Destiny Rising

Gracie Glowers

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Good Morning Folks. I had to go into the office yesterday so I skipped blogging, and then after all of the interacting with people that happened… I crashed early around 8pm. This is a photo of Gracie to make up for not having blogged yesterday. She does this thing where she sits on my router and screams at me… while staring awkwardly at me. She often does this when I have decided I cannot handle her crawling all over me and wallowing on me and need to push her off to get something done. I think this is her way of sulking. It generally cracks me up quite a bit when it happens, because clearly she is mad at me and wants me to know it… by going just far enough away from me that I will be certain to see her and the staring daggers. I am not a good daddy clearly.

I’ve finished the Path of Exile 2 campaign on my bear and am now in maps, and I have to say… this is the point where POE2 ceases to be quite as enjoyable. The campaign is a heck of a lot of fun, and mapping is not. Mapping just feels tedious, because all of the rewards for a given map are contained within a handful of rare spawns… and missing one of them, feels like you are missing most of the loot. So I always arrive at this point where I am roaming around the map looking for the last rare so I can go and beat the damned boss and move on with my life. It is one of those situations where a bunch of subtle decisions have gone into this game, and make it so that mapping is just not really any fun. Its the limited portals, the general lack of loot, the lack of a decade worth of leagues, and the fact that when I do die in POE2… it happens immediately and what feels like completely randomly. It feels like the only way you can make a character feel tanky… is by investing everything in energy shield, because all other defensive layers feel like shit.

Then there is also the problem that the league mechanic feels like crap. There are a bunch of think piece videos floating around about what is wrong with the league mechanic, but ultimately I think it boils down to something very simple. I spent a bunch of this past Keepers league in POE1 deep diving into the existing Incursion mechanic, and my core problem with it has always been that it takes you out of the flow of the rest of the game. What I wanted for Incursion 2.0 was for it to be less fiddly and faster to complete than the original. Vaal temples are not that, and they are way more fiddly and require way more care and feeding. We all sort of thought we could run 60 maps and then do all of those saved up mechanics in a single temple session, but it doesn’t really work that way. Everything is six token chunks and it always feels like I never have the right connectors to make things work in the way that I want them to work. I think ultimately this mechanic needs to be simplified so that there is a single pathway tile, a single power up tile, and having some measure of control over how much of the temple resets on an architect or atziri kill. Then there is the problem with the fact that the rewards were cool while leveling… but quickly feel like crap when compared to the needs of mapping. Hopefully they can fix it, but I figure it won’t be until well into the new year at this point.

In other news the Destiny Rising christmas event is a heck of a lot of fun. You essentially have a version of the crucible but you are throwing snowballs instead of using weapons, and effectively it feels like lobbing grenades at everyone. There is also a crafting mechanic where you build snowmen from the resourcces that you gain every day from doing snowball fight matches. At some point there is going to be a sparrow racing component that unlocks, but right now… this makes up for how shitty the halloween event was. I’m having a lot of fun just yoloing my way through snowball fights, and I would love for something silly like this to return more often in place of the existing pvp modes.

I am also playing some Diablo IV and having a lot of fun on the Paladin class. I am going all in on thorns damage, and I am not sure how long this archetype will hold up, but for the moment it feels great. I am nearing level 60 and will start working on paragon levels shortly. I’ve done one of the capstone dungeons and it felt like it was twice as long as it should be and sort of overstayed its welcome. I need to actually figure out my build, because at the moment I am not really focused on much of anything but leveling. The replacement for powers seems fine, mostly because one of them drops experience orbs which is helping me level faster. I love paladin and crusders in the Diablo franchise and the game immediately got better for me with the addition of this class.

Lastly I thought I would share a photo of the final state of my paint racks. I have been printing these for what feels like ages at this point and essentially this will provide storage for 80 pots of Pro Acryl paint. Each of them has a removable drawer for general hobby storage and are going to line the back of a table in one of the upstairs offices that I will be turning into a hobby room. Now I am going to focus on printing out some other general stuff, like I made a brush rack over night and will probably start working on printing out a wet palette today. At some point I am going to have to actually order the damned paints though, but am effectively doing the prep work for setting everything up. I am hoping to get a lot of the work done on the actual office over the christmas holiday days off. I am really happy with how good the cabinets look, and am going to effectively velcro them together I think so they don’t slide around.

I hope you are having a wonderful week. At some point I have to figure out this whole Christmas thing… because I have done next to nothing for the impending holiday. This year without my spouse it just does not really feel like it matters all that much.

Plastic Spaghetti

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Good Morning Folks! Today is my first day without steroids so here is hoping that I do not begin to backslide on my recovery. I am still going into pretty prolific coughing fits, but only really during exposure to cold air or strenuous activity. I will admit that I went into this weekend planning on spending the entire weekend playing Guild Wars Reforged. That did not happen, but I did at least get to level 9 in Seared Ascalon. Still enjoying myself but sometimes the heart wants familiar patterns, and as such I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile or fiddling around with my 3D printed nonsense. The ranger/elementalist seems to be working swimmingly, other than the fact that I am not really doing anything with the elementalist portion of it. I have too many good Ranger abilities that I want to use, and not enough hotbar space to use them all.

In Path of Exile I am focused on trying to get yet another character to level 100 without taking any deaths. I am sitting at 86% to 100 and am alternating between 250ish depth delving and them relatively chill mapping. I’ve gone hardcore into creating Alva temples, because each of them if crafted properly is worth roughly a divine and they sell almost instantly. They also produce entire rooms full of rare monsters which are pretty solid experience gained per map. I am mixing this in with Ritual which also produces quite a lot of mobs on the map and as such more experience gained. Occasionally I swap back over to my Ice Trap Elementalist if I want to do a Hive Fortress, because that build is way better at clearing the entire screen than Righteous Fire is. I am hoping that over the next few days I hit level 100 so I can at least knock that off my bucket list for the season.

I’ve been doing 7 million shipments in Kingsmarch rather than sending a bunch of little shipments, and managed to get my very first ever Mirror Shard. These sell for around 35 divines each, so it was a quick infusion of capital. It feels better to do this and save up materials until I have 250k Blue Zanthemum and 1 million Dust rather than sending 10k/30k shipments out constantly. Now that I know how well this works… I will probably take this strat for future leagues, because a single shard makes up for all of the effort and I have heard there are often cases where you get multiples at once. Regardless you always get 5 or 6 Divine Orbs in a 7 million shipment so they still feel better off than a bunch of small shipments that may or may not have anything in them. I really need one of my shipments to get interdicted so I can fight the sea captain and knock it off my achievement list. I might have to start running mappers to see if one of those can get captured, because I really just need one of the kingsmarch bosses.

Over in Destiny Rising we managed to get another three stronghold week with the guild, but are reaching the point where we just need more active folks doing dailies because we keep running out of the juice required to keep our “bitcon miner” going. If you dabble in Destiny Rising and need/want a guild and are doing dailies, please hit me up so I can throw you an invite. I managed to get Jaren up high enough to start doing big kid activities and he actually becomes really useful when combined with one of the season artifact abilities that gives you a significant damage boost when you blind enemies. His movement ability that always seems to be up blinds everything around him, which means he can keep buffing damage output and shred through packs quickly. I look forward to seeing what he plays like when we do our grandmaster activities night, because I think he will inevitably be in the mix.

I finished gluing up and hanging my “Lego” Christmas Wreath and I am pretty dang happy with it. I tried solvent glues but did not find anything that would work well with PLA in spite of other discussion about it. The plastistruct stuff does have a solvent effect, but not enough of one to actually allow the plastic to bond. You could probably use it for smoothing out some minor layer lines, but nothing extreme enough to properly “plastic-weld” things together. So instead I relied on good old fashioned superglue and just letting it sit for awhile to make sure it was properly bonded. I cut out felt strips for the back of the wreath and placed those on the 3 highest points so that it would keep things from banging a lot when I hung it. So far I am pretty damned chuffed by it, and can absolutely see creating variations of this for other holidays.

I also finished up printing my second cabinet, but ran out of black filament and had to substitute in something else. I MIGHT reprint that single top of the unit in black because I ordered some refills that should be coming in today. I don’t mind the white but do think I would rather have them all be black structure with colored shelves. I can’t look at anything red and white without thinking of Oklahoma University, which is a thing I already see way too often anyways. I’ve got a really pretty turquoise filament that I ordered that should also be arriving today. For the black I am using spool-less refills for the first time since I now have a decent assortment of reusable spools, so hopefully that goes smoothly. It takes the cost per roll down to around $10 instead of $16, which for a bulk color like black seems like a good option. Right now as we speak my printer is idle for the first time since I got it, mostly because I am waiting on the black filament before I dive back into another series of prints.

I exported one of the timelapse videos that the P1S makes all the time while printing. I’ve already reached the point where I greatly prefer the Sunlu filament to the default Bambu Labs stuff that came with the unit. The Sunlu just ends up with a better finish and it is so much easier to remove supports from it. I printed this little guy in the green filament that came with the printer, and getting the supports off was a pain in the ass. I had to actually break out nippers to cut loose some of the elements that were holding onto the backside of his teeth because I was afraid they would do damage to the actual structure. I am slowly building up a toolkit of things to deal with bad prints, and I feel like I need to search for some sort of a hooked tool that I can print for pulling on supports. I used bambu scraper without a blade in it, to a decent amount of luck to help break free some of the big supports. I think one of my next missions is going to be to start actually organizing my damned tools so I can find things when I need them, because I have decades worth of tools scattered around the house in four different places which is not useful at all.

I had my first print go completely off the rails. I had been trying to print some spindles for a spinning wheel that Ace uses, because I am sending them a dino friend and figured I might as well try printing off a few bobbins while I was at it. I successfully printed off one for their current machine, but when I moved on to trying to print one off for a machine that is currently backordered… things went sideways. I think there were a few things that happened. Firstly I think the part was a bit too fine detail and it maybe had some overhangs that auto supports were not taking care of. Then there was a problem where one of the parts that was very fine… popped up off the bed and then the printer got confused trying to chase it around as it moved. I had tiny bits of white filament everywhere… above the plate, below the plate, on the gantry tracks, at the back of the unit, and most concerningly around the vertical screw drives. I happened to catch it when I looked at the preview and cancelled the print and then cleaned everything up. I might give this another go but I think I will need to increase the wall size or something to make sure it is printing out slightly thicker objects.

I started a new book this weekend as well, but I admit I have not made it super far into it. In 2023, I read the first two books in this series back to back and enjoyed myself. However coming back they feel immensely dense, at least compared to the relatively light reads that I have been doing lately. It is a very Norse mythology themed series and everything has a bunch of hard to pronounce names to remember… and quite frankly the two chapter long rapid fire catch up preamble was a bit much to get through on its own to remind you of what happened in the previous book. I am going to push through this, because I do not want to have a “did not finish” on my list for the year, but it is going to be a bit of a challenge. It is weird how tastes shift over time, because I was fully on board with these novels the first time, but now that I am going back for book three it is a slog.

I am hoping yall had a wonderful weekend that was filled with something interesting. Right now I have used almost all of the superglue that I went out to get over the weekend and am waiting on some bulk shipments to arrive so I can finish putting some of the other projects together. I got an order of magnets and metric machine screws which will further expand what I can do with this nonsense. I still need to get a good set of calipers and might make a trip the next town over to harbor freight to pick up a pair there. I am having a heck of a lot of fun with 3D Printing, and it is way the hell more engaging than I even thought it would be.

AggroChat #548 – ARPG Players Aggro

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

Hey Folks! Bel was partially dead, and then holiday travel happened, and as a result, we ended up taking a few weeks off without really intending to. We are back and hopefully for more than a few weeks, but given another holiday is looming, who knows? This week we talk about how all of the various ARPGs out there seem to have a contingency of aggro fans, and discuss the reasons why, but also why we are not quite as doomer on them.  Bel talks a bit about the release of the Druid and the Vaal league coming up in Path of Exile II.  Tam discusses a new Chinese MMORPG called Where Winds Meet, which seems to push Gacha elements aside and produce a really wild experience.  From there Grace discusses a Raid Healing Simulator if the form of Wild Growth, and Kodra, an alternate universe Donkey Kong Country in the form of Windswept. We have a revisiting of a topic we have discussed more than once, about why PVPVE fails… this time, how it ruins the otherwise joyful experience of Arc Raiders.  We wrap the show up with some rapid-fire topics about various books and media we have been consuming.

Topics Discussed:

  • ARPG Players Angry
    • Last Epoch
    • Path of Exile
    • Diablo IV
    • Path of Exile II
  • Druid and Vaal League
  • Where Winds Meet
  • Wild Growth
  • Windswept
  • PVPVE is Bad Revisited
  • Short Topics

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Druids, Strongholds, and The Searing

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the league reveal for Path of Exile II 0.4.0 both known as The Last of the Druids and the upcoming Fate of the Vaal league. I took a late lunch break and watched the reveal and I have mixed opinions. 0.4.0 was originally announced as a massive endgame changing patch, and so far that is not really the case. There are improvements on the way but they were just not ready for this league. Remember the whole Settlers of Kalguur league lasting an entire year debacle that fueled POE1 on POE2 gamer tensions? Well GGG has made the decision that they are going to release new content for each game every four months and package up whatever the hell they happen to have ready at the time and call it good enough. As a result we are getting 0.4.0 without those sweeping endgame changes, but are instead getting a brand new Incursion adjacent league combined with a new class in the form of the Druid, which introduces our first Intelligence/Strength hybrid class.

I can’t say I am terribly excited for this league. I am sure I will play it, but Path of Exile II is already way less enjoyable for me personally than Path of Exile. Then you combine that with the fact that they keep implementing mechanics but making them cumbersome. We are getting Spell Totem support finally, but they are going to rely on some sort of a charge mechanic so it means you can’t just run around spamming totems like they work in Path of Exile… effectively making this classic build archetype dead on arrival. I am going to have to see how things shake out, because there were enough changes that it is going to be a pretty significant shake up. However they did not announce things like Life on the Passive Tree, or them removing all of the lower attack speed things from the Warrior area… so I am not sure if any of the things that I feel like the game desperately needs are going to be included. I will have to wait until the JSON file drops and the various folks datamine all of the tree changes before I can really tell what I want to play. I’ve never been that big of a fan of shapeshifters but I will probably play a Druid because it is the new thing, and potentially will have a thorns build option.

Ace and I did our Thursday night Calamity Ops reset thing and managed to get in four really good runs, one of which putting us just barely below the promotion line. So in theory we should be good for the rest of this two week period, but will have to probably keep an eye on things to make sure that we do not drop down out of the promotion zone. After that we just happened to align timewise with Ammo and the three of us knocked out the two strongholds that we had found already. Then this morning I uncovered a third stronghold and am going to start working on heading towards another one of those three clusters to see if we can maybe find a fourth this week.s It is good to get at least two of them done so we are not stuck on Saturday and Sunday trying to wrangle the troops to get everything done in a short period of time.

After getting hard carried in our best Calamity Ops run by a 72k Jaren on day one… I figured I should probably throw some points into this character and at least get him up to 65k which is the break point for big kid activities. Since we have shifted into Void and Solar territory, he is going to be pretty important and viable for all of the upcoming content I figure. What I am gated by at the moment though is freaking elemental fruit, which means I need to run a lot of Realm of the Nine in order to knock some of that out to keep upgrading him. I also need to target farm some specific artifacts that are useful for his build in order to bump those up as well. I spent my 4th weapon upgrade to take The Last Word up to level 85 just to get that bit of a boost in his power level.

What I am playing the most of right now is Guild Wars Prophecies. Reforged has been a wild ride and it is shocking how much better the game looks like right. I had rolled a brand new ranger earlier this year but did not make it terribly far, so I picked that character up and completed a slew of pre-searing quests. Essentially I completed a full set of Krytan armor, got a full set of Ranger skills, and then took the plunge and broke the world. I could have likely stuck around in Pre-Searing a bit longer and milked a bit more experience, but I got to level 7, which seems good enough. I decided to go with Elementalist as my second profession, largely with the idea of using elemental weapon buffs at some point. Nothing really fits perfectly well with ranger, especially if you are wanting to use bows.

What is wild to me is how much better the post searing world looks now. This was a god awful muddy reddish brown mess, and now has clear details. You can also scale up the UI interface on high resolution monitors without it becoming five pixels stretched to the size of fifty. More than likely this is going to be what I spend most of my time playing this weekend. It has been eons since I really got into Guild Wars, given that we played this as a bit of a pause after the release of World of Warcraft, and then I revisited it every so often when the mood hit me. I never really made it to the proper endgame on any of my characters, so there is so much of the game I have never seen. I’ve never completed any of the Eye of the North content for example. Maybe the graphical and client refresh will be enough that I am actually going to stick around and do that.