Good Morning Folks! Last night was a pretty great night, but it was one in fairly benign and quiet ways. Due to the holidays and having an exceptionally busy week, Ace and I did not manage to connect and do our normal Tuesday weekly reset nonsense in Destiny Rising. We did however manage to squeeze in a bit of play time last night, which was fortuitous because it also represented the reset of the Calamity Ops period so that we could grind up to promotion status again. We had two really chill Grandmaster Blitz runs, and then a pretty awful Calamity Ops run that knocked the wind out of our sails. However we were determined to at least knock out the 1 million points contribution score and in our second round we got a really solid player that managed to get us over 350k score and unlocked the Calamity Ops title for both of us. We did a few more runs after that and both went pretty smoothly, indicating that really that first player was just awful.
Right now The Dawning event is going on in Destiny Rising, as is it also going on in Destiny 2. However the two events are fairly wildly different… namely because in Rising… we have an animal mascot called the Dawning Chinchilla. We have no clue WHERE the Chinchilla came from or why… but we have a statue of it in our guild hall. In truth it does not look like any Chinchilla I have ever known… and I have had several friends that kept them as pets. Instead it sort of looks like a sheep version of the FFXIV fat cat minion, that has some sort of campfire attached to its back via a saddle. None of this really makes a damned bit of sense in the theme of a holiday event, but I don’t care. I love this thing. It makes me happy when I see it… so I guess mission accomplished. I kind of want to figure out a way to get this model outside of the game and print one.
The other thing that I really enjoy about Destiny Rising is the random names people come up with. Occasionally they really commit super hard to a bit. For example this is Stain, and they were in several of the Blitz runs last night. Notice that they applied the white explosion sticker to the crotch region. There are levels of nonsense applied in this game that I have only seen in the nameplates in FFXIV. We also ran around with a character named “LadyMan” which… I am not sure if it was an attempt to say LadysMan or what… but regardless memorable. It is weird how often I run into the same players over and over while doing content in the game. It does make me a bit concerned as to whether or not this game has much of a population if I keep seeing the same people. I hope it can afford to stay active because I love it very much. It is a game that I did not know I needed in my life, but absolutely do. Because if nothing else it gives Ace and I an excuse to do focused nonsense every single week.
After running around in Destiny Rising, I joined in our normal Thursday night grouping in Guild Wars 2 with Ammo, Ashgar, Sita, and Sol. There is an event going on right now where if you do 5 events in each of the 5 starter zones, you get a weapon and a 20 slot bag. So we ripped through some events in Queensdale, Wayfarer Foothills, and Metrica Province. That will leave each of us up to doing Caledon Forest and Plains of Ashford on our own, because I believe this event will be over by the time we meet up next week… and due to the Holiday I am doubting we are able to meet up anyways. Between spending quality sibling time with Ace, and grouping with the GW2 crew… it helped immensely. Friends really are a delightful panacea and I need to put myself out there more often for hanging on voicechat time. I think I probably need it more now than I ever did, because I live such a solitary life after the passing of my spouse. Sure I talk to my cats… and they talk back… they just don’t say anything that I can actually understand.
In other news I am happy to announce that I have my first STL part to release to the general public. When I was cleaning out my garage I put in these shelving units from Sam’s Club, and they have these little slots in the sides of them so you can either connect them to other units or hang these hooks that they come with off of them. I wanted to design some other utility objects to connect to these slots and made a little buck that I can merge onto existing models that fits the slot. Again this is probably only actually useful to me, but I wanted a broom holder and found a nice one that I then merged my little buck onto the back end of and it printed off beautifully. Now I have a place to store my shop broom and I will hopefully never have to wonder where the hell I put it. I figure I will upload and share any bits that I make, but I am not sure if these are useful enough to actually share with the broader public.
Because of all of the other nonsense that I got up to last night, I did not really make much progress in Path of Exile II. By the time we were wrapping up in Guild Wars 2, it was already 9ish and I just went on to bed. I doubt I will make much progress tonight either because I am doing the semi-monthly pen and paper thing with some friends that I have legitimatley been looking forward to. Mostly I want to get to level 78 so that I can equip my shiny new demon from and play with that a bit. There was a significant patch that dropped yesterday that seems like it might have buffed the league mechanic a bit, so that is welcome. However I am also seeing some reporting about endurance charage generation being bugged for bears… which will suck because I am getting quite a bit of survival from that. Momentum is also apparently not really working for Rampage so I replaced that support gem with Heft for the time being.
Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I think I did most of my shopping but need to get out and get some wrapping paper because I threw out a bunch of the old wrapping paper that I had while I was cleaning out the garage.
The post Praise the Chinchilla appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! When I sat down yesterday to write my blog post, I fully expected to wind down Path of Exile II. I was just not having much fun, and everything felt more than a bit tedious. However yesterday I started having fun again, and as a result I am back with a vengeance. The endgame is still not amazing, and the speed at which you move through maps… also not super amazing. However the core problem that I had with my build is that my bear bro felt a little squishy. I was trying to go hard into Armor and quite honestly… Armor as a mechanic in Path of Exile II is still pure shit. Up until this point the answer to this problem was to go for Blue Health Bars… aka Energy Shield, and from what I understand that is still a perfectly viable option in spite of league after league of them attempting to nerf it. Armor however remains shit, because armor is only really useful against small hits. I did not want to go Energy Shield… so instead I fell back upon familiar ground and opted to try what fixes this problem in Path of Exile 1.
That’s right folks… I bought a pretty dress. Cloak of Flame is the core item that you end up building around as Righteous Fire Chieftain in Path of Exile 1 because it offsets a bunch of your physical damage to elemental damage, which 90% max res can handle nicely. Even with 75% resistances, damage shifting still makes a massive difference when it comes to whittling down those big hits into something reasonable. The Shaman ascendancy gives me 5% phys taken as each of the elemental resistances and the Cloak of Flame I picked up had 50% phys taken as fire for a total of 65% of my physical incoming damage shifted to some sort of element. Then on top of that I have a bunch of the opposite direction which allows my armor to apply to elemental damage. I doubt these double dip, but it does at least help with smaller elemental hits and allows me to mostly shrug those off. This setup massively improved the squish factor and now made mapping feel pretty chill. I still do not have capped Chaos resistance so I still have to dance around anything purple or green in my map, but I am no longer getting oneshot anywhere near as often as I once was.
So I have been roaming around the map and playing the game of seeking out corrupted nexus areas so I can keep getting more atlas passives. At this point I have completed at least the first tier of atlas passives in all of the league mechanics, and periodically take on the harder bosses for the guaranteed chance of getting a waystone upgrade. I am mostly running T4 maps at the moment, but as soon as I can get a few T5s I will be moving up. The waystone drop chance still feels abysmal, and they really need to do something to help give us better map sustain. It feels like I am getting more tablet drops than waystone drops, which I need far fewer of since they all now last 10 rounds. I did find two Moment of Zen near the start of the maps but I am going to hold onto these until I can get up into higher tier maps. I believe the uniques that drop out of these are influenced by the tier of waystone that you feed into them.
I am finally starting to generate some currency and saw my first two raw Divine Orb drops. I am pulling 2-3 Exalted orbs from each map and am fairly regularly seeing Chaos orbs. The loot does not feel overwhelmingly good or anything, and the Vaal Temple still sort of feels like crap, but there is a patch coming this evening I believe to address this. I did manage to pull some unique tablet called Unforseen Consequences that sold for 6 Divine Orbs, which was nice. I will be honest any time I encounter something that sells for that much, I just can’t bring myself to actually run it. The same goes for super rare scarabs in Path of Exile 1, I would rather have the currency than to use them, because my build is not optimized to get the maximum amount of outcome from such things. The way in which I play these games, will always mean I am funneling resources to the highest tier of players, and not actually consuming them myself. Probably the most expensive thing I have used are those Scarabs that were forcing a temple to drop every map and they were around 120 chaos per stack of 20, but I was generating more than enough currency in the Keepers league to fund those.
The real highlight of yesterday is that I found a copy of the Fury of the King Ashbark Talisman that fell within my available Divines. At the start of the league these were going for 25 Divines or more, but I snagged this one for 6 Divines. The only negative is that I still need two more levels before I can equip it. This will also require me to rework my tree a bit to get the most out of it, however I don’t really have much use for my stash of gold so this is also not a big deal. For those who are not in the know this is the Talisman that converts your bear form into a sort of Balrog looking thing. A few days ago Palsteron released a video about this unique. Essentially this will also end up with me dropping pounce from my build because the unique comes with Molten Crash which serves as a movement/attack ability. I am really looking forward to this swap up.
Basically solving the squish factor, made me start really enjoying the game again. Funny how that works. So I figure I will be with this until I push my map tiers up a bit, and start trying to take out some of the other bosses. I need to figure out which trial I want to focus on because I need to get my next two ascendancy points. I hate both Sekemas and Chaos… and desperately want this game to bring back the Labyrinth. However I feel like they will probably fuck it up somehow because there is way too much bullshit going on in this game in general. There are way too many “damage only on tuesdays” stuff going on as they are attempting to be clever. This game would be infinitely better if I was not required to push six buttons to make anything happen. All of that said… I am finding fun in what I am doing. For the most part I leap around the map and then do a big slam to cause packs to explode. This works great until I encounter a boss, but at that point I have to piano key my way through a bunch of abilities to set up a walking calamity which nukes it from orbit.
I wish Two Handed Warrior felt half as good as Bear does.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.
I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.
Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.
After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.
What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.
What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.
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