Dawn of the Hunt (0.2)

The Altar of Randomness

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Good Morning Folks. I am still playing Path of Exile II, and shockingly still having things to say about the game. I expected that I would be full on engaged in the Last Epoch Season 2 propaganda machine by now. For any you are interested however Steelmage posted a pretty fun video that attempts to explain all the things about Last Epoch while he was playing it. Over the weekend I reached a point where my build finally started to feel pretty comfortable. Essentially I leap slam into a pack of mobs, infernal cry, and then boneshatter to cause a screen wide explosion augmented by herald of ash. When it comes to boss time I alternate between Perfect Strike and Hammer of the Gods until it is dead. I can’t do any of the one-shot shenanigans but can pretty effectively dispose of most encounters. I need more strength so I can get a bigger hammer with more physical damage on it, but otherwise I am doing pretty great.

I’ve mostly been focused on finding Corruption Nexuses to cleanse so that I can keep bumping up my tier of maps and getting more atlas passives. At this point I have cleared a T9 Nexus and am trying to find my way to another one so I can clear it and bump up to T10. Map sustain has been pretty reasonable and fighting a boss I believe guarantees that you will always get one tier higher, giving you a fairly predictable way to keep moving up. I’ve found a few maps on my atlas that require specific tiers of maps, namely The Copper Citadel requires T15 or higher, and the Megalith requires T11 or higher. I’ve also found a Kalandra map and it did not seem to have any specific requirements, but also has little to no relation to the version of that map that we got in Path of Exile 1. Mostly it is just a pretty tileset that grows as you move along the path with an altar at the end that gives you a special item base.

At this point I have unlocked 20 of 40 Atlas passives and have mostly focused on waystone sustain, adding additional rares to my map, and then diving into rogue exiles making them more likely to wear strength gear and more likely to have unique jewelry (rings, amulets, and belts) equipped. The biggest complaint that I have with the Path of Exile II Atlas is that it feels like I really don’t have much player agency. I’m roughly halfway through the Atlas progression and by now in a Path of Exile league I would have some sort of defined strategy that I am following, influencing a specific type of content to show up more frequently… and honestly by this point probably have at least two mechanics guaranteed on every map. It is just really hard to target farm specific mechanics for resources because Tablets feel totally random in the type you get, and there is nothing like a Scarab that you can use to force mechanics onto each specific map. For example I really need to farm a ton of Expedition, but it is a total crapshoot which maps I am going to have access to that mechanic on.

So much of the Path of Exile II design has been about removing player agency and re-introducing pure dumb luck. This is pretty much the opposite of what players generally want, and once you learn the systems in Path of Exile you are able to radically influence the randomness in a manner that fits the results that you are trying to get out of it. So I get that the passive tree from POE1 might be a bridge to far for the POE2 systems teams… but I posit that maybe it is time to port over Idols. Right now there is a limited time event happening in POE1 called the Legacy of Phrecia, and one of its features is to remove the existing Atlas Passive tree and introduce in its place a series of Idols with randomly rolled attributes. You cannot pinpoint things quite as easily as you can with the Atlas tree, but stacking enough of these allows you to at least shape the outcome of your maps. This truly is a better system design than the current Atlas in Path of Exile II and I am somewhat hoping that maybe Idols as a concept was a test for improving mapping.

In other news I “crafted” if you can use that word… what I consider to be my ideal normal chestpiece for my build. I had been picking up every Ornate Plate base I could find and specifically I got lucky and got a three socket corrupt on a perfect 2.5% life regeneration item. Other than that I have also upgraded my Xoph’s Blood amulet to a non-corrupted version and added the Titanic enchant to it for 5% more strength. At some point I picked up a slightly better version of Infernoclasp, which represents the only other unique that I am using with the build currently. I picked up a couple of new rings and got one of them to 20% Chaos Modifiers which essentially fixed my resists to the point of allowing me to drop the Chaos Resistance corruption I had on a previous chestpiece. My next big expenditure of currency is going to be buying enough Fire quality currency to max out 40% on the Breach ring, which might be enough to cap my fire resistance at 90%.

Currently I have 89% Fire Resistance, and 76% for Cold and Lightning. If I ever manage to ascend again I will pick up the point that makes max fire res account for lightning and cold and then be at 89/90/90 and should be able to push up Fire that last point either through quality on the breach ring or picking up another +1% max jewel socket. I’ve been pushing up my block chance and am now at 53% with my next pick adding another +12% and the ability to get life back on block. I am just shy of 200 life per second regen which feels pretty comfortable, and my armor is in a decent place… but I could always use more of it. What I need now more than anything is strength… so that I can start using the higher tier bases for my two handed maces.

In a perfect world I want a Fanatic Greathammer, but the base Strength requirement for that is 212… which gets multiplied by Giants Blood for a total of 636 required Strength. There is no way for me to get to that without going down to pick up Polymathy. So either I need a perfectly rolled hammer with maximum reduced attributes… or a lot more passive skill points. It seems like the lowest I can reasonably get is 137 Strength from 35% reduced attributes which would still require me to have 381 Strength. I am pretty commited to my next choice and other than that I am 12 points away from being able to reach Polymathy, which means I will not be able to get there until level 93. Realistically… there is no way in hell that I hit that before Thursday and the launch of Last Epoch, so without radically shifting my tree I am going to be stuck where I am for awhile. What is even sadder is that even AFTER allocating all of those nodes I will only be sitting at 442 Strength so would STILL need to find a reduced attribute roll on my mace.

Loot still feels fairly anemic, but I am usually finding one or two exalts per map now. I’ve had a few good tinks and at this point I have found two Twilight Reliquary Keys and two raw Divine Orbs. I used one of the Twilight keys just to see what luck I might have, and pulled a 1Ex mace from it… so I sold the second one for 18 Exalts. I’ve spent one of the Divines on getting a better Xoph’s Blood that I could enchant, and am shopping around for various upgrades with the second one. Technically I have seen three Divine Orbs, but one I got during the campaign that I cashed into Exalted Orbs to help with some early gearing. What this game really needs is Harvest crafting… the ability to change resistances on gear and the ability to spam craft items that are skewed towards a single needed stat. That really is my primary method for attempting to craft gear in Path of Exile 1, and would love to see something similar here. Then again… I could not reasonably get Harvest on every single map to even farm the currency so maybe there are multiple problems with that statement.

I’ve reached a point where I am legitimately enjoying myself… but that said… I am so fucking ready for Tombs of the Erased on Thursday. The systems of Last Epoch are just better designed than the systems of Path of Exile II. All that was lacking was the endgame and I am hoping the Weaver faction and itemized “maps” are going to solve that last piece of the puzzle. I will probably fanboy out a bit over the coming week sharing “why you should play” type posts. So unless something drastic happens over the coming days, this is probably going to be my last Path of Exile II post for awhile.

It’s Getting Better

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Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.

Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.

Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.

Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.

There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.

After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.

Slow and Steady But Unrewarding

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Good Morning Folks. Yes I am still screwing around with Path of Exile II… in part because I don’t really want to get engaged in another game since Last Epoch Season 2 launches next week. There has been further fruit from the Zizaran interview, namely in the form of a patch summary post for the upcoming 0.2.0e patch. They are tweaking a bunch of things, namely the monster speed for a bunch of encounters during the campaign to even out the difficulty curve a bit so that you are not just rushed and stun-locked until death. This is probably a good thing, especially if I ever decide to level my minions character. That said it is probably too late for me to benefit because around Act 4 I managed to get my build online and stable enough to not really have any more problem pushing through the campaign.

Fairly early yesterday evening I killed Doryani for the second time and progressed into the endgame proper for Path of Exile. Taking on Viper the second time was really no big deal and so much easier than the first time I faced her. Quite frankly the hardest thing for me the second time was the molten smith fight thing, because I just was not doing much damage to him and he kept getting back into the lava flow and healing. I finished him off within a few frames of the end of the path. I could have fought in the lava for a bit but not terribly long. The further into the campaign I got however, the less rewarding everything felt. Rares became more Rare… and currency that matters… aka Chaos, Exalt, and Alchemy all but dried up entirely. I picked up a pair of unique gloves that I was able to sell for a Divine Orb, which I immediately converted back into Exalts so that I could afford some upgrades.

This morning I recorded a quick video of me clearing a map… with quick being a relative term because it took about 10 minutes to full clear all of the rares. The gameplay style is rather slow and plodding but stable as I leap slam into a pack and then boneshatter as soon as I land and if all goes well… blow up most of the screen. I had to drop some area of effect nodes to path over to blood magic to fix my mana issues, but I will be slowly picking those back up as I gain more levels. All in all it is a more stable gameplay style than my character was last league, but it feels infinitely slower because leap slam in Path of Exile II feels sort of awful. Based on the interview though… I still feel like I am probably moving faster than the intended gameplay speed. I need to drop my Trampletoe boots and pick up something with as much movement speed as I can get.

I talk about this in the video, but right now the worst part about the game is how unrewarding everything feels. This represents the loot from my juiciest map yet. The only reason why I got so much stuff is because I found a unique strongbox that spawned seven different rare mobs in a row with each getting stronger than the last. Most maps… are more akin to the one I show off in the video with one to two rares maybe dropping and a handful of bubblegum currency. I realize I am only running tier 1 waystones so far, but still… I swear it feels like it was more rewarding last league. I think that is the core problem with the state of the game. Everything feels sluggish as hell, but at the same time unrewarding so you begin to question why the fuck you are even playing. That is not a question you want your players asking.

One thing that I do have to give them credit for however is that the transition into mapping was a bit more smooth than it was previously. I remember there being a sizeable jump in difficulty between late campaign zones like the Aggorat and your very first T1 Waystones, and that bump is largely gone now. My only real complaint is how slow the combat feels and how little reward we are getting for it. I think I just happen to be playing a tanky enough character that the Rogue Exiles are not really that big of a deal. I’ve watched plenty of videos of folks being harassed by them, but it seems like maybe Warrior from last league is the baseline for the power level that they want classes to be at. We were the slugs last league, but sort of feel like gods as compared to most of the other classes now. It took awhile for my build to really come online, but once I got enough survival and especially after swapping to Giants Blood it has been pretty comfortable.

There is one build that I am super interested in, just not sure if I am interested enough to completely respec my warrior. One of my all time favorite ARPG builds is the “stop hitting yourself” Invoker Thorns Crusader from Diablo III. This is really the ultimate super chill build to play an ARPG with, and is directly related to my love of Righteous Fire in Path of Exile. I love building super tanky and then watching mobs effectively break themselves on my armor. Thorns seemingly is now a viable archetype in Path of Exile II, and most folks seem to be playing this with a Spear and Shield. Mathil also released a video yesterday talking about his own take on the concept. It seems REALLY interesting to me… and might be something I visit after Last Epoch runs its course… pending there is not a 3.26 league in Path of Exile at that time.

All in all… my character is very stable and I should be able to progress through maps without much issue. However a lot of the new has worn off with this game, and what we are left with is a game-play experience that is just not that fun.

Thank You Zizaran

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a wild ride, but I feel like I need to do some filling in of details for any readers who are not aggressively online and part of the Path of Exile community. Zizaran is essentially the gold standard for what a Path of Exile content creator can be. He is active in the community and known as one of the go to places for well crafted and easy to follow guides. Additionally he has a good rapport with Grinding Gear Games and has partnered with them to run a series of event called The Gauntlet where the rules of the game are changed to make an extremely brutal hardcore rule set environment that serves as a very short event league. He stays away from various community drama posts and just keeps his head down doing his thing and supporting the community in his own way. He is not exactly known for hyperbole and when he does come down hard on something… there is good reason.

Yesterday he hosted an interview with Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts of Grinding Gear Games. Note… this was something that was arranged well ahead of the launch of the Dawn of the Hunt league and in theory would normally be a victory lap to talk about all of the good things about it. However given the overwhelming anger and frustration from the community about the changes that went in with 0.2.0 and the current state of the game… this put Zizaran in the unique position of having a platform to discuss those frustrations. Legitimately I do not think there is anyone else in the community who could have played this role, because no one really has the institutional clout to create a scenario where they are both trusted by the players and trusted by the developers.

One of the frustrations that I have heard time and time again from the community is the question… who was this built for? We got a pretty clear answer. Note this is me attempting to clean it up a bit because there were an aggressive number of “ums” and “likes”, and repeated false starts to statements in the YouTube transcript. However here is something that Jonathan said during the interview that really just hit me the wrong way.

Every night I go home and play… I like do test runs of everything right, and if we made it so that there wasn’t any challenge for me in act one, I wouldn’t play the game anymore. But that isn’t helping anyone, right? I need to keep playing the game every night to actually enjoy myself It’s like if I’m not enjoying myself, then it’s like how can I even develop the game correctly? So on some level, it has to be fun for me, and I know that if you get to the point of having everything just be trivial, it’s like, well okay, why am I even playing this anymore? So there has to be some level of challenge.

Jonathan Rogers – Grinding Gear Games

So essentially… we are playing an aggressively tedious game because that is the way that Jonathan likes it? That is probably not fair, but it certain comes off that way. The beginning of the interview was deeply combative with one moment happening where Jonathan was trying to talk over Ziz and answer a question different than the one he was asking… with Ziz having to ask if he could please finish what he was saying. Jonathan apologized at the end of the interview for the way he was behaving, and I think that Mark stepped in to de-escalate things pretty well which allowed for some genuine and meaningful conversation to happen. I genuinely do not feel like if it were anyone other than Zizaran sitting across the interview from them… they would not have taken things quite so seriously. In a previous interview with Ghazzy and Darth Microtransaction, there were a few moments where it felt like Jonathan was straight up shutting down lines of conversation and presenting an impassible wall.

What is probably most impressive about this whole situation is that it has led to direct intervention. This morning I woke up to find that over night another post was made to the Path of Exile forums. Essentially it is outlining some direct changes that they will be implementing this week, and some other changes that they are investigating to determine the correct fix. Does this resolve all of the problems? Absolutely not. However, it does start the process of remedying what went wrong with 0.2.0. After listening to the discussion I do feel like a lot of the problems with this league have been in the “unintended consequences” column or from simply trying to fly a bit too close to the sun. We did not get any patch notes until the day before the league dropped, and even then it was missing details and some of the details that were included were just frankly incorrect. I feel like they set a deadline… and then did not have time to get everything locked down before they pushed the release out the door, creating a bunch of unforced errors in the process.

What has not done them any favors with the fans… is the fact that their release squashed the already scheduled launch window for Last Epoch Season 2 on April 2nd. Eleventh Hour Games did the best thing for them and rescheduled it for next week… but especially given the fact that Dawn of the Hunt was not ready for release… it is only adding to the frustrations. Given the broken state of the Path of Exile II, I can only imagine that Last Epoch is going to have one of its most active season launches yet. I really hope for their sake that the servers are nice and stable and that there are no economy breaking bugs this time around. Talkative Tri had an interview with EHG yesterday and some of the things that are coming in this season seem freaking amazing, and are direct answers to some of the minor squabbles I have had with the game.

So another piece that is coming up as part of this discussion is a bit of information that I assumed was common knowledge… but is apparently not. There has been a pretty regular refrain from Reddit wishing for Chris Wilson to come back and save the game. Thing is… from at least January of this year he has had no involvement with Grinding Gear Games. The incorporation documents on the New Zealand Companies Office was updated to remove Chris Wilson. In late 2024, Tencent acquired the last 20% of Grinding Gear Games making them a solely owned subsidiary and my guess is that Chris’s exit timeline happened around that point. I think he probably stuck around for the launch of Path of Exile II, to do some press for the game if needed, but almost everything for the last year involved Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts doing the heavy listing. I think the very last “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson, From Grinding Gear Games” that we got was during the Settlers of Kalguur league announcement. However even during that content reveal it was mostly Mark that did the bulk of the work.

One of the details that came out surrounding Grinding Gear Games stomping on the release of Last Epoch Season 2, is the statement that they had to launch now and that there was no way around it. In one of those situations of timing never being worse… yesterday the Dawn of the Hunt Mystery Box trailer came out as well. For those who have not been around Path of Exile, these are loot boxes that show up a few days after the launch of a new league and feature a bunch of microtransactions with no chance of getting exact duplicates, so if you spend enough money you are ultimately going to get everything eventually. What makes them better than normal loot boxes however, is at the start of the next league they all go up on the shop as individual purchases meaning that there isn’t much reason to ever chase the gacha highs.

My personal guess is that the “must launch” part of this ties to needing the financial income that a loot box series brings, and needing to be able to guarantee those earnings in the second quarter of 2025. I am uncertain what fiscal year scheme that Grinding Gear Games uses, but it is pretty common for Fiscal years to run July 1st to July 1st so that the financial close does not take place over the extremely fraught Christmas/New Years holiday weekends. In theory it might simply be that they needed to realize the profits from this loot box during this fiscal year in order to meet some arbitrary goals set forth by Tencent. Whatever the case… it sucks because they clearly were not ready and did not test things enough to push Dawn of the Hunt out the door. We are already seeing significant fall off in the player numbers, and potentially any remedies that they have made to this bad launch are not really going to make much of a difference at this point. The steam numbers show a fall off around 100k concurrent players in only a few days.

Anyways… I am personally still plugging away. I have gotten enough strength through the tree and gear to finally swap over to a Giant’s Blood build allowing me to pick up the additional defenses of a shield. I shopped around and spent my single solitary exalted orb on a shield with 40% block and roughly 500 armor. Yesterday I wrapped up Act 5 and am nearing the halfway point for Act 6. So in theory within the next few days I should be venturing forth into maps. I had my first waystone drop this morning when I popped in for a bit to record some screenshots, that I did not end up using today. Sometimes blog posts develop a mind of their own, and this one was more about the larger Path of Exile II situation.

At the end of the day I want to thank Zizaran for seemingly getting through to Grinding Gear Games yesterday. It is my greatest hope that we continue to see improvements and that maybe by the time 0.3.0 happens we will not have a massive regression in the enjoyment of the game.