Good Morning Friends! I have never gone so quickly from being overwhelmingly hyped about something… to rapidly traveling down the stages of grief. Yesterday was the announcement of what is coming with the Affliction League in Path of Exile roughly a week from the day I am posting this. On the one hand… there is a ton of really interesting content being added to the game. On another hand… it may have completely destroyed my favorite gameplay style from the last several leagues and at the same time destroyed many of my characters that are sitting in standard. As a result, I am not entirely certain what I am going to do… and given that we were planning on doing a “GuildSF” type private league I won’t even be able to buy my way out of any holes through trade league. I admit… I am pretty scared about what this means for the future of me and Path of Exile.
First, let’s talk about some of the good things. Affliction League has a mechanic where you go “delving” through a dark and infested forest. You are protected by some wisps that allow you to burn away the corruption, but the wisps will only consume a certain amount of corruption before fading away and returning you to reality. This is in theory a mechanic that favors slower players because it isn’t on a timer like Legion or Breach, which is a huge net positive as far as I am concerned. Collecting these wisps allows you to spend them with vendors inside of the mists or when you return to your map gain a Sentinel-like buff on random packs of mobs remaining buffing them and their loot drops. I think this looks like an overwhelmingly fun mechanic and I am happy that we are finally getting something that once again favors a tanky character as opposed to glass cannon characters like Sanctum did.
The NPCs will allow you to buy your way into a set of ascendancies that modify how the game plays for you. Probably the coolest of these is the Primalist which allows you to socket charms that effectively give you watered-down versions of existing ascedancies turning you into a sort of hybrid Scion. Essentially one does things with Flask slots, one with corpses, and one with charms and you can swap between them but will have to level up the new ascendancy from scratch if you change “factions” as it were. This also seems really freaking awesome and the Primalist gives you the ability to open chests and get extra loot from corpses with warcries similar to the Diablo II ability. I sure was looking forward to this ability.
A somewhat mixed change as far as I am concerned is the return of Ultimatum, but this is largely because I never participated in that league before. It is costing us the loss of Metamorph as a mechanic, which admittedly most players will not mourn… but I sorta enjoyed getting rogue Metamorphs in my maps and crafting monsters. However, I will say that Ultimatum looks interesting, and pending how badly it scales… it might be a blast to play. At least I thought that was the case when I thought I would be going into this league with my trusty Righteous Fire Juggernaut. That however looks a bit less certain than the past three leagues.
I am going to let Pohx explain what happened to Righteous Fire. The biggest change is that they are completely removing Lab enchants and all alternate-quality gems. Similarly, they have changed the functionality of a number of gems completely… one of these was Righteous Fire. Previously RF got a base damage that scaled with gem level and then a 35% bonus based on your maximum life and energy shield. We don’t know what any of the alternate qualities are going to look like at this point… but the base gem will now scale based on 70% of your maximum life and energy shield and have no base damage. This means that in order to reach the effective damage you had from a level 25 Righteous Fire, you are going to need around 7000 combined health and ES. The ability is also losing its 20% burning damage bonus from the quality and instead aging Area of Effect which does not really help with the damage output and has always been more of a quality-of-life change. Similarly, Fire Trap is losing its damage from quality and instead gaining trigger radius which is next to useless.
This double whammy means that Righteous Fire as we have known it for the last few years is pretty well dead. That is to say unless there is an alternate quality version of the game that just works as the previous gem did for both Righteous Fire and Fire Trap. This similarly means that for the most part RF Juggernaut, Chieftain, and Elementalist are similarly dead in the water or at least greatly diminished from the levels that they were able to reach before. I kinda hate this a lot, and I sorta blame myself for saying that I thought Righteous Fire was untouchable yesterday because of the role that it plays in the community. This is bad for Path of Exile as a whole because it removes what was quite possibly the easiest and most well-documented onramp for new players. I feel like there will absolutely be folks that hang up their spurs after this series of changes.
What benefits however is the ultra-high investment version of Righteous Fire popularized by Captain Lance that involves stacking Energy Shield to ludicrous levels. This build with over 55,000 Energy Shield gets massively better but for everyone who does not have around a mirror to spend on the build, you might be shit out of luck. I am sure Pohx will come through with a viable league starter version of this build, but it is almost certainly going to be an Inquisitor and rely on some specific uniques to make it work.
My only hope right now lies in what might simply be an omission from the patch notes. Righteous Fire baseline shows the removal of the base damage. Vaal Righteous Fire however only shows the change in quality. This is some pretty flimsy hope but maybe just maybe the Vaal version works the same as the previous one did.
So where does this leave me for Affliction League? My gut reaction is to pivot from Righteous Fire to Tri-Elemental SRS Guardian. I played this build as a secondary character in Ancestor League and ran it up through maps in the Toucan Private League on zero gear. This should in theory be relatively unharmed by any of the changes in any significant way and should still feel really good for a league starter. While it isn’t anywhere near as sturdy in Delve as RF Juggernaut was… I could still Delve fairly effectively on this character. I could probably make some tweaks while building out the character to ensure that it felt sturdier… namely changing my early pathing to go down the Armor/ES nodes and working on getting better ES recovery so I could use it both as Mana and as a Defensive layer. I was happy with this character and I think I could feel happy maining it during at least the start of this league. If I got some of the key pieces, it also means I could respec to Inquisitor Energy Shield Stacking Righteous Fire later in the league.
I could also just say fuck it and go Lightning Arrow Champion, which is the build that I ultimately landed on as my mapper of choice for Ancestor. I league started a Lighting Arrow Raider turned Deadeye and I found it miserable and way the hell too squishy for my tastes. Later in the league however I ran up another Lightning Arrow Character and this time I went Champion and the added defensive layers made it feel great. I honestly thought that this decision would rule out Delve at all… but before sitting down to write this post I did a few nodes around 150 depth without any issue. Now I would probably not feel comfortable diving down tunnels quite the way that I do with a Juggernaut, but it should be good enough to get some crafting materials since I won’t need to print money like I did in Ancestor.
While talking about Champions… there is also Explosive Arrow which I enjoyed quite a bit in Crucible. From what I can tell everything about this build should still be fine. It has some easy-to-craft gear and If I were to play it again… it would be the third time I have done the build and I am sure I could learn some lessons from the past. I had quite a bit of luck doing Keystone Bosses with the build as well, so that should be good. The only thing that makes me hesitant about going after this build is that I am pretty sure that my friend Ace will be doing this as well. So there could be some good things about that where we can use each other’s hand-me-down upgrades… but it also means we would be in direct contention for specific gear pieces. The positive is you can pretty effectively get through maps on 4 links… so that is a huge positive as it does not rely on bow damage as much as lightning arrow does.
Then there is the Yolo option of just going RF Jugg and dealing with the consequences. If I took this path, I would probably go something similar to this POB from a Chieftain in the November events. It takes a slightly different pathing than the traditional Pohx build and focuses on getting 15% additional life from not having life on your Chestpiece and an additional 10% life from having six life masteries. This ends up taking the build to around 7000 life, just shy of it… which would in theory be about equivalent damage to a level 25 Righteous Fire gem was previously. There is still the problem of none of it scaling quite as well as it did before… but it would probably still be doable and feel okay for depth 100-150 delve and t16 maps. It isn’t ideal but I could probably make it work.
I hate that I’ve essentially been thrown into chaos of not really knowing what path I should follow. Again we don’t really know if there is a version of Righteous Fire out there that still works like the current version does, because we do not have any information for the alternate qualities through the transfiguration system. Right now my gut is telling me to either go Lightning Arrow Champion or SRS Guardian for my first character. The biggest problem with LA Champ is it requires a specific unique… or at least really wants it. SRS Guardian however I have successfully taken to maps in a league where all gear dropped fully scoured… so I know I can make that work with minimal effort. I have no doubts that it will see me through Atlas completion and be a decent beachhead to gear out additional characters. It is probably the most SSF-friendly of the options…. but EA Champ also is looking pretty good.
Basically, I have a week to sort out what I want to do and get the private league up and running. In the meantime, I will be over here mourning my favorite character archetype in Path of Exile.
The post Mourning Righteous Fire appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I think I am about to wind down my Blast from the Past league character. The problem is I am left with more indecision than I had hoped I would be at this point. I am still not entirely certain that RF Chieftain is the way to go for the upcoming private league that we are starting with 3.23. Sure it is damned nice to only have to focus on a single elemental resistance… but it seems to come with a price. I just feel way squishier than I would at the same gear level on a Juggernaut. I think the core problem is that Juggernaut is giving you a lot of survivability from the ascendancy, and Chieftain really is not. Sure it is a pain in the butt to have to care about all of your resistances… but I think that pain might be worth it.
This is essentially where I am currently on my Chieftain in the Blast from the Past league. I have 4700 hit points, 1400 regen, 82% on all Elemental Resistances, and just over 24k armor. Looking at that would make me think… that the character probably feels pretty sturdy. Unfortunately, as you play it… it is just constantly taking damage and I have to hit my healing potion to top myself off. Granted I do not have my potions online yet, because I just do not have the currency to reroll my flasks and get them to flaggelant/auto, so that is a whole defensive layer that is lacking. I also do not have anything resembling optimal gear, but I am starting to feel the same problems as I did with my Shield Crush Chieftain. On paper it feels like I should be sturdier than I actually am. It just feels like I am missing something that I am not sure how to resolve on my own.
At this point I am at 44 of 115 on the Atlas and have done a red map… that was admittedly a bit rough but largely manageable. I feel like I could probably complete my Atlas as a Chieftain, but I wonder if I would be better off just starting Juggernaut and dealing with the itemization problems. Maybe this would be the catalyst for me to learn how to actually craft resistance gear. I am so used to being able to go shopping and use the trade site to resolve my issues. I’m really good at buying gear… but significantly less good at crafting it. That is going to be the collective struggle of a private league… that adds a whole layer of challenge that I am not used to. I am hoping that the collaborative nature of the league will bring me more enjoyment than the inefficient floundering frustrates me.
There is always the possibility that I call an audible at the last minute and level Minion Guardian instead. I had a heck of a lot of fun with this build during the Ancestor league, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there is no way this goes unscathed into 3.23. It feels entirely too powerful for the minimal gear investment. I ran up one of these during the Toucan league and I was able to do red maps without any real fuss. It also did a far better job at bossing than Righteous Fire usually does, so I could absolutely see myself playing this happily for the majority of the league. Sure I would probably STILL level an RF Jugg because I like playing one… but I am not sure if I would feel the need to do so.
I had legitimately hoped that the Blast from the Past League would galvanize my path forward. It has not. The transition from leveling a Chieftain to early maps is very nice. I could also be pretty effective and burning my way through the atlas. However, since Delve is my favorite thing… I just felt very weak compared to the extreme amount of damage that mobs down there do. I’ve only made it down to around depth 80, and realistically at a minimum, I need to be able to comfortably do depth 100-150. So this is why I am waffling so hard right now… Chieftain is so close to being the perfect Righteous Fire leveling experience but still so far away. There is no way I can reasonably rely on using Forbidden Flesh/Flame to seal ascendancy traits from Juggernaut given that we will be essentially Guild SSF, and it will be a long time until any of us are capable of farming those bosses.
So I find myself crawling back into the good ole comfortable reliable Juggernaut. This is the character that I always seem to gravitate towards. I like the way it feels and I like grinding delve with it. So maybe I should just stop trying to go in a different direction and accept that like Pohx… I’ve found my niche. I tried to fight against it at the start of this league with a Lighting Arrow Raider… and as soon as I got up the currency I swapped to running up a Juggernaut. This is the character and build that I know the most about, and in theory, should have the easiest time gearing properly in SSF. So maybe I just live with that decision.
I am sorta jealous of Kodra who is entirely determined to play Hexblast Miner and has created intricate plans for how exactly he is going to achieve that. I strive to try new things… and end up building a ton of characters during a league but always end up sitting back down in my comfy recliner.
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Good Morning Folks! This weekend, the “Blast from the Past” short-term league was launched in Path of Exile. Essentially, this league is running off the Standard template but with the additional Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra league mechanics. For me… there is quite a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in these leagues because I got in at the tail end of Sentinel and made my first real attempt at a proper character. Lake of Kalandra was the first league that I started a character at the very beginning of the league and managed to complete my Atlas of Worlds. While this was just last year… I feel like so much has changed in the way that I approach Path of Exile since then. Sentinel was one of the best-received Path of Exile leagues and Lake of Kalandra was one of the worst… so it is interesting to see these mashed together. It has made me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is attempting to give Kalandra a redemption arc since the sandbox state of the game was just in an awful place when that league was running.
Sentinel is a fairly straightforward mechanic. You pick up three different colors of Sentinels and use them while doing other content to empower monsters for a chance at tasty rewards. Stalker Sentinels can empower a bunch of random mobs, Pandemonium a single pack, and Apex are designed to empower rare or unique enemies but a very limited number of them… aka something you pop in a map bosses arena. This is a great mechanic because you can use it while doing other things, which means it doesn’t necessarily force you to align your play habits to any particular patterns. It is very easy to start using this from the first moments of gameplay all the way to your endgame, and quite honestly… I now appreciate this mechanic far more than I did at the time.
The reason why the league was the stuff of legends in Path of Exile circles, is that it also introduced a specific reward type called Recombinators. These items would allow you to essentially combine two items of the same type which destroys one and gives you a new item that is an amalgam of the attributes of the input items. This allowed players to break the rules of crafting and get items that were simply not allowed to ever roll together on the same item. This was very impactful on Standard League as the items coming out of Sentinel essentially replaced all of the previous mirror tier items. I should probably note that I have been using Sentinels since the start of the league and I have yet to see a single recombinator drop, so they appear to be fairly rare.
Kalandra on the other hand was a league that allowed you to essentially build your own map. Each map would present you with a Mirrored Tablet on a pillar, and you could place one or more tiles. Once you had filled the tiles on a given map you could take it as an itemized map to be run in your map device. Various mechanics also allowed you to swap around existing tiles and do things like move where the entrance to your map was or move specific empty tiles to change the layout. Doing this allows you to crank up the difficulty of a given map because tiles increase in difficulty as they move further from the entrance. At the time of Kalandra’s launch… the state of the game was rough and there were a number of truly unkillable affix combinations that could destroy a run. Even now, however… once you get 8 or more tiles form the entrance the fights get pretty damned “rippy”.
I had some fond memories of Kalandra and honestly still think the concept behind it is really cool. However, even coming back and playing it now… it is not terribly rewarding. I think more than anything that was the damning stroke against this league, is that the rewards felt disconnected from the difficulty of the content. It is very easy to create a Lake that is much harder than any map you could run at least early on, and since most of your rewards come from the tile-specific chests… there just isn’t much loot to speak of. I still enjoy running Lakes as they are essentially free content… you are creating them as a byproduct of other things that you are doing in the game. They just don’t really feel that rewarding… at least not compared to things like Sanctums.
There are three events running in November, the first was the Krangled League, the second is this week the Blast from the Past, and the third is a league where every map has some random league type applied to it. Two of the three events feel like random nonsense, but Blast from the Past feels a bit more deliberate. It makes me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is trying to figure out how to remix and bring back both the Sentinel and Kalandra mechanics and merge them into Standard as they have several other past leagues. Maybe they felt like the Lake itself did not really get a fair shake given how wildly unpopular the game state was at that moment with rampant ArchNemesis nonsense going on. I am not entirely certain how these could come back. It feels like for Kalandra, you would almost need to add another new Atlas Master that specifically has maps filled with mirrored tablets similar to how Alva gives you access to three portals per map. Sentinels would blend more easily into existing content and could simply be drops you find in the world.
We saw a pretty good bump on Friday when this league started. Things were so busy that Ash, Kodra, and I ran into issues with creating new zone instances. For example, none of us could seem to zone into the submerged caverns. I pulled up a graph on Steam Charts to show the bump, and while 27k players are not anywhere near what is seen at a league start, this is a pretty significant bump considering we are at the very tail end of an existing league and most players have faded away from the game. I realize that these November events largely exist to buy time as they needed to bump back the start of the next league because it reportedly has some rather elaborate mechanics. That said it feels like Grinding Gear Games may have underestimated the hunger players seem to have for Sentinel specifically. While it hasn’t really been the redemption arc I had hoped for the Lake of Kalandra, it is still an enjoyable mechanic.
On a personal level, I have used this limited event to test out what a league start as a Righteous Fire Chieftain would feel like. Essentially you are trading the stability of a Juggernaut for the convenience of being able to slide straight into maps without needing to worry about your elemental resistances. It is quite a bit squishier than an equivalent Juggernaut would be, but it was very nice to be able to transition into mapping with no time really spent fussing with gearing. Given that our upcoming private league will be more like SSF as we will only be able to trade among ourselves… I feel like it is probably going to be a good call to start out as Chieftain and then transition later into Juggernaut when I have the gear to support it. The cool thing about that swap is it is literally just ascendancies as RF Jugg and RF Chieftain use the same passive tree.
I think part of the squish factor is that I had been leaning on some Armor/ES gear while leveling just to be able to get the right socket colors. As I began swapping out leveling gear for stronger armor bases, the squish factor began to balance out a bit. There really does seem to be a break point around 25k armor that things start to even out and getting over the 4000 Health threshold also helped. Normally RF involves a swap between running Fire Trap in your helm to running it in your body armor six-link and I might start out in this swapped state. It feels like it is going to be much easier to get a good armor base six-link with RRRGGG than it will be to get BBBRRG without access to the trade economy. I know I will not see a Brass Dome in “Bel League” so I am going to need to lean on something like either a Glorious or Astral Plate.
I’ve hit level 82 without much effort in spite of the massive experience penalty applied to these events. When you die… it feels like dying at level 95ish rather than your early 80s. I am not sure how much higher I will end up getting as I have mostly answered the questions that I had originally wanted to answer. Yes RF Chietain is viable and probably a really good idea for SSF play, and yes I still enjoy the two league mechanics from Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra. Anything else that I might accomplish on top of this is basically gravy. Pushing higher in level means you have more chances at the raffle loot, but honestly… I doubt I will win anything considering how many other players are competing in this particular league event. I do need to log into my Krangled character to see if I qualified for anything and probably delete it in order to free up the character slot.
Have you been playing the Blast from the Past limited league event? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Blast from the Past League appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Morning Folks! I am so damned close to 100. I ended the night with roughly two pips to go which equates to around 37 million experience. Progress is so damned slow at level 99 and I am constantly on edge that something that I might do will set me back. I’m carrying around an Omen of Amelioration which will prevent 75% of the normal XP loss from taking a death. On one hand, I hoped that simply having that in my inventory would keep me from needing it, but if I do take a death it would be well worth the 40 Chaos that I spent on it. For reference, all evening I ground delve and it only got me two pips worth of experience, so essentially it will take another full evening of delve to push across the finish line.
The positive is that I am currently completely full on sulphite and my Lightning Arrow Champion can seemingly refill me much faster and safer than my other options have been. For refilling purposes, I have been running rusted scarabs and slowly chipping away at the Ritual challenge. I ran around ten maps last night with a full complement of blue altars and did not take a single death, which feels miraculous to have something that strong. I also swapped over some gear from my Lightning Arrow Deadeye allowing me to at least have some measure of magic find. Essentially I swapped over the rings which takes me to around +30% quant and +80% rarity which while not super extreme should make a bit of a difference in the long run.
One of the things that I have learned is that I value different things from other Path of Exile players. If you watch any of my videos you will mostly hear me talking about my defensive layers and how I am planning on surviving things… and very little about how I have stacked the deck to be able to kill things. Last night my friend Kodra uploaded a video of his Hexblast Miner since he considered my kill speed “very slow” for bosses. Compared to a boss killer I am exceptionally slow… but even during this video all of the close calls he had where he “almost” died would have driven me up a wall. I’ve played builds that are much much more “killy” but ride the edge of death, and they are very much NOT FOR ME. At some point, I should build something like this Hexblast build just so I have a boss nuker.
Today is also the release of Diablo IV Season 2, and I know I am going to spend some time checking that out. Right now I plan on rolling another Barbarian largely to use it as a point of reference. I played a Barbarian at launch, and in Season 1, and want to at least play one a bit so I can see how the differences in the class feel between the three. I’ve heard that necromancers have a number of significant buffs, namely that the minions can actually stay alive now… so I am probably going to spend some time playing one of those as well. I am honestly not sure how seriously I am going to play D4, because I still have some goals that I want to accomplish in Path of Exile namely that once XP no longer matters I want to beat my head against Maven until I learn that fight.
Anyways! If you are going to be playing some D4 hit me up. I am not even sure if I have room on my B.Net Friends list but I’m Belghast #1752 over there.
The post So Close to 100 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
