Hey Folks! I’m getting a bit of a late start this morning on putting up a daily blog post, which is probably bad considering I hard skipped writing anything yesterday. I’ve been continuing to roam around in Path of Exile while I figure out what I want to tackle next, and made some significant progress on chipping away at my final atlas unlocks. One of the big things about this league is that I have to explore other options for obtaining unique maps. We are in a heavy inflation league economy and as a result, I just don’t have the raw resources to buy my way out of holes in quite the same manner that I normally do. Traditionally I would get down to the last 10 maps or so and just buy them from the trade market. This time around I am using Kirac, Scouting Reports, and Beastcrafting in an effort to find my last few maps.
As of this morning, I am sitting at 112 of 115 maps completed which leaves me with three unique maps. I still need to find The Coward’s Trial, Oba’s Cursed Trove, and weirdly enough the Vault of Atziri which normally is something I find pretty early on. The title of this blog post is somewhat misleading because I am heavily engaged with the Currency Exchange, but largely making the decision to avoid buying most things that are not currency outright. So while I will purchase scouting reports, I am trying my best not to purchase maps. Largely because in my experience so far, it is hard to get anyone to respond to requests right now. The league is fairly dead and the prices that are posted, and not that great. My goal for the league I think is to complete the Atlas and it has been interesting trying to solo my way through that.
I got my first upgrade in quite a long while, and it was picking up an Omen of Connections for 2 Divine Orbs. Essentially I had posted a buy request hoping that someone would eventually decide to sell it to me. Buying one immediately would have taken 4 Divines, and I really did not want to pay that price for it. Before resorting to that I did burn through 600+ fusings in a Yolo attempt to link it that ultimately failed. I had not had much luck either finding the Omen through Ritual or the Black Morrigan through Einhar on my own in this league. I fully expect that after going through and buying it… I will probably get one to drop within the next few play sessions. I wish the Omen of Connections worked on Taited Fusings… but alas it does not. Bumping up to a Six Link is a pretty massive improvement in clear speed, and in theory, at some point, I probably need to run a bunch of labs to get some quality on my gems.
Today is the Early Access/Supporter Pack reveal stream at 2 pm CST and with it comes a very questionable Twitch drop. I will of course be farming it just to have it… but I cannot see a case in the future where I would want to wear these Breach hands as a cloak. The community is excited and thinks this cosmetic means that Breach is effectively confirmed for POE2. I am hoping that during this stream they talk a bit about what the endgame for the early access is going to look like. We know that we are only going to have three acts to play through, and in theory a limited set of classes and only one ascendency per class. I am hoping that most of this information will be confirmed during the show. I am still kind of on the fence about how much I feel like POE2 is going to be my sort of game, but I am hopeful because of how much I enjoy Path of Exile in its current state.
Are you going to be tuning into the reveal stream? What league mechanic are you hoping will return in Path of Exile 2? For me it is Delve, but I also feel like Delve, Heist, and Sanctum since they are not mapping mechanics… are going to be a bit before they are introduced.
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Good Morning Folks. After wrapping up Veilguard I have now uninstalled the game to free up space for whatever comes next and am back futzing around with Path of Exile. I wrapped up my second voidstone and I gotta say… I am somewhat impressed at how much better I am now at doing these first two. It gives me hope that maybe at some point in the future the last two will be a similar cakewalk. I managed to take both down without taking any deaths which I think is a first for me. Searing Exarch is way more dangerous to my specific build, but I find that I hate Eater of Worlds way more. It is the charging the spheres phase that annoys me because inevitably one of the spheres overlaps some of the other nonsense that happens in the arena. I also hate being on a timer… it causes me to freak out mentally. I have some baggage surrounding being timed that I have never quite gotten over.
I am struggling a bit to complete my Atlas of Worlds. At this point, I am at 99 of 115 and am completely out of maps to run. This means I need to chain run maps that I have already completed in the hope of getting something that I can actually run. I have a lighthouse that I do not have credit for, but when I corrupted the map it ended up shifting to include no-regen which my build cannot run. I’ve contemplated trying to run it without Righteous Fire turned on… but that is still always risky as hell. Admittedly there are some times I just fail to brain and realize I am halfway through a map and never actually turned on RF… but that is the exception rather than the rule. I am not sure what is up with Kirac but it seems like his inventory is not generating new maps nearly as often as I would expect him to. I’m also the only one playing in this league from our guild and as a result, there is no map sharing happening in the guild bank. Generally speaking, there are always one or two maps that Kodra gets for example that I had not seen, which helps these dry spells.
I have enough currency that I could just buy my way out of the hole, but the trade market is already pretty dead at this point during the event. There were a lot of folks who only played that first weekend, never to return again. Thankfully the Currency Exchange is still hopping and I can move items pretty easily. I’ve learned that Goddess fragments are a great way to make some gold since they are selling for around 25 chaos each right now. I have zero interest in running lab, and even if I do to quality up my gems I am going to breeze my way through one of the free ones instead of tackling uber lab. Though I have to admit after years of repetition… I don’t mind lab anywhere near as much as I used to. I can pretty much predict instinctively where the doors are going to be and can zip through them pretty quickly these days.
This morning the venerable Sir Gog released a video and in it is the above screenshot from GGG on Twitter. It seems that the minimum buy-in for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is going to be the $30 supporter pack that is likely to be released during the Twitch stream on Thursday. This is going to happen at 2 pm CST and will have Twitch drops enabled which is usually wings or a cloak or something similar. There was some talk about lifetime spenders getting in automatically but I have not seen any specifics surrounding that yet. Honestly, I was probably going to buy something from the upcoming yearly supporter pack anyways so this really isn’t too heinous as far as I am concerned. Path of Exile has earned every dime I have spent on it in a way that most games have not.
In another randomness, I watched the first episode of the HBO Dune Prophecy series last night and I have mixed opinions. I have basically come to accept that this current Dune franchise is going to have to be taken as its own thing. The first movie was mostly a good adaptation of the original source material, but that second movie veered off into left field at the last moments becoming its own unique universe. As such I am mostly assuming that this pre-history series is going to do its own thing. Admittedly while I read the Brian Herbert Houses Trilogy, I never went back and read any of the Machine Crusade stuff. Maybe this is drawing directly from that and I just do not realize it. Whatever the case there was a “superpower” shown at the end of this episode that I do not remember existing previously in the canon. So yeah… I will be watching this but also taking everything with a shaker of salt, because the current vision for this franchise is a bit different than the novels.
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Good Morning Folks. We had one of those weird early morning deliveries before I woke up, and I was too slow removing the box from the bar after unpacking it. As a result… Josie now lives here. I spent most of last night snuggling with this goober while Gracie was on my legs. Especially now that it is getting colder, as soon as I sit still for more than a few minutes I end up with a cat. I am perfectly okay with this reality because truth be told I could use snuggles. Mollie pretty much lives in my office and when I got upstairs this morning she was ready for attention and is now sitting beside me. I feel like there is a periodic cat tax that must be paid on this blog and you can never say I did not provide.
I had every intent to spend my evening continuing the process of unlocking maps and progressing my way through the atlas in Path of Exile. That did not happen, because we had an extended maintenance as they attempted to roll out their new account system. This did not go smoothly. Essentially the QA process did not notice that once they expanded the length of accounts… by adding a numerical bit on the end of them for differentiation purposes… it would then jam up the login process that was strictly limited to 27 characters. I greatly appreciate the level of transparency they gave us in this post, and apparently, they are going to make another run at it on Sunday/Monday. These are all requirements for the eventual start of the Path of Exile 2 Early Access next month.
Instead of playing Path of Exile, I fell back into Veilguard and thankfully quickly sorted out what I was doing the last time I played. I did a round of cleaning up companion missions and then played through the Arlathan Forest main story quest that I had been avoiding. This produced the cutscene that I was expecting where essentially I got prior notice that we were just about to reach the point of no return. I’ve always been thankful when a Bioware game gives me one of these not-subtle reminders that I better do anything I might want to do before going into a big world-state-changing sequence. Of course… immediately following this a whole new round of companion quests opened up which will keep me busy for another night or two.
In other news, Guild Wars 2 released this banger of a trailer coinciding with its release on the Epic Game Store. It feels weird that they are specifically launching on the EGS after having already launched on Steam, but hopefully, they are getting some of that sweet sweet Tim Sweeny payola for going through the effort. Regardless of how I feel about the EGS… this is a fucking amazing trailer. This is how they should have sold the game years ago. It really nails the high points of the game as it is today and if I was not already a player… this would have been the sort of thing that would have inspired me to give it a shot.
They also released the trailer for the next content drop called Godspawn. The big part of this that I need to start prepping for is doing dailies in order to build back up my Wizard Chore currency so that I can hopefully buy another legendary weapon box when the store refreshes on the 19th. I had fallen out of the habit of doing dailies, but I really should get back into that habit in the coming week. The currency builds up really freaking fast so I should be able to buy that box pretty quickly after its release. At this point, I have crafted four legendary weapons, and this content drop releases a new Legendary Spear which I am interested to see what that requires.
Other than that… I might be backpedaling on nuking my Twitter account. My friend Ashgar raised a valid point yesterday, and I have until the end of the month to decide one way or the other. Essentially over most of the last decade, I have used Twitter as my defacto home on the internet. As a result, my blog is littered with references to my Twitter account. This means that I need to sift through 3700 blog posts and their duplicates on AggroChat and replace all of those links… or just turn back on my account and lock it down in a state of dormancy. I am not sure which option I will go with yet. My twitter profile has enough search engine traction that it is not unlikely for someone to snag it and put annoying bullshit on it. Apparently, this happened to a bunch of artists when they left twitter and their accounts got snagged by crypto-scammers. This is not a thing I want associated with my name, even on a platform I have moved past.
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Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.
Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.
I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.
The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.
I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.
Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.
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