Settlers of Kalguur (3.25)

Necro Settlers Event Fun

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Hey Folks! I gotta admit I am still reeling from last week but luckily I am off today… so it means I get an extra day to decompress. Since the world still feels like shit, I needed to retreat into some very familiar comfort gaming, and the Necro Settlers Event league in Path of Exile has fit the bill. This is a bit weird for an event league because there is no fixed end time, so it has effectively turned into a reboot of the Settlers League which I assume will end when that league ends. The league started on the 7th and at this point I am into mapping with a character that can probably get me all the way through t16s. I went RF Chieftain again because it is comfy and familiar and I know how to get it up and running without much deep thought. I am fully expecting to play a fairly scuffed character because event league economies can be a bit weird and limited.

Event leagues always have some gimmick associated with them, and this time around it is all of the normal Settlers of Kalguur mechanics with the addition of the Lantern of Arimor from the Necropolis league. They removed all of the negative modifiers from the pool and additionally since Allflames are no longer dropping… they are just being applied to your maps automatically. What has been interesting is that all maps of a specific tier for a specific timeframe will share the same pool of lantern modifiers. This means that joining a shared global chat is a good idea as folks tend to share when a certain zone is really hot. This creates massive fluctuations in the price of specific maps when they are running a desirable combo, and also creates a situation where Horizon Orbs are more useful than they have ever been in Path of Exile history.

All of this made getting through the campaign rather interesting. I was going much slower than normal, but also having random league mobs showing up in your maps made it a bit more challenging. An example of something that I saw is during Darresso’s Arena in Act 4 is that nothing but Suphite Golems was spawning other than the Dogs that come out of the various gates. The entire place from start to finish was just yellow golems throwing chunks of sulphite at me, which would be great if I were actually messing with Delve right now, but also kind of wild when you get shotgunned by multiple packs at the same time. I think it was Mudflats where I first encountered the Unique Gemling mobs that drop random gems, and there were a few times early on that I just ran from Meatsacks because they took too long to chew through.

The other really weird thing about this league has been its economy. There are certain lantern combinations that print massive amounts of chaos. I’m hearing that some folks with appropriate juicing are seeing upwards of 200 chaos in a single map. There are no real equivalent mods that drop Divine Orbs, which means that the currency conversion between the two is outrageous. For those who do not know normally you trade in the range of 200 Chaos to a Single Divine Orb, but over the weekend at one point it was trading 500 to 1. This has all sorts of trickle-down effects on the economy as a whole meaning that things that would normally be a 5 Chaos item are selling for 60 Chaos or higher. There are a lot of folks who have not caught onto this yet, because there are items priced at 1 Divine that are in no way worth effectively 400-500 Chaos.

Luckily though I have found plenty of raw chaos and items that I can sell easily for chaos, and it has allowed me to outfit myself in the basics of a RF Chieftain build. I’ve not gone life-on-block based yet, so am still rocking the Rise of the Phoenix shield to cap out my Fire Resistances. I’ve not done the last lab so right now I am sitting at 90% Fire Res and 80% Lightning and Cold Res. I am currently using a four-link Cloak of Flame but am outfitting my atlas to do the Einhar/Ritual strategy in hopes of dropping either an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan so that I can six-link it. I spent 70 Chaos on the chest specifically because I was looking for one that would be good enough to bother six-linking eventually. Luckily the Cloak is relatively easy to get RF colors on of BBBRRG. You can see the rest of my scuffed gear in this POB link.

Since I am off today, I plan on slowly chipping away at my Atlas and doing everything I can to unlock more points. I got a wildly lucky drop earlier where I opened a Unique map lockbox and got two that I needed. Sadly the third was the damned pvp map which is always a waste of time. I wish you could use Horizon Orbs on Hall of the Grandmasters in an attempt to get other unique maps. I will however happily take a Twilight Temple map since that is often one of the ones that goes for quite a bit later in the league. Path of Exile and honestly any ARPG is comfort gaming for me, and I needed this more than I realized. I was having plenty of fun with Veilguard but was essentially in the “chores” section of the game where I needed to do a bajillion sidequests so that I could comfortably move the main story forward. Essentially I was in the “hinterlands” again, and needed a bit of a break.

Are you playing Necro Settlers Event league? What are your thoughts so far? Would you want to see the Lantern of Arimor go standard? Drop me a note below.

A Cup of Hatred

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern this week. I have a very long post kicking around in my skull but have not quite committed to writing it yet, or honestly even know how to approach it. However tonight the Vessel of Hatred expansion launches for Diablo IV and I am planning on giving that a go. I did not last terribly long in Season 5, but I am interested to see how things sort out for all of the changes that they are making to the game to make it a bit more Diablo III-ish. Remember I was a D3 seasonal player for over a decade so that is not necessarily a bad thing for me. I am trying to decide if I am going to try out the new Spiritborn class or do my normal Barbarian run. If I go Spiritborn I will probably go the nonsensical-sounding centipede poison build, because might as well play it before it gets nerfed.

In other weekend news, my Minecraft nether tunneling project has finally paid off. Essentially I had been branching out of my main portal in every direction looking for the Warpwood biome, so that I could collect some resources from it and be able to grow the blue-green trees in my base. I really need to plant down some sign posts because my tunnel network is getting a little hard to navigate by memory. The thing I forgot about the Warpwood Biome though, is that Endermen spawn there so I might have to create some structures to be able to farm them for Ender Pearls. I doubt I have a dedicated post to the nonsense I have been up to, because quite honestly… digging tunnels is a big boring, but I find it relaxing.

I also spent a little bit of time this weekend playing around with Tiny Glade. This game essentially is a diorama-building tool that lets you procedurally generate really cool-looking castles and cottages and then terraform the land surrounding it. I wish there was a bit more “game” here like the ability to have tiny NPCs inhabit your world akin to Sim Tower. I used to love that game and then watching the tiny pixel people going about their day. The game is gorgeous though and if you get the hankering to build some cottage-core palaces then this is probably the game you have been looking for. Players have already recreated Rivendell and other massive structures from fiction. One of the neat things about the game is that there is a daily theme to help you get started in your creations.

I’ve also played a bit more Soulframe, but honestly… one of my core complaints about the game thus far appears to be a feature. One of the plots of the game is that this group that you are fighting back against has destroyed knowledge in the world, and as a result, all of your quest objectives show up as this foreign language that you cannot read. Then as you recover knowledge, you begin to be able to translate things a letter or two at a time. This is a cool idea from a storytelling aspect, but it largely just leads to a frustrating in-game experience as you have no clue what you are supposed to be doing or where you should be going. Even more frustrating is that it appears that objectives can be completed multiple times, so your sparrow friend who is supposed to show you the way to the next thing you should care about sometimes sends you back to things you have already completed before. It sure is pretty and combat feels fairly fun, but right now… I am struggling to attach to it due to the obtuse nature of the narrative. Souls players who love obtuse bullshit will probably be in their element here.

Instead of doing new things though, this weekend I fell back on the old and familiar and spent a lot of time playing Path of Exile. It is shocking how good the Currency Exchange system is and how well it works this late in the league. Normally speaking trade would be completely dead and it would be a chore to do any sort of large-volume currency swaps. However, the asynchronous nature of the Currency Exchange means that players are still actively putting things up for sale and creating open buy orders for things that they need. I sold so many Valdo’s Puzzle Boxes for 190 Chaos each, and they did not sit on the exchange for very long before getting snapped up each time.

I’ve been slowly chipping away at objectives and in theory, if I can get to 31 total challenges for the league I will be able to get the same sized totem as I had last league. I have a few candidates to get there, namely the two related to Scarabs that I am getting closer to finishing. I need to look at Sublime Starlight and see what the cheapest path to completing that is as well, given I have a pretty good backlog of the runes from the league mechanic. Arduous Atlas is easy enough, just requires a lot of brute force mapping and is only a matter of time not necessarily effort. I am slowly getting closer and closer to level 100 so the gear grinding goals or whatever that achievement is called might be within reach as well. I’m not super far from several o the ones un Unbelievable Undertakings, but those all for the most part will require me to spec into specific league mechanics to get through them.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend exploring The Legend of Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and I am already a proud member of team Beds for life. I honestly have mixed feelings about the game. It is extremely well built and I think the idea of roaming around as Zelda, but so far combat feels fiddly. Legend of Zelda for me was always a combat experience first and foremost and a puzzle-solving experience as a fun secondary activity that blended along with the combat. I am not sure if Zelda gets better tools but right now killing anything feels a bit annoying so I find myself just avoiding combat whenever possible. Maybe that is the overarching theme that they were going for. I want to get deeper into the game but right now I am only a few hours in and not super far past the initial tutorial.

I have to admit I also don’t feel amazing giving Nintendo money right now. I had already bought Echoes of Wisdom, but their crusade against Switch emulation is a major bummer for me. Playing Switch games on PC has been my primary source of enjoying these games. I would buy the game on Switch and then play it on my PC via emulator because it was simply a more comfortable option than dealing with the short battery life and heft of the Switch console in handheld mode. Additionally playing via emulators allowed me to “patch” things out of games that annoyed me… for example, I ran mods to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom that removed durability from the game entirely. My guess is whatever the Switch 2 ends up being will be backward compatible and the current crop of emulators will likely successfully run all of the games on day one.

All that Nintendo will have done with their action is push the scene underground. They went from having three emulators that were open-source projects that they could easily keep tabs on… to having to deal with what will be countless unofficial forks that are being maintained by piracy distro groups. You can already buy the Miig Switch and Miig Dumper through AliExpress and the price of them keeps dropping. Basically, Nintendo has destroyed the methodology that allowed folks to buy legitimate copies and play them on legitimate Open Source emulators and will now force those folks to either play the inferior version on official hardware… or rely exclusively on distro groups and torrent sites to get the games.

A Jumbled Mess

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Good Morning Folks. I hope that I am coming out of the worst parts of Covid hell. Today is the first day I am going to attempt to put in a full day’s work. What is so fucked about this illness is how wildly it impacts different people. Essentially my wife brought this home to me from her workplace and for her it just seemed like a generic cold with touches of allergies. For me… it started out that way but then essentially knocked me on my ass. I’ve spent so much time coughing that my entire torso feels like it is bruised. Each day has gotten a little better, but it was yesterday and today that I actually started to really begin to feel better. My focus has been scattered as hell, even seeing me attempt to revitalize the Engineer that I worked on unlocking Mechanist with but did nothing afterward.

I honestly had a pretty freaking great day in Guild Wars 2 and I will probably talk more about some revelations that I made yesterday in a longer form post tomorrow. However, I essentially figured out how to make the whole meta-train click. Yesterday I managed to catch Dragon Stand, Chalk Gerent, Auric Basic, Aetherblade Assault, Kaineng City Blackout, and then Echovald Gang War back to back. I could have ridden the train for as long as I would have liked, arriving in the zone just as the next event was ramping up, but I needed a break after that much excitement. That is the big thing I am noticing right now is I can only handle so much focused activity before I get drained. Essentially I will share these dark secrets tomorrow, but if this works as well as I think it does it will absolutely breathe new life into the game for me.

I am continuing to make slow progress in World of Warcraft as I push through The War Within on my Pandaria Remix Dark Iron Dwarf. If nothing else it has given me quite possibly my new favorite transmog. I’ve started the second zone which is considerably cooler than the first one was. I dig the Dwarven-adjacent storyline of the Earthen and this is legitimately quite possibly the best World of Warcraft has been in years. The problem is… it is still World of Warcraft. It lives in this sort of messy middle-ground between Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2 for me. The combat is nowhere near as tightly structured as FFXIV and at the same time does not feel as fluid and fast-paced as Guild Wars 2… so it just sort of feels loose and messy all the time. It does not help that they removed Titanic Throw which was easily my favorite ability from Dragonflight. I miss having something as good as the Paladin shield throw, and I absolutely feel like I need it when moving around the tightly packed corridors to group everything up.

Since I cannot seem to be pinned down to focusing on any one thing… I of course went off and created a new Ruthless character in Path of Exile. A lot of the streamers have been exploring Ruthless mode, which of course made me interested again given that the Settlers town gives you easier access to gear than normal in this mode. I rolled a Duelist with the purpose of going Bleed Gladiator and am mostly just running around with splitting steel and the only two supports that I have found to this point which is Added Cold Damage and Chance to Poison. Not a combination I would ever use together… but when you are limited in your options you use whatever you can get. Add to this some bleed chance that I am getting from the passive tree… I can mostly zip around pretty well in Act III.

What is most interesting about this game mode is the way that it makes re-evaluate items that you might have considered trash drops previously. It isn’t like I have never used a Tear of Purity before, especially if it drops while I am leveling, but I also would not have considered it godly. However, in Ruthless, a game mode where you are unlikely to see access to Purity of Elements or any other auras save for Vitality/Clarity/Precision… this is a game changer. I got this from my very first shipment of goods and it has made all the difference in the world for me given that I now have a decent amount of elemental resistances while leveling and the ability to just entirely avoid all elemental ailments. On top of that, it is a needed source of life and intelligence. So I get why folks enjoy this mode because it makes you really scrutinize the drops to see if you can squeeze any benefit out of them. If normal Path of Exile is well constructed Magic The Gathering… Ruthless is trying to play with the old-school starter deck and nothing else.

I also spent a bit of time this weekend working on my home in Final Fantasy XIV. I raided the private room from our Free Company house and started migrating some of my miniatures over on the shelves behind the counter and vendors. I also brought over my Ahriman furniture set that I picked up from my retainers years ago. I am kind of going for a storefront/showroom vibe for the upstairs and then will build out the downstairs to be more of a bedroom/readyroom thing. If nothing else the home looks a little less barren. If you are on Cactuar, feel free to pop by Ward 28 Plot 3 and sign my guestbook. I will continue to tinker with things because I figure this is going to be a long project, not something I finish in a weekend.

Lastly, while I am squirreling out of control… I am starting to look forward to the Cycle restart in Last Epoch on the 19th. I did not really play that heavily when this cycle started, and will probably come back and start something fresh again. Likely going to spin off the type of character that I was playing in this cycle and see if I can build it a bit better. I really like Warpath and the Spin to Win gameplay style, and more specifically I liked the dual wield torch/smite sword thing. Largely I like this build because it works perfectly fine without the right gear and just gets better as you add the key pieces to it. However, I could throw a last-minute monkey wrench in the system and play a Necromancer again because it has been a while since I have done that. Whatever the case I am looking forward to having the mental bandwidth to give this game some devoted time again.

Basically, I am still spinning out of control right now, but I am hoping as I continue to mend I will be able to focus on individual things a bit better in the coming weeks.

First Apothecary

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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.

What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.

I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.

I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.

I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.

I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.