facts first, which is that Necropolis had the highest day-two falloff in player numbers of any league in certainly recent memory, but technically any league in the history of the game. That same trend largely continued throughout the league eventually stabilizing to having better retention than Kalandra in percentage of peak players vs percentage of current players. I figured this morning I would dive into this fact and share some of my thoughts surrounding it.
Player retention numbers are always challenging when taken out of context as compared to what a baseline trend looks like for any given game. As an outsider, I have limited data with which to draw conclusions but probably the two that I use most often are the Concurrent Numbers page on POEDB and the data kept by SteamCharts. It has been estimated that Steam represents roughly 60% of the Path of Exile player base, so you can use that to extrapolate the total picture. So if you look at the points I have marked A and B that represents the launch of the Ancestor and Affliction leagues respectively. That is what normal player patterns look like… a brief ramp-up to a spike at the league launch and then a slow tapering off of player interest as the weeks pass by. This is pretty much what ANY seasonal model looks for all games that subscribe to that methodology.
Where things get really weird is when you get to C, D, and E and I have zoomed this section in for the sake of exploring that specifically. The dates here don’t make a ton of sense, especially when you consider that the spike starts on February 26th, a little over a month before the start of the Necropolis League which began on March 29th. I pondered this for a bit and then it dawned on me what we were seeing. Last Epoch launched on February 21st and has what one can only charitably call… a rough launch. The servers were largely in a barely playable state for most of that first week. So my theory is that you had a lot of players who got hyped to play an ARPG and could not play Last Epoch, so they popped in to see how things were going in Path of Exile. Similarly, you see the numbers bottom out once again to the residual background noise of a league in week two when the servers were largely fixed and continued on in that fashion until right before the launch of the Necropolis league. While that does not necessarily explain the rapid drop-off after the launch at point E… it does show that the POE community and Last Epoch community… are essentially the same player base.
Necropolis is what is often referred to as a “spreadsheet” league where there is a lot of micromanagement of resources intended to set up specific ideal situations for crafting phenomenal items. In the leagues that I have played the one that feels the most similar was Crucible league where you spent a lot of time “fishing” for items with good trees on them, that you could then use to attempt to manipulate them onto other items. Necropolis brought us Graveyard crafting where in theory you have the ability to set up some very deterministic crafts but it requires you to gather large amounts of individually itemized corpses in order to pull it off. Most of the times I played with this system I would pour 30 or so corpses into a single item craft and end up with something that is not even useable as a final outcome. I think this was for the most part the experience of the majority of players.
Craft of Exile came to the rescue in creating a calculator that would attempt to calculate the corpses needed for the best odds of crafting a specific item. For example, I set up what I would want as an ideal Righteous Fire Sceptre and their calculation uses 86 of 88 corpses and even then only has a 63% chance of creating the final desired output. This becomes a system where those who really know what they are doing can print out mirror-tier items… and those who have no clue get something as a result that is on average going to get hidden by your item filter. In Crucible the act of fishing for items was way more enjoyable and there was a pretty low opportunity cost. You picked up a trash item up off the floor and then ran it through the Crucible Altar that appeared on your map. If you hit a good tree you kept it, if not you threw it back on the floor.
Necropolis Graveyard crafting on the other hand required you to hold onto entire inventories full of individually itemized and non-stacking coffins. You can only have 64 corpses in your Necropolis Morgue, so in order to do that 86 coffin craft above I would need to fill my morgue a few times with corpses out of the bank just to complete the craft. Even worse is trying to purchase specific types of coffins that you might be missing for your craft. The vast majority of corpses are only worth a few chaos, meaning that it is exceptionally hard to find anyone willing to stop what they are doing to sell you a single corpse. Bulk buying options were created by the community but for the most part to get what you wanted you had to buy out an entire stash tab worth of corpses. The above image represents all of the corpses that I held onto which are spread across four quad tabs. For the average player… the system just was not worth interacting with at all.
The other part of the Necropolis was the Lantern of Arimor which gives every campaign zone and atlas map in the game a number of unskippable modifiers that crank up the potential difficulty while in certain cases giving you some hefty rewards. This was a deal breaker for a number of players because it is a system that could not be skipped and before it was nerfed, could legitimately end your hardcore run if you happened to get a bad affix. This drove away a lot of players early, most famous of which is Kripparian who is a huge Ruthless game mode enjoyer who posted this video on day three of the league indicating that he was quitting early. Kalandra and Crucible both had similarly poorly received in map mechanics, but you could just ignore them if you did not want to engage. There was no way to remove the Lantern of Arimor modifiers from a map, nor any way to re-roll them save for trashing the map.
Allflames were another mechanic that allowed you to modify the Lantern of Arimor modifiers and could in theory make some of the downsides of running a particular map mod less severe. However this also represented the first league where there were nodes for that league on the Atlas Passives, and for you to get reliable drops you had to spec heavily into that mechanic. Several Allflames also had unintended consequences which will come into effect when I talk about some later changes. However, one that I used regularly was Allflame Ember of Sulphite which added packs of mobs to your map that dropped large amounts of sulphite to your map, so much so that if I combined this with a modifier that increased pack density I could pretty much fill up all 65,000 of my Sulphite reserve on a single map. Unfortunately, this also interacted with the Atlas Passive that gave you Azerite every time you gained Sulphite meaning that it pretty much destroyed any value in the Delve Resonator market. I have to say though for the most part I enjoyed the Allflames and would love to see something like this stick around in the game permanently.
At this point you might be getting the impression that there were a lot of moving parts to the Necropolis league… and honestly, we have yet to really even begin to discuss the biggest changes. Scarabs have traditionally been an item that you could include in your map device in order to force a specific mechanic onto the map you were running. Necropolis League threw out everything about how that system worked as well as removing the Sextant system and instead created over two hundred individual scarabs that all have a wide array of effects on your map. At face value, this was a brilliant change and has honestly made running maps so much more enjoyable than it ever was previously. In past leagues I ran enough maps to keep myself outfitting in Sulphite so I could do more Delves… but this is the league where I got legitimate enjoyment out of chain running maps and it was in large part due to the availability and variety of Scarab options.
On top of this, the entire way we interacted with the Atlas of Worlds changed because no longer needed to create one largely utilitarian Passive Tree to do 99% of your mapping. Instead, we got 3 different trees with the second unlocking after 50 maps, and the third unlocking after 100 maps. This allowed folks to set up and run multiple highly specialized strategies at the same time. I had one map that was largely for Sulphite gains, another for going super hard into Einhar and Beyond, and a third where I was mostly doing Legion/Breach. The variety of Scarabs allowed you to really custom tailor and buff those strategies to support even wilder things.
Changing so many systems that overlapped in functionality created a slew of unintended consequences. For example, it was possible to add around 200 Unique Monsters to your map and guarantee that every single one of them would drop at least one Unique item. While this was ultimately nerfed… other strategies sprung up equally quickly generating dump trucks full of unique items easily. Essentially every T0 Unique was selling more cheaply during this league than it ever had been at any given time in the past. I think at its lowest you could pick up a Headhunter for 2 Divine Orbs, and I got a Squire for I believe 80 Chaos. While there was fun to be had at creating stupidly profitable maps… that fun sort of has a very limited window of enjoyment when you realize that none of the things that are dropping hold any value. There is in fact such a thing as too much of a good thing.
Then there is the problem of T17 maps. They were advertised as a way of bridging the gap between normal boss encounters and uber bosses, but in truth are largely regarded as some of the hardest content in the game currently. One of the biggest problems with T17 maps is that they have some really wild modifiers on them that can completely brick builds. When they first launched you could not reroll them and even now the only modification you can make to a map is throwing a chaos orb at it and hoping for better options. The biggest challenge with these is that traditionally you have had characters that were good at mapping and characters that were good at bossing… as each type of encounter really wanted something different out of a build. T17s require you to be able to do both fluently which means that there are only a handful of builds that can truly dominate this content.
The loot table for every Pinnacle boss in the game was reworked with a number of items shifting to only dropping from the Uber version. The way Uber versions were summoned changed as well so that it requires 5 fragments that only drop in T17 maps, with each of the five maps having a fixed pool of fragments that can drop from it. Probably the change that personally annoyed me the most is that your 5 Way Map Device is no longer unlocked by running a Legion 4 Way… aka the league content that created the 5 Way Device in the first place… it now comes from clearing a T17. Uber Bosses are now required to either farm up or buy T17 maps… to run in order to get Fragments to then finally fight the Boss. This creates the challenge that most bossing builds are not designed in a way to be able to handle mapping… which has somewhat thrown the whole structure of what makes a good build into turmoil.
So taking all of this into account… do I consider Necropolis to be a failure? It is hard not say something as a strict yes or no answer. You almost have to slice up Necropolis into a bunch of individual features and then judge them separately. Collectively I think Necropolis is a mixed bag, but one that I largely enjoyed and I made it far further into the league challenges than I have in any previous league. That is like more about my personal growth as a League Enjoyer and less a reflection of this specific league. I think Grave Crafting as a whole was a bad idea because unlike Crucible the cost of interacting with it was far too high and left folks to either go all in on it or not touch it at all. I think the Lantern of Arimor and the Allflames were largely successful but they should have been a purely opt-in mechanic that you could ignore if you so desired. The best leagues are something you can choose to engage with if it is your jam, but ignore if it is not.
The Atlas Passive and Scarab changes were a universal success and have greatly improved how it feels to play this game. I feel like there are a lot of things that probably should have been tested a bit more before rolling out… but I enjoyed myself and it was a heck of a lot of fun trying to figure out how to break the system with them. T17s and the Uber Boss changes… this is a system I would normally not care about at all save for it is crossing the streams. Mapping, Heist, Delve Blight, Sanctum, and Bossing should be individual largely self-contained game modes. They all are tailored to a specific player’s fantasy and it is perfectly reasonable if you like one thing but not like other things. I feel like GGG wants every player to do every piece of content in the game and sets up scenarios where you are at least in theory forced to. This is a bad call and as a result, T17s in their current iteration are poorly designed. Embrace the diversity of game modes and create more content that plays into the already-defined niches that players have carved out within your community.
I spent roughly 47 days actively playing the Necropolis League and that seems like a pretty reasonable amount of time. Were it not for the launch of Season 4 in Diablo IV and then finally straightening out systems in that game… I would probably still be poking at it occasionally. I enjoyed myself but there were a lot of times that it felt like I was enjoying myself despite the league rather than because of it. So I think I would have to admit that Necropolis was a bad league, that just so happened to be occurring during a time when the game itself was in a pretty solid state. I don’t think Necropolis will be looked back upon with the same levels of Infamy that Lake of Kalandra has been, because the game is just more enjoyable to play right now than it was at that point.
So yeah I guess I will have to admit… Necropolis Bad. Here is hoping that GGG adjusts and gives us a more widely approachable league for 3.25.
Good Morning Folks! I had a very weird evening in Pandara Remix. I’ve basically reached the place where I have only a handful of vectors to scale up my character. I could pour copious amounts of bronze into upgrades… but I would FAR rather have a fat stack of mounts than buy temporary power in a game mode that has a shelf life of 80 more days. This means that in order for me to fill out my character I am going to need to knock out some achievements. One requires me to do all of the Raids on Normal Mode… which admittedly feels like a bad call from Blizzard on this one. The other steps of this progress are governed by “Finder” tools, but this step requires you to wade knee-deep into the scary realm of the Group Finder.
Weirdly however this was for the most part smooth as heck for the first bit of my evening. I ran through Mogu’shan Vaults, Terrace of the Eternal Spring, and Heart of Fear and it was an extremely delightful proposition. The groups assembled quickly and the only time I took a death was a some point during Terrace where I pulled aggro on one of the trash mobs that a tank had not picked up yet. This success story however ground to a halt as soon as I started shopping for a group for Throne of Thunder or Siege of Orgrimmar. This is where the tropes I had feared were starting to come out… where group leaders were asking for unrealistic gear scores or were “full on DPS” and were looking for a “pumper” or “frogger” for their last slot. I could have shifted over and tanked but honestly, I don’t remember half of these fights anymore.
I spent about an hour applying for groups, joining groups that never went anywhere because they had no tanks or healers… and generally just flailing around in hopelessness. The only thing I can think is that my luck was so smooth in those first few groups because it was extremely early in the evening. The Sweaty McTryhards of the world had not woken up from their slumber and all that were available were us casual scrubs who go to bed at 9 pm. So tonight I am going to set my goal to attempt to get in a Throne or Siege group first thing and MAYBE get my way through both of them if I am lucky.
I know one of the things that currently makes my character look bad is that I don’t have my Rings or Necklace. Admittedly I need all of the raids to get the damned necklace but given that I did not start on day one and I am not as far along in this curve as some players… it does not really seem to matter. So when I could not get the raids rolling I decided to take a step back and chip away at my heroic dungeons. This is the point where I realized how much I have missed this. Heroic Dungeons were always super fun and something that you could smash mindlessly for fun and profit. I’ve missed this game mode being relevant. Mythics came along and largely destroyed any purpose for running Heroics but also made them a bit too sweaty to be truly enjoyable in mass quantities. I get that in their hunt for more competitive game modes they can attempt to monetize into an esport… Mythics made sense… but I still miss heroic smashy fun.
My goal tonight is to knock out the last two dungeons that I need and then start chipping away at the fat stack of scenarios that I need for that ring. Currently, I have only run two of these on Heroic mode and there are so many freaking Scenarios. This is honestly a game mode that I would love to see make a return because it allowed for something similar feeling to a Heroic Dungeon… but that had little to no mechanical requirements. It also served as a way to allow them to pour more story bits into the game which is always good. I feel like World Quest Chains probably replaced these, but does anyone pay attention to the story bits attempting to be told through those? Probably not. Anyways my focus right now is on completing out the missing gear slots, because this will also help any alts that I decide to run up during the event.
The last bit for today is that I am legitimately contemplating changing mains for War Within. Hume Belghast has had a good run and I still like the character quite a bit… but Dark Iron Dwarves. Dark Irons have been something that I have loved since Vanilla World of Warcraft and Blackrock Depths in its original weird twisting form is probably my favorite dungeon. I loved that there was this entire Dark Iron City down there and I loved knowing my way around it. I also kind of love that they have a racial teleport around the world via Mole Machine. I am just having way more fun with this character than I expected given it was only ever intended to be something throwaway for the event.
Anyways! I hope you are having a wonderful week. Are you playing Pandaria Remix or PMIX as I have taken to mentally calling it? What are you playing? Drop me a line below.
Good Morning Folks! I am still sort of in this pattern of MOSTLY playing World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix. I’ve come to realize that I do not have the fortitude to play this optimally… which would be to do ALL of the world bosses, a random heroic and normal dungeon, a random heroic and normal scenario, and then complete ALL of the raids. Instead, I think I am going to focus on trying to get my World Bosses done as they are fun and it is pretty easy to find groups in the LFG tool. After that, I think my goal tonight is to start chipping away at the Heroic Dungeons and Scenarios that I need to unlock rings. Then the next stretch goal would be to complete all of the raids on Normal mode, but that is probably going to take all week as I have realized my appetite for that sort of thing is not what it once was.
Related to that I got my Tauren Paladin over on Drenden up to level 25 at which point I tried my hand at one of the leveling theories. The idea is to run raids starting at 25 and level your character through doing that. I’ve personally found this to be a little lacking as I think in total I gained a single level after having done two wings of LFR. Because of this gameplan I’ve also been leveling as Retribution which is fine for playing at endgame levels… but is not my preferred method of leveling. So as a result I think I am going to shift gears with this character and just level it the old-fashioned way while switching over to Protection so I can bounce shields all over the map for fun and profit. I am also questioning my choice of Tauren as I remember now why I don’t like playing them… because they feel painfully slow.
Lastly, I created a little Vulpera Hunter on Eonar where another friend has a base of operations. In theory, my goal is to push this up to 70 before the event is up so that I can have yet another max-level character seeded throughout the cosmos in case I decide that I want to play on that server. I already have an Orc Deathknight that I played during Legion and a few babby characters of various ages. It would be awesome if they made the Stable go cross-character and cross-realm because that has been my core reason for not playing something other than the original Lodin. I did not love the concept of collecting spirit beasts again. I am kind of wondering how the Warband is going to change things up, because in theory, I should be able to have all of the characters that I am playing regardless of server on the same screen.
Now that I have capped my Barbarian, I think I am going to spend some more quality time with my Necromancer. There is a pattern that can be used from levels 20-50 that will allow you to craft legendary caches so that you can get aspects pretty quickly. So my plan is to push this character up to 20 and see how well that process works. Barbarian was a lot of fun, and I might still rework that character to go for the overpowered Dual Swing Twisters build, but I also want to see how the Necromancer world is doing. I also really need to find a bow build that I like because traditionally… tanky brawler, minion, and bow characters are what I tend to play over and over in ARPGs.
Anyways! Today is my first day back this week so I am not looking forward to getting back into the swing of things. I also have to go into the office tomorrow so I am somewhat dreading that as well. Hopefully, you all had a wonderful weekend and an extended weekend if you are in the states.
