MMORPG

Righteous Fire Juggernaut

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Man wearing lots of armor that is red and black themed standing in a desert region staring up at a giant pyramid with a floating inverted pyramid on top.
Brimstone Sands from New World on PC

Good Morning Friends! It has been a while since I have done one of these roundup posts but that is what you are in for this morning. Over in New World, I feel like I am running on fumes a bit. I do this thing where I get an idea in my head and then I obsess about that idea and when it is eventually accomplished… I end up fairly burned out as a result. My new world version of this was the gear farm series, and now that I have largely finished that… I am struggling to find my next goal. With the start of Winter Convergence, I ground up my faction and now in theory need to spend copious hours following the train and grinding tokens to get kitsch. I’ve also started Brimstone Sands for the first time and lord is that an interesting area. I think I need to just focus on questing out there to get my feet back under me and get to a place where I am deeply enjoying the game again.

The Tequatl World boss fight from Guild Wars 2 where a giant undead dragon attacks the coastline and several dozen players have to take it down in several phases.
Tequatl World Boss from Guild Wars 2 on PC

I’ve also been poking my head back into Guild Wars 2 again and while I am mostly rudderless there I am at least trying to get back in the habit of collecting my daily freebies. Occasionally I do so in a timely enough manner to be able to catch the 6 pm CST Tequatl. This is still my favorite event in the game and quite possibly the first thing I ever did that really sold me on the grandeur and possibility that group content can really have. I need to get back enough into the swing of things to start doing the meta for Cantha and get my siege turtle. I have been growing Kelp in my personal instance for a while now and am hoping that I have enough stockpiled to feed my babby turtle when I finally get one. I greatly appreciate the drop in/drop out nature of Guild Wars 2 and how I can spend an entire evening following the world boss train if I want to… or just not and that is also okay.

Heavily armored warrior wearing red and black gear with a braided brown beard, an eye patch, and a glowing red eye standing in a scrubland region dotted with ornate houses.
Elsweyr in The Elder Scrolls Online

I’ve been visiting The Elder Scrolls Online again and as much as I really want to get back into some questing there because I love the story… I am struggling with it a bit. Mentally I keep comparing the combat in ESO to that of New World and ESO keeps coming up on the losing end of that association. To be completely frank… combat in ESO feels sorta boring. It is a lot of light attacks and heavy attacks with a lowered emphasis on hitting abilities. The time to kill seems way too high for me to enjoyably rip through encounters. Granted I have always played a tank and maybe I should focus more on one of my other characters. That said I am not really sure that anything is going to feel great now that I have seen what a more action-oriented MMO can feel like. Like I am certain that the New World style of combat is not everyone’s jam, but the interplay between weapon abilities feels far better than what ESO is providing currently.

Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build for Path of Exile

I think I have landed on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the Path of Exile league starts tomorrow. I contemplated a lot of things including a more spin-to-win style build of the cyclone that a friend shared with me. Righteous Fire is something I tried a few leagues back but never really converted from the leveling skill over to RF… which I think was a massive mistake on my part. I went off in my own direction because I happened to be enjoying the Wintertide Brand play style and should have actually tried the proper RF build instead. This time with a new take in the form of the Marauder version, I am going to give it my all and make sure I actually follow the guide completely. I might try Cyclone later in the league if I find myself wanting to do something else. Essentially Righteous Fire gameplay reminds me of another one of my favorite classes which is the Thorns Crusader.

User Interface overloaded with Spell Gems in Path of Exile on PC

There has been discussion about setting goals for a new Path of Exile league and I think my goal will be to stop picking up every spell gem I happen to see in my journies. I spent a while yesterday trying to organize my inventory and collapse some of my remove-only tabs into something that makes sense. Granted I will probably never actually play standard, but I hated leaving it in a total mess. For those unfamiliar when you end a league in PoE it gives you a copy of every tab from that season with the suffix (Remove Only). Basically, you can leave it alone indefinitely and to the best of my knowledge, GGG has never deleted these tabs. One of the suggestions I saw for dealing with them was to create a folder named after the league that just ended, and shovel all of the new remove-only tabs into it. I’ve more or less followed this idea with Maps being held out only because I want to convert them and store them when the new league begins. Others like Spell Gems I opted to dump into my inventory and then migrate over to the proper working tab.

I think I am as ready as I am ever going to be for Forbidden Sanctum. If you are planning on doing the league start either tomorrow or in the coming days, shoot me a note. I will be updating my where to find me page once I have my new set of characters.

Winter Convergence 2022 Guide

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Good Morning Friends! The Winter Convergence is upon us and all of Aeternum is feeling the chill of the Winter Warrior… or whatever this storyline actually is. Like much of New World’s story the winter event has the most loosely strung together of themes where basically two Yeti are duking it out… one wants to freeze the entire world and the other wants to protect us from this fate. What it means for the players is one of the most detailed events that take place in the game and features activities that everyone can participate in. This is the second time we have seen the Winter Convergence event and a number of things have been added to improve things. They seemingly have learned a lot from the recent Halloween event and carried forward some improvements.

Daily Presents

In the center of every town that can be held by a faction, you will find the Winter Convergence tree, as well as the entire town decked out in holiday-themed kitsch. One of the key benefits of this event is that you can go up to every tree in every settlement and collect a package each day. The first three packages will include bonus rewards that are effectively the same as the turkey bags that we just had from the Thanksgiving event. Essentially you are going to get some cash, Winter Tokens, and a chance for the various crafting patterns to drop. This is also how you are going to get your Diamond Gypsum for those who are level 60.

Town Board Quests

Every town has new projects that involve upgrading the tree through doing seasonal activities like crafting ornaments or baking cookies. As the town upgrades its tree, the daily rewards will keep getting better with higher token drops and a better chance at patterns. If nothing else they are a very easy way of getting some bonus town reputation each day.

Lost Presents

Scattered around Aeternum along its many roads will be piles of lost presents. You can reclaim these for faction with the Winter Wanderer, and then redeem them for Winter Tokens at the Winter Villages located in Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. Each package nets you 5 faction points so it isn’t a great way to complete the event, but it is the sort of thing you casually collect as you are roaming around and doing other activities.

Floating Packages

I remember when I first encountered a floating package last year I thought it was a bugged spawn. Essentially you will see a glowing pile of packages rotating in the air and if you shoot these down you get a whopping 250 faction with the Winter Wanderer. I am sorry that it is super hard to see in the screenshot, but keep your eyes on the skies and be watching for these. Well worth your time and worth me breaking out a crappy green bow I had in my inventory to shoot them down.

Gleamite Meteors

I’ve not seen one of these this year, but given that I see the ability to trade these in on the Winter Village shops I assume they still exist. Essentially if you hang out in lower-level zones at night time and watch the skies it is possible to see a meteor streaking across the sky. I found this video from last year showing what it looks like so you will know what to watch out for. Essentially when the meteor lands it destroys everything surrounding the impact crater and spawns a number of Gleamite nodes that can be mined for resources you can turn in at the Winter Village as well as some faction with the Winter Wanderer.

Winter Village and the Winter Wanderer

As I said above there are four Winter Villages that you can find spread throughout the world Monarch’s Bluff, Everfall, Brightwood, and Weaver’s Fen. They all for the most part function the same with a few carts in the town that let you trade lost presents and other doodads associated with the holiday event into friendly Yeti helpers in order to gain winter tokens. The Winter Wanderer himself will have a few quests for you. I believe since I did the original series in 2021 I don’t have access to those in order to do them again. However listening to a friend of mine talking about the event, makes me think they are still available. This year he has a new quest to hunt down the Winter Warrior and stop him in his tracks, which is a big boss fight that hops from zone to zone and is marked on your map similar to how the Halloween Boss and Turkulon were.

Winter Convergence Shop

Doing things associated with this holiday gives you a reputation with the Winter Wanderer aka a faction called the Holiday Regent. This works similarly to leveling your other factions, and there are various breakpoints, each unlocking different tiers of items available. At the highest tier which I reached last night, you have a number of somewhat ugly holiday-themed skins as well as a bunch of item-level 600 crafting patterns for every gear slot. You can also get a number of other skins like a replacement for our boring tent, and some extremely festive musical instruments.

Crafting Patterns

One of the really cool things from this year is a number of item-level 600 patterns for pretty much every slot. The huge benefit of this style of the pattern just like the ones that came from the Halloween event is that they can be crafted by anyone without a base skill requirement. The negative is that the materials required for these patterns are going to be extremely costly if you can’t craft them yourself. Each item tends to sell somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-300 coins each so the Great Axe that I crafted yesterday would have cost me around 10,000 coins worth of materials if I was not already capable of making them myself. The benefit with these patterns however is since you crafted them… they operate much like a named item and do not suffer any expertise drain for not having leveled your expertise to 600. A huge boon over the Halloween-themed patterns is it seems like you can choose your primary stat, so you can tailor the item to fit your specific build needs. If you can afford it, this is a fast way to catch up on your gear at level 60.

The Winter Warrior

As I said before the Winter Warrior now spawns in various locations around the world and is marked on your map. This is a large raid encounter and requires a significant number of players in order to take it down. There seems to be some sort of a breakpoint on these each day where the first handful of them reward you 5 Warrior’s Hailspikes and the subsequent kills only reward you 2. At least that seemed to be the case for me… it could simply be RNG. Each one of these can be handed in at the cart in the Winter Village for 10 Winter Tokens, so this becomes the most efficient way to not only farm reputation for the holiday event but also rewards.

Join the Zerg

It is almost guaranteed that your server will have some sort of semi-organized zerg going on while this event is active. Getting everything is going to require copious amounts of farming and as a result, I think this is going to be the case for the majority of the event. Essentially look in your recruitment channel for discussion of WB or World Boss and what zone they are heading towards. Once you are running with the train stay on the sequence as long as you like. Word of warning, however, the Winter Warrior can spawn in multiple locations in every zone in the game, so it is going to pay off significantly if you already have all teleports unlocked. I did not have any of the ones in Brimstone Sands since I had not ventured out there yet, so I took a bit last night and unlocked all of them to make the farming more efficient.

Ice Caves

I guess one last thing I will mention in case the 2021 quests are in fact available. There are a number of Yeti Ice Caves that have spawned around Aeternum and these stay up year-round and were brought into the game after the first Winter Convergence. These are marked on the map with the silhouette of a Yeti, but one of the easiest ones to get to is in Windsward due east along the coast. The lower-level quest will involve going around and killing the Yetis guarding these caves and I believe they are all somewhere in the 25-35 level range. I believe you can farm these caves for reputation but since I capped mine last night I was not able to test this theory.

All told it is a fun event with a lot of stuff going on, and some pretty tasty rewards that can be had if you are diligent in farming over the next few weeks. In theory, this map link should provide you with the locations of all of the Yeti Caves, Winter Villages, and possible Gleamite meteor spawn locations. For me, I am mostly planning on farming the Winter Warrior whenever it suits my fancy and trying to get most of the permanent rewards from the event. Even though the cosmetics are fairly ugly… I am very likely to spend time trying to farm them.

Hopefully, this guide helps players who are unfamiliar with the event get started. If you have any direct questions feel free to drop me a line below or reach out over social media.

Forbidden Sanctum Builds

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Friends, it is three days until the start of a new Path of Exile league, and I find myself doing what every Exile does… pouring over build guides and trying to figure out what path I am going to take for my league start. If you were not around a few months ago… Lake of Kalandra was the first league that a number of us poured our heart and soul into with a day-one start. This was maybe one of the worst leagues in modern history and struggled with currency drop and general survivability problems. While I actually enjoyed the Lake mechanic mechanically, it seemed needlessly brutal and random at times. As far as leagues go it has been shown to have had the worst player retention numbers of any league to date. I had contemplated just swearing off 3.20 but they seemingly know how to hit me straight in the feels.

The league mechanic this time around is The Forbidden Sanctum which is a rogue-lite that takes place within Wraeclast. It sounds like you will be earning currency each trip into the dungeon that can be used to gain buffs for subsequent trips slowly building out a talent tree of a sort. I like rogue-lites quite a bit and have spent plenty of time playing games like Rogue Legacy and Hades. Putting that inside of the ARPG-style gameplay that I am already addicted to… may prove to be my ultimate lure. However, until the trailer dropped I had not even been really contemplating this league which puts me weeks behind in the planning process. So this morning I am going to talk through some of the builds I am contemplating starting with.

Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut

Pohx is hands down the best guide maker I have ever seen in the Path of Exile community. He has his entire website wiki devoted to just giving you information to support his already amazing Path of Building guides. The big change this time around is that Inquisitor either took some direct nerfs or got caught up in other nerfs and is maybe going to not be the optimal way to play Righteous Fire. As a result, Pohx seems to be pouring most of his effort into a Juggernaut build and I am largely on board with this. The pros are a comfortable leveling experience with clear direction on what I should be doing which maybe be the sort of low-stress chill start I need.

Chronic Painless’s Blade Vortex Elementalist/Occultist

One of my all-time favorite playstyles in Diablo III is the Whirlwind Barbarian and its “spin to win” mechanics. The closest thing to really doing this in Path of Exile is Blade Vortex and this guide seems to be extremely detailed. The only problem with it is it involves math… and optimizing blade uptime because really you need to be able to maintain 10 blades at all times to pour through content. Other than that the build and guide seem pretty straightforward forward and it also seems like it would be easy to get gear for it even at the high end. All I really want is something that can complete red maps easily to farm for currency and this seems to be able to do that in spades. I have never played a Witch in any form so this is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone.

Zizaran’s Explosive Arrow Champion

Explosive Arrow Champion is back and Zizaran is once again suggesting this as a league starter. The positives are that I have already played this build before and understand the fundamentals. The negatives are that Zizaran for being as good of a YouTuber as he is… actually sorta writes shitty POBs. He takes for granted that players that are reading his content are going to just understand various concepts, and while I have been around Path of Exile semi-seriously for three leagues now… there are still a lot of core concepts that I do not fully grasp. It will be an uphill battle to sort out what he is saying versus what he is actually meaning. However Grace played this last go-round, and I have played it the time before… so I do have some knowledge that I can draw on.

Velyna’s Spectra Shield Throw Raider

This build looks like a hoot, flat out. I love bouncing shields and it looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. However Velyna seems like a super nice person, but trying to follow one of her guides is sort of awful. I played her Stormbrand last go-round and had all sorts of survival problems that I ultimately had to venture way off the path to fix. Watching this guide video, it sounds like so much of this build hinges upon a super specific shaper base helmet craft… and I am just not sure if I want to go through that nonsense. The stormbrand build eventually ended up being extremely fun to play, but it required me to spend a heck of a lot of currency to get there. So I am deeply gunshy about following Velyna into the breach again.

Ghazzy’s Dark Pact Necromancer

Going completely off the rails I am also sort of considering the Dark Pact Necromancer. Ghazzy really cares about minion builds and is one of the better guide makers for that specific style of play. I have never played a minion build in Path of Exile other than having a random Golem up just to provide a buff. Minions took a massive hit last league and the more traditional builds seem to be not as functional as they once were. This build however focuses on basically using your minions as a bomb to spread Dark Pact which drains minion health but causes chaos damage explosions. It sounds like it might be a fun playstyle but again this is going way out of my comfort zone since I have never played a witch in any form before.

Basically, I have three days to sort out what exactly I want to go for. I think all of the above would probably be a strong league start or at least be viable enough to get through a few labs and into early maps. Probably the top contenders for me at the moment are good ole Righteous Fire or the spin to win Blade Vortex build. I would 100% go Blade Vortex for certain, but I also know I suck ass at trying to maintain the uptime of something on a specific cast pattern. I know when I was splitting steel, I would always find myself out of shards because I was forgetting to make them. Fortunately, it sounds like this doesn’t actually damage my survival and is more than it would harm my clear ability… which is fine. I am okay taking a slower map clear if I screw up rather than taking random deaths.

Are you going to be venturing into The Forbidden Sanctum? If so what build are you looking at running? For those curious about the minutiae, you can check out the current patch notes here.

Exploring Undecember

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Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.

I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.

As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.

Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.

One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.

For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.

All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.

So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.

I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.