Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We start off with almost no topics on the docket and then fill up a full show as we are rolling. Bel saw Thunderbolts and shares that it might be the best Marvel movie he has seen since Guardians 3. From there, Tam dives into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an aggressively French take on the JRPG genre that is insanely good. Grace shares their experiences with Conquest Dark, a new Vampire-Survivors-like that they have been playing. Bel gets sucked back into Path of Exile for Pohx League 2.0 where every map has two random additional bosses. Tam shares some early thoughts about South of Midnight, and Ash shares their recent experiences with Samurai Bringer and Metal Bringer. Kodra discusses some of the recent Chess drama, as Dr Lupo very clearly cheated in the recent PogChamps Tournament. Finally, Tam discusses his recent return to Infinity in edition 5.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday the news broke that Polygon, a gaming website that I actually really enjoyed was sold to Valnet. This is a company largely known for being a content mill, with pretty awful working conditions, and also know for being exceptionally litigious. This is not necessarily a new thing and part of the larger general trend of the “enshitification” of games media. Similarly yesterday it was announced that Jeff Grubb left Giant Bomb which comes on the back of multiple rounds of layoffs in 2023 and 2024… and will likely signal the official end of that site. This comes after being acquired by Fandom, aka the folks behind some of the absolute worst gaming wikis you have ever had the displeasure of reading. This is a tale that has been told so many times in the past from the gutting of Vice Media to the explosion of Joystiq and all of its subsequent brands… to the gobbling up of so many sites you cared about by Ziff Davis. Though honestly… those under the thumb of ZD seem to be faring better than others at least thusfar.
Why is this happening? Because someone out there thinks they can turn a buck from “enthusiast industries”, so that they can convert your love of something… into questionable advertising dollars. The thing is… the shedding of writers generally comes first as part of the “restructuring” plans. Generally speaking we flock to specific sites because they develop a voice, a voice that we feel represents our certain perspective on the world. We develop a relationship with these sites, because we begin to feel like we can trust their opinions. The thing is… “voice” is not what a large media conglomerate wants. They want slick advertiser friendly prose devoid of emotion or opinion, that effectively amounts to a regurgitation of whatever was said in the press release. I know this because I am on the same mailing lists as all of these folks and see the press releases a few days ahead of the articles coming out.
I am small and unimportant, and hopefully so much so that no one cares enough to notice me writing about this topic. The thing is… I am also someone who paid attention to those bylines and noticed who’s voice I was caring about. One of the brilliant things that has been happening almost as a counter movement to the corporatization of games media… is that the authors have been spinning off and creating their own things. What I suggest to you as my reader, is to stop going to these sites that have become devoid of spirit… and instead make a conscious effort to go to more independent voices. That is not to say that these sites do not have their own conflicts of interest as they attempt to fund the ventures through a combination of patreon and ad revenue… but they are better than the alternative.
Massively OP
When Joystiq largely blew up in 2015, it caused several of the sites that I cared about the most to effectively die. One of these sites was Massively, because at that point I had transitioned from only caring about World of Warcraft, to caring about MMORPGs in general. Thing is over the years of being on gaming Twitter I had become friends with a good number of the writers there, so when they decided to spin off and make their own thing happen, I was one of the original backers of the kickstarter. Even today I chip in a meager $5 per month and have done so since the patreon went live. I don’t actually READ any of the news through Patreon because quite honestly I cannot be bothered, especially when I have it delivered to my Mastodon feed their their aggregator account there. However I suggest you get in the habit of reading the about page for the sites you are consuming, so you can understand a bit better about how they are organized.
Blizzard Watch
Another Site that spun up as Joystiq was dying, was Blizzard Watch. This site was crafted out of the flames of WoW Insider, which is responsible for my very first viral moment on this blog. This is another site created by a dedicated batch of writers who care deeply about Blizzard games, and kept writing about them. This is another patreon that I backed for quite awhile, and they even have set up residence on our very own Gamepad for their Mastodon account. While my own interest in Blizzard games has waned over the years, the site has continued to be an excellent source of news. Once again check out their About page to understand who is making the site what it is.
Aftermath
Remember the bit where I said follow the writers behind these sites? Well for years I have followed Gita Jackson, first on Twitter and then later on Bluesky. During one of the dust ups at Kotaku, they spun off into Vice Media’s Waypoint. Then with Vice Media blew up and killed Waypoint and a few other sub-brands, I followed them as they branched out to do their own thing with a bunch of other folks from Waypoint, called Aftermath. Like I have said numerous times, you can learn a lot about a site by reading the About link. I follow the site’s BlueSky account and they tend to cover anything major going on in the gaming industry. If you’ve never read the site, I highly suggest you check it out.
404 Media
Similarly when Vice Media exploded, it also took out Motherboard, which was a more generalist technology issues site. I followed the team over to 404 Media when they launched it in in 2023. Lately they have been chasing the Signal messages thread in United States political discourse, but they have also devoted a lot of page time to investigating various purveyors of AI slop. As far as authors go I specifically really enjoy the writing of Jason Koebler. Mostly I am throwing this out there to show that there are independent sites that have spun off for almost every subject you can think of, because the general abuse of writers has been wide spread enough to general an entire industry of folks who have had enough of this bullshit.
Loading Ready Run
I cannot talk about independent games journalism and entertainment however without also mentioning what I consider to be the gold standard. I have loved Loading Ready Run for so many years, and remember back when they were tied to the Escapist. Originally known for skit comedy, the have become this entire cottage empire making content about the things they care about. Qwerpline is one of my favorite things to exist on this planet, or whatever planet Nsberg is located on. Checkpoint embedded above is effectively required viewing every single week, and it is pretty common that we end up talking about some topic first introduced there on our own podcast. Over the years they have segmented their YouTube channel a bit into one devoted to Video Games, Tabletop Games, Magic the Gathering, Comedy, and then one that is mostly their live productions. Better than all of this is the fact that many of the folks are actually active on Mastodon, my social network of choice. At this point I assume you know about LRR but just in case… my god you have been missing a lot.
Independent Bloggers
Whether or not I necessarily intended to… through the poorly thought out creation of Blaugust in 2013… I have become a bit of a nexus at least in the games blogging community. Each year I update my blogroll on the side of this blog with the current list of participants, and among that are a number of really great voices that are out there saying the things they think about games on a regular basis. While some folks view Blaugust as a race to be run, and stop being quite so active after August has passed. There are folks like Wilhelm with The Ancient Gaming Noob that you can almost set your watch by with just how frequently he posts. Similarly Roger is constantly spinning up discussions about how he feels regarding games and media on Contains Moderate Peril. Legitimately just go down the list from Scopique, to Tipa, to Nimgimli, and countless more you have a constant flow of posts coming from independent voices. All of which are more thought provoking than anything you would read on an industrial slop site.
Basically I am just trying to show you that there are options out there rather than supporting these sites that have proven year after year not to support their writers. The answer to “fixing the internet” is to take back some control, and that means adding a bit more intentionality into your media consumption. The content mills need our eyeballs to succeed, and ultimately it is our responsibility to take them away. Do I think this will change anything? Hell no… I am not that deluded. However I did feel like I had to say something.
Good Morning Folks. One of the things that I really miss from Path of Exile is the existence of a Hideout. Even in that game I am constantly annoyed that I have to load into a public area, instead of just spawning in my hideout… but in Last Epoch I miss someplace private to escape to. Ultimately the thing I call the Monolith Ready Room is the closest thing we have, and unfortunately there is no way to directly port into that area without first running an echo. Truth be told if they just gave us that area I would be appeased, because there are times where I just need to empty my inventory of vendor some items… and the end of time always seems to take forever to zone into. I assume is because I am waiting on other player character models to load. The irony of ARPGs is that I always play then in Online mode, so that I can play with friends if I want to… but then spend 99.9% of my time wishing other players didn’t exist.
I spent most of my night running the Nemesis Woven Echo. I had so many items with Zero Legendary Potential that I needed to cook in eggs, and figured this was also a reasonable way to get more Weavers faction. I think I ran 28 of them in total and eventually gave up on creating clusters and just sort of trailed them off into the far distance of the Stolen Lance timeline. Essentially I would run Echoes until I built up enough stability to do the boss fight, and then take it down before returning to Echoes. Later I used this influx of Gaze of Orobyss to push my corruption up to level 400… which is when I realized that you can only consume so many at once. Weirdly running 400 corruption has not felt that different from 300 corruption.
The only problem with running a bunch of Nemesis Echoes, is that you generate a bunch of bad legendaries. This is honestly a massive boon if you plan on doing a bunch of alting… but unfortunately I have not really done that yet other than the reroll over to Judgement. My poor Beastmaster is sitting there languishing right now. I find it extremely hard to bring myself to delete these. There is still something magical feeling about having a Legendary item in this game, even though I can print dozens of them in a single play session. I think what feels so weird about it is that ultimately when you stick a zero LP unique into an egg… getting a legendary now feels like the failed state instead of a win. Ultimately I am holding onto them I think so that I can use them as fodder to “Divine” uniques in the future, since a bad legendary with 4 affixes on it… still counts as an item with 4 Legendary Potential for those purposes.
In other news… my whole grand plan of being able to predicatively unspec my abilities via my relic slot… did not really work out. It seem like when you remove an item that is giving you bonus levels of a skill… it sort of randomly chooses which nodes you lose. It also seems to ignore Keystones and the minimum requirements to get that Keystone. So even though I did some shenanigans to try and make sure I had all of the other points allocated before equipping the relic, and that the Keystone was in fact gained through those points… it didn’t work. So instead I am trying to learn to love not having the Righteous Fire like aura. In truth you end up dealing so much more damage that I am kind of getting used to the flow of it. It makes such a different on bosses/mini-bosses that it almost seems worth it to give up the quality of life to save from having to unspec all the time.
I do sort of feel like I am maybe winding down a bit. I’m focused on the Reign of Dragons timeline in an attempt to get an upgraded version of my Relic. That and trying to farm more memory amber so that I can buy more woven echoes so that maybe someday I can max out that faction. On some level I feel like I have beat the game. While I love everything there is about Circle of Fortune, not having trade does limit my engagement to some extent. What I mean by this is that I reach a point where I am geared enough to do most things, and the instance of me ever finding an upgrade because less and less likely. Essentially you reach a state where the amount of friction required to keep moving forward, is not necessarily worth it. In Path of Exile there is always trade that I can lean on to get the items that I have not seen with my eyes, which makes more things valuable for the sake of picking up to sell. I could probably never play Last Epoch without Circle of Fortune because it amps up the fun aspect too damned much, but it does also mean that much like Diablo games there is a time limit on just how long I am going to stay engaged.
So then becomes the question, that if I am winding down Last Epoch… what do I want to do instead? There is always the sirens song of Path of Exile, and with the new free private leagues is coming another round of PohxLeague. This time it is with the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion mechanics… the later of which makes every map spawn a random boss, some of which can be guardians. I’ve never experienced this and it could either be super freaking rippy, or a heck of a lot of fun. Additionally there was a big loot patch over in Path of Exile II, and at least on some level I want to pop back in and run a few maps to see how much improvement it made. Then of course there is also a Diablo IV season going on, but given that Raxx called it the season of the battlepass… I am hesitant to log in and play. If I do end up dropping in I will probably play a Whirlwind Barbarian because it is supposedly S-Tier at this point.
Basically I have no clue what I am going to be doing. The desire to join another Pohx League is shockingly stronger than I thought it might be.
Good Morning Folks. My new Judgement Paladin has been a bit of a wild ride. Like I said yesterday this was a brand new character on Sunday morning, and as of yesterday I have effectively completed all of the content that is reasonable to complete at this moment. Since factions are shared across your account, I was able to pick up where I left off on my spin to win character at seven of ten harbingers down. I trivially downed the last few harbingers and then was set up for the pinnacle boss fight which is Aberroth. I get that this entirely has been lowered in difficulty with the Tombs of the Erased patch, but it still seems like a significant challenge.
Yesterday over lunch I made an attempt and was shocked to take down the entire encounter in one go. There are some tricky bits that I happened to just luck into doing the right thing. The problem with being able to tank all the damage, is that you don’t really learn the fight until a bit later. At this point I have now done the encounter around ten times and know some of the pitfalls given that not ALL of those were successes. I’ve managed to pick up copies of most of the items that I will at some point want to swap over to… but I either need to cook them in Nemesis Eggs or hope for better drops with more LP in order to really make the transition.
Last night I grouped up with Ace, because the Woven Echo which requires you to kill 10 Harbingers in a row was kicking my ass. Instead of suffering alone… we suffered together because it was STILL kicking our collective asses. Instead we opted to alternate between summoning Aberroth and trying to farm the items we were needing from the encounter. The only annoying thing about doing this is that the only person who gets guaranteed boss table drops is the person who uses the key. There is a chance of getting drops, as we managed to pick up a few items on the table when not being the summoner, but it seemed super rare. That said it is still well worth it to group up for this because you can always gift items that the other person needs, and the encounter goes so much faster with a second person.
The only frustrating bit is that I realized some of the items I was hunting for were unique to the 500 Corruption Uber Aberroth Woven Echo version of the fight. It is highly unlikely that I will get any of those, at least not without them significantly nerfing the encounter which is counter intuitive to the fact that it is the highest difficulty pinnacle fight. I picked up a few items that like i said need to cook in eggs, but I did swap a few pieces of gear out. First up I got a chest piece with good health and t7 Mana Gained on Vengeance which is required to make the Judgement build feel good since that is your way of regenerating your mana quickly. I also farmed up a Twisted Heart of Uhkeiros and slammed T7 Judgement onto it so that I could swap off my weavers will sentinel relic. Lastly I farmed up a Throne of Ambition unique idol which is highly suggested for the build and does seem to significantly increase my damage output, but I did lose a bit of Healing Effectiveness in doing the swap.
More important than all of that however is that I shuffled my gear around and am now 100% Crit Damage Immune. This is pretty massive because during all of my recent boss attempts I was only sitting at around 35% which was VERY noticeable. I’ve also gotten my block chance up to 76% which is pretty solid, though I would love to be able to hit 100% at some point. The shuffling did drop my Increased Healing Effectiveness below 1300, but only barely which still feels pretty solid. My health is also just shy of 2800 and hopefully once I pour on some more levels I will be able to cross that threshold. A lot of my survive comes from stacking ward which I can usually have around 3000ish without much issue during a boss fight.
The four extra points in Judgement has allowed me to pour some additional area of effect and duration making the whole mapping experience feel considerably more comfortable. This actually does now feel like Righteous Fire and chasing down things like Loot Lizards has become trival. For pure boss fights however, I should probably drop the Anointed keystone because which it is great for mapping it is sort of counter intuitive to how bossing works. Since I am not dropping Consecrated Ground on the floor, I can’t stack it up and add multiple layers of damage on the boss and those same multiple layers of healing on myself. It is kind of annoying to have to unspec something and respec it for mapping…. but it might be worth it if I was chain farming Aberroth or something like that. Probably something I am going to play around with a bit. Ultimately I could probably get this effect by just un-equipping and re-equipping my relic… but then I would also have to fiddle with respeccing all of the other points it is giving me.
The only BAD thing about zooming through so many objectives as I have as quickly as I have… is that I am sort of directionless. I just set up a bunch of Nemesis Towers and I will likely be cooking a bunch of items in those eggs tonight, but in the coming days I am probably going to shift my focus to my Beastmaster build that I intend on going Squirrels with. Other than that I will probably offer assistance to anyone that wants help with Harbingers or Aberroth kills. I still need to max out my Weavers Faction, but it seems like chain buying Woven Echoes goes a long way towards that. I spent down all of my Memory Amber so I need to spend the next bit farming it back up.
