path of exile Archives - Page 23 of 101

Golden Helhest and Hiveborn

October 17, 2025 by Belghast

Hey Folks. I’m still on my Destiny Rising bullshit, I think in large part because I don’t really have another game to obsess about. That is going to change a bit towards the end of this month because I will have the first part of the latest Guild Wars 2 expansion to play (28th), and then a brand new Path of Exile league following closely after that (31st). I will likely be ping ponging between those games, while still doing my dailies in Destiny Rising from that point forward. That probably means that I will let the second account that I rolled up to create the guild lapse a bit, because I won’t be mainlining the game quite so hard. I did however give them some more money and bought the Crow outfit for Helhest because I still think it is badass.

The biggest news since yesterday is that I managed to push Helhest up to gold rank which unlocked another significant boost to exotic mod drop rates. That really is the piece that I need to focus on farming right now. I have decent artifacts for most of my champions, but have next to nothing in the exotic mod department. I did manage to get a single pierce exotic mod that would work for Hellhest’s linear fusion rifle, and that was the thing that pushed me over the light cap for gold. The champion that I am probably going to work on next is either pushing Umeko up to Gold, or spending some time focusing on Ning Fei because after getting him on my second account… I’ve come to realize that I actually really like playing him. Umeko is probably my favorite pure sniper though, because of the self healing benefits. However if I need to take a precision champion somewhere… I am probably going to be playing Helhest for the broader versatility.

Speaking of the second account, over lunch I tried to run a bunch of gauntlet ops, and ran into some friction. This is the first time in the community I have been kicked from a group… seemingly because I had low light levels. It happened twice while trying the run the Gauntlet Break In part of the raid. The irony behind this is that in the teams that I managed to get into… I dusted them hard, and was one of the key players doing the mechanics. More so I ran a strike with Ning Fei and was less than half the light level of the other players… but did 71% of the damage. Please for the love of god.. do not judge players for being new lights, because sure everyone wants an easy run… but there are a ton of folks running second accounts in this game and you can never tell when that new light might be a ringer. Additionally it is just a dick move to try and be exclusionary like that.

Part of what has made my alt Ning Fei so powerful so quickly, is that I managed to get the exotic crossbow to drop as well. That account is shaping up to be pretty freaking strong with both Jolder and Ning Fei. Hopefully I can pull a Helhest while this event is still going on. It sucks that it will be a long time before it has access to Gwynn or Estela since those banners are over. I am guessing when the new content goes in early next year hinted in that trailer, that Gwynn and Estela might be joining the permanent banner at that point. I am still having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, even though I know I am probably switching gears especially when the Path of Exile and Guild Wars 2 expansions drop.

Speaking of which we have a name for the expansion, a theme for the expansion, and a reveal date of the 23rd. Keepers of the Flame seems like maybe this is going to relate to the Acolyte of Chayula from Path of Exile II. Then the theme of the expansion feels like it is going to be Breach focused, and maybe a significant upgrade to the way that it works. The hand jump scare, specially looks like the hand shaped “wings” on the back of Xesht who serves as the boss of Breach in Path of Exile II. I think essentially, we are seeing more content that knits the storyline between the two games together a bit, and maybe serves as a gap closer between the events and organizations that appear in the 20 year gap. It That Fled, one of the Betrayal NPCs specifically talks about the Hive, so yeah…. it feels like we are getting a Breach upgrade league. It does make me wonder how sweeping of a change it is going to end up being.

Additionally there are going to be some sweeping changes coming to Diablo IV. It feels like we JUST started Season 10, and that it is way too soon to begin talking about Season 11… but apparently they are just about to start up the PTR on October 21st. Due to this they dropped some big patch notes, and Raxx also released a video talking about them. I am seeing some things that will probably be really good for the game, namely changes to how Masterworking and Tempering functions to be a bit more deterministic. They are however talking about making combat harder… which worries me because really the point of a Diablo game is getting to a place where you can blow up entire screens. The game itself is not mechanically enjoyable enough to really lean into the soulslike direction like Path of Exile II did. However that said… I am not even sure what sort of unique niche this game can carve out. It will always be a shallower version of better games like Path of Exile or Last Epoch, because it is not growing over time.

Don’t get me wrong. Diablo IV is a pretty good game. It is fun in small doses, but there just isn’t really a lot going on… and they are squandering the seasonal model to keep creating thoroughly disposable content. Each season comes with a new borrowed power system, and a new faction to grind… which gives you rewards that will all be washed away the next time a season rolls out. Last Epoch and Path of Exile 1/2 create permanent changes to the game that grow the depth and complexity each time a season/league happens. Not everything goes “core”, but enough does that it makes the game feel like it is growing and changing in interesting ways. Diablo IV more or less feels the same today as it did at the launch of its DLC… because there is nothing really new to do that did not go in with that DLC. Sure they have moved the chess pieces around on the board, by shifting this or that balance…. but at the end of the day you still have to grind the same endgame that existed a year ago when Vessel of Hatred launched. We are about to be eleven seasons deep into this franchise and have very little to show for it. I think more than anything… the game disappoints me, because it could be a better game than it is now.

The other thing that I am playing that I have not really talked much about is Bravely Default, on my Switch 2 hooked to my new television downstairs. This is a super chill activity that I often do when I am winding down for the night, and at the moment I am largely in Act 2 and grinding levels right in front of Ancheim. At some point I am going to swap up the jobs of everyone so that they can learn a second trait line. Currently I have Edea as Knight, Tiz as Monk, Agnes as White Mage, and Ringabel as Black Mage… and I am going to swap my two martial fighters and my two magic users so they are cross trained. I find grinding levels in turn based JRPGs deeply relaxing, and especially since this one has an auto mode where you can set up a set of attacks and just have them follow them over and over. I am not really sure what level I am going to call “good enough” to move forward, but right now I am mostly farming until I have enough gold to buy all of the upgrades available in town. I like overpowering content, and do not really want to have to think about it.

Anyways. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. It is supposed to be cooler again, so I will likely be working on the south half of the garage. Once I have finished with everything I will probably post before and after photos. It was a complete mess, and it is becoming less of one, every time I go out there and work.

Thirty Million Gold

October 1, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I am still struggling a bit with this respiratory crud, but am doing better enough to be able to function and actually work today. If it drags on, I will end up going to the doctor but given that I doubt there is anything that they can do other than put me on a dose pack of prednisone… which will royally fuck with my sleep patterns… I have been trying to avoid that. I mostly spent the night playing Diablo IV downstairs while snuggling with cats. Gracie was doing the thing in my office where she refused to not be the center of attention, and when this happens it is generally better if I go down to the couch where she can snuggle in my arms while I am playing, rather than me trying to hold her with one hand while using the computer with other other. In wild news… the last few mornings I have been able to pet the super skittish feral black cat that hangs out in front of the house with Greybie.

Last night I managed to finally have some luck with the trade channel and picked up a set of Ancestral Tibault’s Will for 30 million gold. That seems like a nonsensical number, but I had over 200 million and nothing really to do with it… so it effectively has no value to me. I opted to throw on a non-Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which at least allowed me to have the fully functional build, and this more or less has allowed me to bump up to Torment IV and farm the world content comfortably. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I ran Varshan again and finally got an Ancestral version of that helmet to drop, so in theory I have Ancestral of better of everything that is required for the build. I still cannot quite do bosses on T4… but they melt on T3. Now it is just a matter of getting better versions of all of the uniques and maybe hopefully getting a few mythics so I can bump up to that version of the build. I am also hunting for a better pair of boots with more movement speed on them.

The biggest challenge that I am going to face right now is that most of the final set of challenges involve running content on t4 while having a piece of Chaos Armor equipped. I am not really certain which slot I can theoretically sacrifice to the achievement gods in order to make that happen, but I will do some testing. I need to run a few more Infernal Hordes to do the chaos rifts inside of them and also farm some T3 or higher Helltide in order to finish out the next to the last step in the seasons journey. I am on the very last step of the Reign of Chaos quest chain, and I am working on the last section of the Battle Pass. In theory within the next week I will have milked every last bit of this season that I really need to, and be able to walk away happily knowing that I pretty much did everything I could do.

In other news, 0.3.1 dropped in Path of Exile II, and with it comes the significant rework of the endgame and removal of towers as the primary means of adding content to maps. I ran a few maps as a test and for the most part they seem way less rippy than they were previously. I am still largely running t14 content and it seemed pretty easy overall. I have not played for about a month now, so who knows what other previous patches could have added to this feeling. It seems like maybe they have not removed ALL of the content that they intended to remove because it seems like Expeditions are still showing up as icons on the map, whereas I thought ALL additional content would be added by the Tablets instead. Additionally it seems like the whole corruption thing stays on the atlas, which makes sense given that is how you unlock most of your atlas passives.

While the overall density and rippyness of the map was lowered, it did not necessarily feel like the rewards were lowered as a result. I ran a few maps and pulled quite a bit of currency and what felt like more uniques than normal from them. Granted two of them came from a Rogue Exile, but I walked out of the map with five uniques which seems pretty solid for a 4 mod t14 map. I am not really sure if I am going to dip my toes back into the game at this point, because once I unattach from a League in Path of Exile, it sort of feels hard to get back into the swing of things. My mind has adjusted to Diablo IV at this point and I am probably going to ride that into the ground, or at least until I give Legion Remix a shot next week.

I think yesterday I might have just been in a low point, so apologies for whining about life on the blog. I put together a shelving unit which felt like significant progress so that probably cheered me up a bit. I am feeling better about my existence in the world today… even though the country seems to be burning around me.

What Happened to Last Epoch?

September 4, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.

On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.

We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.

Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.

I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.

There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.

The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.

We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.

I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.

The World is Burning

September 3, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I pretty much played Path of Exile II in full degenerate mode this weekend. I took Tuesday off, which combined with Labor Day Monday gave me a four day weekend. I had family stuff on Friday when the league launched, but a good chunk of Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday I played the game. I beat the campaign early yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon getting into the endgame. Probably the best feeling in this game though is logging in to see that some of your stuff had sold and currency is waiting for you on the vendor. The only problem with this is that prices seem to be all over the place. You can find similar items being sold for 1 Exalt, 50 Exalts, 50 Chaos, and 5 Divines… so it is a complete free for all. I am pricing most of the rares that I pick up with any resists on it for 2 Exalts each, and they are selling slowly. I’ve yet to really git any big paydays but I sold a really nice pair of boots for 20 Chaos, which is the single highest item I have moved.

Act IV was phenomenal, and might legitimately be my favorite single Act in any ARPG. There are a bunch of things going on with this. Firstly I’ve come to love Kingsmarch after having lived with it for over a year in Path of Exile 1, and I am pretty fond of the characters surrounding it. Secondly I am a huge fan of the Karui in general after having played so damned many Marauders and listening to those voice lines for years. The other really nice thing about this content is that you can legitimately take it on in any order. The islands increase slightly in level as you clear them, so there is no wrong way to take it on. There is one island that is like a Microcosm of Oriath, and I think for story reasons that is probably going to be the one that I save until last because it flows nicely into the final area. I am in love with the Halls of the Dead and I really wish this had made it into the game as an ascendancy option.

The preludes are also really cool, and honestly I sort of hope these exist as optional side content going forward. There are some really cool stories being told here and I like the whole Bioware style “building forces” aspect of them. Essentially they revolve around three allied groups and in order to guarantee their support for the final invasion of Oriath… you need to help them clear some of their problems at home. I would love to see this continue forward and whether or not you do it… impacts some of the content in Act V. Like depending on how many of the preludes you clear dictates how hard some of the content is when we finally get to that act. Mostly I just enjoyed the stories and content areas enough that I would love to see them continue forward in some form. Each is mostly just a single quest chain with a few optional side areas, but all of them are really cool and worth experiencing… and FAR better than the cruel difficulty stuff.

I’ve made a few purchases in order to buff my spirit to summon more minions and stabilize my resistances. I only have 20% chaos resistance, which is something I need to deal with at some point. However for early mapping it feels fine. I’ve seen exactly one Divine Orb so far in the campaign or maps and I spent it on a slightly better rattling sceptre. The one I was using had +2 minions on it and had level 11 Skeletal Minions… and this one at least takes me to +3 and 15. I wish we could level up the gems associated with weapons, because it is possible to find a really well rolled sceptre early on… but have the minions it provides lag massively behind the rest of your gems. My survival is not amazing but also I am not taking many deaths with 1600 health and 2000 energy shield… both of which need to increase significantly. Ultimately I need to focus at some point on trying to get my third and fourth ascendancy completed. I hate the two trial options, but what I did last time was Sanctum for the third, and Ultimatum for the fourth.

The biggest thing plaguing my build is that I have negative amounts of visual clarity. Essentially I am spreading fire all over the screen through the combination of my own flame wall, skeletal arsonists, and vaal guards throwing bombs everywhere. Essentially it is a complete crapshoot if I am going to be able to see any effects on the ground. When I hear the unblockable effect sound I just sort of instinctively roll away from wherever the boss is hoping that I will be able to dodge it, and then hit potion hoping I can survive it if I actually get hit. This is not exactly great, but the minions deal so much damage that most fights are over very quickly and I can skip a lot of the mechanics. The world is literally on fire… and I guess I am the “This is fine” dog meme.

I encountered my first rogue exile in a tier 2 waystone, and it was wildly juiced. It dropped three unique pieces of gear, and a unique gem that had the ability to unveil four mods on it at the well of souls. Thankfully you only have to wait for the animation to play one time if you are unveiling multiple affixes on the same item. I was able to craft an item that gives me ailment threshold from my energy shield as well as some additional percentage energy shield. It is not a massive item, but I will absolutely use it until I snipe a cheap minion damage gem. That is one thing that I noticed… it is super important to run searches in the web trade site if you are looking for something very specific. No one seems to know how to price anything, and you can occasionally pick up some cheap items if you are running that on your second monitor. Nothing like that exists in the in game client, and it is also missing a lot of the fuzzy search options that you have on the POE1 trade site which I hope they add into it later.

I still don’t really love the current state of the Path of Exile II endgame. Towers are absolutely not the way the endgame should be working, but it seems like they are stumped on what to do with it. Basically I like the concept of the Endless Delve style mapping, but there are still far too many bad layouts available and no way to avoid them. If they keep to this style of content, then they absolutely need to introduce a favored map system that causes may layouts that you prefer to spawn more frequently. This would obviously be only impacting things that are still in the fog of war, but if you engage with the system enough it could feel much better. You would still have to run shitty layouts from time to time, but just being able to make it more common to have the layouts that you actually enjoy would be a massive improvement. I also don’t really enjoy the way atlas passives are unlocked, and it does not feel anywhere near as satisfying as running specific maps to get points.

All of that said. I do feel like the general state of the game is a massive improvement over where it has been. Sure there are some straight up bricked builds right now, and the general state of balance is awful. However it does appear that other builds are rising to the top now. When I made the post two days ago the level 90+ balance was sitting at 73% of players all playing some version of a Bow Deadeye. As of this morning that percentage is down to 56% and I expect this will continue to fall as people find other interesting things to play. I am only level 73 currently so I am not counting in the list and I figure there are a lot of folks who are just leveling more slowly that will eventually erode at that percentage. There are a lot of builds that are working, but I think what harmed this league so much is that none of the guide creators had any prior knowledge of what the passive tree was going to look like, or some of the interactions between abilities. So everyone effectively had to go into this blind, and those who gambled on following the way of the Deadeye won that gamble.

I thought I would have bounced by now, but after taking a break yesterday afternoon I spent the evening chilling out on the couch and slowly plugging my way through maps. I am actually having fun, which in itself is a massive improvement over how I felt about the game in the Dawn of the Hunt league. At some point now that I have more resources, I want to recover my Warrior and turn it into something useful. I have no clue what I will go with, but I might just try another attempt at a slam build and see if stampede aftershock works now. Sprinting MASSIVELY improves mapping, and while there is still a lot of backtracking being able to run at hyperspeed through the dead areas of the map is a big win. I still really feel like sprint needs to be its own keybind rather than just holding dodge because you end up with weird situations where you sprint when you don’t mean to, or dodge when you don’t mean to. It is as fiddly as Guild Wars 2 when you are using the default keybinds of double tapping a direction to dodge. If they just allowed us to set a separate keybind it would improve things considerably.

The biggest things that I am hoping for though, are not things in Path of Exile II. I am looking forward to the trade system being implemented in POE1, and I am really hoping like we got a better version of Animate Guardian… that we get this version of the spectres system. I really like fiddling with spectres at the moment and the whole pokemon aspect of them. I am hoping we get a version of that in the original game, because that would immediately improve all of my frustrations with minion builds in general there. Basically my feelings about Path of Exile II have improved and I think it is actually going to be a good game after all.