Righteous Fire

Rare Currency Burned

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Good Morning Folks! This is another one of my “progress reports” for the Keepers of the Flame league as I work on wrapping up various challenges. If this does not interest you in the least, then today’s blog post might be a complete skip. Tomorrow I will probably have some stuff to talk about The Game Awards and the things that got announced there. However for the moment I am in a pattern of trying to wrap up what I can wrap up so that I can be ready for Path of Exile II League start tomorrow afternoon. The biggest one that I knocked out last night was Grueling Game Grinds, which is the one that has a bunch of sub components, one of which is hitting level 100. I ended up knocking out the invitations option, and I was able to buy up a bunch of super cheap blackstar invitations for 1 Chaos each and burn through them to finish that up.

Another big one that I completed through cursed means, is that I managed to finally get one of the crafting benches with a Hinekora’s Lock in it. Expensive Extravagance requires you to do a bunch of high dollar crafts in order to get credit for specific items. Since I will not be doing any mirror crafting, I have been trying to figure out the cheapest way to finish this nonsense up. If you are lucky, the various Betrayal league crafting benches count towards using these currency, and through doing that I managed to knock out most of them. I had one left and another achievement that I have been working on involves doing a bunch of high end specific league encounters. So I was farming 4 wing Blueprints in Heist and managed to pull several tailoring orbs as a result. Since I did not have a reason to use these, I just sort of threw it at any item I had sitting in my bank. That was essentially 250 chaos down the toilet, but it did finish up the achievement.

Another one that I knocked out was Aggravating Antagonists which involved fighting various endgame versions of league bosses. Most of these are really hard to force… so for my final one I opted into doing one of the level 83 versions of Izaro. The cheapest goddess emblem was Dedication to the Goddess at 40c, so I went with that version. I admit that I have never done one of the higher level versions of the Labyrinth, because I never really needed anything from it. I’ve chain run the normal offering versions before trying to get transfigured gems, but I think in the total of all of my runs of POE I have maybe only ever had one or two of the enhanced offerings drop. I almost NEVER run the in map events, because they always feel like a waste of time once I have my 4th ascendancy and especially since the offerings drop constantly down in Delve. I guess that is one of the things that I like about the challenges is that they force me to do things that I have never done before.

The biggest thing that I probably have left to do, as in the most time consuming… is Legendary Leagues. I need to figure out how best to complete this and see if there are any that can reasonably be brute forced with scarabs. I am running mappers, but it seems like only the 100% completion maps are the ones that count towards the achievement. I could probably buy some Blood-Filled Vessels from the trade market and brute force the Ritual one without much issue. I also need to figure out what the minimum number of emblems I need to run into rder to get the right item level for Legion’s Domain of Timeless Conflict since that is pretty easy overall as well. Simulacrum is time consuming but also fairly easy to complete and would just involve me buying 3 more tokens off the market. So between all of that I probably have a path forward. I wish I knew a way to force T4 Harvest Seeds because that would be a cakewalk if I could do that one.

I am getting close to finishing the Destructive Play achievement and should be able to wrap that while doing some of the other things that I need to do. I wish I had paid more attention to the item quantity when I did some of the other maven witnesses, because as a result I am going to have to redo The Formed, and did Incandescent and Elderslayers last night. I still am doing the quest version of the Zana fights so I need to burn through those so I can start witnessing them for The Remembered and the final piece The Feared. I hate doing the t16.5 content because t17 map mods are pure cancer, so I have been putting those off. There is another achievement for doing a bunch of 16.5 maps, and I have a ton of those banked that I can start chipping away at that. Mostly I am trying to see how far I can get to wrapping things up before Friday, because I am not sure how much effort I am going to be willing to keep putting in once I roll over to another game.

Anyways. If you have made it to the end of this blog post you have a lot of fortitude, especially if you are not actively playing Path of Exile. I hope you have been having a good week. I am not sure what is going on with me because I had another night where I went to bed at 8:30 because I was falling asleep on the sofa. If my body wants rest thought I am determined to give it to it.

One Hundred Again

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday over lunch I pushed my character over the level 100 line and forever secured its place in the pantheon of folks on the ladder for 3.27. Now I have reached the point in the league where I no longer give a shit about taking a death, which means I start doing riskier things. I had banked up a bunch of Aul fights, that I burned through last night… before sadly realizing that they were not actually counting as Pinnacle encounters. This is a bit of a weird thing in Path of Exile, because they use this term liberally to mean a bunch of different things, and in the past Aul absolutely would have counted. However in this league Aul is part of a different group of encounters that unlock bloodline ascendancies.

I had run all of these that I could easily run, and was down to just needing one more of this bloodline ascendancy fights for knocking out the Bloodline Boons challenge. This morning before sitting down to start writing my blog post I did a 15 wave Simulacrum and wrapped it up. The other options are way more tedious to get to including Lycia or the really variable boss fights like Olroth, that is something you are only going to see if you are farming a lot of expedition. Weirdly I was shocked that so far I had yet to get any of my shipments interdicted by the pirate dude, which I need for another one of these challenges. I might start running mappers because there is another one of the challenges where I could chip off a meta achievement by collecting rewards from 30 maps.

Grueling Game Grinds is ultimately the big lengthy grind, at now that I have hit level 100 I only need to complete one more meta achievement to knock that one out. For the moment I am planning on doing Invitations because it has synergy with some of the other challenges that I am working on. If Aul would have counted as a Pinnacle boss for the sake of this achievement, the 12/75 number would have been considerably higher. I could in theory do a bunch of Elder fights, which are without a doubt the easiest of the pinnacle bosses. However I think the fragments are still a bit expensive at this point, and I hate running Elder Guardian maps since you don’t get credit for Maven Witnessing a map boss on those.

Speaking of synergy, that is another thing that I am slowly chipping away at is doing Maven Witness maps with Destructive Play active. I really wish that they would change the way Destructive Play works, so that you can chain run the same map over and over and keep getting new bosses witnessed. This is the reason why I never do Maven content is because I prefer to run the same map layout over and over for consistency sake, and have my favorite map slots set up in a way so that I can produce large quantities of one of two maps that I alternate back and forth between. For example I am running a lot of Tropical Island, but producing a truly prodigious number of Strand maps while running down through my stockpile of Islands.

The other side effect of doing Destructive Play is that I am working on building a Feared invitation along with knocking out the various named invitations that reward atlas passives. I forgot about the 70% quant achievement, so there are a few of these that I am going to have to do over again. I’ve successfully run feared before, but I am not sure I have done it on anything other than that one deeply broken penance brand character from a few leagues ago. It will be interesting to see how well this goes. Really the only thing that I have to worry about too much is Sirius and his physical damage over time nonsense. I am curious if I can buy a bunch of cheap Polaric invitations or something like that to burn through the rest of gear grinding goals.

Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can in the next two days because I figure once I start down the Path of Exile II rabbit hole, it will dominate my attention for awhile. I did not last very long in 0.3.0 so I might find myself returning back to POE1 pretty quickly, but I am hoping that will not be the case. I think some of the things that are happening with Bear and Fire Damage are right up my alley. I am hoping it is pretty fun, because I did enjoy being a big poison bear in my last D4 league. Other than that… I have to admit I have had a bit of an itch to give Warframe another shot. Then there is my backlog of single player games that I have not touched in ages… which is only increased by the fact that Ash sent out the form for our games of the year show this morning. This is the challenge with me and these type of respective shows… is that in truth I mostly play forever games.

What prompted the Warframe desire though is a conversation I had with Ammo about it the other night, and then this morning seeing Ironmouse doing the best Warframe song, We All Lift Together at the Streamer Awards. If you have never seen the original Warframe animation video for this, you should absolutely watch it first so that you can appreciate the effort that they went into with the backgrounds and such for the Streamer awards. Who knows if I will give it another go or not.

Plastic Spaghetti

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Good Morning Folks! Today is my first day without steroids so here is hoping that I do not begin to backslide on my recovery. I am still going into pretty prolific coughing fits, but only really during exposure to cold air or strenuous activity. I will admit that I went into this weekend planning on spending the entire weekend playing Guild Wars Reforged. That did not happen, but I did at least get to level 9 in Seared Ascalon. Still enjoying myself but sometimes the heart wants familiar patterns, and as such I spent most of the weekend playing Path of Exile or fiddling around with my 3D printed nonsense. The ranger/elementalist seems to be working swimmingly, other than the fact that I am not really doing anything with the elementalist portion of it. I have too many good Ranger abilities that I want to use, and not enough hotbar space to use them all.

In Path of Exile I am focused on trying to get yet another character to level 100 without taking any deaths. I am sitting at 86% to 100 and am alternating between 250ish depth delving and them relatively chill mapping. I’ve gone hardcore into creating Alva temples, because each of them if crafted properly is worth roughly a divine and they sell almost instantly. They also produce entire rooms full of rare monsters which are pretty solid experience gained per map. I am mixing this in with Ritual which also produces quite a lot of mobs on the map and as such more experience gained. Occasionally I swap back over to my Ice Trap Elementalist if I want to do a Hive Fortress, because that build is way better at clearing the entire screen than Righteous Fire is. I am hoping that over the next few days I hit level 100 so I can at least knock that off my bucket list for the season.

I’ve been doing 7 million shipments in Kingsmarch rather than sending a bunch of little shipments, and managed to get my very first ever Mirror Shard. These sell for around 35 divines each, so it was a quick infusion of capital. It feels better to do this and save up materials until I have 250k Blue Zanthemum and 1 million Dust rather than sending 10k/30k shipments out constantly. Now that I know how well this works… I will probably take this strat for future leagues, because a single shard makes up for all of the effort and I have heard there are often cases where you get multiples at once. Regardless you always get 5 or 6 Divine Orbs in a 7 million shipment so they still feel better off than a bunch of small shipments that may or may not have anything in them. I really need one of my shipments to get interdicted so I can fight the sea captain and knock it off my achievement list. I might have to start running mappers to see if one of those can get captured, because I really just need one of the kingsmarch bosses.

Over in Destiny Rising we managed to get another three stronghold week with the guild, but are reaching the point where we just need more active folks doing dailies because we keep running out of the juice required to keep our “bitcon miner” going. If you dabble in Destiny Rising and need/want a guild and are doing dailies, please hit me up so I can throw you an invite. I managed to get Jaren up high enough to start doing big kid activities and he actually becomes really useful when combined with one of the season artifact abilities that gives you a significant damage boost when you blind enemies. His movement ability that always seems to be up blinds everything around him, which means he can keep buffing damage output and shred through packs quickly. I look forward to seeing what he plays like when we do our grandmaster activities night, because I think he will inevitably be in the mix.

I finished gluing up and hanging my “Lego” Christmas Wreath and I am pretty dang happy with it. I tried solvent glues but did not find anything that would work well with PLA in spite of other discussion about it. The plastistruct stuff does have a solvent effect, but not enough of one to actually allow the plastic to bond. You could probably use it for smoothing out some minor layer lines, but nothing extreme enough to properly “plastic-weld” things together. So instead I relied on good old fashioned superglue and just letting it sit for awhile to make sure it was properly bonded. I cut out felt strips for the back of the wreath and placed those on the 3 highest points so that it would keep things from banging a lot when I hung it. So far I am pretty damned chuffed by it, and can absolutely see creating variations of this for other holidays.

I also finished up printing my second cabinet, but ran out of black filament and had to substitute in something else. I MIGHT reprint that single top of the unit in black because I ordered some refills that should be coming in today. I don’t mind the white but do think I would rather have them all be black structure with colored shelves. I can’t look at anything red and white without thinking of Oklahoma University, which is a thing I already see way too often anyways. I’ve got a really pretty turquoise filament that I ordered that should also be arriving today. For the black I am using spool-less refills for the first time since I now have a decent assortment of reusable spools, so hopefully that goes smoothly. It takes the cost per roll down to around $10 instead of $16, which for a bulk color like black seems like a good option. Right now as we speak my printer is idle for the first time since I got it, mostly because I am waiting on the black filament before I dive back into another series of prints.

I exported one of the timelapse videos that the P1S makes all the time while printing. I’ve already reached the point where I greatly prefer the Sunlu filament to the default Bambu Labs stuff that came with the unit. The Sunlu just ends up with a better finish and it is so much easier to remove supports from it. I printed this little guy in the green filament that came with the printer, and getting the supports off was a pain in the ass. I had to actually break out nippers to cut loose some of the elements that were holding onto the backside of his teeth because I was afraid they would do damage to the actual structure. I am slowly building up a toolkit of things to deal with bad prints, and I feel like I need to search for some sort of a hooked tool that I can print for pulling on supports. I used bambu scraper without a blade in it, to a decent amount of luck to help break free some of the big supports. I think one of my next missions is going to be to start actually organizing my damned tools so I can find things when I need them, because I have decades worth of tools scattered around the house in four different places which is not useful at all.

I had my first print go completely off the rails. I had been trying to print some spindles for a spinning wheel that Ace uses, because I am sending them a dino friend and figured I might as well try printing off a few bobbins while I was at it. I successfully printed off one for their current machine, but when I moved on to trying to print one off for a machine that is currently backordered… things went sideways. I think there were a few things that happened. Firstly I think the part was a bit too fine detail and it maybe had some overhangs that auto supports were not taking care of. Then there was a problem where one of the parts that was very fine… popped up off the bed and then the printer got confused trying to chase it around as it moved. I had tiny bits of white filament everywhere… above the plate, below the plate, on the gantry tracks, at the back of the unit, and most concerningly around the vertical screw drives. I happened to catch it when I looked at the preview and cancelled the print and then cleaned everything up. I might give this another go but I think I will need to increase the wall size or something to make sure it is printing out slightly thicker objects.

I started a new book this weekend as well, but I admit I have not made it super far into it. In 2023, I read the first two books in this series back to back and enjoyed myself. However coming back they feel immensely dense, at least compared to the relatively light reads that I have been doing lately. It is a very Norse mythology themed series and everything has a bunch of hard to pronounce names to remember… and quite frankly the two chapter long rapid fire catch up preamble was a bit much to get through on its own to remind you of what happened in the previous book. I am going to push through this, because I do not want to have a “did not finish” on my list for the year, but it is going to be a bit of a challenge. It is weird how tastes shift over time, because I was fully on board with these novels the first time, but now that I am going back for book three it is a slog.

I am hoping yall had a wonderful weekend that was filled with something interesting. Right now I have used almost all of the superglue that I went out to get over the weekend and am waiting on some bulk shipments to arrive so I can finish putting some of the other projects together. I got an order of magnets and metric machine screws which will further expand what I can do with this nonsense. I still need to get a good set of calipers and might make a trip the next town over to harbor freight to pick up a pair there. I am having a heck of a lot of fun with 3D Printing, and it is way the hell more engaging than I even thought it would be.

Temu McCree

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Good Morning Friends. I am still dragging ass due to this impossible crud that I cannot seem to kick to the curb, however in roughly an hour I have an appointment with my doctor who will hopefully help with that. I’ve fallen back on the Audiobooks and Chill bandwagon but I will talk about the books portion of that in another post this week. Suffice to say I am mostly spending my time playing Path of Exile. I am still alternating between mapping on my level 96 Ice Trap Elementalist and then diving down into the mines for some relatively safe leveling as I push towards level 100. One of the things that I did not expect enjoying so much is that I have finally properly learned Incursion/Alva and have found great joy in building temples for profit. Essentially if you can craft a temple with a Locus of Corruption on it, you can sell it for a little over a divine, which is meager profit but more than enough to keep paying for the scarabs that I am running and still banking quite a bit for whatever my next project ends up being.

At level 99, I have properly entered the realm of never running without an Omen of Amelioration in my bags. These are going for roughly 120 Chaos at the moment, and is essentially paying for lost time. I took a really dumb death yesterday when I dove into the shadows… did not realize I was out of flares… and then was mercilessly killed by the hubris of using Forbidden Taste as my automated life flask. Thanks to the handy omen though, I did not lose much progress in the grand scheme of things, but any lost progress at level 99 is noticeable. Basically I am going to be pushing hard to hit level 100 so that I can knock another meta achievement off Gear Grinding Goals, and in truth I have hit level 100 in the last several leagues so it feels like a requirement for me to consider myself “finished”. I could buy some 5 way carries or something like that, but it always feels like the wrong sort of cheating. I will happily pay for a Maven carry each league because I fucking hate the memory game and have legitimately beat her myself more than once. Paying for carries for things I can easily accomplish on my own with enough applied time is just a bridge too far.

I continue to chip away at achievements however and knocked out Sinew Swarms yesterday, which required me to do 10 Hive Fortresses or Hive Colonies. This one took so long because they are that much rarer than the other in map breach events. Wierdly since I started running the Ritual and Incursion mapping setup, I have yet to encounter a King in the Mists invitation altar. I did buy an invitation so I have at least beaten him this league, same for Oshabi which I also bought the invitation for off the market. What I really need is a Trialmaster or an Olroth so I can get my last of the bloodline ascendency fights under my belt. I need to also see if I have any of the Vox bros Heist maps so I can knock them off the list of pinnacle encounters. Simialrly I am shocked that I have yet to encounter one of the Kingsmarch fights, which would knock another pinnacle off my list. I am happy to keep my head down and grind for the time being because it pairs so lovely with an audiobook.

Over in Destiny Rising there has been one of the silliest events yet available, called Iron Medley. Essentially it is Iron Banner or as this game calls it Iron Bar, but everyone has to play the exact same character… which produces some really weird end of match shots like this. Essentaily everyone is stripped down to a baseline version of the character with the exact same choices of weapons. In truth… I think this is a better match mode than the default Iron Bar, and should maybe be made into a permanent mode. It feels like running ARAM in League, where your sand off any of the possible advantages and just yolo your way through the matches. I really like when PVP modes in games normalize the advantage so it does not feel like you are getting stomped into the ground because you did not devote time and effort to a game mode that you are not maining.

There is a new character banner starting in roughly two days, and the trailer has been released. Essentially Jaren is just McCree from Overwatch, or whatever the hell they are calling that character these days. All that is missing is Matt Mercer doing the voices. He also gives me BraveStarr vibes, which is not necessarily a bad thing… but also makes me want him to have a talking cybernetic horse companion. My only real problem with him is that I am just not sure if Hand Canon and Shotgun is going to be a fun weapon combo to use. It is really doing to depend on how good the Hand Canon exotic that is going to inevitably come with the character. If the rumors are true… and he is getting Last Word which seems to have been shown during the trailer… he might be super fun. If nothing else this might also revive Attal from being a dumpster tier character for me.

In other news I finally pulled another mythic off the free pulls on the normal banner, and it ended up being my third copy of Tan-2. At some point I should probably build this character out, but I still really prefer Umeko to him. Then again if I am going to play a precision character I am almost always going to pick Helhest for the utility that she provides. I would have greatly preferred an additional copy of Ning Fei because he is up there in the list of characters that I am going to pump currency into to build out. I maxed out Helhests weapon damage, so now it is really just getting a final copy of her bow in order to push her to the same levels as Maru. I still want to build out Gwynn a bit because she is pretty useful when it comes to running limited content even though she is squishy as fuck. Ace and I are getting together to do Grandmasters tonight so we will see what that holds. Hopefully it is a better week than last week.

I am not playing anywhere near as much Destiny Rising as I was, but I am still enjoying myself enough to pop in and do some of the daily and weekly activities. Unfortunately our guild has grown too big for our britches and are no longer able to maintain the upkeep points to keep the “bitcoin miner” active. I wish I could coax a few more people into playing , because just with minimal play we could probably keep things humming again with maybe five more players. We had another really active player that came from the random clan that I was in first, but I think they have also fallen by the wayside. We have managed to find three strongholds for the last two weeks which has been really nice though.

Anyways. Time to get ready for the doctor visit and it is trash day so I have to deal with gathering that. I hope you all are having a wonderful week back, and hope that the doctor can give me something to make me feel less like ass all the time. I need a few days of feeling great so that I can whip the house back into shape, because I have not felt like doing much of anything lately.