Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have the entire crew this week. We start off the show with Bel explaining to Kodra the weird faction war currently happening in the Path of Exile Reddit. Bel also talks about his experiences so far with the Legacy of Phrecia event. From there we talk a bit more about Avowed now that Tam has had a chance to play it. Kodra shares his experiences with Civilization VII talking about how wildly different of a Civ game it is. From there he also talks a bit about Pigment and his ambitions to speedrun it. Ash shares his thoughts about Dynasty Warriors Origins and Tam discusses a Steam recommendation find, Deliver At All Costs.
Good Morning Folks. Sometimes I sit down before you to talk about what nonsense I have been up to lately. Other times I act as an internet anthropologist and document weird things that I am seeing happening in games and their communities. This morning we are going to be wearing that second hat as I talk about something that is currently going on with the Path of Exile Reddit. While Grinding Gear Games hosts a proper forum, I would say that the beating heart of the community is likely the Reddit, and recently there was a thread hatching a plan to buy up all of the Sanctum Tomes available at the launch of Legacy of Phrecia and deleting them… thus spawning the Anti-Sanctum Alliance. Shortly thereafter Captain Lance spawned the concept of the Sanctum Rushers United later turned into Sanctum Runners Union to attempt to counter this plan.
The battle lines were drawn and folks started chipping their hat in with either side. For example Neversink indicated that he would be hiding tomes from everyone’s filters and throwing support to the ASA. This was hopefully a joke, but it was taken seriously enough that folks started posting the code to highlight tomes so that people could restore it to their filters. Then came the propaganda from the SRU both on the Reddit and in the form of YouTube videos. Various streamers in the community started throwing their hats into either camp for example Zizaran is a known Sanctum enjoyer. I personally hate Sanctum and would happy throw my hat into the ring with the ASA, but in truth I will probably just hoard the tomes until Kodra wants to run them… since he is a friend and also a Sanctum enjoyer.
If you have ever questioned if the devs at Grinding Gear Games read the Reddit… this should be proof positive that they do. They even got in on the action and posted a poll on Twitter asking which side the exiles will fight for. At the time of writing this the ASA is winning by a decent margin, and between the time I took the above screenshot and looked as I sat down to write this… the poll has crossed 14k votes. Sanctum generates stupid amounts of Divines per hour, for the folks who have built characters designed specifically to run it. I would be perfectly happy if it just went away… and it seems sad that Sanctum went core… but we also lost Metamorph which was a mechanic that I did enjoy greatly.
The battle lines were cleanly drawn for a short amount of time between two opposing forces… but in truth Path of Exile style folks decided that they were not necessarily represented by either side. This spawned the creation of all manner of other “organizations” representing other favorite league mechanics.
ASA – Anti-Sanctum Alliance
SRU – Sanctum Runners Union
CHB – Crop Harvesting Bureau
COD – Children of Delve
SSS – Simulacrum Secret Service
CLEAR – Committed Lab Enjoyers’ Agency of Revenue
FBI – Fungal Bureau of Investigation
OM – Order of the Mist
KGB – Kalguuran Group for Business
AGI – Alch and Go Industries
BBC – Big Breach Coalition
WETA – Wraeclast Engineering and Temporal Architects
SIH – Sitting in Hideout (doing one map per hour)
CASUAL – Cards and Sometimes Unique Acquisition Lobby
IRS – Institution of Rogues & Smugglers – Redacted
The meme above is right… things are in fact getting out of hand. This though… is probably part of why I love this community. It is completely nonsense and will take something to the extremes… but like the Toucan and Krangled it just becomes part of the culture.
If you have read this blog for any length of time… you will know which faction I truly belong to. In the wise words of Jorgen… Delve Provides. This is the mechanic I keep going back to over and over because I really do enjoy Delving down in the mines more than pretty much anything else. I love the endless scroll of nodes and finding a comfortable level to set up and start farming. Even with my recent Ice Trap Trickster from Pohx League… I am back down in the mines seeking treasure. When I do not Delve I just miss the generic bubblegum currency that it produces in addition to all of the unique stuff that comes from down there. My role in Path of Exile is to provide the stuff that comes from Delve to the people who choose not to partake, and truthfully… I think choosing any role and dedicating to it will lead to decent currency gains.
In other more important news… yesterday the Map Stash tab was finally released for Path of Exile II, and the game instantly became more playable. I managed to snag one of the Guild early in the morning while the weekend stash tab sales were still going on. Then I spent what felt like an eternity trucking waystones from quad tabs over to the new map stash tab with affinity. I am not really playing much Path of Exile II, but I am certain this will be a welcome change whenever I do return. The map stash can hold 576 waystones of each tier with room for the corruption only tier 16 as well. Anything that makes the process of storing loot faster is very welcome. What we need now however is the Fragments tab, because the Maps tab does nothing for our tablets.
The Legacy of Phrecia event starts at 12pm PST on Thursday the 20th… so I have until then to figure out what the hell I am going to play.
The post The Exile Faction Wars appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Since I finished the season in Diablo IV, I am now much more focused on Pohx League. I am very only likely to be dipping my toes back into Necromancer fun times when Ace wants to play, and particularly as we work on some of the seasonal objectives for them. In Pohx League I rolled something that was completely new to me, and it has been shockingly fun. I had never really played a Trickster before, or honestly gotten anything based on the Shadow class to maps. I’ve also not played a pure traps build even though Righteous Fire derives a lot of its damage based on Fire Trap. Ultimately I set out wanting to try a Trickster and then found a build that seemed like it might be enjoyable with that Ascendancy and rolled with it.
This build my friends… is ludicrous. I’ve never played anything with this level of full screen coverage. Sure my lightning arrow and later elemental hit of the spectrum builds could off screen enemies, but nothing to this point has ever just blanketed the entire screen in death. Yesterday I made some significant tweaks to the build and migrated to the “final form” and shifted over to Ice Trap of Hollowness. This is an alternate version of Ice Trap that comes from the Labyrinth that essentially scales up the area of effect of the traps, so that there is a dead spot in the center but MUCH wider coverage. It also has a much shorter time to trigger on its own, which makes it prime territory for some shenanigans.
Essentially to exploit the benefits of this alternate version of Ice Trap, we swap so using the Sunblast unique belt that makes it so enemies cannot trigger your traps, but allows you to throw 2 additional traps and explode on their own significantly faster. A perfectly rolled Sunblast is 75% reduced trap duration, but I was only able to afford a 61% one in Pohx league given the limited market. Since Tinkerskin works exclusively based on when traps are triggered, this means we need to move away from that chest and the most common choice is to go with a Carcass Jack for the additional Area of Effect and Area Damage scaling. The end result… is just truly silly for map clear because you essentially hit the entire screen at once.
More important than that, since I can easily have 17 traps up at once there is quite a lot of overlap which leads to shotgunning. The trick however is that you need to dance around the screen to limit the amount of mobs that are in the dead spot in the center that deals no damage. For bossing it is pretty straightforward to swap back to using the normal Ice Trap but it does mean having to take a moment to swap out your primary gem. I’ve never really loved gem swapping, but it does make enough of a difference to be worthwhile and will be even more so if I can get a slightly better roll on my Sunblast belt. What is nice about this build is with the swap it is both an extremely fast mapper and a pretty competent bosser. If you are curious I dumped a POB of the state of my build.
The only thing really lacking with this build is general defenses. I have enough layers to keep me from getting one shot, but I do have to hit my potion way more often than I would care to. There are a lot of things that I ultimately need to do to scale up the defensive layers, but the biggest one would be a load more evasion. Right now I have around 65% evasion and 90% lucky spell suppression combined with around 3500 hit points and 1700 energy shield. The only thing that is really going to one shot me is chaos damage, because I still have negative resistance in that department. Essentially the build is good enough to probably finish out the Atlas and unlock a few of the boss encounters, but would really need to find better versions of almost every rare slot in my build to make it feel a bit more comfy. Were I playing in a normal trade league this would not be a problem at all… but in a limited time event league there just isn’t a ton of stuff available for prices that I can afford.
I think much like it was in NecroSettlers, my first goal is going to be unlocking my full Atlas. When I get my third passive tree I plan on building it out to be Ritual and Einhar for the purpose of trying to farm either a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to turn my five-link into a six-link. I am pretty happy with the state of my build craft in Path of Exile, where I can make a character function without trade intervention more or less. I still like trading for specific upgrades, and I like selling random stuff as well… but I like knowing that I can mostly get a build off the ground and capable of mapping on my own. I will likely never be a big crafter, nor someone who dives deep into market manipulation… but I do like that I can be fairly self sustaining. That is a pretty huge thing coming from the very rocky starts that I had back in Sentinel and Kalandra leagues to where I am today.
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Good Morning Folks. This weekend I allowed myself to get sucked back into Path of Exile. Given the disappointment for Path of Exile 1 players last night, our hero Pohx decided to take matters into his own hands and throw together a league event. When I wrote about this on Friday, it full at 9500 players… before the end of the day it had been expanded to 20,000 players and also full. Then GGG stepped in and added 10,000 additional player slots, expanding the private league past the normal limit to 30,000. Suffice to say there has been more than a little bit of interest in some sort of a league reset happening in Path of Exile. I think there have been way more players than any of us thought, for which Path of Exile II did not really land well.
As of this morning there are just shy of 28,000 players in the Pohx private league, and I figure that is probably as big as it is going to get for the time being. If you are so inclined, you can go sign up for the league here which officially lasts until April 1st. A few caveats if you have never played in a private league like this. The big thing is expect trade to be much more challenging than during a normal league reset. There are simply going to be fewer items available and this impacts pretty much everything from the currency exchange to the player to player trade site. Folks tend to be way more chill about pricing however since this is a limited time event. However fully expect to be playing at least 80% solo self found. I picked up a few upgrades over the weekend but there was not a lot available on the market, and mostly all I really did was pick up a couple of items with good resists on them.
I am playing well out of my comfort zone and running my very first Trickster ever. I opted to go for Ice Trap, with the idea of eventually shifting into Ice Trap of Hollowness once I got all of my gear in place… which admittedly might not actually happen during the course of a private league. I still feel pretty squishy but am working on a series of upgrades with the next few points that should help that out. Essentially I am going to be stacking Mind of Matter, Ghost Shroud, and Wicked Ward with my existing Eldritch Battery to hopefully resolve my survival problems by making my Energy Shield double as both Mana and a proper damage barrier. I tried running Mind of Matter too early, and really all I did was cause myself to get into situations where I could not cast anything. Wicked Ward and Ghost Shroud should in theory help to solve the energy shield regen problems while I am taking damage.
Once I get another level I am probably going to respec the start of my tree a bit to free up two points, so that I can pick up all three of those notables at once. I am leaning heavily on Polymath which gives me 3% more damage for each unique mastery I am taking which at the moment is a 24% more multiplier. I’ve not run across any of the uber lab shrines in maps, so I might go ahead and try and purchase one from the currency exchange so that I can get my fourth ascendancy point. I feel like I am dealing plenty of damage right now, it is mostly the survival and comfort of mapping that I need to resolve. This is a way squishier character than I am used to playing, and since I don’t have access to really good cheap rares due to the limited trade environment… my evasion is way lower than I would like it to be. I am honestly not really a massive fan of evasion builds to start with, but I am trying to push myself out of my comfort zone.
I am still chipping away at white maps and making pretty decent progress. For the most part once I get something frozen I can kill it extremely quickly. Normal mapping is largely just walking through the map while dropping traps behind me which ends up being a fairly safe gameplay style. Things only really get risky when I have to stop and grind through something a bit tankier. The nice thing about the traps gameplay style is that I can run reflect maps without too much issue. The only change that I need to do is to remember not to drop Frost Bombs. I should also really drop back down to a level 1 Frost Blink so that I don’t have to worry too much about that either. I would really like to pick up some additional regen, but it feels like it is hard to juggle that with everything else that I want in the build.
For the most part right now I am running syndicate, as I try and get the enchants that I need. I am going to mix in some perm Delirium in the hopes of farming up some cluster jewels. Again being in a limited trade environment means that I am going to need to craft most of my own gear if I want some very specific things. I am still hoping at some point a Replica Dragonfang amulet shows up with Ice Trap on it, but I am not holding my breath. Thusfar there are plenty of those, but none for the specific ability that I want. I am very much playing an off meta build at the moment, based on one that was designed for 3.25 that does not 100% equate to the current passive tree. Essentially I tend to follow a guide until I hit maps and then I am off the radar with making the choices needed to hopefully make the build feel good after that.
I am not entirely certain how long Pohx League is going to stay active though, because this morning GGG released a statement that they are working on an event for Path of Exile 1. Essentially they are going to break out 19 Ascendancies that have never seen the light of day before, and will be running a league where every class has totally new options. This will run for a month, and I full expect an influx of players will rush over to this league to test things out. I am hoping we get a full release of what all of the ascendancy nodes are before this drops so that folks can begin to brew a bit ahead of time. This is going to have similar energy to a Krangled league, and I full expect by the end of the first day everyone to have spreadsheets floating around to help with buildcraft.
Tomorrow I am still planning on dipping back into Diablo IV for a bit with the new Lunar New Year event. I am not sure how hard I am going to grind but I would still really like to finish out the seasons journey while the buffs are active. I am hoping that the fixes to the Ring of Mendeln land at the same time so that I potentially see a massive boost in power. Other than that… I mostly want to be able to get some rest. I’ve not been sleeping well because Gracie has taken to screaming for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Additionally I am still fighting a bit of a respiratory thing, which I hope passes rapidly. I have to go in a few times this week for meetings, so I am mostly hoping to get through the week without too much frustration.
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