Path of Exile 3.26 Wishlist

by

Good Morning Folks. With the delay in Last Epoch Season 2 and the upcoming launch of Dawn of the Hunt in Path of Exile 2, it has had me thinking about Path of Exile 3.26 a bit. On March 4th we got an announcement that the Legacy of Phrecia Event was being extended to April 23rd. Additionally as part of this news post, we got a tentative launch window for the 3.26 League landing in June. This means that 3.25 will have lasted just shy of one full year, which is a pretty far fall from the 4 leagues of a year goals that Path of Exile used to attempt. Granted a whole new game has launched so I have to give them some credit.. but given that I am one of the folks who greatly prefers the original game to the sequel… it isn’t going to be much credit. It has made me start to daydream a bit about what 3.26 might look like, and this morning I am going to talk through some of my thoughts.

What Makes a League?

I guess for the uninitiated I should start off with what exactly a league entails. The best leagues feature some sort of brand new mechanic that has its own type of drops associated with it. In the Trial of the Ancestors they introduced tattoos, which allow you to sacrifice a travel node on your passive tree for some powerful buff. Additionally it came with a whole new autobattler style mechanic where you set up matches against various Karui Ancestors and were rewarded with drops based on your success. During Affliction there was this whole new realm that you went into before every map, that allowed you to wildly juice the outcome of that map. Additionally it introduced brand new secondary ascendancies that gave your character brand new abilities. Essentially the best leagues change the way you play the game… over the course of the league and also often introduce items that eventually get worked in as permanent updates going forward.

Settlers Goes Standard

By the time 3.26 drops, we will have had access to Kingsmarch for a full year. As such it would feel really freaking weird to lose access to it. In my perfect scenario we would retain full access to these systems in their entirety and effecting Settlers of Kalguur just goes Standard. Maybe streamline some of the leveling processes a bit and speed things up so it does not take quite as long to get everything online. I think almost everything included in Settlers was a pure win, and I would love to see it continue. Since this involves a lot of the characters from the Heist League already, I would love to see the evolve to fill both roles. Rogue’s Harbor has always been a bit of a pain in the ass, as well as a lag fest that often causes MTX to crash players out of the game. Having a solo instance that fills both jobs would be pretty epic. Once I leave the campaign… in truth I never want to see another player unless I am doing a trade.

Currency Exchange

If for whatever reason Settlers does not go standard in full… at a bare minimum the Currency Exchange must be carried forward. There is no way I can go back to trading currency through the trade website. This has been the single best quality of life improvement in the game full stop. Sure I would love to have better visualization into what people actually want, or the ability to post an item up for players to make an offer on it… especially if it is something that does not have a huge volume of trade. Even in its current form though it is a requirement going forward for the health of the game.

Recombinators

I also feel like Recombinators need to exist in one form for another going forward. Even if this is a machine that we place in our hideouts instead of in Kingsmarch, this is something that needs to stick around in the game. Recombinators give you a reason to care about amassing crafting bases… giving them value and making loot more interesting while you are mapping. Being able to work your way slowly towards a perfect item is a huge boon for a lot of players, specifically those in self-found game modes. I don’t fully grasp the ins and outs of this system, but I feel like once I get a firm handle on it I should be able to slowly work my way towards better gear, rather than hoping and praying for the right item to drop.

Replica Ascendancy

Given based on the volume of trade I am still seeing… the Legacy of Phrecia event has been a massive success. Adding nineteen brand new ascendancies to the game has been wild for class balance, and I would love to see some way of this continuing forward into the game. I’ve heard a bunch of ideas from having a rotation of ascendancies similar to the map rotation, to having some alternate method for ascending to the alternate versions. My favorite name for these was “Replica Ascendancy” and I am sorry that I do not remember who coined this term. I have had a freaking blast playing Scavenger Righteous Fire, and I am not sure if I would continue to choose it over my beloved Chieftain but it would still be nice to have options. Similarly there are a whole bunch of cool builds that have been enabled by the toolkit these new ascendancies have. I would be perfectly happy if 3.26 just had six different paths you could choose off the base classes and then two for Scion.

Mapping Idols

The other big change that the Legacy of Phrecia event introduced was an alternate atlas tree in the form of a series of itemized idols, and a grid that popped out of the side of the mapping device. The existing Atlas Passive tree is near perfection… but it would be exceptionally cool if the Idols moved forward in a limited fashion. What I envision is a 3×3 grid that allows you to fit in a limited number of idols to tweak your existing Atlas strategy. The limited grid would also limit your access to the most powerful abilities that can roll on Idols, and greatly limit the overall impact it has. In doing this I would almost suggest removing all of the nodes that cancel out league mechanics from the Passive tree, and instead limiting them to only exist as Unique Idols. It allows you to either buff existing strats, or splash in something that might be harder to get because you are on the wrong side of the passive tree.

Identification Vendor

Borrowing some quality of life from Path of Exile II… I would love to see one of the vendors have the Identification functionality that The Hooded One/Doryani provides. There were few things that I found myself missing from Path of Exile II, but this was absolutely one of them. I liked the flow of exiting a map, clicking on the vendor to identify everything… and then doing whatever else I wanted to do with the items. Surely this would not be that hard to implement, and it would be a significant quality of life improvement.

Item Salvaging

The other functionality from Path of Exile II that I would love to see implemented… that I think is probably reasonable without massive system changes is the Salvage Bench. The ability to salvage items for various currencies really changes the way that you look at items. For example there are a lot of times in Path of Exile that items drop with quality… but unless the item is rolled particularly well or a base that you care about… it is effectively useless loot. If you could instead then salvage that item to turn it into quality currency, it would make especially the early game feel much better. Similarly if you could convert magic, rare, and unique loot into fractional currency shards it would allow you another way of working up towards currency items that are actually useful for crafting purposes. Having more reasons to actually pick something up off the ground is a good thing.

[EDIT] – After a conversation with Ashgar

Ash remarked that there are in fact vendor “recipes” for a lot of this stuff. I think my point is that the salvage ratios from Path of Exile II, feels more generous than the vendor “recipes” from Path of Exile 1. Maybe this is entirely a “feels” thing and there may be no numerical proof of this. Salvaging things for whatever reason feels better than selling them.

Lantern of Arimor

Necropolis League was not exactly amazing. It introduced this whole itemized corpse system that you planted in graves, in order to craft gear. It was cumbersome as hell, and I do not want it to come back. However it also introduced the Lantern of Arimor, which was a widget that you could fiddle with at the beginning of a map in order to have some agency in the sorts of mobs and types of loot you might encounter. While this slowed down the action a bit, I also found it really enjoyable during mapping. Especially when you added Allflames into the mix that allowed you to substitute out a different monster type for something that would normally spawn on the map. If they brought this back I would prefer to have this as something that appears in the endgame and that you would have to specifically spec into in order to enable.

Bring Back Metamorph

One of the things that often happens during a League patch is the re-introduction of mechanics that have left the game for one reason or another. When Ultimatum was reintroduced, it caused Metamorph to get bumped from the list. I really liked fighting Metamorphs in maps because they were often worth quite a bit of loot. I did not however really enjoy the system where you built your own monster, because while rewarding this required you to exit the flow of the normal game. Since Ultimatum got the drops that traditionally came from Metamorph… and the mechanic was all about crafting monsters… maybe have this as an alternate source of the corpses that currently drop in Ritual that can be used as Spectres. Additionally I feel like the flavor of this mechanic would also make it a good place to reintroduce Allflames in lieu of monster parts. Have this be a map only mechanic and potentially add it to the number of alternate mechanic spawns, either that or implement it through Idols.

Weapon Passive Trees

Another thing that I think would be fun to see make a return, is the Crucible weapon passive trees. Essentially during Crucible every item had the ability to craft on a weapon tree, that could then spawn all sorts of nonsense on them. There was a whole forge mechanic that allowed you to merge together multiple trees similar to how things currently work with Recombinators and item affixes. My idea is to implement these but have them drop from a specific mechanic similar to how fractured bases drop. Instead of the channeling mechanic, make it so that they just level up through combat similar to how virtue gems do. Then the whole manipulation of items can be merged into the Recombination system. You could use that system to either manipulate the crucible trees if both items have one… or put the tree on the item base that you want. This just adds further depth to the crafting system and gives the mirror crafters more nonsense to make even more perfect weapons.

Primordial Blocks

This is a personal desire, and not necessarily a systems thing… but I really want Primordial Blocks to be in the league map rotation. For those who have not participated in many leagues before, essentially each league has a slightly different set of maps included with it. Primordial Blocks has been out of the rotation for a few leagues and I would really love to see it come back. It isn’t necessarily that I love the layout, but there is a Hideout associated with it that spawns exceptionally rarely… and it is my white whale. I have run countless copies of this map and have yet to get it to spawn, and I really want to give it another go.

I get that we are still several months away from 3.26 or even the beginning of early spoilers… but that in part is why I am creating this post now. I did not want my ideas to be tainted by the various prognostication that happens once the spoilers begin to flow. I legitimately have no clue what sort of big system GGG might implement for 3.26, but I wanted to at least talk through some of the quality of life and general systems that I would love to see return. What do you want to make a comeback with this league? What are some of the things that you would love to see implemented in Path of Exile? I would love to have a game pausing system, but I figure that is way too structural to ever actually get. Drop me a line below with some of your own thoughts.

Last Epoch Season 2 Delayed

by

Good Morning Folks. Yesterday we got a bit of news from Eleventh Hour Games that they would be delaying the launch of Last Epoch Season 2 from April 2nd to April 17th. This is to create some distance between their launch date and that of Path of Exile 2 and its first league on the 4th. This whole situation is frustrating because multiple sources have stated that Eleventh Hour Games was in communication with Grinding Gear Games regarding their choice of April 2nd making it an extreme dick move to schedule their own start two days later. I entirely feel like GGG is in the wrong here… but there also may be some external forces at work that we do not know about.

Whatever the case this is probably the right decision for Eleventh Hour Games. As stated in a Zizaran video talking about this situation, it is rare that people go back to a game after the launch… so that would likely mean folks would play Last Epoch for a day or two… if they even gave it a shot at all, and then would flip to Path of Exile II and never look back. I am disappointed mostly because right now I care far more about Last Epoch than I do Path of Exile II. I do not think that there is going to be enough in the upcoming patch to really shift the trajectory of POE2 enough for me to truly enjoy it more than the first game. I might be shocked on the 27th when they announce all of the content, but in truth I mostly just want to get my hands on the redesigned endgame for Last Epoch.

In the meantime I am still playing quite a bit of the Legacy of Phrecia event. In theory I should hit level 99 tonight and I am starting to pick back up and work on some of the challenges that I never completed from Settlers of Kalguur. I’m cycling between Delve and mapping and still only have two of the four voidstones unlocked. I should probably work on that, but I hate the process of grinding for the fragments required to attempt Maven and Uber Elder. The whole bossing system in Path of Exile feels bad to me. I feel like there should be quest support for all four voidstones like there are the first two so that you can knock these out in a relatively straightforward fashion. At some point I should probably try out a T17 again to see if I can complete that, but my build is not exactly great at bossing. Generally speaking I just do not enjoy that side of the game and the whole process of getting access to the fights.

I have burned through a good chunk of my reserves of gold and dust in order to start up a bunch of mappers. One of the league challenges from Settlers that I never knocked out was running 200 t14 or better maps at 100% success rate with mappers, and I figured I might as well start chipping away at that since I am still playing. If I can push to level 100 and complete the rest of those maps that will knock out one more of the challenges and potentially give me a bigger totem pole for my hideout. In truth Path of Exile is just a comfortable activity for me to spend chill evenings listening to an audiobook, and has kind of become my default gaming activity. I hate that among the AggroChat folks, I am the only one who seems to have really reached that point with the game.

I am also still pushing forward with Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon because I hate having a “did not complete” in my list. I swapped over to the Soundbooth Theater version of the audiobook and it is infinitely better than the one I was listening to earlier. There is a significant difference between being read a book out loud, and having someone act out a book… and at this point I have become spoiled by the later. This is a brutal story… in content… and in just how much graphic detail is put into it. I am not sure I would ever suggest this to someone else, but it has enough of a hook into me that I am going to see it to its conclusion. Effectively this is Hostel style torture porn, and my kink does not run in that direction.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

by

Good Morning Folks. I took yesterday off and while I had planned on writing a blog post.. one never actually happened. Instead you are getting the post that I probably would have written yesterday, a day late. This weekend I finished my consumption of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series… and I have to admit I am a bit sad that it is over. This has quite possibly been the book series that I least expected to get into… and then hungrily consumed as quickly as possible after getting into the first book. I admit the whole LitRPG genre never really appealed to me… why read about playing a game when I could just be playing a game? However it can create a really interesting backdrop to tell a well written tale against, as is evidenced by the fact I just spent thirty six days tearing through this series one after another.

The premise of the series is what if you took Duke Nukem… made him lovable… gave him a talking cat companion that is even more lovable… and tossed them both into a Smash TV style Dungeon Crawl where they have to kill their way to the bottom… or die permanently because the planet has been reclaimed for resources by an external galactic bureaucracy. That is one hell of a run-on sentence, but also is about as close as I can really come to explaining the appeal of this series. What this series has in spades is heart. It has so many well written characters that you fall in love with, and genuinely want to succeed and survive… but also know that the odds are stacked against them in spite of quite a bit of literal plot armor. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk is quite possibly the best sidekick ever crafted, and to call her a sidekick though is a bit of a disservice to how much of the plot revolves around her learning how to “adult”. All of the characters show deep growth over the course of the series, and even ones that you kind of sort of loath when you first encounter them… become beloved friends several books in.

What the book series has in abundance though is meaningful payoffs. There have been so many times that a loose plot thread from book one… turns into some significant event later down the line. The dungeon crawl itself has a deeply rich lore surrounding it, and has clear rules that remain in place for the entire series. There are always several different plot threads going at once, and usually colliding in the major event of the individual book. What is really fun however is looking at the artwork for each of the volumes after having finished the book… because there are always so many different moments that suddenly make perfect sense. Sometimes a book series runs out of juice… but this one only seems to be getting better the longer it runs.

On the 16th I finished up This Inevitable Ruin, and it was probably the most epic of the entire series. Even before reading it… I sort of assumed that would be the case given the plot points that were sure to be involved in this single book. It was effectively the culmination of a major event that had bee discussed in every single book of the series, and the resolution was most definitely worth the wait. Carl is a bit of a fuck up at times… and a pure Agent of Chaos… but he is OUR Agent of Chaos. Donut is occasionally very self centered… as is the case with every cat ever to exist on this planet… but she is OUR precious princess. Like I see in her actions literally hundreds of things that my own Gracie, Mollie, and Josie end up doing every day. I feel about Donut the same way that I am certain dog lovers feel about Oberon in the Kevin Hearne books.

So here is the point where I suggest you listen to the Audiobooks instead of reading them. So much of my enjoyment of this series is I think in large part to how well they are acted out by the amazing Jeff Hays of Soundbooth Theater. I decided the embed this video as an example, because it does not really give anything away or steal from you any revelations from the series. God Dammit Donut is sort of the catch phrase for Carl specifically… but other characters occasionally say it as well in the series. So here is a delightful video of Jeff shifting between 14 characters uttering that phrase, and you can see how wildly different each character feels as result. What is often even more entertaining is the in universe advertisement for Soundbooth Theater at the end of every book. These feel like the mid credit scenes in a Marvel movie, because they often have some sort of payoff for the next book in the series… that just happens to take place out of the flow of the novel itself.

The problem with finishing an amazing series… is that I always end up wanting more of it… now. From what I understand more recently there has been a year lag between volumes of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and since this last volume came out in November, it means I am going to have a bit of a wait on my hands. One of the other books that has been advertised throughout the audio books for Dungeon Crawler Carl, is Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. I love Kaiju… and I enjoyed the DCC series… and with a preposterous name like that I figured surely I would love it. The weird thing about this book is that it feels like it comes from an earlier era in Matt Dinniman’s career… when he had not quite found his voice, or more so the voice of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Technically this was published after the popularity of the DCC series, but I kind of wonder if this was a side project that had been shelved for a bit.

Essentially it is a very graphic bio-horror series about being trapped in a world of giant battling Kaiju and playing the support staff to keep them up and fighting. Have you ever dreamed about having an apartment in the bowel system of a giant monster? Oh yeah… me neither. It is most definitely interesting and I will have zero problem finishing it… but it is also just not really my jam. It makes me also think that maybe LitRPG is not really my genre. All of the game elements did not feel front and center in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series and instead it was more of a character driven tale. This very much feels like a book about a game, and the characters themselves seem paper thin so far. Maybe this will change over time… but so far none of the characters are particularly likeable… whereas I fell in love with Carl and Donut almost immediately. It is wild how much of a difference having POV characters that you care about makes for the reading experience.

If you have yet to be infected by the mind virus that is Dungeon Crawler Carl, I suggest you give it a shot. Matt Dinniman has a fancy new publisher and as a result all of the books are being released with more mass-market friendly covers and artwork. I think they all look pretty cool, but also do not have near the heart… nor the final payoff that the original artwork does. They do however make them look far less like graphic novels… which might have been a turn off for some readers. Whatever form you choose to consume them in… I suggest adding them to your list. Give it at least two books, because it is really in the second book that the series comes into its own. I am hooked and am probably going to be consuming these every single time a new one is released going forward. I will probably seek out another popular LitRPG book just to give the genre another chance… but I am not entirely certain reading about a game is really my jam and that DCC might have simply just been a brilliant outlier.

Guild Wars 2 Massive Discount

by

Good Afternoon Folks. This is a bit of a rare post because generally speaking if I do not make my morning post… I just don’t post at all for that day. I spent my morning up at my folks house helping them with some stuff and now that I am back I figured I might as well knock out a post, because I have some potentially time sensitive information. First off if you do not own Guild Wars 2 or are missing any of the content drops… there is a pretty massive sale happening right now on the official storefront. Coinciding with it there is also a sale taking place on Steam but there is a bit of a higher markup there. If you have never played this game you really should especially now that you can get a decades worth of content for $50. That is legitimately one of the best deals out there.

While I was in game I noticed that they once again had the Cat Angel Jadebot skin up… so I broke into my gem reserves and picked it up. I have gone back and forth about whether or not I wanted this for awhile, but I entirely blame Dungeon Crawler Carl and Princess Donut for making me want this. There is no way that given the chance… Donut would not flap around me with wings. I need to dive into the new content which also dropped this week because there is a new Ranger pet Bee that you can get. I’ve been several different mains throughout the years… starting as a Warrior then transitioning to Necro… but I think my true spirit is that of the Ranger. Longbow and Greatsword for life yo! Regardless of how generally selfish that build is since it doesn’t produce Quickness or Alacrity.

I played some Titanquest II and so far I do not think this game is really my jam. Melee combat felt a bit too sluggish for my tastes and pretty much everything seemed to want me to spam the dodge button instead of engaging with mobs up close and personal. Maybe this feels good as ranged, but so far it is not necessarily my jam. However if you are curious for yourself you might check out the Steam page to see if you can still request access to the playtest. The game seems solid enough but leans more towards the never get hit sort of play style that I do not personally enjoy. I am sure it will find an audience, especially with the crowd that feels like the ARPG genre reached its peak with Diablo II.

Another game that I have been fiddling with a bit is Gunlocked. Essentially this is what if Vampire Survivors was a Bullet-Hell shooter. The game starts out a bit weird in that your only attack for a bit is a radar that sweeps around your ship and then marks targets with a lock on, that your ship then fires attacks at to mostly one-shot. As you pick up power-ups you gain a whole slew of interesting attacks slowly giving you a bunch of different ways to take out the ever present deluge of ships and obstacles on your screen. I found out about this game when the sequel was announced on the fediverse, which caused me to go look at the original since I dug the art style. I also checked out Boons and Burdens which is sort of a similar concept but this time smash tv meets vampire survivor but you play as one of several element themed wizards. There is a bundle for both games that is currently just shy of $6.

Another thing that I picked up from the ongoing steam sale is Dragon’s Dogma II. I had played a bit of the first game but never really got fully into it. I thought given my recent foray back into Monster Hunter with Wilds, I might check this out and see if I can get into the sequel. All in all so far I am pretty intrigued. There seems to be more of a clear story element going on here, whereas I felt like I was largely roaming around aimlessly in the first game. So far it sort of feels like a weird version of a Bethesda game in a good way. Not sure how far I will get but I am liking it so far.

I’m also not entirely done with Monster Hunter Wilds either, and I am hoping this weekend I can connect up with my friend Ace and do some more group hunts. In a perfect world maybe also connect up with Thalen, Ammo, or Sita for shenanigans since they all have compatible time zones. I am not in a massive push to clear anything right now, but do want to try out some Charge Blade nonsense to see if I actually like the weapon.

Do you have significant weekend plans? What are you playing currently? Drop me a line below.