Oriath’s End

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Good Morning Folks! While I have been talking about Fallout 76 lately, I am still playing a good deal of Path of Exile. Largely at this point I am about a third of the way through level 99 and would really like to hit 100 as sort of the crowning achievement of the league. I’ve already done enough of the achievements to quality for the sad little totem pole that I go for every league, but there are a handful that seems like they would probably be low-hanging fruit due to the ease of running different league content with scarabs. I am continuing to make tweaks and improvements to my build and figured I would talk through a few of these. If you are curious here is the current state of my character at level 99.

The first upgrade is that I swapped over from my rare armor/evasion boots to a pair of Annihilation’s Approach boots. The weird thing about this swap is that I had tried doing it much earlier in my build and I did not seem to have the survival to soak up the additional fire damage at the time. What these ultimately give me is the ability to drop Brine King pantheon while granting permanent adrenaline. This ends up being some additional physical damage reduction while granting 100% increased flat damage and 25% increased attack, cast, and movement speed. The first pair that I bought was around 4 Divines and then I sold them back at a slight profit after trying them and deciding they were not for me. With the recent market crashes you can now pick up a pair of these for around 20 Chaos which is what I paid for mine.

Another significant upgrade that I made… that I am shocked I was able to snag is this Cloak of Flames. It was already six-linked and corrupted and all I had to do was burn through my stash of tainted chromatic orbs to get it to “righteous fire colors”. My previous Cloak of Flames had 5% Reduced Fire Damage Taken and +2 socketed curse gems… the later of which was a useless corrupt for my build. This one both reduces my fire damage taken and my chaos damage taken… both of which I am shifting a portion of physical damage to… which means they also directly reduce my physical damage taken. Can you believe that I paid 50 Chaos for this? I am still shocked that I snagged it for so low. Sure it required me to spend a lot of tainted chromes to make it work, but they were something I had lying around from mapping.

While I am talking about damage shifting, I thought I would share all of the sources of “physical damage taken” as I have on this build. I have my Cloak of Flames giving me 40% Taken as Fire and an additional 8% Taken as Fire coming from a helm enchant. Then I have 15% Taken as Cold coming from my Taste of Hate flask that winds up as nearly permanent uptime. Finally, I have 10% Taken as Chaos Damage coming from an Armor/Energy Shield Mastery. While my Chaos Resistance is only 75% the 4% Reduced Chaos Damage Taken that I now have on my chestpiece should help to blunt that a bit. In total I am shifting 73% of my incoming Physical Damage to either elements which get soaked by my 90% resistances or Chaos which is being blunted slightly by the Cloak. On top of all of this I have 60% reduced extra damage from critical strikes and in my final form I should have 90%.

The big splurge that I have made is picking up an Oriath’s End flask. This is something I have always wanted to play with because it gives you lots of explosions while the flask effect is active. This combined with my big Hinekora Explosion, and the little Fire Mastery explosion… means I have three sources of things that go boom which is extremely fun to watch. Basically, I have reached the point that between all of my defensive layers and meager offensive layers… I can just sort of charge around the map and watch things explode. It is a truly delightful state to be in. There are things that I am holding off doing until I hit level 100… when deaths are meaningless. Basically, my focus is grinding out the rest of this level. I got my very first Sacred Blossom yesterday and I have never fought Oshabi, but I mostly want to wait until I am not actively trying to gain experience.

I’ve also been getting a fair number of T17 map drops, but after failing miserably the one I attempted I am holding off on touching them until I am level 100 and no longer care about dying. Past that, I could start dropping passive nodes to swap over to some cluster jewels, but I am not sure how much I actually care about that. I always get to a point where I am happy enough with the character and don’t want to keep fiddling with it.

Fallout Fever

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The release of the Fallout Amazon Series appears to be a rousing success. It appears that critics across the board have given the show high marks, and similarly, long-time fans of the series are loving it. Tim Cain who worked on the very first Fallout game released his review of the show on YouTube and pretty much gave glowing praise for the level of detail. Sure there has been some minor controversy about the timeline of events and whether or not it reset the timeline of Fallout New Vegas… but overall folks have been happy. I shared my own praise of the show a few weeks back and I feel like I need to watch it again just to soak in all of the detail.

We are now seeing this Fallout love, translating into a rush of players to games like Fallout 76… which never really seemed to find its place and launched with a peak concurrency of 32k players on Steam. Recently it has been breaking those records with a new peak hitting just shy of 73k players. What is even more telling is… Amazon is giving this game away for free through the Microsoft Game Store and these Steam numbers are not even accounting for that. I’ve said recently that it seems to take about two years before a live service game is really worth playing, and now some five years later… Fallout 76 is in prime shape (pun intended) to welcome this influx of players.

The thing is… this isn’t just impacting the live service Fallout offering. The player numbers in Fallout 3 show an over 200% increase, New Vegas around 130% increase, and Fallout 4 similarly around 130% increase. This is translating to more than just players dusting off their existing copies because Fallout games are now seizing spots on the Steam Top Sellers Chart. As of the time of writing this Fallout 76 is 4th, Fallout 4 5th, Fallout 4 GOTY edition 9th, New Vegas 20th, and Fallout 3 GOTY edition down at 48th. I remember the Witcher Netflix series having a similar effect on sales of Witcher 3 boosting it by around 500%. While the Witcher series went off the rails and lost fans in later seasons, this is evidence that a good project surrounding a game will absolutely have deep impact on sales as it brings in a whole new group of fans.

Over the last week or so I have had a number of gamer friends reach out to me for my advice for where to start in their Fallout adventures. Namely how far back they should go… and as much as I hate to admit it my advice has been to skip the first two games unless they are already indoctrinated into the world of 90s CRPGs. The best Fallout game is New Vegas, so I feel like at a minimum everyone needs to play that one. There is merit however to start with Fallout 3, because while it is a very monochromatic wasteland… Three Dog is without a doubt the best DJ. Fallout 4 is a reasonable starting place if you are unwilling to deal with the jank of older games even though it has plenty of that good good Bethesda jank to contend with. My general advice would be to play Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas, and then Fallout 4 in that order… and if you find yourself craving more then maybe go back and do Fallout 1 and 2 if you can handle the downgrade in tech. Fallout Tactics was a game that I did not enjoy in the least so it isn’t going to get any sort of recommendation from me.

Personally, I find myself sinking further and further into Fallout 76. This is probably a bad starting place for anyone who cares about the story elements of Fallout. The lore of the game feels a bit too malleable, and while I am enjoying myself if you actually care about the story of the world… the other games are a much better option. What I wanted was to explore the content that has been added to this game over the years. I’ve poked at it off and on… and then got into the habit of logging into claim the various offerings throughout the years. However, I’ve never really played it as my main game and I am trying to find my way into that stance. I talked about it quite a bit on the podcast this weekend, but the community is very intriguing.

At some point, I need to dedicate some serious time to building up a proper base. I somehow ended up getting my original destroyed when I tried to move it, but truth be told it was sort of a mess. I would like to actually spend some time building something I am proud of. Above is an older screenshot and quite honestly… I just sort of kept throwing things at it without any real design goals. I’ve found a fairly flat area of land that no one seems to ever have a base… so I am going to attempt to build something more proper there.

AggroChat #475 – Wasteland Dreams

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

We had a bit of a cursed show…  Tam lost power and was essentially knocked out of the rest of the show and then Ash disconnects as well and takes a bit to get back in.  We push through however as we always do.  Bel talks about returning to Fallout 76 and all of the cool changes that have been put in since he last played.  Thalen talks about Open Source Star Control 2 aka Free Stars.  Ash continues his journey into Roguelikes talking about Anomaly Collapse and Inkbound.  Thalen and Kodra share their thoughts about The Sign, the latest episode of Bluey, and Grace shares their thoughts about AFK Journey.  Finally, Bel talks a bit about the recent market crash in the Path of Exile Necropolis league, making many chase items more accessible. 

Topics Discussed:

  • Steamdeck Modification Adventures
  • Returning to Fallout 76
  • Open Source Star Control
    • Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters
  • Roguelike Rundown Redux
    • Anomaly Collapse
    •  Inkbound
  • The Sign Bluey Episode
  • AFK Journey
  • Necropolis Market Crash

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Finding Hidden Delve Nodes

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Good Morning Folks! I don’t have a heck of a lot to talk about this morning, but I thought I would share something that I realized yesterday. I spend a lot of time in Delve and it is quite possibly my favorite game mode in Path of Exile. I would not be shocked if I had spent over a thousand hours running delve nodes. The thing is… the structure of Delve is something that has confused me a bit. Namely, I seemed to be missing the inherent understanding of how to find hidden nodes. There are a lot of things in this game that are based on rules, but for whatever reason I had yet to grasp something fundamental about the way Delve was laid out. Now I have to admit that I had heard this information before, but never fully grasped what it meant.

Veteran Path of Exile players speak like you understand what they are saying. I remember specifically Zizaran talking about this in a video here he was explaining that you could tell where hidden nodes were based on the connections that they were making. A node cannot have only two connection points. It can have one, it can have three, and in rare cases, it can have four… but no node can have only two connections. To illustrate this point I took a screenshot of an area down in Delve where there were two hidden nodes side by side… one azerite and one fossil. I’ve applied some labels to count the connections and you can see there are two places where there are only two visible connections. So I sketched an estimate of where I thought the connections might break off and labeled the expected node path in each case with a “3?” indicating a hidden third connection.

Last night I farmed each of these areas out so that I could take a follow up screenshot showing what the actual connections ended up looking like. I have highlighted the paths in green and in both cases I was more or less right. In the case of the Fossil node, the path broke off to the north instead of to the west, but it was in the same region. In any case looking for nodes that only had two paths connected to it, gave me a place where I knew for certain there would be some sort of path breaking out that I could bomb to get access to the tunnel.

Sometimes there are going to be places on the map where there is a hidden node, but there are two nodes around it that only have two connections. In these cases, you need to look for places where there might be a phantom fourth connection. If I were going to try and get to this currency node then I would start looking at the armor node and azerite nodes that I have highlighted. There is not enough room for a path to break off the Cartography node above the highlighted area, and while technically the singleton Lightning node could break north, that seems to happen really infrequently. Again you can have a single point of connection, three points of connection, or four points of connection but never two.

This is not my image, but it represents a concept that took me a bit to grasp. Delve is aligned to a strict grid of nodes. So when thinking of the way things connect up… there has to be enough room for a path to travel through without interrupting nodes you have already revealed. The way the biomes are laid out gives you a hint for where the edges of the individual blocks are. if you were to start drawing along those boundaries, you would eventually end up with a grid similar to the one above showing you where your hidden node has to be connected to. In the above example, we are going back to the rule of two again making it very clear where the connection is going to be. However in my example, if I follow the biome boundary lines, I cannot rule out either the two four connections that I have highlighted or the potential of that singleton going north.

Delve has long been something that was largely instinctual for me. I would get a feel of which tunnels I could dive down into the darkness and find riches, and which I should skip. However, I knew there had to be a method to the madness, and understanding the rules… makes it so much more straightforward to find those hidden nodes. Again this is something that EVERYONE might already know and I am just slow on the uptake… but I am going to take the risk to look like an idiot and explain it clearly regardless. That has been the problem I have had with most Path of Exile knowledge transfer, is that there is a general assumption that folks already understand core concepts. I’ve played roughly 2500 hours of the game and there are still core concepts that I am finally grasping all the time. It is my hope that this will help someone out there because I am too old for posturing that I know everything.