Good Morning Folks. We have reached the point in the league where I am blowing all of my currency on alt characters.I think I have blown something like 130 divines on kitting out two characters. Divines are easy enough to get at this point just through selling Delve stuff that I could get them back if I really wanted it, but honestly… since I will never play standard I might as well blow them. At this point I know I will be shifting to Last Epoch next week and then once I have my fill of that, probably popping back into Path of Exile II to see what 0.3.0 has to offer. As a result I am in the mode of winding down the Mercenaries of Trarthus league. During the Gauntlet I had a lot of fun with Toxic Rain which caused me to run up a character in the league for that. Additionally I had a Brand character that I was originally planning on going Penance Brand of Dissipation with… but pivoted at the last minute to Storm Brand of Indecision. In both case I have gotten the characters to around level 90.
With Toxic Rain I went Pathfinder as it is really the only Ranger ascendancy that has anything that benefits the skill. Pending I remember to keep a life flask rolling it also has really great surviveability after you have thrown on enough levels and gotten enough raw hit points. There are a few ways to build this and I opted for the modern method of getting a 250% Widowhail and buying a stupidly expensive quiver. I legitimately do not remember how much this cost but I think it was in the neighborhood of 50 Divines and that was the cheapest version I could find with both chaos and normal dot multi, a decent life roll, and bow damage percentage increase on it. This gives me +77% dot multi, +87.5% chaos dot multi, +381.5 life, and +171.5% bow damage. Additionally I am running a Tides of Time which effectively is a budget mageblood that only works on the Pathfinder class which effectively allows me to generate enough flask charges that they have perm uptime with the used when full enchant.
You can check out the full setup here in the POB, but fair warning I don’t know shit about properly configuring POB. I based it loosely on some other POBs that I saw on POE.Ninja and combined a bunch of things that I liked into a new frankenbuild. Essentially I am running Mirage Archer setup in my chestpiece with normal Toxic Rain, and then a Ballista totem setup in my bow with Toxic Rain of Withering to give me withered stacks. Collectively this leads to a pretty comfy playstyle as I roam around the map spamming two buttons and occasionally hitting a health potion when I remember it. If something is taking two long to die I curse it with despair and move on with my life. This is very much a mapper setup and not in any fashion something you would want for bossing purposes. Truth be told, I have learned that I do not like bossing builds in the least… and at some point should probably find one that I enjoy playing just so I can knock out ubers in the future. They all feel bad to me because leveling them feels like ass.
The other character I have been playing is a brand build, which is another archetype that I really love. Basically Wintertide brand is probably my favorite of these, but it always feels too fiddly and requires you to push way the hell too many buttons to play it effectively. Storm Brand is something that I have attempted to play countless times in the past but they always feel too squishy, and I think I might have come up with the solution here. Essentially I am abusing the new golem node on the Elementalist Ascendancy combined with the Fire and Cold nodes and Bastion of Elements as an extra defensive layer. So essentially all of my lightning damage from Storm Brand of Indecision is Chilling, Igniting, and Shocking the enemy and I am running around with massive buffs from Stone, Ice, Lightning, and Flame Golems which have meatshield support giving them extra heft and taunt. I am running two Taming Rings for the lulz and resists, and an Inpulsa’s chest for the explode pops. Add the cheapest Archdemon crown I could find and a +2 crit knife and you have a pretty comfy and powerful feeling setup in maps. I am running Aegis Aurora but don’t really feel like I have enough armor to make it work well… nor enough energy shield so I might swap that up for something else at some point like maybe a Phoenix Shield to resolve the fact that I am not ignite immune.
What is making this feel extremely good is the fact that I am running Storm Brand with a Doryani Merc that is causing everything in my vicinity to have -130% Lighting Resistance. The Merc is also providing shocked ground and using the Kaom’s Binding trick to convert some phys damage to fire, and providing me some extra regen with Shaper’s Seed. Everything else was pretty much a yolo as I just threw on some minion uniques that seemed like they might be useful for all of the Holy Relics and Herald of Purity minions that are being generated. For reference I am running a Shout bot Striker with my Righteous Fire character to add more regen and give culling strike for bosses, and running an Ice Shot ranger type for my Toxic Rain character to help slow up the packs a bit and make them stand in the toxic rain a bit longer. In truth I am looking for better versions of all of these mercs but I have not found exactly what I want. For example I want a striker that provides me fortify stacks, enduring cry, and determination… which is a thing that CAN exist but I just have not seen it.
Mapping with the negative lightning res merc setup is pretty comfy because the one I am running is also spreading out consecrated ground pretty much everywhere. It isn’t the best at killing unique mobs but feels pretty solid. I am blocking just enough incoming damage to make the 3000 life and 1000 energy shield that I have feel decent. Swapping to the Phoenix Shield would give me a bit more life regen which might make things feel a bit better as well as like I said patching the hole I have in my elemental defenses where I would at least become immune to ignite when I hit low life. Of all of the things I am worried about… ignite stacks seem like they are the easiest to work around. All told I am having quite a bit of fun with both of these new characters, but playing alts always feels weird because I never put the same focus on them as I do with my righteous fire mains. One of these leagues I am going to play one of these and force myself to improve it over the course of the league. Next league I am contemplating going down the Golem Elementalist Explosive Arrow path that my friend Sloth did this league… pending it does not get extremely nerfed. EA is an archetype that I already like quite a bit and Golementalist is extremely fun to level.
As far as league progress goes, I am chipping away at some of the remaining challenges for the league. I am sitting at 33 of 40 and at a minimum I want to hit 34 before I wander away like a bored toddler. Strenuous Summons is something that I made a dent in last night, and in theory I am pretty close to Eldritch Expedition and just need to get lucky with Remembrance Repressed. I can do t17s and could in theory chip away at Endgame Enigmas as well. Powerful Pursuits is killing Ubers and if I got desperate I could just buy my way out of that problem with boss carries on TFT. Basically I think I can at least get one more without a ton of effort and that is probably the path that I am going to go down. I am running red altars because I would far rather run the Black Star/Searing Exarch combo for invitations than doing maven witnesses or having to fight Shrek from the eater of worlds invitations. I burned through ALL of my invitations yesterday evening, and that is already way more Shrek fights than I ever want to do going forward. I should see what buying bulk Black Star invites costs on TFT because those are without a doubt the easiest to run over and over.
Anyways… still having fun with my stupid Path of Exile nonsense. Brands are fun, Toxic Rain is fun, and Righteous Fire is fun.
The post Burning Divines appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I had grand plans for all of the things I would do this weekend, but largely spent the weekend being super lazy. One of the things my wife bought me at the beginning of the summer was a set of wind chimes, and it was one of those things that I never quite got around to taking care of. I bought a bracket for them and everything, but it just never seemed terribly important. While she can no longer enjoy them, I am hoping I do especially as things begin to cool down a bit. I had these grand ideas about all of the things I would do over the weekend, and accomplished very few of them because it was too freaking hot to be outside. There are a bunch of things that need to be done, and I struggled to bring myself to do any of them.
I had this idea that I was going to go out on a photo shoot somewhere, but again with the heat I just could not bring myself to go out and do it. I did however get everything all set with my camera and the new USB C charging battery works beautifully. I went out into the backyard and took a few photos which you will see throughout the rest of this post because I wanted to test both the battery and a sd card adapter that I had never used with it. My camera is over a decade old at this point but still seems to do a pretty admirable job capturing shots. It isn’t a full frame digital slr, but does a pretty good job and the only real annoyance I have with it is that I like using this hand grip, and I have to take it off in order to get to the battery compartment. I’ve got my backpack packed with everything I need to go out on adventures and I think I am going to start throwing it in my vehicle when I go anywhere just so it is available if the inspiration hits me.
I need to figure out what I am going to do with the library of books in my wife’s office. I really would like them to go to some measure of use, but I am not even certain where to start with that. I have toyed around with the idea of just getting a storage building so that I can put all of that stuff in it until I have a better idea of what I want to do with it all. Storage units are much cheaper than I realized they were, but that also seems like a hassle to move them somewhere else. I need to get out into the garage and organize and clean some stuff out there as well, but again… the heat is the problem. I am hoping once we get into September that things calm down a bit on that front. I know there is a bunch of stuff in the garage that I just need to have hauled off. There is a local group we have used before that if I can make a big pile, they will take it all at once. I have a bunch of boxes for larger electronics that I need to break down, but then there is the problem of what the heck to do with the Styrofoam inside of them. I could in theory save it for building wargaming terrain or something… but that also seems like a massive pain in the butt to find a place to store it.
What I really need to do is move everything from one side of the garage over to the other side of the garage so that I can put up shelving units properly. There is this giant cat toy thing that my father-in-law made which was lovely… but like 300% larger than it needed to be so that it took up MOST of our livingroom. It is just sitting there and has been sitting there for over two decades, and I think it is a candidate for the “haul pile”. We have a couple of rugs out there as well that I have no clue why we saved… other than it was just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with them at the moment we swapped. Basically I need to spend some time building a pile so that they can come haul it away and clear up more swap space for me to organize things. There are some cheap shelving units that you can get at Sams that seem pretty sturdy and my goal is to put those in pretty much every place where I can in the Garage just to get more stuff up off the ground and usable.
We have this giant workbench thing out in the garage that blocks access to the breaker box… which generally sucks because I have to climb up on the thing if I need to deal with them. However it would make a really great base for setting up both a FDM Printer and Resin Printer out in the garage. Even in the winter months, our garage stays fairly warm because our insulation between the laundry room and the garage is kind of shit, so everything directly up against the house rarely gets low enough to matter. After reading and watching so much stuff on the toxic chemicals that they give off… I am legitimately concerned about the cats when it comes to fume off-gassing for either process. This is especially true with resin, but seems to be also mostly true with FDM as well. There is plenty of room to set everything up out there pending I give it a good cleaning and de-clutter. I have a good concrete slab on the north side of our house that I could start piling up things for the eventual dump run.
Another thing that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later is the little tree/bush/whatever that is growing on the deck off our pool. I have not really spent a ton of time in the backyard this summer due to the extreme heat, and I am sure this is something that my wife was going to take care of eventually as she spent countless hours reading in the backyard. However it has grown up enough now that it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with I think. The vine that we have been fighting for two decades… is back with a vengeance this summer and I just do not care enough to deal with it right now. It seems to be grown all in throughout the boxwood that has long since outgrown the bounds of what a boxwood should be. Everything is just so much more difficult when there is only one person. All of the things that I need to do… are things that the two of us would have tag teamed until we got them finished. I miss my wife for all of the normal reasons but especially because I miss being part of a team.
Anyways…. I have rambled enough for a blog post, but I did share random photos with you for your time.
The post Wind-chimes and Heat appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back after a week off, and like always, when that happens, we come back to a large stack of topics. We start off talking about Hellclock and Grimshire, two great games that Grace has been playing quite a bit of. From there, we discuss Kodra’s adventures in GenCon as he talks about the various LARPs he played in and some exploration of the Starfinder 2 system. Bel talks about how he has come to understand eSports through Path of Exile and discusses a bit about The Gauntlet event that is wrapping up. Bel also talks about effectively trying to speed run several decades worth of advancements in wargaming as he juggles trying to figure out what paint range to invest in. We briefly discuss our non-spoiler thoughts about The Fantastic Four movie, and then a few updates on the books we have been reading.
One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.
I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.
One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.
That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.
The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.
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