Good Morning Folks! At the time if writing this, the Necropolis League for Path of Exile is roughly six hours away. The start will happen at roughly 2 pm CDT and since I have the day off I plan on being there attempting to get in at the very beginning. The only question is whether or not I go through the hassle of trying to download the standalone client which always updates faster than Steam. I’ve not actually run the standalone client in previous leagues but this is the only true way to be in the queue before most of the folks are there. That said I honestly don’t care quite so much about starting exactly when the servers open as I am not planning on racing through the campaign. I thought I would talk a bit this morning about my plans for starting the league.
Shocking to no one who has read this blog for any length of time… I will be starting a Righteous Fire character, more specifically the chieftain variant that I played last league. Truth be told the leagues where I start Righteous Fire… are better experiences for me personally. I like the predictable nature of this build how it comes online, and how well it does at farming lower-level content and working my way through the Atlas of Worlds. Boneshatter last league was great, but it never felt quite as comfortable in Delve as Righteous Fire does. Lightning Arrow saw me zipping through the early maps super well, but struggling a bit when it came to the first two voidstone bosses. Ultimately even in its nerfed state, Righteous Fire feels reliable and stable and that is what I mostly crave for my first character of the league.
The first chaos that I spend in the league is likely going to be on acquiring these four uniques. Immortal Flesh is pretty much irreplaceable given how much value you get on a single belt. I will likely see one drop but what I am looking for specifically is one with high regeneration and -15% to all resistances which is the best roll you can get on that item. Rise of the Phoenix is equally important as it will give me +5 to maximum resistances, so I will be attempting to snipe one of those pretty early if I don’t see one drop. Berek’s Respite worked out extremely well last league and allows me to get some pseudo-proliferation before I can get a Fan the Flames cluster. Truth be told I just kept using the ring long after I replaced other items. For my chestpiece I am going to drop the Lightning Coil and try the more suggested Cloak of Flame this go around. I hate the idea of running an item without armor but the lack of the negative resistance penalty is pretty great as well as the lack of a life roll allowing me to use the 15% life mastery.
As far as later game items… I would love to figure out a way to work in a Defiance of Destiny amulet but I always wind up so dexterity-starved that I can never seem to make that happen. We will have to see if I can figure out a way to make it work. The one I took a screenshot of was the one I was using on my Boneshatter Juggernaut from last league and it added a ton of survival. I would also love to try and work in Legacy of Fury boots but I already have quite a few uniques which will make it a bit hard to make sure I am hitting maximum chaos resistance. I could see maybe swapping to these when I switch over to a Fan the Flames cluster. We also have no clue if these are going to be on the normal Maven drop pool or the Uber Maven drop pool… which will greatly impact their price.
Affliction League did some really screwball things with pricing on items making a number of previously really expensive things… dirt cheap. One of these was the Taste of Hate flask and depending upon the price this is going to be something that I pick up as one of my later acquisitions. It adds more defensive layers as I am converting additional physical damage to elemental where I will have 90% resistance. Last league I got to play with a Headhunter and a Mageblood and both were fine… but the chase item that I want to play with this time is Oriath’s End. This is going to be something that I stockpile divines in order to pick up this league, and I am hoping the changes in uber bosses make me hope the drop rates for this went up a bit. I would also love to pick up a Vaal Breach gem for bossing but that is probably unrealistic given how rare they are.
If you are wanting to follow in my footsteps with Righteous Fire Chieftain, I cannot recommend the guide from Pohx enough. He does a great service to the community by making sure there are viable versions of RF for Chieftain, Juggernaut, and Templar. In truth, ALL Marauder-based RF builds have essentially the same base tree with some tweaks here or there. I plan on mostly following what I did last league with some subtle changes from what Pohx suggests. Mostly Pohx does not go after Explosive Impact and I tend to path down into that area to pick it up. The more area of effect you can have with Righteous Fire, the more comfortable it feels but I tend to play a much slower RF than Pohx does. If you are just starting out though I would absolutely say follow his guide to the letter until you develop your own preferences for the build.
I look forward to getting my “burny boi” up and running today and starting the league back in trade. I think for the moment it looks like it is just going to be me and Kodra from the AggroChat podcast that are going to be playing. So I will like always be looking for things to make Hexblast work for him. I think most of the folks are going to give this league a skip which is a bit of a bummer, but won’t directly impact my enjoyment. I think I was pretty much the only person who really played much Crucible and that is maybe the league that I had the most fun with. I have a few other friends who are going to be either trying the game for the first time or coming back after a long absence, so it will be interesting to see how that all shakes out. As always there is a Path of Exile channel on my Super Dungeon Friends discord that we will likely be hanging out in.
The post Necropolis League Start Plans appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the official end of the Affliction League in Path of Exile and with it comes the quarterly job of shoving all of those “Remove Only” tabs under the bed. My strategy for the end of each league is to group all of those tabs into a folder named after that league so that I never have to deal with them again unless I am specifically fishing for an item. I do the same for the Guild Stash but unfortunately, it does not prevent me from having to log in on the day of a new league and set everything back up again. During Sanctum I started this tradition of talking about the various things that I built during a given league, and I have finally coalesced this into a blog feature that I will probably start doing for Last Epoch Cycles as well. This morning I will talk a bit about the happenings of the Affliction League.
Innaugural Bel League
With the start of the Affliction League, we decided to try something different. Up until this point I had participated in a few private league events, but had never really considered starting our own. Kodra and I were able to drum up enough support for the notion that we managed to have nine different people participating in the league, most of whom made it well into mapping before calling it quits. Quite honestly this is probably the ideal way to play this game. It allowed us to completely bypass what was apparently a pretty rough start to the league with bugs surrounding the goblin band mtx. We already are known for pooling our resources in the guild stash, but this took it to an entirely new level with folks actively hunting for build-required uniques for other folks.
Unfortunately with the launch of the Necropolis League on Friday, it does not look like we have much support. It might even just be me playing, so we won’t be attempting another “Bel League” this time around but it was still a lot of fun. There were a few negatives, however. The first is that we made the league last 40 days… which was honestly way too long. The default 10-day time limit for a private league is probably ideal if we were to do this again. The second negative is that without access to trade, it really negatively impacted the power level we could realistically achieve in this “Semi-SSF” gameplay mode. I was however surprised at just how functional all of my builds were that I created during this league and that was a bit of a pride moment for me personally. I would absolutely do this again but most of the AggroChat crew is down on Path of Exile post launch of Last Epoch 1.0.
Boneshatter Juggernaut
Would you believe that this was my very first time playing Boneshatter in any form? With the severe damage to Righteous Fire that 3.23 caused… it left me reeling a bit trying to figure out a new build to main. Boneshatter has traditionally been one of the most tanky Juggernaut builds, and as such I decided to give it a spin after both Ash and Kodra seriously suggested I try it. I enjoyed it quite a bit but it also didn’t feel quite as sturdy as Righteous Fire did. This was especially true for Delve, my favorite game mode. I am sure there are things that I could have done to build this differently for Delve but without access to trade, I had to basically wing it with what I had access to at the time. Sadly I didn’t dump a POB at the time I recorded the above video, but when we merged the private league into trade, I ended up reworking the character and even putting on a Mageblood for shits and giggles since I could afford one.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain
3.23 was the birth of the Transfigured Gem, and with it came a bunch of interesting-sounding options to play existing skills. The one that stood out the most for me was Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, which causes fissures to form in the ground and cause explosions that heat seal targets. As soon as I saw this… I had a MIGHTY NEED to try and create something with it. Sometimes… a build just does not work out the way you want it to. I really wanted to focus on Mace and Shield for some assorted defensive and offensive layers of “while shield is equipped” passive nodes, but in truth this seemed to either need some sort of stacking that I could not provide on SSF or a switch to a well-rolled Two-Handed Weapon. It was one heck of a fun build to level, and honestly, I wish I had recorded a video of the state of the build before pivoting away from it. Truth be told I just did not record anywhere near as many videos this league as I did during Ancestor League. It did a really good job of clearing maps but was painful to kill anything even slightly tanky like a boss.
If I were to do this again I would probably pivot into armor stacking and go with some sort of setup that would allow me to convert that to damage. This just wasn’t something I could realistically do in the limited access environment of Bel League. If you are curious this is the state of the build before I tore it down to become something else.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Lightning Arrow Champion
Originally this was going to be my second build of the league, but Snaking got in the way. I like having some sort of a map blaster to play around with and for the last two leagues that has been some sort of Lightning Arrow build. I’ve played this as Raider and Deadeye before, but by far my ascendancy of choice is Champion because it feels significantly more sturdy. I really do not like to die. Lightning Arrow just feels comfy and playing it with as many defensive layers as Champion feels even more comfy. This is the state of the build that I managed to get during Bel League, but once we merged into the trade league I upgraded it significantly even eventually taking it to a Magic Find build with a Headhunter. I never found a mirror like Kodra did, but had a lot of fun blowing up maps while juicing them.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Righteous Fire Chieftain
Since Snaking was not working like intended, I wound up pivoting my Chieftain into Righteous Fire. I had given this build a few attempts during some of the limited-time events from last November and never really could get it into a comfortable place. The problem I think was that I kept trying to gear it like I was going to gear the Juggernaut variant. This time around I pivoted into 90% all res combined with converting as much physical damage to elemental damage as I could. Because of the juicing level of this league, we were getting Lightning Coils to drop like candy, so I colored and linked one of those to get RF up and running on it. I had to wildly overstack Fire Resistance to make up for the -60% Lightning Resistance penalty but it was worth it because damage conversion was the piece I had been missing in previous attempts. This is the state at which I got the build during the semi-SSF Bel League, but I later on upgraded pretty much every slot once we moved into trade. It was comfortable enough that I am very likely going to start this for Necropolis league on Friday. That said it is still nowhere near as good as the previous incarnation of Righteous Fire Juggernaut felt so I am downgrading my rating a bit. This time I am going to build with a Cloak of Flames and see if that improves my opinion at all.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Penance Brand of Dissipation Inquisitor
Penance Brand of Inquisitor was absolutely cracked this league. There have been other wildly overpowered builds in other leagues, that I never really threw my hat in the ring on… and then ultimately later wished I had. I remember the broken state of the totem explode builds during Crucible and wished I had made an attempt at creating one while the “getting was good” as it were. I love brand builds, so when a brand build was wildly overpowered… you know I had to at least try it out. I had so much fun playing this build and I will mourn its loss, because it was just stupid amounts of fun to watch things evaporate. We all knew however that there was no way this build could last any longer than one league. This is the state of the build at which I recorded the above video, and this is the state I got it to at the end of the league. Penance Brand of Dissipation you will be missed.
Personal Rating: S Tier +++
Cold Blade Vortex Elementalist
There are a handful of builds that I have always wanted to try, but never quite got around to building. Blade Vortex is one of these abilities and this wound up being the very last build I made during the league. By the time I set down this path I was already losing steam and as such I never really made it very far with this build, only managing to get to level 76 which for me is barely past the campaign. The playstyle was enjoyable with you essentially freezing entire chunks of the screen at once while your blade vortex rips them to pieces. The problem that I have with the gameplay style is it requires you to maintain stacks of Blade Vortex to be effective, which means every few seconds you are hitting a button to keep a buff up. While not necessarily a bad thing, and no different than repeatedly casting a primary attack… knowing that it was a buff that I was maintaining made it mentally feel like more of a chore. If I had given it the love and care of some of my other builds… and if they had not been quite as fun as they were… this might have been something. I would consider revisiting at a later date, but for the moment it satiated most of my curiosity.
Personal Rating: B Tier
Affliction League
I feel like Affliction League is going to go down as one of the player-favorite leagues, in part just for the sheer amount of loot that it generated. I thought the forest mechanic was really interesting, but more than that I really enjoyed the three new meta ascendancies… though in the end I wound up swapping all of my characters over to the same one because it was very clearly the best option. I will greatly miss my Rucksack because having that little extra bit of swap space was just too damned good. Weirdly though it feels like I was nowhere near as active in this league as I have in previous ones. For Trial of the Ancestors I wound up building nine different characters, and in Crucible I played six different builds. During the entire league, I only recorded three videos which is also a bit off-pace for me. While this was the most manic league for most players… it felt like I checked out a bit earlier than I would have expected.
I am really hyped about the Necropolis league, but also a bit bummed because it seems like I am going to be going into it largely solo. Not that I really played much with my friends, but it was fun to be feeding them gear during the guild bank. Ultimately this will probably mean I just go harder on the trade league since I won’t be specifically saving anything for folks. I am also really interested in the scarab changes and the new crafting mechanic. I feel like combined those are going to lead to a wild league… but admittedly probably one a bit more austere than the previous few have been. I am legitimately okay with that because in truth I don’t really love magic find strategies that much. I would rather quietly toil away in the Delve mines to get my currency.
Anyways! That is the last league and its builds in review. Did you enjoy Affliction league? Are you going to be playing Necropolis league? Drop me a line below.
The post 3.23 Builds in Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Friends… sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I cannot seem to forcibly dislodge. I’ve also been sick the last few days so apologies for the lack of any semblance of a post yesterday. Anyways… a while back I wrote a post talking about my attempt at creating something that feels like Righteous Fire in Last Epoch and it was great… up until the point that it was not. The build sort of just fell apart when I entered the level 100 Empowered Monoliths because I was not dealing enough damage and did not have enough survival… so basically could not keep moving forward with it. I attempted to resurrect the build and got it to a point where it felt “aggressively fine” but also not exactly what I was going for in the first place.
I had this entirely different plan and created a Paladin that I was going to do some Healing Hands nonsense with… but before long found myself leveling again with a Firestarter’s Torch and Warpath. Which led me down the path of trying to figure out how Paladin was better suited to the burnination of my dreams. It turns out yes… yes it is. However, I held off on talking about the build until I reached empowered monoliths because I did not want to prematurely share my nonsense before I knew if the wheels were going to stay on the bus this time. Today despite my generally lousy “sickboy” status… I wanted to share what I had been up to. Apologies for the thrashed state of my voice in the above video where I talk about the build and show off some empowered monolith gameplay.
So the idea is not at all dissimilar from the previous build… where I went all in on making Warpath do the fire damage things. I’m trying to do a few new things, namely since I am throwing in Judgment occasionally for more damage which causes me to stop spinning… I’ve taken Giant Splitter which does a bit AOE attack each time I stop channeling. I will likely shift around these points a bit before I land on the final configuration of the build. However, the concept is straight forward… convert all bleed to ignite and convert Warpath to fire damage so that I can scale it and the ignite damage at the same time. Also, this is what makes the build feel thematically like Righteous Fire so it is a hill I am willing to die on.
The big thing that is making the build function a little better… and is the reason why I care about it being Paladin is Holy Aura. This is the unique ability for the Paladin mastery and is just sort of a build-your-own-buff aura system. I’ve found nowhere in the game that properly shows all of the buffs that the aura is granting me so I pasted the above list from the build planner. Largely I am throwing points in fire damage, attack speed, and an ability that will proc a fire explosion whenever I have hit something 6 times in a row. I am not entirely certain if that last bit is worth it because it currently costs me 7 points to get there… and I am wondering if I would not be better off just taking flat damage scaling instead. This also serves as a burn button because when I activate the ability it increases how much of these buffs it is providing.
The thing I dig about the Last Epoch Tools Build Planner is that it collates all of the stats and gives you nice numerical rollups that don’t really exist in the game. Based on the stats in the planner I just linked it shows that I am dealing 832% increased fire damage and have 204% chance to ignite on hit… not factoring in that I have other abilities that Judgement that also have their own baked-in 200% additional chance to ignite on hit with that ability. On top of that for survival purposes, I have 18% melee leech and 7% leech off the additional damage that I am dealing over time with ignite. If I can swap some of my gear around and get more void resistance, I can throw on a shield that will generate a good deal more fire damage over time and ignite chance.
All things considered, I am pretty happy with the state of the build currently. There are a number of levers that I could pull to keep tweaking the damage while leveling the rest of the way to 100. Am I happier with it than I am with my Void Knight? Honestly, I am not sure. However, I am very happy that I did not give up on this concept and was finally able to see it the rest of the way to something viable for empowered monoliths. Would I suggest playing this build? Sure if you like burning things and want to track down either the items I am using or something that gives a similar amount of ignite chance and fire damage scaling. It is a heck of a lot of fun and offers a fairly chill playstyle which is ultimately the aspect of Righteous Fire that I loved so much. Throw on a movie or like I have recently… an audio book… and just grind out some chill monoliths for tasty loot. That really is my happy place.
The post Third Time More Burny appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I’ve talked about my Righteous Fire Chieftain for a few days now and the more I play it… the more I think I maybe even like this build better than the Pre-Nerf Juggernaut that I have played for several leagues before. One of the things I dig the most about this build is how easy it is to get off the ground, and how easy it is to gear. Most of the items that I am wearing are effective trash drops, and there is SO MUCH room for improvement. My sceptre I threw a few essences at it until I got something halfway decent, my helm, boots, and gloves were things I legitimately picked up off the ground and just started using. The only piece that I feel is somewhat critical is the Lighting Coil, but I ran without that for a very long time and primarily it simply adds some survival layers bringing it a bit closer to the tankiness of the Juggernaut. Most builds I am seeing tend to favor the Cloak of Flames… but I wanted some more armor and have also seen four Lighting Coils drop this league making that choice a no-brainer.
The main reason why I am talking about it today, is that I thought I would record some of my dumb little videos showing off gameplay. In this, I am running a non-juiced T16, but the build can handle juicing via the forest… it just significantly slows things down a bit. Right now my happy spot is to run t11/t12 maps with as much juice as I can get. Despite not putting any investment into the run and doing stream of consciousness… I still get a wild map explosion during this video. The play style is just so comfortable and I’ve noticed some weird things about Ignite Proliferation and Hinekora’s Fury down in Delve… that it seems like it can hit things and kill things that are in the Darkness and would otherwise be invulnerable. I need to play around a bit more with this to make sure what I think I am seeing is actually happening but so far this is one hell of a delver and mapper but probably a pretty poor bosser… though to be truthful I have yet to run any bosses or guardians on it.
I am so far from an expert at Path of Building… and in fact all I really know how to do is import my build from the GGG servers and then set some of the correct checkboxes. However, if you want to see the current state of my build:
I have no clue how valid the damage numbers are… because it does not feel “ZDPS” but also can’t oneshot tanky things without a Hinekora’s proc. Bossing on this would be a challenge because not getting the Hinekora’s proc means you are left just grinding it down with Righteous Fire and Fire Traps. I’ve not really talked about what I am running for Primalist charms but the above image is a cut-and-paste job showing everything I am running for both Ascendancies. I would probably swap these out for explosive charms, but I have yet to see any. In a perfect world, I would love to find some with maybe Life Regen and Explosion. I’ve still yet to find the final big boss version of the King in the Mists so I am lacking one entire charm.
All in all, I kinda love this build. Pending nothing significantly changes between now and 3.24 I can see league starting it. I feel bad because I essentially have two other characters… Lightning Arrow Champion and Boneshatter Juggernaut that I built out completely but have also just been sitting there and rotting because I am enjoying the RF Chieftain so much. The only thing odd that you will see in my POB is Corrupting Cry. I just threw that gem in there because I had the spare slot and it converted my Infernal Cry to cost life instead of mana. I am doing nothing with it past that and legitimately just started using it last night given that my Stone Golem could no longer stay alive long enough to be useful. Normally speaking in past leagues this would have been the time when I put a Portal gem in there, but since I have not seen one drop… I can’t do that. If I can find a Vaal Breach I would probably socket that in because it would give me a way to summon a bunch of small adds… and therefore proc Hinekora Explosions on bosses.
Anyways I will probably stop talking about Righteous Fire Chieftain for awhile. I love it, but I don’t want to just pound the build into the ground on the blog now that I have finally recorded a gameplay video.
The post 3.23 SSF Righteous Fire Chieftain appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
