Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I slept like crap last night so I find myself in a bit of a haze… which messes the foggy mess of nonsense that is going on outside today. I’ve officially entered the “playing with dumbass ideas” phase of the Necropolis league, and as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend leveling another Marauder. At this point, I am hanging out on the Oriath docks and nearing the push to finish the campaign. I think over lunch I might try and do the third Labyrinth and push through to the end so I can begin the “gearing phase”.
During the Ancestor League, I attempted to create a Shield Crush Chieftain. My idea was relatively straightforward… take the class that makes it easy to cap elemental resistances and then make it deal physical damage converted to fire damage. The above video is of some footage of me doing a T14 map and shows the state of that build as I managed to get it. You can check out the POB but essentially I was attempting to use Avatar of Fire to convert all of the damage that I was dealing to Fire Damage. It sort of worked… but mostly was less than exciting. However, with the Affliction League, we got a Transfigured version of Shield Crush that essentially was doing the thing I was trying to do… baked into the gem itself. My guess is that there are a lot of folks looking for build content for this gem, because my first Shield Crush Chieftain video that is titled that… has gotten more traction than it deserves.
However, once that seed was planted into my head… I wanted to give it a shot even if it also turned out to be a failure. I am being exceptionally lazy and running Forbidden Flesh/Flame combo to give myself Tasalio Cleansing Water which makes my overcapped Fire Resistance apply to everything else while running a Juggernaut. Other than that I am mostly stacking armor, life, and regen and a few sources that increase “attack damage” but not specifically “physical damage”. I am not where I am ready to do a proper show and tell of how things are going, and am just about to break out into a cluster setup over the next few levels. We will see how it goes but for right now… it feels pretty freaking good.
I am going down the Armor Stacking path which means I am running an Emperor’s Vigilance and a Replica Dreamfeather both of which are extremely cheap right now. I leveled using Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler but it started to fall off significantly the higher in level I got… since I am not explicitly stacking strength. I’ve picked up a Grasping Mail with the “armor increased by over-capped fire-resistance” explicit which is why I decided to do the forbidden flesh/flame combo. I think I paid 8 Divines for the one that I got which has over 1000 armor on it and a decent amount of evasion as well. I am also converting all of my Evasion to Armor through the Iron Reflexes keystone. I will likely take advantage of this when I pick up boots and gloves going for as high of both armor and evasion as I can find with chaos resistance and fire resistance.
At the moment I am running around in a Brass Dome, but only because I pulled one from the Forgotten Sage and figured I might as well use it. Also hilarious… you can equip a Headhunter at level 40 so I ran around with one of those for a while but I have no clue what my final belt is going to look like. Maybe a well-rolled Immortal Flesh since I seem to care about Regeneration. Last time around I went with Arn’s Anguish but I am not sure if I am going to be using anything that generates endurance charges. Regardless the build feels good right now and looks really cool because Shield Crush of the Chieftain has a much wider range than normal Shield Crush does… and once I get Fan the Flames up and running my ignites will start spreading. The biggest challenge is going to be getting enough stats on the few non-unique slots that I have.
By tomorrow I should have a good idea of how well this build actually works so I might do one of my videos showing it off. For the moment I am using a Flammability on Hit ring for my curse which seems to work pretty well, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have any chaos resistance on it. It was something that I picked up off the ground down in Delve and held onto.
The post Crushing Some Fiery Shields appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Monsters Mastered appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
The post Masterful Monsters appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I don’t have a heck of a lot to talk about this morning, but I thought I would share something that I realized yesterday. I spend a lot of time in Delve and it is quite possibly my favorite game mode in Path of Exile. I would not be shocked if I had spent over a thousand hours running delve nodes. The thing is… the structure of Delve is something that has confused me a bit. Namely, I seemed to be missing the inherent understanding of how to find hidden nodes. There are a lot of things in this game that are based on rules, but for whatever reason I had yet to grasp something fundamental about the way Delve was laid out. Now I have to admit that I had heard this information before, but never fully grasped what it meant.
Veteran Path of Exile players speak like you understand what they are saying. I remember specifically Zizaran talking about this in a video here he was explaining that you could tell where hidden nodes were based on the connections that they were making. A node cannot have only two connection points. It can have one, it can have three, and in rare cases, it can have four… but no node can have only two connections. To illustrate this point I took a screenshot of an area down in Delve where there were two hidden nodes side by side… one azerite and one fossil. I’ve applied some labels to count the connections and you can see there are two places where there are only two visible connections. So I sketched an estimate of where I thought the connections might break off and labeled the expected node path in each case with a “3?” indicating a hidden third connection.
Last night I farmed each of these areas out so that I could take a follow up screenshot showing what the actual connections ended up looking like. I have highlighted the paths in green and in both cases I was more or less right. In the case of the Fossil node, the path broke off to the north instead of to the west, but it was in the same region. In any case looking for nodes that only had two paths connected to it, gave me a place where I knew for certain there would be some sort of path breaking out that I could bomb to get access to the tunnel.
Sometimes there are going to be places on the map where there is a hidden node, but there are two nodes around it that only have two connections. In these cases, you need to look for places where there might be a phantom fourth connection. If I were going to try and get to this currency node then I would start looking at the armor node and azerite nodes that I have highlighted. There is not enough room for a path to break off the Cartography node above the highlighted area, and while technically the singleton Lightning node could break north, that seems to happen really infrequently. Again you can have a single point of connection, three points of connection, or four points of connection but never two.
This is not my image, but it represents a concept that took me a bit to grasp. Delve is aligned to a strict grid of nodes. So when thinking of the way things connect up… there has to be enough room for a path to travel through without interrupting nodes you have already revealed. The way the biomes are laid out gives you a hint for where the edges of the individual blocks are. if you were to start drawing along those boundaries, you would eventually end up with a grid similar to the one above showing you where your hidden node has to be connected to. In the above example, we are going back to the rule of two again making it very clear where the connection is going to be. However in my example, if I follow the biome boundary lines, I cannot rule out either the two four connections that I have highlighted or the potential of that singleton going north.
Delve has long been something that was largely instinctual for me. I would get a feel of which tunnels I could dive down into the darkness and find riches, and which I should skip. However, I knew there had to be a method to the madness, and understanding the rules… makes it so much more straightforward to find those hidden nodes. Again this is something that EVERYONE might already know and I am just slow on the uptake… but I am going to take the risk to look like an idiot and explain it clearly regardless. That has been the problem I have had with most Path of Exile knowledge transfer, is that there is a general assumption that folks already understand core concepts. I’ve played roughly 2500 hours of the game and there are still core concepts that I am finally grasping all the time. It is my hope that this will help someone out there because I am too old for posturing that I know everything.
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