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Apprentice Labyrinth Runner

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been doing some nonsense this weekend, that I have honestly spent the entirety of my time playing Path of Exile avoiding. The Lord’s Labyrinth and all of the higher-level derivations of it is a piece of game content that unlocks your access to Ascendancy points. On every character you will in theory need to run it 3 times, in order to unlock the 8 points that you can spend on Ascendancy talent points. Then if you need to change your Ascendancy later, you can run it again in order to do that. Essentially these have traditionally been the bane of my existence and similar to set mastery dungeons in Diablo III, they are the thing that I avoid for as long as possible. The problem with the Labyrinth is that there is no forgiveness or wiggle room, and if you die… you have to start over from scratch.

There is a website devoted to telling you the shortest path through the Labyrinth, which is handy while doing your four labs per character… but were that the only benefit the site would likely not exist. The final victory room of the Labyrinth gives you access to a series of glove, boot, and helm enchants. Running the level 75 version called the Eternal Labyrinth costs an Offering to the Goddess, but at the end of it you are presented with a choice of three different helm enchants. There are roughly three enchants available for almost every active skill gem in the game, so that means each time you run the place you are fighting hundreds of possible combinations hoping that you get the one you need for your character. So far I have lucked into the Righeous Fire Area of Effect enchant, but what I really started this process to get was the one increasing Fire Trap Burning Damage.

There are a handful of ways to get your helm enchant. The first way of course is to luck into finding it yourself. The second is to buy a viable base from the market that already has your enchant on it, and then craft the helm into whatever you need it to be. The third… is to hire a hopefully reputable Labyrinth Runner to chain run the zone over and over until they can get the desired enchant on your helm. This weekend I essentialy became a lab runner for myself, and will probably continue doing a few each day in an attempt to get the enchant I really want. It seemed like a waste to not do anything with all of the helm enchants that I could not use, so I have started squirreling away a tab full of reasonable helm bases sorted by armor, armor/evasion, armor/energy shield, energy shield, evasion, energy shield, and pure evasion. I also take the helms off all of my other characters while I am running this process, just in case an enchant they can use comes up.

Since Delve is my primary game mode, it provides for a ton of raw resources. The level at which I am running Delve means that in theory I can farm a near infinite number of item level 84/85 helmets to feed into my Labyrinth running nonsense. For the moment I am pricing these at 1 div, and then will price them down over time as many of them inevitably do not sell. Delve is critical to this strategy because it also produces a truly silly number of Offering to the Goddess, a drop I have long considered to be pure trash for my previous leagues. Because of the sheer number that I have picked up over the course of this league, I ran roughly 30 Labyrinth’s yesterday afternoon and I’ve yet to put a dent in my supplies. Even if I needed to buy them… they tend to go dirt cheap on the market.

The core way that I gain currency will likely always be Delve, but one of the side ventures that I have been playing with this league is resistance gear. Everyone needs it, and everyone needs a unique combination of stat hits. So as I have been running delve I have been chucking rings and amulets with decent resistances on them in my bank under either a 10 Chaos or 20 Chaos tab. It has been shocking the number of items that I would ahve considered trash previously, that I am getting a stack of chaos for now. It isn’t going to make me wealthy by any means, but it is relatively constant trickle of decent currency while I am mapping or delving. The other thing that I have started doing is taking otherwise worthless uniques and throwing a Vaal Orb on them. Often times a 1 Chaos Unique with a really good Corrupted Implicit on it will sell for upwards of a Divine. I’ve sold several of those for in the 80-100 Chaos range.

Nothing will match the stability of Delve though. I know without a doubt that when I am ready to focus on selling this tab I am looking at around 2000 Chaos or 8 and a half Divine Orbs. I don’t tend to price out my delve tab until I am ready to sell it, because otherwise it will annoy the shit out of me with pings. Delve has not been terribly popular this league, and as a result the prices for resonators keep trickling up along with the more hard to get fossils. The later in the league we get, the more big crafting projects tend to happen and for those they need a ready supply of resonators. Folks ramping up for a big project, like to buy in bulk so generaly speaking I can charge a bit of a premium and still liquidate the entire tab in about ten minutes.

The one thing that I wish I could do… is let my guildmates peruse my vendor tabs. I chuck anything that looks halfway decent in the tabs to see if it will sell. That is not to say that I don’t specifically keep my eyes open for anything that I think another guild member might use. I’ve put all of my six links of any use in the guild gear tab, but I know I likely have a bunch of niche items that someone might be interested in. Specifically when it comes to fixing resistances, it would be handy to let folks browse my inventory of wares. I would happily chuck stuff their way because it is mostly just going to sit there and rot otherwise. While I continue to have a fairly constant trickle of trades, I am acquiring stuff way faster than I could ever liquidate it.

I get this weird sense of joy from being a vendor, and this is something that I have not really experienced in other games. I’ve mostly avoided using the Auction House in games with them, and while my retainers are full with random items in Final Fantasy XIV, it was never something I focused on. I think the one time that I really used them was the Broker boards in EQ2, and in truth FFXIV and POE both have a similar system. I can price an item, throw it in a tab, and then mostly forget that I have it. If it sells awesome… if it doesnt… also no big deal because I am not having to constantly retrieve closed auctions from my mailbox and repost them. Path of Exile feels like I have rented out a booth in one of those big flea markets, and I just keep adding more merchandise until everything is crammed in there really tightly. Folks end up needing such weird stats to finish out a character, that there is always someone out there needing at least one thing I have for sale.

I enjoy this aspect of the game, which is ironically the aspect that turns my friend Ace off the most about Path of Exile. I was afraid of trade for the first few leagues. Then it was something I accessed because I felt like I needed to… but ultimately held my nose while I did it. It wasn’t really until I was by myself grinding delve that I finally reached a point of acceptance with trade and eventual legitimate enjoyment. Now trade is a major component of this game for me, and it feels like anything I could be doing in the game… is ultimately getting me towards whatever goals I have. Every map I run, every delve path, every blight, every legion, and god forbid even every labyrinth is collecting dross for me to sell and turn into the item that I need to upgrade my builds just a little bit further. After decades of feeling like I had no viable way of making currency in MMORPGs, it feels like I have so many possible ways to fund my nonsense in Path of Exile.

Anyways. I hope you all had a great weekend, and that the new week is smooth and chill.

AggroChat #449 – The Magic Analogy

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

Hey Folks! Sorry we missed last week but we were down over half of our show members.  This week Bel faceplants the intro and is urged by the entire crew to keep going. We start off with some discussion about the Honkai Star Rail Swarm Disaster event and a bit of idle gameplay with Chillquarium.  From there we dive into some Path of Exile talk as Kodra is now beginning to become infected with our madness.  He presents the Magic the Gathering draft analogy and we discuss using that as a way of learning Path of Exile as a whole.  We talk a bit about Unity’s corporate failure speedrun by burning off absolutely every bit of their goodwill with some dumb service changes. From there we talk about a game with a very long and contorted name that promises to give you access to all those weird mobile game ads that don’t actually exist.  Lastly, we talk a little bit about the return of Wizardry and how it is the birthplace of the modern JRPG.

Topics Discussed

  • Honkai Star Rail
    • Swarm Disaster
  • Chillquarium
  • Path of Exile
    • The Magic the Gathering Analogy
    • Guardian SRS is Amazing
  • Unity Speedrunning Corporate Failure
  • YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!
  • Does Twitch Viewership Matter to Game Success?
  • Wizardry Returns

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Storm Brand Feels Mid

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Good Morning Folks! Given that I have mostly polished the rough edges off my Minion Guardian, this means I have once again turned my attention to Storm Brand Inquisitor. The why of this build is I wanted to give Storm Brand Inquisitor a bit of a redemption arc, or at least a chance at one. I had played this build in Kalandra League and struggled with it quite a bit. In the last league, I spent some time sifting through my old characters and re-evaluating them with my current level of knowledge and that poor Storm Brand Character was a mess. Essentially I had nothing vaguely resembling proper defensive layers and had nowhere close to capped resistances. At a minimum, I could at least solve that last problem with the build. As a result, I have had this build in the back of my head as something I wanted to revisit, and almost did last league but instead decided to make my “brand build” of the league Wintertide.

Once again I started with Velyna’s guide as a template and then tweaked that a bit to suit my tastes. Namely, I dropped the dual wield nodes and pathed down to pick up shield nodes. I question if this was a good decision because honestly… so far I have not really been able to get enough block chance to make that a viable defensive layer. More than anything I wanted to be able to use shield charge, which requires a shield. So far… the build feels sorta mid. That isn’t necessarily bad, but compared to my other options it doesn’t feel amazing. It also feels far worse than Wintertide Brand did last league. That said… I am very very low level and want to give this build until maybe level 90 before I pass proper judgment. For now, it is perfectly fine and I am able to clear yellow-tier maps with ease… which isn’t amazing considering how much currency I have spent on this stupid build.

One of the challenges with the build is that realistically it wants to use a bunch of uniques. The hardest part about that is the fact that I am using two Call of the Brotherhood rings which gives me 96% cold conversion. Rings are a really hard slot to give up when it comes to making your resistances work, given that there are a number of ring-exclusive implicits that add a bunch of value resistance-wise. The single most expensive item was a six-link Inpulsa’s Broken Heart and since I knew I was going to be running this build I shopped around for this for awhile and managed to snag a “cheap” one for 3 divine orbs. The Crown of the Inward Eye is just a universally good helm, and I managed to pick up one with a Determination Reservation Efficiency enchant for if I remember correctly only 40 Chaos. The Brotherhood Rings were 20 Chaos Each from the same vendor, which shocked me given that they had already spent catalysts on them to get the quality up to 20%.

I’ve also been spending some time playing around with using Heatshiver instead of Crown of the Inward Eye, and I think that might be the correct play. The negative is that I lose my Determination Enchant, and I dislike running Labyrinth enough to farm another one. What this has forced me to do is drop Zealotry and swap it for Discipline to make up for the loss in Energy Shield. Zealotry was mostly being used for the Crit aura as I am already generating nearly 100% uptime on Consecrated Ground. I think I can give up some crit chance for effectively doubling my damage output in some cases. The Heatshiver also has the side benefit of giving me some resistances which are nice, and could allow me to rework my resist gear a bit.

As it stands… I have to heavily utilize my shield, belt, necklace, boots, and gloves to be able to reach resistance caps. I think a lot of the challenge of this build is that I am gaining next to nothing from the tree itself and rings are worth so much freaking resistance. I could of course start slotting more gems into my tree as I pour on levels but I am already using up 3 possible sockets to solve another problem that I will talk about next. The biggest problem with this guild is that for whatever reason… it was ungodly expensive. I think I paid 120 Chaos for the boots, and 150 Chaos for the gloves. The Stygian Vise was 90 Chaos, and the shield I think was around 80 Chaos. We are dealing with some massive price inflation this league caused by just how much currency is being generated by the re-introduction of Sanctum.

Since I did not have a great way of dealing with elemental ailments, I had to eat up the abyssal socket in my belt and two jewel sockets on my tree in order to roll out the “Chance to Avoid Being Shocked” and Stormshroud combo. Essentially if you can get a “chance to avoid being shocked” to at least 100%, the Stormshroud Unique jewel will apply that avoidance to all elemental ailments. At a minimum, this requires either support on your tree or two abyssal jewels with a maximum of 50% on each. This was also not a cheap prospect as I gave around 100 Chaos for each of the Abyssal Jewels and 1.5 Divines for the Stormshroud. I’ve known about this combo for ages, but never actually had to buy my way into it. In theory, this is the way that I am supposed to be fixing Righteous Fire so that I can drop “Purity of Elements”. I’ve just never gone through the motions to make that happen.

So in the end… I have spent 8-10 Divines on a build that I am not really in love with. I have shit armor, shit evasion, bad block, and the only thing really going for me is consecrated ground which applies to both life and energy shield which when combined with petrified blood does a decent enough job at keeping me alive. I am having to change my instincts of trying to move when I am taking damage, to instead standing still and hoping that the consecrated ground will be able to keep up with the damage intake. I am deeply susceptible to being one-shot by certain mechanics because I just don’t have that much effective health. This is most obviously an issue with Physical Hits, because if POB is to be believed I can only soak a maximum hit of just under 7000.

Then again I am only 74… so I am giving this build time to come into its own. I am going to try and give it until level 90 before I pass judgment. I definitely think the state of the build is better than it was in Kalandra league but given my druthers, I would probably rather play Wintertide Brand Occultist. Switching to Heatshiver has definitely helped though, so I am going to run a bunch more maps to start to get the swing of how the build feels. As always my goal here is to give you all the honest assessment of how a build feels. If you are curious you can check out the POB that I dumped this morning of the state of where I am with my character.

Stop Personifying Game Studios

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This morning’s blog post is admittedly going to be a bit of a wild ride. It is a topic that I have been kicking around in my skull for a few weeks now. I hope to do it even half the justice it deserves. Lately, I have been on this binge of consuming the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I’ve been listening to these in Audiobook form while playing Path of Exile, and I love this so much. While I still read books, there is something about listening to the narration while my nervous energies are channeled into a video game that has largely been committed to muscle memory at this point. I feel fully engaged, and it has rapidly become my “happy place”. It also helps that so far this series has been amazing.

I was looking forward to this series because John Scalzi at this point was a known property. I backed into his works differently than most, and the very first novel that I read was Kaiju Preservation Society. I consumed this over the course of a few evenings of staying up well past midnight reading from bed. A few months later I did the same with Redshirts, and after having consumed both… I knew that at some point I would have to read the series he is most known for “Old Man’s War”. This made logical sense because at this point I had consumed two different books from the same author, so it was highly likely that I enjoyed their particular writing style. It was a safe bet because well-established authors tend to bring with them a similar vision to the material that they write.

This does not work for video games. Video Games are a combination of lots of different creatives pouring their energies into a single project. While we love to elevate a single figurehead at a given studio… each game is a snapshot of the state of that company at that very moment. While there are certain tropes that a given studio might have… I can say that Starfield feels like a very “Bethesda” game. I can say this because it is approaching problem-solving in the same way I have experienced in other Bethesda titles. I cannot however state that Starfield is a great experience, because Bethesda created it. It was created by a wide number of individuals who took inspiration from previous titles, but the game being fun and engaging was not a certain thing. I would be surprised if anyone that worked on Fallout New Vegas for example, worked on Starfield. The games were created by wildly different casts of individuals, but we as gamers… have this bad habit of trying to compare them as equivalent products.

So when I approached Diablo IV, I brought with me all of the emotional baggage of having played thousands of hours of games in the Diablo franchise. I also brought with me the emotional baggage of having grown up idolizing Blizzard as a studio. So when I played the game, and it felt bad… it was very hard for me to reign in my disappointment and keep myself from turning into a rabid poo-flinging monkey. I still think that Diablo IV is a bad game, and I think that because I am a core ARPG gamer… and quite frankly the game was never targeting me in the first place. I also think of Blizzard as this storied monolith of a company that encompasses so many fond memories… when in reality they have not produced a new game that I enjoyed since 2013. Sure I enjoyed the heck out of Legion, but that was an expansion to a game that came out in 2004.

Similarly when I approached Mass Effect Andromeda or even Anthem… I brought with me the memories of hundreds of hours spent with each and every Bioware game to that point (save for Jade Empire, I never got into that). I enjoyed Andromeda quite a bit, but it was a pale comparison to the greatness that was achieved over the course of the three games in the Mass Effect trilogy… and even then… they didn’t really stick the landing in that third game. With Anthem I brought my expectations of what a Bioware MMORPG looks like… because Star Wars The Old Republic was a phenomenal experience… and once again I was sadly disappointed. While there was some cross-over between these teams… each game represented a brand new version of what the studio was trying to produce, and as a result, was a completely different product offering.

As gamers, we have this bad habit of personifying Game Studios. We treat them as though the organizational structure itself is capable of pooping out phenomenal game experiences that are similar to those we have had in the past. Sometimes even studios believe this themselves… see the information that came out about the launch of Andromeda and how it was expected that the “Bioware Magic” would somehow pull together a brilliant product in the end. The games that we have loved were snapshots of a moment in time… that may or may not ever happen again. Personifying the Studio as having these indelible properties that can recreate that experience… is only setting us up for heartbreak, disappointment, and eventually failure.

Truth be told… we as gamers with our unrealistic expectations are not entirely to blame for this problem. Game Studios themselves and games media in general are also stoking this fire. How many times have you seen a project being marketed based on where the devs working on it came from before? Hell, the entirety of studios like Dreamhaven seems to be a large dish full of member berries trying to stoke nostalgia about the imagined “good ole days” of a specific studio. The thing is… You would be hard-pressed to find a single game studio out there that does not at least have one person who used to work for Blizzard or Bethesda or Bioware, etc. The game development community is extremely fluid and because of the lack of stability and the tendency to burn a team down after release… means that folks have to go whenever they can to keep a paycheck coming in. Since around 2005, there has never been a time where I have not had at least one close friend working for Blizzard… but the thing is… none of them have really stuck around for more than a few years at a time.

We would be so much better off if we could approach each game that gets released with a fresh set of eyes, and ignore the many-tentacled hype machine. This is part of the reason why folks seem to respond so glowingly to anything that is truly new to them. For example, we are seeing this sort of glow-up happening right now with Baldur’s Gate III, because for so many people Larian Studios was an unknown property. However, for me, I have been playing their games since at least Divinity II, and was definitely there for the fledgling roots of what we are seeing in BG3 with Divinity Original Sin. All of that said though, it is so pure to watch players embrace a game on its own terms… and for its own merit. It is equally heartbreaking when a game that is genuinely good but still a little rough around the edges due to launch constraints, gets memed into oblivion by Streamers and YouTubers.

The hype cycle sometimes inflates a game to proportions that it never could have lived up to. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of these situations, but quite frankly… so was Mass Effect Andromeda. Both were games that given time and attention could be turned into something beautiful. We are seeing this redemption arc with Cyberpunk, but given the financial backlash instead saw with Andromeda the entire Mass Effect series killed off for the better part of a decade. So while I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the gamers for trying to treat the game studios in the same way that I am treating books by a single author… aka John Scalzi. I also blame the studios themselves, the marketing departments, and the 24-hour gaming news cycle desperately seeking anything that even smells a little bit like news in order to fill content deadlines. I fail miserably myself at this all the time, but I also know I would be far happier, or at least less grumpy if I allowed myself to approach everything without expectations.

That is it… that is my soapbox and now I will stand down from it. Expect more blog posts about me talking about some nonsense that I am up to in Path of Exile tomorrow. I can only handle so much seriousness at once, and even with Path of Exile, I have had to deliver myself a dose of realism. I had a lot of hype built up going into the Path of Exile II announcement, only to walk away disappointed and afraid that this game I was pinning my hopes on… was not really going to be what I wanted to play. Instead, now I am trying to stop thinking about it and just enjoy what I enjoy. It feels deeply weird that I am not engaged in the Zeitgeist right now, and not feverishly playing either Baldur’s Gate III or Starfield… while having at the same time enjoyed both. I’m trying to plot my own course independent of FOMO, and right now… my brain craves the familiar rhythms of Path of Exile.

I have no clue what point I was really trying to make this morning, and I definitely doubt that it will make any difference. I hope you have a most excellent day… but now my cats want me to feed them.