Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, Grace and Bel start off the show talking about how good Destiny Rising has been now that they have arrived at the endgame. They also talk a bit about Helhest, the new banner character. Grace shares her initial thoughts about He is Coming a roguelike that they have been playing. Bel shares some of the early spoilers for Path of Exile 3.27 Keepers of the Flame, which we are getting a full reveal for on the 23rd and is starting on the 31st. It seems like we are maybe getting a Breach expansion league, with a bunch of quality of life changes. From there, we dive into the topic that got bumped from last week about how there are so many good games… that it makes it really hard to play less-than-excellent games anymore. We also talk about how players are seeing through pointless grinds, and how AA games are back with a vengeance, while AAA games are floundering.
Hey Folks. I’m still on my Destiny Rising bullshit, I think in large part because I don’t really have another game to obsess about. That is going to change a bit towards the end of this month because I will have the first part of the latest Guild Wars 2 expansion to play (28th), and then a brand new Path of Exile league following closely after that (31st). I will likely be ping ponging between those games, while still doing my dailies in Destiny Rising from that point forward. That probably means that I will let the second account that I rolled up to create the guild lapse a bit, because I won’t be mainlining the game quite so hard. I did however give them some more money and bought the Crow outfit for Helhest because I still think it is badass.
The biggest news since yesterday is that I managed to push Helhest up to gold rank which unlocked another significant boost to exotic mod drop rates. That really is the piece that I need to focus on farming right now. I have decent artifacts for most of my champions, but have next to nothing in the exotic mod department. I did manage to get a single pierce exotic mod that would work for Hellhest’s linear fusion rifle, and that was the thing that pushed me over the light cap for gold. The champion that I am probably going to work on next is either pushing Umeko up to Gold, or spending some time focusing on Ning Fei because after getting him on my second account… I’ve come to realize that I actually really like playing him. Umeko is probably my favorite pure sniper though, because of the self healing benefits. However if I need to take a precision champion somewhere… I am probably going to be playing Helhest for the broader versatility.
Speaking of the second account, over lunch I tried to run a bunch of gauntlet ops, and ran into some friction. This is the first time in the community I have been kicked from a group… seemingly because I had low light levels. It happened twice while trying the run the Gauntlet Break In part of the raid. The irony behind this is that in the teams that I managed to get into… I dusted them hard, and was one of the key players doing the mechanics. More so I ran a strike with Ning Fei and was less than half the light level of the other players… but did 71% of the damage. Please for the love of god.. do not judge players for being new lights, because sure everyone wants an easy run… but there are a ton of folks running second accounts in this game and you can never tell when that new light might be a ringer. Additionally it is just a dick move to try and be exclusionary like that.
Part of what has made my alt Ning Fei so powerful so quickly, is that I managed to get the exotic crossbow to drop as well. That account is shaping up to be pretty freaking strong with both Jolder and Ning Fei. Hopefully I can pull a Helhest while this event is still going on. It sucks that it will be a long time before it has access to Gwynn or Estela since those banners are over. I am guessing when the new content goes in early next year hinted in that trailer, that Gwynn and Estela might be joining the permanent banner at that point. I am still having a lot of fun with Destiny Rising, even though I know I am probably switching gears especially when the Path of Exile and Guild Wars 2 expansions drop.
Speaking of which we have a name for the expansion, a theme for the expansion, and a reveal date of the 23rd. Keepers of the Flame seems like maybe this is going to relate to the Acolyte of Chayula from Path of Exile II. Then the theme of the expansion feels like it is going to be Breach focused, and maybe a significant upgrade to the way that it works. The hand jump scare, specially looks like the hand shaped “wings” on the back of Xesht who serves as the boss of Breach in Path of Exile II. I think essentially, we are seeing more content that knits the storyline between the two games together a bit, and maybe serves as a gap closer between the events and organizations that appear in the 20 year gap. It That Fled, one of the Betrayal NPCs specifically talks about the Hive, so yeah…. it feels like we are getting a Breach upgrade league. It does make me wonder how sweeping of a change it is going to end up being.
Additionally there are going to be some sweeping changes coming to Diablo IV. It feels like we JUST started Season 10, and that it is way too soon to begin talking about Season 11… but apparently they are just about to start up the PTR on October 21st. Due to this they dropped some big patch notes, and Raxx also released a video talking about them. I am seeing some things that will probably be really good for the game, namely changes to how Masterworking and Tempering functions to be a bit more deterministic. They are however talking about making combat harder… which worries me because really the point of a Diablo game is getting to a place where you can blow up entire screens. The game itself is not mechanically enjoyable enough to really lean into the soulslike direction like Path of Exile II did. However that said… I am not even sure what sort of unique niche this game can carve out. It will always be a shallower version of better games like Path of Exile or Last Epoch, because it is not growing over time.
Don’t get me wrong. Diablo IV is a pretty good game. It is fun in small doses, but there just isn’t really a lot going on… and they are squandering the seasonal model to keep creating thoroughly disposable content. Each season comes with a new borrowed power system, and a new faction to grind… which gives you rewards that will all be washed away the next time a season rolls out. Last Epoch and Path of Exile 1/2 create permanent changes to the game that grow the depth and complexity each time a season/league happens. Not everything goes “core”, but enough does that it makes the game feel like it is growing and changing in interesting ways. Diablo IV more or less feels the same today as it did at the launch of its DLC… because there is nothing really new to do that did not go in with that DLC. Sure they have moved the chess pieces around on the board, by shifting this or that balance…. but at the end of the day you still have to grind the same endgame that existed a year ago when Vessel of Hatred launched. We are about to be eleven seasons deep into this franchise and have very little to show for it. I think more than anything… the game disappoints me, because it could be a better game than it is now.
The other thing that I am playing that I have not really talked much about is Bravely Default, on my Switch 2 hooked to my new television downstairs. This is a super chill activity that I often do when I am winding down for the night, and at the moment I am largely in Act 2 and grinding levels right in front of Ancheim. At some point I am going to swap up the jobs of everyone so that they can learn a second trait line. Currently I have Edea as Knight, Tiz as Monk, Agnes as White Mage, and Ringabel as Black Mage… and I am going to swap my two martial fighters and my two magic users so they are cross trained. I find grinding levels in turn based JRPGs deeply relaxing, and especially since this one has an auto mode where you can set up a set of attacks and just have them follow them over and over. I am not really sure what level I am going to call “good enough” to move forward, but right now I am mostly farming until I have enough gold to buy all of the upgrades available in town. I like overpowering content, and do not really want to have to think about it.
Anyways. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. It is supposed to be cooler again, so I will likely be working on the south half of the garage. Once I have finished with everything I will probably post before and after photos. It was a complete mess, and it is becoming less of one, every time I go out there and work.
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Good Morning Folks. I am still struggling a bit with this respiratory crud, but am doing better enough to be able to function and actually work today. If it drags on, I will end up going to the doctor but given that I doubt there is anything that they can do other than put me on a dose pack of prednisone… which will royally fuck with my sleep patterns… I have been trying to avoid that. I mostly spent the night playing Diablo IV downstairs while snuggling with cats. Gracie was doing the thing in my office where she refused to not be the center of attention, and when this happens it is generally better if I go down to the couch where she can snuggle in my arms while I am playing, rather than me trying to hold her with one hand while using the computer with other other. In wild news… the last few mornings I have been able to pet the super skittish feral black cat that hangs out in front of the house with Greybie.
Last night I managed to finally have some luck with the trade channel and picked up a set of Ancestral Tibault’s Will for 30 million gold. That seems like a nonsensical number, but I had over 200 million and nothing really to do with it… so it effectively has no value to me. I opted to throw on a non-Ancestral copy of Vasily’s Prayer which at least allowed me to have the fully functional build, and this more or less has allowed me to bump up to Torment IV and farm the world content comfortably. Just before sitting down to write this blog post I ran Varshan again and finally got an Ancestral version of that helmet to drop, so in theory I have Ancestral of better of everything that is required for the build. I still cannot quite do bosses on T4… but they melt on T3. Now it is just a matter of getting better versions of all of the uniques and maybe hopefully getting a few mythics so I can bump up to that version of the build. I am also hunting for a better pair of boots with more movement speed on them.
The biggest challenge that I am going to face right now is that most of the final set of challenges involve running content on t4 while having a piece of Chaos Armor equipped. I am not really certain which slot I can theoretically sacrifice to the achievement gods in order to make that happen, but I will do some testing. I need to run a few more Infernal Hordes to do the chaos rifts inside of them and also farm some T3 or higher Helltide in order to finish out the next to the last step in the seasons journey. I am on the very last step of the Reign of Chaos quest chain, and I am working on the last section of the Battle Pass. In theory within the next week I will have milked every last bit of this season that I really need to, and be able to walk away happily knowing that I pretty much did everything I could do.
In other news, 0.3.1 dropped in Path of Exile II, and with it comes the significant rework of the endgame and removal of towers as the primary means of adding content to maps. I ran a few maps as a test and for the most part they seem way less rippy than they were previously. I am still largely running t14 content and it seemed pretty easy overall. I have not played for about a month now, so who knows what other previous patches could have added to this feeling. It seems like maybe they have not removed ALL of the content that they intended to remove because it seems like Expeditions are still showing up as icons on the map, whereas I thought ALL additional content would be added by the Tablets instead. Additionally it seems like the whole corruption thing stays on the atlas, which makes sense given that is how you unlock most of your atlas passives.
While the overall density and rippyness of the map was lowered, it did not necessarily feel like the rewards were lowered as a result. I ran a few maps and pulled quite a bit of currency and what felt like more uniques than normal from them. Granted two of them came from a Rogue Exile, but I walked out of the map with five uniques which seems pretty solid for a 4 mod t14 map. I am not really sure if I am going to dip my toes back into the game at this point, because once I unattach from a League in Path of Exile, it sort of feels hard to get back into the swing of things. My mind has adjusted to Diablo IV at this point and I am probably going to ride that into the ground, or at least until I give Legion Remix a shot next week.
I think yesterday I might have just been in a low point, so apologies for whining about life on the blog. I put together a shelving unit which felt like significant progress so that probably cheered me up a bit. I am feeling better about my existence in the world today… even though the country seems to be burning around me.
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Good Morning Folks. I want to start out this week’s posts by giving a rousing round of applause for the Blaugustans who just finished participating in Blaugust 2025. This event would not have existed were it not for the wonderful community of mentors that have volunteered for that role over the last decade. Specifically I want to recognize Krikket who was the first to take up the mantle and acted as defacto leader of this event. Yesterday she made the summary post talking about the participants and handing out of awards and I highly suggest you stop reading this and go check that post out. This is a year that I could not have handled the rigors of running this event, and while I will be happy to take up that mantle again in the future… the success of this event goes out to the crew that helped make it happen while I could not. This is legitimately the largest event that has ever been run, and I was shocked to see the final tally of almost 170 participants. 2024 was previously the largest year with 116, and this 2025 represents roughly 30% growth rate between the two most recent years.
The wildest thing about this event is that we had people participating that did not know until the very end what the event even really was. They just viewed it as a hashtag that got popular on the fediverse and tagged along. In many ways the event has long since outgrown me and my meddling and just become this fixture of our small corner of the internet. I will always think of it as this small game blog thing… but that stopped being true many years ago. The Blaugust discord is super active all year round, but is especially so during the event. The Welcome channel is full of people signing up for the very first time and it has been cool to watch. Watch from the corner of course because everything about the activity levels of the discord now triggers the fuck out of my introvert tendencies… so you only really see me speaking when spoken to directly or talking to something in the super secret mentor channel. This is sort of the way of things that I start… they get bigger than my anxiety can reasonably handle and I get quiet. Folks either tend to view me as aloof or stoic… but in reality I just can’t handle that many people at once.
In other news I have been playing quite a lot of Destiny Rising and am shocked at just how good this game is. That said it has made me contemplate clearing up some disk space to reinstall Destiny 2 so I can have a more direct comparison, since it has been ages since I last played it. The story has been great in Rising, but I am not the biggest fan of the way in which it is doled slowly. You have to do a bunch of different activities to unlock the next bit of story, and my preference tends to be to mainline the story so that I can spend more time enjoying the endgame activities. I know this method is an attempt to keep people engaged longer, but it goes against my natural instincts for this sort of experience.
One of the things that has been really impressive is the breadth of activities and how different they feel. You still only really get a limited amount of activity currency each day in the games pseudo-stamina system, but in truth I am not mainlining the game so it has been more than enough to do anything I might want to do in a single day. If you are playing this game you should absolutely friend me and my code is 20953603268. I attempted to create a version of Greysky Armada but it ultimately timed out. You have 24 hours to get 6 people signed up into the guild (Wolf Pack) in order to create it, and I could not hit that number. If we manage to get enough people playing I will make another attempt at it, because there are a lot of cool things to do in a pack. I joined one of the temporary ones and have been enjoying the weird little missions that open up as a result.
Over in Path of Exile II, I have made it up to level 87 and am capable of pretty comfortably running t15 maps. With that I have unlocked all of the +5 atlas point nodes through cleansing corrupted nexii. Now I am mostly hunting out various unique maps which themselves reward 2 additional points for completing them. I am not sure if there is a place where I can see a total tally of the number of unique maps that I have run, but I think I have done four of them so far. The Lake of Kalandra one is my favorite, but mostly because I love the look of that area. I thought it was cool during the Kalandra league and I still think the effect is extremely slick.
The only problem that I am having right now is that after beating the campaign, and unlocking most of my atlas points… I sort of feel like I don’t have much of a reason to keep playing. I could always keep improving the gear on my character, but it works well enough to do the hardest mapping content, and since I never really care much bout bossing… I sort of feel like I have beaten this league. That is the same problem that I had with Last Epoch, is that after I unlocked all of the Harbingers and took down basic Aberroth I felt like I had accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish. What makes this game more challenging though is that I keep struggling with technical difficulties. Firstly I cannot watch youtube on my second monitor while playing this game because while the audio keeps playing… the video playback always freezes. Secondly the game crashes constantly, and while I can log right back in where I left off… this eventually grates on you after awhile given that I can only finish one or two maps before the client dies on me. Lastly Path of Exile II as a whole is just not as performant as Path of Exile 1, and even when it is not crashing… there are weird hitches and stutters happening all the time. Supposedly most of this is because I have an intel processor… but still it makes the entire thing eventually not worth fighting with.
In another completely different news… on a whim yesterday afternoon I decided to record myself telling the tale of when I saw a Bigfoot in 1986 and 1995 and then turn this into a video. I’ve written about it here before on the blog, but it always feels like the written versions never really do it justice, because I feel like I am having to go into way too much background information. I did not script this take and as a result it is about 25 minutes of me talking through the story and how it relates to some other sightings in my neck of the woods. I also attempting to illustrate the tale a bit with some google maps shots and various other related images. This will not be everyone’s thing, and it does not fit the rest of my YouTube channel but for some reason I felt like I needed to say it all.
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