Abyss

Good Morning Folks. I pretty much played Path of Exile II in full degenerate mode this weekend. I took Tuesday off, which combined with Labor Day Monday gave me a four day weekend. I had family stuff on Friday when the league launched, but a good chunk of Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday I played the game. I beat the campaign early yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon getting into the endgame. Probably the best feeling in this game though is logging in to see that some of your stuff had sold and currency is waiting for you on the vendor. The only problem with this is that prices seem to be all over the place. You can find similar items being sold for 1 Exalt, 50 Exalts, 50 Chaos, and 5 Divines… so it is a complete free for all. I am pricing most of the rares that I pick up with any resists on it for 2 Exalts each, and they are selling slowly. I’ve yet to really git any big paydays but I sold a really nice pair of boots for 20 Chaos, which is the single highest item I have moved.

Act IV was phenomenal, and might legitimately be my favorite single Act in any ARPG. There are a bunch of things going on with this. Firstly I’ve come to love Kingsmarch after having lived with it for over a year in Path of Exile 1, and I am pretty fond of the characters surrounding it. Secondly I am a huge fan of the Karui in general after having played so damned many Marauders and listening to those voice lines for years. The other really nice thing about this content is that you can legitimately take it on in any order. The islands increase slightly in level as you clear them, so there is no wrong way to take it on. There is one island that is like a Microcosm of Oriath, and I think for story reasons that is probably going to be the one that I save until last because it flows nicely into the final area. I am in love with the Halls of the Dead and I really wish this had made it into the game as an ascendancy option.

The preludes are also really cool, and honestly I sort of hope these exist as optional side content going forward. There are some really cool stories being told here and I like the whole Bioware style “building forces” aspect of them. Essentially they revolve around three allied groups and in order to guarantee their support for the final invasion of Oriath… you need to help them clear some of their problems at home. I would love to see this continue forward and whether or not you do it… impacts some of the content in Act V. Like depending on how many of the preludes you clear dictates how hard some of the content is when we finally get to that act. Mostly I just enjoyed the stories and content areas enough that I would love to see them continue forward in some form. Each is mostly just a single quest chain with a few optional side areas, but all of them are really cool and worth experiencing… and FAR better than the cruel difficulty stuff.

I’ve made a few purchases in order to buff my spirit to summon more minions and stabilize my resistances. I only have 20% chaos resistance, which is something I need to deal with at some point. However for early mapping it feels fine. I’ve seen exactly one Divine Orb so far in the campaign or maps and I spent it on a slightly better rattling sceptre. The one I was using had +2 minions on it and had level 11 Skeletal Minions… and this one at least takes me to +3 and 15. I wish we could level up the gems associated with weapons, because it is possible to find a really well rolled sceptre early on… but have the minions it provides lag massively behind the rest of your gems. My survival is not amazing but also I am not taking many deaths with 1600 health and 2000 energy shield… both of which need to increase significantly. Ultimately I need to focus at some point on trying to get my third and fourth ascendancy completed. I hate the two trial options, but what I did last time was Sanctum for the third, and Ultimatum for the fourth.

The biggest thing plaguing my build is that I have negative amounts of visual clarity. Essentially I am spreading fire all over the screen through the combination of my own flame wall, skeletal arsonists, and vaal guards throwing bombs everywhere. Essentially it is a complete crapshoot if I am going to be able to see any effects on the ground. When I hear the unblockable effect sound I just sort of instinctively roll away from wherever the boss is hoping that I will be able to dodge it, and then hit potion hoping I can survive it if I actually get hit. This is not exactly great, but the minions deal so much damage that most fights are over very quickly and I can skip a lot of the mechanics. The world is literally on fire… and I guess I am the “This is fine” dog meme.

I encountered my first rogue exile in a tier 2 waystone, and it was wildly juiced. It dropped three unique pieces of gear, and a unique gem that had the ability to unveil four mods on it at the well of souls. Thankfully you only have to wait for the animation to play one time if you are unveiling multiple affixes on the same item. I was able to craft an item that gives me ailment threshold from my energy shield as well as some additional percentage energy shield. It is not a massive item, but I will absolutely use it until I snipe a cheap minion damage gem. That is one thing that I noticed… it is super important to run searches in the web trade site if you are looking for something very specific. No one seems to know how to price anything, and you can occasionally pick up some cheap items if you are running that on your second monitor. Nothing like that exists in the in game client, and it is also missing a lot of the fuzzy search options that you have on the POE1 trade site which I hope they add into it later.

I still don’t really love the current state of the Path of Exile II endgame. Towers are absolutely not the way the endgame should be working, but it seems like they are stumped on what to do with it. Basically I like the concept of the Endless Delve style mapping, but there are still far too many bad layouts available and no way to avoid them. If they keep to this style of content, then they absolutely need to introduce a favored map system that causes may layouts that you prefer to spawn more frequently. This would obviously be only impacting things that are still in the fog of war, but if you engage with the system enough it could feel much better. You would still have to run shitty layouts from time to time, but just being able to make it more common to have the layouts that you actually enjoy would be a massive improvement. I also don’t really enjoy the way atlas passives are unlocked, and it does not feel anywhere near as satisfying as running specific maps to get points.

All of that said. I do feel like the general state of the game is a massive improvement over where it has been. Sure there are some straight up bricked builds right now, and the general state of balance is awful. However it does appear that other builds are rising to the top now. When I made the post two days ago the level 90+ balance was sitting at 73% of players all playing some version of a Bow Deadeye. As of this morning that percentage is down to 56% and I expect this will continue to fall as people find other interesting things to play. I am only level 73 currently so I am not counting in the list and I figure there are a lot of folks who are just leveling more slowly that will eventually erode at that percentage. There are a lot of builds that are working, but I think what harmed this league so much is that none of the guide creators had any prior knowledge of what the passive tree was going to look like, or some of the interactions between abilities. So everyone effectively had to go into this blind, and those who gambled on following the way of the Deadeye won that gamble.

I thought I would have bounced by now, but after taking a break yesterday afternoon I spent the evening chilling out on the couch and slowly plugging my way through maps. I am actually having fun, which in itself is a massive improvement over how I felt about the game in the Dawn of the Hunt league. At some point now that I have more resources, I want to recover my Warrior and turn it into something useful. I have no clue what I will go with, but I might just try another attempt at a slam build and see if stampede aftershock works now. Sprinting MASSIVELY improves mapping, and while there is still a lot of backtracking being able to run at hyperspeed through the dead areas of the map is a big win. I still really feel like sprint needs to be its own keybind rather than just holding dodge because you end up with weird situations where you sprint when you don’t mean to, or dodge when you don’t mean to. It is as fiddly as Guild Wars 2 when you are using the default keybinds of double tapping a direction to dodge. If they just allowed us to set a separate keybind it would improve things considerably.

The biggest things that I am hoping for though, are not things in Path of Exile II. I am looking forward to the trade system being implemented in POE1, and I am really hoping like we got a better version of Animate Guardian… that we get this version of the spectres system. I really like fiddling with spectres at the moment and the whole pokemon aspect of them. I am hoping we get a version of that in the original game, because that would immediately improve all of my frustrations with minion builds in general there. Basically my feelings about Path of Exile II have improved and I think it is actually going to be a good game after all.

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.