Path of Exile II

Praise the Chinchilla

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a pretty great night, but it was one in fairly benign and quiet ways. Due to the holidays and having an exceptionally busy week, Ace and I did not manage to connect and do our normal Tuesday weekly reset nonsense in Destiny Rising. We did however manage to squeeze in a bit of play time last night, which was fortuitous because it also represented the reset of the Calamity Ops period so that we could grind up to promotion status again. We had two really chill Grandmaster Blitz runs, and then a pretty awful Calamity Ops run that knocked the wind out of our sails. However we were determined to at least knock out the 1 million points contribution score and in our second round we got a really solid player that managed to get us over 350k score and unlocked the Calamity Ops title for both of us. We did a few more runs after that and both went pretty smoothly, indicating that really that first player was just awful.

Right now The Dawning event is going on in Destiny Rising, as is it also going on in Destiny 2. However the two events are fairly wildly different… namely because in Rising… we have an animal mascot called the Dawning Chinchilla. We have no clue WHERE the Chinchilla came from or why… but we have a statue of it in our guild hall. In truth it does not look like any Chinchilla I have ever known… and I have had several friends that kept them as pets. Instead it sort of looks like a sheep version of the FFXIV fat cat minion, that has some sort of campfire attached to its back via a saddle. None of this really makes a damned bit of sense in the theme of a holiday event, but I don’t care. I love this thing. It makes me happy when I see it… so I guess mission accomplished. I kind of want to figure out a way to get this model outside of the game and print one.

The other thing that I really enjoy about Destiny Rising is the random names people come up with. Occasionally they really commit super hard to a bit. For example this is Stain, and they were in several of the Blitz runs last night. Notice that they applied the white explosion sticker to the crotch region. There are levels of nonsense applied in this game that I have only seen in the nameplates in FFXIV. We also ran around with a character named “LadyMan” which… I am not sure if it was an attempt to say LadysMan or what… but regardless memorable. It is weird how often I run into the same players over and over while doing content in the game. It does make me a bit concerned as to whether or not this game has much of a population if I keep seeing the same people. I hope it can afford to stay active because I love it very much. It is a game that I did not know I needed in my life, but absolutely do. Because if nothing else it gives Ace and I an excuse to do focused nonsense every single week.

After running around in Destiny Rising, I joined in our normal Thursday night grouping in Guild Wars 2 with Ammo, Ashgar, Sita, and Sol. There is an event going on right now where if you do 5 events in each of the 5 starter zones, you get a weapon and a 20 slot bag. So we ripped through some events in Queensdale, Wayfarer Foothills, and Metrica Province. That will leave each of us up to doing Caledon Forest and Plains of Ashford on our own, because I believe this event will be over by the time we meet up next week… and due to the Holiday I am doubting we are able to meet up anyways. Between spending quality sibling time with Ace, and grouping with the GW2 crew… it helped immensely. Friends really are a delightful panacea and I need to put myself out there more often for hanging on voicechat time. I think I probably need it more now than I ever did, because I live such a solitary life after the passing of my spouse. Sure I talk to my cats… and they talk back… they just don’t say anything that I can actually understand.

In other news I am happy to announce that I have my first STL part to release to the general public. When I was cleaning out my garage I put in these shelving units from Sam’s Club, and they have these little slots in the sides of them so you can either connect them to other units or hang these hooks that they come with off of them. I wanted to design some other utility objects to connect to these slots and made a little buck that I can merge onto existing models that fits the slot. Again this is probably only actually useful to me, but I wanted a broom holder and found a nice one that I then merged my little buck onto the back end of and it printed off beautifully. Now I have a place to store my shop broom and I will hopefully never have to wonder where the hell I put it. I figure I will upload and share any bits that I make, but I am not sure if these are useful enough to actually share with the broader public.

Because of all of the other nonsense that I got up to last night, I did not really make much progress in Path of Exile II. By the time we were wrapping up in Guild Wars 2, it was already 9ish and I just went on to bed. I doubt I will make much progress tonight either because I am doing the semi-monthly pen and paper thing with some friends that I have legitimatley been looking forward to. Mostly I want to get to level 78 so that I can equip my shiny new demon from and play with that a bit. There was a significant patch that dropped yesterday that seems like it might have buffed the league mechanic a bit, so that is welcome. However I am also seeing some reporting about endurance charage generation being bugged for bears… which will suck because I am getting quite a bit of survival from that. Momentum is also apparently not really working for Rampage so I replaced that support gem with Heft for the time being.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I think I did most of my shopping but need to get out and get some wrapping paper because I threw out a bunch of the old wrapping paper that I had while I was cleaning out the garage.

Oops Fun Happened

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Good Morning Folks! When I sat down yesterday to write my blog post, I fully expected to wind down Path of Exile II. I was just not having much fun, and everything felt more than a bit tedious. However yesterday I started having fun again, and as a result I am back with a vengeance. The endgame is still not amazing, and the speed at which you move through maps… also not super amazing. However the core problem that I had with my build is that my bear bro felt a little squishy. I was trying to go hard into Armor and quite honestly… Armor as a mechanic in Path of Exile II is still pure shit. Up until this point the answer to this problem was to go for Blue Health Bars… aka Energy Shield, and from what I understand that is still a perfectly viable option in spite of league after league of them attempting to nerf it. Armor however remains shit, because armor is only really useful against small hits. I did not want to go Energy Shield… so instead I fell back upon familiar ground and opted to try what fixes this problem in Path of Exile 1.

That’s right folks… I bought a pretty dress. Cloak of Flame is the core item that you end up building around as Righteous Fire Chieftain in Path of Exile 1 because it offsets a bunch of your physical damage to elemental damage, which 90% max res can handle nicely. Even with 75% resistances, damage shifting still makes a massive difference when it comes to whittling down those big hits into something reasonable. The Shaman ascendancy gives me 5% phys taken as each of the elemental resistances and the Cloak of Flame I picked up had 50% phys taken as fire for a total of 65% of my physical incoming damage shifted to some sort of element. Then on top of that I have a bunch of the opposite direction which allows my armor to apply to elemental damage. I doubt these double dip, but it does at least help with smaller elemental hits and allows me to mostly shrug those off. This setup massively improved the squish factor and now made mapping feel pretty chill. I still do not have capped Chaos resistance so I still have to dance around anything purple or green in my map, but I am no longer getting oneshot anywhere near as often as I once was.

So I have been roaming around the map and playing the game of seeking out corrupted nexus areas so I can keep getting more atlas passives. At this point I have completed at least the first tier of atlas passives in all of the league mechanics, and periodically take on the harder bosses for the guaranteed chance of getting a waystone upgrade. I am mostly running T4 maps at the moment, but as soon as I can get a few T5s I will be moving up. The waystone drop chance still feels abysmal, and they really need to do something to help give us better map sustain. It feels like I am getting more tablet drops than waystone drops, which I need far fewer of since they all now last 10 rounds. I did find two Moment of Zen near the start of the maps but I am going to hold onto these until I can get up into higher tier maps. I believe the uniques that drop out of these are influenced by the tier of waystone that you feed into them.

I am finally starting to generate some currency and saw my first two raw Divine Orb drops. I am pulling 2-3 Exalted orbs from each map and am fairly regularly seeing Chaos orbs. The loot does not feel overwhelmingly good or anything, and the Vaal Temple still sort of feels like crap, but there is a patch coming this evening I believe to address this. I did manage to pull some unique tablet called Unforseen Consequences that sold for 6 Divine Orbs, which was nice. I will be honest any time I encounter something that sells for that much, I just can’t bring myself to actually run it. The same goes for super rare scarabs in Path of Exile 1, I would rather have the currency than to use them, because my build is not optimized to get the maximum amount of outcome from such things. The way in which I play these games, will always mean I am funneling resources to the highest tier of players, and not actually consuming them myself. Probably the most expensive thing I have used are those Scarabs that were forcing a temple to drop every map and they were around 120 chaos per stack of 20, but I was generating more than enough currency in the Keepers league to fund those.

The real highlight of yesterday is that I found a copy of the Fury of the King Ashbark Talisman that fell within my available Divines. At the start of the league these were going for 25 Divines or more, but I snagged this one for 6 Divines. The only negative is that I still need two more levels before I can equip it. This will also require me to rework my tree a bit to get the most out of it, however I don’t really have much use for my stash of gold so this is also not a big deal. For those who are not in the know this is the Talisman that converts your bear form into a sort of Balrog looking thing. A few days ago Palsteron released a video about this unique. Essentially this will also end up with me dropping pounce from my build because the unique comes with Molten Crash which serves as a movement/attack ability. I am really looking forward to this swap up.

Basically solving the squish factor, made me start really enjoying the game again. Funny how that works. So I figure I will be with this until I push my map tiers up a bit, and start trying to take out some of the other bosses. I need to figure out which trial I want to focus on because I need to get my next two ascendancy points. I hate both Sekemas and Chaos… and desperately want this game to bring back the Labyrinth. However I feel like they will probably fuck it up somehow because there is way too much bullshit going on in this game in general. There are way too many “damage only on tuesdays” stuff going on as they are attempting to be clever. This game would be infinitely better if I was not required to push six buttons to make anything happen. All of that said… I am finding fun in what I am doing. For the most part I leap around the map and then do a big slam to cause packs to explode. This works great until I encounter a boss, but at that point I have to piano key my way through a bunch of abilities to set up a walking calamity which nukes it from orbit.

I wish Two Handed Warrior felt half as good as Bear does.

Gracie Glowers

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Good Morning Folks. I had to go into the office yesterday so I skipped blogging, and then after all of the interacting with people that happened… I crashed early around 8pm. This is a photo of Gracie to make up for not having blogged yesterday. She does this thing where she sits on my router and screams at me… while staring awkwardly at me. She often does this when I have decided I cannot handle her crawling all over me and wallowing on me and need to push her off to get something done. I think this is her way of sulking. It generally cracks me up quite a bit when it happens, because clearly she is mad at me and wants me to know it… by going just far enough away from me that I will be certain to see her and the staring daggers. I am not a good daddy clearly.

I’ve finished the Path of Exile 2 campaign on my bear and am now in maps, and I have to say… this is the point where POE2 ceases to be quite as enjoyable. The campaign is a heck of a lot of fun, and mapping is not. Mapping just feels tedious, because all of the rewards for a given map are contained within a handful of rare spawns… and missing one of them, feels like you are missing most of the loot. So I always arrive at this point where I am roaming around the map looking for the last rare so I can go and beat the damned boss and move on with my life. It is one of those situations where a bunch of subtle decisions have gone into this game, and make it so that mapping is just not really any fun. Its the limited portals, the general lack of loot, the lack of a decade worth of leagues, and the fact that when I do die in POE2… it happens immediately and what feels like completely randomly. It feels like the only way you can make a character feel tanky… is by investing everything in energy shield, because all other defensive layers feel like shit.

Then there is also the problem that the league mechanic feels like crap. There are a bunch of think piece videos floating around about what is wrong with the league mechanic, but ultimately I think it boils down to something very simple. I spent a bunch of this past Keepers league in POE1 deep diving into the existing Incursion mechanic, and my core problem with it has always been that it takes you out of the flow of the rest of the game. What I wanted for Incursion 2.0 was for it to be less fiddly and faster to complete than the original. Vaal temples are not that, and they are way more fiddly and require way more care and feeding. We all sort of thought we could run 60 maps and then do all of those saved up mechanics in a single temple session, but it doesn’t really work that way. Everything is six token chunks and it always feels like I never have the right connectors to make things work in the way that I want them to work. I think ultimately this mechanic needs to be simplified so that there is a single pathway tile, a single power up tile, and having some measure of control over how much of the temple resets on an architect or atziri kill. Then there is the problem with the fact that the rewards were cool while leveling… but quickly feel like crap when compared to the needs of mapping. Hopefully they can fix it, but I figure it won’t be until well into the new year at this point.

In other news the Destiny Rising christmas event is a heck of a lot of fun. You essentially have a version of the crucible but you are throwing snowballs instead of using weapons, and effectively it feels like lobbing grenades at everyone. There is also a crafting mechanic where you build snowmen from the resourcces that you gain every day from doing snowball fight matches. At some point there is going to be a sparrow racing component that unlocks, but right now… this makes up for how shitty the halloween event was. I’m having a lot of fun just yoloing my way through snowball fights, and I would love for something silly like this to return more often in place of the existing pvp modes.

I am also playing some Diablo IV and having a lot of fun on the Paladin class. I am going all in on thorns damage, and I am not sure how long this archetype will hold up, but for the moment it feels great. I am nearing level 60 and will start working on paragon levels shortly. I’ve done one of the capstone dungeons and it felt like it was twice as long as it should be and sort of overstayed its welcome. I need to actually figure out my build, because at the moment I am not really focused on much of anything but leveling. The replacement for powers seems fine, mostly because one of them drops experience orbs which is helping me level faster. I love paladin and crusders in the Diablo franchise and the game immediately got better for me with the addition of this class.

Lastly I thought I would share a photo of the final state of my paint racks. I have been printing these for what feels like ages at this point and essentially this will provide storage for 80 pots of Pro Acryl paint. Each of them has a removable drawer for general hobby storage and are going to line the back of a table in one of the upstairs offices that I will be turning into a hobby room. Now I am going to focus on printing out some other general stuff, like I made a brush rack over night and will probably start working on printing out a wet palette today. At some point I am going to have to actually order the damned paints though, but am effectively doing the prep work for setting everything up. I am hoping to get a lot of the work done on the actual office over the christmas holiday days off. I am really happy with how good the cabinets look, and am going to effectively velcro them together I think so they don’t slide around.

I hope you are having a wonderful week. At some point I have to figure out this whole Christmas thing… because I have done next to nothing for the impending holiday. This year without my spouse it just does not really feel like it matters all that much.

Bare Also 4 Fite

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In 2005 the Elder Sage Druid Alamo taught us that “CAT DURID IS 4 FITE!” a meme preserved by our dear friend TAGN. The thing is Path of Exile II added the druids, but they did not add a cat form. As a result… “Bare Also 4 Fite”. In truth when it came to World of Warcraft druids, I almost always played bear form for the defensive benefits, and spent most of my time leveling as bear so I am already used to fighting in that form. Alamo would be saddened by my disregard for their sage advice. On Friday the latest patch dropped for Path of Exile II adding 0.4.0 and the Last of the Druids content update, and the Fate of the Vaal league. I was pretty amped for this content drop because the footage that came out after the announcement from ZiggyD looked amazing. Grinding Gear Games has been trying super hard to make us interested in combo gameplay, but up until this point it felt very forced… and not like said combos were really that beneficial.

Druid changes that, and in truth had I been able to play this class from the very start I think I would have been able to grok their design goals. Effectively most of the gameplay for Bear Druid is about mauling your targets until runes light up on the back of your character telling you that your next slam is empowered, and then hitting Furious Slam to devastating impact. However there are mechanical benefits to doing this one two step because Bears effectively have two states, standing on two legs, and down on all four. Furious Slam has the text that adds a 0.4 second delay if you are not already standing. Maul on the other hand gives you a really fast way of standing, and thereby bypassing the built in delay of furious slam as your character stands up. So you are mauling not only to build up the empowerment but also because you can literally cast it faster than the delay built into the slam. This synergy between attacks feels really good, and then throwing in pounce as a movement ability that also primes the ground with fissures for you to exploit with your slam, even feels better.

Collectively in practice it means you are throwing out all sorts of nonsense onto the ground and then slamming on top of it to make big explosions, and the gameplay feels amazing. You can finish off trash mobs with maul without much issue, but it still feels amazing to do a big slam that causes half the screen to explode and also ignite things in the process. This is only going to feel even better as I lean more heavily into area of effect and damage numbers, and hopefully at some point switch to demon form via the Fury of the King Talisman. Really the ease of switching between Bear and Werewolf forms and the abilty to add in pounce as a gap closer as you move around the battlefield is really great. I find myself sprinting constantly as well, because the recent changes to how that mechanic works with stuns, means that I can pretty safely get into pounce range before triggering a heavy stun. The way that bear feels almost makes me want to try playing it with a controller.

The secret sauce of the animal forms though is making sure you are always using the highest damage Talisman that you can get. This is a new two handed weapon type and essentially you want to get one with as much physical damage as you can find on it. Elemental damage is nice, and you are going to get some baked on elemental conversion into your attacks, but like playing a Warrior Slam build, you want as much phys as you can get baseline to bump up your numbers. Essentially I saved all of my gold so that each time I moved into a new level bracket I could gamble for a base to attempt to craft on. I also got super lucky in getting a few rather tasty rare drops like the one above. What also helps massively is that the Vaal temple league mechanic gives you access to Betrayal style crafting benches that are just effectively free Regals and free Exalts. So you can in theory drag a few decent bases in with you when you start a temple and then hopefully exit with a new crafted weapon.

I went back and forth as to what I would start as, and ultimately landed on trying to yolo my way through a Druid and ultimately choose the Shaman ascendancy. I think in theory you can probably build a better Titan or Smith of Kitava that is a bear, but the pathing is a bit more contorted to get there. The area you start as a Druid has a bunch of really good early nodes that help progress you through Act 1 and 2 without much issue. This is quite possibly the MOST melee character, and I would have thought that would make Trial of the Sekemas a pain in the ass, but honestly I steamrolled through it. Similarly when I got access to Trial of Chaos I steamrolled that as well. At some point I am going to need to try for a third ascendancy, but for the moment I have chosen Reactive Growth and Avatar of Evolution which helps a bit when it comes to converting physical damage to elemental damage, and also giving me a bit of a buffer against elemental damage in general. For my third ascendancy point I will probably pick up Wisdom of the Magi and its defensive node, and then if I can do a fourth ascdendancy decide of I want to respec and go into Furious Wellspring or if I just pick up Turning of the Seasons instead.

The thing about Druid is that we did not have the passive tree ahead of the launch of the game. This means that NO ONE had any guides available ahead of time, and honestly if they did… they were completely suspect due to not really having any proper information. It was seemingly reasonable to maybe map out a Titan or Smith start with the class, but Druid was a total crapshoot. Because of this I utilized a wonderful functionality within POE.Ninja that shows a heat map of what talent tree choices most of the player base was choosing, and as such effectively crowd sourced my build. How this works is that you essentially choose the primary skill that you are interested in using, and in this case you can either choose Maul the default bear attack or Furious Slam. This then will show you a lit up tree featuring every build that is currently on the ladder and the warmer the color the more often something is chosen. For example almost EVERYONE is pathing down to pick up Primal Rage, regardless if you are starting Druid or Warrior as your base class.

As a result you can see the tree that sort of evolved out of the wisdom of the crowd. One of the primary deviations that I made from the norm is that I picked up Prism Guard and the nodes surrounding it, because I plan on going heavily into armor investment in the final version of my build. Damage shifting is one of the most powerful abilities in Path of Exile 1, and while that exists to a lesser extent in Path of Exile 2… there is the ability to make armor apply to elemental damage amd for the cost of 4 nodes you can get a baseline of 60% of your armor is applying to elemental damage, which you can then increase by making sure you get that stat on some of your beefier armor items like the chestpiece. Will this make me super tanky? I have no clue… because I have not played a melee character since this stat package was introduced. I am hoping it will however and if you look at Hardcore more folks are picking up that node there in the heat map.

I’m having a lot of fun with the Bear though and am now working my way through the second of the three interlude missions, and just about to wrap that up. The real proof of how well the build works is going to come when I start mapping. I think it is going to feel pretty solid though, because the higher the density the more the explosions seem to really work out. I need to probably spend some time fine tuning my support gems because I am not sure anything I am using is actually optimal. That again is another useful thing about POE.Ninja is because you can look at a bunch of the highest performing builds and see what they are using for abilities. This really is how I make characters these days, is I end up looking at a lot of what other players are doing with the abilities that I want to use in my build, and then sort of make decisions based on that data. That is ultimately how I have ended up with some of my favorite custom characters like my FreezyBoom nonsense, which is absolutely not on meta in the least.

So far I am enjoying this league this most I have ever enjoyed any Path of Exile II league, and have shifted from begrudgingly playing the game… to genuinely having a blast. The other aspect of the druid that I like a lot is all of the unique dialog options that happen while you are playing through the campaign. There is even an interlude that happens when you release the spirit of his dead wife during one of the sequences in the game. Genuinely really find this character enjoyable to play, because his reactions are not dissimilar to how I would react to some of these events. At this point Path of Exile II might legitimately have the best campaign from any ARPG to date. I really hope that they find a way to make the interludes stick around in some form of another because I find them really enjoyable as well. I like the whole concept of revisiting the first three acts to help with with further issues as you are somewhat building an army to fight the beast.

Since I started this blog post with one meme, I will end it with another one. I hightly suggest you check out the Druid review from Josh Strife Hayes. It is pure nonsense.