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Goodbye Stampede and Hello Minions

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When Path of Exile II was released into early access I had a pretty clear vision. I wanted to play a big tanky character that ran around with a two-handed weapon and a shield. I struggled to get this off the ground because starting off as the Warrior is pure misery. However given enough bashing my head against the wall I managed to make it work, and when I stumbled onto Stampede late in the build the rest of the game went much more smoothly. I used Stampede for clear and Hammer of the Gods to one or two shot bosses and life was sublime. However Stampede ate a pretty big Nerf, and it was already a janky mess to play and I just lost steam in trying to push forward. I made it to the end of white maps before I was lured away by one of my alts.

It was a night and day difference playing an actual “on meta” build and was able to pretty much steamroll the campaign. There were a few bosses that I had to take two attempts at, on December 20th when I last made a post I was just starting Act III Normal, and on the 23rd I cleared Act III Normal and progressed into mapping. I started out pretty slowly, but without really doing any work to fix my gear I was able to pick up where my Titan left off and started ripping through maps so much faster than Stampede ever could. The thing is… I was weirdly tankier, or at least felt it as Grim Feast allowed me to gather up some 11,000 Energy Shield over the course of a map. I’m now chipping away at Tier 13 maps and have done a couple of T15 maps which is the highest natural unmodified map tier available in the game. During all of that time, I think I have taken a single death in a map, and that was after doing a full clear and getting credit for it and going back to try a very rippy ritual.

Since we have no Path of Building II, I took some time this morning and input my build in the Maxroll Build planner tool so you could follow along if you so choose. Basically it is derived from the standard maxroll build, but instead, I decided to lean into a unique which is just fun to use. Corpsewade are low-level boots that have the effect of casting Decompose on any corpse that your character walks in the vicinity of… and honestly, the range is pretty wide for triggering this. So what this means in practice is that I am actively poisoning packs of monsters that I am fighting and occasionally either my Flame Wall or the Molotov cocktails that my Skeleton Arsonists are throwing will ignite the cloud of poison causing it to explode for more damage. Packs of monsters die extremely quickly, and this has continued to be true as I have progressed into upper mapping levels.

The biggest challenge of the build is that I am running two unique items and as a result giving up a chunk of potential stats from each of them. My resists are in a reasonable state with 73/69/75 elemental resists and 59 chaos. I am giving up a ton of life by using Ghostwrite to convert 50% of my life to flat Energy Shield, which I then buff further with the passive tree. I’ve contemplated giving up my “Fart Boots” as I call them and going with some 30% movement speed Energy Shield boots with a lot of flat life on them to push that conversion further. I could also go Armor/Energy Shield instead which would help to give me a bit more of a lead in the armor department for when hits finally land. Right now I am anointing Mental Perseverance which takes 10% of my damage out of Mana. I tried running with Mind over Matter and it was a bit much and largely the 50% reduction in mana regen made it too hard to keep mana sustained. 10% is just enough to help blunt the damage a bit.

The biggest challenge that I am dealing with is map sustain. You would think running a T15 map would not yield T1 maps… but you would be wrong. In fact I rarely get maps to drop that are of sufficient level to keep pushing forward. I need T13s right now to keep my quest going, but at the moment I have two T14s before having to slog through lower-level maps and praying for those unicorn high-level maps to drop. This feels REALLY bad, especially considering that I am investing in every map drop node on the atlas tree and also running as many towers with additional Waystone chance on them as I can. I do not want to have to buy maps from trade, because buying maps feels so awful. The only way to do it efficiently is to engage with those third-party community discords, and I would just rather not.

The other problem with mapping in Path of Exile II is effectively the same problem running the Monolith in Last Epoch. Unless you get some bonus content to show up, it feels bad to clear your way through a map. Then there is the ever-present threat of a single death causing you to lose all of the things that are buffing the map to make it feel halfway decent in the first place. There just isn’t enough going on and really when you kill the rares you might as well port out and call it done as opposed to full clearing, because it is super uncommon that anything of consequence drops after that point. Packs of blues really are useless, and only serve to slow down your progress. Loot in general feels like it is in a bad place if you are not stacking mass quantities of rarity. Essentially… right now mapping is pretty boring.

At this point, I feel committed to seeing it through and getting all of the normal atlas passive points by completing all of the red map quest objectives. Even those feel way less exciting than they did in Path of Exile 1. Essentially in POE1, you had to run every map at least once while completing the bonus objective in order to get your 115 out of 115 atlas completion. Here in Path of Exile II for the white map tiers, you have to complete 10 maps, yellow 8 maps, and red 6 maps… and it sort of feels like you are always trying to choose the lesser of evils when it comes to map layouts. The individual maps themselves are just worse than Path of Exile 1. They are all far too cluttered and cumbersome to clear, and always end up with a situation where you missed a rare near the beginning of the map and now have to backtrack all the way through the entire maze of tight corridors in order to go kill it.

At some point I am probably going to do a follow up to my blog post talking about the things that need to change in Path of Exile II. By then I will probably be closer to 200 hours played and feel like I will have a more nuanced take on the game. Right now I feel the same way about Path of Exile II as I do Last Epoch, where both are good bases to build upon, but that it is probably going to take at least two more years before either game is truly “great”. The coming months are going to be interesting because I feel like there is going to be a battle waged in the community for the soul of the game. Depending on how that shakes out, is going to ultimately determine how much time I will spend focused on this game going forward. I am having fun on the Infernalist Minions build but it is very sad just how different of an experience it is to my Stampede Titan build was. There will always be outliers… but right now we have a scenario where four different builds are fun ti play and the rest of the game is a mess otherwise. My ultimate fear is that GGG is going to Nerf the four builds that actually feel good to play, instead of buffing the hundreds of potential builds that feel like shit.

The Streamer Alkaiser has been mister “Warriors are Fine” up until this point, often saying that folks were struggling due to a skill issue. Recently however he rolled a second character and decided to go down the very meta path of the Monk Invoker, and it has been telling how fast he has essentially changed his tune. On basic gear he said in the above video that he feels tankier and stronger in every possible way on the Invoker as compared to the Warrior. The thing is… this isn’t just a warrior thing. This is effectively everyone who is not playing the meta builds for Invoker, Infernalist, Stormcaller, or Deadeye. SirGog highlighted this problem in a recent video where effectively those four builds make up some 85% of the total pie of the top progressed players in Path of Exile II. Everything else feels worse to play, and everything else has a harder time trading power for item rarity to make the drops feel more meaningful.

Anyways, like I said I have a post in me at some point where I talk about all of the core problems I see with the game, but for now I am progressing through the endgame on a character that has less than a week played on it.

Definitely Early Access

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I was piddling around and running maps and saw clear evidence that we are currently in “Early Access”. I had started a Savannah map and cleared the entire thing… and noticed that the final rare was out of the bounds of the map. I moved around the entire map but there was no way to break out of the boundary and get there. Thankfully this did not brick the node, but I was afraid that there was something cursed about it particularly and worked my way around it leaving it open for the time being. It is very clear that Stampede Explode in my current form is not quite as powerful as it used to be. However, I can still clear reasonably effectively and did get some advice that I want to charge along side of a pack rather than directly at them for maximum efficiency.

There is also apparently a version of the build that still exists in its prior glory, but it involves massively investing in AOE nodes and giving up some of the defense. Since I just was able to hit the 75% block cap, I am hesitant to give that up. However this might be a future goal of the build once I can get my hands on The Surrender, for its life recoup. I need to work on my third and fourth ascendancy point, but I have just lacked the desire to bang my head against that particular wall. I still do not enjoy Sanctum and very much do not enjoy Ultimatum in its current state. I tried doing the Trial of Chaos on my Necromancer yesterday and failed brutally on the third area reminding me just how much that entire experience is a crapshoot tied to RNG.

I keep saying Necromancer instead of Infernalist, because really that is how I think of the build because I am very much a “Minions Matter” character. I spent most of yesterday evening playing it instead of the Titan because it is way more enjoyable and relaxing to play. I managed to get up to the Apex of Filth and the very last thing that I did for the night was kill the Molten boss. It took me two tries, but only because I was a bit too slow while moving out of a big leap slam. I had plenty of time left when I killed him because my Raging Spirits floated above the lava field and were constantly attacking him when he jumped back. I will probably wrap up Act III tonight, and start in on the Cruel acts.

I’ve been running the Necromantle the entire time I have been leveling my Necromancer and yesterday on a whim I decided to throw a Vaal orb against it. I managed to get 15% of Damage Taken Recouped as Life which seems really good because it seems to trigger even if that damage is taken by my Energy Shield and not from my life. Combined with Grim Feast overflowing my Energy Shield, this seems like it might actually be a pretty reasonable defensive layer going forward. I originally was just wearing this chest for leveling purposes, but it might stick around as a more permanent edition to my setup. The energy shield on minions is also pretty nice for their general survival and the 50% faster revive is pretty great in scenarios where a big attack wipes all of them out at once.

It is wild to me how I have moved in opinion from “I don’t think I actually like this game” from the 9th, to really enjoying it in its current state despite the glaring flaws. On some level, I think part of this can be chalked up to a difference in expectations. What I really wanted from Path of Exile II was a much more approachable version of Path of Exile 1, and what we got was too sluggish, too difficult, and honestly just too different for me to immediately like it. Now I have gotten used to it, and have been willing to accept that it isn’t going to be the same game experience. I should have known this was a thing, because I’ve learned not to give my opinion of my wife’s new hairstyles until I have lived with them for a few days… because my immediate reaction is always “change is bad”. There are still aspects of Path of Exile II that I don’t like, and I think maybe on Monday I will cobble together a piece that is essentially an updated version of the Good and Bad with how I feel about the game now that I have put over a hundred hours into it.

Sad Stampede and Angy Firebois

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It took every last exalt I had, but I have balanced out my elemental resistances capping them, and got my chaos up to something reasonable for mapping purposes. I would sure love to have chaos at 75% but for the moment that is just not in the cards. I really need to focus on getting through my third trial so that I can pick up crushing impact, which will make stampede much more effective. I have to admit though I have struggled to get into mapping. It is just so much slower-paced than the equivalent activity in Path of Exile 1 and feels less rewarding. This is probably entirely due to the class that I am playing, but Stampede is super jank when it comes to object collisions. I ran a map yesterday that was chock full of trees… all of them had collisions enabled, which made charging through them feel like I was a steel ball in a Pachinko machine.

There is also the challenge of Stampede Explode eating a pretty sizeable nerf with the most recent patch. Technically it was a bug fix, the end result is that it is doing much less damage. Armor Explosion Support was triggering too many times, leading to the entire process proliferating way more explosions than intended. Now without this, it feels like Stampede is considerably weaker, but still one of the better options for clear that the Warrior has. It is essentially either that or Cleave because the other options are way too cumbersome for hitting multiple targets quickly. Once I get my third ascendancy I will probably go down the path of Avatar of Fire as described in this build. Once I go Crushing Impact on my ascendancy it pretty much means that Boneshatter pops are completely off the menu, but everything else should be generating armor explosions a bit more easily.

All of that said, I spent zero time yesterday on my Titan and instead chilled out playing the Infernalist. I finished up Act II and started Act III and am pretty much still humming along easily. I did encounter a bit of a challenge with the Silverback in Act III, but this was only a problem because I approached from a direction other than where the checkpoint was. That boss is so aggressive that it will attack from what feels like halfway across the map. I feel like when you engage a boss regardless if you triggered the checkpoint, the act of fighting the boss should flag you for it automatically. Though I have to say I am nowhere near as annoyed reclearing content areas as the Witch was I was as the Warrior. Clearing is just so much easier because all I am really doing is running around and spamming flame walls as my angry children do all the work.

Essentially at this point I really want to get the Witch into maps to see if they feel better. Ironically I have the opposite problem that I usually do in Path of Exile, where I have built a very shitty mapper in the Titan but a phenomenal bosser. I can evaporate most bosses in one or two hits at this point, but the act of actually clearing the map is cumbersome as hell. With my Infernalist and my army of Raging Spirits, the clearing part is a breeze and the bosses are not terribly difficult… but just take forever to finally drop. However since I can damage from out of melee range, I mostly just spend my time avoiding the mechanics while my minion army slowly whittles it down. I probably need to do some proper research on what an endgame version of this build looks like so that I can start preparing for that because as soon as I hit Cruel acts I expect to breeze through the rest of the campaign and into maps.

The Necromantle

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve reached the point with Path of Exile II where I am alternating largely between two characters. You have my try-hard Titan Stampede Explode character that is progressing my way through maps, and then you have my way more chill Minion Necromancer Witch that I am progressing through Act II. It is amazing how much more chill the campaign feels now that I have gotten used to mapping. I am uncertain if I simply know the content better, that leveling minion is more relaxed, or by playing a lot of higher-level content I’ve reset the anchor for my new normal. Whatever the case I feel like I need multiple characters so that I can shift back and forth between them as my pace needs change. For those looking to play a Minion character, I am mostly following this guide from Maxroll.

Yesterday I decided that since I was seemingly going to run up a second character and take it somewhat seriously, that I might as well buy a few twink items along the way. The first that I picked up is the Necromantle, which is equipable at level 16 and is pretty much just a universally amazing summoner item. The defense for the item is definitely something I will outgrow, but giving my minions some energy shield and the ability to revive 50% faster is freaking amazing. I can legitimately see myself using this all of the way to the end game. I also looked into Dark Defiler, but it is a bit fraught as it drops at several different item levels with higher tiers of Summon Skeletal Warriors on it. Realistically I need to be swapping my sceptre every few levels to keep current pets, so I am probably going to pass on this item. The other item I have contemplated picking up is The Wailing Wall which is just a universally good defensive item. I would have bought it already but I am lacking in Strength, which is going to be an annoying juggling act as I need that to keep upgrading weapons as well.

Over on my Titan main, I have progressed far enough to be doing Tier 3 maps. In all of my maps run I have taken a single death… which made me fully understand how deaths work. They do not bar your progress as they had originally stated, but the node loses any benefits it might have and also eats the tablet that you were using. I still think this 1 portal stuff is bullshit because if I wanted to play in that manner I would be playing hardcore. I am hoping given time they will back away from it and give us back our six portals. We are still very much in a phase where deaths can happen randomly, and it feels annoying to lose XP and resources when you take one. I had spent most of my time clearing to the north but read that there was a quest I needed to start by finding a Fortress. So I found one off in the mists which I marked with a green circle and am beginning to work my way in that direction.

I found a reasonable option for a neck anoint and added it last night. I had to buy some Greed Destilled Emotions from the currency market but picked up three ire through running a delirium map. Essentially I am trying to get my block as high as I possibly can and between this notable and another one that I have already taken I am gaining both life and mana each time I block. This should help sustain quite a bit while mapping. I ended up having to put Lifetap on my Warcry so that it would not eat all of my mana before dropping Hammer of the Gods. I would absolutely go blood magic but I am not sure it is possible for me to stack enough life regeneration for that to be comfortable. Life in general seems like it is a massive problem for everyone, now that it does not exist on the tree.

In other news, we received notice of an upcoming patch that is tweaking a number of things. There are some buffs to Rolling Slam, so I will have to try it again after those go into effect. I am not sure what difference the buff to shield skills are going to do considering I think there are 3 and none of them are really proper attacks. I am holding off on trying to do any more ascendancies until the Trial of Sehkemas changes go in because it should be much easier for me as melee to complete that. The endgame balance and respec costs are both very welcome. All in all it should be a good patch, and given that I am thankfully not playing any of the abilities that were targetted for nerfs, I should not be hit terribly hard by any of it.

Another useful thing that I have found is a replacement for Awakened POE Trade. SnosME is not going to be supporting POE2 since he is not playing it, and does not really have the passion to try and figure out how it works. As there has been a new project that has sprung up called Sidekick which serves to follow in its footsteps and at least in theory appears like it should support both POE1 and POE2 going forward. Better than anything, it uses the same keybinds so your muscle memory should be able to carry along and keep doing the same thing you are used to with Awakened POE Trade. I just started using this and so far it seems to be doing exactly what I would want it to do. This is going to be hugely beneficial in attempting to pricecheck rares and uniques that I might want to sell.

I could grind my way through the early maps, but I am taking the entire process of the Path of Exile II endgame pretty chill. Right now it is all new, and I want to enjoy myself as much as I can. I am much happier with the game than I was, because I have finally reached a point of equilibrium thanks to some of the recent changes surrounding block, and the upcoming changes should only serve to make it easier for me to move forward. I need to spend some time working on my gear, but in order to do that… I need more currency. I greatly miss Delve and the stable source of income it provided in Path of Exile. I need to find my niche, but mapping strategies in general are way less predictable in this game.

How are you getting along in Path of Exile II so far? Have you made it through both the normal and cruel campaigns? How are you enjoying the endgame thusfar? Or are you instead still struggling to get through Act II and Act III and the walls that they often present to players? Drop me a line below.