Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.
I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.
I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.
This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.
The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.
Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.
Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.
Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.
The post Birbsieged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Friday was the launch of the 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas/Mercenaries of Trarthus League in Path of Exile… and it was a bit rough. There was a pretty critical issue that seemed to plague folks randomly involving logging into any characters in the league. It was roughly an hour and a half before this got fixed, and it bit enough streamers that GGG essentially decided that they would be having a second league start race for anyone bit by the issue. I was impacted and essentially any time I waded through the queue I would bounce back to the login screen with the above “An unexpected disconnection occurred”. There were all manner of superstitions that sprung up about it being specific to individual regional servers, or requiring you to change your video drivers… but ultimately it was just something on the GGG side and they patched it allowing everyone to log in. There were still some pretty persistent issues on the European servers however, and Zizaran for example said that he lost 16 maps from getting disconnected in the middle and coming back in with no portals up.
The thing that likely slowed me down the most however was wanting to play with the league mechanic, and purposefully seeking Mercenaries out in every zone that I entered. I struggled with my very first merc, but once I got my hands on one of the bow mercs… they largely carried me through large chunks of content. The wiki is not terribly updated yet with mercenary types but they have quite a few of the strength based ones up now, so I can only assume they are working through the deluge of new data. I really feel like Mercenaries are a game changer for a bunch of reasons… but mostly because unlike other games with companions there is a heck of a lot of gameplay decisions involved. In Diablo III for example you just throw on specific items and they grant you permanent buffs for having one out. In this game there is an opportunity cost to hiring them, because you can’t then steal gear from them.
Most of the gear that I am wearing currently, I stole from Mercenaries. They seem to be mostly using gear with the well rolled gear tree, similar to how shipments did in Kingsmarch. This means that they are equipped with gear that makes sense for the specific type of Mercenary class that they are. A bow Mercenary for example… will probably have a pretty decent bow equipped or a Wand Mercenary a pair of well rolled wands that make sense for their elemental archetype. This also means though that as the player… we can snag pretty juicy items from the Mercenaries that we encounter in maps. Sure the big win items tend to be uniques and large stacks of currency… but I personally used them as a want to keep finding upgrades, and at this point I have not really needed to buy or craft much of anything. I am sure as I keep improving my build I will want to min-max items but for now… They have provided a really good source of gearing with everything in the above image being pulled from Mercs, including a 5-Link chest.
Right now the most impactful Mercs for me personally, seem to be the bow based ones that help with general clear speed. Right now I am running a Toxicologist which is kitted out to deal chaos damage with toxic rain and chaotic burst/shot and provides me the Malevolence aura which I do not need to run, and can focus on things that make me more tanky instead. As I keep moving up in level I will keep trying to find new copies of this same archetype which should be kitted out with pretty similar items. The Manyshots archetype is also pretty great because it is all centered around Ice damage which chills, slows, and freezes incoming packs of mobs. Thunderquiver is another pretty great Mercenary type because they are essentially the Lighting Arrow Deadeye that was so popular from a few leagues ago. Unfortunately the burning arrow Merc does not really seem to do that much damage, so while the alignment of fire damage would work since I am debuffing targets resistance due to my ascendancy… it never seem to do much and they were not providing any complimentary buffs to me.
At this point I have unlocked my fourth ascendancy because I got a goddess token down in Delve. I am slowly starting to break the mines but it is slow going. I am only about 10 maps into my Atlas because I did not actually make it to maps until yesterday evening. Between the rough start Friday, Father’s Day travel yesterday, and me just generally piddling around with the Mercenary mechanic I have been moving exceptionally slow. My hope is that tonight I will be able to make some real progress, but the changes to how Kirac missions work will probably slow that down a bit. You cannot unlock maps by running Kirac missions at lower tiers than the maps normally appear. This is going to greatly devalue putting points into Kirac on the atlas in order to speed through the 115 map unlocks.
As far as uniques go, I’ve pulled a couple of Immortal Flesh off Mercenaries, including the one that I show above. I have a Cloak of Flame that I am trying to five link, and after wasting so many fusings on it… I have a feeling I am just going to be better off waiting until I have the recipe to do it. I also picked up a Rise of the Phoenix which should be a good item until I make the switch over to a Shaper shield, and drop purity of elements. We are dealing with an inflation league so fair warning, because normally I can pick up all of these items for a few chaos… and I had to give 50c for both the Shield and the Chestpiece. Everything seems to be more expensive, because Mercenaries are a fairly reliably source of Chaos. More than that however I seem to be getting more currency drops than I would normally during a league. This could be just a side effect of the loot bonus of running with a Mercenary, or there could have been some fundamental changes in the way drops occur that were not well documented.
I’ve also unlocked Kingsmarch, but since you have to have 50,000 value to send a shipment… that means I am going to be sending WAY fewer shipments and not needing to micromanage it quite as much. The fully built out town is much nicer, and all of the hired hands seem to cap out at tier 5. So in theory it should be easier to fully kit out your town and get it up and running. I did notice that they seemed to have improved the gold drops down in Delve significantly so I am hoping that I will not be quite as starved for gold in this league. Mostly I am in that awkward phase where I just need a lot more time to progress my way through both Delve and Atlas and keep improving my character. Once I can equip the Cloak of Flames without giving up anything… it should wildly improve my survival. There are a few items that I am looking out for that would benefit equipping on the merc, but I am in no real rush.
How was your league start? Were you bit by the disconnection bug? How are you liking the Mercenaries so far? Drop me a line below and let me know.
The post A Rough Start appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have the full crew this week, and Kodra and Thalen have made their way into Dune Awakening, so we talk a bit more about that game. Bel asks what the dumbest thing we have done in a video game to make currency. Ash is back in Guild Wars 2 and attempting to catch up on the story. Kodra and Tam share their thoughts about the Microsoft PuzzleHunt event and contrast it with the MIT Mystery Hunt. Bel shares his early experiences with the Mercenaries of Trarthus as the Secrets of the Atlas expansion kicks off in Path of Exile. Grace talks a bit about Be My Horde as it lets you play a Necromancer, raising an army in a Vampire-Survivors-like game. Finally, we talk a bit about Deltarune actually getting a proper release and Toby Fox accepting money for the game.
Good Morning Folks. Early yesterday evening, we had a 15 minute downtime for Path of Exile II which deployed patch 0.2.0e. The patch included a lot of pretty solid changes from shrinking some of the larger zones by cutting out dead ends, to slowing down specific mob types so that they could not just bum-rush you forever. There are still issues with the game, but most of those are design decisions not necessarily things that feel like they are bugs. I still feel like I am maybe not the intended target audience for this game, but given enough patches like that… it might actually get closer to that. I still feel like crafting is entirely missing from the experience and what we have instead is just praying for the RNG gods to smile upon you with a fortuitous drop. Generally speaking I can get pretty far into maps in Path of Exile 1 before I need to resort to trade… but I did not even make it through the campaign without buying a few items here.
Because of how miserable the campaign felt, I spent most of last night approaching it with fresh eyes to see how the recent round of changes impacted the experience of starting fresh. The only twink item that I threw on my character was Enfolding Dawn, which honestly causes more problems than it solves by taking away your mana gain from Intelligence for the benefit of having 100 Spirit. I mostly ended up yoloing my way through a build without following any guide, and essentially followed in the footsteps of my character from last league. All in all it was a MUCH better experience than when I had rolled this character last week and made it through the first zone. I was not necessarily exploding the entire world, but I managed to work my way through the entire first act without taking any deaths. Sure I had to dodge quite a few effects and work around when my minions died on me… but it was reasonable and I mostly found myself leaning on the combo of Raging Spirits and Arsonists like I did last time.
Mapping is also so much better now that Rares are highlighted on your map immediately. This gives you a clear direction that you should head up entering the map, and gives the entire experience a bit more purpose. The drops are still a bit on the low side, but I do have to say that their waystone changes are perfect. I’m never running into any issues where I am not getting waystone drops enough to sustain my mapping. In fact I am massively over-sustaining which is pretty nice. You get tier upgrades often enough that if you can JUST get through one map in the new tier… that you are probably going to have a bunch of waystones to run to keep progressing through that tier. I’ve yet to be in a position where I need to drop down a tier because I ran out of waystones to run.
Having fewer towers in the endgame mapping is a huge positive. I still do not love running these maps, and as such having to do fewer of them is a good thing. I feel like that does not necessarily make towers actually good though, because I don’t want to do them. I am also not super hyped on the progression system. Path of Exile 1 has this whole grid of maps where you mark them off one by one, which feels good with each new map giving you Atlas Passive points. Instead of running 10 Tier 1 maps, you now have to seek out a Nexus of Corruption and clear that… which in truth often means you are needing to run MORE than 10 maps to find the next one. I get what they are going for here… but it does not feel amazing. It still feels like I am running more maps and getting less benefit from them… which is especially bad when each individual map feels largely unrewarding.
There are however some payoff moments in the maps, and when you find one it feels good. I’ve you’ve been around the community at all you have probably seen screenshots of Ventor’s Contraption, which is a unique lockbox that takes gold to open. Each time you open it, the amount of gold goes up significantly. I only had enough on me to do three spins of the gacha box, and I feel like I got fairly decent outcomes. I know there are folks who have gotten 10 stacks of Divine Orbs from these things, or perfect jewelers orbs… so I did not get that lucky. The only problem is… not every map has anything even vaguely as exciting as the gacha box. A lot of maps are pretty boring still, and lack the chance of decent drops… so it kind of feels like you are just slogging through the objectives hoping it will improve at higher tiers.
After a major patch though, things are in a better state overall. Next week on this blog is likely going to be focused on talking about the Last Epoch Season 2 launch and trying to sell you on why you should be playing it. If anything dramatic happens in Path of Exile II however I will probably at least talk about some of that as well. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get the loot drops you have been hoping for.
The post It’s Getting Better appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
