Hey Folks! I spent some more time yesterday tweaking and leveling my Wintertide Brand Occultist. I’ve dialed up the defensive layers a bit and I have a Watcher’s Eye that should also help whenever I can get the free passive points to allocate a jewel socket for it. This is never going to be a bossing character for me, so with that in mind, I am largely leaning into comfortable mapping clears while upping the survival. Essentially I think my next play is to pick up another strength travel node, which should allow me to drop a +30 strength node and then use that point to allocate the socket for the Watcher’s Eye.
I had a Dawnbreaker laying around in my vault that I picked up off Searing Exarch, and I decided to give it a spin. Sure I lost some damage by dropping the caster shield with +1 to cold gems, but I also gained a number of defensive layers baked into the shield alone. Essentially what this is doing is splitting some portion of the damage I am taking and then making it resolve against my Fire Resistance. Sure my Fire Resistance is not amazing and nothing like the 90% that I have on my Juggernaut… but it is enough to sort of blunt the blow for all other attacks a bit. The shield alone is worth almost 2000 armor by itself and has a small amount of life baked into it along with a 46% block chance. While it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically… so far I am thinking the Dawnbreaker is helping.
I recorded another video yesterday afternoon of me playing the class and talking through some of the decisions that I am making. Now this video was recorded before I made a number of tweaks like the Dawnbreaker last night but still shows the general state of the build. If you want to look at the state of my tree here is a POB, but note that I currently am muling a new wand with my Juggernaut to level it because I can handle crucible progress so much faster with that character. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty happy with where things are so far. Sure it is weaker than most of my other builds but I am actually enjoying running around with Wintertide Brand again. Would I start that build in another league over RF Jugg? Probably not. That does not mean however I am not enjoying myself.
Now that the weather is warmer, my wife has been spending a lot of time out in the backyard in the evenings reading. Around 8 pm I decided to go out and check on her, since often she comes in way earlier than that, and found that Greybie had decided to hang out as well. He’s been coming around to the backyard more often lately and it is pretty great. So I spent about an hour out there petting him and trying to coax him up onto my lap. He is still a little too skittish for me to actually lift him up and place him there… and expect him to do anything other than run away. When not actively getting attention he would set up shop underneath one of our chairs and just lay there.
All the while we were back there Tripod was over on the concrete patio off our kitchen… some 15 feet away. Greybie and Tripod seem to tolerate each other, but I am not certain they are actually friends yet. She kept coming closer to us… like she wanted to come over and get attention as well and then would retreat back under the patio table rubbing up against the chairs. I feel like she is on the brink of being more sociable, but I am not entirely sure how to tip her over. Our thought is maybe if she watches us petting Greybie… and him being seemingly happy about it… that she might realize that she too can get love and attention. I would honestly love it if Greybie set up shop in our backyard as well because at least knowing those two cats are relatively safe and happy would be a load off my mind. He lives somewhere down the cul de sac but given that he spends MOST of us time in the orbit of our house… I don’t think he has another family.
I really need to start taking my Steam Deck out into the backyard with me and playing something while just chilling with the feral cats. Last night was delightful but other than when I was actively playing with Greybie I was somewhat bored. You can only screw around on your phone so much before it is no longer interesting.
Hey Folks! Yesterday I went down yet another rabbit hole of trying to figure out what exactly I wanted my exit condition to be for the Crucible League. The problem with Path of Exile is there is a nigh endless amount of goals that you can have, and at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to complete none of them. A Diablo III season is far more clear-cut in that you have a single seasonal journey with fixed rewards at the end of it, and a clear “finished” point where it is pretty safe to walk away from. With Path of Exile it all depends upon your core activities, and this league for better or worse has been a league of me revisiting old builds and trying to make them work. I did this with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and then again with Explosive Arrow Champion. Then there was the somewhat meme build of Explosive Raging Spirits where I largely created the build entirely around a single pseudo-eight-link that I found in my travels. It worked well enough, but I also didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep the build around for long.
So yesterday I set my sights on completely changing this character up and revisiting one of my first builds that I fell in love with… Wintertide Brand. Now my first Wintertide character was actually a botched attempt at Righteous Fire. I really enjoyed the brand gameplay and I leaned into that rather than actually transitioning to RF when I should have. More modern Wintertide brands tend to focus around the Occultist ascendency, and it is easy enough to respec my Necromancer into that as a result I set out doing just that yesterday with increasingly misnamed BelNecroSrsly. I did not necessarily follow a guide for this transformation but instead went out to my favorite source for the research of builds that are actually being played… POE.ninja. If you set the search parameters to Occultist and the main skill to Wintertide brand, you can see a rundown of what is actively being played.
Now the highest dps version of the build had a Mageblood and a corrupted Loreweave… so I decided that I needed to set my sights a little lower than that. The next one was running Chaos Innoculation which again… not exactly something that I wanted to mess with for the time being. Eventually, I decided to go with the level 90 build for a character called Frosty_Lady. I figured that I could tweak that to my tastes which gives you a POB that looks a little something like this for my current path forward. ultimately I was trying to make as few changes as possible so essentially I needed to swap out my gloves because they were minion damage based, but there really was nothing else special about those. I needed to pick up the remaining resists that I needed off my Necklace since I would be dropping the unique I had been using for SRS. The key unique to make the build feel good was a corrupted Rime Gaze with a Labyrinth Enchant on it giving Wintertide Brand +4 Maximum Stages. Lastly, I swapped out and sold my expensive SRS shield for a more standard Spirit Shield with +1 levels to all Cold Spell Gems. Technically I spent probably 3 Divine Orbs assembling the specific components of the build but then made back way more than 3 Divine Orbs selling the gear that I was using for Summon Raging Spirits.
I have some problems to work through but for the most part, it feels really good clearing maps… considerably less good clearing bosses. I’ve gotten very used to the Juggernaut and Champion that can largely laugh off most incoming damage. This is absolutely a squishier build as a whole, and there are some tweaks that I would probably do to make it feel better. Firstly I would like to get my Armor and Regen up considerably higher. Next, I would love to figure out a way to stack some blocks considering that is not yet a really viable means of defense. The only reason why it feels as good as it does is because cold damage is in itself a defensive layer. Wintertide Brand slows and ultimately freezes mobs around you making it so that they are either not dealing damage to you… or are moving slow enough that you can easily avoid them.
My defenses are honestly pretty puny at the moment. I only have roughly 3500 health and a little over 600 regeneration which combined with only 69% physical damage reduction from armor and a measly 24% block chance… and all of my Energy Shield going to Eldritch Battery… means that when I get hit I get hit it lands extremely hard. My resists are also not amazing… because while capped I don’t have much that is increasing my maximum resistances. So essentially I need to evaluate my tree a bit to see where I can drop some damage and gain some additional life and defensive layers. This will never be a bossing character for me, so in theory I mostly just want to make it feel good for mapping purposes, and as it stands Wintertide Brand already decimates trash mobs so I can afford to lose some damage to gain some a bit of comfort level. I am sure I will probably record one of my dumb videos showing the current state of the build.
After fiddling around with the Wintertide build and getting functional, I decided to spend some time clearing out influenced maps that I had sitting in my bank. This ultimately led me to acquire another set of Shaper Fragments. So I decided to test my mettle against Shaper on my Explosive Arrow Champion, and much to my surprise, it was way easier to do the fight than on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I managed to get through the fight without any deaths and acquired the last Uber Elder fragment that I was missing. So here we are… organically arriving at being able to potentially attempt defeating the memory of The Elder in the Shaper’s Realm that has been haunting my sidebar for a month.
For this fight I opted to go back to my Juggernaut, and took a few deaths in the process but ultimately defeated “Uber Elder” which means I acquired my third void stone… and now all of my maps drop significantly higher. I think the lowest level map can drop for me now is 14, giving me a much wider range of things for farming purposes. I have to say that mechanically on some levels the fight was easier than doing The Shaper or The Elder by themselves. I took deaths in part because I was not prepared to dodge specific mechanics happening at the same time. I think given enough iterations of this fight, I could probably go deathless once I got used to everything. Mostly my key problem with boss encounters in Path of Exile is that they take so much effort to be able to even attempt. If I could run them back to back I would ultimately memorize the patterns and get really good at them. However, doing these once every few weeks… means I lose a lot of progress each time I drop into the encounter because I am going to be rusty each time.
Ultimately though I guess I now know what I have to do to get through this league. I am going to set my sights on beating The Maven encounter, which admittedly feels much easier to get to than Uber Elder given that you just have to chain-run invitations until you get enough fragments to face her. At this point, I am at 8 of 10 fragments so I should be able to burn through this pretty quickly if I actually set my sights on accomplishing it. My hope is that I can take her down by exercising the fact that I have six portals… because I sincerely doubt I will successfully complete a memory game phase. Having three void stones means I am officially further along in this league than I have ever been before. It just feels like Uber Elder was such a pain in the ass that I have to get through Maven now just to finish the job.
I also plan on devoting some time to making Wintertide feel a bit better. Feeling confident enough to tackle this mission is its own accomplishment in my progression through Path of Exile as a whole. I guess the next major achievement would be to go after a build of my own design, without specifically following anything active in the meta. I still feel like I am years away from that accomplishment even though I am well over a thousand hours into this game now. I have no real clue WHY Path of Exile is so engaging for me, but it feels like it is this puzzle that I must solve and each time I clear something new… it uncovers a whole series of other puzzles to be solved just beneath that surface. I will probably spend some more time researching various Wintertide builds on POE.Ninja in order to see how they are solving the survival challenges so that I can devise my own path forward.
Good Morning Friends. Yesterday in the AggroChat Slack there was this whole thread about growing up in the gifted and talented program, but also being just “gifted” enough to fully understand your own inadequacies. I felt this so damned hard because this is essentially the story of my life. I was on the mediocre end of the gifted pool and while I participated in all of the elevated events, and was actually good enough at the academic bowl to place in the district banquet and force the horrible football coach to have to accept an award on my behalf… I never really felt good enough to actually be recognized as such. For most of my life, I have been “winging it” and bumblefucked my way into the occasional success. Take for example this cosmetic outfit that I am wearing on my Explosive Arrow Champion. There was no real planning here, just me clicking on a few random cosmetics because I hate the default look of low-level gear in Path of Exile. By sheer accident, I came up with something that I really love, which is this whole microcosm of my life as a whole. Any real success that I have had… has been purely by accident.
I know yesterday I released this entire blog post talking about my experiences from the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to refine those thoughts a bit and opted to do so in a video of me playing around on my Scion in Path of Exile. Something that I have noticed about myself is that often when I sit down to write about something, it causes me to re-evaluate that topic in my head. This video is largely the place I arrived at after writing an entire blog post about the experience. It allowed me to really refine my thoughts into a sharper point and get to the crux of what my primary problem with the game is. I decided to skip the clever title card and just go with something way more honest. If you want to hear me ramble on for fifteen minutes about the core of my frustrations feel free. But I will skip to the chase and tell you that ultimately it boils down to the level scaling feeling really bad.
In the video, I am poking around at a new character that I have been leveling that I called BelGlamrock mostly because the default Scion appearance looks like an outfit straight out of the hair metal band era. The weird thing about this character is that I honestly have no real intention of ever gearing it fully or turning it into a real character for playing the game. Truth be told, I am not sure if I really like the Scion as a starter class at all. It feels kind of directionless, but I guess that makes sense given it doesn’t have a fixed starter location on the passive tree. The benefit of the class is that you can mix and match the ascendency style of the other classes and build a sort of hybrid to do very specific things. This also feels like the weakness of the class because it doesn’t really have an identity of its own.
Ultimately I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with the character. It was a means to an end and the fact that I had never gotten the achievement for killing Dominus on the Scion bugged me for some reason. I don’t fully understand why I have been motivated to get specific achievements in Path of Exile given that I have never really been an achievement-focused person in any other games. Generally speaking, the only achievements that I spend time on, are the ones that give me something tangible as a reward. This is in part why I have enjoyed the Achievement structure of Guild Wars 2 because almost always they end in some sort of interesting tangible reward. My drive to get achievements in Path of Exile however completely flies in the face of my well-established patterns. I get nothing from having knocked these out other than the sense of checking something off a long list of achievements that I have yet to complete. Similarly, I have this irrational desire to run two characters through Act 2, just to side with the Bandits I have never sided with before in order to knock that achievement as well.
Speaking of achievements, I am nearing 19 league challenges which will give me another sad little totem pole for my hideout. In order to finish this off I respeccced my Atlas Passive tree to drop support for incursion and pile on some of the Abyss nodes. I realize that Abyss is not exactly great in this league, but I am pretty close to knocking out the challenge associated with it. Essentially I need to find several more 4 pit Abysses and I think by trying to force the chance of seeing an Abyssal Depths… it will cause this to happen. In the grand scheme of things I really like Abyss as a mechanic, but it does feel way less rewarding than it did before their most recent revamp. I am going to be running maps anyways to build up sulphite for delving so I might as well be getting the mechanics I need for challenges in the process. I also have a stockpile of abyss scarabs that I can use to force it as well.
I am not entirely certain what my exit strategy is for this league. I’ve still not earned my last two void stones, so given the state my Explosive Arrow Champion is in, I might lend some focus to that. I’ve tried to accumulate the fragments needed for shaper and ultimately uber elder organically, but that is really slow going. I am wondering if I should just use some of my war chest of resources and buy the fragments that I need outright. I still find Delve deeply relaxing but also I am starting to feel a little listless there. I’ve taken down three crystal kings in recent days and failed to get a good amulet, but even if I did get a good one… what exactly would I do with it? I am not sure there are other builds that I really want to spend time doing given that in this league I have made four completely functional builds for doing the various content that I really want to be doing.
I think maybe when I finish up this 19th challenge for the league I might take a bit of a break. I can do so happy that I accomplished pretty much everything that I really wanted to accomplish save for the Uber bosses. I might take a run at those, but to be honest… I don’t really love bossing in the first place. I like the big loot explosions that come from lower tiers of activities and I can’t really bring myself to buy an endless supply of fragments from the trade league in order to chain-run bosses. I might want to do some more heist and burn down my contracts a bit, but other than that… I think I can maybe put the Crucible league to bed for awhile.
Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.
Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.
Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.
To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.
So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.
This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.
The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.
I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.
I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.
This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.
