Good Morning Folks! Given that I have mostly polished the rough edges off my Minion Guardian, this means I have once again turned my attention to Storm Brand Inquisitor. The why of this build is I wanted to give Storm Brand Inquisitor a bit of a redemption arc, or at least a chance at one. I had played this build in Kalandra League and struggled with it quite a bit. In the last league, I spent some time sifting through my old characters and re-evaluating them with my current level of knowledge and that poor Storm Brand Character was a mess. Essentially I had nothing vaguely resembling proper defensive layers and had nowhere close to capped resistances. At a minimum, I could at least solve that last problem with the build. As a result, I have had this build in the back of my head as something I wanted to revisit, and almost did last league but instead decided to make my “brand build” of the league Wintertide.
Once again I started with Velyna’s guide as a template and then tweaked that a bit to suit my tastes. Namely, I dropped the dual wield nodes and pathed down to pick up shield nodes. I question if this was a good decision because honestly… so far I have not really been able to get enough block chance to make that a viable defensive layer. More than anything I wanted to be able to use shield charge, which requires a shield. So far… the build feels sorta mid. That isn’t necessarily bad, but compared to my other options it doesn’t feel amazing. It also feels far worse than Wintertide Brand did last league. That said… I am very very low level and want to give this build until maybe level 90 before I pass proper judgment. For now, it is perfectly fine and I am able to clear yellow-tier maps with ease… which isn’t amazing considering how much currency I have spent on this stupid build.
One of the challenges with the build is that realistically it wants to use a bunch of uniques. The hardest part about that is the fact that I am using two Call of the Brotherhood rings which gives me 96% cold conversion. Rings are a really hard slot to give up when it comes to making your resistances work, given that there are a number of ring-exclusive implicits that add a bunch of value resistance-wise. The single most expensive item was a six-link Inpulsa’s Broken Heart and since I knew I was going to be running this build I shopped around for this for awhile and managed to snag a “cheap” one for 3 divine orbs. The Crown of the Inward Eye is just a universally good helm, and I managed to pick up one with a Determination Reservation Efficiency enchant for if I remember correctly only 40 Chaos. The Brotherhood Rings were 20 Chaos Each from the same vendor, which shocked me given that they had already spent catalysts on them to get the quality up to 20%.
I’ve also been spending some time playing around with using Heatshiver instead of Crown of the Inward Eye, and I think that might be the correct play. The negative is that I lose my Determination Enchant, and I dislike running Labyrinth enough to farm another one. What this has forced me to do is drop Zealotry and swap it for Discipline to make up for the loss in Energy Shield. Zealotry was mostly being used for the Crit aura as I am already generating nearly 100% uptime on Consecrated Ground. I think I can give up some crit chance for effectively doubling my damage output in some cases. The Heatshiver also has the side benefit of giving me some resistances which are nice, and could allow me to rework my resist gear a bit.
As it stands… I have to heavily utilize my shield, belt, necklace, boots, and gloves to be able to reach resistance caps. I think a lot of the challenge of this build is that I am gaining next to nothing from the tree itself and rings are worth so much freaking resistance. I could of course start slotting more gems into my tree as I pour on levels but I am already using up 3 possible sockets to solve another problem that I will talk about next. The biggest problem with this guild is that for whatever reason… it was ungodly expensive. I think I paid 120 Chaos for the boots, and 150 Chaos for the gloves. The Stygian Vise was 90 Chaos, and the shield I think was around 80 Chaos. We are dealing with some massive price inflation this league caused by just how much currency is being generated by the re-introduction of Sanctum.
Since I did not have a great way of dealing with elemental ailments, I had to eat up the abyssal socket in my belt and two jewel sockets on my tree in order to roll out the “Chance to Avoid Being Shocked” and Stormshroud combo. Essentially if you can get a “chance to avoid being shocked” to at least 100%, the Stormshroud Unique jewel will apply that avoidance to all elemental ailments. At a minimum, this requires either support on your tree or two abyssal jewels with a maximum of 50% on each. This was also not a cheap prospect as I gave around 100 Chaos for each of the Abyssal Jewels and 1.5 Divines for the Stormshroud. I’ve known about this combo for ages, but never actually had to buy my way into it. In theory, this is the way that I am supposed to be fixing Righteous Fire so that I can drop “Purity of Elements”. I’ve just never gone through the motions to make that happen.
So in the end… I have spent 8-10 Divines on a build that I am not really in love with. I have shit armor, shit evasion, bad block, and the only thing really going for me is consecrated ground which applies to both life and energy shield which when combined with petrified blood does a decent enough job at keeping me alive. I am having to change my instincts of trying to move when I am taking damage, to instead standing still and hoping that the consecrated ground will be able to keep up with the damage intake. I am deeply susceptible to being one-shot by certain mechanics because I just don’t have that much effective health. This is most obviously an issue with Physical Hits, because if POB is to be believed I can only soak a maximum hit of just under 7000.
Then again I am only 74… so I am giving this build time to come into its own. I am going to try and give it until level 90 before I pass judgment. I definitely think the state of the build is better than it was in Kalandra league but given my druthers, I would probably rather play Wintertide Brand Occultist. Switching to Heatshiver has definitely helped though, so I am going to run a bunch more maps to start to get the swing of how the build feels. As always my goal here is to give you all the honest assessment of how a build feels. If you are curious you can check out the POB that I dumped this morning of the state of where I am with my character.
The post Storm Brand Feels Mid appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.
So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.
Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.
Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.
I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.
All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.
The post Minion Guardian is Phenomenal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning’s blog post is admittedly going to be a bit of a wild ride. It is a topic that I have been kicking around in my skull for a few weeks now. I hope to do it even half the justice it deserves. Lately, I have been on this binge of consuming the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I’ve been listening to these in Audiobook form while playing Path of Exile, and I love this so much. While I still read books, there is something about listening to the narration while my nervous energies are channeled into a video game that has largely been committed to muscle memory at this point. I feel fully engaged, and it has rapidly become my “happy place”. It also helps that so far this series has been amazing.
I was looking forward to this series because John Scalzi at this point was a known property. I backed into his works differently than most, and the very first novel that I read was Kaiju Preservation Society. I consumed this over the course of a few evenings of staying up well past midnight reading from bed. A few months later I did the same with Redshirts, and after having consumed both… I knew that at some point I would have to read the series he is most known for “Old Man’s War”. This made logical sense because at this point I had consumed two different books from the same author, so it was highly likely that I enjoyed their particular writing style. It was a safe bet because well-established authors tend to bring with them a similar vision to the material that they write.
This does not work for video games. Video Games are a combination of lots of different creatives pouring their energies into a single project. While we love to elevate a single figurehead at a given studio… each game is a snapshot of the state of that company at that very moment. While there are certain tropes that a given studio might have… I can say that Starfield feels like a very “Bethesda” game. I can say this because it is approaching problem-solving in the same way I have experienced in other Bethesda titles. I cannot however state that Starfield is a great experience, because Bethesda created it. It was created by a wide number of individuals who took inspiration from previous titles, but the game being fun and engaging was not a certain thing. I would be surprised if anyone that worked on Fallout New Vegas for example, worked on Starfield. The games were created by wildly different casts of individuals, but we as gamers… have this bad habit of trying to compare them as equivalent products.
So when I approached Diablo IV, I brought with me all of the emotional baggage of having played thousands of hours of games in the Diablo franchise. I also brought with me the emotional baggage of having grown up idolizing Blizzard as a studio. So when I played the game, and it felt bad… it was very hard for me to reign in my disappointment and keep myself from turning into a rabid poo-flinging monkey. I still think that Diablo IV is a bad game, and I think that because I am a core ARPG gamer… and quite frankly the game was never targeting me in the first place. I also think of Blizzard as this storied monolith of a company that encompasses so many fond memories… when in reality they have not produced a new game that I enjoyed since 2013. Sure I enjoyed the heck out of Legion, but that was an expansion to a game that came out in 2004.
Similarly when I approached Mass Effect Andromeda or even Anthem… I brought with me the memories of hundreds of hours spent with each and every Bioware game to that point (save for Jade Empire, I never got into that). I enjoyed Andromeda quite a bit, but it was a pale comparison to the greatness that was achieved over the course of the three games in the Mass Effect trilogy… and even then… they didn’t really stick the landing in that third game. With Anthem I brought my expectations of what a Bioware MMORPG looks like… because Star Wars The Old Republic was a phenomenal experience… and once again I was sadly disappointed. While there was some cross-over between these teams… each game represented a brand new version of what the studio was trying to produce, and as a result, was a completely different product offering.
As gamers, we have this bad habit of personifying Game Studios. We treat them as though the organizational structure itself is capable of pooping out phenomenal game experiences that are similar to those we have had in the past. Sometimes even studios believe this themselves… see the information that came out about the launch of Andromeda and how it was expected that the “Bioware Magic” would somehow pull together a brilliant product in the end. The games that we have loved were snapshots of a moment in time… that may or may not ever happen again. Personifying the Studio as having these indelible properties that can recreate that experience… is only setting us up for heartbreak, disappointment, and eventually failure.
Truth be told… we as gamers with our unrealistic expectations are not entirely to blame for this problem. Game Studios themselves and games media in general are also stoking this fire. How many times have you seen a project being marketed based on where the devs working on it came from before? Hell, the entirety of studios like Dreamhaven seems to be a large dish full of member berries trying to stoke nostalgia about the imagined “good ole days” of a specific studio. The thing is… You would be hard-pressed to find a single game studio out there that does not at least have one person who used to work for Blizzard or Bethesda or Bioware, etc. The game development community is extremely fluid and because of the lack of stability and the tendency to burn a team down after release… means that folks have to go whenever they can to keep a paycheck coming in. Since around 2005, there has never been a time where I have not had at least one close friend working for Blizzard… but the thing is… none of them have really stuck around for more than a few years at a time.
We would be so much better off if we could approach each game that gets released with a fresh set of eyes, and ignore the many-tentacled hype machine. This is part of the reason why folks seem to respond so glowingly to anything that is truly new to them. For example, we are seeing this sort of glow-up happening right now with Baldur’s Gate III, because for so many people Larian Studios was an unknown property. However, for me, I have been playing their games since at least Divinity II, and was definitely there for the fledgling roots of what we are seeing in BG3 with Divinity Original Sin. All of that said though, it is so pure to watch players embrace a game on its own terms… and for its own merit. It is equally heartbreaking when a game that is genuinely good but still a little rough around the edges due to launch constraints, gets memed into oblivion by Streamers and YouTubers.
The hype cycle sometimes inflates a game to proportions that it never could have lived up to. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of these situations, but quite frankly… so was Mass Effect Andromeda. Both were games that given time and attention could be turned into something beautiful. We are seeing this redemption arc with Cyberpunk, but given the financial backlash instead saw with Andromeda the entire Mass Effect series killed off for the better part of a decade. So while I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the gamers for trying to treat the game studios in the same way that I am treating books by a single author… aka John Scalzi. I also blame the studios themselves, the marketing departments, and the 24-hour gaming news cycle desperately seeking anything that even smells a little bit like news in order to fill content deadlines. I fail miserably myself at this all the time, but I also know I would be far happier, or at least less grumpy if I allowed myself to approach everything without expectations.
That is it… that is my soapbox and now I will stand down from it. Expect more blog posts about me talking about some nonsense that I am up to in Path of Exile tomorrow. I can only handle so much seriousness at once, and even with Path of Exile, I have had to deliver myself a dose of realism. I had a lot of hype built up going into the Path of Exile II announcement, only to walk away disappointed and afraid that this game I was pinning my hopes on… was not really going to be what I wanted to play. Instead, now I am trying to stop thinking about it and just enjoy what I enjoy. It feels deeply weird that I am not engaged in the Zeitgeist right now, and not feverishly playing either Baldur’s Gate III or Starfield… while having at the same time enjoyed both. I’m trying to plot my own course independent of FOMO, and right now… my brain craves the familiar rhythms of Path of Exile.
I have no clue what point I was really trying to make this morning, and I definitely doubt that it will make any difference. I hope you have a most excellent day… but now my cats want me to feed them.
The post Stop Personifying Game Studios appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve spent a lot of the weekend fiddling around with my Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build and thought I would talk a bit more about it in-depth this morning. For the uninitiated, Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons low-life minions that ultimately die after a short period of time. While they are alive they deal a lot of fire-based melee damage and auto-target the nearest enemy. Essentially think of them as a sentient fireball or something akin to the Demon Skulls from the Doom FPS series. There are a lot of ways to play this but traditionally this has been done with a Witch using the Necromancer ascendancy, in fact, I have played this a number of times in the past both during the Sanctum league and a very short-lived minion instability version during Crucible league that caused them to explode and deal damage based on their maximum life.
The 3.22 league, brought forth some significant changes to both the Chieftan Marauder Ascendancy and Templar Guardian Ascendancy. Essentially the Guardian now has two unique pets, the first of which is the equivalent of a giant Righteous Fire Juggernaut called the Sentinel of Radiance. It is a temporary minion that moves extremely slowly but blankets roughly half of the map in burning damage for 20 seconds before poofing. In order to combat the EXTREMELY slow movement speed… we use a spell called Convocation to teleport all of your minions to you allowing them to bip around the map. The other unique minon is called the Elemental Relic, and you can have 3 of them up at a given time and they are summoned by your minions hitting targets. If you have all of them up, they will be granting you and your minions Level 27 versions of Anger, Hatred, and Wrath. Raging Spirits hit extremely quickly, so for the most part you are guaranteed almost 100% uptime of these buffs while in combat.
This weekend I recorded one of my dumb little videos showing off running a map. Essentially I have been spending most of my time running tier 14 and 15 maps to farm Maven invitations, but in the above video, I am doing a Tier 13. In the video, I state that 16s were a bit “rippy”, which was true… until I poured on a bunch of levels and swapped out some of my gear. Essentially now I am zip through 16s as quickly as I do a 13 in this video. Mostly the gameplay is me charging to a pack of mobs, using convocation to summon my Fiery Lad on top of the pack which between the Righteous Fire Damage and Carrion Golem Bone Flechettes pretty much explodes everything but the Rares at which point I summon a string of Raging Spirits to burn those down… and then repeat until the map is cleared. One of my problems with SRS builds in the past is that they were pretty slow to map because they revolved around trying to herd a pack of raging spirits around the map. Shield Charge + Convocation takes care of this problem and quite honestly I am not sure if I would play SRS without this combo in the future.
The build in its current state is not exactly what I would consider a budget build. That said… I am uncertain that any of my gear is actually required. I have no clue how much currency I have spent on it, but I would guess in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 Divine Orbs. The build felt good and was completely viable from essentially the point I got my first two ascendancies that gave me my unique minions. You could likely perform well with this in a Solo-Self-Found environment because while all of the uniques are nice-to-haves, I don’t think they are really required to make the build function. You would need to do quite a bit of abyss to farm up Ghastly Eye jewels with minion damage and some survival stats on them, however. At the time of writing this… here are a few price checks for the above items:
In reality, you could run this build without any of this… save for maybe crafting your own minion wand. I picked up my first +1 wand off the ground, so they are common enough that I usually end up seeing several so long as you put Convoking Wand on your loot filter as something you want to stand out. There is nothing in my gear that I am really relying on to make the build work. Sometimes you have a series of uniques that produce a very specific interaction that if you don’t have it… your build is bricked. This is absolutely not the case with Guardian SRS, and in theory, you could run happily with a +2 Minion Gem Tabula Rasa(roughly 20 Chaos) and then just a bunch of decently rolled Armor/Energy Shield items.
If you want to give this a shot, then I would definitely check out the build guide from GhazzyTV. I veered slightly off course to stack up some more defenses, so you can also check out my latest POB if you want to see what my tree and gear look like exactly. Essentially right now I am working on building toward being Spell Block capped and then picking up some more minion survival nodes. I had this problem for a bit where my Spectres would die anytime I attempted to take on a high-end Legion pack, and I was trying to gain some additional health and regen to keep them and my carrion golem alive more often. The spell block thing was an oversight I completely missed that node cluster earlier. I feel plenty tanky as is, but as I talk about in the video the combination of Mind Over Matter and Eldritch Battery put me in a situation where if I start taking damage… it sort of snowballs into a death.
This is what my defenses look like. I have decent enough armor but if I have enough points and manage to get this character a bit higher… I will try and pick up another jewel socket on my tree and attempt to get a bit more armor and health. Health truthfully is probably fine as I am a little over 4000, with an Energy Shield that is a bit over 2000. Most of the time I have 75% chance to block attacks, and hopefully will also have 75% chance to block spells soon… though currently, I am sitting at only 65%. I don’t have much in the way of raised elemental resistances but they are all capped along with Chaos Resistance. I feel way sturdier than either of my two past SRS Necromancer builds. In a perfect world, I would pick up Golem Commander and also run a Stone Golem but I am just not sure I can spare the points and I definitely can’t give up my Testudo anoint.
What I did not expect, is how quickly this has become my mapping character of choice. Essentially I have been working on unlocking an attempt on Maven by using this character to get 10 T14+ witnesses and then hopping over onto my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to complete the 10-way. Whenever I manage to fill up my Sulphite, I shift gears and go delving on the Juggernaut until I run out again… then return to the cycle of SRS Guardian Maven invites. At some point, I will start doing some altars and see how well the Guardian can deal with a lightweight boss like the Black Star or Shrek. In theory, SRS tends to be pretty great at bossing and while I am not entirely certain what my damage looks like… according to Path of Building it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million. POB is notoriously bad at calculating minion damage however so I have no clue what the realistic damage looks like whether that is higher or lower than that number.
All in all though, if you are looking for a really chill minion character that you can in theory play without any expensive gear… you might give this one a shot. I’ve definitely spent a lot of currency on mine, but I am not really sure I had to. I think I might just be gilding the lily at this point.
The post Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
