Video Games

Precarious Potty

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Good morning friends. I had a bit of a stressful weekend. So we have a bathroom adjoining our main bedroom and for a while now the toilet has been a bit wobbly. Saturday morning I noticed that it was more wobbly than normal. I thought maybe the bolt just needed to be tightened a thing that I could in theory do for myself because I have the barest modicum of mechanical aptitude. When I reached down to pop the plastic cap off that covered the bolt on the right side… the entire apparatus including the head of the bolt came off in my hand. The bolts themselves were just corroded and rusted messes and seemingly disintegrated. Like I had not put any effort into it… I could have just brushed it lightly aside and had it come toppling off the base. Turns out that the same thing was happening on the left side and essentially the toilet was not securely bolted to the floor anymore.

Thankfully there was no leak that I could find… but in a severe panic, I called the plumber who was able to work us in that afternoon. However, the meant for the entire day the arrival of the plumber became the “main character” of that day. I am thankful that they were able to work us in but it also sort of wrecks the momentum of the day, but anything is better than a continued “precarious potty”. Everything is fixed now and the toilet is “strongk”, but the plumber seems to have used quite possibly the slickest substance on the planet when they cleaned up their work area. I have no clue what exactly they used but it had hints of Orange Oil and Anomia and feels like the floors have been permanently coated with Teflon. Despite several attempts to mop the nonsense away… we are having to cautiously tiptoe into the bathroom like we are walking on a sheet of ice so that is less than enjoyable. We did thankfully have a roll of the clingy rubber rug underlayment that we put under our bathmat so there is at least one section of the floor that is firmly anchored for when we step out of the shower.

Other than this I spent a good chunk of my time not worrying about the bathroom playing Baldur’s Gate III. I had hopes of being able to complete this game prior to the launch of the Affliction League in Path of Exile on Friday. I am no longer under this illusion because last night I finished up Act II. I realize that technically I only have a single act to go… but every act seems to get longer than the previous one. I screwed up Act II, but am mostly fine with this. Apparently, I was not spending enough time talking to Halsin and as a result, missed a critical quest chain that was required to buy off his loyalty. So basically he is no longer in my camp because he is sticking behind in the Act II area for “nature reasons”. So I am attempting to say this in the least spoilery method possible but… maybe talk to Halsin a lot so you will have a clue what this quest is and do it before leaving the Shadowlands. Also also… Owlbear Cub and Scratch are pure beyond words. I sorta wish “Owlbear Cub” had a proper name though.

I’ve continued to play a little bit of Final Fantasy XIV each day and am slowly chipping away at my jobs leveling them. I am working on Red Mage currently, and honestly… it kinda feels bad to play it in PVP. Essentially each day I have been doing a round of Elephant-Friend dailies and the Frontline roulette. This combined adds up to roughly a level, meaning that I enjoy playing a tiny bit of the game but not so much that it begins to feel bogged down. Essentially it takes me about 10 days to level a character from 80 to 90 and feels like I am making some progress. I am not really taking a logical approach to leveling, and more so I am leveling whatever characters that do not have broken gear profiles. I realize this is lazy… but I don’t want to figure out WHY the gear profiles are broken and instead just want to pop in and do my daily nonsense before getting back out and moving on with other things.

Similarly, I have been popping into Guild Wars 2 on a daily basis and playing a bit of the expansion content, and doing whatever it takes to knock out my “wizard chores” aka Astral whatever dailies. One thing that I want more than anything… is for the dumb Krait monument in my Home instance to be able to withdraw from my bank. It sucks trying to remember to pull out some Quartz crystals before I do my home instance farm for the day. I realize that a lot of the older systems of this game are prodigiously hard to update… but there are times I daydream about getting a job for Arena.net just so I can fix some of these things. The game is so fucking close to absolute greatness at times… that if you pushed a few kludgy bits out of the way it would really shine for all the world to see. Friction can be good, but the sort of friction that Guild Wars 2 has… is the unfortunate friction of “tech debt”.

Lastly I did pop back into Path of Exile since Righteous Fire may be a dead spec going forward… which will mean I have three basically useless characters from three different leagues. I had never run a simulacrum before now, and the other day Kodra mentioned that he was able to get to wave 22 and I wanted to see how far Righteous Fire could get. Essentially I gave up after wave 29. I was not going to die… but also Kosis was going to take like 20 minutes to kill and I got tired of waiting. I am certain that if I was not impatient… I could have probably cleared wave 30 because I was more than capable of surviving the incoming damage. It just took so long to rip through Kosis’s constantly regenerating energy shield and begin to whittle him down. I am still holding out some hopium that maybe there is an alternate quality version of Righteous Fire that will work like the previous one did. I don’t really want to play an Inquisitor going forward and would prefer to keep playing Juggernaut.

I am really hoping that we get the big dump of information that includes all of the alternate versions of gems. I could legitimately see them favoring the edge case for Righteous Fire and wanting to push more players toward it, but I feel like they really need to keep the current version around in some form rather than decimating the best-documented build in the entire game. For the moment though I am really leaning towards Explosive Arrow Champion and maybe muling a ranger just to make it easier to start with a bow and go Lightning Arrow until the switch.

Mourning Righteous Fire

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Good Morning Friends! I have never gone so quickly from being overwhelmingly hyped about something… to rapidly traveling down the stages of grief. Yesterday was the announcement of what is coming with the Affliction League in Path of Exile roughly a week from the day I am posting this. On the one hand… there is a ton of really interesting content being added to the game. On another hand… it may have completely destroyed my favorite gameplay style from the last several leagues and at the same time destroyed many of my characters that are sitting in standard. As a result, I am not entirely certain what I am going to do… and given that we were planning on doing a “GuildSF” type private league I won’t even be able to buy my way out of any holes through trade league. I admit… I am pretty scared about what this means for the future of me and Path of Exile.

First, let’s talk about some of the good things. Affliction League has a mechanic where you go “delving” through a dark and infested forest. You are protected by some wisps that allow you to burn away the corruption, but the wisps will only consume a certain amount of corruption before fading away and returning you to reality. This is in theory a mechanic that favors slower players because it isn’t on a timer like Legion or Breach, which is a huge net positive as far as I am concerned. Collecting these wisps allows you to spend them with vendors inside of the mists or when you return to your map gain a Sentinel-like buff on random packs of mobs remaining buffing them and their loot drops. I think this looks like an overwhelmingly fun mechanic and I am happy that we are finally getting something that once again favors a tanky character as opposed to glass cannon characters like Sanctum did.

The NPCs will allow you to buy your way into a set of ascendancies that modify how the game plays for you. Probably the coolest of these is the Primalist which allows you to socket charms that effectively give you watered-down versions of existing ascedancies turning you into a sort of hybrid Scion. Essentially one does things with Flask slots, one with corpses, and one with charms and you can swap between them but will have to level up the new ascendancy from scratch if you change “factions” as it were. This also seems really freaking awesome and the Primalist gives you the ability to open chests and get extra loot from corpses with warcries similar to the Diablo II ability. I sure was looking forward to this ability.

A somewhat mixed change as far as I am concerned is the return of Ultimatum, but this is largely because I never participated in that league before. It is costing us the loss of Metamorph as a mechanic, which admittedly most players will not mourn… but I sorta enjoyed getting rogue Metamorphs in my maps and crafting monsters. However, I will say that Ultimatum looks interesting, and pending how badly it scales… it might be a blast to play. At least I thought that was the case when I thought I would be going into this league with my trusty Righteous Fire Juggernaut. That however looks a bit less certain than the past three leagues.

I am going to let Pohx explain what happened to Righteous Fire. The biggest change is that they are completely removing Lab enchants and all alternate-quality gems. Similarly, they have changed the functionality of a number of gems completely… one of these was Righteous Fire. Previously RF got a base damage that scaled with gem level and then a 35% bonus based on your maximum life and energy shield. We don’t know what any of the alternate qualities are going to look like at this point… but the base gem will now scale based on 70% of your maximum life and energy shield and have no base damage. This means that in order to reach the effective damage you had from a level 25 Righteous Fire, you are going to need around 7000 combined health and ES. The ability is also losing its 20% burning damage bonus from the quality and instead aging Area of Effect which does not really help with the damage output and has always been more of a quality-of-life change. Similarly, Fire Trap is losing its damage from quality and instead gaining trigger radius which is next to useless.

This double whammy means that Righteous Fire as we have known it for the last few years is pretty well dead. That is to say unless there is an alternate quality version of the game that just works as the previous gem did for both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap. This similarly means that for the most part RF Juggernaut, Chieftain, and Elementalist are similarly dead in the water or at least greatly diminished from the levels that they were able to reach before. I kinda hate this a lot, and I sorta blame myself for saying that I thought Righteous Fire was untouchable yesterday because of the role that it plays in the community. This is bad for Path of Exile as a whole because it removes what was quite possibly the easiest and most well-documented onramp for new players. I feel like there will absolutely be folks that hang up their spurs after this series of changes.

What benefits however is the ultra-high investment version of Righteous Fire popularized by Captain Lance that involves stacking Energy Shield to ludicrous levels. This build with over 55,000 Energy Shield gets massively better but for everyone who does not have around a mirror to spend on the build, you might be shit out of luck. I am sure Pohx will come through with a viable league starter version of this build, but it is almost certainly going to be an Inquisitor and rely on some specific uniques to make it work.

My only hope right now lies in what might simply be an omission from the patch notes. Righteous Fire baseline shows the removal of the base damage. Vaal Righteous Fire however only shows the change in quality. This is some pretty flimsy hope but maybe just maybe the Vaal version works the same as the previous one did.

So where does this leave me for Affliction League? My gut reaction is to pivot from Righteous Fire to Tri-Elemental SRS Guardian. I played this build as a secondary character in Ancestor League and ran it up through maps in the Toucan Private League on zero gear. This should in theory be relatively unharmed by any of the changes in any significant way and should still feel really good for a league starter. While it isn’t anywhere near as sturdy in Delve as RF Juggernaut was… I could still Delve fairly effectively on this character. I could probably make some tweaks while building out the character to ensure that it felt sturdier… namely changing my early pathing to go down the Armor/ES nodes and working on getting better ES recovery so I could use it both as Mana and as a Defensive layer. I was happy with this character and I think I could feel happy maining it during at least the start of this league. If I got some of the key pieces, it also means I could respec to Inquisitor Energy Shield Stacking Righteous Fire later in the league.

I could also just say fuck it and go Lightning Arrow Champion, which is the build that I ultimately landed on as my mapper of choice for Ancestor. I league started a Lighting Arrow Raider turned Deadeye and I found it miserable and way the hell too squishy for my tastes. Later in the league however I ran up another Lightning Arrow Character and this time I went Champion and the added defensive layers made it feel great. I honestly thought that this decision would rule out Delve at all… but before sitting down to write this post I did a few nodes around 150 depth without any issue. Now I would probably not feel comfortable diving down tunnels quite the way that I do with a Juggernaut, but it should be good enough to get some crafting materials since I won’t need to print money like I did in Ancestor.

While talking about Champions… there is also Explosive Arrow which I enjoyed quite a bit in Crucible. From what I can tell everything about this build should still be fine. It has some easy-to-craft gear and If I were to play it again… it would be the third time I have done the build and I am sure I could learn some lessons from the past. I had quite a bit of luck doing Keystone Bosses with the build as well, so that should be good. The only thing that makes me hesitant about going after this build is that I am pretty sure that my friend Ace will be doing this as well. So there could be some good things about that where we can use each other’s hand-me-down upgrades… but it also means we would be in direct contention for specific gear pieces. The positive is you can pretty effectively get through maps on 4 links… so that is a huge positive as it does not rely on bow damage as much as lightning arrow does.

Then there is the Yolo option of just going RF Jugg and dealing with the consequences. If I took this path, I would probably go something similar to this POB from a Chieftain in the November events. It takes a slightly different pathing than the traditional Pohx build and focuses on getting 15% additional life from not having life on your Chestpiece and an additional 10% life from having six life masteries. This ends up taking the build to around 7000 life, just shy of it… which would in theory be about equivalent damage to a level 25 Righteous Fire gem was previously. There is still the problem of none of it scaling quite as well as it did before… but it would probably still be doable and feel okay for depth 100-150 delve and t16 maps. It isn’t ideal but I could probably make it work.

I hate that I’ve essentially been thrown into chaos of not really knowing what path I should follow. Again we don’t really know if there is a version of Righteous Fire out there that still works like the current version does, because we do not have any information for the alternate qualities through the transfiguration system. Right now my gut is telling me to either go Lightning Arrow Champion or SRS Guardian for my first character. The biggest problem with LA Champ is it requires a specific unique… or at least really wants it. SRS Guardian however I have successfully taken to maps in a league where all gear dropped fully scoured… so I know I can make that work with minimal effort. I have no doubts that it will see me through Atlas completion and be a decent beachhead to gear out additional characters. It is probably the most SSF-friendly of the options…. but EA Champ also is looking pretty good.

Basically, I have a week to sort out what I want to do and get the private league up and running. In the meantime, I will be over here mourning my favorite character archetype in Path of Exile.

Maybe Not Sentinel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Affliction Spoiler Nonsense

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This morning’s post is almost entirely thanks to SirGog a YouTuber who does an admirable job of providing Path of Exile information and largely just getting straight to the facts or data-influenced predictions. I am writing a blog post about today’s spoilers because they represent a whole order of nonsense. Essentially tomorrow is the big reveal stream for the Affliction League and generally speaking in the days leading up to this stream, we start seeing spoilers from the community staff at Grinding Gear Games. This league has been a bit odd, and the spoiler started later than normal… and have been not terribly forthcoming with information. This could be caused by many different things, not the least of which could be that this is the first spoiler season since the departure of long-term community manager Bex.

To this point we have had a Divination Card spoiled, and some general quality of life changes like the ability to split stacks of currency in the trade window. We’ve also received notice that Trial of the Ancestors league would not be going into standard, and that all of the uniques associated with that league save for the ones that have specific interactions with the tattoo mechanic would be going into the general “drop anywhere” unique pool. Players have focused heavily on the specific wording of this notice “Trial of the Ancestors won’t be going core in 3.23” as a sign that we might be seeing some of these mechanics returning later. I would honestly be shocked if we do not see the Trial in some form because it seemed like it was a huge amount of work to make that content and tattoos as a mechanic were really interesting.

Yesterday/This Morning because timezones are nonsense… Grinding Gear Games released a relatively innocuous image that I have edited to highlight a few things. Firstly the obvious “spoiler” is showing that there is going to be a nice quality of life change that indicates how many character slots you have on your account and how many you have available. Given that I have reached the point where I have to start deleting my characters… this is a good change. What is less than obvious are the two character names. Firstly it was pointed out that those names are too specific to be a community manager banging away at the keyboard. As SirGog states in his video, try typing them and you will see just how awkward it would be to arrive at them by random chance.

This led to speculation and eventually a solution presented by Neversink the dedicated person behind the best series of loot filters for Path of Exile. It was a Caesar Cypher, where you essentially shift the characters by a fixed set of letters to get the original message… in this case an 8-character shift. The end result gives you the message “IWONDER INALTESSENTIALS” which sort of screams Anagram. After many attempts including some rather rude ones… Neversink landed on “Sentinels Atlas Win or Die” which folks are taking to mean that Sentinels are going standard, that Affliction is going to have an Atlas Rework of some sort, and that Ultimatum league is going standard as well.

I admit I did not fully understand what players meant about Ultitmatum coming back, because in patch 3.19 GGG gave us the ability to collect a bunch of nonsense from Vaal activities in order to summon the Trial Master. I’ve done this a few times because one of the rarest items required drops down in Delve. However. since I did not play in this league, I did not realize that there was an in-map component to it as well. I gotta say I am kinda excited about the prospects of something like this permanently getting added to the game. I assume there will be Atlas support for both Sentinels and the Ultimatum Trial encounter, and that the Trial Master will still exist as a weird Vaal crafting recipe.

Sentinels and Ultimatum Trials would already be an awful lot of new content added to the game, but I can’t see that GGG won’t have something new and unique for Affliction. I still think that we are going to see some sort of Ritual rework as part of this patch cycle because the trailer clearly shows a ritual totem. I am definitely looking forward to the stream tomorrow where they announce the full features of the league. If you can tune in tomorrow the stream will start at 12:30 PM PST and drops will be available until 9:30 PM PST featuring a set of Huntsman Wings. Funny enough Diablo 4 is having a stream just ahead of the Path of Exile proceedings where they are going to talk about the upcoming additional changes to Season 2.

I am amped to see what all the Affliction League is going to entail, and I am also bracing myself for some nerfs… specifically to Guardian.