Good Morning Friends! Last night I spent my evening running around in the Last Epoch multiplayer beta and opted to start up another Acolyte. I’ve been enjoying the Necromancer play style lately, and as a result, I am leaning super hard into it with this game. I’m also wanting to spend some time exploring Wolcen soon and plan on doing the same given that Necromancer play styles tend to be pretty chill. It is thoroughly weird to me the way my brain has flipped over the last several years. There was a time when I would only play melee characters and more specifically only characters with a sword and shield. I was completely bought into the mythos of the “tank” and that meant a very specific thing to me namely a full plate-wearing character with a sword and a shield, and occasionally if the class lends itself to that fantasy, a bit damned two-hander.
To some extent, I blame Diablo III for beginning the slow battering down of these walls. I fell in love with the Demon Hunter and how amazing it was for clearing seasonal content. With the right build, you could make literally everything on the screen explode in a hail of fire, making it extremely safe to play. I still greatly prefer high survival characters, but I was forced to reconcile that sometimes overwhelming damage… is a survival ability. Mostly this forced me to re-evaluate what being “fun to play” meant to me personally and that largely meant the ability to kill things without much fear of death. I always got this style of play through traditional MMORPG tanks but found that under certain circumstances I could find that style of play in other families of classes.
I think my mental transformation was really cemented by my time playing Guild Wars 2 last year. I had been trying for a decade to make the Warrior in that game conform to the sort of gameplay that I wanted, a very high survival tanky play that had no fear of dying but could still clear content. It never really felt that way to me personally, and in a moment of frustration, I sat down and had a conversation with my friend Tam. He asked me to describe the goals I wanted in a class and after some serious side eye, I accepted the challenge to try playing a Necromancer. It turned out that while it conformed to none of my normal sensibilities, it was in fact the “tankiest” and highest survival class I had ever played in an MMORPG. This sort of sent my world into a tailspin and has caused me to re-evaluate what it means to be tanky and what it means to “feel good” to play.
Path of Exile has also continued this path forward as I seek out characters that are highly survivable yet still able to clear content. I think maybe the best version of this that I have experienced so far is my Righteous Fire Juggernaut because it is effectively exactly what I want in a game like that. One of my favorite Diablo III builds is the exceptionally tanky Thorns Crusader, which wanders around while everything effectively breaks itself on your damage shield. I’ve also enjoyed my time spent playing on my Summon Righteous Fire Necromancer quite a bit, because while squishier than RF… it can move around freely to avoid a lot of the damage while my pets focus on shredding the target. As I have gained additional levels on that character I have poured more focus into survivability since the damage seems to be solid.
So now that I am playing some Last Epoch, I figured a Necromancer might be a good call. After some research, it does in fact seem to be an extremely tanky option. At the moment I am running around with Skeleton Warriors, a Giant Skeleton Golem, and summoning that game’s equivalent of my “raging spirits” in the form of explosive Zombies. I started a fresh character last night and got it to around 22 before calling it for the night. Unfortunately, the transition to Necromancer seems to be gated behind a quest so I really need to push forward in the story before I spend any more points on the build. The few bosses I have encountered have been extremely relaxing as I simply avoid the telegraphed attacks and let my pets keep chewing away at it.
Last Epoch Build Planner is by the same folks who do the Grim Dawn Tools, and I am largely following this Necromancer build at least as far as Skills and Passive choices go. You can blame Path of Exile on making it so that I just feel more comfortable venturing forth with a build to at least loosely follow. Last Epoch as a whole seems like a much more straightforward game and offers the ability to respec a bit more easily. However, once I started down the path of following a build, I find it is probably going to be harder to shake mentally. Given that I am juggling a large number of ARPGs at the moment, I don’t really want to waste my time building something that won’t be viable and as a result, won’t be “fun”.
If you want to see an example of Necromancer gameplay in Last Epoch, check out the above video. Essentially it is designed around summoning exploding zombies and replenishing your pets as needed when they die. Otherwise, you just zoom around and avoid telegraphs while your army of horrible children kills your foe. I had a lot of fun last night screwing around on the beta server, and will likely be creating the same basic build when the multiplayer patch drops in March.
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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.
One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.
I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.
I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.
What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.
All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.
With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.
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Good Morning Friends! This is going to be another mostly-book post. Whether or I like it or not, my gaming blog has veered closer and closer to a book blog over the last few weeks. In truth Tales of the Aggronaut is not a gaming blog, but a “me” blog, and when my activities shift so does it. I tend to obsess about things and right now it seems that I am obsessing over having a library card and “renting” books, and using that to knock out a bunch of things that I have been meaning to read for years. At this point since Christmas I have finished seven books, and over the weekend I knocked out the latest book in the “Locked Tomb” series by Tamsyn Muir, meaning that I am completely caught up in that series.
If Gideon the Ninth was Deathmetal Hogwarts, and Harrow the Ninth was Necromantic Battlestar Galactica, then Nona the Ninth is Spycraft Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Each novel in the series has been wildly different in part because it gives you a window into a wildly different part of this universe. I’ve tried not to really talk about a lot of details in these posts because I do not want to dive down the rabbit hole of spoilers, but I feel like I need to at least talk a little bit about the setting. Effectively in this fictional universe overlayed on top of our own universe an event happened thousands of years in the past that caused the extinction of the human race. John Gaius, the Necrolord Prime… the God Emperor of the known universe… resurrected humanity and formed the Nine Houses each with their own necromantic traits to serve as his flock.
Gideon the Ninth is a novel that dives deep into the traditions and variations among the nine houses. It is a tale woven through a trial for those assembled to figure out the process of becoming Lyctors. The second novel, Harrow the Ninth, is centered around the truth behind the throne as “God” aka John Gaius struggles against a hidden conflict that none of the nine houses were even aware of. You get an understanding of what the ruling hierarchy of the necromantic empire looks like, and get to know several of the key players. Nona the Ninth however is a novel centered around the common folk, the humans that survived the extinction event and that continue to live in fear of the empire and the nine houses. It also centers around an organization called Blood of Eden, effectively terrorists or freedom fighters depending upon your perspective.
The perspective of the novel is that of Nona, a personality that is inhabiting the body of Harrowhark Nonagesimus and is effectively going through a rapid evolution from infancy to young adolescence. Nona loves everyone, especially dogs. Nona is innocent and childlike unlike the rather severe Harrow that we came to know from the other novels in this series. This leads to a very distorted lens that this story is told from the perspective of an extremely unreliable narrator. The constant thread between the last two novels is a constant grasping for what the fuck is actually going on, and if that is not something you can handle as the pieces slowly slide into place… then you maybe want to stop with the first novel. Each novel has a mystery to be pried loose from the background infrastructure and it leads to a very wobbly and disjointed way that the tale is told until everything eventually comes into focus.
At this point, I am hooked, and I am probably going to be reading these novels forever. Each novel effectively resolves a crescendo that leaves more questions unanswered than know. We will ultimately have to wait for the next novel in the series before those questions even begin to be answered. This was not a big deal when I knew there were novels waiting patiently on me to consume, but now that I am caught up it will probably be a more tangible frustration. The next book has a name… Alecto the Ninth has a targetted release date of sometime this year, so here is hoping that the wait will not be too long.
Following wrapping up Nona the Ninth, I have now dived into The Lies of Locke Lamora another novel that I had been meaning to read for a while. At first, I was not terribly certain what I thought of this story. I tend to not really go into the whole Thieves Guild thing other than maybe the Elder Scrolls games. Now that I am settling into the story I am definitely hooked for the moment, but uncertain if this will be a setting I return to enough to consume all of the available books in the series. It feels very like David Copperfield meets Dishonored at the moment, or at least the Camorr reminds me a bit of the setting of the second game. I originally set myself the goal of 20 books during this calendar year, but I might need to revise that up a bit given that we are just now in February and have already finished seven and am now about 20% or so into the eighth.
I hope you all had a great weekend and I wish you luck in the coming week. I am trying to sort out what exactly I want to do gaming-wise. I am still playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, but am also starting to slide back into some more Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. I also know that Season 28 of Diablo III is just around the corner and am planning on diving into that as well. Given that I have been on this Audiobook plus Mechanically Enjoyable Game kick, I am not really sure when I will return to narrative games again.
The post Nona the Ninth appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start off the show with a discussion that has been kicking around our list for a while, where Tam discusses the shared DNS of a Good Stealth Game and a Good Metroidvania. From there Kodra has had time to play Forspoken and talks about his experiences after last week’s show. We dive into a discussion about the news coming out that no one seems to be signing up for E3 and once again we question if there really is a place for that show in the public consciousness. Lastly, we talk about some of the games that are supposed to be released this year and try and determine which we actually think are.
Topics Discussed
Shared DNA of Stealth games and Good Metroidvanias
