Well, my friends, it is far from the morning, and I am finally doing my first proper blog post of the year. Technically, I could have just called this a loss because of the holiday, as this is the day I actually got off officially in lieu of New Year’s day. I guess I should start things off by wishing you all a Happy New Year. My morning was less than fun because I spent it dealing with technical difficulties in my main machine. I finally sorted it out and it was thoroughly dumb, but not before I uninstalled Steam… without remembering to back up all of my games that were on my C drive. This isn’t the end of the world because most of my games were actually on another drive, but it will require me to reinstall a few things. I went completely down the wrong path because the Xbox Game Pass app apparently mounts a bunch of virtual drives and I got super confused sifting through event viewer thinking it was a hard drive failure.
I am still deeply enthralled in Path of Exile and more specifically the Delve mechanic. In past leagues, I had spent a few minutes exploring the dark depths, but never really engaged with it fully. I knew enough that I liked it, but was largely focused on mapping as my key progression path. Instead, I poured my heart and soul this weekend into Delve and made pretty solid currency for me at least. More than enough to fund several key set pieces to improve problems with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. All told since diving into Delve I have produced somewhere in the neighborhood of five divines worth of currency. Granted I have also spent about two divines worth of that same currency righting the ship on my build as well as funding a few upgrades for one of my friends. Suffice it to say I am shocked at just how well it has worked, and I have a feeling in future leagues I will dig down into the ground well before this point if for no reason other than it seems to be a stable source of funds.
For those who have no clue what I am talking about, Delve was a league mechanic from roughly four years ago which involves exploring the depths under Wraeclast for fun and profit. Essentially the cycle involves running maps for Niko to collect Voltaxic Sulphite which you then use to power The Crawler which is essentially an automated tractor-like thing that plods along fixed courses stringing lighting along behind it. Each “camp” presents you with a series of monster spawns and gives you some sort of rewards like gear, divination cards, raw currency, and azurite that is used to upgrade how far you can delve safely and the radius of your light. The light is key because the monsters in the depths take no damage if they are not in some light source, and you eventually take significant damage yourself if you stay in the darkness too long.
Sometimes the rewards are significant, like this node that dropped a who slew of maps including one that was unique and a unique hybrid flask. Other times it might be a few dozen chromatic orbs, but the sheer volume of “bubble gum” currency is large enough that it is very likely you would never run out. Thanks to my adventures in the deep I have recolored several items for folks and even managed to six-link a few things. While it isn’t always going to be exalted orbs or divine orbs… you end up getting enough raw chaos to make the entire journey feel worthwhile. Where the real money that can be made however is selling the delve-specific items like resonators and fossils, though the later you really need to find someone wanting to purchase them in bulk.
Deep down veiled in darkness are a number of interesting things. The only ones that I have really found yet are Vaal Cities, and I have found I think five of them so far. Each node in a Vaal City involves opening up a chamber filled with corrupted monsters and a dozen or so chests full of loot. The above example is from my completing a single Vaal Chamber. All of the mechanics that can spawn in maps, seem to have nodes down in delve as well and I have taken down a number of Harbingers, Beyond spawns, and even some Breach and Abyss nodes. From what I understand as long as I keep expanding the network of tunnels it will keep spawning new nodes to explore off to either the right or left of the central column. In the second screenshot of this blog post, I did some cut/paste work and pieced together a ton of individual screenshots to show how far I have explored one side so far.
All of the currency that I am generating is allowing me to resolve some of the problems I had with my resists and survivability. At this point, I have upgraded most pieces of gear so my next target is likely to go find better quality versions of each unique that I am using. When I cobbled together the build in the first place I bought the cheapest versions of each that I could afford, and now that currency is a little freer and that Poison SRS is the flavor of the week taking some of the pressure of RF Juggernaut prices I might be able to pick up some deals. I had some moments with the build where I doubted if it was my jam, which is ultimately what led me to roll my own SRS-flavored build. Now that I have invested some more currency in the build I am enjoying myself again.
The real question I have though is if I am going to spend any more time investing in the SRS build that I currently have. There are some significant survival problems with my current build-out. My resists are not in a horrible state, so really I think the problem is that I either don’t have enough spell suppression/block or really need some more regeneration and armor. I could pivot my build into the Poison SRS variant, but that would involve a pretty significant investment at this point. I am just not sure if it is worth it considering that I would probably rather be spending currency on Righteous Fire. Summon Raging Spirits however is a much better bossing build, so if I could solve my mapping survival I could probably use it to catapult progress into finishing the major bosses. I guess I need to make a concerted effort to explore my POB and compare it to what I would need to change to pivot over into the Poison variation.
There are other games that I am interested in… but right now Path of Exile is tweaking all of the dopamine centers in my brain. I am going to stay with this ride until it eventually drops me off somewhere a spent husk of a human.
The post Digging Too Deep appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I hope you are ready for another Path of Exile post because that is what you are getting! I realize that when I dive down into the esoterica of a particularly detail-oriented game I lose many readers. It is shocking that anyone reads me to be honest given that you have suffered through a deep dive into Guild Wars 2, New World many times, and a couple of Path of Exile leagues in the same year. I am way more in my element this league and have branched out into a bunch of side projects. I am thinking that is really what I need to start doing rather than beating my head against a particular obstacle until it yields. I encountered a bit of resistance in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut which lead me to run up the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… and resistance there has led me to dust back off the Toxic Rain Trickster. So essentially I have three major projects going at once and seeing an incremental increase in all of them… which makes me way happier than grinding my face against the walls I was hitting the Juggernaut.
At some point, I will get around to updating my Game Tools page for Path of Exile, but I thought I would take a moment this morning and talk about a few things that I am finding useful. The first is Better Trading for Path of Exile, which is a Chrome extension that adds a bunch of functionality, not the least of which is showing a history of things that you have searched for before. You can pin these as favorites if you find yourself going back to the trade website periodically to look for specific items. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but the extension is no longer being updated there so it is useful enough to make me do all of my POE Trading in Chrome. The guide that I followed for SRS even had importable links so you can find the gear that ticks the right boxes rather easily and import those saved items directly.
The other tool that I have been using is a replacement for the Overwolf-based POE Trading overlay called Awakened PoE Trade. This offers a bunch of functionality like the ability to flag specific attributes on maps that you don’t want to run and have it warn you when you mouse over maps with those specific attributes. However, the most useful thing to me personally is that I can hit Ctl+D while hovering over an item and it will pop up a details screen showing me what the current market price for an item like that would be. It was through doing this that I realized I was sitting on a 3 Divine chest piece that I should probably be using instead of my current Righteous Fire chest. If nothing else this is helping me to understand what elements make something valuable and at some point hopefully I can evaluate them myself.
I had been using the chest piece on the left for a while now and picked it up for 15c when I hit mapping and needed six links for Righteous Fire. At some point, I picked up the chest on the right and held onto it, because I knew the Astral Plate base was really good for Righteous Fire and that the colors were very close. It originally dropped as a six-link RRGGBB, whereas I currently need RRGBBB. In my many travels, I acquired a stash of tainted currency which you can use to modify corrupted items. I figured if it was worth 3 Divines with the wrong colors, it would surely be worth more if I fixed the colors and managed to hit it in 3 Tainted Chromatic Orbs. Then I got the quality up to 16% with some tainted armoring orbs… and at that point, I figured… I might as well give it a shot.
What it did for my Righteous Fire build is it took me over 50,000 Armor, which seems to be a significant break point. I went from getting wrecked by The Hydra to being able to largely face tank the fight. It has not fixed ALL of my problems but it has taken me a good step towards progress. It is weird how a single piece of gear that takes you to a specific breakpoint… seems to have that much immediate difference. So Righteous Fire Juggernaut is back on the menu and I spent quite a bit of yesterday just zipping around and clearing maps for fun and profit.
Another project that I need to devote some more time to is Delve and getting further down in progression. It bugs me that I am constantly capped on yellow delve juice and purposefully avoiding Niko missions. Basically, I need to spend a few days doing nothing but Delve because in truth I enjoy the heck out of it. Similarly, I have a massive stash of contracts and blueprints that I need to burn through over in Heist as well. If nothing else that seems to be the name of the game this season is fixing sustain problems. It is rare that I don’t get at least three or four maps out of a single map, and it is similarly rare that I don’t walk away with at least one contract. There is way more that I could be doing that I would enjoy doing… than I actually have time to do of it. This is a far better situation than the beginning of the Kalandra league when it felt like I was running out of every currency and not really able to find ways to get any of it.
Over on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer, I am in the process of making a number of changes. Currently, as things stand I can pretty comfortably wipe White and Yellow maps but struggle quite a bit with reds. I am not actually using the final configuration of the build and it is going to involve me either muleing a gem or to or just buying level 20 gems from the market. I need to sit down and properly map out what I want gem-wise on each piece of gear and then set forth to recolor as needed. It is shocking how much more comfortable I am with swapping resists, links, and colors on gear than I was in past leagues. Essentially one of the biggest changes that I need to make is to get rid of my Zombies and migrate over to Animate Guardian.
This is a rather big change because Animate Guardian works wildly differently than the other minion summons. Essentially you have to “build” your Guardian like you build a Follower in D3, but with a way more obtuse system behind it. Thankfully Ghazzy did a video on how this works, but essentially you “consume” items while mousing over and hitting Animate Guardian. Then from that point forward, your Animated Guardian is using that item. Luckily there are a bunch of bulk Uniques that I have laying around that apparently make up the suggested “low investment” build for an Animated Guardian and I’ve set these aside at the ready. Essentially you need a two-handed weapon, two one-handed weapons, or a one-hander and a shield combined with a helm, chest, gloves, and boots. This specific combination apparently gives a lot of buffs to both the player and other minions. So I’ve set aside the following items to be consumed once I get a level 20 Animated Guardian:
The challenge is that there is no way to get back any of these items once you have consumed them. However, they do stay “equipped” on your account in a sort of hidden Animated Guardian inventory. This is one of those deeply obtuse systems that could be improved with a UI around it. Similarly, the way that Raise Spectre works is equally dumb and involves me summoning corpses in my hideout and trying to raise one specific corpse… the Carnage Chieftan each time. Thankfully they rarely die so I don’t need to do this super often, but it is still tedious and if for some reason I end up overwriting the corpses available with desecrate… then I have to go back to The Old Fields in Act II and get new apes.
Then you of course have the Toxic Rain Trickster that I dusted off yesterday, set back up, and managed to clear Dominus and get the achievement for Shadow. I think right now I am missing Ranger and Scion and I will have completed the full gamut of classes through Act III. I’ve also got a truly stupidly geared level 6 Shadow sitting in the first map that I am trying to get the Beginner’s Luck achievement with. Seriously you should take a look at “BelginnersLuck” on my character list and how stupidly geared that is for a character that has never made it to Lion’s Arch. I am legitimately curious about what level I will be when Hillock finally drops a unique item. I’m to the point where I can take him down to half health with a single hit, then when he pulls the sword out and regenerates it takes another two hits to finish him off. The energy shield, health regen, and mana regen are overpowered at low levels… just saying.
Tomorrow I will be plumbing the depths of my play history for this year and doing my big round-up post. I hope you are enjoying your break and apologies for being quiet on social media. I tend to ignore the world when I get hyper-fixated on a specific game.
The post Projects within Projects appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
