ranger Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Ancestor League Testing

August 12, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks! Here we go with another Saturday blog post since I seem to be determined to hit thirty-one this Blaugust. We are in the final stretch before the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile next Friday. With a new league comes the eternal question of what the heck to actually play. While I need to spend some time updating it, I have a section on the Path of Exile Tools page where I have been loosely keeping track of the characters and builds that I have played over the course of the last four leagues.

Last week I recorded a bit of a rambling video talking about my journey with Path of Exile so far, but suffice it to say I have learned a lot over the last four leagues, and Ancestor is going to be my fifth league. There are a lot of things that I have come to accept that I did not with that very first build. Firstly I have come to accept that while builds may be advertised as being able to do all of the content in the game, that statement usually comes with some caveats. Namely what feels great clearing a map doesn’t necessarily always feel great in deep delve or fighting bosses. So I am going into the Ancestor league knowing that more than likely I am going to build several characters for various reasons over the course of the league… some because I want to specialize in a specific bit of content and others just because I want to try something different.

For the last two leagues, Sanctum and Crucible, I have league started a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This is without a doubt probably the most comfortable build I have ever played. I’ve never really put the currency into the build in order to turn it into a higher damage potential/do all of the content in the game build… but instead mostly focused on the high levels of survival and making it a comfortable Delve and Heist monster. That is not to say that mapping is not comfortable, but it will never clear as fast as some of the other “entire-screen-clearing” options. I know that more than likely by the end of the league I will have leveled another Righteous Fire character, but I sorta want to see how the new meta shakes out with RF Chieftan and whether or not Forbidden Flesh/Flame are cheap enough to reasonably either cherry pick a Juggernaut ability, or do the same with a Jugg and snag the Chieftain resistance capping node.

However, if you want a very comfortable build that was able to get me two keystones without breaking a sweat and do most of the game modes… then I would suggest checking out Pohx.net or specifically the Righteous Juggernaut written guide. This is a playstyle similar to the Thorns Crusader if you ever played that in Diablo III, where you just run through the map and watch things fall down around you.

Another build that I had a heck of a lot of fun with in this past league was Explosive Arrow Ballistas Champion. This is technically the first build I ever played when I sat down to try and follow a guide back during the Sentinel League. The thing is… there were a lot of layers of how to build a character that I did not understand at that point. As a result… my EA Champion was a bit of a failboat that I half understood the directions that I was trying to follow. This is one of the first builds that I kitbashed a number of guides together along with some information from various POE.ninja profiles of folks playing a similar setup. The end result is a build that looks very much like most EA Champions out there, but one that specifically was suited to my tastes. If you are curious about what the build ended up looking like, here is a short video I recorded a while back.

While I enjoyed it greatly, there is an aspect to the build that just feels weird in that you spend a lot of time running ahead while you wait on your Ballistas to kill things for you. You end up building in such a matter that you don’t actually do any damage yourself, but your turrets do… but they don’t actually do the damage from the initial hit… but instead from a delayed explosion. It is very much a no-aiming gameplay style which is fun and is super tanky in the way in which I built it so you can survive pretty much any of the content. However mapping… never really felt that great because you were essentially always needing to loop back through the map to pick up what dropped in your wake.

If you want to give it a shot though, I highly suggest you check out Zizaran’s video guide from last league. There were no significant changes in the way that someone would build an EA Champion, so for the most part all 3.21 guides should be relevant still.

Another build that I have greatly enjoyed, both in the version that I built this league in the above video, and a half-assed version that I played way back in Sentinel league… is Wintertide Brand. More specifically the best version I have played is the Wintertide Brand Occultist that I cobbled together after looking at a number of POE.Ninja profiles and trying to decide what path I wanted to take. This is the first build that I more or less freehanded based on input that I was seeing from other player builds rather than trying to follow a guide. For the most part, it worked out swimmingly. The core problem, however… is it is a bit on the slow side and has a requirement of needing a unique to feel good. More specifically you want a specific corruption of that unique. I also already had a nice “+Cold Skill Gems” wand laying around that dropped in Delve so it was easy for me to cobble this together.

To be truthful… there are not a ton of guides around for this one. Mr 9 Lives has one but it is nowhere near as detailed as something from Zizaran, Ghazzy, or Palsteron. If you want to copy my POB I dumped that some time ago at level 82. The thing that I never quite solved was with my build were all of the defensive layers. I was going for Regen + Block but I was missing a lot in the block department. Basically I never really wanted to put the effort into properly fixing it, but someday… I am going to make this feel amazing.

Another build has caught my eye recently, and I am doing a bit of a league start test at the moment. While I am only in Act 8… unless something drastically changes I think I am going to league start Lightning Arrow Raider. Essentially what I would like to have is a build that can just wipe the entire screen, and be able to do that… in what is effectively garbage-tier gear. I want to go into this next league pretending like I am approaching it as SSF, in spite of wanting to have access to give stuff to my guildies and hopefully cherry-pick the one thing I am a bit worried about getting… Vaal Lightning Arrow.

I recorded some gameplay this morning of running through some of Act 8. Essentially using a Lightning Arrow 5-link I can often kill things before they even get on the same screen with me. It performed essentially the same on a 3 and 4-link. For Rare/Boss mobs I use Artillery Balistas in order to grind them down or fire off Vaal Lightning Arrow if I have a Vaal charge. For defensive layers I am going after High Evasion, 100% Spell Suppression, 100% Phasing, and trying to get a decent balance of life and armor to round that out.

With this test, I have specifically been avoiding rifling through my vault to find good stuff to equip. Everything I am wearing dropped for me during this run so far. The bow for example was a white five-link item that took the quality to 20% and then threw an Anger Essence at and lucked into a reasonable roll. Then I bench-crafted cold damage on it to add a bit more raw damage. The Helm I Rog Crafted, and the chest, boots, and gloves were all things that dropped. I’ve got a bunch of gems equipped that I am not even using but never actually removed from my gear.

Essentially what sent me down the Lightning Arrow/Artillery Ballista path was the number of folks who made magic find builds using that combination of abilities at the end of the league to farm stuff. In all cases, it seemed like they could make it work on a bare minimum of gear. In my travels of searching for information, I stumbled across the above video from “LifeWithoutPants” a YouTuber I had never seen before. This sent me down the path of Raider instead of PathFinder, so we are going to see how that feels. I really like leveling a Ranger because it does not require me to mule anything from another character, pending I am going for a bow build. Generally speaking, when I get access to Lily or the Library I pick up Flame Dash to replace normal Dash, but past that, you start out with access to everything you need and get most of it through quests.

Right now I plan on finishing leveling all the way through the Acts and then will try some White and Yellow maps to see how those feel. Essentially my plan for this character is to farm maps and work my way up to Red maps. I might go Essences, Harvest, and Jun on my Atlas to help with gathering gear. The other path I guess would be to go down Expeditions and then Rog craft some gear. My hope is with the screen clear potential of the build is that Blight won’t be quite so painful as it usually is with Righteous Fire. I’m not sure I will be able to do Metamorphs in quite the same way as I did as SRS or RF, but I am not going to block any content so that I can at least try a bit of everything.

I am really looking forward to this league, and looking forward to giving Sanctum another shot in its updated form. Are you going to be playing Path of Exile? What are you looking at to league start? Drop me a line below and we can chat! I’m also more than happy to help folks out if you are just dipping your toes in the game and looking for a build to follow. Generally speaking, I should be able to take the type of gameplay that you like in other ARPGs and suggest something similar in POE.

BelToxica and Red Maps

April 21, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to share some nonsense about my second character for the Crucible league in Path of Exile. In the last league I fiddled around a bit with a few different Toxic Rain builds, but I never fully committed to them. I tried a Trickster variant and a Pathfinder variant, and of the two I definitely preferred Pathfinder if for no reason other than the fact that the Shadow voice lines annoy me. When it came time for me to futz around on a second character I decided to give it a shot. Mostly the pattern that I fell into the last league was to farm Sulphite with my alt and then largely reserve my Righteous Fire main to doing deeper levels of Delve. Mostly I originally did this because I did not want to risk taking a dumb death and setting back my leveling progress. However, over time I found I enjoyed flipping between two characters for its own benefit.

Having played a few variants of Toxic Rain last league combined with the fact that Zizaran declared that this was his league starter for Crucible. I cobbled together my build from bits and pieces of a good number of guides. Now for Righteous Fire which relies on Armor and Regeneration, I felt like I fully understood how to make that class feel good. I have never managed to get very far in any class relying on evasion gear, so I am not even sure what to target for defenses. In theory, my guess is that you want 90% avoidance similar to how you want 90% mitigation from armor… and I am so very far away from that number.

Last night I finished the campaign and spent some time shopping on trade to cobble together a set of mostly rare gear focused on Evasion and Energy Shield since I need the later for Eldritch Battery. I am wearing The Restless Ward in part because I happened to have one laying around and I noticed that Zizaran was also wearing this chest… likely because it provides a good deal of Evasion and Energy Shield. I spent ENTIRELY too much currency on making it a six-link so if I had it all to do over I absolutely would not have gone down that rabbit hole. However, once I was committed to it, frustration and stubbornness kicked in and by god, I was going to be the random number generator no matter how much currency I threw at it. I would have been far better served by just getting a high evasion rare chest from trade for around 10 Chaos.

Last night after painstakingly getting my resists perfect and equipping viable gear for every slot… I opted to run a few maps. In total, I did a Tier 1 white map, a Tier 10 yellow map, and a Tier 14 red map and was able to successfully clear all of them. I did however take way more deaths than I was happy with, which led me to search on my phone last night while laying in bed. Essentially so long as I did not get hit, I could clear entire screens at once but if I got touched… I basically crumpled and died. I mean admittedly… high-level Greater Rifts on the Demon Hunter in Diablo III mostly this way as well. So long as you can duck and dodge out of the way of encounters you can wipe the screen but the moment you get noticed you take a death. This would be an acceptable risk were it not for the annoyingly stiff death penalties in Path of Exile. When you are 95 a single death can set you back a day’s worth of leveling.

Ultimately what I landed on was that I had been playing Pathfinder wrong. Essentially the Pathfinder specialization is all about flask effect and charge recovery so that you effectively have the equivalent of a Mageblood with all of your flasks up extremely often. As a result, the correct way to play this class is to proactively keep your life flask rolling at all times. What this does in practice is make it so that when you do get hit, you zoom right back up to full health quickly without investing in massive amounts of regeneration. I still think it would feel better however with more spell suppression and more evasion so that I am just getting hit less often. Similarly, I need a bit more health so that I am further from “one-shot” territory which will allow the flask to do its work.

I’m only level 78 and I’ve also not run my 4th Labyrinth which I should knock out today. That will give me Nature’s Boon which gives me a 30% increased Flask Effect and the pathing node 10% charge generation. This should increase the uptime of everything making it feel stronger. The biggest thing that I need to do is figure out how to squeeze in a 4th aura and get the rest of my assorted abilities online like Malevolence cast with Divine Blessing. I’m also not actually using Despair right now for cursing purposes, which is additional damage I am leaving on the table. So essentially I have room for improvement but the fact that it can already run Red Maps… seems like a win to me. If nothing else this will allow me to comfortably generate Delve juice to feed those adventures on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut.

Then there is the problem I have with Path of Exile where finding one item… makes me want to build an entirely new character around it. While searching the market for something completely different I stumbled onto this helmet that was dirt cheap for what it offered. This is now making me want to start a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and lean toward fire like I did last league. This helm would in theory allow me to create a pseudo-eight-link for Summon Raging Spirits. I am just not sure if I will go for traditional Fire SRS or Minion Instability Exploding SRS. Whatever the case… I am starting to stockpile decent items that I happen to find along the way that would make that build work. I find that I am coming to love the absolute bullshit levels of minutiae and build crafting of Path of Exile.

Desperately Seeking Turtle

March 6, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! Welcome to a new week… or at least I am going to try and take a positive stance even though I feel like I did not get enough sleep at all this weekend. Partially it was that I stayed up way the heck too late reading a book most nights, but even when I did stop… I still struggled to fall asleep. This has ended up creating a situation where I am fairly out of it this morning. That said it was still a very enjoyable weekend as a whole and I spent most of my time screwing around in Guild Wars 2. I also played some multiplayer gaming of a game that is under a very strict NDA, which I can’t talk about but wish that I could. Most of my gaming for the weekend was of the directionless variety, I would let a single activity direct me somewhere and then latch onto whatever happened to fall across my path.

The first of these was doing the Chalk Gerent with a big group. I don’t remember specifically how I ended up latching onto this commander, but it was during another event that I just happened across and decided to join the tag. When there is a commander in the zone, you can click on their “tag” in the map and choose “join squad”. Often times a single commander may be doing a handful of metas and when one finishes they will post the waypoint for the next one they are doing in sequence. This was the case and what ultimately led me to Tangled Depths and to do the Rata Sum lane for the first time. This is without a doubt the best lane because you get to watch a giant robot fight something resembling a Kaiju. Through their tutelage, I actually stayed around after the event and learned that a new area opened up for us to loot, and doing so gained me a new mastery point.

Similarly, I happened to be in the Seitung Province to knock out the End of Dragons daily quest and happened upon another Commander that was organizing the zone meta. Which led me to kill the boss of it for the first time and with it gained another mastery point. These are really my happiest moments in the game where I allow the chance to direct my gaming for a while. Now when I group up like this I might stay for a dozen metas or only a couple, and the free for all nature of grouping in the game makes it so that when I eventually do fade away it isn’t a big deal. I love the casual open grouping of Guild Wars 2, and it allows me to feel like I participated in something epic… without the stress of finding a group and interacting with other human beings directly. Now that is not to say that I won’t chat while we are doing things… but it is also very easy to disappear when I have become “peopled out”.

The bane of my existence right now however is Dragon’s End. This is the big meta zone at the conclusion of the End of Dragons content. This is likely the most difficult meta event in the entire game, and legitimately takes two hours’ worth of prep work before you can successfully get to the final encounter. As a result, this one is much harder to get into a group for, and when a commander starts something in group finder… it is almost instantly full with no ability to get on the same map as the rest of the team. This proves the weakness of the world event system, in that you can’t limit who is on your map to only people participating in the event. As a result, there are always going to be stragglers that are just there to smell the roses and complete some objectives… and this is really the first event where that is a critical problem.

Ultimately I want to complete the event so I can get my Siege Turtle egg… and unlock that mount which is now starting to be required for some content. In Gyala Delve, for example, you have to use Siege Turtles to break down walls and unfortunately, unlike Dragons End, there are no NPC-controlled ones that you can mount to break things down. There are ultimately two ways to get the egg, either complete the meta all the way to its final conclusion or collect 200 Writs of Dragons End and purchase one from a vendor. So while I continue to fail at getting a viable group going in Dragon’s End, I am at a minimum spending time there each day completing events that will at some point add up to 200 writs. I currently have 70 after a single day of actually purposefully trying to farm them… so in theory, by this time next week, I should at least be well on my way to a Siege Turtle mount.

Other than that I spent some more time working on Living World Season 1 on the Ranger. Since I had finished no content at all on the Ranger until recently… I decided to use this character to play through ALL of the seasonal content in the appropriate order. I was stalled out for a bit on the Tower of Nightmares which is a completely miserable place. In order to get the credit you have to do the first two floors in a public group, and this really means you need to be doing this during prime time in order to fill a team. After a half dozen false starts where I was one of only a handful of people in the zone, I stumbled into a team of around a dozen people doing the same quest… and I hung onto them for dear life. While I could have bailed early when I got quest completion, I held out and followed them all the way up the tower and got an achievement for completing it.

I also completed the story mode version of the Marionette fight, which was really freaking cool. I want to do this legitimately at some point and will need to hang out in Eye of the North looking for a group at some point. From there I am leading up to the attack on Lion’s Arch and might knock that out tonight. I’ve enjoyed Living World Season 1 quite a bit, but I think I am ready to move on with the story and revisit Living World Season 2. I remember when I first ran it, I was confused as hell as to who all of these characters I was now interacting with were. I am ready to approach it with fresh eyes after already coming to love all of the members of what will eventually be Dragon’s Watch. It was really weird to see how much of a little shit Taimi was at the start. She rapidly became one of my favorite NPC characters, but she was such a butt in these early quests. Jory and Kas used to annoy me… or more so how airheaded early Kas is, but revisiting them with the love I already have for the characters has blunted that edge a bit. Braham is still… well… Ka-Braham… and doesn’t become a fully fleshed-out character for a very long time.

I think for me at least part of what makes Guild Wars 2 so special, is that it took so damned long for me to realize what a magical game this was. I hated it for so many years because I did not understand it. I kept trying to get into it and being frustrated that for whatever reason it was not grabbing me in the same way that it seemed to grab others. Ultimately it was a frame of mind that shifted and allowed me to understand it better. So long as I kept trying to lump it in with the other WoW-Like MMORPGs, it never really worked for me. When I realized that it was way more like the Diablo-Like ARPGs that I love so much, I finally was able to grasp how it functions as a game. I wish I had been able to grasp that a decade ago… but I guess I am thankful that I finally do nonetheless.

Anthem Demo Weekend Two

February 4, 2019 by Belghast

Outdoor cat has officially been fed so I can now sit down and start trying to compose my feelings about Anthem Demo weekend number two. The first “VIP Demo” weekend was for folks who had pre-ordered the game and I will assume a certain batch of influencers that were brought to that special EA event to record footage. You can scroll through my thoughts about that weekend in a post I made last week, but for me and most of the AggroChat crew it was a buggy and often times unplayable mess. However there was enough good there laying just underneath the covers to make me interested and quite honestly miss playing the game. So while I was not on nearly as much as I could have been… I played a significant amount of Anthem this weekend. I managed to get in a Stronghold… this games version of a Strike and spent a significant amount of time just roaming around and doing World Events and the little mini-dungeons that are available off the segment of the map we had open to us. It galvanized my desire to play this game… and largely reinforced my decision to keep playing the “shootymans” class the Ranger… who appears to be a really amazing single target dps class.

What I want to talk about the most however is what a difference there was between the first and second weekends. During the first weekend it was a constant struggle to be able to play this game… and in the second…. everything just sorta worked flawlessly. Sure there were some minor glitches like for some reason our javelins would not load on the “reward” screen. Additionally I have never actually seen the full suit prep sequence because the game kicks me over to a loading screen when I assume that sequence is designed to make us ignore how generally long loading into an area takes. However what was gone was the need to keep closing the game with task manager and loading back in to successful get into a mission. I could just play the game as it was intended to play and this made me way more open to grouping up with friends given that it was a predictable sequence rather than a struggle to get all four players into the same instance.

I’m very impressed with how communicative Bioware has been during this whole sequence… and more than that I feel heard. We all for the most part universally complained about how bad Mouse and Keyboard Flight/Swimming felt…. and they acknowledged that yeah… it feels less than optimal. These changes are apparently already in the “live” build of the game, but what is even better is that they have started giving us a run down of things that will be fixed before the initial EA Premier launch on the 15th and what will be in place by the 22nd.

UI Clicking on visible options in menus fixed for 15th Feb (except social which is 22nd Feb)
Navigating Menu tabs with Q and E instead of old keybindings fixed for 15th Feb
Forge rotation speed with mouse improved – 15th Feb
Scrolling with mouse wheel wont zoom your javelin AND scroll the menu (will be contextual based on where your mouse is) – 15th Feb
D-Pad will show as keyboard bindings – 15th Feb
Turning off Motion Blur in settings now works (decoupled from post processing) – 22nd Feb
HDR toggle available – 22nd Feb
Camera Shake slider added – 22nd Feb

I’ve said it before but I believe that Bioware feels the pressure that this launch has to go fairly flawlessly, given the perceived failing that Andromeda was. The whole multiple launch dates thing does not do it any favors, especially considering that a lot of the issues that plagued Andromeda were fixed by the end of that first week. EA has a bad habit of shredding game studios, and the whole teasing a Dragon Age game… I think is more insurance than anything else to try and keep delaying that decision. If launch goes like last weekend however I think we are going to be just fine, and what I really want is the same level of communication that they are giving the community to continue into the first year of the game.

I really do think that Anthem might be the game that can finally blended the different looty shooty genre players together. There is enough here to intrigue the Destiny players with a rich and interesting lore and the Ranger class being essentially a “Destiny” class where it is mostly gun play with a few abilities. There is also something here for the Warframe players that want move movement and ability spam… and the Storm and the Interceptor fill those roles nicely. Then there is a class for the player who just wants to be a big freaking mech in the form of the Colossus. What is better is that gameplay feels more enjoyable when you are running with a pretty decent mix of the four classes. Ranger as far as we can tell is going to be the class that has the highest single target damage… so great for boss killing. Storm is the battle tactician that takes an overwatch position over the battlefield and can effect large swaths of it with its abilities. Interceptor is the fact melee shredder that is probably going to be excellent at grabbing objectives and avoiding taking damage. Then you have the colossus which is the king of staying alive… as was seen this weekend when Ashgar absolutely saved the day by surviving long enough to start bringing us all back up during a stronghold. They all have their key niche and all feel great when played together.

Ultimately I progressed my character as far as it probably could have been during the Demo. I managed to upgrade every slot to a level 19 rare item and my final build was an Light Machine Gun for my main weapon… a Marksman Rifle for my secondary to melt anything at a distance like snipers. Then I would run poison darts to act as my primer… that also doubles as a debuff that causes me to just deal extra damage to that target. Frag Grenades after trying a bunch of different options seems to be my detonator of choice, and also a decent crowd sweeper. Then muster point is what I was running as a damage boost for helping to burn down those big mobs. As far as components I was running one to increase Frag damage and another to increase LMG Ammunition, and it was a build I was pretty damned happy with. I could in theory go for a max damage build by picking up the devastator sniper rifle, but I never got one of those to drop for me and did not see it in the crafting tables. I also settled in on the above paint scheme which is pretty much the colors I tend to choose in any game that gives me the options.

Towards the end of the weekend they started an event that caused Primals to spawn in large numbers and frequency… so I managed to get in and take down a few of the bigger ones. In fact I was fighting one of the big primals when the servers went down, so no clue what loot might have dropped. Weirdly the game let me keep fighting, so I am guessing part of the world is cached on the client itself? This gives me concerns when it comes to what hackers are going to be able to do to the game… but without a PVP element I am not entirely certain how much it will effect me. I am a little saddened that it sounds like while my weekend was smooth and flawless… others that had a flawless previous weekend… started encountering disconnect problems during this test. I’ve now played 16 hours worth of the Anthem demo and can say that I am looking forward to starting on the 15th. If you have not already picked up the game… you can pony up for a month of Premier… which gives you a discount that you can then apply to your preorder… and will also give you access to the full game on the 15th instead of the 22nd.

So my awesome readers… are you picking up the game? Will you be joining me on the 15th or are you waiting on the 22nd… or are you just going to take a hard pass?