Good Morning Folks! Friday was the beginning of a new league in Path of Exile, and I spent most of the weekend grinding away at content. The biggest problem that I am having… is that I am enjoying the new Breach mechanic too much, and as such I went super slowly during the campaign. I only made it to Act 4 by the end of the first night, and it took me all of the day on Saturday to make it the rest of the way to maps. I was in my 70s during Act 8… so suffice to say that I was over farming the content. The only real benefit of pushing through the content quickly, is that you can make some early sales and also get some early deals on items that will eventually be far more expensive. I did manage to get enough early chaos to snag a pretty cheap immortal flesh that was well rolled, but other than that… everything was already inflated out of my price range by the time I hit maps.
Breach essentially exists in a few different forms. The main one works more or less like old school breach, except that once you kill enough encounters it will eventually stabilize spawning a new encounter in the center of the breach. These will either be Vruun the new mini-boss of the event, or several rare mobs. Quite frankly I find the multiple rares harder to defeat than the new boss because so long as you avoid his cyclone attack, he mostly just melts. The next version of the encounter is to defend Ailith, the new NPC for the event as she attempts to close the breach that has already managed to get a foothold in our reality. You essentially need to defend her against several waves of incoming attackers, and it is beneficial if you are careful when you burn your way through the breach walls to find her, because it is helpful to create chokepoints for the waves. The last version is the Breach Fortress, which puts you on an alternate map and makes you defend Ailith against 24 waves of spawns… with limited to no chokepoints to funnel the monsters. I’ve only managed to defeat one of these, and when you do… you have to rush back out through the maze and avoid walls that show up on your minimap in order to get out before the entire place collapses.
Breach itself, feels really rewarding, especially early in the league when you need pretty much everything. I am not exactly certain this is going to be the most juicy loot in the endgame, but it certainly feels good to just get a bunch of random stuff by closing one of these. Right now my favorite content is the unstable breaches, because I have enough damage to pretty reliably stabilize these each time so that I can farm the boss/rares that spawn once stabilized. More than anything though farming this content gives you Graftblood, which you can then use to spend on the Tree Tree mechanic as we referred to it Saturday during the podcast. I am not sure how this is going to shake out as I get deeper into progression, but I feel like the new version of Breach is going to continue to be beneficial. My only real complaint is that I wish I had some measure of control over which version of Breach I spawned. I greatly prefer collapsing breach and I feel like if we had tree support, we would be able to throw our thumb onto the scale as to which version we got.
I have not exactly figured out the “Tree Tree” yet, but it is really valuable while leveling to create five and six link chests. I got a relatively well rolled Six Link in Act 6 of the game, which allowed me to effectively power my way through the rest of the content with a fully fleshed out Righteous Fire. I am having a bit more trouble crafting items that are NOT chests… because it seems like I do not have enough control valves to craft the sort of items that I actually want. I have been trying to make a decent amulet, and it just does not feel like I really have enough control over it. What I am however producing is a lot of fractured amulet bases, which may at some point create something I could use to craft the ultimate amulet I am after. I have not been using the tree to print uniques or currency yet, because so far neither of those has produced anything good, and all of the foulborn uniques that I have seen are not really better than the baseline. I had hopes of a good Foulborn Cloak of Flames or Immortal Flesh, but none of the options seem to work well.
I am not generating much in the way of currency yet, so most of my gear is pretty crap. I did pick up a nice Immortal flesh and a decent Rise of the Phoenix, and then this is the six linked chest that I printed from the tree that is working very well. At this point I basically need everything… I need a good +fire levels amulet that I can anoint so I can start getting some endurance charges. I need decent boots and better rings, and to attempt to cobble together an elder helm. For the most part though at this very moment I am stable enough to keep pushing forward and I will fix all of these problems as I gather more resources and unlock more access to content. It always feels weird at the beginning of the league when you are poor and flying by the seat of your pants, but additionally I feel really strong for the crap state of everything. I am still running Purity of Elements which helps a lot, but at some point I will need to completely redo all of my gems to shift to the Purity of Fire version and then eventually drop the Phoenix shield for a +Life gain block shield.
The biggest part of this league are the grafts that you gain through doing breach and crafting them with the tree tree. Mine is specced to greatly favor Xoph grafts, and I am actively searching for better versions of Call the Pyre and Heart of Flame. Really the only truly important one of these is Call the Pyre which generates several fire tornadoes in front of me, which covers everything in Ash causing them to move slower and take more fire damage. This is a nice buff to both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap, and I can apply it easily through shield charge… which means that just charging around the map feels way more powerful than it used to. Heart of Flame on the other hand is essentially Molten Shell that you don’t have much control over. Any time I take damage, if it is off cool-down, it pops up a damage shield that will cause 80% of the incoming damage to go to the shield instead. I might start looking for an Hardening Uulgraft that gives Tender Embrace which causes me to regen life much faster when I hit low life, and also gain endurance charges.
I have picked up a well rolled Cloak of Flames, but essentially need either a shitload of fusings, an Omen of Connetions, or a Black Morrigan to link it. Getting it six socket with the right colors was relatively trivial given its low item requirements. Right now I have cleared 35 maps and when I hit 50 and get the alternate atlas tree I plan on speccing into Einhar and Ritual with that second tree to try and farm one of the items that quickly maxlinks an item. For the moment I am alternating between running maps and pushing delve so that I can eventually get down to a depth to start generating fossil crafting goods to sell. The tree tree is good at a few very specific things, but ultimately the bulk of crafting is still either going to need to rely on fossil crafting or recombination. Gambling and the Tree Tree are great at getting your build started, but once you need specificity you are back to the older crafting methods, unlike the Necropolis. Since you can no longer passively get recombinators, I have a feeling they will be in demand in the later weeks of the league.
All told I am having fun, but I don’t feel quite as driven as I have in past leagues. I am not sure if it is the simple fact that I no longer feel like I have to steal time to play. I have all of the time in the world since it is just me and the cats… and no one else to take care of. Gaming in general has become weird after the loss of my spouse. It was something I used to passionately do in bursts, because I knew someone was always about to pull me away from it. Now… I find myself taking breaks and walking away from it, just because I need to do so. I am having to make the pauses, because otherwise it just feels tedious. For example on Saturday I kept taking breaks to go work in the garage for a bit, which also led to the delay in getting to endgame. Figuring out how to do things… as just me… has been a bit of a weird trip.
The post Unfamiliar Arms appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.
However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.
An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.
Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.
The post Heys for Days appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. It was a weird weekend. I spent a good chunk of it working on the garage since it was much cooler out there than it has been. At this point I have cleaned out the north side of the garage, put up cabinets, and then shifted anything that did not fit from the south side of the garage and acquired and put up the first two cabinets over there. This involved moving out some rather shitty storage options that we have had since college… and have been in place for almost thirty years. One of which I am going to give to my neighbor who sells stuff at craft fairs, because technically it was designed to be collapsible and easy to set up vendor storage that came from a garage sale in college. I could have sworn we had two of these, but I have no clue what happened to the second one over the years. It was bad at doing its job, so it must go and be replaced by nice modular shelving from Sam’s club, because they are cheap, readily available, and something I can buy a few at a time as I have made space for them.
Most of my gaming has been in Destiny Rising. Today is the reset of a new week and I noticed that I finally placed in the shooting range. I did notice that my friend Lociana actually got a space, and Ace kept one placement specifically for Calamity Ops. I have no clue why we do not seem to be getting credit for The Expanse. That one remains empty, and in theory we still need to do the last few parts of the raid so that we can have people showing up on those platforms as well. I like this concept honestly, because one of the cool figures is you can test drive your packmates characters. I mean you can already borrow characters from your friends, but it is extra cool that there is an entire baked in system for this. I honestly wish that there were more of these podiums but one for each character, so you could see how your friends built characters that you might not be playing, rather than just who scored the highest.
I was honestly shocked to see my own character represented on a podium… then I remembered that I actually managed to get a phenomenally good time on Break In, enough to rank my random group 8th on the North American server. If nothing else it was cool to see myself showing up in the ladders for awhile. I have no clue what my final rank was before reset, but it was clearly good enough to get my Jolder riding that podium. While not the strongest or even best character to bring for most content that is focused on damage output… I love my Jolder girl and will always probably be most comfortable playing her. In theory I bring a lot of survival to the team, which makes squishier damage dealers better… but I do second guess some of the activities that I would normally bring her on.
For example, since forming our own pack one of the things that we have been hunting down is a Stronghold, because this is content that I never got to participate in during the wanderer pack. Essentially every member gets 3 attempts at this content for free, before needing to spend pack actions. You are likely going to need this, because the boss that you end up fighting is a giant bag of hitpoints and you have a limited amount of time to dps this down. This is honestly a common gacha trope, and there are a few versions of this that play out in AFK Journey for example, where the entire server or guild joins together to beat down a large health pool. However I question if bringing Jolder on this was a good idea. I did effectively soak a lot of the hate from the boss and keep over-shield rolling on my party… but you can see how much less damage I did overall than Ace did playing Estela. I think in future weeks I am just going to run Estela as well so we can hopefully whittle this down in fewer turns. For the week though we managed to clear two strongholds, which meant loot for everyone in the guild.
We also managed to collect enough materials, and craft enough tchotchkes to upgrade our hangar to rank four. We are burning through the guild ranks pretty quickly, and will be capped out at the final rank of Nightfall before much longer. I am surprised at how fast this goes considering we really only have a handful of players. There are a core group of Greysky folks in the guild, but other than that we have one person that I picked up from my wanderer pack, and another person that seemingly found our guild and joined it on their own. The fact that Ace and I both have second accounts, seems to also be helping the process out, but regardless we are moving through levels quickly.
I honestly still have the pack set to auto approve folks, so if you are playing Destiny Rising and want to be part of our nonsense feel free to join. You have to unfortunately drop your current pack before the game will allow you to join a new one, which made for the whole process of creating this a bit maddening because I could not even throw out an invite until they had left their currently situation. So long as you are going to be pretty chill and relaxed, and don’t do anything wildly offensive… you are welcome. We tend to hang out on my Super Dungeon Friends Discord when we are doing group content, so it is easy for folks to join in the nonsense. There is a Destiny flag in the role assignment channel, but I believe I made it so that once you get flagged for accepting the rules, you can see everything. This tends to be where we organize everything, so similarly if you ever want to join in on our Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans, we arrange that in the Guild Wars 2 channel.
In other news that I am proud of, I am up to five characters at gold rank. I currently have Wolf, Ning Fei, and Tan-2 all in about the same relative position for my next gold. Ning is who I intend on pushing up there, but progress is slow because it entirely relies upon the same limited currency. I got an infusion with the last reset, but am once again stalled out until I can get some more of it. You need six to buy the final rank of abilities, and you can only realistically get four per calamity ops reset. This is the thing that wears on me about the long term viability of Destiny Rising. I feel like they need to give more reasons to run something other than the two seasonal modes… because you can only do so much of that and they reset super infrequently. All of the things that no one queues for… need to be given a reason for folks to queue for them.
Probably the thing that I am most focused on grinding out each day is all of the nonsense needed to upgrade my mentor status. I already have Daybreaker because I run a lot of content, and have run a lot of it with new lights. The more grinding things are “interactions” with new lights which means that you either need to cheer them and get them to cheer you back, or give them an award in a activity… and get them to give you a reward back. Mostly this involves running around haven and aggressively greeting new lights until one of them FINALLY greets you back. The drift bottles and mentor chat is just spamming chat channels… which I feel are counter intuitive to these features. Apparently the next step involves posting things in these same chat channels and begging people for likes. This is dumb, and should maybe be focused on something a bit more conducive to building a successful game.
Ace and I are going to try and knock out a bunch of the new week stuff because the rest of the week is going to be pretty fraught when it comes to playing Destiny Rising. Tomorrow the new Guild Wars 2 expansion drops, and I am probably going to be spending a lot of time playing through that content. Then on Friday the new Path of Exile 3.27 league drops at 12pm PDT, and I took the day off work so expect me to be grinding that like a madman for most of the weekend. Right now I am in the doldrums waiting on those things to drop.
The post Fun with Podiums appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning, Folks! This week we had the entire crew and a stacked list of topics, forcing us to bump several to next week. Tam starts out talking about Time Flies, leading into Grace talking about Ball X Pit. Bel shares his thoughts about the Path of Exile 3.27 reveal stream, and Ash discusses the Session Zero for the Critical Role Daggerheart system. Tam has been playing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2… and how it is very much not a sequel to the first game. Bel talks a bit about the CSGO Gambling Crash, where the illicit market lost some 3 Billion dollars of value in a single day. Ash discusses playing Entropy Effect, which is set in the BlazBlue universe, and Bel shares some further bad news about the self-destruction of Xbox, with some new updates and Halo officially being announced for the PlayStation 5. We wrap things up with first impressions of Dispatch and Outer Worlds 2, which we are likely going to be talking about next week.
