Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Fire Shield Crush Chieftain

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Good Morning Folks! I thought this morning I would talk about my latest mess of a build in depth. I mentioned this on Friday, but essentially this build came about because I wanted a reason to play a Chieftain with its new ascendancy and a reason to play Shield Crush. While there are no actual guides on how to play a Shield Crush Chieftan, there are folks playing Physical to Fire Conversion Chieftans and folks playing Shield Crush. So as a result I spent quite a bit of time on POE.Ninja and kitbashed together something that felt right. I have no clue if anything I am doing is close to optimal, but I can clear red maps so I am going to call that a win. While nothing about this morning’s post is purporting to be a guide, here is my POB if you are interested in trying to follow along.

I recorded some footage of me doing a yellow map… largely because I am trying for the third league in a row to farm the damned Primeval hideout, which requires a lot of luck and running Primordial Blocks. I feel like the above gameplay does a pretty good job of highlighting both the strengths of the build and the weaknesses. The strength is when I charge into a pack of mobs, they usually explode in a brilliant pyroclastic wave. The weakness is… any time I encounter something fire-resistant or extremely tanky. I wind up getting a Niko elemental that is both Soul Eater and Shakiri Touched… and it takes for freaking ever to chew through. All in all, though it feels pretty enjoyable and is extremely tanky.

The new Chieftain ascendancy is this weird mixed bag of extremely powerful nodes and some that are situationally good. The real benefit of this ascendancy is that you can easily fix your elemental resistances. The side benefit is that Hinekora Death’s Fury causes big fire explosions… far bigger than anyone expected when this was announced. It isn’t quite an entire screen radius but it is almost there. I feel like the correct order to choose these is Tasalio, Hinekora, and then Valako because it allows you to fix your resists sooner rather than later. The fourth node is less certain because you have a few options with no clear winner. I am likely going to go with Ramako because it is the lazy option. Ngamahu is probably technically better but it requires you to carefully plan which nodes to put non-unique jewels in to get the maximum benefit in stacking Fire Damage. At least I will likely go Ramako for now and then maybe shift to Ngamahu after some more levels and thinking about it.

Let’s look at a couple of abilities that are key to this build. Shield Crush and Shield Charge are similar in that they scale based on the armor and evasion rating on your shield. This means the more armor or evasion that you happen to have, the more damage that attack is going to do. They also scale based on your physical damage as a whole, so I am looking specifically for ways to scale that. They are both tagged as AOE, and in a perfect world I would be able to incorporate something into the build that gives gem levels to “All AOE Gems” but unfortunately I don’t have that in the build. Given that physical is kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, I am converting as much of it as possible to Fire Damage, which gives me a number of other scaling options. I am primarily accomplishing this through a combination of the Avatar of Fire keystone, The Fire Mastery that converts 40% of physical damage to Fire, and Herald of Ash.

So we know from Shield Crush, that I want as much armor or evasion on my shield as humanly possible. That really probably means that you are looking at either Emperor’s Vigilance or Dawnbreaker. Both of them have very specific reasons to use them and I wound up going with Emperor’s Vigilance because it saves me two passive skill points on the tree, because I wanted Glancing Blows either way. The other semi-required unique would be Replica Dreamfeather which allows me to scale my attack damage based on how much armor I have which allows me to turn a defensive layer into an offensive layer. Currently, I have 36471 armor which would give me 81% increased attack damage. This is most definitely not what I would consider a cheap build, because I think at this point I am about 10 Divine Orbs into it.

Since I was already spending a good deal of money on this build, I decided to go all in and lean on the Replica Dragonfang’s Flight which in spite of its name… has nothing to do with the other replica items from Heist. This is a weird new item that gives +3 gem levels to a specific gem and there exists a version of this amulet for every skill gem in the game. Some of these are extremely expensive, but Shield Crush is one of the cheaper ones and can be picked up for under a hundred chaos. I’m also taking advantage of the Circle of Anguish which scales my fire damage and increases my fire resistance by quite a bit because I will always be running Herald of Ash. This squeezes things a bit and keeps me from being able to cap Chaos Resistance because the large number of uniques that I am running makes it a bit challenging.

Since I want to have a bunch of armor, and it is relatively straightforward to get 4000 armor on a Brass Dome … that also comes along with crit immunity I decided to lean on that chest piece. I managed to find a bargain on a 4% to all maximum resistances chest with all of the right colors and a 6% reduced fire damage taken corruption for 2 Divines. The negative is I no longer gain life from strength, and as a result, I am a bit low on life as a whole. To help mitigate some of that, and to give me a bit of regeneration I decided to lean on a well-rolled Immortal Flesh. There are other options that would not give me as many defensive layers for example Arn’s Anguish is something I have seen used on a few Shield Crush builds. I like survival and I like feeling tanky so… regen is a win for me.

This leaves me leaning on Boots, Gloves, and Helm to try and fix my Chaos Resistance while also stacking as much Fire Resistance as possible… which then in turn fixes my other Resists thanks to Tasalio Ascendancy talent. I also needed to lean on these sockets to fix my lack of Dexterity… which made the gear really really expensive. Normally to get Dex on an item it needs to be an evasion base, but I want Armor given that I don’t currently have access to Iron Reflexes to convert Evasion back into Armor. I think honestly the BEST version of this build we double dipping from armor and evasion to convert it with that keystone. It does make me think that maybe Champion would be the best possible class for a Shield Crush build.

All in all, I enjoy the build. I need a heck of a lot more levels on it and the more I play it the better it feels. Do I think this was worth 10 Divines? Probably not. If I spend more time working on this build I would really like to have Forbidden Flesh/Forbidden Flame jewels that give me Unbreakable from Juggernaut, but they are currently ungodly expensive. There are a bunch of expensive things that I could do to optimize my damage but for the moment… I think I just need to pile on more levels. Would I suggest this to someone who just wants to map quickly? Probably not. Is it fun in its own way? Absolutely.

Diablo 3 Season 29 is Awesome

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.

The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:

  • One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
  • A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
  • A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
  • A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
  • A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.

The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.

The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.

We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.

I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.

All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.

The Next Ugly Duckling

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One of the things about me and Path of Exile is that it seems like I always have to have some project that I am tinkering with. In this league, I have had two resoundingly successful builds, and two that are probably way better than I am giving them credit for. Righteous Fire is essentially a guaranteed banger at this point, and I have tweaked it further than I have in previous leagues. There are still places I could go with it but it would involve a significant respec of my tree and figuring out a way to deal with ailments. Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is way stronger than I would have expected it to be, and it legitimately is on the same tier as Righteous Fire in my mind. Lightning Arrow did what it was supposed to do and helped me fund the switch to Righteous Fire, and then there is my Storm Brand Inquisitor that honestly gets better the longer I play it. Now I feel like I want to venture forth into undiscovered territory.

Two ascendancies saw massive reworks, the Guardian and the Chieftain. So I knew that I wanted to do something with Chieftain just for the hell of it, and so that I could experience the Hinekora node before it likely gets nerfed in the future. An ability that I really like but have never built around is Shield Crush. I played with it a bit on Ruthless, and remember seeing an interesting-looking Juggernaut build from Jorgen that was a deep delver. So I got it in my head that I wanted to try and take that concept and transplant it to the Chieftain tree and then focus on Physical to Fire conversion with some Ignite damage. Normally in this situation, I would lean on POE.Ninja to see what other builds are out there in the wild trying to do this thing. Unfortunately… there are two folks trying this in trade league and one in hardcore… and they are all somewhat doing something different with it.

One of the things that I have learned while playing Path of Exile for several leagues, is that just because something is not in the meta does not mean that it is bad. The challenge of course is that I just have to figure out how to make this combination of abilities feel good and strong enough to get through the campaign. There are some very specific uniques that I have already acquired that should make this feel great… but I have to get to the other side of the leveling gap before I can really utilize them. At the moment… I am sort of making it up as I go along and hoping that given a sufficient number of regret orbs, I can eventually shape this into something that feels great.

I’m currently in Act IV and desperately in need of an upgraded shield and preferably an upgraded sceptre that I can actually equip. My intelligence however is in the dumpster, so I am struggling to find something that is both a sufficient dps upgrade and that I can actually equip right now. For the moment I am running around with a hammer and that seems fine. The shield is important since shield crush scales off armor and energy shields. Mostly I want as much armor as I can reasonably get on the shield, but I’ve yet to see a new base for several levels. Unfortunately, the vendor in High Gate doesn’t seem to have anything to offer that would really help me out. I can do sufficient damage, and I am pretty tanky… but it just is a bit slow going at the moment. I feel like I am going through the ugly duckling doldrums for this build but I am going to push my way to the other side.

I’m not to the point of sharing a POB because I am not entirely certain what changes I am going to need to make in order to improve this. I took Avatar of Fire, and I think maybe I did so a bit too early. Between it and a few other abilities I was converting 90% of my physical damage to fire… but I think maybe it would be better off to also have access to other damage types for the time being. That is probably a late-game choice if I end up making it. I was looking at a build that was trying to do this back in 3.19… at least the fire conversion shield crush but the tree has changed significantly since then. It will be interesting if I can ultimately turn this into something fun.

Honkai Luck

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Yesterday was the launch of a brand new banner in Honkai Star Rail, and as a result, I had to return and test my luck. I’ve not been playing this game of late, largely because I have been hyper-focused on Path of Exile. That said I had quite a amount of currency saved up given that I completely skipped the Not-Dan-Heng banner and managed to snag Kafka relatively quickly. Probably the most important thing about this banner, in particular, is it gives access to a brand new 4-star healer, making it hopefully much easier to obtain than the other options. I remember desperately pulling against the Luocha banner in the hopes of obtaining him because I needed a second healer.

I snagged Lynx the new healer almost immediately and then managed to get two additional copies so that I now have her with some eidolons unlocked. The challenge with new characters is that you essentially have to level them up from scratch, and I was already strapped for resources. I will have to play with her a bit to see if I like her better than Natasha because for the moment Luocha is just so powerful that I would find him hard to replace.

Pretty quickly I saw the gold glow from the train car and hoped that meant I would be picking up the new character Fu Xuan. However, it seems like I had wasted my pitty on Bailu. There was a time when I really wanted this character, but largely because I was stuck needing a second healer. Now I have four healers… which greatly dilutes the importance of Bailu. I guess it is still cool anytime you can pick up a 5 star though.

Another character that I really need to level is Pela. I kinda developed a kinship with this character during the Museum event, and in truth, she is really freaking strong. Given that she is easy to pull on this banner, I managed to pick up enough additional copies of her to unlock all of her eidolons. So at some point, I really need to get around to focusing on leveling and equipping her.

I had made six pulls on the banner depleted almost all of my saved-up currency, and essentially expected not to get the new 5 Star off this banner. Then I remembered that I have the monthly pass thing, and never converted the other currency it gives you into pull currency. So shifting those 300 whatsits into 300 whosits gave me the 1600 needed for a seventh round. It was then that I lucked into a mega pull picking up another copy of Pela, Hook, and the chase character Fu Xuan.

So I ultimately depleted any reserves that I had but I guess it was well worth it to pick up a 6 Eidolon DPS, 2 new healers, and the chase character. I had what I would consider to be an extreme amount of luck to walk away with two 5-star characters in such a short period of time. Now I return to banking my currency until the next banner that I care about rolls around. I need to get back into the swing of playing each day at least a little bit. I think the challenge that I find myself in, is I have so much story content that I now need to complete that logging in just feels overwhelming.

I kind of think of this as the “bags full” problem. There are many MMOs that I can’t bring myself to return to because my bags are full of crap that I no longer recognize, and I just don’t have the spoons to sort through it. In Honkai Star Rail and Final Fantasy XIV… I have an overwhelming amount of content to do in order to get caught up again… so that when I see that I just log right back out. I wish I had a mental trick to avoid this because it ultimately spells a death spiral for many games. This is most definitely a “me” problem not necessarily something wrong with any of the games that trigger it. Anyways… I hope you have been having a great week. Mine has been inordinately stressful but it seems like things are beginning to calm down.