Morning Folks! Yesterday I wrapped up my third character of “Bel League” and this is ultimately the one I originally planned as my “first alt”. Essentially, I wanted a low-pressure map blaster that I knew I could make work on minimal or easily obtained gear. Essentially the idea is to go Champion for survival and Lightning Arrow for ease of getting off the ground. I am more or less following the template of Belgladius, with some items that I used in the original Raider version of the build that was my Ancestor league starter. Primarily the build uses Shadows and Dust for rampage and unholy might as well as some additional Mana Leech, and Perseverance to turn my permanent fortify stacks into permanent Onslaught as well as a bit of Attack Damage since I am stacking both Armor and Evasion. In this specific build I am throwing in a Poised Prism because it is just a generically good quiver with some resists on it and The Taming which similarly fixes some resists and offers up a bit of elemental damage.
The biggest challenge that I find myself in currently is getting enough levels to finish out my tree and I am one level away from 78 which will allow me to actually equip the belt. I also need to sort out my Pantheon and at a minimum get the freeze immunity. One of the huge benefits of a character like this is that it slides into maps extremely easily. I’ve been grinding tier 5 maps to get some levels and am about to transition up into yellow maps. By the time I am in my 90s I should be ripping through Red maps without much issue and hopefully running red/blue altars for drops. Between now and then I really need to find myself a new bow because while I found a lucky six link along the way 566 dps will not cut it for long. Realistically I need something more in the range of 800-900 to really rip through the t16 maps.
I also probably need to find some better gear, because right now after raiding my vault… I am in an “aggressively fine” state. When I ding 78 I will be able to equip Perseverance, and then with a little harvest crafting, I should be able to balance out my resistances. This will still leave me far in the red as far as Chaos goes, but pending I am careful with map modifiers that should not really impact me heavily even in red maps. I would really like to see my armor and resistances a little bit higher, somewhere in the range of 20k so I will need to be on the lookout for good replacements to slot in. If I find two amazing rings, I might be able to keep the resists while also pouring on some chaos. My amulet is also pretty crappy but I am mostly using it to get some attributes I need to equip other items. If you are curious here is a POB I dumped this morning with the current state of my gear.
None of this really matters though because this is what it looks like to play this build… admittedly with a MTX that makes the Lightning Arrow a bit more vibrant. The biggest challenge is how much I need that Mana Leech because there will be times when I run out of mana while mapping and have to wait for the Leech to catch up. In theory, I should have -7 mana on my Amulet and Rings to make this build feel a bit more stable. It works well enough while you are rolling but definitely suffers from the “never stop killing” problem because when there are lulls in the density I start to bottom out my reserves. While I enjoy Boneshatter quite a bit and it feels good to map on it… this is really the gameplay I want when I just want to delete a bunch of surplus maps for goodies. I need to finish out the fourth lab at some point today, but I don’t figure I will have any issues with it.
So with Lightning Arrow coming online, I am very likely to fall into the old familiar pattern of zipping through maps quickly to gain sulphite and then spending that sulphite while delving on the Boneshatter Juggernaut. For the past several leagues I have preferred to have some sort of fast mapper character and then a delve character and alternate back and forth between the two. I am hoping to get my Lightning Arrow character at least to around 95. I am doubting that I will make the pivot into magic find like I did last league, but If I just happen into a couple of extremely well-rolled Ventor rings and a very well-rolled Goldwyrm I might alter those plans. I mostly hope to be able to juice the maps through the league mechanic and see what all I can get doing that and maybe blending in some delirium.
Anyways! I am off to get ready and go do some shopping. I hope you are all having a great week as we slide forward towards Christmas. I am technically “off” now but I had to pop in and deal with some work this morning. I am looking forward to the long break and finishing my fiftieth book of the year and hopefully having a bit of a much needed mental reset.
The post Zappy Zap Zap appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
If you have followed me over the last few days, you have watched me playing around with one of the new transfigured abilities called Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. My idea behind the build was to go with Chieftain which gives me easy access to lots of resistances as well as Hinekora, Death’s Fury for big explosions, and Tawhoa, Forest’s Strength for what is essentially a form of melee-based spell echo. Instead of leaning into scaling a bunch of physical damage, the idea was to convert all of my physical fire damage and instead scale that, chance to ignite and ignite damage with proliferation. The hope was that I could run around with a mace and shield, which would give me extra defenses, and then paint the room in firey eruptions. Leveling through the campaign this felt excellent and after crafting a few clusters it seemed to solve my problem with single-target damage.
However when I swapped over from the campaign to tier 1 unmodified maps… I had some significant damage problems. Ash urged me to grab one of my spare boneshatter axes and throw it on the character, which meant swapping around a ton of points that I had put into shield defenses and attack damage while holding a shield. This however killed my defenses and meant that I saw the “rip” screen quite a bit more. So I am living in this middle ground between having enough defenses and having enough offensive power to make up for not having said defenses. I am only level 74, and I know that levels could help solve this problem… but I am not really sure it is worth the uphill battle and the constant flow of regrets to try and salvage this character. The only positive is that I didn’t really go out of my way to acquire gear for the character and most everything I am wearing is stuff I had lying around in my bank already.
On top of the ascendancy benefits, I went chieftain because I thought starting on the left-hand side of the screen near all of the fire and physical damage buffs would help me. The problem is… it is sort of hard to scale both physical and fire damage while also adding enough defensive layers to make the whole mess viable. Then there is the problem with the ability Volcanic Fissure of Snaking itself… because using it with a two-hander means that it is almost comically slow. So that adds a whole other thing into the mix, that I would in theory need to blend in a bunch of attack speed to try and make the mess feel a bit better. There are other ascendancies that might be better served for this sort of build, but I fear that they would have to rely on clusters even more than I currently am. I keep thinking that Physical to Fire Melee Ignite is more viable than it might be currently.
Ultimately I wanted to play around with one of the new abilities and I had a lot of fun with it… until I didn’t. I think there is a build here, but I feel like I am maybe not capable of building it. At a minimum, I think this might be one of those things that is a bit harder to build without easy access to some specific uniques that would make the one-handed version viable. Again I am annoyed at the restrictions of SSF, but I might shelve this until I finally do migrate out of the private league. I think I am going to low-key start trying to farm things that I know I can turn into currency when the transfer to trade takes place. It will be very hard coming from behind over a month into the league and trying to gather up the currency needed to finish my builds. I feel so hamstrung by not having access to trade that while I have enjoyed the communal nature of the league… I am not sure how up for this I will be in the future. Maybe as a short-term 10-day league, but never one that goes on this long.
I think I figured out yesterday what it is that I like so much about trade leagues in Path of Exile. In a game like Diablo III, loot is so plentiful and there are truthfully a very limited number of possibilities that it is a foregone conclusion that you will see a given item. Enough time put in and it will absolutely with certainly drop, and often in even an ancient legendary version and maybe if you are super lucky a primal. Path of Exile however has a much wider loot pool and it is absolutely possible that you can spend an entire league grinding away and never actually see something… for example, we’ve yet to see a Profane Proxy for Kodra but in past leagues, I was chucking these into Loreweave recipes because we had spares. Trade League allows me to convert the things I am getting, or even the things I enjoy farming the most… into the items that I am now seeing drop. Everything that I do feels like I am working towards some deterministic goal and I like that a lot.
This is a similar problem I am having in Last Epoch, I have run countless helmet nodes in the Monolith and still have no Herald of the Scurry to show for it. I also have a slew of Necromancer drops that I have never seen and have no real deterministic way of farming them. It makes me question my thoughts about the trade league going into that game, and whether or not I would feel happier playing with access to buy items from other players. Path of Exile and the trade league I think have skewed my feelings about this in ways that I did not expect. I just get frustrated with the inefficiency of waiting around for a specific thing to drop, rather than just converting other items into currency and buying exactly the item you wanted instead.
I didn’t expect to be so vehemently turned into a “trade league enjoyer” but I guess that has happened. I am not sure what I want to do at this point. I might take a bit of a break from Path of Exile and go back to Baldur’s Gate III and try and wrap that up before the end of the year.
The post Sometimes its Bricked appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So I am nearing the end of the campaign on BelGoesFireSnake my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain, and I am of mixed opinions. It is amazing to see the entire screen erupting into fire and it brings me immense joy to see a screen covered in magma like the above screenshot. The problem is that it comes with the fairly extreme price of most of your attacks not actually hitting your target. So when you are trying to fight a boss… it feels really bad against anything with sufficient heft. So for clearing entire screens… this build has you covered and does it in a very fun way but anything that is even the slightest bit tanky will feel like you are dealing negative damage.
Right now this is suffering from some of the same problems that I had with my Shield Crush Chieftain from last league. Avatar of Fire may not be worth it. Between it and the fire mastery I am converting 90% of my physical damage to Fire… at the cost of dealing ONLY fire damage. This is why I have leaned heavily into Ignite damage and elemental proliferation… which I just took out of my main five-link because I was able to craft a Fan the Flames cluster. I think I might have to go more heavily into cluster jewels just to pick up enough damage nodes on the end of the tree where I am sitting. My large cluster has Prismatic Heart and Widespread Destruction which help to scale up the Fire Damage further. I’ve also got another easy-to-reach large cluster that I could expand further, but it always feels like you are brute forcing your will upon the tree when you start using a bunch of clusters.
If I can make this stay as tanky as it currently feels… this honestly might be a fun build-down in Delve. The Volcanic Fissures do a great job of finding mobs so you could just be throwing them out while you go down the tunnel mopping up the easy stuff. In theory, I need to find myself a high-level base for a Mace and then try and craft as much physical damage on it. For the moment I am using Lavianga’s Wisdom mostly because it adds a big chunk of increased physical damage. The build that started me down this path was doing Strength stacking and using a Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler which we have not seen yet in Bel League, but I have enough strength to make that a reasonable option. Another potential is Nycta’s Lantern but I am not sure if I have ever actually seen one of those drop. While it is super cheap in trade… I am not sure I can actually find one in SSF.
I have a feeling that this character is ultimately going to be a dead-end learning experience. I think more than anything I need to spend some time down in Delve and pick up some crafting bases to get the rest of my gear fleshed out. If you are curious this is where I am build-wise.
The post Great Clear Bad Bosses appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I think I have reached the point with my Boneshatter Juggernaut where I have gotten it about as far as I can without access to the trade economy. My crafting knowledge is good enough to make a character function in a pseudo-ssf environment but not good enough to start fine-tuning my gear. At this point, I really miss being in the trade league because it would probably be straightforward to fix the awkward bits of this build and make it excel like I think it should. After spending two divines and all of my rare crafting materials yesterday trying to make a better chest piece off a defensively enchanted drop from a heist that Kodra got… I think I am done trying to craft anything complicated because I just can’t cope when those crafts ultimately fail. Mostly it just feels like I am throwing away resources that would be better spent just buying the thing I ultimately want.
Conceptually I like the idea of a private league, but I think maybe the default length of one is set to 10 days for a good reason. Now is about the time when I would prefer for the characters to just merge into the normal trade league, and we still have another 30 days left in our private league. It was a really fun way to start the league, and for the most part, I think all of us have been able to get characters “functional” but maybe not “great” as of yet. What I am seeking for gear would just be much easier to get on trade league… for example last night I spent 2 Divines, 1 Exalt, 1 Annul, and 1 Orb of Conflict attempting to craft something that I could buy for 40 Chaos. The same has been true with the copious amounts of crafting materials I have poured into trying to get a halfway decent axe… that still pales in comparison to the most basic thing I could pick up on trade for a single divine. I’ve just reached the point where I would personally be better served in the trade league.
I’ve made it fairly far on my own and am sitting at 105 of 115 maps, with the remaining ones that I need all unique. This is I think another thorn that is jabbing me right now, is because this is the point where I would just buy the maps that I am missing instead of fishing for them through Kirac. Sure Putrid Cloister is always going to be an expensive map, but it is driving me insane that I have not finished my 115 yet. I feel so far behind the curve as compared to where I would normally be at this point. Part of it is that I lost my comfy Righteous Fire playstyle, and another part of it realizing how much of the currency I was acquiring came from trades and not from raw drops. I also did not realize how much focus and purpose I derived from knowing that I was building towards being able to buy whatever thing I needed for my build. Grinding for the purpose of grinding feels hollow without those “stretch goals” that I was working towards.
So instead… I’ve begun creating alts. One of the abilities that amuses me greatly is Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. Essentially it erupts three times and has some basic seeking logic that will cause the fissures to seek out targets nearby when possible. Over the weekend I started a new Marauder with the intent of going toward Chieftain for the easy resistances and Hinekora explosions. I am sort of going towards something like this, which was a character I found on POE.Ninja seemed to be doing what I was trying to do. Essentially the idea will be to focus on Mace/Sceptre and then do whatever I can to scale up the fire damage from the fissures. I was able to switch over to the transfigured gem before the end of Act 1, and now that I am in Act 2 have have access to Shockwave it really is starting to feel great.
The other alt that I have been playing with is good ole tried and true Lightning Arrow Champion. Now I played this towards the end of the last league and had a lot of fun with it. It can get by without much in the way of gear save for a handful of uniques… that I have thankfully already acquired. I’m at the tail end of Act 4 and would probably be further if I did not get distracted yesterday with starting the Lava Snake character. It is a comfy playstyle and a fun way to churn through maps, though honestly… I gotta say I am more enamored with the chieftain currently. I like the idea of trying out something that I have not played before, especially since I can only really get characters so far without better knowledge of the crafting system. I think maybe the SSF gameplay style is just not for me. While I have enjoyed dumping stuff in the bank and seeing other people use it, I feel like I am stuck in a bit of a rut currently without the ability to get upgrades.
All in all, I am still having quite a bit of fun, and I don’t mean this morning’s post to sound like I am super frustrated. I am still finding joy in what I am doing, but I’ve come to know myself a bit more I guess. I know that I miss the trade economy more than I thought I would. It really has been the factor that has kept me engaged with Path of Exile for as long as I have each league. Losing access to it and losing access to my preferred character and playstyle… has been more of an emotional hit than had hoped. Alting is a comfy space for me, so I think I am going to focus on it for a bit. I am really curious to see what this Volcanic Fissure of Snaking character feels like once I get higher levels and gear. I think it might even be a fun character down in Delve if I can get the survival high enough.
The post Lava Snake Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
