Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post stating that I thought I was done screwing around with gear on BelToxica my Toxic Rain Pathfinder. So immediately after finishing the post… I started screwing around with her gear again. However, before I dive into that madness I thought I would talk about getting my fourth Delve boss of the league. I’ve yet to find a Crystal King, but I am starting to roam around in the appropriate level bracket to find him. I did find a Primeval Ruins last night so it is only a matter of time before I find a boss. Last night I found another Abyss boss which makes two, and I’ve also found a couple of Vaal bosses and have my sights on a third. Admittedly they are nowhere near as rewarding as the Crystal King, but they are still well worth taking the time to clear. Delve is still very clearly my favorite game mode, but I am also spending quite a bit of time in Heist and unlocked my trinket slot yesterday.
So the biggest change that I immediately made was to spend 2 Divine Orbs buying a Devouring Diadem. The piece of this item that I cared the most about was the fact that it gives me the Eldritch Battery notable because this allowed me to reclaim three passive choices, which I immediately poured into additional survival nodes. I also made the swap from the found chest piece that I had been using to go back to The Restless Ward where I spent a stupid amount of currency getting to six sockets and six links. The big benefit to this swap was that it gives me way more Energy Shield… which effectively gives me a larger pool of mana to cast spells with… allowing me to actually start casting the Divine Blessing version of Malevolence that I have in my build. This alone was a pretty massive damage increase to be rocking temporary damage over time aura. The Diadem also now allows me to run 4 auras at all times… which currently are Grace, Determination, Defiance Banner, and Skitterbots.
Then of course I did not leave well enough alone and dropped the Ming’s Heart I had been using for some extra Chaos Damage and went back to the earlier resist ring that I had equipped and then swapped out my amulet to balance out the missing resistances. This allowed me to drop my resistance quiver and pick up one with some damage stats on it. This then caused me to not have enough strength… so I temporarily have a bench-crafted suffix on the item but my goal is to figure out a way to solve that either by giving up a single passive node on the tree or finding another way to shuffle my gear. Either way, once the strength problem is solved I will swap that out for something that adds damage like attack speed.
The biggest change that I made yesterday thought has absolutely nothing to do with gearing. It seems that I was honestly just playing the build wrong. So up until this point I had been periodically dropping ballista totems and then tapping Toxic Rain every now and then to make sure that my Mirage Archer was casting it constantly. This is great when it comes to mapping clear and lets you zoom through the content with things constantly dying in your wake. However, I was doing the same with bosses… and they were taking forever. It suddenly dawned on me… that I can probably cast Toxic Rain much faster than my Mirage Archer can, and as a test, I started channeling from a safe spot during boss fights… and sure enough that caused the bosses to just evaporate. So my build was always way stronger than I gave it credit for. At some point, I am going to try some bigger bosses on the character to see how quickly I can destroy them.
In other news, I’m just about to kill Kitava for the first time on the Explosive Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer build. I decided to lean into the fire nature of the build and threw on a cosmetic set that I had never wore before on a character. At this point, this is mostly a side project but it is kinda silly how much damage SRS with Minion Instability does for damage. I am looking forward to seeing what I can do with this build once I hit mapping. I’m in a really great place in this league honestly between Righteous Fire Juggernaut which feels indestructible, and Toxic Rain which feels pretty comfy as well. I’m mostly only leveling the Necro because I enjoyed the heck out of SRS last league and I am curious about how it will feel with a pseudo-eight-link helm.
It took me four leagues, but I’ve reached this place of zen with Path of Exile. Again I am sorta sad that I don’t feel like I could really recommend it to new players because the journey I had to make to get to where I am today was pretty daunting. Even then there is so much of the game that I have never even touched. I still only have two of my four void stones for example. I’ve never seen a pinnacle boss really, other than the two easy mode ones you get to quickly in Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds. There are so many league mechanics that I have not really spent any time exploring like Breach, Legion, and Delerium. For the moment though I am very happy with the state of all of my characters.
The post Playing it Wrong appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a blend of doing stuff around the house, running errands, and then devoting as much time as I could to playing some Path of Exile. I’m very much in the “ugly baby” phase with the Toxic Rain Self-Cast/Balista combo. Right now I am leaning on my quiver for a good number of resists… and I would like to NOT do that. This means I either need to get a new amulet, ring, or a combination of both… so that I can drop the resists from the quiver and pick up better damage bonuses. I picked up a reasonable Devouring Diadem which allowed me to reclaim a number of points on the tree by removing the branch that was going off to pick up Eldritch Battery. The proc of Feast of Flesh every 5 seconds also provides some additional healing which is nice.
I recorded another one of my dumb videos showing off what doing Red Maps looks like on this build. It is fairly comfortable, to be honest, but nowhere near the mind-blowing damage that I was essentially led to believe. I think the challenge is that I am still playing what would be considered a “budget” build and if I wanted the big numbers… I would have to pour a lot more currency into the build and ultimately swap up my tree considerably to add more socketed and legendary jewels. I feel like I am doing this juggling act of trying to balance survival since I am used to having that with the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and pushing more damage. Since at this point, I can very comfortably do T16 maps, then I am starting to wonder if I have reached as far as I want to take this class.
The defenses on this build are nowhere near where I would like to see them honestly. I want to see way more evasion, but in order to keep that and keep my resists it would involve me completely changing out almost every single piece of gear I am wearing. I am at least spell suppression capped at the moment, which is adding quite a bit of survival against being shotgunned to death by spells. I think basically I am at the point of being able to do maps fast enough, especially if I am doing white and yellows… which in truth was the entire point of having a build like this in order to funnel suphite into Delve. Maybe I have reached the point where I am done futzing with it and should move on to my dumb ideas build of the Explosive Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer that I started working towards last week.
I mean ultimately the fun in running maps once when you see huge loot explosions, and I do from time to time see dumb loot explosions. I’m also able to fill up my sulphite through mapping relatively quickly so I think maybe Toxic Rain Pathfinder is at its logical conclusion. I don’t think ANY class is going to feel as good to me personally as Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Essentially that tanky gameplay is what I have always craved and still to this day my favorite Diablo III build is Invoker Thorns Crusader, which more or less functions just like Righteous Fire. I think Tornado Shot is probably the closest Path of Exile has to something that feels like the Multishot Demon Hunter, but I’ve always heard that build is rather expensive to get rolling.
As far as Delve goes I am slowly working my way lower. Essentially I am hunting cities and I have had a harder time this league finding them. When not actively popping city nodes I am looking for resonators and fossils, but have yet to find any of the fractured fossils that are so in demand with the crucible mechanic. I think I largely get more joy out of playing the RF Jugg, so if I am going to pour more resources into a build it might be that one. Though again I am very much in a place with that build where in order to increase my damage, I need to significantly restructure how the entire build is working currently. I have set aside a few good crafting bases for spell caster shields, so I might try chasing one of those with a good crucible tree. I’m still looking for a great tree for Sceptre but have yet to find anything better than the meager mess that I am currently using.
I am still very much having fun with the moment-to-moment gameplay, but I do think I am going to focus a lot more of my effort in the coming week to finish leveling the Necromancer and try and bring that Explosive Summon Raging Spirits build online. The big concern I have for that build is how expensive Skin of the Lords is this season. Normally that is what I would go for as my six-link chest. I have a +2 minion gems Tabula Rasa, and might just have to limp along with that until I find something better. The builds that are going for explosive SRS seem to be favoring a Cloak of Flames for the chest but a lot of those also seem to be using Formless Inferno and I was planning on doing my pseudo-eight-link with the helmet. Which makes me think I am going out into some undiscovered territory at the moment. It should be interesting to see if I can make this build functional at all. For the moment I am loosely following this POB.
The post Ugly Baby Build Phase appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We start the show with some extemporaneous discussion about Bel and his Three-Legged Backyard Feral Calico Cat… and how she ran away for a month and is now back. From there we talk a bit about Last Epoch finally managing to nail down hotbar management for transformation skills. Bel talks a bit about how free-to-play games have ruined things and that there are folks balking at the $35 price tag of Last Epoch. Ash and Bel are still playing a lot of Path of Exile and Bel talks about rolling into his second build of the league featuring Toxic Rain Pathfinder. Tam talks about mods for Half-Life Alyx that allows you to play the game without VR. From there we talk about Battletech: Mercenaries Kickstarter and how everyone seems to be shocked at how well it has done. We talk a bit about Gunfire Reborn and how good of a game it is to play with friends. We also talk a bit about the Stellaris Co-Op Beta and how it functions. Finally, we wrap up with a bit of discussion about the Dungeons and Dragons Movie.
Good Morning Friends! It is another morning and another post about assorted Path of Exile nonsense. Last night I managed to get up to the point of fighting the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds, which means I am effectively at the same point I closed out the last league with two void stones collected. I made attempts at Uber Elder but failed miserably in the last league. Effectively to get the next two void stones I will need to beat Uber Elder and then take down Maven with her memory game. I remember limping across the finish line in both Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds last league, but I defeated both without taking any deaths this time around.
I think the key difference is that my defenses are just much stronger this league than they were last. I am sitting at 90% fire resistance which combined with the rest of my defensive layers allowed me to just stand in most of the mechanics during the Searing Exarch. There is a phase in the fight where you have to dodge a bunch of incoming fireballs. I was too busy paying attention to the fight to take a screenshot, but here is one that I found online. In my current defensive posture… I could just stand there and ignore the fireballs entirely letting them hit me and explode without taking anywhere close to fatal damage. I figure if enough of them had hit me directly at the same time it might have knocked me out, but I at least dodged around enough to make sure I was only getting hit by one or two at a time.
The best-laid plans sometimes fail miserably… and for me, it was the fact that I thought I would be able to use the “no life modifiers” passive with my Brass Dome. It turns out that the negative life modifier of losing health from strength… knocks that chest piece out of the running. This means in order to use it… I am just going to lose some regeneration and total life. Here is what my defenses look like after the swap of some gear around losing some overcap fire res, some raw regeneration, and some raw health… but gaining permanent 90% physical damage reduction and crit immunity. In truth it isn’t really something that I notice so long as I am not eating some sort of degeneration effect, and across the board I just feel like my health bar almost never moves.
While making some gear swaps, I decided to get myself a budget pseudo-six-link helm. Traditionally for this play, you want level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but those helms are a bit out of my price range with the worst options sitting around 2 Divine Orbs and the best option available at 50. What I did instead is go for the arguably worse but still valid Less Duration, and I was able to pick up the helm shown above for 5 Chaos Orbs. I had to adjust sockets, chrome, and link it but I did so easily with the bench craft socket recipe. This gear swap takes the damage calculation in POB for my Fire Trap from just under 500 DPS to right at 1 million DPS. This was immediately noticeable and since I only really use Fire Trap during burn phases or while circle-strafing a boss… the spammy nature of less duration doesn’t really bother me.
One of the things I do each league is set aside the first white socketed weapons that I get for the purpose of “muling” gems in my secondary weapon slots. Last league I found a six-socketed white staff which was nice, and this time around I happened upon a pair of 3 socketed one-handed maces. It doesn’t really matter what you use, but I find white sockets handy for swapping up whatever gems I happen to want to level. Yesterday I finished my first project which was leveling 6 Righteous Fire gems to 20… doing the vendor recipe to swap them for 20% quality level 1 gems… and then level them again and corrupt them. I lucked out and managed to get 2 of the level 21 20% quality gems that I was seeking, and now have started “muling” some Fire Trap gems to hopefully do the same. I could in theory just buy the damned things, but this is simple enough and I kill more than enough mobs to level the gems pretty efficiently.
I think the next big project for me is to try and find a Sceptre base with a good Crucible tree… and then attempt to craft myself something with +1 gems and all of the assorted fire stats that I care about. Before then I might be shopping for some slightly better resist rings and attempting to use those to gain some more health and regeneration. Now that I understand the basics of a build, I am finding I enjoy the little project aspect of the game as I try and improve various weaknesses of my build. Right now I am trying to figure out how to deal more damage without giving up the tanky nature that I crave so much.
The post Two Voidstones Down appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
