Friday, August 22, 2014

Path of Exile: Stash Tab Sale

I'm just going to throw this out there in case someone is interested in playing Path of Exile and wants to spend some money on it... For some amount of time, probably all day Saturday but I don't know for sure, they're selling a bundle of six premium stash tabs for $16.50 when they're normally $4 each. Not a great discount by any stretch, but also not a bad way to give them some money. It is certainly what I bought when I gave them $20 back when I first started playing. (They use the stupid system where you have to buy in game currency in bulk... I still have 35 points lying around unspent as a result. I understand why they use this system since they got an extra $3.50 out of me but I still hate it.)

I've found some new changes while playing that have made me happy with the game. For one, now when you die you get an option to respawn in town or at a 'checkpoint' where before you had to respawn in town. This makes playing alone so much nicer. It used to be that you could have to run through cleared out zones for quite a long time until you made it back to where you died when playing alone. When playing in a group you'd just have someone else make you a portal back to the fight so no time was lost at all. It's not clear where the checkpoints are (I haven't actually died very often) but getting to respawn at the stairs to the floor in the final dungeon was a lot nicer than having to waypoint back to the gardens and then walk all the way to the tower and then climb all the stairs. I used to run cast on death and portal on my solo characters (possibly the only legitimate uses for both gems) to try to get around this problem and I'm very happy to see it changed.

I've also always run into mana issues on my ranger characters, but this time I have no problems at all. I went and got a single cluster of mana related nodes and now I get 20 mana when I kill an enemy and 2 mana when I hit an enemy. My attack only costs 11 mana and hits everything in a cone so those are some significant numbers. I have 91 mana in my mana pool after running one aura so I do run dry when attacking a single hard target but that's what flasks are for, right?

I went and visited Tom's hideout and while I wasn't able to use his crafting benches I was totally able to tag along on his daily quest. This seems to be a way to let people who are lower level catch up to people who are higher which is nice. On the flip side I was able to invite him to a group when I ran into a quest giver in the world and he was able to tag along and get rep from my quest. (And by tag along I mean he obliterated everything and I just stood around...) So there are ways for low level people to give a boost to high level people as well. Seems reasonable to me!

I also found out while grouping with him that the rampage stack thing refreshes when anyone in the group kills an enemy. I was afraid they'd set it up to screw over parties inadvertently and am happy to see that groups of people will probably get ludicrous rampage stacks as long as someone in the party can find an enemy to kill within 5 seconds. Low mob density is the way I tend to lose my buff as it is so I'm not sure how much it matters? I guess it depends on how far away you can be from your group and still proc stacks for each other.

I'd gone to look up the vendor recipe for how to make a decent weapon since my bow was starting to lag in damage a little. I was waiting until I hit level 35 to get the next type of bow when I found a yellow level 32 bow that is off the charts good. It had 6 mods and all of them are great. A big percentage increase to physical damage, flat physical damage, flat lightning damage, attack speed, cold resist, and life gain on hit. I have a feeling I could probably sell it for a pretty penny, at least if the prices for leveling weapons in a new league are at all comparable to the ones I ran into in the week long race league (which is the only time I looked to buy a leveling weapon).

But even if it is, I don't think I want to sell it. Part of me thinks flipping it into a better weapon when I level up just makes economical sense, but part of me hated that Diablo III launched as a game like that and I don't see a big need to turn Path of Exile into such a game. I really think it's better if I just stick the bow in the guild bank when I'm done with it and let someone else use a stupid good bow for a while. I think the game is fun like that. I still agree with keeping crafting items out of the guild bank because people should be free to screw around with the stuff they find and no one should be subjected to oversight in terms of 'what item justifies using a fusing orb' but at the same time I also don't want someone to randomly throw away every fusing orb I've found on something silly. So use your fusers however you want, and I'll use mine however I want, and we can both be happy! Maybe you use yours to save up and buy something nice instead of crafting at all? Good for you!

I leveled a quest giver up to the point where I could create a hideout and I ended up with one in a graveyard because I happened to randomly get a lot of quests with the necromancer. She buffs items to add on int and mana which sucks for me, but that's who I randomly got so that's what I'm running with. I wonder if hideouts are cross character? I wonder if I can change to a better locale when I unlock more quest givers?

Sthenno asked a question about joining the guild in a response to yesterday's post and I don't know if other people who may have been interested in the response saw the question at all. So here goes... As far as I know all I need to invite someone to the guild is their character name. I think I can send the invite even when they're offline. So if you play the game, or start playing the game, and want to use some left over gear in the guild bank or have people to group with or whatever just send me a message somehow with a character name and I'll hook you up!

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