POE2

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.

Performative Transparency

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Good Morning Folks. It is a bit of a rough day for the Path of Exile community. More specifically it is a rough time for the folks who were Path of Exile 1 players looking forward to the 3.26 League. While there were not hard dates surrounding it, comments made by the development team around the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access indicated that we could expect the next league to land late January or Early February. We are now in that window and there has been a growing unrest among the player base hungry for information about the next league. The new trials for Path of Exile II are almost universally loathed by the community, causing an surge of Izaro memes. One of the biggest is a thread that has been doubling the number of images of Izaro every single day until we get news regarding the launch date of 3.26.

We can’t really work on POE1 3.26 until 0.2.0 has shipped. And being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks as well.

Jonathan Rogers

We got that news… and it was not good. It turns out that Path of Exile 3.26 is not coming anytime soon. Effectively the entire Path of Exile team has been pulled to help resolve the massive issues with Path of Exile II. I think a lot of my poor sentiment over this is being influenced right now by the fact that I am reading Play Nice, the book about the downfall of Blizzard by Jason Schreier. I just finished the passage last night where they talked about how World of Warcraft effectively consumed every available resource from every other team in the company. It certainly feels like we are seeing something similar playing out with Path of Exile II as it is consuming all available attention as the game that put Grinding Gear Games on the map suffers.

During the 2019 Exile Con presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson talked about how they were concerned about splitting the player base, and why they were planning on making Path of Exile II as a content expansion to the original game. Over the years of pandemic era silence this scope was changed, but effectively Chris Wilson’s prophecy has played out. There are a lot of players that did not really enjoy Path of Exile II, a largely group that I am part of that did not like it as much, and then a whole slew of players who were brand new to the franchise and have no clue what they are missing. The choice to focus on a game that is in Early Access, is a purely financial choice. Path of Exile II sold better than they expected and still has peak concurrency higher than some Path of Exile leagues. However for many it also feels like a Betrayal of the promises that Path of Exile was not going to get lost in the hype.

It is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date they are returning to it.

Chris Wilson

As a result… players on the subreddit are taking to using the company’s own words against them. It does in many ways feel like in the push to get Path of Exile II out the door, they have backpedaled on a number of the core tenants that they talked about in this widely viewed 2019 GDC talk. For the outsiders who were never part of this community prior to the launch of the early access, this probably seems odd. The thing that you need to understand is that we were effectively promised that the development of Path of Exile II would not cause the development of Path of Exile 1 to slip.

The release cadence that made Path of Exile the game that it is today is essentially built around the concept of four releases per year. Two would be larger releases, two would be smaller releases, but effectively every three to four months the player base had another league to engage with. The entire flow of Path of Exile centers around the league launch, and then also the fall off of the game after a month or two depending on how successful that league was. At the time of writing this the current league, Settlers of Kalguur launched on July 26th, 2024 and is 188 days old. Prior to this the longest league was Crucible, another league that was pushed out due to work on Path of Exile II at 130 days. They have not been able to hit the target cadence since 2021 with the Sentinel league, which I can only assume also has been impacted by the development of Path of Exile II.

Back in October, I gave Jonathan Rogers a good deal of credit for the communications and transparency when they had to push back the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access. The thing is… this video format of him sitting in the interview suite delivering a fireside chat, only really works so often. This is the fourth of these that I can personally remember, talking about unfortunate events and delivering a public address over whatever issue happens to be going on. What we need is better communication before the train derails. Even in this video he as much indicates that he knew that they were not going to hit the target for 3.26 before they left on holiday break. That is the point where you should have opened up to the community. Many of us were excited to have a new Path of Exile League on the near horizon, and as such it didn’t quite matter so much that the current state of Path of Exile II was pretty shitty. It was “early access” after all, and we had a better game to get excited for soon.

The other thing that really hurts is the loss of Bex, the long time community manager for Grinding Gear Games. She’s been gone since August of 2023, but has never really been replaced in the types of interactions that she had with the community, nor the regularity of communications. We’ve also had the inexplicable loss of Chris Wilson, the previous figurehead of Grinding Gear Games and to the best of my knowledge the last time we heard from him was at the release of the Necropolis league. I get that Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers have stepped up into their roles as leads of Path of Exile I and Path of Exile II respectively… but it still feels weird to not hear the iconic and much memed line anymore: “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games”.

So what do we know? We know that the teams are actively working on Path of Exile II 0.2.0 and we do not have a release date for that, but it will be a massive balance patch that comes with a league reset. Since no timing has been announced yet, I figure that is probably at least a month if not two out. We also know that they will not begin work in earnest on Path of Exile 3.26 until that has launched and that it has been given a few weeks of burn in. So I figure at this point the earliest we will see a new Path of Exile league is April potentially May. In April, the Settlers league will be over 260 days old at that point… so they need to at least throw us some sort of bone. Now is the time for them to dust off some major event like Endless Delve to give players something to focus on while they wait. The NecroSettlers Event was not terribly well received, and that league is effectively dead. I looked to see if I could find a pseudo-six-link helm yesterday and there was exactly one for sale… and it was 260 Divines.

In a perfect world, Eleventh Hour Games would use this opportunity and timeline slippage to slide in and launch Season 2 of Last Epoch. I do not think that is likely, but unfortunately that also means that 3.26 and Season 2 are likely going to be landing around the same time. If I have to choose between the two games I am going to be playing Last Epoch. I don’t want to have to make that choice, but I feel like I am way more excited about the endgame changes coming to the monolith, even though we don’t exactly know what they are. No matter what GGG rolls out with 3.26, it will not be anywhere near enough to make up for the year long Settlers league. This whole sequence has been a real hit to my faith in Grinding Gear Games as a whole. Again… like I said at the top I am reading Play Nice the book about the downfall of Blizzard, and I am honestly seeing some themes playing out here as well. I hope they can pull out of this, but they are essentially spending the goodwill of the player base right now.

Anyways… are you impacted by this announcement? Do you even care about Path of Exile 1? Drop me a line below.