Good Morning, Folks. The last couple of weeks have been a wild ride from the chemo two weeks ago, to the recovery last week, and trying to sort out the current state of my blood pressure medication. While my stamina is still completely shot, and I only have so much “oomph” in me, I was able to more or less have a normal weekend to prepare for the upcoming chemopocalpyse that will be hitting starting tomorrow. I wish I had taken a before photo… because the house was a complete pit, and I just lacked the energy to do much of anything about it. That is not to say that my house is not still messy… because it is… but I was at least able to do enough of the normal rotation of chores this weekend to sort of reset things and prepare for the impending “torpor” brought on by the next round of chemo. I have some stuff to do tonight to prep trash to pull it out to the curb tomorrow morning, but I picked up everything that really mattered and restocked my food stores with easy-to-eat items for the next two-week block. I am hoping, though, since I have mostly sorted out the blood pressure thing, that my “reset times” are a bit more stable this go round. I also purposefully tried to eat more food over the weekend, because I know I will probably not be eating much over the next few days, as I will not feel up to it.
I spent most of my weekend gaming time playing Path of Exile, as I have continued chipping away at challenges. I am sitting on 31/40 and, in theory, have 32, 33, and 34 well in my sights. I’ve completed everything for the “GGG” challenge except for actually hitting level 100, and I had to pause some of my other challenge work because I did a bit of backpedalling there with a few bad deaths. I’ve rebounded, though and am sitting at 3 pips from 100, and might be able to grind that out tonight. After that, I will go back to chipping away at Tremendous Tempests and Sandswept Survivor, which involve me forcing quant via sacrifice fragments in the map device, and running what ends up being some rather juicy Legion maps. Astrolabes are pretty slow and expensive, but I am chipping away at those with my Delve tree, which is pretty easy and does not generate a ton of death risk. Delve traditionally is my safest way to grind out to level 100, because it is very predictable, so I will be doing as much of that as I can until I ding. I really wish that Sulphite was itemised, and something that I could just buy outright on the exchange.
Prior to taking some bad deaths, though, I was having a lot of fun with Legion. Essentially, I would have at least two Legions per map, and each of them would spawn a ton of generals, with those guaranteed loot tiles. I’ve never really gone all in on Legion before during a league, and really forcing myself to go hard on it has been a lot of fun. I did this last league with Alva temples, and learned so much about that mechanic. In theory, I should probably do Blight, the next league, since that is one of those league mechanics that I have never really focused on. Each time I do this… I broaden my knowledge of the game and add more tools to my kit for sourcing my own stuff. Path of Exile is way too detailed to ever learn fully in a single league… so instead I have taken to focusing on single mechanics over the course of MANY leagues to reach a broad understanding. Once I got the foothold of Delve under me, it then allowed me to pretty much tackle any other content because I could reliably make enough currency to fund those endeavours. POE really is the sort of game where you need to learn a “trade” and then be able to utilise that trade to learn other trades.
Speaking of trades… this was supposed to be the league where the “chaos standard” was abolished. However, that said… most of the trades that I do are still in large blocks of chaos. After the video I just linked, it came out that Nightmare maps, which replaced t17s, would still only be modifiable with chaos orbs. I am not entirely certain if that is what saved the day, or simply the fact that we, as players, still place some measure of value and stability in the fact that chaos orbs are familiar. Bench crafts still require them as well, but I think more than anything… it is just that we are used to trading in chaos. Exalted Orbs are certainly way more common, but also…. less common than Chaos, so if we ever shifted the base trading unit, I could see going with those. In truth, it does not really matter, but Chaos to Divines have been just volatile enough that any time I get up around 1000 Chaos, I convert some of it. I’ve blown copious amounts of currency on dumb things… like, for example, squeaking an extra gem out of pretty much every link by getting an imbued gem with lifetap on it.
In other gaming news, I rolled a new character over in Last Epoch. I do not have the mental or physical fortitude right now to take down Aberroth with my Forged Weapons build in its current state. It requires me to do mechanics entirely too much for where I am right now. Over the weekend, Tam talked about how strong the current state of Fire Aura is on a Spellblade, and given that I am an enjoyer of all things Righteous Fire… I figured I owed it to myself to check it out. Right now, the guide I am following is doing something that I have wondered about for years… it converts this Fire Aura to cold damage so that it freezes things. Legitimately, one of my mad daydreams has been an alternate version of Righteous Fire that scales off cold and freezing damage vectors, and right now this seems to be doing exactly that. Cold damage traditionally in ARPGs represents a really strong defensive layer unto itself…. so I think as this scales it will be precisely that.
I think the bigger challenge at the moment is that I am trying to sus out exactly what path through the campaign I want to take. I am probably going to do some skips, because I cannot see doing all of the acts again on this character. However, I am not quite strong enough to jump straight into monos at level 30ish. So I think I might do one of the campaign skips and see where that takes me, and then wrap up the last few acts of the game. The only thing that I do not love about Last Epoch is that most of the builds require you to press the majority of your buttons, which means…. I tend to create a button macro on my logitech g600 that presses all of the buttons at once. The ideal state of an ARPG build involves mostly hitting a single button for me, and when I can’t generate that… I tend to figure out ways to force it. In Diablo 3, I used to use the numlock trick to constantly be firing everything other than my main attacks, so the whole mouse macro thing is not too far from that.
I know tomorrow the bottom will start to fall out again, but I feel like I am at least better prepared for it. I need to deal with trash tonight and then make sure both my tablet and phone are charged fully. I am about as ready for this as I can be. I don’t have the levels of anxiety that I had going into it two weeks ago, because I have been there and done that… and more or less made it out unscathed. I am going to continue to take notes, because due to the whole blood pressure situation, I don’t feel like I got an accurate understanding of what each day was like. When my pressure bottomed out… I was fighting that more than I was actually fighting the effects of the chemo. If you are still around for my shenanigans, thanks. I am not going anywhere, but my schedule pretty much is dictated by how I am feeling on a given day.
The post Freezing Fire Aura appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We were out last week due to various scheduling issues, but led off the show with a bit of a message about Bel going through Chemo and maybe having scheduling issues every other week. From there, we talk a bit about the Artemis II mission and how wild it is to experience “Moon Joy”, as we enter a new phase of space exploration. Ash talks a bit about the Rabbit and Steel update, and Tam talks about the wild experience of playing Screamer. From there, we talk quite a bit about the Promise Mascot Agency and what a weird gem of a game it is, and how the developer is maybe one to watch going forward. We talk a bit about Last Epoch and the progress each of us makes, and how Tam was able to lean entirely into his player fantasy… and at the same time, complete more of the game than I think any of us have, as he dropped Uber Aberroth. Tam also discusses how sometimes it is just best to nuke your emulator devices and start from scratch, and then we wrap things up with a bit of discussion about upcoming changes to Dune Awakening and how they “get it” and are changing the game to reflect the PVE nature of its player base.
Good Morning Folks. I’ve made a few more attempts at getting back into Last Epoch, but I find myself in this really odd place. Namely, I do not have enough gold, and am not generating enough gold, to keep buying new tabs for the stuff that I am farming. I could restrict my filters further, but I already am mostly only showing things that are worth picking up. I’ve made it to the point in my build where I either need to just hang it up or farm super hard to perfect my loot. With everything else that I find myself going through, I am leaning way closer to just hanging it up at the moment and calling myself done with Season 4. I’ve made a few more attempts at Aberroth, and there is a phase that I always end up struggling with a bit, and I am just not sure if I have the mental fortitude or general dexterity right now to push through it. As such, I think it might be time for me to just back away from this season. I had a lot of fun, and I got most of my usual stuff accomplished, but similar to the fact that I don’t really enjoy Uber Bosses in POE… this might just be the limits of how much I care about Last Epoch.
As such, I have been farming quite a bit of random map and delve content in Path of Exile, because my build is immortal enough that I can mostly turn my brain off. This is the level of engagement that I need right now, something that is interesting and passes the time, but does not require a lot from me. I knocked out a few more seasonal challenges and upgraded my totem pole a few times. Right now, I am chipping away at a few really long grinds, while also trying to hit level 100. I am roughly halfway through 99 at the moment, and as such am already running Omens of Amelioration just in case I take a random death. I’ve been running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual map strat that is generating a large number of them just in case, and when I finally hit 100, I am sure I will just cash in any that I have lying around on the market.
Thirty-Four challenges tend to be where I stop every league, and I am at this point, I think 3 challenges away from hitting that. If I never make it back and do any more challenges in this league, I would be happy enough with this totem as my final mark for the league, especially given everything I am going through right now. I know at some point soon, the whole POE2 machine will fire up, and I will start getting interested in whatever is happening with 0.5. I also know that there is a D4 expansion dropping in May that might garner my attention. So in theory, I should probably push through and knock out whatever I can knock out while my focus is available. Everything in my life feels so up in the air right now, and will probably be that way for at least the next four months as I go through cancer infusions.
One thing that is super interesting that just came out is a brand new tool for Path of Exile that essentially replaces all of the third-party tools that folks generally use. It has a price checker, an item recoloring tool, and a way to edit your filters in real time on the fly while you are mapping to add or remove items or shift tiers. I’ve only just started playing with it, but I can see entirely moving away from Awakened POE Trade, especially if this also starts supporting Path of Exile II. The above video is a deep dive into the features of the tool from the developer and his friend, the streamer Aero. Probably the coolest functionality is to be able to shift what tier something is on the fly, which is especially useful if you might care about an item that the general filters would not. I tend to run my filters way too lax for my own good, because I don’t want to miss anything I might at some point care about. However, if I can shift them on the fly, I might actually start using a tool like this to ratchet things down.
One thing I think I should warn you all is that I do not really know what the future of this blog is going to be in the coming months. My life has been turned upside down. “Chemo Brain” is most definitely a thing I am experiencing, and as a result, I am having a bit harder time concentrating and banging out a blog post than I used to. I’ve already had way more gaps in posting than I have in literal years. This is probably going to continue, and I will keep posting whenever I think I can knock something out in a reasonable manner, that does not upset the delicate balance of everything else I have going on in my life. Hopefully, you will be along for this very intermittent journey.
The post More Challenges and a New Tool appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I realize it has been a while since I last posted, but my world has been turned upside down in the last few days. On some level, I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was fully prepared for what it feels like when your body betrays you. Every day has been its own wild ride. I’ve been taking notes because, in theory, I will be going through the same feelings and symptoms at the same time each rotation, and more than anything, that has me dreading the next four months. Can I really do this seven more times? What will even be left of me when I am through the other end? Nothing about this process is easy or comfortable, and it is honestly a struggle to keep sustenance in me. At this point, I am down 50 lbs from my highest weight, and that is just a start. I have no clue where I am going to end up at the end of this journey, because it definitely feels like everything I am going through is accelerating this process, whether or not I want it to. I had a bit of a scare on Friday as my blood pressure meds pushed me down into dangerous territory, so I have completely halted those for the time being and am not sure if and when I will start them back up.
I am not even sure what this means for my blog right now. This is easily the longest gap I have had in writing for a long while, given that it has been five days since my last post. Essentially, all of last week was a wash, and I am not entirely certain how much that will change over time. I keep thinking I will hit a point of equilibrium with the changes my body is going through because they will be cyclical, and that at some point I will be used to the rollercoaster of killing off cells and waiting on new ones to grow back. Every day has been different than the last, but not the same level of better or worse on a progressive scale. I had it in my head that the worst days would be the days actively taking chemo, and then after I finished that, it would be a progressive recovery of functionality, where every day would build upon the previous. That does not appear to be the sort of curve that we are dealing with. Everything just takes so much longer than it normally would, because I keep having to rest between actions. It isn’t that I “can’t” do things… just that the actions bring me to cold sweats and make me need to take pauses in between every micro action. I woke up at 6 am and immediately started getting ready. It was not until around 7:15 that I made it upstairs with breakfast, and everything in between was “do something” and then take a seat for a bit to recover from the thing I just did.
Writing is how I deal with things. I am in part sharing this with you, my readers… because it is my instinct to do so, not necessarily because I want pity or suggestions. I think we have all been around friends and family dealing with cancer in various ways, and this is just my time of life to deal with it. However, the one thing that I can offer is a perspective, as I write through it to process the experience for myself. I’ve always said that I can get used to anything, given enough time and repetition, and I am hoping that this cancer rollercoaster will be one of those things, or that maybe my body will get better at bouncing back. Right now, it is just so broad the impact… because it feels like every single muscle and every single bone… aches at a deeper level than I have ever experienced. I know logically, those are cells dying off and regrowing, and ultimately, I am going to go through this every single round. It feels like when I was a kid and would have massive muscle and bone aches right before a growth spurt. It would also be hilarious if I grew in height from this, but I don’t think it works that way.
On the gaming front, I have cleared all of the Harbingers and am up to Aberroth, but just cannot bring myself to push past and kill him, because I stopped caring enough about it. The build that I am playing is far from immortal, and right now… given my mental bandwidth, I think I need an immortal build to enjoy myself. I could roll a second character and futz around for a while, but I think I might have reached the point where Last Epoch has run its course for me at the moment. There are so many vectors to scale my build on, but they all require massive amounts of effort to accomplish. Were I playing trade, I could just save up and buy whatever I needed, but I do not play trade in this game. So instead, I might just sunset the game for the moment and move on to other things. Maybe if I run across some other build that I just absolutely have to play, I will give it a go, but for the moment, I think I am going to wind things down in Eterra.
That means that I am largely back playing Path of Exile, because the level of engagement works for me. Before the Last Epoch season started, I got my build to a point of almost being immortal, and as a result, I can just go through the motions and collect loot. There are still a bunch of challenges that I want to knock out so that I can upgrade my hideout decoration. I can slowly chip away at these while I am otherwise incapacitated, and feel like I am doing something… while mostly just faffing about. What worries me is that I have four months of this ahead of me. Four months of barely getting by as my body betrays me, and none of this sounds like a good time. I need gaming to keep me sane, but I am going to have to find easy gaming options because I just cannot function at a high level right now. I was naive in that I expected the between week to mostly be getting life back to normal, but so far it is anything but. Maybe as things move forward into the week, it will improve significantly and rapidly, but every day has been a new series of sensations. I am going to realistically also need to start probably forcing myself to work out some, for fear that I lose critical muscle mass each time I kill off cells and regrow them.
Anyways. I am a fucking mess, friends. I will get through this because I have entered the “only way out is through” territory, but holy crap was it not what I was expecting.
The post Every Day a New Betrayal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
