Tomorrow is the start of the Legacy of Phrecia Event… which honestly at this point might as well be considered a league. It feels like we are going to have the bulk of Path of Exile players returning for this thing, which will probably create a very normal trade economy. The Pohx League event has been a blast and I enjoyed my Ice Trap Trickster, and effectively proved that I put enough effort into anything I could make it feel comfortable. Big Ice Trap explosions was really fun, but due to the limited availability of items in the Pohx league I struggled to make it feel as tanky as I would have liked. I might try it again during a proper league economy but this is essentially the place where I managed to get it.
I crave Righteous Fire Shenanigans, but we will not have the good ole reliable and super easy to build Chieftain. Instead a new path will need to be forged and I have a few options. The problem with not having Chieftain is that we will not have easy explosions for clear purposes and the ability to ONLY stack Fire Resistance to get to 90% all res without much fuss. There are a few ways to get back the explodes, namely Legacy of Fury boots and Oriath’s End Flask… both of which might be either cost prohibitive or take awhile for them to actually show up on the market. As such Pohx, the godfather of righteous fire, is looking at the Scavenger aka the Not-Scion which comes with profane bloom shenanigans and the ability to essentially double the effect of a Cloak of Flames.
The thing with the Scion path is that there isn’t a great guide to follow. Pohx has released a vague sketch of a build and I have built Righteous Fire enough times that I often leave the golden path do to my own tweaking already. I am leaning towards giving it a shot and trying to make it work. You can get through Red Maps pretty easily as any form of Righteous Fire and by then hopefully the Legacy of Fury boots and Hateful Accuser ring will fairly available. Essentially a Fire Trap build will work fine until you can get the ring and have been able to get through Uber Lab to get Zerphis’s Heart. One of the nice things about Phrecia being based out of Settlers league is that the shipments seem to favor armor bases that are pretty solid for Righteous Fire builds.
The other path that interests me is Ancestral Commander, which feels like a tankier version of the Juggernaut prior to its most recent nerfs. There are a few paths that I could go with this. I contemplated trying another Boneshatter character since I did mine in a private league and felt like I just did not have enough access to gear to really make it work. That is the problem with physical damage builds, is that you really need to have a strong high PDPS weapon in order to make them work, and I am just not good enough to craft one on my own. I also felt like the survival of the build was nowhere near as good as what I thought it should be based on the hype surrounding it. At some point I definitely want to give Boneshatter another go, just not sure if right now is that moment.
The four picks that I am interested from Ancestral Commander are purely defensive options, essentially giving you 3 extra endurance charges, a poorly rolled defiance of destiny, a cloak-of-flames-at-home, and the old juggernaut node that made you immune to freezes and slows. I could in theory also level this as Righteous Fire using the general Chieftain template that I follow. The problem there is without the explodes it is going to feel super sluggish to map and delve on. The thing about the explode procs in Delve is that they can absolutely hit things out in the darkness helping you clear faster. I would really need an Oriath’s End AND Legacy of Fury boots to make it feel even halfway decent. The boots are probably pretty reasonable, but the flask… all depends upon what the economy looks like for the Phrecia event.
I kicked around Poison Summon Raging Spirits with the Servant of Arakali Shadow ascendancy, but the more I think about it the less inclined I am to go down that path. I remembered that Minions in Path of Exile require you to deal with Spectres and the Animate Guardian. These systems are the most kludgy unfun bullshit ever… and I really do not feel like dealing with that nonsense right now. I will happily return to playing minions when they implement some quality of life for either system. Nothing feels worse than killing your Animate Guardian and having to rebuy all of those damned uniques to make another one. Only slightly less painful is playing the hideout desecrate game to get your Spectres up and running… which will likely not make it through a map without taking a death. While I love SRS, and enjoyed it greatly in Path of Exile II… I think I am just done with it as a concept in Path of Exile 1.
Who knows! I might go in a totally different direction tomorrow whenever I actually get around to starting a character. Right now I am probably leaning towards following the wisdom of Pohx. That means of course that all of the items of that build will be in demand and inflated… but I like Ritual and in theory might be able to farm my own Hateful Accuser ring. Legacy of Fury drops from normal Maven, but I hate that fight so will be hoping someone out there decides to farm them. I will probably try and snag an early Cloak of Flames with whatever chaos I manage to scrounge together during the campaign because getting at least a four-link early really helps out considerably.
Are you going to be playing the Legacy of Phrecia event? Which of the krangled classes are you going to play? Drop me a line below.
The post Legacy of Phrecia Plans appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Sometimes I sit down before you to talk about what nonsense I have been up to lately. Other times I act as an internet anthropologist and document weird things that I am seeing happening in games and their communities. This morning we are going to be wearing that second hat as I talk about something that is currently going on with the Path of Exile Reddit. While Grinding Gear Games hosts a proper forum, I would say that the beating heart of the community is likely the Reddit, and recently there was a thread hatching a plan to buy up all of the Sanctum Tomes available at the launch of Legacy of Phrecia and deleting them… thus spawning the Anti-Sanctum Alliance. Shortly thereafter Captain Lance spawned the concept of the Sanctum Rushers United later turned into Sanctum Runners Union to attempt to counter this plan.
The battle lines were drawn and folks started chipping their hat in with either side. For example Neversink indicated that he would be hiding tomes from everyone’s filters and throwing support to the ASA. This was hopefully a joke, but it was taken seriously enough that folks started posting the code to highlight tomes so that people could restore it to their filters. Then came the propaganda from the SRU both on the Reddit and in the form of YouTube videos. Various streamers in the community started throwing their hats into either camp for example Zizaran is a known Sanctum enjoyer. I personally hate Sanctum and would happy throw my hat into the ring with the ASA, but in truth I will probably just hoard the tomes until Kodra wants to run them… since he is a friend and also a Sanctum enjoyer.
If you have ever questioned if the devs at Grinding Gear Games read the Reddit… this should be proof positive that they do. They even got in on the action and posted a poll on Twitter asking which side the exiles will fight for. At the time of writing this the ASA is winning by a decent margin, and between the time I took the above screenshot and looked as I sat down to write this… the poll has crossed 14k votes. Sanctum generates stupid amounts of Divines per hour, for the folks who have built characters designed specifically to run it. I would be perfectly happy if it just went away… and it seems sad that Sanctum went core… but we also lost Metamorph which was a mechanic that I did enjoy greatly.
The battle lines were cleanly drawn for a short amount of time between two opposing forces… but in truth Path of Exile style folks decided that they were not necessarily represented by either side. This spawned the creation of all manner of other “organizations” representing other favorite league mechanics.
ASA – Anti-Sanctum Alliance
SRU – Sanctum Runners Union
CHB – Crop Harvesting Bureau
COD – Children of Delve
SSS – Simulacrum Secret Service
CLEAR – Committed Lab Enjoyers’ Agency of Revenue
FBI – Fungal Bureau of Investigation
OM – Order of the Mist
KGB – Kalguuran Group for Business
AGI – Alch and Go Industries
BBC – Big Breach Coalition
WETA – Wraeclast Engineering and Temporal Architects
SIH – Sitting in Hideout (doing one map per hour)
CASUAL – Cards and Sometimes Unique Acquisition Lobby
IRS – Institution of Rogues & Smugglers – Redacted
The meme above is right… things are in fact getting out of hand. This though… is probably part of why I love this community. It is completely nonsense and will take something to the extremes… but like the Toucan and Krangled it just becomes part of the culture.
If you have read this blog for any length of time… you will know which faction I truly belong to. In the wise words of Jorgen… Delve Provides. This is the mechanic I keep going back to over and over because I really do enjoy Delving down in the mines more than pretty much anything else. I love the endless scroll of nodes and finding a comfortable level to set up and start farming. Even with my recent Ice Trap Trickster from Pohx League… I am back down in the mines seeking treasure. When I do not Delve I just miss the generic bubblegum currency that it produces in addition to all of the unique stuff that comes from down there. My role in Path of Exile is to provide the stuff that comes from Delve to the people who choose not to partake, and truthfully… I think choosing any role and dedicating to it will lead to decent currency gains.
In other more important news… yesterday the Map Stash tab was finally released for Path of Exile II, and the game instantly became more playable. I managed to snag one of the Guild early in the morning while the weekend stash tab sales were still going on. Then I spent what felt like an eternity trucking waystones from quad tabs over to the new map stash tab with affinity. I am not really playing much Path of Exile II, but I am certain this will be a welcome change whenever I do return. The map stash can hold 576 waystones of each tier with room for the corruption only tier 16 as well. Anything that makes the process of storing loot faster is very welcome. What we need now however is the Fragments tab, because the Maps tab does nothing for our tablets.
The Legacy of Phrecia event starts at 12pm PST on Thursday the 20th… so I have until then to figure out what the hell I am going to play.
The post The Exile Faction Wars appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Last week I dipped my toes into Avowed, the new Elder-Scrolls-Like game from Obsidian… the studio that brought you Fallout New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, The Outer Worlds… and probably my favorite of the batch Tyranny which is criminally underrated. I was going to always play this game. Obsidian is a company known for some really big ideas but also quite a bit of jank that comes along with that. So far Avowed feels like a graduation to releasing a polished product on day one, and I think a lot of that comes from the fact that this game has a fairly limited scope. Essentially it is Elder Scrolls without all of the simulationalist stuff that sometimes gets in the way of playing the game.
It isn’t going to break any boundaries, but instead provides a competent semi-open-world adventure where you explore the setting of the Pillars of Eternity universe in a very familiar Bethesda-like package. The thing is however it sands off the rough edges and provides something a bit more straight forward and to the point. You can send gear to your camp from your inventory at any time as well as being able to break down items for resources in the field. There is an encumbrance system, but the only things that have any weight are your chest armor and your weapons… both of which you can manage pretty easily by the salvage and send to camp systems. Even when you are fully encumbered… you can still fast travel to the nearest camp or way point. Essentially Avowed comes out of the box configured in the manner that I spent hours modding Bethesda games to behave like.
If something exists and is lootable in the world… it is something that is worth looting. There are no cabinets full of empty bottles… that really serve no purpose rather than to potentially get a single coin from lugging them to a vendor. Vendors also do not have limited gold reserves so you do not have to play the game of selling to every vendor in a vicinity trying to empty your pack. Lockpicks exist, but they are simply a resource that is consumed and do not involve dealing with a fiddly mini-game… some of which are are just badly designed. My only real complaint is that lockpicks are rare enough that you will want to probably see if any vendors have them… because while they are super cheap… the bigger boxes consume three at a time to open.
Combat is pretty much what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls game, but I think it feels a bit more fluid and the ability upgrades a bit more enjoyable. I can charge into enemies which will break their ability to block attacks. I’m also a huge fan of when Fantasy games allow me to dual wield pistols which allow for an interesting game play of firing one hand at a time, while the other weapon is reloading. We are not going to talk about how impractical it is for you to be loading a pistol one-handed while you are firing the other pistol… but it is still extremely fun. Boss encounters are smart enough so that if you kill them while roaming the world, and you find a quest later asking you to kill that same thing… you just get to autocomplete the quest and get the rewards. Nacib for example is a spider in a dungeon near the start of the game… that later was a bounty mission allowing me to just get some fast credits when I finally found the bounty board.
I have no clue what the magic system feels like, because I am generally not a “finger wiggler” in these types of games… but I will say that when companions use those abilities it feels solid. Essentially you can let the companion AI do its own thing, or you can also specifically target a monster and pop open the action wheel and send a direct command for them to use one of their attacks. There are a number of environment puzzles in the game that involve freezing, shocking, or setting something on fire… and each of the companions can specifically fill one of these niches. There are also a number of grenades that you can carry around in your inventory allowing you to perform the same action so that you are never in a situation where you brought the wrong companion for the wrong mission.
At this point I have met three companions: Kai, Marius, and Giatta. I’ve met a fourth character that I think will be joining my band of adventurers in the next major story segment. Kai is essentially… what if Garrus was a Shark-man, because it is the same voice actor effectively doing the same sort of vocal treatment. Marius is your traditional non-trusting grump Dwarven character… that is also a wild tracker and scout voiced by the person who did Rathma in Diablo IV. Giatta is an Animancer which is sort of like a Necromancer but can also animate pretty much anything… voiced by the actor who did Ikora Rey in Destiny 2. The last companion Yatzli which I have not collected, is a wizard of some sort voiced by the Symmetra Actress from Overwatch.
One of the things that I find particularly cool is that essentially you can upgrade every weapon you find all the way to the maximum stats it can possibly have for its base item type. This means that as you start to find Unique weapons, it does not matter if you find it at the start of the game… it can be upgraded indefinitely and made useful all the way through the game. I found a flaming sword called the Last Light of Day and have now taken it up to Exceptional/Purple quality and will keep upgrading it all the way to Legendary as I find materials. Similarly unique armors often have specific stats on them that make them more useful than other pieces of gear, and you can keep upgrading those as well. Boots, Gloves, Rings, and Amulets are just stat sticks and are as useful at level 1 as they are at whatever the maximum level of the game happens to be. Essentially like I said before… a lot what I like about Avowed is it is the Bethesda model but with all of the bullshit removed from it.
At this point I am roughly half of the way through the game and have no clue what my played stats look like, because I am not playing it through Steam. This was available on Gamepass and I was able to install it through the Battle.net client, which I hope is a sign of similar functionality to come. According to the save game I am playing I am a little over 12 hours in… but save game playtime counts are somewhat squishy. This is probably going to end up being around a 30 hour game for me personally, which seems like a good size for this sort of adventure. Maybe not every game needs to be a 400 hour epic. My favorite Obsidian game is Tyranny which is maybe 8 hours for a single play-through? The world is rich and feels larger than it technically is… but that is mostly due to conscious design choices rather than just putting a bunch of empty space in the game and hoping you will be impressed by the sheer scale.
I’m off today, so pretty much my plan is to go hang out on the couch after I finish writing this post and continue my adventures in this weird world. I have to say… this is making me want to go back and play the Pillars of Eternity games so that I can have some context on a few of the elements that the characters are talking about. There is a lot of proper noun salad happening at the beginning of the game, but after awhile this lessons. There is clearly some fan service for those who do know this setting… but unfortunately I am not one of them. So far I have enjoyed the writing quite a bit, and have enjoyed hanging out with Not-Garrus who went from sexy-almost-birdman to sexy-sharkman. I think my favorite character is Giatta, but a lot of that is because she is a healer.
So far I would say that Avowed is a solid 8 out of 10 game experience for me. I think lowering the scope of the game helped it out quite a bit. There are going to be folks who consider this to be a bit basic, but I am having fun with it. Given how much has improved between this and when they released Outer Worlds, it makes me really look forward to Outer Worlds II. If they can keep knocking out games of this quality I will be exceptionally happy to keep playing them. I’ve always been a fan of Obsidian games and I think this is really the sort of thing they excel at. At least I have not seen any plot threads that sort of crash directly into a brick wall like they did in games like KOTOR II so if nothing else I think they have gotten better at controlling the scope of effort.
The post Avowed Midpoint Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we are down a Grace and Kodra but get back an Ammo. We start off with a topic that got bumped from last week about how much of a difference music makes in games. Specifically, we talk a bit about Star Citizen getting music but also talk about how important good audio queues are. From there Bel shares his early experiences with Avowed a game by Obsidian that is very much Elder Scrolls if you removed the awkward simulationist tendencies. Ash and Bel talk a bit about the upcoming Legacy of Phrecia event in Path of Exile now that all Nineteen Ascendancies have been fully spoiled. We also talked a bit about the upcoming release of Monster Hunter Wilds and Ammo offering custom Palico commissions. Ash touches on Soulstone Survivors a bit and then we close out the show with a discussion about the Dungeon Crawler Carl series of books and why Bel and Thalen love them so much.
