POE2

The Worst Path of Exile League So Far

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Good Morning Folks. I did not do a blog post on Friday because I just was not feeling it. I hoped maybe the new Path of Exile II league that launched that afternoon/evening would pull me out of my funk. In truth it did… but it replaced sadness with rage. When the game launched I wrote at length about what I considered to be the problems with that game, and I remember Zizaran specifically stating in one of his videos at the launch of the game that what we were playing, was the worst state the game would ever be in. At the time it helped me put some of my own feelings into perspective and I thought sure… it can only go up from here. I chose a more meta build and then honestly had quite a bit of fun getting through maps and farming quite a bit in the endgame. I only got to level 94 on my Minion Infernalist, but that seemed reasonable enough and mostly I just got bored of the very limited state of the end game.

I thought the first release of the game needed some work. Essentially there were four builds that were viable, and I expected those to eat the nerf bat, but hopefully others would be buffed up to reach a point where we had a dozen or so viable builds instead. This is something that they absolutely know how to do… because builds like Penance Brand of Dissipation have eaten massive nerfs… but still remained completely viable choices if someone just happened to enjoy that particular play style. Hell my own love of Righteous Fire and the number of drastic changes in the way it is built over just the few years I Have been playing… is proof positive that balance changes in Path of Exile 1 have mostly been about pruning the outliers. In theory if we had more viable builds and more endgame variety… this league could have been a banger or at least something that I would enjoy to tide me over until Last Epoch.

The day before the patch was set to launch we got a post outlining the changes… and it was nothing but wall to wall nerfs. So much so that it did not just bring builds in line… but absolutely decimated almost every even vaguely halfway viable build from the first league. Warrior was probably the least impacted, but a lot of the things that made them powerful boss hunters were destroyed. Hammer of the Gods now requires you to build up a resource rather than just having a cool down. So we thought it was bad, and admittedly we were warned by Jonathan that it was going to involve a lot of nerfs. What we were not prepared for… was this was only the tip of the iceberg. The nerfs went so much deeper, to the point of builds that seemed viable from these patch notes were themselves untenable when the game actually released.

Were this just a me thing… it would be one thing. However every streamer has effectively come out and talked about how this is the worst update they have ever played. Wudijo seems to be enjoying himself, but he is so damned good-natured that he could not even muster venom over the worst Diablo IV patches, so that checks out. The core POE streamers are all various shades of miserable. Steelmage is generally a super chill dude, but in an impromptu podcast with Zizaran he talked about how generally miserable he has been. Empyrean has just bailed on the league entirely, and others appear to simply be playing because it is financially beneficial for them given that there are twitch drops active. I watched a friend of mine yesterday who seemed to be in good spirits… but watched her and her partner spend 30 minutes dying over and over to the Dreadnought in act II.

I am currently playing what is apparently the strongest and most meta build out there… a generic bone shatter warrior that I have ascended into Smith of Kitava. My damage output is reasonable, but it feels like I am wearing tissue paper for gear… when I have just shy of 1000 health, 1500 armor, and capped elemental resistances at 75/75/75 at level 45. I get interrupted constantly when trying to attack and the only thing that seems to feel halfway decent is Leap Slam to Bone Shatter… with Perfect Strike for harder mobs. However I effectively have to wait until I have stunned something to actually get one of the Perfect Strikes off successfully because otherwise I keep getting stunned out of the channel. White mobs in Path of Exile II, feel like bosses in Path of Exile I in the amount of damage that they are dealing.

There have been numerous points where I have rage quit out over the weekend. The first was dying over and over to these stupid chests in Act 1 at level 5. Why in the hell these things are so murdery at such a low level is beyond me. I suffered through Act 1 on Friday and took out Count Geonor and started on Act 2 before getting frustrated and playing some Path of Exile 1 instead. On Saturday morning I started off with succeeding at the Trial of the Sehkemas and ascending and then chipping away at Act 2, eventually beating it before the end of the night. Once again I had to go play something else because Act 3 was annoying me. Doing anything in the game just feels cumbersome. It isn’t so much that it is challenging, because that denotes it is something that learning from mistakes would improve. Instead it just feels like I am being bludgeoned by a thousand little cuts, each one sapping more joy from me.

Last night’s rage quit moment was Viper Napuatzi, a boss I have never had trouble with in any previous incarnation of this game. Essentially I was getting ripped to shreds by the poison, and my perfect strikes were doing nothing. I seemed like I was able to get her down to around half health and then there health bar would stall out and never dip any lower. I tried this fight a half dozen times before logging out and playing some Last Epoch. I had to do something that felt good for awhile to dull the annoyance and frustration of Path of Exile II. At this point you are probably asking yourself.. “Bel why the fuck are you still playing?”, and in truth I do not have a good answer for you. I would say I am doing it for the content… but that would be a lie. I am doing it because I hate the concept that this fucking game ground me down into the ground, when even as much as I did not enjoy it at times previously… I still pushed through it and figured out a way to have fun. I keep thinking that if I beat my head against this wall hard enough, I will eventually grow numb to the rage.

This morning before sitting down to write this I managed to complete the Trial of Chaos and got my second set of ascendancy points. So much about this stupid Trial seems to be getting a good batch of RNG and getting one option out of three that does not completely fuck over your build. More than that for my build, it also requires that I do not get the Chimera as the final boss… because that fight ends up being a comedy of errors as you have to traverse this gigantic fucking map with the hope of it sticking around long enough in one location to actually get a hit off before it flies off again. Now I need to spend a lot of time farming materials so that I can outfit a reasonable white chest-piece… socket it, get it to 20% quality, and then attempt to corrupt it for a third socket so I can assign those ascendancy points.

This morning they released a “What We’re Working On” post… but honestly I think I am too bitter to read it at this point. To me it just reads like them attempting to justify the decisions that they made which have led us to this point. There have been enough negative Steam reviews to have flipped the game into mixed rating… with 66% of recent reviews being negative. As frustrating as the campaign has been… I am now seeing statements from streamers that the endgame is even worse. Kripparian talks about running a six mod rare map with stacked rarity on gear and on the keystone… and not seeing a single rare item drop in the entire map. It has felt like both experience gain and loot has been nerfed in the campaign, and I have never before felt like I needed to go farm previous areas just to get levels, but I have been actively doing that in this play through. Unless something significant changes during the course of this league, it will probably be the last that I play for Path of Exile II. There are just better ARPGs out there and I am frankly having more fun still in the Legacy of Phrecia temporary event than this mess.

Right now I am giving it until the start of Act IV before I truly give up. That is of course if I can figure out a way to beat Viper in Act III and move on to Doryani. If not… or if the game does not improve in the cruel difficulties like it did previously… I guess I will just be playing around in Phrecia until Last Epoch drops on the 14th. My level 100 Righteous Fire Scavenger has reached a point where I am pretty easily farm T17 maps and was able to faceroll my way through Sirius over the weekend. It seems like a lot of players are back in Phrecia because the sheer volume of trades that I was getting pinged about was extreme. Mostly I chuck every jewel I get into a 20c tab and it is effectively a constant ping of players wanting this gem or that. Legacy of Phrecia legitimately has the most diversity of builds that I have ever seen in a Path of Exile league. Unironically this temp event that they just threw together… is maybe one of the best leagues they have ever created.

Anyways… did you try and play Path of Exile II this weekend? What were your thoughts? Am I completely off base in my rage and it seems fine to you? Drop me a line below.

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.

Last Epoch Season 2 Delayed

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday we got a bit of news from Eleventh Hour Games that they would be delaying the launch of Last Epoch Season 2 from April 2nd to April 17th. This is to create some distance between their launch date and that of Path of Exile 2 and its first league on the 4th. This whole situation is frustrating because multiple sources have stated that Eleventh Hour Games was in communication with Grinding Gear Games regarding their choice of April 2nd making it an extreme dick move to schedule their own start two days later. I entirely feel like GGG is in the wrong here… but there also may be some external forces at work that we do not know about.

Whatever the case this is probably the right decision for Eleventh Hour Games. As stated in a Zizaran video talking about this situation, it is rare that people go back to a game after the launch… so that would likely mean folks would play Last Epoch for a day or two… if they even gave it a shot at all, and then would flip to Path of Exile II and never look back. I am disappointed mostly because right now I care far more about Last Epoch than I do Path of Exile II. I do not think that there is going to be enough in the upcoming patch to really shift the trajectory of POE2 enough for me to truly enjoy it more than the first game. I might be shocked on the 27th when they announce all of the content, but in truth I mostly just want to get my hands on the redesigned endgame for Last Epoch.

In the meantime I am still playing quite a bit of the Legacy of Phrecia event. In theory I should hit level 99 tonight and I am starting to pick back up and work on some of the challenges that I never completed from Settlers of Kalguur. I’m cycling between Delve and mapping and still only have two of the four voidstones unlocked. I should probably work on that, but I hate the process of grinding for the fragments required to attempt Maven and Uber Elder. The whole bossing system in Path of Exile feels bad to me. I feel like there should be quest support for all four voidstones like there are the first two so that you can knock these out in a relatively straightforward fashion. At some point I should probably try out a T17 again to see if I can complete that, but my build is not exactly great at bossing. Generally speaking I just do not enjoy that side of the game and the whole process of getting access to the fights.

I have burned through a good chunk of my reserves of gold and dust in order to start up a bunch of mappers. One of the league challenges from Settlers that I never knocked out was running 200 t14 or better maps at 100% success rate with mappers, and I figured I might as well start chipping away at that since I am still playing. If I can push to level 100 and complete the rest of those maps that will knock out one more of the challenges and potentially give me a bigger totem pole for my hideout. In truth Path of Exile is just a comfortable activity for me to spend chill evenings listening to an audiobook, and has kind of become my default gaming activity. I hate that among the AggroChat folks, I am the only one who seems to have really reached that point with the game.

I am also still pushing forward with Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon because I hate having a “did not complete” in my list. I swapped over to the Soundbooth Theater version of the audiobook and it is infinitely better than the one I was listening to earlier. There is a significant difference between being read a book out loud, and having someone act out a book… and at this point I have become spoiled by the later. This is a brutal story… in content… and in just how much graphic detail is put into it. I am not sure I would ever suggest this to someone else, but it has enough of a hook into me that I am going to see it to its conclusion. Effectively this is Hostel style torture porn, and my kink does not run in that direction.

The Idol Based Atlas

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Good Morning Folks. As of this afternoon we will have had access to the Legacy of Phrecia event for a week. At this point I am level 94 and have mostly reached a point of stability with my build. Sure I would like to craft a new sceptre and am on the look out for a few specific jewels, but all in all Scavenger RF works pretty well. However I am not going to talk about any of that this morning, and am instead going to share my thoughts about the new Idol Based Atlas system. This entire event was touted as ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, and this idol concept was originally something that was abandoned in favor of the current Atlas tree system… which admittedly is damned near perfection. The first few days I was pretty hype for the idols, but now I have reached a point where I absolutely see the limitations and understand why this did not see the light of day.

The good about this system though, is that early maps feel amazing. You get a large number of Idols which allows you to cobble together something that mostly works. During White and Yellow progression I was essentially getting Delirium, Harvest, Niko, Essences, and Strongboxes every map… and Ritual, Expedition, and Betrayal pretty freaking often. This is way more content than you would normally have access to during early maps when you don’t really have that many Atlas points to spend. This makes the early game feel amazing… but you eventually reach a point where it starts to taper off.

By the time you are in yellow or red maps, you have quite a few points to spend on the tree which means that you have pretty much every node available for at least one league mechanic, making that single mechanic extremely juicy. In truth I tend to build trees that synergize with different abilities that are all on the same side of the tree. For example I might have a Ritual, Einhar, and Beyond tree as they all exist within a few nodes of each other so that by the time you near the end of your Atlas you have 100% chance for all of those mechanics and have a bunch of nodes that buff them so that they produce better stuff. I tend to be an “Alch and Go Andy” when it comes to mapping strategies, and I juice to extreme levels with the most expensive scarabs and most carefully rolled maps. I drop a map in the atlas, hit go, and then run with whatever content the device gives me.

For the heaviest juicers however… the Idol system is probably much better. For example Life Without Pants is a YouTuber that I enjoy watching content from, and he talks a bit about his strategy that centers around Harbingers. Essentially through the use of the Idols he can force something like six harbingers on a single map, always convert them to harbinger bosses, cause them to drop whole currency instead of shards, and then cause their cool down to be much shorter so you can complete each individual harbinger encounter much faster. Similarly Fubgun is running a strategy where he forces 36 Rogue Exiles onto his map and then uses Scarabs to juice that up considerably so that he can produce Affliction league levels of drops when you combine that with Ritual.

The problem that I have with the Idol system however is that it essentially forces you to go “all in” on a single strategy. Either you can cobble together something like I am running where it ups the chances of a bunch of different league mechanics to spawn, or you carefully craft a single mechanic and then juice it to levels that have never been possible before. The existing Atlas Tree lets you do a handful of of complementary mechanics really well, and I think makes the entire experience feel a bit better as a result. As someone who cannot bring themselves to skip mechanics when they appear on the map… it feels bad to do a bunch of mechanics with zero investment in them. Nodes that I thought might be good on their own like Crop Rotation, actually feel awful when you don’t have the rest of the points in the tree to buff it.

I think part of what makes the Idol system feel extremely bad is the fact that you are almost required to deal with massive amounts of very small specific trades in order to get an individual strategy working. Everything I am running I have cobbled together from the dregs of my bank. If you were wanting to run a hyper specific strategy though, you would need to trade for a bunch of specific rolls on idols… and then deal with the frustration of not getting answers from most of the traders because 1 Chaos trades are not worth stopping mapping for. If you want to bump things up to the next level, you are also probably going to be spending time deleting idols through the recombinator as you try and get a single item with four usable stats on it. This is graveyard crafting levels of tedium… which is again why I am mostly just yoloing my way through the system and trying to make something that feels halfway decent. This is yet another league that proves Path of Exile needs a fucking auction house already.

As glad as I am that the Idol system was left on the cutting room floor and we have our beloved Atlas tree instead… I have to admit that given the choice I would take this immediately over the systems in Path of Exile II. Everything about the Atlas tree in that game is awful, and it is entirely too focused on bossing. Bossing is just a subset of the Path of Exile 1 endgame, and most people… are not really focusing on it. Idols would go a long way towards patching the problems with that game’s system and forcing specific mechanics onto every map instead of the poorly designed precursor tablet system. Conceptually I like the exploration system because I enjoy it in Delve, but it just does not really work as a replacement for mapping. Part of the payoff of leveling and fully unlocking your atlas tree… is the agency to focus on only the mechanics that you want to focus on. You never really reach any of that payoff or any of that agency in Path of Exile II… which feels like the team missed that core tenet of the first game.

Phrecia has been a really interesting experimental league, and it was announced today that it is being extended by a month. I really like chaos pop righteous fire, and I would absolutely play something like this again in the future. Which admittedly makes me wonder what it would be like to play one of the witch based righteous fire builds at some point in the future. I do think that a lot of the ideas behind the Idol system in this league event could benefit Path of Exile II. Right now the endgame does not really work and feels way too far removed from the near perfect loop of game play that exists within Path of Exile’s endgame. All of POE’s problems center around on-boarding the player and gear acquisition for non-traders and non-crafters but the virtuous loop of the endgame was not something that should have been abandoned. Path of Exile II feels a lot like Destiny 2 did at launch… where it feels like they forgot all of the lessons that the previous game had learned. I am onboard for trying out quirky ideas in event leagues until they figure out how to make Path of Exile II feel a bit better though.