Gaming

Gaming post

Freezing Fire Aura

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Good Morning, Folks. The last couple of weeks have been a wild ride from the chemo two weeks ago, to the recovery last week, and trying to sort out the current state of my blood pressure medication. While my stamina is still completely shot, and I only have so much “oomph” in me, I was able to more or less have a normal weekend to prepare for the upcoming chemopocalpyse that will be hitting starting tomorrow. I wish I had taken a before photo… because the house was a complete pit, and I just lacked the energy to do much of anything about it. That is not to say that my house is not still messy… because it is… but I was at least able to do enough of the normal rotation of chores this weekend to sort of reset things and prepare for the impending “torpor” brought on by the next round of chemo. I have some stuff to do tonight to prep trash to pull it out to the curb tomorrow morning, but I picked up everything that really mattered and restocked my food stores with easy-to-eat items for the next two-week block. I am hoping, though, since I have mostly sorted out the blood pressure thing, that my “reset times” are a bit more stable this go round. I also purposefully tried to eat more food over the weekend, because I know I will probably not be eating much over the next few days, as I will not feel up to it.

I spent most of my weekend gaming time playing Path of Exile, as I have continued chipping away at challenges. I am sitting on 31/40 and, in theory, have 32, 33, and 34 well in my sights. I’ve completed everything for the “GGG” challenge except for actually hitting level 100, and I had to pause some of my other challenge work because I did a bit of backpedalling there with a few bad deaths. I’ve rebounded, though and am sitting at 3 pips from 100, and might be able to grind that out tonight. After that, I will go back to chipping away at Tremendous Tempests and Sandswept Survivor, which involve me forcing quant via sacrifice fragments in the map device, and running what ends up being some rather juicy Legion maps. Astrolabes are pretty slow and expensive, but I am chipping away at those with my Delve tree, which is pretty easy and does not generate a ton of death risk. Delve traditionally is my safest way to grind out to level 100, because it is very predictable, so I will be doing as much of that as I can until I ding. I really wish that Sulphite was itemised, and something that I could just buy outright on the exchange.

Prior to taking some bad deaths, though, I was having a lot of fun with Legion. Essentially, I would have at least two Legions per map, and each of them would spawn a ton of generals, with those guaranteed loot tiles. I’ve never really gone all in on Legion before during a league, and really forcing myself to go hard on it has been a lot of fun. I did this last league with Alva temples, and learned so much about that mechanic. In theory, I should probably do Blight, the next league, since that is one of those league mechanics that I have never really focused on. Each time I do this… I broaden my knowledge of the game and add more tools to my kit for sourcing my own stuff. Path of Exile is way too detailed to ever learn fully in a single league… so instead I have taken to focusing on single mechanics over the course of MANY leagues to reach a broad understanding. Once I got the foothold of Delve under me, it then allowed me to pretty much tackle any other content because I could reliably make enough currency to fund those endeavours. POE really is the sort of game where you need to learn a “trade” and then be able to utilise that trade to learn other trades.

Speaking of trades… this was supposed to be the league where the “chaos standard” was abolished. However, that said… most of the trades that I do are still in large blocks of chaos. After the video I just linked, it came out that Nightmare maps, which replaced t17s, would still only be modifiable with chaos orbs. I am not entirely certain if that is what saved the day, or simply the fact that we, as players, still place some measure of value and stability in the fact that chaos orbs are familiar. Bench crafts still require them as well, but I think more than anything… it is just that we are used to trading in chaos. Exalted Orbs are certainly way more common, but also…. less common than Chaos, so if we ever shifted the base trading unit, I could see going with those. In truth, it does not really matter, but Chaos to Divines have been just volatile enough that any time I get up around 1000 Chaos, I convert some of it. I’ve blown copious amounts of currency on dumb things… like, for example, squeaking an extra gem out of pretty much every link by getting an imbued gem with lifetap on it.

In other gaming news, I rolled a new character over in Last Epoch. I do not have the mental or physical fortitude right now to take down Aberroth with my Forged Weapons build in its current state. It requires me to do mechanics entirely too much for where I am right now. Over the weekend, Tam talked about how strong the current state of Fire Aura is on a Spellblade, and given that I am an enjoyer of all things Righteous Fire… I figured I owed it to myself to check it out. Right now, the guide I am following is doing something that I have wondered about for years… it converts this Fire Aura to cold damage so that it freezes things. Legitimately, one of my mad daydreams has been an alternate version of Righteous Fire that scales off cold and freezing damage vectors, and right now this seems to be doing exactly that. Cold damage traditionally in ARPGs represents a really strong defensive layer unto itself…. so I think as this scales it will be precisely that.

I think the bigger challenge at the moment is that I am trying to sus out exactly what path through the campaign I want to take. I am probably going to do some skips, because I cannot see doing all of the acts again on this character. However, I am not quite strong enough to jump straight into monos at level 30ish. So I think I might do one of the campaign skips and see where that takes me, and then wrap up the last few acts of the game. The only thing that I do not love about Last Epoch is that most of the builds require you to press the majority of your buttons, which means…. I tend to create a button macro on my logitech g600 that presses all of the buttons at once. The ideal state of an ARPG build involves mostly hitting a single button for me, and when I can’t generate that… I tend to figure out ways to force it. In Diablo 3, I used to use the numlock trick to constantly be firing everything other than my main attacks, so the whole mouse macro thing is not too far from that.

I know tomorrow the bottom will start to fall out again, but I feel like I am at least better prepared for it. I need to deal with trash tonight and then make sure both my tablet and phone are charged fully. I am about as ready for this as I can be. I don’t have the levels of anxiety that I had going into it two weeks ago, because I have been there and done that… and more or less made it out unscathed. I am going to continue to take notes, because due to the whole blood pressure situation, I don’t feel like I got an accurate understanding of what each day was like. When my pressure bottomed out… I was fighting that more than I was actually fighting the effects of the chemo. If you are still around for my shenanigans, thanks. I am not going anywhere, but my schedule pretty much is dictated by how I am feeling on a given day.

AggroChat #564 – Moon Joy

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Featuring: Ace, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We were out last week due to various scheduling issues, but led off the show with a bit of a message about Bel going through Chemo and maybe having scheduling issues every other week. From there, we talk a bit about the Artemis II mission and how wild it is to experience “Moon Joy”, as we enter a new phase of space exploration.  Ash talks a bit about the Rabbit and Steel update, and Tam talks about the wild experience of playing Screamer.  From there, we talk quite a bit about the Promise Mascot Agency and what a weird gem of a game it is, and how the developer is maybe one to watch going forward.  We talk a bit about Last Epoch and the progress each of us makes, and how Tam was able to lean entirely into his player fantasy…  and at the same time, complete more of the game than I think any of us have, as he dropped Uber Aberroth.  Tam also discusses how sometimes it is just best to nuke your emulator devices and start from scratch, and then we wrap things up with a bit of discussion about upcoming changes to Dune Awakening and how they “get it” and are changing the game to reflect the PVE nature of its player base.

Topics Discussed:

  • A Very Special Message
  • Experiencing Moon Joy
  • Rabbit & Steel Update
  • Screamer
  • Promise Mascot Agency
  • Last Epoch
    • Tam gets his player fantasy
  • Nuking Your Device
    • Rebuilding a Ayn Thor
  • Dune Awakening Gets It

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Mr. House and Scalpels

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Good Afternoon Folks. I know my blog is a bit of a mess at the moment, but yall are going to have to bear with me. I used to live my life based on a deeply predictable rhythm. I got up around 5:30, and was upstairs around 6 am, having done all of my morning chores like feeding myself, the indoor cats, and the outdoor cats, and even often doing something like starting a load of dishes or laundry. That process is so much slower right now because it takes me quite a bit of time to recover from pretty much every action. I am hoping that, given enough time, I will develop stamina again. I am already doing way better today than I was last week, and a lot of that was jumping through hoops to figure out exactly how much medication I need to maintain my blood pressure at reasonable levels right now. I’ve also found a few things that taste reasonable, and honestly, even kind of hit the spot, so my nutrition side is way more functional as well. My life has often been about figuring out and building routines… and this whole cancer/chemo thing is a giant wrecking ball to one routine and I am having to craft a brand new one out of the pieces that are left behind.

First off, huge props to Quelex for sharing with me some info on how to knock out one of the Gallant Grinding Goals extremely easily. Sure, it was a bit “spendy” because it required some specific popular scarabs, but over the course of four maps, I was able to knock out that bottom objective. I am now slowly poking my way through influenced maps with over 100% Item Quant, and also doing them in Astrolabe maps, so I can be knocking out two objectives at the same time. I am still using the Scarab/Domination/Legion Atlas that I threw together for the previous objective, because it drops plenty of stuff and goes pretty quickly. I figure around the time I ding 100, I will probably knock out the Influenced maps objective and polish off “GGG”. Then it is just down to slowly chipping away at Tyrannical Tiers and Sandswept Survivor, which are both easy enough but simply require a stupid amount of map runs. Atlas Astrolabes should also be finishing up while I am doing the influenced maps, but it mostly just requires me spending chaos to buy the astrolabes.

Mapping has been a really chill experience for me to turn my brain off and just exist. Last night I spent most of the evening watching shows and catching up on various things. I finished up on Season 2 of Fallout, and am pretty pumped with where things left off there. Fallout may be the single best video game adaptation of anything, because it nailed the universe so perfectly… without seeming to feel like it needed to retread ground we have already gone over in the games. After that, I started up Season 2 of Monarch, and thus far, that show continues to give me everything I want in a Godzilla franchise television outing. I am pretty sure that Apple TV might pay more for their shows than other platforms, because the VFX budget here is pretty amazing. At that point, it was getting late, and I figured I should probably turn in early, given that my body is still recovering from everything it is going through. I will probably pick up where I left off tonight and dive into more episodes of Monarch while I chip away at Path of Exile challenges.

Yesterday I talked about Scalpel, but I figured I would give a bit of an update. I have been 100% using it since then and now… I think I can never go back to good ole Awakened POE Trade. Firstly, the whole ability to manipulate your loot filter on the fly is really nice, and the only thing I wish that it did was directly integrate with my profile on Filterblade, so that I could use it to tick up and down the strictness. You can manipulate individual rules and currencies very easily, but yesterday I wanted to just escalate everything up a strictness tier, and still needed to go to Filterblade to do that. The best part about Scalpel for me personally is how good its price prediction tools are, which admittedly are simply relying on Ninja and the Trade API. Awakened POE Trade always tried to make a bit of a fuzzy recommendation, and it was always slightly wrong, and it relied on me looking things up manually most of the time. Scalpel solves those problems and seems like it is just going to keep getting better, the more functionality that is added to it. I need to sort out the Patreon information and give them some money, because I think I will be using this every single league going forward.

I went to my primary care doctor today, which is part of a monthly check-in that we have had since starting tirzepatide. I had to deal with changing how I am getting the meds going forward, but in truth, it should be much easier. I am desperate for a new normal and figuring out what that starts to look like. However, I realized in chatting with my doctor how different my life is going to look by this time next year. In theory, cancer should be far in my rearview mirror, and hopefully, they have pieced me back together into something resembling the original order of how organs connect. I am already down 50 lbs roughly since I started the journey with tirzepatide…. so I am going to be a completely different person than I am today. 2027… I need there to be no crisis of the year… because the death of my spouse last year, and cancer this year… are a decade’s worth of bullshit at once. I really want to travel next year, and figure out how to go see some of the people who matter to me deeply. I’ve lived my life long enough that various folks whom I have known for literal decades, and cannot imagine living my life without, are just amorphous “internet people”.

Anyways! Thanks for bearing with me as I construct a new normal over the course of the next several weeks.

More Challenges and a New Tool

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve made a few more attempts at getting back into Last Epoch, but I find myself in this really odd place. Namely, I do not have enough gold, and am not generating enough gold, to keep buying new tabs for the stuff that I am farming. I could restrict my filters further, but I already am mostly only showing things that are worth picking up. I’ve made it to the point in my build where I either need to just hang it up or farm super hard to perfect my loot. With everything else that I find myself going through, I am leaning way closer to just hanging it up at the moment and calling myself done with Season 4. I’ve made a few more attempts at Aberroth, and there is a phase that I always end up struggling with a bit, and I am just not sure if I have the mental fortitude or general dexterity right now to push through it. As such, I think it might be time for me to just back away from this season. I had a lot of fun, and I got most of my usual stuff accomplished, but similar to the fact that I don’t really enjoy Uber Bosses in POE… this might just be the limits of how much I care about Last Epoch.

As such, I have been farming quite a bit of random map and delve content in Path of Exile, because my build is immortal enough that I can mostly turn my brain off. This is the level of engagement that I need right now, something that is interesting and passes the time, but does not require a lot from me. I knocked out a few more seasonal challenges and upgraded my totem pole a few times. Right now, I am chipping away at a few really long grinds, while also trying to hit level 100. I am roughly halfway through 99 at the moment, and as such am already running Omens of Amelioration just in case I take a random death. I’ve been running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual map strat that is generating a large number of them just in case, and when I finally hit 100, I am sure I will just cash in any that I have lying around on the market.

Thirty-Four challenges tend to be where I stop every league, and I am at this point, I think 3 challenges away from hitting that. If I never make it back and do any more challenges in this league, I would be happy enough with this totem as my final mark for the league, especially given everything I am going through right now. I know at some point soon, the whole POE2 machine will fire up, and I will start getting interested in whatever is happening with 0.5. I also know that there is a D4 expansion dropping in May that might garner my attention. So in theory, I should probably push through and knock out whatever I can knock out while my focus is available. Everything in my life feels so up in the air right now, and will probably be that way for at least the next four months as I go through cancer infusions.

One thing that is super interesting that just came out is a brand new tool for Path of Exile that essentially replaces all of the third-party tools that folks generally use. It has a price checker, an item recoloring tool, and a way to edit your filters in real time on the fly while you are mapping to add or remove items or shift tiers. I’ve only just started playing with it, but I can see entirely moving away from Awakened POE Trade, especially if this also starts supporting Path of Exile II. The above video is a deep dive into the features of the tool from the developer and his friend, the streamer Aero. Probably the coolest functionality is to be able to shift what tier something is on the fly, which is especially useful if you might care about an item that the general filters would not. I tend to run my filters way too lax for my own good, because I don’t want to miss anything I might at some point care about. However, if I can shift them on the fly, I might actually start using a tool like this to ratchet things down.

One thing I think I should warn you all is that I do not really know what the future of this blog is going to be in the coming months. My life has been turned upside down. “Chemo Brain” is most definitely a thing I am experiencing, and as a result, I am having a bit harder time concentrating and banging out a blog post than I used to. I’ve already had way more gaps in posting than I have in literal years. This is probably going to continue, and I will keep posting whenever I think I can knock something out in a reasonable manner, that does not upset the delicate balance of everything else I have going on in my life. Hopefully, you will be along for this very intermittent journey.