Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Rock Bottom Prices

by

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

by

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

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.

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”.