Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we attempt to record a show that is only an hour in length but fail again overshooting by about fifteen minutes. We are down a Tam because life happens, and Kodra had to travel to Ash’s house to get internet… but we get a shot out the door regardless. We start off with a quick recap on the experience of starting Ooblets from scratch, then dive into a discussion about the next Shovel Knight game from a different studio. Ash talks a bit about his experiences with PAX West and we discuss games that evoke the style of a specific era in console games. This dives into a whole discussion about our console gaming experiences throughout the years. Bel talks a bit about the upcoming patch to New World and how it is completely changing the starting game experience for the better.
From there we dive into a discussion about Path of Exile and how spending some in-game currency on a build can make a massive difference. We talk about narrowing down the hunt for Atlas completion as Grace and Bel get close to wrapping that up. Then we dive into a side topic about how easy it is just to write off bad performance when maybe it is something you did to cause it. Essentially running Path of Exile on a mechanical drive makes a massive difference, and you really should use a high-quality SSD.
For the last week, I have been in a very weird place with Path of Exile. I was largely dissatisfied with the state of my build and was teetering on the edge of either quitting the season or trying to restart as something else. After some advice from Ashgar and Carthuun and a bit of tweaking here and there, I decided that before I gave up… I should really make an effort to at least try out the specific combination of unique items that the build suggested. This meant that I would need to be engaging with the trade market, and when I got my six link… it seemed at that time that prices were all over the place. Prices are still considerably worse at the moment than during the Sentinel league, but I came to a realization. I don’t actually care about the accumulation of wealth in the real world or in the game. Why should I sit on what little I have gathered up when I could put it towards some gear and at least feel like I gave this build its all?
Velyna’s Storm Brand build is centered around four unique items, and honestly, at the time I was uncertain what any of them would do for me. Spending a bit more time, and watching a much older video on the build… I finally grok what this was going for. Essentially the goal is to convert some of the lightning damage we have been stacking to cold… then we get 100% chance to shock frozen enemies, and when they die they explode dealing more lightning damage to their friends. The freezing makes running the build significantly easier because it halts a lot of packs in their tracks. I created my shopping list and set forth to purchase everything that I would need.
Call of the Brotherhood – 1 Chaos
Burden of Truth – 2 Chaos
Crown of the Inward Eye – 5 Chaos
Inpulsa’s Broken Heart – 150 Chaos
Call of the Brotherhood I already had sitting around, but it readily goes for 1 Chaos and is easily found. Burden of Truth was also a really cheap buy, and we did not get into some hard decisions until I got to Crown of the Inward Eye. Getting the colors and links that I needed, in a non-corrupted version came with a significant price tag, but I was able to find a slightly imperfect item for only 5 Chaos. The Inpulsa’s Broken Heart was the real challenge as to get one that was completely ready to go it would cost me around 3 Divines which translates to roughly 500 Chaos. After some searching, I managed to find a five-link with the correct socket colors already for 150 Chaos, and I pounced on it. So far I am opting to use it in the five-link state as I gather up the bindings to go for turning it into a six-link later.
By the numbers, it does not seem like I made a significant change. My resists are largely in the same place but I did gain quite a bit of armor, over 700 points of evasion, and while I only gained 2 points of raw health I added 875 energy shield. I’ve also added about 17% spell block and 30% crit reduction. Another big thing that has changed is that I am now immune to Shock, Ignite, and Freeze… with the last coming from finally getting some Divine Vessel drops and working on my pantheon. I’m up to 64% stun recovery and 73% total physical damage reduction. So while again the numbers did not seem that drastic, in actually playing… I feel so much less squishy than I did. I still can’t really afford to let anything big beat me for long, but I am less likely to get randomly one-shot.
Last night I spent most of the evening working on getting some experience by running low-tier maps that I have either run as they stood, or applied an alchemy orb. I had some pretty solid luck last night, like this moment when I opened a storage chest and got three uniques to drop at once. When I finally called it for the evening I was just shy of hitting my next level. So I am likely going to keep this up until I ding, then maybe focus on something risky for a while like trying to progress in red maps again. Essentially if I am in xp earning mode I want to take very few risks, and if I am very far away from a level… then I don’t care how many times I die.
Thanks, I guess in part to the way I have specced my Atlas passives, I have seemingly phenomenal map sustain. It is very rare that I don’t come out with more maps than I put in, and it seems like I get at least three maps the majority of the time. Last night I hit a lucky cartographer’s chest that paid out massively, with the only negative being that all the maps were corrupted meaning they have to be used “as is” without modifications. This however will keep me doing these low-risk maps for awhile, which seem to be extremely lucrative in materials and resources. Essentially I am banking my bindings so that I can make an attempt at converting this five-link to a six-link without risking breaking the configuration that I currently have and that is working so well.
So while I spent the one Divine Orb that I have found so far to get to this point… my general outlook on the game is greatly improved. I would consider that “money” well spent.
Signs are starting to point to it being the time to dust off those copies of New World and return. At the tail end of August, the New World team released a list of things that would be coming in the Brimstone Sands update to the game, and now that update is available on the public test realm. Last night I spent a few hours roaming around the updated new player experience and found it all shockingly improved. From the moment you start the tutorial, there are a lot of things that have changed. For starters, you are no longer fighting generic drowners, but instead corrupted mobs. There are some much upgraded visual indicators of what you should be going to next, and once you land on the beach… almost everything has been revitalized.
An immediate staggering example is a fact that gone are the generic shipwrecks that all looked interchangeable. Instead, each of the four ships you visit during those first few quests has its own look and feel. This one for example has been damaged by corruption, but there is also one that looks like it was attacked by the Angry Earth, though none of them are present. That ship is filled with boars, reminiscent of Edengrove, and gives a bit of flavor of what happens when nature takes over. Most of this is cosmetic, but what is completely new is the fact that Isabella is introduced and is whispering to you through corruption very similar to the Old Gods of World of Warcraft. This ties up so many loose ends as to what exactly happened when Thorpe blasted us with that bolt of corruption in the tutorial and introduces players to Isabella rather than having her pop out of the woodwork later on.
There seem to be a number of “quality of life” improvements as well. For example, there are stray weapons laying all around those early shipwrecks giving you quick access to seemingly every weapon. The Greatsword for example is brand new to this patch, but I found one laying on the beach ready for me to use. The weapons themselves have a slight glow to them in order to make them easier to see for new players. This is huge honestly because previously it could take a dozen or so levels before you would find one of the weapons you were wanting to use as your primary. This whole setup reminded me quite a bit of Coldharbour in Elder Scrolls Online and the room that effectively had one of every weapon type ready for the player to pick up.
Then there is Monarch’s Bluff, which is no longer a ramshackle town and is instead a properly fortified outpost. This change alone is staggering, and instead of generic conquistador types… this town is following the Arthurian story that they added into the game since the release of the game. Supposedly Everfall has also had a significant facelift, and more towns are planned for future patches. The goal is apparently to make each town look truly unique and have its own merits rather than just the central location. This plays into other “quality of life” changes they have made since the release of the game like making the cost of fast travel largely inconsequential and opening access to storage in every town freely from any other town.
I’ve been poking my head back into the game periodically off and on since release, but it had largely fallen out of focus with my time spent in Path of Exile. I have to give credit to YouTuber Demone Kim for releasing a series of videos about the changes. In the video linked above, he does a naked run to Brimstone Sands and the capital city specifically. It looks straight out of Assassin’s Creed Origins/Odyssey and seems to be massive in scale. I spent most of last night playing around with the new weapon, the Greatsword which feels very much like Cloud’s Buster sword so far. You can spec into a tanky tree or a DPS tree, so it will be adding new tanking options to the game which is great. I feel similarly they probably now need to work on some more healing options because right now it feels like Lifestaff is the only truly viable endgame option.
We started talking about it last night among the AggroChat crew and might consider picking a server and starting over from scratch. The new player experience is different enough to warrant this. Yeah, it would suck to lose all of the progress I had made on my main character on Valhalla, but it seems like a lot of the leveling processes are way more forgiving. I was gaining harvest levels at lightning speed last night while picking up random things. Additionally, it felt like the loot was considerably more generous when it came to crafting reagents as well. At some point in the past, they flattened the reagents so that there is only one kind of sandpaper, flux, or thread… etc. So from the first minutes on the beach, you are getting materials that will serve you later in the game.
The more I think about it, the more I think I am going to start from scratch again. I don’t know the release date yet, but since it is up on the PTR currently I would assume it is “soon”.
Good Morning Friends! Last night I had a wild ride of bouncing around in several ARPGs before finally settling into the grind in Diablo III. This season there is an item that drops called an Angelic Crucible that can turn any item into a Primal Ancient, but it also gives the item a special ability. The problem with this system however is that you get one of three random enchants each time you use it. I think I have gotten somewhere in the neighborhood of a dozen of these items so far and out of those I have gotten 1 Wrath of the Berserker power, 1 Whirlwind power, and all of the others have been for Hammer of the Ancients. However last night on my final run before going to bed I finally pulled the Whirlwind power I was hunting for.
I’ve been contemplating stockpiling them and running up a Demon Hunter so I can play with those powers as well. I am hoping that the items persist after the season for non-seasonal play, and if so… then I have the desire to build out a set for each of the powers on Barbarian and maybe Demon Hunter. I’ve heard the Crusader abilities are not that great, so I might take a pass on those. Essentially those are the three classes that I spend more time playing than any others. It would have been awesome if one of the Crusader sets buffed my favorite thorns build, but alas it is not to be. The whirlwind power is really nice because it is a much stronger pull than we have ever had in the game before, and you can just sorta drag things along with you as you spin to win.
In other news, Torchlight Infinite is now up on Steam, and you can request access to the playtest. I’ve had access to the android version of the game for some time now, and it was pretty solid. Unfortunately, the PC version seems to be the most “mobile port” game I have seen. There are very few configuration options and you are stuck to using the default keybindings which are Left Click to move, Right Click to attack, Q to heal, and WERF for special attacks. My default setup for ARPGs is to set Force Move to W, and then steer with my mouse. I find it so much easier than the constant repetitive clicking required for click to move and I am hoping given time that they add in some keybindings.
The main reason why I did not play more on Android is the fact that it currently does not have controller support. I attempted to use a controller through steam last night and this appears to still be the case. I am very interested in this game, but only if either the controller support is solid or they add some keybinding options. Until then it might as well not exist. Your mileage may vary however and if you are interested in checking the game out, it appears that they are just letting people into the playtest immediately. I clicked the “Request Access” button and got instant access to download the game and try it out.
I’m starting to fall into a funk with Path of Exile. Have you ever played a game where it feels like you missed the golden era when it was amazing? That is how I am feeling about Path of Exile. I’ve seen so many videos of people flying through maps and getting explosions of loot left and right, and I can’t seem to ever reach that level. I am in the doldrums of red maps which vacillate wildly between extremely easy to clear to being painful deathfests. I ran into a boss last night in one of the Vaal Corruption Rifts, that had 8 ArchNemesis modifiers on it… and it legitimately took me over twenty deaths before I finally downed it. The only thing that I could do was kite the mob while dropping Storm Brand behind me. I eventually drug it to the start of the Rift so that I could at least resurrect and get back into the action quickly.
I could roll something else and try another build… but there is no guarantee that will work any differently. At this point, I have tried Explosive Arrow and Wintertide Brand last league, and went with a supposedly tried and true Storm Brand build this league… and found both lacking. Maybe lacking is the wrong word, but would require so much currency investment to bring them to the level that would allow me to run content in a carefree manner. I just don’t think that Path of Exile is ever going to be that game for me, and as a result may never replace Diablo III. I love chain-running content over and over in Diablo and picking up loot, then resetting things and going again. In Path… everything feels like it has a cost associated with it… either opportunity cost or a very real cost. I don’t love that feeling.
In Diablo III there is this virtuous cycle of running Nephelem Rifts to get Keystones, and then running Greater Rifts for levels and rewards. It feels good and continues to feel good the deeper you go into the gameplay. You earn gear that helps you move faster through the Nephilim Rifts and go higher in difficulty level in the Greater Rifts… which causes you to earn more rewards and level your gems higher. All the while allowing for easy drop-in gameplay so you can hang out with your friends while doing this, or better yet help them get gear in the process. In Path of Exile, the cycle seems to be focused on making “currency”, and then using that to fund buying better gear on the trade league instead of just doing things for the sake of doing them.
Then there is the problem that I have to effectively make a decision if I care about progress on the atlas or if I care about making levels. I sacrifice levels for the sake of grinding out progress, or I sacrifice any forward momentum for the sake of farming experience. Then there is the hope that I will gain enough currency and map drops through doing the content that I can sustain continuing to do the content. I am always teetering on the edge of not having enough Alchemy or Scouring orbs, with the latter pretty easy to buy from vendors… but the conversion rate is somewhat painful and I feel like I don’t get enough of the feeder currency to make up for it. Then there are chisels… which have a fixed Chaos cost on the vendor and I don’t feel like I get near enough drops.
Essentially while mapping I always feel like I am on the verge of not having enough of something to keep sustaining that activity. In Diablo III it is not very far into the season that I feel like I have either more resources than I could ever spend or easy access to acquire those resources. I am not sure I will ever reach that point with Path of Exile. There will always be subtle friction of not quite having whatever it is that you need, in order to do the things you want to do. The answer is to engage with the trade economy… but I don’t find ANY of that fun. Accumulation of wealth has never been a key goal in my life and once my bills were paid in real life, I stopped caring about making more money. I just think mentally I am not wired to succeed in Path of Exile, and I am concerned that I will keep trying to make it into Diablo III.
I am rapidly losing hope after getting engaged with Path of Exile, that the “sequel” is going to really be a game for me in the long run. With the Torchlight Infinite PC test having its own levels of frustration, I guess I now pin my hopes on Diablo IV giving me a happy medium between the type of gameplay that I do enjoy in Path of Exile, and the virtuous cycle of fun grinding that I have in Diablo III. I am hoping that luck shines upon me and that I get into the Diablo IV testing process. I am not holding my breath, as the person who threw their thumb on the scale and apparently got me into Dragonflight Alpha/Beta is no longer with the company.
