Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We recorded a massive show where we effectively burned through our entire backlog of topics. We start off talking about the new character, Maru, in Destiny Rising, and how this seems to be leading us to finally getting off the planet. Kodra discusses Broom Sweeper, which is effectively the Roguelikeification of Minesweeper. Bel got sucked into a local pen and paper game for Public Access and talks a bit about the setting. Ash is doing a “Three Job Fiesta” run of Trials of Mana, and Tam has been playing some ArcRaiders. We are all pretty pumped for the announcement of new Steam Hardware and what this means for PC gaming. Kodra and Tam talk about It Takes a War, and Bel revisits his Freezy Boom character in Path of Exile. We wrap up the show with some rapid-fire discussions about Gunfire Reborn, Winter Burrow, and Ambrosia Sky.
Good Morning Folks. For a short week… it was one hell of a long week. I did not post yesterday because I was not really sure I had much of anything to say. I’ve shifted my focus over to leveling my now Elementalist that is attempting to retrace the steps that I made previously with my BelFreezyBoom character. That time I played it on a Trickster, and this time around I am leaning into Elementalist for the golem buffs and the ability to be shocking, igniting, and freezing everything with my ice damage. So far… I am still in the campaign but there is not a single fight that I have not instant phased. The sheer amount of damage that I am dealing seems crazy, and I think I am going to end up shifting up some of the build further because the golems are solving a lot of problems for me. In the previous incarnation I went Eldritch Battery, and I would really love not to have to do that here so that I could keep Energy Shield as a proper defensive layer. I also would really love to drop Clarity, so I have some mana fixing that needs to happen so that I can keep spamming traps without running empty.
One of the toys that I am specifically building around this time is the new Foulborn Berek’s Respite. Originally I had planned on using the cheap version of this that had explosion for ignited enemies, and then propagated shocks. However I pulled the 50 divine version of the ring that has both explosions on shocked or ignited mobs and I am running with this. That means that I need to make sure I am shocking and igniting with my cold damage. A big part of why I am playing Elementalist on top of the golem buffs, is the fact that Shaper of Flames and Shaper of Storms make it so that ALL damage that I deal regardless of element can Ignite and can Shock. While leveling I had been using some items to force lightning and fire damage, but in theory I can drop these going forward and just pour all of my effort into cold damage.
This is the current state of the build as exported this morning. I’ve completed three labs and picked up the golem node, and then shaper of storms, and shaper of flames, and then I am probably going to pick up the elemental bastion node as my final choice just for an additional defensive layer. After that I am mostly picking up all of the trap damage and cold damage nodes that are easy to get to, and then picking up energy shield, life, and evasion nodes. I’ve grabbed the entire spell suppression wheel and taken the spell suppression is lucky mastery. Since I am getting so much general problem fixing from the golems, I am hoping I can go way more tanky with the build as a whole. I got the last build to a pretty comfortable spot, but I am hoping that I can improve upon pretty much everything with this version.
For Uniques I am running Sunblast which is really the only thing that is absolutely required to make this work. It essentially makes it so that enemies do not trigger traps, but they trigger on their own quickly after laying them down. I spent a div on a corrupted version that gives me 10% increased Area of Effect scaling, because the goal of this build is to make really large traps. Previously I had been using a Carcass Jack to accomplish this, but in truth… the Fire Golem scaling seems to be enough that I might end up dropping the Jack in order to get a well rolled rare instead. New things that I am playing with is a Kongming’s Stratagem which blinds everything that gets hit by my traps, and I am slotting 3 of my 4 golems in it to get +2 levels, and then the 4th golem is being scaled by the other new unique which is a Foulborn Tulborn which gives +4 levels to cold gems.
This is what the AOE coverage of my traps looked like before throwing on a Carcass Jack, and I think this is MORE than enough for good clearing. So once I throw on a few more levels I will probably sell the Jack and pick up a really well rolled chest-piece with suppression and resists on it. The problem with playing with this many uniques is that I only have a handful of slots to fix my stats with. Essentially I will have gloves, boots, helm, and a ring if I use the Jack, so having another rare in that chest slot should really help spread things out a bit. I am going to need spell suppression on pretty much every slot I can get it, and I need to find good movement speed boots because at the moment I feel extremely sluggish. Once I get this geared enough I will probably start mapping on it, and then using the RF Chieftain almost exclusively for Delve. That said I remember having a pretty good time in Delve with the previous incarnation of this build.
The main reason why I am so focused on trying to build it tanky, is just that I have zero visual clarity while playing the character. The entire screen is white explosions, and there are not even any mtx that you can throw on that improve this. There is a single option but it looks just as much of a whiteout, potentially worse. It is a heck of a lot of fun though to watch everything essentially get wiped out by the traps. The big thing that I need to fix though is my mana, and in theory I probably need to incorporate minus mana cost on my one available rare ring. I might see what I can annoint on my Dragonfang Amulet to resolve my mana woes, since I think I have already picked up all of the trap and cold damage nodes. The only damage node that would make sense is Divine Judgement since I can’t path over to it.
The biggest challenge with this build is the fact that I am flying completely blind. I am having to exclusively lean on my knowledge of the game to solve the problems that it encounters. This is honestly pretty cool, and if nothing else I should earn a tiny bit of hipster cred if it works. If it fails miserably… then I already have one stable character this league that I can fall back on. A lot of the reason why I play Righteous Fire is that it is so predictable, and it can then in turn fund the bad ideas builds that I occasionally come up with. Today I should finish out the campaign and start mapping and we will see if this continues to roll along as smoothly as it does. If so… I might have come up with something really interesting here. If not… I can always fall back on mapping with my existing successful character. This is at least part of the fun for me, trying something different.
Good Morning Folks. Sometimes in a game there is an event that I so loathe… that I cannot bring myself to complete. For me lately that has been the Festival of the Lost event running currently in Destiny Rising. It took what was quite possibly one of my most favorite game modes… Realm of the Nine Chaos mode… and completely ruined it by taking away the fun stuff and replacing it with dumb gimmicks to farm more candy. I have been avoiding doing any of this content, because I just was not having any fun with it. So here I found myself this morning with 23 hours left until the even goes away… and that I had not farmed up any of the actually useful items that come from it. So I put my head down and ground out all of the normal modes so I could at the very least reap the rewards.
I am really hoping that this is not evidence of what we should expect with the Dawning event that is likely to come around the beginning of the year. So far, most of the events have been pretty lackluster. They remix one of the existing game modes and then tack on some meager rewards to make you feel like you really should grind them out. It might just be that I am finding joy outside of Destiny Rising right now, and resent feeling like I need to grind this out. Whatever the case, I am very glad to see that it is over. I got my mask and got all of my exotic weapon mod upgrade currency, and am happy to call this over. I am still having fun with Destiny Rising, just not this event.
Over in Path of Exile, I am starting to get a bit of wanderlust. I’ve dinged level 97 and can in theory keep plugging away at alternating between mapping and delving until I hit 100, and slowly knock out all of the challenges. However… yesterday I started to get that old familiar itch that meant I was probably going to roll an alt. I could in theory keep gathering resources and upgrading gear until I got bored… but I am going to take a break and try and create something that does not currently exist in the league that I have seen. When I created the mule witch to get the starter gems for leveling Righteous Fire, I specifically gave it a reasonable name thinking that I would play an Elementalist later in the league, and I think that time is upon us.
Elementalist as a class, with its deeply strong new Golem node, feels like it is something that can essentially be adapted to almost any gameplay style. Right now there are folks playing all manner of bow skills on it, various assorting kinetic wand abilities, and even exsanguinate/corrupting fever on it. What I am not seeing a lot of however is trappers… and I am going to see if I can make that happen. During the short lived Pohx League in Settlers, I played an Ice Trap of Hollowness Trickster that I had quite a bit of fun with dubbed BelFreezyBoom and you can see a video of that gameplay here. It had good clear and was a fun mapper, and did a fairly reasonable job taking on bosses.
I have this idea in my head for the build where I essentially am using Ice Trap to freeze things, but also using Shaper of Storms and Shaper of Flames to make it so that my ice traps are shocking and igniting things. Then using the new version of Berek’s Respite to make it so that ignited enemies explode… so that my giant field of booms, has its own aftershock boms. I have zero clue how well this is going to work out, but if nothing else it should be fun it see it fall into place. Liege of the Primordial is a massive power node that also allows you to fix pretty much any other issues the build might have just through the use of really good semi-immortal Golems. I don’t necessarily have a build guide for this, but I did stub out a tree that I am going to more or less be following. We will see how this works out. No one appears to be doing anything similar to this… so it is going to be interesting to see if this actually works or if it feels like crap and falls apart rapidly.
Lastly I spent a good chunk of yesterday watching episodes of Dungeon Senshi/Delicious in Dungeon and am now caught up through episode 13. This super chill dungeon crawler cooking show… got real dark, real fast. I am completely hooked at this point so I am along for this ride no matter where it takes us. I am invested in these characters and want them to live a happy life… but I have a feeling they will not be. Bad things have already happened, and I fear that worse things are on the horizon. We will see how it shakes out though. I am likely going to be finishing this series run before moving on to the next Legends and Lattes book that dropped yesterday.
I woke up this morning and as I am oft to do… I sat in bed for a moment and scrolled through email to see what came in over night. I saw a charge from Audiobooksnow the site that I tend to buy my audiobooks for that was $9.99, and had a mild freak out. Did my account get hacked? Did I accidentally sign up for some auto purchase club book thing? NOPE! I apparently pre-ordered Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree and completely forgot about it. So at some point today I will be starting that, and pretty much mainlining it until I finish. Audiobooks are really the perfect compliment for grinding in Path of Exile, and I am very much in head down grind time. Today is a holiday for me, and I have an appointment at 9 am in town, but once I get back from that… I will likely be starting the audiobook and snuggling with cats while POEing it until my brain bleeds. I should probably pick up the house before I dive into that… because everything needs to be cleaned and vacuumed.
Essentially I have reached the point of the league where I need to start chipping away at the various Challenges. Most of them are not that hard, for example I need to unlock 3 Minor Pantheons, and I have plenty of Divine Vessels to do this. I just have not. I did not even fully unlock the one that I am using because the second trait is not really all that important for my build. However there are some that suck… like for example I am going to have to consume a Divine Orb either by using it directly on an item or using it in a craft. I still do not have that many divine orbs to my name, so each one feels like it is precious beyond words.
I have made a handful of Divine Orb sales over the last few days, and I really dig the Sales History tab that got built into the new trade system. The shield I sold for 2 Div was a crafting experiment where I happened into another Shaper shield and I threw purple juice at it until I hit 5% recover on block. The Cloak of Flame is essentially just the first one that I linked using a Black Morrigan that I recently replaced with a corrupted chest with 5% less Fire Damage taken on it. The Stygian Vise was just me flipping a base that I got as a drop that was Hunter Influenced. The gloves were some failed tree tree crafts that were really well rolled, but not good enough to replace my current gloves. While this is still poverty league, some things still sell pretty well.
I am spending most of my time down in the mines still, because there is a brisk business in fossils and resonators, especially now that you cannot passively earn azurite. I expect these to go up in price the longer the league goes, and essentially right now I cash them in whenever I need more divines to buy something. I guess I should figure out what I actually care enough about to buy going forward. I have started doing some heist in the vague attempt that I can get a good ring base to craft on. My rings are not in the best shape, so that would in theory be the next thing I tackle gear wise. Everything else is good enough… or that the upgrade would be 20+ Divines to replace. You quickly reach a place where all of the cheap and easy upgrades are gone. I should in theory start working on replacing my gems with awakened versions.
Over in Destiny Rising, I bumped my Maru high enough to start doing Grandmaster content, and Ace and I got together last night to run through four of our keys. I played Maru one round and Helhest the next round, and then we alternated as we did a few strikes. We tried Gauntlet Blitz, but it was super painful… and scarred us to the point where we did not want to try it again. I think maybe the Grandmaster mode of the new Blitz encounters are a bit overtuned. We got the one where you fight the giant eyeball and we just could not chip away at its health, and everyone kept dying. Strikes on the other hand felt WAY easier, so we instead did two of those and called it good.
I actually managed to get two exotic weapon mods that matched the perks of the Grenade Launcher that I have been using. This is definitely a massive boon for Maru, but will also pull my wolf up a bit as well since I have swapped to using Sweet Business on him instead of the Grenade launcher. I ran out of resources but at some point I will hopefully pull this the rest of the way to +10 on each of the mods. My next step is probably to push the primary weapon slot grenade launcher to 85, as I really like playing Maru. I know she is the new hotness, but I am having a lot of fun and she lives in this weird happy place between how sturdy Jolder is and how squishy Helhast has been. The on demand shield ability helps a ton when it comes to staying alive during content.
After grouping together I went downstairs and started up Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Senshi on my television and watched several episodes while playing Path of Exile. I had made it pretty far in the series watching the subtitled version, but decided to restart it entirely with the dual language version. I’ve basically decided that unless I cannot get the english language version of something… I am always going to wait for it because seemingly most content gets released in both languages anymore. I know there are purists out there, but really… I would prefer to not read television if I can help it. It also means that if it is a language that i understand, I can play games while watching it. This series is pretty great, though I have to admit I do prefer the Japanese language voice actor for Senshi. The rest of the actors though I prefer the English language interpretation.
Anyways wrapping this up because I have stuff to do, so that I can get ready for my appointment in town at 9. I hope you have a most wonderful day.
