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.
Good Morning Folks! While I still have quite a few things that I want to tick off before I am completed with it, I feel like the 3.22 Trials of the Ancestor League is starting to wind down a bit. You can see this in the community as the various streamers detach from the game and start playing other things. I know personally I plan on giving Diablo IV Season 2 a shot tomorrow, and seeing how I feel about that game. As far as objectives go, I have 4 pips of experience to go from level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which will be a first for me in a season. Apart from that, I want to knock out at least one more objective so I can get a sad little totem pole for my third league in a row. So I know that I will still be playing quite a bit, but I am finding my desire to build new builds waning.
As a result, I thought I would spend this morning reviewing my builds for this league and talking a bit about them. This is mostly going to be me posting links to videos that I have recorded throughout the current league, and talking about my feelings regarding the build and how successful it was. This grading will be governed by my own personal feelings about how best to approach Path of Exile. I like tanky builds and I am learning that even when I play a successful build… if it feels too squishy it ruins the experience for me.
Vaal Lightning Arrow Raider
Toward the end of last league I did a brief test to see how it would feel to league start Lightning Arrow, and honestly, the leveling process and early maps felt extremely solid. This prompted me to commit to league starting this build for Trail of the Ancestors and for the most part it went smoothly… until I hit a wall around red maps. Knowing what I know now… this is the point where I should converted my tree over to the critical strike variant, but I did not… and floundered greatly. This built felt amazing when it came to clearing maps… and then struggled significantly with map and atlas bosses. I thought that Raider would give me some additional defensive layers that would make it feel better… but it just was not enough.
The positive of the build is that it allowed me to farm up enough currency to pay for my swap over to Righteous Fire. The negative is… I could have easily just league-started Righteous Fire. This build would essentially color my league experience because I spent a lot of time frustrated that this did not feel good to me. I am not a map blaster and I do not love playing builds that feel like they have paper-thin defensive layers. For those who are curious, this is what the POB looked like at the time of recording this video.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
So after the feelings of failure regarding Lightning Arrow Raider, I rolled right back to the old familiar and comfortable in the form of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. With this build it is a cakewalk to finish your atlas and get your first two voidstones, and it also allowed me to set up shop in delve and start producing raw materials in bulk. I think I have come to the realization that I am going to want an RF Jugg in every league given how much I have bonded with the playstyle, and given that it enables me to spend a large amount of time down in Delve. I did not record a video on this build until fairly late in the league and after I spent some currency on getting a Hinekora, Death’s Fury setup with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels. Once I ding 100 hopefully this week… I am going to shift over to trying to knock out all of the bosses with this character. I get into this pattern of not wanting to risk a death when I am gaining experience given that it slows down so much after level 95.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier Plus
Summon Raging Spirits Guardian
The Trial of the Ancestors League saw significant reworks of two Acendancies, the Templar Guardian and the Marauder Chieftain. In a desire to play with these, I decided to roll a Summon Raging Spirits build as I have often done in past leagues, but play it instead with the new Guardian Ascendancy. This build… is a miraculous powerhouse. This entirely rests upon the shoulders of the fact that the Guardian unique minions are so damned strong. From the very first Labyrinth, you end up getting something with the relative power of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and it can essentially carry you from that point forward. There is a reason why Guardian is the most popular Ascendancy in Ruthless League, making up over 14% of the player base and even higher if you get into the hardcore modes.
What I was not expecting necessarily is how good this felt mapping, because essentially you are using Convocation to keep dragging your pet RF Juggernaut as you shield charge through the map. Summon Raging Spirits always feels great when it comes to killing bosses, but the Sentinel of Radiance pet really makes the map clear in general feel so good. If this does not get nerfed… it is a strong contender for starting “Bel League” because after playing this in the Toucan Treasure Hunt, it can be functional with zero gear.
You can find my POB over on the POE.Ninja page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Storm Brand Inquisitor
It took me a few leagues before I reached a point where I truly understood how to build a character in this game. During Kalandra League I tried Storm Brand Inquisitor, and apparently thought that things like capping your resistances were a suggestion rather than a requirement. Last league, I gave the Explosive Arrow Champion a bit of a redemption arc, as I revisited the character I attempted to play in the Sentinel League and made it feel amazing. So this league I really wanted to do the same for Storm Brand Inquisitor to see what that build could do if I actually built it correctly. The end result… was pretty disappointing. Can it do a T16? Technically yes. Does it feel good doing a T16? Absolutely not.
There is admittedly part of me that wants to poke this with a stick until I figure out how to make it work. I might revisit it in future leagues and try and build it out to be a bit more viable. That said… doing what I did with Explosive Arrow and taking the same build, but just fixing my resistances… did not solve the problems with this build. The disturbing thing about it is that I actually did spend quite a bit on the build to get it to the sorry state that it is in currently. I’m sure given enough time I could get it feeling better, but I am just not sure it would ever feel the way I want it to feel.
For those curious you can see the POB at the time I recorded the above video.
Personal Rating: D Tier
Fire Shield Crush Chieftain
Since there were two ascendancies that changed with this league, and Guardian was so freaking amazing… I decided that I wanted to create something with a Chieftain. The obvious choice would have been Righteous Fire, but I did not really want to recreate that and eventually, I just stole the best node with forbidden flame/flesh for my main RF build. Another build that I have been wanting to play for some time is something built around Shield Crush, so I crudely banged these two build concepts together until something emerged. The end result was an armor-stacking fire damage conversion build that focused on igniting things with Shield Crush and waiting for them to explode with Hinekora, Death’s Fury.
In truth… it is a pretty fun build hampered a bit by the fact that I refused to spend the currency to take it to the next level. The best armor stackers tend to be built around the Duelist class because they can double dip in both Armor and then also convert Evasion over to armor which produces bigger numbers. Stacking armor directly relates to additional damage. The other problem is that the ideal chest piece for this build starts around 20 Divine and has the ability “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance”. As it stands my armor is over 100k with my flasks up, but with a chest like that, I could probably double that. All in all, it is a fun build, with a good map clear… but completely falls apart when it comes to killing bosses. If I were going to change anything, I would find a way to work in Vaal Breach as it would give me waves of fodder which would then hopefully proc Death’s Fury explosions helping me take down bosses faster.
My POB at the timeof recording the video.
Personal Rating: B Tier
Vaal Absolution Necromancer
During the Toucan Treasure Hunt private league, I opted to level up a SRS Guardian, just because that seemed so strong without needing to rely on any gear. There was a period while leveling where I was messing around with the Absolution skill, which while technically a minion ability is mostly just a big lightning strike that spawns minions that do similar lightning strikes. This prompted me to want to give the build a shot so I rolled a Witch and leveled it with Vaal Absolution eventually turning it into a Necromancer. First comment… I played a Necro because after playing two Guardians… I was reluctant to roll another one. That said… I feel like Absolution would be so much stronger if played with a Guardian mostly for the free elemental buffs and the chonky tanky fiery boi. That said the Necromancer version is quite a bit of fun and felt extremely comfortable clearing maps. If I were willing to put the same level of investment in this build that I had in other builds in this league, then I am sure it would be quite solid.
That said… the playstyle of standing still while you cast Absolution with Spell Echo left something to be desired. I didn’t really have any problems with taking Deaths while I was casting, but it did feel a little awkward and went afoul of my “always stay moving” sensibilities. I am not sure if I would ever play this again, but I certainly found it interesting.
My POB at the time of recording the video.
Personal Rating: B Tier
Magic Find Lightning Arrow Deadeye
Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and this league… it was a general sense of frustration over my league starter not feeling amazing. As the league was beginning to wind down I decided to go big instead of going home… and poured roughly 40 Divine Orbs into converting my build into the Magic Find variant that so many players were having good luck with this league. The end result has been an interesting experience. Deadeye is in fact the best choice for this sort of build with the Ranger class… but it is way the hell squishier than I am comfortable playing. Sure I can do pretty much all of the content and stack as many eldritch altars as I want… but if I fail to kill something before it looks at me… I fall over rather spectacularly.
Magic Find is also way more subtle than I would have expected. While I managed to make back a ton of currency largely in the form of Blue Altars that handed out Divine Orbs like candy… I didn’t really manage to find any big-ticket items apart from enough copies of The Fortunate to turn in for a couple of Divine Orbs. While I have run many Crimson Temples… I have yet to see a single Apothecary and I’ve not pulled four Headhunters or Magebloods like the magic find YouTubers would lead you to believe. Is it worth running Magic Find with this sort of build? That is highly likely because I made back the 40 Divines Spent on the build in roughly a week. Is playing a squishy glass cannon character doing it for me? Not really.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Vaal Lightning Arrow Champion
You would think that the whole magic find exercise would finally push Lightning Arrow out of my brain, but you would also be wrong. When I started my Raider version of this character, I thought long and hard about going with Champion. Champion is the “tanky” class for building a bow character, and I really loved my Explosive Arrow Champion last league. As the AggroChat crew is talking more and more about “Bel League” I decided I wanted to test a theory… that theory being that Champion would have made a much more drift-compatible version of Lightning Arrow than anything I had tried to date. So last week in a day and a half I leveled a new Champion character with Vaal Lightning Arrow and by Friday evening I had it geared and mapping.
This is a great character. It has all of the tankyness of a Champion with all of the killing power of the traditional Lightning Arrow builds. It suffers from the same challenge taking down bosses, but the sturdy nature of the build gives you plenty of time to dance around while waiting on your Artillery Ballista to burn the boss. Over the weekend I mapped with basically nothing but this character, and there were several times when I managed to run enough T16 maps to completely refill my sulphite without taking a single death. That in itself is huge, and I’m already sitting at level 90 and fully expect to be able to smoothly ascend past that level as though I were playing one of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut characters. I will absolutely build another one of these in “Bel League” pending there are no major nerfs to either Lightning Arrow or the Champion Class itself. I’ve also played this with Tornado Shot and Ice Shot… and while both are strong I just don’t enjoy them anywhere near as much.
My POB at the time of recording the video.
Personal Rating: S Tier
As I said at the start of this post, I think I am probably done rolling new characters for the rest of this league. I have a solid stable of characters and at least three of them that I enjoy greatly. I want to finish out level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I want to knock out a few more achievements toward the league challenges. I’m currently specced heavily into Ritual on my Atlas, so it should not take terribly long to reroll 25 more favors or get 4 more Blood-Filled Vessels. I could just buy the latter from the market, but I never really like doing that. I know starting tomorrow I want to spend some time playing Diablo IV Season 2 and giving it a fair shake. After that, I still want to pop into New World and see what the expansion is all about, and mostly level the new Flail weapon. Combined, these will likely take me all the way until December when the next league starts and we properly begin the “Bel League” private league thing. If there is a lull in the middle somewhere I might pick back up Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield… or potentially even start a new Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough to see all of the changes.
This morning however I wanted to give a proper rundown of my thoughts on all of the builds of the league. If I end up doing anything further, I might steal the Magic Find gear from my Deadeye and see if I can make something that still feels sturdy with the Champion. Anyways! I hope this week is great for you all. If you have made it this far in the post, I thank you for reading because I am certain there are folks out there who get very very sick of my nonsense.
The post 3.22 Builds In Review appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bit of a mixed bag of activities. I was back in Path of Exile and spent some time on my SRS Guardian. After playing a lot of my Storm Brand Build and Shield Crush Build… it honestly felt amazing to be back on this character. The strength levels of that build are just so much higher and honestly for so much less investment. I fear that this is going to mean that Guardian eats a few swings from the nerf bat before 3.23. If it remains intact, however, I am contemplating this as a league starter for the next go-around. You would have thought I had learned my lesson to stop trying to start something other than Righteous Fire, but legitimately… SRS Guardian feels equally as good and it reached a point of power way faster than RF usually does.
I spent a bit of the evening cleaning out monster parts from my stash tab. One of the things that I like about having Metamorph on my Atlas tree is that I am somewhat passively gaining monster bits and then can have an hour or so of constant fights in Tane’s chambers. Mostly I shifted to running Metamorph because the prices of catalysts are outrageous in this league. 20 Prismatic Catalysts to quality up a single resistance ring has been around 400 Chaos Orbs, which feels way too rich for my blood. There is also the side benefit that I have had pretty decent luck in getting raw Divine Orbs to drop from stomping monsters.
Another thing that I had some exceptional luck with, is that last night I saw three Voidborn Reliquary Keys. I sold two of these and decided to open one because it is always fun to gamble a little bit. While most folks seem to open these chasing a Mageblood or a Headhunter, I am honestly fine with anything else interesting that just happens to be shiny. Last night I pulled what I had honestly wanted all of this time… a Shiny Tabula Rasa. This will let me twink characters in style going forward… though honestly I am not sure how many more builds I am going to make this league.
I spent most of my evening down in Delve, slowly crawling my way across the randomized map. This really is my happy place when it comes to Path of Exile. I was chilled out sitting on the sofa with my laptop, a cat to my side, and listening to an audiobook. I found all three reliquary keys down in Delve last night, and to be truthful… most of them that I have found for the last few leagues all came from Delve. That makes sense because statistically, I am doing way more delve than I am doing any other content. I’m loosely looking for Fire-themed nodes because while I have a decent enough Flammability On Hit ring for the Shield Crush Chieftain, I could always use a slightly better itemized one. I’m also hunting for the parts for precursor rings because those are selling extremely well in this league.
Speaking of sales… the reliquary keys and a few other divine orb drops have helped me recover from the significant outlay of currency that I spent kitting out the Shield Crush Chieftain. I’ve started using POEStack to track my currency since Exilience Next appears to be toast at the moment. In truth, I think I like having a web app way more than a stand-alone desktop client. Additionally, if I ever do start selling on TFT, I will at least be very familiar with the interface. I know that I will probably spend most of that before I gather much more, because I seem to always be funding the next idea that I want to play. I still want to try something with cyclone, but that seems to be always on the far horizon and not something that I am actively doing.
The last thing I guess I will talk a bit about this morning is that I finished up The Final Empire the first book in the initial Mistborn Trilogy. It took me forever to read anything by Brandon Sanderson, but now that I have… I understand what all the hype has been about. The world that he built and the characters in it were deeply enjoyable. I know without a doubt that I am going to be consuming the next two books in rapid order. I really enjoyed the way magic worked in this world and I look forward to seeing how the character of Vin continues to evolve. There is this whole part Shinobi part Jedi thing going on that I dig and I genuinely like a lot of the background characters as well.
I think tonight I will probably be back in Diablo III, working on chipping away at some more of the seasonal achievements. While I am enjoying myself there, I don’t find the gameplay anywhere near as compelling as Path of Exile. It is a heck of a lot of fun, but the dopamine hits are nowhere near as potent.
The post A Shiny Tabby appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! I am going to warn you that this post is going to get a little bit into the weeds on Path of Exile and the trade economy. One of the hallmarks of the last two leagues is how much I have interacted with Trade. The YouTuber/Streamer Jorgen set me down the path of Delve because as he puts it “Delve Provides” and it most certainly does when it comes to a good number of things that can be sold for reasonable value. Items have value in Path of Exile if they are either scarce, come from a particular source, or are a combination of the two. Delve is not what you would call well-loved by the majority of the player base. Mapping is by far the most popular method of play because folks like blasting through maps and seeing explosions of loot. Comparatively, Delve tends to be a bit more slow and methodical.
Delve sees you focus on plotting a course across the underground map looking for high-value nodes. For example in this screenshot above there are six Abyssal City nodes, 2 Fossil nodes, and 1 Fire node which are all things I would seek out specifically. Abyssal City nodes have a number of chests inside that all reward a bunch of useful things and can provide dozens of maps for example on a single node. Fossil nodes have a chance of spawning rare and expensive nodes like the Glyphic Fossil that goes for around 130 Chaos each. Fire nodes and more specifically all elemental nodes have a chance of dropping items that can only be found in delve like curse on hit rings and specific damage conversion items. Delve is really good at producing items that when sold add up to lots of Chaos, but not terribly great at producing raw Divine Orbs.
Traditionally I have avoided currency conversion because it is tedious. Last league for example I wound up with roughly 12,000 Chaos Orbs or the equivalent of over 52 Divine Orbs that just sat there taking up space in my bank. Generally speaking the method for converting currency is to use the Bulk Trade tool on the official Path of Exile website. In truth, it is pretty straight forward. On one side you outline the bulk currency that you are looking for, and on the other side, you fill in which currency you want to pay in. Then the trade site returns you a group of listings of folks willing to accept your currency for the currency you need and what sort of exchange rate they are willing to trade at.
Here is an example listing when I searched for Divine Orbs for Chaos Orbs. The first listing is very clearly someone who does not understand the trade syntax because no one is trying to give you 237 Divine Orbs for a Single Chaos. The second listing looks like someone trying to bring down the cost of Divines and as a result is very unlikely to respond. From 225 Chaos to a Divine down… those are probably legitimate posts. The reality however is that in order for me to actually find a seller, I would likely have to go through the entire page sending a tell… waiting for a response… and then moving to the next person. This is the sad reality of buying items in bulk because quite honestly… being able to handle a bulk trade is tedious. You need to empty out your inventory of items and then prepare to accept the trade. Given how little luck I have had buying Divines, I just generally left my Chaos in the raw form and begged people to accept Chaos instead of Divines when I needed to buy something.
I’ve credited Jorgen for really stoking my interest in Delve. It was a game mode that I enjoyed, but I never really viewed it as a reliable source of currency generation until watching a few of his videos. His slogan is “Delve Provides” but in reality, my slogan should probably be “Jorgen Provides”. About a week ago he released this video talking about how he exchanges Chaos for Divines and it is fairly brilliant. Sadly to do it efficiently you really need a second currency tab. Last weekend thanks to the predictable cadence of Path of Exile sales saw another Stash Tab weekend, and I picked up a second currency tab almost exclusively for the purpose of selling bulk currency. Since then I have made several bulk trades and it has really changed the game for me on how I view the trade economy.
Essentially the logic is that you want to be the seller as often as humanly possible, and very rarely the buyer. Buying gear is relatively straightforward, and you have fairly good luck with that. Buying currency in bulk is a miserable mess. You could of course lean on something like The Forbidden Trove, but that is a bridge I have not really been willing to cross yet. Per Jorgen, I started listing 1880 Chaos Orbs for 5 Divine Orbs, and it is shocking just how fast I get pinged by someone looking to buy Chaos for Divines. There is a certain push and pull of the economy between folks who hold currency in Divines and folks who hold currency in Chaos Orbs. My preferred game mode of choice produces lots of raw Chaos, and I need Divines just to make larger trades a bit more simplistic. Being able to sell Chaos in bulk means I have a very simple way of doing the swap without needing to rely on spam messaging a dozen folks to find a single nibble.
Once I knew this was a thing, I noticed that there is a heck of a lot of players out there trying to take this stance. If you search on the bulk trade side for 1 Divine Orb, without any selection on your input currency you end up with a wealth of random bulk items that folks are looking to acquire. So now that I have a spare currency stash tab, that opens things up like if I know I need to buy something in bulk I can throw a Divine in that tab and price it out in the currency I am looking to receive. So for example if I want Orbs of Fusing to six link something the going rate for that seems to be around 1220 fusing to 1 Divine Orb. The challenge with this however is that you can only hold a total of 1200 fusing in your inventory. This means you need to be VERY careful about trades that require you to produce more than a single inventory because it is essentially on the honor system for them to trade you the rest of your goods. It is far safer just to expect that you are going to lose a little bit of currency in the transaction.
I’ve been using that second currency tab to facilitate a bunch of sales lately. I’ve sold off bulk Awakened Sextants, Silver Coins for the league content, and even started selling my Stacked Decks. More importantly, any time I hit around 3000 Chaos Orbs, I sell off another 1880 for 5 Divines meaning that I am never really at risk of either running out of Chaos for small trades or flooding my stash tab with bulk Chaos. In theory, I am sure there is someone out there doing the other side of this trade for Mirror Shards and eventually Mirrors to keep condensing down their currency into larger and larger “denominations”. I’ve made and spent more Divine Orbs in this league than I have in the past, and I really wish I had been using some sort of tool to track this more closely. For example, the above screenshot is from a website called POEStack which can be used to track your currency tabs. I think going forward and for new leagues, I might utilize this a bit earlier so I can get some proper statistics for the league as a whole.
I know however that I am leaving a lot of currency on the table because while I am a member of The Forbidden Trove, I’ve never actually used it for any trades. I’ve been here for a couple of leagues now because I wanted to see how that side of the community lives. Essentially if you can’t sell it easily through the trade site, there is a channel devoted to it. For example, if you want to liquidate a bunch of Heist contracts in bulk… they got you covered. If you want one of the rare hideouts that can only be found every so often in specific maps… there is a channel for folks selling access to their party so that you can pop in and discover the hideout. If you need Betrayal in a very specific state so that you can do one of the rare crafts, there are folks selling those as well. All of it is above board, and governed by a reputation system… but has just been too much for me to wrap my head around. However, I can see myself sliding into that community as I continue to dive deeper and deeper into the trade economy.
Path of Exile really is the EVE Online of ARPGs… where the further you dive into it the deeper the well keeps getting. While I have no real interest in playing EVE, I have always appreciated when my friend Wilhelm talks about that community. I am hoping someone out there feels the same way about my Path of Exile nonsense, because otherwise… I am deeply sorry I keep filling your RSS reader with this nonsense. It interests me greatly and as such… I hate to say that it is probably only going to get worse from here.
The post Flipping the Trade appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
