inquisitor – Page 3

Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s epic blog post, I am going to take it a bit light so I can actually publish it… in the actual morning. Over the weekend I dusted off my Scion character and have been playing it a bit. I don’t exactly know what I am doing but I am having quite a bit of fun screwing around with it. As I have said before, this character was created only as a way to knock out the clear “Act III on a Scion” achievement but wound up trying out a spell gem that I had never played with before. I like brands as a concept and have played a Wintertide Brand and a Stormbrand build to high levels and enjoyed both. Armageddon Brand works a bit differently in that most of the damage it deals, comes from a single massive meteor that falls from the sky and strikes an impact area surrounding the mob it is targeting.

The end result feels so good as you send down projectiles from above to decimate oncoming packs of monsters. I recorded another one of my dumb videos last night showing off some footage from blood aqueducts. The thing is… I am enjoying this enough that I am legitimately considering trying something like this for a league start. I don’t love the fiddly nature of Scion, so if I did this I would be focused on Inquisitor because it comes with a sizeable amount of survival. The biggest problem that I have with the build currently is it has somewhat anemic single-target damage. To be fair… this is traditionally the problem with a brand build, but I think with enough crit this might resolve itself.

Another problem that I am struggling with right now, is trying to figure out where I want to go on my tree. Since I am doing this completely without a map at this point, I am mostly just trying to seek out things that either give me survivability or elemental damage and crit. Right now I have a bunch of points invested in the minion damage setup that gives me a flat damage increase like I would use with Righteous Fire. I am wondering if those points are better spent elsewhere. There is a cluster of fire nodes way up north that might be worth respeccing and pathing towards. While I recorded the video last night, I sort of hem-hawed around about what my second ascension would be… and last night I made the decision to officially go Chieftan. I need to get another labyrinth down so that I can actually make that happen.

As far as a league starter version, I am sorta leaning towards this sort of build from RaizQT. He is a hardcore player so values survival… so when he says it is Tanky, he probably means that it is actually tanky. On POE.Ninja there are a bunch of players working off some version of this build focused around the Rathpith shield. The negative with that shield is you take 10% life damage every time you cast a spell… but you also gain a ton of damage as a result. Essentially to make this work you need lots of life and even more regeneration… given that it also runs Righteous Fire just to buff the fire damage. It feels weird that I am contemplating not starting RF Juggernaut since I have had so much luck with that build, but I also feel like I probably need to branch out a bit.

If I find myself struggling, I can always lean back on the RF Juggernaut again to fund any sort of nonsense that I want to get up to. I might change my mind by the time the 18th of August actually rolls around, but right now… I am very seriously contemplating an Armageddon Brand Inquisitor for my league starter. In the weeks between now and then, I sort of want to map out a bit of a POB for myself based on the elements that I see from the builds on POE.Ninja. In the meantime, I will continue to screw around on the Scion and see if I can make it viable for mapping. The post Scuffed Arma Brand appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

One Track Mind

This week was quite literally… all about Destiny. We have a trio of myself, Damai, and Saldonas aka Carthuun that have been running around together quite a bit. Alternately I have been spending some time with Euron as well when we can manage to meet up, and both “actually” be on at the same time instead of afking for long periods of time and leaving our Playstation 4 on while connected to Destiny. Of note… if you do not exit out of Destiny before walking away, your PS4 will not fully go to sleep. I know I have frustrated many people on my friends list who tried to invite me to parties at all hours of the day… when I am not actually at my console. I have really been so into the PS4 this week that last night when we recorded the podcast, it was my first time on voice chat and really my PC since last Sunday. Anyways… on with the games!

Rift – Primal Urges

This week on a whim I decided to try and win one of the Wilds Packs being given away by Trion on their Twitter account. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time… and apparently choosing the right code to try. I opened the image that had six codes in it, and keyed it in quickly into my account and BAM… it gave me the Wilds Pack. I did not at first realize it but this was the big $100 pack of goodies, but the only negative so far is that it did not seem to give me ANY of the loyalty. Otherwise it would have pushed me from the Orange tier that I am currently on into the the Red. I put in a support ticket to ask, but my working theory is… that you get the loyalty for purchasing the pack, not for redeeming it. In any case I am more than happy to have a slew of free stuff including the new Primalist calling.

I have to say that mechanically it is really interesting. Instead of an energy or mana based mechanic, you have this push/pull mechanic that shifts your character between Fury and Cunning. Abilities that are scaled based on Fury push your bar closer to Cunning… and Cunning abilities push towards Fury. So you are constantly switching back and forth between the two stances and the gameplay feel reminds me quite a bit of the solar/lunar cycle of the old Boomkin. I say old Boomkin because I honestly have no clue if this push/pull thing is still in that class or not since I have not played one since Cataclysm. The calling itself is a leather wearing heavy weapon wielder, and so far I am digging it. As you can tell I shunned the tribal feel of the class and ended up making mine a steampunk dwarf. I’ve not really made it terribly far, but I have enjoyed the little bit I have played. I hope at some point soon I will devote a few days to getting really up close and personal with the calling.

Star Wars the Old Republic – Sith Happens

Last night during the podcast I returned to my Sith Inquisitor and am working on trying to finish it. I realize there is no way now that I will finish ALL of my classes before Tuesday, but I am at the end of Alderaan now and it seems like maybe if I can focus attention on it today I will be able to wrap this one up. I am still having a very love/hate relationship with the Sith Sorcerer. Namely I love that I can burn things down quickly with lightning, but hate how horrible of a healer I am if my companion ever seems to get into trouble. I switched from Khem Val to Treek and am enjoying that decision so far. Namely the big problem I run into is that my instinct is to burn harder as our health gets lower… and unlike my Scoundrel I cannot pull us out of quite the health deficit. So that means I really need to watch the companion health more closely and start healing sooner. As a result I end up dying quite a lot on this class, which just slows down the process. The storyline isn’t really “catching” me either… and I think largely the problem is I ended up choosing the finger-wiggler path instead of the melee path. Were I slashing things with my dual saber I would probably be enjoying this class significantly more. It does however give me a healing option Sith side… so I am just going to go with it for now and struggle through.

Destiny – Struggling for Exotics

I have reached the point in Destiny where those upgrades are no longer coming as quickly. I am now in the 290 light range and the engrams are being assholes to me. Right now the best source of gear seems to be doing Heroic Strikes, but our trio still struggles a bit with them. I realize that through running copious amounts of them that problem will solve itself. I also am frustrated by three of coins, which seem to be far less effective for me than others. It took me eight coins before I got my first exotic drop, and I am continuing to feed the beast and have not seen a second so far. I will say that the exotic that I did get was pretty sweet… Invective. I like shotguns, but my frustration has always been their relatively small ammo pool and clip size. Invective seems to take care of that for me, in that it regenerates ammunition at a fixed rate… which is actually pretty damned quick. I am finding it useful in strikes for when mobs get too close and personal.. and the fact that you can fire off the four rounds in full auto style… means you can absolutely shred a heroic minotaur for example. Then I shift back to my pulse rifle and by the time I need my shotgun again, the ammunition is back and ready to go. The only thing that could be better about it is if the chamber reloaded…. but that would probably be asking too much.

The funny thing is… I am in this place where I am really happy with my assortment of weapons. I just wish I had more high level blue fodder to feed to them to level them up. Right now I tend to mostly use… Hawksaw, Hung Jury, 1000 Yard Stare, Invective, and Sol Edge. I would love to have the exotic shards and fodder to power up my Hawkmoon… but I don’t have the steady income of exotics yet. I love that gun… but at 280 it is just too low right now to keep up with my other weapons. For the most part I am happy shifting back and forth between Hawksaw and Hung Jury… both of which are weapons that feel great and can precision shot pretty easily. The other big thing that happened this week is that I dug deep into the lore of Destiny, and if you ready yesterdays blog post you will see a bit write up about a series of videos. Last night I also ended up going on at length about this factor on AggroChat and probably bored the pants off of my co-hosts. What can I say… I am loving this universe and as I still continue to work my way through the missions I keep seeing more interesting parts of it. Destiny is one of those games that has grabbed hold of me and does not show signs of letting go. My hope is that I will be able to get it mostly out of my system by the time Fallout 4 launches…. because I want to spend some close and personal time with the wasteland.