Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week we start off with some discussion of the Video Game Trailer show… which really should just call itself that because the “Awards” thing feels like an afterthought at this point. Bel is excited for Witcher 4 and Dispatch, and Ash’s favorite game of all time is finally getting a Sequel. We also are curious what sort of game Intergalactic is going to end up being and sure hope it is not a soulslike. From there Bel talks about softening his thoughts about Path of Exile II as he is probably a day out of getting to maps. Kodra and Tam however have become significantly less charitable than last week. We also talk a bit about Caves of Qud which has actually launched now. Then Ammo and Tam share their glowing praise of the new Indiana Jones game from Machine Games. While it technically is a stealth game, it is also a fascist punching simulator with quirky oneliners which is also great.
Good Morning Folks! Over the last week, I have felt like Gold Five telling my friends to “stay on target” any time they have been tempted to buy stash tabs. I knew this day was coming soonish because there is always another stash tab sale around the corner and it is never a good idea to buy them at any other time. So now is the time for you all to spend those cash shop coins that have been burning a hole in your pocket, and get some additional stash tab storage space. However, this has been way less of a thing with Path of Exile II because so much less loot is actually dropping. Additionally, prior to the launch of the game, I took a wild guess at which tabs would be valuable but had the fatal flaw that the Map tab currently does not exist in any form in the second game. I figure at some point this will change but for the time being… I gave you incorrect data as to which tabs would be valuable. This morning I hope to remedy that.
Essentially in Path of Exile 1 and 2, there are two types of stash tabs. There are those designed to store a specific type of item and have the ability to set affinity so loot automagically goes into those tabs. Then there are just bulk storage tabs that you have to organize manually. In the first category, after some 50 hours of playing Path of Exile II, there are only two that I find actually useful. That is the Currency Stash Tab and the Gem Stash Tab. We don’t necessarily get massive quantities of currency, but I value the ability to rapidly dump it into my stash and have it sorted into the correct bins. This is a tab that becomes more useful the longer you play. Gem Stash Tab is mostly because I get a ton of uncut gems and I prefer to have some magical bin to dump them into that sorts them based on various parameters. This is only really going to be a useful tab if you are going to spend a lot of time on alts like I often do.
In the other category, you have Normal, Premium, and Quad Stash Tabs. Normal and Premium are both 12×12 grids and the key difference is that Premium allows you to engage with the trade system and list items. Quad tabs are literally just 4 times the size of a normal tab and are trade-enabled by default. This honestly really is a matter of player preference. You can see individual items easier in the more “zoomed in” nature of the normal tab, but you can store a heck of a lot more items in a Quad tab but they also cost considerably more. In Path of Exile 1 the only real choice is to go to Quad tabs for everything because a lot of semi-useful loot is dropping. In Path of Exile 2 however… there really is not much that you would want to keep so could probably get along just fine with normal tabs.
I guess while I am talking about stash tabs, I will discuss the other four types that have a POE2 equivalent. The Unique Stash tab allows you to store a single copy of every unique item in the game. This is useful in POE1 where they drop like candy, but less so in POE2 where I have seen seven… and I am well ahead of most of my friends in that count. Flasks were way more important in POE1, and as a result this tab is like a vestigial appendage that no longer makes a ton of sense. You are not really going to be storing a ton of these so no point in buying a custom tab for it. Essences similarly in POE1 were a lot more common and had a lot more varieties. I have seen six total essences since starting the Early Access, and while I already owned a tab… there is no way this is worth purchasing now. Lastly, there is Delirium, which is a mechanic you will not even encounter until you have completed acts 1-3 and cruel 1-3 and start doing the endgame content. Definitely not worth having until you have a specific need for it.
The other thing that I have had friends ask me is how to donate points to your guild. Since guilds did not copy over from the first game, it also means that we did not get to keep our cache of stash tabs. I bought a single Quad tab just so that we would have some swap space for trading items between players, but was holding off on buying more until the sale weekend. Essentially this is way easier to do in POE2 and you open the Shop interface and then in the upper corner there is a button highlighted with a green arrow that allows you to donate points to the guild. This will then open an interface in the center of your screen with a slider and a donate points button also marked with green arrows. Essentially set the slider to the number of points you want to donate, and then hit donate and the guild leader will get a message indicating that you have donated points, and once accepted those points become available for them to purchase things for the guild with it. This is a oneway transfer and there is no way once accepted to transfer points back out of the guild bank.
As far as the game goes, I am nearing the end of Act III on my Titan, but last night I decided to have a bit more chill gameplay and spent time on my baby Witch. I’ve essentially gotten to the end of Act 1 and just need to storm the manor and kill angry dogboy. Summon Raging Spirits is such a massive improvement when that unlocks, and I went from sluggish clear to pretty much being able to move at full speed and decimate everything in my way. Bossing is a bit awkward, but hopefully, that will improve over time. I am essentially just cursing things and then spamming Fire Wall, with a bit of Unearth whenever there is a wave of adds to get extra explosive minions. Since we are in a time of Guides, I am loosely following the Infernalist Minion Army build.
I hope this weekend I will wrap up Act III when I am feeling up to a bit more stressful gameplay and move into Cruel difficulty. I am still enjoying Path of Exile II, but it is the sort of game that I can’t really see playing in a league scenario without at least a lot of watering down of difficulty. Everything is a bit too slow and sluggish for my tastes, and for the moment it feels like a “one and done” type experience.
Hey Folks! Today has gone a bit differently than planned and as a result, I am a bit later getting a blog post out the door than normal. Yesterday I decided to fully embrace the Crab and picked up the last two armor pieces that I was missing from the Blue Crab armor set. I figured this was a fitting visage since I am trying to build tanky in a game that feels like it mostly rewards overwhelming damage output. In theory, though I am on a trajectory that should give me that overwhelming output at some point in the future.
Without really meaning to, I have wound up on an adjacent trajectory to ConnorConverse/OneManaLeft. Essentially I am going down a path of dealing ignites and making things explode on stun, and plan on eventually going down the path of Hammer of the Gods and making it do massive damage with an even bigger ignite. For him, it appears to be working, and for me, I have reached a point where my build no longer feels quite as dumpster-tier as I originally thought. Warriors are in a rough spot where it feels like you have to struggle for an act and a half before you really get enough points for things to come online completely. It probably did not help that I was level 42 and did not have an ascendancy yet.
For years I have said that the most annoying part about leveling a character in Path of Exile 1, was doing the Labyrinth. It is not fun content, but I was wrong to complain… because the alternatives in Path of Exile II are even worse. This morning I managed to finally get through the Trial of the Sehkemas which is effectively Sanctum, and only because I am so defensively geared at this point and have such a large hitpoint pool that I was able to mostly shrug off the damage. I originally had planned on going down the path of Trial of Chaos which unlocks in Act III, because in truth I did fairly well at Ultimatum as Righteous Fire.
The problem with this theory is that Trial of Chaos is so much worse than anything Ultimatum ever dumped on us. In Ultimatum the zone denial abilities are mostly just nuisances because in Path of Exile, we are able to gear defensively enough to mostly shrug them off. In Trial of Chaos, you have to deal with at least twice as many incoming attacks from these, and they deal infinitesimally more damage. I just tried again before sitting down to write this post and chose the lightning turrets, because the alternatives were far worse. What I was not expecting was to get to the boss and effectively have twenty different turrets shotgunning me at the same time.
I suppose I will keep slamming my head against this until either I pass out or learn to enjoy the pain because currently, I am getting nothing from my ascendancy without a second set of two points. At first, I thought I would pick up a different notable, but that wound up bricking my build. So I spent literally all of the gold that I had to respec into the 20-slot bag because it was innocuous enough not to cause any actual harm to what I was doing. That means however that while I am ascended and a TItan, I am also getting zero real benefit from it until I get another trial done and pick up the +50% to all small nodes ability that should be the ultimate payoff.
All of this frustration aside… I have to say that I am really enjoying Act III so far. I’ve reached what is effectively the halfway point and have been loving the adventures in Vaal temples thing we have going on. While I did not really like doing Incursion, I’ve always been a fan of Alva as a character. I was happy to see her playing a larger role in the second game and quite possibly the larger story arc of Path of Exile as a whole. My character also finally feels good to play, which is a huge thing. I still take the occasional death to something stupid, but I pretty much made it through all of the Act III bosses one-shotting them, save for this fight… which required me to learn some of the tells and mechanics a bit more than simply dodging.
I am also really loving the setting and the lore. One of the Act III themes is a remix of one of the jungle themes from the first game and it is delightful. The whole explorer’s vibe is great as well. Oswald has a Death Journal where he has cataloged all of the horrible manners in which people have died in the jungle. This one was probably my favorite. I’ve already been spoiled on the fight that comes at the end of this Act and I am not necessarily looking forward to it. The end-of-act bosses are massive pains in the ass and just feel like they are giant bags of hitpoints. I helped out a guildie with Geonor this morning and it seems like when you group up with another player, the zone is set at the maximum level of the highest player. As such Geonor didn’t do a ton of damage to me, but it took forever to chip away at his health.
The loot changes that rolled in yesterday have made a significant difference, not just in the quantity of rares but the quality of them. I managed to pick up this amazing Chestpiece as a drop out in the world, and immediately spent artificers orbs on it to swap over to it. I also picked up a decent enough upgrade for boots and swapped to those, but I do wish it had movement speed on them. I am contemplating swapping out my chest for a Wandering Reliquary, mostly because the life recoup seems like it would be really strong even though I would be losing some overall life pool.
I also picked up a few more uniques yesterday taking my total to five. The gloves seem really good, and I might do something to build around them for a second warrior at some point. The mask seems odd more than anything, and given how hard it is to get elemental resistances it seems like a really bad idea to take minus any amount. In Path of Exile this would be a trivial downside and easily geared around, but here… that seems like a fatal mistake.
At this point, I am some 40 hours into the game and slowly plugging away at it. By this point in any other league, I would be halfway through completing my Atlas. This is the thing that concerns me the most about the design decisions that were made for Path of Exile II. I cannot see myself wanting to play this as a seasonal game. It will be interesting to play once… but I am not going to be willing to spend this amount of time just to get “started”.
Good Morning Folks. I have to admit I have been largely radio silent on social media about Path of Exile II, because as you might be able to tell from yesterday’s post… I am not exactly certain what to think about it. I had hyped myself up quite a bit going into the release of Early Access, hoping that my love of Path of Exile would translate into a great time playing the sequel. I think ultimately what I was expecting was a much higher fidelity version of Path of Exile, not necessarily a retread of the Ruthless mode as we got. I’ve asked myself a few times… “Are You Having Fun?” and honestly I am not sure what the answer to that question is yet. I am stubborn as hell and I keep progressing with the same build because in theory, it is starting to work.
Up until this point, all we had seen from GGG was some nerfs of specific over performing skills, but nothing to really address the core of my complaints with the game. This morning we saw the first movement, but I am not really certain it is enough. Essentially instead of adding phasing to dodge roll like the players have been asking… they are doing some fiddly nonsense of lowering the player size to 0 for the sake of collision, meaning if there is a gap at all no matter how big, you should be able to roll out of it. Similarly instead of stopping the nonsense of maps respawning when you die in them… they are making it so we can teleport between checkpoints and adding new checkpoints at the boundaries of various zones within the map. They are making improvements, but not necessarily the improvements I would have made. Time will tell what we might see as a result of this. You can check out the broader statement about planned updates, as well as the pieces that they rolled in over night that did not require a restart.
I hit a hard wall yesterday, and it is the same wall that I watched Jorgen battling on his stream over the weekend. Essentially the Boss at the end of Act 2 is a massive step up in difficulty, especially for melee players… though based on the experience of my friend Ace it might not be a cakewalk on other play styles either. Essentially I was running out of resources and while I could get to the final phase of the fight, it felt like I had to perform perfectly and was just not dealing much damage to the end boss. It seems like this is intended, and that they expect fights to drag on forever as you slowly whittle down a giant bag of hitpoints. I got so frustrated that I had to walk away for awhile.
Instead of walking away entirely, I spent some time playing a Ranger. I’ve played a few alts so far for various reasons, but sometimes going back and playing the extremely well-designed first act helps to clear my mind. I am getting MUCH better at making my way through that content and I find that I am starting to focus on efficiency as I clear my way through the objectives much like I do in POE1. I think it was Ash who made the comment that we felt the same way about the first game until we got better at it, and maybe he has a point because subsequent alts are going so much more smoothly than my first outing. The end of the act boss is still a massive pain in the ass no matter what character I am on. I still do not love their boss design this time around but I am adjusting.
For years now I have been a member of the Cult of Mouse Steering since my friend Ace tipped me off to the idea. I wrote a post about it awhile back, but essentially the idea is that you bind force move to W and then steer your character with your mouse cursor, similar to how you might control a third/first-person game. In Path of Exile, this meant that I had to give up a keybind, but I gladly did it just to play a more comfortable control scheme that did not trigger RSI quite so badly. With the Ranger in Path of Exile II however, it made a lot of sense to try out WASD because it allowed me to easily backpedal while firing off attacks and strafing to the side to keep from getting surrounded. The thing is… it felt pretty great and even when I swapped back to playing my Warrior later that evening, I decided to keep rolling with that control scheme. It turns out a lot of the weird targeting I was experiencing was a side effect of the forced move scenario locking in a target direction, and while it is getting addressed with an upcoming patch it does mean that WASD became a bit more predictable for firing off abilities.
Another thing that happened yesterday is that I decided to engage in the Trade Economy. Much like every player… I have been struggling to find upgrades and it had been quite a long while since I updated my weapon. I did not want to give up the +2 Level of Melee Skills, but I did want to find something that was capable of dishing out a bit more damage. I had come into a few Exalts recently so I spent one buying a new mace and spent a second one picking up a shield with quite a bit of armor and life on it. Lastly, I happened into a Plate Belt with a high armor roll and managed to actually craft that into a decent item using one of the few Regals that I had managed to get. These three items were a significant upgrade to my stats.
I also spent a bit of time last night grinding out some more levels and also speccing and respeccing points until I landed on what I feel like is a good combo of abilities. Resolute Technique I think is critical to my build at this point, because I am not really doing anything to try and gain accuracy and at least that guarantees that I am always going to hit my target. Additionally, I have armor break on heavy stun, and some points into aftershocks and damage recoup of physical damage prevented. You can check out the current state of my tree here, but for the moment I plan on building into the rest of the mace node and maybe going up into the ignite node above it on the tree. I am also contemplating going and getting the Heavy Stunned Culling Strike node. For the moment clearing trash feels pretty great because Herald of Ash combined with aftershocks means I am exploding things quite effectively.
Eventually, I returned to making attempts on the boss and it was completely wrecking me still. I was running out of resources, so I decided to stop trying to do as many big attacks as possible. While it might seem counter-intuitive, I knew I did not have the DPS to rush this boss down quickly and would have to batten down the hatches for a long fight. What I started doing was using a lot more basic attacks to jab at the boss here and there and then setting up a big combo every six seconds, when fist of war support was up so that I would pour all of my efforts into a really big attack and then just spend the rest of the time dodging and poking at the boss. The thing is… this actually worked and I managed to down the boss with almost a full mana flask and about half of my life flask still available. Maybe this is the intended play style for this game… just accept that the encounter is going to take forever and try and reserve your resources as much as possible.
So now I have made my way to Act III, and the final new act in this Early Access client. I will start working my way through that tonight, but I managed to clear to the first town at least last night and take out all of the bosses in the first area. So far it felt fine, and while I was having to deal with a lot of poison mechanics I managed to make it across the zone without taking any deaths. I did get a third unique drop, which is I believe still three more than Ace has seen. I thought while I was having show and tell this morning I would show off the uniques that I managed to pick up. By the time I got Hoghunt it was pretty much useless for my warrior but when I rolled my “BigBonk” alt I used it for quite a well to great effect. Blackgleam Quiver is something that I am using on my Ranger and I am not entirely certain if it is good… or if I am just using it for the sake of using a unique. Last night I picked up Igniferis off the beach of Act III, and it is a weird item. Essentially it takes your Regen and multiplies its effect… but makes it so you only get healed every 4 seconds. I could legitimately see this being an interesting item if you have heavy defensive layers otherwise.
So at this point… I have not given up on the game, but I do feel like it has a long way to go in improving before it is a truly great game. I am coming to accept that I am not going to be in maps anytime soon, and hopefully, by the time I get there, we have a few more patches that tweak the difficulty curve of content. I am somewhat proud that I am sticking with my yolo character design, and that it is weirdly working. I probably need to go more into Ignite since I am never going to crit, but for now moment to moment gameplay feels significant smoother than it did. Bossing is still going to be a bit of a pain in the ass for a long while, but so long as I can keep slowly chipping things down I think I might be able to make it through the remaining acts. I am hoping the improved currency drops really do make a difference and give me more access to better gear as I go up in difficulty.
