Good Morning, Folks. Yesterday, we got the teaser trailer dropped for the next Path of Exile II league/expansion, and it was extremely brief. More importantly, though, the community has been clamoring for some sort of notice as to when it was dropping. Folks take off work for these things, and in many cases need a decent amount of notice to get the time off. The good news is we are getting a reveal stream on May 7th. The bad is that the league itself is not dropping until May 29th, which is a significant delay from the original intended “every four months” pace of a POE1 and POE2 league. There will be gnashing of teeth, especially among the folks who only play Path of Exile II about this delay. For the Path of Exile diehards, SirGog announced yesterday that he was going to do some sort of a private league, and those are usually interesting. I’ve participated in one of these leagues before, and in that case, everything dropped scoured so you were forced to craft your own gear. It was interesting in an academic sense, but if that ends up being the case again, I am likely going to skip it.
The trailer shows a giant megastructure rising up out of the ground, and I personally think what we are seeing is somehow representative of the new atlas. This has been a feature that has been promised for a while, because the Delve-like Endless Atlas has generally been poorly received by the playerbase. As someone who loves Delve… I have to say that for whatever reason, when you apply this same concept to mapping, it just does not work. At least based on player behaviors in Path of Exile 1, folks tend to gravitate to a few map layouts that they really like and then run them over and over. Truth be told, the new way that the Atlas works in POE1 is brilliant, and I would love to see something like that translated over to POE2. I think the concept of Endless Atlas is cool, but I would love to see it as a side content. The reason why Delve works so well is that any given node only takes a few minutes to run, whereas every map in POE2 feels like it takes an eternity. It would be cool if they translated the Endless Atlas over to a sequence of micro objectives, building a sort of Delve 2.0 in the game with clearly marked rewards on each of the nodes.
Since POE2 is so far out, that has pretty much cemented the idea that I am going to be diving into Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred when it drops on April 28th. Yesterday Blizz released the opening cinematic, and I am maybe more interested than any of the Akarat nonsense has given me to this point. Right now, unless something drastic changes, I plan to try out the new Warlock class when the expansion drops next Tuesday. That is a chemo day for me, but generally speaking, I feel okay for the first few days after the poison is delivered… and then go downhill drastically as I approach the weekend. If, for whatever reason, I do not vibe with the Warlock’s particular form of summoning minions, then I will probably fall back on playing a Paladin. I think I will dig this expansion more than previous ones because I have figured out how to macro multiple abilities to the same button on my G600 mouse, given that D4 tends to be “spam every button on cooldown” gameplay, and I can reduce that madness to a single click. I did this with the most recent Last Epoch season and it worked swimmingly.
I am honestly vaguely excited about Lord of Hatred, because it seems like Blizzard has made some significant steps in the right direction to turning this game into something that has some lasting draw. The big problem that I have had up until this point with D4 is that leveling is generally pretty fun, but once you hit the end game… it feels boring and repetitive, and they ruined the one thing that was actually fun. Ace and I used to group up together and pool our resources and do a bajillion boss summons for drops… and they recently made it so that you only get loot if you are providing materials. The force multiplier of playing with friends stopped functioning, and as a result… we mostly just stopped playing together. Wudijo is pretty much one of the diehard Diablo creators, and he has released a bunch of information once the press embargo was lifted. He released another short video this morning showing off the new map overlay, which is pretty huge. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about D4. You could not simply toggle the map overlay to stay on, rather than having to keep manually popping it up.
In the meantime, nothing has really been hitting gamewise for me, so I am back to playing Last Epoch. I contemplated rolling a Warpath Void Knight, but instead have gone back to leveling my Fire Aura Spellblade. I keep chasing slightly better gear, so that hopefully I can improve my survival. Ward feels way squishier than Health and Regeneration/Leech. It just seems like all of my ward evaporates at exactly the wrong time, and Omen windows seem to be the hardest content for me. Essentially, I have gotten to the point where I clear everything else in the echo but the Omen, and then do that last so that if I die, I have at least completed the echo and can move on with my life. Right now, I am farming the Blood, Frost, and Death timeline in an attempt to get a better pair of Frostbite Shackles. I love the new corruption system, but I refuse to “yolo corrupt” items and risk not having a copy… so I want multiple copies to play with. I could also use more copies of Last Steps of the Living for the same reason.
Anyways, time for me to wrap this up and move on with life. Are you going to be playing the Diablo IV expansion when it drops next Tuesday? Are you looking forward to the Path of Exile II League and bummed by the delays? Drop me a line below.
The post Ancients and Warlocks Oh My appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! I did not realize this until pulling together the post this morning, but apparently, last Monday was the 12th anniversary of our podcast, and last Friday was the 17th anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog. We have, in fact, been doing this for a while, it seems. Tonight, we start off the show staring into the black hole of equine abominations that is Horsey Game. From there, we talk a bit about the madness that is the challenge mode of Peglin brought by Act 4. After listening to Tamrielo talk about his Mage build in Last Epoch, Belghast was inspired to roll his own Fire Aura build, and we talk a bit about the weaknesses of the Spellblade in general when it comes to survival. Tam shares his initial thoughts on House of Hikmah, a beautiful artistic journey into the Islamic Golden Age. Finally, we talk a bit about the progress Kodra has made with his wolf pack build in Path of Exile, and Bel shares some thoughts about the amazing new overlay tool for the game called Scalpel.
Good Morning, Friends. I am alive and have mostly survived another round of chemotherapy. The good news… my blood pressure has mostly stayed stable during this round after various tweaks to meds. The bad news… I still feel like I am falling apart and everything is a struggle. I guess when you poison your body purposefully with a tiny lemon of evil… There are consequences. I feel better than I did last Friday, but I had hoped the low blood pressure was the majority of what was making me feel like ass at that point. It was at least SOME of it… But I still very much feel like I am operating on maybe a quarter of the energy I would normally have. The cold reaction thing seems to have mostly faded, but I am dealing with sandpaper fingers and a persistent jaw pain, so that is fun and exciting. Cancer is awful, friends, so I highly suggest that you get your colonoscopy early so that, hopefully, if you do have issues, you can take the surgery-only path and not have to go down this hellscape that I am presently puttering along.
In better news, last night I hung out on voice with the Thursday night crew and played some Path of Exile, while they queued for FFXIV roulettes. I managed to push through the last few challenges required to hit 34/40 and get the upgraded totem pole shown in that first screenshot. Technically, I am probably going to keep going for a bit and see how many of the others I can knock out. Not necessarily because I have a deep burning desire for more challenges, but Path of Exile is a comfortable game for me to play and does not require much in the way of thought. There was a little Grids.fun thing that was cycling through the AggroChat crew, and I legitimately put Path of Exile as my “turn my brain off” game. I committed some minor violence by naming Hollow Knight as overrated… but really it is more that Symphony of the Night does everything Hollow Knight does, but does so in a way I enjoy more personally. I do think, though, that Mass Effect Andromeda does not deserve most of the hate that it got, and was a perfectly cromulent gaming experience.
I have been playing some really juicy Legion content and having a lot of fun with it. This is still one of my favorite things about Path of Exile, how you can go so deep on a single mechanic to the exclusion of pretty much everything else… and still have stupid amounts of fun. At some point, I will run a bunch of Legion 5-Ways to burn through the massive stockpile of emblems that I have. I should snag Kodra so he can get credit for them, since I believe one of the challenges required me to run some as well. Honestly, the more people you have in a Legion 5-Wa,y the faster you should, in theory, be able to push through the rounds and the more content you can farm. These can be extremely rippy because I am doing dumb things to force at minimum 150% quantity, because it was required for some of the challenges. Now that I have dinged level 100 though… I don’t really care about the difficulty level since I can no longer lose progress.
Right now, there are two Challenges that seem pretty doable. The first is Vaulted Valuables, which just requires me to run a bunch of Astrolabes and get gems as rewards. I can run the cheapest Astrolabe, which I think is Templar, and push forward with this one just by running random maps. Tremendous Tempests should also be pretty easy to knock out since I am doing the dumb thing to force 150% quant, and just need to run one more map to get it. Tyrannical Tiers is a bit of a stretch goal that I am not sure I will actually make, because if I understand this challenge correctly, I need to run 2667 more “tiers” of maps…. and with the highest option being t16s… that would be 167 more maps. I think I will get there eventually, but it isn’t something that I am going to super focus on. I have PLENTY of maps to run, mind you… but also that one is just a big ole grind that you eventually arrive at and not something I can necessarily sprint towards.
At some point, though, I am likely going to swap back over to Last Epoch and continue my progress on the spellblade righteous fire style character I have been playing. I had to take this specific screenshot this morning, mostly just to show off the sloth backpack and how much I love it. Path of Exile requires less thought from me, so it has been winning for my time. However, I am still super curious to see what the final endgame version of this build can look like. Raxx also released a video this morning with a bunch of wildly overpowered builds that might be worth checking out. I also think we are probably going to get some news from Path of Exile II soon, which will be interesting. April 28th is also when the Diablo IV expansion drops, and I will probably check it out at some point. If I can get to a point where I have more mental fortitude, I might dip into either Pragmata or Greedfall: The Dying World, because I want to experience the story in both of those games.
I am hoping as I go into this weekend, my general health and energy levels improve. I hate feeling so useless, and that everything that I do wears me out. This morning, I had to stop and take multiple breaks while doing things. I got up and showered… and then had to sit down and rest before getting dressed. Then rest again before feeding the cats, and rest again before fixing myself food and heading upstairs. I hate everything about this. Never before have I felt so betrayed by my own body. I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was prepared for just how hard it would end up being.
The post Challenge Totem Upgraded appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning, Folks. I am on day two of the evil lemon, which is hooked up and feeding me poison over the course of 46 hours. I had been warned that the negative cold reactions from the Oxaliplatin escalates over time, and so far that is absolutely a thing. Essentially, any time I touch anything metal… or something that is even coated with rubber over top of metal… I get this tingle sensation in a bad way. I am hoping that it phases out around Thursday like it did last time, because so far it is not fun at all. I’ve cranked up the temp in the house, and it does not seem to be helping at all. Last round of chemo I struggled with sorting out my blood pressure, and that seems to be stable this go round, so I am hoping I will have an easier go for this first week. We had some pretty awful tornadic storms last night, so I really did not sleep terribly well. I might end up taking off the afternoon and trying to catch up on sleep. I am at least getting a bit more used to sleeping with this dumb bag hooked up to me, because from midnight on, I think I got pretty solid sleep until 5:30 or so.
I figured I would share another picture that I took the other day, prior to starting chemo. This is “Splotchie”, and he has been hanging out lately. The positive is that, for being a grizzled tomcat, he seems to get along well enough with Greybie and does not abuse him. I am not sure if I have ever shared a picture of Splotchie on the blog, but he is not friendly, unfortunately. He tolerates me being around, but will not let me get anywhere near him. I love his markings, though, they always remind me of a jaguar. I keep thinking that at some point, he will be willing to let me pet him. There is also another tomcat from a few doors down that is a tux, who will let me pet him, but I have not caught a photo of him. He belongs to this little kid down the street, but he sneaks out and comes to visit. So long as they all leave Greybie alone, I am fine with as many visitors as they want.
In gaming news I have been poking around in Last Epoch again. On the podcast this past weekend, Tam was sharing how broken Fire Aura was, and I noticed that Maxroll seemed to have a pretty solid build for it. I have taken a relatively crazy path through the campaign, with jumping on the first two dungeon skips and then leveling up through Majassa. In lieu of the final act, I started working on Monoliths but I might go back and finish the ancient timeline just to get the bonus points. All in all this build is nonsense, and you can legitimately run around similar to Righteous Fire and just let your Fire Aura burn through most of the trash mobs. The specific version that I am running converts fire to frost damage and freezes targets, which is a thing that I have always thought would be an interesting alternate version of Righteous Fire.
I just got high enough level to be able to equip a lot of the gear that I had been holding onto. There are several pieces that I need to convert to legendaries, and I need to sort out how best to deal with the rest of my resistances. Overcapping Cold Resistance is a thing that buffs Fire Aura, so I am trying to stack that on as many pieces as I can. One of the things that I am seeking the most is a 2lp or better version of the Mad Alchemist’s Laddle. Similarly, I would love to find a 3lp or better Transcriber’s Gavel. I am also always on the lookout for better versions of the Last Nomad rings. What will really help is getting an Omnis amulet because it comes with a ton of resistances. That is going to rely on farming a bunch of 200+ corruption Shade of Orybuss, and unfortunately, as many of these as I have killed… I have yet to see a single one drop. I could also farm Confluence of Oblivion, Woven Echoes, but I am not sure how many of those I currently have.
I came really close to downing Aberroth the other night, with a wipe at 4%. The problem with doing harder content is that I am just too disorganized right now. I think in the meantime, I am going to focus mostly on knocking out monoliths that I have not unlocked on my Spellblade. This will get me some more levels and potentially more gear, and then when I get up there in levels, I might make a shot at Aberroth on the spellblade. I did tweak my Forged Weapons build and dropped the forged armor pet, and picked up holy symbol instead for some additional damage output and survival. That seems to have been a generally positive shift, and was what led to getting Aberroth to 4%. In theory, I probably need to try and get a better two-handed weapon, since the forged weapons inherit those stats. Volcanus has been great, but mostly I just need to craft a better version that has some more base damage stats on it.
I am also poking at Path of Exile still. I am 87% through level 99, am effectively 2 pips and some change to go until level 100. I’m running my pretty chill Delve tree, and gathering up a couple of maps worth of Sulphite before diving down into the mines to burn through it. Delve is shockingly good experience gain, especially around the 250-300 depth realm. This also really does not require much out of me, and I can turn my brain off and just grind. At the very least, it requires way less forethought than Last Epoch does at the moment. That is one of the things I love about Path of Exile, is that it feels like it has way more reliable defenses than Last Epoch does. Sure, there can be some spikes in damage, but it feels like it happens way less often in POE. I think more than anything, I just really want to hit level 100, so that I can go back to some spicy mapping to knock out some of the other challenges.
I am doing okay, and other than the worse spikes in cold reaction… this round of chemo seems to mostly be going more smoothly. I think a lot of the troubles that I had last round were blood pressure related, and I have mostly sorted that out. I look forward to getting unhooked from the evil lemon tomorrow, and will hopefuly be able to get proper rest again.
The post The Evil Lemon appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
