Good Morning Folks! On Tuesday night I started a brand new character and last night I got it into maps. This has been one of the faster leveling characters I have played, but that was in part because for most of it I was using a bunch of uniques to speed up the process. As I talked about yesterday, I created a Necromancer and started working towards a Vaal Absolution build. Last night I did my normal build testing routine of running a T1 map, a T5 map, a T6 map, a T10 map… and then ultimately trying a T16 map. Shockingly I survived very well in a T16 “alch and go” Crimson Temple with red altars turned on. Did it feel amazing? Absolutely not, but it does feel pretty solid when I drop back down to T10 “barely red” maps. I think more than anything I just need more levels to make this build feel a bit more comfortable as I just dinged 76 this morning.
I am sure I will do a full write-up at some point, and I recorded a brief video this morning of how it looks currently. Essentially you can see my POB from level 73 and just starting maps, and I am making a few “choices” that differ from the standard spiel. Most of it is stuff I had lying around like using a +2 Minion Geofri’s Crest just because it had a boost to minions and really good resistances on it rather than its actual purpose of scaling up Holy Relics. I am still not entirely certain what I think of this build but in the grand scheme of things it seems to be pretty solid. I think it falls in the category of so many of my alternate builds where if I put more time into it, it could feel amazing. More than anything this was a test case to feel how absolution plays, and I think I have gotten a decent idea at this point.
I also wrapped up the second book in the first Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson and plan on starting the third book tonight. This novel was a wild ride, and I realize I have said that before… but no really… this was a wild ride. It went in a bunch of directions and wound up with a very “Empire Strikes Back” type ending where everything is bad for our protagonists. However, that makes a lot of sense given this is the middle book in a trilogy. I just did not expect the direction things went, many of the actions that were taken, or the resolution that came out of them. I am still very deeply invested in most of the main characters so of course I will hungrily begin consuming the next bit as soon as things have settled down tonight.
Lastly, my order for the Gamecube Purple Nitro Deck came in yesterday and I had a bit to play with it. Essentially it is a controller dock of a sort for the Switch where you take the central tablet portion and click it securely into a wrap-around controller base. The end result is something that feels significantly more solid and balanced in your hands than the default configuration of a Switch. It features rumble and gyro with the only lost functionality being NFC but given I rarely if ever use Amiibos… this was not a big deal to me. The buttons and dpad are maybe not as high quality as I would have liked, but the thumb sticks are Hall Effect which should stop drift. There is an added benefit of having four buttons on the back in a similar arrangement to the Steam Deck. The entire package is a bit lighter than the Switch with native Joycons attached. All in all I think I am going to like it quite a bit.
While I was writing this post, the video of Vaal Absolution gameplay finished uploading, so check that out if you are interested. Today is my Friday, so quite honestly I have no clue if I will be making a blog post tomorrow. If I do not… I hope you all have a wonderful day. We are going to get our Flu Shot and latest Covid booster so I have no clue how I will be feeling in the morning.
The post Absolution and Mistborn appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably are expecting this post. I talked yesterday about wanting to try out Absolution… so last night I started a brand new Witch and got it through the start of Act 8. I decided to go with a Necromancer in spite of Guardian actually representing over 70% of the folks running Absolution or Vaal Absolution in this league. Guardian is really powerful as evidenced by how easy of a time I had with no real gear during the Toucan League. However, I opted to go back to the minion-loving roots of a Witch, largely because at this point I had already leveled 2 Guardians and an Inquisitor in this league and was a bit tired of the old man in a diaper that is the Templar. I can’t necessarily call mine a Necromancer because in spite of being over level 60… I’ve yet to take the time to do my first Labyrinth and actually ascend.
While technically this is a minion build… it feels absolutely nothing like MOST minion builds. Essentially you run around nuking things with a giant orbital strike of lightning damage and that then spawns up to three Sentinels of Absolution that also cast the same big lightning strike attack. More specifically I am using the Vaal version and thanks to Trade League I picked up a dirt cheap level 1 version with 20% quality on it so when finished I will have a 20/20 Vaal gem which is a bit of a challenge to actually get. Added to the mix are Spectres and Zombies with Feeding Frenzy support and Herald of Purity summoning up four Sentinels of Purity. Because everything seems to lag behind, I end up casting Convocation quite a bit to keep them grouped up on whatever target I want them to attack. The mix of me casting a giant nuke, and then having a swarm of minions… feels supremely odd and I am not entirely certain what I think about it yet.
I am following a guide, but at the moment it feels like my tree is spread out all over the freaking place. At some point, I am certain I will apply a measure of my own personal touch to this build, in order to make it a bit more tanky. This is going for Eldritch Battery, which means I am entirely losing my Energy Shield as a defensive layer. I should then in theory probably stack armor bases for various slots, but given that I mostly need blue sockets… that becomes its own nightmare to get colored correctly. What worries me at the moment is just how low my health currently is. Part of this is because I have been leveling with a 5-Link Thousand Ribbons and a handful of other uniques that made the early game a breeze… but have largely outlived their usefulness.
Almost 50% of players running Absolution are running a specific unique chest piece called Doryani’s Prototype, and I am really not sure if I want to go down that rabbit hole. Essentially the tech behind this body armor relies on you getting your Lightning Resistance as low as possible… for the best builds out there it can be as low as -200%. Then when you attack mobs they have the same lightning resistance as you do… allowing your lightning attacks to do outrageous damage against them. In order to keep from dying, you need to stack as much armor as humanly possible because the chest piece also allows you to soak lightning damage from hits as armor, but this makes you extremely vulnerable to any lightning damage over time attacks. I just do not feel like I want to play this game nonsense game of trying to juggle resistances and make sure one is bottomed out, while the others are high enough to matter.
At least for the time being… I am not going to do this nonsense. Instead, I am going to utilize the fact that we have a truly ridiculous number of six-links in the guild bank. I hand-picked a crusader chainmail that I was able to get 5 Blue/1 Red on pretty quickly through spamming chromatics. I am going to buck the popular advice and just build some measure of normal guild for the moment. I don’t really want to spend much currency on this build especially considering I am not even sure I am going to like how it feels. The only thing so far that I have bought is a Replica Dragonfang with Absolution on it which itself was less than 100 Chaos, so something I can make back rapidly just by selling off some delve stuff. Tonight I am certain that I will wrap up the campaign and start poking my head into early maps to see how this all feels.
I will probably try and knock out the first two Labyrinths over lunch so I can officially call myself a Necromancer. Probably the biggest expenditure I will have is buying a bunch of botched 20/20 corrupted gems in order to jump-start myself to a baseline of power rather than waiting to level them all.
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Hey Folks! This morning I was struggling to find something to write about and I thought I would Trials of the Ancestors league has been going for me so far. We are now forty-six days into the league, and it shows no real signs of slowing down. Generally speaking after the first month there is a massive drop off in players, and based on Steam Charts we’ve maintained at least 40k players for the average concurrency. As compared to this point in the Crucible League the numbers were down to around 16k, and in Sanctum around 21k. There are a lot of factors that are likely generating this. Firstly the base state of the game is amazing right now, and there are so many viable builds available. While Deadeye is currently dominating with 17% of players on the ladder… there is a pretty decent spread among other ascendancies with some reasonable build diversity within each of them.
The other thing that is happening right now, is a bit of an abandoning of the Diablo franchise by content creators and players. Diablo IV was initially well-received but really had some issues. I have talked about this at length on my own blog but the truth is the game was not designed for the Core ARPG player audience. What this has translated to is a massive influx of players trying out Path of Exile and Last Epoch for the first time, and oftentimes realizing that they enjoy it more. Final Fantasy XIV went through a similar glow-up when World of Warcraft was floundering, and we are essentially seeing the same sort of effect happening now in the ARPG market as folks move away from Diablo. The biggest shock for me however is when I saw Raxxanterax essentially announcing that he was going to be moving on to other games. He was the core pillar of the Diablo III Youtube community, and is the CEO of Maxroll.gg so to see him abandoning Diablo IV was rather telling.
Similar to during the great migration from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV a few years ago, I started seeing a number of videos gaining traction like the one above where someone who played a lot of Diablo tried out Path of Exile for the first time. Even more than that… I’ve seen a broadening of the community as more folks try their had at creating content for the game. As a Path of Exile enjoyer, it has been extremely cool to see essentially a broadening of the base. I think the next few years for the game are going to be exceptionally strong as we get the launch of Path of Exile 2 and see just what the release cadence of a two-game experience is going to look like. I think more than anything I am thankful that Path of Exile is going to keep running because no matter what happens with the second game I am always going to be able to return to the first.
As for me, I am still having a blast churning through content and trying out assorted builds. I recorded a new video this morning that shows off my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in its current state. Mostly I recorded it because I realized I did not have a video for Righteous Fire Jugg yet in this league. As far as my other builds I have played Lightning Arrow Raider, Guardian Summon Raging Spirits, Storm Brand Inquisitor, and Shield Crush Chieftain. I have this problem where I get excited about a build… pour some currency into getting it stabilized… and then start wanting to move on to the next build. All of my builds could be so much better than they currently are… if I were playing it and tuning it as my only build. I really like screwing around with new builds and figuring out what makes them tick, and ultimately this has been a huge part of my learning process with the game as a whole.
So of course I am now eyeing the “next” build. While I was leveling an SRS Guardian in the Toucan league over the weekend, there was a short stint where I was trying to weave Absolution into the build. I mean I was doing it completely wrong, but I had enough fun with the ability that I would like to try and build something around it. Seeing as I have now leveled two Minion Guardians and have no Witches yet in this league, I was leaning toward building on that class. I’ve been out looking at what folks are actively playing on POE.Ninja but have not really landed on a final build. I was an altoholic in MMORPGs and it seems like I am even more so in ARPGs given now many individual builds I wind up making in a given league.
I get that Path of Exile is not the game for everyone, but I have enjoyed watching folks warm to it. Closer to home I have been enjoying watching Kodra get the swing of things. What seemed to really cause him to begin to grok the game was the Magic the Gathering Analogy that we talked about on the show some weeks back. It has been a joy to watch him dive into various concepts of the game and assimilate them into his own game style preferences. Every league I seem to learn something new, and this league has been about getting into Blight and Legion more than anything else. There is just too much content in the game to sort of grasp all of it at once. I am where I am today because I have been doing this for five leagues and gathering bits of information along the way. Path of Exile is not a game that you master in a few hundred hours, but instead, one that you keep learning thousands of hours into the gameplay.
Anyways. I am still having a stupid amount of fun. I think maybe Trial of the Ancestors has been my favorite league thus far. They’ve all been on an upward trajectory since Kalandra. I do really wish that particular league mechanic would get its own glow-up and return to the core game. I thought building Lakes was deeply interesting, but the mechanical state of the game was rough. Anyways… I have no clue who actually makes it to the end of one of my Path of Exile posts but I figure it is a small group. Thanks for sticking around as I continue to obsess about this nonsense.
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Good Morning Folks! I did something silly this weekend. In Path of Exile, there is the concept of a private league, where you can pay to essentially play the game in a bubble with your friends. I’ve contemplated trying to do a small private league amongst my handful of friends who play the game regularly, mostly as a way of creating a sort of “Guild Self Found”. The idea is where you can still trade items freely but only amongst a smaller group of people giving you that Solo-Self-Found type experience of needing to actually find things, but also being able to rely on and help out your friends. There are a handful of streamers who run events throughout the year that are specifically associated with private leagues. The most popular of these is probably The Gauntlet, which is very much a much harder mode experience. There is another event called the Badger Private League where folks compete as teams with other teams of players.
SirGog one of my favorite POE information sources, also has one of these leagues that he has run a few times now called the Toucan Treasure Hunt. The idea is fairly straightforward, private leagues expand the lifecycle of a given Path of Exile league by allowing players a renewed focus on the fundamentals and an alternate way to play the game. There is a simple rule when it comes to private leagues, they cannot make the game easier and if you change the rules it can only be to make the base game more difficult. Toucan League for example is focused on crafting and the challenges that it provides. On Friday the league started at 7 p.m. my time and I decided to give it a shot. Specifically, the Toucan League had the following rules associated with it.
All Items Drop Scoured, so everything is essentially “white” quality and all you are really looking at is item bases and sockets.
All Players Start with -20% Resistance across the board, so you immediately need to try and dig yourself out of that hole.
Acts 1-3 have increased difficulty.
I decided to use this opportunity as a way of testing the SSF viability of Guardian SRS. When I was playing my Ancestor League version of this build, I noticed that for the most part, the uniques weren’t really “enabling” that build. They were buffing the strength of it, but they were not doing anything that a set of basic rare gear wouldn’t. Sure enough that has largely worked out as expected and now that I am level 81, I am mapping exceptionally smoothly. With only using some Alchemy Orbs and some Chaos Orbs to re-roll items I was able to land at over-capped elemental resistances thanks to Purity of Elements, but have thus far had no real hope of solving my Chaos Resistance problem. However, as I have learned several times… you can map pretty well with no Chaos Resistance at all. I managed to take my character up through early yellow maps yesterday afternoon and I think I took a single death doing so.
In the Discord associated with the event, there have been daily stretch goals that involve all sorts of things. I’ve largely been ignoring these, but I will say that more than anything I want to at least achieve the bronze-tier goal for the entire event. I’ve already passed level 80, and now I just need to complete my fourth ascendancy and I will feel fine with my progress for the league as a whole. I sincerely doubt that I will accomplish any of the further goals because more than anything this league has taught me a few things about my enjoyment of this game. Firstly I am not really that into the crafting system. I will use it when I need to in order to make serviceable gear, but I just don’t enjoy crafting as an endgame in itself. Secondly, I really hate that items being dropped scoured bricks an entire system that I have leaned on heavily for early gear. Essentially you cannot get crafting patterns from Betrayal as when the items drop, they drop scoured without veiled mods on them.
More than anything else… I am a loot-driven player. I like seeing loot. I like checking loot to see if it might be useful. Sure I can freely admit that 99.9% of rare items that drop on the ground are useless… but in Ancestor League I have made a pretty brisk trade in selling the items that I found in my travels that were NOT useless. For example, I spend a lot of time checking rings and amulets for resistances, and now my only real option is to attempt to brute force craft the resists that I need. Because everything drops scoured… mapping just feels bland and meaningless. I’ve run over a dozen maps, and I am largely just running them for completion sake. I know going into them that the only worth anything that I am going to walk away with, is maybe a few chaos orbs or other assorted bubblegum crafting materials.
I think easily the most interesting aspect of the event though, is it gave me a way of testing to see just how strong Guardian is on its own with absolute dumpster-tier gear. If you want to check out my POB, you can see the level of gear that I currently have. I am still using a level 20 helmet because I just happened to randomly chance my way into a +1 to all minion skills. I am using The Anvil as a necklace, mostly because it was the only unique that I got that actually halfway made sense for my build. I rolled a decent enough Convening Minion damage wand, and am now pretty much stuck with it because I don’t have the base Intelligence to move up to a Convoking wand. The lack of Betrayal crafts means I can never get my auto cursing/offering setup off the ground which means I am losing a lot of efficiency with the build.
Still, however… the build is perfectly playable and I am having little to no resistance progressing through maps. A lot of this is due to the fact that Radiant Crusade and more importantly the Sentinel of Radiance is so damned overpowered. I feel like there is no way that this build survives into 3.23 without at least taking a significant nerf to the amount of damage that the sentinel deals. We talked about this a bit on the podcast and Ash suggested that they might flip the order in which you get Radiant Crusade and Unwavering Crusade so you are at least getting it a bit later in the game. As it stands… Guardian SRS has been the best feeling Minion build I have played in Path of Exile. The fact that I have been able to get it up and running and feeling great with garbage gear only serves to underline this fact.
Alternately, I think I have learned that while I find the concept of the Toucan Treasure Hunt very interesting… I just did not enjoy myself nearly as much as I hoped I might. The lack of good loot really hampered my enjoyment. I’ve known for a while that the only reason why I ever raided in MMORPGs is because I wanted the shiny loot that was exclusive to it. It seems that I am only really into ARPGs because of the constant rain of potentially interesting loot. Don’t get me wrong I absolutely enjoy them mechanically, but mechanics alone are not enough to keep me engaged. Do I regret trying out the Toucan League? Nope! It was worthy of a shot, and I greatly appreciate Sir Gog for running the event. However, I think I will probably take a hard pass going forward because it just did not flip the right switches in my brain.
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