Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Sorry we missed last week but we were down over half of our show members. This week Bel faceplants the intro and is urged by the entire crew to keep going. We start off with some discussion about the Honkai Star Rail Swarm Disaster event and a bit of idle gameplay with Chillquarium. From there we dive into some Path of Exile talk as Kodra is now beginning to become infected with our madness. He presents the Magic the Gathering draft analogy and we discuss using that as a way of learning Path of Exile as a whole. We talk a bit about Unity’s corporate failure speedrun by burning off absolutely every bit of their goodwill with some dumb service changes. From there we talk about a game with a very long and contorted name that promises to give you access to all those weird mobile game ads that don’t actually exist. Lastly, we talk a little bit about the return of Wizardry and how it is the birthplace of the modern JRPG.
Topics Discussed
Honkai Star Rail
Swarm Disaster
Chillquarium
Path of Exile
The Magic the Gathering Analogy
Guardian SRS is Amazing
Unity Speedrunning Corporate Failure
YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!
Yesterday we had a Sony State of Play event, and with it was released some more information about the next part of the Final Fantasy VII reboot saga. There is a part of me that is excited to see more information about this game, and then another part… that is deeply disappointed that it will be released on the PlayStation 5 first. That is not out of some sort of misplaced console fanboyism… because I have a PlayStation 5 and an Xbox Series X. I am fairly agnostic in the console wars. What I am not agnostic about however is the fact that my platform of preference is the PC and my method of play preference is the keyboard and mouse. I often times falter and buy into the hypestorm surrounding a new game. However, I have to examine my track record specifically with major console titles.
Horizon Forbidden West was a game that I had been looking forward to almost more than any other. However I also greatly preferred playing this game on the PC, so when I console release came out I spent about a week playing it… before bouncing and returning to something PC-based. I got frustrated with just how fiddly aiming with a controller was, and how it was hard to read some of the text because we do not have a mammoth-sized television in the livingroom. Then again there was the challenge with the livingroom in general and it mostly being a “public space” and not something that I felt like I could commandeer for long. So now I find myself in a holding pattern waiting and hoping for an eventual PC release of the game so I can finally play it on my platform of choice.
Before HFW, there was Ghost of Tsushima a game that I enjoyed quite a bit. However, the entire time I was playing it… there was a niggling thought in the back of my head about how much I would enjoy the game more if I could play with WASD and Mouse controls. Everything about the game would have been immediately improved if I could just control it the way that I wanted to control it. I made it to the second major area in the game and then bounced because I just didn’t really want to play it with a controller. So I am now sitting in this holding pattern of hoping that maybe one day it also gets a PC release, or that I suddenly switch religion and decide to pick up the controller.
Then there are the games that I bought on console… and ultimately rebought the game on PC much later. Jedi Fallen Order even on PC, goes to a lot of trouble to tell you that playing it with a keyboard and mouse is the wrong way to play. However, I remember when this game first came out, I bounced pretty early into the game. I think I gave it about a weekend and made it to Kashyyyk before completely dropping the game in favor of something else that drew away my attention on the PC. Later I came back on PC with a Keyboard and Mouse and consumed this game hungrily, playing nothing but it until I got the credit roll.
Similarly, there is the case of the first Final Fantasy VII Remake game. I started on the console because it again was a console exclusive to PlayStation, and I didn’t even make it out of the first major area. Then later when it was released on PC via the Epic Game Store, I picked the game up and played it through to completion. The mouse and keyboard controls, while often an afterthought by Squaresoft felt so much better than a controller for me. I had so much fun with this game, but it was largely in part that I got to play it in my way on my platform of choice.
More recently we have the case of Final Fantasy XVI, which again… released as a PlayStation platform exclusive. I bought the game… and I made it about ten minutes into the game before deciding that I didn’t really want to experience it in this manner. So I’ve spent the money… but can’t seem to wrap my brain around wanting to play it on that platform. Everything seems to indicate that the game did not meet sales expectations from SquareSoft, but then again they always seem to say that. My hope is that it legitimately did not… and as a result, it will get a PC release sooner rather than later. I want to experience the game, but I want to experience it in the most comfy manner… with a keyboard and mouse.
So while I am happy as all get out to see more information about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and am really looking forward to the game. I am going to try my damnedest to stick to my guns and ignore it until the game releases on my platform of choice. It has happened too damned many times at this point… that I get excited about a game and then ultimately bounce because I don’t really want to play it on my console. Sure it is dumb that I own both brands of consoles and they mostly collect dust… but it is what it is.
I think I am just coming to realize how much playing with a mouse and keyboard means to my enjoyment of a game. I am not entirely certain WHY I am wired this way, given that I grew up with the NES, SNES, and Genesis. I also played a ton of games on the PlayStation and Dreamcast era but after that… I dove hard into PC gaming as my primary platform. Controllers just end up making my hand cramp, which I get is probably the exact opposite for most gamers. I would love for this not to be the case because gaming in general seems to be leaning more and more into controllers as the default input method… but I am not exactly sure how to change that.
Good Morning Folks! Given that I have mostly polished the rough edges off my Minion Guardian, this means I have once again turned my attention to Storm Brand Inquisitor. The why of this build is I wanted to give Storm Brand Inquisitor a bit of a redemption arc, or at least a chance at one. I had played this build in Kalandra League and struggled with it quite a bit. In the last league, I spent some time sifting through my old characters and re-evaluating them with my current level of knowledge and that poor Storm Brand Character was a mess. Essentially I had nothing vaguely resembling proper defensive layers and had nowhere close to capped resistances. At a minimum, I could at least solve that last problem with the build. As a result, I have had this build in the back of my head as something I wanted to revisit, and almost did last league but instead decided to make my “brand build” of the league Wintertide.
Once again I started with Velyna’s guide as a template and then tweaked that a bit to suit my tastes. Namely, I dropped the dual wield nodes and pathed down to pick up shield nodes. I question if this was a good decision because honestly… so far I have not really been able to get enough block chance to make that a viable defensive layer. More than anything I wanted to be able to use shield charge, which requires a shield. So far… the build feels sorta mid. That isn’t necessarily bad, but compared to my other options it doesn’t feel amazing. It also feels far worse than Wintertide Brand did last league. That said… I am very very low level and want to give this build until maybe level 90 before I pass proper judgment. For now, it is perfectly fine and I am able to clear yellow-tier maps with ease… which isn’t amazing considering how much currency I have spent on this stupid build.
One of the challenges with the build is that realistically it wants to use a bunch of uniques. The hardest part about that is the fact that I am using two Call of the Brotherhood rings which gives me 96% cold conversion. Rings are a really hard slot to give up when it comes to making your resistances work, given that there are a number of ring-exclusive implicits that add a bunch of value resistance-wise. The single most expensive item was a six-link Inpulsa’s Broken Heart and since I knew I was going to be running this build I shopped around for this for awhile and managed to snag a “cheap” one for 3 divine orbs. The Crown of the Inward Eye is just a universally good helm, and I managed to pick up one with a Determination Reservation Efficiency enchant for if I remember correctly only 40 Chaos. The Brotherhood Rings were 20 Chaos Each from the same vendor, which shocked me given that they had already spent catalysts on them to get the quality up to 20%.
I’ve also been spending some time playing around with using Heatshiver instead of Crown of the Inward Eye, and I think that might be the correct play. The negative is that I lose my Determination Enchant, and I dislike running Labyrinth enough to farm another one. What this has forced me to do is drop Zealotry and swap it for Discipline to make up for the loss in Energy Shield. Zealotry was mostly being used for the Crit aura as I am already generating nearly 100% uptime on Consecrated Ground. I think I can give up some crit chance for effectively doubling my damage output in some cases. The Heatshiver also has the side benefit of giving me some resistances which are nice, and could allow me to rework my resist gear a bit.
As it stands… I have to heavily utilize my shield, belt, necklace, boots, and gloves to be able to reach resistance caps. I think a lot of the challenge of this build is that I am gaining next to nothing from the tree itself and rings are worth so much freaking resistance. I could of course start slotting more gems into my tree as I pour on levels but I am already using up 3 possible sockets to solve another problem that I will talk about next. The biggest problem with this guild is that for whatever reason… it was ungodly expensive. I think I paid 120 Chaos for the boots, and 150 Chaos for the gloves. The Stygian Vise was 90 Chaos, and the shield I think was around 80 Chaos. We are dealing with some massive price inflation this league caused by just how much currency is being generated by the re-introduction of Sanctum.
Since I did not have a great way of dealing with elemental ailments, I had to eat up the abyssal socket in my belt and two jewel sockets on my tree in order to roll out the “Chance to Avoid Being Shocked” and Stormshroud combo. Essentially if you can get a “chance to avoid being shocked” to at least 100%, the Stormshroud Unique jewel will apply that avoidance to all elemental ailments. At a minimum, this requires either support on your tree or two abyssal jewels with a maximum of 50% on each. This was also not a cheap prospect as I gave around 100 Chaos for each of the Abyssal Jewels and 1.5 Divines for the Stormshroud. I’ve known about this combo for ages, but never actually had to buy my way into it. In theory, this is the way that I am supposed to be fixing Righteous Fire so that I can drop “Purity of Elements”. I’ve just never gone through the motions to make that happen.
So in the end… I have spent 8-10 Divines on a build that I am not really in love with. I have shit armor, shit evasion, bad block, and the only thing really going for me is consecrated ground which applies to both life and energy shield which when combined with petrified blood does a decent enough job at keeping me alive. I am having to change my instincts of trying to move when I am taking damage, to instead standing still and hoping that the consecrated ground will be able to keep up with the damage intake. I am deeply susceptible to being one-shot by certain mechanics because I just don’t have that much effective health. This is most obviously an issue with Physical Hits, because if POB is to be believed I can only soak a maximum hit of just under 7000.
Then again I am only 74… so I am giving this build time to come into its own. I am going to try and give it until level 90 before I pass judgment. I definitely think the state of the build is better than it was in Kalandra league but given my druthers, I would probably rather play Wintertide Brand Occultist. Switching to Heatshiver has definitely helped though, so I am going to run a bunch more maps to start to get the swing of how the build feels. As always my goal here is to give you all the honest assessment of how a build feels. If you are curious you can check out the POB that I dumped this morning of the state of where I am with my character.
Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.
So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.
Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.
Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.
I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.
All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.
