Video Games

Too Many Greebles

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I’ve been really impressed with my Minions build so far. At the moment, I seem to be able to just do some big chill mapping, as I am now making my way into yellow maps. Essentially, I just walk around casing flame wall, which then summons my raging spirits, while my snipers and vaal guards decimate anything that comes near. If you can solve the survival of a build like this, it rapidly becomes one of the most chill ways to do content. What surprises me is that it is reasonably good at both clearing maps and doing bosses, which I guess makes sense given that I spent so much time playing my minions build in the Mirage league. Essentially, once I solved resistances, everything else has seemingly been gravy. I would love more Life and Energy Shield, so once I finish up picking up minion nodes, I will probably try to buff those things a bit.

I think yesterday I figured out why I don’t enjoy mapping in POE2 as much as I do in POE1. It is that the maps themselves are not as well-designed as the maps in POE1. In order to make prettier maps, they have littered them with all manner of ground clutter that my character just ends up getting caught on. So it feels like I have to pay way more attention to pathing than I ever did in POE1. Sure, there are some tight corridor maps in the original game, but it feels like there are way more wide-open maps as well. Nothing really in POE2 is completely wide open, and it is much harder to do boss rushing strategies since the boss locations vary more than they did in POE1. I think they have tried to improve the mapping significantly, but it still feels like there are way too many choke points in maps, and too many greebles to get caught on.

Right now, I am working towards unlocking both of these nodes, which, in theory, will allow me to progress the central area. Everything in this area requires a t6 or higher map, so it is Yellow or better. It makes me think that once we open the other gates, it will be Red or better maps. What I dig the most about this version of the endgame is that it seems like every single map that I run in this area is giving me points to spend on the Atlas passives. The negative, however, is that there does not appear to be a way to respec your passives. I have no clue how many total passives that I get, but so far it seems like every single map run is giving me incremental progress, so it FINALLY feels as beneficial as mapping in POE1. That was another problem that I had with the old endgame: it required too much progress to get any points, and the points themselves did not feel anywhere near as rewarding as the POE1 Atlas.

I’ve actually rolled an alt as well because I want to play with the nonsense that appears to be the Spiritwalker. I’ve never played a Huntress before, so I am leveling it with a standard crossbow setup with the permafrost bolts, explosive grenade, and herald of ice. So far, it is pretty straightforward, and I am essentially following this pattern until I swap to Spiritwalker and can go tame my beast. I might swap things up earlier, though, when I actually get access to the game beast ability around 22. At that point, I would swap over to a minions hybrid and respec my tree to pick up copious companion nodes. I am not entirely certain I can do the specialization dungeon with crossbows, mostly because I have never tried it. I am doing well enough against both map clear and bosses, so maybe it won’t be too terribly hard. I still have to get through Geonor before finishing up Act 1, so that will be a determining factor for how long I stay with crossbows.

All in all, though, I am enjoying my minions build. The visual clarity is a complete mess, so thankfully, the minions mostly take care of everything. I am setting everything on fire, and then my vaal guards are making everything explode… so I can never actually see anything on the ground. That is the one thing that worries me as I continue leveling, because I will have to watch out for more ground effects. If I notice something shredding my energy shield, I usually try to move out to somewhere clear just in case I am standing in “the bad”. I am curious if any of you are also playing this league, and what your thoughts are. Drop me a line below.

Ancients Did Return

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Good Morning, Folks. I did not blog yesterday because the entire day was a hot mess. I did not sleep Monday night due to severe nausea, and then spent Tuesday mostly attempting to make up for that fact with several naps. Chemo is some bullshit, do not recommend. I had every intention of blogging yesterday, but it did not happen, so you are getting a mishmash of what I would have said yesterday, with some additional focus from what little I played yesterday. To stop beating around the bush, last Friday was the launch of the 0.5.0 Patch for Path of Exile II, signalling the start of the Runes of Aldurr league and the Return of the Ancients content update. I started a pure Minions character like I said I was going to, and honestly… it was a bit of a mistake. In theory, you probably should level for the first several levels as something other than minions because everything is awful until you pick up Raging Spirits from Freythorn. I was stubborn and did not… and I also attempted to make Skeletal Arsonists work, but seemingly they have been nerfed into oblivion. You can see the current state of my character here.

This league start was a bit of a mess, if I am being perfectly honest. They once again did a free weekend for Path of Exile II, which had the benefit of giving them a massive spike in concurrent players. It also seemingly taxed the hell out of the infrastructure, and I spent a lot of time staring at this screen waiting for the zone to load. I can’t 100% be certain this was due to the influx of non-paying players because there was also a massive patch that happened to land right around the end of the free period. Whatever the case, when the free period ended… all of these woes went away. It was also a weird league start for me because of chemo and the low energy that I have… I struggled to focus on the game in quite the same way that I would have normally. I did not make it to maps, for example, until yesterday, which is quite a bit slower than I think I have done in other leagues. Most definitely compared to my Path of Exile times, when I am usually in maps by Saturday evening or at the latest Sunday morning. It is not like I am racing anyone, and I managed to snap up the uniques that I needed pretty cheaply, so it is not like my slow speed stopped me.

I am not really following a build guide, but instead mostly just chasing all of the really good minion nodes in the Witch/Templar area of the tree. I am only using two uniques with the build. The first I picked up really early on is Enfolding Dawn, and I think I gave a single exalt for it. The main reason we are using it for our chest is that it is pretty much the only way to get 100 spirit easily on a chestpiece, and we need that for summoning minions. The second piece is a mace called Trenchtimber, and we are exclusively using it because it has +2 minion gems on it. Literally nothing else about the unique matters really. You cannot dual-wield sceptres, or if we could, we would immediately drop this item. We are still very much in a world where plus gem levels matter more than any other stat in the game. The nice thing about rune forging in this expansion is that you can improve low-level uniques to be higher-level ones. I have done this to the chestpiece but not the mace, because, as I said, the mace is just a stat stick, and the upgrade has too high of strength requirements.

I’ve had some good luck. First off, I ended up getting a drop that sold for 4 divines, and that helped me fund a lot of my early gear. Since then, I have seen my first raw divine drop in maps, so that is always exciting. I’ve been using Scalpel for price checking, but honestly, I might switch back to something else because so far the pricing portion seems to be worse than what I saw with POE1. I might also just scale up the UI to make the elements show a little easier. It has been pretty accurate pricing-wise, because I have been able to price items based on its suggestions, and they eventually move. The economy is always the aspect of Path of Exile in general that is the trickiest, and also something that I have enjoyed more and more the deeper into the game I get. I know for Ace, the economy is the thing that causes them to bounce the hardest, and I wish that were not the case. At some point, I will probably attempt to perfect my gearing, but for the moment, I have 75% resists for chaos and all elements, and that seems to have made me pretty solid.

The new atlas has been pretty freaking cool so far. One of the big problems that I had with Path of Exile II up to this point is how aimless the endgame felt. That is no longer the case, and every time you interact with a league mechanic NPC, it launches its own quest chain, wanting you to do specific content for them to level up that mechanic. More than this, you can acquire Atlas passive points so much easier now, and the new passive tree feels infinitely more enjoyable than the previous one. I am just getting started, but I have already reached the point of pretty chill mapping. For the moment, I have gone into shrines to make them appear more often and also give me bigger buffs. Currently, there is no way to respec your Atlas tree, so I have been very careful not to choose anything that might end up bricking my progress. This version of the Atlas is so much better than what we have had previously, so I feel like, more than anything else, this gave us something that is viable for the 1.0 release at the end of this year.

While I groused a bunch about this on the podcast, the worst part of Path of Exile II is the first few acts. Once you get your build online, the game becomes pretty great. I feel like they should not make Act 1 anywhere near as rough as it is. Sure, there will always be builds that can one-shot everything, but the baseline build should not struggle to take down bosses. There have been so many times that one of us could not get through Geonir with our build and had to call for help to get a carry. Luckily, that was not me this time, but it is most definitely still a thing. For me, the boss that I personally struggle with the most is the Act 2 final boss, Jamanra. Once you get to Act 3, though, your build tends to have more than enough power to push through anything. I just think the early acts of this game need some tweaking, because I am sure there are a lot of folks who bounce before they reach the break point.

All told, I am pretty happy with this league so far. Minions have ended up being extremely powerful, especially the gas arrows from the skeletal snipers. That command ability is causing me to dive into some of the passives that I have never done before to increase command ability damage. I do, however, want to roll a second character and play with the Pokémon aspect of the Spiritwalker. I am happy enough with my current build, but the nonsense going on with the monkey seems too fun not to play along. They have said they do not plan on nerfing anything with companions mid-league, so in theory, I should be safe enough to build that second character. The challenge is that I am not really looking forward to going through the campaign again.

Have you been playing the Path of Exile II new league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #570 – Hollowing Season

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo

Hey Folks! We had quite the list of topics this time around.  We start off with a bit of a postmortem on Zero Parades and how that game really stuck the landing.  From there, Bel talks a bit about the upcoming final patch for Destiny and how it might have saved the game. Tam discusses his feelings so far about 007 First Light and how its Hitman DNA shows through while being a unique game and not a DLC.  Many games were released this week, and we talked about some of them before diving into Mina the Hollower. We talk a bit about Esoteric Ebb, which is another game that shares some lineage with Zero Parades and Disco Elysium.  Finally, we talk a bit about our league starts for Path of Exile II, and how the early game is a real slog. Kodra is having a much better time than Bel is, but they are both progressing towards the endgame.

Topics Discussed:

  • Zero Parades Nails It
  • Last Gasp of Destiny
  • 007 First Light
  • Many Games Released
  • Mina the Hollower
  • Esoteric Ebb
  • Path of Exile II – Return of the Ancients

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A Good Death

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Good Morning, Folks. I thought I would talk a bit about a game that I have not talked about in a very long time. I have a deep attachment to Destiny as a platform, and have been playing since the first game on my PS4. I used to raid even in the game with a crew full of people that I met through my friend Liani, and many of them, like Jex, are going to be friends for life. We can talk about all of the various ways that Destiny failed its players, but the one that ultimately caused me to detach is when they vaulted content that we had paid for, for the second time. Like I was willing to accept that Mercury and Mars needed a rework because they did not really live up to the standards of content from Forsaken forward. However, when Forsaken itself was vaulted, it pissed me off enough to uninstall Destiny and move on with my life.

That is not to say that Destiny has not meant a massive amount to me. I wanted Destiny to do better and pull itself out of what seemed to be a concurrent player death spiral. However, that does not appear to be in the cards for the game, because Bungie has announced that the game is ultimately being sunset with a final massive patch. Bungie appears to have put all of its cards now in the Marathon basket, and I am not sure they can turn this around. I fear that we might be witnessing the death of a studio, more than just the death of one individual game. Marathon is so far from a game that I want to play that I am worried that a “PVE” patch won’t go far enough to bring former Destiny players into the fold. The worst part, however, is that other than Warframe, there is no one really in this space anymore. I wish that any of the competitors had succeeded…. Anthem, or Outriders, could have easily taken this place if they had the sort of support that they needed.

More than anything, I don’t want the death of Destiny to be the death of the Looter Shooter genre. While Destiny Rising continues to do a reasonable job of carrying that banner forward, the problem there is that they also seem to be in a content drought and largely recycling patches that have come from before. Is there just no player appetite for this sort of game anymore? Or has everyone just coalesced on Warframe as the one company that seems to be properly supporting these games? I like Warframe for what it is, but it has never felt anywhere near as polished as the Bungie shooter experience. The gear chase never felt as compelling, and while I like what is happening with the Tennos, it’s a wildly different game experience to me personally. Warframe is the Path of Exile of looter shooters, and what I really wanted was the light Diablo fare instead.

One of the big positives of this patch is that they seem to be restoring the game to a functional state. One of the biggest mistakes that they made was to remove the Director, and migrate everything to the Portal… which is effectively a menu system that limited the amount of content you had access to. The director felt like we were moving around the star systems, and made the game feel less shallow than what is effectively a handful of playlists. The director is coming back, however, as are some game modes that had been shelved, like Gambit and the Sparrow Racing League. Each of the game modes, including patrol destinations, is getting its own pinnacle drops and should, in theory, remain evergreen content. So while they are effectively killing the game, they are at least doing something to restore it to a functional state.

Being perfectly honest… I will probably return to the game when this content patch drops. That seems wild that the death of the game is bringing me back, but really…. this content update is most of what players have been asking about for years. Why did they wait this long to bring back the Sparrow Racing League, for example? This has legitimately been a thing that players have begged for since it was first taken away in 2017. Players loved this, and it feels like they have been sitting on it for almost a decade when it could have easily stirred excitement in the community and caused players to come back. I feel like the downfall of Destiny is the tale of a studio that did not respect what they had and thought that they could string players along indefinitely. I would have loved to have seen what Destiny could have been in the hands of Grinding Gear Games or Digital Extremes, because they seem to be the gold standard when it comes to studios respecting their player base.

All of this said, I am happy that we are getting this final patch, because it brings the game up to date and leaves it in a reasonable condition. Do I think Marathon will be able to pick up the Destiny player base? I doubt it unless they completely rework that game into what is effectively Destiny 3. I will give it a shot when the PVE-only modes go into the game. I have zero interest in the extraction shooter genre, and that seems to be the case for most Destiny players. I think what is more likely to happen is a mass migration to Warframe, since that is a game that supports its players and is at least mostly in this same genre. I think some will also pick up Destiny Rising, because while it seems like it is also in maintenance mode, it is at least really fun. I plan on giving the new patch a spin in between playing other games.

Do you miss Destiny? What are your feelings about this final patch? Drop me a line below.