Good Morning Folks! I am a bit late getting a post started today because work things got in the way early early this morning. Friday was the launch of the Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile and I have been having a blast. I was a bit slower going through the campaign than I normally would be, largely because I spent a lot of time doing the league mechanic once it unlocked upon arriving in Lioneye’s Watch in Act 1. Normally I don’t invest heavily in the league mechanic until I have made my way into mapping, but I feel like doing it while campaigning was the correct choice because a lot of the upgrades end up being time-gated. As a result, it took me roughly 20 hours to finish the campaign which was Friday evening, off and on throughout Saturday, and then finishing my 3rd lab and killing Kitava early Sunday morning.
As of this morning, I am 44 maps into progressing my atlas and very smoothly running through white and yellow maps without significant upgrades. I’ve actually kept track of my expenditures this time around so that I would be able to recap in a blog post. Currently, I’ve spent 51 Chaos on everything I am wearing, including an -15 Immortal Flesh (1c), Cloak of Flames (5c), Rise of the Phoenix (2c), a Fire/Chaos/Dex Helm (3c), Chaos/Fire/Life Ring (20c), and Chaos/Fire/Life/Dex Gloves (20c). I had a bit of a windfall pretty early on where I sold an influenced base for 80c, and an Enlighten support for 260c. On top of that, I have picked up miscellaneous Chaos Orbs and 2 raw Divine Orbs. I’m not in a real rush to buy items but it feels good to know I have some spending money when I ultimately want to replace most of my rare gear. You can get a ton of life on items right now, and I hope to end up replacing pretty much everything with at least 100 life rolls on various slots.
What has kept me from needing to buy a ton more gear is the fact that the league mechanic produces a ton of really good items. While it isn’t generating a ton of raw currency it is producing a lot of items that have relatively high tier rolls, including lots of really good resistances on them. I was kind of screwing up the shipping mechanic a bit, but Sunday a bunch of videos came out explaining how it works or at least how to improve your results and I hope to see a big payoff at some point either today or tomorrow. Essentially each port city has a hidden faction system, and you unlock higher tiers of faction by fulfilling their requested goods. When you fill all of the items on an order it unlocks a new higher tier of demands and again… just by shipping only those items you are basically guaranteed to get more return than you are sending.
I’ve gotten some truly wild items out of this. For example, never did I expect to have it in the cards to be using a one-handed axe right now instead of a scepter but…. that is where we are in the league. I got this axe back from a shipment that had +18% Dot Multi, and +24% Fire Dot Multi on it… which was infinitely better than the scepter I had been using. I threw the new Ignite enchant on it and crafted the Fire Damage/Ignite Combo Betrayal mod on it. This is pretty much better than anything I could get for less than six or so Divines at the moment. Sure the physical attack damage doesn’t really do anything for me… but also I might end up recycling this item into some sort of a fire-based melee build later once I can afford to craft or buy a “forever” scepter.
Legitimately I am having so much fun with the shipping mechanic, and a lot of the items it brings back… might be useful for throwing into the recombinator later. Right now I am using my cast-offs to feed into the disenchanter as arcane dust seems to be a premium commodity that a lot of the upgrades require. At some point, I need to spend some time hiring and firing better people, because I have a bunch of workers that are less than optimal. You can get these combo workers that have lots of different skills… but you end up paying a premium for each additional skill level that they have. I would be better off replacing those with single-stat workers to hopefully bring down my total gold sink for the town a bit.
I’ve not made it super far into Delve, largely because… you can’t gather resources down there. You get a heck of a lot of gold in a short period of time which is good, but I keep running dry on the various ores that are needed to feed shipping. As a result… I might be spending a lot more time mapping this league instead of plumbing the depths for cities. I’ve found my very first city, but it is at around 80 depth which means that the payoff is not amazing. I am still working on spending Azerite to unlock things because if nothing else Delve is amazing for producing sheer quantities of bubblegum currency… something that I find myself tragically lacking. For example, I have zero of my flasks automated at this point… because I don’t have the Glassblower’s Baubles to quality them… nor do I have the Instilling Orbs in order to craft on the auto-use enchant. Both of these are problems that will likely be solved by delving more.
What makes this league so great is honestly the virtuous cycle that takes place between mapping/delving and then returning back to town whenever a shipment comes in. Right now I have two ships going one that is working the 45-minute routes nearest to Wraeclast and one that is working the 2-hour routes that are furthest away. This gives me two distinct reward horizons that look forward to, and nothing feels quite as good as seeing the pop-up in the corner of your screen indicating that it is time to go back and see what the journey brought. It puts me in this pattern of trying to see how much I can get done before the ship comes back and the two cycles feed each other. Mapping and Delving generate gold and resources that I can then invest in my town and keep moving forward. I legitimately hope this system goes standard because it is pretty freaking great.
Honestly, I am super glad that I went ahead and stuck with old and reliable Righteous Fire because it has given me more mental bandwidth to explore the league mechanics without also having to figure out my damned build. Are you playing Settlers of Kalguur league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Settlers League is Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends… which admittedly feels odd to say given how much I have failed this past week to say it. I am not entirely certain what I am going through right now, but it has been harder and harder to sit down and actually write something. I think mostly it has felt like I didn’t really have anything worth saying. I’ve been quietly plugging away at Path of Exile while listening my way through the Brandon Sanderson Cosmere books… and none of that seemed terribly interesting. When every blog post feels the same… I struggle a bit to find the desire to go through the motions. We’ve also had wild weather here in Oklahoma which led me to not even have a podcast this week.
Yesterday I dinged level 100 which makes for the second time I have done this in Path of Exile. I feel like I could walk away from this league happy with my progress. I am not sure why exactly I wanted to hit 100 this time around, but it was one of those nagging feelings in the back of my head. The first time I did so was largely to prove that I could, and after that, it felt like the novelty had worn off. This time around though I had reached a point where I was thoroughly happy with my character and mostly just wanted to ding as a bit of a victory lap. I am contemplating completely reworking a chunk of my character in order to fully switch it to the more powerful version of the build including cluster jewels. I have a good stockpile of currency and given that I have available to me all of the talent points… I could tweak my build to see what that version of Righteous Fire feels like.
Most of my currency is still coming from Delve, but the strategies have shifted a bit. In previous leagues, I made my currency a nickel and dime at a time through Resonator sales. With the graveyard crafting and some changes to the atlas making it so folks are printing azurite… the resonator market has crashed. Though ironically there are still folks occasionally buying my wares in bulk. Most of my currency is coming from Curiosity Vaal Apsects which sell for around 16 Divine Orbs each. There is a slightly lesser trade in Doryani’s Machinarium, Aul’s Uprising, and the various rings that go into Precurors. Basically, this means I am hunting for bosses above all else… which has the positive side effect of progressing one of the league challenges.
Generally speaking, my goal for every league is to get enough of the challenges completed in order to get the sad little totem pole which I think comes at 19. This is the second league in a row where I have gotten at least the first upgraded version. It is highly unlikely that I will ever hit 40 of 40 unless there is a mighty force behind me wanting something that comes from the end of that journey. I will say though that the changes in how Scarabs work, have made focusing in on specific mechanics far easier than they would have been in previous leagues. Running a full complement of scarabs for a single-league mechanic is almost as good as having your tree specced for it. I am slowly collecting Fortunate cards so that I can turn in and complete Divined Destiny. Maybe I can complete the full set of the upgraded armor appearances, but that is probably as far as I will be able to make it in this league before I run out of steam.
I went on a bit of a tear yesterday completing different Maven witnesses. I’ve admittedly never attempted any of these in previous leagues though I probably could have without much issue. At this point, I have completed The Formed, The Forgotten, The Twisted, The Hidden, The Elder Slayers, and am working on getting my witnesses for The Feared. I had no clue that when I took down Cortex it was a Witnessed version. I am just about done with a Chayula Breach stone so I should be able to get that witness pretty quickly then it just leaves Elder, Shaper, and Sirus. Sirus is the one that probably worries me the most because that fight is annoying enough on its own.
Delve is still my happy place, but mostly chasing The Feared is an attempt to prove it to myself that I could do it if I chose to do so. I don’t love bossing. It feels like a lot of effort for a very minimal payoff. Especially given how much the prices of everything has crashed this league, there just isn’t near the chase that there might have been previously. I sincerely doubt I will ever really chase Uber bosses because given that I don’t love the amount of faffing about required to fight normal bosses… I certainly don’t love the thought of grinding out the already painful t17s to get emblems in order to fight Uber bosses. My hope is that in 3.25 they make some significant changes to T17s which will hopefully make them less egregious.
Past that I have been helping my friend get started who is also playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I helped my friend Ric through a bunch of the gear acquisition and now I am helping my friend Lethbridge with some similar gaps in gearing. That is probably my favorite part of Path of Exile when I can help friends get the stuff they need. Acquiring something for a friend who is also playing is way more enjoyable than chasing my own goals. Anyways hopefully I will be a bit more regular this week with my blog posts but honestly… who knows!
The post Hundred Again appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… this has been a weird league. When you make sweeping changes to a game as complicated as Path of Exile… you get some extremely varied issues that come up with it. Going into this league I had one idea planned… which was to gear my character in such a way as to not really need my amulet slot for the dexterity required to play Righteous Fire. The idea behind this was that I could in theory swap in a Defiance of Destiny which is a unique Paula Amulet that went in during 3.22 that has the text “Gain 25-35% of Missing Unreserved Life before being Hit by an Enemy”. On something already as tanky as I tend to build characters, this could make someone nigh immortal, and last league I just could not sort out my gear in order to use one without changing every single slot. The problem is that this league shifted the rarity and with that, the price ballooned up to 55 Divines making it one of the major chase uniques.
This was ultimately the item that I had been saving up all of my divines to get, and yesterday I found out that apparently, the market had crashed. You can pick up a medium-rolled Defiance of Destiny for around 10 Divines now. Similarly, the bottom fell out completely for Headhunters and you can pick up a well rolled uncorrupted one for around 15 Divines. So while I have been sidetracked by Fallout 76 lately, I absolutely zoomed into the game to snap a nearly perfectly rolled Defiance for 15 Divines. If the price of Headhunters falls even further I might snap one of those up as well for if I ever decide to do anything with my Champion alt. I think the downward pressure we are seeing is in part due to the fact that this is the second league in a row where people were printing extremely rare items. It took a bit longer for the prices to drop in Affliction, but having been through that song and dance before there is now a race to the bottom.
I am uncertain what the latest strategy is, but clearly, there is still something alive and well in the current league environment. The previous hotness was stacking Meatsacks, a single monster that replaces a pack and has an extremely high rarity modifier… and then stacking on Tormented Spirits to make them extremely beefy and extremely rewarding when you finally kill them. Folks were doing this in T17 maps which themselves have a massive rarity bonus. The end result was nonsensical loot explosions that covered the entire screen. I remember seeing one clip from Empyrian Gaming where I could see five Defiance of Destiny on screen at one time. Basically, it has reached the point where if that amulet is not literally perfectly rolled and qualitied up with catalysts… it is cheap.
So I am now the proud owner of a would-be 40% Defiance of Destiny instead of the perfectly rolled 42%… once I finish applying quality that is. This has caused me to rework my tree a bit to force in Ultimatum, a league mechanic that I largely hate… but is the most reliable method for farming catalysts. I miss Metamorph so much because that was a mechanic I actually enjoyed and dropped Catalysts like candy. You could add Rogue Metamorphs to your map and just get them passively rather than having to force a largely unfun mechanic to get them. I should just buy the catalysts but that always feels lame when they could be farmed. They are much cheaper this league than they were last league, and my guess is the demand has caused a bunch of folks to start farming them. I also need Fertile Catalysts to quality up my Immortal Flesh as well, so in theory it isn’t a complete waste of time to try and farm them.
Wild Mood Swings was a Cure album that came out when I was in college, and quite honestly… that title accurately describes what it has felt like to play in this league. We’ve been in this cycle of “exploit early, exploit often” where the folks who get to the latest and greatest strategy first… and abuse the fuck out of it… profit and anyone trying to “ethically” play the game is left behind. I can’t complain much honestly because I am still able to do everything that I wanted to do and have managed to find enough high-value items in order to maintain enough currency to play with. All of that is super shocking considering how bottomed out the market is for delve resonators and fossils. Since I seem to be getting engaged with Fallout 76 again, I am not sure how much longer I will be in this league’s economy anyway. Once I get one more achievement and get my sad little totem pole I will be happy enough to leave it behind until 3.25.
The post Rock Bottom Prices appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I find myself starting to feel that old familiar itch… the one that involves me leveling a second character. I have no clue what I actually want to make but that isn’t important. What is important is that I know before long I will wind up chasing some new character and trying to make it work. That is not to say I am not still having a heck of a lot of fun on Righteous Fire Chieftain, and would honestly probably keep playing it for a while. I just always end up starting several other characters during a league and then trying to make them work. I would love to see a redemption arc for Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, but I am not sure if I want to roll another Marauder in this league. It has been a few leagues since I have played Toxic Rain, and bows are dirt cheap due to the corpse-crafting meta right now.
Remember me talking about going all in on my sceptre yesterday? Well… about that. I had this fractured +1 fire gem base that I had been tinkering with for a while. Essentially I had been spamming all of my alts at it hoping to roll the ideal setup… and then survive the regal. Yesterday I had farmed up another stack of alts and threw them all at the weapon… and happened to land a pretty optimal setup. Which then prompted me to spend my last to Divine Orbs to meta-craft this the rest of the way to completion. Now I am back farming blue juice from Harvest so that I can shift this to an alternate quality setup for elemental damage and do the 30% corruption beast again. At that point… I think maybe just maybe I will have the final form of my weapon.
Some “new tech” from this patch that I have been playing with is The Perandus Pact Prismatic Jewel. This is a grave crafted item that can be influenced to roll with a specific stat package on it. I did not do this thing, I just bought mine because the “6% Increased Fire Damage” version is apparently not the sought-after version. Essentially allocating this in my tree gives me a ring that includes 18 passive tree nodes that each gain +6% for a grand total of +108% Increased Fire Damage. I had already planned on picking up the Sanctum of Thought node to push myself up to 90% reduction to critical damage, which will give me another +18%. This seems really good and it would be significantly better if I were building something on the right-hand side of the tree with much tighter clustering of nodes. Alternately I could have gone with +5 life per node, but I wasn’t sure if that would matter as much in the grand scheme of things.
I’ve gotten deep enough into Delve that I am starting to see a few survival issues, so I decided to try something. I was out perusing POE.Ninja as one does… and noticed a Korean player running RF Chieftain with Vampirism allocated on their amulet. This seems really good because it would give me another source of recovery that is not entirely dependent upon my regeneration rate. The big problem is diving into packs of mobs while waiting on an explosion to proc, and while that is going off I would be getting both life on kill and some life recuperation from damage taken. Thankfully Golden Oils are cheap this league so if I want to go back to my Damage Over Time setup that I had been running it would be easy enough to do so.
I picked up another crafting project, that has frankly already cost me around 150 Chaos Orbs of potential value. I found this chestpiece for 10 Chaos Orbs and while I do not care in the least about the level of socketed curse gems… I am a huge fan of that 5% reduced Fire Damage Taken. I am running a lot of beyond on my maps and as such finding quite a bit of tainted currency so essentially as I find tainted fusing I am throwing them at this item. All I need is one to hit with a favorable result. When I fail I go back to the bench and craft 4 linked sockets… restoring me back to the state of just needing one fusing to six link it. Like I said I have made 3 attempts, each attempt with a value of 50 Chaos… and sooner or later I am going to hit it and then swap over to this chest piece and likely sell my RF-colored six-link Cloak of Flames for a bit of a profit.
The last bit of findings is that I actually managed to hit some T4 Harvest Beasts and wound up pulling Bear’s Girdle which is a key component for a Cleave of Rage build. Again it is something that I have wanted to play with, but I am not sure I want to make a second marauder this league. It isn’t like the girdle is worth a ton on its own, but I was happy to get it nonetheless. I’ve never fought the actual harvest endgame boss and keep wondering what is involved in doing so. I guess I should look that up at some point because I know there is a league achievement the includes them as one of the options. I should probably make some general strategy around finishing enough achievements to get my sad little totem pole again. Right now I am mostly working on Maven witnesses so I can attempt to take her down for a voidstone.
How has your league been going? Are you still trucking along or have you moved on already? Drop me a line below.
The post The Perandus Pact appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
