Good Morning Folks! Sorry for never actually getting around to writing anything yesterday… I am going through a bit of a thing. Later today will mark us having the new Affliction League in Path of Exile for a week, and I thought I would spend some time this morning giving my thoughts as a whole on the changes. As of writing this, I am level 93 and can easily do T16 maps and am around the 100 to 150 range in delve farming content there. First I have to say I am very pleased with Boneshatter and this has been one of my most part one of my smoothest transitions from leveling to mapping and to the proper endgame. I still have some relatively scuffed gear, but I feel completely viable and while I am sure I would be stronger in a trade league environment it has been perfect cromulent for “solo-self-found” gameplay.
For those who care about such things, here are screenshots of my offensive and defensive screens inside of POE. I would dump a POB… but it seems like Boneshatter of Complex Trauma is not recognized yet and comes across as complete nonsense. This is one of the challenges of having such a major shift in the meta… all of the tools that we use to help us make better sense of the game are all lagging behind. What matters more than anything is that it feels good to play, but I just noticed this morning that I am inching precariously close to the accuracy cap health-wise, which means my free 40% damage multiplier will break if I cross that line by even one point. I might need to see if I can find a single point on the tree that gives me some more accuracy because I really do not want to go back to running precision if I can help it.
As far as the bit meta shake-up and changes in all of the active skill gems go… I think there is more positive here than negative. Sure it killed my favorite character archetype… the Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but RF still is alive and kicking in the form of an Inquisitor Energy Shield/Life Stacking build and the new weird Mana RF build that is starting to spring up on Hierophant. Neither is really what I want, but I am happy that mechanically the playstyle still lives on even though it no longer does for me. What we gained in return is a bunch of really interesting-looking abilities that I want to try building around like Volcanic Fisure of Snaking which sort of casts a line of snaking explosions on the ground that look something vaguely similar to an Abyss tunnel. While I don’t think most of the community has really had a chance to test out all of the new playstyles, I think we are going to see some extremely interesting builds emerge as a result.
The big mechanic for Affliction League is the Viridian Wildwoods which is a delve-like exploration mechanic where you venture forth into the mists while wisps burn away the taint of evil. Out in the mists are all manner of encounters including NPCs that will teach you one of three new ascendancy classes that you can gain on top of your normal one. Essentially they boil down to “Fun with Flasks”, “Fun with Corpses”, and “DIY Scion” each with their own chase-perfected versions of items that you can equip that are gained through completing Viridian Wildwoods in various tiers of content. The Wildwoods themselves are extremely enjoyable and when you exit them, they give you a Sentinel-like mechanic that randomly juices content in the map making them drop massive amounts of loot while also scaling the difficulty significantly.
There are videos showing the sheer nonsense that can happen when you combine the Wildwoods with existing 100% Delirium juicing strategies… but you don’t even need to really do that to feel the impact. The above screenshot was taken from a white map, after having completed the wildwoods and them doing a SINGLE ritual altar after having defeated an Essence Beast that was in range of it. This is not even showing the real scope of how much loot there was… because there were strings of loot popups that expanded past the borders of the map. This league has forced me to crank up the strictness of my loot filter because it produces way more loot than I could ever sort through. Legitimately it might be one of my favorite league mechanics they have come up with but also feel it might be a bit too strong to go into standard.
The three ascendancies are each strong in their own way but somewhat suffer from the “only three good picks” problem that Chieftain does currently. Since I am melee class, it felt like the natural synergy of tinctures was perfect for me to go with. Essentially due to my ascendancy, I have nearly 100% uptime on the flasks on either side of the tincture. It has also made me shift up my playstyle a bit for example I am using Warlord’s Mark instead of Vulnerability because it synergizes with Detect Evil which makes it so that my hits against marked targets cannot be blocked or suppressed. The problem is I am not exactly sure what I want for my 4th choice. I will likely go Wildwood Blessing as it gives me Barkskin a powerful 25% reservation defensive layer and I really don’t want to give up additional flask slots or remove gems from my gear to benefit from the other two options. What is awesome is I could shift things up and go for the Primalist ascendancy and have equally compelling options. I am definitely calling this system a massive win.
So that is essentially three wins in a row… so let’s talk about a massive “L”. Let’s start off first by stating… that I did not play the Ultimatum league and as a result, I had no nostalgia for it… and that I also enjoyed Metamorph quite a bit and regularly mixed it into my Altas tree. So far Ultimatum seems like a shitty replacement for Metamorph. The rewards are just not great and feel like a greatest hits collection of the shittiest loot you ever got from the corrupted strongbox atlas node with the occasional small stack of currency of catalysts. The thing is… the negative effects can be rather rippy and you can see in the above screenshot what it looks like when you complete all 10 rounds and get a stack of your loot. Nothing in that pile was really worth the time it took me to complete the encounter. I would like to see some data collected from folks who went all in on the Ultimatum atlas tree options, but with zero investment it really isn’t even worth my time.
The other big change for me personally has been the advent of “Bel League” where I gathered together with some close friends and started a private Path of Exile trade league. This has given us a mostly SSF gameplay experience with the ability to share some really good items when we find them. I would say this has been a massive win because it allowed us to bypass a lot of the day-one weirdness as we were limiting ourselves to a very small pool of players. It has also been a lot of fun as random loot we might not be interested in, could be useful for someone else out there playing a wildly different build. I’ve had a lot of fun earmarking assorted loot for my friends and also churning out raw currency for crafting. It is making me realize just how much of the “wealth” I generated last league came from the trade economy because I have rather anemic stacks of chaos and only a single divine orb thus far.
This has also caused me to shift up my Atlas strategy a bit and am actually mixing in Essence and Harvest for the raw crafting potential that each provides. I’ve also just picked up some assorted nodes to increase the drop chance of adjacent maps since I cannot buy my way out of issues when it comes to mapping. I am going to have to find all of my maps the old-fashioned way… which is running maps that connect to the empty slot and hoping for some good luck. I am more than over-sustaining the total number of maps that I am getting and have filled the guild bank with fodder for those coming up the rungs and just starting to enter the endgame. So in total, this has given me a bit different looking Atlas than I normally would have at this point but I am enjoying myself. Once I complete all of the normal maps I will be popping back through and pruning some of the branches a bit to most likely go into either a Red or Blue Altar strategy.
As far as Atlas progress goes I have slowed down considerably because the nodes that I need are a bit harder to find as drops. I need most of the unique maps and quite a few of the higher tier red maps to complete out my 115 of 115 as I currently sit at 95. I did complete my first two “easy” voidstones yesterday, and I am not sure if I will mess around too much with going beyond that. I don’t really like bossing in Path of Exile and it does not bring me the joy that it seems to for Kodra, so I am not sure if I will feel like the grind that is required to get even an attempt at Maven or Uber Elder. Were I in the trade environment I would probably just buy a carry. Honestly, I am not even sure how much I care about getting all maps dropping at t16 for the purpose of this league. It has been pretty chill to grab a yellow map and run the league mechanic on it, without it really escalating the difficulty too highly.
I think that is my rundown of Affliction League so far. I would say that overwhelmingly this is a good league. I will forever miss my Righteous Fire Juggernaut shenanigans but I am pretty happy with where I am in Boneshatter land. It isn’t anywhere near as immortal, but also kills things much faster…. without feeling like a squishy mess so I will call that a net positive. I am certain it could feel much better if I were able to upgrade some of my gear to add spell suppressions as a more reliable defensive layer. Similarly, I would probably try and slide in some “damage taken as X” mechanics to smooth things out a bit. I would also really like to have way more health but for being sub 4000, it still feels pretty great.
So essentially… I am really pleased with both the experiment of “Bel League” and the Affliction league as a whole and especially how much progress I have made in a little less than a week.
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Good Morning Folks! I think I have arrived at the point with Boneshatter where I am really starting to love it. I mean it kinda feels amazing to swing a big axe and watch things explode around me. I absolutely get why this build has been so popular for as long as it has. That somewhat concerns me however given how stable Righteous Fire was for years… and then was suddenly changed fairly drastically. Yesterday I swapped over to Boneshatter of Complex Trauma and got it raised to 20% quality through the Labyrinth. Essentially this is a Boneshatter that ramps much faster but resets when you hit 10 stacks. So this is probably a DPS loss for bossing, but seems to be a massive boost for mapping as most engagements do not last terribly long. I would imagine it is probably also good for boss fights where you need to move around constantly as you won’t hit the reset point quite as quickly.
I saw a noticeable spike in damage when I swapped gems, so at least for me… it seems to be the right call. I am not sure if that will be the case for everyone, however. I still could use a much better axe and my gear is still quite a bit scuffed. I am not running a six-link and would ultimately like to find a chest so that I can put all of my utility stuff in a six-red-socket axe. There are a lot of gems that I am just not using right now. For example, I have Purity of Elements, Grace, and Pride all vying for my last reservation aura slot. Grace is just silly because it allows me to arrive at some extremely high armor levels. Purity of Elements I was using for a bit when I was not capped, and then Pride seems to be what I use most of the time. Thing is… I’ve never unsocketed the gems I am not using which means there is a lot of room to grow my build. At some point, I will shift Blood Rage to a Cast when Damage Taken setup along with Vaal Molten Shell if I can ever find one.
As far as progress goes, I completed my white and yellow maps yesterday which only leaves some red and unique maps to hit my 115. I am sitting at 84 bonus objectives completed which means between yesterday morning and today I managed to pick up 19 new ones. Something new that I learned is that apparently, Delve can drop maps that you do not have access to otherwise. I always thought the maps form Delve followed the logic of needing to drop connecting to some other map that you had already completed. However yesterday I picked up several red maps that were disconnected from everything else. So I guess maybe that is a point for rushing down into Delve earlier than I would have thought. The rest were picked up through the three to one vendor map crafting recipe especially to fill out the remaining yellow maps that I had not seen.
Another thing that I did not realize… is that apparently you can get Awakened gems while Maven is witnessing a fight. I always knew that you could get them from Maven’s Crucible encounters where you fight things that she had witnessed, but I did not know that the sheer act of her witnessing a fight could drop them. I feel like even then, this is probably a unicorn moment and I will likely never see another one of these. It was already pretty rare to get them from the 8 ways, and I am sure it is even rarer still to get them from a map. I do wonder if the atlas keystone that makes extra bosses show up when doing a witnessed map causes the drop rate to increase. Admittedly I am also running with WAY MORE rarity support than I normally do due to those wild rings I showed off yesterday. I might be seeing things on the drop table that I would not normally see without running a specific Magic Find character.
Speaking of unicorn moments, I also got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop down in Delve. Normally speaking I would sell this because I can use the 3 divines that they often are way more than I can the crap unique that is sure to drop. Ace had not seen one of these so I streamed briefly over Discord opening it. Shocking to no one I got a crap unique, but it was at least a reasonably well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble. Were it not for the slight amount of reduced quantity I would probably use it or suggest someone else use it. It would have been hilarious though if I had gotten something like a mageblood given that I am in a private league. Currency and expensive item drops don’t mean quite as much as they normally do since what matters most is the crafting value of an item.
I am legitimately having way more fun than I thought I might playing Boneshatter. I was in pretty heavy mourning for Righteous Fire and while the build is still technically viable it is a bit of a shadow compared to its former self at least for Juggernaut. I spent some time playing around with my well-geared RF Jugg from last league and it is still absolutely viable for mapping and honestly most content… but I kill things noticeably slower. I could probably shift up my build a bit to stack more life, which would then give me much more Righteous Fire damage but would probably mean I would be losing Fire Trap damage in the process. I assume at some point we will let our characters go into Trade League and when that happens I plan on devoting some effort into tweaking my Boneshatter build to see just how good an optimally geared one feels. In the meantime though I am having a freaking blast bashing things and making them explode.
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This morning’s post is almost entirely thanks to SirGog a YouTuber who does an admirable job of providing Path of Exile information and largely just getting straight to the facts or data-influenced predictions. I am writing a blog post about today’s spoilers because they represent a whole order of nonsense. Essentially tomorrow is the big reveal stream for the Affliction League and generally speaking in the days leading up to this stream, we start seeing spoilers from the community staff at Grinding Gear Games. This league has been a bit odd, and the spoiler started later than normal… and have been not terribly forthcoming with information. This could be caused by many different things, not the least of which could be that this is the first spoiler season since the departure of long-term community manager Bex.
To this point we have had a Divination Card spoiled, and some general quality of life changes like the ability to split stacks of currency in the trade window. We’ve also received notice that Trial of the Ancestors league would not be going into standard, and that all of the uniques associated with that league save for the ones that have specific interactions with the tattoo mechanic would be going into the general “drop anywhere” unique pool. Players have focused heavily on the specific wording of this notice “Trial of the Ancestors won’t be going core in 3.23” as a sign that we might be seeing some of these mechanics returning later. I would honestly be shocked if we do not see the Trial in some form because it seemed like it was a huge amount of work to make that content and tattoos as a mechanic were really interesting.
Yesterday/This Morning because timezones are nonsense… Grinding Gear Games released a relatively innocuous image that I have edited to highlight a few things. Firstly the obvious “spoiler” is showing that there is going to be a nice quality of life change that indicates how many character slots you have on your account and how many you have available. Given that I have reached the point where I have to start deleting my characters… this is a good change. What is less than obvious are the two character names. Firstly it was pointed out that those names are too specific to be a community manager banging away at the keyboard. As SirGog states in his video, try typing them and you will see just how awkward it would be to arrive at them by random chance.
This led to speculation and eventually a solution presented by Neversink the dedicated person behind the best series of loot filters for Path of Exile. It was a Caesar Cypher, where you essentially shift the characters by a fixed set of letters to get the original message… in this case an 8-character shift. The end result gives you the message “IWONDER INALTESSENTIALS” which sort of screams Anagram. After many attempts including some rather rude ones… Neversink landed on “Sentinels Atlas Win or Die” which folks are taking to mean that Sentinels are going standard, that Affliction is going to have an Atlas Rework of some sort, and that Ultimatum league is going standard as well.
I admit I did not fully understand what players meant about Ultitmatum coming back, because in patch 3.19 GGG gave us the ability to collect a bunch of nonsense from Vaal activities in order to summon the Trial Master. I’ve done this a few times because one of the rarest items required drops down in Delve. However. since I did not play in this league, I did not realize that there was an in-map component to it as well. I gotta say I am kinda excited about the prospects of something like this permanently getting added to the game. I assume there will be Atlas support for both Sentinels and the Ultimatum Trial encounter, and that the Trial Master will still exist as a weird Vaal crafting recipe.
Sentinels and Ultimatum Trials would already be an awful lot of new content added to the game, but I can’t see that GGG won’t have something new and unique for Affliction. I still think that we are going to see some sort of Ritual rework as part of this patch cycle because the trailer clearly shows a ritual totem. I am definitely looking forward to the stream tomorrow where they announce the full features of the league. If you can tune in tomorrow the stream will start at 12:30 PM PST and drops will be available until 9:30 PM PST featuring a set of Huntsman Wings. Funny enough Diablo 4 is having a stream just ahead of the Path of Exile proceedings where they are going to talk about the upcoming additional changes to Season 2.
I am amped to see what all the Affliction League is going to entail, and I am also bracing myself for some nerfs… specifically to Guardian.
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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bit of a mixed bag of activities. I was back in Path of Exile and spent some time on my SRS Guardian. After playing a lot of my Storm Brand Build and Shield Crush Build… it honestly felt amazing to be back on this character. The strength levels of that build are just so much higher and honestly for so much less investment. I fear that this is going to mean that Guardian eats a few swings from the nerf bat before 3.23. If it remains intact, however, I am contemplating this as a league starter for the next go-around. You would have thought I had learned my lesson to stop trying to start something other than Righteous Fire, but legitimately… SRS Guardian feels equally as good and it reached a point of power way faster than RF usually does.
I spent a bit of the evening cleaning out monster parts from my stash tab. One of the things that I like about having Metamorph on my Atlas tree is that I am somewhat passively gaining monster bits and then can have an hour or so of constant fights in Tane’s chambers. Mostly I shifted to running Metamorph because the prices of catalysts are outrageous in this league. 20 Prismatic Catalysts to quality up a single resistance ring has been around 400 Chaos Orbs, which feels way too rich for my blood. There is also the side benefit that I have had pretty decent luck in getting raw Divine Orbs to drop from stomping monsters.
Another thing that I had some exceptional luck with, is that last night I saw three Voidborn Reliquary Keys. I sold two of these and decided to open one because it is always fun to gamble a little bit. While most folks seem to open these chasing a Mageblood or a Headhunter, I am honestly fine with anything else interesting that just happens to be shiny. Last night I pulled what I had honestly wanted all of this time… a Shiny Tabula Rasa. This will let me twink characters in style going forward… though honestly I am not sure how many more builds I am going to make this league.
I spent most of my evening down in Delve, slowly crawling my way across the randomized map. This really is my happy place when it comes to Path of Exile. I was chilled out sitting on the sofa with my laptop, a cat to my side, and listening to an audiobook. I found all three reliquary keys down in Delve last night, and to be truthful… most of them that I have found for the last few leagues all came from Delve. That makes sense because statistically, I am doing way more delve than I am doing any other content. I’m loosely looking for Fire-themed nodes because while I have a decent enough Flammability On Hit ring for the Shield Crush Chieftain, I could always use a slightly better itemized one. I’m also hunting for the parts for precursor rings because those are selling extremely well in this league.
Speaking of sales… the reliquary keys and a few other divine orb drops have helped me recover from the significant outlay of currency that I spent kitting out the Shield Crush Chieftain. I’ve started using POEStack to track my currency since Exilience Next appears to be toast at the moment. In truth, I think I like having a web app way more than a stand-alone desktop client. Additionally, if I ever do start selling on TFT, I will at least be very familiar with the interface. I know that I will probably spend most of that before I gather much more, because I seem to always be funding the next idea that I want to play. I still want to try something with cyclone, but that seems to be always on the far horizon and not something that I am actively doing.
The last thing I guess I will talk a bit about this morning is that I finished up The Final Empire the first book in the initial Mistborn Trilogy. It took me forever to read anything by Brandon Sanderson, but now that I have… I understand what all the hype has been about. The world that he built and the characters in it were deeply enjoyable. I know without a doubt that I am going to be consuming the next two books in rapid order. I really enjoyed the way magic worked in this world and I look forward to seeing how the character of Vin continues to evolve. There is this whole part Shinobi part Jedi thing going on that I dig and I genuinely like a lot of the background characters as well.
I think tonight I will probably be back in Diablo III, working on chipping away at some more of the seasonal achievements. While I am enjoying myself there, I don’t find the gameplay anywhere near as compelling as Path of Exile. It is a heck of a lot of fun, but the dopamine hits are nowhere near as potent.
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