Good Morning Folks. I feel like I am starting to get back some of my gaming mojo. Since I do not really feel like running up a second character and gearing it… I am starting to invest some more effort into gearing out my Righteous Fire character. That said… you cannot stop me from being exceptionally cheap. One of the huge buffs would be to craft a helical ring… but in order to get a base that you can actually craft on that is not mirrored or split… they start at 110 Divines. I had not touched Heist in this league, but now find myself driven to start the process of unlocking things. There are honestly a bunch of really high dollar bases you can pull from grand heists that might make it interesting. A clean crafting base for a Simplex Amulet… is legitimately selling for a mirror for example. Basically it feels like it is time to start burning through my contracts and leveling up my rogues.
The problem with heist however is that I can never remember the rogue unlock order, so I am posting it here so I will have it in the future… and might end up throwing it over on my game tools page. Essentially you start out with three rogues Isla the Engineer, Karst the Lockpick, and Tibbs the Giant. Then in order to unlock the rest of the rogues you need to run contracts with specific ones in order to snag the next one. Isla is a dead end and unlocks nothing. Karts and Tibbs however each have their own trees to unlock so that you run a contract with each new rogue that you have unlocked until you finish out that branch of the three.
So last night I ran through the process of unlocking everything, and now I just need to level the rogues while collecting equipment. I could in theory just buy equipment from trade, but I am not even sure what I want. This is the piece where the depth of my heist knowledge falls apart because I have no clue what I should even be gearing them for. I think essentially skill speed is king, because the faster they can complete their actions the least amount of time that you need to stand around doing nothing. My friend Sloth recently did a stint on the heist crew of BPL so I might lean on his knowledge to help me get started.
Other than that I am still delving quite a bit. I still find this a terribly enjoyable mechanic where I can turn my brain off and soak in the experience points. I am getting really close to level 99, and since Delve is a pretty safe way of gaining experience I am trying to focus on getting that level before I do anything too outrageous. Essentially I am still slowly chipping away at the seasonal achievements and one of those will require me to hit level 100 to finish it off. I am slowly knocking out the infamous mercs achievement as I find them in maps. I have a big stack of Primordial Blocks maps that I am slowly working through using my Einhar tree with a Niko scarab. I am still hunting for that hideout, and I have seen it come up a few times on TFT but they always wanted 10 Divines for a portal. I keep hoping that at some point I will find it and I can be out of Primordial Prison. I legitimately would be rather running just about any other map… but I want that damned hideout.
Lastly I started trying to craft a new belt to replace my immortal flesh, and ended up settling on this one. Ultimately I would prefer to have one with level 22 enduring cry on it… but those are stupidly expensive and also hell to craft. I burned through a stack of resonators and fossils and about 6000 life essence before just sticking with this one and calling it good enough for now. I lost some regeneration but gained a heck of a lot of life thanks to that tasty 12% increased max life. This allowed me to pick up an abyssal jewel with corrupted blood immunity on it and drop the mastery from the tree that was giving me this. Which in turn allowed me to pick up another jewel socket on the tree and throw in another 8% Fire Multi/7% max life jewel this time with increased trap damage. I’m now over 7k max life and when I get my last two points I am probably just going for 5% life nodes on each of those and pushing that total up even higher.
I am also spending a little bit of time each day in Guild Wars 2, picking back up and working on my dailies and weeklies. I had fallen off the wagon hard with wizard chores before my world ended, so attempting to pick things back up. Guild Wars 2 similar to Path of Exile gives me little bits of focused gameplay and I appreciate that. I was in pretty much only long enough to knock out my fresh dailies yesterday, but in doing so I am starting to chip away at my weeklies. I might actually tag up one night and run bounties if there is not a group currently active to knock that one out quickly. Catching Of Mists and Monsters… and one that actually succeeds is going to be the challenge. Essentially my goal is to finish out my weeklies every week going forward, which means needing to start chipping away on them earlier than Saturday… since doing all of them in a weekend can often cause me to faceplant.
Anyways… I still am not okay, but I am maybe starting to get back into the swing of things. Yesterday was my first day back and it went okayish. Today is my first real day back in the office in five years… so here is hoping it also goes okayish.
The post Unlocking the Rogues appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.
We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.
However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.
The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.
Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.
Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.
The post Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, we start off talking about Four Job Fiesta and how Ash’s playthrough is going as he takes the donation route to fix his class choices. Bel talks about the Absolum a new demo up on Steam which mashes together Streets of Rage, Hades, and Darkest Dungeon into a really fun Roguelike Beat Em Up. From there, Kodra talks about his recent foray into Minecraft Dungeons and how it is a really good entry point to the ARPG/Diablo-like genre. Ash has been revisiting Guild Wars 1 and talks about his progress so far. Thalen shares his early thoughts about Persona 5 The Phantom X and how it seems to be a non-egregious gacha. Finally, Kodra and Bel go on at length about the current Path of Exile league.
Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.
I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.
I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.
This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.
The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.
Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.
Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.
Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.
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