Toxic Rain Champion

by

Good Morning Folks. One of the side projects that I have been working on is a Toxic Rain Champion. I’ve played Toxic Rain before and I have played so many Champion builds… but I have never played Toxic Rain ON Champion. Mostly I am going down this path because I am somewhat tired of Lightning Arrow, yet I also seem to be drawn to creating at least one bow character each league. Clearly, I am doing this wrong because I should be playing my normal Lightning Arrow set up with the new Elemental Hit of the Spectrum instead. I may respec at some point and do this because so many perfect elemental bows are being crafted with the league mechanic that nearly perfect bows… are dirt cheap. However, I am a weirdo and seem to crave doing a thing in spite of it not necessarily being the optimal scenario.

I am loosely following some templating with the tree that ends up creating a wildly different structure than I am used to. I have plenty of regrets to respec this later, but for now, I am going with it so that I can learn the whys of this particular pathing structure. Specifically, I think it is due to this weird snaking column of nodes that do damage over time instead of the normal pathing which puts you down a path of scaling additional arrows and crit. There is a lot of devoting nodes to flasks… and I might remove all of that because I am not sure it is actually worth it. My goal in life is to never have to hit my flasks… and a lot of the scaling is specific to life and mana flasks which I hope to reach a point of never actually having to hit.

I am already off the path because one of the things I have always hated about Toxic Rain is managing wither stacks. I hate withering step full stop. So instead of running toxic rain in both a Mirage Archer setup and a totem setup… I am shifting things up a bit and mixing in Toxic Rain of Withering which went in as a transfigured gem last league. The idea is that the totems debuff while dealing damage and then my Mirage Archer setup deals the bulk of the damage output. Alternatively, I could swap my main link to Withering and then swap over to a Manaforged Arrows setup instead of running totems. Similarly, I have seen folks play this as a full totem build with a link devoted to manaforged arrows to apply culling strikes and withering.

One piece of tech that I am playing with that I have never done before is using Despair as a Blasphemy support aura. I am only going down this rabbit hole because I picked up this necklace and wanted to play around with it. Essentially it gives me some damage over time, chaos damage scaling, decent life, and makes it so that Despair has no reservation if cast as an aura. Since I run around a lot dropping totems and proccing Mirage Archer I am often touching pretty much every mob with this aura. Which means I am stacking withered easily and also rebuffing them with despair… causing a significant escalation of the chaos damage I am dealing.

I am also playing around with a chestpiece that I have contemplated using a few times in the past, but never actually used. Basically it has really high armor and evasion, increased flat chaos damage, decent life, and some buffs to life leech. Unfortunately that last bit is going to require a rework of my tree to make functional, but I feel like it is going to be worth it. I am also desperately needing some mana leech so that I can drop clarity at the moment. I am in a very raw state with this build because I just finished off the second Kitava last night and have yet to do anything to fix my gearing woes. Basically I am going in a direction but it is going to take a lot of fiddling to see if this direction is going to pay off.

I have a number of issues to resolve before I really figure out how well this is going to work. Right now I am running Purity of Elements and I would like to stop doing that at some point. This means I am going to need to cap my resistances through another means as well as figure out a way to deal with elemental ailments. I am too low-level to swap over to the onslaught belt, and am wearing Tanu Ahi to make up for not having that at the moment. I would love to use a Death Rush, but I am not sure if I can make the gearing work out as I need to make up for a lot of resistances and spell suppression and might need that ring slot. Anyways… it is going to be a bit of fiddling around before I can get this build into a workable and stable state.

AggroChat #474 – Decade of AggroChat

by

Featuring:  Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! On April 13th of 2014, we recorded the very first episode of AggroChat so last night the stars aligned just perfectly for us to be recording on our ten-year anniversary.  We start the show by discussing a few different AFK games, namely Gnorp Apologue and AFK Journey.  From there Bel talks a bit about the new Fallout TV Series and how it nails the setting and tone of the game.  Kodra and Thalen talk a bit about the latest Bluey episode Ghostbasket.  Kodra and Tam discuss their experiences playing together in Helldivers 2 and then Kodra and Bel talk some more about the Path of Exile Necropolis League.

Topics Discussed:

  • The 10th Anniversary of AggroChat
  • The Gnorp Apologue
  • AFK Journey
  • Fallout TV Series
  • Bluey Ghostbasket Episode
  • Helldivers 2
  • Path of Exile

Not Feeling It

by

Good Morning Folks. This is going to be one of those posts that occasionally shows up on my blog that is of a more personal nature and that I do not go through any effort to syndicate. Both last week and this week I missed a blog post, and I have to be honest… sitting down to write this one was more of a chore than I would have expected. I’ve thought I was doing okay… but maybe that is less than truthful. I feel like I am on the cusp of another “turtle mode” or a period of time where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world does not exist. All I find myself really wanting in life is to read my books and play my games and forget the world exists.

What prompted this current funk? I think it is largely work-related stress. Tuesday was the last day for one of my co-workers, one who had become my confidant and closest companion over the last decade. He stepped into the team lead and supervisor position that I vacated when I moved up to management, and he had been one of those people that I could just always rely on to do what needed to be done. Unfortunately, the person who I always assumed would step into his role… vacated the company last year leaving me with this feeling of having to start over from scratch. There is someone who has been trying to step up significantly and fill the shoes that were left behind, but it is going to take a lot of work and as such I am spending so much emotional effort trying to make sure things continue to truck along as they should.

I’m just sort of feeling hollow. At the end of the day, I am drained emotionally and mentally and no amount of evening seems to be enough to regenerate those creative forces in time for a morning blog post. When I have specific things to talk about it is fine… but most of the Path of Exile topics that I am dealing with are things I have addressed before. I am playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain… a character that I have played in that specific combination of skill and class at least four times. If you just talk about Righteous Fire Characters… this is maybe my eighth. So on top of the emotional turmoil… I also feel like I have nothing new to say.

I am not entirely certain what will happen in the coming weeks. I don’t want to force myself and make disingenuous posts trying to pretend like everything is okay. However, I also don’t want to get out of the habit of daily blogging. What is most worrying is that my desire to “cease to exist” has gotten much stronger lately. I am not so much worried about my suicidal tendencies, because I think I am good on that front. I mostly just want to flip off the television that has been my life for a while. That is a statement that probably makes no sense, but alas it is the mental pattern that has been playing on repeat lately. I feel disconnected from the world, but also the act of interacting with it… is a bit much right now.

Anyways. Part of this blog has always been the open dialog that I have with you all. I sit here and pretend that no one is reading it, but I know there are folks for whom my daily pattern is part of their own patterns. I’m sorry that I have been less regular lately, and feel even more sorry that probably in the coming weeks that pattern is going to be less frequent still. I need to push past what I am currently going through and find a new sense of equilibrium. The only way out sometimes is in fact through. I’m also shocked as fuck that apparently I have never titled a blog post “Not Feeling It” before today.

Fallout Good So Far

by

Hey Folks! Yesterday I just wasn’t feeling a blog post. It happens sometimes. It almost happened today given how damned late I am getting around to writing something. Today you are getting a bit of a smorgasbord post containing a few disconnected things. The Fallout Series on Amazon Prime is now out and available and honestly… after having watched a single episode so far I gotta say I kinda dig it. We’ve had a pretty rocky history when it comes to video game conversions to live-action media. I am looking at you 80s Super Mario movie. I wanted to believe but I kept keeping myself from fully committing to the hype just in case this ended up being a shit show.

All that said though I am only one episode in, but it FEELS like Fallout. Getting the rights to the same soundtrack really helps that, however. It made me realize how much of Fallout… is the music that is playing in the background. It seems to also be nailing the camp aspect of the universe, so I am hoping this continues into the additional episodes. The entire series dropped at once so I plan on binging my way through this over the next few days. I already feel like I like at least three of the characters. Not too terribly certain about the Brotherhood of Steel Scribe yet, but it is going to be hard to make me care about a BoS more than Veronica.

In Path of Exile news I am starting to stray a bit. I’ve been playing Lightning Arrow as a Champion during the last few leagues, and this time around… I got the hankering to play some Toxic Rain. I’ve always done this as a Pathfinder, but I decided to see if I could make it work with Champion to make it a bit more tanky. I am still pretty early in that run, just now sitting at Act III but it is a bit of a side project. I am kinda wondering about trying to use Cherrubim’s Maleficence as a chestpiece given the big bump in chaos damage that it gives. The other option would be to go with a Lightning Coil, but it really depends if I need spell suppression from my chest slot in order to hit the suppression cap. The problem with Lightning Coil is always the fact that I need to figure out how to make up for the -60% Lighting Resistance which is essentially like eating a second Kitava debuff.

I encountered a wild map effect the other day. I took a screenshot but it indicates that a given pack of mobs will always be accompanied by a Map Boss. This led to a pretty wild experience and it was surprising how few duplicates I got, pretty much pulling from a greatest hits collection of all of the available map bosses. My guess is this is using the same tech as the Destructive Play keystone that causes map bosses to be accompanied by 1 to 3 additional map bosses. I did not get any crazy drops, but it did lead to some really interesting gameplay. More than anything I think that is what I have liked so much about Necropolis post buffs… is that you end up in some really interesting situations while mapping.

As of this morning, the mirror printing strategies are dead, and honestly… I am kinda happy about that. I am not a big fan of investing a ton of currency in a single map run, but as scarabs have dropped I have run a few maps with heavy investment in Rogue Exiles and the scarab that causes every Unique mob on the map to drop a unique item. You get some wild explosions of loot… but also tend to get some really unstable systems while they are dropping. In every case so far I have had to turn off items while clearing the map and then go back through and loot everything after the fact. I’ve not really hit any Tier 0 item bonanzas but did pick up a handful of really nice items. While they nerfed it… it still seems like it will be interesting to run the Rogue Exile Allflame combined with the scarab to force them to drop a unique item. It just won’t be a scenario where you get 1000+ unique mobs on a single map.

Resonators and Fossils are still pretty freaking dead as far as prices go. I am guessing this is a side effect of Necropolis being a new and powerful crafting mechanic in a way that we have not seen in any of the leagues that I have played in. Crucible added a “crafting” mechanic but you still needed traditional means of crafting to make the items any good. Necropolis on the other hand is an opportunity to get a completely finished item with all of the bells and whistles of a mirror craft. As such there seems to be significantly less demand for the previous king of crafting… fossils and resonators. I am still making a fair amount of currency but most of it is coming from item sales and less so in the more reliable “bulk” of selling crafting resources. Essences seem strong but I think fewer people are running Essence strategies because various changes made it more difficult to farm them in low tier maps.

Anyways! Sorry for not posting anything and sorry for this one being so freaking delayed. I am not necessarily going through a funk right now, but I am feeling a lot of stress which I think is in turn making my desire to ramble at length a bit less than normal. I hope you all are having a great week out there. I am definitely looking forward to the weekend and “donut day”.