Good Morning Folks! I am a bit late getting a post started today because work things got in the way early early this morning. Friday was the launch of the Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile and I have been having a blast. I was a bit slower going through the campaign than I normally would be, largely because I spent a lot of time doing the league mechanic once it unlocked upon arriving in Lioneye’s Watch in Act 1. Normally I don’t invest heavily in the league mechanic until I have made my way into mapping, but I feel like doing it while campaigning was the correct choice because a lot of the upgrades end up being time-gated. As a result, it took me roughly 20 hours to finish the campaign which was Friday evening, off and on throughout Saturday, and then finishing my 3rd lab and killing Kitava early Sunday morning.
As of this morning, I am 44 maps into progressing my atlas and very smoothly running through white and yellow maps without significant upgrades. I’ve actually kept track of my expenditures this time around so that I would be able to recap in a blog post. Currently, I’ve spent 51 Chaos on everything I am wearing, including an -15 Immortal Flesh (1c), Cloak of Flames (5c), Rise of the Phoenix (2c), a Fire/Chaos/Dex Helm (3c), Chaos/Fire/Life Ring (20c), and Chaos/Fire/Life/Dex Gloves (20c). I had a bit of a windfall pretty early on where I sold an influenced base for 80c, and an Enlighten support for 260c. On top of that, I have picked up miscellaneous Chaos Orbs and 2 raw Divine Orbs. I’m not in a real rush to buy items but it feels good to know I have some spending money when I ultimately want to replace most of my rare gear. You can get a ton of life on items right now, and I hope to end up replacing pretty much everything with at least 100 life rolls on various slots.
What has kept me from needing to buy a ton more gear is the fact that the league mechanic produces a ton of really good items. While it isn’t generating a ton of raw currency it is producing a lot of items that have relatively high tier rolls, including lots of really good resistances on them. I was kind of screwing up the shipping mechanic a bit, but Sunday a bunch of videos came out explaining how it works or at least how to improve your results and I hope to see a big payoff at some point either today or tomorrow. Essentially each port city has a hidden faction system, and you unlock higher tiers of faction by fulfilling their requested goods. When you fill all of the items on an order it unlocks a new higher tier of demands and again… just by shipping only those items you are basically guaranteed to get more return than you are sending.
I’ve gotten some truly wild items out of this. For example, never did I expect to have it in the cards to be using a one-handed axe right now instead of a scepter but…. that is where we are in the league. I got this axe back from a shipment that had +18% Dot Multi, and +24% Fire Dot Multi on it… which was infinitely better than the scepter I had been using. I threw the new Ignite enchant on it and crafted the Fire Damage/Ignite Combo Betrayal mod on it. This is pretty much better than anything I could get for less than six or so Divines at the moment. Sure the physical attack damage doesn’t really do anything for me… but also I might end up recycling this item into some sort of a fire-based melee build later once I can afford to craft or buy a “forever” scepter.
Legitimately I am having so much fun with the shipping mechanic, and a lot of the items it brings back… might be useful for throwing into the recombinator later. Right now I am using my cast-offs to feed into the disenchanter as arcane dust seems to be a premium commodity that a lot of the upgrades require. At some point, I need to spend some time hiring and firing better people, because I have a bunch of workers that are less than optimal. You can get these combo workers that have lots of different skills… but you end up paying a premium for each additional skill level that they have. I would be better off replacing those with single-stat workers to hopefully bring down my total gold sink for the town a bit.
I’ve not made it super far into Delve, largely because… you can’t gather resources down there. You get a heck of a lot of gold in a short period of time which is good, but I keep running dry on the various ores that are needed to feed shipping. As a result… I might be spending a lot more time mapping this league instead of plumbing the depths for cities. I’ve found my very first city, but it is at around 80 depth which means that the payoff is not amazing. I am still working on spending Azerite to unlock things because if nothing else Delve is amazing for producing sheer quantities of bubblegum currency… something that I find myself tragically lacking. For example, I have zero of my flasks automated at this point… because I don’t have the Glassblower’s Baubles to quality them… nor do I have the Instilling Orbs in order to craft on the auto-use enchant. Both of these are problems that will likely be solved by delving more.
What makes this league so great is honestly the virtuous cycle that takes place between mapping/delving and then returning back to town whenever a shipment comes in. Right now I have two ships going one that is working the 45-minute routes nearest to Wraeclast and one that is working the 2-hour routes that are furthest away. This gives me two distinct reward horizons that look forward to, and nothing feels quite as good as seeing the pop-up in the corner of your screen indicating that it is time to go back and see what the journey brought. It puts me in this pattern of trying to see how much I can get done before the ship comes back and the two cycles feed each other. Mapping and Delving generate gold and resources that I can then invest in my town and keep moving forward. I legitimately hope this system goes standard because it is pretty freaking great.
Honestly, I am super glad that I went ahead and stuck with old and reliable Righteous Fire because it has given me more mental bandwidth to explore the league mechanics without also having to figure out my damned build. Are you playing Settlers of Kalguur league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
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Friends… this has been a weird league. When you make sweeping changes to a game as complicated as Path of Exile… you get some extremely varied issues that come up with it. Going into this league I had one idea planned… which was to gear my character in such a way as to not really need my amulet slot for the dexterity required to play Righteous Fire. The idea behind this was that I could in theory swap in a Defiance of Destiny which is a unique Paula Amulet that went in during 3.22 that has the text “Gain 25-35% of Missing Unreserved Life before being Hit by an Enemy”. On something already as tanky as I tend to build characters, this could make someone nigh immortal, and last league I just could not sort out my gear in order to use one without changing every single slot. The problem is that this league shifted the rarity and with that, the price ballooned up to 55 Divines making it one of the major chase uniques.
This was ultimately the item that I had been saving up all of my divines to get, and yesterday I found out that apparently, the market had crashed. You can pick up a medium-rolled Defiance of Destiny for around 10 Divines now. Similarly, the bottom fell out completely for Headhunters and you can pick up a well rolled uncorrupted one for around 15 Divines. So while I have been sidetracked by Fallout 76 lately, I absolutely zoomed into the game to snap a nearly perfectly rolled Defiance for 15 Divines. If the price of Headhunters falls even further I might snap one of those up as well for if I ever decide to do anything with my Champion alt. I think the downward pressure we are seeing is in part due to the fact that this is the second league in a row where people were printing extremely rare items. It took a bit longer for the prices to drop in Affliction, but having been through that song and dance before there is now a race to the bottom.
I am uncertain what the latest strategy is, but clearly, there is still something alive and well in the current league environment. The previous hotness was stacking Meatsacks, a single monster that replaces a pack and has an extremely high rarity modifier… and then stacking on Tormented Spirits to make them extremely beefy and extremely rewarding when you finally kill them. Folks were doing this in T17 maps which themselves have a massive rarity bonus. The end result was nonsensical loot explosions that covered the entire screen. I remember seeing one clip from Empyrian Gaming where I could see five Defiance of Destiny on screen at one time. Basically, it has reached the point where if that amulet is not literally perfectly rolled and qualitied up with catalysts… it is cheap.
So I am now the proud owner of a would-be 40% Defiance of Destiny instead of the perfectly rolled 42%… once I finish applying quality that is. This has caused me to rework my tree a bit to force in Ultimatum, a league mechanic that I largely hate… but is the most reliable method for farming catalysts. I miss Metamorph so much because that was a mechanic I actually enjoyed and dropped Catalysts like candy. You could add Rogue Metamorphs to your map and just get them passively rather than having to force a largely unfun mechanic to get them. I should just buy the catalysts but that always feels lame when they could be farmed. They are much cheaper this league than they were last league, and my guess is the demand has caused a bunch of folks to start farming them. I also need Fertile Catalysts to quality up my Immortal Flesh as well, so in theory it isn’t a complete waste of time to try and farm them.
Wild Mood Swings was a Cure album that came out when I was in college, and quite honestly… that title accurately describes what it has felt like to play in this league. We’ve been in this cycle of “exploit early, exploit often” where the folks who get to the latest and greatest strategy first… and abuse the fuck out of it… profit and anyone trying to “ethically” play the game is left behind. I can’t complain much honestly because I am still able to do everything that I wanted to do and have managed to find enough high-value items in order to maintain enough currency to play with. All of that is super shocking considering how bottomed out the market is for delve resonators and fossils. Since I seem to be getting engaged with Fallout 76 again, I am not sure how much longer I will be in this league’s economy anyway. Once I get one more achievement and get my sad little totem pole I will be happy enough to leave it behind until 3.25.
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Good Morning Folks! I find myself starting to feel that old familiar itch… the one that involves me leveling a second character. I have no clue what I actually want to make but that isn’t important. What is important is that I know before long I will wind up chasing some new character and trying to make it work. That is not to say I am not still having a heck of a lot of fun on Righteous Fire Chieftain, and would honestly probably keep playing it for a while. I just always end up starting several other characters during a league and then trying to make them work. I would love to see a redemption arc for Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, but I am not sure if I want to roll another Marauder in this league. It has been a few leagues since I have played Toxic Rain, and bows are dirt cheap due to the corpse-crafting meta right now.
Remember me talking about going all in on my sceptre yesterday? Well… about that. I had this fractured +1 fire gem base that I had been tinkering with for a while. Essentially I had been spamming all of my alts at it hoping to roll the ideal setup… and then survive the regal. Yesterday I had farmed up another stack of alts and threw them all at the weapon… and happened to land a pretty optimal setup. Which then prompted me to spend my last to Divine Orbs to meta-craft this the rest of the way to completion. Now I am back farming blue juice from Harvest so that I can shift this to an alternate quality setup for elemental damage and do the 30% corruption beast again. At that point… I think maybe just maybe I will have the final form of my weapon.
Some “new tech” from this patch that I have been playing with is The Perandus Pact Prismatic Jewel. This is a grave crafted item that can be influenced to roll with a specific stat package on it. I did not do this thing, I just bought mine because the “6% Increased Fire Damage” version is apparently not the sought-after version. Essentially allocating this in my tree gives me a ring that includes 18 passive tree nodes that each gain +6% for a grand total of +108% Increased Fire Damage. I had already planned on picking up the Sanctum of Thought node to push myself up to 90% reduction to critical damage, which will give me another +18%. This seems really good and it would be significantly better if I were building something on the right-hand side of the tree with much tighter clustering of nodes. Alternately I could have gone with +5 life per node, but I wasn’t sure if that would matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve gotten deep enough into Delve that I am starting to see a few survival issues, so I decided to try something. I was out perusing POE.Ninja as one does… and noticed a Korean player running RF Chieftain with Vampirism allocated on their amulet. This seems really good because it would give me another source of recovery that is not entirely dependent upon my regeneration rate. The big problem is diving into packs of mobs while waiting on an explosion to proc, and while that is going off I would be getting both life on kill and some life recuperation from damage taken. Thankfully Golden Oils are cheap this league so if I want to go back to my Damage Over Time setup that I had been running it would be easy enough to do so.
I picked up another crafting project, that has frankly already cost me around 150 Chaos Orbs of potential value. I found this chestpiece for 10 Chaos Orbs and while I do not care in the least about the level of socketed curse gems… I am a huge fan of that 5% reduced Fire Damage Taken. I am running a lot of beyond on my maps and as such finding quite a bit of tainted currency so essentially as I find tainted fusing I am throwing them at this item. All I need is one to hit with a favorable result. When I fail I go back to the bench and craft 4 linked sockets… restoring me back to the state of just needing one fusing to six link it. Like I said I have made 3 attempts, each attempt with a value of 50 Chaos… and sooner or later I am going to hit it and then swap over to this chest piece and likely sell my RF-colored six-link Cloak of Flames for a bit of a profit.
The last bit of findings is that I actually managed to hit some T4 Harvest Beasts and wound up pulling Bear’s Girdle which is a key component for a Cleave of Rage build. Again it is something that I have wanted to play with, but I am not sure I want to make a second marauder this league. It isn’t like the girdle is worth a ton on its own, but I was happy to get it nonetheless. I’ve never fought the actual harvest endgame boss and keep wondering what is involved in doing so. I guess I should look that up at some point because I know there is a league achievement the includes them as one of the options. I should probably make some general strategy around finishing enough achievements to get my sad little totem pole again. Right now I am mostly working on Maven witnesses so I can attempt to take her down for a voidstone.
How has your league been going? Are you still trucking along or have you moved on already? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the official end of the Affliction League in Path of Exile and with it comes the quarterly job of shoving all of those “Remove Only” tabs under the bed. My strategy for the end of each league is to group all of those tabs into a folder named after that league so that I never have to deal with them again unless I am specifically fishing for an item. I do the same for the Guild Stash but unfortunately, it does not prevent me from having to log in on the day of a new league and set everything back up again. During Sanctum I started this tradition of talking about the various things that I built during a given league, and I have finally coalesced this into a blog feature that I will probably start doing for Last Epoch Cycles as well. This morning I will talk a bit about the happenings of the Affliction League.
Innaugural Bel League
With the start of the Affliction League, we decided to try something different. Up until this point I had participated in a few private league events, but had never really considered starting our own. Kodra and I were able to drum up enough support for the notion that we managed to have nine different people participating in the league, most of whom made it well into mapping before calling it quits. Quite honestly this is probably the ideal way to play this game. It allowed us to completely bypass what was apparently a pretty rough start to the league with bugs surrounding the goblin band mtx. We already are known for pooling our resources in the guild stash, but this took it to an entirely new level with folks actively hunting for build-required uniques for other folks.
Unfortunately with the launch of the Necropolis League on Friday, it does not look like we have much support. It might even just be me playing, so we won’t be attempting another “Bel League” this time around but it was still a lot of fun. There were a few negatives, however. The first is that we made the league last 40 days… which was honestly way too long. The default 10-day time limit for a private league is probably ideal if we were to do this again. The second negative is that without access to trade, it really negatively impacted the power level we could realistically achieve in this “Semi-SSF” gameplay mode. I was however surprised at just how functional all of my builds were that I created during this league and that was a bit of a pride moment for me personally. I would absolutely do this again but most of the AggroChat crew is down on Path of Exile post launch of Last Epoch 1.0.
Boneshatter Juggernaut
Would you believe that this was my very first time playing Boneshatter in any form? With the severe damage to Righteous Fire that 3.23 caused… it left me reeling a bit trying to figure out a new build to main. Boneshatter has traditionally been one of the most tanky Juggernaut builds, and as such I decided to give it a spin after both Ash and Kodra seriously suggested I try it. I enjoyed it quite a bit but it also didn’t feel quite as sturdy as Righteous Fire did. This was especially true for Delve, my favorite game mode. I am sure there are things that I could have done to build this differently for Delve but without access to trade, I had to basically wing it with what I had access to at the time. Sadly I didn’t dump a POB at the time I recorded the above video, but when we merged the private league into trade, I ended up reworking the character and even putting on a Mageblood for shits and giggles since I could afford one.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain
3.23 was the birth of the Transfigured Gem, and with it came a bunch of interesting-sounding options to play existing skills. The one that stood out the most for me was Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, which causes fissures to form in the ground and cause explosions that heat seal targets. As soon as I saw this… I had a MIGHTY NEED to try and create something with it. Sometimes… a build just does not work out the way you want it to. I really wanted to focus on Mace and Shield for some assorted defensive and offensive layers of “while shield is equipped” passive nodes, but in truth this seemed to either need some sort of stacking that I could not provide on SSF or a switch to a well-rolled Two-Handed Weapon. It was one heck of a fun build to level, and honestly, I wish I had recorded a video of the state of the build before pivoting away from it. Truth be told I just did not record anywhere near as many videos this league as I did during Ancestor League. It did a really good job of clearing maps but was painful to kill anything even slightly tanky like a boss.
If I were to do this again I would probably pivot into armor stacking and go with some sort of setup that would allow me to convert that to damage. This just wasn’t something I could realistically do in the limited access environment of Bel League. If you are curious this is the state of the build before I tore it down to become something else.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Lightning Arrow Champion
Originally this was going to be my second build of the league, but Snaking got in the way. I like having some sort of a map blaster to play around with and for the last two leagues that has been some sort of Lightning Arrow build. I’ve played this as Raider and Deadeye before, but by far my ascendancy of choice is Champion because it feels significantly more sturdy. I really do not like to die. Lightning Arrow just feels comfy and playing it with as many defensive layers as Champion feels even more comfy. This is the state of the build that I managed to get during Bel League, but once we merged into the trade league I upgraded it significantly even eventually taking it to a Magic Find build with a Headhunter. I never found a mirror like Kodra did, but had a lot of fun blowing up maps while juicing them.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Righteous Fire Chieftain
Since Snaking was not working like intended, I wound up pivoting my Chieftain into Righteous Fire. I had given this build a few attempts during some of the limited-time events from last November and never really could get it into a comfortable place. The problem I think was that I kept trying to gear it like I was going to gear the Juggernaut variant. This time around I pivoted into 90% all res combined with converting as much physical damage to elemental damage as I could. Because of the juicing level of this league, we were getting Lightning Coils to drop like candy, so I colored and linked one of those to get RF up and running on it. I had to wildly overstack Fire Resistance to make up for the -60% Lightning Resistance penalty but it was worth it because damage conversion was the piece I had been missing in previous attempts. This is the state at which I got the build during the semi-SSF Bel League, but I later on upgraded pretty much every slot once we moved into trade. It was comfortable enough that I am very likely going to start this for Necropolis league on Friday. That said it is still nowhere near as good as the previous incarnation of Righteous Fire Juggernaut felt so I am downgrading my rating a bit. This time I am going to build with a Cloak of Flames and see if that improves my opinion at all.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Penance Brand of Dissipation Inquisitor
Penance Brand of Inquisitor was absolutely cracked this league. There have been other wildly overpowered builds in other leagues, that I never really threw my hat in the ring on… and then ultimately later wished I had. I remember the broken state of the totem explode builds during Crucible and wished I had made an attempt at creating one while the “getting was good” as it were. I love brand builds, so when a brand build was wildly overpowered… you know I had to at least try it out. I had so much fun playing this build and I will mourn its loss, because it was just stupid amounts of fun to watch things evaporate. We all knew however that there was no way this build could last any longer than one league. This is the state of the build at which I recorded the above video, and this is the state I got it to at the end of the league. Penance Brand of Dissipation you will be missed.
Personal Rating: S Tier +++
Cold Blade Vortex Elementalist
There are a handful of builds that I have always wanted to try, but never quite got around to building. Blade Vortex is one of these abilities and this wound up being the very last build I made during the league. By the time I set down this path I was already losing steam and as such I never really made it very far with this build, only managing to get to level 76 which for me is barely past the campaign. The playstyle was enjoyable with you essentially freezing entire chunks of the screen at once while your blade vortex rips them to pieces. The problem that I have with the gameplay style is it requires you to maintain stacks of Blade Vortex to be effective, which means every few seconds you are hitting a button to keep a buff up. While not necessarily a bad thing, and no different than repeatedly casting a primary attack… knowing that it was a buff that I was maintaining made it mentally feel like more of a chore. If I had given it the love and care of some of my other builds… and if they had not been quite as fun as they were… this might have been something. I would consider revisiting at a later date, but for the moment it satiated most of my curiosity.
Personal Rating: B Tier
Affliction League
I feel like Affliction League is going to go down as one of the player-favorite leagues, in part just for the sheer amount of loot that it generated. I thought the forest mechanic was really interesting, but more than that I really enjoyed the three new meta ascendancies… though in the end I wound up swapping all of my characters over to the same one because it was very clearly the best option. I will greatly miss my Rucksack because having that little extra bit of swap space was just too damned good. Weirdly though it feels like I was nowhere near as active in this league as I have in previous ones. For Trial of the Ancestors I wound up building nine different characters, and in Crucible I played six different builds. During the entire league, I only recorded three videos which is also a bit off-pace for me. While this was the most manic league for most players… it felt like I checked out a bit earlier than I would have expected.
I am really hyped about the Necropolis league, but also a bit bummed because it seems like I am going to be going into it largely solo. Not that I really played much with my friends, but it was fun to be feeding them gear during the guild bank. Ultimately this will probably mean I just go harder on the trade league since I won’t be specifically saving anything for folks. I am also really interested in the scarab changes and the new crafting mechanic. I feel like combined those are going to lead to a wild league… but admittedly probably one a bit more austere than the previous few have been. I am legitimately okay with that because in truth I don’t really love magic find strategies that much. I would rather quietly toil away in the Delve mines to get my currency.
Anyways! That is the last league and its builds in review. Did you enjoy Affliction league? Are you going to be playing Necropolis league? Drop me a line below.
The post 3.23 Builds in Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
