Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.
Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.
I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.
The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.
I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.
Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.
The post Missing Delve appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I gotta admit I am still reeling from last week but luckily I am off today… so it means I get an extra day to decompress. Since the world still feels like shit, I needed to retreat into some very familiar comfort gaming, and the Necro Settlers Event league in Path of Exile has fit the bill. This is a bit weird for an event league because there is no fixed end time, so it has effectively turned into a reboot of the Settlers League which I assume will end when that league ends. The league started on the 7th and at this point I am into mapping with a character that can probably get me all the way through t16s. I went RF Chieftain again because it is comfy and familiar and I know how to get it up and running without much deep thought. I am fully expecting to play a fairly scuffed character because event league economies can be a bit weird and limited.
Event leagues always have some gimmick associated with them, and this time around it is all of the normal Settlers of Kalguur mechanics with the addition of the Lantern of Arimor from the Necropolis league. They removed all of the negative modifiers from the pool and additionally since Allflames are no longer dropping… they are just being applied to your maps automatically. What has been interesting is that all maps of a specific tier for a specific timeframe will share the same pool of lantern modifiers. This means that joining a shared global chat is a good idea as folks tend to share when a certain zone is really hot. This creates massive fluctuations in the price of specific maps when they are running a desirable combo, and also creates a situation where Horizon Orbs are more useful than they have ever been in Path of Exile history.
All of this made getting through the campaign rather interesting. I was going much slower than normal, but also having random league mobs showing up in your maps made it a bit more challenging. An example of something that I saw is during Darresso’s Arena in Act 4 is that nothing but Suphite Golems was spawning other than the Dogs that come out of the various gates. The entire place from start to finish was just yellow golems throwing chunks of sulphite at me, which would be great if I were actually messing with Delve right now, but also kind of wild when you get shotgunned by multiple packs at the same time. I think it was Mudflats where I first encountered the Unique Gemling mobs that drop random gems, and there were a few times early on that I just ran from Meatsacks because they took too long to chew through.
The other really weird thing about this league has been its economy. There are certain lantern combinations that print massive amounts of chaos. I’m hearing that some folks with appropriate juicing are seeing upwards of 200 chaos in a single map. There are no real equivalent mods that drop Divine Orbs, which means that the currency conversion between the two is outrageous. For those who do not know normally you trade in the range of 200 Chaos to a Single Divine Orb, but over the weekend at one point it was trading 500 to 1. This has all sorts of trickle-down effects on the economy as a whole meaning that things that would normally be a 5 Chaos item are selling for 60 Chaos or higher. There are a lot of folks who have not caught onto this yet, because there are items priced at 1 Divine that are in no way worth effectively 400-500 Chaos.
Luckily though I have found plenty of raw chaos and items that I can sell easily for chaos, and it has allowed me to outfit myself in the basics of a RF Chieftain build. I’ve not gone life-on-block based yet, so am still rocking the Rise of the Phoenix shield to cap out my Fire Resistances. I’ve not done the last lab so right now I am sitting at 90% Fire Res and 80% Lightning and Cold Res. I am currently using a four-link Cloak of Flame but am outfitting my atlas to do the Einhar/Ritual strategy in hopes of dropping either an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan so that I can six-link it. I spent 70 Chaos on the chest specifically because I was looking for one that would be good enough to bother six-linking eventually. Luckily the Cloak is relatively easy to get RF colors on of BBBRRG. You can see the rest of my scuffed gear in this POB link.
Since I am off today, I plan on slowly chipping away at my Atlas and doing everything I can to unlock more points. I got a wildly lucky drop earlier where I opened a Unique map lockbox and got two that I needed. Sadly the third was the damned pvp map which is always a waste of time. I wish you could use Horizon Orbs on Hall of the Grandmasters in an attempt to get other unique maps. I will however happily take a Twilight Temple map since that is often one of the ones that goes for quite a bit later in the league. Path of Exile and honestly any ARPG is comfort gaming for me, and I needed this more than I realized. I was having plenty of fun with Veilguard but was essentially in the “chores” section of the game where I needed to do a bajillion sidequests so that I could comfortably move the main story forward. Essentially I was in the “hinterlands” again, and needed a bit of a break.
Are you playing Necro Settlers Event league? What are your thoughts so far? Would you want to see the Lantern of Arimor go standard? Drop me a note below.
The post Necro Settlers Event Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are all reeling a bit from the past week, but we start off things with the joyful return of Ammo from her trip to Japan. She spends a bit of time talking about all the arcade hopping and wonderful food that she found along the way. From there we dive into the furious growth of Pokemon TCG Pocket and how it has swept through our friend group. Ash talks about his experiences with Monster Hunter Wilds Beta and Bel shares his own comfort gaming in the form of the weird Path of Exile Necro Settlers Event League. Bel also talks a bit about playing the Brighter Shores Early Access, and how it has some core design problems that will keep him from playing for very long. Kodra talks a bit about GeekGirlCon where we realize… that he has in fact been talking about it every year since the very first year in 2016. Our podcast… is old. He also talks a bit about his role in the upcoming SudokuCon Stream and some of the nonsense he is going to be doing combining two of his loves: Sudoku, and Celeste.
Morning folks. This is how my yesterday/today is going. Essentially I was supposed to go to a retirement party for the person who originally interviewed me. I left the house with plenty of time, and decided to swing by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription so I would not have to fight lines on my way back home. I rolled down the window and about halfway down I heard a snap, and a grinding… and my window glass fell down abruptly into the door frame. Suffice to say I did not actually end up going to that party, and instead rushed home to attempt to package up my car because it was going to rain. Thankfully my cardboard, trashbag, and packing tape monstrocity made it through the night without leaking. I just dropped my vehicle off this morning and then walked back home, and am hoping they can repair it quickly.
If this is all sounding familiar to you… I’ve probably talked about this before because it happened in October 2022, and early November 2023. I’ve dealt with this once a year for the last three years and I am super tired of it. You cannot fathom the paranoia I feel every single time I roll down the window. Basically I am taking it back to the same place that “fixed” it previously, because last time they ate most of the cost and will likely do the same this time. They are also specifically looking for a different product sku than they used last time. I use this place largely because it is around the corner from my home so I can drop a vehicle off and then walk right back home while I wait. All in all they do a pretty great job with most things, so I am hesitant to say this is entirely their fault. Bad parts are bad parts.
Last night I was lured by the sirens song of a new league in Path of Exile… even though it is technically just a special event league. Essentially they have created a scenario where the good Necropolis mechanic of allflames and rewards… is applied automagically to maps while keeping all of the trappings of the Settlers league. I have to admit while I hated the graveyard crafting of Necropolis, I really did enjoy the whole allflames/mirror thing each time you entered a zone. The only negative about this is… this is making the start of the game way tougher than it normally is. Not to mention I fucked up badly when I muled rolling magma with a witch… and leveled the gem meaning that I had to limp by until I could get some intelligence gear and a few levels on the would be chieftain. I should have leveled melee honestly.
There is some nonsense going on with the mechanics because they have determined the sets of monsters you face by zone… on what appears to be an hour long timer. This means folks will fine whatever the hot map is to run, communicate it over the various chat channels, and then you have an hour to make the most of it before it shifts to another zone. We had an event before with something similar to this, but so far this seems way more powerful. SirGog released a video that I embedded above explaining the mechanics a bit.
I’ve also been playing a bit of the Brighter Shores early access since it launched this week on Steam. It is essentially free to try, but supposedly if you want to access some of the content you have to pay for a $5 per month premium pass. This is a spiritual successor to Old School Runescape from the folks who designed it. I completely missed Runescape as a formative memory because I was at the wrong phase in my life when that game came out. I was playing Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, and eventually World of Warcraft because I was gainfully employed and could afford the subscription. Runescape however seems to have largely been a thing with folks who grew up a generation later than I did and because it was a game you could play in your web browser without a subscription or the need of a proper gaming PC. So far I find it interesting, but also it seems way too needlessly grindy to hook me for long.
I am very much also still playing Veilguard. For whatever reason I was just not feeling it last night after the hustle of trying to seal my car against the impending rain… and pack up anything that might be stolen if someone happened to break in while the window was stuck down. Still enjoying the story but also in a phase where I need to burn through a stack of companion missions. I have no clue if I am near the end or if I am still very much in the middle. There is a ton of content and I am not entirely certain if I am going to take the time to do every side quest or not. After I completed the last story mission, every open world zone now suddenly has a half dozen quest markers waiting for my attention. It can be a little overwhelming and would rather than did a better job of drip feeding you these via a central hub… rather than needing to run out to a location in the world to pick them up. My MMORPG player mindset craves efficiency in design.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I am hoping that my vehicle gets fixed quickly. I had the super sad disappointment of waking up this morning and being absolutely convinced that it was Saturday, and then having to deal with the sad realization that it is only Friday.
The post Automotive Packing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
