I’ve been playing an exceptional amount of Path of Exile since I last posted, but I am not going to talk about that this morning. Instead, I am going to talk about a few disconnected topics. As payment for passage, however, I am sharing a cute picture of Gracie conked out on a blanket laying on my desk. When we first got her she was hassled quite a bit by our eldest cat Mollie, and as a result, she would scream her head off any time she needed to go potty… and we would walk with her up to the litter box and guard her while she did her business. Thankfully we have moved past this and she comes and goes freely from the upstairs bathroom where the litterboxes are at. However, she has started screaming at us for different reasons.
For example Friday evening I was playing Path of Exile and my wife was exhausted, and as such went to bed early. Apparently, my wife and I going to bed at different times is a capital offense in Gracie-land. I had moved from upstairs on Teamspeak to downstairs chilling on my laptop, and it was not long before Gracie was running around screaming at me. At first, I thought she wanted attention and I tried to coax her into laying on my legs like all of our cats seem to enjoy doing. She was having none of this and continued to scream at me until I agreed to shut down my laptop and head to bed. Then when I got to bed… it wasn’t enough and she took to screaming at me until I finally laid down in the position she wanted me so that she could curl up in the hammock of blanket that forms between my legs.
Last night we had a repeat performance of this whole sequence, as my wife went to bed around 9 pm, and shortly thereafter Gracie was telling me how improper this all was. I held out until around 9:45 when I finally gave up and went to bed. At which point she seemed to be satisfied enough to let me choose my own position in the bed and not demand the leg hammock. However the moment I decided to put down my phone and actually go to sleep… she hopped over to my legs and started purring. This is essentially going to be our life now.
In other news, I watched She-Hulk last week and am looking forward to more episodes this week. We really are living in this golden age of comic book media. The thing is that not every show has to be the literal best thing ever because we get so many different snapshots of the same comic book world. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy She-Hulk because I absolutely did, but more that the pressure that I am placing on each individual show is a bit lowered because we are getting so many of them. The CGI work was greatly improved from those early trailers that had a deep uncanny valley problem. I think the big thing I am looking forward to in shows like She-Hulk is a fleshing out of the world, and that not everything has to be building towards some major crisis. That is in part why I am looking forward to a lot of the Star Wars series as well because they are putting more content in the world and expanding it.
In other other news… for some reason, I have decided to start watching Bleach again. Well, I know the reason… and it is because the seventeenth season is about to be released after a massive gap. Why I am starting over from the beginning because I could not remember exactly where I left off in the story. To the best of my knowledge, it was somewhere during season 13 of 16… but it had been well over a decade since I last watched bleach and as a result, the rewatch is probably warranted. For those who are curious, the entire series run is now on Hulu of all places. Like so many fighting anime… it had become extremely formulaic in the late seasons but starting from scratch makes me remember why I loved this show so much in the first place.
I think part of why the first three seasons worked so well, is that there was a lot of “emotional payload”. There was this epic adventure that involved a suicide mission to save a friend, and because of this, it felt like there was so much more riding on the line than just fighting baddies. After the third season, it takes a turn into the formula of meeting a new super powerful enemy… that requires learning a new fighting technique in order to defeat. I am wondering how this is going to feel watching it play out in fast forward rather than waiting a week between the encounters. So far the pacing has seemed more enjoyable chain watching the show as opposed to constantly waiting for the next episode to land… and then having it be half retracing what happened the week before. The new show lands in October… but I have no clue if I will be able to watch all 200+ episodes of the series in order to be ready for it.
The post A Loud Cat appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight is a bit of an odd show because it is in fact our 400th episode of AggroChat. If you had told me in April of 2015 that we would still be doing the show in 2022… I probably would have given you some side-eye. However here we are and for the most part, AggroChat has above all other things… been a time that the seven of us hang out every single week in the lead-up to the show and events that often spawn after the show. Last week after the show we kicked around the idea of doing something special, which ended up materializing into a Question and Answer session.
Huge thanks to our listeners who gave us some questions on the spur of the moment. The complete lack of planning… absolutely fits the overall theme of AggroChat as a show. We had a lot of fun answering the questions so who knows… maybe we will do another one of these at 500 or 600.
Topics Discussed
It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.
Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.
I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.
Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.
Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.
Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.
If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.
If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.
The post Lake of Kalandra Day appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday we got a new Alpha patch for World of Warcraft Dragonflight and the single most exciting thing about it… is the line about all of the zones being open for testing. Up until this point, we have been focused on a single zone at a time per week, and I am hoping that this is signaling a bit of stability in our ability to progress through the zones. It had been a few weeks since I had last stepped foot in the Waking Shores, but already a lot of elements are starting to feel a bit more polished. I noticed that a number of the formerly silent NPCs have suddenly gained vocal dialog. It is still exceedingly eerie for me personally given that I love in-game music and the zones currently have none. I might have to throw together a World of Warcraft music playlist to use for leveling and testing the content.
I did not make it terribly far into testing last night because I was suffering from a pretty debilitating bug. Essentially my Talents were not saving, and that meant if I needed to log out or got disconnected… my hotbars were wiped back to the default mostly empty state and I had to reconfigure my talents. The positive is that I have become real freaking sure of my path through the tree… but the negative is that it felt like I spent most of my evening reconfiguring things. Ultimately I reported the issue, logged out, and then hoped that it would be fixed quickly. As of this morning, I have successfully reset my talent points, logged out, and logged back in with them still set. Progress! I mean this is the sort of thing that you have to take into account when alpha testing any product, but also there comes a time when you should just walk away for a bit.
I have really focused on playing the Warrior as there are a bunch of fun interactions happening. We had a pretty big shuffle of things on the talent tree between the last patch and this most recent one. If you want to check out the full list of changes… then here are the patch notes. I would simply copy/paste them but they are rather significant. Basically, I love the direction that the Protection Warrior is moving in and I just hope that it doesn’t shift too much before launch. Right now it feels good for questing and seems like it would feel great for dungeons… though I have yet to step foot into any of those. I need to get over my grouping mental block and queue up for some of the new dungeons and see how that feels. I also need to work on my keybinds a bit in order to work rend in maybe as a shift modifier to thunderclap since I mostly only care about rend if I am going to spread it. If you want to look at everything I am currently choosing then here is a link to the WoWHead Talent builder for Alpha.
Mostly it just feels really good to run around as a prot warrior and I can shift into “world tank” mode where I charge packs and tank stuff for other people. The real winner though is Titanic Throw, which is a direct replacement for Heroic Throw. The two class-defining features of a Paladin for me personally are the Captain America shield throw and the Steed Charge. Titanic Throw is essentially a shield throw for warriors, with the difference being instead of bouncing between targets… you just sort of yeet up to five throwing axes at different targets within range of each other. This feels so damned good to use in practice and while the animation currently looks a little goofy… I find I am using it way more often to pull my next pack because with an improved heroic throw I can use it to apply deep wounds to my targets. This is going to be amazing in dungeons because it creates an initial threat lead on ranged targets.
I am in this weird position that I have not been in a very long time. Firstly I am loving the state of Warriors and pending nothing changes in the way that they feel… I will absolutely be “maining” one if I return for Dragonflight. Secondly, I find myself really excited about the prospects of this expansion. I am not sure if you can fully understand what a difference that is, because generally speaking, I have played WoW Expansions because that is just the thing I have always done. I think the last expansion that I was genuinely excited to play was Wrath of the Lich King. A lot of why that expansion felt so good to me is that there were some mechanical changes in the way that Warriors worked that I really enjoyed. Similarly, I am loving the class design so far for the Protection Warrior, and I guess I need to spend some time checking out Arms and Fury to see what I think of those as well. I’ve never really liked Arms, to be honest… but Fury has been my jam in the past and I should at least give it a test run.
I am very interested to see if I maintain this level of enjoyment and excitement as testing continues. I still have complaints honestly, but the core enjoyment of being a warrior is overriding them. Right now the world design feels extremely sparse, and I am hoping that over time this will be fleshed out. I am greatly missing all of the doodads and micro objectives in the zones like treasure chests and mini bosses. The few silver elites that do exist, don’t seem to drop anything meaningful at all. It is in part because of this that I am hoping we just have yet to get a pass populating these objects. Similarly, I’ve stumbled across a few nodes, but trade skills in general seem to largely be disabled. I tried to train mining last night and got a “to be determined” prompt on the dialog. So clearly there is a lot of work that needs to happen before this is ready for launch.
However like I said before I am already seeing signs of progress and zones I have leveled through before are starting to tighten up a bit. My caveat will still be that it seems like the game has a lot of work before it can meet a reported December release date. I worry for the team and the amount of crunch that will be required to meet that, and I hope that honestly, the date moves to next year. However like I have said before, I have a lot of hope for Dragonflight and what it will do for the future of World of Warcraft as a franchise.
The post Titanic Throw Is Amazing appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Belghast 
