Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.
I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.
I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.
This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.
The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.
Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.
Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.
Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.
The post Birbsieged appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I promise I had zero intent to just nope out of blog posting for an entire week… but that is pretty much what happened. One of the early rules that I set aside for myself is that I would never work on my birthday if I could help it. As a result I take it off every year, in this year it landed in the middle of the week. We also had Juneteenth off as a federal holiday… which caused me to also take Friday off. Then if I was taking that much of a the week off… might as well take Monday and Tuesday off as well. So essentially I scope crept my way into an entire week of vacation, during which we did several home improvement projects and also… got sick. While we have not taken tests… because all of ours were expired… symptomatically it has seemed a lot like the current strain of Covid. During that time I attempted to play some Path of Exile and made solid progress… and get silly amounts of enjoyment out of running around with my Merc, Einhar, and Huck in an impromptu party.
Right now I am essentially running two trees, with my third completely unspecced at the moment. I will probably go some sort of Harbinger tree for that one. Essentially I have a right side tree where I focus on Niko and Delve, with Harvest crafting, and all of the good strongbox and shrine nodes in addition to the Blue Altars. Then on the left hand side I have a way more rippy tree with perm Delirium, Einhar, Huck, Ritual, Beyond, and Orange Altars. Essentially what determines which tree I am running is how much I want to Delve at that very moment. The rippy tree is largely designed to try and farm up either an Omen of Connections for a Black Morrigan for the purpose of crafting six linked gear. The Niko tree is mostly about getting crafting options either through Delve and Resonators or Harvest rerolls. The general idea behind both is to be as self sufficient as I can be, because while I do actively trade… I don’t necessarily like spending currency on things.
I’m honestly pretty proud of myself, because I have been crafting a lot more items than normal. The introduction of Shaper and Elder Exalted orbs has been a game changer for me. Normally I would shop for a cheap base that was influenced to begin crafting on, but now… I can set aside good bases while delving and mapping and then throw an exalt on it to start the crafting process. At the moment Elder Exalts seem to be going for around 10 chaos, and Shaper Exalts 20 chaos… so pretty reasonable. Since I can get them from the exchange, I also do not have to rely on trying to find someone willing to trade me a relatively low value item. The longer you go into the league… the harder it is to find anyone willing to stop what they are doing for less than a stack of chaos. Even then… a lot of players only want to stop the action for divs. Essentially I crafted the shield and gloves by doing Harvest Reroll Life until I hit something reasonable, and the helmet by doing Harvest Reroll Fire. I went through SO MUCH purple juice… and I still have a backup helm that I am working on to try and potentially craft a 20/20 gem helm with.
Honestly most of my trading… has been for gearing my Mercenary. I am running a tri-elemental crafted bow with around 1100 dps and then every other slot is a unique of some sort giving some benefit. Essentially the idea behind the build is that all damage freezes, shocks, and chills and then using Pyroshock Clasp to convert 15% phys to Fire and 15% phys to Lightning. So my Merc is Chilling, Freezing, Shocking, Igniting, and Scorching everything that I am engaged with while converting 30% of mob Physical damage to Elemental. Then good ole Leer Cast gives me and my Merc a 50% damage boost. I was basically tipped off to this course by Llarold from Path of Evening, and it seems to work well for me given that I am mostly using bow mercenaries. To make things a bit more clear here is a full listing of all of the uniques and links to the POE Wiki.
Weapon – Tri-Elemental Bow as high dps as you can afford
I was using Gruthkul’s Pelt for a bit but noticed it was keeping my Merc from casting certain abilities. This was not the case early on, but I think something might have been patched to make the “your spells are disabled” line to actually apply to Mercenaries. The boots are another slot that might be worth evaluating because Scorched is only useful for elemental builds, and you might benefit more from dropping brittle ground or something like that.
As far as Mercenaries go, I am largely using one of two archetypes… either the Sniper shown above, or Manyshots which focuses on Icicle Rain and Ice Shot. I really like the Sniper and essentially at this point I am fishing for an “Infamous” version of either the Manyshot or Sniper, with a good skill loadout. Not all Mercs are created equal and while I found a higher level Manyshot, it did not have the Icicle Rain ability that makes it so effective. I should probably start exiling Mercs in the hope that maybe it will cause the bow mercs that I actually care about to spawn more frequently. For the most part having a level 83 Merc means that it stays alive 99.9% of the time. There are a few cases where detonate dead or other onerous area of effect spells will kill them, because they have no AI to avoid them.
As far as progression goes, I have completed the story version of the new boss fights which has permanently changed my Atlas to be this Zana themed incarnation. On Saturday I finished my 115 of 115 and got my four void stones, and now I am just working on unlocking the last few map favorite slots. I am alternating between Primordial Blocks and Shipyard, largely because I really want the hideout from Primordial Blocks. Essentially you need two linked maps to sustain drops without having to buy maps. Essentially if I am running Blocks I set all of my favorites to Shipyard, and then flip back when I start running the Blocks maps that I have been collecting. Essentially every league that has Primordial Blocks… I focus on running it so I can chase the damned hideout that never seems to spawn. I did get the Divided Hideout to spawn when I ran Twilight Temple and shouted out to the SirGog Global channel that I use in case someone needed. I think I got three people to zone in and grab the thing before giving up and moving on with my life.
I’ve been having a heck of a lot of fun, even though I am largely the only person playing in the league from the AggroChat crew. I really hope that Mercenaries or some version of them goes core, because they add a lot of interesting dimension to build craft. You can essentially do what I am doing and use them to augment your dps and provide debuffing of targets to make combat easier… or you can convert them into a full on aura bot that buffs your own damage output. This was honestly one of my favorite things about Diablo III, once you began being able to equip the followers there with items that would grant you buffs. I’m also pretty happy with the current state of Kingsmarch and while I am not as focused on it as I was last league, I am still occasionally running shipments to get good stuff.
All in all I am having a lot of fun with this league. Are you playing? If so what are your favorite bits so far? Drop me a line below.
The post Gearing My Mercenary appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
The Nintendo Switch 2 has been out for long enough that folks have really gotten some time to play Mario Kart World, and we discuss some of its features. We also talk a bit about the Donkey Kong Direct and the upcoming game releasing in July. It is the second week of Path of Exile 3.26, and Bel talks about his progress so far and some of the finer details of Mercenaries. We talk briefly about the news that Marathon has been delayed to an indefinite date in the future, but that Sony is still talking about it like it is a thing. Ash shares some thoughts about Siralim Ultimate and the upcoming 2.0 patch. We then devolve into some nonsense about Dune Awakening as we discuss recent happenings on our private server.
Good Morning Folks. Friday was the launch of the 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas/Mercenaries of Trarthus League in Path of Exile… and it was a bit rough. There was a pretty critical issue that seemed to plague folks randomly involving logging into any characters in the league. It was roughly an hour and a half before this got fixed, and it bit enough streamers that GGG essentially decided that they would be having a second league start race for anyone bit by the issue. I was impacted and essentially any time I waded through the queue I would bounce back to the login screen with the above “An unexpected disconnection occurred”. There were all manner of superstitions that sprung up about it being specific to individual regional servers, or requiring you to change your video drivers… but ultimately it was just something on the GGG side and they patched it allowing everyone to log in. There were still some pretty persistent issues on the European servers however, and Zizaran for example said that he lost 16 maps from getting disconnected in the middle and coming back in with no portals up.
The thing that likely slowed me down the most however was wanting to play with the league mechanic, and purposefully seeking Mercenaries out in every zone that I entered. I struggled with my very first merc, but once I got my hands on one of the bow mercs… they largely carried me through large chunks of content. The wiki is not terribly updated yet with mercenary types but they have quite a few of the strength based ones up now, so I can only assume they are working through the deluge of new data. I really feel like Mercenaries are a game changer for a bunch of reasons… but mostly because unlike other games with companions there is a heck of a lot of gameplay decisions involved. In Diablo III for example you just throw on specific items and they grant you permanent buffs for having one out. In this game there is an opportunity cost to hiring them, because you can’t then steal gear from them.
Most of the gear that I am wearing currently, I stole from Mercenaries. They seem to be mostly using gear with the well rolled gear tree, similar to how shipments did in Kingsmarch. This means that they are equipped with gear that makes sense for the specific type of Mercenary class that they are. A bow Mercenary for example… will probably have a pretty decent bow equipped or a Wand Mercenary a pair of well rolled wands that make sense for their elemental archetype. This also means though that as the player… we can snag pretty juicy items from the Mercenaries that we encounter in maps. Sure the big win items tend to be uniques and large stacks of currency… but I personally used them as a want to keep finding upgrades, and at this point I have not really needed to buy or craft much of anything. I am sure as I keep improving my build I will want to min-max items but for now… They have provided a really good source of gearing with everything in the above image being pulled from Mercs, including a 5-Link chest.
Right now the most impactful Mercs for me personally, seem to be the bow based ones that help with general clear speed. Right now I am running a Toxicologist which is kitted out to deal chaos damage with toxic rain and chaotic burst/shot and provides me the Malevolence aura which I do not need to run, and can focus on things that make me more tanky instead. As I keep moving up in level I will keep trying to find new copies of this same archetype which should be kitted out with pretty similar items. The Manyshots archetype is also pretty great because it is all centered around Ice damage which chills, slows, and freezes incoming packs of mobs. Thunderquiver is another pretty great Mercenary type because they are essentially the Lighting Arrow Deadeye that was so popular from a few leagues ago. Unfortunately the burning arrow Merc does not really seem to do that much damage, so while the alignment of fire damage would work since I am debuffing targets resistance due to my ascendancy… it never seem to do much and they were not providing any complimentary buffs to me.
At this point I have unlocked my fourth ascendancy because I got a goddess token down in Delve. I am slowly starting to break the mines but it is slow going. I am only about 10 maps into my Atlas because I did not actually make it to maps until yesterday evening. Between the rough start Friday, Father’s Day travel yesterday, and me just generally piddling around with the Mercenary mechanic I have been moving exceptionally slow. My hope is that tonight I will be able to make some real progress, but the changes to how Kirac missions work will probably slow that down a bit. You cannot unlock maps by running Kirac missions at lower tiers than the maps normally appear. This is going to greatly devalue putting points into Kirac on the atlas in order to speed through the 115 map unlocks.
As far as uniques go, I’ve pulled a couple of Immortal Flesh off Mercenaries, including the one that I show above. I have a Cloak of Flame that I am trying to five link, and after wasting so many fusings on it… I have a feeling I am just going to be better off waiting until I have the recipe to do it. I also picked up a Rise of the Phoenix which should be a good item until I make the switch over to a Shaper shield, and drop purity of elements. We are dealing with an inflation league so fair warning, because normally I can pick up all of these items for a few chaos… and I had to give 50c for both the Shield and the Chestpiece. Everything seems to be more expensive, because Mercenaries are a fairly reliably source of Chaos. More than that however I seem to be getting more currency drops than I would normally during a league. This could be just a side effect of the loot bonus of running with a Mercenary, or there could have been some fundamental changes in the way drops occur that were not well documented.
I’ve also unlocked Kingsmarch, but since you have to have 50,000 value to send a shipment… that means I am going to be sending WAY fewer shipments and not needing to micromanage it quite as much. The fully built out town is much nicer, and all of the hired hands seem to cap out at tier 5. So in theory it should be easier to fully kit out your town and get it up and running. I did notice that they seemed to have improved the gold drops down in Delve significantly so I am hoping that I will not be quite as starved for gold in this league. Mostly I am in that awkward phase where I just need a lot more time to progress my way through both Delve and Atlas and keep improving my character. Once I can equip the Cloak of Flames without giving up anything… it should wildly improve my survival. There are a few items that I am looking out for that would benefit equipping on the merc, but I am in no real rush.
How was your league start? Were you bit by the disconnection bug? How are you liking the Mercenaries so far? Drop me a line below and let me know.
The post A Rough Start appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
