Good Morning Friends. I am still dragging ass due to this impossible crud that I cannot seem to kick to the curb, however in roughly an hour I have an appointment with my doctor who will hopefully help with that. I’ve fallen back on the Audiobooks and Chill bandwagon but I will talk about the books portion of that in another post this week. Suffice to say I am mostly spending my time playing Path of Exile. I am still alternating between mapping on my level 96 Ice Trap Elementalist and then diving down into the mines for some relatively safe leveling as I push towards level 100. One of the things that I did not expect enjoying so much is that I have finally properly learned Incursion/Alva and have found great joy in building temples for profit. Essentially if you can craft a temple with a Locus of Corruption on it, you can sell it for a little over a divine, which is meager profit but more than enough to keep paying for the scarabs that I am running and still banking quite a bit for whatever my next project ends up being.
At level 99, I have properly entered the realm of never running without an Omen of Amelioration in my bags. These are going for roughly 120 Chaos at the moment, and is essentially paying for lost time. I took a really dumb death yesterday when I dove into the shadows… did not realize I was out of flares… and then was mercilessly killed by the hubris of using Forbidden Taste as my automated life flask. Thanks to the handy omen though, I did not lose much progress in the grand scheme of things, but any lost progress at level 99 is noticeable. Basically I am going to be pushing hard to hit level 100 so that I can knock another meta achievement off Gear Grinding Goals, and in truth I have hit level 100 in the last several leagues so it feels like a requirement for me to consider myself “finished”. I could buy some 5 way carries or something like that, but it always feels like the wrong sort of cheating. I will happily pay for a Maven carry each league because I fucking hate the memory game and have legitimately beat her myself more than once. Paying for carries for things I can easily accomplish on my own with enough applied time is just a bridge too far.
I continue to chip away at achievements however and knocked out Sinew Swarms yesterday, which required me to do 10 Hive Fortresses or Hive Colonies. This one took so long because they are that much rarer than the other in map breach events. Wierdly since I started running the Ritual and Incursion mapping setup, I have yet to encounter a King in the Mists invitation altar. I did buy an invitation so I have at least beaten him this league, same for Oshabi which I also bought the invitation for off the market. What I really need is a Trialmaster or an Olroth so I can get my last of the bloodline ascendency fights under my belt. I need to also see if I have any of the Vox bros Heist maps so I can knock them off the list of pinnacle encounters. Simialrly I am shocked that I have yet to encounter one of the Kingsmarch fights, which would knock another pinnacle off my list. I am happy to keep my head down and grind for the time being because it pairs so lovely with an audiobook.
Over in Destiny Rising there has been one of the silliest events yet available, called Iron Medley. Essentially it is Iron Banner or as this game calls it Iron Bar, but everyone has to play the exact same character… which produces some really weird end of match shots like this. Essentaily everyone is stripped down to a baseline version of the character with the exact same choices of weapons. In truth… I think this is a better match mode than the default Iron Bar, and should maybe be made into a permanent mode. It feels like running ARAM in League, where your sand off any of the possible advantages and just yolo your way through the matches. I really like when PVP modes in games normalize the advantage so it does not feel like you are getting stomped into the ground because you did not devote time and effort to a game mode that you are not maining.
There is a new character banner starting in roughly two days, and the trailer has been released. Essentially Jaren is just McCree from Overwatch, or whatever the hell they are calling that character these days. All that is missing is Matt Mercer doing the voices. He also gives me BraveStarr vibes, which is not necessarily a bad thing… but also makes me want him to have a talking cybernetic horse companion. My only real problem with him is that I am just not sure if Hand Canon and Shotgun is going to be a fun weapon combo to use. It is really doing to depend on how good the Hand Canon exotic that is going to inevitably come with the character. If the rumors are true… and he is getting Last Word which seems to have been shown during the trailer… he might be super fun. If nothing else this might also revive Attal from being a dumpster tier character for me.
In other news I finally pulled another mythic off the free pulls on the normal banner, and it ended up being my third copy of Tan-2. At some point I should probably build this character out, but I still really prefer Umeko to him. Then again if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to pick Helhest for the utility that she provides. I would have greatly preferred an additional copy of Ning Fei because he is up there in the list of characters that I am going to pump currency into to build out. I maxed out Helhests weapon damage, so now it is really just getting a final copy of her bow in order to push her to the same levels as Maru. I still want to build out Gwynn a bit because she is pretty useful when it comes to running limited content even though she is squishy as fuck. Ace and I are getting together to do Grandmasters tonight so we will see what that holds. Hopefully it is a better week than last week.
I am not playing anywhere near as much Destiny Rising as I was, but I am still enjoying myself enough to pop in and do some of the daily and weekly activities. Unfortunately our guild has grown too big for our britches and are no longer able to maintain the upkeep points to keep the “bitcoin miner” active. I wish I could coax a few more people into playing , because just with minimal play we could probably keep things humming again with maybe five more players. We had another really active player that came from the random clan that I was in first, but I think they have also fallen by the wayside. We have managed to find three strongholds for the last two weeks which has been really nice though.
Anyways. Time to get ready for the doctor visit and it is trash day so I have to deal with gathering that. I hope you all are having a wonderful week back, and hope that the doctor can give me something to make me feel less like ass all the time. I need a few days of feeling great so that I can whip the house back into shape, because I have not felt like doing much of anything lately.
The post Temu McCree appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… I can be completely oblivious to things at times. This morning’s post is going to largely be the tale of me completely missing the point. In Path of Exile there are a large number of league mechanics that you can choose to engage with or mostly ignore. There are some that I completely love like Abyss, Heist, and Delve, and others that I have avoided for various reasons like Blight and Incursion. Yesterday I ran an Alva memory that caused the portals she opens to work backward, and instead of bringing you into the Vaal Temple, it summons the mobs from it to whatever map you are on. I lamented that I wished that there was a node on the Atlas tree that allowed me to make ALL Incursion encounters work like this. That node sadly does not exist, but I still think it is a cool idea for GGG to think about in the future.
I opened up the AggroChat slack and lamented how I wished Incursion worked differently, and how I avoided it because it broke up the flow of the game. When you complete a temple, it creates a map for you to run through that is way more complicated and involved than your average map. What I wished is that I could save off a temple layout similar to how I could with the Lake of Kalandra, so that I could run it later. At this point, Ashgar used up his daily allotment of “…” and told me that it did in fact work that way. This is the problem with coming into the game late and not really having a ton of explanation in how any of these features from previous leagues worked. I completely missed the button that shows up at the bottom of a completed temple labeled “Take Temple Chronicle”.
This does precisely the thing I was lamenting not being able to do. Again like I said I can be painfully oblivious to things at times. So since then, I have been working on burning through the over forty Alva missions I had racked up and been avoiding. Essentially what would happen is I would build a temple and then put off running it because it takes more time than a normal map. Now I can just save copies of past maps and keep running Alva missions until a time in the future when I want to run a bunch of Vaal Temples in a row. It also turns out there is a fairly brisk trade in folks selling Chronicles, and I find it weird that in all of the POE content that I have consumed… no one has mentioned this. I did run a temple yesterday and even managed to pull an Empower gem, which is something I had been needing for awhile now.
The other major thing that I knocked out yesterday was the Unique Realms challenge that I spoke of in the previous post. I ran through my Doryani’s Machinarium map and then picked up Vinktor’s Square off the market. Finishing them knocked out my T2 boots cosmetic and am one achievement away from getting the next helmet. I was completely oblivious to this fact but apparently, I also finished the Monster Massacre achievement and have now surpassed one million monster kills during this league. Many of the other challenges are going to require me to likely respec my tree a bit in order to increase my chances of completing them.
This revelation about Incursion has led me to once again do some shifting around of my Atlas tree. I removed some of the “dangling” nodes that were not absolutely necessary anymore that involved map duplication and moved them around to some of the incursion nodes. This greatly increases the amount of time I have in each incursion portal and allows me to almost guarantee that I clear everything before running out of time. Map duplication nodes were great while I was building out my Atlas but at this point, I am gaining way more maps than I can actually run, and even donated a couple of hundred maps to the guild bank for other folks coming up through the ranks. I don’t really care about getting into the bulk map-selling game, because it seems horribly tedious. I am getting enough decent drops that they are selling pretty quickly and I still have my resonator business to fall back on if I start running low on currency again.
I have to admit one of the things I love about Path of Exile is how I can easily swap up what I am doing because of the extreme number of viable league mechanics out there. I am still kinda hoping that at some point we see the Lake of Kalandra make a return in some permanent form because, with the “sandbox” of this league, I think that entire experience would have been a lot more enjoyable. There are a lot of shorter-term mechanics that I wonder how they could remix and bring back in a new form. Anyways I hope you all are having a great week and enjoying whatever gaming nonsense you are finding yourself engaged in.
The post Portable Temples appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
