Going Warlord

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I am getting a bit of a late start this morning, and also contemplated just not blogging at all. It has been one of those days. I usually exit the holidays in “turtle mode”, where I have pulled my head up into my shell and largely ignore the world. Generally speaking, this is brought on by the fact that traditionally I tend to spend my large blocks of free time over the break diving into single-player games. However, I find myself in a similar funk and have spent most of my time playing Path of Exile, which is ostensibly a multiplayer game. I think the key difference is that other than trading and sharing things through the guild stash, I very much play the game in a single-player manner. I’ve also been spending my gaming time listening to Audiobooks, which are also largely a solo activity where I spend most of my time focused on the book rather than the game. In order to do this successfully I need a game that I have largely committed to muscle memory, which often means either some sort of well-trod MMORPG or an ARPG.

I know I said yesterday that I thought I was done with my Seismic Saboteur experiment… but instead, I largely focused on playing it last night and have gotten to the blood aqueducts in Act 9. I’ve yet to successfully do the second Labyrinth, largely because I still have significant survival issues. I just do not know how to survive from a pure evasion build, to be honest. I am used to Armor, Regen, and Energy Shield, and Evasion always feels exceptionally squishy. My last attempt frustrated me so completely because I managed to die in the third trial of Labyrinth, probably moments away from a victory. I decided to put on some levels and as a result, I have been abusing the excellent layout of the blood aqueducts in order to do this. Considering I have gotten four Tabula Rasas this league, it isn’t like I need another one… but I have already picked up a handful more Humility cards.

A few days ago I put a call out on Mastodon for folks to suggest ARPGs, and one that I have seen pop up multiple times is Grim Dawn. I’ve actually played a lot of this game, but never really got to the point where the endgame actually begins. As a result, I have created a fresh character and am going down the Soldier path once again. I just got to the point where I could choose my second class and went with Oathkeeper which makes me a Warlord now in the game’s mastery system. I am hoping to go for something akin to the Diablo 3 Crusader in feel. Overall I am easing back into the game but I remember very little of how anything worked mechanically. I know there are a ton of crafting materials and I largely just keep banking them for some point in the future when I might need them.

I’ve also poked my head back into Last Epoch because they keep easing closer to the release of multiplayer. There is a beta event scheduled for the end of this month, with a larger test happening in early February and the intended launch of the feature in March. I have a lot of hope that this game is going to feel good as a multiplayer experience. In the meantime, however, I would like to get at least one character up to endgame levels so that I can see if there is even an endgame that I might enjoy there. My highest character currently is in my mid-20s, so I need to devote a bit more time to pushing that up. What I have read of the end game makes it sound interesting, and sort of a blend of maps from Path of Exile and Rifts from Diablo III. My biggest hope is that playing with friends actually feels good rather than a punitive mess as it does in Path of Exile.

I would also like to really give Wolcen another shot, after having been away from it for a few years. I have no clue if that game evolved at all. I remember specifically the core problem was that it had some pretty atrocious net code, and playing with friends meant that the entire experience was a laggy mess. I think I would also like to start fresh and see the entire game as it stands today, rather than trying to pick up where I left off not remembering how I even got there. I might even do a bit of research into what constitutes a viable build in that game so that I can give it the best possible shot. I keep looking for a good replacement for Diablo III, when none of them really give me the sort of experience that I have been craving. I could of course just play Diablo III, but I still do not feel extremely comfortable giving Blizzard the time of day right now.

Lastly, I would really like to slide back into Guild Wars 2, which feels deeply ARPG adjacent. It has always felt more like a game in the lineage of Diablo than a game in the lineage of Everquest for me. I never finished Living World Season 1, and I would like to do that. I would also like to make progress on my Skyscale because I feel like completing that would greatly improve my long-term enjoyment of the game. I need to do something other than Tequatl, even though I love that fight so much. I’ve fallen into the rut of logging in, doing a few world bosses, and logging back out. Without a wealth of stories to rely on, I sort of lost focus. I guess in theory I could start from scratch on my Ranger, because I’ve not done ANY of the living world stories on that character, and it tends to be who I spend most of my time on these days.

I find myself still very cemented to the ARPG style of gameplay regardless of the form it takes. I have plenty of long-term goals, I just need to focus on completing some of them. I might be in the process of slowly winding down this league in Path of Exile. I should probably at least buy the maps that I am missing and try and finish the last few normal mode atlas bosses before I leave.

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.