Good Morning Friends. Right now my world is banging… and footsteps… and the occasional saws-all on the roof above me. To keep my calm, I am giving you all a picture of Gracie snoozing on my desk from a few days ago. The cats are unfortunately freaking out, which is not shocking given the amount of noise that is happening that they cannot find. So a few weeks back we had one heck of a windstorm, and a few days after that I found shingles in our yard… which led us to contact a roofer to check for damage. There was some, but more than anything our roof just showed signs of normal wear and tear in the windswept blistering heat of Oklahoma summers. So today we are doing what all homeowners dread… spending a lot of money to get the roof replaced. I’ve taken the day off work because there was no way I could reliably attend conference calls with all of this banging. I also needed to be around in case they needed something… so as a result of both I am getting a bit of a late start.
I am still trucking along in the Crucible season, and am still pretty comfortably melting maps. At this point, I have knocked out 37 of the 115 maps in the process of unlocking my atlas. I’ve now entered the beginning of yellow maps and I seem to still be able to wreck them without much issue. I’ve run a few poorly rolled maps without taking a death, so I am already considering myself in a much better state than I was at this point last league with only 60 chaos spent on gearing. Every single slot could use an upgrade as I am kinda rolling around in what I would consider the bare minimum for everything. I need to pour some more points into Dexterity so I can finish leveling my Fire Trap. I also at some point really need to swap out my Vaal Righteous Fire for a level 21 version of the base skill.
As of last night, I’ve completed the Atlas passives that will fuel Niko missions and be able to Delve as often as possible. I also picked up Shaping the Skies and am now working my way towards Shaping the Seas. I legitimately had no clue how cool these nodes were before now, or I would have made a beeline to them from the start. What I assumed they would do is give me free access to the options on your map device that you already can pay Chaos Orbs to use. What actually happened is I got one called “Monstrous Treasure” where it converted every single pack in my map… to a Strongbox for about 30 or so in total. It took me three trips back to my hideout to ferry all of the loot worth keeping… so many div cards and maps and general currency. It wasn’t really paying out in a ton of chaos or higher, but it was absolutely worth my effort. So I am looking forward to seeing how this feels when I pick up the complimentary node.
I still think Crucible as far as mechanics go is sort of shit. It is very limited in its usefulness and seems to just create dumb items. For example, right now I am using a fairly mediocre Opal Sceptre that I picked up off the ground. The available tree looks a little something like this… and I have bolded the options I took.
Adds 7 to 12 Fire Damage. 10% Chance to Ignite.
25% reduced Attack Speed. Attacks with this Weapon have 30% chance to deal Double Damage.
Minion Instability.
Inflict Lightning Exposure on Hit. 25% chance to be inflicted with Lightning Exposure when you take Lightning Damage from a Hit.
Socketed Gems are Supported by Level 10 Energy Leech.
So this item doesn’t really make a ton of sense for my current build… but in theory, it would be super useful if I end up building a Minion Instability Summon Raging Spirits build for example. I guess I am just thankful that nothing on the tree that I have chosen comes with a negative effect. For example, if that first node would have been the 25% reduced Attack Speed… that would have been pretty awful for a lot of builds. I think a lot of the complaints from the players have been when the node they cannot “unchoose” effectively makes it so they can no longer use the item. In theory, if you get to the forge map you can scour nodes but that is a lot of fiddling to fix what is effectively a broken item, especially if your item is say… an appropriately colored six-link bow worth a few divines.
It seems like I even had a better night than I thought I did. Granted this is nowhere near what I would consider a wild profit but between the Delve that I did yesterday and maps… without really selling anything on trade I managed to pick up 21 Chaos Orbs. I also picked up quite a few bindings and chromatics but wound up blowing through my jeweler’s orbs making bad decisions. The biggest benefit of last night though is I managed to find enough quality items to finish getting my armor slots to 20% so that was a not-insignificant bump in armor. My hope is eventually to get enough catalysts from Metamorph to put some stats on jewelry. Granted that nothing I am doing is anywhere near the rocket start that most YouTubers and Streamers have, but it feels pretty dang successful far as I am concerned.
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Good Morning Friends! On Friday evening Season 28 of Diablo 3 started, and I returned to my regular rhythm with my good friend Ace in attempting to complete it. We decided to come back to Diablo in part because this is probably the last great hurrah for the game before the launch of Diablo 4, and the title goes even further into “maintenance mode”. Speaking of maintenance… I had a bit of a rough start. I logged in early Friday morning and was encountering all sorts of issues where my stash tabs were not loading immediately and when they did load it looked like a 90s-era GeoCities site loading one icon at a time. This stabilized but when it came to the actual seasonal launch, I started encountering a problem where I would hard lock every 30 mins or so and then have to hard kill the application to get out of it and back into the game… occasionally having to go so far as to go into task manager and kill battle.net entirely.
I am not sure what caused this or honestly what solved it. I tried to do a client repair but it did not seem to be doing much of anything. Instead what I ended up doing is exiting Battle.net entirely, moving my D3 install, and then going through the process of reinstalling the game while pointing at the new directory. From there I attempted a client repair again, and this time around it took about 10 minutes to complete making me think that maybe it was actually doing something that time. When I got into the game I noticed that for some reason it was set to 32-bit mode instead of 64-bit mode. I swapped that and from that point forward the game has been extremely smooth and I’ve yet to crash out to the desktop again. I am not sure exactly which of the things I did actually solved the problem, or even what the problem was exactly… but for now I am going to stop asking questions.
When I want an easy mode season, I always lean heavily on the Demon Hunter. This time around the Gears of Dreadlands set was on Haedrigs Gift, which meant that I completed most of the early seasonal accomplishments on that set. It is perfectly cromulent and is technically supposed to be the best set currently for progression. I’m not exactly the biggest fan of it because it feels a bit piddly given that you have to keep weaving in normal attacks or you just stop functioning entirely. Weaving normal attacks is always a good idea mind you, but if you get to a point where you can’t easily the wheels sort of fall off.
I used my farming ability however to piece together the Unhallowed set and swap over to Multishot. While my brain had gotten used to the spin to win strafing GoD build, I am slowly getting adjusted once again to the more familiar Demon Hunter gameplay. For the longest time I was waiting for a Yangs to drop and then… waiting for a second Dawn. Once I got both I swapped over and can immediately more comfortably farm T16. Saturday night after recording the podcast several of us knocked out two conquests in rapid order, so I should be able to complete the third one without much issue when I finish leveling 3 gems to 65.
That puts me in a very familiar spot when it comes to finishing up the season. I’ve not touched a set dungeon at all because I hate them. Right now I plan on doing the Marauder set because if I remember correctly it is a pretty easy one. I’ve almost completed building out Marauder and am only missing a few pieces. I have everything that I need ready for the Augment minus one of the red gems, and then it is simply a case of extracting a bunch of cube powers and pushing the gems to 70. I feel like some of the pressure has lessened because I could slack off entirely and then finish up all of this stuff in the final weekend if that ended up happening.
This season’s gimmick is the Altar of Rites, which ends up driving a lot of your farming and grinding. Essentially you sacrifice items to the Altar to get permanent buffs. For example, now my pet can salvage whites, blues, and yellows in addition to picking up gold. The problem with this however is that it cannot keep up with the process and seems to miss a ton of gold and a ton of materials. Another buff is that it makes it so all gear has no level requirement… but what it actually does in practice is set everything to level 1. However Companions don’t seem to be able to take advantage of this, so it means while leveling you cannot tell if your companions can or cannot equip something. The Altar is cool, but also seemingly introduced a bunch of jank into the game that they seemingly were not quite prepared for.
What I was not really prepared for… is how much more I seem to enjoy Path of Exile as compared to Diablo III. I just don’t feel nearly as engaged this season in Diablo, and it is almost as though the gameplay loop is nowhere near as rich as I remember it being. I had fun running amok with Ace, and I had missed that sort of experience, but for whatever reason, the gearing process in D3 has felt way more hollow this season than it has in previous ones. I could micromanage getting exactly the right stats, but it doesn’t feel as repeatably enjoyable as roaming around in Delve, Heist, or doing Maps in Path of Exile.
I am really hoping that when the Last Epoch Multiplayer launches, it can be that happy medium between the more casual grouping play of Diablo III, and the more rich systems of Path of Exile. I also hope to get into testing for Diablo IV so I can try that out and see how it feels. Basically, I am not sure if I was just in the wrong frame of mind for this season of Diablo III, but something feels missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it. I am going to wrap things up, but I think I would rather be playing Guild Wars 2 when I am not actively playing with friends.
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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.
One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.
I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.
I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.
What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.
All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.
With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.
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Good Morning Friends! Prepare for yet another post of me doing some stupid nonsense in Path of Exile. I figure at this point all that is left reading these daily posts are the truly diehard folks, and the actual Path of Exile enjoyers… or I guess those who potentially hate read these? I am an “MTX Enjoyer” and I find that looking cool in a game helps my enjoyment greatly. In this league, one of the supporter packs went all in on the fire theme, and since I was playing Righteous Fire on Juggernaut it seemed like something I definitely needed in my life. What was truly fortuitous was this season when you pick up Kirac’s Vault pass you end up with a bunch of random loot boxes. One of these produced the weird cosmic flaming wolf pet that you see beside me called that apparently came from the Twilight Mystery Box. The cosmic aspect is even more perfect given that I tend to run the celestial MTX for my Righteous Fire aura.
I get that all of this is a colossal waste of money, but they end up making me happy and have no real in-game benefits. There are two things that I really spend money on in games are the first are things that add quality of life benefits, like the various stash tabs in Path of Exile, or the endless crafting storage in Elder Scrolls Online. The second is cool outfits, and I am more than happy to spend some real-world monies to look cool. It isn’t even that I care about the “flexing” aspect of wearing something, because it gives me zero real-world cred to have swiped a credit card. It just makes me happy to have a character that I think looks slick. Transmogrification/Wardrobe systems are among the most important parts of an MMORPG and if you are designing a new one… please put in a system that allows for nigh-endless customization. Do not be FFXIV and artificially limit the number of items you can keep, and instead be like the various systems that give you credit when you pick up an item for its appearance. I wish Path of Exile did this, because there are actually a lot of cool items that drop in the game already.
Last night was a night for exploring Delve, looking for bosses, and listening to Skin Game by Jim Butcher. I’m now somewhere around chapter 30 in the novel and managed to spend my 55k Sulfite and find I think four Abyssal and Vaal cities in the process. In all of those nodes, I managed to fight another Vaal boss and another Abyssal Lich. While yesterday was apparently the day of raw Divine Orbs dropping, I did not have anywhere near that level of luck but I did pick up a few rare items that are going to enable some specific brands of nonsense. While delving I also sold a few high ticket items or at least high tickets for me in the 100s of Chaos range. Thankfully people seem to be pretty good-natured about waiting for you to finish whatever you are doing in order to make the sale. Generally speaking, if I am in the middle of something… the price point of the item that someone wants determines if it is worth my time to respond. If I am just starting a heist run, and you are pinging me about something in my 1 Chaos tab, then I am probably going to ignore it unless you ask nicely. I had someone who specifically needed an amulet and they were fine with waiting for me to finish the activity I was on.
Last night I got the rare piece of the Ultimatum Aspect to drop in delve. Essentially this is a way to access a league mechanic that I did not even know existed. Apparently back in April of 2021 during the 3.14 Ultimatum League, there was a build-your-own-boss-fight encounter called the Tower of Ordeals, that dropped a number of interesting Vaal items. A little-known feature of 3.19 Lake of Kalandra was apparently adding these back into the game through 4 items that drop in different modes of gameplay.
If combined in your inventory in a specific pattern, as shown above, they combine to create a custom map that grants access to the Trialmaster from Ultimatum with a number of random affixes determining what sorts of things happen during the fight. For example, Choking Miasma is a cloud that deals Chaos Damage Over Time, and it means in order to do the fight I am probably going to want to spec my Pantheon into Arakaali which gives me extra resistance to that. For now, I am close to dinging another level on the Juggernaut and as such, I am going to file this away until I am in that post-ding “safe period” to try dumb things.
Another cool thing that happened last night is that I got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop while doing delve. Sadly I have no screenshot of when it dropped because I was in the middle of a darkness-filled abyssal city and hurriedly shoveling loot into my inventory as the darkness timer ticked down. It was very shiny and rainbow-colored on the loot filter, so it will likely be extremely hard to miss. They seem to be going for around 2 Divine Orbs for one of these keys, if not considerably lower than that. There is someone who priced one at 20 Chaos but I think they are just trolling. I figured it was worth 2 Divines or the loss of that in order to have the experience of opening one. When placed in the map device it teleports you to a map featuring a loot box that can be opened once. Inside it is an item dictated by the players who purchased the extremely expensive Voidborn Supporter Pack for around $500.
Purchasing the pack allows players access to a hidden interface on the Grinding Gear Games website allowing them to choose any unique in the game, assign a foil color, and then write a message to players when they open the item. For example, I pulled Ngamahu’s Flame in the Verdant Foil color scheme, and when I opened the item this line of text scrolled across my chat box.
A weapon from olden times, when Cyclone moved in straight lines. Two birds in one with links undone. This axe may finally shine.
I’ve never used this weapon but I am extremely happy that I managed to pull an item with a “real” message. There are apparently a number of items thrown into the mix as clear trolls like “this could have been a headhunter” on one of the other heavy belts. I have to admit this almost makes me want to create a build around this weapon since for some sort of flame-based juggernaut melee build, it seems like it could be rather good. I guess there is a Fire Cyclone Chieftan build that currently exists that utilizes this weapon or at least it did as of 3.19. If I got another key to drop though, I would probably just sell it. I’ve had the experience and it was good enough for me.
I think I have decided that I am going to stop engaging with the Sanctum league mechanic. I do not enjoy it, and while I can often get pretty far with my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… I just sort of hate the way the mechanic works. Sure you can save an entire floor’s worth of progress while doing other things… but there just never seems to be a time when I actually want to sit down and engage with it. I like playing tanky characters and have no interest in dodging all of the mechanics, and as such I will never really grok the way this game mode wants to work. As much effort as GGG has devoted to it, I fully expect this to land in standard and be something that we are dealing with going forward. My hope is that they modify it so that it works well for other styles of play because right now if you are going to engage with it, you really want something that can clear entire screens at a time. My hope is you can eventually collect an entire run and then interact with Divinia in your hideout to embark upon the Sanctum experience.
I think a better version of this would be to merge the Lake of Kalandra mechanic with Sanctum and take away the whole resolve mechanic. Have it so that each map you run builds the layout of rooms in your sanctum, and then once you have finished laying out a floor you save it as a map and run that. I really enjoyed the tile placing mechanic of the Lake, and were it not for ArchNemesis that would have been an extremely fun mechanic. Sanctum only works for people who are not building tanks that benefit from things hitting them. For example on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, a large part of my defensive layer is from building six endurance stacks by getting hit. I just think between Sanctum and Lake there is one really great game mode that could be cobbled together. For the time being, however, I am mostly going to bail from engaging with the current league mechanic because there are so many older mechanics that I would rather spend my time doing.
I think more than anything, that the key to really enjoying Path of Exile long-term is deciding that it is okay that there are parts of the game you will never engage with. Each league mechanic is almost a game in itself, and I am more than happy picking and choosing the ones that I want to play. I don’t force myself into open-world PVP experiences, because I have learned that I don’t enjoy them. Similarly, I should be perfectly fine knowing that I don’t like Tower Defense games and as such, I should probably block Blight from my Atlas tree. Occasionally there is a game mode like Incursion that I did not like at first but have come to enjoy, and that is awesome as well. However, for me… this is the league of Heist and Delve and I am okay with that.
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