gameplay

Scuffed Arma Brand

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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s epic blog post, I am going to take it a bit light so I can actually publish it… in the actual morning. Over the weekend I dusted off my Scion character and have been playing it a bit. I don’t exactly know what I am doing but I am having quite a bit of fun screwing around with it. As I have said before, this character was created only as a way to knock out the clear “Act III on a Scion” achievement but wound up trying out a spell gem that I had never played with before. I like brands as a concept and have played a Wintertide Brand and a Stormbrand build to high levels and enjoyed both. Armageddon Brand works a bit differently in that most of the damage it deals, comes from a single massive meteor that falls from the sky and strikes an impact area surrounding the mob it is targeting.

The end result feels so good as you send down projectiles from above to decimate oncoming packs of monsters. I recorded another one of my dumb videos last night showing off some footage from blood aqueducts. The thing is… I am enjoying this enough that I am legitimately considering trying something like this for a league start. I don’t love the fiddly nature of Scion, so if I did this I would be focused on Inquisitor because it comes with a sizeable amount of survival. The biggest problem that I have with the build currently is it has somewhat anemic single-target damage. To be fair… this is traditionally the problem with a brand build, but I think with enough crit this might resolve itself.

Another problem that I am struggling with right now, is trying to figure out where I want to go on my tree. Since I am doing this completely without a map at this point, I am mostly just trying to seek out things that either give me survivability or elemental damage and crit. Right now I have a bunch of points invested in the minion damage setup that gives me a flat damage increase like I would use with Righteous Fire. I am wondering if those points are better spent elsewhere. There is a cluster of fire nodes way up north that might be worth respeccing and pathing towards. While I recorded the video last night, I sort of hem-hawed around about what my second ascension would be… and last night I made the decision to officially go Chieftan. I need to get another labyrinth down so that I can actually make that happen.

As far as a league starter version, I am sorta leaning towards this sort of build from RaizQT. He is a hardcore player so values survival… so when he says it is Tanky, he probably means that it is actually tanky. On POE.Ninja there are a bunch of players working off some version of this build focused around the Rathpith shield. The negative with that shield is you take 10% life damage every time you cast a spell… but you also gain a ton of damage as a result. Essentially to make this work you need lots of life and even more regeneration… given that it also runs Righteous Fire just to buff the fire damage. It feels weird that I am contemplating not starting RF Juggernaut since I have had so much luck with that build, but I also feel like I probably need to branch out a bit.

If I find myself struggling, I can always lean back on the RF Juggernaut again to fund any sort of nonsense that I want to get up to. I might change my mind by the time the 18th of August actually rolls around, but right now… I am very seriously contemplating an Armageddon Brand Inquisitor for my league starter. In the weeks between now and then, I sort of want to map out a bit of a POB for myself based on the elements that I see from the builds on POE.Ninja. In the meantime, I will continue to screw around on the Scion and see if I can make it viable for mapping.

Sushi and Yuzu

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Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.

I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.

Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.

The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.

So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.

I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.

The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.

Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.

Ember Bay Whirlwind

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I largely spent my evening doing some chill gameplay in Guild Wars 2. When I finished up the previous night I had landed on the Airship parked atop Bloodstone Fen, and that is where I picked up when I logged in. I remembered hating this zone because it is just a murder box. The white mantle and bloodstone elementals always seemed to be hyper-aggressive and stacked in such thick layers around the map that it was almost impossible to move around without death following swiftly behind you. There were weird mechanics that I never really fully grasped as well, making everything a bit more challenging than it was probably intended. However with a firm grasp of how the shield absorption mechanic works and a flying mount… Bloodstone Fen was actually a rather enjoyable experience. When I first attempted this I did not even have much in the way of glider mastery unlocked.

From there I moved over to Ember Bay, and I have to say that flight absolutely trivializes this experience. Ember Bay was very much about teaching you how to use things like thermal vents to navigate the zone combined with a lot of gliding trickery, and when you can just hop on the SkyScale you can absolutely soar over top of all of this nonsense. I have to say originally I liked Ember Bay so much more than Bloodstone Fen because it was seemingly more straightforward. That impression largely is intact but I forgot how generally nasty the vinetouched destroyers are as a whole. I made it through the zone without much effort but I was downed a few times because the fire/poison nonsense caught up with me. In all cases, I was able to get myself back up, and in one moment a random stranger swooped down to help out… and I am a bit sad that they flooped away before I could thank them. That is always one of the great parts about the Guild Wars 2 community, which is that so often complete randos will pop over and help you get resurrected.

I finished out my night protecting Aurene from some bad things. I also remembered that fight being way more stressful the first time I did it. I still took a ton of damage, so it is not like I was able to trivialize it. However across the board so far Living World Season 3 seems nowhere near as “murdery” as I remembered it being from my first and only play-through. Again I think I chalk this one up to a better understanding of the game, and even though I might not remember the content blow for blow… having a vague understanding of what needs to be done in the moment. It is weird how exposure to the character has changed my feelings about the character. Like I remember thinking that initially Aurene was hideous nightmare fuel… but now after growing to love the character, I think the lil spud is kinda cute. Originally she reminded me way the hell too much of the botchling from The Witcher 3.

I closed out my night by happening upon the Tarir event at exactly the right time, allowing me to finish the last few precursor events and get in for the vine kill… and treasure chest crawl. Every time I am away from the game for a bit… I sort of forget how much loot this single event is worth. The vast majority of the last three rows of loot in my inventory came from that one event last night… and most of those are bags that contain even more loot when opened. If I was better about doing things on a predictable schedule, I would absolutely feel the need to do this every single day. In theory, I probably SHOULD get back into a rhythm… because Dragons End is also a phenomenal haul of an event as is Dragonstorm. So many of the meta-events are so fun and at the same time so amazingly rewarding. This is really the thing that hooked me on Guild Wars 2.

I’m moving through content way faster than I expected it to be. I guess the reality is when you are ONLY focused on the story bits… and you have already unlocked most of the zone-wide features… the living world content goes pretty freaking fast. I know Path of Fire is pretty long, or at least I remember it being pretty long. Similarly, I think I remember Living World Season 4 being pretty long as well. End of Dragons comparatively felt relatively short, so maybe just maybe… I might actually make it through all of the content before Secrets of the Obscure releases. We also got word that the next Path of Exile league will begin on August 18th… so I know I will be splitting time with that as well. July and August feel like they are going to be really busy months. I am happy at the moment to be back in Guild Wars 2 and feel like I have a sense of direction and forward momentum.

Spriggan Empowered Monoliths

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Yesterday I talked about my recent Diablo IV adventures, which are admittedly largely led by a desire to keep hanging out with my friend Cyl. That is the game that she is playing so I keep offering myself as tribute to do whatever shenanigans she has in her mind. We did some Nightmare Dungeons last night and I have to admit… while I enjoyed hanging out I didn’t really enjoy the content. We were doing a variety of 21-23 dungeons and honestly… they just were not that fun. It might be that my level is lagging behind hers significantly, or it might be that the content just isn’t actually that fun… but whatever the case the moment we broke for the night I returned to my comfy standby… Last Epoch. I got my Druid to level 84 last night and am still hunting for a few pieces of gear. I need to sit down and properly sort out what I want for each slot and then adapt my loot filter for those specific stats.

Over the weekend I got the Spriggan build through all of the normal mode monoliths and unlocked Empowered Monoliths aka the level 100 Legendary variants of each. I’ve been focused on farming Black Sun mostly for a chance at the squirrel hat aka Herald of the Scurry. I’ve yet to give up on the hope of eventually playing that build. More than anything at the moment I am just farming experience to gain levels. I would really like to have at least one character hit level 100 before the 1.0 drop. This is only the second character that I have hit Empowered Monoliths on so I am still relatively new to the Last Epoch endgame as a whole. That said I already feel like I could use some variety in my life with the content, and my hope is that we maybe see some of the randomization changes sooner rather than later. The Action RPG YouTube channel does a summary of the Friday dev chat live streams and it sounds like something akin to a Loot Goblin is a near-term addition.

I’ve been milking a little bit more experience out of the level 90 normal monoliths because they are so much more chill than empowered. I really need to get back into the habit of throwing on an audiobook while grinding, because when I am doing that… I don’t really notice the repetitive nature of doing monoliths or delve or whatever ARPG grind I happen to be engaged with. The Power sort of broke me as far as books go… and I’ve yet to really dive into another book after that. I tried starting a few but ended up bouncing pretty early. I have a target for the next novel to consume via Audio Book, but I just need to sit down and decide to do it.

At least until the next Path of Exile League, this is going to probably be my gaming happy place. I am still progressing in Honkai Star Rail and got my first character to level 70 last night. I’m going to need to do some devoted grinding in order to get the materials to pull up the rest of my team to 70 as well… then my secondary team after that. I’m pretty happy with the state of my gaming options at the moment. I have Final Fantasy XVI but since it is on console… I just never seem to feel like playing it. I realize I am the weirdo… but the idea of playing a game on a console just feels so exhausting. Controllers are not my natural mode of gameplay and while I grew up playing Atari, NES, SNES, and Genesis… the moment I got access to a 386 computer I was all in on PC gaming. I am honestly somewhat annoyed that Square chose to launch that game ONLY on the PS5 for the time being. If they had done PS5 and Epic Game Store… I would be probably actively playing it on the PC right now.

Anyways hopefully your week is going smoothly. Mine is considerably less hectic than last week was now that the world around me has largely recovered from the storm damage. What are you playing right now? Drop me a line below. Last little note… if you are on Blue Sky you can follow me there now. I had a nice person shove an invite code into my hand. I am not entirely certain what I think about it so far. It feels really really basic, and I still greatly prefer mastodon/gamepad. I am however checking it a few times a day.