Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was “a lot,” and I have survived, but sleeping was a bit of a mess because of the pain. I’ve been working on a new side project in Path of Exile. It largely started because there is a new belt called the Screams of the Dessicated, and the gimmick is that you lose access to your utility flasks but gain at least one permanent shrine buff. Only some of these shrines have any real value, which means the market is flooded with a bunch of belts that the average player has no interest in. I was curious what a Greater Skeletal Shrine would feel like on a proper minion build, and right now, my favorite minion base is Servant of Arakaali… but you only get to play that during the Phrecia league. My second favorite minion base is Guardian, and as a result, I rolled a brand new character and started leveling so that I could play with the belt.
The other thing that I noticed is there are a limited number of folks building around a brand new Unique called Broken Elegy that drops from Saresh, the new boss of the Mirage league. I’ve completely yolo’d my build in its current state and have pivoted towards going down the staff block path, and running the new staff with Servant of Decay, another chestpiece that spawns a bunch of interesting minions that inflict withered on targets, which should buff my chaos damage. The only realistic way for me to get Envy on my build was to lean into Aul’s Uprising, and since the cheapest one already had Death Attunement on it, it allowed me to respec my tree a bit to free up some points. I went with a screams belt that gives me Greater Skeletal Shrine and Replenishing Shrine, the latter essentially replacing any reliance I might have on Clarity or Vitality. Lastly, I picked up a cheap minion gem helm that I have my utility minions in, like Animate Guardian, Stone Golem, and Carrion Golem.
I have no clue how well this is going to work. I need to hit level 78 and pick up some more dexterity somewhere before I can equip the chestpiece, and I am in Act 10, working through the final bits of the campaign. So far, however, it feels amazing. I am running Leap Slam instead of Shield Charge, and also running a Frost Blink so that I have my comfy two movement abilities setup. I leap into a pack, convocate my Sentinel of Radiance, and then start furiously summoning raging spirits as I also generate shrine skeletons and ceaseless flesh zombies from the staff. The Carrion Golem buffs everything, and minion jewels are making it so that everything has a decent chance to poison on hit… and the various stuff buffing chaos damage output is pretty much melting everything. Bosses especially just sort of evaporate right now, and my AG is running Asenath’s Gentle Touch, so corpses are also exploding, helping with the clear. The entire package feels really dumb, and I am curious how well the transition into maps is going to go.
It has been quite a bit since I last updated anything about Path of Exile, and over the weekend, I finished out my Atlas and got my Four Voidstones. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the current state of the new Atlas. For the most part I like it, but I feel like the fog of war needs to go, so that players can at least see where they want to go. When you start getting maps that you cannot run, because you cannot get to the node on the atlas, it is a bit frustrating. For example, one of my friends needed the six-link bench craft, and I had no clue where the Silo map was located, so I just sort of blindly fumbled around until I found it. Being able to easily swap between maps is pretty great, and I still need to finish doing a “blob” as they are being colloquially called in each of the quadrants for one of the quests. Unfortunately, Astrolabes seem to drop rather infrequently from map bosses, so I am going to have to ultimately buy some to finish out that quest.
The biggest upgrade that I have made to my Righteous Fire character is building out the Foulborn Red Dream setup, which involves buying the rather expensive gem, and then tattooing a bunch of strength nodes in the vicinity to instead be Fire Resistance. This, combined with everything else, really gives you a significant boost in life totals. My maximum life is now sitting at 8219, giving me an active pool of 7734 once you take into account my vitality arrogance setup. Realistically, I probably have enough sources of regeneration to comfortably drop vitality, but I just have not done so. The next big swap would be adding some clusters so that I could run Maelevolence, which would involve dropping vitality finally. I’ve not really felt like I needed to do this, so I have been lazy and not done it. I think I have the cluster jewels in my dump tab and could probably get it up and running without much issue. Maybe when I hit 100, I will do that thing.
Other than the Red Dream setup, the biggest upgrade is swapping my Immortal Flesh out for a Cord Belt. Cord Belts are a new base that drops from the Mirage content, and their big new thing is that it allows an anoint. So instead of using an Elder Stygian Vise, I sought out a Cord Belt with the same sort of rolls you normally look for. Everything else is mostly just getting better versions of things I already had, like I now have a proper Elder Helmet, slightly better corrupt for Cloak of Flames, and a full 10% Nebulis, which gives me 450% increased Elemental Damage. I keep getting slightly better regen gloves from the Breach Tree and swapping those out as I find them, then selling my previous version for some divines. My build can do pretty much anything I would want to do with it, including Nightmare Maps… so obviously the first thing I wanted to do was run up an alt, which gives you the Guardian I spoke about first.
All told, I am pretty happy with where I am in almost everything. My main tree is Niko, Ore, Harvest, and Breach and it feels great. My secondary atlas is Einhar, Ritual, Beyond, and Heist, which also feels great. I am thinking about setting up my third tree to be heavily focused on Legion, because there are incubators specific to the league mechanic that I would love to get, so I could start getting coins more regularly. Delve still provides, and Fossils represent my primary source of income right now. I am hovering around the 200 depth and going horizontal to look for bosses. I still need a Doryani map from the Vaal boss, and I am always down for taking out an Aul for some of the big-ticket items. Mirage league has been a blast, and Ace and I were talking about it last night, and how this is probably the furthest they have gotten. At this point, I am mostly focused on challenges so that I can hopefully get another fancy totem pole.
How has your league been going? Between all of the medical stuff that I have been dealing with, mine has been going a bit slower than I would have liked. Additionally, next week we have the release of the Last Epoch Season 4, and I will be spending a lot of time playing that at least for a week or so. I will also be getting adjusted to the routines of chemotherapy which might throw a monkey wrench in pretty much everything.
The post The Broken Elegy appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the launch of World of Warcraft Midnight, and given that I have been talking about WoW in general for several days, it probably seems likely that I would be talking about it this morning. However, you would be wrong, because yesterday was something way more important to me. We got the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.28, the Mirage League, and holy crap was it a banger of a league announcement. I highly suggest you watch the 40+ minute content reveal trailer yourself, but this morning, I am going to talk about some of the highlights and lowlights. Much like last league, this is a league where we are filling some of the gaps in lore between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I am fully on board with this, and I feel like this is happening in part because, apparently, Kitten Cat Noodle is how working for GGG as a Narrative Designer. For those not aware of her work, she was essentially the maintainer of the best lore resources that we had for the game, as she went act by act and league mechanic by league mechanic, explaining the lore behind them.
The league mechanic itself is pretty wild. Essentially, you will be able to enter imperfect copies of sections of the current map, and in them, every single mechanic will be duplicated in one form or another. It might not be the exact same strongbox, but there will be a strongbox in the mirage. When entering, you will be asked to choose one of three wishes that will mutate the results of the miraged area and stack with the existing map modifiers that you already have in place. Some of the ones that they showed off were the ability to have it so that all wisdom and portal scrolls dropped as some other form of currency, or that you gain the Souleater buff for the entire time you are in the miraged area. This should lead to some weird and wild juicing strategies, but since I am mostly an alch and go andy… this is just going to mean I have more mechanics on my map, which will be a welcome addition for certain.
The miraged areas can drop a currency that allows you to corrupt your gems to add an additional modifier to them. This is probably the piece of the league that I am the most excited about, and honestly, part of why I am contemplating going Righteous Fire again. I am curious what having a seven-link fire trap and a seven-link righteous fire are going to feel like. That applies to pretty much anything, though. It seems like the extra support is only going to be level one, so you are going to need to make sure you get specific supports instead of just anything viable. For example, with Righteous Fire, I will probably want Efficacy support if at all possible, because that is one of those gems that levels matter less than others. The only thing that concerns me is if the list of available supports is going to be pretty limited based on the combinations that GGG thinks should go together, not necessarily what players actually use together. I am thinking about the POE2 suggestion system, for example, where a lot of the links that you want on your build are not suggested by the UI.
The Atlas is also being entirely reworked. I was a Sentinel League baby, since that was the first time I got through the campaign and saw maps. As a result, I have never known anything other than the current Atlas, and while I know some other things existed before… I have never played with them. Essentially, the Atlas is being divided up into quadrants and then we will be able to apply influence regions within that quadrant. Each influenced map you complete increases the juiciness of the next in the cluster, all of which seems really cool. More importantly, though, they are splitting map tiers from maps on the atlas, meaning you can run any map at any tier at any moment. This feels essentially like a much better version of the POE2 waystone situation, but instead of relying on random maps on a Delve like endless atlas… we get to run whatever maps we want. The voidstones no longer elevate tiers of the map, and instead apply buffs to the map. The voidstones themselves are changing, and it seems like you will be able to get to three pretty easily, with the fourth still being the maven grind. I will likely continue to pay for a carry there because I hate having to do that many witnessed maps when I could be running altars instead.
So let’s talk about some of the bad things… nerfs. Some of my go-to builds have been Storm Brand of Indecision, Penance Brand of Dissipation, and Ice Trap of Hollowness… and all three of those ate some pretty significant nerfs. First off, Elementalist, which is the base that I would have built around, lost its increase to the Golem buff effect, meaning that every single Golem buff is just a little bit weaker now. Next up, Storm Brand and Penance Brand ate some pretty massive top-end nerfs across the board, making them way less viable to play. My most recent Ice Trapper build was a Golem Elementalist and relied on two Foulborn uniques… both of which ate significant nerfs. Double explode Berek’s Respite rings are no longer a thing… and Foulborn Tulborn can no longer roll with +4 cold gem levels… so I am losing a single gem level there. My other go-to build is Righteous Fire, and Chieftain explodes now deals less damage but procs twice as often… which Pohx thinks is going to be a net positive. Foulborn Red Dream, however, is going to provde 25% less life gain per Fire Resistance node… but still it is probably one of the best options we can slot into the tree. The total health levels of a Chieftain, though, are going to be a bit lower as a result.
There are a whole bunch of new Holy Skills going into the game, which I honestly think is probably a beta test for the Paladin class going into Path of Exile 2. I have to admit a lot of these look really interesting, and it is highly likely that I am going to roll some form of a Guardian before the end of this league and dive deep into maybe the Holy Slam skill. Kodra, right now, is eyeing some sort of Holy Damage minions build since one of the new abilities spawns temporary minions that he can then buff, and also run Herald of Purity for more holy minions. Since it ate zero nerfs, I still feel like Poison SRS is going to be strong, but unfortunately, Servant of Arakaali did not go core as I had hoped. Per Ghazzy, Minions apparently were buffed in general, so it might be a really good league for minions. If you can get level 30 Raise Spectres, they now become level 85 instead of level 81. To get there, though, you have to rely on a bunch of probably expensive corrupts.
While I am exceptionally pumped about the league in general… I am torn as to what I want to play. A couple of the things I considered starting ate nerfs, so essentially I will either go Minions or lean back on good old familiar Righteous Fire. I honestly kind of want to see what the Hinekora procs feel like and if they really do make mapping feel better. That means I am more than likely going to roll an RF Chieftain again and then branch out from there and make a Holy Slam Guardian and maybe a Poison Minions character. Sentinel of Radiance got some significant buffs, so Fire Damage Guardian SRS might be the play as well. In theory, once you get your first lab… You will be a monster and be able to face roll the rest of the campaign. That is mighty freaking tempting, especially now that I know how to build a proper block character and make them feel really damned tanky. I am sure I will be indecisive right up until the point that I roll a character late Friday evening… at which point I will probably just make a gut choice and run with something.
Are you excited about 3.28 Mirage League? What are you looking at playing? Drop me a line below.
The post Mirage Reveal Stream appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Today is the head start for Midnight, and it begins at roughly 5 pm CST. I find it interesting that they are specifically choosing that time frame for the start of a new expansion rather than the normal weekly reset time. Since Panda Remix, I have mostly been playing Belgraven, my Dark Iron warrior, as my main because I have always loved Dwarves… and always wanted to be able to play a Dark Iron. Blackrock Depths to this day is probably my favorite dungeon in the game because it was an entire whole-assed city down there, and it felt like a living, breathing, functional place. So while I have Belghast, my original warrior main at the level cap as well… I am choosing to move forward with a new legacy as I am this fiery Dark Iron dude. That feels a bit fitting, honestly, since I am no longer the Belghast that played World of Warcraft. I am Belghast, the blogger, podcaster, and friend to thousands, thanks to the weird fucking life that I have lived. I have a lot of baggage towards World of Warcraft because when I first left the game… I was in a really bad mental state.
There is an addon that has been cycling around the “social medias” called Account Played that visualizes all of the time you have spent playing World of Warcraft and groups it by class. All that is required is installing the addon and then logging in every character on your account, and now that the Warband makes this so much easier because you can see every character from the login screen… I decided to take the plunge and try it. I knew this was going to be a scary proposition, and this does not take into account the fact that I have a second account… nor any of the time I have spent on beta realms and in World of Warcraft Classic. So when I say I have spent two years of my life playing World of Warcraft, all of those extra realms account for the missing days. No wonder this game has such a fundamental effect on me, and why I have so many deep emotions tied to it. There are people that I met through this game who have become some of my closest adult friends. World of Warcraft feels like a high school reunion whenever I play it… and it has all of the same complicated emotions that go along with that. It was a place and a time in my life that felt as fundamental as going to college, and that might seem odd to people who are not steeped in this world, but as I age, it feels less and less weird to me.
As far as the time break-out goes… I am not shocked by that in the least. Since the Warband gives me easy access to see every single character on my account. I have Eight Warriors, Eight Hunters, Five Deathknights, and Three Paladins. Warrior was the very first character that I rolled when I got into beta testing, and it was a Tauren. If I am going to play a random character in a World of Warcraft Event league… I am going to play a Warrior. What would even be wilder is if this could somehow track the amount of time played per spec, because I imagine I have spent way more time in Protection Spec as a Warrior and Paladin than any other spec. I could have absolutely called Mage as my least-played class, and Priest, I knew, would have been pretty low as well. What I was not expecting was Demon Hunter to be as low as it is, given that I mained it for an expansion. However, it also has not been out that long in the grand scheme of things compared to Warrior. I think I have as many Deathknights as I do, largely because it allowed me to rapidly create a functional character on a server, given it started at I think level 25ish? Levels do not mean much after all of the squishing that has happened.
I am looking forward to giving Midnight a spin tonight whenever it launches, and I expect to largely drop all of the quests that I have on Belgraven like a hot rock and move on with my life. I have contemplated dropping Blacksmithing as my profession and going for pure harvesting as I go into the new content. I think maybe herbalism is a good call, because there will always be demand for flower pickers in the world. Especially since I have reached a point of largely wanting to sell whatever I happen to be finding… double harvesting seems like a good call. The other option would be to mirror Belghast proper and go with Enchanting, because there is always a need for enchanting resources as well. I will probably continue to run old content on OG Bel for that precise reason because I can convert all of those purples into shards and sell them on the open market. I’ve never been one to accumulate much wealth in World of Warcraft, and I am going to see if I can change that, especially given that I have enjoyed being a vendor so much in Path of Exile.
Speaking of Path of Exile, today is also the drop of the Mirage League live stream, and with it comes a Twitch drop that works in both Path of Exile and Path of Exile II. This is where my next few weeks are going to get weird because I fully expect to be mainlining POE, and then playing Midnight, Dune, and Enshrouded as a bit of a palate cleanser. It is really hard to gauge what I am going to end up playing in this league until I have seen the trailer and, more importantly, the patch notes. Since I believe I have convinced Ace to take the plunge, I feel like I am not sure I want to go with Righteous Fire in this league as my starter. I might revisit the Golem Elementalist character and either play it with Ice Trap or try to turn it into some sort of Minion character. There is some thought that maybe some of the Phrecia classes might be going core, and if so, I will absolutely be playing Servant of Arakaali minions, because it was too damned much fun during Phrecia 2.0.
As far as a wish list for this league. I would really like to see some version of Mercenaries go core. GGG said that they would like to bring it core, but it would need some sort of rebalance to make it viable. I liked gearing out Mercenaries and really loved that aspect of Diablo III, because you could use the Merc to balance out the weaknesses of your build. I hope the Breach tree is just as powerful as it was during the last league, because it was amazing for crafting early gear. I would love to see Kingsmarch simplified, because the process of building it out still seems like a massive hassle and one that you feel obligated to do since it is effectively free currency. I would really love it if they unbound the spell choices during the acts from your class so that I did not feel required to mule a witch every now and then when I need some of those early abilities. Other than that, I would really love to see a further separation between bossing content and mapping content, and make it so that you do not have to kill Maven and Uber Elder to get your third and fourth keystone… either that or make quest versions of those encounters because it takes too freaking long to gather up the resources for those fights.
I am sure tomorrow I will be talking mostly about the Mirage League reveals. What do you want most from this new league? Are you going to be playing Midnight today? Drop me a line below.
The post Two Years of My Life appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. We’ve gotten a timetable for the release of 3.28, which is going to drop on March 6th, with the big reveal stream taking place on the 26th of February. It is super fucking rare that I am still playing Path of Exile when the new expansion drops, but for better or worse, the Legacy of Phrecia event has held my attention. BelLovesArakaali might be my favorite minions character ever, and this is the first time I am playing with Spectres or Animate Guardian since they did some major quality of life improvements. What has surprised me about this character is just how much damage it deals… allowing me to focus on more survival. This might be the tankiest minions character I have ever played. Granted, I am still in the process of “breaking into” delve, but I am doing shockingly well down in the mines. It is not like resonators are really worth much of anything, but I still enjoy Delve even if it is not worth tons of currency.
Right now, I am mostly going horizontal at 100ish depth so that I can collect Azurite and start building out the rest of the trappings of Delve. I have reasonable resistance and light area for this level, and am slowly starting to increase the amount of sulphite that I can carry. Once I get a bit more unlocked, I will drop down to the 200ish depth so I can hopefully start getting Primordial Cities and maybe Aul fights. I really should be focusing on bossing with this character because that seems to be its true strength. When all of my minions are focused on the same target, it just sort of melts. I am curious how the Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch go when I unlock them, because the earlier fights aka Blackstar and Shrek, did not even get to a transition phase. I am going to do my best to get my four voidstones on my own, because I think Maven, Shaper, Elder, and Uber Elder are going to melt.
I really need 21/20 gems for Animate Guardian and Raise Spectre, but both are sitting at stupid prices right now. I am not making a ton of currency, so I can’t really afford either. Which means I probably need to pick up a good six socket staff and level up 3 guardians and 3 spectres at a time, and try to corrupt my own 21/20. I hate leveling gems, but if I start doing that… and also keep playing content, I will either get the divines needed to buy the gem outright or get gems to corrupt, either way. I am bad about not leveling gems in the weapon swap set, and I should really be better about that. While I play in a trade league, I greatly prefer being as self-sufficient as I can possibly be. One thing that I wish they would change in POE1 is make it so you only get 4 quality items to max out quality on a gem socket, or a flask. That honestly is the most painful thing about leveling gems: needing to get the gemcutters’ prisms.
Speaking of corruption projects, I picked up a second Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, and tried corrupting both my current copy and my new copy. One of them managed to hit 10% chance to Gain Onslaught for 4 Seconds on Kill, and this does, in fact, count minion kills. So this allowed me to drop my Onslaught flask and swap over to a Gold Flask for some additional rarity. Onslaught doesn’t really do much of anything for me except for the slight speed boost, but I am still happy to have it. I wish it applied to my minions. I wish there were something akin to Spiritual Aid that made buffs on me apply to the minions. That, however, would likely make everything highly broken, since you can target way more buffs at yourself than you can at your minions easily. I am really hoping that Foulborn Uniques stick around for standard, because they have added a lot of really cool interactions.
I am now trying to figure out where I want to go on the passive tree. I guess the next obvious choice would be to go after any jewel sockets I can make my way to easily enough. I need to redo my bandit choice since I have plenty of resistance, so that will give me one more skill point, and then I have seven left. However, I sincerely doubt I’ll level this character higher than level 95, just because of the sheer slog that it becomes then. Last night I picked up Fearsome Force when I dinged 93, which finishes out the minion crit wheel. I could always pick up various other nodes in the meantime and then respec to pick up jewel sockets as I get more points. In theory, I could spec into my minion damage cluster jewel that I have, but I don’t really have enough points left to do much of anything meaningful with it. Really, I am not sure how much it matters at this point because I feel powerful enough to do any content I would want to do.
I am continuing to slowly chip away at Atlas progression, and I think my goal for Phrecia will be to get 115/115 and 4 Voidstones. If I can get there before the launch of 3.28, I will consider myself really good. I do not really want to burn myself out ahead of the next league launch, but I am also mostly finding everything I am doing really chill. Once I hit maps, the Gauntlet style modifiers seemed to evaporate, and life was fine. Even the enrage mechanic doesn’t seem to come into play that often. I think I am doing t13s right now, but really, there is not a big jump between those and t16s, so I should be able to make it all the way up without much issue. I am still running a set of idols that is producing a ton of maps, so that I will have plenty to run as I slowly unlock my way to the top of the atlas. I have been so out of it lately that, honestly, I spend more time talking to “Erasure” or staring at the middle distance than actually playing POE.
The medical woes have been a real drain on my emotional and mental health. Hopefully, today when I get my MRI, I will start to get some answers. I think once I have a path set, whatever path that ends up being… I will be doing better. I hate the limbo of waiting around for something to happen, all the while it feels like I have a ticking time bomb in my body.
The post My Best Minion Build Ever appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
