Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
We start off the show with some discussion about Geek Girl Con and how it is a great experience for the entire family. From there, Ash has played a bit more Daggerheart and discusses how not having initiative in that game actually works out really well. Kodra is trying a new mine build in Path of Exile 3.2,7 and we talk a bit about how Rolling Magma Mine has been working. Bel has finished most of the endgame prep and discusses the state of his build and how Breach has been working as a league mechanic. Touhou gets a little less difficult to engage with as Fantasy Maiden Wars attempts to present twenty years worth of assorted games into something more approachable. Tam revisited VTM Bloodlines 2 and thinks that maybe we are misremembering the first game, and how the thing that exists is actually pretty good if you give it enough time. Lastly, Bel finished Frieren this weekend and talks a bit about it being really good and well worth watching.
Good Morning Folks. I did not get a blog post out yesterday, because for most of the day my site was bricked. This all started the night before with a deluge of spam, that my spam filter seemingly failed to remove. I cleared it up and decided I would investigate the issues in the morning. It seemed as though my site instance was being blocked from reaching out to any endpoints for WordPress, spam filter, the firewall rules, or even google site kit. After going around in circles with a tech twice, they finally escalated me up the tier and around 6:30 last night I got the above email. Apparently my site had received a blacklist complaint for serving up Malware. However they thoroughly scanned my files multiple times and found nothing of the sort. Weird that they took action without actually contacting me about it. I thoroughly scoured my email and found zero attempt to contact me regarding this issue. Things are resolved now and turned back on, but still highly frustrating.
Yesterday was the start of a new season in Destiny Rising, and with it comes a new mythic character called Maru. She had apparently been available during various phases of the alpha and beta testing for the game, and serves as this important niche that was previously only capable of being filled by Wolf or Ikora. The problem there is that neither of those champions are really worth investing a lot of rare resources into, because even fully kitted out… they will never feel as amazing as some of the later champions that came out. This is the problem with Gacha games, there will always be a concerted effort to make the Free characters feel nowhere near as good as the banner pulled characters. I had banked up a few “pink ship” pulls and managed to get a copy of her in my first 10 pull.
Essentially she is using the same class of primary weapon as Ikora, which is a single shot infinite ammo Grenade Launcher. Then she is using the same heavy weapon type as Wolf, which is a multi-shot Grenade launcher. Essentially she is all about explosions and I am not exactly sure why… but the kit feels so much better on her than it ever did on Ikora. Her first ability fires off multiple void grenades at the target, and the second ability provides a shield that then drops when you fire off a charged grenade attack. Her super is great because she bellows “Spray and Pray” and then lobs a heavy machinegun fire rate of grenade attacks at your target. It doesn’t last terribly long, but is pretty great for burn phases.
I ran the Legendary Story Mission on Challenge Difficulty with her and came in well under the gold timer. Sadly this will not count for either silver or gold, because I have yet to get out of bronze with her due to the limited amount of elemental fruit I had available to take her to rank 9 artifact gilding. I have her up to around 60k light, and she is absolutely going to be the next character I push up closer to 64k so I can start doing the Master/Grandmaster content with her. Essentially she fills a niche that I did not really have. For precision content I have Helhest, and for Rapidfire/Solar content I have Estela, but I did not have anyone that could really handle Spread Shinkas. She wrecks them with great abandon, and I pulled her exotic weapon which only serves to greatly improve her utility because it fires faster than the base grenade launchers do.
With today’s patch we also got access to three new Gauntlet Blitz maps, which are mostly better than the original three. I had to snap this screenshot because this represents what most of the night looked like. We queued into a Grandmaster Blitz and half of the party was playing Estela and the other half playing Maru. The thing that kind of sucks about Grandmaster content is that you can only run it once per character, per day… which means you have to go back and do this content multiple days in a row to burn down your limited access keys. I mean it creates scenarios where Ace and I have to group up together multiple days, which is not a bad thing. However I do loathe artificial impositions for play restrictions.
After running the new content in Destiny Rising, I moved downstairs and popped onto Discord for our weekly Thursday night Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. We were down a Sita, though he popped in briefly to say he missed us while he was with family at Disney. It was kind of adorable honestly, and we also missed him. We largely ran Rifts in the first of the new expansion zones, which was great for me because I needed to grind out ranks in Skimmer mastery due to being knee capped by an early bug that I have already talked about. I got the needed rank and a good chunk towards the next rank, though I am probably going to to switch mastery tracks just in case I get gated by something in the zone specific one. It was a lot of fun, as it always is and I greatly love hanging out with Ammo and Sol and doing dumb things. Sometimes you just have to “F” it… which is the primary interaction key in Guild Wars 2.
Lastly over in Path of Exile I am wrapping up red maps on my Atlas and I legitimately have not really encountered any major difficulty spikes. I am in an awkward spot where I need a bunch of different gear pieces and things to happen before transitioning to the next phase of the build. I have a solid life gain block shield that has decent flat regeneration on it, and that will come in handy when I transition to block based. However at the same time I really need a six link helm, which I am working on crafting through delve. The challenge right now is I that I do not have much in the way of currency to spend, so I am having to go out and acquire the needed crafting resources myself which is slowing things down considerably. I think I have enough Divine Vessels to finish out my pantheon so that I can drop Purity of Elements and move to Purity of Fire, but I also need to acquire an Enlighten so that I can get to the res cap. Essentially there are a lot of moving parts but at some point I will click them all into place and shift up my tree. For the time being I am pushing ahead and should be able to complete maps and get at least my first two void stones without much issue.
The biggest challenge that I am having right now is that I am dealing with some health problems and have just not felt like myself for the last few weeks. A medication swap ended poorly, and yesterday I ran to the doctor to talk through the symptoms and it ended up with me having an in office EKG, glucose test, urine test, and ultimately doing a couple of different blood tests that I am waiting on results back from. This morning is the first morning of shifting things back to the way that they were and dropping the new med that seemed to be having some adverse reactions. Additionally I am getting a referral to a Cardiologist and getting signed up for a Colonoscopy since I have never had one of those. They are kind of grasping at straws because at face value… pretty much all of the tests so far have come back normal. If nothing else it was peace of mind, and will be further once the other specialists tag in. Basically I am in a weird place right now, and it is negatively impacting my gusto to push hard in games at the moment.
Having my spouse effectively drop dead in front of my eyes with no warning in July, has basically ratcheted up my sense of panic. I already have natural hypochondriac tendencies that my spouse helped walk me down from, so I am trying to not go into a rampant panic attack. Its scary in the world when you are all alone.
Good Morning Folks, and I legitimately mean it this time. Yesterday was a pretty awful day seeing as I basically got zero sleep Monday night. I was feeling broadly awful by the time I sat down to blog, and was effectively dead to the world the entire day. I had taken the day off because I had heating and air folks out to do the winter checkup, and spent most of the morning cat napping on the sofa in spurts. I think I must have caught something from the handful of trick or treaters that came to visit, one of which a neighbor that hugged me for way the hell too long… and is probably the Typhoid Mary in this situation. Essentially last night I was in bed by 6 pm, and slept the entire night through minus a few fits and starts and trips to the bathroom due to the diuretic that I am on. I woke up this morning though feeling generally better about the world and everything surrounding it. I am still a bit froggy in the throat and congested, but the worst seems to have passed.
Suffice to say though I remember next to nothing about the day, and spent zero time checking into work and email, so I am sure I will have a deep avalanche of bullshit to dig myself out of. That is the thing that sucks about being management, is that even when you are off for a day… you still need to sort of be engaged or you end up seeing things fall apart around you. So hopefully nothing terribly awful happened yesterday during the day. Essentially I did not make much progress across the board, other than a little bit after one of my cat naps during the morning. I swear if I thought I could have slept the entire night, I would have gone to sleep at 2 pm in the afternoon. I only barely managed to stay awake until 6pm when the evening news was coming on, and at that point I decided it was worth risking it. I woke up around midnight feeling like it was around 3 am or so, but thankfully managed to get back to sleep without much hassle. I might be able to blame some of this on time change, which is always a beast… and is especially so when you are the only person in the house so there is no reality to properly ground you.
I did progress my Atlas a bit further and have now cleared all of the white and yellow tiers of maps, and just started reds. I also ran the Polaric Invitation this morning, and should be getting the Shrek one later today. I am generally way more concerned about unlocking those than dealing with Maven because ultimately there are two easy voidstones behind the bosses associated with red and blue altars. I also need a lot more of the currency associated with them so that I can hopefully get ignite proliferation on my gloves. I currently have fire damage multi on my gloves, which is fine… but I really need that proliferation. I could always go for a Medium cluster jewel, but that requires me to take points away from something else on my tree to make it work. I need to unlock the traits for Brine King so that I can eventually make a shift over to Purity of Fire and Tempest Shield and go block based with 90% fire res, but I am also lacking a Shaper Shield. I need to wait until I get deep enough in delve to start getting good bases before I even mess with that. Shaper Exalts are around 30 chaos so that is always a viable option but I really need more Delve and Harvest juice to funnel into crafting.
For the last few days I have been cursing Beast farmers because none of them seemed to be selling any beasts on the instant trade market. Apparently this was a bug, that kept them from listing beasts and it was fixed this morning. Over night the price of a Black Morrigan fell from around 400c down to under 100c. This meant that I was able to buy one and six link my Cloak of Flames that I had gotten to six sockets and gave appropriate colors earlier in the league. This league seems to be amazing for the general player, who just plays the game and spend the chaos that they get dropped on buying stuff. This league seems to be awful for anyone who used to juice maps and funnel resources into a storefront. Everything is cheap because there is absolutely no friction to sell your stuff. This means I can casually list all of the rejects from Tree Crafting for example, and log in the next morning to a handful of chaos sitting there waiting on me. This is freaking great, and feels so good… but it does have some weird trickle down effects.
Price checkers are deeply confused. I have used Awakened POE Trade for years now, to help me determine if anything that I picked up is actually worth selling. It does a few different things where firstly it attempts to estimate what it thinks it is worth, and it also brings up comps from the trade system in order to show you real world pricing. For example these gloves it thinks are worth as much as 2 divines in a previous league… but in truth because they are easy to craft with the tree are now worth maybe 10 chaos. So I am back to doing the thing that I usually do and just pricing things at fixed points. Has a good fracture? 20 Chaos. Has good stats but no good fracture… 10 Chaos. I mean you can technically craft your gear upgrade with the tree, but I also realize there are going to be a lot of players who are too lazy or too confused by the crafting options to actually do that thing. Granted at some point I am going to just have to get rid of everything that has not sold, but that is fine. I will funnel them into the disenchanter, as I am starting to finally do some shipments.
One of the things that I was seeking from Ritual was a good ArchDemon Crown to craft on. I have pulled a couple of them so far, but sadly they are only item level 77, and I need at least 82 to get level 20 gems on them. I was able to sadly pick up a perfect one from the trade market for 5 chaos… making the entire process of farming Ritual feel meaningless. I am likely going to shift my focus over to Delve and Harvest so I can get some crafting juice to start working on trying to get a 20/20 helm out of it. Once I get a six link helm, I will see a massive improvement in my damage. It was wild how big of a difference swapping over to a six link Cloak of Flames was this morning. It is not like I was struggling health wise, but the noticeable difference in damage intake was wild. I kind of dig how easy it seems to be focused on acquiring this specific thing now… since we have so damned many farming and crafting options. I feel like I might be to the point where I actually could go SSF in this game, because I have enough knowledge to figure out how to get what I need to get… which feels like a massive accomplishment.
As far as Tree Crafting goes… I need to shift to focusing on trying to get upgraded grafts. Other than that I will probably still focus on gloves because those are situationally something that I can still improve greatly. However I guess once I am done crafting I will just start trying to print some interesting uniques. The “Tree Tree” feels like it is one of those things that is amazing early in the game, but the utility of it peters out over time. I guess you can keep focusing on trying to get good crafting bases with the perfect fracture on them, but still… the utility of it diminishes over time. I love it however, and I really hope some version of it goes live, because it feels so good for getting a character up and running for the first time. You can create some very good items that propel you into maps, without needing to either know how to craft them or buy them from trade.
The weird side effect of lots of good rares, and freedom of selling things… means however that loot filters which base things on prices… make it feel like there is no loot in the game. I feel like juicers are going to have to relax their filters a bit because the loot is dropping… the filter is just hiding it because it no longer has the value that it once did.
Good Morning Folks. I had a fairly miserable night, and I am hoping at some point today I can take a nap. I was struggling to breathe all day, and coughing quite a bit… then as I prepped for bed the wheezing got pretty awful. So I opted to take a breathing treatment thinking that it might help. This cranked up my system so hard that I pretty much spent most of the evening feeling my heart racing through my ears. I cat napped throughout the evening, and because I am now on diuretics… my bladder kept waking me up. Hopefully tonight I can get some proper rest because today is going to be miserable. Thankfully I had already taken it off, because I have the heating and air folks coming out to do their bi-annual maintenance. Earlier in the evening though, things were pretty great because I ran some Destiny Rising raids with Ace, and pulled the last of the exotic exclusives to the three raid levels.
At this point I believe I am sitting at 65 of 115, and I have switched over to a second tree that is focused on Einhar and Ritual in an attempt to either get a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to six link my cloak of flames. Whenever I get a surplus of fusings, I keep making attempts but so far have been unlucky, Since I am not running a Niko tree at the moment, it means that I am not progressing Delve. I got down to around 100 depth, and it was pretty comfortable, but I just need to grind out the rest of the azerite to make the resists and radius manageable. Resonators are selling, but not so much that they are overwhelmingly good money. Right now single slot ones are selling 2 chaos to 1 resonator, which is fine, and good enough to get some early currency.
What I am honestly making more currency doing is selling near misses that I have been crafting with the tree. I’ve focused on boots and got a good pair, and now am trying to pick up a better pair of gloves. I am looking for either gloves that are ready to go, or gloves that have a max life regeneration fracture on them. I tried my hand at printing amulets and there is just too much going on with those to make anything good. Boots and Gloves have been pretty reasonable, and I might go for a better helmet if I do not upgrade to an elder helm soon. That is really what I need to do, but I have not fought any Elder Guardians yet, and am simply not progressed in my atlas enough to get them.
These are the gloves and boots that I am using that I printed with the tree. Right now I am trying to get ignite proliferation on the gloves, which will help massively for eventually clearing the Breach Fortress encounters much more successfully. The chest that I am using currently is well within the “good enough” realm, especially since my ultimate goal is to replace it with a Cloak of Flames and then pick up the life mastery for not having life on your chest. The weird thing is, I feel like I am in a much more stable state than I normally do at this point in the league. I might start pushing to craft some better rings, if I can figure out the magic formula to spit out amethyst rings with high chaos resistance on them. I did spent my single solitary divine on a reasonable +1 fire gems and damage over time multi necklace, which was worth putting the anoint on it for endurance charges on kill.
I’ve set up my currency branches in a way to where it pretty reliably drops stacks of chaos. Now I wish these were stacks of Divines, but I will take what I can get. Everyone is scared to death of the gold node, that converts all currency to gold… because that would be the one time a Mirror drops and it instead gets converted into a stack of much less useful gold. All in all I am pretty happy with this league, and will continue to grind out progress through the rest of this week. However I think a nap is going to happen soon, or at least one will be attempted.
