Visions of Eternity Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Progress Engines

December 23, 2025 by Belghast

Path of Exile II – Everything Burning Around Me

Good Morning Folks. This is going to be a bit of an academic topic, that stems out of a brief conversation that I had with a friend of mine about Path of Exile II and why mapping in that game just isn’t as fun. I am having a similar conversation with another friend about why the campaign feels worse for them in particular, but that is something that I am not going to dive into really. Basically there is a minimum bar of functionality that is required to get through the campaign, but once you have achieved it… the campaign is honestly one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. I landed on the term “Progress Engine” to describe what is missing in Path of Exile II. Essentially video games for me, or at least the best ones… are really adept at answering the question “what should I do next?”. They have a natural flow and set up a series of short term, medium term, and long term goals for the player and accomplishing any of them feels really good, like ticking something off a list. Path of Exile II is missing this lattice of things to do that provide a clear answer as to what you should be doing with your time. This exists through the campaign, but largely falls apart once you reach maps, and I believe is also why the attach rate at the end game is seemingly so low. Folks either roll a new character and experience the part of the game that works… the campaign… or they are so profit minded that all they care about is exalts/chaos/divines per hour and provide their own internal motivation.

So lets start off with talking about the Atlas of Worlds, which really feels like a pinnacle of progress engine design. This screen might be incomprehensible for a new player, but once you understand it… you see a bunch of carefully structured tick marks. The base atlas is made up of 115 individual maps, 100 normal maps and 15 unique maps and progressing through this rewards you with an Atlas Passive point for each new map that you run under the requirements for that tier of mapping. Early in Atlas Progression it feels like every single map that you finish is contributing towards some broader goal, and then later you start structuring your maps in such a way as to try and produce the maps that you are missing. Additionally you have 12 Favored Map slots which allow you to skew the drop chance towards dropping specific maps, and there is a sequence of boss encounters that unlock Voidstones, which allow you to increase the level almost all map drops so that eventually you reach a point where you are only getting T16s and almost always getting the maps that you want to run. This is in itself a massive reward of being able to do exactly the thing that you want to do over and over for rewards, and it is achieved through a bunch of micro objectives, that in themselves feel good to accomplish.

The payoff for atlas progression is the Atlas Passive tree, which allows you to shape the content that you are running so that over time you can slowly focus things in on exactly the endgame that you want to be doing, and then do it ALL the time. Effectively you can reach a point where you are sustaining map drops for exactly the maps that you want to be running, and then forcing exactly the content that you want to be running on those maps. This has allowed me to deep dive into specific atlas mechanics and really learn them at a meaningful level. Atlas progression also gives you access to more Atlas Passive trees, with a new one unlocking at 50 and at 100 maps completed so that you can quickly shift up your strategies as your mood shifts. These new atlas tree unlocks are themselves medium scale objectives that feel amazing when you accomplish one. Path of Exile 1 is all about running ONLY the content that you want to run, and giving you a bunch of tools that allow you to force exactly that. If you don’t like Ultimatum, then you can literally block it from ever appearing on any map that you run. As a picky eater… that gets squicked out by specific things in my food… I will always appreciate systems that allow me to granularly exclude the parts of a game that I do not want to participate in.

Then once all of this progression is finished, you have the final lap… of really long term goals which are made up by the Challenge system. Each league there are 40 challenges that vary from things you are always going to accomplish by just completing the campaign, to really edge case things like aggressively running whatever the new league mechanic is, and fully exploring it. Gear Grinding Goals or whatever the final one is called in a given league is almost always going to include things like leveling all the way to 100, and running a bajillion invitations or similar really long ranged goals. They give you an optional set of rewards to gather up, usually with some MTX associated with it and a Totem Pole that grows in size each time you get to specific numerical milestones. These are great reasons to keep engaged after you have effectively arrived at and conquered general mapping. Getting 40 of 40 is a massive commitment and often times requires you to start being focused on knocking these out as soon as possible. Many of them the longer you wait the harder they become to accomplish, because the trade economy means there are fewer copies of any given thing once folks check out and stop playing. However at its core Path of Exile 1 is really good at presenting a series of objectives for you to knock down and giving you a reason for doing all of them.

So now let’s compare the systems in Path of Exile II, and we will start with their version of the Atlas of Worlds. Instead of a fixed series of maps that drop and needing to complete each of them, you have an endlessly generating sprawl of procedurally generated nodes that effectively sprawl out forever in any given direction. Mixed in among these nodes are unique maps that provide rewards for completing them the first time, as well as specific mechanics that you can only find in these nodes. The core progression system involves bumping up your map tiers by fighting boss maps, which guarantee you a waystone drop of one higher tier, and finding corruption nexus nodes and then cleansing them on higher map difficulties. The reward for doing so is 5 Atlas Passives, but the time between Corruption Nexus nodes varies wildly based on luck of the draw. You could spawn into an area with three corrupted areas next to each other, and be able to rip through your early atlas progression really quickly. Or you could be unlock and spend hours roaming around the random grid trying to find the next area. This delayed progression ends up making each individual map feel less important, and more of a chore when you run them. Additionally you can never reach a point where you are ONLY running the maps you want, and there are going to be specific layouts that you hate, and inevitably they seem to always be gating your progress towards the nodes that you need… forcing you to run them.

Then there is the Atlas Passive system where each individual node feels less significant than the nodes in the POE1 passive tree. Additionally you are limited to only the most generic mechanics on the base atlas, and each of the individual league mechanics have their own atlas with their own progression system, that only moves the needle forward by doing increasingly more difficult boss encounters in each of those league mechanics. Traditionally bossing and mapping have been considered to be different objectives on Path of Exile 1, but in Path of Exile II you have to do both with your build in order to sufficiently progress your Atlas of Worlds and making mapping feel more rewarding… requires you to also fight a bunch of escalating boss fights in order to achieve it. In practice it just feels like there are large periods of time where you are setting up for your next burst of progression, but not really seeing much benefit from it. There are no favored map slots, no equivalent to void stones, and no challenges… so it feels like there is less progress to be had that feels tangible and provides a meaningful difference in the way you interact with the game.

Then there is the general problem that Waystone drops feel like they are super rare. On average I see one waystone drop per map, so I am almost always just barely replenishing the resources that I spent to engage with mapping in the first place. I have invested in every single waystone drop node in the Atlas Passive tree, and it has not made a meaningful difference in the rate at which I find them. Then there is the problem where mapping in POE2 just has more friction in general, since you no longer get a default six portals per map, but instead get a limited amount of portals based on how many mods a given map has. If you run a juicy 8 mod map, you get a single attempt at it… which makes death feel awful when it happens. It rapidly becomes a scenario where the only thing that matters about mapping is currency acquisition, so that you can either afford to buy more waystones and tablets to make up for any of your failures. There is no real progression for the sake of progression system that is guiding you, and once you finish the campaign it largely feels like you are dumped out into a shapeless abyss without many guard rails to guide you. I think in its current state, the only players that really stick around for long are the financially motivated ones that care the most about divines per hour, because the motiviation to keep pushing to knock out objectives is truly lacking.

Guild Wars 2 – Wizard’s Vault daily objectives and Hero Achievements Panel

There are a bunch of different ways that games generate these progression engines. Probably my favorite example to drop upon is Guild Wars 2, which is the game for people who like focusing on various objectives. You have the Wizards Vault which is essentially what that game refers to as daily quests, which has daily, weekly, and seasonal objectives. Then when you are roaming around the maps there are constantly events firing off which provide micro objectives allowing a player to ping pong between them, feeling fullfilled while accomplishing little bursts of activity. Then the achievements section of the hero panel is filled with various objectives, many of which are made up of smaller multi part objectives giving you various sundry things that take hours, tens of hours, and even hundreds of hours to accomplish. For the “number goes up” players there is a global achievement score for your account that unlocks various minor reward chests each time you hit a new milestone.

Then for the folks who want really long term grinds… there are Legendary Weapons and Legendary Armor pieces that are shared account wide and give you more flexibility in the way you build your characters. Even these come in various flavors that will dicate just how much effort they require. The legendary starter kits give you a massive boost in this progress and shave hundreds of hours off the process. Then there are things like the Gen 2 legendary weapons where you have to jump through a long series of hoops to craft the precursor weapon before factoring in all of the resources required to turn that then into a legendary weapon. All these serve as mile markers on your account and ways of visually being able to show and track your progression as a player. Any time I am faced with not knowing what to do next, I dive into the various legendaries that I have started and see what sort of progress I can make towards them. There are also really low effort things like world boss or meta trains that you can hop on to feel like you are making incremental but generally non-specific progression.

Destiny Rising – Events Screen Fighting for Attention

I would be remiss if I did not talk at least a bit about the other end of the spectrum… namely mobile games with the sort of progression engines that they have. Namely they are all about deluging you with a bunch of required systems that themselves only require a few minutes of your time… but have so many stacked on top of each other that you feel like you need to spend a few hours a day working on them or your risk falling behind. These are all games with largely micro objectives, with limited medium term… and some really long and financially egregious long term objectives. Completing any one gacha character is unobtainium without a multiple hundred dollar financial outlay. Then there is the challenge where both the amount of time that you can commit to something, and the amount of progress that time will earn you are hard gated… so that they will keep driving you towards the cash shop. Some of these are worse than others, and I rather enjoy Destiny Rising that I am using as an example. However it can be exhausting to log in and see thirty windows lit up waiting on your attention that all require just a few moments of your time. This is esssentially progression engines stretched to the point of breaking and is maybe a bridge too far for most players.

POE2DB Player Fall-off in Path of Exile II by League

Fate of the Vaal has so far had the fastest drop off of any Path of Exile II league. POE1 Leagues tend to have more of a slowly declining plateau that they reach quickly that slides slowly as the player count drops off as we get closer to the next league. POE2 on the other hand tends to be pretty rapid and pretty constant, not really starting to plateau until you are a few months into the league. My guess behind this is that as folks get into maps, they tend to drop out of the game because there really isn’t much connective tissue there to keep them engaged. The game is missing a progression engine to keep them invested in the long term. The currency aquisition folks stick around because they are self motivated by their own version of “number goes up”, but I think they tend to be a much smaller portion of the larger pie, especially with Path of Exile II. Completing the campaign feels like it represents a larger part of the game. Not only does a full campaign run take much longer, but it also is much more meaningful than anything that comes after it.

I love Delve in Path of Exile, and for the most part the POE2 atlas system seems inspired by this system of endless progression. The problem is however that Delve is a bunch of micro objectives, with any given delve path taking a few minutes, whereas even the fastest maps are at least 5 minutes because the layouts are not as clean as they were in Path of Exile 1. Bad nodes feel more damning when it takes longer to clear them. In Delve you can pretty quickly rush to the next objective node, and as a result none of them feel that bad. You chase the nodes that you care about, which are more clearly marked on the map, and each of them feel super rewarding because the is a tiny bit of effort to clear any of them. It isn’t so much that I want Path of Exile II to just copy the homework of the Atlas Progression system from Path of Exile 1, and more a case that the Delve Atlas just does not feel good. I am open to other solutions, but whatever the case I think they need to rework the entire atlas progression system to give us more bursts of short term progression, rather than the aimless wandering nature of trying to find the next bit of progression that we have right now.

Anyways. Like I said this is more of an academic ramble than anything else. Did I completely miss the point? Drop me a line below.

New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs

November 21, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.

It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.

That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.

Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.

Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.

I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.

Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.

Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.

Visions of Eternity Early Thoughts

October 29, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! Yesterday about mid day the Visions of Eternity expansion dropped in Guild Wars 2, giving us access to new areas and new elite specs. I’ve not made it past the first zone, but I have to say that Shipwreck Strand is freaking gorgeous. Probably the most interesting thing about the zone so far is how much of it was designed explicitly for the skimmer, and more specifically the ability to use the skimmer underwater, because there are giant swaths of caves believe the surface. Essentially we head to the new far flung locale of Castoria, a sort of rumored island that is shrouded in unnatural fog. I won’t go into too much detail as not to spoil the experience for anyone, but I found the whole navigation sequence of finding our way to the island interesting.

I am not sure if there are some tangible upgrades to the engine for this expansion, or if they are just using artistic flare in new and interesting ways… but the zones look freaking amazing. Specifically the ocean itself looks more alive than it ever has, as it swells and drops in very believable ways. There is this bioluminescent foam-like texture in the water that collects around these tidepools that just looks so good to watch play out in front of you. It feels like they have really pulled out all of the stops of zone design to make something that really looks new and interesting. Greebles are normally a term that is used to describe surface texture… but the sky itself feels like it is greebled with motes of magic and such everywhere, making the entire scene look absolutely enchanted.

I migrated my housing to the new island and that was pretty straight forward. You just talk to the NPC who then warns you that any customization will be reset and that your decorations will be placed in storage when you do so. This was fine for me because while I placed items in my house, I didn’t really do anything specific or intentional with them. I was largely running the default state of the previous island. The only customization that I carried forward was using the aurora borealis themed sky, which really blends nicely with the overall look of the zone. This one feels way more detailed than the previous homestead zone, and honestly there are a few places where I would like to try and erect some custom structures. I’ve not really spent much of any time decorating my homestead and maybe the new island will change that. The default structure feels way less of a “complete” thing as it did with the bearkin area.

Now all of this goodness aside… there is a really frustrating bug at play. Essentially very early on in the quest chain, you are given a collection to finish for an NPC named Pete. It feels bad to halt your progress for this unlocking the wavehawk quest sequence, but I remember them doing something similar for the warclaw in Janthir Wilds. However this time around, I thought they had learned their lesson because I was able to progress past the quest once I had filled the renown heart in the area. DO NOT DO THIS. Currently if you progress your quest past the point where you are given the Wavehawk quest chain, you will no longer be able to complete this chain. This harms you later down the line because you are halted from progressing the story because you do not have a Wavehawk mastery as a result. I’ve tried resetting my quest progress back to this chain to essentially zero luck. I am certain they will resolve this issue at some point, but right now… if you move forward with the quest line called “Solid Ground” you will brick your quest progress sequence seemingly permanently.

The only reliable advice that I have seen on this problem is to break out an alt and progress them up to the point where they receive the Wavehawk quest chain, and then complete the collection on them. This should then in theory unstick your entire account, because mastery unlocks are shared at an account level. Effectively when you are in this broken state, the items just do not spawn in the world that are needed for the collection. Anyways, at some point today I intend to starting this content with my Necromancer, and will be bringing him out of retirement. This is not that big of a deal, given that it has been ages since I have played this character and they were effectively the character that made me fall in love with this game universally.

I threw together a very rudimentary Power Galeshot build and it felt pretty good. I don’t love the disengage shot, but it lives on the same slot as the stealth ability from Longbow, so I was already not in the custom of hitting that button most of the time. Essentially I was able to maintain almost 100% uptime on quickness, 12 stacks of might, and have Aegis up more often than not. This seems like a good kit, and way less selfish than my normal Power Longbow build. I need to play around with it more to get used to it, and probably should also keep tweaking the build a bit to improve it. Nothing much is out there so far for Power Longshot other than a PVP focused build. Hopefully the buildcraft geniuses will come up with something beautiful in the next few days. However for the time being this works well enough to keep rolling and questing with it.

Other than this one egregious game breaking bug… I am pretty happy with everything I have seen so far from Castoria and Visions of Eternity. That said, I am not engaged enough that it is going to stop me from going fully degen mode on Path of Exile come Friday. I’ve done the first zone meta twice, and it is fine… but mostly just felt like a giant bag of hitpoints making the entire thing drag on a bit too long. I had more than enough points on the Necromancer to fully spec out the Ritualist tree so I might see what is available for that before I start questing. I tend to prefer GuildJen over Snowcrows or Metabattle because it seems to favor way less sweaty meta builds, and more general purpose things. I don’t care to run multiple builds for multiple purposes, so am always just looking for something that is fun to play that does “good enough” in most content. GuildJen sort of feels like the spiritual successor to Dulfy now that she has “passed beyond memory” or at very least retired from updating a guide site.

Anyways. Have you played any of Visions of Eternity? What were your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Heys for Days

October 28, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. The one thing that worries me a bit about Destiny Rising is that it is getting a bit harder to fight “New Lights” to harass. Essentially the hardest part of the dailies… are the mentor dailies. This is of course something that I do not actually need to do at all… but I want to upgrade from Mentor to Adept Mentor and this involves jumping through a bunch of hoops. The hardest by far is trying to find 3 New Lights that will respond back to me… so this usually involves roaming around Xiangshi the first area of the game or Haven and looking for new lights… and hoping they know how to respond back with their own “Hey!”. I got my three done super early this morning, so that pretty much sets up the rest of the day well for me. It would probably go smoother if I did this during primetime, but I figure the most serious players are going to be clogging the social areas at that time.

I talked about this a bit yesterday but essentially I am down to three parts of the Adept certification. I am a little over ten days away from completing the Resonator step, which means at that point I can stop trying to find new lights. I only recently started doing the Interpreter and Orator steps which involve posting in the Mentor chat and answering Drift Bottle questions, which are this games version of a forum post. The problem with that last step is… this is mostly mentors answering other mentors… and making dumb posts for the purpose of getting artificial interaction. It feels dumb, but we are all running on this same treadmill, and in theory I should have been focused on this nonsense way earlier than now so I could have been done with it and moving on to the next dumb grind. I believe the step after this is to try and get 200 likes on a post you make in the drift bottle area. Like I said NONE of this is required… it is just something I feel obligated to do, so I can have fancier titles beside my name.

Last night was pretty great because Ace and I hung out on the SDF discord, and before long our friend Mor had joined us. It had been really long since I last talked to him about anything of substance, so it was good to catch up. Though I am sure it sounded like we were speaking some made up language since he is very much NOT into either Destiny Rising or Gacha games in general. We got together and did a Grandmaster Strike… which was exceptionally frustrating because we lacked someone who could take out Spread Shinkas and we had to brute force it. We then treated ourselves to some rounds of Morgans Hunt and they went much better. We are both basically within two more rounds of finishing up the event, and both got our exotic weapons last night. Mine was sadly a copy of the Chaperone… which is a shotgun that I will never actually use because it is quite bad.

Estela is exceptionally good at Morgran’s Hunt and we managed to queue into a group where all three color variants of this skin were represented. It is the weird little moments like this that you cling to and that bring you joy. The round AFTER this one though went exceptionally badly because we had a Tan-2, who has crappy wave clear and I think we only managed to pull a single key from that run. I am left with 5 more keys to get, and I think Ace is left with 4, because at some point they must have done a run without me. I am not sure what night we will finish this up, but maybe on Thursday because that is when the Festival of the Lost event drops. I’ve already begged off of Guild Wars 2 for this week since we have very limited time to do whatever this activity is. I want a dumb papier-mâché mask of a pumpkin, or whatever else is available during the event. Festival of the Lost was always my favorite Destiny 2 event, so I am oddly looking forward to this. I hope it is not a massive disappointment.

Yesterday about mid day was the official end of the Mercenaries of Trarthus league in Path of Exile. This means it was time for me to attempt to straighten and organize my Standard stash a bit, because when you go into the new league its stash will be based on the state of standard. You end up with a stupid amount of remove-only tabs, and I pretty much create a new folder at the end of each league, named after the league that just finished, and shove them all into it. That way if I ever want something to test in standard, I can pull the items out of that folder… and it has the least amount of impact on my limited league stash overall. I am a league player and effectively my standard stash is meaningless. I should probably find a few sacrificial characters and delete them now, so I will have plenty of slots for league characters if the mood hits me.

Something that is worth a watch is a new video that ZiggyD just dropped. One of the side effects of him traveling to Grinding Gear Games each league to record the Q&A session is that he also gets some hands on time with the new mechanics. This morning he released a video talking about the new version of breach a bit, and more importantly what his experiences were using the Genesis Tree to craft gear. It honestly sounds like this might be a reasonable way of getting five links for your build. I am absolutely going to be building out my tree with the idea of hopefully being able to produce a chestpiece and maybe a sceptre or rune dagger for Righteous Fire. I am not necessarily in any rush to get to end game quickly, but as soon as Faustus opens up in Act 6 I am probably going to start selling random stuff on my store vendor trying to build up the currency to buy those needed uniques.

However all of that said, between today and Friday at 2pm CDT, I am going to be playing Guild Wars 2 Visions of Eternity. In theory I should have enough points banked up to buy the new Ranger Elite specialization immediately and play with it a bit. I also have over 1000 wizard vault points, so if there is anything interesting there in the legendary kit variety I should be able to pick that up as well. The biggest swap that I have planned on doing is changing out my Homestead over to the new island themed one. What I am looking forward to though is roaming around the new zones. They are absolutely gorgeous, and I need to get back into the swing of doing regularly content in Guild Wars 2. Basically for the near future I am going to be juggling Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, and Destiny Rising… and trying to spend a bit of time in each daily. The big thing that I want to make sure I keep doing are dailies in GW2 and Destiny Rising, because I know I will be heavily focused on grinding maps and such as my main activity.

An even larger, overarching goal however is to finish up most of the garage before 2pm on Friday. I have taken the day off Friday so at worst I will probably be spending the morning dealing with this. I need to get one more of these shelving units for the left side of the current configuration. I also had forgotten that I had a mini fridge out there, and I am trying to get over to it to make sure it still works. If so I really want to move it upstairs so I can keep water bottles in it or something. I had planned on getting a drink fridge for upstairs, and probably want to eventually, but this will work fine for the time being. Mostly I just want access to cool drinks, and I have been addicted to A&W Zero Root beer lately. Though if I am going to keep drinking cans of that I really need to start collecting them and recycling them like I do shipping boxes. This would probably mean setting up a can crusher somewhere, and I would greatly prefer having that near the fridge somewhere.

Anyways…. plans within plans. I have a lot to keep me busy in the coming weeks however. I still need to finish with the pile in the backyard and contact the folks to haul the junk away. I also want to see what they would charge to take the upstairs loveseat out of the house as well. The problem with everything I am doing in the garage… is it is mostly just the first step of a longer process. A lot of these boxes need to be gone through and decided what to do with the items inside them. Effectively it is all of the stuff from my wife’s classroom, and for now I am just putting it up on shelves to get it off the floor so that I can eventually take all of the outdoor furniture from the backyard inside before it starts to freeze and get really cold. Plans within plans… and since it is just me now… I have to keep myself motivated and moving in the right direction.