Hey Folks! We did not record an episode of AggroChat last night, and as a result, I don’t have the usual Sunday post. Instead, I am going to talk some more about Lightning Arrow Raider. Last night I finished leveling through the campaign and then started running some maps to test the build further. I am still very much wearing the same SSF gear that I picked up through the campaign, with some minor crafting in order to try and fix my resistances a bit. As it stands I have woefully negative Chaos Resistance, very low Cold resistance, and then capped Fire and Lightning. If you want to check out the current state of my build, I dumped a fresh POB or you can check out my character on Path of Exile website.
I also recorded a video of me running a T11 Red Map, where I took a single death from a random rare. I had no clue what hit me, but after the fact while editing I noticed that it was an Innocence Touched monster, which is one of the more annoying god-touched mobs. All told I am pretty happy with where this build ended up with only some assorted bench and essence crafting. It gives me a lot of hope for a smooth transition into maps as I do this all “for real” on Friday evening. I’ve always liked leveling a Ranger because generally speaking all of the tools you need you have easy access to. I will likely run Lesser Multiple Projectiles/Mirage Archer/Caustic Arrow until I can get Lightning Arrow from the quests. I also plan on muleing a bunch of Lightning Arrow gems as I can so that I can hopefully corrupt my way into a Vaal version if I don’t get one to drop.
My goal with the build is for it to be a fast mapper that I can hopefully use to progress my Atlas quickly. At some point, I am likely going to create a Righteous Fire Juggernaut again to have something that I can do Heist and Delve with. I have to say though I am looking forward to playing something with big screen-clearing potential because there are a lot of league mechanics that I have never really explored very much. Legion, Blight, and Breach all really want you to be able to kill lots of the screen quickly in order to get the best possible rewards, and Righteous Fire has always sort of sucked at this. I am legitimately wondering how well this build will do with Heist as well, and I’ve spent a tiny bit of time in Delve and it seemed mostly fine so long as I did not press out into the darkness too much.
If nothing else there is a satisfying explosion of lights whenever I fire my Lightning Arrows, and that will be fun to map around on. I am not necessarily trying to race or anything, but it will be fun to wreck maps for a change. Don’t get me wrong, Righteous Fire is plenty good at mapping but it never felt anywhere near as satisfying as some of the videos I have watched of dedicated mapping builds. I think my early strategy will be Essences, Expedition, and maybe some Lockboxes in order to get a stash of crafting materials to help fix my own gear. I am also going to try and lean as little on buying from trade this league as I can. The main reason why I am not rolling SSF however is so that I can start selling things that I might find along the way that could be worth some change. I am definitely a trade enjoyer, but it was also refreshing to level the Lightning Arrow Raider on mostly found gear.
Anyways… I feel like I am probably annoying everyone with talk of Trial of the Ancestor league. I am excited I guess, and just can’t stop talking about it.
Good Morning Folks! Here we go with another Saturday blog post since I seem to be determined to hit thirty-one this Blaugust. We are in the final stretch before the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile next Friday. With a new league comes the eternal question of what the heck to actually play. While I need to spend some time updating it, I have a section on the Path of Exile Tools page where I have been loosely keeping track of the characters and builds that I have played over the course of the last four leagues.
Last week I recorded a bit of a rambling video talking about my journey with Path of Exile so far, but suffice it to say I have learned a lot over the last four leagues, and Ancestor is going to be my fifth league. There are a lot of things that I have come to accept that I did not with that very first build. Firstly I have come to accept that while builds may be advertised as being able to do all of the content in the game, that statement usually comes with some caveats. Namely what feels great clearing a map doesn’t necessarily always feel great in deep delve or fighting bosses. So I am going into the Ancestor league knowing that more than likely I am going to build several characters for various reasons over the course of the league… some because I want to specialize in a specific bit of content and others just because I want to try something different.
For the last two leagues, Sanctum and Crucible, I have league started a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This is without a doubt probably the most comfortable build I have ever played. I’ve never really put the currency into the build in order to turn it into a higher damage potential/do all of the content in the game build… but instead mostly focused on the high levels of survival and making it a comfortable Delve and Heist monster. That is not to say that mapping is not comfortable, but it will never clear as fast as some of the other “entire-screen-clearing” options. I know that more than likely by the end of the league I will have leveled another Righteous Fire character, but I sorta want to see how the new meta shakes out with RF Chieftan and whether or not Forbidden Flesh/Flame are cheap enough to reasonably either cherry pick a Juggernaut ability, or do the same with a Jugg and snag the Chieftain resistance capping node.
However, if you want a very comfortable build that was able to get me two keystones without breaking a sweat and do most of the game modes… then I would suggest checking out Pohx.net or specifically the Righteous Juggernaut written guide. This is a playstyle similar to the Thorns Crusader if you ever played that in Diablo III, where you just run through the map and watch things fall down around you.
Another build that I had a heck of a lot of fun with in this past league was Explosive Arrow Ballistas Champion. This is technically the first build I ever played when I sat down to try and follow a guide back during the Sentinel League. The thing is… there were a lot of layers of how to build a character that I did not understand at that point. As a result… my EA Champion was a bit of a failboat that I half understood the directions that I was trying to follow. This is one of the first builds that I kitbashed a number of guides together along with some information from various POE.ninja profiles of folks playing a similar setup. The end result is a build that looks very much like most EA Champions out there, but one that specifically was suited to my tastes. If you are curious about what the build ended up looking like, here is a short video I recorded a while back.
While I enjoyed it greatly, there is an aspect to the build that just feels weird in that you spend a lot of time running ahead while you wait on your Ballistas to kill things for you. You end up building in such a matter that you don’t actually do any damage yourself, but your turrets do… but they don’t actually do the damage from the initial hit… but instead from a delayed explosion. It is very much a no-aiming gameplay style which is fun and is super tanky in the way in which I built it so you can survive pretty much any of the content. However mapping… never really felt that great because you were essentially always needing to loop back through the map to pick up what dropped in your wake.
If you want to give it a shot though, I highly suggest you check out Zizaran’s video guide from last league. There were no significant changes in the way that someone would build an EA Champion, so for the most part all 3.21 guides should be relevant still.
Another build that I have greatly enjoyed, both in the version that I built this league in the above video, and a half-assed version that I played way back in Sentinel league… is Wintertide Brand. More specifically the best version I have played is the Wintertide Brand Occultist that I cobbled together after looking at a number of POE.Ninja profiles and trying to decide what path I wanted to take. This is the first build that I more or less freehanded based on input that I was seeing from other player builds rather than trying to follow a guide. For the most part, it worked out swimmingly. The core problem, however… is it is a bit on the slow side and has a requirement of needing a unique to feel good. More specifically you want a specific corruption of that unique. I also already had a nice “+Cold Skill Gems” wand laying around that dropped in Delve so it was easy for me to cobble this together.
To be truthful… there are not a ton of guides around for this one. Mr 9 Lives has one but it is nowhere near as detailed as something from Zizaran, Ghazzy, or Palsteron. If you want to copy my POB I dumped that some time ago at level 82. The thing that I never quite solved was with my build were all of the defensive layers. I was going for Regen + Block but I was missing a lot in the block department. Basically I never really wanted to put the effort into properly fixing it, but someday… I am going to make this feel amazing.
Another build has caught my eye recently, and I am doing a bit of a league start test at the moment. While I am only in Act 8… unless something drastically changes I think I am going to league start Lightning Arrow Raider. Essentially what I would like to have is a build that can just wipe the entire screen, and be able to do that… in what is effectively garbage-tier gear. I want to go into this next league pretending like I am approaching it as SSF, in spite of wanting to have access to give stuff to my guildies and hopefully cherry-pick the one thing I am a bit worried about getting… Vaal Lightning Arrow.
I recorded some gameplay this morning of running through some of Act 8. Essentially using a Lightning Arrow 5-link I can often kill things before they even get on the same screen with me. It performed essentially the same on a 3 and 4-link. For Rare/Boss mobs I use Artillery Balistas in order to grind them down or fire off Vaal Lightning Arrow if I have a Vaal charge. For defensive layers I am going after High Evasion, 100% Spell Suppression, 100% Phasing, and trying to get a decent balance of life and armor to round that out.
With this test, I have specifically been avoiding rifling through my vault to find good stuff to equip. Everything I am wearing dropped for me during this run so far. The bow for example was a white five-link item that took the quality to 20% and then threw an Anger Essence at and lucked into a reasonable roll. Then I bench-crafted cold damage on it to add a bit more raw damage. The Helm I Rog Crafted, and the chest, boots, and gloves were all things that dropped. I’ve got a bunch of gems equipped that I am not even using but never actually removed from my gear.
Essentially what sent me down the Lightning Arrow/Artillery Ballista path was the number of folks who made magic find builds using that combination of abilities at the end of the league to farm stuff. In all cases, it seemed like they could make it work on a bare minimum of gear. In my travels of searching for information, I stumbled across the above video from “LifeWithoutPants” a YouTuber I had never seen before. This sent me down the path of Raider instead of PathFinder, so we are going to see how that feels. I really like leveling a Ranger because it does not require me to mule anything from another character, pending I am going for a bow build. Generally speaking, when I get access to Lily or the Library I pick up Flame Dash to replace normal Dash, but past that, you start out with access to everything you need and get most of it through quests.
Right now I plan on finishing leveling all the way through the Acts and then will try some White and Yellow maps to see how those feel. Essentially my plan for this character is to farm maps and work my way up to Red maps. I might go Essences, Harvest, and Jun on my Atlas to help with gathering gear. The other path I guess would be to go down Expeditions and then Rog craft some gear. My hope is with the screen clear potential of the build is that Blight won’t be quite so painful as it usually is with Righteous Fire. I’m not sure I will be able to do Metamorphs in quite the same way as I did as SRS or RF, but I am not going to block any content so that I can at least try a bit of everything.
I am really looking forward to this league, and looking forward to giving Sanctum another shot in its updated form. Are you going to be playing Path of Exile? What are you looking at to league start? Drop me a line below and we can chat! I’m also more than happy to help folks out if you are just dipping your toes in the game and looking for a build to follow. Generally speaking, I should be able to take the type of gameplay that you like in other ARPGs and suggest something similar in POE.
Diablo 4 has had a bit of a rocky start. The launch went relatively well and while I have shared at length my issues with the game, it seemed to largely be well received. That all changed when the patch notes were released for Season 1 and its pre-patch. Diablo IV was a game where there were only a handful of options that actually felt good to play, and every single one of them was nerfed into oblivion for no apparent reason. This caused an emergency “yeah we fucked up” fireside chat, and with it some massive changes in the way they are addressing the game. The problem is… this was not really enough to stem the bleeding and almost overnight… the game seems to have purged most of its player base. I have a few hundred friends on Battle.Net and at the launch of the game… I saw well over a hundred people playing it including folks I had not seen online in years. At the launch of season one… there were still about six players actively playing the game on my friend’s list.
With this precipitous decline… folks have rushed out of the sidelines to whack away at this misery pinata. “D4 Bad” has become a meme, and you cannot watch an ARPG stream without someone saying it. This charge is being led by several of the Path of Exile streamers and even made its way into the ExileCon official Livestream. This flood of public mockery has even managed to grind down some of the most prolific Diablo Enjoyers. The truth is nothing is ever as simple as the soundbite. I have publicly decried this game, but I don’t seem to hate it anywhere near as much as the zeitgeist seems to right now. On Tuesday Patch 1.1.1 was released, and quite honestly… it brought with it a number of good changes. Since I am sitting in the Path of Exile 3.22 waiting room… I decided to check it out.
As of writing this blog post, I am level 38 and some 13 hours into my playthrough of a seasonal character. Maybe I have mellowed out since my crushing disappointment at launch, or maybe I have just come to accept what Diablo IV is as compared to what I expected it to be. Whatever the case I am not hating what I am playing. I opted to start a Barbarian because ultimately if the game was going to have a redemption arc, it needed to start with the character class that felt awful to play in all of the betas and at launch. I did pivot away from the Whirlwind Barb and am now mostly focused on Hammer of the Ancients. There are a number of things that still feel pretty bad, like how often I have to use my builder in order to get a single hit of my consumer… but that is obviously not really going to change.
Let’s start off by talking about the unique seasonal questline. You are helping Cormond attempt to rid this plague from the world called the Malignant, which infects enemies and causes them to return to life over and over. I believe at this point I have completed the entire quest chain and defeated both forms of the final boss. If you were expecting deep story content that moved the needle forward for Sanctuary… you are pretty much going to have to wait for expansions. What this reminds me of are the storylines that get patched into Gacha games, where you have a handful of quests to introduce a new character or a new mechanic before being turned loose to explore that further. The Cormond storyline exclusively exists to introduce us to the Malignant and give us some structure as to why we are caging these hearts.
As far as the seasonal mechanic itself, every bit of content that you do seems to be able to spawn Malignant monsters which have a chance of dropping a heart that you can attempt to cage. I’ve encountered these in dungeons, cellars, and they are guaranteed to spawn in the new type of dungeon called Malignant Tunnels. What this means in practice is that you have to defeat an elite… remember to click the purple, orange, or blue heart that is left behind… and then fight them again to get a Caged Heart to drop. I wish the hearts were glowing brightly or something because quite honestly they tend to blend into the background and I am pretty sure I have killed Malignant monsters several times and forgot entirely to click on the doodad. When you are going through a dungeon… they feel absolutely the same as every other monster you fight. There is nothing really special about them other than the fact that they look like they have some guck covering them.
The object of your search is the Caged Heart. These come in three common varieties… Viscious (Orange), Devious (Purple), and Brutal (Blue). These fit into corresponding colored sockets that now exist in every piece of jewelry that drops. The key complaint that I heard early on is that these would harm survival given that everyone was socketing skulls into jewelry for armor bonuses. As a result, Blizzard thought far enough ahead to just give each caged heart a ton of armor negating that concern. Each colored heart has specific bonuses that can roll on them, and these are more of the “nice to have” territory than anything build-changing. Under certain rare circumstances, you can get a fourth type called the Wrathful Heart (Black) which is a bit like a watered-down Legendary Aspect, that could impact how you want to build your character. Incremental power gain is still power gain, so I guess this is a positive overall.
Originally I had said this seemed like a watered-down version of the Abyss league mechanic from Path of Exile, but in truth that is giving it a bit too much credit. The Caged Hearts are a nice bonus for doing content you are already going to do, but don’t really feel like something worth specifically chasing. I do however enjoy doing the Malignant Tunnel dungeons because they have a better flow to them than traditional dungeons just for leveling purposes. You can craft devices with the different colors of corruption that you loot, which allows you to spawn a bonus boss fight at the end of the Malignant Tunnel. Again these don’t really feel like chase mechanics, but more something I am doing for experience points given that I end up with a ton of the crafting materials from salvaging the hearts. Hearts take up inventory space, so I feel like I am always needing to destroy them to make room for more loot.
The thing that is a bit intangible is that 1.1.1 feels better, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Granted I am nowhere near the endgame, but my survival feels better and my ability to kill things also feels significantly better. I’ve been in a loop the last several nights where I did not have the mental bandwidth to play Baldur’s Gate 3, but did not want to burn myself out on Path of Exile right before a new league starts. As a result, Diablo IV has felt pretty great as the sort of game interaction that I am craving but also given that I don’t deeply care about it… it is simple enough to log out and walk away from it when I have something else that I would rather be doing. Essentially I feel like the game is in a better state than it was when I left it, and not near as meme-worthy as the internet would lead you to believe. Sure there are things that still bug the fuck out of me, like their overreliance on crowd control… but it also isn’t an awful experience.
Blizzard did win however and convinced me to consume my battle pass token. The armor set that you get as part of the seasonal journey is actually rather sweet. This annoys me however because the set of armor you get the free track… looks like shit. If you want nice things you are going to have to keep buying a quarterly battle pass in order to have access to potentially “earn” it. That whole interaction feels bad, that not only will I have to pay money for it… but I will also be expected to grind away in order to earn the things I paid for. The battle pass as it stands is probably one of my least favorite constructs in gaming, and really… it needs to die in a fire.
I guess the only positive thing that I have to say about the Battle Pass is that it seems like progress is moving extremely quickly through it. Like I said I am roughly thirteen hours into this character and I am sitting at level 43 of 90 in the rewards track. The curve for these rewards seems to also be fairly flat as I’ve not noticed them slowing down significantly as I moved through the content. Basically, I am just about finished with the lower tier of the armor skins and going to be starting on getting the slightly nicer ones. When I ding 40, which should happen today… I will unlock the Smouldering Ashes system that allows me to gain account-wide bonuses. I will of course be going after the Urn of Aggression first which gives a flat XP boost and should speed up the rest of my leveling.
As far as the Season Journey goes, I am already through the first four steps which would have originally been part of the “Haedrig’s Gift” process in Diablo III. Each time you ding you seem to get a set of jewelry and a few aspect unlocks which is nice but also feels a little lackluster. It just really drives home how commoditized gear in general feels in Diablo IV. I will say just the existence of the Seasons Journey makes the game feel like it has a bit more purpose because it gives me some activities to focus on. Weirdly you can progress to the next tier without actually finishing the previous one. I think in most cases when I got all but 2 or 3 of the achievements checked off I was able to leap ahead to the next tier and get the rewards. I like that it gives me a bit of a sense of purpose and causes me to play in a way I would not normally play… like seeking out Cellars each time I happen across one because I know X number of them to tick off a seasonal journey step.
All told… I don’t hate it though. There are a few weeks of focused gameplay here, and quite honestly I am moving through levels way faster than I thought I would. It doesn’t feel as good as Diablo III, where you could burn up a character in a weekend and be doing endgame content the rest of the season, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as slow as leveling did at launch. I hope over time they will continue to accelerate this process because really… it should take you a week to max out a seasonal character and then the rest of the time should be spent interacting with the seasonal mechanic. However, given how shallow the seasonal mechanic is… I can’t really see players sticking around for long because of it. Maybe it is better to think of the endgame as beginning at level 50 when you hit World Tier 3, and then everything after that point is gravy.
I do want the game to find its stride, because even though it has faded significantly… I still have a lot of love and nostalgia for the franchise. I don’t think Diablo IV was the right game to continue that legacy, but I also don’t think it is awful. I think a lot of the Metacritic user score reflects the anger over a bad patch, and I hope given time… the team can recover from that. I am extremely curious about what Path of Exile 3.22 is going to look like because I am already seeing a flood of “D4 player tries POE” videos. I fully expect Diablo IV stumbling will be extremely good for peak numbers in the Ancestor League. I am most definitely looking forward to it, but for the time being… I am actually enjoying the Season of the Malignant. It is nowhere near as bad as I had feared, but also… isn’t as good as I might have hoped. So while I can’t say “D4 Bad” I can probably be fine with saying “D4 Mid”.
Good Morning Friends. Yesterday I did not really have the mental fortitude for Baldur’s Gate III, so I largely focused on ARPGs for a quick dose of fun. I’ve continued working on leveling my Righteous Fire Templar and that continues to go swimmingly. The big difference with this test character is that I am focused on Scorching Ray in lieu of the more traditional Fire Trap for single-target-DPS. I am still not sure if I will actually go in this direction in nine days when the league start happens, but there are absolutely aspects of it that I greatly enjoy. Being able to burn things down at range is rather nice as they are heading toward you, but I am not entirely certain this makes up for the complete lack of mobility while doing the damage. I think in order to really get the most from this, you would need to invert your body armor and helmet quickly and get Scorching Ray in the six-link. I feel like for bosses this might have significantly higher damage potential, but for anything else… probably less because it was so easy just to drop fire traps as you were pathing through a map.
We have yet another new Atlas Passive spoiler and once again SirGog does an excellent job diving into its potential. If you don’t follow his channel, I highly suggest you remedy that because I find him one of the more valuable resources that deep dives into specific theory-crafting. There is this trend between the passive reveals so far that I am digging. They all seem to be making it easier for someone who has zero experience to get into specific league mechanics from the “big boom” option for Expedition to the “Tower Defense Only” Blight and “No Timer Delirium” and now “No Timer Legion” there is a clear pattern. It feels like we are going to see a new passive for most of the “on map” League mechanics that somehow simplify them without the need for a lot of atlas tree investment. Making Path of Exile a little more “noob friendly” seems like a great course to me.
Speaking of “Noob Friendly” I recorded another one of my dumb videos the other day where I ramble on about my journey so far in Path of Exile over the last four leagues. I had someone on social media helpfully suggest that I need to follow a script and that I need to talk faster… but that is going to be advice that I ignore. I’m not trying to turn YouTube or this blog for that matter into a business and I don’t much care about optimizing my output. However, if you are interested in listening to a twenty-minute discussion of how I progressed from half-assing my way through a build, following a guide, and now branching out to do some of my own things… this might be something for you. I talk through some of the websites and tools that I use and at least talk a little bit about Path of Building. I get that I am absolutely an acquired taste, but I know there are at least a few people out there that enjoy listening to me ramble.
In the “things I did not expect to do” department, over lunch yesterday I decided to check out Diablo IV Patch 1.1.1 aka the one that supposedly fixes a bunch of things. All told thus far it feels like a better experience, but then again… I am only level sixteen and am far from the end of the game that wound up frustrating me. I am trying a Hammer of the Ancients aka HOTA Barbarian, because really… if Barb does not feel better then I legitimately have no interest in this game going forward. Originally I thought to myself that I was going to play through the campaign again because starting a character without the campaign feels a little directionless. However, I got bored with the campaign quests and all of the times when you are having to wait on NPCs to path… and wound up hitting the “skip campaign” button. Diablo IV still feels prodigiously slow to me, and probably always will.
Skipping the campaign at least allowed me to fiddle around with the seasonal mechanic. Malignant Hearts are in the “aggressively fine” territory. One of the nice things so far is that I don’t exactly feel like I am giving anything up since I would normally run Skulls in all of my jewelry, and thus far all of the hearts I have picked up have added additional armor. The effects that they grant tend to be a bit on the lackluster side… but again I am only level sixteen. They are certainly nice to haves, but nothing so far that I would consider “build defining”. It most definitely does not feel like it allows me to create some “broken builds” as hinted at by the devs. The biggest problem I have noticed is… the increase in renown means that you cap out an area long before you can reasonably unlock World Tier 3… and continue gaining renown. So at least in the short term, I feel like I would need to bounce around a lot.
I’ve not consumed my extra special battle pass nonsense, and unless I suddenly decide this is the best thing ever… I am unlikely to do so. It isn’t so much that the seasonal mechanic is bad… it is more that it feels like it should have been a small part of much larger mechanics. Like if you collected hearts and then could use your excess hearts (side note I am only 16 and I already have more than I can use) to craft some sort of key that allowed you to run a loot-filled dungeon full of nothing but corrupted/infected/whatever monsters… it might be a really fun season. They could have taken a page from Path of Exile and given us a way to use a heart to corrupt a dungeon boss similar to corrupting an Essence Monster, that then has a chance to drop special corrupted versions of their normal loot table. The mechanic just feels half-baked and it should have been saved to combine with other seasonal mechanics to make something cooler.
I think quite possibly the biggest negative that I can see is that even though it is lackluster as a whole… they have already said that it won’t be going to the Eternal realm. Diablo IV already feels like it just doesn’t have enough to do or enough interesting variety in its content. Making it so that there is a random chance of getting a Malignant heart to drop that then allows it to replace a gem socket or something going forward would at least add some interesting random chance that could break up other seasonal mechanics. The biggest thing that Path of Exile has going for it, is just how damned much content it has and how much random chance there is that something really interesting is going to happen when you run even the most boring of maps. There is something like twenty-four different league mechanics that have migrated to Standard and all of them CAN influence your content… adding that delightful layer of unpredictability to everything you do.
Blizzard decided that Nightmare Dungeons would be their pinnacle activity that everyone would want to do over and over. The problem is… they are boring, repetitive, and in spite of having over a hundred dungeons… they feature what is essentially a dozen different bosses. In the infamous David S. Pumpkins SNL skit one of the characters asks “Why did you go all in on David Pumpkins?” and I feel like I find myself asking that about Nightmare Dungeons. Clearly, the designers thought they were going to be the big thing, and that has not really worked into reality. Anyways do I think I will actually level my now seasonal character in Diablo IV? Probably not. I will likely return to more Baldur’s Gate III, until the 18th when the Ancestor League launches in Path of Exile, and rapidly forget that I even have Diablo IV installed again.
