Good Morning Folks. After wrapping up Veilguard I have now uninstalled the game to free up space for whatever comes next and am back futzing around with Path of Exile. I wrapped up my second voidstone and I gotta say… I am somewhat impressed at how much better I am now at doing these first two. It gives me hope that maybe at some point in the future the last two will be a similar cakewalk. I managed to take both down without taking any deaths which I think is a first for me. Searing Exarch is way more dangerous to my specific build, but I find that I hate Eater of Worlds way more. It is the charging the spheres phase that annoys me because inevitably one of the spheres overlaps some of the other nonsense that happens in the arena. I also hate being on a timer… it causes me to freak out mentally. I have some baggage surrounding being timed that I have never quite gotten over.
I am struggling a bit to complete my Atlas of Worlds. At this point, I am at 99 of 115 and am completely out of maps to run. This means I need to chain run maps that I have already completed in the hope of getting something that I can actually run. I have a lighthouse that I do not have credit for, but when I corrupted the map it ended up shifting to include no-regen which my build cannot run. I’ve contemplated trying to run it without Righteous Fire turned on… but that is still always risky as hell. Admittedly there are some times I just fail to brain and realize I am halfway through a map and never actually turned on RF… but that is the exception rather than the rule. I am not sure what is up with Kirac but it seems like his inventory is not generating new maps nearly as often as I would expect him to. I’m also the only one playing in this league from our guild and as a result, there is no map sharing happening in the guild bank. Generally speaking, there are always one or two maps that Kodra gets for example that I had not seen, which helps these dry spells.
I have enough currency that I could just buy my way out of the hole, but the trade market is already pretty dead at this point during the event. There were a lot of folks who only played that first weekend, never to return again. Thankfully the Currency Exchange is still hopping and I can move items pretty easily. I’ve learned that Goddess fragments are a great way to make some gold since they are selling for around 25 chaos each right now. I have zero interest in running lab, and even if I do to quality up my gems I am going to breeze my way through one of the free ones instead of tackling uber lab. Though I have to admit after years of repetition… I don’t mind lab anywhere near as much as I used to. I can pretty much predict instinctively where the doors are going to be and can zip through them pretty quickly these days.
This morning the venerable Sir Gog released a video and in it is the above screenshot from GGG on Twitter. It seems that the minimum buy-in for Path of Exile 2 Early Access is going to be the $30 supporter pack that is likely to be released during the Twitch stream on Thursday. This is going to happen at 2 pm CST and will have Twitch drops enabled which is usually wings or a cloak or something similar. There was some talk about lifetime spenders getting in automatically but I have not seen any specifics surrounding that yet. Honestly, I was probably going to buy something from the upcoming yearly supporter pack anyways so this really isn’t too heinous as far as I am concerned. Path of Exile has earned every dime I have spent on it in a way that most games have not.
In another randomness, I watched the first episode of the HBO Dune Prophecy series last night and I have mixed opinions. I have basically come to accept that this current Dune franchise is going to have to be taken as its own thing. The first movie was mostly a good adaptation of the original source material, but that second movie veered off into left field at the last moments becoming its own unique universe. As such I am mostly assuming that this pre-history series is going to do its own thing. Admittedly while I read the Brian Herbert Houses Trilogy, I never went back and read any of the Machine Crusade stuff. Maybe this is drawing directly from that and I just do not realize it. Whatever the case there was a “superpower” shown at the end of this episode that I do not remember existing previously in the canon. So yeah… I will be watching this but also taking everything with a shaker of salt, because the current vision for this franchise is a bit different than the novels.
Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.
Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.
I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.
The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.
I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.
Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.
Hey Folks! I gotta admit I am still reeling from last week but luckily I am off today… so it means I get an extra day to decompress. Since the world still feels like shit, I needed to retreat into some very familiar comfort gaming, and the Necro Settlers Event league in Path of Exile has fit the bill. This is a bit weird for an event league because there is no fixed end time, so it has effectively turned into a reboot of the Settlers League which I assume will end when that league ends. The league started on the 7th and at this point I am into mapping with a character that can probably get me all the way through t16s. I went RF Chieftain again because it is comfy and familiar and I know how to get it up and running without much deep thought. I am fully expecting to play a fairly scuffed character because event league economies can be a bit weird and limited.
Event leagues always have some gimmick associated with them, and this time around it is all of the normal Settlers of Kalguur mechanics with the addition of the Lantern of Arimor from the Necropolis league. They removed all of the negative modifiers from the pool and additionally since Allflames are no longer dropping… they are just being applied to your maps automatically. What has been interesting is that all maps of a specific tier for a specific timeframe will share the same pool of lantern modifiers. This means that joining a shared global chat is a good idea as folks tend to share when a certain zone is really hot. This creates massive fluctuations in the price of specific maps when they are running a desirable combo, and also creates a situation where Horizon Orbs are more useful than they have ever been in Path of Exile history.
All of this made getting through the campaign rather interesting. I was going much slower than normal, but also having random league mobs showing up in your maps made it a bit more challenging. An example of something that I saw is during Darresso’s Arena in Act 4 is that nothing but Suphite Golems was spawning other than the Dogs that come out of the various gates. The entire place from start to finish was just yellow golems throwing chunks of sulphite at me, which would be great if I were actually messing with Delve right now, but also kind of wild when you get shotgunned by multiple packs at the same time. I think it was Mudflats where I first encountered the Unique Gemling mobs that drop random gems, and there were a few times early on that I just ran from Meatsacks because they took too long to chew through.
The other really weird thing about this league has been its economy. There are certain lantern combinations that print massive amounts of chaos. I’m hearing that some folks with appropriate juicing are seeing upwards of 200 chaos in a single map. There are no real equivalent mods that drop Divine Orbs, which means that the currency conversion between the two is outrageous. For those who do not know normally you trade in the range of 200 Chaos to a Single Divine Orb, but over the weekend at one point it was trading 500 to 1. This has all sorts of trickle-down effects on the economy as a whole meaning that things that would normally be a 5 Chaos item are selling for 60 Chaos or higher. There are a lot of folks who have not caught onto this yet, because there are items priced at 1 Divine that are in no way worth effectively 400-500 Chaos.
Luckily though I have found plenty of raw chaos and items that I can sell easily for chaos, and it has allowed me to outfit myself in the basics of a RF Chieftain build. I’ve not gone life-on-block based yet, so am still rocking the Rise of the Phoenix shield to cap out my Fire Resistances. I’ve not done the last lab so right now I am sitting at 90% Fire Res and 80% Lightning and Cold Res. I am currently using a four-link Cloak of Flame but am outfitting my atlas to do the Einhar/Ritual strategy in hopes of dropping either an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan so that I can six-link it. I spent 70 Chaos on the chest specifically because I was looking for one that would be good enough to bother six-linking eventually. Luckily the Cloak is relatively easy to get RF colors on of BBBRRG. You can see the rest of my scuffed gear in this POB link.
Since I am off today, I plan on slowly chipping away at my Atlas and doing everything I can to unlock more points. I got a wildly lucky drop earlier where I opened a Unique map lockbox and got two that I needed. Sadly the third was the damned pvp map which is always a waste of time. I wish you could use Horizon Orbs on Hall of the Grandmasters in an attempt to get other unique maps. I will however happily take a Twilight Temple map since that is often one of the ones that goes for quite a bit later in the league. Path of Exile and honestly any ARPG is comfort gaming for me, and I needed this more than I realized. I was having plenty of fun with Veilguard but was essentially in the “chores” section of the game where I needed to do a bajillion sidequests so that I could comfortably move the main story forward. Essentially I was in the “hinterlands” again, and needed a bit of a break.
Are you playing Necro Settlers Event league? What are your thoughts so far? Would you want to see the Lantern of Arimor go standard? Drop me a note below.
Hey Folks! On Friday I talked a little bit about my very early experiences starting a new character in Dragon Age The Veilguard… or I as I seem to keep shortening it to just Veilguard. There was a heap of negative press surrounding this game ahead of its launch and if you spend time on Reddit or YouTube you would be convinced that this is quite possibly the worst game on the planet. Ignore these voices and press forward if you were someone who enjoyed Dragon Age in the past and just want more fun adventures with eventual romance options. It has been wild how every internet pundit seems to be screaming about this game… but all of my actual friends who are playing it seem to be enjoying themselves. If you want to watch a video that is not hyperbolic I recommend this one from my friend Dusty. I’m roughly twenty hours into the game at this point and am going to attempt to give you a low-spoiler discussion about what I like and dislike so far.
Probably my single favorite aspect of the game is that during character creation you are asked to make a choice between six different factions. These factions all play important roles in the story and aligning your character with one of them, also presents a bunch of unique options that play out during a single play-through of the game because of how your character was aligned before the events of Veilguard. I’ve been wanting to play another Grey Warden ever since the second game, and of course, I absolutely chose that path going into Veilguard. I’ve seen so many quest options that only really make sense because I am a Grey Warden, and I am certain that choosing any of the factions will have similar ramifications on your time spent with the story. This means that at a minimum there should be six different really interesting playthroughs of the game before it starts to feel a bit stale. One of my criticisms of Cyberpunk 2077 was how the origins only really made a difference at the very beginning of the game, but this seems to keep pushing forward with the story.
Another thing that I really dig is that as soon as you have completed the first mission in the game and have your base of operations, you have access to the Mirror of Transformation. This allows you to edit your character’s appearance completely at any time. Dusty talked a bit about this in his video, but there have been many times that an option that I chose during the character creator looked cool at the time… but annoyed me after seeing three hundred cutscenes. For example, I had some weird facial tattoos going on with my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and they annoyed me from that point forward. Similarly in Inquisition my first character just felt off, and I didn’t really get into the game until I completely rerolled from scratch. Veilguard just lets you do this as often as you want without needing to spend any resources.
Similarly, you can undo your talent choices and the choices that you make for your companions at any time. Decide you like running with a specific companion, but you really need some sort of healer? You are in luck because pretty much every companion has some sort of healing line that you can invest in. There are a bunch of options that lock off other branches of the tree, but you can just undo all of those choices and try the other branch if you decide you don’t really like it. With your much larger character tree, there are a bunch of times you might want to shift your optimization because you decide that you want a different sort of ability in your loadout, which invalidates a bunch of other choices you made. The game uses a tagging system similar to ARPG games, so if you are using a bunch of abilities with the “Control” tag then you might want to pick up a bunch of other things in the tree that do things for those abilities.
One of the things that I do not love, however… is the gearing system. Namely, my brain interprets the little green sparkly icon as being that there is an upgrade that I should swap to. It is very rare that you will find items that are complete upgrades to other items. Instead, you are going to find a lot of items that are of different item bases, to borrow another term from ARPGs. I wish they clearly identified what sort of base an item is so that I could be on the lookout for new higher-level versions of that base item instead of having to futz with every single item I find. The other weird thing is that you level up the quality tiers of an item… by finding more copies of it. So for example I have a white quality sword… if I find another copy it will turn into green quality, and if I find another after that blue and so on. There is a crafting system but it only increases the bonuses of the item, not the base quality. There is also an enchanting system, but it essentially determines which of several fixed bonuses on an item are unlocked at any given time.
Something that I wish I had noticed sooner was that I could pop over to the world view of the map and fast-travel to any Eluvian without having to go through the crossroads. At first, I was venturing forth into the crossroads anytime I needed to go anywhere in the game, and while this was mildly interesting… it was a bit maddening. I do however need to spend a bit more time in the Crossroads because there are a ton of things to unlock there. There are also a bunch more mirrors than I currently have access to, so I am curious where the campaign will eventually be sending me. Some of them seem to be specifically used for a single mission, and others like the main faction zones are repeatable content that you can visit at any time and explore fully.
One of the things that is a bit weird about the game, is that every companion has some sort of gimmick that they can do to help unlock areas of content in an almost Metroidvania-style manner. Initially, I thought that this meant that it would just give me strong reasons to take specific companions to specific zones so that I could complete puzzles and unlock different areas of these maps. However, once I collected my full set of seven companions… my magical dagger MacGuffin started allowing me to do all of the abilities that related to whoever I did not currently have in my party. Annoyingly I can also do these abilities much faster… than actually having that companion in my party. So this weirdly actually colors my preferences towards never grouping with anyone other than my favorite two companions. Assan the Griffon… responds SO MUCH faster to me when using the dagger… than to Davrin when he is attempting to give commands.
The World is extremely gorgeous and we are getting to see so many areas that we have never been to before. The Antivaan Crows are just as great as we always thought they would be, and it has been interesting seeing the Mourn Watch… a group of Necromancers that feel plucked straight out of the Locked Tomb Series of books. Probably both the coolest thing… and the most jarring is that the game is littered with characters that have appeared in other Dragon Age titles. It is amazing to see these characters again and interact with them again… but the different art style means that generally speaking, they feel like AI Art versions of those characters because the only thing that is really recognizable is the outfit they are wearing. Morrigan for example looks nothing like Morrigan from the other games… Dorian is only vaguely familiar based on his outfit and his mustache. There is a character that I just met that I swear was one of the Deathwatch Dwarves or whatever they were called guarding the bridge and constantly fighting off the Darkspawn in Origins, but I am not finding any references to him.
The world exploration is also quite a bit of fun. There are puzzles but they are basic enough that you can solve them relatively quickly, and won’t be something that you spend hours trying to figure out. I think some of the things that I am enjoying about the game, are some of the aspects that other players are annoyed by. I like that things are relatively light and fast-moving, and do not get bogged down in too much detail. Then again… honestly I remember the other Dragons Age games being fairly similar. They were fun popcorn games, that had enough interesting choices that would allow you to play them multiple times. As much as players talk fondly about it… I don’t really love the extreme number of fail conditions that were laced in the Mass Effect series because it made me feel like I had to follow a guide to make sure that I did not end up losing half of my party permanently during a single quest chain.
I have been having a blast playing through the game, and honestly… I will probably give it a couple of different playthroughs just to see how the other factions shake out. My friends who are also playing the game seem to be enjoying it as well. Essentially my advice is not to allow the internet negativity surrounding this game to color your opinions. I find internet reviews to be less and less valuable these days when it comes to giving me information that actually makes a difference to my enjoyment of something. This honestly… might be my game of the year pending they manage to stick the landing. I went into the experience with fairly low expectations, given how long it took to turn out this game, and how many seeming restarts it had. I have been pleasantly surprised at just how polished the game experience is and how rich the options for playing the game the way you want to play it have been.
Have you been playing Veilguard? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
