Good Morning Friends! I am going to apologize ahead of time, but you are going to get another post completely full of Path of Exile nonsense. We are continuing my descent into madness… literally as I keep going deeper into Delve game mode systems. Last night I discovered Abyssal Cities and I am now on the lookout for as many of these as I can find. Since I missed the launch of the Delve league some four years ago, it floors me just how complete this game mode really is. While you do have to keep running maps periodically to build up a stockpile of Voltaxic Suphite to power your crawler friend and light the way, other than that you can pretty much get anything you could in almost any other game mode down in the darkness. I’ve gotten roughly a dozen Divine Vessels and a couple of dozen Offering to the Goddess that just drop randomly from stuff down in the depths rather than having to hope and pray you to see any of them above ground.
From what I understand there are three kinds of cities that can be found underground. The first is the Vaal ruins that I had been exploring previously and these supposedly start showing up somewhere around a depth of 30. I found my first Vaal city in the 70s, so your mileage may vary of course. Abyssal cities that I found last night and that are highlighted on my Subterranean Chart above in a yellowish outline start showing up in the low 100s. Primeval Ruins are the third kind that I have not seen yet, and those appear around 170 depth. Each City type can have a boss node, and I’ve yet to encounter any of those… and ultimately that is really what I have been searching for. I have a tunnel system around 70-80 depth that has produced five or six Vaal Cities, and last night I opted to dive down deeper and start expanding out around 100ish and almost immediately stumbled onto this first Abyssal City.
Because I got distracted by doing other things… I did not get nearly as much time underground. However, in my limited time, I managed to pull out all of those resonators sitting in my bank. Pending those resonators sell at least as quickly as my previous batches and for the same prices that is roughly 110 chaos worth of items that I pulled out, not counting a few nice pieces of gear that I am selling individually. I tend to price my items just high enough that I am not going to get instant sales which would interrupt the flow of my evening. Instead, I expect to throw items up cheaper when I am more in the mood to field trade requests. If someone wants to pay my inflated prices though, I am willing to stop what I am doing… waste a portal, and go make the trade. I will never be an auction house oligarch but I am making more than enough currency to keep fielding my nonsense plans.
Speaking of currency, I saw my first raw divine orb drop in the depths. This is only the second Divine Orb that I have seen in this league. I’ve seen an Exalted Orb or two in the dark below which keeps building onto my theory that almost anything can drop off node encounters. So far I’ve yet to see anything that is influenced by Elder, Eater, or Exarch so I am guessing that those items are probably limited to bossing or bossing adjacent activities. I have however seen a number of Synthesized and Fractured items below as well as more than a fair number of delve-specific explicit modifiers on items. I only know this because I continue to keep using Awakened POE Trade to price-check anything that looks like it might hold value, which tells me how good the rolls are on a given item and will call out league-specific mechanics.
I am absolutely certain that from this point forward… I want to go into Delve earlier than I did in this league. I am having a freaking ball with my time down there and getting enough currency to be able to fund upgrades to my builds. This is far from a high-yield currency strategy, but it seems reliable and also something that I already enjoy doing. The wide variety of items that I can see is honestly what keeps pushing me forward. I love seeing things that I have yet to see drop, and that happens way more often in Path of Exile than it does in a game like Diablo III. By midseason in D3 I have seen literally everything but Primal Ancient versions of things, and it all sort of blurs into this giant haze of orange text. Sure most of everything that drops is ignorable, but in every round, there is at least one thing that is worth hovering over to check the roll.
The last big thing that I did yesterday was spent some time respeccing my Atlas tree. I was already leaning into Delve a bit, but I removed “Wandering Path” and took all of the notable nodes associated with Niko as well. Basically, in Path of Exile the “trees” are comprised of small nodes often referred to as travel nodes, and big nodes which are referred to as “notables”. Wandering Path is a specific strategy for the Atlas tree which the effectiveness of all of your small travel nodes, but makes it so you get zero benefits from any of the notable nodes. This is great for when you are finishing your Atlas because every map you run will shower you with new maps to fuel your further exploration. However I am getting more than enough “map sustain” through Delve, and I no longer really need it from mapping as such I opted to focus on Strongboxes, Smuggler’s Caches, Ritual Altars, and Delve. I might whittle further into the atlas tree to try and pick back up Essences but for now, I am happy enough.
So essentially I am maining Righteous Fire and focused with it on progression in Delve. I have no clue what I am doing with Summon Raging Spirits in the least, or what I can really do to that build other than shift it to poison. I just am not sure if I care enough about it to fix the problems I am currently having with it. I am getting that old familiar itch of wanting to start something else to play with. I really want to see what the Seismic Trap life is all about, so I might be going down that path at some point soon. I am still periodically playing “BelginnersLuck” as I attempt to get Hillock to drop a unique and am to the point where if I am fast enough I can kill him before he can do the regeneration phase. I am so completely consumed with Path of Exile and all of its deep systems. I have no clue when I will climb back out of this chasm I have dug for myself, but for the moment I am happy.
The post The Abyss Stares Back appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Well, my friends, it is far from the morning, and I am finally doing my first proper blog post of the year. Technically, I could have just called this a loss because of the holiday, as this is the day I actually got off officially in lieu of New Year’s day. I guess I should start things off by wishing you all a Happy New Year. My morning was less than fun because I spent it dealing with technical difficulties in my main machine. I finally sorted it out and it was thoroughly dumb, but not before I uninstalled Steam… without remembering to back up all of my games that were on my C drive. This isn’t the end of the world because most of my games were actually on another drive, but it will require me to reinstall a few things. I went completely down the wrong path because the Xbox Game Pass app apparently mounts a bunch of virtual drives and I got super confused sifting through event viewer thinking it was a hard drive failure.
I am still deeply enthralled in Path of Exile and more specifically the Delve mechanic. In past leagues, I had spent a few minutes exploring the dark depths, but never really engaged with it fully. I knew enough that I liked it, but was largely focused on mapping as my key progression path. Instead, I poured my heart and soul this weekend into Delve and made pretty solid currency for me at least. More than enough to fund several key set pieces to improve problems with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. All told since diving into Delve I have produced somewhere in the neighborhood of five divines worth of currency. Granted I have also spent about two divines worth of that same currency righting the ship on my build as well as funding a few upgrades for one of my friends. Suffice it to say I am shocked at just how well it has worked, and I have a feeling in future leagues I will dig down into the ground well before this point if for no reason other than it seems to be a stable source of funds.
For those who have no clue what I am talking about, Delve was a league mechanic from roughly four years ago which involves exploring the depths under Wraeclast for fun and profit. Essentially the cycle involves running maps for Niko to collect Voltaxic Sulphite which you then use to power The Crawler which is essentially an automated tractor-like thing that plods along fixed courses stringing lighting along behind it. Each “camp” presents you with a series of monster spawns and gives you some sort of rewards like gear, divination cards, raw currency, and azurite that is used to upgrade how far you can delve safely and the radius of your light. The light is key because the monsters in the depths take no damage if they are not in some light source, and you eventually take significant damage yourself if you stay in the darkness too long.
Sometimes the rewards are significant, like this node that dropped a who slew of maps including one that was unique and a unique hybrid flask. Other times it might be a few dozen chromatic orbs, but the sheer volume of “bubble gum” currency is large enough that it is very likely you would never run out. Thanks to my adventures in the deep I have recolored several items for folks and even managed to six-link a few things. While it isn’t always going to be exalted orbs or divine orbs… you end up getting enough raw chaos to make the entire journey feel worthwhile. Where the real money that can be made however is selling the delve-specific items like resonators and fossils, though the later you really need to find someone wanting to purchase them in bulk.
Deep down veiled in darkness are a number of interesting things. The only ones that I have really found yet are Vaal Cities, and I have found I think five of them so far. Each node in a Vaal City involves opening up a chamber filled with corrupted monsters and a dozen or so chests full of loot. The above example is from my completing a single Vaal Chamber. All of the mechanics that can spawn in maps, seem to have nodes down in delve as well and I have taken down a number of Harbingers, Beyond spawns, and even some Breach and Abyss nodes. From what I understand as long as I keep expanding the network of tunnels it will keep spawning new nodes to explore off to either the right or left of the central column. In the second screenshot of this blog post, I did some cut/paste work and pieced together a ton of individual screenshots to show how far I have explored one side so far.
All of the currency that I am generating is allowing me to resolve some of the problems I had with my resists and survivability. At this point, I have upgraded most pieces of gear so my next target is likely to go find better quality versions of each unique that I am using. When I cobbled together the build in the first place I bought the cheapest versions of each that I could afford, and now that currency is a little freer and that Poison SRS is the flavor of the week taking some of the pressure of RF Juggernaut prices I might be able to pick up some deals. I had some moments with the build where I doubted if it was my jam, which is ultimately what led me to roll my own SRS-flavored build. Now that I have invested some more currency in the build I am enjoying myself again.
The real question I have though is if I am going to spend any more time investing in the SRS build that I currently have. There are some significant survival problems with my current build-out. My resists are not in a horrible state, so really I think the problem is that I either don’t have enough spell suppression/block or really need some more regeneration and armor. I could pivot my build into the Poison SRS variant, but that would involve a pretty significant investment at this point. I am just not sure if it is worth it considering that I would probably rather be spending currency on Righteous Fire. Summon Raging Spirits however is a much better bossing build, so if I could solve my mapping survival I could probably use it to catapult progress into finishing the major bosses. I guess I need to make a concerted effort to explore my POB and compare it to what I would need to change to pivot over into the Poison variation.
There are other games that I am interested in… but right now Path of Exile is tweaking all of the dopamine centers in my brain. I am going to stay with this ride until it eventually drops me off somewhere a spent husk of a human.
The post Digging Too Deep appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
My friend has this tradition where the day after Christmas is “Super Xmas” and it is a holiday devoted to self-care and doing the fun things that you can’t while you are rushing around to see family. Apparently large swaths of the world call this “Boxing Day”. I like Super Xmas better though and apparently, the world is heralding its arrival with a rainbow. Granted moments after hopping in my car it started raining so the rainbow could just be telling me that instead. We are defrosting and outside it is a balmy 34 degrees, which admittedly is much better than the 2 degrees that it was Christmas Eve. The gift I got for my parents requires us to be outside and mount some hardware so I am largely putting off a trip up to see them until it warms up a bit. I did talk to them yesterday, however.
The scary news from yesterday is that my cousin about ten years my junior had a stroke. He had just fixed breakfast for his family and talked to my mom, and then shortly after that, he was getting rushed to the hospital. We still don’t know a ton but they think it was a blood clot in his brain that caused it. I think they caught it in time though and he still has speech and movement and seems to mostly be okay. Again though he isn’t local so we are getting news in bits and pieces from his wife as she has time to update us. So if you’d keep our family in your thoughts, it would be lovely.
In gaming terms, I have largely stalled out on completing my atlas in Path of Exile. I am sitting at 112 or 115 maps and the three remaining maps are all unique. Basically, I have done all of the white, yellow, and red maps which are the easier ones to get, and now I need to fish Atlas missions from Kirac hoping that maybe just maybe one of the three maps that I need will show up. I am running out of the currency used to re-roll the missions he is offering however so I am not nearly as hopeful as I was about completing the atlas this league.
Normally I would just buy my way out of this problem but one map goes for around 30 chaos, another around 40 chaos, and another around 50 chaos. While I do have the 110 chaos… I don’t really want to spend it on maps and would far rather put that toward gear upgrades. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a great way to farm these maps individually, and the “favorite maps” system only works if you have actually run the map before and does not work at all for unique maps. In theory, I guess I could run the maps that are adjacent to the unique hoping that maybe just maybe I will see one drop. I am not even sure if that works because every time I have seen a unique drop I have been nowhere near where it is on the actual atlas.
For my Atlas, I am running what is known as a Wandering Path build. Essentially what it does is make it so that none of the notable nodes on the tree give you any benefits, but in doing so it doubles the effectiveness of all of the small nodes. The end result is you get a ton of maps dropping and oftentimes duplicating when they do drop. I’ve paired this with Essence and Harvest to limited results. In theory, I should be selling off my harvest currency in order to fund other things. I am not really doing much in the way of harvest crafting and am sitting on around 4000 red, 1000 yellow, and 2000 blue currency. Looking it up on POE.Ninja that is only around 100 chaos worth of currency though.
What I am spending most of my time doing lately however is running around on a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer. I am more or less following this guide, and I have to tell you this is a truly dumb build but in a good way. Mostly I was looking for something that was a little more easy mode when it came to the Sanctum, and this build is definitely that. I went from not being able to clear a single floor on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to making it all the way to the fourth floor on my second attempt as the SRS Necromancer. Essentially Raging Spirits are for lack of a better explanation, the Lost Souls from Doom and they run around randomly attacking baddies. They have an extremely short lifespan so you have to keep summoning them but they just straight up wreck anything in their path.
As of last night, I am entering Act 8 and trucking along happily. What is complete nonsense about this build is just how fast it decimates bosses. I had heard of SRS builds before now but had never tried them. Essentially I have this dumb desire to knock out the kill Dominus achievement in every class and have purposefully been looking for a Witch build to play. I have to be honest I was just not feeling the Toxic Rain Shadow character, so I have largely abandoned it for the time being. I might pick something else up at some point in the future for Shadow. I have no doubt that I could get through Dominus as Toxic Rain, but I liked the build better when I was using Caustic Arrow before swapping over to Rain fully. That is honestly the problem with builds that have you swap things up in flight, because often… I liked the gameplay of the earlier mechanics. This was me with my attempt at a Righteous Fire Inquisitor… I liked Wintertide Brand and didn’t want to give that up.
I honestly expected that I would have lost steam by now, but I keep trucking along happily in Path of Exile. I need to sort out a proper strategy for farming Divines because the prices of everything seem to be going through the roof right now. I have a bunch of things that have value but are just too painful to sell slowly one at a time. I need to venture forth into the discord communities because surely there is someone out there engaging in arbitrage buying a bunch of random currencies and then bundling them into packages that move more easily. I would happily sell someone a bunch of crap at a loss if it meant I got it all over within a single transaction. The finance side of Path of Exile is absolutely intriguing but also somewhat maddening at the same time. I engage with the Trade economy largely as a way of getting items that I want, but there are absolutely people out there who consider it to be the real game.
Anyways I will wrap up this morning’s post and wish you all a Happy Super Xmas or a good Boxing day if that is more your thing.
The post Atlas Progress Stalled appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Again I am leaning on a technicality here because I seem to be getting around considerably later each day than I did the last. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening running maps and attempting to complete chunks of my remaining atlas. At this point, I am 95 done out of 115 with 8 of those being unique maps that it is highly likely I will have to buy off the traders. I have 8 maps left that require me to run them in a corrupted state, which always yields unpredictable results. What yesterday and probably today have led to is me running maps in the vicinity of the ones that I am missing in hopes of getting the ones I still need to drop. I dinged 92 yesterday which puts me two levels higher than I have ever gotten in a league.
Every build has one or two things that can show that will absolutely brick the map. For me, the absolute “I cannot handle this” is “players cannot regenerate health”. My build is entirely about regenerating a ridiculous amount of health and as such, I just can’t mitigate a map where I can’t do that. That is really my primary line of defense, and as a result, I also had been avoiding “players have 60% less recovery rate”. However, I’ve tried this a few times now to great success, where I basically just don’t use Righteous Fire. That is the primary reason why this build needs so much regeneration is that I am constantly dealing a ton of damage to myself. The single target damage of Fire Trap however is apparently enough to successfully move around a map and kill things, and as a result, I can simply forgo the self-immolation and debuff with Frostblink while killing things albeit slower.
I’ve also been slowly chipping away at collecting kills for Maven, Eater of Worlds, and Searing Exarch as I have not completed any of those quest chains before. Yesterday I took out the Black Star and the Infinite Hunger, and I think I am ramping up to another series of boss fights. The hardest part about Infinite Hunger was finding the way out when I got digested because I was regenerating more than enough health to deal with the incoming damage, but the lack of a mini-map meant that I was completely lost in the process. I eventually fumbled my way to the exit and got the hell out of there. I did die once on Black Star just because something hit me for a truly overwhelming amount of damage… which probably means there was a mechanic I failed at noticing.
Other than that I am contemplating farming up enough Atlas respec currency in order to switch over to a Wandering Path build. This essentially makes it so that your notables aka the biggest nodes give you nothing, and you get double the benefit from all of the smaller passive nodes. This means you can stack a lot of map farming functionality and focus on one or two mechanics and then farm that. I actually do pretty damned well with Harvest this league and could always just sell the excess lifeforce directly. There are enough people trying to gamble for the big ticket items at 1500 lifeforce per pull that someone is always willing to buy the Vivid Crystalized Lifeforce. I personally like using the cheaper 75 skill to reroll some of my shittiest divination cards into something better. This is how I pulled the one I sold for 1.5 divines and the one I sold for .75 divines.
Other than that, I will leave you with this video of Tripod leaving her box this morning. It has been 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside and we’ve been concerned about the safety of our outdoor ferals. I’ve been putting food out to make sure they have something to munch on when they crawl out of wherever they have been hiding. I know when it gets too cold Tripod our three-legged calico that lives in the backyard will crawl down in an old rabbit burrow. Hopefully today it will warm up a bit and then, in theory, we are out of the woods. It likely means though that it will still be sketchy to travel on Christmas day so we might be giving our parents a raincheck once the weather improves significantly.
I hope you are all having a safe time and if you too are getting weather you are bundled up and safe. Here is a bonus picture of Gracie who has taken to sleeping under my monitors and then reaching out to swipe at me from time to time.
The post Obnoxiously Incandescent appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
