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.
Good Morning Folks! On Friday Path of Exile II Early Access launched and at this point, I have played for 24 hours according to Steam spread over two full days and one heavy evening of gaming. This morning I am going to talk about some of the good bits and some of the bad bits from my perspective. I have deeply mixed opinions about this experience, and quite honestly above all else… I am very thankful that Path of Exile 1 is going to continue to receive updates. The thing is… Path of Exile II does not appear to be catering to the Path of Exile 1 audience, or at least not in its entirety. Time will tell if this audience is large enough one to support the type of brutal gameplay that they are going for. However before I put my thumb too far onto the scale, lets talk about some of the great things about the game.
The Good Parts
Feat of Cloud Engineering
While the game launched a few hours late, from the time the servers went up it was pretty much in a fully playable state the entire weekend long. Whatever they did to scale their systems for the massive demand worked. There were a few hiccups here and there, and a few times an instance server seemed to restart itself, but all in all it was a damned smooth experience. You have to understand part of why this is so amazing is that Path of Exile is a game that has never seen a peak concurrency over 500k, and with this launch they were prepping to have over a million players battering down their systems.
Amazing Communication
From the announcement for the Three Week Day, the concerns for launch, and all the way throughout the weekend with updates posted to Twitter (though I wish this were also mirrored on other platforms) the Grinding Gear Games team has been phenomenal with communicating what is going on and what we should expect as players. This really needs to be commended, because this level of honesty with the player base is refreshing. This is just not something we get in our current high-marketing-spin gaming environment and should be viewed as the new standard for game releases full stop. If you are not doing at least this well then you are failing your playerbase.
Better Performing Client
One of the more impressive things is just how well the game performs. It consumes fewer resources than the original Path of Exile client and looks a hell of a lot better. I am shocked at just how good this new client is, and it would be lovely if they could go back and rework the innards of the POE1 client to improve it in the same way.
Gorgeous Visuals
The game looks amazing. The environments look amazing. The lighting engine is phenomenal. There is this scene where you are roaming through a town on fire, and it just looks so damned good. Later there is a similar scene where you are roaming around a town with rain-slicked streets at night, and every so often you get this perfect glint of the moon off the puddles on the ground and it is phenomenal. I never really thought Path of Exile 1 looked dated… until I played Path of Exile II.
Better Onboarding
The game does so much better of a job onboarding the player and simplifying at least some of the early choices of what gems you should be using and what supports you should be putting with them. Some of this needs optimization, but it leads to a much more approachable experience. Similarly having mouse over text in the game for most of the game terms with pop-up definitions is a huge step forward. I often tend to discount this because I am a POE grognard at this point and have memorized a lot of these terms, but to a new player, this would be huge.
Pausing the Game is Huge
While there is a contingency of players who seem to be railing against this change, specifically when it comes to boss encounters… being able to pause your game is a massive improvement. There are a lot of times where I just need to get up and step away from the game and being able to hit escape and do just that is phenomenal. I just wish they would make it so that the game pauses any time you open any menu or even open your inventory. Make this a single-player-only feature, but it would be so nice to be able to fiddle with stuff without the fear of having to flip back out quickly to deal with a swarm of angry mobs.
Checkpointing is Solid
While I am going to complain about certain aspects of this later, the checkpointing tech in this game is pretty great. It feels awesome being able to restart something, without having to run all the way back to it. Similarly, it is great that the game saves your world state, and that you can legitimately just log out of the game and return right back to it without having to start in town again. This is legitimately next level for an ARPG.
Simplified Crafting
At least in theory, the crafting changes should make it far easier for a new player to pick up items off the ground and modify them for their uses. Similarly, the ability to Disenchant items for shards and Salvage items for quality and socketing currency is a big positive. Thankfully things like the Salvaging Bench stay unlocked for secondary characters on the account so that you never have to live without it.
Better Storytelling
Path of Exile had a great story, but it was told in a manner that was less than clear to most players. It was absolutely possible to get through the ten-act story without having a clue what was going on save for the fact that this Piety chick kept showing up regularly. Legitimately I highly suggest checking out KittenCatNoodle and her story deep dives because there is a lot of cool lore there and POE2 is a direct sequel to the story of the first game. However, the way in which the game is telling the story to the player is so much more effective in the second game. It would be very hard for you to exit this game without understanding at least the general broad strokes of the story.
The Bad Parts
Confusing Difficulty Curve
ARPGs are supposed to make you feel powerful when it comes to killing trash mobs but then need to reason your way through the boss fights. This game has some of the weirdest difficulty spikes and almost all of them are surrounding white packs of random trash mobs. They feel awful and just sort of make exploring the world a bit of a slog. This really serves to make roaming around as melee miserable. Almost all of the random deaths that I have taken are to trash packs, which also have collision meaning that when you get surrounding you cannot dodge roll out of the way to get clear. I’ve had a lot of “oops I am swarmed and now fucked” moments and they feel bad. The game could easily have general mob damage lowered by at least half, as well as the hitpoints of trash packs.
Melee Feels Bad
Melee combat just feels bad. So many of the attacks have forced moments built into them, meaning that you have to plan for the dumbassed lunge that your character is going to do every time, meaning that it makes combat abilities feel awkward. I get that they wanted to show off all of these animations that they created, but I do not understand why it should feel so cumbersome to do anything. Leap slam for example just does not feel responsive and I have no clue why they needed to change the way this worked from the first game. All of the movement abilities feel bad, because they have awkward cooldowns, a bit of a windup, and target monsters unpredictably.
Targeting is Awful
There is something fundamentally off with the targeting mechanics in this game. There are so many times that one of my abilities decides to target some random mob other than firing at where my mouse cursor is pointing. This is especially prevalent with Boneshatter which I use as a “detonator” to cause shockwaves to fire off when I consume a Heavy Stun. This means that I need to target a mob that is primed for heavy stun, but too often my character turns in the opposite direction of my cursor and feebly swipes at something behind me rather than the target that is primed to create an explosion. Leap slam similarly often targets something in a completely different direction than my character is facing meaning that I go bounding off into oblivion.
Too Proud of Bosses
I get that you are super proud of just how many bosses you managed to cram into this game, but it is a bit much. Right now the best abilities in the game can one-shot these, and the majority of abilities mean you are just impotently banging away at a giant bag of hitpoints for 5 to 10 minutes so that the game becomes a battle of attrition to see if you run out of potions before you kill it. There is just far too much bossing in the campaign full stop. I never really liked bossing in Path of Exile and considered it the most annoying part of the game. It was something that I did to unlock the power that was gated behind it, but not something I would choose to engage with purposefully. The campaign should be a fairly chill experience as you get used to your character and work through building it up, and it is annoying to constantly have to keep going into a death spiral and restart at the checkpoint until you batter it down… only to have to do the same thing again a few rooms over.
Bosses are Bugged
At this point, I have played through several of the bosses multiple times, on different characters. The experiences are never the same, and this feels bad. I got into a death spiral last night on an alt where Geonor the boss of the first act was chain gunning mechanics so I had no time to actually do any DPS. As soon as one mechanic finished he would immediately start the next one, without giving you any time to do anything between. Other times I have completed the encounter, he has paused a significant time between mechanics. I am not sure which is the intended result, but clearly there are timing bugs happening and it is a bit maddening. As a result, I never quite know if the difficulty I am facing is intended, or if shit is just bugged out. Granted this is all part and parcel with a beta.
Starving for Resources
The supposed trade-off that we were getting for losing the power of the crafting bench, was that picking an item off the floor and crafting it up into something useable was supposed to be way more common. I am constantly starving for resources. I am around level 30 currently have have seen three raw Regal Orbs drop in total. They were correct that I saw around a half dozen Exalted Orbs drop during Act 1, but then they seemed to dry up completely, and have only seen one drop since. I am just starving for resources to be able to try and craft something reasonable for an upgrade.
Gear Drought
This is only magnified by the fact that the gear that is dropping is awful. Rares are exactly that… extremely rare, far more than they were in Path of Exile. It feels like we are playing on Ruthless mode, and news flash… that was not a popular game mode for a reason. What makes this even worse is the fact that the item tiering system does not appear to be working as intended. Jonathan talked about how as you went up in levels, there would be invisible forces gating the loot so that it would stop lower-level bases from dropping and lower-level attributes from rolling. The thing is I am still getting level 1 items with level 1 rolls in my 30s. The loot is horrendous and I feel even more like the only thing that is going to matter in this game is acquiring trade currency so I can buy my way out of gear holes.
Runes are Not Enough
Runes were in theory supposed to be our methodology for “fixing gear” but there are a bunch of problems with this. Firstly socketed gear is not dropping often enough to reliably generate a source of artificer orbs, so most of my gear does not have any sockets to put runes in. Even then the amount of adjustment that a single rune gives is just not good enough to keep up with your gear as you level. There really should be some methodology for spending additional runes on an item with a low chance of upgrading the stats to a higher tier or something like that. Right now I have large quantities of runes, but nothing to do with them.
Resistances Almost Non-Existent
This is a problem that is multiplied by just how bad the loot is that is dropping, but my resistances are awful. There are fewer nodes on the passive tree that have resistances on them, and as a result, we have to rely entirely on gear… most of which are two-stat magic items. People who are actively doing maps right now, can’t even fix their resistances… it should not come as a shock that I am barely keeping mine out of the negatives while doing the campaign.
Passive Tree Choices Lack Power
It feels like most of the choices on the passive tree are not actually giving my character any more power. Across the board, it feels like the passive tree was watered down significantly from Path of Exile, and it does not feel great. There was a bit where I was trying to build into Block as a defensive layer and had my tree configured in order to take advantage of every single block node that I could get. This only managed to take me up to 36% block chance… which is nothing. Ideally in order to go block-based you really need to be able to hit that 75% block cap, and in Path of Exile this is honestly a fairly trivial matter once you have picked up a few node clusters. In POE2, I had three such node clusters and was not even vaguely close to being good enough to make a difference.
Sustain is a Problem
This might be a uniquely melee problem, but I cannot sustain my mana and every fight generally becomes a situation where I am just hoping that I don’t run out of mana flasks. I am running Clarity on my Herald of Ash, but it is nowhere near as powerful as the same ability would be in Path of Exile. In POE1 by the time I exit Act 1 I have generally “fixed” my mana and never have to worry about it again for the rest of the game. Not having the “juice” to be able to use your abilities feels miserable.
Regen is Almost Non-Existent
I’ve taken a ton of regen nodes on the tree and it does not really seem to be making much of a difference. My regeneration rates are so low as compared to what I am expecting from Path of Exile. It feels questionable how much of a defensive layer this really is. Having to sustain yourself from flasks feels bad. Flasks should be for “oh shit” moments, not the general play of your character. I expect to have enough regen to be able to recover from minor hits by just waiting… but that is just not really a thing in this game at least not yet. I have prioritized regen on a bunch of my gear slots and it still does not really make much of a difference.
Zone Pop on Death Feels Miserable
Because the trash mobs are soo poorly balanced currently, the whole thing about the entire zone respawning each time you die feels fucking miserable. There have been several times I have just given up playing for a bit because I knew I would have to clear my way back across a path full of mobs that felt miserable to fight… only to have to do it yet again if I happened to die. The old way of zones working in Path of Exile is far superior. You can still Ctl+Click a zone to respawn it fully, so I do not know why they went down this path of doing the dark souls bullshit of a zone popping. This was a bad idea and it needs to be thrown in the bin entirely.
Tanky is Not Really a Thing Yet
Building defenses feels like it is the wrong choice. I have two Warriors, one with and one without defenses and I had a much easier time getting through the first act ignoring all of my defenses entirely. Even on my character I have gone mace and shield and picked up defenses from the passive tree, I still do not feel tanky enough for it to have been worth the effort. My core player fantasy is to be able to shrug off attacks. I play tanks in MMORPGs, and as such I tend to build tanky characters in ARPGs. My two favorite characters are the Invoker/Thorns Crusader from Diablo III, and the Righteous Fire Juggernaut/Chieftain from Path of Exile and in both, I was playing into the fantasy of building super tanky and then coming up with an alternate feedback method for killing things. This just does not seem to be a thing yet in Path of Exile II.
Not Sure If It’s a Good Game
I am continuing to plug along, but there have been so many times that I have tried to decide if I just wanted to quit. I would like to finish the campaign, but I gotta be honest it is not something I am looking forward to completing it again on alts. Contrast that with the fact that I legitimately love doing the campaign in Path of Exile. I have a blast playing through the various acts and using them as a way of gauging just how powerful I am at any given point along the process. Admittedly we are comparing something I have now done once or twice, with something that I have legitimately done multiple dozens of times, so with familiarity comes fondness I guess.
I think there is a good base to build upon here, but I feel like they need to back away from catering to those players who obtain sexual gratification from difficulty and reign things in a bit. I’ve played this game before, and it was called Path of Exile on Ruthless difficulty. That was not a popular game mode for a reason. People who play ARPGs religiously do so in order to gain player power and crush the content, and I feel like this game is not really allowing me to do this. There are a bunch of reasons behind this like stingy currency system, bad loot drops, overturned mobs, and weak power gained through the passive tree… but all of it ends up adding up to an experience that is not terribly enjoyable for me personally.
Right now I think there are players who might love this game, but they are not the same players who love Path of Exile. Maybe that is okay. I am just annoyed that this is going to be the reason why we are late getting the next POE1 League because I am not sure it was worth it. Maybe I will start to love it over time. It took me from 2015 until 2019 to really begin to Grok the first game, maybe it is going to take a similar amount of beating my head against this wall before I learn to love the frustration.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we end up mostly talking about the early access launch for Path of Exile II. This truly was a feat of cloud engineering as the Grinding Gear Games team delayed for a few hours to prepare for the onslaught of over a million players… then the game just worked pretty much flawlessly until some minor issues on Saturday. It is hard to explain how big of a feat this is, especially considering the struggles that Last Epoch had with unexpected success, for a game that has never had more than 300k peak concurrency to scale up this fast is massive. When it comes to the actual game… Bel is not having a great time as Warrior, but everyone else seems to be greatly enjoying themselves. We talk about the good bits and the bad bits. From there Bel talks a bit about the OnlyFangs Hardcore WoW Event, and then Ash and Kodra share their experiences with Atlyss.
