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Not Feeling It

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Good Morning Folks. This is going to be one of those posts that occasionally shows up on my blog that is of a more personal nature and that I do not go through any effort to syndicate. Both last week and this week I missed a blog post, and I have to be honest… sitting down to write this one was more of a chore than I would have expected. I’ve thought I was doing okay… but maybe that is less than truthful. I feel like I am on the cusp of another “turtle mode” or a period of time where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world does not exist. All I find myself really wanting in life is to read my books and play my games and forget the world exists. What prompted this current funk? I think it is largely work-related stress. Tuesday was the last day for one of my co-workers, one who had become my confidant and closest companion over the last decade. He stepped into the team lead and supervisor position that I vacated when I moved up to management, and he had been one of those people that I could just always rely on to do what needed to be done. Unfortunately, the person who I always assumed would step into his role… vacated the company last year leaving me with this feeling of having to start over from scratch. There is someone who has been trying to step up significantly and fill the shoes that were left behind, but it is going to take a lot of work and as such I am spending so much emotional effort trying to make sure things continue to truck along as they should. I’m just sort of feeling hollow. At the end of the day, I am drained emotionally and mentally and no amount of evening seems to be enough to regenerate those creative forces in time for a morning blog post. When I have specific things to talk about it is fine… but most of the Path of Exile topics that I am dealing with are things I have addressed before. I am playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain… a character that I have played in that specific combination of skill and class at least four times. If you just talk about Righteous Fire Characters… this is maybe my eighth. So on top of the emotional turmoil… I also feel like I have nothing new to say. I am not entirely certain what will happen in the coming weeks. I don’t want to force myself and make disingenuous posts trying to pretend like everything is okay. However, I also don’t want to get out of the habit of daily blogging. What is most worrying is that my desire to “cease to exist” has gotten much stronger lately. I am not so much worried about my suicidal tendencies, because I think I am good on that front. I mostly just want to flip off the television that has been my life for a while. That is a statement that probably makes no sense, but alas it is the mental pattern that has been playing on repeat lately. I feel disconnected from the world, but also the act of interacting with it… is a bit much right now. Anyways. Part of this blog has always been the open dialog that I have with you all. I sit here and pretend that no one is reading it, but I know there are folks for whom my daily pattern is part of their own patterns. I’m sorry that I have been less regular lately, and feel even more sorry that probably in the coming weeks that pattern is going to be less frequent still. I need to push past what I am currently going through and find a new sense of equilibrium. The only way out sometimes is in fact through. I’m also shocked as fuck that apparently I have never titled a blog post “Not Feeling It” before today. The post Not Feeling It appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Necropolis Changes Coming

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Good Morning Folks! Well… that was a rapid turnaround. Yesterday GGG released a post on their forums indicating what they were planning on doing to resolve the dissatisfaction with the Necropolis league mechanic. When a league has reportedly the largest drop-off in player numbers I am guessing Klaxxons start firing and the teams rush into action. We probably would have had action sooner had the league not launched over a holiday weekend. Anyway, it seems like every complaint about the league is being addressed in one form or another save for the most requested feature… aka the ability to just not do it. I think everything in the post is largely a positive step forward, but I still think players are going to want the ability to simply not engage with the mechanic in any form. The ability to itemize corpses immediately is a huge win however and even if I have to loot something to clear a loot pile… I can throw it right back on the ground easily.
I have continued to do some shifting of gear around and am now up to 88% max elemental resistance and have squeaked past the Chaos Resistance cap as well. I’ve also managed to bump my Armor up to 25k which is a bit lower than I would like it to be, but still a good place to be. Combine this with the fact that I am shifting 50% damage to fire, and will in theory soon be adding another 10% of that to chaos damage it should make me pretty freaking tanky. Now I am simply in the place where I need a bunch more levels. I am contemplating trying to get the ignite proliferation glove implicit and then shifting up my Berek’s Respite for something either with more survival or more damage potential. Truth be told I have zero of the desired eldritch implicits so that will come as I farm more content and get more eldritch currency.
I’ve made a bit more progress into my Atlas, but have largely been holding off on doing all of the red maps that I have been collecting. Kirac bumps up the difficulty of his missions when you start running higher-tier maps, and I was trying to use him to help me finish out the yellow maps. That said I have reached a point where I am just going to have to deal with it if I want to keep making forward momentum. When I hit 50 Atlas Passive points I unlocked my second passive tree, and it appears that the third unlocks when I hit 100 passives. I ran betrayal until I had farmed up most of the enchants that I wanted and have now shifted to a strategy with Niko, Scarabs, and Harvest. This morning I cobbled together a second tree with Einhar and Ritual since they both live on the same side of the tree. As I get more passives I will probably splash in Beyond to add more spawns.
Because of the changes to the Niko nodes, it feels like I am filling up on Sulphite so much faster than I normally would have because I need to run fewer maps to get all the missions completed. As a result, I have reached a point occasionally where I would rather be pushing maps than pushing depth, and the Einhar tree will be good for flipping over to when that happens. As far as Delve goes I have farmed out three Vaal cities and have my first Abyssal city in sight. I am still just slightly below the 100-depth mark because the abundance of cities has caused me to go lateral rather than vertical. I feel WAY tankier than I normally would at this point and have been surprised at how fast my RF Chieftain has come online this league. I guess it makes sense because having built this before, I knew going into it the way I needed to build it as compared to the RF Juggernaut.
Delve and Mapping combined have created a virtuous cycle as the cities usually have several map lootboxes in each. This one for example had three different map-themed boxes in the same area, and the thing I have learned over the years is that Delve does not respect your atlas progress. This means you can easily see maps in Delve that cannot drop based on the Atlas nodes that you have already cleared. The only negative of this however is that once you get your four voidstones… these maps will continue to drop at their face value rather than upgrading to T16. This is why I have so many red maps that I have been sitting on and trying not to run, as these loot boxes drop a mix of white, yellow, and red regularly.
The thing I was not expecting is just how prolific the scarab drops are in Delve. Essentially every single node usually drops at least one scarab. This one happened to drop three at once, which is an outlier but not outrageously uncommon. I feel like this is related to Scarabs being put on the general drop-anywhere loot pool instead of being tied to specific mechanics. All in all I think this is a really solid change and my scarab coffers are filling rather quickly. It is going to reach the point where I am almost always running some sort of additional content being added from scarabs. The only thing I wish is that we would get some sort of UI element that allows us to pick scarabs out of our bank from the map device itself. It becomes tedious picking out the scarabs you want to run and then going over to the map device to run them. When I was regularly farming the same content over and over I would just leave a stack of scarabs in the map device.
My big “project” at the moment is attempting to get a six-link Cloak of Flame. I bought a two-link that was really well rolled and then proceeded to get it up to six sockets and color those sockets for Righteous Fire. Now comes the tedious process of pouring every fusing that I get into the chest and praying. With my Niko mapping setup I noticed that I seemed to get Niko Scarabs dropping more often than others. I am hoping there is some hidden affinity and that by shifting over to an Einhar tree I might happen upon the Black Morrigan scarab and link the item that way. Similarly, my shift over to Ritual I hope may see me finding an Omen of Connections which would also be a faster method for linking it.
All in all for a league where I do not care one bit about the mechanic… I am having a shockingly good time. I am definitely looking forward to the changes that are likely to be coming in this week and will probably try and do a bit more crafting as a result. I am not sure it will benefit this character, but it might let me get some good gear for alts. I think my very first alt is going to be an attempt at creating Kitava’s Thirst DD Blaster because it looks hilarious. I made a Witch mule to get Rolling Magma at league start and I figured I would turn that character into that build. It may be a bit before I stray from the fold however because I still have a lot of things to unlock and some voidstones to get. The post Necropolis Changes Coming appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Iron Cave Chest Farm

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Good Morning Folks! Lately, I have been playing an excessive amount of Enshrouded. At this point I’ve put in around 50 hours and last night I hit the current level cap of 25. I still have a ton of the map that remains in the “fog of war”, and there are still some deadly shroud areas that I cannot adventure into until I upgrade my flame altar one more time. On the building front I have been slowly working on digging underground and at this point have dug out a basement and a sub-basement. I am contemplating starting to move some of my crafters down to this area because with all the bits and bobs associated with each of them the current crafting hall is getting a bit busy. In my travels, I have happened upon a few extra crafting machines so I have been setting them up down there just so I can produce more of the time-gated crafts at one time.
I also set up a new bedroom for myself down in the first basement area. I dug a little room off to the side and have set up some stone-themed furniture down there which is capable of getting my comfort level up to 36. As I can craft more of this stone-themed set I will probably replace the bookcases and then build out some armor and weapon storage in this room. Similarly, I am contemplating digging another side chamber and moving where my magic chests are to a more sheltered area underground. Not that there are really the accouterments of setting up a proper treasure room, but it would be nice to build some sort of hidden vault since there are doors for that functionality in the game. I might swap up the entrance to this bedroom with one of the stone “secret” doors.
Last night in my travels I found a golden chest that spits out max-level gear. For the uninitiated, almost everything in the Enshrouded world respawns on a timer. Currently, that timer is 30 minutes, but if you log out and back in… it refreshes all of those timers. So when you find one of these gear chests, you can in theory farm it over and over and over… which I did. I set up a flame altar just outside of the room with the chest and then played the logout and back in the game until I ran out of lockpicks. I will likely run around today and farm up a bunch more metal scraps and then repeat the process until I have gotten the gear that I want. I am always on team… get the best gear and then finish out the adventure.
Here is a map for how to get to the cave that I found the chest in. Like I said it requires lockpicks so you will have to bring a bunch of those with you. I photoshopped two screenshots together so that I could highlight the location of the two nearest spires. Essentially there is just this cave on the side of the hill and inside there is a ton of iron. There will be a rubble-covered wall, that stands out like a sore thumb because the rest of the cave is limestone and iron nodules. Dig through the wall and the chest will be on the other side. I placed my Flame Altar just outside of the chamber where the chest spawns so that I could keep the rubble wall open and not have to dig it out every time. You are going to need to have your Flame Altar upgraded to level 5 as you will have to cross through some areas that were previously deadly shroud to me at level 4. There are some areas you will need to skirt that are still deadly shroud but I did not have to pass through any of them.
There are a whole slew of armor sets that can drop from this chest. The fancy set that I have been wearing in these screenshots is called the Gloom Monarch set, and is sort of a generic survival/melee damage sort of affair. It looks very DeathKnight-ish which I dig, and I have yet to find anything akin to a proper pure tanking set. The other set that I keep getting is something more akin to a caster set that looks kinda like the Heavensward Black Mage armor from Final Fantasy XIV. Even though this appears to be a max-level chest, all of the armor is dropping at level 23 instead of level 25.
It also has a whole slew of weapons that can drop and I think I have seen most of the loot table at this point in either Epic or Legendary qualities. Essentially my goal is to get the sword and bow in legendary quality so it will have five affixes on it. I’m keeping one of everything that looks vaguely interesting and then sharding the rest for upgrade coins. I really wish that armor could be salvaged but apparently, the only option there is to delete it… which seems wasteful. The main reason that I landed on Nova for my main weapon is that it gives off almost as much light as a torch which makes exploration that much easier since I don’t have to keep swapping to my torch so I can see. The wand also has a decent amount of illumination, but not quite as much as the sword.
Also in my travels last night, I happened upon what is apparently the best glider in the game. This thing is ridiculously fast, almost too fast to actually control your flight. It was the top of a sun temple and I had to fight a giant bird in order to get it. In theory, you could probably loot the chest without killing the bird, but since I was up there I figured might as well get some more “chicken” and feathers. I figure I will farm out the orange versions of the weapons I like the best and then start gathering up the materials needed to upgrade my flame altar all the way to level 6. After that, I think the goal will be to uncover every corner of the map that is currently veiled. Past that… I guess we enter the TRUE endgame… which is crafting some more bases and maybe taking over one of the NPC towns for myself. The post Iron Cave Chest Farm appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Faces of Bel Revisited

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Yesterday I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. It started simple enough with a post from Ricki Tarr who posed a question like they often do, this time about your preference for video game characters. This led to me sifting through directory after directory of screenshots compiling “evidence” and eventually making a post in the thread. The question posed is not quite as simple of an answer as you might think. Truth be told I am not exactly sure how I ended up in this situation because it wasn’t always like this. I guess I should stop stalling and just get into the meat of the discussion.
When confronted with the character creation screen of a new video game… I create the same character over and over and that character is named “Belghast”. Yesterday I assembled this collage of 28 characters that I have played in various games and how they all mostly align to the same features. Given the choice my character will be light-skinned, have jet black or at least dark hair… occasionally gray if the black shader looks goofy, either a full beard of a goatee, and some sort of facial scarring preferably over one of the eyes if that is an option. Creating this character comes as naturally as anything else at this point, and I can pretty much chip away at the system and reveal the inner “Belghast” quickly.
When a game has a fixed character but allows for customization options… I will generally speaking lean towards bringing out the inner Belghast in that character as soon as possible. For example here are two screenshots from two different games, and in both, I have adapted the character that I am forced to play into as close of a reasonable facsimile of “Belghast” as I can. The piece that I have not really understood and continue to not… is how I landed on this particular vissage. On some level it is the idealized version of what I actually look like. I have brown hair instead of black, but I’ve always fancied black hair. There was a period in the past where I was super into The Punisher and one year for Halloween I dyed my hair black with that awful spray paint style temporary color and I think maybe I liked it enough for it to have embedded itself into my psyche.
I’ve often assumed that deep in my subconscious there is an action hero from my childhood that looked like this, and I just keep adapting my characters to that model that I imprinted upon. Thing is “bearded” punisher is a thing that did not exist during the time when I was actively reading that comic. He was a clean-shaven man of many guns… and of note, I was into Punisher in the 90s, before the facists decided to co-opt his branding. I was also really into Nick Fury, Wolverine, and Cable… so maybe this character that I landed on is a bit of an amalgam of all of those. There is also Chuck Norris but weirdly I was never into his martial arts movies in a big way. I saw more than my fair share of them as would any pre-teen/teen growing up in the 80s/90s but it wasn’t a big deal for me so I doubt it came from there.
Generally speaking my success at adapting to a video game is directly related to how good of a “Belghast” I can create in it. Sometimes I can’t and in those scenarios, I often create a female character. The thing there is that I want to be able to create something “beefy” and heavily armored. This is something I struggle with endlessly with games adapted from the Chinese or South Korean markets because they tend to feature hairless pretty boys and dainty waifs. Sometimes I just play female characters for a break and I am going to use an example from Diablo IV as the sort of character that I tend to create when given access to a character generator. I’m also highly partial to the female orc models from World of Warcraft because they are “Stronk” and battle-ready.
When none of these options really feel right… I sometimes play something inhuman. For example, when Destiny launched there was nothing available but clean-shaven characters, so instead I went for the robotic Exo. In ArcheAge I could not create a character with a decent beard, so I wound up rolling a cat person. I think more than anything that beard is probably the most important element. I get grumpy when a game has a weak beard game or the only beard options are “peach fuzz” stubble. I don’t mind a trim beard and I can get by well enough with something like that. Lately, I have created characters with pretty bushy beards in part because I kind of miss my own full beard. At some point, I switched back to a trimmed goatee/mustache combo and I keep contemplating growing back the full treatment. This is a post that zero people asked for, but sometimes that is what happens. For those who are curious… here is a quick rundown of the games all of the collage shots came from. In a top left row by row to bottom right order:
  • Dragon Age Inquisition
  • Cyberpunk 2077
  • Outriders
  • Phantasy Star Online 2
  • Guild Wars 2 my Necromancer
  • Red Dead Redemption 2
  • Wildstar
  • Guild Wars 2 my Warrior
  • Elder Scrolls Online
  • Starfield
  • Final Fantasy XIV aka Lala Bel
  • New World
  • Baldur’s Gate 3
  • World of Warcraft
  • City of Heroes
  • Enshrouded
  • Diablo IV
  • Dark Age of Camelot – The First Belghast
  • DC Universe Online
  • Fallout 76
  • Landmark
  • Monster Hunter World
  • Neverwinter
  • Skyforge
  • Star Wars the Old Republic
  • Secret World
  • Hellgate London
  • Fallout 4
I hope yall have a wonderful week and tomorrow I will probably post something a bit more meaningful. The post Faces of Bel Revisited appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.