cats

Dawnbreaker and Backyard Greybie

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Hey Folks! I spent some more time yesterday tweaking and leveling my Wintertide Brand Occultist. I’ve dialed up the defensive layers a bit and I have a Watcher’s Eye that should also help whenever I can get the free passive points to allocate a jewel socket for it. This is never going to be a bossing character for me, so with that in mind, I am largely leaning into comfortable mapping clears while upping the survival. Essentially I think my next play is to pick up another strength travel node, which should allow me to drop a +30 strength node and then use that point to allocate the socket for the Watcher’s Eye.

I had a Dawnbreaker laying around in my vault that I picked up off Searing Exarch, and I decided to give it a spin. Sure I lost some damage by dropping the caster shield with +1 to cold gems, but I also gained a number of defensive layers baked into the shield alone. Essentially what this is doing is splitting some portion of the damage I am taking and then making it resolve against my Fire Resistance. Sure my Fire Resistance is not amazing and nothing like the 90% that I have on my Juggernaut… but it is enough to sort of blunt the blow for all other attacks a bit. The shield alone is worth almost 2000 armor by itself and has a small amount of life baked into it along with a 46% block chance. While it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically… so far I am thinking the Dawnbreaker is helping.

I recorded another video yesterday afternoon of me playing the class and talking through some of the decisions that I am making. Now this video was recorded before I made a number of tweaks like the Dawnbreaker last night but still shows the general state of the build. If you want to look at the state of my tree here is a POB, but note that I currently am muling a new wand with my Juggernaut to level it because I can handle crucible progress so much faster with that character. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty happy with where things are so far. Sure it is weaker than most of my other builds but I am actually enjoying running around with Wintertide Brand again. Would I start that build in another league over RF Jugg? Probably not. That does not mean however I am not enjoying myself.

Now that the weather is warmer, my wife has been spending a lot of time out in the backyard in the evenings reading. Around 8 pm I decided to go out and check on her, since often she comes in way earlier than that, and found that Greybie had decided to hang out as well. He’s been coming around to the backyard more often lately and it is pretty great. So I spent about an hour out there petting him and trying to coax him up onto my lap. He is still a little too skittish for me to actually lift him up and place him there… and expect him to do anything other than run away. When not actively getting attention he would set up shop underneath one of our chairs and just lay there.

All the while we were back there Tripod was over on the concrete patio off our kitchen… some 15 feet away. Greybie and Tripod seem to tolerate each other, but I am not certain they are actually friends yet. She kept coming closer to us… like she wanted to come over and get attention as well and then would retreat back under the patio table rubbing up against the chairs. I feel like she is on the brink of being more sociable, but I am not entirely sure how to tip her over. Our thought is maybe if she watches us petting Greybie… and him being seemingly happy about it… that she might realize that she too can get love and attention. I would honestly love it if Greybie set up shop in our backyard as well because at least knowing those two cats are relatively safe and happy would be a load off my mind. He lives somewhere down the cul de sac but given that he spends MOST of us time in the orbit of our house… I don’t think he has another family.

I really need to start taking my Steam Deck out into the backyard with me and playing something while just chilling with the feral cats. Last night was delightful but other than when I was actively playing with Greybie I was somewhat bored. You can only screw around on your phone so much before it is no longer interesting.

Hunting Aul

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Friends… I thought this would be the week that I started to distance myself from Path of Exile. Between adventures in Grim Dawn and starting to fiddle around with Lord of the Rings Online, I expected to dial back my gameplay. Yet last night I was back on my bullshit happily plugging away at the same stuff I have been plugging away at for a while now. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is seemingly not quite done with Path of Exile. My main strategy continues to be running maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… largely because I don’t care about her level… and then once I have filled up my Sulphite going back down into delve and hunting for the last rare thing that I have not seen… Aul. I think maybe once I finally fight the Crystal King this will lose some of its stickiness for me but I really want to see that encounter at least once.

I wish there was a good gauge numerically on how far to the left or right of the main column I have gone, similar to a depth reading. Essentially I seem to be moving around in a band between 150 and 170 in depth and am six or seven screens away from the central column at this point. I found a very tasty Abyssal City last night as well as a nearby Primeval Ruins but sadly no boss nodes in either. I think I have fought the Vaal boss three times, and the Abyssal boss twice… but have yet to see Aul even though I am poking around in the range where it is reported to find those nodes. I need to dive a bit deeper, but you are sorta at the mercy of the map when it comes to how you can travel. As I dive down I keep hitting dead ends and having to backtrack my way up to higher depths.

One thing I have to say about Delve City farming is that you end up with a truly staggering number of maps. You can see for some tiers I am sitting on over 100 maps and a large chunk of these are coming from the cartographer’s chests that I am pretty regularly finding one or more of in each city node. I currently have Primordial Blocks as my favorite map, not necessarily because I love the layout, but because I am trying to get the hideout to spawn in it so I can collect that for my account. For whatever reason, Primordial Blocks seem to have a higher-than-average spawn rate of Metamorph as well, and as such, I can use it to collect parts. Granted this could just be me running this map over and over and my Atlas tree triggering, but even before I specced into Metamorph I seemed to get that mechanic here more often than not.

Speaking of Metamorph, it continues to pay off nicely. I quietly stockpile body parts and then run through several metamorph spawns at once whenever I get a moment. If I stack currency nodes in every body part, it seems to often produce Divine and Exalted Orbs. This isn’t exactly going to win any divines per hour races, but it is a nice residual impact of me doing the things that I was already going to do in order to fuel my delve addiction. At some point, I am going to need to spend some time selling off undesirable body parts in an attempt to get the ones I am missing because a few of the slots in my metamorph tab are filling up rapidly. That is the most annoying thing about this mechanic is that the body parts are heavily skewed toward a few specific slots. For me, at least the most common part is Heart and Brain and the least common are the Lungs and Eyes. You can sell 3 body parts for a random part, so I need to cull Hearts and Brains in an attempt to fill the other slots as I am completely out of eyes at the moment.

Lastly here is a bonus image of sleepy cats. I wasn’t sure where else to fit this one in, and I know it is awful quality. Essentially the other night my wife snapped a quick photo in the dark because she knew I would not believe her. This is Josie snuggling with Gracie, and this is important because we have never really had cats that would actively snuggle with each other. I am not sure if Josie was even aware that Gracie was there or not, but I did what I could to try and enhance the image so you could see more than a blurry mess. Gracie is damned determined that everyone must love her, and she adores her big sister so I am happy to see this. I noticed Gracie grooming Josie the other day, but I figured it was a fluke.

I hope you are having a most excellent week, and we will see if I actually do something other than Path of Exile.

Obnoxiously Incandescent

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Good Morning Friends! Again I am leaning on a technicality here because I seem to be getting around considerably later each day than I did the last. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening running maps and attempting to complete chunks of my remaining atlas. At this point, I am 95 done out of 115 with 8 of those being unique maps that it is highly likely I will have to buy off the traders. I have 8 maps left that require me to run them in a corrupted state, which always yields unpredictable results. What yesterday and probably today have led to is me running maps in the vicinity of the ones that I am missing in hopes of getting the ones I still need to drop. I dinged 92 yesterday which puts me two levels higher than I have ever gotten in a league.

Every build has one or two things that can show that will absolutely brick the map. For me, the absolute “I cannot handle this” is “players cannot regenerate health”. My build is entirely about regenerating a ridiculous amount of health and as such, I just can’t mitigate a map where I can’t do that. That is really my primary line of defense, and as a result, I also had been avoiding “players have 60% less recovery rate”. However, I’ve tried this a few times now to great success, where I basically just don’t use Righteous Fire. That is the primary reason why this build needs so much regeneration is that I am constantly dealing a ton of damage to myself. The single target damage of Fire Trap however is apparently enough to successfully move around a map and kill things, and as a result, I can simply forgo the self-immolation and debuff with Frostblink while killing things albeit slower.

I’ve also been slowly chipping away at collecting kills for Maven, Eater of Worlds, and Searing Exarch as I have not completed any of those quest chains before. Yesterday I took out the Black Star and the Infinite Hunger, and I think I am ramping up to another series of boss fights. The hardest part about Infinite Hunger was finding the way out when I got digested because I was regenerating more than enough health to deal with the incoming damage, but the lack of a mini-map meant that I was completely lost in the process. I eventually fumbled my way to the exit and got the hell out of there. I did die once on Black Star just because something hit me for a truly overwhelming amount of damage… which probably means there was a mechanic I failed at noticing.

Other than that I am contemplating farming up enough Atlas respec currency in order to switch over to a Wandering Path build. This essentially makes it so that your notables aka the biggest nodes give you nothing, and you get double the benefit from all of the smaller passive nodes. This means you can stack a lot of map farming functionality and focus on one or two mechanics and then farm that. I actually do pretty damned well with Harvest this league and could always just sell the excess lifeforce directly. There are enough people trying to gamble for the big ticket items at 1500 lifeforce per pull that someone is always willing to buy the Vivid Crystalized Lifeforce. I personally like using the cheaper 75 skill to reroll some of my shittiest divination cards into something better. This is how I pulled the one I sold for 1.5 divines and the one I sold for .75 divines.

Other than that, I will leave you with this video of Tripod leaving her box this morning. It has been 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside and we’ve been concerned about the safety of our outdoor ferals. I’ve been putting food out to make sure they have something to munch on when they crawl out of wherever they have been hiding. I know when it gets too cold Tripod our three-legged calico that lives in the backyard will crawl down in an old rabbit burrow. Hopefully today it will warm up a bit and then, in theory, we are out of the woods. It likely means though that it will still be sketchy to travel on Christmas day so we might be giving our parents a raincheck once the weather improves significantly.

I hope you are all having a safe time and if you too are getting weather you are bundled up and safe. Here is a bonus picture of Gracie who has taken to sleeping under my monitors and then reaching out to swipe at me from time to time.

Tech Pedantry

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Roguish Charm

ffxiv 2015-02-23 06-12-46-67This weekend was one of those where we stayed inside for the majority of it.  For starters I still feel like crap, with whatever bronchitis type thing that I have.  I think it might be getting slightly better, but still feeling drained from all the coughing.  For the most part I spent my weekend in a blanket cocoon on the sofa catching up on the show scorpion and playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV.  While some of my time was spent with the guild running group content, a far greater amount was spent working on leveling rogue.  The class is really starting to grow on me, primarily because of the extremely well done animations.  Even though I essentially only have four buttons that matter right now, the animations feel important and it feels like I am the master of dagger based combat.  I started the weekend at level 18 and ended the weekend at level 26 so I am pretty happy with that.

For the longest time I had struggled with what to level next.  My monk was the closest to max level at 33 but really there is just something about it that does not excite me.  I’ve never really liked unarmed/fist weapon classes in games.  At high levels you can get some insane looking claws which I am sure improves the enjoyment…  but in general I have never actually liked monk characters in the Final Fantasy franchise.  Tifa, Sabin, Yang, and Zell all got a minimum of use in my parties, always favoring other jobs for my melee classes.  So I guess for me I don’t have this fond nostalgia for the monk and as such it just feels like a less interesting dragoon.  Rogue and I am hoping ninja on the other hand feels like this blade master that moves swiftly and delivers fast attacks on their target.  I can see leveling both at some point, but I think for the time being I will be “yet another ninja” waiting in the party finder.

Tech Pedantry

mpc-hc64 2015-02-23 06-18-44-52 The other aspect of this hibernation was watching all sixteen episodes of the show Scorpion to catch me up to date.  For some time now my wife has been telling me that she thought I would enjoy the show.  Some people are pedantic about grammar or spelling… for me it is about technology.  If you show a technology used in an inappropriate way it grates on my nerves and I struggle to get past it.  The logo for the television show is stylized as </scorpion>  which is an ending html tag…  and it drives me insane that they did not instead use the appropriate syntax for a single tag which would be <scorpion />.  Anyways at some point I pushed past this frustration when I kept hearing from friends how good the show was.  It took me a few episodes to start caring about the characters but right now I think I am officially hooked.

The strange thing about the show is that for the most part they do get technology right.  When they go into a nuclear reactor they talk about SCADA based systems, which are an actual protocol that for the most part runs all major infrastructure.  Other elements have a bit of science fantasy applied, but still the vast majority of it checks out in theory.  The only question is just how much of the show is based on the real Walter O’Brien and how much is made up for the sake of Hollywood.  The hacking NASA thing is supposedly true, but I feel like much of the show is romanticized for the sake of the screen.  I am just happy to be watching a show that does a pretty fair job of representing tech, and doing so as close to reality as probably any other show has managed to get.  Sure it suffers from the same “goofy interface” issues that any other show does, but I have connected enough with the cast of characters to get past that.  All I have to say is that Happy Quinn is a badass, and so long as she continues to be an interesting character I will probably keep watching.

Best Shoes Ever

starwarsvans I have this strange attachment with Vans, Airwalk and Converse shoes.  There is just something I like about canvas low tops that make me happy… especially the slip on varieties.  I would not say that I collect them but I definitely have more than a handful of pairs that I swap back and forth between.  The other day my wife stumbled onto the above pair of shoes and thought I needed them.  That is how cool my wife is, that she found something like this on her own and suggested I order them.  Granted for size 13 shoes they were a bit more expensive than I originally thought, but damn are they worth it.  Today is going to be the first time I wear them, and I am sure I will get some goofy looks…  but fuck it… they are amazing.  They did have some really subtle Darth Vader shoes that I contemplated getting, but I only wanted to get one pair… and the choice was obvious.

sunningcats While I am posting pictures, I figured I would drop this one on the blog as well.  This is one of those rare moments when all three of our cats are getting along.  It is a great size comparison picture that shows just how insanely huge Chloe is compared to Kenzie and Allie.  As I write this I have Kenzie the kitten sleeping on the top of a computer case on my desk, Allie picking at a box on under my desk, and Chloe sprawled out blocking the exit to my room.  They feel like they should be fed apparently, and are going to guard me until I make it happen.  Every time I stop typing the look around anxiously as though I am going to bolt from the room and try and shake them.  Living with my fuzzy menagerie is definitely an interesting existence, especially when at the same time both ferrets are demanding attention.  These are all the reasons why I often am late getting out the door in the morning, but I would not change it for the world.