Good Morning Friends! Friday saw the launch of a brand league in Path of Exile and I finally landed on playing Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build. Mostly I think I wanted a fairly cozy and low-stress league start and Pohx is maybe one of the best guide builders in the community. Ash and I have talked a bit about this, but various guide makers have various risk margins that they are willing to live with. Velyna seems super chill as a human being, but she is willing to live with way more stress than I want in my life and as a result, I am not super likely to be following any more of her builds in the future. Ash commented that really what we are looking for… builds from people who are willing to take that build to Solo Self Found Hardcore… where they can’t realistically rely on the market for items and need sufficient survival to keep from dying to a random one-shot.
A few leagues ago I had attempted to go down the Righteous Fire path but ultimately stalled out because I loved the play style of Wintertide Brand. In the Inquisitor RF path, this is supposed to be just a jumping-off point, but I leaned into the gameplay so heavily that I never really made the conversion to RF and started going off in my own direction trying to make Wintertide a viable endgame build. In the last league, I took my love of brand gameplay and went down the Storm Brand path, and it was largely fine other than the fact that again I had to deviate to pack on survival. This time around however I committed early on mentally to following the path and trusting in Pohx and so far it has been awesome. I made the switch around level 40 to running Righteous Fire over Rolling Magma, and am now 63 and still trucking along happily.
This has been without a doubt my easiest league start so far, and I am not sure how much is chalked up to following Pohx’s guidance and how much is the fact that this is effectively my third league. The big thing I have noticed is that I’ve yet to die to any of the act bosses. Starting with Hillock I have one-shot every boss encounter so far and the only deaths I have taken… were due to some lag spikes on particularly nasty trash. Since so much of the build relies on health regeneration, you have to be deeply cautious around anything that might impair your regeneration rate. I can’t survive terribly long due to the damage I am dealing myself constantly from Righteous Fire so I have to make sure and disengage or potion to get through the rough spots.
As far as the Forbidden Sanctum league mechanic itself, I am not necessarily the biggest fan. It is a mechanic that greatly favors glass cannon builds because your health bar is not actually your health bar. You instead have this bar called “Resolve” that goes down every time you get hit by anything, and if you are not dodging literally everything you are failing. Ultimately the highest rewards are gained by letting the reward from each floor ride until the end of the map… but that also means you are at risk of losing everything. So my personal preference is to take the reward that effectively cashes out at the end of every floor. That way I at least got something for my time, and so long as I keep that perspective the experience is not too bad. It ends up just being a way to get some supplemental crafting currency which is usually worth my time.
As far as currency goes… this league seems to be way more generous than Lake of Kalandra was at the start. I am in act seven currently and have six raw chaos orbs and one exalted orb. That in theory should give me a good start toward buying some end-game gear at some point. I saw my first Chaos Orb drop in Act III, and my first Exalted Orb in Act V. I am hoping this trend continues and that I see a Divine Orb or maybe my first ever Mirror before too much longer. Normally speaking I have not seen much in the way of raw Chaos drops until maps. I’ve seen a number of the kooky loot types where a single mob will drop like six of an item so it really does feel like we have arrived at a happy place after the wild mood swings of Lake of Kalandra loot. Here is hoping they don’t screw anything up!
I am having a freaking blast… but so far my friend Ace is not. They tried another Minion build and it seems like maybe those are not quite back to normal. I hope either the build improves or they can figure out another build because it is going to suck not to be fucking around in the endgame without them. I want everyone to be happy and engaged in the league because it will make my long-term experience more enjoyable to see everyone having fun. It has been interesting to see how my opinion of different mechanics has shifted now that I have this wildly survivable killing machine. I hated Incursion previously and now… it is super easy and just a case of how fast can I move around the map and soak up more kills. I am looking forward to encountering my first Breach because that was also a mechanic that I loathed but I have a feeling it is now going to be my jam.
Are you playing Forbidden Sanctum in Path of Exile? How has your league start gone? What are your thoughts about the seasonal mechanic? Drop me a line below!
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Thalen
Tonight we start off with a bit of a correction from last week and I explain how I am no longer involved with Mstdn.games and why you maybe shouldn’t be either. We talk about Thalen’s trip to Japan and his adventures in Super Nintendo World among other things. From there we talk about a significant upgrade to Peglin and some of the quality of life improvements. Thalen talks about roaming around the Nuka World Tour in Fallout 76. We talk about The Game Trailer show aka The Game Awards and some of the things that caught our attention. It is a new Path of Exile league and we talk about our builds and the Forbidden Sanctum mechanic. Finally, Bel goes down a rabbit hole talking about folks who seem to only play Nintendo First Party titles.
Topics Discussed:
Friends, it is three days until the start of a new Path of Exile league, and I find myself doing what every Exile does… pouring over build guides and trying to figure out what path I am going to take for my league start. If you were not around a few months ago… Lake of Kalandra was the first league that a number of us poured our heart and soul into with a day-one start. This was maybe one of the worst leagues in modern history and struggled with currency drop and general survivability problems. While I actually enjoyed the Lake mechanic mechanically, it seemed needlessly brutal and random at times. As far as leagues go it has been shown to have had the worst player retention numbers of any league to date. I had contemplated just swearing off 3.20 but they seemingly know how to hit me straight in the feels.
The league mechanic this time around is The Forbidden Sanctum which is a rogue-lite that takes place within Wraeclast. It sounds like you will be earning currency each trip into the dungeon that can be used to gain buffs for subsequent trips slowly building out a talent tree of a sort. I like rogue-lites quite a bit and have spent plenty of time playing games like Rogue Legacy and Hades. Putting that inside of the ARPG-style gameplay that I am already addicted to… may prove to be my ultimate lure. However, until the trailer dropped I had not even been really contemplating this league which puts me weeks behind in the planning process. So this morning I am going to talk through some of the builds I am contemplating starting with.
Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut
Pohx is hands down the best guide maker I have ever seen in the Path of Exile community. He has his entire website wiki devoted to just giving you information to support his already amazing Path of Building guides. The big change this time around is that Inquisitor either took some direct nerfs or got caught up in other nerfs and is maybe going to not be the optimal way to play Righteous Fire. As a result, Pohx seems to be pouring most of his effort into a Juggernaut build and I am largely on board with this. The pros are a comfortable leveling experience with clear direction on what I should be doing which maybe be the sort of low-stress chill start I need.
One of my all-time favorite playstyles in Diablo III is the Whirlwind Barbarian and its “spin to win” mechanics. The closest thing to really doing this in Path of Exile is Blade Vortex and this guide seems to be extremely detailed. The only problem with it is it involves math… and optimizing blade uptime because really you need to be able to maintain 10 blades at all times to pour through content. Other than that the build and guide seem pretty straightforward forward and it also seems like it would be easy to get gear for it even at the high end. All I really want is something that can complete red maps easily to farm for currency and this seems to be able to do that in spades. I have never played a Witch in any form so this is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone.
Zizaran’s Explosive Arrow Champion
Explosive Arrow Champion is back and Zizaran is once again suggesting this as a league starter. The positives are that I have already played this build before and understand the fundamentals. The negatives are that Zizaran for being as good of a YouTuber as he is… actually sorta writes shitty POBs. He takes for granted that players that are reading his content are going to just understand various concepts, and while I have been around Path of Exile semi-seriously for three leagues now… there are still a lot of core concepts that I do not fully grasp. It will be an uphill battle to sort out what he is saying versus what he is actually meaning. However Grace played this last go-round, and I have played it the time before… so I do have some knowledge that I can draw on.
Velyna’s Spectra Shield Throw Raider
This build looks like a hoot, flat out. I love bouncing shields and it looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. However Velyna seems like a super nice person, but trying to follow one of her guides is sort of awful. I played her Stormbrand last go-round and had all sorts of survival problems that I ultimately had to venture way off the path to fix. Watching this guide video, it sounds like so much of this build hinges upon a super specific shaper base helmet craft… and I am just not sure if I want to go through that nonsense. The stormbrand build eventually ended up being extremely fun to play, but it required me to spend a heck of a lot of currency to get there. So I am deeply gunshy about following Velyna into the breach again.
Ghazzy’s Dark Pact Necromancer
Going completely off the rails I am also sort of considering the Dark Pact Necromancer. Ghazzy really cares about minion builds and is one of the better guide makers for that specific style of play. I have never played a minion build in Path of Exile other than having a random Golem up just to provide a buff. Minions took a massive hit last league and the more traditional builds seem to be not as functional as they once were. This build however focuses on basically using your minions as a bomb to spread Dark Pact which drains minion health but causes chaos damage explosions. It sounds like it might be a fun playstyle but again this is going way out of my comfort zone since I have never played a witch in any form before.
Basically, I have three days to sort out what exactly I want to go for. I think all of the above would probably be a strong league start or at least be viable enough to get through a few labs and into early maps. Probably the top contenders for me at the moment are good ole Righteous Fire or the spin to win Blade Vortex build. I would 100% go Blade Vortex for certain, but I also know I suck ass at trying to maintain the uptime of something on a specific cast pattern. I know when I was splitting steel, I would always find myself out of shards because I was forgetting to make them. Fortunately, it sounds like this doesn’t actually damage my survival and is more than it would harm my clear ability… which is fine. I am okay taking a slower map clear if I screw up rather than taking random deaths.
Are you going to be venturing into The Forbidden Sanctum? If so what build are you looking at running? For those curious about the minutiae, you can check out the current patch notes here.
The post Forbidden Sanctum Builds appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! This weekend I spent some time exploring the ARPG called Undecember. I was completely unaware of this game until the launch of Diablo Immortal, and shortly after that point, the folks behind this title started doing some sponsored videos. However similar to Diablo Immortal, discussion of the game also came with a discussion of its cash shop and pay-to-win elements. After going through what we went through with Diablo Immortal and being so egregiously monetized… I decided that I would just give this game a hard pass.
I had largely put it entirely out of my mind when this weekend on a whim I decided to go through steam recommendations. One of the things I greatly appreciate about the Steam interface is the recommendations by friends section because in truth… I care way more about the opinion of my friends than I do any gaming pundit. So I noticed that Teufelaffe had left a review and honestly… it was enough to spark my curiosity and get me to install the game. His stance largely aligns with mine… that I don’t care if there is a way to shortcut the process by spending money so long as it isn’t required to do so. That was the problem I had with Diablo Immortal is that you could not get a fully geared-out character without spending literally tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This created a hard wall that blocked my progression where I could not function in Hell 2 because I lacked the “gear score” to make it viable because the game was actively debuffing me for not having spent enough money.
As Teufelaffe said in his review, the game really does feel like a blending of the best parts of Diablo III and some of the better parts of Path of Exile. It is a game where you have no classes and that you get to create your own character and choose their appearance. Then the spell gems that you equip and attribute points that you spend, determine what sorts of builds you can do. I opted to go for a largely Dexterity-based character, trying to replicate something like the Diablo III demon hunter so I am wearing leather armor, spending most of my points in Dex, and using ranged bow abilities. The hardest thing to get used to is the fact that you do not have full control over all of your keybinds… left click is your movement key and there seems to be no way to change that. However, if you hold down your left click you can steer with your mouse cursor which is functionally what I do with putting “force move” on W in the games that will support it. It took some getting used to but now feels comfortable enough.
Instead of relying on getting gear with specific sockets on it, in order to make your build like Path of Exile you have a hex grid that you lay gems on. Each gem has six sides and each side can have one of three colors on it or be completely empty without any colors. Essentially you can use these special helper gems to link other abilities or buff specific things about it. For example, my main attack right now is a spread shot and I have it linked to cast the ability Chain Lightning on hit. That means I fire off this spread of arrows and the first time it makes contact with any enemy, that triggers a lightning bolt to course and spread through surrounding enemies. Spread Shot also has a green gem that increases the number of projectiles… and I am sharing that with another ability called Flame Shot. Essentially it becomes this puzzle game of trying to figure out how best to place your gems in order to make sure you are getting the maximum benefit.
One thing of note is that Undecember is also a mobile game, and is available on Android and iOS and with it… comes a number of very mobile mechanics. Every time you do anything in the game, you are going to see a dozen teal arrows light up on your interface drawing your attention to various systems. This means spending a lot of time clicking through various menus in order to get various “rewards” that are largely meaningless at the moment because I am not entirely certain what anything does yet. The same is true with the cash shop in general. There are things that the game would like me to buy there, but all of it largely seems like nonsense. The only thing that I did notice is that it would cost you about $40 to buy a full cosmetic skin because skins are broken up into 4 chunks: armor, helm, mainhand, offhand… and each of those costs around $10 in cash shop currency.
For those who have played Path of Exile, the crafting system will be very familiar. In fact, there are a number of items that you will simply recognize as their Path of Exile equivalents… like I got my first Chaos Orb and Exalted Orb the other day and the icons feel similar enough. You can do some basic crafting through the enchant system at the blacksmith, or more hardcore crafting recipes at the alchemy table… aka the crafting bench. One thing that takes a bit to get used to is the fact that you have to manually level your gems by feeding them magic shards. That means at some point in the future you will be grinding random stuff trying to get magic shard drops so that you can catch your gems up. Right now I have not really struggled but at 30… I am starting to notice that I simply don’t have enough magical dust to level everything up at the same time.
All told I have been enjoying myself quite a bit and if you also were looking for a happy midpoint between Diablo III and Path of Exile you might check it out. I will let you know as I progress through the game if I hit any hard paywalls. That will be the point at which I check out, because while I am not afraid of spending money on a game… I don’t want it to be a requirement to progress. We tried some of the groupings over the weekend and unfortunately, there is no level-scaling, so you can drag someone along like you can in Diablo III but if you want grouping to be meaningful… you will have to stay within the level range of your friends. I am hoping that when I reach the endgame the content will be fun for grouping because right now the normal leveling content isn’t terribly exciting with other players.
So now to finish up with a bit of housekeeping. Last Friday I posted a note as a bit of a teaser stating that I was involved in the rollout of a gaming-focused Mastodon Instance. It rolled out on Sunday but I regret to inform you that I am no longer involved with it, nor can I suggest that anyone migrate to it. My yesterday was honestly pretty awful and it involved a sequence of events that led to me getting ejected from the planning discord, moderator status, and ultimately losing my account on the server. Granted I am being told that my account and the account of Scopique were not deleted… but they disappeared in sequence with me being shut out of the project so I drew what felt like obvious conclusions because neither account exists anymore. It was a bad situation but I am not going to go into details publicly, suffice it to say I am withdrawing my support in any capacity from the project. If you do migrate be cautious I guess that is all I would say.
I hope you all have a great day and a phenomenal week… and I am hoping my mental health improves because yesterday was a massive blow to it.
The post Exploring Undecember appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
