Good Morning Friends! I am still mostly sickly, and as such, I spent most of the weekend parked on the couch and playing Path of Exile. When I last talked about the game I spent a large chunk of in-game currency in trades to get the four uniques that make up the foundation of my build. I cannot underscore just how much of a difference they made, and now I can pretty comfortably run through red maps without taking many deaths and often none at all. I’ve also come up with a reasonable way to handle the bane of my existence… elemental reflection. Essentially I swap over to the minor pantheon ability from Yugul, and equip Sybil’s ring in the left slot… which collectively gives me more than 100% elemental reflect damage protection. Combined all of this has allowed me to churn through the remaining maps that I had left on my altas.
Yesterday evening I managed to finish the last of my 115 maps and earn not only the completion achievement but all of the bonuses that grand atlas passive tree progress. This was the main overarching goal that I had for this league, and I managed to make it through in slightly less than a month’s time. The Kalandra league started on August 19th, and I managed to wrap things up on September 11th. The next obvious goal would be all of the seasonal achievements, but that might be a bit more grindy than I am willing to go after right now. One of those achievements requires the running of maps with 6000 explicit modifiers, and at last count, I was sitting at less than 900. I might be able to finish out the tier 2 set of cosmetics with enough low-hanging fruit on the achievement stack… but there is no way I am getting through tier 4.
I think my goal now becomes helping those in my guild who are interested in getting Atlas completion to reach that goal by feeding them maps. In theory for those who are curious I employed a handful of practices in order to get to the end of the list. Firstly my Atlas tree has a lot of nodes that are designed to feed me maps and it is very rare that I run ANY map and not walk away with at least four new ones. Other than that there are a handful of tricks that you can use to get the specific maps that you are after.
How To Get Specific Maps
Vendor Pattern – You can sell any three of the same map to the vendor and you will receive a new map from one tier higher. There is some dark calculus in the way this works and every map has a unique id, and different combinations of different unique ids will produce different maps. So if you have six of the same map, try listing different combinations of those six maps to see if you can get the specific one that you need.
Kirac Atlas Missions – Kirac offers daily atlas missions and these are a godsend for completing the White and Yellow tiers of maps. They become a little hit or miss once you get into reds, because in order for you to get bonus credit the map has to have been corrupted. If you see a red map that you have not completed and it is not corrupted… go ahead and run it because there are things you can do later to get a clean copy of that map.
Kirac Inventory – Kirac is also a vendor and sells a selection of white, yellow, and red maps. These are extremely costly and in theory, you could probably buy the maps cheaper from players via the trade economy… but in a pinch especially for early tiers of maps, these are a quick way of getting some specific maps.
Scouting Reports – As you run maps you will encounter scouting reports, which are used to re-roll Kirac’s missions. This is an extremely good way to get unique missions because often times immediately after a re-roll there will be one or more unique missions available.
Horizon Orb – I happened across a ton of these while grinding out some of the lower tiers of maps, and thankfully saved them for the red map grind. Essentially a Horizon Orb will change a map into any other map of the same tier. This is completely random, but I did manage to luck into several conversions along the way that got me the “clean maps” that I needed. By “clean maps” I mean a white no-modifier version that I can use to craft whatever I need.
Harbinger Orb – These are extremely rare items, but they allow you to reforge a map and turn it into a random map of one tier higher. In absolute desperation, I tried using one of these to get the map I needed one tier up… and succeeded, but it could have gone completely wrong as well.
Map Favorite Slots – On the left side of the map, you have a series of slots that unlock as you achieve various requirements. The easiest slot is attained the first time you complete a T16 map, and then others are mostly tied to elder/shaper maps and specific bosses. Remember earlier when I said it was a good idea to go ahead and run red maps even if they were not corrupted? Once you have cleared a map it becomes something that you can favorite, and then you have a higher chance of seeing that particular map drop from that point forward. I absolutely utilized this to get the last two maps I needed.
Trade – The last resort is to just buy the maps for currency from other players. Most maps go for 1 Chaos Orb each, with a few highly lucrative maps going for significantly more. One of the unique maps that I needed was going for 29 Chaos… but thankfully using Scouting Reports I was able to get access to it through a Kirac Mission.
Now that I am finished with the Atlas, I am probably still going to continue to run the occasional map mission because they are still pretty enjoyable. More likely though I am going to start diving further into Heist and Delve, which are alternative game modes that I’ve not focused as much on in this league. Other than that I am probably going to be spending some more time in Diablo III and finishing up my season’s journey over there. I have a fully kitted-out character, and just need to devote the time and effort to getting Set Mastery and three Conquests. I could stop playing Path of Exile this season and be pretty happy with the process I made. I might take a pass at some more of the elder bosses, but I need to spend some time unlocking The Maven fully before I can dive too deep into that. Side note… all of the currency I spent on gear, I have long ago made back completely so it was a good “investment” as far as easing my access to higher tier content.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we attempt to record a show that is only an hour in length but fail again overshooting by about fifteen minutes. We are down a Tam because life happens, and Kodra had to travel to Ash’s house to get internet… but we get a shot out the door regardless. We start off with a quick recap on the experience of starting Ooblets from scratch, then dive into a discussion about the next Shovel Knight game from a different studio. Ash talks a bit about his experiences with PAX West and we discuss games that evoke the style of a specific era in console games. This dives into a whole discussion about our console gaming experiences throughout the years. Bel talks a bit about the upcoming patch to New World and how it is completely changing the starting game experience for the better.
From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how spending some in-game currency on a build can make a massive difference. We talk about narrowing down the hunt for Atlas completion as Grace and Bel get close to wrapping that up. Then we dive into a side topic about how easy it is just to write off bad performance when maybe it is something you did to cause it. Essentially running Path of Exile on a mechanical drive makes a massive difference, and you really should use a high-quality SSD.
For the last week, I have been in a very weird place with Path of Exile. I was largely dissatisfied with the state of my build and was teetering on the edge of either quitting the season or trying to restart as something else. After some advice from Ashgar and Carthuun and a bit of tweaking here and there, I decided that before I gave up… I should really make an effort to at least try out the specific combination of unique items that the build suggested. This meant that I would need to be engaging with the trade market, and when I got my six link… it seemed at that time that prices were all over the place. Prices are still considerably worse at the moment than during the Sentinel league, but I came to a realization. I don’t actually care about the accumulation of wealth in the real world or in the game. Why should I sit on what little I have gathered up when I could put it towards some gear and at least feel like I gave this build its all?
Velyna’s Storm Brand build is centered around four unique items, and honestly, at the time I was uncertain what any of them would do for me. Spending a bit more time, and watching a much older video on the build… I finally grok what this was going for. Essentially the goal is to convert some of the lightning damage we have been stacking to cold… then we get 100% chance to shock frozen enemies, and when they die they explode dealing more lightning damage to their friends. The freezing makes running the build significantly easier because it halts a lot of packs in their tracks. I created my shopping list and set forth to purchase everything that I would need.
Call of the Brotherhood – 1 Chaos
Burden of Truth – 2 Chaos
Crown of the Inward Eye – 5 Chaos
Inpulsa’s Broken Heart – 150 Chaos
Call of the Brotherhood I already had sitting around, but it readily goes for 1 Chaos and is easily found. Burden of Truth was also a really cheap buy, and we did not get into some hard decisions until I got to Crown of the Inward Eye. Getting the colors and links that I needed, in a non-corrupted version came with a significant price tag, but I was able to find a slightly imperfect item for only 5 Chaos. The Inpulsa’s Broken Heart was the real challenge as to get one that was completely ready to go it would cost me around 3 Divines which translates to roughly 500 Chaos. After some searching, I managed to find a five-link with the correct socket colors already for 150 Chaos, and I pounced on it. So far I am opting to use it in the five-link state as I gather up the bindings to go for turning it into a six-link later.
By the numbers, it does not seem like I made a significant change. My resists are largely in the same place but I did gain quite a bit of armor, over 700 points of evasion, and while I only gained 2 points of raw health I added 875 energy shield. I’ve also added about 17% spell block and 30% crit reduction. Another big thing that has changed is that I am now immune to Shock, Ignite, and Freeze… with the last coming from finally getting some Divine Vessel drops and working on my pantheon. I’m up to 64% stun recovery and 73% total physical damage reduction. So while again the numbers did not seem that drastic, in actually playing… I feel so much less squishy than I did. I still can’t really afford to let anything big beat me for long, but I am less likely to get randomly one-shot.
Last night I spent most of the evening working on getting some experience by running low-tier maps that I have either run as they stood, or applied an alchemy orb. I had some pretty solid luck last night, like this moment when I opened a storage chest and got three uniques to drop at once. When I finally called it for the evening I was just shy of hitting my next level. So I am likely going to keep this up until I ding, then maybe focus on something risky for a while like trying to progress in red maps again. Essentially if I am in xp earning mode I want to take very few risks, and if I am very far away from a level… then I don’t care how many times I die.
Thanks, I guess in part to the way I have specced my Atlas passives, I have seemingly phenomenal map sustain. It is very rare that I don’t come out with more maps than I put in, and it seems like I get at least three maps the majority of the time. Last night I hit a lucky cartographer’s chest that paid out massively, with the only negative being that all the maps were corrupted meaning they have to be used “as is” without modifications. This however will keep me doing these low-risk maps for awhile, which seem to be extremely lucrative in materials and resources. Essentially I am banking my bindings so that I can make an attempt at converting this five-link to a six-link without risking breaking the configuration that I currently have and that is working so well.
So while I spent the one Divine Orb that I have found so far to get to this point… my general outlook on the game is greatly improved. I would consider that “money” well spent.
The post Pondering my Divine Orb appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Signs are starting to point to it being the time to dust off those copies of New World and return. At the tail end of August, the New World team released a list of things that would be coming in the Brimstone Sands update to the game, and now that update is available on the public test realm. Last night I spent a few hours roaming around the updated new player experience and found it all shockingly improved. From the moment you start the tutorial, there are a lot of things that have changed. For starters, you are no longer fighting generic drowners, but instead corrupted mobs. There are some much upgraded visual indicators of what you should be going to next, and once you land on the beach… almost everything has been revitalized.
An immediate staggering example is a fact that gone are the generic shipwrecks that all looked interchangeable. Instead, each of the four ships you visit during those first few quests has its own look and feel. This one for example has been damaged by corruption, but there is also one that looks like it was attacked by the Angry Earth, though none of them are present. That ship is filled with boars, reminiscent of Edengrove, and gives a bit of flavor of what happens when nature takes over. Most of this is cosmetic, but what is completely new is the fact that Isabella is introduced and is whispering to you through corruption very similar to the Old Gods of World of Warcraft. This ties up so many loose ends as to what exactly happened when Thorpe blasted us with that bolt of corruption in the tutorial and introduces players to Isabella rather than having her pop out of the woodwork later on.
There seem to be a number of “quality of life” improvements as well. For example, there are stray weapons laying all around those early shipwrecks giving you quick access to seemingly every weapon. The Greatsword for example is brand new to this patch, but I found one laying on the beach ready for me to use. The weapons themselves have a slight glow to them in order to make them easier to see for new players. This is huge honestly because previously it could take a dozen or so levels before you would find one of the weapons you were wanting to use as your primary. This whole setup reminded me quite a bit of Coldharbour in Elder Scrolls Online and the room that effectively had one of every weapon type ready for the player to pick up.
Then there is Monarch’s Bluff, which is no longer a ramshackle town and is instead a properly fortified outpost. This change alone is staggering, and instead of generic conquistador types… this town is following the Arthurian story that they added into the game since the release of the game. Supposedly Everfall has also had a significant facelift, and more towns are planned for future patches. The goal is apparently to make each town look truly unique and have its own merits rather than just the central location. This plays into other “quality of life” changes they have made since the release of the game like making the cost of fast travel largely inconsequential and opening access to storage in every town freely from any other town.
I’ve been poking my head back into the game periodically off and on since release, but it had largely fallen out of focus with my time spent in Path of Exile. I have to give credit to YouTuber Demone Kim for releasing a series of videos about the changes. In the video linked above, he does a naked run to Brimstone Sands and the capital city specifically. It looks straight out of Assassin’s Creed Origins/Odyssey and seems to be massive in scale. I spent most of last night playing around with the new weapon, the Greatsword which feels very much like Cloud’s Buster sword so far. You can spec into a tanky tree or a DPS tree, so it will be adding new tanking options to the game which is great. I feel similarly they probably now need to work on some more healing options because right now it feels like Lifestaff is the only truly viable endgame option.
We started talking about it last night among the AggroChat crew and might consider picking a server and starting over from scratch. The new player experience is different enough to warrant this. Yeah, it would suck to lose all of the progress I had made on my main character on Valhalla, but it seems like a lot of the leveling processes are way more forgiving. I was gaining harvest levels at lightning speed last night while picking up random things. Additionally, it felt like the loot was considerably more generous when it came to crafting reagents as well. At some point in the past, they flattened the reagents so that there is only one kind of sandpaper, flux, or thread… etc. So from the first minutes on the beach, you are getting materials that will serve you later in the game.
The more I think about it, the more I think I am going to start from scratch again. I don’t know the release date yet, but since it is up on the PTR currently I would assume it is “soon”.
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