Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We had a bunch of topics left over from last week that rolled over to this week. First, we talk a bit about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Shinobi Metroidvania. From there, we talk a bit about Summer Games Done Quick and some of the better runs. Tam talks about his plans to adapt the Starfinder 2 game system to create a Shadowrun Campaign. Ash shares his initial thoughts about Draw Steel, a new RPG coming down the pipe. We talk a bit about the upcoming Last Epoch Season 3, which drops on August 21s and some of the significant changes. We also talk a bit about Path of Exile II 0.3.0, which drops shortly after that on the 29th. Lastly, Tam shares some of his thoughts on actually playing quite a bit of Burrows and Badgers, a squad-based leveling miniatures game along the lines of Mordheim. Grace talks briefly about the new Dwarven Realms season that has started, and Bel shares his suggestions for the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and both Weapons and Barbarian by Zach Cregger.
Good Morning Folks. If you remember yesterday I talked about finally getting an Apothecary card drop. Now these go for roughly 25-30 Divines each because they are hot property for folks wanting to do late league gambles. The thing is I do not need a Mageblood this league, nor do I really think that Magebloods are actually that much fun. They fix builds but they don’t really do anything cool and after played with a handful of them through several leagues the magic of that item is broken for me. Headhunter however is the really fun belt and I will choose it over Mageblood all of the time because it actually does something. So after writing yesterdays blog post, I happened to look over and see that someone was advertising a Primeval Hideout on TFT, and I thought… I wonder if they will trade for this Apothecary card so I could take one rare drop that I don’t particularly care about right now for another thing that I have been desperately seeking for way too long.
Unfortunately it was a Chinese language user that did not speak English, so they invited me with me not knowing if they would actually accept the trade or kick me from the instance. I got to their hideout, popped the Apothecary in the trade window and they accepted without a moments thought. So here I was heading to the hideout, and weirdly unlike the one other time that I bought a hideout on TFT they did not take the time to unlock it. So thankfully I was sturdy enough to clear the mobs inside the hideout and there was another person who had also bought the hideout with me, but I had already cleared 90% of it before they got there. Just like the screenshot that I linked to yesterday, the hideout does in fact appear as a path going down off the side of one of the floating islands. I was always so damned scared that I would miss the hideout in one of my farming runs, but I am pretty sure this would have been impossible to miss.
So now I have my Primeval Hideout unlocked and at some point I want to swap from my Ghost-lit Graveyard Hideout over to this one, but that has to be a challenge for a day I feel like building a new hideout. The biggest problem that I have had when I tried to swap hideouts is that the locations of everything is so baked into my brain that I struggle if I end up moving anything to a different location. I really like the decor of this place, especially if I change up the lighting to make it a little darker. I also have the ability to dump a backup of my current hideout so I can always quickly revert back to it at a moments notice. The only negative is that I have a stash tab full of Primordial Blocks maps… that I might as well run as I flip my favorite map slot to something else and build up a stash of those. Right now I am targeting Toxic Sewer which is one of my favorite layouts because of how compact everything is.
In other related news I recorded one of my dumb little videos last night and it is hard to believe that I have made 37 of these… just for Path of Exile. Specifically I show off what doing a t16 looks like with mid-range investment I think maybe I have spent 50 div on the build… which to new players is a lot, but to folks who spend multiple mirrors on a build is an entry point. I think I have probably spent around 150 Divines on my Righteous Fire Chieftain over the course of this league for reference. Delve was good to me and allowed me to easily generate large quantities of currency to then blow on dumb ideas later. This is legitimately probably my second favorite build I have had in Path of Exile behind my menagerie of Righteous Fire characters. It is not sturdy enough to straight up face tank everything, but it is sturdy enough to feel good playing it with max res and max block and a reasonable amount of life/es regeneration. The thing that would make this feel better would be to try and work in Stone Stance or something like that and maybe a bit more max resist.
Anyways pending this build is still around it will be a contender for 3.27 league starter for me, given that I would like to see what this can be if I really make it my full focus for a league. I also want to see what happens if I just swap out Storm Brand of Indecision for Penance Brand of Dissipation for bossing. I will be doing some testing on that over the weekend but I need to acquire a 21/20 gem for Penance Brand first.
The post Buying Freedom appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This is Primordial Blocks, and I have lived here for every league that has had this map in the rotation. It is the source of the Primeval Ruins Hideout, and I want it bad. The problem with this is that it is extremely rare… and I have likely run over 1000 copies of this map spread between multiple leagues and I have NEVER seen it. The only knowledge I have of what the entrance to this hideout in the map looks like comes from this post from 2021 where they talk about farming it, and then link a screenshot of the hideout showing up as a ramp downwards. Ironically they talk about finding the Nocturnal Hideout being equally difficult to find, and I have found it through running the unique Twilight Temple map three times, which is something that I do exactly once per league and not farm over and over. I am not opposed to buying my way out of this problem… but they are selling right now on TFT when they do show up for 20-30 divines for a portal allowing you to claim it. I fear that this league will be yet another where I do not find it, but when I do… y’all are definitely going to know about it.
I can cross a different drop off my bucket list though, because I have finally acquired my first Apothecary as a drop in a map. This is the token thing that most people farm as it provides access to a Mageblood and is generally popular amongst people who like gambles where they buy a single card of this set and attempt to double or nothing their way to a full set through harvest crafting. I have run a truly stupid number of Crimson Temple and now Defiled Cathedral maps attempting to get one of these as my default farm map in the leagues where Primordial Blocks is not available. This time around I ran enough Defiled Cathedral to get a Nameless Seer so that I could scry the Apothecary drop chance onto Primordial Blocks. I would gamble this off but given that I do not really need a Mageblood this league, I am going to sit on it in case I end up getting more drops while I continue to farm this accursed zone.
The real MVP of the Mercenaries league however has been the Map Device Inventory. Probably the most tedious part of running a lot of maps is rolling them. For those unfamiliar this is the process of scouring and applying alchemy orbs until you get the map modifiers that you want to run, or in my case… re-rolling any mods that I do not feel comfortable running because it will in some way brick my build. For example the mods that disable regeneration or lower your maximum elemental resistances are instant re-rolls for me and always will be regardless of what build I am playing. What the map inventory tab does is allows me to load it up with a bunch of maps, ready to be run, so that I do not have to stop and either retrieve a map from a bank tab or hold them in my inventory limiting what I can pick up in a given map. This has been a game changer and has made the entire process of running maps so much more enjoyable.
I will admit at this point I am getting so freaking tired of Betrayal, but it continues to be some amazing experience gain. The only real annoying thing about it is needing to run the safehouses every so often. It is absolutely worth it because you are pretty much guaranteed to get at least a veiled chaos orb now, but it does break up the flow of mapping. They are selling for roughly 3 to a divine so it is worth the time running it given that they go super quickly. I wish there was a way in the passive tree to block trapped chests and crafting benches because really all I want are boxes to click on super quickly and I cannot be bothered to learn who does what when they are leading. I know that Awakened POE Trade has a cheat sheet button and I run that all of the time for price checking… but it just seems like a lot of effort when all I really want from this mechanic is the sweet sweet burst of experience when I click the buttons. It legitimately is one of my least favorite league mechanics but it is just too much experience to ignore when all I care about are levels.
What I really need now is some more memory tears. I am at 22 of 33 memory altars for the last challenge that I need to hit 34 or 40 for the league. This gives me the same size totem pole that I have gotten for the last two leagues and if I can get that I will be perfectly happy with where I left off for this league. I am not going to be tryhard enough to get 40 of 40, especially when this time next week I will be diving into the new Last Epoch season. It is at this point in the post when I realize… that I am mostly talking to myself. There are so few people that read my blog that are actually this deep into the madness that is Path of Exile to care about anything that I just said. I could talk about flying unicorns or whatever now, and it is unlikely anyone is actually going to get to this paragraph. Then again I would say 90% of the posts I write… are mostly just me journaling my own thoughts about something and provide zero tangible benefit to anyone who reads them. When I write about more mainstream topics that people care about, that is probably not the case but going deep into a niche game late in the league… is probably only for the diehards of which I am probably not enough of one to attract that audience.
Anyways! I got an Apothecary which I think is pretty cool. Tomorrow I might actually try writing a Blaugust post of some sort since I have not really interacted much with the topics.
The post Desperately Seeking Primeval appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. One of my coworkers really cares deeply about his teleconference background… and recently added these cool vapor-wave neon strip things which spurred in my brain… that I could do something cool with my lighting. I have a ceiling fan with three 60W light bulbs… and I got it in my head that I could give myself some cool bisexual lighting by buying a blue, pink, and purple led bulb. The pink was way the hell too overpowering so I ended up with only a blue bulb and a purple bulb and it works… giving me this cool two-tone lighting that is way the hell easier on my eyes than bright white light. However what I did not expect is that I accidentally created a black light, because everything in my office that fluoresces is now glowing like crazy. I feel like I need to lean into this and get some proper velvet black-light paintings up in here. The above photo does not do the effect justice… but you can definitely see that little Kenneth the robot’s arms and head are glowing.
I think at this point I am enjoying my Brand Elemenalist more than the Toxic Rain Pathfinder, because it has officially leap-frogged it in levels and I am pretty close to dinging 92. Everything always slows down at 95 and I am not sure if I have enough survival to really push much further than that but I fully expect to get there before long. The only problem with this build is that so much of my success with it… is entirely depended upon the negative lightning resistance setup I have on my mercenary. If I were playing an actually GOOD build… I can see how dumb this would be especially for bossing purposes. This combined with the Inpulsa chest are giving me some tasty screen wide pops at times that I was not expecting for a brand build. I am still sort of shopping for a better merc, but I really want the ability that causes consecrated ground to cover the screen and the “better” options I have found don’t have that or herald of purity. I wish POE.Ninja tracked Mercenaries so that I could flip through a bunch of different setups to see what people are doing with the Doryani setup.
So one of the battles that I have been having with this character and build is… what the hell to do with the shield. The build that I loosely patterned this one off of was using Aegis Aurora and it makes some amount of sense. It’s a good chunk of armor and decent energy shield, and also has the ability to recover 2% of energy shield on block. The problem with this however is that essentially this is only 96 Energy Shield per block… which is largely meaningless. For awhile I was running Emperor’s Vigilance which has even more armor and energy shield and would allow me to drop a node on my passive tree to keep Glancing Blows, but also has the double edged sword that any unblocked damage bypasses my energy shield. I played around with Rise of the Phoenix and it was fine… but did not have enough chance to block and dropped me down below the block cap. I even tried a solid 5% of life on block shield that has a pretty decent roll and it just did not feel as good as it does on my Righteous Fire characters… because it is only around 200 life recovered per block and the general line of defenses is nowhere near as strong. So I am stick with the Aegis for now, mostly because I am not sure what else to try.
I am ripping through Alch and Go t16 maps without any issue, and am mostly using this character to run Betrayal on Primordial Blocks still chasing that damned hideout. I have a whole new appreciation for Betrayal largely because I never realized exactly how bit of an experience boost it is over any other mechanic. I don’t even care about Safehouses, I am just clicking whatever option there is on every single person just to get the bump of experience. I get it that folks have said Betrayal is great early league, but I always assumed it was for the enchants and abandoned it entirely this league… but legitimately it is probably still worth doing to get a bump in levels quickly. I am sure those Veiled Chaos Orbs were more valuable at the start of the league than they are now as well. I’ve run so much Betrayal and at least a dozen safe houses at this point and have still not found a single invitation for Catrina. I do wish there was some better guidance as to what person does what in which position however, because I keep getting the damned crafting tables… and they are awful.
The other thing I am hunting while running maps is for the memory tears that unlock a sequence of maps. Right now it feels like I am pretty close to knocking out Eldritch Expeditions and will likely need two of these sequences to wrap it up. When I get one of these I pretty much just rip my way through it as RF so that I can knock it out quickly and then return back to chill Ach and Go t16s. I should probably be knocking out t17s as well but those are way less happy chill fun times, and I have not been in the mood for it. Yesterday was “a lot”, and I took the day off to deal with “death things” as I am starting to collectively refer to it as. I had to go back to the funeral home to pick up death certificates and then spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with various things that had been in a holding pattern waiting on them. I still need to make a trek Saturday morning over to deal with another thing related to this, because I was just too beat by the time I got back home yesterday to make another jaunt in the opposite direction.
I had made plans with a friend of mine, but had to beg off last night because I was just too out of it. Instead I sat downstairs on the sofa with cats snuggling tightly, and played some Path of Exile while listening to Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone. I did not expect to necessarily chain through these books but after the ending of Dead Country… I had to know what was coming next. While I loved the Craft Sequence… so far this Craft Wars Trilogy is way more tightly focused and I like it better overall. Tara Abernathy is the best character in the entire series of books, and we are spending way more time with her in this book than some of the other sequels from the previous series. The first sequence hopped around quite a bit between characters, and there were entire books that did not really involve her. This definitely feels like we are headed for some sort of an endgame and all of the best elements of the previous books are being revisited in this one tight narrative arc. Like I said if you have never read any of these books I HIGHLY suggest starting them and unfortunately I would also suggest reading the first six book series, because you will largely be clueless about the importance of some of the events in this trilogy.
I am still functional… deeply low on spoons… but strugglebusing my way through the world.
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