Good Morning Folks! Since I finished the season in Diablo IV, I am now much more focused on Pohx League. I am very only likely to be dipping my toes back into Necromancer fun times when Ace wants to play, and particularly as we work on some of the seasonal objectives for them. In Pohx League I rolled something that was completely new to me, and it has been shockingly fun. I had never really played a Trickster before, or honestly gotten anything based on the Shadow class to maps. I’ve also not played a pure traps build even though Righteous Fire derives a lot of its damage based on Fire Trap. Ultimately I set out wanting to try a Trickster and then found a build that seemed like it might be enjoyable with that Ascendancy and rolled with it.
This build my friends… is ludicrous. I’ve never played anything with this level of full screen coverage. Sure my lightning arrow and later elemental hit of the spectrum builds could off screen enemies, but nothing to this point has ever just blanketed the entire screen in death. Yesterday I made some significant tweaks to the build and migrated to the “final form” and shifted over to Ice Trap of Hollowness. This is an alternate version of Ice Trap that comes from the Labyrinth that essentially scales up the area of effect of the traps, so that there is a dead spot in the center but MUCH wider coverage. It also has a much shorter time to trigger on its own, which makes it prime territory for some shenanigans.
Essentially to exploit the benefits of this alternate version of Ice Trap, we swap so using the Sunblast unique belt that makes it so enemies cannot trigger your traps, but allows you to throw 2 additional traps and explode on their own significantly faster. A perfectly rolled Sunblast is 75% reduced trap duration, but I was only able to afford a 61% one in Pohx league given the limited market. Since Tinkerskin works exclusively based on when traps are triggered, this means we need to move away from that chest and the most common choice is to go with a Carcass Jack for the additional Area of Effect and Area Damage scaling. The end result… is just truly silly for map clear because you essentially hit the entire screen at once.
More important than that, since I can easily have 17 traps up at once there is quite a lot of overlap which leads to shotgunning. The trick however is that you need to dance around the screen to limit the amount of mobs that are in the dead spot in the center that deals no damage. For bossing it is pretty straightforward to swap back to using the normal Ice Trap but it does mean having to take a moment to swap out your primary gem. I’ve never really loved gem swapping, but it does make enough of a difference to be worthwhile and will be even more so if I can get a slightly better roll on my Sunblast belt. What is nice about this build is with the swap it is both an extremely fast mapper and a pretty competent bosser. If you are curious I dumped a POB of the state of my build.
The only thing really lacking with this build is general defenses. I have enough layers to keep me from getting one shot, but I do have to hit my potion way more often than I would care to. There are a lot of things that I ultimately need to do to scale up the defensive layers, but the biggest one would be a load more evasion. Right now I have around 65% evasion and 90% lucky spell suppression combined with around 3500 hit points and 1700 energy shield. The only thing that is really going to one shot me is chaos damage, because I still have negative resistance in that department. Essentially the build is good enough to probably finish out the Atlas and unlock a few of the boss encounters, but would really need to find better versions of almost every rare slot in my build to make it feel a bit more comfy. Were I playing in a normal trade league this would not be a problem at all… but in a limited time event league there just isn’t a ton of stuff available for prices that I can afford.
I think much like it was in NecroSettlers, my first goal is going to be unlocking my full Atlas. When I get my third passive tree I plan on building it out to be Ritual and Einhar for the purpose of trying to farm either a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to turn my five-link into a six-link. I am pretty happy with the state of my build craft in Path of Exile, where I can make a character function without trade intervention more or less. I still like trading for specific upgrades, and I like selling random stuff as well… but I like knowing that I can mostly get a build off the ground and capable of mapping on my own. I will likely never be a big crafter, nor someone who dives deep into market manipulation… but I do like that I can be fairly self sustaining. That is a pretty huge thing coming from the very rocky starts that I had back in Sentinel and Kalandra leagues to where I am today.
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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the 4th day of Pohx League and I’ve gotten my Ice Trap Trickster to level 87 and mostly stabilized the character. It is nowhere near as tanky as my usual RF Chieftain fair, but not too shabby. If I can swap out my gear for higher Evasion/Energy-Shield bases it will begin to perform better. Right now I am only running around 15k Evasion and 2k Energy Shield, the later serving both as a defensive layer and as my mana pool. I also have negative chaos resistance which is a problem when you encounter something that cares about chaos. Specifically I cannot run any map with the “additional chaos damage” mods on it. I however due to my traps giving me energy shield and life, the no-regen and low-regen maps are pretty doable. I am not doing anything to fix elemental ailments yet, so those are still miserable but Arctic Armor is at least making me freeze immune.
It is always wild when a build starts to come together. It is like turning the tumblers on a lock and seeing them click into place. Essentially I am relying heavily on four different notables that take my Energy Shield and convert it into both a way of fixing my mana and then giving me a method for recovering said energy shield quickly when I am taking damage. At some point I will swap over to the low life version of the build and work in petrified blood and pain attunement. However before that I really need to get some life recoup on my rings to pay off the degen that petrified blood brings. In a proper trade league this would be simple enough to fix, but in a limited trade environment of a private league… even the biggest private league ever… it is a bit hard to find the things that I need.
As such I have used this and the previous NecroSettlers league as a way of flexing my SSF muscles a bit, and trying to figure out how best to get the items that I need. For example there is some tech that I stumbled on during base settlers that I am abusing here to farm some cluster gems. Essentially the node Atlas Notable Unending Nightmare makes it so that Delirium fog never dissipates, but you also don’t end up getting splinters or deli orbs. However every time you fill the bar for an objective, you get that reward as a drop… but also get some sort of cluster jewel at the same time. Normally you don’t get cluster jewel drops until the final payoff of the delirium fog, but in this case you get them every step of the way. This means that during the course of a map you can easily farm four or five cluster jewels without much issue. I will then use these to roll the cluster jewels that I need with harvest reforging.
I’m making progress but it is relatively slow progress. I have completed 50 Atlas objectives and as such unlocked my second tree. I’ve specced it into Niko and Scarabs because I am curious how well this build performs down in the mines. Delve produces a lot of useful raw currency, and when I am not running it… I notice it significantly. You have to get pretty deep into red maps before they begin to pay out in the same manner that even shallow delve does. The big thing that I am missing is offerings to the goddess, for the fourth lab. I have a single token, but I have yet to attempt it. I might try that over lunch to see if I can knock out my fourth set of ascendancy points.
I’ve been running a lot of Betrayal to get crafting unlocks, and occasionally there is a big payday when you bargain. I should really spend time memorizing who is the best person to bargain with, because the currency payouts sure are nice. I’ve not gotten anything major but at the state I am in the league, eight alchemy orbs in a single drop is nothing to sneeze at. The biggest problem with Betrayal is that it can be VERY rippy… which is something I have never really had to worry about too much playing mostly exceptionally tanky builds. Folks will say that Trickster is tanky… and it is in its own way… but it feels SUPER lightweight compared to a finished Righteous Fire character. I deal a heck of a lot more damage already though, so for general mapping purposes it feels great. The difference is really only noticeable when I have to fight something that does not fall over immediately.
Tonight however I am going to be returning to Diablo IV. Ace and I have scheduled some hangout as we dive into the lunar new year event. Unfortunately I have not really regenerated my stash of boss materials, so we might have to just run a bunch of Pits and Infernal Hordes. That is not necessarily a bad thing because I can certainly use the levels on my glyphs. We should probably also run some nightmare dungeons, because I am not sure the new shrines can spawn in the more streamlined game modes. I am really hoping that I see a sizeable spike in damage output because supposedly the unique ring I am using got fixed.
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