Path of Exile: Race Season 5

The new race season in Path of Exile started up today. It looks like the season is going to run until Dec 28th and will feature 160 distinct events. The longest of those looks to be 3 hours and the shortest is 12 minutes (with 3 of these run in an hour window counting as a single event). There's a list of rewards that you can earn over the course of the season by picking up cumulative points. The first reward comes up after 7 points earned and I just so happen to have earned 10 points in the three events that ran today. So now I have a low level tanky ring that I can assign to any league I want. I'm pretty sure it's going onto my hardcore character because if there's anyone that needs to be a little tankier at low level it's him. I also imagine the value of these rings is going to bottom right out if it had any at all before today since 2869 of these things were given out today.

I did not do very well in any of the three races today but they were definitely learning experiences. I died in the first one to the same guy who killed Sceadeau in our preseason party race. Freeze lock until dead. It's a bit of a problem and I'm thinking skipping that zone entirely is probably a good idea. I like the reward for killing him though, so maybe you just need to roll the dice and hope you don't die?

We learned that you can share the guild stash during solo races. Then we learned that they just forgot to set a flag turning that off and have fixed it going forward. We learned how the endless ledge and original descent races work. In all three races we all got blown out and we need to figure out why. Initial thoughts lead to thinking that we need to start skipping more monsters and just running to higher level zones. Working out the risk/reward for doing so should be on the to-do list! I may try to track down a stream from today to see how the top people got started each time.

There's another race at 4am... I could stay up and do that one. Or I could go to bed and try to wake up for the ones at 8am and 11am... Really I think I'm just going to go to bed when I'm tired and do the ones that happen to be running while I'm awake. I'm going to be away in New Brunswick for a good chunk of this season and I don't know if my laptop can even run this game so I don't think I can make any sort of run at a lot of points this season anyway. 

Even despite not doing so well I did get 10 points which is tied for 715th place overall. Also interesting is the ranking site shows how many challenges people have completed towards a t-shirt and 3 is the most I saw. There's still tons of time, of course, but I'm a little surprised some of the really good racers haven't done more than 3 by this point.