Good Morning Folks. We are a little less than five days into the 3.28 Mirage League in Path of Exile, and I am having a hard time gauging my progress. I had a medical procedure on Friday that caused me to get a very late start on getting through the early campaign. Then that same night, we had a Tornado pass within a mile of my house, and sirens woke me up at 3:30 in the morning, making Saturday a bit of a mess. Then Sunday was, of course, the bi-annual mass hallucination that is Daylight Savings Time… meaning Sunday and Monday were also fucked. I still feel relatively out of it with my brain struggling more this year to adapt to the change than I think I can remember in any other year. I guess on one hand, I am glad that I decided to roll with another Righteous Fire Chieftain because I can do that progression in my sleep, and am already at a pretty stable point. Now, essentially everything is just tweaking and perfecting the build since I am sitting at level 87 and can probably do red maps without much issue.
I made one of my slowest times through the campaign, I think I have ever experienced, in large part because the campaign itself was way more enjoyable. One of the things about the Wish mechanic is that they force way more additional content onto your map, so that there is usually an Essence or Strongbox at minimum caught up in the Wish area, so it can be duplicated. There is a meta achievement for doing 30 Essences, and I got this done around Act 6 for reference as to how much bonus content was being added to the campaign maps. This also produced a stupid amount of gear, which meant that I was never really struggling to find anything to equip. I think this might have made ground loot more viable as well, but it is hard to tell. I do know without a doubt that I am getting way more currency than I have ever seen at any other point during the campaign. I was picking up chancing bases left and right because I was swimming in Orbs of Chance, but sadly I did not actually convert anything useful into a unique.
The bulk of my gear is stuff that I either picked up or crafted. I made the gloves with the Breach tree, and am working on an upgraded pair of boots. The sceptre and current boots are ones that I picked up off the ground, I believe from a wish area, and the helm is a cheap elder influenced base that I picked up for a few chaos and then threw Essence of Horrors at until I got something usable. I would have preferred to get Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but unfortunately, I did not hit that and am rolling with what I have for the time being. I am watching out for an ArchDemon Crown from Ritual, which is probably going to be my next target upgrade hat. At some point, I need to deal with my total lack of Chaos Resistance, but I will probably be devoting that to my ring slots. Maybe I should start heisting in an attempt to get a Helical ring base.
I’ve bought three items from the market: the Elder helm base from above, a reasonably well-rolled Immortal Flesh, and a Cloak of Flames. Unfortunately, right now I only have a four-link, and I need to upgrade to a six-link pretty soon. Unfortunately, Black Morrigans are over 2 Divines currently and last I checked, there were zero Omen of Connections on the market. So that likely means I will either be brute forcing a six-link, saving up 1500 fusings, or buying a corrupted six-socket and trying my hand at tainted fusings. There is one that I almost bought yesterday that had six white sockets, but I instead bought Essence of Horror to make the helm. Moving up to a proper six-link for both my helm and body would greatly improve my general clear speed, but the changes of Hinekora have honestly alleviated that stress a bit. Explosions are way more reliable, and it is rare that I do not get at least one explosion in a pack of mobs. I know this will fall off a bit as I enter red maps, but for the moment, it seems viable.
That is one thing that I am uncertain of… how I feel about the new Atlas. In theory, it is a better system because it will easily allow you to swap between maps without much fuss. However, in practice, it does not feel anywhere near as exciting since Maps are not a generic consumable resource and are not tied to specific content. Sure, once you hit t16s and had completed your Atlas previously, maps stopped being loot and became a pure commodity. However, in early progression, it was exciting to see a new drop for a map that you had yet to run. That little dopamine hit is gone because everything is effectively the same now, and instead, you are trying to force your Atlas tree to keep upgrading map tiers instead of trying to get connecting maps to drop. Similarly to the whole Path of Exile II atlas not feeling exciting… there is something missing with this new design. I know that once I finish out my Atlas progress, I will probably enjoy it more, but while leveling it feels worse.
Similarly, I feel like I am locked into a specific Atlas Tree layout because I need to keep producing higher tiers of maps. I am only now starting to add some flavor to my Atlas, and as a result, the first 30 or so points felt like they were required. Now I am optimizing the layout a bit and splashing in Niko, and will eventually start splashing in Breach, and maybe Harvest. When I get my second tree, I will be diving hard into Einhar in an attempt to get a Black Morrigan spawn and probably pairing that with Beyond and maybe Ritual to attempt to brute force an Omen of Connections. Progression is so much faster than before, because I was doing Yellow maps really quickly… but then felt like I needed to fill out all of the points that I had missed along the way. The positive, however, is that I am going to have plenty of low-level maps to dump into the bank for folks who are slower than me in progression, since they are all now generic commodities.
I have pretty good defenses for the level of gear that I currently have. At some point, I will shift to going block-based, but right now, all of the shaper shield bases that I could craft on are stupidly expensive. The cheapest ones, pure armor bases that I have found, are 50-100 chaos. I could limp by with an evasion shield if I were absolutely desperate, but I am just not sure I am willing to make that level of compromise. It is not like I have the Harvest or Delve crafting resources yet to really finish out the shield anyway. I am in that awkward phase of being strong enough, but not really having any of the core pieces that I need to push to the next level. I thought I would also post the currency that I have found so far as a reference. The big difference that I have noticed is that I have seen so many Exalted Orbs, because at this point, I might have seen one normally and have had nine drop. More important than that is that I seem to be swimming in Chaos and Alchemy orbs, which have allowed me to craft pretty much the entire way from Act 1 to plug holes in my gearing. Being able to freely craft really has made ground loot start to matter more than it ever has before.
Really, I am just in a state where I need more time devoted to the game in order to push through this awkward phase. I am slowly starting to build out Delve, but I need to invest so much more azurite into upgrades before it starts to feel comfortable. I also need to just churn through more maps so that I can get more Atlas points… which will make mapping feel more rewarding. I am really looking forward to getting my second tree, which I might be able to hit tonight, because I believe that happens normally around 50 points. I’ve unlocked Maven witness and Exarch altars, and should unlock Eater before too much longer. I’ve also been told that I largely want to focus on completing the lower left quadrant and then work my way around clockwise, with the lower right being the hardest area. Essentially, the lower left is Eater/Exarch, the upper left is Zana, the upper right is Elder/Shaper, and the lower right is Maven.
Are you playing the Mirage league? What are your thoughts so far about the Atlas changes and the Mirage mechanic? Drop me a line below.
The post A Rough Start for Mirage appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. As of this afternoon we will have had access to the Legacy of Phrecia event for a week. At this point I am level 94 and have mostly reached a point of stability with my build. Sure I would like to craft a new sceptre and am on the look out for a few specific jewels, but all in all Scavenger RF works pretty well. However I am not going to talk about any of that this morning, and am instead going to share my thoughts about the new Idol Based Atlas system. This entire event was touted as ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, and this idol concept was originally something that was abandoned in favor of the current Atlas tree system… which admittedly is damned near perfection. The first few days I was pretty hype for the idols, but now I have reached a point where I absolutely see the limitations and understand why this did not see the light of day.
The good about this system though, is that early maps feel amazing. You get a large number of Idols which allows you to cobble together something that mostly works. During White and Yellow progression I was essentially getting Delirium, Harvest, Niko, Essences, and Strongboxes every map… and Ritual, Expedition, and Betrayal pretty freaking often. This is way more content than you would normally have access to during early maps when you don’t really have that many Atlas points to spend. This makes the early game feel amazing… but you eventually reach a point where it starts to taper off.
By the time you are in yellow or red maps, you have quite a few points to spend on the tree which means that you have pretty much every node available for at least one league mechanic, making that single mechanic extremely juicy. In truth I tend to build trees that synergize with different abilities that are all on the same side of the tree. For example I might have a Ritual, Einhar, and Beyond tree as they all exist within a few nodes of each other so that by the time you near the end of your Atlas you have 100% chance for all of those mechanics and have a bunch of nodes that buff them so that they produce better stuff. I tend to be an “Alch and Go Andy” when it comes to mapping strategies, and I juice to extreme levels with the most expensive scarabs and most carefully rolled maps. I drop a map in the atlas, hit go, and then run with whatever content the device gives me.
For the heaviest juicers however… the Idol system is probably much better. For example Life Without Pants is a YouTuber that I enjoy watching content from, and he talks a bit about his strategy that centers around Harbingers. Essentially through the use of the Idols he can force something like six harbingers on a single map, always convert them to harbinger bosses, cause them to drop whole currency instead of shards, and then cause their cool down to be much shorter so you can complete each individual harbinger encounter much faster. Similarly Fubgun is running a strategy where he forces 36 Rogue Exiles onto his map and then uses Scarabs to juice that up considerably so that he can produce Affliction league levels of drops when you combine that with Ritual.
The problem that I have with the Idol system however is that it essentially forces you to go “all in” on a single strategy. Either you can cobble together something like I am running where it ups the chances of a bunch of different league mechanics to spawn, or you carefully craft a single mechanic and then juice it to levels that have never been possible before. The existing Atlas Tree lets you do a handful of of complementary mechanics really well, and I think makes the entire experience feel a bit better as a result. As someone who cannot bring themselves to skip mechanics when they appear on the map… it feels bad to do a bunch of mechanics with zero investment in them. Nodes that I thought might be good on their own like Crop Rotation, actually feel awful when you don’t have the rest of the points in the tree to buff it.
I think part of what makes the Idol system feel extremely bad is the fact that you are almost required to deal with massive amounts of very small specific trades in order to get an individual strategy working. Everything I am running I have cobbled together from the dregs of my bank. If you were wanting to run a hyper specific strategy though, you would need to trade for a bunch of specific rolls on idols… and then deal with the frustration of not getting answers from most of the traders because 1 Chaos trades are not worth stopping mapping for. If you want to bump things up to the next level, you are also probably going to be spending time deleting idols through the recombinator as you try and get a single item with four usable stats on it. This is graveyard crafting levels of tedium… which is again why I am mostly just yoloing my way through the system and trying to make something that feels halfway decent. This is yet another league that proves Path of Exile needs a fucking auction house already.
As glad as I am that the Idol system was left on the cutting room floor and we have our beloved Atlas tree instead… I have to admit that given the choice I would take this immediately over the systems in Path of Exile II. Everything about the Atlas tree in that game is awful, and it is entirely too focused on bossing. Bossing is just a subset of the Path of Exile 1 endgame, and most people… are not really focusing on it. Idols would go a long way towards patching the problems with that game’s system and forcing specific mechanics onto every map instead of the poorly designed precursor tablet system. Conceptually I like the exploration system because I enjoy it in Delve, but it just does not really work as a replacement for mapping. Part of the payoff of leveling and fully unlocking your atlas tree… is the agency to focus on only the mechanics that you want to focus on. You never really reach any of that payoff or any of that agency in Path of Exile II… which feels like the team missed that core tenet of the first game.
Phrecia has been a really interesting experimental league, and it was announced today that it is being extended by a month. I really like chaos pop righteous fire, and I would absolutely play something like this again in the future. Which admittedly makes me wonder what it would be like to play one of the witch based righteous fire builds at some point in the future. I do think that a lot of the ideas behind the Idol system in this league event could benefit Path of Exile II. Right now the endgame does not really work and feels way too far removed from the near perfect loop of game play that exists within Path of Exile’s endgame. All of POE’s problems center around on-boarding the player and gear acquisition for non-traders and non-crafters but the virtuous loop of the endgame was not something that should have been abandoned. Path of Exile II feels a lot like Destiny 2 did at launch… where it feels like they forgot all of the lessons that the previous game had learned. I am onboard for trying out quirky ideas in event leagues until they figure out how to make Path of Exile II feel a bit better though.
The post The Idol Based Atlas appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. As of this afternoon we will have had access to the Legacy of Phrecia event for a week. At this point I am level 94 and have mostly reached a point of stability with my build. Sure I would like to craft a new sceptre and am on the look out for a few specific jewels, but all in all Scavenger RF works pretty well. However I am not going to talk about any of that this morning, and am instead going to share my thoughts about the new Idol Based Atlas system. This entire event was touted as ideas that were left on the cutting room floor, and this idol concept was originally something that was abandoned in favor of the current Atlas tree system… which admittedly is damned near perfection. The first few days I was pretty hype for the idols, but now I have reached a point where I absolutely see the limitations and understand why this did not see the light of day.
The good about this system though, is that early maps feel amazing. You get a large number of Idols which allows you to cobble together something that mostly works. During White and Yellow progression I was essentially getting Delirium, Harvest, Niko, Essences, and Strongboxes every map… and Ritual, Expedition, and Betrayal pretty freaking often. This is way more content than you would normally have access to during early maps when you don’t really have that many Atlas points to spend. This makes the early game feel amazing… but you eventually reach a point where it starts to taper off.
By the time you are in yellow or red maps, you have quite a few points to spend on the tree which means that you have pretty much every node available for at least one league mechanic, making that single mechanic extremely juicy. In truth I tend to build trees that synergize with different abilities that are all on the same side of the tree. For example I might have a Ritual, Einhar, and Beyond tree as they all exist within a few nodes of each other so that by the time you near the end of your Atlas you have 100% chance for all of those mechanics and have a bunch of nodes that buff them so that they produce better stuff. I tend to be an “Alch and Go Andy” when it comes to mapping strategies, and I juice to extreme levels with the most expensive scarabs and most carefully rolled maps. I drop a map in the atlas, hit go, and then run with whatever content the device gives me.
For the heaviest juicers however… the Idol system is probably much better. For example Life Without Pants is a YouTuber that I enjoy watching content from, and he talks a bit about his strategy that centers around Harbingers. Essentially through the use of the Idols he can force something like six harbingers on a single map, always convert them to harbinger bosses, cause them to drop whole currency instead of shards, and then cause their cool down to be much shorter so you can complete each individual harbinger encounter much faster. Similarly Fubgun is running a strategy where he forces 36 Rogue Exiles onto his map and then uses Scarabs to juice that up considerably so that he can produce Affliction league levels of drops when you combine that with Ritual.
The problem that I have with the Idol system however is that it essentially forces you to go “all in” on a single strategy. Either you can cobble together something like I am running where it ups the chances of a bunch of different league mechanics to spawn, or you carefully craft a single mechanic and then juice it to levels that have never been possible before. The existing Atlas Tree lets you do a handful of of complementary mechanics really well, and I think makes the entire experience feel a bit better as a result. As someone who cannot bring themselves to skip mechanics when they appear on the map… it feels bad to do a bunch of mechanics with zero investment in them. Nodes that I thought might be good on their own like Crop Rotation, actually feel awful when you don’t have the rest of the points in the tree to buff it.
I think part of what makes the Idol system feel extremely bad is the fact that you are almost required to deal with massive amounts of very small specific trades in order to get an individual strategy working. Everything I am running I have cobbled together from the dregs of my bank. If you were wanting to run a hyper specific strategy though, you would need to trade for a bunch of specific rolls on idols… and then deal with the frustration of not getting answers from most of the traders because 1 Chaos trades are not worth stopping mapping for. If you want to bump things up to the next level, you are also probably going to be spending time deleting idols through the recombinator as you try and get a single item with four usable stats on it. This is graveyard crafting levels of tedium… which is again why I am mostly just yoloing my way through the system and trying to make something that feels halfway decent. This is yet another league that proves Path of Exile needs a fucking auction house already.
As glad as I am that the Idol system was left on the cutting room floor and we have our beloved Atlas tree instead… I have to admit that given the choice I would take this immediately over the systems in Path of Exile II. Everything about the Atlas tree in that game is awful, and it is entirely too focused on bossing. Bossing is just a subset of the Path of Exile 1 endgame, and most people… are not really focusing on it. Idols would go a long way towards patching the problems with that game’s system and forcing specific mechanics onto every map instead of the poorly designed precursor tablet system. Conceptually I like the exploration system because I enjoy it in Delve, but it just does not really work as a replacement for mapping. Part of the payoff of leveling and fully unlocking your atlas tree… is the agency to focus on only the mechanics that you want to focus on. You never really reach any of that payoff or any of that agency in Path of Exile II… which feels like the team missed that core tenet of the first game.
Phrecia has been a really interesting experimental league, and it was announced today that it is being extended by a month. I really like chaos pop righteous fire, and I would absolutely play something like this again in the future. Which admittedly makes me wonder what it would be like to play one of the witch based righteous fire builds at some point in the future. I do think that a lot of the ideas behind the Idol system in this league event could benefit Path of Exile II. Right now the endgame does not really work and feels way too far removed from the near perfect loop of game play that exists within Path of Exile’s endgame. All of POE’s problems center around on-boarding the player and gear acquisition for non-traders and non-crafters but the virtuous loop of the endgame was not something that should have been abandoned. Path of Exile II feels a lot like Destiny 2 did at launch… where it feels like they forgot all of the lessons that the previous game had learned. I am onboard for trying out quirky ideas in event leagues until they figure out how to make Path of Exile II feel a bit better though.
The post The Idol Based Atlas appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did my obligatory “First Day of Blaugust” post and today I am back to my usual nonsense. As of today… specifically about seven hours from now… it will have been one full week of playing Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile. During that time I have made a ton of progress and quite possibly made it further in a shorter period of time than I have ever in the past. The League mechanic slowed me down a bit and it took me roughly 20 hours of play to get through the campaign into maps. It has taken me an additional 42 hours to reach the point where I feel like I am fully ready for endgame shenanigans. Path of Exile players hit these games freaking hard… and I have put in time before work, at lunch, and many hours after work to get where I am now.
At this point, I have completed all sixteen tiers of normal maps and a number of the unique maps leaving ten more of those to go. Two will be rather expensive as they always are because they unlock some meta crafts… but my mappers brought back Poorjoy’s overnight so that is another one I should be able to knock out quickly. I also have my four voidstones and as a result, most of the maps that are dropping normally and not through specific league mechanics will be dropping at the t16 level meaning I will have lots of stuff to farm with soon. I have all but four of my favorite map slots and currently, they are all set to Glacier which is probably my favorite map of the pool that is available this league.
It is wild that I have as strong of a build as I have, given how poor I feel this league. I think across the board everyone is feeling this because this league is the recession following the insane boom leagues of Affliction and Necropolis. Affliction had nonsense levels of juicing coming from the Wildwood Wisps and Necropolis had all manner of ways to force scarabs to spit out hundreds upon hundreds of uniques per map. This league dialed back a lot of the ground loot strategies and the death of magic find as we knew it previously… where folks focused on scaling the quantity of drops, is pretty much dead. Big group juicing parties are declaring group play dead, but ironically in spite of all of this… I am probably having more fun than I have in a long while. Sure I can’t buy bargain basement headhunters for 4 divines… and squires for a handful of chaos… but the league mechanic is actually producing legitimately useful gear.
I’ve recently shifted up my build to go into the block-based Righteous Fire as Pohx has done this league, and I gotta say it feels really great. Crafters are understanding this is the direction everyone is going to go and as a result have wildly inflated the prices of these shields. The stat that you care bout the most is that 5% life gain on block and to get a shield with decent armor and decent life you are looking at 3 divines or more. What I did instead was pick up a shaper-influenced base for 40 chaos and then do reforge life harvest crafting until I got something that looked halfway decent. At some point, I want to upgrade this but for now, it works. Similarly, I was able to snag a pseudo-link elder helm for 1.5 divines… which was a bit of a steal considering these are mostly going for 3 divines or higher. Maybe when I make a bit more currency I can upgrade this but for now, it works and was a huge boost in damage.
The Light of Meaning is a prismatic jewel that is technically new to this league, but it largely replaces the craftable version from Necropolis league called The Perandus Pact. It has all of the same rolls that you could craft and largely works in the same manner. I picked up the +6% increased fire damage version again and worked it into my build in the same location as the last league. Where it is placed currently it is hitting 18 nodes for an additional 108% increased Fire Damage. According to POB, it is adding roughly 50k damage to my build. However when I drop the Spiritual Aid nodes for a cluster jewel that will take it down to only hitting 16 nodes and 96% additional Fire Damage but probably still worth it. I picked up a cheap cluster jewel base and am trying to roll a large cluster with Burning Bright, Primatic Heart, and Widespread Destruction… since I can’t really afford to buy it outright. For now, I am using reforge fire Harvest crafting, but if I go back into delve and get some more fossils and resonators I might just do single socket scorched fossils and yolo it. Once I hit the large I will start trying to craft my mediums.
Admittedly part of the reason why I am so poor at the moment is that I have not been Delving. I am full up on sulphite and ready to go… but have been focusing on finishing out my Atlas and gathering resources for my town. Delve is a great place to get gold… but has zero way of getting any of the mined ore to feed the smelters and shipments. Now that I am through all of the baseline maps and have my voidstones, I am probably going to shift up my focus and dive down into the dark. I’ve only made it to depth 115 and would like to get down to around 200 before I start farming horizontally hunting for cities. I also need the bulk maps that come from Delve to feed my mappers. So this weekend is probably going to be me returning to the virtuous cycle of map until full on delve juice and then burn through it in the mines. This should help me considerably in bubblegum currency and also having resonators both to craft with and bulk sell on the currency exchange. I got a quick shot of 300 chaos yesterday when I sold all of my resonators off in about 15 minutes through Faustus and the automated trades.
Speaking of mappers… I thought I would share what they look like right now. I’ve not been heavily focused on them that much and have not poured a ton of resources into leveling them up. Right now I have a single party with a level 6, level 5, and two level 4 mappers. This allows me to burn through white maps pretty reliably without risking losing them. That does not mean that they 100% complete every map but they do bring back a lot of random stuff, most of the gear I feed into the disenchanter. Last night before going to bed I made sure I had two shipments going and twelve maps in the hopper, and this represents what the mappers brought back. It isn’t phenomenal loot but it also isn’t nothing. Since I was never going to bulk sell my maps, this allowed me to turn a resource that was rotting in my bank into a non-zero quantity of usable items. There is an achievement for running t14 or higher maps with the mappers so at some point I will upgrade to where I can do that.
Similarly, I have been keeping shipments going pretty much as much as I can swing. Essentially I have one boat that I have dedicated to the longer route that takes about 2 hours per run, and another boat that takes the shorter runs at around 45 minutes each. Last night before going to bed I set up two shipments and the left side of the above image shows the returns from each. Again it is not spectacular loot but produces a lot of bubblegum currency that is still useful. There is a Kingsmarch Wiki page that maths out all of the details around sending items, what sorts of rewards they bring, and what the various breakpoints are. Right now I am filling whatever I can towards the items that are being asked for from the port as I am trying to level the hidden faction system for every destination. Then I will add 55 of each other crop, and 8104 Thaumaturgic Dust because it acts as a multiplier to the entire load and that specific number is the 200% more breakpoint. 55 for dust is the 100% more breakpoint, and I am largely just using it as a number for crops. Sending multiple types of crops seems to increase the total yield in currency… so I am just winging it and it seems to mostly make each load worth the time and gold expenditure.
I think my focus over the next few days is going to be gold acquisition. There are a lot of upgrades that I want to make for my town that are going to require forty thousand gold or so each. If I am delving more… I am generating less ore that requires workers to work… and when they go idle they stop draining my coffers. So I am probably going to shut down shipping and mapping and just focus on building up a nest egg for the next phase of development. I have a quad tab full of rare items that I can feed my disenchanter to at least keep it running during this interim. I’ve been running a lot of maps with my Ritual/Einhar/Beyond atlas in the hopes of maybe just maybe either lucking into a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections because I am still using a five-link chest piece. I have a second Cloak of Flame that is better rolled that dropped while mapping, that I have been using to try and link and then eventually swap.
All in all, I am having a blast in Recession League, in spite of what the hardcore juicers are saying about it. I’ve made a ton of progress in a single week and now my focus is on subtly improving my build. I really need to swap out my weapon for something a bit better with at least +1 to all fire gems on it. I have a fractured base that I am crafting into a new pair of gloves and am just now trying to get elemental proliferation implicit on them before wearing them. I have a side project of trying to level a bunch of Purity of Fire gems so that I can hopefully get a level 21/20% quality gem out of the batch. I guess I feel like I have so many projects that I want to devote time to, and that is keeping me in the hype cycle of enjoyment. Eventually, that will slow down, but for me personally, this is one of the best leagues I have ever played in.
The post A Week of Recession League appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
