Ancients League Is Gonna Be Wild

by

Yesterday, we got the reveal stream for Path of Exile II 0.5.0, and it was wild. It was essentially an hour and nineteen minutes of back-to-back, constant reveals, some of which are super intricate. I feel like there is honestly just way too much to even begin to talk about, but I will attempt to discuss some of the high points. Essentially, at a high level, they are reworking every single endgame system that launched with the game in order to make it distinct from the Path of Exile 1 counterpart. Abyss was quite possibly their most successful league launch in Path of Exile II, and they have seemingly taken some of the core tenets of that mechanic and applied them to existing ones. Quite honestly… on some level, I hope we see some of these changes backported to Path of Exile. The new Ritual and Expedition, for example, look freaking awesome, and I cannot wait to play them and see how they feel.

One of the major disappointments from yesterday is that the community had worked itself into a frenzy that we were going to get the Duelist class, and potentially Gladiator ascendancy, and maybe something else. At a minimum, they thought one of the trailers leading up to the release of the content reveal hinted that we were getting swords. This did not happen, and quite frankly, during the Q/A they said that with all of the other endgame changes, there was never going to be any time to do a full class introduction. Instead, we are getting the Martial Artist for Monk, and Spiritwalker for Huntress. In both cases, they represent the third and final ascendancy choice for those classes. I am not that into the whole Monk aesthetic, but Spiritwalker seems really interesting to me because, in theory, it is a minion class? There is a whole tame beast mechanic that is going into the game that allows you to “tame” beasts that are bosses and then use them as what appears to be a spectre-like minion that fights for you. Here is hoping that these are actually powerful and not useless, like 90% of the spectre mobs end up being.

The sweeping endgame changes excite me greatly because the current endgame in Path of Exile II was a bit of a mess. When you hit maps in Path of Exile, there are some clear progression elements that lead you to do specific content in order to unlock the rest of your atlas. The Path of Exile II equivalent felt like it was essentially saying “ya know, do some stuff”, and then dumping you out into an infinitely expanding Atlas and hoping for the best. Now there will be directed quests that effectively lead you towards progressing every single endgame mechanic. On top of that, there is a proper Atlas Passive Tree… not some piddly little nodes that only unlocked as you did specific mechanics. It looks potentially twice the size of the Path of Exile Atlas Passive Tree, so I am sure there is some interesting stuff in there that completely changes the game. They introduced a ton of new endgame crafting systems as well, but all of that shit is mostly too complicated to talk about yet, and it will probably be years before we fully understand how to make the most of them.

The thing that probably excites me the most is something that I have wanted ARPG games to do for decades. Essentially, there is now a standardized build file format that encompasses everything about a build and its leveling progression. You will then be able to drop this .Build file in your Path of Exile II directory and access it in-game. This then highlights all of the nodes that are required for that build and gives creators the ability to attach notes to various elements in the game, to help players along the way in following the guide. The amount of time that I spend at the start of a league flipping between the game and a build guide up on another screen… is a lot. Effectively, this is no more, and I am almost certain that this functionality will be backported to Path of Exile. I imagine it will only be a short amount of time before Path of Building will spit out these build files, so that guide creators can use that as an authoring tool since they are already used to it. Additionally, they are adding in some rudimentary price checking via the in-game trade menu, but this does not look anywhere near as efficient as my current favorite Scalpel. I am hoping beyond hope that the author of that tool updates it to support Path of Exile II.

Another thing that has me SUPREMELY interested is this unique called The Raven’s Flock. If you have followed my escapades, you know two things for certain… I am a Thorns/Righteous Fire enjoyer in ARPGs, and I love me some Minion builds. This new unique seems to essentially be combining these two worlds together in a delightful way. Essentially, the Staff gives you an ability called Spiralling Conspiracy, which summons a flock of ravens that circle you, dealing damage over time to everything in the aura, similar to Righteous Fire. It supposedly scales off Minion damage because the Aura itself… are Minions. I already enjoy playing the various Necro-style builds in the game, but I cannot wait to try and build something around this nonsense. I wonder how well this will work with the new Spiritwalker ascendancy and the big ole beast minion that you can tame. I am sure Papa Pohx will figure out a build to make this all work, but in the meantime, I might start something like Bear, which hopefully is still a beast at farming maps. Then later swap to a character built around this unique once I actually have access to it.

I am honestly pretty freaking pumped for this upcoming league. If you are interested, I highly suggest watching the over-hour-long video because it was packed with information. If you need something a bit more condensed, Raxx released the above video where he sort of runs down the high points. Are you excited for Path of Exile II: Return of the Ancients? What was your favorite thing out of the many reveals? Drop me a line below.

Diablo IV Has Good Numbers

by

Good Morning, Folks. I feel like Diablo IV right now is in a very good state. I know this because every time I log into the game in the new hub city of Temis, regardless of what time of day it is… it is freaking packed with players moving around and interacting with things. It does not hurt at all that they managed to launch for once during a lull in the other games. The last Path of Exile 2 league is from December, Path of Exile 1 from February, and even Last Epoch at this point is stale, having launched its last season in March. It feels like the normal time associated with playing an ARPG season is about three weeks, and all of the more popular games… are well past that. So if there was a perfect time to launch Lord of Hatred, they somehow managed to hit it, which is wild given that there were no delays around POE2 0.5.0, it would have been launching against it. Sure, the game legitimately is in a great state, but the timing has to have massively helped.

It is not like you can really use Steam to represent a significant portion of the Diablo IV player base. The game launched originally only on Battle.net, and most “Blizzard” players use that launcher. We don’t have accurate numbers for the folks on Xbox or PlayStation, so as a result, we have to rely on the general trends from Steam DB since it aggregates its statistics. You can see that on Steam it hit its all-time peak high four days ago, which is wild considerly that that high was reached after the official launch of the expansion. My personal guess is that enough good press and hype about the game had managed to saturate the latent player base to get the message that no… D4 was actually sort of good now. D4 Bad was a meme for so long, and I am happy to see that it has managed to more or less right the ship. It doesn’t have Path of Exile 2 numbers on Steam, but that makes sense as a much larger portion of the GGG playerbase plays via the Steam Client.

I’ve recently spent a lot of time working with the crafting system that exists in-game, and I have to say it is pretty phenomenal. The above are some examples of items that I recently crafted. In the case of the two legendaries, I started with a base yellow or blue ancestral item and worked it up from there. The fact that I managed to hit a quad masterworked chest is wild, but it is more than that… one of the masterworked stats got chosen when I did the final masterworking step at the blacksmith. The enchanting system is also extremely powerful for fixing problems with items. Are any of my items technically perfect? Absolutely not, but they are pretty damned good. Temerity, I managed to pull by taking an ancestral pair of pants, dropping it to white rarity, and then using the cube recipe to promote that item up to a Unique. The mace I managed to get as a drop already at Ancestral rarity. The recipe that I would really like to see, however, is something that will take a normal unique and upgrade it to an Ancestral, because I am struggling to get my last few required uniques to drop at that 900 item level.

Essentially, I am at the point where I just need to put my head down and grind. I need to work through so many runs of the Pit to level all five of my glyphs up to level 50, which is the break point for the legendary traits. At the moment, I can do a Torment 8 pit and am close to unlocking Torment 9, but it is a bit of a slog. The positive I went from running Torment 6 as my comfy speed run level to doing the same for Torment 7, so incremental progress. I feel like I am not that far from being able to bump up to Torment 8 as my baseline. Right now, I am struggling to keep enough materials and gold to masterwork everything, but once I do that… in theory, I should see a significant power boost as a result. Honestly, the best source of resources right now is via the Mercenary favor caches, so again, I just need to do some head-down grinding in order to put on some favor levels and get more caches.

Today, however, is all about the Path of Exile II reveal stream. I feel like there is an awful lot riding on this one, because 0.4.0 was not the best-received league, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit. They have been teasing all of these endgame system reworks, and I fear that they have cranked up expectations to the moon. They really have to stick the landing on this presentation, and it seems like they are pulling out all the stops. The Twitch drop that they announced yesterday is among the most intricate that I have seen them give away for free, so they are most definitely trying to get a bunch of eyeballs on the stream. I will be doing my best to tune in, but I am sure I will miss some of it as it happens smack dab in the middle of the workday. I am sure tomorrow I will be offering up my own commentary to the reveal, so if you care about such things, tune in then. Because tomorrow is a lab work and office visit day, my blog will be landing later in the day than normal.

Arbiter is Awesome

by

Good Morning, Folks! Last night during sibling time with Ace, I ripped the band-aid off and respecced my Paladin from the Thorns Leveling build to the Arbiter Blessed Hammer build. As I had said before, I essentially hit a ceiling where I needed to do something to push things further. I could swing Torment 7, but that was a stretch, and as a result, I was just farming Torment 6 over and over because it was so much faster. Thorns used to be a really awesome build during the season that they introduced the Paladin, where you could more or less run around with impunity and watch things die around you. Now it is way more fiddly because you effectively have to bait mobs into standing around your very slow-moving blessed shields, which are dealing the majority of the damage. It was an amazing boss killer because you could drop the Ultimate and watch their health evaporate as you were dealing massively multiplied thorns damage to anything standing in that ring. Clearing, however, was a bit of a mess, and I suffered through it for a while…. but knew something had to change.

Before we get any further, can we stop for a moment and talk about how crappy it is to spec out paragon boards? When you have 163 points to spend, it takes forever to slowly work your way through all of them and connect up the boards. I feel like there should be some sort of system where you can import a Paragon spec via a string and have the game allocate the boards for you. That way, guide creators could post a minimal spec, and a full spec and then at least get you 90% of the way there with either. Since I do not have 300 points, I did what you usually do and spent time speccing through all of the rare sockets and legendary abilities, and pretty much had enough points to then go back and flesh out the first board completely. Nothing about this process is fun. It does make me appreciate and not mind respeccing quite so badly in other ARPGs.

It is always somewhat fraught to give up what is effectively a functional build… for the hopes of respeccing into a better build, but not quite being certain how things will shake out. Having never played Arbiter Blessed Hammers, I did not know if I would even like the way it feels. So it is always scary to take that plunge and give up what you are used to for the purpose of another build. I had everything that was required for the build except for a single item, the Argent Veil ring shown above. I managed to get it this morning off Andariel, but the build was pretty functional without it. I have a lot of room to grow gear-wise. I am effectively out of materials after building out my Warlock, so nothing of my gear is qualitied up and masterworked. In addition to that, I have zero ancestral uniques, so I will be focusing on farming up those items that I need. I’ve already cleared a pit 55, which is higher than I had managed previously, and I still have a ton of room to upgrade. My short-term goal is to get the build to a point where it is capable of farming Torment 10, and then hopefully get some mythics to move to the final form of the build.

What makes the build so great is its speed. This is very much in the speed farm family of builds, because the gameplay focuses on using a movement ability called Falling Star to leap between packs. This in itself does a good deal of damage, but you also bring your Blessed Hammers with you, so you are constantly dealing damage to stragglers and full clearing packs. Falling Star gives you the Arbiter effect, and essentially, the goal is to keep this up all of the time, which gives you a significant boost to the damage your hammers are doing. When you get to the boss of an encounter, you pop your Arbiter of Justice Ultimate and deal massive amounts of damage while also popping your auras and dropping consecration. All of this will deal so much more damage once I have something resembling the correct stats on my gear. I am probably going to farm a bunch of Infernal Hordes so that I can get materials to start enchanting and upgrading items.

All in all, I am pretty happy that I took the plunge. The build feels extremely strong already, and I am clearing content so much faster than I was when I was previously having to bait targets into my thorns damage. Truth be told, were I starting out right now, I would have leveled blessed hammers from the start. It just feels better to play than the current state of Thorns. Sure, I was able to farm bosses pretty easily, but it was at the cost of pretty much every other type of content. At some point, once I get my Paladin stabilized, I will likely return to the Warlock and see how far I can push its damage. Largely, I am just hoping to get something to a point where T12 content is comfy, so that I can knock out all of the seasonal achievements. My goal is to 100% the season and get that done before the Path of Exile II league drops at the end of the month.

Are you playing Diablo IV? What build are you running? How far into the Torment ladder have you managed to push? Drop me a line below.

State of the Bel: Round Three

by

Good Morning, Folks. You are getting a Diablo IV Screenshot because that happens to be the game I am playing the most at the moment, but this is very much not a gaming blog post. I figured it had been a bit since I had done a “State of the Bel” post, as I am referring to them in my mind, where I catch you up on how things are going with the nightmare that is cancer. Prior to yesterday, I would have told you things were going swimmingly and infinitely better than the first two rounds. This morning, that answer is a bit more complicated, but we will get into that. Essentially, rounds one and two of chemo were met with external factors that complicated things. During round one, I fought with my blood pressure and was trying to figure out the correct amount of meds to take to keep it down to healthy levels, but not drop it to the very fainty 70/40 that I was running for a few days. Solving this problem… of course, uncovered other issues.

I was woefully anemic, as I simply had no red blood cells to transport oxygen through my body. As a result, every time I would stand up, I would feel incredibly woozy for a bit, and getting up in the mornings was pure hell. The answer to this problem was to start giving me Iron Infusions. These legitimately look like giant packets of soy sauce, but are pinkish in hue when they flow into your body. The effect is that it looks like you are bleeding in the wrong direction. After round two, there was a rush infusion to try and get my levels up, and since it moved the needle, when I did round three, they just included the soy sauce along with my normal treatments. This seems to curb a lot of the negative effects that I was feeling, and quite honestly, on the day I get a fresh iron infusion, I feel sort of like I can take on the world. That shit is magical, and it feels like I am hyper-oxygenated for a time, which is a weird feeling for a lifelong severe asthmatic who is likely ALWAYS running low on oxygen.

For those who are curious, this is what infusion days look like:

  • I arrive, and they open my port, aka jam a giant needle in my chest. Prior to leaving the house, I have applied lidocaine cream to the area so that I really cannot feel a thing.
  • First up is a long-acting anti-nausea medication and a steroid to help get me through some of the low-immune-system moments. This takes around 15 minutes to deliver.
  • Next up, I get my Iron Infusion, aka the bag of soy sauce. This takes 30 minutes, and occupies what previously was a dead point because there has to be 30 minutes between the anti-nausea meds and the first of the chemotherapy.
  • There is a bit of a break, but next up is Folinic Acid in one bag, and Oxaliplatin in the next, and these are both hung and set to drip together into me. This process is the big haul that takes two whole hours. At some point during this, I have to get up and tote my bags to the bathroom because they have pushed so many fluids into my body at this point, I am about to burst.
  • After a little break, they give me a bolus of Fluorouracil, aka 5-FU, which takes about 15 minutes, similar to the steroid round.
  • Last, they hook me to the portable pump filled with Fluorouracil, and make sure the valve is against my skin because, for some reason, the heat of my body is what makes the pump work. This will be tethered to me for 46 hours, and I refer to it as the evil lemon, because it looks like a weird lemon. I feel very much like I have a Harkonnen Heart Plug, because I have to do everything while being aware that I have a pump attached to me that goes directly into my heart. Act normal.

So, back to the story… one of the new side effects that sprang up during round two is that I was having a lot of visual issues. Namely, for the first five or so days after the chemo treatment, I was having visual flashes off the right side of my body. It felt like someone was flashing a strobe just outside of my visual range. Additionally, I had some very black line floaters appearing in the same eye. They looked like impossibly black threads that would snake around my vision. This rightly freaked me the fuck out, because my family has a history of retinal detachment, and this was already a point of anxiety for me. After some googling of Folfox(the colloquial name of the treatment) symptoms, it seems that in some very rare occasions, it could lead to damage to the retina or optic nerve. During one of my lab and doctor visit days, I explained these symptoms, and they also seemed equally concerned, but they were happy that they went away on their own. They suggested following up with an eye doctor.

That is what I did yesterday. Last year, I switched to a new eye doctor who operates out of the small town where I grew up, which is only about a thirty-minute drive from where I live. Yesterday’s visit cemented that I made the right decision because she remembered the family history of retinal detachments and took things extremely seriously. Even taking a moment while my eyes were dilating to research the specific ocular things that Folfox can do. Essentially, I got a clean bill of health. Everything inside my eye, apparently, looks extremely healthy, and for good measure, she checked my prescription, and it had not really deviated from last September. Specifically, she said that the most common problem with Folfox is that it attacks the optic nerve, and explained what the symptoms of that would look like to me. It would be either a partial or complete blurring of vision in the eye where it is happening, and a fading of colors, either in saturation level or shifting what colors look like.

Now, one of the confounding variables is that this all happened during the second round, but did not happen during this third and most recent round. The one change between rounds is that I have now had two bags of iron infusion, and have raised my red blood cell count considerably. Talking with the eye doctor, essentially everything I was experiencing could be attributed to extreme anemia. Everything I was experiencing could be caused by a lack of blood flow and oxygen to the eyes. Essentially, the eyes are one of the furthest points in the circulatory system, and if there is anything wrong at a blood level, it can cause visual artifacts and flashes. So in theory, the continued Iron Infusions have helped to stave off some of the visual hallucinations that I was dealing with. If nothing else, it felt good to get a bit of peace of mind that everything was mechanically fine with my eyes. One of my greatest fears has always been losing my eyesight. I figure so long as I can see and so long as my brain is functioning appropriately, I could deal with pretty much anything else.

Collectively, this third round of chemo has gone so much more smoothly than the first two. I feel like I have bounced back more quickly from the infusions. I am still dealing with the weird cold reaction symptoms, but my energy levels as a whole have been much higher. The only negative is… that it feels like I have this very finite pool of energy. Because of how busy yesterday was, and that I tried to cram too much into too short a period of time, I overdrew the bank of energy. As a result, I am paying massively today for this. After mostly doing great for the last several days, I was back to it, taking an hour to get ready this morning, because I kept having to pause between actions. I am sure I will recover from this as well, but I am just not used to having such a limited amount of stamina for doing anything. That has, without a doubt, been the hardest part of chemo in general: accepting the fact that right now, there are just going to be some things that don’t get done in the time frame that I wish they could.

So at a high level… I am doing much better than I was during the first two rounds. However, I still have to realize that I am compromised and need to temper my hubris. I had offers to take me to the eye doctor yesterday, but I stubbornly drove myself and also paid a visit to my parents afterwards. On top of working that morning, it was just collectively too much going on for the state in which I am. I’ve said before that effectively I have 10 shitty days each cycle and 4 good ones… and I need to respect that. I was on day 7 of the 10 shitty days part of the cycle, and I knew that… I just thought I was doing well enough to ignore my own limitations. Each rotation, I learn something new about myself and about the treatment, so I will just file yesterday away as another of those learning moments.