poe

Atomfall, Hero Siege, and SurfBrand

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.

I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.

With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.

Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.

There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.

Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.

However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.

Path of Exile II – Dawn of the Hunt Reveal

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Yesterday was the reveal stream for Path of Exile II 0.2.0 or the Dawn of the Hunt which is their first named league/season. If you are so inclined you can watch the full content reveal here on YouTube. I’ve said before that this first patch that comes with an economy reset is going to effectively be a battle for the soul of the game. Will it be the fast paced blasting content type game that one chunk of the community wants… or will it slow things down to the more tedious and cumbersome game-play that GGG showed in the lead up to the launch of early access. While we will not get the patch notes until next week… I think the message was clear. Path of Exile II is going to remain in that plodding awkward pace that you experienced early in the campaign, and it seems like the goal is for that same pace to continue through the game.

The biggest addition with this content drop is the introduction of a new base class: The Huntress, and its first two acendancies: The Ritualist, and The Amazon. The gameplay showed off in the above trailer seems like it is going to lean into a midrange combat style of having some ranged attacks and some melee attacks, and playing in the middle ground between the two with the ability to disengage. It is not particularly a player fantasy that I specifically care about, and I was not necessarily the biggest fan of the Amazon from Diablo 2, but I am certain there are players who have been craving this. With this class they are also introducing Buckler type shields which have an active parry system attached to them instead of active block. I am not entirely certain what the difference is going to be but I am sure we will be able to see this once we get the patch note drop.

I feel like the biggest thing that needed a lot of work was the general class balance and the endgame. During the Q&A it was stated that this patch is going to feel like a lot of massive nerfs, which does not bode well. Sure I thought Herald stacking and Spark nonsense was a bit much, but I felt like EVERY class should have been brought up to at least the level of the Raging Spirits Infernalist that I ultimately re-rolled to later in the early access. It seems like they are bringing everything down to the floor of what the worst performing builds were capable of doing… but again we won’t really know much officially until we get the patch notes. As far as mapping goes… there really were not a ton of significant changes to the way the endgame would work. A few nice changes are that you get six portals if you are running a raw map with no mods on it, and waystones will no longer drop for lower levels than the map tier you are currently running. However in the Blizzard style of not being able to have nice things… the six portals turn into one portal once you actually roll your map with a full compliment of affixes on it.

The new “league mechanic” is the Azmerian Wisps which is effectively an escort quest. We all know how much players LOVE escort quests. Essentially the optimal gameplay here is to grab a wisp and then guide it around the map through all of the Rare mobs, which it will keep empowering and as such improving the loot drops. If you get too far from the wisp the event fails and the wisp disappears, so this is going to be a deeply anti-zoom mechanic. This does not bode well, because it sort of sets the pace for the sort of game-play that they are wanting from this game. Slow methodical game-play… and maps taking thirty minutes to complete instead of the sub five minutes that players tend to prefer. The thing is it isn’t just this mechanic that is doubling down on “maps take forever”.

There is another map type called the Ezomyte Megaliths that is being introduced that will involve going around the map and turning on pylons. Then you return to the center of the map and once all of the stones are powered you can summon ten waves of boss encounters, each one improving your rewards. Again this is a deeply anti-zoomer map mechanic, and feels like a re-scoped version of Ultimatum… which is one of the few mechanics that I purposefully block on my atlas in Path of Exile 1. In addition to this they have added a reworked version of the Lake of Kalandra, and a map where you empower an Essence monster in the center of the map to be super rippy. Like these are sort of cool but at the same time… really seem to be driving home the point that they want mapping to be a slow process and not something that you blast through.

They are also introducing Rogue Exiles into the game, which normally would be a big win. However it appears that they have turned them into this super tanky speedbump, which again will massively slow down the game-play. No one wants to find random pinnacle bosses in their maps. This is the problem that folks had with Metamorphs and the Arch-Nemesis system in Path of Exile 1. I feel like they are setting themselves up to re-learn the lessons that they SHOULD have learned during Kalandra. I said this patch was going to be a battle for the soul of the game, and really… I think I am learning that it is just turning away from the sort of game that I actually want to be playing. The biggest take away so far… is that I really hope that they extend the Legacy of Phrecia event until the launch of 3.26… because playing it has been infinitely more enjoyable than my experience of playing Path of Exile II.

Another major complaint is the lack of crafting options and how all crafting in the game is effectively gambling. This really does not seem to have changed. They added new tiers of the socketable runes, which is a good change because they stopped being that good once you leveled out of the first few areas. They are also adding more Essences, but since I only saw two Greater essences in the entire 335 hours that I have played the game… I am not sure how much I care about that. Fracturing orbs are going into the game which will help somewhat, but items are not dropping pre-fractured which is going to limit the availability of this mechanic. Recombinators are going in… which I guess is something, but since you can’t really control your inputs… it will not be anywhere near as deterministic as it feels in Settlers of Kalguur currently. I still feel like the game is lacking crafting options, especially when compared to the infinitely better crafting system of Last Epoch.

We are getting a few new ascendancies for existing classes as well. The one that probably excites me the most is the Lich which is gained by the Witch class. Essentially this seems to be leaning into the chaos minion damage type gameplay that has been popular in the first game, and also comes with double curse support along with explode on curse. Right now if I end up rolling something new for this event, I will probably leaning into this class fantasy. Of what I played during the initial early access, I liked the Minion Witch gameplay far more than pretty much anything else. The addition of Spectres is also going to be interesting because they become permanently resummonable skill gems, which resolves the shitty UX problem that Spectres have in Path of Exile 1. I would love to see something like this backported to POE1, because the biggest problem with playing minions is how crappy it feels to summon Spectres and equip your Animate Guardian.

They added another Warrior ascendancy called the Smith of Kitava, and it is weird. On one hand it gives me the thing I love about Chieftain where you can effectively use Fire Resistance for capping Lightning and Cold Resistance so that you can go all in on a single resistance. Then there are a few bits that make less sense… like Temper Weapon which seems to be this really slow buff up ability that you use which gives your next attack a bunch of fire damage. Then there is Smith’s Masterwork that effectively allows you to sacrifice having any affixes on your body armor… but then sort of craft your own using the ability points. This is a cool idea but very few of the things you can get on said armor… are better than an endgame item with good rolls. You can get +5 max resist, 25% phys taken as fire, and some percentage scaling that seem nice… but I am not really sure it is worth giving up your body armor slot.

Maybe I am too critical… but watching this gave me “brother eww” meme vibes. I will give it a shot, because I always seem to give it a shot. However I am going into it not really expecting the game to improve in the ways I wanted it to improve. Maybe I will be surprised… but I doubt it. What worries me the most though is how rapidly the studio seems to have abandoned the Path of Exile 1 player. Maybe 3.26 will blow me out of the water… but the focus always seems to be on this game instead. Path of Exile II made them likely more money than they have made in years of running the first game. Thankfully Last Epoch appears to be going in the right direction, so if Path of Exile falls apart there will always be that game. There is part of me that is also frustrated that Last Epoch delayed their season for this? Really? It was not worth it.

There are a bunch of details that came out of the livestream yesterday and the following Q&A that I did not really talk about here. I suggest you check out Raxx’s video summary as he always does a great job of bullet pointing these sort of things. If you want a much more detailed review, then I would check out SirGog who often adds a lot of background to the changes. There is also a good video summary out from Pohx our Righteous Fire Lord and Savior, that I will always support just because I love his “swimmer” vibe. I am sure there will be others coming out today, so I will also be interested in hearing the takes from Zizaran, Ghazzy, and Darth Microtransaction… though lately I think DM has been way more of a cheerleader for this game than I am. At the end of the day I am telling you how I am feeling about it, not trying to hype something up.

What were your thoughts about the presentation? Do you think the game is going in the direction you wanted it to go? Drop me a line below.

Mageblood Degeneracy

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Good Morning Folks. I contemplated not doing a blog post this morning, because I was not really certain what I would actually talk about. I am still knee deep in Path of Exile Legacy of Phrecia event and enjoying myself greatly. Yesterday I talked about some nonsense I was doing with a Headhunter to enable me to wear a Defiance of Destiny amulet, and then also deciding to pick up a Mageblood while the getting was good. I think the problem that I have long had with the Mageblood is that it enables builds that would not be able to function without it. There are so many builds where they are effectively using one belt slot and their flask slots in order to fix all of their elemental resistances. So it is hypocritical of me that I am essentially going down that path. One of the things that I have not liked about playing Scavenger Righteous Fire is that it seemed too painful to get to 90% all res. I am not there… but using a Mageblood allowed me to get considerably closer.

I spent a good chunk of time farming up flasks down in Delve. Delve provides many things, but it is really easy to get a bunch of level 83+ flasks for the purpose of rolling whatever you want on them. I had a set of 3 Charges per hit flasks that I was using, and I did not want to roll over the top of those, so instead I set out to farm a new Quicksilver, Ruby, Sapphire, and Topaz flask because I had been pretty bad about actually rat-holing these as I found them in the deep below. I rolled them for 70% increased Effect… save for the Sapphire where I gave up as I was running low on currency and did not want to buy more from the market. If I was trying harder I would have shot for Increased effect on all of the flasks as well, but for now I have it on Ruby the most important as over-capped fire resistance turns directly into life regeneration.

While this did not take me to 90 all, it did take me to 90/88/88 which is far better than I was sitting at previously. I have so many defensive layers right now between max block with life recoup, the 25% life recoup before damage taken from the Defiance of Destiny, 80% of all phys damage taken as fire which is then reduced by 90% resistance. Essentially I no longer need armor and just to make things more comfortable I resolved my Freeze and Chill immunity with the flasks so that I could drop Brine King and go back to Lunaris in my Pantheon. Similarly since I am immune to all bleeding I dropped Ralakesh and swapped over to Abberath to make myself immune to Burning Ground. The only elemental ailment that I am not immune to is Ignite and having 60% reduced duration seemed like a good idea. I can soak it with my 90% resistance so it really was not a big deal even before the Mageblood swap when I was sitting at 85%.

Another thing that I plan on playing with is Dawnbreaker. Getting one with 20%/20%/20% generally costs in the neighborhood of a Mageblood, but I managed to pick this one one that was someones “bricked” corruption. Essentially I am losing the 20 Life implicit, getting +2 socketed minion jewels that is essentially useless… but it cost 1.5 Divines… so I can live with it. Essentially equipping this shield would mean I am losing my 5% life recoup on block, but would allow me to take 100% of physical damage as Fire Damage, and at the same time convert 20% of Cold Damage and 20% of Lightning Damage to Fire Damage as well. This means I am contemplating changing out both of my rings to drop the Cold and Lighting resistance that I am gaining from them and stacking nothing but Fire Resistance since the degeneracy of my Mageblood is capping my resistances with flasks. This is essentially why that stupid belt is so powerful… it allows you to shift around stats to something more powerful for your build.

I am roughly half way to level 100, and as a result I have officially deployed my loss prevention strategy. This means giving up two inventory slots so that I can always have with me an Omen of Death-Dancing and an Omen of Amelioration. Essentially the idea is that Death-Dancing will kick in during a near miss to keep it from turning into a death… and then if you do actually end up taking a death Amelioration is going to severely blunt the amount of lost experience, and as a result reduce the amount of time it will take to gain it back. I have a few of each farmed up, but even if I have to start buying these… it would be 40 Chaos well spent just as an insurance policy.

Swapping over to this set up, lost me some damage. I had to drop Oriath’s End, but I will probably pick it back up once I hit level 100 and no longer care about taking deaths. I plan on dropping my Life Flask at that point and it would give me back a third mode of exploding things. Basically my goal now is to hit level 100 and then start trying to farm t17s and other things where I might actually take deaths. For the moment I have swapped over to running Toxic Sewer and City Square for my mapping combo, and am working on trying to get it to a comfortable point of sustaining them. I was running Defiled Cathedral until I got the Nameless Seer to show up, so that I could scry Apothecary on Toxic Sewer. I got that last night so I am in process of swapping over the maps I run. Essentially all of my T14 and T15 maps are going to my mappers as I whittle down that achievement.

I am shocked that I am still having as much fun as I am, given that I only rolled a single character for Phrecia. That said I am looking forward to the 27th so we can see what they have been cooking for Path of Exile II, and then after that the launch of Last Epoch Season 2.

Blowing Divines for Science

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Good Morning folks. We are on the cusp of a new Last Epoch and Path of Exile II league and I cannot stop playing the Legacy of Phrecia event. What is probably even more wilds is that I think right now, there are more Path of Exile players than Path of Exile II players. It is really hard to prove this however because the majority of POE players do not use the Steam client. I switched to the standalone client some leagues ago because there is almost always a delay in league start because of the patch having to go through the Steam QC checks. However the 24 hour peak for POE2 is 35,015 and for POE1 21,117 and in the past they have stated than less than half of the players use the Steam client. Anyways I would believe it given how much trade volume I am seeing in small 20c trades. I can’t complete a map without someone pinging me for an item, which is way more active than a league normally is a month into it.

One of the things that I am chipping away at is the Gear Grinding Goals challenge for successfully running 200 t14 or higher rare maps to 100% completion. In truth I never really spent much time on the mappers when Settlers of Kalguur launched, but have seemingly hit my stride. I should probably finish upgrading my mappers all the way to level 10s, but for now I seem to be able to complete maps pretty solidly. I upgraded my last two voidstones over the weekend and as such I have a backlog of lower tier maps to consume, now that I only really care about t16s. As of this morning I have 50 more maps to go, and then I am sitting at level 99 and am mostly grinding out level 100. Getting this challenge won’t really move the needle and I will need to figure out something else to do to get another totem upgrade. I am hoping that I will actually encounter Sasan now that I am actively running mappers so I can knock out one of those associated achievements.

The thing about keeping your mappers running all the time is that you can also keep your disenchanter going pretty much all the time. More than that however they occasionally return some really nice stuff. I’ve gotten several 21/20 gems and while I did not have the mental fortitude to actually snap a screenshot of it… they brought me a Hinekora’s Lock. Admittedly when I got this, I did not realize the windfall that it actually was. I’ve gotten these to drop before during the Ancestors league and back then it was maybe 20 Divines. I was able to sell mine for 140 Divines. The Reddit regularly has pictures of folks having their mappers bring back a Mirror of Kalandra or even a Mageblood.

The only problem with getting a huge amount of currency this late in the league… is that I pretty much have already upgraded everything that I really needed for my build. I could of course have bought a Mageblood, and technically still can given that a reasonably well rolled one is going for roughly 110 Divines. However when it comes to chase uniques… I have always felt like my favorite is Headhunter. This is a belt that I have used many times on bow builds to help buff up both my damage output and my survival while mapping. However I have never actually used one on a Righteous Fire build… and in truth it would also solve another problem that I have been having in that I could not really juggle my stats in order to add in a Defiance of Destiny. So I spent 10 div on a well rolled Headhunter and 10 div on a well rolled Defiance and have been playing with both for funsies.

I lost quite a bit of regeneration but still have around 1300 health per second which is still enough to maintain righteous fire without any issues. However in general I have been able to hit nowhere near the numbers I am used to as Chieftain where I am only stacking Fire Resistance and can hit something around 2000 health per second. Basically Headhunter just makes any other build feel better as you are effectively getting a ton of buffs any time you kill rare monsters. The best of these is of course Soul Eater… and the worst is the one that gives you a Flicker Strike like effect that teleports you to the nearest rare monster. However since I care about being up close and personal with things… the flicker strike nonsense is way less harmful than it is with a glass cannon bow build. The only time it gets really dangerous is when I am delving… and it decides to teleport me out into the darkness.

Earlier I said that I did not initially buy a MageBlood, but could afford one anyways… so this morning I decided to go ahead and do that. I am not one of those people where the acquisition of money in general is an endgame unto itself. Currency in Path of Exile is only useful in that I can buy things with it that I will likely never actually see drop on their own. I am legitimately not sure what Mageblood number this is now… but I think my third? I think it might be my sixth Headhunter, and fourth Defiance of Destiny… because of all of the Tier 0 rarity uniques that is the only one that I think I have seen drop on its own. I am legitimately contemplating swapping over to a resistance flask setup because that would give me close to 90% fire resistance and around 85% for all of the other resistances. Regardless having a Mageblood gives me more options than NOT having a Mageblood.

Long story short… Legacy of Phrecia has been a pretty great event for me as a whole.