Friends… this has been a weird league. When you make sweeping changes to a game as complicated as Path of Exile… you get some extremely varied issues that come up with it. Going into this league I had one idea planned… which was to gear my character in such a way as to not really need my amulet slot for the dexterity required to play Righteous Fire. The idea behind this was that I could in theory swap in a Defiance of Destiny which is a unique Paula Amulet that went in during 3.22 that has the text “Gain 25-35% of Missing Unreserved Life before being Hit by an Enemy”. On something already as tanky as I tend to build characters, this could make someone nigh immortal, and last league I just could not sort out my gear in order to use one without changing every single slot. The problem is that this league shifted the rarity and with that, the price ballooned up to 55 Divines making it one of the major chase uniques.
This was ultimately the item that I had been saving up all of my divines to get, and yesterday I found out that apparently, the market had crashed. You can pick up a medium-rolled Defiance of Destiny for around 10 Divines now. Similarly, the bottom fell out completely for Headhunters and you can pick up a well rolled uncorrupted one for around 15 Divines. So while I have been sidetracked by Fallout 76 lately, I absolutely zoomed into the game to snap a nearly perfectly rolled Defiance for 15 Divines. If the price of Headhunters falls even further I might snap one of those up as well for if I ever decide to do anything with my Champion alt. I think the downward pressure we are seeing is in part due to the fact that this is the second league in a row where people were printing extremely rare items. It took a bit longer for the prices to drop in Affliction, but having been through that song and dance before there is now a race to the bottom.
I am uncertain what the latest strategy is, but clearly, there is still something alive and well in the current league environment. The previous hotness was stacking Meatsacks, a single monster that replaces a pack and has an extremely high rarity modifier… and then stacking on Tormented Spirits to make them extremely beefy and extremely rewarding when you finally kill them. Folks were doing this in T17 maps which themselves have a massive rarity bonus. The end result was nonsensical loot explosions that covered the entire screen. I remember seeing one clip from Empyrian Gaming where I could see five Defiance of Destiny on screen at one time. Basically, it has reached the point where if that amulet is not literally perfectly rolled and qualitied up with catalysts… it is cheap.
So I am now the proud owner of a would-be 40% Defiance of Destiny instead of the perfectly rolled 42%… once I finish applying quality that is. This has caused me to rework my tree a bit to force in Ultimatum, a league mechanic that I largely hate… but is the most reliable method for farming catalysts. I miss Metamorph so much because that was a mechanic I actually enjoyed and dropped Catalysts like candy. You could add Rogue Metamorphs to your map and just get them passively rather than having to force a largely unfun mechanic to get them. I should just buy the catalysts but that always feels lame when they could be farmed. They are much cheaper this league than they were last league, and my guess is the demand has caused a bunch of folks to start farming them. I also need Fertile Catalysts to quality up my Immortal Flesh as well, so in theory it isn’t a complete waste of time to try and farm them.
Wild Mood Swings was a Cure album that came out when I was in college, and quite honestly… that title accurately describes what it has felt like to play in this league. We’ve been in this cycle of “exploit early, exploit often” where the folks who get to the latest and greatest strategy first… and abuse the fuck out of it… profit and anyone trying to “ethically” play the game is left behind. I can’t complain much honestly because I am still able to do everything that I wanted to do and have managed to find enough high-value items in order to maintain enough currency to play with. All of that is super shocking considering how bottomed out the market is for delve resonators and fossils. Since I seem to be getting engaged with Fallout 76 again, I am not sure how much longer I will be in this league’s economy anyway. Once I get one more achievement and get my sad little totem pole I will be happy enough to leave it behind until 3.25.
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Over the weekend I finished watching my way through the Amazon Fallout Series and I have to say… It nails the vibe of Fallout perfectly. There are so many things that are just “right” about the world and I have a feeling I am going to have to watch the entire series a few more times before all of them sync in. There are moments like Super Duper Mart that are pulled directly from the games, and then there are just set dressing and elements that are so familiar but not necessarily directly connected. For example the placement of first aid kits on walls in exactly the right location to where you find them in pretty much every fallout game. Then there are the sound effects and quite honestly just by those alone… I know exactly what weapon is being fired at any given time. Someone on this show clearly cared about these details and I greatly appreciate all of the loving work that they did on getting them right.
All of this built a strong desire to dive back in and immerse myself in the Fallout Universe. Now about once a year I end up playing some New Vegas because it is one of my all-time favorite games. Fallout 3 however is a game that I have not replayed in over a decade. So I went through the process of getting it up and running. I tried to install some mods and then got frustrated by the fact that apparently, you need to downgrade the current 2021 client… in order to get most of them to work. So instead I nuked everything and started fresh just playing through the vanilla game of the year client as downloaded from Steam.
I’ve got to be honest… the game as a whole holds up surprisingly well. I mean it still has obtuse gunplay and is full of that good good Bethesda jank, but nothing really felt terribly off from the formula we have all gotten used to. Sure mechanically there are some missing features that we have in the more modern Fallout games like 4 and 76, but mechanically it felt solid. I’ve not played a ton so far, and unfortunately Steam seems to not be able to track actual time spent playing the game and instead tracks time spent with the launcher open. I think if I were to play this further I would need to mod it a bit. I had forgotten just how desolate Fallout 3 looks. In the later titles, they realized that barren wastelands were a bit uninteresting to stare at in 3D, but this first of the modern Fallouts is a bit “spartan”.
Last night I spent some time diving back into Fallout 76. At some point, I completely restarted the game and as such still have a lot of the early quest scaffolding to work my way through. I find myself with the itch to live more in the Fallout world so between 3 and 76 I figure I am probably going to be doing a lot more of that in the coming weeks. 76 is a title that I feel like I have never really gotten into the swing of, so it would be interesting to play it enough to really feel like I am experiencing the benefits of the live service side of things. I know it has been a constantly expanding game over the last few years so it will be cool to get through the original story and see some of the newer stuff.
Have you watched your way through the new Amazon series? What were your thoughts? Has it also prompted you to want to spend more time in Fallout games? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks. One of the side projects that I have been working on is a Toxic Rain Champion. I’ve played Toxic Rain before and I have played so many Champion builds… but I have never played Toxic Rain ON Champion. Mostly I am going down this path because I am somewhat tired of Lightning Arrow, yet I also seem to be drawn to creating at least one bow character each league. Clearly, I am doing this wrong because I should be playing my normal Lightning Arrow set up with the new Elemental Hit of the Spectrum instead. I may respec at some point and do this because so many perfect elemental bows are being crafted with the league mechanic that nearly perfect bows… are dirt cheap. However, I am a weirdo and seem to crave doing a thing in spite of it not necessarily being the optimal scenario.
I am loosely following some templating with the tree that ends up creating a wildly different structure than I am used to. I have plenty of regrets to respec this later, but for now, I am going with it so that I can learn the whys of this particular pathing structure. Specifically, I think it is due to this weird snaking column of nodes that do damage over time instead of the normal pathing which puts you down a path of scaling additional arrows and crit. There is a lot of devoting nodes to flasks… and I might remove all of that because I am not sure it is actually worth it. My goal in life is to never have to hit my flasks… and a lot of the scaling is specific to life and mana flasks which I hope to reach a point of never actually having to hit.
I am already off the path because one of the things I have always hated about Toxic Rain is managing wither stacks. I hate withering step full stop. So instead of running toxic rain in both a Mirage Archer setup and a totem setup… I am shifting things up a bit and mixing in Toxic Rain of Withering which went in as a transfigured gem last league. The idea is that the totems debuff while dealing damage and then my Mirage Archer setup deals the bulk of the damage output. Alternatively, I could swap my main link to Withering and then swap over to a Manaforged Arrows setup instead of running totems. Similarly, I have seen folks play this as a full totem build with a link devoted to manaforged arrows to apply culling strikes and withering.
One piece of tech that I am playing with that I have never done before is using Despair as a Blasphemy support aura. I am only going down this rabbit hole because I picked up this necklace and wanted to play around with it. Essentially it gives me some damage over time, chaos damage scaling, decent life, and makes it so that Despair has no reservation if cast as an aura. Since I run around a lot dropping totems and proccing Mirage Archer I am often touching pretty much every mob with this aura. Which means I am stacking withered easily and also rebuffing them with despair… causing a significant escalation of the chaos damage I am dealing.
I am also playing around with a chestpiece that I have contemplated using a few times in the past, but never actually used. Basically it has really high armor and evasion, increased flat chaos damage, decent life, and some buffs to life leech. Unfortunately that last bit is going to require a rework of my tree to make functional, but I feel like it is going to be worth it. I am also desperately needing some mana leech so that I can drop clarity at the moment. I am in a very raw state with this build because I just finished off the second Kitava last night and have yet to do anything to fix my gearing woes. Basically I am going in a direction but it is going to take a lot of fiddling to see if this direction is going to pay off.
I have a number of issues to resolve before I really figure out how well this is going to work. Right now I am running Purity of Elements and I would like to stop doing that at some point. This means I am going to need to cap my resistances through another means as well as figure out a way to deal with elemental ailments. I am too low-level to swap over to the onslaught belt, and am wearing Tanu Ahi to make up for not having that at the moment. I would love to use a Death Rush, but I am not sure if I can make the gearing work out as I need to make up for a lot of resistances and spell suppression and might need that ring slot. Anyways… it is going to be a bit of fiddling around before I can get this build into a workable and stable state.
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Good Morning Folks! I find myself starting to feel that old familiar itch… the one that involves me leveling a second character. I have no clue what I actually want to make but that isn’t important. What is important is that I know before long I will wind up chasing some new character and trying to make it work. That is not to say I am not still having a heck of a lot of fun on Righteous Fire Chieftain, and would honestly probably keep playing it for a while. I just always end up starting several other characters during a league and then trying to make them work. I would love to see a redemption arc for Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, but I am not sure if I want to roll another Marauder in this league. It has been a few leagues since I have played Toxic Rain, and bows are dirt cheap due to the corpse-crafting meta right now.
Remember me talking about going all in on my sceptre yesterday? Well… about that. I had this fractured +1 fire gem base that I had been tinkering with for a while. Essentially I had been spamming all of my alts at it hoping to roll the ideal setup… and then survive the regal. Yesterday I had farmed up another stack of alts and threw them all at the weapon… and happened to land a pretty optimal setup. Which then prompted me to spend my last to Divine Orbs to meta-craft this the rest of the way to completion. Now I am back farming blue juice from Harvest so that I can shift this to an alternate quality setup for elemental damage and do the 30% corruption beast again. At that point… I think maybe just maybe I will have the final form of my weapon.
Some “new tech” from this patch that I have been playing with is The Perandus Pact Prismatic Jewel. This is a grave crafted item that can be influenced to roll with a specific stat package on it. I did not do this thing, I just bought mine because the “6% Increased Fire Damage” version is apparently not the sought-after version. Essentially allocating this in my tree gives me a ring that includes 18 passive tree nodes that each gain +6% for a grand total of +108% Increased Fire Damage. I had already planned on picking up the Sanctum of Thought node to push myself up to 90% reduction to critical damage, which will give me another +18%. This seems really good and it would be significantly better if I were building something on the right-hand side of the tree with much tighter clustering of nodes. Alternately I could have gone with +5 life per node, but I wasn’t sure if that would matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve gotten deep enough into Delve that I am starting to see a few survival issues, so I decided to try something. I was out perusing POE.Ninja as one does… and noticed a Korean player running RF Chieftain with Vampirism allocated on their amulet. This seems really good because it would give me another source of recovery that is not entirely dependent upon my regeneration rate. The big problem is diving into packs of mobs while waiting on an explosion to proc, and while that is going off I would be getting both life on kill and some life recuperation from damage taken. Thankfully Golden Oils are cheap this league so if I want to go back to my Damage Over Time setup that I had been running it would be easy enough to do so.
I picked up another crafting project, that has frankly already cost me around 150 Chaos Orbs of potential value. I found this chestpiece for 10 Chaos Orbs and while I do not care in the least about the level of socketed curse gems… I am a huge fan of that 5% reduced Fire Damage Taken. I am running a lot of beyond on my maps and as such finding quite a bit of tainted currency so essentially as I find tainted fusing I am throwing them at this item. All I need is one to hit with a favorable result. When I fail I go back to the bench and craft 4 linked sockets… restoring me back to the state of just needing one fusing to six link it. Like I said I have made 3 attempts, each attempt with a value of 50 Chaos… and sooner or later I am going to hit it and then swap over to this chest piece and likely sell my RF-colored six-link Cloak of Flames for a bit of a profit.
The last bit of findings is that I actually managed to hit some T4 Harvest Beasts and wound up pulling Bear’s Girdle which is a key component for a Cleave of Rage build. Again it is something that I have wanted to play with, but I am not sure I want to make a second marauder this league. It isn’t like the girdle is worth a ton on its own, but I was happy to get it nonetheless. I’ve never fought the actual harvest endgame boss and keep wondering what is involved in doing so. I guess I should look that up at some point because I know there is a league achievement the includes them as one of the options. I should probably make some general strategy around finishing enough achievements to get my sad little totem pole again. Right now I am mostly working on Maven witnesses so I can attempt to take her down for a voidstone.
How has your league been going? Are you still trucking along or have you moved on already? Drop me a line below.
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