Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Hopefully, everyone is staying warm this week with the big cold snap hitting the center of the country and more specifically impacting Bel and Thalen. This week we start off talking about the Rogue Trader CRPG and how it is doing a pretty solid job of moving the bar forward. From there we talk a bit about the upcoming Granblue Fantasy Action RPG and how we have been waiting for it since 2017. In shocking news, we talk about the City of Heroes Homecoming server and how it is officially licensed and we believe it is the first fan-run emulator server project to achieve that status.
Last Epoch is nearing its official 1.0 launch and with it, a bunch more information about the Trade system came out this week so we dive into it for a bit and contrast it with our experiences from Path of Exile. Peglin has released a bunch of updates and we talk a bit more about that phenomenal puzzle combat game. Thalen shares some information about how Dungeons and Dragons Online is apparently just giving away a ton of content and selling a bunch of mission packs for cheap on top of it. Tam finishes out the show talking about how it has taken him the better part of a year but he finally understands Star Trek Online.
Good Morning Folks! I am going to warn you that this post is going to get a little bit into the weeds on Path of Exile and the trade economy. One of the hallmarks of the last two leagues is how much I have interacted with Trade. The YouTuber/Streamer Jorgen set me down the path of Delve because as he puts it “Delve Provides” and it most certainly does when it comes to a good number of things that can be sold for reasonable value. Items have value in Path of Exile if they are either scarce, come from a particular source, or are a combination of the two. Delve is not what you would call well-loved by the majority of the player base. Mapping is by far the most popular method of play because folks like blasting through maps and seeing explosions of loot. Comparatively, Delve tends to be a bit more slow and methodical.
Delve sees you focus on plotting a course across the underground map looking for high-value nodes. For example in this screenshot above there are six Abyssal City nodes, 2 Fossil nodes, and 1 Fire node which are all things I would seek out specifically. Abyssal City nodes have a number of chests inside that all reward a bunch of useful things and can provide dozens of maps for example on a single node. Fossil nodes have a chance of spawning rare and expensive nodes like the Glyphic Fossil that goes for around 130 Chaos each. Fire nodes and more specifically all elemental nodes have a chance of dropping items that can only be found in delve like curse on hit rings and specific damage conversion items. Delve is really good at producing items that when sold add up to lots of Chaos, but not terribly great at producing raw Divine Orbs.
Traditionally I have avoided currency conversion because it is tedious. Last league for example I wound up with roughly 12,000 Chaos Orbs or the equivalent of over 52 Divine Orbs that just sat there taking up space in my bank. Generally speaking the method for converting currency is to use the Bulk Trade tool on the official Path of Exile website. In truth, it is pretty straight forward. On one side you outline the bulk currency that you are looking for, and on the other side, you fill in which currency you want to pay in. Then the trade site returns you a group of listings of folks willing to accept your currency for the currency you need and what sort of exchange rate they are willing to trade at.
Here is an example listing when I searched for Divine Orbs for Chaos Orbs. The first listing is very clearly someone who does not understand the trade syntax because no one is trying to give you 237 Divine Orbs for a Single Chaos. The second listing looks like someone trying to bring down the cost of Divines and as a result is very unlikely to respond. From 225 Chaos to a Divine down… those are probably legitimate posts. The reality however is that in order for me to actually find a seller, I would likely have to go through the entire page sending a tell… waiting for a response… and then moving to the next person. This is the sad reality of buying items in bulk because quite honestly… being able to handle a bulk trade is tedious. You need to empty out your inventory of items and then prepare to accept the trade. Given how little luck I have had buying Divines, I just generally left my Chaos in the raw form and begged people to accept Chaos instead of Divines when I needed to buy something.
I’ve credited Jorgen for really stoking my interest in Delve. It was a game mode that I enjoyed, but I never really viewed it as a reliable source of currency generation until watching a few of his videos. His slogan is “Delve Provides” but in reality, my slogan should probably be “Jorgen Provides”. About a week ago he released this video talking about how he exchanges Chaos for Divines and it is fairly brilliant. Sadly to do it efficiently you really need a second currency tab. Last weekend thanks to the predictable cadence of Path of Exile sales saw another Stash Tab weekend, and I picked up a second currency tab almost exclusively for the purpose of selling bulk currency. Since then I have made several bulk trades and it has really changed the game for me on how I view the trade economy.
Essentially the logic is that you want to be the seller as often as humanly possible, and very rarely the buyer. Buying gear is relatively straightforward, and you have fairly good luck with that. Buying currency in bulk is a miserable mess. You could of course lean on something like The Forbidden Trove, but that is a bridge I have not really been willing to cross yet. Per Jorgen, I started listing 1880 Chaos Orbs for 5 Divine Orbs, and it is shocking just how fast I get pinged by someone looking to buy Chaos for Divines. There is a certain push and pull of the economy between folks who hold currency in Divines and folks who hold currency in Chaos Orbs. My preferred game mode of choice produces lots of raw Chaos, and I need Divines just to make larger trades a bit more simplistic. Being able to sell Chaos in bulk means I have a very simple way of doing the swap without needing to rely on spam messaging a dozen folks to find a single nibble.
Once I knew this was a thing, I noticed that there is a heck of a lot of players out there trying to take this stance. If you search on the bulk trade side for 1 Divine Orb, without any selection on your input currency you end up with a wealth of random bulk items that folks are looking to acquire. So now that I have a spare currency stash tab, that opens things up like if I know I need to buy something in bulk I can throw a Divine in that tab and price it out in the currency I am looking to receive. So for example if I want Orbs of Fusing to six link something the going rate for that seems to be around 1220 fusing to 1 Divine Orb. The challenge with this however is that you can only hold a total of 1200 fusing in your inventory. This means you need to be VERY careful about trades that require you to produce more than a single inventory because it is essentially on the honor system for them to trade you the rest of your goods. It is far safer just to expect that you are going to lose a little bit of currency in the transaction.
I’ve been using that second currency tab to facilitate a bunch of sales lately. I’ve sold off bulk Awakened Sextants, Silver Coins for the league content, and even started selling my Stacked Decks. More importantly, any time I hit around 3000 Chaos Orbs, I sell off another 1880 for 5 Divines meaning that I am never really at risk of either running out of Chaos for small trades or flooding my stash tab with bulk Chaos. In theory, I am sure there is someone out there doing the other side of this trade for Mirror Shards and eventually Mirrors to keep condensing down their currency into larger and larger “denominations”. I’ve made and spent more Divine Orbs in this league than I have in the past, and I really wish I had been using some sort of tool to track this more closely. For example, the above screenshot is from a website called POEStack which can be used to track your currency tabs. I think going forward and for new leagues, I might utilize this a bit earlier so I can get some proper statistics for the league as a whole.
I know however that I am leaving a lot of currency on the table because while I am a member of The Forbidden Trove, I’ve never actually used it for any trades. I’ve been here for a couple of leagues now because I wanted to see how that side of the community lives. Essentially if you can’t sell it easily through the trade site, there is a channel devoted to it. For example, if you want to liquidate a bunch of Heist contracts in bulk… they got you covered. If you want one of the rare hideouts that can only be found every so often in specific maps… there is a channel for folks selling access to their party so that you can pop in and discover the hideout. If you need Betrayal in a very specific state so that you can do one of the rare crafts, there are folks selling those as well. All of it is above board, and governed by a reputation system… but has just been too much for me to wrap my head around. However, I can see myself sliding into that community as I continue to dive deeper and deeper into the trade economy.
Path of Exile really is the EVE Online of ARPGs… where the further you dive into it the deeper the well keeps getting. While I have no real interest in playing EVE, I have always appreciated when my friend Wilhelm talks about that community. I am hoping someone out there feels the same way about my Path of Exile nonsense, because otherwise… I am deeply sorry I keep filling your RSS reader with this nonsense. It interests me greatly and as such… I hate to say that it is probably only going to get worse from here.
Good Morning Friends! We are going to go on a bit of a journey. I’m very much in Path of Exile mode with the new league starting some 16 days from now. I have been playing around with various build ideas and trying out new things. This also means I am consuming a lot of content which in turn causes the YouTube algorithm to dredge up even more of it for me to watch. Trade is an extremely important part of Path of Exile, whether or not you want to admit it. If you are playing without access to the trade market, you are absolutely playing on the hardest difficulty settings. Solo-Self-Found is absolutely a game mode, but it is also one that expects you to know quite a bit about the even more obtuse crafting system in order to fix your resistances and craft your own gear. I feel strongly enough about this that I took the time to cobble together a rather detailed dissection of a trade encounter in an attempt to demystify the process.
Then I stumbled onto this video from All-Trades Jack who has been going on his own journey through this game much like I have over the last few years. He has an excellent video talking about the merits of following a guide which I highly recommend watching. Essentially he reached the point that I did two leagues ago, where I finally was willing to engage with the Trade system. He honestly talks about many of the very sane and reasonable objections that I also had. Trade in Path of Exile is needlessly cumbersome and it requires a human element to the trades that I have not dealt with since Everquest and setting up a trader in the Nexus. It should be as simple as putting items in a publicly flagged trade stash tab and then allowing players to purchase those items through an in-game auction house. However two leagues into wrapping my head around the trade economy… it works the way it works for a reason.
One of the core problems with an Auction House system is that it often allows for arbitrage, or essentially buying cheap goods and then selling for a profit margin. This is ultimately how the real-world stock market works, so it makes sense that players will figure out ways to carry over this same logic into a video game. In World of Warcraft, this has led to an arms race over the years of Auction House tools and changes to the way that the Auction House worked, in order to try and throttle the equivalent of “fast trading”. Essentially in an Arbitrage system, there is essentially an invisible broker sitting in the middle of a trade always making sure that prices trend upwards. This is an oversimplification because I don’t tend to engage in “economic pvp” as some call it. I know it works and I have a mount in Classic WoW entirely thanks to the fact that my friend Stargrace is extremely skilled at playing a market and looking for opportunities.
This is not me passing judgment on the system, but just saying that it isn’t really my jam. World of Warcraft specifically has systems in place to help limit the impact of runaway arbitrage. When you use an item, it often binds to your character meaning that you cannot then turn around and sell it after using it. When the game launched bags were not bound to the character, and as a result the bag cartel became one of the most rampant marketplaces. I remember getting very threatening messages when I crafted my first Mooncloth Bag and dared to price it cheaper than all of the other bags on the market. From Burning Crusade and beyond, all bags were set to bind to the character on equipment. BOE as a system is likely largely a result of the trade economy that WoW Devs were all too familiar with in Everquest where all of the gear was tradeable effectively forever. Nothing was ever truly removing gear from the economy because I could use the same Lamentation for 50 levels, and then trade it off to the next person when I got an upgrade.
Path of Exile is similar to the original days of Everquest in that almost everything in the game is freely tradeable between your characters or any other player in the game. This allows for some really interesting decisions where I can take maps with modifiers that I cannot personally run, but sell them to players who have builds capable of running them. I can also take every piece of gear that I find and sell it to any other player, or even when I decide I am done with a character use those items to fund my next character. It is an economy begging to be set ablaze by arbitrage, and there are in fact discords devoted to buying items in bulk for the purpose of flipping them. However, this is not something that the game itself supports, and by default, trade seems to be purposefully cumbersome and requires several human touchpoints in order to stop rampant flipping.
It might be Stockholm syndrome, but I have reached a place of acceptance that All-Trades Jack has yet to arrive at. I accept that the cumbersome nature of trade, and the inconvenience of needing to stop what I am doing in order to sell an item… is a fair tradeoff for having the ability to find reasonably priced items for the vast majority of the league life span. We are currently at the end of a league and the trade market is a bit tight, but my reasonably priced items are going like hotcakes as a result. I will say that the inconvenience factor has changed what I am willing to sell. I am no longer going to personally list 1 Chaos items because frankly, it isn’t worth my time to stop doing whatever I happen to be doing to pop into my hideout to complete that trade. In Sanctum my bulk bin was 1 Chaos, in Crucible my cheapest sell price was 5 Chaos… and going into the next league I fully expect the lowest price I am willing to sell at will be 10 Chaos.
While my personal price point has trickled up, it is not that I am charging more for individual items… it is just that I am only selling better quality items. There are enough dedicated traders out there who are more than happy to take on smaller trades to make sure those 1 Chaos uniques are in plentiful supply. I’ve basically figured out a way that I can live with the system. Would I like it all to be automated and require zero human interaction? Absolutely. However, I am not sure if I would like the ramifications of that system. I get the impression that Grinding Gear Games does not want their trade economy to devolve into a flippers paradise. I feel like they would like to reward players for going out and doing content and then selling the items that they find in the wild. Much of why I never really engaged with the Auction House market in World of Warcraft, is that it felt like it was stacked against the folks going out and doing the content.
Anyways I’ve made my peace with the system. I’ve tried to release content both in written and video form in an attempt to demystify it. There will still be folks who want nothing to do with the system, and at least among my circle of friends I am always willing to interact with trade for them when they are looking for something specific. Last league, I had a bag slot that had currency belonging to Thalen for example, and when he wanted something he would just send me the trade site link and I would snatch it up for him. I’ve reached the point where I am comfortable enough navigating the system that I don’t mind doing it for others. I’ve yet to touch the bulk trading options like TFT, but at some point, I could see myself dipping my toes into that market for no reason other than to get rid of some of my vault clutter. That said I keep buying new tabs in the guild bank so I can start sharing excess things like maps, because after a point I am generating them faster than I can run them.
Anyways! I doubt All-Trades Jack will ever read this… but I figured I would at least share my thoughts on the matter.
Good Morning Friends! I have to admit that I am somewhat shocked that I am still as engaged with the Forbidden Sanctum league in Path of Exile as I am. Like I have said before this is effectively my third league and with each league, it seems like I slip further into madness. Path of Exile was one of those games that looked deeply interesting from the outside but that I struggled to actually find purchase on its sheer rock face of complexity. This game is not friendly to new players and even more so neither is its community. That is not to say that they are rude or cruel or anything of the sort, but more that they don’t realize how far they have come in the evolution of understanding the systems within systems that is the game they are playing. “Noob” friendly guides are very much not, because they all require a level of understanding that I am just now arriving at some 600 hours into playing the game.
Take Zizaran for example, who is probably the most community-friendly streamer, and youtuber for Path of Exile. He releases copious guide videos in each league, and it is only now that I am beginning to fully understand them. For example yesterday he released this guide video on how to craft a perfect bow for Explosive Arrow. While for me it does seem pretty straightforward, it would not have when I started. Firstly it assumes you know how to get essences or even what they are as well as how to get divine orbs and exalted orbs, and the dumb things like what it means to “annul a suffix”. It is a beginner guide for someone who is already indoctrinated into the game and all of its concepts. The thing is… playing through the campaign teaches you none of this information and it is only gleaned by reaching a point where you have the items in your inventory and understand what exactly the tooltip means.
I think this obtuse complexity is what makes the experience so damned compelling for me because the more I dive into it… the deeper the well seems to get. I am not specifically trying to pick on the community but if you approach this game the one thing that I would love everyone to understand is just how much of a struggle it is going to be to really engage with it. The game has been adding new roughly every three months over the last decade. I had no understanding of just how many of the systems I engage with regularly… we reworked over 2022 until I watched this year in review video. I also now fully understand why folks were so enraged by the ArchNemesis changes because they were extremely “fresh” in their minds. I love this game but also it saddens me that it is ultimately going to be an uphill struggle to get people to engage with it.
As far as my gaming time goes I have once again swapped up my Atlas tree and have removed everything involving Ritual Altars and instead packed on Metamorph nodes. In Lake of Kalandra encountering a Metamorph was more than likely a death sentence because they all had upwards of eight ArchNemesis mods tacked onto them. Now they are still a bit of a struggle but one that is more winnable and the rewards for doing them seem to be extremely solid. Since I have largely divided up my two characters into Bossing and Maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and Delve and Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… Metamorph is way more feasible.
When I say Metamorph is very rewarding as mechanics go, I’ve seen multiple divines at once drop from a single monster. I’ve seen many exalts drop and stacks of chaos along with all sorts of other useful resources. This is not every single time mind you, but the way I am specced into the tree gives me a bunch of organ drops as well that I can then take to Tane and summon additional monsters with. I also have the trait that allows Rogue Metamorphs to show up in my maps, and when I finish a map with Tane in it I can summon a second Metamorph. Of note when I got that double divine drop, I was running a low red tier map that was magic quality with very little in the way of quantity or quality modifiers on it. In fact most of the time lately I am not even bothering to “Alch and Go” but instead just dropping a Transmutation and maybe a few Alterations on it to reroll to something like extra magic creatures.
Right now I tend to alternate between mapping and delving, and I have my atlas configured so that even if I don’t have Niko on the map I am going to get a little bit of Sulphite from defeating the boss. When I fill up my Sulphite from the Necromancer I dive down into the depths and burn through nodes looking for interesting things. I’ve now fought Kurgal, The Blackblooded twice aka the Lich’s Tomb encounter in an Abyssal Sanctum. In the grand scheme of things the fight is completely doable but there are a few mechanics that I need to at least be somewhat aware of. There is a beam attack that you need to line of sight behind some pillars because it seems to increase in damage the longer it is on you. There are two phases but the second phase seemed to largely be a pushover. It seems like you are guaranteed one of the uniques from Kurgal’s loot table as well as other assorted rewards. His thing seems to be armor pieces aka gloves and helm that have abyssal sockets on them.
I am continuing to plumb the depths looking for Aul the Crystal King, because I want to be able to start farming that encounter. There is a nice necklace that can drop from it that seems to be useful for a great number of builds. Other than that I am slowly acquiring items to make a run at a seismic traps build. I’m also pouring little bits of resources into upgrading both Righteous Fire and Summon Raging Spirits builds as well. On the trade front, I am still doing fairly brisk business in small trades and had replenished everything that I had spent chaos-wise before doing some shopping for Thalen last night. He paid me in divines for my effort, which means I still have the resources but have slightly less liquid chaos than I did before. Profit is a means to an end however and for me, it is all about unlocking easier access to nice things.
I’ve had more fun in this league than in any of my previous attempts combined. I am not sure if it is that I am understanding the interplay of the systems better, or if I simply chose better builds to play. Whatever the case I have a feeling that my life will be dominated by this game for awhile now.
