Good Morning Folks, and I legitimately mean it this time. Yesterday was a pretty awful day seeing as I basically got zero sleep Monday night. I was feeling broadly awful by the time I sat down to blog, and was effectively dead to the world the entire day. I had taken the day off because I had heating and air folks out to do the winter checkup, and spent most of the morning cat napping on the sofa in spurts. I think I must have caught something from the handful of trick or treaters that came to visit, one of which a neighbor that hugged me for way the hell too long… and is probably the Typhoid Mary in this situation. Essentially last night I was in bed by 6 pm, and slept the entire night through minus a few fits and starts and trips to the bathroom due to the diuretic that I am on. I woke up this morning though feeling generally better about the world and everything surrounding it. I am still a bit froggy in the throat and congested, but the worst seems to have passed.
Suffice to say though I remember next to nothing about the day, and spent zero time checking into work and email, so I am sure I will have a deep avalanche of bullshit to dig myself out of. That is the thing that sucks about being management, is that even when you are off for a day… you still need to sort of be engaged or you end up seeing things fall apart around you. So hopefully nothing terribly awful happened yesterday during the day. Essentially I did not make much progress across the board, other than a little bit after one of my cat naps during the morning. I swear if I thought I could have slept the entire night, I would have gone to sleep at 2 pm in the afternoon. I only barely managed to stay awake until 6pm when the evening news was coming on, and at that point I decided it was worth risking it. I woke up around midnight feeling like it was around 3 am or so, but thankfully managed to get back to sleep without much hassle. I might be able to blame some of this on time change, which is always a beast… and is especially so when you are the only person in the house so there is no reality to properly ground you.
I did progress my Atlas a bit further and have now cleared all of the white and yellow tiers of maps, and just started reds. I also ran the Polaric Invitation this morning, and should be getting the Shrek one later today. I am generally way more concerned about unlocking those than dealing with Maven because ultimately there are two easy voidstones behind the bosses associated with red and blue altars. I also need a lot more of the currency associated with them so that I can hopefully get ignite proliferation on my gloves. I currently have fire damage multi on my gloves, which is fine… but I really need that proliferation. I could always go for a Medium cluster jewel, but that requires me to take points away from something else on my tree to make it work. I need to unlock the traits for Brine King so that I can eventually make a shift over to Purity of Fire and Tempest Shield and go block based with 90% fire res, but I am also lacking a Shaper Shield. I need to wait until I get deep enough in delve to start getting good bases before I even mess with that. Shaper Exalts are around 30 chaos so that is always a viable option but I really need more Delve and Harvest juice to funnel into crafting.
For the last few days I have been cursing Beast farmers because none of them seemed to be selling any beasts on the instant trade market. Apparently this was a bug, that kept them from listing beasts and it was fixed this morning. Over night the price of a Black Morrigan fell from around 400c down to under 100c. This meant that I was able to buy one and six link my Cloak of Flames that I had gotten to six sockets and gave appropriate colors earlier in the league. This league seems to be amazing for the general player, who just plays the game and spend the chaos that they get dropped on buying stuff. This league seems to be awful for anyone who used to juice maps and funnel resources into a storefront. Everything is cheap because there is absolutely no friction to sell your stuff. This means I can casually list all of the rejects from Tree Crafting for example, and log in the next morning to a handful of chaos sitting there waiting on me. This is freaking great, and feels so good… but it does have some weird trickle down effects.
Price checkers are deeply confused. I have used Awakened POE Trade for years now, to help me determine if anything that I picked up is actually worth selling. It does a few different things where firstly it attempts to estimate what it thinks it is worth, and it also brings up comps from the trade system in order to show you real world pricing. For example these gloves it thinks are worth as much as 2 divines in a previous league… but in truth because they are easy to craft with the tree are now worth maybe 10 chaos. So I am back to doing the thing that I usually do and just pricing things at fixed points. Has a good fracture? 20 Chaos. Has good stats but no good fracture… 10 Chaos. I mean you can technically craft your gear upgrade with the tree, but I also realize there are going to be a lot of players who are too lazy or too confused by the crafting options to actually do that thing. Granted at some point I am going to just have to get rid of everything that has not sold, but that is fine. I will funnel them into the disenchanter, as I am starting to finally do some shipments.
One of the things that I was seeking from Ritual was a good ArchDemon Crown to craft on. I have pulled a couple of them so far, but sadly they are only item level 77, and I need at least 82 to get level 20 gems on them. I was able to sadly pick up a perfect one from the trade market for 5 chaos… making the entire process of farming Ritual feel meaningless. I am likely going to shift my focus over to Delve and Harvest so I can get some crafting juice to start working on trying to get a 20/20 helm out of it. Once I get a six link helm, I will see a massive improvement in my damage. It was wild how big of a difference swapping over to a six link Cloak of Flames was this morning. It is not like I was struggling health wise, but the noticeable difference in damage intake was wild. I kind of dig how easy it seems to be focused on acquiring this specific thing now… since we have so damned many farming and crafting options. I feel like I might be to the point where I actually could go SSF in this game, because I have enough knowledge to figure out how to get what I need to get… which feels like a massive accomplishment.
As far as Tree Crafting goes… I need to shift to focusing on trying to get upgraded grafts. Other than that I will probably still focus on gloves because those are situationally something that I can still improve greatly. However I guess once I am done crafting I will just start trying to print some interesting uniques. The “Tree Tree” feels like it is one of those things that is amazing early in the game, but the utility of it peters out over time. I guess you can keep focusing on trying to get good crafting bases with the perfect fracture on them, but still… the utility of it diminishes over time. I love it however, and I really hope some version of it goes live, because it feels so good for getting a character up and running for the first time. You can create some very good items that propel you into maps, without needing to either know how to craft them or buy them from trade.
The weird side effect of lots of good rares, and freedom of selling things… means however that loot filters which base things on prices… make it feel like there is no loot in the game. I feel like juicers are going to have to relax their filters a bit because the loot is dropping… the filter is just hiding it because it no longer has the value that it once did.
The post Of Sleep and Beasts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I had a fairly miserable night, and I am hoping at some point today I can take a nap. I was struggling to breathe all day, and coughing quite a bit… then as I prepped for bed the wheezing got pretty awful. So I opted to take a breathing treatment thinking that it might help. This cranked up my system so hard that I pretty much spent most of the evening feeling my heart racing through my ears. I cat napped throughout the evening, and because I am now on diuretics… my bladder kept waking me up. Hopefully tonight I can get some proper rest because today is going to be miserable. Thankfully I had already taken it off, because I have the heating and air folks coming out to do their bi-annual maintenance. Earlier in the evening though, things were pretty great because I ran some Destiny Rising raids with Ace, and pulled the last of the exotic exclusives to the three raid levels.
At this point I believe I am sitting at 65 of 115, and I have switched over to a second tree that is focused on Einhar and Ritual in an attempt to either get a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to six link my cloak of flames. Whenever I get a surplus of fusings, I keep making attempts but so far have been unlucky, Since I am not running a Niko tree at the moment, it means that I am not progressing Delve. I got down to around 100 depth, and it was pretty comfortable, but I just need to grind out the rest of the azerite to make the resists and radius manageable. Resonators are selling, but not so much that they are overwhelmingly good money. Right now single slot ones are selling 2 chaos to 1 resonator, which is fine, and good enough to get some early currency.
What I am honestly making more currency doing is selling near misses that I have been crafting with the tree. I’ve focused on boots and got a good pair, and now am trying to pick up a better pair of gloves. I am looking for either gloves that are ready to go, or gloves that have a max life regeneration fracture on them. I tried my hand at printing amulets and there is just too much going on with those to make anything good. Boots and Gloves have been pretty reasonable, and I might go for a better helmet if I do not upgrade to an elder helm soon. That is really what I need to do, but I have not fought any Elder Guardians yet, and am simply not progressed in my atlas enough to get them.
These are the gloves and boots that I am using that I printed with the tree. Right now I am trying to get ignite proliferation on the gloves, which will help massively for eventually clearing the Breach Fortress encounters much more successfully. The chest that I am using currently is well within the “good enough” realm, especially since my ultimate goal is to replace it with a Cloak of Flames and then pick up the life mastery for not having life on your chest. The weird thing is, I feel like I am in a much more stable state than I normally do at this point in the league. I might start pushing to craft some better rings, if I can figure out the magic formula to spit out amethyst rings with high chaos resistance on them. I did spent my single solitary divine on a reasonable +1 fire gems and damage over time multi necklace, which was worth putting the anoint on it for endurance charges on kill.
I’ve set up my currency branches in a way to where it pretty reliably drops stacks of chaos. Now I wish these were stacks of Divines, but I will take what I can get. Everyone is scared to death of the gold node, that converts all currency to gold… because that would be the one time a Mirror drops and it instead gets converted into a stack of much less useful gold. All in all I am pretty happy with this league, and will continue to grind out progress through the rest of this week. However I think a nap is going to happen soon, or at least one will be attempted.
The post Rough Night appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Friday was the beginning of a new league in Path of Exile, and I spent most of the weekend grinding away at content. The biggest problem that I am having… is that I am enjoying the new Breach mechanic too much, and as such I went super slowly during the campaign. I only made it to Act 4 by the end of the first night, and it took me all of the day on Saturday to make it the rest of the way to maps. I was in my 70s during Act 8… so suffice to say that I was over farming the content. The only real benefit of pushing through the content quickly, is that you can make some early sales and also get some early deals on items that will eventually be far more expensive. I did manage to get enough early chaos to snag a pretty cheap immortal flesh that was well rolled, but other than that… everything was already inflated out of my price range by the time I hit maps.
Breach essentially exists in a few different forms. The main one works more or less like old school breach, except that once you kill enough encounters it will eventually stabilize spawning a new encounter in the center of the breach. These will either be Vruun the new mini-boss of the event, or several rare mobs. Quite frankly I find the multiple rares harder to defeat than the new boss because so long as you avoid his cyclone attack, he mostly just melts. The next version of the encounter is to defend Ailith, the new NPC for the event as she attempts to close the breach that has already managed to get a foothold in our reality. You essentially need to defend her against several waves of incoming attackers, and it is beneficial if you are careful when you burn your way through the breach walls to find her, because it is helpful to create chokepoints for the waves. The last version is the Breach Fortress, which puts you on an alternate map and makes you defend Ailith against 24 waves of spawns… with limited to no chokepoints to funnel the monsters. I’ve only managed to defeat one of these, and when you do… you have to rush back out through the maze and avoid walls that show up on your minimap in order to get out before the entire place collapses.
Breach itself, feels really rewarding, especially early in the league when you need pretty much everything. I am not exactly certain this is going to be the most juicy loot in the endgame, but it certainly feels good to just get a bunch of random stuff by closing one of these. Right now my favorite content is the unstable breaches, because I have enough damage to pretty reliably stabilize these each time so that I can farm the boss/rares that spawn once stabilized. More than anything though farming this content gives you Graftblood, which you can then use to spend on the Tree Tree mechanic as we referred to it Saturday during the podcast. I am not sure how this is going to shake out as I get deeper into progression, but I feel like the new version of Breach is going to continue to be beneficial. My only real complaint is that I wish I had some measure of control over which version of Breach I spawned. I greatly prefer collapsing breach and I feel like if we had tree support, we would be able to throw our thumb onto the scale as to which version we got.
I have not exactly figured out the “Tree Tree” yet, but it is really valuable while leveling to create five and six link chests. I got a relatively well rolled Six Link in Act 6 of the game, which allowed me to effectively power my way through the rest of the content with a fully fleshed out Righteous Fire. I am having a bit more trouble crafting items that are NOT chests… because it seems like I do not have enough control valves to craft the sort of items that I actually want. I have been trying to make a decent amulet, and it just does not feel like I really have enough control over it. What I am however producing is a lot of fractured amulet bases, which may at some point create something I could use to craft the ultimate amulet I am after. I have not been using the tree to print uniques or currency yet, because so far neither of those has produced anything good, and all of the foulborn uniques that I have seen are not really better than the baseline. I had hopes of a good Foulborn Cloak of Flames or Immortal Flesh, but none of the options seem to work well.
I am not generating much in the way of currency yet, so most of my gear is pretty crap. I did pick up a nice Immortal flesh and a decent Rise of the Phoenix, and then this is the six linked chest that I printed from the tree that is working very well. At this point I basically need everything… I need a good +fire levels amulet that I can anoint so I can start getting some endurance charges. I need decent boots and better rings, and to attempt to cobble together an elder helm. For the most part though at this very moment I am stable enough to keep pushing forward and I will fix all of these problems as I gather more resources and unlock more access to content. It always feels weird at the beginning of the league when you are poor and flying by the seat of your pants, but additionally I feel really strong for the crap state of everything. I am still running Purity of Elements which helps a lot, but at some point I will need to completely redo all of my gems to shift to the Purity of Fire version and then eventually drop the Phoenix shield for a +Life gain block shield.
The biggest part of this league are the grafts that you gain through doing breach and crafting them with the tree tree. Mine is specced to greatly favor Xoph grafts, and I am actively searching for better versions of Call the Pyre and Heart of Flame. Really the only truly important one of these is Call the Pyre which generates several fire tornadoes in front of me, which covers everything in Ash causing them to move slower and take more fire damage. This is a nice buff to both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap, and I can apply it easily through shield charge… which means that just charging around the map feels way more powerful than it used to. Heart of Flame on the other hand is essentially Molten Shell that you don’t have much control over. Any time I take damage, if it is off cool-down, it pops up a damage shield that will cause 80% of the incoming damage to go to the shield instead. I might start looking for an Hardening Uulgraft that gives Tender Embrace which causes me to regen life much faster when I hit low life, and also gain endurance charges.
I have picked up a well rolled Cloak of Flames, but essentially need either a shitload of fusings, an Omen of Connetions, or a Black Morrigan to link it. Getting it six socket with the right colors was relatively trivial given its low item requirements. Right now I have cleared 35 maps and when I hit 50 and get the alternate atlas tree I plan on speccing into Einhar and Ritual with that second tree to try and farm one of the items that quickly maxlinks an item. For the moment I am alternating between running maps and pushing delve so that I can eventually get down to a depth to start generating fossil crafting goods to sell. The tree tree is good at a few very specific things, but ultimately the bulk of crafting is still either going to need to rely on fossil crafting or recombination. Gambling and the Tree Tree are great at getting your build started, but once you need specificity you are back to the older crafting methods, unlike the Necropolis. Since you can no longer passively get recombinators, I have a feeling they will be in demand in the later weeks of the league.
All told I am having fun, but I don’t feel quite as driven as I have in past leagues. I am not sure if it is the simple fact that I no longer feel like I have to steal time to play. I have all of the time in the world since it is just me and the cats… and no one else to take care of. Gaming in general has become weird after the loss of my spouse. It was something I used to passionately do in bursts, because I knew someone was always about to pull me away from it. Now… I find myself taking breaks and walking away from it, just because I need to do so. I am having to make the pauses, because otherwise it just feels tedious. For example on Saturday I kept taking breaks to go work in the garage for a bit, which also led to the delay in getting to endgame. Figuring out how to do things… as just me… has been a bit of a weird trip.
The post Unfamiliar Arms appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This week we record an unstable show… and by that I mean a huge chunk of the conversation is about the adventures of Tam, Ash and Kodra in drafting the new magic “un” set. From there we talk a bit about Unstable being Legal in Commander for a small amount of time and the ups and downs of Iconic Masters. We talk a bit about the Curse of Osiris DLC for Destiny 2 and the ups and downs of it. This weekend Monster Hunter World Beta is available on the Playstation Network so we talk a little bit about it and Monster Hunter in general. We talk a bit about Reigns: Her Majesty and Fire Emblem Heroes 2.0 release.
