PoE2 has come back to regular play sessions. We're currently in Act 2 Cruel again with Ranger+Witch combo. That is indeed a lot easier than Monk+Warrior was, so progression is a lot faster this time. We do still die plenty from mostly unknown sources which can be attributed to having 9 to 27 minions on screen plus all the AoE effects of my poison + lightning ranger. It's just hard to see what's going on most of the time, but pretty light show guaranteed.
Still fun to play together although my wife lets me do all the 'preparation', she's not interested in the min-max build side of the game. So we play a few levels together, then I spend an hour or two looking for and upgrading gear, skills, support gems for 2 characters. So much down time in this game! The UI is so far from stream lined on PS5 which is also a reason why my wife has me do all that stuff. They made it very hard to see what's actually better when trying to compare things, maximum number of clicks required. As well as the actual gameplay works on a controller, the UI side is one of the worst. (And only one person can do most of that at a time. I have to log in as her separately since inscribing skill and support gems is currently broken for P2 in couch co-op, but P2 can finally salvage items. 1 step forward, 2 steps back)
Anyway current 'strategy' is me dropping plague pustules around that consecrete ground and add mana regenration for us, then spam with gas arrows that interact with the pustules and gets ignited by arsonist minions for big explosions. Alternating with scattershot conduit spikes for lightning attacks and voltaic volley for huge electric explosions. And ice volley plus ice shot to freeze the boss to revive my wife when needed. (She still plays like a tank...)
My wife has 8 warrior minions (2 from sceptre, 6 burning ones from skills that live on beyond death to close the revive gap. Thus they continually burn themselves then fall and revive instantly every 10 seconds), 2 snipers and an arsonist. She mostly uses essence drain and unearth (makes more temporary minions), bonestorm for bosses. She has Despair and Hexblast as well but mostly sticks to single button fighting.
The gameplay is too fast anyway to set up more complex interactions with debuffs, ailments and curses. Shit simply dies too fast. And since ailments only last 4 to 8 seconds, it's not all that useful for bosses either ugh. Kinda sucks since there are plenty ways to combine ailments and get bonuses for doing so, yet layering ailments within 4 seconds, good luck with that lol. For example Withered increases chaos damage you deal on enemies. Goes in 5% increments up to 50%, but even with a decent wand, can't get it past 30% since each hit only lasts a few seconds. (And you pay for that by 25% less damage, so you're mostly dealing less damage as a result) I guess it's only good for a multi shot fast bow, you need over 2.5 hits per second to reach 50% within the 4 second duration and don't stop.
So many mechanics push you towards using/boosting a single mechanic rather than strategic interactions. Bit of a shame really.
Next to that I'm playing Exocars in VR. Fun distraction, reminds me of Motorstorm. (I wish that would come to VR) It's a rather simple game (looks like a high res ps2 racer with added shadows. Textures are modern yet detail is far less than Motorstorm, no terrain deformation, simple short track layouts) It's fun in short bursts, handling is very twitchy on controller (I set the sensitivity under half below the 'low' setting and it's still hard not to fish tail) yet that satisfying feeling to nail corners is fully there.
Plus you can roll (with) the buggy, view point not locked to the horizon like in GT7.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PSVR/comments/1j6i4hh/exocars_yes_you_can_roll_the_buggy/
Most games are shackled by Quest's mobile graphics, but beggars can't be choosers. Sony won't make VR games :( Hitman WoA and Aces of Thunder might have some modern detail, but always hard to judge from promotional videos. I'll keep my expectations low. Nothing has come anywhere near RE8/RE4r/GT7/CotM yet. All first year games.
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