Good Morning, Folks. The last couple of weeks have been a wild ride from the chemo two weeks ago, to the recovery last week, and trying to sort out the current state of my blood pressure medication. While my stamina is still completely shot, and I only have so much “oomph” in me, I was able to more or less have a normal weekend to prepare for the upcoming chemopocalpyse that will be hitting starting tomorrow. I wish I had taken a before photo… because the house was a complete pit, and I just lacked the energy to do much of anything about it. That is not to say that my house is not still messy… because it is… but I was at least able to do enough of the normal rotation of chores this weekend to sort of reset things and prepare for the impending “torpor” brought on by the next round of chemo. I have some stuff to do tonight to prep trash to pull it out to the curb tomorrow morning, but I picked up everything that really mattered and restocked my food stores with easy-to-eat items for the next two-week block. I am hoping, though, since I have mostly sorted out the blood pressure thing, that my “reset times” are a bit more stable this go round. I also purposefully tried to eat more food over the weekend, because I know I will probably not be eating much over the next few days, as I will not feel up to it.

I spent most of my weekend gaming time playing Path of Exile, as I have continued chipping away at challenges. I am sitting on 31/40 and, in theory, have 32, 33, and 34 well in my sights. I’ve completed everything for the “GGG” challenge except for actually hitting level 100, and I had to pause some of my other challenge work because I did a bit of backpedalling there with a few bad deaths. I’ve rebounded, though and am sitting at 3 pips from 100, and might be able to grind that out tonight. After that, I will go back to chipping away at Tremendous Tempests and Sandswept Survivor, which involve me forcing quant via sacrifice fragments in the map device, and running what ends up being some rather juicy Legion maps. Astrolabes are pretty slow and expensive, but I am chipping away at those with my Delve tree, which is pretty easy and does not generate a ton of death risk. Delve traditionally is my safest way to grind out to level 100, because it is very predictable, so I will be doing as much of that as I can until I ding. I really wish that Sulphite was itemised, and something that I could just buy outright on the exchange.

Prior to taking some bad deaths, though, I was having a lot of fun with Legion. Essentially, I would have at least two Legions per map, and each of them would spawn a ton of generals, with those guaranteed loot tiles. I’ve never really gone all in on Legion before during a league, and really forcing myself to go hard on it has been a lot of fun. I did this last league with Alva temples, and learned so much about that mechanic. In theory, I should probably do Blight, the next league, since that is one of those league mechanics that I have never really focused on. Each time I do this… I broaden my knowledge of the game and add more tools to my kit for sourcing my own stuff. Path of Exile is way too detailed to ever learn fully in a single league… so instead I have taken to focusing on single mechanics over the course of MANY leagues to reach a broad understanding. Once I got the foothold of Delve under me, it then allowed me to pretty much tackle any other content because I could reliably make enough currency to fund those endeavours. POE really is the sort of game where you need to learn a “trade” and then be able to utilise that trade to learn other trades.

Speaking of trades… this was supposed to be the league where the “chaos standard” was abolished. However, that said… most of the trades that I do are still in large blocks of chaos. After the video I just linked, it came out that Nightmare maps, which replaced t17s, would still only be modifiable with chaos orbs. I am not entirely certain if that is what saved the day, or simply the fact that we, as players, still place some measure of value and stability in the fact that chaos orbs are familiar. Bench crafts still require them as well, but I think more than anything… it is just that we are used to trading in chaos. Exalted Orbs are certainly way more common, but also…. less common than Chaos, so if we ever shifted the base trading unit, I could see going with those. In truth, it does not really matter, but Chaos to Divines have been just volatile enough that any time I get up around 1000 Chaos, I convert some of it. I’ve blown copious amounts of currency on dumb things… like, for example, squeaking an extra gem out of pretty much every link by getting an imbued gem with lifetap on it.

In other gaming news, I rolled a new character over in Last Epoch. I do not have the mental or physical fortitude right now to take down Aberroth with my Forged Weapons build in its current state. It requires me to do mechanics entirely too much for where I am right now. Over the weekend, Tam talked about how strong the current state of Fire Aura is on a Spellblade, and given that I am an enjoyer of all things Righteous Fire… I figured I owed it to myself to check it out. Right now, the guide I am following is doing something that I have wondered about for years… it converts this Fire Aura to cold damage so that it freezes things. Legitimately, one of my mad daydreams has been an alternate version of Righteous Fire that scales off cold and freezing damage vectors, and right now this seems to be doing exactly that. Cold damage traditionally in ARPGs represents a really strong defensive layer unto itself…. so I think as this scales it will be precisely that.

I think the bigger challenge at the moment is that I am trying to sus out exactly what path through the campaign I want to take. I am probably going to do some skips, because I cannot see doing all of the acts again on this character. However, I am not quite strong enough to jump straight into monos at level 30ish. So I think I might do one of the campaign skips and see where that takes me, and then wrap up the last few acts of the game. The only thing that I do not love about Last Epoch is that most of the builds require you to press the majority of your buttons, which means…. I tend to create a button macro on my logitech g600 that presses all of the buttons at once. The ideal state of an ARPG build involves mostly hitting a single button for me, and when I can’t generate that… I tend to figure out ways to force it. In Diablo 3, I used to use the numlock trick to constantly be firing everything other than my main attacks, so the whole mouse macro thing is not too far from that.

I know tomorrow the bottom will start to fall out again, but I feel like I am at least better prepared for it. I need to deal with trash tonight and then make sure both my tablet and phone are charged fully. I am about as ready for this as I can be. I don’t have the levels of anxiety that I had going into it two weeks ago, because I have been there and done that… and more or less made it out unscathed. I am going to continue to take notes, because due to the whole blood pressure situation, I don’t feel like I got an accurate understanding of what each day was like. When my pressure bottomed out… I was fighting that more than I was actually fighting the effects of the chemo. If you are still around for my shenanigans, thanks. I am not going anywhere, but my schedule pretty much is dictated by how I am feeling on a given day.