warrior

The Necromantle

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve reached the point with Path of Exile II where I am alternating largely between two characters. You have my try-hard Titan Stampede Explode character that is progressing my way through maps, and then you have my way more chill Minion Necromancer Witch that I am progressing through Act II. It is amazing how much more chill the campaign feels now that I have gotten used to mapping. I am uncertain if I simply know the content better, that leveling minion is more relaxed, or by playing a lot of higher-level content I’ve reset the anchor for my new normal. Whatever the case I feel like I need multiple characters so that I can shift back and forth between them as my pace needs change. For those looking to play a Minion character, I am mostly following this guide from Maxroll.

Yesterday I decided that since I was seemingly going to run up a second character and take it somewhat seriously, that I might as well buy a few twink items along the way. The first that I picked up is the Necromantle, which is equipable at level 16 and is pretty much just a universally amazing summoner item. The defense for the item is definitely something I will outgrow, but giving my minions some energy shield and the ability to revive 50% faster is freaking amazing. I can legitimately see myself using this all of the way to the end game. I also looked into Dark Defiler, but it is a bit fraught as it drops at several different item levels with higher tiers of Summon Skeletal Warriors on it. Realistically I need to be swapping my sceptre every few levels to keep current pets, so I am probably going to pass on this item. The other item I have contemplated picking up is The Wailing Wall which is just a universally good defensive item. I would have bought it already but I am lacking in Strength, which is going to be an annoying juggling act as I need that to keep upgrading weapons as well.

Over on my Titan main, I have progressed far enough to be doing Tier 3 maps. In all of my maps run I have taken a single death… which made me fully understand how deaths work. They do not bar your progress as they had originally stated, but the node loses any benefits it might have and also eats the tablet that you were using. I still think this 1 portal stuff is bullshit because if I wanted to play in that manner I would be playing hardcore. I am hoping given time they will back away from it and give us back our six portals. We are still very much in a phase where deaths can happen randomly, and it feels annoying to lose XP and resources when you take one. I had spent most of my time clearing to the north but read that there was a quest I needed to start by finding a Fortress. So I found one off in the mists which I marked with a green circle and am beginning to work my way in that direction.

I found a reasonable option for a neck anoint and added it last night. I had to buy some Greed Destilled Emotions from the currency market but picked up three ire through running a delirium map. Essentially I am trying to get my block as high as I possibly can and between this notable and another one that I have already taken I am gaining both life and mana each time I block. This should help sustain quite a bit while mapping. I ended up having to put Lifetap on my Warcry so that it would not eat all of my mana before dropping Hammer of the Gods. I would absolutely go blood magic but I am not sure it is possible for me to stack enough life regeneration for that to be comfortable. Life in general seems like it is a massive problem for everyone, now that it does not exist on the tree.

In other news, we received notice of an upcoming patch that is tweaking a number of things. There are some buffs to Rolling Slam, so I will have to try it again after those go into effect. I am not sure what difference the buff to shield skills are going to do considering I think there are 3 and none of them are really proper attacks. I am holding off on trying to do any more ascendancies until the Trial of Sehkemas changes go in because it should be much easier for me as melee to complete that. The endgame balance and respec costs are both very welcome. All in all it should be a good patch, and given that I am thankfully not playing any of the abilities that were targetted for nerfs, I should not be hit terribly hard by any of it.

Another useful thing that I have found is a replacement for Awakened POE Trade. SnosME is not going to be supporting POE2 since he is not playing it, and does not really have the passion to try and figure out how it works. As there has been a new project that has sprung up called Sidekick which serves to follow in its footsteps and at least in theory appears like it should support both POE1 and POE2 going forward. Better than anything, it uses the same keybinds so your muscle memory should be able to carry along and keep doing the same thing you are used to with Awakened POE Trade. I just started using this and so far it seems to be doing exactly what I would want it to do. This is going to be hugely beneficial in attempting to pricecheck rares and uniques that I might want to sell.

I could grind my way through the early maps, but I am taking the entire process of the Path of Exile II endgame pretty chill. Right now it is all new, and I want to enjoy myself as much as I can. I am much happier with the game than I was, because I have finally reached a point of equilibrium thanks to some of the recent changes surrounding block, and the upcoming changes should only serve to make it easier for me to move forward. I need to spend some time working on my gear, but in order to do that… I need more currency. I greatly miss Delve and the stable source of income it provided in Path of Exile. I need to find my niche, but mapping strategies in general are way less predictable in this game.

How are you getting along in Path of Exile II so far? Have you made it through both the normal and cruel campaigns? How are you enjoying the endgame thusfar? Or are you instead still struggling to get through Act II and Act III and the walls that they often present to players? Drop me a line below.

The Difference A Week Makes

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Good Morning Folks! What a difference a week makes. My opinions of Path of Exile II have improved considerably as my build has more or less come online. I largely yolo’d my way into a functional build because I wanted one thing… to be able to run around with a two-hander and a shield. I also really like explosions and fire… so whatever of that I could work into the build was a bonus. On Friday I took the day off to work on some stuff around the house, and when I finished all of that I started plugging away at making progress through Act III, and putting some of the final pieces in place for the build. The hardest part was being able to meet 3 times the strength requirement for a two-hander in order to use the Giant’s Blood notable. Early on I bought a two-hander with reduced attribute requirements that managed to get me over the hump.

It is shocking how much faster the Cruel Acts go after having completed the first three acts on normal mode. There are a bunch of factors here, firstly you know the boss fights and you know how to progress through the quests. Secondly, there is the fact that by the time you reach Cruel difficulty, your build is more or less reaching its final form and it is largely just an optimization game after that point. While i did not set out following a build, I accidentally wound up in a very similar place that Connor Converse/OneManaLeft did with his Titan Ignite build. If you want to follow in my footsteps I would suggest following his guide. A lot of the struggles of the first act were trying out all of the Warrior abilities and figuring out which ones felt pretty decent.

What I have landed upon is using Stampede to charge at a pack and then trigger explosions on it. The more points that I get and the more AOE support that I get, the better this will ultimately work. I need to get through my 3rd ascendancy so I can try out adding Crushing Blows to the mix, which supposedly really helps with the exploding. The only negative of this is that Stampede’s pathing is pretty bad. It often veers off to Albuquerque at the worst possible moments. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a backup plan, because if mobs did not get primed for a heavy stun… then I can’t explode with Boneshatter as a follow-up. I’ve contemplated working Sunder into the build just so I would have something that could deal reasonable clear damage to packs, but then the problem ends up being… what would I even use for support gems since the good stuff is currently buffing Perfect Strike and Hammer of the Gods.

Yesterday afternoon I wrapped up Act III on Cruel difficulty and proceeded into mapping and the endgame. There is the same quirk that happens when you progress to maps in POE1, where you have to do your very first map in the endgame hub or the game does not realize you have progressed that far. Unfortunately this time around there is not a specific quest telling you this, and you end up with this weird scenario where you can access the mapping device, but it will not work because it keeps telling you that you have to finish the campaign. Generally speaking, when you drop into mapping, somewhere in the near vicinity should be a hideout that you can conquer. I wish I had taken a screenshot prior to clearing it but these are mapped with the familiar blue and silver Fleur-De-Lis symbol hideouts have in Path of Exile. I got access to my hideout early due to the $100 supporter pack coming with a hideout, but generally speaking, this is going to be what you want to go for first.

Mechanically speaking I was not sure how maps were going to work exactly, but essentially you need Waystones, which for me started dropping toward the end of the campaign. You click on a node on the map and it opens an inventory and you place the tier of waystone that you want to run, which turns that map into that tier. This is honestly a cleaner system than the whole maps dropping at specific levels, but it still means that you are going to need copious amounts of way stones to progress your way through the content. The mapping NPC (not naming names for spoilers) will sell you a limited quantity of waystones similar to how Kirac and earlier Zana did in Path of Exile. I’ve not interacted with the Atlas passives yet, because I believe I have to complete the quest to do 10 T1 maps before I get any points to spend.

This is what my tree currently looks like at level 70. I am slowly making my way toward a cluster that is going to give additional close melee damage and area of effect. I am contemplating taking a bit of a detour at some point and picking up the 3% life node, which has a few 7-strength nodes on the way to it. I will also probably want to pick up the max resistance nodes, but given that I am nowhere close to capped, I figure this is a future-me problem. I’ve been stacking percentage block on the jewels on my tree and have managed to get up to 51% which means if I find a better shield I will be really close to the block cap. I am going to have to spend most of my exalts in an attempt to get better gear and resistance capped, but my long-term project is to find The Surrender which drops from Breach bosses but should make me way more tanky with its life recoup. I might start banking Stone Tower Shields in an effort to chance gamble on trying to hit one.

All in all, though, my opinions of Path of Exile have improved significantly since last week. I still feel like this game is overturned, especially in the early game, and that a lot of those bosses have about a third to a half too many hitpoints for when you encounter them. That said though, once my build started to come together I have been enjoying myself considerably more. I think Warrior probably just has a really weak start, and it takes forever to start to get abilities that I would consider good. You are forced into the Rolling Slam and Boneshatter combo for way too long and it feels bad for killing bosses. I feel like if they swapped Sunder to a second-tier ability instead of a third-tier ability, that would greatly improve the playstyle as Sunder can absolutely carry you even into the endgame.

For The Cat

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Hey Folks! Last night was a bit of an odd night. We got started a bit later than normal and I also did not sleep for shit Tuesday night… which put me in a bit of a funk. I came close to just begging off of shenanigans but I am very glad that I did not. Going into last night we had seven dungeons to run and Alexander… which I honestly had forgotten about. I am glad that Ace kept that in mind because quite honestly that was probably my favorite bit of the evening. We attempted to legitimately queue for Alexander but given we are on Dynamis… the queue was not moving at all and I did not really want to force an entire group of mentors to do it with us. So instead we duo’d the content which was a heck of a lot of fun. We greeded everything and I know I walked away with enough bits to get to pieces of gear, not sure what Ace managed to pull.

Alexander was the very first raid that I was there to participate in on day one. As a result, it means a heck of a lot to me, and experiencing it again on brand new characters was amazing. The best part of this place is the music. It is just so damned good and honestly… the fights are pretty amazing as well. It was this wild trip down memory lane that was priceless. We cleared the first four parts of Alexander and unlocked the second part… which I think leaves us three dungeons to potentially run tonight. Friday night I will be mainlining Path of Exile, so before we ultimately take a break in this journey we are absolutely going out on a bang. The top shelf absolute bestest part though… the cat that lives on top of the Illuminati leader’s hat. On some level, I had completely forgotten about that.

Before all of this though we churned through Neverreap, Fractal Continuum, Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum, and Pharo Sirius Hard. Yet again we encountered another Reaper who could not stand still and kept standing in front of the boss while ping-ponging around the fights. I have been told by my reaper compatriots on Mastodon that this is not normal behavior but… I keep encountering it over and over. Like I am used to Bards and Machinists going willy-nilly because they don’t have to stay still while attacking but Reapers seem like this game’s Demon Hunter. I remember really hating Neverreap when it first came out and I am not even sure why. There are a few pulls that are bigger than normal, but between my cooldowns and Ace’s expert healing, it was no big deal at all.

This entire experience of going back and seeing things with fresh but wisened eyes continues to be so much fun. If you have a friend that you could convince to participate in this sort of nonsense, then I highly recommend it. Honestly, even if you just want to solo your way through Eorzea, it is probably a great experience. For years I have thought Alting in FFXIV made zero sense because nothing was account-wide and you would be essentially resetting all of the progress you had made to that point. In fact I absolutely remember chiding Ace about it once before when they created an alt because I could not see giving up my stable of high-level jobs or any of the kitsch that I had unlocked along the way. I was wrong… I was so very wrong. It is worth it for the experience of getting to pretend you are seeing it all for the first time again.

Legitimately… the last decade has been extremely rough. I’ve aged far more than ten years… and chipped away bits and pieces of my mental fortitude and well-being. However, going through this experience has honestly been healing. I had convinced myself that there were all of these things that I just couldn’t do anymore… that I was not equipped to do anymore. I am sure this sounds somewhat dumb… but mental barriers are real things and they are hard to push past. I feel younger today thanks to the nonsense we have been getting up to than I have in a very long time. I also feel more equipped to capture the joy in day-to-day life than I have been in quite a while. I am not saying that playing an MMORPG is the key to happiness… but doing so with a close friend sure doesn’t hurt.

Anyways! Tomorrow I will probably be on my Path of Exile nonsense but I am looking forward to one more night of doing fun content before we take a bit of a break.

Cold Criminals

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Good Morning Friends. It has been a few days since I last gave an update on our progress on the Dynamis server Kraken. Once again fair warning that I am going to talk about spoilers for ARR and Heavensward during this blog post, so be forewarned. The first thing that honestly shocks me is how fast we ripped through Heavensward. I remember it taking longer than this but on the 19th we wrapped up the ARR post-patch content and as of last night we are one trial away from finishing Heavensward. I am not sure if they reduced the number of MSQ quests in HW or not, but it certainly feels like it. It may simply be that back then we had to do a certain amount of side questing to maintain our level so we did not hit hard walls with the MSQ, and now you can do only the MSQ and still end up wildly overleveled. At the time of writing this blog post, I am sitting at level 76… which is 16 levels over the original Heavensward cap…. and nearing the Shadowbringers cap.

Watching the final events of ARR play out was a bit difficult to get through. Even knowing that everyone is essentially alright, it still hit me in the feels as I had to experience the “death” of the Scions and Nanamo all over again. Mostly I still feel anger that I have not been allowed to murderate Ilberd yet, and I am still supremely annoyed that we essentially have to accept Lolorito’s actions. I always dislike political machinations in video games, because we get enough of that bullshit in the real world. Everything should be a glorious trial by combat… like our amazing legal aptitude at least in the Ishgardian court of law. I will say that playing through all of that content in rapid succession… does not have anywhere near the impact as when we had to get the events doled out to us over time. Having time to dwell on what was happening… made everything feel that more dire. We were super active at the tail end of ARR and the beginning of HW, so I remember many conversations happening surrounding these events. At some point, I want to listen to our spoiler show that we recorded back in 2015.

We did take a break from the story for a bit and burned through all of the Extreme versions of the ARR trials, and then attempted to duo Binding Coil of Bahamut. Everything went pretty smoothly until we got up to Nael… which is going to require a bit more strategery or gear because we kept getting wrecked in the final phase. We did Garuda through the dungeon finder system and it was a bit of a mess… which prompted us to just duo the remaining Extremes. It is pretty cool that even without a multi-year jump on gearing we can realistically do the fights with a small group. None of them were even all that close, and we were pretty much able to soak almost all of the mechanics. Probably the toughest thing that we did legitimately during the ARR era was Chrysalis which took three attempts to get the DPS to finish the final phase.

I think the thing that shocked me the most about Heavensward is how long you could go between dungeons and how few trials there were. I am used to a cadence of dungeon then trial then dungeon then trial, as we have had for the last few expansions. The first dungeon of Heavensward isn’t even part of the MSQ, so is entirely missable at least until you want to fly. I thought the flow of the Aether Current was pretty great because if you followed the MSQ you would be able to get all of the exploration nodes as they were painfully obviously located next to an NPC. We eventually got into a cadence of finishing everything but the final quest based aether current and then upon finishing the last dungeon… being able to fly in that zone. Azys Lla is freaking miserable to traverse without flying…. essentially since you can’t really see where you are going until you remove the fog of war from the map.

Probably my highlight of Heavensward is doing Limitless Blue aka Bismarck which we took care of over lunch yesterday. This was legitimately one of my favorite primal fights because I liked all of the moving parts of it. I remember when we were learning this fight on Extreme the first few weeks after the expansion launch. All of those muscle memories came back… save for not remembering the lighting strike phase. We had all clumped up which meant that a ton of people took damage from a lightning strike at exactly the same time. It is just cool to fight a giant sky whale from the back of a rock… being towed by an airship. Ravana has the coolest music… but this fight has the coolest visuals.

Tonight we will knock out the final trail of the expansion and will have wrapped up Heavensward before the Path of Exile League starts on Friday. That will allow me to take a bit of a break to focus on leveling and gearing there before returning to Kraken to start the Heavensward post content. All in all, I am still having a freaking blast seeing this content for the first time. It is making me remember how much fun I had while leveling in SWTOR when I did so as a fixed duo of characters. Tag teaming the content with Ace has been so much fun and honestly extremely beneficial to my mental health and happiness. It has made me remember that maybe staying by myself and doing everything solo mode… is not really the best possible way to experience things. Ace has generally been way ahead of me, but we seem to alternate between one catching up and the other catching up so it has shaken out in the end allowing us to stay within a few hours of each other at all times.

I used to think that rolling an alt and restarting the MSQ was a fool’s errand… but if you can find a friend to do it with you, it is an amazing experience.