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.
The post More Angry Fireballs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
The post Old Men Warring appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… I’ve been struggling with something for the last couple of weeks. For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided last minute to make a shift in my normal routine and start the league as a Lightning Arrow Raider. I spent time right before the league launch leveling one as a test, and then ultimately decided I could live with the consequences of playing a much faster… but much squishier build. The truth is… I could not. I almost immediately missed being able to spend my time farming my favorite league mechanic… delve. Before the end of that first week of the new league, I had already started leveling another Righteous Fire Juggernaut and was happy as a clam farming delve. For the most part… I had considered the Lightning Arrow Raider a bit of a failure and that I should have stuck with the tried and true Juggernaut.
On some level, this made a lot of sense. I love the Righteous Fire Juggernaut so much that I have now played it for three leagues, and even went so far as to get my friend Ammo to draw my particular chosen appearance for the blog banner. What makes this even more complicated is how intrinsically attached this character is to my favorite game mode… because I love spending my time bopping from node to node down in Delve. It is super hard for any other build to compete with this… pending it is not also a super tanky build that can survive down there. The thing is… I knew going into the Lightning Arrow Raider that it was going to be a deeply mapping-focused build and as a result, I knew that it would have limitations. While I considered it a failure… it did manage to gather up enough currency to be able to outfit itself in gear, and fund all of the starter gear I needed for the Juggernaut and then still some to spare… as well as unlocking over half of the Atlas of Worlds. That really does not sound like a failed state to me if I view it through a bit more neutral lens.
To some extent… it also isn’t really the problem of the build because I knew there were some glaring holes in my itemization and I was not really willing to invest the time, effort, and more importantly currency to fix them. I can deal without Chaos Damage being capped given that I am mostly zooming around maps. What I could deal with significantly less so… is the fact that I was doing nothing to fix my ailment problems and at the same time invested NONE of my Divine Vessels into actually unlocking a proper pantheon. I treated the character like it was disposable… which as a result produced a feeling that I was playing something impermanent in the way I approached it. For as little effort as I really put forward to fixing its problems, it probably performed even better than it should have.
So last night and this morning I swapped around a bunch of gear, in an effort to try and solve some of those problems. Essentially up til this point, I had been using Wurm’s Molt to solve some of my attribute problems since this build is STARVING for Strength and Intelligence. Essentially most of the gear swaps were an attempt to stop using this damned belt and move over to something more fitting like a well-rolled Prismweave. One of the first steps was a necklace swap because I needed some raw attributes as well as some minus mana cost along with a less-than-ideal anoint that I am using to fix intelligence problems. This led me to look at quivers and I stumbled onto the extremely interesting Shattered Divinity which gives me a pet Harbinger that casts useful buffs on me every 4 seconds. I made the swap from Shadows and Dust which gave me Rampage and Unholy Might over to Tanu Ahi which I had in my vault which gives me Adrenaline and Onslaught.
Lastly, I finally spent a large chunk of currency and picked up Ancestral Vision which makes me officially elemental ailment immune. All of this combined with finally taking the time to get a Cast when Damage Taken/Immortal Call set up in my gloves has led me to a point of dealing noticeably more damage and adding a few more layers of survivability. I am officially off the radar at this point and veering further away from what most of the other Lightning Arrow builds look like, but I am also adapting it to feel more like something I want to play. I have to say all of these changes have breathed new life into the build and made it enjoyable to run around once again. Hopefully, I can stay alive long enough to pour on a few more levels and pick up an additional frenzy charge.
Sometimes a failed build… is really just a build that I gave up on. I think I was simply homesick to be back down in Delve, and cut this off a little too soon. We will see how things go from here because I am just about out of liquid currency and need to spend some more time making it before I dive further into my Storm Brand Inquisitor.
The post Sometimes a Failure Isn’t a Failure appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! As I am sitting here writing it is the dawn of the last day of Blaugust 2023. There was so much content generated, and tomorrow I will likely do a bit of a summary when I talk about the event as a whole. I wanted to start out this morning with a bit of expectation-setting. In an average year, the “tabulation day” as I personally refer to it is a bit of an arduous undertaking. Normally we talk around fifty or so blogs that I have to review and count posts on. This year we have one hundred and three… by far the largest participant pool I’ve ever seen. So please be patient with me as I undertake the task of tabulating everything and calculating the rewards. Tomorrow is the day when I get really grumpy for everyone who has a less standard blog layout without a clear monthly post index. Really it is the more Instagram-like interfaces that fluster me the most with irregular tiling.
I know of at least one blogger who I am going to ask to tabulate their results for me because instead of writing traditional blog posts they created their blog as threads on the Fediverse. It is just too damned hard to track these, and while I want to be super inclusive about this event… we gotta figure out a better way if this is going to be a thing that more people do. I think next year if we have anything even vaguely close to this number of bloggers, I am going to have to write something into the rules for self-submitting your blog post count for the month. I mean the entire event is already largely on the honor system and I am already scared to death that I am going to miss count someone’s posts and dump them into the wrong category. It has happened before. Some blogs are just harder to count than others and when you are doing a ton in a row in as short a time frame as you can… mistakes occasionally get made.
I am still delving around the 150 depth and having a blast doing so. I’ve upgraded my resistance and light radius in order to go much deeper, but for the moment this seems to be my happy place. I am not sure if this league’s RF character is stronger than the last league, but it feels at least as tanky. I know flipping Fire Trap to my chest piece seems to have increased my damage output significantly. I dinged 95 last night and am about a quarter of the way into the next level. I spent my passive tree point last night on some quality of life, and 10% more area of effect for Righteous Fire. I wasn’t entirely certain why, but my radius seemed really small to me… so anything to increase that would be pretty great. I know that I am missing the AOE Gems/Radius bench craft on my Necklace which I have not lucked into unveiling so far this league. I spent a bit of time last night running Jun missions on the Raider in an attempt to get it with no real luck so far.
I spent quite a bit of time on the Storm Brand Templar soon-to-be Inquisitor last night. I am still very much in the “ugly duckling” phase of this build and don’t have much in the way of defensive layers yet. I did pick up a pair of Call of the Brotherhood rings with Lightning to Cold conversion, giving me a grand total of 96% of Lightning Damage converted to cold. I am contemplating trying to work a Heatshiver into the build so that would add some fire damage as well. I still think I want an Inpulsa chest, which is going to be pretty expensive… but thankfully “Delve Provides” to borrow a motto from Jorgen. I already have more than enough currency to pick up whatever I need, but I do like to keep a buffer for more of my bullshit projects. Random comment though… the new Kirac’s Vault outfit is pretty freaking great minus the weird helm. I had this glowing eyes/black hood thing from a random cosmetic box and I think it goes nicely with it… and then matched it with some wings I had from a previous supporter pack and two wand graphics.
Anyways also on the docket this weekend, is Starfield. I preloaded it this morning and play on poking my head in when the early access begins tonight/tomorrow. I am not sure if I will give this a ton of attention, mostly because I am still fairly invested in the Path of Exile league. However, it might surprise me, and grab me in the same way that Skyrim did so many years… when I pretty much disappeared from raiding for a week because I could not stop playing the game. I am hoping for a great experience, but I am also trying to cool my jets when it comes to hype. I know Bethesda games can be a bit buggy, but honestly… I’ve enjoyed all of them. Hell, I even enjoyed Fallout 76 quite a bit at launch and had zero problems with Fallout 4 in spite of so many people lampooning it at the time.
It is weird… I can be super critical of games like Diablo IV, but completely give a pass to other games that people are memeing. I think it mostly depends on how important I consider the genre. For me the ARPG is just such a fundamental part of me as a player, that my disappointment got the best of me with Diablo. However, Bethesda games are just something I play for fun on the side from my more mainline MMO and ARPG games. They are just a fun goof rather than my main course. I think maybe that is also why I didn’t really have any problem with the DC movies that so many people lambasted… because I am just not super invested in them. Investment breeds contempt.
Now time for my second “Anyways” of the post. I hope you all have a great day and a happy last day of Blaugust. Remember… tomorrow will be a stressful day for me. Please give me some space to do the things needed to tabulate the posts.
The post Last Day of Blaugust 2023 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
