Sometimes a blog post happens without me really intending it to. This morning my friend Cliff posted a relatively harmless poll on the Fediverse about whether or not we are a morning person. I have to admit that yes… I am one of the foul accursed beings… but it is not like I ever intended to be. Essentially if there was an “It’s Complicated” choice I would have gone with that. Effectively I am a nightowl that through a series of unfortunate events… has become a daywalker. I was enough of a “not-a-morning-person” growing up, that it was a subject of humor among my parents. I was essentially non-verbal before 9 am… and would stare at whatever morning cartoons happened to be on the television while failing miserably at remembering to eat my breakfast. In High School it got worse, and I suffered some pretty epic bouts of insomnia where I just could not sleep at all. Taking a nap… would effectively reset my biological clock and make it think that it had a full nights sleep causing all sorts of problems that have only just finally as an almost 50 year old adult… resided to the point where I can actually nap again.
This not-a-morning-person nature was pretty freaking fatal when it came to standardized college admission testing. Living in a small town like I grew up in… it meant I had limited options for taking the ACT and SAT and in all cases… it was at eight in the morning. It was specifically my mathematical reasoning that took a hit, and I floundered massively on the first few that I took. It was only through a complicated ruse that I managed to score the 30 that I eventually called “good enough”. Essentially I completely screwed up my sleep schedule and got up super early in the morning so that my brain would think it was closer to noon by the time that 8 am exam happened. It mostly worked, and I did significantly better on the exam than I had up to that point… which was more than enough to basically get admissions to any university at the time.
I was living on a pretty steady dose or IRC and late night gaming for the first bit of college, with most of my coursing being in the evening… or at worst case around One or Two in the afternoon. I kept vampire hours and I like it… up until the point when I moved from my two year college… to a four year university. In my infinite wisdom I decided that I was going to be an art major, and there was one instructor that you could not get out without taking his lab classes. Every single one of them was at 8 am. So I had to not only become functional… but creative… five days a week at eight in the morning. This is truly the beginning of the end for me, and what started the pattern of leaving the comforting darkness behind.
It was not an overnight thing however. I had the misfortune of marrying a teacher… who has a pretty strict timetable that they have to report for work. They were on first shower duty and I was on second shower… and for the most part… it worked. Though my wife reports that she had to jog me from a stupor many times. Apparently I would get up, sit on the side of the bed… and then just sort of stare off into the distance without really knowing what steps came next. Even AFTER taking a shower… I would occasionally just blankly look at my socks, not quite comprehending the step that happened next. All this time I was trying to keep the hours of playing MMORPGs until 1 or 2 in the morning and then getting up at 6 am… and just deciding that it was fine to sacrifice my sleep in order to make this happen.
At the same time however I was noticing the benefits of starting my day early… because it would allow me to leave work early. I was destined for remote work, because the less time I am around other human beings the better… so getting into the office at 7 am let me accomplish a bunch of things before anyone showed up at the door of my office to ask me questions. Additionally tagging out at 4 pm felt great… because it allowed me to avoid that last hour of small talk with the extroverts that always happens in a physical work environment. This of course also got me in the habit of eating lunch at 11 am instead of noon… which has its own benefits of being able to get in and out of restaurants before the massive rush happens. Similarly driving into the office at 7 am and leaving at 4 pm… allowed me to skip the worst of the traffic, so shifting your time frame just outside of the norm had massive benefits.
I am not sure which came first… my poor sleeping habits catching up with me due to age… or the fact that I stopped actively raiding removing the excuse for staying up so late. Whichever the case I eventually got used to keeping more reasonable sleeping hours. Now I tend to go to bed around 9:30-10:30 each night… and am usually soundly asleep by 11. Which then causes me to wake up somewhere between 4 and 5… with me not actually rolling out of bed until 5:30 most days. Long ago I became the “first shower” and on the weekends I can no longer manage to sleep in any later than 6 am… with that last hour generally being me fitfully trying to get back to sleep and failing.
I am still not happy about my lot in life… and I still do not really feel like a morning person. I just feel like a series of coincidences occurred to shift me into the position that I find myself. There are people who welcome in the morning with great joy and gusto… and they make me sick. Some thirty plus years later… I am still not a fan of the Daystar… and I wish it would quit being so damned incandescent. Given my druthers I would still be a Night Owl… but sometimes shit happens and you just have to deal with the consequences of your actions. Maybe someday… when I have left the working world behind… if that ever actually happens… I can be an old grumpy fucker that wakes up at 5pm and curses the sun. We can all dream I guess.
So yeah… I guess I am a morning person. It happens to be the best of us. Getting old and conditioned to doing a thing sucks.
The post Accidental Morning Person appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I have an affliction… and it is Path of Exile league start fever. This is how you know I am a mess and fully bought into whatever nonsense Grinding Gear Games is selling, because right before the launch of a new league I get into this pattern where nothing quite works. I’ve never been one to test builds out ahead of a league start… but lord I am pretty close to this level of madness. I am still spending quite a bit of time poking around in Dune, and had a few close calls yesterday crossing the desert between the first area and the second area. I went back south to pick up the remaining intel that I missed, and when I was about to make the run across the gap a worm popped right in front of me forcing me to turn back around immediately. Then after that cleared I made another run at it, and then had a worm pop shortly after I got to the other side.
There is just enough friction that I find I have ground to a halt. The resources that I need… I cannot get, because I am once again deadlocked by the main story quest. However I have apparently not explored enough of the second area to even be able to see where I need to go. Traversal in the second area is just frustrating enough… that I find myself logging in, mining some easy resources… and then logging right back out. Essentially in the second area the biggest problem that I am having, is the increased presence of the Sardaukar. They made my life miserable when I first entered the zone at night, and I wound up getting chain frozen by their stun beams and burning through all of my bandages. This has scarred me a bit and has made me super hesitant to tangle with them again.
There is also just more ground to cover, and it is way more open… meaning that not only do you have to dodge worms, but also Sarduakar at night, and quicksand and drumsand the rest of the game. What I feel like I need is a Stilltent, which exists in the game, but is apparently not unlocked until much further down the tech tree path. Sandstorms are still terrifying and they seem to be of much higher magnitude than they were in the starter area. I am back to questioning if I am enjoying myself enough to deal with the frustrations to claw out of the hole that I am currently in. Tam has a base to the north and in theory I could make a run for it and then attempt to survey more of the area which will hopefully uncover where my next story quest is at. However when I have the time to play… lately I have just been playing more Guild Wars 2.
Side note… my Bi Pride wings have brought me way more joy than I thought they would. I ended up buying a proper game license for my second account during the recent massive sale, in part just so I could claim a set of the wings. I am not necessarily deeply engaged in Guild Wars 2 at the moment, but I am logging in every night just to make sure I am keeping my daily quests farmed down. I’ve bought the Legendary Weapon Kit, all of the Mystic Clovers, all of the Mystic Coins, and am now buying all of the cheap gold sacks and once I have finished with that I will probably pick up the last few items of cosmetic gear from the set that started last season. I’ve knocked out most of the weekly quests and hopefully Thursday we can do some of the Fractals and knock those out as well.
In a move that completely shocked me… I played some Path of Exile II last night. I started up a Crossbow Warrior with the intent of going down the path of trying the Warbringer Armor Explosion build. There was a build showcase three months ago circling around using the Warbringer armor break tech to cause screen wide explosions with a crossbow. It was one of those things that I kicked around the notion of starting, but never actually did. Since I appear to be in a Path of Exile mindset right now, rather than wasting my mojo in the real game… I figured I would pop into the sequel because playing any amount of that… is going to make playing POE1 feel amazing. All in all the leveling has been pretty smooth and I knocked out the first act last night. I would like to push this far enough to get to the point where the tech comes online and I can see how well it works.
However I am very much in this mindset of everything I am doing being very shallow and temporary. Goratha posted a build guide behind the Rolling Magma Mines concept which is worth checking out if you are interested in such nonsense. Right now at this moment I plan on doing a slams start and moving into Righteous Fire Chieftain when I can bring that online early in Act 2. I know that is the boring option… but also it is the predictable option and I know how to get it up and running and farming currency to do other things. There are a lot of builds that interest me, and I cleared out a bunch of available character slots last night so that I can create some of these fringe builds that interest me. I would rather do that from a stable place once I have unlocked my atlas and generated some currency, rather than trying to figure something out… getting frustrated… and then rolling a RF character later.
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Good Morning Friends. The Settlers of Kalguur league is finally over… and I have never been so happy to see a league go. Don’t get me wrong… I loved the Settlers league, but also did not expect it to last over 300 days. It also had some really hype league events like the Phrecia league, which honestly should have been its own thing. During this one league I competed in two different Pohx leagues, a Sir Gog league, and the Phrecia league… so when I just attempted to wrangle my stash it was pure madness. I did the traditional thing of just shoving all of those remove-only tabs into a tab labelled “Settlers” but even that felt insufficient given that there were four different event leagues that got lumped into that same banner. I’ve been out of Path of Exile just long enough… to now be feening to get back into it and tackle a brand new league when it launches on Friday.
The new league looks amazing, and while it is very much focused on additional pinnacle content… there is more than enough other things going on that someone like myself who is traditionally not bossing motivated can enjoy. I will miss Atlas Memories a bit, but honestly… unless I needed a specific resource I never ran them. My favorite one was the one that made Alva spawn adds in the map instead of forcing you to dip into her incursions. I’ve always wished that was an Atlas keystone, that then just caused Alva to drop random temples. Traditionally I skip that mechanic entirely in most leagues because I hate the time pressure aspect of having to dip into the temples. What we are getting instead looks even more interesting and hopefully the new gear that comes with it will be worth the effort. Let’s not get it twisted however… I am more than likely going to be running Delve like normal, and the fact that we no longer need Betrayal to get crafts means I can start with a comfortable crafting Niko and Harvest Atlas.
There has been enough of a shake up in the meta that I am interested in looking at some other builds. I am doubtful I will actually league start anything but my beloved Righteous Fire… but I do feel like this is probably going to be a league where I have a bunch of alternate builds. The first one that seems interesting is Explosive Trap Trickster. During the first Pohx League I started an Ice Trap of Hollowness Trickster and had a heck of a lot of fun with it. In truth it was a damned good build and while the Trickster ate some minor nerfs it should be just fine. It did however make me interested in exploring some of the other Traps on Trickster concepts and Explosive Trap is already fun on its own. The original Ice Trap Trickster build was from Aero and if you are interested in it I suggest checking out his video. This is where I ended up with my POB on that build if you are curious.
Wintertide Brand got some buffs with the patch notes, and it has once again made me consider playing something around that skill. I love the Brand gameplay and Wintertide is probably my favorite of all of the available options. Storm Brand of Indecision is pretty fun, but there is nothing more comfortable than the chill and freeze lifestyle. This morning I saw the above build concept float across my feed on bluesky, and it seems like a reasonable option for a Wintertide start. The concept here is to use the new major buffs to golems and Elementalist node to pick up some survival and damage output for cold dot. I am not really sure if this is the sort of thing that I would want to league start, but I can absolutely see myself trying to make something around Wintertide brand work during this league as an alt build.
Champion got some massive buffs and I have been trying to sort out what I would want to play with it. There are a few options floating about, but this one from Woolie is basically just a true Cyclone build… not a cast on channeling Cyclone. I’ve never actually played Cyclone in any form, and I have always loved spin to win builds in other games… specifically Whirlwind in Diablo III and Warpath in Last Epoch. On some level I feel like I might owe it to myself to go down this rabbit hole and see what it feels like. Champion is already an ascendancy that I have built many different characters on over the years and they switched it away from generic damage to focused more on banners and melee hit damage… so with Lightning Strike eating a massive nerf you have to figure out a better vehicle for that. This is probably the closest thing to getting me to start something other than Righteous Fire. The only thing keeping me from doing it… is this is not a resolute technique build and I hate fucking around with accuracy bullshit.
Another thing that I am really interested in is some of the reworks for Saboteur. Essentially they can now get an ascendancy node that is effectively a weakened version of the Nimis Ring. Shrapnel Specialist causes projectiles to have a 50% chance to return to you, and projectiles to be fired in random directions. So essentially you need a mine or a trap that throws out projectiles… but that you would not care about them firing in unpredictable directions. From the Trap side of things I am thinking Lightning Trap might work well. From the mine side I am thinking either Rolling Magma converted to a mine as seen above or potentially Pyroclast Mine of Sabotage. This is a little too fringe for me to ever consider starting it, because quite honestly… I want to be able to look at POE.Ninja and see how well this is working and what sort of concoctions folks end up doing with it. It is still an interesting concept that I can’t seem to dislodge from my brain. The biggest problem that I have is that I have never really liked the Mines play style.
Being perfectly honest with myself… I am 99.9% likely to just start Righteous Fire again because it is comfortable and reliable. I’ve done it in trade and in an SSF environment and can pretty much get up and running without any issues and be capable of doing around 200 depth in Delve quickly. The main thing that I will be doing differently is that I hate muling a witch to get Rolling Magma as Pohx suggests, and am just going to do slams until I can turn on Righteous Fire in Act 2. During the SirGog Gauntlet league I went with a strength stacking slam character and my early tree was almost indistinguishable from the general RF tree up until the point you can take it. It felt way more comfortable to slam and shield charge my way around the zones than trying to get perfect bounces from rolling magma and fire wall. So instead I will do Ground Slam to Sunder and then use Crushing Fist with retaliation procs for single target damage. I will have to be on the look out for the correct colors on bases for the swap to Righteous Fire in early Act 2, but that should not really be much of an issue. My first pick ups will be an Cloak of Flame and Immortal Flesh and then hopefully I get some good fire resistance drops to see me cruising into maps and delve depths.
I am soooo ready to be back in Path of Exile and excited for a new league. I’ve missed this and I am pretty amped if Grinding Gear Games can really hit the target schedule that they have planned. Essentially every four months a Path of Exile league and the between months… will be a new Path of Exile II league. Hopefully given enough time POE2 will turn into something that I actually enjoy. Right now it just isn’t there for me, but given enough time cooking there might be an enjoyable game there. I think the challenge for me is that I am a mapper and delver… and just do not care about boss fights. POE2 is a game for people who care about boss fights. I like playing near immortal characters that can steam roll content and collect the shiny loot. I will always optimize the difficulty out of whatever games I play… and I am hoping that at some point there is a path for me in that game. For now though… I am looking forward to getting back into Path of Exile and grinding.
I have a whole slew of audiobooks lined up to listen to while I grind. Are you going to be checking out Path of Exile 3.26? If so what are you looking towards playing? Drop me a line below. Kodra if you are reading this… I really think you need to go down the projectile mines path with Saboteur so I can see how that works.
The post 3.26 Build Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This past Thursday dropped the head start for Dune Awakening, a Survival MMO set in the Dune Universe. Essentially this falls along the lines of something like Valheim but set in the Dune Universe, with really high quality environment graphics and an interesting twist to the story. This is a universe where Paul Atreides was never born and Duke Leto Atreides was never successfully assassinated leading to the downfall of that house. The Fremen were wiped out by the Sardaukar in a mass genocide… and the planet of Arakkis is actively in play with the Harkonnens, Atreides, and other minor houses of the Landsraad vying for control. You can choose to join forces with either Great House, or carve out your own path in between them pitting each against the other. At least that is the pitch for the game… and I can neither verify nor disprove any of it… because I am not terribly far in the overall progression of the game. At this very moment I am level 24 and barely progressed in the main story… because I am prone to fits of being a murder hobo and ignoring quest chains.
I saw some early advice that greatly tweaked my initial plans with the game. Namely that it was very easy to specialize in Trooper because there is an NPC trainer at the first town… but much harder to subclass in other things. I had read that Mentat was a really solid early start because you got access to the very powerful turret ability, and I leaned on this heavily during the early game. Combat is rather challenging at least until you get some decent weapons and gear under your belt, and a lot of my early experiences were me sneaking into a camp… deploying my turret which would fire off 3-4 shots before exploding but was highly capable of dispatching the few scavengers that were in each camp. From there I would mop up whatever was left off… drain all of the corpses of their precious precious moisture and then loot whatever I could and rush back to base to dump it into storage.
You can build up to two bases at a time, and very early you will probably end up creating a box like I did that only served as enough of a base to get you in out of the weather and protect you from the real dangers of Arakkis… the Sun and the Sandstorms. The game does something really interesting in that when you have to abandon a base… it still exists in the world and any other player can claim it by plunking down one of the control beacons. Additionally all of the stuff that you had in your base sticks around in the same way that you left it, and you can trek back to loot it later… but relinquishing control of a base essentially opens up all of that stuff for free for all looting. This has to be really interesting on a public server because I fully expect the entire zone to be littered with little hidey holes created by players… full of random smatterings of loot.
That is the first part of why this experience has been so enjoyable. I am not playing on a public server. Funcom in their infinite wisdom opened the game up so that third party server providers could sell private servers that players could rent. Tam opted to rent a server for the AggroChat crew to play on, which allowed us to play from Thursday all the way through the weekend without a single connection issue. I heard in passing that there were some significant lag and connection problems playing on the public servers, but for us… everything was calm and peachy and allowed for an interesting leveling experience as we could pool resources and share bases. Right now there are just two of us playing on the server, but I believe there will be another batch joining us when the game officially launches for everyone that did not pay the early access tax on Tuesday. You can also see that I tried to lean into the whole Mentat thing with my character appearance.
There are essentially three vectors of progression in the game that I have seen thusfar. The first being your character level and spending skill points in the trees that are available to you. Essentially a build is a combination of points spent, three active abilities, and three passive buffs called techniques. I do not know when my third active ability unlocks but right now I am running my ever faithful turret from Mentat, and the Shigawire Claw from Trooper that allows me to rapidly ascend cliff faces and honestly fly around the battlefield if I need to. When combined with a suspensor belt that allows me to float slightly or more often fall gracefully… I can mimic flight for short periods of time. I’ve unlocked the Trooper class tree and have spent points related to gunplay there and reduced weapon durability loss. Through a quest chain I also gained access to the Planetologist tree which has a Mechanic branch that makes it so that I use less fuel and my sandtrike takes less wear and tear.
A slightly more important progression system is the tech tree gained through researching. Roaming around the map and uncovering new areas, and scouting camps and bandit settlements rewards a currency known as Intel. You can then turn around and spend that Intel researching various patterns that you can then craft. This is going to be a significant hurdle in your progression because not only do you need to research the crafting machines, but you will need to research individual patterns. For example I am not currently using the most efficient mining laser, because I have prioritized combat resources above it… and at some point in the future when I am flush with Intel I might upgrade it for efficiency… or will become a higher priority when I actually need to harvest carbon. Early on it is pretty easy to research everything… but now that I am in the second region of the game I am having to pick and choose what I want to research. Were Tam and I actually doing this game efficiently… we probably should have tag teamed this and focused on different things so that we could have access to everything easily.
One thing that is a bit interesting is the inclusion of Unique patterns. These are essentially what good drops would be in any other game. You often get these from the chest at the end of more difficult content, and they grant you access to craft a single instance of the item. These are HIGHLY relevant items and are a power level that even in the second zone of the game I cannot quite hit by crafting normal items. I focused on crafting the Way of the Fallen Pistol and Kaleff’s Drinker Knife and they hard carried me through the first chunk of the game. The emperor’s wings gave me early access to the ability to float… well before I would be able to research that on my own, and the unique literjon is a massive upgrade given it comes with six pips worth of storage instead of the normal four. I got all of these items way earlier than the main story quest would have given them to me… because again… I have a tendency to go murder hobo and ignore the story. In truth I would absolutely do this again even though it led to me having to do certain chunks of content two or three times as a result.
The third and arguably most important vector of progression… is the main story quest. This is unfortunately where I have fallen down in this game, because generally speaking when you give me an open world experience… I don’t want to be chained to someone else’s timeline. If you look up at the research screenshot, there are a few items that have a lock icon on them. This is effectively locking progression behind some step in the story that you have not reached. I smarter person than I appear to be… would focus fire the story and churn through the progression steps to fully unlock the tech tree more quickly. Tam as a result is way further along in the progression than I am, because he has the proper mindset for this sort of game. Personally I feel like it would be a much BETTER game if you unlocked various tech trees when you first encounter the materials that are used for them. One of the things that I love about Path of Exile for example is that you can completely ignore the story and if you know what you are doing you can short cut all of the quest steps just by obtaining the final items required for them. I have an inventory full of items that I am certain will be used for quests later in the progression… but cannot really do anything with them for the moment because I went somewhere too early.
It admittedly took awhile before the game got into my blood. I think when I last spoke about it at the tail end of the week… I was neither a for or against it… but It has won me over. First off it is just really gorgeous and you have some truly haunting vistas like this guild heighliner floating impossibly silent above the world amidst all of these auroras at night. The true dangerous of the world of Dune are the sun which saps you of moisture, the sandstorms which shred bone… and will absolutely straight up kill you quickly if you are out in one when it happens, and the sandworms which will swallow you whole and cause you to lose everything that was on your body. Pretty much everything else is recoverable by running back to the sight of your death and picking up some of the random stuff that you dropped. I’ve not experienced it but apparently running over top of quicksand is another instant death with 100% loss of everything on you.
Technically I survived a sandstorm, but it involve me chain resurrecting myself… and then blowing through all of the bandages that I had crafted in order to just barely keep alive. I would not recommend it in the least. The game generally gives you one to two minutes of warning, and when you hear the automated voice… you better be booking it to some area that is showing up as “sheltered” or better. Otherwise you too will be doing the resurrection dance trying to stay alive until it blows over. Thankfully they seem to be fairly quickly moving… so you don’t have to stay sheltered for terribly long but so far… it is absolutely the thing I am the most terrified of. The sandworms themselves… seem to travel in patterns and if you just saw one pass then it is probably safe for you to venture forth towards that next rock outcropping. I think of Dune as an ocean game… with the sand being the water, and the rock outcroppings being the islands. Every step that I make… even now that I have transportation is about minimizing my time out in the open so I plot my moves carefully from island to island as I get to my final destination.
I spend a lot of time moving around at night, because at least then you are removing one of the risk vectors from the equation. I do a lot of short trips out to destinations and then ferry back my resources to my base. Essentially I am worried about carrying too much in the open for too long, and it also becomes very important for you to create a garage of sorts to store your vehicles in because if you leave them out during a sandstorm… they will essentially get disintegrated. I’ve not reached the point where I can begin to repair my gear which is extremely nice. However I also feel like I have fallen behind the tech tree as I moved into the second area. Tam has a base near mine that I absolutely used for a bit just because he had more machines available than I did. You can share out your base with your friends, and as a result it has been useful to sort of leap frog our way around the map. I just saw that Tam built a new base to the far north… so I might chose to build something in a different region just to give us more access to safe spots to hole up for awhile.
Is this game the best thing ever? Absolutely not. Am I enjoying myself? Very much so. It is a survival game, much like any other survival game with the added bonus of being Dune themed. If you are looking for the best possible version of this sort of game, I highly suggest checking out Enshrouded. For the moment I am having fun and I am interested to see where this adventure goes. I think I will essentially peter out when the next Path of Exile league drops at the end of the week, or if I high the Landsraad segment of the game…. because we are not a big enough guild to matter there. I kind of hate that the Deep Desert is shared between all of the private servers, and will still be PVP enabled. I was hoping that by renting a server we were skirting that functionality and could just have our big chill player versus environment game-play. Thing is… the environment really is terrifying at times… that was enough for me without having to deal with other players in the mix.
If you were ever a huge Dune nerd then this game is probably something you would want to check out. If you are also a big survival game fan, and have reached a point where some of the other offerings in this genre are stale for you personally… then again it might be worth a shot. However I do not think that this is revolutionary enough to really be a massive hit on its own right. I am not interested in the PVP and Guild Combat aspect of the game, because I am just not wired in that manner. If you are, then it might be a thing you care about far more than I do. I think it is a mid to interesting game experience that comes flavored in a science fiction universe that I care about… and for me personally that is an enjoyable offering. I do not think this is going to be a game that most people are going to care about however. Right now it is a strong six out of ten for me.
Are you playing Dune? What are your thoughts? Over the weekend I saw Scopique made his post like this… but I purposefully skipped reading it until I had written my own thoughts this morning. Now I will be heading over there to hear his experience.
The post Dune Awakening Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
