Best ARPG gets better? Yup.
Basically a season character starts over from scatch, nothing in the stash, no recipes found, just like installing the game fresh with a new save game. But in the case of Diablo 3, they also have goals associated with each character. And each character has certain rewards for completing those goals. So each season they have a new Set that’s really powerful for each character.
In the case of Path of Exile, each season also involves a new twist on how to play. So for instance, it might be like the regular campaign, but every few minutes a new set of season-specific enemies can attack you on top of the normal spawns. So some of the season-specific enemies really made a fresh run through the campaign fun in Path of Exile.
Day one purchase. No question. GD might’ve become my favorite ARPG, and I need to support that shit. ;)
Same here. This is a day 1 buy, easy.
I’m buying on day 0, so take that, you latesters!
I’m playing it now, like a true fan.
I went to the future to pick up the Grim Dawn 2 Game of the Year bundle from Humble for like, $1.
Suckers.
Today I went back to my level 87 Purifier on Ultimate difficulty. Softcore. You know, just to relax.
Boy, Ultimate difficulty is almost overwhelming. The green loot that’s dropping is amazing. I could just look through my loot for hours. Just one evening loot run, where you fill all your five bags with green, blue and purple stuff. There’s just so much of it everywhere on Ultimate difficulty. Every boss drops a Mythical blue or a purple or several greens. And you think… pfffft, greens, are they even worth picking up? But then you look at the greens, and they have a gazillion properties, huge bonuses, higher armor than any of the purple pieces that I’m wearing. Like if I replaced one of the purple pieces I’m wearing with a green, I would have two to three times the armor I have now. And that’s just armor. Each of the resists on these greens is just huge, as are the damage bonuses and other weird properties.
So to really evaluate it properly, you have to sit there for a few minutes, and just read all these properties. Let’s see, the Acid damage increase doesn’t help me. The fire damage does. The Chaos resist is useless to me, but the Aether resist is great, etc.
So yeah, town runs are time consuming.
Meanwhile, the actual enemies with stars over their heads (there’s a LOT of them by this point in the game) are pretty fun to fight. My Thermite mines are the best. No matter who the enemy is, if I can get them to step on some of my mines, it lowers their Chaos and Fire and Lightning resist enough that even the toughest hombre with a gazillion hit points starts dying really fast after Thermite mine exposure. I love it. And my two inquisitor runes, fire and ice, keep them stunned or frozen so they can’t get to me most of the time.
I finally have a blacksmith unlocked, and found the portal to the town where I’ll find the Warden. It’s funny to me that they do such a good job in this game of constantly needing dynamite. Even on Ultimate difficulty, I still can’t get into an area that needs 3 dynamite, because I never have that much dynamite on me.
I was going to post to ask how to change to Elite difficulty, but as it turns out, my google-fu worked for me for once!
So my character just killed the ‘end boss’ in the Necropolis and I can now restart on Elite difficulty… or, since I saw a nice cutscene it appears I can continue in Veteran difficulty to Malmouth. Which should I do? This is my pet Cabalist and he hasn’t had many problems killing anything up to this point. I did try a few minutes of Elite this morning and he didn’t have any issues with the starting mobs. I’m level 49 if that makes a difference.
I finished the xpac on veteran and was in the mid 60’s. It was fun. started a new game on elite and am in act 2 now with no problems playing Apostate. The RNG does like to troll me. There is a level 50 blue 3 piece set that gives +1 to all skills. I found the ring and necklace within 10 minutes of each other but the last piece eludes me. Painful. I’m in the low 70’s now but would still like to find it.
Go back to normal and at least get up to malmouth, so that you can activate the coven, barrowholm, and malmouth faction gains. A lot of the stuff you kill in other areas will contribute to those factions, and they all have some very good faction items. The expansion is a pretty decent difficulty spike, so you may not need to bump it up to veteran.
Woo hoo, beat Loghorrean on hardcore Veteran with my battlemage.
It was a nearer run thing than I though it would be. All my damage was melee but I couldn’t stay in front of the big guy for too long at a stretch because of his poison puke ability, so it turned into a marathon. My biggest mistake was not bringing enough potions. I guess I’d thought you could riftgate out mid battle, but you can’t. I burned through about 60 potions and only had 5 left when I killed the boss. Once my constitution was drained the potions were my only real source of health regen.
Next time I’ll figure out how many potions I need, then take twice that many.
Back to my Purifier last night, I hit level 88, and I’m at the last Waypoint before the Warden on Ultimate difficulty. It’s funny that a lot of the green loot that’s dropping for me now requires level 94. That’s crazy. It took all of Act 1 on Ultimate to get from Level 87 to 88, so I don’t think I’m going to be level 94 any time soon.
I also noticed I have both versions of the reset potions, 3 each, in my inventory. So theoretically at this point, I could completely redesign my Purifier into a different type of character if I wanted. I wonder how I got 3 of those potions each? Shouldn’t I get one in Normal/Veteran in Malmouth, one in Elite, and then eventually one in Ultimate when I get that far?
Anyway, it’s an interesting idea to take stock of what inventory items I want to use, and design a new Purifier around certain inventory that I have on hand, instead of just haphazardly doing every type of damage known to mankind, which is what I’m doing now.
I don’t know why I started thinking about a viable Defiler today, but it happened, and I couldn’t come up with any kind of synergies. A Defiler is Demolitionist + Necromancer. A Demo is all about Fire, Lightning and Chaos damage enhancements and debuffs, and Necromancer is about Vitality, Cold and Aether damage and debuffs. It’s got to be the worst possible character combination in the game, surely.
But then I did notice a little bit of overlap in Physical damage. Fire Strike and it’s direct follow-up skill add to physical damage to your default attacks. And then the damage buff that the Demo gets only adds to fire/lightning, BUT it’s followup adds a lot to Pierce and Physical damage. So you could really buff up your physical damage with each attack on the Demo, and then with the Necro you can debuff physical resistance with your aura, and your exclusive skill, Harbinger of Souls, converts 15% of your physical damage to Vitality damage and also enhances your Vitality damage that way.
So I think a life-stealing Vitality/Physical/Fire/Aether/Poison damage Defiler could actually pretty viable and fun to play. And by viable, I mean viable in Hardcore, thanks to the life-stealing. I’ll have to look into the Devotion tree too, there might be some cool stuff in there that adds to the Defiler.
Argh! My hardcore lvl 51 battlemage died for the stupidest of reasons … I went afk to deal with my toddler and forgot to press pause. :(
Now I’ll never know if she could have beaten elite Loggo.
At least I put all her stuff in a shared stash before she died. Only just discovered you can share stashes between HC characters.
I did end up creating that Defiler. He kicks ass and yet, inexplicably, sometimes the screen turns red and his health is really low. I haven’t quite figured out why he’s near death so often. I don’t think he’ll last long. I’ll try to get Vitality damage and health steal as soon as I can to avoid an early death. And maybe switch to getting exclusively defensive devotions from now on.
Maybe it’s because I’m creating him as 2-handed weapon holder. Maybe that’s not such a good idea in hardcore, not without proper life stealing first.
That’s a terrible way to lose a HC character. Jeez. That will probably happen to me as well at some point.
Is there any way to drop quests you are not interested in any more? I know you can turn them off so they don’t display in the quest tracker but I wanted to drop them completely.
I doubt if there is such an option. Especially if you can choose not to display it already.
Sorry dude, that rando’s hidden stash of vendor-trash greens will haunt you forever.