Good Morning Folks! Sunday was amazing and helped rejuvenate my batteries quite a bit. Last week was fucking awful… full stop. Saturday was also sort of awful because I woke up and went to go get donuts like I always do… and my truck would not start. I was able to get it jumped but after a bunch of run around trying to get the battery and alternator tested, I wound up dropping it off at the shop next to our neighborhood and walking home. Sunday though… was phenomenal. Because of the generally shit week that I had, I missed out on running the raid fights on Tuesday night, and because Saturday was awful too… it got postponed to Sunday. This means that I got to hang out with Ace, Ash, and Thalen and have a generally amazing time doing all four raid fights… all of which were one-shots… though some of them were a bit on the rough side, and then unlock two expert dungeons for Thalen afterward.
We need to do this thing that we did way more often, and maybe Sunday is a day that works for everyone. I was also able to complete all of the left side pieces of 710 normal raid gear, which means I am mostly after a few more pieces of jewelry. This is the first time since Heavensward that I have ever been current with my gear. That should tell you something about how good Dawntrail has been that it has managed to keep my interest and despite largely spending all of my time in Path of Exile, I am still returning at least once or twice a week to hang out with friends in Eorzea. I would love to do the Savage version of the raid fights, but I am not sure that is in the cards for me… since I am not sure I want to do them through Party Finder.
In other news, I watched the Borderlands Movie… in part to see if the wide panning of it by both fans and folks who know nothing about the series was warranted. It was. This is maybe the worst video game adaptation I have ever seen… and retroactively makes the Uwe Boll slop from the 2000s look better. Everything looks like Borderlands but feels way more like one of those high-budget live-action commercials that video games seem to love to film… and less like a cohesive movie experience. I feel like this was probably a film assembled in the editing room because there is a lot of voice-over exposition. In fact the movie opens with a solid ten to fifteen-minute plot vomit of extraneous details that don’t actually matter to the core story of “vault hunters want to find the vault”.
Worse than all of that is the fact that everyone save for Jack Black seems to be phoning in their performance. No one seems like they want to be in this film or care at all about their character or what is going on. Tiny Tina is fine, and originally I thought we were just seeing the traditional child actor thing at work… but also this same actress played a perfectly cromulent young Ahsoka Tano…. so I am just guessing it was a bad script and bad direction. Is it a movie that is worth raging about and making the lives of those who created it hell? Absolutely not… and it is never okay to do that. However, you should probably not go out of your way to see this. The abomination that was the Monster Hunter movie was better than this. It was kind of cool to see Kevin Hart in a role where he was not the constant bumbling fool that was the brunt of everyone’s jokes however. Maybe he should do that more often.
Over in Path of Exile land I beat my first T17, and have now unlocked my sixth map device socket. It turns out that T17s are in fact totally reasonable… if you just so happen to spend a bunch of chaos orbs on rerolling them until you land on non-toxic modifiers. Like I can’t say that they are actually fun. I’ve done two now successfully and I did not enjoy fighting either boss at the end of them. I could see maybe running the mapping portion for fun, and skipping the boss… but then again… maybe it is just better to sell them. I can easily get 70 Chaos for a single t17 map… and there is no way in hell I am going to get 70 Chaos worth of loot or enjoyment out of running them myself. I still think T17s are just a “not for me” mechanic because I am all about zooming around and blowing shit up, and for the moment they get in the way of me doing that. I am happy I was able to get my map device slot without buying a carry, but also I doubt I will be doing any more of these.
I spent a good chunk of my available Divines on an Oriath’s End flask. This will be the second league in a row that I have used this item and while it isn’t necessarily revolutionary it does make up for not running maven boots anymore. Basically, I am already all about exploding things with Hinekora, Death’s Fury and this just adds an additional layer of explosions when I charge into packs. Usually, if a map boss spawns in a room with a lot of adds I can charge in and one-shot the boss with all of the subsequent explosions that are triggered. It is a bit of an extravagant expense given I had to pay ten divine orbs for it… but it also feels good when it triggers an entire room full of explosions. Last league was really the first league I invested a ton of effort into my Righteous Fire build after whatever it took to clear t16s and I gotta say this flask was probably my favorite addition. For as lauded as Mageblood is, it is actually sort of a boring option.
There is a challenge that requires you to have cleared 400 Depth in Delve, and for some reason on Saturday afternoon, I decided I was going to do this thing. At that point, I was sitting around 150ish depth and I thought it would be a quick jaunt down to 400. I was wrong. I am currently at around 300ish depth and it has taken me several days and several loads worth of Sulphite to get there. Now that I have set forth on this path… I guess I am going to do it. I’ve never been to 400 depth before and I might go all the way down to 500 while I am doing this thing. Basically, I am in the mode of trying to wrap up some challenges so I can get my totem pole because ultimately that has become my major goal for each league. I doubt I will finish as many challenges as I did last league, but it will be good to at least get another doodad for my hideout.
Tomorrow my schedule is going to be fried. I am not even sure I will get a blog post out, or if I do… it will be tomorrow evening. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Mine started out like shit, but it is amazing how much hanging out with some friends can help to improve things. I’m hoping that we can make the whole Sunday raid day thing happen more often.
The post Friends Save the Weekend appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we are taking a break from the Dawntrail topic because Ammo was not available. As a result, we dive into a normal topic load starting with Grace talking about their experience playing Diablo IV Season 5. From there we dive into a mega topic of Kodra and his recent trip to GenCon. He talks about True Dungeon, Various Assorted LARPs, and some of the cool stuff from the convention floor. We also dive into a discussion about how a convention reforms its reputation as being the D&D convention into something more open and welcoming. From there we realize that the Age of Sigmar topic is going to get bumped again… but end up also having a bit of a pre-discussion. Finally, we wrap things up with the charming indie game Thank Goodness You’re Here.
Topics Discussed:
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I pushed through the rest of the campaign on my Widow Hail Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye. I feel like it is very important to preface this build with the statement, that for this experiment I was purposefully trying not to follow a meta guide. Those exist, in abundance for Deadeye characters in 3.25 and I purposefully decided to shun them. I know how to do that build and have done it before many times… though my personal preference in the past was to always build on a Champion so I could add on extreme layers of “tankyness”. This time I purposefully went with Deadeye because I wanted to help this build with as much damage output as I possibly could given that I was stepping outside of the current meta and trying something different.
The other constraint that I placed upon myself is that I have tried not to allow this to be the build that trade chat and an abundance of divine orbs built. I’ve been chucking any decent gear into my vault that I picked up through shipping routes and the Settlers of Kalguur league mechanic. The entire purpose of this was to have a stash of things to draw upon when it came to equipping this character. Everything that my character is wearing came either from the league mechanic or was dropped on my Righteous Fire Chieftain save for two items… the tri-elemental quiver needed to drive Widowhail and a cluster jewel that I picked up last night. This has also led to some of my other decisions like running Purity of Elements instead of attempting to fix elemental ailments in another manner. Essentially the goal is to create a psuedo-SSF character without having to wall my character off from the rest of my stuff.
Having said all of that… I will probably start shopping for some upgrades. Right now I have a T2/T2/T3 Elemental Hit quiver and I would really like to get triple T1 with some attack speed while keeping the additional arrow. I really like that I am firing eight arrows at a time and all of those arrows are igniting, chilling, shocking, and eventually freezing. This would be a way worse experience if I were not actively freezing things when I shotgun them. That said… I am squishy as hell and I do not love that. I basically have no real line of defense… awful armor, awful evasion, and 90 suppression though it is lucky suppression. I have overcapped elemental resistances, but they are only 75% and a very negative chaos resistance at the moment. In a few levels, I am swapping to a body armor that I am going to try and six-link that has almost 3000 armor and evasion on it, so that should help out a little bit.
So immediately after killing Kitava, I did the thing you are probably not supposed to do… and just dropped straight into a yellow tier map. It went fine and honestly… still felt like I was running the campaign. So of course I immediately bumped up to a Tier 11 Red Map, and again… it was pretty much okay. I did struggle a bit with an Expedition rare that I made super freaking tanky… because the only not-toxic atlas strategy that I have is one that includes a single big explosion. I did not read the buffs I was applying to that monster, and I had to bring in Big Brother RF Chieftain to kill it before proceeding. I legitimately think that I could probably be just fine running T16s and I am sure tonight I will experiment with that. Quite honestly, this character already feels much like my other Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit characters have felt damage output-wise before getting a Headhunter.
I think with some judicious gearing choices to give me some modicum of survivability… this could turn into a pretty effective map blaster. Basically… I am hoping that this does not become a popular strategy because I need a very specific roll combination on a quiver to make it work. I would love to see those not skyrocket to outrageous prices.
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Good Morning Folks. Last night I got my baby Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye up to a high enough level to try out my Widowhail nonsense. For the uninitiated this is a unique bow that has no real damage stats of its own… but instead inherits whatever stats you have on your quiver and then multiplies them based on a value that ranges from 150% to 250%. During the campaign on my RF Chieftain, I wound up getting a 240% version to drop… which started my gears turning. Now if you look on POE.Ninja this is a bow mostly used for damage over time bow builds as you can get a lot of stats that are very difficult to get on a bow otherwise. Almost no one appears to be using this for hit-based attacks, but given you can get a quiver with all three elemental damage types… and Elemental Hit of the Spectrum only cares about elemental damage… I thought maybe it might work.
So far it seems to be pretty freaking great, but I am also still in the campaign. I went from it taking a few hits to take most mobs down to essentially one-shotting everything but tankier rares. I spent 5000 harvest juice to flip the quality to increasing attack speed instead of physical damage… given that again we do not care about physical damage at all. Right now I am using Behemoth Brand and it feels great while firing 6 arrows at a time, which fork and chain and ricochet before returning back to me… which ends up shotgunning down most things. Given that I am dealing three types of damage with every hit… I have 100% uptime on Trinity Support and I am freezing, igniting, and shocking pretty much everything in my path. I have a slightly better-suited quiver to upgrade to when I hit 67 and I am curious to see what sort of damage boost I get then.
I am also not really following a meaningful build guide at this point. I’ve played several different versions of Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit and know more or less what the shape of the build looks like. I was going to try and do some unnatural instinct shenanigans but unfortunately, right now those are going for like 8 Divines. Thread of Hope is pretty cheap right now, so I might try my hand at working one of those into the build. I am contemplating being super lazy and just running Purity of Elements so I do not have to care at all about ailments. Basically, right now I am super glass cannon, and as I get to where I can start equipping some of the well-rolled shipping gear I have set aside for the build, I am hoping I can have a decent amount of armor and evasion. I’ve also contemplated throwing on a tiny bit of ward as a defensive layer when evasion fails.
I have zero clue if this is going to work, but I am interested in the ride at least. If it sucks, it won’t be the first character that I have leveled only to fall flat when I hit maps. I think in theory it might be good, but I am just not sure it will be able to compete with a 1000 elemental DPS bow for example. I am not sure it will require a level of min-maxing on the quiver that I am just not prepared to engage with. For the moment, it feels really damned good in Act 7. I am sure I will be able to blast through the rest of the acts and I will probably do the second lab tonight and see how more deadeye nonsense helps things out. I believe it should add two more arrows to the mix so that will be firing eight at a time. That is a heck of a lot more damage output. If nothing else this should be fun for farming low-tier maps and setting up something like essences.
If this actually ends up working… I will of course drop a POB.
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