Settlers of Kalguur (3.25)

Trade but Without Trading

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Hey Folks! I’m getting a bit of a late start this morning on putting up a daily blog post, which is probably bad considering I hard skipped writing anything yesterday. I’ve been continuing to roam around in Path of Exile while I figure out what I want to tackle next, and made some significant progress on chipping away at my final atlas unlocks. One of the big things about this league is that I have to explore other options for obtaining unique maps. We are in a heavy inflation league economy and as a result, I just don’t have the raw resources to buy my way out of holes in quite the same manner that I normally do. Traditionally I would get down to the last 10 maps or so and just buy them from the trade market. This time around I am using Kirac, Scouting Reports, and Beastcrafting in an effort to find my last few maps.

As of this morning, I am sitting at 112 of 115 maps completed which leaves me with three unique maps. I still need to find The Coward’s Trial, Oba’s Cursed Trove, and weirdly enough the Vault of Atziri which normally is something I find pretty early on. The title of this blog post is somewhat misleading because I am heavily engaged with the Currency Exchange, but largely making the decision to avoid buying most things that are not currency outright. So while I will purchase scouting reports, I am trying my best not to purchase maps. Largely because in my experience so far, it is hard to get anyone to respond to requests right now. The league is fairly dead and the prices that are posted, and not that great. My goal for the league I think is to complete the Atlas and it has been interesting trying to solo my way through that.

I got my first upgrade in quite a long while, and it was picking up an Omen of Connections for 2 Divine Orbs. Essentially I had posted a buy request hoping that someone would eventually decide to sell it to me. Buying one immediately would have taken 4 Divines, and I really did not want to pay that price for it. Before resorting to that I did burn through 600+ fusings in a Yolo attempt to link it that ultimately failed. I had not had much luck either finding the Omen through Ritual or the Black Morrigan through Einhar on my own in this league. I fully expect that after going through and buying it… I will probably get one to drop within the next few play sessions. I wish the Omen of Connections worked on Taited Fusings… but alas it does not. Bumping up to a Six Link is a pretty massive improvement in clear speed, and in theory, at some point, I probably need to run a bunch of labs to get some quality on my gems.

Today is the Early Access/Supporter Pack reveal stream at 2 pm CST and with it comes a very questionable Twitch drop. I will of course be farming it just to have it… but I cannot see a case in the future where I would want to wear these Breach hands as a cloak. The community is excited and thinks this cosmetic means that Breach is effectively confirmed for POE2. I am hoping that during this stream they talk a bit about what the endgame for the early access is going to look like. We know that we are only going to have three acts to play through, and in theory a limited set of classes and only one ascendency per class. I am hoping that most of this information will be confirmed during the show. I am still kind of on the fence about how much I feel like POE2 is going to be my sort of game, but I am hopeful because of how much I enjoy Path of Exile in its current state.

Are you going to be tuning into the reveal stream? What league mechanic are you hoping will return in Path of Exile 2? For me it is Delve, but I also feel like Delve, Heist, and Sanctum since they are not mapping mechanics… are going to be a bit before they are introduced.

Dead Event League

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Good Morning Folks. After wrapping up Veilguard I have now uninstalled the game to free up space for whatever comes next and am back futzing around with Path of Exile. I wrapped up my second voidstone and I gotta say… I am somewhat impressed at how much better I am now at doing these first two. It gives me hope that maybe at some point in the future the last two will be a similar cakewalk. I managed to take both down without taking any deaths which I think is a first for me. Searing Exarch is way more dangerous to my specific build, but I find that I hate Eater of Worlds way more. It is the charging the spheres phase that annoys me because inevitably one of the spheres overlaps some of the other nonsense that happens in the arena. I also hate being on a timer… it causes me to freak out mentally. I have some baggage surrounding being timed that I have never quite gotten over.

I am struggling a bit to complete my Atlas of Worlds. At this point, I am at 99 of 115 and am completely out of maps to run. This means I need to chain run maps that I have already completed in the hope of getting something that I can actually run. I have a lighthouse that I do not have credit for, but when I corrupted the map it ended up shifting to include no-regen which my build cannot run. I’ve contemplated trying to run it without Righteous Fire turned on… but that is still always risky as hell. Admittedly there are some times I just fail to brain and realize I am halfway through a map and never actually turned on RF… but that is the exception rather than the rule. I am not sure what is up with Kirac but it seems like his inventory is not generating new maps nearly as often as I would expect him to. I’m also the only one playing in this league from our guild and as a result, there is no map sharing happening in the guild bank. Generally speaking, there are always one or two maps that Kodra gets for example that I had not seen, which helps these dry spells.

I have enough currency that I could just buy my way out of the hole, but the trade market is already pretty dead at this point during the event. There were a lot of folks who only played that first weekend, never to return again. Thankfully the Currency Exchange is still hopping and I can move items pretty easily. I’ve learned that Goddess fragments are a great way to make some gold since they are selling for around 25 chaos each right now. I have zero interest in running lab, and even if I do to quality up my gems I am going to breeze my way through one of the free ones instead of tackling uber lab. Though I have to admit after years of repetition… I don’t mind lab anywhere near as much as I used to. I can pretty much predict instinctively where the doors are going to be and can zip through them pretty quickly these days.

This morning the venerable Sir Gog released a video and in it is the above screenshot from GGG on Twitter. It seems that the minimum buy-in for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is going to be the $30 supporter pack that is likely to be released during the Twitch stream on Thursday. This is going to happen at 2 pm CST and will have Twitch drops enabled which is usually wings or a cloak or something similar. There was some talk about lifetime spenders getting in automatically but I have not seen any specifics surrounding that yet. Honestly, I was probably going to buy something from the upcoming yearly supporter pack anyways so this really isn’t too heinous as far as I am concerned. Path of Exile has earned every dime I have spent on it in a way that most games have not.

In another randomness, I watched the first episode of the HBO Dune Prophecy series last night and I have mixed opinions. I have basically come to accept that this current Dune franchise is going to have to be taken as its own thing. The first movie was mostly a good adaptation of the original source material, but that second movie veered off into left field at the last moments becoming its own unique universe. As such I am mostly assuming that this pre-history series is going to do its own thing. Admittedly while I read the Brian Herbert Houses Trilogy, I never went back and read any of the Machine Crusade stuff. Maybe this is drawing directly from that and I just do not realize it. Whatever the case there was a “superpower” shown at the end of this episode that I do not remember existing previously in the canon. So yeah… I will be watching this but also taking everything with a shaker of salt, because the current vision for this franchise is a bit different than the novels.

Failing Some Goals

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Folks… I have completely fallen off the wagon this year when it comes to books. I finished Apostles of Mercy in August and then just have not kept up with things. It really fell apart during my lead-up to Dawntrail in Final Fantasy XIV since my chosen vehicle for consuming books is playing an audiobook in the background while I grind away at an ARPG or similarly narratively vacant game. Playing anything with a lot of focused stories completely destroys my ability to listen to anything else of substance. Since I am back in Path of Exile for a bit, I really need to get plugged back in and consume literature again. I think my methodology of essentially chainsmoking Sanderson where I lit the next book off the dying embers of the previous, took a lot out of me. I would like to hit that goal of 50 books for the year, which means I need to get through 12 more books before 2025. I kind of doubt that is going to happen.

As far as Atlas progress goes in Path of Exile, I am up to 70 of 115 and have plenty of uncompleted maps to keep churning forward. I’ve still made almost zero progress on any further gearing goals, but am realizing that… honestly I don’t need it. This baseline version of the Righteous Fire Chieftain can absolutely complete the atlas and probably get my first two keystones without much issue. Given this is a limited event, in spirit if not necessarily in time constraints… means I am probably okay if I never get past the “starter” build. Optimization and climbing the ladder is really for a proper fresh league.

I specced out my second Atlas tree for Niko, Scarabs, Shrines, and Strongboxes and it also seems to have the side effect of producing a lot more raw map drops than my very focused Einhar, Beyond, and Ritual build did. I will probably run this for awhile alternating between mapping and delving until I finish out my atlas. Then once I have gotten through the t16 maps I will shift back over to the Einhar/Ritual build in a further attempt to farm one of the two things that can get me an easy Six-Link. I am fine operating in this Semi-SSF mode where I am mostly getting my own stuff. I am however selling a lot of things through the currency exchange to build up a stockpile of currency for when I decide I care about some of the upgrades.

Hoping this weekend to get back engaged in a book and go back to that normal mode of ARPG plus Audiobook. I am not entirely certain what path I am going to go down. I did pick up a copy of Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future of Blizzard Entertainment, and I would like to make my way through that at some point. I am just not usually one for non-fiction so we will see how well that works. I also have a Cyberpunk 2077 novelization in my back pocket for when I want something that is not too bogged down. Then again I could dive into the next book in the Stormlight Archive series, but I also know that is going to be a major commitment timewise because once I start I am going to burn through it until I complete it.

Anyways. I hope you all have a delightful weekend. I will let you know Monday if I actually accomplished any of the things I hope to going into my weekend.

Missing Delve

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Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.

Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.

I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.

The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.

I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.

Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.