the oath

The Let’s Make Art oath, which Sarah recites at the start of every tutorial, is “I promise to be kind to myself, I promise not to compare my work, and I promise to have fun.” I naturally do this with art, but not so much with everything else. Case in point: Path of Exile 2. I like this game, but it tilts me so hard.

First: dying. Through the campaign, I paid minimal attention to defense. I focused on offense-based passives and wore whatever armor/evasion gear I found on the floor. This kept me afloat until endgame, when I started dying constantly. Every boss fight I’d die in the first 10-15% and spend the rest of the fight on the floor while HGR soloed the boss. Lots of deaths to normal mobs too. It was bad.

After a lot of frustration, I went to google what other witchhunters were doing. Evasion + sorcery ward seemed to be the most common strat. (At the time, I was running around 80% armor/20% evasion, with little passive support for either.) I redid my second ascendancy trial to replace culling strike + decimator with a fully upgraded sorcery ward. With the ward in place (and honor resistance relics from HGR), I did my third ascendancy to get my culling strike back. I also reworked my tree to pick up some evasion nodes and started looking for evasion gear.

Gearing up was the second big point of frustration. PoE2’s gear customization is incredibly rich and multifaceted, but it comes with a steep learning curve and most of it is not explained in-game. There’s different gear bases with different native stat ranges and the whole tiered affix system. There are so many kinds of orbs, plus omens and essences, plus mechanics of desecration, corruption, recombination… I’m still working on getting my head around it all. From the simple (I still can’t keep regal/alchemy/exalted orbs straight) to the complex (lesser/normal/greater essences can only be used on magic gear, and will turn it rare, while perfect essences can only be used on rare gear and have their own special mechanics), the whole gear crafting process makes me feel like a moron at every turn.

There was a real bad spot where I was still dying a lot and muddling through the process of fixing my gear. We’ve mostly stabilized by now—my witchhunter is a lot stronger now, and more importantly, I understand things better—but I can tell nothing has changed internally. I don’t want to be kind to myself, damn it. I want to get things right. Is that so much to ask?? (Apparently it is.)

Third, there was the waystone situation. I kept rolling bad mods on my waystones and bricking them. Then HGR would be like “We’re not doing that one” and I’d be like “okay?? if we don’t run this I have to drop down 2 tiers” and then HGR would give me one of his waystones to use. Which is fine, but I felt bad about being waystone-negative. In retrospect, it was silly to be so tilted about bad RNG, but I was already massively on tilt from everything else. Also, come to think of it, I bet I could have saved some of those bricked waystones with (alchemy? exalted?) orbs (whichever one rerolls the item completely). I didn’t think you could use those orbs on waystones because my dumb ass doesn’t know the difference between a waystone and a precursor tablet.

Thinking about it, watercolor lends itself easily to kindness. It’s real hard to brick a watercolor tree. Even if you do, you don’t lose exp, or go down a watercolor tier, or have to farm rare drops to try again. You just flip to a new page and paint another tree (or anything else you want). I like that aspect, but I also like PoE2 a lot and certainly don’t plan to give up on the game. I just wish I were better at it.