So Much Fortress

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One of the cool things about playing Path of Exile and buying the supporter packs, is that you end up with a bunch of interesting toys. For example I have a ring that when equipped on a character as a cosmetic, keeps track of every bit of currency that drops on the ground. I wish this covered the entire league and all of my characters… and not just the character equipped but regardless it is still cool. Similarly I have a map device that is a cool glowing purple tree that keeps track of every map that has been run in the device. So over the course of this league I have personally launched 37 White Tier Maps, 82 Yellow Tier Maps, 530 Red Tier Maps, and 29 t17s or Purple Tier Maps. I have technically run 30 t17s but one of them I did not launch myself but it still counted towards the challenges of the league. Similarly I have found 41 Divine Orbs as raw drops, 37 Exalted Orbs, and 2838 Chaos Orbs. If you want a better accounting than that, you have to use some sort of third party tool like Wealthy Exile which tracks currency in your tabs not exclusively currency that drops on the ground.

The biggest thing that took place over the weekend, is that I realized I could burn through t17s pretty easily on my Righteous Fire Chieftain character and as such… that 30 maps challenge became priority. This is the point where I talk about how much I hate the process of rolling t17s because there are so many awful modifiers that brick builds. I feel like t17s and t16.5s need to be rethought because there is no one that actually enjoys running any of the completely awful mods. I honestly feel like t17s overall were a massive mistake because they have become the default map to run if you care about juicing, leaving t16s in the dust. I had gathered up enough Fortress maps to run nothing but those, and at some point I might give a shot at doing some of the other maps just to see how bad they are if carefully rolled. Fortress is nice because as RF Chieftain I can pretty much stand on top of the boss and ignore everything else going on other than occasionally the robot’s bit slam attack.

On the 17th just before 7pm I completed Endgame Enigmas and unlocked my 34th challenge, giving me the upgraded totem pole for my hideout that I have gotten the last two leagues. I could continue pushing for 40, but I doubt I am going to make that effort. There are two more that seem within the realm of possibility that I might knock out, because that would give me access to the fully upgraded cosmetic set. Essentially I have 3 more Memory Altars left to go before I unlock that achievement and then the next easiest is the one centered around modifiers on invitations. I have a stack of Black Star and Searing Exarch fights sitting around that I can run, and I think I am sitting at 125 of 250 towards the challenge. I would love to buy a bunch of Black Star invites but those are going to be tedious and are not something often sold in bulk on TFT. This is one of those moments when I feel like we really need a proper automated auction system.

If I walked away right now though… I would be reasonably happy. I have a third totem pole that matches the other two from Settlers, and Necropolis. I had been on a streak of upgrading the size every league, but 34 seems like the most reasonable amount for me personally. I really need to make better use of my resources and look at all of the challenges at the start of the league… rather than the end of the league. That way I can start to plan my way of what I am going to run so I can begin chipping away earlier rather than later. At some point I am going to burn down my hideout and build a new one since I got the Primeval Hideout unlocked. I need to figure out a better place to put these things since I apparently care about collecting them. Right now they are just sort of shimmed in north of all of the rest of the stuff in my headout near my Delve entrance.

We are two days out from the start of the Last Epoch league, which is my hard stop of Path of Exile nonsense at least for the time being. Right now I am leaning towards a Fire Based Necromancer build that Aaron Action RPG posted yesterday, or at least something similar to that. I did not think I would be going down the Abomination route but since you can build one exclusively with volatile zombies. I will miss my lorge chonky Golem friends, but it will be kind of cool to play with the new Abom mechanics. I am going Necromancer regardless of what version I go with, where I will either follow that the path in that build or set off on my own zoomancer setup. I am super looking forward to the new season in Last Epoch and can’t wait for it to start. I am honestly even excited to watch the reveal stream for Path of Exile II on the 20th.

Are you going to be playing Last Epoch? If so what are you planning on going with as a build? Are you instead waiting for Path of Exile II? If so what are you starting there. Drop me a line below.

Low Stake Hot Takes

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Krikket was the first of the mentors to offer to run with Blaugust 2025 this year, and she has been doing a phenomenal job of things. One of the things that they have been cooking is a Community Builder group project trying to get as many people as possible to make a post today on the topic of “Low Stake Hot Takes” aka things that you feel very strongly about… but don’t actually really matter in the grand scheme of things. Since I have largely not been joining in the Blaugust Reindeer Games this year for obvious reasons… I figured I would come out of hibernation and join in this nonsense. Being weirdly opinionated about insignificant things is definitely on brand with my blog. That is of course if my blog stops acting up long enough to get a post out. My web host seems to be having problems this morning, and it took me significantly longer to log in than I was expecting.

Ketchup is a Good Base, but a Bad Sauce

I have very particular feelings about Ketchup, namely that it is a really boring sauce and that there are almost zero reasons why you should be using it. Essentially there are so many sauces that are just Ketchup but better. Barbecue sauce for example, just neatly slots into every scenario where you would normally be using Ketchup. If you are not that adventurous there is always Cocktail Sauce or Sweet and Sour sauce… both of which can be made off a Ketchup base. Hell just adding Sriracha to ketchup makes it instantly a better sauce combination. Barack Obama commented on a podcast once that “In my opinion, and this is controversial in my family, but you should not eat ketchup after the age of 8”. I agree with him wholeheartedly because it just is not a good condiment. Life is way too short to smear bland tomato paste onto your food, you deserve more flavor in your life.

I am sorry Canadians… but Ketchup chips are mid as hell as well. It is the most boring flavor you could ever make chips out of. At least go with All Dressed where something more is happening. Barbecue chips are just Ketchup but better… and honestly same goes with something like Teriyaki where you can make a pretty good version of it if you use Ketchup as your base. I am just saying… Ketchup is incomplete homework. It is almost a good sauce but needs something more to make it work. Hell even the lowly Thousand Island Dressing… is a better Ketchup based sauce than Ketchup is. If you are still using Ketchup you need to expand your horizons is all I am saying. Shit you can just literally mix any other condiment you have in your house with Ketchup and almost instantly make it better. You are too good for Ketchup boo, you deserve better.

If It Makes it Two Years, It will Make it Twenty

So this is less a hot take and more just a guiding principal. Products fail for two reasons really… poor construction or mechanical failure of some critical piece. If I buy something and it survives two years, then more than likely it is going to make it for twenty years because it has left that window where the obvious failures are going to happen. I have an Alarm clock in my bedroom that I got when I was around twelve. That thing has been kicking for thirty seven years at this point and still functions every bit as well as it did when I was a kid. Maybe the buttons require a little more effort to push them, and maybe the plastic on the front is scratched up at this point, but it is a survivor and will likely keep ticking for another generation. Products are made more poorly now than they used to be, but generally speaking even in modern times… if a product you buy survives two years… it will probably just keep chugging along especially if there are minimal moving parts.

There is of course a caveat in this statement that you should do your best to regularly maintain whatever it is. There are some things I do not give a shit about, and they survive almost to spite me. There are of course going to be cases where a power spike will fry something and release the magical blue smoke, that exists outside of this concept. However if you lucked into getting something that was reasonably well assembled and operates within the tolerances it was designed to operate in… it should in theory just keep doing that pending there is no mechanical failure due to stress. I have lots of old things that I just cannot be bothered to replace, and similarly have had situations where I thought I would replace something with a shiny new bauble… only to have to fall back on the reliable one when the new one fails. I think an addendum to this is… when possible buy things with a single function. The more shit you are asking an object to do, the more likely one of them will fail within those first two years.

Listening to an Audiobook Counts as Reading A Book

This one is very near and dear to my heart because I love Audiobooks and my un-diagnosed ADHD tendencies make it very hard for me to pay attention while reading a book. I can read books, I just do so far less frequently than listening to them. My mind wanders when I read a book and before long I realize I have not been paying attention for several pages and have to flip back and re-read segments of the text so that I can glean understanding from them, even though mechanically my brain was going through the motion of consuming it. So the reason why I feel like listening to an Audiobook counts as reading, is because it activates the same centers of my brain while I am doing it. One of my favorite things that I have talked about at length is to listening to an Audiobook while I am keeping myself mechanically busy playing a game that does not require a narrative component. For me these are either MMORPGs where I am just farming content and I have committed everything to muscle memory, or playing something like an ARPG where I am similarly relying on instinct. If I stop and engage with chat or read quest text… I instantly lose the ability to consume the audio that is going into my head and glean any meaning from it.

Essentially I have through testing figured out that whatever part of my brain that does the mechanical motions of gaming, and the part of my brain that understands and engages with narratives… are completely separate. While I don’t have a brain scan or anything like that, I would be willing to bet that if you looked at my brain while reading text and while listening to text narrated… that they would be lighting up the exact same areas. When I shift that narrative processing away from the audio that is playing, the loss of meaning is instantaneous. The same thing happens when I am on a conference call, and a critical priority email comes through… I lose the meaning of what was happening on the call while I am reading that email. So basically my take is that listening is the exact same thing as reading for the purpose of consuming meaning. This might not be a thing for everyone, and maybe I am just wired in this particular way… but I honestly find that I listen better when I am doing something with my hands. I used to get in trouble for this all of the damned time while growing up because I would be voraciously doodling while listening to a lecture in class instead of taking notes. I would cross link the thing that I was drawing with the subject matter that I was learning, and it was almost as though one was encoded with the other.

Similarly if I am having a conversation with someone… I will cross link whatever I was doing at that time with the conversation that I was having. As a result there are all of these inexplicable hot-wired subjects in my brain where I will be thinking about this things, and immediately jump to something totally unrelated other than at one point they were linked while listening to a conversation. Anyways the thing is… because of the way my brain works, I often just use the shorthand of “reading” a book instead of diving into the details that I actually listening to it for 10 hours while playing Path of Exile, because that is a thing that society understands more clearly. I gained the same understanding of the material that someone who read it did, and often times it is way more deeply lodged into my brain because I took away the nervous energy that was blocking my brain from getting into a flow state and listening more intently.

That’s All Folks

I think that is a sufficient amount of opinions for one morning. I have others that I could go into, but then you are getting more into the founding principles of my personality. Things like “never trust someone who does not like animals” feels like it is veering out of the “low stakes” nature of this prompt.


AggroChat #534 – Runners Ready

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

Hey Folks! We had a bunch of topics left over from last week that rolled over to this week.  First, we talk a bit about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Shinobi Metroidvania. From there, we talk a bit about Summer Games Done Quick and some of the better runs. Tam talks about his plans to adapt the Starfinder 2 game system to create a Shadowrun Campaign.  Ash shares his initial thoughts about Draw Steel, a new RPG coming down the pipe. We talk a bit about the upcoming Last Epoch Season 3, which drops on August 21s and some of the significant changes.  We also talk a bit about Path of Exile II 0.3.0, which drops shortly after that on the 29th. Lastly, Tam shares some of his thoughts on actually playing quite a bit of Burrows and Badgers, a squad-based leveling miniatures game along the lines of Mordheim. Grace talks briefly about the new Dwarven Realms season that has started, and Bel shares his suggestions for the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and both Weapons and Barbarian by Zach Cregger.

Topics Discussed:

  • Shinobi: Art of Vengeance
  • Summer GDQ
  • Shadowfinder
  • Draw Steel RPG
  • Last Epoch Season 3
  • Path of Exile 2 0.3 Spoilers
  • Burrows and Badgers
  • Dwarven Realms 
  • Craft Sequence
  • Weapons and Barbarian

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Buying Freedom

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Good Morning Folks. If you remember yesterday I talked about finally getting an Apothecary card drop. Now these go for roughly 25-30 Divines each because they are hot property for folks wanting to do late league gambles. The thing is I do not need a Mageblood this league, nor do I really think that Magebloods are actually that much fun. They fix builds but they don’t really do anything cool and after played with a handful of them through several leagues the magic of that item is broken for me. Headhunter however is the really fun belt and I will choose it over Mageblood all of the time because it actually does something. So after writing yesterdays blog post, I happened to look over and see that someone was advertising a Primeval Hideout on TFT, and I thought… I wonder if they will trade for this Apothecary card so I could take one rare drop that I don’t particularly care about right now for another thing that I have been desperately seeking for way too long.

Unfortunately it was a Chinese language user that did not speak English, so they invited me with me not knowing if they would actually accept the trade or kick me from the instance. I got to their hideout, popped the Apothecary in the trade window and they accepted without a moments thought. So here I was heading to the hideout, and weirdly unlike the one other time that I bought a hideout on TFT they did not take the time to unlock it. So thankfully I was sturdy enough to clear the mobs inside the hideout and there was another person who had also bought the hideout with me, but I had already cleared 90% of it before they got there. Just like the screenshot that I linked to yesterday, the hideout does in fact appear as a path going down off the side of one of the floating islands. I was always so damned scared that I would miss the hideout in one of my farming runs, but I am pretty sure this would have been impossible to miss.

So now I have my Primeval Hideout unlocked and at some point I want to swap from my Ghost-lit Graveyard Hideout over to this one, but that has to be a challenge for a day I feel like building a new hideout. The biggest problem that I have had when I tried to swap hideouts is that the locations of everything is so baked into my brain that I struggle if I end up moving anything to a different location. I really like the decor of this place, especially if I change up the lighting to make it a little darker. I also have the ability to dump a backup of my current hideout so I can always quickly revert back to it at a moments notice. The only negative is that I have a stash tab full of Primordial Blocks maps… that I might as well run as I flip my favorite map slot to something else and build up a stash of those. Right now I am targeting Toxic Sewer which is one of my favorite layouts because of how compact everything is.

In other related news I recorded one of my dumb little videos last night and it is hard to believe that I have made 37 of these… just for Path of Exile. Specifically I show off what doing a t16 looks like with mid-range investment I think maybe I have spent 50 div on the build… which to new players is a lot, but to folks who spend multiple mirrors on a build is an entry point. I think I have probably spent around 150 Divines on my Righteous Fire Chieftain over the course of this league for reference. Delve was good to me and allowed me to easily generate large quantities of currency to then blow on dumb ideas later. This is legitimately probably my second favorite build I have had in Path of Exile behind my menagerie of Righteous Fire characters. It is not sturdy enough to straight up face tank everything, but it is sturdy enough to feel good playing it with max res and max block and a reasonable amount of life/es regeneration. The thing that would make this feel better would be to try and work in Stone Stance or something like that and maybe a bit more max resist.

Anyways pending this build is still around it will be a contender for 3.27 league starter for me, given that I would like to see what this can be if I really make it my full focus for a league. I also want to see what happens if I just swap out Storm Brand of Indecision for Penance Brand of Dissipation for bossing. I will be doing some testing on that over the weekend but I need to acquire a 21/20 gem for Penance Brand first.