Video Games

Necropolis League Start Plans

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Good Morning Folks! At the time if writing this, the Necropolis League for Path of Exile is roughly six hours away. The start will happen at roughly 2 pm CDT and since I have the day off I plan on being there attempting to get in at the very beginning. The only question is whether or not I go through the hassle of trying to download the standalone client which always updates faster than Steam. I’ve not actually run the standalone client in previous leagues but this is the only true way to be in the queue before most of the folks are there. That said I honestly don’t care quite so much about starting exactly when the servers open as I am not planning on racing through the campaign. I thought I would talk a bit this morning about my plans for starting the league.

Shocking to no one who has read this blog for any length of time… I will be starting a Righteous Fire character, more specifically the chieftain variant that I played last league. Truth be told the leagues where I start Righteous Fire… are better experiences for me personally. I like the predictable nature of this build how it comes online, and how well it does at farming lower-level content and working my way through the Atlas of Worlds. Boneshatter last league was great, but it never felt quite as comfortable in Delve as Righteous Fire does. Lightning Arrow saw me zipping through the early maps super well, but struggling a bit when it came to the first two voidstone bosses. Ultimately even in its nerfed state, Righteous Fire feels reliable and stable and that is what I mostly crave for my first character of the league.

The first chaos that I spend in the league is likely going to be on acquiring these four uniques. Immortal Flesh is pretty much irreplaceable given how much value you get on a single belt. I will likely see one drop but what I am looking for specifically is one with high regeneration and -15% to all resistances which is the best roll you can get on that item. Rise of the Phoenix is equally important as it will give me +5 to maximum resistances, so I will be attempting to snipe one of those pretty early if I don’t see one drop. Berek’s Respite worked out extremely well last league and allows me to get some pseudo-proliferation before I can get a Fan the Flames cluster. Truth be told I just kept using the ring long after I replaced other items. For my chestpiece I am going to drop the Lightning Coil and try the more suggested Cloak of Flame this go around. I hate the idea of running an item without armor but the lack of the negative resistance penalty is pretty great as well as the lack of a life roll allowing me to use the 15% life mastery.

As far as later game items… I would love to figure out a way to work in a Defiance of Destiny amulet but I always wind up so dexterity-starved that I can never seem to make that happen. We will have to see if I can figure out a way to make it work. The one I took a screenshot of was the one I was using on my Boneshatter Juggernaut from last league and it added a ton of survival. I would also love to try and work in Legacy of Fury boots but I already have quite a few uniques which will make it a bit hard to make sure I am hitting maximum chaos resistance. I could see maybe swapping to these when I switch over to a Fan the Flames cluster. We also have no clue if these are going to be on the normal Maven drop pool or the Uber Maven drop pool… which will greatly impact their price.

Affliction League did some really screwball things with pricing on items making a number of previously really expensive things… dirt cheap. One of these was the Taste of Hate flask and depending upon the price this is going to be something that I pick up as one of my later acquisitions. It adds more defensive layers as I am converting additional physical damage to elemental where I will have 90% resistance. Last league I got to play with a Headhunter and a Mageblood and both were fine… but the chase item that I want to play with this time is Oriath’s End. This is going to be something that I stockpile divines in order to pick up this league, and I am hoping the changes in uber bosses make me hope the drop rates for this went up a bit. I would also love to pick up a Vaal Breach gem for bossing but that is probably unrealistic given how rare they are.

If you are wanting to follow in my footsteps with Righteous Fire Chieftain, I cannot recommend the guide from Pohx enough. He does a great service to the community by making sure there are viable versions of RF for Chieftain, Juggernaut, and Templar. In truth, ALL Marauder-based RF builds have essentially the same base tree with some tweaks here or there. I plan on mostly following what I did last league with some subtle changes from what Pohx suggests. Mostly Pohx does not go after Explosive Impact and I tend to path down into that area to pick it up. The more area of effect you can have with Righteous Fire, the more comfortable it feels but I tend to play a much slower RF than Pohx does. If you are just starting out though I would absolutely say follow his guide to the letter until you develop your own preferences for the build.

I look forward to getting my “burny boi” up and running today and starting the league back in trade. I think for the moment it looks like it is just going to be me and Kodra from the AggroChat podcast that are going to be playing. So I will like always be looking for things to make Hexblast work for him. I think most of the folks are going to give this league a skip which is a bit of a bummer, but won’t directly impact my enjoyment. I think I was pretty much the only person who really played much Crucible and that is maybe the league that I had the most fun with. I have a few other friends who are going to be either trying the game for the first time or coming back after a long absence, so it will be interesting to see how that all shakes out. As always there is a Path of Exile channel on my Super Dungeon Friends discord that we will likely be hanging out in.

Pumped for Necropolis

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Morning Friends! I have to say I am getting pretty freaking pumped for the Necropolis League start on Friday. I’m off work on that day due to the Good Friday holiday and plan on starting things up when the servers go live. I will probably talk a bit about my league plans tomorrow, but I am way more excited about this league than I expected to be honest. I think part of that excitement comes from the sweeping changes that are happening in the end game, which are something that the average player may not fully understand. This morning I am going to talk a bit about these changes and how they are going to drastically shift how we interact with maps in general.

Good or bad, a large chunk of your end game in Path of Exile is going to involve running maps. By default without manipulation, a given map has the chance of containing content from some forty different leagues. However, not all builds are designed in a manner to support all league content efficiently. For example if you want to run Legion or Breach efficiently you want the ability to blow up entire screens worth of enemies at a time, so you might favor something along the lines of a Lightning Arrow build or previously a Tornado Shot build in order to clear lots of targets at once. If you instead want to focus on Delve you will need a character with strong defenses as things down in the depths hit rather hard. So much of ARPG gameplay centers around optimization and efficiency, so it becomes more efficient to try and run the content that works best for your builds.

You can utilize the Atlas Passive tree in order to stick your thumb on the scale, but the only truly efficient way of guaranteeing specific content appears on a specific map has been with Scarabs. Right now in their current state they have felt like a mandatory evil, and if you want to run a lot of a specific kind of content you are forced to engage with the trade economy because they simply do not drop often enough for you to be able to sustain them. For example I greatly enjoy Delve, which requires me to run missions for Niko to get sulphite in order to maintain my missions into the darkness. This has always required that I at a minimum buy large stacks of Rusted Sulphite Scarabs in order to guarantee that Niko appears on my maps. There were other techniques like the All Hands Atlas Notable, but the only 100% method was to make sure I was running a Sulphite scarab with every map.

All of this is changing with Necropolis. Essentially they have redesigned the entire Atlas Passive Tree along with all of the Scarabs and have completely removed another system that involved putting enchants on the four voidstones that you unlock with sextants. Previously points invested in Delve nodes on the passive tree increased the chance of Niko, but never let you modify the exact percentage chance of him appearing directly. Now by investing in every Niko chance node, I can reach a point where Niko will appear 104% of the time, making it guaranteed that every map that I run with this talent tree will produce sulphite. More than that we are now going to be able to unlock three different passive trees so that we can swap between different scenarios more easily. So you can set up several trees with complimentary league mechanics and swap between them based on what you need to run.

Removing the requirement of Scarabs being the only methodology of reliably influencing map content has freed up some design space to shift them into doing “interesting things”. Some of these are going to be really wild when it comes to running them and will be the sort of thing that you want to stack a bunch of interesting scarabs together to handcraft a pretty intense map. I am super interested in seeing how these interactions play out, and Scarabs as a whole have shifted from being something that can only drop under certain circumstances to being available from the general loot pool. So we should have way more access to scarabs in general and then they will also provide more interesting interactions when we use them. They also added a “Limit” that indicates that you can use more than one of the same scarab at a time. So for example, if you just really want a lot of strongboxes you can stack 4 Ambush Scarabs and get 20 additional strong boxes in a map. You can see the full list of all 109 Scarabs in this post on the GGG site.

More than that… it feels like there has been a changing of the guard when it comes to the future of Path of Exile 1. I don’t want this to come across as a Chris Wilson bad, Mark Roberts good tirade… but things certainly feel different. The above video is an interview that Mark Roberts did with Zizaran and included some pretty serious philosophical deep dives about changes that he would like to see in the future. Specifically towards the end of the discussion, Mark said “this is the age of questioning original philosophies”, and it certainly feels like a lot of the quality of life changes we are getting this league are a result of this. It is going to take awhile to remove some systems that have just been accepted as “good enough” but it seems like maybe there is the will to make Path of Exile at least in small measures a more approachable experience. There is a brilliant clip at the very end of this presentation assuring us all that Mark really does “give a shit”.

Mapping for maximum profit has never really been my jam. So part of why I am damned interested in this league is that it feels like I am going to have a lot more interesting options to run with maps. I like playing makes as they are rolled in an “alch and go” strategy, and I like that I will be able to use more scarabs more freely in order to just make the entire experience a bit more novel. All the while being able to run an Atlas that makes sure I am getting the maximum amount of sulphite with whatever the heck I am doing. Having three atlases also means I will be able to switch to doing other things when I am full on sulphite and am not quite in the mood to go burn it down again in Devle without feeling like I am wasting resources quite so much. Very much looking forward to seeing how all of these changes shake out in the end, and how they interact with the actual League mechanic for Necropolis which I have spent almost zero time thinking about.

Anyways! I realize I ramble on about things that very few people actually care about, but I thank you greatly if you have survived this long in the post. I am contemplating streaming my league start tomorrow, so we will see if that actually happens.

Horizon Forbidden West on PC

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I have to admit I feel a little bit bad for the Guerilla Games. This game released in early 2022 and was somewhat screwed over by Elden Ring releasing within a few days of it. Now the PC version is finally out and it is colliding up against the release date for Dragon’s Dogma II. For me… not being a souls-like fan I played this game originally on the PS5 but bounced around the midpoint of the game, or at least what I feel like is the midpoint. After some time I made the decision just to wait and revisit it when it released on PC since I enjoyed the first game infinitely more with a mouse and keyboard. Sony really needs to tighten up the release cadence of these games because two years waiting on a PC release seems a bit brutal. Complaining aside… Horizon Forbidden West is a beautiful game.

On so many levels, this is just mechanically a better version of the first game. It does everything that Zero Dawn did right and then adds multiple layers of nuance and enjoyment on top of that. The addition of gliding really improves the entire experience and makes this quite possibly the best version of “Breath of the Wild” that exists. The mechanics of hunting dinobots is just so much fun. Focusing in on specific weak points and weak elements to quickly decimate these gigantic machines is just pure enjoyment for me. However few moments beat this massively long glide down from the side of a mountain after finishing an epic climb.

The other thing that I really feel like calling out about this game is that the side content is so much more developed. In the first game the main story was the highlight but you still met a lot of really interesting side characters. In Forbidden West every interlude seems to be filled with characters that I legitimately care about. I was happy to see a bunch of folks returning like my Petra, my favorite side character from the first game. However there are a bunch of new characters like Silga… who once heard a radio broadcast for a brief moment and it sort of dominated her destiny from that point forward. So many heart felt stories woven through the forbidden west that I have spent way more time focusing on side content than actually moving the main story forward.

There are also so many freaking vistas that are just breathtaking. Like who else could have made a swamp look this interesting? The color palette of the game is part of what makes it all work so well. Everything is so vibrant and really pops on the screen, even without leaning on the gimmick of HDR since I generally play with that turned off. For the most part I have been playing the game at 1440p at at 144hz and it looks amazing. There have been a few times I shift it up and do 1080p 60hz when I am downstairs and playing on my laptop remote into my gaming machine upstairs via Parsec and that still looks gorgeous.

That is not to say there are not some performance issues with the game. There are some areas surrounding the region known as “The Grove” or “Lowland Territory” that have volumetric fog that seems to slow everything down. The game has received a few minor patches and I have not experienced since the first days, so maybe that is now taken care of… but I did experience some sluggish experience in a few specific areas. This was also something that impacted cutscenes where the dialog and the animations were wildly out of sync with the animations playing much too slowly. Like I said I have not experienced this in a few days and there were some patches… so hopefully it was a bug that was taken care of but I can’t talk about the game without at least mentioning that there were some issues from time to time.

I’ve passed the point where I was in my previous attempt at the game, and I have no clue how far I am from the end… but it is my goal to wrap this up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile League on Friday. That is going to happen fairly late in the day and I am off Friday so if nothing else I should be able to wrap up loose ends then. The Horizon series is just a phenomenal experience and it gives me some hope about the talk of an MMORPG version of this game. If I could have a game that is a mishmash of Horizon, Destiny, and Monster Hunter that I could play with friends… I would be in heaven. The only thing that gives me some pause… is that this project is being led by NC Soft… a company that is not known for creating games that I love. Sure they published Guild Wars 2… but that is more Arena.Net than anything that NC Soft did. They also had the short-sightedness to cancel City of Heroes so… suffice to say I am cautious about that project.

Done Isn’t a Bad Thing

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This weekend we talked a bit about Last Epoch and I get the impression that I came off as a bit more negative than I had expected. When I said “I think I am done with Last Epoch”, it was meant to indicate that I had seen all that I really wanted to see during this cycle and not that I was done with the game completely. At this point, I have pushed my Echo Warpath Void Knight all the way to level 100 and seen all of the content that there is to see save for doing higher corruption pushing which feels largely pointless. On top of that I created another character for an attempt at making something Righteous Fire Adjacent… only to fail completely but still managed to get Forge Guard to 88. Then I rerolled yet another sentinel and succeeded in creating the Ignite Warpath goodness that I was trying to make in my now level 89 Paladin. I also managed to pick up a Helm of the Scurry and pushed a Bleed Squirrels Beastmaster all the way to level 84 along with an attempt at a Flame Reave Spellblade that I stopped at 65.

Essentially since the launch of 1.0 and the very first cycle on February 21st, I have put roughly 300 hours into the game and I think it is time to stop for now. I have 11 tabs full of LP1 or higher copies of uniques, 10 tabs full of well-rolled Exalted items for slamming, and a full tab of dungeon keys that I have no real interest in spending. I could in theory cobble together a few more builds, I have five copies of the David Harbour collab helmet that summons a Wraith Lord and that was going to be my next character to finish leveling. I’ve just reached a point where I think I am done grinding for the moment. That is not to say I won’t happily return to the game at the start of the next cycle. This is sort of the way of ARPGs in that I get in… grind a copious amount of time… then reach a point where I am happy to walk away again and then dive into the next one.

I got roughly a month of constant play out of Last Epoch and that honestly seems really good. In general, I tend to get about two months out of a Path of Exile league and two weeks out of a Diablo III Season. What ultimately stymies me is that the Monoliths are not really done baking, and are in need of more different forms of content to break up the rhythm. Adding chests and rogue exiles went a long way to making them more exciting, but they are still a far cry from Path of Exile where running a map without support can yield content from some forty leagues that have played out over the last decade. I think each cycle the game will get better and add more things to break up the monotony, but the team at EHG just hasn’t had the time to build in the same levels of nuance and complexity. I got a lot of pushback from the AggroChat folks when I said there was no competition and that Path of Exile was clearly the better game… but what I meant is that there is more depth of content than any other ARPG currently has.

I had a heck of a lot of fun playing Last Epoch over the last month, and the game is in a far better state than it has ever been before. That said the well of content currently is not limitless. I could force myself to keep pushing, but with Path of Exile releasing its next league on Friday it seemed like a good time to get off the ride before my opinions started to turn. So like I said I feel like I came across as more negative than I intended during the Podcast. My joy in this sort of game is not necessarily building a bunch of characters and then never really pushing them very far. As always if I am going to play any game… the long-term grind is going to be about the acquisition of loot. I could keep pushing and trying to perfect my builds by getting ever better rolled legendary items… but what would I be doing it for?

In Path of Exile, there are a lot of pieces of content that require you to operate at a certain level to be able to attempt and ultimately succeed at it. While I am not necessarily a bossing motivated person, getting my four void stones was a nice accomplishment last league, and I was able to take down all of the non-uber bosses. More than that being able to survive juiced T16 maps and reap the rewards from running them was extremely cool as well. Pushing Monolith corruption doesn’t really feel that rewarding yet or more so… the things that I am chasing are not that fundamentally different than the things I currently have access to. At some point, I am certain there will be a reason for me to keep pushing, but for now, there really isn’t. I have a handful of functional builds and could keep churning those out for a while now if I really pushed myself but I would rather leave while I am still very happy with the game than burn myself out on it when my attention is waning.

So instead of being progressively more grumpers about the game… I am looking forward to the start of a new Path of Exile league and leveling once again from scratch. Right now I plan on going for something similar to the Righteous Fire Chieftain that I played last league as my starter. From there I will be able to farm enough currency to build whatever other characters that interest me. I am contemplating a trip down memory lane and firing up some sort of Toxic Rain build again, after spending a bunch of time playing Lightning Arrow for a map blaster over the last two leagues. I am also somewhat interested in some sort of an elemental strike build. I’ve also never actually made anything with Cyclone despite threatening to do so for years. I’m also interested in trying out one of the alternate Boneshatter builds using Trauma support and some other ability.

Last Epoch was a great run, and I look forward to being excited to start over again in the next cycle when 1.1 drops. We are already starting to get some teasers about what that is going to entail including several new bosses and a new pinnacle boss. That is cool and all but what I am really hoping is for some additional monolith content. We need something like Ritual or Legion to break up the monotony of the same three map types over and over: Arena, Ambush, and Spires. I would also love to see them get inventive and create new gameplay modes similar to Heist or Delve in Path of Exile. Dungeons are not really my thing and I would love to see those reworked to be more enjoyable. As it stands the lead-up to the boss is boring as hell and then you get a single attempt at the boss before having to go through the boring parts again. As much as I have maligned Nightmare Dungeons in Diablo IV, they would honestly be preferable to the Last Epoch Dungeon design.

In Path of Exile, you can really focus on a single game mode and have more than enough content doing just that in order to get an entire league worth of play. My hope is that at some point each of the game modes in Last Epoch will be equally rich. I have faith in how far I have seen the game come since I first set foot in it back in 2018 and comparing that to what it plays like today. I think the game will get there, and they have already added so much good stuff. The Circle of Fortune and the prophecies are brilliant and I enjoyed running them so much. I hope at some point we get character customization, something akin to the hideout system from POE, and the ability to unlock item drops as cosmetics. There is so much room to grow the game, and I think given enough time we will see all of it come to fruition.

Anyways! At the moment I have been playing through Horizon Forbidden West on the PC and am hoping to wrap that up prior to the launch of the Path of Exile Necropolis league. I will probably talk some about that in the coming days. Apologies for the lack of blog posts for Thursday or Friday, but I took those days off and just was not feeling the blog.