Cresting the Chasm

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Good Morning Folks. I am not entirely certain that Magic Find as a concept is for me. Running the same two maps over and over is exceedingly repetitive. I guess the good news is that I am “over-sustaining” maps, meaning that if I hop back and forth between a Crimson Temple and a City Square, I am always walking away with more of those two maps than I went into the process with. The bad news is… I have the layouts of both zones and most of the variants memorized at this point. It feels to me that magic find as a concept involves trying to sand down all of the rough edges on the map running process and then speeding through them as fast as humanly possible in the hopes of winning the jackpot.

When you DO win the jackpot it feels absolutely phenomenal. I hit yet another Divine Orb dropping map last night and it was only tarnished slightly by the fact had I gone down the right path first instead of the left path… I would have also hit a duplication altar to go with my Divine Orb dropping one. However, any map you walk away with eight Divine Orbs feels phenomenal. The only negative is thus far I have yet to really see anything exceptionally rare. I still have zero Apothecary cards, and while I have gotten a couple of copies of The Fortunate… I’ve not really seen more than I did previously. I guess I expected to start seeing better uniques than what I have gotten to this point but that hasn’t really worked out. I am not expecting to see a Headhunter or a Mageblood drop, but I did expect to start seeing more tier-three uniques and maybe a few tier-two ones.

There is no denying however that it has made a sizeable difference. If you look at my PoeStack this morning, I have officially dug myself out of the hole created by pouring forty Divines into this build. Granted a lot of currency is locked up in pools that are a bit harder to liquidate, but still, I am almost back to the same amount of raw Divine Orbs that I was previously and have enough Chaos to comfortably cash it into Divines as well as a haul of Delve merch that I could sell quickly. It isn’t so much that Magic Find… at least doing so outside of a party who is also magic finding… is that dramatically different from other methods, it is more than it adds up over time. I am consistently getting more of everything which also means that I am seeing more rarer items as a result.

I still greatly prefer Delve to Mapping, but I’ve always had to at least rely somewhat on maps to fill back up the Sulphite tank. Now instead of just running a bunch of random maps, I am approaching the sulphite refill process a bit more methodical as I burn through the maps quickly on my Magic Find Lightning Arrow character. I do somewhat wonder how viable it would be to try and build a Magic Find character in the Guild SSF private league we are considering. The core magic find items are common enough, that I would just need to devote a tab to collecting them for the three to one recipe until I wound up with something good. I do wonder if Deadeye and Lighting Arrow are going to eat a bit of a nerf considering just how wildly popular that one build was in this league.

In other news, I ran my first Trial of the Ancestors in well over a week and was rewarded with a Divine Orb in the next to the last round. I guess that means I might be getting up high enough to start seeing good rewards. Kodra has managed to run a Sanctum all the way through, and that is one thing Magic Find has produced more Sanctum Tomes. I am contemplating trying one out with the state of my Lighting Arrow character to see just how fast I can burn through it. It is really good at making things explode and is also VERY fast moving. I feel like my POB is probably underestimating how much damage I am dealing because other than tanky bosses… I am pretty much making entire screens evaporate.

Anyways! Tuesdays are hard. I hope you all have a great day and are having a pretty great week. The weekend seems so far away at the moment.

Adventures in Magic Find

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Good Morning Folks! We talked a bit about this on the podcast this weekend, but Ancestor League as a whole has had some amazing staying power. More specifically I find myself still extremely engaged and we are just shy of two months into the league at this point. Throughout this league I have built six builds thus far, but only one of them… really did not live up to my expectations. Lightning Arrow Raider felt like it was going to be this amazing experience, but really… the survivability of that class did not live up to my expectations. I think in part I held onto the original configuration of the build for a bit too long and did not lean into the more crit-based build. The problem being that there was really no clear indication of when I should be doing what, but when I hit red maps things started to struggle quite a bit.

Over the course of this league, I had managed to build up quite a nest egg of currency, and I decided to burn through it in a final act of rebellion. I opted to shift my league start Lightning Arrow build into a Magic Find Crit Variant. I sifted through a bunch of options and landed upon largely following the template of Balor Mage from his solo magic find deadeye. This late in the league… everything was overinflated but I managed to cobble together the basic skeleton of this build. In truth, the respec was nowhere near as significant as I thought it would be… but still managed to burn through around 80 Regret Orbs to make it happen. Most of the cost of the build was tied up in a handful of unique jewels including a new Watchers Eye, a large ring Thread of Hope, and then I opted for a more budget option of an Impossible Escape instead of another massive ring Thread of Hope.

You can see some footage of me running through a Crimson Temple map. I am not good at “blasting maps” as it were, and still go way too slowly. However to coin something I said in the earlier Lightning Arrow video “It sure do kill”. It suffers from all of the problems that Lighting Arrow always had, where it does not have great single-target damage… and since I am no longer running an Artillery Ballista link I cannot lean upon that. However, when it comes to clearing entire screens worth of trash it does a phenomenal job and still manages to obliterate all but the tankier rares. Basically, I have been consuming my stockpile of Crimson Temple and City Square maps, and while most of the results have not been dramatic… there is a significant upward trend in the amount of currency that I am pulling from them.

The most dramatic event is that I had a Crimson Temple where I got eight raw Divine Orbs that dropped. Most of it however has been significantly more subtle where I just find single Divine Orbs a bit more commonly and have pulled several Voidborn Reliquary Keys which sell for 3.2 Divines each. I’ve yet to find an Apothecary card or any of the big chase rares, but it has been noticeable enough to know that something changed. I started running Blue Altars mostly because I needed an influx of the Eldritch currency associated with them. I might switch over to Red Altars soon just to build back up that as well, but it has been nice to occasionally hit a Sulphite Scarab Altar and help fuel my delve juice proceedings.

In two days of casually running maps on Magic Find Lightning Arrow, I have essentially repaired most of the dent that getting the gear to set up the build in the first place caused. I am not hitting things anywhere near as hard as I could be. In theory, I should be running a much more strict filter that only flags high-value items in order to maximize the speed at which I am running things. I however enjoy mulling over random small items and hunting for interesting fractures. I also like picking up “bubblegum currency”, which is not a thing that most magic finders do. So while I could improve my gear significantly as I picked up some of the cheapest magic find options available… I am not sure if I could ever really optimize my gameplay patterns in a way to generate mirrors’ worth of currency… nor would I have any real interest in spending that kind of currency in the first place.

This has allowed me to see how the other half lives. I get the appeal… but also I hate being this squishy. I’ve put on a couple of levels since switching over to this build, but I am losing way more experience than I am gaining and have mostly stalled out at level 93. I am missing one of the key defensive mechanisms built into this build that centers around getting stunned often, but recovering a ton of health when you do so. I might see if I can reconfigure my tree in such a way as to pick up these points without losing any other serious benefits. That might let me get back into positive experience territory again.

All in all, this has been interesting… but with us contemplating a private league next time, it means that none of the currency I am attempting to gain will have any value other than for crafting purposes.

AggroChat #452 – Cyberpunk Redemption Arc

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

Hey Folks! We are down a Grace and a Thalen this weekend so we floundered a bit on the topics we were going to talk about.  While we questioned if we had enough for a show, we still wound up going over by about fourteen minutes. We start off with some discussion about GeekGirlCon 2023 which all of our Seattle contingency attended this weekend.  From there Bel talks a bit about a new Switch device that he picked up called the CRKD Nitro Deck that makes the Switch a bit beefer and feel like a Steam Deck.  Tam has been diving back into Cyberpunk 2077 with the release of the 2.0 update and Phantom Libery expansion.  Finally, we wind around to Path of Exile that Ash, Kodra, and Bel are still deeply engaged with this league.  We talk a bit more about the birth of the “Bel League” private league concept.

Topics Discussed

  • GeekGirlCon 2023
  • CRKD Nitro Deck
  • Cyberpunk 2077 2.0
  • Path of Exile
    • Bel League Gaining Traction
    • Random Path of Exile nonsense

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Absolution and Mistborn

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Good Morning Folks! On Tuesday night I started a brand new character and last night I got it into maps. This has been one of the faster leveling characters I have played, but that was in part because for most of it I was using a bunch of uniques to speed up the process. As I talked about yesterday, I created a Necromancer and started working towards a Vaal Absolution build. Last night I did my normal build testing routine of running a T1 map, a T5 map, a T6 map, a T10 map… and then ultimately trying a T16 map. Shockingly I survived very well in a T16 “alch and go” Crimson Temple with red altars turned on. Did it feel amazing? Absolutely not, but it does feel pretty solid when I drop back down to T10 “barely red” maps. I think more than anything I just need more levels to make this build feel a bit more comfortable as I just dinged 76 this morning.

I am sure I will do a full write-up at some point, and I recorded a brief video this morning of how it looks currently. Essentially you can see my POB from level 73 and just starting maps, and I am making a few “choices” that differ from the standard spiel. Most of it is stuff I had lying around like using a +2 Minion Geofri’s Crest just because it had a boost to minions and really good resistances on it rather than its actual purpose of scaling up Holy Relics. I am still not entirely certain what I think of this build but in the grand scheme of things it seems to be pretty solid. I think it falls in the category of so many of my alternate builds where if I put more time into it, it could feel amazing. More than anything this was a test case to feel how absolution plays, and I think I have gotten a decent idea at this point.

I also wrapped up the second book in the first Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson and plan on starting the third book tonight. This novel was a wild ride, and I realize I have said that before… but no really… this was a wild ride. It went in a bunch of directions and wound up with a very “Empire Strikes Back” type ending where everything is bad for our protagonists. However, that makes a lot of sense given this is the middle book in a trilogy. I just did not expect the direction things went, many of the actions that were taken, or the resolution that came out of them. I am still very deeply invested in most of the main characters so of course I will hungrily begin consuming the next bit as soon as things have settled down tonight.

Lastly, my order for the Gamecube Purple Nitro Deck came in yesterday and I had a bit to play with it. Essentially it is a controller dock of a sort for the Switch where you take the central tablet portion and click it securely into a wrap-around controller base. The end result is something that feels significantly more solid and balanced in your hands than the default configuration of a Switch. It features rumble and gyro with the only lost functionality being NFC but given I rarely if ever use Amiibos… this was not a big deal to me. The buttons and dpad are maybe not as high quality as I would have liked, but the thumb sticks are Hall Effect which should stop drift. There is an added benefit of having four buttons on the back in a similar arrangement to the Steam Deck. The entire package is a bit lighter than the Switch with native Joycons attached. All in all I think I am going to like it quite a bit.

While I was writing this post, the video of Vaal Absolution gameplay finished uploading, so check that out if you are interested. Today is my Friday, so quite honestly I have no clue if I will be making a blog post tomorrow. If I do not… I hope you all have a wonderful day. We are going to get our Flu Shot and latest Covid booster so I have no clue how I will be feeling in the morning.