Hey Folks! I am in the process of trying to reboot one of my favorite side projects, “Bel Folks Stuff”, and get into the swing of recording new episodes. However, it was in this process that I realized that I recorded a whole episode with Tam and never released it. What is wild about this episode is that it is a timecapsule from before the world changed. I think many of us were irreparably damaged by the isolation and changes to our norms that the pandemic and lockdowns brought forward. However, for some… the isolation of the pandemic completely changed their lives. This version of Tam that I interviewed was before he got into a lockdown relationship, which turned into a marriage, which ultimately led to him becoming a father.
The negative of this episode, however, is now that I listen to it… I remember why I never released it. I was trying to figure out how to fix the audio. I was dealing with some really frustrating coil whine happening in my microphone, and it just so happened to plague this episode. I think this might have been the point I realized it was a thing, and it took me months to figure out how to keep it from happening. So this episode was edited and ready to go… but just never got released, and I feel like it is unfair to leave this to the void. Some interesting conversations happen in the middle of this episode, and it is fitting that the broader world finally gets to listen to them.
Good Morning Folks. While I am not the biggest fan of the Gauntlet mechanics mixed in with Phrecia, I am still playing Path of Exile because I don’t have the mental bandwidth to pick up something else at the moment. My Servant of Arakaali Poison SRS build seems to keep trucking along swimmingly, and thus far feels like maybe one of the sturdiest builds I have played for minions save for maybe my Guardian from several leagues ago. That is one of the things that I love the most about Path of Exile is that you are constantly learning new tricks, and each build is better than the previous build because you have learned something in the process. For example I learned some tech that is new to me that I can see using in the future. Essentially one of the common things that you can do with a Rare Wand for minions builds is automate your desecration and offering via the enchant that auto casts whatever is socketed into your wand. However I am using a Unique weapon which takes away that functionality, but apparently you can do the same thing with a four socket arcanists brand setup. So now I have a little bit of tech in my back pocket for whenever I need it the next time to work around a constraint of a build.
Some big changes since the last time I talked about the build is that I managed to pick up a Covenant and then six linked it with a Black Morrigan. I am still using my Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, which I picked up early in the league for a single chaos orb. Yesterday I bought a decent shield base with shaper influence and then threw reforge chaos harvest crafts at it until I lucked into a roll with recover life on block. This is not an amazing roll but was good enough to start using it, and at some point I will probably pick up another shaper influenced base and try and craft one with at least 5% recovery on it. This is one of the tricks that I learned over the last several leagues is taking the “good enough” craft and then replacing it with another craft later. I find that I enjoy my characters far better if there is always some upgrade that I can be working towards.
I had to respec my tree a bit in order to pick up Eldritch Battery so that I could afford the costs that The Covenant adds to all spell casts. I have enough life regeneration though to make it feel pretty comfortable. There are a lot of versions of this build that are going blood magic, and I did not really want to deal with the reservation nightmare or going low life. Low Life is fine and dandy if you are also going petrified blood, but I did not want to have to mess with that. I would far rather have my tasty 4500 life pool with good regeneration, and some defensive reservations. When I switched to Eldritch Battery though I dropped Clarity and replaced it with Tempest Shield for more spell block, and Flesh and Stone for more damage reduction.
I’ve also picked up my fourth labyrinth finally for Silk Dancer which causes webbed mobs to deal 20% less damage and have 20% less to all resistances. Since pretty much everything that my minions touch has webs via Aspect of the Spider, it means this is largely just a flat 20% damage reduction. I do not know for certain if this stacks since I believe you can apply multiple copies of the spider webs debuff to the same mob. Since I am doing nothing to scale duration though I am not sure how much overlap I am actually getting. I know that it is being applied constantly however because it has a very clear visual tell when a mob has webbing on it. I almost went down the path of summoning more minions, but since I am still running zombies, and am in the process of leveling a spectre and animate guardian gem to bring those online at some point soon, I am probably going to have more than enough minions especially when you throw in the four breach spider things that I get from doing offerings.
Defensively I no longer have a negative amount of Chaos Resistance, which already helps considerably. I am sitting at 73% attack block, and 65% spell block… which combined with a recover life on block shield feels pretty comfy. The thing is by not having to take Glancing Blows to get to this level of block, it means I am not giving up the complete negation aspect of that defensive layer. I need to get Aggressive Bastion on my necklace so that I can start picking up additional endurance charges which will go a long way towards feeling more defensively comfortable. Again these are all tricks that I have learned over the years by playing other builds that relied on block as a defensive layer. I am not sure who first made this comment but essentially defenses in Path of Exile are like slices of swiss cheese, and if you stack up enough of them you negative the impact of the holes in any one particular layer. Some people play glass canon builds and rely on six portals to succeed, but I really prefer to play builds that simply don’t ever die.
I have still not really made a ton of progress but have largely completed almost all of the white tier maps, and am about to start into yellow maps. With everything going on in my life I have not been able to give this the devotion that I normally I would during a league start scenario. However I am still having a lot of fun chipping away at progression. While the Gauntlet aspects still annoy me, I feel like I chose the right league start character for this event, because so far at least it is working beautifully. I might run into some roadblocks as I hit Red Maps, but I am hoping that spectres and animate guardian coming online around that time will help immensely. Right now my biggest challenge is that I just don’t have much in the way of currency. That will come over time from running more maps, but I could really use a few lucky divine drops to keep my progression from stalling out.
Yesterday I met with the surgeon who will ultimately remove the cancer from my butt. The office was pretty great because they were really leaning into the fact that they were butt doctors with the decor. Prime example is this delightful lamp with a golden backside. They were running behind and originally I was being “worked in” at 16:30 but did not leave the office until 18:30. My dad was going with me as moral support and he was running early… so we got to the doctors office around 3pm and largely waited around for our turn. I have to admit I was nervous as hell about yesterday, because from the moment I learned about this foreign invader in my rectum… I wanted it out. It turns out things are maybe not that simple, and I am still processing the news that I received.
Ultimately the next step is that today they will be scheduling an MRI which will allow them to stage the cancer. What stage it is in will determine what the path going forward is. When I met with the doctor after my colonoscopy he seemed to indicate that it looked like we caught it early enough and that it would likely be surgery without the need for chemotherapy or radiation. Yesterday I learned that is probably not going to be the case. There is still a golden path however where that might be the case, and that all banks on how the MRI looks. In that golden path it would be straight to surgery and then several weeks of recovery, and a travel restriction of not leaving the state, because I will be under risk of something rupturing for the first few months. That honestly fucking hurt more than anything else because it means that my planned trip down to see “Erasure” is off the table. I was warned by the doctor that this is probably going to be a year long ordeal at a minimum.
If the golden path is off the table, then I will be rushed in to get a port put in my shoulder and will begin chemotherapy and radiation treatment with a new as yet to be named oncologist. The most modern studies apparently show that the best case of complete remission is to hit it with chemotherapy now, rather than later. Then after a course of chemotherapy and radiation, the surgery would take place. The monkey wrench this time however is that instead of a quick in and out surgery, I would be on a temporary bag for two to three months while things heal. Then there would be another surgery to reconnect everything and remove the bag. It was around this point where I started freaking out nice and proper. They would be removing a large chunk of my rectum and colon and then when reconnecting things up, in either scenario there would be some weird circumstances for me long term, but nothing unmanageable. I will just always need access to a friendly bathroom.
If things were not freak out inducing enough… the doctor starts going into all of the possible complications. Since they are working in an area where a lot of other things are. I could wind up incontinent if they nick anything to do with the kidneys, or could end up various flavors of erectile dysfunction depending on what they damaged. There is also the possibility of a rupture which means that we would be on a clock to catch that fast enough before I went septic and potentially died. Then there is the whole doomsday scenario of if they did not catch this in time, and it spreads to the lungs or liver… at which point it is probably game over for me as a human being. I get that the first doctor that did my colonoscopy was probably just trying to keep me calm and from freaking out on him… but I was really not fully prepared for the results of yesterday.
More than that I was not really prepared to have a speculum up my ass. For the ladies out there, they did in fact insert it ice fucking cold… so that is unfortunately not just a gynecology thing. Yesterday was a lot. Today is also going to be a lot because I was already scheduled for a cardiology appointment where they do an ultrasound. It is also at this point that the dark thoughts that I have struggled with my entire life start to creep in. Am I really worth saving? Should I just give up and accept my fate and try and eek out as much joy as I can in the meantime? Really out of everything that has happened the thing that I worry about the most is the damage it will end up doing to the fledgling relationship that I am trying to build with “Erasure”. We were friends before, and we will always be at least that… but I wanted more.
Basically I am very scared and not really sure how to deal with those emotions because I am not always great at that. Everything would be so much easier were I not alone. I have people that I can lean on, but I hate asking them for anything… and I also hate tolerating other human beings in my space. Its a catch 22… I need people but I also have to psyche myself up… to be able to accept them. I am lucky in that I have plenty of folks who are willing to help, I just have to start availing myself of them. For the moment I am focusing entirely on getting through the MRI which will hopefully be either at the tail end of this week or beginning of the next week. Nothing can be known until that is done, and from there I figure out how to cope with whatever path we end up going down.
Good Morning Folks. Last Thursday was the launch of the Phrecia 2.0 event, and last Saturday during the podcast I finished the campaign and got to maps. I had so many issues early not… not the least of which was the fact that I was using a level 1 Summon Raging Spirits until 34. However there are a lot of annoyances with the current state of the game because we are not only playing Phrecia which comes with alternate classes, but also playing under the Gauntlet ruleset which adds increased difficulty to the game in general. I kind of hate it. What I think most people wanted was a vanilla Phrecia league built on top of Keepers of the Flame, and that would have been pretty amazing. Instead we got Gauntlet plus the permanent mod that causes everything unique to enrage and rip your faces off. Grinding Gear Games has this weird kink about difficulty in games, and I really wish they would leave that shit for the hardcore game modes and leave us poor softcore players out of their player death goonfest. I get the point of the Gauntlet ruleset in that it was supposed to test the mettle of players in a hardcore single death ruleset… but on softcore it just feels annoying as you throw your body against the dumb shit until you eventually brute force your way through it.
I might be just salty because I made an attempt at my 4th labyrinth this morning and an enraged Izaro took me from 4400 health to zero in less than a second, so much so that I have no clue what even hit me. Izaro was not even standing anywhere near me. I have a second Goddess token so I will give another attempt at this over lunch probably, but it still annoys the shit out of me. Phrecia should be about the fun of building around new ascendancies, not some uber deathmatch scenario. It just annoys me that GGG constantly keeps adding their kink into places where it is not wanted. This is not the first time that they have snuck the Gauntlet ruleset into an event league, and it will likely not be the last. On some level I curse Zizaran for suggesting that this nonsense be created. Having Hillock witnessed by The Maven is novel exactly one time, but it overstays its welcome and the thought of grinding up another character to try some other build becomes thoroughly unappealing. Sure I can just keep rezzing my way through fights, but it rapidly feels like tedium.
I will be brutally honest, at this point I have a partially functional character. As of this morning I am wearing pretty much a bunch of gear that I got from the tree, including the six link that I am currently using. I have seven empty sockets, have zero spectres, and no animate guardian. I could improve immediately by doing those things, but I have been able to progress well enough through early maps that I have not felt the drive to do so. I did however get a pretty lucky Gruthkul’s Pelt drop so I could probably cobble together an Animate Guardian set reasonably since that tends to be the most expensive part. When I do this thing I think I am probably going to go with Temp Chains on hit gloves, since I do not believe that Despair on hit exists. I figure Temp Chains + Aspect of Spider is going to make things a lot more cozy overall. I suppose it is well past times to actually finish sorting out my build and gear before I make that second attempt at labyrinth four.
Defensively I am doing pretty okay with overcapped elemental resistances across the board, 4400 life, almost 700 regen, and 76% attack block and 41% spell block. I really want to pick up a life gain on block shield at some point and maybe trying to cap my spell block as well. At some point i will have to deal with the process of capping chaos resistance, but at least for early mapping it is generally fine to be in the negatives here. Pretty much all of my gear right now is complete crap and should be replaced. I am trying to decide if I want to stack Armor and Energy shield, or if I want to try Evasion and Energy Shield and then picking up an extra defensive layer in the form of Spell Suppression. In truth Armor + Energy Shield + Block + Regen + Life Gain on Block should be more than enough to feel comfortable, especially once I gain some additional damage reduction from the fourth ascendancy point. I’ve run around with less defensive layers on minion builds before at least.
So this is the point where I tell you about another critical flaw in my run so far. As I got to the end of the campaign on Saturday it seemed really fucking weird that I had not seen a single map drop. I was level 75 as I went into acts 9 and 10, and normally by this point I would have started seeing the occasional T1 map drop so that by the time I hit maps I had a stash of them to run. This was not the case, and even weirder… as I started running maps… I was not seeing any drop. At first I chalked this up to the Gauntlet ruleset, but had not been seeing anyone else complain about this. Then it dawned on me… this is the Keepers League, and during the tail end of Keepers I modified my Neversink filter to up the strictness of my filter and turn off any map drop that was not t16 or t17. Sure enough I had just been hiding every single map that dropped and gleefully running past them. I had been farming Kirac in order to get early unlocks, and lord knows how much progress I sacrificed by this stupid move.
Suffice to say I am not super far into progression at the moment with only 21 of 115 maps finished. I’ve been having to farm other maps that I have already gotten credit for in the hopes of getting maps that I need to unlock progress. White maps have been perfectly fine for progressing so far, and while I do take the random death here or there to enrages… I am able to them down in six portals without much issue. Mostly I am trying to build up enough currency to be able to buy what I need to improve my build. My next big target is a six link Covenant, and the prices on those are coming down steadily. I’ve contemplated trying to mix in some Delve since resonators tend to sell well enough because someone out there is always looking to craft something. I don’t have anything resembling a cohessive strategy on my idols, so I am slowly trying to work on that as well. I would not mind doing Vaal temple generation again, but I need a bunch of incursion idols to really make that work, and some initial capital to buy the required scarabs. Harbingers is apparently printing currency, but I am sure those idols are already priced out of existence for me.
I got my first Divine Orb from the tree but it is unfortunately not the windfall that I would have hoped. Normally at this point in the league I would try and sell a divine orb in order to get some much needed chaos for other things. However right now it is only 114 chaos to the divine orb, so I am probably better off holding onto this for the moment and then trying to get a few more so I can pick up a linked covenant. Ultimately I just need to spend more time playing and more time grinding, but I have been all over the place lately. So much shit has been going on in my life that I have lacked the will to really push forward here. Today is going to be exceptionally stressful, and tonight is probably going to be sibling time in Destiny Rising, so it might be a few days before I actually grind again. Tomorrow I have a very early doctors appointment so it is unlikely that I will blog tomorrow morning to add to the litany of things going on. My life feels like it has been turned upside down, and I am going to need some things to click into place before I can right it again. Too many things out of my control and game progress is just one of the things that has suffered as a result.
Anyways. I hope you are having a wonderful week. We are thawing out finally and the snow is almost entirely gone. I hope the same is true for you. If I don’t see you tomorrow, I will be back on Thursday.
