Good Morning Folks. I had taken a break in Diablo IV because I knew the Lunar New Year event was right around the corner, and a lot of my remaining achievements for the seasons journey would simply require me to grind a ton. I figured if I was going to be grinding, I might as well be getting credit for the Lunar Awakening event. This was great in theory, but it turns out that it is a really bad event to be doing with friends. All of the things that are actually fun to do with other people… reward zero credit towards the event. The only truly reliable method for grinding this out is to run a stupid amount of Nightmare Dungeons. These feel bad on the best of terms, but somehow feel even worse with a party. As a result we did a few of these… decided it was not a good time… and then moved on with our lives.
Neither of us had been playing a ton, and as a result we had not gathered up that many boss materials… but still made the effort to summon what we had. Ace’s cat however had other ideas and we got cut short after three bosses in the rotation. However this was enough for me to get my first Mythic item to drop… which was unfortunately Doombringer and not something I could use… but I turned it into a shard and got the chest-piece I wanted for my build. I am uncertain that yesterdays event patched in the fixes to the Mendeln ring, because I did not feel any stronger. I also did not see anything in the patch notes specifically calling it out.
At this point I have unlocked three of the caches on the Ancestral Favor path, and honestly it might be most efficient to just run around looking for the world events associated with this instead of purposefully grinding. The big problem that I am having with this event is that it is so limited in scope as to how you can progress it. In theory if I were doing this event, every activity would reward at least some credit towards the reputation system. Instead the only thing that you can do with other players that seems to reward anything is Nightmare Dungeons, which are legitimately the bottom of the rung when it comes to “fun things you can do with friends”. I think I will probably push a little bit towards this goal each day, and hopefully over the course of the event I will unlock everything. I am going to get bored if I try and mainline it however.
With that in mind, once we adjourned for the evening due to cat aggro, I went downstairs and spent the rest of the evening in Path of Exile. My build feels relatively solid at this point and while I have moments where I take stupid amounts of damage… this is largely caused by bad map rolls rather than endemic to the build itself. I’ve been running my Delve atlas tree and slowly working on “breaking delve” which is the process of slowly upgrading the various levers enough to where delve begins to feel like a reasonable activity.
Ultimately my goal is 150 depth for now, and I need to upgrade my darkness resistance significantly more in order to do that level comfortably. I am also slowly upgrading my sulphite capacity so that I can spend more time down in the mines once I have filled up from mapping. I like the Delve virtual cycle of doing some maps then doing some delve until I run out of sulphite. Ultimately my goal is to get to 150-200 depth and start chasing cities, because at that level I can get all three types of cities and their associated boss fights. In theory once I start gathering up resonators, I will also start getting a reliable income to spend on upgrades… or at least the few upgrades that are available in a semi-private league.
I am not sure how long Pohx League is going to stay active, but GGG has upgraded the cap to 40k players and I believe made it available to everyone. On top of that they have also started to spoil information about the event league with nineteen new ascendancies. It is going to be called the Legacy of Phrecia Event and this morning they shared the Harbinger ascendancy for Witch, and the Gambler ascendancy for Duelist. Sir Gog has also released a video doing a bit of a deep dive into these two ascendancies. Given how wildly different these are going to be… it makes me think this is probably going to be a void league aka a league where the characters do not transfer into standard. They seem far less generalist, and more designed for each to be played in a very specific manner. For example how good the Harbinger ascendancy is… will rely heavily upon whether or not the Harbingers you summon are permanent minions… or if they are on similar cooldowns to the uniques that the abilities originally came from.
I’m 60 maps deep into the Atlas at this point and have knocked out most of the white and yellow options. At this point I need to start tempting fate and running corrupted red tier maps to keep expanding out my passives. The thing is I am not really pushing it nearly as hard as I would during a normal league start, because I have done this progression a few times for Settlers. I unlocked the full Atlas when the league launched and then did it again with the Necro Settlers event launched. I will likely finish up 115 of 115 in this league as well, just because it is a thing that ends up happening if you play often enough. With me doing Delve, I am hopefully going to encounter more map caches which will speed up the process.
So right now my plan is to do Lunar stuff until I get bored… and then drop back down into old comfortable Path of Exile grind mode.
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