Improving Lightning Arrow Champion

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Since I spent some time yesterday talking about my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I figured I would talk this morning about some improvements I have been making to my high survival magic find mapping character, my Lightning Arrow Champion. I had first played a version of Lightning Arrow at the end of Crucible as a test for a league start and then started a Raider variant for Ancestor league. I just did not like how little survival the character had and wound up retooling it late in the league into a Champion variant. When it came to rolling a second character in our private league I went with the Champion variant again because I knew I could make it work on almost no gear and that it would have quite a bit of survival. Since it only really needed two unique items it would be extremely flexible when it came to whatever gear I happened to find. As soon as we found our first Perseverance and a pair of Shadows and Dust I knew I was good to go and just needed to half-ass my way into a tri-element bow.

The biggest change that I needed to make was getting a better bow and more specifically a bow that fired an additional arrow. Similarly, I wanted to get a quiver that also fired an additional arrow… which would then in turn allow me to drop Greater Multiple Projectiles from the support gems and get a significant damage boost as a result of that alone. I found a reasonable 1200 dps bow from trade that had pretty much everything I wanted on it and given the prevalence of folks doing magic find lightning arrow the price was only 10 Divines. The quiver was significantly cheaper but I specifically needed a couple of resistance hits on it to maintain elemental caps. Essentially dropping GMP I still fire 6 arrows and said arrows pierce 4 targets… making the entire process feel pretty great.

The other major thing that I needed was to swap Artillery Ballista into my chest piece and get an actual six link for that. By the time we were swimming in six-links, my appetite for fiddling with gear on this particular character was at a minimum. Basically, I had been running Artillery Ballista as a four-link in my gloves and had a whole series of nonsense Mana Forged Arrows abilities firing off in a five-link chest. In the final form, I moved the rest of my utility abilities to the gloves and used that opportunity to pick up a good corrupt with some additional attack speed, and then added Culling Strike to my Artillery Ballista link since I was losing access to it via Mana Forged Arrows which now only fires Frenzy.

As far as Magic Find goes…. I am really not going too far off the path to make that happen. During my copious amount of farming, I lucked into two relatively well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble rings. Apart from that I just happened to roll a helmet with +19% rarity on it giving me a total of +15% Quantity and +70% Rarity. It is not a ton and nowhere near as much as the folks who are sacrificing damage and defense to stack every last drop of it… but enough to feel like you are sticking your thumb on the scale from time to time. Since my Lightning Arrow Champion is a mapper and does nothing else, it seemed easy enough to integrate this much into the build. The biggest change I would make to the character would be to drop perseverance and pick up a Headhunter… but I doubt that will happen unless I get a windfall.

As far as the character goes, here is what the stats look like. You can also check out my POB over on POE.Ninja. I am pretty happy with the current state of this character. Last league, I attempted to make the Tornado Shot shift and I just did not like it anywhere near as much. I might try that again given it is mostly just swapping some gem links around, but I am not sure I will like it any better than I did previously. For now, this is the character that I use to burn through maps and get sulfite so that I can feed the delving on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. While I can do juiced T16s… the bosses end up taking longer than I would prefer so I am probably going to keep sticking to the t11 Cemetary and t12 Tropical Island sequence that I have been doing up to this point.

If You Give a Chieftain a Cookie

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Hey Folks! I am getting around to writing my “morning” post in the afternoon… or at least it will be after noon by the time I finally publish this thing. Yesterday was the official end of our private league that lovingly became known as “Bel League”. I think this was a very interesting experiment and I think that for the most part, it was a success. I created three highly viable characters during the league and one failed character. I made my way through all of the maps save for one that never would drop… the Unique Twilight Temple map, but I still consider that a win in spirit. In the experience ladder my characters sit for perpetuity at First, Third, and Fifth place which seems like a solid performance. The character that did not work was my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking build, but I pivoted that character into what has become one of the more enjoyable Righteous Fire characters I’ve created. Now that I am over in Trade League, my characters are showing up on POE.Ninja so for anyone at home you can check out the state in which I managed to get them all.

As soon as I got access to the trade economy… I of course started fiddling with my characters. The problem with reaching a point of stability with a character is that it is almost like trying to renovate a house of cards. As you swap a piece of gear for something else… you create a deficit that you then have to patch elsewhere. In all of my time in the private league, I never found a single viable Elder influenced helm and since we are playing in a hyperinflation league… I did not want to pay 20-30 Divines for a pseudo-six-link helm to put Righteous Fire in. My first purchase was spending 5 Chaos on a level 85 base Pig-Faced Bascinet that I then proceeded to pour a bunch of fossils into before making do with Level 20 Burning Damage and Level 18 Concentrated Effect. This however meant that I would be losing my +1 to Maximum Fire resistance on my influenced helm. So I got around that by picking up a Rise of the Phoenix with +2 level of Socketed Aura Gems… which bumped my 21/20% Purity of Fire to the next breakpoint and made up that missing Maximum Fire Resistance allowing me to stay at 90% to all elements.

If I was moving Righteous Fire to my helmet, that meant that I needed to either recolor my existing Lightning Coil or purchase a new one. Having access to trade meant that I could find a better-rolled one that was also corrupted and had the +2 to Level of Socketed AOE Gems on it… meaning that my 21/20% Fire Trap gains +2 from the chest, +1 from a leveling Empower, and +1 from my Sceptre for a grand total of Level 25 and soon to be 26 once I gain another level on that Empower gem. Since I am converting 50% of my physical damage taken to Lightning Damage, I thought while I was at it I would pick up a reasonably rolled Taste of Hate to add 15% of physical taken as Cold. I thought these flasks would be much more expensive but I picked it up for 10 Chaos. I am guessing all of the magic find is producing more than the market can absorb.

This left me with one last problem to try and fix. I’ve always had negative chaos resistance on this character since the swap over to Righteous Fire and I really wanted to at least attempt to resolve that problem. Given the high number of uniques that I am using, that left me with three slots that I could swap out pretty easily to try and at least make a dent in this problem. So after some fiddling around I found a new pair of boots, gloves, and an amethyst ring that combined take me close to the cap in spite of not quite hitting it. I’m at least up to a positive 67% which is far better than I was before starting this process. I could in theory swap my necklace out… but given how much I am relying on it to make up attributes I would still want +1 to all fire skills… I figured that would be a more tricky replacement. I would love to be able to run Defiance of Destiny that I lucked into yesterday… but I would need to probably swap over to a full cluster jewel setup in order to make that happen. I’ve rapidly run into a Ship of Theseus problem… where I am not quite certain how much of my build remains the same.

The last thing that I swapped out was my two Ursine charms for slightly better-rolled ones to increase my regen and strength… that will give me some additional health. In the end… I’m about the same armor-wise… down about 200 life, and 200 life regen… but am converting 15% more damage to elemental and have enough chaos resistance to not be completely trashed by any modifiers that deal chaos damage. I also picked up a bit more damage from the swap of Righteous Fire and Fire Trap so am killing things faster…. which ends up making the build feel better as a result. All told… it was a good series of moves that cost me around 5 Divines in total. If I decide to push this build any further… it will involve almost entirely respeccing the character and stacking on a bunch of cluster jewels. For now, however… I am going to let things alone for a bit and just play the damned game.

Rikti Invasions

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Last night I decided to play some City of Heroes, in part because Thalen created a SuperGroup yesterday and I was hoping to potentially get an invite. That did not happen, but what did… is I experienced something that I am guessing I had pushed out of my memory. I was hanging out in the highest level end of King’s Row because it was much easier to solo than Steel Canyon. I had just rounded a corner when I noticed that a bunch of bombs had spawned with what looked like countdown timers. A few minutes later… there was a massive wave of players rushing towards me and before I knew it I had been invited into a raid group for whatever nonsense this held. I had completely forgotten that City of Heroes had zone-wide events.

What proceeded was about thirty minutes of nonsense where I targetted whatever I could get my hands on… and made my way through waves of mobs that were way too high level for me. The splash healing of my party though kept me alive and well throughout the entire event. Per the patch notes on the Homecoming forum, apparently, the Rikti Invasions will keep going through January 23rd when the next maintenance happens. I guess maybe I need to actually start reading chat, because I have been playing this game with the entire chat window minimized and slowly working my way through quests and doing some random combat. Last night though was a heck of a lot of fun and I would happily join in this nonsense again in the near future.

I realize I am playing on Everlasting the Roleplaying server, but I was pleasantly surprised by just how chill everyone seemed to be and how much actual roleplay was happening. Granted I myself am not a huge roleplayer but I always try and respond in kind. I tend to roll on Roleplay servers when possible because the players end up feeling like they are much more community-minded, and last night absolutely made me feel like Everlasting was the correct choice for me. You have to figure that the folks playing Homecoming are folks who missed the special magic that City of Heroes had over other MMORPGs so just from that alone they are probably going to be on their best behavior. I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how much fun I am having and how close to my memories of the game the actual experience ends up being.

At this point I am level 16 nearing level 17 and am hanging out in Steel Canyon. I’ve continued to follow this build guide that I found linked via the wayback machine to the old forums. It isn’t exactly the Katana/Regen scrapper that I played at release but it also isn’t super far off. One of the things that I want to do for my own benefit is to start collecting City of Heroes resources that still exist around the web and create a tools page as I have for other games. At a minimum I want to create a copy of that wayback machine page so that if I lose it, it will still exist in some form on my infrastructure. There are so many resources that I remember having… that just do not exist anymore. For example, I remember zone level guide maps that showed which factions and what level ranges were in each area. I would love to have those back so I am going to do some digging to attempt to unearth some of these things.

One of the things that I dig about this server is that pretty much everything that cost money at one point is free. You can move your characters freely between servers and it seems like you can also respec your character as often as you like. On the character select screen it shows that we have access to 1000 character slots which also seems similarly silly. I need to dig up what sort of support infrastructure this game has because I would not mind chipping some money towards the product. I feel like I am getting more than enough enjoyment out of it that I should at least make a one-time donation if not a reoccurring one. This is not how I expected to be spending January… but I am having a blast all the same.

Tempus GameIt

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If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time, you might know about my yearly tradition that I refer to as the “Years in Review” where I attempt to track the games I play in a given year. I don’t go into a ton of detail in this process, mostly it is just a hashmark of “Was this game played during this month” and it doesn’t go into much detail to quantify how much something was played. Other bloggers do similar things, and one of the more interesting versions of this is from The Ancient Gaming Noob where he has used a software tracking tool called ManicTime to log actual hours in specific games. There was a time when I briefly kicked around the notion of writing something to do this for me… all in the name of attempting to replace functionality that Raptr used to do.

Last year I learned that my friend Kevin Brill had been working on precisely this side project and had made quite a good deal of movement towards a production client. Essentially, TempusGameIt, as he calls it, is an application that you install and hangs out in your system tray and then utilizes an application detection library to log when you are playing specific games. This information gets uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers and quietly tracks the games that you are playing, matching them against its database of existing games. I had known this was a functionality that existed, but with the New Year, I decided to support this project and become an active guinea pig. So since the beginning of the year, I have been keeping the client updated and logging my gameplay.

I’ve wanted to talk about this application for a bit, but decided I should probably get permission from Kevin before diving into it and introducing my audience. Right now this is mostly an application that has been bouncing around on the Gamepad.club Mastodon server with a handful of us testing it, but I believe I am the only person who is actively running it all of the time. Essentially there is currently a Mac and a PC Client with some side discussion about potentially creating a Linux client at some point. This installs a service on your local machine and when you double-click the icon in your system tray it opens a webpage at http://localhost:45000/ that allows you to configure various options. You can publicly log your time or privately do so… which makes certain aspects of the data only available to you. You also need to configure which drives you want it to scan and identify games on. Essentially each time you install new software as it stands currently you will need to run another sweep of your drives. For me, I technically have games on three of my four drives so I have it inventorying those.

Under Catalog it will show what games have been detected. Occasionally the same game shows up multiple times, specifically if there is for example a 32-bit and a 64-bit executable. If a game does not exist currently in the known catalog of available games, there is also the option for you to add it which involves you searching for the game title and then selecting which process currently running in memory represents that game. I’ve done this for a few things that had not been seen yet like Fallout 76 and more recently City of Heroes. Once the game has been detected and is in your local Catalog, the detection from that point forward just works “automagically”. I believe there is some sort of minimum session length, as there have been a few times I have seen my sessions get ignored if I accidentally launched the wrong game for example as I occasionally do with Steam when I click the wrong listing.

From there everything pretty much takes care of itself. Your session data will begin showing up in your local interface as well as when you are logged in through the TempusGameIt server. The application has several different ways to slice the data and in truth, this is probably going to be perfect for most users. For example, this is a snapshot of a weekly view showing how much time I spent in games. Right now my data is heavily skewing the usage patterns of the application as a whole, but I am hoping as more folks start using it the global data becomes a bit more interesting. I’ve requested to have a raw export option because in truth I would rather dump my information and fiddle with it in google sheets than have reports compiled for me. At a minimum, I plan on using this information to feed into my “Years in Review” process, but I think I will be able to generate far more specific data than I have ever before.

There is a bunch of functionality that I have never touched as well. Supposedly the application can detect new screenshots from specific applications and have those uploaded to the TempusGameIt servers as well. Additionally, there is a methodology for linking to various game accounts and tracking achievements. The fact that I have my profile fairly locked down in Steam and tend to run in “show offline” mode seems to be throwing an error when it attempts to track achievements there per a discussion with Kevin last night. There are also a lot of ideas that are planned for the application and you can see where various features are on the roadmap via the Trello board. There is also a discord server for discussions and feature requests, but I think for the moment Kevin and I are the only ones who have joined it.

For the moment this is a passion project, but one that I personally think is really freaking cool. At some point, if there is ever a Patreon or something of the sort to fund development I will probably pitch into it. For the moment it is doing a functionality that has been missing since Raptr, and it will be interesting to see how this service evolves. I’ve not talked about it a ton to this point, but I figured if nothing else I would share it with my readers. For the most part it “just works” and has required little fiddling. There have been a few things I have talked back and forth with Kevin about and have helped debug a few problems but the majority of the time it quietly does what it is supposed to be doing.