arpg

Fun is Ephemeral

by

Hey Folks. I did not end up blogging yesterday because the morning just sort of got away from me. On Monday I talked about my adventures in Pohx League 2.0 with the Atlas Invasion ruleset. Immediately following that post… I rolled a character in Sir Gog’s league which is using a Softcore Ruleset based on the Gauntlet event. Initially my goal was to run up a Commander and do another attempt at Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. I didn’t get that far and am instead some sort of one handed mace sunder build… leaning into fire damage with the goal of at some point farming up the right main attack gem. One of the fellow league participants dumped a bunch of random uniques on me in early act 1… one of which was a Lead Sprinkler which essentially caused me to shift focus to building around that. Truth be told I have something akin to a functional build going, and after a bit of respeccing away from the early bleed iteration it is getting more functional. I do know that I will pretty much NEVER again level using Rolling Magma when I could be using Ground Slam and Crushing Fist any time I block something. The optimal slam tree is close enough to the Righteous Fire tree that I am just going to stop muling an Templar and roll with it going forward, because I really hate Rolling Magma.

I get why someone might like the Gauntlet ruleset, because there are a bunch of shocking changes to the flow of the game. For example it took me three deaths to get off the beach because Hillock was supported by The Maven, had a new leapslam attack, and summoned zombies. I decided to side with “Definitely Oak” here for the extra life, but I am sure that fight is pretty different considering that the other two most certainly were. On some level it is a bit fun to see how ridiculous this event was, but also… it feels like I am just grinding my way through the rough spots by throwing my body at it over and over until the monster falls down. A lot of the Act bosses specifically feel more cheap than they are interesting… I have no clue how in the hell a melee players on hardcore did the Vaal Oversoul for example. Looking back at actual gauntlet footage, a lot of players seemed to be playing cheap builds designed to oneshot encounters from a safe distance. Basically yesterday I decided that as I entered Act 5… that I wasn’t really having any fun. The novelty had warn off and all I was left with was friction… and I’ve never been a “frustration for frustrations” sake type gamer.

I could always roll back to Pohx’s Atlas Invasion league where I am progressed to the point of maps… but honestly… for a limited event with only three weeks left I am just not sure how much effort I am willing to put out there. Settlers of Kalguur specifically is starting to wear very thin. I’ve played the original league, Necro Settlers league, Pohx League 1.0, the Legacy of Phrecia Event, Pohx League 2.0, and Sir Gog’s Gauntlet league. During Phrecia I even pushed all the way to level 100 with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. I just feel like I have done this song and dance too many times to really find much joy in it. Sure it was exciting and refreshing to return to Path of Exile over the weekend… but once I cleared the campaign and got used to the new reality of map bosses in every map… the fun sort of drained away. I feel like I am going through a weird funk right now where I am struggling to find a permanent source of enjoyment. This could be because I have a bunch of real world things going on that are beating me down… but that is all the more reason why I need my diversionary tactics to keep me sane.

I had an absolute blast in Last Epoch, but similarly arrived at a point where I felt like I “beat” the game. There are a whole slew of alternate characters that I could run up and gear… but I am not exactly drawn to doing that right now. I made it further this league than I ever have before… and in large part that is due to the fact that the Judgement build is so freaking broken. I’ve cleared the Harbingers, gotten to 400ish corruption comfortably, and taken down normal Aberroth. I have no real drive to keep grinding away to the point where I could start farming Uber Aberroth. Basically I know what I would need and it either comes from being exceptionally lucky… or diligently trying the same content over and over. I spent a bit of time early in the evening yesterday running Monolith Echoes and they are still a lot of fun in the moment to moment game play, but I am struggling to find anything that really scratches that meaningful progression itch in the game right now.

Last week Path of Exile II released a pretty significant patch that in large part solved some of the loot problems that were happening with the game. I’ve been back and played a few maps and there does in fact appear to be way more loot dropping than had previously been. The challenge there is that adding more loot does not really fix the problems with that game. The moment to moment game play still feels pretty awful, and like I am wading into a pool filled with oatmeal. Yes I can clear entire screens by leaping into a pack of mobs and then hitting Boneshatter which gets amplified by Herald of Ash. Sure that works… but the whole delay and sluggishness of movement makes it feel sort of awful. That same type of build in Path of Exile 1 would feel phenomenal. Everything feels like it is locked behind animation cycles that feel awful to wait on. All of the most popular builds right now are largely focused around exploiting some bug that is currently in the game to cause a single attack to either wipe the entire screen or delete a boss in second. I just do not care enough about the game to shift to building one of those builds right now. So essentially… there is no fun left there either.

There is also a new Diablo IV season going on right now, so in my search for joy… I rolled a character with the idea of playing the whirlwind build that I never quite created during any of the other leagues. I recently resolved my performance issues that I had with the game and others… because at some point windows had decided to set my virtual memory to my slowest drive. Even though the game feels fresh and snappy compared to previous leagues… I am just not feeling it. Diablo IV gameplay is so samey, and it feels like the ideal method for leveling is to run from zone to zone chasing these new invasion events… where players will straight up oneshot everything before you can touch them. Playing a Barbarian was probably the wrong call because I am constantly starved for rage right now, since I am not getting the initial hit on things that are being nuked from orbit by random ranged players. This game would be infinitely more enjoyable if there were no other players in the world. Had they not tried to retrofit Diablo into the MMORPG model… there might have been a really enjoyable game there. I want the ability to play with my friends when I am in the mood to do so… but every other instance of other players in my games is a net loss. Which is ironic… because in games like Guild Wars 2… I love the existence of random players.

So ultimately last night I went in a totally different direction and left behind the ARPG games that have fueled me for the last five or six years. I’ve heard amazing things about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and fired it up yesterday. This game is phenomenal and I have only really just played through the prologue. I am not the biggest fan of quick time events in my combat… but am playing on the lowest difficulty setting as to avoid as much of the annoyance as I can. I would be far happier if this were truly just turn based combat instead of playing “press your luck” to avoid damage. However all of that said… the game world, the characters, the set design… all make up for those frustrations. I already want to know what the heck is going on in this world. It is also shocking how damned good this game looks for coming from what seems to be a really small studio with many of the folks having this as their first game release. I’m already hooked and really like the characters so far.

So I guess this is what I am going to be playing… at least until it too stops bringing me joy. Fun is a deeply ephemeral thing, because all of the above should in theory be fun for me. However for some reason my brain is wired in a specific manner so that very little is really hitting in the right ways.

Atlas Invasion is Wild

by

Hey Folks! I am back on my Path of Exile bullshit. It always feels good to go home, and there will always be something about Path of Exile that feels special to me. How I got here however is its own story. Since it has been 10 going on 11 months since the last Path of Exile league… Grinding Gear Games keeps running events in order to briefly placate the very angry and dejected player base. The Phrecia league event was extremely fun, and one of the best times I have had playing Path of Exile in recent memory. Currently we are going through a phase where they have unlocked and made private leagues free for all players to create… something that normally has a relatively hefty cost to it. I think we paid around $60 for the league that we ran, because we extended the time a bit and it would have been more had we needed to scale up the number of participants in any meaningful way.

Currently anyone can create a private league for free during this event, and there are a number of different templates. SirGog for example is running a league with the Phrecia alternate classes but with the extremely difficult Gauntlet rule set created specifically for Zizaran’s reoccurring Gauntlet event. Pohx on the other hand is running a more casual friendly outing with the inclusion of the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion rulesets. Essentially Shifting Stones makes it so every map has either Tower Damage Blight, Endless Delirium, Endless Legion, or Player Haunting Tormented Spirits mapped to the specific Atlas Keystones that grant those things, and what a zone has changes every 15 minutes. Atlas Invasion on the other hand makes it so that once you leave the beach, every single map has two bosses that have “invaded” the map and the pool of what it can draw from is wild.

Most of the time you are going to get one of the generic rebrands of campaign bosses, but every so often you get a pinnacle boss spawning in your map. These are scaled down in difficulty for the area of the map, but still do all of the same attacks. For example while I was fighting the Dweller in Act 1… I heard the “DIE!!!!” voice line and then frantically tried to dodge a giant shaper beam that came through the wall. Before finishing Act 1 I had fought Shaper, Elder, a few Guardian encounters, and Ulhtred the pinnacle boss attacked to Expedition. The ones that I found roughest weirdly enough were the ones associated with Breach… because Tul for whatever reason will oneshot me every time I see him when I may not be prepared to dodge his frontal cone attack.

You may be thinking to yourself… This sounds awful! You would be wrong. As penance for making you fight a bunch of Atlas bosses they each drop somewhere between one to four unique items. Before I exited Act 2 I had already seen a Cloak of Flames, pretty much setting me up for success the entire run as Righteous Fire Chieftain. Most of the uniques are the low tier ones that you will leave rotting on the ground, but every so often something really special drops. Essentially it feels like mapping with a juice Rogue Exiles atlas strategy… but begins the moment you exit LionEye’s Watch. What is really cool is how you realize that there are a lot of uniques that are exceptionally powerful at low levels. I’ve picked up a couple of Cloak of Flames, Immortal Flesh, Berek’s Respite, and once I get a second Rise of the Phoenix I will probably start corrupting them trying for some interesting results.

One of the interesting things about a limited trade environment, is that because I know I will never find a perfect item… I tend to be willing to craft more gear for myself. Granted the boots in the above screenshot dropped almost perfect already from Betrayal, and all I had to do was slap fire resistance on them. Coming back to Path of Exile, it really feels like they could do with bumping down Exalted Orbs in loot tier so that they drop more often. I’ve yet to see one and had to buy one from the currency exchange to do a craft that required one. I’ve been focused on mostly running Betrayal to get my enchants and Harvest because it is by far the most accessible crafting method for getting decent gear, specifically resist rings, amulets, and cluster jewels.

However I am having to re-learn a lesson that I have learned many times in the past… by not going into Delve early I have missed out on a bunch of currency and maps. Delve is so damned good at producing large amounts of basic crafting currency. I have been strapped for pretty much everything from alts to alchs and it sucks. More than that Delve Cities seem to produce a bunch of random maps independent of what tier your current progression is at. So instead I am relying entirely on the few horizon orbs I get, vendor recipe, and map drop luck to make my way through the atlas progression. I did not really start making progress until yesterday because I did not hit maps until Saturday night. The juicy nature of the Atlas bosses has meant that during the campaign I was seeking out every optional boss… and doing every Vaal side area because they would guarantee two extra bosses as well.

The only negative of the event is that something appears to be jacked up with Kingsmarch. Essentially more than half of the times I tried to travel there I would get “Failed to join any instances”. There are threads about this error where folks have claimed that logging out and back in fixed it for them. This has not been the case for me. I can bounce in and out of the game effectively forever and it does not fix it when it is occurring. Then randomly other times it will just work fine and allow me to pop into the zone and do my business. This has sucked quite a bit because shipments are a pretty good source of early gear and currency, and I have effectively been locked out of them. This also means that my progression in Kingsmarch is a bit behind where it should be. Hopefully now that we are past the weekend someone at GGG will sort this out.

All in all though this has been a really fun event. Really if you are trying to do a group found/semi-SSF event this is the perfect ruleset. You end up generating a ton of uniques and for example I noticed every time a Dreadarc dropped which is something Kodra would have needed for Hexblast. Before I left act one I probably saw a dozen of them, which was wild. So essentially if we were ever going to do another AggroChat league I would want to run this ruleset and then have folks basically post a shopping list of what uniques are useful to them, so we could fill up the guild bank. Another thing that I found great while leveling was the Araku Tiki amulet which provides up to 50 life and 50 Fire Resistance… perfect for a budding Righteous Fire character. I ended up wearing one of these until maps because I just could not find a good enough neck to give up that much life and resistance on a single item.

I’ve had a lot of fun so far, but not sure how much I am really going to push it. Some leagues ago I joined SirGog’s chat channel during the scour league which made it so everything dropped as bases and you had to craft your own gear. After that… I just never reset my global back to another channel. I’ve come to really like the chill but focused vibe that the channel tends to attract, and did not know that chat channels apparently spanned across multiple leagues. As a result I have been listening to folks who are participating in his “Softcore Gauntlet” ruleset event and while I normally do not go for “challenge for challenge’s sake” type events, it sounds equally hilarious. So at some point I am going to roll a character in that event when I figure out what I can plan that will be exceptionally tanky using the Phrecia classes.

AggroChat #521 – The French JRPG

by
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.

Topics Discussed:

  • Thunderbolts Movie Great
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  • Conquest Dark
  • Path of Exile
    • Pohx League 2.0
    • Atlas Invasion
  • South of Midnight
  • Samurai Bringer
  • Metal Bringer
  • Chess Drama
  • Infinity: N5

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Cooking Nemesis Eggs

by

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.