One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.
I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.
One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.
That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.
The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.
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Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.
Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.
Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.
Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.
In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.
I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.
Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.
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Good Morning My Perky Pals… happy dawning of a new work week. In my semi-regular mental health updates… I did pretty okay on Friday. Dealing with the first anniversary of our wedding after the death of my wife… was mostly okay. I had a few tough moments but the day was not the soul crushing experience that I expected it to be. I am still glad that I took the day off and quite honestly… I might just start taking it off yearly just in case because sooner or later… it will catch up with me. This weekend I did dumb things and this morning I am going to tell you about them, since we did not record a podcast this weekend where I would have likely talked about it. Why yes that is me on the beach in Path of Exile… so buckle up friends.
The Gauntlet is an event run by Zizaran in Path of Exile that cranks up the difficulty of the game to stupid levels… and takes place in a Hardcore Solo-Self-Found environment. Meaning that you cannot rely on anyone other than yourself and if you take a death, your character is exiled to standard. I do not normally like the hardcore rule-set, nor am I the biggest fan of SSF either. What prompted me to join this madness? The Gauntlet is often supported by Grinding Gear Games which cooks up specific challenges that do not exist in other environments, and this year they added a unique MTX that can only be gained through playing the event. Essentially if you get off the beach and defeat Hillock, you are guaranteed to get a copy of the Merciless Gauntlets. If you get to at least level 5, your copy will have flavor text added to it indicating how far you made it.
What makes this extra challenging however is that a lot of the bosses have new mechanics. For example Hillock on the beach, is supported by The Maven and all of the nonsense that she does while witnessing a map boss can be done during this fight. Brutus is already a bit of a filter for new players, but when you encounter him in the prison you first fight a proxy… and then in the normally safe room… face a buffed version that has the canons on all four sides of the arena that can be found during the Hydra Guardian fight. I could have been like my friend Sloth and killed Hillock and then immediately killed that character to be done with it. However I could not bring myself to do this thing and I had to play things out for as long as they lasted… even though the whole experience is not really my jam.
I had experienced some of the mechanics when SirGog ran a version of the Gauntlet with Softcore rules as a custom league. However new and extra spicy this year is that when you face an end of act boss… you also face every single unique mob that can spawn in any of the maps of that act. This means you are fighting a literal gauntlet of enemies, that works similar to a maven witness in that if you do not kill them fast enough… they can start stacking up on top of each other as they spawn at fixed intervals. I managed to push through the first act boss, largely because Toxic Rain is really good at low levels and I got an early Goldrim drop from Hailrake that carried me super freaking hard. By the time I faced Merveil I essentially had capped resistances which was wildly overpowered for any fight, but especially the gauntlet since you needed to care about more than just cold resistance.
I named my character BelCantKillHillock because I legitimately did not expect to get off the beach. If you are so inclined you can see a POB of where I got and what gear I was wearing at the time of my death. I made it to the Act II boss and was presented with a decision. I could easily have backed out of the fight and come back when I was stronger… but instead I just decided to allow the death to happen. I played 5 hours and 21 minutes to get to that point, and while I was enjoying Toxic Rain overall… I was not enjoying having to play with my head on a swivel at all times. I figured once I cleared Act II it was only going to get worse in Act III. So instead of exiting to character selection and bouncing back in and throwing on a few levels… I just decided to let the death of attrition happen because I was having to chain flasks to stay alive to all of the nonsense happening on the Vaal Oversoul fight. I made it through the Gauntlet of Uniques without much issue, but the stupid stuff that was happening in the room kept grinding me down.
Being perfectly honest I am extremely happy with the level 27 death that is now enshrined in my glove mtx. I started out not expecting to make it off the beach, and then decided to keep playing until I was at least level 5 so I could get text on my gloves. Then I just kept moving the goalposts… could I get through Brutus… could I get through Merveil. Could I get past the bandits… and then ultimately could I clear Act II. By the time I reached the end of Act II though I was well past my point of caring about the event. All of this nonsense did lead me to run up a softcore Toxic Rain character and spend all of my currency on it… before realizing that my general problem with these characters is how squishy they end up feeling. That ability is phenomenal during the campaign, but requires way the hell too much investment to feel decent in maps, or at least as a second character after having played a super tanky righteous fire character for months.
Will I do this nonsense again in the future? Honestly I have no clue. I don’t actually enjoy playing in the event, but I did really enjoy watching streamers competing for various prizes on day one. I did not start until the morning of day two and even then only because there was an MTX to be had. If GGG keeps doing cosmetic prize support for these events… I will probably keep throwing my face into this particular wood chipper. That is so long as the bar of entry stays sufficiently low. I am not a member of the “hard content is my kink” club, and in truth I would rather play super chill content so that I can happily be listening to an audiobook while I play it. More than anything right now I am looking forward to the start of season three in Last Epoch on the 21st. I know Path of Exile II lands on the 29th, but I will probably not be done with Last Epoch by then, and if I do play the third pseudo-league in that game I will be starting much later.
Did you play any of the Gauntlet? How far did you make it? Drop me a line below.
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I tell you friends… I did not expect the Path of Exile community to be as pure as it is sometimes. Time is immeasurable… but some time ago I played in a private league event that SirGog was organizing, and I set my global channel to the one that is used by the folks who played in that event. Thing is… I just never set it back to a different global so I have been there and active during several leagues. As a result my Path of Exile experience is a bit skewed from the standard one, and I have never met a more supportive group of strangers in my life. I’ve witnesses for ages when someone needs something, asking out to global and someone almost always fulfilling that request. So when I have found a rare hideout in one of my maps for example, I always message global to see if anyone wants it. The other day I got to within 3 maps of completing the final sub goal of Grinding Gear Goals and asked if anyone had three guardian/conqueror maps I could buy from them. Within seconds I got a few invites and the first person who got to me, would not even take payment for them. It was because of them that I finished this achievement so easily and I am immensely thankful.
As far as Unreal Undertakings… I went for one of the more annoying options but it did go along with something I was trying to do already. Essentially I ran five blueprints with four wings unveiled and in order to do that… I had to grind up a bunch of levels of various skills on assorted rogues. It went fast enough and I have effectively learned that it takes 4 Tier 4 Contracts to hit Tier 5 in a skill, so I could essentially pre-stage a bunch of stuff and have it ready to bulk grind through contracts. Once I finished leveling everything, it legitimately did not take me terribly long to chain through five sets of grand heists and finish up the achievement. However… I think I might have hit the wall on how much I am going to accomplish during this league. There are a few of them like the Infamous Mercenaries one that I will probably accidentally complete since I only have one of those left to find… but then there are others where I would have to devote more effort to completing them than I feel like it. I could pay for a bunch of uber carries to knock that one out… but also I am not sure I care enough about that.
In other news I finished up Space Oddity on Monday night, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t think it is anywhere near as good as Space Opera was, but that is not for lack of trying. I think the narrative was just a bit messier than the first one, that had a fairly clear call to action and then a sequence of events that played out in a logical order. With Space Oddity, there was this whole messy middle of the book where things just felt like they flailed a bit… which only seemed to accentuate the “world salad” nature of this series where every sentence is desperately trying to be profound and funny at the same time. It did however stick the landing though and the end of the book was wonderful, so flailing aside it is still worth the read. I just struggled for awhile to push through it until I started the care about the outcome. Maybe if I had read it back to back with the first one like Thalen did, it would have been a different experience.
Last night I started Overgrowth by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire. I think what I have realized is that I just really love her writing style, because I would rank the Newsflesh series under the Mira Grant pseudonym and the Alchemical Journeys series among my favorite books ever. The characters in overgrowth feel familiarly adjacent to some of the characters that I came to love specifically in the Newsflesh series. I am deeply interested to see how things turn out when the invasion actually starts. I am not entirely certain how far I made it last night compared to the length of the book… which is admittedly the problem in listening to an audiobook being fed to me through my private plex server. It isn’t real great and indicating how much is left, but it feels like I am barely through the beginning of the book and sleep claimed me pretty freaking early last night around 9 pm.
In other news unrelated to anything to this point… I started playing Hell Clock which is what if Hades were actually an ARPG and not just an action game. So far I am really enjoying it and I love that it is so honest about difficulty levels and that if you are struggling on a boss… the game is not intended to be that way. I also greatly love that you can just disable the time pressure which is huge for me personally. I have a weird hang up about being timed while doing things, that dates back to third grade mathematics and these awful things called “mad minutes” that effectively ruined my brain for math from that point forward. You can just disable the 7 minute timer… and the game will STILL warn you when you are too poorly equipped to ride the ride. For example I got to a point in the first level where it warned me that even though I had disabled the timer… I should probably go back to town and buy some equipment before moving forward. I appreciate that level of bluntness greatly in a video game.
As far as other things in my life… I am just trying to seep back into a normal routine. I had one of my best friends that I consider my legitimate sibling offer to come stay with me this coming week. I cannot fully explain how much that means to me, but also… I would rather get together at a time when I was not actively feeling miserable. I am not sure I am capable of truly experiencing joy right now. I would rather get together at a time when I am not so broken inside.
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