Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Visions of Flailing

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Good Morning Folks. I have no clue what I am doing anymore. I have my first counseling session this afternoon so we will see how that goes. I am still having the minor hallucinations that my wife is still here in this home, but like it is more a feeling than actually seeing or experiencing anything. Many folks have told me this is normal, and honestly it probably is. My brain is hardwired to expect her to be here and that does not go away in a few weeks time. I also have a meeting with a financial advisor in a few weeks to talk about how best to handle a bunch of stuff that I am dealing with. Most of which is in a holding pattern until we have a death certificate. Everything needs a death certificate and I am mostly just trying to function until that point. Tomorrow I have taken the day off because I have to move everything out of her classroom, so that they can prepare it for another teacher to move in. Thankfully her teacher pals have offered to pack everything up for me, and it will just be a matter of trucking things home and stacking the boxes up in the garage for now.

This morning I am probably going to be wildly flipping back and forth between my real world stuff… and gaming stuff because that is effectively how my brain works right now. I am latching onto distractions like a life raft, and we got some good distractions in abundance this week. Guild Wars 2 released a reveal trailer for their upcoming Visions of Eternity expansion and it looks awesome. Whoever is responsible for the motion graphics for their expansion logos… they need a fucking raise because this one is the best yet. SOTO and Janthir Wilds were both awesome, but the story being told by this logo is freaking phenomenal. I am really looking forward to the updates to the Skimmer mount because right now… it is the one that I use the least unless I have to be doing underwater stuff. I’m also looking forward to more shenanigans with the Inquest because they are one of my favorite bad guy groups. I am not sure how excited I am for more Elite specs, because quite honestly… I rarely change my builds and something is going to have to be really freaking cool to get me to change things up.

Depending upon how the counseling session goes, I might be ready to dip my toes back into Thursday night nonsense in Guild Wars 2. I have not mentioned any of this to Ammo, Sol, Ash, Thalen, or Sita… but I might do that throughout the day. I know there are a bunch of weeklies that we would even work on, like I could tag up and run bounties to knock out that one. I am also down with more Fractals or Dungeons because there are so many of those that I have not run. I’ve come to realize that my go to for knocking things out in Guild Wars 2 is running rifts in the Janthir area, because they are so much easier to get to than the Rifts in the SOTO area. They area great way to knock out general kills, defiance breaks, combos, and a few other general things because when you start one up… you almost always have a large group. Quite honestly Rifts in general are one of the best things that they have added to the game because they are so easy to get going.

Over in Path of Exile I am still slowly grinding up levels. I dinged level 99 yesterday over lunch and am starting to chip away at the large grind towards level 100. For now I am just pouring my last few points into 5% life nodes. They are generically useful, give me slightly more righteous fire damage… and quite a bit of just general survival. I might do something more clever but I can sort that out once I am actually level 100. I am trying to decide if I want to make a second character or not. I was running up an Elementalist to play with the Golems and was contemplating doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation power charge stacker to see how that goes. I would like to have some sort of a bossing focused character just to rip through invitations faster than righteous fire. There are a ton of challenges that I still need to work on to get my sad little totem pole a bit bigger before the end of the league.

There are a bunch of challenges that are pretty close to wrapping up. Some of them I just need some luck, like finding Infamous Mercs that I can steal gear from that I have not already stolen. Then there are things like the fact that I need to do a Cortex where my merc survives, and I think if I switch to my tanky bossing merc I should be good there. Sanctified Scarabs is in theory just me running a bunch of scarabs from various different league mechanics on a map with a minimum of 80% item quantity which should be reasonable enough to do. My Einhar tree makes a pretty decent base for generic usage of other scarabs so I might start working on those tonight. Remarkable Realms is worse this league because it is 40 maps instead of running one of a specific set of maps. I think previously it was 18 maps in total… so I just need to churn through the maps that I have banked up in order to finish that one out. Either that or pick a map that is not heinous and run that one over and over. Most of the unique maps are annoying in one way or another. I should grab Kodra at some point and force him to run them with me so he also gets credit.

The other thing that I have contemplated… is streaming again. Mostly just as a way of interacting with other human beings while I am playing mostly single player gaming experiences like my beloved ARPGs. I have a pretty beefy gaming desktop and it would not be a big deal to stream while playing most of the games that I play. I used to really enjoy doing this, but it always got really weird and made me feel like I was making myself unavailable to my wife while I was doing it. Now that it is just me… I have lots of time to kill before sleep claims me. I can’t say that I would ever be a good streamer, and there is no way in hell that I will ever turn on a camera. Just thinking it might be something fun to dabble in again on the side. Mostly it is just one of those intrusive thoughts that has started appearing in my head and I am not sure if I am going to allow it to take purchase there or not. If I did stream it would be over on my sad little Twitch channel which I believe is still an affiliate. I streamed consistently enough during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online to actually qualify for that. Apparently I have $71.31 in payouts that I am due… that I sort of wish I could just send to a charity somewhere. Accepting subs always seemed really fucking weird.

I legitimately have no clue what I am doing half the time these days. I think once some of the looming things finally are dealt with… I will maybe begin to allow myself to develop a new normal, but right now everything is too damned fresh. I should really spend my weekends working through some of the things that I need to work through. One of my good friends mentioned a pen and paper game, so I might be tagging in on that soon. I also need to sort out a good place to paint and assemble some miniatures for that purpose. I just do not know what I am going to do long term with my life and I am trying to figure out a lot of things. Thanks for sticking around and reading my nonsense as I flail.

Unlocking the Rogues

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Good Morning Folks. I feel like I am starting to get back some of my gaming mojo. Since I do not really feel like running up a second character and gearing it… I am starting to invest some more effort into gearing out my Righteous Fire character. That said… you cannot stop me from being exceptionally cheap. One of the huge buffs would be to craft a helical ring… but in order to get a base that you can actually craft on that is not mirrored or split… they start at 110 Divines. I had not touched Heist in this league, but now find myself driven to start the process of unlocking things. There are honestly a bunch of really high dollar bases you can pull from grand heists that might make it interesting. A clean crafting base for a Simplex Amulet… is legitimately selling for a mirror for example. Basically it feels like it is time to start burning through my contracts and leveling up my rogues.

The problem with heist however is that I can never remember the rogue unlock order, so I am posting it here so I will have it in the future… and might end up throwing it over on my game tools page. Essentially you start out with three rogues Isla the Engineer, Karst the Lockpick, and Tibbs the Giant. Then in order to unlock the rest of the rogues you need to run contracts with specific ones in order to snag the next one. Isla is a dead end and unlocks nothing. Karts and Tibbs however each have their own trees to unlock so that you run a contract with each new rogue that you have unlocked until you finish out that branch of the three.

So last night I ran through the process of unlocking everything, and now I just need to level the rogues while collecting equipment. I could in theory just buy equipment from trade, but I am not even sure what I want. This is the piece where the depth of my heist knowledge falls apart because I have no clue what I should even be gearing them for. I think essentially skill speed is king, because the faster they can complete their actions the least amount of time that you need to stand around doing nothing. My friend Sloth recently did a stint on the heist crew of BPL so I might lean on his knowledge to help me get started.

Other than that I am still delving quite a bit. I still find this a terribly enjoyable mechanic where I can turn my brain off and soak in the experience points. I am getting really close to level 99, and since Delve is a pretty safe way of gaining experience I am trying to focus on getting that level before I do anything too outrageous. Essentially I am still slowly chipping away at the seasonal achievements and one of those will require me to hit level 100 to finish it off. I am slowly knocking out the infamous mercs achievement as I find them in maps. I have a big stack of Primordial Blocks maps that I am slowly working through using my Einhar tree with a Niko scarab. I am still hunting for that hideout, and I have seen it come up a few times on TFT but they always wanted 10 Divines for a portal. I keep hoping that at some point I will find it and I can be out of Primordial Prison. I legitimately would be rather running just about any other map… but I want that damned hideout.

Lastly I started trying to craft a new belt to replace my immortal flesh, and ended up settling on this one. Ultimately I would prefer to have one with level 22 enduring cry on it… but those are stupidly expensive and also hell to craft. I burned through a stack of resonators and fossils and about 6000 life essence before just sticking with this one and calling it good enough for now. I lost some regeneration but gained a heck of a lot of life thanks to that tasty 12% increased max life. This allowed me to pick up an abyssal jewel with corrupted blood immunity on it and drop the mastery from the tree that was giving me this. Which in turn allowed me to pick up another jewel socket on the tree and throw in another 8% Fire Multi/7% max life jewel this time with increased trap damage. I’m now over 7k max life and when I get my last two points I am probably just going for 5% life nodes on each of those and pushing that total up even higher.

I am also spending a little bit of time each day in Guild Wars 2, picking back up and working on my dailies and weeklies. I had fallen off the wagon hard with wizard chores before my world ended, so attempting to pick things back up. Guild Wars 2 similar to Path of Exile gives me little bits of focused gameplay and I appreciate that. I was in pretty much only long enough to knock out my fresh dailies yesterday, but in doing so I am starting to chip away at my weeklies. I might actually tag up one night and run bounties if there is not a group currently active to knock that one out quickly. Catching Of Mists and Monsters… and one that actually succeeds is going to be the challenge. Essentially my goal is to finish out my weeklies every week going forward, which means needing to start chipping away on them earlier than Saturday… since doing all of them in a weekend can often cause me to faceplant.

Anyways… I still am not okay, but I am maybe starting to get back into the swing of things. Yesterday was my first day back and it went okayish. Today is my first real day back in the office in five years… so here is hoping it also goes okayish.

Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die

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Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.

We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.

However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.

The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.

Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.

Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.

Golems, Brands, and Divines

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Good Morning Folks. The league challenge set of armor this time around is loosely based on the Shaper, since the Secrets of the Atlas expansion is all about Zana and the Shaper. I figured that I would use it for my second character of the league where I am essentially planning on doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation Elementalist with Heralds and Golems. I have done a version of this build before when it was the new overpowered hotness, and everything that I can tell is that the build colloquially known as “penis brand” is still extremely solid. Mostly I want something that can evaporate bosses but that is also somewhat fun to play. I can clear t17 maps with the greatest of ease on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, but the bosses themselves… are a bit of a pain in the ass. My idea is that I run the map itself on my most comfortable build, and then swap to my boss “deleter” to finish up the map. For the time being I have just been selling t17 maps, and t16.5s are super easy to run because you don’t have to deal with a pinnacle boss at the end of them.

I am not necessarily really following a guide of any sort when it comes to this build. I am largely patterning it off a character named Glacial_Golems in Mercenaries Trade League, however they went deeper into the minions aspect of the build that I am likely going to go. Additionally I want to probably run this with a shield of some sort so I can zoom around the map with shield charge, so that means I will probably go with a Void Battery and Malachai’s Loop instead of two batteries. Though by the time I get to that point I might have changed my mind. The big thing that the build I am loosely following the template of does that I will not be doing… is going into golem clusters. Instead I will likely be going into some sort of damage cluster setup because really… the golems are going to keep resurrecting themselves and I am fine with them being expendable buff bots. Some of the builds are going into a Forbidden Flesh/Flame setup to pick up the Forbidden Power ascendancy so that is also on the table.

For the moment however I am leveling with Storm Brand of Indecision because it is an excellent clearing brand. I think in an ultimate scenario I would be able to swap between Storm Brand and Penance Brand for clear vs bossing, however most of the builds seem to be leaning into physical damage scaling for Penance Brand which is not going to do much of anything for Storm Brand. Right now I am in act six and just a few zones into it. I started this character during the podcast on Saturday and got through Act 1 and 2 while we were recording. I then played it most of Sunday morning and at some point during the day swapped over to playing my RF Chieftain again to farm for awhile. All in all the character is pretty great, and it is pretty silly running around with four different buff golems at the same time. However they do not feel anywhere near as potential as running actual minions would at this point. I am mostly focused on getting fairly tanky Mercenaries so that they can hold aggro for me as I zip around the map, and that is working for now.

As far as RF Chieftain goes, I am still farming Primordial Blocks attempting to get the Hideout and alternating with Shipyard when I have burned through all of my maps. When I fill up on Sulphite, I swap over and farm Delve until I burn down my supply. This means I am not necessarily an efficient mapper or an efficient delver… but I am having fun doing a little of both. I am in the 150-200 range right now and I am honestly seeing raw divine drops reasonably often. Mostly I am chasing Cities, Fossils, and generic loot box nodes while picking up as much azurite as I can find along the way. I’ve unlocked pretty much everything that I intend to unlock and am not going to spend any more azurite on upgrades until I decide to go deeper. However I am probably easily go down to depth 300 with the current state of my upgrades. This allows me to essentially convert every drop of the blue stuff into profits as I buy resonators from Niko.

It seems like there are just not that many people Delving in this league. That combined with the fact that GGG did not introduce some new contorted meta crafting method in the Mercenaries league… has created a scenario where everyone wants resonators and fossils. Right now single slot resonators are going for between 3.5 and 4 chaos each, which is a pretty efficient azurite dump. This morning when I logged in, for whatever reason two slot resonators were going for 24 chaos each which seems wild to me. Three slots around 12 chaos which is also reasonable. I did not price check 4 slots since I did not have any but POE.Ninja says they are going for 70 chaos. This is probably too low because POE.Ninja tends to be extremely low on almost all currencies that are in demand given according to it 2 slots are 3 chaos each. Essentially for the moment this is printing money and I am converting up to Divines every so often to keep from losing the trade value. At this moment POE.Ninja claims that it is 230 chaos to a divine, which seems pretty high but who knows what happened over night.

The thing that I am doing to passively earn some currency is sending 25k Blue Zanthemum to Kalguur whenever I have both the gold and the crops to do so. I need to start disenchanting again so that I can keep my stockpile of dust up there, but essentially I send 25k crops and 25k dust and almost always get at least one Divine Orb in return. The inset above is an example of a shipment that I got back which takes around 3.5 hours to return. Essentially I have my entire farm cranking out this single crop, and have mostly reached the point of completely ignoring ore. I don’t really have any use for gear in return, so I need to sift through my other workers and see if they can be repurposed for either disenchanting or running maps. At some point I am going to burn through a bunch of my bulk maps that I am never going to run and see what thye will return. For now I am holding those in reserve in case Kodra needs them to hit his 115 of 115.

I did craft a new helm for my RF character, and got extremely lucky with a yolo recombine. Essentially I had been trying to throw harvest juice and resonators at elder helms on the Giantslayer base trying to get one with 20 Burning Damage and 20 Concentrated Effect. I know the new hotness is to use Archdemon Crowns, but I don’t have one… nor have I started heisting as of yet. At some point I plan on doing this and hopefully I will pick up a few of these bases to start this process all over again. Essentially it was easy for me to get 20 of one of the gems… but not on the same item so I crafted two bases… one of which also had 20% Life Regeneration Rate and then out of frustration… mashed them together with the unpredictable recombination and lucked out. I would love to have a useful stat on the item in place of Reflect…. but I am happy enough with it for the moment. The next craft I am probably going to work towards is making a better set of gloves with more regeneration on them. I have several tabs where I am set aside good bases for this process, and now that Kodra is playing a Str/Dex character I am setting aside good bases for him in the guild bank.

I am still having a heck of a lot of fun this league, so much so that I am struggling to attach to pretty much any other game. I played some Dune last night, but only really so that I could find enough power packs so that I can pay the upkeep on my base without having to worry about losing all of my stuff. At some point I should really just move all of my materials north to Tam’s central base and move in with him so I did not have to worry about keep my generators active anymore. I need to devote more time to leveling the skill tree… but also… I could just be doing big dumb fun in Path of Exile. For the moment.. mapping and delving are winning out. It is brain dead… but also really fucking relaxing which I seem to be needing at the moment. The problem with all of it however is there isn’t much that is actually exciting to be writing about, so as a result I have been way more radio silent than normal.