Good Morning Friends! I have never gone so quickly from being overwhelmingly hyped about something… to rapidly traveling down the stages of grief. Yesterday was the announcement of what is coming with the Affliction League in Path of Exile roughly a week from the day I am posting this. On the one hand… there is a ton of really interesting content being added to the game. On another hand… it may have completely destroyed my favorite gameplay style from the last several leagues and at the same time destroyed many of my characters that are sitting in standard. As a result, I am not entirely certain what I am going to do… and given that we were planning on doing a “GuildSF” type private league I won’t even be able to buy my way out of any holes through trade league. I admit… I am pretty scared about what this means for the future of me and Path of Exile.
First, let’s talk about some of the good things. Affliction League has a mechanic where you go “delving” through a dark and infested forest. You are protected by some wisps that allow you to burn away the corruption, but the wisps will only consume a certain amount of corruption before fading away and returning you to reality. This is in theory a mechanic that favors slower players because it isn’t on a timer like Legion or Breach, which is a huge net positive as far as I am concerned. Collecting these wisps allows you to spend them with vendors inside of the mists or when you return to your map gain a Sentinel-like buff on random packs of mobs remaining buffing them and their loot drops. I think this looks like an overwhelmingly fun mechanic and I am happy that we are finally getting something that once again favors a tanky character as opposed to glass cannon characters like Sanctum did.
The NPCs will allow you to buy your way into a set of ascendancies that modify how the game plays for you. Probably the coolest of these is the Primalist which allows you to socket charms that effectively give you watered-down versions of existing ascedancies turning you into a sort of hybrid Scion. Essentially one does things with Flask slots, one with corpses, and one with charms and you can swap between them but will have to level up the new ascendancy from scratch if you change “factions” as it were. This also seems really freaking awesome and the Primalist gives you the ability to open chests and get extra loot from corpses with warcries similar to the Diablo II ability. I sure was looking forward to this ability.
A somewhat mixed change as far as I am concerned is the return of Ultimatum, but this is largely because I never participated in that league before. It is costing us the loss of Metamorph as a mechanic, which admittedly most players will not mourn… but I sorta enjoyed getting rogue Metamorphs in my maps and crafting monsters. However, I will say that Ultimatum looks interesting, and pending how badly it scales… it might be a blast to play. At least I thought that was the case when I thought I would be going into this league with my trusty Righteous Fire Juggernaut. That however looks a bit less certain than the past three leagues.
I am going to let Pohx explain what happened to Righteous Fire. The biggest change is that they are completely removing Lab enchants and all alternate-quality gems. Similarly, they have changed the functionality of a number of gems completely… one of these was Righteous Fire. Previously RF got a base damage that scaled with gem level and then a 35% bonus based on your maximum life and energy shield. We don’t know what any of the alternate qualities are going to look like at this point… but the base gem will now scale based on 70% of your maximum life and energy shield and have no base damage. This means that in order to reach the effective damage you had from a level 25 Righteous Fire, you are going to need around 7000 combined health and ES. The ability is also losing its 20% burning damage bonus from the quality and instead aging Area of Effect which does not really help with the damage output and has always been more of a quality-of-life change. Similarly, Fire Trap is losing its damage from quality and instead gaining trigger radius which is next to useless.
This double whammy means that Righteous Fire as we have known it for the last few years is pretty well dead. That is to say unless there is an alternate quality version of the game that just works as the previous gem did for both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap. This similarly means that for the most part RF Juggernaut, Chieftain, and Elementalist are similarly dead in the water or at least greatly diminished from the levels that they were able to reach before. I kinda hate this a lot, and I sorta blame myself for saying that I thought Righteous Fire was untouchable yesterday because of the role that it plays in the community. This is bad for Path of Exile as a whole because it removes what was quite possibly the easiest and most well-documented onramp for new players. I feel like there will absolutely be folks that hang up their spurs after this series of changes.
What benefits however is the ultra-high investment version of Righteous Fire popularized by Captain Lance that involves stacking Energy Shield to ludicrous levels. This build with over 55,000 Energy Shield gets massively better but for everyone who does not have around a mirror to spend on the build, you might be shit out of luck. I am sure Pohx will come through with a viable league starter version of this build, but it is almost certainly going to be an Inquisitor and rely on some specific uniques to make it work.
My only hope right now lies in what might simply be an omission from the patch notes. Righteous Fire baseline shows the removal of the base damage. Vaal Righteous Fire however only shows the change in quality. This is some pretty flimsy hope but maybe just maybe the Vaal version works the same as the previous one did.
So where does this leave me for Affliction League? My gut reaction is to pivot from Righteous Fire to Tri-Elemental SRS Guardian. I played this build as a secondary character in Ancestor League and ran it up through maps in the Toucan Private League on zero gear. This should in theory be relatively unharmed by any of the changes in any significant way and should still feel really good for a league starter. While it isn’t anywhere near as sturdy in Delve as RF Juggernaut was… I could still Delve fairly effectively on this character. I could probably make some tweaks while building out the character to ensure that it felt sturdier… namely changing my early pathing to go down the Armor/ES nodes and working on getting better ES recovery so I could use it both as Mana and as a Defensive layer. I was happy with this character and I think I could feel happy maining it during at least the start of this league. If I got some of the key pieces, it also means I could respec to Inquisitor Energy Shield Stacking Righteous Fire later in the league.
I could also just say fuck it and go Lightning Arrow Champion, which is the build that I ultimately landed on as my mapper of choice for Ancestor. I league started a Lighting Arrow Raider turned Deadeye and I found it miserable and way the hell too squishy for my tastes. Later in the league however I ran up another Lightning Arrow Character and this time I went Champion and the added defensive layers made it feel great. I honestly thought that this decision would rule out Delve at all… but before sitting down to write this post I did a few nodes around 150 depth without any issue. Now I would probably not feel comfortable diving down tunnels quite the way that I do with a Juggernaut, but it should be good enough to get some crafting materials since I won’t need to print money like I did in Ancestor.
While talking about Champions… there is also Explosive Arrow which I enjoyed quite a bit in Crucible. From what I can tell everything about this build should still be fine. It has some easy-to-craft gear and If I were to play it again… it would be the third time I have done the build and I am sure I could learn some lessons from the past. I had quite a bit of luck doing Keystone Bosses with the build as well, so that should be good. The only thing that makes me hesitant about going after this build is that I am pretty sure that my friend Ace will be doing this as well. So there could be some good things about that where we can use each other’s hand-me-down upgrades… but it also means we would be in direct contention for specific gear pieces. The positive is you can pretty effectively get through maps on 4 links… so that is a huge positive as it does not rely on bow damage as much as lightning arrow does.
Then there is the Yolo option of just going RF Jugg and dealing with the consequences. If I took this path, I would probably go something similar to this POB from a Chieftain in the November events. It takes a slightly different pathing than the traditional Pohx build and focuses on getting 15% additional life from not having life on your Chestpiece and an additional 10% life from having six life masteries. This ends up taking the build to around 7000 life, just shy of it… which would in theory be about equivalent damage to a level 25 Righteous Fire gem was previously. There is still the problem of none of it scaling quite as well as it did before… but it would probably still be doable and feel okay for depth 100-150 delve and t16 maps. It isn’t ideal but I could probably make it work.
I hate that I’ve essentially been thrown into chaos of not really knowing what path I should follow. Again we don’t really know if there is a version of Righteous Fire out there that still works like the current version does, because we do not have any information for the alternate qualities through the transfiguration system. Right now my gut is telling me to either go Lightning Arrow Champion or SRS Guardian for my first character. The biggest problem with LA Champ is it requires a specific unique… or at least really wants it. SRS Guardian however I have successfully taken to maps in a league where all gear dropped fully scoured… so I know I can make that work with minimal effort. I have no doubts that it will see me through Atlas completion and be a decent beachhead to gear out additional characters. It is probably the most SSF-friendly of the options…. but EA Champ also is looking pretty good.
Basically, I have a week to sort out what I want to do and get the private league up and running. In the meantime, I will be over here mourning my favorite character archetype in Path of Exile.
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