kodra Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Mirror Based Economy

January 22, 2024 by Belghast

This weekend, I saw some odd things happening over in Path of Exile. First, my good friend Kodra hit the jackpot and got what is quite possibly the most valuable item you can drop in Path of Exile. He was running a t16 Carcass map with 2332 Yellow juice and 3438 Blue juice and lucked into a Mirror of Kalandra. This led to a whole sequence of events happening… because a Mirror is worth too much currency to sell it in a single trade. This forced him to go to The Forbidden Trove to find a trade, which wound up being in Mirror Shards which are fractional Mirror currency, and some raw Divines to add up to I believe 913 Divine Orbs worth of value. This is essentially more currency than you can reasonably spend… and opened the door to all sorts of nonsense. He purchased a Mageblood and pretty much offered the rest of us Bel-Leaguers one as well… which truthfully I am not even sure what I would do with one at least not yet.

This led both of us down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out what the hell is going on with Affliction League. If you have watched anything in the way of streamer highlight videos in this league, you will see that many magic finders have found twenty or more mirrors a piece… simultaneously generating more “wealth” than the game has ever probably seen outside of the Standard League. The weird thing about this is it has had the inverse effect that I would have expected. By nature, I would have assumed this would push the price down from what we saw in Ancestor… which also generated more mirrors than normal. However, the opposite has been the case. During Ancestor League a single mirror was worth roughly 145 Divine Orbs and in Affliction League that same mirror is now worth 924 Divine Orbs as of the time of writing this… and still climbing.

What is happening is that since Mirrors are so plentiful… they are actually being used for their intended purpose. Traditionally the Mirror is a vehicle for parking “wealth” in Path of Exile especially once you start reaching 5000 Divine Orbs aka the maximum storage capacity for any single currency type in the specialized currency tab. I know I personally have spent a lot of time “selling chaos” for a simple reason to convert it up to Divine Orbs and keep from the mess of having 10s of thousands of chaos laying around. But notice in the above screenshot there are four random Deadeye’s that I picked out off POE.Ninja and they are all using the same mirrored bow Vengeance Barrage which I believe is the new “best in slot”. Thing is… for a lot of these maxed-out characters they are wearing MULTIPLE mirror tier items each consuming at least one Mirror and an amount of Divines as the required “tip” for a “Mirror service”.

Mirror Service is such a weird concept and I had trouble wrapping my head around it at first. Essentially a Mirror of Kalandra’s intended purpose is to create a copy of an item. This means that extremely skilled crafters can create what is a “near perfect” item and then sell the rights to copy that item to other players. For example here is a screenshot from The Forbidden Trove discord of the Mirror Service channel showing one player “selling” access to six different “Mirror Tier” items each with a fee listed. The player wanting one of these items is expected to provide their own Mirror of Kalandra and then also upwards of 150 Divine Orbs as a “tip” for the service. I’ve blurred out the specific details, but essentially this is how some players make their currency… but pouring divines into outrageous crafts and then selling access to the byproducts of that crafting to other players. Since there are so many Mirrors floating around in the economy, it means that they are being removed at a massive rate by folks getting their own copy of mirror gear.

On top of this…. the proliferation of magic-find characters is causing a downward pressure on pretty much everything else that used to hold value. The Mageblood for example generally was considered to be almost as stable as the Mirror and Mirror Shard for parking currency. However the whacked out juiced maps that people are running, can in times produce multiple magebloods in the same map. In Ancestor League the Mageblood was around 230 Divine Orbs and this league you can pick a well rolled one up for around 100 Divines. This price continues to plummet as more of them enter the market than the market can reasonably absorb. The same thing happens to every other item that can drop on a map because the magic finders are just finding more of them. Taste of Hate for example is generally around a 100 Chaos item… but I picked one up for 5 Chaos the other day. If it can be generated with Quantity and Rarity… it is likely cheaper than it has ever been in any other league.

My big splurge is that I dumped 50 Divines into a well-rolled non-corrupted Headhunter. I’ve always wanted to play with one of these and never felt like I could reasonably afford it. In a normal league, a well-rolled headhunter would be twice the price that it is currently. I still have a bit of a nest egg and I still have a lot of things that are selling, but I thought it might be fun to screw around with this belt on my babby magic find lightning arrow champion. So far it has been interesting. Headhunter seems to be feast or famine… either you get a bunch of really amazing buffs and feel like a god… or you mostly just drone through the map without a ton of benefit from the belt. I am sure I could get whatever I wanted from Kodra, but honestly, I have no clue what I even want or how much longer I really feel like screwing around in this league.

In truth, I have accomplished everything I had hoped for in the league. Over the weekend I hit 19 of 40 challenges which gives me my fourth tiny totem. Essentially since getting my first totem, that has become my primary goal for any league to keep adding to the collection. I keep kicking around the idea of trying to build a Penance Brand of Dissipation character just to do dumb things with Uber bosses. I did not jump on the Totem Explosion bandwagon during Crucible and honestly, I have always kicked myself a little for not doing that while it was available. I mean ultimately the first step in this process would be running enough lab to get a Penance Brand of Dissipation gem. I could just buy one off the market… but I would feel better about myself if I at least tried to get one from Lab first. I don’t have a Templar in this league so I might as well go for it. So that might be a project as the week goes on.

Anyways! I hope you all had a great weekend. We are still in freezing temperatures here and I am feeling more than a little cooped up. Hopefully, we get some better weather as the week drags on because I am not designed for this amount of cold.

Kodra the Prodigy

September 23, 2016 by Belghast

Last night I had what is going to go down for awhile as one of my strangest dreams. The root of it was a roadtrip, that apparently myself and the rest of the AggroChat crew were taking across country. I have no clue at all where we were going, or what we were actually doing. However we were in a road trip in a car that was probably too small to fit all of us… but those are the sort of details that dreams just handwave away. What I do know for certain is that at some point we stopped at a roadside diner, and while milling around and waiting for everyone to finish going to the restroom I noticed this little girl had a cool vintage metroid championship t-shirt. I commented that I liked her shirt and she showed it to me proudly… and that is when I noticed that emblazoned across it in a fuchsia with purple shadow version of the Metroid logo was the name “Kodra”. Round about this time in the dream Kodra comes out of the bathroom and I point out the t-shirt and he is super nonchalant about it. This is the point where we learn that apparently he was a child prodigy at video games… and “he doesn’t like to talk about that time”. We also find out that apparently there is this entire internet sub culture that has been trying to find out what happened to Kodra after the championship… which in itself is funny given that he goes by that game on our podcast. It is around this point that the dream starts to break down like every dream does, especially given that I am not sure the timing works. Kodra is quite a bit younger than I am, so not sure what age he would have been when Metroid was even a thing. In any case… it was one of those strange dreams that I had to commit to paper as it were.

As far as “me”, I am doing mostly better… or at least on the road to better. I feel bad about the weird state of yesterdays post, but I just didn’t have any proper fuel to cobble together a post. I have been stressed beyond belief for reasons I can’t get into. Just know that for the most part those events have passed and I think I am on the other side of them. Cryptic as hell I know but that is about all I can really say. I have not been feeling great, but I think it is just a side effect of the stress. Last night I wound up going to bed before 10 pm, and then woke up about midnight feeling like I had slept an entire night. My body does strange things when it comes to sleep, but thankfully I was able to mostly get right back to sleep. As far as gaming goes last night, I managed to exist in the “organized gameplay” world just long enough to drag some friends into Heroic Darkheart Thicket for the World Quest that rewarded an 850 wrist. This was unfortunately good enough that it was worth breaking up my four piece world quest set to partake of the level difference. After that and finishing up my emissary quest for the day I flipped over to my paladin and continued questing out in Highmountain for a bit. So far leveling as a tankadin is pretty chill and relaxing, and while I would rather run around Justicar Julia Celeste, I have to say Vindicator Boros is growing on me. It is kinda fun to run around and be Super Draenei Tankbros. I contemplated actually transmogging to some of the gear he is wearing to make it even seem more legit, since I think I have a lot of that stuff from the Draenor expansion. However my purple judgement set matches the purple tone artifact so well… that I am leaving it be for the time being. Over the night Tam managed to ding 110 so my hope for tonight is to grab him and smuggle him into a heroic to hopefully get some gear.

A Proper Paladin

September 27, 2014 by Belghast

Capitalism Ho!

This morning I am getting around a bit later than normal. I am not sure why exactly I slept in so late. I got up to go to the restroom at 6 am, and then next thing I know my wife is getting up at 8:30 telling me that her tummy is grumbling. I apparently took from 8:30 until 9 to actually raise myself from the stupor. I showered and got dressed and wandered out like usual to find some breakfast. When I got to the QuikTrip just down the street from my house it was absolutely packed with people. When I exited the car I immediately realized why. Across the street is the high school and I was confronted with a barrage of the sound of that can only come from a dozen marching bands warming and tuning.

Since there were band parents and potential competitors wandering in and out of the store, I half expected that everything would be picked over. However it seems like they were prepared and pretty much everything you could want was in stock. I ended up getting my traditional Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Roll, and for my wife a chocolate long john. For the moment life is good as I have consumed my breakfast and am now writing for you lovely readers. It was around this point that I remembered that my friend Kodra and fellow host of AggroChat was planning a stream this morning. If you catch this post early enough you should totally tune into his Hitbox stream and watch him attempt to date birds. We have been joking for a few weeks that he needed to play this game… and the subsection title comes from a comment he just made over the stream when he was offered to get a job.

All Grown Up

Yesterday I was feeling absolutely like crap. I woke up and it felt like someone had filled my head with concrete over the night, and took after my throat with some sandpaper. I struggled around yesterday morning trying to get psyched for work, and it just wasn’t working. I texted one of my co-workers to make sure he was in the office, and that things were going smoothly. After reporting back in that all was well I decided to just stay home. I stayed remoted into work most of the day, working on this and that but took breaks to work on leveling my paladin. Considering I technically took a sick day, I didn’t feel bad at all about doing this. They were essentially getting free work from me as it was, and I was mostly just dealing with little issues as they came up, and responding to email.

After doing my daily low level dungeon roulette and getting Haukke yet again… I decided to pull everything in the zone and skip nothing. The boost of XP managed to take me through the rest of 48 and halfway through 49. I didn’t really feel like tanking another low level dungeon considering my precious bonus was gone, so instead I went out to Mor Dhona and worked on some leves. It is almost as though they had intended folks to do just this because all but one of the Leves spawn in exactly the same corner of the zone. So I could run to the vendor get four quests, complete all four and just say no to the free teleport between them. It took a couple of rounds of this to get close, but what actually dinged me was completely the “do 5 different types of leves” challenge log entry. Those things are worth a truly prodigious amount of experience.

The awesome thing about having so much Syrcus tower and Weathered gear, is that all of it is dual class for both Warriors and Paladins. This means the second I dinged 50, and bought 3 pieces of ilevel 90 gear from the hunt master… I was sitting at I think ilevel 89. My weapon and shield being the only thing dragging down my overall score. The problem is I had glamoured most of the hideous looking Syrcus tower gear to look like the default warrior set, and class specific glamours won’t show up when you equip it as another class. Instead I opted to go for a mix of the chain tunic I loved so much, and some of the heavy allagan bits I had managed to connect. For the paladin I keep the golden crown, and for warrior I use the bunny samurai hat. So far I am digging the look.

A Proper Paladin

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, my mission was to push through the Relic Reborn quest line and become a proper Curtana wielding paladin. One of the unintended consequences of the Nexus relic system, is that folks tend to be ONLY farming whatever happens to be the dungeon or trial that gives bonus light. Players have figured out there is the equivalent of the “Hot Zone” that Everquest and Everquest II used to have. Where if you run that one thing, you get a significantly boosted amount of nexus light. The result is that it took absolutely forever to get most of my primals done. I think at this point folks are still busy farming nexus light, and not working on alts… which I think is what keeps the group steps for the relic moving along quickly. You would figure as a tank I would get damned near instant queues… but unfortunately that was not the case.

I spent large blocks of time dancing in various places. Here I am dancing for two NPCs in Uldah… both of which seem thoroughly unimpressed by my skills. I think a rundown of the waits looked a little something like this… Chimera took around 45 minutes to finally pop and when it did I was the most seasoned tank so ended up tanking it. Hydra on the other hand took only about 25 minutes… and the other tank a Cat Girl in a Bikini wielding a huge axe rushed in and tanked it. For Ifrit it was more like a 15 minute wait, and oddly enough once again a Cat Girl in a Bikini tanked it, but from what I can tell it was a different one. Finally we come around to Garuda and it was almost instant pop. It turns out that I lucked out and hit a spot where Garuda was the Hot Zone… and as such it was the fastest Garuda run I have ever experienced. Folks were ignoring all of the mechanics and pretty much just burning her.

That just left Titan, and after another fifteen minute run I was volunteered to be the primary tank. This is fine because really as far as fights go Titan is one of the easiest fights to tank. For the most part you just stand in one spot occasionally shifting slightly to either be next to the red line or to avoid a bomb. Like every titan I have seemed to be in ever… it took a couple of wipes and echo stacks before we finally pushed through. On the time we won we were down to a single Scholar healer and a few dps and me. This seems to honestly be easier than trying to keep alive eight people on this fight. Sure it was a pain in the ass and took a really long time, but you reach a point where the healing and movement is manageable and you just keep repeating the same loop. With that I had my Curtana and shield. Moments later I had upgraded it to Zenith level and finally felt like a real paladin tank. This makes level 50 job number four and my fourth Relic Zenith.

#FFXIV #Paladin