Path of Exile II

Spare Keys and Spoiler Season

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Good Morning Folks! We’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern in the Path of Exile community wondering exactly when accounts would be flagged for early access for folks with a lifetime spend of $480 or more… aka the price of the largest yearly supporter pack. Apparently, that happened overnight and I was able to confirm something that I hoped would be the case. When the supporter packs went live last Thursday I bought one that granted early access and was wondering if I would also get a key from the lifetime spend. It turns out that yes I did and while my spare key was already spoken for, you might check your early access page to see if you also got a spare key. Essentially you consume the key on the key redemption page and then go back to your early access page and snag the Steam key so that you can register that and be ready to download whenever preloading begins. I appreciate greatly that I got a spare key instead of just flagging the account.

We are well engaged in spoiler season, and it seems like GGG is releasing a new video pretty much every day. The one that launched overnight was for Ball Lightning, Archmage, Sigil of Power… and Wildshards which answered a question that I was having about support gems. Essentially it has been stated that we only get to use a single support gem once per character, and there were a lot of gems that ended up being added to multiple links on your character. In Path of Exile for example Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support and Greater Multiple Projectiles Support were used universally to make abilities split into multiple attacks. It seems as though Wildshards is a special version of this that only works with spells which makes me wonder if we are going to get several different flavors of commonly used supports tailored to very specific use cases.

The venerable SirGog released a video yesterday with a VERY important reminder in it. Essentially it is presented as though it were going to be a tier list for ascendancies, but really… none of us know anything about what the game is going to be like and how strong specific abilities are going to play. There are a handful of starter tier lists floating around and they are all essentially nonsense. I know personally I am going to do something with a Titan and probably use Giants Blood the notable that allows me to use a Twohander in one hand… to do Twohanded Mace and Shield. I am diving into the player fantasy that I want for a character because I have always loved that type of character when a game allows me to play it. I know roughly where in the tree I am going to be heading based on some preview nodes, but I fully expect when I level up for the first time… that I am going to be spending thirty minutes looking at the passive tree to figure out how I want to path.

Another Jonathan Rogers interview came out yesterday, this time with Talkative Tri but I have not had a chance to watch it myself. I thought it might be useful to sort of catalog all of the interviews that are currently available with different groups of people.

So far these are the four that I am aware of, but there might be more out there in the broader community. What I noticed with a lot of these interviews is that it seems like they are branching out from the core of the insular community. DM for example is wildly popular with the Diablo IV playerbase and has a really broad appeal. Talkative Tri focuses mostly on trying to present a really positive viewpoint in games and is relatively new to the scene. Legendary Drops comes from a totally different community and only recently started playing the game seriously with Settlers. Essentially it seems like they are doing a good measure of outreach to try and connect with a broader base of players.

There were a lot of folks who were invited to some recent event in LA and apparently there was an embargo on the footage that they recorded there. As such pretty much each day there are new revelations about the passive tree. For example, this is a video focused on the Warrior and its tree that I will be at some point watching through to try and get a feel of who I am going to path when the game releases. I apologize for anyone who is not into Path of Exile, because this blog is pretty much going to me obsessing about the game until it releases and then gibbering madly once I finally do get my hands on it. As I said yesterday… I’ve not really felt this way since the launch of World of Warcraft with a game consuming this much of my mental focus.

I figure I will probably take the next two days off from the blog so for everyone who celebrates, I hope you and yours have a very Happy Thanksgiving.

Don’t Take Vacation for POE2 Early Access

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Good Morning Folks! I’m in a massive hype cycle for the early access launch of Path of Exile II next Friday. However, I would caution you my dear readers… to not actually take time off from work to play it. I’ve been watching something with a bit of trepidation, which is Path of Exile 2 climbing on the top-selling games list for Steam. Something important to know about this list is that this is based on the amount of cash brought in by that product, which is why the Steam Deck for example is eternally at the top of this list because it is a very expensive item. Another important thing to note about this list is that a large chunk of POE players… are not actually buying things through the Steam store. None of the purchases I have made for example have been through Steam and are instead bought on PathOfExile.com meaning that you are seeing a minority of the total amount being spent on early access for Path of Exile II.

I am fully expecting that when the game goes online at 1 pm my time… the servers will be a complete mess that is likely only to get worse as we roll into primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely going to attempt to play next Friday but I am also preparing for the worst. If Jonathan Rogers was saying during the DM/Ghazzy stream that the numbers were significantly higher than they were expecting… I would believe him given that the game moved from 5th on the high sales chart to 3rd since yesterday. As a veteran of many a bad MMORPG launch, I would just suggest you not blow any of that valuable vacation time until the first few weeks have stabilized a bit. I am about as hyped as anyone could be for this thing, but have a backup plan because I fully expect the game to be largely unplayable for the first 48 hours. Maybe GGG will surprise me, and I hope they do… but I am also giving them leverage to adapt without holding them accountable for the extreme hype levels.

I think a lot of this hype comes from the fact that for the most part, Diablo IV has been unsatisfying. It stirred up the desire to play an ARPG… but failed to deliver anything that holds attention for long periods of time. Path of Exile has been considered to be largely unapproachable by most players and Path of Exile II is in many ways an attempt to open the door to folks who bounced the first time they saw the passive skill tree. Do I think Path of Exile II will be casual friendly enough to gather the mass of disillusioned Diablo IV players? Probably not. However, there are going to be a lot of people who are amped to give it a shot and as such… given how well Diablo IV sold… we are going to see similar numbers throwing themselves into Path of Exile II early access. I think GGG knows this is going to be a problem and is scrambling last minute to sure up their infrastructure but no amount of load testing can really compete with the sledgehammer of millions of players battering down the gates and flooding the first few zones at the exact same time.

Please note that this sober advice is coming from someone who is chain-watching pretty much every bit of information coming out about the game and has rewatched the opening cinematic a disturbing number of times at this point. I am fully enthralled by the game at this point and am ready for the doors to open. However, as someone who has been in this position… taken time off from work in order to play a game that was largely in permanent maintenance mode for weeks… don’t do it. I am not sure there is a chance in hell of this being a perfectly smooth launch. Line up other games to play while waiting for the servers to right themselves. There is going to be plenty of time to play this game in the coming months and unless you are a hardcore racing type… really there is no rush to be there first. The economy is going to take weeks to sort itself out anyway.

Mostly I love you all and just want to limit your frustrations… and nothing amps up frustration more than making specific plans to do a thing and then having those plans effectively canceled by technical difficulties.

Goodbye Necro Settlers

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Good Morning Folks! The amount of hype that I have going into Path of Exile II is honestly worrying levels. It reminds me a bit of the way I felt about World of Warcraft going into the launch of that game all those years ago. I now have it sitting in my steam library taunting me. Honestly, at this point, I just hope that the servers do not crater too badly. I fully expect things to be a bit borked because some comments that Jonathan Rogers made on a podcast with Ghazzy and DM yesterday indicate that the access key sales have far exceeded anything they had planned for. The level of excitement Jonathan has for the game is infectious and it is wild that he was just down to record for over two hours. If you do not have two hours… SylverXYZ did a 20-minute recap of everything that was discussed in the interview.

I should be getting a lifetime spend key, but I picked up one of the cosmetic supporter packs just because I loved the appearance. I cobbled together a pretty slick looking appearance setup for my Necro Settlers league RF Chieftain using it. Truth be told I think I am pretty much done with the Necro Settlers Event. The extreme inflation of that league is going to prevent me from really progressing my character much further than it currently is. Basically, all of the next major upgrades are priced out of my range. For example, the next obvious step would be to shift to the life recovery on block setup which has decently rolled shields running around 20 Divines. Annihilation’s Approach boots are around 2 Divines, and a decently rolled Elder pseudo-helm starts around 12 Divines. On top of that, pretty much every rare piece of gear would likely need to be swapped to balance out the stats from shifting items around. I would also realistically need to pick up a cluster gem setup.

All of that said… I am pretty happy with as far as I got on potato gear. I made my way through all 115 maps in the Atlas and unlocked the first two voidstones. In theory, I probably could have struggled my way through the last two but the amount of effort just did not feel worth it. I am far better at Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds than I used to be because I killed both of them deathless. When I hit level 95 and began running juicier t16 maps I started eating a lot of deaths. I think I mostly fixed that by shifting up my tree a bit to pick up 80% reduction in extra critical damage. Were this a normal league, I could have easily pushed this character further but I am pretty happy with how far I got with relatively little investment. Almost all of the gear save for my Cloak of Flames was stuff I picked up off the ground. I feel like the whole event was a rousing success.

This however has caused me to pop back into the normal Settlers league and start chipping away at some of the further challenges. At this point, I have 31 of 40 and I am not entirely certain how much further I am reasonably going to get. Challenging Competitors is probably doable, but I have never seen the boss that highjacks your maprunners and I keep failing to avoid the verisium lasers on the Black Knight encounter. Gear Grinding Goals… mostly is going to require me to hit 100 and then finish out another one of the stupidly painful goals. I’m roughly half of the way through level 99 and am running around with an Omen of Amelioration to blunt the impact of any deaths that I might take. I made an Abyss Atlas tree and probably need to focus on running around with it as that is supposedly a pretty efficient way to gain experience.

I’m also potentially back in Enshrouded for a bit, as my friend Ace has been talking about it lately. I am trying to run up a fresh character and this friends is the majesty of my night one hovel. Yesterday I cleared two Elixir Wells, upgraded the Flame one step, and gathered the Blacksmith, Hunter, Alchemist, and Farmer. Next up would be the lengthy trek out to go find the Carpenter. Most of my sojourns to this point have involved climbing up to the tower I cleared before getting the Blacksmith and then gliding down to near the locations. I am however abusing the hell out of the fact that you can log out in a shrouded area and it will teleport you back to base. So essentially I am playing similar to how I would play Path of Exile where I am bouncing to character select all the time. This has allowed me to go off into the mists and collect what I need and then efficiently pop back to town with my load of goodies.

I am not sure how deep I am going to get into the game, but I would like to experience some of the dungeons that Ace has found as a duo. I could always just grab my previous geared-out character for shenanigans, but it feels better starting from scratch.

Path of Exile 2 Early Access Hype

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was an event from Grinding Gear Games that gave us the complete picture of what the Path of Exile 2 Early Access would look like. Essentially in two weeks, we are going to be able to play the game in a relatively finished state with a fully fleshed-out endgame. As far as ARPGs go… the king up to this point has been Blizzard with the Diablo series. GGG is gunning for that crown however and released a new opening cinematic for Path of Exile 2 that rivals some of the best. What is more, as an avid player of Path of Exile and its lore… I think I more or less know what a good deal of the elements that were introduced in the cinematic were. In fact, I have seen confirmation on at least one point… what the thing in the sphere was. I am not going to go into details on this however because I am hoping the story of the game will answer these questions for any players who are not lore fanatics.

More than that, the footage that we saw yesterday gives me hope that this is not an attempt at a soulslike. The previous footage was VERY slow and plodding… with what seemed to be unoptimized builds. Path of Exile is a game about player power and blasting through content… and this did not feel like that experience. However yesterday they released an updated gameplay trailer with what appears to be some optimized characters and while not nearly as fast as POE1… it felt like player power would not really be a problem. More than anything I was super interested in playing a largely shield-focused character that they showed off via the Warrior. The combat still feels chunky, but fluid, and I think it is going to be fun exploring the maps and finding all the hidden things. There are apparently hidden bosses scattered throughout the content that will unlock permanent upgrades for your character.

The presentation was roughly an hour and a half long and contained ZERO fluff. There are way too many things to talk about in a single post, so I am not even going to try. I highly suggest if you are interested either as an existing Path of Exile player or someone who has a middling interest in ARPGs and was going to give Path of Exile a shot with the second game… to spend the time and watch through the footage. Essentially POE2 is going to be a wildly different sort of game than Path of Exile has been up to this point, and probably that is for the best. There are a lot of mechanics that are going to be returning in one form or another, and even more that seem to be remixed combining multiple leagues worth of content from the first game into a single mechanic in the second.

Probably the single biggest change is how the Atlas of Worlds is going to work in POE2. If you’ve read this blog for a long while as I talk about my adventures in the game, you are probably familiar at least with the concept of Delve. Essentially it is an endless mine that scales both horizontally and vertically allowing you to effectively keep going forever… or at least to the maximum value of an int32. They are taking this endless concept and applying it to the Atlas of Worlds so that instead of collecting specific maps… you can just keep expanding out effectively forever and finding new content to run. Scattered throughout the map will be special nodes for bosses or other events as well as brand-new hideouts for you to find and conquer. This is going to radically change what the endgame is going to look like for players, and what “juicing” strategies are available. Essentially it seems like this is going to favor folks like me who are in team “Alch and Go” as opposed to folks who bought hundreds of copies of the same map and same scarabs and ran the same optimized strategy over and over.

I am pretty sure that my first character is going to be a Warrior and that I am going to go down the path of the Titan ascendancy. They introduced that there is a keystone called Giants Blood that is going to allow you to wield two-handed weapons in a single hand… so you can do the whole Titan Grip thing from World of Warcraft. My favorite version of this has always been the Two-Hander and Shield thing that you could do on the Crusader in Diablo III, and I will be attempting to recreate that feel with my Warrior. I already love Shield Charge and there was this attack that they kept doing during the footage called Stampede that looked amazing. If possible I am going to use something like Volcanic Fissure to mix in fire damage since I also have a deep affinity towards setting things on fire.

Other than the Warrior, I thought the Witch seemed really cool. I like that minions are going to be something that you do in addition to making actual attacks. The Blood Mage seemed really cool because I already love stacking as much health and regen as possible, and that ascendancy seemed like it would reward that significantly. It is going to be a bit weird that minions require spirit aka mana reservation in order to keep up and running, but it seems like Sceptres have been turned into the Minion weapon and will now provide a lot of spirit just for using them. The challenge is going to be balancing permanent minions taking up spirit reservation and defensive auras doing the same. My hope is all the health stacking of Blood Mage is going to offset the lack of defenses from auras.

The labyrinth appears to be gone, at least they did not show it in relation to unlocking ascendancies. Instead, you will have a choice between running the spiritual successor to Sanctum, or the spiritual successor to Ultimatum. For me, that choice is a no-brainer… I don’t particularly enjoy either mechanic but I would far rather deal with the Trial Master than never get hit. Every build that I create is designed to be tanky as hell, and able to soak damage… which is counter-intuitive to how Sanctum has worked where if you get hit… you lose a permanent stat that you cannot easily get back and when that stat goes to zero you fail. Ultimatum on the other hand is about being stupidly tanky and being able to deal with lots of incoming damage and souped-up monsters. Unfortunately, I think this will also mean that I might need to ascend later if I want to skip the “pseudo-sanctum”. I will give it a shot, but it is not my kind of gameplay.

All in all though… I am way more hyped about Path of Exile 2 than I have been at any other point. I had a lot of trepidation that they were going to take this too far toward the souls-like gameplay. It seems like that will not be the case. It seems like you can still revel in power fantasy and create super murder-y characters. I’m also really interested now to see where the story goes. Twenty years have passed since the previous game and I am wondering if our “exile” will play a role at all in the new story. I honestly wonder if the Ghost from the trailer is us since we unwittingly became the guardians of our world. The Elder, Shaper, and Sirius were all normal folks who transcended to godhood through external influences and I wonder if that is ultimately what happened to us as well after meddling in things we should not have meddled in.

If you are someone who has not played a lot of Path of Exile or someone who has not paid attention to the lore, then I highly suggest you check out KittenCatNoodle who have created a ton of lore deep dive videos.