Good Morning Folks! I don’t have a heck of a lot to talk about this morning, but I thought I would share something that I realized yesterday. I spend a lot of time in Delve and it is quite possibly my favorite game mode in Path of Exile. I would not be shocked if I had spent over a thousand hours running delve nodes. The thing is… the structure of Delve is something that has confused me a bit. Namely, I seemed to be missing the inherent understanding of how to find hidden nodes. There are a lot of things in this game that are based on rules, but for whatever reason I had yet to grasp something fundamental about the way Delve was laid out. Now I have to admit that I had heard this information before, but never fully grasped what it meant.
Veteran Path of Exile players speak like you understand what they are saying. I remember specifically Zizaran talking about this in a video here he was explaining that you could tell where hidden nodes were based on the connections that they were making. A node cannot have only two connection points. It can have one, it can have three, and in rare cases, it can have four… but no node can have only two connections. To illustrate this point I took a screenshot of an area down in Delve where there were two hidden nodes side by side… one azerite and one fossil. I’ve applied some labels to count the connections and you can see there are two places where there are only two visible connections. So I sketched an estimate of where I thought the connections might break off and labeled the expected node path in each case with a “3?” indicating a hidden third connection.
Last night I farmed each of these areas out so that I could take a follow up screenshot showing what the actual connections ended up looking like. I have highlighted the paths in green and in both cases I was more or less right. In the case of the Fossil node, the path broke off to the north instead of to the west, but it was in the same region. In any case looking for nodes that only had two paths connected to it, gave me a place where I knew for certain there would be some sort of path breaking out that I could bomb to get access to the tunnel.
Sometimes there are going to be places on the map where there is a hidden node, but there are two nodes around it that only have two connections. In these cases, you need to look for places where there might be a phantom fourth connection. If I were going to try and get to this currency node then I would start looking at the armor node and azerite nodes that I have highlighted. There is not enough room for a path to break off the Cartography node above the highlighted area, and while technically the singleton Lightning node could break north, that seems to happen really infrequently. Again you can have a single point of connection, three points of connection, or four points of connection but never two.
This is not my image, but it represents a concept that took me a bit to grasp. Delve is aligned to a strict grid of nodes. So when thinking of the way things connect up… there has to be enough room for a path to travel through without interrupting nodes you have already revealed. The way the biomes are laid out gives you a hint for where the edges of the individual blocks are. if you were to start drawing along those boundaries, you would eventually end up with a grid similar to the one above showing you where your hidden node has to be connected to. In the above example, we are going back to the rule of two again making it very clear where the connection is going to be. However in my example, if I follow the biome boundary lines, I cannot rule out either the two four connections that I have highlighted or the potential of that singleton going north.
Delve has long been something that was largely instinctual for me. I would get a feel of which tunnels I could dive down into the darkness and find riches, and which I should skip. However, I knew there had to be a method to the madness, and understanding the rules… makes it so much more straightforward to find those hidden nodes. Again this is something that EVERYONE might already know and I am just slow on the uptake… but I am going to take the risk to look like an idiot and explain it clearly regardless. That has been the problem I have had with most Path of Exile knowledge transfer, is that there is a general assumption that folks already understand core concepts. I’ve played roughly 2500 hours of the game and there are still core concepts that I am finally grasping all the time. It is my hope that this will help someone out there because I am too old for posturing that I know everything.
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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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Good Morning Folks! Things continue to truck along happily in the post-patch Necropolis league. The only real problem I am having right now is that there are too many things that I would like to be doing. Normally speaking I tend to focus hard on a single mechanic, and more often than not that is Delve. I am down around 230ish depth and having a grand ole time… but also I find myself really enjoying mapping this league more than normal. Having access to three Atlas trees seems to have made all of the difference in the world because I can shift things up depending on what I want to run. The shocking winner for this league is the tree that I have focused hard on Einhar, Beyond, Rogue Exiles, and Ritual. It ends up creating some extremely rippy maps but they are also ridiculous loot bonanzas.
When you have a large number of red beasts, corrupted rogue exiles, and beyond packs spawning… your screen often looks like this. I have a lower-density magic find filter that I occasionally swap to, but more often than not I just toggle off items entirely while I am fighting and then run around the room picking things up after the battle is over. The biggest problem that I have with a more restrictive loot filter is that there are things that I still want to pick up. For example, I am not going to pass by a stack of Jewelers Orbs or Chisels because I hate dealing with currency trades. I would instead rather have a full vault of that sort of stuff for when I potentially need it later down the line. The magic find ethos is to ignore anything that isn’t worth a lot of money and then buy the things you need… but I still enjoy looting normal stuff occasionally.
There is a nonsensical strategy where you essentially force every rogue exile to drop a unique, and then do some shenanigans with allflames and scarabs in order to force hundreds of them on your map. I’ve done some of this and it is truly silly. I am not chain-running it as a mapping strategy because I hate buying resources… but when I get the right scarab drops and the stars align I will run one of these maps. I think the challenge I have when it comes to making currency in Path of Exile, is that I can’t ever bring myself to grind the same thing over and over save for Delve. When I am mapping I like to shake things up a bit because it gets extremely tiring running the same map over and over under optimal conditions in order to maximize your profit margins. Instead, I would greatly prefer throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks and then being pleasantly surprised when something pays off.
I am still seeing the occasional raw divine drop and I am still occasionally moving random items that I chuck in my trade tabs. I think the league mechanic is adversely impacting my normal money maker, aka Delve Resonators. Though I have to be honest there are some things that it seems like are a massive pain in the ass to craft with corpses. I’ve mostly had complete failures myself each time I tried to craft anything. I’ve also seen a lot of failed craft videos out there, so I think at some point… good ole tried and true fossil crafting will win out and there will be a significant spike in prices. I am not willing to sell delve goods at the prices they are currently going for, so instead I sit on my mountain of stock in the hopes that eventually the prices will turn around.
I decided to go ahead and commit to the scetpre that I have currently and took it to 30% quality with an alternate quality harvest enchant. It is not a bad weapon, but a couple of the stats only really benefit fire trap and not both of my abilities. I have a project weapon with fractured +1 fire gems on it but have currently run myself entirely out of alts from spamming to try and get t1 Damage Over Time Multiplier or Fire Damage Over Time Multiplier. I managed to get this once… but failed on the regal and then failed again on an annul. Basically, I need the regal to add a prefix or be able to annul off a suffix for it to work. If I ever get the craft to work it should give me a significant upgrade, at which point I will do the alt quality harvest craft again and then beast craft corrupt it to 30% quality like I did this one.
Over the weekend I bought the three maps that I needed to finish out my Atlas. Thankfully they are all pretty cheap this league, but I realize this was a deeply selfish thing to do rather than sharing the love and inviting folks in to get credit. The thing that sucks is right now something is going on with my machine and Path of Exile and every time I attempt to run ANY maps with anyone I crash to the desktop. As a result I made the decision to go ahead and knock out my maps rather than spend the currency and risk not getting credit, with the thought that the moment I unlock these maps the sooner I get additional copies of them. For example, I have already gotten another copy of Coward’s Trial for the guild bank, and hopefully, folks who are not crashing out while doing multiplayer content can group together and run it. I’m hoping to see the other maps soonish so I won’t feel quite so bad for going ahead and knocking them out.
That has been a point of frustration for me ever since they started integrating the POE2 tech into the game. My performance has gone to shit, and every time I have tried grouping with anyone I end up without fail crashing out. Last league I attempted a number of Blight maps with Kodra and in every case I ended up losing one or two portals because I would crash when trying to group together. The other night I tried to bring along Ric to farm Black Morrigan and risked missing the capture because I bombed out right as we were fighting it. For now… I am just going to solo and feel slightly bad for being selfish with maps. My hope is that I will be farming up enough of everything else to make up for it.
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This weekend, I saw some odd things happening over in Path of Exile. First, my good friend Kodra hit the jackpot and got what is quite possibly the most valuable item you can drop in Path of Exile. He was running a t16 Carcass map with 2332 Yellow juice and 3438 Blue juice and lucked into a Mirror of Kalandra. This led to a whole sequence of events happening… because a Mirror is worth too much currency to sell it in a single trade. This forced him to go to The Forbidden Trove to find a trade, which wound up being in Mirror Shards which are fractional Mirror currency, and some raw Divines to add up to I believe 913 Divine Orbs worth of value. This is essentially more currency than you can reasonably spend… and opened the door to all sorts of nonsense. He purchased a Mageblood and pretty much offered the rest of us Bel-Leaguers one as well… which truthfully I am not even sure what I would do with one at least not yet.
This led both of us down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out what the hell is going on with Affliction League. If you have watched anything in the way of streamer highlight videos in this league, you will see that many magic finders have found twenty or more mirrors a piece… simultaneously generating more “wealth” than the game has ever probably seen outside of the Standard League. The weird thing about this is it has had the inverse effect that I would have expected. By nature, I would have assumed this would push the price down from what we saw in Ancestor… which also generated more mirrors than normal. However, the opposite has been the case. During Ancestor League a single mirror was worth roughly 145 Divine Orbs and in Affliction League that same mirror is now worth 924 Divine Orbs as of the time of writing this… and still climbing.
What is happening is that since Mirrors are so plentiful… they are actually being used for their intended purpose. Traditionally the Mirror is a vehicle for parking “wealth” in Path of Exile especially once you start reaching 5000 Divine Orbs aka the maximum storage capacity for any single currency type in the specialized currency tab. I know I personally have spent a lot of time “selling chaos” for a simple reason to convert it up to Divine Orbs and keep from the mess of having 10s of thousands of chaos laying around. But notice in the above screenshot there are four random Deadeye’s that I picked out off POE.Ninja and they are all using the same mirrored bow Vengeance Barrage which I believe is the new “best in slot”. Thing is… for a lot of these maxed-out characters they are wearing MULTIPLE mirror tier items each consuming at least one Mirror and an amount of Divines as the required “tip” for a “Mirror service”.
Mirror Service is such a weird concept and I had trouble wrapping my head around it at first. Essentially a Mirror of Kalandra’s intended purpose is to create a copy of an item. This means that extremely skilled crafters can create what is a “near perfect” item and then sell the rights to copy that item to other players. For example here is a screenshot from The Forbidden Trove discord of the Mirror Service channel showing one player “selling” access to six different “Mirror Tier” items each with a fee listed. The player wanting one of these items is expected to provide their own Mirror of Kalandra and then also upwards of 150 Divine Orbs as a “tip” for the service. I’ve blurred out the specific details, but essentially this is how some players make their currency… but pouring divines into outrageous crafts and then selling access to the byproducts of that crafting to other players. Since there are so many Mirrors floating around in the economy, it means that they are being removed at a massive rate by folks getting their own copy of mirror gear.
On top of this…. the proliferation of magic-find characters is causing a downward pressure on pretty much everything else that used to hold value. The Mageblood for example generally was considered to be almost as stable as the Mirror and Mirror Shard for parking currency. However the whacked out juiced maps that people are running, can in times produce multiple magebloods in the same map. In Ancestor League the Mageblood was around 230 Divine Orbs and this league you can pick a well rolled one up for around 100 Divines. This price continues to plummet as more of them enter the market than the market can reasonably absorb. The same thing happens to every other item that can drop on a map because the magic finders are just finding more of them. Taste of Hate for example is generally around a 100 Chaos item… but I picked one up for 5 Chaos the other day. If it can be generated with Quantity and Rarity… it is likely cheaper than it has ever been in any other league.
My big splurge is that I dumped 50 Divines into a well-rolled non-corrupted Headhunter. I’ve always wanted to play with one of these and never felt like I could reasonably afford it. In a normal league, a well-rolled headhunter would be twice the price that it is currently. I still have a bit of a nest egg and I still have a lot of things that are selling, but I thought it might be fun to screw around with this belt on my babby magic find lightning arrow champion. So far it has been interesting. Headhunter seems to be feast or famine… either you get a bunch of really amazing buffs and feel like a god… or you mostly just drone through the map without a ton of benefit from the belt. I am sure I could get whatever I wanted from Kodra, but honestly, I have no clue what I even want or how much longer I really feel like screwing around in this league.
In truth, I have accomplished everything I had hoped for in the league. Over the weekend I hit 19 of 40 challenges which gives me my fourth tiny totem. Essentially since getting my first totem, that has become my primary goal for any league to keep adding to the collection. I keep kicking around the idea of trying to build a Penance Brand of Dissipation character just to do dumb things with Uber bosses. I did not jump on the Totem Explosion bandwagon during Crucible and honestly, I have always kicked myself a little for not doing that while it was available. I mean ultimately the first step in this process would be running enough lab to get a Penance Brand of Dissipation gem. I could just buy one off the market… but I would feel better about myself if I at least tried to get one from Lab first. I don’t have a Templar in this league so I might as well go for it. So that might be a project as the week goes on.
Anyways! I hope you all had a great weekend. We are still in freezing temperatures here and I am feeling more than a little cooped up. Hopefully, we get some better weather as the week drags on because I am not designed for this amount of cold.
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