POE2

Thirty Million Gold

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Good Morning Folks. I am still struggling a bit with this respiratory crud, but am doing better enough to be able to function and actually work today. If it drags on, I will end up going to the doctor but given that I doubt there is anything that they can do other than put me on a dose pack of prednisone… which will royally fuck with my sleep patterns… I have been trying to avoid that. I mostly spent the night playing Diablo IV downstairs while snuggling with cats. Gracie was doing the thing in my office where she refused to not be the center of attention, and when this happens it is generally better if I go down to the couch where she can snuggle in my arms while I am playing, rather than me trying to hold her with one hand while using the computer with other other. In wild news… the last few mornings I have been able to pet the super skittish feral black cat that hangs out in front of the house with Greybie.

Last night I managed to finally have some luck with the trade channel and picked up a set of Ancestral Tibault’s Will for 30 million gold. That seems like a nonsensical number, but I had over 200 million and nothing really to do with it… so it effectively has no value to me. I opted to throw on a non-Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which at least allowed me to have the fully functional build, and this more or less has allowed me to bump up to Torment IV and farm the world content comfortably. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I ran Varshan again and finally got an Ancestral version of that helmet to drop, so in theory I have Ancestral of better of everything that is required for the build. I still cannot quite do bosses on T4… but they melt on T3. Now it is just a matter of getting better versions of all of the uniques and maybe hopefully getting a few mythics so I can bump up to that version of the build. I am also hunting for a better pair of boots with more movement speed on them.

The biggest challenge that I am going to face right now is that most of the final set of challenges involve running content on t4 while having a piece of Chaos Armor equipped. I am not really certain which slot I can theoretically sacrifice to the achievement gods in order to make that happen, but I will do some testing. I need to run a few more Infernal Hordes to do the chaos rifts inside of them and also farm some T3 or higher Helltide in order to finish out the next to the last step in the seasons journey. I am on the very last step of the Reign of Chaos quest chain, and I am working on the last section of the Battle Pass. In theory within the next week I will have milked every last bit of this season that I really need to, and be able to walk away happily knowing that I pretty much did everything I could do.

In other news, 0.3.1 dropped in Path of Exile II, and with it comes the significant rework of the endgame and removal of towers as the primary means of adding content to maps. I ran a few maps as a test and for the most part they seem way less rippy than they were previously. I am still largely running t14 content and it seemed pretty easy overall. I have not played for about a month now, so who knows what other previous patches could have added to this feeling. It seems like maybe they have not removed ALL of the content that they intended to remove because it seems like Expeditions are still showing up as icons on the map, whereas I thought ALL additional content would be added by the Tablets instead. Additionally it seems like the whole corruption thing stays on the atlas, which makes sense given that is how you unlock most of your atlas passives.

While the overall density and rippyness of the map was lowered, it did not necessarily feel like the rewards were lowered as a result. I ran a few maps and pulled quite a bit of currency and what felt like more uniques than normal from them. Granted two of them came from a Rogue Exile, but I walked out of the map with five uniques which seems pretty solid for a 4 mod t14 map. I am not really sure if I am going to dip my toes back into the game at this point, because once I unattach from a League in Path of Exile, it sort of feels hard to get back into the swing of things. My mind has adjusted to Diablo IV at this point and I am probably going to ride that into the ground, or at least until I give Legion Remix a shot next week.

I think yesterday I might have just been in a low point, so apologies for whining about life on the blog. I put together a shelving unit which felt like significant progress so that probably cheered me up a bit. I am feeling better about my existence in the world today… even though the country seems to be burning around me.

Biggest Blaugust Ever

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Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years.

The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.

In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.

One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.

Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.

The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.

In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all.

Helena Steps Up

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Hey Folks. Yesterday was a massive reveal for Path of Exile II, and there is a lot of interesting stuff there happening in that game. I am actually excited to give it a shot once Last Epoch Season 3 (which starts today at 11 am CDT) has run its course for me. All of that said, the most exciting change that happened yesterday… did not happen in Path of Exile II but instead was thrown in as part of a Path of Exile 1 patch that added the new MTX sets. Helena has now gained the ability that Sin and Doryani have in Path of Exile II, where she will identify everything that is in your inventory. Better yet it has the same Ctl+Click shortcut that exists in Path of Exile II, so now when I finish a map my first step is to walk over and have her bulk identify everything. Unfortunately that means that Lily is no longer my vendor character and Helena just got elevated in her location in my hideout significantly. I moved Lily over to the side a bit because I still feel like the ability to buy gems is a pretty huge role.

If you have not seen the presentation I highly suggest giving it a watch because it goes in depth as to the massive design changes that are a foot in that game. The full patch notes are also available if that is more your speed and you do not feel like watching an over hour long presentation. The biggest take away that I had is it seems like they are genuinely trying to make the game feel less clunky and then highlighted a bunch of ways they are trying to achieve this. Namely things like weapon swaps no longer having an animation lock, shield charge dropping its cool-down so you can spam it, and the addition of a sprint key to speed your way across large empty chunks of map seem like they will improve the flow of game-play. More important than all of this… they are introducing the first step at an asynchronous trade system that works somewhat similar to how the brokerage system worked in Everquest II. You post items on a vendor and then people come to your hideout to buy those items, all without you needing to be online.

It is going to take a bit for the changes to really sink in, and since I am not likely to start on the 29th I will be able to know whatever is busted before rolling my character. However I think I am probably going to try and revisit something I did this league where I played a Warrior archetype with Crossbows and leaned heavily into Armor Explosion stacked on Explosive Shot and then used Blueflame Bracers to convert that damage to cold so that I could also freeze things. The biggest change will be that since I can use the same support gems on all of my abilities, I can really lean into the armor break and armor explosion mechanics, while also dipping into some of the nodes that they highlighted in the warrior starting area that do fun things with armor break and fire damage. I still think there is probably a build here, and that it should also have more survival since you can now get the ability for armor to apply to elemental damage on gear.

My tree was somewhat of a mess but once the build sites get updated for the new information I will probably sit down and plan something out so I am not winging it every time I place a point. I still feel like the two handed and armor break nodes are really key to rush towards at first, but after that I sort of lost focus and went all over the place. Since I can throw attack speed gems on every node that should improve the feel of the crossbow abilities a bit, given they already feel a bit sluggish. There is a new support gem that they previewed that shows your crossbow reloading every time you break armor, and since that is my entire focus… so that I can make things explode based on broken armor… it should have a lot of synergy with what I am trying to do. I am just hoping that this build type goes under the radar enough to still be functional by the time I start a character.

I’m actually excited to play some Path of Exile II at some point, and that is the first time since the pre-release client came out and I saw what the game played like. I’ve been pretty down on this game, and I know that is disheartening for some folks who really like the changes it made over the Path of Exile formula. I will likely always love Path of Exile more, because I have spent over 2000 hours playing the damned game at this point. However getting into Titans Quest 2 made me appreciate a slower pace, and I played some of my crossbow dude last night and it felt better than I remember it feeling. I never beat the campaign on this character, but I did get another character to 85 during the Dawn of the Hunt league. I just did not enjoy the game enough to push any further, even though I was having more fun with crossbows than I was with Twohander and Shield Smith of Kitava. I still hate the way that characters ascend and find that entire process miserable, so I am definitely going ranged for the upcoming league to make Sanctum more tolerable.

However that is not what today is about. Today is hype for Last Epoch Beneath Ancient Skies, and you can check out the full patch notes here. I am going to be rolling a Necromancer of some sort and will likely wing it through the campaign and then build something more seriously after that. The ancient area has long been my favorite part of Last Epoch, so I am pumped to explore more of it. Mostly I am trying really hard not to fall back on Warpath Sentinel that I have played so many times in the past. The Judgement build ate a bunch of nerfs so I am hoping Necromancer can reach a point where I can at least do the endgame bosses. More than anything I am looking forward to hanging out with Ace and doing some group play over the weekend. I have plans for Saturday during the day but Thursday, Friday, and Sunday I am hoping to group up and do some nonsense. More than anything I am on the hunt for the Tyrant’s Skull so I can have a TRex minion.

I hope to see you all in Last Epoch today, and then eventually in a few weeks Path of Exile II.

Out of Time

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was a bit of a wild ride work-wise for me and this morning has been similarly wild but I have a bit of a gap and am going to try and bang out a blog post in the spirit of Blaugust. After I finished with my sixteen hour day I unwound with a bit of Path of Exile while listening to various YouTube videos. I managed to get my last round of memory altars and finish up Eldritch Expeditions giving me 35 of 40 for the league. The challenge here is the fact that memory tears aka the things that replaced atlas memories, are pretty freaking rare even though I have stacked up +40% chance on my atlas. There are a bunch of mechanics like this that I wish we had scarabs to force onto a map… like I would love to do that with Sentinel for example. I fully expect that Memory Tears are permanent, since they were part of an endgame expansion to the game and not necessarily tied to a league mechanic.

I would really like to knock out another challenge so that I could finish unlocking the cosmetic armor. The issue is that all of the remaining challenges are a pain in the butt. In theory the one I am closest to, also requires me to “get gud” as it were. Basically you have to complete the new endgame encounters while avoiding taking specific attacks, and quite honestly I am not sure what half of the effects that are called out are and would have to look them up. I made an attempt at Incarnation of Fear but failed to correctly identify which mechanic I needed to care about. Strenuous Summons is the easiest but also the one that requires the most grinding. Recollections Realized is pretty straight forward… I have more than enough memory influenced maps so it is just a case of running them. Then I would need to buy a bunch of boss tokens from the currency exchange and run those as well. All of that is doable even though I don’t really enjoy fighting bosses in Path of Exile. Any fight that takes longer than few seconds feels like a massive bore, and since I do not play bossing specific characters… they all take longer than I care to commit.

The reality though is that I am pretty much out of time. Tomorrow at 11 am the Beneath Ancient Skies season for Last Epoch drops, and at that point… I am pretty much going to stop playing Path of Exile for awhile. After Last Epoch has run its course, I will probably swap over and play the new Path of Exile II league. That means that if I do not finish it up tonight… it is highly unlikely that I will return after those two games to knock out another achievement before the next Path of Exile league in October. I am pretty amped about Last Epoch and I know that once I get back into the game, all thoughts about the Mercenaries League are going to fly out of my head. The one that I absolutely COULD complete tonight is the one that requires all of the boss summons, because it is simply me setting my mind to doing it and then acquiring all of the stuff to complete it. I am back up to just shy of 90 divines after my massive currency dump on my alts and I am sure I can probably afford to buy my way out of this problem.

The other major distraction is that today at 3pm CDT there is a Path of Exile II reveal stream with the upcoming Third Edict league. Over night however there were a massive series of leaks from a French publication outlined on Reddit. Sir Gog released a video that is essentially him going over the leaks on livestream if you are curious. I am only really interested in terms of seeing how much more is in this league than was released on that site, because it seems as though at some point during the publishing of this content Grinding Gear Games caught on and asked them to stop. During the stream today there will be Twitch drops so manage your lives accordingly so you can pop in and get a finisher effect. If the leaks are correct there are a massive number of changes coming to Path of Exile II that are going to fundamentally shift how the game plays. What really matters though is how it feels to play, and we won’t know that until the 29th.

Lastly we got a cinematic reveal for the next World of Warcraft expansion yesterday and I feel mixed about it. This trailer does not feel like Blizzard trailers usually do. It feels as though it came from a trailer house and not from the in house team that has done all of the amazing cinematics in the past. I know the Blizzard marketing team was recently dismantled… and I can’t help but think the uncanny nature of this trailer is a direct result. It could also be that I am further removed from the Warcraft fandom than I have ever been at this point. I barely played Dragonflight and I started War Within but never made it out of the first zone. There is a heck of a lot of cool stuff coming with this expansion, and my friends who are still engaged with the game seem to be excited. I can’t necessarily say I will not play it at this point, but I am also not nearly as drawn to it as I am for example with the new Guild Wars 2 content drop on October 28th.

Wrapping this post up. I am hoping that I can maybe squeeze out one more challenge before I put Path of Exile to bed. If I can do that, I can walk way with a clear conscience and not look back.