Month: December 2025

Shadow Drop Paladin and Game Awards

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Yesterday was Geoff Keighley show of madness known as The Game Awards, and I was motivated to watch because there was a Path of Exile II mtx to be farmed as a twitch drop. I stuck around and watched the entire thing because if I was already a few hours into it… I might as well see the end. Prior to the show we had seen rumors swirling around Diablo IV and the fact that the Paladin was going to be previewed… which is why they had such a god awful league start time of starting up after the show finished airing. What I did not expect was the fact that they shadow dropped the entire Paladin class, pending you were willing to preorder the next expansion. The only sad thing about this… is that because they so hamfistedly planned their league start to stomp right on top of the much more exciting Path of Exile II league start… that I am not sure how many people are actually going to care about this. Blizzard has always had this way of trying to piss on the news from other studios to steal their thunder… but I hate to tell them that they are no longer the massive juggernaut that they once were. Path of Exile 1 and 2… and hell even Last Epoch are doing way more exciting things than Diablo IV is… so they will always be relegated to third or fourth fiddle when it comes to the ARPG community.

I of course fell for the madness and pre-purchased the expansion so I could poke my head in and try out the Paladin. So far I would say this class feels way more akin to the Diablo III Crusader than it does the Diablo II Paladin. The naming is largely just semantics and determins which of the holy orders the character comes from in lore more than anything. I am not shocked they went back to the Paladin as the name, but I am happy that they seem to be following the pattern set forth by the Crusader. That was probably my favorite character from Diablo III, and it makes me wonder if there is going to be an equivalent to Thorns Invoker in this game, which was my single favorite build. Right now I am leaning into the lunge attack that acts as a gap closer and the orbiting hammer throw that shatters into more hammers when it hits things. So far it seems plenty strong but I will be curious to see what endgame builds end up looking like on this class. However I am probably only going to play this over lunch, because once POE2 drops I am going to be focused on that.

Now you are going to get a bunch of trailers and me talking about them. The thing that I am absolutely the most hype about is Control Resonant. The only downside there is that it does not appear like we are playing as Jesse Faden this time. Instead we are going to be playing as her brother. Something has gone horribly wrong at The Oldest House and Jesse appears to be missing. So now we get to go on an adventure to save reality…. and I am so fucking here for this. I love Remedy games, and quite possibly… they are the studio that I now look forward to the most when they drop something new. They are a surreal feast of visuals and the storytelling and lore goes so deep that it feeds my hunger in those departments too. All of the Remedy games are connected… even though they cannot officially be so due to the weird history of how they released titles for various studios. If you ever want to deep dive into this madness… I highly suggest you play everything they have ever released.

In things that I absolutely did not expect… we are getting a sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic games featuring one of the folks from that era Casey Hudson. I have so much hope pinned on this nonsense, and the thing that bolsters me is the fact that it is not coming from Electronic Arts. I realize this is probably five years out at this point… but I can have hope… please god leave me with some shreds of hope. Knights of the Old Republic will always be one of my favorite games to have ever existed, and it is my favorite Star Wars era. I want to be positive about something for once.

Pivoting from the remants of Bioware… to a spiritual successor to Bioware… we got another trailer for Exodus. The disappointing thing about this is that we now know this is not coming until 2027. This game looks amazing and feels like they are leaning hard into the Mass Effect formula. Please god let this be good, because I also need this. Bioware is in shambles, and I have very little faith that Mass Effect 4 is going to be any good. I am okay with starting fresh with a new franchise and new characters to care about…. but what I really want is that good good ship of fools gameplay that Mass Effect provided. Give me a ship, and an interesting crew, and a bunch of cool missions to go on. Let me romance weird aliens and line the halls of my ship with all manner of miscreants. I am probably going to be there on day one if they manage to pull off even half of the joy that was Mass Effect 2.

So something you need to know… is that I fucking love Ma Dong-seok. I have loved him since Train to Busan, and if you have never seen that film… stop what you are doing and go watch it now. Wierd Yakuza adjascent game featuring Ma Dong-seok as the main character? Sign me the hell up. That is all honestly.

Another game that I did not know anything about going into the show was No Law. Mostly I am here for the cyberpunk dystopia. It seems to be some sort of a shooter, and depending on how that plays out I am here for it. Mostly I am just into the visuals of this game. I am hoping it ends up being fun, and not chock full of weird microtransactions and AI Slop since it is coming out from Krafton.

There is a “somehow sebulba has returned” meme floating around and it is delightful. A game that I did not know that I needed was what feels like a spiritual successor to Star Wars Pod Racer on the Nintendo 64. What is cool though is it seems like it is not just pod racers, but also featuring a bunch of speeders. I love a good big dumb racing game, and I am hoping this provides. If nothing else the visuals look really cool.

For the most disturbing game trailer, that goes to Larian for their next Divinity game. They are supposedly taking everything that they have learned making Baldur’s Gate III and then bringing that home to their own Divinity setting. So expect a rich isolemtric CRPG with a truly staggering number of choices. Maybe this will prompt me to actually go back and play Original Sin 1 and 2 so I can get caught up on the lore of this setting. I played Divinity 1 and 2 and loved them, but never could seem to get into Original Sin. If you needed a trailer where children revel while a man is burned alive… while also simultaneously a bunch of random people are fornicating in the front row… you might need to get your head checked. Regardless it was certainly memorable. I loved Baldur’s Gate 3, and I have loved various other Larian games in the past so I am hoping this brings me back into the fold.

Another thing that I did not expect is that we are getting a Total War game set in the Warhammer 40k universe. This is especially confusing because we are just about to get another Dawn of War game, which is also an RTS. It seems like these two games would cannibalize audience from each other. It could simply be that Dawn of War 3 is much closer to release and this is much further out, and we won’t be seeing the Total War game for a few years. Either way I am interested. I’ve heard the Total War Warhammer Fanatasy games were great, though I have never played them.

The last game that I am going to highlight is Highguard, which is a really quirky looking competitive shooter. It sort of reminds me of a bunch of other games that I have played in the past mutated into a single experience. I am not entirely against competitive shooters, but I want the playing field to be level if possible and for there to be other objectives that we are focused on rather than just racking up kills. My favorite competitive shooters were the Enemy Terrritory series with both Wolfenstein and Quake games set in it. This sort of feels like a spiritual successor to that where you seem to be focused on holding objectives and setting up attacks like the siege tower that is built that the group is obviously escorting across the map. I am really interested to see how this plays it. It screams hero shooter to me, and that is ultimately going to determine how much I like it… because if you keep having to buy the latest and greatest hero it is going to limit my joy for the long term.

If you missed the show they released a 4k 60fps version this morning, but be warned it is a 3 hour and 35 minute long commitment. These shows always overstay their welcome, and while I had fun for the first hour or so… I was mostly just wanting to hit the fast foward button from that point on. You truly are better off just checking the YouTube page the next morning and cherry picking the trailers that you want to watch. The award portion of the show always feels like an afterthought, and there is generally one game that wins everything… for example I am pretty sure that Expedition 33 won every award it was up for. I like that there exists something like this, that is now the focal point of the gaming year…. especially with E3 long dead and gone… but in truth I would rather have an event like this once a quarter… that is half as long than have this one big dumb stupidly long event at the end of the year.

Did you watch The Game Awards? What games were you excited about that I did not cover? Drop me a line below.

Rare Currency Burned

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Good Morning Folks! This is another one of my “progress reports” for the Keepers of the Flame league as I work on wrapping up various challenges. If this does not interest you in the least, then today’s blog post might be a complete skip. Tomorrow I will probably have some stuff to talk about The Game Awards and the things that got announced there. However for the moment I am in a pattern of trying to wrap up what I can wrap up so that I can be ready for Path of Exile II League start tomorrow afternoon. The biggest one that I knocked out last night was Grueling Game Grinds, which is the one that has a bunch of sub components, one of which is hitting level 100. I ended up knocking out the invitations option, and I was able to buy up a bunch of super cheap blackstar invitations for 1 Chaos each and burn through them to finish that up.

Another big one that I completed through cursed means, is that I managed to finally get one of the crafting benches with a Hinekora’s Lock in it. Expensive Extravagance requires you to do a bunch of high dollar crafts in order to get credit for specific items. Since I will not be doing any mirror crafting, I have been trying to figure out the cheapest way to finish this nonsense up. If you are lucky, the various Betrayal league crafting benches count towards using these currency, and through doing that I managed to knock out most of them. I had one left and another achievement that I have been working on involves doing a bunch of high end specific league encounters. So I was farming 4 wing Blueprints in Heist and managed to pull several tailoring orbs as a result. Since I did not have a reason to use these, I just sort of threw it at any item I had sitting in my bank. That was essentially 250 chaos down the toilet, but it did finish up the achievement.

Another one that I knocked out was Aggravating Antagonists which involved fighting various endgame versions of league bosses. Most of these are really hard to force… so for my final one I opted into doing one of the level 83 versions of Izaro. The cheapest goddess emblem was Dedication to the Goddess at 40c, so I went with that version. I admit that I have never done one of the higher level versions of the Labyrinth, because I never really needed anything from it. I’ve chain run the normal offering versions before trying to get transfigured gems, but I think in the total of all of my runs of POE I have maybe only ever had one or two of the enhanced offerings drop. I almost NEVER run the in map events, because they always feel like a waste of time once I have my 4th ascendancy and especially since the offerings drop constantly down in Delve. I guess that is one of the things that I like about the challenges is that they force me to do things that I have never done before.

The biggest thing that I probably have left to do, as in the most time consuming… is Legendary Leagues. I need to figure out how best to complete this and see if there are any that can reasonably be brute forced with scarabs. I am running mappers, but it seems like only the 100% completion maps are the ones that count towards the achievement. I could probably buy some Blood-Filled Vessels from the trade market and brute force the Ritual one without much issue. I also need to figure out what the minimum number of emblems I need to run into rder to get the right item level for Legion’s Domain of Timeless Conflict since that is pretty easy overall as well. Simulacrum is time consuming but also fairly easy to complete and would just involve me buying 3 more tokens off the market. So between all of that I probably have a path forward. I wish I knew a way to force T4 Harvest Seeds because that would be a cakewalk if I could do that one.

I am getting close to finishing the Destructive Play achievement and should be able to wrap that while doing some of the other things that I need to do. I wish I had paid more attention to the item quantity when I did some of the other maven witnesses, because as a result I am going to have to redo The Formed, and did Incandescent and Elderslayers last night. I still am doing the quest version of the Zana fights so I need to burn through those so I can start witnessing them for The Remembered and the final piece The Feared. I hate doing the t16.5 content because t17 map mods are pure cancer, so I have been putting those off. There is another achievement for doing a bunch of 16.5 maps, and I have a ton of those banked that I can start chipping away at that. Mostly I am trying to see how far I can get to wrapping things up before Friday, because I am not sure how much effort I am going to be willing to keep putting in once I roll over to another game.

Anyways. If you have made it to the end of this blog post you have a lot of fortitude, especially if you are not actively playing Path of Exile. I hope you have been having a good week. I am not sure what is going on with me because I had another night where I went to bed at 8:30 because I was falling asleep on the sofa. If my body wants rest thought I am determined to give it to it.

One Hundred Again

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday over lunch I pushed my character over the level 100 line and forever secured its place in the pantheon of folks on the ladder for 3.27. Now I have reached the point in the league where I no longer give a shit about taking a death, which means I start doing riskier things. I had banked up a bunch of Aul fights, that I burned through last night… before sadly realizing that they were not actually counting as Pinnacle encounters. This is a bit of a weird thing in Path of Exile, because they use this term liberally to mean a bunch of different things, and in the past Aul absolutely would have counted. However in this league Aul is part of a different group of encounters that unlock bloodline ascendancies.

I had run all of these that I could easily run, and was down to just needing one more of this bloodline ascendancy fights for knocking out the Bloodline Boons challenge. This morning before sitting down to start writing my blog post I did a 15 wave Simulacrum and wrapped it up. The other options are way more tedious to get to including Lycia or the really variable boss fights like Olroth, that is something you are only going to see if you are farming a lot of expedition. Weirdly I was shocked that so far I had yet to get any of my shipments interdicted by the pirate dude, which I need for another one of these challenges. I might start running mappers because there is another one of the challenges where I could chip off a meta achievement by collecting rewards from 30 maps.

Grueling Game Grinds is ultimately the big lengthy grind, at now that I have hit level 100 I only need to complete one more meta achievement to knock that one out. For the moment I am planning on doing Invitations because it has synergy with some of the other challenges that I am working on. If Aul would have counted as a Pinnacle boss for the sake of this achievement, the 12/75 number would have been considerably higher. I could in theory do a bunch of Elder fights, which are without a doubt the easiest of the pinnacle bosses. However I think the fragments are still a bit expensive at this point, and I hate running Elder Guardian maps since you don’t get credit for Maven Witnessing a map boss on those.

Speaking of synergy, that is another thing that I am slowly chipping away at is doing Maven Witness maps with Destructive Play active. I really wish that they would change the way Destructive Play works, so that you can chain run the same map over and over and keep getting new bosses witnessed. This is the reason why I never do Maven content is because I prefer to run the same map layout over and over for consistency sake, and have my favorite map slots set up in a way so that I can produce large quantities of one of two maps that I alternate back and forth between. For example I am running a lot of Tropical Island, but producing a truly prodigious number of Strand maps while running down through my stockpile of Islands.

The other side effect of doing Destructive Play is that I am working on building a Feared invitation along with knocking out the various named invitations that reward atlas passives. I forgot about the 70% quant achievement, so there are a few of these that I am going to have to do over again. I’ve successfully run feared before, but I am not sure I have done it on anything other than that one deeply broken penance brand character from a few leagues ago. It will be interesting to see how well this goes. Really the only thing that I have to worry about too much is Sirius and his physical damage over time nonsense. I am curious if I can buy a bunch of cheap Polaric invitations or something like that to burn through the rest of gear grinding goals.

Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can in the next two days because I figure once I start down the Path of Exile II rabbit hole, it will dominate my attention for awhile. I did not last very long in 0.3.0 so I might find myself returning back to POE1 pretty quickly, but I am hoping that will not be the case. I think some of the things that are happening with Bear and Fire Damage are right up my alley. I am hoping it is pretty fun, because I did enjoy being a big poison bear in my last D4 league. Other than that… I have to admit I have had a bit of an itch to give Warframe another shot. Then there is my backlog of single player games that I have not touched in ages… which is only increased by the fact that Ash sent out the form for our games of the year show this morning. This is the challenge with me and these type of respective shows… is that in truth I mostly play forever games.

What prompted the Warframe desire though is a conversation I had with Ammo about it the other night, and then this morning seeing Ironmouse doing the best Warframe song, We All Lift Together at the Streamer Awards. If you have never seen the original Warframe animation video for this, you should absolutely watch it first so that you can appreciate the effort that they went into with the backgrounds and such for the Streamer awards. Who knows if I will give it another go or not.

Thermal Failure

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Good Morning Folks. My wreath was perfect… until it wasn’t. Around 3:30 yesterday afternoon I had to run into the office for a moment, and when I left the house the wreath looked beautiful. When I got back around 5:30 it looked like the image on the right side. Essentially there is a short period of time where the light streams through our glass storm door at exactly the right angle that it heats up the metal of our door handle. This is not something I had really thought about before now, but apparently it also heats up the door frame area enough for the PLA that I printed the wreath out of to warp beyond all recognition. At first I thought it was a mechanical failure in one of the joints that could be fixed, but upon further inspection it is like the thing just sort of stretched and warped uncontrollably. For now I have a deeply surrealist wreath, and I am kind of curious what it does over multiple days… but for future knowledge I guess I probably need to print the frame out of ABS which is way more heat resistant. It was a massive bummer, but at least it looked cool long enough to take a photo of it.

I had an extremely busy day, and when I finally got home legitimately I crashed pretty hard after eating the takeout that I picked up on my way home. I attempted to grind a bit in Path of Exile but by 8:30pm I was falling asleep in my chair, and decided to head to bed. I tossed and turned quite a bit, and had a rather fitful night where I was either too hot or too cold and could not really seem to regulate my temperatures. I did make it a bit further into my quest for level 100 and am roughly 1 pip away from dinging. In theory if I stay awake long enough tonight… I should be able to push through to level 100, or at least get considerably closer. I am still fighting whatever unnamed death flu nonsense that I picked up. My boss is a few days behind me and is also struggling, even though to the best of my knowledge we did not infect each other. The cough has been the worst part and I just go into these coughing fits where I struggle to recover gracefully. Today is supposed to be the holiday party in the office, but I dropped off the cookies I was bringing last night so that I did not have to be around people, and am otherwise skipping out today because I don’t feel comfortable hacking and coughing nonstop around others.

Tam introduced us to Where Winds Meet last weekend on the podcast and a few of us have tried it out. So far… I am not really vibing with it. He indicated that they had resolved the beard problems that I have with most eastern fantasy games… and I am not entirely certain about that. This was the best beard I could get, which is reasonable, but nowhere near as majestic as I would have liked. Mostly it feels very much like a Ghosts game, and I am not sure when the MMORPG elements come online. For the moment it feels like I am playing an entirely single player adventure game with mildly souls-like roots, and that is find and good…. but I am not entirely certain if I care enough about it to keep playing. If anything I think my time would be better served playing Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, or catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I at a minimum wanted to fire it up and check it out, and it is a gorgeous game… just not sure if it is one that is going to flip the appropriate centers in my brain.

So the other night I got distracted when I was going out into the backyard and feeding tripod, and apparently never actually locked that door. So I slept the entire night with it unlocked, where anyone could have walked into my bedroom. That creeped me out to the point where I had to scrub through my backyard camera just to make sure no one did anything untoward. At which point I found out that I have a bunch of Raccoons who have apparently been climbing the pole up to the second floor deck off my wife’s office. I have no clue what they are doing. There is nowhere into the house up there, and no access to any crawl spaces or anything… but it seems like they are just having fun climbing around. They were specifically doing it when the wind-chimes were going crazy so I wonder if they were going up to investigate that. I figured if nothing else you could see cute Raccoons doing Raccoon things.

I am bummed about the wreath, but it is what it is. This is all learning experiences as I shuffle forward into my first attempts at 3D printing.