Secrets of the Atlas

Desperately Seeking Guardians

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Good Morning Folks. This weekend I mostly spent my time listening to an audiobook and trying to chip away at league challenges in Path of Exile. My sad little totem is slowly growing bigger as I knock things out. At this point I am sitting at 29 of 40 completed and quite possibly the largest sub item is that I managed to hit level 100. This is the fourth character overall that I have taken all the way to the maximum level, largely because it either requires a stupid amount of grinding… or paying someone to power level you. I would be willing to bet all of those level 100 squishy builds that you see on the ladder… paid someone to get them there because a single death can set you back several hours worth of progress. Once I clear level 98… I pretty much have an Omen of Amelioration on me at all times and if I take a death in a map… I abandon that map. I believe I hit level 100 on Friday when I was home sick and chilling on the sofa between moments when my body was actively trying to kill me.

I knocked a few achievements out this weekend, namely I bought a set for Uber Atziri and was able to knock that out without much issue. I had tried earlier in my leveling journey and she wrecked me at one point during the fight where I got clipped by two of her big rings at once. The other thing that I knocked out was Cross Contamination which involves doing two league mechanics at the same time, and the final one that I did was killing an Essence monster while being buffed by a tempest. I did the scarab that gives you a tempest on your map and a bunch of essence scarabs to force several and waited until I had the buff and then popped the essence monster and burned it down as quickly as I could. I think the highest I have ever gotten during a league is 34 challenges, and I hope to be able to do at least that well. I have no interest in running uber bosses, but given that I am sitting on a stack of currency I could probably pay for carries to get that knocked out.

The one that I am struggling through right now is gear grinding goals. Hitting level 100 was a bit part of that progress and the 1000 maps and 100 maps with a Mercenary I accomplished pretty easily just while doing other things. That left me with a few options. Since I am not well suited for bossing, the 30 uber pinnacle bosses was a non-starter. Similarly whiel I have a new appreciation for the Labyrinth after the shit show of ascension options in Path of Exile II… that does not mean that I want to run uber lab enough times to use the divine font 70 more times. That left me with Guardian/Conqueror maps and after burning through all of them that I had sitting in my bank I am at 40 of 50. My goal is to use my stash of scouting reports and the fat stack of saved up Kirac missions to fish for the last 10. The big problem here is that they have to be 80% quant or higher. This means that not only is a crapshoot that you find a guardian map on Kirac… but you have to find one with high quant that does not have a mod that bricks your build. I think I have 60 of the normal scouting reports, and 40 of the vaal ones… so in theory between those two stacks I should be able to find 10 maps that I can actually run.

The one that is quite possibly the hardest to complete is Infamous Instigators. This requires you to defeat 15 different Infamous mercenaries. I never run from fights, and I cannot remember the last time a Mercenary defeated me… so in theory my reputation should be just about maxed out. However I seem to find infamous mercs every twenty maps or so… and then it only counts if it is a version you have not already killed. In theory I could probably start banning specific types in the hope that maybe it might influence what I get next… but the problem is that it is not like all of the missing mercs are of the same type. I wish there was a scarab or a node on the tree that gave you a higher chance of encountering infamous mercs… but sadly that is not a thing. I just need to grind more maps in the rare hope of finding these stupid things so I can find my last three.

Another annoying one is Unreal Undertakings, which requires you to effectively do the rare versions of various league content. Defeating Settlers bosses was pretty easy because I have been running shipments trying to get divine orbs, and have had enough interdicted that I managed to kill several pirates. Breachstones similarly were super easy and I just bought five of the cheapest ones off the currency exchange. For Tier 4 Harvest Seeds I simply forced Harvest onto my map and then also ran a Harvest Scarab of Cornucopia which shockingly gave me more than one T4 beast per each harvest I ran with it. So between two of these scarabs I had knocked out the achievement. All of the rest of these kind of suck. Abyssal Depths for example there is no way to really force one to happen because you are going to get way more Spires than Depths. Domain of Timeless Conflict is an option but you have to run at least 4 emblems and two of the emblems are stupidly expensive. I finished a full Simulacrum without much issue and could in theory just buy 3 more and hope that I can run all 15 waves of them… but they take a stupid amount of time. I have been leveling my rogues and in theory I could run 4 wing Blueprints and probably knock that out pretty easily… but again it will take dedicated time.

The problem with all of this is that I am going to have to sacrifice making currency to finish these out. Right now most of the divines that I am making is through selling resonators and fossils and then converting that from chaos to divines. My preferred method of play is to alternate between filling up my sulphite on some maps, and then dive down into delve around 300 depth and burn it back down to zero before going up and mapping again. However nothing I am doing in delve… can really help me complete anything left on my list save for maybe Aul fights… which do count as pinnacle bosses. However I have only found two Auls so far this league, and it feels like they maybe made them a bit more rare to find. Normally going horizontal at 200ish depth will get you tons of them… and I am just not lucking out into much in the way of Primordial Cities. Mostly I am trying to wrap up whatever I can wrap before August 21st when the Last Epoch season starts, because from that point forward… it is going to be real hard to get me interested in Path of Exile grinding.

I am thankful though to have mindless things like this to focus on… because it makes me think less about the general state of my life. I have an appointment with a financial planner today, to help me sort out what to do with insurance and such and how best to handle it. This week and next week are going to be super fucking hard… because Friday is our wedding anniversary, and next week is her birthday. We have a thing planned for her birthday so I will at least be seeing other human beings that day. I plan on taking both days off from work because I will likely not be functional in either case. Anyways… the last month… has been fucking hard, but I am managing.

Visions of Flailing

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Good Morning Folks. I have no clue what I am doing anymore. I have my first counseling session this afternoon so we will see how that goes. I am still having the minor hallucinations that my wife is still here in this home, but like it is more a feeling than actually seeing or experiencing anything. Many folks have told me this is normal, and honestly it probably is. My brain is hardwired to expect her to be here and that does not go away in a few weeks time. I also have a meeting with a financial advisor in a few weeks to talk about how best to handle a bunch of stuff that I am dealing with. Most of which is in a holding pattern until we have a death certificate. Everything needs a death certificate and I am mostly just trying to function until that point. Tomorrow I have taken the day off because I have to move everything out of her classroom, so that they can prepare it for another teacher to move in. Thankfully her teacher pals have offered to pack everything up for me, and it will just be a matter of trucking things home and stacking the boxes up in the garage for now.

This morning I am probably going to be wildly flipping back and forth between my real world stuff… and gaming stuff because that is effectively how my brain works right now. I am latching onto distractions like a life raft, and we got some good distractions in abundance this week. Guild Wars 2 released a reveal trailer for their upcoming Visions of Eternity expansion and it looks awesome. Whoever is responsible for the motion graphics for their expansion logos… they need a fucking raise because this one is the best yet. SOTO and Janthir Wilds were both awesome, but the story being told by this logo is freaking phenomenal. I am really looking forward to the updates to the Skimmer mount because right now… it is the one that I use the least unless I have to be doing underwater stuff. I’m also looking forward to more shenanigans with the Inquest because they are one of my favorite bad guy groups. I am not sure how excited I am for more Elite specs, because quite honestly… I rarely change my builds and something is going to have to be really freaking cool to get me to change things up.

Depending upon how the counseling session goes, I might be ready to dip my toes back into Thursday night nonsense in Guild Wars 2. I have not mentioned any of this to Ammo, Sol, Ash, Thalen, or Sita… but I might do that throughout the day. I know there are a bunch of weeklies that we would even work on, like I could tag up and run bounties to knock out that one. I am also down with more Fractals or Dungeons because there are so many of those that I have not run. I’ve come to realize that my go to for knocking things out in Guild Wars 2 is running rifts in the Janthir area, because they are so much easier to get to than the Rifts in the SOTO area. They area great way to knock out general kills, defiance breaks, combos, and a few other general things because when you start one up… you almost always have a large group. Quite honestly Rifts in general are one of the best things that they have added to the game because they are so easy to get going.

Over in Path of Exile I am still slowly grinding up levels. I dinged level 99 yesterday over lunch and am starting to chip away at the large grind towards level 100. For now I am just pouring my last few points into 5% life nodes. They are generically useful, give me slightly more righteous fire damage… and quite a bit of just general survival. I might do something more clever but I can sort that out once I am actually level 100. I am trying to decide if I want to make a second character or not. I was running up an Elementalist to play with the Golems and was contemplating doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation power charge stacker to see how that goes. I would like to have some sort of a bossing focused character just to rip through invitations faster than righteous fire. There are a ton of challenges that I still need to work on to get my sad little totem pole a bit bigger before the end of the league.

There are a bunch of challenges that are pretty close to wrapping up. Some of them I just need some luck, like finding Infamous Mercs that I can steal gear from that I have not already stolen. Then there are things like the fact that I need to do a Cortex where my merc survives, and I think if I switch to my tanky bossing merc I should be good there. Sanctified Scarabs is in theory just me running a bunch of scarabs from various different league mechanics on a map with a minimum of 80% item quantity which should be reasonable enough to do. My Einhar tree makes a pretty decent base for generic usage of other scarabs so I might start working on those tonight. Remarkable Realms is worse this league because it is 40 maps instead of running one of a specific set of maps. I think previously it was 18 maps in total… so I just need to churn through the maps that I have banked up in order to finish that one out. Either that or pick a map that is not heinous and run that one over and over. Most of the unique maps are annoying in one way or another. I should grab Kodra at some point and force him to run them with me so he also gets credit.

The other thing that I have contemplated… is streaming again. Mostly just as a way of interacting with other human beings while I am playing mostly single player gaming experiences like my beloved ARPGs. I have a pretty beefy gaming desktop and it would not be a big deal to stream while playing most of the games that I play. I used to really enjoy doing this, but it always got really weird and made me feel like I was making myself unavailable to my wife while I was doing it. Now that it is just me… I have lots of time to kill before sleep claims me. I can’t say that I would ever be a good streamer, and there is no way in hell that I will ever turn on a camera. Just thinking it might be something fun to dabble in again on the side. Mostly it is just one of those intrusive thoughts that has started appearing in my head and I am not sure if I am going to allow it to take purchase there or not. If I did stream it would be over on my sad little Twitch channel which I believe is still an affiliate. I streamed consistently enough during the launch of Elder Scrolls Online to actually qualify for that. Apparently I have $71.31 in payouts that I am due… that I sort of wish I could just send to a charity somewhere. Accepting subs always seemed really fucking weird.

I legitimately have no clue what I am doing half the time these days. I think once some of the looming things finally are dealt with… I will maybe begin to allow myself to develop a new normal, but right now everything is too damned fresh. I should really spend my weekends working through some of the things that I need to work through. One of my good friends mentioned a pen and paper game, so I might be tagging in on that soon. I also need to sort out a good place to paint and assemble some miniatures for that purpose. I just do not know what I am going to do long term with my life and I am trying to figure out a lot of things. Thanks for sticking around and reading my nonsense as I flail.

AggroChat #529 – Illing with Illagers

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Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week, we start off talking about Four Job Fiesta and how Ash’s playthrough is going as he takes the donation route to fix his class choices.  Bel talks about the Absolum a new demo up on Steam which mashes together Streets of Rage, Hades, and Darkest Dungeon into a really fun Roguelike Beat Em Up. From there, Kodra talks about his recent foray into Minecraft Dungeons and how it is a really good entry point to the ARPG/Diablo-like genre.  Ash has been revisiting Guild Wars 1 and talks about his progress so far.  Thalen shares his early thoughts about Persona 5 The Phantom X and how it seems to be a non-egregious gacha.  Finally, Kodra and Bel go on at length about the current Path of Exile league.

Topics Discussed:

  • Four Job Fiesta Status Report
  • Absolum
  • Minecraft Dungeons
  • Revisiting Guild Wars 1
  • Persona 5 The Phantom X
  • Path of Exile

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Birbsieged

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Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.

I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.

I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.

This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.

The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.

Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.

Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.

Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.