Tomorrow is the start of the Legacy of Phrecia Event… which honestly at this point might as well be considered a league. It feels like we are going to have the bulk of Path of Exile players returning for this thing, which will probably create a very normal trade economy. The Pohx League event has been a blast and I enjoyed my Ice Trap Trickster, and effectively proved that I put enough effort into anything I could make it feel comfortable. Big Ice Trap explosions was really fun, but due to the limited availability of items in the Pohx league I struggled to make it feel as tanky as I would have liked. I might try it again during a proper league economy but this is essentially the place where I managed to get it.
I crave Righteous Fire Shenanigans, but we will not have the good ole reliable and super easy to build Chieftain. Instead a new path will need to be forged and I have a few options. The problem with not having Chieftain is that we will not have easy explosions for clear purposes and the ability to ONLY stack Fire Resistance to get to 90% all res without much fuss. There are a few ways to get back the explodes, namely Legacy of Fury boots and Oriath’s End Flask… both of which might be either cost prohibitive or take awhile for them to actually show up on the market. As such Pohx, the godfather of righteous fire, is looking at the Scavenger aka the Not-Scion which comes with profane bloom shenanigans and the ability to essentially double the effect of a Cloak of Flames.
The thing with the Scion path is that there isn’t a great guide to follow. Pohx has released a vague sketch of a build and I have built Righteous Fire enough times that I often leave the golden path do to my own tweaking already. I am leaning towards giving it a shot and trying to make it work. You can get through Red Maps pretty easily as any form of Righteous Fire and by then hopefully the Legacy of Fury boots and Hateful Accuser ring will fairly available. Essentially a Fire Trap build will work fine until you can get the ring and have been able to get through Uber Lab to get Zerphis’s Heart. One of the nice things about Phrecia being based out of Settlers league is that the shipments seem to favor armor bases that are pretty solid for Righteous Fire builds.
The other path that interests me is Ancestral Commander, which feels like a tankier version of the Juggernaut prior to its most recent nerfs. There are a few paths that I could go with this. I contemplated trying another Boneshatter character since I did mine in a private league and felt like I just did not have enough access to gear to really make it work. That is the problem with physical damage builds, is that you really need to have a strong high PDPS weapon in order to make them work, and I am just not good enough to craft one on my own. I also felt like the survival of the build was nowhere near as good as what I thought it should be based on the hype surrounding it. At some point I definitely want to give Boneshatter another go, just not sure if right now is that moment.
The four picks that I am interested from Ancestral Commander are purely defensive options, essentially giving you 3 extra endurance charges, a poorly rolled defiance of destiny, a cloak-of-flames-at-home, and the old juggernaut node that made you immune to freezes and slows. I could in theory also level this as Righteous Fire using the general Chieftain template that I follow. The problem there is without the explodes it is going to feel super sluggish to map and delve on. The thing about the explode procs in Delve is that they can absolutely hit things out in the darkness helping you clear faster. I would really need an Oriath’s End AND Legacy of Fury boots to make it feel even halfway decent. The boots are probably pretty reasonable, but the flask… all depends upon what the economy looks like for the Phrecia event.
I kicked around Poison Summon Raging Spirits with the Servant of Arakali Shadow ascendancy, but the more I think about it the less inclined I am to go down that path. I remembered that Minions in Path of Exile require you to deal with Spectres and the Animate Guardian. These systems are the most kludgy unfun bullshit ever… and I really do not feel like dealing with that nonsense right now. I will happily return to playing minions when they implement some quality of life for either system. Nothing feels worse than killing your Animate Guardian and having to rebuy all of those damned uniques to make another one. Only slightly less painful is playing the hideout desecrate game to get your Spectres up and running… which will likely not make it through a map without taking a death. While I love SRS, and enjoyed it greatly in Path of Exile II… I think I am just done with it as a concept in Path of Exile 1.
Who knows! I might go in a totally different direction tomorrow whenever I actually get around to starting a character. Right now I am probably leaning towards following the wisdom of Pohx. That means of course that all of the items of that build will be in demand and inflated… but I like Ritual and in theory might be able to farm my own Hateful Accuser ring. Legacy of Fury drops from normal Maven, but I hate that fight so will be hoping someone out there decides to farm them. I will probably try and snag an early Cloak of Flames with whatever chaos I manage to scrounge together during the campaign because getting at least a four-link early really helps out considerably.
Are you going to be playing the Legacy of Phrecia event? Which of the krangled classes are you going to play? Drop me a line below.
The post Legacy of Phrecia Plans appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Last night I dinged 97, and is often the case when I have freshly dinged and no longer worry about experience loss for a bit… I decided to try a few things. One of these was the new version of the King in the Mists fight that originally debuted in the Affliction League. This is now accessed through a fragment called An Audience With the King that can show up as Ritual rewards, and over the course of running a bunch of my Einhar/Ritual atlas, I found three of these. It feels like this fight is much easier than the version I remember from Affliction League, either that or I am much stronger than I was at the time I fought him initially back then. In my three kills I got 2 copies of Untouched Soul and 1 copy of the chase item Light of Meaning which is a rework of the Perandus Pact from Necropolis League. The version I got was the lightning damage variant which I sold for five Divine Orbs.
I feel like I have reached the point where I am starting to see the flaws of the Settlers of Kalguur league. Don’t get me wrong I am still having a blast and I still love the town mechanic, but there is a bit of an Achilles heel. Essentially any activity that does not produce copious amounts of gold… is the wrong choice for spending your time. Delve was doing decently gold-wise for a bit, but now just cannot keep up with running maps. However, even when running maps I average around 10,000 gold per map if I attempt to fully clear everything. It creates this scenario where you feel like you are being chased by a loan shark and never quite able to get ahead. I went to bed last night with a decent gold lead and woke up this morning to see that almost all of it was drained away by my 3000+ gold-per-hour upkeep costs that just kept ticking overnight. I am not actively running mappers right now, and I am barely shipping anything… and have heard that for folks with high-end mappers, their upkeep can be 30k to 100k per hour. Basically, I feel like I have to keep pushing in order to feed the beast, or feel like I am falling behind.
Last night I spent the tail end of my evening leveling a ranger that I am ultimately planning on going Deadeye to play Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. However, doing low-level content means that my gold drops shifted from 100 or so gold at a time to 5 gold at the best of times. This slowed my gains to a trickle which means that for the entirety of my leveling period, I maybe got 2000 gold, which doesn’t even pay for an hour of resource gathering. I am hoping that either GGG increases gold drops, or reduces upkeep costs because we are heading towards a mobile game scenario where it feels like you can never really get ahead. Sure there is zero penalty for letting the coffers run dry. Everything stops, and the game complains at you, but effectively all of your workers sit there until you are ready to feed them gold again. Alternatively, I could manually deallocate everything so that they stopped costing me any resources. I might end up doing that for a bit while I am leveling alts just so it doesn’t feel quite so bad to watch it all waste away.
Part of why I am leveling a bow character is that I managed to pull a pretty well-rolled Widowhail while playing my Righteous Fire Chieftain. No one plays Elemental Hit of the Spectrum with a Widowhail, but honestly, I sort of want to understand why. I got this quiver with attack all elements, bows fire an additional arrow, global accuracy increase, and crafted attack speed on it. In theory, once you multiply these values by 2.4 you end up with what seems like it would be a pretty solid elemental bow. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe my weird kludge Deadeye will work just fine. I’ve also been setting aside good Armor/Evasion gear that I have gotten from shipments and in theory, have most of everything ready to go for an attempt at this character. All I really need to do is farm up the gem… which I will absolutely do on my RF Chieftain because I can steamroll the Labyrinth.
For now, I am leveling double Lightning Arrow, one with a Mirage Archer setup in a Quillrain and one with a Ballista Totem setup in a Foxshade chest. I did try leveling with a gem that I have never used before and I think I might like it better than pretty much any bow gem for early levels. One of the challenges with bow leveling is when you first start out you don’t have access to Lesser Multiple Projectiles which means for a bit you just don’t have terribly good coverage. Galvanic Arrow however fixes this and is one of the first gem picks that you have access to upon reaching Lion Eye’s Watch. Essentially it fires out three bolts of lighting that fork giving you a good deal of coverage and allowing you to shred packs. I am sure someone will tell me all of the reasons why this is not a great skill, but having just used it until I got Lightning Arrow, I gotta say it felt pretty solid.
I got tired of looking awful and this morning I decided to go with a Vaal theme for leveling purposes. I went with the Vaal set from the 2024 supporter packs, the giant rolling Vaal orb pet, and the baby Vaal oversoul minion. I have a lot of MTX for Path of Exile, but I gotta say given how much enjoyment I get out of the game and how optional all of them are… I’ve never really felt bad giving them money. I am near the end of Act 3 currently, and I want to at least get up to level 56 tonight if possible so that I can see how the Widowhail combo feels in real-world usage. I might try and farm up elemental hit gems over lunch, or I could just stop being cheap and pay the 40-50 chaos they are going for currently.
Still hoping we see a patch before the end of the week that addresses the gold issues. Are you paying Path of Exile? What have you thought of the Settlers League so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Return of the King appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I played a heck of a lot of Path of Exile this weekend and a lot of that time was focused on gold acquisition to feed the league mechanic. I did some Photoshop magic to create a single screen that shows all of the parts of the town that I have maxed out. The only thing not shown here is the Recruiter which does not have its own doodad on the town view. Mining helped a lot because it means that I get gold from marking ore in my maps, which also means if I happen to find two nodes in a map it increases my gold gain significantly. Generally speaking, I am clearing 8k to 20k depending on a bunch of variables in each map but more often hover around the 10k mark. I still have my enchanter, disenchanter, mappers, and recombinators to max out before I have everything at the level cap of 11.
The thing is… I am not sure it is really worth pushing through to level everything up. Granted I have not put any effort into significantly upgrading my workers… but with capped shipping I seem to be largely getting the same results that I have always gotten. The main difference is I have three ships and all of the ports unlocked at this point. The league mechanic feels like it pays out significantly better in gear than it does in currency. This can be really cool as I will talk about a bit later when I go over my gear upgrades, but since gear isn’t selling amazingly well in this league due to the mechanic is generating so much of it… it is not like getting a ton of gear really helps your bottom line. So long as I get a few chaos per boatload I am mostly happy. I’ve yet to pull anything higher than an exalted orb from a shipment, and I think in truth I will be better served tweaking my map runners to be able to reliably do t16s.
That said occasionally you get some amazing gear from the mechanic. The gloves that I swapped to yesterday are better rolled than a pair that I was looking at on the market going for 8 Divines. I legitimately was contemplating making that purchase and I am so glad I did not given that I wound up with essentially the same thing for free. I’ve also been wearing league mechanic boots for a while now with no signs of finding reasonable upgrades. The big upgrade of the weekend though is that I sold a big ticket item and bought a rather expensive fractured sceptre base and then crafted it into a replacement weapon. Lastly, I swapped out my pseudo-six-link helm for a slightly better-rolled one. I had picked up my previous one for a steal and was able to flip it for 3 Divines when I only paid 1.5 Divines for the new one. For things like that I tend to overprice because I don’t necessarily care about a fast sale.
In other news, I ran into one of the new optional boss encounters that can show up in T16 maps. The Black Knight is in theory a replacement for the Black Morrigan encounter, but instead of showing up in the Viridian Wildwood, he shows up as a clickable hole in the ground called the Starfall Crater. Fighting him feels an awful lot like fighting Aul the Crystal King, so it was not a big deal to beat him since I have done that fight so many times down in Delve. I was hoping to get him to down Svalinn so I can make a dumb block build that triggers spellcasts… but mostly I just got a ton of Verisium and Runes. Really hoping that I can find a bunch more of him so I can try and farm the shield. All in all, it was a really fun optional encounter, similar to finding the Nameless Seer.
The biggest progress from the weekend is that I have completed the 115 normal and unique maps that make up the Atlas. On top of that, I have done Vinktar Square and am only lacking Doryani’s Machinarium from the challenge of running all of the unique maps. I am hoping a Doryani’s drops down in Delve soon because I am beelining to fight any bosses that I encounter down there. What prompted me to push through and buy the last few maps is that I needed the crafting recipes that they generated in order to craft my scepter. Truth be told, none of the maps were more than 20 chaos with Doryani being the outlier going for around 2 Divines. Now my focus really turns to trying to knock out some of the challenges that I am close to finishing up. Basically, my goal as always is to do enough challenges in order to unlock a totem pole for my hideout. Once I have done that… any progress after that is gravy.
Finishing out my 115th map also unlocked the last of the rewards in Kirac’s Vault, with that very last item being a simulacrum. One of the big changes that they made in this league is that Simulacrums essentially start 15 waves into the previous progress and cap out at 15 waves instead of 30. So essentially doing a 15 now is the same level of accomplishment as doing a 30 previously. I am a big fan of this change because it did previously feel like you spent a lot of time facerolling waves until they started to matter. I took a ton of deaths and basically lost any progress toward 97 that I had made… but managed to complete all fifteen waves. Truth be told in those last few waves… the trash mobs were WAY more difficult than the boss encounters. That said I did try really hard to split up Ominphobia and Kosis so that I did not have to be fighting them at the same time. I didn’t necessarily get anything amazing for my troubles but did manage to pull a few different copies of Megalomaniac.
I’ve not made it super far into Delve this league and am sitting around 150 depth. I have gotten several lucky divine drops from nodes, however, which has been great. Recombinators continue to be my most reliable method for earning a bunch of chaos quickly, and the currency exchange is freaking amazing. I need to spend more time down there, but the mapping has just felt better because it helps feed the league mechanic more efficiently. I’m mostly running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual strategy in maps and have lucked into one spawn of Black Morrigan that happily occurred when I was running a duplicating scarab so I got two copies. What has been shocking however is just how many Omens have been dropping from the map spawned ritual mobs. I’ve already pulled two Omen of Connections, a few Omen of Blanching, and pretty much every other more common Omen a half dozen times. The biggest challenge is that none of my trees have a lot of map drop support so sustaining maps is a big fraught at the moment.
All told however I am still having a freaking blast. This legitimately might be my favorite league even though the ground loot that is dropping in maps has not been that phenomenal. If I need money I can go farm up more resonators and fossils down in the dark, but for now, I am mostly able to afford anything that I really want. There are some upgrades that I still need… namely I have been trying to roll a large cluster jewel to replace the janky one that I am using currently. I also have a nice corrupted Cloak of Flame that I am slowly working on getting socketed and linked, but it is a bit of a stretch goal. I also have another Shaper Shield that I am occasionally trying to craft into something better than the one I am currently using. I like having some long-reaching goals though so I am not in any real rush to acquire anything. Getting my Six-Link chest due to getting Black Morrigan went a long way to improving my league experience. I also need to swap out some of my gems for Awakened versions, but it isn’t like I am struggling with anything currently.
I got a really nicely rolled Widowhail, and found a pretty nice quiver to go with it from the league mechanic… so I am starting to get that itch to try rolling a bow character. I’ve been stockpiling decent drops for that eventuality given that I seem to always end up wanting a bow character. I’m also contemplating trying to build something around Volcanic Fissure of Snaking again. Then there is the whole desire to try Lacerate of Haemorrhage Gladiator like literally everyone else in this league. Basically, I am starting to feel that alting itch, so I fully expect before the end of the week I will have rolled something new.
The post A Weekend of Upgrades appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Tomorrow is the start of Blaugust and with it will come some more Blaugusty-themed posts, and probably a few days without proper league updates. Not that I think anyone out there is hanging on my words wanting to know what I did the day before… but you know I can pretend right. At this point, I am completely done with white maps and almost done with yellow maps. I get in this weird place where I try and finish the yellow maps before I run any of my red maps because I know Kirac will progressively stop offering lower maps when I actually do that. Tonight we have raid night and I will be back in Final Fantasy XIV, but after I bid Ace adieu for the evening I plan on starting running corrupted reds to begin knocking them out.
I did some more upgrades. First I bought a +1 fire gem neck for pretty cheap and was specifically looking for one with a lot of dex on it, fire res, chaos res, and everything else was negotiable. I picked up a second amethyst ring which gave me quite a bit of life and was enough to cap my chaos resistance while also pouring on more fire resistance to feed my regen. The boots came straight out of a shipment and all I had to do with it was drop a chaos/fire affix on them and resistance swap cold to fire with harvest. I still need to get relevant eldritch implicit on it, but did manage to hit ignite proliferation on my gloves. I think my gear is good enough for now to make it all the way through T16s. At some point, I plan on probably going block-based and dropping determination.
Right now I am running my first Atlas with Niko and Jun and will probably splash in some more points into Ambush and Scarab gain. My second Atlas for the moment is Einhar and Beyond with the goal of trying to farm Black Morrigan for six linking my chestpiece eventually. I believe Black Morrigan can only spawn in T14 or higher so I will get a bit more serious about that when I get up there. I’ve never done Betrayal with full Atlas support and it is honestly pretty wild. I will kill a single Betrayal mini-boss and end up getting a big ole loot explosion. For example, the above loot is from killing Hillock who spawned by himself and then offered to drop some currency. So I get why folks are talking about this mechanic for early loot bases. For me, I mostly was trying to speed run my way through the betrayal crafting unlocks. Once I get all of those I am likely going to shift over to Expedition since it is also on that same side of the tree.
At this point, I am sitting at 69 maps in my atlas and the only yellow-tier map that I have left is Leyline. I used a horizon orb to get a copy of that map, and will probably run it after I finish work and before I start doing some FFXIV nonsense. So like I said we have raid night and then I need to start running experts again because new bookrocks unlocked today, but tomorrow I will likely push through as many of the red maps as I can and see if I can maybe wrap my atlas up before the weekend. I running a bit low on chaos and do not want to cash in any of my divines yet, but I will likely start buying some of the unique maps needed to finish out the atlas. I am slowly pushing my way through Maven, Searing Exarch, and Eater of Worlds and hope to have those unlocked by the time I hit T16s. Hopefully, I get some more big ticket items to drop so I can be a little more liquid.
This league is so freaking good folks.
The post Fully Specced Betrayal is Wild appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
