Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.
What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.
I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.
I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.
I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.
I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was a hellacious day for me, and today I am off… so since I did not get a chance to blog I am dropping a mega topic on you. Mostly this is something that I had been kicking around in my head for weeks but I simply did not feel like I had the time to devote to the topic during my normal morning blogging window. We are going to talk about Path of Exile and how the scope and complexity of that game has completely changed my viewpoint on what exactly the term “Endgame” means. At this point in the Settlers of Kalguur League, I am mostly in a game mode of wrapping up challenges, and honestly could in theory walk away happily at any point. Did I complete everything in the league? Absolutely not. Do I feel the need to complete everything in the league? Absolutely not. This morning’s blog post if anything is a post about coming to terms with not being able to do all of the things, or more so realizing that I don’t actually want to do them.
Sentinel League – July 2022
This journey is going to be illustrated as we walk through the last several leagues of Path of Exile, and how my perspective changed during each of them. While I first played Path of Exile in 2015, it was not until July of 2022 that I actually beat the ten-act campaign. I have fuzzy memories of playing during Delve, Heist, Expedition, Breach, and Scourge… and getting several acts deep into each of those characters but never really grasping the game to the level of being able to make it all the way through the end of Act 10. So basically my “Endgame” was beating the campaign… an activity that I now consider so trivial that I level characters for fun. I felt a real sense of accomplishment for getting that far into the game and in spite of not really having a clue what I was doing landed on a love for the ability Wintertide Brand.
Kalandra League – August/September 2022
The Lake of Kalandra League was the first time I was actively playing the game and prepared on the day the league launched. During Sentinel, I had spent time playing Explosive Arrow Ballista and also half-assing my own thing with Wintertide Brand, and given that I liked the brand playstyle so much I decided to explore Storm Brand. I found a guide and attempted to follow it, and then set my goal for that league to complete my atlas… which is all 115 Maps with bonus objectives including the ten unique maps. My “Endgame” in the context of this league was accomplished on September 12th, and honestly… I did not play much more than that. I had a rough time in Kalandra and part of it was how rippy some of the mobs were and other parts were how clueless I was about how one should actually build a character. In either case, I did not have as much fun as I hoped I would have, and damned near swore off the game until my friend Ace got excited for the next League Start. However, I definitely felt like I had reached the Endgame because getting through 115 maps… on a character that was not even vaguely close to having elemental resistance caps… was a challenge.
Sanctum League – December 2022/January 2023
As I said above, this is the league that I almost did not play. I set forth intending to learn how not to die and in doing so I embraced my old friend Righteous Fire for the very first time and learned the goodness that is Pohx. This was the league where I learned that Elemental Resistances were not suggestions, but the absolutely hard requirement to survive in maps and if possible you wanted to do something to increase your caps. I also learned one of the ways you can build a character that feels tanky and unstoppable. This is also the first league that I played where I absolutely hated the league mechanic. There are so many “Sanctum Enjoyers” out there, but running around and never getting hit is not a gameplay style that I enjoy. My player fantasy is to be an unstoppable juggernaut that bulldozes over top of the enemies… and RF with its constant reliance on Shield Charge really fits that fantasy. My endgame was getting through all 115 maps, and while I did not make a post about accomplishing that goal it happened at some point around December 27th. Apart from not dying… I branched out and played with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… cementing my love of SRS going forward. I had a freaking blast and it was during this league that I think some of the levers of understanding clicked into place that would serve me well going forward allowing me to build not just one character that worked, but at least four of them in a single league.
Crucible League – April/May 2023
Crucible was the first league where I was pretty much the only person in my friend group actively playing the game. This meant more than anything, that I needed to invent my own goals because the friendly competition of knocking out objectives was missing. In Sanctum I dabbled in Delve and had quite a bit of luck with it, deciding that it would be my core focus for Crucible. Again we had a league with a lackluster mechanic, and as such I kept my head down and focused on learning how to make currency that was needed to fund building characters. “Delve Provides” is the motto of Jorgen a YouTuber that almost exclusively covers Delve content, and Crucible is the league where I put that into practice. Trading became something that I tolerated to something that I actually enjoyed doing and as such in many ways, it became my endgame for this league. During Sanctum I had managed to hit enough of the challenges to earn a tiny totem pole for my hideout and as such I knew that I wanted to do at least 19 of them in order to earn another one… which has since then become basically my goal for every league. During the tail end of Sanctum, I recorded a few videos to highlight my point of what felt good and why Diablo IV did not at all… and that turned into me recording videos talking about various side projects and builds during the Crucible league.
Ancestor League – August/September/October 2023
For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided to league start something other than Righteous Fire. This was a mistake. While I was able to zip through the campaign extremely quickly on my Lightning Arrow Raider build… I struggled quite a bit with survival when I hit maps… more specifically the transition between yellow and red maps and getting my first two voidstones. So a few days into the league… I was running up a Righteous Fire Juggernaut and essentially starting over. I eventually came to love the Lightning Arrow gameplay style, but greatly preferred running it on Champion. Trial of the Ancestors was another league where the mechanic was sort of meh… enjoyable but also did not really seem to have much of a point to running it. So I focused my time on getting better at mapping and starting to deep dive into various league mechanics like Legion and Breach on a bow character. I also created a staggering eight characters during this league, my favorite alt of which was probably the SRS Guardian. My endgame was learning league mechanics that I had not really dealt with before… and also getting a totem pole.
Affliction League – Bel League – December 2023/January/February 2024
My friend Ace HATES trading. It isn’t so much that they hate buying items… they hate the way Trade is implemented within Path of Exile and the required interaction with other players. During Ancestors League they decided to go Solo-Self-Found which essentially walled them off from the rest of us. In Affliction League I proposed that we start a private league that would take trading off the table, but also allow us to share resources with each other. So as a result “Bel League” was born, and it was simultaneously one of the most enjoyable Path of Exile experiences, and also deeply frustrating. This is also the patch where they largely wrecked Righteous Fire in its previous state, so as a result I decided to try out Boneshatter, a build I had never played before… making my endgame learning how to play this dumb thing in a Semi-SSF environment where I could not buy my way out of problems. Mechanically being able to share resources with other folks felt amazing… but in all cases, there was only so far I could reasonably take a build before running into a wall that was lack of resources or lack of crafting knowledge. We kept the private league going for 40 days… which maybe was overstaying its welcome. When it dropped both Kodra and I went nuts with the economy and funding dumb builds. He got a Mirror of Kalandra drop, and this was the first league where I bought both a Mageblood and a Headhunter. So my endgame shifted from Solo-Self-Found sentimentality to breaking the dumb state of the economy wide open and building some truly broken characters.
Necropolis League – March/April/May 2024
Necropolis League was simultaneously a bad league and one of the best leagues. The League crafting mechanic was dumb and overly complicated, but the sweeping game system changes allowed for an environment where you could do some truly dumb things while mapping. In past leagues, I had reached this point where characters many times where they were comfortable enough, but I never really micromanaged my way into hyper-optimizing them. During Necropolis my “endgame” was seeing how far I could push my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which ended up requiring another Mageblood… but since so many of these were being created I got it for the super low price of 50 Divines. I spent so much time exploring the interactions with different combinations of scarabs, and this is also the league where I accepted that I don’t actually like “Bossing” and just bought a carry for my last two voidstones… the ones that take a stupid amount of time… so I could enjoy T16 mapping for the majority of the league. The endgame goal that I was not expecting was that I would ultimately hit 34 out of 40 challenges completed and get a massive totem pole for my hideout.
Settlers League – July/Current 2024
Now we are here during the Settlers League and I have to be honest… I am not sure what my endgame looks like as of today. Last night I pushed down to 400 Depth in Delve and knocked out my 19th Challenge for the league earning me a totem pole for my hideout. I’ve done a few T17s this league which was something that I could not accomplish during the last league. I’m level 98 and am trying to decide if I want to go ahead and make a push to hit 100, something that I have only accomplished before during Crucible and Necropolis. I would love to get my Widowhail build working… because right now it is doing more than enough damage but also completely unable to survive for more than five minutes when something gets the first hit in. If I can take that build to a comfortable state, my endgame goal might be grinding out the currency to buy it a Headhunter because of the two chase belts… I feel like Headhunter is way more interesting than Mageblood. I also want to try building some sort of bleed-based Gladiator since that is the new hotness so I will likely be running something up to do that. At this point, I have explored most of the endgame systems in Path of Exile and have firm opinions on what I like and don’t like. One thing I have not done is really dive into Blight Ravaged maps so maybe I will set that up as my new endgame goal… to reach a point of comfortability running them.
Endgames Shift Over Time
Essentially the entire point of this lengthy post was not necessarily about a trip down memory lane covering the last three years and Eight Path of Exile Leagues. Instead, it was to set up the notion that you should have a personal Endgame and you really should not allow the opinion of others to color your enjoyment. When you spend time on Reddit, YouTube, and Twitch… so much of the discourse around Path of Exile specifically tends to be about finding the most efficient way to print currency and “getting rich”. I’ve been fairly wealthy in this game, with enough currency to buy anything I wanted… and I gotta admit that is not a goal that I care about. Instead, I have to carve out personal goals that make me happy, that are things I actually care about and that I can focus on.
I have come to realize that this is true regardless of the game. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV and I am doing the things that I personally enjoy. Some of that involves raiding, but also I am not pushing myself to dive in deeper than I want. I remember back in World of Warcraft feeling like an absolute failure when our raid was not progressing as quickly as the others on the server. I felt the need to “keep up with the joneses” and personally blamed myself when we were not able to. I’ve reached a point where “Endgame” is whatever I want it to be. For some games, it is just getting through the campaign and then walking away happily until more story content is released, and in other games, it is trying to consume every last drop of goodness. Being able to set your own personal endgame that is not beholden to the progress of others feels like a requirement to play games like these and not drive yourself insane trying to keep up.
It took me years to get a SkyScale in Guild Wars 2, and I am super happy that I completed the grind… that also greatly improved my enjoyment of the game. However, I did not really feel like I was missing out on something all the time I spent not paying attention to it. When you face a game with over a decade’s worth of content that is still relevant… it becomes impossible to try and immediately encompass all of it. So Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, and Path of Exile all live in these bubbles of having way too much stuff going on to really try and zoom to the end of it without missing a beat. As such I have personally found it all the more important to determine my own goals and decide what I considered reaching the endgame to be in all of those cases. I’ve also given myself the flexibility to revise what those goals are over time.
What lodged this in my head the other day was watching the process a friend of mine has been going through with Path of Exile. They were overwhelmed and were in that state before finishing the campaign. Thing is… there is no rush. There is no real forward push saying you have to complete this much content in order to feel validated. Sure you will miss out on things… but the journey I have been on started in July of 2022 and each new league taught me important lessons that I have built upon to reach the point where I am today. I stopped playing on the Steam client during the last league, but at that point, I was at 2500 hours… and I have very easily put in another 500 hours after that. Path of Exile is the sort of game where even after 3000 hours I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and as a result, there is no way any player is going to do everything in a single go.
The Endgame is what you make of it, and your personal Endgame journey is just as valid as anyone else’s.
This morning I had a delightful experience. For a few months, we have been getting up at 5:30 and going for a walk before things heat up. Part of this experience is feeding the outdoor feral cats that visit our home. Generally speaking, we have Greybie, Skippy, Big Boy, and Blackie waiting on us out front of the house. This morning there was another little face peeking around the corner of the house and in the dark I thought at first it was a cat. Once I got a good look it was a skinny little possum, that troddled off once I had “perceived” it. After my walk, I go out into the backyard and feed Tripod the three-legged stray calico that lives there, and as I was walking back into the house I noticed this momma possum hanging out in front of me. She was pretty chill about it and largely did not move until I was just about to go back into the house… at which point she wandered off towards the cat food I had set out.
Surely the joeys are about to be weaned because they were pretty big and VERY active. I felt for the momma because one of them kept slipping down and covering her face… which would lead her to push them back up onto her back. We’ve had some pretty extreme reactions from our family as we have shown them pictures. I told my dad we had a new weird-looking cat, and he appreciated it because they live in the country and have all manner of visitors like this. Another family member has been squicked out by the possums and thought they looked scary. Me… I just think they are adorable and wish they would be my friend. I don’t dare attempt to pet one because they have very hurty-looking teeth. I kinda hope that we have a bunch of baby possums underfoot in the backyard honestly. I am wondering though if they are living under our deck.
Last night we continued our shenanigans and realized we had missed unlocking one dungeon… Lost City of Amdapor Hard. We ran through it, Sohm Al Hard, Hullbreaker Hard, and Great Gubal Hard. All in all they pretty much all went smoothly. I am still seeing the recurring thing about Reapers having ants in their pants and being unable to stand still. I did screw up and start one dungeon without tank stance on, but recovered pretty quickly. Things ended up going onto Ace… who was heavily shielded giving me plenty of time to pick it back up. I am consistently annoyed that Tank stance gets turned off constantly… and while I am usually good about hitting it first thing. Ace and I had gotten to talking about something over Discord and I completely forgot about it.
We got a bit of a late start last night so did not end up doing anymore Alexander, but we did duo Ravana and Bismark Extreme. Ravana was pretty easy and we one-shot it without much problem… giving us the confidence to try harder things. Bismark however took a couple of attempts for us to get a pattern going. The first failure was trying to kill both of the Snake adds at the same time…. then the second go I turned off tank stance and Ace heal/dpsd one down while I dpsd down the other… only to have Ace get knocked off the platform. On the third attempt, we executed everything pretty perfectly and got our kill. We attempted Thordan Extreme and just could not make it through the very final phase. There was some mechanic we were failing to do correctly…. which would knock us both out in a single hit so we are going to need to do some research on how to solo that fight. Either that or we just wait until we have more levels on us and attempt it again.
Probably the coolest part of last night is that we killed two Extremes and got two Lanners to drop. We both rolled on and I won the one from Ravana, and then passed on the one from Bismarck so we each got one. Honestly, the distribution is pretty perfect because my gear is way more red in theme, and theirs is way more white on average just because healer gear is usually white. We’ve made a pact that once my Path of Exile shenanigans wind down a bit we will probably start working on farming all of the lanners… doggos… etc on our Cactuar mains. I am pretty sure Ashgar and Thalen might want to get in on that nonsense as well. I had to turn back on the mount music so I could cruise around listening to the Ravana music. I am glad they chose the Phase 2 music instead of the Phase 1 music… but either is pretty great. Side note we also both got a pony from our Extreme ARR shenanigans.
In other news, I patched up World of Warcraft and logged in enough to make sure my friend Finni had gotten an invite to House Stalwart. I am not actively playing the game and it will probably be a while before I check out War Within, but I did run through the quests to unlock the Warband fully on my OG Main Belghast. Right now the Warband is showing my Dark Iron Warrior, Tauren Paladin, and Vulpera Hunter from Pandaria Remix. It seems as though the Warband bank is bricked at the moment… but this is apparently a known issue. At some point I will get in and play around some more with it. Probably when my Dark Iron Dwarf transfers over from Pandaria to Retail. That is probably going to be who I play War Within on because I had a lot of fun being a Dark Iron.
Finally, today is the league start for Path of Exile Settlers League and I have decided that I am once again going to level a Righteous Fire Chieftain. There is a meme over on Reddit that indirectly calls RF players Cowards and I am fine with that. Largely I enjoyed the leagues when I started RF and regretted starting something else on the leagues where I have not… ultimately rerolling at some point. It is my happy place and I have reached a point of acceptance around that. I like playing other builds and I will absolutely roll something else along the way to play as well. I just like having my good stable base of a character to get through the atlas and into the endgame before I start experimenting with other things. I know at some point I am going to make a Gladiator Bleed character of some sort… and maybe something focused around Retaliation skills as well. I also want to try building something around the new Warden ascendancy… but those are all side projects that I will do after building a stable base of currency on the Chieftain.
If you play any of the games that I play regularly feel free to join me in the Super Dungeon Friends discord. It is a little community that I run that is admittedly not super active, but we have a league chat channel for example where we talk a lot about Path of Exile while the league is going on. I keep getting the notion that I am going to start streaming again at some point, and if I ever do I will be hanging out in this Discord while live. All are welcome pending they agree to the rules upon entry. It pretty much follows the guidelines that I have for this blog as can be seen in my Core Beliefs page, so if you align to those thoughts you would probably enjoy yourself just fine.
Good Morning Folks. Over the fifteen years of this blog, I have attempted to create a good number of reoccurring posts. In all cases, I have failed to maintain them for very long. However, one of the series that I managed to keep going relatively frequently was “regularly playing”. The idea behind this is that every few months I would update the similarly named widget in my sidebar showing what games I could be found in. If you mouse over one of the buttons, you get a popup indicating how you can find me in said game. If you click on the button it transfers you to the game page, or better yet if a profile system exists it links directly to my character profile. However this only really works if I update things frequently… and I have not made one of these posts since October 2022. At some point along the way I updated the sidebar and just did not make a post… poor form Bel. Yesterday I updated my bar again and this morning I am going to finally acknowledge the proper format and make a post.
Traditionally these posts have been broken down into four categories:
To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.
Since I am largely “off the format” I am not going to attempt to catch up from the last post in October 2022, but instead talk about changes in the bar that I made yesterday.
To Those Remaining
Diablo III – PC
I have to be honest, we are not starting off with the strongest footing. Diablo III is likely hanging by a thread at this point. I have left it installed and very rarely poke my head into the game, usually for the first weekend of a new season… only to disappear rapidly. Diablo III is sort of my baseline ARPG at this point and the bare minimum amount of joy that a game needs to give me in order to engage with it frequently. There has been a lot of innovation in this game over the years since it has launched, but honestly, after getting into Path of Exile it feels extremely simplistic. There are times I want that, but I am not playing this nearly as regularly as I think I probably should.
Diablo IV – PC
For the longest time, Diablo IV was also hanging by a thread, but I feel like with Season 4 the game has redeemed itself. I have at least as much fun as I do playing Diablo III during the start of a new Diablo IV season. I still do not consider D4 to be a terribly brilliant game. Many of the features are “aggressively fine” or more likely the bare minimum needed to make something enjoyable. Blizzard has lost the plot. What I mean by that is that Blizzard games used to have a clear focus and a clear vision, and now it feels like they make the safest possible decisions. The content updates they have added to Diablo IV are uninspired, and essentially the most basic iterations on the same general themes. They are no longer “bad” and I hope over time they will actually start being “good”. For as much as I disliked the Necropolis mechanic in Path of Exile, it was at least really interesting and attempting to do something cool. Diablo IV feels like the content diversity found in a McDonald’s menu… where everything sort of feels the same.
Fallout 76 – PC
Fallout 76 is a game that I enjoy greatly… when I remember to play it. That probably sounds harsher than I mean it to, but I always seem to have objectives in other games that I am working towards and sort of forget to log into this game instead. I think the challenge is that when I do play Fallout 76 I need large blocks of uninterrupted time because the world is extremely unpredictable… or at least I am not seasoned enough to make it FEEL predictable given that I am still leveling. I know my friend Nimgimli is playing a lot of this game right now and it would be fun to run around with someone else… save for the fact that my level range is probably too low to reasonably link up with anyone. I know Thalen also plays this game fairly regularly and I would probably feel way more comfortable imposing upon his grace to drag me along through content. Anyway, it is a super interesting game that gets a shocking amount of updates, but also sort of quietly just exists in the background doing its own thing.
Guild Wars 2 – PC
I’ve had a series of sort of lackluster game discussions here in a row, but now we reach Guild Wars 2 which has been one of my primary games for a while now. My history with GW2 is pretty wild given that I was an alpha tester… resigned from said alpha test… and then struggled with trying to get into the game from launch until 2017 when I finally began to grok it. However, since 2018 I have been properly hooked on the game and now spend 99.9% of my time on my Norn Longbow/Greatsword Power Soulbeast Ranger. I know those are a lot of words to be said in a row, especially if you know nothing about the game but essentially that told those who do know what I run around with build-wise. This past year I have crafted two legendary weapons, thanks in large part due to the headstart boxes that you can get through the Astral Ward chores. I’ve been working towards crafting a third one, but need to do a full world completion and farm up a gift of battle before I can craft it. Damned fun game and especially great for drop-in gameplay without the need for other players. However, I do want to get into organizing Strike and Fractal groups on “the regular” so that I can expand my horizons.
Last Epoch – PC
Last Epoch is another game that I am deeply devoted to. I am pretty much going to play every new cycle that releases, which is the name for their seasonal content loop. There is one starting in early July and I am pumped for the additions to the game that it is going to bring. Last Epoch and Diablo IV are an interesting contrast game-wise because they are both games that are “just starting out” which means they lack some depth of content. However, everything that Eleventh Hour Games introduces is deeply interesting in some way. The new patch is adding even more systems to the game and for the first time feels like something Grinding Gear Games would have created as a league in Path of Exile. If you have not had a chance to watch the Harbingers of Ruin trailer and are in any way a fan of ARPGs I urge you to check it out.
Path of Exile – PC
Friends… this has been my “main” game for the last few years. It took me four leagues to finally really begin to grok how to properly play this game, and even then… I tend to prefer tanky “zdps” builds. While I have a mountain of complaints about various aspects of Path of Exile, I love it so freaking much. I am uncertain there will be a time when I am not playing this game at league start, and it would take a heck of a lot to draw my attention away from it permanently. For the last five leagues I have earned a totem pole for my hideout and I feel like I want to keep that traditional rolling. Necropolis is a league where I checked out fairly early, but so did most of the player base. That is not to say that I won’t be there with bells on when the next league launches sometime in August. Do I recommend this game to other players? Honestly not really. This is quite possibly the most obtuse mess you will ever encounter, but if you can climb that mountain and reach a point of understanding… it becomes deeply rewarding.
To The New and Returning
Final Fantasy XIV – PC
Folks I am so happy to add Final Fantasy XIV back to my list of games, because with it has come a pretty significant change in my perspective. I’ve had this mental block against grouping with other players… and more specifically against tanking for strangers. I can’t really trace it back to a single incident that led me down this path, but it was that way for several years and recently I was able to return to doing the thing that I love the most… tanking. Nothing makes the heart grow fonder than being isolated from FFXIV for two days… and now I am pumped as heck for the drop of Dawntrail tomorrow. I am really looking forward to leveling through the content and then starting to get up so that hopefully I can do the raid when it launches. I am also super pumped that my friend Ace is equally bought back in and it is going to be a blast doing nonsense like roulettes with them.
World of Warcraft – PC
I’m also tentatively adding back in World of Warcraft to the list. I came back several months ago and played through the Dragonflight campaign and largely enjoyed it. Then I played a little bit of Plunderstorm and really came back properly during Pandaria Remix. It was all of the grouping with strangers in PMIX that I feel probably got me over my mental block of grouping with strangers. World of Warcraft can have some pretty toxic players in random grouping, and honestly… everyone in Pandaria Remix was delightful. Maybe this was an anomaly or maybe I just built up the negativity of strangers to a fever pitch in my mind and it did not necessarily represent reality. Maybe the WoW community has just aged to the point of maturity and they are less awful than I remember them being. Whatever the case I enjoyed myself and plan on giving War Within a shot when it drops. I doubt I will ever go back to mainlining this game but it is fun enough to visit from time to time.
To Those Departing
Honkai Star Rail – PC
This one had been hanging from a thread for quite a while. It seemed that I was only logging in during a major announcement to soak up some free pulls and spend zero time actually playing the game. I uninstalled this yesterday and decided that I am finally going to stop pretending I am actually engaging with it. I am not dissatisfied with the game, I just haven’t been in the mood for it. I had a heck of a lot of fun playing it for a while, but “Space China” and how much content was contained within it and the constant need to keep going back there sort of killed the pace for me. The first two “planets” were freaking great, but things bogged down in the Luofu. I am sure at some point I will return when I am in the mood for turn-based combat, but for now I figured I would reclaim the disk space and the mental bandwidth.
New World – PC
This was honestly the game that prompted me to update my sidebar yesterday. I think I am officially done caring about New World. The recent marketing debacle has led me to believe that the game is no longer going in the direction I want it to be going. Yesterday I made the step of uninstalling the game for the first time in three years and reclaiming the large amount of disk space that it was taking up. It is an interesting game, but it has gone the way of Bungie and removed content that I liked from the game… namely First Light turning into the expansion zone for Angry Earth, and now Cutlass Keys being consumed to build a zone for the upcoming Aeternum rebranding. I checked the fuck out of Destiny when they started vaulting content, and what they have done feels pretty similar to that. I get that they are struggling and this whole ARPG rebranding nonsense is a last-ditch effort to become relevant… but discounting the few players who were playing your game is the wrong way to get there.
Wrapping Up
Maybe I won’t wait a year before making one of these posts again. I seem to have settled into a series of forever games once more. I have my cycle of ARPGs that I shift between each time they release new content, and then I have a few MMORPGs to bounce back and forth between. I am pretty happy with the state of things because there is almost always something that I want to be doing in each of them. There will of course be single-player games that I spend a weekend and play through like I did with Horizon Forbidden West when it was released on PC, but really… very few of those last long enough to ever make it onto one of these posts. For now, I am really looking forward to Dawntrail dropping tomorrow and then the Harbingers cycle in Last Epoch in early July.
