Good Morning Folks. I’ve made a few more attempts at getting back into Last Epoch, but I find myself in this really odd place. Namely, I do not have enough gold, and am not generating enough gold, to keep buying new tabs for the stuff that I am farming. I could restrict my filters further, but I already am mostly only showing things that are worth picking up. I’ve made it to the point in my build where I either need to just hang it up or farm super hard to perfect my loot. With everything else that I find myself going through, I am leaning way closer to just hanging it up at the moment and calling myself done with Season 4. I’ve made a few more attempts at Aberroth, and there is a phase that I always end up struggling with a bit, and I am just not sure if I have the mental fortitude or general dexterity right now to push through it. As such, I think it might be time for me to just back away from this season. I had a lot of fun, and I got most of my usual stuff accomplished, but similar to the fact that I don’t really enjoy Uber Bosses in POE… this might just be the limits of how much I care about Last Epoch.
As such, I have been farming quite a bit of random map and delve content in Path of Exile, because my build is immortal enough that I can mostly turn my brain off. This is the level of engagement that I need right now, something that is interesting and passes the time, but does not require a lot from me. I knocked out a few more seasonal challenges and upgraded my totem pole a few times. Right now, I am chipping away at a few really long grinds, while also trying to hit level 100. I am roughly halfway through 99 at the moment, and as such am already running Omens of Amelioration just in case I take a random death. I’ve been running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual map strat that is generating a large number of them just in case, and when I finally hit 100, I am sure I will just cash in any that I have lying around on the market.
Thirty-Four challenges tend to be where I stop every league, and I am at this point, I think 3 challenges away from hitting that. If I never make it back and do any more challenges in this league, I would be happy enough with this totem as my final mark for the league, especially given everything I am going through right now. I know at some point soon, the whole POE2 machine will fire up, and I will start getting interested in whatever is happening with 0.5. I also know that there is a D4 expansion dropping in May that might garner my attention. So in theory, I should probably push through and knock out whatever I can knock out while my focus is available. Everything in my life feels so up in the air right now, and will probably be that way for at least the next four months as I go through cancer infusions.
One thing that is super interesting that just came out is a brand new tool for Path of Exile that essentially replaces all of the third-party tools that folks generally use. It has a price checker, an item recoloring tool, and a way to edit your filters in real time on the fly while you are mapping to add or remove items or shift tiers. I’ve only just started playing with it, but I can see entirely moving away from Awakened POE Trade, especially if this also starts supporting Path of Exile II. The above video is a deep dive into the features of the tool from the developer and his friend, the streamer Aero. Probably the coolest functionality is to be able to shift what tier something is on the fly, which is especially useful if you might care about an item that the general filters would not. I tend to run my filters way too lax for my own good, because I don’t want to miss anything I might at some point care about. However, if I can shift them on the fly, I might actually start using a tool like this to ratchet things down.
One thing I think I should warn you all is that I do not really know what the future of this blog is going to be in the coming months. My life has been turned upside down. “Chemo Brain” is most definitely a thing I am experiencing, and as a result, I am having a bit harder time concentrating and banging out a blog post than I used to. I’ve already had way more gaps in posting than I have in literal years. This is probably going to continue, and I will keep posting whenever I think I can knock something out in a reasonable manner, that does not upset the delicate balance of everything else I have going on in my life. Hopefully, you will be along for this very intermittent journey.
The post More Challenges and a New Tool appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the official launch of Midnight, and I am always shocked at how much of a difference this seems to make. My rotted “deluxe edition” brain feels that if there is a head start… I am probably going to pay the extra in order to enable it. However, there seems to be a large volume of people who do not do this thing, either because they cannot afford the difference or because they are diametrically opposed to the practice. So I will never be shocked at what a difference things make when the flood gates actually open and all of the players show up. All of the zones were way the heck more active last night, but shockingly, the most cogent change was the fact that general chat was way more hopping with activity. It’s been disturbingly quiet the entire time I have been playing, and even the few times I attempted to ping chat for a rare mob… I got crickets.
This morning I had popped in to check on World Quests and saw someone calling out that this dragon named Ravengerus was up and that they were going to take it down. I had attempted this the other day, and even attempted to summon folks to my aid… with zero luck but today… we got the critical mass of players needed to take it down. It dropped nothing useful, and also, seemingly, the rare kill quest is bugged because this thing did not count towards it… nor did any of other named mob spawns that I have taken down count. I like killing big monsters, and I will always be down for taking down a silver elite, no matter if I am likely to get loot from it or not. I took a screenshot in large part so those who have not been around WoW, can see how much better the ground markers and attack visualization are. While this is not the pixel-perfect nature of Final Fantasy XIV, it is so much better than the “every edge is fuzzy” problem that we had for years. Fights are way easier to do because it is so much easier to actually avoid attacks that are avoidable.
Between World Quests and Rare mobs, and a few hunts, I have gotten my item level up to 225, which includes a 220 blue or better in every slot except for my belt and my boots. I picked up a 201 belt for cheap off the Auction House, because I had so little luck with belt drops that I just could not seem to find anything better. I’ve gotten belts to drop from Rares, but it is always a cloth belt. Similarly, I have gotten multiple pairs of boots to drop but they are always Mail, so it makes me wonder if there is some sort of bug happening in the smart loot system. Apparently, you can only get two Veteran rewards from weekly hunts, because the first two “hard” hunts that I completed rewarded a trinket and an amulet, and then all of the others after that rewarded a generic green bag of loot. The 246 trinket hat I got came from the Singularity quartermaster for achieving a specific reknown rating and then completing one of the tower defense things in the Voidstorm. I need to probably grind out dungeons or delves to see if I can get a damned pair of boots, since no one seems to be crafting them and selling them for a reasonable price on the Auction House either.
I also went through the process of unlocking the Haranir, which is, by far, the easiest Allied race that I have seen. Essentially, it just involves completing the campaign in Harandar and then talking to the NPC near the portal in Silvermoon. I create a baby Navi/Troll thingy that is a Druid in large part because the most interesting thing going on for the race is their Druid forms. I played through the tiny bit of story that represents a starter zone, and then moved to the portion where I go through the motions and choose a campaign to go through. I opted to go for Battle for Azeroth because it has been a while since I have seen those zones, and I particularly enjoyed the main story quest for The Horde. At some point, I will need to get an invite to Facepull since I rolled this on The Scryers. I know guilds are both cross-server and cross-faction these days, but I prefer to keep my horde with my horde friends in Facepull and then all of them also on The Scryers, whereas Argent Dawn is for Alliance.
Other than that, I have been making daily trips into Dune Awakening to farm for batteries. I did quite a bit of this during the double resources event over the weekend, and now I am mostly just making a bit lap around the central rocky area that my base is located in. I am up to 17 days of power currently, but keep dipping in to do this to keep extending this time frame. The most recent Coriolis storm seemingly ruined some of the easy battery spawns in my area. However, there are still at least three spawns that I can farm relatively easily, and I dip in periodically to do so whenever I think about it. I am not done messing around with Dune, but I know that my focus is going to be really fraugh after this Friday when the Path of Exile league starts. My base to the south is going to run out of power, though, and I have warned the others on the server to raid the resources if they want anything.
There is a pretty constant trickle of information coming out ahead of the League start this Friday, and I am all on board with it. I’ve decided that I am, in fact, rolling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as my first character, in large part because I really want to get into the endgame as fast as I can so I can start exploring the reworked Atlas. I do want to build a Holy Hammers character and maybe a Guardian minions character, but those will come later once I have a stable financial base in this league. It seems like Kodra is going to be rolling some sort of Holy Strike character, and I will be interested in seeing how that works. Additionally, I have convinced my sibling Ace to give this a go, and they are going to probably be rolling an SRS Necromancer since it is pretty easy to get up and running. I would love to be there to support them as they need gear, but also know that they are deeply aligned with SSF ideology, so it will be a balancing act. I think Carth is going to be giving this league a shot as well and has a friend who will need to be invited to the clan. If we are mutuals and you play POE, you are always welcome in our nonsense.
The post Where Are The Boots? 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.
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Good Morning Folks! Well… I guess I am back in World of Warcraft for a bit. I originally installed it as a bit of a lark, to see what Housing was up to, and wound up getting back into the swing of the game. I missed the majority of the Valentines day event, but I did manage to get a few runs in, which was enough to get this shiny new mount that was apparently available this year. I am missing all of the other mounts, unfortunately. I never got my love rocket, and I never got the broom that they added either. This is not bad luck, however, for having run exactly two queues of the event, I was mostly queueing to see if I could get any of the new housing items, but alas, I did not. However, queuing for this event got me back in the swing of combat, which only further devolved me into the flow of the game. While I have been gone, though the game has been cooking, and it seems like World of Warcraft is in pretty good hands with the current dev team.
I, of course, did what I have always done… and ran a bunch of old raids for gear attempts. I remembered at one point they made it so you could collect transmog appearances from any role, not just the one you were currently on. This makes running these old raids feel significantly better, and all of the tokens that you get for gear sets are warbound and can be dropped in the warband bank. I will be using this later to help fill out missing set pieces on other characters. Yesterday I made quite a bit of progress on Warrior sets, having completed the Destroyer set and the Onslaught set, and then gained a few more pieces of Wrath. There was a time when I had the full Onslaught set, because I wore it back in the day, but apparently, the boots and bracers had gone missing from my bank before the appearance collection became a thing. I need to start working on the Warlords of Draenor sets, because they all looked pretty cool for warriors.
Running all of this content means I am now swimming in old materials and gear pieces. One of the points of realization that I learned in Guild Wars 2 is that the economy there is stable enough that I should really just sell everything and then buy back whatever I happen to need at any given time. Similarly, in Path of Exile, I have actually learned to really enjoy being a vendor and selling stuff to other players. Since World of Warcraft has a much updated Auction House system, I thought I would try my hand at being a vendor here. This largely involved installing and configuring TSM and the tool that stays active in the background and updates the auction house data. All in all, I think it was mostly a success, and on my first day of being a vendor, I sold something in the neighborhood of 28k in gold. This is a pittance compared to the gold that Stargrace brings in regularly, but she is also selling on all of her characters and has done this for a decade now. I am mostly only running auctions on this one character.
In other news, on my Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven, I finished The Ringing Deeps and am trying to figure out how to get the quest starter that sends me to the next zone. All told, the story for the zone was pretty good once I managed to get into it. This was part of why I bounced so hard at the launch of War Within, is that I got to this zone… which, quite honestly, the whole Earthen thing should have been the most “me” story ever, given how much I love Dwarves in general. However, I just struggled to attach to it, and I maybe should have just critical pathed the story rather than trying to do every single side quest in the entire zone. I have been playing too many games that are not World of Warcraft, and got used to the concept that I needed to do side content to progress, whereas this is more like FFXIV in that the side content is entirely for flavor only, and you will get enough experience by largely just doing the Main Story.
Another thing that I got caught up in was doing a meta achievement called Two Minutes to Midnight, which requires you to farm up nineteen rare bosses during the Midnight pre-event that is happening in Twilight Highlands. I was largely obvious to this whole thing and started fairly late in the night… which meant that I stayed up a bit longer than I normally would have yesterday. Essentially, it seems like the Twilight Highlands are on a clock, and every five to ten minutes, a new rare boss spawns, and they all spawn in sequence. So by hopping on this train, I was ultimately able to catch all nineteen of them. The only reason why I did not go to bed at my normal time… is that I did not want to try and coordinate hopping back on the train at exactly the right time. I still wrapped up by 10:30, which is not the end of the world, but it was a lot of flying around the zone and button mashing until I got out the other side.
The benefit of doing this event during prime time is that the bosses and adds go pretty quickly. You have a ten-minute clock that starts when the event spawns, and you have that long to kill enough mobs to trigger the event, then also take down three mini bosses, and the ultimate rare boss, before the timer is up. Each of the encounters has the chance of dropping a set of purple armor and various other resources, but I don’t entirely understand what to do with them yet. Hopping on the train, I was able to farm up every gear slot, plus a cloak, and a ring… and in theory, if the dailies are still available tonight, I will try and knock those out and hopefully pick up the other ring, and an amulet so that this character is relatively well geared going into midnight. Apparently, I purchased a cloak that was not flagged as part of the set piece… which seems like a bug… but if I have more resources left over I will purchase the correctly named cloak.
So at roughly 10:15 last night, I got my last named mob kill and finished the meta achievement. If I had been paying attention to this more I would have tried to run this on multiple characters. I remember an event like this happening in Silithis prior to Battle for Azeroth that effectively worked the same way. I was out there constantly to farm up full sets of gear for almost all of my Horde characters. Maybe it is a miracle that I came in at the last moment and got exactly one set of gear, because otherwise I probably would have burned myself out massively. Grinding is one of those things that I seem to be exceptionally good at, and when there is something like this going on, I can seem to put my head down and push through it. However, once I am finished… I have usually burnt myself out to the point where I just don’t want to play the game anymore, once I have lost that burning focus that was driving me. I seem to have a hard time finding a new focal point once I have accomplished my goal.
As to why I did any of this? A mount of course. You get this shiny new mech suit if you manage to take down all nineteen mini-bosses that are part of this event. I know the head start for the expansion is right around the corner, but supposedly, this event hangs around until the 2nd when the expansion fully launches. I think I will probably be spending that time trying to get through the main story quest rather than grinding up additional characters. I think I have the desire to actually try and play this expansion when it drops now. It is weird how I have gone from logging in on a lark to actually starting to mainline the damned game again. Damn you, Blizzard, for getting your hooks in me at least temporarily. I fully expect to drop this at least for the short term when Path of Exile Mirage launches on the sixth, but given how much I seem to bounce between games right now, and how I played Destiny Rising the entire time during the last league… I might find room for Warcraft as well.
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