Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! The gang is all back at the same time… just in time to take a break effectively until after the new year. Because of how the holidays fall this year, we will not be recording shows for the next few weeks and returning after that with our usually two-part Games of the Year show.
This week we talk about more Twitter Madness and the time when a journalist misread the now-banned JoinMastodon account and created a fictitious person named John Mastodon that runs Mastodon. From there we talk about Tam’s epic journey in trying to find some way to comfortably use a push-to-talk key while playing games on a controller. We talk a bit about a few 2D games on the Steam Deck specifically Ghost Song and Salt and Sanctuary. After that, we talk about our progress in the Path of Exile Forbidden Sanctum league and just how much madness is associated with learning that game in general. Finally, we talk about playing Justin Roiland’s High On Life, a game about talky gunfriends.
Good Morning Friends! It has been a few days since I last updated my progress in Path of Exile, so this morning is going to be one of those posts. At this point, I am finishing up white maps and well into yellow maps. Initially, my first goal is to finish out my Atlas so that I can get all of my passives for mapping purposes. After that, if I still have solid momentum, my goal is going to be to finish each of the “uber” fights. All told I am enjoying this league a heck of a lot more than Lake of Kalandra, though I did enjoy the “Lake” Mechanic more than I enjoy the Sanctum Mechanic. It feels like the base game is just in a better state than it was during the lake, but I do want to spend some time testing out the feel on my old Stormbrand build over in Standard to see if this is more a case of Righteous Fire just being extremely strong or if the game itself is less punitive.
It has been three days since I last posted a screenshot of my currency tab, so you can see a lot of progress on various currencies. At face value, it doesn’t look like I have gained a lot in the liquid currency department aka Chaos, Exalts, and Divines. However, I’ve made 27 Chaos worth of purchases which would take that the liquid assets that I have found up to 2 Exalts and 49 Chaos which isn’t too bad. I’ve yet to find a Divine, which at this point in the last league I had… but it dropped in the Lake so I am not sure if that counts. I am however seen a much more steady trickle of Chaos getting at least one in almost every map that I run.
One of the biggest complaints from the last league was how hard it was in general to “sustain” the “alch and go” style of mapping. What that means is getting enough raw map drops, alchemy drops to turn them into rare maps, and scouring orbs to reset the maps you can’t run with your build. The biggest improvement this league has brought is access to rusted scarabs almost immediately. It took a long time last league before I started seeing scarabs of any sort, and earlier I lucked into a single mob that dropped ten gilded scarabs which I chock up to a kooky algorithm that went in with Kalandra. However, I have seen way more alchemy and way more raw maps than I did the last league which means I can really never stop running maps. If anything this is the “alch and go” league which is extremely enjoyable.
I guess let’s talk a little bit about some of my Chaos expenditures. The first thing of course is trying to get a six-link in the correct colors. I had been searching for a while for pure armor base, that had relevant stats for my build and the prices ranged pretty wildly from 10c to 1 divine depending on how good the rolls. I managed to snag this one for 15c which seems entirely reasonable for having pretty much everything on it be useful to a Righteous Fire build. I would have loved to have had it not be corrupted just to open up some wiggle room for later crafting, but for the price tag, I am willing to take having it set in stone and potentially upgrading again later in the season.
The next thing I picked up was an Immortal Flesh belt, which adds on a ton of life and regen at the cost of elemental resistances. The thing with Immortal Flesh is it is a search to try and find the belt with the best benefits and the least negatives. The hard pill to swallow is the hit to your resists on top of the already 60% hit you take from defeating Kitava twice. So essentially my goal was to get as close to the -15% minimum as I could, and I jumped on -16% as “good enough”. The other thing I was specifically looking for was a minimum of 250 Life per Second regeneration, so when I found this belt for 2 Chaos I figured it was about as good as I could get for the time being.
This last pickup is probably my least needed of the items, but after many attempts to get one of these myself and picking up every Void Sceptre I came across… I decided to just buy my way out of the frustration. Essentially I was looking for 40% Elemental Damage, a minimum of 30% Spell Damage, and a minimum of 15% Fire Damage over Time Multiplier. The rest of the stats are mostly useful except for 10% Attack Speed, but I can live with an almost perfect item for awhile. This cost me 10 Chaos, which seemed like a deal considering other sceptres I had been watching were considerably more and would have required me to get a 3 link.
At some point, I need to probably look at my boots and gloves and maybe try and pour on some more chaos resistance. I have a good chaos ring but it, unfortunately, drops some of my other resists to the point of not having any wiggle room. As far as the atlas goes I’ve completed 43 of the 115 bonus objectives which put me absolutely completed with the first three tiers of maps and missing a map each in tiers four and five. I am not doing great in yellow progression mostly because I have not hit a mass influx of yellow maps but that will probably be coming soon. For anyone who is interested, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my map progress and I have created a blank copy that you can clone here.
All told I am having a blast this league but I did run into a rather nasty bug last night. Essentially I put in a map, that thankfully I had two of… and hit a hard stall bug that is unrecoverable. This is apparently a known problem and I’ve found evidence of this dating back to at least last year. Anecdotal evidence from one thread makes it seem that maybe it takes place more often with adding Betrayal to your maps, but that isn’t necessarily certain. I know when it happened to me last night I was running a map and trying to add Betrayal to it, but I’ve also seen signs of folks encountering this with Delve. I am probably going to land on the side of only adding mechanics to maps that I can afford to lose and don’t need for completion purposes. Once my atlas is complete though, all bets are off.
All in all, this is probably my favorite league so far and has really sold me on being a permanent player of Path of Exile. Sentinel was a good league and Lake was a little shaky, but Sanctum so far has restored my faith. I am hoping with the addition of Ruthless mode, that GGG will stop trying to make the base game more difficult and leave it more or less as is. Are you playing in this league? What build are you running? What are your experiences so far? Drop me a line below.
Yesterday Keza MacDonald wrote a piece for her Pushing Buttons column in The Guardian posing the question if there should be more of a focus on The Awards portion of the Video Game awards rather than the extreme focus on trailers. Last week I wrote about how much fun I had watching the show with a few friends while hanging out on Discord and I can tell you… it wasn’t the oppressively long Christopher Judge speech that excited us, it was all of the shiny new trailers. Granted at the time it felt like that speech lasted about twenty minutes, but it seems like in truth it was somewhere in the neighborhood of nine, but it did absolutely destroy the momentum of an otherwise delightful evening. So when posed the question if the show should focus more on the awards I have to tell you a very clear and resounding no.
Award shows are generally awful. The viewership has been in a freefall for decades, and I think more than anything this is due to the impact of the internet. When you can just find out the winners the day after the show… why watch the show? I remember as a kid watching these not necessarily because I wanted to… but because there was a significant lack of other things to watch at the same time when confronted with my rural existence and having only three channels. As an adult, however, I cannot tell you the last time I watched part of one of these award shows. That said I make a point of setting aside time every year to watch The Game Awards live broadcast, because it effectively sets the tone for the next year’s game announcements.
The other problem with Awards shows is that they are generally lagging behind the trends, yet still trying desperately to act like cool kids and pander to them. I remember the exact moment I stopped caring about Awards shows… the year was 1989 and the Grammy’s added a new category for “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance”. I tuned in largely to watch Metallica who was going to be doing a live performance of One. We all assumed they would win because the And Justice for All album was such a powerhouse. They even managed to get good presenters, Lita Ford and Alice Cooper. Then I remember my jaw hitting the floor when the award went to Jethro Tull… some fucked up jazz fusion holdout from the 70s. I’ve since as an adult listened to Tull and it is “fine” but not really my jam, but I remember holding a grudge against the band and the Grammys for years as a result of this.
I think it is telling that the highlight of the Oscars is generally the live musical performances of songs from films. For years they have leaned hard on trying to make the entire proceedings more entertaining and not just a sequence of reading cards and playing brief clips of films. Whether or not the Oscars are a success is generally entirely dependent upon whoever they got to run the show, which is generally speaking a comedian. Basically, I think there is a disconnect between being a serious awards show and also being something that is fun for the audience to watch at home. As much as we might appreciate the effort that goes into creating the things we love… it is so much better to consume the Monday after by reading a quick synopsis rather than listening to yet another “trying to thank everyone” speech.
So while I love Christopher Judge as Kratos… and loved the hell out of him as Teal’c before that… I have no interest in listening to him ponder the success of his role when I could be watching trailers instead. That probably sounds harsh but it is the truth. I want him to be recognized for the effort that he has done, but also my spending $70 on a video game is already doing that. I think the harsh truth is that the Awards are for the Industry, but the broadcast is for the people. Give the people what they want, and at least in the case of the Game Awards… it is more video game trailers. We have long joked about how the entire show is just a bunch of trailers with occasional brief intermissions to hand out some awards, and that is honestly a good thing. In a world without E3 as a cogent thing… The Game Awards have sprung forth to fill that gap and give us our Christmas Wishbook experience of pondering the shiny things that are just beyond the horizon.
At least that is my take on this. I am sure there will be many others. If you have a particular stance, feel free to drop me a line below.
Good Morning Friends! As of last night, I am officially in maps. So far they are honestly going pretty smoothly with a few moments of press potion panic but otherwise manageable. Essentially yesterday I finished up the rest of Act Nine and all of Act Ten, then did my third Labyrinth, and finally killed Kitava for the second time. The transition into early maps for Righteous Fire is far smoother than any build I have played so far. I now understand why Pohx has so many devotees because this build is awesome for just sorta kicking back and doing content. Granted I am only in white maps so far, and who knows what the transition into yellows is going to look like.
So far I have only swapped out a single piece of gear, but my resists seem to be solid. I am shocked that my gear is as seemingly good still as was. This is the kooky thing about Path of Exile is that gear level seems to not matter even one little bit but instead how lucky you were on the random rolls that it came with. Obviously, the higher the gear the better the possible rolls that can be, but I am still using some items that show equipable levels in the teens. At this point, I am probably going to start shopping for something that I can use as a six-link chest piece so that I can migrate over to using all of the appropriate gems for righteous fire. I think everything else should be relatively correct. I had to move frostblink over to lifetap finally so that I could start running skitterbots.
I had some exceptional luck in my last few acts of the game, and due to over-leveling as heavily as I did… started seeing tier-one maps dropping left and right. I now have fourteen T1, one T2, three T3, and one T4 ready to run. In total, I have unlocked six points on the Atlas Passive tree and have several more that I can run that I have not gotten the bonus from. For the moment I am going hard into Betrayal and Expedition since I seem to be getting some cool things from there. Now that I finally understand Betrayal a bit more, I am way more willing to engage with it. Every map mechanic just seems to work better with RF, and I even managed to wreck Blight on one of the maps. I am looking forward to trying Breach since that seemed to be my personal nemesis before. Speaking of Nemesis… ArchNemesis still mostly sucks and I encountered my first proper mob in the middle of a map yesterday. It took forever but was mostly doable.
One of my goals in this league is to spend more time in other game modes. I noticed that I was almost capped on the Delve currency so I finished out my evening burning through some of that and shocking no one… Righteous Fire is also good at this game mode. I started at a rather conservative level, but I expect in the coming days to be cranking this up a bit as I upgrade the various sliders for Delve. All told I am having a lot of freaking fun and it feels like RF opens a lot more doors than the builds I had been previously playing. I am now however looking forward to bossing because this video of Pohx against Maven seems like nonsense. I found out that he is running a “quenching” flask to turn off his Righteous Fire during the degeneration phases but that also means that he can do it only so many times before falling over. This is probably the downside of this build, but considering most of what I enjoy is mapping, heist, and delve… I am probably okay with this. I could always afford to build a bossing character from the currency I am likely to gain doing that content.
I am having a heck of a lot of fun right now, and my current goal is to improve my gear and knock out more of the Atlas Passive tree. Coming from having completed this last league, it feels a little meager but it is progress nonetheless. I guess I will spend some time today and create another spreadsheet like I had last time to track my map progress. Games like this… really suit me. It gives me a bunch of goals that I can chip away at solo and feel like I am making forward momentum. At some point, I need to dust off Guild Wars 2 as well because it similarly has a bunch of solo-friendly micro goals that I can make progress on.
Hopefully, your week is going pretty swimmingly. Mine is largely tolerable but at some point, I am going to have to actually care about Christmas… because we have done next to nothing planning-wise.
