0.5 – Return of the Ancients

Slug Shakes with Friends

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Good Morning, Folks! Last night was our regularly scheduled Sibling Time ™, and I spent it with my sibling Ace. One thing that you have to know about Ace is that they love ANYTHING to do with the ocean, which means that I have more or less lost them completely since the release of Subnautica 2. Last night we decided to dive into the realm of multiplayer, and I have to say… much like it is with EVERY survival game… Subnautica 2 is better with friends. That is not to say there are no problems. Subnautica 2 has way more of a specific story than the first game, but less so than the expansion. The unfolding of the story happens in a very non-sequitur manner if you are not the person clicking on all of the objects. You will be exploring the world and have a sudden voice clip play from out of nowhere.

The game more or less follows a similar flow to the first one. You are on an Ocean planet, working for an evil corporation, and the first steps in this new world are to unjam your pod and send it to the surface. From there, you are gathering resources to build a more permanent structure and upgrade your kit of equipment to do various things. Where this game differs from the first one is that it adds to the mix genetic mutations that allow you to interact with various things that you cannot from the start. For example, before you launch your pod, you have to take an adaptation that allows you to process oxygen under the high atmospheric pressure of this planet. One of the first mutations that you seek out when oceanside is something that will allow you to process water and nutrients from the planetary wildlife. This is where the slug shake comes in, because effectively, you end up picking up these adorable sea slugs and drinking the filtered water inside of them.

Last night was a heck of a lot of fun, and we plan on playing on this same save file next week during Sibling Time. Probably the highlight of the night was disturbing this giant crab monstrosity that seems to churn up resources as it moves around. The other highlight is just how fast resource gathering goes when you have multiple people working towards the same objectives. We ended the night with a pretty sweet base, after our first one did not really meet our long-term needs. We had a lot of issues with that first base and object collisions, but in the second base, we largely built it once we opened up the ability to create rooms, so we have so much more space for “activities”. Right now, we are sort of working towards our ability to get a vehicle, and with that, I know that Ace is going to push me to start exploring the deep dark ocean that terrifies me so.

Since I have largely stopped playing Diablo IV, that means I am back in Path of Exile for the moment while waiting on the launch of Path of Exile II’s new league on the 29th. One of the characters that I really enjoyed this league is my yolo build around taking a guardian and then using a few new uniques to create a giant army of minions. Mostly, I guess I am seeing how far I can push this build before I lose focus again and start playing Path of Exile II. It is shocking just how well this build works and how tanky it actually is. It is nothing like my Righteous Fire characters, but it still has a fair amount of block and over 5000 life. I have been doing Delve with this character, which seems wild because you need a very tanky character for that. I’m not sure if I have ever had a Minions character that felt this comfy. Do I think anyone should follow this build? Probably not. It was super easy to level, and I mostly just typed Minion into the search box and went for those nodes.

I think for Path of Exile II, I am once again going to go with an Infernalist for minions. There does not seem to be any really popular overpowered build guides for this class, but my plan right now is that I am going to do what I did with the above build and just type “minion” in the search box and go where the nodes are. If nothing else, that should get me through the campaign pretty easily, and then I just have to work on defenses. My hope is that going Infernalist is going to allow me to pivot pretty easily into Raven Righteous Fire whenever I can get my hands on that staff. This first character will also serve as something to acquire some easy currency and buy some of the other new build enabling uniques. I want to try and shield throw/slam build with the new Tul unique. I am contemplating trying to do that build as a strength stacker with the new water sprinkler unique. Honestly, I am looking forward to playing some POE2 way more than I expected.

This was a bit of a mixed bag of topics, but as is the case often with my muddled chemo brain.

Winding Down Diablo

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Good Morning, Folks. For the last few weeks, my default gaming activity has been playing Diablo 4. More specifically, playing a Thorns Paladin at first and then switching it over to a Hammer/Arbiter Paladin to push a little further. I felt I hit a wall with Thorns around Torment IV, and that was what prompted me to the build that Raxx had been promoting to see if I could make it further. I could a bit, and now can pretty comfortably do Torment VIII Content, but tend to run Torment VII because it goes much faster. The big problem is that this build was supposed to be something that I could cakewalk Torment XII with, and so far, it has not been that. My time to kill, especially in the pit, is abysmal. I’ve technically unlocked Torment IX, but just barely by the skin of my teeth. I think I am just getting tired of pushing the build, and in theory, need to scrutinize and probably recraft every single piece of my gear to get further, since I cannot seem to get any Mythic Uniques to actually drop.

What I had been grinding so damned hard for was an Ancestral copy of Judgment of Auriel. I finally got that to drop off Lord Zir, and the difference that it made in the build was negligible. Maybe Torment VIII got a bit more comfortable, but nothing really to write home about. I thought maybe there was some hidden multiplier that I was not getting for not having a full set of Ancestral gear equipped, but that does not appear to be the case. The problem is that Ancestral drops still feel extremely rare events, especially from uniques at Torment VIII. It took me probably 60 kills before Lord Zir finally dropped the item I was after, and it took me farming the mercenary favors to get those boss summoning keys. It feels like I have a much harder time getting the keys for the low-level bosses than I do the grand keys for the bigger bosses. Something is not right here, and I hope they sort it out in the coming seasons.

I’ve also had zero luck with Echo of Lilith. I can get her down to around 20% life and then something oneshots me, so I guess I need to spend some time studying videos on this fight. I honestly hate shit like that, when bosses have oneshot mechanics. ARPGs for me are about gaining enough stats to steamroll over the top of content. This is why I hate Maven so much in Path of Exile, because there is no way I can cheese that fight. Bossing in general is not my jam, because I do not want to barely win. I want to crush the monsters and take away tasty loot as a result. At least in Path of Exile, I have done almost all of the fights; I just dislike them. I know Ace, and I have taken down Lilith as a team before, so I just need to figure out where I need to stand during that oneshot phase because it wasn’t really clearly telegraphed. It is also weird that I have to specifically do it on Torment VIII since many of the previous ranks required things way lower than that, and it feels like this one jumped several torment levels at once.

I had mostly been focused on grinding out tokens for the armor sets, because I have completed all of the other reliquaries, but not this one. I’ve gotten the shield and three of the armor sets, but I just do not know if I have it in me to keep grinding. These tokens come pretty slowly through doing content, and I am just not sure I have it in me to grind it out. The last one I picked up was for Spiritborn, which I did mostly because I lack a lot of armor sets that I really like for that class. I have plenty of armor sets for Barbarian, so that will probably be my last if I manage to grind these out. I did manage to grind out the limited-time World of Warcraft reliquary, but now there is nothing left to do with the tokens that I am generating through gameplay. I spent a bit of time playing Path of Exile, and doing maps… and I have to be honest, the moment-to-moment gameplay in that game just feels better. In truth, Diablo IV is at the bottom of the ARPG pecking list for me. If there is a Path of Exile, Last Epoch, or Path of Exile II league in that pecking order… I will choose those before playing Diablo IV. I might even choose fresh Titan Quest II content over Diablo IV, and that is not to say that D4 is a bad game… just that the others are giving me more of what I want.

There is also the problem that we are now roughly eleven days out from a new Path of Exile II league. Return of the Ancients looks wild, and I am here for everything that it is doing. I just have to figure out a class that will be both fun to level and powerful in the endgame. Since I am very much interested in Raven Righteous Fire, I am contemplating going Lich or Infernalist and a traditional Summon Raging Spirits start. I like spamming temporary minions because it feels like I am doing something other than just dragging around an army. I also know the leveling for this sort of build is pretty chill, and I like chill leveling. I am really curious how fast I can get through the campaign with the most recent round of updates to make signposting of content a bit easier to find. More than anything, though, I am somewhat excited to see the updated versions of various leagues and am wondering how much of that will trickle down into Path of Exile, the game I care about the most.

Anyways. I think I am out of things to talk about for this Monday morning. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and as always, feel free to drop me a line if you want to contest anything that I have said.

Ancients League Is Gonna Be Wild

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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.

Warlock Pretty Great

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Good Morning, Folks! This is going to seem like a bit of whiplash, but my opinion of Diablo IV Lord of Hatred has evolved yet again. At this point, I am over Paragon 150 with the Paladin, which means I have picked up most of the best nodes on the Paragon board. I’ve done a lot of content, both in queuing directly for things for the purpose of knocking out seasonal journey achievements, and through the War Plan system. Essentially, there is this awkward phase around Torment 1 where it is a bit of a struggle to get Ancestral gear, and I found that frustrating. Once I pushed through this by using the crafting system to craft up blue and yellow ancestrals into usable gear, things started to move more smoothly. I have to give them credit; the crafting system is phenomenal, and essentially, you can take any item and make it function for your build so long as it is the right item level. Essentially, the game has the POE2 version of the Chaos Orb, which removes an affix and adds a random affix, and through this, you can kind of brute force your way to something useful. If you only have one bad affix, there is still the enchanting system that can be used to target, remove it, and get something usable.

At this point, I have a fairly optimal set of legendaries and a few key uniques that buff the amount of thorns damage that I am dealing. I can relatively easily do Torment VII, but mostly do VI because speed is king when it comes to farming content. That said, I feel like I have hit the ceiling of the initial thorns leveling build that I have been running. There is an endgame version of this that changes out a lot of stuff, and I could move over to it. Though I am tempted if I have to respec my character anyway, to migrate over to an Arbiter Hammerdin build, which is supposedly extremely good at speed farming. The biggest problem that I have with the current version of Thorns is that it relies entirely upon Blessed Shield to deliver most of the damage, which moves slowly, and ends up creating a delayed damage output. So you either have to lead with shield throw so that mobs run into it as they are coming at you, or have a trail of mobs who are slowly being whittled down by the shields as they follow behind you. If I want to continue playing Paladin and push it to the higher tiers… I need to make a decision and deal with what will probably be a minor setback as I start acquiring gear again.

I’ve also been leveling a Warlock, in part because this is the build that the streamer Raxxanterax has been playing and it looks insanely powerful. Legitimately, it seems like Dread Claws Warlock is this league’s version of the early Spiritborn builds that were so insanely powerful at the launch of the last expansion. Initially, this relies upon Command Fallen as its builder and Dread Claws as its spender. I did not really love the feeling of Command Fallen, because I went into it expecting them to feel a bit like Summon Raging Spirits. However, once you get the Fallen Rush notable, it transforms them into an Abyss ability, making it so you summon 3 at a time, and allows you to target them by resummoning them. This makes it feel much better, and pretty much I am constantly spamming both my right and left clicks to either summon/target my pack of Fallen or fire off cascading dread claws, which gives it a pretty comfortable gameplay style. You are always targeting things before they can get to you, and your Dread Claws are mostly doing all of the work to mop things up before they can damage you.

The entire build gets a bit more Summoner feeling when you unlock the Warlock quest chain at 15. This involves you going and defeating a series of demons and binding them to your will, so that you can then choose one to permanently follow you. The Dread Claws build uses Laalish, which is a giant worm that is constantly following you and leaping out of the ground to eat mobs. Having one big minion, a turret-style minion, and a swarm of fallen minions makes the entire thing feel a bit more like I wanted it to feel from the start. Your Ultimate is a swarm of minions that effectively shred the target, making short work of whatever you throw them on. The only negative about it is that the swarm is stationary, so you have to sometimes nudge a mob back into it to get the full effect. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the Warlock and look forward to pushing it to 70, and then building the proper endgame build with all of my paragon points.

One other side note, there is an event running right now that adds an extra battle pass to the game that unlocks a bunch of World of Warcraft-themed weapon skins. There is also a rather expensive pack that gives you all of the Tier 2 armor sets, and I am specifically the kind of sucker who fell for that. The T2 era was the golden days of World of Warcraft for me, and those are some of my favorite sets. So I was more than happy to be able to run around as a Judgement Paladin or a Nemesis Warlock. It also seemed fitting to have the Warlock using Corrupted Ashbringer. I have enough disposable income to make these bad decisions, because really… it is not worth what they are charging. However, given how much bullshit is happening in my life right now… I will take my joy however I can get it, even if that means retail therapy for some overpriced digital baubles.

In other news, we have been in teaser season for a bit with Path of Exile II slowly releasing some very short videos. SirGog has finally decided to make a video covering everything that has been released to date, so if you have not been watching as they slowly drip-feed us information, I suggest checking out his summary. The entire League Reveal presentation takes place on the 7th, and the full release of the content drops on the 29th. As SirGog indicates in the video, this is a really weird sequence of events for Grinding Gear Games. This is not the way that previous leagues have been teased, nor is the timing of the release following their normal patterns either. Generally speaking, we get the content revealed one week, and then the next week we have the start of the league. Anzac Day was the last public holiday until June, so I am not entirely certain why the big gap between the two events. Either way, I am hoping to wrap up my Diablo IV shennannigans well before the 29th so that I can hop into Path of Exile II fully, with no regrets.

What have you been playing? Have you tried out Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred? If so, what are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.