Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! On April 13th of 2014, we recorded the very first episode of AggroChat so last night the stars aligned just perfectly for us to be recording on our ten-year anniversary. We start the show by discussing a few different AFK games, namely Gnorp Apologue and AFK Journey. From there Bel talks a bit about the new Fallout TV Series and how it nails the setting and tone of the game. Kodra and Thalen talk a bit about the latest Bluey episode Ghostbasket. Kodra and Tam discuss their experiences playing together in Helldivers 2 and then Kodra and Bel talk some more about the Path of Exile Necropolis League.
Good Morning Folks. This is going to be one of those posts that occasionally shows up on my blog that is of a more personal nature and that I do not go through any effort to syndicate. Both last week and this week I missed a blog post, and I have to be honest… sitting down to write this one was more of a chore than I would have expected. I’ve thought I was doing okay… but maybe that is less than truthful. I feel like I am on the cusp of another “turtle mode” or a period of time where I pull my head into my shell and pretend the world does not exist. All I find myself really wanting in life is to read my books and play my games and forget the world exists.
What prompted this current funk? I think it is largely work-related stress. Tuesday was the last day for one of my co-workers, one who had become my confidant and closest companion over the last decade. He stepped into the team lead and supervisor position that I vacated when I moved up to management, and he had been one of those people that I could just always rely on to do what needed to be done. Unfortunately, the person who I always assumed would step into his role… vacated the company last year leaving me with this feeling of having to start over from scratch. There is someone who has been trying to step up significantly and fill the shoes that were left behind, but it is going to take a lot of work and as such I am spending so much emotional effort trying to make sure things continue to truck along as they should.
I’m just sort of feeling hollow. At the end of the day, I am drained emotionally and mentally and no amount of evening seems to be enough to regenerate those creative forces in time for a morning blog post. When I have specific things to talk about it is fine… but most of the Path of Exile topics that I am dealing with are things I have addressed before. I am playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain… a character that I have played in that specific combination of skill and class at least four times. If you just talk about Righteous Fire Characters… this is maybe my eighth. So on top of the emotional turmoil… I also feel like I have nothing new to say.
I am not entirely certain what will happen in the coming weeks. I don’t want to force myself and make disingenuous posts trying to pretend like everything is okay. However, I also don’t want to get out of the habit of daily blogging. What is most worrying is that my desire to “cease to exist” has gotten much stronger lately. I am not so much worried about my suicidal tendencies, because I think I am good on that front. I mostly just want to flip off the television that has been my life for a while. That is a statement that probably makes no sense, but alas it is the mental pattern that has been playing on repeat lately. I feel disconnected from the world, but also the act of interacting with it… is a bit much right now.
Anyways. Part of this blog has always been the open dialog that I have with you all. I sit here and pretend that no one is reading it, but I know there are folks for whom my daily pattern is part of their own patterns. I’m sorry that I have been less regular lately, and feel even more sorry that probably in the coming weeks that pattern is going to be less frequent still. I need to push past what I am currently going through and find a new sense of equilibrium. The only way out sometimes is in fact through. I’m also shocked as fuck that apparently I have never titled a blog post “Not Feeling It” before today.
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”.
Good Morning Folks! I find myself starting to feel that old familiar itch… the one that involves me leveling a second character. I have no clue what I actually want to make but that isn’t important. What is important is that I know before long I will wind up chasing some new character and trying to make it work. That is not to say I am not still having a heck of a lot of fun on Righteous Fire Chieftain, and would honestly probably keep playing it for a while. I just always end up starting several other characters during a league and then trying to make them work. I would love to see a redemption arc for Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, but I am not sure if I want to roll another Marauder in this league. It has been a few leagues since I have played Toxic Rain, and bows are dirt cheap due to the corpse-crafting meta right now.
Remember me talking about going all in on my sceptre yesterday? Well… about that. I had this fractured +1 fire gem base that I had been tinkering with for a while. Essentially I had been spamming all of my alts at it hoping to roll the ideal setup… and then survive the regal. Yesterday I had farmed up another stack of alts and threw them all at the weapon… and happened to land a pretty optimal setup. Which then prompted me to spend my last to Divine Orbs to meta-craft this the rest of the way to completion. Now I am back farming blue juice from Harvest so that I can shift this to an alternate quality setup for elemental damage and do the 30% corruption beast again. At that point… I think maybe just maybe I will have the final form of my weapon.
Some “new tech” from this patch that I have been playing with is The Perandus Pact Prismatic Jewel. This is a grave crafted item that can be influenced to roll with a specific stat package on it. I did not do this thing, I just bought mine because the “6% Increased Fire Damage” version is apparently not the sought-after version. Essentially allocating this in my tree gives me a ring that includes 18 passive tree nodes that each gain +6% for a grand total of +108% Increased Fire Damage. I had already planned on picking up the Sanctum of Thought node to push myself up to 90% reduction to critical damage, which will give me another +18%. This seems really good and it would be significantly better if I were building something on the right-hand side of the tree with much tighter clustering of nodes. Alternately I could have gone with +5 life per node, but I wasn’t sure if that would matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve gotten deep enough into Delve that I am starting to see a few survival issues, so I decided to try something. I was out perusing POE.Ninja as one does… and noticed a Korean player running RF Chieftain with Vampirism allocated on their amulet. This seems really good because it would give me another source of recovery that is not entirely dependent upon my regeneration rate. The big problem is diving into packs of mobs while waiting on an explosion to proc, and while that is going off I would be getting both life on kill and some life recuperation from damage taken. Thankfully Golden Oils are cheap this league so if I want to go back to my Damage Over Time setup that I had been running it would be easy enough to do so.
I picked up another crafting project, that has frankly already cost me around 150 Chaos Orbs of potential value. I found this chestpiece for 10 Chaos Orbs and while I do not care in the least about the level of socketed curse gems… I am a huge fan of that 5% reduced Fire Damage Taken. I am running a lot of beyond on my maps and as such finding quite a bit of tainted currency so essentially as I find tainted fusing I am throwing them at this item. All I need is one to hit with a favorable result. When I fail I go back to the bench and craft 4 linked sockets… restoring me back to the state of just needing one fusing to six link it. Like I said I have made 3 attempts, each attempt with a value of 50 Chaos… and sooner or later I am going to hit it and then swap over to this chest piece and likely sell my RF-colored six-link Cloak of Flames for a bit of a profit.
The last bit of findings is that I actually managed to hit some T4 Harvest Beasts and wound up pulling Bear’s Girdle which is a key component for a Cleave of Rage build. Again it is something that I have wanted to play with, but I am not sure I want to make a second marauder this league. It isn’t like the girdle is worth a ton on its own, but I was happy to get it nonetheless. I’ve never fought the actual harvest endgame boss and keep wondering what is involved in doing so. I guess I should look that up at some point because I know there is a league achievement the includes them as one of the options. I should probably make some general strategy around finishing enough achievements to get my sad little totem pole again. Right now I am mostly working on Maven witnesses so I can attempt to take her down for a voidstone.
How has your league been going? Are you still trucking along or have you moved on already? Drop me a line below.
