path of exile Archives - Page 43 of 94

Cats and Companions

November 14, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. We had one of those weird early morning deliveries before I woke up, and I was too slow removing the box from the bar after unpacking it. As a result… Josie now lives here. I spent most of last night snuggling with this goober while Gracie was on my legs. Especially now that it is getting colder, as soon as I sit still for more than a few minutes I end up with a cat. I am perfectly okay with this reality because truth be told I could use snuggles. Mollie pretty much lives in my office and when I got upstairs this morning she was ready for attention and is now sitting beside me. I feel like there is a periodic cat tax that must be paid on this blog and you can never say I did not provide.

I had every intent to spend my evening continuing the process of unlocking maps and progressing my way through the atlas in Path of Exile. That did not happen, because we had an extended maintenance as they attempted to roll out their new account system. This did not go smoothly. Essentially the QA process did not notice that once they expanded the length of accounts… by adding a numerical bit on the end of them for differentiation purposes… it would then jam up the login process that was strictly limited to 27 characters. I greatly appreciate the level of transparency they gave us in this post, and apparently, they are going to make another run at it on Sunday/Monday. These are all requirements for the eventual start of the Path of Exile 2 Early Access next month.

Instead of playing Path of Exile, I fell back into Veilguard and thankfully quickly sorted out what I was doing the last time I played. I did a round of cleaning up companion missions and then played through the Arlathan Forest main story quest that I had been avoiding. This produced the cutscene that I was expecting where essentially I got prior notice that we were just about to reach the point of no return. I’ve always been thankful when a Bioware game gives me one of these not-subtle reminders that I better do anything I might want to do before going into a big world-state-changing sequence. Of course… immediately following this a whole new round of companion quests opened up which will keep me busy for another night or two.

In other news, Guild Wars 2 released this banger of a trailer coinciding with its release on the Epic Game Store. It feels weird that they are specifically launching on the EGS after having already launched on Steam, but hopefully, they are getting some of that sweet sweet Tim Sweeny payola for going through the effort. Regardless of how I feel about the EGS… this is a fucking amazing trailer. This is how they should have sold the game years ago. It really nails the high points of the game as it is today and if I was not already a player… this would have been the sort of thing that would have inspired me to give it a shot.

They also released the trailer for the next content drop called Godspawn. The big part of this that I need to start prepping for is doing dailies in order to build back up my Wizard Chore currency so that I can hopefully buy another legendary weapon box when the store refreshes on the 19th. I had fallen out of the habit of doing dailies, but I really should get back into that habit in the coming week. The currency builds up really freaking fast so I should be able to buy that box pretty quickly after its release. At this point, I have crafted four legendary weapons, and this content drop releases a new Legendary Spear which I am interested to see what that requires.

Other than that… I might be backpedaling on nuking my Twitter account. My friend Ashgar raised a valid point yesterday, and I have until the end of the month to decide one way or the other. Essentially over most of the last decade, I have used Twitter as my defacto home on the internet. As a result, my blog is littered with references to my Twitter account. This means that I need to sift through 3700 blog posts and their duplicates on AggroChat and replace all of those links… or just turn back on my account and lock it down in a state of dormancy. I am not sure which option I will go with yet. My twitter profile has enough search engine traction that it is not unlikely for someone to snag it and put annoying bullshit on it. Apparently, this happened to a bunch of artists when they left twitter and their accounts got snagged by crypto-scammers. This is not a thing I want associated with my name, even on a platform I have moved past.

Missing Delve

November 12, 2024 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.

Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.

I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.

The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.

I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.

Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.

Necro Settlers Event Fun

November 11, 2024 by Belghast

Hey Folks! I gotta admit I am still reeling from last week but luckily I am off today… so it means I get an extra day to decompress. Since the world still feels like shit, I needed to retreat into some very familiar comfort gaming, and the Necro Settlers Event league in Path of Exile has fit the bill. This is a bit weird for an event league because there is no fixed end time, so it has effectively turned into a reboot of the Settlers League which I assume will end when that league ends. The league started on the 7th and at this point I am into mapping with a character that can probably get me all the way through t16s. I went RF Chieftain again because it is comfy and familiar and I know how to get it up and running without much deep thought. I am fully expecting to play a fairly scuffed character because event league economies can be a bit weird and limited.

Event leagues always have some gimmick associated with them, and this time around it is all of the normal Settlers of Kalguur mechanics with the addition of the Lantern of Arimor from the Necropolis league. They removed all of the negative modifiers from the pool and additionally since Allflames are no longer dropping… they are just being applied to your maps automatically. What has been interesting is that all maps of a specific tier for a specific timeframe will share the same pool of lantern modifiers. This means that joining a shared global chat is a good idea as folks tend to share when a certain zone is really hot. This creates massive fluctuations in the price of specific maps when they are running a desirable combo, and also creates a situation where Horizon Orbs are more useful than they have ever been in Path of Exile history.

All of this made getting through the campaign rather interesting. I was going much slower than normal, but also having random league mobs showing up in your maps made it a bit more challenging. An example of something that I saw is during Darresso’s Arena in Act 4 is that nothing but Suphite Golems was spawning other than the Dogs that come out of the various gates. The entire place from start to finish was just yellow golems throwing chunks of sulphite at me, which would be great if I were actually messing with Delve right now, but also kind of wild when you get shotgunned by multiple packs at the same time. I think it was Mudflats where I first encountered the Unique Gemling mobs that drop random gems, and there were a few times early on that I just ran from Meatsacks because they took too long to chew through.

The other really weird thing about this league has been its economy. There are certain lantern combinations that print massive amounts of chaos. I’m hearing that some folks with appropriate juicing are seeing upwards of 200 chaos in a single map. There are no real equivalent mods that drop Divine Orbs, which means that the currency conversion between the two is outrageous. For those who do not know normally you trade in the range of 200 Chaos to a Single Divine Orb, but over the weekend at one point it was trading 500 to 1. This has all sorts of trickle-down effects on the economy as a whole meaning that things that would normally be a 5 Chaos item are selling for 60 Chaos or higher. There are a lot of folks who have not caught onto this yet, because there are items priced at 1 Divine that are in no way worth effectively 400-500 Chaos.

Luckily though I have found plenty of raw chaos and items that I can sell easily for chaos, and it has allowed me to outfit myself in the basics of a RF Chieftain build. I’ve not gone life-on-block based yet, so am still rocking the Rise of the Phoenix shield to cap out my Fire Resistances. I’ve not done the last lab so right now I am sitting at 90% Fire Res and 80% Lightning and Cold Res. I am currently using a four-link Cloak of Flame but am outfitting my atlas to do the Einhar/Ritual strategy in hopes of dropping either an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan so that I can six-link it. I spent 70 Chaos on the chest specifically because I was looking for one that would be good enough to bother six-linking eventually. Luckily the Cloak is relatively easy to get RF colors on of BBBRRG. You can see the rest of my scuffed gear in this POB link.

Since I am off today, I plan on slowly chipping away at my Atlas and doing everything I can to unlock more points. I got a wildly lucky drop earlier where I opened a Unique map lockbox and got two that I needed. Sadly the third was the damned pvp map which is always a waste of time. I wish you could use Horizon Orbs on Hall of the Grandmasters in an attempt to get other unique maps. I will however happily take a Twilight Temple map since that is often one of the ones that goes for quite a bit later in the league. Path of Exile and honestly any ARPG is comfort gaming for me, and I needed this more than I realized. I was having plenty of fun with Veilguard but was essentially in the “chores” section of the game where I needed to do a bajillion sidequests so that I could comfortably move the main story forward. Essentially I was in the “hinterlands” again, and needed a bit of a break.

Are you playing Necro Settlers Event league? What are your thoughts so far? Would you want to see the Lantern of Arimor go standard? Drop me a note below.

AggroChat #499 – Pokemon Hearthstonification

November 10, 2024 by Belghast

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

Hey Folks! We are all reeling a bit from the past week, but we start off things with the joyful return of Ammo from her trip to Japan. She spends a bit of time talking about all the arcade hopping and wonderful food that she found along the way. From there we dive into the furious growth of Pokemon TCG Pocket and how it has swept through our friend group. Ash talks about his experiences with Monster Hunter Wilds Beta and Bel shares his own comfort gaming in the form of the weird Path of Exile Necro Settlers Event League. Bel also talks a bit about playing the Brighter Shores Early Access, and how it has some core design problems that will keep him from playing for very long. Kodra talks a bit about GeekGirlCon where we realize… that he has in fact been talking about it every year since the very first year in 2016. Our podcast… is old. He also talks a bit about his role in the upcoming SudokuCon Stream and some of the nonsense he is going to be doing combining two of his loves: Sudoku, and Celeste.