Strongboxes really are terrible.
If you’ve been spending all your time over the holidays playing the early access release of Path of Exile 2, you may be eagerly awaiting some substantial patch notes. We’ve all got our own gripes with the game, which despite an excellent skeleton still needs a lot of work. Thankfully, after weeks of radio silence from Griding Gear Games we’re starting to get some drips of bugfixes—and they’re hilarious.
Take, for example, strongboxes. Beloved institutions of juicy monsters, fountains of loot, and hilarious Zizaran RIP videos, strongboxes are a favorite of players in Path of Exile 1. Unfortunately, their incarnations in the sequel are steaming piles of hot, stinky, garbage. Strongboxes open agonizingly slowly, they emit a cloud of… something that makes it impossible to see the monsters (y’know, when they don’t just bug out and disappear), and their loot sucks.
In the patch notes from last night’s small update, GGG addressed some of the issues we’ve been having with Delirium, fixing bugs where rare monsters pause the fog indefinitely and making it so strongboxes pause the mist for 10 seconds instead of 5. The developer also wrote this: “Note that unrelated to Delirium Mist, further changes to Strongboxes will be made in an upcoming patch to make them less terrible.” At least they’re aware of the issue.
And then there’s Xesht. One of the pinnacle encounters in the game, he’s the end boss you fight after clearing a Breachstone, and a roadblock between players and the juicy juicy atlas points that turn Breaches into one of the highlights of the game so far for me—a crazy giant wave of monsters expanding outward in a seemingly endless fountain of destruction and death. It’s divine.
He can, however, sometimes be a huge dick. I’ve died a couple times to this guy. It’s a sweet fight—he covers the floor in purple doom, summons a giant hand to squash you like a bug, and pulls glowy purple arms out of the ground to swat you to death. Sometimes, however, it turns out he was doing more than intended. Apparently GGG has “fixed a bug where Xesht, We That Are One could sometimes endlessly throw hands.” Indeed.
Now, none of these things are what I really want to see from GGG (except maybe the crash fixes. If my rig locks up one more time opening a map… to the moon). What I really want to see is an EA roadmap, notes about what’s coming down the pike, and some balance changes to shore up some of the more egregiously bad builds in the game. Okay maybe an archmage nerf, too, if you insist.
Those kinds of things will be coming soon I’m sure—Grinding Gear said today that details on Patch 0.1.1 will be coming on January 12—and in the meantime I’ll have to settle for some bugfixes where it’s clear someone on their comms team is enjoying their job.
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