Good Morning Folks! When I sat down yesterday to write my blog post, I fully expected to wind down Path of Exile II. I was just not having much fun, and everything felt more than a bit tedious. However yesterday I started having fun again, and as a result I am back with a vengeance. The endgame is still not amazing, and the speed at which you move through maps… also not super amazing. However the core problem that I had with my build is that my bear bro felt a little squishy. I was trying to go hard into Armor and quite honestly… Armor as a mechanic in Path of Exile II is still pure shit. Up until this point the answer to this problem was to go for Blue Health Bars… aka Energy Shield, and from what I understand that is still a perfectly viable option in spite of league after league of them attempting to nerf it. Armor however remains shit, because armor is only really useful against small hits. I did not want to go Energy Shield… so instead I fell back upon familiar ground and opted to try what fixes this problem in Path of Exile 1.
That’s right folks… I bought a pretty dress. Cloak of Flame is the core item that you end up building around as Righteous Fire Chieftain in Path of Exile 1 because it offsets a bunch of your physical damage to elemental damage, which 90% max res can handle nicely. Even with 75% resistances, damage shifting still makes a massive difference when it comes to whittling down those big hits into something reasonable. The Shaman ascendancy gives me 5% phys taken as each of the elemental resistances and the Cloak of Flame I picked up had 50% phys taken as fire for a total of 65% of my physical incoming damage shifted to some sort of element. Then on top of that I have a bunch of the opposite direction which allows my armor to apply to elemental damage. I doubt these double dip, but it does at least help with smaller elemental hits and allows me to mostly shrug those off. This setup massively improved the squish factor and now made mapping feel pretty chill. I still do not have capped Chaos resistance so I still have to dance around anything purple or green in my map, but I am no longer getting oneshot anywhere near as often as I once was.
So I have been roaming around the map and playing the game of seeking out corrupted nexus areas so I can keep getting more atlas passives. At this point I have completed at least the first tier of atlas passives in all of the league mechanics, and periodically take on the harder bosses for the guaranteed chance of getting a waystone upgrade. I am mostly running T4 maps at the moment, but as soon as I can get a few T5s I will be moving up. The waystone drop chance still feels abysmal, and they really need to do something to help give us better map sustain. It feels like I am getting more tablet drops than waystone drops, which I need far fewer of since they all now last 10 rounds. I did find two Moment of Zen near the start of the maps but I am going to hold onto these until I can get up into higher tier maps. I believe the uniques that drop out of these are influenced by the tier of waystone that you feed into them.
I am finally starting to generate some currency and saw my first two raw Divine Orb drops. I am pulling 2-3 Exalted orbs from each map and am fairly regularly seeing Chaos orbs. The loot does not feel overwhelmingly good or anything, and the Vaal Temple still sort of feels like crap, but there is a patch coming this evening I believe to address this. I did manage to pull some unique tablet called Unforseen Consequences that sold for 6 Divine Orbs, which was nice. I will be honest any time I encounter something that sells for that much, I just can’t bring myself to actually run it. The same goes for super rare scarabs in Path of Exile 1, I would rather have the currency than to use them, because my build is not optimized to get the maximum amount of outcome from such things. The way in which I play these games, will always mean I am funneling resources to the highest tier of players, and not actually consuming them myself. Probably the most expensive thing I have used are those Scarabs that were forcing a temple to drop every map and they were around 120 chaos per stack of 20, but I was generating more than enough currency in the Keepers league to fund those.
The real highlight of yesterday is that I found a copy of the Fury of the King Ashbark Talisman that fell within my available Divines. At the start of the league these were going for 25 Divines or more, but I snagged this one for 6 Divines. The only negative is that I still need two more levels before I can equip it. This will also require me to rework my tree a bit to get the most out of it, however I don’t really have much use for my stash of gold so this is also not a big deal. For those who are not in the know this is the Talisman that converts your bear form into a sort of Balrog looking thing. A few days ago Palsteron released a video about this unique. Essentially this will also end up with me dropping pounce from my build because the unique comes with Molten Crash which serves as a movement/attack ability. I am really looking forward to this swap up.
Basically solving the squish factor, made me start really enjoying the game again. Funny how that works. So I figure I will be with this until I push my map tiers up a bit, and start trying to take out some of the other bosses. I need to figure out which trial I want to focus on because I need to get my next two ascendancy points. I hate both Sekemas and Chaos… and desperately want this game to bring back the Labyrinth. However I feel like they will probably fuck it up somehow because there is way too much bullshit going on in this game in general. There are way too many “damage only on tuesdays” stuff going on as they are attempting to be clever. This game would be infinitely better if I was not required to push six buttons to make anything happen. All of that said… I am finding fun in what I am doing. For the most part I leap around the map and then do a big slam to cause packs to explode. This works great until I encounter a boss, but at that point I have to piano key my way through a bunch of abilities to set up a walking calamity which nukes it from orbit.
I wish Two Handed Warrior felt half as good as Bear does.
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