Winding Down Sanctum

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Good Morning Friends! I think I might be in the process of winding down my focus on Path of Exile and the Forbidden Sanctum league. Going into this league I had a few goals in front of me. Some of them have been accomplished and others I decided not to really worry with. This is not exactly a comprehensive list but here are essentially the things I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish this go-round.

  • Finish Atlas Objective passives for all 115 Maps
  • Get my 4 Void Stones
  • Complete Enough Challenges to Get a Totem
  • Level a Character to 100

Last night I finished my 19th Challenge of the league and unlocked my very first totem for the hideout. Admittedly it is a short and sad totem but it is my very first period. Last league, I unlocked enough challenges to get one full set of armor, and this go around I got two sets of armor appearances as well as the totem so I consider that progress. I finished the Atlas last league and did so faster this time around and set my sights on getting the four void stones that are required to make it so that every map that drop is Tier 16.

The first two void stones came extremely quickly and made me think that this was going to be a reasonable challenge. However the amount of time or currency that is required to get them… just doesn’t feel worth it to me on a personal level. I could go on the forbidden trove and buy a carry for the remaining two void stones, but that seems silly and since I don’t REALLY love chain running maps I am not sure what it would get me. The last goal that I had in my sights is getting my Juggernaut to level 100, which is still doable given that I get great enjoyment out of fucking around in Delve for hours. the problem is that XP gain vs XP loss is a massive struggle at that level and it takes days of grinding to gain a level, and literal seconds to lose all of that progress. While I think I am winding down my focus, it doesn’t mean I won’t keep playing so I am hoping that maybe I go ahead and knock this one out.

As far as Delve goes I am pretty comfortable at the 200-250ish level which seems a solid place to go city hunting. I should do a push-down to see how far I can sustain without increasing the risk greatly. I figure the lower I go the better the experience farming will get. There have been a few deaths that I have taken in delve that snuck up on me and overwhelmed my defenses, but they are few and far between. I moused over my Darkness Resistance and my raw score is currently sitting at 1050% with a similar Light Radius value. I’ve tried to keep those at roughly the same upgrade level as I moved further down. In theory, I could have been buying small resonators all this time with excess azurite because I have way more resists than I need for the level range that I have been exploring.

Every league it feels like I learn a ton of lessons. In this league more than anything I became significantly more adept at trading. Here is another stash tab snapshot, but on 1/12 I had 1695 raw chaos and 7 raw divines, and now I am sitting at 4916 raw chaos and 15 raw divines. I think the key thing that has changed is that I have gotten better at using the price-checking functionality of Awakened POE Trade but more than that I’ve gotten better at eyeballing value. I’ve started to develop a mental map of what makes something valuable to the state of the league as it stands. This sorta requires you to get a vague understanding of which builds are actively in the meta and what sorts of gear they want. For example, in this league Poison Summon Raging Spirits became a massive flavor of the week’s build, and almost overnight anything with poison and minion stats boomed.

Here are some general things that I look for:

  • Jewelry with at least three good resistance hits, specifically a solid chaos roll plus at least two other resists.
  • Good Corrupted Implicits on a good base with good stats. The prevalence of tainted currency makes minor crafting on corrupted items that I would have long ignored a much more feasible option.
  • Anything that has damage multipliers plus damage bonuses. This is really subjective but I’ve moved a lot of items in this category.
  • Unique Items with a good Corruption. This is a weird category because it is going to be hard to find comps, but still worth trying.
  • Ventor’s Gamble rings… legitimately can be sold at 5 Chaos a pop all day long because for whatever reason people seem to love gambling on these to vendor swap for the possibility of that one perfect ring with max positive hits to everything.

Then there are some things that I have started doing to improve otherwise disappointing items that I have.

  • Corrupt Every Rare Gem Period… If you have a fluid source of Vaal Orbs. In Delve you get a ton of these and way more than I could ever possibly use. I’ve seen so many gems go from being something I could get 5 Chaos out of to something I can get 50-100 Chaos just from a “yolo corrupt”.
  • Corrupt Amethyst Rings. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but Amethyst rings tend to be how people fix resists more than anything else and there is a chance that an otherwise shitty ring turns into something phenomenal, and again… it is worth the Vaal orb.
  • If you have an item that is middling… and does not have max sockets on it throw a few Jewelers Orbs at it until you hit max sockets. Jewelers orbs are extremely plentiful, and it is amazing what a difference it makes in moving an item with max sockets versus moving one that is going to require some crafting before use. Most players want ZERO engagement with the crafting system and you can profit from this.

As far as traders go I am a very very small fish in a very large pond. I am not dealing with mirrors worth of value (aka something like 84,000 Chaos with wild fluctuation in prices) but I feel like I am doing well enough to buy most anything I might want. I’ve also brokered items for various members of my guild that wanted zero engagement with the economy, but I’ve kept that stuff separate and excluded from Exilence when I have it crawl through my tabs and look for anything that I have missed. I feel like if I had the knowledge that I have now, I would be in a much better position at this point in the league than I was when I started. Essentially I started trading a bit too late, and there is a lot of value in bread-and-butter items early in the league. Even now over a month into the league, I am still getting a constant flow of 5-50 chaos trades.

I’ve also reached a point of maturity when it comes to builds in the game in general. I am okay with realizing that it is unrealistic that one build is ever going to feel great doing all of the content in the game. Over time I standardized on Righteous Fire Juggernaut as my main character to do things like Delve and Heist on, and Fire Variant Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer as my bossing and mapping character. The RF Jugg can map just fine but I put a heavy investment in Metamorph on my maps which means I can chew through those so much faster on the SRS Necro which is designed to take out boss characters. The state of my SRS Necro however is not exactly “Uber Boss” capable, which is why I stalled out on finishing unlocking my Atlas Void Stones. I could have pivoted into the Poison build, but decided that I just did not care enough to spend the currency required to do that.

As far as league mechanics go, I tried a number of different things this time around. I started off with a bit of a mess as far as Atlas passives but quickly coalesced into a “Wandering Path” design, which is a notable that doubles the effect of every small node on the tree, but makes it so that you do not gain any benefit from the medium-sized nodes. This was amazing for raw map generation which in turn helped me rapidly unlock the Atlas tree without needing to buy any maps or go fishing for Kirac missions too much. Ultimately I came down to buying 3 Unique Maps in the end, but that was well worth it to finish out the tree.

After that, I focused on Ritual Alters for a bit with Harvest as a secondary goal. This was fine but Ritual feels like it has been nerfed from my past experience because I did not get much in the way of big-ticket currency items. In Kalandra league I got several Divines through Ritual even without investing Atlas nodes in it, and I thought maybe if I did go hard into Ritual it would pay off. Harvest seemed like a good bet and it was “fine” but its money gains are really through bulk trading the three colors of crafting resources that you get from running it, and I decided early on that I had no interest in that.

My next strategy was to focus on lockboxes and essence farming, which again was fine… but never really had much luck with that and I was still very much trying to focus my attention on mapping as my primary game mode. It was only through happenstance that I really decided to dive as deeply into Delve as I did, and once I realized how much I enjoyed it… and how reliably profitable selling resonators was that I reshaped my tree to work around getting as much Sulfite as quickly as I could. I had noticed how good items could drop pretty reliably from Metamorph, and with my SRS Necro those encounters were extremely easy so I shifted around points to focus on Delve and Metamorph.

It was very very late in the league that I made a tiny bit of a twist to my strategy and included a bare minimum of Harbinger, dropping the last of the Essences that I had in my tree. My Atlas tree now guarantees at least one Harbinger per map and while that isn’t a ton, it has made a noticeable bump in the raw number of Annulment Orbs and Ancient Orbs that I end up getting as well as a not insignificant amount of Chaos Shards that eventually add up to my raw chaos total. The real chase item however is the Fracturing Shard, because these puppies sell for 50 Chaos each and move almost instantly. So sure it isn’t a dramatic amount of currency but because you are running several maps in order to fill back up your Sulfite, the Metamorph and Harbinger nodes sort of just passively add to your bottom line in a way that doesn’t really add that much complexity or time to the maps.

While I think I am starting to wind down, all of this has me looking forward to the next league start. I’ve learned so much more about the game as a whole this time around. I know significantly more about what makes a build viable and how to fix problems. I think going forward I am going to look for some sort of engine to fuel further explorations. The Righteous Fire Juggernaut served as an excellent stable character to farm resources for other more volatile characters. I guess I have fully committed to the concept of the Trade League and as a result, I am getting better at amassing a “warchest” that I can then use to buy my way out of frustrating situations.

Path of Exile is a very different game experience than any that I have played before, and it is the first time I have really willfully engaged in active trading. It sorta makes me reassess how I have interacted with trade in other games, and how in large part I have done it completely wrong. It isn’t that I think I will ever become an Auction House Baron… but in theory, if I can apply some of the things I have learned to other games I might at least not be broke all the time.

Game Releases of 2023

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One of the things that I often do at the beginning of a year is to try and project out some of the things that I think I might be interested in on the upcoming release radar. I’ve not done that at all this year because I have been overwhelmingly obsessed with the current Path of Exile league. I thought it might be interesting to peer into the future and talk about some of the games I am interested in that have release dates for the common year, or at least look likely to release in one form or another. The further into the list, we get the more likely these things are to be bumped because they don’t have firm dates associated with them. There are going to be some big titles missing from the list that you might feel is important, because this is a deeply personal outing. For example the new Zelda game, I will likely ignore it until the emulators can run it and I can disable weapon durability because that construct ruined the first game for me.

Atomic Heart – February 21

Atomic Heart is one of those games that I have been amped for since I first saw it in a trailer presentation. It looks like a soviet block spin on the Fallout games, with weird robotics and psychic phenomena. I am largely on board for all of this. I fully expect it to have some jank but also I’ve played and loved Bethesda games so I am mostly used to that. I’ve played the Metro games and they were for the most part a giant mess, and I still enjoyed them. I have high hopes but also they have been tempered by past experience with games wanting to be the Russian Fallout.

Star Wars Jedi Survivor – March 17

Jedi Fallen Order was one of my favorite games when it came out. It proved to me the possibility of what a “soulslike” game could be if it had a difficulty slider. If you want the Dark Souls experience you play it on hard, and if you want just a fun narrative romp you play it on easy. I played the game happily on easy and enjoyed the hell out of the experience. I am looking forward to another outing as Cal Kestis, and I really hope that at some point this character is going to intersect with some of the Disney live shows because it seems too damned good not to use given that Cameron Monaghan is right there ready to go.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores – April 19

I am throwing this out here because it has a fixed date, but I have to be honest… I am not sure if I will play this when it releases. I never actually finished Forbidden West, and in large part, it is because I don’t really play consoles that often. I would far rather do what I did with Zero Dawn, and play the expansion whenever the PC release comes out because playing this game with a mouse and keyboard is so much more enjoyable than playing it with a controller. We will see if I stick to my guns on this one, and while I enjoyed HFW it is nowhere near as compelling as the first game for me. Everything about how Aloy moved and controlled was so much better, but the story was just less interesting and didn’t really push me forward as fastly. Don’t get me wrong I loved all of the world-building and I look forward to playing this on PC whenever it releases there.

Redfall – May 2

We got new gameplay yesterday in the Microsoft presentation, and I have to say I am probably more interested now than I was before. It feels like this is going to be interesting as a completely single-player game, and also really interesting as more of a co-op Left 4 Dead type experience. I am going to have to sort out ways to be online at the same time as the rest of AggroChat folks to be able to experience this together. It honestly reminded me a bit of how State of Decay 2 feels, where you have bases that you operate out of and then go out into dangerous areas to collect resources and complete missions.

Diablo IV – June 6

I am throwing this on the list because I am very interested, but also very conflicted about it. Blizzard continues to not exactly be an exemplar for things that I want to engage with right now. I was hoping that by now we would be further along in the Microsoft acquisition and that Bobby Kotick would be on his way out the door. I want to play this, but I am not sure if I can play this. What is there looks interesting so far and I am very interested to see how a “post Path of Exile” Diablo game operates. I was burnt so heavily on Diablo Immortal as was pretty much everyone else, and my confidence levels are lower than they normally would be.

Final Fantasy XVI – June 22

I am exceptionally bummed that this is a PlayStation Exclusive. I would far rather play this on the PC full stop and it is dumb that I can’t. That said there is no way in hell that I am not going to play a mainline PC game that was crafted by the same team that gave me the FFXIV story experience. ARR to Endwalker was the best Final Fantasy experience I have ever had, and as a result, I am completely going to “day one” this game and probably “no life” it. I am in fact an acolyte of Yoshi P, and am willing to sign up for any nonsense that he is involved with. I mean it looks fucking gorgeous so there is also that. I am going to have to drag my PS5 back upstairs so that I can have undivided access to it.

Arc Raiders – TBA 2023

We’ve not seen a lot about this game since the Game Awards in 2021, but recently it has apparently been confirmed to be a 2023 release coming to Playstation, Xbox, and PC including Gamepass. I mean I love me some looter shooter action, so you know I am going to check this out regardless of how non sequitur using a Robyn song about masturbation is for the trailer. I loved the 1970s gritty science fiction vibe about it that a lot of games have been adopting. We still don’t know a ton about how the gameplay is going to unfold but this is firmly in my wheelhouse so I will be watching as a proper release date is assigned.

Hellboy Web of Wyrd – TBA 2023

I love Hellboy and I love the art style of Mike Mignola so I am completely onboard with a game that features a reasonable adaptation of both. We have no release date for this but it is supposedly coming during the calendar year. I kind of expect this to be a shorter very narrative-focused game. It has a Steam page that appears to be active, so here is hoping that it comes out on PC at the same time as everywhere else. This does not exactly seem like the sort of game that Sony would pay for exclusivity to.

Nightingale – TBA 2023 ???

We got an updated trailer for Nightingale at The Game Awards, and it gives me hope that maybe we will see it this year. This is probably the title that I consider to be the most likely to slide to 2024 however given that we’ve not really seen anything resembling public testing. If this was active, I figure by now someone would have broken NDA and leaked some footage of it. Because we have not seen that, it makes me think that it might still be “in progress” to a point of not really being ready to ship soon. I was deeply suspicious of this game until it was confirmed to be a purely PVE experience. I am going to play it when it comes out because I am here for the victorian gaslight-type setting.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – TBA 2023

This is another one that I question if we are actually going to see this year. CDPR has had a less-than-spotless record lately with being able to release things in the timeframe that they originally expect. We’ve heard that this is a bigger DLC than all of the DLC for Witcher 3 combined, and I know for certain when it lands I will be starting over Cyberpunk from scratch in order to be able to play my way through this seamlessly with the rest of the content. I love Cyberpunk 2077 and I cannot imagine that I won’t also love this expansion content.

Alan Wake 2 – TBA 2023

This game was announced at the 2021 Game Awards and so far we have not gotten much more information on it than this original trailer. At the end of this trailer, it shows a 2023 release date, but given the radio silence so far… I am not sure if that is going to be a realistic date given that everything takes slightly longer than anyone originally expects. When this game drops… I will stop whatever I am doing and play it. Last year’s journey into the “Remedyverse” has turned me into a dedicated fan of their particular style of narrative fiction. I am excited as hell to see what a Remedy game looks like post-Control which for me at least was their magnum opus. I am hoping to see even more blending of the settings and maybe have Jesse Faden play a role in this game.

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn – TBA 2023

I am throwing this game on the list because it looks interesting, and I know for certain it will be a Game Pass title when it finally comes out. That lowers the bar of entry enough to make me want to give it a spin. It looks like a souls-like, and I don’t exactly have a great track record with those. I don’t go in for frustration gaming. If I am playing a game for the story, I want to see the story play out without a lot of false steps. If I am playing a game for the mechanics, then that is a totally different type of experience for me. I’ve never really managed to bridge the gap in a souls game to where I actually care about the mechanics and I mostly have played them because I am curious about the world. Flintlock looks really cool but I am also throwing it a bit of side-eye, but will check it out for free when it launches on GamePass.

There are a bunch of titles that I opted not to include. Destiny 2 for example has a brand-new expansion landing on February 28th for example. However, I’ve grown away from that game because I hated the content vaulting removing a bunch of things I loved, and have never really reached a point of forgiveness. I’m also deeply interested in Death Stranding 2, but somehow doubt we will see it released this year. These are the games that I am looking forward to the most, but given my track record, there are going to be a bunch of things that spring up along the way that catches my attention.

What games are you looking forward to the most this year?

Forever Shifting Focus

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Good Morning Friends! Sometimes in my life, I fall into a virtuous pattern in life that makes me immensely happy. I am still deeply engaged in Path of Exile, but it is more than just that. Since coming back from the holiday break I have been spending my evenings futzing around in Delve while listening to an Audiobook. So many of the games that I play are mechanically enjoyable but not necessarily narratively engaging. So it has long been my habit to be doing two things at the same time. Often this is listening to a YouTube video, specifically a long-form pseudo-documentary but more recently it has been consuming books. I talked awhile back about the Libby App, and granting me easy access to digital books and in my specific case a trove of audiobooks.

Since starting this new trend I’ve consumed three books and am nearing the end of the fourth. So much of me wants to say “read” because that is normally how you talk about a book. I don’t have a great vernacular for audiobooks because “listening” to a book seems not quite right for the process. Essentially my focus is entirely on the book that is playing out in a wonderful radio play style audio drama, and the game itself is just something I am also doing with my time. Not listed above is Skin Game also in the Harry Dresden series, which I had purchased when it came out and had laying around. I never got around to catching up and am doing so now. I’ve got holds in place for the next Dresden novel Battleground as well as one for Nona the Ninth the next book in the Locked Tomb series. I am uncertain which one of those will land first but whatever the case I think I am enjoying this process I am engaged in.

I was talking about this last night over on Mastodon/Fediverse and my friend Victor chimed in that he did not understand how I could do this. I don’t necessarily understand either to be truthful. I’ve never really been able to do just one thing at a time. If I am watching television I am also playing a game on my laptop. If I am reading, I am also listening to music or something of the sort. Part of why I hate going to the theater is that I feel like I need to be doing something else while watching the Movie. It is like I need to be doing one thing that has my focus, and another thing that is consuming all of my fidgety energies. Even if it is just running around in circles, that second activity is almost always going to be a game. As a result the games that I play the most, tend to be the games that are most mechanically focused and less focused on narrative and story. Sure I will go on a kick of playing a bunch of narrative games in a row, but my more common happy place is to be playing a game that I have shifted to muscle memory while doing something else with my greater focus.

My happy place of late has been Delve, which is a game mode within Path of Exile where you go diving down tunnels looking for treasure as you move from node to node on an underground map. Last night I found this amazing cluster of cities including three boss nodes, two of which I completed before running out of sulfite. Instead of shifting over to my mapping/bossing character, I opted to start working on a Toxic Rain Raider which is intended to be the eventual replacement for the Trickster variant that I started a while back. In both cases though, these are things that I know extremely well and understand the patterns that I need to follow, and as such, I can shift my attention to something else like the book I was “reading”. This is unfortunately just how my brain processes data best. Growing up I used to doodle incessantly to the chagrin of my teachers… who did not understand that doodling was actually allowing me to consume the content more completely.

For me, if I am “only” listening or “only” watching… I tend to zone out and lose track of what I am doing. I get bored because I am not as engaged as I want to be. There are some activities that I can’t do at the same time. For example, if I am writing I can’t listen to anything with words… because my “word center” is having its attention split between actively writing and trying to understand the words. As a result for times when I need to focus on something that is text-based… I have a stock of orchestral soundtracks to listen to. Admittedly all of this as a side note, is why I greatly prefer “dubbed” Anime because I can’t read television at the same time I am playing a video game. I am not sure if anyone else is regularly doing two or three things at the same time, but it is the thing that works for me.

Aul the Crystal King

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The Forbidden Sanctum league has apparently had the highest player retention of any league in the last three years. One of the things that concern me a bit is I am afraid that maybe Grinding Gear Games assumes this is because of the Sanctum mechanic itself. I hate Sanctum, but the “sandbox” state of the game to borrow a term from the Destiny community is the best it has been since I started reliably playing Path of Exile. Granted you have to have lucked into a successful build, but once you have… every bit of content feels good. I’m mostly spending my time doing Delve and Heist with enough mapping in between to fill up the Sulfite for another journey into the depths. I am pretty safely doing T16 maps on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and largely unkillable at this point in Delve or Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. You would think I would run out of enjoyment in the game, but for whatever reason, I am in this super zen place and enjoying myself greatly.

A good deal of my focus has been on trying to find Aul the Crystal King. This is a boss node shown above that appears in the Primeval Ruins biome within Delve. The encounter has a chance of dropping a really sought-after necklace that can roll with a mod that effectively gives you no mana reservation costs on one of the auras in the game. If you are lucky, this would allow you to add an additional aura… and with it a significant amount of power or survivability without the worry of trying to maintain your mana. While I would love to have a big beefy reservation for free, I mostly wanted to find Aul because I had not seen him yet. Over the weekend I found it, and in the previous screenshot, I am fighting the encounter, but all fights are largely unintelligible when you have a righteous fire aura around you..

I did not get the prized necklace, and the fight is just as tanky as I had heard… but I made it through and have now cleared all of the possible bosses encounters for Delve. I’ve also capped my sulfite capacity which stops at I believe 65,000. Essentially my jam right now is to fill up my sulfite as fast as I can and then spend the evening listening to an audiobook while chilling out in delve and farming up as many nodes as I can before running out of juice again. I’ve been farming Primordial Blocks maps in the faint hope of trying to get the hideout which seems to be an extremely rare spawn. If I need to buy maps, I’ve noticed that it isn’t an extremely sought-after map either. I like it because it has a good number of spawns, and at this point, I can pretty much do the boss fight in my sleep.

The other mechanic I am spending a lot of time engaging with is Metamorph, and most maps that I run on the Atlas end up having either a Rogue Metamorph or allowing me to collect parts and spawn Two Metamorphs at the end. This means that I am gathering up a significant number of body parts, that I let stack up and feed into the metamorph mechanic for tasty loot. It is not unusual at all that I end up walking away with several divines when I have collected enough bits to spawn several monsters. I’ve also put a lot of use into the various catalysts that allow me to add variant degrees of quality to my jewelry and belt slots.

I have no clue when Path of Exile will end up playing out for me, but for now, I am enjoying myself greatly still. I am sure you all are tired of reading about it, but as I have said before… the heart wants what the heart wants.