gearing

Thirty Million Gold

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Good Morning Folks. I am still struggling a bit with this respiratory crud, but am doing better enough to be able to function and actually work today. If it drags on, I will end up going to the doctor but given that I doubt there is anything that they can do other than put me on a dose pack of prednisone… which will royally fuck with my sleep patterns… I have been trying to avoid that. I mostly spent the night playing Diablo IV downstairs while snuggling with cats. Gracie was doing the thing in my office where she refused to not be the center of attention, and when this happens it is generally better if I go down to the couch where she can snuggle in my arms while I am playing, rather than me trying to hold her with one hand while using the computer with other other. In wild news… the last few mornings I have been able to pet the super skittish feral black cat that hangs out in front of the house with Greybie.
Last night I managed to finally have some luck with the trade channel and picked up a set of Ancestral Tibault’s Will for 30 million gold. That seems like a nonsensical number, but I had over 200 million and nothing really to do with it… so it effectively has no value to me. I opted to throw on a non-Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which at least allowed me to have the fully functional build, and this more or less has allowed me to bump up to Torment IV and farm the world content comfortably. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I ran Varshan again and finally got an Ancestral version of that helmet to drop, so in theory I have Ancestral of better of everything that is required for the build. I still cannot quite do bosses on T4… but they melt on T3. Now it is just a matter of getting better versions of all of the uniques and maybe hopefully getting a few mythics so I can bump up to that version of the build. I am also hunting for a better pair of boots with more movement speed on them.
The biggest challenge that I am going to face right now is that most of the final set of challenges involve running content on t4 while having a piece of Chaos Armor equipped. I am not really certain which slot I can theoretically sacrifice to the achievement gods in order to make that happen, but I will do some testing. I need to run a few more Infernal Hordes to do the chaos rifts inside of them and also farm some T3 or higher Helltide in order to finish out the next to the last step in the seasons journey. I am on the very last step of the Reign of Chaos quest chain, and I am working on the last section of the Battle Pass. In theory within the next week I will have milked every last bit of this season that I really need to, and be able to walk away happily knowing that I pretty much did everything I could do.
In other news, 0.3.1 dropped in Path of Exile II, and with it comes the significant rework of the endgame and removal of towers as the primary means of adding content to maps. I ran a few maps as a test and for the most part they seem way less rippy than they were previously. I am still largely running t14 content and it seemed pretty easy overall. I have not played for about a month now, so who knows what other previous patches could have added to this feeling. It seems like maybe they have not removed ALL of the content that they intended to remove because it seems like Expeditions are still showing up as icons on the map, whereas I thought ALL additional content would be added by the Tablets instead. Additionally it seems like the whole corruption thing stays on the atlas, which makes sense given that is how you unlock most of your atlas passives.
While the overall density and rippyness of the map was lowered, it did not necessarily feel like the rewards were lowered as a result. I ran a few maps and pulled quite a bit of currency and what felt like more uniques than normal from them. Granted two of them came from a Rogue Exile, but I walked out of the map with five uniques which seems pretty solid for a 4 mod t14 map. I am not really sure if I am going to dip my toes back into the game at this point, because once I unattach from a League in Path of Exile, it sort of feels hard to get back into the swing of things. My mind has adjusted to Diablo IV at this point and I am probably going to ride that into the ground, or at least until I give Legion Remix a shot next week. I think yesterday I might have just been in a low point, so apologies for whining about life on the blog. I put together a shelving unit which felt like significant progress so that probably cheered me up a bit. I am feeling better about my existence in the world today… even though the country seems to be burning around me. The post Thirty Million Gold appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Yon Bus of Struggle

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I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.
I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.
In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.
Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.
Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.
In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.
Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day. Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading. The post Yon Bus of Struggle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Gearing My Mercenary

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Good Morning Folks. I promise I had zero intent to just nope out of blog posting for an entire week… but that is pretty much what happened. One of the early rules that I set aside for myself is that I would never work on my birthday if I could help it. As a result I take it off every year, in this year it landed in the middle of the week. We also had Juneteenth off as a federal holiday… which caused me to also take Friday off. Then if I was taking that much of a the week off… might as well take Monday and Tuesday off as well. So essentially I scope crept my way into an entire week of vacation, during which we did several home improvement projects and also… got sick. While we have not taken tests… because all of ours were expired… symptomatically it has seemed a lot like the current strain of Covid. During that time I attempted to play some Path of Exile and made solid progress… and get silly amounts of enjoyment out of running around with my Merc, Einhar, and Huck in an impromptu party.
Right now I am essentially running two trees, with my third completely unspecced at the moment. I will probably go some sort of Harbinger tree for that one. Essentially I have a right side tree where I focus on Niko and Delve, with Harvest crafting, and all of the good strongbox and shrine nodes in addition to the Blue Altars. Then on the left hand side I have a way more rippy tree with perm Delirium, Einhar, Huck, Ritual, Beyond, and Orange Altars. Essentially what determines which tree I am running is how much I want to Delve at that very moment. The rippy tree is largely designed to try and farm up either an Omen of Connections for a Black Morrigan for the purpose of crafting six linked gear. The Niko tree is mostly about getting crafting options either through Delve and Resonators or Harvest rerolls. The general idea behind both is to be as self sufficient as I can be, because while I do actively trade… I don’t necessarily like spending currency on things.
I’m honestly pretty proud of myself, because I have been crafting a lot more items than normal. The introduction of Shaper and Elder Exalted orbs has been a game changer for me. Normally I would shop for a cheap base that was influenced to begin crafting on, but now… I can set aside good bases while delving and mapping and then throw an exalt on it to start the crafting process. At the moment Elder Exalts seem to be going for around 10 chaos, and Shaper Exalts 20 chaos… so pretty reasonable. Since I can get them from the exchange, I also do not have to rely on trying to find someone willing to trade me a relatively low value item. The longer you go into the league… the harder it is to find anyone willing to stop what they are doing for less than a stack of chaos. Even then… a lot of players only want to stop the action for divs. Essentially I crafted the shield and gloves by doing Harvest Reroll Life until I hit something reasonable, and the helmet by doing Harvest Reroll Fire. I went through SO MUCH purple juice… and I still have a backup helm that I am working on to try and potentially craft a 20/20 gem helm with.
Honestly most of my trading… has been for gearing my Mercenary. I am running a tri-elemental crafted bow with around 1100 dps and then every other slot is a unique of some sort giving some benefit. Essentially the idea behind the build is that all damage freezes, shocks, and chills and then using Pyroshock Clasp to convert 15% phys to Fire and 15% phys to Lightning. So my Merc is Chilling, Freezing, Shocking, Igniting, and Scorching everything that I am engaged with while converting 30% of mob Physical damage to Elemental. Then good ole Leer Cast gives me and my Merc a 50% damage boost. I was basically tipped off to this course by Llarold from Path of Evening, and it seems to work well for me given that I am mostly using bow mercenaries. To make things a bit more clear here is a full listing of all of the uniques and links to the POE Wiki. I was using Gruthkul’s Pelt for a bit but noticed it was keeping my Merc from casting certain abilities. This was not the case early on, but I think something might have been patched to make the “your spells are disabled” line to actually apply to Mercenaries. The boots are another slot that might be worth evaluating because Scorched is only useful for elemental builds, and you might benefit more from dropping brittle ground or something like that.
As far as Mercenaries go, I am largely using one of two archetypes… either the Sniper shown above, or Manyshots which focuses on Icicle Rain and Ice Shot. I really like the Sniper and essentially at this point I am fishing for an “Infamous” version of either the Manyshot or Sniper, with a good skill loadout. Not all Mercs are created equal and while I found a higher level Manyshot, it did not have the Icicle Rain ability that makes it so effective. I should probably start exiling Mercs in the hope that maybe it will cause the bow mercs that I actually care about to spawn more frequently. For the most part having a level 83 Merc means that it stays alive 99.9% of the time. There are a few cases where detonate dead or other onerous area of effect spells will kill them, because they have no AI to avoid them.
As far as progression goes, I have completed the story version of the new boss fights which has permanently changed my Atlas to be this Zana themed incarnation. On Saturday I finished my 115 of 115 and got my four void stones, and now I am just working on unlocking the last few map favorite slots. I am alternating between Primordial Blocks and Shipyard, largely because I really want the hideout from Primordial Blocks. Essentially you need two linked maps to sustain drops without having to buy maps. Essentially if I am running Blocks I set all of my favorites to Shipyard, and then flip back when I start running the Blocks maps that I have been collecting. Essentially every league that has Primordial Blocks… I focus on running it so I can chase the damned hideout that never seems to spawn. I did get the Divided Hideout to spawn when I ran Twilight Temple and shouted out to the SirGog Global channel that I use in case someone needed. I think I got three people to zone in and grab the thing before giving up and moving on with my life.
I’ve been having a heck of a lot of fun, even though I am largely the only person playing in the league from the AggroChat crew. I really hope that Mercenaries or some version of them goes core, because they add a lot of interesting dimension to build craft. You can essentially do what I am doing and use them to augment your dps and provide debuffing of targets to make combat easier… or you can convert them into a full on aura bot that buffs your own damage output. This was honestly one of my favorite things about Diablo III, once you began being able to equip the followers there with items that would grant you buffs. I’m also pretty happy with the current state of Kingsmarch and while I am not as focused on it as I was last league, I am still occasionally running shipments to get good stuff. All in all I am having a lot of fun with this league. Are you playing? If so what are your favorite bits so far? Drop me a line below. The post Gearing My Mercenary appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Listless

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The past week was hyper focused on a single goal… getting Belgaoh my monk from 53 to 100.  The weird thing about this process is that once completed… I am finding myself drifting a bit without purpose.  The above screenshot is unrelated to anything, but I thought it looked cool so you are getting it with this mornings post.  Starting yesterday I begin finally running my stable of characters through the Broken Shore content.  I managed to snag all of the toys, and troll shoes transmog from my single leel 100 horde character, and on my second time through on an alliance character successfully got the bonnet cosmetic item.  I am assuming that tomorrow there will be a new step on the quest chain being patched in, and this time around we will actually do the moving of Dalaran to the Broken Isles bit.  Tonight is our Final Fantasy XIV raid, so that means I will go into this weeks patch not having run Broken Shores on the bulk of my characters.  At least in theory the content isn’t going anywhere so I shouldn’t feel that much of a rush to push through it.  I think this content will essentially be the “welcome to Legion” content for everyone from this point on wards.  I will say it was really strange buzzing right past the quest starter for Cataclysm, Pandaria and Draenor on the monk.  I think I have all of the quests sitting in my log, because they are given automatically when you zone into Stormwind, but I am not sure when if ever I am going to do them.  At this moment I am contemplating using the Timeless Isle port to get to Draenor, but then again that would mean I need to open up Pandaria to get to it.

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Even though I have completed one journey to 100… I am finding that I cannot seem to quit the Invasion Event.  A good chunk of yesterday was also spent running characters through the event trying to get the last few 700 items for each.  I managed to finish off Lodin and Tallow last night, which leaves Gloam, Exeter and Belglaive all needing a single item slot.  Belglaive is a little more complicated because I used that character to purchase the pet, and as a result he is still missing several of the purchased pieces of gear.  I just need to run ANY instances on him to get that finished off.  I do have his Glaives upgraded to 725, and I have started a second set mooching off of everyone else’s spare tokens to upgrade them for my eventual Horde demon hunter.  I wish the other weapons worked like this, in that they were bind on account and you could pass them around as needed.  Some characters I have gotten more than my fair share of weapons… and then others like Exeter have yet to see a single one.  I have this feeling that ultimately it is going to be Ex my Paladin that I will continue to run events on, as I try and get three weapons for him.  The other big thing that I need to accomplish before this event is over is to try and find the Demon that spawns in Orgrimmar and Stormwind and get a Fel Spreader toy.  I failed to get one the two times I tried it yesterday, with the one in Orgrimmar bugging out and running back to the Doomsayer and fading.

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The big thing I have learned over the years is that I have a lot of fun playing World of Warcraft, so long as I have a goal in mind.  For example this last week has been a blast as I leveled my way through to 100 doing events.  In theory I could pick a Horde character and start doing the same, but I don’t really have any that are nearly as close to finish as my Monk was.  Doing the event without flight was a pain in the butt, and I am not sure if I want to go back to that frustration right now.  If I was going to pick a character on that side of the fence I would probably pick my Warlock since I have really enjoyed playing my Alliance lock… and I have full cloth heirlooms.  Similarly I have full leather heirlooms, but of the leather classes the one I am most likely to play… is the Demon Hunter, which is easy as hell to get to 100.  I do however have the cash to just go ahead and outfit my plate heirlooms up to 100 and then push something else that I would likely play.  My Orc Deathknight is sitting at 60, so flight is possible, even if it is a slow version.  I might be fun to be able to use this event to play with one of the other specs like Frost or Unholy.  If the next goal is NOT the event however… I need to pick something be it Mount Farming or Dungeon Achievements because so long as I can keep a list of things I want to do… I will be able to stay engaged in this game.  I really am having a lot of fun being around all of these people again.  It is a bit like a reunion, because everywhere I turn on Argent Dawn I keep running into familiar faces from the past.  I know we have roughly a week until the official launch of Legion, and with that comes a whole new set of goals so I just need to keep busy in the meantime.