Good Morning Friends! I am going to apologize ahead of time, but you are going to get another post completely full of Path of Exile nonsense. We are continuing my descent into madness… literally as I keep going deeper into Delve game mode systems. Last night I discovered Abyssal Cities and I am now on the lookout for as many of these as I can find. Since I missed the launch of the Delve league some four years ago, it floors me just how complete this game mode really is. While you do have to keep running maps periodically to build up a stockpile of Voltaxic Suphite to power your crawler friend and light the way, other than that you can pretty much get anything you could in almost any other game mode down in the darkness. I’ve gotten roughly a dozen Divine Vessels and a couple of dozen Offering to the Goddess that just drop randomly from stuff down in the depths rather than having to hope and pray you to see any of them above ground.
From what I understand there are three kinds of cities that can be found underground. The first is the Vaal ruins that I had been exploring previously and these supposedly start showing up somewhere around a depth of 30. I found my first Vaal city in the 70s, so your mileage may vary of course. Abyssal cities that I found last night and that are highlighted on my Subterranean Chart above in a yellowish outline start showing up in the low 100s. Primeval Ruins are the third kind that I have not seen yet, and those appear around 170 depth. Each City type can have a boss node, and I’ve yet to encounter any of those… and ultimately that is really what I have been searching for. I have a tunnel system around 70-80 depth that has produced five or six Vaal Cities, and last night I opted to dive down deeper and start expanding out around 100ish and almost immediately stumbled onto this first Abyssal City.
Because I got distracted by doing other things… I did not get nearly as much time underground. However, in my limited time, I managed to pull out all of those resonators sitting in my bank. Pending those resonators sell at least as quickly as my previous batches and for the same prices that is roughly 110 chaos worth of items that I pulled out, not counting a few nice pieces of gear that I am selling individually. I tend to price my items just high enough that I am not going to get instant sales which would interrupt the flow of my evening. Instead, I expect to throw items up cheaper when I am more in the mood to field trade requests. If someone wants to pay my inflated prices though, I am willing to stop what I am doing… waste a portal, and go make the trade. I will never be an auction house oligarch but I am making more than enough currency to keep fielding my nonsense plans.
Speaking of currency, I saw my first raw divine orb drop in the depths. This is only the second Divine Orb that I have seen in this league. I’ve seen an Exalted Orb or two in the dark below which keeps building onto my theory that almost anything can drop off node encounters. So far I’ve yet to see anything that is influenced by Elder, Eater, or Exarch so I am guessing that those items are probably limited to bossing or bossing adjacent activities. I have however seen a number of Synthesized and Fractured items below as well as more than a fair number of delve-specific explicit modifiers on items. I only know this because I continue to keep using Awakened POE Trade to price-check anything that looks like it might hold value, which tells me how good the rolls are on a given item and will call out league-specific mechanics.
I am absolutely certain that from this point forward… I want to go into Delve earlier than I did in this league. I am having a freaking ball with my time down there and getting enough currency to be able to fund upgrades to my builds. This is far from a high-yield currency strategy, but it seems reliable and also something that I already enjoy doing. The wide variety of items that I can see is honestly what keeps pushing me forward. I love seeing things that I have yet to see drop, and that happens way more often in Path of Exile than it does in a game like Diablo III. By midseason in D3 I have seen literally everything but Primal Ancient versions of things, and it all sort of blurs into this giant haze of orange text. Sure most of everything that drops is ignorable, but in every round, there is at least one thing that is worth hovering over to check the roll.
The last big thing that I did yesterday was spent some time respeccing my Atlas tree. I was already leaning into Delve a bit, but I removed “Wandering Path” and took all of the notable nodes associated with Niko as well. Basically, in Path of Exile the “trees” are comprised of small nodes often referred to as travel nodes, and big nodes which are referred to as “notables”. Wandering Path is a specific strategy for the Atlas tree which the effectiveness of all of your small travel nodes, but makes it so you get zero benefits from any of the notable nodes. This is great for when you are finishing your Atlas because every map you run will shower you with new maps to fuel your further exploration. However I am getting more than enough “map sustain” through Delve, and I no longer really need it from mapping as such I opted to focus on Strongboxes, Smuggler’s Caches, Ritual Altars, and Delve. I might whittle further into the atlas tree to try and pick back up Essences but for now, I am happy enough.
So essentially I am maining Righteous Fire and focused with it on progression in Delve. I have no clue what I am doing with Summon Raging Spirits in the least, or what I can really do to that build other than shift it to poison. I just am not sure if I care enough about it to fix the problems I am currently having with it. I am getting that old familiar itch of wanting to start something else to play with. I really want to see what the Seismic Trap life is all about, so I might be going down that path at some point soon. I am still periodically playing “BelginnersLuck” as I attempt to get Hillock to drop a unique and am to the point where if I am fast enough I can kill him before he can do the regeneration phase. I am so completely consumed with Path of Exile and all of its deep systems. I have no clue when I will climb back out of this chasm I have dug for myself, but for the moment I am happy.
The post The Abyss Stares Back appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Brimstone Sands from New World on PC
Good Morning Friends! It has been a while since I have done one of these roundup posts but that is what you are in for this morning. Over in New World, I feel like I am running on fumes a bit. I do this thing where I get an idea in my head and then I obsess about that idea and when it is eventually accomplished… I end up fairly burned out as a result. My new world version of this was the gear farm series, and now that I have largely finished that… I am struggling to find my next goal. With the start of Winter Convergence, I ground up my faction and now in theory need to spend copious hours following the train and grinding tokens to get kitsch. I’ve also started Brimstone Sands for the first time and lord is that an interesting area. I think I need to just focus on questing out there to get my feet back under me and get to a place where I am deeply enjoying the game again.
Tequatl World Boss from Guild Wars 2 on PC
I’ve also been poking my head back into Guild Wars 2 again and while I am mostly rudderless there I am at least trying to get back in the habit of collecting my daily freebies. Occasionally I do so in a timely enough manner to be able to catch the 6 pm CST Tequatl. This is still my favorite event in the game and quite possibly the first thing I ever did that really sold me on the grandeur and possibility that group content can really have. I need to get back enough into the swing of things to start doing the meta for Cantha and get my siege turtle. I have been growing Kelp in my personal instance for a while now and am hoping that I have enough stockpiled to feed my babby turtle when I finally get one. I greatly appreciate the drop in/drop out nature of Guild Wars 2 and how I can spend an entire evening following the world boss train if I want to… or just not and that is also okay.
Elsweyr in The Elder Scrolls Online
I’ve been visiting The Elder Scrolls Online again and as much as I really want to get back into some questing there because I love the story… I am struggling with it a bit. Mentally I keep comparing the combat in ESO to that of New World and ESO keeps coming up on the losing end of that association. To be completely frank… combat in ESO feels sorta boring. It is a lot of light attacks and heavy attacks with a lowered emphasis on hitting abilities. The time to kill seems way too high for me to enjoyably rip through encounters. Granted I have always played a tank and maybe I should focus more on one of my other characters. That said I am not really sure that anything is going to feel great now that I have seen what a more action-oriented MMO can feel like. Like I am certain that the New World style of combat is not everyone’s jam, but the interplay between weapon abilities feels far better than what ESO is providing currently.
Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build for Path of Exile
I think I have landed on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the Path of Exile league starts tomorrow. I contemplated a lot of things including a more spin-to-win style build of the cyclone that a friend shared with me. Righteous Fire is something I tried a few leagues back but never really converted from the leveling skill over to RF… which I think was a massive mistake on my part. I went off in my own direction because I happened to be enjoying the Wintertide Brand play style and should have actually tried the proper RF build instead. This time with a new take in the form of the Marauder version, I am going to give it my all and make sure I actually follow the guide completely. I might try Cyclone later in the league if I find myself wanting to do something else. Essentially Righteous Fire gameplay reminds me of another one of my favorite classes which is the Thorns Crusader.
User Interface overloaded with Spell Gems in Path of Exile on PC
There has been discussion about setting goals for a new Path of Exile league and I think my goal will be to stop picking up every spell gem I happen to see in my journies. I spent a while yesterday trying to organize my inventory and collapse some of my remove-only tabs into something that makes sense. Granted I will probably never actually play standard, but I hated leaving it in a total mess. For those unfamiliar when you end a league in PoE it gives you a copy of every tab from that season with the suffix (Remove Only). Basically, you can leave it alone indefinitely and to the best of my knowledge, GGG has never deleted these tabs. One of the suggestions I saw for dealing with them was to create a folder named after the league that just ended, and shovel all of the new remove-only tabs into it. I’ve more or less followed this idea with Maps being held out only because I want to convert them and store them when the new league begins. Others like Spell Gems I opted to dump into my inventory and then migrate over to the proper working tab.
I think I am as ready as I am ever going to be for Forbidden Sanctum. If you are planning on doing the league start either tomorrow or in the coming days, shoot me a note. I will be updating my where to find me page once I have my new set of characters.
The post Righteous Fire Juggernaut appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Â Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
This week we decided to bypass a traditional show and do a full spoiler episode for Star Wars the Last Jedi.  We talk about the latest Star Wars movie and our thoughts given that they are super fresh in our minds at the moment.  This is a very different sort of Star Wars movie and we have a wide variety of opinions on various aspects of the film.  Once again this is a full spoiler show so I highly suggest not listening until you have seen the film…  or in a few of our cases seen it several times.
Firstly let me lead off this post with a quick note… Â I screwed up. Â We had a discussion last week about potentially switching to the Season/Episode format for our show numbers. Â After the discussion we decided to go with continuing the bigger numbers is better format. Â Before the show I go out and double check to make sure what episode we are on… and apparently I look at the wrong episode. Â As a result I absolutely announced this week as 89 when it should have been 90. Â I feel strange about edits… largely because the format of our show is intended to be like listening in on an existing conversation. Â So for the time being I’ve decided to let my screw up stand… Â feel free to mock me.
On the week of Star Wars the Force Awakens release we actually had planned on recording a show on our feelings about the movie. Â The thing is… that we all for the most part loved the movie so much that we did not want to add to the spoilers on the internet. Â As a result we put off the show until a point where we felt it was “fair game”. Â Upon coming back to work after New Years it seems like the internet has declared Star Wars spoilers open season, so as a result we decided to go ahead and record the show. Â What ended up happening is a show really unlike what I expected. Â It was far more critical than the hour and a half gush fest that I expected… Â but still from the point of fans talking about fandom.
Tonight we also welcome back Dallian and Neph for yet another “big show” which are starting to seem far more common this year.
