Good Morning Folks. Today we mostly return to our regularly scheduled gaming content. I’ve been playing an awful lot of Path of Exile, mostly because I feel like I am maybe done with Path of Exile II for the moment. My jumpy Fire Bear build works amazingly well, and has completed most of the content in the game except for the most tryhard hardcore content. I have no real interest in doing any of that, just like I have never had much interest in doing it in Path of Exile. So instead I have shifted gears to working specifically on trying to get 34 of 40 Challenges in the Keepers of the Flame league. Since my Righteous Fire Chieftain is pretty much as blinged out as I can get him…. I have opted to start working a bit on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, which was not a thing… prior to me doing it I think. It has been freaking potent as far as characters go and I would honestly do this over and over if I had the option. Unfortunately a lot of the power of the build is coming from Foulborn Uniques, specifically the double explode Berek’s Respite. I hope this shit goes core.
I had been trying to finish the challenge that requires you to run 50000 quant worth of maps. However on a whim I decided to see just how well my Ice Trapper could do at the Bolstered Breachlords challenge. I had knocked out one of the three conditions, and I figured since I do so well at Hive Fortresses I might as well give it a shot. The thing about the Ice Trap build is that it essentially freezes the entire damned screen. You know what is really good defensively? Freezing the entire screen when you are facing a boss. Sure enough I was able to effectively keep the “It that was” bosses locked down for the entire fight and kept them from firing off any of the specific abilities that I was not supposed to get hit by. After my second hive brain, I managed to complete Bolstered Breachlords and with it my 34th challenge of the league. I am not sure if I am going to try and knock out any more challenges at this point.
The real thing that I am chasing is getting the same sized totem pole for my hideout. I have been collecting totem poles since the Sanctum league, and when Necropolis league happened I was able to get 34 of 40 challenges. After that it has sort of set a benchmark for me in my league journey, and now that is my ultimate goal is to be able to get the same size as I have previously gotten. I doubt I will ever be a 40 of 40 andy, at least not without paying for some of the ubers… which is not a thing that I want to do. Please note when I talk about paying for carries in Path of Exile, we are not talking about real world money. There is a thriving business of people who make bossing specific characters and then spend the entire league doing nothing but carries for Chaos or Divine Orbs. There are a lot of places where you can get access to this but the most common is The Forbiddden Trove discord. I specifically hate doing The Maven fight. I CAN do it… have done it more than once… but I hate the fucking “simon says” round and as a result I almost always pay for that carry to get my last voidstone.
In my travels of completing my last challenge of the league I happened to get a Hinekora’s Lock to drop, and these were at that time going for 147 Divine Orbs. I don’t really NEED the Divines right now since I am winding down the league, but I figured I would rather than the Divines in standard than the Lock. For reference at this point in the league a Lock effectively sells for Mageblood money. It is not like I need a Mageblood for anything however, because I do not want to shuffle the gear on either of my characters to try and make room for it. I still stand by my statement that a Mageblood is the least interest of the high priced items, because it mostly just allows you to cheat things on your build, and doesn’t really add anything interesting to the mix. Given the choice I will always build around a Headhunter instead, because it actually does something interesting mechanically. Though in truth I rarely play the type of builds that can benefit from either of those.
In other Path of News… we are getting a redo of The Legacy of Phrecia event and I am pretty pumped about it. Instead of using Standard as the baseline we are getting all of the bells and whistles that come with the 3.27 Keepers of the Flame league. Phrecia was one of my favorite events last year, and honestly it was hype enough that I put it on my games of the year list. Essentially every normal ascendancy is replaced by 19 new alternative ascendancies, and what is wild about this version is that we will also have the new bloodline ascendancies… which will create some truly wild combinations. I have no clue what I am going to be playing, because I am waiting on the patch notes to drop that explain some of the updates that rebalance the state of things in the last running of this event. Everyone is assuming this will mean some nerfs for Scavenger and Ancestral Commander because they dominated the last round. Scavenger for example made it trivial to get 90% of physical damage converted to elemental damage, because you could stack that cloak of flame node with an actual cloak of flame. Anyways this one starts on the 29th and I am fully expecting to be mainlining this event for awhile.
Last night I spent a bit of time in Destiny Rising, because due to all of the shit going on in my life we did not get to do our normal “Sibling Time” night on Tuesday. We knocked out a couple of rounds of Grandmasters, and unfortunately learned the lesson that you can in fact run with characters that have run out of stamina… but you do not get the Grandmaster rewards. We got enough to Calamity Ops to not be relegated, which we are calling good and then finished up with some Morgran’s Hunt. I will still need to do another 5 key run, but that should be easy enough before the reset. We have found two Strongholds for the week, but I know I have expended resources on three accounts… so that is probably all we are going to find. I know I need to spend some time running The Expanse this weekend so I can get some fruit and progress for the upcoming reset next week.
As far as the other news in my life… I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support that I have received. It is honestly overwhelming. I had a bit of a nervous breakdown yesterday at one point when out of the blue and without warning I was scheduled for two diagnostic tests that I do not remember the doctor mentioning. I of course immediately expected the worst… but then later called their office only to find out that no they did not have the biopsy results back and that these were just part of the standard procedures to look for anything else that might be going on. I still know next to nothing other than I have cancer, and at some point it has to be removed. I am just hoping that the snowmageddon we have barrelling down on us, is such that I can get out Monday for those diagnostic tests. I am trying desperately to hold my shit together in the meantime while my nerves eat away at me. I go between being largely fine and resigned to whatever is going to happen, to being a basket case.
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