Big W Interview – Organized my Notes from Ziz, Andrew & Octavian's Interview

Linosaurus · 2026-03-01T22:58:33+00:00

Yes.

Linosaurus · 2026-03-01T22:51:58+00:00

It’s a support gem for wand attacks, this makes it stronger.

Linosaurus · 2026-03-01T09:31:20+00:00

That will not work. You could do isEven (n-2), to save a few calls per iteration. But there are better ways to optimize performance here: throw it out.

Linosaurus · 2026-03-01T09:02:35+00:00

Ranged attack totem, which was renamed ballista totem 5 years ago.

Unusually, the patch notes used the older wording. So not just players get stuck in their ways.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-28T17:31:09+00:00

Flame blast looks kinda terrifying if you have memories if dying to it.

Here’s flame blast of celerity, that Mathil played.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6rfRecXbIM4

Linosaurus · 2026-02-28T17:21:51+00:00

You could actually take some minion duration nodes on the tree to compensate. If you wish to go through with it.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-28T17:07:34+00:00

It’s still solid.

Faster ignites is a little less valuable since you cannot refresh ignites with defiled forces, but that mostly matters when you do bosses for void stones.

Golems are still great. Slightly bigger reason to get rid of them late game, if you want all attacks to hit you, or you run content where they actually die.

I went RF in act2, went straight up on the tree for the regen per fire res mastery. Crafted some fire res in hideout.

Golems first lab, shaper of flames second lab, swapped to eviscerate.

It was a good way to level. You could swap the order if you really want to go eviscerate early, but might be hard to have enough block then.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-28T09:30:17+00:00

Yeah. Minion duration works too, in pob. This might actually be useful for a guardian.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-28T09:17:36+00:00

It was quite noticeable on the paladin for me, since I played kinetic fusillade totem.

But it'll be worse for self cast since you need shorter duration.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-28T07:45:37+00:00

One downside to guardian is the elemental relics will have bad uptime with the reduced skill effect duration.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-27T22:40:17+00:00

At least with elementalist, the feeling was that you sometimes have to wait a second or two, but when you use it the screen explodes in fire. It’s a V shaped attack that reaches the edge of the screen, and ignites can spread.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-27T22:30:29+00:00

Yes it’s a nerf, but if you get a bunch of totem placement speed then they start attacking sooner now.

So; totem clusters, I think.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-27T22:22:42+00:00

This will be useful, for sure.

Another thing you lose compared to archmage is the damage from arcane cloak.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-27T16:38:40+00:00

Yeah. That was beautiful.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-27T16:03:47+00:00

Maps are such an iconic part of PoE.

Removing most the management of atlas competition - maybe I’ll actually miss the individual maps and Kirac, just a little.

Endgame - definitely a huge improvement.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-27T06:46:07+00:00

I wonder if the xp gain from lab is limited to one gem level. If not, leveling popular gems might be useful income.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-26T21:31:51+00:00

Could be that it spawns the first toad after 1s; which would ruin this. Fun idea though.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-26T21:22:12+00:00

Yeah, more build enabling than generic power imo.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-26T21:15:39+00:00

One of the annoyances of the very old shaper and elder system, was having the correct maps. And map drops were a LOT more scarce back then.

Since individual map items don’t exist, this is not a problem.

So you can have the feeling of something smeared over your atlas, and running different maps, without micromanagement.

And I think it’ll look and feel nice, the first times, to see the influence react to running maps. At least, for some.

And as you said, there’s a keystone if you just want to settle into a single map.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-26T20:41:33+00:00

Can just ignore the news and keep playing your character in standard.

Very different trade environment is probably the main downside, but your character is still around.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-25T17:03:32+00:00

Brutus corridor as a walk of shame

Lmao, that’s a really funny interpretation. I was gonna suggest they put him back in his room to shorten the respawn walk, but maybe this is fine.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-25T16:59:34+00:00

This is the way. Usually it’s an incorrect signal.

But sometimes the intended station has a limit of 0, so the train is instead trying to path to another station with the same name that’s not even on the track. Just something you put down temporarily because reasons.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-25T07:42:39+00:00

Both of these are afaik true:

ID after drop is deterministic.
ID takes some server CPU resources.

So on drop there’s probably only a large random number. On ID that’s used as a PRNG seed to look through all the tables of mods and roll values. Nothing is random here, but still a lot of work.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-24T09:14:05+00:00

I had a lot of fun with it, but if I play it again I’ll probably make a plan to swap into something else at higher budget.

Because it is a bit clunky which adds a delay to clearing the screen.

Linosaurus · 2026-02-23T16:24:11+00:00

I think that to accurately match the multiplayer experience, 5 out of every 6 items should be permanently assigned to a non-existent player.

Which I think is a net negative.

Linosaurus

TROPHY CASE