Good Morning Folks. I realize it has been a while since I last posted, but my world has been turned upside down in the last few days. On some level, I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was fully prepared for what it feels like when your body betrays you. Every day has been its own wild ride. I’ve been taking notes because, in theory, I will be going through the same feelings and symptoms at the same time each rotation, and more than anything, that has me dreading the next four months. Can I really do this seven more times? What will even be left of me when I am through the other end? Nothing about this process is easy or comfortable, and it is honestly a struggle to keep sustenance in me. At this point, I am down 50 lbs from my highest weight, and that is just a start. I have no clue where I am going to end up at the end of this journey, because it definitely feels like everything I am going through is accelerating this process, whether or not I want it to. I had a bit of a scare on Friday as my blood pressure meds pushed me down into dangerous territory, so I have completely halted those for the time being and am not sure if and when I will start them back up.
I am not even sure what this means for my blog right now. This is easily the longest gap I have had in writing for a long while, given that it has been five days since my last post. Essentially, all of last week was a wash, and I am not entirely certain how much that will change over time. I keep thinking I will hit a point of equilibrium with the changes my body is going through because they will be cyclical, and that at some point I will be used to the rollercoaster of killing off cells and waiting on new ones to grow back. Every day has been different than the last, but not the same level of better or worse on a progressive scale. I had it in my head that the worst days would be the days actively taking chemo, and then after I finished that, it would be a progressive recovery of functionality, where every day would build upon the previous. That does not appear to be the sort of curve that we are dealing with. Everything just takes so much longer than it normally would, because I keep having to rest between actions. It isn’t that I “can’t” do things… just that the actions bring me to cold sweats and make me need to take pauses in between every micro action. I woke up at 6 am and immediately started getting ready. It was not until around 7:15 that I made it upstairs with breakfast, and everything in between was “do something” and then take a seat for a bit to recover from the thing I just did.
Writing is how I deal with things. I am in part sharing this with you, my readers… because it is my instinct to do so, not necessarily because I want pity or suggestions. I think we have all been around friends and family dealing with cancer in various ways, and this is just my time of life to deal with it. However, the one thing that I can offer is a perspective, as I write through it to process the experience for myself. I’ve always said that I can get used to anything, given enough time and repetition, and I am hoping that this cancer rollercoaster will be one of those things, or that maybe my body will get better at bouncing back. Right now, it is just so broad the impact… because it feels like every single muscle and every single bone… aches at a deeper level than I have ever experienced. I know logically, those are cells dying off and regrowing, and ultimately, I am going to go through this every single round. It feels like when I was a kid and would have massive muscle and bone aches right before a growth spurt. It would also be hilarious if I grew in height from this, but I don’t think it works that way.
On the gaming front, I have cleared all of the Harbingers and am up to Aberroth, but just cannot bring myself to push past and kill him, because I stopped caring enough about it. The build that I am playing is far from immortal, and right now… given my mental bandwidth, I think I need an immortal build to enjoy myself. I could roll a second character and futz around for a while, but I think I might have reached the point where Last Epoch has run its course for me at the moment. There are so many vectors to scale my build on, but they all require massive amounts of effort to accomplish. Were I playing trade, I could just save up and buy whatever I needed, but I do not play trade in this game. So instead, I might just sunset the game for the moment and move on to other things. Maybe if I run across some other build that I just absolutely have to play, I will give it a go, but for the moment, I think I am going to wind things down in Eterra.
That means that I am largely back playing Path of Exile, because the level of engagement works for me. Before the Last Epoch season started, I got my build to a point of almost being immortal, and as a result, I can just go through the motions and collect loot. There are still a bunch of challenges that I want to knock out so that I can upgrade my hideout decoration. I can slowly chip away at these while I am otherwise incapacitated, and feel like I am doing something… while mostly just faffing about. What worries me is that I have four months of this ahead of me. Four months of barely getting by as my body betrays me, and none of this sounds like a good time. I need gaming to keep me sane, but I am going to have to find easy gaming options because I just cannot function at a high level right now. I was naive in that I expected the between week to mostly be getting life back to normal, but so far it is anything but. Maybe as things move forward into the week, it will improve significantly and rapidly, but every day has been a new series of sensations. I am going to realistically also need to start probably forcing myself to work out some, for fear that I lose critical muscle mass each time I kill off cells and regrow them.
Anyways. I am a fucking mess, friends. I will get through this because I have entered the “only way out is through” territory, but holy crap was it not what I was expecting.
The post Every Day a New Betrayal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start off this week discussing a bit about Project Tahiti, which is a fairly professional emulator server that is helping to keep Marvel Heroes Omega alive. We’ve talked a bit in the past about missing this game, but it now functions again and is really easy to get up and running, especially if you ever played it on Steam. Bel talks a bit about some drama happening in Path of Exile with the account banning of Jenebu, the originator of The Forbidden Trove and what this means for the Mirror Economy. Last Epoch dropped a new expansion, Shattered Omens, and we talk a bit about playing that and the changes that have gone into the game as a result. Finally, Ash shares some rapid-fire updates on Coromon, Sunderfolk, and Peglin.
Good Morning Folks. Last night I stayed up way the hell too late, because I got focused on working on seasonal challenges in the Mirage League. I’ve reached the point in the league where my main build is extremely fleshed out, my second build of the league is pretty solid as well, and I have turned my attention to trying to complete as many challenges as I can before I wander off and play the Last Epoch Season that starts tomorrow. I usually come back later and finish things up, because ultimately my goal is to get 34 Challenges so that I can keep the streak of the same size totem pole in my hideout for each of the recent leagues. I’ve already placed the one for Mirage, and you can see it is a bit lacking so far, but hopefully time and focus will fix that.
Yesterday, I finished up three challenges to knock off the list. Deadly Deeds is one that involves running a bunch of juiced league content, and I completed my final one by running three legion five-ways. This was a big part of why I respecced my third Atlas passive tree over to Legion, so that I could collect a bunch of emblems and finish this one out pretty easily. Seized Strength focuses on completing endgame content that is associated with various leagues, knocking that one out by finishing a fifteen-wave simulacrum. Leathal Leaders I did not end up screenshotting, but I wrapped that up by clearing an Alva Temple and completing a Vox Twin encounter. Finally, I took a few of the gems that I had been leveling and sacrificed them to the Vaal gods so that I could get a corrupted outcome and finish up Glorious Gemcraft.
At this point, I am sitting at 26 of 40 challenges, and have a handful that are pretty close to wrapping up. Coveted Currency mostly just requires that I spend some currency buying coins to imbue things with in order to complete my last objective there. Remarkable Realms, unfortunately, is going to have to wait until I can farm up a Doryani’s Machinarium in Delve because they are going for 16 Divines at the moment… and I refuse to pay that when I run as much Delve as I do. I could, in theory, reroll Kirac until it eventually shows up, which is an option because I seem to be generating a bunch of gold at the moment. Magnificent Memories is honestly pretty close as well, and I have stacks of Originator-influenced maps that I could be running. I need to get in the habit of using Exalted Orbs on maps so that I can get them up to 8 mods before running them for maximum impact.
Last night I also dinged 99, which feels like it is faster than I usually do in leagues like this. It could just be all of the times that I took the Mirage wish that gave me bonus experience. I should probably queue up a bunch of maps that I have with full Mirages, while burning through some of the challenges related to running map content with scarabs, and hope for the experience bonus. In theory, a FULL map with that bonus would be really nice and a decent boost. If I really want to push through experience, though, I should probably either spec one of my trees to an Alva strategy or a Betrayal strategy because both reward a ton of experience for completing them. I think the Alva scarabs are pretty expensive right now, because it seems like Alva maps sell for quite a bit of currency at the moment. Delve is also a pretty great source of experience, and it tends to be relatively safe for me. Tonight is pretty much my last push for getting to 100, though, before I lose focus and play a bunch of Last Epoch for a while.
In other moves, I shuffled some gear around and picked up a new shield and helm, so that I could, in theory, run Malevolence in addition to the auras that I have already been running. Due to socket pressure, I had to drop the arrogance vitality setup, but I still have 2000 life per second regen, so that is fine. I lost a bit of regen with my new Archdemon Crown setup, but gained quite a bit of single-target damage, so I think it shakes out. Mostly, I wanted to buff my damage before I tried the Legion 5-Way and Simulacrum. I have another double influence shield that I have been crafting on, but I doubt I will actually hit anything better than the one I am using. I played pass down the gear to my friend Carthuun, who is a bit behind me in Righteous Fire progression. Sure, I could have sold it for some divines, but generally speaking, I would rather pass gear down to a friend than profit from it.
I feel like I am in pretty good shape for the launch of Last Epoch Shattered Omens tomorrow. I know I will cycle back around to Path of Exile after Last Epoch, but I am hoping I get a good few weeks to a month out of Season 4. I think a lot of the changes are going to be really good, and I am mostly trying to figure out what I want to do for a build. I know I will probably make a Minion Necro at some point, but I don’t think I want to start that. I am contemplating going with Forge Guard and doing the summoned weapons nonsense since I have never actually done that. I will probably talk tomorrow about some of the builds that I am contemplating. For this morning, however, I am pretty happy with the progress I made in Path of Exile last night.
The post Mirage Progress appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. The other day I talked about the build that I had been cooking up centered around the new unique staff called The Broken Elegy. When I wrote about it, I was still leveling, but having a great time doing so. Ultimately I went with Guardian, not necessarily because I thought it would be the best option, but more because it would be the most enjoyable leveling path. Essentially, once you get your Sentinel of Radiance online, aka Butter Boy, you can face roll the campaign from that point forward, and you can pick him up in the first lab. It ends up playing like a slightly delayed version of Righteous Fire, because you charge into a pack of mobs, convocate him into the middle, and his burning aura pretty much obliterates everything instantly. Technically, The Broken Elegy would probably have been better served by a Necromancer, and most definitely would be better served by the Servant of Arakaali. However, Guardian puts me in the right corner of the tree for Staff defenses, and also has its own benefits, so I rolled with it.
As is the tradition when I do something dumb… I record one of my dumb little videos. I am not doing anything terribly challenging, but essentially, as soon as I exited the campaign, I rolled straight into t16 maps. Technically, I ran a single T10 just to see how it was going, and after stomping all over that, I ripped the band-aid off. The biggest challenge that I think I am running into is simply having too many minions for any of them to be doing effective damage. You already run into this problem with just Raging Spirits sometimes, but in total, I have 43 minions… and that is before I take into account the Greater Skeletal Shrine belt that I am running. Look… I completely understand that this is a dumb idea, but I am having fun… and quite frankly, that is the most important part of any build. I have noticed that things die faster if I stop summoning Raging Spirits, but when it comes to clearing maps… having so many aggressive minions means that they just sort of spread out and lay waste to everything.
I’ve been using them to farm Legion, because I have been trying to get a bunch of the new honoured incubators so I can stockpile some of the imbuement coins. This is not really working out as I had hoped, but I am still enjoying running something like six legions per map. I have a ton of emblems, and those will ultimately come in handy when it comes to doing some of the league challenges. Maps take way too long right now with the Mirages for me to efficiently do any sort of targeted farm, because I cannot seem to bring myself to ignore mechanics. Effectively, I am sort of this worse version of SSF, where I play in trade… but still feel like I want to farm almost everything myself. I would be so much better off if I just focused on a single mechanic and then used it to make currency, which I then spent on other things. However, that does not bring me joy. Sure, I like being able to buy the items that I cannot be bothered to farm, but if I can farm it… I want to farm it.
Speaking of buying things… I am using name-brand corpses for the very first time. In the past, these have always been super freaking expensive, but for some reason this league, they are all cheap. Perfect Turtles are only around 20 Chaos right now, and in theory, I should probably buy a bunch of them to stockpile for when I eventually kill one of these and cannot get it back somehow. Perfect Forest Warriors were less than 10c, and I am running a 5c Perfect Hulking Miscreation because apparently Raging Spirits count as constructs, and it buffs those nicely. Running the Forest Warrior provides Onslaught, which is going to allow me to rework my tree a bit at some point… because I no longer need the node that gives my minions Onslaught. I might end up rolling a cluster jewel and switching over to that, because there is an entire upper branch of my tree layout that is progressively becoming less optimal.
Speaking of less than optimal, I did zero planning for this build and sort of just winged it as I went. Mostly, I typed “Minion|Life|Block” into the search bar and routed around as many of those nodes as I could make happen easily. At the suggestion of Kodra, I just now pathed down to pick up Divine Shield, and that seems to help out considerably and makes my 2000 energy shield a bit more useful. With the Guardian Turtle, I have around 9000 armor, and around 4500 without it, so I am still going to never run into problems with regenerating my entire energy shield if needed. I realistically probably have more than enough survival… but I have considered doing the terribly dumb thing of going six life masteries for the 10% life boost. I feel like I have plenty of damage for what I want to do with this build. I could stack more minion damage, and probably should… but I am not as motivated by “number goes up” as I am doing dumb things that I find enjoyable.
I have zero doubt that proper minion players will be turning their noses up at what I am doing, and that is okay. I do think at some point, someone terribly more clever than I am… will build around The Broken Elegy and make it really strong. It seems like a crazy item, especially if you could figure out a way to make the minions that it spawns a little more reliable. I believe they are inheriting everything that I am currently doing to buff my Raging Spirits, which should mean they are pretty potent already. I should probably actually drop the whole imbue thing that I am trying and just go with a 21/20 Raging Spirits gem instead. I am not that certain that Imbues have turned out to be as much power as I was hoping they would be. They are also really freaking painful to try and land something useful on, because I am building this graveyard of bricked gems that makes me more than a little sad inside. I know I will be taking a break this week to play the new Last Epoch season, but at some point, once that has run its cours,e I will be returning to grind out more challenges here and having fun doing so.
The post Way Too Many Minions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
