Good Morning Folks. I feel like I am starting to get back some of my gaming mojo. Since I do not really feel like running up a second character and gearing it… I am starting to invest some more effort into gearing out my Righteous Fire character. That said… you cannot stop me from being exceptionally cheap. One of the huge buffs would be to craft a helical ring… but in order to get a base that you can actually craft on that is not mirrored or split… they start at 110 Divines. I had not touched Heist in this league, but now find myself driven to start the process of unlocking things. There are honestly a bunch of really high dollar bases you can pull from grand heists that might make it interesting. A clean crafting base for a Simplex Amulet… is legitimately selling for a mirror for example. Basically it feels like it is time to start burning through my contracts and leveling up my rogues.
The problem with heist however is that I can never remember the rogue unlock order, so I am posting it here so I will have it in the future… and might end up throwing it over on my game tools page. Essentially you start out with three rogues Isla the Engineer, Karst the Lockpick, and Tibbs the Giant. Then in order to unlock the rest of the rogues you need to run contracts with specific ones in order to snag the next one. Isla is a dead end and unlocks nothing. Karts and Tibbs however each have their own trees to unlock so that you run a contract with each new rogue that you have unlocked until you finish out that branch of the three.
So last night I ran through the process of unlocking everything, and now I just need to level the rogues while collecting equipment. I could in theory just buy equipment from trade, but I am not even sure what I want. This is the piece where the depth of my heist knowledge falls apart because I have no clue what I should even be gearing them for. I think essentially skill speed is king, because the faster they can complete their actions the least amount of time that you need to stand around doing nothing. My friend Sloth recently did a stint on the heist crew of BPL so I might lean on his knowledge to help me get started.
Other than that I am still delving quite a bit. I still find this a terribly enjoyable mechanic where I can turn my brain off and soak in the experience points. I am getting really close to level 99, and since Delve is a pretty safe way of gaining experience I am trying to focus on getting that level before I do anything too outrageous. Essentially I am still slowly chipping away at the seasonal achievements and one of those will require me to hit level 100 to finish it off. I am slowly knocking out the infamous mercs achievement as I find them in maps. I have a big stack of Primordial Blocks maps that I am slowly working through using my Einhar tree with a Niko scarab. I am still hunting for that hideout, and I have seen it come up a few times on TFT but they always wanted 10 Divines for a portal. I keep hoping that at some point I will find it and I can be out of Primordial Prison. I legitimately would be rather running just about any other map… but I want that damned hideout.
Lastly I started trying to craft a new belt to replace my immortal flesh, and ended up settling on this one. Ultimately I would prefer to have one with level 22 enduring cry on it… but those are stupidly expensive and also hell to craft. I burned through a stack of resonators and fossils and about 6000 life essence before just sticking with this one and calling it good enough for now. I lost some regeneration but gained a heck of a lot of life thanks to that tasty 12% increased max life. This allowed me to pick up an abyssal jewel with corrupted blood immunity on it and drop the mastery from the tree that was giving me this. Which in turn allowed me to pick up another jewel socket on the tree and throw in another 8% Fire Multi/7% max life jewel this time with increased trap damage. I’m now over 7k max life and when I get my last two points I am probably just going for 5% life nodes on each of those and pushing that total up even higher.
I am also spending a little bit of time each day in Guild Wars 2, picking back up and working on my dailies and weeklies. I had fallen off the wagon hard with wizard chores before my world ended, so attempting to pick things back up. Guild Wars 2 similar to Path of Exile gives me little bits of focused gameplay and I appreciate that. I was in pretty much only long enough to knock out my fresh dailies yesterday, but in doing so I am starting to chip away at my weeklies. I might actually tag up one night and run bounties if there is not a group currently active to knock that one out quickly. Catching Of Mists and Monsters… and one that actually succeeds is going to be the challenge. Essentially my goal is to finish out my weeklies every week going forward, which means needing to start chipping away on them earlier than Saturday… since doing all of them in a weekend can often cause me to faceplant.
Anyways… I still am not okay, but I am maybe starting to get back into the swing of things. Yesterday was my first day back and it went okayish. Today is my first real day back in the office in five years… so here is hoping it also goes okayish.
The post Unlocking the Rogues appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. The league challenge set of armor this time around is loosely based on the Shaper, since the Secrets of the Atlas expansion is all about Zana and the Shaper. I figured that I would use it for my second character of the league where I am essentially planning on doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation Elementalist with Heralds and Golems. I have done a version of this build before when it was the new overpowered hotness, and everything that I can tell is that the build colloquially known as “penis brand” is still extremely solid. Mostly I want something that can evaporate bosses but that is also somewhat fun to play. I can clear t17 maps with the greatest of ease on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, but the bosses themselves… are a bit of a pain in the ass. My idea is that I run the map itself on my most comfortable build, and then swap to my boss “deleter” to finish up the map. For the time being I have just been selling t17 maps, and t16.5s are super easy to run because you don’t have to deal with a pinnacle boss at the end of them.
I am not necessarily really following a guide of any sort when it comes to this build. I am largely patterning it off a character named Glacial_Golems in Mercenaries Trade League, however they went deeper into the minions aspect of the build that I am likely going to go. Additionally I want to probably run this with a shield of some sort so I can zoom around the map with shield charge, so that means I will probably go with a Void Battery and Malachai’s Loop instead of two batteries. Though by the time I get to that point I might have changed my mind. The big thing that the build I am loosely following the template of does that I will not be doing… is going into golem clusters. Instead I will likely be going into some sort of damage cluster setup because really… the golems are going to keep resurrecting themselves and I am fine with them being expendable buff bots. Some of the builds are going into a Forbidden Flesh/Flame setup to pick up the Forbidden Power ascendancy so that is also on the table.
For the moment however I am leveling with Storm Brand of Indecision because it is an excellent clearing brand. I think in an ultimate scenario I would be able to swap between Storm Brand and Penance Brand for clear vs bossing, however most of the builds seem to be leaning into physical damage scaling for Penance Brand which is not going to do much of anything for Storm Brand. Right now I am in act six and just a few zones into it. I started this character during the podcast on Saturday and got through Act 1 and 2 while we were recording. I then played it most of Sunday morning and at some point during the day swapped over to playing my RF Chieftain again to farm for awhile. All in all the character is pretty great, and it is pretty silly running around with four different buff golems at the same time. However they do not feel anywhere near as potential as running actual minions would at this point. I am mostly focused on getting fairly tanky Mercenaries so that they can hold aggro for me as I zip around the map, and that is working for now.
As far as RF Chieftain goes, I am still farming Primordial Blocks attempting to get the Hideout and alternating with Shipyard when I have burned through all of my maps. When I fill up on Sulphite, I swap over and farm Delve until I burn down my supply. This means I am not necessarily an efficient mapper or an efficient delver… but I am having fun doing a little of both. I am in the 150-200 range right now and I am honestly seeing raw divine drops reasonably often. Mostly I am chasing Cities, Fossils, and generic loot box nodes while picking up as much azurite as I can find along the way. I’ve unlocked pretty much everything that I intend to unlock and am not going to spend any more azurite on upgrades until I decide to go deeper. However I am probably easily go down to depth 300 with the current state of my upgrades. This allows me to essentially convert every drop of the blue stuff into profits as I buy resonators from Niko.
It seems like there are just not that many people Delving in this league. That combined with the fact that GGG did not introduce some new contorted meta crafting method in the Mercenaries league… has created a scenario where everyone wants resonators and fossils. Right now single slot resonators are going for between 3.5 and 4 chaos each, which is a pretty efficient azurite dump. This morning when I logged in, for whatever reason two slot resonators were going for 24 chaos each which seems wild to me. Three slots around 12 chaos which is also reasonable. I did not price check 4 slots since I did not have any but POE.Ninja says they are going for 70 chaos. This is probably too low because POE.Ninja tends to be extremely low on almost all currencies that are in demand given according to it 2 slots are 3 chaos each. Essentially for the moment this is printing money and I am converting up to Divines every so often to keep from losing the trade value. At this moment POE.Ninja claims that it is 230 chaos to a divine, which seems pretty high but who knows what happened over night.
The thing that I am doing to passively earn some currency is sending 25k Blue Zanthemum to Kalguur whenever I have both the gold and the crops to do so. I need to start disenchanting again so that I can keep my stockpile of dust up there, but essentially I send 25k crops and 25k dust and almost always get at least one Divine Orb in return. The inset above is an example of a shipment that I got back which takes around 3.5 hours to return. Essentially I have my entire farm cranking out this single crop, and have mostly reached the point of completely ignoring ore. I don’t really have any use for gear in return, so I need to sift through my other workers and see if they can be repurposed for either disenchanting or running maps. At some point I am going to burn through a bunch of my bulk maps that I am never going to run and see what thye will return. For now I am holding those in reserve in case Kodra needs them to hit his 115 of 115.
I did craft a new helm for my RF character, and got extremely lucky with a yolo recombine. Essentially I had been trying to throw harvest juice and resonators at elder helms on the Giantslayer base trying to get one with 20 Burning Damage and 20 Concentrated Effect. I know the new hotness is to use Archdemon Crowns, but I don’t have one… nor have I started heisting as of yet. At some point I plan on doing this and hopefully I will pick up a few of these bases to start this process all over again. Essentially it was easy for me to get 20 of one of the gems… but not on the same item so I crafted two bases… one of which also had 20% Life Regeneration Rate and then out of frustration… mashed them together with the unpredictable recombination and lucked out. I would love to have a useful stat on the item in place of Reflect…. but I am happy enough with it for the moment. The next craft I am probably going to work towards is making a better set of gloves with more regeneration on them. I have several tabs where I am set aside good bases for this process, and now that Kodra is playing a Str/Dex character I am setting aside good bases for him in the guild bank.
I am still having a heck of a lot of fun this league, so much so that I am struggling to attach to pretty much any other game. I played some Dune last night, but only really so that I could find enough power packs so that I can pay the upkeep on my base without having to worry about losing all of my stuff. At some point I should really just move all of my materials north to Tam’s central base and move in with him so I did not have to worry about keep my generators active anymore. I need to devote more time to leveling the skill tree… but also… I could just be doing big dumb fun in Path of Exile. For the moment.. mapping and delving are winning out. It is brain dead… but also really fucking relaxing which I seem to be needing at the moment. The problem with all of it however is there isn’t much that is actually exciting to be writing about, so as a result I have been way more radio silent than normal.
The post Golems, Brands, and Divines appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week, we start off talking about Four Job Fiesta and how Ash’s playthrough is going as he takes the donation route to fix his class choices. Bel talks about the Absolum a new demo up on Steam which mashes together Streets of Rage, Hades, and Darkest Dungeon into a really fun Roguelike Beat Em Up. From there, Kodra talks about his recent foray into Minecraft Dungeons and how it is a really good entry point to the ARPG/Diablo-like genre. Ash has been revisiting Guild Wars 1 and talks about his progress so far. Thalen shares his early thoughts about Persona 5 The Phantom X and how it seems to be a non-egregious gacha. Finally, Kodra and Bel go on at length about the current Path of Exile league.
Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.
I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.
I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.
This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.
The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.
Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.
Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.
Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.
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