Good Morning Folks. If you remember yesterday I talked about finally getting an Apothecary card drop. Now these go for roughly 25-30 Divines each because they are hot property for folks wanting to do late league gambles. The thing is I do not need a Mageblood this league, nor do I really think that Magebloods are actually that much fun. They fix builds but they don’t really do anything cool and after played with a handful of them through several leagues the magic of that item is broken for me. Headhunter however is the really fun belt and I will choose it over Mageblood all of the time because it actually does something. So after writing yesterdays blog post, I happened to look over and see that someone was advertising a Primeval Hideout on TFT, and I thought… I wonder if they will trade for this Apothecary card so I could take one rare drop that I don’t particularly care about right now for another thing that I have been desperately seeking for way too long.
Unfortunately it was a Chinese language user that did not speak English, so they invited me with me not knowing if they would actually accept the trade or kick me from the instance. I got to their hideout, popped the Apothecary in the trade window and they accepted without a moments thought. So here I was heading to the hideout, and weirdly unlike the one other time that I bought a hideout on TFT they did not take the time to unlock it. So thankfully I was sturdy enough to clear the mobs inside the hideout and there was another person who had also bought the hideout with me, but I had already cleared 90% of it before they got there. Just like the screenshot that I linked to yesterday, the hideout does in fact appear as a path going down off the side of one of the floating islands. I was always so damned scared that I would miss the hideout in one of my farming runs, but I am pretty sure this would have been impossible to miss.
So now I have my Primeval Hideout unlocked and at some point I want to swap from my Ghost-lit Graveyard Hideout over to this one, but that has to be a challenge for a day I feel like building a new hideout. The biggest problem that I have had when I tried to swap hideouts is that the locations of everything is so baked into my brain that I struggle if I end up moving anything to a different location. I really like the decor of this place, especially if I change up the lighting to make it a little darker. I also have the ability to dump a backup of my current hideout so I can always quickly revert back to it at a moments notice. The only negative is that I have a stash tab full of Primordial Blocks maps… that I might as well run as I flip my favorite map slot to something else and build up a stash of those. Right now I am targeting Toxic Sewer which is one of my favorite layouts because of how compact everything is.
In other related news I recorded one of my dumb little videos last night and it is hard to believe that I have made 37 of these… just for Path of Exile. Specifically I show off what doing a t16 looks like with mid-range investment I think maybe I have spent 50 div on the build… which to new players is a lot, but to folks who spend multiple mirrors on a build is an entry point. I think I have probably spent around 150 Divines on my Righteous Fire Chieftain over the course of this league for reference. Delve was good to me and allowed me to easily generate large quantities of currency to then blow on dumb ideas later. This is legitimately probably my second favorite build I have had in Path of Exile behind my menagerie of Righteous Fire characters. It is not sturdy enough to straight up face tank everything, but it is sturdy enough to feel good playing it with max res and max block and a reasonable amount of life/es regeneration. The thing that would make this feel better would be to try and work in Stone Stance or something like that and maybe a bit more max resist.
Anyways pending this build is still around it will be a contender for 3.27 league starter for me, given that I would like to see what this can be if I really make it my full focus for a league. I also want to see what happens if I just swap out Storm Brand of Indecision for Penance Brand of Dissipation for bossing. I will be doing some testing on that over the weekend but I need to acquire a 21/20 gem for Penance Brand first.
The post Buying Freedom appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This is Primordial Blocks, and I have lived here for every league that has had this map in the rotation. It is the source of the Primeval Ruins Hideout, and I want it bad. The problem with this is that it is extremely rare… and I have likely run over 1000 copies of this map spread between multiple leagues and I have NEVER seen it. The only knowledge I have of what the entrance to this hideout in the map looks like comes from this post from 2021 where they talk about farming it, and then link a screenshot of the hideout showing up as a ramp downwards. Ironically they talk about finding the Nocturnal Hideout being equally difficult to find, and I have found it through running the unique Twilight Temple map three times, which is something that I do exactly once per league and not farm over and over. I am not opposed to buying my way out of this problem… but they are selling right now on TFT when they do show up for 20-30 divines for a portal allowing you to claim it. I fear that this league will be yet another where I do not find it, but when I do… y’all are definitely going to know about it.
I can cross a different drop off my bucket list though, because I have finally acquired my first Apothecary as a drop in a map. This is the token thing that most people farm as it provides access to a Mageblood and is generally popular amongst people who like gambles where they buy a single card of this set and attempt to double or nothing their way to a full set through harvest crafting. I have run a truly stupid number of Crimson Temple and now Defiled Cathedral maps attempting to get one of these as my default farm map in the leagues where Primordial Blocks is not available. This time around I ran enough Defiled Cathedral to get a Nameless Seer so that I could scry the Apothecary drop chance onto Primordial Blocks. I would gamble this off but given that I do not really need a Mageblood this league, I am going to sit on it in case I end up getting more drops while I continue to farm this accursed zone.
The real MVP of the Mercenaries league however has been the Map Device Inventory. Probably the most tedious part of running a lot of maps is rolling them. For those unfamiliar this is the process of scouring and applying alchemy orbs until you get the map modifiers that you want to run, or in my case… re-rolling any mods that I do not feel comfortable running because it will in some way brick my build. For example the mods that disable regeneration or lower your maximum elemental resistances are instant re-rolls for me and always will be regardless of what build I am playing. What the map inventory tab does is allows me to load it up with a bunch of maps, ready to be run, so that I do not have to stop and either retrieve a map from a bank tab or hold them in my inventory limiting what I can pick up in a given map. This has been a game changer and has made the entire process of running maps so much more enjoyable.
I will admit at this point I am getting so freaking tired of Betrayal, but it continues to be some amazing experience gain. The only real annoying thing about it is needing to run the safehouses every so often. It is absolutely worth it because you are pretty much guaranteed to get at least a veiled chaos orb now, but it does break up the flow of mapping. They are selling for roughly 3 to a divine so it is worth the time running it given that they go super quickly. I wish there was a way in the passive tree to block trapped chests and crafting benches because really all I want are boxes to click on super quickly and I cannot be bothered to learn who does what when they are leading. I know that Awakened POE Trade has a cheat sheet button and I run that all of the time for price checking… but it just seems like a lot of effort when all I really want from this mechanic is the sweet sweet burst of experience when I click the buttons. It legitimately is one of my least favorite league mechanics but it is just too much experience to ignore when all I care about are levels.
What I really need now is some more memory tears. I am at 22 of 33 memory altars for the last challenge that I need to hit 34 or 40 for the league. This gives me the same size totem pole that I have gotten for the last two leagues and if I can get that I will be perfectly happy with where I left off for this league. I am not going to be tryhard enough to get 40 of 40, especially when this time next week I will be diving into the new Last Epoch season. It is at this point in the post when I realize… that I am mostly talking to myself. There are so few people that read my blog that are actually this deep into the madness that is Path of Exile to care about anything that I just said. I could talk about flying unicorns or whatever now, and it is unlikely anyone is actually going to get to this paragraph. Then again I would say 90% of the posts I write… are mostly just me journaling my own thoughts about something and provide zero tangible benefit to anyone who reads them. When I write about more mainstream topics that people care about, that is probably not the case but going deep into a niche game late in the league… is probably only for the diehards of which I am probably not enough of one to attract that audience.
Anyways! I got an Apothecary which I think is pretty cool. Tomorrow I might actually try writing a Blaugust post of some sort since I have not really interacted much with the topics.
The post Desperately Seeking Primeval appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. We have reached the point in the league where I am blowing all of my currency on alt characters.I think I have blown something like 130 divines on kitting out two characters. Divines are easy enough to get at this point just through selling Delve stuff that I could get them back if I really wanted it, but honestly… since I will never play standard I might as well blow them. At this point I know I will be shifting to Last Epoch next week and then once I have my fill of that, probably popping back into Path of Exile II to see what 0.3.0 has to offer. As a result I am in the mode of winding down the Mercenaries of Trarthus league. During the Gauntlet I had a lot of fun with Toxic Rain which caused me to run up a character in the league for that. Additionally I had a Brand character that I was originally planning on going Penance Brand of Dissipation with… but pivoted at the last minute to Storm Brand of Indecision. In both case I have gotten the characters to around level 90.
With Toxic Rain I went Pathfinder as it is really the only Ranger ascendancy that has anything that benefits the skill. Pending I remember to keep a life flask rolling it also has really great surviveability after you have thrown on enough levels and gotten enough raw hit points. There are a few ways to build this and I opted for the modern method of getting a 250% Widowhail and buying a stupidly expensive quiver. I legitimately do not remember how much this cost but I think it was in the neighborhood of 50 Divines and that was the cheapest version I could find with both chaos and normal dot multi, a decent life roll, and bow damage percentage increase on it. This gives me +77% dot multi, +87.5% chaos dot multi, +381.5 life, and +171.5% bow damage. Additionally I am running a Tides of Time which effectively is a budget mageblood that only works on the Pathfinder class which effectively allows me to generate enough flask charges that they have perm uptime with the used when full enchant.
You can check out the full setup here in the POB, but fair warning I don’t know shit about properly configuring POB. I based it loosely on some other POBs that I saw on POE.Ninja and combined a bunch of things that I liked into a new frankenbuild. Essentially I am running Mirage Archer setup in my chestpiece with normal Toxic Rain, and then a Ballista totem setup in my bow with Toxic Rain of Withering to give me withered stacks. Collectively this leads to a pretty comfy playstyle as I roam around the map spamming two buttons and occasionally hitting a health potion when I remember it. If something is taking two long to die I curse it with despair and move on with my life. This is very much a mapper setup and not in any fashion something you would want for bossing purposes. Truth be told, I have learned that I do not like bossing builds in the least… and at some point should probably find one that I enjoy playing just so I can knock out ubers in the future. They all feel bad to me because leveling them feels like ass.
The other character I have been playing is a brand build, which is another archetype that I really love. Basically Wintertide brand is probably my favorite of these, but it always feels too fiddly and requires you to push way the hell too many buttons to play it effectively. Storm Brand is something that I have attempted to play countless times in the past but they always feel too squishy, and I think I might have come up with the solution here. Essentially I am abusing the new golem node on the Elementalist Ascendancy combined with the Fire and Cold nodes and Bastion of Elements as an extra defensive layer. So essentially all of my lightning damage from Storm Brand of Indecision is Chilling, Igniting, and Shocking the enemy and I am running around with massive buffs from Stone, Ice, Lightning, and Flame Golems which have meatshield support giving them extra heft and taunt. I am running two Taming Rings for the lulz and resists, and an Inpulsa’s chest for the explode pops. Add the cheapest Archdemon crown I could find and a +2 crit knife and you have a pretty comfy and powerful feeling setup in maps. I am running Aegis Aurora but don’t really feel like I have enough armor to make it work well… nor enough energy shield so I might swap that up for something else at some point like maybe a Phoenix Shield to resolve the fact that I am not ignite immune.
What is making this feel extremely good is the fact that I am running Storm Brand with a Doryani Merc that is causing everything in my vicinity to have -130% Lighting Resistance. The Merc is also providing shocked ground and using the Kaom’s Binding trick to convert some phys damage to fire, and providing me some extra regen with Shaper’s Seed. Everything else was pretty much a yolo as I just threw on some minion uniques that seemed like they might be useful for all of the Holy Relics and Herald of Purity minions that are being generated. For reference I am running a Shout bot Striker with my Righteous Fire character to add more regen and give culling strike for bosses, and running an Ice Shot ranger type for my Toxic Rain character to help slow up the packs a bit and make them stand in the toxic rain a bit longer. In truth I am looking for better versions of all of these mercs but I have not found exactly what I want. For example I want a striker that provides me fortify stacks, enduring cry, and determination… which is a thing that CAN exist but I just have not seen it.
Mapping with the negative lightning res merc setup is pretty comfy because the one I am running is also spreading out consecrated ground pretty much everywhere. It isn’t the best at killing unique mobs but feels pretty solid. I am blocking just enough incoming damage to make the 3000 life and 1000 energy shield that I have feel decent. Swapping to the Phoenix Shield would give me a bit more life regen which might make things feel a bit better as well as like I said patching the hole I have in my elemental defenses where I would at least become immune to ignite when I hit low life. Of all of the things I am worried about… ignite stacks seem like they are the easiest to work around. All told I am having quite a bit of fun with both of these new characters, but playing alts always feels weird because I never put the same focus on them as I do with my righteous fire mains. One of these leagues I am going to play one of these and force myself to improve it over the course of the league. Next league I am contemplating going down the Golem Elementalist Explosive Arrow path that my friend Sloth did this league… pending it does not get extremely nerfed. EA is an archetype that I already like quite a bit and Golementalist is extremely fun to level.
As far as league progress goes, I am chipping away at some of the remaining challenges for the league. I am sitting at 33 of 40 and at a minimum I want to hit 34 before I wander away like a bored toddler. Strenuous Summons is something that I made a dent in last night, and in theory I am pretty close to Eldritch Expedition and just need to get lucky with Remembrance Repressed. I can do t17s and could in theory chip away at Endgame Enigmas as well. Powerful Pursuits is killing Ubers and if I got desperate I could just buy my way out of that problem with boss carries on TFT. Basically I think I can at least get one more without a ton of effort and that is probably the path that I am going to go down. I am running red altars because I would far rather run the Black Star/Searing Exarch combo for invitations than doing maven witnesses or having to fight Shrek from the eater of worlds invitations. I burned through ALL of my invitations yesterday evening, and that is already way more Shrek fights than I ever want to do going forward. I should see what buying bulk Black Star invites costs on TFT because those are without a doubt the easiest to run over and over.
Anyways… still having fun with my stupid Path of Exile nonsense. Brands are fun, Toxic Rain is fun, and Righteous Fire is fun.
The post Burning Divines appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the official end of the Affliction League in Path of Exile and with it comes the quarterly job of shoving all of those “Remove Only” tabs under the bed. My strategy for the end of each league is to group all of those tabs into a folder named after that league so that I never have to deal with them again unless I am specifically fishing for an item. I do the same for the Guild Stash but unfortunately, it does not prevent me from having to log in on the day of a new league and set everything back up again. During Sanctum I started this tradition of talking about the various things that I built during a given league, and I have finally coalesced this into a blog feature that I will probably start doing for Last Epoch Cycles as well. This morning I will talk a bit about the happenings of the Affliction League.
Innaugural Bel League
With the start of the Affliction League, we decided to try something different. Up until this point I had participated in a few private league events, but had never really considered starting our own. Kodra and I were able to drum up enough support for the notion that we managed to have nine different people participating in the league, most of whom made it well into mapping before calling it quits. Quite honestly this is probably the ideal way to play this game. It allowed us to completely bypass what was apparently a pretty rough start to the league with bugs surrounding the goblin band mtx. We already are known for pooling our resources in the guild stash, but this took it to an entirely new level with folks actively hunting for build-required uniques for other folks.
Unfortunately with the launch of the Necropolis League on Friday, it does not look like we have much support. It might even just be me playing, so we won’t be attempting another “Bel League” this time around but it was still a lot of fun. There were a few negatives, however. The first is that we made the league last 40 days… which was honestly way too long. The default 10-day time limit for a private league is probably ideal if we were to do this again. The second negative is that without access to trade, it really negatively impacted the power level we could realistically achieve in this “Semi-SSF” gameplay mode. I was however surprised at just how functional all of my builds were that I created during this league and that was a bit of a pride moment for me personally. I would absolutely do this again but most of the AggroChat crew is down on Path of Exile post launch of Last Epoch 1.0.
Boneshatter Juggernaut
Would you believe that this was my very first time playing Boneshatter in any form? With the severe damage to Righteous Fire that 3.23 caused… it left me reeling a bit trying to figure out a new build to main. Boneshatter has traditionally been one of the most tanky Juggernaut builds, and as such I decided to give it a spin after both Ash and Kodra seriously suggested I try it. I enjoyed it quite a bit but it also didn’t feel quite as sturdy as Righteous Fire did. This was especially true for Delve, my favorite game mode. I am sure there are things that I could have done to build this differently for Delve but without access to trade, I had to basically wing it with what I had access to at the time. Sadly I didn’t dump a POB at the time I recorded the above video, but when we merged the private league into trade, I ended up reworking the character and even putting on a Mageblood for shits and giggles since I could afford one.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain
3.23 was the birth of the Transfigured Gem, and with it came a bunch of interesting-sounding options to play existing skills. The one that stood out the most for me was Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, which causes fissures to form in the ground and cause explosions that heat seal targets. As soon as I saw this… I had a MIGHTY NEED to try and create something with it. Sometimes… a build just does not work out the way you want it to. I really wanted to focus on Mace and Shield for some assorted defensive and offensive layers of “while shield is equipped” passive nodes, but in truth this seemed to either need some sort of stacking that I could not provide on SSF or a switch to a well-rolled Two-Handed Weapon. It was one heck of a fun build to level, and honestly, I wish I had recorded a video of the state of the build before pivoting away from it. Truth be told I just did not record anywhere near as many videos this league as I did during Ancestor League. It did a really good job of clearing maps but was painful to kill anything even slightly tanky like a boss.
If I were to do this again I would probably pivot into armor stacking and go with some sort of setup that would allow me to convert that to damage. This just wasn’t something I could realistically do in the limited access environment of Bel League. If you are curious this is the state of the build before I tore it down to become something else.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Lightning Arrow Champion
Originally this was going to be my second build of the league, but Snaking got in the way. I like having some sort of a map blaster to play around with and for the last two leagues that has been some sort of Lightning Arrow build. I’ve played this as Raider and Deadeye before, but by far my ascendancy of choice is Champion because it feels significantly more sturdy. I really do not like to die. Lightning Arrow just feels comfy and playing it with as many defensive layers as Champion feels even more comfy. This is the state of the build that I managed to get during Bel League, but once we merged into the trade league I upgraded it significantly even eventually taking it to a Magic Find build with a Headhunter. I never found a mirror like Kodra did, but had a lot of fun blowing up maps while juicing them.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Righteous Fire Chieftain
Since Snaking was not working like intended, I wound up pivoting my Chieftain into Righteous Fire. I had given this build a few attempts during some of the limited-time events from last November and never really could get it into a comfortable place. The problem I think was that I kept trying to gear it like I was going to gear the Juggernaut variant. This time around I pivoted into 90% all res combined with converting as much physical damage to elemental damage as I could. Because of the juicing level of this league, we were getting Lightning Coils to drop like candy, so I colored and linked one of those to get RF up and running on it. I had to wildly overstack Fire Resistance to make up for the -60% Lightning Resistance penalty but it was worth it because damage conversion was the piece I had been missing in previous attempts. This is the state at which I got the build during the semi-SSF Bel League, but I later on upgraded pretty much every slot once we moved into trade. It was comfortable enough that I am very likely going to start this for Necropolis league on Friday. That said it is still nowhere near as good as the previous incarnation of Righteous Fire Juggernaut felt so I am downgrading my rating a bit. This time I am going to build with a Cloak of Flames and see if that improves my opinion at all.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Penance Brand of Dissipation Inquisitor
Penance Brand of Inquisitor was absolutely cracked this league. There have been other wildly overpowered builds in other leagues, that I never really threw my hat in the ring on… and then ultimately later wished I had. I remember the broken state of the totem explode builds during Crucible and wished I had made an attempt at creating one while the “getting was good” as it were. I love brand builds, so when a brand build was wildly overpowered… you know I had to at least try it out. I had so much fun playing this build and I will mourn its loss, because it was just stupid amounts of fun to watch things evaporate. We all knew however that there was no way this build could last any longer than one league. This is the state of the build at which I recorded the above video, and this is the state I got it to at the end of the league. Penance Brand of Dissipation you will be missed.
Personal Rating: S Tier +++
Cold Blade Vortex Elementalist
There are a handful of builds that I have always wanted to try, but never quite got around to building. Blade Vortex is one of these abilities and this wound up being the very last build I made during the league. By the time I set down this path I was already losing steam and as such I never really made it very far with this build, only managing to get to level 76 which for me is barely past the campaign. The playstyle was enjoyable with you essentially freezing entire chunks of the screen at once while your blade vortex rips them to pieces. The problem that I have with the gameplay style is it requires you to maintain stacks of Blade Vortex to be effective, which means every few seconds you are hitting a button to keep a buff up. While not necessarily a bad thing, and no different than repeatedly casting a primary attack… knowing that it was a buff that I was maintaining made it mentally feel like more of a chore. If I had given it the love and care of some of my other builds… and if they had not been quite as fun as they were… this might have been something. I would consider revisiting at a later date, but for the moment it satiated most of my curiosity.
Personal Rating: B Tier
Affliction League
I feel like Affliction League is going to go down as one of the player-favorite leagues, in part just for the sheer amount of loot that it generated. I thought the forest mechanic was really interesting, but more than that I really enjoyed the three new meta ascendancies… though in the end I wound up swapping all of my characters over to the same one because it was very clearly the best option. I will greatly miss my Rucksack because having that little extra bit of swap space was just too damned good. Weirdly though it feels like I was nowhere near as active in this league as I have in previous ones. For Trial of the Ancestors I wound up building nine different characters, and in Crucible I played six different builds. During the entire league, I only recorded three videos which is also a bit off-pace for me. While this was the most manic league for most players… it felt like I checked out a bit earlier than I would have expected.
I am really hyped about the Necropolis league, but also a bit bummed because it seems like I am going to be going into it largely solo. Not that I really played much with my friends, but it was fun to be feeding them gear during the guild bank. Ultimately this will probably mean I just go harder on the trade league since I won’t be specifically saving anything for folks. I am also really interested in the scarab changes and the new crafting mechanic. I feel like combined those are going to lead to a wild league… but admittedly probably one a bit more austere than the previous few have been. I am legitimately okay with that because in truth I don’t really love magic find strategies that much. I would rather quietly toil away in the Delve mines to get my currency.
Anyways! That is the last league and its builds in review. Did you enjoy Affliction league? Are you going to be playing Necropolis league? Drop me a line below.
The post 3.23 Builds in Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
