The Path of Exile Iceberg Explained

welcome Exile I'm sure you're pretty excited recently with the news about Path of Exile 2. well in celebration I have created The Path of Exile Iceberg not to be confused with a map no no no anyways this whole Iceberg right here contains exactly 100 entries spread evenly across five layers each theme for a progression point in the game the entries here range from many faces of the game including some game facts the company behind it content creators memes and more I wanted this Iceberg to serve as an introductory point for new players that is not only interested in the game but also wanting to know the general culture surrounding it like many icebergs we go from the top with well-known facts to the bottom with lesser known facts but to add to it there are also going to be some entries that are deemed as controversial to some degree so we also got least controversial at the top to most controversial at the bottom because as much as I like this game there are some flaws that we do need to acknowledge but with that being said are you still seeing exile then let's dive [Music] still alive are we Chris Wilson well I had to give the headliner to the main face of the game after all so Chris Wilson from grinding gear games hi I'm Chris Wilson from grinding gay games hi I'm Chris Wilson from grinding gear games hi I'm Chris Wilson from grinding gear games he is one of the founders of the company who works as CEO and managing director he is the one mainly seen among several presentations and interviews divulging information of new game content and insight of the company he and his co-founders in 2006 desired heavily for the next arpg and decided to not wait any longer and start a GG right there and then and develop Path of Exile as we see it today Chris always aims to be involved with the community the best that he can even in situations where backlash is high as he is willing to be the punching bag as dedicated as he is he can be quite stubborn with the decision he makes which results in some negative takes from the player base and even spawning some memes as a result in the end however he does what he believes is best for the game and I doubt he's doing it out of spite as Innovative as Path of Exile is someone has got to be there to make the tough decisions and Chris Wilson is willing to lead the charge well that feels amazing tabula rasa this hair is a very sought after unique at leak start for its six length wide sockets especially when leveling more than one character it saves you the headaches of constantly finding new Gear with the right colors and links thus making your leveling experience more smooth and flexible granted there is no defense or other modifiers so for newer players out there do be careful when using this personally I'm a fan of the older design that looks like a t-shirt because it does not look lore friendly that's why I love it so much zizerin scissoring is a well-known content creator covering Path of Exile and arpgs since October 2015. his content is very Community focused with teaching viewers the ins and outs of Poe through League start guides is poe University series covering Poe news Etc he's also a very big fan of playing hardcore which inevitably showcases him how he died in almost every run which is likely why he always ends his videos with try to die less than I do his General helpful and friendly nature would also net him the position as Ambassador on twitch's Safety Council and lastly he is known for running a racing event called The Gauntlet that takes place near the end of almost every leak in it players compete in a Solo cell phone hardcore environment to complete objectives to earn various prizes like cash MTX PC parts gift cards and so on all the while having to deal with special difficulty modifiers like this recent one right here yeah I'm not a hardcore gamer enough for that skill tree quitters I'm sure you probably have been there when this happened after killing hillock and leveling up you earned her first skill point and open up the menu to allocate it what do you see a massive web of passive skills that likely left you in shock at that point the absolute size of it might have scared off new players from continuing on most recent example I've witnessed was with the Shojo zentria as seen here thank you and that is only one layer although she did go as far as completing the dweller of the deep Quest this moment is one of many examples new players can face and feel overwhelmed as a result and trust me we've all been there just imagine how new players would react to the atlas passive skill tree because Dear God [Music] oh methyl methyl or methylification is another notable content creator who is very dedicated to Poe Sense close beta a lot of his content focuses on making many ridiculous bills and documenting his findings his extensive knowledge of the game and experimentation with builds over the years heavily influences the metagame like crazy if there's a stupid idea for a build he has likely done it and made it work so if you want to know what a meme build is like that actually works is the guy you go to all while having a Down to Earth laid-back vibe to his videos and streams and he does Track Running and rock climbing Brady Giga Chad visual clutter especially more in recent times Path of Exile has been known for having a lot of visual clutter that makes it difficult to ascertain at any given moment the following list includes your own MTX the skills that you use many types of enemies the amount of enemies mods onset enemies many moves of send enemies Loot on the floor High saturated locations League mechanic overlap and much more I'm sure Gigi is doing what they can to make any combat encounter distinct in its visuals but then again we're making it worse for ourselves anyways the touch of God this is referring to the high Templar Dominus who is the main guide that sentenced you to Ray class as an exile keep it comes the boss that you fight against in act 3 and one of his moves involves him having to say the iconic line the touch of God and slamming his fist into the ground resulting in one hit for the uninitiated for a good while in the earlier years Dominus was considered to be the final boss of the game and as such we've heard his iconic line many times over and to some of us probably got PTSD because of getting one shot all the time oh God do I have to talk about him okay yes he is a prominent twitch streamer that reaches over 10K views on average and he is known for playing Path of Exile but just through osmosis he just exudes this hardcore God gamer Vibe and yet he keeps dying a lot people say it's an act I don't know I don't watch him if you like that style of entertainment that's fine it just isn't for me I mean he's got to be doing something right if he's got that big of a following so yeah guys it's okay I don't actually hate him anyways headhunter by far Headhunter is the most iconic unique item in the entire game aside from having life attributes and increased damage to rares being able to steal all modifiers from a rare monster for a solid minute makes this item highly desired at least to Casual players for high-end players feelings are usually mixed as having 100 can make the game boring or it just wasn't the same as before as it did get indirectly nerfed some time ago it went from gating modifiers that can stack to only one instance of each modifier at any given time but with a longer duration nowadays players are more interested in Mage blood and it shows with the price history being much higher and consistent compared to headhunter but nonetheless the belt still has its uses and its Legacy cannot be forgotten Ziggy D yeah I realize I'm including a lot of content creators on this list but it's good that we cover our bases as ziggity got his star covering Diablo 3 but when Path of Exile came along during close beta he covered a lot of aspects of the game like beginner's guides crafting patch notes builds and more it was very much an earlier adopter to Path of Exile and as a result of his dedication he is the one that does the special q a segments with Chris Wilson during League reveals Diablo refugees this is the community's way of describing new players who previously enjoyed the Diablo franchise but was turned away from it for one reason or another likely due to a mortal being so cash grabby and probably Diablo 4 just not delivering up to the hype so now they're in the search of wanting more out of their arpgs and rest assured Path of Exile has got you covered path of building if you are aware how overwhelming that Poe is going to be you've likely seen guides making use of the software as the name implies path of building is what allows you to plan your build ahead of time with setting up the passive skill tree gem links gear and doing stat calculations it is also capable of importing and exporting builds for example if you want to take a closer look at a build on poe.ninja you can press the button to copy the code and you can import it straight into the program and you can have a closer look in how everything clicks do take calculations like DPS with a grain of salt unless you or someone else has done the math correctly because some skill interactions are always easy to calculate Tai Thai killer well known in the community as a prominent racer and speedrunner Tai Thai killer first got started right when version 1.0 came out on October 2013. he initially didn't click with the game with how confusing it was however years later when breach was about to launch his friend which funny enough is named Chris got him back into the game and was floored with the way he progressed to the end game it was then he vowed to level faster one day when fall of orieth was in beta he took notes of a run by den and doom and used it as a foundation to learn how to race from there his skills improved and participated in many Community racing events the biggest ones of course was the finals at Exile con 2019 and 2023 while he only got fourth place and third place respectively getting to the files in the first place is no easy feat which is still commendable for Tai Tai and the other Racers involved einhard Frey this character's entire existence is a meme just straight up first introduced during bestiary League einhard The Beastmaster is a very eccentric NPC with a passion for capturing beasts and the dialogue he spouts are just gold ready Exile it is time to hunt [Music] you are captured stupid beast but by far my favorite line that he says is this what do you not have Nets Exile this line actually has two meanings behind it firstly in bestiary League the main way you had to interact with the league mechanic was to manually throw Nets at beasts when it has little life left it was a clunky mechanic so now einhardt joins you to catch specific beasts and then he throws the Nets instead but the second meeting is a Jabet blizzard in reference to the Diablo Immortal reveal when the presenter said the line did you guys not have phones yeah and no this isn't the last time GGG has done this as you will hear later never sink as a new player you'll eventually get to the point of items on the ground ticking up too much screen space and only want relevant items where you need an item filter and you're likely appointed towards a website called filterblade and this is all thanks to Neversink much like most other players never think played the heck out of Diablo 2 and then by Word of Mouth try it out Path of Exile and he gradually got hooked by the time 2.0 beta came around where it introduced item filters he knew he was going to be spending too much time optimizing it given by his developer background so he did from there he and his friends top neck and haggis created filter blade as we see it today with the goal of filters to be intuitive customizable visualize why certain items are highlighted and to save and share this man does however run a patreon to keep the servers running and he really deserves it as item filters these days are honestly required in my opinion so definitely show your support to Neversink on the topic of item filters sound packs one of the functions item filters can do is to play a sound whenever a certain item drops if you're using filter Blade the sound selection can range from simple default sounds NPC voice lines the mirror of Calandra or custom-made packs by the community hey over here check this out of course you have the option to create your own meme filled sound pack yourself for me I created a Michael Rosen sound pack fantastic nice it has over 80 sounds I'm not joking Becks Bex is the marketing manager and Community lead over at grinding gear games she gets involved in the community by having to do interviews with notable content creators and most notably through her Twitter having to sprinkle bits of information during spoiler season of an upcoming League she can also sometimes be cryptic as well especially with her own divination card called cursed words Reddit user taco cat took all known words including the hidden words in the art and discovered an anagram that reads would you hide when krillson Master fishermen of winding pure Fame found you decoding how to catch fish I'll explain what that means later before I go to the next entry I have an update on Bex while I'm making this video on August 3rd 2023 Bex has posted a tweet saying that she is officially leaving grinding gear games this was very surprising since this was almost a week after XL con 2023 but she has really done a lot over the past 10 years with the way that she interacts with the community and I find that Excel con 2023 is the perfect swan song for her career at grinding gear games so thank you very much Bex and I hope that your next chapter is amazing Calandra this is a name that is often recognized through the most expensive currency in the game called the mirror of Calandra which allows you to copy any non-unique non-corrupted item because of its Rarity and function it became a well-known status symbol amongst players and for the design of the main logo so for a while we had nothing solidified within the lore on this iconic piece of currency until the lake of Calandra League and if some of you are shuddering by me mentioning it I'm going to be talking about it more in later entries in this league we finally get to see Calandra a being who possesses a body of an owl and the head of a human in her story calendar discovered the lake during a primary old time out of curiosity upon entering the lake she couldn't leave she attempted to leave many times but always ended up back of the lake with memories outside of the lake completely wiped all this you can do now is just observe the outside world and to do rare interaction to those that visited those that did visit were free to leave including us Exiles there was hope however when the order of the Gin found Calandra and made a vow to free her but upon uncovering the truth the Scrolls and scribes that read it were burned so yeah kilometer can't catch a break especially after the poor reception from many things surrounding this league which again I'll talk about later if you want to know more about the lore and theory on this character I recommend watching kitten cat noodles video on the subject and even more horror videos if you're invested in the lore of Path of Exile Venter recipes path of exile's way of Material Exchange is more varied than the traditional gold you receive in other arpgs in Path of Exile you have the vendor recipe system where you get multiple kinds of currency based on the state of the item or in combination with other items when selling knowing about the recipes especially the basic ones is crucial when starting a new league as you'll need many currencies for all sorts of crafting but currency isn't the only thing you can get you can also do crafting and item production through vendor recipes as well some examples include an iring with a blue gem gives you a sapphire ring a full unidentified rare set with item levels between 60 and 74 gives you two chaos orbs and a normal Caster weapon with gems that totals to at least 40 percent in quality with the cold tag gives you a magic weapon with plus one to level of all cold spell skill gems there is a lot more recipes than you can discover but if you're lazy like most of us I recommend you take a look at the POA Wiki to see the full list Diablo 2 inspired content it's no surprise that Path of Exile was built off the DNA of Diablo 2. even though Poe aims to do its own thing there are some pieces of content that is a bit on the nose in reference to Diablo 2. for skill gems spectro Helix functions similarly to the Paladin's blessed hammer eye of winter is the sorcerer's Frozen orb and Cyclone is barbarian's whirlwind even some Lee mechanics were formed from Diablo 2 with gwendin in Expedition with the gambling mechanic I'm sure there are more obvious nods to Diablo 2 and I'm sure it's not going to be the last the flame of Hope May flicker but it cannot be extinguished Vol or no balls for the uninitiated of all orb corrupts an item to change its properties unpredictably and in most cases brick your item as modifying it afterwards becomes more costly however the best outcome from it would be to get of all implicit a special modifier that is exclusive to corrupting items some of the best ones are on body armors which can grant additional levels to gems plus one percent to all Maximum resistances reduce damage taken and more as for the phrase Vol or no balls this is one of the early Poe phrases in the community that dares you to use a vol orb on one of your items or you got no balls to do it the joke of course you wouldn't do it but since it's way too risky unless you have a backup item flask piano this is the simple Act of pressing your flask keys in sequence as if you're playing the piano this is a default action for players for a long time and is still is to an extent this repetitive button mashing is not only brain dead but could also be potentially strenuous and cause injury this was something that was addressed later during the Expedition League where in stealing orbs make it so that the effect happens based on certain conditions and in killing Earth that gives increased effect but you don't gain charges while it's in effect to say if this worked it kinda did but what happened during Expedition league in general that's a toughy and you'll know why later Exile crimes have you bothered to check why the Exiles are being exiled well let's go down the list the witch was ostracized by the villagers for her practice in the elemental and dark arts as such they burned her house down and drove her away from the village but she got even with having to destroy the village and the children were sent to daycare the shadow was a hired killer to assassinate someone important in orioth when he spoke to proudly to his members of The Guild of the night of his achievement he was ratted out and sent to rayquest the ranger was a loner just living off the land by hunting but to the oriathans they see this as poaching and now the ranger Hunts on raidclast the Duelist was a famous Gladiator in theopolis who had such an inflated Eagle that when a noble insults him the noble was killed and the Duelist was sent to rayquest the marauder akari Warrior was enslaved by the oriyathans after three years he had enough and rebelled against his Masters thus sending him to Ray class and free from slavery the Templar was part of a fashion called the order of the Templar whose more notable members were responsible for the cataclysm in raid class past upon having visions of this event the Templar sought out answers from his Brethren only then to be silenced and labeled as a heretic now the Templar sets foot onto rayquess to seek the truth and finally the Scion who was born in a family of corrupt Nobles for political reasons the Scion was forced into an arranged marriage for someone she had no romantic interest in then on that wedding night she promptly killed her husband now she walks Rey class in a new light that isn't barred by her upbringing gamer for life gamer for life is a YouTube channel centered on highlight compilations of Path of Exile the Creator started in July of 2015 with a few different gaming videos but quickly jumped over to Path of Exile to show off his own personal moments and guides then in April of 2017 he posted a video to offer anybody that would like to have a clip submitted to his channel for future compilations and from there he's been doing highlights ever since showing off the many facets of Path of Exile deaths and hardcore Epic Loot drops blessed RNG crafting glitches and more [Music] five ways no this doesn't mean anything sexual but this refers to the legion mechanic as you encounter Timeless monoliths and collect splinters you'll eventually create emblems which can then be used in your map device you can only start with 4 out of the five emblems but upon completing the encounter you'll unlock a 5th slot in your map device which will allow you to do all five emblems that's why it's called a five-way this was a good way to earn a lot of XP but as a 3.22 the XP increase was nerfed making other options now more competitive this is a buff pre-leak hyperpath of Exile is always an exciting time for Better or For Worse and it's often expressed through reading the patch notes but we just need that extra clarification to know if that something was buffed sign into the 2.4 atlas of world's patch notes there are a few lines showing numerical changes on some gems with a statement ending with this is a buff in italics this line stuck out so much that the player base uses this meme no matter what the context is but you know what having to deal with Nerfs on a league by League basis we need some form of copium with this meme League start cosplays as part of the ritual for leak start twitch streamers can opt in in doing cosplay for viewers to see sometimes relating to the league itself one of the examples of this of course is methyl as seen here it's often amusing to see how creative the streamer can get with whatever materials they have lying around while I'm at it I do want to acknowledge the effort of cosplays over at XL con showing off the various NPCs and even some of them that are wearing well-known unique items very well done guys Ward this is a rather odd defense mechanic in the game right now for the longest time we are given three known defense types armor for physical reduction evasion rating to evade attacks and energy Shield that protects your life in most cases but what about Ward this is the fourth defense type that was included in the Expedition League where you can get items that are exclusive to that mechanic with this defense type Ward reduces the damage taken from a hit equal to that amount of Ward goes on cooldown for 4 seconds and instantly return his back the best that I could see to make this viable is pairing it up with evasion but even then the only way to scale Ward is through the gear itself or even on some other gear that has a special modifier like increased Global defenses so there sadly is no other option like no passive skills keystones none of that stuff hopefully gdg will explore Ward further one day SS drain contagion Trickster for multiple leagues Essence dream contagion trickster was a popular choice for League star builds with how well the two skills interact with each other how it works is that you place contingent on the enemy and following it up with lesson strain the effect of contagion will take the chaos damage of essence strain and spread it to nearby enemies giving it a smooth playstyle this league starter was popularized by zizerin to the point of just becoming a meme but by version 3.17 he finally killed the meme as as his dream contagion trickster is now seen as okay compared to other bills no longer and as of 319 the truckstart no longer has a syncy passive skills relating to chaos or damage over time enki's arkwitch this is a very historical build within Path of Exile that dates back to December of 2014 in the forums this build is very simple you cast Arc and it just easily chains and kill mobs hence fourth an enticing choice for new players and it's still being updated to this day how viable it is right now I can't really say as it has been a while for me but in the latest edited Post in the forums enki states that the current setup isn't all that doable and is right now experimenting with different lightning spells and if you wanted to play Arc that badly hierophant is the much better option according to poe.ninja so the legacy of enki's arkwitch would seem to be coming to an end and I'm kind of sad honestly but let's be thankful that it did exist in the first place as it did introduce new players to the game with a simple build Pizza totems this is referring to the skull flame blast a channeling skill that creates a glowing ring of fire that explodes the graphic of flame blast with its bright orange outline reminds us too much of pizza add in the convenience of totems because standing still yourself is a death sentence and you got pizza totems this is a build that I personally mess with dating back to best serial league and it was amusing and it got the job done through the campaign but I have not tested it in maps nowadays there are new things to bring it up to Snuff as demonstrated by Captain Lance in a recent video but then again this is totems we're talking about and not everyone can resonate with that play style but hey we all like pizza don't we Oni garoshi this is a rather ridiculous sword both in its stats and how to get it the signature stats in this sort includes physical damage scaling per level quick chance the her Embrace buff on ignite where you cannot be stunned physical as extra fire unaffected by burning ground immune to freeze chill and ignite and 20 increase Attack cast and movement speed you'll also take fire damage per second per level while in her Embrace and lastly it's fully linked with six sockets and you need to use both hands and she talks so where in the heck do you get this well you need to kill uberhillic without leaving the Twilight strand which involves creating multiple characters and rotating between them to level them up until finally Uber Helix spawns do I recommend doing this um no you'll lose like eight to ten hours on average by doing this you're probably better off having to get a fishing rod wait fishing let's talk about that fishing a boat leak there is quite the fascination of fishing in boats and Path of Exile that is littered with Easter eggs joke items and all things nautical themed the earliest information on anything fishing related likely started with open Beta in 2013. players could encounter a very rare albino Roa which drops a feather like it can be used as bait players can get fishing rods while wearing fairgraves tricorn or by extreme chances you'll meet with krillson Master fisherman of whining pure Fame and yes it is who you think it is this is what I was referring to earlier on the Beck's cursed words anagram now there is more to the fishing Easter egg mostly through definition cards but what about the idea of a boat leak that again is likely because of the fishing Easter eggs but the direct connection I can think of was the game originally had a character select screen taking place on a boat there could be some other sources on social media that keeps teasing about the idea of boat league but we all know that'll never happen instead let's have jagex do that idea and see how well that turns out this will not be an escape this is one of the lines spoken by the maven one of the in-game Pinnacle bosses what might send shivers down your spine with this quote is that it's a line spoken when she starts the memory game she'll teleport to the center and begin highlighting three different sections of the arena and you are to repeat the sequence while avoiding the charge up blast stepping on the wrong section will accelerate the charge up if you complete the memory game while standing in it or the arena gets filled you basically get one shot and it gets progressively worse you start with three sections to memorize going up to six with rotating lightning beams in the Final Phase from my personal experience with her debut in 3.13 I had to fight her while I was bedridden while using a wireless keyboard and a mouse and I lost all of my portals but in my second attempt I only died four times so don't be like me when you're recovering from ankle surgery to fight the maven with wireless peripherals it's just bad molten strike Nerfs this one oddly fascinates me whenever patch notes are imminent the first meme that is said by people is multi-strike is nerfed slashed removed but why well it could be that molten strike was genuinely a good skill back in the day the first instance of his downfall that I could find started in 3.5 with helmet enchantments decreasing the amount of projectiles by one in 3.7 you have to actually hit the enemy to produce the projectiles and the projectiles themselves still 50 less damage in 3.9 the point-blank Keystone went from 50 to 30 percent more damage an indirect Nerf to multi-strike and in 3.11 the Wildfire Jewel became almost useless to the point of being deleted in 3.20 however in the most recent League 3.21 the change to Vengeance Cascade has made molten strike more appealing to use again and in builds that's outside of the Juggernaut ascendancy but if history repeats itself we're just going to say this again out of habit incoming molten Strike Nerf demigod items these are a special collection of items that are rewarded to the top players from various races throughout the years the first one being demigod's presence in close beta to the more recent one demigod's Authority in 3.12 sadly with all the races characters and migrated standard along with those items but they do have a second life over in standard as they are limited items making highly sought after for collectors endless stealth on the topic of races there is a special subset of races where you can start outside of regular areas with special items and vendors to achieve a particular objective in this case of endless delve you start in Solo cell found at the Azurite mine encampment with unique items only found in this race along with Lily Roth to buy gems with one scroll each and the insertion alter to use at appropriate levels and you begin delving at no sulfite costs with the nodes properly scaled starting at level 1 and you can go as far as you can this became a really good racing event in the past two to three years running three times in total it's so good some players often think that why can't dubbing be an alternate way to level a character to the end game but that is a can of worms for another entry most likely infinite Heist not to be confused with the endless Heist Rays this was a money making strategy that involves you doing infinite contracts even before getting into Maps by the time you reach the mid-60s you can start running contracts mainly lock picking contracts and earn a lot of currency when you level up and run out of contracts talk to akano and get more contracts the level using a book of regression which will refresh what conno's inventory with more contracts while the Strat was most likely done for a while it gained a lot more attention after a big controversy in 3.19 that I'll touch on a later entry but suffice to say it felt mandatory to do this method to start gaining funds but the Strat was recently killed off in 3.21 with the book of aggression no longer craftable reverting back to doing Heist as intended Dev check during the Q a segments of League reveals whenever Chris Wilson is presented with a question that needs clarification he turns his head in escadev on standby for his or her input came a regular thing to expect in the Q a is that a third-party twitch emote was made as a fun meme in the community and press is definitely in on the joke since it knows it just makes everyone smile [Music] slams this one has a few definitions the first one is referring to an enemy whose attack move has a big wind-up and unleashes it all at once resulting in huge damage or even one-shotting you examples include the previously mentioned Dominus with his Touch Of God move and the Pinnacle boss shaper with his teleport slam move the second definition is with the exalted orb where you exalt slam on an item in the hopes of getting a good modifier likely to finish up your item and lastly slam is a subset of melee's skill gems with the slam tag like ground slam ice crash and Volcanic fissure for example foreign still sane exile [Music] buildbase some players would like to take the easy Road and find the build that can do all the content and would likely stumble upon videos or Forum posts promising that ideal build showing the DPS and gameplay to back it up but when the player takes on that build it performs less than intended and thus the build was bait now on the one hand it is really bad when the guide Creator deliberately makes bills that doesn't live up to the hype just for the sake of clicks or Worse forward you to a sketchy website buildbade has become so ridiculous that Captain Lance created a parody series judging League stars as bait or no bait on the other hand you should take builds with a grain of salt and do your homework to confirm if it's viable look into how the damage calculation Works see if it can run on basic gear do some leveling practice to get a feel for it part of the fun in Path of Exile is to experiment and seeing one person's guide on a build is like the first few pages of a book while the rest is to be written by you through your experience and knowledge Minecraft unique bow did you know that Marcus Notch person the creator of Minecraft actually supported Path of Exile in close beta as such he was given the opportunity to create a new unique item to the game and what we got is a bow called infractum the name and fractum is a nanogram of the title Minecraft and the flavor text makes use of Marx's name and alias Mark us with Mercy then press on with care execute us steadily Notch away at our despair I know I'm cringing too ultimatum returning something that has been pondered about for a while is that when will ultimatum be returning initially ultimatum has a gun core because of the combat being overwhelming and not so tactical and the rewards being more about mixture of the main rewards and item Falcon and less on just the main rewards in nearly every q a segment with ziggity and Chris since 3.14 that mentions any news on ultimatum there is a plan to bring the main mechanic back that is in line with tactical gameplay much like what we saw with the recent Path of Exile 2 gameplay with the way the gameplay is done with thought and care and the movement and attack options ultimatum sounds like a fitting candidate for a poa2 league actually but if you're sad with that being a possibility we did at least get the Trial Master fight as part of a unique map but one day one day The Trial Master will return to taunt us once again to be hideout for those that enjoy your waifus you know that 2B is the main character of the game near automata so what do you get when players spend too much time in their hideout they draw and if you happen to be training with someone or watching a streamer you might have seen this image of 2B in a rather pricey pose and it's all thanks to Quantum Fox on hideoutshowcase.com Nate Poe toucan this is referring to the classic piece of asciar called Li toucan that is often spammed in twitch chat as a copy pasta it eventually made its way into Path of Exile of the copy pasta being spammed in global chat and players would sometimes respond back by praising it says of course gig needs to keep things regulated it eventually made it impossible by limiting characters associated with escr to be typed in and thus no more toucan but it did leave a bit of an impact on the community to the point of becoming The Unofficial series mascot the feared this is an appropriately named encounter I myself have yet to do and for good reason it's hard the fierce is a special maven's invitation where you have the maven observe the following bosses vanarius in the cortex map chiola Uber adziri the shaper and the Elder upon finding the correct invitation you are challenged to fight all of these bosses potentially all at once if you're not quick enough or unlucky I don't know if anyone can attest that the fear it is the hardest challenge compared to Uber bosses of any kind because this just fries my brain on death effects there is a number of on-death effects in this game that you need to be on your toes for don't always assume that once the enemy is dead that you're safe because there could be a modifier or something inherent to the enemy itself for example porcupine Goliath shoots spines on death dealing physical damage so unless you have armor don't stand in the pack when you kill them for modifiers there exists the three Elemental ailment types shocked burning and chilled ground on death lining flame and frost beacons on death exploding chaos crystals on death cossagorbs on death okay I think he got the point crangled if there was ever an image that would best summarize the complexity of this game this would be it post it on the poe read it by Izzy on April 15 2020 we have this mock-up of a resonator that has such lengthy incoherent detail that is just beautiful and it ends with the word crangled from there it stuck and became the alternative word for corrupted items the term became even more prominent when Scourge League was released as the views of the blood Crucible and tainted currency was just the crangling league phobia boy that's a word anyways this here is a divination card where uponka playing the set while nechu a corrupted tier 13 map at 13 quality with all eight modifiers at 100 delirium so what's odd about this one well it's the fact that the name of this card is an actual phobia which is the fear of the number 13. that's why the map tier and quality is 13 with delirium representing the Fear Part to be fair the number 13 is considered to be unlucky so where does it drop tier 13 Maps man I love these joke Dev cards removed leaks as Path of Exile continues to grow and innovate there are bound to be pieces of content that no longer fits the mold in this case would be two of the most recent examples mirandis and prophecy in parandis you encountered secret caches protected by mobs which contained parandis coins which can then be traded with kadiro parandis for various offers in Prophecy you collect a new currency called silver coins where upon right-clicking it activates a prophecy which enables certain scenarios to occur like entering a map with six strong boxes upgrading uniques from killing specific bosses or using a single orb refusing to get a six link while some parts of the leagues were interesting and useful the overall content didn't match up with modern standards of lead quality or rewards and thus were sadly removed but the NPCs did get a second chance to exist kadera was made to be an exclusive MTX from the gemling supporter pack and a volley returns in the up-and-coming trial of the ancestors League what a comeback Bots and rmt any kind of game that involves the generation and transaction of digital Goods there are bound to be bots in real money trading and Path of Exile is no exception now I'm far from being an economic expert so I can only give my thoughts from a moral standpoint obviously both cases are bad but rmt is the worst one because of the risk of being scammed personal information getting stolen or getting your account banned bots on the other hand is in a weird gray area as a lot of Trades particularly with consumable trades are the lubricant of the economy because nobody wants to stand in their Hideout private messaging over a hundred players to trade for divine orbs and removing all the boss would just raise the private messaging even higher now at the very least Chris stated that he does go after the RM tiers by finding their Network and pulling the plug on their operation killing those bots in particular while he does hate bots in general he understands the convenience it brings to players with consumable trading and solving this issue is far from Easy ritualist hideout in Echoes of the atlas the very top MTX that can be earned aside from trophy pieces was The ritualist Hideout themed after the league mechanic that was bundled with the Alice expansion this is so far the only hideout in the game that can be earned through completing challenges personally I like this Hideout not just because I own it and got the bragging rights but because it was back when I was recovered from ankle surgery and all I can do is just play Path of Exile to spend the time fighting the maven was actually the very last challenge I needed to complete to earn that Hideout and that Victory felt so good Circle leaks for a brief period we saw a trend with a few leagues back to back with ritual ultimatum and a little bit of expedition that being the league mechanic involves circles in some way in ritual you had to stay inside of a circle to fight mobs the same could be said for ultimatum but stepping out of the circle too long will make you lose your stuff and Expedition you had to place circular explosives I don't know if any other players pointed this out but I certainly noticed and I'll always think of those leagues as Circle leagues six portal defense this is a phrase to describe a player that lacks the proper defensive layers and only use the six available portals in the end game to persevere through Maps in my opinion doing this unironically is something I don't like as it encourages a reckless play style with every time you die in the end game you lose 10 percent of your current XP typically from level 70 to 90 if you're a decent with some defensive layers it can still be a Net game in levels but once you've reached 90 and intend to go for at least 95 then you gotta play carefully and this six portal defense thing ain't cutting it anymore for all I know this is probably got reduced to being the joke as actual defenses became more mandatory I personally don't like dying so it's probably just my own bias saying don't do the six portal only thing it's stupid Creator builds are meta builds if someone is well known in the poe community and has created build guides then it's a high chance the build will be more played than others generally when a build is meta the acquisition of items for it would be more costly the day one example in Crucible League will show the Elementalist in the top position with firetrap in their five link uses frostblank and a unique item if malice all of this point towards subtractum in his videos covering firetrap Elementalist now doing metabills isn't always a bad thing especially if it's for Less experienced players but for players that are more knowledgeable would experiment with lesser-known but effective builds prior to leak start to get an advantage in trading for cheaper items 3.13 was the best league this is ultimately a subjective piece and it depends on who you ask which League was the best one you've experienced for me and many others 3.13 was the big one it introduced the expansion to the end game with Echoes of the atlas where you can fight up to 10 map bosses at once fight really tough boss combinations like the feared as previously mentioned and fight the maven herself the atlas itself got passive trees for each region which served as a foundation for what will become the big atlas tree in Siege of the atlas there is also the ritual mechanic new maps new skills reworked ascendancies highest going core and most notably Harvest going core this last one was the key thing that most players remember it for because of the player agency Harvest provided it made it really easy to deterministically craft your gear making it possible for Once Dead builds gaining a second life and the build variety was nuts but as history taught us good things must come to an end as I'll explain in a later entry attribute stacking this is a build archetype that focuses on gaining as much relevant attribute points as possible to maximize damage these bills require an additional stat per X attribute modifier on mainly items but sometimes elsewhere for example a dexterity stacking build would involve the unique item fractal thoughts or stacking decks will give you increased Elemental damage for strength brutus's lead sprinkler will give you flat fire attacks pertense strength and for intelligence the whispering ice not only does increase spell damage per 10 intelligence but the ice storm skill does five to seven base coal damage per 10 intelligence there are more items that goes into this archetype so go and explore if this interests you Dark Souls Easter egg upon entering the ridge in X6 nearby you'll see a unlit bonfire with a sword in it resembling the same bonfire in Dark Souls if you wanted to you can add the same bonfire to your hideout which is labeled Ash and bonfire and within the same area you'll encounter dread Wheels which looks similar to Bone wheels in the Dark Souls series it's likely GGG is no stranger to the soul series as the recent poe2 gameplay seems to be inspired by it with its meaningful movement and decisive attack options whether or not you like the idea we'll have to wait and see next year to see how it pans out tencent tencent is one of the largest tech Giants in the world based in Shenzhen China they focus on internet related services and products entertainment Ai and so on tencent is also the world's largest video game vendor with one example of subsidiaries that they own being Riot games the company that owns League of Legends as a heads up I don't like to engage with anything political or certain business practices but as far as what I've seen is that test set does have a history of accusations going against it namely for its anti-competitive monopolistic business strategies and having ties to the Chinese government so it became a shock to people when on May 20th 2018 Chris made a post stating that tencent now has major ownership of grinding gear games along with answering potential questions that users might ask in short tencent claims to be hands-off and gdg continues to run independently as further reinforced in a bay class interview during 3.15 and as I'm sure you have seen by Now tencent does not have any desire to exert any kind of control over the direction of the game right there has not been a single phone call going hey what happened with 315 right like that's on me to work out it's essentially still my company as far as the authority of running it goes the only difference being is that the Chinese version of Path of Exile will have some exclusive features per request of tencent some of which I'll share about in a later entry Battle Royale fittingly on April 1st 2018 GGG released for a couple of days a game mode simply called Royale where players fought for items experience and survival on a shrinking Island this April Fool's event turned out surprisingly well that they brought it back starting at Expedition league and stuck around every weekend all the way up through Scourge leak winners of The Royale game mode would receive an exclusive Hideout decoration of a row of feast with additional wins upgrading the decoration while Royal games aren't my cup of tea it's cool that the developers played in on the joke and made a functional game mode then again they've tackled leak mechanics that have different game genres attached to them so seeing them doing a royal mode should come to No Surprise this is the key to a crucible that stretches the sanity of the Mind all Mech Sanctum this one is my personal favorite what are the unique maps that you'll come across in the end game is called Olmec sanctum in the map there are four paths each representing one of three elements as well as chaos at the end of each path you'll fight the boss of that set damage type upon defeat you collect the object and move on to the next after all four is complete you return to the center to fight all Mech the all Stone which does all four types of damage with higher level items as Rewards this whole map is a reference to the 90s Nickelodeon game show Legends of the Hidden Temple the final boss is named after the talking Stone head character of the same name the silver monkey pieces that you collect are the same pieces the contestants assemble to advance in the temple run and the flavor text of the map makes reference to the show's six teams along with the title drop this was one of my favorite shows growing up and seeing this being referenced here just puts a gigantic smile on my face so to the support of that created this tpap157 you have great taste in game shows aurobots this is another build archetype that's definitely more Niche and sometimes Infamous depending how you look at it aurobots are simply support builds that focuses on auras with scaling or effect and Mana reservation to squeeze out Max potential to buff your party this cannot be played solo as you basically deal no damage it should be played with at least one other person originally the Mana reservation system made it very easy to add a lot of auras at high investment which I don't know what the math was like back then but the new system as a version 3.16 made it so that investing into reservation efficiency has diminishing returns top players get less and average players get more alongside it there were changes to sources of increased Aura effect to where aurobots are now in a more healthy State that's in GGG introduced link gems which who really uses those things betrayal League allegory in version 3.5 we were given the Betrayal League where we uncover and take down a mysterious group known as The Immortal syndicate some of those members were originally NPCs that served as Masters to complete daily missions or Random Encounters it's like in the past we were helping them to gain power in a sense but when 3.5 came along they betrayed us funny thing this isn't the allegory I was building up to this instead has to do with diaboly Mortal when Diablo moral was announced on November 2nd 2018 the fans were appropriately disappointed with the news that it would be mobile only at the time but then gdg swooped right in 11 days later dropping a trailer for the next league and what was it called betrayal because blizzard has betrayed the fans and geg decided to be Savage about it and welcomed the Diablo refugees with open arms now I don't know if any of this was coincidence but if the inclusion of the line einhardt said about not having nuts mean anything because that line was included in the same update then gdg likely did last minute changes to reflect the situation and win over a new audience maybe the league was originally called Immortal Syndicate but who knows either way it was a massive W for GGG and I couldn't be any more proud ascendancy skills to keystones reworks are often needed as Path of Exile develops one aspect being the rework of ascendancies in some cases what was originally part of the ascendancy skill tree now becomes more accessible to other classes as a keystone one example is wicked Ward which once belonged to the occultist ascendancy other examples include versatile companion which once belonged to the Gladiator and ghostness which once belonged to the trickster there are probably more keystones that I'm not aware of that was originally a descendancy skill but that does make me wonder what I missed out on in earlier versions for ascendancies cartographer seal this is a former currency that was used on the atlas of Worlds to uncomplete a map but why would you do that don't you want to have full completion well generally the more maps you complete the more maps are added to the drop pool thus diluting the maps you would like to play more of with the seals you can omit certain maps and increase the likelihood of your preferred Maps this was made through a vendor recipe using three sections of one color and an orbus scouring to make either an apprentice journeyman or Master seal which works on white yellow and red Maps respectively but now that the atlas progression has changed now we have the favorite map system where you can select your favorite map or maps and it'll get a 10 times multiplier for each slot up to 12 for potentially a 120 times multiplier I definitely like the ladder system better just because my slight completionist side of me would go crazy otherwise Brother Laz for those that played modded Diablo 2 chances are you've heard of brother Les the creator of the median XL mod well you'll be happy to know that due to his talent and hard work he was graced with an email one day from grinding gear games to do freelance work in creating unique items for the game and he said yes some of the items he designed includes cloak of flame Bramble Jack abyssus Fox shade facebreakers dead Bell and many more if you happen to be a fan of the immediate XL mod then you'll be happy to know that he is back at it again with having to mod Diablo 2 resurrected with a new overhaul mod called Brotherhood hopefully it'll turn out good when it comes out I don't like it it's during 3.19 kilometer League one of the balance changes in the patch notes addresses minions not having good item options what they did to balance this was to lower minion base life and damage but provide more ways for players to invest into Minions on their own gear allowing minion damage and survivability to be higher than previously possible for a character with strong items gassy TV however the main expert of the poe Community says otherwise in a video discussing the changes in Calandra League Cassie raised a point about enemies doing too much damage and it wasn't because of the arch nemesis mods he laid out the stats for his anime Guardians Bob the first and Bob II showing which enemies that killed them a tier 16 Harbinger and tier 16 tool creeping Avalanche both with zero damage mods gazi has pushed the Guardians to their limits with defenses and yet still died to them because of this this is what he had to say this is not okay and I reached out to ggd of raising my concerns before the league launched about things like this and the answer I received was that it's been plate tested it felt fine for us you should just I don't know what to say you should try it out in uh when League launches and see how it feels well tell you what I have play tested it I have tested it and I've and I don't like it I don't like it it's such simple and Powerful Words that really brings us to question did GG really play test this well more like an oversight there was a follow-up video on Minion defense that being the first Guardian didn't have bone offering which was a my bad for gassy but the second Guardian died because tool didn't have a hidden damage penalty against minions which is a modifier that exists on some other end game bosses prior to this as such GGG did a follow-up patch to apply the proper balance so minions can live for another fight ablegamer's charity this is a community charity event ran by Lighty and slippery gym during ultimatum League to raise money for ablegamers anybody was free to join and the goal was to band together to collect all available unique items within the game within a week and as such nearly 2 200 players included myself actually partaken in this collaborative effort what's interesting is that for the most part there was no economy for financial gain it was purely trading what players need to progress further thus getting the uniques faster in the end the charity managed to raise around four thousand dollars and the unique tab got around 950 uniques in give or take personally I wasn't able to find any uniques that others haven't found already but I did assist players with supplies that they needed this was a lot of fun and I would like to do another unique collecting event like this again in the future actually pay to win path of exile's whole business model relies on microtransactions to fund the game and none of these are technically needed to play but there are some that give great quality of life this mainly has to do with stash tabs by default if I'm remembering correctly you start with three standard tabs but those tabs are not public you would have to upgrade them to premium to make them public so you can list your items on the main Poe trade site I mean you could try to sell your items By Word of Mouth but nobody does that then there's the other stash tabs that's meant to easily organize and consolidate your goods if you don't want to pay for them there is at least the folders and the Affinity system that you could use for cosmetic MTX there's obviously no advantage to player power but few have argued that some skill Jam MTX has better visual Clarity but that's about it honestly this is more pay for convenience rather than pay to win and it all depends how much you want to dedicate yourself to this game all this is also subjective so if you believe that paying for quality of life is pay to win then I can't argue with that bad performance at League launch when it comes to League launches it can often come with a price of their servers being unable to handle the load they do have a safe garden place to cue players in but even then there can be screw-ups the worst one from my experience would have to be from ultimatum I remember being around position 1500 in the queue normally once they allow players in it would take no more than a minute to get in but for some reason it took at least five minutes and if there was trouble getting in there will be trouble staying in I swear this league launch was putting me to the test because I got through act one in three hours due to multiple disconnects and waiting in the queue what's even more insulting is that there were points where I didn't even get to keep the loot because of rollbacks I fought mervel and got a quicksilver flask but the game rolled me back so I didn't get to keep it yay so why was this launch so bad simply put it was a human error so prior to a league launch characters made in the previous League needed to be automatically set to standard because majority of players wouldn't be logged in between the last League ending and the new one starting if that doesn't happen then the player that logs in would have the old characters migrate right away but because so many players were logging in that day the on-demand migration of characters was adding up by a lot and it tanked the servers really badly but that wasn't the only thing that happened during that launch there was another bad situation that I'll share about in a later entry talismans was actually decent for a quick recap Talisman originally came out in version 2.1 as its own League you would kill monsters that would possess these talismans collect them and sacrifice them at a stone altar to upgrade their tiers and even to fight a boss named rigwald while I personally wasn't there when Talisman was first introduced I never saw a reason to pick up a Talisman as the roles never seemed to interest me but there was a point in time that it did grab my attention during version 3.12 Heist League talismans were now able to drop with higher tier modifiers on average and with a random anointed notable for once it made talismans worth looking at and maybe even to sell them but two leagues later at ultimatum while anointed notables were still there talismans became Bland again why well Chris simply stated that it was Overkill you what now granted we have new crafting options with the likes of tinted courtesy to mess with talismans but who really does that exalted and divine switch for years the exalted orb has been ingrained into the mind of every player with how it gives that Spike of dopamine when one of them drops but in recent history it's becoming this weird dopamine detox and then relearning of valuable drops because in 3.19 kilometer League the new exalted orb is now the Divine orb reason for the change in economic status was that the exalted orb had no easy vendor recipe for them and they were often used for crafting meta mods ddg would rather have the Divine or Buffet to be rarer so getting good roles would matter more and so that players can exalt craft their items more frequently so they changed the crafting minimize that used to cost exalted orbs now cost Divine orbs and change the six-link vendor recipe to Grant 20 orbs of fusings rather than a Divine orb once again I'm no economic expert and I feel indifferent to the change from that standpoint but it feels so off to see an exalted orb drop get quickly excited and then immediately feel sad I hate it Eternal orb this is a earlier form of deterministic crafting up until version 2.0 the Eternal orb creates an imprint of an item that can later be used to revert the item to the imprinted state so if you made a mistake or get an undesired outcome the imprint is your undo button basically nowadays we have a beast crafting recipe that can do imprints but it only works on magic items limiting imprints to a starting point of crafting rather than at any point while the Eternal orb can no longer drop almost everywhere it can however drop in ruthless mode now but good luck getting your hands on that Maelstrom of Chaos nowadays this is one of the unique maps that you'll find in the end game where you fight a different version of mervale but at one point this was the end game back in close beta when you completed Act 2 on merciless difficulty you talk to aramir and you would gain access to a new area through the Waypoint called the Maelstrom of chaos a high level area that uses a random instance from the campaign as its base like the beach or the forest keep in mind there was only two acts at that time so the selection was pretty limited this type of end game lasted for nearly a year until the new map system took its place and the Maelstrom of chaos itself soon became a map later on Masters and favors in version 1.2 The Forsaken Master's expansion was released that featured a new slew of NPCs you'd encounter to do various missions to level them up and earn favor once level 3 you can claim a personalized Hideout invite Masters to The Hideout and make use of favor points to buy decorations and make use of the crafting Services they provided version 3.5 betrayal League had a revamp of the Masters permanent Hideout unlocks and all crafting is done on one bench while finding recipes throughout the game the system of earning favor still remained the same and finally in 3.16 Scourge League The Master Level and favor systems have been removed entirely allowing players to have full rain on create in their ideal hideouts recounting from my experience some of the master missions in the older versions was kinda bad namely with Haku and because of my Play Time back then being so sporadic I never actually got a hideout but jumping forward after betrayal League doing missions definitely got better and I was playing a lot more earning more favor than I could spend which is probably why they later dropped the favor system and just let us go ham with our hideouts procurement procurement was an old companion tool in the earlier years of Path of Exile that pulls up stash Tab and character info from the forums so you can price items and create shop threads very easily you can also do Advanced surges in your stash find items for vendor recipes and save item stats as an image this tool also works with third-party sites for your ions to be easily searched tools and websites such as this was the norm if it means to get a speedy trade but a lot of this was eventually phased out when on November 2nd 2017 Chris posted the trade Manifesto explaining their philosophy on trading as well as launching their own trade site whether or not you agree with her philosophy this was a step in the right direction with having the trade features from tools and Community trade sites all Consolidated and officially hosted on their site along with adding more features down the line Dodge this used to be a common defensive layer among Builds on the right side of the tree we're investing into Dodge provides a chance to prevent damaging hits this isn't to be confused with evasion as that uses a entropy-based system meaning that you'll eventually get hit Dodge instead just goes by random chance evasion-based builds would almost always go for the keystones acrobatics and phase acrobatics that provide a tech Dodge and spell dive respectively but when 3.16 Scourge lead came along defenses got reworked with attack Dodge being removed while buffing evasion rating to go along with evasion is a new defensive layer called spell suppression which gives a chance to half incoming spell damage ideally of course you want to cap the chance to 100 to always cut down on spell damage but what about spell Dodge well that got reworked to the new acrobax Keystone where modifiers the chance to suppress spell damage instead applied to chance to dodge spell hits at 50 of their value and maximum chance to dodge spellheads is 75 percent I don't think I've seen anyone make use of this Keystone since the change but I personally think investing into guaranteed spell suppression seems more powerful and consistent kiwi the Kiwi is a unique flightless bird native to New Zealand with the body size of a chicken short and stout legs and a long beak since grinding gear games is located in New Zealand the KOA is sure to get their image represented in Path of Exile if you paid for close beta access for at least 25 US Dollars you'll get a kiwi pet along with access to the beta shop points other digital goods and even physical Goods at higher tiers regular kiwi starts at 25 then bronze at 50 dollars silver at 100 gold at 250 and Diamond at one thousand there is also an albino kiwi pet but it's only exclusive to a rogue Exile and not available anywhere else personally I have the regular kiwi and it's such an adorable ball of feathers now that I think about it there has been talk about there being a beta access for Path of Exile too makes me wonder if those Feathered Friends would make a return for a limited time hmm the conquerors are the players prior to the conquerors of the atlas expansion the end game objective in terms of bosses was to face the Elder specifically in the Uber Elder fight with the shaper what's your Victorious Zona proceeds to use the cosmic Arcana to open up a portal and trap the Elder inside in conquerors of the atlas the story is retold with Sana being accompanied by a group of five Exiles called The Elder Slayers named Cirrus El husband ferritania drox and baron after the defeat of the Elder the Elder Slayers proceed to go back into the atlas numerous times becoming more and more powerful just like us the players this is a brilliant piece of meta commentary from grinding gear games having our end game addiction being perfectly encapsulated by the Elder Slayers later referred to as the conquerors of the atlas this Atlas expansion came in at the right time for me as I joined back in the middle of blight league and when the trailer dropped showing off the conquerors with what their addiction has become of them GGG knew I would be doing the very same thing shared Poe 2 assets since both games are all built on the same engine we have been getting slight improvements in foreshadowing with what poe2 is going to look like after the first announcement of poe2 the first thing I noticed in the patch notes of conquerors of the atlas was lionit's watched has been visually updated and is our latest rendering technology it also mentions a bunch of skills receiving visual improvements along with the statement that reads continued to incrementally improve the sound art effects and environments although this statement has been repeated ever since the days of closed beta this now Rings more true than ever since the devs now have a large library of assets from poe2 to use for later updates like the case of 3.13 Echoes of the atlas in this update we were given 11 new maps to explore a lot of them using new textures we've never seen yet along with select new bosses even in more recent leagues like the Forbidden sanctum we've seen promos of this candle monster named varicath the waxin that has been reused from poe2 gameplay featured at XL con 2019 of similar design called Candlemass now that has been announced that both games will be separate there still might be some shared assets of Poe too but things like the character model overhauls unfortunately won't happen so pilly 1 characters will continue to run like they have a stick up their butt the fires of a thousand suns arch nemesis over tuning arch nemesis feels like an anime Arc with how ridiculous the implementation was but how did this all go well in patch 3.18 Sentinel League arch nemesis went core to replace the old modifiers on Magic and rare monsters the problem it was way too threatening even in act 1 the wrong combination of mods could take way too long to kill or even brick certain builds forcing you to skip the monster and we don't like skipping monsters naturally there are patches within the first hours of the launch and even in the following days to Nerf the mods archdemps has tried to make a comeback in Calandra league with not only another rebalancing but to make the rewards for killing them more meaningful and abusable the problem now was specific rewards were tied to specific mods and if you got the right combination or at least one of them you might get stacks of divine orbs so to really take full advantage of it you would need to hire a magic fire to do the final blow to maximize profits like what arch nemesis monsters now became synonymous to Luke goblins and we do not want that comparison oh and the mods were still bad thus ultimately in sanctum League the modifiers now resemble what was similar to the old system but with much more up-to-date content and balance and the notable awards are now hidden in random eliminating the need to do any annoying actions to maximize rewards needless to say this will be a story to tell to our grandchildren the Great Expedition Nerf this is not referring to the league mechanic of expedition as that piece of content is just fine this has to do with what it was bundled with probably the biggest wave of Nerfs in the game's entire history at least from what I experienced in general leading up to this league there was an increase of power creep with each new league and GGG had to Stamp It Out by decreasing player power through the following things many skills and support gems had their overall damage reduced by 20 to 40 percent the Mana cost was harder to deal with flasks got reworked a lot movement got slower act one got tougher ascendency balance Etc there were a lot of sweeping changes that it was just a huge meta shift and it was difficult a lot of this stirred the community so bad that Chris went on to four different podcasts to be interviewed one on allcraft one on Bay class one with scissoring and mathol and one with gazi grimro and crouching tuna this whole league was a wake-up call for everyone to better communicate with one another and it did work out with later patches addressing defensive options ailment mitigation flask further refined aspirational content endgame progression and more thankfully we didn't have nerves to this magnitude since then only the usual amount of Nerfs explodey chest in 3.9 conquerors of the atlas we received four new influence types for items each representing the conquerors minus Cirrus one of which I will talk about will be from Baron on a piece of body armor with the Crusader's influence one of the best modifiers you can roll is enemies you kill explode dealing X percent of their life as physical damage this was a mod that can take almost any build and make it capable of doing screen wide clears I was lucky to get my hands on one in 3.13 as I was rocking a bladefall blade blast Chieftain and the pops felt so nice was it overpowered oh you bet it was so GGG nerfed it now instead of a guaranteed explosion it's now a chance to explode that ranges from 11 to 35 percent and dealing a tenth of their maximum life as physical damage since then players have tried to fill the void with other sources of explosion like occultist with profane Bloom the Gladiator with gratuitous violence and on unique items like SNS Gentle Touch This mod can still likely work provide you have a good chance percentage and investing into generic AOE and physical damage using Herald of Ash and increasing mob density in your Maps poe2 will fix everything this phrase was something that was uttered by the player base for the past few years before we knew that Poe 1 and 2 will be separate games prior to that announcement players would often speculate what new features and improvements will take place but the phrase poe2 will fix everything is more to address the common problems rather than genuine desire and I can think of three examples the first one I can think of is an alternative leveling system with events like endless delve where players got to experience a different leveling scenario now players want to have the option to skip the campaign entirely but GGG is very much against it and would instead craft a much better campaign with having different side quests objectives with every playthrough and having it being 6X next there's a talk of smart loot or loot 2.0 to make items on the ground to be less cluttered and more meaningful while there has been subtle improvement with general decluttering like currency Stacks the improved loot was something they could just not nail down for example condensing 20 bad rares into one good rare and as we found out at XL con 2023 itemization for poe2 is done much differently and trying to bridge the gap between the two games would be almost impossible and lastly there is the state of trading with the big one of streamlining the trading process when having to deal with trading you must disengage from whatever you're doing Maps bossing highest delving you name it if you don't you'll lose out on the sale because of that items at a low price like one chaos for a unique are just never sold the price needs to be worth the seller's time to leave and engage in trading now there's definitely other problems with trading like Bots arm tiers scamming price fixing Etc but simplifying training is what a lot of players want the most the best example I've seen so far for a fix was in subtractives video where you still have to use the trading window but you can be in the middle of a map or boss fight and the game would just be paused while Trading it'll automatically pull the item and or currency from each respective Trader's stash and send the goods to their stash upon agreement definitely give that video a watch to get more detail on this idea in any case it's kind of hard to say that poe2 will fix everything now that the games are separate it'll likely come down to a matter of preference item quantity support gym just from the name alone you can already tell that this support gem is overpowered and can no longer drop but it still can't be traded for in standard leak having your character with increased quantity is the ideal stat to get more currency as it's the only stat that matters item Rarity would have no effect on currency as that stat only affects items with tiers of Rarity like normal magic rare or unique with that knowledge in mind it would get out of hand really quickly if this support gem was still dropping but item Rarity support still exists and if you're lucky to find a rare monster with an arch nemesis reward type that converts dropped items to currency based on Rarity then there's your one way to get more currency but again the arch nemesis War type is hidden and random so I wouldn't rely on that infinite splits before version 3.14 splitting was a powerful method of basically duplicating items through the use of fractured fossils and Beast crafting what players would do to squeeze every drop of value in their Maps was to craft things like a specific fractured mod the area is influenced does not consume Sextant uses lots of delirium orbs and high map quality from there you can just use a fractured fossil and essentially dupe the map with the only difference being explicit modifiers were re-rolled this was so incredibly powerful for the end game juicers that when 3.14 came along splitting was nerfed hard where it cannot be applied to an enchanted item a fractured item a synthesized item or influenced item when the splitting Works otherwise both the master item and the copied item hit the split tag meaning they cannot be split again hot take this was a change I'm actually okay with because it was really unethical now the point one percent has to do some maps like the rest of us I I guess I don't know I don't know what they exactly do they're definitely not touching grass I'll tell you that much Harvest Nerfs originally Harvest was a very tedious mechanic where you actually have to plant seeds which then you harvest life force afterwards to be used for crafting and the crafting options you were given was overpowered like targeted nulls and exalts so when Harvest came back in 3.13 the tedium was gone but the crafts were still there and those crafts were not staying long term because GGG knew they made a mistake so on the next League ultimatum Harvest was nerfed to be more in line with path of exile's item philosophy that items are hard to perfect he also did it because other crafting options would be neglected if left untouched why use expensive basic currency when you got Harvest they now made Harvest so that it was still usable for Mid game crafting but end game crafting was just gutted fast forward to 3.19 calendar League Harvest once again was reworked to have mobs drop crystallized life force so that it can be used later for crafting this basically makes Harvest now tradable through formal means as previously players would trade items to another to do crafting for them as a service which was a risky thing to do in my opinion but now that Harvest became more accessible even more crafts were removed from the list which included reforge keep prefix suffix upon reflection I just grew to accept the changes but the other players do miss those powerful crafts as it was their gateway to more of the end game so all I can say now is paroshabi your boss fight is garbage third party reliance let me say this first I greatly appreciate the people in the community that makes these great tools and websites path of building awaken Poe trade filter blade and the like but I do have to ask does it bother you to use these things outside of the game so what I mean by third party Reliance is that if you want to get a leg up in playing this game you essentially have to alt have to look at another resource which can play a factor in the player's enjoyment not familiar how to scale your damage you look it up on the poe Wiki D2 predetermine your passive skill tree route you use path of building need to know what the metal looks like you go to poe.ninja the thing is there are some aspects that are better off to be built into the game so the player doesn't have to change screens all the time awaken POA trade does give an overlay and I guess technically the steam overlay can work as well but players would likely watch it interact directly through the game itself in order to get their answers change the help section to have an index of terms that the player can search for and have a way to pre-plan the passive skill tree I don't know how big of a concern it is to some players as it personally doesn't bother me to use outside resources but if it benefits the game greatly to improve the new player experience with including those resources in game I say go for it but maybe I'm wrong and I don't understand their Vision foreshadowing backstab and snipe skill jumps in early development of Path of Exile there were two skill gems that didn't make the cut for public release and those can still be found in the code backstab and snipe sniper originally was going to work with frenzy charges to scale physical damage and attack speed but snipe did get a second chance as a modifier on the unique helmet Asylum and was changed to a channeling skill with a support component which gained stages to do more damage and I'm guessing with how well the unique item served the skill itself actually became its own skill gem in 3.21 backstab on the other hand it's best that it didn't make the final cut because GGG thought of doing an actual backstab mechanic that would definitely not work well today maybe Poe too but definitely not one I personally think that the Nightblade support gem is the spiritual successor 2 backstab as getting elusive will give you a Critical Strike chance and multiplier bonus like if you were sneaking and then Landing a backstab so in some way shape or form old ideas can come back much like this next entry relics predated jewels originally in Diablo 2 characters can gain passive bonuses through the use of charms sitting in the player's inventory jijide wanted to do the same idea but to have the bonuses elsewhere and out of the player's inventory and eventually what they came up with was jewels that can be socketed in the passive skill tree but GG thought of a different idea before that which involved relics players would kill monsters find a rare Relic drop and then the player would take it to an altar for the bonuses to go into effect if that sounds familiar that's because in 3.20 the Forbidden sanctum they brought back the idea of relics for the league mechanic most of the routes that you would find will only apply its effects while you're in the sanctum with one exception Sanctified relics these are the ones that will affect your character stats anywhere just like how the original idea worked and once you know it the Forbidden sanctum is now going core along with the relics except for Sanctified relics as that'll need a balance pass first of course Ranger is a lesbian there are a few subtle clues in the lore that describes the ranger as a lesbian when venturing through Marvel's Cavern you'll come across these tempting Spirits where they extend their arm out while stepping backwards and fading away in an attempt to lure you in through your desires depending on the class you play you'll see the opposite gender of the spirits for example the Templar will have female Spirits tempting him and the witch will have male Spirits tempting her the ranger is the only class where the spirits are female greatly implying that the ranger is actually lesbian there's also a notable voice line later in Act 2 when killing Alara the witch Bandit where she says this flower there's one like you even when the ranger knew she had to kill alera she gave her a brief compliment it's just these little things in storytelling that makes me appreciate it even more the strange voice is Tang Mazu in 3.10 deliriumly were introduced to a being called The Strange voice an unknown entity that messes with the player's mind when interacting with the delirium mechanic during the campaign from Act five and onwards the strange voice would often comment about your environment and goals some of which mentions about the guides you're going to slay and he seems oddly knowledgeable about them even saying he's related to relicesh my brother has been busy so we can tell that the strange voice might be a god of some kind but what kind of role does he play honestly a big one when talking to sin in act 8 about lunaris he mentions about a trickster by the name of Tang Mazu who was responsible for tricking Solaris and lunaris to fight against each other for many years and what comment did the strange voice say when entering deep into the lunaris temple it wasn't hard to turn them against each other did it announced here and there that's all it took now there are some other pieces of lore around Tang Mazu through flavor tests of some unique items but what we got here sounds pretty conclusive to me the actual name of the strange voice is Tang Mazu the main antagonist of delirium the last to die is Alva in 3.16 Scourge League we meet an NPC out on the coast who just escaped The Scourge from her Dimension fittingly named the last to die she managed to escape thanks to an artifact called the blood Crucible created on The pact between chaos and the high priest of the vaal luckily she is the descendant of the Vault priest thus able to use her life to sustain the blood Crucible now what is the case with Alva villai the master Explorer from incursion well it's a given she likes to go on adventures in finding treasure something that we the players can relate to but what is more interesting is with her methods of finding treasure she one day found a manual of fall blood thamaturgy and kept it hidden for personal use with it along with you the Exile must travel to the past to alter and locate the Temple of azawadl and she does this by activating these ancient waste zones with the blood of the ball which she happens to have inside her is also later confirmed in dialogue with the atlas memories content that she is a distant Vault descendant that's no problem for me since I'm distantly a varish descent so Alva and the last to die are both descendants of the vaal they both make use of their blood to accomplish their goals plus they're both voiced by the same voice actress now this isn't entirely conclusive as these characters have different upbringings Alva's blood magic needs specific requirements to work and she may finally hunts for Treasure blessedite knows her blood magic really well to hop dimensions and to fight off the scourge for a long time I personally like this connection because of the whole what if scenario for Ray class and how events would play out streamer priority remember the story of the ultimate oblique launch I talked about earlier well there's a part two to this while the majority of us were waiting in queue are getting kicked and back into queue it turns out some select people were able to jump the line and get ahead of everyone and those were the streamers hey wait a minute I was streaming at that time why didn't I get priority I I'm joking by the way what happened was GGG had arranged big streamers like shroud for example to Showcase Path of Exile to their viewers for money but because of the servers having a meltdown from the collective character migrations they panicked and turned on a white list of streamers to skip the queue both paid and regular known streamers ggt initially thought that viewers can just watch these streamers while they wait in queue but quickly realize that that only made players angry that they couldn't get in and instead have to watch streamers get an advantage while some of the streamers realize that they have priority they immediately requested for the priority to be taken off just because the hatred from the viewers was getting out of hand the worst example out of all this was with Imperium gaming he and his crew took the priority queue much for the same reason GGG initially thought viewers can watch while they wait that obviously didn't happen and the hatred from the viewers was building up so much that when he was asked how is this Fair he made an unfair comparison to unclean water in Africa to streamer priority this was horrible wording on his part that his comment was clipped and reached top post in the poe subreddit he did regret saying that likely because it was a stressful situation and he later made a donation of a thousand dollars to a charity that provides clean water to developing countries but if you guys think he deserves it more he and his crew did get banned for the league for exploding a bug so that works out now I can understand having to allow paid streamers to get priority as those streamers only had to play for like what two hours it really wasn't going to make a big impact on the economy but for regular streamers who has extensive knowledge of the game that's a different story and I'm glad they spoke up about it I know this was a horrible situation GGG was in but they learned their lesson and we haven't had a bad League launch like this ever since Labyrinth Jewel sealer ever since the release of version 2.2 ascendancy there was a patch that added leaderboards to the Labyrinth that rotates daily whoever was the top player of the day reached in the end of the labyrinth per difficulty would be rewarded with a unique Jewel that can only be found in The Labyrinth now what if I was to tell you that there was a Stranglehold on these Jewels enter to hammer who has been lab running for four years and winning almost every single one other players have rightly grown suspicious of his victories to see what the heck was going on with this guy was he cheating or even rmting well it turns out he does have a history of bands that he did admit to but neither was for cheating or rmting one was for account sharing and another was for leaking data for the upcoming blight leak either way his actions has painted him as a very Infamous Poe player in the poe subreddit but his winning streak came to a close when version 3.14 ultimatum League the unique jewels in The Labyrinth now only drop from Lazaro's treasure chests in the Eternal and enriched Eternal Labyrinth from there to hammer decided to make a post in the subreddit detailing what he did to win using some kind of loading trick of course most people responded with heavy skepticism given by his reputation it did suck that no one else was able to get these Jewels for four years which is surprising that GGG didn't do anything about it sooner but they did change it and the fias goes over now players can get their hands on those precious jewels path of math band path of math was an avid content creator for Path of Exile that greatly focuses on high-end crafting deep economy and some build guides he has built a sizable following to be featured on GG's website a few times from what I've heard from others don't quote me on this and to have sponsorships on his live streams the problem I think starts here with his status like he's an authority figure so whenever his way of playing the game is threatened he becomes quite toxic and it has resulted him in multiple controversies and bands yes he was banned more than once he harasses staff member first band did giveaways to viewers of in-game items which is actually labeled as rmt by GGG as in you're trading items to viewers for their loyalty and potential donations so second ban Shilling himself on Reddit using sock puppet accounts Reddit band and now the third and current band where he has a temper tantrum on stream calling Chris Wilson a bald r word his tantrum in this case was from the changes in 3.19 collateral League mainly concerned about crafting and the economy and this whole thing blew up and crumbled down right in front of him because of his actions since then he has stopped streaming and his video uploads became sparse even saying that he is focusing more on real life stuff for the sake of his health which is definitely the best choice for him stealth item drop Nerf in relation to 3.19 kilander League we talked about the arch nemesis over tuning and rewards we talked about the Harvest nerves we talked about the exalts and divine switch and we talked about the minion Nerfs what else is there to cover well probably the worst thing out of all this was a stealth Nerf to item drops yes that one thing that we players want out of our RPGs is Loot and if there is less loot we'd Riot okay to back up a bit what started this was that the big party juicers like Imperium gaming and his crew had noticed that there was notably less loot to confirm this they did a comparison with the loot drops in previous leaks and it definitely stood out so if high-end players were having issues then the rest of us will have issues and indeed we did we resorted to League mechanics that weren't affected by drop rates for Monsters like Expedition and especially Heist which is why infinite Heist was catching Steam so what did ggd do exactly what they did was two things and I quote the first is that the rate of encountering rare monsters from certain League content has been reduced so you are fighting killing and receiving rewards from fewer monsters than before this is partially offset by rare monsters in 319 now being more rewarding than they were before the mods at bar item quantity and Rarity than before and then there's the reward conversion system used for the more dangerous mods the second reason is that we removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and or Rarity that applied to some League specific monsters we replaced it with a moderate two to three times increased item quality to offset the FED that they often have more life than regular monsters and some Cannot drop Maps now they did do a thorough look into the drop rates from anywhere else that might have caused a change and they later dropped a patch to improving Rarity on rares and bosses increasing the unique drop rate by 33 percent and increasing the base drop rate of currency items by 25 percent it's good that they responded and tried to fix the issue but the thing is that they still didn't tell us ahead of time Chris later made a post named what happened with items where he explained that there was a human error for the person forgan to include this in the patch notes and for Chris for not noticing it while proof reading it prior to proofreading it this change was mentioned to him in passing but didn't press further on the matter because he was so busy at the time he definitely would have been better prepared if he knew the consequences he definitely felt bad with the way things have transpired and didn't want to disappoint the player base but as always he was willing to admit his mistakes and take full responsibility whether or not that you agree with all this is up to you for me well I'm still playing it just learn to adapt and making the best of it Path of Exile inspiration in old school RuneScape I find it really cool when a company is popping off quite well with their IPs that it becomes a source of inspiration for other companies and that is the case with jagex in November 14th 2019 jagex launched their first generation of old school RuneScape leaks the general objective is that you start with a new character separate from the main game with certain restrictions to complete as many tasks as possible to earn points the points can then be used to purchase cosmetic rewards and total points will determine what trophy you'll earn it was cited in The gilinore Gazette February 2020 that the idea of doing leagues of their own was because of Path of Exile and Diablo but the inspiration didn't stop there two years later in another gilinore Gazette the old school team did what was called a game Jam where they brainstormed and showcased a bunch of Concepts one of which was the toss of call trials a wave-based challenge to earn loot but with a price for every wave you complete you can either leave with the loot you got or risk it all for more and if that idea screams ultimatum you be correct as they were heavily inspired by that League mechanic sadly we haven't heard any news of its inclusion to old school RuneScape but it's still awesome that they cited Path of Exile for their ideas Chinese only features as a follow-up from the tencent entry we do have the Chinese version of Path of Exile which has some exclusive features some of which that makes this question why isn't this in the international release well let's go down the list first example would be Auto pickup pets there are two versions from what I found a magic one that picks up all types of currency and a rare one where you can filter which ones to pick up for 90 days then it becomes Magic next would be a passive tree planner where you can highlight which nose to take ahead of time how about an actual in-game Market open a side tab to see the market do a basic search for the item put the currency in hit accept wait for response and boom a very quick trade granted if you still need to find something more specific you still need to use the poe trade site other examples include a death log better rewards from quests one button trigger to activate more than one flask backpack MTX to expand your inventory for only one League a built-in browser with game information and a bunch of other differences I do recommend researching the differences as it paints a much different picture with how tencent wants to run the Chinese version definitely more blatant examples of pay to win that's for sure but I do think we can learn from this and Implement some features to the international release I do think an in-game browser is needed just for the sake of reducing alt tabbing to another window the passive tree planner is another thing the game could benefit even just a basic one will suffice but some of them are questionable ones like the Looting pets and even the in-game market should be avoided which is crazy for me to say because I wanted trading fixes GGG doesn't want to go down the slippery slope as they want to retain the difficulty and friction where appropriate so when you overcome it you learn and feel rewarded if you want to start getting deep into what should the game be like then let me introduce you to the final entry of this iceberg [Music] I personally put this entry at the very bottom for a good reason as this encapsulates so much about the game the company and the player base as a whole to explain what the vision is it's a term coined by the player base to describe the direction up Path of Exile in a negative way typically when patch notes roll out and the changes conflict with players or it doesn't address the player's feedback it's just then assumed that it's more what the company wants and not what the player base wants hence why players call it the vision out of disappointment this is very problematic because it's a game that I love and yet it's true sometimes a lot of the earlier entries that I detailed can be seen as GGG just following their vision and not thinking about what the majority wants but that can't be true regarding the outcome of 3.15 expedition League Chris went on a total of four interviews gaining perspectives from different creators understanding their concerns and forwarding it to the rest of the team at the same time he stays very firm about his philosophies and reinforces it almost every chance he gets I get it that it's annoying to hear the word philosophy and its variations from Chris but he does this because he has immense belief in this game he knows that if he lets his guard down for what he stands for the rewarding feeling of progression Conquering the challenges and living the ultimate power fantasy will start to lose its meaning sometimes it takes a good long look to get a firm grip on where GGG is heading for Path of Exile when I was re-watching the interviews I started to see a different perspective before I was with the content creators eager to hear the answers to have our desires satisfied right away now I'm more with Chris playing the long game to see the bigger picture I think that when we are so blindsided with hype and immediate changes we react more selfishly to be honest how dare GGG ruined their own game do they not care about the player base look I've been there I hooked a bunch of copium yada yada but when it reaches the second or third month of the league it's a moment of reflection did GGG make the right call did they communicate with us are they doing what is really best for the players for path effects out to be innovating so many ideas compared to other arpgs they're about to have a lot of missteps and reworks for example synthesis League had an interesting idea to it but poor execution instead we got fractured and synthesized items and the bosses from the league as unique maps in the base game this has always been a constantly updated game that reflects on the decisions of GGG and player feedback yes our voices do matter they do make adjustments in response to critical feedback they do explain in detail and apologize when things go seriously wrong they're not perfect and can screw up but they're willing to own up to it now I am sounding like a GGG apologist right now and I might just be so if you want to label me as one go right ahead but I went through a lot of the ebb and flow changes in recent years and I felt all of that I was hyped I was disappointed I was worried and I was hopeful I do disagree with some aspects of the game but if it means to let it run its course leading up to something grandiose that players derisively call it the vision then I'll still be playing so if you're upset by gdg at any point in time and want to see their Vision to be put to the ultimate test then mark your calendar for Path of Exile 2 and judge it for yourself and I shall do the same but we got plenty of time we got the 3.22 league that's coming out and allowed discussing to be had I might even have another Path of Exile video right here on screen for you to watch if not then maybe this video here on dusk it does have Elders themes to it that being said thank you for watching and I shall see you soon well wishers

Channel: Wickman

Views: 178,928

Keywords: path of exile, path of exile 2, path of exile 3.22, poe, poe 3.22, iceberg, path of exile iceberg explained, poe iceberg explained, iceberg explained, trial of the ancestors, game facts, grinding gear games, ggg, poe memes, exilecon 2023, path of exile trivia, path of exile facts, iceberg meme, path of exile new league, path of exile iceberg map, iceberg video, explained, path of exile new player guide

Id: iSQ2dbsWv7g

Length: 109min 46sec (6586 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023