Mercenaries of Trarthus (3.26)

Guardian Maps and Plant Invasions

by

I tell you friends… I did not expect the Path of Exile community to be as pure as it is sometimes. Time is immeasurable… but some time ago I played in a private league event that SirGog was organizing, and I set my global channel to the one that is used by the folks who played in that event. Thing is… I just never set it back to a different global so I have been there and active during several leagues. As a result my Path of Exile experience is a bit skewed from the standard one, and I have never met a more supportive group of strangers in my life. I’ve witnesses for ages when someone needs something, asking out to global and someone almost always fulfilling that request. So when I have found a rare hideout in one of my maps for example, I always message global to see if anyone wants it. The other day I got to within 3 maps of completing the final sub goal of Grinding Gear Goals and asked if anyone had three guardian/conqueror maps I could buy from them. Within seconds I got a few invites and the first person who got to me, would not even take payment for them. It was because of them that I finished this achievement so easily and I am immensely thankful.

As far as Unreal Undertakings… I went for one of the more annoying options but it did go along with something I was trying to do already. Essentially I ran five blueprints with four wings unveiled and in order to do that… I had to grind up a bunch of levels of various skills on assorted rogues. It went fast enough and I have effectively learned that it takes 4 Tier 4 Contracts to hit Tier 5 in a skill, so I could essentially pre-stage a bunch of stuff and have it ready to bulk grind through contracts. Once I finished leveling everything, it legitimately did not take me terribly long to chain through five sets of grand heists and finish up the achievement. However… I think I might have hit the wall on how much I am going to accomplish during this league. There are a few of them like the Infamous Mercenaries one that I will probably accidentally complete since I only have one of those left to find… but then there are others where I would have to devote more effort to completing them than I feel like it. I could pay for a bunch of uber carries to knock that one out… but also I am not sure I care enough about that.

In other news I finished up Space Oddity on Monday night, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t think it is anywhere near as good as Space Opera was, but that is not for lack of trying. I think the narrative was just a bit messier than the first one, that had a fairly clear call to action and then a sequence of events that played out in a logical order. With Space Oddity, there was this whole messy middle of the book where things just felt like they flailed a bit… which only seemed to accentuate the “world salad” nature of this series where every sentence is desperately trying to be profound and funny at the same time. It did however stick the landing though and the end of the book was wonderful, so flailing aside it is still worth the read. I just struggled for awhile to push through it until I started the care about the outcome. Maybe if I had read it back to back with the first one like Thalen did, it would have been a different experience.

Last night I started Overgrowth by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire. I think what I have realized is that I just really love her writing style, because I would rank the Newsflesh series under the Mira Grant pseudonym and the Alchemical Journeys series among my favorite books ever. The characters in overgrowth feel familiarly adjacent to some of the characters that I came to love specifically in the Newsflesh series. I am deeply interested to see how things turn out when the invasion actually starts. I am not entirely certain how far I made it last night compared to the length of the book… which is admittedly the problem in listening to an audiobook being fed to me through my private plex server. It isn’t real great and indicating how much is left, but it feels like I am barely through the beginning of the book and sleep claimed me pretty freaking early last night around 9 pm.

In other news unrelated to anything to this point… I started playing Hell Clock which is what if Hades were actually an ARPG and not just an action game. So far I am really enjoying it and I love that it is so honest about difficulty levels and that if you are struggling on a boss… the game is not intended to be that way. I also greatly love that you can just disable the time pressure which is huge for me personally. I have a weird hang up about being timed while doing things, that dates back to third grade mathematics and these awful things called “mad minutes” that effectively ruined my brain for math from that point forward. You can just disable the 7 minute timer… and the game will STILL warn you when you are too poorly equipped to ride the ride. For example I got to a point in the first level where it warned me that even though I had disabled the timer… I should probably go back to town and buy some equipment before moving forward. I appreciate that level of bluntness greatly in a video game.

As far as other things in my life… I am just trying to seep back into a normal routine. I had one of my best friends that I consider my legitimate sibling offer to come stay with me this coming week. I cannot fully explain how much that means to me, but also… I would rather get together at a time when I was not actively feeling miserable. I am not sure I am capable of truly experiencing joy right now. I would rather get together at a time when I am not so broken inside.

Desperately Seeking Guardians

by

Good Morning Folks. This weekend I mostly spent my time listening to an audiobook and trying to chip away at league challenges in Path of Exile. My sad little totem is slowly growing bigger as I knock things out. At this point I am sitting at 29 of 40 completed and quite possibly the largest sub item is that I managed to hit level 100. This is the fourth character overall that I have taken all the way to the maximum level, largely because it either requires a stupid amount of grinding… or paying someone to power level you. I would be willing to bet all of those level 100 squishy builds that you see on the ladder… paid someone to get them there because a single death can set you back several hours worth of progress. Once I clear level 98… I pretty much have an Omen of Amelioration on me at all times and if I take a death in a map… I abandon that map. I believe I hit level 100 on Friday when I was home sick and chilling on the sofa between moments when my body was actively trying to kill me.

I knocked a few achievements out this weekend, namely I bought a set for Uber Atziri and was able to knock that out without much issue. I had tried earlier in my leveling journey and she wrecked me at one point during the fight where I got clipped by two of her big rings at once. The other thing that I knocked out was Cross Contamination which involves doing two league mechanics at the same time, and the final one that I did was killing an Essence monster while being buffed by a tempest. I did the scarab that gives you a tempest on your map and a bunch of essence scarabs to force several and waited until I had the buff and then popped the essence monster and burned it down as quickly as I could. I think the highest I have ever gotten during a league is 34 challenges, and I hope to be able to do at least that well. I have no interest in running uber bosses, but given that I am sitting on a stack of currency I could probably pay for carries to get that knocked out.

The one that I am struggling through right now is gear grinding goals. Hitting level 100 was a bit part of that progress and the 1000 maps and 100 maps with a Mercenary I accomplished pretty easily just while doing other things. That left me with a few options. Since I am not well suited for bossing, the 30 uber pinnacle bosses was a non-starter. Similarly whiel I have a new appreciation for the Labyrinth after the shit show of ascension options in Path of Exile II… that does not mean that I want to run uber lab enough times to use the divine font 70 more times. That left me with Guardian/Conqueror maps and after burning through all of them that I had sitting in my bank I am at 40 of 50. My goal is to use my stash of scouting reports and the fat stack of saved up Kirac missions to fish for the last 10. The big problem here is that they have to be 80% quant or higher. This means that not only is a crapshoot that you find a guardian map on Kirac… but you have to find one with high quant that does not have a mod that bricks your build. I think I have 60 of the normal scouting reports, and 40 of the vaal ones… so in theory between those two stacks I should be able to find 10 maps that I can actually run.

The one that is quite possibly the hardest to complete is Infamous Instigators. This requires you to defeat 15 different Infamous mercenaries. I never run from fights, and I cannot remember the last time a Mercenary defeated me… so in theory my reputation should be just about maxed out. However I seem to find infamous mercs every twenty maps or so… and then it only counts if it is a version you have not already killed. In theory I could probably start banning specific types in the hope that maybe it might influence what I get next… but the problem is that it is not like all of the missing mercs are of the same type. I wish there was a scarab or a node on the tree that gave you a higher chance of encountering infamous mercs… but sadly that is not a thing. I just need to grind more maps in the rare hope of finding these stupid things so I can find my last three.

Another annoying one is Unreal Undertakings, which requires you to effectively do the rare versions of various league content. Defeating Settlers bosses was pretty easy because I have been running shipments trying to get divine orbs, and have had enough interdicted that I managed to kill several pirates. Breachstones similarly were super easy and I just bought five of the cheapest ones off the currency exchange. For Tier 4 Harvest Seeds I simply forced Harvest onto my map and then also ran a Harvest Scarab of Cornucopia which shockingly gave me more than one T4 beast per each harvest I ran with it. So between two of these scarabs I had knocked out the achievement. All of the rest of these kind of suck. Abyssal Depths for example there is no way to really force one to happen because you are going to get way more Spires than Depths. Domain of Timeless Conflict is an option but you have to run at least 4 emblems and two of the emblems are stupidly expensive. I finished a full Simulacrum without much issue and could in theory just buy 3 more and hope that I can run all 15 waves of them… but they take a stupid amount of time. I have been leveling my rogues and in theory I could run 4 wing Blueprints and probably knock that out pretty easily… but again it will take dedicated time.

The problem with all of this is that I am going to have to sacrifice making currency to finish these out. Right now most of the divines that I am making is through selling resonators and fossils and then converting that from chaos to divines. My preferred method of play is to alternate between filling up my sulphite on some maps, and then dive down into delve around 300 depth and burn it back down to zero before going up and mapping again. However nothing I am doing in delve… can really help me complete anything left on my list save for maybe Aul fights… which do count as pinnacle bosses. However I have only found two Auls so far this league, and it feels like they maybe made them a bit more rare to find. Normally going horizontal at 200ish depth will get you tons of them… and I am just not lucking out into much in the way of Primordial Cities. Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can wrap before August 21st when the Last Epoch season starts, because from that point forward… it is going to be real hard to get me interested in Path of Exile grinding.

I am thankful though to have mindless things like this to focus on… because it makes me think less about the general state of my life. I have an appointment with a financial planner today, to help me sort out what to do with insurance and such and how best to handle it. This week and next week are going to be super fucking hard… because Friday is our wedding anniversary, and next week is her birthday. We have a thing planned for her birthday so I will at least be seeing other human beings that day. I plan on taking both days off from work because I will likely not be functional in either case. Anyways… the last month… has been fucking hard, but I am managing.

Amelioration Addict

by

Good Morning Folks. One of the hardest parts about the situation I am in… is watching the cats trying to deal with it in their own way. Gracie has been struggling and her way of dealing with it, has been being attached to me pretty much 24/7. This is not a bad thing and quite honestly, having this adorable fuzzbutt at my side has helped me a lot as well. However she always interacted with me and my wife in different ways… and now I am having to be both momma and daddy. Like she used to get up in my wife’s face constantly and want to headbutt her… and she is starting to do that with me. She has also started recently standing in empty rooms and meowing a lot… because I think on some level she thinks maybe she can summon her back out of the woodwork. Either that or she has momentarily lost sight of me, and is afraid I will go away too. I always holler down to her and then she comes and finds me… but its been really hard to see the toll that it is having specifically on Gracie.

I finally started Cold Iron Task by James J. Butcher after sitting on this book for what feels like forever. The last book that I read before this was Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle… and that was back in March. I am not sure what exactly happened. I think maybe that book took a lot out of me and I needed a break… and then that break turned into month after month with me never quite getting around to starting something new. It has been good to crawl back inside of a book, because it helps pry me out of my own head and dealing with my own issues. I’m a little over halfway through at this point and this third book in the Unorthodox Chronicles series is considerably better than the first two. Not that the first two were bad, but they spent a lot of time setting up the character of Grimsby and now he has arrived as a fully fledged character with his own cast of supporting characters. So much so that I think you could probably just skip the first two books without a ton of issue, because when something is brought up from a previous book they still keep explaining what it means.

Over in Path of Exile I am still chipping away at challenges and am roughly seven pips away from level 100. Until I ding I am largely playing it safe and also carrying with me an Omen of Amelioration to diminish the impact of random deaths. My current play pattern is that I run maps until I am full on Sulphite and then dive back into Delve to spend that down, and when I gather up eight or so of the quest heists I chain through those to clear out my inventory. I’ve run around 100-150 copies of Primordial Blocks and still have not found my hideout. I am currently on an off cycle building up more blocks maps and running Defiled Cathedral in the hopes of getting a Nameless Seer so I can shift the divination card pool from Cathedral over to Blocks. I have found tons of these… but never on a map that I actually wanted to swipe the div card pool from. I’ve also not really gotten any big ticket uniques from the Seer so I keep hoping that one of them will give me something really tasty.

Over in Guild Wars 2 I am back to doing our Thursday night shenanigans which also turned into a Friday night this past week. I have a whole new batch of weeklies to start chewing through as yesterday was the reset. I will probably spend some time tonight doing that. This is really the only MMORPG I can seem to get into these days, because everything else requires too much focus. So much of Guild Wars 2 has been pushed to muscle memory, so that I can just sort of turn my brain off and run content without thinking too much about it. That is a lot of the reason why I play so many ARPGs is it allows me to just sink into the keyboard and exist while dealing with my own stuff in my head. We have the WvW event starting today, so I might spend some time doing that so that I can grind out a few more Gifts of Battle and keep pushing my ranks up.

Because I am a glutton for punishment… I also rolled a brand new character in Guild Wars 1. I am going to do prophecies because quite honestly… that is the one that I want to see the story for the most. It is also probably the worst of the campaigns so I will need strength of mind to get through it. I went Ranger and I am probably going to go Elementalist just for the elemental weapon buffs, given that I do not want to go daggers… which pretty much negates the popular combo with Assassin. I did not make it terribly far, but I am trying to complete as much stuff as I can pre-sundering because the world feels so much shittier once everything is monochromatic. I’ve always tried to do Warrior combos, and honestly… I think this game might just feel better as ranged.

I am doing okay. I made a post effectively saying as much on Facebook with the hopes of reassuring people who are worried about me… but it seems to have had the opposite effect. Clearly people are not prepared for me to be raw and honest about life. That makes sense. Most people just want you to say “fine” when they ask how you are doing, because it lets them know that they checked in on you… but in truth they probably didn’t actually want a real answer because now it forces them to deal with you not being okay. In truth I am doing far better than I thought I would be.

Relaxing Rifting

by

Good Morning Folks. Last night was another return to normalcy. We had been on a stint of doing Thursday night Guild Wars 2 nonsense, and I had tagged out for a few weeks for obvious reasons. We did not do a ton of stuff, but ran the daily fractal which also doubled for the weekly, and then did a bunch of Rift hunts in Lowland Shore. Me talking about it in my blog yesterday apparently prompted the rest of the crew to do some of that since they had never really chained them. So we mostly just had this really chill night of going to the next rift and sitting on discord and chatting for a few hours. We normally stop earlier than we did last night, which I think is evidence of the relaxing vibes we had going on. I was yawning super freaking hard by the time we wrapped up and pretty much logged from voice and went straight to bed. I needed a night like that.

Over in Path of Exile I knocked out four more achievements for the league challenges and upgraded my sad little totem pole a bit. If you are not to this point yet in the league… I highly suggest you rathole corrupted, mirrored, influenced, and fractured items because you are going to need them for the Equipped Elites challenge. The other really easy one is to fully equip a mercenary in unique items. For Elated Exaltation I found that normal Exalt, Tainted, Eldritch, Shaper, Elder, Redeemer, and Warlord exalts were the cheapest options. In truth if you are planning ahead and don’t actually need to use these for crafting purposes… you can use this to complete any holes you have in influenced gear for the mercenary equipment achievement. Scarabs were pretty straight forward and swapping to my tanky single target bossing merc, was in fact what I needed to go ahead and finish up Pinnacles Paired keeping them alive when I downed Cortex. It also does not hurt that my damage output is way higher than it was when I took down the rest of the pinnacles with a merc.

As far as other things… I am still alternating between mapping and mining and have yet to find the damned hideout in Primordial Blocks. Every time I have seen it up for sale on TFT they have wanted 10 Divines to buy a portal… and I just cannot bring myself to spend that much on a stupid hideout. As the league runs on I might get more desperate. If I ever do find it on my own… I will absolutely shout out to the global I hang out in and give away portals to anyone who might want one because I am not hyper capitalist. I really want to swap things up a bit and run another map, because like I have said before… I don’t actually like the layout or boss for Primordial Blocks, I just want the hideout. I do however want to try and find a different Striker with a better setup. I love that I am getting Fortification stacks, but I really would like to have him generating some useful aura in addition to being a endurance charge bot.

I am thinking more and more seriously about the whole streaming thing, and might try a quick foray into that over the weekend. I spent a bit of time creating some necessary screens for like going AFK and swapping games, so that is at least some semblance of forward momentum. I need to spend some time updating my Twitch channel, because all of the info is very outdated at this point. Like my gear section still shows that I had a 980… which is 3 graphic cards ago because I went from that to a 1080 ti to eventually the 3080 that I have currently. At some point I want to burn down my setup upstairs and get consoles back up and running so that they can be streamed. In truth the only console that I have set up currently is my Switch 2 downstairs. At some point I want to get the loft setup with consoles again, but I have no clue how I am going to figure out how to record that. That is a problem for another day. Mostly just wanted to say that I am still moving forward potentially on starting streaming again, just so that I feel less alone while I am doing single player nonsense.

As far as everything else in my life… I had my first counseling session yesterday and it went pretty well. I get four more of these and for the most part this will be occurring every Thursday for awhile. It helped to have a professional validate some of the things I was going through as being perfectly normal. Even the soft hallucinations are normal. She described them as sort of a phantom limb pain thing, that my brain is just getting adjusted to my wife not being there and that it was not a sign of anything more concerning. I feel better just having someone echo back feedback that I had already heard from friends. I took the day off today because I am going up to move her stuff out of her classroom, so that is going to be rough. However her teacher friends are mostly going to be the ones packing up the room for me, and I will just be coming up to truck things back. In theory I am going to come back to the house and haul some stuff out of the garage that needs to be taken care of. I have a few dead tvs that I am going to try and find recycling for just to free up the space.

I’ve legitimately contemplated getting a storage unit so that I can box up and move her stuff into it… until I am ready to deal with it. There are a bunch of things I want to do in the garage, but I have always needed swap space to do any of it. Effectively I have to get rid of the piles of stuff from when she moved out of her last school district before I can do much of anything to improve the situation out there. I use the garage as sort of an extended pantry for the various stuff I order from Sams Club, and I would like to have proper shelving to put stuff on. I also potentially want to get rid of the collection of old door mats that I have out there, because they are so worn down the likelihood that I will use them again is minimal. Decorating our door wreath and the rug… are something that I will probably keep doing because while it was her thing… I do enjoy the whimsy of it.

Anyways… I am doing okayish still. I figure the best indicator of my mental health is that I am still getting up and making the bed. When I stop doing that… it is time to worry.