Good Morning Friends… which admittedly feels odd to say given how much I have failed this past week to say it. I am not entirely certain what I am going through right now, but it has been harder and harder to sit down and actually write something. I think mostly it has felt like I didn’t really have anything worth saying. I’ve been quietly plugging away at Path of Exile while listening my way through the Brandon Sanderson Cosmere books… and none of that seemed terribly interesting. When every blog post feels the same… I struggle a bit to find the desire to go through the motions. We’ve also had wild weather here in Oklahoma which led me to not even have a podcast this week.
Yesterday I dinged level 100 which makes for the second time I have done this in Path of Exile. I feel like I could walk away from this league happy with my progress. I am not sure why exactly I wanted to hit 100 this time around, but it was one of those nagging feelings in the back of my head. The first time I did so was largely to prove that I could, and after that, it felt like the novelty had worn off. This time around though I had reached a point where I was thoroughly happy with my character and mostly just wanted to ding as a bit of a victory lap. I am contemplating completely reworking a chunk of my character in order to fully switch it to the more powerful version of the build including cluster jewels. I have a good stockpile of currency and given that I have available to me all of the talent points… I could tweak my build to see what that version of Righteous Fire feels like.
Most of my currency is still coming from Delve, but the strategies have shifted a bit. In previous leagues, I made my currency a nickel and dime at a time through Resonator sales. With the graveyard crafting and some changes to the atlas making it so folks are printing azurite… the resonator market has crashed. Though ironically there are still folks occasionally buying my wares in bulk. Most of my currency is coming from Curiosity Vaal Apsects which sell for around 16 Divine Orbs each. There is a slightly lesser trade in Doryani’s Machinarium, Aul’s Uprising, and the various rings that go into Precurors. Basically, this means I am hunting for bosses above all else… which has the positive side effect of progressing one of the league challenges.
Generally speaking, my goal for every league is to get enough of the challenges completed in order to get the sad little totem pole which I think comes at 19. This is the second league in a row where I have gotten at least the first upgraded version. It is highly unlikely that I will ever hit 40 of 40 unless there is a mighty force behind me wanting something that comes from the end of that journey. I will say though that the changes in how Scarabs work, have made focusing in on specific mechanics far easier than they would have been in previous leagues. Running a full complement of scarabs for a single-league mechanic is almost as good as having your tree specced for it. I am slowly collecting Fortunate cards so that I can turn in and complete Divined Destiny. Maybe I can complete the full set of the upgraded armor appearances, but that is probably as far as I will be able to make it in this league before I run out of steam.
I went on a bit of a tear yesterday completing different Maven witnesses. I’ve admittedly never attempted any of these in previous leagues though I probably could have without much issue. At this point, I have completed The Formed, The Forgotten, The Twisted, The Hidden, The Elder Slayers, and am working on getting my witnesses for The Feared. I had no clue that when I took down Cortex it was a Witnessed version. I am just about done with a Chayula Breach stone so I should be able to get that witness pretty quickly then it just leaves Elder, Shaper, and Sirus. Sirus is the one that probably worries me the most because that fight is annoying enough on its own.
Delve is still my happy place, but mostly chasing The Feared is an attempt to prove it to myself that I could do it if I chose to do so. I don’t love bossing. It feels like a lot of effort for a very minimal payoff. Especially given how much the prices of everything has crashed this league, there just isn’t near the chase that there might have been previously. I sincerely doubt I will ever really chase Uber bosses because given that I don’t love the amount of faffing about required to fight normal bosses… I certainly don’t love the thought of grinding out the already painful t17s to get emblems in order to fight Uber bosses. My hope is that in 3.25 they make some significant changes to T17s which will hopefully make them less egregious.
Past that I have been helping my friend get started who is also playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I helped my friend Ric through a bunch of the gear acquisition and now I am helping my friend Lethbridge with some similar gaps in gearing. That is probably my favorite part of Path of Exile when I can help friends get the stuff they need. Acquiring something for a friend who is also playing is way more enjoyable than chasing my own goals. Anyways hopefully I will be a bit more regular this week with my blog posts but honestly… who knows!
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Morning Folks! If you have read this blog for any length of time over the last few years, you will know I am a “Delve Enjoyer”. One of the nuisances of Delve is that you need to pop out every so often to refill sulphite that you use to power the minecart or in my case the tunnel bear mtx… used to traverse the darkness. Generally speaking even with full Niko support on the Atlas tree it will take several maps to fully top back off your stockpile of 65,000 sulphite for a maximum upgraded capacity. When I am in the mood to Delve I pretty much want to do nothing but that. This makes the need to map for a bit in order to fill back up my stockpile of “delve juice” feel like a chore.
One of the components of the Necropolis league mechanic is Allflames which are used to swap out a pack of mobs on your map for a pack that has specific rewards. One of these is the Allflame Ember of Sulphite which removes a normal pack for a pack of 5-7 Monsters that reward Sulphite on Death. If you add the Sulphite Scarab of Greed which causes the map owner to gain 150% more Sulphite you have a wild interaction. In a T16 map, if you replace the top pack aka the one with the highest occurrence in the map with the Sulphite Allflame, and run one of these Scarabs you are pretty much guaranteed to top off your 65,000 Sulphite in a single map. Which of course means that I can get back to doing the thing that I want to be doing almost immediately. This is part of the reason why I am hoping that if nothing else… the Allflame mechanic goes standard after this league.
I am not super deep into Delve right now, but I am farming comfortably a bit deeper than normal this league. Generally speaking, I would stick in the 150 to 200 range and keep going horizontal looking for new cities and fossil nodes. In this league, it feels like I am much stronger than I normally would be, and as such I keep going deeper in order to test what the lower bounds of this build would be. I don’t necessarily want to leave super chill mode, at least not until I have dinged level 100. After that, I will probably start diving straight down to see where the break point is for my build where it transitions to something I can’t do quite as easily. In previous leagues, by the time I hit 500 depth, I was in pain. I am wondering if I can somehow make it down to around 1000 depth this go-round.
I have passed the halfway point in level 99 and am at the point where I plan on always carrying around an Omen of Amelioration just in case. During the 99 to 100 grind, a single death can cause you to lose at least a full night’s worth of experience progress. If I do take a random death the Omen will be consumed and I will save 75% of the loss, making it a bit less painful. I got mine as a drop but given that they are only around 50 Chaos, I would absolutely buy another one if I take a death because the savings is well worth it at this point. Once I ding 100 I will go back to doing some dangerous content again. Honestly the XP penalty is the piece of Path of Exile that I like the least. It feels like I have to play super safe if I want to make any progress at all. I’ve only ever hit level 100 on one other character, because while I will happily pay for voidstones… I refuse to pay for power levelling services.
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Good Morning Folks! While I have been talking about Fallout 76 lately, I am still playing a good deal of Path of Exile. Largely at this point I am about a third of the way through level 99 and would really like to hit 100 as sort of the crowning achievement of the league. I’ve already done enough of the achievements to quality for the sad little totem pole that I go for every league, but there are a handful that seems like they would probably be low-hanging fruit due to the ease of running different league content with scarabs. I am continuing to make tweaks and improvements to my build and figured I would talk through a few of these. If you are curious here is the current state of my character at level 99.
The first upgrade is that I swapped over from my rare armor/evasion boots to a pair of Annihilation’s Approach boots. The weird thing about this swap is that I had tried doing it much earlier in my build and I did not seem to have the survival to soak up the additional fire damage at the time. What these ultimately give me is the ability to drop Brine King pantheon while granting permanent adrenaline. This ends up being some additional physical damage reduction while granting 100% increased flat damage and 25% increased attack, cast, and movement speed. The first pair that I bought was around 4 Divines and then I sold them back at a slight profit after trying them and deciding they were not for me. With the recent market crashes you can now pick up a pair of these for around 20 Chaos which is what I paid for mine.
Another significant upgrade that I made… that I am shocked I was able to snag is this Cloak of Flames. It was already six-linked and corrupted and all I had to do was burn through my stash of tainted chromatic orbs to get it to “righteous fire colors”. My previous Cloak of Flames had 5% Reduced Fire Damage Taken and +2 socketed curse gems… the later of which was a useless corrupt for my build. This one both reduces my fire damage taken and my chaos damage taken… both of which I am shifting a portion of physical damage to… which means they also directly reduce my physical damage taken. Can you believe that I paid 50 Chaos for this? I am still shocked that I snagged it for so low. Sure it required me to spend a lot of tainted chromes to make it work, but they were something I had lying around from mapping.
While I am talking about damage shifting, I thought I would share all of the sources of “physical damage taken” as I have on this build. I have my Cloak of Flames giving me 40% Taken as Fire and an additional 8% Taken as Fire coming from a helm enchant. Then I have 15% Taken as Cold coming from my Taste of Hate flask that winds up as nearly permanent uptime. Finally, I have 10% Taken as Chaos Damage coming from an Armor/Energy Shield Mastery. While my Chaos Resistance is only 75% the 4% Reduced Chaos Damage Taken that I now have on my chestpiece should help to blunt that a bit. In total I am shifting 73% of my incoming Physical Damage to either elements which get soaked by my 90% resistances or Chaos which is being blunted slightly by the Cloak. On top of all of this I have 60% reduced extra damage from critical strikes and in my final form I should have 90%.
The big splurge that I have made is picking up an Oriath’s End flask. This is something I have always wanted to play with because it gives you lots of explosions while the flask effect is active. This combined with my big Hinekora Explosion, and the little Fire Mastery explosion… means I have three sources of things that go boom which is extremely fun to watch. Basically, I have reached the point that between all of my defensive layers and meager offensive layers… I can just sort of charge around the map and watch things explode. It is a truly delightful state to be in. There are things that I am holding off doing until I hit level 100… when deaths are meaningless. Basically, my focus is grinding out the rest of this level. I got my very first Sacred Blossom yesterday and I have never fought Oshabi, but I mostly want to wait until I am not actively trying to gain experience.
I’ve also been getting a fair number of T17 map drops, but after failing miserably the one I attempted I am holding off on touching them until I am level 100 and no longer care about dying. Past that, I could start dropping passive nodes to swap over to some cluster jewels, but I am not sure how much I actually care about that. I always get to a point where I am happy enough with the character and don’t want to keep fiddling with it.
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The release of the Fallout Amazon Series appears to be a rousing success. It appears that critics across the board have given the show high marks, and similarly, long-time fans of the series are loving it. Tim Cain who worked on the very first Fallout game released his review of the show on YouTube and pretty much gave glowing praise for the level of detail. Sure there has been some minor controversy about the timeline of events and whether or not it reset the timeline of Fallout New Vegas… but overall folks have been happy. I shared my own praise of the show a few weeks back and I feel like I need to watch it again just to soak in all of the detail.
We are now seeing this Fallout love, translating into a rush of players to games like Fallout 76… which never really seemed to find its place and launched with a peak concurrency of 32k players on Steam. Recently it has been breaking those records with a new peak hitting just shy of 73k players. What is even more telling is… Amazon is giving this game away for free through the Microsoft Game Store and these Steam numbers are not even accounting for that. I’ve said recently that it seems to take about two years before a live service game is really worth playing, and now some five years later… Fallout 76 is in prime shape (pun intended) to welcome this influx of players.
The thing is… this isn’t just impacting the live service Fallout offering. The player numbers in Fallout 3 show an over 200% increase, New Vegas around 130% increase, and Fallout 4 similarly around 130% increase. This is translating to more than just players dusting off their existing copies because Fallout games are now seizing spots on the Steam Top Sellers Chart. As of the time of writing this Fallout 76 is 4th, Fallout 4 5th, Fallout 4 GOTY edition 9th, New Vegas 20th, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition down at 48th. I remember the Witcher Netflix series having a similar effect on sales of Witcher 3 boosting it by around 500%. While the Witcher series went off the rails and lost fans in later seasons, this is evidence that a good project surrounding a game will absolutely have deep impact on sales as it brings in a whole new group of fans.
Over the last week or so I have had a number of gamer friends reach out to me for my advice for where to start in their Fallout adventures. Namely how far back they should go… and as much as I hate to admit it my advice has been to skip the first two games unless they are already indoctrinated into the world of 90s CRPGs. The best Fallout game is New Vegas, so I feel like at a minimum everyone needs to play that one. There is merit however to start with Fallout 3, because while it is a very monochromatic wasteland… Three Dog is without a doubt the best DJ. Fallout 4 is a reasonable starting place if you are unwilling to deal with the jank of older games even though it has plenty of that good good Bethesda jank to contend with. My general advice would be to play Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and then Fallout 4 in that order… and if you find yourself craving more then maybe go back and do Fallout 1 and 2 if you can handle the downgrade in tech. Fallout Tactics was a game that I did not enjoy in the least so it isn’t going to get any sort of recommendation from me.
Personally, I find myself sinking further and further into Fallout 76. This is probably a bad starting place for anyone who cares about the story elements of Fallout. The lore of the game feels a bit too malleable, and while I am enjoying myself if you actually care about the story of the world… the other games are a much better option. What I wanted was to explore the content that has been added to this game over the years. I’ve poked at it off and on… and then got into the habit of logging into claim the various offerings throughout the years. However, I’ve never really played it as my main game and I am trying to find my way into that stance. I talked about it quite a bit on the podcast this weekend, but the community is very intriguing.
At some point, I need to dedicate some serious time to building up a proper base. I somehow ended up getting my original destroyed when I tried to move it, but truth be told it was sort of a mess. I would like to actually spend some time building something I am proud of. Above is an older screenshot and quite honestly… I just sort of kept throwing things at it without any real design goals. I’ve found a fairly flat area of land that no one seems to ever have a base… so I am going to attempt to build something more proper there.
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