After yesterday’s massive blog post, I figure I am okay to do a bit of a smaller one today. Yesterday was the end of the Crucible League in Path of Exile, and that meant a short downtime and then a bunch of fiddling around to integrate my previous League inventory into my Standard inventory. Essentially what I do is create a folder named after the league and then shove all of my remove-only versions of the tabs into there. For the most part, I don’t bother removing items from those tabs unless I specifically want something. I do however condense most of the valuable things from my currency tab into my main standard currency tab. This meant a lot of last night extracting stacks of things from one tab and shoving them into another tab.
One of the things that I did during a recent sale is picked up a Currency Stash tab for the guild bank. Essentially I figured I would chuck some of my bubblegum currency that overrunneth to help out anyone in our clan that is also playing a given season. So last night when I was cramming things into my own stash, I was occasionally dumping a load of things in the guild stash. I’ve owned the “Dragon’s Hoard” stash MTX for a while now, and this has caused some hilarious results in my own hideout as the amount of raw currency in the guild bank grew. This seems to be the number of items and not necessarily the total market value of items, but I loaded up the bank full of basic useful crafting materials and around 1700 chaos orbs.
Mostly I find myself in a bit of a holding pattern. Before the league ended I did put a bunch of incubators on my gear, one of which is a fairly rare six-linked armor incubator. I am pretty curious to see what sort of armor pops out of that so I might run Crimson Temple or Cemetary until it “pops”. Other than that I am largely just fiddling around waiting for Friday. I need to set back up my Atlas Passive tree because while I did get credit for all 115 nodes, it didn’t copy over my passives at all. One positive is that since I got my third void stone in Crucible, that means I now also have my third void stone in Standard. I have a few youngin characters in Standard that I could fiddle around on, and I certainly have PLENTY of gear to outfit them if I sift through four leagues of remove-only tabs.
Since Standard is sort of a testing ground for my “real” characters later… I might go ahead and do the body armor/helm flip on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and then see what I can do about getting my fourth void stone. I really really hate the Maven fight… mostly I hate the memory game portion of it. I don’t deal enough damage to really skip phases, but it might be worth a few shots at learning the fight better so that maybe just maybe I can actually do it, next league. Since I took the day off… I am contemplating streaming my league start. Given that I am not super attached to Twitch, I have configured OBS to connect to YouTube and am considering streaming there. Not sure if this is actually going to happen but it is at least something I am kicking around in my head. I think the league goes live around 3 pm my time so it would be a late afternoon thing if it happens.
Anyways I think that is good for a blog post. I hope your week is going excellently, and I am hoping the next few days go by smoothly for me and nothing major comes up to halt my enjoyment.
The post Crucible League Has Ended appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! The Crucible Challenge league is coming to a close in Path of Exile and I thought I would spend some time this morning talking about the various builds I played. The crucible mechanic itself was a bit cumbersome and lackluster unless you were willing to go extremely deep into the system and attempt to craft the perfect tree. I was not willing to do this, but I did interact with it at a very surface level. This was the league of completely insane builds that we will likely never see again, in part due to the crucible weapon tree allowing for some complete nonsense. The fact that there were nodes that allowed an item to vendor for a unique version of that item base, led to drops in prices of things like the Aegis Aurora selling at one point for as cheap as 60 Chaos instead of the usual 1-2 Divines.
What this did do was cause me to set up several tabs where I just chucked bases that I cared about into them… and then when I was bored or looking for something to do I would run maps and reveal trees. The problem with this plan however is that it was EXTREMELY rare that I went through a map and did not get one of the bases that I cared about to drop… so my supply never seemed to deplete. I should probably spend the next few days unlocking the trees that I already have revealed that sell for currency. Essentially I spent a lot of time fishing for a better tree to them try and merge with my assorted weapons… and never really had much luck. I think this was probably better for map blasters than someone like me who tended to favor Heist and Delve… two league mechanics without Crucible forges.
Crucible was easily my most active League and during it, I completed a large number of builds. I have to be honest… this is maybe my favorite part of Path of Exile. I like trying different things, given that there are so many years worth of content and so many skill gems that I have never really explored. More than anything this league was a bit of a redemption arc for characters that I had tried in the past and never really managed to get working. The only problem with trying out a bunch of different builds is that I never really elevated any of them as far as they could really go… before shifting gears and trying something else. I guess let’s review some of the builds that I played in this league.
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
Another relatively new thing about this league is that I recorded a lot of short videos talking about various builds. I’ve recorded several with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but here is one where I did some delving which is honestly how I spent most of my time on this build. Righteous Fire and more specifically the Juggernaut variant is just one of those comfy builds. You end up being super tanky and can mostly laugh off most incoming damage. I managed to clear 3 of the 4 Void Stones on this character and make it all of the way through mapping without much issue. I never really took this build as far as it could go because I essentially needed to complete the swap from Fire Trap on the pseudo-six-link helm to my six-link body armor and I never really wanted to mess with recoloring my Brass Dome. Additionally in a true endgame variant, I would have figured out a way to make myself ailment immune without Purity of Elements.
That said the version that I ended up with felt extremely good and served as my pillar for pretty much all of the rest of my shenanigans last league. I love this so much that even though I am not planning on starting Righteous Fire… it is pretty much a given that I will end up building one for delving. Here are the details behind the build.
This is the first build in what I call my redemption arc of past builds. I had tried a few versions of Toxic Rain during the Sanctum league, and never really landed on something that I enjoyed. Mostly what I landed on was that I had been trying to convert to Toxic Rain a bit early for my tastes and that in past iterations I was not running both Toxic Rain as a self-cast ability and on Totems. Additionally, I have learned that I really hate Focused Totem Support, because I do not want to be responsible for triggering my totems. Sure Focused Totems are a clear dps win, but you also lose the quality of life of not having to constantly aim them in order to get anything from them. I had a lot of fun with this character, but the negative with a Pathfinder is the reliance on constantly hitting your life flask to keep your regeneration rolling.
I am not sure if I specifically followed any single build guide, but probably the most comprehensive version available is the one that Zizaran produces for each league. This is really the build where I discovered POE.Ninja and their Builds section and I was able to compare and contrast a bunch of successful Toxic Rain builds in order to land on something that felt good to me. Admittedly this is sort of a more advanced process, but learning that I could adapt builds to fit my needs was a real game changer for me.
One of the things that I love about Diablo-style ARPGs is how getting a specific item that drops… often generates a desire to build around it. In my travels on my RF Juggernaut, I stumbled across a helmet with four gems on it… Burning Damage, Concentrated Effect, Minion Damage, and Minion Life. After spending a chunk of the Sanctum league playing a Summon Raging Spirits build… I had this desire to build around this helm and more specifically pivot into Minion Instability with a Fire Explosive Raging Spirits build. For the most part, this worked well, but as is the case with many of my builds… I was unwilling to focus on it enough to really sand off some of the rough edges. This could have been a great build on its own and would have been perfect cromulent as a main build. Its critical flaw… is that Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire were just better. Unfortunately, this character no longer exists in this state, because I recycled it into a later build.
There really is not a direct guide that I followed, but again spent a lot of time on POE.Ninja looking at other Summon Raging Spirits builds that utilized Minion Instability. If you want to go down this path, I did find a decent enough guide you could follow.
This is another build in my redemption arc because the very first time I attempted to follow a guide was back in the Sentinel League and attempting to play Explosive Arrow. I had no idea what I was doing, and going back earlier this league and looking at my old characters… it was painfully obvious. I had no real defensive strategy and made zero effort in attempting to cap my resistances. So knowing what I know now… I wanted to make an attempt at creating a better version of this character. Originally I thought maybe Zizaran’s definition of “Tanky” just did not match my definition of that word. Turns out no… Explosive Arrow Champion is EXCEPTIONALLY Tanky… almost to the point of being similar in feel to my RF Juggernaut. I had so much fun with this character, and unfortunately… it RAPIDLY eclipsed my Toxic Rain Pathfinder in the amount of time I spent on it. This is the build that I most associate with Zizaran, so of course I would suggest someone following his guides. If you have any questions however with this build or any of the other ones I have talked about… my comms are always open.
On the ultimate redemption arc build… we have Wintertide Brand Occultist. Back during the Sentinel League, I made an attempt at following Pohx’s guide for the Righteous Fire Inquisitor. However, I stopped short… and pivoted into undiscovered territory when I decided that I really liked Wintertide Brand. This led me to try Storm Brand for my Kalandra league starter, to mixed experiences but it also started a mental obsession with wondering what a proper Wintertide Brand build would feel like. So this League I decided to repurpose my Explosive SRS Necromancer and respec it into a Wintertide Brand Occultist. The only negative about this build is that I tried to do it on the most shoestring budget ever… which meant that I reused as much gear as I thought I could get away with from the previous build. The end result… works shockingly well and quite honestly in the time that has passed since I recorded the above video… I have gotten much better at playing it. I spent a good chunk of last night zipping through Tier 16 Red Maps with a decent amount of juice applied and it performs like a champ.
I honestly considered just league starting this build for Ancestor League, it is that stable. With enough attention and focus, I think I could resolve any of the existing survival issues. Namely, I need a lot more block but levels and investing in some good jewels for my passive tree would solve that. Sadly I don’t really have a guide for you to follow. The only thing I can truly provide is my POB. I pieced this build together on my own by looking at a bunch of folks who were doing something similar on POE.Ninja. Wintertide Brand is sort of an offshoot of the much more popular Cold Dot Elementalist.
My Sixth build of the league was extremely haphazard and a bit of a mess. I normally do not care about Achievements in video games but for some reason… I do in Path of Exile. There is an achievement for killing Dominus in Act 3 with every base class in the game, and the fact I had never done this with a Scion was bugging me. So I rolled a Holy Flame Totem/Flame Wall Scion entirely with the purpose of killing Dominus, and after doing this… I mostly felt fine with walking away from that character. As the league wore on, and I was feeling the itch to play some more Path of Exile I dusted this character off and made a pivot from Totems to Brands, and decided to roll with an Armageddon Brand setup. I successfully got it up to maps, and with enough time and investment, I could have probably made this an enjoyable character.
However one of the lessons I have learned… is it is okay to walk away from a character because it is relatively trivial to run up another character. I actually enjoy leveling through the contents and I find the process of “building” a character to be extremely therapeutic. Unfortunately, again there is ZERO guide here, and mostly just a lot of me winging it as I went and searching the passive tree for anything that I thought might be useful that I could path to easily. Do I suggest anyone follow my character? Hell no. Do I really like Armageddon Brand and want to give that ability a proper redemption arc in the future? Hell yes.
Now we get to what is technically my eighth build of the league. There is a Righteous Fire Inquisitor that I never finished because I decided that I really do not love the Inquisitor variant of that build and will probably always choose Juggernaut. Essentially this was my first time doing a “league start test” where I tried out a build to determine if I wanted to play it at the launch of the Ancestor League on Friday. I had noticed over the last few leagues that there are a lot of folks who play some variant of Lighting Arrow as a league starter, because reportedly it requires no gear to function. After playing it I can in fact verify that it does not require much in the way of gear and can map on four-links. The most popular variant of this is played with a Deadeye and is exceptionally squishy. I opted to go for a way less common variant that uses a Raider that is significantly less squishy… but also is nowhere near anything I would consider “tanky”.
I am league-starting this because I really enjoy leveling on a Ranger, and also… I really want to do some of the content that is facilitated by having a character that can explode an entire screen at once. I know at some point I will crave a tanky character to do some delve or similar meaty content… but I am looking forward to seeing how the mapping phase goes with this character. I managed to survive low-tier red maps without any investment and only some minimal bench crafting to at least partially solve my resistances. My goal is to see how far I can get without touching the trade league to help solve my problems, and mostly turn this into my mapper for the league. The nice thing about Ranger is that I will be able to pivot into a bunch of popular builds if I decide I get tired of Lightning Arrow.
While Crucible as a league mechanic was a bit “bleh” in that it didn’t really give me a fun repeatable activity that made currency… the “sandbox” state of the game was phenomenal. It is easily my favorite league of the four I have played thus far, but largely because this is the league where I felt like I finally grasped some of the nuances of this game. Of the builds that I tried this league… I would absolutely play RF Jugg, some form of Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Wintertide Brand, and some form of Armageddon Brand build again. Probably my favorite build would be the Wintertide Brand Occultist because as time has gone on in the league I have played it more and more as my “not RF Jugg” build. Wintertide Brand just feels cool and adding in all the other cold dot mechanics feels super satisfying.
As we go into the Ancestor league I have a handful of builds that I want to try a make happen:
Poison Summon Raging Spirits Juggernaut – This is a staple of hardcore and I am curious if I can make a version that feels tanky enough to do delve. It is simple enough to pivot into Righteous Fire if it doesn’t work out.
Shockwave Totems – I still want to find a totem build that I enjoy, and since Shockwave Totems wrecked Sanctum the first time around… I am curious about this one as maybe a Hierophant build.
Exsanguinate/Reap – I played seismic totems for a bit during Sanctum, and I really liked Exsanguinate far more than I liked the actual Seismic totems. I know there are versions of this build that use Juggernaut for Hardcore, and others that use Scion for Softcore. I want to research this and try and make one that feels good.
Something with Cyclone – I love Whirlwind and its spin-to-win play style. Righteous Fire sort of scratches a bit of this itch of being able to just roll over the top of your enemies. I do however want to try and figure out a way to build around Cyclone and make it feel enjoyable… maybe a cold conversion.
Armageddon Brand – I enjoyed Arma Brand enough with the Scion to try and give it a redemption arc. I figure this is probably going to be best played with either Hierophant or Elementalist, but will need to do some research.
This is one of the things that I love about Path of Exile is that I always have projects within projects. I know for example that I will likely create stash tabs devoted to each of these ideas so that as I find gear that might be useful I can start gathering it up while I am playing my league starter. I sincerely doubt that many of you are going to make it down to this point in the blog post because this one is pretty massive. If you have, however, thanks for sticking around even though I tend to get hyper-focused and obsessed with a single game at a time. This has become more of a thing the older I have gotten.
Anyways I hope you have a most excellent day and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.
The post Crucible in Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.
I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.
At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.
Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.
Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.
I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.
The post Windswept appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! We did not record an episode of AggroChat last night, and as a result, I don’t have the usual Sunday post. Instead, I am going to talk some more about Lightning Arrow Raider. Last night I finished leveling through the campaign and then started running some maps to test the build further. I am still very much wearing the same SSF gear that I picked up through the campaign, with some minor crafting in order to try and fix my resistances a bit. As it stands I have woefully negative Chaos Resistance, very low Cold resistance, and then capped Fire and Lightning. If you want to check out the current state of my build, I dumped a fresh POB or you can check out my character on Path of Exile website.
I also recorded a video of me running a T11 Red Map, where I took a single death from a random rare. I had no clue what hit me, but after the fact while editing I noticed that it was an Innocence Touched monster, which is one of the more annoying god-touched mobs. All told I am pretty happy with where this build ended up with only some assorted bench and essence crafting. It gives me a lot of hope for a smooth transition into maps as I do this all “for real” on Friday evening. I’ve always liked leveling a Ranger because generally speaking all of the tools you need you have easy access to. I will likely run Lesser Multiple Projectiles/Mirage Archer/Caustic Arrow until I can get Lightning Arrow from the quests. I also plan on muleing a bunch of Lightning Arrow gems as I can so that I can hopefully corrupt my way into a Vaal version if I don’t get one to drop.
My goal with the build is for it to be a fast mapper that I can hopefully use to progress my Atlas quickly. At some point, I am likely going to create a Righteous Fire Juggernaut again to have something that I can do Heist and Delve with. I have to say though I am looking forward to playing something with big screen-clearing potential because there are a lot of league mechanics that I have never really explored very much. Legion, Blight, and Breach all really want you to be able to kill lots of the screen quickly in order to get the best possible rewards, and Righteous Fire has always sort of sucked at this. I am legitimately wondering how well this build will do with Heist as well, and I’ve spent a tiny bit of time in Delve and it seemed mostly fine so long as I did not press out into the darkness too much.
If nothing else there is a satisfying explosion of lights whenever I fire my Lightning Arrows, and that will be fun to map around on. I am not necessarily trying to race or anything, but it will be fun to wreck maps for a change. Don’t get me wrong, Righteous Fire is plenty good at mapping but it never felt anywhere near as satisfying as some of the videos I have watched of dedicated mapping builds. I think my early strategy will be Essences, Expedition, and maybe some Lockboxes in order to get a stash of crafting materials to help fix my own gear. I am also going to try and lean as little on buying from trade this league as I can. The main reason why I am not rolling SSF however is so that I can start selling things that I might find along the way that could be worth some change. I am definitely a trade enjoyer, but it was also refreshing to level the Lightning Arrow Raider on mostly found gear.
Anyways… I feel like I am probably annoying everyone with talk of Trial of the Ancestor league. I am excited I guess, and just can’t stop talking about it.
The post Raider on Red Maps appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
