AggroChat #469 – Explosion Specialist

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

Tonight we are back with the whole crew. We start off the show talking about how Secrets of Grindea, a game that we did an early gameclub show about…  has FINALLY launched out of Early Access. From there we talk about Last Epoch some more as Kodra was out last week and has much to say about explosions.  We also discussed building different characters and how the game rewards them.  Bel attempts a Tier list but gets shut down as he is the only one who still prefers Path of Exile. Finally, Tam and Ammo share their early thoughts about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Topics Discussed:

  • Secrets of Grindea Launched
  • Last Epoch
    • Kodra Returns and Has Thoughts
    • The joy of building new characters
    • Bel’s Tier Ranking Gets Shut Down
  • Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Precarious Potty

Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore.

Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.

Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.

I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.

Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.

Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut.

I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch.

Maybe Not Sentinel

This is one of those blog posts that I am not highly likely to syndicate widely. There are essentially two reasons why I do this… the first is that the content is of a deeply personal nature and the second is that I am writing about something that I don’t think anyone is really going to care about. This blog post is the later because I don’t have a ton of import to discuss, but also sort of feel obligated to make a post given the whole weekly blog posts schedule thing. Firstly I wish Henry Kissinger a long well deserved stay in the deepest levels of hell. Last night was the first time Mastodon/Fediverse felt like Twitter as everyone came out of the woodwork to dance on his grave. I know it is generally thought poorly to speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose truly awful policies are responsible for roughly four million deaths and throwing several countries into decades’ worth of turmoil is excluded from that statement. Congratz to the Grim Reaper for finally getting that epic pull.

Next up on today’s wild ride of topics… I finally left the Hinterlands. For anyone who does not understand that reference… in Dragon Age Inquisition, the Hinterlands is this massive nigh endless zone full of busywork that has stalled out many a playthrough. I know for me it personally wrecked at least two attempts to actually get through that game. Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate feels like a similar experience. That first area of the game is so packed full of content that you feel like you have to complete everything before just moving on with the damned story. I have graduated into Act II, and have now officially made it further in this playthrough than I have before. My previous run stalled out in the middle of the Underdark segment, and last night I crossed that barrier and finally met “Not-Gandalf”.

I have to admit that I have really mixed feelings about Baldur’s Gate III thus far. I love the story, and I love the dialog options… and the truly stupid level of detail brought on by the smallest changes in the way you approach things. However, I still feel like combat in the game is a deeply tedious process. There are times I realize that my tastes have changed and while I loved Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 back in the day… and ravenously played them… my tastes have changed. I would kill to have a version of this game with action combat, because I get so overwhelmingly bored while waiting on combat to resolve. Were this more akin to something like Mass Effect, it would easily be my game of the year. I’ve realized this is a “me” problem and not a game problem because I find 4x games similarly tedious when I used to lose entire weekends playing them.

Nick aka WithoutAGout replaced Bex as the community manager for Grinding Gear Games. If his tweet yesterday is to be believed… the theories surrounding a return of Sentinel are wrong. That is not to say that they could have simply not renamed that mechanic or this tweet could be a troll… but I guess we will find out in a short enough period of time. I think this does however indicate that we are likely to get a full patch notes drop shortly after the reveal. I am still banking on there being some sort of a Ritual rework coming with the Affliction League. What I however am most interested in is knowing when I can set up the “Bel League” private league and get that ball rolling.

This is your reminder to make sure your Twitch account is connected to your Grinding Gear Games account and that if you watch 45 minutes between 12:30 PST and 21:30 PST you can earn a set of cosmetic wings. I can’t say that I am terribly interested in insect wings, but I am going to try and watch this regardless so I might as well get some free mtx? You will of course have to redeem them from your Twitch Drops Inventory before getting them in game. I am sure tomorrow I will be making a post talking about my thoughts about the announcement as a whole, and as such today is this awkward middle ground of almost being there but not quite knowing much.

SirGog has once again done a big ole video talking about his thoughts about 3.23 and what is likely going to be on the chopping block. Various other folks have thrown out a few ideas, for example, Ghazzy thinks it is time to nerf Righteous Fire. However as an “RF Enjoyer” I hope that this won’t be the case, and I honestly think it isn’t likely because it isn’t like that build is overpowered. It is widely played because it is the best new player experience and has hands down the best guide creator supporting that build. GGG desperately needs an approachable onramp to the game, and right now RF provides that… and I feel like they would be shooting themselves many times in several sets of feet if they did anything to damage that. The only thing that is going to pull me away from RF for Bel League is if Guardian moves forward completely untouched.

I hope you all are having a wonderful week. Tomorrow I am sure I will have more cogent things to say about both the Affliction League and whatever comes from the Diablo IV Campfire chat.

Talking to Animals

I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.

I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.

Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.

Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.

Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.

I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.