Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Mercenaries Gauntlet

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Good Morning My Perky Pals… happy dawning of a new work week. In my semi-regular mental health updates… I did pretty okay on Friday. Dealing with the first anniversary of our wedding after the death of my wife… was mostly okay. I had a few tough moments but the day was not the soul crushing experience that I expected it to be. I am still glad that I took the day off and quite honestly… I might just start taking it off yearly just in case because sooner or later… it will catch up with me. This weekend I did dumb things and this morning I am going to tell you about them, since we did not record a podcast this weekend where I would have likely talked about it. Why yes that is me on the beach in Path of Exile… so buckle up friends.

The Gauntlet is an event run by Zizaran in Path of Exile that cranks up the difficulty of the game to stupid levels… and takes place in a Hardcore Solo-Self-Found environment. Meaning that you cannot rely on anyone other than yourself and if you take a death, your character is exiled to standard. I do not normally like the hardcore rule-set, nor am I the biggest fan of SSF either. What prompted me to join this madness? The Gauntlet is often supported by Grinding Gear Games which cooks up specific challenges that do not exist in other environments, and this year they added a unique MTX that can only be gained through playing the event. Essentially if you get off the beach and defeat Hillock, you are guaranteed to get a copy of the Merciless Gauntlets. If you get to at least level 5, your copy will have flavor text added to it indicating how far you made it.

What makes this extra challenging however is that a lot of the bosses have new mechanics. For example Hillock on the beach, is supported by The Maven and all of the nonsense that she does while witnessing a map boss can be done during this fight. Brutus is already a bit of a filter for new players, but when you encounter him in the prison you first fight a proxy… and then in the normally safe room… face a buffed version that has the canons on all four sides of the arena that can be found during the Hydra Guardian fight. I could have been like my friend Sloth and killed Hillock and then immediately killed that character to be done with it. However I could not bring myself to do this thing and I had to play things out for as long as they lasted… even though the whole experience is not really my jam.

I had experienced some of the mechanics when SirGog ran a version of the Gauntlet with Softcore rules as a custom league. However new and extra spicy this year is that when you face an end of act boss… you also face every single unique mob that can spawn in any of the maps of that act. This means you are fighting a literal gauntlet of enemies, that works similar to a maven witness in that if you do not kill them fast enough… they can start stacking up on top of each other as they spawn at fixed intervals. I managed to push through the first act boss, largely because Toxic Rain is really good at low levels and I got an early Goldrim drop from Hailrake that carried me super freaking hard. By the time I faced Merveil I essentially had capped resistances which was wildly overpowered for any fight, but especially the gauntlet since you needed to care about more than just cold resistance.

I named my character BelCantKillHillock because I legitimately did not expect to get off the beach. If you are so inclined you can see a POB of where I got and what gear I was wearing at the time of my death. I made it to the Act II boss and was presented with a decision. I could easily have backed out of the fight and come back when I was stronger… but instead I just decided to allow the death to happen. I played 5 hours and 21 minutes to get to that point, and while I was enjoying Toxic Rain overall… I was not enjoying having to play with my head on a swivel at all times. I figured once I cleared Act II it was only going to get worse in Act III. So instead of exiting to character selection and bouncing back in and throwing on a few levels… I just decided to let the death of attrition happen because I was having to chain flasks to stay alive to all of the nonsense happening on the Vaal Oversoul fight. I made it through the Gauntlet of Uniques without much issue, but the stupid stuff that was happening in the room kept grinding me down.

Being perfectly honest I am extremely happy with the level 27 death that is now enshrined in my glove mtx. I started out not expecting to make it off the beach, and then decided to keep playing until I was at least level 5 so I could get text on my gloves. Then I just kept moving the goalposts… could I get through Brutus… could I get through Merveil. Could I get past the bandits… and then ultimately could I clear Act II. By the time I reached the end of Act II though I was well past my point of caring about the event. All of this nonsense did lead me to run up a softcore Toxic Rain character and spend all of my currency on it… before realizing that my general problem with these characters is how squishy they end up feeling. That ability is phenomenal during the campaign, but requires way the hell too much investment to feel decent in maps, or at least as a second character after having played a super tanky righteous fire character for months.

Will I do this nonsense again in the future? Honestly I have no clue. I don’t actually enjoy playing in the event, but I did really enjoy watching streamers competing for various prizes on day one. I did not start until the morning of day two and even then only because there was an MTX to be had. If GGG keeps doing cosmetic prize support for these events… I will probably keep throwing my face into this particular wood chipper. That is so long as the bar of entry stays sufficiently low. I am not a member of the “hard content is my kink” club, and in truth I would rather play super chill content so that I can happily be listening to an audiobook while I play it. More than anything right now I am looking forward to the start of season three in Last Epoch on the 21st. I know Path of Exile II lands on the 29th, but I will probably not be done with Last Epoch by then, and if I do play the third pseudo-league in that game I will be starting much later.

Did you play any of the Gauntlet? How far did you make it? Drop me a line below.

Guardian Maps and Plant Invasions

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I tell you friends… I did not expect the Path of Exile community to be as pure as it is sometimes. Time is immeasurable… but some time ago I played in a private league event that SirGog was organizing, and I set my global channel to the one that is used by the folks who played in that event. Thing is… I just never set it back to a different global so I have been there and active during several leagues. As a result my Path of Exile experience is a bit skewed from the standard one, and I have never met a more supportive group of strangers in my life. I’ve witnesses for ages when someone needs something, asking out to global and someone almost always fulfilling that request. So when I have found a rare hideout in one of my maps for example, I always message global to see if anyone wants it. The other day I got to within 3 maps of completing the final sub goal of Grinding Gear Goals and asked if anyone had three guardian/conqueror maps I could buy from them. Within seconds I got a few invites and the first person who got to me, would not even take payment for them. It was because of them that I finished this achievement so easily and I am immensely thankful.

As far as Unreal Undertakings… I went for one of the more annoying options but it did go along with something I was trying to do already. Essentially I ran five blueprints with four wings unveiled and in order to do that… I had to grind up a bunch of levels of various skills on assorted rogues. It went fast enough and I have effectively learned that it takes 4 Tier 4 Contracts to hit Tier 5 in a skill, so I could essentially pre-stage a bunch of stuff and have it ready to bulk grind through contracts. Once I finished leveling everything, it legitimately did not take me terribly long to chain through five sets of grand heists and finish up the achievement. However… I think I might have hit the wall on how much I am going to accomplish during this league. There are a few of them like the Infamous Mercenaries one that I will probably accidentally complete since I only have one of those left to find… but then there are others where I would have to devote more effort to completing them than I feel like it. I could pay for a bunch of uber carries to knock that one out… but also I am not sure I care enough about that.

In other news I finished up Space Oddity on Monday night, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I don’t think it is anywhere near as good as Space Opera was, but that is not for lack of trying. I think the narrative was just a bit messier than the first one, that had a fairly clear call to action and then a sequence of events that played out in a logical order. With Space Oddity, there was this whole messy middle of the book where things just felt like they flailed a bit… which only seemed to accentuate the “world salad” nature of this series where every sentence is desperately trying to be profound and funny at the same time. It did however stick the landing though and the end of the book was wonderful, so flailing aside it is still worth the read. I just struggled for awhile to push through it until I started the care about the outcome. Maybe if I had read it back to back with the first one like Thalen did, it would have been a different experience.

Last night I started Overgrowth by Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire. I think what I have realized is that I just really love her writing style, because I would rank the Newsflesh series under the Mira Grant pseudonym and the Alchemical Journeys series among my favorite books ever. The characters in overgrowth feel familiarly adjacent to some of the characters that I came to love specifically in the Newsflesh series. I am deeply interested to see how things turn out when the invasion actually starts. I am not entirely certain how far I made it last night compared to the length of the book… which is admittedly the problem in listening to an audiobook being fed to me through my private plex server. It isn’t real great and indicating how much is left, but it feels like I am barely through the beginning of the book and sleep claimed me pretty freaking early last night around 9 pm.

In other news unrelated to anything to this point… I started playing Hell Clock which is what if Hades were actually an ARPG and not just an action game. So far I am really enjoying it and I love that it is so honest about difficulty levels and that if you are struggling on a boss… the game is not intended to be that way. I also greatly love that you can just disable the time pressure which is huge for me personally. I have a weird hang up about being timed while doing things, that dates back to third grade mathematics and these awful things called “mad minutes” that effectively ruined my brain for math from that point forward. You can just disable the 7 minute timer… and the game will STILL warn you when you are too poorly equipped to ride the ride. For example I got to a point in the first level where it warned me that even though I had disabled the timer… I should probably go back to town and buy some equipment before moving forward. I appreciate that level of bluntness greatly in a video game.

As far as other things in my life… I am just trying to seep back into a normal routine. I had one of my best friends that I consider my legitimate sibling offer to come stay with me this coming week. I cannot fully explain how much that means to me, but also… I would rather get together at a time when I was not actively feeling miserable. I am not sure I am capable of truly experiencing joy right now. I would rather get together at a time when I am not so broken inside.

Desperately Seeking Guardians

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Good Morning Folks. This weekend I mostly spent my time listening to an audiobook and trying to chip away at league challenges in Path of Exile. My sad little totem is slowly growing bigger as I knock things out. At this point I am sitting at 29 of 40 completed and quite possibly the largest sub item is that I managed to hit level 100. This is the fourth character overall that I have taken all the way to the maximum level, largely because it either requires a stupid amount of grinding… or paying someone to power level you. I would be willing to bet all of those level 100 squishy builds that you see on the ladder… paid someone to get them there because a single death can set you back several hours worth of progress. Once I clear level 98… I pretty much have an Omen of Amelioration on me at all times and if I take a death in a map… I abandon that map. I believe I hit level 100 on Friday when I was home sick and chilling on the sofa between moments when my body was actively trying to kill me.

I knocked a few achievements out this weekend, namely I bought a set for Uber Atziri and was able to knock that out without much issue. I had tried earlier in my leveling journey and she wrecked me at one point during the fight where I got clipped by two of her big rings at once. The other thing that I knocked out was Cross Contamination which involves doing two league mechanics at the same time, and the final one that I did was killing an Essence monster while being buffed by a tempest. I did the scarab that gives you a tempest on your map and a bunch of essence scarabs to force several and waited until I had the buff and then popped the essence monster and burned it down as quickly as I could. I think the highest I have ever gotten during a league is 34 challenges, and I hope to be able to do at least that well. I have no interest in running uber bosses, but given that I am sitting on a stack of currency I could probably pay for carries to get that knocked out.

The one that I am struggling through right now is gear grinding goals. Hitting level 100 was a bit part of that progress and the 1000 maps and 100 maps with a Mercenary I accomplished pretty easily just while doing other things. That left me with a few options. Since I am not well suited for bossing, the 30 uber pinnacle bosses was a non-starter. Similarly whiel I have a new appreciation for the Labyrinth after the shit show of ascension options in Path of Exile II… that does not mean that I want to run uber lab enough times to use the divine font 70 more times. That left me with Guardian/Conqueror maps and after burning through all of them that I had sitting in my bank I am at 40 of 50. My goal is to use my stash of scouting reports and the fat stack of saved up Kirac missions to fish for the last 10. The big problem here is that they have to be 80% quant or higher. This means that not only is a crapshoot that you find a guardian map on Kirac… but you have to find one with high quant that does not have a mod that bricks your build. I think I have 60 of the normal scouting reports, and 40 of the vaal ones… so in theory between those two stacks I should be able to find 10 maps that I can actually run.

The one that is quite possibly the hardest to complete is Infamous Instigators. This requires you to defeat 15 different Infamous mercenaries. I never run from fights, and I cannot remember the last time a Mercenary defeated me… so in theory my reputation should be just about maxed out. However I seem to find infamous mercs every twenty maps or so… and then it only counts if it is a version you have not already killed. In theory I could probably start banning specific types in the hope that maybe it might influence what I get next… but the problem is that it is not like all of the missing mercs are of the same type. I wish there was a scarab or a node on the tree that gave you a higher chance of encountering infamous mercs… but sadly that is not a thing. I just need to grind more maps in the rare hope of finding these stupid things so I can find my last three.

Another annoying one is Unreal Undertakings, which requires you to effectively do the rare versions of various league content. Defeating Settlers bosses was pretty easy because I have been running shipments trying to get divine orbs, and have had enough interdicted that I managed to kill several pirates. Breachstones similarly were super easy and I just bought five of the cheapest ones off the currency exchange. For Tier 4 Harvest Seeds I simply forced Harvest onto my map and then also ran a Harvest Scarab of Cornucopia which shockingly gave me more than one T4 beast per each harvest I ran with it. So between two of these scarabs I had knocked out the achievement. All of the rest of these kind of suck. Abyssal Depths for example there is no way to really force one to happen because you are going to get way more Spires than Depths. Domain of Timeless Conflict is an option but you have to run at least 4 emblems and two of the emblems are stupidly expensive. I finished a full Simulacrum without much issue and could in theory just buy 3 more and hope that I can run all 15 waves of them… but they take a stupid amount of time. I have been leveling my rogues and in theory I could run 4 wing Blueprints and probably knock that out pretty easily… but again it will take dedicated time.

The problem with all of this is that I am going to have to sacrifice making currency to finish these out. Right now most of the divines that I am making is through selling resonators and fossils and then converting that from chaos to divines. My preferred method of play is to alternate between filling up my sulphite on some maps, and then dive down into delve around 300 depth and burn it back down to zero before going up and mapping again. However nothing I am doing in delve… can really help me complete anything left on my list save for maybe Aul fights… which do count as pinnacle bosses. However I have only found two Auls so far this league, and it feels like they maybe made them a bit more rare to find. Normally going horizontal at 200ish depth will get you tons of them… and I am just not lucking out into much in the way of Primordial Cities. Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can wrap before August 21st when the Last Epoch season starts, because from that point forward… it is going to be real hard to get me interested in Path of Exile grinding.

I am thankful though to have mindless things like this to focus on… because it makes me think less about the general state of my life. I have an appointment with a financial planner today, to help me sort out what to do with insurance and such and how best to handle it. This week and next week are going to be super fucking hard… because Friday is our wedding anniversary, and next week is her birthday. We have a thing planned for her birthday so I will at least be seeing other human beings that day. I plan on taking both days off from work because I will likely not be functional in either case. Anyways… the last month… has been fucking hard, but I am managing.

Kinfall and Eternity

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Good Morning Folks. I had a really fun night with Ammo, Ash, Sita, and Sol running fractals and actually attempting to finish our tier 1 progression. The problem with that however is that I took exactly zero screenshots while we were doing things, so instead you get this generic placeholder that I took this morning while finishing off yesterday’s dailies. Our Thursday night shenanigans have been something that I very much look forward to each week. Occasionally they also extend out into Friday night nonsense, but not every single week. I got to test out my new headset which worked pretty well, save for the fact that it blocks out a lot of external sound… making my voice sound odd in my own head while I am talking. I went with a Corsair wireless headset, and the only reason why I had never used something like this previously… is I always tried to keep my headphones pretty open ear in case my wife needed to talk to me about something. If nothing else it beats the heck out of the lid mic on my laptop when I am downstairs.

Since I never shared a photo of me actually USING Eternity, here is that thing. I actually used it quite a bit last night because we tried the new Kinfall Fractal and the final boss is a bit of a damage sponge. I had to rapidly flip between my two weapons so that I could do sufficient breakbar damage to keep us alive. We got better after our first attempt, because we went into the fight completely blind. Mostly it is a melee fight because everyone has to stay stacked up in range of these two bubbles that protect you from environmental damage. Greatsword has two breakbar abilities, and Longbow one… and I needed all of them in order to burn through that bar as quickly as possible, especially in that final invulnerability phase. It was fun… but probably had about 50% more hitpoints than it needed for a Tier 1 Fractal. It wasn’t so much that the fight was complicated… it just got busy over time.

I’ve knocked out all of the weeklies already, but one of the aspects I love of them is there is always one that requires you to kill 100 enemies of a specific type. This often causes me to rack my brain trying to figure out where I could do this most efficiently, and this time around one of the types was Inquest. This immediately made me think of the Living World Season 4 zone Sandswept Isles, which is the last time we had any major involvement with fighting against the Inquest. There is an entire area of the zone that is pretty much nothing but Inquest mobs. While I was out there an event was firing up to defeat a boss named Zohaqan which is something that I had never participated in. The weeklies specifically often put me in these situations where I am getting exposure to content that I have never actually taken the time to do. When I was clearing Living World Season 4, I was burning through the content so that I could move on to Icebrood Saga. This is the thing about playing catch up in a game like this, is that you really do not spend as much time experiencing the content as you would when it is fresh and new. The Wizards Vault is this excellent way of forcing you to go back and focus on things like this.

The bite sized nature of the game makes me way more willing to just lean into content that is happening in whatever zone I happen to be in. That really is the secret sauce of what makes Guild Wars 2 so good. You start out with one goal in mind, but then are set down a path of doing a bunch of other interesting things… because you just so happen to be there at the right time for them to be firing off. Events fire off at a consistent enough schedule that you CAN seek out specific events, but you can also just pop into a zone and ride along with the current doing whatever the heck happens to be going on at that moment. I often operate in both modes while playing these games, and I am happy that this one supports a gameplay style where I don’t have to have a fixed purpose… but can still find purposeful things to do.

Anyways! I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I will probably be diving into another book and playing some more Path of Exile since I am less than three pips away from level 100.