Settlers of Kalguur (3.25)

Settlers League is Great

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Good Morning Folks! I am a bit late getting a post started today because work things got in the way early early this morning. Friday was the launch of the Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile and I have been having a blast. I was a bit slower going through the campaign than I normally would be, largely because I spent a lot of time doing the league mechanic once it unlocked upon arriving in Lioneye’s Watch in Act 1. Normally I don’t invest heavily in the league mechanic until I have made my way into mapping, but I feel like doing it while campaigning was the correct choice because a lot of the upgrades end up being time-gated. As a result, it took me roughly 20 hours to finish the campaign which was Friday evening, off and on throughout Saturday, and then finishing my 3rd lab and killing Kitava early Sunday morning.

As of this morning, I am 44 maps into progressing my atlas and very smoothly running through white and yellow maps without significant upgrades. I’ve actually kept track of my expenditures this time around so that I would be able to recap in a blog post. Currently, I’ve spent 51 Chaos on everything I am wearing, including an -15 Immortal Flesh (1c), Cloak of Flames (5c), Rise of the Phoenix (2c), a Fire/Chaos/Dex Helm (3c), Chaos/Fire/Life Ring (20c), and Chaos/Fire/Life/Dex Gloves (20c). I had a bit of a windfall pretty early on where I sold an influenced base for 80c, and an Enlighten support for 260c. On top of that, I have picked up miscellaneous Chaos Orbs and 2 raw Divine Orbs. I’m not in a real rush to buy items but it feels good to know I have some spending money when I ultimately want to replace most of my rare gear. You can get a ton of life on items right now, and I hope to end up replacing pretty much everything with at least 100 life rolls on various slots.

What has kept me from needing to buy a ton more gear is the fact that the league mechanic produces a ton of really good items. While it isn’t generating a ton of raw currency it is producing a lot of items that have relatively high tier rolls, including lots of really good resistances on them. I was kind of screwing up the shipping mechanic a bit, but Sunday a bunch of videos came out explaining how it works or at least how to improve your results and I hope to see a big payoff at some point either today or tomorrow. Essentially each port city has a hidden faction system, and you unlock higher tiers of faction by fulfilling their requested goods. When you fill all of the items on an order it unlocks a new higher tier of demands and again… just by shipping only those items you are basically guaranteed to get more return than you are sending.

I’ve gotten some truly wild items out of this. For example, never did I expect to have it in the cards to be using a one-handed axe right now instead of a scepter but…. that is where we are in the league. I got this axe back from a shipment that had +18% Dot Multi, and +24% Fire Dot Multi on it… which was infinitely better than the scepter I had been using. I threw the new Ignite enchant on it and crafted the Fire Damage/Ignite Combo Betrayal mod on it. This is pretty much better than anything I could get for less than six or so Divines at the moment. Sure the physical attack damage doesn’t really do anything for me… but also I might end up recycling this item into some sort of a fire-based melee build later once I can afford to craft or buy a “forever” scepter.

Legitimately I am having so much fun with the shipping mechanic, and a lot of the items it brings back… might be useful for throwing into the recombinator later. Right now I am using my cast-offs to feed into the disenchanter as arcane dust seems to be a premium commodity that a lot of the upgrades require. At some point, I need to spend some time hiring and firing better people, because I have a bunch of workers that are less than optimal. You can get these combo workers that have lots of different skills… but you end up paying a premium for each additional skill level that they have. I would be better off replacing those with single-stat workers to hopefully bring down my total gold sink for the town a bit.

I’ve not made it super far into Delve, largely because… you can’t gather resources down there. You get a heck of a lot of gold in a short period of time which is good, but I keep running dry on the various ores that are needed to feed shipping. As a result… I might be spending a lot more time mapping this league instead of plumbing the depths for cities. I’ve found my very first city, but it is at around 80 depth which means that the payoff is not amazing. I am still working on spending Azerite to unlock things because if nothing else Delve is amazing for producing sheer quantities of bubblegum currency… something that I find myself tragically lacking. For example, I have zero of my flasks automated at this point… because I don’t have the Glassblower’s Baubles to quality them… nor do I have the Instilling Orbs in order to craft on the auto-use enchant. Both of these are problems that will likely be solved by delving more.

What makes this league so great is honestly the virtuous cycle that takes place between mapping/delving and then returning back to town whenever a shipment comes in. Right now I have two ships going one that is working the 45-minute routes nearest to Wraeclast and one that is working the 2-hour routes that are furthest away. This gives me two distinct reward horizons that look forward to, and nothing feels quite as good as seeing the pop-up in the corner of your screen indicating that it is time to go back and see what the journey brought. It puts me in this pattern of trying to see how much I can get done before the ship comes back and the two cycles feed each other. Mapping and Delving generate gold and resources that I can then invest in my town and keep moving forward. I legitimately hope this system goes standard because it is pretty freaking great.

Honestly, I am super glad that I went ahead and stuck with old and reliable Righteous Fire because it has given me more mental bandwidth to explore the league mechanics without also having to figure out my damned build. Are you playing Settlers of Kalguur league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Many Smol Possums

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This morning I had a delightful experience. For a few months, we have been getting up at 5:30 and going for a walk before things heat up. Part of this experience is feeding the outdoor feral cats that visit our home. Generally speaking, we have Greybie, Skippy, Big Boy, and Blackie waiting on us out front of the house. This morning there was another little face peeking around the corner of the house and in the dark I thought at first it was a cat. Once I got a good look it was a skinny little possum, that troddled off once I had “perceived” it. After my walk, I go out into the backyard and feed Tripod the three-legged stray calico that lives there, and as I was walking back into the house I noticed this momma possum hanging out in front of me. She was pretty chill about it and largely did not move until I was just about to go back into the house… at which point she wandered off towards the cat food I had set out.

Surely the joeys are about to be weaned because they were pretty big and VERY active. I felt for the momma because one of them kept slipping down and covering her face… which would lead her to push them back up onto her back. We’ve had some pretty extreme reactions from our family as we have shown them pictures. I told my dad we had a new weird-looking cat, and he appreciated it because they live in the country and have all manner of visitors like this. Another family member has been squicked out by the possums and thought they looked scary. Me… I just think they are adorable and wish they would be my friend. I don’t dare attempt to pet one because they have very hurty-looking teeth. I kinda hope that we have a bunch of baby possums underfoot in the backyard honestly. I am wondering though if they are living under our deck.

Last night we continued our shenanigans and realized we had missed unlocking one dungeon… Lost City of Amdapor Hard. We ran through it, Sohm Al Hard, Hullbreaker Hard, and Great Gubal Hard. All in all they pretty much all went smoothly. I am still seeing the recurring thing about Reapers having ants in their pants and being unable to stand still. I did screw up and start one dungeon without tank stance on, but recovered pretty quickly. Things ended up going onto Ace… who was heavily shielded giving me plenty of time to pick it back up. I am consistently annoyed that Tank stance gets turned off constantly… and while I am usually good about hitting it first thing. Ace and I had gotten to talking about something over Discord and I completely forgot about it.

We got a bit of a late start last night so did not end up doing anymore Alexander, but we did duo Ravana and Bismark Extreme. Ravana was pretty easy and we one-shot it without much problem… giving us the confidence to try harder things. Bismark however took a couple of attempts for us to get a pattern going. The first failure was trying to kill both of the Snake adds at the same time…. then the second go I turned off tank stance and Ace heal/dpsd one down while I dpsd down the other… only to have Ace get knocked off the platform. On the third attempt, we executed everything pretty perfectly and got our kill. We attempted Thordan Extreme and just could not make it through the very final phase. There was some mechanic we were failing to do correctly…. which would knock us both out in a single hit so we are going to need to do some research on how to solo that fight. Either that or we just wait until we have more levels on us and attempt it again.

Probably the coolest part of last night is that we killed two Extremes and got two Lanners to drop. We both rolled on and I won the one from Ravana, and then passed on the one from Bismarck so we each got one. Honestly, the distribution is pretty perfect because my gear is way more red in theme, and theirs is way more white on average just because healer gear is usually white. We’ve made a pact that once my Path of Exile shenanigans wind down a bit we will probably start working on farming all of the lanners… doggos… etc on our Cactuar mains. I am pretty sure Ashgar and Thalen might want to get in on that nonsense as well. I had to turn back on the mount music so I could cruise around listening to the Ravana music. I am glad they chose the Phase 2 music instead of the Phase 1 music… but either is pretty great. Side note we also both got a pony from our Extreme ARR shenanigans.

In other news, I patched up World of Warcraft and logged in enough to make sure my friend Finni had gotten an invite to House Stalwart. I am not actively playing the game and it will probably be a while before I check out War Within, but I did run through the quests to unlock the Warband fully on my OG Main Belghast. Right now the Warband is showing my Dark Iron Warrior, Tauren Paladin, and Vulpera Hunter from Pandaria Remix. It seems as though the Warband bank is bricked at the moment… but this is apparently a known issue. At some point I will get in and play around some more with it. Probably when my Dark Iron Dwarf transfers over from Pandaria to Retail. That is probably going to be who I play War Within on because I had a lot of fun being a Dark Iron.

Finally, today is the league start for Path of Exile Settlers League and I have decided that I am once again going to level a Righteous Fire Chieftain. There is a meme over on Reddit that indirectly calls RF players Cowards and I am fine with that. Largely I enjoyed the leagues when I started RF and regretted starting something else on the leagues where I have not… ultimately rerolling at some point. It is my happy place and I have reached a point of acceptance around that. I like playing other builds and I will absolutely roll something else along the way to play as well. I just like having my good stable base of a character to get through the atlas and into the endgame before I start experimenting with other things. I know at some point I am going to make a Gladiator Bleed character of some sort… and maybe something focused around Retaliation skills as well. I also want to try building something around the new Warden ascendancy… but those are all side projects that I will do after building a stable base of currency on the Chieftain.

If you play any of the games that I play regularly feel free to join me in the Super Dungeon Friends discord. It is a little community that I run that is admittedly not super active, but we have a league chat channel for example where we talk a lot about Path of Exile while the league is going on. I keep getting the notion that I am going to start streaming again at some point, and if I ever do I will be hanging out in this Discord while live. All are welcome pending they agree to the rules upon entry. It pretty much follows the guidelines that I have for this blog as can be seen in my Core Beliefs page, so if you align to those thoughts you would probably enjoy yourself just fine.

Settlers League Looks Amazing

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Hey Folks! On Thursday we had the reveal stream for Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur aka 3.25 and it was nonsense. The patch notes are over 30,000 words long and involve some big shakeups to existing metas. The biggest thing is that melee may now be back on the menu because all melee-focused abilities essentially got their damage at least doubled. Detonate Dead which was a massive meta ability last league, is essentially dead now… Raider was deleted as an ascendancy and turned into Warden, and my favorite bow ascendancy Champion is far less powerful. Melee Totems were deleted from the game, Banners are essentially dead as they are used for only specific situations, and Warcries are universally worse for anyone who is not a melee character. Physical Damage Taken As conversion is essentially dead… because everything but a few sources lost that affix including the ubiquitous Taste of Hate.

So if there are so many negative impacts… why then am I excited about this patch? Essentially the game is getting what it feels like a completely new core system. We are building Kingsmarch a city that will play a heavy role in Path of Exile 2 and with it comes this entirely city-building mechanic. We will be able to recruit NPCs to help us along and build up Kingsmarch to add new functionality. There will be this whole material gathering and trading system that will allow us to send off NPCs while we are doing other things… and then reap the rewards of their work. I love this aspect of the Retainers from FFXIV, where I can send them off to gather needed things for me and check in every so often to a significant payday. In many ways, it reminds me of what the endgame systems of Wolcen were trying to be, where you are building this entire City for your account to benefit from.

By far the best part of all of this is the fact that we are now going to get a true Auction House system in Path of Exile. Right now it has limited scope and can only be used for “non-itemized” items aka items that stack and do not have individual rolls. However, this fixes so many problems in the game, and anyone who has ever tried to trade for bulk resources can attest to just how painful it is to gather up 20 Catalysts needed to quality up an item. In fact it was hinted during the Q&A session that this system exists because of the amount of frustration Mark Robert had when trying to trade for currency late game. He said he messaged over 100 people with no responses and then decided there had to be a better way. This is going to be amazing because honestly, I am going to be posting things while leveling that I don’t think I really need, knowing that at some point in the future, I will be able to buy them back when I actually do need them. I think the fluidity of trading will probably bring prices down considerably. There was also some discussion of trying to expand this if it is successful.

Settlers introduces a new currency called Gold, and really I think this is a dry run for figuring out how this is going to work in Path of Exile 2. Gold will drop from mobs and we will also be able to earn it through trading resources around the globe. What is interesting about this is that Gold will be an untradeable resource meaning that it essentially rewards playing the game rather than being an eternal auction house flipper. Mapping will be an excellent source, and I am hoping it drops down in Delve as well. I get that they nerfed the shit out of The Adorned so one of the major Delve cash items will weaken significantly… but I liked playing the Fossil and Resonator game long before that existed. With the fluidity of the currency market, I should have a much easier time selling my Delve wares than ever before.

Sending off harvested resources to other ports in shipments seems to be the high-risk and high-reward side of this gameplay. There were moments in the feature reveal trailer where they showed off bringing back three loot pages full of resources from a single shipment mission. I’ve always liked 4X games and specifically the city management aspect of them. Making cities pump out resources in Civilization is a heck of a lot of fun, and so far everything I am seeing makes me think this entire side game will be a blast in Path of Exile. I’ve never been someone who can chain blast maps without a break… and going to Kingsmarch to fiddle with shipments and such seems like a perfect pause button when I need one of those breaks. I am really hoping that we have our own private copy of Kingsmarch because I don’t really want another Heist problem where it is MTX hell whenever I want to engage with that content.

Another thing I am super interested in is the ability to have map runner NPCs churn through your bulk maps. Even contributing maps regularly to the guild bank… by mid-league, you end up with a glut of maps that you do not want to run. Delve is amazing for generating maps early in the league but given that it does not take your voidstones into account when maps drop… you end up with a bunch of sub-t16 maps that you would never actually run other than on secondary characters. This system will now be a sink for those otherwise useless maps and you can send teams of NPCs out to get interesting drops. Likely this is just going to be a lot of “bubblegum” currency aka alts, alchs, chisels, and the like… but that is still putting the map to more use than sitting there in your bank. I am not expecting this to generate massive amounts of divine orbs, but a non-zero amount of resources would be great.

The in-map encounters seem like they are going to be fun. Sure it is the good old-fashioned “fight in a circle” mechanic but anything that adds additional density to the map… specifically additional rare monsters is a win in my book. The fact that you start the encounter and then the resources are collected automagically is also a big plus. There is no real downside to engaging in this mechanic and as a result, I figure I will be gathering a ton of these resources just by getting through the atlas. One of them is a Crucible-style channel up to increase damage mechanic but that is probably fine given that it sounds like that one is going to be considerably rarer. Combine this with a bunch of returning mechanics like Sentinels showing up in maps… T16 mapping should be more enjoyable than it has been in awhile.

I’ve honestly BARELY scratched the surface of all of the features of this league. The presentation was limited to nothing but Path of Exile 1 content and was roughly 45 minutes long. I highly suggest you watch it as it is EXCEPTIONALLY content-dense. Now comes the challenge of figuring out what the hell I actually want to play. I could go with old reliable and do Righteous Fire again because I do love it so. I am also contemplating a Bleed-based Earthquake build on the newly changed Gladiator ascendency, specifically a block-based Shield/Axe variant that I saw the other day. I’ve had a lot of fun in the past with Volcanic Fissure of Snaking and given the melee buffs it should be in a pretty great place… though I am not entirely certain what Ascendancy I would want to play it with. Legitimately right now… I have no clue what I am actually going to do when Friday rolls around.

I do know that I am probably going to pause a lot of the nonsense that I am doing in FFXIV for a little bit as I get established in this new league. I will probably be spending a lot of time with my head down and focused on mapping while listening to Audiobooks. Are you going to be checking out this league? What build are you thinking about going with? Drop me a line below.