Good Morning Folks! Necropolis is quite possibly the most enjoyable mapping league yet. Affliction offered outrageous juicing options, but what Necropolis offers is flexibility and the ability to easily tailor the content to fit your whims. This is in large part due to the fact that we have three different atlas trees at our disposal, but on top of that, we have the freedom to add a bunch of interesting scarabs that wildly change your map-to-map experience. More important than that, the scarabs have been plentiful allowing me to constantly shift what I want to focus on without needing to buy them from the market. That is not to say that if you want to chain run the same strategy over and over… you will probably need to buy scarabs in bulk like in past leagues, but if you are a bit more open to your mapping options you should be relatively self-sustaining.
For the last several leagues I have built some form of a Righteous Fire character for Delving and getting through the bosses and some form of a Bow-based character for pure mapping fun. Over the years I have played Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Lightning Arrow, and Vaal Lightning Arrow to various degrees of success. Last league I had landed on what I felt was the ultimate version of this in the form of a champion. In this league, I am elevating it a bit further by diving into the new transfigured gem Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. Essentially it deals all three elements worth of damage at the same time and then scales based on the number of unique ailments you have on a target. This means you only have to account for elemental reflect damage which can be taken care of with a Level 5 Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks Support gem.
Here is the POB if you want to follow along as I talk through gearing choices.
What makes this build so potent is that we are living in “interesting times”. Grave crafting has created this weird situation where so many mirror-tier perfect bows have been created, that anything that is slightly imperfect in any way… but still extremely good… is dirt cheap. This is a 1500 DPS bow with an additional arrow, triple tier 1 elemental damage, and attack speed and I gave I believe 9 Divine Orbs for it. I am pretty sure that I paid way more than that for a 1200 DPS bow that I was EXCEPTIONALLY proud of last league. I’ve had this bow for a few weeks now and when I was shopping yesterday for gear after trying to convince Ace that now was the time to give a mapper lighting arrow/elemental hit character a try… they were considerably cheaper. Weird things exist… like quadruple fractured items, which this bow is. I finished off the item by changing the quality to attack speed and corrupting it to 30% with a beast craft.
The other reason why this build is so potent is that I am getting to play around with Headhunter again. When I bought this belt it was I believe 8 Divines, but as of yesterday when I was shopping for a second that price had dropped to around 4 Divines. Note… I thought 50 Divines for a headhunter last league was a “bargain” that I could not pass up. If you have ever wanted to play a bow-build map-blaster that runs around with a stupid amount of headhunter buffs… this is your league. There is basically no reason to NOT run this belt on any build that is clearing rares quickly. Having played with a Mageblood and a Headhunter I have to say that the Headhunter mechanic is significantly more enjoyable. Mageblood is just sort of cheating at flasks, which can allow you to do some dumb things… but isn’t in itself interesting.
Another thing that is just stupidly cheap right now is the Defiance of Destiny amulet. I am legitimately using this just to add some additional layers of survival to my build while at the same time providing a bunch of elemental resistance on a single item. I am using the anoint Disciple of Slaughter so that I do not have to run Frenzy in a Manaforged Arrows setup. If you did want to go into Manaforged Arrows I would probably consider Frenzy of Onslaught which would then allow you to move some points around a bit because I am spending three points to get Graceful Assault instead of running a Silver Flask to guarantee reasonably close to permanent Onslaught. Ultimately these are decisions you reach after having played a build a bunch of times and wanting to tweak it slightly to do something specific.
One of my favorite things that I added to the build the last time I played it, was performing some pathing Jenga in order to use an Unnatural Instinct over by Avatar of the Hunt. I got the jewel that I am using as a drop, but generally speaking these are not terribly expensive and you gain a ton of value from that one socket. I mean sure I wish that Unnatural Instinct also gave you the notables, but I can live without Avatar of the Hunt. This is a late-game pathing thing, and while leveling I absolutely path into that notable and take it… then modify my pathing later to add in the jewel.
Another piece of tech that I am playing around with is the new Perandus Pact jewel that comes from Grave Crafting. Essentially you collect all of the corpses of the Perandus family and then can influence which jewel stat roll you get based on the other corpses you add with it. At the moment the Evasion version of this jewel is dirt cheap and adds 7% Evasion for every passive allocated in the large radius of where you place it. For me it is hitting 32 different nodes and giving me a grand total of +224% Increased Evasion… which essentially is giving me “Grace” without needing to sort out the reservation of that aura. There are a bunch of other viable options and if you didn’t care about the survival you could stack a specific elemental damage instead. I’m using the Fire Damage version on my Righteous Fire Chieftain to give me around +120% Increased Fire Damage.
The last thing that I added most recently, was to pick up another Jewel socket and put a Watcher’s Eye in it. In truth the only thing I really cared about here was trying to get permanent phasing while running haste. Cannot Be Blinded While Affected by Precision is solid and basically is a net win, but the reduced physical reflection from Determination is largely useless. Essentially I was looking for two things here… more life, more mana, and permanent haste giving me more ease of movement in mapping. I am not going to lie this is good enough that I have contemplated trying to figure out a way to mix in haste and a watcher’s eye into my RF Chieftain because it would be SUPER handy for Delving.
The character feels so good for mapping purposes and I cannot remember the last time I died. Not dying is a big thing for me, but your comfort levels might be completely different. If you wanted to play a less defensive version of this build that has significantly higher damage output, then I would look at the various folks running this Deadeye. They specifically favor the critical variant of the build whereas I am running Precise Technique and do not care about crit. It would be easy enough to transition over with a few gear swaps though if I were so inclined. My kink though is never the damage output I am doing, and more so that I am nigh immortal. So long as I can rip through maps comfortably I am happy with my damage output.
Anyways! I had not talked about this build that I have been running on the side and figured today I would do a deep dive and share some footage. I hope you all are doing well out there, and that you have a great and safe weekend. We have more danger weather rolling in, so I will likely be watching the skies.
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Good Morning Folks! Well… that was a rapid turnaround. Yesterday GGG released a post on their forums indicating what they were planning on doing to resolve the dissatisfaction with the Necropolis league mechanic. When a league has reportedly the largest drop-off in player numbers I am guessing Klaxxons start firing and the teams rush into action. We probably would have had action sooner had the league not launched over a holiday weekend. Anyway, it seems like every complaint about the league is being addressed in one form or another save for the most requested feature… aka the ability to just not do it. I think everything in the post is largely a positive step forward, but I still think players are going to want the ability to simply not engage with the mechanic in any form. The ability to itemize corpses immediately is a huge win however and even if I have to loot something to clear a loot pile… I can throw it right back on the ground easily.
I have continued to do some shifting of gear around and am now up to 88% max elemental resistance and have squeaked past the Chaos Resistance cap as well. I’ve also managed to bump my Armor up to 25k which is a bit lower than I would like it to be, but still a good place to be. Combine this with the fact that I am shifting 50% damage to fire, and will in theory soon be adding another 10% of that to chaos damage it should make me pretty freaking tanky. Now I am simply in the place where I need a bunch more levels. I am contemplating trying to get the ignite proliferation glove implicit and then shifting up my Berek’s Respite for something either with more survival or more damage potential. Truth be told I have zero of the desired eldritch implicits so that will come as I farm more content and get more eldritch currency.
I’ve made a bit more progress into my Atlas, but have largely been holding off on doing all of the red maps that I have been collecting. Kirac bumps up the difficulty of his missions when you start running higher-tier maps, and I was trying to use him to help me finish out the yellow maps. That said I have reached a point where I am just going to have to deal with it if I want to keep making forward momentum. When I hit 50 Atlas Passive points I unlocked my second passive tree, and it appears that the third unlocks when I hit 100 passives. I ran betrayal until I had farmed up most of the enchants that I wanted and have now shifted to a strategy with Niko, Scarabs, and Harvest. This morning I cobbled together a second tree with Einhar and Ritual since they both live on the same side of the tree. As I get more passives I will probably splash in Beyond to add more spawns.
Because of the changes to the Niko nodes, it feels like I am filling up on Sulphite so much faster than I normally would have because I need to run fewer maps to get all the missions completed. As a result, I have reached a point occasionally where I would rather be pushing maps than pushing depth, and the Einhar tree will be good for flipping over to when that happens. As far as Delve goes I have farmed out three Vaal cities and have my first Abyssal city in sight. I am still just slightly below the 100-depth mark because the abundance of cities has caused me to go lateral rather than vertical. I feel WAY tankier than I normally would at this point and have been surprised at how fast my RF Chieftain has come online this league. I guess it makes sense because having built this before, I knew going into it the way I needed to build it as compared to the RF Juggernaut.
Delve and Mapping combined have created a virtuous cycle as the cities usually have several map lootboxes in each. This one for example had three different map-themed boxes in the same area, and the thing I have learned over the years is that Delve does not respect your atlas progress. This means you can easily see maps in Delve that cannot drop based on the Atlas nodes that you have already cleared. The only negative of this however is that once you get your four voidstones… these maps will continue to drop at their face value rather than upgrading to T16. This is why I have so many red maps that I have been sitting on and trying not to run, as these loot boxes drop a mix of white, yellow, and red regularly.
The thing I was not expecting is just how prolific the scarab drops are in Delve. Essentially every single node usually drops at least one scarab. This one happened to drop three at once, which is an outlier but not outrageously uncommon. I feel like this is related to Scarabs being put on the general drop-anywhere loot pool instead of being tied to specific mechanics. All in all I think this is a really solid change and my scarab coffers are filling rather quickly. It is going to reach the point where I am almost always running some sort of additional content being added from scarabs. The only thing I wish is that we would get some sort of UI element that allows us to pick scarabs out of our bank from the map device itself. It becomes tedious picking out the scarabs you want to run and then going over to the map device to run them. When I was regularly farming the same content over and over I would just leave a stack of scarabs in the map device.
My big “project” at the moment is attempting to get a six-link Cloak of Flame. I bought a two-link that was really well rolled and then proceeded to get it up to six sockets and color those sockets for Righteous Fire. Now comes the tedious process of pouring every fusing that I get into the chest and praying. With my Niko mapping setup I noticed that I seemed to get Niko Scarabs dropping more often than others. I am hoping there is some hidden affinity and that by shifting over to an Einhar tree I might happen upon the Black Morrigan scarab and link the item that way. Similarly, my shift over to Ritual I hope may see me finding an Omen of Connections which would also be a faster method for linking it.
All in all for a league where I do not care one bit about the mechanic… I am having a shockingly good time. I am definitely looking forward to the changes that are likely to be coming in this week and will probably try and do a bit more crafting as a result. I am not sure it will benefit this character, but it might let me get some good gear for alts. I think my very first alt is going to be an attempt at creating Kitava’s Thirst DD Blaster because it looks hilarious. I made a Witch mule to get Rolling Magma at league start and I figured I would turn that character into that build. It may be a bit before I stray from the fold however because I still have a lot of things to unlock and some voidstones to get.
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