Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.
I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.
In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.
Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.
I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.
I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.
Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! I had to take the obligatory screenshot of my sad little totem as it has become a little less sad and a little less little. I am currently at 33 of 40 challenges completed for the Necropolis League in Path of Exile and without a doubt I will be hitting 34 before I am said and done. In past leagues, I have been happy enough with getting 19 challenges completed in order to get the most basic form of the totem pole hideout decoration. As such I have totems for Sanctum, Crucible, Ancestor, Affliction, and now Necropolis. During the Affliction League, I was playing a particularly strong bosser character and managed to get a few more challenges completed than I normally would have during a league. This time around however I seem to have gone all in on a number of these and ground out things that I never thought I would accomplish.
The biggest event of the weekend was that I managed to take down “The Feared” which is a special Maven invitation where you fight a number of pinnacle bosses at the same time. Essentially you fight them two at a time and get a random order of Cortex, Chayula, Uber Atziri, The Shaper, and The Elder. It took me two attempts to complete this but I managed to take it down as a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I could have probably had an easier time were I to build a dedicated bossing character, but it feels more “legitimate” after having accomplished this on my own in my preferred method of play. Atziri really was the only challenge because her explosions just take up most of the room leaving you very little place to stand. What makes it even more wild is that I managed to do this… without having a healing potion equipped.
The reason why I did not have a health potion equipped is that I recently purchased a Mageblood. I realize this is the second mageblood I have owned, but it feels a bit more legitimate as I did not borrow anything from the guild bank to purchase this one. Last League Kodra managed to find a Mirror and as a result it felt a bit Oprah-esc as we all got to buy items of our wildest dreams. This time around I actually had a reason for purchasing it. Basically, I wanted to swap some of my gear and points around so that I could maintain 90% all elemental resistance from equipping a Ruby Flask, and then use flask rolls to make myself immune to shock, bleeding, corrupted blood, and poison. I still stand by my statement that Headhunters are way more interesting than Magebloods, largely because one lets you do something really fun… and the other just patches holes in your build.
Another thing that happened this weekend is that I went really hard on Heist. This is something that I have dabbled with in the past but never really focused on specifically. Essentially I had to knock out a bunch of Heist-specific goals for the Tactful Thievery challenge. This involved running five different blueprints with four wings unlocked… which in turn required me to level all of my rogues so that they had at least one level 5 skill. Basically, I ran a ton of heist on Friday since I took the day off from work, and in doing so I dove seriously into the mechanics of it. I gotta say with the right character, I think I enjoy it every bit as much as I enjoy Delve.
Another big goal that I completed this weekend was Mag Magnifience which is to clear 10,000 Tiers of Maps. What this means is each map that you run counts towards that total and it means that I have run at least 700 maps during this league. That number is probably significantly higher considering I spent several days running maps before I got all four voidstones and upgraded everything to T16. This is more mapping than I’ve ever done in a league before. Normally I spend the vast majority of my time down in the Delve mines, but the availability and variety of scarabs have made running just maps in bulk a ton of fun. Essentially I have been rolling up eight maps at a time and then chain-running them on my Elemental Hit Champion.
The last big challenge that I am working on currently, is Grueling Gauntlet Grinds which is designed as a bit of a capstone activity. This all started when I noticed that I had a bunch of Guardian maps completed, and still had even more sitting in the bank. Collecting corpses in T16 maps is pretty much a “gimme” and I reached level 100 earlier in the league on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. I had a ton of Kirac missions saved up, so I used those and my stockpile of scouting reports to fish for 8 mod maps that I could run easily. That just has left Guardian maps as the remaining task that I need to complete. I have a few more Kirac missions so I will likely fish for maps there and then potentially either buy off the market the remaining maps that I need or chain run T16s until I get some as drops. My goal is to finish this up tonight so that I can move forward into the next Diablo IV season with a clear conscience.
While I feel like I should be wrapping things up… I am still having quite a lot of fun piddling around in this league. I am hoping that D4 Season 4 will be equally fun and distract me for a bit, but in a worse-case scenario I would be more than happy to return to Necropolis League and continue to slowly chip away at these things. I’ve not touched the one related to Atlas Memories and have a bunch of those saved up that I could burn through. The only thing that is a bit disheartening is that I cannot see myself ever finishing the T17 or Uber-Boss-related ones without pouring some time and effort into building a proper bossing character. Bossing is just not really what I want out of a game like this, so it is never really my focus. I am a bit worried that I am setting myself up for the future expectation of getting this far into the challenges every time, since I am on a bit of a roll of getting further in each league lately.
Anyways! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Are you going to be playing some Diablo IV with the launch of Season 4 on Tuesday? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bad weather night so I am running on minimal sleep. However that said I recorded a video of gameplay of my Shield Crush of the Chieftain Juggernaut… which is a mouthful. At this point, I am level 86 and have picked up most of the things I was seeking out, and feel relatively confident that I can make a general pronouncement about the build as a whole. Does it work well enough? Sure. Does it feel amazing? Not really. The problem with Shield Crush in general is that it is largely a stationary ability and in order to crank up its damage, you probably want to be running it with Multistrike. I personally don’t like the way Multistrike feels, so for reference, I am using Melee Splash instead in my gameplay.
I think the ideal playstyle is to gather up a bunch of mobs and then burn it all down at once from a stationary position. This works but also doesn’t necessarily feel amazing for mapping, especially not when you are going to struggle with a lot of tankier mobs. This was admittedly the very first T16 that I had attempted and it went smoothly enough. I never really came close to dying, and a lot of the mobs were taken out pretty easily but each time it stranded a single rare that I needed to chew thing. I am wondering if maybe the play would have been to try and run this build as a Chieftain for Hinekora explosions which would honestly go a very long way towards feeling tasty with clears. However, in that scenario, I would have probably chosen to go with a Cloak of Flames/Damage Conversion setup rather than trying to get as much armor out of my chest as possible.
The problem with armor scaling and damage conversion is that it requires some very specific items… a few of which are a bit “spendy” in a normal league. For example, I was able to pick up this grasping mail with the “Armour is Increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” for around 8 Divines in this league, but I have priced out the same item in other leagues and they were going for around 25 Divines. The cheaper option that gives you the same explicit is Formless Flame which itself can have over 1000 Armor but comes with a -30% Fire Resistance penalty reducing how much scaling you can easily get. Legitimately the more I sit here and think about it, the more I am wondering what converting this over to chieftain would do. If I did so I would end up dropping all of the crit nodes and go for Resolute Technique.
The other piece that artificially inflates the price of this build is my Aul’s Uprising. I picked this up off the ground so it cost me nothing, but these often go for several Divines in a more normal league. In this league, there are only a couple of stacks of chaos orbs. Essentially this is allowing me to not have to deal with trying to anoint charisma to fit in all of my auras as I am running Determination, Grace, and Defiance Banner all to keep bumping up that Armor score to 250k. I do wonder however if this would be better with a Strength stacking setup and running Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler and leaning more into the fire damage. I might Path of Building out some of these divergent paths to see if one of them is clearly better than the others. No one seems to have solved this problem as right now there are only four builds on the ladder that are attempting to use this ability… two of which are using it for Generals Cry.
There is a version in Hardcore however where someone has leaned heavily into the ignite damage and I am curious if maybe that is the correct play. Similar to what I said above they went down the Resolute Technique path of dealing zero crits, and have instead scaled similar to how you would scale Righteous Fire. This biggest change though is that they ended up going with a Dawnbreaker which can get upwards of 2000 Armor on a single item. Then interestingly they used Dyadian Dawn which is largely thought of as the “Explosive Arrow” belt as it was popularized with that build, but makes it so that you deal zero physical damage but your ignites deal damage faster. I think I might go down this rabbit hole a bit further because at the moment I am largely dissatisfied with the current state of my build.
Anyways this is part of the fun of Path of Exile… sometimes you go down a path that is a dead end. Sometimes that path branches a bit but can still maybe end up in an interesting place. I am maybe not giving up on this one yet.
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Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I slept like crap last night so I find myself in a bit of a haze… which messes the foggy mess of nonsense that is going on outside today. I’ve officially entered the “playing with dumbass ideas” phase of the Necropolis league, and as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend leveling another Marauder. At this point, I am hanging out on the Oriath docks and nearing the push to finish the campaign. I think over lunch I might try and do the third Labyrinth and push through to the end so I can begin the “gearing phase”.
During the Ancestor League, I attempted to create a Shield Crush Chieftain. My idea was relatively straightforward… take the class that makes it easy to cap elemental resistances and then make it deal physical damage converted to fire damage. The above video is of some footage of me doing a T14 map and shows the state of that build as I managed to get it. You can check out the POB but essentially I was attempting to use Avatar of Fire to convert all of the damage that I was dealing to Fire Damage. It sort of worked… but mostly was less than exciting. However, with the Affliction League, we got a Transfigured version of Shield Crush that essentially was doing the thing I was trying to do… baked into the gem itself. My guess is that there are a lot of folks looking for build content for this gem, because my first Shield Crush Chieftain video that is titled that… has gotten more traction than it deserves.
However, once that seed was planted into my head… I wanted to give it a shot even if it also turned out to be a failure. I am being exceptionally lazy and running Forbidden Flesh/Flame combo to give myself Tasalio Cleansing Water which makes my overcapped Fire Resistance apply to everything else while running a Juggernaut. Other than that I am mostly stacking armor, life, and regen and a few sources that increase “attack damage” but not specifically “physical damage”. I am not where I am ready to do a proper show and tell of how things are going, and am just about to break out into a cluster setup over the next few levels. We will see how it goes but for right now… it feels pretty freaking good.
I am going down the Armor Stacking path which means I am running an Emperor’s Vigilance and a Replica Dreamfeather both of which are extremely cheap right now. I leveled using Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler but it started to fall off significantly the higher in level I got… since I am not explicitly stacking strength. I’ve picked up a Grasping Mail with the “armor increased by over-capped fire-resistance” explicit which is why I decided to do the forbidden flesh/flame combo. I think I paid 8 Divines for the one that I got which has over 1000 armor on it and a decent amount of evasion as well. I am also converting all of my Evasion to Armor through the Iron Reflexes keystone. I will likely take advantage of this when I pick up boots and gloves going for as high of both armor and evasion as I can find with chaos resistance and fire resistance.
At the moment I am running around in a Brass Dome, but only because I pulled one from the Forgotten Sage and figured I might as well use it. Also hilarious… you can equip a Headhunter at level 40 so I ran around with one of those for a while but I have no clue what my final belt is going to look like. Maybe a well-rolled Immortal Flesh since I seem to care about Regeneration. Last time around I went with Arn’s Anguish but I am not sure if I am going to be using anything that generates endurance charges. Regardless the build feels good right now and looks really cool because Shield Crush of the Chieftain has a much wider range than normal Shield Crush does… and once I get Fan the Flames up and running my ignites will start spreading. The biggest challenge is going to be getting enough stats on the few non-unique slots that I have.
By tomorrow I should have a good idea of how well this build actually works so I might do one of my videos showing it off. For the moment I am using a Flammability on Hit ring for my curse which seems to work pretty well, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have any chaos resistance on it. It was something that I picked up off the ground down in Delve and held onto.
The post Crushing Some Fiery Shields appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
