Good Morning Folks. I am fighting some generic respiratory crud and as such feeling pretty freaking awful. However here I am sharing my nonsense with you all. Yesterday I finished the campaign on my Storm Brand of Indecision character built on top of the Surfcaster ascendancy. I legitimately have no real idea where I am going with this character, nor is there a major consensus of builds over on POE.Ninja… so I am kind of winging it for the moment. I am currently playing pretty much a pure energy shield build and then using Zealot’s Oath to turn my life regeneration into Energy Shield regeneration. I have no clue how well this is going to work and for how long… but for the moment it feels shockingly comfortable for being low effective health. I already have a phenomenal character that I have taken pretty much as far as it can go… so any joy I get out of this character is just a placeholder until Last Epoch Season 2 drops.
The main draw of the Surfcaster is Stormy Seas. This ascendancy keystone converts all of your Lightning Damage to Cold Damage and makes it so that your Cold Damage can Shock, allowing you to effectively double dip both Cold and Lightning Damage while Chilling, Freezing, and Shocking with it. This gives me the ability to use a really fast ability like Storm Brand of Indecision and make it feels as comfy and safe as Wintertide Brand. Glacial Wave reduces incoming hit damage and buffs your damage, Sea Legs gives you a way of scaling Crit and Evasion, and then Ghosts of the Deep is just a generically good buff. All combined you end up with a package that just sort of works for the Storm Brand play style remarkably well. I know this is also being played more commonly with Penance Brand of Dissipation, but I prefer the pacing of Storm Brand a bit more.
What is wild about the current state of my build is that I am almost exclusively using unique items. Essentially the only gear slots that I am using rare items in are my amulet and both rings… all of which are items that I had laying around in my stash and or recycled from earlier versions of my RF build. The only uniques that are really purposeful at the moment are Shavronne’s Wrappings so that Chaos damage does not go straight through my Energy Shield, and Ralakesh’s Impatience for permanent charges. Everything else I just sort of made an audible on while I was leveling… and then largely just stuck with it and it somehow has kept working in maps. Immortal Flesh was pulled in pretty late into the process when I swapped to Zealot’s Oath, just to make the regeneration a bit more comfortable. At some point I plan on probably replacing all of this with Rare items but I am just sort of rolling the dice to see how long it works.
I can pretty comfortably do yellow maps without much issue, and while I successfully completed a red map… it was a bit rough at my current level. Swapping out some of my uniques for rare gear with more survival on them would probably help. Essentially I need to swap out everything that I do not absolutely need for high evasion and energy shield items… because right now I am running around with the effective hit point pool of 2000, whereas I am way more used to running around in the 5000-6000 level with my Righteous Fire characters. Essentially the next few levels are going to be building out another Lightning Cluster with dual Brand Clusters to see where that gets my damage output. If you are curious you can see the current state of my build with this POB.
There was another Dev Interview yesterday with Jonathan and Mark of Grinding Gear Games hosted by Darth Microtransaction and Ghazzy TV. It is two hours long, but if you are just wanting a quick summary Raxxanterax released a 20 minute video covering pretty much all of the important bits. I am still not entirely certain that the game that I want to be playing, is the game that they are envisioning in their heads. There are certain aspects of Path of Exile that they seem to have considered failures, and are trying to right those perceived wrongs… but how many things can you change while still capturing the same magic. The current version of Path of Exile II isn’t really quite right… so we will see if 0.2.0 brings things closer or pushes them further away. Like it is hard to quantify what I personally want, but going back and playing the Legacy of Phrecia event has made me realize how much magic was lost with POE2.
It is very clear that Legacy of Phrecia was intended as a quick filler content league, but ironically they have accidentally crafted one of the most enjoyable POE experiences. I still feel like they need to keep expanding Phrecia until 3.26 launches, but it seems like GGG would prefer that we all swap to playing Path of Exile II instead. That said I will be checking out the Dawn of the Hunt launch on Friday, just not sure how much I will actually be playing and for how long. Supposedly we are going to see patch notes potentially on Wednesday, and I feel like I should get a good idea from those how enjoyable I am going to find the first POE2 league. If things went too far in the wrong direction, and I can tell that from the patch notes… I might just make a hard skip until Last Epoch in a few weeks.
The post Surfs Up Brando appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.
I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.
With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.
Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.
There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.
Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.
However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.
The post Atomfall, Hero Siege, and SurfBrand appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I made the swap over to the Dawnbreaker that I talked about picking up cheaply yesterday and I have to say… it is complete nonsense. Basically I have 100% of all physical damage taken as fire damage, and then that gets reduced by 90% fire resistance. On top of that damage that I take from hits… triggers Defiance of Destiny causing me to recoup 24% of my missing unreserved life before the hit damage is calculated. Then on top of that 20% of my Lightning and Cold damage is taken as Fire… meaning that damage is reduced by my 88% resistance to the base element, then 20% of it is reduced again by my 90% fire resistance. Essentially I feel as tanky as I have ever felt in this game and can pretty much just stand and soak most attacks. Example I took out an Ahuatotli, the Blind at around 180 depth and normally there are two attacks that I would dodge out of… the skeleton thing and the ball of blood and I was able to just stand in both without really taking any damage.
Given that I am gaining a ton of resistance from my permanent flasks… I did the degenerate thing and dropped as much Lightning and Cold resistance from my gear as I could. This means I had to find new rings that only have Fire and Chaos resistance on them. This means I am running around over 450% Fire Resistance which then is getting converted straight into regeneration due to my fire mastery, allowing me to gain back the regen that I lost by swapping shields and dropping my Immortal Flesh. One of the rings was missing a prefix so I attempted a Warlord slam on it, but wound up with nothing special. Basically I am overcapped on all of my resistances to be able to eat an Elemental Weakness and still be perfectly capped, so it is only really minus res and minus regen maps that I have to worry about.
In other more important news… I can stop my constant grind of t14 of better rare maps because as of this morning I hit the 200 map sub-achievement. Now all I need to do is finish my push to level 100 in order to knock out Gear Grinding Goals. As of this morning I think I am 59% of the way through 99 towards 100, and at this point it is all super slow going. I have a tank full of delve juice so I should be able to make a pretty solid dent in that tonight. Mapping is really when the experience gain slows down because I get so much less experience off your average t16 map… and t17s are too rippy to risk taking a death. While I am in delve I can consistently keep up the mob level and gain some decent experience in the process.
This is quite possibly the Righteous Fire variant that I have had the most fun with in awhile. Its initial problem was that it just was not quite as tanky as the Chieftain version. However now that I got 90% fire resistance and got my other elements to 88% all of that tankyness came back. Adding the Mageblood and Defiance of Destiny were honestly overkill, but what else am I going to spend currency on. I admit I am going to be super sad when this character poofs on April 23rd. I assume at that point this character turns into a normal Scion… and Ascendant is not going to have access to the fun toys that Scavenger did. I think more than anything that is what has been pushing me to play quite a bit, because I know that all of this fun is going away sooner rather than later. I wish GGG would simply extend the Legacy of Phrecia event all the way to the launch of 3.26… but they want people to give a shit about their shiny new toy, Path of Exile II.
In other news… Discord continues to be an application that is attempting to gobble up more and more of our attention. They rolled out some shiny new version of the game overlay… and as such force re-enabled it for everyone. This is not the first time they have done this, so fair warning that if you are like me… and disabled that shit ages ago… you are going to have to do it again. This time they want to know WHY you are disabling the overlay… and I gave them what they wanted my truthful reasoning. This might just be Old Man Bel, but I fucking hate when what used to be a simple application… keeps trying to grab more and more of your attention. I use Discord as a chat program. It is a ubiquitous method of communicating between my game playing friends, and also a decent enough way to organize around various topics. I do not want it to be the uber application that consumes all of my time… nor do I want it popping over the top of the games I am playing. I have my phone set to silent for a reason… I hate notifications. Legitimately… kindly fuck off.
Anyways Grumpy Bel over…. I hope you are all having a great day in spite of that admonishment. I am curious to see what GGG announces for Path of Exile II tomorrow, given that it seems like their presentation is going to run two hours.
The post Mappers have Mapped appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I contemplated not doing a blog post this morning, because I was not really certain what I would actually talk about. I am still knee deep in Path of Exile Legacy of Phrecia event and enjoying myself greatly. Yesterday I talked about some nonsense I was doing with a Headhunter to enable me to wear a Defiance of Destiny amulet, and then also deciding to pick up a Mageblood while the getting was good. I think the problem that I have long had with the Mageblood is that it enables builds that would not be able to function without it. There are so many builds where they are effectively using one belt slot and their flask slots in order to fix all of their elemental resistances. So it is hypocritical of me that I am essentially going down that path. One of the things that I have not liked about playing Scavenger Righteous Fire is that it seemed too painful to get to 90% all res. I am not there… but using a Mageblood allowed me to get considerably closer.
I spent a good chunk of time farming up flasks down in Delve. Delve provides many things, but it is really easy to get a bunch of level 83+ flasks for the purpose of rolling whatever you want on them. I had a set of 3 Charges per hit flasks that I was using, and I did not want to roll over the top of those, so instead I set out to farm a new Quicksilver, Ruby, Sapphire, and Topaz flask because I had been pretty bad about actually rat-holing these as I found them in the deep below. I rolled them for 70% increased Effect… save for the Sapphire where I gave up as I was running low on currency and did not want to buy more from the market. If I was trying harder I would have shot for Increased effect on all of the flasks as well, but for now I have it on Ruby the most important as over-capped fire resistance turns directly into life regeneration.
While this did not take me to 90 all, it did take me to 90/88/88 which is far better than I was sitting at previously. I have so many defensive layers right now between max block with life recoup, the 25% life recoup before damage taken from the Defiance of Destiny, 80% of all phys damage taken as fire which is then reduced by 90% resistance. Essentially I no longer need armor and just to make things more comfortable I resolved my Freeze and Chill immunity with the flasks so that I could drop Brine King and go back to Lunaris in my Pantheon. Similarly since I am immune to all bleeding I dropped Ralakesh and swapped over to Abberath to make myself immune to Burning Ground. The only elemental ailment that I am not immune to is Ignite and having 60% reduced duration seemed like a good idea. I can soak it with my 90% resistance so it really was not a big deal even before the Mageblood swap when I was sitting at 85%.
Another thing that I plan on playing with is Dawnbreaker. Getting one with 20%/20%/20% generally costs in the neighborhood of a Mageblood, but I managed to pick this one one that was someones “bricked” corruption. Essentially I am losing the 20 Life implicit, getting +2 socketed minion jewels that is essentially useless… but it cost 1.5 Divines… so I can live with it. Essentially equipping this shield would mean I am losing my 5% life recoup on block, but would allow me to take 100% of physical damage as Fire Damage, and at the same time convert 20% of Cold Damage and 20% of Lightning Damage to Fire Damage as well. This means I am contemplating changing out both of my rings to drop the Cold and Lighting resistance that I am gaining from them and stacking nothing but Fire Resistance since the degeneracy of my Mageblood is capping my resistances with flasks. This is essentially why that stupid belt is so powerful… it allows you to shift around stats to something more powerful for your build.
I am roughly half way to level 100, and as a result I have officially deployed my loss prevention strategy. This means giving up two inventory slots so that I can always have with me an Omen of Death-Dancing and an Omen of Amelioration. Essentially the idea is that Death-Dancing will kick in during a near miss to keep it from turning into a death… and then if you do actually end up taking a death Amelioration is going to severely blunt the amount of lost experience, and as a result reduce the amount of time it will take to gain it back. I have a few of each farmed up, but even if I have to start buying these… it would be 40 Chaos well spent just as an insurance policy.
Swapping over to this set up, lost me some damage. I had to drop Oriath’s End, but I will probably pick it back up once I hit level 100 and no longer care about taking deaths. I plan on dropping my Life Flask at that point and it would give me back a third mode of exploding things. Basically my goal now is to hit level 100 and then start trying to farm t17s and other things where I might actually take deaths. For the moment I have swapped over to running Toxic Sewer and City Square for my mapping combo, and am working on trying to get it to a comfortable point of sustaining them. I was running Defiled Cathedral until I got the Nameless Seer to show up, so that I could scry Apothecary on Toxic Sewer. I got that last night so I am in process of swapping over the maps I run. Essentially all of my T14 and T15 maps are going to my mappers as I whittle down that achievement.
I am shocked that I am still having as much fun as I am, given that I only rolled a single character for Phrecia. That said I am looking forward to the 27th so we can see what they have been cooking for Path of Exile II, and then after that the launch of Last Epoch Season 2.
The post Mageblood Degeneracy appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
