Good Morning Folks! I am going to warn you that this post is going to get a little bit into the weeds on Path of Exile and the trade economy. One of the hallmarks of the last two leagues is how much I have interacted with Trade. The YouTuber/Streamer Jorgen set me down the path of Delve because as he puts it “Delve Provides” and it most certainly does when it comes to a good number of things that can be sold for reasonable value. Items have value in Path of Exile if they are either scarce, come from a particular source, or are a combination of the two. Delve is not what you would call well-loved by the majority of the player base. Mapping is by far the most popular method of play because folks like blasting through maps and seeing explosions of loot. Comparatively, Delve tends to be a bit more slow and methodical.
Delve sees you focus on plotting a course across the underground map looking for high-value nodes. For example in this screenshot above there are six Abyssal City nodes, 2 Fossil nodes, and 1 Fire node which are all things I would seek out specifically. Abyssal City nodes have a number of chests inside that all reward a bunch of useful things and can provide dozens of maps for example on a single node. Fossil nodes have a chance of spawning rare and expensive nodes like the Glyphic Fossil that goes for around 130 Chaos each. Fire nodes and more specifically all elemental nodes have a chance of dropping items that can only be found in delve like curse on hit rings and specific damage conversion items. Delve is really good at producing items that when sold add up to lots of Chaos, but not terribly great at producing raw Divine Orbs.
Traditionally I have avoided currency conversion because it is tedious. Last league for example I wound up with roughly 12,000 Chaos Orbs or the equivalent of over 52 Divine Orbs that just sat there taking up space in my bank. Generally speaking the method for converting currency is to use the Bulk Trade tool on the official Path of Exile website. In truth, it is pretty straight forward. On one side you outline the bulk currency that you are looking for, and on the other side, you fill in which currency you want to pay in. Then the trade site returns you a group of listings of folks willing to accept your currency for the currency you need and what sort of exchange rate they are willing to trade at.
Here is an example listing when I searched for Divine Orbs for Chaos Orbs. The first listing is very clearly someone who does not understand the trade syntax because no one is trying to give you 237 Divine Orbs for a Single Chaos. The second listing looks like someone trying to bring down the cost of Divines and as a result is very unlikely to respond. From 225 Chaos to a Divine down… those are probably legitimate posts. The reality however is that in order for me to actually find a seller, I would likely have to go through the entire page sending a tell… waiting for a response… and then moving to the next person. This is the sad reality of buying items in bulk because quite honestly… being able to handle a bulk trade is tedious. You need to empty out your inventory of items and then prepare to accept the trade. Given how little luck I have had buying Divines, I just generally left my Chaos in the raw form and begged people to accept Chaos instead of Divines when I needed to buy something.
I’ve credited Jorgen for really stoking my interest in Delve. It was a game mode that I enjoyed, but I never really viewed it as a reliable source of currency generation until watching a few of his videos. His slogan is “Delve Provides” but in reality, my slogan should probably be “Jorgen Provides”. About a week ago he released this video talking about how he exchanges Chaos for Divines and it is fairly brilliant. Sadly to do it efficiently you really need a second currency tab. Last weekend thanks to the predictable cadence of Path of Exile sales saw another Stash Tab weekend, and I picked up a second currency tab almost exclusively for the purpose of selling bulk currency. Since then I have made several bulk trades and it has really changed the game for me on how I view the trade economy.
Essentially the logic is that you want to be the seller as often as humanly possible, and very rarely the buyer. Buying gear is relatively straightforward, and you have fairly good luck with that. Buying currency in bulk is a miserable mess. You could of course lean on something like The Forbidden Trove, but that is a bridge I have not really been willing to cross yet. Per Jorgen, I started listing 1880 Chaos Orbs for 5 Divine Orbs, and it is shocking just how fast I get pinged by someone looking to buy Chaos for Divines. There is a certain push and pull of the economy between folks who hold currency in Divines and folks who hold currency in Chaos Orbs. My preferred game mode of choice produces lots of raw Chaos, and I need Divines just to make larger trades a bit more simplistic. Being able to sell Chaos in bulk means I have a very simple way of doing the swap without needing to rely on spam messaging a dozen folks to find a single nibble.
Once I knew this was a thing, I noticed that there is a heck of a lot of players out there trying to take this stance. If you search on the bulk trade side for 1 Divine Orb, without any selection on your input currency you end up with a wealth of random bulk items that folks are looking to acquire. So now that I have a spare currency stash tab, that opens things up like if I know I need to buy something in bulk I can throw a Divine in that tab and price it out in the currency I am looking to receive. So for example if I want Orbs of Fusing to six link something the going rate for that seems to be around 1220 fusing to 1 Divine Orb. The challenge with this however is that you can only hold a total of 1200 fusing in your inventory. This means you need to be VERY careful about trades that require you to produce more than a single inventory because it is essentially on the honor system for them to trade you the rest of your goods. It is far safer just to expect that you are going to lose a little bit of currency in the transaction.
I’ve been using that second currency tab to facilitate a bunch of sales lately. I’ve sold off bulk Awakened Sextants, Silver Coins for the league content, and even started selling my Stacked Decks. More importantly, any time I hit around 3000 Chaos Orbs, I sell off another 1880 for 5 Divines meaning that I am never really at risk of either running out of Chaos for small trades or flooding my stash tab with bulk Chaos. In theory, I am sure there is someone out there doing the other side of this trade for Mirror Shards and eventually Mirrors to keep condensing down their currency into larger and larger “denominations”. I’ve made and spent more Divine Orbs in this league than I have in the past, and I really wish I had been using some sort of tool to track this more closely. For example, the above screenshot is from a website called POEStack which can be used to track your currency tabs. I think going forward and for new leagues, I might utilize this a bit earlier so I can get some proper statistics for the league as a whole.
I know however that I am leaving a lot of currency on the table because while I am a member of The Forbidden Trove, I’ve never actually used it for any trades. I’ve been here for a couple of leagues now because I wanted to see how that side of the community lives. Essentially if you can’t sell it easily through the trade site, there is a channel devoted to it. For example, if you want to liquidate a bunch of Heist contracts in bulk… they got you covered. If you want one of the rare hideouts that can only be found every so often in specific maps… there is a channel for folks selling access to their party so that you can pop in and discover the hideout. If you need Betrayal in a very specific state so that you can do one of the rare crafts, there are folks selling those as well. All of it is above board, and governed by a reputation system… but has just been too much for me to wrap my head around. However, I can see myself sliding into that community as I continue to dive deeper and deeper into the trade economy.
Path of Exile really is the EVE Online of ARPGs… where the further you dive into it the deeper the well keeps getting. While I have no real interest in playing EVE, I have always appreciated when my friend Wilhelm talks about that community. I am hoping someone out there feels the same way about my Path of Exile nonsense, because otherwise… I am deeply sorry I keep filling your RSS reader with this nonsense. It interests me greatly and as such… I hate to say that it is probably only going to get worse from here.
The post Flipping the Trade appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! As I am sitting here writing it is the dawn of the last day of Blaugust 2023. There was so much content generated, and tomorrow I will likely do a bit of a summary when I talk about the event as a whole. I wanted to start out this morning with a bit of expectation-setting. In an average year, the “tabulation day” as I personally refer to it is a bit of an arduous undertaking. Normally we talk around fifty or so blogs that I have to review and count posts on. This year we have one hundred and three… by far the largest participant pool I’ve ever seen. So please be patient with me as I undertake the task of tabulating everything and calculating the rewards. Tomorrow is the day when I get really grumpy for everyone who has a less standard blog layout without a clear monthly post index. Really it is the more Instagram-like interfaces that fluster me the most with irregular tiling.
I know of at least one blogger who I am going to ask to tabulate their results for me because instead of writing traditional blog posts they created their blog as threads on the Fediverse. It is just too damned hard to track these, and while I want to be super inclusive about this event… we gotta figure out a better way if this is going to be a thing that more people do. I think next year if we have anything even vaguely close to this number of bloggers, I am going to have to write something into the rules for self-submitting your blog post count for the month. I mean the entire event is already largely on the honor system and I am already scared to death that I am going to miss count someone’s posts and dump them into the wrong category. It has happened before. Some blogs are just harder to count than others and when you are doing a ton in a row in as short a time frame as you can… mistakes occasionally get made.
I am still delving around the 150 depth and having a blast doing so. I’ve upgraded my resistance and light radius in order to go much deeper, but for the moment this seems to be my happy place. I am not sure if this league’s RF character is stronger than the last league, but it feels at least as tanky. I know flipping Fire Trap to my chest piece seems to have increased my damage output significantly. I dinged 95 last night and am about a quarter of the way into the next level. I spent my passive tree point last night on some quality of life, and 10% more area of effect for Righteous Fire. I wasn’t entirely certain why, but my radius seemed really small to me… so anything to increase that would be pretty great. I know that I am missing the AOE Gems/Radius bench craft on my Necklace which I have not lucked into unveiling so far this league. I spent a bit of time last night running Jun missions on the Raider in an attempt to get it with no real luck so far.
I spent quite a bit of time on the Storm Brand Templar soon-to-be Inquisitor last night. I am still very much in the “ugly duckling” phase of this build and don’t have much in the way of defensive layers yet. I did pick up a pair of Call of the Brotherhood rings with Lightning to Cold conversion, giving me a grand total of 96% of Lightning Damage converted to cold. I am contemplating trying to work a Heatshiver into the build so that would add some fire damage as well. I still think I want an Inpulsa chest, which is going to be pretty expensive… but thankfully “Delve Provides” to borrow a motto from Jorgen. I already have more than enough currency to pick up whatever I need, but I do like to keep a buffer for more of my bullshit projects. Random comment though… the new Kirac’s Vault outfit is pretty freaking great minus the weird helm. I had this glowing eyes/black hood thing from a random cosmetic box and I think it goes nicely with it… and then matched it with some wings I had from a previous supporter pack and two wand graphics.
Anyways also on the docket this weekend, is Starfield. I preloaded it this morning and play on poking my head in when the early access begins tonight/tomorrow. I am not sure if I will give this a ton of attention, mostly because I am still fairly invested in the Path of Exile league. However, it might surprise me, and grab me in the same way that Skyrim did so many years… when I pretty much disappeared from raiding for a week because I could not stop playing the game. I am hoping for a great experience, but I am also trying to cool my jets when it comes to hype. I know Bethesda games can be a bit buggy, but honestly… I’ve enjoyed all of them. Hell, I even enjoyed Fallout 76 quite a bit at launch and had zero problems with Fallout 4 in spite of so many people lampooning it at the time.
It is weird… I can be super critical of games like Diablo IV, but completely give a pass to other games that people are memeing. I think it mostly depends on how important I consider the genre. For me the ARPG is just such a fundamental part of me as a player, that my disappointment got the best of me with Diablo. However, Bethesda games are just something I play for fun on the side from my more mainline MMO and ARPG games. They are just a fun goof rather than my main course. I think maybe that is also why I didn’t really have any problem with the DC movies that so many people lambasted… because I am just not super invested in them. Investment breeds contempt.
Now time for my second “Anyways” of the post. I hope you all have a great day and a happy last day of Blaugust. Remember… tomorrow will be a stressful day for me. Please give me some space to do the things needed to tabulate the posts.
The post Last Day of Blaugust 2023 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I had a rather busy day of significant progress and changes to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. First off I took out The Searing Exarch and while I took a few deaths, I managed to get my void stone well within the six portals. I don’t fight these bosses often enough to be terribly good at them, so there are always things that I forget will kill me. I can tank a single ball at a time during the ball phase, but never two at once for example. Shortly after taking down the Searing Exarch, I went after the Eater of Worlds and the same essential story. I also downed it with portals left but took a few deaths re-learning what I could take and what I could not take.
So that leaves me at 106 maps out of 115 with the “easy” two voidstones slotted into my Atlas. I am not entirely certain how hard I will go after Elder and Maven, or if I will eventually just buy a carry for both to get it over with. Having access to voidstones however, fixed the problem I was having with the scarab market. Essentially it is roughly 2-3 Chaos per Rusted Sulphite Scarab which allows me to force Niko on a map so that I can restock my Delve coffers. There is a specific Charged Compass that has “your maps contain Niko” which lasts for 3 maps and seems to cost in the neighborhood of 1 Chaos each. So while these are a bigger pain in the ass to buy, because no one wants to stop what they are doing for a 1 Chaos sale… it essentially gives me similar results for a minimum of 5 Chaos less. I suppose I should go through the hassle of snapping up a pile of these. Unfortunately, they don’t really stack so I would have to dump them in my “Alt Maps” tab along with my Sanctum books, Temple maps, and Memories.
One of the things that I have been watching the market for is a Brass Dome. This is essentially my chest of choice when it comes to gearing out an RF Juggernaut because you can get over 4000 Armor, up to 5% additional maximum elemental resistance, and crit immunity. However these are always pricey, and since I had four Divine Orbs to play with, and a stash of Chaos Orbs from selling a round of Delve items… yesterday I actually began seriously shopping for something. Essentially what I wanted was a chest with a combination of White sockets and colored sockets that would allow me to flip it back and forth between Righteous Fire in the chest and eventually do the swap to Fire Trap in my Chest and Righteous Fire in my Helm.
What I found was a six-socket Brass Dome with over 4000 Armor, and +5% to all maximum resists that had WWWRRG giving me access to run both the common BBBRRG Righteous Fire setup and the GGGRRR or in my case GGGRRB setup for Fire Trap. It was not linked, so essentially I had to spend another 400 Chaos Orbs to buy the Orb of Bindings to do the benchcraft recipe. I did not really want to fuck around and try and manually link this for fear of spending way more than 1500 Bindings to accomplish the job. This happened to me last league when I was trying to link a chest and burned through 2000 Bindings without ever actually getting a six link. So essentially I wound up spending 5 Divines in total on the chest, but yesterday the cheapest equivalent already linked was 16 Divines. This morning there are two options at 9 Divines so I still feel like I came out ahead.
With my remaining currency or at least part of it, I picked up an Elder Influenced pure armor helm with level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Concentrated Effect support that happened to be in the right colors to run Righteous Fire. I originally had intended to run the new Brass Dome with Righteous Fire for a bit while I saved up the currency for a helm, but I managed to snag this one for around a Divine and figured no time like the present to complete the swap. Of note… I’ve never actually done this one before and always ran the traditional RF in Chest and Fire Trap in helm setup. The difference is immediately clear when it comes to taking anything down that requires me to drop a Fire Trap. The only negative in this process is that I had an Area of Effect implicit on my previous helmet, so I am getting used to a slightly smaller Righteous Fire aura.
So I am fairly broke… I went into the day with 4 Divines and around 800 Chaos and I exited the day with somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 Chaos. That said… I have another load of resonators to sell and if they sell as quickly as the last batch that will be a significant boost to my vault. Essentially the next few upgrades will be more difficult because I have to be very wary of my resistance, dexterity, and intelligence. Ultimately in a perfect world, I would go after a +1 or +2 if that is even possible Amulet and a +2 Sceptre. I also need to swap out my gems for either 21/20 gems or the Awakened equivalent which will take a chunk of currency to do. Then after that, I am contemplating picking up the Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame jewels to allocate Unrelenting which is the other side of the Endurance stacking tree that gives me physical reduction, elemental damage reduction, and chaos resistance.
All in all a pretty great day, and one that both increased my survivability and my damage output. Currency gain in Path of Exile is always a means to an end for me. I farm currency so that I can do the things I like… which often generates more currency… so that I can buy upgrades to do the things I like more efficiently. At some point, I will start working on some more alt characters when my coffers have filled again so that I have money to play with. Ash continues to push me in the direction of a Cyclone build, and I still want to do a bit of a redemption arc for Storm Brand. Both of these will need things purchased or farmed, and both of which are probably going to happen before the league is up. Essentially right now… I am very “in my element” and enjoying my time greatly.
The post Broke and Flipped appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Well, this is the weekend where I officially switched mains it seems as if my Juggernaut has now eclipsed the level of my Lightning Arrow Raider. I gotta say that I enjoyed the Raider quite a bit, but it hit a bit of a hard plateau around red maps. I knew the class was going to have some survival issues, which was pretty understandable… but what I did not expect was just how much harder boss fights would be than I am used to. Essentially so long as the Raider is killing small mobs it can keep its dance of death ongoing forever. However, when I am just fighting a single target, I am not getting near enough life and mana leech to keep everything going and I start harming myself with lifetap. The RF Juggernaut however… is just stable all the time which is I guess what I had been missing.
I am in the awkward part of mapping where I only have a few maps left to go… and they are becoming increasingly more difficult to get to drop. I am sitting at 103 of 115 with a number of those remaining maps being uniques. I am abusing Kirac missions and Scouting reports to try and roll my way into the maps that I am missing, but I have a feeling at some point I will resort to just buying the ones I am missing. I tried the strategy of going ahead and running red maps from Kirac even though they are not corrupted in the hopes of getting raw maps that I can corrupt to drop. However, that really has not worked out terribly well so far even though I have one of those maps I completed but did not get the bonus for in my favorite slot.
It could also be that I have just not been running enough maps lately, because as I have gotten my Juggernaut online, I have spent more time underground. I’m continuing the veer slightly deeper and am comfortably trucking along around 130 depth. Mostly I am chasing cities and will go to whatever depth I need to in order to intercept them. I’ve finished off one full Abyss City, and two Vaal cities including a Vaal boss, and am currently winding my way down to a four-node Vaal City. After finishing that I will backtrack and pick up the Abyss City that I can see on my map. I’ve over-upgraded my Resistance and Light Radius and am beginning to knock out some of the other upgrades as I get the Azurite to unlock them.
I would probably spend ALL of my time down in Delve were it not for the fact that Scarab prices right now are a bit bonkers. I am not sure if Delve is more popular in this league, or if there is some mechanic that used to produce a lot of Scarabs that is not currently being run. Whatever the case right now the humble Rusted Suphite Scarab is going for over 1 Chaos Each, which is a little too rich for my blood. I can still fill my Suphite Meter thanks to the Atlas Passives and getting a bonus from completing maps, but it is fairly slow going. I wish there was some sort of Scarab vendor or something in the game that you could trade bubble gum currency for Scarabs. It does make me wonder if more people are playing Trials than I expected, and since Scarabs are a relatively uncommon reward not as many are making it to the market.
Now that I have the Juggernaut up and running, I have been trying a bit of heisting as well since the Righteous Fire character does really well at Delve and Heist both. I vaguely remember blueprints rewarding quite a few scarabs, so that might be an alternate method for refilling my coffers. I might try rerolling scarabs because I think there is a Harvest recipe. Heist though is fun on its own merits and I still need to go through the process of unlocking all of the thieves and leveling them. There is an awful lot of minutiae when it comes to getting set up in a new league and unlocking everything that you need to really be viable. The good bit is that I have goals plenty to focus on.
In other news, I am finally back on my reading nonsense… as a couple of books had broken me a bit. I tried very hard to get through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I am not sure if it was the extremely brutal, violent, and oftentimes racist content… or the general lack of punctuation or any sort of scaffolding to better explain who the fuck was talking. Whatever the case that book beat me, and while I figure it is probably an important read to understand the brutality against the Native tribes that lies behind the Cowboy mythos… it was just too bleak for me to continue trudging through. It knocked me out of commission for several months and I am finally getting back on the horse again with finally reading Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. So far this is a much more comfortable read, even though it has its own bleak content… just not quite as brutal.
I’ve also been struggling a bit with feeling generally out of it. Over the weekend my wife started coming down with something, and I am wondering if I too am catching whatever she brought home from the hellions that she teaches. I’m in a bit of a funk on top of that though. I’m having one of those ” would anyone miss me if I was gone” malaises that washes over me from time to time. I will pull through the other side I am sure because I know it is nonsense. If you made it this far in my blog post I know that you would probably miss me. I think part of it has also been brought on by the fact that it has been way the hell too hot to do anything outside of stay sequestered inside in the air conditioning. Hopefully, that too will pass.
Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful beginning of the week.
The post Frightening Scarab Market appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
