Many Games and Little Focus

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Path of Exile – PC

Good Morning Friends! I find myself in a weird position right now where I am picking at the bones of several games but not terribly engaged with most of them. There was a time when I used to create these “regularly playing” posts, and in theory that is what today’s post is going to largely be. However, I just don’t really feel like reviving that format. If I was going to say I had a primary game at the moment it would be Path of Exile. I am very much in a bit of a honeymoon phase with that game… or as “honeymoon” as you can be with a game that is actively trying to make interactions with its systems difficult. I am not in my 60s on the Explosive Arrow Champion build and I have a few baby alts that are doing different things that I am poking around with as well. We have several folks from the AggroChat podcast playing right now and as a result, we have a “Greysky Armada” guild up and running. Not that I actually understand half of what there is to do with a guild… but we have a Guild Hideout and at least some Guild Stash storage.

Outriders Worldslayer – PC

Since Outriders Worldslayer just released, I am spending some time playing around in that game. I enjoy the mechanical systems but am a bit frustrated with how limited the expansion actually was. Essentially at its core, it adds one new activity to the game… the Trial of Tarya Gratar. If for whatever reason you don’t want to engage with the time commitment of that event, then you are stuck doing the same familiar grinds that have been in place since the release of the game. However, with the game being way more generous about dropping legendaries, I am actually trying to build a proper gear set focused around the Seismic Commander set. At the moment I am wearing mostly the “purple legendaries” gear until I can get a decent roll on all slots of the actual gear set.

Guild Wars 2 – PC

I am still logging in pretty regularly to Guild Wars 2, but I am not really doing much of anything. At a minimum, I farm resources in the three guild halls that I can farm each day, and gather what home instance nodes I have. Most days I try and figure out a quick path to getting 3 dailies done and get my 2 gold. However lately I have not even been doing that. Essentially I need to pick a goal and then focus on that because while I have a wealth of things that I could be doing… I am pretty directionless in actually doing any of them. I could focus on my Skyscale or knocking out the karka hunting achievement which would give me some way of disposing of excess ascended materials. The problem is that I fail miserably at actually sitting down and focusing on any of them.

New World – PC

I am in a similar “maintenance mode” with New World, where I am logging in most days and harvesting enough materials to get 3 of the Hidden Stashes which turn into diamond gypsum, and one of the proficiency caches that gives me emerald gypsum. I then take these out to Shattered Mountain where my inn is bound, craft some gear for expertise boosts and then log out for the day. Doing this has allowed me to take all of my armor slots, sword, shield, and warhammer to 600 expertise. Right now I am working on pushing up greataxe and hatchet. At some point when the major patch drops that take away dungeon keys I will probably start running some of these again through the new group finder tool. The devs made a joke about calling them tuning orbs and expeditions… but I am sorry… that is obtuse and weird. They are dungeons and they are keys and “ya done fucked up” by not naming them the industry standards.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I am even in a worse state with Final Fantasy XIV right now. Basically, I am logging in every 4 days… either to go house shopping among the ever-dwindling number of housing plots… or to collect my money from the lottery system because I lost yet again. None of these interactions make me happy. I am very sad about the state of housing in Final Fantasy XIV. The lottery while it helped in some ways by keeping me from having to set up an auto clicker in order to succeed… but I also feel pretty hopeless still about my prospects of acquiring a house. Now that there are additional catch-up mechanics, I really should dive back into the systems and catch a character up. However, there is a mental barrier between me and this game at the moment. If I win a house I will once again have the desire to spend time in this world, but so long as I am homeless I am lacking that traction.

Diablo III – PC

My return to Diablo III was a whirlwind romance. While it was not my fastest season in the world, now that I have finished up with those achievements and gotten the rewards… I have very little desire to keep playing. I had started a Hardcore Seasonal character, simply because I had never actually played in that game mode. I have to admit what knocked the wind out of my sails was when I realized it worked vastly different than I was expecting. I assumed that when I took a death, the hardcore seasonal would turn into a softcore seasonal. I mean this is how it works in Path of Exile and my brief jaunt into Hardcore Minecraft… but my assumptions were wrong. Instead, your character is just gone, and I cannot stomach the idea of wasting time on a character that poofs. This combined with the fact that I just got into Path of Exile has more or less stopped this project dead in its tracks.

Diablo Immortal – PC/Android

Lastly, we have Diablo Immortal. This one is mostly just a footnote because I have uninstalled this game from all of my devices and not looked back after my “fruitless grinding” post. There were a lot of things I liked about this game and the way some of the systems interacted. I specifically loved the way that legendary items worked, and how you could extract the “legendaryness” and apply it to other items. It appears that Diablo 4 is going to do something similar to this, so it makes me very excited for what that game might end up feeling like in the end. However, the monetization of Immortal is going to give me a great pause for what the future of Blizzard games looks like. I have to admit though I had some fun while it lasted, and if they at some point in the future come to their damned senses and make this a more reasonable option… I might return. Considering most of the reputable sources have stopped covering the game aside from the occasional dunk on it… I will be interested to see what the revenue stream looks like on this going forward. I am also curious to see what lasting impact this will have on the Diablo player base… since this essentially nuked the goodwill from orbit.

A Blaugust Solicitation

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Hey Folks! It is almost Blaugust time. No this is not the new logo but it was the only one I could grab on the fly from my archives that did not have an implicit year associated with it. The new logo is still a work in progress, as is most of the stuff that would go into the big rules and sign-up posts. However, I thought I would do things a little differently this year. I more or less cobbled together Blaugust each year as a “thing I do” that the community also does with me, but this time around I am asking for some feedback.

What Do You Want From Blaugust?

It is a simple enough question. What are you expecting from the Blaugust experience, and what sorts of things do you hope to participate in? Each year I follow a pretty similar script, and each year I have folks who are confused by the rules or expect them to be way more strict than they actually are. I have some ideas on how to resolve that confusion or attempt to resolve it. However, I thought I would start this whole pre-Blaugust discussion out by just asking what you as a participant are expecting to get from the experience.

What Worked Well in Past Blaugusts?

If you have participated in Blaugust before, or merely lurked… what seemed to work well? What aspects of it did you enjoy? What aspects of the proceedings did you want to see more of? I get that this is a bit weird as far as blog posts go, but essentially I am soliciting feedback before I lock this year’s rules in stone.

What Did Not Work Well?

Now we have the opposite side of that coin. What did not work well, and what do you feel could have been improved upon? I can’t guarantee that your feedback is going to change the course of the past year’s proceedings, but I am curious what aspects did not go as well as they could have. Essentially I want to know what did not land as well as it could have, so that maybe with some tweaking I can prevent that from happening again. Blaugust is very much a free-form experience, and I don’t think I will be playing more of a camp director role going forward, but if there are things that we can change to make things work more smoothly in this self-directed manner then I am all about that.

As it stands right now I do not expect to be posting my “launch” topic until at least next week, but I am in the process of firming up material for the coming run of Blaugust. You can of course post your feedback in the comment section below. Also, I am pretty widely reachable through various direct message platforms if what you want to say is in a more sensitive manner. Lastly, if you crave more real-time interaction for this discussion and feedback from other voices there is always the Post Discussion channel in the Blaugust Discord. This is the first time I have really asked for feedback during the entire process of running Blaugust so we will see how this goes.

Thanks and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and also to the upcoming Blaugust 2022.

Explosive Arrow Balistas

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Yesterday I talked about one of the two games that I spent most of my extended weekend playing, and this morning I am going to talk about the other. Of all of the things that you could have predicted about 2022… I did not think that it would be the year that I got into Path of Exile. This game is exceptionally daunting, but also as you start to ease into it… it becomes more and more engaging. Once I got over the hurdle that was the passive tree, I’ve been engaging with the almost overwhelming number of systems. At this point, I am sitting in Act Seven of Ten and it feels like many of the league mechanics are scattered through the second half of the game, specifically starting up when you revisit Lioneye’s Watch in Act Six. I’ve attempted to play this game numerous times, and I absolutely remember a season when Gwennen the Gambler factored into the league mechanic heavily for example.

I’ve switched from using Splitting Steel to the final configuration of this build which focuses on Explosive Arrow and turning it into a Balista Totem ability. My main spell link looks a little something like this:

  • Explosive Arrow
  • Balista Totem Support
  • Elemental Damage with Attacks Support
  • Lesser Multiple Projectiles Support

Balista Totem turns Explosive Arrow into an attack that drops something akin to the Demon Hunter Sentinel on the ground that fires Explosive Arrows for a period of time. Elemental Damage support makes it so that the Arrows that they fire utilize any elemental effects that I have on my gear, and Lesser Projectiles just makes them shoot more arrows at once, which is helpful for wave clear.

What took me so long to switch over to the final configuration is that I did not realize a key truth that I am going to share with you now. Guides will refer to items in shorthand as needing a GGRR or a GRR item meaning that you need those colors with linked slots. However, I was taking this as a completely literal statement, where I needed a Green gem linked to another Green gem which is linked to a Red and then linked to another Red. As a result, I had filled up a stash tab full of items that I thought would not work, but might be able to reroll the color order on at a later date. Essentially links work in both directions, and you can have support gems on either side of your main attack. Meaning that GGRR, GRRG, RGGR, or GRGR would have all worked for my purposes. Essentially as a result I had waited for some 20 levels before swapping over to the build I should have been running.

The gameplay feels much different, and admittedly nowhere near as cool as being Magneto all the time… but still enjoyable. Essentially I run around the battlefield making sure I have all four balistas up and running and bathing my enemies in explosive arrows. The build works off a specific interaction where I keep up 3 stacks of frenzy, curse the incoming packs to take more fire damage with Flammability… then each current triggers Elemental Equilibrium. Essentially EE is a keystone in the Passive Tree that makes it so that when you deal damage with one element, it debuffs the target to take more damage from the other two. Between my Skitterbots and Balistas they are applying Cold and Lightning damage, which causes them to take more fire damage… so when the secondary effect of Explosive Arrow fires… aka the explosion… it nukes everything. This can be improved when I find some six link items, but for now it is pretty badass to watch it all work.

Lastly, I am far from an expert in Path of Exile and quite honestly I am way deep in novice territory still. However, I have added a new page for Path of Exile to my Game Tools menu. Right now as I find things that I consider to be beneficial, I am going to be placing them on this page. If you are also taking this journey with me, I will be adding links to everything that I am actively using like the Loot Filter I run, build sites that I am reading, and miscellaneous tools like Path of Building. I am slowly in the process of converting all of my link lists over to individual static pages like this because I personally find it a bit more usable. It allows me to give some explanation for each tool rather than just a disconnected list of links.

Death Farming Hauras

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Hey Friends! I spent most of the weekend bouncing back and forth between two games. The primary of these was Outriders, which makes sense given that the new expansion dropped. I have to admit there are a lot of things about the expansion that annoy me. One of my favorite aspects of the original was the fact that after I completed the story, I could do some “choose my own adventure” type gameplay as I bounced back to previous flags on the map. There are a number of encounters that would spawn in as you moved through the world, and these were somewhat fun to play. You have to understand in Destiny 1 and 2… my all-time favorite game mode was patrol, where I could just roam aimlessly and kill things for fun and profit. The new story content does not have this functionality and the only way that you can go back to a previous area in the new zones… is to reset your story progress to that specific point.

It is very painfully clear that the studio’s intent was that we would be spending all of our time playing the Trial of Tarya Gratar, because that is the ONLY activity that is easily repeatable. Granted this is a perfectly fine game mode, but for my tastes, it takes entirely too long to do a full run. Once you sit down to play through it, you are committed to thirty minutes to an hour of dedicated attention. Granted you can checkpoint and resume a save attempt if you need to leave halfway through the event, but it will cost you an attempt in doing so. What I have instead been using the Trial for is to drop the difficulty down to apocalypse 10, and breezing through it to farm legendaries for deconstruction. This is giving me access to a good number of mods that I did not have in my repository given how stingy legendary drops were before.

Right now this is my favorite weapon in the game. I honestly do not remember what the original first slot trait was, but I replaced it with Firestorm from one of the new legendary weapons called Sunfall. Essentially Firestorm calls down a beam of fire from above that roasts anything within its radius for 8 seconds. The beam will follow your attacks, so if you get good with it you can have it slowly beam its way through a pack of mobs. This combined with Claymore which calls down an anomaly attack every 2 seconds for over 100k damage, means you can whittle things down very quickly. Firebrand Defiant is a random roll weapon, and I just happened to luck out and get something that worked extremely well for my purposes. Your mileage will absolutely vary given that I have gotten weapons named this… with completely useless perks on them. This also proves that the new purple three-perk weapons can be better than the legendaries that drop.

As far as usable gear goes, I have taken a page back from my old playbook of farming the beasts. In the base game, there are two quest chains that start out of the bar in Trench Town. Specifically for these purposes, I care about the Hauras hunter quest. If you do not have access to this because you have completed it in the past, simply finish up the rest of the hunter quests and that NPC will allow you to restart the entire chain. The reason why we care about this quest specifically, is that you can run in and kill two boss-type monsters… then let the waves of trash kill you as you hit your auto loot key to vacuum up the items. I’ve gotten pretty much all of the gear that I am currently using, as well as quite a few legendaries doing this rather mind-numbing farm.

The key to this success however is that you need to set your level to one apocalypse tier down from whatever you can currently do. Deaths at your current apocalypse tier cause you to lose experience progress, but if you have already filled the bar on a given tier… you can’t lose any progress. So when I was farming this the other day my highest tier was 14, but I was farming it at 13 and weirdly enough was still gaining pretty constant ascension XP regardless of the deaths. The only negative about this method is I have so much sustain that it sometimes takes forever for the trash mobs to kill me off. As a result, you can always go back to the lobby and come back into the game in order to reset at the checkpoint. Keep that trick in your arsenal if you also run into this problem.

I spent some time bouncing around the map trying different spots, and realistically Hauras seems to be the best option. There were a few other areas that I liked, that also gave me access to multiple boss types but the reset cycle was much more obtuse and took longer. There is a specific area in the Quarry for example that I really like, but it involved moving the truck to a new location and back to the Quarry in order to reset the spawns. As much as I hate dying over and over again to the same encounter to farm loot… it really is the most efficient method. I might record a video of the run at some point, but basically, trust the monster fights if you are just wanting to work on your gear. If you can burn through Trial of Tarya Gratar then by all means keep farming the proper endgame content.