Good Morning Friends! It has been almost a month since the start of the Crucible league, and I thought I would talk a bit this morning about my experiences with the league as a whole and why this is probably the best league I have participated in… even though the actual league mechanic is a bit of a dud. I discussed this the other day but effectively I have been “really” playing Path of Exile for the last four leagues: Sentinel, Lake of Kalandra, Forbidden Sanctum, and now Crucible. While I technically dabbled with the game before that, I didn’t “really” play the game with any purpose or direction which is sadly a key part of the Path of Exile experience. During that time each league has improved my personal experiences and I think the core behind this improvement is my willingness to embrace the trade mechanics within the game.
Prior to Kalandra I technically played in the trade league but never interacted with it. In Lake of Kalandra, I barely touched trade other than to solve a few very specific problems, namely finding some key uniques for my build. Starting with Sanctum I began legitimately trying to acquire currency and used said currency to solve problems with my build and ultimately started to dabble in actually selling goods on the market. With Crucible I was a functioning part of the economy from the very first days of this league and immediately set up trade tabs as I was playing through the content, making a few bits of currency off things I happened across but were of no use to me at the time. So it is by no coincidence that we are less than a month into the league and I am sitting here with three endgame viable characters and a mountain of currency to do pretty much anything I want to do in the future. Embracing the trade economy meant that I could fix problems with my builds pretty easily and get to a functional state within a very short time with each of them.
I will admit… the version of me that started seriously playing Path of Exile during the Sentinel league would have found this deeply distasteful. I’ve hated the idea of having to rely on auction house economies in games before, and this is even worse considering all trade takes place in person. The truth is however that trade practices are so automatic at this point in the community that most trades take less than 5 minutes and often go through without a single word. I’ve also found ways to make currency with the methods of play that I enjoy the most, and without specifically doing things for the purpose of currency generation. The above is a snapshot of my inventory on 4/12 when I was starting to gain a little bit of chaos and again this morning showing my war chest of funds that I can use to either improve my current builds or create something new.
Exilence is a third-party tool that will scan your stash tabs and evaluate items that are stored in them. I do this periodically to find anything that I might be sitting on that is worth a good deal of currency. The curve is somewhat choppy because I have not taken snapshots of my inventory very often this league, but you can see a steady increase from only having a few Chaos Orbs to having an estimated value of 15,949 Chaos Orbs or a little over 72 Divine Orbs in roughly a month into the league. Most of what I just said is probably absolute gibberish to the uninitiated. Essentially Path of Exile is a game without a gold equivalent and when you sell items to a vendor you get crafting resources. Some of these crafting resources have become cash equivalents due to the mechanical value of the game. Essentially the common scale goes a little something like this.
Common Trade Currencies
Chaos Orb – Randomizes the Modifiers of a Rare Item – The Dollar Bill of Path of Exile
Awakened Sextant – Used in Generating Map Sextants – 5.8 Chaos Orbs
Honestly relatively new pricing tool but gaining popularity in this league.
Exalted Orb – Adds a new modifier to a Rare Item – 14.7 Chaos Orbs
Divine Orb – Randomizes the Numerical Values of a Rare Item – 220 Chaos Orbs
Mirror of Kalandra – Creates a Copy of an Item – 57200 Chaos Orbs
Generally speaking, small trades are priced in Chaos, larger trades in Divines, and absolutely massive trades are when you get into the realm of the Mirror. Mirrors are this weird investment vehicle as it tends to go up in value as the league goes on because there are folks who only play individual leagues for the purpose of getting cheap mirrors. A Mirror of Kalandra goes for 118,400 Chaos Orbs in the Standard League and since all currency dumps into Standard at the end of a league… the value slowly trends upwards towards that Standard League price.
I’ve rattled off a bunch of prices, and you who are not indoctrinated at this nonsense are probably thinking… “Bel how the hell do you know this?”. Every trade economy needs a price guide. For sports cards there was Beckett, for Magic the Gathering there was Scrye, for Comic Books there was Overstreet, and for Path of Exile there is POE.Ninja. POE Ninja serves as the neutral arbiter of price based on trade volume data pulled from the official GGG Trade Website and offers up various APIs that other applications can use to facilitate price checking. So when you price an item at 2.2 Divine Orbs… the community as a whole just knows that what you mean is 2 Divine Orbs and 44 Chaos Orbs, 484 Chaos Orbs, or some other equivalent of readily used trade currencies. There is some natural fluctuation throughout the league but generally speaking, they stay in fairly narrow bands other than the Mirror which always trends upwards.
Through the use of loot filters and a general increased understanding of what makes something sought after in Path of Exile, I’ve gotten better at “eyeballing” something to determine if it was worth anything. When in doubt however I run an overlay called Awakened POE Trade that allows me to price check an item by mousing over it and pressing Ctl+D. This pops up a dialog window that shows that POE.Ninja thinks the item is worth it and has a number of active listings for the item. So while the estimate is 119 if you convert up the sextants you end up with a current trade value of 116 chaos to 121 chaos roughly. This current trend of pricing things in Sextants is a bit weird and so far folks tend to still prefer dealing with Chaos instead. So I could probably price this card out at 120 and it would move quickly.
So at this point, you are potentially asking yourself… “Bel how exactly do you make currency?”. Just like in life, there are a ton of get-rich-quick schemes that the YouTuber community will try and convince you of. Most of these strategies involve bulk selling relatively common and inexpensive resources through third-party sites like The Forbidden Trove or TFT for short. I don’t do this. I just play the game in the way I like to play it which means I tend to focus on Heist, Delve, and running maps to fuel those two league mechanics that I enjoy. A lot of strategies revolve around your Atlas Passive tree and for me, I focus on a few basic things like Shaping the Mountains and Skies to give you free bonuses from your map device and then went hard on Delve, Strongboxes, and Heist. Then I put a good deal of points into Metamorph to give me more boss rewards and Shrines to give me more pack size in my maps. Most of my mapping however is largely a fun means to an end to give me Sulphite which allows me to go do more Delve and to provide contracts to do Heist.
Delve is without a doubt my favorite part of Path of Exile. I just find it so chill to roam around in the procedurally generated labyrinth of madness. More specifically my favorite thing to do in Delve is to hunt for cities, which coincidentally pay out a lot in the way of interesting things. While hunting cities I go diving down tunnels looking for Resonator Caches which are a fairly plentiful but rarely farmed resource. For whatever reason… mapping is the primary focus for most of the Path of Exile players and Delve tends to be more of an acquired taste. This means specifically as folks start trying to craft ever more and more ridiculous items they will need more and more resonators and fossils in order to do this. Early crafting tends to be the realm of Essences and late crafting tends to be all about combining a certain number of Fossils to give you the heist chance of rolling that perfect stat combination.
So through this somewhat casual interaction with the game, I am accumulating trade value without really meaning to. Resonators come in four sizes and currently, their value looks something like this:
1 Slot Resonator – 1.4 Chaos Orbs
2 Slot Resonator – 1 Chaos Orb – No Clue why these are less popular
3 Slot Resonator – 3 Chaos Orbs
4 Slot Resonator – 30 Chaos Orbs
This is what I have gained from a night of chill gameplay doing delve, and if I were to liquidate it all right now it would be worth 545 Chaos Orbs. The disturbing thing about this is when I do list resonators, it is like turning on the hot light at a Krispy Kreme, and within 10 minutes I will be completely sold out. Similarly, I have started selling off my Awakened Sextants which I am not really using, because mapping is not my primary game mode and I sold 4 Divine Orbs worth of those in about 5 minutes. On top of this, I have made a bunch of 5, 10, and 20 Chaos Orb sales throughout the league of random items that I picked up off the ground and price checked because they looked interesting. This is all stuff that I am doing while I am enjoying the parts of the game that I actually enjoy… rather than going out of my way to try and build a “money-making strategy”.
I’ve been able to take that currency that I am accumulating over time and convert it into the items that I actually need to solve specific problems in my builds. Admittedly I am just as much of a tightwad in the game as I am in the real world… and I kinda hate spending money even when the money is fake and only really matters so long as the league is active. There seem to be specific brackets of spending that give you different effects. You can stabilize a build for a few Chaos here or there getting your resists in the right place. For around 100 Chaos you can set up a build to where it runs extremely comfortably and will let you complete your Atlas. For upwards of 10 Divines Orbs you can make a build generally feel really good and of note… all told for kitting out three different characters I have maybe spent 10 Divines in total. Then the order of magnitude jumps significantly and for example, I was looking for a replacement Sceptre to the one that I crafted for my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… and to get what I really want on it the price tag shoots up to 50 Divine Orbs.
Personally, I am pretty happy to be playing characters that “feel good” in that 100 Chaos Orbs to 2-3 Divine Orbs range. I would rather build several characters that are specialized in different sorts of activities than pour 100 Divine Orbs into a single character that can do everything that the game has to offer. Slowly I am working towards trying out the last few bosses needed for my Void Stones on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and if that requires some additional gearing… I might actually do that. However for meme characters like my Explosive Raging Spirits Necromancer… I think I am good where it is and might actually completely respec that character to try out some ideas I have for a Wintertide Brand build. Embracing the existence of the trade economy is ultimately what gives me the freedom to play whatever I want to be playing.
I could be frustrated and grinding away looking for the perfect drop, or spending all of my currency in the hope of maybe just maybe being able to craft that perfect item. Instead, I would rather convert resources that I am passively gaining through playing the game in the manner I want to play it… and then buy the items I actually want. Admittedly this is not a play style for everyone and I get that but I have made peace with the existence of the trade economy and become a thriving part of it.
The post Embracing Trade League appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night was the culmination of a “bad ideas” project that I have been working on for a bit. I leveled a Necromancer up through Kitava and geared it out yesterday, then tested the sort of content that it could do. You might remember that I played a Fire-based Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer some last league and enjoyed it quite a bit. This league as my third character I decided to go down that path again but take a slight detour into “Minion Instability” land. For those unfamiliar with that keystone, it makes it so that Minions explode when reduced to low life and deal 33% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies. So essentially I am using Summon Raging Spirits to create bombs, which then nuke my enemies with a baptism in flames when they get low on life.
This entire build started when I stumbled onto a helmet in my travels. I was looking for a better version of my pseudo-six-link helm that I use for Righteous Fire when I came across this monstrosity for 5 Chaos. I snapped it up because my brain immediately went to using it for some sort of Explosive SRS build. While I would have liked it to have higher than a level 16 Minion damage gem, the important bit for the explosive goodness is that level 20 Minion Life. Essentially this makes it so my Summon Raging Spirits will have the following setup:
Summon Raging Spirits
Burning Damage
Concentrated Effect
Minion Life
Minion Damage
Fire Penetration
Combustion
Lifetap
+2% Critical Strike Chance
Generally speaking for a Necromancer build I would have looked to get a good Skin of the Lords with a useful keystone on it. However this league Skin of the Lords starts at 5 Divine Orbs for one with a crap keystone, and the only one available with Eldritch Battery is 59 Divine Orbs. This caused me to pivot and just lean into a bunch of gear with Armor and Energy shield. Other than the fancy shield that I just added last night, in total all of my gear could be purchased for a single Divine Orb, and you would probably still have some change left over. The pseudo-eight-link helm for Summon Raging Spirits allowed me to shift my chest to effectively become 3 four-links summoning different alternative summons.
Zombies / Spectres / Stone Golem
Minion Damage
Minion Life
Feeding Frenzy
This leads us to bad ideas item number two for this setup. Tavukai can effectively replace Infernal Army as a way of shuffling my angry skulls off this mortal coil as it deals them 20% of their maximum life as Chaos Damage per second. That gives my SRS a maximum duration of 3 seconds which is just about long enough to fly into range of the enemies and explode. When I was shopping for a Tavukai I noticed a number of them were corrupted with various abilities, and one had Golem Commander which gives me 40% increased buff from my Stone Golem and lets me summon two of them. So all told that gives me a maximum load of the following minions:
7 Zombies
2 Stone Golems
2 Spectres
8 Raging Spirits (largely limited by how fast I can actually click the button)
I geared my character out before taking down Kitava in Act 10, and pretty much instant-phased that fight. Then I went over to the Uber Labyrinth and while I did not get the achievement for insta-gibbing the boss I did burn through each of the Aspirant Trial phases super fast. From there I opted to test my mettle against a T1, T6, T11, T15, and finally a chain of T16 maps. I also decided to try a couple of fully juiced metamorphs in the laboratory as well, and for the most part other than a couple of dumb deaths to lockboxes I breezed through the content. I would say this character is extremely comfortable to run content on in its current state and could probably be scaled to do a lot more damage once all of my gems are actually level 20 and I have the rest of my passive tree points. This is what my build looks like as of today.
There are some glaring problems that I could fix given the time and desire to do so. Namely, I would like to get my block chance up much higher so that it properly acts as the defensive layer that it should. Additionally, there is the problem that I am not elemental ailment immune, and unfortunately, I don’t have enough mana reservation for the easy button way of fixing that with Purity of Elements. I am overcapped on my resistances but I am not really sure how I could fix that without regearing entirely to remove some of those resists, but it just means that I don’t have other stats on my gear to replace them. All said though I am pretty happy with this “bad ideas” character or at least happy enough for my third viable character of the league. The biggest immediate issue is just my low life pool of only 3500 health.
I have to be honest… this was more of a thought experiment than an actual character that I intended to do much with. Right now Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire are just stronger in their current state, and could be even stronger if I spent more currency on upgrading them. I mostly just wanted to see what this would do, and now that I have… my curiosity is satiated. My side project interest turns to a discussion I had with Ashgar yesterday about maybe trying to build a Wintertide Brand character, but I am not sure if that will actually happen. I would like to get a Scion up if for no reason other than getting the achievement for clearing Act IV with that class. Other than that I would like to finish getting my void stones this season, but that either requires a lot of farming T14 or higher maps looking for guardian map drops… or just buying the fragments I need to summon the fights.
This has easily been my best league so far, but it is a bit sad given that so few have dropped off the game. However, I’ve come to realize that the grind of Path of Exile is enough to keep me happy for the time being.
The post Exploding Your Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I hope this week is excellent. Last week was a kick in the teeth as far as weeks go, so by the time I reached Friday evening I was just too exhausted to start anything new and unfamiliar. So as a result I did not get engaged in Star Wars Jedi Survivor until Saturday morning, as I wanted to start the game with fresh eyes and a good perspective on life. I am playing on PC and I had a really good experience playing at 1440p and at the default settings which are a mix of High and Epic. I did not have any significant instances of slowdown other than one place on the first real planet where there is just a massive volume of particle effects.
That is absolutely not the case for everyone. Digital Foundry who obsesses about PC detail and performance has decreed this the worst Triple-A PC Port of 2023. When we recorded the show on Saturday night I found out that Tam was bit by this problem. My system is fairly beefy with an 11th gen Intel i7, RTX 3080, and 16 GB of ram… but so is his with a Ryzen 7, RTX 3070, and 128 GB of ram. Both are systems that should have run the game at 60 fps at 1440p without any issues. It did on my machine but it absolutely did not on Tam’s which led him to refund the game on Steam and pick it up on the PlayStation 5. Basically, I am throwing this out there so if you are on the fence… maybe wait a bit on the PC version of the game.
When you boot up the game, it is going to give you a warning message stating that the game is best played with a Controller. If you are most comfortable with a keyboard and mouse, then I would ignore this completely. I remember the first game having this warning as well, and I took its advice and bounced off the game pretty quickly. It was not until I stuck to my guns and played the game with my more greatly preferred mouse and keyboard input that I made it all the way through the game. Essentially I am telling you to take this with a grain of salt. There is one thing that frustrates me greatly though. While you technically can change some of your keybindings on the PC, you can’t change all of them. For example, I want to change dodge to something other than tab… because that feels like a keybinding decided upon by Joe in Accounting. So if you play with Mouse and Keyboard there are going to be some things you are just stuck with.
At this point, I don’t want to talk a ton about anything that would venture into the territory of spoilers. The game is gorgeous and manages to do something that so few games do. It allows you to pick up effectively where you left off without having some narrative device that caused you to forget everything you learned in the previous game. You effectively start with all of the movement and traversal abilities that you had at the end of Fallen Order and rapidly add a few new tricks to your repertoire including apparently the Jedi Mind Trick. The last bit I have admittedly only used once so far, and it was during a speech dialog, but I can influence animals with the force to either calm them or agitate them and get them to attack baddies.
The Tutorial Planet takes place on Coruscant, giving us an amazing romp through the lower levels of the machine city. After completing that mission arc and refreshing yourself on all of the movement, you are set loose on a much more open planet allowing you to explore fairly freely. This gives the game a bit of a Breath of the Wild feeling, though the exploration is not quite THAT free but you do eventually unlock the use of animals as gliders. You also open up a new lightsaber stance which is the ability to break apart your lightsaber into two sabers and fight dual-wielding style. This has absolutely been my jam so far and I am investing heavily in the ability to throw my sabers at enemies.
There are way more friendly folks scattered throughout the world that you can help out. There is also the introduction of Boglings, which serve a similar function to the golden birds from Ghost of Tsushima in that they occasionally lead you to the next objective. You can of course pet the Boglings which is super pure. The detail of the world is so much better than in the previous game. Fallen Order suffered from the problem of several tunnels and areas of work looking pretty similar to other areas. I know this was really bad on Kashyyyk, and caused me to get completely turned round at several points. Navigating here by visual landmark seems to work much better for me at least, but they have also improved the 3D mapping system if you need to lean on that instead.
Over the weekend I played all of the way through the Tutorial planet and unlocked everything that I think I can currently from the second planet. This led me onto the third planet… which frustrated me to the point of shutting down the game and going back to Path of Exile for a while. This third planet is “the floor is lava” the planet, and is comprised of shale piles that you can’t walk up without sliding down… and some sort of sandworm-like creature that can detect your movement and jumps up from the ground to eat you. Which means you have to do a series of annoying wall runs and duck from shelter to shelter while traversing the early areas. I opted to bail out because I did not want to tarnish the great experience of that second planet. I am sure I will return to it at some point this week and deal with the frustrations.
Probably my favorite aspect of the new game is that I can finally have a beard. Look this is important to me. I also can fiddle a bit with different styles of gear and assign some basic color options. My hope is as the game continues there are some really cool-looking options. What I really want is something akin to Obi-Wan’s Jedi Battle Armor from the prequel series. I have a few pieces of tactical armor that I have picked up but nothing quite that grand. As far as the story goes, it isn’t terribly interesting as of yet but does seem like it is going to bridge the gap between the Kenobi Series/Rogue One era of Star Wars and the burgeoning High Republic era. Nothing really has grasped me though story wise other than the desire to “get the band back together”, as all of the characters went their separate ways at the end of the first game.
I think that is probably all I will talk about for now. Expect more attempts at spoiler-free updates on my progress. If you were going to play this on PC… maybe wait for a patch for two until someone like Digital Foundry calls the all-clear.
The post Jedi Survivor Early Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This show was one of those times when random discussions that we did not plan happened. Firstly we had a bit of an impromptu discussion about the Dungeons and Dragons movie which also led to some non-movie discussion. From there Bel talks about his life as a Path of Exile Vendor as he has become increasingly immersed in the trade market as a seller. Tam and Bel talk quite a bit about Jedi Survivor and how it is a more open game and might even draw some connections to Breath of the Wild. Kodra talks about Lone Fungus and Ash about Everspace 2. From there we fall into some unplanned discussions about how games seem to be moving away from Holiday Season release schedules, and then we get off on this tangent about the Gameboy.
Topics Discussed:
