Good Morning folks. We are on the cusp of a new Last Epoch and Path of Exile II league and I cannot stop playing the Legacy of Phrecia event. What is probably even more wilds is that I think right now, there are more Path of Exile players than Path of Exile II players. It is really hard to prove this however because the majority of POE players do not use the Steam client. I switched to the standalone client some leagues ago because there is almost always a delay in league start because of the patch having to go through the Steam QC checks. However the 24 hour peak for POE2 is 35,015 and for POE1 21,117 and in the past they have stated than less than half of the players use the Steam client. Anyways I would believe it given how much trade volume I am seeing in small 20c trades. I can’t complete a map without someone pinging me for an item, which is way more active than a league normally is a month into it.
One of the things that I am chipping away at is the Gear Grinding Goals challenge for successfully running 200 t14 or higher rare maps to 100% completion. In truth I never really spent much time on the mappers when Settlers of Kalguur launched, but have seemingly hit my stride. I should probably finish upgrading my mappers all the way to level 10s, but for now I seem to be able to complete maps pretty solidly. I upgraded my last two voidstones over the weekend and as such I have a backlog of lower tier maps to consume, now that I only really care about t16s. As of this morning I have 50 more maps to go, and then I am sitting at level 99 and am mostly grinding out level 100. Getting this challenge won’t really move the needle and I will need to figure out something else to do to get another totem upgrade. I am hoping that I will actually encounter Sasan now that I am actively running mappers so I can knock out one of those associated achievements.
The thing about keeping your mappers running all the time is that you can also keep your disenchanter going pretty much all the time. More than that however they occasionally return some really nice stuff. I’ve gotten several 21/20 gems and while I did not have the mental fortitude to actually snap a screenshot of it… they brought me a Hinekora’s Lock. Admittedly when I got this, I did not realize the windfall that it actually was. I’ve gotten these to drop before during the Ancestors league and back then it was maybe 20 Divines. I was able to sell mine for 140 Divines. The Reddit regularly has pictures of folks having their mappers bring back a Mirror of Kalandra or even a Mageblood.
The only problem with getting a huge amount of currency this late in the league… is that I pretty much have already upgraded everything that I really needed for my build. I could of course have bought a Mageblood, and technically still can given that a reasonably well rolled one is going for roughly 110 Divines. However when it comes to chase uniques… I have always felt like my favorite is Headhunter. This is a belt that I have used many times on bow builds to help buff up both my damage output and my survival while mapping. However I have never actually used one on a Righteous Fire build… and in truth it would also solve another problem that I have been having in that I could not really juggle my stats in order to add in a Defiance of Destiny. So I spent 10 div on a well rolled Headhunter and 10 div on a well rolled Defiance and have been playing with both for funsies.
I lost quite a bit of regeneration but still have around 1300 health per second which is still enough to maintain righteous fire without any issues. However in general I have been able to hit nowhere near the numbers I am used to as Chieftain where I am only stacking Fire Resistance and can hit something around 2000 health per second. Basically Headhunter just makes any other build feel better as you are effectively getting a ton of buffs any time you kill rare monsters. The best of these is of course Soul Eater… and the worst is the one that gives you a Flicker Strike like effect that teleports you to the nearest rare monster. However since I care about being up close and personal with things… the flicker strike nonsense is way less harmful than it is with a glass cannon bow build. The only time it gets really dangerous is when I am delving… and it decides to teleport me out into the darkness.
Earlier I said that I did not initially buy a MageBlood, but could afford one anyways… so this morning I decided to go ahead and do that. I am not one of those people where the acquisition of money in general is an endgame unto itself. Currency in Path of Exile is only useful in that I can buy things with it that I will likely never actually see drop on their own. I am legitimately not sure what Mageblood number this is now… but I think my third? I think it might be my sixth Headhunter, and fourth Defiance of Destiny… because of all of the Tier 0 rarity uniques that is the only one that I think I have seen drop on its own. I am legitimately contemplating swapping over to a resistance flask setup because that would give me close to 90% fire resistance and around 85% for all of the other resistances. Regardless having a Mageblood gives me more options than NOT having a Mageblood.
Long story short… Legacy of Phrecia has been a pretty great event for me as a whole.
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Good Morning Folks! It is feeling like it is time to start putting things to bed in the Path of Exile Affliction league. I’ve been spending most of my time over the last few weeks playing either Enshrouded or Last Epoch, and with that has come less desire to log in and grind. I feel like it was a successful league considering this was the league that broke my favorite build. Throughout the league I wound up creating five viable characters and honestly enjoyed each of them:
The only real failed build of the league was Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, and even then I probably could have made that work were I sitting in trade league at the time. I pivoted that character to Righteous Fire and was able to get it going much easier.
That was another thing that I largely considered a big success. We started the league in a private “Guild SSF” and I think that was a heck of a lot of fun. I am not sure I would ever let that league extend out as long as we did, but I could definitely see starting off with a 10-day private league again. It was a lot of fun trying to get my builds up and running under the stipulations of having to either farm or craft everything. Playing with a group of people made it a lot easier to find some of the various build-required uniques for folks, and there was also a general sense of camaraderie that was a lot of fun. Going 40 days though… was a bit much and quite honestly MOST of the folks hit it heavy for the first week and then slowly tapered off. It was really only a handful of us that stuck around for the entire league and continued on into trade.
We find ourselves in the doldrums of the league now as player numbers are waning heavily. I think tomorrow and the launch of Last Epoch 1.0 and its first seasonal content called a “cycle” will be the final nail in Affliction League. As it stands it seems like most of the streamers are going to be transitioning from Path of Exile to Last Epoch, and without a steady drum beat of new build and farming strategy videos at least some of the player interest will drop. All in all I think the league was pretty successful in keeping players engaged, but I am honestly hoping we have a bit more sober of an experience for the next league. We jokingly referred to last league as the “Inflation League” and if that was the case… this league was the “Hyper Inflation League”.
I talked a while back about how Mirrors of Kalandra have spiked in price, in part because they were common enough to actually allow them to be regularly used in crafting. The weirder effect this league has had is that it has pushed the value of a Divine Orb into the ground. For the uninitiated in Path of Exile for the sake of trading Chaos Orbs are the Dollar Bill and the Divine Orb has traditionally been the next major unit of pricing for larger trades in the neighborhood of 200-260 Chaos orbs. During almost all of the Ancestor League the price of the Divine Orb stayed pretty stable at 250-260 on the higher end of “normal”, and as of this morning, Affliction Divine Orbs could be got on the market for 130 Chaos. You would assume that this would create upward pressure on items… but in truth, most staples of the market are down as well in price. Essentially anything that could be gotten from Magic Find and juicing the Affliction mechanic is plentiful and cheap.
The positive I guess in this whacky economy is that it has pushed up the price of a lot of things that come from sources OTHER than juiced mapping adding to a scenario where I have made far more currency in this league than any other to date. The lower price of otherwise expensive things has meant that I was able to pick up a Headhunter for 50 Divines, Mageblood for 140 Divines, and a Squire for 3 Divines. For Reference… during Ancestor league a Squire was roughly 25 Divines, Headhunter roughly 100 Divines, and Mageblood roughly 230 Divines. With the league winding down and prices always going up at the end of a league due to a limited player pool… I decided to go ahead and “cash out” and pick up these “Tier 0” uniques so that I at least have them to play with in the Standard league. It is highly unlikely I will ever be in the position to have them going forward, so might as well get them while the getting is good.
Now my thoughts are largely turning towards Last Epoch. At 11 am CST today the online servers are going dark until 11 am tomorrow when 1.0 drops officially. This means I am going to have to find something else to play tonight, either that or start some offline characters. It is going to be weird moving into a seasonal model with Last Epoch because I know me… and that means I will stop caring about my “standard” characters. I am just wired to play seasons at this point, and it will be interesting to see how it changes my focus going forward. I might even play some Diablo IV this evening because I barely made a dent in Season 3 before bailing to go back to Path of Exile. I could also work on some crafting projects in Enshrouded, but now that I have more or less “beat” that game my interesting has waned a bit. I am contemplating poking my head back into Valheim to see how that game has progressed while I have been away.
Anyways! Mostly I am anxious for Last Epoch 1.0 to drop tomorrow. I have already done a slew of planning and I hope luck is on my side when it comes to getting the uniques I want early.
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