Tale of Two Game Experiences

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Good Morning Folks. Friday was the start of a new league in Path of Exile II, and with it came a lot of hype from the trailers leading up to the release of it. The skill gem system was getting a massive rework and the abyssal mechanic from Path of Exile 1 was getting reworked and implemented in this game. More important than all of this a new asynchronous trade system was going in, which hopefully resolved the friction of trading items with other players. I figured I would start a Warrior and go crossbows since I had pretty good luck doing that at the end of the last league. The patch notes came out on the 20th and everything looked pretty solid. However these patch notes were woefully incomplete and over the next several days leading up to the 29th… they kept dropping more updates… most of which were nerfs. Days before the launch they broke the interaction that I was going to use to level… which was essentially armor break and armor explosion with crossbows.

I went forward with Crossbow Warrior anyways figuring I could at the very least limp through the first act. Essentially there are three cosmetics available for completing the first act. The first one you get for making it off the “beach” and into town. Another you unlock for killing the Rotten Druid in the Grim Tangle, and the last for clearing Act 1 and killing Count Geonor. I struggled so freaking hard with Geonor… more so than I have ever before… enough that I ultimately had to throw on a mace and cut some slam gems in order to get through the encounter. There are a number of clip channels devoted to Path of Exile 1 and 2 content, and it seems like the streamers were not having a great time either. The above video starts out with a comment from Raxx where a friend of his stated “I’m Clicking around on random streamers and it doesn’t look like anyone is having fun”. After having watched a handful of this videos it seems like this was pretty much the case, with a lot of folks ultimately re-rolling when their original build idea did not work out. Team Empyrean is already done with the game after struggling with grouping issues and general frustrations deciding it was just not worth it to keep going.

Essentially there is a tale of two game experiences happening and once again we can use POE2.Ninja as a gauge of what is happening. Right now if you filter by 90+ players… 73% of them are playing Deadeye as well as 70% are playing Lightning Arrow with another batch playing some sort of Tornado shot. Worse than that, not a single other Ascendancy has double digit numbers of players… with the next highest being Blood Mage at 9%. If you stumbled into one of the builds that is working, you are having a good time. If you are not playing one of those builds however… the game is pretty freaking miserable. I personally re-rolled and gave Raging Spirits Infernalist a go since this was a build that I had a lot of fun with my second character after release, and I had heard minions were in a pretty good state. My friend Eliyon is playing some sort of Sorceress build that seems to be working pretty well for him. However there are just a lot of players that are not having fun out there… especially some of the streamers who are new to this genre and only playing because they were paid to play by Grinding Gear Games. Maybe this was not the patch to showcase the game with a free to play weekend.

This is a bit sad because Abyss actually adds a lot of fun to the mapping experience. It is pretty freaking rippy, and on my Crossbow Warrior I wound up dying to it quite often. However if I treat it with respect on my Minions character I can clear them without much issue and get some really good rewards from the Abyssal Troves that spawn. More than that there are some fun interactions between Abyss and Essences where if an Essence monster spawns inside of an Abyss you get special Abyssal crafting essences. The changes to the way that Essences work were also welcome in that getting them during the campaign feels like something worth using, because they are effectively just a equivalent to a Regal Orb that comes with a guaranteed stat on it. Gearing has felt a bit easier and while I struggled on the Warrior… it was not for lack of items dropping.

More fun than the Abysses themselves, are the Abyssal Depths that can spawn in your maps. These are essentially a whole new map layout that comes with a few rare bosses and access to a bunch of troves scattered through the layout. All of which feel extremely rewarding and worth doing. I got my first Lesser Jeweler’s Orbs from the Abyss mechanic for example, and I’ve seen plenty of clips of folks pulling Divine Orbs and Perfect Jeweler’s Orbs from these layouts. The Abyss monsters can be pretty brutal though, so it is equally likely that you just end up dying to some bullshit mechanic and losing all of the loot. There is one specific Abyssal monster that seems to entirely ignore my minions and spends the entire time chasing me as I am backpedaling while trying to keep my raging spirits summoned. Thankfully my Arsonists carry me pretty freaking hard and so long as I keep dodging they will eventually kill the stupid things.

The thing that shocked me though is on the Infernalist I breezed through my first two ascendancies. Sanctum was super easy and honestly the sprint mechanic makes the death crystal timer thing trivial. Since the monsters all have a “wake up” animation when you get to them in, you can just run past them pending you do not collide into them. In all of these escape trials I largely skipped all of the combat and just ran from crystal to crystal until I cleared the level. What shocked me ven more though is that I got a really good sequence of choices in Ultimatum and was able to knock that one out as well. I will very likely go with Sanctum to get my last two ascendancy points, but that is going to be something I put off for awhile because the last two choices will probably hinder me more than help me until I get some good gear.

One of the things that has annoyed me quite a bit is that Trade is not working out like we were told during the presentation. In the features discussion it was indicated that the gate for trade was having a hideout, and that if we had a hideout already from previously leagues we would be able to interact with it immediately. That is not the case. You have to get to Kingsmarch in Act IV before the system will unlock, meaning that while we can access the UI elements… they are entirely useless until you rush through the campaign. This only further serves to make things worse for players who are struggling… because they have also taken away the currency exchange from the previous zones. So if you are struggling and cannot quite get your build off the ground, you can’t spend the meager exalts that you have gotten to buy gems to improve your situation… and instead are better off just rolling another character.

At the moment I am not really following a build guide, and just sort of yoloing my way through the various minion clusters that I have used previously. This seems to be working for the moment. At some point I am going to have to start investing in defenses but that is a future me problem and not a current problem. I should be able to get through the campaign in my current state and as far as ascendancy points I picked up the Hellhound first and gave it poison support and armor break through corrosion which seems to be working well. Since my build is mostly doing fire damage, I opted to go with Bringer of Flame since ignites are much harder to get than they used to be after the changes they made to how that whole thing works. This node use to require Pyromantic Pact… and now that it does not it seems universally great pending you care about igniting things. I will go for Altered Flesh next, and then might respec to go down to half life reserved and get bonus spirit and energy shield through Beidat’s Will and Beidat’s Hand.

Right now I am running with 4 Arsonists, 3 Skeletal Warriors, and can summon 12 Raging Spirits at a time. I went ahead and picked up Bind Spectre so that I can hopefully gain one of the Vaal dudes that everyone seems to be using since I am nearing the end of Act III. There are apparently 3 types of Vaal Guard and the one that we want is the one that throws green fireballs. You can keep disenchanting your gem each type if you wind up getting the wrong one. As far as gearing goes… I think I am going Armor and Energy Shield bases either that or a mix of pure bases of either. I would not mind having some armor counts towards elemental damage items. I’m also not sure if I can stack block as a defensive layer or not, or if that will cost way too many points on the tree to get a useful amount. Right now I am mostly surviving by not getting hit and letting the overwhelming damage my minions deal carry me.

I am actually enjoying myself now that I swapped characters, and the crafting mechanics that come along with Abyss have been pretty cool. There is a whole version of the veiled orb that allows you to unveil a modifier on your items, and they all seem to be pretty solid options so far. They also drop often enough that I have felt like I could actually use them rather than hoard them for perfect items late in the game. I will at a bare minimum play through all of the new content, but I am not sure how deep into mapping I am going to get. The whole tower chase thing feels pretty hollow, and that seems to be when most of the folks begin petering out. At bare minimum I want to be able to play around with the trade system so I will know what to expect when it comes to Path of Exile 1. I’ve actually come to the point where I enjoy the trade economy and I can only see how this is going to improve things.

Are you playing Path of Exile II? What did you end up rolling? Are you enjoying yourself or did you rage quit out in frustration? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #536 – Fear the Beefists

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Happy Labor Day holiday weekend for our fellow countryfolk. We start off this show with Thalen making a reference to a dream that Bel had… which forces a recounting of the madness.  From there, we talk about Last Epoch and a completely silly build that Bel is playing, where things explode around him without doing anything.  Grace also talks a bit about their similarly silly single minion build that just melts most things.  Bel talks a bit about YoloMouse and how it solves the problem of not being able to find your cursor on screen.  From there, Tam talks a bit about PEAK, which is a new popular multiplayer frustration adjacent experience. Bel talks a bit about the launch of the Third Edict league in Path of Exile II and how it seems like none of the streamers are actually having fun… and he most definitely was not.  We close out the show with some discussion about some of the recent updates to Star Citizen and how it continues to shape up to actually being a game.

Topics Discussed:

  • The Beefists
  • Last Epoch
    • Fun with Thorns and Aboms
  • YoloMouse
  • PEAK
  • Path of Exile II Third Edict frustrations
  • Star Citizen 2025 updates

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Empire of Beef

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Good Morning Folks. This is going to be a weird post and I apologize ahead of time for the madness that I am about to unleash upon you. However it was so fucking weird to live through it, that I have to write it down before it fades. Friends… I had one of those nights where I woke up, and then fell back asleep to a dream within a dream about the previous dream. So much so that I literally have no clue what is reality and what is dream at this point. In the first of this series of dreams I was traveling to visit family in Ohio. Lets not get caught up on the detail that I have no family in Ohio… because that is not important to this tale. I also have no clue what town in Ohio we were going to visit them at… because again that isn’t really important.

I keep my car stereo pretty much permanently tuned to the local NPR station, and for some reason I turned on the radio wanting some music. Instead of NPR I was treated to a radio station filled with propaganda. The person on the radio was speaking in a conspiratorial manner like Andrew Ryan from the Bioshock games… talking about the virtues of Beef. He would go on about the wonders of the modern Roast Beef Industry and how good it was for both humans and nature. If you have never played Bioshock… then I urge you to listen to this remastered version of the intro speech so that you can fully understand the gravitas of this voice that was speaking to me over the radio about roast beef and the absolute absurdity of it.

So we get to my family and they work… at an Arbys. They say that they have no clue who runs the station but that it has just been a thing their entire lives. That nobody much thinks about it, and anyone who actually listens to it is considered a bit of a kook. There is a bit of a break here, because it flips around as dreams do… and next thing I know I am driving my family to work at Arbys early in the morning, and we are there before sunrise. I am helping them get the place ready and am taking stuff out to the dumpster out back. For some reason I have this little blue and white transistor radio that I had as a kid and I am listening to the damned broadcast of what I have not learned are referred to as “Beefists” and their ideology.

Around the time the restaurant is about to open up in the morning… because for some reason in this dream Arby’s opens early, Bernie Sanders pulls up with some lady with him and he goes into the restaurant. The radio starts blaring in a tirade about how Senator Sanders has come to town to harm the Roast Beef Industry and that he opposes their Beefist ways. The speaker says something about getting up early to paint his house so he would be ready to do battle with Sanders. I think it is around this time that I woke up to go to the bathroom as one does when you are almost 50… and can’t sleep wall the way through the night anymore.

When I get settled back in I start dreaming about coming back from the trip to Ohio and trying to research anything about this radio station and its enigmatic Beefist orator. The thing is I find absolutely nothing about it. I can’t find any signs of anyone even knowing about it. I even get on Mastodon and make a post because I think surely that someone will have heard of this or might live in Ohio and be familiar with it. I get nothing at all apart from Arbys ads popping up everywhere. In truth I am not even sure where this dream could have come from. It’s been months since I last ate at Arbys, and even more so I am not usually a big fan of beef in general. I always prefer to have chicken or pork and have for most of my life. I think I was reading an article the other day about the Beef industry struggling… but honestly after some googling this morning I am not even sure that was a real thing… and not just more scaffolding from this bizarre dreamscape.

Now that I have excised this from my brain… you too can revel in the madness of Beefist propaganda. The way in which I had to get up and write this down makes me question if it were an SCP style Cognitohazard. Regardless… I have done its bidding now and can be free of it. I am sorry.

A Thorny Reception

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Good Morning folks. I am getting a bit later start than normal to blogging, because work got in the way. If it can start interrupting me at 6 am… I can take a brief break to bang out a blog post. While I have mostly been focused on my new Thorns Forge Guard build, I am still playing quite a bit of my Minion Necromancer. I have to say I really love the look of the coven set that was one of the support packs this season. I buy the most expensive supporter pack every season, because I like giving Eleventh Hour Games my money because they do a phenomenal job of giving me a few fun weeks each new season. They are also considerably cheaper than Grinding Gear Games in the way that they price these packs, making it feel like a massive steel. That said… I don’t love every armor set that I end up picking up, but this one… perfectly fits the vibe of the Acolyte.

I said yesterday that I have changed my perspective on how to build a loot filter, and now that I am building one for all of my characters in a given season… it means that often times I get really cool things for the character I am not actively playing. As a result I got a bunch of really good upgrades for my Necromancer yesterday while working on unlocking Empowered Monoliths. Firstly I got an LP2 copy of the Mantle of the Pale Ox and leaned heavily into survival giving it +flat health and +regen percentage. Next up I got an LP1 copy of Tyrant’s Skull and I gave it percentage Minion Damage… and quite honestly it will be pretty unlikely that I improve this further. For Dragonflame’s Edict I gave it Minion Fire Pen which was the best of the options I had laying around for donor staves. It’s not ideal but it does at least prove that I can clear a t4 Julra without much issue. I really need to farm the End of Dragons timeline for more chances at staves. I also really wish this game had some equivalent of the Path of Exile 3 to 1 vendor recipe because I have a bunch of junk that I really need to feed into the turtle to see if I can upgrade it, but that is way more of a hassle than just vendoring things.

I’ve been spending way more time over on the Forge Guard because having things just explode when they look at me is too much fun not to take advantage of it while it lasts. This is one of those builds that I do not expect to survive this season, or at least not at this power level. Everything that I have heard is that Judgement Paladin is still one of the best builds out there, but it is nowhere near the levels of raw survival and damage output that it had last time. That is really the thing that I appreciate the most about Eleventh Hour Games is that they nerf things down to a reasonable level… rather than giving the GGG triple tap and knocking them completely out of the rotation. I think GGG feels like they have to shake up the meta every league, but what ends up happening is they just create a new build of the league… and all of the other play-styles suffer. Right now in Last Epoch there are countless perfectly viable builds, and that seems really healthy.

Now that my Thorns build is online, I am going to start actually focusing on pushing corruption. I knocked out my third Harbinger and at the suggestion of my friend Ace I did Lagon because the arena is so limited there that it becomes a bit of a pain in the ass to actually fight the Harbinger. The earlier you fight a Harby… the weaker a version of it that you end up getting. So the easier fights… you probably want to wait until the last few tiers of corruption. Ultimately when you hit 300 corruption you unlock Aberroth and I want to do that and see how well this build continues to hold up. Right now it actually does a really great job of bossing, but is lacking a bit in the survival department so I am trying to buff that as I swap out gear. At the moment I have two completely useless rings, so I will be targeting trying to figure out what I actually want in those slots for survival and damage output. I am trying to stack as much Phys Resistance, Attunement, and Reflection as I can, wherever I can get it.

I’ve made so many changes and updates to the build since the last post. Essentially I swapped out six pieces of gear and am looking to swap out even more as I get deeper down this particular rabbit hole. The biggest upgrade is a new copy of the Thicket chest and crafting a t6 thorns onto it. I am still keeping Last Laugh because after having tried a bunch of different things, I find I miss the culling strike when I don’t have access to it. I had a two-hander with +8 to all attributes, and I figured that was good enough for the time being until I found a higher legendary potential version. Other than that my general plan has been to throw on additional life or survival in general onto every piece that I can. I am still using Boulderfists because they have good armor and life on them… and I need to sort out what I actually want as an eventual replacement for those.

The biggest challenge I am facing is that in order to really push this build to the limit… I need a ton of small weavers idols with damage reflect on them. This problem is two fold. In all of the idols that have dropped for me this league, I have found exactly two of these. Secondly there is no real way to target farm weavers idols apart from running a bunch of cemeteries. Normal idols there is an entire tab in the prophecies that supports farming those. Weavers Idols… not so much. There is not even any support on the weavers tree for making them drop more often. Ultimately I think this is one of those builds that is only really going to reach its maximum potential in a trade league economy… and even swapping to trade would be futile since for whatever reason… trade just never quite works out in Last Epoch. It is either wildly overpriced or completely dead. So far I am dealing roughly 8000 reflect damage every .5 seconds to everything looking at me… and this scales up to I believe 3 million damage against bosses due to the more multiplier on the chest for bosses and rares.

Anyways… I am having fun. Friday though I am swapping for a bit to Path of Exile II to farm the MTX, but depending on how that goes I will probably keep poking at this build and seeing where I can take it.