This weekend, I saw some odd things happening over in Path of Exile. First, my good friend Kodra hit the jackpot and got what is quite possibly the most valuable item you can drop in Path of Exile. He was running a t16 Carcass map with 2332 Yellow juice and 3438 Blue juice and lucked into a Mirror of Kalandra. This led to a whole sequence of events happening… because a Mirror is worth too much currency to sell it in a single trade. This forced him to go to The Forbidden Trove to find a trade, which wound up being in Mirror Shards which are fractional Mirror currency, and some raw Divines to add up to I believe 913 Divine Orbs worth of value. This is essentially more currency than you can reasonably spend… and opened the door to all sorts of nonsense. He purchased a Mageblood and pretty much offered the rest of us Bel-Leaguers one as well… which truthfully I am not even sure what I would do with one at least not yet.
This led both of us down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out what the hell is going on with Affliction League. If you have watched anything in the way of streamer highlight videos in this league, you will see that many magic finders have found twenty or more mirrors a piece… simultaneously generating more “wealth” than the game has ever probably seen outside of the Standard League. The weird thing about this is it has had the inverse effect that I would have expected. By nature, I would have assumed this would push the price down from what we saw in Ancestor… which also generated more mirrors than normal. However, the opposite has been the case. During Ancestor League a single mirror was worth roughly 145 Divine Orbs and in Affliction League that same mirror is now worth 924 Divine Orbs as of the time of writing this… and still climbing.
What is happening is that since Mirrors are so plentiful… they are actually being used for their intended purpose. Traditionally the Mirror is a vehicle for parking “wealth” in Path of Exile especially once you start reaching 5000 Divine Orbs aka the maximum storage capacity for any single currency type in the specialized currency tab. I know I personally have spent a lot of time “selling chaos” for a simple reason to convert it up to Divine Orbs and keep from the mess of having 10s of thousands of chaos laying around. But notice in the above screenshot there are four random Deadeye’s that I picked out off POE.Ninja and they are all using the same mirrored bow Vengeance Barrage which I believe is the new “best in slot”. Thing is… for a lot of these maxed-out characters they are wearing MULTIPLE mirror tier items each consuming at least one Mirror and an amount of Divines as the required “tip” for a “Mirror service”.
Mirror Service is such a weird concept and I had trouble wrapping my head around it at first. Essentially a Mirror of Kalandra’s intended purpose is to create a copy of an item. This means that extremely skilled crafters can create what is a “near perfect” item and then sell the rights to copy that item to other players. For example here is a screenshot from The Forbidden Trove discord of the Mirror Service channel showing one player “selling” access to six different “Mirror Tier” items each with a fee listed. The player wanting one of these items is expected to provide their own Mirror of Kalandra and then also upwards of 150 Divine Orbs as a “tip” for the service. I’ve blurred out the specific details, but essentially this is how some players make their currency… but pouring divines into outrageous crafts and then selling access to the byproducts of that crafting to other players. Since there are so many Mirrors floating around in the economy, it means that they are being removed at a massive rate by folks getting their own copy of mirror gear.
On top of this…. the proliferation of magic-find characters is causing a downward pressure on pretty much everything else that used to hold value. The Mageblood for example generally was considered to be almost as stable as the Mirror and Mirror Shard for parking currency. However the whacked out juiced maps that people are running, can in times produce multiple magebloods in the same map. In Ancestor League the Mageblood was around 230 Divine Orbs and this league you can pick a well rolled one up for around 100 Divines. This price continues to plummet as more of them enter the market than the market can reasonably absorb. The same thing happens to every other item that can drop on a map because the magic finders are just finding more of them. Taste of Hate for example is generally around a 100 Chaos item… but I picked one up for 5 Chaos the other day. If it can be generated with Quantity and Rarity… it is likely cheaper than it has ever been in any other league.
My big splurge is that I dumped 50 Divines into a well-rolled non-corrupted Headhunter. I’ve always wanted to play with one of these and never felt like I could reasonably afford it. In a normal league, a well-rolled headhunter would be twice the price that it is currently. I still have a bit of a nest egg and I still have a lot of things that are selling, but I thought it might be fun to screw around with this belt on my babby magic find lightning arrow champion. So far it has been interesting. Headhunter seems to be feast or famine… either you get a bunch of really amazing buffs and feel like a god… or you mostly just drone through the map without a ton of benefit from the belt. I am sure I could get whatever I wanted from Kodra, but honestly, I have no clue what I even want or how much longer I really feel like screwing around in this league.
In truth, I have accomplished everything I had hoped for in the league. Over the weekend I hit 19 of 40 challenges which gives me my fourth tiny totem. Essentially since getting my first totem, that has become my primary goal for any league to keep adding to the collection. I keep kicking around the idea of trying to build a Penance Brand of Dissipation character just to do dumb things with Uber bosses. I did not jump on the Totem Explosion bandwagon during Crucible and honestly, I have always kicked myself a little for not doing that while it was available. I mean ultimately the first step in this process would be running enough lab to get a Penance Brand of Dissipation gem. I could just buy one off the market… but I would feel better about myself if I at least tried to get one from Lab first. I don’t have a Templar in this league so I might as well go for it. So that might be a project as the week goes on.
Anyways! I hope you all had a great weekend. We are still in freezing temperatures here and I am feeling more than a little cooped up. Hopefully, we get some better weather as the week drags on because I am not designed for this amount of cold.
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