path of exile

Bare Also 4 Fite

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In 2005 the Elder Sage Druid Alamo taught us that “CAT DURID IS 4 FITE!” a meme preserved by our dear friend TAGN. The thing is Path of Exile II added the druids, but they did not add a cat form. As a result… “Bare Also 4 Fite”. In truth when it came to World of Warcraft druids, I almost always played bear form for the defensive benefits, and spent most of my time leveling as bear so I am already used to fighting in that form. Alamo would be saddened by my disregard for their sage advice. On Friday the latest patch dropped for Path of Exile II adding 0.4.0 and the Last of the Druids content update, and the Fate of the Vaal league. I was pretty amped for this content drop because the footage that came out after the announcement from ZiggyD looked amazing. Grinding Gear Games has been trying super hard to make us interested in combo gameplay, but up until this point it felt very forced… and not like said combos were really that beneficial.

Druid changes that, and in truth had I been able to play this class from the very start I think I would have been able to grok their design goals. Effectively most of the gameplay for Bear Druid is about mauling your targets until runes light up on the back of your character telling you that your next slam is empowered, and then hitting Furious Slam to devastating impact. However there are mechanical benefits to doing this one two step because Bears effectively have two states, standing on two legs, and down on all four. Furious Slam has the text that adds a 0.4 second delay if you are not already standing. Maul on the other hand gives you a really fast way of standing, and thereby bypassing the built in delay of furious slam as your character stands up. So you are mauling not only to build up the empowerment but also because you can literally cast it faster than the delay built into the slam. This synergy between attacks feels really good, and then throwing in pounce as a movement ability that also primes the ground with fissures for you to exploit with your slam, even feels better.

Collectively in practice it means you are throwing out all sorts of nonsense onto the ground and then slamming on top of it to make big explosions, and the gameplay feels amazing. You can finish off trash mobs with maul without much issue, but it still feels amazing to do a big slam that causes half the screen to explode and also ignite things in the process. This is only going to feel even better as I lean more heavily into area of effect and damage numbers, and hopefully at some point switch to demon form via the Fury of the King Talisman. Really the ease of switching between Bear and Werewolf forms and the abilty to add in pounce as a gap closer as you move around the battlefield is really great. I find myself sprinting constantly as well, because the recent changes to how that mechanic works with stuns, means that I can pretty safely get into pounce range before triggering a heavy stun. The way that bear feels almost makes me want to try playing it with a controller.

The secret sauce of the animal forms though is making sure you are always using the highest damage Talisman that you can get. This is a new two handed weapon type and essentially you want to get one with as much physical damage as you can find on it. Elemental damage is nice, and you are going to get some baked on elemental conversion into your attacks, but like playing a Warrior Slam build, you want as much phys as you can get baseline to bump up your numbers. Essentially I saved all of my gold so that each time I moved into a new level bracket I could gamble for a base to attempt to craft on. I also got super lucky in getting a few rather tasty rare drops like the one above. What also helps massively is that the Vaal temple league mechanic gives you access to Betrayal style crafting benches that are just effectively free Regals and free Exalts. So you can in theory drag a few decent bases in with you when you start a temple and then hopefully exit with a new crafted weapon.

I went back and forth as to what I would start as, and ultimately landed on trying to yolo my way through a Druid and ultimately choose the Shaman ascendancy. I think in theory you can probably build a better Titan or Smith of Kitava that is a bear, but the pathing is a bit more contorted to get there. The area you start as a Druid has a bunch of really good early nodes that help progress you through Act 1 and 2 without much issue. This is quite possibly the MOST melee character, and I would have thought that would make Trial of the Sekemas a pain in the ass, but honestly I steamrolled through it. Similarly when I got access to Trial of Chaos I steamrolled that as well. At some point I am going to need to try for a third ascendancy, but for the moment I have chosen Reactive Growth and Avatar of Evolution which helps a bit when it comes to converting physical damage to elemental damage, and also giving me a bit of a buffer against elemental damage in general. For my third ascendancy point I will probably pick up Wisdom of the Magi and its defensive node, and then if I can do a fourth ascdendancy decide of I want to respec and go into Furious Wellspring or if I just pick up Turning of the Seasons instead.

The thing about Druid is that we did not have the passive tree ahead of the launch of the game. This means that NO ONE had any guides available ahead of time, and honestly if they did… they were completely suspect due to not really having any proper information. It was seemingly reasonable to maybe map out a Titan or Smith start with the class, but Druid was a total crapshoot. Because of this I utilized a wonderful functionality within POE.Ninja that shows a heat map of what talent tree choices most of the player base was choosing, and as such effectively crowd sourced my build. How this works is that you essentially choose the primary skill that you are interested in using, and in this case you can either choose Maul the default bear attack or Furious Slam. This then will show you a lit up tree featuring every build that is currently on the ladder and the warmer the color the more often something is chosen. For example almost EVERYONE is pathing down to pick up Primal Rage, regardless if you are starting Druid or Warrior as your base class.

As a result you can see the tree that sort of evolved out of the wisdom of the crowd. One of the primary deviations that I made from the norm is that I picked up Prism Guard and the nodes surrounding it, because I plan on going heavily into armor investment in the final version of my build. Damage shifting is one of the most powerful abilities in Path of Exile 1, and while that exists to a lesser extent in Path of Exile 2… there is the ability to make armor apply to elemental damage amd for the cost of 4 nodes you can get a baseline of 60% of your armor is applying to elemental damage, which you can then increase by making sure you get that stat on some of your beefier armor items like the chestpiece. Will this make me super tanky? I have no clue… because I have not played a melee character since this stat package was introduced. I am hoping it will however and if you look at Hardcore more folks are picking up that node there in the heat map.

I’m having a lot of fun with the Bear though and am now working my way through the second of the three interlude missions, and just about to wrap that up. The real proof of how well the build works is going to come when I start mapping. I think it is going to feel pretty solid though, because the higher the density the more the explosions seem to really work out. I need to probably spend some time fine tuning my support gems because I am not sure anything I am using is actually optimal. That again is another useful thing about POE.Ninja is because you can look at a bunch of the highest performing builds and see what they are using for abilities. This really is how I make characters these days, is I end up looking at a lot of what other players are doing with the abilities that I want to use in my build, and then sort of make decisions based on that data. That is ultimately how I have ended up with some of my favorite custom characters like my FreezyBoom nonsense, which is absolutely not on meta in the least.

So far I am enjoying this league this most I have ever enjoyed any Path of Exile II league, and have shifted from begrudgingly playing the game… to genuinely having a blast. The other aspect of the druid that I like a lot is all of the unique dialog options that happen while you are playing through the campaign. There is even an interlude that happens when you release the spirit of his dead wife during one of the sequences in the game. Genuinely really find this character enjoyable to play, because his reactions are not dissimilar to how I would react to some of these events. At this point Path of Exile II might legitimately have the best campaign from any ARPG to date. I really hope that they find a way to make the interludes stick around in some form of another because I find them really enjoyable as well. I like the whole concept of revisiting the first three acts to help with with further issues as you are somewhat building an army to fight the beast.

Since I started this blog post with one meme, I will end it with another one. I hightly suggest you check out the Druid review from Josh Strife Hayes. It is pure nonsense.

Rare Currency Burned

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Good Morning Folks! This is another one of my “progress reports” for the Keepers of the Flame league as I work on wrapping up various challenges. If this does not interest you in the least, then today’s blog post might be a complete skip. Tomorrow I will probably have some stuff to talk about The Game Awards and the things that got announced there. However for the moment I am in a pattern of trying to wrap up what I can wrap up so that I can be ready for Path of Exile II League start tomorrow afternoon. The biggest one that I knocked out last night was Grueling Game Grinds, which is the one that has a bunch of sub components, one of which is hitting level 100. I ended up knocking out the invitations option, and I was able to buy up a bunch of super cheap blackstar invitations for 1 Chaos each and burn through them to finish that up.

Another big one that I completed through cursed means, is that I managed to finally get one of the crafting benches with a Hinekora’s Lock in it. Expensive Extravagance requires you to do a bunch of high dollar crafts in order to get credit for specific items. Since I will not be doing any mirror crafting, I have been trying to figure out the cheapest way to finish this nonsense up. If you are lucky, the various Betrayal league crafting benches count towards using these currency, and through doing that I managed to knock out most of them. I had one left and another achievement that I have been working on involves doing a bunch of high end specific league encounters. So I was farming 4 wing Blueprints in Heist and managed to pull several tailoring orbs as a result. Since I did not have a reason to use these, I just sort of threw it at any item I had sitting in my bank. That was essentially 250 chaos down the toilet, but it did finish up the achievement.

Another one that I knocked out was Aggravating Antagonists which involved fighting various endgame versions of league bosses. Most of these are really hard to force… so for my final one I opted into doing one of the level 83 versions of Izaro. The cheapest goddess emblem was Dedication to the Goddess at 40c, so I went with that version. I admit that I have never done one of the higher level versions of the Labyrinth, because I never really needed anything from it. I’ve chain run the normal offering versions before trying to get transfigured gems, but I think in the total of all of my runs of POE I have maybe only ever had one or two of the enhanced offerings drop. I almost NEVER run the in map events, because they always feel like a waste of time once I have my 4th ascendancy and especially since the offerings drop constantly down in Delve. I guess that is one of the things that I like about the challenges is that they force me to do things that I have never done before.

The biggest thing that I probably have left to do, as in the most time consuming… is Legendary Leagues. I need to figure out how best to complete this and see if there are any that can reasonably be brute forced with scarabs. I am running mappers, but it seems like only the 100% completion maps are the ones that count towards the achievement. I could probably buy some Blood-Filled Vessels from the trade market and brute force the Ritual one without much issue. I also need to figure out what the minimum number of emblems I need to run into rder to get the right item level for Legion’s Domain of Timeless Conflict since that is pretty easy overall as well. Simulacrum is time consuming but also fairly easy to complete and would just involve me buying 3 more tokens off the market. So between all of that I probably have a path forward. I wish I knew a way to force T4 Harvest Seeds because that would be a cakewalk if I could do that one.

I am getting close to finishing the Destructive Play achievement and should be able to wrap that while doing some of the other things that I need to do. I wish I had paid more attention to the item quantity when I did some of the other maven witnesses, because as a result I am going to have to redo The Formed, and did Incandescent and Elderslayers last night. I still am doing the quest version of the Zana fights so I need to burn through those so I can start witnessing them for The Remembered and the final piece The Feared. I hate doing the t16.5 content because t17 map mods are pure cancer, so I have been putting those off. There is another achievement for doing a bunch of 16.5 maps, and I have a ton of those banked that I can start chipping away at that. Mostly I am trying to see how far I can get to wrapping things up before Friday, because I am not sure how much effort I am going to be willing to keep putting in once I roll over to another game.

Anyways. If you have made it to the end of this blog post you have a lot of fortitude, especially if you are not actively playing Path of Exile. I hope you have been having a good week. I am not sure what is going on with me because I had another night where I went to bed at 8:30 because I was falling asleep on the sofa. If my body wants rest thought I am determined to give it to it.

One Hundred Again

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday over lunch I pushed my character over the level 100 line and forever secured its place in the pantheon of folks on the ladder for 3.27. Now I have reached the point in the league where I no longer give a shit about taking a death, which means I start doing riskier things. I had banked up a bunch of Aul fights, that I burned through last night… before sadly realizing that they were not actually counting as Pinnacle encounters. This is a bit of a weird thing in Path of Exile, because they use this term liberally to mean a bunch of different things, and in the past Aul absolutely would have counted. However in this league Aul is part of a different group of encounters that unlock bloodline ascendancies.

I had run all of these that I could easily run, and was down to just needing one more of this bloodline ascendancy fights for knocking out the Bloodline Boons challenge. This morning before sitting down to start writing my blog post I did a 15 wave Simulacrum and wrapped it up. The other options are way more tedious to get to including Lycia or the really variable boss fights like Olroth, that is something you are only going to see if you are farming a lot of expedition. Weirdly I was shocked that so far I had yet to get any of my shipments interdicted by the pirate dude, which I need for another one of these challenges. I might start running mappers because there is another one of the challenges where I could chip off a meta achievement by collecting rewards from 30 maps.

Grueling Game Grinds is ultimately the big lengthy grind, at now that I have hit level 100 I only need to complete one more meta achievement to knock that one out. For the moment I am planning on doing Invitations because it has synergy with some of the other challenges that I am working on. If Aul would have counted as a Pinnacle boss for the sake of this achievement, the 12/75 number would have been considerably higher. I could in theory do a bunch of Elder fights, which are without a doubt the easiest of the pinnacle bosses. However I think the fragments are still a bit expensive at this point, and I hate running Elder Guardian maps since you don’t get credit for Maven Witnessing a map boss on those.

Speaking of synergy, that is another thing that I am slowly chipping away at is doing Maven Witness maps with Destructive Play active. I really wish that they would change the way Destructive Play works, so that you can chain run the same map over and over and keep getting new bosses witnessed. This is the reason why I never do Maven content is because I prefer to run the same map layout over and over for consistency sake, and have my favorite map slots set up in a way so that I can produce large quantities of one of two maps that I alternate back and forth between. For example I am running a lot of Tropical Island, but producing a truly prodigious number of Strand maps while running down through my stockpile of Islands.

The other side effect of doing Destructive Play is that I am working on building a Feared invitation along with knocking out the various named invitations that reward atlas passives. I forgot about the 70% quant achievement, so there are a few of these that I am going to have to do over again. I’ve successfully run feared before, but I am not sure I have done it on anything other than that one deeply broken penance brand character from a few leagues ago. It will be interesting to see how well this goes. Really the only thing that I have to worry about too much is Sirius and his physical damage over time nonsense. I am curious if I can buy a bunch of cheap Polaric invitations or something like that to burn through the rest of gear grinding goals.

Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can in the next two days because I figure once I start down the Path of Exile II rabbit hole, it will dominate my attention for awhile. I did not last very long in 0.3.0 so I might find myself returning back to POE1 pretty quickly, but I am hoping that will not be the case. I think some of the things that are happening with Bear and Fire Damage are right up my alley. I am hoping it is pretty fun, because I did enjoy being a big poison bear in my last D4 league. Other than that… I have to admit I have had a bit of an itch to give Warframe another shot. Then there is my backlog of single player games that I have not touched in ages… which is only increased by the fact that Ash sent out the form for our games of the year show this morning. This is the challenge with me and these type of respective shows… is that in truth I mostly play forever games.

What prompted the Warframe desire though is a conversation I had with Ammo about it the other night, and then this morning seeing Ironmouse doing the best Warframe song, We All Lift Together at the Streamer Awards. If you have never seen the original Warframe animation video for this, you should absolutely watch it first so that you can appreciate the effort that they went into with the backgrounds and such for the Streamer awards. Who knows if I will give it another go or not.

Plastic Spaghetti

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Good Morning Folks! Today is my first day without steroids so here is hoping that I do not begin to backslide on my recovery. I am still going into pretty prolific coughing fits, but only really during exposure to cold air or strenuous activity. I will admit that I went into this weekend planning on spending the entire weekend playing Guild Wars Reforged. That did not happen, but I did at least get to level 9 in Seared Ascalon. Still enjoying myself but sometimes the heart wants familiar patterns, and as such I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile or fiddling around with my 3D printed nonsense. The ranger/elementalist seems to be working swimmingly, other than the fact that I am not really doing anything with the elementalist portion of it. I have too many good Ranger abilities that I want to use, and not enough hotbar space to use them all.

In Path of Exile I am focused on trying to get yet another character to level 100 without taking any deaths. I am sitting at 86% to 100 and am alternating between 250ish depth delving and them relatively chill mapping. I’ve gone hardcore into creating Alva temples, because each of them if crafted properly is worth roughly a divine and they sell almost instantly. They also produce entire rooms full of rare monsters which are pretty solid experience gained per map. I am mixing this in with Ritual which also produces quite a lot of mobs on the map and as such more experience gained. Occasionally I swap back over to my Ice Trap Elementalist if I want to do a Hive Fortress, because that build is way better at clearing the entire screen than Righteous Fire is. I am hoping that over the next few days I hit level 100 so I can at least knock that off my bucket list for the season.

I’ve been doing 7 million shipments in Kingsmarch rather than sending a bunch of little shipments, and managed to get my very first ever Mirror Shard. These sell for around 35 divines each, so it was a quick infusion of capital. It feels better to do this and save up materials until I have 250k Blue Zanthemum and 1 million Dust rather than sending 10k/30k shipments out constantly. Now that I know how well this works… I will probably take this strat for future leagues, because a single shard makes up for all of the effort and I have heard there are often cases where you get multiples at once. Regardless you always get 5 or 6 Divine Orbs in a 7 million shipment so they still feel better off than a bunch of small shipments that may or may not have anything in them. I really need one of my shipments to get interdicted so I can fight the sea captain and knock it off my achievement list. I might have to start running mappers to see if one of those can get captured, because I really just need one of the kingsmarch bosses.

Over in Destiny Rising we managed to get another three stronghold week with the guild, but are reaching the point where we just need more active folks doing dailies because we keep running out of the juice required to keep our “bitcon miner” going. If you dabble in Destiny Rising and need/want a guild and are doing dailies, please hit me up so I can throw you an invite. I managed to get Jaren up high enough to start doing big kid activities and he actually becomes really useful when combined with one of the season artifact abilities that gives you a significant damage boost when you blind enemies. His movement ability that always seems to be up blinds everything around him, which means he can keep buffing damage output and shred through packs quickly. I look forward to seeing what he plays like when we do our grandmaster activities night, because I think he will inevitably be in the mix.

I finished gluing up and hanging my “Lego” Christmas Wreath and I am pretty dang happy with it. I tried solvent glues but did not find anything that would work well with PLA in spite of other discussion about it. The plastistruct stuff does have a solvent effect, but not enough of one to actually allow the plastic to bond. You could probably use it for smoothing out some minor layer lines, but nothing extreme enough to properly “plastic-weld” things together. So instead I relied on good old fashioned superglue and just letting it sit for awhile to make sure it was properly bonded. I cut out felt strips for the back of the wreath and placed those on the 3 highest points so that it would keep things from banging a lot when I hung it. So far I am pretty damned chuffed by it, and can absolutely see creating variations of this for other holidays.

I also finished up printing my second cabinet, but ran out of black filament and had to substitute in something else. I MIGHT reprint that single top of the unit in black because I ordered some refills that should be coming in today. I don’t mind the white but do think I would rather have them all be black structure with colored shelves. I can’t look at anything red and white without thinking of Oklahoma University, which is a thing I already see way too often anyways. I’ve got a really pretty turquoise filament that I ordered that should also be arriving today. For the black I am using spool-less refills for the first time since I now have a decent assortment of reusable spools, so hopefully that goes smoothly. It takes the cost per roll down to around $10 instead of $16, which for a bulk color like black seems like a good option. Right now as we speak my printer is idle for the first time since I got it, mostly because I am waiting on the black filament before I dive back into another series of prints.

I exported one of the timelapse videos that the P1S makes all the time while printing. I’ve already reached the point where I greatly prefer the Sunlu filament to the default Bambu Labs stuff that came with the unit. The Sunlu just ends up with a better finish and it is so much easier to remove supports from it. I printed this little guy in the green filament that came with the printer, and getting the supports off was a pain in the ass. I had to actually break out nippers to cut loose some of the elements that were holding onto the backside of his teeth because I was afraid they would do damage to the actual structure. I am slowly building up a toolkit of things to deal with bad prints, and I feel like I need to search for some sort of a hooked tool that I can print for pulling on supports. I used bambu scraper without a blade in it, to a decent amount of luck to help break free some of the big supports. I think one of my next missions is going to be to start actually organizing my damned tools so I can find things when I need them, because I have decades worth of tools scattered around the house in four different places which is not useful at all.

I had my first print go completely off the rails. I had been trying to print some spindles for a spinning wheel that Ace uses, because I am sending them a dino friend and figured I might as well try printing off a few bobbins while I was at it. I successfully printed off one for their current machine, but when I moved on to trying to print one off for a machine that is currently backordered… things went sideways. I think there were a few things that happened. Firstly I think the part was a bit too fine detail and it maybe had some overhangs that auto supports were not taking care of. Then there was a problem where one of the parts that was very fine… popped up off the bed and then the printer got confused trying to chase it around as it moved. I had tiny bits of white filament everywhere… above the plate, below the plate, on the gantry tracks, at the back of the unit, and most concerningly around the vertical screw drives. I happened to catch it when I looked at the preview and cancelled the print and then cleaned everything up. I might give this another go but I think I will need to increase the wall size or something to make sure it is printing out slightly thicker objects.

I started a new book this weekend as well, but I admit I have not made it super far into it. In 2023, I read the first two books in this series back to back and enjoyed myself. However coming back they feel immensely dense, at least compared to the relatively light reads that I have been doing lately. It is a very Norse mythology themed series and everything has a bunch of hard to pronounce names to remember… and quite frankly the two chapter long rapid fire catch up preamble was a bit much to get through on its own to remind you of what happened in the previous book. I am going to push through this, because I do not want to have a “did not finish” on my list for the year, but it is going to be a bit of a challenge. It is weird how tastes shift over time, because I was fully on board with these novels the first time, but now that I am going back for book three it is a slog.

I am hoping yall had a wonderful weekend that was filled with something interesting. Right now I have used almost all of the superglue that I went out to get over the weekend and am waiting on some bulk shipments to arrive so I can finish putting some of the other projects together. I got an order of magnets and metric machine screws which will further expand what I can do with this nonsense. I still need to get a good set of calipers and might make a trip the next town over to harbor freight to pick up a pair there. I am having a heck of a lot of fun with 3D Printing, and it is way the hell more engaging than I even thought it would be.