I’ve been kicking around this topic for a while now, and it seems like a good one to close out what has been a fairly busy week. This blog got its start originally as not only a World of Warcraft blog but more specifically a World of Warcraft Warrior Raid Tanking blog. From 2000 until around 2015 this blog was largely dominated by an endless cavalcade of MMORPGs. They were truly my primary gaming outlet and any time a new one queued up I was there with the rest of my friends grinding out a new batch of characters and classes. It was a love affair that started with Everquest and just kept continuing each time a new latest and greatest game was on the horizon. In part, I was enamored with the concept of playing with so many other people and most of my long-term friends stem from one or more of these games. Hell the entirety of the podcast I have been recording for over a decade, are folks that I met through Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Tam and Kodra date back to my early days raiding with Late Night Raiders, and Thalen was a member of a competing raid that occasionally subbed in for assorted content. Ashgar is someone that Tam and Kodra met when they left Argent Dawn and was someone I was ultimately introduced to when I talked them back to the server for Cataclysm. Ammo I knew her mom first, but also stems originally from World of Warcraft on Argent Dawn. Grace/Ace is someone I met on Twitter but roped into our nonsense in Final Fantasy XIV and ultimately became someone that I am close enough to that I consider my sibling. The entire reason why I got on Twitter in the first place back in 2009… was to have a better way of communicating with other bloggers and more specifically the Blog Azeroth folks. I am uncertain I ever would have been attracted to the platform were it not for the rich MMORPG gaming community that I found there.
The problem is that as my life changed, and the bulk of my active gaming group shifted two timezones away… I found myself in a position where I was drawn to MMORPGs but largely ended up never playing with anyone else. I reached the point in my life where I could no longer stomach the late nights of staying up until 1 am and then getting back up at 5:30 am to start the next day. I needed to take better care of myself and also started getting more real-world responsibilities that required it. Around 2013 I shifted from being a worker bee, to a team lead, and eventually to an official supervisor. Then in 2017, I made another big shift to Management. All of this… brought a dislike for actually having any modicum of responsibility in my downtime. So I went from being a Guild Leader and occasional Raid Leader first… to trying to stay in the background and take on as little responsibility as possible.\
I loved raiding in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV and spent a lot of time leading raids over the years. However, I reached a point where I was no longer willing to give up multiple evenings of my time for the express purpose of progression. From 2004 until around 2012 I was devoting at least three nights every single week to raiding, and pushing everything else to the side. Once I stopped raiding… it became harder to work it back into my schedule. I made attempts to raid seriously again during Warlords of Draenor and Legion… and over in Final Fantasy XIV during A Realm Reborn and Heavensward but all were relatively short-lived. Legion I made it through a few tiers of content and Heavensward we never really made it past the Extreme Primals before I faded into the background. I would always get to the point where I was dreading raid night, because of the loss of freedom it posed.
In spite of not really having active groups on demand like I used to during most of my World of Warcraft days, I still actively pugged. My class of choice has always been some form of a Tank, which meant that I needed to take on a lot of responsibility in dungeon runs. I am not sure if the groups got more aggressively toxic… or if I just became less tolerant of other human beings, but over the years I found myself not wanting to run dungeons with other random players anymore. I built up this mental block to the responsibility of leading a dungeon, and I’ve found it extremely hard to get past it. While I still like the concept of tanking dungeons I just never do it… not unless I have at least one friend along with me. As my time tables shifted out of the range of most of my friends… it just meant that I didn’t run group content anymore.
I am legitimately not sure how it started, but in 2015 I got pulled into running Seasonal content in Diablo III with my friend Grace/Ace. I had always been a fan of the Diablo-like ARPG genre and often played them in my downtime from raiding or other MMORPG shenanigans. I fell in love with Diablo in college and obsessed over the game and then followed the long sequence of games that came after it from Dungeon Siege to Sacred to Titanquest to more modern games like Grim Dawn and Wolcen. Running Diablo III Seasons with Grace gave me all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… all the fun of rushing through the objectives and trying to build a powerful character as fast as you could… all condensed within a few weeks. Then I could walk away, so other things, and know that in three or four months we could do it all again.
More than that ARPGs gave me all of the complexity and loot chase that I craved, but the ability to take all of it at my own pace. I could play rich and mechanically interesting characters and did not need other players to accomplish any goals that I set out for myself. Sure it was fun as hell to play with friends whenever our paths happened to cross… but I never found myself in a holding pattern needing more people to make something happen. That was always the worst part about playing MMORPGs… was the waiting around for something to happen. In the early days of World of Warcraft, I had fostered this arcane tapestry of social channels that I relied upon to be able to form groups… but even then having access to all of those people and so many different relationships… it would still sometimes take upwards of an hour to get things started.
Playing MMORPGs in a post-dungeon finder economy meant that most people were not actively creating groups. Those who did exist in the group finder were divorced from any personal connection and often had a wealth of toxic behavior associated with them. It just became easier for me to be off doing my own thing and having a less rewarding gameplay experience… than to subject myself to having to deal with other people. Even when the groups went smoothly and everyone was kind… the imagined specter of potentially being called out for missing a cooldown or not mashing my buttons hard enough or in the correct order was enough to keep me from ever trying most nights. Occasionally I would get brave and put myself out there… and those were often the times that I ran into the worst possible individuals.
For years Final Fantasy XIV was the exception to the growing toxicity of gaming communities. It was downright wholesome in comparison and there were so many moments like above where someone needed to AFK and all of the players just chilled out and chatted while waiting. However with the downfall of World of Warcraft and the mass migration of players to XIV… with it has seemed to come a lot more of those cultural norms. Now I have friends talking about struggling to find a static raid group that does not require you to use tools that violate the terms of service. I’ve absolutely seen a lot more talk of damage numbers and open calling out of folks who are not performing up to some imagined bar in the few groups I have exposed myself to. All of this just makes it that much harder to get over my growing mental block to putting myself out there.
If I were the type of player who could happily subsist on casual “Stardew Valley” style gameplay, I could probably still find fulfilling gameplay in MMORPGs. I am not that player. I love loot and quite honestly the only reason why I started raiding in the first place back in World of Warcraft is that I wanted access to shiny purple items. Sure raiding with other people is its own kind of rewarding, and sure it feels great to finally take down a boss… but it feels much better to get that item you have been trying to get for months. Legitimately I probably had more fun in World of Warcraft raids by soloing them years after the fact… than I ever did actually doing them legitimately. I liked collecting things and I absolutely loved collecting appearances. That sort of mindset was not always conducive to a need-based or points-based raiding economy.
You know what case endless mountains of loot to climb? Action ARPGs absolutely do, so much so that we set up complicated loot filter systems in order to show us only the “best” items, and even then… nonsense like this occasionally happens. So it was a few months back that I realized that a lot of my shift from MMORPGs as my core focus to ARPGs is that it largely scratches all of the itches for me. I can play with friends and have a heck of a lot of fun when our schedules happen to align, but the rest of the time I have endless progression and complexity buried behind a constant dopamine hit of loot acquisition. I get all the things that I loved about MMORPGs but none of the obstacles standing in my way.
More than that I get to feel like I am part of a larger community and get to help others in their own progression. I get so deep in the weeds at times when I am writing about ARPGs, but I feel like someone out there is benefitting from the nonsense I am doing. Then there is the whole concept of guilds and shared stashes that let me legitimately help my friends who happen to be playing along with me. Games like Last Epoch and the resonance system allow me to share items that I have collecting dust in my massive treasure trove… even if I was not playing with a friend at the time it dropped. Bel League in Path of Exile was a heck of a lot of fun, and while it seems like most of the AggroChat crew is over that game… there will be times in the future when I can share things through the Guild Stash with other players who are active in the game at that time. If nothing else my blog and my constant ramblings serve as a locus of information for anyone who might want to get into these sorts of games.
That is not to say that I don’t still play MMORPGs, but when I do so I go into them knowing that I am likely never going to actively group with another player. I think this is why I have had a bit of a renaissance with Guild Wars 2 because it is a game that lets me do large-scale raid-like events in the open world… without ever having to organize or manage other players. I had a heck of a lot of fun recently playing through the Dragonflight story, and doing some of the World Quests in World of Warcraft but also reached a point where I felt like I had experienced enough of that game. At some point prior to the release of Dawntrail this summer I will pop back into Final Fantasy XIV and complete all of the content I have missed and then happily play through the new expansion, but also know that once the credits roll I am probably out again.
For the foreseeable future, I am very likely to be devoted almost entirely to ARPGs, because they scratch the right itches for me and fit my usage patterns. I’ve had similar phases with Monster Hunter World or whatever the latest Looter Shooter happens to be because they operate in similar patterns. I had several weeks of joy when Enshrouded launched into early access because it gave me a lot of the same dopamine hits. I don’t think it is that any of the MMORPGs have changed… and more that my patterns of play have changed. I’ve just finally reached a point where I am ready to accept it and stop trying to push myself to do things that I no longer find as comfortable as I once did.
Anyways! I had been kicking around this topic for a while now and like I said at the start… it seemed like a decent way to close out the week. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I will see you all on Monday for a recap of whatever the hell I end up doing this weekend.
The post Why I Now Main ARPGs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I know a few days ago I stated that I was going to be putting my Ignite Warpath Forge Guard aka “Fire Bro” on hold. However yesterday I ended up ripping the bandaid off and completely rebuilding the character into something slightly different. I am not sure how interesting this post is going to be for most people, because I am going to be diving into the changes that I made. I decided to go ahead and write about it mostly to show how easy it is to shift gears within Last Epoch. I’ve said this before, but the only thing that is absolutely set in stone is your mastery. So no matter what I would be doing from this point out, I would be doing it as a Forge Guard. Within that mastery, there is a heck of a lot of leverage to move around and change things up significantly.
For anyone who has not been following the saga of “Fire Bro” let’s do a really quick recap. The above video shows some Monolith gameplay of the build as it stood at the beginning of yesterday. I was focused on shifting Warpath to fire damage, and then using Lunge also shifted to fire damage as my movement ability, generating Sigils of Hope on kill, and proccing Smite every second while spinning to deal additional fire damage and some splash healing. It worked phenomenally well… up until the point that it didn’t. I had put almost all of my eggs in the block mechanic basket and did not have enough health or general survival to keep pushing forward. While I got to Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 + 100 Corruption version of the endgame system… I spent most of my time just getting overwhelmed by incoming damage. For anyone curious here is a Build Planner for the state of this build before the impending rework.
Yesterday started largely as me sitting down and trying to figure out how to work Healing Hands into my build. This is an ability that received a new talent tree with 1.0 and offers a ton of utility. Firstly you can have melee attacks proc healing hands 100% of the time generating a burst of direct healing and some healing over time. On top of that you can shift the ability to scale based on melee damage with Seraph Blade and if you have enough points left over you can turn it into a movement ability when directly cast and even give it the same invulnerability frames that other movement abilities have. A huge positive side effect of this interaction is the splash healing is not only keeping me alive but also keeping my Manifest Armor minion topped off. The problem with all of this… is it does not work terribly well with Warpath. It will proc once per channel, meaning that you need to constantly “pulse” Warpath meaning that you are losing some of the benefits that I had stacked for “channeling” constantly. Essentially I needed a new main damage-dealing ability.
Without Warpath smite was out the window as well, but I landed on another favorite of my abilities Rive. Essentially Rive is a 3-strike combo and the talent trees allow you to tweak which of the strikes is the most important. For me I wanted to go with Focused Strike which means that the third large AOE strike will always be a critical strike. On top of that while I can’t shift the damage of Rive to Fire… I can pick up three points into Savagery meaning that I am dealing 45% more damage against Ignited Targets and both my Manifest Armor and I are always igniting targets. Lastly, there is Coup De Grace which means that rive has a 15% kill threshold so that it simply deletes any target when their health drops to 15% or below.
Since I removed… Smite, Warpath, and Lunge… that left me with an open slot. As uninteresting of a choice as it is… I ended up going with the good ole swiss-army-knife of damage dealing… Volatile Reversal. I do not care at all about void damage, but this ability creates a rift at the start of my movement rewind and a rift at the end of my movement and causes everything touched by either rift to take 30% more damage. Additionally, I gain a boost in global attack speed meaning I burn through my 3-hit combo faster causing more ignites and dealing more critical damage on that third hit. The cooldown is lowered to the point where I can basically be constantly pressing it while in combat pending the “rewind” functionality does not screw things up.
With all of these changes also came a significant rework of some of my gearing. You can see the totality of the changes with this new Build Planner export, but I will talk through a few of them specifically. Firstly this build is still based around Firestarter’s Torch and the interactions with that weapon and ignite damage. I’ve managed to craft an amazing legendary version with T7 Hybrid Fire Penetration, and T5 Ignite Chance. I swapped out Rahyeh’s Light for the best rolled Cradle of the Erased that I have managed to pick up so far. Golden Aegis is a ton of survival, and the stats on this shield work pretty well with what I am trying to do. I had to swap out my helm and chestpiece trading Manifest Armor and Warpath for ones focused on Healing Hands and Rive. I am sticking with Solarum Plate as it gives me a nice boost in Fire Damage along with decent armor and endurance. Lastly giving up Warpath meant that I lost my ability to convert bleed into ignite, which means that I had to swap out my gloves for a pair of Maehlin’s Hubris which I managed to craft into a legendary with T6 Hybrid Health.
I can now rip through Empowered Monoliths, but that is not to say I don’t still have some issues. I am still using seven uniques and at some point, I would like to replace my Sunwreath and Fiery Dragon Shoes with either a good legendary version of either or a really well-rolled Exalted. Neither are doing anything that I could not pick up off another item and several of the lines on Sunwreath specifically only apply to a spellblade. I need a lot more health in order to be really comfortable as I am still sitting at around 1800. From an offense standpoint, I have 530% Fire Damage and 1 point shy of 300% Chance to Ignite which feels really good. I could use some more flat physical damage however to buff the moment-to-moment combat with Rive. There are still levers to tweak with this build, and I will likely be slowly poking at it until the next Path of Exile league.
Is it as fun as the previous version? Honestly… no. There was something so chill about rolling over the top of things and watching them burn to death in my wake. That aspect of the build is gone, but I am not sure what I could have done to keep making that sort of gameplay work. What I wanted was a pseudo Righteous Fire gameplay style with super chill Monoliths and so long as I stuck to the level 90 non-Empowered ones it worked well enough. I needed to do something to make things work for Empowered and my series of significant revisions to the build have done that. Is it still enjoyable? Yeah, it absolutely still is, but combat does not feel anywhere near as fluid as it did before. Needing to cycle through the three-hit combo of Rive gives everything a stutter-step feel which is nowhere near as smooth as spinning around and clipping through mobs constantly. My Void Knight continues to remain my “main” and I dinged 97 last night and continue pushing towards 100. However “Fire Bro” will likely stay here as a pet project.
The post Resurrecting Fire Bro appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
While I am still very much pushing my main Belgrevious the Echo Warpath Void Knight to 100, every so often I need a break. Lately, I have been tinkering with a Spellblade Mage, specifically one focused on Flame Reave, Firebrand, and Flame Ward. My friend Tam had talked at length about how much he was enjoying the Spellbade mastery and how specifically it was playing into his core fantasy of a melee mage. So I decided to give it a shot and ran up BelSpellReave to play with this. I believe he shifted his damage to Lightning, but for me setting things on fire will always be my happy place. I have to say I have gotten much faster at the campaign for Last Epoch and I think probably in total it took me around five hours to level from beginning a character to defeating Majasa and entering the Monolith. This is much faster than I am at getting through the Path of Exile campaign, and I am not even using any of the skips available in Last Epoch.
I have to admit when the concept of “Melee Mage” came up, it wasn’t necessarily this. Generally speaking, I expected to be swinging a weapon that was enchanted with magic… almost a Lightsaber for lack of a better description. What the Spellblade is doing instead is casting a very short-range blade-like spell that extends out in front of them. Essentially you have Flamebrand shown above or Shatter Strike that creates a weird strike that sort of wraps around your character. Mana Strike is the one that feels the closest to what I would have expected a Spellblade to feel like, but it feels super weak and is a default mage thing, not something attached to the specialization. It does not live up to my mental picture of what caster melee would look like, but I can roll with pretty much anything given that I am forced into the role of a caster in most of the characters I play in Path of Exile.
What is however a lot of fun is Flame Reave. By default, it is a cone that shoots out in front of you, but with the addition of the unique Sunwreath, it changes to a ring of fire that shoots out from your character. With points in the tree, you can make this ring return to your character causing it to deal another pulse of damage as it shrinks back down. It feels really good running around the map, gathering up a ton of mobs, and then firing off a few Flame Reaves to clean them up. The problem with this however is that I am constantly out of mana because I think in total I can shoot off four of these before it entirely drains my mana pool. This is one of the core problems I have with the design of Last Epoch… is that there does not seem to be a way to properly “fix” your mana problems. In Path of Exile, you can take actions that will make it so you effectively have an unlimited mana pool and never have to stop your most fun abilities. I’ve yet to truly figure out how to do this with most abilities in Last Epoch.
I realize that a lot of my current woes can almost directly be traced to the fact that my gear is a complete mess. Predictive loot is awesome for leveling a character and finding things that you can actually use… but it royally sucks for leveling alts that are of different base classes. I am wearing almost entirely a bunch of not-exactly ideal unique items because that is what I have in droves laying around that I can throw on a character. I am just now starting to get decent mage drops and I figure as I keep swapping out more of these items the character will perform significantly better. Uniques are a great boost in power while leveling… but that starts to become a hindrance as you near the end of the campaign and actually need some mana and survivability.
I absolutely skyrocketed through the campaign but hit a bit of a wall when I reached Majasa for the first time. She was simply dealing more damage to me faster than I could generate ward. I have really bad health and cannot seem to generate ward fast enough to make up for that fact. I was able to rip through Monoliths without problems and put on a few more levels and then finally came back and killed her at level 60 with fewer problems. In those few levels, I had done some swapping around of gear and talent points to try and focus more on survival and less on wholesale murder. That is one huge positive of the Spellblade though. It can certainly do a proper murder and has zero issues shredding bosses. If I can ever solve my ward woes and mana malfunctions… it will be a pretty dang fun build.
I’ve been through so many phases with this character in the last two days since starting it. I’ve fallen in love with the clear speed while doing the campaign, been frustrated with how weak the survival feels, and then reached a place of acceptance that it is never going to feel as sturdy as my Void Knight but certainly has faster-killing potential. Would I play one of these again? Probably not… or at least not without learning some significant lessons on how to fix some of its problems. I’ve never played a ward character before, and I essentially need to learn how to make them feel good. I also need to swap out almost all of my uniques for properly rolled exalted gear… which is simply going to take time in the monolith. It will be a pet project for when I get tired of spinning and winning.
The post Flamereaving appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Last Epoch. With it I am playing a slew of different characters that all have their own different demands. At least in part, I am “yoloing” my way through gearing and speccing most of the characters, and it made me think about some of the skills key to that process. Path of Exile and Last Epoch have a specific tagging system that indicates how abilities, gear, and passive points interact with each other, but coming from Diablo it was not necessarily something that I was super familiar with. In Diablo you generally think about how to scale a Barbarian, or a Demon Hunter, or a Crusader… and less so about how to scale one individual ability in their wide array of abilities. In Path of Exile you could play any ability on any base class, and while this is not exactly the case with Last Epoch… you can make every class perform in wildly different ways based on your specific choice of abilities and how you support them with the talent tree and your gear.
Ultimately it is the skill tags that will dictate how this interaction is going to work. If you mouse over any ability in the game and hold down the alt button, you are going to see an extended amount of information about how that ability is interacting currently. I chose a wide number of abilities and specifically what we are going to focus on the most is Scaling Tags. For example, Static is a Lightning Spell, and as such has both the tags “Lightning” and “Spell”, but it also has the tag “Instant Cast” and “Intelligence” indicating that it scales based on your current Intelligence stat and counts as an instant cast for anything that interacts with instant abilities. Summon Thorn Totem is a Minion but more specifically a Totem and will scale based on those tags but also indicates that it scales based on your Attunement ability score. Every ability in the game has tags that map out how they are going to interact with other abilities, the gear you equip, and the sorts of passive talent points that you invest in.
It is that last bit that becomes very important because sometimes a skill talent tree can impact the tags associated with a skill. They can either add new tags, remove tags, or sometimes change a tag completely. Let’s look at Warpath specifically as I am currently running two different builds that use that ability in different ways. By default, Warpath has the tags Physical, Melee, Area, Channeled, Movement, and Strength and you can scale the ability based on any of those interactions. If you choose Apocalypse Whirl in the skill tree it causes that ability to lose the Physical tag and instead gain the Void Tag. Similarly, if you choose Earthscorcher it will cause the ability to lose the physical tag and gain the Fire tag instead. These two notable passives are mutually exclusive, and change how you would begin to gear for that ability. Most abilities in the game have some sort of version of this interaction that allows you to lean into a specific playstyle or damage type, allowing you to more efficiently scale.
If you look at gearing, the affixes that are on an item will more or less map directly to the tagging system. For example, the Two-Handed Mace above scales Void Damage, so it would work well with an ability that either starts as dealing void damage or one that you have shifted to void damage in the above Warpath example. The Bow has Minion Melee Damage and Minion Bow Damage, and as such would scale the damage of any minions you create that either do Bow Attacks or Melee Attacks, but would not scale Thorn Totems that we talked about above because they have the Spell tag associated with them and not Bow or Melee. Harthenon’s Vow scales Melee Physical Damage which would work great with Warpath in its original form, but does nothing if you shift it to Fire or Void. Things get a little more tricky when afflictions interact with items… for example, Warpath shifted with the Earthscorcher talent can inflict Ignite, which itself does fire damage over time. Knowing that means that Firestarter’s Torch will specifically scale the damage if the Ignite you are inflicting on targets, but not necessarily the Fire-based Warpath damage directly.
You can in theory limp through the campaign on almost any combination of abilities, gear, and passive points. However, if you want a build that feels exceptionally good, you are going to want to pay attention to synergies between abilities, the tags that scale them, and the gear that you were equipping. Shifting everything to a single damage type, for example, makes it much easier to gear your character and makes every interaction that much more powerful. On my Void Knight that I am pushing towards 100, I have shifted pretty much every ability that I am using towards Void Melee damage so that I can scale effectively off either pure Void Damage, Void Melee, or pure Melee scaling. For the Ignite character that I have been tweaking, I have been focusing more on Fire Damage Over Time and Ignite Chance so that I don’t have to worry too much about whether or not my abilities are critical attacks. I need to take a step back and rework some things because right now I am having survival issues… but knowing my core focus on that character will allow me to shift some things around to create a better functioning total package.
The awesome thing about Last Epoch is that the interactions between abilities, gear, and talents are extremely straightforward. In Path of Exile, there are a bunch of edge cases where something might be tagged as this but scales in a very specific way when it comes to the damage that is being dealt. I am sure there are probably SOME edge-case interactions here, but most things certainly feel more clearly outlined. Mostly I wanted to talk about the concept of tagging because I know at this point Last Epoch is interesting to a lot of players who have not gotten down in the weeds when it comes to character builds. When I was playing Diablo, I was not necessarily paying attention to the nuance of every ability and trying to glean their finer interactions because I didn’t need to. Skill Tagging however is one of those concepts that will help you go a long way towards making more enjoyable characters without following a guide.
The post Last Epoch and Skill Tags appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
