POE2 Patch 0.1.1 Announcement

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday afternoon Grinding Gear Games released an announcement trailer for the changes that are going to be landing this week in Path of Exile II Patch 0.1.1. This was then followed by an over two hour long Tavern Talk with Darth Microtransaction and Ghazzy TV where they talked with Mark and Jonathan from GGG about the state of the game and the upcoming changes. We won’t know a lot of the specifics until the patch notes actually drop, but the announcement video itself is well worth a watch and is roughly 8 minutes long. If you do not want to sift through the two hour long Q&A the shortest summary that I have seen is from Raxxanterax. SirGog released a similar summary this morning where he talks about some of the specific ramifications of the changes as well. There is also a Reddit thread that bullet points the list of changes if you just want the TLDR version.

This morning I am going to share some of my thoughts about what are some of the major winners of this patch, and what are the losers thusfar.

The Winners

Juicier Maps and Map Identity

We don’t have details here but there are a batch of changes that are targeted at making the gap between the juiciest map and the worst map a bit smaller. Especially early maps, the entire process feels useless and you are not really getting much in the way of usable stuff until you are pretty deep. Specifically they called out improving mob density and making the overall rewards a bit better by default. Similarly they said that there was going to be some sort of specialization system so that maybe a specific map would have a hidden modifier that might make the chests extremely good, or have more essences etc.

Strongboxes are Improved Slightly

Strongboxes were just not worth running because they took forever to finish spawning all of the waves of monsters and had a significant built in delay between waves. This seems like it is being removed and instead of instant popping like POE1, they will spawn in more akin to an Abyss Spire from the looks of it. I am mostly okay with this. They don’t seem MASSIVELY improved, but seem like they are going to be better overall.

Less Visual Clutter and Better Visibility of Monster Effects

This one is pretty huge but they have made a pass to remove some of the ground clutter in maps and have made it so that it is much easier to see visual effects on monsters and their attacks. Specifically it seems like they are doing some sort of tech to render these effects over top of the other layers of visuals so that they will be much harder to miss. I think this is probably what was causing the “random death” problem that players were fighting with is that we simply could not see any of the effects that were being rendered due to all of the visual noise. This is also extending to Delirium Fog, so that you will actually be able to see what the hell is going on.

Better Tiered and Expedition Items

Tiered loot was bad, and apparently this was due to a specific bug in the way these items were being calculated. Some of the culling of lower tiers… actually kept affixes from spawning entirely that did not have higher affixes. Attack speed for example notoriously only has a few affix tiers, the negative… so did light radius. Who knows if this will actually make Tier 5 loot worth picking up but we will see. Additionally they are making changes to the rarity of loot that appears through expedition crafting, so hopefully that actually becomes a viable method for getting some early gear.

Citadels in the Fog

One of the biggest challenges for actually running the pinnacle boss was finding the damned Citadels. They are making a few changes here, the first being that they can spawn closer to the origin point than they previously could. Additionally you will be able to see a glowing spire of light out in the fog of war, so that you know what direction you should be working towards in order to get to a Citadel. This is pretty huge overall. I am not sure if this is going to cause the Citadel market to crash though, because I was making quite a bit of currency tracking these down, clearing them, and then selling the tokens.

Six Pinnacle Boss Portals

Related to this… the tokens might actually be worth using instead of just selling thing. Starting with Arbiter of Ash and eventually ALL of the Pinnacle bosses, you are going to get six attempts at the fight. As you move up in difficulty with the encounter you will get less respawn attempts, but everyone should be able to get six attempts at the zero difficulty. I will probably making an attempt on the Arbiter once, and then go back to selling my tokens because I am really not a boss-centric player. However since more people will be attempting the bosses… it should actually make the demand for tokens a bit higher than it currently is.

Atlas Zoom and Biomes

You will be able to zoom out further on the Atlas of Worlds so that you can see more nodes at a time. Additionally when you mouse over a node it will clearly indicate what biome that maps is in. This is something I specifically called out in one of my posts. I sincerely doubt anyone from GGG has ever read one of my posts, so I am certain this is probably something they were already working on. This is specifically tied to one of the Atlas passives that causes increased chances for specific types of drops in maps within that biome. It was really hard however to tell what map was in what biome.

More Boss Maps and Precursor Support

The design goal for the Atlas of Worlds was that one in four maps would contain a boss. This did not actually shake out, because some of the maps cannot have a boss attached to them. As such they have made tweaks to the spawn rates so that hopefully it will be closer to this one in four ideal. This seems like a good call because in truth it was really hard to find maps that had both Irradiation and Corruption to complete some of the boss atlas passives. Boss maps in general seem to just drop better loot, so they are probably the ideal things to run anyway. They are also adding precursor tablets that can add bosses to maps that do not have them, so that you can further juice your map by adding more of them.

More Tower Maps

The existing state of tower maps in the game is just bad. Most players wanted them removed entirely and the process of juicing maps to be reworked significantly. We are not getting that. However they are adding four new tower maps and improving the layout of the existing one, hopefully making the process of running towers feel less bad. I think the biggest problem right now with towers is that they just feel unrewarding since the towers don’t actually inherit any of the map buffs from other towers. Maybe the overall buffing of map rewards will fix this.

Runes Can Be Overwritten

This is one of those things that pretty much everyone universally was asking for, because it made gearing your character annoying… and a lot of items less valuable because they might have the wrong rune socketed into them. Essentially you reach a point in your builds where you are overcapped on resistances and could them dial back on some of the runes to add something more valuable like defensive layers and life. Additionally there are a lot of soulcores that are super powerful, but you won’t have access to these early on… meaning you can eventually swap out for these as you fix other gear problems.

Armor and Scavenged Plating Buffed

Armor is in an awful state and there have been a lot of videos expounding upon why this is the case. Apparently GGG agrees but specifically said that more needs to happen, but it would not be happening until they do an economy reset with a new league. However in the meantime they are buffing armor a bit and specifically buffing the spirit gem that is associated with scaling armor. We do not know the specifics here, but I am hoping it will be enough to actually make this a viable defensive layer.

No Major Nerfs

Similar to the above item, since they want to reserve significant sweeping changes for largely economy reset patches where they roll out a new league… there are going to be no significant nerfs to any of the existing builds. The only thing that they are nerfing right now are issues that impact server stability and performance. The various “cast on” abilities for example were legitimately crashing server instances so they had to tackle those immediately.

The Losers

No Major Buffs

Once again since they are not making sweeping changes without a league reset… all of the under-performing classes are likely to stay in the shitty state that they currently are. Darth Microtransaction actually went on the offensive a bit during the podcast and effectively made Mark and Jonathan agree that the state of Warrior was not good. This is unfortunately not changing and we will still have a game dominated by four builds… and if you are not playing one of them you are doing it wrong.

No Six Portal Maps

This appears to be a hill that they are willing to die on… but they do not want to give players back six portals for maps. A single death is still going to adversely impact the player and cause them to lose their waystone and the stuff that was on the atlas that made the map worth running. This feels bad and feels like a forced hardcore mode. They did however say that they think the penalties are a bit too strong right now because multiple problems are stacking on top of each other leading things to feel bad. They instead want to smooth out the mapping experience rather than giving players six portals.

No Map Tab… Yet

They said that they are working on it, but as of right now we are still not getting a map tab. This is probably the single biggest issue for me that makes the entire endgame experience feel bad. I consider there to be two tabs that are mandatory to enjoy the game… currency and maps, and having to try and deal with two quad tabs full of waystones and another overflow tab that I have in the guild bank… feels bad.

No Campaign Improvements

This again might be related to the lack of buffs for classes, but the campaign can be a bit rough for certain classes right now. It has some significant difficulty spikes that can crush the will of folks to move forward. GGG stated that they are pretty happy with the current state of the campaign, and I think maybe this is a loss. There are multiple levers that need to be flipped and maybe once the other classes are in a decent state this will no longer be an issue. At this point I have leveled four characters through the campaign and it was “fine”.

No Ascendancy Respecs

While not necessarily a hill that they are dying on… there seems to be a dumb amount of resistance to allowing players to respec their ascendancy class. This is something we were able to do freely in Path of Exile 1 and it feels bad not being able to do it now. Essentially right now it feels like there are certain ascendancies that are “noob traps” and if you chose them… you are just borked. This hurts the more casual players the worst because in its current state, it is exceptionally cumbersome to level more than one character through the campaign.

No Trial Improvements

Trials and the entire process of ascending is sort of bullshit right now. I hate it so much. During the Q&A it was specifically asked that if they thought the fourth ascendancy should be an endgame goal that the average player will never accomplish. For the most part GGG said yes. This is dumb. This feels exceptionally bad. I think the entire process of ascending needs to be rethought from the ground up and that Sanctum and Ultimatum should be optional content.

No Minion Collision Fixes

Right now minions fail to enter most doors, forcing you to wait on them to respawn next to you. This feels awful. Right now there are no major changes coming for minion collision problems. They are working on a solution but have not landed on something that actually works right yet.

No Phasing on Dodge Roll/Movement Abilities

This is still something that I feel like the game needs. Right now movement abilities and the dodge roll still get caught on mob collision and I feel like this is a poor design choice.

No Proper Auction House

I realize this is going to be something that probably never happens, but since we have the currency exchange it only further underlines just how bad the trade system in Path of Exile 1 and 2 are. The chinese players have had an instant purchase auction house for awhile… we need this for western audiences.

No New Gold Sinks

Gold feels useless right now and the current state of gambling feels awful. Apparently Gambling in the hideout was removed last minute due to an exploit of some sort being found. They are working on adding Alva back to he hideout with proper gambling support. However there still needs to be something else that we can do with gold.

A Mixed Bag

I think for the most part the changes are good. I still take umbrage with some of the design decisions that they are standing by. I am curious to see what the actual patch notes look like and what other hidden details are contained within them that they did not highlight in the announcement trailer. I think I am at the point of stepping away from the game until the next league reset. I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing Last Epoch and it felt amazing. I think I am ready for a break from the mindset of Path of Exile 2, and I am most definitely ready for the next Path of Exile 1 league.

AggroChat #507 – Games of the Year Show 2024 – Part Two

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

Hey Folks! We have a bit of a long show because we wound up cramming a few games that we missed in the first show into this list.  We round out our yearly tradition with the second part of our Games of the Year show.  I am once again so glad that we decided a few years ago to start doing these on multiple nights because this year would have been a four-hour-long epic marathon of recording.

Games Discussed:

  • Space Marine 2
  • Path of Exile II
  • Metaphor Refantazio
  • Kunitsu-Gami
  • Games Finally Leaving Early Access
    • Caves of Qud
  • Middara
  • Gundam Breaker 4
  • Dwarven Realms
  • Nova Drift
  • UFO 50
  • Warhammer 40k Franchise
  • Tactical Breach Wizards
  • Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur League
  • Enshrouded
  • Warcraft Pandaria Remix
  • Rabbit And Steel
  • Helldivers 2
  • Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
  • Last Epoch

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Moment of Zen

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Good Morning Folks! We’ve had a bit of a snowpocalpyse here in Oklahoma. We handle icy roads pretty well, but when you give us a bunch of inches of snow at once… pretty much all of our infrastructure breaks down. I had already taken the day off because we were supposed to go do something… which has essentially been cancelled. So instead of cancelling my leave and working today… I am just going to chill out. The above image is from my Dad’s backyard staring out of his shop and I figured I would share it because of how pretty all of the trees look. We technically got more snow, but his yard looks way cooler.

I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II, though admittedly at this point I am pretty ready for another game to come along and distract me. I’ve largely been chasing Citadels and it is awesome when you get two spawn near each other. For example this one screen was worth 6 divines as the Copper Citadel fragments go for the most on the currency exchange. I have no clue why I am attempting to accumulate wealth because my Minions build is effectively as geared as I can probably get it without going to mirror tier perfectly rolled items. Now that Kripparian has made a video about the fart boots, I do have some concern that they will be nerfed. Thankfully I am only using them as additive damage and not the core of that build.

I’ve been knocking out a few of the things like getting my 8th set of bossing atlas points. It is shocking how hard it is to find a boss map node that is both Corrupted and Irradiated, because in order to get that 8th point you need both of those in place and to run a map that has corrupted and upgraded into a t16. I had been sitting on one of those in my bank for a bit looking for a node that met all of the criteria so I could get those two points. My last two points in the bossing tree will require me to actually use the fragments I am farming and go after The Arbiter. I am not sure I really care that much about this, especially given that I only have one shot at that fight, and the accumulated tokens to do one attempt are worth roughly 5 Divines in total.

That said I did finally gather up the 300 splinters required to take on the Breach boss Xesht. I was expecting this to be way tougher than it actually was and in truth it was pretty similar to your average map boss, just with a lot more mechanics. This was of course a Xesht zero difficulty, and I am sure as you scale up the fight it gets considerably more spicy. I did not get anything really good from the encounter, but it was interesting enough that I could see doing this again whenever I organically gather up enough splinters. The node that I chose makes it so Breaches open and close 30% slower, which honestly… GREATLY improves the quality of life of doing Breaches on a Minion build.

I’ve got an Iron Citadel that I have been sitting on, that I will probably take a run at today. My hope is that it drops multiple fragments, because honestly otherwise it isn’t really worth much to run it. Copper Citadels are the real money right now, but they also appear to be the hardest to find. That said the further I get away from the origin the more often I seem to be finding both Citadel spawns and Unique map spawns. This seems to mimic Delve in that the deeper there that you went the more often rare nodes would spawn.

I’ve found exactly one Moment of Zen, which is a unique map that spawns the Nameless Seer. He did not really have anything terribly interesting in the way of the uniques he was offering, but I am very thankful that this node is impossible to miss on the tree. Honestly I really appreciate that EVERY map has a unique appearance on the map, so that once you know what you are looking for you can pretty much tell which map it is before even mousing over it. I do hope that there is either a favorite map slot system eventually or something that at least allows us to ban the maps that we cannot stand. People seem to hate Augury but that one does not really bug me much… it is maps like Vaal Factory with a bajillion doors that sap my joy.

I got a grocery delivery yesterday morning, well before all of the snow started. So for the most part I am going to hunker down and snuggle with some kitties and forget that the outside exists for the moment. I am hoping we get enough melt over the course of the day so I can go out and do my habitual donut run in the morning without much hassle. I hope you have wonderful weekend and thoughts go out to my friends in California dealing with the wildfires.

Minecraft But Cumbersome

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Hey Folks! I guess I might still be taking a bit of a break given that I did not blog yesterday. I am mostly spending my evenings chilling out mapping in Path of Exile II while listening to the latest book in the Divide series by J.S. Dewes. However there is another game that I have been exploring a bit. One of my friend tipped me off to Vintage Story, which is a game that attempts to bring back the confusion and fear that was playing Minecraft back in Alpha when we did not have all of the patterns and progression trees memorized. This game has apparently been out since 2016, and started its life as a mod of the same name. However mechanically it feels fairly similar to Minecraft in that you punch blocks to harvest them, place them with the right mouse button, and open your inventory with E.

The similarities however go careening off a cliff pretty quickly. In Minecraft you punch a few trees, get some resources to craft some basic tools and then rapidly start progressing your way up through the skill tree as you immediately dive into being able to mine resources properly. In Vintage Story… you go through the Stone Age first. Essentially in that first day you are looking for a few resources, the first being flint, which shows up occasionally in these stone piles scattered around the surface of the world. In the above image there is a stonepile in the middle of the screen, and flint will show up as a slightly darker colored rock in those piles.

When you have at least two pieces of flint you can create your first tools by the process of knapping, which is a legitimate thing that our ancestors used to create effectively the first known tools. Essentially in the real world, you use one rock to flake off pieces of another rock until you have shaped it into the manner that you wanted. In Vintage Story you place down the stone on the ground and then slowly knock out pieces of rock until you have freed the shape of the toolhead that you are trying to create. Initially you are going to create a Knife which then can be used to harvest plants, because you will need grass and reeds to progress further.

Once you have a toolhead you can place it in your crafting inventory along with a stick, which you can either pick up off the ground, or get from punching bushes rarely. You can also create an Axe with flint that allows you to start felling trees… and then taking those logs and splitting them into firewood. When combined with dry grass you can create your first campfire. You have to use dry grass and sticks to create a firestarter though… which has a seemingly random chance of lighting something on fire as it loses durability.

Once you have your trusty flint knife, you can wander around and find bodies of water… which often have cattails growing beside them. You can now harvest these and then use them as reeds for the creation of wicker goods. Namely you want to create hand basket which allow you to expand your meager inventory beyond the tool hotbar slots. You can also use these to create more permanent chests that will be helpful once you settle down and build shelter.

I built a relatively simple shelter… that is honestly quite ugly… but I don’t know how to make decent looking building blocks. Essentially the game has a day/night cycle that is 45 minutes in length. In the default survival mode when night falls, a monster type called creeps spawn and hunt you down. You have to be inside in order to really survive this. Similarly wolves are another massive problem in survival mode as they will aggro you from quite a long distance away and chase you for a good ways before giving up. You can also customize your difficulty level, and for the time being I am playing on a custom mode that delays the nighttime spawns for several days and makes wolves neutral. I am essentially trying to get my feet under me before I deal with chain deaths.

I’ve reached the point where I am beginning to move into the metal age, and with this I need clay in order to form molds and crucibles. Essentially once you have a shovel you can seek out clay deposits and then similar to knapping, you form the clay into specific shapes building up several layers of blocks until you have reached the final shape. Here I was creating four crucibles where I had to create the base for each and then build up several layers of walls before finally adding the top to the container.

However your clay doesn’t become usable until you have fired it in a kiln. The cool thing about this is… so far everything that I am doing in this game mirrors the real world practices. So the simplest form of a kiln is a pit kiln, where you effectively dig a whole… surround the raw dry clay vessels by material that burns, and then layer on things that will burn more slowly above that… finally lighting the whole mess and letting it burn and cool on its own. Weirdly enough I have actually fired clay bowls in the real world with a version of this… in essentially a metal trashcan. In the game version you dig a single block hole, place your vessels on the ground, layer up 5 layers of dry grass, then 2 layers of sticks, and finally place 4 pieces of firewood on top before lighting the whole thing. It takes 24 in-game hours to complete the process at which point you will have your fired pottery waiting on you at the bottom of the pit. These however catch EVERYTHING on fire… so make sure you surround the pit with some sort of non-flammable retaining wall. Definitely DO NOT do this in a wooden home.

There are a lot of random spawns out in the world, including traders that will buy things from you and sell other things back to you for the gears currency that they trade in. There are various ruins of buildings, that occasionally will have chests that you can loot with resources that you might not yet be able to create on your own. When I last stopped playing I was firing a hammer mold and a pick mold, and was roaming around the world looking for surface deposits of copper. The next step is to go through the process of smelting that copper in a crucible and then pouring the molten copper into the two molds. From there I will need to create a pair of tongs so that I can take the toolheads once cooled and go quench them in a nearby body of water.

One of the things that I really appreciate about the game is that it has a very robust mapping system. You can right click on the map and add waypoints noting various things that you find in your travels. I’ve heard that finding copper deposits on the surface also indicates that there should be nearby copper once you are capable of mining below the ground. So I’ve marked all of these with a copper colored pickaxe with the goal of eventually going back once I have the necessary tool to go exploring further. Similarly if you find clay, you can mark it on the map so you can go back later and harvest more of it given that there always seems to be a lot of it when it spawns.

The game is definitely interesting, but I am not sure if it is the sort of thing I will play with any frequency. I play games not necessarily to mirror the difficulty of how you might do the same thing in the real world, and while I appreciate the level of “sim” built into this survival Minecraft clone… it might be a bit too cumbersome for me personally for the long run. Especially given how quickly your tools break down, forcing you to create new ones. The level of nonsense that I am going through to create my first copper tools… is not something I want to do on a daily basis. In theory once you move on to smithing, things get a bit easier… but still the amount of resources needed to do only the most basic things seems a bit on the extreme side.

If you are the sort of person who likes to run Minecraft with the super simulation heavy mods installed, it might be worth checking out Vintage Story. One thing of note… this is not on Steam but is instead on Humble Bundle, Itch.io, or directly from the developer. I picked my copy up from Humble mostly because I already have a bunch of games on that platform.