Month: November 2023

Blast from the Past League

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend, the “Blast from the Past” short-term league was launched in Path of Exile. Essentially, this league is running off the Standard template but with the additional Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra league mechanics. For me… there is quite a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in these leagues because I got in at the tail end of Sentinel and made my first real attempt at a proper character. Lake of Kalandra was the first league that I started a character at the very beginning of the league and managed to complete my Atlas of Worlds. While this was just last year… I feel like so much has changed in the way that I approach Path of Exile since then. Sentinel was one of the best-received Path of Exile leagues and Lake of Kalandra was one of the worst… so it is interesting to see these mashed together. It has made me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is attempting to give Kalandra a redemption arc since the sandbox state of the game was just in an awful place when that league was running.

Sentinel is a fairly straightforward mechanic. You pick up three different colors of Sentinels and use them while doing other content to empower monsters for a chance at tasty rewards. Stalker Sentinels can empower a bunch of random mobs, Pandemonium a single pack, and Apex are designed to empower rare or unique enemies but a very limited number of them… aka something you pop in a map bosses arena. This is a great mechanic because you can use it while doing other things, which means it doesn’t necessarily force you to align your play habits to any particular patterns. It is very easy to start using this from the first moments of gameplay all the way to your endgame, and quite honestly… I now appreciate this mechanic far more than I did at the time.

The reason why the league was the stuff of legends in Path of Exile circles, is that it also introduced a specific reward type called Recombinators. These items would allow you to essentially combine two items of the same type which destroys one and gives you a new item that is an amalgam of the attributes of the input items. This allowed players to break the rules of crafting and get items that were simply not allowed to ever roll together on the same item. This was very impactful on Standard League as the items coming out of Sentinel essentially replaced all of the previous mirror tier items. I should probably note that I have been using Sentinels since the start of the league and I have yet to see a single recombinator drop, so they appear to be fairly rare.

Kalandra on the other hand was a league that allowed you to essentially build your own map. Each map would present you with a Mirrored Tablet on a pillar, and you could place one or more tiles. Once you had filled the tiles on a given map you could take it as an itemized map to be run in your map device. Various mechanics also allowed you to swap around existing tiles and do things like move where the entrance to your map was or move specific empty tiles to change the layout. Doing this allows you to crank up the difficulty of a given map because tiles increase in difficulty as they move further from the entrance. At the time of Kalandra’s launch… the state of the game was rough and there were a number of truly unkillable affix combinations that could destroy a run. Even now, however… once you get 8 or more tiles form the entrance the fights get pretty damned “rippy”.

I had some fond memories of Kalandra and honestly still think the concept behind it is really cool. However, even coming back and playing it now… it is not terribly rewarding. I think more than anything that was the damning stroke against this league, is that the rewards felt disconnected from the difficulty of the content. It is very easy to create a Lake that is much harder than any map you could run at least early on, and since most of your rewards come from the tile-specific chests… there just isn’t much loot to speak of. I still enjoy running Lakes as they are essentially free content… you are creating them as a byproduct of other things that you are doing in the game. They just don’t really feel that rewarding… at least not compared to things like Sanctums.

There are three events running in November, the first was the Krangled League, the second is this week the Blast from the Past, and the third is a league where every map has some random league type applied to it. Two of the three events feel like random nonsense, but Blast from the Past feels a bit more deliberate. It makes me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is trying to figure out how to remix and bring back both the Sentinel and Kalandra mechanics and merge them into Standard as they have several other past leagues. Maybe they felt like the Lake itself did not really get a fair shake given how wildly unpopular the game state was at that moment with rampant ArchNemesis nonsense going on. I am not entirely certain how these could come back. It feels like for Kalandra, you would almost need to add another new Atlas Master that specifically has maps filled with mirrored tablets similar to how Alva gives you access to three portals per map. Sentinels would blend more easily into existing content and could simply be drops you find in the world.

We saw a pretty good bump on Friday when this league started. Things were so busy that Ash, Kodra, and I ran into issues with creating new zone instances. For example, none of us could seem to zone into the submerged caverns. I pulled up a graph on Steam Charts to show the bump, and while 27k players are not anywhere near what is seen at a league start, this is a pretty significant bump considering we are at the very tail end of an existing league and most players have faded away from the game. I realize that these November events largely exist to buy time as they needed to bump back the start of the next league because it reportedly has some rather elaborate mechanics. That said it feels like Grinding Gear Games may have underestimated the hunger players seem to have for Sentinel specifically. While it hasn’t really been the redemption arc I had hoped for the Lake of Kalandra, it is still an enjoyable mechanic.

On a personal level, I have used this limited event to test out what a league start as a Righteous Fire Chieftain would feel like. Essentially you are trading the stability of a Juggernaut for the convenience of being able to slide straight into maps without needing to worry about your elemental resistances. It is quite a bit squishier than an equivalent Juggernaut would be, but it was very nice to be able to transition into mapping with no time really spent fussing with gearing. Given that our upcoming private league will be more like SSF as we will only be able to trade among ourselves… I feel like it is probably going to be a good call to start out as Chieftain and then transition later into Juggernaut when I have the gear to support it. The cool thing about that swap is it is literally just ascendancies as RF Jugg and RF Chieftain use the same passive tree.

I think part of the squish factor is that I had been leaning on some Armor/ES gear while leveling just to be able to get the right socket colors. As I began swapping out leveling gear for stronger armor bases, the squish factor began to balance out a bit. There really does seem to be a break point around 25k armor that things start to even out and getting over the 4000 Health threshold also helped. Normally RF involves a swap between running Fire Trap in your helm to running it in your body armor six-link and I might start out in this swapped state. It feels like it is going to be much easier to get a good armor base six-link with RRRGGG than it will be to get BBBRRG without access to the trade economy. I know I will not see a Brass Dome in “Bel League” so I am going to need to lean on something like either a Glorious or Astral Plate.

I’ve hit level 82 without much effort in spite of the massive experience penalty applied to these events. When you die… it feels like dying at level 95ish rather than your early 80s. I am not sure how much higher I will end up getting as I have mostly answered the questions that I had originally wanted to answer. Yes RF Chietain is viable and probably a really good idea for SSF play, and yes I still enjoy the two league mechanics from Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra. Anything else that I might accomplish on top of this is basically gravy. Pushing higher in level means you have more chances at the raffle loot, but honestly… I doubt I will win anything considering how many other players are competing in this particular league event. I do need to log into my Krangled character to see if I qualified for anything and probably delete it in order to free up the character slot.

Have you been playing the Blast from the Past limited league event? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #456 – Kalandra Redemption Arc

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We start off the show with a bit of a reprisal from last week.  Namely, Grace and Bel thought that all of the announcements at BlizzCon were universally good, but it seems that at least for some WoW Pundits they were a bit disappointed.  Ash talks about the remake of Risk of Rain called Risk of Rain Returns and how it improves upon the original.  We talk about the Blast from the Past League in Path of Exile and how Lake of Kalandra is getting a bit of a redemption arc.  From there we talk some more about Cities Skylines 2 and Bel opines that he just really wants a prettier version of Simcity 2000. Tam talks a bit about BOKURA a multiplayer puzzle game where both players are seemingly wildly different things, but need to solve puzzles together. Bel talks a bit about the death of the Draft Booster and what the changes surrounding the “Play Booster” mean for Magic the Gathering. Finally, we wrap up with a few very short topics, and Bel talks about how good Bookshops & Bonedust the sequel to Legends & Lattes was. 

Topics Discussed

  •  WoW Pundits and War Within
  • Risk of Rain Returns
  • Path of Exile
    • Blast from the Past League
  • Cities Skylines 2
  • BOKURA
  • Magic the Gathering
    • Death of the Draft Booster
  • Bookshops and Bonedust is Great

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Bookshops, Marvels, and a couple of Lokis

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Good Morning Friends! I am getting a bit late this morning because I have been off-watching the last of the Loki series. We have the day off from work, and I have a list of things I plan on doing today but have yet to start. One of these is breaking down the mountain of shipping boxes I have carelessly thrown in the garage, and I plan on doing so while listening to an audiobook to make the time pass more easily. Speaking of books… I wrapped up Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree. This book came out on the 7th and I think maybe this is the fastest I have ever consumed a book. There is just something cozy about the style of writing of these books and how easy it is to consume. Truth be told there is nothing terribly special about the setting of the books themselves because it is sort of this familiar fantasy setting that would blend cleanly with any D&D session.

What makes them special however is the love and attention paid to the characters. Legends and Lattes was probably my favorite book that I read this year because it created this tapestry of characters that now all have permanent homes in my heart. I can’t say that Bookshops and Bonedust is necessarily a better book, but it is still equally enjoyable. Where Legends starts at the end of Viv’s adventuring life… this book is set far earlier in the very beginning as she was earning her place in an Adventuring company and got knocked out of battle and forced to stay behind and heal. This is a book about becoming the Viv that we know in the first book, and some of the key moments that set her on a path to that eventual future. Above anything else though it is a book about falling in love with books… and the friends that you meet along the way that influence your tastes. I chiseled careful niches in my soul for a whole new cast of beloved characters, and I think you will as well.

I watched The Marvels, and I think this is probably going to be a bit of a divisive film. Let’s just get this out of the way… I loved it and I think it might be slingshotted into the pantheon of my favorite Marvel films. However, I think the hype being artificially manufactured related to this film is going to leave a lot of folks frustrated. The last trailer that was released makes it seem like this is the beginning of a brand new era for Marvel and that “everything changes”. On some level this is true… but on other levels, the film itself is a really good character-driven story about three generations of heroes at different steps in their journey. I feel like this is going to be a film that the folks like me who enjoyed Thor Ragnarok and Love and Thunder will greatly appreciate. I feel like the folks who trashed those films… will not and will probably be overly vocal about it.

Ms Marvel is one of my favorite characters in Marvel comics, and I loved the Disney Plus Mini-Series. This movie is more a direct sequel to that than anything else, and it does a fairly good job of wrapping up some loose ends surrounding Captain Marvel and Monica/Captain Rambeau. I feel like it also makes some effort to try and set up events for future movies to explore… with a post-credits scene that finally begins to make good on a whole slew of teasers that have been not so stealthily inserted into a lot of Marvel media of them finally making good on the Fox Studios acquisition. More than that however it lays further groundwork for the Young Avengers… a project I am entirely here for.

As stated in the first paragraph, I wrapped up the second season of Loki this morning. I really hate the Disney Plus standard now of airing shows at a fixed time, because it ultimately means I always watch something the day after it comes out. This season admittedly was a bit of a mess and I spent most of the episodes uncertain of what I thought about the journey we were taking. The art direction of Loki is phenomenal, as is honestly the acting… but the tale that was woven felt a bit unsteady at times. However I am happy to report that the series as a whole sticks the landing, and I think we will probably be closing out this chapter of the MCU and opening a brand new one thanks to this series.

I think that has been my frustration with Marvel over the last few outings… we’ve been on the cusp of something greater but never quite getting there. It is a series of media telling us that something is coming, but never quite stepping over the threshold and out into whatever this new reality is. Multiverse of Madness, Quantumania, The Marvels, and the Loki series… all have been playing around the periphery of things to come and I feel like finally we are beginning to get somewhere worth going. After a lot of floundering and a few just plain awful series like Secret Invasion, I am hoping that maybe just maybe Marvel is beginning to coalesce into something better.

All of that said… Loki as far as a standalone series goes… has enough internal continuity to be universally good for even someone who knows nothing about the Marvel Universe. I would legitimately recommend this series even if you have never darkened the door of any superhero properties. I am hoping however it leads to more interesting things that do finally begin to factor into the larger picture. I think it has to… there is no way this series and the others I mentioned before are not leading to a Multilateral war that will carry us forward into the second culmination event for the MCU.

Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I highly recommend all three of the pieces of Media that I talked about this morning.

Desperately Seeking Mythril

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Morning Folks! I’ve been cycling through a lot of games lately… namely because I am in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for Friday’s Path of Exile event to begin. I’ve also been working through a number of books in audio form, which means I can’t really juggle story content while also listening and enjoying a book. As a result, I have been playing through a number of mechanically enjoyable games where I either don’t need to see the story… or I don’t really care about the story. I apologize to all of the narrative team that I am certain is doing some amazing work New World… but I really do not care about what is going on with the story of that game. For me it is a big fun sandboxy crafting MMORPG nonsense fest and as a result it has been in this limited rotation of games that I have been spending time playing. I realized this morning that I had not really talked much about it.

The first cool thing that I want to talk about is that the game has an extremely robust appearance system, where you can essentially take any item you loot and convert it into an item skin that you can then apply to items freely. While I had a pretty large collection of skins from various Twitch drops and a handful of store purchases… there is one appearance that I really wanted. I hate the highest tiers of the Syndicate armor, because it is just some boring assed robes. However, I loved the mid-tier design that was just a nice simple armor with a purple Syndicate tabard over it. I liked this vibe so much that even though it was not the gear that I was wearing at the time, I had Ammo draw my character wearing it when I added New World to the site masthead. I can now run around in the game with something pretty close to this appearance permanently.

The only negative of the system is that you pretty much have to buy these from the in-game shop. It is roughly $2.50 for a single transmog token, which then can be used to convert a single item into a skin. I vaguely remembered them talking about these dropping out in the world as well when the system was first introduced, but so far the only two tokens I have found came from the free track of the battle pass system. This means that If you really want to convert large swaths of items into appearances you are probably going to be shelling out $20 at a time to pick up 10 tokens at the cheapest conversion rate. I’ve not been running dungeons, so maybe they are dropping there and I have just not encountered them. That said I have even gone to some elite areas and looted a few of those chests and gotten bubkis.

I’ve played through most of the content in the new area, but the piece that I have been focused on lately is trying to get all of my gathering abilities up high enough to be able to partake in the new resource nodes when I find them. Essentially everything in the game has been raised a tier so that you can take your character up to level 65… you can also raise all of your professions by another 50 points. The combat leveling was super straightforward and I blew past those levels well before finishing the campaign. The profession leveling has bit considerably slower and I need to get everything up 5 points to 205 to harvest the new stuff. For example, the above screenshot shows some Mythril nodes that I was way too low level to harvest… which made me sad. Skinning of course levels super fast because it is fueled by murder, but I have been roaming around some of my old world haunts to push up the rest of the professions.

I really like the new weapon type that was added to the game and have mostly been running around with Flail and Greatsword. I can’t say it does anywhere near as much damage as Greatsword does, but it is still fairly fun. I seem to have a One Handed Weapon and Shield Fetish when it comes to combat in games, and the Flail of course just furthers that fantasy. I still need many levels with the weapon but I have taken it up to 14 and unlocked a lot of the goodness. I opted to go down the tanking tree which should shock zero people who have read this blog for any period of time. I might at some point respec and play around with the cleric tree though as supposedly it gives you some ranged attacks.

The biggest improvement that I have seen has been in itemization and loot drops. What I would have considered previously to be “great gear” has been dropping like candy. I’ve seen many in world legendary drops and a ton of “named” item drops that come with fixed stats. All of the gear that I had previously was taken up to at least level 600 when the patch dropped, and now I am very regularly seeing upwards of 680 gear dropping. A new Artifact rarity tier of gear was added to the game and I’ve managed to pick one piece up from completing steps in the campaign, and another piece because I happened upon a group of a dozen folks farming a boss. Any time you see a cluster like that you might as well stick around and farm too… which netted a light armor chest. I do not fully understand how artifact gear works, but it appears that it can be configured at least somewhat by the players.

I think my focus in the short term is going to be to push my trade skills up a bit so that I can start crafting some nice upgrades. When I last played the game I was capped on Armorcrafting, and I would like to get it up there again so that I can maybe craft some artifact gear. After that, I really want to push up Engineering so I can make a new set of harvesting tools. The prices on the market in the game are insane… and item level 700 gathering tools are around 30-100k gold which seems like complete and total nonsense. Since I enjoy the crafting system I might as well push my trades up and craft them myself and then sell the botched crafts.

I doubt that I will ever go back to playing New World as a mainline game, but I am enjoying poking at it from time to time. The community surrounding the game is still not really my crowd. It is entirely too PVP-focused and the player base tends to make some interesting decisions… like this mess of a house, I took a screenshot of this morning. I admit it sort of makes me wish there was a roleplaying server as those servers tend to just have a higher caliber of player when it comes to community interactions. While not a roleplayer myself in the game, I’ve always flocked to those servers as they seemed to be more my speed.

If you have New World in your game library, you might patch it up and give it a shot. The game has improved massively since launch and I have been enjoying myself.