Phasing

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There are times when I don’t have much to really talk about. One of the problems with doing a daily blog is that you need a daily churn of exciting things you are willing to expound upon. Right now I am in a bit of a betweensies phase for gaming. I’ve wrapped up Blast from the Past and gotten out of it what I wanted, and I am largely in a holding phase until we start “Bel League” with 3.23… which of note will have its theme, teaser trailer, title, and start date announced today. When I am in one of these periods I tend to allow myself a bit of navel-gazing and reminiscing. I have no clue why I barged into a thread and dumped a bit of a soliloquy on it…. but it happened nonetheless. For those who don’t know my social media of choice these days continues to be Mastodon and I help run a server called Gamepad.club if you need a good home.

Anyways in the thread that I barged into… I sort of force-dumped this whole bit about how my life has gone through various phases that have shaped me into the person my readers know. I thought this morning I might expand upon this theory into a proper blog post. This will likely be a deeply personal post, the sort of thing that I feel weird about widely syndicating. One of the rules I set forth for myself when I began this blog so many years ago… is that I would try my best to show the real me… just occasionally omitting names and specific details for the protection of others. If you are so inclined, feel free to join me on a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Baby Bel Watches Star Wars

A very small simulacrum of Belghast hugging his Dad's neck... which what I am guessing based on the wrapping paper was for a father's day? Small blonde haired child in bed with father both wearing pajamas

I don’t have a lot of photos of tiny proto-bel at the ready, but I think this one is pretty great. I am guessing based on the wrapping paper that this is maybe a Father’s Day. My best guess is this is me circa age 2 or so… I have questions as to why my parents had Disney pillowcases… but whatever. One of the earliest memories that I have is of watching Star Wars at the local drive-in theater. I was around two when it came out, and that movie rocked my world. I was obsessed with it in a way that I have probably never really been obsessed with anything since. I apparently went around quoting or more likely misquoting lines from the movies and was most obsessed with Darth Vader… or “Darfa Bader” as my parents said I called him.

I think more than anything Star Wars lit a spark in me that has never really been quenched and set me down a path of consuming pretty much all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. It also ignited my obsession with toys… and more specifically anything that is at the 3 and 3/4ths scale figures. Star Wars faded to GI Joe which faded to He-Man… but all the while that obsession was ignited by being very small and very amazed by the wonders that I was seeing on the big screen while sitting in my Dad’s truck. The problem with early memories is that you can never for certain really know if you are actually remembering things or if it is a construction based on photos you have seen and stories that you have been told. I remember a lot of birthday parties… all themed over whatever fandom I happened to be obsessed with at the time.

Bel Gets an Atari

Atari 2600 Console with classic black and wood grain appearance. Two cartridges shown... Pac-Man and Super Breakout

While technically my first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong Clone console that my parents bought… my real addiction to video games began when my Mom brought me home an Atari. The Pong console never really got used because my Uncle borrowed it… hooked it to my grandparent’s TV… left it on all night and ruined their expensive Zenith console television with screen burn-in making EVERYONE paranoid about that. She was a school teacher and one of her students was selling it… so for $50, we got the console, several controllers, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 games. This was the era of “video games are ruining the youth” so it was a rare occasional that my folks actually let me play a stand-up arcade game, let alone go to an actual arcade… but when I got a home console I could play as much as I wanted.

Sure this led to the memorable Christmas of 1987 when I got my Nintendo and countless consoles after that as I picked up each new generation… and quite honestly still do even though I am not much of a console player. This moment ignited my obsession with video games as a whole which has never quite left me. It was a simpler time, to be honest, and I miss some aspects of being able to stick a cartridge into a system and immediately play it. Sure I long ago abandoned physical media for the convenience of digital downloads and having my entire game library “on tap” to be played on a whim. The thing is though that I have never engaged with games as deeply as I did back then. It would take several months’ worth of allowance saved up or ratholed Christmas/birthday money to buy a single cartridge… and once purchased I knew I had to make the best of it. There are a lot of games that I am personally nostalgic about only because I bought it and then was effectively stuck to make the best of it.

Bel Discovers Pen and Paper

Being a teacher’s kid came with few perks, and a lot of downsides including having to spend way too much time at school. One interesting perk though was something that happened at the end of every school year… that was like Christmas morning for the teacher kids. Essentially the rule was that anything not removed from your locker by the final bell on the last day of school was subjected to being thrown away. The janitors would pull everything out of the lockers and dump them in the aisle, and then we would rummage through it looking for anything interesting. It was on one of these treasure trove days at the end of my first grade year… that I found my first beat-up, slightly water-damaged copy of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Player’s Handbook. Access to this arcane tome, forever altered my destiny.

I only knew of D&D from the Cartoon but was immediately enamored by this larger world that I had just opened the door to. A few of my friends attempted to “play” not realizing that we were missing an entire set of rules in the Dungeon Masters Book, but we made it work enough to decide we liked it. This was the height of the “Satanic Panic” unfortunately… when Mazes and Monsters aired as a “movie of the week” we were sort of fucked and overnight several otherwise complicit parents shut that shit down. I pivoted to something less controversial and as a result, I have a deep nostalgia for the Marvel Superheroes System from TSR. My friends would keep their dice at my house because my parents were largely cool with it and supported my obsession. Many years later I was introduced to the Palladium system and wound up in a regular campaign run by the much older brother of one of my childhood friends. Throughout High School I always had some sort of campaign going for me and my friends alternating between me running something and my friend Jason running something… eventually built our own system that we called “Infinite Earths” which was a mishmash of things we liked from pop culture and things from books we dug.

Bel Gets a Computer

There are a lot of phases in my life that I am probably glossing over… but this is the story of what shaped the “Bel” that you know today and is just sort of skipping over the threads that didn’t really lead to anywhere. I don’t have the same tale that a lot of computer-focused GenXers have… our family did not get a computer until 1989 which was a generic clone 386 SX 16hz with 2 meg of RAM and a 90 meg hard drive. Eventually, we upgraded to a palatial 4 meg of RAM, but the system had no CD-ROM as it was a generation too early and no sound card… though later I picked up this weird hybrid device called the Disney Sound Source that hooked up through the parallel port. The weird thing is… I had actually gone to a computer camp before this point and learned how to program in BASIC on a Trash 80 (TSR-80). My family just never decided it was a thing they needed until this point. I wish I had grown up with the Commodore 64… and learned to program when I was much younger but alas that is not my tale.

When we got a computer… My Dad’s friend may have snuck some sharpie labeled diskettes home with him which gave me access to a smattering of games. I remember playing Maniac Mansion in that initial round of games. Later I found this bookstore in the mall that would sell 5.25-inch floppies with assorted shareware on it… which is where I found Wolfenstein 3D. This is also where I found the assorted shareware tools that let you edit levels… which led to a new obsession with modding my games. There was a little computer lab off my mom’s classroom, and at lunch, we would build entirely new campaigns for Wolf3D and then challenge each other to play them. Years later when Doom became the new hotness, I similarly got obsessed with creating WAD files and building new sprite artwork for them. I had this entire Shattenjager campaign that I wish I still had a copy of… that was a proto-hexen thing. I am sure it was primitive as hell… but it was at least cool in my memories.

Bel Gets the Internet

In High School, I got into a pretty bad car accident… enough so that I got a fairly heft “pain and suffering” settlement from the insurance company. Most of this money was put aside “For College” but one of the things that I was allowed to buy was a new computer given that my intent was to go into that field. I ended up getting a Pentium 90 Packard Bell, that got Frankensteined a few times to add some graphical functionality and a scanner. More important than anything else… it was a computer with a 14400 baud modem. Like so many folks of my age… my first experience with the internet was through America Online. The thing is… neither I nor my parents understood how the internet worked and more importantly that it was just a normal phone call. So after racking up a few $500 phone bills… the internet was canceled for a while.

It was a bit later that we found out that you could pay $20 a month to the phone company to get unlimited calls to an adjacent area that had the dial-up numbers… and then $40 a month to get unlimited internet via Trumpet Winsock. Essentially once I found out there was a “real and unguarded” internet that existed beyond the gates of America Online… I had no interest in doing anything else. Mostly I used the internet for downloading stuff, finding my way into usenet and reading assorted video game newsgroups. This was 93/94ish and I began to learn how to make websites and hosted my first ones on the space provided by my ISP which also ran a BBS I believe called Darkstar. I also remember playing some of my first online games through a TCP/IP to IPX/SPX emulator called Kali. In college, I got an Amiga 3000 because it was used in my coursework, and I played some Super Air Warrior a bit on GEnie because the guy I bought it from gave me his account.

Bel Becomes an IRC Junkie

I had messed around a bit in AOL chatrooms before that service went away due to the astronomical phone bills… but I had no clue what IRC was until my freshman year in college. In an attempt to save money… I commuted from home and pieced together a two-year degree from attending essentially four different campuses and two different universities. Because of the weirdness of my schedule, this meant that I had an afternoon course in C++ and then a couple of evening courses… and about a three-hour lag between the two of them. This meant I spent copious hours killing time in the computer lab, which had a few rows of internet-enabled machines. Everything about the internet was novel at that point, and no one seemed to think spending time hanging out in IRC chatrooms via mIRC was a waste of resources. So I learned the finer points of IRC from some fellow computer lab rats… and it was not long before I had snagged the software and was connecting to it from home.

I was a denizen of the Undernet and was a regular in a number of gaming channels… as well as a handful of less-than-reputable channels that shall not be named. Undernet was far less advanced than DalNet, and if you wanted to maintain any semblance of control over a channel you had to employ a bot to which you would give Operator status, and then it could “Op” users when they joined the channel if they were on the approved allow list. I spent time working on these bots, and more specifically the ancillary bots that were used for filesharing or in my case… roleplaying. I wrote a number of bots that would maintain character sheets, handle dice rolls, and such to support a few Vampire and Werewolf channels that were active because at this point… I was obsessed with the World of Darkness like the wannabe goth that I was.

Bel Meets His Wife

The thing about the bots… is that they require a lot of maintenance and periodic configuration. I was running a file serve bot for a friend who ran a less-than-reputable channel and needed to perform maintenance. So I was sitting there logged into the bot via SSH while also sitting in the channel in mIRC. I had the bot configured to execute a /WHOIS command and echo it to the console as folks joined. This was somewhat useful for when an issue happened and when I had to ban a user I already had that information in the log to craft a netmask. The thing about the early internet and more specifically early IRC… is folks tended to be logged in from their universities that configured the shell-based IRC clients. This meant you learned to decipher their connection information and recognize the folks from local schools. Very late one night… technically early in the morning… I was slaving away on updating this bot when I saw a university that I recognized pop into the channel.

Not remembering where I was… what I was locked into… I pinged them with a hey. Turns out… my wife and I had this mutual friend out of the Netherlands and she knew him through some Christian channel. He had originally gone there the first time to troll them… and stuck around and chatted, eventually becoming a regular. He had apparently dared her to join the “questionable” channel, and it was moments after making good on this dare that some random stranger clocks her university and starts messaging her. Admittedly it was not a good look, and I am sure that I came across as the biggest creeper ever. My wife said there was a flurry of side conversation that essentially amounted to “Who the hell is this creep?” and thankfully I was vouched for as “chill” and “safe”.

This set up an regular series of conversations whenever we saw the other was online, eventually realizing that we grew up 30 minutes apart from each other. Meeting your IRC friends was a bit of a thing at that point, and we decided to meet up on easter weekend and go see a movie together. It was purely platonic, and eventually, I started “dating” a friend of hers… as much as you can really refer to being IRC steadies as dating. About a year later I was in the process of transferring from my assortment of 2-year schools to the University she went to in order to finish up my 4-year degree. It was only after being around each other more regularly that things evolved into something more than platonic. However without IRC… and a random dude that we both lost touch with from the Netherlands we would have never met in spite of after the fact… knowing a lot of the same folks.

Bel Lured into Everquest

MMORPGs are very important to me and have honestly introduced me to most of my long-term friendships over the last several decades have ultimately been forged in some game or another. It all began for me however with a single moment… when my wife was out of town and a friend of mine coaxed me over to his house to help him with an Everquest raid. His guild had been planning on trying to take down Vox and as we were closing out the work day he got a text message saying that she had spawned. He was a dual boxer and ran a Monk and a Druid together… but was being asked to pull the raid and knew that there was no way he could reasonably do both roles. I got a five-minute explanation of how the game worked, and how to play a druid… and was set to the task of nuking and healing.

I held in for quite a bit of time, but at some point wiped… when my friend realized this he is yelling at me to “mem” a spell and get back into the fight. I am butt naked because that is how Everquest worked… you lost all of your gear as it was sitting on your corpse. I memorized something that looked like a powerful spell… and then fumbled my way through the caverns leading up to Vox. Something you have to know about me… I have no sense of direction. So it is a sheer miracle that I made my way back to the chamber after having exclusively followed other players to get there. I get into the room, throw a few spells and actually manage to land the killing blow. I was hooked… by the end of the weekend I had picked up the base game, Kunark, and the brand new Velious expansion and was leveling Exeteroth Iceforge the Dwarven Cleric that became lovingly known as “Tiny Elvis”.

It was not all happiness and sunshine, however… and Everquest leaves a very bad taste in my wife’s mouth. The amount of time that the game required… was extreme and the fact that I could not realistically stop what I was doing at a moment’s notice. There was legitimately one point at which my wife pulled the ethernet jack out of my computer because she was tired of me saying “just a minute” when trying to get to a safe place to log out. There was also the fact that I would get called at all hours of the night, begged to log in, and come somewhere to resurrect someone… because they lost their level. As we find ourselves in the revival of “games with consequences” this is part of the reason I am not exactly signing up on that particular nostalgia train. I have great memories, and Everquest ultimately led to so many other games that respected my time a bit more… but it also has a gulf of frustrations if I am honest about it.

Bel Becomes Belghast

For most of my internet existence, I was largely known as “eXeter”… yes I legitimately used to type it just like that. Even with World of Warcraft, it was my intention that Exeter my Dwarf Paladin was going to be my main and it was only a death in the family that caused me to fall behind my friends that led me to start Lodin my Hunter that eventually became my raid main. When WoW Launched I founded a guild named House Stalwart, in part because I had some baggage from Everquest when guild leadership goes wrong. It just so happened that one of my friends from the guild started a raid group called the Late Night Raiders. He needed a few more hunters that he could rely on for tranq shot rotations… and given that I did complete heal rotations in Everquest… that was something I was more than prepared to orchestrate. This group is super important to me, in large part because so many of my current friend group either stems from that group itself or branch out from it. On the AggroChat podcast that I record every week… Tam and Kodra were both members, Thalen was in another raid but occasionally subbed in on our raids, and Ashgar came from the guild that came AFTER that raid broke apart that Tam led. Even Ammo the artist that does all of my stuff… has ties to the server we all raided on.

I never wanted to be a Hunter. It was just something that knew I could solo and use to catch up with my friends. I am not a DPS at heart and do not care one bit about how much damage I am dealing. What I care about is tanking… similarly, my friend Finni decided that she didn’t really want to play a hunter anymore either but instead wanted to be a Priest. Leveling a Warrior and a Priest sucked in vanilla Warcraft, so we decided to level together as a tag team allowing me to play as Prot and her to play as Holy… and then chew our way through the quests rapidly. Now I had used the name Belghast before in Dark Age of Camelot as my Celt Champion and in Everquest as my Froglok Warrior, so when I went to create a Human Warrior in World of Warcraft I kept that naming scheme. With the great reset of that game with Burning Crusade, I used it as my opportunity to shift mains, and from that point forward I was known as Belghast to most folks.

As LNR failed to survive the transition from 40-player raids to 25-player raids… I bounced around tanking for a handful of other raids before finally banding together with Thalen and a priest friend named Elnore to start the “Duranub Raiding Company”. Shiana the leader of LNR used to refer to our raid as a “Durable Pack of Nubs” and we just sort of shortened that sentiment. He left the server to play with another group of friends… House Stalwart was supposed to be a dual guild with one half on Alliance and one half on Horde, and a significant chunk of folks that we had played with in City of Heroes ended up preferring the Horde side better. I just became known on Argent Dawn as Belghast it was the character that I wound up taking to raids most often, and when I eventually started a blog the name was forever cemented in time as I started signing up for social media accounts under that name.

Bel Starts a Blog

Friends… I started this blog under the hubris of feeling like I knew something about both Warrior tanking and leading a raid. The name Tales of the Aggronaut was referring to a tank as someone who holds/navigates aggro… aka an Aggronaut. I was inspired by the blog “The Wordy Warrior” and thought that maybe I could do something similar. Little did I know that I had essentially painted myself into a corner feeling like I needed to talk about playing a Warrior in World of Warcraft and more specifically talking about leading a raid as a Warrior. What did not help is the fact that Wrath of the Lich King was very much a high point of the game for me but a crushing low point. I went through one of the worst depressions I have ever experienced in my life and there were a few times I came close to acting upon it. It did not help that I felt like I was failing whatever audience I might have… but not keeping up with the rigors of actually making posts.

As The Cataclysm expansion decimated Duranub… with the shift towards rewarding guild-based raiding… I found myself out of sync with the guild as a whole and enjoying raiding significantly less. When Rift came out, I used it as a lifeboat and an excuse to go elsewhere… and with it, I shifted focus to that game. I went through a rebranding of the site and everything… new logo, a new chibi Bahmi version of my character from the game adorning its masthead. As I once again found myself out of sync with that game… I realized that doing this every time I jumped ship was going to get extremely tiresome. While the name of the blog became increasingly incorrect… I needed to shift its focus to just being about me and my adventures.

In 2013 I started what I then called the Grand Experiment, where I forced myself to write something every single day regardless of what it was. The idea was simple… I was essentially trying to desensitize myself against the anxiety of hitting that publish button and feeling like I needed to wait for something truly profound before posting it. A year later… with much hubris again, I decided to challenge other bloggers to do the same… at least for a single month. Timing just so happened to land around August so I mashed the word Blog and August together in my head and wound up with the term Blaugust… only to find out years later that someone had already started something of the same name back in 2010. Now I have become known for running this event and in the broader blogging and social media community as being a pillar of the game blogging community… but really I am still the same idiot that used to flood forums with inane banter.

Admittedly I am feeling rather exposed and stupid for writing all of this nonsense and forcing it upon you all. I have no clue WHY exactly I did this other than a lack of other things to talk about. As I have written today it just sort of developed a life of its own. If you’ve made it to this point I thank you greatly for sticking around. There are a lot of things that I have skipped over… I generally don’t talk about work stuff on my blog for example. Other things I have already talked about here like my skater phase… but really this is the progression of events that more or less led you to be reading me today.

Alchemical Boy and Murder Puppet

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Good Morning Folks! Every so often I find myself lacking gaming content… and decide that it is going to be a book update day. Today is in fact one of those days. Over the last week and some change, I have consumed three books and started on a fourth, and am going to talk about them. First up we have Last First Snow by Max Gladstone, the fourth book in the Craft Sequence and chronologically the first. I have to admit… this book combined with the fact that my Library system does not have the other books available… has halted my momentum in this series. It isn’t so much that Last First Snow is a bad book, and more that it takes the least likable character from Two Serpents Rise and then writes an entire damned book about them. It is essentially a retelling of events that are hinted at during the second book in the Craft Sequence and the whole thing feels a bit superfluous.

Sure it shows us that Elayne Kevarian is maybe a far cooler person than we had realized up to this point… but also I was sort of already on that page and the Temoc is awful… which again I am already on that page. I feel like this is a “darling” that the author should have probably dragged out into the street and killed. In the grand sequence of events in this series… I am hoping this book matters more than I realize at the moment. It very much feels like Max Gladstone has a deeper attachment to Temoc than we their readers do… kinda like Metzen and Thrall. Maybe I am wrong… maybe this character is beloved by the fanbase as a whole… but I am sorta doubting that someone who is pro-blood-sacrifice and ritualized scaring of children is a champion of the people. This is going to be a speed bump to the series as a whole for me that I am going to have to get over.

I found myself in need of a palette cleanser after that book, so I ventured slightly to the side and picked up This is How You Lose the Time War which is a collaboration between Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar. As suggested by my friend Thalen, this book is sort of this weird romp of taking the classic Mad Magazine Spy vs Spy characters… and then turning that into a Romeo and Juliet story arc. The story is presented in alternating excerpts about two characters… Red and Blue are on diametrically opposed sides of a time and reality-bending Cold War. The thrill of competition leads to begrudging respect which blossoms into a romance that could never be… were it not for the fact that the two of them are adept at making the impossible appear probable. It is a really short book, only 200ish pages and once you get indoctrinated into the speech patterns of the two characters time flies by. I highly suggest you pick this up and give it a spin because I found it delightful.

Similarly recommended, this time by my friend Ace/Grace… we have the book Space Opera which is also smallish in stature coming in around 300 pages. The tagline for this book compares it to what if Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy met Eurovision and quite honestly it is apt. A more brutalist interpretation is what if the Get Schwifty episode of Rick and Morty were played a bit more seriously and expanded into an entire story arc. It is the tale of washed-up glam rockers Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes, and how they saved the earth from total annihilation at the hands of the great galactic civilizations. How does a civilization prove itself to be truly sentient? Through music of course. It was a fun ride that took a bit to get into, but once I was bought in… I was there happily until the conclusion. The only thing a bit distracting about the novel is it has a propensity for rapid-fire information dumping asides… but then again so did Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy so maybe that is just fit for form.

Now I am working my way through Middlegame which is in itself part of a larger series… that admittedly I am probably going to dive into as well. It also has this whole story-within-a-story thing going on… which has spun off into its own book series. I admit though… the first night that I started this book I struggled considerably because it spends a lot of time introducing you to some deeply unlikeable characters. Last night however I broke through the surface and met the adorable Roger and Dodger… two small genius potatoes that I want to protect with all my life. I am glad I suffered through a maniacal alchemy boy and his murder puppet in order to get to the good bits. It definitely feels like one of those novels where every statement is purposeful as we are carefully working our way toward some grand denouement. While I had wobbly legs for a bit… I am very much on board now and will see this through.

Finishing Middlegame will take me to 48 books this year and that seems like a reasonable number. Sure it would be nice to maybe push that to 50 for clean divisible by ten goodness… but I am finding myself craving some narrative gaming. A lot of this has been me listening to audiobooks while playing mechanically enjoyable games that don’t require the narrative centers of my brain. I think I want to spend some time before the close of the year visiting some of the wealth of games that came out in 2023. I feel like I want to start Baldur’s Gate 3 over from scratch, and maybe roll something that can talk to animals as I seem to have missed out on a major part of the game.

Chieftain Waffle Time

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Good Morning Folks. I think I am about to wind down my Blast from the Past league character. The problem is I am left with more indecision than I had hoped I would be at this point. I am still not entirely certain that RF Chieftain is the way to go for the upcoming private league that we are starting with 3.23. Sure it is damned nice to only have to focus on a single elemental resistance… but it seems to come with a price. I just feel way squishier than I would at the same gear level on a Juggernaut. I think the core problem is that Juggernaut is giving you a lot of survivability from the ascendancy, and Chieftain really is not. Sure it is a pain in the butt to have to care about all of your resistances… but I think that pain might be worth it.

This is essentially where I am currently on my Chieftain in the Blast from the Past league. I have 4700 hit points, 1400 regen, 82% on all Elemental Resistances, and just over 24k armor. Looking at that would make me think… that the character probably feels pretty sturdy. Unfortunately, as you play it… it is just constantly taking damage and I have to hit my healing potion to top myself off. Granted I do not have my potions online yet, because I just do not have the currency to reroll my flasks and get them to flaggelant/auto, so that is a whole defensive layer that is lacking. I also do not have anything resembling optimal gear, but I am starting to feel the same problems as I did with my Shield Crush Chieftain. On paper it feels like I should be sturdier than I actually am. It just feels like I am missing something that I am not sure how to resolve on my own.

At this point I am at 44 of 115 on the Atlas and have done a red map… that was admittedly a bit rough but largely manageable. I feel like I could probably complete my Atlas as a Chieftain, but I wonder if I would be better off just starting Juggernaut and dealing with the itemization problems. Maybe this would be the catalyst for me to learn how to actually craft resistance gear. I am so used to being able to go shopping and use the trade site to resolve my issues. I’m really good at buying gear… but significantly less good at crafting it. That is going to be the collective struggle of a private league… that adds a whole layer of challenge that I am not used to. I am hoping that the collaborative nature of the league will bring me more enjoyment than the inefficient floundering frustrates me.

There is always the possibility that I call an audible at the last minute and level Minion Guardian instead. I had a heck of a lot of fun with this build during the Ancestor league, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there is no way this goes unscathed into 3.23. It feels entirely too powerful for the minimal gear investment. I ran up one of these during the Toucan league and I was able to do red maps without any real fuss. It also did a far better job at bossing than Righteous Fire usually does, so I could absolutely see myself playing this happily for the majority of the league. Sure I would probably STILL level an RF Jugg because I like playing one… but I am not sure if I would feel the need to do so.

I had legitimately hoped that the Blast from the Past League would galvanize my path forward. It has not. The transition from leveling a Chieftain to early maps is very nice. I could also be pretty effective and burning my way through the atlas. However, since Delve is my favorite thing… I just felt very weak compared to the extreme amount of damage that mobs down there do. I’ve only made it down to around depth 80, and realistically at a minimum, I need to be able to comfortably do depth 100-150. So this is why I am waffling so hard right now… Chieftain is so close to being the perfect Righteous Fire leveling experience but still so far away. There is no way I can reasonably rely on using Forbidden Flesh/Flame to seal ascendancy traits from Juggernaut given that we will be essentially Guild SSF, and it will be a long time until any of us are capable of farming those bosses.

So I find myself crawling back into the good ole comfortable reliable Juggernaut. This is the character that I always seem to gravitate towards. I like the way it feels and I like grinding delve with it. So maybe I should just stop trying to go in a different direction and accept that like Pohx… I’ve found my niche. I tried to fight against it at the start of this league with a Lighting Arrow Raider… and as soon as I got up the currency I swapped to running up a Juggernaut. This is the character and build that I know the most about, and in theory, should have the easiest time gearing properly in SSF. So maybe I just live with that decision.

I am sorta jealous of Kodra who is entirely determined to play Hexblast Miner and has created intricate plans for how exactly he is going to achieve that. I strive to try new things… and end up building a ton of characters during a league but always end up sitting back down in my comfy recliner.

Blast from the Past League

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend, the “Blast from the Past” short-term league was launched in Path of Exile. Essentially, this league is running off the Standard template but with the additional Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra league mechanics. For me… there is quite a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in these leagues because I got in at the tail end of Sentinel and made my first real attempt at a proper character. Lake of Kalandra was the first league that I started a character at the very beginning of the league and managed to complete my Atlas of Worlds. While this was just last year… I feel like so much has changed in the way that I approach Path of Exile since then. Sentinel was one of the best-received Path of Exile leagues and Lake of Kalandra was one of the worst… so it is interesting to see these mashed together. It has made me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is attempting to give Kalandra a redemption arc since the sandbox state of the game was just in an awful place when that league was running.

Sentinel is a fairly straightforward mechanic. You pick up three different colors of Sentinels and use them while doing other content to empower monsters for a chance at tasty rewards. Stalker Sentinels can empower a bunch of random mobs, Pandemonium a single pack, and Apex are designed to empower rare or unique enemies but a very limited number of them… aka something you pop in a map bosses arena. This is a great mechanic because you can use it while doing other things, which means it doesn’t necessarily force you to align your play habits to any particular patterns. It is very easy to start using this from the first moments of gameplay all the way to your endgame, and quite honestly… I now appreciate this mechanic far more than I did at the time.

The reason why the league was the stuff of legends in Path of Exile circles, is that it also introduced a specific reward type called Recombinators. These items would allow you to essentially combine two items of the same type which destroys one and gives you a new item that is an amalgam of the attributes of the input items. This allowed players to break the rules of crafting and get items that were simply not allowed to ever roll together on the same item. This was very impactful on Standard League as the items coming out of Sentinel essentially replaced all of the previous mirror tier items. I should probably note that I have been using Sentinels since the start of the league and I have yet to see a single recombinator drop, so they appear to be fairly rare.

Kalandra on the other hand was a league that allowed you to essentially build your own map. Each map would present you with a Mirrored Tablet on a pillar, and you could place one or more tiles. Once you had filled the tiles on a given map you could take it as an itemized map to be run in your map device. Various mechanics also allowed you to swap around existing tiles and do things like move where the entrance to your map was or move specific empty tiles to change the layout. Doing this allows you to crank up the difficulty of a given map because tiles increase in difficulty as they move further from the entrance. At the time of Kalandra’s launch… the state of the game was rough and there were a number of truly unkillable affix combinations that could destroy a run. Even now, however… once you get 8 or more tiles form the entrance the fights get pretty damned “rippy”.

I had some fond memories of Kalandra and honestly still think the concept behind it is really cool. However, even coming back and playing it now… it is not terribly rewarding. I think more than anything that was the damning stroke against this league, is that the rewards felt disconnected from the difficulty of the content. It is very easy to create a Lake that is much harder than any map you could run at least early on, and since most of your rewards come from the tile-specific chests… there just isn’t much loot to speak of. I still enjoy running Lakes as they are essentially free content… you are creating them as a byproduct of other things that you are doing in the game. They just don’t really feel that rewarding… at least not compared to things like Sanctums.

There are three events running in November, the first was the Krangled League, the second is this week the Blast from the Past, and the third is a league where every map has some random league type applied to it. Two of the three events feel like random nonsense, but Blast from the Past feels a bit more deliberate. It makes me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is trying to figure out how to remix and bring back both the Sentinel and Kalandra mechanics and merge them into Standard as they have several other past leagues. Maybe they felt like the Lake itself did not really get a fair shake given how wildly unpopular the game state was at that moment with rampant ArchNemesis nonsense going on. I am not entirely certain how these could come back. It feels like for Kalandra, you would almost need to add another new Atlas Master that specifically has maps filled with mirrored tablets similar to how Alva gives you access to three portals per map. Sentinels would blend more easily into existing content and could simply be drops you find in the world.

We saw a pretty good bump on Friday when this league started. Things were so busy that Ash, Kodra, and I ran into issues with creating new zone instances. For example, none of us could seem to zone into the submerged caverns. I pulled up a graph on Steam Charts to show the bump, and while 27k players are not anywhere near what is seen at a league start, this is a pretty significant bump considering we are at the very tail end of an existing league and most players have faded away from the game. I realize that these November events largely exist to buy time as they needed to bump back the start of the next league because it reportedly has some rather elaborate mechanics. That said it feels like Grinding Gear Games may have underestimated the hunger players seem to have for Sentinel specifically. While it hasn’t really been the redemption arc I had hoped for the Lake of Kalandra, it is still an enjoyable mechanic.

On a personal level, I have used this limited event to test out what a league start as a Righteous Fire Chieftain would feel like. Essentially you are trading the stability of a Juggernaut for the convenience of being able to slide straight into maps without needing to worry about your elemental resistances. It is quite a bit squishier than an equivalent Juggernaut would be, but it was very nice to be able to transition into mapping with no time really spent fussing with gearing. Given that our upcoming private league will be more like SSF as we will only be able to trade among ourselves… I feel like it is probably going to be a good call to start out as Chieftain and then transition later into Juggernaut when I have the gear to support it. The cool thing about that swap is it is literally just ascendancies as RF Jugg and RF Chieftain use the same passive tree.

I think part of the squish factor is that I had been leaning on some Armor/ES gear while leveling just to be able to get the right socket colors. As I began swapping out leveling gear for stronger armor bases, the squish factor began to balance out a bit. There really does seem to be a break point around 25k armor that things start to even out and getting over the 4000 Health threshold also helped. Normally RF involves a swap between running Fire Trap in your helm to running it in your body armor six-link and I might start out in this swapped state. It feels like it is going to be much easier to get a good armor base six-link with RRRGGG than it will be to get BBBRRG without access to the trade economy. I know I will not see a Brass Dome in “Bel League” so I am going to need to lean on something like either a Glorious or Astral Plate.

I’ve hit level 82 without much effort in spite of the massive experience penalty applied to these events. When you die… it feels like dying at level 95ish rather than your early 80s. I am not sure how much higher I will end up getting as I have mostly answered the questions that I had originally wanted to answer. Yes RF Chietain is viable and probably a really good idea for SSF play, and yes I still enjoy the two league mechanics from Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra. Anything else that I might accomplish on top of this is basically gravy. Pushing higher in level means you have more chances at the raffle loot, but honestly… I doubt I will win anything considering how many other players are competing in this particular league event. I do need to log into my Krangled character to see if I qualified for anything and probably delete it in order to free up the character slot.

Have you been playing the Blast from the Past limited league event? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.