Good Morning Folks. Yesterday I made the swap over to the Dawnbreaker that I talked about picking up cheaply yesterday and I have to say… it is complete nonsense. Basically I have 100% of all physical damage taken as fire damage, and then that gets reduced by 90% fire resistance. On top of that damage that I take from hits… triggers Defiance of Destiny causing me to recoup 24% of my missing unreserved life before the hit damage is calculated. Then on top of that 20% of my Lightning and Cold damage is taken as Fire… meaning that damage is reduced by my 88% resistance to the base element, then 20% of it is reduced again by my 90% fire resistance. Essentially I feel as tanky as I have ever felt in this game and can pretty much just stand and soak most attacks. Example I took out an Ahuatotli, the Blind at around 180 depth and normally there are two attacks that I would dodge out of… the skeleton thing and the ball of blood and I was able to just stand in both without really taking any damage.
Given that I am gaining a ton of resistance from my permanent flasks… I did the degenerate thing and dropped as much Lightning and Cold resistance from my gear as I could. This means I had to find new rings that only have Fire and Chaos resistance on them. This means I am running around over 450% Fire Resistance which then is getting converted straight into regeneration due to my fire mastery, allowing me to gain back the regen that I lost by swapping shields and dropping my Immortal Flesh. One of the rings was missing a prefix so I attempted a Warlord slam on it, but wound up with nothing special. Basically I am overcapped on all of my resistances to be able to eat an Elemental Weakness and still be perfectly capped, so it is only really minus res and minus regen maps that I have to worry about.
In other more important news… I can stop my constant grind of t14 of better rare maps because as of this morning I hit the 200 map sub-achievement. Now all I need to do is finish my push to level 100 in order to knock out Gear Grinding Goals. As of this morning I think I am 59% of the way through 99 towards 100, and at this point it is all super slow going. I have a tank full of delve juice so I should be able to make a pretty solid dent in that tonight. Mapping is really when the experience gain slows down because I get so much less experience off your average t16 map… and t17s are too rippy to risk taking a death. While I am in delve I can consistently keep up the mob level and gain some decent experience in the process.
This is quite possibly the Righteous Fire variant that I have had the most fun with in awhile. Its initial problem was that it just was not quite as tanky as the Chieftain version. However now that I got 90% fire resistance and got my other elements to 88% all of that tankyness came back. Adding the Mageblood and Defiance of Destiny were honestly overkill, but what else am I going to spend currency on. I admit I am going to be super sad when this character poofs on April 23rd. I assume at that point this character turns into a normal Scion… and Ascendant is not going to have access to the fun toys that Scavenger did. I think more than anything that is what has been pushing me to play quite a bit, because I know that all of this fun is going away sooner rather than later. I wish GGG would simply extend the Legacy of Phrecia event all the way to the launch of 3.26… but they want people to give a shit about their shiny new toy, Path of Exile II.
In other news… Discord continues to be an application that is attempting to gobble up more and more of our attention. They rolled out some shiny new version of the game overlay… and as such force re-enabled it for everyone. This is not the first time they have done this, so fair warning that if you are like me… and disabled that shit ages ago… you are going to have to do it again. This time they want to know WHY you are disabling the overlay… and I gave them what they wanted my truthful reasoning. This might just be Old Man Bel, but I fucking hate when what used to be a simple application… keeps trying to grab more and more of your attention. I use Discord as a chat program. It is a ubiquitous method of communicating between my game playing friends, and also a decent enough way to organize around various topics. I do not want it to be the uber application that consumes all of my time… nor do I want it popping over the top of the games I am playing. I have my phone set to silent for a reason… I hate notifications. Legitimately… kindly fuck off.
Anyways Grumpy Bel over…. I hope you are all having a great day in spite of that admonishment. I am curious to see what GGG announces for Path of Exile II tomorrow, given that it seems like their presentation is going to run two hours.
The post Mappers have Mapped appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning folks. We are on the cusp of a new Last Epoch and Path of Exile II league and I cannot stop playing the Legacy of Phrecia event. What is probably even more wilds is that I think right now, there are more Path of Exile players than Path of Exile II players. It is really hard to prove this however because the majority of POE players do not use the Steam client. I switched to the standalone client some leagues ago because there is almost always a delay in league start because of the patch having to go through the Steam QC checks. However the 24 hour peak for POE2 is 35,015 and for POE1 21,117 and in the past they have stated than less than half of the players use the Steam client. Anyways I would believe it given how much trade volume I am seeing in small 20c trades. I can’t complete a map without someone pinging me for an item, which is way more active than a league normally is a month into it.
One of the things that I am chipping away at is the Gear Grinding Goals challenge for successfully running 200 t14 or higher rare maps to 100% completion. In truth I never really spent much time on the mappers when Settlers of Kalguur launched, but have seemingly hit my stride. I should probably finish upgrading my mappers all the way to level 10s, but for now I seem to be able to complete maps pretty solidly. I upgraded my last two voidstones over the weekend and as such I have a backlog of lower tier maps to consume, now that I only really care about t16s. As of this morning I have 50 more maps to go, and then I am sitting at level 99 and am mostly grinding out level 100. Getting this challenge won’t really move the needle and I will need to figure out something else to do to get another totem upgrade. I am hoping that I will actually encounter Sasan now that I am actively running mappers so I can knock out one of those associated achievements.
The thing about keeping your mappers running all the time is that you can also keep your disenchanter going pretty much all the time. More than that however they occasionally return some really nice stuff. I’ve gotten several 21/20 gems and while I did not have the mental fortitude to actually snap a screenshot of it… they brought me a Hinekora’s Lock. Admittedly when I got this, I did not realize the windfall that it actually was. I’ve gotten these to drop before during the Ancestors league and back then it was maybe 20 Divines. I was able to sell mine for 140 Divines. The Reddit regularly has pictures of folks having their mappers bring back a Mirror of Kalandra or even a Mageblood.
The only problem with getting a huge amount of currency this late in the league… is that I pretty much have already upgraded everything that I really needed for my build. I could of course have bought a Mageblood, and technically still can given that a reasonably well rolled one is going for roughly 110 Divines. However when it comes to chase uniques… I have always felt like my favorite is Headhunter. This is a belt that I have used many times on bow builds to help buff up both my damage output and my survival while mapping. However I have never actually used one on a Righteous Fire build… and in truth it would also solve another problem that I have been having in that I could not really juggle my stats in order to add in a Defiance of Destiny. So I spent 10 div on a well rolled Headhunter and 10 div on a well rolled Defiance and have been playing with both for funsies.
I lost quite a bit of regeneration but still have around 1300 health per second which is still enough to maintain righteous fire without any issues. However in general I have been able to hit nowhere near the numbers I am used to as Chieftain where I am only stacking Fire Resistance and can hit something around 2000 health per second. Basically Headhunter just makes any other build feel better as you are effectively getting a ton of buffs any time you kill rare monsters. The best of these is of course Soul Eater… and the worst is the one that gives you a Flicker Strike like effect that teleports you to the nearest rare monster. However since I care about being up close and personal with things… the flicker strike nonsense is way less harmful than it is with a glass cannon bow build. The only time it gets really dangerous is when I am delving… and it decides to teleport me out into the darkness.
Earlier I said that I did not initially buy a MageBlood, but could afford one anyways… so this morning I decided to go ahead and do that. I am not one of those people where the acquisition of money in general is an endgame unto itself. Currency in Path of Exile is only useful in that I can buy things with it that I will likely never actually see drop on their own. I am legitimately not sure what Mageblood number this is now… but I think my third? I think it might be my sixth Headhunter, and fourth Defiance of Destiny… because of all of the Tier 0 rarity uniques that is the only one that I think I have seen drop on its own. I am legitimately contemplating swapping over to a resistance flask setup because that would give me close to 90% fire resistance and around 85% for all of the other resistances. Regardless having a Mageblood gives me more options than NOT having a Mageblood.
Long story short… Legacy of Phrecia has been a pretty great event for me as a whole.
The post Blowing Divines for Science appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Rock Bottom Prices appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
