gauntlet

Oops an Audiobook

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I woke up this morning and as I am oft to do… I sat in bed for a moment and scrolled through email to see what came in over night. I saw a charge from Audiobooksnow the site that I tend to buy my audiobooks for that was $9.99, and had a mild freak out. Did my account get hacked? Did I accidentally sign up for some auto purchase club book thing? NOPE! I apparently pre-ordered Brigands and Breadknives by Travis Baldree and completely forgot about it. So at some point today I will be starting that, and pretty much mainlining it until I finish. Audiobooks are really the perfect compliment for grinding in Path of Exile, and I am very much in head down grind time. Today is a holiday for me, and I have an appointment at 9 am in town, but once I get back from that… I will likely be starting the audiobook and snuggling with cats while POEing it until my brain bleeds. I should probably pick up the house before I dive into that… because everything needs to be cleaned and vacuumed.

Essentially I have reached the point of the league where I need to start chipping away at the various Challenges. Most of them are not that hard, for example I need to unlock 3 Minor Pantheons, and I have plenty of Divine Vessels to do this. I just have not. I did not even fully unlock the one that I am using because the second trait is not really all that important for my build. However there are some that suck… like for example I am going to have to consume a Divine Orb either by using it directly on an item or using it in a craft. I still do not have that many divine orbs to my name, so each one feels like it is precious beyond words.

I have made a handful of Divine Orb sales over the last few days, and I really dig the Sales History tab that got built into the new trade system. The shield I sold for 2 Div was a crafting experiment where I happened into another Shaper shield and I threw purple juice at it until I hit 5% recover on block. The Cloak of Flame is essentially just the first one that I linked using a Black Morrigan that I recently replaced with a corrupted chest with 5% less Fire Damage taken on it. The Stygian Vise was just me flipping a base that I got as a drop that was Hunter Influenced. The gloves were some failed tree tree crafts that were really well rolled, but not good enough to replace my current gloves. While this is still poverty league, some things still sell pretty well.

I am spending most of my time down in the mines still, because there is a brisk business in fossils and resonators, especially now that you cannot passively earn azurite. I expect these to go up in price the longer the league goes, and essentially right now I cash them in whenever I need more divines to buy something. I guess I should figure out what I actually care enough about to buy going forward. I have started doing some heist in the vague attempt that I can get a good ring base to craft on. My rings are not in the best shape, so that would in theory be the next thing I tackle gear wise. Everything else is good enough… or that the upgrade would be 20+ Divines to replace. You quickly reach a place where all of the cheap and easy upgrades are gone. I should in theory start working on replacing my gems with awakened versions.

Over in Destiny Rising, I bumped my Maru high enough to start doing Grandmaster content, and Ace and I got together last night to run through four of our keys. I played Maru one round and Helhest the next round, and then we alternated as we did a few strikes. We tried Gauntlet Blitz, but it was super painful… and scarred us to the point where we did not want to try it again. I think maybe the Grandmaster mode of the new Blitz encounters are a bit overtuned. We got the one where you fight the giant eyeball and we just could not chip away at its health, and everyone kept dying. Strikes on the other hand felt WAY easier, so we instead did two of those and called it good.

I actually managed to get two exotic weapon mods that matched the perks of the Grenade Launcher that I have been using. This is definitely a massive boon for Maru, but will also pull my wolf up a bit as well since I have swapped to using Sweet Business on him instead of the Grenade launcher. I ran out of resources but at some point I will hopefully pull this the rest of the way to +10 on each of the mods. My next step is probably to push the primary weapon slot grenade launcher to 85, as I really like playing Maru. I know she is the new hotness, but I am having a lot of fun and she lives in this weird happy place between how sturdy Jolder is and how squishy Helhast has been. The on demand shield ability helps a ton when it comes to staying alive during content.

After grouping together I went downstairs and started up Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Senshi on my television and watched several episodes while playing Path of Exile. I had made it pretty far in the series watching the subtitled version, but decided to restart it entirely with the dual language version. I’ve basically decided that unless I cannot get the english language version of something… I am always going to wait for it because seemingly most content gets released in both languages anymore. I know there are purists out there, but really… I would prefer to not read television if I can help it. It also means that if it is a language that i understand, I can play games while watching it. This series is pretty great, though I have to admit I do prefer the Japanese language voice actor for Senshi. The rest of the actors though I prefer the English language interpretation.

Anyways wrapping this up because I have stuff to do, so that I can get ready for my appointment in town at 9. I hope you have a most wonderful day.

Onslaught with Friends

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I had quite a lot of fun running around in Destiny Rising with Ace and Ammo. Since we had last grouped Ammo had managed to finish up the main storyline which opened access to a whole slew of new activities. She had not experienced Gauntlet Onslaught, aka the raid at all and after taking down the Stronghold we had uncovered for the pack, we queued one by one through all of the parts of it. We also did all of the new Gauntlet Blitz modes that are being previewed right now, and have guaranteed weapon drops associated with them. It was a heck of a lot of fun, and while we struggled a bit with Issakkis, in finding a group that could do the mechanic… we cleared everything without much issue. We did fail once at breakin, but shifted our strategy to make sure that I was on the first bridge crew, and Ace was on the last bridge crew… because we had someone take a key on that last round and just mill around killing random stuff.

The big highlight of the night is that I finally pulled the Renegade ghost shell on my main account, which drops from the raid. I also pulled a second copy of Izanagi’s Burden, which will allow me to progress that weapon at some point for Tan-2 and Umeko. Though to be honest, if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to be bringing Helhest. I really love Maru the new champion and am working on leveling her up so that she can become one of my mains for progressing content. I needed someone that I really liked that could handle spread shinkas and she does so masterfully. I think Ace and I are going to hang out tonight and do some of the weekly reset content, and maybe tomorrow during the day a bit since I am off due to the holiday. I have business to take care of in the morning but should be home by noon and ready to roll.

Over in Path of Exile, it was a weekend of finishing things up. I ended the weekend with 115 of 115 maps completed, my four voidstones, and all of the map favorites unlocked except Sirius and the Feared. At some point I will run Sirius, but I have not done enough maps to gain the fragments yet. I just bought fragments for the other ones, and I guess I could do the same for Sirius but it did not feel that pressing. I’ve also completed a t17 which unlocked my six socket map device, and have started running proper maps loaded with scarabs and everything. Right now I am alternating between Shipyard and Toxic Sewer, because both are fairly decent maps for the type of gameplay I play… and not too bad honestly for the breach mechanic. They both offer at least some modicum of bottlenecking for the times when you have to defend Ailith.

When I dinged 96, I devoted some time to running through a bunch of boss encounters and I completed the pinnacle fight for Breach, where you fight both Not-Tul and Not-Esh together. I am not sure if it is always Tul and Esh or if you sometimes get the other combinations of the Breachlords that are not Chayula. The story of this Breach league is really interesting and I love how it is essentially setting up the events that ultimately lead to the coming of Xesht in Path of Exile II. I would love it if we got more of these betweener leagues that move the story forward for each league’s content. For example I would love an updated version of Abyss that brings us closer to what it is like in Path of Exile II, because it is SO MUCH better than defacto Abyss that we currently have. The only league I am scared about them changing is Delve, but that is mostly because I love it so much that I do not want them to fuck it up and make it no longer fun for me.

I’ve been slowly working on my build while leveling my character towards 100, and I picked up a Foulborn Red Dream jewel, which is helpful this league for stacking life. As a result I have almost 8000 life, and there are some other things that I could do to push it higher. Pohx showcased a version of his build running 10k life, and I effectively need to swap from Immortal Flesh to a well crafted Stygian Vise to get there. This was a rather costly swap because the jewel itself was 2 divines, and then each of the five tattoos needed was around 70 chaos. That said… I’ve never run Righteous Fire with this much health so it is at least worth doing for the time being. I feel a bit squishier than I have in previous incarnations of RF, and I am not entirely certain what is going on there. It might be that I currently only have 30% reduced crit damage. I am contemplating swapping in a Taste of Hate to also get more phys to elemental conversion.

I am also still working on getting some better gear upgrades. On the Tree Tree I am working on crafting a new pair of gloves, because while my current ones are pretty solid and I have yet been unable to replace them… I could also have way more life on them. I am still fairly proud of the Archedemon Crown and Shaper Shield that I crafted. I bought a new sceptre which I picked up fairly cheaply, and recently swapped over to a Cloak of Flame with more ignite duration, more fire resistance, and 5% reduced fire damage taken which is super useful. At some point I would love to get a good corruption for Annihilation’s Approach boots, but the best one is super expensive thanks to Pohx’s video about them. My amulet and rings are all sort of trash and could be improved greatly, but it really depends upon how much currency I want to pour into them. Now that I am delving around 200 depth reliably and running t16s easily, I can start generating way more currency.

The other thing that I added was a Light of Meaning, buffing fire damage. I lost some damage in the swap to the Red Dream jewel because I had to give up a jewel with fire multi on it. This single jewel swap pushed me well past where I was originally with the damage and took the entire build up into the 1.5 million-ish range, making the boss fights way more comfortable and the general mapping and delving way faster. Right now I have a jewel with Fire Multi and Max Fire Res on it, and swapping that for one with max life would be helpful… but those are running around 10 div at the moment and I do not have that. I tried the Sir Gog method of crafting Jewels with the Tree Tree for a bit, and didn’t have much luck. I have way more luck printing gloves, so I am back on that path for now. Essentially I am looking for gloves with 21% regen, 100+ flat life, 45+ fire res, 58+ dex… and then anything else that is useful life. I’ve gotten close a few times and have sold the failures. If I get a 21% regen fractured roll I might try either fossil crafting or harvest crafting to get the rest of the way there.

I am basically at the point in the league where I need to start chipping away at achievements so I can get my totem pole. The build is stable and reliable, and I can pretty much do any content on it. I am fishing for an Aul in Delve, but have not had much luck. One thing that I have noticed is that I think they have killed the curse on hit rings from Delve, either that or made them extremely uncommon. I’ve cleared a bunch of the elemental nodes down there and not seen a single one yet. I always beeline for these because they also reward elemental fossils, which I find way more useful than any of the loot other than the curse rings. According to the trade site, they still exist… but have either had their rarity cranked or my luck has just been shit. The death of Hexblast Mines though, pretty much decimated the market for these so it is not like they were selling well anyways. I used to throw 20c on each of them in the hopes that maybe one of them would move, but given the deflation of this league it seems like they are all around 1c each.

In other unrelated news… I have been watching Frieren for the last few weeks and finished up season one on Saturday. This show is extremely delightful and I highly suggest giving it a watch if you like that D&D party vibe. I would say it has thematic notes aligned with Delicious in Dungeon/Dungeon Meshi except it is effectively the tale in reverse. Frieren was the Mage for a party that defeated the Demon King, and a huge part of the show is going on another adventure to somewhat retrace the steps that the first party made. Elves are effectively immortal in this universe, so the march of time just works differently for her… and the decade spent partying together… felt like a brief interaction for her. Through retracing the steps she is effectively realizing what she missed. You would think this would make the show deeply melancholy but it isn’t really, and through retracing the steps… she realizes how special the first journey was. Super charming honestly, and well worth a watch of the first 28 episodes. I will be anxiously awaiting the drop for season 2.

Suspicious Dongle

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Good Morning Folks. For awhile now I have used a wireless headset downstairs with my laptop, and I have come to love it. The only real problem with it is that I wish it were semi-open like the Superlux headphones that I use upstairs. When led me down the path of wishing there was a way to convert a normal wired headset to a wireless one. After a bit of back and forth on mastodon, I found an option that is pretty tiny and weighs almost nothing. There are a bunch of versions of this, but the one that I purchased is from MIPEACE and it essentially hangs off the short cord directly from the headphones as seen in the image above. I thought I would need to attach it somehow to the outside of my headset, but since it is so lightweight it seems to be able to just hang there comfortably. I charged it up last night, and now I am curious if it can get through the entire day on a single charge. I will of course report back how well this works out. I am keeping music running in the background so I know when it cuts out.

I am still a bit all over the place right now, spending time in Diablo IV, New World, and Destiny Rising. If I had to claim a main game right now, it would probably be Diablo IV since I am trying to level up and push into the end game. I am taking it super chill right now. I am sure I could grind up in a single afternoon if I really focused on it, but I do that during Path of Exile leagues… and since I don’t take Diablo near as seriously there is no point not to just slow roll this. The Druid felt sort of awful for the first few levels but now it feels pretty solid. Namely when I got some sort of spirit recovery I have been able to mostly just run around pulverizing things. I have enough defenses that I can largely just gather things up in a big pack and them smash them to bits with my beary goodness.

One of the things that I always wish I did…. while leveling, was focus on the various strongholds. This is one of those things that are nice to have unlocked… but also something that I never really want to go back and do later. So this time around I finally smartened up and that has essentially been my focus. As of this morning prior to sitting down to write this blog post, I have now opened every single stronghold and it got me to level 46. Now I just need to find some other activity to grind out the rest of the levels and start the endgame proper. Other than Strongholds, I have also popped around the map unlocking the various waypoints so that when I do hit the endgame, I won’t be hamstrung by not having a port open while doing events.

Between lunch breaks and this evening, I am going to see if I can hit level 60 and start working on Paragon levels. In theory if I hang out in the hellfire areas it should go quickly enough. I’ve done a world boss and a legions event, but the experience gain there seemed pretty slow. At some point I should probably bump up the difficulty, but really since the same gear drops on the first two difficulties there has not been much of a reason to do it. I think I am tanky enough to handle it without much issue, but I am also exceptionally lazy. I need to probably start running some content that reliably drops legendaries so I can collect the necessary affixes needed for my eventual build. I need to look at the maxroll guide I have been following and seeing which affixes come from dungeons, and then get those knocked out while I am still leveling.

I connected up with Ace again last night. We had not really been planning on doing so, but I just happened to notice that they were online when I was starting to grind out my pinnacle rewards for the day. We ran a handful of strikes and mostly it was just a good excuse to hang out on voice and chat while doing activities. I promise I am not super vain… but I still have to screenshot any time I get MVP at the end of a match, especially if it is as Jolder. Generally speaking MVPs tend to favor those characters that deal large amounts of damage, and/or provides some sort of support benefit. I do find it hilarious that “Damage Taken” is a thing that the game is tracking as something that is good. My job as a defensive character though is to get up in the bosses face and try and get it to focus on me… since I have my health bar and a full over-shield bar most of the time.

I’ve been doing the planetary dailies on Finnala, and while I do not really love the character… It has still been fun. Essentially each of the champions has some sort of activities in their lore panel that it asks you to do. For Nala it is do 10 days worth of the destination daily quests in the Red Sea Rift area. Jolder had the same quest chain and I have already completed hers, so I figured I might as well be knocking them out for another character since I am going to do a set of these every day regardless. At some point though I really need to shift focus on the Jiangshi Metro area because my faction level there is pretty pitiful. That first zone is just nowhere near as well designed as the second zone, so it is way less enjoyable just to run around killing stuff in. When I need to do a bounty… I tend to pop down to Red Sea Rift instead.

I went through the process of setting up Overwolf last night, so that I could start running Aeternum Map on the second monitor. Essentially this allows me to keep up a map that tracks my progress through the world, and also shows me the locations of all of the resource spawn points. I have some zones in the game memorized just from running them so much… for example there is a loop in Brightwood that I can run in my sleep. However they have added a lot of higher tier resources into zones like Edengrove, and I figured I might as well have the map up so I can see if there is something that I want to make a beeline for. I hate Overwolf… so I only keep it running so long as I need it for the purpose of this map. Overwolf is essentially keeping track of your location in the world, and all of the tools seem to rely on it to make the maps interactive.

The positive of the map though is it has led me to explore some areas I probably never would have been. For example there is a cave up near Shattered Mountain in Edengrove that is chock full of Mithril nodes. Sure you have to find waves of the exploding blight mobs… and have to keep waiting on your blight bar to tick down, but I think I pulled almost 1000 ore just from this one location last night in a single pass. Similarly I have made beelines off the path to find other precious nodes while exploring things. One cool thing is that since the level cap is now 65… things like Shattered Mountain are no longer as scary as they once were. I need to get out there and explore a bit more, and maybe take down some of the bosses out there for funsies. Every major boss spawn point… seems to always have a group at it. Over the weekend I did a bunch of kills of Baines at the top of a tower in Edengrove, just because I happened to stumble upon a full party hanging out there. Boss farming was one of my favorite things in this game.

Hades 2 is also leaving Early Access today, so at some point I will probably give that a spin. I am installing it currently so I have it at the ready when I am in the mood to give it a go. I know tonight we will be doing our normal Guild Wars 2 shenanigans. I am hoping the crew is further along in the quest chain so that we can knock out some of the things that you cannot get through running quick play. I already have my Legendary Gloves, so mostly I just want to do whatever I can to help push the others through the process. I feel like I am all over the place right now and having trouble focusing on any one thing in particular. That is probably okay, given how much I hyper fixate on a single thing at a time for weeks.

Bears and Blunderbusses

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Morning Folks. It rained most of the day and so far it seems like the fix from the roofers is working. That said, it has only ever leaked when it was torrential rain, and instead we got a light drizzle. I finally washed the towels, but here is a picture of Gracie guarding against leaks. Yesterday was a lot. Not only did I have the fasting blood draw that I talked about yesterday, but I was trying to deal with a bunch of “death stuff” as I collectively call it. Namely I have had a few checks come in that were in my spouse’s name… after I had done what I thought was the right thing and removed her name from our banking accounts. It seems as though I will have to file a case with the probate court and create an “estate” account in order to cash these now… something that at a bare minimum will cost me $200 just for file the paperwork, let alone whatever I will need to pay a lawyer to draw up said paperwork. Thus far the checks don’t even total $100… so this is not likely something I will be doing. I dealt with a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff yesterday, including calling the medical examiner to see if they have finally given a proper cause of death…. which they have… but now I am waiting for official death certificates. All of this… extremely fucking draining.

The absolute high point of my evening was hanging out with my virtual sibling Ace and doing some Destiny Rising. We essentially hung out together and ground out a bunch of strikes, until we were both completely out of pinnacle currency… and then ran a few after that for good measure. For whatever reason we seemed to keep getting The Pit over and over, and stumbled onto a weird glitch in the matrix. It seems that if you have gone down the path of becoming a Mentor… your light requirement is higher for queuing for heroics than when you were a “New Light”. This seems exceptionally lame, and led to a scenario to where they could not queue as anything other than Estela, the champion that they have most recently poured resources into to bump up. This was a bit annoying when one of the dailies involved killing things with a void champion, and they could not play one.

My highest light champion is Jolder, which I am largely still maining. However Estela, Wolf, and Umeko are all pretty close in ranking. I’ve still not really found an Arc champion that I enjoy very well, and I am hoping that maybe the next premium banner will bring one that is a bit more enjoyable to play than anything I have gotten so far. Ace pulled the Arc Staff guy and said that so far they seem pretty fun. I am not too far from the Mythic choice pity on the normal banner, so in theory I will likely pick him as my choice when it comes down to that. I really wish that the banner was just for pulling additional copies of champions for powering them up, and that there was a way to unlock every champion by default through a quest chain or something. It really feels like that sort of thing would better serve a game like Destiny Rising, where so much of the game is based on team composition.

Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 10, and I rolled a new character to see how the game has progressed since I last paid attention to it. I’ve sat out the last few seasons and for the most part… everything is perfectly cromulent. I heard that the pulverize druid was really strong, so I ended up rolling one of those. I think the challenge that both Druid and Barbarian have is that they feel sort of awful to play early game… but become godlike in the late game. So you have to suffer a bit until your build comes online. I am very thankful that at some point in the past I spent money on a nice looking cosmetic set… because the base druid vibe is not really my thing. I wish there was a way to just run around in Werebear form all of the time, because that shit is awesome. I feel like this is missing out on something significantly here. The game would be better if you could just always be Werebear or Werewolf.

I have not made it super far, but I am also not really rushing it. This morning my build started to come a bit more online and the Druid as a whole is feeling much better as I am now in my 20s. I figure this is going to be something that I poke out off and on until I hit the level cap and build a reasonable build. That said… when a new Path of Exile season drops I am abandoning this. Additionally I know that Legion Remix is happening early in October and it is likely that if I have not hit the level cap and am farming the endgame by the time that comes out… D4 is also getting dropped in favor of that. I’ve contemplated firing up World of Warcraft and trying to get caught up on the story there, but it still just doesn’t really feel right. I am interested in a lot of the things that are going on in that game, but am not sure I am really in the mood for a traditional MMORPG experience.

New World on the other hand seems to be clicking pretty well. I’ve swapped back to my level 65 main on Pangaea and spent a bit of time just roaming around and getting used to the combat again. Mostly it is muscle memory that came back extremely quickly. One of my favorite aspects of the game has always been roaming around and harvesting resources, and I am starting to do that again. I did figure out how to upgrade gear, but the process is confusing and arduous and nowhere near as clear as it used to be. I think Amazon Game studios suffers from some poor game design at times… and there are weird gates for things that should be more accessible. The whole concept of needing to craft dungeon keys for example seems to still be a thing, and it is weird that you would not want your players just playing your content all of the time. This is especially fraught given the great experiences we have had recently with the Fractal Incursion event in Guild Wars 2.

All of that said, there are some pretty solid crafted gear options and I think in the short term I am going to focus more on leveling up my tradeskills. Ultimately I would need to push things up to 250 in order to craft the best stuff, and a lot of my harvesting abilities are already climbing past 200. I am in no rush to do any of this, but I am interested to see what the new content that drops looks like. The biggest problem I have had with the evolution of New World, is that it has removed zones from the game in order to rework them as something else. I am hoping this new zone is actually that… new territory to be explored that has never existed in the game before. That is not to say that I don’t think that the reworked zones are not good steps… but games need to expand… not just be revised to death.

Anyways. That is my yesterday. Today I am back at work like normal and will probably futz around with Diablo IV some more this evening and see if I can get closer to the level cap.