Good Morning Friends! Last night I spent my evening running around in the Last Epoch multiplayer beta and opted to start up another Acolyte. I’ve been enjoying the Necromancer play style lately, and as a result, I am leaning super hard into it with this game. I’m also wanting to spend some time exploring Wolcen soon and plan on doing the same given that Necromancer play styles tend to be pretty chill. It is thoroughly weird to me the way my brain has flipped over the last several years. There was a time when I would only play melee characters and more specifically only characters with a sword and shield. I was completely bought into the mythos of the “tank” and that meant a very specific thing to me namely a full plate-wearing character with a sword and a shield, and occasionally if the class lends itself to that fantasy, a bit damned two-hander.
To some extent, I blame Diablo III for beginning the slow battering down of these walls. I fell in love with the Demon Hunter and how amazing it was for clearing seasonal content. With the right build, you could make literally everything on the screen explode in a hail of fire, making it extremely safe to play. I still greatly prefer high survival characters, but I was forced to reconcile that sometimes overwhelming damage… is a survival ability. Mostly this forced me to re-evaluate what being “fun to play” meant to me personally and that largely meant the ability to kill things without much fear of death. I always got this style of play through traditional MMORPG tanks but found that under certain circumstances I could find that style of play in other families of classes.
I think my mental transformation was really cemented by my time playing Guild Wars 2 last year. I had been trying for a decade to make the Warrior in that game conform to the sort of gameplay that I wanted, a very high survival tanky play that had no fear of dying but could still clear content. It never really felt that way to me personally, and in a moment of frustration, I sat down and had a conversation with my friend Tam. He asked me to describe the goals I wanted in a class and after some serious side eye, I accepted the challenge to try playing a Necromancer. It turned out that while it conformed to none of my normal sensibilities, it was in fact the “tankiest” and highest survival class I had ever played in an MMORPG. This sort of sent my world into a tailspin and has caused me to re-evaluate what it means to be tanky and what it means to “feel good” to play.
Path of Exile has also continued this path forward as I seek out characters that are highly survivable yet still able to clear content. I think maybe the best version of this that I have experienced so far is my Righteous Fire Juggernaut because it is effectively exactly what I want in a game like that. One of my favorite Diablo III builds is the exceptionally tanky Thorns Crusader, which wanders around while everything effectively breaks itself on your damage shield. I’ve also enjoyed my time spent playing on my Summon Righteous Fire Necromancer quite a bit, because while squishier than RF… it can move around freely to avoid a lot of the damage while my pets focus on shredding the target. As I have gained additional levels on that character I have poured more focus into survivability since the damage seems to be solid.
So now that I am playing some Last Epoch, I figured a Necromancer might be a good call. After some research, it does in fact seem to be an extremely tanky option. At the moment I am running around with Skeleton Warriors, a Giant Skeleton Golem, and summoning that game’s equivalent of my “raging spirits” in the form of explosive Zombies. I started a fresh character last night and got it to around 22 before calling it for the night. Unfortunately, the transition to Necromancer seems to be gated behind a quest so I really need to push forward in the story before I spend any more points on the build. The few bosses I have encountered have been extremely relaxing as I simply avoid the telegraphed attacks and let my pets keep chewing away at it.
Last Epoch Build Planner is by the same folks who do the Grim Dawn Tools, and I am largely following this Necromancer build at least as far as Skills and Passive choices go. You can blame Path of Exile on making it so that I just feel more comfortable venturing forth with a build to at least loosely follow. Last Epoch as a whole seems like a much more straightforward game and offers the ability to respec a bit more easily. However, once I started down the path of following a build, I find it is probably going to be harder to shake mentally. Given that I am juggling a large number of ARPGs at the moment, I don’t really want to waste my time building something that won’t be viable and as a result, won’t be “fun”.
If you want to see an example of Necromancer gameplay in Last Epoch, check out the above video. Essentially it is designed around summoning exploding zombies and replenishing your pets as needed when they die. Otherwise, you just zoom around and avoid telegraphs while your army of horrible children kills your foe. I had a lot of fun last night screwing around on the beta server, and will likely be creating the same basic build when the multiplayer patch drops in March.
The post Re-evaluating Tankyness appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.
One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.
I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.
I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.
What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.
All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.
With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.
The post Yup Books and Games appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I spent a bit of time yesterday setting up my bookwyrm profile and loading the books that I have already read this year into it. So far I dig it. Unlike Good Reads it does appear to be an entirely manual process. This morning for example I updated my progress in The Exiled Fleet and it just required me to plug in a page number that I was sitting on. As a result, I am probably not really going to be updating progress that often and simply adding a book when I start reading it and then marking it as read, and writing some general comments about my experience. The other aspect of the tool that I want to explore a bit more is using it as a cache of books that I want to read. Libby does not exactly have the best discovery engine, so my goal is to use the “To Read” section as a sort of memory-jogging mechanism when I find I am looking for something new to consume.
What I had feared might happen… has happened. I am around 60% through The Exiled Fleet and my hold for the last Dresden novel has come open. Essentially as I understand it I have three days from the time of receiving the notice to claim it or else the book goes to the next person in line and I keep my “next in line” spot. My hope is that I can push through the novel I am currently reading in the next few days so that I can go ahead and claim my spot and go back to the gaming/audiobook nonsense that I enjoy so greatly. This is the part of the library system that I do not love… is the inherent pressure of trying to churn through something in a specific amount of time. As a result last night I spend most of the evening reading rather than gaming, which was its own sort of charming. My wife is admittedly a bit flabbergasted by this sudden transformation because reading all night is her jam, not necessarily mine.
That is not to say I am doing zero gaming. I am starting to poke my head back into Guild Wars 2 a bit, because I’ve been craving that sort of gameplay. I seem to be very much in this ARPG/Action MMO mindset right now and after coming from Path of Exile, I have to admit Lord of the Rings Online was a little slow for my tastes right now. I am easing back into Guild Wars 2 by spending some time doing the world boss train. I think ultimately however I will pick up and start working on the main/expansion stories with my Ranger. I am not sure what shifted mentally but I just started enjoying running around with my Ranger a bit more than I did my Necromancer.
I’ve also been playing a bit more Last Epoch and currently am really enjoying the Acolyte class which will eventually become a Necromancer. After decades of avoiding casters like the plague… which admittedly is probably a defunct saying given that we had a plague and no one avoided it… I actually find that I enjoy casters quite a bit these days. Most of the classes that I have played in Path of Exile ultimately end up being some sort of a caster given that melee is just not great there. While I enjoyed my Paladin character in Last Epoch, I think I am enjoying being a Necromancer a bit more. With the upcoming Multiplayer release, I figured it was time for me to finally get a character to the game’s endgame. I don’t think Last Epoch will be anywhere near as rich as Path of Exile but I am hoping it will be a better “with friends” experience.
I do not exactly feel great playing Blizzard games right now. I know that there have been significant changes inside of the company, but so long as Kotick still profits from it… I feel more than a little dirty spending time on those games. That said… I will be pausing my prohibition for a bit and diving into Diablo III Season 28 soon. It looks fucking amazing and this may be the last new season we get for a while, given that Diablo IV will be launching before we see another season. I figure a lot of the live team currently supporting Diablo III will end up getting transitioned. Mostly I am really interested in the Altar of rites which is a system where you sacrifice various things and get permanent account-wide buffs. Some of these give you significant amounts of power and others are just quality of life like the ability for your pets to pick up and salvage white, blue, and yellow items. I am deeply interested in this season, and in theory… once it has run its course I will have either Multiplayer in Last Epoch or another Path of Exile league to focus on.
Basically, it feels like this is going to be a very ARPG year for me. I knew at some point I would be playing Jedi Survivor but with it being bumped back by another month yesterday that gives me a bit more wiggle room to fully dive into this nonsense.
The post A Very ARPG Year appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I think I might be in the process of winding down my focus on Path of Exile and the Forbidden Sanctum league. Going into this league I had a few goals in front of me. Some of them have been accomplished and others I decided not to really worry with. This is not exactly a comprehensive list but here are essentially the things I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish this go-round.
Finish Atlas Objective passives for all 115 Maps
Get my 4 Void Stones
Complete Enough Challenges to Get a Totem
Level a Character to 100
Last night I finished my 19th Challenge of the league and unlocked my very first totem for the hideout. Admittedly it is a short and sad totem but it is my very first period. Last league, I unlocked enough challenges to get one full set of armor, and this go around I got two sets of armor appearances as well as the totem so I consider that progress. I finished the Atlas last league and did so faster this time around and set my sights on getting the four void stones that are required to make it so that every map that drop is Tier 16.
The first two void stones came extremely quickly and made me think that this was going to be a reasonable challenge. However the amount of time or currency that is required to get them… just doesn’t feel worth it to me on a personal level. I could go on the forbidden trove and buy a carry for the remaining two void stones, but that seems silly and since I don’t REALLY love chain running maps I am not sure what it would get me. The last goal that I had in my sights is getting my Juggernaut to level 100, which is still doable given that I get great enjoyment out of fucking around in Delve for hours. the problem is that XP gain vs XP loss is a massive struggle at that level and it takes days of grinding to gain a level, and literal seconds to lose all of that progress. While I think I am winding down my focus, it doesn’t mean I won’t keep playing so I am hoping that maybe I go ahead and knock this one out.
As far as Delve goes I am pretty comfortable at the 200-250ish level which seems a solid place to go city hunting. I should do a push-down to see how far I can sustain without increasing the risk greatly. I figure the lower I go the better the experience farming will get. There have been a few deaths that I have taken in delve that snuck up on me and overwhelmed my defenses, but they are few and far between. I moused over my Darkness Resistance and my raw score is currently sitting at 1050% with a similar Light Radius value. I’ve tried to keep those at roughly the same upgrade level as I moved further down. In theory, I could have been buying small resonators all this time with excess azurite because I have way more resists than I need for the level range that I have been exploring.
Every league it feels like I learn a ton of lessons. In this league more than anything I became significantly more adept at trading. Here is another stash tab snapshot, but on 1/12 I had 1695 raw chaos and 7 raw divines, and now I am sitting at 4916 raw chaos and 15 raw divines. I think the key thing that has changed is that I have gotten better at using the price-checking functionality of Awakened POE Trade but more than that I’ve gotten better at eyeballing value. I’ve started to develop a mental map of what makes something valuable to the state of the league as it stands. This sorta requires you to get a vague understanding of which builds are actively in the meta and what sorts of gear they want. For example, in this league Poison Summon Raging Spirits became a massive flavor of the week’s build, and almost overnight anything with poison and minion stats boomed.
Here are some general things that I look for:
Jewelry with at least three good resistance hits, specifically a solid chaos roll plus at least two other resists.
Good Corrupted Implicits on a good base with good stats. The prevalence of tainted currency makes minor crafting on corrupted items that I would have long ignored a much more feasible option.
Anything that has damage multipliers plus damage bonuses. This is really subjective but I’ve moved a lot of items in this category.
Unique Items with a good Corruption. This is a weird category because it is going to be hard to find comps, but still worth trying.
Ventor’s Gamble rings… legitimately can be sold at 5 Chaos a pop all day long because for whatever reason people seem to love gambling on these to vendor swap for the possibility of that one perfect ring with max positive hits to everything.
Then there are some things that I have started doing to improve otherwise disappointing items that I have.
Corrupt Every Rare Gem Period… If you have a fluid source of Vaal Orbs. In Delve you get a ton of these and way more than I could ever possibly use. I’ve seen so many gems go from being something I could get 5 Chaos out of to something I can get 50-100 Chaos just from a “yolo corrupt”.
Corrupt Amethyst Rings. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but Amethyst rings tend to be how people fix resists more than anything else and there is a chance that an otherwise shitty ring turns into something phenomenal, and again… it is worth the Vaal orb.
If you have an item that is middling… and does not have max sockets on it throw a few Jewelers Orbs at it until you hit max sockets. Jewelers orbs are extremely plentiful, and it is amazing what a difference it makes in moving an item with max sockets versus moving one that is going to require some crafting before use. Most players want ZERO engagement with the crafting system and you can profit from this.
As far as traders go I am a very very small fish in a very large pond. I am not dealing with mirrors worth of value (aka something like 84,000 Chaos with wild fluctuation in prices) but I feel like I am doing well enough to buy most anything I might want. I’ve also brokered items for various members of my guild that wanted zero engagement with the economy, but I’ve kept that stuff separate and excluded from Exilence when I have it crawl through my tabs and look for anything that I have missed. I feel like if I had the knowledge that I have now, I would be in a much better position at this point in the league than I was when I started. Essentially I started trading a bit too late, and there is a lot of value in bread-and-butter items early in the league. Even now over a month into the league, I am still getting a constant flow of 5-50 chaos trades.
I’ve also reached a point of maturity when it comes to builds in the game in general. I am okay with realizing that it is unrealistic that one build is ever going to feel great doing all of the content in the game. Over time I standardized on Righteous Fire Juggernaut as my main character to do things like Delve and Heist on, and Fire Variant Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer as my bossing and mapping character. The RF Jugg can map just fine but I put a heavy investment in Metamorph on my maps which means I can chew through those so much faster on the SRS Necro which is designed to take out boss characters. The state of my SRS Necro however is not exactly “Uber Boss” capable, which is why I stalled out on finishing unlocking my Atlas Void Stones. I could have pivoted into the Poison build, but decided that I just did not care enough to spend the currency required to do that.
As far as league mechanics go, I tried a number of different things this time around. I started off with a bit of a mess as far as Atlas passives but quickly coalesced into a “Wandering Path” design, which is a notable that doubles the effect of every small node on the tree, but makes it so that you do not gain any benefit from the medium-sized nodes. This was amazing for raw map generation which in turn helped me rapidly unlock the Atlas tree without needing to buy any maps or go fishing for Kirac missions too much. Ultimately I came down to buying 3 Unique Maps in the end, but that was well worth it to finish out the tree.
After that, I focused on Ritual Alters for a bit with Harvest as a secondary goal. This was fine but Ritual feels like it has been nerfed from my past experience because I did not get much in the way of big-ticket currency items. In Kalandra league I got several Divines through Ritual even without investing Atlas nodes in it, and I thought maybe if I did go hard into Ritual it would pay off. Harvest seemed like a good bet and it was “fine” but its money gains are really through bulk trading the three colors of crafting resources that you get from running it, and I decided early on that I had no interest in that.
My next strategy was to focus on lockboxes and essence farming, which again was fine… but never really had much luck with that and I was still very much trying to focus my attention on mapping as my primary game mode. It was only through happenstance that I really decided to dive as deeply into Delve as I did, and once I realized how much I enjoyed it… and how reliably profitable selling resonators was that I reshaped my tree to work around getting as much Sulfite as quickly as I could. I had noticed how good items could drop pretty reliably from Metamorph, and with my SRS Necro those encounters were extremely easy so I shifted around points to focus on Delve and Metamorph.
It was very very late in the league that I made a tiny bit of a twist to my strategy and included a bare minimum of Harbinger, dropping the last of the Essences that I had in my tree. My Atlas tree now guarantees at least one Harbinger per map and while that isn’t a ton, it has made a noticeable bump in the raw number of Annulment Orbs and Ancient Orbs that I end up getting as well as a not insignificant amount of Chaos Shards that eventually add up to my raw chaos total. The real chase item however is the Fracturing Shard, because these puppies sell for 50 Chaos each and move almost instantly. So sure it isn’t a dramatic amount of currency but because you are running several maps in order to fill back up your Sulfite, the Metamorph and Harbinger nodes sort of just passively add to your bottom line in a way that doesn’t really add that much complexity or time to the maps.
While I think I am starting to wind down, all of this has me looking forward to the next league start. I’ve learned so much more about the game as a whole this time around. I know significantly more about what makes a build viable and how to fix problems. I think going forward I am going to look for some sort of engine to fuel further explorations. The Righteous Fire Juggernaut served as an excellent stable character to farm resources for other more volatile characters. I guess I have fully committed to the concept of the Trade League and as a result, I am getting better at amassing a “warchest” that I can then use to buy my way out of frustrating situations.
Path of Exile is a very different game experience than any that I have played before, and it is the first time I have really willfully engaged in active trading. It sorta makes me reassess how I have interacted with trade in other games, and how in large part I have done it completely wrong. It isn’t that I think I will ever become an Auction House Baron… but in theory, if I can apply some of the things I have learned to other games I might at least not be broke all the time.
The post Winding Down Sanctum appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
