Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We started out down an Ace and a Kodra, but picked up a Kodra as we went. Ash informs us that Nextfest is happening, and a few of us realized it. We talk a bit about the various games that have demos right now, or at least will for the first day after this show releases. From there, Tam shares his thoughts about Under the Island, a charming Zelda-like. Tam also talks about attempting to get into some of the later retro gaming consoles like the PS2, PS3, Saturn, and Dreamcast on the Ayn Thor. Bel is spun up because this week he has two big topics to talk about, first starting with the Path of Exile Mirage announcement and the sweeping endgame changes. From there, he talks about getting sucked back into World of Warcraft and mainlining the new expansion. Finally, we have a bit of a quick topic as we discuss the Dune Awakening Double Experience and Resources Event that is happening currently.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the launch of World of Warcraft Midnight, and given that I have been talking about WoW in general for several days, it probably seems likely that I would be talking about it this morning. However, you would be wrong, because yesterday was something way more important to me. We got the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.28, the Mirage League, and holy crap was it a banger of a league announcement. I highly suggest you watch the 40+ minute content reveal trailer yourself, but this morning, I am going to talk about some of the highlights and lowlights. Much like last league, this is a league where we are filling some of the gaps in lore between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I am fully on board with this, and I feel like this is happening in part because, apparently, Kitten Cat Noodle is how working for GGG as a Narrative Designer. For those not aware of her work, she was essentially the maintainer of the best lore resources that we had for the game, as she went act by act and league mechanic by league mechanic, explaining the lore behind them.
The league mechanic itself is pretty wild. Essentially, you will be able to enter imperfect copies of sections of the current map, and in them, every single mechanic will be duplicated in one form or another. It might not be the exact same strongbox, but there will be a strongbox in the mirage. When entering, you will be asked to choose one of three wishes that will mutate the results of the miraged area and stack with the existing map modifiers that you already have in place. Some of the ones that they showed off were the ability to have it so that all wisdom and portal scrolls dropped as some other form of currency, or that you gain the Souleater buff for the entire time you are in the miraged area. This should lead to some weird and wild juicing strategies, but since I am mostly an alch and go andy… this is just going to mean I have more mechanics on my map, which will be a welcome addition for certain.
The miraged areas can drop a currency that allows you to corrupt your gems to add an additional modifier to them. This is probably the piece of the league that I am the most excited about, and honestly, part of why I am contemplating going Righteous Fire again. I am curious what having a seven-link fire trap and a seven-link righteous fire are going to feel like. That applies to pretty much anything, though. It seems like the extra support is only going to be level one, so you are going to need to make sure you get specific supports instead of just anything viable. For example, with Righteous Fire, I will probably want Efficacy support if at all possible, because that is one of those gems that levels matter less than others. The only thing that concerns me is if the list of available supports is going to be pretty limited based on the combinations that GGG thinks should go together, not necessarily what players actually use together. I am thinking about the POE2 suggestion system, for example, where a lot of the links that you want on your build are not suggested by the UI.
The Atlas is also being entirely reworked. I was a Sentinel League baby, since that was the first time I got through the campaign and saw maps. As a result, I have never known anything other than the current Atlas, and while I know some other things existed before… I have never played with them. Essentially, the Atlas is being divided up into quadrants and then we will be able to apply influence regions within that quadrant. Each influenced map you complete increases the juiciness of the next in the cluster, all of which seems really cool. More importantly, though, they are splitting map tiers from maps on the atlas, meaning you can run any map at any tier at any moment. This feels essentially like a much better version of the POE2 waystone situation, but instead of relying on random maps on a Delve like endless atlas… we get to run whatever maps we want. The voidstones no longer elevate tiers of the map, and instead apply buffs to the map. The voidstones themselves are changing, and it seems like you will be able to get to three pretty easily, with the fourth still being the maven grind. I will likely continue to pay for a carry there because I hate having to do that many witnessed maps when I could be running altars instead.
So let’s talk about some of the bad things… nerfs. Some of my go-to builds have been Storm Brand of Indecision, Penance Brand of Dissipation, and Ice Trap of Hollowness… and all three of those ate some pretty significant nerfs. First off, Elementalist, which is the base that I would have built around, lost its increase to the Golem buff effect, meaning that every single Golem buff is just a little bit weaker now. Next up, Storm Brand and Penance Brand ate some pretty massive top-end nerfs across the board, making them way less viable to play. My most recent Ice Trapper build was a Golem Elementalist and relied on two Foulborn uniques… both of which ate significant nerfs. Double explode Berek’s Respite rings are no longer a thing… and Foulborn Tulborn can no longer roll with +4 cold gem levels… so I am losing a single gem level there. My other go-to build is Righteous Fire, and Chieftain explodes now deals less damage but procs twice as often… which Pohx thinks is going to be a net positive. Foulborn Red Dream, however, is going to provde 25% less life gain per Fire Resistance node… but still it is probably one of the best options we can slot into the tree. The total health levels of a Chieftain, though, are going to be a bit lower as a result.
There are a whole bunch of new Holy Skills going into the game, which I honestly think is probably a beta test for the Paladin class going into Path of Exile 2. I have to admit a lot of these look really interesting, and it is highly likely that I am going to roll some form of a Guardian before the end of this league and dive deep into maybe the Holy Slam skill. Kodra, right now, is eyeing some sort of Holy Damage minions build since one of the new abilities spawns temporary minions that he can then buff, and also run Herald of Purity for more holy minions. Since it ate zero nerfs, I still feel like Poison SRS is going to be strong, but unfortunately, Servant of Arakaali did not go core as I had hoped. Per Ghazzy, Minions apparently were buffed in general, so it might be a really good league for minions. If you can get level 30 Raise Spectres, they now become level 85 instead of level 81. To get there, though, you have to rely on a bunch of probably expensive corrupts.
While I am exceptionally pumped about the league in general… I am torn as to what I want to play. A couple of the things I considered starting ate nerfs, so essentially I will either go Minions or lean back on good old familiar Righteous Fire. I honestly kind of want to see what the Hinekora procs feel like and if they really do make mapping feel better. That means I am more than likely going to roll an RF Chieftain again and then branch out from there and make a Holy Slam Guardian and maybe a Poison Minions character. Sentinel of Radiance got some significant buffs, so Fire Damage Guardian SRS might be the play as well. In theory, once you get your first lab… You will be a monster and be able to face roll the rest of the campaign. That is mighty freaking tempting, especially now that I know how to build a proper block character and make them feel really damned tanky. I am sure I will be indecisive right up until the point that I roll a character late Friday evening… at which point I will probably just make a gut choice and run with something.
Are you excited about 3.28 Mirage League? What are you looking at playing? Drop me a line below.
The post Mirage Reveal Stream appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Today is the head start for Midnight, and it begins at roughly 5 pm CST. I find it interesting that they are specifically choosing that time frame for the start of a new expansion rather than the normal weekly reset time. Since Panda Remix, I have mostly been playing Belgraven, my Dark Iron warrior, as my main because I have always loved Dwarves… and always wanted to be able to play a Dark Iron. Blackrock Depths to this day is probably my favorite dungeon in the game because it was an entire whole-assed city down there, and it felt like a living, breathing, functional place. So while I have Belghast, my original warrior main at the level cap as well… I am choosing to move forward with a new legacy as I am this fiery Dark Iron dude. That feels a bit fitting, honestly, since I am no longer the Belghast that played World of Warcraft. I am Belghast, the blogger, podcaster, and friend to thousands, thanks to the weird fucking life that I have lived. I have a lot of baggage towards World of Warcraft because when I first left the game… I was in a really bad mental state.
There is an addon that has been cycling around the “social medias” called Account Played that visualizes all of the time you have spent playing World of Warcraft and groups it by class. All that is required is installing the addon and then logging in every character on your account, and now that the Warband makes this so much easier because you can see every character from the login screen… I decided to take the plunge and try it. I knew this was going to be a scary proposition, and this does not take into account the fact that I have a second account… nor any of the time I have spent on beta realms and in World of Warcraft Classic. So when I say I have spent two years of my life playing World of Warcraft, all of those extra realms account for the missing days. No wonder this game has such a fundamental effect on me, and why I have so many deep emotions tied to it. There are people that I met through this game who have become some of my closest adult friends. World of Warcraft feels like a high school reunion whenever I play it… and it has all of the same complicated emotions that go along with that. It was a place and a time in my life that felt as fundamental as going to college, and that might seem odd to people who are not steeped in this world, but as I age, it feels less and less weird to me.
As far as the time break-out goes… I am not shocked by that in the least. Since the Warband gives me easy access to see every single character on my account. I have Eight Warriors, Eight Hunters, Five Deathknights, and Three Paladins. Warrior was the very first character that I rolled when I got into beta testing, and it was a Tauren. If I am going to play a random character in a World of Warcraft Event league… I am going to play a Warrior. What would even be wilder is if this could somehow track the amount of time played per spec, because I imagine I have spent way more time in Protection Spec as a Warrior and Paladin than any other spec. I could have absolutely called Mage as my least-played class, and Priest, I knew, would have been pretty low as well. What I was not expecting was Demon Hunter to be as low as it is, given that I mained it for an expansion. However, it also has not been out that long in the grand scheme of things compared to Warrior. I think I have as many Deathknights as I do, largely because it allowed me to rapidly create a functional character on a server, given it started at I think level 25ish? Levels do not mean much after all of the squishing that has happened.
I am looking forward to giving Midnight a spin tonight whenever it launches, and I expect to largely drop all of the quests that I have on Belgraven like a hot rock and move on with my life. I have contemplated dropping Blacksmithing as my profession and going for pure harvesting as I go into the new content. I think maybe herbalism is a good call, because there will always be demand for flower pickers in the world. Especially since I have reached a point of largely wanting to sell whatever I happen to be finding… double harvesting seems like a good call. The other option would be to mirror Belghast proper and go with Enchanting, because there is always a need for enchanting resources as well. I will probably continue to run old content on OG Bel for that precise reason because I can convert all of those purples into shards and sell them on the open market. I’ve never been one to accumulate much wealth in World of Warcraft, and I am going to see if I can change that, especially given that I have enjoyed being a vendor so much in Path of Exile.
Speaking of Path of Exile, today is also the drop of the Mirage League live stream, and with it comes a Twitch drop that works in both Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. This is where my next few weeks are going to get weird because I fully expect to be mainlining POE, and then playing Midnight, Dune, and Enshrouded as a bit of a palate cleanser. It is really hard to gauge what I am going to end up playing in this league until I have seen the trailer and, more importantly, the patch notes. Since I believe I have convinced Ace to take the plunge, I feel like I am not sure I want to go with Righteous Fire in this league as my starter. I might revisit the Golem Elementalist character and either play it with Ice Trap or try to turn it into some sort of Minion character. There is some thought that maybe some of the Phrecia classes might be going core, and if so, I will absolutely be playing Servant of Arakaali minions, because it was too damned much fun during Phrecia 2.0.
As far as a wish list for this league. I would really like to see some version of Mercenaries go core. GGG said that they would like to bring it core, but it would need some sort of rebalance to make it viable. I liked gearing out Mercenaries and really loved that aspect of Diablo III, because you could use the Merc to balance out the weaknesses of your build. I hope the Breach tree is just as powerful as it was during the last league, because it was amazing for crafting early gear. I would love to see Kingsmarch simplified, because the process of building it out still seems like a massive hassle and one that you feel obligated to do since it is effectively free currency. I would really love it if they unbound the spell choices during the acts from your class so that I did not feel required to mule a witch every now and then when I need some of those early abilities. Other than that, I would really love to see a further separation between bossing content and mapping content, and make it so that you do not have to kill Maven and Uber Elder to get your third and fourth keystone… either that or make quest versions of those encounters because it takes too freaking long to gather up the resources for those fights.
I am sure tomorrow I will be talking mostly about the Mirage League reveals. What do you want most from this new league? Are you going to be playing Midnight today? Drop me a line below.
The post Two Years of My Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Last night was “Sibling Time ™” and for the majority of the night, we were just hanging out on voice and talking. I was spun up and needed to vent my grievances towards the medical industry… and I am just getting started, but so fucking tired of everything. Later in the evening, we joined up in Enshrouded and ran around together. Ace is way further progressed than I am, and I abused some of their locations so I could see some of the late-game content. I also abused access to some significantly higher-level mobs to get some really fast levels. The irony is that the legendary gear that I am wearing is way more than capable of taking down these mobs that are roughly 10 levels higher than I am. I experienced my first frostbite, or whatever the effect is called, which threatens you with hypothermia. It was quite a bit of fun, even though it was a pretty short outing.
Ace also showed off this location on the map, where they had access to massive fields for growing crops. Among the gardens, they also created this awful bed of shroud plants, which sort of look like demonic wacky waving arm guys. You can’t get the full effect from a screenshot… but it looks so wrong to be standing here and letting them move around you. I am absolutely going to steal this idea from them for one of my forward bases so that I can use it for crops as well. I need to get more serious about progression in my world, rather than just completing quests. I’ve been so heavily focused on collecting all of the bits and bobs that the NPC crafters are acting for, and spending little to no time actually progressing the state of my world and collecting resources. I really wish the game had a better inventory and storage system, because I hate dealing with a bunch of random boxes full of stuff. I am sure I could, in theory, mod this problem away, but it won’t help me for my multiplayer shenanigans.
I seem to have settled in nicely with World of Warcraft, and I spent some time this morning working on my house. I have an octagon room that I have essentially subdivided into multiple rooms. This is more or less “my” room and represents things that I have collected in my adventures, with one side a small bedroom and the other side an office, that branches off this central chamber that is somewhat of a war room. I downloaded the Homebound addon, and plan on using it to back track and sort out what sorts of things I should go out into the world and farm. This essentially tells you every quest chain that unlocks some sort of housing resource. I will likely focus on the drops first since that is a bit more easily done than going and doing bullshit like the Green Hills of Stranglethorn.
I am also enjoying the content surrounding the guild village that I live in. There are specific endeavors that we can do each week to gain points for the guild, and we have already maxed out the bar as of this morning. It reminds me a bit of the Garrison system, but in the best possible way. I honestly wish they would have embedded some of that functionality in housing, to give us more to do here other than running around and collecting beans and luckydoos. Still, it sort of feels neat to have a village of our own. Coming back to the guild has been interesting because I have been gone for so long that, really… at the end of the day, it ceased to be the guild that I ran eons ago. There are a bunch of the same people, but also a ton of new people that I do not know at all. It will be interesting getting to know folks, especially if I stick around for a while. I might actually force myself onto Discord so I can hang out with folks and speed up the acclimatization process.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time leveling characters, and of all of the random things, I am playing Lodin… who was my very first raid main. Hillariously this character is still in the Late Night Raiders chat channel, and I noticed yesterday that Kerrun was as well. It makes me wonder how many of the active crew are still in that channel. I would sort of expect that maybe Erixi and Kylana were both in it as well. I remembered the /chatwho command so I could list out who was in it. It is weird how many muscle memory things come back to you when you are dropped into a familiar environment with a familiar character. I am, of course, leveling Beast Mastery so that I can have two pets. I should, in theory, be pushing through the remainder of the War Within campaign, but I have been enjoying playing alt characters way too much to focus on anything much.
I’ve also spent a little bit of time over on my Horde main from Facepull, which is my Blood Elf Paladin. I was legally required to go over and set up his outfit so he would stop looking like a mismatched mess on my Warband screen. I have done a bunch of different outfits throughout the years, so I went back with this purple and green illidari theme. I swear I had a mace that worked better with this outfit, but when I was setting things up, I could not seem to find it. I wish the in-game cosmetic system allowed you to search by color palette. There is probably an add-on for this, but I could not be bothered to go looking for one. Chances are someone will respond in the comments with exactly the name of said addon if I wait long enough. I am not sure if I will level as prot like I usually do, or instead go retribution.
Technically, Midnight launches tomorrow if you bought in and got access to the head start. I did this thing, but I am uncertain if I will actually start the new content or instead wrap up the War Within. I know the main story beats so it is not like I need to see the content in order to understand it. This is not Final Fantasy XIV, and I am not waiting with bated breath on the conclusion of a ten-year saga. There has been way too much retconning going on in the World that is Warcraft for me to be super concerned about the purity of the story experience. So essentially, there is nothing much stopping me from diving straight into the new content. Both Belghast and Belgraven are sitting at level 80 thanks to the Twilight Highlands event. It is somewhat hilarious that I have two max-level characters… and they are both warriors. I guess tomorrow will see whether or not I join in the reindeer games.
All of this said… I am having a lot of fun being back in Warcraft.
The post LNR Channel Still Exists appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
