Pohx League Shenanigans

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Good Morning Folks. This weekend I allowed myself to get sucked back into Path of Exile. Given the disappointment for Path of Exile 1 players last night, our hero Pohx decided to take matters into his own hands and throw together a league event. When I wrote about this on Friday, it full at 9500 players… before the end of the day it had been expanded to 20,000 players and also full. Then GGG stepped in and added 10,000 additional player slots, expanding the private league past the normal limit to 30,000. Suffice to say there has been more than a little bit of interest in some sort of a league reset happening in Path of Exile. I think there have been way more players than any of us thought, for which Path of Exile II did not really land well.

As of this morning there are just shy of 28,000 players in the Pohx private league, and I figure that is probably as big as it is going to get for the time being. If you are so inclined, you can go sign up for the league here which officially lasts until April 1st. A few caveats if you have never played in a private league like this. The big thing is expect trade to be much more challenging than during a normal league reset. There are simply going to be fewer items available and this impacts pretty much everything from the currency exchange to the player to player trade site. Folks tend to be way more chill about pricing however since this is a limited time event. However fully expect to be playing at least 80% solo self found. I picked up a few upgrades over the weekend but there was not a lot available on the market, and mostly all I really did was pick up a couple of items with good resists on them.

I am playing well out of my comfort zone and running my very first Trickster ever. I opted to go for Ice Trap, with the idea of eventually shifting into Ice Trap of Hollowness once I got all of my gear in place… which admittedly might not actually happen during the course of a private league. I still feel pretty squishy but am working on a series of upgrades with the next few points that should help that out. Essentially I am going to be stacking Mind of Matter, Ghost Shroud, and Wicked Ward with my existing Eldritch Battery to hopefully resolve my survival problems by making my Energy Shield double as both Mana and a proper damage barrier. I tried running Mind of Matter too early, and really all I did was cause myself to get into situations where I could not cast anything. Wicked Ward and Ghost Shroud should in theory help to solve the energy shield regen problems while I am taking damage.

Once I get another level I am probably going to respec the start of my tree a bit to free up two points, so that I can pick up all three of those notables at once. I am leaning heavily on Polymath which gives me 3% more damage for each unique mastery I am taking which at the moment is a 24% more multiplier. I’ve not run across any of the uber lab shrines in maps, so I might go ahead and try and purchase one from the currency exchange so that I can get my fourth ascendancy point. I feel like I am dealing plenty of damage right now, it is mostly the survival and comfort of mapping that I need to resolve. This is a way squishier character than I am used to playing, and since I don’t have access to really good cheap rares due to the limited trade environment… my evasion is way lower than I would like it to be. I am honestly not really a massive fan of evasion builds to start with, but I am trying to push myself out of my comfort zone.

I am still chipping away at white maps and making pretty decent progress. For the most part once I get something frozen I can kill it extremely quickly. Normal mapping is largely just walking through the map while dropping traps behind me which ends up being a fairly safe gameplay style. Things only really get risky when I have to stop and grind through something a bit tankier. The nice thing about the traps gameplay style is that I can run reflect maps without too much issue. The only change that I need to do is to remember not to drop Frost Bombs. I should also really drop back down to a level 1 Frost Blink so that I don’t have to worry too much about that either. I would really like to pick up some additional regen, but it feels like it is hard to juggle that with everything else that I want in the build.

For the most part right now I am running syndicate, as I try and get the enchants that I need. I am going to mix in some perm Delirium in the hopes of farming up some cluster jewels. Again being in a limited trade environment means that I am going to need to craft most of my own gear if I want some very specific things. I am still hoping at some point a Replica Dragonfang amulet shows up with Ice Trap on it, but I am not holding my breath. Thusfar there are plenty of those, but none for the specific ability that I want. I am very much playing an off meta build at the moment, based on one that was designed for 3.25 that does not 100% equate to the current passive tree. Essentially I tend to follow a guide until I hit maps and then I am off the radar with making the choices needed to hopefully make the build feel good after that.

I am not entirely certain how long Pohx League is going to stay active though, because this morning GGG released a statement that they are working on an event for Path of Exile 1. Essentially they are going to break out 19 Ascendancies that have never seen the light of day before, and will be running a league where every class has totally new options. This will run for a month, and I full expect an influx of players will rush over to this league to test things out. I am hoping we get a full release of what all of the ascendancy nodes are before this drops so that folks can begin to brew a bit ahead of time. This is going to have similar energy to a Krangled league, and I full expect by the end of the first day everyone to have spreadsheets floating around to help with buildcraft.

Tomorrow I am still planning on dipping back into Diablo IV for a bit with the new Lunar New Year event. I am not sure how hard I am going to grind but I would still really like to finish out the seasons journey while the buffs are active. I am hoping that the fixes to the Ring of Mendeln land at the same time so that I potentially see a massive boost in power. Other than that… I mostly want to be able to get some rest. I’ve not been sleeping well because Gracie has taken to screaming for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Additionally I am still fighting a bit of a respiratory thing, which I hope passes rapidly. I have to go in a few times this week for meetings, so I am mostly hoping to get through the week without too much frustration.

AggroChat #510 – Death From Above

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

Hey Folks! This week we started with a single topic…  and by the time we were finished ended up having to bump half of the assembled topics to next week in order to keep the runtime down.  We start off with Bel talking about the bad news for Path of Exile players, and how there is no new league around the corner.  He also talks a bit about getting sucked into the private league that Pohx created which has capped out at 20,000 players.  From there Grace talks a bit about playing Heroes of Hammerwatch II and enjoying that.  Kodra shares his thoughts about the Diablo IV Campaign thus far as he still is effectively in the first act. Grace and Ash share their experiences with Coridden a more narrative-driven action role-playing game.  Finally, Kodra and Tam talk about their experiences playing Battletech and how Kodra is coming around to the idea of playing games for fun, rather than simply optimizing the strategy for winning.

Topics Discussed

  • Path of Exile League Months Away
    • Pohx League
  • Heroes of Hammerwatch II
  • Kodra’s Diablo 4 Thoughts
  • Coridden
  • Battletech – A Game of Awesome Moments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Goodbye Hillock

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Good Morning Folks! I am still terribly bummed about the Path of Exile news, but yesterday I knocked out an achievement that I have been working towards for literal years now. There is an achievement called “Beginner’s Luck” for getting a drop from the beach at the beginning of the campaign, an area that cannot be returned to once you have exited it. So essentially I have had a character named BelginnersLuck parked there and every now and then I run down the beach kill Hillock and then log to another character. I got to level 8.5 in doing this and effectively have every single item at yellow rarity from repeating this process over and over. Unfortunately I did not get the drop that is unique to Hillock, but I did at least get something meaning that I can stop this nonsense.

Pohx released a video yesterday sharing his disappointment about Path of Exile, and then handling it in the best way. Since folks really wanted a fresh start, he set up a private league that is up to 9500 players currently. I have no clue if he will keep expanding the size of the league because it gets rather expensive, but good on him for making a player run event happen since GGG does not appear to be willing to do something official. I was expecting them to do Endless Delve or something that they have done in the past to give the POE1 player base something to focus on. I missed my opportunity to apply when there were openings to this private league, so I doubt I will be able to participate in a few hours when it goes live.

I’ve taken a bit of a break from Diablo IV as there is a lunar new year event about to start right around the corner with various experience and drop bonuses. I’m in the phase of the game where I just need to spend a lot of time grinding, and I figure there is no point in doing that until I can earn the cosmetics from this event and also have some of my progress sped up slightly. I still do not feel super powerful yet in Season 7, and had been slowly accumulating a full set of gear so that I could have an alternate Blood Wave build to play with it. On the 4th I am sure I will be back and grinding that out, and hopefully finishing my seasons journey.

I’ve also been back playing some Guild Wars 2, and at least popping in and trying to do dailies and chip away at my weeklies. It is always extremely comfortable going back to Guild Wars 2. I probably should work on the Janthir Wilds story since I have not done the second part. Additionally there are holiday events going on there which could be lucrative. I could also start work again on one of the various legendaries that I have parts for. I picked up the kit from the dailies shop for Kudzu, since I really like using Longbows on a few of my characters. The weapon also deeply reminds me of Rhok’delar from World of Warcraft.

A new season dropped in Dwarven Realms as well, and with it comes a complete overhaul of the generally awful passive tree. I am sure at some point tonight I will be in the game playing that, so that I can talk about it on the podcast Saturday. I really want to probably do a bit of research because I know there is some sort of a spin to win build, and I am interested in seeing what that takes to build weapon and skill wise. I am not even sure if there are proper build sites for this game or not. I have always just winged it and been relatively successful, but like I said I do want to know what weapon grants the whirlwind-like ability.

I’ve also been fighting some sort of respiratory crud for the last few days and am running a low grade fever. So more than anything I am probably going to be chilling on the sofa and trying to coax cats to snuggle. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, because I am super tired of this week.

Performative Transparency

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Good Morning Folks. It is a bit of a rough day for the Path of Exile community. More specifically it is a rough time for the folks who were Path of Exile 1 players looking forward to the 3.26 League. While there were not hard dates surrounding it, comments made by the development team around the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access indicated that we could expect the next league to land late January or Early February. We are now in that window and there has been a growing unrest among the player base hungry for information about the next league. The new trials for Path of Exile II are almost universally loathed by the community, causing an surge of Izaro memes. One of the biggest is a thread that has been doubling the number of images of Izaro every single day until we get news regarding the launch date of 3.26.

We can’t really work on POE1 3.26 until 0.2.0 has shipped. And being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks as well.

Jonathan Rogers

We got that news… and it was not good. It turns out that Path of Exile 3.26 is not coming anytime soon. Effectively the entire Path of Exile team has been pulled to help resolve the massive issues with Path of Exile II. I think a lot of my poor sentiment over this is being influenced right now by the fact that I am reading Play Nice, the book about the downfall of Blizzard by Jason Schreier. I just finished the passage last night where they talked about how World of Warcraft effectively consumed every available resource from every other team in the company. It certainly feels like we are seeing something similar playing out with Path of Exile II as it is consuming all available attention as the game that put Grinding Gear Games on the map suffers.

During the 2019 Exile Con presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson talked about how they were concerned about splitting the player base, and why they were planning on making Path of Exile II as a content expansion to the original game. Over the years of pandemic era silence this scope was changed, but effectively Chris Wilson’s prophecy has played out. There are a lot of players that did not really enjoy Path of Exile II, a largely group that I am part of that did not like it as much, and then a whole slew of players who were brand new to the franchise and have no clue what they are missing. The choice to focus on a game that is in Early Access, is a purely financial choice. Path of Exile II sold better than they expected and still has peak concurrency higher than some Path of Exile leagues. However for many it also feels like a Betrayal of the promises that Path of Exile was not going to get lost in the hype.

It is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date they are returning to it.

Chris Wilson

As a result… players on the subreddit are taking to using the company’s own words against them. It does in many ways feel like in the push to get Path of Exile II out the door, they have backpedaled on a number of the core tenants that they talked about in this widely viewed 2019 GDC talk. For the outsiders who were never part of this community prior to the launch of the early access, this probably seems odd. The thing that you need to understand is that we were effectively promised that the development of Path of Exile II would not cause the development of Path of Exile 1 to slip.

The release cadence that made Path of Exile the game that it is today is essentially built around the concept of four releases per year. Two would be larger releases, two would be smaller releases, but effectively every three to four months the player base had another league to engage with. The entire flow of Path of Exile centers around the league launch, and then also the fall off of the game after a month or two depending on how successful that league was. At the time of writing this the current league, Settlers of Kalguur launched on July 26th, 2024 and is 188 days old. Prior to this the longest league was Crucible, another league that was pushed out due to work on Path of Exile II at 130 days. They have not been able to hit the target cadence since 2021 with the Sentinel league, which I can only assume also has been impacted by the development of Path of Exile II.

Back in October, I gave Jonathan Rogers a good deal of credit for the communications and transparency when they had to push back the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access. The thing is… this video format of him sitting in the interview suite delivering a fireside chat, only really works so often. This is the fourth of these that I can personally remember, talking about unfortunate events and delivering a public address over whatever issue happens to be going on. What we need is better communication before the train derails. Even in this video he as much indicates that he knew that they were not going to hit the target for 3.26 before they left on holiday break. That is the point where you should have opened up to the community. Many of us were excited to have a new Path of Exile League on the near horizon, and as such it didn’t quite matter so much that the current state of Path of Exile II was pretty shitty. It was “early access” after all, and we had a better game to get excited for soon.

The other thing that really hurts is the loss of Bex, the long time community manager for Grinding Gear Games. She’s been gone since August of 2023, but has never really been replaced in the types of interactions that she had with the community, nor the regularity of communications. We’ve also had the inexplicable loss of Chris Wilson, the previous figurehead of Grinding Gear Games and to the best of my knowledge the last time we heard from him was at the release of the Necropolis league. I get that Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers have stepped up into their roles as leads of Path of Exile I and Path of Exile II respectively… but it still feels weird to not hear the iconic and much memed line anymore: “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games”.

So what do we know? We know that the teams are actively working on Path of Exile II 0.2.0 and we do not have a release date for that, but it will be a massive balance patch that comes with a league reset. Since no timing has been announced yet, I figure that is probably at least a month if not two out. We also know that they will not begin work in earnest on Path of Exile 3.26 until that has launched and that it has been given a few weeks of burn in. So I figure at this point the earliest we will see a new Path of Exile league is April potentially May. In April, the Settlers league will be over 260 days old at that point… so they need to at least throw us some sort of bone. Now is the time for them to dust off some major event like Endless Delve to give players something to focus on while they wait. The NecroSettlers Event was not terribly well received, and that league is effectively dead. I looked to see if I could find a pseudo-six-link helm yesterday and there was exactly one for sale… and it was 260 Divines.

In a perfect world, Eleventh Hour Games would use this opportunity and timeline slippage to slide in and launch Season 2 of Last Epoch. I do not think that is likely, but unfortunately that also means that 3.26 and Season 2 are likely going to be landing around the same time. If I have to choose between the two games I am going to be playing Last Epoch. I don’t want to have to make that choice, but I feel like I am way more excited about the endgame changes coming to the monolith, even though we don’t exactly know what they are. No matter what GGG rolls out with 3.26, it will not be anywhere near enough to make up for the year long Settlers league. This whole sequence has been a real hit to my faith in Grinding Gear Games as a whole. Again… like I said at the top I am reading Play Nice the book about the downfall of Blizzard, and I am honestly seeing some themes playing out here as well. I hope they can pull out of this, but they are essentially spending the goodwill of the player base right now.

Anyways… are you impacted by this announcement? Do you even care about Path of Exile 1? Drop me a line below.