Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

Accidental Black Light

by

Good Morning Folks. One of my coworkers really cares deeply about his teleconference background… and recently added these cool vapor-wave neon strip things which spurred in my brain… that I could do something cool with my lighting. I have a ceiling fan with three 60W light bulbs… and I got it in my head that I could give myself some cool bisexual lighting by buying a blue, pink, and purple led bulb. The pink was way the hell too overpowering so I ended up with only a blue bulb and a purple bulb and it works… giving me this cool two-tone lighting that is way the hell easier on my eyes than bright white light. However what I did not expect is that I accidentally created a black light, because everything in my office that fluoresces is now glowing like crazy. I feel like I need to lean into this and get some proper velvet black-light paintings up in here. The above photo does not do the effect justice… but you can definitely see that little Kenneth the robot’s arms and head are glowing.

I think at this point I am enjoying my Brand Elemenalist more than the Toxic Rain Pathfinder, because it has officially leap-frogged it in levels and I am pretty close to dinging 92. Everything always slows down at 95 and I am not sure if I have enough survival to really push much further than that but I fully expect to get there before long. The only problem with this build is that so much of my success with it… is entirely depended upon the negative lightning resistance setup I have on my mercenary. If I were playing an actually GOOD build… I can see how dumb this would be especially for bossing purposes. This combined with the Inpulsa chest are giving me some tasty screen wide pops at times that I was not expecting for a brand build. I am still sort of shopping for a better merc, but I really want the ability that causes consecrated ground to cover the screen and the “better” options I have found don’t have that or herald of purity. I wish POE.Ninja tracked Mercenaries so that I could flip through a bunch of different setups to see what people are doing with the Doryani setup.

So one of the battles that I have been having with this character and build is… what the hell to do with the shield. The build that I loosely patterned this one off of was using Aegis Aurora and it makes some amount of sense. It’s a good chunk of armor and decent energy shield, and also has the ability to recover 2% of energy shield on block. The problem with this however is that essentially this is only 96 Energy Shield per block… which is largely meaningless. For awhile I was running Emperor’s Vigilance which has even more armor and energy shield and would allow me to drop a node on my passive tree to keep Glancing Blows, but also has the double edged sword that any unblocked damage bypasses my energy shield. I played around with Rise of the Phoenix and it was fine… but did not have enough chance to block and dropped me down below the block cap. I even tried a solid 5% of life on block shield that has a pretty decent roll and it just did not feel as good as it does on my Righteous Fire characters… because it is only around 200 life recovered per block and the general line of defenses is nowhere near as strong. So I am stick with the Aegis for now, mostly because I am not sure what else to try.

I am ripping through Alch and Go t16 maps without any issue, and am mostly using this character to run Betrayal on Primordial Blocks still chasing that damned hideout. I have a whole new appreciation for Betrayal largely because I never realized exactly how bit of an experience boost it is over any other mechanic. I don’t even care about Safehouses, I am just clicking whatever option there is on every single person just to get the bump of experience. I get it that folks have said Betrayal is great early league, but I always assumed it was for the enchants and abandoned it entirely this league… but legitimately it is probably still worth doing to get a bump in levels quickly. I am sure those Veiled Chaos Orbs were more valuable at the start of the league than they are now as well. I’ve run so much Betrayal and at least a dozen safe houses at this point and have still not found a single invitation for Catrina. I do wish there was some better guidance as to what person does what in which position however, because I keep getting the damned crafting tables… and they are awful.

The other thing I am hunting while running maps is for the memory tears that unlock a sequence of maps. Right now it feels like I am pretty close to knocking out Eldritch Expeditions and will likely need two of these sequences to wrap it up. When I get one of these I pretty much just rip my way through it as RF so that I can knock it out quickly and then return back to chill Ach and Go t16s. I should probably be knocking out t17s as well but those are way less happy chill fun times, and I have not been in the mood for it. Yesterday was “a lot”, and I took the day off to deal with “death things” as I am starting to collectively refer to it as. I had to go back to the funeral home to pick up death certificates and then spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with various things that had been in a holding pattern waiting on them. I still need to make a trek Saturday morning over to deal with another thing related to this, because I was just too beat by the time I got back home yesterday to make another jaunt in the opposite direction.

I had made plans with a friend of mine, but had to beg off last night because I was just too out of it. Instead I sat downstairs on the sofa with cats snuggling tightly, and played some Path of Exile while listening to Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone. I did not expect to necessarily chain through these books but after the ending of Dead Country… I had to know what was coming next. While I loved the Craft Sequence… so far this Craft Wars Trilogy is way more tightly focused and I like it better overall. Tara Abernathy is the best character in the entire series of books, and we are spending way more time with her in this book than some of the other sequels from the previous series. The first sequence hopped around quite a bit between characters, and there were entire books that did not really involve her. This definitely feels like we are headed for some sort of an endgame and all of the best elements of the previous books are being revisited in this one tight narrative arc. Like I said if you have never read any of these books I HIGHLY suggest starting them and unfortunately I would also suggest reading the first six book series, because you will largely be clueless about the importance of some of the events in this trilogy.

I am still functional… deeply low on spoons… but strugglebusing my way through the world.

Burning Divines

by

Good Morning Folks. We have reached the point in the league where I am blowing all of my currency on alt characters.I think I have blown something like 130 divines on kitting out two characters. Divines are easy enough to get at this point just through selling Delve stuff that I could get them back if I really wanted it, but honestly… since I will never play standard I might as well blow them. At this point I know I will be shifting to Last Epoch next week and then once I have my fill of that, probably popping back into Path of Exile II to see what 0.3.0 has to offer. As a result I am in the mode of winding down the Mercenaries of Trarthus league. During the Gauntlet I had a lot of fun with Toxic Rain which caused me to run up a character in the league for that. Additionally I had a Brand character that I was originally planning on going Penance Brand of Dissipation with… but pivoted at the last minute to Storm Brand of Indecision. In both case I have gotten the characters to around level 90.

With Toxic Rain I went Pathfinder as it is really the only Ranger ascendancy that has anything that benefits the skill. Pending I remember to keep a life flask rolling it also has really great surviveability after you have thrown on enough levels and gotten enough raw hit points. There are a few ways to build this and I opted for the modern method of getting a 250% Widowhail and buying a stupidly expensive quiver. I legitimately do not remember how much this cost but I think it was in the neighborhood of 50 Divines and that was the cheapest version I could find with both chaos and normal dot multi, a decent life roll, and bow damage percentage increase on it. This gives me +77% dot multi, +87.5% chaos dot multi, +381.5 life, and +171.5% bow damage. Additionally I am running a Tides of Time which effectively is a budget mageblood that only works on the Pathfinder class which effectively allows me to generate enough flask charges that they have perm uptime with the used when full enchant.

You can check out the full setup here in the POB, but fair warning I don’t know shit about properly configuring POB. I based it loosely on some other POBs that I saw on POE.Ninja and combined a bunch of things that I liked into a new frankenbuild. Essentially I am running Mirage Archer setup in my chestpiece with normal Toxic Rain, and then a Ballista totem setup in my bow with Toxic Rain of Withering to give me withered stacks. Collectively this leads to a pretty comfy playstyle as I roam around the map spamming two buttons and occasionally hitting a health potion when I remember it. If something is taking two long to die I curse it with despair and move on with my life. This is very much a mapper setup and not in any fashion something you would want for bossing purposes. Truth be told, I have learned that I do not like bossing builds in the least… and at some point should probably find one that I enjoy playing just so I can knock out ubers in the future. They all feel bad to me because leveling them feels like ass.

The other character I have been playing is a brand build, which is another archetype that I really love. Basically Wintertide brand is probably my favorite of these, but it always feels too fiddly and requires you to push way the hell too many buttons to play it effectively. Storm Brand is something that I have attempted to play countless times in the past but they always feel too squishy, and I think I might have come up with the solution here. Essentially I am abusing the new golem node on the Elementalist Ascendancy combined with the Fire and Cold nodes and Bastion of Elements as an extra defensive layer. So essentially all of my lightning damage from Storm Brand of Indecision is Chilling, Igniting, and Shocking the enemy and I am running around with massive buffs from Stone, Ice, Lightning, and Flame Golems which have meatshield support giving them extra heft and taunt. I am running two Taming Rings for the lulz and resists, and an Inpulsa’s chest for the explode pops. Add the cheapest Archdemon crown I could find and a +2 crit knife and you have a pretty comfy and powerful feeling setup in maps. I am running Aegis Aurora but don’t really feel like I have enough armor to make it work well… nor enough energy shield so I might swap that up for something else at some point like maybe a Phoenix Shield to resolve the fact that I am not ignite immune.

What is making this feel extremely good is the fact that I am running Storm Brand with a Doryani Merc that is causing everything in my vicinity to have -130% Lighting Resistance. The Merc is also providing shocked ground and using the Kaom’s Binding trick to convert some phys damage to fire, and providing me some extra regen with Shaper’s Seed. Everything else was pretty much a yolo as I just threw on some minion uniques that seemed like they might be useful for all of the Holy Relics and Herald of Purity minions that are being generated. For reference I am running a Shout bot Striker with my Righteous Fire character to add more regen and give culling strike for bosses, and running an Ice Shot ranger type for my Toxic Rain character to help slow up the packs a bit and make them stand in the toxic rain a bit longer. In truth I am looking for better versions of all of these mercs but I have not found exactly what I want. For example I want a striker that provides me fortify stacks, enduring cry, and determination… which is a thing that CAN exist but I just have not seen it.

Mapping with the negative lightning res merc setup is pretty comfy because the one I am running is also spreading out consecrated ground pretty much everywhere. It isn’t the best at killing unique mobs but feels pretty solid. I am blocking just enough incoming damage to make the 3000 life and 1000 energy shield that I have feel decent. Swapping to the Phoenix Shield would give me a bit more life regen which might make things feel a bit better as well as like I said patching the hole I have in my elemental defenses where I would at least become immune to ignite when I hit low life. Of all of the things I am worried about… ignite stacks seem like they are the easiest to work around. All told I am having quite a bit of fun with both of these new characters, but playing alts always feels weird because I never put the same focus on them as I do with my righteous fire mains. One of these leagues I am going to play one of these and force myself to improve it over the course of the league. Next league I am contemplating going down the Golem Elementalist Explosive Arrow path that my friend Sloth did this league… pending it does not get extremely nerfed. EA is an archetype that I already like quite a bit and Golementalist is extremely fun to level.

As far as league progress goes, I am chipping away at some of the remaining challenges for the league. I am sitting at 33 of 40 and at a minimum I want to hit 34 before I wander away like a bored toddler. Strenuous Summons is something that I made a dent in last night, and in theory I am pretty close to Eldritch Expedition and just need to get lucky with Remembrance Repressed. I can do t17s and could in theory chip away at Endgame Enigmas as well. Powerful Pursuits is killing Ubers and if I got desperate I could just buy my way out of that problem with boss carries on TFT. Basically I think I can at least get one more without a ton of effort and that is probably the path that I am going to go down. I am running red altars because I would far rather run the Black Star/Searing Exarch combo for invitations than doing maven witnesses or having to fight Shrek from the eater of worlds invitations. I burned through ALL of my invitations yesterday evening, and that is already way more Shrek fights than I ever want to do going forward. I should see what buying bulk Black Star invites costs on TFT because those are without a doubt the easiest to run over and over.

Anyways… still having fun with my stupid Path of Exile nonsense. Brands are fun, Toxic Rain is fun, and Righteous Fire is fun.

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

by

One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Four Winds, Toxic Rain, and MyMiniFactory Sale

by

Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.

Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.

Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.

Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.

In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.

I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.

Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.