Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we end up mostly talking about the early access launch for Path of Exile II. This truly was a feat of cloud engineering as the Grinding Gear Games team delayed for a few hours to prepare for the onslaught of over a million players… then the game just worked pretty much flawlessly until some minor issues on Saturday. It is hard to explain how big of a feat this is, especially considering the struggles that Last Epoch had with unexpected success, for a game that has never had more than 300k peak concurrency to scale up this fast is massive. When it comes to the actual game… Bel is not having a great time as Warrior, but everyone else seems to be greatly enjoying themselves. We talk about the good bits and the bad bits. From there Bel talks a bit about the OnlyFangs Hardcore WoW Event, and then Ash and Kodra share their experiences with Atlyss.
This is going to be a bit of a weird one, for anyone not deeply entrenched in the names and faces of Path of Exile content creators. Essentially what triggered this blog post is a simple message that I saw scroll across my timeline over on BlueSky. Ziggy D, a content creator in the Path of Exile community that I know almost exclusively as “the guy who does the Q&A discussions after a Path of Exile League announcement“, got snatched up by Maxroll. I’ve been a supporter of Maxroll for quite a while since Raxxanterax took a role with the site in the lead-up to the release of Diablo IV. They’ve seemingly pioneered this model of going into a community and signing up a bunch of creators who are already known for creating great content. However, this is not just something they are doing right now.
On November 20th Lolcohol, another Path of Exile Content Creator announced that he was taking the leap and going full-time content creator and at the same time announced his partnership with a site I had never heard of before. This of course caused me to do what I always do and furiously google it to glean some understanding. It seems like Mobalytics is a big player in the MOBA guide space, and is now casting out its fortunes with ARPGs. It turns out it was not just Lolcohol that they snatched up but also signed a bunch of other names that I actually care about. Here is the list of folks on the Content creator team that I immediately recognized:
There are a few other names listed but I have no clue who they are. If you have read any of my discussions about Path of Exile, you will probably recognize at a minimum SirGog and Jorgen, two creators that influence me pretty heavily. I am certain I will watch to see what sorts of content gets released on this site as we roll into POE2, and how heavily these creators end up promoting it.
I talked at the top of this post about Maxroll and their recent land grab for creators, and quite honestly they have a very impressive team as well. I think the big thing they are known for among creators is their profit-sharing agreements. This is something that ZiggyD went into at length in this thread on Bluesky. I know at least in their support of Path of Exile 1, their guide creation and the way they format the information has been presented has improved massively since their first few outings. That is the biggest thing I like about the site and why I have decided to become a supporter, is that they keep changing the site to service the content better. Anyways like I said they have a pretty stacked list of creators and these are the ones that I immediately recognized:
Like I have said before it was really the involvement of Raxxanterax that made me sit up and pay attention to Maxroll initially. More recently getting Zizaran to come on board in a major way was a huge boon to the site, because essentially he is synonymous with Path of Exile and New Player Guides. I also like that basically it is a single site that I feel entirely comfortable recommending to friends who are just getting started out. The initial round of POE guides were a bit bait, but they have improved drastically over time.
However, we can’t really talk about POE Guide sites without talking about POE Vault aka the site owned by a major player in the MMORPG space Icy Veins. Until the advent of Maxroll, Icy Veins was my go-to site for Diablo III guides and information, and for years it was probably the most recognizable single source of guides for Path of Exile. The thing is… it isn’t anywhere near as clear to determine who is actually being sponsored by IcyVeins to create guides for them. I know that GhazzyTV is, mostly because he has talked about it specifically and his role in helping to manage that site. For a lot of folks, it was just a convenient place to host the text version of their otherwise largely YouTube guides. Pohx for example hosts his guides there in spite of having an entirely custom wiki surrounding his infamous Righteous Fire content. So while it is uncertain what the relationship is with the site financially, there are still quite a few creators who seem to support the site:
There are other names associated with the site, but those are the main ones that I would personally care about. The danger of the site is there are also quite a few guides that feel like bait. Example… I would take anything maintained by TbXie with a massive grain of salt because the friends I know who have attempted to follow their guides have struggled considerably.
It certainly feels like most of the guide creation for Path of Exile and Path of Exile II, has been consumed by three websites at this point. It makes me wonder if this trend will accelerate as they attempt to effectively lock down the remaining talent. I question though… how much money is there really in creating guides for an ARPG? There will of course be plenty of guides unaffiliated with these sites. Reddit and the PathOfExile2Builds subreddit which is patterned off the already excellent PathOfExileBuilds will be a likely source. It is just really weird to watch this land grab happening for Content creators because I do not remember similar things happening in the MMORPG space necessarily. There was always the eternal war between Icy Veins and WoWHead but it seemed to be way less centered around “celebrities” from those communities.
My hat is in the ring with Maxroll, mostly because it is the site that personally seems to be the most valuable to me. I am however really interested to see what sorts of things SirGog and Jorgen end up creating on Mobalytics.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday Grinding Gear Games released the full reveal of all of the major nodes for the twelve ascendancies that will be playable in the Path of Exile II Early Access. This is critical because at least in this first release, players will be unable to respec their ascendancy. Generally speaking, you don’t have to be super certain which direction you are going to be going in Path of Exile, because you can always change ascendancies at a later date. You will still be able to move points around, but shifting from Titan to Warbringer on the Warrior class for example would require you to roll a brand new character. This has been a point of contention for veteran players, Zizaran specifically in his recent interview with Jonathan asked for them to release the full ascendancy information ahead of time.
Right now my game plan is to go Warrior and rush the Regen/Armor cluster marked with number one. We don’t have a complete build tool yet, but a number of the nodes have been data-mined from the various videos that were released of the last LA Streamer event. So far this seems to be the best tool available with updated information, and where I pulled the above screenshot that I took into photoshop. The next goal is to pick up the one-hander nodes at #4 and then head down to pick up all of the mace nodes at #2. Then I will path down to #3 and hopefully be able to pay the strength requirements to swap over to Giant’s Blood which will allow me to run the Two-Hander and Shield setup that I plan on going permanently. I will likely have some abilities set up with this configuration, and then others will be swapping over to a dual-wielding Two-hander weapon swap. Once I get Giant’s Blood I will be dropping the Onehanded nodes at #4 and picking up the Twohanded nodes directly across the path from them.
However, I am stuck with which of the two Warrior ascendancies to go with. All of this time I have said I was going Titan, but one of potentially the best nodes is buried behind a fairly awful one. Hulking Form seems really strong because this will not only give me a 50% increased effect on the attribute travel nodes but also all of the small nodes that give other benefits throughout the tree. Like I said though, it is buried behind Colossal Capacity which is a nice quality of life, but otherwise useless node. I also want Crushing Blows and a 40% More multiplier against Heavy Stunned enemies, but taking Hulking Form would force me to bypass some of the other good nodes like the ones that cause Slam skills to gain Aftershocks.
All of that said… the Warbringer tree is looking pretty tasty as well. Namely, there is a potentially wild node called Imploding Impacts that lets your Armor break attacks go into the negatives, increasing the amount of damage dealt with your attacks. This morning however SirGog pointed out that unless the damage calculations have changed for Armor, there is the potentially to break the game. I am also a big fan of Warcaller’s Bellow which causes corpses around you to explode when you do a Warcry and Greatwolf’s Howl which removes the cooldown from Warcries in general. There are also a bunch of block-related nodes that might be good because I am absolutely going after some block on the tree to allow me to passively shed damage. Basically I want high armor, high regen, and high block to attempt to create a pretty tanky character.
In other general Path of Exile II news, they released an announcement yesterday that preloading will be available on Thursday aka Tomorrow at 7 pm CST. This is specifically for the standalone client, but I would expect that it should be available through Steam shortly after that point. I am not sure if I will do the Standalone client or the Steam client. Right now I am running POE1 with a separate client, but have been contemplating moving back to the Steam client just to have better time played tracking. Hopefully, this gives folks enough time to download if they have slower internet connections. Essentially they were playing a game of chicken so that they could hopefully release the game without giving time for folks to data-mine the hell out of the client before it goes live.
Lastly, they released a video yesterday as well showing off a series of Twitch drops, and a promotion with Twitch for gifting two subs to a streamer. I will likely do this thing because the Chimaera pet is kind of adorable, in that so hideous it is cute kind of way. I will absolutely be farming the Twitch drops as I often do, even though none of them are particularly exciting to me save for the pet.
Good Morning Folks! We’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern in the Path of Exile community wondering exactly when accounts would be flagged for early access for folks with a lifetime spend of $480 or more… aka the price of the largest yearly supporter pack. Apparently, that happened overnight and I was able to confirm something that I hoped would be the case. When the supporter packs went live last Thursday I bought one that granted early access and was wondering if I would also get a key from the lifetime spend. It turns out that yes I did and while my spare key was already spoken for, you might check your early access page to see if you also got a spare key. Essentially you consume the key on the key redemption page and then go back to your early access page and snag the Steam key so that you can register that and be ready to download whenever preloading begins. I appreciate greatly that I got a spare key instead of just flagging the account.
We are well engaged in spoiler season, and it seems like GGG is releasing a new video pretty much every day. The one that launched overnight was for Ball Lightning, Archmage, Sigil of Power… and Wildshards which answered a question that I was having about support gems. Essentially it has been stated that we only get to use a single support gem once per character, and there were a lot of gems that ended up being added to multiple links on your character. In Path of Exile for example Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support and Greater Multiple Projectiles Support were used universally to make abilities split into multiple attacks. It seems as though Wildshards is a special version of this that only works with spells which makes me wonder if we are going to get several different flavors of commonly used supports tailored to very specific use cases.
The venerable SirGog released a video yesterday with a VERY important reminder in it. Essentially it is presented as though it were going to be a tier list for ascendancies, but really… none of us know anything about what the game is going to be like and how strong specific abilities are going to play. There are a handful of starter tier lists floating around and they are all essentially nonsense. I know personally I am going to do something with a Titan and probably use Giants Blood the notable that allows me to use a Twohander in one hand… to do Twohanded Mace and Shield. I am diving into the player fantasy that I want for a character because I have always loved that type of character when a game allows me to play it. I know roughly where in the tree I am going to be heading based on some preview nodes, but I fully expect when I level up for the first time… that I am going to be spending thirty minutes looking at the passive tree to figure out how I want to path.
Another Jonathan Rogers interview came out yesterday, this time with Talkative Tri but I have not had a chance to watch it myself. I thought it might be useful to sort of catalog all of the interviews that are currently available with different groups of people.
So far these are the four that I am aware of, but there might be more out there in the broader community. What I noticed with a lot of these interviews is that it seems like they are branching out from the core of the insular community. DM for example is wildly popular with the Diablo IV playerbase and has a really broad appeal. Talkative Tri focuses mostly on trying to present a really positive viewpoint in games and is relatively new to the scene. Legendary Drops comes from a totally different community and only recently started playing the game seriously with Settlers. Essentially it seems like they are doing a good measure of outreach to try and connect with a broader base of players.
There were a lot of folks who were invited to some recent event in LA and apparently there was an embargo on the footage that they recorded there. As such pretty much each day there are new revelations about the passive tree. For example, this is a video focused on the Warrior and its tree that I will be at some point watching through to try and get a feel of who I am going to path when the game releases. I apologize for anyone who is not into Path of Exile, because this blog is pretty much going to me obsessing about the game until it releases and then gibbering madly once I finally do get my hands on it. As I said yesterday… I’ve not really felt this way since the launch of World of Warcraft with a game consuming this much of my mental focus.
I figure I will probably take the next two days off from the blog so for everyone who celebrates, I hope you and yours have a very Happy Thanksgiving.
