Good Morning Folks! Friday was the beginning of a new league in Path of Exile, and I spent most of the weekend grinding away at content. The biggest problem that I am having… is that I am enjoying the new Breach mechanic too much, and as such I went super slowly during the campaign. I only made it to Act 4 by the end of the first night, and it took me all of the day on Saturday to make it the rest of the way to maps. I was in my 70s during Act 8… so suffice to say that I was over farming the content. The only real benefit of pushing through the content quickly, is that you can make some early sales and also get some early deals on items that will eventually be far more expensive. I did manage to get enough early chaos to snag a pretty cheap immortal flesh that was well rolled, but other than that… everything was already inflated out of my price range by the time I hit maps.
Breach essentially exists in a few different forms. The main one works more or less like old school breach, except that once you kill enough encounters it will eventually stabilize spawning a new encounter in the center of the breach. These will either be Vruun the new mini-boss of the event, or several rare mobs. Quite frankly I find the multiple rares harder to defeat than the new boss because so long as you avoid his cyclone attack, he mostly just melts. The next version of the encounter is to defend Ailith, the new NPC for the event as she attempts to close the breach that has already managed to get a foothold in our reality. You essentially need to defend her against several waves of incoming attackers, and it is beneficial if you are careful when you burn your way through the breach walls to find her, because it is helpful to create chokepoints for the waves. The last version is the Breach Fortress, which puts you on an alternate map and makes you defend Ailith against 24 waves of spawns… with limited to no chokepoints to funnel the monsters. I’ve only managed to defeat one of these, and when you do… you have to rush back out through the maze and avoid walls that show up on your minimap in order to get out before the entire place collapses.
Breach itself, feels really rewarding, especially early in the league when you need pretty much everything. I am not exactly certain this is going to be the most juicy loot in the endgame, but it certainly feels good to just get a bunch of random stuff by closing one of these. Right now my favorite content is the unstable breaches, because I have enough damage to pretty reliably stabilize these each time so that I can farm the boss/rares that spawn once stabilized. More than anything though farming this content gives you Graftblood, which you can then use to spend on the Tree Tree mechanic as we referred to it Saturday during the podcast. I am not sure how this is going to shake out as I get deeper into progression, but I feel like the new version of Breach is going to continue to be beneficial. My only real complaint is that I wish I had some measure of control over which version of Breach I spawned. I greatly prefer collapsing breach and I feel like if we had tree support, we would be able to throw our thumb onto the scale as to which version we got.
I have not exactly figured out the “Tree Tree” yet, but it is really valuable while leveling to create five and six link chests. I got a relatively well rolled Six Link in Act 6 of the game, which allowed me to effectively power my way through the rest of the content with a fully fleshed out Righteous Fire. I am having a bit more trouble crafting items that are NOT chests… because it seems like I do not have enough control valves to craft the sort of items that I actually want. I have been trying to make a decent amulet, and it just does not feel like I really have enough control over it. What I am however producing is a lot of fractured amulet bases, which may at some point create something I could use to craft the ultimate amulet I am after. I have not been using the tree to print uniques or currency yet, because so far neither of those has produced anything good, and all of the foulborn uniques that I have seen are not really better than the baseline. I had hopes of a good Foulborn Cloak of Flames or Immortal Flesh, but none of the options seem to work well.
I am not generating much in the way of currency yet, so most of my gear is pretty crap. I did pick up a nice Immortal flesh and a decent Rise of the Phoenix, and then this is the six linked chest that I printed from the tree that is working very well. At this point I basically need everything… I need a good +fire levels amulet that I can anoint so I can start getting some endurance charges. I need decent boots and better rings, and to attempt to cobble together an elder helm. For the most part though at this very moment I am stable enough to keep pushing forward and I will fix all of these problems as I gather more resources and unlock more access to content. It always feels weird at the beginning of the league when you are poor and flying by the seat of your pants, but additionally I feel really strong for the crap state of everything. I am still running Purity of Elements which helps a lot, but at some point I will need to completely redo all of my gems to shift to the Purity of Fire version and then eventually drop the Phoenix shield for a +Life gain block shield.
The biggest part of this league are the grafts that you gain through doing breach and crafting them with the tree tree. Mine is specced to greatly favor Xoph grafts, and I am actively searching for better versions of Call the Pyre and Heart of Flame. Really the only truly important one of these is Call the Pyre which generates several fire tornadoes in front of me, which covers everything in Ash causing them to move slower and take more fire damage. This is a nice buff to both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap, and I can apply it easily through shield charge… which means that just charging around the map feels way more powerful than it used to. Heart of Flame on the other hand is essentially Molten Shell that you don’t have much control over. Any time I take damage, if it is off cool-down, it pops up a damage shield that will cause 80% of the incoming damage to go to the shield instead. I might start looking for an Hardening Uulgraft that gives Tender Embrace which causes me to regen life much faster when I hit low life, and also gain endurance charges.
I have picked up a well rolled Cloak of Flames, but essentially need either a shitload of fusings, an Omen of Connetions, or a Black Morrigan to link it. Getting it six socket with the right colors was relatively trivial given its low item requirements. Right now I have cleared 35 maps and when I hit 50 and get the alternate atlas tree I plan on speccing into Einhar and Ritual with that second tree to try and farm one of the items that quickly maxlinks an item. For the moment I am alternating between running maps and pushing delve so that I can eventually get down to a depth to start generating fossil crafting goods to sell. The tree tree is good at a few very specific things, but ultimately the bulk of crafting is still either going to need to rely on fossil crafting or recombination. Gambling and the Tree Tree are great at getting your build started, but once you need specificity you are back to the older crafting methods, unlike the Necropolis. Since you can no longer passively get recombinators, I have a feeling they will be in demand in the later weeks of the league.
All told I am having fun, but I don’t feel quite as driven as I have in past leagues. I am not sure if it is the simple fact that I no longer feel like I have to steal time to play. I have all of the time in the world since it is just me and the cats… and no one else to take care of. Gaming in general has become weird after the loss of my spouse. It was something I used to passionately do in bursts, because I knew someone was always about to pull me away from it. Now… I find myself taking breaks and walking away from it, just because I need to do so. I am having to make the pauses, because otherwise it just feels tedious. For example on Saturday I kept taking breaks to go work in the garage for a bit, which also led to the delay in getting to endgame. Figuring out how to do things… as just me… has been a bit of a weird trip.
The post Unfamiliar Arms appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! I am back on my Path of Exile bullshit. It always feels good to go home, and there will always be something about Path of Exile that feels special to me. How I got here however is its own story. Since it has been 10 going on 11 months since the last Path of Exile league… Grinding Gear Games keeps running events in order to briefly placate the very angry and dejected player base. The Phrecia league event was extremely fun, and one of the best times I have had playing Path of Exile in recent memory. Currently we are going through a phase where they have unlocked and made private leagues free for all players to create… something that normally has a relatively hefty cost to it. I think we paid around $60 for the league that we ran, because we extended the time a bit and it would have been more had we needed to scale up the number of participants in any meaningful way.
Currently anyone can create a private league for free during this event, and there are a number of different templates. SirGog for example is running a league with the Phrecia alternate classes but with the extremely difficult Gauntlet rule set created specifically for Zizaran’s reoccurring Gauntlet event. Pohx on the other hand is running a more casual friendly outing with the inclusion of the Shifting Stones and Atlas Invasion rulesets. Essentially Shifting Stones makes it so every map has either Tower Damage Blight, Endless Delirium, Endless Legion, or Player Haunting Tormented Spirits mapped to the specific Atlas Keystones that grant those things, and what a zone has changes every 15 minutes. Atlas Invasion on the other hand makes it so that once you leave the beach, every single map has two bosses that have “invaded” the map and the pool of what it can draw from is wild.
Most of the time you are going to get one of the generic rebrands of campaign bosses, but every so often you get a pinnacle boss spawning in your map. These are scaled down in difficulty for the area of the map, but still do all of the same attacks. For example while I was fighting the Dweller in Act 1… I heard the “DIE!!!!” voice line and then frantically tried to dodge a giant shaper beam that came through the wall. Before finishing Act 1 I had fought Shaper, Elder, a few Guardian encounters, and Ulhtred the pinnacle boss attacked to Expedition. The ones that I found roughest weirdly enough were the ones associated with Breach… because Tul for whatever reason will oneshot me every time I see him when I may not be prepared to dodge his frontal cone attack.
You may be thinking to yourself… This sounds awful! You would be wrong. As penance for making you fight a bunch of Atlas bosses they each drop somewhere between one to four unique items. Before I exited Act 2 I had already seen a Cloak of Flames, pretty much setting me up for success the entire run as Righteous Fire Chieftain. Most of the uniques are the low tier ones that you will leave rotting on the ground, but every so often something really special drops. Essentially it feels like mapping with a juice Rogue Exiles atlas strategy… but begins the moment you exit LionEye’s Watch. What is really cool is how you realize that there are a lot of uniques that are exceptionally powerful at low levels. I’ve picked up a couple of Cloak of Flames, Immortal Flesh, Berek’s Respite, and once I get a second Rise of the Phoenix I will probably start corrupting them trying for some interesting results.
One of the interesting things about a limited trade environment, is that because I know I will never find a perfect item… I tend to be willing to craft more gear for myself. Granted the boots in the above screenshot dropped almost perfect already from Betrayal, and all I had to do was slap fire resistance on them. Coming back to Path of Exile, it really feels like they could do with bumping down Exalted Orbs in loot tier so that they drop more often. I’ve yet to see one and had to buy one from the currency exchange to do a craft that required one. I’ve been focused on mostly running Betrayal to get my enchants and Harvest because it is by far the most accessible crafting method for getting decent gear, specifically resist rings, amulets, and cluster jewels.
However I am having to re-learn a lesson that I have learned many times in the past… by not going into Delve early I have missed out on a bunch of currency and maps. Delve is so damned good at producing large amounts of basic crafting currency. I have been strapped for pretty much everything from alts to alchs and it sucks. More than that Delve Cities seem to produce a bunch of random maps independent of what tier your current progression is at. So instead I am relying entirely on the few horizon orbs I get, vendor recipe, and map drop luck to make my way through the atlas progression. I did not really start making progress until yesterday because I did not hit maps until Saturday night. The juicy nature of the Atlas bosses has meant that during the campaign I was seeking out every optional boss… and doing every Vaal side area because they would guarantee two extra bosses as well.
The only negative of the event is that something appears to be jacked up with Kingsmarch. Essentially more than half of the times I tried to travel there I would get “Failed to join any instances”. There are threads about this error where folks have claimed that logging out and back in fixed it for them. This has not been the case for me. I can bounce in and out of the game effectively forever and it does not fix it when it is occurring. Then randomly other times it will just work fine and allow me to pop into the zone and do my business. This has sucked quite a bit because shipments are a pretty good source of early gear and currency, and I have effectively been locked out of them. This also means that my progression in Kingsmarch is a bit behind where it should be. Hopefully now that we are past the weekend someone at GGG will sort this out.
All in all though this has been a really fun event. Really if you are trying to do a group found/semi-SSF event this is the perfect ruleset. You end up generating a ton of uniques and for example I noticed every time a Dreadarc dropped which is something Kodra would have needed for Hexblast. Before I left act one I probably saw a dozen of them, which was wild. So essentially if we were ever going to do another AggroChat league I would want to run this ruleset and then have folks basically post a shopping list of what uniques are useful to them, so we could fill up the guild bank. Another thing that I found great while leveling was the Araku Tiki amulet which provides up to 50 life and 50 Fire Resistance… perfect for a budding Righteous Fire character. I ended up wearing one of these until maps because I just could not find a good enough neck to give up that much life and resistance on a single item.
I’ve had a lot of fun so far, but not sure how much I am really going to push it. Some leagues ago I joined SirGog’s chat channel during the scour league which made it so everything dropped as bases and you had to craft your own gear. After that… I just never reset my global back to another channel. I’ve come to really like the chill but focused vibe that the channel tends to attract, and did not know that chat channels apparently spanned across multiple leagues. As a result I have been listening to folks who are participating in his “Softcore Gauntlet” ruleset event and while I normally do not go for “challenge for challenge’s sake” type events, it sounds equally hilarious. So at some point I am going to roll a character in that event when I figure out what I can plan that will be exceptionally tanky using the Phrecia classes.
The post Atlas Invasion is Wild appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I played a heck of a lot of Path of Exile this weekend and a lot of that time was focused on gold acquisition to feed the league mechanic. I did some Photoshop magic to create a single screen that shows all of the parts of the town that I have maxed out. The only thing not shown here is the Recruiter which does not have its own doodad on the town view. Mining helped a lot because it means that I get gold from marking ore in my maps, which also means if I happen to find two nodes in a map it increases my gold gain significantly. Generally speaking, I am clearing 8k to 20k depending on a bunch of variables in each map but more often hover around the 10k mark. I still have my enchanter, disenchanter, mappers, and recombinators to max out before I have everything at the level cap of 11.
The thing is… I am not sure it is really worth pushing through to level everything up. Granted I have not put any effort into significantly upgrading my workers… but with capped shipping I seem to be largely getting the same results that I have always gotten. The main difference is I have three ships and all of the ports unlocked at this point. The league mechanic feels like it pays out significantly better in gear than it does in currency. This can be really cool as I will talk about a bit later when I go over my gear upgrades, but since gear isn’t selling amazingly well in this league due to the mechanic is generating so much of it… it is not like getting a ton of gear really helps your bottom line. So long as I get a few chaos per boatload I am mostly happy. I’ve yet to pull anything higher than an exalted orb from a shipment, and I think in truth I will be better served tweaking my map runners to be able to reliably do t16s.
That said occasionally you get some amazing gear from the mechanic. The gloves that I swapped to yesterday are better rolled than a pair that I was looking at on the market going for 8 Divines. I legitimately was contemplating making that purchase and I am so glad I did not given that I wound up with essentially the same thing for free. I’ve also been wearing league mechanic boots for a while now with no signs of finding reasonable upgrades. The big upgrade of the weekend though is that I sold a big ticket item and bought a rather expensive fractured sceptre base and then crafted it into a replacement weapon. Lastly, I swapped out my pseudo-six-link helm for a slightly better-rolled one. I had picked up my previous one for a steal and was able to flip it for 3 Divines when I only paid 1.5 Divines for the new one. For things like that I tend to overprice because I don’t necessarily care about a fast sale.
In other news, I ran into one of the new optional boss encounters that can show up in T16 maps. The Black Knight is in theory a replacement for the Black Morrigan encounter, but instead of showing up in the Viridian Wildwood, he shows up as a clickable hole in the ground called the Starfall Crater. Fighting him feels an awful lot like fighting Aul the Crystal King, so it was not a big deal to beat him since I have done that fight so many times down in Delve. I was hoping to get him to down Svalinn so I can make a dumb block build that triggers spellcasts… but mostly I just got a ton of Verisium and Runes. Really hoping that I can find a bunch more of him so I can try and farm the shield. All in all, it was a really fun optional encounter, similar to finding the Nameless Seer.
The biggest progress from the weekend is that I have completed the 115 normal and unique maps that make up the Atlas. On top of that, I have done Vinktar Square and am only lacking Doryani’s Machinarium from the challenge of running all of the unique maps. I am hoping a Doryani’s drops down in Delve soon because I am beelining to fight any bosses that I encounter down there. What prompted me to push through and buy the last few maps is that I needed the crafting recipes that they generated in order to craft my scepter. Truth be told, none of the maps were more than 20 chaos with Doryani being the outlier going for around 2 Divines. Now my focus really turns to trying to knock out some of the challenges that I am close to finishing up. Basically, my goal as always is to do enough challenges in order to unlock a totem pole for my hideout. Once I have done that… any progress after that is gravy.
Finishing out my 115th map also unlocked the last of the rewards in Kirac’s Vault, with that very last item being a simulacrum. One of the big changes that they made in this league is that Simulacrums essentially start 15 waves into the previous progress and cap out at 15 waves instead of 30. So essentially doing a 15 now is the same level of accomplishment as doing a 30 previously. I am a big fan of this change because it did previously feel like you spent a lot of time facerolling waves until they started to matter. I took a ton of deaths and basically lost any progress toward 97 that I had made… but managed to complete all fifteen waves. Truth be told in those last few waves… the trash mobs were WAY more difficult than the boss encounters. That said I did try really hard to split up Ominphobia and Kosis so that I did not have to be fighting them at the same time. I didn’t necessarily get anything amazing for my troubles but did manage to pull a few different copies of Megalomaniac.
I’ve not made it super far into Delve this league and am sitting around 150 depth. I have gotten several lucky divine drops from nodes, however, which has been great. Recombinators continue to be my most reliable method for earning a bunch of chaos quickly, and the currency exchange is freaking amazing. I need to spend more time down there, but the mapping has just felt better because it helps feed the league mechanic more efficiently. I’m mostly running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual strategy in maps and have lucked into one spawn of Black Morrigan that happily occurred when I was running a duplicating scarab so I got two copies. What has been shocking however is just how many Omens have been dropping from the map spawned ritual mobs. I’ve already pulled two Omen of Connections, a few Omen of Blanching, and pretty much every other more common Omen a half dozen times. The biggest challenge is that none of my trees have a lot of map drop support so sustaining maps is a big fraught at the moment.
All told however I am still having a freaking blast. This legitimately might be my favorite league even though the ground loot that is dropping in maps has not been that phenomenal. If I need money I can go farm up more resonators and fossils down in the dark, but for now, I am mostly able to afford anything that I really want. There are some upgrades that I still need… namely I have been trying to roll a large cluster jewel to replace the janky one that I am using currently. I also have a nice corrupted Cloak of Flame that I am slowly working on getting socketed and linked, but it is a bit of a stretch goal. I also have another Shaper Shield that I am occasionally trying to craft into something better than the one I am currently using. I like having some long-reaching goals though so I am not in any real rush to acquire anything. Getting my Six-Link chest due to getting Black Morrigan went a long way to improving my league experience. I also need to swap out some of my gems for Awakened versions, but it isn’t like I am struggling with anything currently.
I got a really nicely rolled Widowhail, and found a pretty nice quiver to go with it from the league mechanic… so I am starting to get that itch to try rolling a bow character. I’ve been stockpiling decent drops for that eventuality given that I seem to always end up wanting a bow character. I’m also contemplating trying to build something around Volcanic Fissure of Snaking again. Then there is the whole desire to try Lacerate of Haemorrhage Gladiator like literally everyone else in this league. Basically, I am starting to feel that alting itch, so I fully expect before the end of the week I will have rolled something new.
The post A Weekend of Upgrades appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Tomorrow is the start of Blaugust and with it will come some more Blaugusty-themed posts, and probably a few days without proper league updates. Not that I think anyone out there is hanging on my words wanting to know what I did the day before… but you know I can pretend right. At this point, I am completely done with white maps and almost done with yellow maps. I get in this weird place where I try and finish the yellow maps before I run any of my red maps because I know Kirac will progressively stop offering lower maps when I actually do that. Tonight we have raid night and I will be back in Final Fantasy XIV, but after I bid Ace adieu for the evening I plan on starting running corrupted reds to begin knocking them out.
I did some more upgrades. First I bought a +1 fire gem neck for pretty cheap and was specifically looking for one with a lot of dex on it, fire res, chaos res, and everything else was negotiable. I picked up a second amethyst ring which gave me quite a bit of life and was enough to cap my chaos resistance while also pouring on more fire resistance to feed my regen. The boots came straight out of a shipment and all I had to do with it was drop a chaos/fire affix on them and resistance swap cold to fire with harvest. I still need to get relevant eldritch implicit on it, but did manage to hit ignite proliferation on my gloves. I think my gear is good enough for now to make it all the way through T16s. At some point, I plan on probably going block-based and dropping determination.
Right now I am running my first Atlas with Niko and Jun and will probably splash in some more points into Ambush and Scarab gain. My second Atlas for the moment is Einhar and Beyond with the goal of trying to farm Black Morrigan for six linking my chestpiece eventually. I believe Black Morrigan can only spawn in T14 or higher so I will get a bit more serious about that when I get up there. I’ve never done Betrayal with full Atlas support and it is honestly pretty wild. I will kill a single Betrayal mini-boss and end up getting a big ole loot explosion. For example, the above loot is from killing Hillock who spawned by himself and then offered to drop some currency. So I get why folks are talking about this mechanic for early loot bases. For me, I mostly was trying to speed run my way through the betrayal crafting unlocks. Once I get all of those I am likely going to shift over to Expedition since it is also on that same side of the tree.
At this point, I am sitting at 69 maps in my atlas and the only yellow-tier map that I have left is Leyline. I used a horizon orb to get a copy of that map, and will probably run it after I finish work and before I start doing some FFXIV nonsense. So like I said we have raid night and then I need to start running experts again because new bookrocks unlocked today, but tomorrow I will likely push through as many of the red maps as I can and see if I can maybe wrap my atlas up before the weekend. I running a bit low on chaos and do not want to cash in any of my divines yet, but I will likely start buying some of the unique maps needed to finish out the atlas. I am slowly pushing my way through Maven, Searing Exarch, and Eater of Worlds and hope to have those unlocked by the time I hit T16s. Hopefully, I get some more big ticket items to drop so I can be a little more liquid.
This league is so freaking good folks.
The post Fully Specced Betrayal is Wild appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
