Return to Fallout 76

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Morning Folks! Like I said the other day… watching the Fallout Amazon Series has summoned forth a bunch of nostalgia for the series. As a result, I have found myself back in Fallout 76, which honestly is a better game than anyone gives it credit for. It was kinda janky at launch, but I remember having a heck of a lot of fun with the AggroChat crew. If you have Amazon Prime, you can get the game for free right now. As a promotion along with the Fallout series, you can snag a copy for either the Windows Store or Xbox. While there is no cross-platform play, the PC accounts on Steam and on the Windows Store both connect to Bethesda.net and can play together. So it is the perfect time to check the game out if you have never played it before.

Coming back to the game after a long absence, I have picked up a number of things that I figure I will share with you. First off… there is now a “Pacifist Mode” in the game which entirely disables PVP functionality. This can be found in the game section of the menu just below the look sensitivity and vibration settings. While the populace of Fallout 76 seems to largely be positive and non-toxic… there are occasionally bad apples that will come along attempting to trick you into PVP combat so that they can curb stomp you and get their jollies. If you are not PVP-minded… as is usually the case with most of my readership… then I suggest you pop into the settings and just set yourself to pacifist mode and never have to deal with it again. Similarly, you will want to make sure you set yourself to push to talk because by default the game is open mic which gets super annoying. I’ve just disabled voice chat in its entirety because it takes away from my enjoyment of most games.

This next piece of advice is going to seem entirely counterintuitive especially considering I just told you to disable voice chat. There is an odd culture that has spawned around this game of ALWAYS being grouped with other players when possible. The game gives you a pretty hefty experience bonus, so there are no downsides to grouping up. There are multiple types of teams available with specific ones that are focused on individual game modes. Casual teams however are largely thought of by the populace as “experience sharing” groups and whenever I play I hit Ctl+Tab to pop open the teams interface and see if there are any casual groups currently running. If they are all full you can just create your own Casual team which will likely fill quickly. One of the side benefits of being in a team aside from experience bonuses is the ability to teleport to the camps of your team mates to get around the map. You can also check to see if they have any vendors and are selling things that you might need cheaply.

Another thing that has been added to the game since I last played is Donation Boxes. These appear at hubs like the train station and outside the first vault allowing players to leave items for each other and to give players a good start in the wasteland. There always seems to be something in them especially ammunition and needed resources like bobby pins. I need to clean out my ammunition stores and drop some goodies in these to share with others myself. I’ve yet to find anything in them that I really needed so I have left them alone, but it is cool that it is a cultural tenant of the game now. Apparently, players used to leave goods in a specific box on the map, and it became an unofficial swap hub. The Fallout 76 devs noticed this and decided to make it an official system.

Another thing that was either not like this previously… or that I simply did not remember is that breaking down multiple copies of the same weapon teaches you mods for that weapon type. I believe when the game first launched this only worked if you happened to find a weapon with said mod already in place. Now just salvaging multiple copies of the same item seems to reward you a new mod each time, allowing you to build up your stockpile of recipes and resources. As someone who grew up playing Doom… I am of course using the pump shotgun quite a bit and slowly over time I have unlocked additional mods for it. I really need to find a higher level one however because as of writing this post I just noticed that it is level 5.

Another thing that I once knew but had forgotten… is that you want to use Photo Mode any time you are in an area that you might want to remember. Photos you have taken in-game in this manner will from that point forward be used as loading screens for the game. If nothing else it is pretty cool to see your character in various locations as you pop around the game incurring loading screens. I am trying to remember to do this more often because I think I only have five pictures currently in my rotation.

One of the things that Amazon Prime is giving away right now is a trial membership to Fallout 1st. This is essentially a subscription model to the game and gives you a number of limited-time cosmetics for playing and a fairly generous “allowance” of currency for the Atom shop. The big feature that you get with 1st however is the ability to create private worlds. The nice thing about this is that the same character progresses in both Adventure mode aka with other players, and Private Adventure which is your own private snapshot of the world. Sometimes in spite of all of the bonuses for playing with other players… you just want to be off in your own world doing your own thing. You can also spin up entirely custom worlds that let you fiddle with the ruleset. These however do not carry over progress to the “Adventure” worlds, and generally speaking, there is always some special limited-time event going on.

There is a battlepass-like seasonal model in the game, and the last time I played it was essentially a game board where you unlocked one slot at a time. This seems to have changed to something more akin to a storefront where ranking up gives you golden tickets and then those can be spent on various cosmetic stuff. Each page is gated by a specific rank and doing various Daily Quests and Weekly Quests earns you currency. If you have experienced the modern Guild Wars 2 dailies system it works fairly similarly to this, but the Fallout 76 goes much deeper in the various things you can unlock. Right now the season is focused around one of the in-world radio drama characters “Rip Daring” and some sort of cryptid-based theme. This current season began on March 26th and will run through June. If I can get into the swing of things and get used to running dailies then I might actually have enough time to unlock some of the cooler stuff.

I’ve been having quite a bit of fun just roaming around the West Virginia Wasteland. In a few days I have leveled up a bunch of times and unlocked several battlepass levels. From what I understand the first real breakpoint in the game comes at level 50, and any levels after that are just sort of gravy. You can start a fresh character at level 20 now, but I think I am pretty happy just slowly leveling my way up from where I am currently. That is one thing that changed that I think is really slick. So the world originally was tiered allowing you to accidentally wander into some really high level areas. Then they made some changes which had the group leader set the level of the world, making it awkward for low levels grouping with higher levels. Now it seems that they have done something similar to the Elder Scrolls Online level scaling tech where the world around you is set based on your own level allowing a level 1 player and a level 100 player to be effectively fighting the same monster.

Anyways, I am having quite a bit of fun poking around with this lately. If you make it into the game my Bethesda account is Belghast so feel free to friend me up and say hi.

Rock Bottom Prices

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Friends… this has been a weird league. When you make sweeping changes to a game as complicated as Path of Exile… you get some extremely varied issues that come up with it. Going into this league I had one idea planned… which was to gear my character in such a way as to not really need my amulet slot for the dexterity required to play Righteous Fire. The idea behind this was that I could in theory swap in a Defiance of Destiny which is a unique Paula Amulet that went in during 3.22 that has the text “Gain 25-35% of Missing Unreserved Life before being Hit by an Enemy”. On something already as tanky as I tend to build characters, this could make someone nigh immortal, and last league I just could not sort out my gear in order to use one without changing every single slot. The problem is that this league shifted the rarity and with that, the price ballooned up to 55 Divines making it one of the major chase uniques.

This was ultimately the item that I had been saving up all of my divines to get, and yesterday I found out that apparently, the market had crashed. You can pick up a medium-rolled Defiance of Destiny for around 10 Divines now. Similarly, the bottom fell out completely for Headhunters and you can pick up a well rolled uncorrupted one for around 15 Divines. So while I have been sidetracked by Fallout 76 lately, I absolutely zoomed into the game to snap a nearly perfectly rolled Defiance for 15 Divines. If the price of Headhunters falls even further I might snap one of those up as well for if I ever decide to do anything with my Champion alt. I think the downward pressure we are seeing is in part due to the fact that this is the second league in a row where people were printing extremely rare items. It took a bit longer for the prices to drop in Affliction, but having been through that song and dance before there is now a race to the bottom.

I am uncertain what the latest strategy is, but clearly, there is still something alive and well in the current league environment. The previous hotness was stacking Meatsacks, a single monster that replaces a pack and has an extremely high rarity modifier… and then stacking on Tormented Spirits to make them extremely beefy and extremely rewarding when you finally kill them. Folks were doing this in T17 maps which themselves have a massive rarity bonus. The end result was nonsensical loot explosions that covered the entire screen. I remember seeing one clip from Empyrian Gaming where I could see five Defiance of Destiny on screen at one time. Basically, it has reached the point where if that amulet is not literally perfectly rolled and qualitied up with catalysts… it is cheap.

So I am now the proud owner of a would-be 40% Defiance of Destiny instead of the perfectly rolled 42%… once I finish applying quality that is. This has caused me to rework my tree a bit to force in Ultimatum, a league mechanic that I largely hate… but is the most reliable method for farming catalysts. I miss Metamorph so much because that was a mechanic I actually enjoyed and dropped Catalysts like candy. You could add Rogue Metamorphs to your map and just get them passively rather than having to force a largely unfun mechanic to get them. I should just buy the catalysts but that always feels lame when they could be farmed. They are much cheaper this league than they were last league, and my guess is the demand has caused a bunch of folks to start farming them. I also need Fertile Catalysts to quality up my Immortal Flesh as well, so in theory it isn’t a complete waste of time to try and farm them.

Wild Mood Swings was a Cure album that came out when I was in college, and quite honestly… that title accurately describes what it has felt like to play in this league. We’ve been in this cycle of “exploit early, exploit often” where the folks who get to the latest and greatest strategy first… and abuse the fuck out of it… profit and anyone trying to “ethically” play the game is left behind. I can’t complain much honestly because I am still able to do everything that I wanted to do and have managed to find enough high-value items in order to maintain enough currency to play with. All of that is super shocking considering how bottomed out the market is for delve resonators and fossils. Since I seem to be getting engaged with Fallout 76 again, I am not sure how much longer I will be in this league’s economy anyway. Once I get one more achievement and get my sad little totem pole I will be happy enough to leave it behind until 3.25.

Radioactive Nostalgia

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Over the weekend I finished watching my way through the Amazon Fallout Series and I have to say… It nails the vibe of Fallout perfectly. There are so many things that are just “right” about the world and I have a feeling I am going to have to watch the entire series a few more times before all of them sync in. There are moments like Super Duper Mart that are pulled directly from the games, and then there are just set dressing and elements that are so familiar but not necessarily directly connected. For example the placement of first aid kits on walls in exactly the right location to where you find them in pretty much every fallout game. Then there are the sound effects and quite honestly just by those alone… I know exactly what weapon is being fired at any given time. Someone on this show clearly cared about these details and I greatly appreciate all of the loving work that they did on getting them right.

All of this built a strong desire to dive back in and immerse myself in the Fallout Universe. Now about once a year I end up playing some New Vegas because it is one of my all-time favorite games. Fallout 3 however is a game that I have not replayed in over a decade. So I went through the process of getting it up and running. I tried to install some mods and then got frustrated by the fact that apparently, you need to downgrade the current 2021 client… in order to get most of them to work. So instead I nuked everything and started fresh just playing through the vanilla game of the year client as downloaded from Steam.

I’ve got to be honest… the game as a whole holds up surprisingly well. I mean it still has obtuse gunplay and is full of that good good Bethesda jank, but nothing really felt terribly off from the formula we have all gotten used to. Sure mechanically there are some missing features that we have in the more modern Fallout games like 4 and 76, but mechanically it felt solid. I’ve not played a ton so far, and unfortunately Steam seems to not be able to track actual time spent playing the game and instead tracks time spent with the launcher open. I think if I were to play this further I would need to mod it a bit. I had forgotten just how desolate Fallout 3 looks. In the later titles, they realized that barren wastelands were a bit uninteresting to stare at in 3D, but this first of the modern Fallouts is a bit “spartan”.

Last night I spent some time diving back into Fallout 76. At some point, I completely restarted the game and as such still have a lot of the early quest scaffolding to work my way through. I find myself with the itch to live more in the Fallout world so between 3 and 76 I figure I am probably going to be doing a lot more of that in the coming weeks. 76 is a title that I feel like I have never really gotten into the swing of, so it would be interesting to play it enough to really feel like I am experiencing the benefits of the live service side of things. I know it has been a constantly expanding game over the last few years so it will be cool to get through the original story and see some of the newer stuff.

Have you watched your way through the new Amazon series? What were your thoughts? Has it also prompted you to want to spend more time in Fallout games? Drop me a line below.

Toxic Rain Champion

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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.