season 8

Fun is Ephemeral

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Hey Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday because the morning just sort of got away from me. On Monday I talked about my adventures in Pohx League 2.0 with the Atlas Invasion ruleset. Immediately following that post… I rolled a character in Sir Gog’s league which is using a Softcore Ruleset based on the Gauntlet event. Initially my goal was to run up a Commander and do another attempt at Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. I didn’t get that far and am instead some sort of one handed mace sunder build… leaning into fire damage with the goal of at some point farming up the right main attack gem. One of the fellow league participants dumped a bunch of random uniques on me in early act 1… one of which was a Lead Sprinkler which essentially caused me to shift focus to building around that. Truth be told I have something akin to a functional build going, and after a bit of respeccing away from the early bleed iteration it is getting more functional. I do know that I will pretty much NEVER again level using Rolling Magma when I could be using Ground Slam and Crushing Fist any time I block something. The optimal slam tree is close enough to the Righteous Fire tree that I am just going to stop muling an Templar and roll with it going forward, because I really hate Rolling Magma.
I get why someone might like the Gauntlet ruleset, because there are a bunch of shocking changes to the flow of the game. For example it took me three deaths to get off the beach because Hillock was supported by The Maven, had a new leapslam attack, and summoned zombies. I decided to side with “Definitely Oak” here for the extra life, but I am sure that fight is pretty different considering that the other two most certainly were. On some level it is a bit fun to see how ridiculous this event was, but also… it feels like I am just grinding my way through the rough spots by throwing my body at it over and over until the monster falls down. A lot of the Act bosses specifically feel more cheap than they are interesting… I have no clue how in the hell a melee players on hardcore did the Vaal Oversoul for example. Looking back at actual gauntlet footage, a lot of players seemed to be playing cheap builds designed to oneshot encounters from a safe distance. Basically yesterday I decided that as I entered Act 5… that I wasn’t really having any fun. The novelty had warn off and all I was left with was friction… and I’ve never been a “frustration for frustrations” sake type gamer.
I could always roll back to Pohx’s Atlas Invasion league where I am progressed to the point of maps… but honestly… for a limited event with only three weeks left I am just not sure how much effort I am willing to put out there. Settlers of Kalguur specifically is starting to wear very thin. I’ve played the original league, Necro Settlers league, Pohx League 1.0, the Legacy of Phrecia Event, Pohx League 2.0, and Sir Gog’s Gauntlet league. During Phrecia I even pushed all the way to level 100 with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. I just feel like I have done this song and dance too many times to really find much joy in it. Sure it was exciting and refreshing to return to Path of Exile over the weekend… but once I cleared the campaign and got used to the new reality of map bosses in every map… the fun sort of drained away. I feel like I am going through a weird funk right now where I am struggling to find a permanent source of enjoyment. This could be because I have a bunch of real world things going on that are beating me down… but that is all the more reason why I need my diversionary tactics to keep me sane.
I had an absolute blast in Last Epoch, but similarly arrived at a point where I felt like I “beat” the game. There are a whole slew of alternate characters that I could run up and gear… but I am not exactly drawn to doing that right now. I made it further this league than I ever have before… and in large part that is due to the fact that the Judgement build is so freaking broken. I’ve cleared the Harbingers, gotten to 400ish corruption comfortably, and taken down normal Aberroth. I have no real drive to keep grinding away to the point where I could start farming Uber Aberroth. Basically I know what I would need and it either comes from being exceptionally lucky… or diligently trying the same content over and over. I spent a bit of time early in the evening yesterday running Monolith Echoes and they are still a lot of fun in the moment to moment game play, but I am struggling to find anything that really scratches that meaningful progression itch in the game right now.
Last week Path of Exile II released a pretty significant patch that in large part solved some of the loot problems that were happening with the game. I’ve been back and played a few maps and there does in fact appear to be way more loot dropping than had previously been. The challenge there is that adding more loot does not really fix the problems with that game. The moment to moment game play still feels pretty awful, and like I am wading into a pool filled with oatmeal. Yes I can clear entire screens by leaping into a pack of mobs and then hitting Boneshatter which gets amplified by Herald of Ash. Sure that works… but the whole delay and sluggishness of movement makes it feel sort of awful. That same type of build in Path of Exile 1 would feel phenomenal. Everything feels like it is locked behind animation cycles that feel awful to wait on. All of the most popular builds right now are largely focused around exploiting some bug that is currently in the game to cause a single attack to either wipe the entire screen or delete a boss in second. I just do not care enough about the game to shift to building one of those builds right now. So essentially… there is no fun left there either.
There is also a new Diablo IV season going on right now, so in my search for joy… I rolled a character with the idea of playing the whirlwind build that I never quite created during any of the other leagues. I recently resolved my performance issues that I had with the game and others… because at some point windows had decided to set my virtual memory to my slowest drive. Even though the game feels fresh and snappy compared to previous leagues… I am just not feeling it. Diablo IV gameplay is so samey, and it feels like the ideal method for leveling is to run from zone to zone chasing these new invasion events… where players will straight up oneshot everything before you can touch them. Playing a Barbarian was probably the wrong call because I am constantly starved for rage right now, since I am not getting the initial hit on things that are being nuked from orbit by random ranged players. This game would be infinitely more enjoyable if there were no other players in the world. Had they not tried to retrofit Diablo into the MMORPG model… there might have been a really enjoyable game there. I want the ability to play with my friends when I am in the mood to do so… but every other instance of other players in my games is a net loss. Which is ironic… because in games like Guild Wars 2… I love the existence of random players.
So ultimately last night I went in a totally different direction and left behind the ARPG games that have fueled me for the last five or six years. I’ve heard amazing things about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and fired it up yesterday. This game is phenomenal and I have only really just played through the prologue. I am not the biggest fan of quick time events in my combat… but am playing on the lowest difficulty setting as to avoid as much of the annoyance as I can. I would be far happier if this were truly just turn based combat instead of playing “press your luck” to avoid damage. However all of that said… the game world, the characters, the set design… all make up for those frustrations. I already want to know what the heck is going on in this world. It is also shocking how damned good this game looks for coming from what seems to be a really small studio with many of the folks having this as their first game release. I’m already hooked and really like the characters so far.
So I guess this is what I am going to be playing… at least until it too stops bringing me joy. Fun is a deeply ephemeral thing, because all of the above should in theory be fun for me. However for some reason my brain is wired in a specific manner so that very little is really hitting in the right ways. The post Fun is Ephemeral appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Cooking Nemesis Eggs

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Good Morning Folks. One of the things that I really miss from Path of Exile is the existence of a Hideout. Even in that game I am constantly annoyed that I have to load into a public area, instead of just spawning in my hideout… but in Last Epoch I miss someplace private to escape to. Ultimately the thing I call the Monolith Ready Room is the closest thing we have, and unfortunately there is no way to directly port into that area without first running an echo. Truth be told if they just gave us that area I would be appeased, because there are times where I just need to empty my inventory of vendor some items… and the end of time always seems to take forever to zone into. I assume is because I am waiting on other player character models to load. The irony of ARPGs is that I always play then in Online mode, so that I can play with friends if I want to… but then spend 99.9% of my time wishing other players didn’t exist.
I spent most of my night running the Nemesis Woven Echo. I had so many items with Zero Legendary Potential that I needed to cook in eggs, and figured this was also a reasonable way to get more Weavers faction. I think I ran 28 of them in total and eventually gave up on creating clusters and just sort of trailed them off into the far distance of the Stolen Lance timeline. Essentially I would run Echoes until I built up enough stability to do the boss fight, and then take it down before returning to Echoes. Later I used this influx of Gaze of Orobyss to push my corruption up to level 400… which is when I realized that you can only consume so many at once. Weirdly running 400 corruption has not felt that different from 300 corruption.
The only problem with running a bunch of Nemesis Echoes, is that you generate a bunch of bad legendaries. This is honestly a massive boon if you plan on doing a bunch of alting… but unfortunately I have not really done that yet other than the reroll over to Judgement. My poor Beastmaster is sitting there languishing right now. I find it extremely hard to bring myself to delete these. There is still something magical feeling about having a Legendary item in this game, even though I can print dozens of them in a single play session. I think what feels so weird about it is that ultimately when you stick a zero LP unique into an egg… getting a legendary now feels like the failed state instead of a win. Ultimately I am holding onto them I think so that I can use them as fodder to “Divine” uniques in the future, since a bad legendary with 4 affixes on it… still counts as an item with 4 Legendary Potential for those purposes.
In other news… my whole grand plan of being able to predicatively unspec my abilities via my relic slot… did not really work out. It seem like when you remove an item that is giving you bonus levels of a skill… it sort of randomly chooses which nodes you lose. It also seems to ignore Keystones and the minimum requirements to get that Keystone. So even though I did some shenanigans to try and make sure I had all of the other points allocated before equipping the relic, and that the Keystone was in fact gained through those points… it didn’t work. So instead I am trying to learn to love not having the Righteous Fire like aura. In truth you end up dealing so much more damage that I am kind of getting used to the flow of it. It makes such a different on bosses/mini-bosses that it almost seems worth it to give up the quality of life to save from having to unspec all the time.
I do sort of feel like I am maybe winding down a bit. I’m focused on the Reign of Dragons timeline in an attempt to get an upgraded version of my Relic. That and trying to farm more memory amber so that I can buy more woven echoes so that maybe someday I can max out that faction. On some level I feel like I have beat the game. While I love everything there is about Circle of Fortune, not having trade does limit my engagement to some extent. What I mean by this is that I reach a point where I am geared enough to do most things, and the instance of me ever finding an upgrade because less and less likely. Essentially you reach a state where the amount of friction required to keep moving forward, is not necessarily worth it. In Path of Exile there is always trade that I can lean on to get the items that I have not seen with my eyes, which makes more things valuable for the sake of picking up to sell. I could probably never play Last Epoch without Circle of Fortune because it amps up the fun aspect too damned much, but it does also mean that much like Diablo games there is a time limit on just how long I am going to stay engaged.
So then becomes the question, that if I am winding down Last Epoch… what do I want to do instead? There is always the sirens song of Path of Exile, and with the new free private leagues is coming another round of PohxLeague. This time it is with the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion mechanics… the later of which makes every map spawn a random boss, some of which can be guardians. I’ve never experienced this and it could either be super freaking rippy, or a heck of a lot of fun. Additionally there was a big loot patch over in Path of Exile II, and at least on some level I want to pop back in and run a few maps to see how much improvement it made. Then of course there is also a Diablo IV season going on, but given that Raxx called it the season of the battlepass… I am hesitant to log in and play. If I do end up dropping in I will probably play a Whirlwind Barbarian because it is supposedly S-Tier at this point. Basically I have no clue what I am going to be doing. The desire to join another Pohx League is shockingly stronger than I thought it might be. The post Cooking Nemesis Eggs appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #515 – Guild Authorizes This Hunt

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are down an Ash this week and start the show down a Kodra who slips in while we record.  This week we talk about the press tour for Last Epoch Season 2 and some of the new information that came out on a podcast with Raxxanterax and Zizaran.  From there we talk about the fatal wound that is the upcoming Season 8 in Diablo IV because Season 7 was apparently too fun and Blizzard cannot stomach that.  Tam shares his experiences with Megamek an archaic way of playing Battletech Tabletop online.  From there we dive into our further experiences with Monster Hunter Wilds as Bel has finished all of the story content and the majority of folks have hit the credit roll that transitions to High Rank play.  Kodra shares some thoughts about Finspan and also engaging with Chess.com as a way to learn better chess play.

Topics Discussed:

  • Last Epoch is Cooking
    • More Season 2 Reveals
  • Diablo IV Enshitification
    • Incoming Bad Season
  • Megamek
    • Oldest School Battletech
  • Monster Hunter Wilds
  • Finspan
  • Chess.com
The post AggroChat #515 – Guild Authorizes This Hunt appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Journey Completed

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Journey Completed

This weekend represents quite possibly the quickest I have “finished” the Diablo 3 seasonal journey.  I say finished with quotes because there is still a lot more that I could be doing, but I think I am ultimately as far as I intend to go.  Of note… when I logged in this morning I got an anniversary achievement and  the above Diablo pet so if you are interested you might check it out and make sure you log in within the next few days.  For lack of a better word…  Season 8 completely caught me off guard.  Unfortunately the rotating three month schedule means that this is going to happen more often than not these days.  Season 7 released during the Legion pre-launch event… so it too was a fairly truncated effort.  I know my friend Grace managed to make it in on the day before Season 7 ended and push hard enough to get her extra bank tab.  It would have been a great season to do that for, given just how good the hunter set was for pushing content.  I however just let my attempt at getting that bank slot slip away because I couldn’t bring myself to push any further.  This time around… we have a new set and a new optimal build.  We started the season once again on a Friday night, logging in and beginning the push within moments of the season going live.  Generally speaking we make it pretty close to 70 on that first night… but this time both Grace and I lost our “oomph” at around 54.

Journey Completed

I managed to pick up the next day with another group and we ground together from the 50s through to 70 making it to roughly paragon 20 before needing to bail and get some dinner.  Yesterday afternoon I focused on getting the various achievement bits needed to get the first four chapters of the seasons journey and unlock the cosmetic options, and finished gear set.  This time around with the Demon Hunter it was Natalya’s set, which is a bit of an odd one given that it focuses on dealing damage with rain of vengeance.  This is the basic build that I followed, substituting a few abilities for ones I prefer, namely I found Stampede way harder to control than Shade for Rain of Vengeance.  I played a little of both but given how much I was in constant motion having the stampede actually pointed in the right direction was always a thing.  Towards evening yesterday though I finally started to feel like I was getting a handle on the play style and soloing my GR20 was actually far easier than I had expected.  The biggest problem is that this build just clears so much more slowly than the equivalent Multishot build did last season.  If I were to actually push for the full compliment of seasonal achievements… I would more than likely try and farm up a full set of Unhallowed Essence again and just go back to the tried and true multishot.

However it is highly unlikely that I will spend much more time on this season.  There was just something lackluster about it, given that nothing had changed since the previous season.  All of the same builds worked as we left them in the previous patch.  I was one of the people cheering on the three month seasonal cycle, but having been through it a few times now…  I am thinking that maybe it is just too short a time period between them.  Previously enough time had passed for me to start to miss the seasonal grind… enough to be truly excited for another opportunity to hang out and push to 70 together.  This time… it just felt like we were doing it to get shiny cosmetic baubles instead of to really enjoy the experience.  This makes me a little sad given just how pumped I have been in the past for the season to roll around and start anew.  This time around I literally had no clue it was happening until Grace told me.  In the past I almost marked the date on my calendar and started to get excited for the whole process.  Who knows maybe in a weeks time I will feel differently and want to pick up where I left off… grinding out more seasonal achievements.  That said I am perfectly happy leaving Season 8 as is, because I feel like I did what I set forth to do…  collect another batch of exclusive cosmetic appearances.