Last Epoch

Challenge Totem Upgraded

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Good Morning, Friends. I am alive and have mostly survived another round of chemotherapy. The good news… my blood pressure has mostly stayed stable during this round after various tweaks to meds. The bad news… I still feel like I am falling apart and everything is a struggle. I guess when you poison your body purposefully with a tiny lemon of evil… There are consequences. I feel better than I did last Friday, but I had hoped the low blood pressure was the majority of what was making me feel like ass at that point. It was at least SOME of it… But I still very much feel like I am operating on maybe a quarter of the energy I would normally have. The cold reaction thing seems to have mostly faded, but I am dealing with sandpaper fingers and a persistent jaw pain, so that is fun and exciting. Cancer is awful, friends, so I highly suggest that you get your colonoscopy early so that, hopefully, if you do have issues, you can take the surgery-only path and not have to go down this hellscape that I am presently puttering along.

In better news, last night I hung out on voice with the Thursday night crew and played some Path of Exile, while they queued for FFXIV roulettes. I managed to push through the last few challenges required to hit 34/40 and get the upgraded totem pole shown in that first screenshot. Technically, I am probably going to keep going for a bit and see how many of the others I can knock out. Not necessarily because I have a deep burning desire for more challenges, but Path of Exile is a comfortable game for me to play and does not require much in the way of thought. There was a little Grids.fun thing that was cycling through the AggroChat crew, and I legitimately put Path of Exile as my “turn my brain off” game. I committed some minor violence by naming Hollow Knight as overrated… but really it is more that Symphony of the Night does everything Hollow Knight does, but does so in a way I enjoy more personally. I do think, though, that Mass Effect Andromeda does not deserve most of the hate that it got, and was a perfectly cromulent gaming experience.

I have been playing some really juicy Legion content and having a lot of fun with it. This is still one of my favorite things about Path of Exile, how you can go so deep on a single mechanic to the exclusion of pretty much everything else… and still have stupid amounts of fun. At some point, I will run a bunch of Legion 5-Ways to burn through the massive stockpile of emblems that I have. I should snag Kodra so he can get credit for them, since I believe one of the challenges required me to run some as well. Honestly, the more people you have in a Legion 5-Wa,y the faster you should, in theory, be able to push through the rounds and the more content you can farm. These can be extremely rippy because I am doing dumb things to force at minimum 150% quantity, because it was required for some of the challenges. Now that I have dinged level 100 though… I don’t really care about the difficulty level since I can no longer lose progress.

Right now, there are two Challenges that seem pretty doable. The first is Vaulted Valuables, which just requires me to run a bunch of Astrolabes and get gems as rewards. I can run the cheapest Astrolabe, which I think is Templar, and push forward with this one just by running random maps. Tremendous Tempests should also be pretty easy to knock out since I am doing the dumb thing to force 150% quant, and just need to run one more map to get it. Tyrannical Tiers is a bit of a stretch goal that I am not sure I will actually make, because if I understand this challenge correctly, I need to run 2667 more “tiers” of maps…. and with the highest option being t16s… that would be 167 more maps. I think I will get there eventually, but it isn’t something that I am going to super focus on. I have PLENTY of maps to run, mind you… but also that one is just a big ole grind that you eventually arrive at and not something I can necessarily sprint towards.

At some point, though, I am likely going to swap back over to Last Epoch and continue my progress on the spellblade righteous fire style character I have been playing. I had to take this specific screenshot this morning, mostly just to show off the sloth backpack and how much I love it. Path of Exile requires less thought from me, so it has been winning for my time. However, I am still super curious to see what the final endgame version of this build can look like. Raxx also released a video this morning with a bunch of wildly overpowered builds that might be worth checking out. I also think we are probably going to get some news from Path of Exile II soon, which will be interesting. April 28th is also when the Diablo IV expansion drops, and I will probably check it out at some point. If I can get to a point where I have more mental fortitude, I might dip into either Pragmata or Greedfall: The Dying World, because I want to experience the story in both of those games.

I am hoping as I go into this weekend, my general health and energy levels improve. I hate feeling so useless, and that everything that I do wears me out. This morning, I had to stop and take multiple breaks while doing things. I got up and showered… and then had to sit down and rest before getting dressed. Then rest again before feeding the cats, and rest again before fixing myself food and heading upstairs. I hate everything about this. Never before have I felt so betrayed by my own body. I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was prepared for just how hard it would end up being.

The Evil Lemon

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Good Morning, Folks. I am on day two of the evil lemon, which is hooked up and feeding me poison over the course of 46 hours. I had been warned that the negative cold reactions from the Oxaliplatin escalates over time, and so far that is absolutely a thing. Essentially, any time I touch anything metal… or something that is even coated with rubber over top of metal… I get this tingle sensation in a bad way. I am hoping that it phases out around Thursday like it did last time, because so far it is not fun at all. I’ve cranked up the temp in the house, and it does not seem to be helping at all. Last round of chemo I struggled with sorting out my blood pressure, and that seems to be stable this go round, so I am hoping I will have an easier go for this first week. We had some pretty awful tornadic storms last night, so I really did not sleep terribly well. I might end up taking off the afternoon and trying to catch up on sleep. I am at least getting a bit more used to sleeping with this dumb bag hooked up to me, because from midnight on, I think I got pretty solid sleep until 5:30 or so.

I figured I would share another picture that I took the other day, prior to starting chemo. This is “Splotchie”, and he has been hanging out lately. The positive is that, for being a grizzled tomcat, he seems to get along well enough with Greybie and does not abuse him. I am not sure if I have ever shared a picture of Splotchie on the blog, but he is not friendly, unfortunately. He tolerates me being around, but will not let me get anywhere near him. I love his markings, though, they always remind me of a jaguar. I keep thinking that at some point, he will be willing to let me pet him. There is also another tomcat from a few doors down that is a tux, who will let me pet him, but I have not caught a photo of him. He belongs to this little kid down the street, but he sneaks out and comes to visit. So long as they all leave Greybie alone, I am fine with as many visitors as they want.

In gaming news I have been poking around in Last Epoch again. On the podcast this past weekend, Tam was sharing how broken Fire Aura was, and I noticed that Maxroll seemed to have a pretty solid build for it. I have taken a relatively crazy path through the campaign, with jumping on the first two dungeon skips and then leveling up through Majassa. In lieu of the final act, I started working on Monoliths but I might go back and finish the ancient timeline just to get the bonus points. All in all this build is nonsense, and you can legitimately run around similar to Righteous Fire and just let your Fire Aura burn through most of the trash mobs. The specific version that I am running converts fire to frost damage and freezes targets, which is a thing that I have always thought would be an interesting alternate version of Righteous Fire.

I just got high enough level to be able to equip a lot of the gear that I had been holding onto. There are several pieces that I need to convert to legendaries, and I need to sort out how best to deal with the rest of my resistances. Overcapping Cold Resistance is a thing that buffs Fire Aura, so I am trying to stack that on as many pieces as I can. One of the things that I am seeking the most is a 2lp or better version of the Mad Alchemist’s Laddle. Similarly, I would love to find a 3lp or better Transcriber’s Gavel. I am also always on the lookout for better versions of the Last Nomad rings. What will really help is getting an Omnis amulet because it comes with a ton of resistances. That is going to rely on farming a bunch of 200+ corruption Shade of Orybuss, and unfortunately, as many of these as I have killed… I have yet to see a single one drop. I could also farm Confluence of Oblivion, Woven Echoes, but I am not sure how many of those I currently have.

I came really close to downing Aberroth the other night, with a wipe at 4%. The problem with doing harder content is that I am just too disorganized right now. I think in the meantime, I am going to focus mostly on knocking out monoliths that I have not unlocked on my Spellblade. This will get me some more levels and potentially more gear, and then when I get up there in levels, I might make a shot at Aberroth on the spellblade. I did tweak my Forged Weapons build and dropped the forged armor pet, and picked up holy symbol instead for some additional damage output and survival. That seems to have been a generally positive shift, and was what led to getting Aberroth to 4%. In theory, I probably need to try and get a better two-handed weapon, since the forged weapons inherit those stats. Volcanus has been great, but mostly I just need to craft a better version that has some more base damage stats on it.

I am also poking at Path of Exile still. I am 87% through level 99, am effectively 2 pips and some change to go until level 100. I’m running my pretty chill Delve tree, and gathering up a couple of maps worth of Sulphite before diving down into the mines to burn through it. Delve is shockingly good experience gain, especially around the 250-300 depth realm. This also really does not require much out of me, and I can turn my brain off and just grind. At the very least, it requires way less forethought than Last Epoch does at the moment. That is one of the things I love about Path of Exile, is that it feels like it has way more reliable defenses than Last Epoch does. Sure, there can be some spikes in damage, but it feels like it happens way less often in POE. I think more than anything, I just really want to hit level 100, so that I can go back to some spicy mapping to knock out some of the other challenges.

I am doing okay, and other than the worse spikes in cold reaction… this round of chemo seems to mostly be going more smoothly. I think a lot of the troubles that I had last round were blood pressure related, and I have mostly sorted that out. I look forward to getting unhooked from the evil lemon tomorrow, and will hopefuly be able to get proper rest again.

Freezing Fire Aura

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Good Morning, Folks. The last couple of weeks have been a wild ride from the chemo two weeks ago, to the recovery last week, and trying to sort out the current state of my blood pressure medication. While my stamina is still completely shot, and I only have so much “oomph” in me, I was able to more or less have a normal weekend to prepare for the upcoming chemopocalpyse that will be hitting starting tomorrow. I wish I had taken a before photo… because the house was a complete pit, and I just lacked the energy to do much of anything about it. That is not to say that my house is not still messy… because it is… but I was at least able to do enough of the normal rotation of chores this weekend to sort of reset things and prepare for the impending “torpor” brought on by the next round of chemo. I have some stuff to do tonight to prep trash to pull it out to the curb tomorrow morning, but I picked up everything that really mattered and restocked my food stores with easy-to-eat items for the next two-week block. I am hoping, though, since I have mostly sorted out the blood pressure thing, that my “reset times” are a bit more stable this go round. I also purposefully tried to eat more food over the weekend, because I know I will probably not be eating much over the next few days, as I will not feel up to it.

I spent most of my weekend gaming time playing Path of Exile, as I have continued chipping away at challenges. I am sitting on 31/40 and, in theory, have 32, 33, and 34 well in my sights. I’ve completed everything for the “GGG” challenge except for actually hitting level 100, and I had to pause some of my other challenge work because I did a bit of backpedalling there with a few bad deaths. I’ve rebounded, though and am sitting at 3 pips from 100, and might be able to grind that out tonight. After that, I will go back to chipping away at Tremendous Tempests and Sandswept Survivor, which involve me forcing quant via sacrifice fragments in the map device, and running what ends up being some rather juicy Legion maps. Astrolabes are pretty slow and expensive, but I am chipping away at those with my Delve tree, which is pretty easy and does not generate a ton of death risk. Delve traditionally is my safest way to grind out to level 100, because it is very predictable, so I will be doing as much of that as I can until I ding. I really wish that Sulphite was itemised, and something that I could just buy outright on the exchange.

Prior to taking some bad deaths, though, I was having a lot of fun with Legion. Essentially, I would have at least two Legions per map, and each of them would spawn a ton of generals, with those guaranteed loot tiles. I’ve never really gone all in on Legion before during a league, and really forcing myself to go hard on it has been a lot of fun. I did this last league with Alva temples, and learned so much about that mechanic. In theory, I should probably do Blight, the next league, since that is one of those league mechanics that I have never really focused on. Each time I do this… I broaden my knowledge of the game and add more tools to my kit for sourcing my own stuff. Path of Exile is way too detailed to ever learn fully in a single league… so instead I have taken to focusing on single mechanics over the course of MANY leagues to reach a broad understanding. Once I got the foothold of Delve under me, it then allowed me to pretty much tackle any other content because I could reliably make enough currency to fund those endeavours. POE really is the sort of game where you need to learn a “trade” and then be able to utilise that trade to learn other trades.

Speaking of trades… this was supposed to be the league where the “chaos standard” was abolished. However, that said… most of the trades that I do are still in large blocks of chaos. After the video I just linked, it came out that Nightmare maps, which replaced t17s, would still only be modifiable with chaos orbs. I am not entirely certain if that is what saved the day, or simply the fact that we, as players, still place some measure of value and stability in the fact that chaos orbs are familiar. Bench crafts still require them as well, but I think more than anything… it is just that we are used to trading in chaos. Exalted Orbs are certainly way more common, but also…. less common than Chaos, so if we ever shifted the base trading unit, I could see going with those. In truth, it does not really matter, but Chaos to Divines have been just volatile enough that any time I get up around 1000 Chaos, I convert some of it. I’ve blown copious amounts of currency on dumb things… like, for example, squeaking an extra gem out of pretty much every link by getting an imbued gem with lifetap on it.

In other gaming news, I rolled a new character over in Last Epoch. I do not have the mental or physical fortitude right now to take down Aberroth with my Forged Weapons build in its current state. It requires me to do mechanics entirely too much for where I am right now. Over the weekend, Tam talked about how strong the current state of Fire Aura is on a Spellblade, and given that I am an enjoyer of all things Righteous Fire… I figured I owed it to myself to check it out. Right now, the guide I am following is doing something that I have wondered about for years… it converts this Fire Aura to cold damage so that it freezes things. Legitimately, one of my mad daydreams has been an alternate version of Righteous Fire that scales off cold and freezing damage vectors, and right now this seems to be doing exactly that. Cold damage traditionally in ARPGs represents a really strong defensive layer unto itself…. so I think as this scales it will be precisely that.

I think the bigger challenge at the moment is that I am trying to sus out exactly what path through the campaign I want to take. I am probably going to do some skips, because I cannot see doing all of the acts again on this character. However, I am not quite strong enough to jump straight into monos at level 30ish. So I think I might do one of the campaign skips and see where that takes me, and then wrap up the last few acts of the game. The only thing that I do not love about Last Epoch is that most of the builds require you to press the majority of your buttons, which means…. I tend to create a button macro on my logitech g600 that presses all of the buttons at once. The ideal state of an ARPG build involves mostly hitting a single button for me, and when I can’t generate that… I tend to figure out ways to force it. In Diablo 3, I used to use the numlock trick to constantly be firing everything other than my main attacks, so the whole mouse macro thing is not too far from that.

I know tomorrow the bottom will start to fall out again, but I feel like I am at least better prepared for it. I need to deal with trash tonight and then make sure both my tablet and phone are charged fully. I am about as ready for this as I can be. I don’t have the levels of anxiety that I had going into it two weeks ago, because I have been there and done that… and more or less made it out unscathed. I am going to continue to take notes, because due to the whole blood pressure situation, I don’t feel like I got an accurate understanding of what each day was like. When my pressure bottomed out… I was fighting that more than I was actually fighting the effects of the chemo. If you are still around for my shenanigans, thanks. I am not going anywhere, but my schedule pretty much is dictated by how I am feeling on a given day.

More Challenges and a New Tool

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve made a few more attempts at getting back into Last Epoch, but I find myself in this really odd place. Namely, I do not have enough gold, and am not generating enough gold, to keep buying new tabs for the stuff that I am farming. I could restrict my filters further, but I already am mostly only showing things that are worth picking up. I’ve made it to the point in my build where I either need to just hang it up or farm super hard to perfect my loot. With everything else that I find myself going through, I am leaning way closer to just hanging it up at the moment and calling myself done with Season 4. I’ve made a few more attempts at Aberroth, and there is a phase that I always end up struggling with a bit, and I am just not sure if I have the mental fortitude or general dexterity right now to push through it. As such, I think it might be time for me to just back away from this season. I had a lot of fun, and I got most of my usual stuff accomplished, but similar to the fact that I don’t really enjoy Uber Bosses in POE… this might just be the limits of how much I care about Last Epoch.

As such, I have been farming quite a bit of random map and delve content in Path of Exile, because my build is immortal enough that I can mostly turn my brain off. This is the level of engagement that I need right now, something that is interesting and passes the time, but does not require a lot from me. I knocked out a few more seasonal challenges and upgraded my totem pole a few times. Right now, I am chipping away at a few really long grinds, while also trying to hit level 100. I am roughly halfway through 99 at the moment, and as such am already running Omens of Amelioration just in case I take a random death. I’ve been running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual map strat that is generating a large number of them just in case, and when I finally hit 100, I am sure I will just cash in any that I have lying around on the market.

Thirty-Four challenges tend to be where I stop every league, and I am at this point, I think 3 challenges away from hitting that. If I never make it back and do any more challenges in this league, I would be happy enough with this totem as my final mark for the league, especially given everything I am going through right now. I know at some point soon, the whole POE2 machine will fire up, and I will start getting interested in whatever is happening with 0.5. I also know that there is a D4 expansion dropping in May that might garner my attention. So in theory, I should probably push through and knock out whatever I can knock out while my focus is available. Everything in my life feels so up in the air right now, and will probably be that way for at least the next four months as I go through cancer infusions.

One thing that is super interesting that just came out is a brand new tool for Path of Exile that essentially replaces all of the third-party tools that folks generally use. It has a price checker, an item recoloring tool, and a way to edit your filters in real time on the fly while you are mapping to add or remove items or shift tiers. I’ve only just started playing with it, but I can see entirely moving away from Awakened POE Trade, especially if this also starts supporting Path of Exile II. The above video is a deep dive into the features of the tool from the developer and his friend, the streamer Aero. Probably the coolest functionality is to be able to shift what tier something is on the fly, which is especially useful if you might care about an item that the general filters would not. I tend to run my filters way too lax for my own good, because I don’t want to miss anything I might at some point care about. However, if I can shift them on the fly, I might actually start using a tool like this to ratchet things down.

One thing I think I should warn you all is that I do not really know what the future of this blog is going to be in the coming months. My life has been turned upside down. “Chemo Brain” is most definitely a thing I am experiencing, and as a result, I am having a bit harder time concentrating and banging out a blog post than I used to. I’ve already had way more gaps in posting than I have in literal years. This is probably going to continue, and I will keep posting whenever I think I can knock something out in a reasonable manner, that does not upset the delicate balance of everything else I have going on in my life. Hopefully, you will be along for this very intermittent journey.