Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.
I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.
With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.
Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.
There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.
Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.
However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.
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