Good Morning Folks. I’ve now made it through the Black Star, and am working on unlocking both the Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds fights. I have to admit I have a little bit of hesitancy around both, given how hard it was to get through Infinite Hunger and now Black Star. I am just not used to playing characters that fall down if you look at them crossways. I am not sure what else I can do in my current build trajectory that would improve my survival without also losing a lot of killing power. Again I went into this knowing that I was going to be playing a map blaster, and it does that beautifully… but bossing on it is a bit of a pain in the butt. Just like Infinite Hunger I managed to down the encounter with a single portal left, so the “six-portal defense” was definitely a thing.
I’ve never quite played a build like this before where I either completely clear the entire screen… or get one shot. I’m able to wreck red maps in pretty much the same way as I could wreck white and yellow maps… but every now and then there is a single mob that just ruins my day. Mostly the challenge now is to get red maps that have doable negatives by the time I have corrupted it in order to get credit. While I am clearing, everything is peachy. When I have to stop and fight a tanky mob or a boss… things begin to get considerably more dicey.
That said I have made one heck of a lot of progress and am sitting at 68 bonus objectives out of 115, and I just got a Unique Moon Temple drop that will give me yet another point to spend. I think the challenge that I am running into is always before my map blasters were a secondary project. Now it is all I currently have and it is making me miss my super tanky Righteous Fire Juggernaut a bit. I miss being able to do heist and delve with impunity… but again I also knew what I was getting myself in for. I have a pretty thick stash of essences and am almost done unlocking what I need to run Beasts. The truth though is that I have been spending almost all of my time unlocking new maps, and not really a lot of it reaping the benefit of having such a brutal killing machine. Maybe I should pause my progression a bit to remember what I built this character for actually.
That said I did start a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I have to say… it is weird how much slower the character is than I remember it being. I am a bit concerned that the pace of my Lightning Arrow Raider will have adversely impacted my opinion of my old standby. That said I am only in Act 3 and have a lot of points to sink into the tree until it starts to feel amazing. However, I am shocked at how easy it was to get Righteous Fire and pretty much all of the other abilities I use in the endgame version, up and running by around level 20. I am kinda of wondering about going straight for the pseudo-six-link helm for Righteous Fire rather than bothering with the six-link chest. In theory, you are supposed to pivot to that setup eventually, but I have never gone through the hassle on my previous RF characters. By the time I get there, I should have the cash to buy a good helm and then shop for a proper RRRGGG chest instead of the traditional RF BBBRRG.
I did not make it super far yesterday, because I spent a good chunk of the night watching the back-to-back episodes of the new Disney Plus Ahsoka series. Now Ahsoka Tano is probably one of my favorite Star Wars characters, and I am a huge fan of Rosario Dawson. I think she brings a lot to the character and I enjoyed her story arc mingled in amongst the Mandalorian seasons. All in all, I was not disappointed in the show and loved the way it felt. It definitely felt like they pulled out the stops for this one and the cinematography was excellent.
My only complaint… something is just not right with Hera. I don’t necessarily think that Mary Elizabeth Winstead did a bad job playing her. It is more that something is off with the makeup. Like the shade of skin tone seems wrong, and it feels way more like a human in facepaint with rubber lekku than an actual Twi’lek. It makes me wonder if there just was not enough time to go back and fix this in the post. Thankfully most of the time we are just seeing Hera in Hologram form where it isn’t really that big of a deal but it was jarring. Maybe this is just a me thing, and because Hera was another favorite character of mine… but it was this weird offputting moment in an otherwise phenomenal show.
Overall though I am definitely looking forward to seeing more of this show. We also got a new Guild Wars 2 expansion yesterday, but unfortunately with everything else going on I did not make it much further than seeing that the launcher had updated. I really dig the color scheme this time around. The End of Dragons patcher was nice, but this one seems much cooler. Maybe I am just partial to the color purple. Anyway, I think I am going to stop typing now. Hopefully, you are having an excellent week.
The post Polaric Void and Ahsoka appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I am losing track of how many days into the build it has been, but things are continuing to progress. I am starting to see the rough edges of this build, namely that it is not great at any sort of a boss encounter. I’ve found myself struggling with bosses that I’ve never struggled with before. For example, the pseudo-Fairgraves at the end of Frozen Cabins are something that I have steamrolled every single time on Righteous Fire, and on this character, I was completely out of potion charges when I downed it last night. Similarly, I struggled with the actual Fairgraves character on Mao Kun way more than I thought I would have because every so often my evasion would fail and he would just hit me for a ton.
By far the hardest encounter so far has been The Infinite Hunger aka “Shrek”. I absolutely got through it on the “six portal defense” and as you can see was down to my very last portal with my bell tower in flames. I’ve never had this much trouble with this boss, not even when I attempted him on my extremely sketchy Storm Brand Inquisitor back in Kalandra. We will see how Black Star goes when I get to that point with Searing Exarch, but I am deeply questioning if I will be able to drop the first two void stones with this character, at least not without significant investment. Like I know at some point I am running up a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but that might be sooner rather than later.
Like there are some obvious weaknesses in the build, but it absolutely excels at just killing all the things on a map. I recorded a video yesterday of me running through a map just to show what the gameplay style feels like. Granted this is only a T5 map, but I’ve now done one red map and for the most part, it felt exactly the same. You just make the entire screen pop with returning projectiles… you end up hitting all sorts of stuff that you didn’t even realize. There was one point last night when I was doing a blight map, and I just stood still and killed two lanes worth of mobs at once because my projectiles would go out and pop the ones in front of me, and then bounce through me and get the ones behind me. It was nonsense honestly, and it makes me wish I had actually anointed Vengeant Cascade before it was nerfed.
As far as progression goes, I am 52 maps into the Atlas out of 115 and have already knocked out two of the unique maps. Neither of them is a particularly rare map, but when Kirac has one available I try and complete it. Essentially I can run all the map types except elemental/physical reflect and even then… I’ve already completed several of those by just not ever firing my bow. I simply run around the map dropping Artillery Ballista and letting it do all the work for me. No Leech maps would be a problem, mostly because a lot of my ability to keep killing revolves around leeching back health and mana. No Regen maps can be a bit of a bummer but once the leech kicks in they provide more than enough health to keep my lifetap going. I just have to be careful not to spam ballistas when I am not actually killing anything.
I’ve spent some more time with the league mechanic and I think I really like it. It definitely feels like playing League of Legends with bots, but I’ve landed on a technique that mostly works for me. Essentially I swoop into enemy territory and drop my Ballistas which keep the other team attacking those while I circle them while firing off lightning arrow. For the most part, this works very well… and the only thing I have struggled a bit with is when there is some mechanic that is just covering the field in bad stuff. I’ve won four tournaments though at this point and kinda have a reasonable strategy for how to build my team. The rewards are sorta meh, but I’ve sold several of the rare tattoos for some decent bank and used one that swapped a Dex node for 80 Evasion. I am so starved for Strength and Intelligence that I could never actually use those tattoos, but I do have some more wiggle room for swapping dex for something else.
All in all, I am exceptionally happy with how things are going. I knew I was not going to be playing an “all arounder” build and so long as I keep that in focus I am exceptionally happy with my progress. At some point, I am going to start leveling an RF Juggernaut so that I can start throwing gear on it as I get it. I’m also helping out Thalen gear his Jugg so I’m hoping I can get some “hand me downs” as he levels out of them. God I love this game… it really gets in your blood sometimes.
The post Not A Bosser appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! We are on day four of the Trial of the Ancestors League. According to the /played command, I have put in 32 hours so far and that got me through the campaign and up to comfortably doing yellow maps. I dawdled a bit during the campaign but enjoyed the ride. I am on such a different trajectory than I am used to because I am playing what is commonly referred to as a “map blaster” character. This means that I am designed to decimate oncoming packs of mobs before they can touch me… but the trade-off is that I have very little in the way of proper defenses. This sort of flies in the face of everything that I know about building a comfortable character, but somehow it is working. I ran with a friend who needed credit for a map I was just about to run yesterday, and he was laughing at how much nonsense is flying around the screen when I get moving.
My big lucky drop of the weekend was picking up a corrupted six-link bow, that was in the right colors… or at least “right enough” colors. This is going to hold me until I get much deeper into my character and pick up something in the range of a 1000 dps bow. This bow would be awful for the more popular Toxic Rain/Explosive Arrow builds, but it works beautifully for my build as realistically I want flat damage against three elements, and this has two. The bleeding bits on the bow are a bit meh as is the accuracy because I am capped without needing it on my bow. I would have rather had some attack speed but in the realm of corrupted gear this is pretty solid. I need to get some beyond mobs and hopefully get some tainted currency to get some quality on it.
I know I had said that I was going to try and craft my own gear… but at this point, I am fully engaged in the trade economy and have made a few smaller sales. On Sunday night I started poking around looking at prices for six link chest pieces and managed to snatch this one up for 25 Chaos Orbs. This spent the largest chunk of my currency that I have gathered up so far but seemed like a good call. It has really good evasion and decent armor and while there are various elements of this that I would change, again it isn’t bad for a corrupted item. I wish it had more resistance on it, but that is sort of my general problem right now… the fact that I am pretty much capped in only one element.
Another really lucky drop was that I picked up a Poised Prism with some decent resistances on it. This is in theory the suggested quiver for this build and I had hoped that I would see one drop. Truth be told… apart from eventually replacing this with a perfect roll I think this is pretty damned good. I’ve seen all of the common quivers at this point, so it seems like they just drop more often than other uniques. I am hoping to see a Prismweave to replace the Wurm’s Molt that I am currently wearing. Unfortunately at the moment, I can’t really afford to get rid of the Molt, because it is helping to fix some of my attribute problems. I am pretty much starving for Strength and Intelligence, and having to use up a handful of significant suffixes to gain more.
The other purchase that I made was a pair of Shadows and Dust gloves. Namely, this is a way of getting rampage on the build, and it seems to really help my clear. I picked these up I believe for 2 Chaos and then threw some jewelers orbs to add some sockets. I need to recolor these in order to set up a cast when damage taken combo with Immortal Call, just to add another smaller layer of defense. I’ve got my auto snipers hit set up in my boots at the moment and all of my auras are in my helm. I am still running clarity because I still have mana problems. My ballista is at least now running off Lifetap which is fine given I have a decent chunk of life leech. Truth be told when I am killing things, I have no real mana problems… it is only when I am setting up for the next run.
I’ve never played a character before that was this much of a glass cannon and was always riding the edge of falling apart completely. At the moment I have 100% spell suppression which is good, and decent enough evasion though I would like to see that MUCH higher. My armor however is complete shit and my resists… are awful. I’ve contemplated trying to create a Taming ring, but so far I have not seen any of the component Berek rings drop. I could farm Heterochromia cards, but one of the problems I am running into as a mapper… is that without buying maps from the market, you can’t really reliably “Farm” anything over and over. I feel like all of the mapping strategies involve either buying specific maps or buying scarabs in order to set up ideal conditions. I would for example love to be trying to farm Legion, but that requires Legion Scarabs. Delve honestly was just more simple… and quite honestly more rewarding. I ran literally any map until I got Sulphite and then Delved until I ran out, and then repeated the virtuous cycle.
I can’t complain though, I am only one day into mapping and I already have 32 maps completed and have done one of the Maven Challenges. I need to find a zone connection diagram that I can reference because I need to be running connected maps in an attempt to get the maps I am missing. I am not super in a rush to get to red maps, because on my test version of this build… that is where things started to fall apart without being resist capped. What I really want to find is an Ancestral Vision, because it would solve my elemental ailments problem completely. I currently have 50% elemental avoidance and Ancestral Vision would get me the rest of the way to 100%.
As far as my Atlas tree goes… I am sorta all over the place at the moment. I rushed to get Shaping the Skies and Mountains to start getting some free map device unlocks. I’ve picked up a little here and a little there on the essences and picked up Stream of Consciousness since I won’t have a steady supply of scarabs for a while. I am slowly working my way up to the Einhar nodes that unlock access to the beasts that sell for quite a bit of currency. I figure at least until I have unlocked everything I will be doing essence/beasts to hopefully make a little currency. Essences mostly because I want to maybe be able to craft some gear at some point. Beasts mostly to hopefully sell some split beasts and mirror beasts.
I’ve done only the smallest amount of Delve, basically running down my Sulphite supply each time I fill it up. I know that this build is very much not designed for the rigors of the deep, but for the most part, so far it has been “fine”. I mostly just have to keep blowing things up in front of me for fear of anything actually touching me. Mostly I am working on the tedium of setting things up and getting some initial darkness resistance and light radius unlocked. I know at some point I will level another character that is more specifically designed for delving and then be running that in the deep. I will say though… the little bit of Delve that I have done… has felt generally more rewarding than most of the mapping I have done. Heist is still the mixed back it always is, but for the most part, the build has done excellently there.
All told though I am pretty happy with the build and pretty happy with where I am after 32 hours of play. I will continue to chip away at the Atlas, and I am hoping by the time I have unlocked all 115 maps, I will have enough currency to do a massive overhaul of my tree to something more enjoyable. I would really like to focus on Legion, and I have to say… Blight, Legion, and Breach are all awesome on this character. That was really my hope that I would be able to do some of the mechanics that I mostly ignored in the past because they were just not drift-compatible with the Righteous Fire lifestyle. I’ve seen my first Exalted Orb pictured above, but I have yet to see a Divine Orb drop. When I start getting some of those, and a bit more of a liquid position in the currency market… I will feel better about my decisions.
I realize I have not stayed true to the SSF-lite attempt that I originally planned. Truth be told though… I actually have arrived at a point where I enjoy the trade economy in this game. I’ve made several smaller sales and have already set up the infrastructure to be able to sell more stuff as I get access to better items. I am not sure what happened to the person who used to avoid the auction house like the plague. Right now I just don’t have much value that anyone would care about. I have a friend who will probably be willing to knock out the Void Stones for me because I sorta doubt this character is going to be able to do much more than the first two. I have a lot of mapping and farming though before that is even a real concern.
Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful week. I will be over here in the corner chipping away at this nonsense and completely happy.
The post First Day of Mapping appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! We are on day four of the Trial of the Ancestors League. According to the /played command, I have put in 32 hours so far and that got me through the campaign and up to comfortably doing yellow maps. I dawdled a bit during the campaign but enjoyed the ride. I am on such a different trajectory than I am used to because I am playing what is commonly referred to as a “map blaster” character. This means that I am designed to decimate oncoming packs of mobs before they can touch me… but the trade-off is that I have very little in the way of proper defenses. This sort of flies in the face of everything that I know about building a comfortable character, but somehow it is working. I ran with a friend who needed credit for a map I was just about to run yesterday, and he was laughing at how much nonsense is flying around the screen when I get moving.
My big lucky drop of the weekend was picking up a corrupted six-link bow, that was in the right colors… or at least “right enough” colors. This is going to hold me until I get much deeper into my character and pick up something in the range of a 1000 dps bow. This bow would be awful for the more popular Toxic Rain/Explosive Arrow builds, but it works beautifully for my build as realistically I want flat damage against three elements, and this has two. The bleeding bits on the bow are a bit meh as is the accuracy because I am capped without needing it on my bow. I would have rather had some attack speed but in the realm of corrupted gear this is pretty solid. I need to get some beyond mobs and hopefully get some tainted currency to get some quality on it.
I know I had said that I was going to try and craft my own gear… but at this point, I am fully engaged in the trade economy and have made a few smaller sales. On Sunday night I started poking around looking at prices for six link chest pieces and managed to snatch this one up for 25 Chaos Orbs. This spent the largest chunk of my currency that I have gathered up so far but seemed like a good call. It has really good evasion and decent armor and while there are various elements of this that I would change, again it isn’t bad for a corrupted item. I wish it had more resistance on it, but that is sort of my general problem right now… the fact that I am pretty much capped in only one element.
Another really lucky drop was that I picked up a Poised Prism with some decent resistances on it. This is in theory the suggested quiver for this build and I had hoped that I would see one drop. Truth be told… apart from eventually replacing this with a perfect roll I think this is pretty damned good. I’ve seen all of the common quivers at this point, so it seems like they just drop more often than other uniques. I am hoping to see a Prismweave to replace the Wurm’s Molt that I am currently wearing. Unfortunately at the moment, I can’t really afford to get rid of the Molt, because it is helping to fix some of my attribute problems. I am pretty much starving for Strength and Intelligence, and having to use up a handful of significant suffixes to gain more.
The other purchase that I made was a pair of Shadows and Dust gloves. Namely, this is a way of getting rampage on the build, and it seems to really help my clear. I picked these up I believe for 2 Chaos and then threw some jewelers orbs to add some sockets. I need to recolor these in order to set up a cast when damage taken combo with Immortal Call, just to add another smaller layer of defense. I’ve got my auto snipers hit set up in my boots at the moment and all of my auras are in my helm. I am still running clarity because I still have mana problems. My ballista is at least now running off Lifetap which is fine given I have a decent chunk of life leech. Truth be told when I am killing things, I have no real mana problems… it is only when I am setting up for the next run.
I’ve never played a character before that was this much of a glass cannon and was always riding the edge of falling apart completely. At the moment I have 100% spell suppression which is good, and decent enough evasion though I would like to see that MUCH higher. My armor however is complete shit and my resists… are awful. I’ve contemplated trying to create a Taming ring, but so far I have not seen any of the component Berek rings drop. I could farm Heterochromia cards, but one of the problems I am running into as a mapper… is that without buying maps from the market, you can’t really reliably “Farm” anything over and over. I feel like all of the mapping strategies involve either buying specific maps or buying scarabs in order to set up ideal conditions. I would for example love to be trying to farm Legion, but that requires Legion Scarabs. Delve honestly was just more simple… and quite honestly more rewarding. I ran literally any map until I got Sulphite and then Delved until I ran out, and then repeated the virtuous cycle.
I can’t complain though, I am only one day into mapping and I already have 32 maps completed and have done one of the Maven Challenges. I need to find a zone connection diagram that I can reference because I need to be running connected maps in an attempt to get the maps I am missing. I am not super in a rush to get to red maps, because on my test version of this build… that is where things started to fall apart without being resist capped. What I really want to find is an Ancestral Vision, because it would solve my elemental ailments problem completely. I currently have 50% elemental avoidance and Ancestral Vision would get me the rest of the way to 100%.
As far as my Atlas tree goes… I am sorta all over the place at the moment. I rushed to get Shaping the Skies and Mountains to start getting some free map device unlocks. I’ve picked up a little here and a little there on the essences and picked up Stream of Consciousness since I won’t have a steady supply of scarabs for a while. I am slowly working my way up to the Einhar nodes that unlock access to the beasts that sell for quite a bit of currency. I figure at least until I have unlocked everything I will be doing essence/beasts to hopefully make a little currency. Essences mostly because I want to maybe be able to craft some gear at some point. Beasts mostly to hopefully sell some split beasts and mirror beasts.
I’ve done only the smallest amount of Delve, basically running down my Sulphite supply each time I fill it up. I know that this build is very much not designed for the rigors of the deep, but for the most part, so far it has been “fine”. I mostly just have to keep blowing things up in front of me for fear of anything actually touching me. Mostly I am working on the tedium of setting things up and getting some initial darkness resistance and light radius unlocked. I know at some point I will level another character that is more specifically designed for delving and then be running that in the deep. I will say though… the little bit of Delve that I have done… has felt generally more rewarding than most of the mapping I have done. Heist is still the mixed back it always is, but for the most part, the build has done excellently there.
All told though I am pretty happy with the build and pretty happy with where I am after 32 hours of play. I will continue to chip away at the Atlas, and I am hoping by the time I have unlocked all 115 maps, I will have enough currency to do a massive overhaul of my tree to something more enjoyable. I would really like to focus on Legion, and I have to say… Blight, Legion, and Breach are all awesome on this character. That was really my hope that I would be able to do some of the mechanics that I mostly ignored in the past because they were just not drift-compatible with the Righteous Fire lifestyle. I’ve seen my first Exalted Orb pictured above, but I have yet to see a Divine Orb drop. When I start getting some of those, and a bit more of a liquid position in the currency market… I will feel better about my decisions.
I realize I have not stayed true to the SSF-lite attempt that I originally planned. Truth be told though… I actually have arrived at a point where I enjoy the trade economy in this game. I’ve made several smaller sales and have already set up the infrastructure to be able to sell more stuff as I get access to better items. I am not sure what happened to the person who used to avoid the auction house like the plague. Right now I just don’t have much value that anyone would care about. I have a friend who will probably be willing to knock out the Void Stones for me because I sorta doubt this character is going to be able to do much more than the first two. I have a lot of mapping and farming though before that is even a real concern.
Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful week. I will be over here in the corner chipping away at this nonsense and completely happy.
The post First Day of Mapping appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
