Good Morning Folks! Friday was the beginning of a new league in Path of Exile, and I spent most of the weekend grinding away at content. The biggest problem that I am having… is that I am enjoying the new Breach mechanic too much, and as such I went super slowly during the campaign. I only made it to Act 4 by the end of the first night, and it took me all of the day on Saturday to make it the rest of the way to maps. I was in my 70s during Act 8… so suffice to say that I was over farming the content. The only real benefit of pushing through the content quickly, is that you can make some early sales and also get some early deals on items that will eventually be far more expensive. I did manage to get enough early chaos to snag a pretty cheap immortal flesh that was well rolled, but other than that… everything was already inflated out of my price range by the time I hit maps.
Breach essentially exists in a few different forms. The main one works more or less like old school breach, except that once you kill enough encounters it will eventually stabilize spawning a new encounter in the center of the breach. These will either be Vruun the new mini-boss of the event, or several rare mobs. Quite frankly I find the multiple rares harder to defeat than the new boss because so long as you avoid his cyclone attack, he mostly just melts. The next version of the encounter is to defend Ailith, the new NPC for the event as she attempts to close the breach that has already managed to get a foothold in our reality. You essentially need to defend her against several waves of incoming attackers, and it is beneficial if you are careful when you burn your way through the breach walls to find her, because it is helpful to create chokepoints for the waves. The last version is the Breach Fortress, which puts you on an alternate map and makes you defend Ailith against 24 waves of spawns… with limited to no chokepoints to funnel the monsters. I’ve only managed to defeat one of these, and when you do… you have to rush back out through the maze and avoid walls that show up on your minimap in order to get out before the entire place collapses.
Breach itself, feels really rewarding, especially early in the league when you need pretty much everything. I am not exactly certain this is going to be the most juicy loot in the endgame, but it certainly feels good to just get a bunch of random stuff by closing one of these. Right now my favorite content is the unstable breaches, because I have enough damage to pretty reliably stabilize these each time so that I can farm the boss/rares that spawn once stabilized. More than anything though farming this content gives you Graftblood, which you can then use to spend on the Tree Tree mechanic as we referred to it Saturday during the podcast. I am not sure how this is going to shake out as I get deeper into progression, but I feel like the new version of Breach is going to continue to be beneficial. My only real complaint is that I wish I had some measure of control over which version of Breach I spawned. I greatly prefer collapsing breach and I feel like if we had tree support, we would be able to throw our thumb onto the scale as to which version we got.
I have not exactly figured out the “Tree Tree” yet, but it is really valuable while leveling to create five and six link chests. I got a relatively well rolled Six Link in Act 6 of the game, which allowed me to effectively power my way through the rest of the content with a fully fleshed out Righteous Fire. I am having a bit more trouble crafting items that are NOT chests… because it seems like I do not have enough control valves to craft the sort of items that I actually want. I have been trying to make a decent amulet, and it just does not feel like I really have enough control over it. What I am however producing is a lot of fractured amulet bases, which may at some point create something I could use to craft the ultimate amulet I am after. I have not been using the tree to print uniques or currency yet, because so far neither of those has produced anything good, and all of the foulborn uniques that I have seen are not really better than the baseline. I had hopes of a good Foulborn Cloak of Flames or Immortal Flesh, but none of the options seem to work well.
I am not generating much in the way of currency yet, so most of my gear is pretty crap. I did pick up a nice Immortal flesh and a decent Rise of the Phoenix, and then this is the six linked chest that I printed from the tree that is working very well. At this point I basically need everything… I need a good +fire levels amulet that I can anoint so I can start getting some endurance charges. I need decent boots and better rings, and to attempt to cobble together an elder helm. For the most part though at this very moment I am stable enough to keep pushing forward and I will fix all of these problems as I gather more resources and unlock more access to content. It always feels weird at the beginning of the league when you are poor and flying by the seat of your pants, but additionally I feel really strong for the crap state of everything. I am still running Purity of Elements which helps a lot, but at some point I will need to completely redo all of my gems to shift to the Purity of Fire version and then eventually drop the Phoenix shield for a +Life gain block shield.
The biggest part of this league are the grafts that you gain through doing breach and crafting them with the tree tree. Mine is specced to greatly favor Xoph grafts, and I am actively searching for better versions of Call the Pyre and Heart of Flame. Really the only truly important one of these is Call the Pyre which generates several fire tornadoes in front of me, which covers everything in Ash causing them to move slower and take more fire damage. This is a nice buff to both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap, and I can apply it easily through shield charge… which means that just charging around the map feels way more powerful than it used to. Heart of Flame on the other hand is essentially Molten Shell that you don’t have much control over. Any time I take damage, if it is off cool-down, it pops up a damage shield that will cause 80% of the incoming damage to go to the shield instead. I might start looking for an Hardening Uulgraft that gives Tender Embrace which causes me to regen life much faster when I hit low life, and also gain endurance charges.
I have picked up a well rolled Cloak of Flames, but essentially need either a shitload of fusings, an Omen of Connetions, or a Black Morrigan to link it. Getting it six socket with the right colors was relatively trivial given its low item requirements. Right now I have cleared 35 maps and when I hit 50 and get the alternate atlas tree I plan on speccing into Einhar and Ritual with that second tree to try and farm one of the items that quickly maxlinks an item. For the moment I am alternating between running maps and pushing delve so that I can eventually get down to a depth to start generating fossil crafting goods to sell. The tree tree is good at a few very specific things, but ultimately the bulk of crafting is still either going to need to rely on fossil crafting or recombination. Gambling and the Tree Tree are great at getting your build started, but once you need specificity you are back to the older crafting methods, unlike the Necropolis. Since you can no longer passively get recombinators, I have a feeling they will be in demand in the later weeks of the league.
All told I am having fun, but I don’t feel quite as driven as I have in past leagues. I am not sure if it is the simple fact that I no longer feel like I have to steal time to play. I have all of the time in the world since it is just me and the cats… and no one else to take care of. Gaming in general has become weird after the loss of my spouse. It was something I used to passionately do in bursts, because I knew someone was always about to pull me away from it. Now… I find myself taking breaks and walking away from it, just because I need to do so. I am having to make the pauses, because otherwise it just feels tedious. For example on Saturday I kept taking breaks to go work in the garage for a bit, which also led to the delay in getting to endgame. Figuring out how to do things… as just me… has been a bit of a weird trip.
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