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Affliction Spoiler Nonsense

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This morning’s post is almost entirely thanks to SirGog a YouTuber who does an admirable job of providing Path of Exile information and largely just getting straight to the facts or data-influenced predictions. I am writing a blog post about today’s spoilers because they represent a whole order of nonsense. Essentially tomorrow is the big reveal stream for the Affliction League and generally speaking in the days leading up to this stream, we start seeing spoilers from the community staff at Grinding Gear Games. This league has been a bit odd, and the spoiler started later than normal… and have been not terribly forthcoming with information. This could be caused by many different things, not the least of which could be that this is the first spoiler season since the departure of long-term community manager Bex.

To this point we have had a Divination Card spoiled, and some general quality of life changes like the ability to split stacks of currency in the trade window. We’ve also received notice that Trial of the Ancestors league would not be going into standard, and that all of the uniques associated with that league save for the ones that have specific interactions with the tattoo mechanic would be going into the general “drop anywhere” unique pool. Players have focused heavily on the specific wording of this notice “Trial of the Ancestors won’t be going core in 3.23” as a sign that we might be seeing some of these mechanics returning later. I would honestly be shocked if we do not see the Trial in some form because it seemed like it was a huge amount of work to make that content and tattoos as a mechanic were really interesting.

Yesterday/This Morning because timezones are nonsense… Grinding Gear Games released a relatively innocuous image that I have edited to highlight a few things. Firstly the obvious “spoiler” is showing that there is going to be a nice quality of life change that indicates how many character slots you have on your account and how many you have available. Given that I have reached the point where I have to start deleting my characters… this is a good change. What is less than obvious are the two character names. Firstly it was pointed out that those names are too specific to be a community manager banging away at the keyboard. As SirGog states in his video, try typing them and you will see just how awkward it would be to arrive at them by random chance.

This led to speculation and eventually a solution presented by Neversink the dedicated person behind the best series of loot filters for Path of Exile. It was a Caesar Cypher, where you essentially shift the characters by a fixed set of letters to get the original message… in this case an 8-character shift. The end result gives you the message “IWONDER INALTESSENTIALS” which sort of screams Anagram. After many attempts including some rather rude ones… Neversink landed on “Sentinels Atlas Win or Die” which folks are taking to mean that Sentinels are going standard, that Affliction is going to have an Atlas Rework of some sort, and that Ultimatum league is going standard as well.

I admit I did not fully understand what players meant about Ultitmatum coming back, because in patch 3.19 GGG gave us the ability to collect a bunch of nonsense from Vaal activities in order to summon the Trial Master. I’ve done this a few times because one of the rarest items required drops down in Delve. However. since I did not play in this league, I did not realize that there was an in-map component to it as well. I gotta say I am kinda excited about the prospects of something like this permanently getting added to the game. I assume there will be Atlas support for both Sentinels and the Ultimatum Trial encounter, and that the Trial Master will still exist as a weird Vaal crafting recipe.

Sentinels and Ultimatum Trials would already be an awful lot of new content added to the game, but I can’t see that GGG won’t have something new and unique for Affliction. I still think that we are going to see some sort of Ritual rework as part of this patch cycle because the trailer clearly shows a ritual totem. I am definitely looking forward to the stream tomorrow where they announce the full features of the league. If you can tune in tomorrow the stream will start at 12:30 PM PST and drops will be available until 9:30 PM PST featuring a set of Huntsman Wings. Funny enough Diablo 4 is having a stream just ahead of the Path of Exile proceedings where they are going to talk about the upcoming additional changes to Season 2.

I am amped to see what all the Affliction League is going to entail, and I am also bracing myself for some nerfs… specifically to Guardian.

Talking to Animals

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I’ve been on a narrative game kick of late, starting and finishing Alan Wake II, and then wrapping up the back half of Jedi Survivor. Essentially I know that as of December 8th, I will be once again enthralled with Path of Exile and the new league that is about to start. More importantly, this is the league we are planning on doing a private guild-only type of league which will mean we will all be leaning on each other heavily to get the things we need to complete builds without access to the larger trade league. Thursday is the big reveal of the rest of the information surrounding the league, and in the time between now and the start I am trying to catch up on narrative gaming that I have been ignoring for the sake of more Path of Exile.

I had been gone so long from Baldur’s Gate 3 that I decided to just reroll. I had never made it out of Act 1 and I was not really feeling my Duergar Barbarian so it did not seem like a massive loss. This time around I rolled a more traditional “Belghast” appearance character which means Human Male, Black Hair, Some sort of Ponytail or longer haircut, and a trimmed beard. This is a character template I have returned to time and time again over the years and feels like the most cogent realization of me I sort of wish I was. Also in Dungeons and Dragons terms I always play Rangers and Clerics… so I opted to go for a Ranger and down the dual-wielding path that I did so many times in Neverwinter Nights. Of course, I have a bear friend… and mostly Ranger was to have easier access to talking to animals. So far I like how things are going a bit better and I have corrected some early mistakes that I made.

Other than Baldur’s Gate 3, I started playing some more Guild Wars 2 and actually started the Secrets of the Obscure expansion proper. I gotta say the first map is really good and in spite of requiring flight… it seems like it would give folks a Skyscale almost immediately. I’ve just randomly happened across the meta event three times and enjoyed it quite a bit. It seems to be a happy medium between something forgettable like the Svanir Shaman and something way too difficult and cumbersome like Dragon’s End. It doesn’t really feel as rewarding as one of the big metas but also still produces quite a bit of stuff so that seems fine as well. It grants access to a loot room at the very end which is like a cut-rate version of Auric Basin which again… makes sense given that Auric Basin is probably way too rewarding.

Just the act of bopping around the landscape and chasing Rifts to close seems quite enjoyable as well. I decided to go ahead and start the content on my Ranger, in spite of never quite finishing up the Path of Fire content. It seemed very much like this was disconnected from the chronology of the previous expansions, so I was happy to see that was mostly the case here. There are characters that maybe had more dialog since I had encountered them before, but other than being “The Commander” and being known for ending the Dragon Cycle… there really is not much feedover. It also seems to assume that I finished End of Dragons because it talks about events as they have happened for someone who has finished that content. This might make the experience a bit disconcerting and spoilery if you had never completed any of that content on any other character.

Lastly, I have continued to slowly chip away at leveling classes in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve fallen into a very casual rhythm of popping in long enough to do a set of beast tribe quests, daily cactpot, and a daily frontline… which combined usually ends up adding up to a full level. At this point, I have leveled Monk and Samurai doing this and am sitting at level 88 on my Dragoon and should in theory get 89 today and 90 tomorrow. When I was leveling classes prior to Endwalker, I was super focused and spent a lot of time maximizing my experience gain… and it wound up just burning me out. Instead, now I am doing three easy things every day that I find enjoyable, but also seem to be making serious progress at working through my backlog of classes. In theory, the goal behind all of this is to finally have a great purge of gear before the launch of Dawntrail.

I know several of these things will probably fall by the wayside on the 8th when the Affliction League launches in Path of Exile, but for the moment I am having quite a bit of fun picking away at the edges of things.

AggroChat #458 – Muddied Waters

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

Hey Folks! This week we start off with a topic about in-game events, and how wildly different they can be between various games.  Specifically, this topic was inspired by the Star Citizen IAE 2953 event but we give into many different game events.  Ash gets around to playing Armored Core 6 and talks about how awful the intro to the game is.  Bel laments how sometimes maybe being a more Open World experience makes a game worse.  Specifically, this is inspired by Jedi Survivor and how it is a much less tight game than Fallen Order.  Shocking to no one we dive into another Path of Exile topic and more specifically how Kodra and Bel completed some dumb Trial of the Ancestors’ achievements.  Bel has finished Alan Wake II and gives the game another hard plug and then talks a bit about how Guild Wars 2 Secrets of the Obscure is really good.

Topics Discussed:

  • In-Game Festival Events
    • Star Citizen IAE 2953
    • Final Fantasy events
    • Other Game Holidays
  • Armored Core 6
    • Why is the intro so awful?
  • Sometimes Open World Makes Games Worse
    • Jedi Survivor
    • Muddied Waters
  • Path of Exile
    • Doing Dumb Things with Totems
    • Lament of why Multiplayer is needlessly punishing
    • Kodra knocking out achievements
  • Alan Wake II – After Credit Roll
  • Guild Wars 2 Secrets of the Obscure is good

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

With Liquid Hot Magma

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One of the problems with finishing up a truly phenomenal game… is that it is occasionally hard to move past it. I had decided that I would be in a bit of a narrative phase given that I am mostly done with the Trials of the Ancestor league in Path of Exile and that I have a few weeks until the launch of the next league on December 8th. I have a list of games I wanted to play this year… but never quite got around to it. Top of the list was Alan Wake II of course, and I have now finished it… but last night I had some trouble easing into the next adventure.

Another game this year that I was deeply looking forward to was Jedi Survivor. However much like Fallen Order… I floundered a bit when I first started playing it. I decided that I would go after this as my next game to finish, and I went back and forth about whether or not it was a good idea to start from scratch. I only made it a few planets into the game and I think it would have been easy enough to retrace my steps, but instead, I decided to essentially wing it and just keep pushing forward. Thankfully I had never actually uninstalled the game and didn’t need to bother with trying to track down my save games.

I apparently had left off on a phase where I was forced to do a lot of platforming and careful gliding between platforms over a giant pit of magma. Luckily my muscle memory came back pretty quickly and the puzzle I was being asked to solve involved something brand new to me so I could learn on the go. The first thing I did was rebind a number of keys because hitting 2 and 3 on the Hotbar was a bit awkward while also having to navigate myself with WASD. I moved them down to 7 and 8 which are way more comfortable for me to hit on the keypad on the side of my g600 MMO mouse. There are probably a few other things that I want to shift around a bit. I know that this is a game designed for a controller but I fought through playing it with a mouse and keyboard for the first game and I will struggle forth again because the actual combat feels way more comfortable for me with a mouse.

I did not make it terribly far last night, but I did complete the series of puzzles that involved the gaping chasms… collected some data and am now about to face off against some Imperials as I attempt to buy folks time to evacuate a safe house. I did manage to pick up some gun parts and crafted something a bit more to my taste as far as blasters go. That is probably my favorite part about these games is collecting bits and bobs and crafting my own lightsaber and now blaster. I am hoping as I go forward with the game I will begin to feel it. At the moment I am nowhere near as connected to this particular story as I was the first one.

I am sure I will get into the swing of things as I go… but honestly, I feel like this game might be too open-ended. I know that is ironic considering how much I have praised other games for having a big explorable world… but I am not sure it really serves the story here. The set pieces are wonderful, but I gotta say I enjoyed the opening scenes on Coruscant far more than I have these wide-open planets. I think Fallen Order benefited by having a fairly linear story that was being told. Sure there were hidden places to find along the golden path… but there was still a very clear golden path to follow. It feels a bit like a Ubisoft collect all the things game… which I can’t say is necessarily a good thing. I’m hoping once I get engaged in the plot thread I will ignore this and just push forward.

The other big game that I am hoping to make a dent in during this break is Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. If I manage to wrap these two up I will be pretty happy, but if I do and have room left over… I am probably going to play some more Zelda or maybe actually finally try and get into Final Fantasy XVI. The tail end of the year tends to be when I have the mental power to focus on story-driven adventures.