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.
