Good Afternoon Folks. I know my blog is a bit of a mess at the moment, but yall are going to have to bear with me. I used to live my life based on a deeply predictable rhythm. I got up around 5:30, and was upstairs around 6 am, having done all of my morning chores like feeding myself, the indoor cats, and the outdoor cats, and even often doing something like starting a load of dishes or laundry. That process is so much slower right now because it takes me quite a bit of time to recover from pretty much every action. I am hoping that, given enough time, I will develop stamina again. I am already doing way better today than I was last week, and a lot of that was jumping through hoops to figure out exactly how much medication I need to maintain my blood pressure at reasonable levels right now. I’ve also found a few things that taste reasonable, and honestly, even kind of hit the spot, so my nutrition side is way more functional as well. My life has often been about figuring out and building routines… and this whole cancer/chemo thing is a giant wrecking ball to one routine and I am having to craft a brand new one out of the pieces that are left behind.
First off, huge props to Quelex for sharing with me some info on how to knock out one of the Gallant Grinding Goals extremely easily. Sure, it was a bit “spendy” because it required some specific popular scarabs, but over the course of four maps, I was able to knock out that bottom objective. I am now slowly poking my way through influenced maps with over 100% Item Quant, and also doing them in Astrolabe maps, so I can be knocking out two objectives at the same time. I am still using the Scarab/Domination/Legion Atlas that I threw together for the previous objective, because it drops plenty of stuff and goes pretty quickly. I figure around the time I ding 100, I will probably knock out the Influenced maps objective and polish off “GGG”. Then it is just down to slowly chipping away at Tyrannical Tiers and Sandswept Survivor, which are both easy enough but simply require a stupid amount of map runs. Atlas Astrolabes should also be finishing up while I am doing the influenced maps, but it mostly just requires me spending chaos to buy the astrolabes.
Mapping has been a really chill experience for me to turn my brain off and just exist. Last night I spent most of the evening watching shows and catching up on various things. I finished up on Season 2 of Fallout, and am pretty pumped with where things left off there. Fallout may be the single best video game adaptation of anything, because it nailed the universe so perfectly… without seeming to feel like it needed to retread ground we have already gone over in the games. After that, I started up Season 2 of Monarch, and thus far, that show continues to give me everything I want in a Godzilla franchise television outing. I am pretty sure that Apple TV might pay more for their shows than other platforms, because the VFX budget here is pretty amazing. At that point, it was getting late, and I figured I should probably turn in early, given that my body is still recovering from everything it is going through. I will probably pick up where I left off tonight and dive into more episodes of Monarch while I chip away at Path of Exile challenges.
Yesterday I talked about Scalpel, but I figured I would give a bit of an update. I have been 100% using it since then and now… I think I can never go back to good ole Awakened POE Trade. Firstly, the whole ability to manipulate your loot filter on the fly is really nice, and the only thing I wish that it did was directly integrate with my profile on Filterblade, so that I could use it to tick up and down the strictness. You can manipulate individual rules and currencies very easily, but yesterday I wanted to just escalate everything up a strictness tier, and still needed to go to Filterblade to do that. The best part about Scalpel for me personally is how good its price prediction tools are, which admittedly are simply relying on Ninja and the Trade API. Awakened POE Trade always tried to make a bit of a fuzzy recommendation, and it was always slightly wrong, and it relied on me looking things up manually most of the time. Scalpel solves those problems and seems like it is just going to keep getting better, the more functionality that is added to it. I need to sort out the Patreon information and give them some money, because I think I will be using this every single league going forward.
I went to my primary care doctor today, which is part of a monthly check-in that we have had since starting tirzepatide. I had to deal with changing how I am getting the meds going forward, but in truth, it should be much easier. I am desperate for a new normal and figuring out what that starts to look like. However, I realized in chatting with my doctor how different my life is going to look by this time next year. In theory, cancer should be far in my rearview mirror, and hopefully, they have pieced me back together into something resembling the original order of how organs connect. I am already down 50 lbs roughly since I started the journey with tirzepatide…. so I am going to be a completely different person than I am today. 2027… I need there to be no crisis of the year… because the death of my spouse last year, and cancer this year… are a decade’s worth of bullshit at once. I really want to travel next year, and figure out how to go see some of the people who matter to me deeply. I’ve lived my life long enough that various folks whom I have known for literal decades, and cannot imagine living my life without, are just amorphous “internet people”.
Anyways! Thanks for bearing with me as I construct a new normal over the course of the next several weeks.
The post Mr. House and Scalpels appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Today is the head start for Midnight, and it begins at roughly 5 pm CST. I find it interesting that they are specifically choosing that time frame for the start of a new expansion rather than the normal weekly reset time. Since Panda Remix, I have mostly been playing Belgraven, my Dark Iron warrior, as my main because I have always loved Dwarves… and always wanted to be able to play a Dark Iron. Blackrock Depths to this day is probably my favorite dungeon in the game because it was an entire whole-assed city down there, and it felt like a living, breathing, functional place. So while I have Belghast, my original warrior main at the level cap as well… I am choosing to move forward with a new legacy as I am this fiery Dark Iron dude. That feels a bit fitting, honestly, since I am no longer the Belghast that played World of Warcraft. I am Belghast, the blogger, podcaster, and friend to thousands, thanks to the weird fucking life that I have lived. I have a lot of baggage towards World of Warcraft because when I first left the game… I was in a really bad mental state.
There is an addon that has been cycling around the “social medias” called Account Played that visualizes all of the time you have spent playing World of Warcraft and groups it by class. All that is required is installing the addon and then logging in every character on your account, and now that the Warband makes this so much easier because you can see every character from the login screen… I decided to take the plunge and try it. I knew this was going to be a scary proposition, and this does not take into account the fact that I have a second account… nor any of the time I have spent on beta realms and in World of Warcraft Classic. So when I say I have spent two years of my life playing World of Warcraft, all of those extra realms account for the missing days. No wonder this game has such a fundamental effect on me, and why I have so many deep emotions tied to it. There are people that I met through this game who have become some of my closest adult friends. World of Warcraft feels like a high school reunion whenever I play it… and it has all of the same complicated emotions that go along with that. It was a place and a time in my life that felt as fundamental as going to college, and that might seem odd to people who are not steeped in this world, but as I age, it feels less and less weird to me.
As far as the time break-out goes… I am not shocked by that in the least. Since the Warband gives me easy access to see every single character on my account. I have Eight Warriors, Eight Hunters, Five Deathknights, and Three Paladins. Warrior was the very first character that I rolled when I got into beta testing, and it was a Tauren. If I am going to play a random character in a World of Warcraft Event league… I am going to play a Warrior. What would even be wilder is if this could somehow track the amount of time played per spec, because I imagine I have spent way more time in Protection Spec as a Warrior and Paladin than any other spec. I could have absolutely called Mage as my least-played class, and Priest, I knew, would have been pretty low as well. What I was not expecting was Demon Hunter to be as low as it is, given that I mained it for an expansion. However, it also has not been out that long in the grand scheme of things compared to Warrior. I think I have as many Deathknights as I do, largely because it allowed me to rapidly create a functional character on a server, given it started at I think level 25ish? Levels do not mean much after all of the squishing that has happened.
I am looking forward to giving Midnight a spin tonight whenever it launches, and I expect to largely drop all of the quests that I have on Belgraven like a hot rock and move on with my life. I have contemplated dropping Blacksmithing as my profession and going for pure harvesting as I go into the new content. I think maybe herbalism is a good call, because there will always be demand for flower pickers in the world. Especially since I have reached a point of largely wanting to sell whatever I happen to be finding… double harvesting seems like a good call. The other option would be to mirror Belghast proper and go with Enchanting, because there is always a need for enchanting resources as well. I will probably continue to run old content on OG Bel for that precise reason because I can convert all of those purples into shards and sell them on the open market. I’ve never been one to accumulate much wealth in World of Warcraft, and I am going to see if I can change that, especially given that I have enjoyed being a vendor so much in Path of Exile.
Speaking of Path of Exile, today is also the drop of the Mirage League live stream, and with it comes a Twitch drop that works in both Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. This is where my next few weeks are going to get weird because I fully expect to be mainlining POE, and then playing Midnight, Dune, and Enshrouded as a bit of a palate cleanser. It is really hard to gauge what I am going to end up playing in this league until I have seen the trailer and, more importantly, the patch notes. Since I believe I have convinced Ace to take the plunge, I feel like I am not sure I want to go with Righteous Fire in this league as my starter. I might revisit the Golem Elementalist character and either play it with Ice Trap or try to turn it into some sort of Minion character. There is some thought that maybe some of the Phrecia classes might be going core, and if so, I will absolutely be playing Servant of Arakaali minions, because it was too damned much fun during Phrecia 2.0.
As far as a wish list for this league. I would really like to see some version of Mercenaries go core. GGG said that they would like to bring it core, but it would need some sort of rebalance to make it viable. I liked gearing out Mercenaries and really loved that aspect of Diablo III, because you could use the Merc to balance out the weaknesses of your build. I hope the Breach tree is just as powerful as it was during the last league, because it was amazing for crafting early gear. I would love to see Kingsmarch simplified, because the process of building it out still seems like a massive hassle and one that you feel obligated to do since it is effectively free currency. I would really love it if they unbound the spell choices during the acts from your class so that I did not feel required to mule a witch every now and then when I need some of those early abilities. Other than that, I would really love to see a further separation between bossing content and mapping content, and make it so that you do not have to kill Maven and Uber Elder to get your third and fourth keystone… either that or make quest versions of those encounters because it takes too freaking long to gather up the resources for those fights.
I am sure tomorrow I will be talking mostly about the Mirage League reveals. What do you want most from this new league? Are you going to be playing Midnight today? Drop me a line below.
The post Two Years of My Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week, we start off with some discussion around Path of Exile 3.27, the Keepers of the Flame league, and how we are doing breach to make things with the tree tree. From there, we talk a bit about the murder of Amazon Game Studios and how New World is essentially a shambling corpse now… spooky. After that horror story, we needed something chill, so we talked a bit about Powerwash Simulator and its interesting method for delivering a story. Grace and Bel finally finish the Destiny Rising raid and talk a bit about how good it is at teaching mechanics in lower-level content. Dispatch is a wildly good game that is being delivered in an episodic method that feels like you are playing a really good television show. Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity launched and we talk about some of our early thoughts, namely around the builds introduced by the new elite specs. Finally, we talk a bit about Outer Worlds 2 and how it makes good on the idea of Obsidian’s very own Fallout New Vegas that the first game started.
Good Morning Folks. If you have been reading this blog lately you might have had a bit of whiplash as I went from having a blast in Last Epoch… to suddenly diving headlong into Path of Exile II. So you might be asking yourself… Hey Bel… What happened to Last Epoch? This is one of the challenges of both the seasonal model of ARPGs and the fact that a new game launched over an extended United States Holiday weekend. Kodra and Ash are still very much 100% engaged with Last Epoch, and I think I maybe just burned through the process a bit faster than they did. Ultimately I built two fairly successful characters with my Fire Minions Necromancer and then later my Thorns Forge Guard. More than that though I think I just accomplished everything that I really wanted to accomplish in a very short amount of time… far shorter than I thought it would be.
On Saturday, Ace and I spent the day pushing through corruption levels. I was a bit further progressed than they were and thanks to these temporal token things, you can force a boss pretty fast in a given timeline to help catch corruption up. So before lunch we burned through all of the Harbingers that they were missing that I had completed, and then after a lunch break we pushed through all of the remaining Harbingers. The unfortunate part about this story is that when you are pushing corruption with a friend… your own corruption levels are not updating at all. This feels like something that really needs to change because I think above anything else this kill momentum for Ace. They were sub 200 when we started the day and to push up to 300+ is hours worth of work. I really feel like Eleventh Hour Games needs to rethink the way that corruption works, and that it should be something akin to how pushing Greater Rifts worked in Diablo 3, that once you achieve a rank in any timeline… you can select the corruption that you want to farm from a slider or drop down.
We made an attempt on Aberroth together but had both completely forgotten the mechanics. We took a break to go off and do things before the podcast and I returned managing to take down Aberroth after a few tries. The problem with this however is that it how feels like I have effectively beaten the game. Pushing corruption for the sake of pushing corruption never really feels like a meaningful goal. Before you hit corruption levels you have honestly unlocked most of the content you will ever be engaging with, and doing the harbingers sort of feels like a last hurrah for your build. Sure Uber Aberroth exists, but I am not nearly “tryhard” enough to care about taking it down. At this point I would probably swap builds and try running something else up through the paces. There are more woven echoes that I could unlock for more points in the weavers tree… but I sort of just feel like I finished on a good place.
Farming content is enjoyable, and I am sure I will play some more Last Epoch before the next season. There are a few builds that I want to try, but there is just something missing in this game that Path of Exile has that keeps me engaged. I am not entirely certain how to quantify it. Last Epoch is a game about farming multiple copies of the same thing trying to get ever more perfect versions… but you can essentially reach a point of good enough to do all of the content extremely quickly. There are fewer endgame systems to engage with, and as a result it starts to feel stale more quickly. Whereas Path of Exile has a decades worth of content that is all super detailed enough to be its own game… and I wind up going down rabbit holes trying to farm this super rare item or that. The only thing of equivalent rarity here is the Red Ring… which I have never seen, nor do I think I will ever actually see. It is like trying to farm a mageblood or mirror… and effectively unobtainium.
I legitimately expected to only play enough Path of Exile II to farm up the MTX for clearing Act 1 and then move on with my life. However I wound up rerolling and found out that Minion Internalist is still a pretty freaking solid build. More than that I am actually enjoying myself and wanting to see how deep I can push this time around. The gearing process also feels like it takes way longer here, which is a double edged sword. You have to engage with the trade system to really build a functional character, or you need a PHD in the crafting system in order to build your own gear. I managed to mostly get a stable character with stuff off the ground, but now I am largely in currency acquisition mode so that I can eventually afford nicer stuff. Last Epoch doesn’t really have that currency acquisition mode feeling… because even in a trade economy they are using the boring resource of gold… and not the exciting tink of getting a Divine Orb to drop in a map. Gold will never feel as individually special as getting that rare currency item to drop for you.
There are also these “Difficult Boss” nodes that I want to check out, but have not pushed my map tiers up high enough to be able to farm them yet. I did figure out how to unlock them and I figured I would post an infographic for anyone who follows after me. Essentially when you see a blocked node covered in fog, there will be nodes that show up with blue swirlies around them. Inside of each of them there will be a Draiocht Hengestone in the boss chamber of that map, and clicking on this will cause another node to show up. Once you have cleared a few of these the swirlies will move to the blocked node and uncloak the fog of war around it. There is a similar Temporal Sandstorm and Eye of the Storm mechanic on the map but I have not figured out the on map tell for either of those. I know for the Temporal Sandstorm I have started to find hourglasses in the boss rooms of the surrounding maps, and I assume like the hengestones that if I click on enough of these a path will show up.
The biggest problem that I am having right now is with map sustain. It used to be that running a map with a boss guaranteed an upgrade to the next tier higher. This seems to no longer be the case and I am struggling to keep upgrading my map tiers and pushing things higher. I am heading towards a corrupted area now, desperately trying to spawn a T6 map drop… so that I can complete the corruption nexus and get more skill points. I really do not like this method for unlocking atlas points, and in truth I hope they rethink the whole design of this endgame system. This is a perfectly fine endgame system, but I don’t feel like it is a good replacement for mapping from Path of Exile. I loved Delve, but that was not a game mode for everyone. This is honestly a complaint I have with the game is that it feels like they have doubled down on specific mechanics and are now forcing everyone to do them. Sanctum and Ultimatum were perfectly fine mechanics if you enjoyed them, and so long as they were optional… life was great… same for Delve. However now that all three are required mechanics to progress in the game… players are not enjoying it.
We had a big patch yesterday and so far my build seems to have survived it just fine. That has not been the case with other Spectre builds, and it makes me really glad that I have not chased the trend of hopping on the latest and greatest spectre combination. The unique spectres that gave specific buffs ate the nerfbat, and unfortunately one of the new hotness spectres that everyone has been switching to also got impacted. The last bit is supposedly a mistake, but I am glad that I have more or less stuck with Vaal Guards in spite of the visual noise. I could run more but I feel like a mix of Arsonists and Vaal Guards helps clear significantly because the Arsonists do nice instant damage and the Guards have a delayed grenade impact effect.
I have a few gear upgrades that I snagged cheaply, but unfortunately both require level 80… so I am mostly head down farming mode until then. It looks like the Frozen Mandibles were restored in a patch this morning so when I get that additional spirit I might try swapping over to them at that point.
The post What Happened to Last Epoch? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
