Surprise Suckerpunch

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The start of a new Path of Exile season overlapping with the holiday break has really shifted up the dynamic for what the beginning of a new year looks like on Tales of the Aggronaut. Generally speaking the last few weeks of one year and the first few weeks of the following year are filled with a lot of posts navel-gazing about my thoughts about the year coming to a close and my hopes for the next. I’ve just not really been in the headspace to do much forecasting of what is on the horizon, and quite honestly now that I have abandoned Twitter I am not nearly as connected to the zeitgeist and the constant thrum of new releases. I’ve been weirdly comfortable just doing my own thing in my own corner and if the world is interested in tuning in… awesome. If not however I am going to keep doing my nonsense regardless.

This means that other than time spent in Alpha and Beta, I completely missed the launch of Dragonflight. While I saw bits and pieces of it flashing across my feed in Mastodon, it was not nearly as constant and imperative that I be doing the thing along with everyone else. Similarly, I am seeing flashes of the 6.3 patch that landed in Final Fantasy XIV, but it is nowhere near as constant as it would have been if I were active on Twitter. My engagement with FFXIV seems to be limited to logging in every four or five days and putting in yet another bid on a house that I won’t win. I think that if I do ever win a housing plot… it will probably signal my re-engagement with that game in a large way.

There was a patch last night in Path of Exile, and during it, I dusted off Grim Dawn and gave it a bit of a spin. It has been a few years since I last played it, and admittedly last night I mostly fiddled with keybinds because I have “specific preferences”. I’ve never made it through the campaign and seen the endgame and would really like to do this. Mostly I want to know what the multiplayer feels like once you are in content designed for multiple players. When I last played trying to do the campaign with another person was a bit of misery, because it very clearly was not designed for more than one person. I am going with a tanky character and have been doing a little bit of research on how best to build that, which should shock no one. I remember really liking the vibe of this game, and while the crafting system confused me at the time… I think after having assimilated to Path of Exile it should seem much easier.

Part of why I am hunting for another ARPG experience is that I am still at odds with actively playing Blizzard games while Bobby Kotick still has his thumb on that company. Then there is Path of Exile which I love for a single-player experience, but feels weirdly punitive when it comes to playing with other folks. This week my good friend Ace largely checked out of the league, because we found out the hard way that if your Animate Guardian dies… you lose all of the gear you equipped it with. It is stupid decisions like that which really harm Path of Exile as a long-term experience. The game is oddly hostile toward its players and so much of your success or failure is that you “bet” on the right build at the start of the league. For Ace, this was a third strike, and as a result, just too much frustration to recover from during this league. The first strike was that the Dark Pact Necromancer really did not pan out as well as it sounded like it would. The second strike was that Summon Raging Spirits was great, but the Poison variant became the flavor of the month and elevated the prices to make it unaffordable. Losing the Animated Guardian and having to buy admittedly a bunch of cheap uniques to equip it again… seemed a bit futile knowing that it could happen again in the future.

I completely understand what they are going through, because last league… I came precariously close to just saying fuck it and abandoning my character entirely. It was only through sheer dumb stubbornness that I made my way through all 115 Atlas nodes, and after completing that… I was largely done with the league. Ace made a comment that really hit home with me and put it all into perspective. Ultimately with POE you never really reach a point where you can have chill interaction with the game that also feels like it is moving your character forward. You spend so much time making incremental progress on levels after 90… that can then be wiped out completely by one or two deaths. You feel like you are stuck in this rut of not really having anything you can do that is enjoyable without feeling like the sword of Damocles is hanging precariously above your head at all times. Last night I took the first death on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut that I had in weeks… and it felt completely random and at the same time, I have no understanding of WHY I died. I just suddenly took way more damage than I ever do and fell over.

I’ve started a number of side projects this league and I am not entirely certain how I feel about any of them. Right now my Seismic Trap Saboteur feels like it is in this awkward pubescent phase of not quite being able to shift to using the abilities that will ultimately be the hallmark of the build. I need to knock out the first two Labyrinths but also feel ungodly squishy most of the time. This is a familiar side effect of leveling while using a Tabula Rasa, and honestly, I am beginning to think that item does more harm than it is worth. This is the second attempt at using one to jump-start a class and they feel like they begin to fall apart a bit around the first death of Kitava. I could pour resources into making it work, but also… I am not sure if I care enough yet to do that.

I wish I was more motivated by currency, because if that were my ultimate gauge of success then I would say I am doing grand. According to Exilence I am up roughly 3000 chaos since the last snapshot I took on Monday. I’ve had a large number of higher ticket items start moving, as well as a constant flow of resonators from my delve excursions. So I have resources that I could pour into fixing builds… but I am not entirely certain there will ever be a place I reach where everything feels amazing. It seems like Path of Exile is the sort of game that is always going to be pulling the rug out from under you when you feel like you reach solid ground. The more you engage with the game, the more it feels like there is another sucker punch waiting around the corner.

I don’t think I will ever reach a place of complete happiness with this game. I have moments of excitement and joy, followed by a pound of frustration being dumped in my lap. This is in part why I don’t try and get people to play this game like I do others. I enjoy myself but also sorta feel like I should maybe be playing something else after awhile.

Portable Temples

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Friends… I can be completely oblivious to things at times. This morning’s post is going to largely be the tale of me completely missing the point. In Path of Exile there are a large number of league mechanics that you can choose to engage with or mostly ignore. There are some that I completely love like Abyss, Heist, and Delve, and others that I have avoided for various reasons like Blight and Incursion. Yesterday I ran an Alva memory that caused the portals she opens to work backward, and instead of bringing you into the Vaal Temple, it summons the mobs from it to whatever map you are on. I lamented that I wished that there was a node on the Atlas tree that allowed me to make ALL Incursion encounters work like this. That node sadly does not exist, but I still think it is a cool idea for GGG to think about in the future.

I opened up the AggroChat slack and lamented how I wished Incursion worked differently, and how I avoided it because it broke up the flow of the game. When you complete a temple, it creates a map for you to run through that is way more complicated and involved than your average map. What I wished is that I could save off a temple layout similar to how I could with the Lake of Kalandra, so that I could run it later. At this point, Ashgar used up his daily allotment of “…” and told me that it did in fact work that way. This is the problem with coming into the game late and not really having a ton of explanation in how any of these features from previous leagues worked. I completely missed the button that shows up at the bottom of a completed temple labeled “Take Temple Chronicle”.

This does precisely the thing I was lamenting not being able to do. Again like I said I can be painfully oblivious to things at times. So since then, I have been working on burning through the over forty Alva missions I had racked up and been avoiding. Essentially what would happen is I would build a temple and then put off running it because it takes more time than a normal map. Now I can just save copies of past maps and keep running Alva missions until a time in the future when I want to run a bunch of Vaal Temples in a row. It also turns out there is a fairly brisk trade in folks selling Chronicles, and I find it weird that in all of the POE content that I have consumed… no one has mentioned this. I did run a temple yesterday and even managed to pull an Empower gem, which is something I had been needing for awhile now.

The other major thing that I knocked out yesterday was the Unique Realms challenge that I spoke of in the previous post. I ran through my Doryani’s Machinarium map and then picked up Vinktor’s Square off the market. Finishing them knocked out my T2 boots cosmetic and am one achievement away from getting the next helmet. I was completely oblivious to this fact but apparently, I also finished the Monster Massacre achievement and have now surpassed one million monster kills during this league. Many of the other challenges are going to require me to likely respec my tree a bit in order to increase my chances of completing them.

This revelation about Incursion has led me to once again do some shifting around of my Atlas tree. I removed some of the “dangling” nodes that were not absolutely necessary anymore that involved map duplication and moved them around to some of the incursion nodes. This greatly increases the amount of time I have in each incursion portal and allows me to almost guarantee that I clear everything before running out of time. Map duplication nodes were great while I was building out my Atlas but at this point, I am gaining way more maps than I can actually run, and even donated a couple of hundred maps to the guild bank for other folks coming up through the ranks. I don’t really care about getting into the bulk map-selling game, because it seems horribly tedious. I am getting enough decent drops that they are selling pretty quickly and I still have my resonator business to fall back on if I start running low on currency again.

I have to admit one of the things I love about Path of Exile is how I can easily swap up what I am doing because of the extreme number of viable league mechanics out there. I am still kinda hoping that at some point we see the Lake of Kalandra make a return in some permanent form because, with the “sandbox” of this league, I think that entire experience would have been a lot more enjoyable. There are a lot of shorter-term mechanics that I wonder how they could remix and bring back in a new form. Anyways I hope you all are having a great week and enjoying whatever gaming nonsense you are finding yourself engaged in.

One Million Monsters

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I have been playing a lot of Path of Exile in this league and this morning I just noticed a hard data point to prove this. During a league, there are a number of achievements that are meant to be sort of stretch goals for you to complete after you finish the story and complete your atlas. Knocking these out rewards you with progressively more ostentatious cosmetic outfits. At this point, I have unlocked the first tier of these and am slowly chewing on goals for the second tier. This morning I noticed I was most of the way through the goal that requires you to kill 1 million level 68 or higher mobs. I’ve never finished this in previous leagues, and now I am sitting here just slightly over a month into the experience. I would love to be able to get at least 19 of these season challenges done so I can get my first hideout totem.

I would be willing to bet that a large percentage of my mob kill count comes from delve. You end up pouring through so many monsters in this “endless” dungeon crawl. I’ve found out that it is not truly endless, that there is apparently a maximum depth of 65,536 aka the largest value that an unsigned 16-bit integer can hold. My guess is that there is also probably some sort of a width limit as well, but so far to the best of my knowledge, no one has found that one. It would take me more time than exists in a season to push out far enough to get even vaguely close to the boundaries, and my guess is to go that deep you would need something close to a perfectly rolled build to survive it. I personally just marvel at finding a new city to explore, for example in the above screenshot you can see a six-node Vaal city that I began working through last night.

At this point, Exilence tells me that I have well over 12,000 chaos worth of “wealth” but a good chunk of that is tied up in things that are not exactly “liquid”. While I might have well over 3000 chaos worth of Orbs of Augmentation, it isn’t like I am going to find a ready buyer for them. How I am making the vast majority of the liquid chaos that I am utilizing to buy upgrades is through drops that look just like the one above. Resonators are a unique crafting resource that can only be found in delve, and just by doing a large volume of nodes you end up with a good stockpile of them. Every few days I liquidate my stockpiles and convert them into raw chaos. For example over lunch yesterday I listed all of my resonators and within ten minutes I had roughly 400 chaos in my coffers.

Resonators and Fossils (which have much less value) combine to offer a more deterministic method for crafting items. Think of them as a targetted chaos orb, that randomly rerolls an item but includes specific classes of attributes. If you need Elemental damage types then you can socket a fossil that will give you a higher chance of getting elemental damage types when you re-roll an item. Item crafters love the system because it allows them to target specific item combinations, but regardless of the fact that it is more deterministic, it still requires throwing a ton of currency at an item to get the desired result. Personally, I would rather convert these to Chaos and then use that Chaos to buy the items with the actual combinations of attributes I am interested in rather than gamble the same amount of currency on an uncertain outcome.

Speaking of “expensive items” I pulled a Doryani’s Machinarium Maze Map when I took down the Vaal city boss the other day. I’ve not run this but I am likely going to do so soon. Mostly there is a seasonal achievement for running every unique map in the game, and I am down to just Doryani’s and one other. I need to look up some information on this map. I will likely only get one shot at this given that the map itself is worth roughly two divines in the open market. The other map I am missing goes for around 15 Chaos so it is way more reasonable to just buy that one from the market to finish up the achievement. Luckily neither seem to have too egregious of modifiers, so hopefully, I can get this finished in the six portals. I would be really sad if I tried this and effectively blew 2 divines on nothing.

The fact that everything has some market value associated with it, adds a weird dimension to the league experience. Currency is useful to be able to solve problems with your build, but also it has no real lasting value. Everything is effectively monopoly money because it is very unlikely that I would ever devote time to playing in Standard and will just keep re-rolling characters every three months. So that means all of this currency I am stockpiling only serves the purpose of aiding me for a few months. This makes me way more likely to blow hundreds of chaos at a time on upgrades, but also weirdly hesitant to use a single currency item that is worth multiple divines on an undetermined outcome. I am not much of a gambler in real life or in games honestly. The most “gambling” that I do is using my Stacked Decks instead of selling them or re-rolling divination cards with harvest currency. I tend to be someone who stockpiles resources in case I need them… then never ends up using them ever.

I’ve said it before though, that I am a little sad that this game is as obtuse as it is. I would love to share the experience I am having with others other than these blog posts, but it requires way too much of the player in order to really become indoctrinated in the process. I do think that Stargrace would greatly enjoy the market aspect of this game, but would probably bounce from the ARPG before really getting there.

Ahuatotli the Blind

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. I spent my time doing stuff around the house and playing Path of Exile. I’ve continued doing Delve and Heist with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and mostly doing Maps and Bossing with my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer. After spending quite a bit more currency to resolve some outstanding issues with the Necromancer, both characters feel in a pretty solid place. I would likely be doing better had I gone with the Poison variant of Summon Raging Spirits which seems to be all the rage right now, but it would have also cost me a heck of a lot more. I have concerns that Poison SRS is going to eat a big nerf bat when the next league rolls out because it seems like Grinding Gear Games loves to beat down the most popular classes. Admittedly I am also somewhat concerned about Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but considering the prices of gear is dropping I would assume that means that a lot of folks have abandoned it.

Continuing my descent into the darkness I finally located Ahuatotli, the Blind the Vaal City boss. The first screenshot is of me fighting that encounter, and the above screenshot shows the marker on the map in a Vaal city. All in all, I thought it was an easier fight than the Lich, which I guess makes sense given that you can supposedly start encountering it at a much lower level. Right now I am spending most of my time in the 125-150 range going out to the right side trying to find the only Delve boss that I have not faced yet. According to the fan-run Wiki, Aul the Crystal King can begin spawning in around depth 171 but I’ve also seen reports of folks encountering him as early as depth 125. So I figure staying around the 150 depth and going sideways will probably let me see Abyssal Cities that I should investigate and hopefully find a boss node in one of them.

On Friday I started leveling another character and gave it the dumb name of “BelMakeQuake” indicating that it is going to be a Seismic Trap build. Right now I am leveling using Poisonous Concoction which is a really weird skill to use. Essentially you cannot use it with a weapon equipped, which means you are giving up at least three sockets. Your damage scales off whatever life flask is in your left-most slot on the potion bar and you really want a slow healing potion that recovers lots of life in the process for maximum damage. The end result however means that you are just sort of deleting packs of mobs mad bomber style. Once I threw Greater Multiple Projectiles and Greater Volley on the skill, I essentially began throwing this giant wall of death at packs of mobs eating everything in my wake.

Once I have done the first and second Labyrinth I can supposedly switch over to the final combo of Seismic Trap and Exsanguinate for bossing and clearing respectively. I made an attempt to switch over a little bit early because the POB that I am following is not exactly what I would consider “good”. The end result is that I happily murdered myself by dropping way too many exsanguinates, each of which dealt significant damage to me in the process. I’ve not touched it since that fatal mistake, but when I do make my way back to the character I will essentially undo everything that I did and go back to my poisonous concoction nonsense. I started off leveling in a bunch of random uniques and then really needed to switch over to some proper rare gear, which I did not have laying around. I might go back to the uniques however because they seemed to be “good enough”.

On the market front, I am still selling a lot of random stuff. As I upgrade gear I tend to put up the item that I was using previously for a significant profit. For example, the boots I had crafted on my SRS necromancer were pretty good but did not contribute significantly enough to my survival in the manner that I needed. So I picked up a new pair of boots for about 80 chaos, and yesterday I sold my previous boots for 80 chaos making that upgrade net neutral. I’ve done similar things on Righteous Fire as well where I took an item that I bought for 20 chaos originally and used for quite a while and then ultimately sold it for 50 chaos. It isn’t a massive volume and I am not exactly swimming in divines, but it is enough to keep funding upgrades as I find them for a reasonable price. Metamorph continues to pay off significantly, so if you have a character that can handle killing those tanky monsters then you might spec your Atlas into that.

I also managed to finally get my Betrayal map in a state that allowed me to assault the mastermind. That was an interesting fight and was significantly more challenging than I expected. All of the other safehouse bosses have been massive pushovers, but I did this on my necro and for whatever reason, she could deal massive amounts of damage to me in short periods of time. Essentially I would run out of flask charges and then take a death. I persevered however and got achievement of killing the boss. I’ve not got my Betrayal map almost to the point where I can do a few more safehouses. Mostly I have been running Jun missions because I have a lot of them saved up for red maps, and when I run out of Niko missions I need to do something to regenerate them.

We are right at a month into the new league and it feels like I am not slowing down yet. There is so much that I still want to do and I finally feel like I have the characters to be able to do them. At some point, I will get enough guardian maps to drop so that I can keep moving the atlas bar forward as well. I still need to do Elder and Maven in order to get my next void stones. Having an absolute blast and wondering how long the contact high with this league will last.