Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. I spent my time doing stuff around the house and playing Path of Exile. I’ve continued doing Delve and Heist with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and mostly doing Maps and Bossing with my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer. After spending quite a bit more currency to resolve some outstanding issues with the Necromancer, both characters feel in a pretty solid place. I would likely be doing better had I gone with the Poison variant of Summon Raging Spirits which seems to be all the rage right now, but it would have also cost me a heck of a lot more. I have concerns that Poison SRS is going to eat a big nerf bat when the next league rolls out because it seems like Grinding Gear Games loves to beat down the most popular classes. Admittedly I am also somewhat concerned about Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but considering the prices of gear is dropping I would assume that means that a lot of folks have abandoned it.
Continuing my descent into the darkness I finally located Ahuatotli, the Blind the Vaal City boss. The first screenshot is of me fighting that encounter, and the above screenshot shows the marker on the map in a Vaal city. All in all, I thought it was an easier fight than the Lich, which I guess makes sense given that you can supposedly start encountering it at a much lower level. Right now I am spending most of my time in the 125-150 range going out to the right side trying to find the only Delve boss that I have not faced yet. According to the fan-run Wiki, Aul the Crystal King can begin spawning in around depth 171 but I’ve also seen reports of folks encountering him as early as depth 125. So I figure staying around the 150 depth and going sideways will probably let me see Abyssal Cities that I should investigate and hopefully find a boss node in one of them.
On Friday I started leveling another character and gave it the dumb name of “BelMakeQuake” indicating that it is going to be a Seismic Trap build. Right now I am leveling using Poisonous Concoction which is a really weird skill to use. Essentially you cannot use it with a weapon equipped, which means you are giving up at least three sockets. Your damage scales off whatever life flask is in your left-most slot on the potion bar and you really want a slow healing potion that recovers lots of life in the process for maximum damage. The end result however means that you are just sort of deleting packs of mobs mad bomber style. Once I threw Greater Multiple Projectiles and Greater Volley on the skill, I essentially began throwing this giant wall of death at packs of mobs eating everything in my wake.
Once I have done the first and second Labyrinth I can supposedly switch over to the final combo of Seismic Trap and Exsanguinate for bossing and clearing respectively. I made an attempt to switch over a little bit early because the POB that I am following is not exactly what I would consider “good”. The end result is that I happily murdered myself by dropping way too many exsanguinates, each of which dealt significant damage to me in the process. I’ve not touched it since that fatal mistake, but when I do make my way back to the character I will essentially undo everything that I did and go back to my poisonous concoction nonsense. I started off leveling in a bunch of random uniques and then really needed to switch over to some proper rare gear, which I did not have laying around. I might go back to the uniques however because they seemed to be “good enough”.
On the market front, I am still selling a lot of random stuff. As I upgrade gear I tend to put up the item that I was using previously for a significant profit. For example, the boots I had crafted on my SRS necromancer were pretty good but did not contribute significantly enough to my survival in the manner that I needed. So I picked up a new pair of boots for about 80 chaos, and yesterday I sold my previous boots for 80 chaos making that upgrade net neutral. I’ve done similar things on Righteous Fire as well where I took an item that I bought for 20 chaos originally and used for quite a while and then ultimately sold it for 50 chaos. It isn’t a massive volume and I am not exactly swimming in divines, but it is enough to keep funding upgrades as I find them for a reasonable price. Metamorph continues to pay off significantly, so if you have a character that can handle killing those tanky monsters then you might spec your Atlas into that.
I also managed to finally get my Betrayal map in a state that allowed me to assault the mastermind. That was an interesting fight and was significantly more challenging than I expected. All of the other safehouse bosses have been massive pushovers, but I did this on my necro and for whatever reason, she could deal massive amounts of damage to me in short periods of time. Essentially I would run out of flask charges and then take a death. I persevered however and got achievement of killing the boss. I’ve not got my Betrayal map almost to the point where I can do a few more safehouses. Mostly I have been running Jun missions because I have a lot of them saved up for red maps, and when I run out of Niko missions I need to do something to regenerate them.
We are right at a month into the new league and it feels like I am not slowing down yet. There is so much that I still want to do and I finally feel like I have the characters to be able to do them. At some point, I will get enough guardian maps to drop so that I can keep moving the atlas bar forward as well. I still need to do Elder and Maven in order to get my next void stones. Having an absolute blast and wondering how long the contact high with this league will last.
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