Path of Exile II

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

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One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Sitting In The Waiting Room

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Good Morning Folks. Waiting Room by Fugazi is not only my favorite song from that band… but one of my favorite songs of all time. Right now I am very much sitting in the waiting room, waiting on the Last Epoch servers to come up and the Tombs of the Erased season to start. I did a very dumb thing. I took the day off work, which almost certainly means that the game is going to be unplayable for large chunks of the day. This is pretty much the rule of game launches… that you never take time off for it. However in this case I have a backup plan, or at least some chores that need to get done around the house. So once I wrap this post I will be going in the backyard and continuing the leaf removal process that we have been doing for the last few days so that we can properly open the back yard and set up the patio off our bedroom.

One of the productive things that you can do while waiting on the servers to come up, is to fiddle around with your loot filter. This is legitimately one of my favorite parts of Last Epoch is that I can customize my filter until my heart is content, and honestly… it is way more straight forward than you might think. It seems like each new league I greatly simplify my process and filter out more chaff. This is essentially the base version of my filter and they are applied from the bottom up so you sort of have to remember the order of operations. As the league progresses I will tighten my filter but right now going into the league this is what I am going to be running with.

Since they get applied from the ground up, here is a brief explanation of what each filter does:

  • Starting at level 5 I am going to hide all Normal aka White Items
  • Starting at level 15 I am going to hide all Magic aka Blue Items.
  • Starting at level 40 I am going to hide all Rare aka Yellow Items… and at that point I will probably delete the first two rules to free up some space. Later I will tweak this rule to remove the level requirements and start hiding Purple items.
  • The next rule is to hide all Idols, because most of them are absolute trash.
  • The next rule is a Recolor rule, which will show and color any Idols with at least two affixes that I care about on them. I trigger the Emphasis bit which puts the item names in all Caps so that I can know for certain it was triggered by a rule and that it did not just somehow slip through the cracks of my hide rules.
  • The next rule I am looking for any item that has an affix that I care about coloring it blue. This is my shard fodder rule allowing me to build up crafting resources that I need through salvaging items.
  • Next up I am looking for any item that has at least TWO affixes that I care about on it and then coloring those purple.
  • Lastly is my “good item” rule where I am looking for any item with at least 3 affixes that I care about and a total item weight of at least 20 tiers which I color Red.

You can do a lot more but for the time being this is what I am going to roll into the new season with. As the season goes on I will start caring about only wanting specific base types which will further limit the visual clutter from mapping.

In other filter news… Neversink/Filterblade has been updated with a brand new theme called Cobalt. I spent some time last night running with it and I really like it quite a bit. Sure it is going to take awhile to train my brain on what is and what is not something that I care about, but the colors that are being used feel fresh and new. This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Filterblade, which really is the site you should be using for your item filter needs in Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. In a perfect world I would have EHG hire this team to rework their own item filter visualizations. The thing I miss most when playing Last Epoch is the “tink” sound from a great drop.

I’ve made it to T10 maps after spending two days hunting for another nexus of corruption. I’ve also started to actually see this again, since the T10 mobs are a bit rippier than the T9 and below ones were. I am wondering if I need to tweak my gear to add on more survival bits, or if this is just the point at which armor begins to be ineffective against damage. I’ve tried to do my third ascendancy a few times and I just can’t. Either I need to spend time farming lower tier Sanctums looking for honor resist idols, or I need a really good run of RNG in the Trial of Chaos. If I can get my next two points I can buff all of my resists up to 89. The thing that is super brutal though is there are these plants that spawn from certain monsters that throw out a ton of chaos balls… and they will just fucking rip through you and if there is too much mob density on screen you cannot even see them.

In totally not ARPG news… my friend Mog/Astella has had the foresight to create a Fediverse Hunter Squad for Monster Hunter Wilds. Since you can seemingly be in a bunch of different squads I joined this morning, and it is going to be an excellent time for anyone on Mastodon/The Fediverse that is also playing the game. Essentially you can search for the squad via the id TA8E48PM and then request to join. Mog had already thrown me an invite so this process was greatly simplified for me. Also side note if you are tired of trying to be normal on social media and want a place almost exclusively populated with fellow weirdos… then check out the Mastodon Server that I help administrate. Right now I am on Bluesky and Tumblr, but the real place I consider my home is The Fediverse aka Mastodon aka Gamepad.club.

Anyways! I really hope today’s launch of the new Last Epoch season goes really smoothly. They are getting a ton of press from various ARPG streamers, so I am hoping it pays off massively for them.

Still Burning

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I released a bit of propaganda for the upcoming Last Epoch Tombs of the Erased season. I’ve been asked a few times what I plan on starting for the league. I’ve kicked around a few ideas, namely checking out the Forge Guard updates and running something with a Two-hander and Shield to see how that plays. However I think at least in the short term I am going to revisit some familiar territory. Warpath is without a doubt my favorite skill in Last Epoch. I’ve always loved whirlwind builds as a concept and I do love to spin and win. Over the course of various leagues I have played so many different versions of this build.

Each time I have played this build I have tweaked it a bit and improved upon the previous iterations. This video is recorded of that last version of the build and from what I can tell based on the patch notes and updates… it maybe got buffed a little bit. So unless something drastic changes between now and tomorrow when the league starts, I am going to essentially follow the template of this character. There are a few changes in the passive tree that I will navigate in the moment, but I have a pretty good idea of how I am going to path. I will very likely wing it, because having effectively built five versions of this character… I more or less know what I like. Do I suggest you follow this build? Fuck no. It works for me, but I’ve never done any of the pinnacle content on it, and it still requires you to be in melee range making it more challenging than probably literally any ranged build is going to be.

At some point I am probably going to run up some sort of a bow character and play with the brand new Heartseeker ability. I think this is what my friend Ace is going to start, so I will likely lean on their experiences. I have a feeling I am going to be playing Last Epoch for a few months and as a result I will probably run up multiple characters like I did at the 1.0 release. I probably want to lean into cold damage, because I like the crowd control aspect of that element. I think maybe the fire damage version is going to be more powerful though, but given that I am leaning into fire with my “Spin to Win” character I am not certain that I want to do that on multiple characters.

Another build that I have played a lot in the past that is pretty fun is some sort of Necromancer. For those builds I have tended to follow some of the builds from Aaron Action RPG. This is going to be one of those things that I only build if I get one of two uniques. Aaron’s Will is pretty freaking rare, but if I get one as a drop I will very likely go into the Golem build that uses it. More common is the build designed by actor David Harbor called Wraithlord’s Harbor which goes all in on summoning Wraiths. I’ve never actually made this build but I have always been curious about it. The only problem with minions is that you end up mostly just running around avoiding taking any damage while your swarm of minions overwhelm things. Its relatively comfortable but you also tend to not have much survival.

So right now that is my plan, to stick with the familiar and maybe at some point respec into something Forge Guard to play with some of those new abilities. I know that Warpath Ignite is going to give me a solid start to the league and allow me to build up some resources without much issue. Once I start getting some Circle of Fortune rep going and filling my bank with uniques, I might pivot into some other builds for funsies. I know I am going to at the very least play some sort of bow build, so I might add to my item filter some things to support that so I can begin banking useful gear for leveling purposes. There are some really good leveling uniques that you can lean on pretty heavily. The first thing that I am hoping to find is my old friend the Firestarter’s Torch which really trivializes a lot of the early content with my build.

In non-Last-Epoch news, we got another banger of a patch in Path of Exile II with 0.2.0f landing yesterday evening around 8pm. It includes a bunch of quality of life changes, including some stash tab affinities for various items that were annoying the shit out of me and belts being modified to have additional charm charges by default. I still think the charm system as a whole is complete garbage… but at least we might be able to use more than one of them at a time. Flask automation from Path of Exile was just better. The patch however apparently caused some unintended consequences for users with AMD cards so I suppose that sucked. Being able to bookmark nodes on the Atlas is pretty cool so you can mark those unique maps that you cannot quite run yet, or at least that has been my use of them so far.

Are you going to be firing up Last Epoch for the upcoming season? If so what are you playing? Are you planning on just sticking it out with what I have personally dubbed “Sad League” in Path of Exile II? Drop me a line below.

The Altar of Randomness

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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.