Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

The Broken Elegy

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was “a lot,” and I have survived, but sleeping was a bit of a mess because of the pain. I’ve been working on a new side project in Path of Exile. It largely started because there is a new belt called the Screams of the Dessicated, and the gimmick is that you lose access to your utility flasks but gain at least one permanent shrine buff. Only some of these shrines have any real value, which means the market is flooded with a bunch of belts that the average player has no interest in. I was curious what a Greater Skeletal Shrine would feel like on a proper minion build, and right now, my favorite minion base is Servant of Arakaali… but you only get to play that during the Phrecia league. My second favorite minion base is Guardian, and as a result, I rolled a brand new character and started leveling so that I could play with the belt.

The other thing that I noticed is there are a limited number of folks building around a brand new Unique called Broken Elegy that drops from Saresh, the new boss of the Mirage league. I’ve completely yolo’d my build in its current state and have pivoted towards going down the staff block path, and running the new staff with Servant of Decay, another chestpiece that spawns a bunch of interesting minions that inflict withered on targets, which should buff my chaos damage. The only realistic way for me to get Envy on my build was to lean into Aul’s Uprising, and since the cheapest one already had Death Attunement on it, it allowed me to respec my tree a bit to free up some points. I went with a screams belt that gives me Greater Skeletal Shrine and Replenishing Shrine, the latter essentially replacing any reliance I might have on Clarity or Vitality. Lastly, I picked up a cheap minion gem helm that I have my utility minions in, like Animate Guardian, Stone Golem, and Carrion Golem.

I have no clue how well this is going to work. I need to hit level 78 and pick up some more dexterity somewhere before I can equip the chestpiece, and I am in Act 10, working through the final bits of the campaign. So far, however, it feels amazing. I am running Leap Slam instead of Shield Charge, and also running a Frost Blink so that I have my comfy two movement abilities setup. I leap into a pack, convocate my Sentinel of Radiance, and then start furiously summoning raging spirits as I also generate shrine skeletons and ceaseless flesh zombies from the staff. The Carrion Golem buffs everything, and minion jewels are making it so that everything has a decent chance to poison on hit… and the various stuff buffing chaos damage output is pretty much melting everything. Bosses especially just sort of evaporate right now, and my AG is running Asenath’s Gentle Touch, so corpses are also exploding, helping with the clear. The entire package feels really dumb, and I am curious how well the transition into maps is going to go.

It has been quite a bit since I last updated anything about Path of Exile, and over the weekend, I finished out my Atlas and got my Four Voidstones. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the current state of the new Atlas. For the most part I like it, but I feel like the fog of war needs to go, so that players can at least see where they want to go. When you start getting maps that you cannot run, because you cannot get to the node on the atlas, it is a bit frustrating. For example, one of my friends needed the six-link bench craft, and I had no clue where the Silo map was located, so I just sort of blindly fumbled around until I found it. Being able to easily swap between maps is pretty great, and I still need to finish doing a “blob” as they are being colloquially called in each of the quadrants for one of the quests. Unfortunately, Astrolabes seem to drop rather infrequently from map bosses, so I am going to have to ultimately buy some to finish out that quest.

The biggest upgrade that I have made to my Righteous Fire character is building out the Foulborn Red Dream setup, which involves buying the rather expensive gem, and then tattooing a bunch of strength nodes in the vicinity to instead be Fire Resistance. This, combined with everything else, really gives you a significant boost in life totals. My maximum life is now sitting at 8219, giving me an active pool of 7734 once you take into account my vitality arrogance setup. Realistically, I probably have enough sources of regeneration to comfortably drop vitality, but I just have not done so. The next big swap would be adding some clusters so that I could run Maelevolence, which would involve dropping vitality finally. I’ve not really felt like I needed to do this, so I have been lazy and not done it. I think I have the cluster jewels in my dump tab and could probably get it up and running without much issue. Maybe when I hit 100, I will do that thing.

Other than the Red Dream setup, the biggest upgrade is swapping my Immortal Flesh out for a Cord Belt. Cord Belts are a new base that drops from the Mirage content, and their big new thing is that it allows an anoint. So instead of using an Elder Stygian Vise, I sought out a Cord Belt with the same sort of rolls you normally look for. Everything else is mostly just getting better versions of things I already had, like I now have a proper Elder Helmet, slightly better corrupt for Cloak of Flames, and a full 10% Nebulis, which gives me 450% increased Elemental Damage. I keep getting slightly better regen gloves from the Breach Tree and swapping those out as I find them, then selling my previous version for some divines. My build can do pretty much anything I would want to do with it, including Nightmare Maps… so obviously the first thing I wanted to do was run up an alt, which gives you the Guardian I spoke about first.

All told, I am pretty happy with where I am in almost everything. My main tree is Niko, Ore, Harvest, and Breach and it feels great. My secondary atlas is Einhar, Ritual, Beyond, and Heist, which also feels great. I am thinking about setting up my third tree to be heavily focused on Legion, because there are incubators specific to the league mechanic that I would love to get, so I could start getting coins more regularly. Delve still provides, and Fossils represent my primary source of income right now. I am hovering around the 200 depth and going horizontal to look for bosses. I still need a Doryani map from the Vaal boss, and I am always down for taking out an Aul for some of the big-ticket items. Mirage league has been a blast, and Ace and I were talking about it last night, and how this is probably the furthest they have gotten. At this point, I am mostly focused on challenges so that I can hopefully get another fancy totem pole.

How has your league been going? Between all of the medical stuff that I have been dealing with, mine has been going a bit slower than I would have liked. Additionally, next week we have the release of the Last Epoch Season 4, and I will be spending a lot of time playing that at least for a week or so. I will also be getting adjusted to the routines of chemotherapy which might throw a monkey wrench in pretty much everything.

Importance of the Journey

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I love Last Epoch, but one of the things that I have lamented for a while is that there just does not feel like there is enough to do in the game. So as a result, I have a couple of good weeks and then bounce because I run out of things that I actually care to do. On Tuesday nights, Ace and I have what we refer to as “Sibling Time” and more often than not lately it just ends up with us hanging out and chatting while we are doing out own things. Ace has been enjoying Path of Exile more than normal, but also was talking about how much they were looking forward to Last Epoch. At this point, I dug out my old lament, which led to us trying to dissect why it is that Last Epoch does not have the staying power that Path of Exile does. After some back and forth, I think we landed on the “why” behind this statement.

Ace and I have had a lot of bonding moments over the years. There is a natural back and forth between a tank that I always played and a healer that they always played. There is also the bonding of growing up in oddly similar circumstances, despite being in wildly different states. However, I would say probably our most pivotal bonding experience was a shared love of Diablo, and quite frankly, were it not for them and the fun that I had playing Diablo III Seasons, I would probably not be the ARPG junkie that I am today. I will always be deeply thankful for them indoctrinating me into the cyclical nature of Diablo III Seasons, and quite honestly, it was an event that I looked forward to more than pretty much anything else on the gaming calendar. I cannot say with any certainty which season was the first season we did this ritual together, but it became sacred.

So much of this experience centered around the Diablo III Seasons Journey, which was a series of achievements that ultimately unlocked some sort of cosmetic item. Generally speaking, this was some sort of a pet or a portal effect, and in the grand scheme of modern MTX, it was rather meager. What it did more than anything was give us something to focus on other than just grinding mobs and explosions of loot. Sure, we only got a week or two out of a Diablo III season, and by the end of that first weekend, we would have 90% of the list checked off, but it did force us to do some outliers in order to complete everything. This is what Last Epoch is missing, some sort of long ranged goal that we can focus on during the season and that pushes us to do specific content in order to knock out individual achievements.

I’ve also realized that is really what changed regarding my interaction with Path of Exile. Starting with the Sanctum league I started caring about trying to complete league challenges. This was an easy carryover from Diablo III, since I was already in that mindset, and for each league from that point forward, I have purposefully tried to get enough challenges completed to earn the little totem pole for my hideout. It started with just attempting to get one at all, to now where I am specifically trying to finish at least 34 of 40 each league, so I can earn the same size as I have in the last several leagues. I’ve never actually completed 40 of 40, because it involves doing a bunch of bossing, which is not really something I enjoy, given that bossing characters are different from mapping characters. It still gives me something to focus on and has pushed me outside of my comfort zone and forced me to learn a bunch of leagues’ worth of content that I had never interacted with previously.

Even Diablo IV has something similar in the form of the battlepass, and while I have issues with its specific implementation… it still gives a long tail to the league. There are specific things that you can focus on doing in order to unlock a sequence of cosmetic items. They made it worse since, in order to do most of these, you have to pay money to unlock them, but it still exists in one form or another. Last Epoch does not have something like this. Sure, Last Epoch has a ladder, but I am not the sort of competitive player who gives a shit about this sort of thing. What it is missing is some sort of long grind that has a destination in mind and rewards some sort of bauble for doing so. There is a certain measure of bragging rights in being able to show off your pet from a season, years later, after it is no longer available. Not that Last Epoch MTX are generally that great… it still would give me a bit more focus towards pushing down to specific levels in the Monolith, completing dungeons, or something that would push me out of the standard practice of playing for a few weeks and then going right back to Path of Exile.

Right now, the closest thing that Last Epoch has is the Forgotten Knights path of killing Harbingers and fighting Aberroth. However, this is often something that you can do in a single weekend with a good enough build and does not really require you to go out of your way in order to accomplish it. I feel like this is the equivalent of unlocking your Atlas and Voidstones in Path of Exile, and less a destination and more the starting place of the “true” endgame. I feel like Last Epoch really needs something that will take a few weeks to chip through in order to keep us grinding well past the natural expiration date of one of their seasons. I’ve jokingly said that I really like grinding and loot explosions, but it seems like the thing that really keeps me engaged is a series of tasks to tick off. I think this is in part why I love daily quests so much, because it gives me a reason to play the game and something specific to focus on without having to make any real decisions for myself. Similarly, this is why I have engaged in so many Legendary gear grinds in Guild Wars 2, because it gives me an overarching goal to focus on. Last Epoch really needs something more than trying to get slightly better gear, and I am hoping that, at some point, they give us some equivalent to all of these systems that I talked about today.

All of that said, I am still really looking forward to the launch of Last Epoch Season 4 when it drops on the 26th of this month. However, I still expect to mostly play for a few weeks and then go right back to Path of Exile.

Explosive Searing Bond

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I fell into a book and sort of forgot that the world existed. The book is a complete and total mess, but it is a compelling one… that I might talk about at some point. I spent the night largely playing Path of Exile, and attempted to go downstairs in the hopes that I would have cats snuggling with me. Gracie took the bait, but sadly, Josie did not. I’ve been careening towards destiny when it comes to the medical side of things, and I think I am just about out of hope that we have a shot at the easy path. I will probably talk more about this in another post at some point, once we have a predetermined path that I know for certain we are going down. However, today I am going to an orientation class on chemotherapy, and how to take care of the port they will be installing into me… so none of these things are doing especially good things for my current mental health. Neither is the book that I am consuming, but at least by falling into another world, I am not having to think about myself and my issues.

Yesterday, one of the big changes that I made with my character was that I replaced all of the jewelry that I had been wearing in order to fix my glaring Chaos Resistance problem. Since I got a +2 gems corrupt on my books, that took away my reliance on needing All Skill/All Fire Gems on my Necklace, allowing me to open up the suffixes to get some chaos resistance on it. Mostly, I needed Dex, Int, and Chaos Reists and was willing to sacrifice just about anything else to get them. One of the rings comes with some downsides, but since I do not care about evasion rating, and that is a negligible amount of phys damage that I am adding to anything hitting me… it was worth it to get the massively elevated stats the ring otherwise comes with. This also pushed me to 400 strength, which is the next breakpoint of the increased damage per 100 strength implicit on my gloves.

Another big change that I made yesterday was that I swapped the colors on my helmet and switched over to the new Searing Bond of Detonation gem. This is pretty interesting and I patterned my gems off some of the other people playing this ability. I really need to swap my helm at some point for one with Burning Damage on it, but for the moment thing seem to be pretty solid. The place that I really notice this is clearing in Delve because I am constantly dragging laser beams behind me that deal burning damage to everything that gets close to them. Bossing also seems much faster than with Fire Trap, because I set down six totems and they all explode at the same time. I am not entirely certain this is going to have the top end that Fire Trap can reach, but it is certainly fun to play with for the moment, and it is easy enough to recolor my helm if I want to swap back to Fire Trap. I went with Less Duration for the imbue mostly because it was one of the cheapest options that actually did anything. Since I am self exploding the totems by oversummoning them, it isn’t like the duration actually does much… but the more multiplier does.

If nothing else, it is entertaining to see all of these totems making cool patterns as I run around the map. Searing Bond, in general, is such a weird ability, and the fact that they all explode means I no longer really have to care about totem placement. I think with the normal version of this, you want to create a crisscrossing box pattern so that the beams hit as many targets as possible. All I really care about is that every third summon, I am causing all six to explode. The baked-in negative of this abiltiy however, is that I am lifetapping a heck of a lot of damage, which is a noticeable hit when I summon something. Once I pushed up into the 6k for max health, this cost seemed far more negligible and seemed perfectly fine. Unfortunately, the jewelry swap, though, was a hit to some of my total regeneration, but I could upgrade my immortal flesh to get that back.

All in all, I am pretty happy with the state of the build, but that said… I am feeling a bit of wanderlust, and I think before long, I will probably roll a second character of the league. I am not entirely certain what I want to be playing, but I will sort something out. Holy Hammers still is calling my name.

Ninety Max and Block Based

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Good Morning Folks. It’s been a bit of a weird league so far. I am slowly beginning to push down into Delve and going through the “breaking the depths” process that I ultimately do every league. There is this back and forth as you collect Azurite to spend on buffs… to go deeper… to get more Azurite… to spend more on buffs. My main Atlas tree is largely designed around trying to make sure I have Niko and Breach in every single map, in addition to having a bunch of map drops in order to sustain my forward momentum. This works pretty great, and I am focused largely on Unstable Breach since you can have more than one of them in a single map, instead of Hives, where you seem to only get the one. This is in large part to keep funding my building out of Delve and, at the same time, get me access to some of the nifty Foulborn Uniques. I’m also trying to slowly perfect my regeneration gloves that I am using the tree to craft.

The biggest problem that I am having with Delve is that it is a bit of a poverty league for me, and all of my normal instincts are busted. Traditionally, the bulk of your reliable currency from Delve comes in the form of selling Resonators. These can be found in the darkness and also purchased from Niko directly. However, something weird has happened, and it is different from what I thought would be the case. They removed Fossils from all of the league content except for Delve, and as a result, this has greatly lowered the demand for Resonators. I thought this might cause the price of Resonators to spike, but instead it turned Fossils into the expensive component of these crafts. Instead of going for the crates, I find myself targeting Fossil and Elemental nodes specifically because they tend to pay out the most Fossil drops. Maybe this all changes in a few weeks as we get into the late league economy, because usually delve merch spikes at some point. For the moment, I am holding onto every single Resonator that I have in the hopes that maybe the market flips. This, unfortunately, does not give me a lot of liquid currency to throw around on upgrades as I would normally have at this point.

I am still making upgrades, but they are just a bit more meager than they would normally be because I don’t have much in the way of divines to leverage. The biggest upgrade from yesterday is that I picked up a six-link cloak of flames, which allowed me to fully build out my Righteous Fire Links. I also made another attempt at a six-link helm and had to settle once again when I ran out of Essences, but did end up with a slightly better helm as a result. I also moved into the block-based setup with an absolute “settle” shield, which only has 3% life on block but does have +1 totems, which might be useful if I ever try the whole Searing Bond of Detonation structure at some point. I also picked up Annihilation’s Approach, which allowed me to swap over to Purity of Flames, and I picked up a cheap Nebulis, which I will hopefully upgrade at some point.

So the biggest improvement for my build overall is that thanks to the +2 aura gems on the boots, and +2 from a jewel on my tree… I have been able to hit 90% elemental resistance, which is a significant survival break point. Next up, as I hit the next few levels, is to go for the 6 Life Mastery bonuses, which should be a good chunk of life gained. The +2 gem levels on my boots have removed my reliance on an amulet to get +levels, so that I will hopefully be using the amulet and both rings to fix my chaos resistance problem. At some point, I would love to be able to solve my Chaos Resistance with just my ring slots and pick up a Defiance of Destiny for more tankyness, because it has been a few leagues since I have used one of those. The two biggest problems with my build at the moment are the fact that I have negative Chaos Resistance, and that I have not done anything to start adding on Endurance Charges, nor do I have the Amulet Anoint to gain them.

Before I can do anything about any of this, however, I really need to solve my cash flow problems. For the moment, I am making tiny bits of currency by selling random stuff. It is wild how well decent shield bases seem to sell, but my guess here is that people are using these as part of recombination nonsense. Initially, I would think these were being shifted to Shaper influence somehow and then turned into life on block shield projects, but I am not sure if that is currently cost-effective. I think the core problem is that I am just not far enough into league progression to start making reasonable currency. I think as I get down to t16 maps, and some voidstones, a lot of this is going to resolve itself. For the moment, I am trying ot build out as functional a character as I can with the resources I have access to.

Last night I finished up Tier 9 maps, and will be starting Tier 10s. I am spiraling out, finishing a tier at a time and then doing various witness and influence maps as I get access to them. The only problem with Mirages is that, effectively, you are doing two maps, so they take almost twice as long to complete. I’ve built out a second tree with focuses on Einhar, Ritual, and Beyond, and am going to start trying to farm some of the high-dollar items from each of those leagues. Mostly, I am in that place where I just need a lot more Atlas points to be able to do anything effectively. All of this just requires time spent in-game, and by this weekend, I should be in a pretty decent spot. Mirage is just a mechanic that takes longer than normal.