legendary Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

South Central Ruins Chest Farm

February 9, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I have to be perfectly honest… I thought I was done documenting camps. Yesterday I crafted my final level of flame altar and was going to spend the evening poking around the previously deadly shroud areas. However, before sitting down to do this, I saw this video over on YouTube reporting to have the “fastest legendary farm ever”. I am a sucker for this nonsense and given that I documented two other really good farms, I thought I would at least check this one out. Turns out that this is maybe the single best farming spot I have experienced.

The video title was not hyperbole in the least. The farm originally comes from this video by 04AM, but since Glitchiz is the video I first saw and it covers ONLY this one farm I figured that would be the one that I embed. I am uncertain what level of shroud you need to have, but you likely need to have at least found the Kindlewastes spire and have the ability updraft to make it straight forward. During the video, he covers the entire setup of the farm and some tips, like things I did not even think about such as using a grappling point to make getting to the chest a bit faster. I’m legitimately hoping that this is going to be the last time I feel compelled to document one of these chest farms, but in truth pending you want max-level gear, this is the only one you are going to need.

Essentially you are going to fly West South West of the Kindlewastes Ancient Spire, which I have highlighted on my map to show in reference where the spot is. The red bag icon marks where the location of the chest actually is. The only gotchas with this camp is that it isn’t necessarily entirely safe. There are the “giant pterodactyl bird” things roaming around this area, and on very rare occasions one will get close enough to this area to aggro. So either you need to build yourself a safe “hidey hole” that you can duck into around the flame altar, or you need to be able to safely kill one of these. You can see in the first screenshot of this post, that the chest will be sticking half out of the sand by a dead tree on the edge of a set of desert ruins that have no spawns in them.

The above screenshot of my chest represents an hour of farming at this location. I did not keep anything below legendary quality and skipped over most of the duplicates. Additionally, I ignored all of the set gear because I already had two full sets of everything. In truth had I kept everything it would have easily filled up two of the max-size chests, and I got more than a full set of each of the types of armor. What was interesting about this location is that the legendary drop rate chance was so much higher than either of the two camps that I had spent time farming. More than that I saw a lot of items that I only ever saw in epic rarity from the other camps. I am pretty sure this chest is capable of dropping every single legendary weapon in the game. At none of the camps have I seen any legendary shields or rings, and the only thing of the sort I have seen is a magical shield bracelet thingy from the first camp.

What was awesome though is that the camp allowed me to pretty much swap out all of the gear that I was using for an upgrade. The White Wolf Sword has a very bright blue glow, but more important than that is all of the +Shroud Damage it is capable of doing. Similarly, the Ritual Tempest Wand is awesome for all of the +Shock Damage it can deal. Then we have Wolf’s Snarl Longbow, which I had only ever seen a purple version of… and has the highest damage of any bow I have seen in the game so far. That said there were so many drops that you could pretty much find a weapon to suit whatever playstyle you are going for at this one camp. The Iron Cave is still probably easier to get to early on, but after seeing the output of this camp I would completely skip the Cliffside camp that I talked about yesterday.

I have some thoughts about where I would love to see Enshrouded go as a game, but I will probably save those for another day. I hope to try out grouping with some friends over the weekend where I will very likely start a brand new character. I legitimately hope this is the last one of these camps that I feel like I need to document, as spinning the loot table over and over is getting a bit boring.

Bolt Crafted Sorta

December 6, 2023 by Belghast

As we get closer to Friday, I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I will be going Boneshatter for the league start. After sifting through many different guides and POBs, I think I honestly prefer the one that Zizaran released for 3.22. This is mostly because the gear seems pretty straightforward and craftable and it features some of the things that I knew that I wanted to lean into like double-dipping evasion for armor with Iron Reflexes. We have a Trello for all of the folks doing league starts in the private league we are running and I have highlighted some of the uniques that I am looking out for, but in theory, this should be able to be done with nothing but rares at least for a while. If this can get me down into Delve at around 150 depth I will be very happy.

Additionally, since yesterday was the official stop of the Trial of the Ancestors league, it meant that they opened up the ability to create private leagues for Affliction. So we now officially have the “Bel League Affliction” set up and running and most of the participants have joined. Ash and Kodra helped split the cost of the league three ways with us each chipping in 100 coins, with more folks willing to chip in if we decide to expand it past the initial 40 days. I figure at the 40-day mark we will either allow the characters to drop down into the trade league or if folks are still going hot and heavy, expand it out by another 30 days.

The other big thing that I did in Path of Exile last night was to get both my personal and the guild’s stash set up in standard the way I want it to look in Affliction. Essentially the state of your standard stash is what gets imported into the next league, and for the guild, I mostly wanted to get the tabs named and affinities set properly so that hopefully I don’t have to do this on the first day of the new league. Similarly, I did a bunch of rearranging things in my personal stash to go ahead and set up some of the common folders that I used in Ancestor League. As far as all of those “Remove-Only” tabs I tend to shove them into a folder named after the league they were created during. Not that I spend much time in Standard, but I figure this will make this a bit easier at a later date when I might be looking for something.

In other news, I have been playing a not-insignificant amount of Guild Wars 2 lately. I’ve talked about this a bit, but I have been popping in at least once each day to chip away at my “wizard chores” which is a humorous term that I picked up from my friend Ace regarding World of Warcraft Dailies. Given that I am actually doing them for a tower full of wizards… and the reward system is called the Wizard’s Vault… it is finally the perfect term for what I am doing. Doing various daily, weekly, and period objectives gives you a currency called Astral Acclaim which can then be used to buy all manner of things from cosmetics, to pieces of usable gear… to probably the most valuable item which amounts to a massive boost in crafting your choice of a legendary from four different options.

Astral Acclaim stacks to 1300 points, and I was nearing the cap where I could not earn anymore and needed to spend down some of it. So I opted to pick up the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit – Set 2. This gave me access to shortcutting the crafting process for Bolt, The Moot, Quip, or The Predator. Since I use Sword on a few of my characters and am looking forward to playing around with Sword on my Necromancer soonish… I opted to go with Bolt. I don’t really love the appearance of any of these weapons, but the other one I was considering for a bit was Quip just to give me access to a pistol as that seems to be a weapon archetype I also enjoy. What this box does is give you the precursor weapon, the “gift of” for the specific weapon shortcutting the need to level a profession to 400, and either a Gift of Magic or Gift of Might. This then requires you to supply your own Gift of Mastery and the Gift of Magic/Might that you did not receive, along with 77 Mystic Clovers, and 250 Globs of Ecotoplasm to craft a Gift of Fortune.

I had already been chipping away at some of the legendary weapon requirements because I have been working towards Twilight… which I stalled out on when it came to crafting the precursor. I should have just sucked it up and bought the precursor and would have likely already completed that weapon before now had I done so. This however meant that I had already done the legwork to craft a Gift of Mastery, and had been stockpiling resources that got me at least part of the way towards the missing Gift of Magic since my package gave me Might instead. I took the easy way out and spent roughly 200 gold to finish gathering the Tier 6 materials needed to craft the Gift of Fortune and then threw all of the expensive bits in the mystical commode to get my very first Legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2.

To be fair… I said “sorta” in the title because it doesn’t feel like I really put in all of the effort required to craft a Legendary weapon. I would probably feel more accomplished had I done so, but given that gathering Legendary gear is the true endgame of Guild Wars 2, it does seem a bit brilliant to give players an onramp to demystify the process a bit. According to GW2 Efficiency, the price right now to craft a Bolt from scratch would require about 1300 gold. This is greatly shortcutting that process giving you the Gift of Bolt (~200 Gold), Gift of Might (~150 Gold), and the precursor (~70 Gold) all for the low price of a month’s worth of dailies. It also encourages players to complete that Gift of Mastery on their own which requires getting full Tyria exploration completion and farming up a Gift of Battle. The more players engage with Legendary crafting, the more they become entwined into the flow of the game… and likely the longer they will stick around. While this essentially handed me 450 Gold… it did so in a way that meant I had to have poured a good deal of my time into the project to make anything of it.

The only annoyance is that I will have to craft a second legendary sword at some point for the characters that would want to dual-wield them. Now that I have broken the seal on this system, however… I sorta want to focus some time on wrapping up Twilight and getting a Greatsword for all of my alts to use as well. I see what you did there Wizard Vault…

Loot Problems

March 11, 2019 by Belghast

Shocking to no one I spent the majority of my weekend playing Anthem again. It was a bizarre weekend for those of us who spent both Friday night and Saturday playing because some things happened. Firstly the the 1.0.3 patch that we were expecting to land on the 12th launched a bit early on the 9th around 7 am, meaning when I woke up for the day I had a significant patch to download. However Friday night… they did the thing where they accidentally set the loot drops too high and we were getting Masterworks left and right. Once again the community thought this was intentional… because ultimately it is what we have been clamoring for all this time. However with the launch of the patch it was rolled back… and it has been a bit hard to separate the good of the patch with the bad of having loot nerfed again.

Anthem has a loot problem, namely that it is way too stingy with Masterworks but more importantly too stingy with Legendaries. All told I have gotten 4 Legendary drops in what is now 164 hours worth of play time. Dividing that out it is me seeing a Legendary drop every 41 hours of play time. There are folks out there who have racked up similar hours and have yet to see a single one. It was the futile hope of the player base that when we removed Whites and Greens from dropping in post 30 content… that it would have a positive effect of skewing the number of Masterworks and Legendaries we would get. However as some testing has shown… essentially every green and white drop was replaced by a purple… which is awesome if you are just getting started but more disenchant fodder once you enter the hunt for Orange and Lime (that’s what I am deciding to call legendary green). There is an interesting post that was up on the reddit over the weekend… where a player farmed 200 drops with +95 luck before and after the patch, linking to the original thread but going to post the data here for reference.

Pre-Patch Numbers

Common: 17 items at 8.5%
Uncommon: 24 items at 12%
Rare: 34 items at 17%
Epic: 102 items at 51%
Masterwork: 21 items at 10.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

Post-Patch Numbers

Rare: 28 items at 14%
Epic: 163 items at 81.5%
Masterwork: 7 items at 3.5%
Legendary: 2 items at 1%

The original poster went to the trouble of documenting all of their loot with screenshots, but accounting for randomness it does appear that the Common and Uncommon slots are now just Epic items, which again is great for people getting a start in the game but bad for anyone who has collected a set of epic gear which now happens frighteningly fast under the current loot environment.

All of that said… I am still enjoying myself and have managed to cobble together gear for three different javelins at this point. I will probably be starting on the Storm at some point soon once I have spent a bit more time fine tuning the Interceptor. Right now I have something that I would call a proper build on both the Ranger and the Colossus, and I will be farming content until I reach that point on the Interceptor as well. How I am getting there… is because I am exploiting the fact that Strongholds drop a guaranteed ability and Legendary contracts drop a guaranteed component. While I only have three legendary contracts available to me each day, it seems that Quickplay on Grandmaster 1 difficulty tends to place you into a Legendary Contract more often than not… and doing this nets you a guaranteed component as well. Stronghold Quickplay similarly nets you a guaranteed ability drop… however in my experience this is bugged out the vast majority of the time and not really worth your effort.

Now I realize there are a lot of players out there that have been having issues with the game nonstop since release. However for the most part I had not… until this weekend when I started heavily relying on Quickplay. That functionality seems to be far more buggy than the rest of the game, and I am wondering if the majority of the issues that players have been encountering have revolved around trying to do this abbreviated path to loot. Normal Quickplay seemed to stick me in far fewer bugged out instances than it did before the patch, however when something went wrong… it went REALLY wrong often times causing me to have to either go through a loop of being bounced back to the loading screen like the above screenshot… or having to hard kill the client. Starting Missions, Contracts, Strongholds and Freeplay myself all resulted in predictably smooth gameplay… however any time I dared to mess with Quickplay I was effectively playing with fire.

Another byproduct of the patch is that overall Javelin power feels like it has increased, and a side effect of that is that none of the lower difficulty ranks seem to be anywhere near as populated as they were. Thalen reported issues getting full groups on normal difficulty as he was playing through the story and leveling, and I personally experienced a challenge getting groups at hard difficulty when I was attempting to finish getting the epics on my Interceptor. So one of two things has happened… either the average player has released that they can now crush Grandmaster 1 thanks to the power scaling, or more likely a lot of players have just stopped messing with the game out of frustration over various issues. Neither case is great for the game as a whole because it makes it harder and harder to onboard a supply of new players. Grace will be starting up this week and I will be curious to see how that experience is as a new player and whether or not the matchmaking is as quick as it was for the rest of us that started out. Side note since I have done this pretty much every week, throwing out a screenshot of the Alliance contribution screen… I have yet to hit the hard cap for the week.

One final screenshot of note… since I played a bit of Warframe this weekend… I am pretty sure these two chests in the hanger area are a nod to that game. Anyone has played much Warframe will notice that they have a lot of lockers scattered throughout the ships that look suspiciously similar to these. Also oddly enough playing a lot of Anthem has somehow made Warframe feel more manageable? I was not nearly as motion sick playing it yesterday as I have been in the past, and the way too zoomed in perspective did not feel anywhere near as bad as it had after playing the whirling ball of death that is the Interceptor. I still greatly prefer Anthem, but I have a feeling I could probably start to finally delve into Warframe if I so choose.

So where we are left is that Anthem needs to make a lot of changes quickly. Chad Robertson the Head of Live Services chimed in over on twitter with some comments to this whole situation. It spans several tweets so quoting rather than just pasting the thread for ease of consumption.

We appreciate all the feedback from the community on the game. We love the passion and share it. We’re not yet fully happy with the game’s loot behavior either. One of the downsides of moving so fast to improve is that we’re making changes to complex loot systems in several areas and it’s then harder to know how it’s performing. In the next few months, we’re expecting to make significant changes, but we’re starting with some incremental ones so we can better navigate that evolution. Our goal is to ensure the best possible player experience.

So while I appreciate this comment, because they are actually saying words in reference to problems… which is a step above a lot of studios out there. The biggest problem that I have with this comment is the fact that he mentions the time frame of “the next few months”. I am not entirely certain that they have months… and more likely have weeks to sort this out before players simply give up and file this game in the bin of “check back for year two” like so many of us did with Destiny. We already see the signs in matchmaking of players dropping out of the system, which is a bad sign. Additionally the temperature of the Reddit has shifted drastically over the last few days, which was a different situation than the inflammatory YouTube community… they were positive and hopeful and I think were pinning their hopes on the patch from March 12th fixing a lot of the major issues… namely with loot drops. That however has drastically shifted to a community demanding fixes now, because Patch 1.0.3 did not deliver the solace they were hoping for. While I am still playing the hell out of this game… I cannot say they are necessarily wrong in their frustrations.

There have been two situations where supposedly accidental loot changes have “fixed” the game. In both times the game felt so much better because it didn’t feel bad when you got another Masterwork with crappy rolls, because you knew another one was right around the corner. The unbridled excitement of actually seeing a legendary drop, and knowing that this wasn’t a once in a career thing… made you care less about also getting crappy rolls on it too. Loot needs to flow like water Diablo 3 style so you can pick through the dross and cobble together something resembling a proper build. Nothing is more frustrating than getting a bunch of abilities you don’t care about… when you have a specific style of play that you enjoy on your character… but feel forced to use the Masterworks because the item level increase makes them just flat out superior to using a proper build. All of this felt less of the case when the loot was accidentally generous… and the players will not be satisfied until we get something resembling that state again.