Sad Bel Days

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Hey Folks. I am sorry that I stopped blogging for awhile. I had been struggling with figuring out what I wanted to talk about for the last few weeks, and then my world effectively ended on July 2nd. Around 8pm my wife passed away suddenly an very unexpectedly, and I lost touch with reality. I am not okay, and quite honestly I am not sure if I will ever be okay again. I am however forcing myself to attempt to keep some semblance of a rhythm and put one foot in front of the other over and over until I get through this. Today is the visitation and tomorrow the funeral, and I have done my best to do her justice. There is honestly nothing that I could ever do to truly do that. She was an amazing woman and I am sorry I never shared her with you other than little snippets here or there.

She dedicated her life to education, and teachers live under a microscope, especially in my state and the current political climate. I was always terrified that something I did or something I said would negatively impact her or her career, so I only really talked about her in generalities. Know that she was my whole world. My mission in life was to do whatever I could do to enable the great things she was doing in the world. Nothing I did was terribly important compared to the impact she had on countless lives. I may have groused from time to time, but I always understood the importance each time I was “voluntold” to do something for her and her classroom. I have a lull this morning so I am sitting down to talk to you all… but quite honestly I have no clue where I am going to go with this. I guess I will start by sharing a snippet of the obituary I wrote for her.

She devoted her life to the power of education, particularly in the field of mathematics. A passionate and lifelong learner, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Education from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah in 1998. Throughout her 26-year teaching career, she inspired thousands of students, primarily at Jenks Public Schools in Jenks, Oklahoma, and more recently at Collinsville High School in Collinsville, Oklahoma.

At the time of her passing, She had just completed the coursework for her Master of Education, majoring in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in Math Education. She was set to graduate with honors from Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

Her love extended far beyond the classroom. She was devoted to her family, her friends, her students, and her church. A woman of deep faith, she lived her beliefs with action, compassion, and integrity. She was an active and beloved member of Dalton Hill Baptist Church in Owasso, serving in numerous roles, including most recently as song leader.

Her dedication to math education led her to travel widely, including presenting at an international conference in Portugal. She was a respected member of countless educational communities, both in-person and online. She also had a deep love for books and knowledge; in another life, she might have been just as at home in a library as she was in the classroom.

Its weird because even now… I feel this visceral instinct to protect her anonymity. While pasting that… I could not stop myself from lightly editing out her name. I think part of this is because she quite possibly is the only person on the planet with her name. She had an unusual spelling and that made me hyper vigilant. I just wanted to protect her… and still do… but was completely useless in the end. She was claimed by biology and there was nothing at the time that I could do other than sit and watch and hope that they could save her. I miss her so much. Everything in the world feels wrong right now. I am not sure if anything will ever feel right again.

I am not sure what the future of this blog is. It all feels so hollow and useless. I am terrified for today, because it will be the first time I see her since the emergency room. I am also terrified at all the social interactions that are going to be needed to get through the day. I’ve been thankful that family on both sides has done a lot of texting, and limited dropping in… because on some level I just need time by myself to process this. Everyone in my larger social network has been great, and I appreciate all of you. I’ve been talking some in semi-public messages over on my Gamepad account, usually content warning them with “Sad Bel Days”. I don’t want to trauma dump, but it also gives folks a way to check in on my mental state without pestering me. I will say I am at the very least still making the bed every morning, which was a little thing that was super important to my wife.

I am terrified for the ordeals to come. 90% of everything in her classroom is something that we had bought, so it will fall upon me at some point in the very near future to go up there and pack everything up. More than that there will be month after month of various legal processes that have to take place as I update everything from medical insurance to car titles. Functionally I know I will be fine, but I am also terrified financially because I don’t know what the future looks like. I knew what reality looked like with two incomes, but I have zero clue what things are going to be like with one. I feel fucking guilty that I am even thinking in those terms. My brain keeps latching onto random threads because the more analysis that I do… the less processing power I am giving to my emotions to completely crush me. I’ve felt the pain of losing someone before, but this is so fundamentally different that it might not even be thought of as the same thing. It legitimately feels like half of my being was ripped away from me… and I have no clue who I am anymore in any capacity.

GenX • Husband • Petfriend • WASD Stan • Daily Blogger • Weekly Podcaster • Eternally Confused

My social tagline was ordered on purpose. Husband comes first in the list of non-age-based descriptors because that is where I placed that role. Whatever she needed of me I was there without question. I took care of things. I dealt with the financials, restocked the house with groceries, did the laundry… etc etc… all so she could focus on the important work of making the world a better place through education. Now that she is gone… I just don’t know who I am anymore. Like there are people in this community that think I have shit figured out, but my entire life revolved around my wife. Anything I did on the side felt thoroughly unimportant and meaningless next to the great things she was doing constantly. Maybe it is because I grew up with a mom who was also an educator, but I treated that role as sacred.

Anyways I am mostly posting because I am not sure what my posting schedule is going to look like. I figure there are people out there who may not follow me on social media and may not know that my world ended. I am still out here. I have so much support. I just don’t know who I am anymore, and it will take me a bit to figure that out again.

Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die

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Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.

We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.

However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.

The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.

Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.

Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.

Golems, Brands, and Divines

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Good Morning Folks. The league challenge set of armor this time around is loosely based on the Shaper, since the Secrets of the Atlas expansion is all about Zana and the Shaper. I figured that I would use it for my second character of the league where I am essentially planning on doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation Elementalist with Heralds and Golems. I have done a version of this build before when it was the new overpowered hotness, and everything that I can tell is that the build colloquially known as “penis brand” is still extremely solid. Mostly I want something that can evaporate bosses but that is also somewhat fun to play. I can clear t17 maps with the greatest of ease on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, but the bosses themselves… are a bit of a pain in the ass. My idea is that I run the map itself on my most comfortable build, and then swap to my boss “deleter” to finish up the map. For the time being I have just been selling t17 maps, and t16.5s are super easy to run because you don’t have to deal with a pinnacle boss at the end of them.

I am not necessarily really following a guide of any sort when it comes to this build. I am largely patterning it off a character named Glacial_Golems in Mercenaries Trade League, however they went deeper into the minions aspect of the build that I am likely going to go. Additionally I want to probably run this with a shield of some sort so I can zoom around the map with shield charge, so that means I will probably go with a Void Battery and Malachai’s Loop instead of two batteries. Though by the time I get to that point I might have changed my mind. The big thing that the build I am loosely following the template of does that I will not be doing… is going into golem clusters. Instead I will likely be going into some sort of damage cluster setup because really… the golems are going to keep resurrecting themselves and I am fine with them being expendable buff bots. Some of the builds are going into a Forbidden Flesh/Flame setup to pick up the Forbidden Power ascendancy so that is also on the table.

For the moment however I am leveling with Storm Brand of Indecision because it is an excellent clearing brand. I think in an ultimate scenario I would be able to swap between Storm Brand and Penance Brand for clear vs bossing, however most of the builds seem to be leaning into physical damage scaling for Penance Brand which is not going to do much of anything for Storm Brand. Right now I am in act six and just a few zones into it. I started this character during the podcast on Saturday and got through Act 1 and 2 while we were recording. I then played it most of Sunday morning and at some point during the day swapped over to playing my RF Chieftain again to farm for awhile. All in all the character is pretty great, and it is pretty silly running around with four different buff golems at the same time. However they do not feel anywhere near as potential as running actual minions would at this point. I am mostly focused on getting fairly tanky Mercenaries so that they can hold aggro for me as I zip around the map, and that is working for now.

As far as RF Chieftain goes, I am still farming Primordial Blocks attempting to get the Hideout and alternating with Shipyard when I have burned through all of my maps. When I fill up on Sulphite, I swap over and farm Delve until I burn down my supply. This means I am not necessarily an efficient mapper or an efficient delver… but I am having fun doing a little of both. I am in the 150-200 range right now and I am honestly seeing raw divine drops reasonably often. Mostly I am chasing Cities, Fossils, and generic loot box nodes while picking up as much azurite as I can find along the way. I’ve unlocked pretty much everything that I intend to unlock and am not going to spend any more azurite on upgrades until I decide to go deeper. However I am probably easily go down to depth 300 with the current state of my upgrades. This allows me to essentially convert every drop of the blue stuff into profits as I buy resonators from Niko.

It seems like there are just not that many people Delving in this league. That combined with the fact that GGG did not introduce some new contorted meta crafting method in the Mercenaries league… has created a scenario where everyone wants resonators and fossils. Right now single slot resonators are going for between 3.5 and 4 chaos each, which is a pretty efficient azurite dump. This morning when I logged in, for whatever reason two slot resonators were going for 24 chaos each which seems wild to me. Three slots around 12 chaos which is also reasonable. I did not price check 4 slots since I did not have any but POE.Ninja says they are going for 70 chaos. This is probably too low because POE.Ninja tends to be extremely low on almost all currencies that are in demand given according to it 2 slots are 3 chaos each. Essentially for the moment this is printing money and I am converting up to Divines every so often to keep from losing the trade value. At this moment POE.Ninja claims that it is 230 chaos to a divine, which seems pretty high but who knows what happened over night.

The thing that I am doing to passively earn some currency is sending 25k Blue Zanthemum to Kalguur whenever I have both the gold and the crops to do so. I need to start disenchanting again so that I can keep my stockpile of dust up there, but essentially I send 25k crops and 25k dust and almost always get at least one Divine Orb in return. The inset above is an example of a shipment that I got back which takes around 3.5 hours to return. Essentially I have my entire farm cranking out this single crop, and have mostly reached the point of completely ignoring ore. I don’t really have any use for gear in return, so I need to sift through my other workers and see if they can be repurposed for either disenchanting or running maps. At some point I am going to burn through a bunch of my bulk maps that I am never going to run and see what thye will return. For now I am holding those in reserve in case Kodra needs them to hit his 115 of 115.

I did craft a new helm for my RF character, and got extremely lucky with a yolo recombine. Essentially I had been trying to throw harvest juice and resonators at elder helms on the Giantslayer base trying to get one with 20 Burning Damage and 20 Concentrated Effect. I know the new hotness is to use Archdemon Crowns, but I don’t have one… nor have I started heisting as of yet. At some point I plan on doing this and hopefully I will pick up a few of these bases to start this process all over again. Essentially it was easy for me to get 20 of one of the gems… but not on the same item so I crafted two bases… one of which also had 20% Life Regeneration Rate and then out of frustration… mashed them together with the unpredictable recombination and lucked out. I would love to have a useful stat on the item in place of Reflect…. but I am happy enough with it for the moment. The next craft I am probably going to work towards is making a better set of gloves with more regeneration on them. I have several tabs where I am set aside good bases for this process, and now that Kodra is playing a Str/Dex character I am setting aside good bases for him in the guild bank.

I am still having a heck of a lot of fun this league, so much so that I am struggling to attach to pretty much any other game. I played some Dune last night, but only really so that I could find enough power packs so that I can pay the upkeep on my base without having to worry about losing all of my stuff. At some point I should really just move all of my materials north to Tam’s central base and move in with him so I did not have to worry about keep my generators active anymore. I need to devote more time to leveling the skill tree… but also… I could just be doing big dumb fun in Path of Exile. For the moment.. mapping and delving are winning out. It is brain dead… but also really fucking relaxing which I seem to be needing at the moment. The problem with all of it however is there isn’t much that is actually exciting to be writing about, so as a result I have been way more radio silent than normal.

AggroChat #529 – Illing with Illagers

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Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week, we start off talking about Four Job Fiesta and how Ash’s playthrough is going as he takes the donation route to fix his class choices.  Bel talks about the Absolum a new demo up on Steam which mashes together Streets of Rage, Hades, and Darkest Dungeon into a really fun Roguelike Beat Em Up. From there, Kodra talks about his recent foray into Minecraft Dungeons and how it is a really good entry point to the ARPG/Diablo-like genre.  Ash has been revisiting Guild Wars 1 and talks about his progress so far.  Thalen shares his early thoughts about Persona 5 The Phantom X and how it seems to be a non-egregious gacha.  Finally, Kodra and Bel go on at length about the current Path of Exile league.

Topics Discussed:

  • Four Job Fiesta Status Report
  • Absolum
  • Minecraft Dungeons
  • Revisiting Guild Wars 1
  • Persona 5 The Phantom X
  • Path of Exile

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