Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.
In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.
I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.
I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.
Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.
I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.
I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.
I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.
All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.
The post A Cup of Hatred appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! It is another Monday and here comes another one of my semi-regular weekend recap posts. I am still in a really odd place gaming wise where I am not necessarily hardcore motivated by anything. I thought I might dive into Space Marine 2 or Final Fantasy XVI this weekend… but neither happened because I just did not feel like playing anything that “heavy”. I’m not sure how to explain it, but there are times when I don’t want to play anything that I cannot easily dip out of at a moment’s notice as my mood changes. As a result I am still playing quite a bit of Minecraft because it is easy to pop out of and return to, and one of the major things that I did is create a bunch of dog houses for all of my wolves that I have had hanging out in my base for ages. Of note… that is NOT lava in the back of their cage but instead, a shroom light to keep them warm and safe from baddies.
It has been ages since I made one of my dumb videos, and this weekend I decided to record a bit of a base tour in Minecraft. The Path of Exile league was fun, but didn’t necessarily inspire me to create any videos, similarly, Last Epoch has been more of the same but if I can ever get my build dialed in I might record one of it. This recent foray into Minecraft started by watching this video about a 14-year-old Minecraft mystery while convalescing from Covid. This then made me remember that I have videos from my very first Minecraft world over on another channel, which made me nostalgic for the game and the way in which I used to play it. It has been a lot of fun and while I have entered the “machine building” phase of the game, I am still enjoying myself because it does not ask a lot of me to play it.
Over in Last Epoch, my build is starting to come together and I have picked up a handful of really decent Legendary items. We are in a really weird state of the endgame meta for the game where you either want an item to drop with 2 or more Legendary Potential, or you want an item to drop with NO Legendary Potential so you can feed it to a Nemesis Egg and either get a Legendary or an item with hopefully 2 or more LP on it. Circle of Fortune however makes it so that most Uniques drop with at least 1LP… meaning that 99.9% of what drops for you is useless. What I find myself doing is picking up weapons off the ground and then rolling the dice with a Rune of Ascendance because it does not seem to take into account the Circle of Fortune bonuses and is way more likely to give me a raw zero LP version of the item if I luck my way into it.
There are also some weird growing pains around being in the endgame and crafting items. Last Epoch should be praised for how approachable crafting items is and how easy it is to make decent enough gear while running through the campaign. However, when you hit the endgame… it sort of stops being useful. Glyph of Envy is this really cool item that was recently introduced that lets you take a single good stat and then reroll everything else. I could see this actually being really useful for those items that have a Tier 7 roll of that one stat you care the most about. However, it does not work in this situation because you cannot use this unless an Affix can be upgraded, meaning that you cannot use this on T5, T6, or T7 items. I’ve tried this a few times and when you end up getting as a result is an item that would probably be hidden by your loot filter. There really is no way to craft perfect items in Last Epoch, meaning that after a point you just stop engaging with that system other than randomly trying to reroll a single stat on an item.
Friday while I was off my friend Ace gifted me a copy of Pesticide Not Required and I’ve had a blast playing some of it. Essentially this is a game in the same style as Vampire Survivors but instead you play a cute frog that has inherited a farm Stardew Valley style. You roam around doing chores, planting crops, watering them, and eventually growing new weapons… to help you clear out the bugs that are trying to attack you faster… so you can grow more crops and get more weapons. It has a really fun main gameplay loop and you get to throw a bunch of fun things as weapons like randomly sending lawnmowers off in various directions. Over time you get the ability to buy pets that take care of some of the tasks for you like an Elephant that waters your plants, or a Dog that retrieves loot for you. If you liked Vampire Survivors give it a go, because it is kind of stupidly fun. I do suggest you play it with a controller because originally I tried Keyboard and Mouse and completely missed that you could direct your attacks until I played with dual sticks.
Lastly, The Cure released a new single and it is brilliant. It is hard to explain how much this band means to me, and listening to this was like a visit from an old friend. Fair warning though it is 3 minutes or so into the song before the lyrics start because The Cure has reached a point where they just do not have to give a fuck about pop sensibilities. What is staggering about this track is how much like classical young Robert Smith this sounds like. Whatever he is doing to take care of his voice… it is phenomenal. If you also love The Cure and were not aware of this collaboration with Chvrches from a few years ago, I highly suggest you give it a listen as well.
Anyways! I hope you all have a most wonderful week. Mine is probably going to be busy, but I am had a great weekend.
The post Weekend Recap with Frogs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Friends… I am swimming in cooked chicken. For years when I have played Minecraft the first thing that I have done is wrangle a bunch of cows… stuff them in a hole and then feed them wheat until they pass the entity cramming limits and start dying off giving me a stable supply of leather and beef. The thing is… I don’t really need much leather… and my chicken operation has been way more productive than I thought it would be. As such I am contemplating tearing down the cow station… and sending them all to that big farm upstate… to free up room for more shenanigans. I just do not need the beef in quite the way that I thought I would and chicken appears to be a perfectly cromulent option.
Chicken solves a lot of other problems like the ability to get a quick safe experience boost to repair items. In theory, if I cared more about it I would relocate the chickens to a place where I could reasonably use them to feed the egg-throwing machine directly. I could do some nonsense with minecart hoppers and bubble elevators, but that seems like “a lot”. Also, minecarts are super noisy, and I am already dealing with the din of a thousand clucks at all hours of the day. There is something primal that I enjoy about loading up a pitching machine and watching it birth chickens into my pen. I’ve created so many lanterns for the nether tunnels that I am going to need to find a more stable source of iron. I’ve gotten most of it from hollowing out areas under my base, but I might be trying to build a Villager breeder soon… and from there an Iron Golem farm since I have Pillagers nearby.
I am still playing quite a bit of Last Epoch and one of the things about Cycle 2.5 that I have to say… is that I don’t think dungeons are quite as much of a waste of time. This is in large part because mapping content that appears in Monoliths, can now appear and does so frequently in dungeons. Better than that, each floor of the dungeon seems to count as a new map meaning that you can find a Nemesis, Treasure Chest, and Exiled Mage on each floor giving you a way to burn through Nemesis so much faster than monoliths. I’ve only really spent much time doing Temporal Sanctum trying to create legendary gear, but then again that tends to be the only dungeon that I do consistently.
I had a dry streak of eggs that I complained about on the blog, and then grouped with Ace and immediately following that have gotten an egg for almost every single Nemesis. This is allowing me to start burning through my stockpile of non-LP copies of Palarus and Firestarter. This actually makes the whole Circle of Fortune thing making it super common to get 1LP uniques a bad thing. I wish you could throw LP uniques in the Eggs and then either get it turned into a completely random legendary or upgrade to higher LP levels. As it stands right now 1LP uniques… feel sorta awful to loot. I upgraded my Palarus this morning significantly keeping the 15 Health on Hit and adding 109% Melee Damage. I will keep trying for a 3 or 4 LP version, but for the time being, I am pretty happy with it.
I have to admit though, I feel like I am starting to wind down a bit on Last Epoch. This is the phase of the game where it always loses me. I am just not motivated by completing all of the bosses, and the worst thing about Last Epoch… is that it isn’t Path of Exile. What I mean by that is POE has quite possibly the most interesting endgame with a lot of player choice in what you want to focus on mechanic-wise. If I could take the player builds from Last Epoch and copy-paste in the Atlas of Worlds and all of the other endgame systems like Heist and Delve over top of the existing endgame… it would be my ultimate experience. The worst thing about Last Epoch is that it just doesn’t have a rich and varied endgame yet. I know over time they will get there, based on what we have seen so far, but it also means for the time being… every cycle has a shelf life.
Anyways Minecraft is giving me plenty of alternative shenanigans to enjoy, and at some point, I want to dive into Final Fantasy XVI now it is on PC, and Space Marine 2. I might try both of those out either today or this weekend.
The post Unlimited Chicken appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I am still spending the majority of my time in Last Epoch currently, as I am trying to push up to level 100. I also did not make it super far in Cycle 2 before the reset, so that means I have only done a handful of the Harbingers that start showing up at the end of empowered monoliths. That is honestly one of my complaints is that they really should have gone for a system like Guardians that appear in Path of Exile maps. As it stands the Harbinger spawns in right after you kill the boss and you effectively have to survive two fights in a row in order to get your loot. This feels REALLY bad when you have a prophecy dump a ton of stuff on the ground and you don’t have time to loot it before ultimately getting attacked again… and feels even worse if you fail the Harbinger and are effectively locked out of any of your rewards. Harbingers should spawn a portal to go into their fight area rather than this whole surprise attack bullshit.
The other thing that has sucked is that the Imperial Undead packs feel way harder than the rest of the map content. I’ve adjusted my playstyle and am way more cautious… but this feels bad. I should in theory be able to continue face-rolling low corruption levels for a while before I have to start playing tense and on edge all the time. However several of the undead appear to have a version of Detonate Dead from Path of Exile, called Necrotic Self Destruct. This is awful and it is messaged so much worse than Detonate Dead is currently, which means you basically have to stay away from looting corpses for a period of time after finishing combat. It just sort of fucks with the flow of things, and feels like it punishes melee play way more than it punishes ranged play. Melee already has to deal with more inherent risk… so stacking additional effects as a “gotcha” always feels a bit miserable. I am dealing with it, but I am also grumpy about it.
At this point, I have dinged level 88 and am working on filling out the last bits of my tree. I had skipped an attack speed talent in the general sentinel tree so I am largely going back and snagging that for the time being. Since I have leech and on-hit effects, more attack speed weirdly means more survival. I’ve swapped out a bunch of gear over the last few days and feel like I am in a much better place than I was previously. The biggest slots that I probably need to find upgrades for are my helm and my belt, which are not really doing much for me. I swapped out one of my rings for a reasonably well-rolled Sunwreath with 2 LP and then failed to land any of the stats I actually wanted on it. I’ve still not seen any eggs from the Nemesis system because I really need to start getting some LP on my weapon cache that I have been stockpiling for that purpose.
I will be honest… I am not sure how much longer I will keep plugging away at Last Epoch. I just don’t enjoy its endgame anywhere near as much as I enjoy the Endgame in Path of Exile. Right now it feels very focused on grinding out Harbingers so that you can fight Aberroth and while I am glad something like that exists… I am just not a bossing-focused person. In Path of Exile tend to kill every boss once and then sell my tokens when I get them to fund more of the nonsense that I actually do enjoy doing. There is no equivalent grind to Delve in Last Epoch, and baseline mapping does not feel anywhere near as fun or rewarding as it does in Path of Exile. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed myself quite a bit during Cycle 2.5, but more just that there is a cap to how much of it I want to do.
Right now my goal is to hit 100 and then potentially finish grinding the Circle of Fortune rep to tier 12. Things have definitely slowed down reputationally, however, because I am just not making that much progress. It could be simply that I am not progressing through maps as fast as I was before, but I think maybe they backloaded the grind so that the first bit was super easy to get and the later levels would be stretch goals. I would also like to make it through all of the Harbingers even though I doubt I will actually kill Aberroth. I got a wild item drop last night, but I am just not sure if I have an alt in me in order to take advantage of it. It was essentially an insanely rolled version of what looked to be Cloud’s Buster Sword.
All of this said… Minecraft has been calling my name again. I’m still building a bit on the side and at some point, I will give you all an update on the progress of my world. The biggest change is that I have dabbled with mods again and installed a shader pack that completely changes the experience. Anyways… I hope your week is going excellently and if you made it this far into the post you are definitely one of those dedicated folks.
The post Detonate Dead is UnFun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
