path of exile

Atlas Invasion is Wild

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Hey Folks! I am back on my Path of Exile bullshit. It always feels good to go home, and there will always be something about Path of Exile that feels special to me. How I got here however is its own story. Since it has been 10 going on 11 months since the last Path of Exile league… Grinding Gear Games keeps running events in order to briefly placate the very angry and dejected player base. The Phrecia league event was extremely fun, and one of the best times I have had playing Path of Exile in recent memory. Currently we are going through a phase where they have unlocked and made private leagues free for all players to create… something that normally has a relatively hefty cost to it. I think we paid around $60 for the league that we ran, because we extended the time a bit and it would have been more had we needed to scale up the number of participants in any meaningful way.

Currently anyone can create a private league for free during this event, and there are a number of different templates. SirGog for example is running a league with the Phrecia alternate classes but with the extremely difficult Gauntlet rule set created specifically for Zizaran’s reoccurring Gauntlet event. Pohx on the other hand is running a more casual friendly outing with the inclusion of the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion rulesets. Essentially Shifting Stones makes it so every map has either Tower Damage Blight, Endless Delirium, Endless Legion, or Player Haunting Tormented Spirits mapped to the specific Atlas Keystones that grant those things, and what a zone has changes every 15 minutes. Atlas Invasion on the other hand makes it so that once you leave the beach, every single map has two bosses that have “invaded” the map and the pool of what it can draw from is wild.

Most of the time you are going to get one of the generic rebrands of campaign bosses, but every so often you get a pinnacle boss spawning in your map. These are scaled down in difficulty for the area of the map, but still do all of the same attacks. For example while I was fighting the Dweller in Act 1… I heard the “DIE!!!!” voice line and then frantically tried to dodge a giant shaper beam that came through the wall. Before finishing Act 1 I had fought Shaper, Elder, a few Guardian encounters, and Ulhtred the pinnacle boss attacked to Expedition. The ones that I found roughest weirdly enough were the ones associated with Breach… because Tul for whatever reason will oneshot me every time I see him when I may not be prepared to dodge his frontal cone attack.

You may be thinking to yourself… This sounds awful! You would be wrong. As penance for making you fight a bunch of Atlas bosses they each drop somewhere between one to four unique items. Before I exited Act 2 I had already seen a Cloak of Flames, pretty much setting me up for success the entire run as Righteous Fire Chieftain. Most of the uniques are the low tier ones that you will leave rotting on the ground, but every so often something really special drops. Essentially it feels like mapping with a juice Rogue Exiles atlas strategy… but begins the moment you exit LionEye’s Watch. What is really cool is how you realize that there are a lot of uniques that are exceptionally powerful at low levels. I’ve picked up a couple of Cloak of Flames, Immortal Flesh, Berek’s Respite, and once I get a second Rise of the Phoenix I will probably start corrupting them trying for some interesting results.

One of the interesting things about a limited trade environment, is that because I know I will never find a perfect item… I tend to be willing to craft more gear for myself. Granted the boots in the above screenshot dropped almost perfect already from Betrayal, and all I had to do was slap fire resistance on them. Coming back to Path of Exile, it really feels like they could do with bumping down Exalted Orbs in loot tier so that they drop more often. I’ve yet to see one and had to buy one from the currency exchange to do a craft that required one. I’ve been focused on mostly running Betrayal to get my enchants and Harvest because it is by far the most accessible crafting method for getting decent gear, specifically resist rings, amulets, and cluster jewels.

However I am having to re-learn a lesson that I have learned many times in the past… by not going into Delve early I have missed out on a bunch of currency and maps. Delve is so damned good at producing large amounts of basic crafting currency. I have been strapped for pretty much everything from alts to alchs and it sucks. More than that Delve Cities seem to produce a bunch of random maps independent of what tier your current progression is at. So instead I am relying entirely on the few horizon orbs I get, vendor recipe, and map drop luck to make my way through the atlas progression. I did not really start making progress until yesterday because I did not hit maps until Saturday night. The juicy nature of the Atlas bosses has meant that during the campaign I was seeking out every optional boss… and doing every Vaal side area because they would guarantee two extra bosses as well.

The only negative of the event is that something appears to be jacked up with Kingsmarch. Essentially more than half of the times I tried to travel there I would get “Failed to join any instances”. There are threads about this error where folks have claimed that logging out and back in fixed it for them. This has not been the case for me. I can bounce in and out of the game effectively forever and it does not fix it when it is occurring. Then randomly other times it will just work fine and allow me to pop into the zone and do my business. This has sucked quite a bit because shipments are a pretty good source of early gear and currency, and I have effectively been locked out of them. This also means that my progression in Kingsmarch is a bit behind where it should be. Hopefully now that we are past the weekend someone at GGG will sort this out.

All in all though this has been a really fun event. Really if you are trying to do a group found/semi-SSF event this is the perfect ruleset. You end up generating a ton of uniques and for example I noticed every time a Dreadarc dropped which is something Kodra would have needed for Hexblast. Before I left act one I probably saw a dozen of them, which was wild. So essentially if we were ever going to do another AggroChat league I would want to run this ruleset and then have folks basically post a shopping list of what uniques are useful to them, so we could fill up the guild bank. Another thing that I found great while leveling was the Araku Tiki amulet which provides up to 50 life and 50 Fire Resistance… perfect for a budding Righteous Fire character. I ended up wearing one of these until maps because I just could not find a good enough neck to give up that much life and resistance on a single item.

I’ve had a lot of fun so far, but not sure how much I am really going to push it. Some leagues ago I joined SirGog’s chat channel during the scour league which made it so everything dropped as bases and you had to craft your own gear. After that… I just never reset my global back to another channel. I’ve come to really like the chill but focused vibe that the channel tends to attract, and did not know that chat channels apparently spanned across multiple leagues. As a result I have been listening to folks who are participating in his “Softcore Gauntlet” ruleset event and while I normally do not go for “challenge for challenge’s sake” type events, it sounds equally hilarious. So at some point I am going to roll a character in that event when I figure out what I can plan that will be exceptionally tanky using the Phrecia classes.

AggroChat #521 – The French JRPG

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

Hey Folks! We start off with almost no topics on the docket and then fill up a full show as we are rolling.  Bel saw Thunderbolts and shares that it might be the best Marvel movie he has seen since Guardians 3.  From there, Tam dives into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an aggressively French take on the JRPG genre that is insanely good. Grace shares their experiences with Conquest Dark, a new Vampire-Survivors-like that they have been playing. Bel gets sucked back into Path of Exile for Pohx League 2.0 where every map has two random additional bosses.  Tam shares some early thoughts about South of Midnight, and Ash shares their recent experiences with Samurai Bringer and Metal Bringer.  Kodra discusses some of the recent Chess drama, as Dr Lupo very clearly cheated in the recent PogChamps Tournament. Finally, Tam discusses his recent return to Infinity in edition 5.

Topics Discussed:

  • Thunderbolts Movie Great
  • Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
  • Conquest Dark
  • Path of Exile
    • Pohx League 2.0
    • Atlas Invasion
  • South of Midnight
  • Samurai Bringer
  • Metal Bringer
  • Chess Drama
  • Infinity: N5

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Cooking Nemesis Eggs

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Good Morning Folks. One of the things that I really miss from Path of Exile is the existence of a Hideout. Even in that game I am constantly annoyed that I have to load into a public area, instead of just spawning in my hideout… but in Last Epoch I miss someplace private to escape to. Ultimately the thing I call the Monolith Ready Room is the closest thing we have, and unfortunately there is no way to directly port into that area without first running an echo. Truth be told if they just gave us that area I would be appeased, because there are times where I just need to empty my inventory of vendor some items… and the end of time always seems to take forever to zone into. I assume is because I am waiting on other player character models to load. The irony of ARPGs is that I always play then in Online mode, so that I can play with friends if I want to… but then spend 99.9% of my time wishing other players didn’t exist.

I spent most of my night running the Nemesis Woven Echo. I had so many items with Zero Legendary Potential that I needed to cook in eggs, and figured this was also a reasonable way to get more Weavers faction. I think I ran 28 of them in total and eventually gave up on creating clusters and just sort of trailed them off into the far distance of the Stolen Lance timeline. Essentially I would run Echoes until I built up enough stability to do the boss fight, and then take it down before returning to Echoes. Later I used this influx of Gaze of Orobyss to push my corruption up to level 400… which is when I realized that you can only consume so many at once. Weirdly running 400 corruption has not felt that different from 300 corruption.

The only problem with running a bunch of Nemesis Echoes, is that you generate a bunch of bad legendaries. This is honestly a massive boon if you plan on doing a bunch of alting… but unfortunately I have not really done that yet other than the reroll over to Judgement. My poor Beastmaster is sitting there languishing right now. I find it extremely hard to bring myself to delete these. There is still something magical feeling about having a Legendary item in this game, even though I can print dozens of them in a single play session. I think what feels so weird about it is that ultimately when you stick a zero LP unique into an egg… getting a legendary now feels like the failed state instead of a win. Ultimately I am holding onto them I think so that I can use them as fodder to “Divine” uniques in the future, since a bad legendary with 4 affixes on it… still counts as an item with 4 Legendary Potential for those purposes.

In other news… my whole grand plan of being able to predicatively unspec my abilities via my relic slot… did not really work out. It seem like when you remove an item that is giving you bonus levels of a skill… it sort of randomly chooses which nodes you lose. It also seems to ignore Keystones and the minimum requirements to get that Keystone. So even though I did some shenanigans to try and make sure I had all of the other points allocated before equipping the relic, and that the Keystone was in fact gained through those points… it didn’t work. So instead I am trying to learn to love not having the Righteous Fire like aura. In truth you end up dealing so much more damage that I am kind of getting used to the flow of it. It makes such a different on bosses/mini-bosses that it almost seems worth it to give up the quality of life to save from having to unspec all the time.

I do sort of feel like I am maybe winding down a bit. I’m focused on the Reign of Dragons timeline in an attempt to get an upgraded version of my Relic. That and trying to farm more memory amber so that I can buy more woven echoes so that maybe someday I can max out that faction. On some level I feel like I have beat the game. While I love everything there is about Circle of Fortune, not having trade does limit my engagement to some extent. What I mean by this is that I reach a point where I am geared enough to do most things, and the instance of me ever finding an upgrade because less and less likely. Essentially you reach a state where the amount of friction required to keep moving forward, is not necessarily worth it. In Path of Exile there is always trade that I can lean on to get the items that I have not seen with my eyes, which makes more things valuable for the sake of picking up to sell. I could probably never play Last Epoch without Circle of Fortune because it amps up the fun aspect too damned much, but it does also mean that much like Diablo games there is a time limit on just how long I am going to stay engaged.

So then becomes the question, that if I am winding down Last Epoch… what do I want to do instead? There is always the sirens song of Path of Exile, and with the new free private leagues is coming another round of PohxLeague. This time it is with the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion mechanics… the later of which makes every map spawn a random boss, some of which can be guardians. I’ve never experienced this and it could either be super freaking rippy, or a heck of a lot of fun. Additionally there was a big loot patch over in Path of Exile II, and at least on some level I want to pop back in and run a few maps to see how much improvement it made. Then of course there is also a Diablo IV season going on, but given that Raxx called it the season of the battlepass… I am hesitant to log in and play. If I do end up dropping in I will probably play a Whirlwind Barbarian because it is supposedly S-Tier at this point.

Basically I have no clue what I am going to be doing. The desire to join another Pohx League is shockingly stronger than I thought it might be.

Sitting In The Waiting Room

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Good Morning Folks. Waiting Room by Fugazi is not only my favorite song from that band… but one of my favorite songs of all time. Right now I am very much sitting in the waiting room, waiting on the Last Epoch servers to come up and the Tombs of the Erased season to start. I did a very dumb thing. I took the day off work, which almost certainly means that the game is going to be unplayable for large chunks of the day. This is pretty much the rule of game launches… that you never take time off for it. However in this case I have a backup plan, or at least some chores that need to get done around the house. So once I wrap this post I will be going in the backyard and continuing the leaf removal process that we have been doing for the last few days so that we can properly open the back yard and set up the patio off our bedroom.

One of the productive things that you can do while waiting on the servers to come up, is to fiddle around with your loot filter. This is legitimately one of my favorite parts of Last Epoch is that I can customize my filter until my heart is content, and honestly… it is way more straight forward than you might think. It seems like each new league I greatly simplify my process and filter out more chaff. This is essentially the base version of my filter and they are applied from the bottom up so you sort of have to remember the order of operations. As the league progresses I will tighten my filter but right now going into the league this is what I am going to be running with.

Since they get applied from the ground up, here is a brief explanation of what each filter does:

  • Starting at level 5 I am going to hide all Normal aka White Items
  • Starting at level 15 I am going to hide all Magic aka Blue Items.
  • Starting at level 40 I am going to hide all Rare aka Yellow Items… and at that point I will probably delete the first two rules to free up some space. Later I will tweak this rule to remove the level requirements and start hiding Purple items.
  • The next rule is to hide all Idols, because most of them are absolute trash.
  • The next rule is a Recolor rule, which will show and color any Idols with at least two affixes that I care about on them. I trigger the Emphasis bit which puts the item names in all Caps so that I can know for certain it was triggered by a rule and that it did not just somehow slip through the cracks of my hide rules.
  • The next rule I am looking for any item that has an affix that I care about coloring it blue. This is my shard fodder rule allowing me to build up crafting resources that I need through salvaging items.
  • Next up I am looking for any item that has at least TWO affixes that I care about on it and then coloring those purple.
  • Lastly is my “good item” rule where I am looking for any item with at least 3 affixes that I care about and a total item weight of at least 20 tiers which I color Red.

You can do a lot more but for the time being this is what I am going to roll into the new season with. As the season goes on I will start caring about only wanting specific base types which will further limit the visual clutter from mapping.

In other filter news… Neversink/Filterblade has been updated with a brand new theme called Cobalt. I spent some time last night running with it and I really like it quite a bit. Sure it is going to take awhile to train my brain on what is and what is not something that I care about, but the colors that are being used feel fresh and new. This is in honor of the 10th anniversary of Filterblade, which really is the site you should be using for your item filter needs in Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. In a perfect world I would have EHG hire this team to rework their own item filter visualizations. The thing I miss most when playing Last Epoch is the “tink” sound from a great drop.

I’ve made it to T10 maps after spending two days hunting for another nexus of corruption. I’ve also started to actually see this again, since the T10 mobs are a bit rippier than the T9 and below ones were. I am wondering if I need to tweak my gear to add on more survival bits, or if this is just the point at which armor begins to be ineffective against damage. I’ve tried to do my third ascendancy a few times and I just can’t. Either I need to spend time farming lower tier Sanctums looking for honor resist idols, or I need a really good run of RNG in the Trial of Chaos. If I can get my next two points I can buff all of my resists up to 89. The thing that is super brutal though is there are these plants that spawn from certain monsters that throw out a ton of chaos balls… and they will just fucking rip through you and if there is too much mob density on screen you cannot even see them.

In totally not ARPG news… my friend Mog/Astella has had the foresight to create a Fediverse Hunter Squad for Monster Hunter Wilds. Since you can seemingly be in a bunch of different squads I joined this morning, and it is going to be an excellent time for anyone on Mastodon/The Fediverse that is also playing the game. Essentially you can search for the squad via the id TA8E48PM and then request to join. Mog had already thrown me an invite so this process was greatly simplified for me. Also side note if you are tired of trying to be normal on social media and want a place almost exclusively populated with fellow weirdos… then check out the Mastodon Server that I help administrate. Right now I am on Bluesky and Tumblr, but the real place I consider my home is The Fediverse aka Mastodon aka Gamepad.club.

Anyways! I really hope today’s launch of the new Last Epoch season goes really smoothly. They are getting a ton of press from various ARPG streamers, so I am hoping it pays off massively for them.