Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back in full force and continuing our adventure through the second part of the Games of the Year 2025 podcast. We cut the list in half, giving us fifteen games that we were talking about in each episode. This is not necessarily a numerical list, but the titles that appear later in the shows did get more votes. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks. I am still playing Path of Exile II, and shockingly still having things to say about the game. I expected that I would be full on engaged in the Last Epoch Season 2 propaganda machine by now. For any you are interested however Steelmage posted a pretty fun video that attempts to explain all the things about Last Epoch while he was playing it. Over the weekend I reached a point where my build finally started to feel pretty comfortable. Essentially I leap slam into a pack of mobs, infernal cry, and then boneshatter to cause a screen wide explosion augmented by herald of ash. When it comes to boss time I alternate between Perfect Strike and Hammer of the Gods until it is dead. I can’t do any of the one-shot shenanigans but can pretty effectively dispose of most encounters. I need more strength so I can get a bigger hammer with more physical damage on it, but otherwise I am doing pretty great.
I’ve mostly been focused on finding Corruption Nexuses to cleanse so that I can keep bumping up my tier of maps and getting more atlas passives. At this point I have cleared a T9 Nexus and am trying to find my way to another one so I can clear it and bump up to T10. Map sustain has been pretty reasonable and fighting a boss I believe guarantees that you will always get one tier higher, giving you a fairly predictable way to keep moving up. I’ve found a few maps on my atlas that require specific tiers of maps, namely The Copper Citadel requires T15 or higher, and the Megalith requires T11 or higher. I’ve also found a Kalandra map and it did not seem to have any specific requirements, but also has little to no relation to the version of that map that we got in Path of Exile 1. Mostly it is just a pretty tileset that grows as you move along the path with an altar at the end that gives you a special item base.
At this point I have unlocked 20 of 40 Atlas passives and have mostly focused on waystone sustain, adding additional rares to my map, and then diving into rogue exiles making them more likely to wear strength gear and more likely to have unique jewelry (rings, amulets, and belts) equipped. The biggest complaint that I have with the Path of Exile II Atlas is that it feels like I really don’t have much player agency. I’m roughly halfway through the Atlas progression and by now in a Path of Exile league I would have some sort of defined strategy that I am following, influencing a specific type of content to show up more frequently… and honestly by this point probably have at least two mechanics guaranteed on every map. It is just really hard to target farm specific mechanics for resources because Tablets feel totally random in the type you get, and there is nothing like a Scarab that you can use to force mechanics onto each specific map. For example I really need to farm a ton of Expedition, but it is a total crapshoot which maps I am going to have access to that mechanic on.
So much of the Path of Exile II design has been about removing player agency and re-introducing pure dumb luck. This is pretty much the opposite of what players generally want, and once you learn the systems in Path of Exile you are able to radically influence the randomness in a manner that fits the results that you are trying to get out of it. So I get that the passive tree from POE1 might be a bridge to far for the POE2 systems teams… but I posit that maybe it is time to port over Idols. Right now there is a limited time event happening in POE1 called the Legacy of Phrecia, and one of its features is to remove the existing Atlas Passive tree and introduce in its place a series of Idols with randomly rolled attributes. You cannot pinpoint things quite as easily as you can with the Atlas tree, but stacking enough of these allows you to at least shape the outcome of your maps. This truly is a better system design than the current Atlas in Path of Exile II and I am somewhat hoping that maybe Idols as a concept was a test for improving mapping.
In other news I “crafted” if you can use that word… what I consider to be my ideal normal chestpiece for my build. I had been picking up every Ornate Plate base I could find and specifically I got lucky and got a three socket corrupt on a perfect 2.5% life regeneration item. Other than that I have also upgraded my Xoph’s Blood amulet to a non-corrupted version and added the Titanic enchant to it for 5% more strength. At some point I picked up a slightly better version of Infernoclasp, which represents the only other unique that I am using with the build currently. I picked up a couple of new rings and got one of them to 20% Chaos Modifiers which essentially fixed my resists to the point of allowing me to drop the Chaos Resistance corruption I had on a previous chestpiece. My next big expenditure of currency is going to be buying enough Fire quality currency to max out 40% on the Breach ring, which might be enough to cap my fire resistance at 90%.
Currently I have 89% Fire Resistance, and 76% for Cold and Lightning. If I ever manage to ascend again I will pick up the point that makes max fire res account for lightning and cold and then be at 89/90/90 and should be able to push up Fire that last point either through quality on the breach ring or picking up another +1% max jewel socket. I’ve been pushing up my block chance and am now at 53% with my next pick adding another +12% and the ability to get life back on block. I am just shy of 200 life per second regen which feels pretty comfortable, and my armor is in a decent place… but I could always use more of it. What I need now more than anything is strength… so that I can start using the higher tier bases for my two handed maces.
In a perfect world I want a Fanatic Greathammer, but the base Strength requirement for that is 212… which gets multiplied by Giants Blood for a total of 636 required Strength. There is no way for me to get to that without going down to pick up Polymathy. So either I need a perfectly rolled hammer with maximum reduced attributes… or a lot more passive skill points. It seems like the lowest I can reasonably get is 137 Strength from 35% reduced attributes which would still require me to have 381 Strength. I am pretty commited to my next choice and other than that I am 12 points away from being able to reach Polymathy, which means I will not be able to get there until level 93. Realistically… there is no way in hell that I hit that before Thursday and the launch of Last Epoch, so without radically shifting my tree I am going to be stuck where I am for awhile. What is even sadder is that even AFTER allocating all of those nodes I will only be sitting at 442 Strength so would STILL need to find a reduced attribute roll on my mace.
Loot still feels fairly anemic, but I am usually finding one or two exalts per map now. I’ve had a few good tinks and at this point I have found two Twilight Reliquary Keys and two raw Divine Orbs. I used one of the Twilight keys just to see what luck I might have, and pulled a 1Ex mace from it… so I sold the second one for 18 Exalts. I’ve spent one of the Divines on getting a better Xoph’s Blood that I could enchant, and am shopping around for various upgrades with the second one. Technically I have seen three Divine Orbs, but one I got during the campaign that I cashed into Exalted Orbs to help with some early gearing. What this game really needs is Harvest crafting… the ability to change resistances on gear and the ability to spam craft items that are skewed towards a single needed stat. That really is my primary method for attempting to craft gear in Path of Exile 1, and would love to see something similar here. Then again… I could not reasonably get Harvest on every single map to even farm the currency so maybe there are multiple problems with that statement.
I’ve reached a point where I am legitimately enjoying myself… but that said… I am so fucking ready for Tombs of the Erased on Thursday. The systems of Last Epoch are just better designed than the systems of Path of Exile II. All that was lacking was the endgame and I am hoping the Weaver faction and itemized “maps” are going to solve that last piece of the puzzle. I will probably fanboy out a bit over the coming week sharing “why you should play” type posts. So unless something drastic happens over the coming days, this is probably going to be my last Path of Exile II post for awhile.
Good Morning Folks. I am still feeling under the weather, but last night I continued plugging away at my Storm Brand of Indecision Surfcaster in the Legacy of Phrecia Event. There are a few things… firstly this is one of the more squishy builds that I have played. Essentially I have no life and no mana… all of which is being used for reservation auras. The only defenses that I have are roughly 3000 Energy Shield, 20k Evasion, and Ghost Shroud. I can soak the stray hit here or there, but if anything actually gets in contact with me and starts beating away… I am going to drop quickly. Last night I got to the point where I felt comfortable swapping to a Melding of the Flesh setup, and now have 82% Elemental Resistance to all resists. Ultimately my goal is to stack enough +2% max lightning resistance jewels in order to get up to 90% all eventually.
I made a bunch of updates to the build, namely swapping out unique helm and gloves for rares with a large amount of Evasion and Energy shield on them. Essentially having high evasion is a requirement for making Ghost Shroud not feel awful, and the more Energy Shield I can get… the bigger the buffer. I also swapped over to Nebulis which gives me 15% Increased Cold Damage and 20% Increased Lightning Damage per 1% of resist over 75%. So this alone is giving me 105% Increased Cold Damage and 140% Increased Lightning Damage. At some point I want to try and find one with 20/20 on the boosts but for now this one works well enough. I also swapped over to the Headhunter I already had, mostly for the addition buffs which helps make mapping a little bit more smooth. However at some point I will probably swap to a well rolled Crystal Belt to add a bit more defense.
In my adventures yesterday, I noticed a bit of potential unintended interaction. In order to stack more Damage and Critical Chance, I have been leaning heavily into Large Cluster Jewels and Medium Cluster Jewels. I had a bunch of these sitting in my bank and used Harvest elemental re-rolls in order to craft some with reasonable stats. There are a bunch of these that I mostly just settled for anything that looked interesting. One of these abilities was something called Thunderstruck which gives me +20% Lightning Damage, 30% increased Critical Strike Chance, and then the text “Your Critical Strikes Knock Back Shocked Enemies”. This is not a chance to knock back… but if you crit they get knocked back 100% of the time. I did not really expect there to be a significant interaction and largely just went with this notable because it gave a lot of crit and some damage.
However when I started playing with it… I noticed some nonsense happening. I recorded a clip of me fighting a map boss so that you can see what is happening. Essentially Storm Brand of Indecision is constantly attaching and detaching from the target… something that is happening essentially every 0.16 seconds. How this actually plays in a map is that effectively it pushes a mob away from you… rapidly… in an almost comical manner. This reminds me a lot of the nonsense that players were doing with Knock Back and Totems during Trials of the Ancestors to effectively stunlock the mobs and keep them from doing anything. This does not prevent mobs from casting… but it does seem to confuse the shit out of them while they are being rapidly pushed in one direction.
I am also using freeze proliferation and cold exposure on my gloves… which combined with Herald of Ice produces big pops. If you are going to use Heralds… you gotta use the Automaton MTX to make big pretty splashes of course. I am in a weird space with this character because I like it a ton… but also it is way the hell more squishy than any character I normally play. I am not sure how far I will push this character. If I can get it to 90% all res, and maybe swap out a few other pieces for more defenses… it might get to a comfortable place. However it will never be as comfortable as something like my Righteous Fire Scavenger or my history of Chieftains will ever be. Evasion/ES just is never going to feel quite as good as Armor+Block+Max Res+tons of Regeneration.
All in all though, I am pretty happy with Storm Brand of Indecision Surfcaster. It was a lot of fun to pull together and will only get better as I keep poking at it. This is ultimately going to be the last character I probably play of Phrecia because I will obviously be at least giving the Path of Exile II Dawn of the Hunt league a shot. I am likely going to be playing something on the Smith of Kitava first. I just don’t really know what abilities I am going to go with. Maybe whatever that fire spear attack was that was shown in the presentation. Probably pairing a spear with Chernobog’s Pillar shield and then going all in on buffing fire damage as best I can.
Good Morning Folks. I am fighting some generic respiratory crud and as such feeling pretty freaking awful. However here I am sharing my nonsense with you all. Yesterday I finished the campaign on my Storm Brand of Indecision character built on top of the Surfcaster ascendancy. I legitimately have no real idea where I am going with this character, nor is there a major consensus of builds over on POE.Ninja… so I am kind of winging it for the moment. I am currently playing pretty much a pure energy shield build and then using Zealot’s Oath to turn my life regeneration into Energy Shield regeneration. I have no clue how well this is going to work and for how long… but for the moment it feels shockingly comfortable for being low effective health. I already have a phenomenal character that I have taken pretty much as far as it can go… so any joy I get out of this character is just a placeholder until Last Epoch Season 2 drops.
The main draw of the Surfcaster is Stormy Seas. This ascendancy keystone converts all of your Lightning Damage to Cold Damage and makes it so that your Cold Damage can Shock, allowing you to effectively double dip both Cold and Lightning Damage while Chilling, Freezing, and Shocking with it. This gives me the ability to use a really fast ability like Storm Brand of Indecision and make it feels as comfy and safe as Wintertide Brand. Glacial Wave reduces incoming hit damage and buffs your damage, Sea Legs gives you a way of scaling Crit and Evasion, and then Ghosts of the Deep is just a generically good buff. All combined you end up with a package that just sort of works for the Storm Brand play style remarkably well. I know this is also being played more commonly with Penance Brand of Dissipation, but I prefer the pacing of Storm Brand a bit more.
What is wild about the current state of my build is that I am almost exclusively using unique items. Essentially the only gear slots that I am using rare items in are my amulet and both rings… all of which are items that I had laying around in my stash and or recycled from earlier versions of my RF build. The only uniques that are really purposeful at the moment are Shavronne’s Wrappings so that Chaos damage does not go straight through my Energy Shield, and Ralakesh’s Impatience for permanent charges. Everything else I just sort of made an audible on while I was leveling… and then largely just stuck with it and it somehow has kept working in maps. Immortal Flesh was pulled in pretty late into the process when I swapped to Zealot’s Oath, just to make the regeneration a bit more comfortable. At some point I plan on probably replacing all of this with Rare items but I am just sort of rolling the dice to see how long it works.
I can pretty comfortably do yellow maps without much issue, and while I successfully completed a red map… it was a bit rough at my current level. Swapping out some of my uniques for rare gear with more survival on them would probably help. Essentially I need to swap out everything that I do not absolutely need for high evasion and energy shield items… because right now I am running around with the effective hit point pool of 2000, whereas I am way more used to running around in the 5000-6000 level with my Righteous Fire characters. Essentially the next few levels are going to be building out another Lightning Cluster with dual Brand Clusters to see where that gets my damage output. If you are curious you can see the current state of my build with this POB.
There was another Dev Interview yesterday with Jonathan and Mark of Grinding Gear Games hosted by Darth Microtransaction and Ghazzy TV. It is two hours long, but if you are just wanting a quick summary Raxxanterax released a 20 minute video covering pretty much all of the important bits. I am still not entirely certain that the game that I want to be playing, is the game that they are envisioning in their heads. There are certain aspects of Path of Exile that they seem to have considered failures, and are trying to right those perceived wrongs… but how many things can you change while still capturing the same magic. The current version of Path of Exile II isn’t really quite right… so we will see if 0.2.0 brings things closer or pushes them further away. Like it is hard to quantify what I personally want, but going back and playing the Legacy of Phrecia event has made me realize how much magic was lost with POE2.
It is very clear that Legacy of Phrecia was intended as a quick filler content league, but ironically they have accidentally crafted one of the most enjoyable POE experiences. I still feel like they need to keep expanding Phrecia until 3.26 launches, but it seems like GGG would prefer that we all swap to playing Path of Exile II instead. That said I will be checking out the Dawn of the Hunt launch on Friday, just not sure how much I will actually be playing and for how long. Supposedly we are going to see patch notes potentially on Wednesday, and I feel like I should get a good idea from those how enjoyable I am going to find the first POE2 league. If things went too far in the wrong direction, and I can tell that from the patch notes… I might just make a hard skip until Last Epoch in a few weeks.
