I woke up this morning and as I am oft to do… I sat in bed for a moment and scrolled through email to see what came in over night. I saw a charge from Audiobooksnow the site that I tend to buy my audiobooks for that was $9.99, and had a mild freak out. Did my account get hacked? Did I accidentally sign up for some auto purchase club book thing? NOPE! I apparently pre-ordered Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree and completely forgot about it. So at some point today I will be starting that, and pretty much mainlining it until I finish. Audiobooks are really the perfect compliment for grinding in Path of Exile, and I am very much in head down grind time. Today is a holiday for me, and I have an appointment at 9 am in town, but once I get back from that… I will likely be starting the audiobook and snuggling with cats while POEing it until my brain bleeds. I should probably pick up the house before I dive into that… because everything needs to be cleaned and vacuumed.
Essentially I have reached the point of the league where I need to start chipping away at the various Challenges. Most of them are not that hard, for example I need to unlock 3 Minor Pantheons, and I have plenty of Divine Vessels to do this. I just have not. I did not even fully unlock the one that I am using because the second trait is not really all that important for my build. However there are some that suck… like for example I am going to have to consume a Divine Orb either by using it directly on an item or using it in a craft. I still do not have that many divine orbs to my name, so each one feels like it is precious beyond words.
I have made a handful of Divine Orb sales over the last few days, and I really dig the Sales History tab that got built into the new trade system. The shield I sold for 2 Div was a crafting experiment where I happened into another Shaper shield and I threw purple juice at it until I hit 5% recover on block. The Cloak of Flame is essentially just the first one that I linked using a Black Morrigan that I recently replaced with a corrupted chest with 5% less Fire Damage taken on it. The Stygian Vise was just me flipping a base that I got as a drop that was Hunter Influenced. The gloves were some failed tree tree crafts that were really well rolled, but not good enough to replace my current gloves. While this is still poverty league, some things still sell pretty well.
I am spending most of my time down in the mines still, because there is a brisk business in fossils and resonators, especially now that you cannot passively earn azurite. I expect these to go up in price the longer the league goes, and essentially right now I cash them in whenever I need more divines to buy something. I guess I should figure out what I actually care enough about to buy going forward. I have started doing some heist in the vague attempt that I can get a good ring base to craft on. My rings are not in the best shape, so that would in theory be the next thing I tackle gear wise. Everything else is good enough… or that the upgrade would be 20+ Divines to replace. You quickly reach a place where all of the cheap and easy upgrades are gone. I should in theory start working on replacing my gems with awakened versions.
Over in Destiny Rising, I bumped my Maru high enough to start doing Grandmaster content, and Ace and I got together last night to run through four of our keys. I played Maru one round and Helhest the next round, and then we alternated as we did a few strikes. We tried Gauntlet Blitz, but it was super painful… and scarred us to the point where we did not want to try it again. I think maybe the Grandmaster mode of the new Blitz encounters are a bit overtuned. We got the one where you fight the giant eyeball and we just could not chip away at its health, and everyone kept dying. Strikes on the other hand felt WAY easier, so we instead did two of those and called it good.
I actually managed to get two exotic weapon mods that matched the perks of the Grenade Launcher that I have been using. This is definitely a massive boon for Maru, but will also pull my wolf up a bit as well since I have swapped to using Sweet Business on him instead of the Grenade launcher. I ran out of resources but at some point I will hopefully pull this the rest of the way to +10 on each of the mods. My next step is probably to push the primary weapon slot grenade launcher to 85, as I really like playing Maru. I know she is the new hotness, but I am having a lot of fun and she lives in this weird happy place between how sturdy Jolder is and how squishy Helhast has been. The on demand shield ability helps a ton when it comes to staying alive during content.
After grouping together I went downstairs and started up Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Senshi on my television and watched several episodes while playing Path of Exile. I had made it pretty far in the series watching the subtitled version, but decided to restart it entirely with the dual language version. I’ve basically decided that unless I cannot get the english language version of something… I am always going to wait for it because seemingly most content gets released in both languages anymore. I know there are purists out there, but really… I would prefer to not read television if I can help it. It also means that if it is a language that i understand, I can play games while watching it. This series is pretty great, though I have to admit I do prefer the Japanese language voice actor for Senshi. The rest of the actors though I prefer the English language interpretation.
Anyways wrapping this up because I have stuff to do, so that I can get ready for my appointment in town at 9. I hope you have a most wonderful day.
The post Oops an Audiobook appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Last night I had quite a lot of fun running around in Destiny Rising with Ace and Ammo. Since we had last grouped Ammo had managed to finish up the main storyline which opened access to a whole slew of new activities. She had not experienced Gauntlet Onslaught, aka the raid at all and after taking down the Stronghold we had uncovered for the pack, we queued one by one through all of the parts of it. We also did all of the new Gauntlet Blitz modes that are being previewed right now, and have guaranteed weapon drops associated with them. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and while we struggled a bit with Issakkis, in finding a group that could do the mechanic… we cleared everything without much issue. We did fail once at breakin, but shifted our strategy to make sure that I was on the first bridge crew, and Ace was on the last bridge crew… because we had someone take a key on that last round and just mill around killing random stuff.
The big highlight of the night is that I finally pulled the Renegade ghost shell on my main account, which drops from the raid. I also pulled a second copy of Izanagi’s Burden, which will allow me to progress that weapon at some point for Tan-2 and Umeko. Though to be honest, if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to be bringing Helhest. I really love Maru the new champion and am working on leveling her up so that she can become one of my mains for progressing content. I needed someone that I really liked that could handle spread shinkas and she does so masterfully. I think Ace and I are going to hang out tonight and do some of the weekly reset content, and maybe tomorrow during the day a bit since I am off due to the holiday. I have business to take care of in the morning but should be home by noon and ready to roll.
Over in Path of Exile, it was a weekend of finishing things up. I ended the weekend with 115 of 115 maps completed, my four voidstones, and all of the map favorites unlocked except Sirius and the Feared. At some point I will run Sirius, but I have not done enough maps to gain the fragments yet. I just bought fragments for the other ones, and I guess I could do the same for Sirius but it did not feel that pressing. I’ve also completed a t17 which unlocked my six socket map device, and have started running proper maps loaded with scarabs and everything. Right now I am alternating between Shipyard and Toxic Sewer, because both are fairly decent maps for the type of gameplay I play… and not too bad honestly for the breach mechanic. They both offer at least some modicum of bottlenecking for the times when you have to defend Ailith.
When I dinged 96, I devoted some time to running through a bunch of boss encounters and I completed the pinnacle fight for Breach, where you fight both Not-Tul and Not-Esh together. I am not sure if it is always Tul and Esh or if you sometimes get the other combinations of the Breachlords that are not Chayula. The story of this Breach league is really interesting and I love how it is essentially setting up the events that ultimately lead to the coming of Xesht in Path of Exile II. I would love it if we got more of these betweener leagues that move the story forward for each league’s content. For example I would love an updated version of Abyss that brings us closer to what it is like in Path of Exile II, because it is SO MUCH better than defacto Abyss that we currently have. The only league I am scared about them changing is Delve, but that is mostly because I love it so much that I do not want them to fuck it up and make it no longer fun for me.
I’ve been slowly working on my build while leveling my character towards 100, and I picked up a Foulborn Red Dream jewel, which is helpful this league for stacking life. As a result I have almost 8000 life, and there are some other things that I could do to push it higher. Pohx showcased a version of his build running 10k life, and I effectively need to swap from Immortal Flesh to a well crafted Stygian Vise to get there. This was a rather costly swap because the jewel itself was 2 divines, and then each of the five tattoos needed was around 70 chaos. That said… I’ve never run Righteous Fire with this much health so it is at least worth doing for the time being. I feel a bit squishier than I have in previous incarnations of RF, and I am not entirely certain what is going on there. It might be that I currently only have 30% reduced crit damage. I am contemplating swapping in a Taste of Hate to also get more phys to elemental conversion.
I am also still working on getting some better gear upgrades. On the Tree Tree I am working on crafting a new pair of gloves, because while my current ones are pretty solid and I have yet been unable to replace them… I could also have way more life on them. I am still fairly proud of the Archedemon Crown and Shaper Shield that I crafted. I bought a new sceptre which I picked up fairly cheaply, and recently swapped over to a Cloak of Flame with more ignite duration, more fire resistance, and 5% reduced fire damage taken which is super useful. At some point I would love to get a good corruption for Annihilation’s Approach boots, but the best one is super expensive thanks to Pohx’s video about them. My amulet and rings are all sort of trash and could be improved greatly, but it really depends upon how much currency I want to pour into them. Now that I am delving around 200 depth reliably and running t16s easily, I can start generating way more currency.
The other thing that I added was a Light of Meaning, buffing fire damage. I lost some damage in the swap to the Red Dream jewel because I had to give up a jewel with fire multi on it. This single jewel swap pushed me well past where I was originally with the damage and took the entire build up into the 1.5 million-ish range, making the boss fights way more comfortable and the general mapping and delving way faster. Right now I have a jewel with Fire Multi and Max Fire Res on it, and swapping that for one with max life would be helpful… but those are running around 10 div at the moment and I do not have that. I tried the Sir Gog method of crafting Jewels with the Tree Tree for a bit, and didn’t have much luck. I have way more luck printing gloves, so I am back on that path for now. Essentially I am looking for gloves with 21% regen, 100+ flat life, 45+ fire res, 58+ dex… and then anything else that is useful life. I’ve gotten close a few times and have sold the failures. If I get a 21% regen fractured roll I might try either fossil crafting or harvest crafting to get the rest of the way there.
I am basically at the point in the league where I need to start chipping away at achievements so I can get my totem pole. The build is stable and reliable, and I can pretty much do any content on it. I am fishing for an Aul in Delve, but have not had much luck. One thing that I have noticed is that I think they have killed the curse on hit rings from Delve, either that or made them extremely uncommon. I’ve cleared a bunch of the elemental nodes down there and not seen a single one yet. I always beeline for these because they also reward elemental fossils, which I find way more useful than any of the loot other than the curse rings. According to the trade site, they still exist… but have either had their rarity cranked or my luck has just been shit. The death of Hexblast Mines though, pretty much decimated the market for these so it is not like they were selling well anyways. I used to throw 20c on each of them in the hopes that maybe one of them would move, but given the deflation of this league it seems like they are all around 1c each.
In other unrelated news… I have been watching Frieren for the last few weeks and finished up season one on Saturday. This show is extremely delightful and I highly suggest giving it a watch if you like that D&D party vibe. I would say it has thematic notes aligned with Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi except it is effectively the tale in reverse. Frieren was the Mage for a party that defeated the Demon King, and a huge part of the show is going on another adventure to somewhat retrace the steps that the first party made. Elves are effectively immortal in this universe, so the march of time just works differently for her… and the decade spent partying together… felt like a brief interaction for her. Through retracing the steps she is effectively realizing what she missed. You would think this would make the show deeply melancholy but it isn’t really, and through retracing the steps… she realizes how special the first journey was. Super charming honestly, and well worth a watch of the first 28 episodes. I will be anxiously awaiting the drop for season 2.
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Good Morning Folks, and I legitimately mean it this time. Yesterday was a pretty awful day seeing as I basically got zero sleep Monday night. I was feeling broadly awful by the time I sat down to blog, and was effectively dead to the world the entire day. I had taken the day off because I had heating and air folks out to do the winter checkup, and spent most of the morning cat napping on the sofa in spurts. I think I must have caught something from the handful of trick or treaters that came to visit, one of which a neighbor that hugged me for way the hell too long… and is probably the Typhoid Mary in this situation. Essentially last night I was in bed by 6 pm, and slept the entire night through minus a few fits and starts and trips to the bathroom due to the diuretic that I am on. I woke up this morning though feeling generally better about the world and everything surrounding it. I am still a bit froggy in the throat and congested, but the worst seems to have passed.
Suffice to say though I remember next to nothing about the day, and spent zero time checking into work and email, so I am sure I will have a deep avalanche of bullshit to dig myself out of. That is the thing that sucks about being management, is that even when you are off for a day… you still need to sort of be engaged or you end up seeing things fall apart around you. So hopefully nothing terribly awful happened yesterday during the day. Essentially I did not make much progress across the board, other than a little bit after one of my cat naps during the morning. I swear if I thought I could have slept the entire night, I would have gone to sleep at 2 pm in the afternoon. I only barely managed to stay awake until 6pm when the evening news was coming on, and at that point I decided it was worth risking it. I woke up around midnight feeling like it was around 3 am or so, but thankfully managed to get back to sleep without much hassle. I might be able to blame some of this on time change, which is always a beast… and is especially so when you are the only person in the house so there is no reality to properly ground you.
I did progress my Atlas a bit further and have now cleared all of the white and yellow tiers of maps, and just started reds. I also ran the Polaric Invitation this morning, and should be getting the Shrek one later today. I am generally way more concerned about unlocking those than dealing with Maven because ultimately there are two easy voidstones behind the bosses associated with red and blue altars. I also need a lot more of the currency associated with them so that I can hopefully get ignite proliferation on my gloves. I currently have fire damage multi on my gloves, which is fine… but I really need that proliferation. I could always go for a Medium cluster jewel, but that requires me to take points away from something else on my tree to make it work. I need to unlock the traits for Brine King so that I can eventually make a shift over to Purity of Fire and Tempest Shield and go block based with 90% fire res, but I am also lacking a Shaper Shield. I need to wait until I get deep enough in delve to start getting good bases before I even mess with that. Shaper Exalts are around 30 chaos so that is always a viable option but I really need more Delve and Harvest juice to funnel into crafting.
For the last few days I have been cursing Beast farmers because none of them seemed to be selling any beasts on the instant trade market. Apparently this was a bug, that kept them from listing beasts and it was fixed this morning. Over night the price of a Black Morrigan fell from around 400c down to under 100c. This meant that I was able to buy one and six link my Cloak of Flames that I had gotten to six sockets and gave appropriate colors earlier in the league. This league seems to be amazing for the general player, who just plays the game and spend the chaos that they get dropped on buying stuff. This league seems to be awful for anyone who used to juice maps and funnel resources into a storefront. Everything is cheap because there is absolutely no friction to sell your stuff. This means I can casually list all of the rejects from Tree Crafting for example, and log in the next morning to a handful of chaos sitting there waiting on me. This is freaking great, and feels so good… but it does have some weird trickle down effects.
Price checkers are deeply confused. I have used Awakened POE Trade for years now, to help me determine if anything that I picked up is actually worth selling. It does a few different things where firstly it attempts to estimate what it thinks it is worth, and it also brings up comps from the trade system in order to show you real world pricing. For example these gloves it thinks are worth as much as 2 divines in a previous league… but in truth because they are easy to craft with the tree are now worth maybe 10 chaos. So I am back to doing the thing that I usually do and just pricing things at fixed points. Has a good fracture? 20 Chaos. Has good stats but no good fracture… 10 Chaos. I mean you can technically craft your gear upgrade with the tree, but I also realize there are going to be a lot of players who are too lazy or too confused by the crafting options to actually do that thing. Granted at some point I am going to just have to get rid of everything that has not sold, but that is fine. I will funnel them into the disenchanter, as I am starting to finally do some shipments.
One of the things that I was seeking from Ritual was a good ArchDemon Crown to craft on. I have pulled a couple of them so far, but sadly they are only item level 77, and I need at least 82 to get level 20 gems on them. I was able to sadly pick up a perfect one from the trade market for 5 chaos… making the entire process of farming Ritual feel meaningless. I am likely going to shift my focus over to Delve and Harvest so I can get some crafting juice to start working on trying to get a 20/20 helm out of it. Once I get a six link helm, I will see a massive improvement in my damage. It was wild how big of a difference swapping over to a six link Cloak of Flames was this morning. It is not like I was struggling health wise, but the noticeable difference in damage intake was wild. I kind of dig how easy it seems to be focused on acquiring this specific thing now… since we have so damned many farming and crafting options. I feel like I might be to the point where I actually could go SSF in this game, because I have enough knowledge to figure out how to get what I need to get… which feels like a massive accomplishment.
As far as Tree Crafting goes… I need to shift to focusing on trying to get upgraded grafts. Other than that I will probably still focus on gloves because those are situationally something that I can still improve greatly. However I guess once I am done crafting I will just start trying to print some interesting uniques. The “Tree Tree” feels like it is one of those things that is amazing early in the game, but the utility of it peters out over time. I guess you can keep focusing on trying to get good crafting bases with the perfect fracture on them, but still… the utility of it diminishes over time. I love it however, and I really hope some version of it goes live, because it feels so good for getting a character up and running for the first time. You can create some very good items that propel you into maps, without needing to either know how to craft them or buy them from trade.
The weird side effect of lots of good rares, and freedom of selling things… means however that loot filters which base things on prices… make it feel like there is no loot in the game. I feel like juicers are going to have to relax their filters a bit because the loot is dropping… the filter is just hiding it because it no longer has the value that it once did.
The post Of Sleep and Beasts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I had a fairly miserable night, and I am hoping at some point today I can take a nap. I was struggling to breathe all day, and coughing quite a bit… then as I prepped for bed the wheezing got pretty awful. So I opted to take a breathing treatment thinking that it might help. This cranked up my system so hard that I pretty much spent most of the evening feeling my heart racing through my ears. I cat napped throughout the evening, and because I am now on diuretics… my bladder kept waking me up. Hopefully tonight I can get some proper rest because today is going to be miserable. Thankfully I had already taken it off, because I have the heating and air folks coming out to do their bi-annual maintenance. Earlier in the evening though, things were pretty great because I ran some Destiny Rising raids with Ace, and pulled the last of the exotic exclusives to the three raid levels.
At this point I believe I am sitting at 65 of 115, and I have switched over to a second tree that is focused on Einhar and Ritual in an attempt to either get a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to six link my cloak of flames. Whenever I get a surplus of fusings, I keep making attempts but so far have been unlucky, Since I am not running a Niko tree at the moment, it means that I am not progressing Delve. I got down to around 100 depth, and it was pretty comfortable, but I just need to grind out the rest of the azerite to make the resists and radius manageable. Resonators are selling, but not so much that they are overwhelmingly good money. Right now single slot ones are selling 2 chaos to 1 resonator, which is fine, and good enough to get some early currency.
What I am honestly making more currency doing is selling near misses that I have been crafting with the tree. I’ve focused on boots and got a good pair, and now am trying to pick up a better pair of gloves. I am looking for either gloves that are ready to go, or gloves that have a max life regeneration fracture on them. I tried my hand at printing amulets and there is just too much going on with those to make anything good. Boots and Gloves have been pretty reasonable, and I might go for a better helmet if I do not upgrade to an elder helm soon. That is really what I need to do, but I have not fought any Elder Guardians yet, and am simply not progressed in my atlas enough to get them.
These are the gloves and boots that I am using that I printed with the tree. Right now I am trying to get ignite proliferation on the gloves, which will help massively for eventually clearing the Breach Fortress encounters much more successfully. The chest that I am using currently is well within the “good enough” realm, especially since my ultimate goal is to replace it with a Cloak of Flames and then pick up the life mastery for not having life on your chest. The weird thing is, I feel like I am in a much more stable state than I normally do at this point in the league. I might start pushing to craft some better rings, if I can figure out the magic formula to spit out amethyst rings with high chaos resistance on them. I did spent my single solitary divine on a reasonable +1 fire gems and damage over time multi necklace, which was worth putting the anoint on it for endurance charges on kill.
I’ve set up my currency branches in a way to where it pretty reliably drops stacks of chaos. Now I wish these were stacks of Divines, but I will take what I can get. Everyone is scared to death of the gold node, that converts all currency to gold… because that would be the one time a Mirror drops and it instead gets converted into a stack of much less useful gold. All in all I am pretty happy with this league, and will continue to grind out progress through the rest of this week. However I think a nap is going to happen soon, or at least one will be attempted.
The post Rough Night appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
