path of exile

Unlocking the Rogues

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Good Morning Folks. I feel like I am starting to get back some of my gaming mojo. Since I do not really feel like running up a second character and gearing it… I am starting to invest some more effort into gearing out my Righteous Fire character. That said… you cannot stop me from being exceptionally cheap. One of the huge buffs would be to craft a helical ring… but in order to get a base that you can actually craft on that is not mirrored or split… they start at 110 Divines. I had not touched Heist in this league, but now find myself driven to start the process of unlocking things. There are honestly a bunch of really high dollar bases you can pull from grand heists that might make it interesting. A clean crafting base for a Simplex Amulet… is legitimately selling for a mirror for example. Basically it feels like it is time to start burning through my contracts and leveling up my rogues.

The problem with heist however is that I can never remember the rogue unlock order, so I am posting it here so I will have it in the future… and might end up throwing it over on my game tools page. Essentially you start out with three rogues Isla the Engineer, Karst the Lockpick, and Tibbs the Giant. Then in order to unlock the rest of the rogues you need to run contracts with specific ones in order to snag the next one. Isla is a dead end and unlocks nothing. Karts and Tibbs however each have their own trees to unlock so that you run a contract with each new rogue that you have unlocked until you finish out that branch of the three.

So last night I ran through the process of unlocking everything, and now I just need to level the rogues while collecting equipment. I could in theory just buy equipment from trade, but I am not even sure what I want. This is the piece where the depth of my heist knowledge falls apart because I have no clue what I should even be gearing them for. I think essentially skill speed is king, because the faster they can complete their actions the least amount of time that you need to stand around doing nothing. My friend Sloth recently did a stint on the heist crew of BPL so I might lean on his knowledge to help me get started.

Other than that I am still delving quite a bit. I still find this a terribly enjoyable mechanic where I can turn my brain off and soak in the experience points. I am getting really close to level 99, and since Delve is a pretty safe way of gaining experience I am trying to focus on getting that level before I do anything too outrageous. Essentially I am still slowly chipping away at the seasonal achievements and one of those will require me to hit level 100 to finish it off. I am slowly knocking out the infamous mercs achievement as I find them in maps. I have a big stack of Primordial Blocks maps that I am slowly working through using my Einhar tree with a Niko scarab. I am still hunting for that hideout, and I have seen it come up a few times on TFT but they always wanted 10 Divines for a portal. I keep hoping that at some point I will find it and I can be out of Primordial Prison. I legitimately would be rather running just about any other map… but I want that damned hideout.

Lastly I started trying to craft a new belt to replace my immortal flesh, and ended up settling on this one. Ultimately I would prefer to have one with level 22 enduring cry on it… but those are stupidly expensive and also hell to craft. I burned through a stack of resonators and fossils and about 6000 life essence before just sticking with this one and calling it good enough for now. I lost some regeneration but gained a heck of a lot of life thanks to that tasty 12% increased max life. This allowed me to pick up an abyssal jewel with corrupted blood immunity on it and drop the mastery from the tree that was giving me this. Which in turn allowed me to pick up another jewel socket on the tree and throw in another 8% Fire Multi/7% max life jewel this time with increased trap damage. I’m now over 7k max life and when I get my last two points I am probably just going for 5% life nodes on each of those and pushing that total up even higher.

I am also spending a little bit of time each day in Guild Wars 2, picking back up and working on my dailies and weeklies. I had fallen off the wagon hard with wizard chores before my world ended, so attempting to pick things back up. Guild Wars 2 similar to Path of Exile gives me little bits of focused gameplay and I appreciate that. I was in pretty much only long enough to knock out my fresh dailies yesterday, but in doing so I am starting to chip away at my weeklies. I might actually tag up one night and run bounties if there is not a group currently active to knock that one out quickly. Catching Of Mists and Monsters… and one that actually succeeds is going to be the challenge. Essentially my goal is to finish out my weeklies every week going forward, which means needing to start chipping away on them earlier than Saturday… since doing all of them in a weekend can often cause me to faceplant.

Anyways… I still am not okay, but I am maybe starting to get back into the swing of things. Yesterday was my first day back and it went okayish. Today is my first real day back in the office in five years… so here is hoping it also goes okayish.

AggroChat #529 – Illing with Illagers

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

Hey Folks! This week, we start off talking about Four Job Fiesta and how Ash’s playthrough is going as he takes the donation route to fix his class choices.  Bel talks about the Absolum a new demo up on Steam which mashes together Streets of Rage, Hades, and Darkest Dungeon into a really fun Roguelike Beat Em Up. From there, Kodra talks about his recent foray into Minecraft Dungeons and how it is a really good entry point to the ARPG/Diablo-like genre.  Ash has been revisiting Guild Wars 1 and talks about his progress so far.  Thalen shares his early thoughts about Persona 5 The Phantom X and how it seems to be a non-egregious gacha.  Finally, Kodra and Bel go on at length about the current Path of Exile league.

Topics Discussed:

  • Four Job Fiesta Status Report
  • Absolum
  • Minecraft Dungeons
  • Revisiting Guild Wars 1
  • Persona 5 The Phantom X
  • Path of Exile

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Birbsieged

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Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.

I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.

I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.

This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.

The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.

Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.

Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.

Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.

Gearing My Mercenary

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Good Morning Folks. I promise I had zero intent to just nope out of blog posting for an entire week… but that is pretty much what happened. One of the early rules that I set aside for myself is that I would never work on my birthday if I could help it. As a result I take it off every year, in this year it landed in the middle of the week. We also had Juneteenth off as a federal holiday… which caused me to also take Friday off. Then if I was taking that much of a the week off… might as well take Monday and Tuesday off as well. So essentially I scope crept my way into an entire week of vacation, during which we did several home improvement projects and also… got sick. While we have not taken tests… because all of ours were expired… symptomatically it has seemed a lot like the current strain of Covid. During that time I attempted to play some Path of Exile and made solid progress… and get silly amounts of enjoyment out of running around with my Merc, Einhar, and Huck in an impromptu party.

Right now I am essentially running two trees, with my third completely unspecced at the moment. I will probably go some sort of Harbinger tree for that one. Essentially I have a right side tree where I focus on Niko and Delve, with Harvest crafting, and all of the good strongbox and shrine nodes in addition to the Blue Altars. Then on the left hand side I have a way more rippy tree with perm Delirium, Einhar, Huck, Ritual, Beyond, and Orange Altars. Essentially what determines which tree I am running is how much I want to Delve at that very moment. The rippy tree is largely designed to try and farm up either an Omen of Connections for a Black Morrigan for the purpose of crafting six linked gear. The Niko tree is mostly about getting crafting options either through Delve and Resonators or Harvest rerolls. The general idea behind both is to be as self sufficient as I can be, because while I do actively trade… I don’t necessarily like spending currency on things.

I’m honestly pretty proud of myself, because I have been crafting a lot more items than normal. The introduction of Shaper and Elder Exalted orbs has been a game changer for me. Normally I would shop for a cheap base that was influenced to begin crafting on, but now… I can set aside good bases while delving and mapping and then throw an exalt on it to start the crafting process. At the moment Elder Exalts seem to be going for around 10 chaos, and Shaper Exalts 20 chaos… so pretty reasonable. Since I can get them from the exchange, I also do not have to rely on trying to find someone willing to trade me a relatively low value item. The longer you go into the league… the harder it is to find anyone willing to stop what they are doing for less than a stack of chaos. Even then… a lot of players only want to stop the action for divs. Essentially I crafted the shield and gloves by doing Harvest Reroll Life until I hit something reasonable, and the helmet by doing Harvest Reroll Fire. I went through SO MUCH purple juice… and I still have a backup helm that I am working on to try and potentially craft a 20/20 gem helm with.

Honestly most of my trading… has been for gearing my Mercenary. I am running a tri-elemental crafted bow with around 1100 dps and then every other slot is a unique of some sort giving some benefit. Essentially the idea behind the build is that all damage freezes, shocks, and chills and then using Pyroshock Clasp to convert 15% phys to Fire and 15% phys to Lightning. So my Merc is Chilling, Freezing, Shocking, Igniting, and Scorching everything that I am engaged with while converting 30% of mob Physical damage to Elemental. Then good ole Leer Cast gives me and my Merc a 50% damage boost. I was basically tipped off to this course by Llarold from Path of Evening, and it seems to work well for me given that I am mostly using bow mercenaries. To make things a bit more clear here is a full listing of all of the uniques and links to the POE Wiki.

I was using Gruthkul’s Pelt for a bit but noticed it was keeping my Merc from casting certain abilities. This was not the case early on, but I think something might have been patched to make the “your spells are disabled” line to actually apply to Mercenaries. The boots are another slot that might be worth evaluating because Scorched is only useful for elemental builds, and you might benefit more from dropping brittle ground or something like that.

As far as Mercenaries go, I am largely using one of two archetypes… either the Sniper shown above, or Manyshots which focuses on Icicle Rain and Ice Shot. I really like the Sniper and essentially at this point I am fishing for an “Infamous” version of either the Manyshot or Sniper, with a good skill loadout. Not all Mercs are created equal and while I found a higher level Manyshot, it did not have the Icicle Rain ability that makes it so effective. I should probably start exiling Mercs in the hope that maybe it will cause the bow mercs that I actually care about to spawn more frequently. For the most part having a level 83 Merc means that it stays alive 99.9% of the time. There are a few cases where detonate dead or other onerous area of effect spells will kill them, because they have no AI to avoid them.

As far as progression goes, I have completed the story version of the new boss fights which has permanently changed my Atlas to be this Zana themed incarnation. On Saturday I finished my 115 of 115 and got my four void stones, and now I am just working on unlocking the last few map favorite slots. I am alternating between Primordial Blocks and Shipyard, largely because I really want the hideout from Primordial Blocks. Essentially you need two linked maps to sustain drops without having to buy maps. Essentially if I am running Blocks I set all of my favorites to Shipyard, and then flip back when I start running the Blocks maps that I have been collecting. Essentially every league that has Primordial Blocks… I focus on running it so I can chase the damned hideout that never seems to spawn. I did get the Divided Hideout to spawn when I ran Twilight Temple and shouted out to the SirGog Global channel that I use in case someone needed. I think I got three people to zone in and grab the thing before giving up and moving on with my life.

I’ve been having a heck of a lot of fun, even though I am largely the only person playing in the league from the AggroChat crew. I really hope that Mercenaries or some version of them goes core, because they add a lot of interesting dimension to build craft. You can essentially do what I am doing and use them to augment your dps and provide debuffing of targets to make combat easier… or you can convert them into a full on aura bot that buffs your own damage output. This was honestly one of my favorite things about Diablo III, once you began being able to equip the followers there with items that would grant you buffs. I’m also pretty happy with the current state of Kingsmarch and while I am not as focused on it as I was last league, I am still occasionally running shipments to get good stuff.

All in all I am having a lot of fun with this league. Are you playing? If so what are your favorite bits so far? Drop me a line below.