Good Morning Friends! Last night I had a wild ride of bouncing around in several ARPGs before finally settling into the grind in Diablo III. This season there is an item that drops called an Angelic Crucible that can turn any item into a Primal Ancient, but it also gives the item a special ability. The problem with this system however is that you get one of three random enchants each time you use it. I think I have gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen of these items so far and out of those I have gotten 1 Wrath of the Berserker power, 1 Whirlwind power, and all of the others have been for Hammer of the Ancients. However last night on my final run before going to bed I finally pulled the Whirlwind power I was hunting for.
I’ve been contemplating stockpiling them and running up a Demon Hunter so I can play with those powers as well. I am hoping that the items persist after the season for non-seasonal play, and if so… then I have the desire to build out a set for each of the powers on Barbarian and maybe Demon Hunter. I’ve heard the Crusader abilities are not that great, so I might take a pass on those. Essentially those are the three classes that I spend more time playing than any others. It would have been awesome if one of the Crusader sets buffed my favorite thorns build, but alas it is not to be. The whirlwind power is really nice because it is a much stronger pull than we have ever had in the game before, and you can just sorta drag things along with you as you spin to win.
In other news, Torchlight Infinite is now up on Steam, and you can request access to the playtest. I’ve had access to the android version of the game for some time now, and it was pretty solid. Unfortunately, the PC version seems to be the most “mobile port” game I have seen. There are very few configuration options and you are stuck to using the default keybindings which are Left Click to move, Right Click to attack, Q to heal, and WERF for special attacks. My default setup for ARPGs is to set Force Move to W, and then steer with my mouse. I find it so much easier than the constant repetitive clicking required for click to move and I am hoping given time that they add in some keybindings.
The main reason why I did not play more on Android is the fact that it currently does not have controller support. I attempted to use a controller through steam last night and this appears to still be the case. I am very interested in this game, but only if either the controller support is solid or they add some keybinding options. Until then it might as well not exist. Your mileage may vary however and if you are interested in checking the game out, it appears that they are just letting people into the playtest immediately. I clicked the “Request Access” button and got instant access to download the game and try it out.
I’m starting to fall into a funk with Path of Exile. Have you ever played a game where it feels like you missed the golden era when it was amazing? That is how I am feeling about Path of Exile. I’ve seen so many videos of people flying through maps and getting explosions of loot left and right, and I can’t seem to ever reach that level. I am in the doldrums of red maps which vacillate wildly between extremely easy to clear to being painful deathfests. I ran into a boss last night in one of the Vaal Corruption Rifts, that had 8 ArchNemesis modifiers on it… and it legitimately took me over twenty deaths before I finally downed it. The only thing that I could do was kite the mob while dropping Storm Brand behind me. I eventually drug it to the start of the Rift so that I could at least resurrect and get back into the action quickly.
I could roll something else and try another build… but there is no guarantee that will work any differently. At this point, I have tried Explosive Arrow and Wintertide Brand last league, and went with a supposedly tried and true Storm Brand build this league… and found both lacking. Maybe lacking is the wrong word, but would require so much currency investment to bring them to the level that would allow me to run content in a carefree manner. I just don’t think that Path of Exile is ever going to be that game for me, and as a result may never replace Diablo III. I love chain-running content over and over in Diablo and picking up loot, then resetting things and going again. In Path… everything feels like it has a cost associated with it… either opportunity cost or a very real cost. I don’t love that feeling.
In Diablo III there is this virtuous cycle of running Nephelem Rifts to get Keystones, and then running Greater Rifts for levels and rewards. It feels good and continues to feel good the deeper you go into the gameplay. You earn gear that helps you move faster through the Nephilim Rifts and go higher in difficulty level in the Greater Rifts… which causes you to earn more rewards and level your gems higher. All the while allowing for easy drop-in gameplay so you can hang out with your friends while doing this, or better yet help them get gear in the process. In Path of Exile, the cycle seems to be focused on making “currency”, and then using that to fund buying better gear on the trade league instead of just doing things for the sake of doing them.
Then there is the problem that I have to effectively make a decision if I care about progress on the atlas or if I care about making levels. I sacrifice levels for the sake of grinding out progress, or I sacrifice any forward momentum for the sake of farming experience. Then there is the hope that I will gain enough currency and map drops through doing the content that I can sustain continuing to do the content. I am always teetering on the edge of not having enough Alchemy or Scouring orbs, with the latter pretty easy to buy from vendors… but the conversion rate is somewhat painful and I feel like I don’t get enough of the feeder currency to make up for it. Then there are chisels… which have a fixed Chaos cost on the vendor and I don’t feel like I get near enough drops.
Essentially while mapping I always feel like I am on the verge of not having enough of something to keep sustaining that activity. In Diablo III it is not very far into the season that I feel like I have either more resources than I could ever spend or easy access to acquire those resources. I am not sure I will ever reach that point with Path of Exile. There will always be subtle friction of not quite having whatever it is that you need, in order to do the things you want to do. The answer is to engage with the trade economy… but I don’t find ANY of that fun. Accumulation of wealth has never been a key goal in my life and once my bills were paid in real life, I stopped caring about making more money. I just think mentally I am not wired to succeed in Path of Exile, and I am concerned that I will keep trying to make it into Diablo III.
I am rapidly losing hope after getting engaged with Path of Exile, that the “sequel” is going to really be a game for me in the long run. With the Torchlight Infinite PC test having its own levels of frustration, I guess I now pin my hopes on Diablo IV giving me a happy medium between the type of gameplay that I do enjoy in Path of Exile, and the virtuous cycle of fun grinding that I have in Diablo III. I am hoping that luck shines upon me and that I get into the Diablo IV testing process. I am not holding my breath, as the person who threw their thumb on the scale and apparently got me into Dragonflight Alpha/Beta is no longer with the company.
The post Whirlwind Powers Activate appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I’ve spent the entire weekend being paranoid because my wife and I had both been sickly for the last week or so. We assumed it was allergies, but Saturday night my wife took a COVID swab test, and came up positive. Thus far mine have come up negative but I am having what I am not sure are symptoms or not. Basically, I feel like I got hit by a truck and everything aches… almost like when you have the flu. Other than that most of what I am experiencing is just general “allergies” or “hay fever”. My wife had to scramble and prepare for a sub for this week as she is out until Friday. I find it highly unlikely that I do not have COVID unless she just had a very light viral load. I feel pretty lousy, and as a result, spent most of the extended weekend chilling out and playing a mix of Diablo III and Path of Exile.
I’ve talked about it before but my goal for this season has been to clear the atlas map. At this point, I am sitting at 83 out of 115, and the majority of what I have left in front of me is red maps and uniques. I’ve been trying to farm whatever I could from Kirac, but once we entered red map territory the requirement of having to have a corrupted map has made him less than useful. Essentially I seem to be alternating between grinding low-level maps for experience and pushing progress because deaths really hurt. That is probably one of the most annoying things about Path of Exile is how brutal death is to your leveling. There have been so many maps where a chain death spree reduces whatever progress I made to nothing.
Shocking to probably no one that has been around my blog for long… I created a spreadsheet to track our progress. That way the handful of us that are playing together can tick off maps as we clear them. The theory is we can also maybe share the wealth if someone is missing some gaps in their progress and we have maps that can fill them. Group play sucks… but it is worth it to help someone complete a hole in their maps. It took me forever to finish out yellow maps and I would have struggled to finish out white maps were it not for some help from Ace. It has helped me at least to feel like I am making forward momentum, ticking off each map as I finish it.
I’m finding it shockingly lucrative to run just white and yellow maps without any modifiers, and I think in part that is thanks to my Atlas tree. Right now I have gone hard into Essences, Strongboxes, and Expeditions. The only things that I have shut off completely are Breach, Blight, and Metamorph. Those are just league mechanics that I do not enjoy. Blight is essentially tower defense and I have always disliked those sorts of encounters. Metamorph in its current state just does not feel worth my time given that the bosses you end up creating are super tanky and take forever to kill. Breach might be cool but with a brand build I always end up getting overwhelmed and dying to those mechanics when I get overwhelmed. My favorite mechanic is probably still Expedition, which is in part why I have gone so hard into it with the tree, and haggling seems to be a solid source of cool stuff.
One of the cooler things that I have encountered in my running base maps, is a unique strongbox. A pretty tanky boss spawned out of it and dropped a few unique items as a result. Strongboxes used to be pretty dangerous but I have managed to get a Divine Vessel drop and picked up the “cannot be frozen” trait from the Brine King. I either need more divines to drop or more vessels to drop so that I can finish collecting abilities for my Pantheon. I think since I made quite a bit of progress over the long weekend, I will probably focus the next few days on running maps for experience so I can pour on a few more levels. I’ve reorganized my passive tree quite a bit to gain some tankiness and I am working my way toward the Armor and Energy Shield mastery cluster to add a bit more. It was shocking to me how much of a difference swapping out my level 19 Storm Brand gem was for a level 21 corrupted Storm Brand gem. I’ve got an item as well that increases all of the levels of lightning gems by one, so a 22 gem seems to just deal much more damage as a result.
I’m still having quite a bit of fun, but I am trying to ease back a bit on the pushing… because I am afraid I will just get frustrated. On the podcast this weekend I came off a lot more negative on the game than I expected to. I do fear that the vision that Grinding Gear Games has for the future of the title is going in the opposite direction that I would prefer. I play ARPGs because I like the power fantasy of crushing maps full of enemies and getting randomized loot as a result. There is a dopamine hit when you wreck something and watch a rainbow pinata of loot explode out of it. Path of Exile however seems to be on a path of making a more difficult and slow-paced game, which makes me hope that maybe Diablo IV will be the game I am looking for. Last Epoch also seems really solid right now and I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with it. The challenge there however will be whether or not the group gameplay is good.
The post Tracking Atlas Progress appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! What happens when we have a few weeks’ worth of Path of Exile discussion bottled up? Well, apparently we record a two-hour-long show! Bel was completely oblivious to how long we were recording in spite of the entire crew trying to warn him. First, we have a few quick topics about Return to Oz and the launch of Ooblets on all platforms including Nintendo Switch. From there we dive into a long discussion about our thoughts relating to Path of Exile and how the Lake of Kalandra league has gone. We have different points of entry from those of us who have been grinding away at maps and those who have yet to finish the campaign. We also attempt to scare Kodra who thinks he has seen a lot of systems so far… but has yet to unlock half of them.
Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.
The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.
It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.
I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.
Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.
I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about.
Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post.
The post Blaugust and the Grand Experiment appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
