MMORPG

Forbidden Sanctum Builds

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Friends, it is three days until the start of a new Path of Exile league, and I find myself doing what every Exile does… pouring over build guides and trying to figure out what path I am going to take for my league start. If you were not around a few months ago… Lake of Kalandra was the first league that a number of us poured our heart and soul into with a day-one start. This was maybe one of the worst leagues in modern history and struggled with currency drop and general survivability problems. While I actually enjoyed the Lake mechanic mechanically, it seemed needlessly brutal and random at times. As far as leagues go it has been shown to have had the worst player retention numbers of any league to date. I had contemplated just swearing off 3.20 but they seemingly know how to hit me straight in the feels.

The league mechanic this time around is The Forbidden Sanctum which is a rogue-lite that takes place within Wraeclast. It sounds like you will be earning currency each trip into the dungeon that can be used to gain buffs for subsequent trips slowly building out a talent tree of a sort. I like rogue-lites quite a bit and have spent plenty of time playing games like Rogue Legacy and Hades. Putting that inside of the ARPG-style gameplay that I am already addicted to… may prove to be my ultimate lure. However, until the trailer dropped I had not even been really contemplating this league which puts me weeks behind in the planning process. So this morning I am going to talk through some of the builds I am contemplating starting with.

Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut

Pohx is hands down the best guide maker I have ever seen in the Path of Exile community. He has his entire website wiki devoted to just giving you information to support his already amazing Path of Building guides. The big change this time around is that Inquisitor either took some direct nerfs or got caught up in other nerfs and is maybe going to not be the optimal way to play Righteous Fire. As a result, Pohx seems to be pouring most of his effort into a Juggernaut build and I am largely on board with this. The pros are a comfortable leveling experience with clear direction on what I should be doing which maybe be the sort of low-stress chill start I need.

Chronic Painless’s Blade Vortex Elementalist/Occultist

One of my all-time favorite playstyles in Diablo III is the Whirlwind Barbarian and its “spin to win” mechanics. The closest thing to really doing this in Path of Exile is Blade Vortex and this guide seems to be extremely detailed. The only problem with it is it involves math… and optimizing blade uptime because really you need to be able to maintain 10 blades at all times to pour through content. Other than that the build and guide seem pretty straightforward forward and it also seems like it would be easy to get gear for it even at the high end. All I really want is something that can complete red maps easily to farm for currency and this seems to be able to do that in spades. I have never played a Witch in any form so this is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone.

Zizaran’s Explosive Arrow Champion

Explosive Arrow Champion is back and Zizaran is once again suggesting this as a league starter. The positives are that I have already played this build before and understand the fundamentals. The negatives are that Zizaran for being as good of a YouTuber as he is… actually sorta writes shitty POBs. He takes for granted that players that are reading his content are going to just understand various concepts, and while I have been around Path of Exile semi-seriously for three leagues now… there are still a lot of core concepts that I do not fully grasp. It will be an uphill battle to sort out what he is saying versus what he is actually meaning. However Grace played this last go-round, and I have played it the time before… so I do have some knowledge that I can draw on.

Velyna’s Spectra Shield Throw Raider

This build looks like a hoot, flat out. I love bouncing shields and it looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. However Velyna seems like a super nice person, but trying to follow one of her guides is sort of awful. I played her Stormbrand last go-round and had all sorts of survival problems that I ultimately had to venture way off the path to fix. Watching this guide video, it sounds like so much of this build hinges upon a super specific shaper base helmet craft… and I am just not sure if I want to go through that nonsense. The stormbrand build eventually ended up being extremely fun to play, but it required me to spend a heck of a lot of currency to get there. So I am deeply gunshy about following Velyna into the breach again.

Ghazzy’s Dark Pact Necromancer

Going completely off the rails I am also sort of considering the Dark Pact Necromancer. Ghazzy really cares about minion builds and is one of the better guide makers for that specific style of play. I have never played a minion build in Path of Exile other than having a random Golem up just to provide a buff. Minions took a massive hit last league and the more traditional builds seem to be not as functional as they once were. This build however focuses on basically using your minions as a bomb to spread Dark Pact which drains minion health but causes chaos damage explosions. It sounds like it might be a fun playstyle but again this is going way out of my comfort zone since I have never played a witch in any form before.

Basically, I have three days to sort out what exactly I want to go for. I think all of the above would probably be a strong league start or at least be viable enough to get through a few labs and into early maps. Probably the top contenders for me at the moment are good ole Righteous Fire or the spin to win Blade Vortex build. I would 100% go Blade Vortex for certain, but I also know I suck ass at trying to maintain the uptime of something on a specific cast pattern. I know when I was splitting steel, I would always find myself out of shards because I was forgetting to make them. Fortunately, it sounds like this doesn’t actually damage my survival and is more than it would harm my clear ability… which is fine. I am okay taking a slower map clear if I screw up rather than taking random deaths.

Are you going to be venturing into The Forbidden Sanctum? If so what build are you looking at running? For those curious about the minutiae, you can check out the current patch notes here.

Exploring Undecember

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Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.

I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.

As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.

Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.

One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.

For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.

All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.

So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.

I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.

Successfully Merged

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I logged in this morning and it appears that the merger has been completed. I am now on Heliopolis instead of Themiscyra and our old server is no more. Because we were not the server being merged into, it means that none of the companies that held territory on our server kept it. I fully expect the next few weeks to be a time of strife as far as faction conflicts go as the companies from three servers ultimately settle into a pecking order. Sadly I had made quite a few friends in the group that previously controlled Everfall, which is where my tier 4 home is located. Positive however is it seems that Everfall is just as well taken care of on Heliopolis with all but one of the crafting machines sitting at Tier 5.

The map on Heliopolis is seemingly more competitive whereas on Themiscyra it seemed like the heavy hitters were all Marauder or Covenant after the biggest Syndicate company transferred off the server. In truth, I don’t much care about who holds a territory so long as they are not being slumlords and doing nothing to maintain the crafting machines. Sadly on Themiscyra we had reached a point where Everfall and Windsward were the only two territories that seemed to put any effort and pride into maintaining them. My hope as well is that with more players there will be more activity happening in the various open world farms since that seems to be the side of the game that I really enjoy doing.

Speaking of farms, I went back out to the camp with Pit Lord Daeshi and have now picked up all of the gear drops off that loot table. It seems like folks are regularly farming this camp because it is where the legendary corrupted trophy material drops, which is heavily needed for invasions. In fact, at two different times out there I was with groups from major companies on the previous server trying to far trophies. Of those drops the one I was seeking out the most of course was the tanking sword… or at least I am turning it into a tanking sword. I figured with two different life-stealing traits on it and a base constitution stat, that screamed sustain and tanking. It does not hurt that it also looks really cool.

Other than farming gear, I spent part of my last night on Themiscyra doing another invasion. It was doomed from the start but we fought valiantly. We had even less than we had the night before and I think we made it to wave 5 before a boss type made it into the base… which caused everyone to collapse in to deal with it… which caused the other gates to fall. Essentially this is sort of what seems to happen as a cascade failure any time you need to call an all-hands-on-point type scenario. Invasions are very much a “manage everything all at once” type thing but once the plates stop spinning and fall down… everything goes south really fast.

Now to sort of bury the lede… I have been up to some shenanigans or at least I am supporting an initiative that is. A handful of my friends have been working on a brand new Mastodon instance that is gaming-focused, given that this seemed to be a niche that wasn’t really well served. Elekk.xyz is a fine server but it is deeply sequestered from the rest of the Fediverse, and really didn’t seem to be all that gaming-focused in the first place. It is nowhere near ready for sign-ups yet, but those of us who are going to be helping with the day-to-day stuff on the instance now have our accounts. Expect more updates as I have them as to when this is going to be launching. I think for the time being I am probably going to keep my Masto.ai account at least in the short run until we have worked out all of the kinks and have federation relays spinning. At some point in the not-too-distant future however I expect to migrate my account once again, but hopefully for the very last time. I have a lot of faith in this team and it will be nice to have a place to suggest where I very directly know everyone involved.

I’ve known about the possibility of this happening for a while but did not want to say anything until it was actually “for seriously” happening.

Gone Fishin

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Sometimes my brain latches onto something and just won’t let it go… until I have obsessed my way through completing it. For this particular obsession, I am going to blame my friend PlayerVsHobbies. When she joined New World not too long ago… she sorta made a beeline straight for the fishing system and as a result, ended up in some areas of the game that her level range was not quite prepared for. I know Vernie at one point helped her I think with a run through some dangerous areas and the other day I happened to be on when she was attempting to sneak to a fishing hole in Shattered Mountain. For those unfamiliar with this game, Shattered Mountain is a deeply scary place with monsters well above the maximum level cap of players… so if you are not well geared and max level, you are probably going to struggle out there. So I played guard duty as we made our way to the fishing hole and then farmed Dryad Wolves for Wyrdwood while she managed to get the fish that was required for that step in the chain.

This all planted in my head that I too have been on this quest chain for a while, and never actually completed it on my original server Valhalla. I’ve admittedly never spent that much time fishing in New World, though of my limited experience of MMO fishing systems it seemed to be about the best. So for whatever reason, this flipped some bits in my brain and made it so that this became my all-consuming mission in life… to complete the fishing chain and walk away with a shiny legendary fishing pole. So other than farming my daily Gypsum, this has been the task I set forth in front of myself… and I have to say it was relaxing as hell. There is something extremely chill about fishing in these beautiful locations for the amount of time needed to complete the quest. I’ve never been most of a fisherman in other games, but I can absolutely see the appeal here.

Another huge benefit of this quest chain is that you pretty much walk away with a full set of Tier 4 and Tier 5 fishing gear, which only serves to help you out as the requests get a bit rare. The only time that I had to rely on bait was when trying to catch fish over 30 lbs, but thankfully what I needed was cheap enough to stock up before heading out into the field. I had always just chucked bait into the bank and in truth, I had quite a good stockpile of various sorts which I now am carrying around on me at all times. I guess I have been bit by the bug because I have found myself flipping over to my fishing set, hitting F3, and doing this while waiting on things to spawn.

I completed the quest chain and you get a random box that includes a level 600 Legendary Fishing Pole. I think PvH got one that was Angry-Earth-themed, and the one I pulled was Ancient-themed. It appears that the stats are largely randomized, which means that in truth… I think the one I crafted and happened to pull 4 tier 3 stats on is maybe a bit better as a daily driver. I know I will be spending a lot more time crafting fishing poles as that seems to be my best option for leveling Engineering, so I might even pull an even better quad/three in my next flurry of crafting. I think if I manage to get geared up enough to start crafting for item level 600 fishing poles, there is the rare chance that I could make my own version of a 5-stat.

What I found somewhat weird though… is that the quest chain only required me to get to level 100 in Fishing, and not 200 which is the maximum before you start getting into aptitude levels. So I also now have the title “Fishing Legend” which I don’t feel like is really something I should equip until I ultimately cap out that skill. It is a fun and relaxing way to pass the time, especially while watching a YouTube video or something like that. So I guess I am thankful to my good friend PvH for getting me started down this path. I wonder what other enjoyable grinds are out there that I have been avoiding.