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Ancients League Is Gonna Be Wild

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Yesterday, we got the reveal stream for Path of Exile II 0.5.0, and it was wild. It was essentially an hour and nineteen minutes of back-to-back, constant reveals, some of which are super intricate. I feel like there is honestly just way too much to even begin to talk about, but I will attempt to discuss some of the high points. Essentially, at a high level, they are reworking every single endgame system that launched with the game in order to make it distinct from the Path of Exile 1 counterpart. Abyss was quite possibly their most successful league launch in Path of Exile II, and they have seemingly taken some of the core tenets of that mechanic and applied them to existing ones. Quite honestly… on some level, I hope we see some of these changes backported to Path of Exile. The new Ritual and Expedition, for example, look freaking awesome, and I cannot wait to play them and see how they feel.

One of the major disappointments from yesterday is that the community had worked itself into a frenzy that we were going to get the Duelist class, and potentially Gladiator ascendancy, and maybe something else. At a minimum, they thought one of the trailers leading up to the release of the content reveal hinted that we were getting swords. This did not happen, and quite frankly, during the Q/A they said that with all of the other endgame changes, there was never going to be any time to do a full class introduction. Instead, we are getting the Martial Artist for Monk, and Spiritwalker for Huntress. In both cases, they represent the third and final ascendancy choice for those classes. I am not that into the whole Monk aesthetic, but Spiritwalker seems really interesting to me because, in theory, it is a minion class? There is a whole tame beast mechanic that is going into the game that allows you to “tame” beasts that are bosses and then use them as what appears to be a spectre-like minion that fights for you. Here is hoping that these are actually powerful and not useless, like 90% of the spectre mobs end up being.

The sweeping endgame changes excite me greatly because the current endgame in Path of Exile II was a bit of a mess. When you hit maps in Path of Exile, there are some clear progression elements that lead you to do specific content in order to unlock the rest of your atlas. The Path of Exile II equivalent felt like it was essentially saying “ya know, do some stuff”, and then dumping you out into an infinitely expanding Atlas and hoping for the best. Now there will be directed quests that effectively lead you towards progressing every single endgame mechanic. On top of that, there is a proper Atlas Passive Tree… not some piddly little nodes that only unlocked as you did specific mechanics. It looks potentially twice the size of the Path of Exile Atlas Passive Tree, so I am sure there is some interesting stuff in there that completely changes the game. They introduced a ton of new endgame crafting systems as well, but all of that shit is mostly too complicated to talk about yet, and it will probably be years before we fully understand how to make the most of them.

The thing that probably excites me the most is something that I have wanted ARPG games to do for decades. Essentially, there is now a standardized build file format that encompasses everything about a build and its leveling progression. You will then be able to drop this .Build file in your Path of Exile II directory and access it in-game. This then highlights all of the nodes that are required for that build and gives creators the ability to attach notes to various elements in the game, to help players along the way in following the guide. The amount of time that I spend at the start of a league flipping between the game and a build guide up on another screen… is a lot. Effectively, this is no more, and I am almost certain that this functionality will be backported to Path of Exile. I imagine it will only be a short amount of time before Path of Building will spit out these build files, so that guide creators can use that as an authoring tool since they are already used to it. Additionally, they are adding in some rudimentary price checking via the in-game trade menu, but this does not look anywhere near as efficient as my current favorite Scalpel. I am hoping beyond hope that the author of that tool updates it to support Path of Exile II.

Another thing that has me SUPREMELY interested is this unique called The Raven’s Flock. If you have followed my escapades, you know two things for certain… I am a Thorns/Righteous Fire enjoyer in ARPGs, and I love me some Minion builds. This new unique seems to essentially be combining these two worlds together in a delightful way. Essentially, the Staff gives you an ability called Spiralling Conspiracy, which summons a flock of ravens that circle you, dealing damage over time to everything in the aura, similar to Righteous Fire. It supposedly scales off Minion damage because the Aura itself… are Minions. I already enjoy playing the various Necro-style builds in the game, but I cannot wait to try and build something around this nonsense. I wonder how well this will work with the new Spiritwalker ascendancy and the big ole beast minion that you can tame. I am sure Papa Pohx will figure out a build to make this all work, but in the meantime, I might start something like Bear, which hopefully is still a beast at farming maps. Then later swap to a character built around this unique once I actually have access to it.

I am honestly pretty freaking pumped for this upcoming league. If you are interested, I highly suggest watching the over-hour-long video because it was packed with information. If you need something a bit more condensed, Raxx released the above video where he sort of runs down the high points. Are you excited for Path of Exile II: Return of the Ancients? What was your favorite thing out of the many reveals? Drop me a line below.

Diablo IV Has Good Numbers

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Good Morning, Folks. I feel like Diablo IV right now is in a very good state. I know this because every time I log into the game in the new hub city of Temis, regardless of what time of day it is… it is freaking packed with players moving around and interacting with things. It does not hurt at all that they managed to launch for once during a lull in the other games. The last Path of Exile 2 league is from December, Path of Exile 1 from February, and even Last Epoch at this point is stale, having launched its last season in March. It feels like the normal time associated with playing an ARPG season is about three weeks, and all of the more popular games… are well past that. So if there was a perfect time to launch Lord of Hatred, they somehow managed to hit it, which is wild given that there were no delays around POE2 0.5.0, it would have been launching against it. Sure, the game legitimately is in a great state, but the timing has to have massively helped.

It is not like you can really use Steam to represent a significant portion of the Diablo IV player base. The game launched originally only on Battle.net, and most “Blizzard” players use that launcher. We don’t have accurate numbers for the folks on Xbox or PlayStation, so as a result, we have to rely on the general trends from Steam DB since it aggregates its statistics. You can see that on Steam it hit its all-time peak high four days ago, which is wild considerly that that high was reached after the official launch of the expansion. My personal guess is that enough good press and hype about the game had managed to saturate the latent player base to get the message that no… D4 was actually sort of good now. D4 Bad was a meme for so long, and I am happy to see that it has managed to more or less right the ship. It doesn’t have Path of Exile 2 numbers on Steam, but that makes sense as a much larger portion of the GGG playerbase plays via the Steam Client.

I’ve recently spent a lot of time working with the crafting system that exists in-game, and I have to say it is pretty phenomenal. The above are some examples of items that I recently crafted. In the case of the two legendaries, I started with a base yellow or blue ancestral item and worked it up from there. The fact that I managed to hit a quad masterworked chest is wild, but it is more than that… one of the masterworked stats got chosen when I did the final masterworking step at the blacksmith. The enchanting system is also extremely powerful for fixing problems with items. Are any of my items technically perfect? Absolutely not, but they are pretty damned good. Temerity, I managed to pull by taking an ancestral pair of pants, dropping it to white rarity, and then using the cube recipe to promote that item up to a Unique. The mace I managed to get as a drop already at Ancestral rarity. The recipe that I would really like to see, however, is something that will take a normal unique and upgrade it to an Ancestral, because I am struggling to get my last few required uniques to drop at that 900 item level.

Essentially, I am at the point where I just need to put my head down and grind. I need to work through so many runs of the Pit to level all five of my glyphs up to level 50, which is the break point for the legendary traits. At the moment, I can do a Torment 8 pit and am close to unlocking Torment 9, but it is a bit of a slog. The positive I went from running Torment 6 as my comfy speed run level to doing the same for Torment 7, so incremental progress. I feel like I am not that far from being able to bump up to Torment 8 as my baseline. Right now, I am struggling to keep enough materials and gold to masterwork everything, but once I do that… in theory, I should see a significant power boost as a result. Honestly, the best source of resources right now is via the Mercenary favor caches, so again, I just need to do some head-down grinding in order to put on some favor levels and get more caches.

Today, however, is all about the Path of Exile II reveal stream. I feel like there is an awful lot riding on this one, because 0.4.0 was not the best-received league, even though I enjoyed it quite a bit. They have been teasing all of these endgame system reworks, and I fear that they have cranked up expectations to the moon. They really have to stick the landing on this presentation, and it seems like they are pulling out all the stops. The Twitch drop that they announced yesterday is among the most intricate that I have seen them give away for free, so they are most definitely trying to get a bunch of eyeballs on the stream. I will be doing my best to tune in, but I am sure I will miss some of it as it happens smack dab in the middle of the workday. I am sure tomorrow I will be offering up my own commentary to the reveal, so if you care about such things, tune in then. Because tomorrow is a lab work and office visit day, my blog will be landing later in the day than normal.

Arbiter is Awesome

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Good Morning, Folks! Last night during sibling time with Ace, I ripped the band-aid off and respecced my Paladin from the Thorns Leveling build to the Arbiter Blessed Hammer build. As I had said before, I essentially hit a ceiling where I needed to do something to push things further. I could swing Torment 7, but that was a stretch, and as a result, I was just farming Torment 6 over and over because it was so much faster. Thorns used to be a really awesome build during the season that they introduced the Paladin, where you could more or less run around with impunity and watch things die around you. Now it is way more fiddly because you effectively have to bait mobs into standing around your very slow-moving blessed shields, which are dealing the majority of the damage. It was an amazing boss killer because you could drop the Ultimate and watch their health evaporate as you were dealing massively multiplied thorns damage to anything standing in that ring. Clearing, however, was a bit of a mess, and I suffered through it for a while…. but knew something had to change.

Before we get any further, can we stop for a moment and talk about how crappy it is to spec out paragon boards? When you have 163 points to spend, it takes forever to slowly work your way through all of them and connect up the boards. I feel like there should be some sort of system where you can import a Paragon spec via a string and have the game allocate the boards for you. That way, guide creators could post a minimal spec, and a full spec and then at least get you 90% of the way there with either. Since I do not have 300 points, I did what you usually do and spent time speccing through all of the rare sockets and legendary abilities, and pretty much had enough points to then go back and flesh out the first board completely. Nothing about this process is fun. It does make me appreciate and not mind respeccing quite so badly in other ARPGs.

It is always somewhat fraught to give up what is effectively a functional build… for the hopes of respeccing into a better build, but not quite being certain how things will shake out. Having never played Arbiter Blessed Hammers, I did not know if I would even like the way it feels. So it is always scary to take that plunge and give up what you are used to for the purpose of another build. I had everything that was required for the build except for a single item, the Argent Veil ring shown above. I managed to get it this morning off Andariel, but the build was pretty functional without it. I have a lot of room to grow gear-wise. I am effectively out of materials after building out my Warlock, so nothing of my gear is qualitied up and masterworked. In addition to that, I have zero ancestral uniques, so I will be focusing on farming up those items that I need. I’ve already cleared a pit 55, which is higher than I had managed previously, and I still have a ton of room to upgrade. My short-term goal is to get the build to a point where it is capable of farming Torment 10, and then hopefully get some mythics to move to the final form of the build.

What makes the build so great is its speed. This is very much in the speed farm family of builds, because the gameplay focuses on using a movement ability called Falling Star to leap between packs. This in itself does a good deal of damage, but you also bring your Blessed Hammers with you, so you are constantly dealing damage to stragglers and full clearing packs. Falling Star gives you the Arbiter effect, and essentially, the goal is to keep this up all of the time, which gives you a significant boost to the damage your hammers are doing. When you get to the boss of an encounter, you pop your Arbiter of Justice Ultimate and deal massive amounts of damage while also popping your auras and dropping consecration. All of this will deal so much more damage once I have something resembling the correct stats on my gear. I am probably going to farm a bunch of Infernal Hordes so that I can get materials to start enchanting and upgrading items.

All in all, I am pretty happy that I took the plunge. The build feels extremely strong already, and I am clearing content so much faster than I was when I was previously having to bait targets into my thorns damage. Truth be told, were I starting out right now, I would have leveled blessed hammers from the start. It just feels better to play than the current state of Thorns. Sure, I was able to farm bosses pretty easily, but it was at the cost of pretty much every other type of content. At some point, once I get my Paladin stabilized, I will likely return to the Warlock and see how far I can push its damage. Largely, I am just hoping to get something to a point where T12 content is comfy, so that I can knock out all of the seasonal achievements. My goal is to 100% the season and get that done before the Path of Exile II league drops at the end of the month.

Are you playing Diablo IV? What build are you running? How far into the Torment ladder have you managed to push? Drop me a line below.

Warlock Pretty Great

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Good Morning, Folks! This is going to seem like a bit of whiplash, but my opinion of Diablo IV Lord of Hatred has evolved yet again. At this point, I am over Paragon 150 with the Paladin, which means I have picked up most of the best nodes on the Paragon board. I’ve done a lot of content, both in queuing directly for things for the purpose of knocking out seasonal journey achievements, and through the War Plan system. Essentially, there is this awkward phase around Torment 1 where it is a bit of a struggle to get Ancestral gear, and I found that frustrating. Once I pushed through this by using the crafting system to craft up blue and yellow ancestrals into usable gear, things started to move more smoothly. I have to give them credit; the crafting system is phenomenal, and essentially, you can take any item and make it function for your build so long as it is the right item level. Essentially, the game has the POE2 version of the Chaos Orb, which removes an affix and adds a random affix, and through this, you can kind of brute force your way to something useful. If you only have one bad affix, there is still the enchanting system that can be used to target, remove it, and get something usable.

At this point, I have a fairly optimal set of legendaries and a few key uniques that buff the amount of thorns damage that I am dealing. I can relatively easily do Torment VII, but mostly do VI because speed is king when it comes to farming content. That said, I feel like I have hit the ceiling of the initial thorns leveling build that I have been running. There is an endgame version of this that changes out a lot of stuff, and I could move over to it. Though I am tempted if I have to respec my character anyway, to migrate over to an Arbiter Hammerdin build, which is supposedly extremely good at speed farming. The biggest problem that I have with the current version of Thorns is that it relies entirely upon Blessed Shield to deliver most of the damage, which moves slowly, and ends up creating a delayed damage output. So you either have to lead with shield throw so that mobs run into it as they are coming at you, or have a trail of mobs who are slowly being whittled down by the shields as they follow behind you. If I want to continue playing Paladin and push it to the higher tiers… I need to make a decision and deal with what will probably be a minor setback as I start acquiring gear again.

I’ve also been leveling a Warlock, in part because this is the build that the streamer Raxxanterax has been playing and it looks insanely powerful. Legitimately, it seems like Dread Claws Warlock is this league’s version of the early Spiritborn builds that were so insanely powerful at the launch of the last expansion. Initially, this relies upon Command Fallen as its builder and Dread Claws as its spender. I did not really love the feeling of Command Fallen, because I went into it expecting them to feel a bit like Summon Raging Spirits. However, once you get the Fallen Rush notable, it transforms them into an Abyss ability, making it so you summon 3 at a time, and allows you to target them by resummoning them. This makes it feel much better, and pretty much I am constantly spamming both my right and left clicks to either summon/target my pack of Fallen or fire off cascading dread claws, which gives it a pretty comfortable gameplay style. You are always targeting things before they can get to you, and your Dread Claws are mostly doing all of the work to mop things up before they can damage you.

The entire build gets a bit more Summoner feeling when you unlock the Warlock quest chain at 15. This involves you going and defeating a series of demons and binding them to your will, so that you can then choose one to permanently follow you. The Dread Claws build uses Laalish, which is a giant worm that is constantly following you and leaping out of the ground to eat mobs. Having one big minion, a turret-style minion, and a swarm of fallen minions makes the entire thing feel a bit more like I wanted it to feel from the start. Your Ultimate is a swarm of minions that effectively shred the target, making short work of whatever you throw them on. The only negative about it is that the swarm is stationary, so you have to sometimes nudge a mob back into it to get the full effect. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the Warlock and look forward to pushing it to 70, and then building the proper endgame build with all of my paragon points.

One other side note, there is an event running right now that adds an extra battle pass to the game that unlocks a bunch of World of Warcraft-themed weapon skins. There is also a rather expensive pack that gives you all of the Tier 2 armor sets, and I am specifically the kind of sucker who fell for that. The T2 era was the golden days of World of Warcraft for me, and those are some of my favorite sets. So I was more than happy to be able to run around as a Judgement Paladin or a Nemesis Warlock. It also seemed fitting to have the Warlock using Corrupted Ashbringer. I have enough disposable income to make these bad decisions, because really… it is not worth what they are charging. However, given how much bullshit is happening in my life right now… I will take my joy however I can get it, even if that means retail therapy for some overpriced digital baubles.

In other news, we have been in teaser season for a bit with Path of Exile II slowly releasing some very short videos. SirGog has finally decided to make a video covering everything that has been released to date, so if you have not been watching as they slowly drip-feed us information, I suggest checking out his summary. The entire League Reveal presentation takes place on the 7th, and the full release of the content drops on the 29th. As SirGog indicates in the video, this is a really weird sequence of events for Grinding Gear Games. This is not the way that previous leagues have been teased, nor is the timing of the release following their normal patterns either. Generally speaking, we get the content revealed one week, and then the next week we have the start of the league. Anzac Day was the last public holiday until June, so I am not entirely certain why the big gap between the two events. Either way, I am hoping to wrap up my Diablo IV shennannigans well before the 29th so that I can hop into Path of Exile II fully, with no regrets.

What have you been playing? Have you tried out Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred? If so, what are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.