Tracking Atlas Progress

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Hey Folks! I’ve spent the entire weekend being paranoid because my wife and I had both been sickly for the last week or so. We assumed it was allergies, but Saturday night my wife took a COVID swab test, and came up positive. Thus far mine have come up negative but I am having what I am not sure are symptoms or not. Basically, I feel like I got hit by a truck and everything aches… almost like when you have the flu. Other than that most of what I am experiencing is just general “allergies” or “hay fever”. My wife had to scramble and prepare for a sub for this week as she is out until Friday. I find it highly unlikely that I do not have COVID unless she just had a very light viral load. I feel pretty lousy, and as a result, spent most of the extended weekend chilling out and playing a mix of Diablo III and Path of Exile.

I’ve talked about it before but my goal for this season has been to clear the atlas map. At this point, I am sitting at 83 out of 115, and the majority of what I have left in front of me is red maps and uniques. I’ve been trying to farm whatever I could from Kirac, but once we entered red map territory the requirement of having to have a corrupted map has made him less than useful. Essentially I seem to be alternating between grinding low-level maps for experience and pushing progress because deaths really hurt. That is probably one of the most annoying things about Path of Exile is how brutal death is to your leveling. There have been so many maps where a chain death spree reduces whatever progress I made to nothing.

Shocking to probably no one that has been around my blog for long… I created a spreadsheet to track our progress. That way the handful of us that are playing together can tick off maps as we clear them. The theory is we can also maybe share the wealth if someone is missing some gaps in their progress and we have maps that can fill them. Group play sucks… but it is worth it to help someone complete a hole in their maps. It took me forever to finish out yellow maps and I would have struggled to finish out white maps were it not for some help from Ace. It has helped me at least to feel like I am making forward momentum, ticking off each map as I finish it.

I’m finding it shockingly lucrative to run just white and yellow maps without any modifiers, and I think in part that is thanks to my Atlas tree. Right now I have gone hard into Essences, Strongboxes, and Expeditions. The only things that I have shut off completely are Breach, Blight, and Metamorph. Those are just league mechanics that I do not enjoy. Blight is essentially tower defense and I have always disliked those sorts of encounters. Metamorph in its current state just does not feel worth my time given that the bosses you end up creating are super tanky and take forever to kill. Breach might be cool but with a brand build I always end up getting overwhelmed and dying to those mechanics when I get overwhelmed. My favorite mechanic is probably still Expedition, which is in part why I have gone so hard into it with the tree, and haggling seems to be a solid source of cool stuff.

One of the cooler things that I have encountered in my running base maps, is a unique strongbox. A pretty tanky boss spawned out of it and dropped a few unique items as a result. Strongboxes used to be pretty dangerous but I have managed to get a Divine Vessel drop and picked up the “cannot be frozen” trait from the Brine King. I either need more divines to drop or more vessels to drop so that I can finish collecting abilities for my Pantheon. I think since I made quite a bit of progress over the long weekend, I will probably focus the next few days on running maps for experience so I can pour on a few more levels. I’ve reorganized my passive tree quite a bit to gain some tankiness and I am working my way toward the Armor and Energy Shield mastery cluster to add a bit more. It was shocking to me how much of a difference swapping out my level 19 Storm Brand gem was for a level 21 corrupted Storm Brand gem. I’ve got an item as well that increases all of the levels of lightning gems by one, so a 22 gem seems to just deal much more damage as a result.

I’m still having quite a bit of fun, but I am trying to ease back a bit on the pushing… because I am afraid I will just get frustrated. On the podcast this weekend I came off a lot more negative on the game than I expected to. I do fear that the vision that Grinding Gear Games has for the future of the title is going in the opposite direction that I would prefer. I play ARPGs because I like the power fantasy of crushing maps full of enemies and getting randomized loot as a result. There is a dopamine hit when you wreck something and watch a rainbow pinata of loot explode out of it. Path of Exile however seems to be on a path of making a more difficult and slow-paced game, which makes me hope that maybe Diablo IV will be the game I am looking for. Last Epoch also seems really solid right now and I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with it. The challenge there however will be whether or not the group gameplay is good.

AggroChat #402 – Kalandras Wild Ride

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

Hey Folks!  What happens when we have a few weeks’ worth of Path of Exile discussion bottled up?  Well, apparently we record a two-hour-long show!  Bel was completely oblivious to how long we were recording in spite of the entire crew trying to warn him.  First, we have a few quick topics about Return to Oz and the launch of Ooblets on all platforms including Nintendo Switch.  From there we dive into a long discussion about our thoughts relating to Path of Exile and how the Lake of Kalandra league has gone.  We have different points of entry from those of us who have been grinding away at maps and those who have yet to finish the campaign.  We also attempt to scare Kodra who thinks he has seen a lot of systems so far…  but has yet to unlock half of them.

Topics Discussed

  • Return to Oz
  • Ooblets Launch
  • Path of Exile
    • Lake of Kalandra League

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Blaugust and the Grand Experiment

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Good Morning Friends! How is your day going? I just spent the last twenty minutes trying to figure out why ShareX was not working… only to realize that it is no longer August and I should be looking in the September folder instead. My wife is a teacher and we are pretty sure she brought home some generic crud to us. She is a few days ahead of me but I am very much starting to feel awful. We’ve been playing the “is it allergies or something worse” game for a bit, but so far neither of us has run a fever or had the traditional Covid symptoms. Regardless I am more than a bit mentally lagged at the moment and I am just very thankful that I made it through “Blaugust Hell Day”, or the day that I have to tabulate everything and post the final tallies. So far it appears that I have mostly been okay on my counts, but I had minor stress out yesterday when I thought all of my graphics were posted in a non-transparent mode.

The truth about Blaugust is I am floored that it is still as big of a thing as it is. The entire idea behind it was somewhat dumb. At this point, I think my blog is known more for the frequency of my posts rather than if any of them are good. However, that was not always the case. In the first several years of the blog I would go months between posts, and each time I did… I found it harder to get up the confidence to post again. So on April 26th of 2013, I set forth on my “Grand Experiment” and decided that I was going to be posting every single day. Why April 26th? I legitimately have no clue other than that was just the day that I started posting… and kept posting for several years in this fashion. After a year of doing this nonsense, I somehow got it in my head that everyone should just hit the post button and challenged folks to a month of posting.

It cracks me up a little when I catch hell for not making it to 31 posts during a contest I started in 2014. It is all in good fun, but after doing the daily posting thing for 1120 days in a row… I decided that it probably was not healthy for me. I dropped my streak on May 21st of 2016 when I took both Saturday and Sunday off from posting. For me, at least the whole daily posting routine had become such a concrete part of my life that I was constantly in fear of failing. Even though Blaugust is just a month-long event, for 2018-2022 I have taken Saturdays off just like I do in my normal posting routine. Now I allow myself the leverage to just not post whenever I am “not feeling it”. This weekend for example is Labor Day weekend here in the United States and it is probably a crap shoot if I am actually going to post or not. I called Blaugust a “dumb idea” earlier because in part I think I thought I had figured out the formula for how to blog post… and the contest was pure hubris. Now I am more in line with the thinking that you have to figure out whatever pattern works for you and then stick to that rather than some dogmatic requirement.

I am not making a ton of traction in Path of Exile at the moment in part because I have generally felt like crap and the content that I am doing requires entirely too much concentration and reaction time for me to succeed. I did clear a few more maps to add to my total of 60 out of 115 cleared. I managed to pick up a few more uniques from Kirac’s quest and failed miserably at a third. I’m in this awkward phase of not quite having the survival to just run amok killing everything, and I am not entirely certain which knobs I need to turn in order to get there. Right now I am at the default cap of 75% on all elemental resists, 20% chaos resist, and 5% spell suppression… which seems really hard to get. I need to get through my 4th ascension honestly and have a couple of tokens saved up now. That is probably going to be my next major focus. I got through to the final boss phase and died to his slam, but have upgraded a few pieces of gear since then.

Because it requires so much less focus, I am spending more time playing Diablo 3 at the moment and have a mostly viable Whirlrend Barbarian build. I can comfortably clear T13 content and uncomfortably clear t16. Mostly my core problem right now is survival… which is admittedly always the problem with an early whirlrend build. I have all of the components to make a functional build, I just need to start upgrading things to ancient and finish upgrading my gems. I think my next push is to get my GR75 out of the way so I can start getting a chance at primal ancient legendary drops. I was able to do a GR66 without much issue other than having to be careful of stray projectiles, so I am certain I will be able to do it without much concern. I am back to being stalled on my old friend the Set Dungeon, so another focus soon will be getting one of those mastered so I can clear the way for other objectives.

I am also spending a minimum amount of time playing Tower of Fantasy each day. Essentially I knock out my bounties and then move on to other things. The biggest problem that I am seeing is that since I am no longer farming content… my character level is not keeping up with the requirements material-wise to keep leveling things up. I can technically level my main three weapons from 90 to 100 but I am lacking all of the materials that I would need to do this. My account still seems “lucky” as I have already pulled the new rate-up banner character/weapon called Balmung which is a matched pair of frost swords. All told it seems pretty cool. I will likely continue to dump free summons into the limited-time banners as I have everyone on the standard banner that I care about.

Other than all of this nonsense, if you are in the United States I wish you all a great extended weekend. For the rest of the world… sorry that Monday is going to be oddly quiet. I will likely take the day off unless I have a burning passion to get something out of my system and into a blog post.

Blaugust 2022 In Review

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Good Morning Friends! It is that time again, time for me to attempt to tabulate all of the blog posts from this year’s running of Blaugust and hand out awards. We had a phenomenal turnout this year with a grand total of 67 blogs participating. During this one month collectively we produced a grand total of thirteen hundred and thirty-three new blog posts. This was not our highest attended year, as we had one back in 2018 with over 90 blogs participating, but it feels like one of our busiest years. The community has felt considerably more active than it has in the past, and that might be in part due to finally adding a more “general purpose” channel to the Discord called #blaugust-banter. We are still learning and adjusting each year, and this seems to have been a positive change for group cohesiveness.

Blaugust is one of those things that has more or less developed a mind of its own over the years. Originally it was a challenge for folks to blog every single day for a month, and I embarked upon this nonsense after spending the previous year blogging every day. Of note, I made it about three and a half years of daily blogging before I finally needed to dial things back a bit. I really never expected to run Blaugust more than that first year, but collectively the community has always been there to spur me forward to organize yet another one. Over the years it has shifted more into a celebration of blogging, and a time to stoke our creative fires for the next year. There will always be folks that disappear into the woodwork after August is over, but I feel like collectively this is good for the community and keeping blogging alive.

Newbie Class of 2022

One of the things I am proudest of this year is the general outreach we have had to find new voices. Some of our lists are already seasoned bloggers, some started a brand new blog just for this event, and others just rekindled the home fires of their abandoned digital homestead. Whatever the case we had a large list of folks who were participating in Blaugust for the very first time. It has long been our tradition to celebrate our newbies with a special award, and as such here is our list of first-time Blaugustans for 2022.

Now has come the time to talk about the awards. Each year we give awards out to represent the level of posting that each blogger has completed. Since this year had a bit of a Stranger Things theme going on, and since Dungeons and Dragons played such a key role in that series, I decided to use a D20 for the background of this year’s awards. For those who might need a refresher into rules here are the guidelines.

  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2022.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2022.

Before we get into the lists however it is that time again for my yearly disclaimer. I am a human being and highly fallible. If you feel that I made a mistake in the tabulation process please let me know and I will get the lists remedied as soon as possible. Some blog layouts are easier to tabulate than others and I want to share my undying love for those of you who have a sidebar widget that counts posts by month. Again if I made a mistake in my counting, please reach out to me posthaste and I will fix it.

The Bronze Club 2022

This year we had eighteen blogs that managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2022. Often times we set ourselves to a goal but fall short, however, if you think about it this way that is an average of one post a week!

The Silver Club 2022

This year we had twelve blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2022. if you spread them out across the five weeks of Blaugust, that is posting at least three times a week.

The Gold Club 2022

This year we had three blogs that managed the feat of posting at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2022. The pack thins a bit at this point because if folks are willing to post this much, they are often willing to go that extra mile does daily postings. However, on average, this is at least posting five times a week during the course of blaugust.

The Rainbow Diamond Club 2022

This year we have a very impressive twenty-seven blogs that managed the feat of posting at least thirty-one times during the month of August 2022. There are always folks who end up wildly overshooting this goal and with two blogs in the challenge, Syp managed to bring in 86 total posts between the pair of sites. All of the bloggers who make it to this level deserve our admiration, I started this nonsense and even I don’t do thirty-one posts anymore.

Honorable Mentions

While the first of the awards start with five posts during the month, it still takes a lot of effort to sign up and write even one post. As a result, we have traditionally spent some time honoring those who started down this road and joined in this nonsense we call Blaugust. This year I decided to do something a little differently and go ahead and create a themed image based on the red Blaugust 2022 logo coloration.

Final Thoughts

One of the things that I have done each year pulls together some basic statistics in an easy-to-read summary block. I would love to have some stats around Discord, but unfortunately in order to get that we would have to turn ourselves into a public community server. That feels like a double-edged sword, and I have not gone down that path yet. Regardless it definitely feels like we have had a busier community this year than we have had at any point during the Blaugust process. Without further rambling, here are some basic statistics.

  • 1333 posts were made by Blaugust 2022 Participants.
  • 67 blogs signed up and made at least one post during the month.
  • 24 blogs participated in Blaugust for the very first time.
    • Collectively our “Newbies” made a total of 376 posts.
  • 60 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze.
  • 42 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 15 posts qualifying for Silver.
  • 30 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold.
  • 26 out of the 67 participating blogs made at least 31 posts qualifying for Rainbow Diamond.

So while it was not our biggest year, it was a significant bump up from the 45 participants in 2021. I think the piece of this year’s Blaugust that I am proudest of, is how much our community has grown in scope. Traditionally Blaugust has been an event that draws its participants from the same pool of bloggers, and while it is awesome that folks look forward to this event… every year we lose a few from the fold. Our impressive twenty-four new participants tell me that we are expanding our reach and moving out into other blogging spheres.

As always I am deeply proud of everyone who participated this year. Again I am a very fallible human being and if my counts do you reflect your counts, please let me know. I’ve updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with this year’s images, and the “Blaugchievements” are on the honor system. I hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2023 and whatever twists that might bring us. Lastly, I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. For many of us, this is a support structure that we can rely on, and while I may not say it often… I appreciate all of you greatly.