path of exile

Deterministic Crafting

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve now spent more time with Last Epoch and leveled a character further than I had managed previously. Last night I dinged level 50, and am an undetermined amount of progress into the story. I kinda like how Path of Exile has nice clean points of demarcation between content blocks, but Last Epoch is this whole weird timey-wimey chrono-trigger-esc mess of timelines. I’ve been playing the Necromancer and it is pure nonsense. Right now if I am summoning the maximum number of critters following me and doing my bidding I have:

  • 2 – Bone Golems
  • 5 – Skeletal Warriors
  • 3 – Skeletal Mages
  • 6 – Exploding Zombies
  • 3 – Skeletal Vanguard
  • 2 – Wraiths

So at full compliment… which I admittedly only really hit regularly when I am in a boss fight… I am roaming around with Twenty-One Horrible Children. This is what I want in a Necromancer class, just a veritable army of dead friends doing my work for me. Admittedly that is ALL I do… because I effectively keep summoning Exploding Zombies in lieu of casting a fireball or something of the sort. Each time one of my pets die, including my exploding zombies that are designed to die… I have a 10% chance of summoning a Skeletal Vanguard. So while the rest of my pets I can summon up before I get into battle, those I need to effectively get through combat. I guess technically I could probably sit there summoning Exploding Zombies until I procced all three of them.

There are a lot of things that I really like about the game and probably the biggest one of those is the crafting system. Coming from Path of Exile, I think I have had my fill of “crafting gamba” and hate how you have to game that system in order to get what you actually want from it… while at the same time always being on the very edge of “bricking” your item in the process. In Last Epoch, the “random” element is pushed to finding the crafting shards in the wild, but once you have one it is always going to apply a predictable effect to an item. Sure this sucks a bit when you really need Minion Damage on an item and you have not found any Minion Damage shards, but at least you have a fixed item that you need to get as a drop. There are items that let you shatter an item that has a stat you want with a chance of recovering a shard of that type, so at least there are ways around that.

If you really want that “big gamba energy” though there are various rare items that cause your crafts to give you less predictable results. For example, if you have an item with one bad affix on it, you can try your luck with a Glyph of Chaos which will replace it with a random affix that could exist on that item. Rune of Refinement is effectively the equivalent of a Divine Orb from Path of Exile where it rerolls the stat values of all of your affixes allowing you to try and eke out a little bit of extra stat bonus. So there is still some random chance in the system, but if you just want some basic things on your gear that will support your build you can fairly predictably make that happen. The most important thing however is the forging potential of an item in determining whether or not you can shift it to be exactly what you were wanting. That stat ultimately dictates how many modifications you can apply to an item before it is essentially “locked” and can no longer craft on it.

One thing that I desperately wish the game had… was some sort of wardrobe system. My character looks awful right now, and there is no real way I can change that. I am going to look like a mess until I get to a point where I can effectively start wearing better-looking set gear. I am always big into cosmetic systems because if your character looks cool, it feels better to play said character. This is why games with cosmetic microtransactions will always be my weakness because it is pretty easy to get me to pony up a few bucks to feel better about how my character looks. There is a tab in the UI for appearances but it is inaccessible and I am not even sure where on the roadmap those features sit. I would assume that it would be important because cosmetics are ultimately when you can start offering things for sale in the shop and give the game a renewable line of income.

Another thing that I really want is some version of the Diablo III pet that runs around vacuuming up gold and shards. Having to walk over gold gets annoying really quickly after you’ve been used to a game with a pet, and a game without any sort of gold equivalent. The shards all get picked up at once when you click on any one of them, similar to the gems in Diablo III but I wish they went straight to the crafting bank. At any point, you can click a button in your inventory to send them there, so it just feels tedious for them not to do that by default. After a while most of what you are going to be picking up are the shards because you will likely be running a loot filter and ignoring everything that doesn’t have a stat package conducive to your base class.

Speaking of the loot filter… that is definitely something that I like greatly about the game. You can absolutely import a filter from your clipboard and there are plenty of sources for good filters on the internet. I do wish it worked a bit more like a POB and that you could just import from a pastebin URL given that most filter authors seem to store said filters there. The functionality that I like the most about this however is that once you have imported a filter, you can customize it easily in the game. This will allow you to tweak it later on when you are looking for specific items to stylize that loot when it finally does drop. For example, in Path of Exile I was looking for a Gladiator armor base and would have loved if I could simply add a custom rule for that item in the game quickly. In Last Epoch, I will absolutely be able to do that when I am specifically hunting for something that might otherwise get dropped by the filters.

Mechanically it is a deeply enjoyable game, but I think time will tell if I feel like the endgame is good. One of the reasons why I am so damned hooked on Path of Exile is that it has so much content left over from previous leagues that it allows me to narrow in on the one specific thing that I want to spend most of my time doing. I’ve not made it to anything close to the end game, so I will be interested to see what it entails. Essentially I need something that is a fun loop that feels rewarding while also being something that I can mostly turn my brain off for. That is why I stuck with Diablo III for so long because the rhythm of running Rifts and Bounties was something I found deeply soothing. The thing I struggle with in Path of Exile is that for whatever reason the game seems to relish random assed deaths, and there is never a point where you can truly just zone out and chill. Delve has been the closest to that for me, but even then it is entirely possible for me to encounter exactly the wrong combination of abilities from a mob and take an almost instant death.

Shifting back to the negative column for a bit. The story in Last Epoch is “fine” for an ARPG but is largely nonsense. You are shifting back and forth between multiple Eras of the same area and while it is cool the times you have to go back into the past to impact an event in the future, like flipping a switch in a temple before it was ruined to extend a bridge in the future. Those gameplay loops seem to be few and far between and the timescape seems to largely just be a way of presenting different-looking maps as you fight not-demons that might as well be demons as well as copious amounts of the undead. It feels like a bog standard Diablo-like ARPG with some technically and mechanically superior features that have learned lessons from all of the games that came before it. While that makes a deeply interesting game to play, it doesn’t necessarily fix the “not great story” problem that all ARPGs seem to have.

This might be a “feature” rather than a “bug” honestly because ARPG gameplay is largely about mechanical repetition and making that loop enjoyable. If you are forced to stop and deal with the narrative, it makes repeat playthroughs more cumbersome than they need to be. Essentially what I am saying is that if you are a player that primarily plays games for the narrative adventure, this game is probably going to disappoint you in the long run. If you like to play games while doing something else like watching a show, or in my case often listening to an audiobook… then this is precisely that sort of game.

I am currently playing in the Multiplayer Beta Week, and I am really interested to see how this game feels with other players. That can often make or break the overall experience of an ARPG, because while Path of Exile is a deeply interesting game… it sucks to play with friends. I’ve never found a game that feels anywhere near as good as Diablo III does with other players, and I am hoping beyond all hopes that maybe Last Epoch will fill that niche. I know what I am doing on March 9th though, because I will likely be recreating the character I am playing on the beta server. My hope is I can coax a few of my friends to also give it a shot so we can test how it feels to play with others. I like enough of the core systems that I could see really engaging with this game long-term.

Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you played Last Epoch? Are you interested in the multiplayer launch? Drop me a line below with your thoughts.

Re-evaluating Tankyness

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I spent my evening running around in the Last Epoch multiplayer beta and opted to start up another Acolyte. I’ve been enjoying the Necromancer play style lately, and as a result, I am leaning super hard into it with this game. I’m also wanting to spend some time exploring Wolcen soon and plan on doing the same given that Necromancer play styles tend to be pretty chill. It is thoroughly weird to me the way my brain has flipped over the last several years. There was a time when I would only play melee characters and more specifically only characters with a sword and shield. I was completely bought into the mythos of the “tank” and that meant a very specific thing to me namely a full plate-wearing character with a sword and a shield, and occasionally if the class lends itself to that fantasy, a bit damned two-hander.

To some extent, I blame Diablo III for beginning the slow battering down of these walls. I fell in love with the Demon Hunter and how amazing it was for clearing seasonal content. With the right build, you could make literally everything on the screen explode in a hail of fire, making it extremely safe to play. I still greatly prefer high survival characters, but I was forced to reconcile that sometimes overwhelming damage… is a survival ability. Mostly this forced me to re-evaluate what being “fun to play” meant to me personally and that largely meant the ability to kill things without much fear of death. I always got this style of play through traditional MMORPG tanks but found that under certain circumstances I could find that style of play in other families of classes.

I think my mental transformation was really cemented by my time playing Guild Wars 2 last year. I had been trying for a decade to make the Warrior in that game conform to the sort of gameplay that I wanted, a very high survival tanky play that had no fear of dying but could still clear content. It never really felt that way to me personally, and in a moment of frustration, I sat down and had a conversation with my friend Tam. He asked me to describe the goals I wanted in a class and after some serious side eye, I accepted the challenge to try playing a Necromancer. It turned out that while it conformed to none of my normal sensibilities, it was in fact the “tankiest” and highest survival class I had ever played in an MMORPG. This sort of sent my world into a tailspin and has caused me to re-evaluate what it means to be tanky and what it means to “feel good” to play.

Path of Exile has also continued this path forward as I seek out characters that are highly survivable yet still able to clear content. I think maybe the best version of this that I have experienced so far is my Righteous Fire Juggernaut because it is effectively exactly what I want in a game like that. One of my favorite Diablo III builds is the exceptionally tanky Thorns Crusader, which wanders around while everything effectively breaks itself on your damage shield. I’ve also enjoyed my time spent playing on my Summon Righteous Fire Necromancer quite a bit, because while squishier than RF… it can move around freely to avoid a lot of the damage while my pets focus on shredding the target. As I have gained additional levels on that character I have poured more focus into survivability since the damage seems to be solid.

So now that I am playing some Last Epoch, I figured a Necromancer might be a good call. After some research, it does in fact seem to be an extremely tanky option. At the moment I am running around with Skeleton Warriors, a Giant Skeleton Golem, and summoning that game’s equivalent of my “raging spirits” in the form of explosive Zombies. I started a fresh character last night and got it to around 22 before calling it for the night. Unfortunately, the transition to Necromancer seems to be gated behind a quest so I really need to push forward in the story before I spend any more points on the build. The few bosses I have encountered have been extremely relaxing as I simply avoid the telegraphed attacks and let my pets keep chewing away at it.

Last Epoch Build Planner is by the same folks who do the Grim Dawn Tools, and I am largely following this Necromancer build at least as far as Skills and Passive choices go. You can blame Path of Exile on making it so that I just feel more comfortable venturing forth with a build to at least loosely follow. Last Epoch as a whole seems like a much more straightforward game and offers the ability to respec a bit more easily. However, once I started down the path of following a build, I find it is probably going to be harder to shake mentally. Given that I am juggling a large number of ARPGs at the moment, I don’t really want to waste my time building something that won’t be viable and as a result, won’t be “fun”.

If you want to see an example of Necromancer gameplay in Last Epoch, check out the above video. Essentially it is designed around summoning exploding zombies and replenishing your pets as needed when they die. Otherwise, you just zoom around and avoid telegraphs while your army of horrible children kills your foe. I had a lot of fun last night screwing around on the beta server, and will likely be creating the same basic build when the multiplayer patch drops in March.

Yup Books and Games

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One of the challenges with this whole “goes super hard on books” pattern that I seem to be in, is that it does not exactly translate to an easy steady drip of content to write about. It feels really weird to sit down in the morning and essentially say “yup books”. From the standpoint of “talking about them when I’ve finished them” is great, but the whole me being in mid-flight thing is not exactly a delightful spectator sport. At this point, I am about half the way through Lies of Locke Lamora and it has grabbed me enough to make me want more. However, I also don’t really want to talk about the book as I am experiencing it, and rather will just batch up those thoughts once I have finished it.

One thing I did find out is that apparently there is an order of operations that must be maintained within Bookwyrm, and if you want a book to count towards your reading goals it has to hit the “read” shelf at some point. I ended up moving Nona the Ninth to my “Books of 2023” shelf and then “finished reading” and it completely skipped the goals queue. I had to do a bit of backpedaling and “finish” the book again to get it properly slotted as my 7th book of the year in my “20 books” goal. Other than that general weirdness, I am enjoying Bookwyrm quite a bit however I wish its federation worked a bit more as I was expecting. I thought maybe I would be able to follow my Bookwyrm account and then boost the comments that I leave when I finish a book. However while I am following myself, I never see any updates even when I drill down into the profile. A friend suggested that I check out Storygraph so I might dive into that at some point because it seems like it would potentially be a good recommendation engine.

I am trying to branch out a bit of late and do things that are not “Path of Exile Delve” while consuming an audiobook. So far doing events and map completion in Guild Wars 2 seems pretty drift compatible for the sort of interaction that I am looking for. Essentially an activity that flows nicely with listening to an audiobook needs to be one that is mechanically satisfying but asks nothing really of me to grasp narratively. Working on the main story or expansion quests doesn’t really fill this role, but all of the assorted drop-in group activity does beautifully. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of doing Tequatl at a minimum, and then knocking out my daily objectives and farming the three guild halls worth of resources as well as my home instance. For a long time, I have felt like I really wasn’t making much progress financially in the game, but there is a neat add-on for BlishHud that tracks “coin” earned during your session and it seems like every night I am clearing about 5 gold in an hours worth of time.

I’ve also been trying to ease back into playing Final Fantasy XIV more frequently. What I really need to do is get started on leveling my crafting or working on beast tribe quests again… but what I am actually doing is running retainer missions and fucking around liberally. One of the giant obstacles in front of me is the fact that I need to spend some serious time cleaning out my retainers and sorting out the gear that I actually might want to keep for cosmetic purposes from the dross that I should just turn in for company seals. I also noticed that apparently, I am no longer the highest possible rank in my grand company, so I guess I need to sort out how to change that. There are weird minion boxes that I cannot seem to purchase.

What I REALLY need to do is get into the Hunt Train nonsense, because they are super lucrative and also just enough activity to feel like I am doing something meaningful in the game. I have greatly enjoyed this activity in the past, and I need to probably ease back into doing it more often. It might even be a reasonable option for leveling alternate jobs. I only actually leveled Paladin to 90, but did manage to pull everything up to 80 before burning out in 2021. Hunt trains are a great way to get some gear to level those classes up easily as maxed Crystarium gear will pretty much hold you until you hit the level cap.

All of that said… I still actually am playing a lot of Path of Exile. I find the mechanical loop that I have fallen into deeply relaxing. I play the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer until I fill up my sulfite and then play my Righteous Fire Juggernaut down in Delve until I run out of that resource again. I continue to periodically liquidate cool things I found down in the dark for profit and as a result, I have over 7000 Chaos Orbs and another 20 or so Divine Orbs. That is without me really going out of my way to do much other than these two activities, and passing up a ton of smaller trades because I am busy and don’t feel like stopping what I am doing for 5 chaos. I think more than anything I learned a lot about the trade economy in this league and feel like there will never be a point in future leagues where I struggle to gear myself.

With all of that… I somehow managed to cobble together a blog post on a day when I was not feeling particularly like blogging. Sometimes in life, you just need to start writing and eventually, it will coalesce into something hopefully worth reading. That I guess is the benefit of Tales of the Aggronaut being a blog about “me”, and less about any one particular subject. Hopefully, yall are having a delightful week out there, and if so… I hope it keeps on that trajectory until the weekend. If you are not, I hope whatever stresses are haunting you, ease the fuck up.

Winding Down Sanctum

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Good Morning Friends! I think I might be in the process of winding down my focus on Path of Exile and the Forbidden Sanctum league. Going into this league I had a few goals in front of me. Some of them have been accomplished and others I decided not to really worry with. This is not exactly a comprehensive list but here are essentially the things I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish this go-round.

  • Finish Atlas Objective passives for all 115 Maps
  • Get my 4 Void Stones
  • Complete Enough Challenges to Get a Totem
  • Level a Character to 100

Last night I finished my 19th Challenge of the league and unlocked my very first totem for the hideout. Admittedly it is a short and sad totem but it is my very first period. Last league, I unlocked enough challenges to get one full set of armor, and this go around I got two sets of armor appearances as well as the totem so I consider that progress. I finished the Atlas last league and did so faster this time around and set my sights on getting the four void stones that are required to make it so that every map that drop is Tier 16.

The first two void stones came extremely quickly and made me think that this was going to be a reasonable challenge. However the amount of time or currency that is required to get them… just doesn’t feel worth it to me on a personal level. I could go on the forbidden trove and buy a carry for the remaining two void stones, but that seems silly and since I don’t REALLY love chain running maps I am not sure what it would get me. The last goal that I had in my sights is getting my Juggernaut to level 100, which is still doable given that I get great enjoyment out of fucking around in Delve for hours. the problem is that XP gain vs XP loss is a massive struggle at that level and it takes days of grinding to gain a level, and literal seconds to lose all of that progress. While I think I am winding down my focus, it doesn’t mean I won’t keep playing so I am hoping that maybe I go ahead and knock this one out.

As far as Delve goes I am pretty comfortable at the 200-250ish level which seems a solid place to go city hunting. I should do a push-down to see how far I can sustain without increasing the risk greatly. I figure the lower I go the better the experience farming will get. There have been a few deaths that I have taken in delve that snuck up on me and overwhelmed my defenses, but they are few and far between. I moused over my Darkness Resistance and my raw score is currently sitting at 1050% with a similar Light Radius value. I’ve tried to keep those at roughly the same upgrade level as I moved further down. In theory, I could have been buying small resonators all this time with excess azurite because I have way more resists than I need for the level range that I have been exploring.

Every league it feels like I learn a ton of lessons. In this league more than anything I became significantly more adept at trading. Here is another stash tab snapshot, but on 1/12 I had 1695 raw chaos and 7 raw divines, and now I am sitting at 4916 raw chaos and 15 raw divines. I think the key thing that has changed is that I have gotten better at using the price-checking functionality of Awakened POE Trade but more than that I’ve gotten better at eyeballing value. I’ve started to develop a mental map of what makes something valuable to the state of the league as it stands. This sorta requires you to get a vague understanding of which builds are actively in the meta and what sorts of gear they want. For example, in this league Poison Summon Raging Spirits became a massive flavor of the week’s build, and almost overnight anything with poison and minion stats boomed.

Here are some general things that I look for:

  • Jewelry with at least three good resistance hits, specifically a solid chaos roll plus at least two other resists.
  • Good Corrupted Implicits on a good base with good stats. The prevalence of tainted currency makes minor crafting on corrupted items that I would have long ignored a much more feasible option.
  • Anything that has damage multipliers plus damage bonuses. This is really subjective but I’ve moved a lot of items in this category.
  • Unique Items with a good Corruption. This is a weird category because it is going to be hard to find comps, but still worth trying.
  • Ventor’s Gamble rings… legitimately can be sold at 5 Chaos a pop all day long because for whatever reason people seem to love gambling on these to vendor swap for the possibility of that one perfect ring with max positive hits to everything.

Then there are some things that I have started doing to improve otherwise disappointing items that I have.

  • Corrupt Every Rare Gem Period… If you have a fluid source of Vaal Orbs. In Delve you get a ton of these and way more than I could ever possibly use. I’ve seen so many gems go from being something I could get 5 Chaos out of to something I can get 50-100 Chaos just from a “yolo corrupt”.
  • Corrupt Amethyst Rings. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but Amethyst rings tend to be how people fix resists more than anything else and there is a chance that an otherwise shitty ring turns into something phenomenal, and again… it is worth the Vaal orb.
  • If you have an item that is middling… and does not have max sockets on it throw a few Jewelers Orbs at it until you hit max sockets. Jewelers orbs are extremely plentiful, and it is amazing what a difference it makes in moving an item with max sockets versus moving one that is going to require some crafting before use. Most players want ZERO engagement with the crafting system and you can profit from this.

As far as traders go I am a very very small fish in a very large pond. I am not dealing with mirrors worth of value (aka something like 84,000 Chaos with wild fluctuation in prices) but I feel like I am doing well enough to buy most anything I might want. I’ve also brokered items for various members of my guild that wanted zero engagement with the economy, but I’ve kept that stuff separate and excluded from Exilence when I have it crawl through my tabs and look for anything that I have missed. I feel like if I had the knowledge that I have now, I would be in a much better position at this point in the league than I was when I started. Essentially I started trading a bit too late, and there is a lot of value in bread-and-butter items early in the league. Even now over a month into the league, I am still getting a constant flow of 5-50 chaos trades.

I’ve also reached a point of maturity when it comes to builds in the game in general. I am okay with realizing that it is unrealistic that one build is ever going to feel great doing all of the content in the game. Over time I standardized on Righteous Fire Juggernaut as my main character to do things like Delve and Heist on, and Fire Variant Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer as my bossing and mapping character. The RF Jugg can map just fine but I put a heavy investment in Metamorph on my maps which means I can chew through those so much faster on the SRS Necro which is designed to take out boss characters. The state of my SRS Necro however is not exactly “Uber Boss” capable, which is why I stalled out on finishing unlocking my Atlas Void Stones. I could have pivoted into the Poison build, but decided that I just did not care enough to spend the currency required to do that.

As far as league mechanics go, I tried a number of different things this time around. I started off with a bit of a mess as far as Atlas passives but quickly coalesced into a “Wandering Path” design, which is a notable that doubles the effect of every small node on the tree, but makes it so that you do not gain any benefit from the medium-sized nodes. This was amazing for raw map generation which in turn helped me rapidly unlock the Atlas tree without needing to buy any maps or go fishing for Kirac missions too much. Ultimately I came down to buying 3 Unique Maps in the end, but that was well worth it to finish out the tree.

After that, I focused on Ritual Alters for a bit with Harvest as a secondary goal. This was fine but Ritual feels like it has been nerfed from my past experience because I did not get much in the way of big-ticket currency items. In Kalandra league I got several Divines through Ritual even without investing Atlas nodes in it, and I thought maybe if I did go hard into Ritual it would pay off. Harvest seemed like a good bet and it was “fine” but its money gains are really through bulk trading the three colors of crafting resources that you get from running it, and I decided early on that I had no interest in that.

My next strategy was to focus on lockboxes and essence farming, which again was fine… but never really had much luck with that and I was still very much trying to focus my attention on mapping as my primary game mode. It was only through happenstance that I really decided to dive as deeply into Delve as I did, and once I realized how much I enjoyed it… and how reliably profitable selling resonators was that I reshaped my tree to work around getting as much Sulfite as quickly as I could. I had noticed how good items could drop pretty reliably from Metamorph, and with my SRS Necro those encounters were extremely easy so I shifted around points to focus on Delve and Metamorph.

It was very very late in the league that I made a tiny bit of a twist to my strategy and included a bare minimum of Harbinger, dropping the last of the Essences that I had in my tree. My Atlas tree now guarantees at least one Harbinger per map and while that isn’t a ton, it has made a noticeable bump in the raw number of Annulment Orbs and Ancient Orbs that I end up getting as well as a not insignificant amount of Chaos Shards that eventually add up to my raw chaos total. The real chase item however is the Fracturing Shard, because these puppies sell for 50 Chaos each and move almost instantly. So sure it isn’t a dramatic amount of currency but because you are running several maps in order to fill back up your Sulfite, the Metamorph and Harbinger nodes sort of just passively add to your bottom line in a way that doesn’t really add that much complexity or time to the maps.

While I think I am starting to wind down, all of this has me looking forward to the next league start. I’ve learned so much more about the game as a whole this time around. I know significantly more about what makes a build viable and how to fix problems. I think going forward I am going to look for some sort of engine to fuel further explorations. The Righteous Fire Juggernaut served as an excellent stable character to farm resources for other more volatile characters. I guess I have fully committed to the concept of the Trade League and as a result, I am getting better at amassing a “warchest” that I can then use to buy my way out of frustrating situations.

Path of Exile is a very different game experience than any that I have played before, and it is the first time I have really willfully engaged in active trading. It sorta makes me reassess how I have interacted with trade in other games, and how in large part I have done it completely wrong. It isn’t that I think I will ever become an Auction House Baron… but in theory, if I can apply some of the things I have learned to other games I might at least not be broke all the time.