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Leaping Doggos

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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.
When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.
Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.
I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.
Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts. I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend. The post Leaping Doggos appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Deeply Enjoying Explosions

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Good Morning Friends! Welcome back to more of my Path of Exile nonsense. Hopefully, you enjoyed the brief intermission of cats, but unfortunately, I am still knee-deep in this season and have more things to say about it. Crucible as a whole has been a bit of a weird experience because the season mechanic is a bit of a dud. Sure you can do some wild things with the talent trees on weapons and shields, but you either need deep pockets to outright buy finished weapons from the trade league or an unlimited amount of time and patience to sift through the piles of utter crap trees to craft one that is even halfway decent.
This is a video from Spicy Sushi… which is an hour and six-minute long highlight reel of an over ten-hour long stream where he attempted to craft a mirror tier Elemental Bow by combining various Crucible Trees to get a perfect path of five nodes. Of note… a good chunk of this stream features someone else leveling bows looking for the nodes he needs and then feeding them to him directly… and then later outright buying bows from the trade league that has the stats he is needing when that person goes to bed. The sheer amount of work required to force your way into a perfect crucible tree is completely unfathomable and during ALL of that time… there is still no real loot to speak of associated with the Crucible mechanic encounters. So it is not shocking that most players are just hard “hoping” out of the content and instead focusing on what is maybe the best “standard” league state that the game has had so far.
For my part, I am loving where things are going with my Explosive Arrow Champion build. I’ve said this a few times in various conversations, but had I experienced the level of enjoyment that I am having now back in Sentinel League, it might have been this class that I bonded with as the best league starter rather than Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Nothing will ever be as “tanky” as my Juggernaut, but that strength comes with the weakness of being relatively slow to progress through similarly tanky content. I now fully understand why Zizaran was such a huge fan of this build, because once crafted correctly it really is an extremely tanky feeling character… with the caveat being tanky for DPS purposes and not the Juggernaut style of “I can just stand in everything”. I still need to be cautious and dodge mechanics that I don’t need to take. I also need to spend some time sorting out what I want as my pantheon tree… because I’ve not even devoted any effort to that. I would also like to figure out a way to become ailment immune at some point… but for now, I can rip through T16 maps and happily farm up sulphite for my delving expeditions on the Juggernaut.
When I recorded the last video with my EA Champion, there were some heavy caveats to that video. Firstly the character was effectively three days old and as such was only level 78 and had not a single gem leveled all the way to 20 or higher. Secondly being 78 means I was missing a ton of passive nodes, and when I built the character I tended to lean more heavily toward defensive ability rather than DPS ability just to make the leveling process easier. The end result was a competent character at T16 maps but a bit of a slow one. Last night I recorded an update video showing off what it feels like today now that I have recolored my bow, swapped out for some awakened gems, and also put on thirteen levels worth of passive points. The difference is quite remarkable and as I invest more points into a cluster jewel setup I think it is only going to get better over time.
More specifically the Large and Medium Clusters that I am going for should provide me the following traits.
  • Tempered Arrowheads
    • Bow Skills have +6% to Damage Over Time Multiplier
    • Bow Skills have 10% increased Skill Effect Duration
    • 10% increased Duration of Ailments inflicted while wielding a Bow
  • Calamitous
    • 10% chance to Freeze, Shock, and Ignite
    • 30% increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills
    • 15% increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments
  • Martial Prowess
    • 20% increased Attack Damage
    • 6% increased Attack Speed
    • 15% increased Global Accuracy Rating
    • 20% increased Damage with Ailments from Attack Skills
  • Blowback
    • 10% chance to Ignite
    • Ignites you inflict deal Damage 8% faster
  • Cooked Alive
    • 15% chance to Ignite
    • Enemies Ignited by you have -5% to Fire Resistance
Currently, I have the first three online in my build and they are active in the video above. The next passive point will allow me to slot my medium cluster jewel and then the next several after that should give me Blowback and Cooked Alive. I have no clue if I am reading Path of Building correctly, but it seems like this is easily my highest-damage build so far. In the grand scheme of things, EA Champ seems to be a happy medium between the feel of my Toxic Rain Pathfinder and my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. If I devoted the resources to scaling either of those they could easily do a good deal more damage than they currently do… but I am able to deal that level of damage while also feeling extremely sturdy.
As happy as I am with the current state of the Path of Exile sandbox… I think I still want to see where exactly Diablo IV is at. This weekend there is a big “Sever Slam” event where they are trying to stress test the servers and show off some of the changes that they made in the game since the last round of beta. For me… this is going to essentially be the last chance of this game to really grab me. I did not really enjoy my time playing the open beta, and my hope is that the gameplay feels a bit more punchy and fast-paced than it did the last time around. I am not holding my breath, but this weekend I am going to be at least giving it a shot. Since I played Barbarian and Necromancer last go-round, I will probably play the same two classes so I can compare and contrast how it feels. Tomorrow I am taking the day off, not necessarily for D4 but because my wife has the day off. I am still not sure if I will feel the desire to blog in the morning… so if this is the last you hear from me this week I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and a wonderful mothers day. The post Deeply Enjoying Explosions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #135 – Looks Like A Kahuna

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Tonight Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tam talk Pokemon and a whole list of other topics.

aggrochat135_720

Tonight we got a bit of late start, but once things got rolling we recorded a proper show.  Last week we had pushed off the topic of Pokemon Sun and Moon because we literally ran out of time.  We start recording around 9 pm CST and when it is past midnight…  we know we are in trouble.  So we talk a bit about the game and things that folks have noticed about it.  Several of us are not terribly far along… others have beaten the game.  Grace talks about her addiction to Justice Monsters Five and how no other games really matter at all.  

Bel goes on a discussion about his feelings about various streaming options and why he is moving towards Beam.  Bel talks about how this is the year that he stopped browsing steam, because there is just too much random stuff out there.  This spawns a conversation about games that get lost in the mix…  like Obsidian’s recent release of Tyranny.  This oddly spawns another contorted shift as Bel talks about that he figures out why he doesn’t really enjoy Halo games.  We shift gears and talk a bit about Final Fantasy XIV and the Alexander Turn 11 fight.  Finally we wrap things up with some talk about the new Star Wars Destiny Collectible Card Game.

Discussion points: Pokemon Sun and Moon – Justice Monsters Five – Twitch vs Hitbox vs Beam – Browsing Steam – Tyranny – Bel and Halo – Final Fantasy XIV – Alexander Turn 11 – Star Wars Destiny

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On Video Editing

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If you missed it, an earworm was inflicted on the Aggrochat crew a little while ago and refuses to go away. The song in question is a remix of Boney M.’s Rasputin, as seen in the following video:

Beyond being super catchy, this is actually a surprising feat of video editing The original song has nothing to do with Rasputin, or Russia, or funk. Love the Way You Move is about ~136 BPM and the music video for it is 3:40 long. The remixed song is closer to 150 BPM, and is also 3:40. But the music video has a lot of parts that match the beat, so just playing one over the other wouldn’t look very good.

As a result, the final version does quite a bit of audio and video editing. The most notable part is that any beat-matched sections are sped up to match the new tempo. This includes the working with tools near the beginning and all dance sequences (including the flashing siren near the end). The tradeoff for this is that most parts that didn’t need to match the beat were slowed down. This means the introduction, most of the middle section, and Putin’s arrival. In order to make this work, a little bit of audio editing was also necessary. Love the Way You Move has a 16-bar chorus, the chorus of Rasputin is only 8 bars. In order to make the end section fit, an extra repetition was added in.

I just thought this was interesting to note.