We're continuing to share backstories of Divination Cards created by our supporters. This time we spoke with Quelex about the story behind the Imperfect Memories, a Divination Card from the Siege of the Atlas expansion.
I have played games like Path of Exile since Diablo 1 came out when I was young. I've always enjoyed coming up with different ideas and testing how well they will work. I stumbled upon the website for PoE during its closed beta and thought it looked cool (especially as a person who loves Final Fantasy X's passive tree) but I didn't know anyone that played it. When the open beta came around my friend and I finally gave it a shot and we have been hooked and played every league since.
As with many other cards, the idea for the reward came first. I've always felt it was important to have special mods tied to content (like Incursion or Delve) to keep that content relevant to crafting. Synthesis league added a ton of stats and some you can't find anywhere else. I especially liked +% Attributes from jewelry as an implicit since I love playing Whispering Ice. So why not a 3 implicit synthesised jewelry so that you can try to hit at least one of those chase modifiers?
But there was a snag: You can't make a card for an item that can't drop in Standard. Synthesis was one of my favorite leagues and for over a year it looked like nothing from it would be coming back so the idea was shelved. With Echoes of The Atlas, synthesised and fractured items returned to the core game and so now the card I wanted could be made!
For the theme I wanted to connect something from my life to Synthesis. Synthesis League was a personal favorite, but it had its flaws. I thought back to how my then girlfriend (and now wife!) and I had been apart while she was at college a couple hours away. It was hard being apart but it made the times we did get to spend together on the beautiful campus memorable. Looking back it's easy to gloss over the bad parts. So I settled on the theme of nostalgia and the rest of the card came together quickly at that point. The art comes from a combination of the synthesis decay effect around the edges and a picture of a spot on the campus featuring a very assertive pilgrim goose that always wandered the campus with its duck friends in tow.
Thank you GGG for an amazing game, for adding my card, and for bringing more Synthesis content back to the game! (Synthesis 2 league when?) It's been wonderful to see other contributors bringing more opportunities for people to get synthesised items and maps so that part of the game can live on and be more accessible. And for all of those who made it to the end and have turned in a set: I'm sorry you got resists and mana regen. I'm sure you'll get an extra maximum power charge next time.
