This morning’s blog post is admittedly going to be a bit of a wild ride. It is a topic that I have been kicking around in my skull for a few weeks now. I hope to do it even half the justice it deserves. Lately, I have been on this binge of consuming the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I’ve been listening to these in Audiobook form while playing Path of Exile, and I love this so much. While I still read books, there is something about listening to the narration while my nervous energies are channeled into a video game that has largely been committed to muscle memory at this point. I feel fully engaged, and it has rapidly become my “happy place”. It also helps that so far this series has been amazing.
I was looking forward to this series because John Scalzi at this point was a known property. I backed into his works differently than most, and the very first novel that I read was Kaiju Preservation Society. I consumed this over the course of a few evenings of staying up well past midnight reading from bed. A few months later I did the same with Redshirts, and after having consumed both… I knew that at some point I would have to read the series he is most known for “Old Man’s War”. This made logical sense because at this point I had consumed two different books from the same author, so it was highly likely that I enjoyed their particular writing style. It was a safe bet because well-established authors tend to bring with them a similar vision to the material that they write.
This does not work for video games. Video Games are a combination of lots of different creatives pouring their energies into a single project. While we love to elevate a single figurehead at a given studio… each game is a snapshot of the state of that company at that very moment. While there are certain tropes that a given studio might have… I can say that Starfield feels like a very “Bethesda” game. I can say this because it is approaching problem-solving in the same way I have experienced in other Bethesda titles. I cannot however state that Starfield is a great experience, because Bethesda created it. It was created by a wide number of individuals who took inspiration from previous titles, but the game being fun and engaging was not a certain thing. I would be surprised if anyone that worked on Fallout New Vegas for example, worked on Starfield. The games were created by wildly different casts of individuals, but we as gamers… have this bad habit of trying to compare them as equivalent products.
So when I approached Diablo IV, I brought with me all of the emotional baggage of having played thousands of hours of games in the Diablo franchise. I also brought with me the emotional baggage of having grown up idolizing Blizzard as a studio. So when I played the game, and it felt bad… it was very hard for me to reign in my disappointment and keep myself from turning into a rabid poo-flinging monkey. I still think that Diablo IV is a bad game, and I think that because I am a core ARPG gamer… and quite frankly the game was never targeting me in the first place. I also think of Blizzard as this storied monolith of a company that encompasses so many fond memories… when in reality they have not produced a new game that I enjoyed since 2013. Sure I enjoyed the heck out of Legion, but that was an expansion to a game that came out in 2004.
Similarly when I approached Mass Effect Andromeda or even Anthem… I brought with me the memories of hundreds of hours spent with each and every Bioware game to that point (save for Jade Empire, I never got into that). I enjoyed Andromeda quite a bit, but it was a pale comparison to the greatness that was achieved over the course of the three games in the Mass Effect trilogy… and even then… they didn’t really stick the landing in that third game. With Anthem I brought my expectations of what a Bioware MMORPG looks like… because Star Wars The Old Republic was a phenomenal experience… and once again I was sadly disappointed. While there was some cross-over between these teams… each game represented a brand new version of what the studio was trying to produce, and as a result, was a completely different product offering.
As gamers, we have this bad habit of personifying Game Studios. We treat them as though the organizational structure itself is capable of pooping out phenomenal game experiences that are similar to those we have had in the past. Sometimes even studios believe this themselves… see the information that came out about the launch of Andromeda and how it was expected that the “Bioware Magic” would somehow pull together a brilliant product in the end. The games that we have loved were snapshots of a moment in time… that may or may not ever happen again. Personifying the Studio as having these indelible properties that can recreate that experience… is only setting us up for heartbreak, disappointment, and eventually failure.
Truth be told… we as gamers with our unrealistic expectations are not entirely to blame for this problem. Game Studios themselves and games media in general are also stoking this fire. How many times have you seen a project being marketed based on where the devs working on it came from before? Hell, the entirety of studios like Dreamhaven seems to be a large dish full of member berries trying to stoke nostalgia about the imagined “good ole days” of a specific studio. The thing is… You would be hard-pressed to find a single game studio out there that does not at least have one person who used to work for Blizzard or Bethesda or Bioware, etc. The game development community is extremely fluid and because of the lack of stability and the tendency to burn a team down after release… means that folks have to go whenever they can to keep a paycheck coming in. Since around 2005, there has never been a time where I have not had at least one close friend working for Blizzard… but the thing is… none of them have really stuck around for more than a few years at a time.
We would be so much better off if we could approach each game that gets released with a fresh set of eyes, and ignore the many-tentacled hype machine. This is part of the reason why folks seem to respond so glowingly to anything that is truly new to them. For example, we are seeing this sort of glow-up happening right now with Baldur’s Gate III, because for so many people Larian Studios was an unknown property. However, for me, I have been playing their games since at least Divinity II, and was definitely there for the fledgling roots of what we are seeing in BG3 with Divinity Original Sin. All of that said though, it is so pure to watch players embrace a game on its own terms… and for its own merit. It is equally heartbreaking when a game that is genuinely good but still a little rough around the edges due to launch constraints, gets memed into oblivion by Streamers and YouTubers.
The hype cycle sometimes inflates a game to proportions that it never could have lived up to. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of these situations, but quite frankly… so was Mass Effect Andromeda. Both were games that given time and attention could be turned into something beautiful. We are seeing this redemption arc with Cyberpunk, but given the financial backlash instead saw with Andromeda the entire Mass Effect series killed off for the better part of a decade. So while I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the gamers for trying to treat the game studios in the same way that I am treating books by a single author… aka John Scalzi. I also blame the studios themselves, the marketing departments, and the 24-hour gaming news cycle desperately seeking anything that even smells a little bit like news in order to fill content deadlines. I fail miserably myself at this all the time, but I also know I would be far happier, or at least less grumpy if I allowed myself to approach everything without expectations.
That is it… that is my soapbox and now I will stand down from it. Expect more blog posts about me talking about some nonsense that I am up to in Path of Exile tomorrow. I can only handle so much seriousness at once, and even with Path of Exile, I have had to deliver myself a dose of realism. I had a lot of hype built up going into the Path of Exile II announcement, only to walk away disappointed and afraid that this game I was pinning my hopes on… was not really going to be what I wanted to play. Instead, now I am trying to stop thinking about it and just enjoy what I enjoy. It feels deeply weird that I am not engaged in the Zeitgeist right now, and not feverishly playing either Baldur’s Gate III or Starfield… while having at the same time enjoyed both. I’m trying to plot my own course independent of FOMO, and right now… my brain craves the familiar rhythms of Path of Exile.
I have no clue what point I was really trying to make this morning, and I definitely doubt that it will make any difference. I hope you have a most excellent day… but now my cats want me to feed them.
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Good Morning Friends! I’ve spent a lot of the weekend fiddling around with my Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build and thought I would talk a bit more about it in-depth this morning. For the uninitiated, Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons low-life minions that ultimately die after a short period of time. While they are alive they deal a lot of fire-based melee damage and auto-target the nearest enemy. Essentially think of them as a sentient fireball or something akin to the Demon Skulls from the Doom FPS series. There are a lot of ways to play this but traditionally this has been done with a Witch using the Necromancer ascendancy, in fact, I have played this a number of times in the past both during the Sanctum league and a very short-lived minion instability version during Crucible league that caused them to explode and deal damage based on their maximum life.
The 3.22 league, brought forth some significant changes to both the Chieftan Marauder Ascendancy and Templar Guardian Ascendancy. Essentially the Guardian now has two unique pets, the first of which is the equivalent of a giant Righteous Fire Juggernaut called the Sentinel of Radiance. It is a temporary minion that moves extremely slowly but blankets roughly half of the map in burning damage for 20 seconds before poofing. In order to combat the EXTREMELY slow movement speed… we use a spell called Convocation to teleport all of your minions to you allowing them to bip around the map. The other unique minon is called the Elemental Relic, and you can have 3 of them up at a given time and they are summoned by your minions hitting targets. If you have all of them up, they will be granting you and your minions Level 27 versions of Anger, Hatred, and Wrath. Raging Spirits hit extremely quickly, so for the most part you are guaranteed almost 100% uptime of these buffs while in combat.
This weekend I recorded one of my dumb little videos showing off running a map. Essentially I have been spending most of my time running tier 14 and 15 maps to farm Maven invitations, but in the above video, I am doing a Tier 13. In the video, I state that 16s were a bit “rippy”, which was true… until I poured on a bunch of levels and swapped out some of my gear. Essentially now I am zip through 16s as quickly as I do a 13 in this video. Mostly the gameplay is me charging to a pack of mobs, using convocation to summon my Fiery Lad on top of the pack which between the Righteous Fire Damage and Carrion Golem Bone Flechettes pretty much explodes everything but the Rares at which point I summon a string of Raging Spirits to burn those down… and then repeat until the map is cleared. One of my problems with SRS builds in the past is that they were pretty slow to map because they revolved around trying to herd a pack of raging spirits around the map. Shield Charge + Convocation takes care of this problem and quite honestly I am not sure if I would play SRS without this combo in the future.
The build in its current state is not exactly what I would consider a budget build. That said… I am uncertain that any of my gear is actually required. I have no clue how much currency I have spent on it, but I would guess in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 Divine Orbs. The build felt good and was completely viable from essentially the point I got my first two ascendancies that gave me my unique minions. You could likely perform well with this in a Solo-Self-Found environment because while all of the uniques are nice-to-haves, I don’t think they are really required to make the build function. You would need to do quite a bit of abyss to farm up Ghastly Eye jewels with minion damage and some survival stats on them, however. At the time of writing this… here are a few price checks for the above items:
In reality, you could run this build without any of this… save for maybe crafting your own minion wand. I picked up my first +1 wand off the ground, so they are common enough that I usually end up seeing several so long as you put Convoking Wand on your loot filter as something you want to stand out. There is nothing in my gear that I am really relying on to make the build work. Sometimes you have a series of uniques that produce a very specific interaction that if you don’t have it… your build is bricked. This is absolutely not the case with Guardian SRS, and in theory, you could run happily with a +2 Minion Gem Tabula Rasa(roughly 20 Chaos) and then just a bunch of decently rolled Armor/Energy Shield items.
If you want to give this a shot, then I would definitely check out the build guide from GhazzyTV. I veered slightly off course to stack up some more defenses, so you can also check out my latest POB if you want to see what my tree and gear look like exactly. Essentially right now I am working on building toward being Spell Block capped and then picking up some more minion survival nodes. I had this problem for a bit where my Spectres would die anytime I attempted to take on a high-end Legion pack, and I was trying to gain some additional health and regen to keep them and my carrion golem alive more often. The spell block thing was an oversight I completely missed that node cluster earlier. I feel plenty tanky as is, but as I talk about in the video the combination of Mind Over Matter and Eldritch Battery put me in a situation where if I start taking damage… it sort of snowballs into a death.
This is what my defenses look like. I have decent enough armor but if I have enough points and manage to get this character a bit higher… I will try and pick up another jewel socket on my tree and attempt to get a bit more armor and health. Health truthfully is probably fine as I am a little over 4000, with an Energy Shield that is a bit over 2000. Most of the time I have 75% chance to block attacks, and hopefully will also have 75% chance to block spells soon… though currently, I am sitting at only 65%. I don’t have much in the way of raised elemental resistances but they are all capped along with Chaos Resistance. I feel way sturdier than either of my two past SRS Necromancer builds. In a perfect world, I would pick up Golem Commander and also run a Stone Golem but I am just not sure I can spare the points and I definitely can’t give up my Testudo anoint.
What I did not expect, is how quickly this has become my mapping character of choice. Essentially I have been working on unlocking an attempt on Maven by using this character to get 10 T14+ witnesses and then hopping over onto my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to complete the 10-way. Whenever I manage to fill up my Sulphite, I shift gears and go delving on the Juggernaut until I run out again… then return to the cycle of SRS Guardian Maven invites. At some point, I will start doing some altars and see how well the Guardian can deal with a lightweight boss like the Black Star or Shrek. In theory, SRS tends to be pretty great at bossing and while I am not entirely certain what my damage looks like… according to Path of Building it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million. POB is notoriously bad at calculating minion damage however so I have no clue what the realistic damage looks like whether that is higher or lower than that number.
All in all though, if you are looking for a really chill minion character that you can in theory play without any expensive gear… you might give this one a shot. I’ve definitely spent a lot of currency on mine, but I am not really sure I had to. I think I might just be gilding the lily at this point.
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Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and presently it is making a Summon Raging Spirits Guardian. In this league, there were a number of changes to the Guardian Ascendancy, not the least of which was adding two extremely powerful minion nodes. Starting from your first Ascendancy you can have a very very very slow minion that follows you around and does a Righteous-Fire-like aura that covers half of the screen. Because this minion moves so slowly, you have to use an ability called Convocation which summons minions to you. The end result is what feels like a really weird slow-motion stagger step Righteous Fire build as you move ahead, summon your big boy, and repeat until you have cleared the map.
When you add to this the fact that you can summon 20 Righteous Fire Minions, and have any other assortment of additional minions… you have this rolling ball of death. This is my first time really experiencing the Carrion Golem and I have to say… it is pretty great. I did not realize just how well that single minion shotgunned packs of mobs as it sprayed them down with bone flechettes. For the moment I am running with Zombies but I am not sure if I will keep this in my final configuration. I really really really do not want to run Animate Guardian, so I am going to try my best to find a solution that works well without it. I hate that you lose all of your gear if your animate guardian dies. I hate the whole process of equipping gear on the animate guardian. I want to see how well I can do without having to deal with it.
At the moment I am level 71 and am sitting near the end of Act 9. With ease, I will be wrapping up the campaign this evening and then working on gearing my character properly. I’ve snagged a few build-defining pieces already, but generally speaking, I wait to do the whole “balance my resistances” thing until I actually kill Kitava for the second time. I am still not entirely certain how I am going to survive on this build. At the moment I am running Eldritch Battery, and contemplating picking up Mind Over Matter which I believe will allow me to use my Energy Shield once again as a defensive barrier. I need to run my third Labyrinth soon, but given how fast the first two were, I feel like it is highly unlikely the third one will give me any trouble. So far this build is most definitely in the “stupidly powerful” department. Right now I am running Purity of Elements to make the campaign easier, but I am going to try my best to gear out enough resistances to not have to run it in the final configuration.
All in all… I am enjoying this character and I am really interested to see how it feels once I have finished gearing it.
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Good Morning Folks! Something happens in Path of Exile when you get past around level 95… you start trying your best never to die because a single death can cause an experience loss that sets you back multiple hours worth of experience gain. As a result I tend to go through periods where if I am very very close to leveling up… I only want to tackle content that I am not likely to take a death on. I had been in this mode for several days, but last night I hit level 97 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and as a result… I am now shifting into the other phase… where I try more tricky content while taking a death doesn’t feel quite as bad.
So last night I did a lot of things… I took down my first Elder and am working up to another one. I burned through several guardian maps to try and get fragments to try some of those fights. I took down two breach lords that I had saved up. What I am working towards now is getting enough fragments to try Shaper, Maven, and Uber Elder aka Elder in the Shapers realm. I was kinda shocked at how “facerolly” Elder went last night. Normally speaking this is a fight that I have at least struggled a bit on in past leagues, but I was able to take him down without even coming close to using a health potion. I picked up a decent enough Grace/Purity of Elements Watcher’s Eye as well. Essentially now I need to do a lot of Maven witnessed maps in an attempt to build up a stockpile of Guardian maps… that I can then run to get more fragments. The irony is… that likely all of this activity will once again put me close to dinging a new level… which means I will slow down again until I push through and hit the next plateau.
I had been working on a Storm Brand Inquisitor, and I have to say… I am just not feeling the character so far. I’ve only made it to Act 5, but it already feels a little sluggish for my tastes. I am certain that I could push through and eventually reach a point where I have enough crit to make this feel good… but for now I just am not in the mood for it. Rather than rerolling to something else… I am just going to park this character for awhile and see if maybe I am in the mood for it later. Mostly Storm Brand is way slower than I remember it being, and I think it is because I just don’t have enough crit support yet in my passive tree. The problem with lightning damage is that it has a VERY large range of damage values… and in order for it to feel good you have to throw your thumb on the scale and try and make sure that it is ALWAYS rolling at the top end of the damage curve. I think maybe I switched to Storm Brand a bit too fast, so I might flip over to Armageddon Brand or Wintertide Brand to finish leveling.
What I am working on at the moment… as in I just literally started this character last night… is an Elemental SRS Guardian. This is apparently the new hotness and I remember SRS being extremely good at Sanctum. Essentially I would like to have SOME character that makes Sanctum easymode so that I can at the very least knock out some of the achievements. There are an awful lot of them this league that are gating my progress towards unlocking yet another sad little totem pole. I am also curious to see how an SRS build aka Summon Raging Spirits… feels with something other than the Necromancer. I feel like it is probably much easier to make this feel tanky than it was with the witch.
I’m not terribly far along but have swapped over to a three link Summon Raging Spirits with Melee Splash and Minion Damage support, and am already zipping through the content. It is hillarious that last league I saw I think 8 raw Tabula Rasa drops, and so far this league I have seen zero. I picked up a +2 minion gems Tabula last night and it is sitting there waiting for me to hit level 16 so I can equip it. Mostly I am wanting to focus on making this a Sanctum runner, but it would not be bad if this was good at bossing either. Supposedly the elemental variant with Guardian can hit the peaks that Poison did with Necromancer. It is also apparently much cheaper to gear because the required items for poison have trickled up in price after having four leagues of that being a phenomenal build.
Other than that, today the Runes of Power patch drops in Last Epoch, so I am certain I will be poking my head into that game to check out the changes. They have apparently done quite a bit to add some random encounters in the Monoliths, which ultimately is the part of the game that needed the most improvement. Running Monoliths gets stale way faster than running Maps in Path of Exile. There are apparently rogue mages that are a cross between a Diablo Loot Goblin and a Path of Exile Essence monster. I am curious to see how these work and I am hoping that their drop tables are generous and give you a bit of a way to target farm some uniques.
Anyways! I hope you are having an excellent week and I hope we can all slide into the weekend without much hassle.
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