Tales of the Aggronaut

Swole Treebeard

June 21, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I think I am probably done with Diablo IV for a while. I absolutely got some enjoyment out of the game, but as far as long-term replayability goes… it isn’t really doing it for me. The moment-to-moment gameplay and grind are just not what I want out of an ARPG, but I also sort of knew this going into the game. As a result, I am back to my usual nonsense and playing some Last Epoch. When I was having a blast in the Path of Exile Crucible league, my friend Ace was having a similar blast playing a Druid Spriggan build in Last Epoch. So this morning I am going to talk a bit through the build and share some gameplay footage that I recorded yesterday. First, however… I want you all to bask in the glory that is my Wild Man Pool Cleaner… because I can’t NOT see a pool skimmer with the way he is holding that staff.

Thankfully however you spend all of your time in this build as a Swole Treant. This build revolves around spending all of your time in Spriggan Form and then buffing the abilities that you have access to in that form. Spriggan form like the other transformed forms relies on rage, so you will be needing to do things to make sure that you can make it all the way through a map without getting knocked back into your weaksauce human form again. We are also going to be shifting as much damage as we can to cold… which adds a bunch of benefits including a whole other defensive layer that comes from slowing and eventually freezing enemies.

Yesterday over lunch I recorded a video showing off some gameplay. This is me doing a level 75 monolith as I slowly work towards getting this character into empowered monoliths. Essentially the gameplay involves having 1 Spriggan, 1 Wolf, and 1 Storm Crow pet that provide buffs, conditions, and some meager additional damage and then running amok through the map dropping 9 Healing Totems and 12 Vines. The Healing Totems are converted to spiked totems through the Spriggan Form skill tree and the Vines are converted into frozen thorn turrets. So what ends up happening in practice is that the Healing Totems keep you alive through almost any damage, and there are just so many things firing spikes in all directions that it shreds most smaller mobs. It isn’t amazing at bossing… because it takes quite a bit of time for them to actually deal damage to the stronger enemies but the excessive healing you are receiving allows you to survive basically anything that does not one-shot you.

Currently, I am at level 73 and working my way through the level 85 Monolith without much issue. After conquering that I will have the three level 90 Monoliths to complete and then can properly begin Empowered level 100 Monoliths. Honestly, the mapping portion of running the various Echoes is smooth as butter. The only challenges thus far have come from the bosses, where there are a lot of one-shot mechanics that I have to dodge. I steamrolled the first Monolith boss and took two attempts at Rahyeh, and two attempts at Lagon. While it took quite a while for my army of turrets to burn down the bosses, the healing allowed me to deal with a lot of the smaller mechanics that just sort of whittles you down over time. So on Lagon for example I needed to dodge any of his beam attacks… but could just stand in and soak the waves.

As far as the build goes, Aaron from Action RPG has a guide video above and you can find the Last Epoch Tools template here. One thing that I find I miss greatly when playing games that are not Path of Exile… is POE.Ninja. That website scrapes the build information from the top progressed players so if you are curious how others have solved specific problems in a build, you can sift through information til your heart is content. I legitimately wish EVERY ARPG had something like this, so you could see how players that are focused on a specific type of play are gearing out and solving the inherent issues with the build. Mostly what I would love to see from build creators is some stat information… like you should have X amount of Y stats, rather than suggesting some idealized pieces of gear that will probably be almost impossible to replicate.

For my build currently, I have some pretty scuffed gear and am utilizing two uniques. The first is Tears of the Forest, which is very likely to be required to make this build work. Essentially it solves your rage problems and generates 2 Rage per second for each Vine you currently have summoned. Since you are going to be trying to keep up all twelve Vines at any given time, this means you are generating 24 Rage per second which is pretty much faster than you can reasonably spend it. I’m also using Valeroot, which is not super amazing… but does give me +1 to the level of Spriggan Form. My goal is at some point to replace that with a purple chest that has more than one level of Spriggan Form on it. While I have legendary potential on Valeroot… I am just not sure if it is worth trying to turn into a Legendary.

All I know for certain is that this has revitalized my joy in Last Epoch for the time being. I have two builds that need specific items to drop for them to really be able to transition into the next level, and Spriggan seems to be extremely solid with little to no specific items. My hope is if nothing else I can use this build to farm items in higher tiers of corruption in order to finish out both my Bone Golem Necro build and my Squirrelmaster build. I have been contemplating turning my necro from being Fire Based to Necrotic/Self-healing based but it just felt like too much fiddling to really make happen. Not that it would actually be that difficult given that I shifted gears to Spriggan extremely abruptly on my baby druid, but it is sort of the “full bags” problem I have with MMORPGs.

What I mean by the “full bags” problem is that there is often a game for me that I might want to play… but there is just enough friction involved with playing it that I have trouble getting started. Traditionally this has been an MMORPG problem where I have no clue what any of the items in my bags do anymore, and it would require an hour or so of dedicated effort to sort things out… so instead I keep logging in and then logging right back out. I’ve had this most specifically with Everquest II, where I have some 300 bag slots full of probably useless crap, and I just don’t want to dedicate the mental bandwidth to trying to figure out what to do with any of it. Similarly, I have this wall with getting back into Genshin Impact, where I have too many quests pulling me in too many different directions… so instead I just don’t engage at all. So instead of taking the time to sort out my Necromancer in Last Epoch… I just shifted my focus to a different character for a while.

I am a “stuffer” and this drives my wife insane. She will occasionally bring me an object… that she wants me to deal with, but at the moment she hands me it… I can’t dedicate the mental bandwidth to figuring out what to do with it so I just find someplace to put it. Often that place is somewhere I will likely never find it again, but I just can’t deal with new stimuli when I am in the middle of doing something at times. In Path of Exile I have several “dump” tabs, where I just shove gear that might be useful at some point but I can’t deal with trying to decide if I sell them or vendor them at that very moment. The huge benefit of having seasons that reset in ARPGs… is it limits my ability to get into a state of having too much shit to process. For now, I am enjoying the heck out of the Spriggan, and my hope is that this will ground me enough in Last Epoch again to feel comfortable going and actually dealing with making the Necromancer work in a more comfortable manner.

Pom-Pom Is Sadcore

June 20, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I figured I would talk a bit this morning about Honkai Star Rail. I’ve continued to play it in the background but have not really talked about it in a while. I’m still finding this an extremely fun game even though I am mostly playing for however long it takes to complete the daily activities and spend down my activity currency. I wish there was a bit more meat on the bones here, but we are in somewhat of a holding pattern for the next major story drop to land. I’ve contemplated picking back up Genshin Impact as my friend Ace has done, but I find just the concept of trying to ease back into that game overwhelming. There is so much content that I missed and it feels weird trying to find a place to even start.

I pulled Silver Wolf off the current banner and immediately adapted my default team to include her. The whole mechanic of being able to make encounters weak to abilities that they were not already weak to seems extremely strong. Natasha though is doing the heavy lifting of this team. Right now I only have one healer and really wish I had a second. Right now that would be Bailu… which is a five-star and not on a banner yet. The next banner is for Luocha, which is a character that I have no thematic interest in at all… but might still try and get just to have a second reliable healer. I’ve reached the point where I need to attempt to maintain two teams in order to keep pushing some of the content and whichever team does not have Natasha on it… struggles quite a bit. As far as my lineup of spare 60s goes… I have Bronya, March, Asta, Gepard, and Serval. Essentially I tend to make a super shield team and then give the healer to the other team and it MOSTLY works.

Right now in lieu of story content, we are getting several events happening in the game. The best of these is a sim game where you take over management of the Everwinter City Museum. It took me 71 turns to complete all of the activities which is probably a bit long, but there were several turns where I let my current actions ride just to build up the resource used to fund renovations. Essentially someone looted the museum and you are helping out Pela track down the culprits and replace the items. You also spend some time tracking down volunteers and convincing them to help be docents at the museum. All in all, it was a really fun event and I am sort of sad that I am done with it.

Another game that is cycling off in just a few days is the Starhunt Game which is associated with Silver Wolf. You are essentially tracking down graffiti that she tagged the space station with, and decoding it. This involves going through some mini-dungeons and completing very specific objectives. There is this cool mechanic where the boss of the encounter is too powerful to be defeated, so you have to find a specific tag somewhere in the zone that will reduce its level significantly so you can take it down. The biggest thing gained from this event though is a Light Cone that is themed for Silver Wolf and the ability to power it up significantly. It was fun, but nothing really to write home about.

The event that started this week is a “research” event where you just supply the researcher with some basic materials. So far nothing they have asked for has been a challenge and are items I have hundreds of sitting in my vault. These sorts of events tend to be a way of removing some resources from the economy, and if you have played for any length of time you tend to have plenty of whatever the resources are. The rewards are nice even though the event itself is rather boring. I can always use more blue materials to either synthesize into purple materials or to power up characters.

Honkai Star Rail, while largely in maintenance mode for me… is still something that I enjoy doing each day. It maybe takes thirty minutes to complete everything for the day, and then move on to whatever my gaming main course for the evening. This is just enough time to feel like I accomplished something, without the game really overstaying its welcome. I do however look forward to the next batch of story content dropping, and I am enjoying the little daily interludes that take place over the in-game text system. I should probably spend some time trying to farm the Space-China currency so I can pick up the remaining Eidolons for Fire Traveller. I’ve almost completed the battle pass for the month as well, so it still feels like I am making constant progress. Honkai Star Rail is one of those games where it was really fun to mainline it until I caught up with the content… and then still fun playing it in daily maintenance mode.

Fun with Stable Diffusion

June 19, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends and Happy Juneteenth! Yesterday was my Birthday in addition to being Father’s Day, and I am super thankful for all the assorted well wishes. This morning is going to be a bit of a departure from my regularly scheduled ARPG nonsense. Over the weekend I spent some time messing around with Stable Diffusion running locally, and I thought I would talk a bit about it. Let’s get some stuff out of the way first. I do not condone Art Generation models as a method of replacing the work of actual artists. You will see a bunch of images adorning this blog, and they are all for the most part the paid creation of my good friend Ammo. In fact, as we speak she is working on yet another one of my hair-brained ideas and I have no clue what the final bill will even be, but will pay it happily as I always do. For me, the “AI Art” landscape is more a toy than a tool and in the past, I have enjoyed feeding it nonsense and seeing what it comes up with out of that chaos. For example… I have no clue who the fuck this dude is but any time I feed it a prompt with the name “Gideon” in it, I end up with this visage.

I’ve known for a while that you could run various generation tools locally off your graphics cards, but I always assumed it would be a tedious process. I started down this present rabbit hole when I found out that there was literally a one-click installer that set everything that you needed up for you. There is a distribution of Stable Diffusion called “Easy Diffusion” that offers a quick install for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and within about 15 minutes I was up and running and generating nonsense. I am sure there is probably something inferior about the path that I took to get to this destination, but I honestly don’t really care. I wanted to see if it could be done, and have gotten sufficient enjoyment from this digital version of wooly willy.

The end result is a web server running on your local machine, that you can then access from any other machine on your network. By default, this runs on port 9000 and gives you a fairly detailed interface to control the process. You are going to need some prompts and honestly… the best guide that I have found about this process is this one. More specifically it was helpful in understanding the concept of negative prompts… aka the things that you want to steer the engine away from creating. This is going to be really important if you are working with anything that could be considered the human form because like a pre-teen boy… it seems to be drawn to replicating boobs in the strangest ways. There are negative prompts that you can supply to the process in order to sort of steer it away from that particular uncanny valley.

The other thing you are probably going to want is some more models to play with. You could get really deep in the weeds in trying to explain exactly what a model is… but effectively think of it as encoded data that tells Stable Diffusion how it should produce images. The best place for these seems to be CivitAI.com and on the front page, you will find a number of the more popular options. I’ve played with several of these and after fiddling around a bit, I think I probably like DreamShaper the best because it tends to lean towards more imaginative imagery rather than attempting to replicate reality. Wherever you installed Easy Diffusion, you should find a directory along the lines of “EasyDiffusion\models\stable-diffusion”. When you download a model from CivitAI it will be a “.safetensors” file and you just need to drag it into this directory in order to use it. Something important to note… each model is roughly 2 gigabytes in size so they can rapidly fill your drive if you download too many.

Let’s walk through a multi-hour deep dive that I did yesterday in trying to get something interesting out of the generator. I wanted a Kaiju attacking a city, but I assumed that maybe the model wouldn’t understand the term Kaiju. Essentially when writing a prompt I find it best to sort of use simple language. So for example this is the prompt that I supplied to get the above image.

A giant monster attacking a modern city with the military fighting back against it

This was maybe a little too on the nose and had a distinct Godzilla feel to it. Since I tend to generate five images at a time, you can often see it going in a bunch of directions. Some of these were more akin to something that you would find in a Doom video game, but I mostly liked the general direction it was going. Essentially what I usually do is feed the image that was just generated back into the prompt in order to iterate on that idea. I find that over the course of what ends up being a few hundred generations, it slowly narrows down the focus to get closer to what you were actually wanting.

I wanted to go in a different direction, so I tweaked my prompt a little bit and fed it the previous image.

A giant monster that looks like Cthulhu attacking a modern city with the military fighting back against it

Basically, I supplied that I wanted it to look more like Cthulhu to steer it away from Godzilla… which worked like a charm. However, remember that bit where I said that the models seem to really want to draw boobs? I included this specific image just to show that point.

I took a bit of a pivot because I didn’t want this to end up being a pretty boring drab scene. So for the next prompt, I started adding some style elements to it. I also wanted the city to look a bit more ruinous.

a vaporwave scene featuring A giant monster that looks like Cthulhu attacking a modern city knocking down buildings some of the rubble on fire

I noticed that some of the elements of the monster how were mechanical looking, which made me start shifting in a slightly different direction. Could I get this to make it give me a scene of a Kaiju fighting a Robot over a ruined landscape? Unfortunately at this point going forward… I don’t have exact prompts. The images that generate are named based on your prompt, and my phrase got too long for the file character limit.

I kept the prompt above but instead added that it was fighting a Giant Robot that was wielding a laser sword. The generator got confused as it often does… and just started making the monster look more robotic. While extremely cool looking… this was not really what I was going for, but it was a key step in the process nonetheless.

I tried a few more rounds of generation, feeding my favorite from the previous round into the next round… but no matter what I tried it seemed to be hung up on a single “monster” figure. I am including this one mostly just because it looked pretty freaking badass. I have no clue what is going on with that building but I am on board with the bio-organic mech with a giant laser sword thing that is going on here.

It was around this point that I decided that I needed to tweak things up a bit further. So I specifically called out that there were two figures, the monster, and the giant robot and this finally began to produce paydirt. It started out a bit ephemeral at first, with this pseudo-robot-building thing in the background. However, that gave me a thread to expand on, again feeding one generation into the next round of five generations.

After a few more rounds of generation, the idea was starting to finally take root. I say idea because in fiddling with this nonsense, it does seem like the generator gets something stuck in its head and you have to sort of forcibly dislodge it at times. I was getting somewhere though, but knew it would take many more instances of taking an image that was the closest to what I wanted, and then feeding it into the next loop… and doing this over and over until the results started to turn in the direction I wanted it to.

Then after legitimately two or three hundred rounds of this nonsense and the course of an entire afternoon wasted… we have this glorious piece of nonsense. I think what I find so interesting about Stable Diffusion so far, is that it can serve as this rapid ideation platform. If you want to quickly iterate on some ideas you had in your head, you can come up with something that is still… very visually wrong at times but contains the flavor of what you wanted. I could see this being honestly an amazing tool for an “actual artist” to test out some ideas and have the machine keep iterating on something until they get a layout and subject matter that they wanted… that could then serve as the scaffolding to build something interesting. Even for wordsmiths, this could be super interesting because I can already wrap a story in my head around what is going on in this picture.

It is also sometimes just super interesting to feed it a prompt and see where it goes. This is a hundred or so generations off of the prompt “Belghast”. No clue why but it seemed to really latch onto a military and zombies theme when I used my chosen moniker as the prompt.

This delightfully ominous scene was generated with this prompt:

a skinwalker stalking a group of hunters in the woods

So while I would not at all consider that to be a successful prompt as far as subject matter goes… it still looks freaking cool nonetheless. Again this image has a story to it that is just begging to be told. I feel like trying to make one of these image generators create exactly the image that you were wanting… is a path to madness. However, if you sort of go with the flow and iterate on the patterns that you are seeing emerging… it can produce some really interesting things. While I don’t exactly consider this art on the same level as the things being produced for me by Ammo… there is definitely an art form that is emerging from guiding the machine. It somewhat reminds me of carving a woodcut block, and allowing yourself to lean into the imperfections of the material… rather than trying to fight against them.

Anyways I thought this was interesting. No clue if anyone else cares about it, and I have no clue if I will ever walk through one of my generative steps again in the future. The cool thing about this blog is it is a “me” blog more than it is a blog devoted to any one particular topic. I’m enjoying creating nonsense with Stable Diffusion and thought I would share that with you all.

AggroChat #438 – Teenage Exocolonist Blues

June 18, 2023 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks! This week we start off with a carryover topic from last week and talk a bit about Star Wars Shatterpoint. From there Ash tells us about the Furry Child Soldier game… better known as Fuga: Melodies of Steel 2. Bel talks a bit about the Overwatch 2 PVE content that is being sold for $15 after the original PVE expansion was canceled. He also talks a bit about the concerns brewing about a proper cash shop opening in World of Warcraft. Tam tells us about this delightful-sounding game called I Was a Teenage Exocolonist before Bel brings down the show with talk of the current Corporate Internet Apocalypse. We talk a bit about the Reddit Blackout and Streamers abandoning Twitch. Finally, Bel and Ash talk a bit about how nonsensically good the Spriggan that Grace told us about is in Last Epoch.