Hey Folks! I’ve spent the entire weekend being paranoid because my wife and I had both been sickly for the last week or so. We assumed it was allergies, but Saturday night my wife took a COVID swab test, and came up positive. Thus far mine have come up negative but I am having what I am not sure are symptoms or not. Basically, I feel like I got hit by a truck and everything aches… almost like when you have the flu. Other than that most of what I am experiencing is just general “allergies” or “hay fever”. My wife had to scramble and prepare for a sub for this week as she is out until Friday. I find it highly unlikely that I do not have COVID unless she just had a very light viral load. I feel pretty lousy, and as a result, spent most of the extended weekend chilling out and playing a mix of Diablo III and Path of Exile.
I’ve talked about it before but my goal for this season has been to clear the atlas map. At this point, I am sitting at 83 out of 115, and the majority of what I have left in front of me is red maps and uniques. I’ve been trying to farm whatever I could from Kirac, but once we entered red map territory the requirement of having to have a corrupted map has made him less than useful. Essentially I seem to be alternating between grinding low-level maps for experience and pushing progress because deaths really hurt. That is probably one of the most annoying things about Path of Exile is how brutal death is to your leveling. There have been so many maps where a chain death spree reduces whatever progress I made to nothing.
Shocking to probably no one that has been around my blog for long… I created a spreadsheet to track our progress. That way the handful of us that are playing together can tick off maps as we clear them. The theory is we can also maybe share the wealth if someone is missing some gaps in their progress and we have maps that can fill them. Group play sucks… but it is worth it to help someone complete a hole in their maps. It took me forever to finish out yellow maps and I would have struggled to finish out white maps were it not for some help from Ace. It has helped me at least to feel like I am making forward momentum, ticking off each map as I finish it.
I’m finding it shockingly lucrative to run just white and yellow maps without any modifiers, and I think in part that is thanks to my Atlas tree. Right now I have gone hard into Essences, Strongboxes, and Expeditions. The only things that I have shut off completely are Breach, Blight, and Metamorph. Those are just league mechanics that I do not enjoy. Blight is essentially tower defense and I have always disliked those sorts of encounters. Metamorph in its current state just does not feel worth my time given that the bosses you end up creating are super tanky and take forever to kill. Breach might be cool but with a brand build I always end up getting overwhelmed and dying to those mechanics when I get overwhelmed. My favorite mechanic is probably still Expedition, which is in part why I have gone so hard into it with the tree, and haggling seems to be a solid source of cool stuff.
One of the cooler things that I have encountered in my running base maps, is a unique strongbox. A pretty tanky boss spawned out of it and dropped a few unique items as a result. Strongboxes used to be pretty dangerous but I have managed to get a Divine Vessel drop and picked up the “cannot be frozen” trait from the Brine King. I either need more divines to drop or more vessels to drop so that I can finish collecting abilities for my Pantheon. I think since I made quite a bit of progress over the long weekend, I will probably focus the next few days on running maps for experience so I can pour on a few more levels. I’ve reorganized my passive tree quite a bit to gain some tankiness and I am working my way toward the Armor and Energy Shield mastery cluster to add a bit more. It was shocking to me how much of a difference swapping out my level 19 Storm Brand gem was for a level 21 corrupted Storm Brand gem. I’ve got an item as well that increases all of the levels of lightning gems by one, so a 22 gem seems to just deal much more damage as a result.
I’m still having quite a bit of fun, but I am trying to ease back a bit on the pushing… because I am afraid I will just get frustrated. On the podcast this weekend I came off a lot more negative on the game than I expected to. I do fear that the vision that Grinding Gear Games has for the future of the title is going in the opposite direction that I would prefer. I play ARPGs because I like the power fantasy of crushing maps full of enemies and getting randomized loot as a result. There is a dopamine hit when you wreck something and watch a rainbow pinata of loot explode out of it. Path of Exile however seems to be on a path of making a more difficult and slow-paced game, which makes me hope that maybe Diablo IV will be the game I am looking for. Last Epoch also seems really solid right now and I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with it. The challenge there however will be whether or not the group gameplay is good.
The post Tracking Atlas Progress appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
