Hey Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning so I thought I would do a bit of a recap of my weekend. One of those games that I keep returning to no matter what is going on in my life is Minecraft. I’ve not felt the best over the last few weeks because of mystery-ailment-that-is-likely-not-covid. I can always retreat to Minecraft and my research into the NFTWorld fiasco sparked my desire to play the game. What do I usually do when I play Minecraft? Well, I burrow into the side of a mountain and dig one tunnel going up and one tunnel going down. This screenshot was from the beginning of my process of terraforming a mountain top. I’ve now since built a bit of a reasonable structure up top, and my incessant tunneling has served as material for building projects.
What consumed a truly inordinate amount of time is that in the process of digging down… I encountered an underground ocean. I mean I could, of course, have just blocked it off and continued along with my day but instead, I decided to use the particular properties of gates to hold back water… in order to give me access still to this resource if I happened to need it. Granted again I could have done this in a more simple manner with a door… but I set down this path so I trucked right along with this madness. The most quirky thing about this is that later on, I encountered another section of this cave network with the difference this one being mostly dry. My entire focus however became digging down to bedrock… which I accomplished yesterday and now have a ton of deep slate to build things with.
In other activities, I am still working on my Inquisitor in Path of Exile and have just started the final act. I am still running around with Wintertide Brand and have not transitioned my build over to Righteous Fire. I think I still need to finish cruel lab before I can do this thing, so I should probably set my mind to completing that before I finish Act Ten and take another resistance hit. I believe I am sitting at 70 just about to hit 71 so I have long since started getting lots and lots of map drops. My time with Path of Exile right now is more or less trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. What I mean by that is I am trying to figure out what I want my build to be for my first legit season open. I think a few of us are in this holding pattern of trying to click the gears in place because we know we are just about to do it all over again in mid-August.
Lastly, I am still spending time in Dragonflight alpha, and as such spending time poking around on an Evoker. I believe today is the cut-off for this phase of the alpha test and in theory, when I next play the game I will be able to access one of the expansion zones. I have a Deathknight ready to go and I will probably spend some time speccing out a Warrior and trying to build something I enjoy there as well. I am honestly looking forward to seeing the zones because I have heard good things about them. Evoker and Dracthyr are decidedly not my jam and I feel are right now negatively coloring my impression of the expansion so far. I’ve evolved to be able to play “finger wigglers” a bit more than I could in the past, but the Evoker is maybe a bit too on that spectrum for my tastes. I’ve never reconciled my ability to enjoy a Mage, but I dig the heck out of Demonology Warlock.
Good Morning Friends. I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile, or at least the part of the weekend I was functional. I ended up getting some generic crud that started on Wednesday and then knocked me out of commission for most of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was only on Sunday that I started to feel much better and even now I am not feeling amazing. We took a number of covid tests throughout this so we are pretty certain it is not that. My wife started getting sick on Friday, so whatever it appears to be contagious but the strange thing is… I was not really around anyone for the last two weeks.
I think since we last talked I have finished the main campaign of Path of Exile and my Explosive Arrow Champion is now level 73. I’ve begun dipping my toes into maps and I have to say… I feel super freaking squishy right now. I think the core problem I am having with Path of Exile is that the gear is nowhere near as straightforward as my beloved Diablo III. I know in D3 that in order to make X build work I need these ten items in these specific slots. The collection of specific items grants me the ability to get progress further with the build, and subsequent fine-tuning and acquiring better versions of said items… also then make the build more efficient. I understand none of these levers in Path of Exile. My gear is effectively a pile of stats that I do not fully understand the interactions with, and as such I do not know how to make myself feel less squishy.
In part, due to this sudden friction… and also in part because I have not felt well enough to engage with my friend Grace who is also at the maps phase… I have been spending some time trying other classes. I have a mess of a character that I built without a guide that mostly works but it is also deeply inefficient, and then I have the Inquisitor that I am building towards Righteous Fire. One thing of note… for whatever reason at the time of writing this POE Vault seems to be down so that link may or may not work. Wintertide Brand is ridiculously fun and does some really dumb things. Essentially I cast this spell and it spreads throughout the map of NPCs and kills them with a frost disease sort of thing. The only problem here is that wintertide brand is not the final form of this build, so we will see if I also like running through things while self-immolating.
I think the ultimate problem I have with Path of Exile is also one of its strengths. You have these mechanics stacked on top of other mechanics, and if you have been around you maybe learned them all individually. However today a new player trying to unpack everything is not only having to understand core concepts but also learn the remainder of thirty-seven, soon to be thirty-eight league mechanics. This means that the game has grown significantly and is constantly changing, but also has just layer after layer of madness stacked loosely on top of the layers below it. The seasoned players understand how to solve the problems that I am running into with survival, but it is much harder to grok than “equip Aquila Cuirass”. That is not to say that eventually, Path of Exile won’t feel the same to me… just that I have a large lift to get there. There are times when I feel like I need a guide to reading the guide I am trying to follow.
Ultimately I am wanting to spend the remainder of 3.18 trying to figure out what exactly I want to do for 3.19. I like Explosive Arrow just fine, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as the original Splitting Steel build that I ran until I could switch over to Explosive Arrow. Similarly, right now I am loving the way running around with Wintertide Brand feels, but I am concerned that I won’t enjoy the final Righteous Fire form. I know there are pure Splitting Steel builds that exist, and pure Brand builds that exist, so I might also create some characters along those play styles at some point. Essentially my time spent in Path of Exile is more or less preparing for August when the new league starts. Ultimately we won’t know what 3.19 looks like until the live stream on August 4th, and at that point, I will probably consume a flurry of information and try and pick a path to go down then.
Good Morning Friends! It has been a few weeks and I thought I would give a proper blog update on Gracie and how she is settling in. For most of this week, she has been on “free roam” mode with the complete reign of the house. I am slightly sleep deprived because we have yet to learn when sleep time is supposed to happen, and occasionally have fits of activity overnight that wake us up. That said she tends to sleep snuggled between the covers between us, which is perfectly fine with me. In the grand scheme of things, it has been a pretty smooth transition and Mollie/Josie are doing a fair job of adjusting. Yesterday is really when things started to feel like normal again with far less cautious stalking around the house for fear of attracting the attention of the tiny terror.
Gracie herself is also way less likely to spend every moment of every day with a human being. So the negative means that I am not getting this sort of attention right now. It was fun while it lasted, but also extremely detrimental to actually getting anything done. Josie and Gracie appear to be developing a friendship, or at least there is more playing with each other that involves less hissing and puffed tails. Mollie has oddly been more stoic about this, which I thought was weird given that she is naturally the more skittish cat. However, then I realized that she has been through this before and realizes that “mommy and daddy” will still love her even though there is a new addition. Josie was the last new addition a few years ago, and as such, she is not sure what to think about any of this.
We are starting to settle into what feels like the new normal. Josie is back to sleeping on my legs overnight while Gracie sleeps up at the head of the bed between us. Mollie is back to spending almost all of every day with me in my office and requesting periodic pet breaks. Gracie alternates between sleeping downstairs in the hammock and screaming at the top of her lungs for attention because she doesn’t see any human beings around her. She has an exceptional set of lungs for someone so small, and she also seems to be completely fearless which makes any time we have to open the front or back door anxiety-ridden. All of this said though, I think we picked an exceptionally sweet kitten and are now batting two for two from rescuing animals from the local animal welfare. We’ve always gotten animals through third-party rescue organizations in the past, but I have to say our animal welfare seems to do a great job with their animals and socializing them.
Finally, in some gaming news, I have officially entered Act 10 but did not manage to get through it last night before sleep claimed me. I am going to need to spend some effort trying to sort out gearing because I am most definitely feeling much squishier all of a sudden. Additionally I checked my guide and I am no longer using the correct combination of skill gems. Basically, I am once again under some socket pressure and now need I believe an RRGGBB item to socket my preferred skill chain into. Mostly I just am trying to get up to maps because my friend Grace has managed to rocket past me… and finished the main story over lunch yesterday. I think we are ultimately trying to determine if the league start experience in Path of Exile can fully replace our traditional Diablo 3 fun time.
In another quick footnote… I am grinding away on Blaugust stuff and am hoping to make a big announcement soon.
So recently I have been on an ARPG kick and quite honestly… while I am most known for being an MMORPG player, I was an ARPG player first. I love Diablo and have loved it since getting my hands on the pre-release test of the first game back in college. When confronted with the decision of which game to buy… because Icewind Dale and Diablo II came out on the same day… I of course bought Diablo II. Years later I was STILL playing Diablo II as my primary reprieve from playing Everquest, and keeping a server running with friends. As such I have always bought and tried out pretty much every new ARPG that comes down the pipe, and Last Epoch was no exception. I did not like this game when I first tried it… but given that I also did not like Path of Exile when I first tried it I figured it might be worth a revisit.
Sometimes when you try out a new game there is one small thing that destroys the experience. If you search google on “Last epoch move and attack” you will find a litany of people who have requested the ability to bind move and attack to the same key, which is admittedly the post-Diablo ARPG standard. For whatever reason be it technical or philosophical… the Last Epoch team seems diametrically opposed to actually doing this. So when I found out that this was not a thing that I could do in this game, and that it did not have Controller support to fall back upon… I uninstalled it and moved on. Then I had a bit of a revelation last week while playing Path of Exile and on the podcast that changed my perspective a bit.
While Click to Move is a concept I am deeply comfortable with and fall back upon… I don’t actually play games in that manner if I can help it. Some years ago my friend Grace got me hooked on another control scheme for Diablo III, where I bind “Force Move” to W and then essentially “steer” my character while moving my mouse cursor around the screen. When I got into Path of Exile recently, this is one of the first things that I did and I am annoyed at that game that I had to give up a functional skill slot in order to make this happen. It turns out that I can in fact do this same sort of mechanic in Last Epoch and after some careful keybind swaps I was able to land on a gameplay structure that more or less maps to what I am familiar with in Diablo III, where I hit Q for the potion, 7/8/9 for some of my abilities because they are comfortable to hit on my g600 mouse, and spacebar for my “charge” ability. Once the mechanical aspect of playing the game was solved… it is actually a pretty solid option.
Last night I created a fresh Sentinel because I had no clue what I was doing the last time I had attempted to play this game. Essentially you choose a base class and then that can morph over time into one of three masteries. For Sentinel, I get the choice of Paladin, Forge Guard, and Void Knight currently I am leaning heavily towards Forge Guard.
This is the class wheel from the wiki, and gives a pretty good representation of your options. The only traditional “Diablo” archetype that seems to be missing is that of the Barbarian/Brawler type character. While Sentinel looks like a Paladin/Crusader it does have a lot of the same tropes that you might find from a Barbarian including the very spin-to-win playstyle of “Whirlwind”. I noticed last night that a few of these mastery classes exist in the interface, but are not something you can choose. I am guessing since this game is still in active development that there just has not been time to complete them.
I think the thing that honestly impresses me the most so far is the fact that at level 7, I feel like I have a pretty complete package of abilities. I have a big single target attack, my default attack has been replaced by a three-hit combo, I have a ranged throw ability, I can charge at packs of mobs, and I can whirlwind down large packs of enemies. This is something that I would have expected to arrive at far later in the game, and quite honestly… reminds me a bit of how good Diablo Immortal felt at low levels. It seems like I am going to continue to get more abilities than I have room for, and as a result, will have to tailor my build looking for more direct synergies.
Please note that I have only the most shallow of understanding this game right now. However once I have arrived at a place where the controls felt playable, it is something I want to explore further. Essentially as far as I can tell character progression goes down two lines at the start. The first is a series of passive talent choices, with additional trees for the three master class choices. I greatly appreciate that it seems like I can just come in here and respec at will. That is deeply refreshing coming from Path of Exile where I am scared to death I am going to screw up and choose the wrong thing.
The next progression system seems to allow you to specialize in five different class abilities, with additional slots unlocking as you level. Right now I have spent some points specializing in my three-hit combo primary attack, and my lunging charge attack. I feel like no matter where I go skill-wise I am probably going to keep using these because they feel great. All in all the structure of this game feels something more closely related to Diablo III than the Diablo II roots that games like Path of Exile or Grimdawn have. I honestly appreciate the more hand-holding given in the talent trees and the ability to just respec everything at will. I always hated the need to roll a new character if you wanted to try something different in ARPGs and consider the freeform nature of Diablo III to be a benefit to the genre.
While I was able to get past the control scheme boss, many of my past complaints still exist. Classes are gender locked and there appears to be no manner of character customization. Mage is always going to be an old man with a book, which admittedly is better than the old man in a diaper look that Diablo III gives the male Barbarian. So depending upon your personal preferences here, you might end up having to play a character that does not suit your representation choices. Admittedly this is a problem in general with ARPGs, but one that I keep hoping someone realizes IS a problem. I cannot tell you just how refreshing the character creation system was in Diablo Immortal. Too bad that game is a dumpster fire for other reasons.
I’ve not spent much time honestly in Last Epoch but it is already something that I want to explore a bit further. The lack of multiplayer play was always a bit of a bummer as well with Last Epoch, but more of an “in development” thing than a willful omission. It seems that Multiplayer is currently in closed testing and planned to be opened up to all players “soon”. I think ultimately more than anything that is going to determine how engaged I become with this game, is whether or not it can scratch the same multiplayer fun itches that Diablo III has for many seasons. The design of the end game is extremely important for long-term replayability. In the meantime, however, I am preparing myself for the launch of the new Path of Exile league and getting in truly on the ground floor of that experience. It launches on a Friday night, which hopefully can give the same sort of vibes as a Diablo III seasonal launch.
