blaugust

Ancestor League Testing

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Good Morning Folks! Here we go with another Saturday blog post since I seem to be determined to hit thirty-one this Blaugust. We are in the final stretch before the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile next Friday. With a new league comes the eternal question of what the heck to actually play. While I need to spend some time updating it, I have a section on the Path of Exile Tools page where I have been loosely keeping track of the characters and builds that I have played over the course of the last four leagues.

Last week I recorded a bit of a rambling video talking about my journey with Path of Exile so far, but suffice it to say I have learned a lot over the last four leagues, and Ancestor is going to be my fifth league. There are a lot of things that I have come to accept that I did not with that very first build. Firstly I have come to accept that while builds may be advertised as being able to do all of the content in the game, that statement usually comes with some caveats. Namely what feels great clearing a map doesn’t necessarily always feel great in deep delve or fighting bosses. So I am going into the Ancestor league knowing that more than likely I am going to build several characters for various reasons over the course of the league… some because I want to specialize in a specific bit of content and others just because I want to try something different.

For the last two leagues, Sanctum and Crucible, I have league started a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This is without a doubt probably the most comfortable build I have ever played. I’ve never really put the currency into the build in order to turn it into a higher damage potential/do all of the content in the game build… but instead mostly focused on the high levels of survival and making it a comfortable Delve and Heist monster. That is not to say that mapping is not comfortable, but it will never clear as fast as some of the other “entire-screen-clearing” options. I know that more than likely by the end of the league I will have leveled another Righteous Fire character, but I sorta want to see how the new meta shakes out with RF Chieftan and whether or not Forbidden Flesh/Flame are cheap enough to reasonably either cherry pick a Juggernaut ability, or do the same with a Jugg and snag the Chieftain resistance capping node.

However, if you want a very comfortable build that was able to get me two keystones without breaking a sweat and do most of the game modes… then I would suggest checking out Pohx.net or specifically the Righteous Juggernaut written guide. This is a playstyle similar to the Thorns Crusader if you ever played that in Diablo III, where you just run through the map and watch things fall down around you.

Another build that I had a heck of a lot of fun with in this past league was Explosive Arrow Ballistas Champion. This is technically the first build I ever played when I sat down to try and follow a guide back during the Sentinel League. The thing is… there were a lot of layers of how to build a character that I did not understand at that point. As a result… my EA Champion was a bit of a failboat that I half understood the directions that I was trying to follow. This is one of the first builds that I kitbashed a number of guides together along with some information from various POE.ninja profiles of folks playing a similar setup. The end result is a build that looks very much like most EA Champions out there, but one that specifically was suited to my tastes. If you are curious about what the build ended up looking like, here is a short video I recorded a while back.

While I enjoyed it greatly, there is an aspect to the build that just feels weird in that you spend a lot of time running ahead while you wait on your Ballistas to kill things for you. You end up building in such a matter that you don’t actually do any damage yourself, but your turrets do… but they don’t actually do the damage from the initial hit… but instead from a delayed explosion. It is very much a no-aiming gameplay style which is fun and is super tanky in the way in which I built it so you can survive pretty much any of the content. However mapping… never really felt that great because you were essentially always needing to loop back through the map to pick up what dropped in your wake.

If you want to give it a shot though, I highly suggest you check out Zizaran’s video guide from last league. There were no significant changes in the way that someone would build an EA Champion, so for the most part all 3.21 guides should be relevant still.

Another build that I have greatly enjoyed, both in the version that I built this league in the above video, and a half-assed version that I played way back in Sentinel league… is Wintertide Brand. More specifically the best version I have played is the Wintertide Brand Occultist that I cobbled together after looking at a number of POE.Ninja profiles and trying to decide what path I wanted to take. This is the first build that I more or less freehanded based on input that I was seeing from other player builds rather than trying to follow a guide. For the most part, it worked out swimmingly. The core problem, however… is it is a bit on the slow side and has a requirement of needing a unique to feel good. More specifically you want a specific corruption of that unique. I also already had a nice “+Cold Skill Gems” wand laying around that dropped in Delve so it was easy for me to cobble this together.

To be truthful… there are not a ton of guides around for this one. Mr 9 Lives has one but it is nowhere near as detailed as something from Zizaran, Ghazzy, or Palsteron. If you want to copy my POB I dumped that some time ago at level 82. The thing that I never quite solved was with my build were all of the defensive layers. I was going for Regen + Block but I was missing a lot in the block department. Basically I never really wanted to put the effort into properly fixing it, but someday… I am going to make this feel amazing.

Another build has caught my eye recently, and I am doing a bit of a league start test at the moment. While I am only in Act 8… unless something drastically changes I think I am going to league start Lightning Arrow Raider. Essentially what I would like to have is a build that can just wipe the entire screen, and be able to do that… in what is effectively garbage-tier gear. I want to go into this next league pretending like I am approaching it as SSF, in spite of wanting to have access to give stuff to my guildies and hopefully cherry-pick the one thing I am a bit worried about getting… Vaal Lightning Arrow.

I recorded some gameplay this morning of running through some of Act 8. Essentially using a Lightning Arrow 5-link I can often kill things before they even get on the same screen with me. It performed essentially the same on a 3 and 4-link. For Rare/Boss mobs I use Artillery Balistas in order to grind them down or fire off Vaal Lightning Arrow if I have a Vaal charge. For defensive layers I am going after High Evasion, 100% Spell Suppression, 100% Phasing, and trying to get a decent balance of life and armor to round that out.

With this test, I have specifically been avoiding rifling through my vault to find good stuff to equip. Everything I am wearing dropped for me during this run so far. The bow for example was a white five-link item that took the quality to 20% and then threw an Anger Essence at and lucked into a reasonable roll. Then I bench-crafted cold damage on it to add a bit more raw damage. The Helm I Rog Crafted, and the chest, boots, and gloves were all things that dropped. I’ve got a bunch of gems equipped that I am not even using but never actually removed from my gear.

Essentially what sent me down the Lightning Arrow/Artillery Ballista path was the number of folks who made magic find builds using that combination of abilities at the end of the league to farm stuff. In all cases, it seemed like they could make it work on a bare minimum of gear. In my travels of searching for information, I stumbled across the above video from “LifeWithoutPants” a YouTuber I had never seen before. This sent me down the path of Raider instead of PathFinder, so we are going to see how that feels. I really like leveling a Ranger because it does not require me to mule anything from another character, pending I am going for a bow build. Generally speaking, when I get access to Lily or the Library I pick up Flame Dash to replace normal Dash, but past that, you start out with access to everything you need and get most of it through quests.

Right now I plan on finishing leveling all the way through the Acts and then will try some White and Yellow maps to see how those feel. Essentially my plan for this character is to farm maps and work my way up to Red maps. I might go Essences, Harvest, and Jun on my Atlas to help with gathering gear. The other path I guess would be to go down Expeditions and then Rog craft some gear. My hope is with the screen clear potential of the build is that Blight won’t be quite so painful as it usually is with Righteous Fire. I’m not sure I will be able to do Metamorphs in quite the same way as I did as SRS or RF, but I am not going to block any content so that I can at least try a bit of everything.

I am really looking forward to this league, and looking forward to giving Sanctum another shot in its updated form. Are you going to be playing Path of Exile? What are you looking at to league start? Drop me a line below and we can chat! I’m also more than happy to help folks out if you are just dipping your toes in the game and looking for a build to follow. Generally speaking, I should be able to take the type of gameplay that you like in other ARPGs and suggest something similar in POE.

Over One Hundred Blogs

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Ten years of nonsense Blaugust image showing the logos from various years... Blaugust 2015 Blaugust 2016 Blaugust 2018 Blaugust 2019 Blapril 2020 Blaugust Promptapalooza 2020 Blaugust 2021 Blaugust 2022 and Blaugust 2023

Friends… I am completely floored. Yesterday we got both our hundredth and hundred and first sign up for Blaugust 2023. This prompted me to look up what our past numbers looked like. The highest participation year ever was 2018 with 90 blogs. There were a lot of factors going into that, not the least of which was having had a somewhat lowkey 2016 and me needing to entirely take off 2017 for running the event. It created a sense of nostalgia about the event I think, and I had numerous folks track me down and ask me if I was going to run it again. When I brought it back folks seemed to come from out of the woodwork and flock to the event, and until this year we had never really captured that kind of lightning in the bottle.

Screenshot of the Blaugust Gamepad.club account on Mastodon

This year is a similarly odd year in that we are in a state of turmoil when it comes to social media. Blaugust was in large part an event that was started on Twitter and dominated by folks who participated in the event in that manner. With me transplanting myself from Twitter to Mastodon last year, I was admittedly somewhat concerned that the interest just would not be there. What has happened instead is that we have gotten traction with folks who had never even heard of the event before. Over half of the blogs that are participating in Blaugust this year are first-timers. That is really freaking huge, but I guess not super shocking. The fediverse as a platform is way more interested in interaction than Twitter ever was, and the number of random conversations that I have struck up with complete strangers has been massive. Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole seem to be a platform with lowered barriers and in many ways lowered inhibitions.

Screenshot showing Indiecator.org and the Blaugust 2023 - Participant Appreciation Post

If you have a minute I would suggest you pop over to Indiecator the blog run by Magi, and check out his Participant Appreciation Post. On one hand, Magi is a Blaugust success story. If my memory serves me right, he started his blog around the beginning of Blaugust in 2019, signed up as a newbie… got 31 posts in his first year, and is now a rather prolific blogger. Last year he assumed the mantle of Mentor to help out other bloggers and has been aiding significantly this year in trying to keep the roles on the Discord set. However, none of that is why you should go read that blog post. You should read it because he took the time to crawl through every single blog (that had signed up to that point) and write a paragraph talking about them. It is a phenomenal post and does a great job of showing the breadth of folks that we have gathered here.

The very first Blaugust logo from 2014 with the text It Came From the Summer Haze! Blaugust Thirty One Days of Blog Posts

I get a lot of credit for Blaugust because I happened to be the idiot who rammed Blog and August together and tried to make it a thing. As I have stated before, I wasn’t even the first person to do this. There was a whole Australian Blaugust dating back to 2010 that Leaflocker and Alecat were part of. I will forever be grateful that they joined in my brand of nonsense instead of being cross with me for stepping on their toes. There is a separate version of Blaugust over on the #MTBoSBlaugust hashtag that my wife helped spawn based on ours, and I’ve heard of similar events out there in the aether. I am somewhat shocked at how far this dumb little idea I had back in 2014 has spread. I am deeply humbled that so many of you keep showing up every single year to participate and spend the rest of the year chatting way in the Discord.

If you are seeing a bunch of information about Blaugust flying by, and you have found your way here… there is still plenty of time to sign up and join in this particular brand of nonsense. I would suggest you check out the information post from mid-July outlining everything about the event. It has links to various key things like the Sign-Up Form and explains how you can participate. While I am overwhelmed that we have officially broken the hundred blogs barrier, there is always room for more. Though it might take me a bit longer to tabulate the results this year than it has in past years. We are only eight days into the month and I am already a bit overwhelmed by the participation. I want to give a huge thanks to everyone that is participating this year and everyone who has participated in any year over the last decade. It has been a wild ride and I am thankful to count you all among my friends. This year set a bar that I am not sure we will ever beat again, but if nothing else we are proving that blogging is still a vibrant means of expression.

A Packed Weekend

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Screenshot from Path of Exile showing a Righteous Fire Inquisitor firing off Scorching Ray with the Shaper Beam Micro-transaction.

Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.

A screenshot from Sir Gog's review of recent 3.22 Path of Exile spoilers showing off the Unending Nightmare atlas passive node.

Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.

My Baldur's Gate 3 Party does a murder of some Gnolls

Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.

Screenshot from the Code: Action mini game in Honkai Star Rail where I have created a movie poster themed after The Matrix called "Super Hacker" featuring Blade as Neo and Silver Wolf as Trinity.

There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.

A screenshot from Palia Beta showing off my plot and the fact that you can have multiple storage chests.

I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.

A screenshot from The Witcher Netflix series during happier times in Season One with Geralt and Yaskier/Dandelion

I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.

Photo of me and Greybie our Tigerstripe Grey Tabby Stray "Community Cat"

Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.

I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.

Inconvenience as a Feature

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Good Morning Friends! We are going to go on a bit of a journey. I’m very much in Path of Exile mode with the new league starting some 16 days from now. I have been playing around with various build ideas and trying out new things. This also means I am consuming a lot of content which in turn causes the YouTube algorithm to dredge up even more of it for me to watch. Trade is an extremely important part of Path of Exile, whether or not you want to admit it. If you are playing without access to the trade market, you are absolutely playing on the hardest difficulty settings. Solo-Self-Found is absolutely a game mode, but it is also one that expects you to know quite a bit about the even more obtuse crafting system in order to fix your resistances and craft your own gear. I feel strongly enough about this that I took the time to cobble together a rather detailed dissection of a trade encounter in an attempt to demystify the process.

Then I stumbled onto this video from All-Trades Jack who has been going on his own journey through this game much like I have over the last few years. He has an excellent video talking about the merits of following a guide which I highly recommend watching. Essentially he reached the point that I did two leagues ago, where I finally was willing to engage with the Trade system. He honestly talks about many of the very sane and reasonable objections that I also had. Trade in Path of Exile is needlessly cumbersome and it requires a human element to the trades that I have not dealt with since Everquest and setting up a trader in the Nexus. It should be as simple as putting items in a publicly flagged trade stash tab and then allowing players to purchase those items through an in-game auction house. However two leagues into wrapping my head around the trade economy… it works the way it works for a reason.

One of the core problems with an Auction House system is that it often allows for arbitrage, or essentially buying cheap goods and then selling for a profit margin. This is ultimately how the real-world stock market works, so it makes sense that players will figure out ways to carry over this same logic into a video game. In World of Warcraft, this has led to an arms race over the years of Auction House tools and changes to the way that the Auction House worked, in order to try and throttle the equivalent of “fast trading”. Essentially in an Arbitrage system, there is essentially an invisible broker sitting in the middle of a trade always making sure that prices trend upwards. This is an oversimplification because I don’t tend to engage in “economic pvp” as some call it. I know it works and I have a mount in Classic WoW entirely thanks to the fact that my friend Stargrace is extremely skilled at playing a market and looking for opportunities.

This is not me passing judgment on the system, but just saying that it isn’t really my jam. World of Warcraft specifically has systems in place to help limit the impact of runaway arbitrage. When you use an item, it often binds to your character meaning that you cannot then turn around and sell it after using it. When the game launched bags were not bound to the character, and as a result the bag cartel became one of the most rampant marketplaces. I remember getting very threatening messages when I crafted my first Mooncloth Bag and dared to price it cheaper than all of the other bags on the market. From Burning Crusade and beyond, all bags were set to bind to the character on equipment. BOE as a system is likely largely a result of the trade economy that WoW Devs were all too familiar with in Everquest where all of the gear was tradeable effectively forever. Nothing was ever truly removing gear from the economy because I could use the same Lamentation for 50 levels, and then trade it off to the next person when I got an upgrade.

Path of Exile is similar to the original days of Everquest in that almost everything in the game is freely tradeable between your characters or any other player in the game. This allows for some really interesting decisions where I can take maps with modifiers that I cannot personally run, but sell them to players who have builds capable of running them. I can also take every piece of gear that I find and sell it to any other player, or even when I decide I am done with a character use those items to fund my next character. It is an economy begging to be set ablaze by arbitrage, and there are in fact discords devoted to buying items in bulk for the purpose of flipping them. However, this is not something that the game itself supports, and by default, trade seems to be purposefully cumbersome and requires several human touchpoints in order to stop rampant flipping.

It might be Stockholm syndrome, but I have reached a place of acceptance that All-Trades Jack has yet to arrive at. I accept that the cumbersome nature of trade, and the inconvenience of needing to stop what I am doing in order to sell an item… is a fair tradeoff for having the ability to find reasonably priced items for the vast majority of the league life span. We are currently at the end of a league and the trade market is a bit tight, but my reasonably priced items are going like hotcakes as a result. I will say that the inconvenience factor has changed what I am willing to sell. I am no longer going to personally list 1 Chaos items because frankly, it isn’t worth my time to stop doing whatever I happen to be doing to pop into my hideout to complete that trade. In Sanctum my bulk bin was 1 Chaos, in Crucible my cheapest sell price was 5 Chaos… and going into the next league I fully expect the lowest price I am willing to sell at will be 10 Chaos.

While my personal price point has trickled up, it is not that I am charging more for individual items… it is just that I am only selling better quality items. There are enough dedicated traders out there who are more than happy to take on smaller trades to make sure those 1 Chaos uniques are in plentiful supply. I’ve basically figured out a way that I can live with the system. Would I like it all to be automated and require zero human interaction? Absolutely. However, I am not sure if I would like the ramifications of that system. I get the impression that Grinding Gear Games does not want their trade economy to devolve into a flippers paradise. I feel like they would like to reward players for going out and doing content and then selling the items that they find in the wild. Much of why I never really engaged with the Auction House market in World of Warcraft, is that it felt like it was stacked against the folks going out and doing the content.

Anyways I’ve made my peace with the system. I’ve tried to release content both in written and video form in an attempt to demystify it. There will still be folks who want nothing to do with the system, and at least among my circle of friends I am always willing to interact with trade for them when they are looking for something specific. Last league, I had a bag slot that had currency belonging to Thalen for example, and when he wanted something he would just send me the trade site link and I would snatch it up for him. I’ve reached the point where I am comfortable enough navigating the system that I don’t mind doing it for others. I’ve yet to touch the bulk trading options like TFT, but at some point, I could see myself dipping my toes into that market for no reason other than to get rid of some of my vault clutter. That said I keep buying new tabs in the guild bank so I can start sharing excess things like maps, because after a point I am generating them faster than I can run them.

Anyways! I doubt All-Trades Jack will ever read this… but I figured I would at least share my thoughts on the matter.