Good Morning, Folks. For the last few weeks, my default gaming activity has been playing Diablo 4. More specifically, playing a Thorns Paladin at first and then switching it over to a Hammer/Arbiter Paladin to push a little further. I felt I hit a wall with Thorns around Torment IV, and that was what prompted me to the build that Raxx had been promoting to see if I could make it further. I could a bit, and now can pretty comfortably do Torment VIII Content, but tend to run Torment VII because it goes much faster. The big problem is that this build was supposed to be something that I could cakewalk Torment XII with, and so far, it has not been that. My time to kill, especially in the pit, is abysmal. I’ve technically unlocked Torment IX, but just barely by the skin of my teeth. I think I am just getting tired of pushing the build, and in theory, need to scrutinize and probably recraft every single piece of my gear to get further, since I cannot seem to get any Mythic Uniques to actually drop.
What I had been grinding so damned hard for was an Ancestral copy of Judgment of Auriel. I finally got that to drop off Lord Zir, and the difference that it made in the build was negligible. Maybe Torment VIII got a bit more comfortable, but nothing really to write home about. I thought maybe there was some hidden multiplier that I was not getting for not having a full set of Ancestral gear equipped, but that does not appear to be the case. The problem is that Ancestral drops still feel extremely rare events, especially from uniques at Torment VIII. It took me probably 60 kills before Lord Zir finally dropped the item I was after, and it took me farming the mercenary favors to get those boss summoning keys. It feels like I have a much harder time getting the keys for the low-level bosses than I do the grand keys for the bigger bosses. Something is not right here, and I hope they sort it out in the coming seasons.
I’ve also had zero luck with Echo of Lilith. I can get her down to around 20% life and then something oneshots me, so I guess I need to spend some time studying videos on this fight. I honestly hate shit like that, when bosses have oneshot mechanics. ARPGs for me are about gaining enough stats to steamroll over the top of content. This is why I hate Maven so much in Path of Exile, because there is no way I can cheese that fight. Bossing in general is not my jam, because I do not want to barely win. I want to crush the monsters and take away tasty loot as a result. At least in Path of Exile, I have done almost all of the fights; I just dislike them. I know Ace, and I have taken down Lilith as a team before, so I just need to figure out where I need to stand during that oneshot phase because it wasn’t really clearly telegraphed. It is also weird that I have to specifically do it on Torment VIII since many of the previous ranks required things way lower than that, and it feels like this one jumped several torment levels at once.
I had mostly been focused on grinding out tokens for the armor sets, because I have completed all of the other reliquaries, but not this one. I’ve gotten the shield and three of the armor sets, but I just do not know if I have it in me to keep grinding. These tokens come pretty slowly through doing content, and I am just not sure I have it in me to grind it out. The last one I picked up was for Spiritborn, which I did mostly because I lack a lot of armor sets that I really like for that class. I have plenty of armor sets for Barbarian, so that will probably be my last if I manage to grind these out. I did manage to grind out the limited-time World of Warcraft reliquary, but now there is nothing left to do with the tokens that I am generating through gameplay. I spent a bit of time playing Path of Exile, and doing maps… and I have to be honest, the moment-to-moment gameplay in that game just feels better. In truth, Diablo IV is at the bottom of the ARPG pecking list for me. If there is a Path of Exile, Last Epoch, or Path of Exile II league in that pecking order… I will choose those before playing Diablo IV. I might even choose fresh Titan Quest II content over Diablo IV, and that is not to say that D4 is a bad game… just that the others are giving me more of what I want.
There is also the problem that we are now roughly eleven days out from a new Path of Exile II league. Return of the Ancients looks wild, and I am here for everything that it is doing. I just have to figure out a class that will be both fun to level and powerful in the endgame. Since I am very much interested in Raven Righteous Fire, I am contemplating going Lich or Infernalist and a traditional Summon Raging Spirits start. I like spamming temporary minions because it feels like I am doing something other than just dragging around an army. I also know the leveling for this sort of build is pretty chill, and I like chill leveling. I am really curious how fast I can get through the campaign with the most recent round of updates to make signposting of content a bit easier to find. More than anything, though, I am somewhat excited to see the updated versions of various leagues and am wondering how much of that will trickle down into Path of Exile, the game I care about the most.
Anyways. I think I am out of things to talk about for this Monday morning. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and as always, feel free to drop me a line if you want to contest anything that I have said.
The post Winding Down Diablo appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. The other day I talked about the build that I had been cooking up centered around the new unique staff called The Broken Elegy. When I wrote about it, I was still leveling, but having a great time doing so. Ultimately I went with Guardian, not necessarily because I thought it would be the best option, but more because it would be the most enjoyable leveling path. Essentially, once you get your Sentinel of Radiance online, aka Butter Boy, you can face roll the campaign from that point forward, and you can pick him up in the first lab. It ends up playing like a slightly delayed version of Righteous Fire, because you charge into a pack of mobs, convocate him into the middle, and his burning aura pretty much obliterates everything instantly. Technically, The Broken Elegy would probably have been better served by a Necromancer, and most definitely would be better served by the Servant of Arakaali. However, Guardian puts me in the right corner of the tree for Staff defenses, and also has its own benefits, so I rolled with it.
As is the tradition when I do something dumb… I record one of my dumb little videos. I am not doing anything terribly challenging, but essentially, as soon as I exited the campaign, I rolled straight into t16 maps. Technically, I ran a single T10 just to see how it was going, and after stomping all over that, I ripped the band-aid off. The biggest challenge that I think I am running into is simply having too many minions for any of them to be doing effective damage. You already run into this problem with just Raging Spirits sometimes, but in total, I have 43 minions… and that is before I take into account the Greater Skeletal Shrine belt that I am running. Look… I completely understand that this is a dumb idea, but I am having fun… and quite frankly, that is the most important part of any build. I have noticed that things die faster if I stop summoning Raging Spirits, but when it comes to clearing maps… having so many aggressive minions means that they just sort of spread out and lay waste to everything.
I’ve been using them to farm Legion, because I have been trying to get a bunch of the new honoured incubators so I can stockpile some of the imbuement coins. This is not really working out as I had hoped, but I am still enjoying running something like six legions per map. I have a ton of emblems, and those will ultimately come in handy when it comes to doing some of the league challenges. Maps take way too long right now with the Mirages for me to efficiently do any sort of targeted farm, because I cannot seem to bring myself to ignore mechanics. Effectively, I am sort of this worse version of SSF, where I play in trade… but still feel like I want to farm almost everything myself. I would be so much better off if I just focused on a single mechanic and then used it to make currency, which I then spent on other things. However, that does not bring me joy. Sure, I like being able to buy the items that I cannot be bothered to farm, but if I can farm it… I want to farm it.
Speaking of buying things… I am using name-brand corpses for the very first time. In the past, these have always been super freaking expensive, but for some reason this league, they are all cheap. Perfect Turtles are only around 20 Chaos right now, and in theory, I should probably buy a bunch of them to stockpile for when I eventually kill one of these and cannot get it back somehow. Perfect Forest Warriors were less than 10c, and I am running a 5c Perfect Hulking Miscreation because apparently Raging Spirits count as constructs, and it buffs those nicely. Running the Forest Warrior provides Onslaught, which is going to allow me to rework my tree a bit at some point… because I no longer need the node that gives my minions Onslaught. I might end up rolling a cluster jewel and switching over to that, because there is an entire upper branch of my tree layout that is progressively becoming less optimal.
Speaking of less than optimal, I did zero planning for this build and sort of just winged it as I went. Mostly, I typed “Minion|Life|Block” into the search bar and routed around as many of those nodes as I could make happen easily. At the suggestion of Kodra, I just now pathed down to pick up Divine Shield, and that seems to help out considerably and makes my 2000 energy shield a bit more useful. With the Guardian Turtle, I have around 9000 armor, and around 4500 without it, so I am still going to never run into problems with regenerating my entire energy shield if needed. I realistically probably have more than enough survival… but I have considered doing the terribly dumb thing of going six life masteries for the 10% life boost. I feel like I have plenty of damage for what I want to do with this build. I could stack more minion damage, and probably should… but I am not as motivated by “number goes up” as I am doing dumb things that I find enjoyable.
I have zero doubt that proper minion players will be turning their noses up at what I am doing, and that is okay. I do think at some point, someone terribly more clever than I am… will build around The Broken Elegy and make it really strong. It seems like a crazy item, especially if you could figure out a way to make the minions that it spawns a little more reliable. I believe they are inheriting everything that I am currently doing to buff my Raging Spirits, which should mean they are pretty potent already. I should probably actually drop the whole imbue thing that I am trying and just go with a 21/20 Raging Spirits gem instead. I am not that certain that Imbues have turned out to be as much power as I was hoping they would be. They are also really freaking painful to try and land something useful on, because I am building this graveyard of bricked gems that makes me more than a little sad inside. I know I will be taking a break this week to play the new Last Epoch season, but at some point, once that has run its cours,e I will be returning to grind out more challenges here and having fun doing so.
The post Way Too Many Minions appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the launch of World of Warcraft Midnight, and given that I have been talking about WoW in general for several days, it probably seems likely that I would be talking about it this morning. However, you would be wrong, because yesterday was something way more important to me. We got the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.28, the Mirage League, and holy crap was it a banger of a league announcement. I highly suggest you watch the 40+ minute content reveal trailer yourself, but this morning, I am going to talk about some of the highlights and lowlights. Much like last league, this is a league where we are filling some of the gaps in lore between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I am fully on board with this, and I feel like this is happening in part because, apparently, Kitten Cat Noodle is how working for GGG as a Narrative Designer. For those not aware of her work, she was essentially the maintainer of the best lore resources that we had for the game, as she went act by act and league mechanic by league mechanic, explaining the lore behind them.
The league mechanic itself is pretty wild. Essentially, you will be able to enter imperfect copies of sections of the current map, and in them, every single mechanic will be duplicated in one form or another. It might not be the exact same strongbox, but there will be a strongbox in the mirage. When entering, you will be asked to choose one of three wishes that will mutate the results of the miraged area and stack with the existing map modifiers that you already have in place. Some of the ones that they showed off were the ability to have it so that all wisdom and portal scrolls dropped as some other form of currency, or that you gain the Souleater buff for the entire time you are in the miraged area. This should lead to some weird and wild juicing strategies, but since I am mostly an alch and go andy… this is just going to mean I have more mechanics on my map, which will be a welcome addition for certain.
The miraged areas can drop a currency that allows you to corrupt your gems to add an additional modifier to them. This is probably the piece of the league that I am the most excited about, and honestly, part of why I am contemplating going Righteous Fire again. I am curious what having a seven-link fire trap and a seven-link righteous fire are going to feel like. That applies to pretty much anything, though. It seems like the extra support is only going to be level one, so you are going to need to make sure you get specific supports instead of just anything viable. For example, with Righteous Fire, I will probably want Efficacy support if at all possible, because that is one of those gems that levels matter less than others. The only thing that concerns me is if the list of available supports is going to be pretty limited based on the combinations that GGG thinks should go together, not necessarily what players actually use together. I am thinking about the POE2 suggestion system, for example, where a lot of the links that you want on your build are not suggested by the UI.
The Atlas is also being entirely reworked. I was a Sentinel League baby, since that was the first time I got through the campaign and saw maps. As a result, I have never known anything other than the current Atlas, and while I know some other things existed before… I have never played with them. Essentially, the Atlas is being divided up into quadrants and then we will be able to apply influence regions within that quadrant. Each influenced map you complete increases the juiciness of the next in the cluster, all of which seems really cool. More importantly, though, they are splitting map tiers from maps on the atlas, meaning you can run any map at any tier at any moment. This feels essentially like a much better version of the POE2 waystone situation, but instead of relying on random maps on a Delve like endless atlas… we get to run whatever maps we want. The voidstones no longer elevate tiers of the map, and instead apply buffs to the map. The voidstones themselves are changing, and it seems like you will be able to get to three pretty easily, with the fourth still being the maven grind. I will likely continue to pay for a carry there because I hate having to do that many witnessed maps when I could be running altars instead.
So let’s talk about some of the bad things… nerfs. Some of my go-to builds have been Storm Brand of Indecision, Penance Brand of Dissipation, and Ice Trap of Hollowness… and all three of those ate some pretty significant nerfs. First off, Elementalist, which is the base that I would have built around, lost its increase to the Golem buff effect, meaning that every single Golem buff is just a little bit weaker now. Next up, Storm Brand and Penance Brand ate some pretty massive top-end nerfs across the board, making them way less viable to play. My most recent Ice Trapper build was a Golem Elementalist and relied on two Foulborn uniques… both of which ate significant nerfs. Double explode Berek’s Respite rings are no longer a thing… and Foulborn Tulborn can no longer roll with +4 cold gem levels… so I am losing a single gem level there. My other go-to build is Righteous Fire, and Chieftain explodes now deals less damage but procs twice as often… which Pohx thinks is going to be a net positive. Foulborn Red Dream, however, is going to provde 25% less life gain per Fire Resistance node… but still it is probably one of the best options we can slot into the tree. The total health levels of a Chieftain, though, are going to be a bit lower as a result.
There are a whole bunch of new Holy Skills going into the game, which I honestly think is probably a beta test for the Paladin class going into Path of Exile 2. I have to admit a lot of these look really interesting, and it is highly likely that I am going to roll some form of a Guardian before the end of this league and dive deep into maybe the Holy Slam skill. Kodra, right now, is eyeing some sort of Holy Damage minions build since one of the new abilities spawns temporary minions that he can then buff, and also run Herald of Purity for more holy minions. Since it ate zero nerfs, I still feel like Poison SRS is going to be strong, but unfortunately, Servant of Arakaali did not go core as I had hoped. Per Ghazzy, Minions apparently were buffed in general, so it might be a really good league for minions. If you can get level 30 Raise Spectres, they now become level 85 instead of level 81. To get there, though, you have to rely on a bunch of probably expensive corrupts.
While I am exceptionally pumped about the league in general… I am torn as to what I want to play. A couple of the things I considered starting ate nerfs, so essentially I will either go Minions or lean back on good old familiar Righteous Fire. I honestly kind of want to see what the Hinekora procs feel like and if they really do make mapping feel better. That means I am more than likely going to roll an RF Chieftain again and then branch out from there and make a Holy Slam Guardian and maybe a Poison Minions character. Sentinel of Radiance got some significant buffs, so Fire Damage Guardian SRS might be the play as well. In theory, once you get your first lab… You will be a monster and be able to face roll the rest of the campaign. That is mighty freaking tempting, especially now that I know how to build a proper block character and make them feel really damned tanky. I am sure I will be indecisive right up until the point that I roll a character late Friday evening… at which point I will probably just make a gut choice and run with something.
Are you excited about 3.28 Mirage League? What are you looking at playing? Drop me a line below.
The post Mirage Reveal Stream appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. We’ve gotten a timetable for the release of 3.28, which is going to drop on March 6th, with the big reveal stream taking place on the 26th of February. It is super fucking rare that I am still playing Path of Exile when the new expansion drops, but for better or worse, the Legacy of Phrecia event has held my attention. BelLovesArakaali might be my favorite minions character ever, and this is the first time I am playing with Spectres or Animate Guardian since they did some major quality of life improvements. What has surprised me about this character is just how much damage it deals… allowing me to focus on more survival. This might be the tankiest minions character I have ever played. Granted, I am still in the process of “breaking into” delve, but I am doing shockingly well down in the mines. It is not like resonators are really worth much of anything, but I still enjoy Delve even if it is not worth tons of currency.
Right now, I am mostly going horizontal at 100ish depth so that I can collect Azurite and start building out the rest of the trappings of Delve. I have reasonable resistance and light area for this level, and am slowly starting to increase the amount of sulphite that I can carry. Once I get a bit more unlocked, I will drop down to the 200ish depth so I can hopefully start getting Primordial Cities and maybe Aul fights. I really should be focusing on bossing with this character because that seems to be its true strength. When all of my minions are focused on the same target, it just sort of melts. I am curious how the Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch go when I unlock them, because the earlier fights aka Blackstar and Shrek, did not even get to a transition phase. I am going to do my best to get my four voidstones on my own, because I think Maven, Shaper, Elder, and Uber Elder are going to melt.
I really need 21/20 gems for Animate Guardian and Raise Spectre, but both are sitting at stupid prices right now. I am not making a ton of currency, so I can’t really afford either. Which means I probably need to pick up a good six socket staff and level up 3 guardians and 3 spectres at a time, and try to corrupt my own 21/20. I hate leveling gems, but if I start doing that… and also keep playing content, I will either get the divines needed to buy the gem outright or get gems to corrupt, either way. I am bad about not leveling gems in the weapon swap set, and I should really be better about that. While I play in a trade league, I greatly prefer being as self-sufficient as I can possibly be. One thing that I wish they would change in POE1 is make it so you only get 4 quality items to max out quality on a gem socket, or a flask. That honestly is the most painful thing about leveling gems: needing to get the gemcutters’ prisms.
Speaking of corruption projects, I picked up a second Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, and tried corrupting both my current copy and my new copy. One of them managed to hit 10% chance to Gain Onslaught for 4 Seconds on Kill, and this does, in fact, count minion kills. So this allowed me to drop my Onslaught flask and swap over to a Gold Flask for some additional rarity. Onslaught doesn’t really do much of anything for me except for the slight speed boost, but I am still happy to have it. I wish it applied to my minions. I wish there were something akin to Spiritual Aid that made buffs on me apply to the minions. That, however, would likely make everything highly broken, since you can target way more buffs at yourself than you can at your minions easily. I am really hoping that Foulborn Uniques stick around for standard, because they have added a lot of really cool interactions.
I am now trying to figure out where I want to go on the passive tree. I guess the next obvious choice would be to go after any jewel sockets I can make my way to easily enough. I need to redo my bandit choice since I have plenty of resistance, so that will give me one more skill point, and then I have seven left. However, I sincerely doubt I’ll level this character higher than level 95, just because of the sheer slog that it becomes then. Last night I picked up Fearsome Force when I dinged 93, which finishes out the minion crit wheel. I could always pick up various other nodes in the meantime and then respec to pick up jewel sockets as I get more points. In theory, I could spec into my minion damage cluster jewel that I have, but I don’t really have enough points left to do much of anything meaningful with it. Really, I am not sure how much it matters at this point because I feel powerful enough to do any content I would want to do.
I am continuing to slowly chip away at Atlas progression, and I think my goal for Phrecia will be to get 115/115 and 4 Voidstones. If I can get there before the launch of 3.28, I will consider myself really good. I do not really want to burn myself out ahead of the next league launch, but I am also mostly finding everything I am doing really chill. Once I hit maps, the Gauntlet style modifiers seemed to evaporate, and life was fine. Even the enrage mechanic doesn’t seem to come into play that often. I think I am doing t13s right now, but really, there is not a big jump between those and t16s, so I should be able to make it all the way up without much issue. I am still running a set of idols that is producing a ton of maps, so that I will have plenty to run as I slowly unlock my way to the top of the atlas. I have been so out of it lately that, honestly, I spend more time talking to “Erasure” or staring at the middle distance than actually playing POE.
The medical woes have been a real drain on my emotional and mental health. Hopefully, today when I get my MRI, I will start to get some answers. I think once I have a path set, whatever path that ends up being… I will be doing better. I hate the limbo of waiting around for something to happen, all the while it feels like I have a ticking time bomb in my body.
The post My Best Minion Build Ever appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
