Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.
It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.
That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.
Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.
Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.
I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.
Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.
Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.
The post New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I could do a blog post about my meager progression in Path of Exile, but I will be honest that gets boring over time. Instead I am going to talk about a few games that stumbled into my awareness over the last few days. First up YouTube actually served me something interesting in the form of a video about a new MMO called Spirit Vale that is from a one person development team. Essentially the game is free right now and exists in a sort of permanent open play test state. It is very Ragnarok Online inspired, which I only know by the appearance because when folks were playing Ragnarok and Runescape… I was playing Everquest because I was gainfully employed and could afford the subscription fees. There is an entire era of MMORPGs that I have no real experience with, but the video I linked above interested me enough to give it a shot.
I’ve not done much in the game yet, but essentially you roam into the low level zone and play murder hobo for awhile until gear and upgrades drop, and then take that gear and the levels you gained… to the next zone and repeat ad infinitum until you get bored. I like killing things, and while I don’t have much in the way of abilities yet there is something deeply satisfying about the sounds of combat in this game. I am not sure how much I am going to be playing it, but it might be worth a look, especially if you were ever a Ragnarok kid. Definitely plays on the cute side of MMORPGs, and there are little quest NPCs in zone who will craft gear for you if you gather enough items from killing baddies. That is how I got the charming bear hat. Supposedly the content stays somewhat evergreen because there are items that drop from even low level NPCs that can be used as upgrade components in later gear. If curious you can pop over to the Steam page and join the play test now.
Next up we got some new gameplay footage from Hytale, which is a game I was deeply interested in when it was first announced… but then promptly forgot about its existence. Originally this was a Minecraft-alike that was started by the folks behind the popular Hypixel Skyblock Minecraft Server. It then got picked up by Riot Games, and eventually cancelled by Riot Games, and most recently was sold back to the original developers who are attempting to pick up the pieces and keep it moving forward. Essentially the promise of the game is Minecraft but with good combat, and the gameplay demo seems to show that it is making good on that concept. Will this ever actually release? Who knows! However I am still fairly interested in seeing the development progress. I have a friend on Mastodon who is also making a Minecraft-alike that I am watching closely but I am not sure if even they have any idea what the core gameplay loop of that is going to be. Minecraft as a concept is still something fairly compelling for me, so I will probably always like breaking blocks.
Yesterday we got a bit of a mic drop from Arena.net as they announced that Guild Wars Reforged is a thing… and that it is coming really freaking soon. Reportedly it is releasing on December 3rd, and everyone who already owns copies of the original Guild Wars games… are going to get copies of it for free. There is not a lot of information available yet on the game, but essentially it seems like they are targeting a Steam release that is going to be SteamDeck compatible and will bundle all of the existing Guild Wars Trilogy content into a single package but with updated graphics and graphical engines. It also reports to have full controller support, which will be interesting… and might honestly become the best way to play this game. There are a lot of articles on this game but most of them are largely regurgitating the original press release.
My favorite Guild Wars 2 creator/streamer Laranity is hosting a Developer Q&A today at 11 am PST, after which I am hoping we have a better idea of what is coming. Weirdly the original release did not mention anything about Eye of the North and I am really hoping that was not an intended exclusion. I am legitimately pumped about this because I want to experience all of Guild Wars 1… but the engine is pretty damned clunky. I doubt they will give me the ability to jump… but one can hope. I would love for the game to have the option of a more standardized MMORPG control scheme rather than click to move and click to attack. If they support Direct Input… there is the possibility of someone creating an interpretation layer that will support a friendlier keyboard control scheme. I will definitely be watching today to see this discussion, but look forward to the various articles that will likely summarize the details.
That is all I really have to talk about this morning. I’ve also heard that there is a resurgence of folks playing Rift again, but I need to do a bit more research on that before I feel comfortable talking about it. What games are on your radar in the MMORPG space? Drop me a line below.
The post Games to Watch: Spirit Vale, Hytale, Guild Wars Reforged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I took the day off because I have several doctors appointments stacked up. A few weeks ago I dealt with a medical issue brought on by a change in medication, and that has triggered a bunch of referrals to specialists. The positive is all of the tests have turned up nothing special, and everything being normal… the negative is we still have no clear indication as to what caused me to react to the medication swap so drastically. I don’t want to go into too much detail but essentially I lost 22 lbs in 3 days… on something that was not designed to make you lose weight like that. Essentially threw my body into a state of shock and we are fishing for the reason behind it. We will see how things shake out over the next month or so of going to specialists. Here is hoping I don’t have something tragically wrong with me that can’t be fixed.
So here is where I share some of my shame with you. Over the pandemic the Garage became a dumping ground for everything from boxes that I had yet to break down and take to recycling, to dead electronics, to all of my wife’ stuff from her classroom. I don’t have a proper before and after, because things were far worse than the picture on the left when I started this mission over the last two months… but essentially I have been working on the garage and getting it into a workable state. Essentially when my wife switched schools during the pandemic, she dumped everything from her previous classroom in a pile of boxes on the left side of the garage. When I had to hurriedly move her out of her out of the classroom when she passed away, those boxes got crammed into the right side of the garage. So since September I have been plugging away at improving things… effectively moving everything to the south side and then putting up shelving on the north side, and then doing the opposite. I have a ton of boxes that will need to be gone through and dealt with, but at least most of it is now up on shelving units, and the work table that has not been clear in over a decade is now almost completely clear… allowing me to move forward with the purchase of a 3D Printer that I am going to set up out here. I still need to do a bunch out here, but I was pushing to get to clear enough for me to be able to move all of the furniture in from the backyard before the truly cold weather hit.
In other news I recorded one of my dumb little gameplay videos of my Icetrap build, and have since pushed it up another level. Right now this has become my mapper and I play it while gathering up the sulphite to go back into delve and grind out levels on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. For the moment I am running a bunch of scarabs that just add additional monsters to the map, while also running legion and expedition with the node that gives me a single large explosion. It has been years since I have run either of those mechanics so I am having fun. It also makes for some pretty chill experience loaded mapping. For the moment, the next few points I spend on the tree are going to be adding a couple more power charges to see how things scale from there. If by some miracle I can ever stack all 18 traps on the same target and have them overlap… POB claims it will deal 16 million dps. I do not however believe that is even in the realm of possibility.
I am now sitting at 20 of 40 challenges and have my first tiny totem pole joining the role of totem poles in my hideout. I’ve knocked out most of the simple items and what is left requires quite a bit of grinding. I need to open two more of the currency wombgifts and then I will knock out the achievement for those. After that I need to focus on getting things like the cross contamination achievements, and quite honestly… just grinding a bunch of content to finish out the gear grinding goals objective. My goal is to match the same size totem pole that I have had the last few leagues which I think is 34 of 40. So I have a long ways to go before I accomplish that.
I just dinged 98 on the RF Chieftain and now I plan on knocking out a few more difficult things that I had been putting off, because I did not want to risk backsliding on experience gain. So i will be knocking out Sirius for another map slot, and potentially doing some stuff like Uber Atziri which should be reasonable with the current state of my build. I might even try some of the other proper ubers to see how well I can tackle them. I might do some more T17s and a few T16.5s since it will be awhile before I really care about how far progressed in experience I am again. 98 is really where the experience curve grinds to a halt, and those last two levels are super painful. However I expect to push to 100 again, because it knocks off a component in the last achievement.
Anyways! I need to gather trash and get it out to the curb and then start prepping to go to a doctor appointment. I hope yall are having a great week, and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.
The post Pile of Shame appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! When last I talked about my second build of the league, I was nearing the end of the campaign and it was still dominating. I had quite possibly the easiest time transitioning into maps that I have ever had, and after running a yellow map to test things out, I jumped straight into T16s. While I have taken a few deaths, largely because I did not have an anti-bleeding flask rolled yet at that point… I can pretty much rip through maps without any issue. I am now level 91 and the build is pretty closed to finished. Right now I am mostly just picking up those window dressing nodes to improve the damage as I go into power charge stacking and beef up my crit a bit more. The build is functional in its current state and will just continue to get better as I am able to spend more points.
If you are playing along at home, you can check out the POB here but I am not entirely certain how genuine its damage number is. I can reliably have up 18 traps at once, and if they ALL overlapped on a single target that would be around 8 million damage. And while that can happen due to the massive amount of area that the build has… it is also not super likely to happen and I am also never going to be standing perfectly still. Defensively I have 64% evasion rating which scales up to 74% when I have my flasks active, 100% spell suppression and in theory since I am hitting that naturally I should reclaim the point that is giving me lucky suppression. I am running Purity of Elements just so that I did not have to fuck with trying to fix elemental ailments and am not doing anything to increase base resistance over 75%. I have cast on damage taken immortal coil, stone stance, wicked ward, and the elementalist aegis all playing a part in keeping me alive and healthy when I do finally take damage. Given how fast I am moving through maps this feels really comfortable, and completely dominates the hive fortress encounters in the new breach league.
I am doing a few screwball things with jewels and pathing. Namely I am using an Unnatural Instinct to pick up a ton of nodes in the top part of the tree that are all mostly useful for what I am doing. I could not afford a version of the jewel that had corrupted blood immunity, but at some point I would love to replace it with one of those. I am also using Light of Meaning in an area of the tree where I am taking a bunch of nodes and it is collectively giving me +132% increased Cold Damage. Unfortunately I do not really have any great sources of MORE Cold Damage… so I am essentially having to rely pretty deeply on increased. I am however running with a level 28 Ice Trap gem which is giving me a ton of flat cold damage, which helps a bit. Occultist sadly is the only easy way to get More Cold, but then I would be losing all of the nice toys that the golems are giving me and my ability to ignite and shock with cold damage.
There are a lot of elements about this build that would be really cheap to assemble. Most of the gear I am wearing, could be crafted with the Tree Tree. However there is one element that is hard carrying how good it feels. I just happened into a dual explode Foulborn Berek’s Respite and have played with what happens to the build when I take it off. Essentially the Single Target damage is just fine, but the clear no longer feels anywhere near as good. This ring alone pushes the price point of the build up by a lot… this is essentially a headhunter level item as they are currently going for around 50 Divines. Even dropping down to a single explode version of this ring is noticeable, because I have an ignite only variant sitting in my bank and I could immediately tell the difference. I hate that this is what makes it feel so good while mapping, because this is going to push my variant of the build out of a lot of peoples price range. It works fine, and you can still clear pretty well… but it is like the difference between playing Righteous Fire with and without the Hinekora Chieftain node.
As far as gearing changes, I largely went with strong evasion and energy shield in every single slot. I swapped the Carcass Jack out for a well rolled rare chestpiece like I talked about in my last post. Sadly I need the chaos resistance from the Fugitive Boots or I would pick up eldritch implicits on that item as well. I did swap the Kongming out for a Jaws of Agony, because the whole blind thing did not really seem to be making that much difference. Jaws gives me quite a bit of trap damage, a decent chunk of life, and since it is a unique I was still able to keep my +2 minion gems corruption. The AOE gems does not do anything for this item, it just happened to be the cheapest +2 minions corrupt that I could buy. I need to spend some time rethinking this item slot however because I am sure there is something else that I could be using that would be more valuable. At the moment the 25% chance to gain a power charge on Jaws is making it so that I am pretty much always at max power charges.
I am extremely happy with this build right now. For the moment I am running a Freezing Tulgraft and a Flamecaller Xophgraft, the later mostly because it has +12 strength on it and I am needing more strength. I shield charge around the map quite a bit and Call of the Pyre itself has quite a lot of clear, which is pretty nice. I am totally open on these however and probably should optimize them a bit better. In theory I should probably swap over to a Hardening Uulgraft for Tender Embrace, which could come in handy when something does hit me. Unfortunately it cannot roll with strength on it, so I will need to figure out some other way of solving my strength problem. I basically need at least 100 Strength to run max level versions of Stone and Flame Golems… which I need for the buffs that they provide me, and also to keep them alive while mapping. Elementalist Golems self rez, but it is really noticeable when one of them dies and I would like to prevent that if at all possible.
At some point I am probably going to record some gameplay of the build so that yall can see it in action, but I would definitely all Freezy Boom 2.0 a rousing success. This is honestly good enough that I would be shocked if someone else does not realize its potential.
The post Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
