path of exile

POE2 Free Weekend and Thorns Sentinel

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Good Morning Folks. This weekend is the launch of Path of Exile II 0.3 aka The Third Edict and I have had every intent to just start playing whenever the hell I felt like it. Last Epoch Season 3 launched this past weekend and with how close these two things seem to always be now… I feel like we are always going to be courted towards one or the other. Last Epoch got the win last go round with the combination of a pretty frustrating 0.2 patch in POE2 combined with Last Epoch pushing back their seasonal start so that players frustrated by one game could bounce to the next. The thing about The Third Edict is that nothing about the patch really excites me except for the new asynchronous trade system. I have been wanting a more automated trading system in Path of Exile since I first started playing it, and I am pumped as hell that they have already announced a version of this is coming to the superior game… Path of Exile 1.

What raised my excitement level however is that yesterday Grinding Gear Games announced that there will now be an in game version of the trade website browser. I am pretty freaking pumped about this, because while sure… power traders will likely keep using the trade website on a second monitor, this makes trade in general much more approachable for players and a much better option for those who play on console. Sure the whole concept of having to teleport into a hideout to buy your items is a bit kludgy, but this is so much better than anything we have had access to. It will also present some interesting situations to make bulk selling items more reasonable, because when someone teleports in to buy one sanctum book for example, it is likely they will just hoover up all of the books at the same price. Our very own community Saint, Sir Gog released a video this morning as a bit of a warning though, outlining several different scams that he can see working under the new system. It will kill several that are notorious in both POE1 and 2, but offers up some new ones for folks who are in a hurry to get their currency deleted.

What has changed for my equation of playing this in a few weeks… is that they are running an event the first weekend where they are giving away a few MTX for anyone who has cleared Act 1. I am a sucker for MTX… and as a result I am very much likely going to be firing up a character and at a minimum clearing through Count Geonor. Right now I am looking to play a version of the character that I rolled late in 0.2 that is some sort of a Warrior playing with Crossbows, and namely Incendiary Shot with Armor Explosion support. More than likely I am going to be doing a Titan and then stacking small passives to inflate the damage and survival of the build. I have no clue what order I am going to take my ascendancy points… probably do Crushing Impact first and then when I get my second ascendancy done, swap the points into Hulking Form given that the bag is a waste of a point until you can go two points in. Everything that Crushing Impact is doing, I can get with support gems, but it will be handy once I am able to pick up a fourth ascendancy and get 50% more multiplier against heavy stunned enemies.

The other thing of note about the Path of Exile II 0.3 release weekend is that they are opening it up for all players to try out the game for free. Starting at 1pm PDT on August 29th and ending at 1pm PDT September 1st… anyone is going to be able to go to the platform of their choice and download the game for free and play it. This likely means that the servers are going to be heavily congested. However it sounds as though the free players will not be able to start the download until that 1pm deadline ticks over, giving anyone who already has the full client a bit of a head start in the process. I hope it works out for them and does not lead to a massive quagmire over a holiday weekend. The last league launched over Easter Weekend and caused all manner of issues with them updating bugs… and I realize that Labor Day is not a thing outside of the United States… but I really hope they are prepared for the onslaught of players. If you’ve ever been curious about the game then I suggest you give it a shot and check it out. If nothing else… Path of Exile II is a great gateway drug to the real goodness of Path of Exile 1.

Over in Last Epoch I am slowly progressing on my Zoo Necromancer build, but I am starting to hit my first opposition as I begin raising corruption. This is probably something that levels could resolve, either that or trying to perfect my passive tree and go with the Abomination build. Mostly I am now through two harbingers and need to actually begin raising corruption to keep progressing. The big problem that I am having is that even though I have better general survival while mapping… I still can easily get one shot by bosses. I struggled to get through Gaspar in The Last Ruin timeline, because I just kept dying to the rotating beam phase once there was more shit on the ground that I needed to avoid. Once I beat Gaspar, actually downing the Harbinger was more tedious than anything. I’ve been focusing on some of the harder timelines to knock those out for these first few Harbingers so that I can do some of the easier ones later once the difficulty increases.

I’m also being tempted away by another build. Ash had already signaled to me that there was the possibility of some thorns shenanigans with the new primordial chest called Thicket of Blinding Light. He was thinking about this as a build on the Primalist tree, but I think I am more comfortable with the Sentinel tree overall and its general survival options. Yesterday the algorithm fed me this video doing exactly that thing… and now I want to give it a try. Last night I started a brand new character and have been leveling it with Shield Throw converted to fire damage. I had never really played around with Shield Throw in this game and it is a heck of a lot of fun. I basically leveled with Hammer Throw until I unlocked it and then when I had enough points into Shield Throw I dropped Hammer Throw entirely. Right now I am trying to pick up the Paladin tree points so I can start speccing out the abilities needed from there before dumping more points into Forge Guard.

I think tonight Ace and I might run around on our Necros and try and do some nonsense. I am not super feeling the current state of that build so I might try and tweak it a bit over lunch today. That is of course pending I am doing better by tonight. I essentially breathed in some fumes over the weekend and they have thrashed my lungs a bit… and I am having quite a bit of trouble breathing today. It is one of those days where I can work remotely just fine, but today is supposed to be an in office day and there is no way I can do that. So as a result I will likely be taking a sick day.

Helena Steps Up

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Hey Folks. Yesterday was a massive reveal for Path of Exile II, and there is a lot of interesting stuff there happening in that game. I am actually excited to give it a shot once Last Epoch Season 3 (which starts today at 11 am CDT) has run its course for me. All of that said, the most exciting change that happened yesterday… did not happen in Path of Exile II but instead was thrown in as part of a Path of Exile 1 patch that added the new MTX sets. Helena has now gained the ability that Sin and Doryani have in Path of Exile II, where she will identify everything that is in your inventory. Better yet it has the same Ctl+Click shortcut that exists in Path of Exile II, so now when I finish a map my first step is to walk over and have her bulk identify everything. Unfortunately that means that Lily is no longer my vendor character and Helena just got elevated in her location in my hideout significantly. I moved Lily over to the side a bit because I still feel like the ability to buy gems is a pretty huge role.

If you have not seen the presentation I highly suggest giving it a watch because it goes in depth as to the massive design changes that are a foot in that game. The full patch notes are also available if that is more your speed and you do not feel like watching an over hour long presentation. The biggest take away that I had is it seems like they are genuinely trying to make the game feel less clunky and then highlighted a bunch of ways they are trying to achieve this. Namely things like weapon swaps no longer having an animation lock, shield charge dropping its cool-down so you can spam it, and the addition of a sprint key to speed your way across large empty chunks of map seem like they will improve the flow of game-play. More important than all of this… they are introducing the first step at an asynchronous trade system that works somewhat similar to how the brokerage system worked in Everquest II. You post items on a vendor and then people come to your hideout to buy those items, all without you needing to be online.

It is going to take a bit for the changes to really sink in, and since I am not likely to start on the 29th I will be able to know whatever is busted before rolling my character. However I think I am probably going to try and revisit something I did this league where I played a Warrior archetype with Crossbows and leaned heavily into Armor Explosion stacked on Explosive Shot and then used Blueflame Bracers to convert that damage to cold so that I could also freeze things. The biggest change will be that since I can use the same support gems on all of my abilities, I can really lean into the armor break and armor explosion mechanics, while also dipping into some of the nodes that they highlighted in the warrior starting area that do fun things with armor break and fire damage. I still think there is probably a build here, and that it should also have more survival since you can now get the ability for armor to apply to elemental damage on gear.

My tree was somewhat of a mess but once the build sites get updated for the new information I will probably sit down and plan something out so I am not winging it every time I place a point. I still feel like the two handed and armor break nodes are really key to rush towards at first, but after that I sort of lost focus and went all over the place. Since I can throw attack speed gems on every node that should improve the feel of the crossbow abilities a bit, given they already feel a bit sluggish. There is a new support gem that they previewed that shows your crossbow reloading every time you break armor, and since that is my entire focus… so that I can make things explode based on broken armor… it should have a lot of synergy with what I am trying to do. I am just hoping that this build type goes under the radar enough to still be functional by the time I start a character.

I’m actually excited to play some Path of Exile II at some point, and that is the first time since the pre-release client came out and I saw what the game played like. I’ve been pretty down on this game, and I know that is disheartening for some folks who really like the changes it made over the Path of Exile formula. I will likely always love Path of Exile more, because I have spent over 2000 hours playing the damned game at this point. However getting into Titans Quest 2 made me appreciate a slower pace, and I played some of my crossbow dude last night and it felt better than I remember it feeling. I never beat the campaign on this character, but I did get another character to 85 during the Dawn of the Hunt league. I just did not enjoy the game enough to push any further, even though I was having more fun with crossbows than I was with Twohander and Shield Smith of Kitava. I still hate the way that characters ascend and find that entire process miserable, so I am definitely going ranged for the upcoming league to make Sanctum more tolerable.

However that is not what today is about. Today is hype for Last Epoch Beneath Ancient Skies, and you can check out the full patch notes here. I am going to be rolling a Necromancer of some sort and will likely wing it through the campaign and then build something more seriously after that. The ancient area has long been my favorite part of Last Epoch, so I am pumped to explore more of it. Mostly I am trying really hard not to fall back on Warpath Sentinel that I have played so many times in the past. The Judgement build ate a bunch of nerfs so I am hoping Necromancer can reach a point where I can at least do the endgame bosses. More than anything I am looking forward to hanging out with Ace and doing some group play over the weekend. I have plans for Saturday during the day but Thursday, Friday, and Sunday I am hoping to group up and do some nonsense. More than anything I am on the hunt for the Tyrant’s Skull so I can have a TRex minion.

I hope to see you all in Last Epoch today, and then eventually in a few weeks Path of Exile II.

Out of Time

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a wild ride work-wise for me and this morning has been similarly wild but I have a bit of a gap and am going to try and bang out a blog post in the spirit of Blaugust. After I finished with my sixteen hour day I unwound with a bit of Path of Exile while listening to various YouTube videos. I managed to get my last round of memory altars and finish up Eldritch Expeditions giving me 35 of 40 for the league. The challenge here is the fact that memory tears aka the things that replaced atlas memories, are pretty freaking rare even though I have stacked up +40% chance on my atlas. There are a bunch of mechanics like this that I wish we had scarabs to force onto a map… like I would love to do that with Sentinel for example. I fully expect that Memory Tears are permanent, since they were part of an endgame expansion to the game and not necessarily tied to a league mechanic.

I would really like to knock out another challenge so that I could finish unlocking the cosmetic armor. The issue is that all of the remaining challenges are a pain in the butt. In theory the one I am closest to, also requires me to “get gud” as it were. Basically you have to complete the new endgame encounters while avoiding taking specific attacks, and quite honestly I am not sure what half of the effects that are called out are and would have to look them up. I made an attempt at Incarnation of Fear but failed to correctly identify which mechanic I needed to care about. Strenuous Summons is the easiest but also the one that requires the most grinding. Recollections Realized is pretty straight forward… I have more than enough memory influenced maps so it is just a case of running them. Then I would need to buy a bunch of boss tokens from the currency exchange and run those as well. All of that is doable even though I don’t really enjoy fighting bosses in Path of Exile. Any fight that takes longer than few seconds feels like a massive bore, and since I do not play bossing specific characters… they all take longer than I care to commit.

The reality though is that I am pretty much out of time. Tomorrow at 11 am the Beneath Ancient Skies season for Last Epoch drops, and at that point… I am pretty much going to stop playing Path of Exile for awhile. After Last Epoch has run its course, I will probably swap over and play the new Path of Exile II league. That means that if I do not finish it up tonight… it is highly unlikely that I will return after those two games to knock out another achievement before the next Path of Exile league in October. I am pretty amped about Last Epoch and I know that once I get back into the game, all thoughts about the Mercenaries League are going to fly out of my head. The one that I absolutely COULD complete tonight is the one that requires all of the boss summons, because it is simply me setting my mind to doing it and then acquiring all of the stuff to complete it. I am back up to just shy of 90 divines after my massive currency dump on my alts and I am sure I can probably afford to buy my way out of this problem.

The other major distraction is that today at 3pm CDT there is a Path of Exile II reveal stream with the upcoming Third Edict league. Over night however there were a massive series of leaks from a French publication outlined on Reddit. Sir Gog released a video that is essentially him going over the leaks on livestream if you are curious. I am only really interested in terms of seeing how much more is in this league than was released on that site, because it seems as though at some point during the publishing of this content Grinding Gear Games caught on and asked them to stop. During the stream today there will be Twitch drops so manage your lives accordingly so you can pop in and get a finisher effect. If the leaks are correct there are a massive number of changes coming to Path of Exile II that are going to fundamentally shift how the game plays. What really matters though is how it feels to play, and we won’t know that until the 29th.

Lastly we got a cinematic reveal for the next World of Warcraft expansion yesterday and I feel mixed about it. This trailer does not feel like Blizzard trailers usually do. It feels as though it came from a trailer house and not from the in house team that has done all of the amazing cinematics in the past. I know the Blizzard marketing team was recently dismantled… and I can’t help but think the uncanny nature of this trailer is a direct result. It could also be that I am further removed from the Warcraft fandom than I have ever been at this point. I barely played Dragonflight and I started War Within but never made it out of the first zone. There is a heck of a lot of cool stuff coming with this expansion, and my friends who are still engaged with the game seem to be excited. I can’t necessarily say I will not play it at this point, but I am also not nearly as drawn to it as I am for example with the new Guild Wars 2 content drop on October 28th.

Wrapping this post up. I am hoping that I can maybe squeeze out one more challenge before I put Path of Exile to bed. If I can do that, I can walk way with a clear conscience and not look back.

So Much Fortress

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One of the cool things about playing Path of Exile and buying the supporter packs, is that you end up with a bunch of interesting toys. For example I have a ring that when equipped on a character as a cosmetic, keeps track of every bit of currency that drops on the ground. I wish this covered the entire league and all of my characters… and not just the character equipped but regardless it is still cool. Similarly I have a map device that is a cool glowing purple tree that keeps track of every map that has been run in the device. So over the course of this league I have personally launched 37 White Tier Maps, 82 Yellow Tier Maps, 530 Red Tier Maps, and 29 t17s or Purple Tier Maps. I have technically run 30 t17s but one of them I did not launch myself but it still counted towards the challenges of the league. Similarly I have found 41 Divine Orbs as raw drops, 37 Exalted Orbs, and 2838 Chaos Orbs. If you want a better accounting than that, you have to use some sort of third party tool like Wealthy Exile which tracks currency in your tabs not exclusively currency that drops on the ground.

The biggest thing that took place over the weekend, is that I realized I could burn through t17s pretty easily on my Righteous Fire Chieftain character and as such… that 30 maps challenge became priority. This is the point where I talk about how much I hate the process of rolling t17s because there are so many awful modifiers that brick builds. I feel like t17s and t16.5s need to be rethought because there is no one that actually enjoys running any of the completely awful mods. I honestly feel like t17s overall were a massive mistake because they have become the default map to run if you care about juicing, leaving t16s in the dust. I had gathered up enough Fortress maps to run nothing but those, and at some point I might give a shot at doing some of the other maps just to see how bad they are if carefully rolled. Fortress is nice because as RF Chieftain I can pretty much stand on top of the boss and ignore everything else going on other than occasionally the robot’s bit slam attack.

On the 17th just before 7pm I completed Endgame Enigmas and unlocked my 34th challenge, giving me the upgraded totem pole for my hideout that I have gotten the last two leagues. I could continue pushing for 40, but I doubt I am going to make that effort. There are two more that seem within the realm of possibility that I might knock out, because that would give me access to the fully upgraded cosmetic set. Essentially I have 3 more Memory Altars left to go before I unlock that achievement and then the next easiest is the one centered around modifiers on invitations. I have a stack of Black Star and Searing Exarch fights sitting around that I can run, and I think I am sitting at 125 of 250 towards the challenge. I would love to buy a bunch of Black Star invites but those are going to be tedious and are not something often sold in bulk on TFT. This is one of those moments when I feel like we really need a proper automated auction system.

If I walked away right now though… I would be reasonably happy. I have a third totem pole that matches the other two from Settlers, and Necropolis. I had been on a streak of upgrading the size every league, but 34 seems like the most reasonable amount for me personally. I really need to make better use of my resources and look at all of the challenges at the start of the league… rather than the end of the league. That way I can start to plan my way of what I am going to run so I can begin chipping away earlier rather than later. At some point I am going to burn down my hideout and build a new one since I got the Primeval Hideout unlocked. I need to figure out a better place to put these things since I apparently care about collecting them. Right now they are just sort of shimmed in north of all of the rest of the stuff in my headout near my Delve entrance.

We are two days out from the start of the Last Epoch league, which is my hard stop of Path of Exile nonsense at least for the time being. Right now I am leaning towards a Fire Based Necromancer build that Aaron Action RPG posted yesterday, or at least something similar to that. I did not think I would be going down the Abomination route but since you can build one exclusively with volatile zombies. I will miss my lorge chonky Golem friends, but it will be kind of cool to play with the new Abom mechanics. I am going Necromancer regardless of what version I go with, where I will either follow that the path in that build or set off on my own zoomancer setup. I am super looking forward to the new season in Last Epoch and can’t wait for it to start. I am honestly even excited to watch the reveal stream for Path of Exile II on the 20th.

Are you going to be playing Last Epoch? If so what are you planning on going with as a build? Are you instead waiting for Path of Exile II? If so what are you starting there. Drop me a line below.