Path of Exile II

3.22 Early Map Divination Cards

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Good Morning Folks! I’m in a bit of a holding pattern waiting on the Path of Exile Trial of the Ancestors league’s start tomorrow. In this downtime I find myself doing a ton of research designed to help make my start a bit smoother. Currently, my intention is to attempt to solve my own problems in a very solo-self-found manner, without actually flagging myself as part of that challenge league. This means there will be several phases that my build will go through… namely finding my first five-link gear, attempting to solve my resistance, and eventually finding comfortable six-link items to help with that process. The challenge is that it is very hard to brute force your way into a six-link weapon or piece of armor, and it will be a long time before I find 1500 Bindings Orbs which is what the guaranteed recipe requires.

White Tier Maps

As you migrate out of the campaign, you will find yourself moving into what is colloquially referred to as “White Maps” largely because the border of the icon has a white color, as compared to the later yellow, and red versions. Essentially this pool of 36 “white” maps is divided up into difficulty tiers one through five and are realistically not that far from the general difficulty level of the campaigns. Recently we got a big information dump for the Item Filter creators to update their filters, and with it came a full list of which maps are associated with which tiers. For the sake of this exercise, we are only going to focus on those first five tiers of maps because you should be getting quite a few of these as you progress through the Atlas of Worlds.

Tier 1

  • Bone Crypt
  • Arena
  • Barrows
  • Plateau

Tier 2

  • Dunes
  • Stagnation
  • Primordial Blocks
  • Estuary
  • Grave Trough
  • Beach
  • Wasteland
  • Mineral Pools

Tier 3

  • Overgrown Shrine
  • Strand
  • Cold River
  • Lookout
  • Residence
  • Bog
  • Forking River
  • Mesa

Tier 4

  • Cemetery
  • Moon Temple
  • Vaal Pyramid
  • Primordial Pool
  • Malformation
  • Iceberg
  • Graveyard
  • Cage

Tier 5

  • Atoll
  • Courtyard
  • Volcano
  • Bazaar
  • Cells
  • Tropical Island
  • Leyline
  • Alleyways

Divination Cards

It is extremely difficult to predict what maps might drop what pieces of gear, because for the most part armor drops are a complete crapshoot. However, there is a thing in Path of Exile called a Divination Card, and these drop from specific zones. If you collect a full set of a given card, you can turn them in for a specific item or pool of items. So as a result one of the most “deterministic” ways of farming six-linked gear is to set your focus on a specific zone that drops a specific set of cards. This morning I thought I would talk a bit about what is available in the white tier of maps. Quite frankly… there is a heck of a lot of useful cards available.

Six-Link Body Armor

[EDIT] – My fact-checker-in-chief Ashgar, pointed out that some of these cards namely Imperial Legacy, Dapper Prodigy, and Bowyer’s Dream cannot drop in the minimum tier versions of these maps. Item level 100 drops have a minimum drop level of 80. This means you will be able to run these maps once you get some void stones… but sadly not before that.

For guaranteed Six-Link body armor, we have four different cards to choose from. It should be noted, that all of these will reward a normal quality item, meaning you are going to need to craft it into something useable usually by throwing some essences at it. However, you can usually brute force your way into something that will work for your build. Of these probably the worst one is Emperor of Purty, which gives you an Item Level 60 Holy Chainmail which has fairly low stats but would be easier to get green sockets on for example if you needed that in an Armor/Energy Shield base. The best option is probably The Dapper Prodigy which will drop item level 100 armor, which makes it easier to get higher-tier crafting rolls on it. Celestial Justicar is specifically good for anyone needing a pure armor base as Astral Plate has extremely high armor and comes with an implicit bonus to all elemental resistances. The Chains that Bind is fairly commonly farmed though because it drops fairly frequently and can realistically be farmed while doing the campaign as it can drop off level 38 content, and all of the maps associated with Shavron’s Tower in Act 6.

Six-Link Weapons

[EDIT] – My fact-checker-in-chief Ashgar, pointed out that some of these cards namely Imperial Legacy, Dapper Prodigy, and Bowyer’s Dream cannot drop in the minimum tier versions of these maps. Item level 100 drops have a minimum drop level of 80. This means you will be able to run these maps once you get some void stones… but sadly not before that.

Weapons are largely only a concern for folks needing to use two-handers. Unfortunately for anyone needing a two-handed melee weapon that is not a staff… you are sorta screwed with the white maps this time. However, if you are a bow user… life is pretty peachy. The Porcupine is infamous because it is the most common crafting base for anyone trying to build a bow for Toxic Rain or Explosive Arrow, both of which want fast attack speed. I however will be going for Imperial Legacy for my Lightning Arrow build, which while not the best base is at least item level 100. I threw Bowyer’s Dream in mostly because it exists, but this only drops from the boss of that map so it is likely out of reach unless you boss rush Leyline. For staves, your best option would be The Dark Mage or if you can survive from a 5-Link the lesser Flora’s Gift also exists.

Currency Cards

One of my favorite videos on the subject of the “easiest way to get a six-link” basically just comes out and says that trade… trade is the easiest way. A lot of the suggestions here are for folks wanting to avoid trade, but even then… if you want to buy a six-link you are going to need some trade currency. That means Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, and Divine Orbs. While there are still some weirdos trying to run the Awakened Sextant scam, for the most part, you need to have the three most common liquid currencies in order to buy anything. A lot of early league strategies for money-making involve farming a bunch of bulk items and then trading those on The Forbidden Trove, which is a bit too far for me personally. If we look at the maps that are available to us, for the purpose of farming Div Cards that reward raw currency… the clear winner is Brother’s Stash and Brother’s Gift as they both drop from the same locations. Alternatively, if you need Vaal Orbs, then The Inventor is well worth your time, and if you need Exalted Orbs then maybe The Scout is worth chasing. What we really benefit from this league is three separate locations within White Maps where we can farm the brother’s cards.

Chase Cards

So say you have a lot of expenses… and you need to target much bigger prey when it comes to farming currency cards. I guess at this point let’s talk a bit about some of the chase rare cards that are available in this league’s White Maps. Please note… you may go all-league and NEVER see one of these drops, but if you want to chase some “big game” there are some options. The biggest fish is definitely Unrequited Love, which is essentially a fraction of a fraction of a Mirror of Kalandra. At the time of writing this card is going for 42 Divine Orbs, and the price fluctuates wildly through the league. Next up you The Nurse which is a fraction of a fraction of a Headhunter belt and this usually goes for around a Divine Orb. Similarly priced is The Sephirot, but it is much harder to farm given that it only drops from a boss. Lastly, you have Divine Beauty which only goes for around half a Divine Orb, so you would probably be better off just farming the entire set of 12 and turning in for 7 Divine Orbs.

Kirac Farming

While I am spending all of this time talking about Divination Cards, I would be remiss if I did not at least mention Kirac farming. As you unlock your atlas you are likely to be leaning on missions from Kirac to help uncover new maps. One of the reward types that Kirac offers is a map that will drop a full stack of Divination cards. Most of the time these will be junk cards that give basic crafting currency, but there is always the rare chance of you getting a full stack of one of the most sought-after cards. When I farm Kirac missions for cards I rely heavily on Divcards.io, which allows you to input a map and it brings back quickly a list of cards that could drop.

So in this example, Kirac is offering me a Div Card mission for Defiled Cathedral. When I search on Divcards.io it returns the following results for that map. In this case… there is an exceedingly rare potential for dropping one of the most sought-after cards in the entire game… The Apothecary. Even though I know I am more likely to get a stack of a trash card like Her Mask, I am absolutely going to run this on the off chance that I get lucky. If there is absolutely nothing worth getting, then you can always use a Scouting Report to reroll Kirac’s Inventory. Getting a full stack of The Apothecary and then turning in for a Mageblood represents a potential 200+ Divine Orb payday. For me… if I ever got a Mageblood I would just use the damned thing.

Final Thoughts

For a league start, I feel like we have a shockingly good number of gear-farming maps available in those first five tiers. I think Div cards are fun because they give you a reason to farm a specific zone, and while doing that… you are going to be seeing a lot of other interesting things along the way. So if you set your mind on a set of Dapper Prodigy cards to get a six-link, you might actually see a raw six-link drop in the process. Not to mention getting likely several chaos orbs or higher crafting currency in the process of farming. Having farmed full sets of cards up many times, they don’t exactly drop quickly. What I like however is they set my focus on doing a specific thing that is going to likely improve my character, rather than just mindless random farming. In a game with an overwhelming wealth of options… having specific goals in mind can be extremely important. Even when I was spending hundreds of hours down in Delve, I had the specific goal of finding cities and more specifically Delve bosses.

Anyways, I hope this actually helps someone out there. I’m looking forward to the league starting on Friday, and I am hoping that I have a bit of luck when it comes to drops. I am not opposed to fixing problems through the trade market, but I am going to see how far I can get on my own.

Inconvenience as a Feature

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Good Morning Friends! We are going to go on a bit of a journey. I’m very much in Path of Exile mode with the new league starting some 16 days from now. I have been playing around with various build ideas and trying out new things. This also means I am consuming a lot of content which in turn causes the YouTube algorithm to dredge up even more of it for me to watch. Trade is an extremely important part of Path of Exile, whether or not you want to admit it. If you are playing without access to the trade market, you are absolutely playing on the hardest difficulty settings. Solo-Self-Found is absolutely a game mode, but it is also one that expects you to know quite a bit about the even more obtuse crafting system in order to fix your resistances and craft your own gear. I feel strongly enough about this that I took the time to cobble together a rather detailed dissection of a trade encounter in an attempt to demystify the process.

Then I stumbled onto this video from All-Trades Jack who has been going on his own journey through this game much like I have over the last few years. He has an excellent video talking about the merits of following a guide which I highly recommend watching. Essentially he reached the point that I did two leagues ago, where I finally was willing to engage with the Trade system. He honestly talks about many of the very sane and reasonable objections that I also had. Trade in Path of Exile is needlessly cumbersome and it requires a human element to the trades that I have not dealt with since Everquest and setting up a trader in the Nexus. It should be as simple as putting items in a publicly flagged trade stash tab and then allowing players to purchase those items through an in-game auction house. However two leagues into wrapping my head around the trade economy… it works the way it works for a reason.

One of the core problems with an Auction House system is that it often allows for arbitrage, or essentially buying cheap goods and then selling for a profit margin. This is ultimately how the real-world stock market works, so it makes sense that players will figure out ways to carry over this same logic into a video game. In World of Warcraft, this has led to an arms race over the years of Auction House tools and changes to the way that the Auction House worked, in order to try and throttle the equivalent of “fast trading”. Essentially in an Arbitrage system, there is essentially an invisible broker sitting in the middle of a trade always making sure that prices trend upwards. This is an oversimplification because I don’t tend to engage in “economic pvp” as some call it. I know it works and I have a mount in Classic WoW entirely thanks to the fact that my friend Stargrace is extremely skilled at playing a market and looking for opportunities.

This is not me passing judgment on the system, but just saying that it isn’t really my jam. World of Warcraft specifically has systems in place to help limit the impact of runaway arbitrage. When you use an item, it often binds to your character meaning that you cannot then turn around and sell it after using it. When the game launched bags were not bound to the character, and as a result the bag cartel became one of the most rampant marketplaces. I remember getting very threatening messages when I crafted my first Mooncloth Bag and dared to price it cheaper than all of the other bags on the market. From Burning Crusade and beyond, all bags were set to bind to the character on equipment. BOE as a system is likely largely a result of the trade economy that WoW Devs were all too familiar with in Everquest where all of the gear was tradeable effectively forever. Nothing was ever truly removing gear from the economy because I could use the same Lamentation for 50 levels, and then trade it off to the next person when I got an upgrade.

Path of Exile is similar to the original days of Everquest in that almost everything in the game is freely tradeable between your characters or any other player in the game. This allows for some really interesting decisions where I can take maps with modifiers that I cannot personally run, but sell them to players who have builds capable of running them. I can also take every piece of gear that I find and sell it to any other player, or even when I decide I am done with a character use those items to fund my next character. It is an economy begging to be set ablaze by arbitrage, and there are in fact discords devoted to buying items in bulk for the purpose of flipping them. However, this is not something that the game itself supports, and by default, trade seems to be purposefully cumbersome and requires several human touchpoints in order to stop rampant flipping.

It might be Stockholm syndrome, but I have reached a place of acceptance that All-Trades Jack has yet to arrive at. I accept that the cumbersome nature of trade, and the inconvenience of needing to stop what I am doing in order to sell an item… is a fair tradeoff for having the ability to find reasonably priced items for the vast majority of the league life span. We are currently at the end of a league and the trade market is a bit tight, but my reasonably priced items are going like hotcakes as a result. I will say that the inconvenience factor has changed what I am willing to sell. I am no longer going to personally list 1 Chaos items because frankly, it isn’t worth my time to stop doing whatever I happen to be doing to pop into my hideout to complete that trade. In Sanctum my bulk bin was 1 Chaos, in Crucible my cheapest sell price was 5 Chaos… and going into the next league I fully expect the lowest price I am willing to sell at will be 10 Chaos.

While my personal price point has trickled up, it is not that I am charging more for individual items… it is just that I am only selling better quality items. There are enough dedicated traders out there who are more than happy to take on smaller trades to make sure those 1 Chaos uniques are in plentiful supply. I’ve basically figured out a way that I can live with the system. Would I like it all to be automated and require zero human interaction? Absolutely. However, I am not sure if I would like the ramifications of that system. I get the impression that Grinding Gear Games does not want their trade economy to devolve into a flippers paradise. I feel like they would like to reward players for going out and doing content and then selling the items that they find in the wild. Much of why I never really engaged with the Auction House market in World of Warcraft, is that it felt like it was stacked against the folks going out and doing the content.

Anyways I’ve made my peace with the system. I’ve tried to release content both in written and video form in an attempt to demystify it. There will still be folks who want nothing to do with the system, and at least among my circle of friends I am always willing to interact with trade for them when they are looking for something specific. Last league, I had a bag slot that had currency belonging to Thalen for example, and when he wanted something he would just send me the trade site link and I would snatch it up for him. I’ve reached the point where I am comfortable enough navigating the system that I don’t mind doing it for others. I’ve yet to touch the bulk trading options like TFT, but at some point, I could see myself dipping my toes into that market for no reason other than to get rid of some of my vault clutter. That said I keep buying new tabs in the guild bank so I can start sharing excess things like maps, because after a point I am generating them faster than I can run them.

Anyways! I doubt All-Trades Jack will ever read this… but I figured I would at least share my thoughts on the matter.

Digesting Path of Exile II

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Good Morning Friends! This weekend was a bit packed with both Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas and ExileCon happening in New Zealand. Throughout the weekend I consumed quite a bit of information related to both, but of the two events the one I had been looking forward to the most was getting some more information regarding Path of Exile II. I wrote a bit in June talking about my hopes for the game, especially in light of not really feeling Diablo IV. Quite honestly I had reached a fairly unhealthy level of hype for the game and had begun pinning my hopes on it coming in and being the one game to unite them all. This was at least influenced by me dealing with the emotional hit after waiting a decade for it… Diablo IV was really just not designed for my tastes. This weekend was a bit of a second volley though as I am realizing that Path of Exile II may also not be for me. Maybe we as gamers should learn not to pin our hopes and dreams on something we’ve yet to play… but the heart wants what the heart wants. Gamers in general would be a lot less toxic if we were better at handling disappointment.

A lot has changed since Exilecon 2019. At that point, it was announced that POE1 and POE2 would effectively be the same game, and essentially would just be an additional campaign that dumps out into the same endgame. In the four years since the last ExileCon, a lot has changed… not the least of which has been deciding that the two games had simply grown too far apart. Now the plan is to have two games that share a pool of microtransactions, but each has its own gameplay and content. We got to see a lot of gameplay, and I have to say… after seeing what seemed to be a much more slow-paced and almost soulslike style of combat… I am kinda glad that Path of Exile 1 will remain intact. Watching the above gameplay demo… gave me some of the same concerns that I had watching gameplay from Diablo IV, that maybe it just isn’t for me. I don’t get my joy from reveling in difficulty… I get my joy from blowing up entire screens of enemies and getting a massive loot explosion.

I have to admit I had some concerns in the back of my head. It seemed like Path of Exile was really pushing its Ruthless mode very hard. I spent some of the weekends playing Ruthless (shown above) just to get a feel for it, and it took me way longer than I want to admit just to get through the first act. I think Ruthless was essentially Grinding Gear Games’ way of testing the waters to see how players were going to feel about some of the design decisions that they were going to be making with Path of Exile II. In fact, at the start of the Crucible, they decided to make the league start race be in Hardcore Ruthless Solo-Self-Found… and had the lowest race participation in Path of Exile history. So it makes me wonder… if the decision to split the games was made rather recently taking into account how the core Path of Exile audience seems to be allergic to that game mode. During a given league, there tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand players who participate in Ruthless as compared to the multiple hundreds of thousands that play the traditional trade league.

That isn’t to say that Path of Exile II does not interest me at all. In spite of not really feeling like an ARPG to me, I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of Diablo IV after all. The game seems to be leaning more heavily into class fantasy and creating some more clearly defined swimlanes for each class and ascendency. Essentially every attribute combination now will have two classes for a total of twelve with thirty-six ascendency classes in total. I’m really excited to see what the Druid and Monk for example play like, and I think even if it continues to double down on “super hardcore mode” vibes I got, since I won’t really be paying anything extra for it… it is likely going to be similar to the Retail vs Classic WoW dichotomy. If you have access to both you might as well dip your toes in occasionally.

There are a lot of really neat ideas that will be coming to the game. I like the concept of weapon swaps and being able to assign different skills to different weapons and have them change gear automagically. I also like the idea of being able to have conditional passive tree skills assigned based on which weapon set you are currently using. This is going to create a lot of really interesting build possibilities, but I am also concerned about some of the other things that appear to be happening. It seems as though movement abilities for example are just gone, as are some of the quirky spell types like brands, and it also feels like Auras will be significantly weaker than they currently are. Flasks are also designed to be more reactive than a defensive layer as they are today, which again… all of these things are probably better for new players but will serve to make POE2 feel wildly different than the original game.

I think the biggest concern I have is just how slow combat felt. In the demo embedded above, the characters seemed to spend more time rolling around on the ground than actually fighting things. This is what Dark Souls feels like to me… and that is not exactly the fantasy that I want to lean into with an ARPG. Like I said before I want to melt entire screens of monsters at once and pick through the remains looking for treasure. It feels like at some point they made a decision that Path of Exile would be the zoomy game and that Path of Exile II would be more slow and methodical. My hope is if this decision has officially been made, they maybe ease up a bit on the reigns of POE1 since many of the last few league’s worth of changes have seemingly been to slow things down a bit. Don’t get me wrong… the demos look really cool but I think it can be summarized best by what want of the devs said. To paraphrase they said that they wanted people to see the game and think it looks like a really good action game, not necessarily an ARPG.

It isn’t just a “me” thing… I’ve had side conversations on social media over the weekend about my weird feelings regarding the POE2 reveal. Additionally… I watched a lot of streamers playing the game and seemingly trying to hide some measure of disappointment. They were warned before sitting down to play that the game was a bit overturned, but all of the ones that I saw streamed… got wrecked and overwhelmed as they attempted to play POE2 like they would have approached POE1. The only person who really was successful as a whole was Kripparian, who admittedly is primarily a Ruthless mode player so likely approached the game from that standpoint rather than trying to gather up big packs and nuke them down quickly. Mathil seemed to have really mixed feelings about the game, and a number of folks who watched from home shared their concerns in live talking head reactions. So I at least feel like I am not alone in this.

Now this may be “copium”… but like I said I spent a lot of the weekend consuming POE2-related content and saw lots of different folks from GGG talking about the game and more specifically the demo that was available. It sounds as though they specifically wanted to slow down the gameplay so that it would record better and show off all of the work that they have done on the animation and skill design front. Players had no access to the skills screen and were effectively forced to play the builds that were presented to them. Based on some information like seeing how far off the gear that Kripp started with for example as compared to a few of the drops he got during his demo… it seems like they were trying to play mid-game content with starter gearing. So taking that into account… the game may be WAY faster when you actually get to play and gear your own character and design a relatively optimal build. If they are designing the game to be completed with bad gear and bad character templates… then maybe it will be good for brand-new players.

The other big disappointment of the weekend is that the “Closed Beta” begins June 7th of 2024. So we have almost a full year to wait until players can realistically get their hands on the game. I would assume they will have an “Open Beta” period as well, which means we are realistically looking at a Q4 2024 release for the game. A lot can change in ten months. I know I will play it when it comes out, but I am also going to try my best not to pin my hopes on it. I love Path of Exile 1, and my hope is that this means that they are actually going to devote more resources to it. I heard during the event that for the last year and a half, there has been an eight-person team supporting that game, with all resources being siphoned off by POE2 to speed up its development. I would wait an entire year more if it meant that we get better leagues as a result. With that in mind… the last several leagues have been rather impressive considering how tightly constrained resources were.

I am super pumped about the next league, but that is another post for another day. What were your thoughts about POE2? Do you also have concerns or were you pumped at what you saw? Feel free to drop me a line below.

It’s Glorbin Time

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If you have not been following the saga of Glorbo, you might be confused when I posted a random comment last night like “Praise Glorbo”. Essentially fans have been trying to trip up AI-generated content on less-than-reputable websites… and likewise trying to see who will just run with it. The first instance I am aware of, and the one that made gaming press news… is a Reddit post about the introduction of Glorbo to World of Warcraft. This spawned a number of AI-generated articles including the one above that is archived here. A few days ago the Destiny 2 Community got in on the fun and spawned their own AI-Generated article about how tough the new Glorbo fight is to beat and even a post featuring tips and tricks.

So with the FFXIV Fanfest and ExileCon both taking place this weekend… I thought it was fertile ground to fuck with the AI a bit more. Yesterday I contemplated writing up a blog post talking about how Glorbo had leaked just ahead of Fanfest or ExileCon and then trying to spread it on Reddit. So far various fandoms have been more than willing to play along, and it would have been very believable for something to leak just ahead of a presentation. However, at the end of the day, I decided against it. Firstly I was not certain that I wanted the spotlight shone on my blog, or the server load. Secondly, I was not sure I wanted to be involved in the spread of disinformation… even if it is just to fuck with some AI scrapers.

This morning I realized that I could join in with the nonsense in a relatively harmless manner. A while back I went through the process of getting Stable Diffusion models up and running on the tensor cores of my graphics card. This has provided me with some weird hours of fun from time to time, feeding prompts and going down rabbit holes trying to produce something interesting from the madness. This morning I decided that I would ask the mechanical hivemind what Glorbo looked like. So we start off with probably my favorite… and easily the most whimsical that was generated off the prompt “Introducing Glorbo”.

Next up I decided to vary that prompt a bit and feed it “Glorbo the Movie”. My favorite part about this one is how confidently the digital toddler produced something that looks like properly formed words but is complete gibberish. It definitely feels like we are going in a “Pokemon” direction with this one. I am not sure what is more troubling… the fact that his hand just disappears in the fur of whatever is going on with the left creature… or the very human hand on the shoulder potentially emanating from the large-toothed beachball thingy.

Next up I decided to go down a rabbit hole of trying to ask the art mangling machine what Glorbo would look like when he arrived in Path of Exile. This one specifically is off the prompt “Glorbo The New Uber Boss from Path of Exile”. Any combination of Glorbo and Path of Exile seemed to produce this wizard-like dude with very chunky man-nips. This is the most work-appropriate version of the various images that it generated. There were a handful that looked like Vladimir Putin with very aggressive nipples, and I will spare you the damage to your sanity. That said… other than the inexplicably blue beard… I could see passing this image off as something coming to Path of Exile.

The little engine that could completely derails however whenever I started trying to get it to show me Glorbo from FFXIV. This monstrosity is from the prompt “Glorbo Riding a Chocobo”. Like I have no clue what is going on…. with this Horse/Chocobo hydra being ridden by another Chocobo chicken thing.

Even after trying to do a few generations of steering it away from the void… it just kept getting worse. This was honestly the “best” version of what I was able to get from the nonsense machine. This is some kid riding the Human-Centipede version of a Chocobo… while inexplicably wearing what looks like stilts that have a pair of shoes on them. So I am deciding my friends… This is Glorbo. This is Glorbo in all his glory when it lands in Eorzea.

Anyways thanks for indulging me in this madness. I hope you all have a great weekend. Next week starts Blaugust and I figure we will also have plenty to talk about coming out of both Fanfest and ExileCon.