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.

AggroChat #417 – 2022 Games of the Year Show – Part One

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

Hey Folks! It is that time again for our multi-part episode as we talk about the games that were important to us specifically during 2022.  A bit of a reminder for anyone who has not heard one of these shows before, we are not necessarily only talking about games that were released in 2022.  If we were late playing a game but it was extremely important to us, it might still get the nod here.

Something that is working slightly differently this year is generally speaking we record a marathon show that runs about 3-4 Hours and then I crudely carves it up into multiple shows.  However, what happens is we have one show that is full of short topics and another show that has all of the long discussions.  This year I sorted the list so we got a blend of single honorable mention picks and meaty multi-member picks in the same show.  We are also recording it two weeks apart so none of us have to deal with the late night that this show always brought on.

Hopefully, the changes lead to a better listening experience.  So in this episode, we are going to talk about the first half of our games of the year, and next week we will continue with the rest.

Topics Discussed:

  • Digimon Survive
  • Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
  • TMNT Shedder’s Revenge
  • Trials of Mana
  • Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons
  • Elden Ring
  • Fallout 76
  • Star Ocean: The Divine Force
  • Wordle
  • Kirby and the Forgotten Land
  • Cult of the Lamb
  • Path of Exile

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Kurgal the Blackblooded

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Good Morning Friends! I have to admit that I am somewhat shocked that I am still as engaged with the Forbidden Sanctum league in Path of Exile as I am. Like I have said before this is effectively my third league and with each league, it seems like I slip further into madness. Path of Exile was one of those games that looked deeply interesting from the outside but that I struggled to actually find purchase on its sheer rock face of complexity. This game is not friendly to new players and even more so neither is its community. That is not to say that they are rude or cruel or anything of the sort, but more that they don’t realize how far they have come in the evolution of understanding the systems within systems that is the game they are playing. “Noob” friendly guides are very much not, because they all require a level of understanding that I am just now arriving at some 600 hours into playing the game.

Take Zizaran for example, who is probably the most community-friendly streamer, and youtuber for Path of Exile. He releases copious guide videos in each league, and it is only now that I am beginning to fully understand them. For example yesterday he released this guide video on how to craft a perfect bow for Explosive Arrow. While for me it does seem pretty straightforward, it would not have when I started. Firstly it assumes you know how to get essences or even what they are as well as how to get divine orbs and exalted orbs, and the dumb things like what it means to “annul a suffix”. It is a beginner guide for someone who is already indoctrinated into the game and all of its concepts. The thing is… playing through the campaign teaches you none of this information and it is only gleaned by reaching a point where you have the items in your inventory and understand what exactly the tooltip means.

I think this obtuse complexity is what makes the experience so damned compelling for me because the more I dive into it… the deeper the well seems to get. I am not specifically trying to pick on the community but if you approach this game the one thing that I would love everyone to understand is just how much of a struggle it is going to be to really engage with it. The game has been adding new roughly every three months over the last decade. I had no understanding of just how many of the systems I engage with regularly… we reworked over 2022 until I watched this year in review video. I also now fully understand why folks were so enraged by the ArchNemesis changes because they were extremely “fresh” in their minds. I love this game but also it saddens me that it is ultimately going to be an uphill struggle to get people to engage with it.

As far as my gaming time goes I have once again swapped up my Atlas tree and have removed everything involving Ritual Altars and instead packed on Metamorph nodes. In Lake of Kalandra encountering a Metamorph was more than likely a death sentence because they all had upwards of eight ArchNemesis mods tacked onto them. Now they are still a bit of a struggle but one that is more winnable and the rewards for doing them seem to be extremely solid. Since I have largely divided up my two characters into Bossing and Maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and Delve and Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… Metamorph is way more feasible.

When I say Metamorph is very rewarding as mechanics go, I’ve seen multiple divines at once drop from a single monster. I’ve seen many exalts drop and stacks of chaos along with all sorts of other useful resources. This is not every single time mind you, but the way I am specced into the tree gives me a bunch of organ drops as well that I can then take to Tane and summon additional monsters with. I also have the trait that allows Rogue Metamorphs to show up in my maps, and when I finish a map with Tane in it I can summon a second Metamorph. Of note when I got that double divine drop, I was running a low red tier map that was magic quality with very little in the way of quantity or quality modifiers on it. In fact most of the time lately I am not even bothering to “Alch and Go” but instead just dropping a Transmutation and maybe a few Alterations on it to reroll to something like extra magic creatures.

Right now I tend to alternate between mapping and delving, and I have my atlas configured so that even if I don’t have Niko on the map I am going to get a little bit of Sulphite from defeating the boss. When I fill up my Sulphite from the Necromancer I dive down into the depths and burn through nodes looking for interesting things. I’ve now fought Kurgal, The Blackblooded twice aka the Lich’s Tomb encounter in an Abyssal Sanctum. In the grand scheme of things the fight is completely doable but there are a few mechanics that I need to at least be somewhat aware of. There is a beam attack that you need to line of sight behind some pillars because it seems to increase in damage the longer it is on you. There are two phases but the second phase seemed to largely be a pushover. It seems like you are guaranteed one of the uniques from Kurgal’s loot table as well as other assorted rewards. His thing seems to be armor pieces aka gloves and helm that have abyssal sockets on them.

I am continuing to plumb the depths looking for Aul the Crystal King, because I want to be able to start farming that encounter. There is a nice necklace that can drop from it that seems to be useful for a great number of builds. Other than that I am slowly acquiring items to make a run at a seismic traps build. I’m also pouring little bits of resources into upgrading both Righteous Fire and Summon Raging Spirits builds as well. On the trade front, I am still doing fairly brisk business in small trades and had replenished everything that I had spent chaos-wise before doing some shopping for Thalen last night. He paid me in divines for my effort, which means I still have the resources but have slightly less liquid chaos than I did before. Profit is a means to an end however and for me, it is all about unlocking easier access to nice things.

I’ve had more fun in this league than in any of my previous attempts combined. I am not sure if it is that I am understanding the interplay of the systems better, or if I simply chose better builds to play. Whatever the case I have a feeling that my life will be dominated by this game for awhile now.

The Libby App

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Generally speaking, I figure I am probably the last to learn about most things. This morning’s blog post is going to be one of those situations. I am assuming that all of you have already had experiences with the Libby app, but on the off chance that even one of you has not… I am going to devote a blog post to it. This next part is going to be extremely embarrassing considering that one of my oldest, longest, and “bestest” friends is a Librarian… but I’ve not had an active Library card for a few decades. As much as I love Libraries and as much time as I spent in them growing up… as an adult, they have just not been a huge part of my life. I read so slowly that the constant pressure of feeling like I have a deadline looming over my head means that in most cases I just bought books outright rather than borrowed them. Recently I discovered something called the Libby app and it has changed how I have thought about our wonderful Library system.

For those unfamiliar, it essentially acts as a glue between the physical library presence and digital services. You can log in with your Library card/Account and effectively gain access to all of the digital books and audiobooks that your library has on offer. You can configure it to connect to your Kindle account and download it directly to your e-Reader and then it also facilitates the check-in process when you are finished and removes the book from your devices. All of this honestly seems like magic and it interoperates seamlessly between a Web Client, your dedicated devices, mobile phones, and tablets. You can be consuming the same item on all of those and it will helpfully leap you forward to where you last left off, which admittedly is a huge deal for me because I often start something on my desktop and then continue it on my phone.

What I love the most however is that it grants me access to a large library full of audiobooks. I am not sure what it is exactly about the audiobook experience that I love so much. I can remember as a kid loving story time and listening attentively as teachers read to me in class. My wife cannot handle audiobooks, but she is very much NOT an auditory learner but for me… I love throwing one on while I am doing something else. This week I’ve been listening to Gideon The Ninth while playing Path of Exile because I have more or less committed the game to muscle memory and can devote my processing resources to consuming the book. So I have been shifting back and forth between listening to it while working during the day and listening to it while playing at night, all without the app really missing a beat.

One of the things that are somewhat cool is the fact that you can in theory be connected to multiple library systems at the same time. I am extremely lucky in that the Tulsa City-County Library system is vast and expands out into many of the communities surrounding the greater metro area. However, I noticed that Bartlesville a larger town nearby also supports the Libby app under their digital services, which means, in theory, I could go there and get a library card and then effectively merge the reach of both library systems together. Again I am going to assume that I am the last to know any of this, but like I said at the beginning of the post I figured it was cool enough that I would devote a blog post to talking about it just in case someone else out there was a similar late bloomer. It seems silly but this has very much revitalized how I consume books and made me want to consume more of them.

As far as Gideon the Ninth, I kinda love it so far. I am not even sure how I would describe it to someone else, but a Dune meets a Death Metal Harry Potter sort of sprung to mind. While I would never give a dime to anything that might benefit the horrible Terfmaster general that is J.K. Rowling, I cannot discount how important the Harry Potter series was to me and how it still sorta colors how I view other media at times. Gideon The Ninth is set in this weird timeline where death magic and all of its many forms effectively dictate society. I am sure I will talk about it more at length as I continue down the series but since I missed the boat when it was all the rage among my Twitter friends I am catching up. I had mentally put a pin in the title thinking that I would enjoy it and am now just experiencing it. I tend to consume series more than individual books. For example, I have been absolutely ravenous when a new Dresden novel comes out. Another book that I have pinned in my memory is The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I will probably start on once I have consumed everything in this series available.

Audio books just fit my life more easily than reading does, which makes me a little sad to be honest. I’ve never been one to choose reading over something else. That is my wife and she will happily sit in the living room and consume a stack of books in a single weekend. Me, I tend to pick at them like leftovers slowly and over time… and usually before going to sleep which means I maybe get a chapter read before sleep claims me. Audiobooks however I can easily listen to while playing one of my “forever games” like Path of Exile that does not require a lot of higher level processing from me and is more mechanical reflex and repetition than anything else. My goal for this new year is to consume more books in this manner. Since I know I have a ton of avid readers in among my followers knowing that I am greatly enjoying Gideon The Ninth and that I love Dune, Dresden, the Witcher series, and a lot of 70s/80s science fiction… feel free to give me some more modern suggestions to throw in my list to consume.