Good Morning Folks! Here we go with another Saturday blog post since I seem to be determined to hit thirty-one this Blaugust. We are in the final stretch before the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile next Friday. With a new league comes the eternal question of what the heck to actually play. While I need to spend some time updating it, I have a section on the Path of Exile Tools page where I have been loosely keeping track of the characters and builds that I have played over the course of the last four leagues.
Last week I recorded a bit of a rambling video talking about my journey with Path of Exile so far, but suffice it to say I have learned a lot over the last four leagues, and Ancestor is going to be my fifth league. There are a lot of things that I have come to accept that I did not with that very first build. Firstly I have come to accept that while builds may be advertised as being able to do all of the content in the game, that statement usually comes with some caveats. Namely what feels great clearing a map doesn’t necessarily always feel great in deep delve or fighting bosses. So I am going into the Ancestor league knowing that more than likely I am going to build several characters for various reasons over the course of the league… some because I want to specialize in a specific bit of content and others just because I want to try something different.
For the last two leagues, Sanctum and Crucible, I have league started a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This is without a doubt probably the most comfortable build I have ever played. I’ve never really put the currency into the build in order to turn it into a higher damage potential/do all of the content in the game build… but instead mostly focused on the high levels of survival and making it a comfortable Delve and Heist monster. That is not to say that mapping is not comfortable, but it will never clear as fast as some of the other “entire-screen-clearing” options. I know that more than likely by the end of the league I will have leveled another Righteous Fire character, but I sorta want to see how the new meta shakes out with RF Chieftan and whether or not Forbidden Flesh/Flame are cheap enough to reasonably either cherry pick a Juggernaut ability, or do the same with a Jugg and snag the Chieftain resistance capping node.
However, if you want a very comfortable build that was able to get me two keystones without breaking a sweat and do most of the game modes… then I would suggest checking out Pohx.net or specifically the Righteous Juggernaut written guide. This is a playstyle similar to the Thorns Crusader if you ever played that in Diablo III, where you just run through the map and watch things fall down around you.
Another build that I had a heck of a lot of fun with in this past league was Explosive Arrow Ballistas Champion. This is technically the first build I ever played when I sat down to try and follow a guide back during the Sentinel League. The thing is… there were a lot of layers of how to build a character that I did not understand at that point. As a result… my EA Champion was a bit of a failboat that I half understood the directions that I was trying to follow. This is one of the first builds that I kitbashed a number of guides together along with some information from various POE.ninja profiles of folks playing a similar setup. The end result is a build that looks very much like most EA Champions out there, but one that specifically was suited to my tastes. If you are curious about what the build ended up looking like, here is a short video I recorded a while back.
While I enjoyed it greatly, there is an aspect to the build that just feels weird in that you spend a lot of time running ahead while you wait on your Ballistas to kill things for you. You end up building in such a matter that you don’t actually do any damage yourself, but your turrets do… but they don’t actually do the damage from the initial hit… but instead from a delayed explosion. It is very much a no-aiming gameplay style which is fun and is super tanky in the way in which I built it so you can survive pretty much any of the content. However mapping… never really felt that great because you were essentially always needing to loop back through the map to pick up what dropped in your wake.
If you want to give it a shot though, I highly suggest you check out Zizaran’s video guide from last league. There were no significant changes in the way that someone would build an EA Champion, so for the most part all 3.21 guides should be relevant still.
Another build that I have greatly enjoyed, both in the version that I built this league in the above video, and a half-assed version that I played way back in Sentinel league… is Wintertide Brand. More specifically the best version I have played is the Wintertide Brand Occultist that I cobbled together after looking at a number of POE.Ninja profiles and trying to decide what path I wanted to take. This is the first build that I more or less freehanded based on input that I was seeing from other player builds rather than trying to follow a guide. For the most part, it worked out swimmingly. The core problem, however… is it is a bit on the slow side and has a requirement of needing a unique to feel good. More specifically you want a specific corruption of that unique. I also already had a nice “+Cold Skill Gems” wand laying around that dropped in Delve so it was easy for me to cobble this together.
To be truthful… there are not a ton of guides around for this one. Mr 9 Lives has one but it is nowhere near as detailed as something from Zizaran, Ghazzy, or Palsteron. If you want to copy my POB I dumped that some time ago at level 82. The thing that I never quite solved was with my build were all of the defensive layers. I was going for Regen + Block but I was missing a lot in the block department. Basically I never really wanted to put the effort into properly fixing it, but someday… I am going to make this feel amazing.
Another build has caught my eye recently, and I am doing a bit of a league start test at the moment. While I am only in Act 8… unless something drastically changes I think I am going to league start Lightning Arrow Raider. Essentially what I would like to have is a build that can just wipe the entire screen, and be able to do that… in what is effectively garbage-tier gear. I want to go into this next league pretending like I am approaching it as SSF, in spite of wanting to have access to give stuff to my guildies and hopefully cherry-pick the one thing I am a bit worried about getting… Vaal Lightning Arrow.
I recorded some gameplay this morning of running through some of Act 8. Essentially using a Lightning Arrow 5-link I can often kill things before they even get on the same screen with me. It performed essentially the same on a 3 and 4-link. For Rare/Boss mobs I use Artillery Balistas in order to grind them down or fire off Vaal Lightning Arrow if I have a Vaal charge. For defensive layers I am going after High Evasion, 100% Spell Suppression, 100% Phasing, and trying to get a decent balance of life and armor to round that out.
With this test, I have specifically been avoiding rifling through my vault to find good stuff to equip. Everything I am wearing dropped for me during this run so far. The bow for example was a white five-link item that took the quality to 20% and then threw an Anger Essence at and lucked into a reasonable roll. Then I bench-crafted cold damage on it to add a bit more raw damage. The Helm I Rog Crafted, and the chest, boots, and gloves were all things that dropped. I’ve got a bunch of gems equipped that I am not even using but never actually removed from my gear.
Essentially what sent me down the Lightning Arrow/Artillery Ballista path was the number of folks who made magic find builds using that combination of abilities at the end of the league to farm stuff. In all cases, it seemed like they could make it work on a bare minimum of gear. In my travels of searching for information, I stumbled across the above video from “LifeWithoutPants” a YouTuber I had never seen before. This sent me down the path of Raider instead of PathFinder, so we are going to see how that feels. I really like leveling a Ranger because it does not require me to mule anything from another character, pending I am going for a bow build. Generally speaking, when I get access to Lily or the Library I pick up Flame Dash to replace normal Dash, but past that, you start out with access to everything you need and get most of it through quests.
Right now I plan on finishing leveling all the way through the Acts and then will try some White and Yellow maps to see how those feel. Essentially my plan for this character is to farm maps and work my way up to Red maps. I might go Essences, Harvest, and Jun on my Atlas to help with gathering gear. The other path I guess would be to go down Expeditions and then Rog craft some gear. My hope is with the screen clear potential of the build is that Blight won’t be quite so painful as it usually is with Righteous Fire. I’m not sure I will be able to do Metamorphs in quite the same way as I did as SRS or RF, but I am not going to block any content so that I can at least try a bit of everything.
I am really looking forward to this league, and looking forward to giving Sanctum another shot in its updated form. Are you going to be playing Path of Exile? What are you looking at to league start? Drop me a line below and we can chat! I’m also more than happy to help folks out if you are just dipping your toes in the game and looking for a build to follow. Generally speaking, I should be able to take the type of gameplay that you like in other ARPGs and suggest something similar in POE.
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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s epic blog post, I am going to take it a bit light so I can actually publish it… in the actual morning. Over the weekend I dusted off my Scion character and have been playing it a bit. I don’t exactly know what I am doing but I am having quite a bit of fun screwing around with it. As I have said before, this character was created only as a way to knock out the clear “Act III on a Scion” achievement but wound up trying out a spell gem that I had never played with before. I like brands as a concept and have played a Wintertide Brand and a Stormbrand build to high levels and enjoyed both. Armageddon Brand works a bit differently in that most of the damage it deals, comes from a single massive meteor that falls from the sky and strikes an impact area surrounding the mob it is targeting.
The end result feels so good as you send down projectiles from above to decimate oncoming packs of monsters. I recorded another one of my dumb videos last night showing off some footage from blood aqueducts. The thing is… I am enjoying this enough that I am legitimately considering trying something like this for a league start. I don’t love the fiddly nature of Scion, so if I did this I would be focused on Inquisitor because it comes with a sizeable amount of survival. The biggest problem that I have with the build currently is it has somewhat anemic single-target damage. To be fair… this is traditionally the problem with a brand build, but I think with enough crit this might resolve itself.
Another problem that I am struggling with right now, is trying to figure out where I want to go on my tree. Since I am doing this completely without a map at this point, I am mostly just trying to seek out things that either give me survivability or elemental damage and crit. Right now I have a bunch of points invested in the minion damage setup that gives me a flat damage increase like I would use with Righteous Fire. I am wondering if those points are better spent elsewhere. There is a cluster of fire nodes way up north that might be worth respeccing and pathing towards. While I recorded the video last night, I sort of hem-hawed around about what my second ascension would be… and last night I made the decision to officially go Chieftan. I need to get another labyrinth down so that I can actually make that happen.
As far as a league starter version, I am sorta leaning towards this sort of build from RaizQT. He is a hardcore player so values survival… so when he says it is Tanky, he probably means that it is actually tanky. On POE.Ninja there are a bunch of players working off some version of this build focused around the Rathpith shield. The negative with that shield is you take 10% life damage every time you cast a spell… but you also gain a ton of damage as a result. Essentially to make this work you need lots of life and even more regeneration… given that it also runs Righteous Fire just to buff the fire damage. It feels weird that I am contemplating not starting RF Juggernaut since I have had so much luck with that build, but I also feel like I probably need to branch out a bit.
If I find myself struggling, I can always lean back on the RF Juggernaut again to fund any sort of nonsense that I want to get up to. I might change my mind by the time the 18th of August actually rolls around, but right now… I am very seriously contemplating an Armageddon Brand Inquisitor for my league starter. In the weeks between now and then, I sort of want to map out a bit of a POB for myself based on the elements that I see from the builds on POE.Ninja. In the meantime, I will continue to screw around on the Scion and see if I can make it viable for mapping.
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Good Morning Friends! I have no clue how many morning posts I am actually going to make this week. This is the week where I have to do in-person training from 8 am until 5 pm. At least for this morning, I decided to vary my sleep schedule a bit and go back to my 5:30 am wake-up. This honestly isn’t a bad idea given that during the school year this is what I am going to end up doing anyways, and maybe this gives us a month or so of getting back into the swing of it. I had every intent of making it super far into the Guild Wars 2 story progression, but that never really happened. Instead I spent my weekend playing a whole slew of other games. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. As is often the case… this Monday’s post is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord of different topics. As the week goes on I might drill down into each of them a bit further.
I am continuing to move forward in Honkai Star Rail, and tend to put in 30 mins or so every day to do the assorted daily content. There has been an event that allowed for double rewards from Calyx, and I have honestly been using this to stock up on experience gain items. I am nearing the next break point in adventure level which should allow me to take my characters up to level 80. I know I do not have anywhere near enough materials banked to bring my entire squad up in level, but my goal is to at least get a few of them up, and then grind more materials to pull up the rest. I still have had zero luck pulling Luocha and am rapidly running out of time to snag him before the next banner starts.
Another game that I spent some time playing this weekend was Dave the Diver. This honestly seems like the perfect Steam Deck game, though I’ve only played it on my Gaming Desktop so far. I saw this dumb game all over my feed over the last couple of weeks, and when it showed up on the AggroChat topic list I figured I needed to check it out. It is somewhat hard to describe this game… because it is so many different games rolled into one. You spend your days diving into the ocean gathering resources for various folks… and then you spend your evenings waiting on customers at a seaside sushi bar. While gathering resources you are under constant pressure to make sure you are catching enough fish so that you can open the sushi bar that evening. Instead of a health bar, the game uses your oxygen meter as a single combined resource. If you “die” you only get to keep a single item from your inventory. I definitely want to play more of this, and if you need a charming oceanic game… maybe check it out.
The other revelation that I made this weekend is that Parsec now supports Dual Sense controllers. Right now the Dual Sense is probably my favorite controller, and use it whenever possible. I noticed a few weeks back that Yuzu the Switch Emulator is now smart enough to interpret the gyroscope built into the Dual Sense and map it over as the console gyro. The challenge was that up until this point, Parsec had essentially read every gamepad as an Xbox 360 controller, effectively dumbing down the input to only the buttons that allowed. However in my research in how to make a Dual Sense work… I found that it is just now natively supported, pending you download the parsec USB Driver for it. It works shockingly well and even the gyro has next to no latency.
So that means that I am way more interested in emulating Switch games than I was previously. If I could play them over parsec, it means I can hang out and play them on my laptop or even figure out some shenanigans that also let me play them over a mobile phone maybe. I get that making a thing that is already portable… portable by jumping through a bunch of hoops sounds dumb but I am who I am. I finally got around to trying out Pokemon Arceus, and I gotta say… I already like this FAR better than the traditional mainline Pokemon model. I have a weird relationship with Pokemon given that I was an adult when they came out and I played Blue for the first time on a Gameboy Emulator. I don’t have the built-up nostalgia for the game that so many folks are roughly a decade younger than me do. I hope we see more of this formula because I really dig it so far.
I also spent a bit more time playing Tears of the Kingdom, and honestly… this is the game that I mainlined yesterday. The main reason why I am playing it on Yuzu is that I can apply cheats that remove weapon durability from the game. This honestly ruins the entire game experience for me, and I didn’t really love Breath of the Wild until I played through on Cemu the Wii Emulator with a durability patch to just remove that system from the game. I get for some of you fine folks out there, the durability system is way more important to your experience… but I hated that aspect of Halo… needing to constantly swap weapons, and I hated it in Zelda as well. I already really like this game far more than I did Breath of the Wild. I will probably talk more about it later this week, but essentially I got far enough yesterday to get off the initial “tutorial island”.
The extremely astute might have already noticed that there are a couple of new additions to my masthead of nonsense. Either that or you might have been around the fediverse this weekend when I talked about it. For a bit, I have wanted some of the cute critters from Guild Wars 2 to fill in a few gaps. I’ve had my set of “Streamer Moogles” for a while, that have stolen my keyboard, mouse, headset, etc. I love my Choya Pinata miniature and I have a deep adoration of the Quaggan… and the cutest version is the one with the Turtle shell hat. So when Ammo wrapped up my Path of Exile commission, I threw out another one for her to work on whenever she got a chance. Over the weekend she wrapped them up and then of course I immediately incorporated them into the banner. Some people get Tattoos… and apparently, I just keep adding stuff to the masthead of my blog.
Anyways! It is time for me to go get ready. I hope to be able to knock out blog posts each morning… but just in case that doesn’t actually happen… I wish you all an amazing week and I am hoping to survive mine.
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Good Morning Friends! Last night I largely spent my evening doing some chill gameplay in Guild Wars 2. When I finished up the previous night I had landed on the Airship parked atop Bloodstone Fen, and that is where I picked up when I logged in. I remembered hating this zone because it is just a murder box. The white mantle and bloodstone elementals always seemed to be hyper-aggressive and stacked in such thick layers around the map that it was almost impossible to move around without death following swiftly behind you. There were weird mechanics that I never really fully grasped as well, making everything a bit more challenging than it was probably intended. However with a firm grasp of how the shield absorption mechanic works and a flying mount… Bloodstone Fen was actually a rather enjoyable experience. When I first attempted this I did not even have much in the way of glider mastery unlocked.
From there I moved over to Ember Bay, and I have to say that flight absolutely trivializes this experience. Ember Bay was very much about teaching you how to use things like thermal vents to navigate the zone combined with a lot of gliding trickery, and when you can just hop on the SkyScale you can absolutely soar over top of all of this nonsense. I have to say originally I liked Ember Bay so much more than Bloodstone Fen because it was seemingly more straightforward. That impression largely is intact but I forgot how generally nasty the vinetouched destroyers are as a whole. I made it through the zone without much effort but I was downed a few times because the fire/poison nonsense caught up with me. In all cases, I was able to get myself back up, and in one moment a random stranger swooped down to help out… and I am a bit sad that they flooped away before I could thank them. That is always one of the great parts about the Guild Wars 2 community, which is that so often complete randos will pop over and help you get resurrected.
I finished out my night protecting Aurene from some bad things. I also remembered that fight being way more stressful the first time I did it. I still took a ton of damage, so it is not like I was able to trivialize it. However across the board so far Living World Season 3 seems nowhere near as “murdery” as I remembered it being from my first and only play-through. Again I think I chalk this one up to a better understanding of the game, and even though I might not remember the content blow for blow… having a vague understanding of what needs to be done in the moment. It is weird how exposure to the character has changed my feelings about the character. Like I remember thinking that initially Aurene was hideous nightmare fuel… but now after growing to love the character, I think the lil spud is kinda cute. Originally she reminded me way the hell too much of the botchling from The Witcher 3.
I closed out my night by happening upon the Tarir event at exactly the right time, allowing me to finish the last few precursor events and get in for the vine kill… and treasure chest crawl. Every time I am away from the game for a bit… I sort of forget how much loot this single event is worth. The vast majority of the last three rows of loot in my inventory came from that one event last night… and most of those are bags that contain even more loot when opened. If I was better about doing things on a predictable schedule, I would absolutely feel the need to do this every single day. In theory, I probably SHOULD get back into a rhythm… because Dragons End is also a phenomenal haul of an event as is Dragonstorm. So many of the meta-events are so fun and at the same time so amazingly rewarding. This is really the thing that hooked me on Guild Wars 2.
I’m moving through content way faster than I expected it to be. I guess the reality is when you are ONLY focused on the story bits… and you have already unlocked most of the zone-wide features… the living world content goes pretty freaking fast. I know Path of Fire is pretty long, or at least I remember it being pretty long. Similarly, I think I remember Living World Season 4 being pretty long as well. End of Dragons comparatively felt relatively short, so maybe just maybe… I might actually make it through all of the content before Secrets of the Obscure releases. We also got word that the next Path of Exile league will begin on August 18th… so I know I will be splitting time with that as well. July and August feel like they are going to be really busy months. I am happy at the moment to be back in Guild Wars 2 and feel like I have a sense of direction and forward momentum.
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