Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of my evening hanging out in Path of Exile down in Delve hunting for bosses. I finished up the Masterful Monsters challenge last night which involved defeating 50 Delve, Syndicate, Bestiary, or Incursion bosses aka the endgame bosses from the original “Master Missions” that went away this league. I would say the vast majority of those 50 bosses came from Delve since I spent most of my time down there, but I did pick up a number of beast spawns to knock out some of those as well. It seems like Curiosity Vaal Aspects have slowed down in sales, so I decided to go ahead and turn one of them into an Adorned Jewel. I didn’t get a high roll but I at least got one that is over 100% increased buff so usable. I am contemplating swapping over to the Adorned version of the Righteous Fire build so might create a few more if sales don’t pick up.
I am still not certain how many of these achievements I am going to go for, but in theory I should be able to knock out the Heist one called Tactful Thievery easily enough given the stockpile of contracts I have. Sanctified Scarabs will also be pretty easy given napkin math I will need to run 9 more maps with four scarabs to hit the goal. Map Magnificence is a much longer stretch… but also doable if I just put my head down and grind maps. Once again per napkin math that should take me around 260 t16 maps to finish that one off. In theory, I could just burn through all of my corrupted maps on my Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion and not worry much about the rewards. After that, the objectives become significantly harder. If I can do The Feared… I will wrap up another one but given how hard Atziri was in that fight… I am not sure I will be able to survive long enough to take her down.
I also spent some time leveling my Witch, who for the moment is not yet ascended and leveling through abuse of Storm Brand of Indecision. Like I remember folks complaining heavily about how much this skill was nerfed into the ground, but it still feels phenomenal for leveling purposes. Basically, once I can equip most of the uniques I have sitting in the bank I will respec the character entirely to go down the Tornado of Elemental Turbulence path. I managed to fish for a level 1/20% quality one so I will begin muling it at level 34. I am going to be extremely slow leveling this character because at the moment I think I care more about knocking out “acheesements” than I do leveling yet another character.
In another piece of news… Maxroll has thrown their hat in the Path of Exile Bulk Trading game. On top of this, they have also created their own TFT competitor Discord that will eventually connect up with the new website. Recently Zizaran partnered with Maxroll, and he appears to now be the owner of this new Discord. On top of that streamers Subtractem, Crouching Tuna, and Tenkiei have joined in to moderate the moderators and make sure things stay transparent and on the up and up. So I wish them luck and I hope they continue to expand the functionality of this new site. So far it seems pretty solid for bulk trading and I might try and liquidate my coffins at some point over the weekend. I am still picking them up but I think I am mostly not going to engage with graveyard crafting any further. It just isn’t really my jam.
I don’t love that it is “Yet Another Discord” and I’ve only minimally interacted with TFT, but I do like Maxroll quite a bit and think that they are doing a good job of trying to create “best in breed” applications to support the games that they cover. I can’t see that anything they have done so far cannot be a positive in the grand scheme of things. Partnering with Zizaran was a good move as the official host of his guides. Pohx would be someone else I would love to see them work with, but he has invested a lot of time in his own website. Anyways I know that these posts are only useful for folks who are already engaged in Path of Exile, but given that it is already a struggle to keep posting this is kind of what you are going to get.
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Good Morning Folks! Between yesterday’s post and this morning, I finished off two more league challenges. Namely, I knocked out the challenge involving killing a bunch of specific league boss encounters, and I finished the one that was focused around Essences and corrupting them. I am three kills away from taking out Masterful Monsters which I am largely getting down in Delve by hunting Abyssal, Vaal, or Primal bosses. I have a few Incursion temples that I could run to knock out Vaal Omnitect which would count as well. I chain-ran a bunch of Bestiary bosses to knock out a good chunk of these as I was sitting on a bunch of the portal crafts to spawn them. I think the next one I will start chipping away at is the Heist-related one where I am pretty close to finishing up a few of the meta steps, but largely I have not even finished unlocking all of the rogues.
I am to the point of Righteous Fire where it would benefit me to swap Fire Trap to my chestpiece, but I have a tricky coloring situation there. Essentially I picked up this excellent Cloak of Flames cheaply… and have been throwing tainted chromatic orbs at it when I get them. Basically, I need RRRGGG and there is no easy way to get that on a pure Intelligence base. I could throw 1000 Tainted Chromes at this or I could get it in my next drop. In theory, I should probably focus on farming tainted currency for a bit and try and knock this out given that tainted chromes are a bit painful right now to buy in bulk. I tried the bench craft for red and green sockets a few times and burned through some of my excess vaal orbs to no real luck.
There is a skill I have been interested in this league called Tornado of Elemental Turbulence that allows you to throw out three Tornadoes at a time, but they deal damage with a random element. It just so happened that this morning Mathil published a video showing off his wonky build for this ability and it looks interesting. It would be a way squishier character than I am used to playing, but I do kinda want to play an “offense is the best defense” character to see if I could get used to it. The positive of his particular build is it is mostly uniques… and mostly things I already have sitting in my bank. I also have a Witch character that I created at the start of the league to mule some abilities that I had planned on originally making into something Detonate Dead related. I might level it up and see what this build feels like.
That will however require me to do some transfigured gem fishing in the Labyrinth. Lately I have been using Doppelganger card sets to do this which turns in for a 20% Quality level 1 Mirror Arrow card. When you use the basic lab ability to swap a gem for a transfigured gem of that same color, it will respect the level and quality making it an easy way to get 20% quality green gems to level. I was doing this to get copies of Elemental Hit of the Spectrum for attempting to corrupt it into a level 21 version. I figure in the coming days I will do the same fishing for Tornado of Elemental Turbulence. This is one of those rare cases where I think I am actually corrupting for a 20/23% gem instead of a 21/20% gem given that Quality increases movement speed giving the attack better quality of life.
Anyways! We will see what comes out of this. I know Diablo IV dropped some information on Season 4 yesterday and that we will get more info after the campfire chat. I figure I will give that game another shot, but my hopes are not high. I kinda feel like the folks working on that game don’t really understand how to make an ARPG that ARPG players actually enjoy. There was a whole sound clip from one of the earlier campfire chats where one of the devs indicated that he thought Elden Ring, Hades, Hollow Knight, and Diablo IV were all in the same genre of “Action RPG”. While I think the itemization updates are good, I still have zero faith that the folks steering that project have a clue what the folks who will stick around and keep playing season after season actually want.
Anyways! I hope you are having a most excellent week. I am still struggling to focus and fighting off a massive “turtle mode” but trying to brute force my way out of it.
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Morning Folks! If you have read this blog for any length of time over the last few years, you will know I am a “Delve Enjoyer”. One of the nuisances of Delve is that you need to pop out every so often to refill sulphite that you use to power the minecart or in my case the tunnel bear mtx… used to traverse the darkness. Generally speaking even with full Niko support on the Atlas tree it will take several maps to fully top back off your stockpile of 65,000 sulphite for a maximum upgraded capacity. When I am in the mood to Delve I pretty much want to do nothing but that. This makes the need to map for a bit in order to fill back up my stockpile of “delve juice” feel like a chore.
One of the components of the Necropolis league mechanic is Allflames which are used to swap out a pack of mobs on your map for a pack that has specific rewards. One of these is the Allflame Ember of Sulphite which removes a normal pack for a pack of 5-7 Monsters that reward Sulphite on Death. If you add the Sulphite Scarab of Greed which causes the map owner to gain 150% more Sulphite you have a wild interaction. In a T16 map, if you replace the top pack aka the one with the highest occurrence in the map with the Sulphite Allflame, and run one of these Scarabs you are pretty much guaranteed to top off your 65,000 Sulphite in a single map. Which of course means that I can get back to doing the thing that I want to be doing almost immediately. This is part of the reason why I am hoping that if nothing else… the Allflame mechanic goes standard after this league.
I am not super deep into Delve right now, but I am farming comfortably a bit deeper than normal this league. Generally speaking, I would stick in the 150 to 200 range and keep going horizontal looking for new cities and fossil nodes. In this league, it feels like I am much stronger than I normally would be, and as such I keep going deeper in order to test what the lower bounds of this build would be. I don’t necessarily want to leave super chill mode, at least not until I have dinged level 100. After that, I will probably start diving straight down to see where the break point is for my build where it transitions to something I can’t do quite as easily. In previous leagues, by the time I hit 500 depth, I was in pain. I am wondering if I can somehow make it down to around 1000 depth this go-round.
I have passed the halfway point in level 99 and am at the point where I plan on always carrying around an Omen of Amelioration just in case. During the 99 to 100 grind, a single death can cause you to lose at least a full night’s worth of experience progress. If I do take a random death the Omen will be consumed and I will save 75% of the loss, making it a bit less painful. I got mine as a drop but given that they are only around 50 Chaos, I would absolutely buy another one if I take a death because the savings is well worth it at this point. Once I ding 100 I will go back to doing some dangerous content again. Honestly the XP penalty is the piece of Path of Exile that I like the least. It feels like I have to play super safe if I want to make any progress at all. I’ve only ever hit level 100 on one other character, because while I will happily pay for voidstones… I refuse to pay for power levelling services.
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Good Morning Folks! I find myself starting to feel that old familiar itch… the one that involves me leveling a second character. I have no clue what I actually want to make but that isn’t important. What is important is that I know before long I will wind up chasing some new character and trying to make it work. That is not to say I am not still having a heck of a lot of fun on Righteous Fire Chieftain, and would honestly probably keep playing it for a while. I just always end up starting several other characters during a league and then trying to make them work. I would love to see a redemption arc for Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, but I am not sure if I want to roll another Marauder in this league. It has been a few leagues since I have played Toxic Rain, and bows are dirt cheap due to the corpse-crafting meta right now.
Remember me talking about going all in on my sceptre yesterday? Well… about that. I had this fractured +1 fire gem base that I had been tinkering with for a while. Essentially I had been spamming all of my alts at it hoping to roll the ideal setup… and then survive the regal. Yesterday I had farmed up another stack of alts and threw them all at the weapon… and happened to land a pretty optimal setup. Which then prompted me to spend my last to Divine Orbs to meta-craft this the rest of the way to completion. Now I am back farming blue juice from Harvest so that I can shift this to an alternate quality setup for elemental damage and do the 30% corruption beast again. At that point… I think maybe just maybe I will have the final form of my weapon.
Some “new tech” from this patch that I have been playing with is The Perandus Pact Prismatic Jewel. This is a grave crafted item that can be influenced to roll with a specific stat package on it. I did not do this thing, I just bought mine because the “6% Increased Fire Damage” version is apparently not the sought-after version. Essentially allocating this in my tree gives me a ring that includes 18 passive tree nodes that each gain +6% for a grand total of +108% Increased Fire Damage. I had already planned on picking up the Sanctum of Thought node to push myself up to 90% reduction to critical damage, which will give me another +18%. This seems really good and it would be significantly better if I were building something on the right-hand side of the tree with much tighter clustering of nodes. Alternately I could have gone with +5 life per node, but I wasn’t sure if that would matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve gotten deep enough into Delve that I am starting to see a few survival issues, so I decided to try something. I was out perusing POE.Ninja as one does… and noticed a Korean player running RF Chieftain with Vampirism allocated on their amulet. This seems really good because it would give me another source of recovery that is not entirely dependent upon my regeneration rate. The big problem is diving into packs of mobs while waiting on an explosion to proc, and while that is going off I would be getting both life on kill and some life recuperation from damage taken. Thankfully Golden Oils are cheap this league so if I want to go back to my Damage Over Time setup that I had been running it would be easy enough to do so.
I picked up another crafting project, that has frankly already cost me around 150 Chaos Orbs of potential value. I found this chestpiece for 10 Chaos Orbs and while I do not care in the least about the level of socketed curse gems… I am a huge fan of that 5% reduced Fire Damage Taken. I am running a lot of beyond on my maps and as such finding quite a bit of tainted currency so essentially as I find tainted fusing I am throwing them at this item. All I need is one to hit with a favorable result. When I fail I go back to the bench and craft 4 linked sockets… restoring me back to the state of just needing one fusing to six link it. Like I said I have made 3 attempts, each attempt with a value of 50 Chaos… and sooner or later I am going to hit it and then swap over to this chest piece and likely sell my RF-colored six-link Cloak of Flames for a bit of a profit.
The last bit of findings is that I actually managed to hit some T4 Harvest Beasts and wound up pulling Bear’s Girdle which is a key component for a Cleave of Rage build. Again it is something that I have wanted to play with, but I am not sure I want to make a second marauder this league. It isn’t like the girdle is worth a ton on its own, but I was happy to get it nonetheless. I’ve never fought the actual harvest endgame boss and keep wondering what is involved in doing so. I guess I should look that up at some point because I know there is a league achievement the includes them as one of the options. I should probably make some general strategy around finishing enough achievements to get my sad little totem pole again. Right now I am mostly working on Maven witnesses so I can attempt to take her down for a voidstone.
How has your league been going? Are you still trucking along or have you moved on already? Drop me a line below.
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