Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.
I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.
I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.
This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.
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Friends! I have completed my Atlas! I have essentially resorted to the behavior that I always end up resorting to, and purchased the last 5 unique maps from the trade market. There are two that are always grossly expensive because they unlock two exceptionally powerful meta-crafting recipes, so combined they were around 100 Chaos. The rest were dirt cheap in the 2-5 Chaos range, but having them done… means more to me than any currency that I had to spend to finish this off. I did manage to get all the way through the normal maps the “old fashioned way” which is either running adjacent maps and hoping for one to drop, or using the 3-to-1 Vendor recipe to try and convert three lower-tier maps into the one that I was missing from a higher tier. I think it took me a bit longer than usual, but this league did see me do a week one re-roll so that probably caused some manner of delay. I should probably keep track of when I accomplished various feats in a spreadsheet or something… so I can ponder them later.
My focus has very much shifted from mapping to Delving, and I am essentially only poking my head up above ground in order to regain Sulphite needed to keep diving deeper. I am essentially hovering around the 150 depth level… and quite honestly for me traditionally the 150-250 range seems to be the sweet spot. I cleared out four Delve Cities last night and fought a Lich boss in the Abyssal City biome. That one took me a bit by surprise and I forgot that I could not in fact stand in the laserbeam star thingy that they spread around the room. Truth be told… I find so few Liches as compared to Vaal and Primeval bosses that I am not near as seasoned at that fight. Doing the bosses in general feels like hopping back on a bike after a few years of not riding it… as the season goes on I get better but I am always a bit rusty at the start.
In other news, I started a third character for the league and am enamored with Lightning Tendrils. This is really cool ability and given that I can pretty much get through the campaign on ANYTHING… I’ve started choosing abilities that I have never used before to at least do the early levels. Lightning Tendrils is essentially a channeled frontal cone lightning attack that is shockingly powerful… pun intended. I’ve already transitioned to using Wintertide Brand, which is the halfway point before getting Storm Brand later… but I plan on keeping Lightning Tendrils as my burn spell to help out the brands a bit. I am sort of yoloing my way through a build while looking at what players are using in the endgame for Storm Brand through POE.Ninja. Essentially I filter out players with a Mageblood because while I am running Crimson Temple when possible, I have no illusions of ever actually having one of those. This is a bit of a redemption arc for the character I played during the Kalandra League, and I want to see what that build would look like knowing what I know now.
Lastly, I wrapped up Old Man’s War, and everyone who suggested I read this book… starting with my friend Vernie… was completely right and I did in fact love it. So much so that I pretty much finished it and then immediately started the second part of this series. This is pretty much my jam when it comes to science fiction, and made me realize how much I enjoyed this sort of genre in general. I also now understand why when I was reading The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes, a lot of the comments compared it to this book. Very similar genre, and if you like Old Man’s War then I highly suggest you check out that series as well. I’ve read the first two books and anxiously await the third one that I think is coming out at some point later this year. I’m about a fifth of the way through The Ghost Brigades and I figure I will be consuming it just as ravenously as I did Old Man’s War.
Now that I am getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would mention Bookwyrm again. Essentially it is a federated platform for tracking your reading, and if you are on the Fediverse/Mastodon you can follow my Bookwyrm account. I somewhat wish that a lot of these ancillary services like Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, and even OwnCloud had the ability to have some sort of account hierarchy so that my Gamepad.Club accounts could use the services, but not have to maintain separate credentials. I get that it mostly defeats the point of how ActivityPub works, but it would be nice if there was some form of identity sharing between platforms. It used to bug me that people might reply back to me on one of these services that I don’t really use AS social media… but when I stopped caring about likes and boosts… it stopped bugging me very much. I guess the shift to Mastodon as my primary platform has come with it a shift away from caring about being seen… and more about the utility of what good these services bring to my own life.
Anyways, I hope you are having a most excellent week. We are nearing the end of Blaugust and I am preparing to do the likely all-day job of tallying all of the participants. Essentially expect my Friday post to land a bit later in the day than usual, because I will be scrambling to catalog the over hundred participants. I really should devise some sort of a self-reporting system, but that is perhaps a challenge for another year given that it is a bit late to shift gears this year.
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I had a rather busy day of significant progress and changes to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. First off I took out The Searing Exarch and while I took a few deaths, I managed to get my void stone well within the six portals. I don’t fight these bosses often enough to be terribly good at them, so there are always things that I forget will kill me. I can tank a single ball at a time during the ball phase, but never two at once for example. Shortly after taking down the Searing Exarch, I went after the Eater of Worlds and the same essential story. I also downed it with portals left but took a few deaths re-learning what I could take and what I could not take.
So that leaves me at 106 maps out of 115 with the “easy” two voidstones slotted into my Atlas. I am not entirely certain how hard I will go after Elder and Maven, or if I will eventually just buy a carry for both to get it over with. Having access to voidstones however, fixed the problem I was having with the scarab market. Essentially it is roughly 2-3 Chaos per Rusted Sulphite Scarab which allows me to force Niko on a map so that I can restock my Delve coffers. There is a specific Charged Compass that has “your maps contain Niko” which lasts for 3 maps and seems to cost in the neighborhood of 1 Chaos each. So while these are a bigger pain in the ass to buy, because no one wants to stop what they are doing for a 1 Chaos sale… it essentially gives me similar results for a minimum of 5 Chaos less. I suppose I should go through the hassle of snapping up a pile of these. Unfortunately, they don’t really stack so I would have to dump them in my “Alt Maps” tab along with my Sanctum books, Temple maps, and Memories.
One of the things that I have been watching the market for is a Brass Dome. This is essentially my chest of choice when it comes to gearing out an RF Juggernaut because you can get over 4000 Armor, up to 5% additional maximum elemental resistance, and crit immunity. However these are always pricey, and since I had four Divine Orbs to play with, and a stash of Chaos Orbs from selling a round of Delve items… yesterday I actually began seriously shopping for something. Essentially what I wanted was a chest with a combination of White sockets and colored sockets that would allow me to flip it back and forth between Righteous Fire in the chest and eventually do the swap to Fire Trap in my Chest and Righteous Fire in my Helm.
What I found was a six-socket Brass Dome with over 4000 Armor, and +5% to all maximum resists that had WWWRRG giving me access to run both the common BBBRRG Righteous Fire setup and the GGGRRR or in my case GGGRRB setup for Fire Trap. It was not linked, so essentially I had to spend another 400 Chaos Orbs to buy the Orb of Bindings to do the benchcraft recipe. I did not really want to fuck around and try and manually link this for fear of spending way more than 1500 Bindings to accomplish the job. This happened to me last league when I was trying to link a chest and burned through 2000 Bindings without ever actually getting a six link. So essentially I wound up spending 5 Divines in total on the chest, but yesterday the cheapest equivalent already linked was 16 Divines. This morning there are two options at 9 Divines so I still feel like I came out ahead.
With my remaining currency or at least part of it, I picked up an Elder Influenced pure armor helm with level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Concentrated Effect support that happened to be in the right colors to run Righteous Fire. I originally had intended to run the new Brass Dome with Righteous Fire for a bit while I saved up the currency for a helm, but I managed to snag this one for around a Divine and figured no time like the present to complete the swap. Of note… I’ve never actually done this one before and always ran the traditional RF in Chest and Fire Trap in helm setup. The difference is immediately clear when it comes to taking anything down that requires me to drop a Fire Trap. The only negative in this process is that I had an Area of Effect implicit on my previous helmet, so I am getting used to a slightly smaller Righteous Fire aura.
So I am fairly broke… I went into the day with 4 Divines and around 800 Chaos and I exited the day with somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 Chaos. That said… I have another load of resonators to sell and if they sell as quickly as the last batch that will be a significant boost to my vault. Essentially the next few upgrades will be more difficult because I have to be very wary of my resistance, dexterity, and intelligence. Ultimately in a perfect world, I would go after a +1 or +2 if that is even possible Amulet and a +2 Sceptre. I also need to swap out my gems for either 21/20 gems or the Awakened equivalent which will take a chunk of currency to do. Then after that, I am contemplating picking up the Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame jewels to allocate Unrelenting which is the other side of the Endurance stacking tree that gives me physical reduction, elemental damage reduction, and chaos resistance.
All in all a pretty great day, and one that both increased my survivability and my damage output. Currency gain in Path of Exile is always a means to an end for me. I farm currency so that I can do the things I like… which often generates more currency… so that I can buy upgrades to do the things I like more efficiently. At some point, I will start working on some more alt characters when my coffers have filled again so that I have money to play with. Ash continues to push me in the direction of a Cyclone build, and I still want to do a bit of a redemption arc for Storm Brand. Both of these will need things purchased or farmed, and both of which are probably going to happen before the league is up. Essentially right now… I am very “in my element” and enjoying my time greatly.
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Yesterday I made it through the campaign on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and by the middle of the night I was back delving which makes me very happy. I burned through a lot of my available currency kitting out my character in gear in order to make my resists work. I purposefully tried to overcap resists by a bit because at some point I hope to swap out to a Brass Dome with +5 to maximum elemental resistances and that will mean losing the resistances that I currently have on my 5-link corrupted chest. Other than that I could probably due for a sceptre upgrade at some point, and then I definitely need to find a pseudo-six-link helm. Those however can wait because for now… I need to get my money printing machine up and running that will fund the rest of my adventures.
I’m very much in the early stages of breaking into Delve and getting my resistances up enough to go down further. I’ve been down to around depth 85 and have done just fine, but my resists are a bit puny for me to go diving down dark tunnels as I am used to doing. Once I get down to around 100 I will finally start seeing a lot of content in the side tunnels and hopefully some cities. There is one already on the map but I have to figure out how to approach it as there is no direct path that I can see. I think that is probably why I enjoy Delve the most, because it offers bite-sized adventures with promised loot at the end. It feels way more stable and reliable than mapping does in general.
When I last talked about my map progress I think I was around 73, and as of this morning, I am sitting at 88 of 115 maps completed. Essentially each time I shift over to run maps for sulphite I am trying to unlock something new. I’ve actually managed to get quite a number of the unique maps out of the way which feels really good. I did miserably fail one of them, but it was a T16 unique map which is always painful. Mapping still feels good on Lightning Arrow Raider, but she is way squishier than the Juggernaut which is to be expected because there is a massive difference in killing power.
Since I am spending way more time in Delve, I am starting to pivot away from Essences and towards Niko missions and Sulphite. I think I think once I finish picking up Niko nodes, I will shift towards picking more Legion on the tree or maybe Blight since the Raider can do those a lot better than my Juggernaut ever could. I think what I dig about having a proper map blaster is that if I decide to dive into mapping a bunch, I can pivot back without much issue. However what I have missed the most is the reliable currency generation of Delve, and the Raider just was not a Delve-friendly character. So much of what comes from Delve comes from careening down dark tunnels looking for treasure, and you really need something sturdy to be able to do that.
I am also still doing the occasional tournament for the league mechanic, and those mostly go smoothly. I’ve not won a tournament outright since crossing the 200 rating barrier, but I am also not really using a mechanic to cheese things. I do well enough to get several rewards though, but last night I saw my first six-link and missed winning it by losing the final match. I did pull a five-link earlier, so it seems like I am starting to get into better rewards territory in general. I feel in this weird place so far in that I have two highly functioning characters but am also mostly broke. Hopefully, a week of focusing on just doing some mechanics to get some stuff will help change that trajectory. Once I have more currency to play with, I will probably start rolling some more side projects.
All told though I am having a lot of fun. I feel much better now that I have my Tankyboi back in the repertoire of characters.
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