I think I have reached the point with my Boneshatter Juggernaut where I have gotten it about as far as I can without access to the trade economy. My crafting knowledge is good enough to make a character function in a pseudo-ssf environment but not good enough to start fine-tuning my gear. At this point, I really miss being in the trade league because it would probably be straightforward to fix the awkward bits of this build and make it excel like I think it should. After spending two divines and all of my rare crafting materials yesterday trying to make a better chest piece off a defensively enchanted drop from a heist that Kodra got… I think I am done trying to craft anything complicated because I just can’t cope when those crafts ultimately fail. Mostly it just feels like I am throwing away resources that would be better spent just buying the thing I ultimately want.
Conceptually I like the idea of a private league, but I think maybe the default length of one is set to 10 days for a good reason. Now is about the time when I would prefer for the characters to just merge into the normal trade league, and we still have another 30 days left in our private league. It was a really fun way to start the league, and for the most part, I think all of us have been able to get characters “functional” but maybe not “great” as of yet. What I am seeking for gear would just be much easier to get on trade league… for example last night I spent 2 Divines, 1 Exalt, 1 Annul, and 1 Orb of Conflict attempting to craft something that I could buy for 40 Chaos. The same has been true with the copious amounts of crafting materials I have poured into trying to get a halfway decent axe… that still pales in comparison to the most basic thing I could pick up on trade for a single divine. I’ve just reached the point where I would personally be better served in the trade league.
I’ve made it fairly far on my own and am sitting at 105 of 115 maps, with the remaining ones that I need all unique. This is I think another thorn that is jabbing me right now, is because this is the point where I would just buy the maps that I am missing instead of fishing for them through Kirac. Sure Putrid Cloister is always going to be an expensive map, but it is driving me insane that I have not finished my 115 yet. I feel so far behind the curve as compared to where I would normally be at this point. Part of it is that I lost my comfy Righteous Fire playstyle, and another part of it realizing how much of the currency I was acquiring came from trades and not from raw drops. I also did not realize how much focus and purpose I derived from knowing that I was building towards being able to buy whatever thing I needed for my build. Grinding for the purpose of grinding feels hollow without those “stretch goals” that I was working towards.
So instead… I’ve begun creating alts. One of the abilities that amuses me greatly is Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. Essentially it erupts three times and has some basic seeking logic that will cause the fissures to seek out targets nearby when possible. Over the weekend I started a new Marauder with the intent of going toward Chieftain for the easy resistances and Hinekora explosions. I am sort of going towards something like this, which was a character I found on POE.Ninja seemed to be doing what I was trying to do. Essentially the idea will be to focus on Mace/Sceptre and then do whatever I can to scale up the fire damage from the fissures. I was able to switch over to the transfigured gem before the end of Act 1, and now that I am in Act 2 have have access to Shockwave it really is starting to feel great.
The other alt that I have been playing with is good ole tried and true Lightning Arrow Champion. Now I played this towards the end of the last league and had a lot of fun with it. It can get by without much in the way of gear save for a handful of uniques… that I have thankfully already acquired. I’m at the tail end of Act 4 and would probably be further if I did not get distracted yesterday with starting the Lava Snake character. It is a comfy playstyle and a fun way to churn through maps, though honestly… I gotta say I am more enamored with the chieftain currently. I like the idea of trying out something that I have not played before, especially since I can only really get characters so far without better knowledge of the crafting system. I think maybe the SSF gameplay style is just not for me. While I have enjoyed dumping stuff in the bank and seeing other people use it, I feel like I am stuck in a bit of a rut currently without the ability to get upgrades.
All in all, I am still having quite a bit of fun, and I don’t mean this morning’s post to sound like I am super frustrated. I am still finding joy in what I am doing, but I’ve come to know myself a bit more I guess. I know that I miss the trade economy more than I thought I would. It really has been the factor that has kept me engaged with Path of Exile for as long as I have each league. Losing access to it and losing access to my preferred character and playstyle… has been more of an emotional hit than had hoped. Alting is a comfy space for me, so I think I am going to focus on it for a bit. I am really curious to see what this Volcanic Fissure of Snaking character feels like once I get higher levels and gear. I think it might even be a fun character down in Delve if I can get the survival high enough.
The post Lava Snake Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Sorry for never actually getting around to writing anything yesterday… I am going through a bit of a thing. Later today will mark us having the new Affliction League in Path of Exile for a week, and I thought I would spend some time this morning giving my thoughts as a whole on the changes. As of writing this, I am level 93 and can easily do T16 maps and am around the 100 to 150 range in delve farming content there. First I have to say I am very pleased with Boneshatter and this has been one of my most part one of my smoothest transitions from leveling to mapping and to the proper endgame. I still have some relatively scuffed gear, but I feel completely viable and while I am sure I would be stronger in a trade league environment it has been perfect cromulent for “solo-self-found” gameplay.
For those who care about such things, here are screenshots of my offensive and defensive screens inside of POE. I would dump a POB… but it seems like Boneshatter of Complex Trauma is not recognized yet and comes across as complete nonsense. This is one of the challenges of having such a major shift in the meta… all of the tools that we use to help us make better sense of the game are all lagging behind. What matters more than anything is that it feels good to play, but I just noticed this morning that I am inching precariously close to the accuracy cap health-wise, which means my free 40% damage multiplier will break if I cross that line by even one point. I might need to see if I can find a single point on the tree that gives me some more accuracy because I really do not want to go back to running precision if I can help it.
As far as the bit meta shake-up and changes in all of the active skill gems go… I think there is more positive here than negative. Sure it killed my favorite character archetype… the Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but RF still is alive and kicking in the form of an Inquisitor Energy Shield/Life Stacking build and the new weird Mana RF build that is starting to spring up on Hierophant. Neither is really what I want, but I am happy that mechanically the playstyle still lives on even though it no longer does for me. What we gained in return is a bunch of really interesting-looking abilities that I want to try building around like Volcanic Fisure of Snaking which sort of casts a line of snaking explosions on the ground that look something vaguely similar to an Abyss tunnel. While I don’t think most of the community has really had a chance to test out all of the new playstyles, I think we are going to see some extremely interesting builds emerge as a result.
The big mechanic for Affliction League is the Viridian Wildwoods which is a delve-like exploration mechanic where you venture forth into the mists while wisps burn away the taint of evil. Out in the mists are all manner of encounters including NPCs that will teach you one of three new ascendancy classes that you can gain on top of your normal one. Essentially they boil down to “Fun with Flasks”, “Fun with Corpses”, and “DIY Scion” each with their own chase-perfected versions of items that you can equip that are gained through completing Viridian Wildwoods in various tiers of content. The Wildwoods themselves are extremely enjoyable and when you exit them, they give you a Sentinel-like mechanic that randomly juices content in the map making them drop massive amounts of loot while also scaling the difficulty significantly.
There are videos showing the sheer nonsense that can happen when you combine the Wildwoods with existing 100% Delirium juicing strategies… but you don’t even need to really do that to feel the impact. The above screenshot was taken from a white map, after having completed the wildwoods and them doing a SINGLE ritual altar after having defeated an Essence Beast that was in range of it. This is not even showing the real scope of how much loot there was… because there were strings of loot popups that expanded past the borders of the map. This league has forced me to crank up the strictness of my loot filter because it produces way more loot than I could ever sort through. Legitimately it might be one of my favorite league mechanics they have come up with but also feel it might be a bit too strong to go into standard.
The three ascendancies are each strong in their own way but somewhat suffer from the “only three good picks” problem that Chieftain does currently. Since I am melee class, it felt like the natural synergy of tinctures was perfect for me to go with. Essentially due to my ascendancy, I have nearly 100% uptime on the flasks on either side of the tincture. It has also made me shift up my playstyle a bit for example I am using Warlord’s Mark instead of Vulnerability because it synergizes with Detect Evil which makes it so that my hits against marked targets cannot be blocked or suppressed. The problem is I am not exactly sure what I want for my 4th choice. I will likely go Wildwood Blessing as it gives me Barkskin a powerful 25% reservation defensive layer and I really don’t want to give up additional flask slots or remove gems from my gear to benefit from the other two options. What is awesome is I could shift things up and go for the Primalist ascendancy and have equally compelling options. I am definitely calling this system a massive win.
So that is essentially three wins in a row… so let’s talk about a massive “L”. Let’s start off first by stating… that I did not play the Ultimatum league and as a result, I had no nostalgia for it… and that I also enjoyed Metamorph quite a bit and regularly mixed it into my Altas tree. So far Ultimatum seems like a shitty replacement for Metamorph. The rewards are just not great and feel like a greatest hits collection of the shittiest loot you ever got from the corrupted strongbox atlas node with the occasional small stack of currency of catalysts. The thing is… the negative effects can be rather rippy and you can see in the above screenshot what it looks like when you complete all 10 rounds and get a stack of your loot. Nothing in that pile was really worth the time it took me to complete the encounter. I would like to see some data collected from folks who went all in on the Ultimatum atlas tree options, but with zero investment it really isn’t even worth my time.
The other big change for me personally has been the advent of “Bel League” where I gathered together with some close friends and started a private Path of Exile trade league. This has given us a mostly SSF gameplay experience with the ability to share some really good items when we find them. I would say this has been a massive win because it allowed us to bypass a lot of the day-one weirdness as we were limiting ourselves to a very small pool of players. It has also been a lot of fun as random loot we might not be interested in, could be useful for someone else out there playing a wildly different build. I’ve had a lot of fun earmarking assorted loot for my friends and also churning out raw currency for crafting. It is making me realize just how much of the “wealth” I generated last league came from the trade economy because I have rather anemic stacks of chaos and only a single divine orb thus far.
This has also caused me to shift up my Atlas strategy a bit and am actually mixing in Essence and Harvest for the raw crafting potential that each provides. I’ve also just picked up some assorted nodes to increase the drop chance of adjacent maps since I cannot buy my way out of issues when it comes to mapping. I am going to have to find all of my maps the old-fashioned way… which is running maps that connect to the empty slot and hoping for some good luck. I am more than over-sustaining the total number of maps that I am getting and have filled the guild bank with fodder for those coming up the rungs and just starting to enter the endgame. So in total, this has given me a bit different looking Atlas than I normally would have at this point but I am enjoying myself. Once I complete all of the normal maps I will be popping back through and pruning some of the branches a bit to most likely go into either a Red or Blue Altar strategy.
As far as Atlas progress goes I have slowed down considerably because the nodes that I need are a bit harder to find as drops. I need most of the unique maps and quite a few of the higher tier red maps to complete out my 115 of 115 as I currently sit at 95. I did complete my first two “easy” voidstones yesterday, and I am not sure if I will mess around too much with going beyond that. I don’t really like bossing in Path of Exile and it does not bring me the joy that it seems to for Kodra, so I am not sure if I will feel like the grind that is required to get even an attempt at Maven or Uber Elder. Were I in the trade environment I would probably just buy a carry. Honestly, I am not even sure how much I care about getting all maps dropping at t16 for the purpose of this league. It has been pretty chill to grab a yellow map and run the league mechanic on it, without it really escalating the difficulty too highly.
I think that is my rundown of Affliction League so far. I would say that overwhelmingly this is a good league. I will forever miss my Righteous Fire Juggernaut shenanigans but I am pretty happy with where I am in Boneshatter land. It isn’t anywhere near as immortal, but also kills things much faster…. without feeling like a squishy mess so I will call that a net positive. I am certain it could feel much better if I were able to upgrade some of my gear to add spell suppressions as a more reliable defensive layer. Similarly, I would probably try and slide in some “damage taken as X” mechanics to smooth things out a bit. I would also really like to have way more health but for being sub 4000, it still feels pretty great.
So essentially… I am really pleased with both the experiment of “Bel League” and the Affliction league as a whole and especially how much progress I have made in a little less than a week.
The post One Week of Affliction League appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I think I have arrived at the point with Boneshatter where I am really starting to love it. I mean it kinda feels amazing to swing a big axe and watch things explode around me. I absolutely get why this build has been so popular for as long as it has. That somewhat concerns me however given how stable Righteous Fire was for years… and then was suddenly changed fairly drastically. Yesterday I swapped over to Boneshatter of Complex Trauma and got it raised to 20% quality through the Labyrinth. Essentially this is a Boneshatter that ramps much faster but resets when you hit 10 stacks. So this is probably a DPS loss for bossing, but seems to be a massive boost for mapping as most engagements do not last terribly long. I would imagine it is probably also good for boss fights where you need to move around constantly as you won’t hit the reset point quite as quickly.
I saw a noticeable spike in damage when I swapped gems, so at least for me… it seems to be the right call. I am not sure if that will be the case for everyone, however. I still could use a much better axe and my gear is still quite a bit scuffed. I am not running a six-link and would ultimately like to find a chest so that I can put all of my utility stuff in a six-red-socket axe. There are a lot of gems that I am just not using right now. For example, I have Purity of Elements, Grace, and Pride all vying for my last reservation aura slot. Grace is just silly because it allows me to arrive at some extremely high armor levels. Purity of Elements I was using for a bit when I was not capped, and then Pride seems to be what I use most of the time. Thing is… I’ve never unsocketed the gems I am not using which means there is a lot of room to grow my build. At some point, I will shift Blood Rage to a Cast when Damage Taken setup along with Vaal Molten Shell if I can ever find one.
As far as progress goes, I completed my white and yellow maps yesterday which only leaves some red and unique maps to hit my 115. I am sitting at 84 bonus objectives completed which means between yesterday morning and today I managed to pick up 19 new ones. Something new that I learned is that apparently, Delve can drop maps that you do not have access to otherwise. I always thought the maps form Delve followed the logic of needing to drop connecting to some other map that you had already completed. However yesterday I picked up several red maps that were disconnected from everything else. So I guess maybe that is a point for rushing down into Delve earlier than I would have thought. The rest were picked up through the three to one vendor map crafting recipe especially to fill out the remaining yellow maps that I had not seen.
Another thing that I did not realize… is that apparently you can get Awakened gems while Maven is witnessing a fight. I always knew that you could get them from Maven’s Crucible encounters where you fight things that she had witnessed, but I did not know that the sheer act of her witnessing a fight could drop them. I feel like even then, this is probably a unicorn moment and I will likely never see another one of these. It was already pretty rare to get them from the 8 ways, and I am sure it is even rarer still to get them from a map. I do wonder if the atlas keystone that makes extra bosses show up when doing a witnessed map causes the drop rate to increase. Admittedly I am also running with WAY MORE rarity support than I normally do due to those wild rings I showed off yesterday. I might be seeing things on the drop table that I would not normally see without running a specific Magic Find character.
Speaking of unicorn moments, I also got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop down in Delve. Normally speaking I would sell this because I can use the 3 divines that they often are way more than I can the crap unique that is sure to drop. Ace had not seen one of these so I streamed briefly over Discord opening it. Shocking to no one I got a crap unique, but it was at least a reasonably well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble. Were it not for the slight amount of reduced quantity I would probably use it or suggest someone else use it. It would have been hilarious though if I had gotten something like a mageblood given that I am in a private league. Currency and expensive item drops don’t mean quite as much as they normally do since what matters most is the crafting value of an item.
I am legitimately having way more fun than I thought I might playing Boneshatter. I was in pretty heavy mourning for Righteous Fire and while the build is still technically viable it is a bit of a shadow compared to its former self at least for Juggernaut. I spent some time playing around with my well-geared RF Jugg from last league and it is still absolutely viable for mapping and honestly most content… but I kill things noticeably slower. I could probably shift up my build a bit to stack more life, which would then give me much more Righteous Fire damage but would probably mean I would be losing Fire Trap damage in the process. I assume at some point we will let our characters go into Trade League and when that happens I plan on devoting some effort into tweaking my Boneshatter build to see just how good an optimally geared one feels. In the meantime though I am having a freaking blast bashing things and making them explode.
The post Large Axe Enthusiast appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! We are on the morning of day five of the Affliction League, and I have to say one of the more interesting things about the psuedo-ssf environment is how it changes your perspective on things. I recently got a pair of rings and they are phenomenal. The only thing I would change is adding 30 Chaos Resistance to the left ring somehow. Combined, these go a long way towards fixing my resistances and also give me a whopping 49% Item Rarity. These are both rings that I probably would have chucked in a vendor tab were I playing in Standard, because the moment I finished the campaign I would have fixed my resistances by buying gear. That is not to say that I don’t miss easy access to really good gear, but it is nice when something that drops is a solid upgrade for something that you use out of sheer desperation.
One of my favorite aspects of the “Bel League” as it continues to be called by folks… is that I can share the wealth. I am I believe the furthest progressed of our folks thus far and as a result, I am chucking anything with halfway decent resists into a vendor dump tab for 1 Wisdom Scroll. This makes all that gear searchable by my teammates and allows them to go shopping through my vault. I have no clue what resists a given player might need, but by just sort of gathering up anything with 60% total resists or higher, it allows folks to fix problems with their build and makes me feel at least somewhat useful. Honestly, I’ve wished I could make my entire bank searchable by my guild for a while now because in normal trade league, I am often doing this as well. The main difference is I am throwing 20 Chaos on them. I would always rather gear go to someone I care about rather than a random stranger.
The upgrade that has been the hardest fought thusfar is getting a new axe. While leveling through the campaign I picked up a random axe with a good fracture on it, and I have been unable to replace it. The positive is that I had a fairly decent axe for the later half of the game, but the negative is it was almost too good to get rid of easily when I started finding six socket items. I’ve been using the “Reroll Physical” craft through harvest on a few different items in the vague hope of trying to find something. Last night I picked up a six-socket/five-link Karui Chopper and managed a craft without bleed on it and am rolling with it. It is a fairly nice upgrade but I am feeling the slower attack speed. I’ve not found a six-link chest either because I would rather throw my main attack in that so that I can shift all six sockets in my weapon to red due to the axe mastery.
I am still extremely happy with my progress, and while I slowed down considerably I still managed to get 65 of 115 last night. I am starting to get into red maps and pulled a random corrupted T15 from a div card stack. For the most part that went fine and I took no deaths running it, but the rogue exiles and a few of the harvest beasts were a bit tanky. I am sure once I get some more quality on my gems and some slightly better gear that will even out. This was before I picked up the axe upgrade so that will likely help somewhat as well. I am honestly surprised at how well this is going both in delve and in mapping… I have no real doubts that I will be able to complete my Atlas and I have already set up camp hunting down delve-specific gear that folks need.
As far as my Atlas Strategy goes… I don’t really have one. Mine is the Atlas is sheer desperation and right now the thing I think we all need… is ways to craft gear. So I picked up the bare minimum needed to bring Delve online and start getting sulphite, and then picked up the best nodes for Harvest so that I could get higher quantities of juice. Finally, I have started pivoting into Essences so that I can pick those up as a sort of “bycatch” for running other content and slowly building out a cache of crafting materials. I’ve already picked up the nodes that upgrade the essences, and I am about to pick up the early node that forces at least one on every map. I am not sure I really want to take the one that forces multiple essences on the same monster, because that just tends to slow down the mapping. Given that my goal in running maps is to get sulphite and that harvest and essences are just a useful byproduct… I don’t want to slow things down any more than I can help it.
I think I am pretty happy with where I am currently in this build. I had declared in my video yesterday that Righteous Fire was dead and that was what prompted me to try Boneshatter. However, per one of my friends, RF is just fine and they are having a perfectly cromulent time with it. I need to spend a bit of time on my Standard RF Character and see just how it feels to play. Maybe the changes are not as bad as they seemed. I think probably the Inquisitor version is fine, but I have a sneaking feeling that the Juggernaut version will not be. Anyways! Boneshatter seems fun so I am happy enough for the time being regardless.
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