gladiator

Jack Attack

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Hey Folks! I am running very low on spoons this week but wanted to get a post out this morning since I already missed one on Tuesday. Basically last night I kept my head down and pushed through the campaign on my Bleed Gladiator. Right before taking out Kitava for the second time, I made the tree swap over to drop all of the two-handed damage nodes and pick up all of the block nodes. While it is not as fast as Bleed Cleave was while leveling… it sure feels immortal on what is effectively some pretty scuffed gear. It feels weird to be this strong, this early, without really doing much other than fixing my resistances.

The biggest portion of the swap required me to be at least level 65, so I could throw on Jack, the Axe. This is not the most optimal weapon for this build, but everyone is using it because it is “good enough” and does not require much thought. I picked up one that was really well rolled and has the 11% increased Physical Damage corruption which helps out a bit. The shield is also really important but this is a hand-me-down from my Righteous Fire Chieftain. A lot of builds are going with spell suppression and as such using an evasion base shaper shield, but I already had this one lying around and did not want to shell out additional currency right now. I figure if I run into issues I might shift over to a suppression-based setup but like I said yesterday… I am not that sold on suppression as a required layer.

I dumped a POB this morning just so you could see the state of the build if you wanted to. Largely for the next little bit I will be keeping my head down and pushing through levels to build out more of my tree. The gear that I am wearing is not amazing, but save for my necklace and the abyssal jewel this is all stuff that I had sitting in my vault that I made do with. I had to do a few harvest resistance swaps to get everything balanced out and I have a much better six-link chest for 78… but I have to get there in order to swap to it. Random pet peeve… I really wish that GGG would make it so that Pride had a buff icon indicating it was turned on because I keep finding myself checking that constantly.

The playstyle is a little weird right now in that I am mostly using Bladestorm for clear and then when I encounter something that does not get one-shot I will stop and Lacerate. Just charging around honestly does a pretty decent job of triggering bleeding… which triggers explosions… and takes out normal mobs effectively. It feels slower than Righteous Fire does because I am not dealing massive amounts of passive damage all the time. Essentially my playstyle right now is to charge around dropping bladestorms and then when I charge into a large pack cursing and lacerating the hardest target. I jumped straight into yellow maps upon completing the campaign, and tonight I will likely try a T16 just to see how far from the goals on the build I actually am. I don’t have ailments fixed at all… nor do I really have a plan for that. For the moment I am leaning on Brine King and Abberoth to take care of two of the three… then will have to figure something else out for shock.

This build feels insanely powerful, and honestly… I get why everyone seems to be playing some variant of it. It also seems to be super effective at taking down bosses so I might try some guardians and see how it does on those before moving up to Shaper/Elder. I want to do a bit more research into POE.Ninja builds because I can’t say I am super sold on Lacerate.

Belghast Bleed Bro

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Good Morning Everyone! Yesterday I was off from work, and wound up starting a character that I had been meaning to start. During the Settlers of Kalguur league, they completely reworked the Gladiator Ascendency along with a number of changes that improved melee. As a result, Bleed Gladiator is really freaking good and I’ve been wanting to create one with maxed block chance and recovery on block for a while. I upgraded the shaper shield I had been using on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and plan on using that hand-me-down on this character paired for the time being with a maxrolled Jack, The Axe. If I really love the build I might look at picking up a better itemized Rare weapon but for now the Unique slots in nicely and does not require much in the way of thought.

I’m level 51 and just a little bit of the way into Act 6. I’ve already completed my second Lab, which means that I have a 100% chance to inflict bleeding on hit, all of my bleeds are treated as aggravated damage, and when something dies that has been bleeding it causes a nice explosion. While I am a bit on the squishy side for now, at least until I go block-based… I am dealing stupid amounts of damage. Pretty much everything gets one shot. For now, I am largely a Bleed Sunder build following the tree from Zizaran’s league starter video, but at some point, I am going to pivot into something more along the lines of this. Zizaran is really focused on right-side builds and right-side defenses, and I am personally way more comfortable on the left side of the tree and as such I plan on pivoting in that direction. I will likely wear a lot of Armor/Evasion gear but plan on taking Iron Reflexes to convert all of that to Armor. I’ve personally never found Spell Suppression to be that amazing of a defensive layer but I know Ziz loves it and as such his build goes for 100%.

In other news, I have now maxed out my town and have upgraded everything that can be upgraded. This means I will no longer be draining large chunks of gold at once for upgrade purposes. I did another one of my Photoshop jobs showing everything sitting at rank 11. The only thing that is not ranked to 11 is the recombinator but it caps out at a much lower level. The big thing that I need to do still is go shopping for workers and upgrade some of the options I currently have available to me. I also need stupid amounts of ore, and I kind of wish there was some atlas support to increase the amount of ore you get from mapping. I am growing crops at a good rate, but I always feel like I am out of ore.

They released a patch on the 13th and it has been a bit on the controversial side. Namely this specific block:

Reworked how shipping Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipping Risk and Rewards. Previously, it was multiplying the shipment value and having a disproportionately high impact on risk compared to rewards. Now, it simply adds to Shipment Value and scales the amount of rewards based on the other goods being shipped. This means the way Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipment Value/Risk now directly correlates with the amount of rewards you will receive, and in almost all cases this is a buff from before.

In my experience, this has been true. Folks who had previously worked out some system other than what I have been doing… it is apparently not true. This seems to negatively impact folks who were shipping massive shipments. For the most part, I have shipped some items that were requested… maybe 1000 of each, then 55 of each other crop, and 8300 Thaumaturgic Dust. So far this seems to bring reasonable rewards and over the last few days, I have pulled four Divine Orbs doing this. It is very much not an every shipment sort of thing, but maybe one in three or one in four shipments. I might simply have hit a lucky streak of “Bel Luck” as my friends call it, but whatever the case it seems to be good.

The thing that I have noticed however is a massive increase in interdictions. During the entirety of this league until the patch, I had only seen a single instance where the Pirate Admiral waylayed my crews. Since the patch, I have fought him five more times. Don’t get me wrong I largely consider this to be a huge net positive because it is a fairly easy fight, and worth a huge chunk of gold. However, there are a lot of folks who are not terribly amused by this. The biggest problem is that if for some reason you disconnect in the middle of one of these interdiction fights, you lose your entire crew. You only get a single portal and when you disconnect it counts the encounter as failing and the fail condition is always that it is 100% wipe of the team that was abducted. This is especially tragic for folks who have a maxed-out crew of map runners. For me… none of my workers are terribly min-maxed so it would suck but not that much.

A lot of my focus right now is knocking out the low-hanging fruit when it comes to League Challenges. At the moment I am sitting at 21 of 40, and there are a number that would not be terribly awful to complete. Just mapping will eventually finish Overwhelming Opposition and Peddler’s Produce requires me to either craft a Grasping Mail or a Loreweave… both of which I have a tab full of rings for and it is only a matter of time before I complete one or the other. I am still missing a Doryani’s Machinarium map, but when one drops I can finish off Remarkable Realms. Sublime Starlight is doable but requires me to craft a bunch of enchants that are largely going to be throwaways, the hardest being Power Runes which are currently going for almost 4 Divine Orbs each. The cheapest enchants take at least three of them as well as a bunch of other runes. So for shipping purposes, I am probably going to focus on running things back and forth between Kalguurian ports for the chance at getting runes.

All told I am still having a lot of fun with the league, but I definitely feel like I am in the mindset of trying to wrap things up and get as far as I can before I lose steam. I want to push up the Gladiator today and see how fun of a build it ends up being. I am looking forward to the shift over to Lacerate of Haemoragging, which honestly I should chuck into a spare gear slot to start leveling now.

Rockets and Striders

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Love Rocket Is A Lie

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Last night I did little productive.  I think I am still dealing with the after effects of not sleeping terribly well on Monday night, because I ended up going to bed insanely early.  I did however get Witcher 3 installed on the new laptop, and it runs amazingly well.  The strange thing is…. it almost runs better on the laptop on a mobile video card than it does upstairs on my desktop and a full fledged gtx 960.  That has been the oddest revelation is just how little difference there has been in performance, and in some cases it seems to perform better.  I am guessing that might be due to the difference of the laptop being a 4th gen i7 and my desktop being an FX-6300…. which if that is the case I guess I will be paying the Intel tax on all future systems.  The bulk of my actual game time was switching between my six level 100 characters in World of Warcraft and trying to get the “Love Rocket” mount to drop.  Now granted I have done this for several years at this point without luck, and quite honestly I am not sure why.  Now the Headless Horseman mount is badass… and I can absolutely see why I chase that every single year I am actively playing during the Halloween event.  I would absolutely use the hell out of a flying spectral horse, because it looks amazing.

The Love Rocket on the other hand…. I am largely just chasing because it exists and I don’t have it yet.  Now I have had the Blue and Red rockets from the card game for years, and never end up using either of them…. largely because I don’t like the slight wobble while flying.  So I cannot see how having a giant pink rocket is going to make that effect any better.  That said…  the thrill is in the hunt and even though I have gotten like a dozen pets…  I am still going after the mount every single day.  The best and worst part of the entire experience is when you go to click your Heart-Shaped Box… because for a moment you get a surge of hope… only to have it dashed quickly when you find nothing interesting inside.  I think the worst part of the event are the Love Tokens, because seriously…. could they have just not made these BOA?  There are some really cool things you can purchase with them like heirloom upgrades but by running the dungeon each day during the even you won’t get anywhere near enough to do something with them.  Sure there are a bunch of quests that you can also do…  but they are freaking annoying.  I have my magenta drake from doing the holiday events, and I made a little promise to myself never to touch them again…  well apart from the dungeon encounters.

Water Strider

The other big frustration for the player base right now seems to be the fact that the Water Strider is changing functionality in the latest Legion Alpha build notes.  Original its restrictions were simply limited to “non-battleground areas” but it seems like they are greatly reducing its usefulness by limiting it to only Draenor and Pandaria.  I absolutely get the frustration that players are feeling over this, because Blizzard honestly makes a bunch of bizarre calls.  What I don’t get is why this seems to be the breaking point for some folks, and other even more confusing changes weren’t.  What I have to somehow believe is that this is an additive effect of all of the fiddling that Legion seems to be doing… and that for some they are choosing to draw a line in the sand here.  To those players…  I promise that I understand your frustration.  I am losing an entire spec…  Gladiator will not exist in Legion and I have gone through the whole “seven stages of grief” thing over that.  Being able to be a viable dps with a sword and a shield has always been my ultimate “player fantasy”.  There is just something awesome about smashing mobs in the face with my shield, and a huge part of what kept me glued to Warlords as long as I was… was the ability to live out those dreams.  The side effect of that however is that it was a horribly fiddly spec, that was difficult to itemize for…. and because of that I can absolutely understand why it is going the way of the Dodo.

To the players who are frustrated over this mount…  I hear you… I really do.  There have been many times in the past of this blog where I have railed on Blizzard for their failures.  On March 25th of 2011 I wrote an article chronicling all of the things I saw as failures in the game in my “Is WoW the WoW-Killer?” post.  I read through it yesterday… and it was a lot less ranty than I originally thought it was.  The thing is…  I’ve learned that it is absolutely okay to play other games.  In fact I would say it is pretty damned healthy to shift back and forth between games on a regular basis.  That sort of distance has allowed me to see the parts of the game that really are being done well, and learn to ignore some of the things that just out and out piss me off.  Sure it means that I often disappear from World of Warcraft, and venture into other lands for awhile…  but that distance allows me to blow off the steam and remember when I come back why I liked the game in the first place.  I am not meaning this to be trite or offensive….  but if the Water Strider is your line in the sand…  then really it might be time for you to go explore other games as well.  I am not saying “leave” the game… just go play something else for a bit. The World of Warcraft is a great game, but during these long content doldrums it can also be an extremely frustrating game to be a fan of.  Right now I am actively playing WoW, FFXIV, Destiny, ESO….  and planning on picking up The Division when it comes out… and hoping to return and play some more SWTOR at some point as well.  Playing all of those games has in truth allowed me to more greatly appreciate the quirks and things that each of them do the best…. and to some extent ignore the faults.  The only true statement is that there is no WoW Killer coming…. but instead a bunch of interesting games to explore that have their own rich communities.

Old-Lady Suit

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Best Intentions

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I had psyched myself up yesterday to go off and do some raiding last night.  Some friends of friends had graciously offered to drag me along with them for the first part of Heroic Hellfire Citadel.  I thought to myself that this was an excellent opportunity, that could lead to gear and maybe even a moose at some point, so even though they raid PST, I figured I would make the good college try.  The problem being my body is still conspiring against me.  This is officially the sickest I have been in years, as we are now going on thirteen days for this crud.  Admittedly my wife had something super similar weeks before we went to PAX and while she got over the bulk of it… almost a month later she still has the constant cough.  The thing that is killing me at the moment is the sore throat, only exacerbated by the constant body shaking coughing fits and drainage.  So by the time the raid was starting around 9:30 my time…. I was already taking NyQuil and planning to slip into bed.  I politely begged off as best I could and if any of them are reading today… I sincerely thank them for the opportunity.  One which I kinda hope will still be available when I am not feeling like shit.

The problem I am in with Belghast is the fact that my item level is artificially low, because there are four pieces of gear that I simply cannot afford to get rid of.  I have the four piece normal Blackrock Foundry set, and every time I try and sim out swapping out of it for higher item level gear… it is a major dps loss.  The problem being that I am playing a special snowflake class that will be going away in Legion.  Gladiator just works strangely, and it feels like Blizzard inadvertently gave use the most perfect class set ever.  The two piece bonus is “Shield Slam has a 8% Chance to Automatically Cast Shield Charge” which is massive, and helps fill in those spots where I could not normally have Shield Charge up for the damage bonuses.  The four piece is essentially “Shield Charge increases the damage of Heroic Strike, Slam, and Revenge by an Additional 20%” which is the single best damage booster that I can get right now.  So I simply cannot abandon this set bonus, and the only real option right now would be to try and find a Mythic Blackrock group so I could get the Mythic four piece set.  Because of the way the Hellfire Dungeon set works… I can also squeeze in the two piece of that set giving me “Bonus Armor Increased by 145” which while not insane… is a decent dps boost since every point of armor translates to 2 attack power for Gladiator spec.  So needless to say I am stuck in a corner where my 686 gear score does not exactly equate to my performance…  but I don’t really have access to the upgrades that would actually help.  I mean as much as I hate to see it go, I totally see why Blizzard is getting rid of this special snowflake spec.  It is extremely hard to itemize for and gear for.

Madness and Cheese

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So after getting frustrated that there was very little I could do to improve my lot in life on my Warrior, I ended up logging over into Elder Scrolls Online for some nice and peaceful questing.  I actually managed to catch Solaria on at the same time, and I spent a little bit of time attempting to help her get started in crafting.  The only problem being that during prime time it seems like all of the ore is heavily farmed down.  Since I have the insane “see it from a distance” glow effect, I am wondering about dropping down to Betnikh and helping farm up a bunch of ore for her.  She decided to go with a Heavy Armor Two-Handed Templar…. which was one of my favorite paths from alpha testing.  It feels a little bit like a WoW Retribution Paladin in the burst damage department, and has some really high survival when running around questing.  It also greatly simplifies the crafting, since Blacksmith can literally make everything they would need to use from the weapon to the armor.  The problem there is Blacksmithing honestly seems to be the most useful profession, and as a result ore is always in high demand.  I could in theory just pass over a bunch of bars, but she really needs the skill-ups from refining the bars right now, so I would be better served just going out and farming ore for her.

One of the things I had forgotten about Elder Scrolls Online was just how well written the quests are.  I completed a sequence in Grahtwood where I ended up encountering my favorite of all Daedra… Sheogorath the Prince of Madness.  You never know if he is going to attack you… or offer you cheese…  and then attack you.  What makes this sequence so great is the fact that I have tangled with Sheogorath in the past of this game.  He remembers my interactions and even seems to comment based on my decisions….  in this completely unrelated quest line.  The amount of time that they put into making sure that the dialog trees had little gems like this, is just awesome… and I am still really impressed by them when I find them.  All of the content was designed knowing that your single character might be completing all three factions worth of it.  There is just something warm and fuzzy about playing this game…  and while at one point I was disappointed in it…  I think most of that was really just me trying to make it into something that it was not.  As a largely solo experience the game is exemplary, and honestly I look forward to trying to scramble enough people together to do a dungeon or two and see if that experience improved as well.  Cheese for everyone!