path of exile Archives - Page 33 of 99

Path of Exile 3.26 Wishlist

March 20, 2025March 20, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. With the delay in Last Epoch Season 2 and the upcoming launch of Dawn of the Hunt in Path of Exile 2, it has had me thinking about Path of Exile 3.26 a bit. On March 4th we got an announcement that the Legacy of Phrecia Event was being extended to April 23rd. Additionally as part of this news post, we got a tentative launch window for the 3.26 League landing in June. This means that 3.25 will have lasted just shy of one full year, which is a pretty far fall from the 4 leagues of a year goals that Path of Exile used to attempt. Granted a whole new game has launched so I have to give them some credit.. but given that I am one of the folks who greatly prefers the original game to the sequel… it isn’t going to be much credit. It has made me start to daydream a bit about what 3.26 might look like, and this morning I am going to talk through some of my thoughts.

What Makes a League?

I guess for the uninitiated I should start off with what exactly a league entails. The best leagues feature some sort of brand new mechanic that has its own type of drops associated with it. In the Trial of the Ancestors they introduced tattoos, which allow you to sacrifice a travel node on your passive tree for some powerful buff. Additionally it came with a whole new autobattler style mechanic where you set up matches against various Karui Ancestors and were rewarded with drops based on your success. During Affliction there was this whole new realm that you went into before every map, that allowed you to wildly juice the outcome of that map. Additionally it introduced brand new secondary ascendancies that gave your character brand new abilities. Essentially the best leagues change the way you play the game… over the course of the league and also often introduce items that eventually get worked in as permanent updates going forward.

Settlers Goes Standard

By the time 3.26 drops, we will have had access to Kingsmarch for a full year. As such it would feel really freaking weird to lose access to it. In my perfect scenario we would retain full access to these systems in their entirety and effecting Settlers of Kalguur just goes Standard. Maybe streamline some of the leveling processes a bit and speed things up so it does not take quite as long to get everything online. I think almost everything included in Settlers was a pure win, and I would love to see it continue. Since this involves a lot of the characters from the Heist League already, I would love to see the evolve to fill both roles. Rogue’s Harbor has always been a bit of a pain in the ass, as well as a lag fest that often causes MTX to crash players out of the game. Having a solo instance that fills both jobs would be pretty epic. Once I leave the campaign… in truth I never want to see another player unless I am doing a trade.

Currency Exchange

If for whatever reason Settlers does not go standard in full… at a bare minimum the Currency Exchange must be carried forward. There is no way I can go back to trading currency through the trade website. This has been the single best quality of life improvement in the game full stop. Sure I would love to have better visualization into what people actually want, or the ability to post an item up for players to make an offer on it… especially if it is something that does not have a huge volume of trade. Even in its current form though it is a requirement going forward for the health of the game.

Recombinators

I also feel like Recombinators need to exist in one form for another going forward. Even if this is a machine that we place in our hideouts instead of in Kingsmarch, this is something that needs to stick around in the game. Recombinators give you a reason to care about amassing crafting bases… giving them value and making loot more interesting while you are mapping. Being able to work your way slowly towards a perfect item is a huge boon for a lot of players, specifically those in self-found game modes. I don’t fully grasp the ins and outs of this system, but I feel like once I get a firm handle on it I should be able to slowly work my way towards better gear, rather than hoping and praying for the right item to drop.

Replica Ascendancy

Given based on the volume of trade I am still seeing… the Legacy of Phrecia event has been a massive success. Adding nineteen brand new ascendancies to the game has been wild for class balance, and I would love to see some way of this continuing forward into the game. I’ve heard a bunch of ideas from having a rotation of ascendancies similar to the map rotation, to having some alternate method for ascending to the alternate versions. My favorite name for these was “Replica Ascendancy” and I am sorry that I do not remember who coined this term. I have had a freaking blast playing Scavenger Righteous Fire, and I am not sure if I would continue to choose it over my beloved Chieftain but it would still be nice to have options. Similarly there are a whole bunch of cool builds that have been enabled by the toolkit these new ascendancies have. I would be perfectly happy if 3.26 just had six different paths you could choose off the base classes and then two for Scion.

Mapping Idols

The other big change that the Legacy of Phrecia event introduced was an alternate atlas tree in the form of a series of itemized idols, and a grid that popped out of the side of the mapping device. The existing Atlas Passive tree is near perfection… but it would be exceptionally cool if the Idols moved forward in a limited fashion. What I envision is a 3×3 grid that allows you to fit in a limited number of idols to tweak your existing Atlas strategy. The limited grid would also limit your access to the most powerful abilities that can roll on Idols, and greatly limit the overall impact it has. In doing this I would almost suggest removing all of the nodes that cancel out league mechanics from the Passive tree, and instead limiting them to only exist as Unique Idols. It allows you to either buff existing strats, or splash in something that might be harder to get because you are on the wrong side of the passive tree.

Identification Vendor

Borrowing some quality of life from Path of Exile II… I would love to see one of the vendors have the Identification functionality that The Hooded One/Doryani provides. There were few things that I found myself missing from Path of Exile II, but this was absolutely one of them. I liked the flow of exiting a map, clicking on the vendor to identify everything… and then doing whatever else I wanted to do with the items. Surely this would not be that hard to implement, and it would be a significant quality of life improvement.

Item Salvaging

The other functionality from Path of Exile II that I would love to see implemented… that I think is probably reasonable without massive system changes is the Salvage Bench. The ability to salvage items for various currencies really changes the way that you look at items. For example there are a lot of times in Path of Exile that items drop with quality… but unless the item is rolled particularly well or a base that you care about… it is effectively useless loot. If you could instead then salvage that item to turn it into quality currency, it would make especially the early game feel much better. Similarly if you could convert magic, rare, and unique loot into fractional currency shards it would allow you another way of working up towards currency items that are actually useful for crafting purposes. Having more reasons to actually pick something up off the ground is a good thing.

[EDIT] – After a conversation with Ashgar

Ash remarked that there are in fact vendor “recipes” for a lot of this stuff. I think my point is that the salvage ratios from Path of Exile II, feels more generous than the vendor “recipes” from Path of Exile 1. Maybe this is entirely a “feels” thing and there may be no numerical proof of this. Salvaging things for whatever reason feels better than selling them.

Lantern of Arimor

Necropolis League was not exactly amazing. It introduced this whole itemized corpse system that you planted in graves, in order to craft gear. It was cumbersome as hell, and I do not want it to come back. However it also introduced the Lantern of Arimor, which was a widget that you could fiddle with at the beginning of a map in order to have some agency in the sorts of mobs and types of loot you might encounter. While this slowed down the action a bit, I also found it really enjoyable during mapping. Especially when you added Allflames into the mix that allowed you to substitute out a different monster type for something that would normally spawn on the map. If they brought this back I would prefer to have this as something that appears in the endgame and that you would have to specifically spec into in order to enable.

Bring Back Metamorph

One of the things that often happens during a League patch is the re-introduction of mechanics that have left the game for one reason or another. When Ultimatum was reintroduced, it caused Metamorph to get bumped from the list. I really liked fighting Metamorphs in maps because they were often worth quite a bit of loot. I did not however really enjoy the system where you built your own monster, because while rewarding this required you to exit the flow of the normal game. Since Ultimatum got the drops that traditionally came from Metamorph… and the mechanic was all about crafting monsters… maybe have this as an alternate source of the corpses that currently drop in Ritual that can be used as Spectres. Additionally I feel like the flavor of this mechanic would also make it a good place to reintroduce Allflames in lieu of monster parts. Have this be a map only mechanic and potentially add it to the number of alternate mechanic spawns, either that or implement it through Idols.

Weapon Passive Trees

Another thing that I think would be fun to see make a return, is the Crucible weapon passive trees. Essentially during Crucible every item had the ability to craft on a weapon tree, that could then spawn all sorts of nonsense on them. There was a whole forge mechanic that allowed you to merge together multiple trees similar to how things currently work with Recombinators and item affixes. My idea is to implement these but have them drop from a specific mechanic similar to how fractured bases drop. Instead of the channeling mechanic, make it so that they just level up through combat similar to how virtue gems do. Then the whole manipulation of items can be merged into the Recombination system. You could use that system to either manipulate the crucible trees if both items have one… or put the tree on the item base that you want. This just adds further depth to the crafting system and gives the mirror crafters more nonsense to make even more perfect weapons.

Primordial Blocks

This is a personal desire, and not necessarily a systems thing… but I really want Primordial Blocks to be in the league map rotation. For those who have not participated in many leagues before, essentially each league has a slightly different set of maps included with it. Primordial Blocks has been out of the rotation for a few leagues and I would really love to see it come back. It isn’t necessarily that I love the layout, but there is a Hideout associated with it that spawns exceptionally rarely… and it is my white whale. I have run countless copies of this map and have yet to get it to spawn, and I really want to give it another go.

I get that we are still several months away from 3.26 or even the beginning of early spoilers… but that in part is why I am creating this post now. I did not want my ideas to be tainted by the various prognostication that happens once the spoilers begin to flow. I legitimately have no clue what sort of big system GGG might implement for 3.26, but I wanted to at least talk through some of the quality of life and general systems that I would love to see return. What do you want to make a comeback with this league? What are some of the things that you would love to see implemented in Path of Exile? I would love to have a game pausing system, but I figure that is way too structural to ever actually get. Drop me a line below with some of your own thoughts.

Last Epoch Season 2 Delayed

March 19, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Yesterday we got a bit of news from Eleventh Hour Games that they would be delaying the launch of Last Epoch Season 2 from April 2nd to April 17th. This is to create some distance between their launch date and that of Path of Exile 2 and its first league on the 4th. This whole situation is frustrating because multiple sources have stated that Eleventh Hour Games was in communication with Grinding Gear Games regarding their choice of April 2nd making it an extreme dick move to schedule their own start two days later. I entirely feel like GGG is in the wrong here… but there also may be some external forces at work that we do not know about.

Whatever the case this is probably the right decision for Eleventh Hour Games. As stated in a Zizaran video talking about this situation, it is rare that people go back to a game after the launch… so that would likely mean folks would play Last Epoch for a day or two… if they even gave it a shot at all, and then would flip to Path of Exile II and never look back. I am disappointed mostly because right now I care far more about Last Epoch than I do Path of Exile II. I do not think that there is going to be enough in the upcoming patch to really shift the trajectory of POE2 enough for me to truly enjoy it more than the first game. I might be shocked on the 27th when they announce all of the content, but in truth I mostly just want to get my hands on the redesigned endgame for Last Epoch.

In the meantime I am still playing quite a bit of the Legacy of Phrecia event. In theory I should hit level 99 tonight and I am starting to pick back up and work on some of the challenges that I never completed from Settlers of Kalguur. I’m cycling between Delve and mapping and still only have two of the four voidstones unlocked. I should probably work on that, but I hate the process of grinding for the fragments required to attempt Maven and Uber Elder. The whole bossing system in Path of Exile feels bad to me. I feel like there should be quest support for all four voidstones like there are the first two so that you can knock these out in a relatively straightforward fashion. At some point I should probably try out a T17 again to see if I can complete that, but my build is not exactly great at bossing. Generally speaking I just do not enjoy that side of the game and the whole process of getting access to the fights.

I have burned through a good chunk of my reserves of gold and dust in order to start up a bunch of mappers. One of the league challenges from Settlers that I never knocked out was running 200 t14 or better maps at 100% success rate with mappers, and I figured I might as well start chipping away at that since I am still playing. If I can push to level 100 and complete the rest of those maps that will knock out one more of the challenges and potentially give me a bigger totem pole for my hideout. In truth Path of Exile is just a comfortable activity for me to spend chill evenings listening to an audiobook, and has kind of become my default gaming activity. I hate that among the AggroChat folks, I am the only one who seems to have really reached that point with the game.

I am also still pushing forward with Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon because I hate having a “did not complete” in my list. I swapped over to the Soundbooth Theater version of the audiobook and it is infinitely better than the one I was listening to earlier. There is a significant difference between being read a book out loud, and having someone act out a book… and at this point I have become spoiled by the later. This is a brutal story… in content… and in just how much graphic detail is put into it. I am not sure I would ever suggest this to someone else, but it has enough of a hook into me that I am going to see it to its conclusion. Effectively this is Hostel style torture porn, and my kink does not run in that direction.

Choosing Last Epoch

March 13, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. There is a bit of a kerfuffle happening right now in ARPG land. Essentially this was bound to happen at some point, but the overlapping seasons combined with various setbacks have essentially conspired to multiple things happening all at once. Two days ago Grinding Gear Games released an announcement that 0.2.0 was not months away like we had thought, but would instead be landing at the beginning of April. With it came some new footage and the tease of one of the missing classes being released as part of this. The Huntress has long been an announced class for Path of Exile II and is playing into the Spear Amazon play-style that was popular in Diablo II. My personal guess is that the first successful builds are going to be Lightning Strike and chaining full screen pops with Heralds…. essentially copy pasting the current popular Path of Exile 1 builds.

This is universally a really cool thing though, especially for players who are not mainlining Path of Exile II, and do not care about the other ARPGs in the genre. Where the kerfuffle comes in… is that it is launching 2 days after the start of the second Last Epoch season. For me it is a no-brainer… Path of Exile II can wait and I am going to be spending my time playing Last Epoch until I tire of it. However what proponents of EHG and Last Epoch were hoping… was a little bit of clear runway so that folks bored of POE2 and POE1… might take a chance on seeing how much has changed in what I feel to be the game with the best systems design. That is not happening… and for a lot of players they are going to follow whatever Path of Exile is doing. If they had a few weeks gap they might check out Last Epoch, but with it only being two days… I feel like there are going to be a large chunk of folks who just skip that game entirely.

This also sucks for the dedicated ARPG community Streamers who have been putting a lot of time and effort into the lead up to Last Epoch Season 2. Sure Last Epoch has a dedicated core of streamers like Aaron Action RPG, Dr3adful, and Perry the Pig but they are honestly small potatoes up against the likes of a Darth Microtransaction, Zizaran, or Raxxanterax. Drawing the attention of the Path of Exile streamer community means that you are throwing a bunch of eyeballs on the game that otherwise might not take an interest in it. So they are stuck in a position of whether or not they follow their hearts and stick with Last Epoch, or if they follow the money and flip over immediately to start streaming the new Path of Exile II content. Having major events land this close to each other means… that they have to choose one audience over another and lose out on part of it.

So I am hearing a lot from both the Path of Exile and Last Epoch community that Grinding Gear Games is a bit of a bad guy for doing this. I do think they might have delayed it by at least one week to make things a bit easier on everyone involved… but they are also up against a wall here as well. In 2019 during the ExileCon presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson outlined that they did not want to split the community with the release of the new game. However that is precisely what has happened, so much so that Path of Exile II players and topics have been kicked off the Path of Exile subreddit. The POE1 players who do not care about Path of Exile II essentially rioted by the delays and we got the Legacy of Phrecia event as a result. In the weeks leading up to this Path of Exile II 0.2.0 announcement, I have been starting to see a similar current happening on the POE2 SubReddit of folks frustrated by the attention that Grinding Gear Games was devoting to something other than the game that they care about the most. Regardless of when…. they needed to release this first proper league for the new game as quickly as possible.

To further complicate things, as of yesterday we have a playtest active for Titan Quest II, another game that is throwing its hat in the ring of next gen ARPG. You have to request access to get into the playtest, but I did so before heading to bed last night and had been flagged for access as of this morning. There is just a lot going on right now and for those who care both Diablo IV Season 8 and a massive update to No Rest for the Wicked are landing at the tail end of April. It is going to be a very tight slot for ARPG enthusiasts, but at least there will be no lack of things to devote our time to. Since I am largely wrapped up with Monster Hunter Wilds, I am probably going to be spending the next few days checking out Titan Quest II. I am also still playing a not-insignificant amount of Legacy of Phrecia as I continue to tweak and improve my Righteous Fire Scavenger.

However when it comes to the Path of Exile II vs Last Epoch debate that is raging in the community… I am drawing my personal line in the sand. I am extremely interested in experiencing what the new endgame for Last Epoch has to show us. So I will be playing Tombs of the Erased on April 2nd and effectively play it until I get tired of grinding. I have no clue how long that is going to be, but on average I get about a month out of a Path of Exile league and a few solid weeks so far out of a Last Epoch event… so I am hoping somewhere around that time frame. Whenever I finish with Last Epoch, I am sure I will check out what is going on with 0.2.0 or as it is officially being called Dawn of the Hunt League. I will of course be tuning in on the 27th to check out the live-stream to see what all it will include. I am not a streamer and no one really cares what I am playing, but I do tend to devote all of my time for awhile to whatever I happen to be obsessed about and as such the pages of this blog.

In a perfect world… Last Epoch would move their own launch up by a few days and Path of Exile II back by a few days to create a bit more room. However there are other forces at play. For example I am pretty certain they cannot reschedule Twitch Drops willy nilly… so the particular timing is probably going to be stuck where it is. I would love to see more folks choosing Last Epoch as well, but I am also realistic that the Streamers are going to chase that money while they can get it.

Regularly Playing: March 2025 Edition

March 7, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. One of the long running themes of this blog is how much I like the concept of reoccurring posts. Another running theme is how bad I am at actually following through with them. One of these series was “Regularly Playing” where in theory I update the sidebar of my blog with the current crops of games that I am playing on the regular that then show my account information when you mouse over them so folks can find me if they so choose. The general idea is that you have a list of games that you are likely to hear information about advertised on the front page… even though we all know that I tend to fixate on a single game for weeks at a time before jumping to the next one. However behind the scenes I am flipping back and forth between games as my mood hits me.

The core problem with this is… my updates in this series tend to happen way less often. The idea was to have a monthly roundup of things that I was playing but what it ends up being instead is a semi-yearly truing up of the sidebar. For example my last update in this series was June 27th of 2024… when I acted as though I would now make it a regularly feature of the blog again. We can all see that this did not happen. Before that the last update was during the great blur in October of 2022. This is funny given that at least part of my claim to fame is being a consistent blogger. Anyways… I am not making any false promises here but I did think it was far past time to crank out one of these posts and to more importantly update the damned sidebar.

Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Some of these categories only really make sense if I am doing this on the regular, but we are going to attempt to make one of these happen regardless.

To Those Remaining

After being very frustrated with the launch state of Diablo IV in 2023, it has honestly turned in to a pretty decent game. This has more or less taken the place of Diablo III as being that short term game that I am happy to play for a week or two before finishing everything up that I want to finish and moving on with my life. It also has some of the easiest group game play out there, and while it lacks the depth of Path of Exile it is a fun time to be had with my friend Ace as we tackle the seasonal journey. I am not saying this is a phenomenal game, but it is far from “bad” at this point and is honestly pretty damned great if you are interested in some super chill ARPG fun. That is not to say that the game does not have problems… all of which can be chalked up to the shitty design practices of Blizzard. Ace and I have a joke about Blizzard design philosophy. They give you this super sweet kitten that is loving and adorable… but it has permanent explosive diarrhea. They have some really cool ideas, but they always come with some shitty downside to them.

Being brutally honest… were it not for the fact that I own a home on Cactuar… and extremely hard world to get housing on… and had lost said home from not logging in previously… I would likely not be actively playing Final Fantasy XIV. I am very much in the mindset of playing Final Fantasy XIV during an expansion… and then at the end of an expansion right before the release of the next expansion. The rest of the time I am just paying yearly rent for the privilege of home ownership. I know this is dumb, and I know that I should stop doing this… but I keep doing it anyway. I think my mind might just be broken when it comes to the traditional MMORPG gameplay model. I enjoy them when I enjoy them… but struggle each time to get reconnected and back into the normal rhythms of logging in daily and treating it as my only game. I also really hate gearing… which is weird given that used to be one of my favorite aspects of playing MMORPG expansions.

Guild Wars 2 on the other hand… is designed in a way that makes me love it. It has way more of an ARPG design aesthetic and it is so easy to drop in and participate in some epic feeling content… and then tag out without letting anyone down. I love large world group content and I love doing things like WVW where I can just blend in with the crowd and not have to give a shit about human connections. For me it is largely a solo game… that just happens to have lots of friendly and helpful people also playing it. Everything about the design model for this game rewards players for doing the right thing and stopping to rez players or help them out. When you see other players doing something, it is always a positive and a force multiplier. The long tailed grinds also give you projects to focus on when you want to play more seriously. Right now with the way my mind works, this is hands down the best MMORPG.

Last Epoch is going to be the best ARPG on the market at some point. This is just a fact. It has the best class design, and the best itemization and crafting already. What it lacks is endgame content, but given how solid the foundation is it is only a matter of time before they gather up enough to make this game into a proper rival of Path of Exile. Ten years down the line we will be thinking about EHG and Last Epoch in the same manner that we do about GGG and Path of Exile. I am extremely excited for the upcoming Season 2 launch on April 2nd, and with it a focus on more endgame content as well as a bunch of interesting crafting options. It looks like this is going to be landing in a lull in other games, but I would give up a Path of Exile league start to play this next season. If you have read this blog for the last few years you would know what a bold statement that is for me, given that I practically play every single league and event that comes out for Path of Exile.

For years when someone has asked me what my favorite video game is, I have always answered Castlevania: Symphony of the Night without missing a beat. While I still love that game with all of my heart, I have to admit the true answer is Path of Exile. I started taking this game seriously in 2019 and since then it has effectively dominated this blog for months at a time. During that time I have dedicated over 250 posts to this game and will likely keep doing so each time new content releases. It is a very hard hill to crest, and getting engaged in the game is going to take a lot of effort and research… but once you finally reach a point of comfort with it the endgame potential is limitless. Each new league also radically shakes up the game and changes how you need to interact with the character building process. I’m easily over 4000 hours into the game… and still feel like a beginner at times. There are almost no games on the market with the level of depth that Path of Exile offers.

To The New and Returning

One of the things that I am trying to do with this post is be a bit more honest about the games that I am playing. I almost never talk about mobile games on this blog. I think the only ones that I have actually ever really talked about at length are Pokemon Go and Dragalia Lost… the later of which is no longer even in operation. I had more or less stopped playing mobile games because my old Razer Phone 2 was performing so poorly that it almost was not worth it. However when I swapped to my OnePlus 12R, it opened back up the world of mobile games and I started adding them into my pre-sleep rotation. Essentially every night for the last year I have played a little bit of AFK Journey and find it an extremely enjoyable daily activity. I am not a big spender when it comes to games like this, but I have given them a few bucks here or there namely if there is a cool looking costume on their $7 pseudo-battlepass system. Essentially I level up my characters and play a round of all of the various battle modes and whatever events happen to be going on and when sleep claims me put it away for another day.

I know this game has only recently come out, but playing it has made me remember all of the things I loved about Monster Hunter Worlds and how much it dominated my life for a point in time. There are around 150 blog posts that I have made over my time playing that game, and I can already tell that this is going to be a regular rotation for me for awhile. At a minimum I want to get geared up so I can start participating in the event quests as they get released, because Monster Hunter games have some wild collabs and some interesting cosmetic gear to collect. Now that I am in High Rank I am getting back into the swing of finding my own fun in the game and setting my own goals rather than following the main story quest. This is honestly my preferred method of playing and I am glad I am past the forced section of the game. I’m just about to HR 20 and looking forward to collecting the REAL version of the Arkveld armor that I am wearing in the above image.

I had so many hopes for Path of Exile II, and honestly… it satisfied almost none of them. I am not actively playing this game but I know with the impending release of 0.2.0 I will give it another spin to see how much I want to keep playing it for the long run. Recently returning to Path of Exile 1 though… has made me realize just how lacking Path of Exile II actually is. Right now there is a battle for the soul of this game happening and depending on how it goes… will ultimately determine if I write this off in the long run. Right now the core game feels like a sluggish mess for anyone not playing one of four builds that are actually functioning pretty well. Even those builds take specific gear and a lot of levels to really make them feel phenomenal. Grinding Gear Games needs to do some real soul searching with this one and determine what sort of game they want it to be. If it is a cumbersome souls-like experience, then I am out. If they improve the leveling experience, add some decent movement abilities, and fix the endgame… then maybe it is going to be a great experience. I am thankful however that they split this game from Path of Exile because at least that game is largely in a great state.

Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket – Android

I will be honest. I am the wrong generation for Pokemon in general. I played Pokemon Blue a few years after it came out on a Gameboy emulator but did not play another game until Pokemon X and Y released. I watched my fair share of the Pokemon cartoon because it was playing while I was getting ready for work. I played some of the early WOTC version of the Pokemon TCG, but only because it was released by WOTC and briefly popular with the MTG community before the kiddies invaded the card shops. I am too old to really be in the core audience for Pokemon. However I do like opening card packs, and have a basic understanding of the card game mechanics. Essentially every night I open a few packs of cards as part of my nightly mobile gaming routine. I occasionally play some hands of the game against the NPC opponents. Calling this a game for me… is questionable. I am not going to spend money on virtual packs, but I do like opening virtual shiny cards every so often… but it will never mean quite as much as if something like this existed for Magic the Gathering that was mostly just a pack opening simulator. If Arena gave me two five card packs each day… I would probably be playing that.

To Those Departing

This one hurts a little bit to admit, but I think I am mostly done with Diablo III. With the release of Diablo IV, this game went into true maintenance mode. There will be no new seasonal mechanics coming out, and since the launch of Diablo IV they have simply been rotating through previous seasons. Diablo IV is finally in a state where playing it mostly feels like playing a fancier version of Diablo III, and as such has completely replaced the niche that this game filled for me. Instead of Ace and I getting together for D3 season launches, it is now D4 seasons. This game will always hold a very special place in my heart, and I am sure every so often I will fire it up again just to revisit it… but there are just better ARPG experiences out there. I am sorry my old friend, but it is time we officially parted and I stop pretending that I am every going to truly play you with the same vigor again.

I really love this game, but just have not really been in the mood to play it. I am not sure when I uninstalled it… but prior to that I was only logging in to collect daily freebies. I would absolutely play this again in the future, but never really got into the seasonal loop of this game. I also never leveled anything all the way to the upper levels to be able to participate in the “reindeer games”. I deeply respect the game that this has become, and were I playing on console I would probably be way more into it than I am. However given the choice between mindless grinding in Path of Exile and mindless leveling in Fallout 76… I just always chose Path of Exile. If I had a regular group of friends to play with, it would probably be different but this as a solo experience is not near as exciting. If the AggroChat crew started playing again I would likely happily reinstall and join in the nonsense.

Like I said for Final Fantasy XIV… I am just not in the right mindset for playing MMORPGs these days. I enjoyed playing through Dragonflight, but it never really caught my attention as anything other than playing through the Main Story Quest. I loved Pandaria Remix, and when the next one of those type events drop I will probably be back immediately. I attempted to play War Within but never made it out of the first zone. I have all of the social reasons in the world to be playing this game as some of my oldest gaming friends are happily playing it… but for whatever reason it just doesn’t scratch the itch anymore. That is not to say that World of Warcraft is probably in the best state it has ever been since at least Legion, if not Wrath of the Lich King. It really is peak Warcraft, but I think I have just outgrown it. When I think fondly of this game I think about specific people and a specific point in time when it was the center of my world… not the actual game itself.

Wrapping Up

I would love to tell you that it won’t be another year before I sit down to write one of these posts. I am still very much an ARPG gamer and will probably continue to cycle through whatever active season/league happens to be going in between Diablo IV, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, and Path of Exile II. I also find myself with way more affinity for games that are ARPG-adjacent like Guild Wars 2 and now Monster Hunter Wilds. The drop in nature and largely single player focuses progression really hits the spot for me, and will probably continuing doing so for a long while. I marvel that there was an era when I used to raid three or four nights each week and arranged my schedule happily around the schedules of others. I miss playing with other people regularly, but I think I might just be too far gone to ever adapt to doing it again. I am an old gamer that has become very set in my ways at this point.

I hope you all are having a great week and have a good weekend ahead of you. For me… I plan on spending most of it in Monster Hunter Wilds and hope to catch up with some of my friends and do some hunts together.