Good Morning, Folks. I am on day two of the evil lemon, which is hooked up and feeding me poison over the course of 46 hours. I had been warned that the negative cold reactions from the Oxaliplatin escalates over time, and so far that is absolutely a thing. Essentially, any time I touch anything metal… or something that is even coated with rubber over top of metal… I get this tingle sensation in a bad way. I am hoping that it phases out around Thursday like it did last time, because so far it is not fun at all. I’ve cranked up the temp in the house, and it does not seem to be helping at all. Last round of chemo I struggled with sorting out my blood pressure, and that seems to be stable this go round, so I am hoping I will have an easier go for this first week. We had some pretty awful tornadic storms last night, so I really did not sleep terribly well. I might end up taking off the afternoon and trying to catch up on sleep. I am at least getting a bit more used to sleeping with this dumb bag hooked up to me, because from midnight on, I think I got pretty solid sleep until 5:30 or so.
I figured I would share another picture that I took the other day, prior to starting chemo. This is “Splotchie”, and he has been hanging out lately. The positive is that, for being a grizzled tomcat, he seems to get along well enough with Greybie and does not abuse him. I am not sure if I have ever shared a picture of Splotchie on the blog, but he is not friendly, unfortunately. He tolerates me being around, but will not let me get anywhere near him. I love his markings, though, they always remind me of a jaguar. I keep thinking that at some point, he will be willing to let me pet him. There is also another tomcat from a few doors down that is a tux, who will let me pet him, but I have not caught a photo of him. He belongs to this little kid down the street, but he sneaks out and comes to visit. So long as they all leave Greybie alone, I am fine with as many visitors as they want.
In gaming news I have been poking around in Last Epoch again. On the podcast this past weekend, Tam was sharing how broken Fire Aura was, and I noticed that Maxroll seemed to have a pretty solid build for it. I have taken a relatively crazy path through the campaign, with jumping on the first two dungeon skips and then leveling up through Majassa. In lieu of the final act, I started working on Monoliths but I might go back and finish the ancient timeline just to get the bonus points. All in all this build is nonsense, and you can legitimately run around similar to Righteous Fire and just let your Fire Aura burn through most of the trash mobs. The specific version that I am running converts fire to frost damage and freezes targets, which is a thing that I have always thought would be an interesting alternate version of Righteous Fire.
I just got high enough level to be able to equip a lot of the gear that I had been holding onto. There are several pieces that I need to convert to legendaries, and I need to sort out how best to deal with the rest of my resistances. Overcapping Cold Resistance is a thing that buffs Fire Aura, so I am trying to stack that on as many pieces as I can. One of the things that I am seeking the most is a 2lp or better version of the Mad Alchemist’s Laddle. Similarly, I would love to find a 3lp or better Transcriber’s Gavel. I am also always on the lookout for better versions of the Last Nomad rings. What will really help is getting an Omnis amulet because it comes with a ton of resistances. That is going to rely on farming a bunch of 200+ corruption Shade of Orybuss, and unfortunately, as many of these as I have killed… I have yet to see a single one drop. I could also farm Confluence of Oblivion, Woven Echoes, but I am not sure how many of those I currently have.
I came really close to downing Aberroth the other night, with a wipe at 4%. The problem with doing harder content is that I am just too disorganized right now. I think in the meantime, I am going to focus mostly on knocking out monoliths that I have not unlocked on my Spellblade. This will get me some more levels and potentially more gear, and then when I get up there in levels, I might make a shot at Aberroth on the spellblade. I did tweak my Forged Weapons build and dropped the forged armor pet, and picked up holy symbol instead for some additional damage output and survival. That seems to have been a generally positive shift, and was what led to getting Aberroth to 4%. In theory, I probably need to try and get a better two-handed weapon, since the forged weapons inherit those stats. Volcanus has been great, but mostly I just need to craft a better version that has some more base damage stats on it.
I am also poking at Path of Exile still. I am 87% through level 99, am effectively 2 pips and some change to go until level 100. I’m running my pretty chill Delve tree, and gathering up a couple of maps worth of Sulphite before diving down into the mines to burn through it. Delve is shockingly good experience gain, especially around the 250-300 depth realm. This also really does not require much out of me, and I can turn my brain off and just grind. At the very least, it requires way less forethought than Last Epoch does at the moment. That is one of the things I love about Path of Exile, is that it feels like it has way more reliable defenses than Last Epoch does. Sure, there can be some spikes in damage, but it feels like it happens way less often in POE. I think more than anything, I just really want to hit level 100, so that I can go back to some spicy mapping to knock out some of the other challenges.
I am doing okay, and other than the worse spikes in cold reaction… this round of chemo seems to mostly be going more smoothly. I think a lot of the troubles that I had last round were blood pressure related, and I have mostly sorted that out. I look forward to getting unhooked from the evil lemon tomorrow, and will hopefuly be able to get proper rest again.
The post The Evil Lemon appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
