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Ugly Baby Build Phase

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a blend of doing stuff around the house, running errands, and then devoting as much time as I could to playing some Path of Exile. I’m very much in the “ugly baby” phase with the Toxic Rain Self-Cast/Balista combo. Right now I am leaning on my quiver for a good number of resists… and I would like to NOT do that. This means I either need to get a new amulet, ring, or a combination of both… so that I can drop the resists from the quiver and pick up better damage bonuses. I picked up a reasonable Devouring Diadem which allowed me to reclaim a number of points on the tree by removing the branch that was going off to pick up Eldritch Battery. The proc of Feast of Flesh every 5 seconds also provides some additional healing which is nice.

I recorded another one of my dumb videos showing off what doing Red Maps looks like on this build. It is fairly comfortable, to be honest, but nowhere near the mind-blowing damage that I was essentially led to believe. I think the challenge is that I am still playing what would be considered a “budget” build and if I wanted the big numbers… I would have to pour a lot more currency into the build and ultimately swap up my tree considerably to add more socketed and legendary jewels. I feel like I am doing this juggling act of trying to balance survival since I am used to having that with the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and pushing more damage. Since at this point, I can very comfortably do T16 maps, then I am starting to wonder if I have reached as far as I want to take this class.

The defenses on this build are nowhere near where I would like to see them honestly. I want to see way more evasion, but in order to keep that and keep my resists it would involve me completely changing out almost every single piece of gear I am wearing. I am at least spell suppression capped at the moment, which is adding quite a bit of survival against being shotgunned to death by spells. I think basically I am at the point of being able to do maps fast enough, especially if I am doing white and yellows… which in truth was the entire point of having a build like this in order to funnel suphite into Delve. Maybe I have reached the point where I am done futzing with it and should move on to my dumb ideas build of the Explosive Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer that I started working towards last week.

I mean ultimately the fun in running maps once when you see huge loot explosions, and I do from time to time see dumb loot explosions. I’m also able to fill up my sulphite through mapping relatively quickly so I think maybe Toxic Rain Pathfinder is at its logical conclusion. I don’t think ANY class is going to feel as good to me personally as Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Essentially that tanky gameplay is what I have always craved and still to this day my favorite Diablo III build is Invoker Thorns Crusader, which more or less functions just like Righteous Fire. I think Tornado Shot is probably the closest Path of Exile has to something that feels like the Multishot Demon Hunter, but I’ve always heard that build is rather expensive to get rolling.

As far as Delve goes I am slowly working my way lower. Essentially I am hunting cities and I have had a harder time this league finding them. When not actively popping city nodes I am looking for resonators and fossils, but have yet to find any of the fractured fossils that are so in demand with the crucible mechanic. I think I largely get more joy out of playing the RF Jugg, so if I am going to pour more resources into a build it might be that one. Though again I am very much in a place with that build where in order to increase my damage, I need to significantly restructure how the entire build is working currently. I have set aside a few good crafting bases for spell caster shields, so I might try chasing one of those with a good crucible tree. I’m still looking for a great tree for Sceptre but have yet to find anything better than the meager mess that I am currently using.

I am still very much having fun with the moment-to-moment gameplay, but I do think I am going to focus a lot more of my effort in the coming week to finish leveling the Necromancer and try and bring that Explosive Summon Raging Spirits build online. The big concern I have for that build is how expensive Skin of the Lords is this season. Normally that is what I would go for as my six-link chest. I have a +2 minion gems Tabula Rasa, and might just have to limp along with that until I find something better. The builds that are going for explosive SRS seem to be favoring a Cloak of Flames for the chest but a lot of those also seem to be using Formless Inferno and I was planning on doing my pseudo-eight-link with the helmet. Which makes me think I am going out into some undiscovered territory at the moment. It should be interesting to see if I can make this build functional at all. For the moment I am loosely following this POB.

AggroChat #431 – Comfy Bow Time

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

Hey Folks! We start the show with some extemporaneous discussion about Bel and his Three-Legged Backyard Feral Calico Cat…  and how she ran away for a month and is now back.  From there we talk a bit about Last Epoch finally managing to nail down hotbar management for transformation skills.  Bel talks a bit about how free-to-play games have ruined things and that there are folks balking at the $35 price tag of Last Epoch.  Ash and Bel are still playing a lot of Path of Exile and Bel talks about rolling into his second build of the league featuring Toxic Rain Pathfinder.  Tam talks about mods for Half-Life Alyx that allows you to play the game without VR.  From there we talk about Battletech: Mercenaries Kickstarter and how everyone seems to be shocked at how well it has done.  We talk a bit about Gunfire Reborn and how good of a game it is to play with friends.  We also talk a bit about the Stellaris Co-Op Beta and how it functions.  Finally, we wrap up with a bit of discussion about the Dungeons and Dragons Movie.

Topics Discussed:

  • Feral Backyard Calico is Back!
  • Last Epoch Transform Improvements
  • Free to Play Ruined Things
  • Path of Exile
    • Toxic Rain Pathfinder is Comfy
  • Half-Life Alyx Without VR
  • Battletech: Mercenaries Kickstarter
  • Gunfire Reborn is Great
  • Stellaris Co-Op
  • Dungeons and Dragons Movie

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

BelToxica and Red Maps

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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to share some nonsense about my second character for the Crucible league in Path of Exile. In the last league I fiddled around a bit with a few different Toxic Rain builds, but I never fully committed to them. I tried a Trickster variant and a Pathfinder variant, and of the two I definitely preferred Pathfinder if for no reason other than the fact that the Shadow voice lines annoy me. When it came time for me to futz around on a second character I decided to give it a shot. Mostly the pattern that I fell into the last league was to farm Sulphite with my alt and then largely reserve my Righteous Fire main to doing deeper levels of Delve. Mostly I originally did this because I did not want to risk taking a dumb death and setting back my leveling progress. However, over time I found I enjoyed flipping between two characters for its own benefit.

Having played a few variants of Toxic Rain last league combined with the fact that Zizaran declared that this was his league starter for Crucible. I cobbled together my build from bits and pieces of a good number of guides. Now for Righteous Fire which relies on Armor and Regeneration, I felt like I fully understood how to make that class feel good. I have never managed to get very far in any class relying on evasion gear, so I am not even sure what to target for defenses. In theory, my guess is that you want 90% avoidance similar to how you want 90% mitigation from armor… and I am so very far away from that number.

Last night I finished the campaign and spent some time shopping on trade to cobble together a set of mostly rare gear focused on Evasion and Energy Shield since I need the later for Eldritch Battery. I am wearing The Restless Ward in part because I happened to have one laying around and I noticed that Zizaran was also wearing this chest… likely because it provides a good deal of Evasion and Energy Shield. I spent ENTIRELY too much currency on making it a six-link so if I had it all to do over I absolutely would not have gone down that rabbit hole. However, once I was committed to it, frustration and stubbornness kicked in and by god, I was going to be the random number generator no matter how much currency I threw at it. I would have been far better served by just getting a high evasion rare chest from trade for around 10 Chaos.

Last night after painstakingly getting my resists perfect and equipping viable gear for every slot… I opted to run a few maps. In total, I did a Tier 1 white map, a Tier 10 yellow map, and a Tier 14 red map and was able to successfully clear all of them. I did however take way more deaths than I was happy with, which led me to search on my phone last night while laying in bed. Essentially so long as I did not get hit, I could clear entire screens at once but if I got touched… I basically crumpled and died. I mean admittedly… high-level Greater Rifts on the Demon Hunter in Diablo III mostly this way as well. So long as you can duck and dodge out of the way of encounters you can wipe the screen but the moment you get noticed you take a death. This would be an acceptable risk were it not for the annoyingly stiff death penalties in Path of Exile. When you are 95 a single death can set you back a day’s worth of leveling.

Ultimately what I landed on was that I had been playing Pathfinder wrong. Essentially the Pathfinder specialization is all about flask effect and charge recovery so that you effectively have the equivalent of a Mageblood with all of your flasks up extremely often. As a result, the correct way to play this class is to proactively keep your life flask rolling at all times. What this does in practice is make it so that when you do get hit, you zoom right back up to full health quickly without investing in massive amounts of regeneration. I still think it would feel better however with more spell suppression and more evasion so that I am just getting hit less often. Similarly, I need a bit more health so that I am further from “one-shot” territory which will allow the flask to do its work.

I’m only level 78 and I’ve also not run my 4th Labyrinth which I should knock out today. That will give me Nature’s Boon which gives me a 30% increased Flask Effect and the pathing node 10% charge generation. This should increase the uptime of everything making it feel stronger. The biggest thing that I need to do is figure out how to squeeze in a 4th aura and get the rest of my assorted abilities online like Malevolence cast with Divine Blessing. I’m also not actually using Despair right now for cursing purposes, which is additional damage I am leaving on the table. So essentially I have room for improvement but the fact that it can already run Red Maps… seems like a win to me. If nothing else this will allow me to comfortably generate Delve juice to feed those adventures on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut.

Then there is the problem I have with Path of Exile where finding one item… makes me want to build an entirely new character around it. While searching the market for something completely different I stumbled onto this helmet that was dirt cheap for what it offered. This is now making me want to start a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and lean toward fire like I did last league. This helm would in theory allow me to create a pseudo-eight-link for Summon Raging Spirits. I am just not sure if I will go for traditional Fire SRS or Minion Instability Exploding SRS. Whatever the case… I am starting to stockpile decent items that I happen to find along the way that would make that build work. I find that I am coming to love the absolute bullshit levels of minutiae and build crafting of Path of Exile.

Oopsiversary

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Good Morning Friends! This year I have been more than a little bit scatterbrained and unfocused. As a result, many things have slipped… not the least of which is realizing that it is apparently anniversary time. For whatever reason I tend to start a lot of things in April and both the anniversary of Tales of the Aggronaut (April 17th, 2009) and our AggroChat Podcast (April 13th, 2014) landed this month. Then there was April 26th of 2013 when I started what I called the “Grand Experiment” of forcing myself to blog every single day which lasted a little over three years before landing on something more manageable of “every weekday unless I really don’t feel like it”. You could say that this also ultimately led to the creation of Blaugust because I personally found a lot of success in forcing myself to blog damn the torpedos.

In the grand scheme of things the key to longevity for me, was to shift my focus of this blog as a vehicle for some specific planned idea… and instead just make it about whatever I happened to want to be talking about at the time. This is my blog… the Bel does dumb nonsense blog… and if you are along for the ride awesome. If this is not your jam, that is also awesome because I realize I am very much an acquired taste. I don’t have an overwhelming number of readers to be honest, but the ones I do have… end up being exceptionally loyal. Most of them are people that I legitimately consider friends… which is why in part the whole recent verbiage of “Good Morning Friends” is not inherently dishonest. I realize I am mostly talking to a circle of friends that occasionally has some rando stumble into that conversation. The thing is… those randos are also more than welcome to hang out and become friends too.

When I post on social media that I am not making a post for a given day… it isn’t out of some ego trip because I know the world continues to tick along just fine if I have not extruded words. I do it because in the past when I have skipped a day… I had a lot of folks checking in on me to make sure I am okay. I do it out of a sense of not wanting to make this community of friends that read my ramblings worry about me. Honestly, my favorite part about joining the Fediverse and leaving Twitter has been just how many new faces I have seen join the ranks of people who appear to be consuming my nonsense each day. I want you all to feel welcome, but also I am still mostly writing these posts like I am talking to myself so… sorry for not being more interesting.

So if you have been reading my blog for a bit, you will probably be familiar with Tripod… the admittedly horribly named three-legged feral calico cat that lives in our backyard. I’ve not talked about this situation lately because it honestly really depressed me. Roughly a month ago… two dogs got into our yard under the front fence and seemingly chased her off. We’ve been watching anxiously hoping for any signs of her, checking the video camera feeds multiple times per day hoping for a glimpse of her. We were starting to worry that something had happened to her. The next-door neighbor saw the dogs chasing her, but also that she got away from them and they did not follow. However, we’ve learned from experience in the past with other backyard ferals… that when they disappear they are often gone permanently.

However last night while my wife was sitting on the back patio reading, she showed back up. I went out and put some food out but she was too skittish to come over and eat. My hope is that once my wife went inside she fed, though I did not notice her on the camera. That said she is also pretty damned good at avoiding detection algorithms. This morning she was milling around the little house we have in the backyard for her, so my hope is she spent the night there. When I go out to feed in a few minutes I am hoping that she comes out and eats. I mean it isn’t like she is defenseless and I am certain that she is more than capable of catching a meal… but she also looks way thinner than when we last saw her. I cannot explain fully what a gift it is to see her again because we were overwhelmed with concern for the last several weeks. So much so that I just could not bring myself to write about it.

In other nighttime visitor news… we have a few adorable Raccoons and at least one very chubby Possum that come by. I really should start uploading to Catfriend Television again, my dumb YouTube channel that I started during the pandemic where I uploaded clips from our security cameras of cats and other visitors. There is one video clip that I have somewhere that shows two raccoons up on the porch, and another few waiting in the wings on the sidewalk. I feel like some people would have a drastically different reaction than I do… but so long as they are not causing a mess I am more than happy to have them visiting. When I was a Scout camp counselor, I remember some raccoons getting into my igloo cooler and stealing my dry Gatorade powder. Maybe I should put some out for them and see if this group likes that too. I know it was a raccoon because there were sticky red paw prints leading out of my tent.

Lastly, I recorded another one of my dumb videos yesterday. I have been running up an alt in Path of Exile and was amused at just how easily Toxic Rain Ballista/Caustic Arrow deletes mobs. I was talking to my friend Ace about it and decided to record a video showing it off. Granted this is just the campaign and I have no idea if this will continue into mapping… but I am probably going to do a follow-up video once I have verified that it still remains good. Like always I mostly record these for me, or for some other purpose than to ever get YouTube viewers. I enjoy making these short dumb videos, and just like with my blog… am perfectly fine if no one actually consumes them.

Anyways! I am officially in my fifteenth year with this blog and I just want to thank you all for following me on this journey. At this point, daily blogging is so ingrained in my person that I am pretty sure I will be doing this 25 years from now as well. The slow death of social media has only served to drive home just how important it is to me to have a place on the internet that I can call entirely my own.