Video Games

Game Releases of 2023

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One of the things that I often do at the beginning of a year is to try and project out some of the things that I think I might be interested in on the upcoming release radar. I’ve not done that at all this year because I have been overwhelmingly obsessed with the current Path of Exile league. I thought it might be interesting to peer into the future and talk about some of the games I am interested in that have release dates for the common year, or at least look likely to release in one form or another. The further into the list, we get the more likely these things are to be bumped because they don’t have firm dates associated with them. There are going to be some big titles missing from the list that you might feel is important, because this is a deeply personal outing. For example the new Zelda game, I will likely ignore it until the emulators can run it and I can disable weapon durability because that construct ruined the first game for me.

Atomic Heart – February 21

Atomic Heart is one of those games that I have been amped for since I first saw it in a trailer presentation. It looks like a soviet block spin on the Fallout games, with weird robotics and psychic phenomena. I am largely on board for all of this. I fully expect it to have some jank but also I’ve played and loved Bethesda games so I am mostly used to that. I’ve played the Metro games and they were for the most part a giant mess, and I still enjoyed them. I have high hopes but also they have been tempered by past experience with games wanting to be the Russian Fallout.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor – March 17

Jedi Fallen Order was one of my favorite games when it came out. It proved to me the possibility of what a “soulslike” game could be if it had a difficulty slider. If you want the Dark Souls experience you play it on hard, and if you want just a fun narrative romp you play it on easy. I played the game happily on easy and enjoyed the hell out of the experience. I am looking forward to another outing as Cal Kestis, and I really hope that at some point this character is going to intersect with some of the Disney live shows because it seems too damned good not to use given that Cameron Monaghan is right there ready to go.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores – April 19

I am throwing this out here because it has a fixed date, but I have to be honest… I am not sure if I will play this when it releases. I never actually finished Forbidden West, and in large part, it is because I don’t really play consoles that often. I would far rather do what I did with Zero Dawn, and play the expansion whenever the PC release comes out because playing this game with a mouse and keyboard is so much more enjoyable than playing it with a controller. We will see if I stick to my guns on this one, and while I enjoyed HFW it is nowhere near as compelling as the first game for me. Everything about how Aloy moved and controlled was so much better, but the story was just less interesting and didn’t really push me forward as fastly. Don’t get me wrong I loved all of the world-building and I look forward to playing this on PC whenever it releases there.

Redfall – May 2

We got new gameplay yesterday in the Microsoft presentation, and I have to say I am probably more interested now than I was before. It feels like this is going to be interesting as a completely single-player game, and also really interesting as more of a co-op Left 4 Dead type experience. I am going to have to sort out ways to be online at the same time as the rest of AggroChat folks to be able to experience this together. It honestly reminded me a bit of how State of Decay 2 feels, where you have bases that you operate out of and then go out into dangerous areas to collect resources and complete missions.

Diablo IV – June 6

I am throwing this on the list because I am very interested, but also very conflicted about it. Blizzard continues to not exactly be an exemplar for things that I want to engage with right now. I was hoping that by now we would be further along in the Microsoft acquisition and that Bobby Kotick would be on his way out the door. I want to play this, but I am not sure if I can play this. What is there looks interesting so far and I am very interested to see how a “post Path of Exile” Diablo game operates. I was burnt so heavily on Diablo Immortal as was pretty much everyone else, and my confidence levels are lower than they normally would be.

Final Fantasy XVI – June 22

I am exceptionally bummed that this is a PlayStation Exclusive. I would far rather play this on the PC full stop and it is dumb that I can’t. That said there is no way in hell that I am not going to play a mainline PC game that was crafted by the same team that gave me the FFXIV story experience. ARR to Endwalker was the best Final Fantasy experience I have ever had, and as a result, I am completely going to “day one” this game and probably “no life” it. I am in fact an acolyte of Yoshi P, and am willing to sign up for any nonsense that he is involved with. I mean it looks fucking gorgeous so there is also that. I am going to have to drag my PS5 back upstairs so that I can have undivided access to it.

Arc Raiders – TBA 2023

We’ve not seen a lot about this game since the Game Awards in 2021, but recently it has apparently been confirmed to be a 2023 release coming to Playstation, Xbox, and PC including Gamepass. I mean I love me some looter shooter action, so you know I am going to check this out regardless of how non sequitur using a Robyn song about masturbation is for the trailer. I loved the 1970s gritty science fiction vibe about it that a lot of games have been adopting. We still don’t know a ton about how the gameplay is going to unfold but this is firmly in my wheelhouse so I will be watching as a proper release date is assigned.

Hellboy Web of Wyrd – TBA 2023

I love Hellboy and I love the art style of Mike Mignola so I am completely onboard with a game that features a reasonable adaptation of both. We have no release date for this but it is supposedly coming during the calendar year. I kind of expect this to be a shorter very narrative-focused game. It has a Steam page that appears to be active, so here is hoping that it comes out on PC at the same time as everywhere else. This does not exactly seem like the sort of game that Sony would pay for exclusivity to.

Nightingale – TBA 2023 ???

We got an updated trailer for Nightingale at The Game Awards, and it gives me hope that maybe we will see it this year. This is probably the title that I consider to be the most likely to slide to 2024 however given that we’ve not really seen anything resembling public testing. If this was active, I figure by now someone would have broken NDA and leaked some footage of it. Because we have not seen that, it makes me think that it might still be “in progress” to a point of not really being ready to ship soon. I was deeply suspicious of this game until it was confirmed to be a purely PVE experience. I am going to play it when it comes out because I am here for the victorian gaslight-type setting.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – TBA 2023

This is another one that I question if we are actually going to see this year. CDPR has had a less-than-spotless record lately with being able to release things in the timeframe that they originally expect. We’ve heard that this is a bigger DLC than all of the DLC for Witcher 3 combined, and I know for certain when it lands I will be starting over Cyberpunk from scratch in order to be able to play my way through this seamlessly with the rest of the content. I love Cyberpunk 2077 and I cannot imagine that I won’t also love this expansion content.

Alan Wake 2 – TBA 2023

This game was announced at the 2021 Game Awards and so far we have not gotten much more information on it than this original trailer. At the end of this trailer, it shows a 2023 release date, but given the radio silence so far… I am not sure if that is going to be a realistic date given that everything takes slightly longer than anyone originally expects. When this game drops… I will stop whatever I am doing and play it. Last year’s journey into the “Remedyverse” has turned me into a dedicated fan of their particular style of narrative fiction. I am excited as hell to see what a Remedy game looks like post-Control which for me at least was their magnum opus. I am hoping to see even more blending of the settings and maybe have Jesse Faden play a role in this game.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn – TBA 2023

I am throwing this game on the list because it looks interesting, and I know for certain it will be a Game Pass title when it finally comes out. That lowers the bar of entry enough to make me want to give it a spin. It looks like a souls-like, and I don’t exactly have a great track record with those. I don’t go in for frustration gaming. If I am playing a game for the story, I want to see the story play out without a lot of false steps. If I am playing a game for the mechanics, then that is a totally different type of experience for me. I’ve never really managed to bridge the gap in a souls game to where I actually care about the mechanics and I mostly have played them because I am curious about the world. Flintlock looks really cool but I am also throwing it a bit of side-eye, but will check it out for free when it launches on GamePass.

There are a bunch of titles that I opted not to include. Destiny 2 for example has a brand-new expansion landing on February 28th for example. However, I’ve grown away from that game because I hated the content vaulting removing a bunch of things I loved, and have never really reached a point of forgiveness. I’m also deeply interested in Death Stranding 2, but somehow doubt we will see it released this year. These are the games that I am looking forward to the most, but given my track record, there are going to be a bunch of things that spring up along the way that catches my attention.

What games are you looking forward to the most this year?

Housing Savage Defeated

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Those who have been around the blog for a while might know that I have been trying to get a house in Final Fantasy XIV for quite a while. When I returned to the game in 2021, I gathered a decent holding of gil and got the itch to try and purchase a house. This is when I found out about the sorry state of affairs that was the housing system at that point. Essentially at any given time, there might be one or two plots available on the entire server, and they would come available at a random time. So you were forced to sit there clicking the placard hoping that you would be lucky enough to time it just perfectly and get the property before the others also swarming the plot had a chance to purchase. Shocking to no one… it was a time rife with botters and those of us who were not botting would do all sorts of things to try and trick them into doing dumb things.

With Patch 6.1 this changed significantly and introduced the Housing Lottery system. Essentially every nine days the game would go through a cycle of placing bids and accepting results. If you wanted to buy property you would find an open plot during the bidding period, and place down your earnest money in escrow by clicking on the placard of that property. Then it was simply a waiting game to see if you lucked into winning the property. For the last year, I have been riding the cycle of bid and results periods, logging in to go plot shopping and then logging in on results day to get disappointed that I did not get yet another property. I think maybe I missed a single bid period because I was just too disheartened after losing to the closest odds I had seen to date. Most of the time it was me up against over 200 other bidders and then treated to another happy message wishing me more luck in the future.

All of that changed last week and I honestly did not want to talk too much about it ahead of time for fear I would jinx it. With the release of the 6.3 patch Square Enix added 1800 plots to the game by adding six new wards to every housing area. Since the very beginning I had one wish above others… to get the same plot that we used to have for a Free Company house in the Mists district of Limsa Lominsa. So when the bidding period started after the release of 6.3 I opted to bid on Plot 13 in Ward 26. When I logged in the day before the end of the period… I was the only bidder on my property. When I logged in feverishly after the bidding period ended, I was happy to see that I did in fact win. While it is not the same Ward as our old Free Company house, it makes me exceptionally happy to have the same relative position in the new area.

One of the things that are exceptionally cool about this whole process is the fact that EVERYONE that is populating this new ward, is someone who had been anxiously trying to get a house. I’ve had many random conversations with my neighbors while slowly working away on getting everything set up. I made friends with the folks who own one of the large homes in the area and they were roaming around chatting with everyone who was fiddling the other day. I’ve similarly had conversations with many of the folks surrounding me, and it is bringing back memories of when we first bought the Free Company house in this same location. I remember there was a welcome committee of sorts that welcomed us all to the neighborhood. I kinda want to maybe revive a tradition and create a linkshell for all of the inhabitants of the district.

It is going to take me a very long time before I get everything exactly how I want it, but the front yard is starting to come along nicely. Huge props to Sol for helping me out with some of the finer points of understanding this system… that I never really engaged with before. I mean I’ve had permission to fiddle with shit in the guild hall for years, but I never wanted to mess anything up since Sol spends so much effort getting things just so. The tree house that I am standing in while taking these screenshots was a housewarming gift that was super sweet. It does make me want to maybe start working on my crafters and use the house as an excuse to set goals for leveling them in order to make items. Thankfully I have all of my gatherers to at least level 80, so acquiring items for leveling purposes does not seem too taxing.

The inside is considerably more spartan. My idea currently is to arrange the upstairs as the office of an adventuring company and then the downstairs as my private quarters. At the moment I just have functional decorations. I’ve placed four NPCs, a retainer bell, an aesthetician bell, a guest book, and an orchestrion. I kinda think I will probably be working on little vignettes as I did in the front yard. I need to acquire some mannequins at some point, because I know I want them configured for different gear sets representing all of the jobs that I play. Right now I picture them up on some sort of a stage immediately across the room from the guildleve counter.

Downstairs I have done almost nothing other than swap the walls, and flooring, and put up a maelstrom ceiling fan. I know I will want some aquariums for down here, but past that I am not really sure what I want this area to look like. I am probably going to put up some walls to partition off an area to put a bed, and have another area that is for seating and various collected items like the miniatures that I have gathered over the years. I swear the hardest part about all of this is trying to decide what the heck I want my house to look like. I will say… after having used a number of housing systems the one in FFXIV is not what I would consider “good”. It already feels like I have to fight it more than I should to do simple things like select an object when it is overlapping another object. I am sure with time I will get better at cheesing the system, but for now, it feels extremely cumbersome.

Part of why I opted for a Shirogane-style roof is so that I could climb up on top of it. This is one of my favorite pastimes in the district we have a Free Company House. Being able to climb up on my own roof and watch the world go by, is extremely heartening for me. It is so weird to be writing this post after so much frustration and disappointment trying to acquire a house for so long. I am really hoping that maybe this will be the action that brings me back into the fold and gets me engaged with the game again. There is a good deal of content that I have never experienced and I should pick up and start working on the main story quest chain again. After leveling all of my jobs to 80, and then leveling through Endwalker almost immediately following that… I just burned myself out tremendously. I still have so much affection for this game, that I am hoping maybe being grounded in the Housing system will give me goals to engage with the rest of the game.

The Mists is traditionally one of the more popular housing areas and even in my ward, there were a number of properties that did not get bid on. That would tell me that if you were ever hoping to get housing, and were disappointed by the process in the past… you might throw your bid in when the coming period opens on the 24th. There still should be a number of really good properties available. Notice that there is some prime beachfront real estate that did not even get bid on in my ward, and there are even more properties still open when you shift over to the subdivision including a number of mediums and even a large. I’ve spent so much money over the last few days that I am going to have to figure out what actually sells on the market and start listing things again to build back up my nest egg. Thankfully there really isn’t much that you actually need to buy in Final Fantasy XIV.

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be posting a screenshot from the beach of MY housing district. Soon I think it will be time for me to go roaming around and looking for more guestbooks to sign. One of the coolest things is that I found out one of my friends got a property in the same ward. They opted for the subdivision, but I bumped into them the other day at the housing vendors while trying to figure out how to actually build a house. I need to scan through the list a bit more thoroughly and see if there are any other names that I recognize. I wish you all a wonderful week and if you wade into the lottery system waters, I wish you luck in the upcoming bidding period!

Voidborn Reliquary Key

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Good Morning Friends! Prepare for yet another post of me doing some stupid nonsense in Path of Exile. I figure at this point all that is left reading these daily posts are the truly diehard folks, and the actual Path of Exile enjoyers… or I guess those who potentially hate read these? I am an “MTX Enjoyer” and I find that looking cool in a game helps my enjoyment greatly. In this league, one of the supporter packs went all in on the fire theme, and since I was playing Righteous Fire on Juggernaut it seemed like something I definitely needed in my life. What was truly fortuitous was this season when you pick up Kirac’s Vault pass you end up with a bunch of random loot boxes. One of these produced the weird cosmic flaming wolf pet that you see beside me called that apparently came from the Twilight Mystery Box. The cosmic aspect is even more perfect given that I tend to run the celestial MTX for my Righteous Fire aura.

I get that all of this is a colossal waste of money, but they end up making me happy and have no real in-game benefits. There are two things that I really spend money on in games are the first are things that add quality of life benefits, like the various stash tabs in Path of Exile, or the endless crafting storage in Elder Scrolls Online. The second is cool outfits, and I am more than happy to spend some real-world monies to look cool. It isn’t even that I care about the “flexing” aspect of wearing something, because it gives me zero real-world cred to have swiped a credit card. It just makes me happy to have a character that I think looks slick. Transmogrification/Wardrobe systems are among the most important parts of an MMORPG and if you are designing a new one… please put in a system that allows for nigh-endless customization. Do not be FFXIV and artificially limit the number of items you can keep, and instead be like the various systems that give you credit when you pick up an item for its appearance. I wish Path of Exile did this, because there are actually a lot of cool items that drop in the game already.

Last night was a night for exploring Delve, looking for bosses, and listening to Skin Game by Jim Butcher. I’m now somewhere around chapter 30 in the novel and managed to spend my 55k Sulfite and find I think four Abyssal and Vaal cities in the process. In all of those nodes, I managed to fight another Vaal boss and another Abyssal Lich. While yesterday was apparently the day of raw Divine Orbs dropping, I did not have anywhere near that level of luck but I did pick up a few rare items that are going to enable some specific brands of nonsense. While delving I also sold a few high ticket items or at least high tickets for me in the 100s of Chaos range. Thankfully people seem to be pretty good-natured about waiting for you to finish whatever you are doing in order to make the sale. Generally speaking, if I am in the middle of something… the price point of the item that someone wants determines if it is worth my time to respond. If I am just starting a heist run, and you are pinging me about something in my 1 Chaos tab, then I am probably going to ignore it unless you ask nicely. I had someone who specifically needed an amulet and they were fine with waiting for me to finish the activity I was on.

Last night I got the rare piece of the Ultimatum Aspect to drop in delve. Essentially this is a way to access a league mechanic that I did not even know existed. Apparently back in April of 2021 during the 3.14 Ultimatum League, there was a build-your-own-boss-fight encounter called the Tower of Ordeals, that dropped a number of interesting Vaal items. A little-known feature of 3.19 Lake of Kalandra was apparently adding these back into the game through 4 items that drop in different modes of gameplay.

If combined in your inventory in a specific pattern, as shown above, they combine to create a custom map that grants access to the Trialmaster from Ultimatum with a number of random affixes determining what sorts of things happen during the fight. For example, Choking Miasma is a cloud that deals Chaos Damage Over Time, and it means in order to do the fight I am probably going to want to spec my Pantheon into Arakaali which gives me extra resistance to that. For now, I am close to dinging another level on the Juggernaut and as such, I am going to file this away until I am in that post-ding “safe period” to try dumb things.

Another cool thing that happened last night is that I got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop while doing delve. Sadly I have no screenshot of when it dropped because I was in the middle of a darkness-filled abyssal city and hurriedly shoveling loot into my inventory as the darkness timer ticked down. It was very shiny and rainbow-colored on the loot filter, so it will likely be extremely hard to miss. They seem to be going for around 2 Divine Orbs for one of these keys, if not considerably lower than that. There is someone who priced one at 20 Chaos but I think they are just trolling. I figured it was worth 2 Divines or the loss of that in order to have the experience of opening one. When placed in the map device it teleports you to a map featuring a loot box that can be opened once. Inside it is an item dictated by the players who purchased the extremely expensive Voidborn Supporter Pack for around $500.

Purchasing the pack allows players access to a hidden interface on the Grinding Gear Games website allowing them to choose any unique in the game, assign a foil color, and then write a message to players when they open the item. For example, I pulled Ngamahu’s Flame in the Verdant Foil color scheme, and when I opened the item this line of text scrolled across my chat box.

A weapon from olden times, when Cyclone moved in straight lines.  Two birds in one with links undone.  This axe may finally shine.

I’ve never used this weapon but I am extremely happy that I managed to pull an item with a “real” message. There are apparently a number of items thrown into the mix as clear trolls like “this could have been a headhunter” on one of the other heavy belts. I have to admit this almost makes me want to create a build around this weapon since for some sort of flame-based juggernaut melee build, it seems like it could be rather good. I guess there is a Fire Cyclone Chieftan build that currently exists that utilizes this weapon or at least it did as of 3.19. If I got another key to drop though, I would probably just sell it. I’ve had the experience and it was good enough for me.

I think I have decided that I am going to stop engaging with the Sanctum league mechanic. I do not enjoy it, and while I can often get pretty far with my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… I just sort of hate the way the mechanic works. Sure you can save an entire floor’s worth of progress while doing other things… but there just never seems to be a time when I actually want to sit down and engage with it. I like playing tanky characters and have no interest in dodging all of the mechanics, and as such I will never really grok the way this game mode wants to work. As much effort as GGG has devoted to it, I fully expect this to land in standard and be something that we are dealing with going forward. My hope is that they modify it so that it works well for other styles of play because right now if you are going to engage with it, you really want something that can clear entire screens at a time. My hope is you can eventually collect an entire run and then interact with Divinia in your hideout to embark upon the Sanctum experience.

I think a better version of this would be to merge the Lake of Kalandra mechanic with Sanctum and take away the whole resolve mechanic. Have it so that each map you run builds the layout of rooms in your sanctum, and then once you have finished laying out a floor you save it as a map and run that. I really enjoyed the tile placing mechanic of the Lake, and were it not for ArchNemesis that would have been an extremely fun mechanic. Sanctum only works for people who are not building tanks that benefit from things hitting them. For example on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, a large part of my defensive layer is from building six endurance stacks by getting hit. I just think between Sanctum and Lake there is one really great game mode that could be cobbled together. For the time being, however, I am mostly going to bail from engaging with the current league mechanic because there are so many older mechanics that I would rather spend my time doing.

I think more than anything, that the key to really enjoying Path of Exile long-term is deciding that it is okay that there are parts of the game you will never engage with. Each league mechanic is almost a game in itself, and I am more than happy picking and choosing the ones that I want to play. I don’t force myself into open-world PVP experiences, because I have learned that I don’t enjoy them. Similarly, I should be perfectly fine knowing that I don’t like Tower Defense games and as such, I should probably block Blight from my Atlas tree. Occasionally there is a game mode like Incursion that I did not like at first but have come to enjoy, and that is awesome as well. However, for me… this is the league of Heist and Delve and I am okay with that.

The Brass Dome

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Friends I spent more currency yesterday on a single item than I have ever spent on anything in the trade league. I’ve had this dumb side project of trying to “chance orb” my way into a Brass Dome given that it is the only unique for the Gladiator Plate base. However hundreds of scouring and chance orbs later, I decided to just buy the damned thing. It seemed to be the next obvious step in the evolution of my build and I found one with the highest maximum elemental resistance bump you could get and a decent armor bonus for 5.3 Divine Orbs. Granted this ate up almost all of my liquid Divines, other than the stash tab that is devoted to Thalen’s purchases… I was sitting on 7 total Divines with another 10 roughly sitting in raw Chaos Orbs. I had to do some Harvest Crafting to flip one of my items to Lightning Resistance in order to make up the gap lost from my rare chest but that was pretty straightforward.

The end result however is pretty staggering. I took a screenshot in-game of what my defenses screen looks like with six stacks of endurance. I have a little over 90,000 armor 89% fire, 87% cold, and 87% lightning resistances, and a life regeneration of a little over 2000 per second with my max life sitting around 4500. I took a bit of a raw life loss because of the removal of bonus life from Strength, but I think being effectively immune to extra crit damage makes up for that. When I “ding” 98 I should be able to pick up another life node that will more than make up for the loss, and I am slowly adding catalysts as they drop to give me bonus life as well. Sure I could have gotten an even more perfectly rolled version of this armor but it is still a big bump.

The game seems to have noticed that I was missing several Divines and over the course of the night I legitimately got all of them back as drops. From Metamorph, running maps to refill my sulfite, and from delve itself, I got back 5 raw Divines. This seems like one hell of a lucky streak to me, but I will absolutely take it. Weirdly I got two of the divines from Abyssal Cities in the same biome, which seems extremely lucky. I guess maybe I should start paying more attention to the biome bonuses because it makes me wonder if that area had some extreme rarity bonus applied to it. I also managed to knock out another Vaal boss which gave me one of the rings needed to craft a precursor. I need to sift through my rare stockpile to see if I have any more of these rings laying around.

I feel like last night I went through yet another trade league right of passage. Up until this point I had been surviving on the scarabs that I got dropped from running other content. The problem however is that it seems like I am just not getting sulfite scarabs. I decided to remedy this by just purchasing a large stack of them and picking up 100 Rusted Sulfite Scarabs for 90 Chaos. This should in theory keep me going on refilling my delve fuel for awhile. I had been trying to rely on proccing Niko missions, but that ultimately took forever if I was specifically wanting to go back down into the dark. This will at least give me a rapid way to fill back up to 55,000 Sulfite.

Now that I have significantly more defenses, I am starting to work my way a little lower in delve. I found these odd biomes with a single Abyssal City node, and there seems to be another one on the lower left side of the screen partially occluded. That is ultimately where I am trying to target because I am still seeking out an Aul the Crystal King node and I am thinking I must just need to be a bit deeper to get them to spawn more reliably. The boss nodes are a bit tiresome with Righteous Fire, largely because I just don’t dish out as much damage as they would need to make them happen quickly. I can survive everything without much issue, but it is the slow process of whittling down via Fire Trap that gets cumbersome.

Through all of the mapping to get Sulfite, I’ve been trying to focus on running Tier 14 or higher maps which have a chance of dropping Guardian maps. Over the course of the last few days, I’ve accumulated a decent stash of these and plan on running them through with my SRS Necromancer at some point soon. Like I said yesterday I legitimately thought I would be winding down this season by now, but I keep finding more goals that I want to work on. I am a few more achievements away from finishing my Tier 2 set of armor, and three away from getting my first totem. I think I am way more interested in those than in progressing my atlas any further. Bossing really does not hold much excitement for me personally and if given the choice I would almost always rather be farming league mechanics for loot.

There is a mechanical loop that I have fallen into that I greatly enjoy, and I feel a little sad because I know it is entirely because I chose wisely when deciding on a class to start Sanctum with. Had I chosen something jankier, I probably would have bounced when I finished my 115 maps to unlock the first step of the Atlas. This is what happened to me during Lake of Kalandra when I tried Storm Brand. It is making me wonder if I now just go Righteous Fire each league, because if nothing else it can make currency to fund an additional class as it did with my Fire SRS Necromancer, and partially leveled Seismic Saboteur and Toxic Rain Trickster. Needing to have multiple characters for multiple different game modes seems extremely cumbersome, but it might just be the best way to approach Path of Exile.