poe

Bolt Crafted Sorta

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As we get closer to Friday, I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I will be going Boneshatter for the league start. After sifting through many different guides and POBs, I think I honestly prefer the one that Zizaran released for 3.22. This is mostly because the gear seems pretty straightforward and craftable and it features some of the things that I knew that I wanted to lean into like double-dipping evasion for armor with Iron Reflexes. We have a Trello for all of the folks doing league starts in the private league we are running and I have highlighted some of the uniques that I am looking out for, but in theory, this should be able to be done with nothing but rares at least for a while. If this can get me down into Delve at around 150 depth I will be very happy.

Additionally, since yesterday was the official stop of the Trial of the Ancestors league, it meant that they opened up the ability to create private leagues for Affliction. So we now officially have the “Bel League Affliction” set up and running and most of the participants have joined. Ash and Kodra helped split the cost of the league three ways with us each chipping in 100 coins, with more folks willing to chip in if we decide to expand it past the initial 40 days. I figure at the 40-day mark we will either allow the characters to drop down into the trade league or if folks are still going hot and heavy, expand it out by another 30 days.

The other big thing that I did in Path of Exile last night was to get both my personal and the guild’s stash set up in standard the way I want it to look in Affliction. Essentially the state of your standard stash is what gets imported into the next league, and for the guild, I mostly wanted to get the tabs named and affinities set properly so that hopefully I don’t have to do this on the first day of the new league. Similarly, I did a bunch of rearranging things in my personal stash to go ahead and set up some of the common folders that I used in Ancestor League. As far as all of those “Remove-Only” tabs I tend to shove them into a folder named after the league they were created during. Not that I spend much time in Standard, but I figure this will make this a bit easier at a later date when I might be looking for something.

In other news, I have been playing a not-insignificant amount of Guild Wars 2 lately. I’ve talked about this a bit, but I have been popping in at least once each day to chip away at my “wizard chores” which is a humorous term that I picked up from my friend Ace regarding World of Warcraft Dailies. Given that I am actually doing them for a tower full of wizards… and the reward system is called the Wizard’s Vault… it is finally the perfect term for what I am doing. Doing various daily, weekly, and period objectives gives you a currency called Astral Acclaim which can then be used to buy all manner of things from cosmetics, to pieces of usable gear… to probably the most valuable item which amounts to a massive boost in crafting your choice of a legendary from four different options.

Astral Acclaim stacks to 1300 points, and I was nearing the cap where I could not earn anymore and needed to spend down some of it. So I opted to pick up the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit – Set 2. This gave me access to shortcutting the crafting process for Bolt, The Moot, Quip, or The Predator. Since I use Sword on a few of my characters and am looking forward to playing around with Sword on my Necromancer soonish… I opted to go with Bolt. I don’t really love the appearance of any of these weapons, but the other one I was considering for a bit was Quip just to give me access to a pistol as that seems to be a weapon archetype I also enjoy. What this box does is give you the precursor weapon, the “gift of” for the specific weapon shortcutting the need to level a profession to 400, and either a Gift of Magic or Gift of Might. This then requires you to supply your own Gift of Mastery and the Gift of Magic/Might that you did not receive, along with 77 Mystic Clovers, and 250 Globs of Ecotoplasm to craft a Gift of Fortune.

I had already been chipping away at some of the legendary weapon requirements because I have been working towards Twilight… which I stalled out on when it came to crafting the precursor. I should have just sucked it up and bought the precursor and would have likely already completed that weapon before now had I done so. This however meant that I had already done the legwork to craft a Gift of Mastery, and had been stockpiling resources that got me at least part of the way towards the missing Gift of Magic since my package gave me Might instead. I took the easy way out and spent roughly 200 gold to finish gathering the Tier 6 materials needed to craft the Gift of Fortune and then threw all of the expensive bits in the mystical commode to get my very first Legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2.

To be fair… I said “sorta” in the title because it doesn’t feel like I really put in all of the effort required to craft a Legendary weapon. I would probably feel more accomplished had I done so, but given that gathering Legendary gear is the true endgame of Guild Wars 2, it does seem a bit brilliant to give players an onramp to demystify the process a bit. According to GW2 Efficiency, the price right now to craft a Bolt from scratch would require about 1300 gold. This is greatly shortcutting that process giving you the Gift of Bolt (~200 Gold), Gift of Might (~150 Gold), and the precursor (~70 Gold) all for the low price of a month’s worth of dailies. It also encourages players to complete that Gift of Mastery on their own which requires getting full Tyria exploration completion and farming up a Gift of Battle. The more players engage with Legendary crafting, the more they become entwined into the flow of the game… and likely the longer they will stick around. While this essentially handed me 450 Gold… it did so in a way that meant I had to have poured a good deal of my time into the project to make anything of it.

The only annoyance is that I will have to craft a second legendary sword at some point for the characters that would want to dual-wield them. Now that I have broken the seal on this system, however… I sorta want to focus some time on wrapping up Twilight and getting a Greatsword for all of my alts to use as well. I see what you did there Wizard Vault…

Maybe Boneshatter

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Friends… I am essentially giving up on Righteous Fire for the time being. I was holding out some hope that maybe an alt-quality version of the gem would be released that works more or less like the previous version. Yesterday we got a dump of 39 transfigured gems, and given that Righteous Fire has caused more strife than probably any other change… if they were going to let us down easily yesterday would have been the ideal time to do it. It is somewhat sad, given that I went so far as to get my Righteous Fire Juggernaut drawn by Ammo and included in my site header. It won’t be the first time that a dead character ends up in the banner, and I still love the look of this character and will remember my three different RF Juggernauts fondly. I could migrate over to playing the Inquisitor version that Pohx has been cooking up… but honestly, I did not really like the feel of an Inquisitor. It was too squishy for my tastes.

What seems to be happening instead is that Ash and Kodra have come very close to talking me into trying out Boneshatter Juggernaut as a league starter. I like Juggernaut and being unkillable and apparently this build fits those requirements. It is unfortunately not a shield charge build… which will feel a bit bad given how much I enjoy zooming around with my shield. The only problem is… there are a lot of versions of Boneshatter requiring some wildly different levels of investment. Jorgen for example has shown off several different variants including one designed for fairly deep levels of delving that uses a shield and an axe. I am probably instead going to follow a more standard league starter two-handed axe variant and then pivot from there into some of the other build options.

I did see a version of Boneshatter that piqued my interest this morning. Smokie is a YouTuber/Streamer that I stumbled onto when I was looking at Chieftain RF builds and honestly… I dig their vibe. This version seems to pivot into Iron Reflexes and instead of going with a Glorious Plate, going with a high Evasion/Armor chest which abuses the order of operations to double the converted evasion in addition to the armor. The only challenge is… I don’t know that I want to follow this POB entirely because they value defense far less than I do. So if I am going to go down this path… I guess I need to spend the next few days trying to whittle down the various versions into a build that I actually want to follow. I always felt that Boneshatter was way too fiddly, but I guess without the Divergent version it will be less so.

In another league I might spend the next couple of days doing a test run… but instead, I am spending my evenings in Baldur’s Gate III, trying to wrap up a play-through before I dive into Affliction league. So at this point… I am legitimately considering going Boneshatter, but I could of course make an audible at the last moment and shift to Explosive Arrow Champion, or if there DOES end up being an alt-quality viable Righteous Fire going back to good ole comfy main. What is stressing me out more than ALL of this however is the fact that they have yet to open up private league signups for the new affliction league. Everything feels like it is really underprepared for this league, and I don’t know how much of it is the sheer number of changes they decided to take on, or the loss of their veteran community manager. Whatever the case… Affliction is going to be by the seat of our pants.

AggroChat #459 – An Elegy for Pohx

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Featuring: Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are down basically the front half of the alphabet for this show, but the remaining four of us end up recording a deceptively long episode.  Path of Exile revealed the details of the Affliction League and we had an awful lot to say about that.  We talk through one of the biggest meta-shakeups in the game’s history.  Bel also picks a fight with Kodra apparently when he called Guild Wars 2 more of an ARPG than an MMO.  It all resolves peacefully however as we realize those judgments are based on different points of reference.  We close out the show with Tam talking about some of the interesting choices being forced in Star Citizen.

Topics Discussed:

  • Path of Exile
    • Affliction League
    • Meta Shake-Up
    • Death of Righteous Fire
    • Ultimatum Returns
    • Goodbye Metamorph
  • Guild Wars 2 as ARPG
    • Kodra wants to fight Bel
    • Different points of reference
  • Star Citizen
    • Forcing Interesting Choices

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Maybe Not Sentinel

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This is one of those blog posts that I am not highly likely to syndicate widely. There are essentially two reasons why I do this… the first is that the content is of a deeply personal nature and the second is that I am writing about something that I don’t think anyone is really going to care about. This blog post is the later because I don’t have a ton of import to discuss, but also sort of feel obligated to make a post given the whole weekly blog posts schedule thing. Firstly I wish Henry Kissinger a long well deserved stay in the deepest levels of hell. Last night was the first time Mastodon/Fediverse felt like Twitter as everyone came out of the woodwork to dance on his grave. I know it is generally thought poorly to speak ill of the dead, but anyone whose truly awful policies are responsible for roughly four million deaths and throwing several countries into decades’ worth of turmoil is excluded from that statement. Congratz to the Grim Reaper for finally getting that epic pull.

Next up on today’s wild ride of topics… I finally left the Hinterlands. For anyone who does not understand that reference… in Dragon Age Inquisition, the Hinterlands is this massive nigh endless zone full of busywork that has stalled out many a playthrough. I know for me it personally wrecked at least two attempts to actually get through that game. Act 1 in Baldur’s Gate feels like a similar experience. That first area of the game is so packed full of content that you feel like you have to complete everything before just moving on with the damned story. I have graduated into Act II, and have now officially made it further in this playthrough than I have before. My previous run stalled out in the middle of the Underdark segment, and last night I crossed that barrier and finally met “Not-Gandalf”.

I have to admit that I have really mixed feelings about Baldur’s Gate III thus far. I love the story, and I love the dialog options… and the truly stupid level of detail brought on by the smallest changes in the way you approach things. However, I still feel like combat in the game is a deeply tedious process. There are times I realize that my tastes have changed and while I loved Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 back in the day… and ravenously played them… my tastes have changed. I would kill to have a version of this game with action combat, because I get so overwhelmingly bored while waiting on combat to resolve. Were this more akin to something like Mass Effect, it would easily be my game of the year. I’ve realized this is a “me” problem and not a game problem because I find 4x games similarly tedious when I used to lose entire weekends playing them.

Nick aka WithoutAGout replaced Bex as the community manager for Grinding Gear Games. If his tweet yesterday is to be believed… the theories surrounding a return of Sentinel are wrong. That is not to say that they could have simply not renamed that mechanic or this tweet could be a troll… but I guess we will find out in a short enough period of time. I think this does however indicate that we are likely to get a full patch notes drop shortly after the reveal. I am still banking on there being some sort of a Ritual rework coming with the Affliction League. What I however am most interested in is knowing when I can set up the “Bel League” private league and get that ball rolling.

This is your reminder to make sure your Twitch account is connected to your Grinding Gear Games account and that if you watch 45 minutes between 12:30 PST and 21:30 PST you can earn a set of cosmetic wings. I can’t say that I am terribly interested in insect wings, but I am going to try and watch this regardless so I might as well get some free mtx? You will of course have to redeem them from your Twitch Drops Inventory before getting them in game. I am sure tomorrow I will be making a post talking about my thoughts about the announcement as a whole, and as such today is this awkward middle ground of almost being there but not quite knowing much.

SirGog has once again done a big ole video talking about his thoughts about 3.23 and what is likely going to be on the chopping block. Various other folks have thrown out a few ideas, for example, Ghazzy thinks it is time to nerf Righteous Fire. However as an “RF Enjoyer” I hope that this won’t be the case, and I honestly think it isn’t likely because it isn’t like that build is overpowered. It is widely played because it is the best new player experience and has hands down the best guide creator supporting that build. GGG desperately needs an approachable onramp to the game, and right now RF provides that… and I feel like they would be shooting themselves many times in several sets of feet if they did anything to damage that. The only thing that is going to pull me away from RF for Bel League is if Guardian moves forward completely untouched.

I hope you all are having a wonderful week. Tomorrow I am sure I will have more cogent things to say about both the Affliction League and whatever comes from the Diablo IV Campfire chat.