Good Morning Folks! We’ve had a bit of a snowpocalpyse here in Oklahoma. We handle icy roads pretty well, but when you give us a bunch of inches of snow at once… pretty much all of our infrastructure breaks down. I had already taken the day off because we were supposed to go do something… which has essentially been cancelled. So instead of cancelling my leave and working today… I am just going to chill out. The above image is from my Dad’s backyard staring out of his shop and I figured I would share it because of how pretty all of the trees look. We technically got more snow, but his yard looks way cooler.
I am still playing quite a bit of Path of Exile II, though admittedly at this point I am pretty ready for another game to come along and distract me. I’ve largely been chasing Citadels and it is awesome when you get two spawn near each other. For example this one screen was worth 6 divines as the Copper Citadel fragments go for the most on the currency exchange. I have no clue why I am attempting to accumulate wealth because my Minions build is effectively as geared as I can probably get it without going to mirror tier perfectly rolled items. Now that Kripparian has made a video about the fart boots, I do have some concern that they will be nerfed. Thankfully I am only using them as additive damage and not the core of that build.
I’ve been knocking out a few of the things like getting my 8th set of bossing atlas points. It is shocking how hard it is to find a boss map node that is both Corrupted and Irradiated, because in order to get that 8th point you need both of those in place and to run a map that has corrupted and upgraded into a t16. I had been sitting on one of those in my bank for a bit looking for a node that met all of the criteria so I could get those two points. My last two points in the bossing tree will require me to actually use the fragments I am farming and go after The Arbiter. I am not sure I really care that much about this, especially given that I only have one shot at that fight, and the accumulated tokens to do one attempt are worth roughly 5 Divines in total.
That said I did finally gather up the 300 splinters required to take on the Breach boss Xesht. I was expecting this to be way tougher than it actually was and in truth it was pretty similar to your average map boss, just with a lot more mechanics. This was of course a Xesht zero difficulty, and I am sure as you scale up the fight it gets considerably more spicy. I did not get anything really good from the encounter, but it was interesting enough that I could see doing this again whenever I organically gather up enough splinters. The node that I chose makes it so Breaches open and close 30% slower, which honestly… GREATLY improves the quality of life of doing Breaches on a Minion build.
I’ve got an Iron Citadel that I have been sitting on, that I will probably take a run at today. My hope is that it drops multiple fragments, because honestly otherwise it isn’t really worth much to run it. Copper Citadels are the real money right now, but they also appear to be the hardest to find. That said the further I get away from the origin the more often I seem to be finding both Citadel spawns and Unique map spawns. This seems to mimic Delve in that the deeper there that you went the more often rare nodes would spawn.
I’ve found exactly one Moment of Zen, which is a unique map that spawns the Nameless Seer. He did not really have anything terribly interesting in the way of the uniques he was offering, but I am very thankful that this node is impossible to miss on the tree. Honestly I really appreciate that EVERY map has a unique appearance on the map, so that once you know what you are looking for you can pretty much tell which map it is before even mousing over it. I do hope that there is either a favorite map slot system eventually or something that at least allows us to ban the maps that we cannot stand. People seem to hate Augury but that one does not really bug me much… it is maps like Vaal Factory with a bajillion doors that sap my joy.
I got a grocery delivery yesterday morning, well before all of the snow started. So for the most part I am going to hunker down and snuggle with some kitties and forget that the outside exists for the moment. I am hoping we get enough melt over the course of the day so I can go out and do my habitual donut run in the morning without much hassle. I hope you have wonderful weekend and thoughts go out to my friends in California dealing with the wildfires.
The post Moment of Zen appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I took quite possibly the longest break I have ever taken with my blog over the break. It was good, and honestly I should allow myself to do this a bit more often. It isn’t necessarily that I did not want to blog, but more that I did not want to have to summon forth something worth talking about. I spent a lot of the break listening to audiobooks and grinding away in Path of Exile II, which is an extremely comfortable existence for me. This morning I am going to talk about a few things that I have landed on. I’m still mostly playing my Minions Infernalist and am enjoying the largely chill methodology of mapping. I can go days without taking a death, which makes it feel pretty similar to my experiences with Righteous Fire characters in the baseline game.
Even in the baseline game I am not what you would call a “Juicer” aka someone who buys optimized maps or optimized scarabs in order to run the most content dense and optimal mapping experiences. I am instead what would be referred to as an “alch and go andy”, where I greatly prefer running whatever maps happen to roll when I throw an Alchemy Orb at a white map, and then utilize whatever scarabs happen to drop. This is also the way that I have been playing Path of Exile II, where I am relying entirely upon drops in order to keep “map sustain” going. The thing that I have learned is that in order to do this, you really need to target Boss maps, because they seem to have a much higher density of T15 map drops. Bosses seem to be guaranteed to drop two T15 maps, and then during the course of the map you will often see one or two more T15 maps meaning that a single boss map can sustain four or five other maps worth of content. I am also getting enough Precursor Tablets in order to essentially cram one of them into every single Tower that I come across.
One of the things that I loved about Path of Exile, is the Delve alternate game mode where you spent your time spelunking through the mines looking for treasure. The Path of Exile II endgame atlas borrows a lot from this concept with everything being a bit more exploration based than the traditional Atlas progression. Delve for me was a game mode about finding the best possible nodes, and more specifically chasing the three Cities and the boss fights that could spawn in them which were capable of dropping some of the specific items that came from that game mode. As such my POE2 Atlas strategy has been about trying to find the three Citadels that can spawn, each of which containing a boss fight, as well as keeping a look out for any interesting unique maps that happen to spawn along the way.
Essentially Iron Citadels contain the boss fight from Act 1, and spawn in segmented off plots of farmland. You will often see the worked fields appearing on your map and the gothic buildings well before you actually arrive at the Citadel. Weird quirk of this specific Citadel is that they often spawn in clusters where I have seen three of them within a few towers distance of each other. Stone Citadels contain the boss of Act III and seem to spawn often butting up against mountain ranges. You will usually see a number of steppe pyramids and ziggurats in the near vicinity. The Copper Citadel spawns exclusively in the desert and contains the boss of Act II, and it will be in a larger swath of desert as opposed to sandy coastal regions. In this case you will see grayish green tents surrounding the few nodes closest to the Citadel.
Why am I chasing these Citadels? Well for one they drop specific fragments that are required to summon the Uber boss. However given the current one portal state of the game, I have zero interest in attempting the boss. Instead I am using these Citadels as a way of making pretty decent spikes of currency. The Copper Citadel seems to be the rarest, which is vetted by how much more these fragments go for as compared to the others. The most common seems to be Iron Citadels in part due to the fact that they often spawn in clusters. However I am guessing that the Stone Citadel can do the same thing given its fragment is just as cheap. Essentially running around 150% Rarity, I am pulling 5 to 10 Exalts per map run and then when I find a Citadel I get a rather large payday with the bosses often dropping two fragments each given that I can run them with my Atlas tree that buffs up their level.
Essentially I am running an Atlas that adds +3 levels to every single map boss that I encounter, as well as trying to stack as much rarity from the tree. I am specifically also adding some pack size nodes and ones that cause one rare in my map to duplicate. Basically I am trying to add as many rares to the map as I can, which is why I am also dipping into the Essence nodes just a bit, which means that I usually have one of those on each map. The only things in a map that drop any loot worth mentioning are Rares and Uniques, and as such trying to stack as many of those as possible really helps out. One of the interesting things about the node that doubles one of the rares, is that it occasionally also triggers on bosses giving me two copies of the same boss to fight at once. This can get a bit dicey at times, especially for bosses like the Miller which often like to time their attacks so you are essentially having to dodge from two different things at the same time.
Other than that I have leveled up an Invoker and now have it in maps as well, which makes my third character capable of mapping. I am trying to fix some of the survival issues with this character, namely that it is so much squishier than my Infernalist. I am probably going to respec the entire tree at some point and follow one of the other build paths that I have seen. I am running the Polcirkeln ring which means I do not necessarily have to run both Heralds to make big pops happen. This allowed me to pick up another defensive aura which helped, but also… given that I am having to charge into packs of mobs there is just a higher likelihood of taking random deaths. I’ve gotten used to my fart boots on the Witch consuming corpses and effectively making me immune to on death effects. I am pretty sure that all of the deaths I have taken on the Monk thus far have probably been triggered by something happening after I exploded a pack of mobs.
I am really interested to see what happens this week as GGG comes back into the office. I fully expect there to be some significant patches happening. We are essentially interesting a period of time which is the battle for the soul of the game. Either they are going to claw back the power that players have found dragging the game back down into its Ruthless roots, or they are going to lean into the play style that players seem to want. Ruthless is the least played game mode for a reason, and I for one am hoping that we see significant buffs to the under-performing classes and only the lightest of nerfs to the classes and abilities that are performing well. If they nerf my minions character, I am probably done with the game because quite honestly… nothing else feels good enough to keep me around.
The post An Unjuiced Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I decided to do something a little bit different… or at least different from what I have done recently. Occasionally I record videos of gameplay to illustrate a point, and this morning I spent time recording myself running a map on my Infernalist Minions character as well as running a map on my Titan Stampede character to contrast the different in how they feel. I’ve effectively completely abandoned the Titan other than occasionally running t10 or so level maps on it to clear some of those out. I should in theory try and figure out how to fix that character and make it more enjoyable. It still largely works, but armor is way less effective of a defensive layer right now as energy shield is.
In the first video I run a T16 map, which is a t15 map that has been buffed in monster level with irradiate up to what folks are calling Tier 16. Similarly a T17 would be a map that both has corruption aka beyond monsters buffing up its monster level as well as being irradiated. The thing is I can happily do those while having a half specced boss atlas also buffing up monster level of those encounters. I’m using a combination of life converted to energy shield, a small amount of armor, and 68% block chance which all together make the character feel relatively tanky. I can clear content so fast at least compared to the Titan, but nowhere near as zoomy as some of the builds like Sorcs and Rangers are able to do.
Then you have my Titan which I was running a T11 map and had to hit my health pot several times during rare encounters to stay topped off. Essentially the playstyle is that I stampeded across the map, trying to explode the majority of the packs and then when I encounter a rare or a boss I pop infernal cry, and then hammer of the gods… and throw up active block while waiting on the hammer to land and effectively delete the target. This is great… unless the mob moves out of the Hammer of the Gods target area or I have to fight two tanky things back to back. At that point I have to rely on Perfect Strike which has a long windup in order to take out the extra monsters. There is a point in the video where I get pushed out of Hammer of the Gods by a Rare so you can see this happen in realtime.
The other big problem with the game right now is how important rarity is as a stat. I currently have 79% magic find on my Infernalist and I did not see a single Divine Orb drop until I had at least 50% and I did not se any Greater Jeweler’s Orbs until I bumped up to 79% getting my first ones while recording the podcast on Saturday. More than that I am seeing way more Exalted Orbs dropping at a given time as well as seeing some of the better options in things like Ritual. I’ve picked up two of the Vaal Omens that sell for roughly a Divine on the currency exchange. It feels really bad that a piece of gear is not good, until it has rarity on it. On the flipside, however you can sell so pretty whack items so long as they have high rarity on them.
The biggest problem that I still have with Path of Exile II however, is the one portal problem. This is not that big of a deal for me personally because I can go an entire day doing back to back maps without taking a death. However there still are the random deaths that come out of nowhere… and it makes it feel even worse when you are not used to barely limping by. My friends who should be joining me in mapping bliss… are having trouble getting started due to repeated deaths and losing maps… and now having a ton of map sustain to keep throwing maps at the problem. Map sustain is definitely an issue, but for me it is mostly lack of getting T15 maps to drop. I never see them unless they come from a rare or a boss, and most rares… don’t seem to drop them. Essentially when I am getting low I do a lap around the map looking for bosses which have a pretty high likelihood to drop two at a time so that I can restock a bit.
I found an Untainted Paradise, which is the only unique map that I have seen so far. I ran it because might as well, but was disappointed at how little experience I actually got from it at 90. Among our friend group I think I am the only one who is actually having fun with this game. Almost everyone else has stalled out significantly and is just not making significant progress. Essentially there is a group of folks who managed to get to maps, and then struggled. There is another group of folks who hit Act II Normal and had trouble pushing through that. Right now the current state of Path of Exile II is not great, and is potentially more difficult to make progress in than the first game was. This gives the game a feeling of potentially being even more elitist than the first game, because it requires a lot of prior understanding and willingness to engage heavily in trade to really make significant progress.
Anyways! Are you still playing? How far have you managed to make it? I am curious among my readers who is actually still engaged and having fun, and who has checked out waiting for future patches? Drop me a line below.
The post Infernalist vs Titan POE2 Mapping appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We are back this week and only actually down one person which seems great for the holiday season. This week we start off talking about Toad’s Item Factory which is a multiperson minigame in Super Mario Party Jamboree and Kodra talks about his experiences playing it with his kiddo. From there Tam shares his experiences with Nine Sols, which is in theory a game he should like but is not quite there. Several of us have made it to the Path of Exile II Endgame and as such we discuss some of the issues with it, the most glaring being the whole One Portal Problem. Kodra has started playing Warhammer 40,000 Martyr which is honestly prompting Bel to reinstall and check it out again. Finally, Tam talks a bit about the major changes that have gone into Star Citizen with the opening of a whole other star system with the Pyro update.
