Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
The post Old Men Warring appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This is Big Boy… though technically, his name is Tigger, but we did not know that then and can’t seem to shift gears. Big Boy doesn’t really know where he belongs, so this morning when my spouse went outside, he was on the roof of her car. We’ve seen cat prints for years on our vehicles but never really knew who it was. Part of Big Boy’s confusion is that his original family moved away and while our next-door neighbors have officially adopted him, he still spends much time in our front yard. He is a sweet baby and will headbutt your hand, but he can also be a bit of a bully to the other outdoor cats so I’m not nearly as fond of him as I used to be. He still has a home, but it just isn’t the same home… and he still comes and goes as he pleases which I question if that is the best idea. However, there are times when he acts like he wants us to be his family.
In other Cat-related breaking news… Gracie has learned a new thing. When she figures out how to do something, she obsesses over that new thing until she gets bored and moves on. This particular new thing is that she has learned that she can easily jump up on top of the fridge in the kitchen, and since yesterday has just spent a decent amount of time up there chilling. She of course figured out she could knock magnets off the fridge door from this vantage point… so they have all been redistributed to a position slightly lower than her paws can reach. She is terribly proud of herself and feels like you should be proud of her too. I am dreading when she figures out how to get on top of the entertainment center, as we have tended to use that as a “Gracie-free zone” for anything she needs not to play with.
In Path of Exile news they have buffed the Trial of the Ancestors significantly. For example in the above image, that shows my opening round rewards and there is one opponent who would give me nine raw Chaos Orbs for winning that round. Unfortunately, the stacking seems to be that the best rewards offer the least favor with the various opponents, so you can take some short-term gains… but at the cost of overall progress in the tournament as a whole. If you are playing to win, you would take the 19 Jewelers Orbs as that option gives you the most favor with the individual factions, which would in turn allow you to buy more units. I’ve won enough matches that I have pushed up my ranking over 200, which in theory means I should start seeing even better rewards… but also the combat has become rather brutal.
There had been a degenerate strategy centered around Empire’s Grasp and Quill Rain, and involved creating totems that would indefinitely knock back the guards allowing you to just walk around and capture the totems. This briefly saw the price of Empire’s Grasp shoot up from a 1 Chaos Orb item to over 50 Chaos Orbs. I managed to monopolize on this and sold the pair I had sitting in my vault for 50 Chaos Orbs yesterday before the price started to come back down… and thanks to the emergency patch fixing this interaction has plummeted back down to the expected 1 Chaos Orb territory. If you are curious about what this looked like, Zizaran released a video explaining the strategy yesterday that has now been fixed. GGG has come out and said that they are not going to claw back any of the loot that was gained through this exploitative interaction, so as is often the case… the answer is to exploit early and exploit often. I opted not to chase this because I figured it would get patched out quickly, and would prefer to learn how to do the tournament correctly.
Most of my effort has been towards trying to set up and prepare my Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the endgame. I’m now in Act 9 and should wrap up the character today. I had been holding onto a reasonable Opal Sceptre base and performed some quick essence crafting and landed a +1 to all fire spell skill gems which will benefit both my Righteous Fire main link and my Fire Trap helmet link. As for helmets I held onto a good fractured base and then threw some essences at it until I wound up with something that had some decent resistances. The other interesting item that I am using currently, and will likely need to toss aside is a Pyre ring that I picked up on my journeys. I am not really using much in the way of cold damage other than Frost Blink, and mostly I am using it for the bonus burning damage and pretty solid resistances. Honestly, I will likely end up using this Sceptre for quite a while given that I am just realizing while writing this that I can bench-craft on Minion damage to get even more of a boost.
I did have to spend a bit of time running maps yesterday in order to gain some more currency, as I bankrupted myself trying to help Thalen get the same items I talked about picking up yesterday for his Righteous Fire build. In my travels, I managed to pick up my first Divine Orb of the league so that was exciting. My happy place I think is going to be using my Lightning Arrow Raider for mapping and then swapping over to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to spend all that sweet sweet sulphite to Delve up some goodies. I’ve probably missed Delve the most and while technically the Lightning Arrow Raider can do some of that… the second a mob down there looks at me crosswise I evaporate. The Raider is amazing for brute forcing a lot of AOE damage all over the place… but not that great at anything that requires survival or scenarios where I can’t leech a lot of life and mana. However, occasionally swapping in a totem support for my Lighting Arrow has opened up the ability to run reflection maps with impunity which is nice.
Anyways! Time to wrap this up. I had a power outage in the middle of writing this which caused me to have to re-write quite a bit after the “blink” was over. I hope you all are having a wonderful week and I am hoping to wrap up my Juggernaut today.
The post Gracie’s New Trick appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.
Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.
Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.
There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.
I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.
I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.
Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.
I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.
The post A Packed Weekend appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a personal blog post and less of a gaming one. One of my biggest joys over the last few weeks has been evening time with one of the outdoor feral cats that we call Greybie. He has started coming out into the backyard to hang out with us. My wife spends way more time in the backyard than I do, and generally speaking, pings me over messages to let me know when he arrives. I’ve been spending about an hour each night hanging out and loving on Greybie and it completely warms my heart that when I get out there and set down, he comes running across the yard to be by my side.
There is so much of me that wants to adopt him and take him inside, but I have deeply conflicted feelings. Firstly we have three indoor cats already, so we would have to get him tame enough to go to the vet first without freaking him out completely. We are not quite there yet. Secondly, he is a “notched” baby which means he is a community cat. He was purposefully caught, neutered, vaccinated, and then released back into the community. Our neighborhood in general seems to be a collection point for these cats and in theory… you are not supposed to adopt them. So instead we give them safe places to stay during the winter with a few cat shelters and then make sure they are getting food and water to supplement whatever they are catching. Greybie roams around quite a bit and honestly, I am not sure if he would enjoy being an indoor cat… so instead I just give him lots of attention when he wants it.
Right now we are going through a lot of construction… that unintentionally coalesced at the same time. The city is blacktopping our neighborhood, so we have dust being kicked up endlessly by heavy machinery that is sanding the surface of the streets in preparation for the asphalt to come through. Then in our backyard, we are finally dealing with our bedraggled decking. It was never really usefully located and involved having to skim the edge of the pool in order to get over to it. We are hopefully making things work a little more smoothly and it was more economical to have folks just rip out the current deck than to try and do careful surgery and fix the old one. So as a result we have this super awkward empty space in our yard, that will begin to be filled today as the team comes back to begin construction of the new deck.
The negative is that Tripod has disappeared once again. We saw her bound over the neighbor’s fence and into the greenbelt that exists between neighborhoods. This is not the first time that things have gotten “too noisy” for her and she has checked out for a while. It is our hope that once things have settled down a bit, she will return as she has for the last five years. In the meantime, I am continuing to put food and water out just in case she needs to come back for a quick visit before bouncing again. It hurts our hearts to have her gone from the backyard, but this was something that needed to happen with the deck and I am hopeful she will fall back into her normal order eventually. The biggest sadness though is that she and Greybie were slowly working towards getting along together. The above photo is probably the closest we have ever seen them together, and one of the closest times she has been near us as humans. That photo was taken from my chair so she was maybe four or five feet away. I’m hoping by the end of the week we have our new deck and our backyard at least can return to peaceful quiet.
On the gaming front, a new patch dropped for Honkai Star Rail and we get access to the Silver Wolf banner. I spent through my stockpile of pull currency and have not picked her up yet, but essentially I will be spending every bit of free currency to do so until this banner is over. Basically, I want access to her because she has the ability to create a vulnerability in one of your team members, making it a bit easier to push through encounters without changing up your team significantly. My guess is I would replace March with her in my current comp. The arcade graphics of her attacks are also pretty freaking cool.
I’m also still poking around at Diablo IV, namely working at knocking out Lilith Altars in the various zones and getting my renown up to at least rank 3 so I can finish getting the remaining skill points. After I do this I think there is probably a significant respec in my future. Right now I am using Upheaval which seems to be completely out of the current meta of “best barbarian builds”. So once I wrap up this project of finishing the Lilith Statues, I will likely spend time trying to decide what build I want to spec into, and then making sure I have the legendary aspects needed for that build unlocked in my codex of power. At the moment I am leaning towards Whirlwind because that traditionally is my favorite Barbarian build, however, I am going to wait a bit before deciding because they are still pretty actively balancing things. I know Upheaval hit some nerfs going into the previous open test, and it certainly feels weak at times so I am open to other options.
I hope Tripod is doing okay out there. She has left and returned so many times in the past that I feel pretty confident that she is going to be just fine and then eventually return to our home and take up residence again. That said… I still worry about her.
The post Goodbye Deck appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
