Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I pushed through the rest of the campaign on my Widow Hail Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye. I feel like it is very important to preface this build with the statement, that for this experiment I was purposefully trying not to follow a meta guide. Those exist, in abundance for Deadeye characters in 3.25 and I purposefully decided to shun them. I know how to do that build and have done it before many times… though my personal preference in the past was to always build on a Champion so I could add on extreme layers of “tankyness”. This time I purposefully went with Deadeye because I wanted to help this build with as much damage output as I possibly could given that I was stepping outside of the current meta and trying something different.
The other constraint that I placed upon myself is that I have tried not to allow this to be the build that trade chat and an abundance of divine orbs built. I’ve been chucking any decent gear into my vault that I picked up through shipping routes and the Settlers of Kalguur league mechanic. The entire purpose of this was to have a stash of things to draw upon when it came to equipping this character. Everything that my character is wearing came either from the league mechanic or was dropped on my Righteous Fire Chieftain save for two items… the tri-elemental quiver needed to drive Widowhail and a cluster jewel that I picked up last night. This has also led to some of my other decisions like running Purity of Elements instead of attempting to fix elemental ailments in another manner. Essentially the goal is to create a psuedo-SSF character without having to wall my character off from the rest of my stuff.
Having said all of that… I will probably start shopping for some upgrades. Right now I have a T2/T2/T3 Elemental Hit quiver and I would really like to get triple T1 with some attack speed while keeping the additional arrow. I really like that I am firing eight arrows at a time and all of those arrows are igniting, chilling, shocking, and eventually freezing. This would be a way worse experience if I were not actively freezing things when I shotgun them. That said… I am squishy as hell and I do not love that. I basically have no real line of defense… awful armor, awful evasion, and 90 suppression though it is lucky suppression. I have overcapped elemental resistances, but they are only 75% and a very negative chaos resistance at the moment. In a few levels, I am swapping to a body armor that I am going to try and six-link that has almost 3000 armor and evasion on it, so that should help out a little bit.
So immediately after killing Kitava, I did the thing you are probably not supposed to do… and just dropped straight into a yellow tier map. It went fine and honestly… still felt like I was running the campaign. So of course I immediately bumped up to a Tier 11 Red Map, and again… it was pretty much okay. I did struggle a bit with an Expedition rare that I made super freaking tanky… because the only not-toxic atlas strategy that I have is one that includes a single big explosion. I did not read the buffs I was applying to that monster, and I had to bring in Big Brother RF Chieftain to kill it before proceeding. I legitimately think that I could probably be just fine running T16s and I am sure tonight I will experiment with that. Quite honestly, this character already feels much like my other Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit characters have felt damage output-wise before getting a Headhunter.
I think with some judicious gearing choices to give me some modicum of survivability… this could turn into a pretty effective map blaster. Basically… I am hoping that this does not become a popular strategy because I need a very specific roll combination on a quiver to make it work. I would love to see those not skyrocket to outrageous prices.
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Good Morning Folks. Last night I got my baby Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye up to a high enough level to try out my Widowhail nonsense. For the uninitiated this is a unique bow that has no real damage stats of its own… but instead inherits whatever stats you have on your quiver and then multiplies them based on a value that ranges from 150% to 250%. During the campaign on my RF Chieftain, I wound up getting a 240% version to drop… which started my gears turning. Now if you look on POE.Ninja this is a bow mostly used for damage over time bow builds as you can get a lot of stats that are very difficult to get on a bow otherwise. Almost no one appears to be using this for hit-based attacks, but given you can get a quiver with all three elemental damage types… and Elemental Hit of the Spectrum only cares about elemental damage… I thought maybe it might work.
So far it seems to be pretty freaking great, but I am also still in the campaign. I went from it taking a few hits to take most mobs down to essentially one-shotting everything but tankier rares. I spent 5000 harvest juice to flip the quality to increasing attack speed instead of physical damage… given that again we do not care about physical damage at all. Right now I am using Behemoth Brand and it feels great while firing 6 arrows at a time, which fork and chain and ricochet before returning back to me… which ends up shotgunning down most things. Given that I am dealing three types of damage with every hit… I have 100% uptime on Trinity Support and I am freezing, igniting, and shocking pretty much everything in my path. I have a slightly better-suited quiver to upgrade to when I hit 67 and I am curious to see what sort of damage boost I get then.
I am also not really following a meaningful build guide at this point. I’ve played several different versions of Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit and know more or less what the shape of the build looks like. I was going to try and do some unnatural instinct shenanigans but unfortunately, right now those are going for like 8 Divines. Thread of Hope is pretty cheap right now, so I might try my hand at working one of those into the build. I am contemplating being super lazy and just running Purity of Elements so I do not have to care at all about ailments. Basically, right now I am super glass cannon, and as I get to where I can start equipping some of the well-rolled shipping gear I have set aside for the build, I am hoping I can have a decent amount of armor and evasion. I’ve also contemplated throwing on a tiny bit of ward as a defensive layer when evasion fails.
I have zero clue if this is going to work, but I am interested in the ride at least. If it sucks, it won’t be the first character that I have leveled only to fall flat when I hit maps. I think in theory it might be good, but I am just not sure it will be able to compete with a 1000 elemental DPS bow for example. I am not sure it will require a level of min-maxing on the quiver that I am just not prepared to engage with. For the moment, it feels really damned good in Act 7. I am sure I will be able to blast through the rest of the acts and I will probably do the second lab tonight and see how more deadeye nonsense helps things out. I believe it should add two more arrows to the mix so that will be firing eight at a time. That is a heck of a lot more damage output. If nothing else this should be fun for farming low-tier maps and setting up something like essences.
If this actually ends up working… I will of course drop a POB.
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Good Morning Folks! Last night I dinged 97, and is often the case when I have freshly dinged and no longer worry about experience loss for a bit… I decided to try a few things. One of these was the new version of the King in the Mists fight that originally debuted in the Affliction League. This is now accessed through a fragment called An Audience With the King that can show up as Ritual rewards, and over the course of running a bunch of my Einhar/Ritual atlas, I found three of these. It feels like this fight is much easier than the version I remember from Affliction League, either that or I am much stronger than I was at the time I fought him initially back then. In my three kills I got 2 copies of Untouched Soul and 1 copy of the chase item Light of Meaning which is a rework of the Perandus Pact from Necropolis League. The version I got was the lightning damage variant which I sold for five Divine Orbs.
I feel like I have reached the point where I am starting to see the flaws of the Settlers of Kalguur league. Don’t get me wrong I am still having a blast and I still love the town mechanic, but there is a bit of an Achilles heel. Essentially any activity that does not produce copious amounts of gold… is the wrong choice for spending your time. Delve was doing decently gold-wise for a bit, but now just cannot keep up with running maps. However, even when running maps I average around 10,000 gold per map if I attempt to fully clear everything. It creates this scenario where you feel like you are being chased by a loan shark and never quite able to get ahead. I went to bed last night with a decent gold lead and woke up this morning to see that almost all of it was drained away by my 3000+ gold-per-hour upkeep costs that just kept ticking overnight. I am not actively running mappers right now, and I am barely shipping anything… and have heard that for folks with high-end mappers, their upkeep can be 30k to 100k per hour. Basically, I feel like I have to keep pushing in order to feed the beast, or feel like I am falling behind.
Last night I spent the tail end of my evening leveling a ranger that I am ultimately planning on going Deadeye to play Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. However, doing low-level content means that my gold drops shifted from 100 or so gold at a time to 5 gold at the best of times. This slowed my gains to a trickle which means that for the entirety of my leveling period, I maybe got 2000 gold, which doesn’t even pay for an hour of resource gathering. I am hoping that either GGG increases gold drops, or reduces upkeep costs because we are heading towards a mobile game scenario where it feels like you can never really get ahead. Sure there is zero penalty for letting the coffers run dry. Everything stops, and the game complains at you, but effectively all of your workers sit there until you are ready to feed them gold again. Alternatively, I could manually deallocate everything so that they stopped costing me any resources. I might end up doing that for a bit while I am leveling alts just so it doesn’t feel quite so bad to watch it all waste away.
Part of why I am leveling a bow character is that I managed to pull a pretty well-rolled Widowhail while playing my Righteous Fire Chieftain. No one plays Elemental Hit of the Spectrum with a Widowhail, but honestly, I sort of want to understand why. I got this quiver with attack all elements, bows fire an additional arrow, global accuracy increase, and crafted attack speed on it. In theory, once you multiply these values by 2.4 you end up with what seems like it would be a pretty solid elemental bow. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe my weird kludge Deadeye will work just fine. I’ve also been setting aside good Armor/Evasion gear that I have gotten from shipments and in theory, have most of everything ready to go for an attempt at this character. All I really need to do is farm up the gem… which I will absolutely do on my RF Chieftain because I can steamroll the Labyrinth.
For now, I am leveling double Lightning Arrow, one with a Mirage Archer setup in a Quillrain and one with a Ballista Totem setup in a Foxshade chest. I did try leveling with a gem that I have never used before and I think I might like it better than pretty much any bow gem for early levels. One of the challenges with bow leveling is when you first start out you don’t have access to Lesser Multiple Projectiles which means for a bit you just don’t have terribly good coverage. Galvanic Arrow however fixes this and is one of the first gem picks that you have access to upon reaching Lion Eye’s Watch. Essentially it fires out three bolts of lighting that fork giving you a good deal of coverage and allowing you to shred packs. I am sure someone will tell me all of the reasons why this is not a great skill, but having just used it until I got Lightning Arrow, I gotta say it felt pretty solid.
I got tired of looking awful and this morning I decided to go with a Vaal theme for leveling purposes. I went with the Vaal set from the 2024 supporter packs, the giant rolling Vaal orb pet, and the baby Vaal oversoul minion. I have a lot of MTX for Path of Exile, but I gotta say given how much enjoyment I get out of the game and how optional all of them are… I’ve never really felt bad giving them money. I am near the end of Act 3 currently, and I want to at least get up to level 56 tonight if possible so that I can see how the Widowhail combo feels in real-world usage. I might try and farm up elemental hit gems over lunch, or I could just stop being cheap and pay the 40-50 chaos they are going for currently.
Still hoping we see a patch before the end of the week that addresses the gold issues. Are you paying Path of Exile? What have you thought of the Settlers League so far? Drop me a line below.
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Good Morning Folks! Necropolis is quite possibly the most enjoyable mapping league yet. Affliction offered outrageous juicing options, but what Necropolis offers is flexibility and the ability to easily tailor the content to fit your whims. This is in large part due to the fact that we have three different atlas trees at our disposal, but on top of that, we have the freedom to add a bunch of interesting scarabs that wildly change your map-to-map experience. More important than that, the scarabs have been plentiful allowing me to constantly shift what I want to focus on without needing to buy them from the market. That is not to say that if you want to chain run the same strategy over and over… you will probably need to buy scarabs in bulk like in past leagues, but if you are a bit more open to your mapping options you should be relatively self-sustaining.
For the last several leagues I have built some form of a Righteous Fire character for Delving and getting through the bosses and some form of a Bow-based character for pure mapping fun. Over the years I have played Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Lightning Arrow, and Vaal Lightning Arrow to various degrees of success. Last league I had landed on what I felt was the ultimate version of this in the form of a champion. In this league, I am elevating it a bit further by diving into the new transfigured gem Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. Essentially it deals all three elements worth of damage at the same time and then scales based on the number of unique ailments you have on a target. This means you only have to account for elemental reflect damage which can be taken care of with a Level 5 Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks Support gem.
Here is the POB if you want to follow along as I talk through gearing choices.
What makes this build so potent is that we are living in “interesting times”. Grave crafting has created this weird situation where so many mirror-tier perfect bows have been created, that anything that is slightly imperfect in any way… but still extremely good… is dirt cheap. This is a 1500 DPS bow with an additional arrow, triple tier 1 elemental damage, and attack speed and I gave I believe 9 Divine Orbs for it. I am pretty sure that I paid way more than that for a 1200 DPS bow that I was EXCEPTIONALLY proud of last league. I’ve had this bow for a few weeks now and when I was shopping yesterday for gear after trying to convince Ace that now was the time to give a mapper lighting arrow/elemental hit character a try… they were considerably cheaper. Weird things exist… like quadruple fractured items, which this bow is. I finished off the item by changing the quality to attack speed and corrupting it to 30% with a beast craft.
The other reason why this build is so potent is that I am getting to play around with Headhunter again. When I bought this belt it was I believe 8 Divines, but as of yesterday when I was shopping for a second that price had dropped to around 4 Divines. Note… I thought 50 Divines for a headhunter last league was a “bargain” that I could not pass up. If you have ever wanted to play a bow-build map-blaster that runs around with a stupid amount of headhunter buffs… this is your league. There is basically no reason to NOT run this belt on any build that is clearing rares quickly. Having played with a Mageblood and a Headhunter I have to say that the Headhunter mechanic is significantly more enjoyable. Mageblood is just sort of cheating at flasks, which can allow you to do some dumb things… but isn’t in itself interesting.
Another thing that is just stupidly cheap right now is the Defiance of Destiny amulet. I am legitimately using this just to add some additional layers of survival to my build while at the same time providing a bunch of elemental resistance on a single item. I am using the anoint Disciple of Slaughter so that I do not have to run Frenzy in a Manaforged Arrows setup. If you did want to go into Manaforged Arrows I would probably consider Frenzy of Onslaught which would then allow you to move some points around a bit because I am spending three points to get Graceful Assault instead of running a Silver Flask to guarantee reasonably close to permanent Onslaught. Ultimately these are decisions you reach after having played a build a bunch of times and wanting to tweak it slightly to do something specific.
One of my favorite things that I added to the build the last time I played it, was performing some pathing Jenga in order to use an Unnatural Instinct over by Avatar of the Hunt. I got the jewel that I am using as a drop, but generally speaking these are not terribly expensive and you gain a ton of value from that one socket. I mean sure I wish that Unnatural Instinct also gave you the notables, but I can live without Avatar of the Hunt. This is a late-game pathing thing, and while leveling I absolutely path into that notable and take it… then modify my pathing later to add in the jewel.
Another piece of tech that I am playing around with is the new Perandus Pact jewel that comes from Grave Crafting. Essentially you collect all of the corpses of the Perandus family and then can influence which jewel stat roll you get based on the other corpses you add with it. At the moment the Evasion version of this jewel is dirt cheap and adds 7% Evasion for every passive allocated in the large radius of where you place it. For me it is hitting 32 different nodes and giving me a grand total of +224% Increased Evasion… which essentially is giving me “Grace” without needing to sort out the reservation of that aura. There are a bunch of other viable options and if you didn’t care about the survival you could stack a specific elemental damage instead. I’m using the Fire Damage version on my Righteous Fire Chieftain to give me around +120% Increased Fire Damage.
The last thing that I added most recently, was to pick up another Jewel socket and put a Watcher’s Eye in it. In truth the only thing I really cared about here was trying to get permanent phasing while running haste. Cannot Be Blinded While Affected by Precision is solid and basically is a net win, but the reduced physical reflection from Determination is largely useless. Essentially I was looking for two things here… more life, more mana, and permanent haste giving me more ease of movement in mapping. I am not going to lie this is good enough that I have contemplated trying to figure out a way to mix in haste and a watcher’s eye into my RF Chieftain because it would be SUPER handy for Delving.
The character feels so good for mapping purposes and I cannot remember the last time I died. Not dying is a big thing for me, but your comfort levels might be completely different. If you wanted to play a less defensive version of this build that has significantly higher damage output, then I would look at the various folks running this Deadeye. They specifically favor the critical variant of the build whereas I am running Precise Technique and do not care about crit. It would be easy enough to transition over with a few gear swaps though if I were so inclined. My kink though is never the damage output I am doing, and more so that I am nigh immortal. So long as I can rip through maps comfortably I am happy with my damage output.
Anyways! I had not talked about this build that I have been running on the side and figured today I would do a deep dive and share some footage. I hope you all are doing well out there, and that you have a great and safe weekend. We have more danger weather rolling in, so I will likely be watching the skies.
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