path of exile Archives - Page 24 of 99

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

August 8, 2025 by Belghast

One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Mercenaries Gauntlet

August 4, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning My Perky Pals… happy dawning of a new work week. In my semi-regular mental health updates… I did pretty okay on Friday. Dealing with the first anniversary of our wedding after the death of my wife… was mostly okay. I had a few tough moments but the day was not the soul crushing experience that I expected it to be. I am still glad that I took the day off and quite honestly… I might just start taking it off yearly just in case because sooner or later… it will catch up with me. This weekend I did dumb things and this morning I am going to tell you about them, since we did not record a podcast this weekend where I would have likely talked about it. Why yes that is me on the beach in Path of Exile… so buckle up friends.

The Gauntlet is an event run by Zizaran in Path of Exile that cranks up the difficulty of the game to stupid levels… and takes place in a Hardcore Solo-Self-Found environment. Meaning that you cannot rely on anyone other than yourself and if you take a death, your character is exiled to standard. I do not normally like the hardcore rule-set, nor am I the biggest fan of SSF either. What prompted me to join this madness? The Gauntlet is often supported by Grinding Gear Games which cooks up specific challenges that do not exist in other environments, and this year they added a unique MTX that can only be gained through playing the event. Essentially if you get off the beach and defeat Hillock, you are guaranteed to get a copy of the Merciless Gauntlets. If you get to at least level 5, your copy will have flavor text added to it indicating how far you made it.

What makes this extra challenging however is that a lot of the bosses have new mechanics. For example Hillock on the beach, is supported by The Maven and all of the nonsense that she does while witnessing a map boss can be done during this fight. Brutus is already a bit of a filter for new players, but when you encounter him in the prison you first fight a proxy… and then in the normally safe room… face a buffed version that has the canons on all four sides of the arena that can be found during the Hydra Guardian fight. I could have been like my friend Sloth and killed Hillock and then immediately killed that character to be done with it. However I could not bring myself to do this thing and I had to play things out for as long as they lasted… even though the whole experience is not really my jam.

I had experienced some of the mechanics when SirGog ran a version of the Gauntlet with Softcore rules as a custom league. However new and extra spicy this year is that when you face an end of act boss… you also face every single unique mob that can spawn in any of the maps of that act. This means you are fighting a literal gauntlet of enemies, that works similar to a maven witness in that if you do not kill them fast enough… they can start stacking up on top of each other as they spawn at fixed intervals. I managed to push through the first act boss, largely because Toxic Rain is really good at low levels and I got an early Goldrim drop from Hailrake that carried me super freaking hard. By the time I faced Merveil I essentially had capped resistances which was wildly overpowered for any fight, but especially the gauntlet since you needed to care about more than just cold resistance.

I named my character BelCantKillHillock because I legitimately did not expect to get off the beach. If you are so inclined you can see a POB of where I got and what gear I was wearing at the time of my death. I made it to the Act II boss and was presented with a decision. I could easily have backed out of the fight and come back when I was stronger… but instead I just decided to allow the death to happen. I played 5 hours and 21 minutes to get to that point, and while I was enjoying Toxic Rain overall… I was not enjoying having to play with my head on a swivel at all times. I figured once I cleared Act II it was only going to get worse in Act III. So instead of exiting to character selection and bouncing back in and throwing on a few levels… I just decided to let the death of attrition happen because I was having to chain flasks to stay alive to all of the nonsense happening on the Vaal Oversoul fight. I made it through the Gauntlet of Uniques without much issue, but the stupid stuff that was happening in the room kept grinding me down.

Being perfectly honest I am extremely happy with the level 27 death that is now enshrined in my glove mtx. I started out not expecting to make it off the beach, and then decided to keep playing until I was at least level 5 so I could get text on my gloves. Then I just kept moving the goalposts… could I get through Brutus… could I get through Merveil. Could I get past the bandits… and then ultimately could I clear Act II. By the time I reached the end of Act II though I was well past my point of caring about the event. All of this nonsense did lead me to run up a softcore Toxic Rain character and spend all of my currency on it… before realizing that my general problem with these characters is how squishy they end up feeling. That ability is phenomenal during the campaign, but requires way the hell too much investment to feel decent in maps, or at least as a second character after having played a super tanky righteous fire character for months.

Will I do this nonsense again in the future? Honestly I have no clue. I don’t actually enjoy playing in the event, but I did really enjoy watching streamers competing for various prizes on day one. I did not start until the morning of day two and even then only because there was an MTX to be had. If GGG keeps doing cosmetic prize support for these events… I will probably keep throwing my face into this particular wood chipper. That is so long as the bar of entry stays sufficiently low. I am not a member of the “hard content is my kink” club, and in truth I would rather play super chill content so that I can happily be listening to an audiobook while I play it. More than anything right now I am looking forward to the start of season three in Last Epoch on the 21st. I know Path of Exile II lands on the 29th, but I will probably not be done with Last Epoch by then, and if I do play the third pseudo-league in that game I will be starting much later.

Did you play any of the Gauntlet? How far did you make it? Drop me a line below.

Desperately Seeking Guardians

July 28, 2025 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. This weekend I mostly spent my time listening to an audiobook and trying to chip away at league challenges in Path of Exile. My sad little totem is slowly growing bigger as I knock things out. At this point I am sitting at 29 of 40 completed and quite possibly the largest sub item is that I managed to hit level 100. This is the fourth character overall that I have taken all the way to the maximum level, largely because it either requires a stupid amount of grinding… or paying someone to power level you. I would be willing to bet all of those level 100 squishy builds that you see on the ladder… paid someone to get them there because a single death can set you back several hours worth of progress. Once I clear level 98… I pretty much have an Omen of Amelioration on me at all times and if I take a death in a map… I abandon that map. I believe I hit level 100 on Friday when I was home sick and chilling on the sofa between moments when my body was actively trying to kill me.

I knocked a few achievements out this weekend, namely I bought a set for Uber Atziri and was able to knock that out without much issue. I had tried earlier in my leveling journey and she wrecked me at one point during the fight where I got clipped by two of her big rings at once. The other thing that I knocked out was Cross Contamination which involves doing two league mechanics at the same time, and the final one that I did was killing an Essence monster while being buffed by a tempest. I did the scarab that gives you a tempest on your map and a bunch of essence scarabs to force several and waited until I had the buff and then popped the essence monster and burned it down as quickly as I could. I think the highest I have ever gotten during a league is 34 challenges, and I hope to be able to do at least that well. I have no interest in running uber bosses, but given that I am sitting on a stack of currency I could probably pay for carries to get that knocked out.

The one that I am struggling through right now is gear grinding goals. Hitting level 100 was a bit part of that progress and the 1000 maps and 100 maps with a Mercenary I accomplished pretty easily just while doing other things. That left me with a few options. Since I am not well suited for bossing, the 30 uber pinnacle bosses was a non-starter. Similarly whiel I have a new appreciation for the Labyrinth after the shit show of ascension options in Path of Exile II… that does not mean that I want to run uber lab enough times to use the divine font 70 more times. That left me with Guardian/Conqueror maps and after burning through all of them that I had sitting in my bank I am at 40 of 50. My goal is to use my stash of scouting reports and the fat stack of saved up Kirac missions to fish for the last 10. The big problem here is that they have to be 80% quant or higher. This means that not only is a crapshoot that you find a guardian map on Kirac… but you have to find one with high quant that does not have a mod that bricks your build. I think I have 60 of the normal scouting reports, and 40 of the vaal ones… so in theory between those two stacks I should be able to find 10 maps that I can actually run.

The one that is quite possibly the hardest to complete is Infamous Instigators. This requires you to defeat 15 different Infamous mercenaries. I never run from fights, and I cannot remember the last time a Mercenary defeated me… so in theory my reputation should be just about maxed out. However I seem to find infamous mercs every twenty maps or so… and then it only counts if it is a version you have not already killed. In theory I could probably start banning specific types in the hope that maybe it might influence what I get next… but the problem is that it is not like all of the missing mercs are of the same type. I wish there was a scarab or a node on the tree that gave you a higher chance of encountering infamous mercs… but sadly that is not a thing. I just need to grind more maps in the rare hope of finding these stupid things so I can find my last three.

Another annoying one is Unreal Undertakings, which requires you to effectively do the rare versions of various league content. Defeating Settlers bosses was pretty easy because I have been running shipments trying to get divine orbs, and have had enough interdicted that I managed to kill several pirates. Breachstones similarly were super easy and I just bought five of the cheapest ones off the currency exchange. For Tier 4 Harvest Seeds I simply forced Harvest onto my map and then also ran a Harvest Scarab of Cornucopia which shockingly gave me more than one T4 beast per each harvest I ran with it. So between two of these scarabs I had knocked out the achievement. All of the rest of these kind of suck. Abyssal Depths for example there is no way to really force one to happen because you are going to get way more Spires than Depths. Domain of Timeless Conflict is an option but you have to run at least 4 emblems and two of the emblems are stupidly expensive. I finished a full Simulacrum without much issue and could in theory just buy 3 more and hope that I can run all 15 waves of them… but they take a stupid amount of time. I have been leveling my rogues and in theory I could run 4 wing Blueprints and probably knock that out pretty easily… but again it will take dedicated time.

The problem with all of this is that I am going to have to sacrifice making currency to finish these out. Right now most of the divines that I am making is through selling resonators and fossils and then converting that from chaos to divines. My preferred method of play is to alternate between filling up my sulphite on some maps, and then dive down into delve around 300 depth and burn it back down to zero before going up and mapping again. However nothing I am doing in delve… can really help me complete anything left on my list save for maybe Aul fights… which do count as pinnacle bosses. However I have only found two Auls so far this league, and it feels like they maybe made them a bit more rare to find. Normally going horizontal at 200ish depth will get you tons of them… and I am just not lucking out into much in the way of Primordial Cities. Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can wrap before August 21st when the Last Epoch season starts, because from that point forward… it is going to be real hard to get me interested in Path of Exile grinding.

I am thankful though to have mindless things like this to focus on… because it makes me think less about the general state of my life. I have an appointment with a financial planner today, to help me sort out what to do with insurance and such and how best to handle it. This week and next week are going to be super fucking hard… because Friday is our wedding anniversary, and next week is her birthday. We have a thing planned for her birthday so I will at least be seeing other human beings that day. I plan on taking both days off from work because I will likely not be functional in either case. Anyways… the last month… has been fucking hard, but I am managing.

AggroChat #531 – Commodore Is Back?

July 20, 2025 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks! We are down a Kodra this week but assembled a surprisingly long list of topics. First off Bel discusses the return of Commodore and the new product being released. Blaugust is coming up soon, and Bel is not running it this year. Tam shares the tribulations of trying to upgrade a PC right now, and the expense of hardware. Ash is finally back on the Final Fantasy XVI trai,n and it is really good. Donkey Kong Bananza is pretty great… but completely unintelligible. BPL or Badger Private League is a thing in Path of Exile and watching people participate is wild. Guild Wars 2 announced the Visions of Eternity expansion and we talk a bit about the upcoming features. Finally, Tam dives into a topic about how you get players to actually communicate with each other in games… and we brainstorm ways to make those interactions happen.