Good Morning Folks. The other day I talked about the build that I had been cooking up centered around the new unique staff called The Broken Elegy. When I wrote about it, I was still leveling, but having a great time doing so. Ultimately I went with Guardian, not necessarily because I thought it would be the best option, but more because it would be the most enjoyable leveling path. Essentially, once you get your Sentinel of Radiance online, aka Butter Boy, you can face roll the campaign from that point forward, and you can pick him up in the first lab. It ends up playing like a slightly delayed version of Righteous Fire, because you charge into a pack of mobs, convocate him into the middle, and his burning aura pretty much obliterates everything instantly. Technically, The Broken Elegy would probably have been better served by a Necromancer, and most definitely would be better served by the Servant of Arakaali. However, Guardian puts me in the right corner of the tree for Staff defenses, and also has its own benefits, so I rolled with it.
As is the tradition when I do something dumb… I record one of my dumb little videos. I am not doing anything terribly challenging, but essentially, as soon as I exited the campaign, I rolled straight into t16 maps. Technically, I ran a single T10 just to see how it was going, and after stomping all over that, I ripped the band-aid off. The biggest challenge that I think I am running into is simply having too many minions for any of them to be doing effective damage. You already run into this problem with just Raging Spirits sometimes, but in total, I have 43 minions… and that is before I take into account the Greater Skeletal Shrine belt that I am running. Look… I completely understand that this is a dumb idea, but I am having fun… and quite frankly, that is the most important part of any build. I have noticed that things die faster if I stop summoning Raging Spirits, but when it comes to clearing maps… having so many aggressive minions means that they just sort of spread out and lay waste to everything.
I’ve been using them to farm Legion, because I have been trying to get a bunch of the new honoured incubators so I can stockpile some of the imbuement coins. This is not really working out as I had hoped, but I am still enjoying running something like six legions per map. I have a ton of emblems, and those will ultimately come in handy when it comes to doing some of the league challenges. Maps take way too long right now with the Mirages for me to efficiently do any sort of targeted farm, because I cannot seem to bring myself to ignore mechanics. Effectively, I am sort of this worse version of SSF, where I play in trade… but still feel like I want to farm almost everything myself. I would be so much better off if I just focused on a single mechanic and then used it to make currency, which I then spent on other things. However, that does not bring me joy. Sure, I like being able to buy the items that I cannot be bothered to farm, but if I can farm it… I want to farm it.
Speaking of buying things… I am using name-brand corpses for the very first time. In the past, these have always been super freaking expensive, but for some reason this league, they are all cheap. Perfect Turtles are only around 20 Chaos right now, and in theory, I should probably buy a bunch of them to stockpile for when I eventually kill one of these and cannot get it back somehow. Perfect Forest Warriors were less than 10c, and I am running a 5c Perfect Hulking Miscreation because apparently Raging Spirits count as constructs, and it buffs those nicely. Running the Forest Warrior provides Onslaught, which is going to allow me to rework my tree a bit at some point… because I no longer need the node that gives my minions Onslaught. I might end up rolling a cluster jewel and switching over to that, because there is an entire upper branch of my tree layout that is progressively becoming less optimal.
Speaking of less than optimal, I did zero planning for this build and sort of just winged it as I went. Mostly, I typed “Minion|Life|Block” into the search bar and routed around as many of those nodes as I could make happen easily. At the suggestion of Kodra, I just now pathed down to pick up Divine Shield, and that seems to help out considerably and makes my 2000 energy shield a bit more useful. With the Guardian Turtle, I have around 9000 armor, and around 4500 without it, so I am still going to never run into problems with regenerating my entire energy shield if needed. I realistically probably have more than enough survival… but I have considered doing the terribly dumb thing of going six life masteries for the 10% life boost. I feel like I have plenty of damage for what I want to do with this build. I could stack more minion damage, and probably should… but I am not as motivated by “number goes up” as I am doing dumb things that I find enjoyable.
I have zero doubt that proper minion players will be turning their noses up at what I am doing, and that is okay. I do think at some point, someone terribly more clever than I am… will build around The Broken Elegy and make it really strong. It seems like a crazy item, especially if you could figure out a way to make the minions that it spawns a little more reliable. I believe they are inheriting everything that I am currently doing to buff my Raging Spirits, which should mean they are pretty potent already. I should probably actually drop the whole imbue thing that I am trying and just go with a 21/20 Raging Spirits gem instead. I am not that certain that Imbues have turned out to be as much power as I was hoping they would be. They are also really freaking painful to try and land something useful on, because I am building this graveyard of bricked gems that makes me more than a little sad inside. I know I will be taking a break this week to play the new Last Epoch season, but at some point, once that has run its cours,e I will be returning to grind out more challenges here and having fun doing so.
The post Way Too Many Minions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, we start off with a discussion about Dragonkin, a new ARPG that launched this past week, and how it has improved since early access. Last Epoch has a new season dropping this coming week, and we talk a bit about the patch notes and all of the major changes that are coming to various classes and abilities. The Pokémon cartoon has traditionally had little to do with the actual video game, but we talk a bit about the Pokémon Horizons cartoon and how it is actually teaching valid tactics now. Tam talks about playing through As Long as You’re Here, a game about dealing with Alzheimer’s. Bel talks a bit about his own yolo build centered around The Broken Elegy staff in Path of Exile, and Kodra updates us on the current progress of his side project there. Finally, we get into a bit of a discussion about what makes a character versus what is just your build, and how it changes your perspectives on a game.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was “a lot,” and I have survived, but sleeping was a bit of a mess because of the pain. I’ve been working on a new side project in Path of Exile. It largely started because there is a new belt called the Screams of the Dessicated, and the gimmick is that you lose access to your utility flasks but gain at least one permanent shrine buff. Only some of these shrines have any real value, which means the market is flooded with a bunch of belts that the average player has no interest in. I was curious what a Greater Skeletal Shrine would feel like on a proper minion build, and right now, my favorite minion base is Servant of Arakaali… but you only get to play that during the Phrecia league. My second favorite minion base is Guardian, and as a result, I rolled a brand new character and started leveling so that I could play with the belt.
The other thing that I noticed is there are a limited number of folks building around a brand new Unique called Broken Elegy that drops from Saresh, the new boss of the Mirage league. I’ve completely yolo’d my build in its current state and have pivoted towards going down the staff block path, and running the new staff with Servant of Decay, another chestpiece that spawns a bunch of interesting minions that inflict withered on targets, which should buff my chaos damage. The only realistic way for me to get Envy on my build was to lean into Aul’s Uprising, and since the cheapest one already had Death Attunement on it, it allowed me to respec my tree a bit to free up some points. I went with a screams belt that gives me Greater Skeletal Shrine and Replenishing Shrine, the latter essentially replacing any reliance I might have on Clarity or Vitality. Lastly, I picked up a cheap minion gem helm that I have my utility minions in, like Animate Guardian, Stone Golem, and Carrion Golem.
I have no clue how well this is going to work. I need to hit level 78 and pick up some more dexterity somewhere before I can equip the chestpiece, and I am in Act 10, working through the final bits of the campaign. So far, however, it feels amazing. I am running Leap Slam instead of Shield Charge, and also running a Frost Blink so that I have my comfy two movement abilities setup. I leap into a pack, convocate my Sentinel of Radiance, and then start furiously summoning raging spirits as I also generate shrine skeletons and ceaseless flesh zombies from the staff. The Carrion Golem buffs everything, and minion jewels are making it so that everything has a decent chance to poison on hit… and the various stuff buffing chaos damage output is pretty much melting everything. Bosses especially just sort of evaporate right now, and my AG is running Asenath’s Gentle Touch, so corpses are also exploding, helping with the clear. The entire package feels really dumb, and I am curious how well the transition into maps is going to go.
It has been quite a bit since I last updated anything about Path of Exile, and over the weekend, I finished out my Atlas and got my Four Voidstones. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the current state of the new Atlas. For the most part I like it, but I feel like the fog of war needs to go, so that players can at least see where they want to go. When you start getting maps that you cannot run, because you cannot get to the node on the atlas, it is a bit frustrating. For example, one of my friends needed the six-link bench craft, and I had no clue where the Silo map was located, so I just sort of blindly fumbled around until I found it. Being able to easily swap between maps is pretty great, and I still need to finish doing a “blob” as they are being colloquially called in each of the quadrants for one of the quests. Unfortunately, Astrolabes seem to drop rather infrequently from map bosses, so I am going to have to ultimately buy some to finish out that quest.
The biggest upgrade that I have made to my Righteous Fire character is building out the Foulborn Red Dream setup, which involves buying the rather expensive gem, and then tattooing a bunch of strength nodes in the vicinity to instead be Fire Resistance. This, combined with everything else, really gives you a significant boost in life totals. My maximum life is now sitting at 8219, giving me an active pool of 7734 once you take into account my vitality arrogance setup. Realistically, I probably have enough sources of regeneration to comfortably drop vitality, but I just have not done so. The next big swap would be adding some clusters so that I could run Maelevolence, which would involve dropping vitality finally. I’ve not really felt like I needed to do this, so I have been lazy and not done it. I think I have the cluster jewels in my dump tab and could probably get it up and running without much issue. Maybe when I hit 100, I will do that thing.
Other than the Red Dream setup, the biggest upgrade is swapping my Immortal Flesh out for a Cord Belt. Cord Belts are a new base that drops from the Mirage content, and their big new thing is that it allows an anoint. So instead of using an Elder Stygian Vise, I sought out a Cord Belt with the same sort of rolls you normally look for. Everything else is mostly just getting better versions of things I already had, like I now have a proper Elder Helmet, slightly better corrupt for Cloak of Flames, and a full 10% Nebulis, which gives me 450% increased Elemental Damage. I keep getting slightly better regen gloves from the Breach Tree and swapping those out as I find them, then selling my previous version for some divines. My build can do pretty much anything I would want to do with it, including Nightmare Maps… so obviously the first thing I wanted to do was run up an alt, which gives you the Guardian I spoke about first.
All told, I am pretty happy with where I am in almost everything. My main tree is Niko, Ore, Harvest, and Breach and it feels great. My secondary atlas is Einhar, Ritual, Beyond, and Heist, which also feels great. I am thinking about setting up my third tree to be heavily focused on Legion, because there are incubators specific to the league mechanic that I would love to get, so I could start getting coins more regularly. Delve still provides, and Fossils represent my primary source of income right now. I am hovering around the 200 depth and going horizontal to look for bosses. I still need a Doryani map from the Vaal boss, and I am always down for taking out an Aul for some of the big-ticket items. Mirage league has been a blast, and Ace and I were talking about it last night, and how this is probably the furthest they have gotten. At this point, I am mostly focused on challenges so that I can hopefully get another fancy totem pole.
How has your league been going? Between all of the medical stuff that I have been dealing with, mine has been going a bit slower than I would have liked. Additionally, next week we have the release of the Last Epoch Season 4, and I will be spending a lot of time playing that at least for a week or so. I will also be getting adjusted to the routines of chemotherapy which might throw a monkey wrench in pretty much everything.
The post The Broken Elegy appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I went back and forth about whether or not I wanted to make this a proper blog post, but seeing as I have folks who read this blog but do not follow me on social media platforms, I am pushing forward with it. I guess a quick rundown of the last few months is probably in order, in case someone missed the chain of events. On January 21st, I had a routine colonoscopy, and one of the things that came out of it was the diagnosis of a cancerous colorectal tumor. There were a few paths that were outlined, but it all depended upon the specificity of my condition as ot which one we could go down. Effectively, there was what I called the “golden path” that was “surgery-only” and five to eight days in the hospital, and then I moved on with my life. There was also a path that involved four months of Chemotherapy, two months of Radiation, a Surgery, and then two months of being on a bag while things healed, and a follow-up surgery to hook everything back up.
For the last fifty-five days, I have been in limbo, not knowing which path I was headed down, and quite honestly… this is the worst part of the current situation. For as many mental health issues as I have struggled with in my life, I honestly do pretty well at adjusting to reality once it is forced upon me. However, what I do not handle super awesomely is waiting and not knowing. I’ve been through so many things over the last couple of months. Everything was going to hinge upon an MRI that would allow the surgeon to stage the cancer, but when it came time to get said MRI… no one checked the fact that I was bigger than the average bear and as a result was too damned big for their MRI machine. So I had to get scheduled for a totally different machine, which was out of network, and I had to pay a lot of the costs out of pocket. In the meantime, I have had a CT Scan, a PET Scan, Genetic Testing, and many bloodwork draws.
Because of limited scheduling, I have been going down the path of the industrial cancer treatment industry and attending orientation for chemotherapy, and even starting tirzepatide, a GLP-1 agonist, to help reduce my weight and lower the complications of the eventual surgery and radiation. I’ve been terrified of everything that is looming on the horizon, all the while not knowing at all which path I was going to be pushed down. On March 6th, I finally had the MRI, and I figured any day I would get the call from the surgeon outlining what we were going to do. Tomorrow I am scheduled for outpatient surgery to get a chemotherapy port grafted to my body, and I really had to know something before that, so I could either go forward with it or cancel it. Everything that I knew based on my reading and based on the results of various tests made me think that I was a borderline case, that it could go one way or the other and there was nothing that I could do to really predict the results.
Last night at 5:30, I got a call back from the Surgeon. In his eyes, it had progressed past the point where we can comfortably do the “surgery-only” route. So the two options in front of us were his suggested Chemo > Radiation > Surgery > Bag > Surgery route… OR Surgery > Bag > Chemo > Radiation > Surgery. There was no path that did not put me on a bag for some period of time. That is really the thing that terrifies me the most in all of this. If I were going to have to do Chemo and Radiation anyway… I might as well follow the path that was going to have me on the bag for the least amount of time, and also reportedly gives me the best chances for complete remission. So tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning, I will be having a twilight sedation outpatient surgery, and will come out with a fancy new multipurpose port, which they will be using for Chemo and blood draws during this whole ordeal. I’ve had a PICC line before when I was really sick in the hospital, and from what I understand, this is essentially a permanent version of that.
So that is the bad news, and I guess let’s talk about the good news. As I said, I have had a battery of tests, in part because when they did the CT Scan, there was a weird, unexplained nodule on my 7th rib on the left side. The CT and PET Scan combined show that the cancer is very well contained and has not touched any of the lymph nodes or metastasized to any other area of my body. The cancer itself is Stage II and shows high signs of “curative” treatment, because, in orientation, I have learned about all of the catch phrases that indicate your likelihood of survival. Technically, I have T3N0M0 Invasive Moderately Differentiated Adenocarcinoma. These are words that I have googled quite a bit, which I know is probably bad for my mental health, but various comorbidity charts put the 5 year survival rate at 90%. I have no genetic markers for cancer, or at least no known ones, so in theory I have a very good chance of walking out on the other side of this alive and well. It is just going to be a bit of a miserable mess getting there.
Another positive is that the particular treatment path that I will be on does not generally lead to hair loss. This is at least somewhat of a bummer because I was hoping it would come in curly afterwards, like happened with my sister-in-law. I will be on something called FOLFOX, and its major side effect is that, apparently, anything cold will feel like shards of glass and cause severe nerve pain for around the first five days after treatment. It is also going to decimate my immune system, meaning that I will have to be hyper-cautious about any sort of injuries or being around anyone who might be sick. There will also be diarrhea and nausea, but I will be taking some meds to counteract that, hopefully. Essentially, I will be on a two-week rotation, where I will go one day, get 30 mins of chemo in the office, and walk away with a pump that will deliver the rest of the chemotherapy to me over the course of 48 hours. After that, I will go back in and get everything unhooked from my port and begin the resting phase, returning essentially two weeks later to start over. I will be going through eight rounds of this, which will span four months.
I’ve been told that I should take notes during my first cycle because essentially every cycle after that will follow the same pattern. So the good days should land on the same days, and the worst days should follow as well. Five days in is supposed to be my low point, or my “nadir,” when my immune system and blood/platelet production are lowest. After that, everything should be improving until I then return to start it all over again. The orientation was honestly pretty freaking valuable because they prepped us to have a bunch of over-the-counter drugs on hand to deal with the side effects. Additionally, they gave some clear markers of when I should be calling in and getting help and when I can reasonably tough things through. 100.5 is apparently the magic temperature where I need to be taking immediate action in an attempt to stem an infection. I have not run fevers very often, so hopefully this is still a measurement that works for me. It has been wild just how standard this process has been, and how seemingly good they are at treating cancer now.
In other news, the Tirzepatide has been going pretty well. I give the injections to myself on Wednesday mornings, and I am on my 4th week, with next week being my first scheduled increase in dosage. As of this morning, I have lost roughly 28 lbs, and have started some light weight training in the hopes of staving off muscle loss. That is one of the side effects that folks worry about, and that is also one of the side effects of the chemotherapy that I am on, so I am doing some very simple exercises with weights every day. Nothing major, just ten-pound weights, but the repetition seems to be making some minor improvements already. I’ve also drastically overhauled my diet, which I assume is a big part of what has led to such rapid results. I’m only on about half of the final therapeutic dose, and already having significant losses. I’m forcing a lot more fruits and vegetables into my normal routine, and I have come to love a cold apple. I will be super sad that during my treatment, I will not be able to tolerate that due to the nerve pain nonsense.
The loss of my spouse last year already caused some significant shifts in my life, and cancer now… is going to cement even more. I am trying to look to the future and some of the goals that I really want to accomplish once I am on the far side of this situation. For example, I have a friend in the Chicago area that I am going to visit at some point, because that is also a reasonable driving distance for Cyl, one of my two adopted siblings. I also want to make good on the threat to go visit “Erasure” in the Houston area, since my previously planned trip got cancelled due to all of this. I am hoping to be a much smaller person at that point, and that will likely make travel way more enjoyable than it ever has been. I am trying to handle all of this the best that I can, but I also know it is going to be really fucking hard. However, it is eight months of my life… and I can endure anything.
Anyways… now you know as much as I know. I’ve been mostly radio silent about what is going on, because nothing was really certain. I will likely begin chemo before the end of the month, and after that, I will be on a routine path. As things change, I will probably talk about it, but I do not really want my “cancer boy” journey to dominate this blog. This is still a blog about the things I am interested in, mostly, and while cancer is now a part of me… I don’t want to make it the only important thing. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking around.
The post Cancer Boy in Chemo Land appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
