Good Morning Friends! It is technically correct by the slimmest of margins because I am posting this just before noon. I am very much in vacation mode currently because as of yesterday I am off until the third. We are going through a bit of a cold snap which means we scurried around yesterday in order to get some shopping done and be ready to just stay indoors for the next few days. Our concerns turn to the outside ferals that we feed. I’ve not seen any of them this morning, but they seem to have hidey-holes to go into in order to stay warm. Tripod in the backyard seems to be able to get down into a rabbit burrow when the weather turns frigid and I am hoping Greybie and Tabby out front have something similar. I’m putting food out just in case but I feel like it is unlikely that we are going to see much of them on the camera.
I’ve been playing around on Beltoxrain my fledgling toxic rain trickster and I am not yet certain how I feel about the build. Right now it deals a ton of damage but sort of has shit for survival. The fact that I am using a Tabula Rasa to level doesn’t exactly help that fact because the chest piece is generally a good source of survivability. The killing power is most definitely there but I can very easily run out of mana which means I am running clarity to help try and solve that for the moment. We will see how I fair when it comes to the first Labyrinth that I am getting close to running. I am nearing the end of Act III and still can pretty much shred anything that comes up to me. Toxic Rain feels so freaking weird to use, that I am not entirely certain this is the build for me in the long run. I might try to pivot to building something for Explosive Arrow Balistas instead.
I did get enough porcupine cards to get a six-link short bow and now am using my Righteous Fire main to try and farm some dread essences so that I can hopefully get a good roll with attack power and bonus to bow gems. At this point, I am honestly thinking of this more for Explosive Arrow than I am for Toxic Rain because I have a feeling like I will be starting another character at some point before the end of this league. One of the things that annoy me greatly about builds in this game is that most of the creators tend to consider “50 divines” as a “cheap” build. I’ve yet to see ANY divines drop let alone enough of them to be able to afford something like that. At the moment I tend to focus any currency that I do have on improving Righteous Fire because it seems to be what I am clearing most of the content with.
I’ve struggled a bit on mapping progression, only because I am finding it very hard to get the right maps that I need to drop. I could of course just buy my way to victory but that sorta feels like cheating a bit. For the moment I am running maps in the near vicinity to the ones I need to drop hoping that maybe I will get the ones I actually need for bonuses. The other challenge that I have is trying to get a corrupt that I can actually run. I’m pretty close to dinging 91, which makes me not really want to risk losing progress on a bad map combo. Essentially maps that fuck with my Elemental Resists, Reflect Elemental Damage, or screw with my Life Regeneration is undoable. I get that corruption is supposed to be something unpredictable but I do wish there was a bench recipe to scour a corrupted item that had scouring and Vaal orbs or something, or required a heck of a lot of harvest materials.
It isn’t that I am not seeing a ton of maps dropping… it is just that they are mostly white maps which are significantly less useful currently. I should just burn through a bunch of these hoping for the best honestly because right now I have gathered up a rather large treasure trove of them. I could of course sell them off in bulk, but I try not to engage with the trade league any more than I have to. I know I still have a very long way to go until I start getting t16 versions of everything. I need to kill all of the bosses in order to finish unlocking my atlas. I am still having a heck of a lot of fun, but I am not loving feeling like I stalled out at some point.
The Righteous Fire play style is probably the favorite I have experienced in Path of Exile so far. The problem being in order to move from where I am now to be able to do much higher content it feels like I either need to get lucky or spend an awful lot of currency. A lot of the things that I need now however include price tags that are multiple divines, which I just don’t have yet. I might have to swap up what I am doing in order to figure out a way to make better currency. Essentially I am going to keep plugging away as is hoping that I finish things out the Atlas and then see what it takes to finish up with the bosses. Once I ding 91 and secure that level, I am going to run a map and see how functional I can be just turning off Righteous Fire and leaning entirely on Fire Trap. I have 3 gems for Fire Trap and Righteous fire each leveling currently, and my hope is to do the 20% quality swap and then level them again and attempt to get some corrupts. I know Fire Trap in a level 21/20% quality version sells for a few divines so that might be an option to make some money if I get lucky.
In the meantime, however, I really need to work on catching up on some of my data. I’ve done a poor job of keeping track of the games I have played this year. I normally do a rundown of the games played and I won’t be able to do that normal end-of-the-year stuff if I don’t start tabulations soon.
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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about setting forth on a dumb adventure that was trying to brute force my way to farming a Tabula Rasa. For those unfamiliar with Path of Exile, the Tabula is essentially the perfect starter item that you can equip at level one and has six linked white gem sockets, allowing you to basically get your spell links faster than usual. The catch however is that the item has no stats on it other than the six gem links. There are a number of ways to farm one of these up but I specifically chose Blood Aqueducts zone because Waterways is not in the Atlas this league and Waterways the other map that can drop it is a tier 13 and I’ve yet to see one. Blood Aqueducts is also largely a straight line, which means I can zip through there relatively quickly making the total clear time of each reset extremely fast.
I set down this path initially because I wanted a Tabula to start the Toxic Rain Trickster that I am working on. However, what set me down that path was picking up a Replica Quill Rain from a Grand Heist. However, while farming the Blood Aqueducts I managed to pick up a legitimate Quill Rain that is probably better for the build overall due to the higher attack speed. Both are currently five-links, so will take some effort to push them to six-links. I have to say I got a shocking amount of loot from farming this one map over and over. In total, I found four six-link chests, one of which will do nicely for the Toxic Rain build once I get it high enough for that to matter and one that would work well for the character that Ace is leveling and that Thalen is leveling. I’ve also filled the Guild Bank with minor uniques that I had already seen a drop, probably the most significant that I got was a Call of the Brotherhood which is not expensive but is used by a number of builds.
So around 7:20 yesterday evening I got my last Humility card to drop as pictured in the first screenshot. In total it took me somewhere around four hours to farm the remaining Humility cards, but I went into this adventure having already found three of them in my travels. Had I started with none, it probably would have taken me somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours total. So I guess the question is which is worth more to you… the six hours of farming or the ten chaos that the item regularly seems to cost. I mostly did the farming method so that I could prove to myself that it was something that could be done relatively easily. Additionally, it is also something that you can do without having a maxed-out character that is heavily geared. You essentially have to get a character to act nine and then can farm this up freely. I personally used the time to work on leveling a set of 3 Fire Trap and 3 Righteous Fire gems for attempting to corrupt later for a level 21 gem of each.
As far as Toxic Rain Trickster goes… it is weird and is going to take some getting used to. Essentially the bulk of my damage comes from the spectral archer that hangs out attached to my head raining down bad stuff on the baddies. So I have to stop and channel for a moment to begin that process and then can run around like crazy avoiding taking damage. I’ve picked up a second copy of Toxic Rain that I have kitted out with Balista Totems so that I can drop those as well for additional unattended damage. Mostly I went down this path because I had already done an Explosive Arrow build and wanted to try one of the other “archer” staples. This also allows me to knock out a few achievements because I have never played a Shadow of any kind before. As of this morning, I am level 15 and have completed Act 1 entirely, and am moving on to Act 2. This is very much going to be a side project when I don’t want to do serious content on the RF Juggernaut.
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