Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Sorry, we were out last week but we ended up with too few folks to feel like it was worth recording a show. This week we are back and talk about the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile. Grace talks a bit about their adventures in Genshin Impact and exploring the realm of the Hydro Archon. Kodra gets featured again on Cracking the Cryptic with a Sudoku and then talks about his adventures at GenCon. Finally, we wrap up the show with an attempt at a spoiler-free discussion of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Good Morning Friends! I am taking a break from leveling in Path of Exile to bang out a blog post. Yesterday at 3 pm my time the servers launched for the Trial of the Ancestors league, and I did not hop in the queue nearly fast enough apparently. It took me about fifteen minutes to actually get in, but once I did things were fairly smooth. Granted I did not risk logging out to the character screen for a bit just to make sure. I did not manage to get as far as I would have liked, but I did make it to Act 5 before calling it a night. Originally I had headed to bed around halfway through Act 4, but it was hot and I couldn’t sleep so I got back up and punished into Oriath.
Something that I did that is a bit out of the ordinary, is that I streamed Act 1 on Youtube. This was my first time really managing a stream through YouTube and for the most part… I think it went pretty well. When I was setting up the stream I did not really understand some of the options, and I think I could have potentially made the chat delay a bit less had I chosen the lower latency option. I had a handful of folks pop in and hang out, which was really cool. I however am not used to streaming… and after an hour of narrating my actions, I needed a bit of a break for my voice. I might try this again later as I start maps.
I’ve not really had much of an opportunity to play with the league mechanic, but you end up getting a silver coin pretty much in every zone. These work much like the rogue tokens do in that you click on them and they teleport you to the Halls of the Dead. From there you can talk to all of the other Karui combatants and enter a tournament match. Essentially you place attackers and blockers on the field and then try and take out the other team’s totems by clicking on them and channeling a bar to take it down. In theory, the attackers can do this for you, but it seemed to go much faster when I took care of it. Essentially I would wipe out a wave of attackers and then channel a totem, and repeat this process until all the enemy totems were down. It seems like it would be a fun mode with a party of friends, so I will have to try that later.
There are a few metrics that I tend to keep track of when I am leveling a new character. For example, the first Chaos Orb drop of the league was in Fellshrine Ruins, and before I had seen my first Chance Orb. I’ve had some really weird luck in this league because I think I have seen seven Chaos drop already before beating Kitava for the first time. I’ve also had a drought of Scrolls of Wisdom forcing me to do the Portals to Wisdom vendor recipe a few times. I’ve also seen way more Orb of Bindings and Jewelers Orbs than I am used to by this point in the league. As far as Vaal side areas go… I’ve only seen one, so that seems a bit weird and is harmful to my needing a Vaal Lightning Arrow. I tried to yolo corrupt the Lightning Arrow I had been using when I saw my first Vaal Orb drop… which raised it by a level and made it so I could no longer equip it. I had to go buy another Lightning Arrow from the Act 1 vendor to keep moving forward.
Since then I have wised up and am now muling four Lightning Arrow gems in my secondary weapons. The first death of the league was in Act 4 in the Mines Level 2. I ended up being too close to a mob with an “on-death” effect that nuked me. So far I think I have taken a total two deaths so far which seems good overall. I’ve also made it through the first Labyrinth and I varied my path a bit. The build that I am loosely following really suggested going for the Perma Onslaught node first before taking the Phasing node in the Raider tree, and then later speccing out of Onslaught and into the Frenzy nodes. I did not do this while leveling originally, so I thought I would give it a shot. It isn’t like I am going to be using many regrets in total so I should have plenty to do the swap at the fourth Labyrinth.
All told things seem to be going fairly smoothly. I’ve had decent luck when it comes to picking up random bows with the right sockets along the way. I am hoping that before long I will be able to start finding some five-link bows and given that I have a decent stash of chromatics built up, I should be able to force it to the correct colors. I am hoping to start seeing some more Vaal orbs, because I would love to swap over to Vaal Lightning Arrow at some point soon just for the additional damage on bosses. I am hoping that by the end of the day I am starting to dip my toes into mapping.
Are you leveling in Trials of the Ancestors? How has your journey gone so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Ancestors League – Day One appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Today the Trial of the Ancestors league in Path of Exile launches at approximately 3 pm CDT, and I am looking forward to getting in and playing my brand new Ranger character. I spent some of last night poking around on the ghosts of leagues past, and more specifically my Storm Brand Inquisitor. During the Crucible league, I gave a few of my past league start characters a bit of a redemption arc, and I feel like this character needs one during Ancestors. Essentially I have no clue how I managed to complete 115 of 115 Atlas maps and spend quite a bit of time playing at the end game… without ever capping my resistances or having anything resembling proper defensive layers. As Ash suggested last night I just “died a lot”, which is true… but I did manage to get the character to level 90. Maybe I will roll a new Inquisitor and try and make a proper version of this build. Playing last night… it certainly is strong in spite of all of its problems.
I’m getting a bit of a late start on this morning’s blog post because I spent the first bit of the morning updating the Path of Exile Tools page. For those who do not know this… the Game Tools menu features a bunch of pages full of curated information about a given game. Sometimes it is woefully out of date like the Destiny 2 page as I have not played the game in quite some time. Essentially when I am actively playing a game I tend to update it with links that I personally find useful, so that I have a single place to get everything that I need. I make it a public page though so that it can help out other players. There are a few pages that I need to switch over to the modern “single page” format like FFXIV, Grim Dawn, and ESO.
Essentially EVERY section of this page got an update, but namely, I fleshed out the Crafting section a bit more. I also added an Economy section, as when I first drafted this page I was not nearly as engaged in the trade market. Previously I only had Zizaran on there for Streamers/YouTubers so I added a few more of my favorites. Basically, it is a much more useful guide than it was before. Some of these tools I play on keeping up on my second monitor while I play through the campaign this afternoon. Act 2 for whatever reason causes me to get all turned around so I am probably going to keep up the cheat sheet for that act for example.
Another thing that happened yesterday is that I tested out Streaming to Youtube for a little bit over lunch. All in all, I think it worked pretty well so I am contemplating streaming this afternoon when I start the league at least for an hour or so. I really have no clue how one links to their stream on YouTube but my guess is through the Live page. When I actually get a broadcast started I am likely going to just post the link to that on Gamepad as I am doing the busywork that comes with starting a stream. Fair warning… I might have a rough day and back out of this as it has been literal years since I last streamed publicly. Mostly I figured that I really have zero connection to Twitch, and given that I post our podcast and the occasional gameplay video to YouTube, it made a lot more sense just to stream there. It isn’t like anyone is going to watch me regularly, because it is highly unlikely that I will stream regularly. For something like a league start though, it might be fun.
Anyways! I am super excited to get started in a brand-new league. I’m hoping that my excitement rubs off on others and we get some folks logging in to check it out over the next few days. If you are playing Path of Exile on PC, feel free to friend me I am BelghastStern. Though to be honest… most group play is sort of butts, so we mostly just share resources in the guild bank.
The post The Calm Before appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
After yesterday’s massive blog post, I figure I am okay to do a bit of a smaller one today. Yesterday was the end of the Crucible League in Path of Exile, and that meant a short downtime and then a bunch of fiddling around to integrate my previous League inventory into my Standard inventory. Essentially what I do is create a folder named after the league and then shove all of my remove-only versions of the tabs into there. For the most part, I don’t bother removing items from those tabs unless I specifically want something. I do however condense most of the valuable things from my currency tab into my main standard currency tab. This meant a lot of last night extracting stacks of things from one tab and shoving them into another tab.
One of the things that I did during a recent sale is picked up a Currency Stash tab for the guild bank. Essentially I figured I would chuck some of my bubblegum currency that overrunneth to help out anyone in our clan that is also playing a given season. So last night when I was cramming things into my own stash, I was occasionally dumping a load of things in the guild stash. I’ve owned the “Dragon’s Hoard” stash MTX for a while now, and this has caused some hilarious results in my own hideout as the amount of raw currency in the guild bank grew. This seems to be the number of items and not necessarily the total market value of items, but I loaded up the bank full of basic useful crafting materials and around 1700 chaos orbs.
Mostly I find myself in a bit of a holding pattern. Before the league ended I did put a bunch of incubators on my gear, one of which is a fairly rare six-linked armor incubator. I am pretty curious to see what sort of armor pops out of that so I might run Crimson Temple or Cemetary until it “pops”. Other than that I am largely just fiddling around waiting for Friday. I need to set back up my Atlas Passive tree because while I did get credit for all 115 nodes, it didn’t copy over my passives at all. One positive is that since I got my third void stone in Crucible, that means I now also have my third void stone in Standard. I have a few youngin characters in Standard that I could fiddle around on, and I certainly have PLENTY of gear to outfit them if I sift through four leagues of remove-only tabs.
Since Standard is sort of a testing ground for my “real” characters later… I might go ahead and do the body armor/helm flip on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and then see what I can do about getting my fourth void stone. I really really hate the Maven fight… mostly I hate the memory game portion of it. I don’t deal enough damage to really skip phases, but it might be worth a few shots at learning the fight better so that maybe just maybe I can actually do it, next league. Since I took the day off… I am contemplating streaming my league start. Given that I am not super attached to Twitch, I have configured OBS to connect to YouTube and am considering streaming there. Not sure if this is actually going to happen but it is at least something I am kicking around in my head. I think the league goes live around 3 pm my time so it would be a late afternoon thing if it happens.
Anyways I think that is good for a blog post. I hope your week is going excellently, and I am hoping the next few days go by smoothly for me and nothing major comes up to halt my enjoyment.
The post Crucible League Has Ended appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
