Good Morning Folks. At this point I am several days into the Legacy of Phrecia event in Path of Exile. I decided to follow the path of Pohx and am playing Righteous Fire on the new Scion Scavenger. This effectively gives me Obliteration pops, Chaos Ignite, and a free Cloak of Flames that can then be stacked with a real cloak of flames to convert 80% of all physical damage taken as fire. Initially… this does not feel nearly as effective at killing as the Chieftain variant I usually play, nor does it feel as tanky yet. However I am still very much wearing scuffed gear. I hit maps half of the way through Saturday and have been juggling between map progression and Delve progression as best I can. I am definitely intrigued enough to want to see this build to its completion. You can see the current state of my build here as I dumped a POB this morning.
What I find most interesting about this event is how mapping feels with the Idol system replacing the Atlas Passive Tree. Essentially the early maps, namely the white and early yellow maps feel like they are way more juicy than they ever would be at this point. However they also feel deeply random, because most of the idols that you end up getting… are not really focused on a single league mechanic. I took the time to screenshot everything that I am currently using and it is a bit of a mess. I’ve specifically targeted at trying to get Niko on my maps so that I can gain Sulphite, but am also not really gaining any of the additional benefits from the passive nodes on the tree.
This is really starting to be felt as by 41 nodes into the Atlas of Worlds, I would start to have a coherent strategy going… that reinforces itself by buffing one specific league mechanic. I would probably have the buffs applied when I collect sulphite nodes, or have them spawn golems which increase my sulphite gain and give me additional density. Instead it is a struggle to get Niko consistently on my maps, and I am gaining almost no other benefits from him being there… and as such I have to run way more maps to fill up on Delve juice before going back down into the mines. Similarly when I get Jun… without the nodes supporting him the Betrayal mobs don’t drop veiled items nearly as often… and as such I am struggling to build out my crafting bench. It feels like running maps that are generically juiced with somewhat random abilities…. but not really being able to focus on anything.
I am not making a ton of currency yet, but have managed to gather enough to get most of the uniques I need for the build. I picked up a Cloak of Flames and five linked it, and hope to maybe pick up a second and begin working on trying to six link that one. I snagged an Immortal Flesh pretty early, but it is not what I would consider a well rolled one. At some point I want to replace it for one with similar life stats on it but the minimum negative elemental resistance. I am running a Rise of the Phoenix shield, but at some point I will drop this to go with a Shaper Shield as I transition into the life gain on block build variant. I just spent most of my available currency on a well rolled pair of Legacy of Fury boots, which help with the clear considerably. Probably the item that I need to upgrade the most is my Sceptre which is a complete trash item that I picked up off the ground and threw a few things on it. My goal once I get deep enough into delve is to start picking up Sceptre bases with the purpose of trying to craft something with the recombinator.
All told though it is quite a bit of fun, and it has been ages since I ran a build that uses Legacy of Fury. I have the blackstar mtx from several leagues ago that makes the pops turn pink, which goes nicely with the purple righteous fire aura mtx that I am running. I’ve crafted a couple of cluster jewels so that I have Fan the Flames giving me elemental proliferation and Flow of Life then the combo of Prismatic Heart/Widespread Destruction on a large cluster. I have another medium cluster that I am working on crafting and my hope is to get another Flow of Life and maybe Burning Bright but I would probably roll with anything halfway decent. At some point I want a +Fire% Light of Meaning and an Unnatural Instinct but that is way beyond my price range. Similarly I would love to add on an Oriath’s End for more pops but I am not sure I will be able to hit that price point. I wish Scavenger was going to Standard so I could attempt to build the penultimate version there at some point.
All told though I am having a heck of a lot of fun. This event is pretty great and honestly… I would not have minded if this were turned into a three month long league. The absence of the Atlas Tree is a bit of a pain, but I would honestly love to see these idols worked into the game in some form in the future. There are some nodes that I really like having… but are just too cumbersome to path over to for various Atlas strategies. I would love to see a much smaller version of the Idol inventory that maybe only lets you slot only a few idols. For example I always run the node that turns every strongbox into a corrupted rare, because I like the way it feels… and if I could simply equip an idol to give every build that… or endless delirium… I probably would.
Anyways. Have you been playing the Legacy of Phrecia event? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below, or of course respond to either Mastodon or Bluesky.
The post Better Early Maps appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We have the entire crew this week. We start off the show with Bel explaining to Kodra the weird faction war currently happening in the Path of Exile Reddit. Bel also talks about his experiences so far with the Legacy of Phrecia event. From there we talk a bit more about Avowed now that Tam has had a chance to play it. Kodra shares his experiences with Civilization VII talking about how wildly different of a Civ game it is. From there he also talks a bit about Pigment and his ambitions to speedrun it. Ash shares his thoughts about Dynasty Warriors Origins and Tam discusses a Steam recommendation find, Deliver At All Costs.
Hey Folks! The Legacy of Phrecia event is live in Path of Exile and yesterday I followed the Path of Pohx and rolled a Scion. I’ve only ever played one Scion in the entirety of all of my time playing this game, and it was only to unlock the handful of achievements that are associated with that class. The general idea behind rolling this as Scavenger which is the krangled version of Scion’s Ascendant is that it will give me access to 80% of physical damage taken as fire damage once I actually get my hands on a Cloak of Flames. Sadly because I was not super fast… I did not manage to snag one before they started to get expensive. In the first moments of the league they were going for 3 Chaos… which I now have, but the price has unfortunately gone up to around 20-30 Chaos for a non-corrupted version.
It’s been a pretty smooth run so far, and I’ve only taken a single death and that was before I was able to switch over to Righteous Fire. I just got completely swarmed in the cavern of rage and could not potion my way through it. Once I swapped to RF it was a cakewalk. I attempted to follow the whole Cobra Lash path that was suggested by Pohx but I think in future attempts I might just do with flame wall and rolling magma. I had a lot of weird early problems getting the right links, and for the first five areas I was struggling to find any wisdom scrolls at all to identify anything that might have been viable. I still don’t have the right links for anything, but I am rolling with it because I do at least have a 2 link Fire Trap and 4 link Righteous Fire.
The build has a somewhat annoying respec that I am going to have to deal with at some point. He suggested starting down the projectile path because of Cobra Lash and then swapping over to the resistance path for those first four nodes… which is fine but since Path of Exile does not have a “respec mode” you can’t just swap those points directly and will instead need to spend a total of 8 respec points to get those 4 swapped over. I should probably deal with that now rather than later so that the gold costs are not onerous. Overall the pathing is not terrible for this one and you get to the fire regeneration node about the same time you do as with the Marauder path.
Now we get to the point that I hated about Scion in general. The first labyrinth does not really get you anything. Instead you do not gain any new powers until you finish the second labyrinth. So I have ascended to Scavenger but the only thing I have to show for it is two passive points. I mean that is still a decent reward and I am fine with it… but it makes the entire process of leveling as Scion feel a little lackluster. Pohx suggests going for Bluderbore for the second lab and then later respeccing for Cloak of Flames once you get into maps. I am not sure if I will follow that path or not, because I am honestly hoping to be able to get a Cloak of Flames and four link it before we get to that point. Regardless of what I take for my second choice, I am absolutely taking Obliteration for chaos pops when I get to third lab, and then later picking up the bit that allows chaos to ignite as my fourth.
I did find a pretty reasonable weapon. It has an open suffix, so once I get access to the damage over time crafts I will probably slap that on it. Plus one to fire spells is not necessarily the major win that it once was, but it does help a bit since I just added burning damage support to both my fire trap and righteous fire links. I will drop this like a hot potato however if I manage to get any damage over time multi weapons to drop. I have been farming the kingsmarch shipments trying to get some decent gear, and I am hoping I end up getting a hat with the right links to expand Firetrap beyond two links. I basically need better items for almost every slot except my chest, and I am basically running minimum shipments hoping to get something good.
I have no clue what strategy I am going to end up leaning on for mapping… because that entirely depends upon which idols I get first. I do plan on dabbling in Delve so now that I am in Act 4 I will probably spend a bit of time getting the early unlocks set up there. My hope is that I can find delve idols soon enough, and I also really want endless delirium for farming cluster jewels. It is going to be wild playing with a mishmash of krangled atlas passives. They verified that you are going to be able to recombinate idols, which is likely going to be required to try and make any coherent mapping strategy. I will worry about that when I get there however.
For now I am just going to focus on leveling up and getting to maps. Did you end up rolling something for the Legacy of Phrecia event? What are you playing? Drop me a line below.
The post Starting Scavenger appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Today is the launch of the Legacy of Phrecia event in Path of Exile, and I will be participating this evening whenever I get a chance to log in. However this morning since I don’t have much gaming wise to talk about, I am going to share the current state of my world, which is effectively snowbound. On the 18th starting at roughly 9 am in the morning we started getting ice which then transitioned into snow, and effectively did not stop until the morning of the 19th. I do not for certain know how many inches that we ended up getting, but it was a very dry snow and as such blew everywhere forming some pretty significant snow drifts. My wife made a valiant attempt to keep the front porch clear… which would last for maybe 20 minutes before it was fully covered again. Side note… there is an over 2 foot drop off our porch and you can barely tell it in this photo.
When it gets cold like this, our immediate concern is the little tribe of feral cats that call our neighborhood home. We have a box in the front and a box in the back… and at least one of them took advantage of this momentary respite. We also have a large deck in the backyard that we have created some artificial breaks along the edge of so that they can get out of the wind. There is also a series of rabbit burrows under two bushes in the backyard, which is I think where at least one of them goes when it gets super cold. Basically we were super worried because for the 18th and the morning of the 19th we saw zero sign of feral activity. There was a brief blip on the camera where we saw one of them jump into the above box… and I have to admit I was scared to death I would find a body in there in the morning when it got down into the negatives.
The first to make her way out was Tripod, the three legged calico cat that calls our backyard home. We cannot get anywhere near her, but she was hungry enough that her fear went out the window as she approached me to get at the pile of food. She meowed at me to go back inside and I obliged so that she could eat in peace. We had swept a little clear spot so that we could feed, and the wind had died down yesterday so that we were not getting quite the amount of drifting. She came back and visited a few times eating most of the pile of food.
What she did not eat… went to the birds. It was not until I started putting food out for the ferals that I realized just how much the birds also love cat food. My wife gets annoyed at the influx of birbs, but I have zero problem feeding them as well. Our backyard is full of songbirds during the springtime as a result of our home being a regular unintentional feeding ground. Thankfully it looked like Tripod got most of the food, and the birbs just came down and vacuumed up what was left over. Birds do not care about food getting wet, so they serve the important role of cleaning up anything that the cats don’t want to eat. Negative side effect however… is we do have to clean bird droppings off our lawn chairs.
Shortly after Tripod made her appearance in the backyard, Greybie made his presence known in the front yard. Basically I am waiting for them to make an appearance before putting out food, and if today follows the pattern that yesterday did I will be feeding them around noonish when the sun comes out and is warm. Greybie spent most of the day lounging on the sisal rug and soaking up the rays, and I was surprised that I did not see the little black void cat that also frequents the front porch at the same time. We tried putting out on of the fleece warming pads that the indoor cats use… but he wanted none of it and started laying on the cold rock until we went back out and retrieved it. Mostly each time we went out he just wanted some pets, because while skittish… he is the one feral that we can actually touch. I doubt we could ever bring him inside though… because periodically he still runs like hell from us.
It was not until yesterday evening though that the void cat made her appearance known. She is so close to being friendly… she occasionally dive bombs my legs while I am feeding them but also runs if she notices me giving her attention. She will stand off the porch and meow at me which I take is her quietly asking me to go back inside so she can eat in peace. We saw all of our feral babies yesterday, so we know they all managed to find someplace warm enough to get through the cold night. Last night was colder, so once again I am sitting here fretting and worrying. So I hope they follow a similar pattern to what they did yesterday and we start seeing them around noon. I will be periodically checking the cameras so that I can pop out and give them some food whenever they make their presence known.
We did not really get any significant melt yesterday, but it is supposed to be nice and sunshiny today so at some point we need to go out and help the cars get cleared so that we can get out if we need to. I work remotely pretty much every day, but my wife has been remote most of this week as well. Technically we could probably go well over a month without leaving the house between the fridge, freezer, pantry, and chest freezer in the garage. So it is not like we are desperate for anything, and we did a minor bit of stocking up right before this hit. We were given plenty of warning and also given that the estimates were everything from 4 inches to 14 inches… we had no clue what it would end up looking like. For you northern climates… you have to understand we have zero infrastructure for this sort of thing as it maybe happens once every five years. I don’t even own a snow shovel, because I have never needed to regularly clear my driveway. Generally speaking any time we do get snow… within 24 hours most of it will be gone. This whole staying around zero for multiple days in a row thing is relatively rare.
By next week it is supposed to be back in the 60s and 70s… so Snowmageddon will be a fading memory. I am sure I will be sharing notes throughout the day as our Ferals come out and start moving around. Until I see them though I will still be worried that they made it through the night okay.
The post Snowmageddon and Ferals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
