Path of Exile Archives - Page 46 of 48

Sometimes You Gotta Dig

July 25, 2022 by Belghast

Hey Friends! I don’t have a ton to talk about this morning so I thought I would do a bit of a recap of my weekend. One of those games that I keep returning to no matter what is going on in my life is Minecraft. I’ve not felt the best over the last few weeks because of mystery-ailment-that-is-likely-not-covid. I can always retreat to Minecraft and my research into the NFTWorld fiasco sparked my desire to play the game. What do I usually do when I play Minecraft? Well, I burrow into the side of a mountain and dig one tunnel going up and one tunnel going down. This screenshot was from the beginning of my process of terraforming a mountain top. I’ve now since built a bit of a reasonable structure up top, and my incessant tunneling has served as material for building projects.

What consumed a truly inordinate amount of time is that in the process of digging down… I encountered an underground ocean. I mean I could, of course, have just blocked it off and continued along with my day but instead, I decided to use the particular properties of gates to hold back water… in order to give me access still to this resource if I happened to need it. Granted again I could have done this in a more simple manner with a door… but I set down this path so I trucked right along with this madness. The most quirky thing about this is that later on, I encountered another section of this cave network with the difference this one being mostly dry. My entire focus however became digging down to bedrock… which I accomplished yesterday and now have a ton of deep slate to build things with.

In other activities, I am still working on my Inquisitor in Path of Exile and have just started the final act. I am still running around with Wintertide Brand and have not transitioned my build over to Righteous Fire. I think I still need to finish cruel lab before I can do this thing, so I should probably set my mind to completing that before I finish Act Ten and take another resistance hit. I believe I am sitting at 70 just about to hit 71 so I have long since started getting lots and lots of map drops. My time with Path of Exile right now is more or less trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. What I mean by that is I am trying to figure out what I want my build to be for my first legit season open. I think a few of us are in this holding pattern of trying to click the gears in place because we know we are just about to do it all over again in mid-August.

Lastly, I am still spending time in Dragonflight alpha, and as such spending time poking around on an Evoker. I believe today is the cut-off for this phase of the alpha test and in theory, when I next play the game I will be able to access one of the expansion zones. I have a Deathknight ready to go and I will probably spend some time speccing out a Warrior and trying to build something I enjoy there as well. I am honestly looking forward to seeing the zones because I have heard good things about them. Evoker and Dracthyr are decidedly not my jam and I feel are right now negatively coloring my impression of the expansion so far. I’ve evolved to be able to play “finger wigglers” a bit more than I could in the past, but the Evoker is maybe a bit too on that spectrum for my tastes. I’ve never reconciled my ability to enjoy a Mage, but I dig the heck out of Demonology Warlock.

Fun with Brands

July 18, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends. I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile, or at least the part of the weekend I was functional. I ended up getting some generic crud that started on Wednesday and then knocked me out of commission for most of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. It was only on Sunday that I started to feel much better and even now I am not feeling amazing. We took a number of covid tests throughout this so we are pretty certain it is not that. My wife started getting sick on Friday, so whatever it appears to be contagious but the strange thing is… I was not really around anyone for the last two weeks.

I think since we last talked I have finished the main campaign of Path of Exile and my Explosive Arrow Champion is now level 73. I’ve begun dipping my toes into maps and I have to say… I feel super freaking squishy right now. I think the core problem I am having with Path of Exile is that the gear is nowhere near as straightforward as my beloved Diablo III. I know in D3 that in order to make X build work I need these ten items in these specific slots. The collection of specific items grants me the ability to get progress further with the build, and subsequent fine-tuning and acquiring better versions of said items… also then make the build more efficient. I understand none of these levers in Path of Exile. My gear is effectively a pile of stats that I do not fully understand the interactions with, and as such I do not know how to make myself feel less squishy.

In part, due to this sudden friction… and also in part because I have not felt well enough to engage with my friend Grace who is also at the maps phase… I have been spending some time trying other classes. I have a mess of a character that I built without a guide that mostly works but it is also deeply inefficient, and then I have the Inquisitor that I am building towards Righteous Fire. One thing of note… for whatever reason at the time of writing this POE Vault seems to be down so that link may or may not work. Wintertide Brand is ridiculously fun and does some really dumb things. Essentially I cast this spell and it spreads throughout the map of NPCs and kills them with a frost disease sort of thing. The only problem here is that wintertide brand is not the final form of this build, so we will see if I also like running through things while self-immolating.

I think the ultimate problem I have with Path of Exile is also one of its strengths. You have these mechanics stacked on top of other mechanics, and if you have been around you maybe learned them all individually. However today a new player trying to unpack everything is not only having to understand core concepts but also learn the remainder of thirty-seven, soon to be thirty-eight league mechanics. This means that the game has grown significantly and is constantly changing, but also has just layer after layer of madness stacked loosely on top of the layers below it. The seasoned players understand how to solve the problems that I am running into with survival, but it is much harder to grok than “equip Aquila Cuirass”. That is not to say that eventually, Path of Exile won’t feel the same to me… just that I have a large lift to get there. There are times when I feel like I need a guide to reading the guide I am trying to follow.

Ultimately I am wanting to spend the remainder of 3.18 trying to figure out what exactly I want to do for 3.19. I like Explosive Arrow just fine, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as good as the original Splitting Steel build that I ran until I could switch over to Explosive Arrow. Similarly, right now I am loving the way running around with Wintertide Brand feels, but I am concerned that I won’t enjoy the final Righteous Fire form. I know there are pure Splitting Steel builds that exist, and pure Brand builds that exist, so I might also create some characters along those play styles at some point. Essentially my time spent in Path of Exile is more or less preparing for August when the new league starts. Ultimately we won’t know what 3.19 looks like until the live stream on August 4th, and at that point, I will probably consume a flurry of information and try and pick a path to go down then.

Gracie and the New Normal

July 13, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! It has been a few weeks and I thought I would give a proper blog update on Gracie and how she is settling in. For most of this week, she has been on “free roam” mode with the complete reign of the house. I am slightly sleep deprived because we have yet to learn when sleep time is supposed to happen, and occasionally have fits of activity overnight that wake us up. That said she tends to sleep snuggled between the covers between us, which is perfectly fine with me. In the grand scheme of things, it has been a pretty smooth transition and Mollie/Josie are doing a fair job of adjusting. Yesterday is really when things started to feel like normal again with far less cautious stalking around the house for fear of attracting the attention of the tiny terror.

Gracie herself is also way less likely to spend every moment of every day with a human being. So the negative means that I am not getting this sort of attention right now. It was fun while it lasted, but also extremely detrimental to actually getting anything done. Josie and Gracie appear to be developing a friendship, or at least there is more playing with each other that involves less hissing and puffed tails. Mollie has oddly been more stoic about this, which I thought was weird given that she is naturally the more skittish cat. However, then I realized that she has been through this before and realizes that “mommy and daddy” will still love her even though there is a new addition. Josie was the last new addition a few years ago, and as such, she is not sure what to think about any of this.

We are starting to settle into what feels like the new normal. Josie is back to sleeping on my legs overnight while Gracie sleeps up at the head of the bed between us. Mollie is back to spending almost all of every day with me in my office and requesting periodic pet breaks. Gracie alternates between sleeping downstairs in the hammock and screaming at the top of her lungs for attention because she doesn’t see any human beings around her. She has an exceptional set of lungs for someone so small, and she also seems to be completely fearless which makes any time we have to open the front or back door anxiety-ridden. All of this said though, I think we picked an exceptionally sweet kitten and are now batting two for two from rescuing animals from the local animal welfare. We’ve always gotten animals through third-party rescue organizations in the past, but I have to say our animal welfare seems to do a great job with their animals and socializing them.

Finally, in some gaming news, I have officially entered Act 10 but did not manage to get through it last night before sleep claimed me. I am going to need to spend some effort trying to sort out gearing because I am most definitely feeling much squishier all of a sudden. Additionally I checked my guide and I am no longer using the correct combination of skill gems. Basically, I am once again under some socket pressure and now need I believe an RRGGBB item to socket my preferred skill chain into. Mostly I just am trying to get up to maps because my friend Grace has managed to rocket past me… and finished the main story over lunch yesterday. I think we are ultimately trying to determine if the league start experience in Path of Exile can fully replace our traditional Diablo 3 fun time.

In another quick footnote… I am grinding away on Blaugust stuff and am hoping to make a big announcement soon.

Many Games and Little Focus

July 8, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I find myself in a weird position right now where I am picking at the bones of several games but not terribly engaged with most of them. There was a time when I used to create these “regularly playing” posts, and in theory that is what today’s post is going to largely be. However, I just don’t really feel like reviving that format. If I was going to say I had a primary game at the moment it would be Path of Exile. I am very much in a bit of a honeymoon phase with that game… or as “honeymoon” as you can be with a game that is actively trying to make interactions with its systems difficult. I am not in my 60s on the Explosive Arrow Champion build and I have a few baby alts that are doing different things that I am poking around with as well. We have several folks from the AggroChat podcast playing right now and as a result, we have a “Greysky Armada” guild up and running. Not that I actually understand half of what there is to do with a guild… but we have a Guild Hideout and at least some Guild Stash storage.

Since Outriders Worldslayer just released, I am spending some time playing around in that game. I enjoy the mechanical systems but am a bit frustrated with how limited the expansion actually was. Essentially at its core, it adds one new activity to the game… the Trial of Tarya Gratar. If for whatever reason you don’t want to engage with the time commitment of that event, then you are stuck doing the same familiar grinds that have been in place since the release of the game. However, with the game being way more generous about dropping legendaries, I am actually trying to build a proper gear set focused around the Seismic Commander set. At the moment I am wearing mostly the “purple legendaries” gear until I can get a decent roll on all slots of the actual gear set.

I am still logging in pretty regularly to Guild Wars 2, but I am not really doing much of anything. At a minimum, I farm resources in the three guild halls that I can farm each day, and gather what home instance nodes I have. Most days I try and figure out a quick path to getting 3 dailies done and get my 2 gold. However lately I have not even been doing that. Essentially I need to pick a goal and then focus on that because while I have a wealth of things that I could be doing… I am pretty directionless in actually doing any of them. I could focus on my Skyscale or knocking out the karka hunting achievement which would give me some way of disposing of excess ascended materials. The problem is that I fail miserably at actually sitting down and focusing on any of them.

I am in a similar “maintenance mode” with New World, where I am logging in most days and harvesting enough materials to get 3 of the Hidden Stashes which turn into diamond gypsum, and one of the proficiency caches that gives me emerald gypsum. I then take these out to Shattered Mountain where my inn is bound, craft some gear for expertise boosts and then log out for the day. Doing this has allowed me to take all of my armor slots, sword, shield, and warhammer to 600 expertise. Right now I am working on pushing up greataxe and hatchet. At some point when the major patch drops that take away dungeon keys I will probably start running some of these again through the new group finder tool. The devs made a joke about calling them tuning orbs and expeditions… but I am sorry… that is obtuse and weird. They are dungeons and they are keys and “ya done fucked up” by not naming them the industry standards.

I am even in a worse state with Final Fantasy XIV right now. Basically, I am logging in every 4 days… either to go house shopping among the ever-dwindling number of housing plots… or to collect my money from the lottery system because I lost yet again. None of these interactions make me happy. I am very sad about the state of housing in Final Fantasy XIV. The lottery while it helped in some ways by keeping me from having to set up an auto clicker in order to succeed… but I also feel pretty hopeless still about my prospects of acquiring a house. Now that there are additional catch-up mechanics, I really should dive back into the systems and catch a character up. However, there is a mental barrier between me and this game at the moment. If I win a house I will once again have the desire to spend time in this world, but so long as I am homeless I am lacking that traction.

My return to Diablo III was a whirlwind romance. While it was not my fastest season in the world, now that I have finished up with those achievements and gotten the rewards… I have very little desire to keep playing. I had started a Hardcore Seasonal character, simply because I had never actually played in that game mode. I have to admit what knocked the wind out of my sails was when I realized it worked vastly different than I was expecting. I assumed that when I took a death, the hardcore seasonal would turn into a softcore seasonal. I mean this is how it works in Path of Exile and my brief jaunt into Hardcore Minecraft… but my assumptions were wrong. Instead, your character is just gone, and I cannot stomach the idea of wasting time on a character that poofs. This combined with the fact that I just got into Path of Exile has more or less stopped this project dead in its tracks.

Lastly, we have Diablo Immortal. This one is mostly just a footnote because I have uninstalled this game from all of my devices and not looked back after my “fruitless grinding” post. There were a lot of things I liked about this game and the way some of the systems interacted. I specifically loved the way that legendary items worked, and how you could extract the “legendaryness” and apply it to other items. It appears that Diablo 4 is going to do something similar to this, so it makes me very excited for what that game might end up feeling like in the end. However, the monetization of Immortal is going to give me a great pause for what the future of Blizzard games looks like. I have to admit though I had some fun while it lasted, and if they at some point in the future come to their damned senses and make this a more reasonable option… I might return. Considering most of the reputable sources have stopped covering the game aside from the occasional dunk on it… I will be interested to see what the revenue stream looks like on this going forward. I am also curious to see what lasting impact this will have on the Diablo player base… since this essentially nuked the goodwill from orbit.