Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we are taking a break from the Dawntrail topic because Ammo was not available. As a result, we dive into a normal topic load starting with Grace talking about their experience playing Diablo IV Season 5. From there we dive into a mega topic of Kodra and his recent trip to GenCon. He talks about True Dungeon, Various Assorted LARPs, and some of the cool stuff from the convention floor. We also dive into a discussion about how a convention reforms its reputation as being the D&D convention into something more open and welcoming. From there we realize that the Age of Sigmar topic is going to get bumped again… but end up also having a bit of a pre-discussion. Finally, we wrap things up with the charming indie game Thank Goodness You’re Here.
Topics Discussed:
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I pushed through the rest of the campaign on my Widow Hail Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye. I feel like it is very important to preface this build with the statement, that for this experiment I was purposefully trying not to follow a meta guide. Those exist, in abundance for Deadeye characters in 3.25 and I purposefully decided to shun them. I know how to do that build and have done it before many times… though my personal preference in the past was to always build on a Champion so I could add on extreme layers of “tankyness”. This time I purposefully went with Deadeye because I wanted to help this build with as much damage output as I possibly could given that I was stepping outside of the current meta and trying something different.
The other constraint that I placed upon myself is that I have tried not to allow this to be the build that trade chat and an abundance of divine orbs built. I’ve been chucking any decent gear into my vault that I picked up through shipping routes and the Settlers of Kalguur league mechanic. The entire purpose of this was to have a stash of things to draw upon when it came to equipping this character. Everything that my character is wearing came either from the league mechanic or was dropped on my Righteous Fire Chieftain save for two items… the tri-elemental quiver needed to drive Widowhail and a cluster jewel that I picked up last night. This has also led to some of my other decisions like running Purity of Elements instead of attempting to fix elemental ailments in another manner. Essentially the goal is to create a psuedo-SSF character without having to wall my character off from the rest of my stuff.
Having said all of that… I will probably start shopping for some upgrades. Right now I have a T2/T2/T3 Elemental Hit quiver and I would really like to get triple T1 with some attack speed while keeping the additional arrow. I really like that I am firing eight arrows at a time and all of those arrows are igniting, chilling, shocking, and eventually freezing. This would be a way worse experience if I were not actively freezing things when I shotgun them. That said… I am squishy as hell and I do not love that. I basically have no real line of defense… awful armor, awful evasion, and 90 suppression though it is lucky suppression. I have overcapped elemental resistances, but they are only 75% and a very negative chaos resistance at the moment. In a few levels, I am swapping to a body armor that I am going to try and six-link that has almost 3000 armor and evasion on it, so that should help out a little bit.
So immediately after killing Kitava, I did the thing you are probably not supposed to do… and just dropped straight into a yellow tier map. It went fine and honestly… still felt like I was running the campaign. So of course I immediately bumped up to a Tier 11 Red Map, and again… it was pretty much okay. I did struggle a bit with an Expedition rare that I made super freaking tanky… because the only not-toxic atlas strategy that I have is one that includes a single big explosion. I did not read the buffs I was applying to that monster, and I had to bring in Big Brother RF Chieftain to kill it before proceeding. I legitimately think that I could probably be just fine running T16s and I am sure tonight I will experiment with that. Quite honestly, this character already feels much like my other Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit characters have felt damage output-wise before getting a Headhunter.
I think with some judicious gearing choices to give me some modicum of survivability… this could turn into a pretty effective map blaster. Basically… I am hoping that this does not become a popular strategy because I need a very specific roll combination on a quiver to make it work. I would love to see those not skyrocket to outrageous prices.
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Good Morning Folks. Last night I got my baby Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye up to a high enough level to try out my Widowhail nonsense. For the uninitiated this is a unique bow that has no real damage stats of its own… but instead inherits whatever stats you have on your quiver and then multiplies them based on a value that ranges from 150% to 250%. During the campaign on my RF Chieftain, I wound up getting a 240% version to drop… which started my gears turning. Now if you look on POE.Ninja this is a bow mostly used for damage over time bow builds as you can get a lot of stats that are very difficult to get on a bow otherwise. Almost no one appears to be using this for hit-based attacks, but given you can get a quiver with all three elemental damage types… and Elemental Hit of the Spectrum only cares about elemental damage… I thought maybe it might work.
So far it seems to be pretty freaking great, but I am also still in the campaign. I went from it taking a few hits to take most mobs down to essentially one-shotting everything but tankier rares. I spent 5000 harvest juice to flip the quality to increasing attack speed instead of physical damage… given that again we do not care about physical damage at all. Right now I am using Behemoth Brand and it feels great while firing 6 arrows at a time, which fork and chain and ricochet before returning back to me… which ends up shotgunning down most things. Given that I am dealing three types of damage with every hit… I have 100% uptime on Trinity Support and I am freezing, igniting, and shocking pretty much everything in my path. I have a slightly better-suited quiver to upgrade to when I hit 67 and I am curious to see what sort of damage boost I get then.
I am also not really following a meaningful build guide at this point. I’ve played several different versions of Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit and know more or less what the shape of the build looks like. I was going to try and do some unnatural instinct shenanigans but unfortunately, right now those are going for like 8 Divines. Thread of Hope is pretty cheap right now, so I might try my hand at working one of those into the build. I am contemplating being super lazy and just running Purity of Elements so I do not have to care at all about ailments. Basically, right now I am super glass cannon, and as I get to where I can start equipping some of the well-rolled shipping gear I have set aside for the build, I am hoping I can have a decent amount of armor and evasion. I’ve also contemplated throwing on a tiny bit of ward as a defensive layer when evasion fails.
I have zero clue if this is going to work, but I am interested in the ride at least. If it sucks, it won’t be the first character that I have leveled only to fall flat when I hit maps. I think in theory it might be good, but I am just not sure it will be able to compete with a 1000 elemental DPS bow for example. I am not sure it will require a level of min-maxing on the quiver that I am just not prepared to engage with. For the moment, it feels really damned good in Act 7. I am sure I will be able to blast through the rest of the acts and I will probably do the second lab tonight and see how more deadeye nonsense helps things out. I believe it should add two more arrows to the mix so that will be firing eight at a time. That is a heck of a lot more damage output. If nothing else this should be fun for farming low-tier maps and setting up something like essences.
If this actually ends up working… I will of course drop a POB.
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Good Morning Folks! My morning has been a bit on the odd side. I had to get up super early, run into the office, do a few things, and then get back home before an 8:30 meeting. As a result, I am getting a bit of a late start to the day. There is a topic that I have been mulling over in my head and I thought I would use today as a time to open a discussion. This year with Blaugust we have had a significantly larger reach than we have in previous years. At the time of writing, we have one-hundred-seven participating blogs and fifty-nine of them are completely new to the Blaugust event. This means our community is growing, but also as it grows some of the collective cultural tenets of the community are changing a bit. Right or wrong this was an event born out of the MMORPG Blogging community, and most of us old-timers have created blogs where we ramble on about our thoughts regarding the games we are playing and the new games on the horizon that we find ourselves pining for.
I appreciate a fresh perspective as folks arrive who have been wholly disconnected from this original community. I think there has been a good deal of shared growth since we opened up the call to pretty much anyone who creates regularly syndicated content in whatever form that takes. However this year I have seen a few entrants that are very clearly using Large Language Models as part of their daily routine. This feels like we are approaching a slippery slope here, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. I’ve screwed around a lot specifically with Large Language Models that generate images off prompts. I’ve spent most of my time playing around with Stable Diffusion, and that is precisely what I think of it as… “play”.
It is a toy that I can fiddle around with and get some curious results from, but nothing I am doing do I truly consider to be a creative endeavor. I know other folks who have been in this same blogging pod for a while do the same. Sometimes we need an image to break up the text of a post, and can’t find anything that fits our exact requirements so it is pretty easy to turn to a picture generation machine and have it poop out something to fill this void. The thing is… when I do this, I don’t take any sense of pride in “creating” something because I did not. I typed some words into a magic box and it spit out a visualization, and while that visualization might be appealing it is a largely unrepeatable event. What I take pride in are the words surrounding that visualization that I pulled from my head.
So I am finding myself in a weird state looking at the prospect of folks having LLMs spit out the text for their blog posts, even if they are tweaking them later. Blaugust originally was an event centered around writing. That is humans who are sitting down to commit the thoughts that they are thinking to the digital page and then share them with peers. Typing some prompts into a machine and having it generate thoughts for you… feels like a bit of a violation of that original goal. I don’t care what ChatGPT regurgitated from stolen data… I care about what YOU think as the person behind the screen typing the thing that I am reading. I find zero value something that an LLM generates that is formatted to look like a number of posts that it consumed that were written by someone originally.
So I find myself in an awkward position. Blaugust 2024 as the rules of the contest stand, does not have any text forbidding the use of large language models to generate posts. As a result, I find myself having to tolerate some things that seem distasteful to me personally… and given the number of back-channel comments that I have received other Blaugustans also find it distasteful. Going forward for 2025 and beyond there is likely going to be an “Anti-AI” rider that the mentors will have to work through. Again I don’t so much care about the “AI as Clipart” trend of using it as something vaguely pleasant looking to break up large blocks of text. What concerns me is using Large Language Models to generate text posts instead of sharing your own thoughts.
I’m not purposefully trying to be a Luddite, but also believe there is value in human creativity that cannot be replaced by a regurgitation of consumed source material. Maybe I am off base here, and folks don’t mind the concept of LLM content mills… but given the number of sidebars I have had with folks I am guessing that will not be the case. Anyways I am opening this discussion, feel free to drop me your thoughts and feelings below.
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