If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably are expecting this post. I talked yesterday about wanting to try out Absolution… so last night I started a brand new Witch and got it through the start of Act 8. I decided to go with a Necromancer in spite of Guardian actually representing over 70% of the folks running Absolution or Vaal Absolution in this league. Guardian is really powerful as evidenced by how easy of a time I had with no real gear during the Toucan League. However, I opted to go back to the minion-loving roots of a Witch, largely because at this point I had already leveled 2 Guardians and an Inquisitor in this league and was a bit tired of the old man in a diaper that is the Templar. I can’t necessarily call mine a Necromancer because in spite of being over level 60… I’ve yet to take the time to do my first Labyrinth and actually ascend.
While technically this is a minion build… it feels absolutely nothing like MOST minion builds. Essentially you run around nuking things with a giant orbital strike of lightning damage and that then spawns up to three Sentinels of Absolution that also cast the same big lightning strike attack. More specifically I am using the Vaal version and thanks to Trade League I picked up a dirt cheap level 1 version with 20% quality on it so when finished I will have a 20/20 Vaal gem which is a bit of a challenge to actually get. Added to the mix are Spectres and Zombies with Feeding Frenzy support and Herald of Purity summoning up four Sentinels of Purity. Because everything seems to lag behind, I end up casting Convocation quite a bit to keep them grouped up on whatever target I want them to attack. The mix of me casting a giant nuke, and then having a swarm of minions… feels supremely odd and I am not entirely certain what I think about it yet.
I am following a guide, but at the moment it feels like my tree is spread out all over the freaking place. At some point, I am certain I will apply a measure of my own personal touch to this build, in order to make it a bit more tanky. This is going for Eldritch Battery, which means I am entirely losing my Energy Shield as a defensive layer. I should then in theory probably stack armor bases for various slots, but given that I mostly need blue sockets… that becomes its own nightmare to get colored correctly. What worries me at the moment is just how low my health currently is. Part of this is because I have been leveling with a 5-Link Thousand Ribbons and a handful of other uniques that made the early game a breeze… but have largely outlived their usefulness.
Almost 50% of players running Absolution are running a specific unique chest piece called Doryani’s Prototype, and I am really not sure if I want to go down that rabbit hole. Essentially the tech behind this body armor relies on you getting your Lightning Resistance as low as possible… for the best builds out there it can be as low as -200%. Then when you attack mobs they have the same lightning resistance as you do… allowing your lightning attacks to do outrageous damage against them. In order to keep from dying, you need to stack as much armor as humanly possible because the chest piece also allows you to soak lightning damage from hits as armor, but this makes you extremely vulnerable to any lightning damage over time attacks. I just do not feel like I want to play this game nonsense game of trying to juggle resistances and make sure one is bottomed out, while the others are high enough to matter.
At least for the time being… I am not going to do this nonsense. Instead, I am going to utilize the fact that we have a truly ridiculous number of six-links in the guild bank. I hand-picked a crusader chainmail that I was able to get 5 Blue/1 Red on pretty quickly through spamming chromatics. I am going to buck the popular advice and just build some measure of normal guild for the moment. I don’t really want to spend much currency on this build especially considering I am not even sure I am going to like how it feels. The only thing so far that I have bought is a Replica Dragonfang with Absolution on it which itself was less than 100 Chaos, so something I can make back rapidly just by selling off some delve stuff. Tonight I am certain that I will wrap up the campaign and start poking my head into early maps to see how this all feels.
I will probably try and knock out the first two Labyrinths over lunch so I can officially call myself a Necromancer. Probably the biggest expenditure I will have is buying a bunch of botched 20/20 corrupted gems in order to jump-start myself to a baseline of power rather than waiting to level them all.
The post Lightning Struck Friends 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.
Good Morning Friends! Last night was the culmination of a “bad ideas” project that I have been working on for a bit. I leveled a Necromancer up through Kitava and geared it out yesterday, then tested the sort of content that it could do. You might remember that I played a Fire-based Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer some last league and enjoyed it quite a bit. This league as my third character I decided to go down that path again but take a slight detour into “Minion Instability” land. For those unfamiliar with that keystone, it makes it so that Minions explode when reduced to low life and deal 33% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies. So essentially I am using Summon Raging Spirits to create bombs, which then nuke my enemies with a baptism in flames when they get low on life.
This entire build started when I stumbled onto a helmet in my travels. I was looking for a better version of my pseudo-six-link helm that I use for Righteous Fire when I came across this monstrosity for 5 Chaos. I snapped it up because my brain immediately went to using it for some sort of Explosive SRS build. While I would have liked it to have higher than a level 16 Minion damage gem, the important bit for the explosive goodness is that level 20 Minion Life. Essentially this makes it so my Summon Raging Spirits will have the following setup:
Summon Raging Spirits
Burning Damage
Concentrated Effect
Minion Life
Minion Damage
Fire Penetration
Combustion
Lifetap
+2% Critical Strike Chance
Generally speaking for a Necromancer build I would have looked to get a good Skin of the Lords with a useful keystone on it. However this league Skin of the Lords starts at 5 Divine Orbs for one with a crap keystone, and the only one available with Eldritch Battery is 59 Divine Orbs. This caused me to pivot and just lean into a bunch of gear with Armor and Energy shield. Other than the fancy shield that I just added last night, in total all of my gear could be purchased for a single Divine Orb, and you would probably still have some change left over. The pseudo-eight-link helm for Summon Raging Spirits allowed me to shift my chest to effectively become 3 four-links summoning different alternative summons.
Zombies / Spectres / Stone Golem
Minion Damage
Minion Life
Feeding Frenzy
This leads us to bad ideas item number two for this setup. Tavukai can effectively replace Infernal Army as a way of shuffling my angry skulls off this mortal coil as it deals them 20% of their maximum life as Chaos Damage per second. That gives my SRS a maximum duration of 3 seconds which is just about long enough to fly into range of the enemies and explode. When I was shopping for a Tavukai I noticed a number of them were corrupted with various abilities, and one had Golem Commander which gives me 40% increased buff from my Stone Golem and lets me summon two of them. So all told that gives me a maximum load of the following minions:
7 Zombies
2 Stone Golems
2 Spectres
8 Raging Spirits (largely limited by how fast I can actually click the button)
I geared my character out before taking down Kitava in Act 10, and pretty much instant-phased that fight. Then I went over to the Uber Labyrinth and while I did not get the achievement for insta-gibbing the boss I did burn through each of the Aspirant Trial phases super fast. From there I opted to test my mettle against a T1, T6, T11, T15, and finally a chain of T16 maps. I also decided to try a couple of fully juiced metamorphs in the laboratory as well, and for the most part other than a couple of dumb deaths to lockboxes I breezed through the content. I would say this character is extremely comfortable to run content on in its current state and could probably be scaled to do a lot more damage once all of my gems are actually level 20 and I have the rest of my passive tree points. This is what my build looks like as of today.
There are some glaring problems that I could fix given the time and desire to do so. Namely, I would like to get my block chance up much higher so that it properly acts as the defensive layer that it should. Additionally, there is the problem that I am not elemental ailment immune, and unfortunately, I don’t have enough mana reservation for the easy button way of fixing that with Purity of Elements. I am overcapped on my resistances but I am not really sure how I could fix that without regearing entirely to remove some of those resists, but it just means that I don’t have other stats on my gear to replace them. All said though I am pretty happy with this “bad ideas” character or at least happy enough for my third viable character of the league. The biggest immediate issue is just my low life pool of only 3500 health.
I have to be honest… this was more of a thought experiment than an actual character that I intended to do much with. Right now Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire are just stronger in their current state, and could be even stronger if I spent more currency on upgrading them. I mostly just wanted to see what this would do, and now that I have… my curiosity is satiated. My side project interest turns to a discussion I had with Ashgar yesterday about maybe trying to build a Wintertide Brand character, but I am not sure if that will actually happen. I would like to get a Scion up if for no reason other than getting the achievement for clearing Act IV with that class. Other than that I would like to finish getting my void stones this season, but that either requires a lot of farming T14 or higher maps looking for guardian map drops… or just buying the fragments I need to summon the fights.
This has easily been my best league so far, but it is a bit sad given that so few have dropped off the game. However, I’ve come to realize that the grind of Path of Exile is enough to keep me happy for the time being.
The post Exploding Your Friends appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
It is weird to me how I have gone from thinking I would give the Crucible League a hard pass… to be extremely excited for the league start tomorrow. It reminds me quite a bit of back when no matter my mental state… the mere existence of BlizzCon and the news feed that would come from it would stir up a desire to log back in. I seem to have been inoculated from BlizzCon Madness over the last several years, and even though I was playing the Alpha for Dragonflight I had no real interest in playing the game at launch. That said I am still extremely susceptible to Diablo III Seasonitis, and it brought me back to the game to play with the Altar mechanics in Season 28. It seems that maybe with Sanctum, Path of Exile finally burrowed its way deep into my core and I am going to be just as vulnerable to the League Virus as well.
I’ve had people ask me before why I participate in Seasons and Leagues… when in truth you are just playing the same game over again but taking away any advantage you might have earned in the past. This is so much the case that I rarely if ever touch my “Standard” characters that largely just end up being a storehouse of materials that will never be used. For me personally, it has nothing to do with the challenge, but more that it is like this microcosm of a game launch. I love the launch of a new MMORPG and the excitement as folks scurry around trying to adapt to the game systems and the almost crushing amount of content flowing forth about the game. That same environment exists around the launch of a new season or league as everyone gets excited about the start, and then gibbers excitedly about what new lessons they have learned and exciting drops they might have found. It is all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… crammed into a few weeks to a month every three or four months repeating like clockwork… and once you engage with it fully it can be addictive as fuck.
The unfortunate truth however is your “Standard” characters often feel like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Path of Exile has maybe the best method for dealing with the cleanup. Essentially you get a tab added to your standard inventory that is marked as “remove-only” and then you can withdraw things from it at your leisure. This is far better than the Diablo III norm of just mailing you all of your items. In a season or league, you end up just collecting a bunch of nonsense. For example, I apparently gathered up almost 9000 Chaos Orbs, that I never took the time to convert to Divine Orbs for easier storage. I spent some time yesterday straightening up my standard inventory in prep for the launch of the new league, which meant painstakingly withdrawing items from one tab and depositing them into another. I should have waited until AFTER the league patch dropped because the stack size is being increased from 10 to 20… and it would have literally taken half the time.
I am certain that I will be starting out the league as a Marauder and moving towards Juggernaut and Righteous Fire because it is just too good of a general build not to have at my disposal. During the last league, I ended up leveling and gearing a whole slew of characters. Other than the RF Jugg I had my SRS Necromancer, Seismic Saboteur, and two attempts at a Toxic Rain build that I liked in both Trickster and Pathfinder variants. Primarily I say this because I absolutely expect to have more than one character. Righteous Fire is an amazing build for Delve, Heist, and burning through the early maps but at some point, I want something that is more “Bossing” friendly. I only ended up getting two void stones last league, because quite honestly… I do not enjoy the bossing game nearly as much as I enjoy the rest of the game. However, I might want to change that and try and knock out the last two void stones so I can have T16 maps for everything. For those curious, the above video is Pohx simulating a run of all 10 acts as Righteous Fire.
If I was not starting Righteous Fire, I would probably try out this build from Ghazzy which is more of a traditional ARPG minion build. I don’t think it will probably be as good of a bosser as my SRS build was last league, but it looks like a pretty chill option. The only annoying thing is using Hungry Loop to essentially give you a 5 link for Animate Guardian. I do not love Animate Guardian, so if I did try this out I would probably run it largely ignoring that. The spell is cool in design but the fact that you erase uniques to equip it… and then lose them all if it ever dies… just feels bad. We will have to see how bad the Poison SRS variant is currency-wise, because I might try building this league as my “bosser” since I enjoyed my Fire variant in Sanctum.
I don’t get at all why I am caught up on this emotional rollercoaster of the league start when I am legitimately enjoying myself playing Last Epoch. The heart wants what the heart wants, unfortunately. I did get my primalist/beastmaster up to the second monolith last night however and am still enjoying that gameplay. Right now without going into totems like the build I was loosely following suggests, it feels quite a bit like a HotA Barb from Diablo III. It also seems to have just a ton of survival and feels way tankier than my Necromancer does. I’m technically working on the Monolith that has a higher than reasonable chance of dropping the Herald of the Scurry helm that I will ultimately need, but unfortunately, I think the level is too low yet and I will have to farm it once I get to empowered monoliths.
I’ve also been back to logging into BelginnersLuck shown in the first screenshot of the post and trying to get a unique to drop from Hillock. If nothing else… I am definitely much faster at pathing through that first map in a league and much better at fighting that first obstacle. Tomorrow I will be rolling a brand new character and diving into the league. I don’t necessarily expect any of my friends to really join me in this madness, because I know it literally is that now… madness. I enjoy myself though so that I guess is the part that matters the most. If you plan on diving into the Crucible league drop me a line and say hey.
The post The Heart Wants appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
