Good Morning, Folks! I am still mostly playing Path of Exile II with brief flurries of Spirit Crossing. This weekend brought a bunch of changes in my build, and I will catalog them shortly. On the personal side, Sunday is generally the low point in my recovery, and from this point forward, everything should be slight improvements. All of my friends seem to want me to get magically better, but unfortunately, the recovery from chemo does not work that way. It is slight incremental improvements until I am actually feeling pretty great by the time I arrive at Chemo for the next round. It seems deeply unfortunate that it works out to be that way, where I feel my best right before I get poisoned again. I am hoping to have a burst of energy tomorrow because it is our primary election, and I definitely want to vote.
The biggest change of the weekend is that I finally hit the point where I could equip Raven’s Flock staff, letting me finally have a Righteous Fire style aura that deals chaos damage to monsters in range of me. The big problem with this change is that, unlike actual Righteous Fire, my minion character is not terribly tanky. The gameplay that makes it so fun is the fact that I can shield charge and frost blink my way around the map, killing everything in my wake. Minion RF, on the other hand, still requires me to maintain my minion army, and I still cannot tank that many hits. I had been using the infernalist ascendancy, which reserves half of my health to give me more spirit and energy shield, and it made me feel exceptionally squishy.
The other major change in my build is that I have swapped over to the Lich ascendancy to improve my survival. This does a lot of really important things. First, it solves my mana problem by making my mana regeneration based on 6% of my total health. It also gives me chaos pops when I kill cursed enemies, which I am admittedly bad at actually doing. It also gives me and my minions Unholy Might, which increases the chaos damage being dealt. None of this screws with my life or energy shield, which means I have full access to all of this, giving me around 3500 shield/life and 500 runic ward. I feel so much more tanky than I did previously, so all in all, this seems to be a massive improvement.
That said, I need to run some actual hard maps to see how well I do. Right now, I have been farming t8 maps just to move around the atlas and look for new areas to farm. I am looking for a Ritual Area, because that is really what I want to be farming, and I want some of the passive points for that mechanic. I’ve farmed a lot of Abyss and Breach, and the passives both improve them greatly. Right now, I seem to MOSTLY be finding expedition areas, aka coastal regions. I should also probably farm some more delirium to earn more passive points. That is the only problem that I have with this current endgame: I feel like I am drawn in too many different directions and never actually make complete progress in any of them.
I am not sure what I have done with the normal atlas passives, but I seem to have triggered this weird event happening constantly. Essentially, I will kill a boss and then a bajillion two affix rares drop, and they are all identified as well. This is honestly kind of cool because it allows my filters to sift through them, but it has made me bump up to strict so that I can only deal with the well-rolled items. I have been able to pick up a lot of these and throw them in my shop and sell them for around 20 exalts each. It is not going to make me rich, but it is some nice passive income. I am seeing more Divines drop from maps as well, which are nice. That said, I did spend down some of my war chest when I bought an upgraded version of the Raven staff.
I did manage to find a runic doodad that dropped 3 Divine Orbs, which was pretty nice. If I feel up to it, I might record a video of this build in progress, because I feel like it doesn’t really make sense until you see it in action. So far, I am enjoying myself, but it also doesn’t really scratch that RF itch. Pohx said as much, and I believed him at the time. I am hoping we get proper RF in this game, but I fear they might fuck it up as they did with Raging Spirits. The general design ethic of POE2 just is not my jam, and I will probably always prefer the first game. It is fun, and I can reach a point where I enjoy myself, but it feels like it is a massive battle to get there.
Good Morning Folks. The other day I talked about the build that I had been cooking up centered around the new unique staff called The Broken Elegy. When I wrote about it, I was still leveling, but having a great time doing so. Ultimately I went with Guardian, not necessarily because I thought it would be the best option, but more because it would be the most enjoyable leveling path. Essentially, once you get your Sentinel of Radiance online, aka Butter Boy, you can face roll the campaign from that point forward, and you can pick him up in the first lab. It ends up playing like a slightly delayed version of Righteous Fire, because you charge into a pack of mobs, convocate him into the middle, and his burning aura pretty much obliterates everything instantly. Technically, The Broken Elegy would probably have been better served by a Necromancer, and most definitely would be better served by the Servant of Arakaali. However, Guardian puts me in the right corner of the tree for Staff defenses, and also has its own benefits, so I rolled with it.
As is the tradition when I do something dumb… I record one of my dumb little videos. I am not doing anything terribly challenging, but essentially, as soon as I exited the campaign, I rolled straight into t16 maps. Technically, I ran a single T10 just to see how it was going, and after stomping all over that, I ripped the band-aid off. The biggest challenge that I think I am running into is simply having too many minions for any of them to be doing effective damage. You already run into this problem with just Raging Spirits sometimes, but in total, I have 43 minions… and that is before I take into account the Greater Skeletal Shrine belt that I am running. Look… I completely understand that this is a dumb idea, but I am having fun… and quite frankly, that is the most important part of any build. I have noticed that things die faster if I stop summoning Raging Spirits, but when it comes to clearing maps… having so many aggressive minions means that they just sort of spread out and lay waste to everything.
I’ve been using them to farm Legion, because I have been trying to get a bunch of the new honoured incubators so I can stockpile some of the imbuement coins. This is not really working out as I had hoped, but I am still enjoying running something like six legions per map. I have a ton of emblems, and those will ultimately come in handy when it comes to doing some of the league challenges. Maps take way too long right now with the Mirages for me to efficiently do any sort of targeted farm, because I cannot seem to bring myself to ignore mechanics. Effectively, I am sort of this worse version of SSF, where I play in trade… but still feel like I want to farm almost everything myself. I would be so much better off if I just focused on a single mechanic and then used it to make currency, which I then spent on other things. However, that does not bring me joy. Sure, I like being able to buy the items that I cannot be bothered to farm, but if I can farm it… I want to farm it.
Speaking of buying things… I am using name-brand corpses for the very first time. In the past, these have always been super freaking expensive, but for some reason this league, they are all cheap. Perfect Turtles are only around 20 Chaos right now, and in theory, I should probably buy a bunch of them to stockpile for when I eventually kill one of these and cannot get it back somehow. Perfect Forest Warriors were less than 10c, and I am running a 5c Perfect Hulking Miscreation because apparently Raging Spirits count as constructs, and it buffs those nicely. Running the Forest Warrior provides Onslaught, which is going to allow me to rework my tree a bit at some point… because I no longer need the node that gives my minions Onslaught. I might end up rolling a cluster jewel and switching over to that, because there is an entire upper branch of my tree layout that is progressively becoming less optimal.
Speaking of less than optimal, I did zero planning for this build and sort of just winged it as I went. Mostly, I typed “Minion|Life|Block” into the search bar and routed around as many of those nodes as I could make happen easily. At the suggestion of Kodra, I just now pathed down to pick up Divine Shield, and that seems to help out considerably and makes my 2000 energy shield a bit more useful. With the Guardian Turtle, I have around 9000 armor, and around 4500 without it, so I am still going to never run into problems with regenerating my entire energy shield if needed. I realistically probably have more than enough survival… but I have considered doing the terribly dumb thing of going six life masteries for the 10% life boost. I feel like I have plenty of damage for what I want to do with this build. I could stack more minion damage, and probably should… but I am not as motivated by “number goes up” as I am doing dumb things that I find enjoyable.
I have zero doubt that proper minion players will be turning their noses up at what I am doing, and that is okay. I do think at some point, someone terribly more clever than I am… will build around The Broken Elegy and make it really strong. It seems like a crazy item, especially if you could figure out a way to make the minions that it spawns a little more reliable. I believe they are inheriting everything that I am currently doing to buff my Raging Spirits, which should mean they are pretty potent already. I should probably actually drop the whole imbue thing that I am trying and just go with a 21/20 Raging Spirits gem instead. I am not that certain that Imbues have turned out to be as much power as I was hoping they would be. They are also really freaking painful to try and land something useful on, because I am building this graveyard of bricked gems that makes me more than a little sad inside. I know I will be taking a break this week to play the new Last Epoch season, but at some point, once that has run its cours,e I will be returning to grind out more challenges here and having fun doing so.
Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.
On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.
We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.
Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.
I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.
There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.
The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.
We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.
I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.
Good Morning Folks. I pretty much played Path of Exile II in full degenerate mode this weekend. I took Tuesday off, which combined with Labor Day Monday gave me a four day weekend. I had family stuff on Friday when the league launched, but a good chunk of Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday I played the game. I beat the campaign early yesterday morning, and spent the afternoon getting into the endgame. Probably the best feeling in this game though is logging in to see that some of your stuff had sold and currency is waiting for you on the vendor. The only problem with this is that prices seem to be all over the place. You can find similar items being sold for 1 Exalt, 50 Exalts, 50 Chaos, and 5 Divines… so it is a complete free for all. I am pricing most of the rares that I pick up with any resists on it for 2 Exalts each, and they are selling slowly. I’ve yet to really git any big paydays but I sold a really nice pair of boots for 20 Chaos, which is the single highest item I have moved.
Act IV was phenomenal, and might legitimately be my favorite single Act in any ARPG. There are a bunch of things going on with this. Firstly I’ve come to love Kingsmarch after having lived with it for over a year in Path of Exile 1, and I am pretty fond of the characters surrounding it. Secondly I am a huge fan of the Karui in general after having played so damned many Marauders and listening to those voice lines for years. The other really nice thing about this content is that you can legitimately take it on in any order. The islands increase slightly in level as you clear them, so there is no wrong way to take it on. There is one island that is like a Microcosm of Oriath, and I think for story reasons that is probably going to be the one that I save until last because it flows nicely into the final area. I am in love with the Halls of the Dead and I really wish this had made it into the game as an ascendancy option.
The preludes are also really cool, and honestly I sort of hope these exist as optional side content going forward. There are some really cool stories being told here and I like the whole Bioware style “building forces” aspect of them. Essentially they revolve around three allied groups and in order to guarantee their support for the final invasion of Oriath… you need to help them clear some of their problems at home. I would love to see this continue forward and whether or not you do it… impacts some of the content in Act V. Like depending on how many of the preludes you clear dictates how hard some of the content is when we finally get to that act. Mostly I just enjoyed the stories and content areas enough that I would love to see them continue forward in some form. Each is mostly just a single quest chain with a few optional side areas, but all of them are really cool and worth experiencing… and FAR better than the cruel difficulty stuff.
I’ve made a few purchases in order to buff my spirit to summon more minions and stabilize my resistances. I only have 20% chaos resistance, which is something I need to deal with at some point. However for early mapping it feels fine. I’ve seen exactly one Divine Orb so far in the campaign or maps and I spent it on a slightly better rattling sceptre. The one I was using had +2 minions on it and had level 11 Skeletal Minions… and this one at least takes me to +3 and 15. I wish we could level up the gems associated with weapons, because it is possible to find a really well rolled sceptre early on… but have the minions it provides lag massively behind the rest of your gems. My survival is not amazing but also I am not taking many deaths with 1600 health and 2000 energy shield… both of which need to increase significantly. Ultimately I need to focus at some point on trying to get my third and fourth ascendancy completed. I hate the two trial options, but what I did last time was Sanctum for the third, and Ultimatum for the fourth.
The biggest thing plaguing my build is that I have negative amounts of visual clarity. Essentially I am spreading fire all over the screen through the combination of my own flame wall, skeletal arsonists, and vaal guards throwing bombs everywhere. Essentially it is a complete crapshoot if I am going to be able to see any effects on the ground. When I hear the unblockable effect sound I just sort of instinctively roll away from wherever the boss is hoping that I will be able to dodge it, and then hit potion hoping I can survive it if I actually get hit. This is not exactly great, but the minions deal so much damage that most fights are over very quickly and I can skip a lot of the mechanics. The world is literally on fire… and I guess I am the “This is fine” dog meme.
I encountered my first rogue exile in a tier 2 waystone, and it was wildly juiced. It dropped three unique pieces of gear, and a unique gem that had the ability to unveil four mods on it at the well of souls. Thankfully you only have to wait for the animation to play one time if you are unveiling multiple affixes on the same item. I was able to craft an item that gives me ailment threshold from my energy shield as well as some additional percentage energy shield. It is not a massive item, but I will absolutely use it until I snipe a cheap minion damage gem. That is one thing that I noticed… it is super important to run searches in the web trade site if you are looking for something very specific. No one seems to know how to price anything, and you can occasionally pick up some cheap items if you are running that on your second monitor. Nothing like that exists in the in game client, and it is also missing a lot of the fuzzy search options that you have on the POE1 trade site which I hope they add into it later.
I still don’t really love the current state of the Path of Exile II endgame. Towers are absolutely not the way the endgame should be working, but it seems like they are stumped on what to do with it. Basically I like the concept of the Endless Delve style mapping, but there are still far too many bad layouts available and no way to avoid them. If they keep to this style of content, then they absolutely need to introduce a favored map system that causes may layouts that you prefer to spawn more frequently. This would obviously be only impacting things that are still in the fog of war, but if you engage with the system enough it could feel much better. You would still have to run shitty layouts from time to time, but just being able to make it more common to have the layouts that you actually enjoy would be a massive improvement. I also don’t really enjoy the way atlas passives are unlocked, and it does not feel anywhere near as satisfying as running specific maps to get points.
All of that said. I do feel like the general state of the game is a massive improvement over where it has been. Sure there are some straight up bricked builds right now, and the general state of balance is awful. However it does appear that other builds are rising to the top now. When I made the post two days ago the level 90+ balance was sitting at 73% of players all playing some version of a Bow Deadeye. As of this morning that percentage is down to 56% and I expect this will continue to fall as people find other interesting things to play. I am only level 73 currently so I am not counting in the list and I figure there are a lot of folks who are just leveling more slowly that will eventually erode at that percentage. There are a lot of builds that are working, but I think what harmed this league so much is that none of the guide creators had any prior knowledge of what the passive tree was going to look like, or some of the interactions between abilities. So everyone effectively had to go into this blind, and those who gambled on following the way of the Deadeye won that gamble.
I thought I would have bounced by now, but after taking a break yesterday afternoon I spent the evening chilling out on the couch and slowly plugging my way through maps. I am actually having fun, which in itself is a massive improvement over how I felt about the game in the Dawn of the Hunt league. At some point now that I have more resources, I want to recover my Warrior and turn it into something useful. I have no clue what I will go with, but I might just try another attempt at a slam build and see if stampede aftershock works now. Sprinting MASSIVELY improves mapping, and while there is still a lot of backtracking being able to run at hyperspeed through the dead areas of the map is a big win. I still really feel like sprint needs to be its own keybind rather than just holding dodge because you end up with weird situations where you sprint when you don’t mean to, or dodge when you don’t mean to. It is as fiddly as Guild Wars 2 when you are using the default keybinds of double tapping a direction to dodge. If they just allowed us to set a separate keybind it would improve things considerably.
The biggest things that I am hoping for though, are not things in Path of Exile II. I am looking forward to the trade system being implemented in POE1, and I am really hoping like we got a better version of Animate Guardian… that we get this version of the spectres system. I really like fiddling with spectres at the moment and the whole pokemon aspect of them. I am hoping we get a version of that in the original game, because that would immediately improve all of my frustrations with minion builds in general there. Basically my feelings about Path of Exile II have improved and I think it is actually going to be a good game after all.
