Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the official launch of Midnight, and I am always shocked at how much of a difference this seems to make. My rotted “deluxe edition” brain feels that if there is a head start… I am probably going to pay the extra in order to enable it. However, there seems to be a large volume of people who do not do this thing, either because they cannot afford the difference or because they are diametrically opposed to the practice. So I will never be shocked at what a difference things make when the flood gates actually open and all of the players show up. All of the zones were way the heck more active last night, but shockingly, the most cogent change was the fact that general chat was way more hopping with activity. It’s been disturbingly quiet the entire time I have been playing, and even the few times I attempted to ping chat for a rare mob… I got crickets.
This morning I had popped in to check on World Quests and saw someone calling out that this dragon named Ravengerus was up and that they were going to take it down. I had attempted this the other day, and even attempted to summon folks to my aid… with zero luck but today… we got the critical mass of players needed to take it down. It dropped nothing useful, and also, seemingly, the rare kill quest is bugged because this thing did not count towards it… nor did any of other named mob spawns that I have taken down count. I like killing big monsters, and I will always be down for taking down a silver elite, no matter if I am likely to get loot from it or not. I took a screenshot in large part so those who have not been around WoW, can see how much better the ground markers and attack visualization are. While this is not the pixel-perfect nature of Final Fantasy XIV, it is so much better than the “every edge is fuzzy” problem that we had for years. Fights are way easier to do because it is so much easier to actually avoid attacks that are avoidable.
Between World Quests and Rare mobs, and a few hunts, I have gotten my item level up to 225, which includes a 220 blue or better in every slot except for my belt and my boots. I picked up a 201 belt for cheap off the Auction House, because I had so little luck with belt drops that I just could not seem to find anything better. I’ve gotten belts to drop from Rares, but it is always a cloth belt. Similarly, I have gotten multiple pairs of boots to drop but they are always Mail, so it makes me wonder if there is some sort of bug happening in the smart loot system. Apparently, you can only get two Veteran rewards from weekly hunts, because the first two “hard” hunts that I completed rewarded a trinket and an amulet, and then all of the others after that rewarded a generic green bag of loot. The 246 trinket hat I got came from the Singularity quartermaster for achieving a specific reknown rating and then completing one of the tower defense things in the Voidstorm. I need to probably grind out dungeons or delves to see if I can get a damned pair of boots, since no one seems to be crafting them and selling them for a reasonable price on the Auction House either.
I also went through the process of unlocking the Haranir, which is, by far, the easiest Allied race that I have seen. Essentially, it just involves completing the campaign in Harandar and then talking to the NPC near the portal in Silvermoon. I create a baby Navi/Troll thingy that is a Druid in large part because the most interesting thing going on for the race is their Druid forms. I played through the tiny bit of story that represents a starter zone, and then moved to the portion where I go through the motions and choose a campaign to go through. I opted to go for Battle for Azeroth because it has been a while since I have seen those zones, and I particularly enjoyed the main story quest for The Horde. At some point, I will need to get an invite to Facepull since I rolled this on The Scryers. I know guilds are both cross-server and cross-faction these days, but I prefer to keep my horde with my horde friends in Facepull and then all of them also on The Scryers, whereas Argent Dawn is for Alliance.
Other than that, I have been making daily trips into Dune Awakening to farm for batteries. I did quite a bit of this during the double resources event over the weekend, and now I am mostly just making a bit lap around the central rocky area that my base is located in. I am up to 17 days of power currently, but keep dipping in to do this to keep extending this time frame. The most recent Coriolis storm seemingly ruined some of the easy battery spawns in my area. However, there are still at least three spawns that I can farm relatively easily, and I dip in periodically to do so whenever I think about it. I am not done messing around with Dune, but I know that my focus is going to be really fraugh after this Friday when the Path of Exile league starts. My base to the south is going to run out of power, though, and I have warned the others on the server to raid the resources if they want anything.
There is a pretty constant trickle of information coming out ahead of the League start this Friday, and I am all on board with it. I’ve decided that I am, in fact, rolling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as my first character, in large part because I really want to get into the endgame as fast as I can so I can start exploring the reworked Atlas. I do want to build a Holy Hammers character and maybe a Guardian minions character, but those will come later once I have a stable financial base in this league. It seems like Kodra is going to be rolling some sort of Holy Strike character, and I will be interested in seeing how that works. Additionally, I have convinced my sibling Ace to give this a go, and they are going to probably be rolling an SRS Necromancer since it is pretty easy to get up and running. I would love to be there to support them as they need gear, but also know that they are deeply aligned with SSF ideology, so it will be a balancing act. I think Carth is going to be giving this league a shot as well and has a friend who will need to be invited to the clan. If we are mutuals and you play POE, you are always welcome in our nonsense.
The post Where Are The Boots? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Happy Midnight Official Release Day! I have been playing Midnight since Thursday, when the head start began, because I am a sucker and am willing to pay the premium to get access to things early. There are folks out there with way more self-control than I have… and as a result, I hope you all enjoy your journey into Midnight. This morning’s blog post is going to talk about some of the themes in Midnight, so if you want to go into the game completely unspoiled, this morning be something that you want to come back to later. I feel like it is also important to state that I have been out of the World of Warcraft game for a while now. I very briefly played through the Dragonflight campaign at release and then attempted to come back and play a bit for War Within, and crashed out on the second zone because I was overloaded by the sheer number of quests. So I have been gone from seriously attempting to play World of Warcraft since the Shadowlands expansion in 2020.
The last time I played the game seriously was during Pandaria Remix in 2024, and I am actually maining the character that I played during that event, which is a Dark Iron Dwarf Warrior named Belgraven. There has been a lot of adjusting to the sweeping changes in the game that have happened since I last played, and Remix doesn’t fully count since it was its own thing. First up, I think the User Interface changes are brilliant, and I have managed to play the game without reinstalling any sort of hotbar or nameplate addons. The only thing that I wish I had was some equivalent of the threat bar that FFXIV has where you can see how much threat you are holding on all of the targets that you currently have threat on. This would be amazing, but the base UI seems perfectly cromulent for the role of a tank. I have no clue how good it is for healing, but seemingly it works just fine for DPS, given that after the campaign, I have swapped over to Arms Warrior. I’ve also been using the one button assist quite a bit because I have wanted to completely shut off my brain while playing World of Warcraft. If I do anything serious, I will set my hotbars up properly and care about rotations again.
As far as the campaign goes, I think Midnight is pretty freaking great. It is a massive step up in World of Warcraft storytelling, even over The War Within… which was itself a massive step up over Dragonflight. While I am not feeling the feels that I did during Final Fantasy XIV, they are trying to tackle far more nuanced topics in this expansion than we usually get. The Amani zone and the redemption arc featured within it was phenomenal, and it might go down as one of my favorite World of Warcraft zones, period, from any expansion. Zul’Aman will always have a special place in my heart, and I completely forgot that it was associated with the Silvermoon area… so this was a massively pleasant surprise. Another zone that I did not expect to really love was the rambling mess that featured around Silvermoon, which takes you across all of the Plaguelands as you deal with the sins of the past. It tells a way more mature story about the horrors of war and what it brings people to do than I expected from Warcraft. Blizzard is known for big bombastic hero tales… and significantly less so for dealing with sensitive topics, but I applaud them for trying something new and interesting.
This game, however, continues my tradition of hating the “druid” zone. I am not the biggest fan of Harandar or the Navi… I mean Haranir. I get what they are going for with this zone and this race, and I might actually play one at some point because they have some really interesting druid transformation forms, but this is so not my jam. Harandar, in general, also suffers from the “Heart of Thorns” problem, where the zone uses aggressive verticality that makes waypoints mostly useless unless you have the layout memorized and know without a doubt what vertical tier of the zone the thing you are looking for is located on. I will always love the Guild Wars 2 Heart of Thorns expansion for the sweeping meta events that it introduced, but I fucking hate traversing these zones… and Harandar is that but for World of Warcraft. It also makes me feel like I need to sneeze the entire damned time because I can always feel the pollen in the air. There are going to be tree huggers out there that love this zone and good for them… but for someone whose favorite zone is Blackrock Depths… this is very much not my jam.
I dinged level 90 on Sunday morning and then wrapped up the campaign about an hour after that. This feels like a pretty good pace for leveling through the content, but I was left in the dust by Kylana and Erixi, who dinged, I believe, sometime on Friday. The biggest frustration that I have with the leveling experience is that you are still going to need about two zones worth of side quests to hit the max level. Go into the leveling process with that in mind and choose which zones you want to grind out completely in order to accomplish this. I personally chose Voidstorm and the Amani zone, and doing all of the quests in one and 90% of the quests in the other, combined with the Main Story quest, was enough to get me there. I did hit a wall at level 95, where I needed to be 96 in order to open up the last zone of the game, so you are better off just pushing through some side quests that are convenient as you are doing the MSQ. I wish the MSQ alone gave you enough experience, but then again, this is a problem that FFXIV has not solved either.
I’ve geared out Belgraven mostly through world quests, which are way less plentiful than when I was doing this in Shadowlands. That has opened up a lot more time to start leveling an alt, and I decided to push up Belgrace, my Horde side Paladin that was my main during Shadowlands. I have two guild families, House Stalwart on the Alliance side and Facepull on the Horde side, and I feel like it is only proper that I alternate back and forth between the two. I was apparently already in Dragonflight when I last played the character, and in theory, I should be able to hit level 80 while doing the campaign over there. I might actually do War Within as well because I would like to actually see the main story quest for that expansion without a multi-year lag between the first parts and then wrapping up rapidly right before Midnight. I’ve swapped up to Retribution because it feels like leveling as a tank is no longer as advantageous as it once was.
One thing that I had forgotten, though, is how much I enjoyed certain aspects of the Dragonflight storyline. While I do not give a shit about the Dragonflights in general… I really enjoyed a lot of the quests involving the races of the Dragon Isles that weave around the larger draconic narrative. I will never not love a Tuskarr storyline, and I really enjoy the tales of the Centaur tribes as well. Probably the worst zone is actually The Waking Shores, and that’s largely because you are so deeply involved in Dragon bullshit, with no real side narrative of the people you are impacting along the way. I feel like the Dragonflight storyline peaked in Northrend, and it has been downhill ever since. That is not to say that I did not enjoy this expansion, because clearly, there are some well-designed zones, and so much of it has an Outland and Northrend revisited vibe to it. The Ohn’ahran Plains is absolutely a rethinking of Nagrand, and large swaths of The Azure Span feel like Grizzly Hills, all of which are huge positives for the expansion in general.
As much credit as I give them for the updated UI, I am back to my old ways of installing a bunch of addons and using WoWUP to keep them patched, specifically the Curse Forge branch. Most of these are just quality of life improvements but the ones that I probably would not want to be without are Better Bags, which gives me similar functionality of having virtual bags sorted by item type, and Waypoint UI, which gives you a giant glowing beacon where the next step in your quest chain leads you to. The latter is especially handy when dealing with the bullshit verticality of Harandar. I am also a big fan of Dialog UI, which gives you a much more readable quest interface that also creates keybinds for all of the dialog options so you do not have to click the screen. Now that I am in the “endgame” and doing World Quests and such I started leaning on Handynotes and RareScanner again, which just are significant quality of life improvements when looking for rares and lootables in the zones. So I feel like all of the addons I am using now are window dressing on what is a completely functional base game, and I could play without them… but simply do not want to.
Are you just starting Midnight today? What are you most excited about for this expansion? Have you played through the expansion already? What did you enjoy the most? Drop me a line below.
The post Midnight Was Pretty Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This is another one of my “progress reports” for the Keepers of the Flame league as I work on wrapping up various challenges. If this does not interest you in the least, then today’s blog post might be a complete skip. Tomorrow I will probably have some stuff to talk about The Game Awards and the things that got announced there. However for the moment I am in a pattern of trying to wrap up what I can wrap up so that I can be ready for Path of Exile II League start tomorrow afternoon. The biggest one that I knocked out last night was Grueling Game Grinds, which is the one that has a bunch of sub components, one of which is hitting level 100. I ended up knocking out the invitations option, and I was able to buy up a bunch of super cheap blackstar invitations for 1 Chaos each and burn through them to finish that up.
Another big one that I completed through cursed means, is that I managed to finally get one of the crafting benches with a Hinekora’s Lock in it. Expensive Extravagance requires you to do a bunch of high dollar crafts in order to get credit for specific items. Since I will not be doing any mirror crafting, I have been trying to figure out the cheapest way to finish this nonsense up. If you are lucky, the various Betrayal league crafting benches count towards using these currency, and through doing that I managed to knock out most of them. I had one left and another achievement that I have been working on involves doing a bunch of high end specific league encounters. So I was farming 4 wing Blueprints in Heist and managed to pull several tailoring orbs as a result. Since I did not have a reason to use these, I just sort of threw it at any item I had sitting in my bank. That was essentially 250 chaos down the toilet, but it did finish up the achievement.
Another one that I knocked out was Aggravating Antagonists which involved fighting various endgame versions of league bosses. Most of these are really hard to force… so for my final one I opted into doing one of the level 83 versions of Izaro. The cheapest goddess emblem was Dedication to the Goddess at 40c, so I went with that version. I admit that I have never done one of the higher level versions of the Labyrinth, because I never really needed anything from it. I’ve chain run the normal offering versions before trying to get transfigured gems, but I think in the total of all of my runs of POE I have maybe only ever had one or two of the enhanced offerings drop. I almost NEVER run the in map events, because they always feel like a waste of time once I have my 4th ascendancy and especially since the offerings drop constantly down in Delve. I guess that is one of the things that I like about the challenges is that they force me to do things that I have never done before.
The biggest thing that I probably have left to do, as in the most time consuming… is Legendary Leagues. I need to figure out how best to complete this and see if there are any that can reasonably be brute forced with scarabs. I am running mappers, but it seems like only the 100% completion maps are the ones that count towards the achievement. I could probably buy some Blood-Filled Vessels from the trade market and brute force the Ritual one without much issue. I also need to figure out what the minimum number of emblems I need to run into rder to get the right item level for Legion’s Domain of Timeless Conflict since that is pretty easy overall as well. Simulacrum is time consuming but also fairly easy to complete and would just involve me buying 3 more tokens off the market. So between all of that I probably have a path forward. I wish I knew a way to force T4 Harvest Seeds because that would be a cakewalk if I could do that one.
I am getting close to finishing the Destructive Play achievement and should be able to wrap that while doing some of the other things that I need to do. I wish I had paid more attention to the item quantity when I did some of the other maven witnesses, because as a result I am going to have to redo The Formed, and did Incandescent and Elderslayers last night. I still am doing the quest version of the Zana fights so I need to burn through those so I can start witnessing them for The Remembered and the final piece The Feared. I hate doing the t16.5 content because t17 map mods are pure cancer, so I have been putting those off. There is another achievement for doing a bunch of 16.5 maps, and I have a ton of those banked that I can start chipping away at that. Mostly I am trying to see how far I can get to wrapping things up before Friday, because I am not sure how much effort I am going to be willing to keep putting in once I roll over to another game.
Anyways. If you have made it to the end of this blog post you have a lot of fortitude, especially if you are not actively playing Path of Exile. I hope you have been having a good week. I am not sure what is going on with me because I had another night where I went to bed at 8:30 because I was falling asleep on the sofa. If my body wants rest thought I am determined to give it to it.
The post Rare Currency Burned appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday over lunch I pushed my character over the level 100 line and forever secured its place in the pantheon of folks on the ladder for 3.27. Now I have reached the point in the league where I no longer give a shit about taking a death, which means I start doing riskier things. I had banked up a bunch of Aul fights, that I burned through last night… before sadly realizing that they were not actually counting as Pinnacle encounters. This is a bit of a weird thing in Path of Exile, because they use this term liberally to mean a bunch of different things, and in the past Aul absolutely would have counted. However in this league Aul is part of a different group of encounters that unlock bloodline ascendancies.
I had run all of these that I could easily run, and was down to just needing one more of this bloodline ascendancy fights for knocking out the Bloodline Boons challenge. This morning before sitting down to start writing my blog post I did a 15 wave Simulacrum and wrapped it up. The other options are way more tedious to get to including Lycia or the really variable boss fights like Olroth, that is something you are only going to see if you are farming a lot of expedition. Weirdly I was shocked that so far I had yet to get any of my shipments interdicted by the pirate dude, which I need for another one of these challenges. I might start running mappers because there is another one of the challenges where I could chip off a meta achievement by collecting rewards from 30 maps.
Grueling Game Grinds is ultimately the big lengthy grind, at now that I have hit level 100 I only need to complete one more meta achievement to knock that one out. For the moment I am planning on doing Invitations because it has synergy with some of the other challenges that I am working on. If Aul would have counted as a Pinnacle boss for the sake of this achievement, the 12/75 number would have been considerably higher. I could in theory do a bunch of Elder fights, which are without a doubt the easiest of the pinnacle bosses. However I think the fragments are still a bit expensive at this point, and I hate running Elder Guardian maps since you don’t get credit for Maven Witnessing a map boss on those.
Speaking of synergy, that is another thing that I am slowly chipping away at is doing Maven Witness maps with Destructive Play active. I really wish that they would change the way Destructive Play works, so that you can chain run the same map over and over and keep getting new bosses witnessed. This is the reason why I never do Maven content is because I prefer to run the same map layout over and over for consistency sake, and have my favorite map slots set up in a way so that I can produce large quantities of one of two maps that I alternate back and forth between. For example I am running a lot of Tropical Island, but producing a truly prodigious number of Strand maps while running down through my stockpile of Islands.
The other side effect of doing Destructive Play is that I am working on building a Feared invitation along with knocking out the various named invitations that reward atlas passives. I forgot about the 70% quant achievement, so there are a few of these that I am going to have to do over again. I’ve successfully run feared before, but I am not sure I have done it on anything other than that one deeply broken penance brand character from a few leagues ago. It will be interesting to see how well this goes. Really the only thing that I have to worry about too much is Sirius and his physical damage over time nonsense. I am curious if I can buy a bunch of cheap Polaric invitations or something like that to burn through the rest of gear grinding goals.
Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can in the next two days because I figure once I start down the Path of Exile II rabbit hole, it will dominate my attention for awhile. I did not last very long in 0.3.0 so I might find myself returning back to POE1 pretty quickly, but I am hoping that will not be the case. I think some of the things that are happening with Bear and Fire Damage are right up my alley. I am hoping it is pretty fun, because I did enjoy being a big poison bear in my last D4 league. Other than that… I have to admit I have had a bit of an itch to give Warframe another shot. Then there is my backlog of single player games that I have not touched in ages… which is only increased by the fact that Ash sent out the form for our games of the year show this morning. This is the challenge with me and these type of respective shows… is that in truth I mostly play forever games.
What prompted the Warframe desire though is a conversation I had with Ammo about it the other night, and then this morning seeing Ironmouse doing the best Warframe song, We All Lift Together at the Streamer Awards. If you have never seen the original Warframe animation video for this, you should absolutely watch it first so that you can appreciate the effort that they went into with the backgrounds and such for the Streamer awards. Who knows if I will give it another go or not.
The post One Hundred Again appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
