Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week we start off the show with some continued Path of Exile Trials of the Ancestor league discussion. From there we talk briefly about the new Guild Wars 2 expansion. Tam has spent some time playing Pseudoregalia and has thoughts about that, which leads into a discussion about our impressions of game generations shifting over time. Tam also spends some time playing Banished Vault and has some things to say about it. This week Armored Core 6 launched and we talk a bit about a Giant Robot game from a developer who has become mostly known for Dark Souls. Finally, we close things out with some more nonsense related to the Path of Exile league.
Yesterday I made it through the campaign on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and by the middle of the night I was back delving which makes me very happy. I burned through a lot of my available currency kitting out my character in gear in order to make my resists work. I purposefully tried to overcap resists by a bit because at some point I hope to swap out to a Brass Dome with +5 to maximum elemental resistances and that will mean losing the resistances that I currently have on my 5-link corrupted chest. Other than that I could probably due for a sceptre upgrade at some point, and then I definitely need to find a pseudo-six-link helm. Those however can wait because for now… I need to get my money printing machine up and running that will fund the rest of my adventures.
I’m very much in the early stages of breaking into Delve and getting my resistances up enough to go down further. I’ve been down to around depth 85 and have done just fine, but my resists are a bit puny for me to go diving down dark tunnels as I am used to doing. Once I get down to around 100 I will finally start seeing a lot of content in the side tunnels and hopefully some cities. There is one already on the map but I have to figure out how to approach it as there is no direct path that I can see. I think that is probably why I enjoy Delve the most, because it offers bite-sized adventures with promised loot at the end. It feels way more stable and reliable than mapping does in general.
When I last talked about my map progress I think I was around 73, and as of this morning, I am sitting at 88 of 115 maps completed. Essentially each time I shift over to run maps for sulphite I am trying to unlock something new. I’ve actually managed to get quite a number of the unique maps out of the way which feels really good. I did miserably fail one of them, but it was a T16 unique map which is always painful. Mapping still feels good on Lightning Arrow Raider, but she is way squishier than the Juggernaut which is to be expected because there is a massive difference in killing power.
Since I am spending way more time in Delve, I am starting to pivot away from Essences and towards Niko missions and Sulphite. I think I think once I finish picking up Niko nodes, I will shift towards picking more Legion on the tree or maybe Blight since the Raider can do those a lot better than my Juggernaut ever could. I think what I dig about having a proper map blaster is that if I decide to dive into mapping a bunch, I can pivot back without much issue. However what I have missed the most is the reliable currency generation of Delve, and the Raider just was not a Delve-friendly character. So much of what comes from Delve comes from careening down dark tunnels looking for treasure, and you really need something sturdy to be able to do that.
I am also still doing the occasional tournament for the league mechanic, and those mostly go smoothly. I’ve not won a tournament outright since crossing the 200 rating barrier, but I am also not really using a mechanic to cheese things. I do well enough to get several rewards though, but last night I saw my first six-link and missed winning it by losing the final match. I did pull a five-link earlier, so it seems like I am starting to get into better rewards territory in general. I feel in this weird place so far in that I have two highly functioning characters but am also mostly broke. Hopefully, a week of focusing on just doing some mechanics to get some stuff will help change that trajectory. Once I have more currency to play with, I will probably start rolling some more side projects.
All told though I am having a lot of fun. I feel much better now that I have my Tankyboi back in the repertoire of characters.
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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! This is probably going to be a bit of a short post because I really don’t have a ton to talk about today. We are an unknown number of days away from the league launch because quite frankly I’ve lost count and everything has begun to blend together. When I posted yesterday I was sitting at 68 maps unlocked and as of this morning, I am up to 73, so not a ton of progress. Essentially I am in the mucky phase of the atlas where I have to trade character levels for mapping progress, and it feels sorta bad. As I progress into red maps, they become more “rippy” as the community calls it and as such I take a lot more deaths. I can generally get through unscathed with the “six portal defense”, but it is sort of demoralizing.
So instead of making proper progress, I spent most of last night slowly poking at my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I’m now near the end of act 6, and things are starting to speed up as more abilities come online. In theory, by the time we hit the weekend, I should easily be at mapping levels and through the campaign with this character. My survival is sort of iffy at the moment, but I should be good to knock out some of my trials today and actually become a proper “Juggernaut”. That should actually help quite a bit on the survival front. I need to fiddle with my gear so that I can run an additional aura and pack on purity of elements to fix elemental ailments.
Given that I have geared this character two times already in the past… I decided to go ahead and pre-emptively do a bit of shopping. It seems like a lot of the staples are really cheap right now, so I picked up an almost perfect Immortal Flesh, Saffel’s Frame, and Legacy of the Fury. I also managed to snag a pretty cheap 5-link chest that should hold me until I generate enough currency to buy another Brass Dome. That is the weird dichotomy of pricing right now… a number of the staples of RF are super cheap but others… like Burning Damage/Concentrated Effect Helms… are outrageously priced. Essentially if I can get an influenced helm on a decent armor base, I can attempt to craft my own BD/CE helm as I have done it before. Hell, you can have shockingly good luck just chaos-spamming one to get something usable.
I’ve played a lot of mapping characters in the past and had fun with them, and in this league, I wondered what it would be like to start as one. Truth is… as much fun as it is to tear through maps, it would feel better as a secondary “alt” character than it does as my “main”. It was a great way to start out and get some early progress, and lord knows progressing through the campaign is WAY easier on Lightning Arrow than it is currently on Righteous Fire. However much like I did with my test character, there is a big of a ceiling that I have bumped into as I am entering red maps. I could probably push through it but it would take a lot of currency to get there and significant upgrades. I can continue to “six portal defense” my way through the rest of the Atlas, but I sort of miss having that rock-solid and stable tanky character as my “main”.
I also greatly miss the stable currency generation that was Delve. It isn’t so much that it produced thousands of Chaos Orbs worth of merchandise to sell… which it did… but more that it also produced truckloads of what I consider “bubble gum currency”. My vault is just short on everything from bindings to jewelers to regals. I am not running enough bulk maps to make up for the difference, and truth be told… I am just not wired to blast through a map and ignore most of the stuff on it. “Map Blasters” as a gameplay style really seems to focus on casting a wide net across hundreds of map runs and trying to gather up a few good things each time. If I could get used to the speed, I could probably do this because I am over-sustaining maps by a large margin. I think I just prefer the mechanical loop of delve a bit more because each individual loop feels shorter and more concise. Delve is essentially the equivalent of running a Greater Rift in Diablo III and almost all of the loot is at the end of the event.
I think if nothing else… Trial of the Ancestor has cemented some of my preferences about how I want to approach the game going forward. I need to “main” a pretty tanky character and then use that to build out other alternate characters designed for specific purposes. Since mapping is not really my favorite thing about Path of Exile, then maybe I should not really pivot into playing that as my first character.
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