Grueling Grinds

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Good Morning Folks! I had to take the obligatory screenshot of my sad little totem as it has become a little less sad and a little less little. I am currently at 33 of 40 challenges completed for the Necropolis League in Path of Exile and without a doubt I will be hitting 34 before I am said and done. In past leagues, I have been happy enough with getting 19 challenges completed in order to get the most basic form of the totem pole hideout decoration. As such I have totems for Sanctum, Crucible, Ancestor, Affliction, and now Necropolis. During the Affliction League, I was playing a particularly strong bosser character and managed to get a few more challenges completed than I normally would have during a league. This time around however I seem to have gone all in on a number of these and ground out things that I never thought I would accomplish.

The biggest event of the weekend was that I managed to take down “The Feared” which is a special Maven invitation where you fight a number of pinnacle bosses at the same time. Essentially you fight them two at a time and get a random order of Cortex, Chayula, Uber Atziri, The Shaper, and The Elder. It took me two attempts to complete this but I managed to take it down as a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I could have probably had an easier time were I to build a dedicated bossing character, but it feels more “legitimate” after having accomplished this on my own in my preferred method of play. Atziri really was the only challenge because her explosions just take up most of the room leaving you very little place to stand. What makes it even more wild is that I managed to do this… without having a healing potion equipped.

The reason why I did not have a health potion equipped is that I recently purchased a Mageblood. I realize this is the second mageblood I have owned, but it feels a bit more legitimate as I did not borrow anything from the guild bank to purchase this one. Last League Kodra managed to find a Mirror and as a result it felt a bit Oprah-esc as we all got to buy items of our wildest dreams. This time around I actually had a reason for purchasing it. Basically, I wanted to swap some of my gear and points around so that I could maintain 90% all elemental resistance from equipping a Ruby Flask, and then use flask rolls to make myself immune to shock, bleeding, corrupted blood, and poison. I still stand by my statement that Headhunters are way more interesting than Magebloods, largely because one lets you do something really fun… and the other just patches holes in your build.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I went really hard on Heist. This is something that I have dabbled with in the past but never really focused on specifically. Essentially I had to knock out a bunch of Heist-specific goals for the Tactful Thievery challenge. This involved running five different blueprints with four wings unlocked… which in turn required me to level all of my rogues so that they had at least one level 5 skill. Basically, I ran a ton of heist on Friday since I took the day off from work, and in doing so I dove seriously into the mechanics of it. I gotta say with the right character, I think I enjoy it every bit as much as I enjoy Delve.

Another big goal that I completed this weekend was Mag Magnifience which is to clear 10,000 Tiers of Maps. What this means is each map that you run counts towards that total and it means that I have run at least 700 maps during this league. That number is probably significantly higher considering I spent several days running maps before I got all four voidstones and upgraded everything to T16. This is more mapping than I’ve ever done in a league before. Normally I spend the vast majority of my time down in the Delve mines, but the availability and variety of scarabs have made running just maps in bulk a ton of fun. Essentially I have been rolling up eight maps at a time and then chain-running them on my Elemental Hit Champion.

The last big challenge that I am working on currently, is Grueling Gauntlet Grinds which is designed as a bit of a capstone activity. This all started when I noticed that I had a bunch of Guardian maps completed, and still had even more sitting in the bank. Collecting corpses in T16 maps is pretty much a “gimme” and I reached level 100 earlier in the league on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. I had a ton of Kirac missions saved up, so I used those and my stockpile of scouting reports to fish for 8 mod maps that I could run easily. That just has left Guardian maps as the remaining task that I need to complete. I have a few more Kirac missions so I will likely fish for maps there and then potentially either buy off the market the remaining maps that I need or chain run T16s until I get some as drops. My goal is to finish this up tonight so that I can move forward into the next Diablo IV season with a clear conscience.

While I feel like I should be wrapping things up… I am still having quite a lot of fun piddling around in this league. I am hoping that D4 Season 4 will be equally fun and distract me for a bit, but in a worse-case scenario I would be more than happy to return to Necropolis League and continue to slowly chip away at these things. I’ve not touched the one related to Atlas Memories and have a bunch of those saved up that I could burn through. The only thing that is a bit disheartening is that I cannot see myself ever finishing the T17 or Uber-Boss-related ones without pouring some time and effort into building a proper bossing character. Bossing is just not really what I want out of a game like this, so it is never really my focus. I am a bit worried that I am setting myself up for the future expectation of getting this far into the challenges every time, since I am on a bit of a roll of getting further in each league lately.

Anyways! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Are you going to be playing some Diablo IV with the launch of Season 4 on Tuesday? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #477 – Why Fallout Works

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

We have a pretty big show which is surprising given we are down a few folks.  Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there who might be listening to this show.  We start talking about Bluey Surprise! Episode, and then dive into Kodra’s thoughts about Guild Wars 2 Season 1.  Bel talks a bit about why the Fallout series works but the Witcher series did not after the first season. Grace talks about Wylde Flowers a witchy queer farming sim and Thalen his experiences with Little Kitty Big City.  Kodra shares his thoughts about the platformer Metroidvania Animal Well and Tam about the massive changes with Star Citizen 3.23. Lastly, Bel talks a bit about beating “The Feared” in Path of Exile on a non-bossing character.

Topics Discussed:

  • Bluey the “Surprise!” episode
  • Guild Wars 2 Living Season 1
  • Why Fallout Series Works by Witcher Does Not
  • Wylde Flowers
  • Little Kitty Big City
  • Animal Well
  • Star Citizen 3.23
  • Virtual Tabletops
  • Bel Beats “The Feared”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

John Wayne and the Milkshake

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Good Morning Folks! Technically it is morning still at the time of writing this but it is considerably later in the day than I normally do a blog post. I’m in a funk. I think I can fully admit that right now. The thought of sitting down to write a blog post on most days when I am uncertain what I want to actually talk about… is a bit of a challenge at the moment. When I am actively sharing a build I am working on, or yammering about some cool game I am playing I do pretty well. When I bore myself thinking about what I have been up to… it doesn’t really bode well for trying to convert that into something readable. So instead you are getting an adventure in AI Image Generation using Stable Diffusion. This morning one of my coworkers was all excited about prompting Microsoft CoPilot to draw pictures for him.

I think this is a thing everyone goes through when they first start playing with AI Image generation. I tend to do more surrealist prompts… for example, I set forth the basic concept of “John Wayne Drinking a Milkshake”. This was more of a chore than I figured it would be. I had Luke Skywalker eating a bagel rather easily… but I was also trying to explain the concept of “hallucinations” to my coworker and this served as a good lesson. The above image is pretty much what I consider to be the most cogent example of what was generated. There are still some weird things going on with the eyes… and the milkshake that was rendered seems to be cookies and cream… which then was also inexplicably applied to the sleeves of the shirt because that makes perfect sense.

It was one hell of a journey to get there. At first, I thought I would try and get it to spit out “John Wayne in a 57 Chevy drinking a Milkshake”. There are so many things wrong with this image. Firstly you have the impossible space of a car that is sort of wrapping around the figures in a nightmare hellscape with two not-quite steering wheels… Legs that attach out of the wrong places… and right-side John Wayne appears to be sitting on the lap of a three-legged left-side John Wayne. Then there is the playdough fingers of the right subject and the extra joints of the left subject’s most visible arm and the melted playdough nature of the other arm. Legitimate nightmare fuel. The color palate is good though and FEELS like a 50s almost 60s-era photo. I decided that the bit of the prompt about the 57 Chevy was too challenging and that I did not want to fuck with it any longer so I abandoned it.

Let’s ignore the fact that we once again have two John Waynes. There are parts of this that look pretty solid. I have no clue why I got shirtless erotic John Wayne trying to hand me a Milkshake that someone is obviously holding with two hands… as evidenced by the phantom figures. There is some jacked-up perspective stuff going on where the mangled hand of shirtless Wayne is somehow holding the straw… which is much closer to the camera than the figure is. Like if you could somehow remove all of the nonsense on the left side of the picture and just have seated-Wayne at the counter with a single milkshake it would be somewhat reasonable.

Shit just kept getting weirder the deeper I went. This is probably my favorite because again two John Waynes… one of which is lovingly holding quite possibly the worlds largest milkshake. The other one is inexplicably wearing a miniskirt and one leg appears to be a table leg. I also sort of love the super skinny tall milkshake that is sitting on the ground. Basically, I wanted to show some hallucinations… and I got a fever dream to explain that concept. This is the problem I have had with “AI Images” is that for a second when scrolling past them… they seem normal. The longer you look at them the more surreal and nonsensical they become.

I finally had to start including that he was “standing alone” to start to reign in the nonsense and simplify things further. He was no longer drinking a milkshake but just holding one. Eventually, I got a few images that began to look reasonable. Even then the prompt was still a bit fucked up because if you go back to that first image for a figure who was “alone” there were still a couple of dead-eyed “AI Zombies” in the background. Basically I feel like AI in its current state is a neat party trick. If you want “Superman Riding a Horse with a Shotgun”, you are going to get something that fills that prompt… no matter how confusing or contorted it winds up looking. If you want specificity or correct answers… I am just not sure if we are at a point where large language models can fill that bill. I for example would never want to put anyone’s life in the hands of an AI-based decision engine yet.

If you want some surrealist nonsense as AI attempts to draw you a picture of something called “Glorbo”, then it absolutely has you covered.

Shield Crush of the Chieftain

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bad weather night so I am running on minimal sleep. However that said I recorded a video of gameplay of my Shield Crush of the Chieftain Juggernaut… which is a mouthful. At this point, I am level 86 and have picked up most of the things I was seeking out, and feel relatively confident that I can make a general pronouncement about the build as a whole. Does it work well enough? Sure. Does it feel amazing? Not really. The problem with Shield Crush in general is that it is largely a stationary ability and in order to crank up its damage, you probably want to be running it with Multistrike. I personally don’t like the way Multistrike feels, so for reference, I am using Melee Splash instead in my gameplay.

I think the ideal playstyle is to gather up a bunch of mobs and then burn it all down at once from a stationary position. This works but also doesn’t necessarily feel amazing for mapping, especially not when you are going to struggle with a lot of tankier mobs. This was admittedly the very first T16 that I had attempted and it went smoothly enough. I never really came close to dying, and a lot of the mobs were taken out pretty easily but each time it stranded a single rare that I needed to chew thing. I am wondering if maybe the play would have been to try and run this build as a Chieftain for Hinekora explosions which would honestly go a very long way towards feeling tasty with clears. However, in that scenario, I would have probably chosen to go with a Cloak of Flames/Damage Conversion setup rather than trying to get as much armor out of my chest as possible.

The problem with armor scaling and damage conversion is that it requires some very specific items… a few of which are a bit “spendy” in a normal league. For example, I was able to pick up this grasping mail with the “Armour is Increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” for around 8 Divines in this league, but I have priced out the same item in other leagues and they were going for around 25 Divines. The cheaper option that gives you the same explicit is Formless Flame which itself can have over 1000 Armor but comes with a -30% Fire Resistance penalty reducing how much scaling you can easily get. Legitimately the more I sit here and think about it, the more I am wondering what converting this over to chieftain would do. If I did so I would end up dropping all of the crit nodes and go for Resolute Technique.

The other piece that artificially inflates the price of this build is my Aul’s Uprising. I picked this up off the ground so it cost me nothing, but these often go for several Divines in a more normal league. In this league, there are only a couple of stacks of chaos orbs. Essentially this is allowing me to not have to deal with trying to anoint charisma to fit in all of my auras as I am running Determination, Grace, and Defiance Banner all to keep bumping up that Armor score to 250k. I do wonder however if this would be better with a Strength stacking setup and running Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler and leaning more into the fire damage. I might Path of Building out some of these divergent paths to see if one of them is clearly better than the others. No one seems to have solved this problem as right now there are only four builds on the ladder that are attempting to use this ability… two of which are using it for Generals Cry.

There is a version in Hardcore however where someone has leaned heavily into the ignite damage and I am curious if maybe that is the correct play. Similar to what I said above they went down the Resolute Technique path of dealing zero crits, and have instead scaled similar to how you would scale Righteous Fire. This biggest change though is that they ended up going with a Dawnbreaker which can get upwards of 2000 Armor on a single item. Then interestingly they used Dyadian Dawn which is largely thought of as the “Explosive Arrow” belt as it was popularized with that build, but makes it so that you deal zero physical damage but your ignites deal damage faster. I think I might go down this rabbit hole a bit further because at the moment I am largely dissatisfied with the current state of my build.

Anyways this is part of the fun of Path of Exile… sometimes you go down a path that is a dead end. Sometimes that path branches a bit but can still maybe end up in an interesting place. I am maybe not giving up on this one yet.