Tales of the Aggronaut

Accidental Black Light

August 13, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. One of my coworkers really cares deeply about his teleconference background… and recently added these cool vapor-wave neon strip things which spurred in my brain… that I could do something cool with my lighting. I have a ceiling fan with three 60W light bulbs… and I got it in my head that I could give myself some cool bisexual lighting by buying a blue, pink, and purple led bulb. The pink was way the hell too overpowering so I ended up with only a blue bulb and a purple bulb and it works… giving me this cool two-tone lighting that is way the hell easier on my eyes than bright white light. However what I did not expect is that I accidentally created a black light, because everything in my office that fluoresces is now glowing like crazy. I feel like I need to lean into this and get some proper velvet black-light paintings up in here. The above photo does not do the effect justice… but you can definitely see that little Kenneth the robot’s arms and head are glowing.

I think at this point I am enjoying my Brand Elemenalist more than the Toxic Rain Pathfinder, because it has officially leap-frogged it in levels and I am pretty close to dinging 92. Everything always slows down at 95 and I am not sure if I have enough survival to really push much further than that but I fully expect to get there before long. The only problem with this build is that so much of my success with it… is entirely depended upon the negative lightning resistance setup I have on my mercenary. If I were playing an actually GOOD build… I can see how dumb this would be especially for bossing purposes. This combined with the Inpulsa chest are giving me some tasty screen wide pops at times that I was not expecting for a brand build. I am still sort of shopping for a better merc, but I really want the ability that causes consecrated ground to cover the screen and the “better” options I have found don’t have that or herald of purity. I wish POE.Ninja tracked Mercenaries so that I could flip through a bunch of different setups to see what people are doing with the Doryani setup.

So one of the battles that I have been having with this character and build is… what the hell to do with the shield. The build that I loosely patterned this one off of was using Aegis Aurora and it makes some amount of sense. It’s a good chunk of armor and decent energy shield, and also has the ability to recover 2% of energy shield on block. The problem with this however is that essentially this is only 96 Energy Shield per block… which is largely meaningless. For awhile I was running Emperor’s Vigilance which has even more armor and energy shield and would allow me to drop a node on my passive tree to keep Glancing Blows, but also has the double edged sword that any unblocked damage bypasses my energy shield. I played around with Rise of the Phoenix and it was fine… but did not have enough chance to block and dropped me down below the block cap. I even tried a solid 5% of life on block shield that has a pretty decent roll and it just did not feel as good as it does on my Righteous Fire characters… because it is only around 200 life recovered per block and the general line of defenses is nowhere near as strong. So I am stick with the Aegis for now, mostly because I am not sure what else to try.

I am ripping through Alch and Go t16 maps without any issue, and am mostly using this character to run Betrayal on Primordial Blocks still chasing that damned hideout. I have a whole new appreciation for Betrayal largely because I never realized exactly how bit of an experience boost it is over any other mechanic. I don’t even care about Safehouses, I am just clicking whatever option there is on every single person just to get the bump of experience. I get it that folks have said Betrayal is great early league, but I always assumed it was for the enchants and abandoned it entirely this league… but legitimately it is probably still worth doing to get a bump in levels quickly. I am sure those Veiled Chaos Orbs were more valuable at the start of the league than they are now as well. I’ve run so much Betrayal and at least a dozen safe houses at this point and have still not found a single invitation for Catrina. I do wish there was some better guidance as to what person does what in which position however, because I keep getting the damned crafting tables… and they are awful.

The other thing I am hunting while running maps is for the memory tears that unlock a sequence of maps. Right now it feels like I am pretty close to knocking out Eldritch Expeditions and will likely need two of these sequences to wrap it up. When I get one of these I pretty much just rip my way through it as RF so that I can knock it out quickly and then return back to chill Ach and Go t16s. I should probably be knocking out t17s as well but those are way less happy chill fun times, and I have not been in the mood for it. Yesterday was “a lot”, and I took the day off to deal with “death things” as I am starting to collectively refer to it as. I had to go back to the funeral home to pick up death certificates and then spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with various things that had been in a holding pattern waiting on them. I still need to make a trek Saturday morning over to deal with another thing related to this, because I was just too beat by the time I got back home yesterday to make another jaunt in the opposite direction.

I had made plans with a friend of mine, but had to beg off last night because I was just too out of it. Instead I sat downstairs on the sofa with cats snuggling tightly, and played some Path of Exile while listening to Wicked Problems by Max Gladstone. I did not expect to necessarily chain through these books but after the ending of Dead Country… I had to know what was coming next. While I loved the Craft Sequence… so far this Craft Wars Trilogy is way more tightly focused and I like it better overall. Tara Abernathy is the best character in the entire series of books, and we are spending way more time with her in this book than some of the other sequels from the previous series. The first sequence hopped around quite a bit between characters, and there were entire books that did not really involve her. This definitely feels like we are headed for some sort of an endgame and all of the best elements of the previous books are being revisited in this one tight narrative arc. Like I said if you have never read any of these books I HIGHLY suggest starting them and unfortunately I would also suggest reading the first six book series, because you will largely be clueless about the importance of some of the events in this trilogy.

I am still functional… deeply low on spoons… but strugglebusing my way through the world.

Burning Divines

August 12, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. We have reached the point in the league where I am blowing all of my currency on alt characters.I think I have blown something like 130 divines on kitting out two characters. Divines are easy enough to get at this point just through selling Delve stuff that I could get them back if I really wanted it, but honestly… since I will never play standard I might as well blow them. At this point I know I will be shifting to Last Epoch next week and then once I have my fill of that, probably popping back into Path of Exile II to see what 0.3.0 has to offer. As a result I am in the mode of winding down the Mercenaries of Trarthus league. During the Gauntlet I had a lot of fun with Toxic Rain which caused me to run up a character in the league for that. Additionally I had a Brand character that I was originally planning on going Penance Brand of Dissipation with… but pivoted at the last minute to Storm Brand of Indecision. In both case I have gotten the characters to around level 90.

With Toxic Rain I went Pathfinder as it is really the only Ranger ascendancy that has anything that benefits the skill. Pending I remember to keep a life flask rolling it also has really great surviveability after you have thrown on enough levels and gotten enough raw hit points. There are a few ways to build this and I opted for the modern method of getting a 250% Widowhail and buying a stupidly expensive quiver. I legitimately do not remember how much this cost but I think it was in the neighborhood of 50 Divines and that was the cheapest version I could find with both chaos and normal dot multi, a decent life roll, and bow damage percentage increase on it. This gives me +77% dot multi, +87.5% chaos dot multi, +381.5 life, and +171.5% bow damage. Additionally I am running a Tides of Time which effectively is a budget mageblood that only works on the Pathfinder class which effectively allows me to generate enough flask charges that they have perm uptime with the used when full enchant.

You can check out the full setup here in the POB, but fair warning I don’t know shit about properly configuring POB. I based it loosely on some other POBs that I saw on POE.Ninja and combined a bunch of things that I liked into a new frankenbuild. Essentially I am running Mirage Archer setup in my chestpiece with normal Toxic Rain, and then a Ballista totem setup in my bow with Toxic Rain of Withering to give me withered stacks. Collectively this leads to a pretty comfy playstyle as I roam around the map spamming two buttons and occasionally hitting a health potion when I remember it. If something is taking two long to die I curse it with despair and move on with my life. This is very much a mapper setup and not in any fashion something you would want for bossing purposes. Truth be told, I have learned that I do not like bossing builds in the least… and at some point should probably find one that I enjoy playing just so I can knock out ubers in the future. They all feel bad to me because leveling them feels like ass.

The other character I have been playing is a brand build, which is another archetype that I really love. Basically Wintertide brand is probably my favorite of these, but it always feels too fiddly and requires you to push way the hell too many buttons to play it effectively. Storm Brand is something that I have attempted to play countless times in the past but they always feel too squishy, and I think I might have come up with the solution here. Essentially I am abusing the new golem node on the Elementalist Ascendancy combined with the Fire and Cold nodes and Bastion of Elements as an extra defensive layer. So essentially all of my lightning damage from Storm Brand of Indecision is Chilling, Igniting, and Shocking the enemy and I am running around with massive buffs from Stone, Ice, Lightning, and Flame Golems which have meatshield support giving them extra heft and taunt. I am running two Taming Rings for the lulz and resists, and an Inpulsa’s chest for the explode pops. Add the cheapest Archdemon crown I could find and a +2 crit knife and you have a pretty comfy and powerful feeling setup in maps. I am running Aegis Aurora but don’t really feel like I have enough armor to make it work well… nor enough energy shield so I might swap that up for something else at some point like maybe a Phoenix Shield to resolve the fact that I am not ignite immune.

What is making this feel extremely good is the fact that I am running Storm Brand with a Doryani Merc that is causing everything in my vicinity to have -130% Lighting Resistance. The Merc is also providing shocked ground and using the Kaom’s Binding trick to convert some phys damage to fire, and providing me some extra regen with Shaper’s Seed. Everything else was pretty much a yolo as I just threw on some minion uniques that seemed like they might be useful for all of the Holy Relics and Herald of Purity minions that are being generated. For reference I am running a Shout bot Striker with my Righteous Fire character to add more regen and give culling strike for bosses, and running an Ice Shot ranger type for my Toxic Rain character to help slow up the packs a bit and make them stand in the toxic rain a bit longer. In truth I am looking for better versions of all of these mercs but I have not found exactly what I want. For example I want a striker that provides me fortify stacks, enduring cry, and determination… which is a thing that CAN exist but I just have not seen it.

Mapping with the negative lightning res merc setup is pretty comfy because the one I am running is also spreading out consecrated ground pretty much everywhere. It isn’t the best at killing unique mobs but feels pretty solid. I am blocking just enough incoming damage to make the 3000 life and 1000 energy shield that I have feel decent. Swapping to the Phoenix Shield would give me a bit more life regen which might make things feel a bit better as well as like I said patching the hole I have in my elemental defenses where I would at least become immune to ignite when I hit low life. Of all of the things I am worried about… ignite stacks seem like they are the easiest to work around. All told I am having quite a bit of fun with both of these new characters, but playing alts always feels weird because I never put the same focus on them as I do with my righteous fire mains. One of these leagues I am going to play one of these and force myself to improve it over the course of the league. Next league I am contemplating going down the Golem Elementalist Explosive Arrow path that my friend Sloth did this league… pending it does not get extremely nerfed. EA is an archetype that I already like quite a bit and Golementalist is extremely fun to level.

As far as league progress goes, I am chipping away at some of the remaining challenges for the league. I am sitting at 33 of 40 and at a minimum I want to hit 34 before I wander away like a bored toddler. Strenuous Summons is something that I made a dent in last night, and in theory I am pretty close to Eldritch Expedition and just need to get lucky with Remembrance Repressed. I can do t17s and could in theory chip away at Endgame Enigmas as well. Powerful Pursuits is killing Ubers and if I got desperate I could just buy my way out of that problem with boss carries on TFT. Basically I think I can at least get one more without a ton of effort and that is probably the path that I am going to go down. I am running red altars because I would far rather run the Black Star/Searing Exarch combo for invitations than doing maven witnesses or having to fight Shrek from the eater of worlds invitations. I burned through ALL of my invitations yesterday evening, and that is already way more Shrek fights than I ever want to do going forward. I should see what buying bulk Black Star invites costs on TFT because those are without a doubt the easiest to run over and over.

Anyways… still having fun with my stupid Path of Exile nonsense. Brands are fun, Toxic Rain is fun, and Righteous Fire is fun.

Wind-chimes and Heat

August 11, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. I had grand plans for all of the things I would do this weekend, but largely spent the weekend being super lazy. One of the things my wife bought me at the beginning of the summer was a set of wind chimes, and it was one of those things that I never quite got around to taking care of. I bought a bracket for them and everything, but it just never seemed terribly important. While she can no longer enjoy them, I am hoping I do especially as things begin to cool down a bit. I had these grand ideas about all of the things I would do over the weekend, and accomplished very few of them because it was too freaking hot to be outside. There are a bunch of things that need to be done, and I struggled to bring myself to do any of them.

I had this idea that I was going to go out on a photo shoot somewhere, but again with the heat I just could not bring myself to go out and do it. I did however get everything all set with my camera and the new USB C charging battery works beautifully. I went out into the backyard and took a few photos which you will see throughout the rest of this post because I wanted to test both the battery and a sd card adapter that I had never used with it. My camera is over a decade old at this point but still seems to do a pretty admirable job capturing shots. It isn’t a full frame digital slr, but does a pretty good job and the only real annoyance I have with it is that I like using this hand grip, and I have to take it off in order to get to the battery compartment. I’ve got my backpack packed with everything I need to go out on adventures and I think I am going to start throwing it in my vehicle when I go anywhere just so it is available if the inspiration hits me.

I need to figure out what I am going to do with the library of books in my wife’s office. I really would like them to go to some measure of use, but I am not even certain where to start with that. I have toyed around with the idea of just getting a storage building so that I can put all of that stuff in it until I have a better idea of what I want to do with it all. Storage units are much cheaper than I realized they were, but that also seems like a hassle to move them somewhere else. I need to get out into the garage and organize and clean some stuff out there as well, but again… the heat is the problem. I am hoping once we get into September that things calm down a bit on that front. I know there is a bunch of stuff in the garage that I just need to have hauled off. There is a local group we have used before that if I can make a big pile, they will take it all at once. I have a bunch of boxes for larger electronics that I need to break down, but then there is the problem of what the heck to do with the Styrofoam inside of them. I could in theory save it for building wargaming terrain or something… but that also seems like a massive pain in the butt to find a place to store it.

What I really need to do is move everything from one side of the garage over to the other side of the garage so that I can put up shelving units properly. There is this giant cat toy thing that my father-in-law made which was lovely… but like 300% larger than it needed to be so that it took up MOST of our livingroom. It is just sitting there and has been sitting there for over two decades, and I think it is a candidate for the “haul pile”. We have a couple of rugs out there as well that I have no clue why we saved… other than it was just too much of a pain in the ass to deal with them at the moment we swapped. Basically I need to spend some time building a pile so that they can come haul it away and clear up more swap space for me to organize things. There are some cheap shelving units that you can get at Sams that seem pretty sturdy and my goal is to put those in pretty much every place where I can in the Garage just to get more stuff up off the ground and usable.

We have this giant workbench thing out in the garage that blocks access to the breaker box… which generally sucks because I have to climb up on the thing if I need to deal with them. However it would make a really great base for setting up both a FDM Printer and Resin Printer out in the garage. Even in the winter months, our garage stays fairly warm because our insulation between the laundry room and the garage is kind of shit, so everything directly up against the house rarely gets low enough to matter. After reading and watching so much stuff on the toxic chemicals that they give off… I am legitimately concerned about the cats when it comes to fume off-gassing for either process. This is especially true with resin, but seems to be also mostly true with FDM as well. There is plenty of room to set everything up out there pending I give it a good cleaning and de-clutter. I have a good concrete slab on the north side of our house that I could start piling up things for the eventual dump run.

Another thing that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later is the little tree/bush/whatever that is growing on the deck off our pool. I have not really spent a ton of time in the backyard this summer due to the extreme heat, and I am sure this is something that my wife was going to take care of eventually as she spent countless hours reading in the backyard. However it has grown up enough now that it is going to be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with I think. The vine that we have been fighting for two decades… is back with a vengeance this summer and I just do not care enough to deal with it right now. It seems to be grown all in throughout the boxwood that has long since outgrown the bounds of what a boxwood should be. Everything is just so much more difficult when there is only one person. All of the things that I need to do… are things that the two of us would have tag teamed until we got them finished. I miss my wife for all of the normal reasons but especially because I miss being part of a team.

Anyways…. I have rambled enough for a blog post, but I did share random photos with you for your time.

AggroChat #533 – Greg Universe Equivalent

August 10, 2025 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks! We are back after a week off, and like always, when that happens, we come back to a large stack of topics. We start off talking about Hellclock and Grimshire, two great games that Grace has been playing quite a bit of. From there, we discuss Kodra’s adventures in GenCon as he talks about the various LARPs he played in and some exploration of the Starfinder 2 system. Bel talks about how he has come to understand eSports through Path of Exile and discusses a bit about The Gauntlet event that is wrapping up. Bel also talks about effectively trying to speed run several decades worth of advancements in wargaming as he juggles trying to figure out what paint range to invest in. We briefly discuss our non-spoiler thoughts about The Fantastic Four movie, and then a few updates on the books we have been reading.