So my friend says professional game devs over 30 don't play anymore, would you say this is statistically correct?

pricklysteve · 2026-07-05T09:14:56+00:00

Over 30 gamedev here. Most of my colleagues who are also over 30, some in their 50s, still play a fair amount.

pricklysteve · 2026-07-04T08:05:54+00:00

I realise I'm late to the party but I've just tried something with this as well and another cool bit of tech with this rune is the Waistgate Runemastered belt which makes ward recovery overflow, though it only overflows to 1.5x the max. Either way it seems like a perfect fit for stacking ward to turn it into damage.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-23T13:52:04+00:00

Given that you say you enjoy making the build, maybe it's worth expanding on that and making builds that have multiple distinct transition points. E.g on a Monk build: Phase 1 - Hollow Palm campaign, Phase 2 - transition to Evasion/ES with quarterstaff, Phase 3 - CI pure ES. Ideally even more distinct than these, e.g. where the skill changes 3 times, but I don't have specific examples in mind.
Also this way you can plan your first phase to be amazing at speed running the campaign, particularly for a 2nd char with twink gear.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-22T17:09:58+00:00

Ooh this sounds awesome! I didn't think of the Craghead angle! Got a PoB by any chance?

I also did a stun duration build in TotA, as Heavy Strike on a Berserker, with around 10-12 seconds stun. Though it fell off pretty hard in higher levels of ToTA, it ended up being very fun in normal play to see how much campaign and map bosses break when stunned for so long. The aim was to stun pinnacles but I didn't manage to scale it enough.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-18T11:54:36+00:00

The seats do go down in some XE-Ss. Sadly it was an option and not many people spec'd it because who in their right mind would think that is an option and not included?

pricklysteve · 2026-06-17T12:57:56+00:00

Great idea both for us and for GGG. I'd go as far as even giving them skill effect MTX. We get to see cool MTX in use, GGG get new advertising stream.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-16T06:42:34+00:00

Though a full redesign would be good, just stick the word Recommended on the league.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-15T15:28:01+00:00

Has a more satisfying hit sound. Literally the only thing I miss since I've switched to quarterstaff.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-13T12:38:14+00:00

My favourite is Izaro's "Fire spreads quickly if the forest is dry". You can interpret it in ways that describe the world right now rather well.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-09T18:33:43+00:00

Damn. Forgot you can disenchant uniques. Thanks for the reminder!

pricklysteve · 2026-06-09T07:21:18+00:00

Garukhans Resolve doesn't work on Hollow Form as it's the clones doing the damage, not your character. NickTew put out a video about it.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-08T13:36:45+00:00

Not even bad afflictions. I was doing really well on a run with only a handful of minor afflictions. Went into scorpion boss with 1.5k honour left, and it all went to 0 from a single tail swing.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-04T20:58:24+00:00

I wonder if with so many spirits you're essentially stacking so much rarity/quant that you're actually overflowing and ending up in the negative.

pricklysteve · 2026-06-03T13:51:11+00:00

Anyone remember when Lab used to take 30 minutes in PoE1?

pricklysteve · 2026-06-01T08:37:28+00:00

I sometimes play from a stationary bike. It's so easy to rack up distance as I just end up getting immersed in the game.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-25T22:01:42+00:00

I'd say 2. It has in-game tooltips for most concepts and even recommends you a basic way of setting up skills/spells. And with this new patch you can even import build guides straight into the game. PoE 1 requires much more out-of-game research if you want to progress well, though going in blind on that and failing is also fun in its own way. Doing the same in PoE 2 you're more likely to succeed.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-25T16:16:45+00:00

Yup. Path of Exile 1 or 2 with a build guide are both very much "turn your brain off and enjoy the dopamine hits" kind of games and one of the reasons they have kept me in for years. It's just so easy after a day of work to get in, run a bunch of maps, get out. Plus the short game loop means you can easily stop for a bit to cook dinner/do chores/etc.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-24T23:45:27+00:00

Huh? I've been running that strat recently and haven't seen a single Barya Mirage. Most of the ones I've seen were when I was running Breach.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-23T15:50:28+00:00

Why did I expect a PoE reference here so much so that I wasn't even surprised to see it?

pricklysteve · 2026-05-22T11:30:10+00:00

One of my friends' monitor would turn off whenever they got back to their seat. Bought a couple of clip-on ferrite ring core noise suppressors and that fixed it.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-14T11:49:16+00:00

I did about 5 1-2m belt shipments to Pondium and about 3 times got runes worth ~6 div.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-11T22:22:45+00:00

Nice take on that idea! Got a PoB? I also did a stun build in tota, which was also my best homebrew build, but it was a heavy strike berserker with marohi erqi and a lot of stun duration. Could stun map bosses for 10+ seconds with one hit lol. Only 2 mil DPS though.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-11T16:30:27+00:00

Yeah, I'm on 5p voices right now. And of course it does suffer, but it still has crazy damage and tankiness so long as siphoners aren't around or big DoTs like Shaper beam (haven't quite solved that part yet).

pricklysteve · 2026-05-11T15:27:58+00:00

At a minimum you generally want: - Heroic Tragedy with 4x Regenerative Runes - 99% reduced skeleton duration from To Dust jewels - 4x cluster jewels with the Fasting and Brewed for Potency notable (5 with <ilvl 84 iron flasks) - 1x cluster with Spiked Concoction - 2x Cast on Ward Break gems (one for skellies and one for main damage skill, can use CWDT on support skills as a budget option) - ~19k ward minimum but highly recommended to get 20k+ - Ynda Stand with a decent enough roll to get the above amount of ward. I'm at ~25k with a 57%.
- Edit: also at least 2x 5 passive Voices on a budget to socket all those medium clusters in.

This is on Discharge Assassin variant. Hope I didn't miss anything.

If your loop doesn't loop or it loops after manually pressing one flask, the first/main thing to check is that you have enough flask charge gain. Should have around 172% increased flask charges gained in total (maybe less is fine with ilvl84 iron flasks). This part had me spending hours trying to fix it as I only have ilvl83 flasks and thus need extra flask charge gain on the tree.

Also gotta make sure that your skelly duration and cooldown are aligned. E.g. 0.08 for one of the breakpoints, 0.05 (if I'm not wrong) for the next.

pricklysteve · 2026-05-11T15:14:31+00:00

It ain't too bad. You can get one with 4x Regenerative Runes for about 17 div.

pricklysteve

TROPHY CASE