talisman

Bare Also 4 Fite

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In 2005 the Elder Sage Druid Alamo taught us that “CAT DURID IS 4 FITE!” a meme preserved by our dear friend TAGN. The thing is Path of Exile II added the druids, but they did not add a cat form. As a result… “Bare Also 4 Fite”. In truth when it came to World of Warcraft druids, I almost always played bear form for the defensive benefits, and spent most of my time leveling as bear so I am already used to fighting in that form. Alamo would be saddened by my disregard for their sage advice. On Friday the latest patch dropped for Path of Exile II adding 0.4.0 and the Last of the Druids content update, and the Fate of the Vaal league. I was pretty amped for this content drop because the footage that came out after the announcement from ZiggyD looked amazing. Grinding Gear Games has been trying super hard to make us interested in combo gameplay, but up until this point it felt very forced… and not like said combos were really that beneficial.

Druid changes that, and in truth had I been able to play this class from the very start I think I would have been able to grok their design goals. Effectively most of the gameplay for Bear Druid is about mauling your targets until runes light up on the back of your character telling you that your next slam is empowered, and then hitting Furious Slam to devastating impact. However there are mechanical benefits to doing this one two step because Bears effectively have two states, standing on two legs, and down on all four. Furious Slam has the text that adds a 0.4 second delay if you are not already standing. Maul on the other hand gives you a really fast way of standing, and thereby bypassing the built in delay of furious slam as your character stands up. So you are mauling not only to build up the empowerment but also because you can literally cast it faster than the delay built into the slam. This synergy between attacks feels really good, and then throwing in pounce as a movement ability that also primes the ground with fissures for you to exploit with your slam, even feels better.

Collectively in practice it means you are throwing out all sorts of nonsense onto the ground and then slamming on top of it to make big explosions, and the gameplay feels amazing. You can finish off trash mobs with maul without much issue, but it still feels amazing to do a big slam that causes half the screen to explode and also ignite things in the process. This is only going to feel even better as I lean more heavily into area of effect and damage numbers, and hopefully at some point switch to demon form via the Fury of the King Talisman. Really the ease of switching between Bear and Werewolf forms and the abilty to add in pounce as a gap closer as you move around the battlefield is really great. I find myself sprinting constantly as well, because the recent changes to how that mechanic works with stuns, means that I can pretty safely get into pounce range before triggering a heavy stun. The way that bear feels almost makes me want to try playing it with a controller.

The secret sauce of the animal forms though is making sure you are always using the highest damage Talisman that you can get. This is a new two handed weapon type and essentially you want to get one with as much physical damage as you can find on it. Elemental damage is nice, and you are going to get some baked on elemental conversion into your attacks, but like playing a Warrior Slam build, you want as much phys as you can get baseline to bump up your numbers. Essentially I saved all of my gold so that each time I moved into a new level bracket I could gamble for a base to attempt to craft on. I also got super lucky in getting a few rather tasty rare drops like the one above. What also helps massively is that the Vaal temple league mechanic gives you access to Betrayal style crafting benches that are just effectively free Regals and free Exalts. So you can in theory drag a few decent bases in with you when you start a temple and then hopefully exit with a new crafted weapon.

I went back and forth as to what I would start as, and ultimately landed on trying to yolo my way through a Druid and ultimately choose the Shaman ascendancy. I think in theory you can probably build a better Titan or Smith of Kitava that is a bear, but the pathing is a bit more contorted to get there. The area you start as a Druid has a bunch of really good early nodes that help progress you through Act 1 and 2 without much issue. This is quite possibly the MOST melee character, and I would have thought that would make Trial of the Sekemas a pain in the ass, but honestly I steamrolled through it. Similarly when I got access to Trial of Chaos I steamrolled that as well. At some point I am going to need to try for a third ascendancy, but for the moment I have chosen Reactive Growth and Avatar of Evolution which helps a bit when it comes to converting physical damage to elemental damage, and also giving me a bit of a buffer against elemental damage in general. For my third ascendancy point I will probably pick up Wisdom of the Magi and its defensive node, and then if I can do a fourth ascdendancy decide of I want to respec and go into Furious Wellspring or if I just pick up Turning of the Seasons instead.

The thing about Druid is that we did not have the passive tree ahead of the launch of the game. This means that NO ONE had any guides available ahead of time, and honestly if they did… they were completely suspect due to not really having any proper information. It was seemingly reasonable to maybe map out a Titan or Smith start with the class, but Druid was a total crapshoot. Because of this I utilized a wonderful functionality within POE.Ninja that shows a heat map of what talent tree choices most of the player base was choosing, and as such effectively crowd sourced my build. How this works is that you essentially choose the primary skill that you are interested in using, and in this case you can either choose Maul the default bear attack or Furious Slam. This then will show you a lit up tree featuring every build that is currently on the ladder and the warmer the color the more often something is chosen. For example almost EVERYONE is pathing down to pick up Primal Rage, regardless if you are starting Druid or Warrior as your base class.

As a result you can see the tree that sort of evolved out of the wisdom of the crowd. One of the primary deviations that I made from the norm is that I picked up Prism Guard and the nodes surrounding it, because I plan on going heavily into armor investment in the final version of my build. Damage shifting is one of the most powerful abilities in Path of Exile 1, and while that exists to a lesser extent in Path of Exile 2… there is the ability to make armor apply to elemental damage amd for the cost of 4 nodes you can get a baseline of 60% of your armor is applying to elemental damage, which you can then increase by making sure you get that stat on some of your beefier armor items like the chestpiece. Will this make me super tanky? I have no clue… because I have not played a melee character since this stat package was introduced. I am hoping it will however and if you look at Hardcore more folks are picking up that node there in the heat map.

I’m having a lot of fun with the Bear though and am now working my way through the second of the three interlude missions, and just about to wrap that up. The real proof of how well the build works is going to come when I start mapping. I think it is going to feel pretty solid though, because the higher the density the more the explosions seem to really work out. I need to probably spend some time fine tuning my support gems because I am not sure anything I am using is actually optimal. That again is another useful thing about POE.Ninja is because you can look at a bunch of the highest performing builds and see what they are using for abilities. This really is how I make characters these days, is I end up looking at a lot of what other players are doing with the abilities that I want to use in my build, and then sort of make decisions based on that data. That is ultimately how I have ended up with some of my favorite custom characters like my FreezyBoom nonsense, which is absolutely not on meta in the least.

So far I am enjoying this league this most I have ever enjoyed any Path of Exile II league, and have shifted from begrudgingly playing the game… to genuinely having a blast. The other aspect of the druid that I like a lot is all of the unique dialog options that happen while you are playing through the campaign. There is even an interlude that happens when you release the spirit of his dead wife during one of the sequences in the game. Genuinely really find this character enjoyable to play, because his reactions are not dissimilar to how I would react to some of these events. At this point Path of Exile II might legitimately have the best campaign from any ARPG to date. I really hope that they find a way to make the interludes stick around in some form of another because I find them really enjoyable as well. I like the whole concept of revisiting the first three acts to help with with further issues as you are somewhat building an army to fight the beast.

Since I started this blog post with one meme, I will end it with another one. I hightly suggest you check out the Druid review from Josh Strife Hayes. It is pure nonsense.

Affliction League Teaser

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Morning Folks! Yesterday we got the name reveal, teaser trailer, full reveal date, and league start information for the next Path of Exile league. It is going to be called Affliction and seems to have some sort of a curse-based theme. This morning I am going to kick my navel-gazing into high gear and spout some speculative nonsense as I overanalyze way too few frames of animation. The concrete details that we have so far are that on the 30th of November, we will be getting the full reveal stream that will go over all of the features of this league. Then on December 8th, the league will start for PC players and for console folks on the 13th. If you want to watch the full teaser trailer before I obsess over possibly made-up details… you can check out the link here.

First of all… I have screwed with the images a bit to lighten them but unfortunately, the sheer amount of darkness somewhat crushes the detail. I’ve seen folks stating that they think this is the delve, but I can’t really follow that thread. Sure everything is bluish-black like you see while delving, but it also very clearly seems to be in a forest at night, and the delve forest biomes look totally different than this. You also don’t really see the swirling shadows that you normally do at the far corners of Delve.

Next, we are going to skip to a scene a bit later in the video when the supplicant seems to be devolving into a swarm of insects. These are Wetas, and I only know this because the Weta is already in the game as a pet… and is a New Zealand thing. It is essentially a giant nocturnal insect… and if you want some nightmare fuel take a gander at this image. I looked so you don’t have to. To me at least that very clearly looks like a Ritual totem from the Ritual League mechanic. This makes me think that the Affliction League is somehow tied to Ritual either as the existing mechanic or something that reworks, expands, and ultimately replaces Ritual. Since we just participated in the Blast from the Past League which featured Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra… I’ve wondered if the insect swarm could work similarly to how Sentinels buff minions around you and also increase the loot chances.

This isn’t a character that I recognize, but they do sorta remind me of the way Einhar is dressed. Einhar is an Ezomyte and his people worship beast gods known as the first ones. It makes me wonder if this could be some sort of Ezomyte shaman that we are seeing in front of this Ritual totem. Another possibility that I have wondered about is if this league will feature updates and changes to the way that Talismans work, as right now they are mostly a quirk of the past and not something that players really purposefully seek out. In Crucible we saw GGG reworking Breach and Abyss and I feel like that is something that they are going to keep doing. So I could see that this league is tied to a revamp of Ritual and maybe a revamp of Talismans and maybe some skill changes focused on the way that curses work and are applied in the game. Of course, this is all me grasping at straws and could be nothing.

I would love to see the Sentinel League mechanic return in some form… and I feel like the Blast from the Past event had to be purposeful in some way. I don’t even really care that much about the recombinators, but I have loved being able to pop sentinels to get juicy bursts of loot. Lake of Kalandra being revisited has made me realize that that mechanic while cool… really needs to be reworked completely before it would feel good. The wildly variable difficulty level of the maps just feels bad… and I think I would rather see something along the lines of how the nodes in Expedition work so that each tile you place gives you boon/debuff to everything in the finally crafted map. I think it would be also cool to see some sort of return of the Crucible mechanic. I thought skill trees on items made for some really interesting build possibilities. I think everyone would love to see Tattoos from this league go Standard as well, but I feel similar to Kalandra… the actual Trial of the Ancestors mechanic needs some work. There is just too rapid of a transition from cakewalk to impossible without cheating by abusing crowd control mechanics.

Anyways! Happy Friday! Happy almost Thanksgiving week! What would you like to see in the upcoming Affliction League in Path of Exile? Drop me a line below.

Beatstick Acquired

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Ice Ice Baby

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We are still functionally iced in, at least in the way that everything outside is coated in a thick layer of ice… including both vehicles.  This has been the weirdest storm however as it has clung to everything but the concrete.  Additionally the temperatures have remained at just the right place to keep the ice from melting.  This means for the most part the roads are completely fine.  It is just lack of caring that has kept us in the house.  By the manifest restlessness upstairs from my wife, I have a feeling this is coming to an end today.  We honestly need to get out and about to pick up the last few gifts in order to be done for the holidays.

Right now on twitter, I have the name “Belgrinch Stole Xmas” and to some extent it is not just clever use of my existing naming convention.  I tend to be a big of a humbug when it comes to the holidays.  Over the years bad things seem to fall near the holidays, and when you combine that with the fact that Christmas as an adult is a massive let down if you don’t have children.  My wife and I have not put up a tree in over a decade.  For children, Christmas still is a magical time but for me I just see the hassle of having to run between four households and shop for a bunch of people you literally only see once a year.  I wish so much we could make Christmas be Thanksgiving 2.0.

Thanksgiving is pretty much my ideal holiday.  People get together to share a meal together, and there is no expectations past that.  You just have some good food, good conversation and then everyone goes on their merry ways.  Instead we have an awkward exchange of time as everyone tries to avoid the inevitable gift exchanges.  This year because of my aunt’s dialysis the timing is all messed up.  Normally we do all of this on Christmas eve, but instead this year everything is pretty tentative.  We considered going up tomorrow so we could just spend time with the family members we want to without the rest of the three ring circus.  For me it is about spending time with my parents and my grandmother…  past that it just gets progressively more and more awkward.  Namely I am trying to avoid being around my bigoted uncles as they seriously destroy what little inner peace I have… and make me feel absolutely dirty for being around them.

Beatstick Acquired

I have chronicled the hunt for one-handed weapons over the last few weeks.  My guildies and I have been running daily Heroic Scenarios for a shot at the 516 weapons that can drop there.  Additionally I have been working my way through both Throne of Thunder and Siege of Orgrimmar.  Yesterday I spent most of the day queued for the various ToT dungeons that have a chance of dropping a weapon.  Turns out the in game loot advisor thingy doesn’t list everything.  It seems there is a series of weapons that can drop off every single boss in the instance, and after killing Jinrohk yesterday I managed to get one of them.  The mace pictured above is Zeeg’s Ancient Kegsmasher and comes from that list of alternative drops.  While not ideal, I wish it was a 2.6 speed weapon and not the awkward 2.4 speed… but it is better than what I had and I am extremely happy to get it.

Additionally I managed to get through the Underhold section of Siege of Orgrimmar which unlocks The Downfall and a shot at another one-hander off of the Klaxxi council event.  I am honestly not sure what it is about Underhold, but every single group I would get into would spontaneously disintegrate shortly after finishing Malkorok.  There always seems to be either a mass exodus immediately after finishing the boss, or after failing that first time to Spoils of Pandaria.  Last night… fairly late… I actually managed to find a group that oneshot every single encounter there… including captain lunchmeats himself… Thok.  I won’t lie, I am not sure if I will actually ever queue for Underhold again unless a guild member needs it for something.  The queue is around an hour generally, and with the lacklustre success rate it seems like a bundle of frustration I can simply live without.

Christmas Gifts Abound

So I am bad at this… let me start out by saying that up front.  My intent in this section is not to be “look what soandso go me, neener neener” so you are going to see some thank yous, without me actually listing who they are directed to.  I figure the people read my blog and they will know it is heart felt and directed at them.  First up someone very awesome got me Talisman Prologue from my steam list.  This is a game that I have thought about picking up so many times in the past but never pulled the trigger.  I love the Talisman board game, and even the crappy american version that Milton Bradley released called Hero’s Quest.  Despite how much frustration I have built up over the years… I am still a massive fanboy for Games Workshop and Talisman seems to be one of their purest gaming experiences.  Really looking forward to seeing how well the digital version translates.

I am a massive sucker for the sandboxy shooter experience.  Everything I have heard from friends and read has said that Farcry 3 really takes this whole concept up a notch.  As a result this is one of those titles I have almost bought half a dozen times.  But thanks to another amazing friend the decision was made for me.  Again I plan on devoting some of my two weeks of downtime to exploring this game.  Quite honestly… I have stuff on my steam wishlist as more of a reminder to myself, and because steam emails you when one of those titles goes on sale.  I never in a million years expected anyone to buy me something off of it.  Thank you guys very much, it made me feel loved.

Last but definitely not least…  the League of Legends Mystery Gift madness is back in full swing again.  For those of you who are not indoctrinated, you can send a friend a random skin for one of the champions they have.  The price is 450 RP but you are guaranteed to get a skin that is of higher value, but it will be assigned completely at random.  The coolest part about it is there is a chance of getting skins that have long been retired or for whatever reason removed from the game.  One of the skins I have always wanted but never picked up is Chosen Master Yi.  Who doesn’t want to play as a Jedi Knight?  Huge thanks to another good friend for sending me a mystery box and giving me this awesome skin.