Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.
What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.
I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.
I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.
I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.
I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.
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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bad weather night so I am running on minimal sleep. However that said I recorded a video of gameplay of my Shield Crush of the Chieftain Juggernaut… which is a mouthful. At this point, I am level 86 and have picked up most of the things I was seeking out, and feel relatively confident that I can make a general pronouncement about the build as a whole. Does it work well enough? Sure. Does it feel amazing? Not really. The problem with Shield Crush in general is that it is largely a stationary ability and in order to crank up its damage, you probably want to be running it with Multistrike. I personally don’t like the way Multistrike feels, so for reference, I am using Melee Splash instead in my gameplay.
I think the ideal playstyle is to gather up a bunch of mobs and then burn it all down at once from a stationary position. This works but also doesn’t necessarily feel amazing for mapping, especially not when you are going to struggle with a lot of tankier mobs. This was admittedly the very first T16 that I had attempted and it went smoothly enough. I never really came close to dying, and a lot of the mobs were taken out pretty easily but each time it stranded a single rare that I needed to chew thing. I am wondering if maybe the play would have been to try and run this build as a Chieftain for Hinekora explosions which would honestly go a very long way towards feeling tasty with clears. However, in that scenario, I would have probably chosen to go with a Cloak of Flames/Damage Conversion setup rather than trying to get as much armor out of my chest as possible.
The problem with armor scaling and damage conversion is that it requires some very specific items… a few of which are a bit “spendy” in a normal league. For example, I was able to pick up this grasping mail with the “Armour is Increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” for around 8 Divines in this league, but I have priced out the same item in other leagues and they were going for around 25 Divines. The cheaper option that gives you the same explicit is Formless Flame which itself can have over 1000 Armor but comes with a -30% Fire Resistance penalty reducing how much scaling you can easily get. Legitimately the more I sit here and think about it, the more I am wondering what converting this over to chieftain would do. If I did so I would end up dropping all of the crit nodes and go for Resolute Technique.
The other piece that artificially inflates the price of this build is my Aul’s Uprising. I picked this up off the ground so it cost me nothing, but these often go for several Divines in a more normal league. In this league, there are only a couple of stacks of chaos orbs. Essentially this is allowing me to not have to deal with trying to anoint charisma to fit in all of my auras as I am running Determination, Grace, and Defiance Banner all to keep bumping up that Armor score to 250k. I do wonder however if this would be better with a Strength stacking setup and running Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler and leaning more into the fire damage. I might Path of Building out some of these divergent paths to see if one of them is clearly better than the others. No one seems to have solved this problem as right now there are only four builds on the ladder that are attempting to use this ability… two of which are using it for Generals Cry.
There is a version in Hardcore however where someone has leaned heavily into the ignite damage and I am curious if maybe that is the correct play. Similar to what I said above they went down the Resolute Technique path of dealing zero crits, and have instead scaled similar to how you would scale Righteous Fire. This biggest change though is that they ended up going with a Dawnbreaker which can get upwards of 2000 Armor on a single item. Then interestingly they used Dyadian Dawn which is largely thought of as the “Explosive Arrow” belt as it was popularized with that build, but makes it so that you deal zero physical damage but your ignites deal damage faster. I think I might go down this rabbit hole a bit further because at the moment I am largely dissatisfied with the current state of my build.
Anyways this is part of the fun of Path of Exile… sometimes you go down a path that is a dead end. Sometimes that path branches a bit but can still maybe end up in an interesting place. I am maybe not giving up on this one yet.
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Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I slept like crap last night so I find myself in a bit of a haze… which messes the foggy mess of nonsense that is going on outside today. I’ve officially entered the “playing with dumbass ideas” phase of the Necropolis league, and as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend leveling another Marauder. At this point, I am hanging out on the Oriath docks and nearing the push to finish the campaign. I think over lunch I might try and do the third Labyrinth and push through to the end so I can begin the “gearing phase”.
During the Ancestor League, I attempted to create a Shield Crush Chieftain. My idea was relatively straightforward… take the class that makes it easy to cap elemental resistances and then make it deal physical damage converted to fire damage. The above video is of some footage of me doing a T14 map and shows the state of that build as I managed to get it. You can check out the POB but essentially I was attempting to use Avatar of Fire to convert all of the damage that I was dealing to Fire Damage. It sort of worked… but mostly was less than exciting. However, with the Affliction League, we got a Transfigured version of Shield Crush that essentially was doing the thing I was trying to do… baked into the gem itself. My guess is that there are a lot of folks looking for build content for this gem, because my first Shield Crush Chieftain video that is titled that… has gotten more traction than it deserves.
However, once that seed was planted into my head… I wanted to give it a shot even if it also turned out to be a failure. I am being exceptionally lazy and running Forbidden Flesh/Flame combo to give myself Tasalio Cleansing Water which makes my overcapped Fire Resistance apply to everything else while running a Juggernaut. Other than that I am mostly stacking armor, life, and regen and a few sources that increase “attack damage” but not specifically “physical damage”. I am not where I am ready to do a proper show and tell of how things are going, and am just about to break out into a cluster setup over the next few levels. We will see how it goes but for right now… it feels pretty freaking good.
I am going down the Armor Stacking path which means I am running an Emperor’s Vigilance and a Replica Dreamfeather both of which are extremely cheap right now. I leveled using Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler but it started to fall off significantly the higher in level I got… since I am not explicitly stacking strength. I’ve picked up a Grasping Mail with the “armor increased by over-capped fire-resistance” explicit which is why I decided to do the forbidden flesh/flame combo. I think I paid 8 Divines for the one that I got which has over 1000 armor on it and a decent amount of evasion as well. I am also converting all of my Evasion to Armor through the Iron Reflexes keystone. I will likely take advantage of this when I pick up boots and gloves going for as high of both armor and evasion as I can find with chaos resistance and fire resistance.
At the moment I am running around in a Brass Dome, but only because I pulled one from the Forgotten Sage and figured I might as well use it. Also hilarious… you can equip a Headhunter at level 40 so I ran around with one of those for a while but I have no clue what my final belt is going to look like. Maybe a well-rolled Immortal Flesh since I seem to care about Regeneration. Last time around I went with Arn’s Anguish but I am not sure if I am going to be using anything that generates endurance charges. Regardless the build feels good right now and looks really cool because Shield Crush of the Chieftain has a much wider range than normal Shield Crush does… and once I get Fan the Flames up and running my ignites will start spreading. The biggest challenge is going to be getting enough stats on the few non-unique slots that I have.
By tomorrow I should have a good idea of how well this build actually works so I might do one of my videos showing it off. For the moment I am using a Flammability on Hit ring for my curse which seems to work pretty well, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have any chaos resistance on it. It was something that I picked up off the ground down in Delve and held onto.
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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.
