Path of Exile 2

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.

My Kingdom for a Map Stash

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I partook in some pre-patch degeneracy, and honestly, it wasn’t as overpowered as I was expecting. Yesterday a pretty sweeping patch hit, and one of the things that was broken by it was the Beetle farm. During Act II on Normal or Cruel difficulty, in the Lost City map, there was a waypoint right next to a rare mini-boss. If you had a method for removing the corpse, aka unearth, you could respawn at the waypoint and the mini-boss would be back up allowing you to kill it again and get the loot again. I farmed this for a few hours right before the patch and got three uniques, a smattering of currency, and a bunch of rares… which seems good but not overwhelmingly so. Apparently, folks have been farming this for the last week, and I can absolutely see them having a massive leg up on the market leading to some of the exalted orb inflation that has been happening.

This is very much a first-world problem, but one of the things that is killing me right now is the amount of stuff that has no proper place to go. We do not have a map tab, a fragments tab, or even a stash chest for expeditions like we would normally have in Path of Exile 1. This means all of this crap accumulates and needs to be manually processed into some semblance of a tab structure. The lack of a map tab is by far the most annoying because I really hate mapping in this unstructured manner. The other thing that grates at my nerves is the fact that Charms are effectively utility flasks, but do not fit into the Flask tab… which at the moment is largely a useless custom tab. Even if they can’t spend the time to work on the custom tabs right now, at least give us the ability to set affinity to a normal or quad tab just to dump things into it. I hate using a dump tab and sorting it out later, but I think if I am ever going to efficiently map I am going to have to lean on that strategy.

I did however spend a bit of time arranging my hideout to make it more efficient for mapping purposes. I need to do the same for the Guild Hideout since during the last patch they made it so we can actually get there. I will probably tweak the layout a bit but at a minimum, I have easy access to stashes, Doryani for identifying items, and Ketzuel for disenchanting all without really moving my character. I’ve only found Gwenin and Tujen from the Expedition NPCs but found it weird that they are all effectively Rog now. They all sell items and then offer you the ability to upgrade them, with each NPC focusing on a single type of gear. Gwenin is weapons, and Tujen is jewelry… I am assuming that Rog is armor and no clue what Dannig is. Dannig might still be the currency trader because I can see that being a useful thing to have to swap stuff around. I’ve not found any of the Expedition NPC inventory reroll currency so far, but they all have the widget at the bottom of the screen that allows for it.

I did not make a ton of progress last night, because the issues surrounding the rollout of the patch gave me a bit of a break in gaming during my normal operating window. I did work my way over to The Burning Monolith and got the quest to gather up the three keys to unlock it. I have no clue what the fortresses look like that it is referring to, but I am sure given time I will find them. Right now I am struggling to sustain maps and am weirdly getting mostly Tier IV or Tier II maps… but very few Tier III’s which is the step in the quest I am presently on. My friend Jarik gave me an infusion of various map levels this morning, so I can at least keep progressing tonight for a little bit. I’ve not played with any of the towers yet, so I might do that as well as I have a small stock of currency for them.

I made a little bit of progress on my Witch and it is now officially an Infernalist. It is wild how much easier everything is as minions than it was as Warrior. I rolled over the top of the Trial of the Sehkemas yesterday without even getting close to running out of honor. I think I maybe had at most 10% of my honor bar gone, which is wild given that I do not have a ton of hitpoints or energy shield on that character. I will probably make a run at my third ascendancy on my Titan tonight, as I have a bunch of 3-floor trials and I am curious how they feel now that I have some relics with honor resistance on them, and the changes that rolled in yesterday to reduce damage for melee characters. I feel like Trial of Chaos is always going to be cursed, so I might as well get used to Sehkemas because it seems the lesser of the two evils.

In other news, Neversink has released a new update to their temporary filter over on GitHub. Essentially the process of creating filterblade support for POE2 is going much slower than they thought it would be and still expect that their proper filter system is going to be about another month out. As such they opted to make some improvements to their first temporary filter to make life a bit better for us in the meantime. It is amazing what a difference it made for me personally when I started running a loot filter. It isn’t like I am actively excluding anything… but just the act of getting back the styling of loots and the “tink” sounds did a ton to improve my enjoyment of the game. Think of Neversink as the language in which I interpret the game, and playing without them… was like reading the mangled item descriptions on AliExpress.

In other other news… there is a fork of Awakened POE Trade that is gaining steam called Exiled Exchange 2. Essentially it is an attempt to adapt the existing structure of Awakened POE Trade and make it work with Path of Exile 2. I spent some time trying it last night because I admit I like the look of the Awakened interface more than I do that of Sidekick which is more patterned off of the Overwolf Overlay. The problem is… it is very much a work in progress and a lot of things about the interface were a bit too janky for my tastes. For example, for some reason any time I did a price check with Ctl+D it would strand the popup showing the item on my screen until I manually hit the [X] in the upper right corner of the window. For the time being, I suggest Sidekick at least until this has worked out some of its kinks. This also makes me realize that I need to spend some time updating my tools page, now that the game has actually been released and there are a number of properly supported tools out there.

The Difference A Week Makes

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Good Morning Folks! What a difference a week makes. My opinions of Path of Exile II have improved considerably as my build has more or less come online. I largely yolo’d my way into a functional build because I wanted one thing… to be able to run around with a two-hander and a shield. I also really like explosions and fire… so whatever of that I could work into the build was a bonus. On Friday I took the day off to work on some stuff around the house, and when I finished all of that I started plugging away at making progress through Act III, and putting some of the final pieces in place for the build. The hardest part was being able to meet 3 times the strength requirement for a two-hander in order to use the Giant’s Blood notable. Early on I bought a two-hander with reduced attribute requirements that managed to get me over the hump.

It is shocking how much faster the Cruel Acts go after having completed the first three acts on normal mode. There are a bunch of factors here, firstly you know the boss fights and you know how to progress through the quests. Secondly, there is the fact that by the time you reach Cruel difficulty, your build is more or less reaching its final form and it is largely just an optimization game after that point. While i did not set out following a build, I accidentally wound up in a very similar place that Connor Converse/OneManaLeft did with his Titan Ignite build. If you want to follow in my footsteps I would suggest following his guide. A lot of the struggles of the first act were trying out all of the Warrior abilities and figuring out which ones felt pretty decent.

What I have landed upon is using Stampede to charge at a pack and then trigger explosions on it. The more points that I get and the more AOE support that I get, the better this will ultimately work. I need to get through my 3rd ascendancy so I can try out adding Crushing Blows to the mix, which supposedly really helps with the exploding. The only negative of this is that Stampede’s pathing is pretty bad. It often veers off to Albuquerque at the worst possible moments. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a backup plan, because if mobs did not get primed for a heavy stun… then I can’t explode with Boneshatter as a follow-up. I’ve contemplated working Sunder into the build just so I would have something that could deal reasonable clear damage to packs, but then the problem ends up being… what would I even use for support gems since the good stuff is currently buffing Perfect Strike and Hammer of the Gods.

Yesterday afternoon I wrapped up Act III on Cruel difficulty and proceeded into mapping and the endgame. There is the same quirk that happens when you progress to maps in POE1, where you have to do your very first map in the endgame hub or the game does not realize you have progressed that far. Unfortunately this time around there is not a specific quest telling you this, and you end up with this weird scenario where you can access the mapping device, but it will not work because it keeps telling you that you have to finish the campaign. Generally speaking, when you drop into mapping, somewhere in the near vicinity should be a hideout that you can conquer. I wish I had taken a screenshot prior to clearing it but these are mapped with the familiar blue and silver Fleur-De-Lis symbol hideouts have in Path of Exile. I got access to my hideout early due to the $100 supporter pack coming with a hideout, but generally speaking, this is going to be what you want to go for first.

Mechanically speaking I was not sure how maps were going to work exactly, but essentially you need Waystones, which for me started dropping toward the end of the campaign. You click on a node on the map and it opens an inventory and you place the tier of waystone that you want to run, which turns that map into that tier. This is honestly a cleaner system than the whole maps dropping at specific levels, but it still means that you are going to need copious amounts of way stones to progress your way through the content. The mapping NPC (not naming names for spoilers) will sell you a limited quantity of waystones similar to how Kirac and earlier Zana did in Path of Exile. I’ve not interacted with the Atlas passives yet, because I believe I have to complete the quest to do 10 T1 maps before I get any points to spend.

This is what my tree currently looks like at level 70. I am slowly making my way toward a cluster that is going to give additional close melee damage and area of effect. I am contemplating taking a bit of a detour at some point and picking up the 3% life node, which has a few 7-strength nodes on the way to it. I will also probably want to pick up the max resistance nodes, but given that I am nowhere close to capped, I figure this is a future-me problem. I’ve been stacking percentage block on the jewels on my tree and have managed to get up to 51% which means if I find a better shield I will be really close to the block cap. I am going to have to spend most of my exalts in an attempt to get better gear and resistance capped, but my long-term project is to find The Surrender which drops from Breach bosses but should make me way more tanky with its life recoup. I might start banking Stone Tower Shields in an effort to chance gamble on trying to hit one.

All in all, though, my opinions of Path of Exile have improved significantly since last week. I still feel like this game is overturned, especially in the early game, and that a lot of those bosses have about a third to a half too many hitpoints for when you encounter them. That said though, once my build started to come together I have been enjoying myself considerably more. I think Warrior probably just has a really weak start, and it takes forever to start to get abilities that I would consider good. You are forced into the Rolling Slam and Boneshatter combo for way too long and it feels bad for killing bosses. I feel like if they swapped Sunder to a second-tier ability instead of a third-tier ability, that would greatly improve the playstyle as Sunder can absolutely carry you even into the endgame.

Stash Tab Sale Weekend

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Good Morning Folks! Over the last week, I have felt like Gold Five telling my friends to “stay on target” any time they have been tempted to buy stash tabs. I knew this day was coming soonish because there is always another stash tab sale around the corner and it is never a good idea to buy them at any other time. So now is the time for you all to spend those cash shop coins that have been burning a hole in your pocket, and get some additional stash tab storage space. However, this has been way less of a thing with Path of Exile II because so much less loot is actually dropping. Additionally, prior to the launch of the game, I took a wild guess at which tabs would be valuable but had the fatal flaw that the Map tab currently does not exist in any form in the second game. I figure at some point this will change but for the time being… I gave you incorrect data as to which tabs would be valuable. This morning I hope to remedy that.

Essentially in Path of Exile 1 and 2, there are two types of stash tabs. There are those designed to store a specific type of item and have the ability to set affinity so loot automagically goes into those tabs. Then there are just bulk storage tabs that you have to organize manually. In the first category, after some 50 hours of playing Path of Exile II, there are only two that I find actually useful. That is the Currency Stash Tab and the Gem Stash Tab. We don’t necessarily get massive quantities of currency, but I value the ability to rapidly dump it into my stash and have it sorted into the correct bins. This is a tab that becomes more useful the longer you play. Gem Stash Tab is mostly because I get a ton of uncut gems and I prefer to have some magical bin to dump them into that sorts them based on various parameters. This is only really going to be a useful tab if you are going to spend a lot of time on alts like I often do.

In the other category, you have Normal, Premium, and Quad Stash Tabs. Normal and Premium are both 12×12 grids and the key difference is that Premium allows you to engage with the trade system and list items. Quad tabs are literally just 4 times the size of a normal tab and are trade-enabled by default. This honestly really is a matter of player preference. You can see individual items easier in the more “zoomed in” nature of the normal tab, but you can store a heck of a lot more items in a Quad tab but they also cost considerably more. In Path of Exile 1 the only real choice is to go to Quad tabs for everything because a lot of semi-useful loot is dropping. In Path of Exile 2 however… there really is not much that you would want to keep so could probably get along just fine with normal tabs.

I guess while I am talking about stash tabs, I will discuss the other four types that have a POE2 equivalent. The Unique Stash tab allows you to store a single copy of every unique item in the game. This is useful in POE1 where they drop like candy, but less so in POE2 where I have seen seven… and I am well ahead of most of my friends in that count. Flasks were way more important in POE1, and as a result this tab is like a vestigial appendage that no longer makes a ton of sense. You are not really going to be storing a ton of these so no point in buying a custom tab for it. Essences similarly in POE1 were a lot more common and had a lot more varieties. I have seen six total essences since starting the Early Access, and while I already owned a tab… there is no way this is worth purchasing now. Lastly, there is Delirium, which is a mechanic you will not even encounter until you have completed acts 1-3 and cruel 1-3 and start doing the endgame content. Definitely not worth having until you have a specific need for it.

The other thing that I have had friends ask me is how to donate points to your guild. Since guilds did not copy over from the first game, it also means that we did not get to keep our cache of stash tabs. I bought a single Quad tab just so that we would have some swap space for trading items between players, but was holding off on buying more until the sale weekend. Essentially this is way easier to do in POE2 and you open the Shop interface and then in the upper corner there is a button highlighted with a green arrow that allows you to donate points to the guild. This will then open an interface in the center of your screen with a slider and a donate points button also marked with green arrows. Essentially set the slider to the number of points you want to donate, and then hit donate and the guild leader will get a message indicating that you have donated points, and once accepted those points become available for them to purchase things for the guild with it. This is a oneway transfer and there is no way once accepted to transfer points back out of the guild bank.

As far as the game goes, I am nearing the end of Act III on my Titan, but last night I decided to have a bit more chill gameplay and spent time on my baby Witch. I’ve essentially gotten to the end of Act 1 and just need to storm the manor and kill angry dogboy. Summon Raging Spirits is such a massive improvement when that unlocks, and I went from sluggish clear to pretty much being able to move at full speed and decimate everything in my way. Bossing is a bit awkward, but hopefully, that will improve over time. I am essentially just cursing things and then spamming Fire Wall, with a bit of Unearth whenever there is a wave of adds to get extra explosive minions. Since we are in a time of Guides, I am loosely following the Infernalist Minion Army build.

I hope this weekend I will wrap up Act III when I am feeling up to a bit more stressful gameplay and move into Cruel difficulty. I am still enjoying Path of Exile II, but it is the sort of game that I can’t really see playing in a league scenario without at least a lot of watering down of difficulty. Everything is a bit too slow and sluggish for my tastes, and for the moment it feels like a “one and done” type experience.