Tales of the Aggronaut

Every Day a New Betrayal

April 6, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I realize it has been a while since I last posted, but my world has been turned upside down in the last few days. On some level, I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was fully prepared for what it feels like when your body betrays you. Every day has been its own wild ride. I’ve been taking notes because, in theory, I will be going through the same feelings and symptoms at the same time each rotation, and more than anything, that has me dreading the next four months. Can I really do this seven more times? What will even be left of me when I am through the other end? Nothing about this process is easy or comfortable, and it is honestly a struggle to keep sustenance in me. At this point, I am down 50 lbs from my highest weight, and that is just a start. I have no clue where I am going to end up at the end of this journey, because it definitely feels like everything I am going through is accelerating this process, whether or not I want it to. I had a bit of a scare on Friday as my blood pressure meds pushed me down into dangerous territory, so I have completely halted those for the time being and am not sure if and when I will start them back up.

I am not even sure what this means for my blog right now. This is easily the longest gap I have had in writing for a long while, given that it has been five days since my last post. Essentially, all of last week was a wash, and I am not entirely certain how much that will change over time. I keep thinking I will hit a point of equilibrium with the changes my body is going through because they will be cyclical, and that at some point I will be used to the rollercoaster of killing off cells and waiting on new ones to grow back. Every day has been different than the last, but not the same level of better or worse on a progressive scale. I had it in my head that the worst days would be the days actively taking chemo, and then after I finished that, it would be a progressive recovery of functionality, where every day would build upon the previous. That does not appear to be the sort of curve that we are dealing with. Everything just takes so much longer than it normally would, because I keep having to rest between actions. It isn’t that I “can’t” do things… just that the actions bring me to cold sweats and make me need to take pauses in between every micro action. I woke up at 6 am and immediately started getting ready. It was not until around 7:15 that I made it upstairs with breakfast, and everything in between was “do something” and then take a seat for a bit to recover from the thing I just did.

Writing is how I deal with things. I am in part sharing this with you, my readers… because it is my instinct to do so, not necessarily because I want pity or suggestions. I think we have all been around friends and family dealing with cancer in various ways, and this is just my time of life to deal with it. However, the one thing that I can offer is a perspective, as I write through it to process the experience for myself. I’ve always said that I can get used to anything, given enough time and repetition, and I am hoping that this cancer rollercoaster will be one of those things, or that maybe my body will get better at bouncing back. Right now, it is just so broad the impact… because it feels like every single muscle and every single bone… aches at a deeper level than I have ever experienced. I know logically, those are cells dying off and regrowing, and ultimately, I am going to go through this every single round. It feels like when I was a kid and would have massive muscle and bone aches right before a growth spurt. It would also be hilarious if I grew in height from this, but I don’t think it works that way.

On the gaming front, I have cleared all of the Harbingers and am up to Aberroth, but just cannot bring myself to push past and kill him, because I stopped caring enough about it. The build that I am playing is far from immortal, and right now… given my mental bandwidth, I think I need an immortal build to enjoy myself. I could roll a second character and futz around for a while, but I think I might have reached the point where Last Epoch has run its course for me at the moment. There are so many vectors to scale my build on, but they all require massive amounts of effort to accomplish. Were I playing trade, I could just save up and buy whatever I needed, but I do not play trade in this game. So instead, I might just sunset the game for the moment and move on to other things. Maybe if I run across some other build that I just absolutely have to play, I will give it a go, but for the moment, I think I am going to wind things down in Eterra.

That means that I am largely back playing Path of Exile, because the level of engagement works for me. Before the Last Epoch season started, I got my build to a point of almost being immortal, and as a result, I can just go through the motions and collect loot. There are still a bunch of challenges that I want to knock out so that I can upgrade my hideout decoration. I can slowly chip away at these while I am otherwise incapacitated, and feel like I am doing something… while mostly just faffing about. What worries me is that I have four months of this ahead of me. Four months of barely getting by as my body betrays me, and none of this sounds like a good time. I need gaming to keep me sane, but I am going to have to find easy gaming options because I just cannot function at a high level right now. I was naive in that I expected the between week to mostly be getting life back to normal, but so far it is anything but. Maybe as things move forward into the week, it will improve significantly and rapidly, but every day has been a new series of sensations. I am going to realistically also need to start probably forcing myself to work out some, for fear that I lose critical muscle mass each time I kill off cells and regrow them.

Anyways. I am a fucking mess, friends. I will get through this because I have entered the “only way out is through” territory, but holy crap was it not what I was expecting.

Cancer Boy in the Chemo Cubbie

April 1, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was my first round of Chemotherapy and I took it at this massive cancer treatment center. While the floor was relatively empty, I took a quick photo of the cubicle across from me and specifically timed it when no one else was in the line of sight for privacy reasons. This floor was massive, and I did my math correctly; there are around 120 of these cubicals, and by the time I left around noonish, pretty much every slot was filled. These were serviced by around 30 nurses with a handful of roamers on each side. It is consistently amazing to me just how much cancer is happening in order to support a center like this. The crew continues to be amazing, and there was even a floater roaming around constantly seeing if we needed anything. She made a run through the cubicles with a box full of snacks asking if anyone wanted anything.

The chair shown was way more comfortable than I expected it to be. It reclined a bit and had both built-in heat and built-in massage functionality. At 6’4″, my legs stuck out too far to be able to support the footrest fully extended, so I mostly just sat there in the default configuration. I got to the parking lot of the cancer center around 6:30 am, and they opened up around 6:45. I had to make a trip to the Lab to get my port hooked up, and before that, a quick visit by the finance office to sign some waivers before starting. I was seated on the infusion floor by around 8:30, but the actual process did not take place for a bit. They were waiting on my lab work to get back, and given how many people were actively on the floor at that point, it makes sense why it might have taken a bit of time. Initially was given a bolus of a steroid and a long lasting anti-nauseau med that should, in theory, last for three days before I need to figure out if I have to take any of the prescription meds for the same purpose. After this ran through my system, I had to wait around 30 minutes for everything to cycle before I started the next phase.

I am taking a treatment package known collectively as “Folfox” where the first round is a dose of Oxaliplatin, which takes about 2.5 hours to cycle through. The Oxaliplatin actually goes a bit quicker, but there is a bag of a vitamin mixture that is given at the same time, which took a bit longer to finish up after the first bag was completed. However, they were able to crank up the delivery rate once it was the only bag running. The worst part about all of this is the fact that I had to go to the bathroom simply due to the fact that they had pumped me full of so much fluid. I thought MAYBE I could wait it out, but essentially I had to unhook the pump and wheel it into the restroom and then do my business in as careful of a manner as possible. The pumps themselves were battery-powered, so they would continue to work while unplugged, at least for a short period of time.

The next step was to hook me up to my portable party ball of poison, which would then deliver the fluorouracil (5-FU) over the next 48 hours. Because I got a later start to everything due to labs, I will go back about an hour later on Thursday to unhook things. They carefully fished the line for the take-home chemo edition through the bottom of my shirt so that I could change clothing more easily when I got home. This is not my particular pump, but showing a drained one that I found on the internet, and I then mosaiced out the information on it. Essentially, the elastic bladder around the center of the pump deflates as the medication drips into you, and overnight, mine shows a significant loss in total bulk. You have to maintain a certain elevation of the pump so that things continue to drain successfully. The biggest problem that I have personally had is trying to sleep while this is attached to me, because I am terrified that I will kink a cord, fail to maintain the height difference, or one of the cats will puncture it while they attempt to love on me. This is exacerbated by the fact that they give you some rather lengthy hazmat instructions on what to do if it gets damaged.

When I got home, I played this fun new game of… is it a chemo side effect or am I just exhausted? Due to nerves, I woke up around 3 am yesterday morning and could not get to sleep. So by the time five rolled around, I was pretty freaking dead to the world. I think I went to sleep around 7:30 or at least attempted it, but given the awkward nature of the whole situation, I am not entirely certain how much sleep I actually got. I kept having to get up to pee thanks to the constant trickle of fluids into me throughout the night from the party ball. The other problem that I dealt with was the fact that the Oxaliplatin was no joke. There is a famous side effect where there is a nerve pain reaction to cold, which causes neuropathy, and the more often it triggers, the more likely you are to have it permanently. I had turned up the temperature of the house, but I had to do this again to around 75 when I got home, because picking up a metal water bottle immediately triggered this effect. So what constitutes “cold” is a really broad range of temperatures. I need to get a jug of water that I can have sitting out at room temperature that I can then fill my water bottles from, because I cannot drink tap water at the default cool temperature.

I am awake, but I am honestly not sure how much longer I will be. As I said before, I did not sleep hardly at all last night, and I am not sure how much work I will actually be able to get done today. I normally sleep on my belly when I am getting good restful REM sleep, and I cannot do that while hooked to this pump. I am ultimately going to have to get used to this nonsense because I have seven more rounds of this, and there is no way in hell I am going to survive it if I have to keep going sleepless for 48 hours. A lot of my pre-game jitters were due to the fact that I did not really know what to expect. This whole ordeal is going to rapidly become rote, and that should help considerably with the whole not getting much sleep the night before thing. The hardest part at the moment is my inability to shower, but I plan on taking sponge baths today and tomorrow. I will probably wear a beanie/tuque in tomorrow when I go to get everything unhooked because my hair is already rather jacked up due to sleep and the lack of a shower.

You might ask yourself… Bel, why are you sharing so much information about this process? Well, I figure it serves two purposes. The first is to document this for my own purposes, and the second is to demystify the process for anyone who might be coming along after me with colorectal cancer. There is also this negative side effect of viewing people dealing with cancer as being slightly less than the normal human beings that they are. I write through pretty much everything that I deal with, including the hard things like cancer and the death of my spouse. Seeing me writing about it, I hope makes you realize that I am still the same person I always was, that I just have a new piece of bullshit to deal with. I am really hoping that 2027 is a more chill year because the death of a spouse in 2025 and cancer in 2026 is pretty fucking awful. Right now, more than anything… I just want some damned rest.

The positive is that, for the moment, there is nothing that I can really peg on chemotherapy specifically. I just have a general sense that I was run over by a truck, and feel generically awful. There was a big part of me that expected to feel like I was dying inside once the proper poison started seeping into me. If my math is correct, my low point is going to be Friday, and then after that, it will be an upward trend of recovering pretty much everything. I am hoping by Monday, I will be mostly back to normal or at least well on my way. For this exact moment, there is nothing that I am really experiencing that I cannot account for as general exhaustion and the fact that nature is having sex… and trying to destroy me with allergies. I figure that will change, and I will probably talk about it as it does. I am hoping to be able to at least take a nap today… but I might just take the second half of the day off and try to rest. This whole process sucks… but so far slightly less than I was expecting it to.

Juggling Weapons for Harbingers

March 30, 2026 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. This weekend, I should have spent the entire weekend prepping for the fact that I will be in a bad way, because tomorrow I start my bi-weekly dose of poison known as chemotherapy. I did not do that thing. I instead fucked around and played Last Epoch all weekend, because I did not feel like doing much else due to allergies… and I figured starting tomorrow, I might be too miserable to play much of anything. I technically did all of the things that I absolutely needed to do, like dishes, laundry, etc… and today I am going to get a haircut and pick up some groceries on my way back to the house at lunch. I will also be dealing with gathering the trash and putting the cart to the curb so that I do not have to deal with it in the morning, along with everything else, since I have to be at the chemo location starting at 7 am tomorrow morning.

At this point, I am level 91 and working on raising the corruption on the monolith with the current one I am working on sitting around 160 corruption, and I need to raise it to 175 so that I can do my next harbinger. Generally speaking, the hurdles that I deal with that end my Deathless streaks are Lagon in the Campaign, Rahyeh in early Monoliths, and if I manage to skirt past those… it is just some sort of massive damage happening at the same time that kills me. I made it past Lagon, and Rahyeh, and even the often dicey Emperor of Corpses for its big explosions, and finally took my first death at level 82 to the final step of an Omen Chain when there was just too much damage output for me to heal through. This character is exceptionally tanky… not Judgement Paladin tanky, but still pretty formidable so long as I can keep leeching life, and as I have improved my gear to allow me over 3000 hitpoints, I can heal through a lot.

I am playing a variant Forge Guard Forged Weapons, which is this weird hybrid of a melee class and a minion class. The minions in my case are Molten Armor, which is a build-your-own golem sort of thing that allows you to grant it stats from your own gear while also buffing the damage output that it does. The other “minion” is Forged Weapons, which are effectively a proc of a proc… making them slightly less than reliable to summon. Essentially, I am leaning heavily on Vengeance, which procs them based on my Attunement rating, and the only negative about this is that the build ends up with a “ramping” phase as I am summoning all 12 weapons, and while my Molten Armor is building ignite stacks on the target. I’ve specifically specced into Shrapnel, which is a node that gives my Weapon minions a shorter duration, but causes them to make a bit explosion at the end… which also means I can oversummon them to cause the oldest copies to explode.

I am only really able to oversustain weapons because of an exceptionally lucky drop. When I said I was doing a variant, I specifically mean that I am using a Two-Handed Weapon with a Shield, through the passive point that Forge Guard has access to. This gives me a bit more survival since I can use block as a defensive layer, but in order to proc things quickly… I need a pretty fast weapon. The lucky corrupt that I got on Volcanus gives me a second vector for summoning Forged Weapons, and allows me to skip the 3 points in Molten Strike that also serve to summon weapons, and instead invest those points in AOE scaling that also applies to the weapons. Other than that, I am constantly seeking better versions of Falcon Fists and Phantom Grip, and then I figured I might as well show off another lucky amulet that gives me +2 to all skills. Collectively, I think my gear is in a pretty strong place, and you can check out my profile over on LastEpochTools.

I was a bit slow getting to Empowered Monoliths because I spent a bunch of time doing every possible Woven Echo that I could, so that I could rush my Weaver Tree. My goal, as always, is to unlock every single imprint slot because I spend much time grinding the Monolith. For those unfamiliar, you can put an item in these slots, and it makes it so it is way more likely for that to occur when that specific type of item drops. These become way more powerful when you combine them with Circle of Fortune Prophecies that force specific content to drop specific items. For example, I am not sure I found a single Phantom Grip ring until I started running prophecies that force various encounters to drop legendary rings. Then once I got my first one… dedicating two imprint slots to them made it way more likely to see them. Now I am actually fishing for set pieces so that I can craft slightly better versions of my helm, which requires a shard from the helm slot of the Sunforged set to craft. At some point, I really need to start farming T4 Julra so that I can maybe get a high LP Vessel of Strife.

As far as progression goes, I am four Harbingers into the endgame monolith progression. I am building towards the 175 Corruption Harbinger and going to go ahead and knock out the Emperor of Corpses, since late versions of that can be pretty dicey with all of the explosions. Right now, at 160 Corruption, I can soak the big “get out” explosion without any issue, so I can just stand and tank everything, and that should hold true when I hit 175 as well. I have to admit I still hate the way that corruption works. It feels like you spend a lot of time fiddling around and trying to get your corruption level up high enough to do the next sequence of content. If I could pay someone to take me all of the way to 300… as you can with a carry service in Path of Exile, I would probably do that, just so I could knock out all of my Harbingers in a single go and take down Aberroth. I find the process of raising corruption to be way the fuck too fiddly and unfun… and wish it were more akin to Greater Rifts, where you could just keep bumping up a number manually without having to do the song and dance of killing a bunch of bosses so that when you take down a Shade of Orbyss, you get a decent jump.

The frustrations over raising corruption, though, might just be because this is not the fastest clearing build I have ever played. It is forbidable and tanky as hell, but nothing that I am doing is doing any sort of screen-wide clearing. I need to be in base-to-base combat with my targets to proc the weapons, which then decimate the targets. They drop pretty quickly… unless you are Draal, which I think are inherently resistant to fire. The biggest challenge, honestly, is wrangling my weapons and keeping them on a single target rather than letting them spread out to run amok. However, I will say they are pretty good at mopping up secondary targets while I am moving to the next area. For example, I almost never have to specifically target the little weavers’ egg cases, because the weapons are off destroying them either with melee attacks or their big explosions when they run out of summoning time.

I’ve made exceptionally fast progress in the Circle of Fortune, which has really helped in the gear acquisition department. Going into this season, they indicated that they were nerfing some of the drop rates, especially off imprint slots… and there were times that I could absolutely feel that. However, the deeper that I get into CoF, the better the drops in general feel, and I am slowly clawing back some of the missing loot. The only real frustration that I have right now is that it feels like I cannot gain gold fast enough to keep up with the need to buy more storage tabs. Those are now over 100k gold per tab, and it takes me a while to gather up a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe I should focus on the monolith echoes that reward gold or something to build that up more quickly. I also wish that we had some sort of guild system in this game with shared stashes and such, but then again, that would probably fight against the whole design goals of Circle of Fortune. Having a guild where everyone was limited to the same faction, though, might be able to get past that.

I’ve also made an attempt at starting a Primalist, because in my many travels I managed to get the Apiarist set which summons a bunch of bees. Much like the Squirrel build before it… I want to see if I can make a Bee build work. If not there is always “Cocaine Bear” to fall back on. I legitimately started writing this blog post this morning… and then got sidetracked and completely missed the fact that I never actually finished it and hit publish. Welcome to how my brain seems to be working right now… or not working. Tomorrow I start chemotherapy and that has been consuming almost all of my mental cycles. I am as prepared for that as I think I can be… and here is hoping I make it out the other side in several months. Suffice to say that since I have to be at the location at 7 am tomorrow morning… I will not be doing a blog post. I could in theory drag a laptop to the doctors office and blog from there… but I am not going to do that.

Last Epoch Season Four is really good, but is effectively the same game as before. If you liked it then, you will like it probably even more. However there is no massive revelation that will change your opinion of the title if you gave it a pass before. I will be playing it for the next several days I am sure… that is pending I can stay upright enough to do so.

AggroChat #563 – Omens Were Shattered

March 29, 2026 by Belghast

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

We start off this week discussing a bit about Project Tahiti, which is a fairly professional emulator server that is helping to keep Marvel Heroes Omega alive. We’ve talked a bit in the past about missing this game, but it now functions again and is really easy to get up and running, especially if you ever played it on Steam. Bel talks a bit about some drama happening in Path of Exile with the account banning of Jenebu, the originator of The Forbidden Trove and what this means for the Mirror Economy. Last Epoch dropped a new expansion, Shattered Omens, and we talk a bit about playing that and the changes that have gone into the game as a result. Finally, Ash shares some rapid-fire updates on Coromon, Sunderfolk, and Peglin.