Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
The Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for long enough that folks have really gotten some time to play Mario Kart World, and we discuss some of its features. We also talk a bit about the Donkey Kong Direct and the upcoming game releasing in July. It is the second week of Path of Exile 3.26, and Bel talks about his progress so far and some of the finer details of Mercenaries. We talk briefly about the news that Marathon has been delayed to an indefinite date in the future, but that Sony is still talking about it like it is a thing. Ash shares some thoughts about Siralim Ultimate and the upcoming 2.0 patch. We then devolve into some nonsense about Dune Awakening as we discuss recent happenings on our private server.
Good Morning Folks. Friday was the launch of the 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas/Mercenaries of Trarthus League in Path of Exile… and it was a bit rough. There was a pretty critical issue that seemed to plague folks randomly involving logging into any characters in the league. It was roughly an hour and a half before this got fixed, and it bit enough streamers that GGG essentially decided that they would be having a second league start race for anyone bit by the issue. I was impacted and essentially any time I waded through the queue I would bounce back to the login screen with the above “An unexpected disconnection occurred”. There were all manner of superstitions that sprung up about it being specific to individual regional servers, or requiring you to change your video drivers… but ultimately it was just something on the GGG side and they patched it allowing everyone to log in. There were still some pretty persistent issues on the European servers however, and Zizaran for example said that he lost 16 maps from getting disconnected in the middle and coming back in with no portals up.
The thing that likely slowed me down the most however was wanting to play with the league mechanic, and purposefully seeking Mercenaries out in every zone that I entered. I struggled with my very first merc, but once I got my hands on one of the bow mercs… they largely carried me through large chunks of content. The wiki is not terribly updated yet with mercenary types but they have quite a few of the strength based ones up now, so I can only assume they are working through the deluge of new data. I really feel like Mercenaries are a game changer for a bunch of reasons… but mostly because unlike other games with companions there is a heck of a lot of gameplay decisions involved. In Diablo III for example you just throw on specific items and they grant you permanent buffs for having one out. In this game there is an opportunity cost to hiring them, because you can’t then steal gear from them.
Most of the gear that I am wearing currently, I stole from Mercenaries. They seem to be mostly using gear with the well rolled gear tree, similar to how shipments did in Kingsmarch. This means that they are equipped with gear that makes sense for the specific type of Mercenary class that they are. A bow Mercenary for example… will probably have a pretty decent bow equipped or a Wand Mercenary a pair of well rolled wands that make sense for their elemental archetype. This also means though that as the player… we can snag pretty juicy items from the Mercenaries that we encounter in maps. Sure the big win items tend to be uniques and large stacks of currency… but I personally used them as a want to keep finding upgrades, and at this point I have not really needed to buy or craft much of anything. I am sure as I keep improving my build I will want to min-max items but for now… They have provided a really good source of gearing with everything in the above image being pulled from Mercs, including a 5-Link chest.
Right now the most impactful Mercs for me personally, seem to be the bow based ones that help with general clear speed. Right now I am running a Toxicologist which is kitted out to deal chaos damage with toxic rain and chaotic burst/shot and provides me the Malevolence aura which I do not need to run, and can focus on things that make me more tanky instead. As I keep moving up in level I will keep trying to find new copies of this same archetype which should be kitted out with pretty similar items. The Manyshots archetype is also pretty great because it is all centered around Ice damage which chills, slows, and freezes incoming packs of mobs. Thunderquiver is another pretty great Mercenary type because they are essentially the Lighting Arrow Deadeye that was so popular from a few leagues ago. Unfortunately the burning arrow Merc does not really seem to do that much damage, so while the alignment of fire damage would work since I am debuffing targets resistance due to my ascendancy… it never seem to do much and they were not providing any complimentary buffs to me.
At this point I have unlocked my fourth ascendancy because I got a goddess token down in Delve. I am slowly starting to break the mines but it is slow going. I am only about 10 maps into my Atlas because I did not actually make it to maps until yesterday evening. Between the rough start Friday, Father’s Day travel yesterday, and me just generally piddling around with the Mercenary mechanic I have been moving exceptionally slow. My hope is that tonight I will be able to make some real progress, but the changes to how Kirac missions work will probably slow that down a bit. You cannot unlock maps by running Kirac missions at lower tiers than the maps normally appear. This is going to greatly devalue putting points into Kirac on the atlas in order to speed through the 115 map unlocks.
As far as uniques go, I’ve pulled a couple of Immortal Flesh off Mercenaries, including the one that I show above. I have a Cloak of Flame that I am trying to five link, and after wasting so many fusings on it… I have a feeling I am just going to be better off waiting until I have the recipe to do it. I also picked up a Rise of the Phoenix which should be a good item until I make the switch over to a Shaper shield, and drop purity of elements. We are dealing with an inflation league so fair warning, because normally I can pick up all of these items for a few chaos… and I had to give 50c for both the Shield and the Chestpiece. Everything seems to be more expensive, because Mercenaries are a fairly reliably source of Chaos. More than that however I seem to be getting more currency drops than I would normally during a league. This could be just a side effect of the loot bonus of running with a Mercenary, or there could have been some fundamental changes in the way drops occur that were not well documented.
I’ve also unlocked Kingsmarch, but since you have to have 50,000 value to send a shipment… that means I am going to be sending WAY fewer shipments and not needing to micromanage it quite as much. The fully built out town is much nicer, and all of the hired hands seem to cap out at tier 5. So in theory it should be easier to fully kit out your town and get it up and running. I did notice that they seemed to have improved the gold drops down in Delve significantly so I am hoping that I will not be quite as starved for gold in this league. Mostly I am in that awkward phase where I just need a lot more time to progress my way through both Delve and Atlas and keep improving my character. Once I can equip the Cloak of Flames without giving up anything… it should wildly improve my survival. There are a few items that I am looking out for that would benefit equipping on the merc, but I am in no real rush.
How was your league start? Were you bit by the disconnection bug? How are you liking the Mercenaries so far? Drop me a line below and let me know.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have the full crew this week, and Kodra and Thalen have made their way into Dune Awakening, so we talk a bit more about that game. Bel asks what the dumbest thing we have done in a video game to make currency. Ash is back in Guild Wars 2 and attempting to catch up on the story. Kodra and Tam share their thoughts about the Microsoft PuzzleHunt event and contrast it with the MIT Mystery Hunt. Bel shares his early experiences with the Mercenaries of Trarthus as the Secrets of the Atlas expansion kicks off in Path of Exile. Grace talks a bit about Be My Horde as it lets you play a Necromancer, raising an army in a Vampire-Survivors-like game. Finally, we talk a bit about Deltarune actually getting a proper release and Toby Fox accepting money for the game.
Sometimes a blog post happens without me really intending it to. This morning my friend Cliff posted a relatively harmless poll on the Fediverse about whether or not we are a morning person. I have to admit that yes… I am one of the foul accursed beings… but it is not like I ever intended to be. Essentially if there was an “It’s Complicated” choice I would have gone with that. Effectively I am a nightowl that through a series of unfortunate events… has become a daywalker. I was enough of a “not-a-morning-person” growing up, that it was a subject of humor among my parents. I was essentially non-verbal before 9 am… and would stare at whatever morning cartoons happened to be on the television while failing miserably at remembering to eat my breakfast. In High School it got worse, and I suffered some pretty epic bouts of insomnia where I just could not sleep at all. Taking a nap… would effectively reset my biological clock and make it think that it had a full nights sleep causing all sorts of problems that have only just finally as an almost 50 year old adult… resided to the point where I can actually nap again.
This not-a-morning-person nature was pretty freaking fatal when it came to standardized college admission testing. Living in a small town like I grew up in… it meant I had limited options for taking the ACT and SAT and in all cases… it was at eight in the morning. It was specifically my mathematical reasoning that took a hit, and I floundered massively on the first few that I took. It was only through a complicated ruse that I managed to score the 30 that I eventually called “good enough”. Essentially I completely screwed up my sleep schedule and got up super early in the morning so that my brain would think it was closer to noon by the time that 8 am exam happened. It mostly worked, and I did significantly better on the exam than I had up to that point… which was more than enough to basically get admissions to any university at the time.
I was living on a pretty steady dose or IRC and late night gaming for the first bit of college, with most of my coursing being in the evening… or at worst case around One or Two in the afternoon. I kept vampire hours and I like it… up until the point when I moved from my two year college… to a four year university. In my infinite wisdom I decided that I was going to be an art major, and there was one instructor that you could not get out without taking his lab classes. Every single one of them was at 8 am. So I had to not only become functional… but creative… five days a week at eight in the morning. This is truly the beginning of the end for me, and what started the pattern of leaving the comforting darkness behind.
It was not an overnight thing however. I had the misfortune of marrying a teacher… who has a pretty strict timetable that they have to report for work. They were on first shower duty and I was on second shower… and for the most part… it worked. Though my wife reports that she had to jog me from a stupor many times. Apparently I would get up, sit on the side of the bed… and then just sort of stare off into the distance without really knowing what steps came next. Even AFTER taking a shower… I would occasionally just blankly look at my socks, not quite comprehending the step that happened next. All this time I was trying to keep the hours of playing MMORPGs until 1 or 2 in the morning and then getting up at 6 am… and just deciding that it was fine to sacrifice my sleep in order to make this happen.
At the same time however I was noticing the benefits of starting my day early… because it would allow me to leave work early. I was destined for remote work, because the less time I am around other human beings the better… so getting into the office at 7 am let me accomplish a bunch of things before anyone showed up at the door of my office to ask me questions. Additionally tagging out at 4 pm felt great… because it allowed me to avoid that last hour of small talk with the extroverts that always happens in a physical work environment. This of course also got me in the habit of eating lunch at 11 am instead of noon… which has its own benefits of being able to get in and out of restaurants before the massive rush happens. Similarly driving into the office at 7 am and leaving at 4 pm… allowed me to skip the worst of the traffic, so shifting your time frame just outside of the norm had massive benefits.
I am not sure which came first… my poor sleeping habits catching up with me due to age… or the fact that I stopped actively raiding removing the excuse for staying up so late. Whichever the case I eventually got used to keeping more reasonable sleeping hours. Now I tend to go to bed around 9:30-10:30 each night… and am usually soundly asleep by 11. Which then causes me to wake up somewhere between 4 and 5… with me not actually rolling out of bed until 5:30 most days. Long ago I became the “first shower” and on the weekends I can no longer manage to sleep in any later than 6 am… with that last hour generally being me fitfully trying to get back to sleep and failing.
I am still not happy about my lot in life… and I still do not really feel like a morning person. I just feel like a series of coincidences occurred to shift me into the position that I find myself. There are people who welcome in the morning with great joy and gusto… and they make me sick. Some thirty plus years later… I am still not a fan of the Daystar… and I wish it would quit being so damned incandescent. Given my druthers I would still be a Night Owl… but sometimes shit happens and you just have to deal with the consequences of your actions. Maybe someday… when I have left the working world behind… if that ever actually happens… I can be an old grumpy fucker that wakes up at 5pm and curses the sun. We can all dream I guess.
So yeah… I guess I am a morning person. It happens to be the best of us. Getting old and conditioned to doing a thing sucks.
