Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We had a bunch of topics left over from last week that rolled over to this week. First, we talk a bit about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Shinobi Metroidvania. From there, we talk a bit about Summer Games Done Quick and some of the better runs. Tam talks about his plans to adapt the Starfinder 2 game system to create a Shadowrun Campaign. Ash shares his initial thoughts about Draw Steel, a new RPG coming down the pipe. We talk a bit about the upcoming Last Epoch Season 3, which drops on August 21s and some of the significant changes. We also talk a bit about Path of Exile II 0.3.0, which drops shortly after that on the 29th. Lastly, Tam shares some of his thoughts on actually playing quite a bit of Burrows and Badgers, a squad-based leveling miniatures game along the lines of Mordheim. Grace talks briefly about the new Dwarven Realms season that has started, and Bel shares his suggestions for the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and both Weapons and Barbarian by Zach Cregger.
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.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We were out last week but, as such, came back with a stacked list of topics to discuss. We start off talking about Path of Exile II and the bad launch patch for Dawn of the Hunt. We also talk about the interview between Zizaran and the Devs and the resulting updates. We then dive into some discussion about an amazing-looking season for Tombs of the Erased in Last Epoch coming next week and all of the new features. Kodra and Tam share their experiences with Blue Prince, which is a puzzle exploration game that highly suggests you keep track of some real-world notes. Bel discusses his thoughts on the Minecraft Movie and how it splits the line between brilliance and trash and ends up providing a pretty great time. Ash has restarted Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX, and Thalen talks about the Hugo Award Nominations. Sudokucon has happened, and Kodra shares how the event went. We also have a brief revisiting of Xenoblade Chronicles X, which Ammo and Ash are still playing through.
Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.
Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.
Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.
Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.
There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.
After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.
