Good Morning Folks! We’ve been dealing with some sort of flu-like crud that has swept through our house. I feel awful, but I am doing much better than my wife is… which means that I have become the defacto caregiver. So this weekend I pretty much needed some comfort gaming, which meant that I spent most of my time screwing around with a new character in Path of Exile. For a while now I have contemplated either building a cyclone character or a blade vortex character for that whole whirlwind “spin to win” equivalent gameplay. While neither is really quite like the Whirlwind Barbarian, Cyclone mostly gets used as a vehicle for delivering other attacks via cast-on-channeling… which pushed me towards Blade Vortex.
More specifically I was interested in the cold conversion version of the build that can freeze entire packs in seconds allowing you to ignore a lot of the defensive layers as locking down targets goes a long way. At the moment I have a 93% chance to freeze targets, and given how often blade vortex hits that is pretty much a guaranteed freeze as soon as I hop into a pack of mobs. More than that I am running a medium cluster with Blast-Freeze which works similar to Fan the Flames does for ignites and my freezes spread to everything in a 1.2 meter radius. I wish this was chained, but unfortunately, it only applies to freezes from the initial attack and not freezes that proc from Blast-Freeze. I also have an “explody chest” with the crusader modifier that causes enemies to deal 1/10th of their life as physical damage… which then gets converted entirely to cold damage via hrimsorrow.
I am loosely following this POB, and am now trying to decide if I want to go the route of +1 physical wand and shield, or if I want to shift things up and go for a +3 bow and quiver setup. The biggest benefit of staying with a physical wand or scepter and a caster shield is that it allows me to keep using shield charge. Given that all of my physical is being converted to cold, it is not unusual for the shield charge itself to freeze something. The biggest negative about +physical gear right now is that is also what Penance Brand of Dissipation is using, which has jacked up the price of everything on the market. I have a +1 physical scepter that I attempted to throw some fossils at but have not really had much in the way of luck yet. I might yolo some “reforge cold” harvest crafts to see what that yields given that I have +1 physical as a fracture.
Probably the best aspect of this build is that it can pretty much perma-freeze a boss long enough to kill it. Which helps greatly considering that my survival is in a really bad state. I have capped my resistances at 75% all but have nothing much in the way of armor or evasion to speak of… and am not even close to having capped spell suppression. If I get looked at the wrong way I am going to go down in a blaze of glory. Mostly right now I need to grind out the first few charms and then put on some levels because I think currently I am level 73 so just barely started. I can however fairly comfortably do red maps even without upgrading to a decent wand/shield. I should probably also swap out all of my gems for fully leveled and qualitied ones as I just have whatever I leveled with. I did splurge for a 21/20 Blade Vortex but so far that is the only “endgame” gem that I have.
At some point today I will work my way through the fourth labyrinth and get the Primal Aegis up and running. That should help quite a bit as I already have quite a number of notables allocated. It will also make me immune to reflected elemental damage which will help greatly as I am converting all of my physical to cold. Other than that I really need more life, and would love to figure out a way to work in haste because I feel slow currently. For a very squishy build it is shockingly viable given the screen-wide freezing effect. I get now why this has at various points in the past been a popular league starter.
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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! It has been a few weeks since we recorded a normal show and I think we had a bunch of conversation in us waiting to get out. As a result, we recorded a bit longer than we should have but that is okay! We talk about Celeste 64 and that sort of gameplay translates to a very Mario 64 inspired game. From there Kodra shares his experiences with Songs of Conquest a game that is very much a nostalgic continuation of the Heroes of Might and Magic Series. Bel and Kodra talk about their experiences with the other new survival early access game Enshrouded and how it is shockingly complete, and really just needs polish. From there we dive into the mail topic of the show where we discuss City of Heroes and how it is this perfect snapshot of the best of MMORPGs before World of Warcraft changed everything. Finally, Bel actually completes his four voidstones in Path of Exile and talks about what a difference a dedicated bosser makes.
Hey Folks! It has been a bit since I have done one of my dumb little videos and I figured I finally had something worth showing off. I did not expect to be rolling a new character this late in the league, but I enjoy brand characters and Penance Brand of Dissipation is a little cracked right now. If I remember correctly, I started this character last Monday, leveled it through the campaign in two days, then threw on some pretty basic rare gear, and have been using that ever since. In any other league this would be a character walking around under a divine orb’s worth of gear… but given that dissipation is a flavor of the week build and wants specific things, it is causing a bit of inflation to happen. I think in total though I am wearing roughly 10 Divine Orbs worth of gear and a lot of it could be rolled either by yourself or through something like Rog crafting.
Right now I am using zero uniques in my build, but that is not to say there are not some that would probably work well with it. Since I am doing cold damage and lightning damage, I could see this potentially working well with an Inpulsa’s Broken Heart but I have not made that swap because I would end up losing some physical damage taken as elements conversion. I’ve wound up honestly fairly tanky for the sort of damage that I am dealing. The only three specific gear slots that I sought out was +1 level of physical gems on weapon, amulet, and caster shield which give my Penance Brand of Dissipation additional levels and more damage as a result. At some point I should probably spend some currency and try and get a +2 weapon or amulet but again… during an inflation league that would end up costing probably more than I am willing to spend. Another option would be a Replica Dragonfang’s Flight but those start around 10 Divine Orbs and higher for one with decent mana reservation efficiency.
To demonstrate the build I ran a quick Shaper Guardian map at t16. You can see that the mapping is honestly reasonable for a build that is not really focused on doing full-screen clears. The brands bounce between packs quickly shredding all of the monsters within them and my gameplay largely revolves around moving constantly while dropping fresh brands and attempting to keep my Divine Blessing Haste up all of the time. When I get to the boss it isn’t so much that I nuke it instantly, but it gets shredded pretty quickly. At this point, I have done Elder, Sirius, and Maven and in all of those cases, I was pretty much ending each phase before the mob had much chance to do anything. It took me a bunch of portals on Maven but only because I suck at the memory game and dropping puddles. Sirius and Elder I oneshot and it wasn’t even close. I’ve not done Shaper only because I have not gotten one of the four guardian maps to drop but I am grinding maps the atlas support hoping to see it.
I am having a heck of a lot of fun with this build and quite honestly… I am pretty happy with the state of all of my builds right now. I’ve spent some time tweaking Boneshatter to the point where it has much better survivability thanks to Defiance of Destiny. I am also very happy with the current state of my Righteous Fire Chieftain and the only thing I would really change on it would be to potentially add Oriath’s End for more explosions, then again I could also use one on Penance Brand just to help with the clearing. Then I have my Lightning Arrow Champion that I bought a Headhunter for because they are so damned cheap this league and that has been a lot of fun. I really don’t have a single build right now that feels like it is underperforming. There is room on each of them to improve but I am relatively happy with where they all are.
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Penance Brand of Dissipation might be one of my fastest-leveling characters ever. I started it pretty late on Monday night, leveled it through Kitava on Tuesday night, and then geared it yesterday and started mapping. The skill is not the best thing in the world for map clear, but it does a phenomenal job at deleting anything that is even the littlest bit tanky. This build has become a bit of a bossing meme during this league and given that I have never really played anything with a serious bossing focus… I decided that I would give it a shot. I had around 20 Divines left to spend and I think as of this morning I am sitting at 8 left, so I spent quite a bit gearing this character out. The challenge is that because this is so popular it means all of the optimal gear for it is also wildly overpriced. A Replica Dragonfang’s Flight for Penance brand with max reservation efficiency runs around 20 Divine Orbs for example.
The biggest challenge for me is that I do not know anything about gearing characters for damage output. I know this is a bit of an irony given how many characters I have leveled… but for the most part, my focus has always been on survival and defensive layers leaving the damage that I dealt as a bit of an afterthought. My “kink” if you will for games is being able to take the maximum amount of punishment without falling down. I mean I play almost exclusively tanks in MMORPGs for example… so I am big into being a chonky juggernaut of meaty goodness, and could give a shit what I am dealing for damage output. Bossers, however… are about dealing as much damage to a single target as they can in as short of a period as they can. So I have no clue if I am even dealing enough damage to the boss successfully and even more so no clue how to set up POB to accurately display my damage output. In theory, if I am even vaguely close I should be somewhere around the 8 Million DPS range currently.
Right now I am mostly focused on leveling and running a bunch of the random t14-t16 maps that I have laying around in the bank. I would really like to get this character to the level 90-95 range before I deal with focusing on bossing. I might start dipping my toes into the water with some Guardian maps soon as I can seemingly handle t16s without any real issues. One of the most annoying things about shifting from a private league to the trade league is that it reset all of my master missions. I had around 80 Kirac missions that just poofed when we left private league, and this would have been the perfect opportunity to utilize those since I don’t really care about the output of the map and just care about the experience gained.
The biggest thing that I am trying to get used to is not spamming my brand ability. In theory in a perfect scenario, you only want one brand on your target at any given time, and you want it to tick for the maximum number of pulses because each pulse ramps the damage. I am so damned used to spamming abilities that this is requiring a bit of a rework of my brain. On a boss fight you would be spending most of that downtime moving around and avoiding things so that seems doable. I need to get better at keeping up my Hatred as well which I have on Divine Blessing. I am contemplating dropping some of my defensive layers to stack on additional offensive auras and MAYBE go low life with this build. Taste of Hate and the damage conversion that I have on my chestpiece along with good resists and maxed spell suppression go a long way toward helping with incidental damage. If I take a bit hit though I am going to die regardless of how much Evasion and Armor I have.
I am so out of my depth though because again… the thing I care about most is NEVER dying. So playing a squishy character that cares about damage output is just completely outside my wheelhouse.
The post Trying to Care About DPS appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
