Video Games

Harrow the Ninth

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Good Morning Friends! I opted to take yesterday off because for me it was a holiday and I was off work, and also I was feeling like complete shit. I am either fighting off allergies turned asthma attack, or I have picked up something… but for the latter, I’ve not really been around anyone to catch anything. Over the weekend I finished up my second book from the Libby App, and it was a wild ride. I think last I said I had started Skin Game by Jim Butcher, but I abruptly paused that because my library hold came up on the next novel in the Locked Tomb series. Harrow The Ninth was a hard book to get through, because it has you questioning the events of the first novel… which ended on a bit of a frustrating cliffhanger. During at least the first fourth of the novel, I was going back and forth about whether or not Tamsyn Muir had a fucking clue what they were doing with this story. Thankfully it paid off in the end and the story that was woven between the two tales is extremely good.

Essentially between the two novels, there is a character perspective shift, from the very likable Gideon Nav to the very unlikeable Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It feels like a massive “bait and switch” at the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book, which knocks the reader off balance. However, I would assume this was all on purpose to make you now start to deeply care about Harrow and move her from the Villain column more solidly into the hero column. Now I just want to read the next one the sequence, Nona the Ninth… but the Libby App tells me it is going to be about a six-week wait. Granted the last book told me it would be a four-week wait and that is why I had started Skin Game, but my hold suddenly came available after about a week. I figure I will finish Skin Game and evaluate where I am at that point, but I might end up just buying this next book so I can consume it faster.

In other random events this weekend, it appears that Tam and a few others have been screwing around in Lord of the Rings Online. I opted to go ahead and install the game and start a brand new character, a Guardian named Belglaive on Landroval. Immediately stepping into this game feels like I went back two decades in MMORPG design, which has its ups and downs. I opted to start the recently released new character starter experience, and honestly… I think I like the Shadows of Angmar option a bit better. This is really slow-paced and I feel like I am completely disconnected from the rest of the game at the moment. With the previous experience, I could at least rush to Bree and train professions, and I guess in theory I can probably do that now… but I am trying to follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in front of me. All told though I am enjoying myself in what feels like an anachronistic jaunt into MMORPG gaming.

In Path of Exile, I spent a bit more money… swapped out some gems for Awakened versions, and got my flasks in order so that now I am much tankier even than I was before. Righteous Fire is still really bad at bossing, and as such, I have continued trying to tweak my Fire SRS Necromancer to set it up as my bossing character. In the grand scheme of things it works… most of the time. I did a Maven Invitation last night and wrecked it as the Necro, something that I would have struggled at length on the Juggernaut. I’ve done several invitations, but it just takes forever whereas on the Necro I kept a pretty good pace as the new bosses were being released. I could pour some more funds into the character and improve this I am certain. I think my short-term goal is to keep getting levels on the Juggernaut, and I would really love to hit level 100 this season.

I officially have more currency than I have ever had before in Path of Exile. That catch is it isn’t mine. Thalen lucked into an Unrequited Love card, that at the time was going for 18 Divine Orbs. However since he got it, and when he decided to have me sell it… the price dropped considerably. I originally priced it at 18, hoping the price would go back up but in the meantime, a number of 17 Divine cards have created this price barrier that I knew we would not be breaking anytime soon. I priced it at 16.5 Divines and within moments had sold it. Now I am essentially acting as a concierge broker and Thalen sends me a link to something he wants, and I attempt to acquire it for him. I’ve set aside all of his currency and my purchases from it in a stash tab to keep it separate from everything else. This also allows me to just ignore that tab when running Exilence to see if I have any other high-value items that I should be trying to sell.

I made a bit more progress in Grim Dawn on the Soldier/Oathkeeper combination and I have to say… I am not sure if I like the build at all. I am not really enjoying myself that much, so I might fall back on playing my original level 42 Warder character which is Soldier/Shaman. I also need to try some ranged and caster options because at the moment I am just not feeling the game. I feel way more squishy than I want to feel, so I either need to kill things much faster or have better layers of defense. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as active of a community as say Path of Exile, and while there is a build guide website it is much harder to gauge how successful a given build is going to be. Admittedly that is my lack of knowledge of the game because I am sure if you are already well indoctrinated into Grim Dawn it would be fine.

Anyways I hope you all had a most excellent weekend, and now if I can just kick this crud life would be grand. As is often the case I have way too many gaming irons in the fire at the moment. It is a much better problem to have than languishing in that “nothing I want to play” feeling.

AggroChat #418 – 2022 Games of the Year Show – Part Two

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Welcome back to the second part of our yearly “Games of the Year Show”.  I have to admit I greatly enjoy this process and probably this year more than many in the past.  We had a wildly diverse set of games that the seven of us collectively chose this year.  Over the course of these two shows, we talk about twenty-six different games.  Often times there are a few big games that most of us played and put on our list, but this year we all had a pretty wild variety of choices.

I also feel like we have set a standard going forward, that we no longer will we do this nonsense where we record for four or five hours and then split it in half.  Recording two normal shows seemed to feel much better and produce a better discussion.  Hopefully, our listeners will agree.  In this show, we tackle the second half of the list and burn through fourteen more games.

Topics Discussed

  • Fire Emblem Warriors Three Hopes
  • Peglin
  • Stepmaniax
  • Unsighted
  • Mindcrack for Celeste
  • Vampire Survivors
  • Stray
  • New World Brimstone Sands
  • Pokemon Legends Arceus
  • Tunic
  • Ooblets
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 3
  • Citizen Sleeper
  • Horizon Forbidden West

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Surprise Suckerpunch

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The start of a new Path of Exile season overlapping with the holiday break has really shifted up the dynamic for what the beginning of a new year looks like on Tales of the Aggronaut. Generally speaking the last few weeks of one year and the first few weeks of the following year are filled with a lot of posts navel-gazing about my thoughts about the year coming to a close and my hopes for the next. I’ve just not really been in the headspace to do much forecasting of what is on the horizon, and quite honestly now that I have abandoned Twitter I am not nearly as connected to the zeitgeist and the constant thrum of new releases. I’ve been weirdly comfortable just doing my own thing in my own corner and if the world is interested in tuning in… awesome. If not however I am going to keep doing my nonsense regardless.

This means that other than time spent in Alpha and Beta, I completely missed the launch of Dragonflight. While I saw bits and pieces of it flashing across my feed in Mastodon, it was not nearly as constant and imperative that I be doing the thing along with everyone else. Similarly, I am seeing flashes of the 6.3 patch that landed in Final Fantasy XIV, but it is nowhere near as constant as it would have been if I were active on Twitter. My engagement with FFXIV seems to be limited to logging in every four or five days and putting in yet another bid on a house that I won’t win. I think that if I do ever win a housing plot… it will probably signal my re-engagement with that game in a large way.

There was a patch last night in Path of Exile, and during it, I dusted off Grim Dawn and gave it a bit of a spin. It has been a few years since I last played it, and admittedly last night I mostly fiddled with keybinds because I have “specific preferences”. I’ve never made it through the campaign and seen the endgame and would really like to do this. Mostly I want to know what the multiplayer feels like once you are in content designed for multiple players. When I last played trying to do the campaign with another person was a bit of misery, because it very clearly was not designed for more than one person. I am going with a tanky character and have been doing a little bit of research on how best to build that, which should shock no one. I remember really liking the vibe of this game, and while the crafting system confused me at the time… I think after having assimilated to Path of Exile it should seem much easier.

Part of why I am hunting for another ARPG experience is that I am still at odds with actively playing Blizzard games while Bobby Kotick still has his thumb on that company. Then there is Path of Exile which I love for a single-player experience, but feels weirdly punitive when it comes to playing with other folks. This week my good friend Ace largely checked out of the league, because we found out the hard way that if your Animate Guardian dies… you lose all of the gear you equipped it with. It is stupid decisions like that which really harm Path of Exile as a long-term experience. The game is oddly hostile toward its players and so much of your success or failure is that you “bet” on the right build at the start of the league. For Ace, this was a third strike, and as a result, just too much frustration to recover from during this league. The first strike was that the Dark Pact Necromancer really did not pan out as well as it sounded like it would. The second strike was that Summon Raging Spirits was great, but the Poison variant became the flavor of the month and elevated the prices to make it unaffordable. Losing the Animated Guardian and having to buy admittedly a bunch of cheap uniques to equip it again… seemed a bit futile knowing that it could happen again in the future.

I completely understand what they are going through, because last league… I came precariously close to just saying fuck it and abandoning my character entirely. It was only through sheer dumb stubbornness that I made my way through all 115 Atlas nodes, and after completing that… I was largely done with the league. Ace made a comment that really hit home with me and put it all into perspective. Ultimately with POE you never really reach a point where you can have chill interaction with the game that also feels like it is moving your character forward. You spend so much time making incremental progress on levels after 90… that can then be wiped out completely by one or two deaths. You feel like you are stuck in this rut of not really having anything you can do that is enjoyable without feeling like the sword of Damocles is hanging precariously above your head at all times. Last night I took the first death on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut that I had in weeks… and it felt completely random and at the same time, I have no understanding of WHY I died. I just suddenly took way more damage than I ever do and fell over.

I’ve started a number of side projects this league and I am not entirely certain how I feel about any of them. Right now my Seismic Trap Saboteur feels like it is in this awkward pubescent phase of not quite being able to shift to using the abilities that will ultimately be the hallmark of the build. I need to knock out the first two Labyrinths but also feel ungodly squishy most of the time. This is a familiar side effect of leveling while using a Tabula Rasa, and honestly, I am beginning to think that item does more harm than it is worth. This is the second attempt at using one to jump-start a class and they feel like they begin to fall apart a bit around the first death of Kitava. I could pour resources into making it work, but also… I am not sure if I care enough yet to do that.

I wish I was more motivated by currency, because if that were my ultimate gauge of success then I would say I am doing grand. According to Exilence I am up roughly 3000 chaos since the last snapshot I took on Monday. I’ve had a large number of higher ticket items start moving, as well as a constant flow of resonators from my delve excursions. So I have resources that I could pour into fixing builds… but I am not entirely certain there will ever be a place I reach where everything feels amazing. It seems like Path of Exile is the sort of game that is always going to be pulling the rug out from under you when you feel like you reach solid ground. The more you engage with the game, the more it feels like there is another sucker punch waiting around the corner.

I don’t think I will ever reach a place of complete happiness with this game. I have moments of excitement and joy, followed by a pound of frustration being dumped in my lap. This is in part why I don’t try and get people to play this game like I do others. I enjoy myself but also sorta feel like I should maybe be playing something else after awhile.

Portable Temples

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Friends… I can be completely oblivious to things at times. This morning’s post is going to largely be the tale of me completely missing the point. In Path of Exile there are a large number of league mechanics that you can choose to engage with or mostly ignore. There are some that I completely love like Abyss, Heist, and Delve, and others that I have avoided for various reasons like Blight and Incursion. Yesterday I ran an Alva memory that caused the portals she opens to work backward, and instead of bringing you into the Vaal Temple, it summons the mobs from it to whatever map you are on. I lamented that I wished that there was a node on the Atlas tree that allowed me to make ALL Incursion encounters work like this. That node sadly does not exist, but I still think it is a cool idea for GGG to think about in the future.

I opened up the AggroChat slack and lamented how I wished Incursion worked differently, and how I avoided it because it broke up the flow of the game. When you complete a temple, it creates a map for you to run through that is way more complicated and involved than your average map. What I wished is that I could save off a temple layout similar to how I could with the Lake of Kalandra, so that I could run it later. At this point, Ashgar used up his daily allotment of “…” and told me that it did in fact work that way. This is the problem with coming into the game late and not really having a ton of explanation in how any of these features from previous leagues worked. I completely missed the button that shows up at the bottom of a completed temple labeled “Take Temple Chronicle”.

This does precisely the thing I was lamenting not being able to do. Again like I said I can be painfully oblivious to things at times. So since then, I have been working on burning through the over forty Alva missions I had racked up and been avoiding. Essentially what would happen is I would build a temple and then put off running it because it takes more time than a normal map. Now I can just save copies of past maps and keep running Alva missions until a time in the future when I want to run a bunch of Vaal Temples in a row. It also turns out there is a fairly brisk trade in folks selling Chronicles, and I find it weird that in all of the POE content that I have consumed… no one has mentioned this. I did run a temple yesterday and even managed to pull an Empower gem, which is something I had been needing for awhile now.

The other major thing that I knocked out yesterday was the Unique Realms challenge that I spoke of in the previous post. I ran through my Doryani’s Machinarium map and then picked up Vinktor’s Square off the market. Finishing them knocked out my T2 boots cosmetic and am one achievement away from getting the next helmet. I was completely oblivious to this fact but apparently, I also finished the Monster Massacre achievement and have now surpassed one million monster kills during this league. Many of the other challenges are going to require me to likely respec my tree a bit in order to increase my chances of completing them.

This revelation about Incursion has led me to once again do some shifting around of my Atlas tree. I removed some of the “dangling” nodes that were not absolutely necessary anymore that involved map duplication and moved them around to some of the incursion nodes. This greatly increases the amount of time I have in each incursion portal and allows me to almost guarantee that I clear everything before running out of time. Map duplication nodes were great while I was building out my Atlas but at this point, I am gaining way more maps than I can actually run, and even donated a couple of hundred maps to the guild bank for other folks coming up through the ranks. I don’t really care about getting into the bulk map-selling game, because it seems horribly tedious. I am getting enough decent drops that they are selling pretty quickly and I still have my resonator business to fall back on if I start running low on currency again.

I have to admit one of the things I love about Path of Exile is how I can easily swap up what I am doing because of the extreme number of viable league mechanics out there. I am still kinda hoping that at some point we see the Lake of Kalandra make a return in some permanent form because, with the “sandbox” of this league, I think that entire experience would have been a lot more enjoyable. There are a lot of shorter-term mechanics that I wonder how they could remix and bring back in a new form. Anyways I hope you all are having a great week and enjoying whatever gaming nonsense you are finding yourself engaged in.