A Weekend of Upgrades

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Good Morning Folks! I played a heck of a lot of Path of Exile this weekend and a lot of that time was focused on gold acquisition to feed the league mechanic. I did some Photoshop magic to create a single screen that shows all of the parts of the town that I have maxed out. The only thing not shown here is the Recruiter which does not have its own doodad on the town view. Mining helped a lot because it means that I get gold from marking ore in my maps, which also means if I happen to find two nodes in a map it increases my gold gain significantly. Generally speaking, I am clearing 8k to 20k depending on a bunch of variables in each map but more often hover around the 10k mark. I still have my enchanter, disenchanter, mappers, and recombinators to max out before I have everything at the level cap of 11.

The thing is… I am not sure it is really worth pushing through to level everything up. Granted I have not put any effort into significantly upgrading my workers… but with capped shipping I seem to be largely getting the same results that I have always gotten. The main difference is I have three ships and all of the ports unlocked at this point. The league mechanic feels like it pays out significantly better in gear than it does in currency. This can be really cool as I will talk about a bit later when I go over my gear upgrades, but since gear isn’t selling amazingly well in this league due to the mechanic is generating so much of it… it is not like getting a ton of gear really helps your bottom line. So long as I get a few chaos per boatload I am mostly happy. I’ve yet to pull anything higher than an exalted orb from a shipment, and I think in truth I will be better served tweaking my map runners to be able to reliably do t16s.

That said occasionally you get some amazing gear from the mechanic. The gloves that I swapped to yesterday are better rolled than a pair that I was looking at on the market going for 8 Divines. I legitimately was contemplating making that purchase and I am so glad I did not given that I wound up with essentially the same thing for free. I’ve also been wearing league mechanic boots for a while now with no signs of finding reasonable upgrades. The big upgrade of the weekend though is that I sold a big ticket item and bought a rather expensive fractured sceptre base and then crafted it into a replacement weapon. Lastly, I swapped out my pseudo-six-link helm for a slightly better-rolled one. I had picked up my previous one for a steal and was able to flip it for 3 Divines when I only paid 1.5 Divines for the new one. For things like that I tend to overprice because I don’t necessarily care about a fast sale.

In other news, I ran into one of the new optional boss encounters that can show up in T16 maps. The Black Knight is in theory a replacement for the Black Morrigan encounter, but instead of showing up in the Viridian Wildwood, he shows up as a clickable hole in the ground called the Starfall Crater. Fighting him feels an awful lot like fighting Aul the Crystal King, so it was not a big deal to beat him since I have done that fight so many times down in Delve. I was hoping to get him to down Svalinn so I can make a dumb block build that triggers spellcasts… but mostly I just got a ton of Verisium and Runes. Really hoping that I can find a bunch more of him so I can try and farm the shield. All in all, it was a really fun optional encounter, similar to finding the Nameless Seer.

The biggest progress from the weekend is that I have completed the 115 normal and unique maps that make up the Atlas. On top of that, I have done Vinktar Square and am only lacking Doryani’s Machinarium from the challenge of running all of the unique maps. I am hoping a Doryani’s drops down in Delve soon because I am beelining to fight any bosses that I encounter down there. What prompted me to push through and buy the last few maps is that I needed the crafting recipes that they generated in order to craft my scepter. Truth be told, none of the maps were more than 20 chaos with Doryani being the outlier going for around 2 Divines. Now my focus really turns to trying to knock out some of the challenges that I am close to finishing up. Basically, my goal as always is to do enough challenges in order to unlock a totem pole for my hideout. Once I have done that… any progress after that is gravy.

Finishing out my 115th map also unlocked the last of the rewards in Kirac’s Vault, with that very last item being a simulacrum. One of the big changes that they made in this league is that Simulacrums essentially start 15 waves into the previous progress and cap out at 15 waves instead of 30. So essentially doing a 15 now is the same level of accomplishment as doing a 30 previously. I am a big fan of this change because it did previously feel like you spent a lot of time facerolling waves until they started to matter. I took a ton of deaths and basically lost any progress toward 97 that I had made… but managed to complete all fifteen waves. Truth be told in those last few waves… the trash mobs were WAY more difficult than the boss encounters. That said I did try really hard to split up Ominphobia and Kosis so that I did not have to be fighting them at the same time. I didn’t necessarily get anything amazing for my troubles but did manage to pull a few different copies of Megalomaniac.

I’ve not made it super far into Delve this league and am sitting around 150 depth. I have gotten several lucky divine drops from nodes, however, which has been great. Recombinators continue to be my most reliable method for earning a bunch of chaos quickly, and the currency exchange is freaking amazing. I need to spend more time down there, but the mapping has just felt better because it helps feed the league mechanic more efficiently. I’m mostly running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual strategy in maps and have lucked into one spawn of Black Morrigan that happily occurred when I was running a duplicating scarab so I got two copies. What has been shocking however is just how many Omens have been dropping from the map spawned ritual mobs. I’ve already pulled two Omen of Connections, a few Omen of Blanching, and pretty much every other more common Omen a half dozen times. The biggest challenge is that none of my trees have a lot of map drop support so sustaining maps is a big fraught at the moment.

All told however I am still having a freaking blast. This legitimately might be my favorite league even though the ground loot that is dropping in maps has not been that phenomenal. If I need money I can go farm up more resonators and fossils down in the dark, but for now, I am mostly able to afford anything that I really want. There are some upgrades that I still need… namely I have been trying to roll a large cluster jewel to replace the janky one that I am using currently. I also have a nice corrupted Cloak of Flame that I am slowly working on getting socketed and linked, but it is a bit of a stretch goal. I also have another Shaper Shield that I am occasionally trying to craft into something better than the one I am currently using. I like having some long-reaching goals though so I am not in any real rush to acquire anything. Getting my Six-Link chest due to getting Black Morrigan went a long way to improving my league experience. I also need to swap out some of my gems for Awakened versions, but it isn’t like I am struggling with anything currently.

I got a really nicely rolled Widowhail, and found a pretty nice quiver to go with it from the league mechanic… so I am starting to get that itch to try rolling a bow character. I’ve been stockpiling decent drops for that eventuality given that I seem to always end up wanting a bow character. I’m also contemplating trying to build something around Volcanic Fissure of Snaking again. Then there is the whole desire to try Lacerate of Haemorrhage Gladiator like literally everyone else in this league. Basically, I am starting to feel that alting itch, so I fully expect before the end of the week I will have rolled something new.

AggroChat #488 – Dawntrail Spoiler Show – Part One

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, and Thalen

Hey Folks!  For years we have had this tradition of recording a full spoiler show once all of the folks who are actively playing Final Fantasy XIV have completed the content.  We knew this would be an epic undertaking given that we never got around to recording a post-Endwalker show.  This is absolutely going to at a minimum be two shows…  maybe three depending on how well the next show goes.  We used to record these epic five-hour-long shows that I edited down into chunks…  but have thankfully since wised up to just splitting them between several weeks.  This week we cover everything that happens after the Endwalker MSQ credit roll until just before the halfway point of Dawntrail.  Be warned, this is a full spoiler discussion as we recount the tale and talk about various details in depth along the way.

Topics Discussed:

  • Post Endwalker Content
  • Estinien is Bad with Money
  • Once More to the Thirteenth
  • An Unlikely Mentorship
  • The Journey of the Dawnservant

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

A Week of Recession League

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did my obligatory “First Day of Blaugust” post and today I am back to my usual nonsense. As of today… specifically about seven hours from now… it will have been one full week of playing Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile. During that time I have made a ton of progress and quite possibly made it further in a shorter period of time than I have ever in the past. The League mechanic slowed me down a bit and it took me roughly 20 hours of play to get through the campaign into maps. It has taken me an additional 42 hours to reach the point where I feel like I am fully ready for endgame shenanigans. Path of Exile players hit these games freaking hard… and I have put in time before work, at lunch, and many hours after work to get where I am now.

At this point, I have completed all sixteen tiers of normal maps and a number of the unique maps leaving ten more of those to go. Two will be rather expensive as they always are because they unlock some meta crafts… but my mappers brought back Poorjoy’s overnight so that is another one I should be able to knock out quickly. I also have my four voidstones and as a result, most of the maps that are dropping normally and not through specific league mechanics will be dropping at the t16 level meaning I will have lots of stuff to farm with soon. I have all but four of my favorite map slots and currently, they are all set to Glacier which is probably my favorite map of the pool that is available this league.

It is wild that I have as strong of a build as I have, given how poor I feel this league. I think across the board everyone is feeling this because this league is the recession following the insane boom leagues of Affliction and Necropolis. Affliction had nonsense levels of juicing coming from the Wildwood Wisps and Necropolis had all manner of ways to force scarabs to spit out hundreds upon hundreds of uniques per map. This league dialed back a lot of the ground loot strategies and the death of magic find as we knew it previously… where folks focused on scaling the quantity of drops, is pretty much dead. Big group juicing parties are declaring group play dead, but ironically in spite of all of this… I am probably having more fun than I have in a long while. Sure I can’t buy bargain basement headhunters for 4 divines… and squires for a handful of chaos… but the league mechanic is actually producing legitimately useful gear.

I’ve recently shifted up my build to go into the block-based Righteous Fire as Pohx has done this league, and I gotta say it feels really great. Crafters are understanding this is the direction everyone is going to go and as a result have wildly inflated the prices of these shields. The stat that you care bout the most is that 5% life gain on block and to get a shield with decent armor and decent life you are looking at 3 divines or more. What I did instead was pick up a shaper-influenced base for 40 chaos and then do reforge life harvest crafting until I got something that looked halfway decent. At some point, I want to upgrade this but for now, it works. Similarly, I was able to snag a pseudo-link elder helm for 1.5 divines… which was a bit of a steal considering these are mostly going for 3 divines or higher. Maybe when I make a bit more currency I can upgrade this but for now, it works and was a huge boost in damage.

The Light of Meaning is a prismatic jewel that is technically new to this league, but it largely replaces the craftable version from Necropolis league called The Perandus Pact. It has all of the same rolls that you could craft and largely works in the same manner. I picked up the +6% increased fire damage version again and worked it into my build in the same location as the last league. Where it is placed currently it is hitting 18 nodes for an additional 108% increased Fire Damage. According to POB, it is adding roughly 50k damage to my build. However when I drop the Spiritual Aid nodes for a cluster jewel that will take it down to only hitting 16 nodes and 96% additional Fire Damage but probably still worth it. I picked up a cheap cluster jewel base and am trying to roll a large cluster with Burning Bright, Primatic Heart, and Widespread Destruction… since I can’t really afford to buy it outright. For now, I am using reforge fire Harvest crafting, but if I go back into delve and get some more fossils and resonators I might just do single socket scorched fossils and yolo it. Once I hit the large I will start trying to craft my mediums.

Admittedly part of the reason why I am so poor at the moment is that I have not been Delving. I am full up on sulphite and ready to go… but have been focusing on finishing out my Atlas and gathering resources for my town. Delve is a great place to get gold… but has zero way of getting any of the mined ore to feed the smelters and shipments. Now that I am through all of the baseline maps and have my voidstones, I am probably going to shift up my focus and dive down into the dark. I’ve only made it to depth 115 and would like to get down to around 200 before I start farming horizontally hunting for cities. I also need the bulk maps that come from Delve to feed my mappers. So this weekend is probably going to be me returning to the virtuous cycle of map until full on delve juice and then burn through it in the mines. This should help me considerably in bubblegum currency and also having resonators both to craft with and bulk sell on the currency exchange. I got a quick shot of 300 chaos yesterday when I sold all of my resonators off in about 15 minutes through Faustus and the automated trades.

Speaking of mappers… I thought I would share what they look like right now. I’ve not been heavily focused on them that much and have not poured a ton of resources into leveling them up. Right now I have a single party with a level 6, level 5, and two level 4 mappers. This allows me to burn through white maps pretty reliably without risking losing them. That does not mean that they 100% complete every map but they do bring back a lot of random stuff, most of the gear I feed into the disenchanter. Last night before going to bed I made sure I had two shipments going and twelve maps in the hopper, and this represents what the mappers brought back. It isn’t phenomenal loot but it also isn’t nothing. Since I was never going to bulk sell my maps, this allowed me to turn a resource that was rotting in my bank into a non-zero quantity of usable items. There is an achievement for running t14 or higher maps with the mappers so at some point I will upgrade to where I can do that.

Similarly, I have been keeping shipments going pretty much as much as I can swing. Essentially I have one boat that I have dedicated to the longer route that takes about 2 hours per run, and another boat that takes the shorter runs at around 45 minutes each. Last night before going to bed I set up two shipments and the left side of the above image shows the returns from each. Again it is not spectacular loot but produces a lot of bubblegum currency that is still useful. There is a Kingsmarch Wiki page that maths out all of the details around sending items, what sorts of rewards they bring, and what the various breakpoints are. Right now I am filling whatever I can towards the items that are being asked for from the port as I am trying to level the hidden faction system for every destination. Then I will add 55 of each other crop, and 8104 Thaumaturgic Dust because it acts as a multiplier to the entire load and that specific number is the 200% more breakpoint. 55 for dust is the 100% more breakpoint, and I am largely just using it as a number for crops. Sending multiple types of crops seems to increase the total yield in currency… so I am just winging it and it seems to mostly make each load worth the time and gold expenditure.

I think my focus over the next few days is going to be gold acquisition. There are a lot of upgrades that I want to make for my town that are going to require forty thousand gold or so each. If I am delving more… I am generating less ore that requires workers to work… and when they go idle they stop draining my coffers. So I am probably going to shut down shipping and mapping and just focus on building up a nest egg for the next phase of development. I have a quad tab full of rare items that I can feed my disenchanter to at least keep it running during this interim. I’ve been running a lot of maps with my Ritual/Einhar/Beyond atlas in the hopes of maybe just maybe either lucking into a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections because I am still using a five-link chest piece. I have a second Cloak of Flame that is better rolled that dropped while mapping, that I have been using to try and link and then eventually swap.

All in all, I am having a blast in Recession League, in spite of what the hardcore juicers are saying about it. I’ve made a ton of progress in a single week and now my focus is on subtly improving my build. I really need to swap out my weapon for something a bit better with at least +1 to all fire gems on it. I have a fractured base that I am crafting into a new pair of gloves and am just now trying to get elemental proliferation implicit on them before wearing them. I have a side project of trying to level a bunch of Purity of Fire gems so that I can hopefully get a level 21/20% quality gem out of the batch. I guess I feel like I have so many projects that I want to devote time to, and that is keeping me in the hype cycle of enjoyment. Eventually, that will slow down, but for me personally, this is one of the best leagues I have ever played in.

Tour of the Aggronaut

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Good Morning Folks! However, by the time I actually finish this blog post, it might be afternoon. Today is the very first day of Blaugust 2024, and this year one of our mentors had a pretty great suggestion. Magi thought it might be pretty great if everyone dedicated one of their early posts to introducing themselves to the rest of the Blaugust Community. As a result, I am going to attempt this feat, but I will be honest… introductions are always a challenge. I never know what details someone might be interested in or what I have already said in the past. For the sake of this exercise however, I am going to pretend that you know absolutely nothing about me or my blog.

So with that in mind… Hi, I’m Belghast and welcome to this nonsense that I crank on a regular basis called Tales of the Aggronaut. I’ve been blogging here since April of 2009 and in total including other blogs I created period to this one… I’ve been doing this since around 2000. I am in fact an “internet old” and pretty much arrived on the internet in 1993 and was here for the very early days of the web. For a period of time in college I worked at an Internet Service Provider as a system administrator and webmaster, then worked for a college as a webmaster and computer lab admin… before making my way into the professional world as a web developer turned traditional programmer. These days I live the life of a manager over Development and Data teams. Since a lot of folks participating in Blaugust this year exist on the Fediverse, I also help to administrate Gamepad.club where the Blaugust account resides.

I have a ton of various sundry geek interests. I’ve been a Magic the Gathering junkie since the launch of Revised, have played a lot of tabletop games throughout the years, am a fairly avid reader specifically of science fiction and fantasy, and nerd out about alternative/indie/punk/industrial/metal music. I love Horror films and Monster movies and spent years working at a sports card and comic book shop and while I am not quite the avid collector and reader of comics that I used to be… I still have decades’ worth of nonsense crammed into my skull. I come and go these days in interest levels surrounding Marvel and Star Wars because quite honestly… the modern quality levels vary wildly. Growing up my dad was a professional portrait photographer on the side and I spent a lot of my childhood in the darkroom, so I still have a knack for going out and doing artsy photography every now and then.

Mostly thought… I play a lot of video games… or more so I play a number of video games a lot. There was a period of time where I could with all confidence say that if there was an MMORPG out there I had probably played it. Over the last decade or so there are a number of specifically eastern MMOs that I have not really spent much time with. However, all of the western ones from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV to Guild Wars 2 and on… I’ve logged multiple hundreds of hours in with many max-level characters. The origins of this blog started with a laser focus on “a world of warcraft warrior tanking blog” and was spun up during the heyday of the Blog Azeroth community. Over the years as my interests have changed this mission statement has also changed to where it is today… that this is just my blog and I make no thematic claims.

What I am probably the most interested in these days are ARPGs or Diablo-likes most specifically Path of Exile and Last Epoch. In the sidebar on the right side is a list labeled “Regularly Playing” and contains the usual suspects that I devote most of my time to. If you mouse over any of the game icons you will see my character information, and if there exists a profile system in that game it will link directly to that. Right now I tend to play MMORPGs very heavily when a new expansion rolls out and ARPGs when a new season starts. Right now I am knee-deep in the Settlers of Kalguur league in Path of Exile, and as a result, you are going to get some deeply in-the-weeds posts from me as I talk about my progress through that league. I am still deeply engaged in Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and while I have taken a bit of a break have a side project to level alts with a friend on the Kraken server, while we are still doing raids together every week on our Cactuar mains. On the near horizon I am really looking forward to the Janthir Wilds expansion in Guild Wars 2, and at some point when there is a lull I plan on playing through the War Within expansion in World of Warcraft but it is highly unlikely I will be playing at launch.

Watch

Since I called this post “Tour of the Aggronaut” I thought I would also do a bit of a show and tell with this website. Since this website has been active for fifteen years and has over 3500 posts during that time, there is a lot in my backlog. Most of this is accessed through a menu structure at the top of the site. I figured I would take a few sentences to discuss each of the options. So for this first image, it shows off the Watch menu. This largely links to my YouTube page and also has a link to my Twitch page… which rarely if ever gets any use these days. There was a period of time when I streamed to Twitch quite a bit and got affiliate… then just sort of stopped. Youtube however is full of our weekly AggroChat podcast episodes and a number of videos that I have recorded talking about hyper-specific features of video games in my “Bel Bungles” series.

Listen

Next up is the Listen menu that links to AggroChat.com our podcast website. At some point in the future I might be pulling this content into Aggronaut.com because really there is not a lot going on over there and largely serves just to be a clone of Aggronaut. When we first set it up all seven of us hosts were actively blogging on our own platforms, and the goal of AggroChat.com was to coallate all of this together in a single place. Nowadays however I am the only one still actively blogging with any regularity and it is mostly just a carbon copy of the posts here on Aggronaut. Bel Folks Stuff was a really fun interview podcast series that I did with some of my friends. I still really want to get it started back up at some point because they were fun deep dives into a person I am close with. There is also a page of guest appearances I have made on other podcasts and such.

Social

The social menu links to my How to Find Me page with links to various social media and where I play various games with server and character information. There is also a direct link to my primary social media account over on Gamepad.club in the Fediverse as well as links to the Super Dungeon Friends discord and the Blaugust Discord. I really should throw up a link to Spoopy Town which is a discord I run dedicated to horror, cryptids, and good-natured conspiracy theories… though to be perfectly honest it is mostly just Jaedia and I chatting back and forth.

Features

Over the fifteen years of this blog I have decided I was going to start various features… only to abandon them after a while. The Features menu is where a lot of these ideas end up and they are all tied to various categories within WordPress. Probably the one I am most proud of is Mixtape Mondays where every Monday for I think 23 weeks I posted a unique mixtape with some album art that I created for it. I had a lot of fun doing these, and I still listen to most of them… but also it was really hard to keep creative inspiration to keep churning out new ones that also did not sound like anything I had created before. I might revisit it at some point, but it was still a really cool thing that I enjoyed doing.

Game Tools

These are technically a feature of the website but grew into their own thing. Essentially there are a lot of games that I play and in them… there are a lot of third-party tools and websites that I use while playing them. The “Game Tools” section is a place where I keep track of these things, partially for public benefit, but partially because several years might have passed since I last played a specific game and I want to have a good place to jot these things down so I will remember them. There are a few games that I still need to update to the new single-page format specifically FFXIV and Elder Scrolls Online. It is on my todo list, specifically since I am actively playing FFXIV right now and finding lots of useful resources that I did not know about previously.

Core Beliefs

The last area is what I refer to as my “Core Beliefs” and is essentially a page where I state things that I take as true. In this era of negotiable facts, I thought it was important for me to plant my flag in the ground and list out the details that are not negotiable for me. That is not to say that I am not constantly learning and adjusting details in my head and eventually evolving these beliefs, but if you have deep concerns with this page it is unlikely we will ever truly see eye to eye on issues. Essentially this is my page of “this is where I stand on these things” and if you have an issue with my stance on things… then it is cool if you no longer want to read my content. I am very much an acquired taste and it is fine if you never acquire it.

So there you go friends… a bit of a fresh introduction and a tour of the website. It is just about to stop being morning as I am still working on this thing. So I guess my initial comment was truthful as I have continued to get sidetracked and distracted from my task. I hope you all have an amazing Blaugust. I started this nonsense eleven years ago and am still consistently amazed that anyone else out there is down for this thing. I am very afk most of the time in Discord but if you need something specific feel free to page me with an @Belghast and I will try and answer any questions you might have. I am very much the sort of person who creates something… sends it out into the world… and then hopes someone else out there enjoys it. This means I am far more comfortable being behind the scenes than I am getting up close and personal. I will always be an introvert at heart, and most days as I write these blog posts I am pretending that I am just talking to myself. As a result blogging also is rather therapeutic because I am telling myself things I think I need to hear.

Anyways! I am going to hit publish and send another mess of nonsense out into the aether!