Hey Folks! I spent some more time yesterday tweaking and leveling my Wintertide Brand Occultist. I’ve dialed up the defensive layers a bit and I have a Watcher’s Eye that should also help whenever I can get the free passive points to allocate a jewel socket for it. This is never going to be a bossing character for me, so with that in mind, I am largely leaning into comfortable mapping clears while upping the survival. Essentially I think my next play is to pick up another strength travel node, which should allow me to drop a +30 strength node and then use that point to allocate the socket for the Watcher’s Eye.
I had a Dawnbreaker laying around in my vault that I picked up off Searing Exarch, and I decided to give it a spin. Sure I lost some damage by dropping the caster shield with +1 to cold gems, but I also gained a number of defensive layers baked into the shield alone. Essentially what this is doing is splitting some portion of the damage I am taking and then making it resolve against my Fire Resistance. Sure my Fire Resistance is not amazing and nothing like the 90% that I have on my Juggernaut… but it is enough to sort of blunt the blow for all other attacks a bit. The shield alone is worth almost 2000 armor by itself and has a small amount of life baked into it along with a 46% block chance. While it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically… so far I am thinking the Dawnbreaker is helping.
I recorded another video yesterday afternoon of me playing the class and talking through some of the decisions that I am making. Now this video was recorded before I made a number of tweaks like the Dawnbreaker last night but still shows the general state of the build. If you want to look at the state of my tree here is a POB, but note that I currently am muling a new wand with my Juggernaut to level it because I can handle crucible progress so much faster with that character. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty happy with where things are so far. Sure it is weaker than most of my other builds but I am actually enjoying running around with Wintertide Brand again. Would I start that build in another league over RF Jugg? Probably not. That does not mean however I am not enjoying myself.
Now that the weather is warmer, my wife has been spending a lot of time out in the backyard in the evenings reading. Around 8 pm I decided to go out and check on her, since often she comes in way earlier than that, and found that Greybie had decided to hang out as well. He’s been coming around to the backyard more often lately and it is pretty great. So I spent about an hour out there petting him and trying to coax him up onto my lap. He is still a little too skittish for me to actually lift him up and place him there… and expect him to do anything other than run away. When not actively getting attention he would set up shop underneath one of our chairs and just lay there.
All the while we were back there Tripod was over on the concrete patio off our kitchen… some 15 feet away. Greybie and Tripod seem to tolerate each other, but I am not certain they are actually friends yet. She kept coming closer to us… like she wanted to come over and get attention as well and then would retreat back under the patio table rubbing up against the chairs. I feel like she is on the brink of being more sociable, but I am not entirely sure how to tip her over. Our thought is maybe if she watches us petting Greybie… and him being seemingly happy about it… that she might realize that she too can get love and attention. I would honestly love it if Greybie set up shop in our backyard as well because at least knowing those two cats are relatively safe and happy would be a load off my mind. He lives somewhere down the cul de sac but given that he spends MOST of us time in the orbit of our house… I don’t think he has another family.
I really need to start taking my Steam Deck out into the backyard with me and playing something while just chilling with the feral cats. Last night was delightful but other than when I was actively playing with Greybie I was somewhat bored. You can only screw around on your phone so much before it is no longer interesting.
Hey Folks! Yesterday I went down yet another rabbit hole of trying to figure out what exactly I wanted my exit condition to be for the Crucible League. The problem with Path of Exile is there is a nigh endless amount of goals that you can have, and at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to complete none of them. A Diablo III season is far more clear-cut in that you have a single seasonal journey with fixed rewards at the end of it, and a clear “finished” point where it is pretty safe to walk away from. With Path of Exile it all depends upon your core activities, and this league for better or worse has been a league of me revisiting old builds and trying to make them work. I did this with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and then again with Explosive Arrow Champion. Then there was the somewhat meme build of Explosive Raging Spirits where I largely created the build entirely around a single pseudo-eight-link that I found in my travels. It worked well enough, but I also didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep the build around for long.
So yesterday I set my sights on completely changing this character up and revisiting one of my first builds that I fell in love with… Wintertide Brand. Now my first Wintertide character was actually a botched attempt at Righteous Fire. I really enjoyed the brand gameplay and I leaned into that rather than actually transitioning to RF when I should have. More modern Wintertide brands tend to focus around the Occultist ascendency, and it is easy enough to respec my Necromancer into that as a result I set out doing just that yesterday with increasingly misnamed BelNecroSrsly. I did not necessarily follow a guide for this transformation but instead went out to my favorite source for the research of builds that are actually being played… POE.ninja. If you set the search parameters to Occultist and the main skill to Wintertide brand, you can see a rundown of what is actively being played.
Now the highest dps version of the build had a Mageblood and a corrupted Loreweave… so I decided that I needed to set my sights a little lower than that. The next one was running Chaos Innoculation which again… not exactly something that I wanted to mess with for the time being. Eventually, I decided to go with the level 90 build for a character called Frosty_Lady. I figured that I could tweak that to my tastes which gives you a POB that looks a little something like this for my current path forward. ultimately I was trying to make as few changes as possible so essentially I needed to swap out my gloves because they were minion damage based, but there really was nothing else special about those. I needed to pick up the remaining resists that I needed off my Necklace since I would be dropping the unique I had been using for SRS. The key unique to make the build feel good was a corrupted Rime Gaze with a Labyrinth Enchant on it giving Wintertide Brand +4 Maximum Stages. Lastly, I swapped out and sold my expensive SRS shield for a more standard Spirit Shield with +1 levels to all Cold Spell Gems. Technically I spent probably 3 Divine Orbs assembling the specific components of the build but then made back way more than 3 Divine Orbs selling the gear that I was using for Summon Raging Spirits.
I have some problems to work through but for the most part, it feels really good clearing maps… considerably less good clearing bosses. I’ve gotten very used to the Juggernaut and Champion that can largely laugh off most incoming damage. This is absolutely a squishier build as a whole, and there are some tweaks that I would probably do to make it feel better. Firstly I would like to get my Armor and Regen up considerably higher. Next, I would love to figure out a way to stack some blocks considering that is not yet a really viable means of defense. The only reason why it feels as good as it does is because cold damage is in itself a defensive layer. Wintertide Brand slows and ultimately freezes mobs around you making it so that they are either not dealing damage to you… or are moving slow enough that you can easily avoid them.
My defenses are honestly pretty puny at the moment. I only have roughly 3500 health and a little over 600 regeneration which combined with only 69% physical damage reduction from armor and a measly 24% block chance… and all of my Energy Shield going to Eldritch Battery… means that when I get hit I get hit it lands extremely hard. My resists are also not amazing… because while capped I don’t have much that is increasing my maximum resistances. So essentially I need to evaluate my tree a bit to see where I can drop some damage and gain some additional life and defensive layers. This will never be a bossing character for me, so in theory I mostly just want to make it feel good for mapping purposes, and as it stands Wintertide Brand already decimates trash mobs so I can afford to lose some damage to gain some a bit of comfort level. I am sure I will probably record one of my dumb videos showing the current state of the build.
After fiddling around with the Wintertide build and getting functional, I decided to spend some time clearing out influenced maps that I had sitting in my bank. This ultimately led me to acquire another set of Shaper Fragments. So I decided to test my mettle against Shaper on my Explosive Arrow Champion, and much to my surprise, it was way easier to do the fight than on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I managed to get through the fight without any deaths and acquired the last Uber Elder fragment that I was missing. So here we are… organically arriving at being able to potentially attempt defeating the memory of The Elder in the Shaper’s Realm that has been haunting my sidebar for a month.
For this fight I opted to go back to my Juggernaut, and took a few deaths in the process but ultimately defeated “Uber Elder” which means I acquired my third void stone… and now all of my maps drop significantly higher. I think the lowest level map can drop for me now is 14, giving me a much wider range of things for farming purposes. I have to say that mechanically on some levels the fight was easier than doing The Shaper or The Elder by themselves. I took deaths in part because I was not prepared to dodge specific mechanics happening at the same time. I think given enough iterations of this fight, I could probably go deathless once I got used to everything. Mostly my key problem with boss encounters in Path of Exile is that they take so much effort to be able to even attempt. If I could run them back to back I would ultimately memorize the patterns and get really good at them. However, doing these once every few weeks… means I lose a lot of progress each time I drop into the encounter because I am going to be rusty each time.
Ultimately though I guess I now know what I have to do to get through this league. I am going to set my sights on beating The Maven encounter, which admittedly feels much easier to get to than Uber Elder given that you just have to chain-run invitations until you get enough fragments to face her. At this point, I am at 8 of 10 fragments so I should be able to burn through this pretty quickly if I actually set my sights on accomplishing it. My hope is that I can take her down by exercising the fact that I have six portals… because I sincerely doubt I will successfully complete a memory game phase. Having three void stones means I am officially further along in this league than I have ever been before. It just feels like Uber Elder was such a pain in the ass that I have to get through Maven now just to finish the job.
I also plan on devoting some time to making Wintertide feel a bit better. Feeling confident enough to tackle this mission is its own accomplishment in my progression through Path of Exile as a whole. I guess the next major achievement would be to go after a build of my own design, without specifically following anything active in the meta. I still feel like I am years away from that accomplishment even though I am well over a thousand hours into this game now. I have no real clue WHY Path of Exile is so engaging for me, but it feels like it is this puzzle that I must solve and each time I clear something new… it uncovers a whole series of other puzzles to be solved just beneath that surface. I will probably spend some more time researching various Wintertide builds on POE.Ninja in order to see how they are solving the survival challenges so that I can devise my own path forward.
Good Morning Friends. Yesterday in the AggroChat Slack there was this whole thread about growing up in the gifted and talented program, but also being just “gifted” enough to fully understand your own inadequacies. I felt this so damned hard because this is essentially the story of my life. I was on the mediocre end of the gifted pool and while I participated in all of the elevated events, and was actually good enough at the academic bowl to place in the district banquet and force the horrible football coach to have to accept an award on my behalf… I never really felt good enough to actually be recognized as such. For most of my life, I have been “winging it” and bumblefucked my way into the occasional success. Take for example this cosmetic outfit that I am wearing on my Explosive Arrow Champion. There was no real planning here, just me clicking on a few random cosmetics because I hate the default look of low-level gear in Path of Exile. By sheer accident, I came up with something that I really love, which is this whole microcosm of my life as a whole. Any real success that I have had… has been purely by accident.
I know yesterday I released this entire blog post talking about my experiences from the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to refine those thoughts a bit and opted to do so in a video of me playing around on my Scion in Path of Exile. Something that I have noticed about myself is that often when I sit down to write about something, it causes me to re-evaluate that topic in my head. This video is largely the place I arrived at after writing an entire blog post about the experience. It allowed me to really refine my thoughts into a sharper point and get to the crux of what my primary problem with the game is. I decided to skip the clever title card and just go with something way more honest. If you want to hear me ramble on for fifteen minutes about the core of my frustrations feel free. But I will skip to the chase and tell you that ultimately it boils down to the level scaling feeling really bad.
In the video, I am poking around at a new character that I have been leveling that I called BelGlamrock mostly because the default Scion appearance looks like an outfit straight out of the hair metal band era. The weird thing about this character is that I honestly have no real intention of ever gearing it fully or turning it into a real character for playing the game. Truth be told, I am not sure if I really like the Scion as a starter class at all. It feels kind of directionless, but I guess that makes sense given it doesn’t have a fixed starter location on the passive tree. The benefit of the class is that you can mix and match the ascendency style of the other classes and build a sort of hybrid to do very specific things. This also feels like the weakness of the class because it doesn’t really have an identity of its own.
Ultimately I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with the character. It was a means to an end and the fact that I had never gotten the achievement for killing Dominus on the Scion bugged me for some reason. I don’t fully understand why I have been motivated to get specific achievements in Path of Exile given that I have never really been an achievement-focused person in any other games. Generally speaking, the only achievements that I spend time on, are the ones that give me something tangible as a reward. This is in part why I have enjoyed the Achievement structure of Guild Wars 2 because almost always they end in some sort of interesting tangible reward. My drive to get achievements in Path of Exile however completely flies in the face of my well-established patterns. I get nothing from having knocked these out other than the sense of checking something off a long list of achievements that I have yet to complete. Similarly, I have this irrational desire to run two characters through Act 2, just to side with the Bandits I have never sided with before in order to knock that achievement as well.
Speaking of achievements, I am nearing 19 league challenges which will give me another sad little totem pole for my hideout. In order to finish this off I respeccced my Atlas Passive tree to drop support for incursion and pile on some of the Abyss nodes. I realize that Abyss is not exactly great in this league, but I am pretty close to knocking out the challenge associated with it. Essentially I need to find several more 4 pit Abysses and I think by trying to force the chance of seeing an Abyssal Depths… it will cause this to happen. In the grand scheme of things I really like Abyss as a mechanic, but it does feel way less rewarding than it did before their most recent revamp. I am going to be running maps anyways to build up sulphite for delving so I might as well be getting the mechanics I need for challenges in the process. I also have a stockpile of abyss scarabs that I can use to force it as well.
I am not entirely certain what my exit strategy is for this league. I’ve still not earned my last two void stones, so given the state my Explosive Arrow Champion is in, I might lend some focus to that. I’ve tried to accumulate the fragments needed for shaper and ultimately uber elder organically, but that is really slow going. I am wondering if I should just use some of my war chest of resources and buy the fragments that I need outright. I still find Delve deeply relaxing but also I am starting to feel a little listless there. I’ve taken down three crystal kings in recent days and failed to get a good amulet, but even if I did get a good one… what exactly would I do with it? I am not sure there are other builds that I really want to spend time doing given that in this league I have made four completely functional builds for doing the various content that I really want to be doing.
I think maybe when I finish up this 19th challenge for the league I might take a bit of a break. I can do so happy that I accomplished pretty much everything that I really wanted to accomplish save for the Uber bosses. I might take a run at those, but to be honest… I don’t really love bossing in the first place. I like the big loot explosions that come from lower tiers of activities and I can’t really bring myself to buy an endless supply of fragments from the trade league in order to chain-run bosses. I might want to do some more heist and burn down my contracts a bit, but other than that… I think I can maybe put the Crucible league to bed for awhile.
Good Morning Folks! This past weekend there was another Diablo IV Stress Test event, and I thought I would poke my head in to see how it felt. On the show Saturday night I talked about it feeling much better as a whole and that is true. However better, in this case, does not necessarily equate to “great”. I am still not super sold on Diablo IV but since I was gifted a copy, I figure I will be playing some at launch regardless so I can see if yet again they make a number of tweaks to potentially improve things further. One thing that shocked me about the “Server Slam” event is how short it actually was. I fully expected this thing to last until mid-day on Monday as most “weekend” events do. Instead, it cut off in the middle of Sunday afternoon unexpectedly. The only reason why I realized this had happened is that I finished a quest and could not port anywhere, after trying ten times I opted to log out and back in when I was hit with the “event is over” banner on the Battle.net launcher. I found it weird that it did not actually disconnect me from the server, it just stopped my character from doing anything meaningful.
Since I was testing out the changes, I decided to play Barbarian again because of the classes available it is really the one that is nearest and dearest to my heart. If there was a Crusader you would likely see me playing nothing but that all the time as I did when I played Diablo Immortal. The last round of testing the Barbarian felt awful. It felt like I had no survivability and struggled to keep up gear levels so that I could actually kill anything before it killed me. Of note… during neither beta did I spend any time “farming” gear drops and instead just sort of subsisted with whatever happened to fall while playing the game. One of the biggest weaknesses that Diablo IV has in my opinion is the fact that the world is constantly leveling up with you. I think this is an attempt at creating an evergreen game that “lasts longer” for the player, but the end result feels like the world gets more difficult faster than you gain power. While it was less noticeable during this test, it still felt like from levels 15-20 I lost power and the time to kill in the world kept getting worse.
One massive change in this test was that they nerfed drop rates into the ground. Like I knew without a doubt that legendary drops were increased for testing purposes in the last open beta weekend. However, I did not expect them to be quite this anemic going forward. It was level 17 before I found a single legendary item, and even then… by the time I finished with the weekend I had seen two and they were both rings. The only gear slot that seems to matter significantly is your weapon slot, and I struggled consistently to find upgrades there. The game just does not really seem to drop a lot of gear in general or when it does… drops them in a manner that is not upgrading. I saw lots of items that were just slightly worse than what I was wearing but extremely rarely ever saw something with more power. Even when you stumbled across a Loot Goblin, they seemed deeply anticlimactic for the amount of effort they took to kill. I took one down on Sunday and it dropped 2 blue items, 2 gems, and some Obols the new pseudo-Kadala currency.
Speaking of Obols… this is a screenshot from the last test of that vendor. It became my prime source of upgrades and was how I got most of the legendary items that I pulled last time around. In this test… it was nerfed into the ground and became a largely worthless interaction. Since I was not getting gear through other sources I kept spending my Obols trying to target specific slots, and the vast majority of the time I would end up getting a white item and trigger the “bad luck” voice line from the vendor. At level 20, I kept trying to target a chest piece and never got anything that would be considered an upgrade. At a minimum, this vendor should be dropping Magic and Rare items much more frequently, because every activity in the game seems to be balanced around paying out a stock of this dumb alternative currency. If this vendor is pure shit, then it makes every interaction with the game feel much worse.
One interaction however that was massively improved was the completion of “Cellars”. These are little mini dungeons where you rush in, kill a pack of monsters and get a chest to drop. These went from being the most useless thing in the game to quite possibly the most lucrative when it comes to farming items. These chests almost always rewarded two yellows, two blues, some gems, and some gold. I feel like Blizzard does not really want us farming Cellars over and over… but also right now as it stands those are way more beneficial than running an actual dungeon given that they both provide about the same amount of rewards but for a significantly lower time investment. I fully expect the cellar system to be nerfed into the ground before launch and for them to once again fade into something that is not worth your time to complete.
The goal of this weekend was to successfully kill Ashava, and for doing so you got some nifty-looking horse armor. I have to admit this was not necessarily my personal goal for the weekend. I wanted to see if Barbarian felt any better, and at least partially it does… not great… but better. After editing the AggroChat podcast on Sunday I decided to finally make my way over to the staging grounds for the Ashava fight. My hope was that if I showed up early enough I might happen upon a decent group and that seems to have paid off as everyone that was milling around in the area was at least level 20. This was apparently a huge problem for players this weekend as level 2 players could wander into the area and essentially destroy the chances of that group succeeding at the encounter since Ashava is templated at level 25 and does not scale.
This is the one where I am going to complain at length about this encounter and the way it works. The difficulty level of this encounter does not necessarily match the open-world nature of the encounter. This fight feels like it is designed to have a team full of ringers that actually know what is going on. Instead, you get a group of random players and hope that fate smiles upon you and you end up with a group that is at least going to give it their best effort. The limited-time nature of the fight however makes it so that if you failed… you don’t get another chance any time soon. If I were Blizzard I would change the way this works entirely and make it so that you queue into the “serious mode” version of Ashava and then have a much more watered-down version that exists in the real world showing up on a specific timer… but also make that timer fire every thirty mins rather than every three hours.
The group I was in managed to take down Ashava with roughly three of the fifteen-minute clock left. What I did not realize however is that I got in on the very last Ashava kill of the entire testing period. I wandered over through the sheer happenstance of finishing editing and having time to play and made zero plans to actually accomplish this over the weekend. I am deeply fortunate that I happened upon a group of players who did not give up and just kept throwing themselves at the boss. What did annoy me however is that before the fight I purposefully slotted Poison Resistance into every gem slot that I had, and it did not seem to make a damned bit of difference on this fight. This only leads me back down the path of that gear doesn’t really mean anything and only your weapon slot seems to make any significant difference in your performance. For example, in Path of Exile, if you equip a couple of frost resistance rings before you face Merveil, it will absolutely make that encounter much easier and oftentimes just straight-up trivializes it. Poison Resistance did not seem to do a damned thing against getting clipped by one of Ashava’s attacks and only through spamming potions were you able to survive getting poisoned.
I hope at some point that this game is good and worthy of the Diablo name. I like the story well enough, but the moment-to-moment gameplay still just feels bad. Maybe that is the wrong statement to make. It doesn’t feel like an Action RPG should, or at least how I have come to expect one to play. It seems to be going for more consequential gameplay, which is counter-intuitive to this genre for me at least. I care about shredding monsters and getting “phat lewts”, and this game doesn’t really deliver in that department. Fights feel like a battle of attrition more than a power fantasy, and as a result, I am not sure it is ever going to be my jam. The weekend of playing Diablo IV made me dive back into Path of Exile after the event was over and it just felt so much better. Maybe this is just a franchise I need to let go of in the way I have at least partially let go of Zelda after Breath of the Wild and Metroid after Dread. It sucks… but maybe it is time for me to move on considering I apparently have preferences that are not going to be served going forward.
