Good Morning Friends! I have to admit that I am somewhat shocked that I am still as engaged with the Forbidden Sanctum league in Path of Exile as I am. Like I have said before this is effectively my third league and with each league, it seems like I slip further into madness. Path of Exile was one of those games that looked deeply interesting from the outside but that I struggled to actually find purchase on its sheer rock face of complexity. This game is not friendly to new players and even more so neither is its community. That is not to say that they are rude or cruel or anything of the sort, but more that they don’t realize how far they have come in the evolution of understanding the systems within systems that is the game they are playing. “Noob” friendly guides are very much not, because they all require a level of understanding that I am just now arriving at some 600 hours into playing the game.
Take Zizaran for example, who is probably the most community-friendly streamer, and youtuber for Path of Exile. He releases copious guide videos in each league, and it is only now that I am beginning to fully understand them. For example yesterday he released this guide video on how to craft a perfect bow for Explosive Arrow. While for me it does seem pretty straightforward, it would not have when I started. Firstly it assumes you know how to get essences or even what they are as well as how to get divine orbs and exalted orbs, and the dumb things like what it means to “annul a suffix”. It is a beginner guide for someone who is already indoctrinated into the game and all of its concepts. The thing is… playing through the campaign teaches you none of this information and it is only gleaned by reaching a point where you have the items in your inventory and understand what exactly the tooltip means.
I think this obtuse complexity is what makes the experience so damned compelling for me because the more I dive into it… the deeper the well seems to get. I am not specifically trying to pick on the community but if you approach this game the one thing that I would love everyone to understand is just how much of a struggle it is going to be to really engage with it. The game has been adding new roughly every three months over the last decade. I had no understanding of just how many of the systems I engage with regularly… we reworked over 2022 until I watched this year in review video. I also now fully understand why folks were so enraged by the ArchNemesis changes because they were extremely “fresh” in their minds. I love this game but also it saddens me that it is ultimately going to be an uphill struggle to get people to engage with it.
As far as my gaming time goes I have once again swapped up my Atlas tree and have removed everything involving Ritual Altars and instead packed on Metamorph nodes. In Lake of Kalandra encountering a Metamorph was more than likely a death sentence because they all had upwards of eight ArchNemesis mods tacked onto them. Now they are still a bit of a struggle but one that is more winnable and the rewards for doing them seem to be extremely solid. Since I have largely divided up my two characters into Bossing and Maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and Delve and Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… Metamorph is way more feasible.
When I say Metamorph is very rewarding as mechanics go, I’ve seen multiple divines at once drop from a single monster. I’ve seen many exalts drop and stacks of chaos along with all sorts of other useful resources. This is not every single time mind you, but the way I am specced into the tree gives me a bunch of organ drops as well that I can then take to Tane and summon additional monsters with. I also have the trait that allows Rogue Metamorphs to show up in my maps, and when I finish a map with Tane in it I can summon a second Metamorph. Of note when I got that double divine drop, I was running a low red tier map that was magic quality with very little in the way of quantity or quality modifiers on it. In fact most of the time lately I am not even bothering to “Alch and Go” but instead just dropping a Transmutation and maybe a few Alterations on it to reroll to something like extra magic creatures.
Right now I tend to alternate between mapping and delving, and I have my atlas configured so that even if I don’t have Niko on the map I am going to get a little bit of Sulphite from defeating the boss. When I fill up my Sulphite from the Necromancer I dive down into the depths and burn through nodes looking for interesting things. I’ve now fought Kurgal, The Blackblooded twice aka the Lich’s Tomb encounter in an Abyssal Sanctum. In the grand scheme of things the fight is completely doable but there are a few mechanics that I need to at least be somewhat aware of. There is a beam attack that you need to line of sight behind some pillars because it seems to increase in damage the longer it is on you. There are two phases but the second phase seemed to largely be a pushover. It seems like you are guaranteed one of the uniques from Kurgal’s loot table as well as other assorted rewards. His thing seems to be armor pieces aka gloves and helm that have abyssal sockets on them.
I am continuing to plumb the depths looking for Aul the Crystal King, because I want to be able to start farming that encounter. There is a nice necklace that can drop from it that seems to be useful for a great number of builds. Other than that I am slowly acquiring items to make a run at a seismic traps build. I’m also pouring little bits of resources into upgrading both Righteous Fire and Summon Raging Spirits builds as well. On the trade front, I am still doing fairly brisk business in small trades and had replenished everything that I had spent chaos-wise before doing some shopping for Thalen last night. He paid me in divines for my effort, which means I still have the resources but have slightly less liquid chaos than I did before. Profit is a means to an end however and for me, it is all about unlocking easier access to nice things.
I’ve had more fun in this league than in any of my previous attempts combined. I am not sure if it is that I am understanding the interplay of the systems better, or if I simply chose better builds to play. Whatever the case I have a feeling that my life will be dominated by this game for awhile now.
The post Kurgal the Blackblooded appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I am going to apologize ahead of time, but you are going to get another post completely full of Path of Exile nonsense. We are continuing my descent into madness… literally as I keep going deeper into Delve game mode systems. Last night I discovered Abyssal Cities and I am now on the lookout for as many of these as I can find. Since I missed the launch of the Delve league some four years ago, it floors me just how complete this game mode really is. While you do have to keep running maps periodically to build up a stockpile of Voltaxic Suphite to power your crawler friend and light the way, other than that you can pretty much get anything you could in almost any other game mode down in the darkness. I’ve gotten roughly a dozen Divine Vessels and a couple of dozen Offering to the Goddess that just drop randomly from stuff down in the depths rather than having to hope and pray you to see any of them above ground.
From what I understand there are three kinds of cities that can be found underground. The first is the Vaal ruins that I had been exploring previously and these supposedly start showing up somewhere around a depth of 30. I found my first Vaal city in the 70s, so your mileage may vary of course. Abyssal cities that I found last night and that are highlighted on my Subterranean Chart above in a yellowish outline start showing up in the low 100s. Primeval Ruins are the third kind that I have not seen yet, and those appear around 170 depth. Each City type can have a boss node, and I’ve yet to encounter any of those… and ultimately that is really what I have been searching for. I have a tunnel system around 70-80 depth that has produced five or six Vaal Cities, and last night I opted to dive down deeper and start expanding out around 100ish and almost immediately stumbled onto this first Abyssal City.
Because I got distracted by doing other things… I did not get nearly as much time underground. However, in my limited time, I managed to pull out all of those resonators sitting in my bank. Pending those resonators sell at least as quickly as my previous batches and for the same prices that is roughly 110 chaos worth of items that I pulled out, not counting a few nice pieces of gear that I am selling individually. I tend to price my items just high enough that I am not going to get instant sales which would interrupt the flow of my evening. Instead, I expect to throw items up cheaper when I am more in the mood to field trade requests. If someone wants to pay my inflated prices though, I am willing to stop what I am doing… waste a portal, and go make the trade. I will never be an auction house oligarch but I am making more than enough currency to keep fielding my nonsense plans.
Speaking of currency, I saw my first raw divine orb drop in the depths. This is only the second Divine Orb that I have seen in this league. I’ve seen an Exalted Orb or two in the dark below which keeps building onto my theory that almost anything can drop off node encounters. So far I’ve yet to see anything that is influenced by Elder, Eater, or Exarch so I am guessing that those items are probably limited to bossing or bossing adjacent activities. I have however seen a number of Synthesized and Fractured items below as well as more than a fair number of delve-specific explicit modifiers on items. I only know this because I continue to keep using Awakened POE Trade to price-check anything that looks like it might hold value, which tells me how good the rolls are on a given item and will call out league-specific mechanics.
I am absolutely certain that from this point forward… I want to go into Delve earlier than I did in this league. I am having a freaking ball with my time down there and getting enough currency to be able to fund upgrades to my builds. This is far from a high-yield currency strategy, but it seems reliable and also something that I already enjoy doing. The wide variety of items that I can see is honestly what keeps pushing me forward. I love seeing things that I have yet to see drop, and that happens way more often in Path of Exile than it does in a game like Diablo III. By midseason in D3 I have seen literally everything but Primal Ancient versions of things, and it all sort of blurs into this giant haze of orange text. Sure most of everything that drops is ignorable, but in every round, there is at least one thing that is worth hovering over to check the roll.
The last big thing that I did yesterday was spent some time respeccing my Atlas tree. I was already leaning into Delve a bit, but I removed “Wandering Path” and took all of the notable nodes associated with Niko as well. Basically, in Path of Exile the “trees” are comprised of small nodes often referred to as travel nodes, and big nodes which are referred to as “notables”. Wandering Path is a specific strategy for the Atlas tree which the effectiveness of all of your small travel nodes, but makes it so you get zero benefits from any of the notable nodes. This is great for when you are finishing your Atlas because every map you run will shower you with new maps to fuel your further exploration. However I am getting more than enough “map sustain” through Delve, and I no longer really need it from mapping as such I opted to focus on Strongboxes, Smuggler’s Caches, Ritual Altars, and Delve. I might whittle further into the atlas tree to try and pick back up Essences but for now, I am happy enough.
So essentially I am maining Righteous Fire and focused with it on progression in Delve. I have no clue what I am doing with Summon Raging Spirits in the least, or what I can really do to that build other than shift it to poison. I just am not sure if I care enough about it to fix the problems I am currently having with it. I am getting that old familiar itch of wanting to start something else to play with. I really want to see what the Seismic Trap life is all about, so I might be going down that path at some point soon. I am still periodically playing “BelginnersLuck” as I attempt to get Hillock to drop a unique and am to the point where if I am fast enough I can kill him before he can do the regeneration phase. I am so completely consumed with Path of Exile and all of its deep systems. I have no clue when I will climb back out of this chasm I have dug for myself, but for the moment I am happy.
The post The Abyss Stares Back appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Well, my friends, it is far from the morning, and I am finally doing my first proper blog post of the year. Technically, I could have just called this a loss because of the holiday, as this is the day I actually got off officially in lieu of New Year’s day. I guess I should start things off by wishing you all a Happy New Year. My morning was less than fun because I spent it dealing with technical difficulties in my main machine. I finally sorted it out and it was thoroughly dumb, but not before I uninstalled Steam… without remembering to back up all of my games that were on my C drive. This isn’t the end of the world because most of my games were actually on another drive, but it will require me to reinstall a few things. I went completely down the wrong path because the Xbox Game Pass app apparently mounts a bunch of virtual drives and I got super confused sifting through event viewer thinking it was a hard drive failure.
I am still deeply enthralled in Path of Exile and more specifically the Delve mechanic. In past leagues, I had spent a few minutes exploring the dark depths, but never really engaged with it fully. I knew enough that I liked it, but was largely focused on mapping as my key progression path. Instead, I poured my heart and soul this weekend into Delve and made pretty solid currency for me at least. More than enough to fund several key set pieces to improve problems with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. All told since diving into Delve I have produced somewhere in the neighborhood of five divines worth of currency. Granted I have also spent about two divines worth of that same currency righting the ship on my build as well as funding a few upgrades for one of my friends. Suffice it to say I am shocked at just how well it has worked, and I have a feeling in future leagues I will dig down into the ground well before this point if for no reason other than it seems to be a stable source of funds.
For those who have no clue what I am talking about, Delve was a league mechanic from roughly four years ago which involves exploring the depths under Wraeclast for fun and profit. Essentially the cycle involves running maps for Niko to collect Voltaxic Sulphite which you then use to power The Crawler which is essentially an automated tractor-like thing that plods along fixed courses stringing lighting along behind it. Each “camp” presents you with a series of monster spawns and gives you some sort of rewards like gear, divination cards, raw currency, and azurite that is used to upgrade how far you can delve safely and the radius of your light. The light is key because the monsters in the depths take no damage if they are not in some light source, and you eventually take significant damage yourself if you stay in the darkness too long.
Sometimes the rewards are significant, like this node that dropped a who slew of maps including one that was unique and a unique hybrid flask. Other times it might be a few dozen chromatic orbs, but the sheer volume of “bubble gum” currency is large enough that it is very likely you would never run out. Thanks to my adventures in the deep I have recolored several items for folks and even managed to six-link a few things. While it isn’t always going to be exalted orbs or divine orbs… you end up getting enough raw chaos to make the entire journey feel worthwhile. Where the real money that can be made however is selling the delve-specific items like resonators and fossils, though the later you really need to find someone wanting to purchase them in bulk.
Deep down veiled in darkness are a number of interesting things. The only ones that I have really found yet are Vaal Cities, and I have found I think five of them so far. Each node in a Vaal City involves opening up a chamber filled with corrupted monsters and a dozen or so chests full of loot. The above example is from my completing a single Vaal Chamber. All of the mechanics that can spawn in maps, seem to have nodes down in delve as well and I have taken down a number of Harbingers, Beyond spawns, and even some Breach and Abyss nodes. From what I understand as long as I keep expanding the network of tunnels it will keep spawning new nodes to explore off to either the right or left of the central column. In the second screenshot of this blog post, I did some cut/paste work and pieced together a ton of individual screenshots to show how far I have explored one side so far.
All of the currency that I am generating is allowing me to resolve some of the problems I had with my resists and survivability. At this point, I have upgraded most pieces of gear so my next target is likely to go find better quality versions of each unique that I am using. When I cobbled together the build in the first place I bought the cheapest versions of each that I could afford, and now that currency is a little freer and that Poison SRS is the flavor of the week taking some of the pressure of RF Juggernaut prices I might be able to pick up some deals. I had some moments with the build where I doubted if it was my jam, which is ultimately what led me to roll my own SRS-flavored build. Now that I have invested some more currency in the build I am enjoying myself again.
The real question I have though is if I am going to spend any more time investing in the SRS build that I currently have. There are some significant survival problems with my current build-out. My resists are not in a horrible state, so really I think the problem is that I either don’t have enough spell suppression/block or really need some more regeneration and armor. I could pivot my build into the Poison SRS variant, but that would involve a pretty significant investment at this point. I am just not sure if it is worth it considering that I would probably rather be spending currency on Righteous Fire. Summon Raging Spirits however is a much better bossing build, so if I could solve my mapping survival I could probably use it to catapult progress into finishing the major bosses. I guess I need to make a concerted effort to explore my POB and compare it to what I would need to change to pivot over into the Poison variation.
There are other games that I am interested in… but right now Path of Exile is tweaking all of the dopamine centers in my brain. I am going to stay with this ride until it eventually drops me off somewhere a spent husk of a human.
The post Digging Too Deep appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played Since 2012
Well my friends it is time once again for me to drag out the spreadsheet porn and share with you my gaming habits from the last year. Since this post is likely going to see some fresh eyeballs who have never experienced this level of nonsense before let me give you a high level of this project. One of the cool things about daily blogging is that it gives me a pretty solid record of what I was doing at any given point since April of 2013 when I embarked upon my first daily blogging journey. I also take fairly meticulous care of saving my screenshots and have a collection sorted by game and genre that makes up well over 50,000 individual files and takes up around 140 GB. This has allowed me to more or less reconstruct my playing habits back to 2012.
For years I used a service called Raptr, but when it died I lost something that I considered to be a relatively valuable resource. I knew that trying to keep track of hours played was a fool’s errand and for Steam games that interface did a relatively good job of that. Instead what I wanted to track was whether or not I played a game in a given month. This was a simple data point that allowed me to view how my tastes in gaming shifted over time. The pattern that emerges is that I have a dozen or so “forever games” that I shift back and forth between, and a number of games that I visit for a month or two. Since starting this nonsense I have logged 374 different games that I have spent time playing and of those 236 have only been played for a single month.
Exploring Games PLayed in 2022
Games Played Longer than 3 Months in 2022
This was very much a year of forever games for me it seems. I spent a lot of time visiting old favorites, and this is also the year that I finally “groked” Path of Exile and allowed it to start dominating my life. The above list is every game that I spent time playing for more than three months. Some of these are going to be terribly deceiving because for example, you would think this year is dominated by Final Fantasy XIV and that would be a lie. What I did throughout the year was log in every 4-5 days and either go house shopping or retrieve my money because I failed to win a house in the lottery. Similarly, I played Guild Wars 2 quite a bit for several months in a row, and then have fallen into a routine of logging in and farming the guild halls for resources or doing the occasional world event, but not really spending a massive amount of time there.
Fallout 76 has been something I have quietly played off and on whenever the mood hit me, and it wasn’t really that I started actively talking about it until the rest of AggroChat got into it. New World was a major force in my year because I was either playing in maintenance mode for the first few months, playing on the PTR for the middle of the year and hit rerolling and hitting the game extremely hard for the last few months of the year. I decided to track World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha/Beta separate from World of Warcraft as a whole because I very much approached the game from a more clinical tester mindset. I’ve not actively played World of Warcraft legitimately since December 2020 and as such have not paid for a subscription either. Basically, my time in Dragonflight did not really feel like I was truly playing the game because I was playing a series of disposable characters for each testing session.
Apparently, I played Torchlight Infinite More than I thought
The game that sort of surprised me for how long I actually spent playing it is Torchlight Infinite. The weird thing about that is that I don’t really particularly like the game. I got into it from a testing standpoint and between mobile testing and PC testing, I dipped my toes into the water for six separate months. It isn’t a bad game necessarily but it isn’t exactly a game that compels me either. Similarly, I kept trying to play Monster Hunter Rise and never really attached to it. Whatever magic that kept me glued to Monster Hunter World for as long as it did seems to have passed because from what I can tell Rise is essentially a spiritual successor but I am just not finding it nearly as enjoyable. Lost Ark is similarly a game that I kept trying to enjoy, finally giving up on it and moving on with life. I am not entirely certain what it is about that game that I don’t enjoy but it is very much “not for me”.
Total Number of Games Played in Each Year
Something that I started doing last year is adding a bunch of graphs to this shindig. There seems to be a weird ebb and flow pattern arising from the number of games I played in a given year. There are years where I churn through a lot of games, and then years that I play significantly fewer. Considering the number of “forever” games that I engaged with, I would have thought this was going to be a low-count year I did have an exceptionally frantic few months in the beginning. January, February, and some of March I was a game-finishing machine. I was all about the single-player lifestyle and seemingly catching up for so much lost time. I thought that trend would carry forward but apparently, that did not, and starting in March I was diving hardcore into Guild Wars 2 and really finding a place for it properly in my life. Basically, I approached it with the level of gusto that I had Final Fantasy XIV several times in the past. Once that trend started it seemed to reignite my play of shared world games where admittedly I still mostly play like a single-player murder hobo.
Top Games of 2021 compared to 2022
Another thing that I like to do is compare the top games that I played this year against the top list of last year. The first thing I noticed as a trend is that this is the year that I effectively stopped playing mobile games. There is a period of time when lay in bed attempting to let sleep claim me, and that previously had been a time I played random mobile games. I would play a game for a few months, then when I got to the point where it started needing a financial investment I would bounce and move to another one. Instead, I have spent more time sifting through things like Instagram and Tumblr rather than playing a game. I have to be honest, the mobile gaming experience is fairly miserable in general on Android and I don’t really find that I am missing it.
I played an awful lot of Action RPGs, and while I had distanced myself from Diablo 3 in 2021… it made me miserable doing it. So this year saw a bit of a resurgence as I allowed myself to play it once more. I also branched out and played a lot of other games from Path of Exile to Undecember. Last Epoch is actually shaping up now to be a game worth playing and I am actively looking forward to the multiplayer client testing. Elder Scrolls Online and Destiny both fell by the wayside further and Guild Wars 2 really moved into the forefront of games I care deeply about. GW2 had been a title I had struggled to really understand for the better part of a decade and finally for whatever reason this past year it clicked for me. New World continues to be a major force in both years and while I was very much in a depressed state about the future of that game at this time last year, this year gave it a brand new lease on life.
Games Played Since the Start of This Project
Comparing my Top Games of All Time from Last Year and This Year
I am shifting things up a bit differently this year. In the past, I had posted a snippet of the larger chart and it didn’t really mean anything. Instead, I am looking specifically at the total months played counts at the end of this year s contrasted with where we were at the end of last year. World of Warcraft has finally been dethroned, but admittedly this is only due to some trickery and me not counting my time spent testing Dragonflight as me playing World of Warcraft. If you added the 4 months that I tested Dragonflight to the Warcraft totals, then you end up with Final Fantasy XIV finally tying it. For me, my “truth” is that I was not actually playing World of Warcraft but instead focused on rigorous testing and writing bug notes, so that is ultimately how I logged it but I could see the argument the other way around.
Destiny fell to third, and I found it funny that Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift all held their relative positions at Third, Fourth, and Fifth. I technically did log into Rift and play for a little bit but not terribly munch. I was feeling nostalgic and trying to figure out what the hell I was doing the last time I played largely drove any of those feelings from me. Guild Wars 2 and New World shuffled the order as did Minecraft. You are not reading that wrong… I did in fact play Wildstar this year admittedly with the emulator server client that is deeply incomplete but I will be keeping tabs on that as it progresses. I do feel a bit bad because if trends continue to follow by this time next year Everquest II will have most likely been pushed off the list.
Games Played Longer than Six Months
Something that I started last year is charting all of the games that I have played for longer than six months in total. You can really see that there are six games that have dominated my landscape for the last decade and that is Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Destiny, Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift. Of those I am no longer really playing World of Warcraft or Rift, so their influence will continue to be diminished while games like Guild Wars 2, New World, and Path of Exile are starting to gain ground. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in another decade if I keep up with this nonsense. I had been fairly regularly playing Magic the Gathering Arena but I largely stopped that. I am not entirely certain what led to me not playing it, but it has been ages since I have even booted it up to claim free cards, let alone sit down to play an actual game.
Another thing that I started last year is keeping track of my longest streaks. What I mean by that is the most months in a row that I have played at least some of the game. This list changes a lot more slowly because while I may shift through several games in a year, it is very rare that I keep at them for more than a few months at a time. New World is gaining ground as a serious contender at twenty-three months so far, and Path of Exile while much further back in the pack is gaining ground with seven months. It is going to be very hard for something to top the salad days of Destiny and how active I was in that game. Thirty-Three months is going to be extremely hard to top and even Diablo 3 had its streak broken last year.
Another Year in the Books
Sometimes I roll into this post with thoughts about what might be on the horizon for me as a gamer or blogger, but this time I really don’t know what the next year might hold. I thought last year that I would be focused more on single-player games, and while the first few months were definitely that… I quickly fell back into my shared environment gamer ways. I am so far removed at this point from regularly gaming with others, that I wonder if I will ever get back to my “pugging” for hours at a time sort of ways of my past. I’ve not raided in any form since 2016 and even then I was not the most serious raider. I think I might have largely closed that chapter in my life and instead, find comfort in having other people around… but doing my own thing.
For those who might want to go back in time and see how this series has evolved, I finally actually created a proper category on my blog for it. I know it only took me seven years to get around to doing this. I think one side goal is to do a better job of charting this data as the year is going on, rather than having a flurry of activity in the last few months trying to catch everything up. Another thing that I want to do is dive back into Guild Wars 2 and finally finish up my Skyscale so I can fly like a proper player of that game. Maybe even finish my Epic Weapon that I started and then largely walked away from. I would love to be able to dive back into Final Fantasy XIV but I wonder if that game is “finished” for me. I am feeling about it much like I felt about World of Warcraft at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The narrative was wrapped up in a clean and satisfying manner and it is going to take a lot to really engage me in quite the same way as I had been for the last ten years.
What are your goals for the coming year? Do you think this whole game-tracking project that I keep doing is pure nonsense? Feel free to drop me a line below. I hope you all have had a great holiday season and that you have a phenomenal start to the new year.
The post Games Played 2022 Edition appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
