Good Morning Folks! I did something silly this weekend. In Path of Exile, there is the concept of a private league, where you can pay to essentially play the game in a bubble with your friends. I’ve contemplated trying to do a small private league amongst my handful of friends who play the game regularly, mostly as a way of creating a sort of “Guild Self Found”. The idea is where you can still trade items freely but only amongst a smaller group of people giving you that Solo-Self-Found type experience of needing to actually find things, but also being able to rely on and help out your friends. There are a handful of streamers who run events throughout the year that are specifically associated with private leagues. The most popular of these is probably The Gauntlet, which is very much a much harder mode experience. There is another event called the Badger Private League where folks compete as teams with other teams of players.
SirGog one of my favorite POE information sources, also has one of these leagues that he has run a few times now called the Toucan Treasure Hunt. The idea is fairly straightforward, private leagues expand the lifecycle of a given Path of Exile league by allowing players a renewed focus on the fundamentals and an alternate way to play the game. There is a simple rule when it comes to private leagues, they cannot make the game easier and if you change the rules it can only be to make the base game more difficult. Toucan League for example is focused on crafting and the challenges that it provides. On Friday the league started at 7 p.m. my time and I decided to give it a shot. Specifically, the Toucan League had the following rules associated with it.
All Items Drop Scoured, so everything is essentially “white” quality and all you are really looking at is item bases and sockets.
All Players Start with -20% Resistance across the board, so you immediately need to try and dig yourself out of that hole.
Acts 1-3 have increased difficulty.
I decided to use this opportunity as a way of testing the SSF viability of Guardian SRS. When I was playing my Ancestor League version of this build, I noticed that for the most part, the uniques weren’t really “enabling” that build. They were buffing the strength of it, but they were not doing anything that a set of basic rare gear wouldn’t. Sure enough that has largely worked out as expected and now that I am level 81, I am mapping exceptionally smoothly. With only using some Alchemy Orbs and some Chaos Orbs to re-roll items I was able to land at over-capped elemental resistances thanks to Purity of Elements, but have thus far had no real hope of solving my Chaos Resistance problem. However, as I have learned several times… you can map pretty well with no Chaos Resistance at all. I managed to take my character up through early yellow maps yesterday afternoon and I think I took a single death doing so.
In the Discord associated with the event, there have been daily stretch goals that involve all sorts of things. I’ve largely been ignoring these, but I will say that more than anything I want to at least achieve the bronze-tier goal for the entire event. I’ve already passed level 80, and now I just need to complete my fourth ascendancy and I will feel fine with my progress for the league as a whole. I sincerely doubt that I will accomplish any of the further goals because more than anything this league has taught me a few things about my enjoyment of this game. Firstly I am not really that into the crafting system. I will use it when I need to in order to make serviceable gear, but I just don’t enjoy crafting as an endgame in itself. Secondly, I really hate that items being dropped scoured bricks an entire system that I have leaned on heavily for early gear. Essentially you cannot get crafting patterns from Betrayal as when the items drop, they drop scoured without veiled mods on them.
More than anything else… I am a loot-driven player. I like seeing loot. I like checking loot to see if it might be useful. Sure I can freely admit that 99.9% of rare items that drop on the ground are useless… but in Ancestor League I have made a pretty brisk trade in selling the items that I found in my travels that were NOT useless. For example, I spend a lot of time checking rings and amulets for resistances, and now my only real option is to attempt to brute force craft the resists that I need. Because everything drops scoured… mapping just feels bland and meaningless. I’ve run over a dozen maps, and I am largely just running them for completion sake. I know going into them that the only worth anything that I am going to walk away with, is maybe a few chaos orbs or other assorted bubblegum crafting materials.
I think easily the most interesting aspect of the event though, is it gave me a way of testing to see just how strong Guardian is on its own with absolute dumpster-tier gear. If you want to check out my POB, you can see the level of gear that I currently have. I am still using a level 20 helmet because I just happened to randomly chance my way into a +1 to all minion skills. I am using The Anvil as a necklace, mostly because it was the only unique that I got that actually halfway made sense for my build. I rolled a decent enough Convening Minion damage wand, and am now pretty much stuck with it because I don’t have the base Intelligence to move up to a Convoking wand. The lack of Betrayal crafts means I can never get my auto cursing/offering setup off the ground which means I am losing a lot of efficiency with the build.
Still, however… the build is perfectly playable and I am having little to no resistance progressing through maps. A lot of this is due to the fact that Radiant Crusade and more importantly the Sentinel of Radiance is so damned overpowered. I feel like there is no way that this build survives into 3.23 without at least taking a significant nerf to the amount of damage that the sentinel deals. We talked about this a bit on the podcast and Ash suggested that they might flip the order in which you get Radiant Crusade and Unwavering Crusade so you are at least getting it a bit later in the game. As it stands… Guardian SRS has been the best feeling Minion build I have played in Path of Exile. The fact that I have been able to get it up and running and feeling great with garbage gear only serves to underline this fact.
Alternately, I think I have learned that while I find the concept of the Toucan Treasure Hunt very interesting… I just did not enjoy myself nearly as much as I hoped I might. The lack of good loot really hampered my enjoyment. I’ve known for a while that the only reason why I ever raided in MMORPGs is because I wanted the shiny loot that was exclusive to it. It seems that I am only really into ARPGs because of the constant rain of potentially interesting loot. Don’t get me wrong I absolutely enjoy them mechanically, but mechanics alone are not enough to keep me engaged. Do I regret trying out the Toucan League? Nope! It was worthy of a shot, and I greatly appreciate Sir Gog for running the event. However, I think I will probably take a hard pass going forward because it just did not flip the right switches in my brain.
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Good Morning Folks! I thought I would give a bit of a quick update on the state of my Fire Conversion Shield Crush Chieftain. When I last posted about the build I was sitting at 78 and I have now put on another nine levels and am sitting at 87. Levels have helped quite a bit, as has a bit of gear swapping. The end result feels a bit closer to what I would consider a proper build. There have been a few times in this “Bel makes Videos” adventure where I have recorded a bit of an update because the build has suddenly felt much better to play. All in all, this is probably still not something that I would suggest to anyone because for the amount of effort I have poured into it… it still is not what I would consider a fast mapper or honestly particularly great at any sort of content.
Here is some updated gameplay that I recorded yesterday over my lunch break. If you compare this to the previous video, you can already see that not only am I running a harder map but I am also zipping through the packs much faster. The Achilles heel of the build continues to be bosses and the fact that anything with resistance takes forever to chew through even with flammability, fire penetration, and the Ramako ascendancy. The other glaring problem is that I have negative amounts of chaos resistance, which makes for a pretty quick death on occasion. I am slowly working my way towards the 10% of armor applies to Chaos Resistance mastery which I am hoping will at least help a bit.
To get where I am now, I have swapped out several gear slots so let’s dive into some of those decisions. Firstly I gave up chaos resistance and my rare helmet to go over to the armor stacking staple The Formless Flame. This is something I should have done from the start, but I was honestly more concerned about not having any chaos resistance than I was over the huge benefits of this item. I swapped from Immortal Flesh which I had been using for some life and regeneration, back to Arn’s Anguish the DPS belt that gives me a lot of Armor, Brutality Stacks, and some more Fire Resistance which then converts to at least some regeneration. I swapped out my rare boots with chaos resistance for Legacy of Fury which gives additional explosions and applies scorch to everything for more fire damage. Lastly, I swapped from my previous corrupted Emperor’s Vigilance to one with a bit more Armor and Energy shield since the price of those shields has crashed since I bought mine and I might as well min/max that a bit.
So when my flasks are ticking, which they usually are given they are all “flagellant” meaning I gain stacks while being hit… I am sitting at over 109k armor. This of course gets converted to attack damage which then gets converted to fire damage… which means the more defenses that I pour on the more damage I deal. Additionally, I talked about this in the build, but I did swap my Amethyst Flask for a perfectly rolled Rumi’s Concoction that I had sitting in the bank which gives me a capped block chance for both spells and attacks at 75%. Once I get the 10% of armor applied to chaos damage node, that should give me 10,962 armor being applied to chaos damage which should at least give me a bit of wiggle room even when I have negative resistance.
The challenge that I find myself in is that my next really huge upgrade would be swapping my Brass Dome out for a Grasping Mail. More specifically I need one that has rolled with the “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” prefix which cannot be rolled/crafted and has to drop natively on the item. The biggest challenge with all of this is… even a shitty one sells for around 10 Divine Orbs and for one that is already linked you are talking somewhere in the 25-50 Divine Orb range. I just feel like that is way more currency that I want to spend on this build especially when swapping this out would mean I would be down 4% maximum resistance and lose my crit immunity. Moreover even after swapping this… I would still largely be fucked on Chaos Resistance. While I have the currency to buy one of these, and then link it myself… I just have stayed my hand because I can’t see spending it on a build that I am not even sure about. I would probably rather spend that currency on upgrades for my SRS Guardian or RF Juggernaut as both of them feel worlds better than this character.
I think more than anything, Shield Crush Chieftain has been a fun experiment. It was a costly experiment, but it at least satiated my desire to see what Shield Crush and the new Chieftain changes were all about. I thought I would have put this character to bed long before now, but I continue to dink around with it. I am likely to swap back to either the Jugg or the Guardian however to knock out some of my missing league achievements so I can get another sad little totem pole for my hideout. This would be my third one if I managed to knock out two more achievements before the end of the league. Additionally, I am on the cusp of finishing up Diablo III Season 29, so I will probably be spending some time wrapping that up over the weekend.
That said… I am already contemplating a totally different distraction. Sir Gog is one of my favorite Path of Exile YouTubers, and he will be hosting a private league event starting this weekend. The idea is that it will be a crafting league and that everything is going to be dropping scoured so that you have to craft your own statistics on it. I am contemplating doing another SRS Guardian, largely as a way to test SSF Viability of the build for future leagues. I am not entirely certain this is going to happen, but I believe the league starts sometime around 7 p.m. for me. If you want to give this a shot check out the video above or the league invite page.
The post Fire Shield Crush Updates appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I thought this morning I would talk about my latest mess of a build in depth. I mentioned this on Friday, but essentially this build came about because I wanted a reason to play a Chieftain with its new ascendancy and a reason to play Shield Crush. While there are no actual guides on how to play a Shield Crush Chieftan, there are folks playing Physical to Fire Conversion Chieftans and folks playing Shield Crush. So as a result I spent quite a bit of time on POE.Ninja and kitbashed together something that felt right. I have no clue if anything I am doing is close to optimal, but I can clear red maps so I am going to call that a win. While nothing about this morning’s post is purporting to be a guide, here is my POB if you are interested in trying to follow along.
I recorded some footage of me doing a yellow map… largely because I am trying for the third league in a row to farm the damned Primeval hideout, which requires a lot of luck and running Primordial Blocks. I feel like the above gameplay does a pretty good job of highlighting both the strengths of the build and the weaknesses. The strength is when I charge into a pack of mobs, they usually explode in a brilliant pyroclastic wave. The weakness is… any time I encounter something fire-resistant or extremely tanky. I wind up getting a Niko elemental that is both Soul Eater and Shakiri Touched… and it takes for freaking ever to chew through. All in all, though it feels pretty enjoyable and is extremely tanky.
The new Chieftain ascendancy is this weird mixed bag of extremely powerful nodes and some that are situationally good. The real benefit of this ascendancy is that you can easily fix your elemental resistances. The side benefit is that Hinekora Death’s Fury causes big fire explosions… far bigger than anyone expected when this was announced. It isn’t quite an entire screen radius but it is almost there. I feel like the correct order to choose these is Tasalio, Hinekora, and then Valako because it allows you to fix your resists sooner rather than later. The fourth node is less certain because you have a few options with no clear winner. I am likely going to go with Ramako because it is the lazy option. Ngamahu is probably technically better but it requires you to carefully plan which nodes to put non-unique jewels in to get the maximum benefit in stacking Fire Damage. At least I will likely go Ramako for now and then maybe shift to Ngamahu after some more levels and thinking about it.
Let’s look at a couple of abilities that are key to this build. Shield Crush and Shield Charge are similar in that they scale based on the armor and evasion rating on your shield. This means the more armor or evasion that you happen to have, the more damage that attack is going to do. They also scale based on your physical damage as a whole, so I am looking specifically for ways to scale that. They are both tagged as AOE, and in a perfect world I would be able to incorporate something into the build that gives gem levels to “All AOE Gems” but unfortunately I don’t have that in the build. Given that physical is kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, I am converting as much of it as possible to Fire Damage, which gives me a number of other scaling options. I am primarily accomplishing this through a combination of the Avatar of Fire keystone, The Fire Mastery that converts 40% of physical damage to Fire, and Herald of Ash.
So we know from Shield Crush, that I want as much armor or evasion on my shield as humanly possible. That really probably means that you are looking at either Emperor’s Vigilance or Dawnbreaker. Both of them have very specific reasons to use them and I wound up going with Emperor’s Vigilance because it saves me two passive skill points on the tree, because I wanted Glancing Blows either way. The other semi-required unique would be Replica Dreamfeather which allows me to scale my attack damage based on how much armor I have which allows me to turn a defensive layer into an offensive layer. Currently, I have 36471 armor which would give me 81% increased attack damage. This is most definitely not what I would consider a cheap build, because I think at this point I am about 10 Divine Orbs into it.
Since I was already spending a good deal of money on this build, I decided to go all in and lean on the Replica Dragonfang’s Flight which in spite of its name… has nothing to do with the other replica items from Heist. This is a weird new item that gives +3 gem levels to a specific gem and there exists a version of this amulet for every skill gem in the game. Some of these are extremely expensive, but Shield Crush is one of the cheaper ones and can be picked up for under a hundred chaos. I’m also taking advantage of the Circle of Anguish which scales my fire damage and increases my fire resistance by quite a bit because I will always be running Herald of Ash. This squeezes things a bit and keeps me from being able to cap Chaos Resistance because the large number of uniques that I am running makes it a bit challenging.
Since I want to have a bunch of armor, and it is relatively straightforward to get 4000 armor on a Brass Dome … that also comes along with crit immunity I decided to lean on that chest piece. I managed to find a bargain on a 4% to all maximum resistances chest with all of the right colors and a 6% reduced fire damage taken corruption for 2 Divines. The negative is I no longer gain life from strength, and as a result, I am a bit low on life as a whole. To help mitigate some of that, and to give me a bit of regeneration I decided to lean on a well-rolled Immortal Flesh. There are other options that would not give me as many defensive layers for example Arn’s Anguish is something I have seen used on a few Shield Crush builds. I like survival and I like feeling tanky so… regen is a win for me.
This leaves me leaning on Boots, Gloves, and Helm to try and fix my Chaos Resistance while also stacking as much Fire Resistance as possible… which then in turn fixes my other Resists thanks to Tasalio Ascendancy talent. I also needed to lean on these sockets to fix my lack of Dexterity… which made the gear really really expensive. Normally to get Dex on an item it needs to be an evasion base, but I want Armor given that I don’t currently have access to Iron Reflexes to convert Evasion back into Armor. I think honestly the BEST version of this build we double dipping from armor and evasion to convert it with that keystone. It does make me think that maybe Champion would be the best possible class for a Shield Crush build.
All in all, I enjoy the build. I need a heck of a lot more levels on it and the more I play it the better it feels. Do I think this was worth 10 Divines? Probably not. If I spend more time working on this build I would really like to have Forbidden Flesh/Forbidden Flame jewels that give me Unbreakable from Juggernaut, but they are currently ungodly expensive. There are a bunch of expensive things that I could do to optimize my damage but for the moment… I think I just need to pile on more levels. Would I suggest this to someone who just wants to map quickly? Probably not. Is it fun in its own way? Absolutely.
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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been doing some nonsense this weekend, that I have honestly spent the entirety of my time playing Path of Exile avoiding. The Lord’s Labyrinth and all of the higher-level derivations of it is a piece of game content that unlocks your access to Ascendancy points. On every character you will in theory need to run it 3 times, in order to unlock the 8 points that you can spend on Ascendancy talent points. Then if you need to change your Ascendancy later, you can run it again in order to do that. Essentially these have traditionally been the bane of my existence and similar to set mastery dungeons in Diablo III, they are the thing that I avoid for as long as possible. The problem with the Labyrinth is that there is no forgiveness or wiggle room, and if you die… you have to start over from scratch.
There is a website devoted to telling you the shortest path through the Labyrinth, which is handy while doing your four labs per character… but were that the only benefit the site would likely not exist. The final victory room of the Labyrinth gives you access to a series of glove, boot, and helm enchants. Running the level 75 version called the Eternal Labyrinth costs an Offering to the Goddess, but at the end of it you are presented with a choice of three different helm enchants. There are roughly three enchants available for almost every active skill gem in the game, so that means each time you run the place you are fighting hundreds of possible combinations hoping that you get the one you need for your character. So far I have lucked into the Righeous Fire Area of Effect enchant, but what I really started this process to get was the one increasing Fire Trap Burning Damage.
There are a handful of ways to get your helm enchant. The first way of course is to luck into finding it yourself. The second is to buy a viable base from the market that already has your enchant on it, and then craft the helm into whatever you need it to be. The third… is to hire a hopefully reputable Labyrinth Runner to chain run the zone over and over until they can get the desired enchant on your helm. This weekend I essentialy became a lab runner for myself, and will probably continue doing a few each day in an attempt to get the enchant I really want. It seemed like a waste to not do anything with all of the helm enchants that I could not use, so I have started squirreling away a tab full of reasonable helm bases sorted by armor, armor/evasion, armor/energy shield, energy shield, evasion, energy shield, and pure evasion. I also take the helms off all of my other characters while I am running this process, just in case an enchant they can use comes up.
Since Delve is my primary game mode, it provides for a ton of raw resources. The level at which I am running Delve means that in theory I can farm a near infinite number of item level 84/85 helmets to feed into my Labyrinth running nonsense. For the moment I am pricing these at 1 div, and then will price them down over time as many of them inevitably do not sell. Delve is critical to this strategy because it also produces a truly silly number of Offering to the Goddess, a drop I have long considered to be pure trash for my previous leagues. Because of the sheer number that I have picked up over the course of this league, I ran roughly 30 Labyrinth’s yesterday afternoon and I’ve yet to put a dent in my supplies. Even if I needed to buy them… they tend to go dirt cheap on the market.
The core way that I gain currency will likely always be Delve, but one of the side ventures that I have been playing with this league is resistance gear. Everyone needs it, and everyone needs a unique combination of stat hits. So as I have been running delve I have been chucking rings and amulets with decent resistances on them in my bank under either a 10 Chaos or 20 Chaos tab. It has been shocking the number of items that I would ahve considered trash previously, that I am getting a stack of chaos for now. It isn’t going to make me wealthy by any means, but it is relatively constant trickle of decent currency while I am mapping or delving. The other thing that I have started doing is taking otherwise worthless uniques and throwing a Vaal Orb on them. Often times a 1 Chaos Unique with a really good Corrupted Implicit on it will sell for upwards of a Divine. I’ve sold several of those for in the 80-100 Chaos range.
Nothing will match the stability of Delve though. I know without a doubt that when I am ready to focus on selling this tab I am looking at around 2000 Chaos or 8 and a half Divine Orbs. I don’t tend to price out my delve tab until I am ready to sell it, because otherwise it will annoy the shit out of me with pings. Delve has not been terribly popular this league, and as a result the prices for resonators keep trickling up along with the more hard to get fossils. The later in the league we get, the more big crafting projects tend to happen and for those they need a ready supply of resonators. Folks ramping up for a big project, like to buy in bulk so generaly speaking I can charge a bit of a premium and still liquidate the entire tab in about ten minutes.
The one thing that I wish I could do… is let my guildmates peruse my vendor tabs. I chuck anything that looks halfway decent in the tabs to see if it will sell. That is not to say that I don’t specifically keep my eyes open for anything that I think another guild member might use. I’ve put all of my six links of any use in the guild gear tab, but I know I likely have a bunch of niche items that someone might be interested in. Specifically when it comes to fixing resistances, it would be handy to let folks browse my inventory of wares. I would happily chuck stuff their way because it is mostly just going to sit there and rot otherwise. While I continue to have a fairly constant trickle of trades, I am acquiring stuff way faster than I could ever liquidate it.
I get this weird sense of joy from being a vendor, and this is something that I have not really experienced in other games. I’ve mostly avoided using the Auction House in games with them, and while my retainers are full with random items in Final Fantasy XIV, it was never something I focused on. I think the one time that I really used them was the Broker boards in EQ2, and in truth FFXIV and POE both have a similar system. I can price an item, throw it in a tab, and then mostly forget that I have it. If it sells awesome… if it doesnt… also no big deal because I am not having to constantly retrieve closed auctions from my mailbox and repost them. Path of Exile feels like I have rented out a booth in one of those big flea markets, and I just keep adding more merchandise until everything is crammed in there really tightly. Folks end up needing such weird stats to finish out a character, that there is always someone out there needing at least one thing I have for sale.
I enjoy this aspect of the game, which is ironically the aspect that turns my friend Ace off the most about Path of Exile. I was afraid of trade for the first few leagues. Then it was something I accessed because I felt like I needed to… but ultimately held my nose while I did it. It wasn’t really until I was by myself grinding delve that I finally reached a point of acceptance with trade and eventual legitimate enjoyment. Now trade is a major component of this game for me, and it feels like anything I could be doing in the game… is ultimately getting me towards whatever goals I have. Every map I run, every delve path, every blight, every legion, and god forbid even every labyrinth is collecting dross for me to sell and turn into the item that I need to upgrade my builds just a little bit further. After decades of feeling like I had no viable way of making currency in MMORPGs, it feels like I have so many possible ways to fund my nonsense in Path of Exile.
Anyways. I hope you all had a great weekend, and that the new week is smooth and chill.
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