Hey Folks! I thought I would take a detour from my usual ARPG nonsense to talk about something else I have been playing the last few nights. I realize that practically everyone has been talking about Honkai Star Rail, but I’ve also dipped my toes into those waters. In truth, I started playing shortly after the game launched but apparently did not play long enough to save my progress. This was a little weird to me but it seems you have to complete the entire first tutorial segment… which is not exactly short… before the game actually saves your account. I am not exactly certain at what point this takes place, but my guess is once you’ve defeated the first boss and been presented with the choice of staying on the station or riding the rails.
As a result, I have a much high UID in the sequence than I thought I did, because my account was not actually finalized until over the weekend. I need to install the game on my phone to see how well my roughly five-year-old device handles it. In order to do that I will probably need to uninstall a bunch of junk that I am no longer playing. I have this bad habit of randomly installing games when I am bored… playing them for a day or two and then wandering away like a bored toddler. I think this game will probably work much better as a mobile game than Genshin did for me, given that everything is turn-based and high-speed inputs are crap on a touchscreen device. I remember when Genshin launched there was talk of a Switch version… and I really wish that had come to fruition because I also feel like Honkai Star Rail would be a perfect fit for that device. I suppose I could sort out how to launch it on my Steam Deck because there is very likely a solution for that just like there is for Genshin.
Anyways if you are playing feel free to friend me up: UID – 604908816
I think what I dig the most about Star Rail so far is that it feels like a really good turn-based JRPG. You can definitely see how far Hoyoverse as a company has come since the release of Genshin. Admittedly I have not played Genshin Impact really since maybe the first or second major content area was added to the game. The last region that I explored at length was Liyue and I never really got into the big mountain region that they added after that. I am sure that likely Genshin has also improved its storytelling, but from someone who heavily played that game at launch and then walked away… Star Rail feels like a massive boost in quality levels. The combat and designs are also pretty great and so far I am pretty happy with the default cast of characters that you get handed to you along the way.
I am not very deep into the game and have just landed on the first planet after the tutorial space station. So far I am digging the story enough that I would probably keep playing the game just for that alone. I am also really enjoying the turn-based combat and setting up combos that feed off each other to try and burn through encounters quickly. I do however wonder if part of the reason they decided to go turn-based with this game was so that they could add the ever-present mobile game auto-battle option. I’ve not turned that on so I have no clue how successfully it actually does at managing combat. What I really dig is that the game is a TRUE turn-based, and not that active time battle type system that Final Fantasy games shifted to. You can sit there mulling over your next move for as long as you like and the game does not seem to hurry you along in the process.
Combat is flashy as heck, and this goes for your moves as well as those of the enemies you are fighting. This makes everything feel sufficiently epic, and I really dig the main character this time. Pretty much the entire time playing Genshin Impact I was using a cast of side characters and never actually using the default Traveler. The game gives me enough options in the dialog to feel like I am having some impact on the type of character that I have chosen to be, without getting bogged down doing so. I also really like that I am a melee… but that is probably not going to sit so well with my finger-wiggling friends out there. You can of course create a party NOT including the main character just like you could in Genshin but you will ultimately have to wait until you get enough side characters to make that functional.
I think ultimately my fate with Honkai Star Rail will be determined by if I can manage to play it casually. I do not want to spend any significant sum of money on this game, which means I will be relying on the slow drip of cash shop currency and free pulls in order to get additional characters. I’ve picked up a few new options but so far none of the much coveted five-star champions. I think my frustration with these games in general is the power difference between getting a five-star and sufficing with the much more common four-stars. Since you spend so much time and resources in leveling characters up in a game like this… getting a very powerful character early on really improves your overall experience in the long run.
If I can manage to play this as a casual story-driven turn-based RPG… then I think I will be happy. However, I have this bad habit of trying to go deep into the game as I did with both Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy, and when that happens… I get frustrated by the artificial walls that are put up as barriers that require you to dig into your pocketbook in order to get through them. So long as I can keep the mindset that this is like a Final Fantasy single-player game… I think I might just be okay. It does not really FEEL like an open-world loot-grinding game which probably helps my enjoyment. We will have to see what this game looks like once I have depleted the main campaign for content. I noticed there is a similar system to Genshin in that you can only do so much in a given day without paying for additional turns, so we will see how badly that impacts my progress.
Ultimately this is like every other one of these Gacha games in that they are free-to-start, but likely not free forever. We will have to see just how much FOMO is baked into this particular game, and how hampered I feel by things that I can ultimately gain for free. It isn’t that I mind spending money on games, I just don’t like the sort of spending that is attached to gacha mechanics. I would rather a game like this launch with an honest $50-$100 price point that allows you to feel like you have everything you need in the game. That is unfortunately fundamentally against the design of this type of experience because they are “Gone Whaling”. So instead my mindset has been to try and get as much fun out of them as I can until I hit that paywall and then wander off for a while, maybe to return at a later date to gobble up more free content.
Like I said above, if you are also playing this game feel free to friend me. Not sure if there are any passive interactions between players like there are in something along the lines of Pokemon Go or not. I can’t guarantee to be terribly active because this is absolutely a side game for me right now.
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Hey Folks! I hope you all had a most wonderful weekend. I’m now beginning the weird phase of working at home while my wife is off for summer break. I took advantage of this nonsense by sleeping in until 6:30 instead of my usual 5:30… and as a result, everything just feels “off” this morning. It was a bit of a busy weekend, but when I did play games I spent some time playing Last Epoch. Coming up on the 25th Eleventh Hour Games is going to be dropping the 0.9.1 patch… which I mistakenly called 1.0 in a video I recorded. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of the game and I spent some time playing captain toilet brush, seen above. While I love the feel of “mapping” on the Paladin, fighting bosses as a melee character that has its entire damage centered around having a big third hit… feels awful. So this sent me back to the drawing bin in trying to find a comfy new character to spend time on.
When I set aside Last Epoch for diving back into Path of Exile at the launch of the Crucible League, I was spending a lot of time playing a Beastmaster Primalist character. More specifically this was a character that I had intended upon doing the “Squirrel Build” where essentially you get a unique helm called the Herald of the Scurry and then it transforms every wolf that you can summon into two squirrels. If my calculations are correct it will mean that I have an army of twelve squirrels following me around and shredding my enemies. The only problem with this is… that in spite of spending a lot of time on my level 90 Necromancer farming for the helm… I’ve never seen one drop.
Over the weekend I recorded some gameplay of my build in its current state doing a monolith… or map as I will likely keep referring to it. So essentially I have focused my entire passive tree on making my wolves stronger and making them deal a lot of bleed damage and then I run around with a pack of six of them. I don’t have an active skill really, and the way I deal damage is whenever I leap it fires off an Upheaval when I land. However, my Upheaval is specced in such a way as to generate a totem that fires off six upheavals in a row. So essentially I leap around making totems and then use Warcry and Frenzy Totem to buff my doggos who are actually doing the damage for me. I had to go so far as to remove Upheaval from my bar because I kept hitting it periodically and screwing things up. Instead, I have Tempest Strike on my bar, which mostly sucks… but it keeps me from resetting the Upheaval Totem duration.
I have most of the key points in the build at level 74 and am largely just “gilding the lily” when it comes to putting additional points in to slowly flesh things out. It’s a fun build, but also a fairly squishy one. I’m hoping to improve that over time as I get better gear, but right now I am just trying desperately to avoid getting hit while leaping around and letting my doggos shred things. I think in theory the build will improve feel-wise when I can finally get a Herald of the Scurry and double the total number of minions that I have on the field. Essentially my goal right now is to work my way to empowered monoliths and then spend all of my time in the second one… Black Sun… until I get a helmet to drop.
Alternatively, I could just log into the Necromancer and see how it feels now, and farm Empowered Black Sun until I get the helm. Admittedly I have not played the Necro at all since coming back to Last Epoch over the weekend. That might be a good option to see what I think about the character and the current state of that build. I mean I enjoyed it quite a bit while I was leveling it, and I am already in Empowered Monoliths… and I think I will probably have a much easier time GETTING TO Empowered Monoliths on the Beastmaster if I have the helm. Anyways… Last Epoch is still a lot of fun and it was pretty fast for me to get back into the swing of things there. I’m looking forward to this week’s patch and seeing what all gets tweaked and changed. More specifically I am curious what new content gets added to the game as that has been teased and potentially today we will get some answers in the last of the hype week blog posts.
I hope you all have a great week and for those in the United States… a good lead-up to Memorial Day weekend.
The post Leaping Doggos appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I spent some more time yesterday tweaking and leveling my Wintertide Brand Occultist. I’ve dialed up the defensive layers a bit and I have a Watcher’s Eye that should also help whenever I can get the free passive points to allocate a jewel socket for it. This is never going to be a bossing character for me, so with that in mind, I am largely leaning into comfortable mapping clears while upping the survival. Essentially I think my next play is to pick up another strength travel node, which should allow me to drop a +30 strength node and then use that point to allocate the socket for the Watcher’s Eye.
I had a Dawnbreaker laying around in my vault that I picked up off Searing Exarch, and I decided to give it a spin. Sure I lost some damage by dropping the caster shield with +1 to cold gems, but I also gained a number of defensive layers baked into the shield alone. Essentially what this is doing is splitting some portion of the damage I am taking and then making it resolve against my Fire Resistance. Sure my Fire Resistance is not amazing and nothing like the 90% that I have on my Juggernaut… but it is enough to sort of blunt the blow for all other attacks a bit. The shield alone is worth almost 2000 armor by itself and has a small amount of life baked into it along with a 46% block chance. While it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically… so far I am thinking the Dawnbreaker is helping.
I recorded another video yesterday afternoon of me playing the class and talking through some of the decisions that I am making. Now this video was recorded before I made a number of tweaks like the Dawnbreaker last night but still shows the general state of the build. If you want to look at the state of my tree here is a POB, but note that I currently am muling a new wand with my Juggernaut to level it because I can handle crucible progress so much faster with that character. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty happy with where things are so far. Sure it is weaker than most of my other builds but I am actually enjoying running around with Wintertide Brand again. Would I start that build in another league over RF Jugg? Probably not. That does not mean however I am not enjoying myself.
Now that the weather is warmer, my wife has been spending a lot of time out in the backyard in the evenings reading. Around 8 pm I decided to go out and check on her, since often she comes in way earlier than that, and found that Greybie had decided to hang out as well. He’s been coming around to the backyard more often lately and it is pretty great. So I spent about an hour out there petting him and trying to coax him up onto my lap. He is still a little too skittish for me to actually lift him up and place him there… and expect him to do anything other than run away. When not actively getting attention he would set up shop underneath one of our chairs and just lay there.
All the while we were back there Tripod was over on the concrete patio off our kitchen… some 15 feet away. Greybie and Tripod seem to tolerate each other, but I am not certain they are actually friends yet. She kept coming closer to us… like she wanted to come over and get attention as well and then would retreat back under the patio table rubbing up against the chairs. I feel like she is on the brink of being more sociable, but I am not entirely sure how to tip her over. Our thought is maybe if she watches us petting Greybie… and him being seemingly happy about it… that she might realize that she too can get love and attention. I would honestly love it if Greybie set up shop in our backyard as well because at least knowing those two cats are relatively safe and happy would be a load off my mind. He lives somewhere down the cul de sac but given that he spends MOST of us time in the orbit of our house… I don’t think he has another family.
I really need to start taking my Steam Deck out into the backyard with me and playing something while just chilling with the feral cats. Last night was delightful but other than when I was actively playing with Greybie I was somewhat bored. You can only screw around on your phone so much before it is no longer interesting.
The post Dawnbreaker and Backyard Greybie appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Yesterday I went down yet another rabbit hole of trying to figure out what exactly I wanted my exit condition to be for the Crucible League. The problem with Path of Exile is there is a nigh endless amount of goals that you can have, and at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to complete none of them. A Diablo III season is far more clear-cut in that you have a single seasonal journey with fixed rewards at the end of it, and a clear “finished” point where it is pretty safe to walk away from. With Path of Exile it all depends upon your core activities, and this league for better or worse has been a league of me revisiting old builds and trying to make them work. I did this with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and then again with Explosive Arrow Champion. Then there was the somewhat meme build of Explosive Raging Spirits where I largely created the build entirely around a single pseudo-eight-link that I found in my travels. It worked well enough, but I also didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep the build around for long.
So yesterday I set my sights on completely changing this character up and revisiting one of my first builds that I fell in love with… Wintertide Brand. Now my first Wintertide character was actually a botched attempt at Righteous Fire. I really enjoyed the brand gameplay and I leaned into that rather than actually transitioning to RF when I should have. More modern Wintertide brands tend to focus around the Occultist ascendency, and it is easy enough to respec my Necromancer into that as a result I set out doing just that yesterday with increasingly misnamed BelNecroSrsly. I did not necessarily follow a guide for this transformation but instead went out to my favorite source for the research of builds that are actually being played… POE.ninja. If you set the search parameters to Occultist and the main skill to Wintertide brand, you can see a rundown of what is actively being played.
Now the highest dps version of the build had a Mageblood and a corrupted Loreweave… so I decided that I needed to set my sights a little lower than that. The next one was running Chaos Innoculation which again… not exactly something that I wanted to mess with for the time being. Eventually, I decided to go with the level 90 build for a character called Frosty_Lady. I figured that I could tweak that to my tastes which gives you a POB that looks a little something like this for my current path forward. ultimately I was trying to make as few changes as possible so essentially I needed to swap out my gloves because they were minion damage based, but there really was nothing else special about those. I needed to pick up the remaining resists that I needed off my Necklace since I would be dropping the unique I had been using for SRS. The key unique to make the build feel good was a corrupted Rime Gaze with a Labyrinth Enchant on it giving Wintertide Brand +4 Maximum Stages. Lastly, I swapped out and sold my expensive SRS shield for a more standard Spirit Shield with +1 levels to all Cold Spell Gems. Technically I spent probably 3 Divine Orbs assembling the specific components of the build but then made back way more than 3 Divine Orbs selling the gear that I was using for Summon Raging Spirits.
I have some problems to work through but for the most part, it feels really good clearing maps… considerably less good clearing bosses. I’ve gotten very used to the Juggernaut and Champion that can largely laugh off most incoming damage. This is absolutely a squishier build as a whole, and there are some tweaks that I would probably do to make it feel better. Firstly I would like to get my Armor and Regen up considerably higher. Next, I would love to figure out a way to stack some blocks considering that is not yet a really viable means of defense. The only reason why it feels as good as it does is because cold damage is in itself a defensive layer. Wintertide Brand slows and ultimately freezes mobs around you making it so that they are either not dealing damage to you… or are moving slow enough that you can easily avoid them.
My defenses are honestly pretty puny at the moment. I only have roughly 3500 health and a little over 600 regeneration which combined with only 69% physical damage reduction from armor and a measly 24% block chance… and all of my Energy Shield going to Eldritch Battery… means that when I get hit I get hit it lands extremely hard. My resists are also not amazing… because while capped I don’t have much that is increasing my maximum resistances. So essentially I need to evaluate my tree a bit to see where I can drop some damage and gain some additional life and defensive layers. This will never be a bossing character for me, so in theory I mostly just want to make it feel good for mapping purposes, and as it stands Wintertide Brand already decimates trash mobs so I can afford to lose some damage to gain some a bit of comfort level. I am sure I will probably record one of my dumb videos showing the current state of the build.
After fiddling around with the Wintertide build and getting functional, I decided to spend some time clearing out influenced maps that I had sitting in my bank. This ultimately led me to acquire another set of Shaper Fragments. So I decided to test my mettle against Shaper on my Explosive Arrow Champion, and much to my surprise, it was way easier to do the fight than on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I managed to get through the fight without any deaths and acquired the last Uber Elder fragment that I was missing. So here we are… organically arriving at being able to potentially attempt defeating the memory of The Elder in the Shaper’s Realm that has been haunting my sidebar for a month.
For this fight I opted to go back to my Juggernaut, and took a few deaths in the process but ultimately defeated “Uber Elder” which means I acquired my third void stone… and now all of my maps drop significantly higher. I think the lowest level map can drop for me now is 14, giving me a much wider range of things for farming purposes. I have to say that mechanically on some levels the fight was easier than doing The Shaper or The Elder by themselves. I took deaths in part because I was not prepared to dodge specific mechanics happening at the same time. I think given enough iterations of this fight, I could probably go deathless once I got used to everything. Mostly my key problem with boss encounters in Path of Exile is that they take so much effort to be able to even attempt. If I could run them back to back I would ultimately memorize the patterns and get really good at them. However, doing these once every few weeks… means I lose a lot of progress each time I drop into the encounter because I am going to be rusty each time.
Ultimately though I guess I now know what I have to do to get through this league. I am going to set my sights on beating The Maven encounter, which admittedly feels much easier to get to than Uber Elder given that you just have to chain-run invitations until you get enough fragments to face her. At this point, I am at 8 of 10 fragments so I should be able to burn through this pretty quickly if I actually set my sights on accomplishing it. My hope is that I can take her down by exercising the fact that I have six portals… because I sincerely doubt I will successfully complete a memory game phase. Having three void stones means I am officially further along in this league than I have ever been before. It just feels like Uber Elder was such a pain in the ass that I have to get through Maven now just to finish the job.
I also plan on devoting some time to making Wintertide feel a bit better. Feeling confident enough to tackle this mission is its own accomplishment in my progression through Path of Exile as a whole. I guess the next major achievement would be to go after a build of my own design, without specifically following anything active in the meta. I still feel like I am years away from that accomplishment even though I am well over a thousand hours into this game now. I have no real clue WHY Path of Exile is so engaging for me, but it feels like it is this puzzle that I must solve and each time I clear something new… it uncovers a whole series of other puzzles to be solved just beneath that surface. I will probably spend some more time researching various Wintertide builds on POE.Ninja in order to see how they are solving the survival challenges so that I can devise my own path forward.
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