Good Morning Folks! I thought I would give a bit of a quick update on the state of my Fire Conversion Shield Crush Chieftain. When I last posted about the build I was sitting at 78 and I have now put on another nine levels and am sitting at 87. Levels have helped quite a bit, as has a bit of gear swapping. The end result feels a bit closer to what I would consider a proper build. There have been a few times in this “Bel makes Videos” adventure where I have recorded a bit of an update because the build has suddenly felt much better to play. All in all, this is probably still not something that I would suggest to anyone because for the amount of effort I have poured into it… it still is not what I would consider a fast mapper or honestly particularly great at any sort of content.
Here is some updated gameplay that I recorded yesterday over my lunch break. If you compare this to the previous video, you can already see that not only am I running a harder map but I am also zipping through the packs much faster. The Achilles heel of the build continues to be bosses and the fact that anything with resistance takes forever to chew through even with flammability, fire penetration, and the Ramako ascendancy. The other glaring problem is that I have negative amounts of chaos resistance, which makes for a pretty quick death on occasion. I am slowly working my way towards the 10% of armor applies to Chaos Resistance mastery which I am hoping will at least help a bit.
To get where I am now, I have swapped out several gear slots so let’s dive into some of those decisions. Firstly I gave up chaos resistance and my rare helmet to go over to the armor stacking staple The Formless Flame. This is something I should have done from the start, but I was honestly more concerned about not having any chaos resistance than I was over the huge benefits of this item. I swapped from Immortal Flesh which I had been using for some life and regeneration, back to Arn’s Anguish the DPS belt that gives me a lot of Armor, Brutality Stacks, and some more Fire Resistance which then converts to at least some regeneration. I swapped out my rare boots with chaos resistance for Legacy of Fury which gives additional explosions and applies scorch to everything for more fire damage. Lastly, I swapped from my previous corrupted Emperor’s Vigilance to one with a bit more Armor and Energy shield since the price of those shields has crashed since I bought mine and I might as well min/max that a bit.
So when my flasks are ticking, which they usually are given they are all “flagellant” meaning I gain stacks while being hit… I am sitting at over 109k armor. This of course gets converted to attack damage which then gets converted to fire damage… which means the more defenses that I pour on the more damage I deal. Additionally, I talked about this in the build, but I did swap my Amethyst Flask for a perfectly rolled Rumi’s Concoction that I had sitting in the bank which gives me a capped block chance for both spells and attacks at 75%. Once I get the 10% of armor applied to chaos damage node, that should give me 10,962 armor being applied to chaos damage which should at least give me a bit of wiggle room even when I have negative resistance.
The challenge that I find myself in is that my next really huge upgrade would be swapping my Brass Dome out for a Grasping Mail. More specifically I need one that has rolled with the “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” prefix which cannot be rolled/crafted and has to drop natively on the item. The biggest challenge with all of this is… even a shitty one sells for around 10 Divine Orbs and for one that is already linked you are talking somewhere in the 25-50 Divine Orb range. I just feel like that is way more currency that I want to spend on this build especially when swapping this out would mean I would be down 4% maximum resistance and lose my crit immunity. Moreover even after swapping this… I would still largely be fucked on Chaos Resistance. While I have the currency to buy one of these, and then link it myself… I just have stayed my hand because I can’t see spending it on a build that I am not even sure about. I would probably rather spend that currency on upgrades for my SRS Guardian or RF Juggernaut as both of them feel worlds better than this character.
I think more than anything, Shield Crush Chieftain has been a fun experiment. It was a costly experiment, but it at least satiated my desire to see what Shield Crush and the new Chieftain changes were all about. I thought I would have put this character to bed long before now, but I continue to dink around with it. I am likely to swap back to either the Jugg or the Guardian however to knock out some of my missing league achievements so I can get another sad little totem pole for my hideout. This would be my third one if I managed to knock out two more achievements before the end of the league. Additionally, I am on the cusp of finishing up Diablo III Season 29, so I will probably be spending some time wrapping that up over the weekend.
That said… I am already contemplating a totally different distraction. Sir Gog is one of my favorite Path of Exile YouTubers, and he will be hosting a private league event starting this weekend. The idea is that it will be a crafting league and that everything is going to be dropping scoured so that you have to craft your own statistics on it. I am contemplating doing another SRS Guardian, largely as a way to test SSF Viability of the build for future leagues. I am not entirely certain this is going to happen, but I believe the league starts sometime around 7 p.m. for me. If you want to give this a shot check out the video above or the league invite page.
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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bit of a mixed bag of activities. I was back in Path of Exile and spent some time on my SRS Guardian. After playing a lot of my Storm Brand Build and Shield Crush Build… it honestly felt amazing to be back on this character. The strength levels of that build are just so much higher and honestly for so much less investment. I fear that this is going to mean that Guardian eats a few swings from the nerf bat before 3.23. If it remains intact, however, I am contemplating this as a league starter for the next go-around. You would have thought I had learned my lesson to stop trying to start something other than Righteous Fire, but legitimately… SRS Guardian feels equally as good and it reached a point of power way faster than RF usually does.
I spent a bit of the evening cleaning out monster parts from my stash tab. One of the things that I like about having Metamorph on my Atlas tree is that I am somewhat passively gaining monster bits and then can have an hour or so of constant fights in Tane’s chambers. Mostly I shifted to running Metamorph because the prices of catalysts are outrageous in this league. 20 Prismatic Catalysts to quality up a single resistance ring has been around 400 Chaos Orbs, which feels way too rich for my blood. There is also the side benefit that I have had pretty decent luck in getting raw Divine Orbs to drop from stomping monsters.
Another thing that I had some exceptional luck with, is that last night I saw three Voidborn Reliquary Keys. I sold two of these and decided to open one because it is always fun to gamble a little bit. While most folks seem to open these chasing a Mageblood or a Headhunter, I am honestly fine with anything else interesting that just happens to be shiny. Last night I pulled what I had honestly wanted all of this time… a Shiny Tabula Rasa. This will let me twink characters in style going forward… though honestly I am not sure how many more builds I am going to make this league.
I spent most of my evening down in Delve, slowly crawling my way across the randomized map. This really is my happy place when it comes to Path of Exile. I was chilled out sitting on the sofa with my laptop, a cat to my side, and listening to an audiobook. I found all three reliquary keys down in Delve last night, and to be truthful… most of them that I have found for the last few leagues all came from Delve. That makes sense because statistically, I am doing way more delve than I am doing any other content. I’m loosely looking for Fire-themed nodes because while I have a decent enough Flammability On Hit ring for the Shield Crush Chieftain, I could always use a slightly better itemized one. I’m also hunting for the parts for precursor rings because those are selling extremely well in this league.
Speaking of sales… the reliquary keys and a few other divine orb drops have helped me recover from the significant outlay of currency that I spent kitting out the Shield Crush Chieftain. I’ve started using POEStack to track my currency since Exilience Next appears to be toast at the moment. In truth, I think I like having a web app way more than a stand-alone desktop client. Additionally, if I ever do start selling on TFT, I will at least be very familiar with the interface. I know that I will probably spend most of that before I gather much more, because I seem to always be funding the next idea that I want to play. I still want to try something with cyclone, but that seems to be always on the far horizon and not something that I am actively doing.
The last thing I guess I will talk a bit about this morning is that I finished up The Final Empire the first book in the initial Mistborn Trilogy. It took me forever to read anything by Brandon Sanderson, but now that I have… I understand what all the hype has been about. The world that he built and the characters in it were deeply enjoyable. I know without a doubt that I am going to be consuming the next two books in rapid order. I really enjoyed the way magic worked in this world and I look forward to seeing how the character of Vin continues to evolve. There is this whole part Shinobi part Jedi thing going on that I dig and I genuinely like a lot of the background characters as well.
I think tonight I will probably be back in Diablo III, working on chipping away at some more of the seasonal achievements. While I am enjoying myself there, I don’t find the gameplay anywhere near as compelling as Path of Exile. It is a heck of a lot of fun, but the dopamine hits are nowhere near as potent.
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Good Morning Folks! I thought this morning I would talk about my latest mess of a build in depth. I mentioned this on Friday, but essentially this build came about because I wanted a reason to play a Chieftain with its new ascendancy and a reason to play Shield Crush. While there are no actual guides on how to play a Shield Crush Chieftan, there are folks playing Physical to Fire Conversion Chieftans and folks playing Shield Crush. So as a result I spent quite a bit of time on POE.Ninja and kitbashed together something that felt right. I have no clue if anything I am doing is close to optimal, but I can clear red maps so I am going to call that a win. While nothing about this morning’s post is purporting to be a guide, here is my POB if you are interested in trying to follow along.
I recorded some footage of me doing a yellow map… largely because I am trying for the third league in a row to farm the damned Primeval hideout, which requires a lot of luck and running Primordial Blocks. I feel like the above gameplay does a pretty good job of highlighting both the strengths of the build and the weaknesses. The strength is when I charge into a pack of mobs, they usually explode in a brilliant pyroclastic wave. The weakness is… any time I encounter something fire-resistant or extremely tanky. I wind up getting a Niko elemental that is both Soul Eater and Shakiri Touched… and it takes for freaking ever to chew through. All in all, though it feels pretty enjoyable and is extremely tanky.
The new Chieftain ascendancy is this weird mixed bag of extremely powerful nodes and some that are situationally good. The real benefit of this ascendancy is that you can easily fix your elemental resistances. The side benefit is that Hinekora Death’s Fury causes big fire explosions… far bigger than anyone expected when this was announced. It isn’t quite an entire screen radius but it is almost there. I feel like the correct order to choose these is Tasalio, Hinekora, and then Valako because it allows you to fix your resists sooner rather than later. The fourth node is less certain because you have a few options with no clear winner. I am likely going to go with Ramako because it is the lazy option. Ngamahu is probably technically better but it requires you to carefully plan which nodes to put non-unique jewels in to get the maximum benefit in stacking Fire Damage. At least I will likely go Ramako for now and then maybe shift to Ngamahu after some more levels and thinking about it.
Let’s look at a couple of abilities that are key to this build. Shield Crush and Shield Charge are similar in that they scale based on the armor and evasion rating on your shield. This means the more armor or evasion that you happen to have, the more damage that attack is going to do. They also scale based on your physical damage as a whole, so I am looking specifically for ways to scale that. They are both tagged as AOE, and in a perfect world I would be able to incorporate something into the build that gives gem levels to “All AOE Gems” but unfortunately I don’t have that in the build. Given that physical is kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, I am converting as much of it as possible to Fire Damage, which gives me a number of other scaling options. I am primarily accomplishing this through a combination of the Avatar of Fire keystone, The Fire Mastery that converts 40% of physical damage to Fire, and Herald of Ash.
So we know from Shield Crush, that I want as much armor or evasion on my shield as humanly possible. That really probably means that you are looking at either Emperor’s Vigilance or Dawnbreaker. Both of them have very specific reasons to use them and I wound up going with Emperor’s Vigilance because it saves me two passive skill points on the tree, because I wanted Glancing Blows either way. The other semi-required unique would be Replica Dreamfeather which allows me to scale my attack damage based on how much armor I have which allows me to turn a defensive layer into an offensive layer. Currently, I have 36471 armor which would give me 81% increased attack damage. This is most definitely not what I would consider a cheap build, because I think at this point I am about 10 Divine Orbs into it.
Since I was already spending a good deal of money on this build, I decided to go all in and lean on the Replica Dragonfang’s Flight which in spite of its name… has nothing to do with the other replica items from Heist. This is a weird new item that gives +3 gem levels to a specific gem and there exists a version of this amulet for every skill gem in the game. Some of these are extremely expensive, but Shield Crush is one of the cheaper ones and can be picked up for under a hundred chaos. I’m also taking advantage of the Circle of Anguish which scales my fire damage and increases my fire resistance by quite a bit because I will always be running Herald of Ash. This squeezes things a bit and keeps me from being able to cap Chaos Resistance because the large number of uniques that I am running makes it a bit challenging.
Since I want to have a bunch of armor, and it is relatively straightforward to get 4000 armor on a Brass Dome … that also comes along with crit immunity I decided to lean on that chest piece. I managed to find a bargain on a 4% to all maximum resistances chest with all of the right colors and a 6% reduced fire damage taken corruption for 2 Divines. The negative is I no longer gain life from strength, and as a result, I am a bit low on life as a whole. To help mitigate some of that, and to give me a bit of regeneration I decided to lean on a well-rolled Immortal Flesh. There are other options that would not give me as many defensive layers for example Arn’s Anguish is something I have seen used on a few Shield Crush builds. I like survival and I like feeling tanky so… regen is a win for me.
This leaves me leaning on Boots, Gloves, and Helm to try and fix my Chaos Resistance while also stacking as much Fire Resistance as possible… which then in turn fixes my other Resists thanks to Tasalio Ascendancy talent. I also needed to lean on these sockets to fix my lack of Dexterity… which made the gear really really expensive. Normally to get Dex on an item it needs to be an evasion base, but I want Armor given that I don’t currently have access to Iron Reflexes to convert Evasion back into Armor. I think honestly the BEST version of this build we double dipping from armor and evasion to convert it with that keystone. It does make me think that maybe Champion would be the best possible class for a Shield Crush build.
All in all, I enjoy the build. I need a heck of a lot more levels on it and the more I play it the better it feels. Do I think this was worth 10 Divines? Probably not. If I spend more time working on this build I would really like to have Forbidden Flesh/Forbidden Flame jewels that give me Unbreakable from Juggernaut, but they are currently ungodly expensive. There are a bunch of expensive things that I could do to optimize my damage but for the moment… I think I just need to pile on more levels. Would I suggest this to someone who just wants to map quickly? Probably not. Is it fun in its own way? Absolutely.
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Good Morning Folks! This weekend I got pulled back into Diablo III. The new season dropped a few weeks ago but I did not actually get around to playing it on launch day. Instead over the course of the week my friend Ace got engaged with Diablo III again, which then pulled me back in on Saturday afternoon. This is without a doubt the most chill leveling experience I have ever had because I started a little after 2 pm my time and by the time I finished recording the podcast that evening, I was just a stone’s throw away from 70. That isn’t anywhere close to record time or anything, but it is a heck of a lot faster than I normally end up leveling. When we would do a season launch on a Friday I would maybe make it to 50 that first night.
The key difference this season is a new event type called a “Vision of Enmity”. I recorded some footage of me doing one on Saturday, largely so I would have an example for this inevitable blog post. Essentially any mob you kill in the open world has a chance of spawning a portal, and when you teleport inside you are presented with a series of “rooms” for lack of a better term. Each room will either spawn another portal or spawn a treasure goblin. Killing the Treasure Goblin drops a chest full of bounty materials that signal the end of the event. The rooms seem to have a handful of possible outcomes:
One or more elite packs spread out through the map.
A room where everything is magic or higher, and drops death’s breath.
A room with three Greater Rift Portal bosses.
A room where every mob is a treasure goblin, most of them being the material goblins.
A room with a single treasure goblin spawn, signaling the normal end of the run.
The treasure goblin room is by far the most ridiculous thing I have seen in Diablo III full stop. That said… even the normal rooms are insanely rewarding. Almost my entire leveling process was me attempting to do one full round of bounties. I would start down the path to a bounty objective, and at some point, a portal would spawn. Early on I would get distracted by the portal forcing me to do the objective all over again because, at the end of the event, you get shunted back to town. Later I got in a rhythm of doing the objective, going to town, vendoring, and then going back to the portal because thankfully it gets marked on your minimap with an arrow pointing towards it. One single round of five acts of bounties plus all of the assorted portals that spawned… added up to I think 65 levels. For the last few I did Nephelem rifts to finish things off.
The most beneficial part of Enmity portals is that you end up with so many materials. I started getting Death’s Breath at level 2 and when I would get one of the rooms with three Greater Rift bosses they would drop Greater Rift Keystones. At the time of writing this, I have 166 GRift stones and almost all of those were gained through Enmity portals. Similarly, I have around 100 of each of the bounty materials and I have consumed a bunch of them cubing items and doing other crafting recipes. Materials are not really a problem because if you run out… just run a few more portals and in the process of doing those you will likely also get a number of legendary items. This legitimately feels like the most generous Diablo III season ever.
We talked about this on the show a bit, but it feels like the Diablo III team did not hold anything back. This is reportedly the last new season for the game and in doing so they created something purely fun for the players. It makes me a little sad to be honest, because the very limited team working on Diablo III has managed to create some extremely fun content over the last several leagues. I wonder what this game would have been like if they had gotten the full backing of Blizzard. Seeing how rich and varied the content is in Path of Exile makes me sort of wish for an alternate universe version of Diablo III where it got the same love and attention. That is not to say that the team working on D3 has not done some amazing stuff, but you can clearly tell they have limited resources.
I am very much in that awkward phase of not having all of my gear and not having enough gold to finish crafting my set of gems. I love Crusader and more specifically the Invoker set, so when I saw it was the Haedrig’s Gift set for the season I knew what class I would be playing. I have my six-piece and am currently trying to farm a Ring of Royal Grandeur in order to swap to Half Invoker/Half Crimson. I have none of my cube items and I am missing the correct jewelry and chestpiece. I think a lot of my squishiness will be alleviated when I get an Aquilas’ chest to drop. For now, I am very much in the area where my killing potential is extremely high… but my survival is very very low. I just swapped back to using the Paladin as a heal bot so here is hoping that resolves some of the issues.
All told I am very happy with this season so far, but I also know that I am going to maybe get a week out of it before returning to Path of Exile as my primary game. Playing Diablo III made me realize how lucky I am to have so many good ARPGs to swap between. It used to be Diablo III was pretty much it for me, and I would hunger for a new season. Now when I get tired of one game I can swap to one of many other ARPGs and keep the joy rolling. At some point, I will make my way back to Last Epoch and see some of the changes over there. For now, though, I am happy to be playing some Diablo III and happy to be working on my Invoker build. If you’ve ever loved Diablo III, I highly suggest reinstalling and checking this season out because the Enmity rifts are extremely fun. I love that it is content that you can do pretty much immediately. I can only hope that the Diablo III team will be consumed by Diablo IV where hopefully they can right that sinking ship.
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