Good Morning Friends! I think I might be in the process of winding down my focus on Path of Exile and the Forbidden Sanctum league. Going into this league I had a few goals in front of me. Some of them have been accomplished and others I decided not to really worry with. This is not exactly a comprehensive list but here are essentially the things I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish this go-round.
Finish Atlas Objective passives for all 115 Maps
Get my 4 Void Stones
Complete Enough Challenges to Get a Totem
Level a Character to 100
Last night I finished my 19th Challenge of the league and unlocked my very first totem for the hideout. Admittedly it is a short and sad totem but it is my very first period. Last league, I unlocked enough challenges to get one full set of armor, and this go around I got two sets of armor appearances as well as the totem so I consider that progress. I finished the Atlas last league and did so faster this time around and set my sights on getting the four void stones that are required to make it so that every map that drop is Tier 16.
The first two void stones came extremely quickly and made me think that this was going to be a reasonable challenge. However the amount of time or currency that is required to get them… just doesn’t feel worth it to me on a personal level. I could go on the forbidden trove and buy a carry for the remaining two void stones, but that seems silly and since I don’t REALLY love chain running maps I am not sure what it would get me. The last goal that I had in my sights is getting my Juggernaut to level 100, which is still doable given that I get great enjoyment out of fucking around in Delve for hours. the problem is that XP gain vs XP loss is a massive struggle at that level and it takes days of grinding to gain a level, and literal seconds to lose all of that progress. While I think I am winding down my focus, it doesn’t mean I won’t keep playing so I am hoping that maybe I go ahead and knock this one out.
As far as Delve goes I am pretty comfortable at the 200-250ish level which seems a solid place to go city hunting. I should do a push-down to see how far I can sustain without increasing the risk greatly. I figure the lower I go the better the experience farming will get. There have been a few deaths that I have taken in delve that snuck up on me and overwhelmed my defenses, but they are few and far between. I moused over my Darkness Resistance and my raw score is currently sitting at 1050% with a similar Light Radius value. I’ve tried to keep those at roughly the same upgrade level as I moved further down. In theory, I could have been buying small resonators all this time with excess azurite because I have way more resists than I need for the level range that I have been exploring.
Every league it feels like I learn a ton of lessons. In this league more than anything I became significantly more adept at trading. Here is another stash tab snapshot, but on 1/12 I had 1695 raw chaos and 7 raw divines, and now I am sitting at 4916 raw chaos and 15 raw divines. I think the key thing that has changed is that I have gotten better at using the price-checking functionality of Awakened POE Trade but more than that I’ve gotten better at eyeballing value. I’ve started to develop a mental map of what makes something valuable to the state of the league as it stands. This sorta requires you to get a vague understanding of which builds are actively in the meta and what sorts of gear they want. For example, in this league Poison Summon Raging Spirits became a massive flavor of the week’s build, and almost overnight anything with poison and minion stats boomed.
Here are some general things that I look for:
Jewelry with at least three good resistance hits, specifically a solid chaos roll plus at least two other resists.
Good Corrupted Implicits on a good base with good stats. The prevalence of tainted currency makes minor crafting on corrupted items that I would have long ignored a much more feasible option.
Anything that has damage multipliers plus damage bonuses. This is really subjective but I’ve moved a lot of items in this category.
Unique Items with a good Corruption. This is a weird category because it is going to be hard to find comps, but still worth trying.
Ventor’s Gamble rings… legitimately can be sold at 5 Chaos a pop all day long because for whatever reason people seem to love gambling on these to vendor swap for the possibility of that one perfect ring with max positive hits to everything.
Then there are some things that I have started doing to improve otherwise disappointing items that I have.
Corrupt Every Rare Gem Period… If you have a fluid source of Vaal Orbs. In Delve you get a ton of these and way more than I could ever possibly use. I’ve seen so many gems go from being something I could get 5 Chaos out of to something I can get 50-100 Chaos just from a “yolo corrupt”.
Corrupt Amethyst Rings. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but Amethyst rings tend to be how people fix resists more than anything else and there is a chance that an otherwise shitty ring turns into something phenomenal, and again… it is worth the Vaal orb.
If you have an item that is middling… and does not have max sockets on it throw a few Jewelers Orbs at it until you hit max sockets. Jewelers orbs are extremely plentiful, and it is amazing what a difference it makes in moving an item with max sockets versus moving one that is going to require some crafting before use. Most players want ZERO engagement with the crafting system and you can profit from this.
As far as traders go I am a very very small fish in a very large pond. I am not dealing with mirrors worth of value (aka something like 84,000 Chaos with wild fluctuation in prices) but I feel like I am doing well enough to buy most anything I might want. I’ve also brokered items for various members of my guild that wanted zero engagement with the economy, but I’ve kept that stuff separate and excluded from Exilence when I have it crawl through my tabs and look for anything that I have missed. I feel like if I had the knowledge that I have now, I would be in a much better position at this point in the league than I was when I started. Essentially I started trading a bit too late, and there is a lot of value in bread-and-butter items early in the league. Even now over a month into the league, I am still getting a constant flow of 5-50 chaos trades.
I’ve also reached a point of maturity when it comes to builds in the game in general. I am okay with realizing that it is unrealistic that one build is ever going to feel great doing all of the content in the game. Over time I standardized on Righteous Fire Juggernaut as my main character to do things like Delve and Heist on, and Fire Variant Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer as my bossing and mapping character. The RF Jugg can map just fine but I put a heavy investment in Metamorph on my maps which means I can chew through those so much faster on the SRS Necro which is designed to take out boss characters. The state of my SRS Necro however is not exactly “Uber Boss” capable, which is why I stalled out on finishing unlocking my Atlas Void Stones. I could have pivoted into the Poison build, but decided that I just did not care enough to spend the currency required to do that.
As far as league mechanics go, I tried a number of different things this time around. I started off with a bit of a mess as far as Atlas passives but quickly coalesced into a “Wandering Path” design, which is a notable that doubles the effect of every small node on the tree, but makes it so that you do not gain any benefit from the medium-sized nodes. This was amazing for raw map generation which in turn helped me rapidly unlock the Atlas tree without needing to buy any maps or go fishing for Kirac missions too much. Ultimately I came down to buying 3 Unique Maps in the end, but that was well worth it to finish out the tree.
After that, I focused on Ritual Alters for a bit with Harvest as a secondary goal. This was fine but Ritual feels like it has been nerfed from my past experience because I did not get much in the way of big-ticket currency items. In Kalandra league I got several Divines through Ritual even without investing Atlas nodes in it, and I thought maybe if I did go hard into Ritual it would pay off. Harvest seemed like a good bet and it was “fine” but its money gains are really through bulk trading the three colors of crafting resources that you get from running it, and I decided early on that I had no interest in that.
My next strategy was to focus on lockboxes and essence farming, which again was fine… but never really had much luck with that and I was still very much trying to focus my attention on mapping as my primary game mode. It was only through happenstance that I really decided to dive as deeply into Delve as I did, and once I realized how much I enjoyed it… and how reliably profitable selling resonators was that I reshaped my tree to work around getting as much Sulfite as quickly as I could. I had noticed how good items could drop pretty reliably from Metamorph, and with my SRS Necro those encounters were extremely easy so I shifted around points to focus on Delve and Metamorph.
It was very very late in the league that I made a tiny bit of a twist to my strategy and included a bare minimum of Harbinger, dropping the last of the Essences that I had in my tree. My Atlas tree now guarantees at least one Harbinger per map and while that isn’t a ton, it has made a noticeable bump in the raw number of Annulment Orbs and Ancient Orbs that I end up getting as well as a not insignificant amount of Chaos Shards that eventually add up to my raw chaos total. The real chase item however is the Fracturing Shard, because these puppies sell for 50 Chaos each and move almost instantly. So sure it isn’t a dramatic amount of currency but because you are running several maps in order to fill back up your Sulfite, the Metamorph and Harbinger nodes sort of just passively add to your bottom line in a way that doesn’t really add that much complexity or time to the maps.
While I think I am starting to wind down, all of this has me looking forward to the next league start. I’ve learned so much more about the game as a whole this time around. I know significantly more about what makes a build viable and how to fix problems. I think going forward I am going to look for some sort of engine to fuel further explorations. The Righteous Fire Juggernaut served as an excellent stable character to farm resources for other more volatile characters. I guess I have fully committed to the concept of the Trade League and as a result, I am getting better at amassing a “warchest” that I can then use to buy my way out of frustrating situations.
Path of Exile is a very different game experience than any that I have played before, and it is the first time I have really willfully engaged in active trading. It sorta makes me reassess how I have interacted with trade in other games, and how in large part I have done it completely wrong. It isn’t that I think I will ever become an Auction House Baron… but in theory, if I can apply some of the things I have learned to other games I might at least not be broke all the time.
The post Winding Down Sanctum appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The Forbidden Sanctum league has apparently had the highest player retention of any league in the last three years. One of the things that concern me a bit is I am afraid that maybe Grinding Gear Games assumes this is because of the Sanctum mechanic itself. I hate Sanctum, but the “sandbox” state of the game to borrow a term from the Destiny community is the best it has been since I started reliably playing Path of Exile. Granted you have to have lucked into a successful build, but once you have… every bit of content feels good. I’m mostly spending my time doing Delve and Heist with enough mapping in between to fill up the Sulfite for another journey into the depths. I am pretty safely doing T16 maps on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and largely unkillable at this point in Delve or Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. You would think I would run out of enjoyment in the game, but for whatever reason, I am in this super zen place and enjoying myself greatly.
A good deal of my focus has been on trying to find Aul the Crystal King. This is a boss node shown above that appears in the Primeval Ruins biome within Delve. The encounter has a chance of dropping a really sought-after necklace that can roll with a mod that effectively gives you no mana reservation costs on one of the auras in the game. If you are lucky, this would allow you to add an additional aura… and with it a significant amount of power or survivability without the worry of trying to maintain your mana. While I would love to have a big beefy reservation for free, I mostly wanted to find Aul because I had not seen him yet. Over the weekend I found it, and in the previous screenshot, I am fighting the encounter, but all fights are largely unintelligible when you have a righteous fire aura around you..
I did not get the prized necklace, and the fight is just as tanky as I had heard… but I made it through and have now cleared all of the possible bosses encounters for Delve. I’ve also capped my sulfite capacity which stops at I believe 65,000. Essentially my jam right now is to fill up my sulfite as fast as I can and then spend the evening listening to an audiobook while chilling out in delve and farming up as many nodes as I can before running out of juice again. I’ve been farming Primordial Blocks maps in the faint hope of trying to get the hideout which seems to be an extremely rare spawn. If I need to buy maps, I’ve noticed that it isn’t an extremely sought-after map either. I like it because it has a good number of spawns, and at this point, I can pretty much do the boss fight in my sleep.
The other mechanic I am spending a lot of time engaging with is Metamorph, and most maps that I run on the Atlas end up having either a Rogue Metamorph or allowing me to collect parts and spawn Two Metamorphs at the end. This means that I am gathering up a significant number of body parts, that I let stack up and feed into the metamorph mechanic for tasty loot. It is not unusual at all that I end up walking away with several divines when I have collected enough bits to spawn several monsters. I’ve also put a lot of use into the various catalysts that allow me to add variant degrees of quality to my jewelry and belt slots.
I have no clue when Path of Exile will end up playing out for me, but for now, I am enjoying myself greatly still. I am sure you all are tired of reading about it, but as I have said before… the heart wants what the heart wants.
The post Aul the Crystal King appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Prepare for yet another post of me doing some stupid nonsense in Path of Exile. I figure at this point all that is left reading these daily posts are the truly diehard folks, and the actual Path of Exile enjoyers… or I guess those who potentially hate read these? I am an “MTX Enjoyer” and I find that looking cool in a game helps my enjoyment greatly. In this league, one of the supporter packs went all in on the fire theme, and since I was playing Righteous Fire on Juggernaut it seemed like something I definitely needed in my life. What was truly fortuitous was this season when you pick up Kirac’s Vault pass you end up with a bunch of random loot boxes. One of these produced the weird cosmic flaming wolf pet that you see beside me called that apparently came from the Twilight Mystery Box. The cosmic aspect is even more perfect given that I tend to run the celestial MTX for my Righteous Fire aura.
I get that all of this is a colossal waste of money, but they end up making me happy and have no real in-game benefits. There are two things that I really spend money on in games are the first are things that add quality of life benefits, like the various stash tabs in Path of Exile, or the endless crafting storage in Elder Scrolls Online. The second is cool outfits, and I am more than happy to spend some real-world monies to look cool. It isn’t even that I care about the “flexing” aspect of wearing something, because it gives me zero real-world cred to have swiped a credit card. It just makes me happy to have a character that I think looks slick. Transmogrification/Wardrobe systems are among the most important parts of an MMORPG and if you are designing a new one… please put in a system that allows for nigh-endless customization. Do not be FFXIV and artificially limit the number of items you can keep, and instead be like the various systems that give you credit when you pick up an item for its appearance. I wish Path of Exile did this, because there are actually a lot of cool items that drop in the game already.
Last night was a night for exploring Delve, looking for bosses, and listening to Skin Game by Jim Butcher. I’m now somewhere around chapter 30 in the novel and managed to spend my 55k Sulfite and find I think four Abyssal and Vaal cities in the process. In all of those nodes, I managed to fight another Vaal boss and another Abyssal Lich. While yesterday was apparently the day of raw Divine Orbs dropping, I did not have anywhere near that level of luck but I did pick up a few rare items that are going to enable some specific brands of nonsense. While delving I also sold a few high ticket items or at least high tickets for me in the 100s of Chaos range. Thankfully people seem to be pretty good-natured about waiting for you to finish whatever you are doing in order to make the sale. Generally speaking, if I am in the middle of something… the price point of the item that someone wants determines if it is worth my time to respond. If I am just starting a heist run, and you are pinging me about something in my 1 Chaos tab, then I am probably going to ignore it unless you ask nicely. I had someone who specifically needed an amulet and they were fine with waiting for me to finish the activity I was on.
Last night I got the rare piece of the Ultimatum Aspect to drop in delve. Essentially this is a way to access a league mechanic that I did not even know existed. Apparently back in April of 2021 during the 3.14 Ultimatum League, there was a build-your-own-boss-fight encounter called the Tower of Ordeals, that dropped a number of interesting Vaal items. A little-known feature of 3.19 Lake of Kalandra was apparently adding these back into the game through 4 items that drop in different modes of gameplay.
If combined in your inventory in a specific pattern, as shown above, they combine to create a custom map that grants access to the Trialmaster from Ultimatum with a number of random affixes determining what sorts of things happen during the fight. For example, Choking Miasma is a cloud that deals Chaos Damage Over Time, and it means in order to do the fight I am probably going to want to spec my Pantheon into Arakaali which gives me extra resistance to that. For now, I am close to dinging another level on the Juggernaut and as such, I am going to file this away until I am in that post-ding “safe period” to try dumb things.
Another cool thing that happened last night is that I got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop while doing delve. Sadly I have no screenshot of when it dropped because I was in the middle of a darkness-filled abyssal city and hurriedly shoveling loot into my inventory as the darkness timer ticked down. It was very shiny and rainbow-colored on the loot filter, so it will likely be extremely hard to miss. They seem to be going for around 2 Divine Orbs for one of these keys, if not considerably lower than that. There is someone who priced one at 20 Chaos but I think they are just trolling. I figured it was worth 2 Divines or the loss of that in order to have the experience of opening one. When placed in the map device it teleports you to a map featuring a loot box that can be opened once. Inside it is an item dictated by the players who purchased the extremely expensive Voidborn Supporter Pack for around $500.
Purchasing the pack allows players access to a hidden interface on the Grinding Gear Games website allowing them to choose any unique in the game, assign a foil color, and then write a message to players when they open the item. For example, I pulled Ngamahu’s Flame in the Verdant Foil color scheme, and when I opened the item this line of text scrolled across my chat box.
A weapon from olden times, when Cyclone moved in straight lines. Two birds in one with links undone. This axe may finally shine.
I’ve never used this weapon but I am extremely happy that I managed to pull an item with a “real” message. There are apparently a number of items thrown into the mix as clear trolls like “this could have been a headhunter” on one of the other heavy belts. I have to admit this almost makes me want to create a build around this weapon since for some sort of flame-based juggernaut melee build, it seems like it could be rather good. I guess there is a Fire Cyclone Chieftan build that currently exists that utilizes this weapon or at least it did as of 3.19. If I got another key to drop though, I would probably just sell it. I’ve had the experience and it was good enough for me.
I think I have decided that I am going to stop engaging with the Sanctum league mechanic. I do not enjoy it, and while I can often get pretty far with my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… I just sort of hate the way the mechanic works. Sure you can save an entire floor’s worth of progress while doing other things… but there just never seems to be a time when I actually want to sit down and engage with it. I like playing tanky characters and have no interest in dodging all of the mechanics, and as such I will never really grok the way this game mode wants to work. As much effort as GGG has devoted to it, I fully expect this to land in standard and be something that we are dealing with going forward. My hope is that they modify it so that it works well for other styles of play because right now if you are going to engage with it, you really want something that can clear entire screens at a time. My hope is you can eventually collect an entire run and then interact with Divinia in your hideout to embark upon the Sanctum experience.
I think a better version of this would be to merge the Lake of Kalandra mechanic with Sanctum and take away the whole resolve mechanic. Have it so that each map you run builds the layout of rooms in your sanctum, and then once you have finished laying out a floor you save it as a map and run that. I really enjoyed the tile placing mechanic of the Lake, and were it not for ArchNemesis that would have been an extremely fun mechanic. Sanctum only works for people who are not building tanks that benefit from things hitting them. For example on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, a large part of my defensive layer is from building six endurance stacks by getting hit. I just think between Sanctum and Lake there is one really great game mode that could be cobbled together. For the time being, however, I am mostly going to bail from engaging with the current league mechanic because there are so many older mechanics that I would rather spend my time doing.
I think more than anything, that the key to really enjoying Path of Exile long-term is deciding that it is okay that there are parts of the game you will never engage with. Each league mechanic is almost a game in itself, and I am more than happy picking and choosing the ones that I want to play. I don’t force myself into open-world PVP experiences, because I have learned that I don’t enjoy them. Similarly, I should be perfectly fine knowing that I don’t like Tower Defense games and as such, I should probably block Blight from my Atlas tree. Occasionally there is a game mode like Incursion that I did not like at first but have come to enjoy, and that is awesome as well. However, for me… this is the league of Heist and Delve and I am okay with that.
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Friends I spent more currency yesterday on a single item than I have ever spent on anything in the trade league. I’ve had this dumb side project of trying to “chance orb” my way into a Brass Dome given that it is the only unique for the Gladiator Plate base. However hundreds of scouring and chance orbs later, I decided to just buy the damned thing. It seemed to be the next obvious step in the evolution of my build and I found one with the highest maximum elemental resistance bump you could get and a decent armor bonus for 5.3 Divine Orbs. Granted this ate up almost all of my liquid Divines, other than the stash tab that is devoted to Thalen’s purchases… I was sitting on 7 total Divines with another 10 roughly sitting in raw Chaos Orbs. I had to do some Harvest Crafting to flip one of my items to Lightning Resistance in order to make up the gap lost from my rare chest but that was pretty straightforward.
The end result however is pretty staggering. I took a screenshot in-game of what my defenses screen looks like with six stacks of endurance. I have a little over 90,000 armor 89% fire, 87% cold, and 87% lightning resistances, and a life regeneration of a little over 2000 per second with my max life sitting around 4500. I took a bit of a raw life loss because of the removal of bonus life from Strength, but I think being effectively immune to extra crit damage makes up for that. When I “ding” 98 I should be able to pick up another life node that will more than make up for the loss, and I am slowly adding catalysts as they drop to give me bonus life as well. Sure I could have gotten an even more perfectly rolled version of this armor but it is still a big bump.
The game seems to have noticed that I was missing several Divines and over the course of the night I legitimately got all of them back as drops. From Metamorph, running maps to refill my sulfite, and from delve itself, I got back 5 raw Divines. This seems like one hell of a lucky streak to me, but I will absolutely take it. Weirdly I got two of the divines from Abyssal Cities in the same biome, which seems extremely lucky. I guess maybe I should start paying more attention to the biome bonuses because it makes me wonder if that area had some extreme rarity bonus applied to it. I also managed to knock out another Vaal boss which gave me one of the rings needed to craft a precursor. I need to sift through my rare stockpile to see if I have any more of these rings laying around.
I feel like last night I went through yet another trade league right of passage. Up until this point I had been surviving on the scarabs that I got dropped from running other content. The problem however is that it seems like I am just not getting sulfite scarabs. I decided to remedy this by just purchasing a large stack of them and picking up 100 Rusted Sulfite Scarabs for 90 Chaos. This should in theory keep me going on refilling my delve fuel for awhile. I had been trying to rely on proccing Niko missions, but that ultimately took forever if I was specifically wanting to go back down into the dark. This will at least give me a rapid way to fill back up to 55,000 Sulfite.
Now that I have significantly more defenses, I am starting to work my way a little lower in delve. I found these odd biomes with a single Abyssal City node, and there seems to be another one on the lower left side of the screen partially occluded. That is ultimately where I am trying to target because I am still seeking out an Aul the Crystal King node and I am thinking I must just need to be a bit deeper to get them to spawn more reliably. The boss nodes are a bit tiresome with Righteous Fire, largely because I just don’t dish out as much damage as they would need to make them happen quickly. I can survive everything without much issue, but it is the slow process of whittling down via Fire Trap that gets cumbersome.
Through all of the mapping to get Sulfite, I’ve been trying to focus on running Tier 14 or higher maps which have a chance of dropping Guardian maps. Over the course of the last few days, I’ve accumulated a decent stash of these and plan on running them through with my SRS Necromancer at some point soon. Like I said yesterday I legitimately thought I would be winding down this season by now, but I keep finding more goals that I want to work on. I am a few more achievements away from finishing my Tier 2 set of armor, and three away from getting my first totem. I think I am way more interested in those than in progressing my atlas any further. Bossing really does not hold much excitement for me personally and if given the choice I would almost always rather be farming league mechanics for loot.
There is a mechanical loop that I have fallen into that I greatly enjoy, and I feel a little sad because I know it is entirely because I chose wisely when deciding on a class to start Sanctum with. Had I chosen something jankier, I probably would have bounced when I finished my 115 maps to unlock the first step of the Atlas. This is what happened to me during Lake of Kalandra when I tried Storm Brand. It is making me wonder if I now just go Righteous Fire each league, because if nothing else it can make currency to fund an additional class as it did with my Fire SRS Necromancer, and partially leveled Seismic Saboteur and Toxic Rain Trickster. Needing to have multiple characters for multiple different game modes seems extremely cumbersome, but it might just be the best way to approach Path of Exile.
The post The Brass Dome appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
