Good Morning Friends! I am still on my Path of Exile nonsense. We got another update as to what events led to the cascade of issues at the start of Lake of Kalandra. I think it largely makes sense, especially as a software developer myself… there is always room for the law of unintended consequences. The truth is that I feel like I am honestly in a better state this expansion than I was the last. I have way more raw currency than I had during the entirety of the last league, and I am slowly starting to catch up on the total unique count. So when the post talks about the average playing not being impacted… I believe it. In fact, it feels like the average player is probably in a better state now than they have been in the past.

We got another patch yesterday, but the ArchNemesis changes did not make it into it. What did however was a general rebalancing of some of the harvest changes as well as some buffs to the Lake of Kalandra. I think the truth is that the folks who have been most impacted are the currency farmers, who are looking for the most efficient “chaos per hour” farming rates. They are the loudest voices in the room, but also don’t necessarily represent my play style. I’ve never engaged with the trade mechanics other than the dump gear in our shared guild vault. I mostly like killing things until I get something interesting and then maybe tweaking it a bit with the crafting system. That said at some point I am probably going to have to buy some gear, but seem to have a reasonable amount of currency to do this.

Last night I spent a good deal of time running around and doing maps with my friend Ace. I am trying to purposefully swap things up… yall know them as Grace but over time they have shifted more and more to using Ace so I am going to try and do the mental swap as well. All told we ran a bunch of maps and an expedition that I had laying around. The expedition was really interesting but also stressful because I had to route so many charges around the map. All told other than one map that seemed to have modifiers from hell, we had no issues completing them and got pretty solid rewards. On the bad modifier map, it was yellow and seemed to have some crazy poison dot that would just shred me. Ace managed to save the day and finish the final boss which gave us both credit… even though I was dead with no portals back into the map.

It may not look like much but I feel like we had a very successful night of knocking out maps. All told we both now have all of the Tier 1 maps and all of the Tier 2 maps finished, with a few tier 3… and then I have a random tier 5 over there in the corner thanks to Kirac. One of my long-range goals for this season is to complete my atlas which means I am currently sitting on 18 maps completed out of 115 total. That is a long way to go but still feels like progress. On the achievements front, I have finished collecting a full set of rewards, but only the Tier 1 versions of them. I will need to be able to run level 81 maps to qualify for working on a lot of the later rewards. As I am currently sitting at level 78, I have a ways to go before I get there.

In other random news, I’ve been working on a new section for the blog where I track where I am in the games I regularly play. If you have read this blog for any length of time, you will notice that there are specific games that I tend to haunt over and over. For years I had the regularly playing section in my sidebar, but once I remove a game there was no place to store that information permanently. I am still not sure what I will do with this section once I am finished building it out and where I will integrate it into the existing menu structure, but you can check out a sneak peek of it in progress. There are a few more games that I want to add and I also intend to create a section for tracking my accounts on different platforms. Think of it as a social media link page, but for games.

Last night I tuned into a stream for the person who designed the build that I am currently running and encountered something that I found interesting. She stated a few times that “this is a league enjoyed” stream, as in someone who is actually enjoying Lake of Kalandra and isn’t going to be doom and gloom about the game. I feel like, after the last few days of posts, it might be important for me to reiterate that I also am a “League Enjoyer”. I am having a lot of fun playing Lake of Kalandra and while I am very far behind the curve of everyone “quitting” the game, I think my own personal play style will have very little impact on the problems that folks are running into. There are times I explore topics on my blog because it interests me, almost from a sociological standpoint. The situation that is currently happening with Path of Exile is one of those, and while I am firmly enjoying the experience of running around with sparklers and making mobs explode around me… I still like to keep a pulse on what is happening in the larger community.

Yesterday I started running maps for the first time. I had been holding off on killing Kitava for the final time until I could get through the third phase of the labyrinth and get my ascension. I had a good run that went south on the final boss and did not feel like fighting my way through the labyrinth again. However, I did manage to get a successful run over lunch yesterday and spent the first bit of the evening knocking out some of the early maps. Thankfully I have a stack of strand maps and am hoping to get the last tier 1 map that I have not completed as a drop in one of those. I keep checking Kirac but so far he has yet to sell the map that I need so that I can finish out that first row. I am well into knocking things out on the second row however and even have some banked maps for the third and fourth rows. All told that I have been having quite a bit of fun running around maps and I feel like I have much better survival than I did last season.

There is still a large amount of what I would consider “kooky” loot. For example apparently yesterday the game thought I needed 80 Armourer’s Scraps to drop from the same mob. That said the quantity and quality of loot seem to have improved considerably. So far every single map boss that I have killed has dropped at a minimum a unique. Granted most of the uniques that I am now finding are not what I would consider good, but getting them regardless is “interesting”. I have noticed the “higher bases” on the drops that I am getting as well which does make them something maybe to build into. I got my first six-link, but sadly it was a weird GRRBBB two-handed axe…. that was corrupted so not much we can do about the gem colors.

The other day I posted a screenshot of the currency tab of my stash as an indicator of the “currency drought”. This morning I took a similar screenshot and sandwiched them together. I’ve not really done much differently than I was doing before, and already I have doubled my scouring orbs, and chaos orbs, and picked up a few currencies that I was missing entirely. I have quite a bit more fluid currency for crafting in general, and this is not even taking into account the crafts that I have spent currency on. I know I made a modification to an item the other night that cost 4 chaos for example. Basically, we have arrived at “this seems fine” territory for me at least. Granted I am not “juicing” maps and probably never will to the extent that the folks who are complaining were doing. I am also never going to be a currency trader and if I engage at all with the market, it will be to strategically buy a handful of items needed to finish out a build. Even though I have trade stash tabs… I am not certain I would ever mess with selling anything.

Last night I spent a while working on my hideout, to arrange it in a better manner for running maps since that is ultimately the mode I am going to be in for a while. I moved back to the graveyard and have set up a little corner surrounding the mapping device so that all of the mapping-related NPCs are there as well as the crafting bench, horticulture bench, and my stashes. The only thing that I really wish I could change… is so that the game returns me to my hideout rather than dumping me out in the Act 11 hub when I log back into the game. In theory, the only reason why I ever want to go back to Act 11 is if I am shopping for something from one of the vendors there. Other than that my hideout offers pretty much everything else that I could want.

I also spent a bit of time yesterday with Delve. This is a system that I greatly enjoy and it is a little bit more lag friendly as I have been struggling a bit with parsec and lag spikes that can easily kill me in a map. This morning there is a new thread on the Path of Exile forums talking about nerfing down ArchNemesis and I look forward to seeing how that changes things up tonight. I fought a MetaMorph last night in a Lake of Kalandra map… and it absolutely took me a good five minutes to kill so I can see the frustrations. However as I said at the start of the post, even though I might talk about some of the things happening in the larger community, I am very much still enjoying my time in the game. So if there is a spectrum from “League Enjoyer” to “League Hater”, throw me in the “Enjoyer” column. I still really enjoy the Lake mechanic and since I am not playing this game for profit… I think that is what makes the difference.