League

Two Years of My Life

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Good Morning Folks. Today is the head start for Midnight, and it begins at roughly 5 pm CST. I find it interesting that they are specifically choosing that time frame for the start of a new expansion rather than the normal weekly reset time. Since Panda Remix, I have mostly been playing Belgraven, my Dark Iron warrior, as my main because I have always loved Dwarves… and always wanted to be able to play a Dark Iron. Blackrock Depths to this day is probably my favorite dungeon in the game because it was an entire whole-assed city down there, and it felt like a living, breathing, functional place. So while I have Belghast, my original warrior main at the level cap as well… I am choosing to move forward with a new legacy as I am this fiery Dark Iron dude. That feels a bit fitting, honestly, since I am no longer the Belghast that played World of Warcraft. I am Belghast, the blogger, podcaster, and friend to thousands, thanks to the weird fucking life that I have lived. I have a lot of baggage towards World of Warcraft because when I first left the game… I was in a really bad mental state.

There is an addon that has been cycling around the “social medias” called Account Played that visualizes all of the time you have spent playing World of Warcraft and groups it by class. All that is required is installing the addon and then logging in every character on your account, and now that the Warband makes this so much easier because you can see every character from the login screen… I decided to take the plunge and try it. I knew this was going to be a scary proposition, and this does not take into account the fact that I have a second account… nor any of the time I have spent on beta realms and in World of Warcraft Classic. So when I say I have spent two years of my life playing World of Warcraft, all of those extra realms account for the missing days. No wonder this game has such a fundamental effect on me, and why I have so many deep emotions tied to it. There are people that I met through this game who have become some of my closest adult friends. World of Warcraft feels like a high school reunion whenever I play it… and it has all of the same complicated emotions that go along with that. It was a place and a time in my life that felt as fundamental as going to college, and that might seem odd to people who are not steeped in this world, but as I age, it feels less and less weird to me.

As far as the time break-out goes… I am not shocked by that in the least. Since the Warband gives me easy access to see every single character on my account. I have Eight Warriors, Eight Hunters, Five Deathknights, and Three Paladins. Warrior was the very first character that I rolled when I got into beta testing, and it was a Tauren. If I am going to play a random character in a World of Warcraft Event league… I am going to play a Warrior. What would even be wilder is if this could somehow track the amount of time played per spec, because I imagine I have spent way more time in Protection Spec as a Warrior and Paladin than any other spec. I could have absolutely called Mage as my least-played class, and Priest, I knew, would have been pretty low as well. What I was not expecting was Demon Hunter to be as low as it is, given that I mained it for an expansion. However, it also has not been out that long in the grand scheme of things compared to Warrior. I think I have as many Deathknights as I do, largely because it allowed me to rapidly create a functional character on a server, given it started at I think level 25ish? Levels do not mean much after all of the squishing that has happened.

I am looking forward to giving Midnight a spin tonight whenever it launches, and I expect to largely drop all of the quests that I have on Belgraven like a hot rock and move on with my life. I have contemplated dropping Blacksmithing as my profession and going for pure harvesting as I go into the new content. I think maybe herbalism is a good call, because there will always be demand for flower pickers in the world. Especially since I have reached a point of largely wanting to sell whatever I happen to be finding… double harvesting seems like a good call. The other option would be to mirror Belghast proper and go with Enchanting, because there is always a need for enchanting resources as well. I will probably continue to run old content on OG Bel for that precise reason because I can convert all of those purples into shards and sell them on the open market. I’ve never been one to accumulate much wealth in World of Warcraft, and I am going to see if I can change that, especially given that I have enjoyed being a vendor so much in Path of Exile.

Speaking of Path of Exile, today is also the drop of the Mirage League live stream, and with it comes a Twitch drop that works in both Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. This is where my next few weeks are going to get weird because I fully expect to be mainlining POE, and then playing Midnight, Dune, and Enshrouded as a bit of a palate cleanser. It is really hard to gauge what I am going to end up playing in this league until I have seen the trailer and, more importantly, the patch notes. Since I believe I have convinced Ace to take the plunge, I feel like I am not sure I want to go with Righteous Fire in this league as my starter. I might revisit the Golem Elementalist character and either play it with Ice Trap or try to turn it into some sort of Minion character. There is some thought that maybe some of the Phrecia classes might be going core, and if so, I will absolutely be playing Servant of Arakaali minions, because it was too damned much fun during Phrecia 2.0.

As far as a wish list for this league. I would really like to see some version of Mercenaries go core. GGG said that they would like to bring it core, but it would need some sort of rebalance to make it viable. I liked gearing out Mercenaries and really loved that aspect of Diablo III, because you could use the Merc to balance out the weaknesses of your build. I hope the Breach tree is just as powerful as it was during the last league, because it was amazing for crafting early gear. I would love to see Kingsmarch simplified, because the process of building it out still seems like a massive hassle and one that you feel obligated to do since it is effectively free currency. I would really love it if they unbound the spell choices during the acts from your class so that I did not feel required to mule a witch every now and then when I need some of those early abilities. Other than that, I would really love to see a further separation between bossing content and mapping content, and make it so that you do not have to kill Maven and Uber Elder to get your third and fourth keystone… either that or make quest versions of those encounters because it takes too freaking long to gather up the resources for those fights.

I am sure tomorrow I will be talking mostly about the Mirage League reveals. What do you want most from this new league? Are you going to be playing Midnight today? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #545 – The Tree Tree

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

This week, we start off with some discussion around Path of Exile 3.27, the Keepers of the Flame league, and how we are doing breach to make things with the tree tree. From there, we talk a bit about the murder of Amazon Game Studios and how New World is essentially a shambling corpse now…  spooky. After that horror story, we needed something chill, so we talked a bit about Powerwash Simulator and its interesting method for delivering a story.  Grace and Bel finally finish the Destiny Rising raid and talk a bit about how good it is at teaching mechanics in lower-level content.  Dispatch is a wildly good game that is being delivered in an episodic method that feels like you are playing a really good television show.  Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity launched and we talk about some of our early thoughts, namely around the builds introduced by the new elite specs.  Finally, we talk a bit about Outer Worlds 2 and how it makes good on the idea of Obsidian’s very own Fallout New Vegas that the first game started.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile 3.27
    • Keepers of the Flame
    • The Tree Tree
  • New World in Zombie Mode
  • Powerwash Simulator
  • Destiny Rising Raid
  • Dispatch
  • GW2 Visions of Eternity Early Thoughts
  • Outer Worlds 2

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

What Happened to Last Epoch?

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Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.

On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.

We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.

Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.

I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.

There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.

The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.

We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.

I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.

The World is Burning

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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.