The End of Time

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I think I have reached a point with Path of Exile where I am done with it for the moment. I accomplished what I set out to do and completed all 115 nodes on the Atlas tree. I could push further, but my gameplay lately has been more frustrating than it has been successful. We talked about this on the podcast over the weekend, but for all of the things that I love about this game… there are an equal number of things that I greatly dislike. Not the least of which is XP loss on death, and it feels like I either need to grind safe things to protect my XP gains… or throw caution to the wind and do more challenging content. However regardless I have to make this choice of do I go for content that feels meaningful, or I go for the remaining skills on the passive tree.

I am not entirely certain I will be doing a Path of Exile league start again for a while. I had some fun, but it was more that I was driven by a specific purpose that allowed me to temporarily overlook the bad aspects of the game. I am uncertain why the design of Path of Exile is specifically punitive in nature, but it seems to be a common theme among ARPG enthusiasts. Where I would prefer if games just let you respec as often as you want, and that the core loop of the game be chasing loot not painting yourself into a corner and then having to deal with that frustration.

I spent a good chunk of time playing Last Epoch as that game is nearing the opening of wider multiplayer testing. While playing I also spent quite a bit of time listening to interviews with the development team to try and get a feeling for how punitive they feel a game should be designed. While they are less open than I would have liked, they seem to land more on the side of the player than Grinding Gear Games does. One of my early frustrations with the game was the gender-locked class design, but apparently, that is still on the table. Based on one interview they apparently want to expand the gender options but that would be after the finishing of the remaining class specializations. I am fine with waiting, but I am hoping when they take this pass they also open up some more character customization options.

I am really enjoying the Sentinel Class because it allows me to play something tanky feeling… while also maintaining access to Whirlwind. Essentially right now it feels like a blending of my two favorite Diablo classes the Barbarian and the Crusader. The only thing that could improve this feel is if buried somewhere there is a talent that lets me equip a two-handed weapon with a shield. For the moment the game feels very much like a weird love child of Chrono Trigger, Diablo, and Path of Exile. I really dig the crafting system so far because it is way more deterministic than that of Path of Exile, and even more open to changing things around than that of Diablo III. It seems like given enough attempts it would probably be pretty straightforward to gear out a character in this game.

Another thing that I really dig is how straightforward the loot filter is, and how they seem to be committed to putting guides in the game, instead of trying to make you rely on third-party sites. The only negative so far is that respecs are nowhere near as free as I would like them to be. They are not as punitive as Path of Exile, but you do have to roll things back a single point at a time which appears to cost gold. Changing your specialized skills and the trees associated with them seems to roll back experience with that skill. This means you would ultimately end up needing to re-level them to get them back to the place where you were previously. This isn’t much different than changing up your skill gems in Path of Exile but is still less open to modification than Diablo III would be.

All in all the game looks really good, but the proof will ultimately be in how the multiplayer game feels. That is ultimately what has killed my long-term enjoyment in Path of Exile. It isn’t really a game that I can sit down and play with my friend Ace in the way that we could Diablo III. Grouping in PoE is actively punitive, and you can’t just easily drop in and ride along for some chill gaming. Everything in that game also seems to be focused around trade value, and as such the gear that drops appears to mostly be shit and you are instead focused on gaining currency to then buy the items you actually need. It seems like based on the conversations I listened to… Last Epoch seems to not want this to happen. They want the trade to be free enough that if an item drops while your buddy is offline, you can give it to them… but to keep third-party trade from being the primary source of items.

I also spent a good chunk of my weekend poking around in the New World PTR. I’ve been playing a bit more with trade skills and verifying that you do in fact level a ton faster than you did previously. Across the board, your level gains are much faster as a character than previously. I’ve barely scratched the surface on Cutlass Keys and am almost level 40. I’ve been trying to push up trade skills a bit honestly as a source of gear. Since the PTR does not represent the actual live environment, there is nowhere near as much stuff on the trading post… and as such getting gear upgrades has been a bit of a challenge. I figured instead I would see how far and how easily I can level Armoring. This is a grind I have completed on live with my current main, and I am wondering just how difficult the 150-plus grind is going to be. Getting Smelting and Weaving to 100, just sort of happened automagically without me really trying and I am getting very close to the first major break point of 100 Armoring.

I am really looking into this patch dropping because it seems like I have convinced most of the AggroChat folks to try rolling again fresh on another server. We’ve yet to determine WHICH server yet, but likely whatever the lowest pop East/West server there is. I think there will be a sizeable influx of players for the Brimstone Sands patch. The new content appears also appears to be dropping items that can level your expertise, so that grind may also not be as bad as it once was. I’m thankful Demone Kim is back on the grind and knocking out often times multiple videos a day. I am not really spending any time testing Brimstone Sands content because I want that to be fresh when I complete my restart.

That was largely my weekend. Did any of you do anything fun? Drop me a line below telling me what you got up to.

AggroChat #404 – Show Not Found

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We start off the show with a hearty congratulations to Tam who will likely be out for a few weeks because he is in dad mode with a very “smol hume”.  From there we talk a bit about the Fall of Babylon…  or at least Babylon’s Fall and the game we never understood why it was a thing officially shuttering in February.  It has been a very Not-E3 week as all major players had a significant presence at the Tokyo Game Show.  More specifically we talk a lot about everything that came out of the Nintendo Direct.  It is time for the Nightmare Tower in Guild Wars 2 as Season 1 Episode 4 drops, leaving we believe only one more episode to go before the story hole has officially been patched.  Bel talks at length about his adventures on the New World PTR and more specifically some of the massive changes to how crafting works.  From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how it isn’t really a “chill” game.  When the game is good it is great, but when it is bad it is atrocious.  As always though when we complain about games it comes from a place of love, because if we don’t really care…  we just don’t talk about it.

Topics Discussed

  • Babylon’s Fall Shutdown
  • Tokyo Game Show
  • Nintendo Direct
  • New World PTR
  • Path of Exile Frustrations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Steam Pal

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Good Morning Friends! I am currently like many in the holding pattern for the Steam Deck, checking my purchase history page to see if it has shipped yet. In my travels, I have found out that this exists, and feel like you all need to know as well. I introduce to you Steam Pal, which is apparently the original name of the Steam Deck when it was in development. Since everything in Japan needs to have a mascot, this comes from the Steam Deck Japan regional Twitter account. I love this mascot so much, and I especially love the fact that there is a tiny valve on top of its head.

It has apparently been seen at the Tokyo Game Show attached to the carrying case on display in the Steam Deck booth. I have to admit I really hope that this is something that crosses the ocean because I think everyone would be better off with a tiny Steam Pal guarding their expensive toy. I think that I have reached peak excitement for the Steam Deck, and I am sure like always you will be flooded with testing information when I get my hands on it. I fully expect to install lots of unsanctioned things on mine so will hopefully be able to report how well things like the Epic Game Store and Xbox Game Pass work on the device. I’ve also been holding off on any more emulation devices because I knew that eventually, the Steam Deck would blow them all out of the water.

In other news, I have been playing quite a bit on the New World PTR and working my way through the story and questing. There are so many small quality-of-life changes coming with this patch. The New World channel on the AggroChat podcast slack has been flooded with random observations that I have made while running around. Some examples are… you now get bonus experience the first time you craft a new item, making it more valuable to just craft a bunch of different things. There is a visual indicator now to denote “named” items that drop with static stat packages so that you can easily differentiate them from random rolled loot. All of the factions have bases now, and they are themed based on the faction. Harvest breakpoints have been lowered a bit so that you can get to higher tiers of materials a bit faster and now those “rare” drop items can be created out of base materials so if you really need Fae Iron to craft something, you can just pour Iron ore into making some.

My biggest takeaway is that I am in love with the Greatsword. If this weapon had existed at launch I would have been a Greatsword main. I believe whoever designed this weapon damage-dealing kit, was absolutely used to playing a Greatsword Warrior in Guild Wars 2. So many of the abilities feel like they were lifted straight from that game. I have a multi-slash attack that feels very much the same and a spinning charge attack that can be used to either get into battle or get out of battle quickly. The only thing that doesn’t really fit is that there is a big jumping hit that starts as an uppercut but has a follow-up downward slash. I need to respec at some point and play around with the tanking abilities to see if I like those as well. I am looking forward to when this game has loadouts, which are apparently coming… because I could absolutely see having a greatsword damage build-out and a greatsword tank build-out.

I finished up my night with a little bit of Cyberpunk. This game is absolutely “comfort gaming” for me and really other than ARPGs… the whole Open World RPG genre is my comfy place. There was a time when I would boot up Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas, but now I tend to gravitate towards Cyberpunk and Witcher 3. I am not terribly far into the game on this playthrough and when I decided to go to bed last night, I was about halfway through the initial braindance sequence. I hope there was a reasonable checkpoint because the game would not let me save… so I ultimately just bailed out. I don’t think I am necessarily done with Path of Exile, and am most definitely not done with Diablo III Season 27… but I needed a break from that style of gameplay for a bit.

Testing Assumptions

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post, and after reading through the comments… specifically that of Bhagpuss I realized I did make quite a few assumptions. After playing so many MMORPGs with so many different people over the years, I assumed that most people had a stacked list of acquaintances after spending decades playing these titles. I long ago ran out of space in my Battle.net friends list and am consistently having to delete people to find space to add new ones, but that is in part the side effect of leading a raid for a few expansions. As a result, I decided to test these assumptions to see how true my point of view happened to be. So the easiest means of doing this was to cobble together a Twitter poll and then ask folks to retweet it around a bit to try and get a more diverse smattering of eyeballs on it.

So first off I realize that my methodology is a bit flawed. There are only 144 votes at the time of taking this screenshot, and it is limited to those who are active on twitter and the range that 29 retweets will get you… which according to Twitter analytics is a little over 800 impressions. Folks who are active on social media are probably already self-selected into a group of those who are either more socially active or at least more interested in being socially active. However, if you accept those flaws, the numbers more or less shake out like I thought they would. Some 86.1% of users view starting on the same server as friends as a positive thing, 4.2% considered it neutral, and 9.7% prefer to go it alone. Part of what makes me think these numbers are pretty stable is for the most part yesterday after the first hour of the poll, the percentages stayed mostly unchanged within a margin of error. If you want to chime in or just watch the process of the poll, I believe I have it up for another day.

I played a bit more of New World on the PTR server yesterday, and if I thought the redone Monarch’s Bluff was cool… Everfall is even cooler. It has a whole gaslit industrial revolution era vibe to it, with considerably more modern housing. This makes me wonder what exactly the rework of the other towns will bring. I am hoping that they keep this going forward with doing each town as though it had been built during a different era on the island. I think I have followed the main story quest as far as I can for right now because it bugged out when I tried to do the latest version of the Soul Warden trial. The leveling is so much faster than when this game went live initially. I’ve only really poked at this game for two days and am already level twenty, and most of that was just from following the story quests. So I do believe then when they say that you will no longer need to do the town boards to gain levels.

In my travels, I came across someone with the name “Dr Demone Kim” so I am not sure if this is actually THE Youtuber or just a fan trying to look like him. I do know that he was recording some videos in Monarch’s Bluff but I have no clue what his new character name is. He got his original character stuck in Brimstone Sands, where anytime he logs in he pretty much instantly dies. It is super cool thought to bump into a name I at least recognize, even if it is not his account. We are still trying to sort out how we are going to approach this game when the patch drops. Right now I am leaning towards picking whatever normal server happens to be the lowest population and rolling there, in the hope that everyone else that is planning on doing the same can as well. This would leave open the option for folks who don’t want to re-roll to just move their characters with one of the free tokens, whereas the fresh start servers will be locked for transfers.

I had one of those weird nights where nothing really felt right gaming-wise, so toward the end of the evening, I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would check out some of the patch changes, and so far I am on board with the wardrobe system. It was always one of the things that bugged me that I could not really control my appearance if I was trying to optimize my gearing. I would try and latch onto the first decent-looking legendary item I could find and then just keep upgrading it, so I could maintain a specific look and feel. I started another femme V as I have yet to play through the game completely on anything other than my original masculine V. I went for the nomad story start, in part because I actually want to see the questline that involves Alanah Pearce. I have no clue if I will stick with this play-through or bounce back into more multiplayer nonsense.

It is a bit of a scattered post this morning, but those sometimes happen.