minions

Lightning Struck Friends

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If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably are expecting this post. I talked yesterday about wanting to try out Absolution… so last night I started a brand new Witch and got it through the start of Act 8. I decided to go with a Necromancer in spite of Guardian actually representing over 70% of the folks running Absolution or Vaal Absolution in this league. Guardian is really powerful as evidenced by how easy of a time I had with no real gear during the Toucan League. However, I opted to go back to the minion-loving roots of a Witch, largely because at this point I had already leveled 2 Guardians and an Inquisitor in this league and was a bit tired of the old man in a diaper that is the Templar. I can’t necessarily call mine a Necromancer because in spite of being over level 60… I’ve yet to take the time to do my first Labyrinth and actually ascend.

While technically this is a minion build… it feels absolutely nothing like MOST minion builds. Essentially you run around nuking things with a giant orbital strike of lightning damage and that then spawns up to three Sentinels of Absolution that also cast the same big lightning strike attack. More specifically I am using the Vaal version and thanks to Trade League I picked up a dirt cheap level 1 version with 20% quality on it so when finished I will have a 20/20 Vaal gem which is a bit of a challenge to actually get. Added to the mix are Spectres and Zombies with Feeding Frenzy support and Herald of Purity summoning up four Sentinels of Purity. Because everything seems to lag behind, I end up casting Convocation quite a bit to keep them grouped up on whatever target I want them to attack. The mix of me casting a giant nuke, and then having a swarm of minions… feels supremely odd and I am not entirely certain what I think about it yet.

I am following a guide, but at the moment it feels like my tree is spread out all over the freaking place. At some point, I am certain I will apply a measure of my own personal touch to this build, in order to make it a bit more tanky. This is going for Eldritch Battery, which means I am entirely losing my Energy Shield as a defensive layer. I should then in theory probably stack armor bases for various slots, but given that I mostly need blue sockets… that becomes its own nightmare to get colored correctly. What worries me at the moment is just how low my health currently is. Part of this is because I have been leveling with a 5-Link Thousand Ribbons and a handful of other uniques that made the early game a breeze… but have largely outlived their usefulness.

Almost 50% of players running Absolution are running a specific unique chest piece called Doryani’s Prototype, and I am really not sure if I want to go down that rabbit hole. Essentially the tech behind this body armor relies on you getting your Lightning Resistance as low as possible… for the best builds out there it can be as low as -200%. Then when you attack mobs they have the same lightning resistance as you do… allowing your lightning attacks to do outrageous damage against them. In order to keep from dying, you need to stack as much armor as humanly possible because the chest piece also allows you to soak lightning damage from hits as armor, but this makes you extremely vulnerable to any lightning damage over time attacks. I just do not feel like I want to play this game nonsense game of trying to juggle resistances and make sure one is bottomed out, while the others are high enough to matter.

At least for the time being… I am not going to do this nonsense. Instead, I am going to utilize the fact that we have a truly ridiculous number of six-links in the guild bank. I hand-picked a crusader chainmail that I was able to get 5 Blue/1 Red on pretty quickly through spamming chromatics. I am going to buck the popular advice and just build some measure of normal guild for the moment. I don’t really want to spend much currency on this build especially considering I am not even sure I am going to like how it feels. The only thing so far that I have bought is a Replica Dragonfang with Absolution on it which itself was less than 100 Chaos, so something I can make back rapidly just by selling off some delve stuff. Tonight I am certain that I will wrap up the campaign and start poking my head into early maps to see how this all feels.

I will probably try and knock out the first two Labyrinths over lunch so I can officially call myself a Necromancer. Probably the biggest expenditure I will have is buying a bunch of botched 20/20 corrupted gems in order to jump-start myself to a baseline of power rather than waiting to level them all.

A Shiny Tabby

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bit of a mixed bag of activities. I was back in Path of Exile and spent some time on my SRS Guardian. After playing a lot of my Storm Brand Build and Shield Crush Build… it honestly felt amazing to be back on this character. The strength levels of that build are just so much higher and honestly for so much less investment. I fear that this is going to mean that Guardian eats a few swings from the nerf bat before 3.23. If it remains intact, however, I am contemplating this as a league starter for the next go-around. You would have thought I had learned my lesson to stop trying to start something other than Righteous Fire, but legitimately… SRS Guardian feels equally as good and it reached a point of power way faster than RF usually does.

I spent a bit of the evening cleaning out monster parts from my stash tab. One of the things that I like about having Metamorph on my Atlas tree is that I am somewhat passively gaining monster bits and then can have an hour or so of constant fights in Tane’s chambers. Mostly I shifted to running Metamorph because the prices of catalysts are outrageous in this league. 20 Prismatic Catalysts to quality up a single resistance ring has been around 400 Chaos Orbs, which feels way too rich for my blood. There is also the side benefit that I have had pretty decent luck in getting raw Divine Orbs to drop from stomping monsters.

Another thing that I had some exceptional luck with, is that last night I saw three Voidborn Reliquary Keys. I sold two of these and decided to open one because it is always fun to gamble a little bit. While most folks seem to open these chasing a Mageblood or a Headhunter, I am honestly fine with anything else interesting that just happens to be shiny. Last night I pulled what I had honestly wanted all of this time… a Shiny Tabula Rasa. This will let me twink characters in style going forward… though honestly I am not sure how many more builds I am going to make this league.

I spent most of my evening down in Delve, slowly crawling my way across the randomized map. This really is my happy place when it comes to Path of Exile. I was chilled out sitting on the sofa with my laptop, a cat to my side, and listening to an audiobook. I found all three reliquary keys down in Delve last night, and to be truthful… most of them that I have found for the last few leagues all came from Delve. That makes sense because statistically, I am doing way more delve than I am doing any other content. I’m loosely looking for Fire-themed nodes because while I have a decent enough Flammability On Hit ring for the Shield Crush Chieftain, I could always use a slightly better itemized one. I’m also hunting for the parts for precursor rings because those are selling extremely well in this league.

Speaking of sales… the reliquary keys and a few other divine orb drops have helped me recover from the significant outlay of currency that I spent kitting out the Shield Crush Chieftain. I’ve started using POEStack to track my currency since Exilience Next appears to be toast at the moment. In truth, I think I like having a web app way more than a stand-alone desktop client. Additionally, if I ever do start selling on TFT, I will at least be very familiar with the interface. I know that I will probably spend most of that before I gather much more, because I seem to always be funding the next idea that I want to play. I still want to try something with cyclone, but that seems to be always on the far horizon and not something that I am actively doing.

The last thing I guess I will talk a bit about this morning is that I finished up The Final Empire the first book in the initial Mistborn Trilogy. It took me forever to read anything by Brandon Sanderson, but now that I have… I understand what all the hype has been about. The world that he built and the characters in it were deeply enjoyable. I know without a doubt that I am going to be consuming the next two books in rapid order. I really enjoyed the way magic worked in this world and I look forward to seeing how the character of Vin continues to evolve. There is this whole part Shinobi part Jedi thing going on that I dig and I genuinely like a lot of the background characters as well.

I think tonight I will probably be back in Diablo III, working on chipping away at some more of the seasonal achievements. While I am enjoying myself there, I don’t find the gameplay anywhere near as compelling as Path of Exile. It is a heck of a lot of fun, but the dopamine hits are nowhere near as potent.

Final Fantasy XIV Minion Guide

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I Love Mini-Pets

ffxiv 2015-02-22 10-52-44-08 One of my favorite things in any game is the collection of mini-pets and in Final Fantasy XIV they have a truly silly amount of them.  In talking to a guildie today I realized just how contorted it is to try and figure out how to get each of them.  They come from vendors, achievements, quests, an random raid and dungeon drops.  I thought for today’s post I would attempt to pull together a rudimentary list of where you can obtain which minions.  This will likely not be a complete list, but it is a good first attempt.  I will try and update it for new data as I find what I am missing.

Purchased Minions

This is probably the least complete of the information I have, but if you really want to find out how to get each of the minions, click the link and follow up to find out where the vendor is located.  Some of these require you to complete certain FATEs to get the vendor to show up. Anything marked Special event means it is from a holiday event or similar limited time happening.

Beast Tribe Purchased Minions

This next batch are vendor purchased, but require you to gain a certain amount of faction with a given beast tribe to access the minions.  It looks like each faction has two different minions.

Crafting and Harvested Minions

This category of minions is obtained either through a crafted pattern or through harvesting.  Click through to the minion to find out specifically what it takes to obtain each.

Quested Minions

There are a number of minions that can be obtained through the completion of quests.  Here is a list of those that I know of, as well as the quest that goes with them.  Be warned looking at the quest might be a bit of a spoiler at times.  Anything marked Special event means it is from a holiday event or similar limited time happening.

Achievement Minions

There are a number of minions that are associated with the completion of an achievement.  I’ve attempted to link the achievement to help you figure out what it takes to get each one.  Some of them are extremely involved.

FATE Minions

There are a number of minions that are obtained through the completion of specific FATEs.  Generally speaking these require you to get gold completion on the FATE in order to earn the minion.  These drop each time you get gold, meaning they are often extremely cheap on the market board.

Treasure Map Minions

With the introduction of the treasure map system, there are a number of extremely rare and highly sought after minions that come from completing these maps.  From what I understand it is a sub 1% chance of getting one of these minions, because of this… they go for millions of gil each.  Good luck!

Gardening Minions

When the housing garden plots were introduced, there are a number of minions that can be in essence grown.  Each of them requires you to do some truly contorted things to get a rare seed… that will then grow into the minion.  I don’t know the specifics but hopefully you can research how to do this elsewhere.  I am just providing a list of minions.

Retainer Venture Minions

Similar to the Treasure Map minions… there are minions that have an exceptionally rare chance of being returned from Retainer ventures.  Most of these come from exploration ventures of specific gathering types.  The rarity causes them to generally be priced in the millions.  Hopefully you will have some extremely good luck.

Dungeon Drop Minions

There are a number of minions that can be found as somewhat uncommon drops in various dungeons.  Several of these started as 100% chance drops, but as the market was flooded, Square decided to dial back the drop chance making them significantly rarer.  The best option for these is to farm them by running the dungeon multiple times.

Raid Drop Minions

A Number of the raids and trials drop minions.  Generally speaking when a trial drops a minion it is dropped every time you successfully complete it.  When a raid drops one, there is a chance it may or may not drop the minion.  The problem with raid drops is you are having to roll against potentially 24 other players… which means you need to roll exceptionally well to have a shot at walking away with it.

Veteran Reward Minions

Final Fantasy XIV has easily one of the best veteran rewards programs, rewarding players for subscribing to the game with various items.  At each step you get a minion, so I have jotted down the minion and the number of days subscribed you have to reach to earn it.

Mog Station Purchased Minions

Recently Square Enix introduced a number of RMT minions available through the Mog Station.  Each of these runs roughly $5.  So far these are limited to the various scions apart from Minfilia that comes from the yearly anniversary event.

Final Fantasy XIV Merchandise Bonus Minions

There are a handful of items that can be purchased that have a pack in code for a specific minion.  These are all exclusive and cannot be obtained through other means.

Eternal Bonding Ceremony Minion

Finally there is one other very specific minion that can only be obtained through attending an Eternal Bonding ceremony.  Having not actually done this myself yet, I am uncertain how this process works but I would assume it becomes purchasable after you attend.

Thats All Folks… for now

ffxiv 2015-02-23 21-43-30-57

That ladies and gentlemen is all of the minions that I happen to know about.  As they add more to the game I will try and keep this guide updated.  Tomorrow the 2.51 patch lands and with it I am sure more minions.  Also if there are other minions not included in this guide that you know how to get, please let me know and I will copy over the information.  Hopefully someone out here will find this information useful.

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