Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the start of the Legacy of Phrecia 2.0 event in Path of Exile, and I got a bit of a late start… because my dentist called and told me that my night guard was ready for pickup. I expected to bop over and they would have it waiting on me at the desk. Instead I had to wait for a room to clear so they could do a fitting. Positive is it fits fine and I used it for the first time last night, and so far it is mostly okay. I was able to sleep fine with it in and it only really started to annoy me when I woke up around 2:30 in the morning, but was mostly able to turn over and fall back to sleep until the alarm went off. For the Phrecia event I was playing a class that is not supposed to be using minions… so as a result much like with Righteous Fire I spent the first part of the event creating a Witch Mule so that I could get abilities not accessible to the Shadow until the Library in Act 3. My problems started here… but we will talk about that in a bit.
This is what my early pathing looked like, and I have modified it slightly to drop some nodes and pick up some others. The early pathing is a bit of double edged sword, because you are not getting any power… but you are getting a bunch of much needed stats, namely intelligence. I did not really start to gain any real power until eleven points in. Suffice to say this was a bit of a rough start, which is only multiplied by the fact that we are playing under the Gauntlet ruleset. This means there is a bunch of general fuckery going on with boss fights. When you encounter Hillock on the beach, he is being witnessed by Maven, and when you take out Brutus you get a fake version to fight first… and then have to fight the real thing while the water canons from Hydra are attacking in patterns. On top of these every so has a modifier applied to it, so the base maps themselves are much more difficult they than would normally be. Combine this with the fact that Breach can be a bit rippy early on… and not playing a class designed for minions… it was a very rough start.
This was only multiplied by the fact that I was a complete and total fucking idiot, and I did not realize this until this morning at level 34. Essentially prior to that I had been using a level 1 Summon Raging Spirits, Flame Wall, and Holy Flame Totem. out of absolute paranoia of leveling them, and then screwing over the Shadow when I switched off the Witch Mule, I right clicked all of the abilities to keep them from leveling up. Problem is that this now applies globally when you move the gems to your main character. So for 34 levels… I have been using level 1 gems, and quite honestly just brute forcing my way through the content. This is so outrageously dumb, and it is no wonder that pretty much every boss fight was a massive pain in the ass to get through. Since all of my power comes from this one gem… I was essentially smashing my face against everything with the equivalent of a level one character. Sure I was a bit more sturdy and had some gear that was giving me some additional power… but not enough to make up for the fact that my minions were pure shit.
I am hoping that since I have now righted that wrong… the rest of the campaign will go much more smoothly. It will take a bit for Raging Spirits to catch up gem levels, but they should gain a lot of power in a quick burst. I am just about to the first lab, and at that point I get another massive boost of power in the form of a level 15 Envy buff that has no reservation. At that point I should be able to ride that as an express elevator through the rest of the content. Sadly I only made it to Act 3 last night before giving up for the evening. I did not do my normal Thursday thing but I did hang out on voice with everyone. Ace joined in the shenanigans this week so that was pretty delightful, and we had Ashgar until he had to bug out for Pathfinder. I laugh so much on Thursday nights, and they are truly good for my soul. Even if I am not playing the same game it is generally a good time to spend the time with my friends.
All in all the event seems to be pretty freaking popular. I have no clue what the actual numbers look like, but we did encounter some failures for instances loading, which means the instance servers were completely swamped early on. This is not exactly the same as a normal league launch, but it definitely seems like everyone is in and the game is hopping again. I kind of hate that this is a limited three week event. I am hoping they extend it until the next league drop, because ultimately this is going to be the league that everyone plays out if given the choice until 3.28. I am rocking the King in the Mists outfit with this character because it seemed fitting, and I am also using the Shadow Ravens mtx for SRS. I gave my Witch mule a proper name just in case I decided I wanted to roll a second character for the league. The thing is even though it has been brutal due to my own stupidity, I have been having fun. Tonight I am probably going to hang out downstairs, and attempt to coax some kitty cuddles while listening to an audio book.
Are you playing Legacy of Phrecia? If so what did you end up rolling? Drop me a line below.
