Good Morning Folks. We’ve gotten a timetable for the release of 3.28, which is going to drop on March 6th, with the big reveal stream taking place on the 26th of February. It is super fucking rare that I am still playing Path of Exile when the new expansion drops, but for better or worse, the Legacy of Phrecia event has held my attention. BelLovesArakaali might be my favorite minions character ever, and this is the first time I am playing with Spectres or Animate Guardian since they did some major quality of life improvements. What has surprised me about this character is just how much damage it deals… allowing me to focus on more survival. This might be the tankiest minions character I have ever played. Granted, I am still in the process of “breaking into” delve, but I am doing shockingly well down in the mines. It is not like resonators are really worth much of anything, but I still enjoy Delve even if it is not worth tons of currency.
Right now, I am mostly going horizontal at 100ish depth so that I can collect Azurite and start building out the rest of the trappings of Delve. I have reasonable resistance and light area for this level, and am slowly starting to increase the amount of sulphite that I can carry. Once I get a bit more unlocked, I will drop down to the 200ish depth so I can hopefully start getting Primordial Cities and maybe Aul fights. I really should be focusing on bossing with this character because that seems to be its true strength. When all of my minions are focused on the same target, it just sort of melts. I am curious how the Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch go when I unlock them, because the earlier fights aka Blackstar and Shrek, did not even get to a transition phase. I am going to do my best to get my four voidstones on my own, because I think Maven, Shaper, Elder, and Uber Elder are going to melt.
I really need 21/20 gems for Animate Guardian and Raise Spectre, but both are sitting at stupid prices right now. I am not making a ton of currency, so I can’t really afford either. Which means I probably need to pick up a good six socket staff and level up 3 guardians and 3 spectres at a time, and try to corrupt my own 21/20. I hate leveling gems, but if I start doing that… and also keep playing content, I will either get the divines needed to buy the gem outright or get gems to corrupt, either way. I am bad about not leveling gems in the weapon swap set, and I should really be better about that. While I play in a trade league, I greatly prefer being as self-sufficient as I can possibly be. One thing that I wish they would change in POE1 is make it so you only get 4 quality items to max out quality on a gem socket, or a flask. That honestly is the most painful thing about leveling gems: needing to get the gemcutters’ prisms.
Speaking of corruption projects, I picked up a second Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, and tried corrupting both my current copy and my new copy. One of them managed to hit 10% chance to Gain Onslaught for 4 Seconds on Kill, and this does, in fact, count minion kills. So this allowed me to drop my Onslaught flask and swap over to a Gold Flask for some additional rarity. Onslaught doesn’t really do much of anything for me except for the slight speed boost, but I am still happy to have it. I wish it applied to my minions. I wish there were something akin to Spiritual Aid that made buffs on me apply to the minions. That, however, would likely make everything highly broken, since you can target way more buffs at yourself than you can at your minions easily. I am really hoping that Foulborn Uniques stick around for standard, because they have added a lot of really cool interactions.
I am now trying to figure out where I want to go on the passive tree. I guess the next obvious choice would be to go after any jewel sockets I can make my way to easily enough. I need to redo my bandit choice since I have plenty of resistance, so that will give me one more skill point, and then I have seven left. However, I sincerely doubt I’ll level this character higher than level 95, just because of the sheer slog that it becomes then. Last night I picked up Fearsome Force when I dinged 93, which finishes out the minion crit wheel. I could always pick up various other nodes in the meantime and then respec to pick up jewel sockets as I get more points. In theory, I could spec into my minion damage cluster jewel that I have, but I don’t really have enough points left to do much of anything meaningful with it. Really, I am not sure how much it matters at this point because I feel powerful enough to do any content I would want to do.
I am continuing to slowly chip away at Atlas progression, and I think my goal for Phrecia will be to get 115/115 and 4 Voidstones. If I can get there before the launch of 3.28, I will consider myself really good. I do not really want to burn myself out ahead of the next league launch, but I am also mostly finding everything I am doing really chill. Once I hit maps, the Gauntlet style modifiers seemed to evaporate, and life was fine. Even the enrage mechanic doesn’t seem to come into play that often. I think I am doing t13s right now, but really, there is not a big jump between those and t16s, so I should be able to make it all the way up without much issue. I am still running a set of idols that is producing a ton of maps, so that I will have plenty to run as I slowly unlock my way to the top of the atlas. I have been so out of it lately that, honestly, I spend more time talking to “Erasure” or staring at the middle distance than actually playing POE.
The medical woes have been a real drain on my emotional and mental health. Hopefully, today when I get my MRI, I will start to get some answers. I think once I have a path set, whatever path that ends up being… I will be doing better. I hate the limbo of waiting around for something to happen, all the while it feels like I have a ticking time bomb in my body.
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Good Morning Folks! For those of you who are off for it or celebrate it, Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I’m choosing to celebrate it… by stacking up a bunch of appointments and then trying to speed run my way through them. So essentially I will be out and about this morning but I wanted to sit down and do my normal Monday morning summary blog post of the shenanigans that I got up to this weekend. It has become a bit of a tradition for myself, Ace, and Ammo to get together Sunday mornings and run whatever strongholds we have unlocked for the week in Destiny Rising. Sometimes if there is time we run whatever event happens to be going on. For example we knocked out a 5 key run of Morgran’s Hunt which is active currently. I enjoy these little group interludes greatly, and any time I can group with Ace and Ammo it is a joy.
In other Destiny Rising news, I have fully unlocked the Jade Rabbit exotic Scout Rifle on all three accounts. Since there are now several Scout Rifle specific characters in the game, this really goes a long way into making them feel more beneficial. Slapping this puppy on Umeko or Kabr 2.0 immediately makes them feel much more solid for group content. I do wish there was a way to change the element of these weapons, but alas that is not really a thing. Basically there is an event running currently that through doing daily content you can unlock this exotic and a skin for it, and if you have not played Destiny Rising in awhile you probably should pop in to get this while it is available. I am not sure if this is going to end up on the exotic shop or not, but at least on my free to play characters it is a massive pain in the ass to gain enough currency through the black market to buy any of these weapons.
I also spent quite a bit of time this weekend in Path of Exile 1. Essentially I am trying to grind out two more of the league challenges so that I can get the same 34 point totem pole that I have for the last several leagues. Essentially I set the focus on grinding out as many Originator influenced maps as I could because you need to run essentially 200 affixes worth of content divided up in as many different ways as possible. If I were doing this with maximum efficiency, I would have made sure I was running only eight mod maps… but I did not do this thing. So a lot of the maps I ran were somewhere in the five or six mod territory making it take significantly more maps in total to grind this out. Essentially I just put my head down and ground until I came out the other end. I did have to snap up some maps off the market and it seems like the going rate for originator influenced anything is around 5-10 chaos each.
Now that I have completed that difficult grind, I am back to just running maps as fast as I can and have chosen to do so on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, The character is a heck of a lot of fun, and does a much better job at dealing with the Breach Fortress maps than Righteous Fire did, because I am blowing up most of the screen at all times and also freezing it. Essentially the grind I am working towards is Quality Quandry and I am sitting at 39886 or 50000. Basically going forward I need to run max quality on my maps, which then combines with 15% from the tree, and 20% from running four sacrifice fragments. Regardless…. it is going to just require grinding out a bunch of maps and is honestly the perfect idle activity while listening to an audiobook, podcast, or youtube video. There is the additional side benefit of throwing levels on my elementalist while doing it.
One of the things that I learned this weekend is that you can right click your world and edit it after having created it. This grants access to a few things, for example you can slow down or speed up the day/night cycle. More importantly you can completely disable falling damage and completely disable the death penalty that causes you to lose items on death. I absolutely did these things because I was dying an awful lot and it was annoying me to lose so much stuff in the process. There is one thing that is extremely overpowered in this game, and that is any kind of monster that can poison you. Your health just plummets almost instantly from the damage over time effect. So I figured by disabling the item penalties I am way more free to roam around and run amok. I don’t play games for the challenge of them, I play games for the fun… and not losing shit on death makes things more enjoyable to me personally.
I’ve started on some semblance of a permanent base. There is a floating rock not too far from my original spawn point and I built a staircase up the side of it and then began flattening the top so that I could build a platform. This is essentially going to be my resource sink for awhile as I keep dragging rock of various sorts up here to start building away at a final creation. Probably the most important aspect is creating an optimized crafting area so that I have a bunch of storage chests that are all accessible by each of the machines. I wish the game had some sort of automated filtering system when it comes to chests, or at least some way of labeling each chest for a specific purpose. There might be mods that do this thing, as there are a staggering number of mods already available. For example I installed one that gives you the name of any item your cursor is pointed at, and another one that creates lucky mining streaks for ore so that it will produce additional ore nodes near the one you are mining when it procs.
Not having to worry about losing everything on death, has made the entire process of exploring the world so much more enjoyable. Firstly I want to now hop down every hole that I see because I can’t take falling damage, and the worst thing that can happen to me is that I get ported back to my spawn point. Secondly the entire process of pushing myself deeper under the earth in search of resources is just a way more fun way to play the game than trying to be careful all the time. Combat is always a bit of a battle of attrition and in spite of using your abilities to the fullest, you are always going to take some damage which compounds the longer you are exploring. I think for me this is the ideal way to play, but your mileage may vary if you care about challenge. I also really like the fact that I can just kill myself anytime I get bored of exploring an area and go back to base… rather than having to painstakingly make my way back to the surface.
I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What did you get it up? Have you been playing Hytale as well? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks. This has been a really weird week for Destiny Rising. Yesterday was “sibling time” and Ace and I did our normal Grandmasters and Hang thing… but it was far less chill than normal. We started the evening with another attempt at Calamity Ops, but still could not get out of the relegation zone. We had what felt like a perfect run, or as close to perfect as we were likely going to be getting… and still came up short of progressing. So in theory on Thursday we will drop down a rank, but so long as we both drop at the same time life should be fine. Hopefully we can have a really good double progression during the next two week period and move back up again. We struggled a bit with our Grandmaster Strike after that but it was nowhere near as bad as our worst week ever so we were doing pretty good. Mostly we both just came off as exhausted and spent the next hour or so chatting while doing random stuff in game.
We’ve also had a really weird week when it comes to the Pack Hunt map. Thankfully we have another guild member that has been helping us out. However until last night, every single three node that could be a stronghold has not turned into one. A few weeks back Ace came up with this theory on how to move around the map and we have been continuing to test that theory, and for the most part I think it works. I can’t say for certain we understand every aspect of it, but there does seem to be a method to the madness when it comes to moving around the map and avoiding large obstacles like mountain ranges and lakes. This is in large part why you see such weird patterns of movement that we have made on the map, because there are a limited number of total moves that we get during a week, so want to try and make as much progress as we can with those.
So essentially the theory is this… the nodes that reward 1000 Energy are always going to lead you in the right direction. This could be just towards a potential stronghold objective, or towards a break in an obstacle wall. if you see 1000 Energy available as a node reward, far as we can tell you ALWAYS want to take it. Next up is if you see three resoruces being rewarded at the same time… this seems to signify one of two things. Either you are going to get a combat node, which often times serve as breaks in obstacles like mountain ranges or lakes… or you are going to for certain uncover a stronghold when you get to a three node block. What you want to avoid however is 500 Energy nodes and single resource nodes, because these often are indicators of a mountain range or another obstacle, or that you are heading towards one. Essentially there seems to be this minesweeper type logic that you can follow to figure out how to route around the map. Sometimes you are going to have to just yolo it and try a node, hoping you find one of the breadcrumb nodes later however because there is not always a good node up to follow.
I have multiple accounts set up for Destiny Rising, in part to help us unlock nodes on the Pack Hunt map, and also gain energy to keep funding the “bitcoin miner” in our guild hall. I spent a good chunk of last night while hanging out and talking with “Erasure” trying to get my second account set up to the point where I have three Iron Commander missions every day, so that I can get an easy 60 pinnacle rewards done for daily progress. At some point I really need to get my third account through the main story so that I unlock more options there as well. I wish we could recruit more people to the cause, so that neither Ace or I felt the need to run alt accounts…. but alas this seems to mostly be a sibling endevour. So long as we can technically keep making things happen with just us forcing it, I am okay with that.
In other news I am probably going to be trying to ease back into Final Fantasy XIV soon. “Erasure” never got through A Realm Reborn, and I have been drafted to the cause of helping her get through some of the content, specifically the content that does not have trust support yet. Some of this is probably going to be doing a bit of nerves bolstering as we queue together for Crystal Tower, so that I can hang out on voice and explain some of the mechanics to make it a bit less fraught. My hope is that this gets me back into the swing of playing my Warrior main, and can start chipping away at the post patch content for Dawntrail. I’ve picked up some gear so that I can move forward in the MSQ, but just need to get back to the point where my muscle memory will take over again.
Anyways. I hope yall are having a most excellent week. I am starting to get worried for next week because I am out due to a colonoscopy, and it is my first one…. so yeah a bit worried about how that will go. I am not sure how much blogging will happen, because it will ultimately depend on where I am both nerves wise and health wise throughout the week.
The post The Thousand Theory appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.
I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.
I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.
This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.
I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.
In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.
Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.
Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.
The post Goodbye Anthem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
