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Southeast Cliffside Chest Farm

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Good Morning Folks! After having some luck with the chest farm that I showed off yesterday, I decided to try another one that I have seen in literally every YouTube video talking about Level 25 Golden Chests. This one is located in the very Southeastern corner of the map down by Scatterbone and one of the Sun Temples. Of note… this is the Sun Temple which has the legendary glider that I talked about yesterday. It is going to require you to have Flame Level 5 and you are also going to have to take a bit of a leap of faith. There is a ledge just above the deadly shroud where the chest is located, and the easiest way to get there is to run along the cliffside to the west of Scatterbone and then drop down and glide into place.

When you get there the chest is going to be exposed on a pile of rubble, and there is plenty of land for you to be able to set up a Flame Altar just outside of the range of the chest. I am guessing that the original intent for this chest was to be buried down inside of the rubble and that you would have to bomb or dig to expose it. Unlike the chest I showed off yesterday, this one does not require any lockpicks. However that said it seems to have significantly worse drop rates than the Iron Cave chest. The majority of the time you are likely going to get white and blue items, the occasional purple, and very rarely legendary orange items. What is interesting about this farm however is that it has a completely different batch of armor sets, this time the level 25 versions.

Elder Armor Set

I thought I would take a moment this morning to go over the three new armor sets that I found, and photoshop together a little image that shows all of the items as well as the appearance. First up we have the Elder set, and this seems to be the set that I see most of the YouTubers wearing. This is primarily designed for the wand and stave wielders and buffs mana regen and magical damage. It also offers high magical resistance but low physical resistance.

Eagle Eye Armor Set

Next up is the Eagle Eye set which is very clearly designed for ranged combat and specifically folks going down the path of the bow. Most of these armor sets have a bit of a natural glow to them that helps illuminate dark areas, but this one unfortunately has the least amount of glowy bits. I dig the design but I am likely never going to main a bow, and mostly just use mine for pulling. This set has balanced resistance with the same numbers for both physical and magical.

Radiant Paladin Armor Set

This set however is entirely my jam, The Radiant Paladin is a health regen, melee set, offering high physical resistance and decent enough magical resistance. It also has a lot of glowy bits which really helps to illuminate your surroundings. This is going to be the set that I wear from this point forward, or at least until there is an even better set that I find.

Between the two camps, I have spent quite a bit of time opening chests and doing the logout reset game. However, I think for the time being I am mostly done with chest farming. I was specifically seeking the legendary version of the Nova sword and I picked that up last night. I also got a bow that I like quite a bit and have swapped it out for my purple one. Mostly several of the bosses are weak to shroud damage and this will give me a way of plinking them from a distance. You can also see the assortment of legendary weapons that I have picked up in my travels in a shot of my storage chest on the right side of the above image. There is a shield that I got early on in the game that had a lot of glow to it, and I would really like to find a level 25 legendary version of it. So I might do some research to see if such a thing exists. It seems like every item in the game can be found in all four rarities and at most item levels, so I am guessing it is out there somewhere.

I’ve come very close to “beating” the game in its current state. Now that I have finished gearing up, I will likely gather the rest of the bits needed to unlock the final rank of the Flame Altar so that I can explore the remaining deadly shroud areas. Past that, I think the only real things that I have left on my radar is doing some more build projects. I would like to take over a town at some point and try refurbishing it. I also need to finish up the remaining few tradesfolk quests requesting different items from the shrouded areas. All in all, it is a heck of a game. However, it has made me realize how much I would love to see something akin to Enshrouded but with an ARPG build and randomized loot system. Having some chase rare items would make farming content in this game feel a bit more enjoyable, especially if the drops were more focused on individual monster kills rather than finding golden chests. As it stands killing random encounters is a way to farm resources, not actually find anything cool.

At this point, I have gotten over 50 hours of joy from this game so I would definitely say it is worth the purchase and then some. I will also keep returning over time, but it is making me realize that at some point I really need to make my way back to Valheim and give it another go. A few years have passed and I am sure the game is a bit more fleshed out now.

Iron Cave Chest Farm

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Good Morning Folks! Lately, I have been playing an excessive amount of Enshrouded. At this point I’ve put in around 50 hours and last night I hit the current level cap of 25. I still have a ton of the map that remains in the “fog of war”, and there are still some deadly shroud areas that I cannot adventure into until I upgrade my flame altar one more time. On the building front I have been slowly working on digging underground and at this point have dug out a basement and a sub-basement. I am contemplating starting to move some of my crafters down to this area because with all the bits and bobs associated with each of them the current crafting hall is getting a bit busy. In my travels, I have happened upon a few extra crafting machines so I have been setting them up down there just so I can produce more of the time-gated crafts at one time.

I also set up a new bedroom for myself down in the first basement area. I dug a little room off to the side and have set up some stone-themed furniture down there which is capable of getting my comfort level up to 36. As I can craft more of this stone-themed set I will probably replace the bookcases and then build out some armor and weapon storage in this room. Similarly, I am contemplating digging another side chamber and moving where my magic chests are to a more sheltered area underground. Not that there are really the accouterments of setting up a proper treasure room, but it would be nice to build some sort of hidden vault since there are doors for that functionality in the game. I might swap up the entrance to this bedroom with one of the stone “secret” doors.

Last night in my travels I found a golden chest that spits out max-level gear. For the uninitiated, almost everything in the Enshrouded world respawns on a timer. Currently, that timer is 30 minutes, but if you log out and back in… it refreshes all of those timers. So when you find one of these gear chests, you can in theory farm it over and over and over… which I did. I set up a flame altar just outside of the room with the chest and then played the logout and back in the game until I ran out of lockpicks. I will likely run around today and farm up a bunch more metal scraps and then repeat the process until I have gotten the gear that I want. I am always on team… get the best gear and then finish out the adventure.

Here is a map for how to get to the cave that I found the chest in. Like I said it requires lockpicks so you will have to bring a bunch of those with you. I photoshopped two screenshots together so that I could highlight the location of the two nearest spires. Essentially there is just this cave on the side of the hill and inside there is a ton of iron. There will be a rubble-covered wall, that stands out like a sore thumb because the rest of the cave is limestone and iron nodules. Dig through the wall and the chest will be on the other side. I placed my Flame Altar just outside of the chamber where the chest spawns so that I could keep the rubble wall open and not have to dig it out every time. You are going to need to have your Flame Altar upgraded to level 5 as you will have to cross through some areas that were previously deadly shroud to me at level 4. There are some areas you will need to skirt that are still deadly shroud but I did not have to pass through any of them.

There are a whole slew of armor sets that can drop from this chest. The fancy set that I have been wearing in these screenshots is called the Gloom Monarch set, and is sort of a generic survival/melee damage sort of affair. It looks very DeathKnight-ish which I dig, and I have yet to find anything akin to a proper pure tanking set. The other set that I keep getting is something more akin to a caster set that looks kinda like the Heavensward Black Mage armor from Final Fantasy XIV. Even though this appears to be a max-level chest, all of the armor is dropping at level 23 instead of level 25.

It also has a whole slew of weapons that can drop and I think I have seen most of the loot table at this point in either Epic or Legendary qualities. Essentially my goal is to get the sword and bow in legendary quality so it will have five affixes on it. I’m keeping one of everything that looks vaguely interesting and then sharding the rest for upgrade coins. I really wish that armor could be salvaged but apparently, the only option there is to delete it… which seems wasteful. The main reason that I landed on Nova for my main weapon is that it gives off almost as much light as a torch which makes exploration that much easier since I don’t have to keep swapping to my torch so I can see. The wand also has a decent amount of illumination, but not quite as much as the sword.

Also in my travels last night, I happened upon what is apparently the best glider in the game. This thing is ridiculously fast, almost too fast to actually control your flight. It was the top of a sun temple and I had to fight a giant bird in order to get it. In theory, you could probably loot the chest without killing the bird, but since I was up there I figured might as well get some more “chicken” and feathers. I figure I will farm out the orange versions of the weapons I like the best and then start gathering up the materials needed to upgrade my flame altar all the way to level 6. After that, I think the goal will be to uncover every corner of the map that is currently veiled. Past that… I guess we enter the TRUE endgame… which is crafting some more bases and maybe taking over one of the NPC towns for myself.

AggroChat #466 – When Crowd Control Mattered

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! It has been a few weeks since we recorded a normal show and I think we had a bunch of conversation in us waiting to get out.  As a result, we recorded a bit longer than we should have but that is okay! We talk about Celeste 64 and that sort of gameplay translates to a very Mario 64 inspired game.  From there Kodra shares his experiences with Songs of Conquest a game that is very much a nostalgic continuation of the Heroes of Might and Magic Series.  Bel and Kodra talk about their experiences with the other new survival early access game Enshrouded and how it is shockingly complete, and really just needs polish. From there we dive into the mail topic of the show where we discuss City of Heroes and how it is this perfect snapshot of the best of MMORPGs before World of Warcraft changed everything.  Finally, Bel actually completes his four voidstones in Path of Exile and talks about what a difference a dedicated bosser makes.

Topics Discussed:

  • Celeste 64
  • Songs of Conquest
  • Enshrouded
  • When Crowd Control Mattered
    • City of Heroes
    • The World before Warcraft
    • No Daily Chores is Refreshing
  • What a Difference a Bosser Makes
    • Bel Kills POE Bosses

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Losing a Player House

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Whelp friends… I screwed up. November, December, and January were exceptionally busy months for me. At some point during that time I was only saved from the repo man by my friend Sol who happened to pop into my house and see that it was set for demolition. She unfortunately could not save me this time, and last night someone on Gamepad posted about the monthly routine of logging in and checking on the houses… which prompted a panic moment. I checked the email bound to that account from bed only to find out that my house in Final Fantasy XIV was repossessed on January 15th. So I had screwed up royally and cost myself my “perfect” house as a result. Weirdly I am not as devastated as I thought I would be. The big reason why this happened is that my FFXIV account is bound to an account that I do not check on regularly and apparently went over two months without logging into it.

On some level, my house was an attempt to capture the magic of a specific time and place when the game was super engaging for me. Our original Free Company house was Mists number 13, and when I was able to get that I thought maybe it would unlock an attachment to the game that I had been missing. It did not. Sure I spent a bit of time obsessing over housing details, but quickly I abandoned that project for more exciting things and my poor house sat for a year with only the most sparse decorations. I thought maybe it would ground me into the community… but in truth, the neighborhood was in was pretty dead. On the day a bunch of us got houses it was pretty hopping, but in each return visit, I saw pretty much no one.

On some level buying a house was like trying to buy my way back to a place and time shrouded in the deep past. This was taken from our old FC house, and our old Neighborhood… with the lively folks that were so community-oriented that we had a neighborhood linkshell. Truth be told… of that old crew of players the only one that I ever talk to on a regular basis is Ayla who is the miquote pictured above. Most of the other folks in that neighborhood are no longer even on Cactuar and have migrated off to other servers. Our Free Company also is nowhere near as active as it used to be. So the game just does not feel the same. I thought maybe owning the same plot of land would rekindle some of those feelings and it maybe did for a short period of time… but not long enough to keep me active.

The other truth is that I have changed. I am just not as interested in MMORPGs as I once was. Recently I returned to World of Warcraft after over two years away from it… and while I had quite a bit of fun for a few weeks I am already on my way out of that game as well. I leveled to the cap, then decided that there really wasn’t anything else that I wanted to do and wound up bouncing hard. This has been the case with FFXIV and the post-Stormblood expansions. I show up… have a lot of fun leveling through the main story quest, and then bounce shortly after hitting the level cap and doing some rudimentary gearing. I am not sure why I changed, but I most definitely did. So while I could be bitter about losing my housing plot and the money that I laid out in buying stuff for it… but in truth, I just can’t seem to muster much ire other than a “well shit”.

Truth be told… I think I am okay with this. Having my own housing plot really didn’t bring me much more happiness than having unfettered access to the Free Company plot does. The biggest change is that I stopped seeing a lot of the familiar faces from Shriogane that I had come to know, like the folks who lived across the street from our Free Company. I had thought if I ever lost the house I would decide that I was “officially done” with the game, but in truth, I am finding it doesn’t really matter that much one way or the other. I am way more attached to my Hideout in Path of Exile than I ever was to the housing plot that I purchased a little over a year ago. Maybe whoever buys the plot will be happier with it than I was. Maybe it will be the act that binds them to the game and makes the feel part of something. Maybe a fledgling Free Company will use it as a base of operations for many fun adventures. I am okay with letting it go, mostly because I have to be. It was my own damned fault and my own lack of focus that caused it.