path of exile

D4 Not Bad

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Diablo 4 has had a bit of a rocky start. The launch went relatively well and while I have shared at length my issues with the game, it seemed to largely be well received. That all changed when the patch notes were released for Season 1 and its pre-patch. Diablo IV was a game where there were only a handful of options that actually felt good to play, and every single one of them was nerfed into oblivion for no apparent reason. This caused an emergency “yeah we fucked up” fireside chat, and with it some massive changes in the way they are addressing the game. The problem is… this was not really enough to stem the bleeding and almost overnight… the game seems to have purged most of its player base. I have a few hundred friends on Battle.Net and at the launch of the game… I saw well over a hundred people playing it including folks I had not seen online in years. At the launch of season one… there were still about six players actively playing the game on my friend’s list.

With this precipitous decline… folks have rushed out of the sidelines to whack away at this misery pinata. “D4 Bad” has become a meme, and you cannot watch an ARPG stream without someone saying it. This charge is being led by several of the Path of Exile streamers and even made its way into the ExileCon official Livestream. This flood of public mockery has even managed to grind down some of the most prolific Diablo Enjoyers. The truth is nothing is ever as simple as the soundbite. I have publicly decried this game, but I don’t seem to hate it anywhere near as much as the zeitgeist seems to right now. On Tuesday Patch 1.1.1 was released, and quite honestly… it brought with it a number of good changes. Since I am sitting in the Path of Exile 3.22 waiting room… I decided to check it out.

As of writing this blog post, I am level 38 and some 13 hours into my playthrough of a seasonal character. Maybe I have mellowed out since my crushing disappointment at launch, or maybe I have just come to accept what Diablo IV is as compared to what I expected it to be. Whatever the case I am not hating what I am playing. I opted to start a Barbarian because ultimately if the game was going to have a redemption arc, it needed to start with the character class that felt awful to play in all of the betas and at launch. I did pivot away from the Whirlwind Barb and am now mostly focused on Hammer of the Ancients. There are a number of things that still feel pretty bad, like how often I have to use my builder in order to get a single hit of my consumer… but that is obviously not really going to change.

Let’s start off by talking about the unique seasonal questline. You are helping Cormond attempt to rid this plague from the world called the Malignant, which infects enemies and causes them to return to life over and over. I believe at this point I have completed the entire quest chain and defeated both forms of the final boss. If you were expecting deep story content that moved the needle forward for Sanctuary… you are pretty much going to have to wait for expansions. What this reminds me of are the storylines that get patched into Gacha games, where you have a handful of quests to introduce a new character or a new mechanic before being turned loose to explore that further. The Cormond storyline exclusively exists to introduce us to the Malignant and give us some structure as to why we are caging these hearts.

As far as the seasonal mechanic itself, every bit of content that you do seems to be able to spawn Malignant monsters which have a chance of dropping a heart that you can attempt to cage. I’ve encountered these in dungeons, cellars, and they are guaranteed to spawn in the new type of dungeon called Malignant Tunnels. What this means in practice is that you have to defeat an elite… remember to click the purple, orange, or blue heart that is left behind… and then fight them again to get a Caged Heart to drop. I wish the hearts were glowing brightly or something because quite honestly they tend to blend into the background and I am pretty sure I have killed Malignant monsters several times and forgot entirely to click on the doodad. When you are going through a dungeon… they feel absolutely the same as every other monster you fight. There is nothing really special about them other than the fact that they look like they have some guck covering them.

The object of your search is the Caged Heart. These come in three common varieties… Viscious (Orange), Devious (Purple), and Brutal (Blue). These fit into corresponding colored sockets that now exist in every piece of jewelry that drops. The key complaint that I heard early on is that these would harm survival given that everyone was socketing skulls into jewelry for armor bonuses. As a result, Blizzard thought far enough ahead to just give each caged heart a ton of armor negating that concern. Each colored heart has specific bonuses that can roll on them, and these are more of the “nice to have” territory than anything build-changing. Under certain rare circumstances, you can get a fourth type called the Wrathful Heart (Black) which is a bit like a watered-down Legendary Aspect, that could impact how you want to build your character. Incremental power gain is still power gain, so I guess this is a positive overall.

Originally I had said this seemed like a watered-down version of the Abyss league mechanic from Path of Exile, but in truth that is giving it a bit too much credit. The Caged Hearts are a nice bonus for doing content you are already going to do, but don’t really feel like something worth specifically chasing. I do however enjoy doing the Malignant Tunnel dungeons because they have a better flow to them than traditional dungeons just for leveling purposes. You can craft devices with the different colors of corruption that you loot, which allows you to spawn a bonus boss fight at the end of the Malignant Tunnel. Again these don’t really feel like chase mechanics, but more something I am doing for experience points given that I end up with a ton of the crafting materials from salvaging the hearts. Hearts take up inventory space, so I feel like I am always needing to destroy them to make room for more loot.

The thing that is a bit intangible is that 1.1.1 feels better, and I can’t exactly put my finger on why. Granted I am nowhere near the endgame, but my survival feels better and my ability to kill things also feels significantly better. I’ve been in a loop the last several nights where I did not have the mental bandwidth to play Baldur’s Gate 3, but did not want to burn myself out on Path of Exile right before a new league starts. As a result, Diablo IV has felt pretty great as the sort of game interaction that I am craving but also given that I don’t deeply care about it… it is simple enough to log out and walk away from it when I have something else that I would rather be doing. Essentially I feel like the game is in a better state than it was when I left it, and not near as meme-worthy as the internet would lead you to believe. Sure there are things that still bug the fuck out of me, like their overreliance on crowd control… but it also isn’t an awful experience.

Blizzard did win however and convinced me to consume my battle pass token. The armor set that you get as part of the seasonal journey is actually rather sweet. This annoys me however because the set of armor you get the free track… looks like shit. If you want nice things you are going to have to keep buying a quarterly battle pass in order to have access to potentially “earn” it. That whole interaction feels bad, that not only will I have to pay money for it… but I will also be expected to grind away in order to earn the things I paid for. The battle pass as it stands is probably one of my least favorite constructs in gaming, and really… it needs to die in a fire.

I guess the only positive thing that I have to say about the Battle Pass is that it seems like progress is moving extremely quickly through it. Like I said I am roughly thirteen hours into this character and I am sitting at level 43 of 90 in the rewards track. The curve for these rewards seems to also be fairly flat as I’ve not noticed them slowing down significantly as I moved through the content. Basically, I am just about finished with the lower tier of the armor skins and going to be starting on getting the slightly nicer ones. When I ding 40, which should happen today… I will unlock the Smouldering Ashes system that allows me to gain account-wide bonuses. I will of course be going after the Urn of Aggression first which gives a flat XP boost and should speed up the rest of my leveling.

As far as the Season Journey goes, I am already through the first four steps which would have originally been part of the “Haedrig’s Gift” process in Diablo III. Each time you ding you seem to get a set of jewelry and a few aspect unlocks which is nice but also feels a little lackluster. It just really drives home how commoditized gear in general feels in Diablo IV. I will say just the existence of the Seasons Journey makes the game feel like it has a bit more purpose because it gives me some activities to focus on. Weirdly you can progress to the next tier without actually finishing the previous one. I think in most cases when I got all but 2 or 3 of the achievements checked off I was able to leap ahead to the next tier and get the rewards. I like that it gives me a bit of a sense of purpose and causes me to play in a way I would not normally play… like seeking out Cellars each time I happen across one because I know X number of them to tick off a seasonal journey step.

All told… I don’t hate it though. There are a few weeks of focused gameplay here, and quite honestly I am moving through levels way faster than I thought I would. It doesn’t feel as good as Diablo III, where you could burn up a character in a weekend and be doing endgame content the rest of the season, but it doesn’t feel anywhere near as slow as leveling did at launch. I hope over time they will continue to accelerate this process because really… it should take you a week to max out a seasonal character and then the rest of the time should be spent interacting with the seasonal mechanic. However, given how shallow the seasonal mechanic is… I can’t really see players sticking around for long because of it. Maybe it is better to think of the endgame as beginning at level 50 when you hit World Tier 3, and then everything after that point is gravy.

I do want the game to find its stride, because even though it has faded significantly… I still have a lot of love and nostalgia for the franchise. I don’t think Diablo IV was the right game to continue that legacy, but I also don’t think it is awful. I think a lot of the Metacritic user score reflects the anger over a bad patch, and I hope given time… the team can recover from that. I am extremely curious about what Path of Exile 3.22 is going to look like because I am already seeing a flood of “D4 player tries POE” videos. I fully expect Diablo IV stumbling will be extremely good for peak numbers in the Ancestor League. I am most definitely looking forward to it, but for the time being… I am actually enjoying the Season of the Malignant. It is nowhere near as bad as I had feared, but also… isn’t as good as I might have hoped. So while I can’t say “D4 Bad” I can probably be fine with saying “D4 Mid”.

Scorching Ray and Malignant Hearts

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Good Morning Friends. Yesterday I did not really have the mental fortitude for Baldur’s Gate III, so I largely focused on ARPGs for a quick dose of fun. I’ve continued working on leveling my Righteous Fire Templar and that continues to go swimmingly. The big difference with this test character is that I am focused on Scorching Ray in lieu of the more traditional Fire Trap for single-target-DPS. I am still not sure if I will actually go in this direction in nine days when the league start happens, but there are absolutely aspects of it that I greatly enjoy. Being able to burn things down at range is rather nice as they are heading toward you, but I am not entirely certain this makes up for the complete lack of mobility while doing the damage. I think in order to really get the most from this, you would need to invert your body armor and helmet quickly and get Scorching Ray in the six-link. I feel like for bosses this might have significantly higher damage potential, but for anything else… probably less because it was so easy just to drop fire traps as you were pathing through a map.

We have yet another new Atlas Passive spoiler and once again SirGog does an excellent job diving into its potential. If you don’t follow his channel, I highly suggest you remedy that because I find him one of the more valuable resources that deep dives into specific theory-crafting. There is this trend between the passive reveals so far that I am digging. They all seem to be making it easier for someone who has zero experience to get into specific league mechanics from the “big boom” option for Expedition to the “Tower Defense Only” Blight and “No Timer Delirium” and now “No Timer Legion” there is a clear pattern. It feels like we are going to see a new passive for most of the “on map” League mechanics that somehow simplify them without the need for a lot of atlas tree investment. Making Path of Exile a little more “noob friendly” seems like a great course to me.

Speaking of “Noob Friendly” I recorded another one of my dumb videos the other day where I ramble on about my journey so far in Path of Exile over the last four leagues. I had someone on social media helpfully suggest that I need to follow a script and that I need to talk faster… but that is going to be advice that I ignore. I’m not trying to turn YouTube or this blog for that matter into a business and I don’t much care about optimizing my output. However, if you are interested in listening to a twenty-minute discussion of how I progressed from half-assing my way through a build, following a guide, and now branching out to do some of my own things… this might be something for you. I talk through some of the websites and tools that I use and at least talk a little bit about Path of Building. I get that I am absolutely an acquired taste, but I know there are at least a few people out there that enjoy listening to me ramble.

In the “things I did not expect to do” department, over lunch yesterday I decided to check out Diablo IV Patch 1.1.1 aka the one that supposedly fixes a bunch of things. All told thus far it feels like a better experience, but then again… I am only level sixteen and am far from the end of the game that wound up frustrating me. I am trying a Hammer of the Ancients aka HOTA Barbarian, because really… if Barb does not feel better then I legitimately have no interest in this game going forward. Originally I thought to myself that I was going to play through the campaign again because starting a character without the campaign feels a little directionless. However, I got bored with the campaign quests and all of the times when you are having to wait on NPCs to path… and wound up hitting the “skip campaign” button. Diablo IV still feels prodigiously slow to me, and probably always will.

Skipping the campaign at least allowed me to fiddle around with the seasonal mechanic. Malignant Hearts are in the “aggressively fine” territory. One of the nice things so far is that I don’t exactly feel like I am giving anything up since I would normally run Skulls in all of my jewelry, and thus far all of the hearts I have picked up have added additional armor. The effects that they grant tend to be a bit on the lackluster side… but again I am only level sixteen. They are certainly nice to haves, but nothing so far that I would consider “build defining”. It most definitely does not feel like it allows me to create some “broken builds” as hinted at by the devs. The biggest problem I have noticed is… the increase in renown means that you cap out an area long before you can reasonably unlock World Tier 3… and continue gaining renown. So at least in the short term, I feel like I would need to bounce around a lot.

I’ve not consumed my extra special battle pass nonsense, and unless I suddenly decide this is the best thing ever… I am unlikely to do so. It isn’t so much that the seasonal mechanic is bad… it is more that it feels like it should have been a small part of much larger mechanics. Like if you collected hearts and then could use your excess hearts (side note I am only 16 and I already have more than I can use) to craft some sort of key that allowed you to run a loot-filled dungeon full of nothing but corrupted/infected/whatever monsters… it might be a really fun season. They could have taken a page from Path of Exile and given us a way to use a heart to corrupt a dungeon boss similar to corrupting an Essence Monster, that then has a chance to drop special corrupted versions of their normal loot table. The mechanic just feels half-baked and it should have been saved to combine with other seasonal mechanics to make something cooler.

I think quite possibly the biggest negative that I can see is that even though it is lackluster as a whole… they have already said that it won’t be going to the Eternal realm. Diablo IV already feels like it just doesn’t have enough to do or enough interesting variety in its content. Making it so that there is a random chance of getting a Malignant heart to drop that then allows it to replace a gem socket or something going forward would at least add some interesting random chance that could break up other seasonal mechanics. The biggest thing that Path of Exile has going for it, is just how damned much content it has and how much random chance there is that something really interesting is going to happen when you run even the most boring of maps. There is something like twenty-four different league mechanics that have migrated to Standard and all of them CAN influence your content… adding that delightful layer of unpredictability to everything you do.

Blizzard decided that Nightmare Dungeons would be their pinnacle activity that everyone would want to do over and over. The problem is… they are boring, repetitive, and in spite of having over a hundred dungeons… they feature what is essentially a dozen different bosses. In the infamous David S. Pumpkins SNL skit one of the characters asks “Why did you go all in on David Pumpkins?” and I feel like I find myself asking that about Nightmare Dungeons. Clearly, the designers thought they were going to be the big thing, and that has not really worked into reality. Anyways do I think I will actually level my now seasonal character in Diablo IV? Probably not. I will likely return to more Baldur’s Gate III, until the 18th when the Ancestor League launches in Path of Exile, and rapidly forget that I even have Diablo IV installed again.

A Packed Weekend

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Screenshot from Path of Exile showing a Righteous Fire Inquisitor firing off Scorching Ray with the Shaper Beam Micro-transaction.

Good Morning Friends! Today is the first day of the new school year for my wife, and as a result, much of the weekend was centered around preparing her for that. However, I did manage to get a bunch of gaming in around the margins. I’ve been playing an RF Inquisitor as a test character to decide if I want to go down that path or stick with my Juggernaut shenanigans. In truth, the final decisions will be made when the patch notes drop in Friday and we see if Juggernaut and Righteous Fire spring forth unscathed. One of the things I am playing with as I level this character is relying on Scorching Ray instead of Fire Trap for single-target damage. There are definitely some positives being that I can burn through rare and unique monsters much faster. The glaring negative however is that I have to remain stationary while channeling it, which means there are going to be times when I cannot realistically stop to cast it. I wonder if I can create a linkage that could support both Fire Trap and Scorching Ray without greatly hampering either of them… because it sure would be nice to have both available.

A screenshot from Sir Gog's review of recent 3.22 Path of Exile spoilers showing off the Unending Nightmare atlas passive node.

Sir Gog released a video talking about the spoilers that are being released this week for Patch 3.22, and of them, I am greatly interested in Unending Nightmare. Essentially I have always wanted the ability to just not have Delirium Fog clear on its own. I get that for Delirium farmers this is a bad thing, but for me who only ever dabbles in most of the league mechanics it would be pretty great to have the option of simply clearing the entire map before it ends. Similarly, the Expedition node that gives you one big explosion has been something I have often wished existed. If this new Atlas Passive Tree gives me a node that just turns every Alva into the Inverse Incursions from the Memory maps… I would be in heaven. So far it feels like I am getting a lot of the things that I have wanted to exist, so maybe just maybe there are going to be a few more of them.

My Baldur's Gate 3 Party does a murder of some Gnolls

Most of my weekend gaming was spent playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is likely no shock to anyone. The game as a whole has had a peak concurrency on Steam of over 800,000 players and it has yet to release on Consoles. I thought I had screwed up my current playthrough because I missed a key character when I could first talk to them. However last night I managed to sort out a sequence of events that had them come to seek me out in my camp, so I have now picked up Karlach and Wyll and shuffled my party around to allow room for both so I can give them a shot. I can already tell that I am going to love running around with Karlach. BG3 is one of those games where you think you are playing for thirty minutes but have wound up playing for four hours. It has been a while since a game has caused this much time dilation for me, but I am enjoying it.

Screenshot from the Code: Action mini game in Honkai Star Rail where I have created a movie poster themed after The Matrix called "Super Hacker" featuring Blade as Neo and Silver Wolf as Trinity.

There is a cute web-based game called “Code: Action” going on in Honkai Star Rail where you retell the stories of Blade, Kafka, and to some extent Silver Wolf. The end result is you create these cute movie posters based on the characters. It is largely fluff, but each of the six posters gives you a chunk of currency in the game so if you have fifteen minutes it is well worth doing. I am slowly chipping away at leveling some more characters. I think I have unlocked enough on my Luocha to where he is undeniably the correct choice for party healing over Natasha. Next up I am probably going to start working on kitting out Himeko because I really like her follow-up attacks. Still enjoying myself but this game is very much in maintenance mode for me where I play thirty minutes a day and feel happy doing so.

A screenshot from Palia Beta showing off my plot and the fact that you can have multiple storage chests.

I did not really get into Palia much more over the weekend, but I did test a theory. The first chest that you place gives you 400 storage capacity, and if you place additional storage chests on your property it just keeps giving you an additional 400 capacity in one large shared bank. Given that I gathered a ton of resources clearing my plot I decided to go ahead and craft a few spares. The grid view is really nice and allows you to align things much more cleanly than you can while placing things in the third person. I sorta wish housing systems like FFXIV had an over-the-top grid view like this for placing objects and aligning them to grid lines.

A screenshot from The Witcher Netflix series during happier times in Season One with Geralt and Yaskier/Dandelion

I also finished Season Three of the Netflix Witcher series. I had been avoiding it because the first half of this season was pretty awful, and I was afraid it would go even further off the rails. I’ve chosen to use an image of happier times when the series was more closely following the actual source material. Essentially The Witcher is a wobbly cart, and the first season had a few rough moments but largely lifted scenes directly from the novels or short stories. In the second season… the cart began to shake itself violently with the mischaracterization and subsequent murder of the beloved Eskel. In Season Three… the wheels have fallen off and the series has been drug along the path on the backs of the still rather excellent character actors. I’ve come to really like the actors playing most of the roles, but instead of doing justice to original property be it the novels or the games… we are just sort of in David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie territory.

Photo of me and Greybie our Tigerstripe Grey Tabby Stray "Community Cat"

Lastly, to end on a positive note, I spent some time last night hanging out with our community cat Greybie. He has pretty much moved to our backyard permanently along with Tripod. I’ve been going out and loving on him each day when I put down food and water, but he has been mournfully meowing at me for not sticking around and staying a bit. He likes to hop up in my lap while I am sitting in my chair, and it has just been too hot to do this lately. However given that yesterday was the first sub-hundred-degree day in over a week, I figured I needed to go out and indulge the sweet baby. Sadly Tripod is still completely skittish, but at least hangs out… from afar… when I am out there.

I hope that you all had a great weekend. I hope my wife has a great start to the new school year today. I look forward to playing a lot more Baldur’s Gate 3 this week and getting a bit further in my RF Inquisitor test build.

Inconvenience as a Feature

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Good Morning Friends! We are going to go on a bit of a journey. I’m very much in Path of Exile mode with the new league starting some 16 days from now. I have been playing around with various build ideas and trying out new things. This also means I am consuming a lot of content which in turn causes the YouTube algorithm to dredge up even more of it for me to watch. Trade is an extremely important part of Path of Exile, whether or not you want to admit it. If you are playing without access to the trade market, you are absolutely playing on the hardest difficulty settings. Solo-Self-Found is absolutely a game mode, but it is also one that expects you to know quite a bit about the even more obtuse crafting system in order to fix your resistances and craft your own gear. I feel strongly enough about this that I took the time to cobble together a rather detailed dissection of a trade encounter in an attempt to demystify the process.

Then I stumbled onto this video from All-Trades Jack who has been going on his own journey through this game much like I have over the last few years. He has an excellent video talking about the merits of following a guide which I highly recommend watching. Essentially he reached the point that I did two leagues ago, where I finally was willing to engage with the Trade system. He honestly talks about many of the very sane and reasonable objections that I also had. Trade in Path of Exile is needlessly cumbersome and it requires a human element to the trades that I have not dealt with since Everquest and setting up a trader in the Nexus. It should be as simple as putting items in a publicly flagged trade stash tab and then allowing players to purchase those items through an in-game auction house. However two leagues into wrapping my head around the trade economy… it works the way it works for a reason.

One of the core problems with an Auction House system is that it often allows for arbitrage, or essentially buying cheap goods and then selling for a profit margin. This is ultimately how the real-world stock market works, so it makes sense that players will figure out ways to carry over this same logic into a video game. In World of Warcraft, this has led to an arms race over the years of Auction House tools and changes to the way that the Auction House worked, in order to try and throttle the equivalent of “fast trading”. Essentially in an Arbitrage system, there is essentially an invisible broker sitting in the middle of a trade always making sure that prices trend upwards. This is an oversimplification because I don’t tend to engage in “economic pvp” as some call it. I know it works and I have a mount in Classic WoW entirely thanks to the fact that my friend Stargrace is extremely skilled at playing a market and looking for opportunities.

This is not me passing judgment on the system, but just saying that it isn’t really my jam. World of Warcraft specifically has systems in place to help limit the impact of runaway arbitrage. When you use an item, it often binds to your character meaning that you cannot then turn around and sell it after using it. When the game launched bags were not bound to the character, and as a result the bag cartel became one of the most rampant marketplaces. I remember getting very threatening messages when I crafted my first Mooncloth Bag and dared to price it cheaper than all of the other bags on the market. From Burning Crusade and beyond, all bags were set to bind to the character on equipment. BOE as a system is likely largely a result of the trade economy that WoW Devs were all too familiar with in Everquest where all of the gear was tradeable effectively forever. Nothing was ever truly removing gear from the economy because I could use the same Lamentation for 50 levels, and then trade it off to the next person when I got an upgrade.

Path of Exile is similar to the original days of Everquest in that almost everything in the game is freely tradeable between your characters or any other player in the game. This allows for some really interesting decisions where I can take maps with modifiers that I cannot personally run, but sell them to players who have builds capable of running them. I can also take every piece of gear that I find and sell it to any other player, or even when I decide I am done with a character use those items to fund my next character. It is an economy begging to be set ablaze by arbitrage, and there are in fact discords devoted to buying items in bulk for the purpose of flipping them. However, this is not something that the game itself supports, and by default, trade seems to be purposefully cumbersome and requires several human touchpoints in order to stop rampant flipping.

It might be Stockholm syndrome, but I have reached a place of acceptance that All-Trades Jack has yet to arrive at. I accept that the cumbersome nature of trade, and the inconvenience of needing to stop what I am doing in order to sell an item… is a fair tradeoff for having the ability to find reasonably priced items for the vast majority of the league life span. We are currently at the end of a league and the trade market is a bit tight, but my reasonably priced items are going like hotcakes as a result. I will say that the inconvenience factor has changed what I am willing to sell. I am no longer going to personally list 1 Chaos items because frankly, it isn’t worth my time to stop doing whatever I happen to be doing to pop into my hideout to complete that trade. In Sanctum my bulk bin was 1 Chaos, in Crucible my cheapest sell price was 5 Chaos… and going into the next league I fully expect the lowest price I am willing to sell at will be 10 Chaos.

While my personal price point has trickled up, it is not that I am charging more for individual items… it is just that I am only selling better quality items. There are enough dedicated traders out there who are more than happy to take on smaller trades to make sure those 1 Chaos uniques are in plentiful supply. I’ve basically figured out a way that I can live with the system. Would I like it all to be automated and require zero human interaction? Absolutely. However, I am not sure if I would like the ramifications of that system. I get the impression that Grinding Gear Games does not want their trade economy to devolve into a flippers paradise. I feel like they would like to reward players for going out and doing content and then selling the items that they find in the wild. Much of why I never really engaged with the Auction House market in World of Warcraft, is that it felt like it was stacked against the folks going out and doing the content.

Anyways I’ve made my peace with the system. I’ve tried to release content both in written and video form in an attempt to demystify it. There will still be folks who want nothing to do with the system, and at least among my circle of friends I am always willing to interact with trade for them when they are looking for something specific. Last league, I had a bag slot that had currency belonging to Thalen for example, and when he wanted something he would just send me the trade site link and I would snatch it up for him. I’ve reached the point where I am comfortable enough navigating the system that I don’t mind doing it for others. I’ve yet to touch the bulk trading options like TFT, but at some point, I could see myself dipping my toes into that market for no reason other than to get rid of some of my vault clutter. That said I keep buying new tabs in the guild bank so I can start sharing excess things like maps, because after a point I am generating them faster than I can run them.

Anyways! I doubt All-Trades Jack will ever read this… but I figured I would at least share my thoughts on the matter.