Path of Exile 2

Better But Not Great

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Hey Folks. Well… I did not actually stop playing Path of Exile II. I am a deeply stubborn human being at times, and I kept pushing forward and have managed to get things into a semi-viable state. Warrior right now is probably the most functional class in the game. Until yesterday 9 of the top 10 spots on the Hardcore leader-board were playing the Smith of Kitava. Now several Lich builds have snuck into the top 10, now that the chaos dot contagion tech has become more common. Conversely there are only three Huntresses in the top 100, and the first one of those is sitting down at spot 21. Not that I play Hardcore, but you can generally use it as a gauge of the success and viability of builds more than you really can the softcore characters.

So how did I reach a point of viability with my build? Essentially it was the second set of ascendancy points that pushed me over the edge, and had I realized how much of a difference this would have made I probably would have chosen these as my first points. Basically I farmed a decent normal body armor from Act 3, and kept farming until I had enough socket and quality currency to attempt a corruption. I did not win the one in four, and got nothing added to my chest piece but it has still worked well enough. That 5% life generation was just enough to take the edge off my incoming damage and give me time to react with a health potion when I started taking shotgun damage. What has been frustrating however is just how much time I have spent vendor shopping for quality and socket currency. Essentially each time I ding a new level I bounce back to all of the act vendors looking for anything I can salvage… so I can hopefully set up for my next upgrade at some point.

This largely set me up to finish Act III, and in truth things were pretty easy from that point forward. That is not to say it was not tedious. Essentially my gameplay is Leap Slam and then when I land hitting Boneshatter to blow everything up. Now that I have some leech on my weapon I can sustain my mana reasonably well, and I am no longer having to survive on potions alone. That really is the point at which both Path of Exile 1 and 2 start to feel decent, is when you can automate your regeneration of life and mana to the point where you ONLY have to care about potions to deal with large hits. Potions are awful and have always felt bad, and I hate it when you are struggling and just have to keep downing one after every fight. Doryani took forever, but it was reasonably easy… so essentially my only real roadblock was Viper and once I had some regeneration I managed to push through that without much issue.

Last night I picked up a pair of Trampletoe boots off trade for one exalt, and I have been using these to pretty solid effect. Yes these were nerfed so that they do not do the massive chains that they used to. However this does not really matter because it gives me a second bit of explode so that when combined with my Herald of Ash it essentially blows up most packs. The only thing that I have to stop and fight is rare mobs, which mostly just mean I have to throw out a single perfect strike. I’ve managed to get into a pretty good rotation of leap slam/boneshatter repeated forever. The only things that I really have to watch out for are poison and chaos damage… both of which completely shred me because I have zero chaos resistance. At some point that is going to be something I focus on… hopefully with my next set of armor upgrades.

Now that I have gotten past some of the mechanical frustration… we are left with the loot frustrations. This game feels largely unrewarding. My POE1 brain gets excited when I see a rare chest in a zone… and then upon opening it all of the dopamine drains rapidly out of my system when I get two blues and 15 gold. Note… I am not filtering out any loot here. I am running Filterblade but was simply not getting enough loot that I backed off all the way down to the softest filter, which only serves to shrink the font size of items that it deems worthy of filtering out. When I killed Doryani at the end of act 3, he dropped 2 rare items, 2 magic items… and around 100 gold. The loot just feels so phenomenally throttled, that I am not sure what the heck is going on. This is why I hate magic find as a stat… because it is clear that the GGG folks are assuming that we are stacking it and throttling loot by default to make up for having this stat in the game.

At this point I am level 52 and heading off to Fight Count Geonor at the end of Act IV. I’ve been following a relatively generic boneshatter tree and at some point I will respec a bit to be able to pick up Giants Blood and go Two Handed Hammer and Shield. I am really interested in some of the build tech that OneManaLeft is using, that Carnarius also used a bit towards the end of last league. Essentially they drop Leap Slam and pick up Blink so that you can blink from pack to pack and then mace strike to explode the packs. You can check out Connor’s POB for the full version of the build. As I get more currency I am going to start shopping trying to pick up an Infernoclasp which I will eventually need to hit 90% fire resistance. If nothing else it will serve as a pretty decent belt for the time being… but as of right now the prices are all over the place.

Am I having fun yet? The jury is still out on that one… I am having less frustration than I was having so for the moment that has to count for something. I still feel like there are deep problems with the design of this game. Do I think it is as simple as Chris Wilson good Jonathan Rogers bad? No… not really. Games are not the product of a single person, and no matter how much the community points this out does not really make it true. It does feel like GGG does not understand their own game however, nor really understand what made Path of Exile so great. They are trying to build a different game, but right now… they are whiffing in empty air because this is not working. The longer the game goes on… the more it is clear that the original design is not going to be the thing people actually want to play for the long run. I fully expect that as soon as Last Epoch launches its second season… Path of Exile II is going to be a ghost town.

At some point today Zizaran is supposed to be sitting down with Jonathan Rogers for an interview about the Dawn of the Hunt league. I am going to be extremely interested to see how this shakes out, especially given that Ziz has rated this league 4 out of 10. I am hoping that GGG goes through with the interview because quite frankly, Ziz is probably the person who is going to be the most respectful towards them, and they cannot avoid the bad press if they were to cancel it. Tonight I will be wrapping up Geonor and moving on to Act 2 Cruel, so we will see if the “better” continues.

The Worst Path of Exile League So Far

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Good Morning Folks. I did not do a blog post on Friday because I just was not feeling it. I hoped maybe the new Path of Exile II league that launched that afternoon/evening would pull me out of my funk. In truth it did… but it replaced sadness with rage. When the game launched I wrote at length about what I considered to be the problems with that game, and I remember Zizaran specifically stating in one of his videos at the launch of the game that what we were playing, was the worst state the game would ever be in. At the time it helped me put some of my own feelings into perspective and I thought sure… it can only go up from here. I chose a more meta build and then honestly had quite a bit of fun getting through maps and farming quite a bit in the endgame. I only got to level 94 on my Minion Infernalist, but that seemed reasonable enough and mostly I just got bored of the very limited state of the end game.

I thought the first release of the game needed some work. Essentially there were four builds that were viable, and I expected those to eat the nerf bat, but hopefully others would be buffed up to reach a point where we had a dozen or so viable builds instead. This is something that they absolutely know how to do… because builds like Penance Brand of Dissipation have eaten massive nerfs… but still remained completely viable choices if someone just happened to enjoy that particular play style. Hell my own love of Righteous Fire and the number of drastic changes in the way it is built over just the few years I Have been playing… is proof positive that balance changes in Path of Exile 1 have mostly been about pruning the outliers. In theory if we had more viable builds and more endgame variety… this league could have been a banger or at least something that I would enjoy to tide me over until Last Epoch.

The day before the patch was set to launch we got a post outlining the changes… and it was nothing but wall to wall nerfs. So much so that it did not just bring builds in line… but absolutely decimated almost every even vaguely halfway viable build from the first league. Warrior was probably the least impacted, but a lot of the things that made them powerful boss hunters were destroyed. Hammer of the Gods now requires you to build up a resource rather than just having a cool down. So we thought it was bad, and admittedly we were warned by Jonathan that it was going to involve a lot of nerfs. What we were not prepared for… was this was only the tip of the iceberg. The nerfs went so much deeper, to the point of builds that seemed viable from these patch notes were themselves untenable when the game actually released.

Were this just a me thing… it would be one thing. However every streamer has effectively come out and talked about how this is the worst update they have ever played. Wudijo seems to be enjoying himself, but he is so damned good-natured that he could not even muster venom over the worst Diablo IV patches, so that checks out. The core POE streamers are all various shades of miserable. Steelmage is generally a super chill dude, but in an impromptu podcast with Zizaran he talked about how generally miserable he has been. Empyrean has just bailed on the league entirely, and others appear to simply be playing because it is financially beneficial for them given that there are twitch drops active. I watched a friend of mine yesterday who seemed to be in good spirits… but watched her and her partner spend 30 minutes dying over and over to the Dreadnought in act II.

I am currently playing what is apparently the strongest and most meta build out there… a generic bone shatter warrior that I have ascended into Smith of Kitava. My damage output is reasonable, but it feels like I am wearing tissue paper for gear… when I have just shy of 1000 health, 1500 armor, and capped elemental resistances at 75/75/75 at level 45. I get interrupted constantly when trying to attack and the only thing that seems to feel halfway decent is Leap Slam to Bone Shatter… with Perfect Strike for harder mobs. However I effectively have to wait until I have stunned something to actually get one of the Perfect Strikes off successfully because otherwise I keep getting stunned out of the channel. White mobs in Path of Exile II, feel like bosses in Path of Exile I in the amount of damage that they are dealing.

There have been numerous points where I have rage quit out over the weekend. The first was dying over and over to these stupid chests in Act 1 at level 5. Why in the hell these things are so murdery at such a low level is beyond me. I suffered through Act 1 on Friday and took out Count Geonor and started on Act 2 before getting frustrated and playing some Path of Exile 1 instead. On Saturday morning I started off with succeeding at the Trial of the Sehkemas and ascending and then chipping away at Act 2, eventually beating it before the end of the night. Once again I had to go play something else because Act 3 was annoying me. Doing anything in the game just feels cumbersome. It isn’t so much that it is challenging, because that denotes it is something that learning from mistakes would improve. Instead it just feels like I am being bludgeoned by a thousand little cuts, each one sapping more joy from me.

Last night’s rage quit moment was Viper Napuatzi, a boss I have never had trouble with in any previous incarnation of this game. Essentially I was getting ripped to shreds by the poison, and my perfect strikes were doing nothing. I seemed like I was able to get her down to around half health and then there health bar would stall out and never dip any lower. I tried this fight a half dozen times before logging out and playing some Last Epoch. I had to do something that felt good for awhile to dull the annoyance and frustration of Path of Exile II. At this point you are probably asking yourself.. “Bel why the fuck are you still playing?”, and in truth I do not have a good answer for you. I would say I am doing it for the content… but that would be a lie. I am doing it because I hate the concept that this fucking game ground me down into the ground, when even as much as I did not enjoy it at times previously… I still pushed through it and figured out a way to have fun. I keep thinking that if I beat my head against this wall hard enough, I will eventually grow numb to the rage.

This morning before sitting down to write this I managed to complete the Trial of Chaos and got my second set of ascendancy points. So much about this stupid Trial seems to be getting a good batch of RNG and getting one option out of three that does not completely fuck over your build. More than that for my build, it also requires that I do not get the Chimera as the final boss… because that fight ends up being a comedy of errors as you have to traverse this gigantic fucking map with the hope of it sticking around long enough in one location to actually get a hit off before it flies off again. Now I need to spend a lot of time farming materials so that I can outfit a reasonable white chest-piece… socket it, get it to 20% quality, and then attempt to corrupt it for a third socket so I can assign those ascendancy points.

This morning they released a “What We’re Working On” post… but honestly I think I am too bitter to read it at this point. To me it just reads like them attempting to justify the decisions that they made which have led us to this point. There have been enough negative Steam reviews to have flipped the game into mixed rating… with 66% of recent reviews being negative. As frustrating as the campaign has been… I am now seeing statements from streamers that the endgame is even worse. Kripparian talks about running a six mod rare map with stacked rarity on gear and on the keystone… and not seeing a single rare item drop in the entire map. It has felt like both experience gain and loot has been nerfed in the campaign, and I have never before felt like I needed to go farm previous areas just to get levels, but I have been actively doing that in this play through. Unless something significant changes during the course of this league, it will probably be the last that I play for Path of Exile II. There are just better ARPGs out there and I am frankly having more fun still in the Legacy of Phrecia temporary event than this mess.

Right now I am giving it until the start of Act IV before I truly give up. That is of course if I can figure out a way to beat Viper in Act III and move on to Doryani. If not… or if the game does not improve in the cruel difficulties like it did previously… I guess I will just be playing around in Phrecia until Last Epoch drops on the 14th. My level 100 Righteous Fire Scavenger has reached a point where I am pretty easily farm T17 maps and was able to faceroll my way through Sirius over the weekend. It seems like a lot of players are back in Phrecia because the sheer volume of trades that I was getting pinged about was extreme. Mostly I chuck every jewel I get into a 20c tab and it is effectively a constant ping of players wanting this gem or that. Legacy of Phrecia legitimately has the most diversity of builds that I have ever seen in a Path of Exile league. Unironically this temp event that they just threw together… is maybe one of the best leagues they have ever created.

Anyways… did you try and play Path of Exile II this weekend? What were your thoughts? Am I completely off base in my rage and it seems fine to you? Drop me a line below.

Surfs Up Brando

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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.

The Idol Based Atlas

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Good Morning Folks. As of this afternoon we will have had access to the Legacy of Phrecia event for a week. At this point I am level 94 and have mostly reached a point of stability with my build. Sure I would like to craft a new sceptre and am on the look out for a few specific jewels, but all in all Scavenger RF works pretty well. However I am not going to talk about any of that this morning, and am instead going to share my thoughts about the new Idol Based Atlas system. This entire event was touted as ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, and this idol concept was originally something that was abandoned in favor of the current Atlas tree system… which admittedly is damned near perfection. The first few days I was pretty hype for the idols, but now I have reached a point where I absolutely see the limitations and understand why this did not see the light of day.

The good about this system though, is that early maps feel amazing. You get a large number of Idols which allows you to cobble together something that mostly works. During White and Yellow progression I was essentially getting Delirium, Harvest, Niko, Essences, and Strongboxes every map… and Ritual, Expedition, and Betrayal pretty freaking often. This is way more content than you would normally have access to during early maps when you don’t really have that many Atlas points to spend. This makes the early game feel amazing… but you eventually reach a point where it starts to taper off.

By the time you are in yellow or red maps, you have quite a few points to spend on the tree which means that you have pretty much every node available for at least one league mechanic, making that single mechanic extremely juicy. In truth I tend to build trees that synergize with different abilities that are all on the same side of the tree. For example I might have a Ritual, Einhar, and Beyond tree as they all exist within a few nodes of each other so that by the time you near the end of your Atlas you have 100% chance for all of those mechanics and have a bunch of nodes that buff them so that they produce better stuff. I tend to be an “Alch and Go Andy” when it comes to mapping strategies, and I juice to extreme levels with the most expensive scarabs and most carefully rolled maps. I drop a map in the atlas, hit go, and then run with whatever content the device gives me.

For the heaviest juicers however… the Idol system is probably much better. For example Life Without Pants is a YouTuber that I enjoy watching content from, and he talks a bit about his strategy that centers around Harbingers. Essentially through the use of the Idols he can force something like six harbingers on a single map, always convert them to harbinger bosses, cause them to drop whole currency instead of shards, and then cause their cool down to be much shorter so you can complete each individual harbinger encounter much faster. Similarly Fubgun is running a strategy where he forces 36 Rogue Exiles onto his map and then uses Scarabs to juice that up considerably so that he can produce Affliction league levels of drops when you combine that with Ritual.

The problem that I have with the Idol system however is that it essentially forces you to go “all in” on a single strategy. Either you can cobble together something like I am running where it ups the chances of a bunch of different league mechanics to spawn, or you carefully craft a single mechanic and then juice it to levels that have never been possible before. The existing Atlas Tree lets you do a handful of of complementary mechanics really well, and I think makes the entire experience feel a bit better as a result. As someone who cannot bring themselves to skip mechanics when they appear on the map… it feels bad to do a bunch of mechanics with zero investment in them. Nodes that I thought might be good on their own like Crop Rotation, actually feel awful when you don’t have the rest of the points in the tree to buff it.

I think part of what makes the Idol system feel extremely bad is the fact that you are almost required to deal with massive amounts of very small specific trades in order to get an individual strategy working. Everything I am running I have cobbled together from the dregs of my bank. If you were wanting to run a hyper specific strategy though, you would need to trade for a bunch of specific rolls on idols… and then deal with the frustration of not getting answers from most of the traders because 1 Chaos trades are not worth stopping mapping for. If you want to bump things up to the next level, you are also probably going to be spending time deleting idols through the recombinator as you try and get a single item with four usable stats on it. This is graveyard crafting levels of tedium… which is again why I am mostly just yoloing my way through the system and trying to make something that feels halfway decent. This is yet another league that proves Path of Exile needs a fucking auction house already.

As glad as I am that the Idol system was left on the cutting room floor and we have our beloved Atlas tree instead… I have to admit that given the choice I would take this immediately over the systems in Path of Exile II. Everything about the Atlas tree in that game is awful, and it is entirely too focused on bossing. Bossing is just a subset of the Path of Exile 1 endgame, and most people… are not really focusing on it. Idols would go a long way towards patching the problems with that game’s system and forcing specific mechanics onto every map instead of the poorly designed precursor tablet system. Conceptually I like the exploration system because I enjoy it in Delve, but it just does not really work as a replacement for mapping. Part of the payoff of leveling and fully unlocking your atlas tree… is the agency to focus on only the mechanics that you want to focus on. You never really reach any of that payoff or any of that agency in Path of Exile II… which feels like the team missed that core tenet of the first game.

Phrecia has been a really interesting experimental league, and it was announced today that it is being extended by a month. I really like chaos pop righteous fire, and I would absolutely play something like this again in the future. Which admittedly makes me wonder what it would be like to play one of the witch based righteous fire builds at some point in the future. I do think that a lot of the ideas behind the Idol system in this league event could benefit Path of Exile II. Right now the endgame does not really work and feels way too far removed from the near perfect loop of game play that exists within Path of Exile’s endgame. All of POE’s problems center around on-boarding the player and gear acquisition for non-traders and non-crafters but the virtuous loop of the endgame was not something that should have been abandoned. Path of Exile II feels a lot like Destiny 2 did at launch… where it feels like they forgot all of the lessons that the previous game had learned. I am onboard for trying out quirky ideas in event leagues until they figure out how to make Path of Exile II feel a bit better though.