One of the cool things about playing Path of Exile and buying the supporter packs, is that you end up with a bunch of interesting toys. For example I have a ring that when equipped on a character as a cosmetic, keeps track of every bit of currency that drops on the ground. I wish this covered the entire league and all of my characters… and not just the character equipped but regardless it is still cool. Similarly I have a map device that is a cool glowing purple tree that keeps track of every map that has been run in the device. So over the course of this league I have personally launched 37 White Tier Maps, 82 Yellow Tier Maps, 530 Red Tier Maps, and 29 t17s or Purple Tier Maps. I have technically run 30 t17s but one of them I did not launch myself but it still counted towards the challenges of the league. Similarly I have found 41 Divine Orbs as raw drops, 37 Exalted Orbs, and 2838 Chaos Orbs. If you want a better accounting than that, you have to use some sort of third party tool like Wealthy Exile which tracks currency in your tabs not exclusively currency that drops on the ground.
The biggest thing that took place over the weekend, is that I realized I could burn through t17s pretty easily on my Righteous Fire Chieftain character and as such… that 30 maps challenge became priority. This is the point where I talk about how much I hate the process of rolling t17s because there are so many awful modifiers that brick builds. I feel like t17s and t16.5s need to be rethought because there is no one that actually enjoys running any of the completely awful mods. I honestly feel like t17s overall were a massive mistake because they have become the default map to run if you care about juicing, leaving t16s in the dust. I had gathered up enough Fortress maps to run nothing but those, and at some point I might give a shot at doing some of the other maps just to see how bad they are if carefully rolled. Fortress is nice because as RF Chieftain I can pretty much stand on top of the boss and ignore everything else going on other than occasionally the robot’s bit slam attack.
On the 17th just before 7pm I completed Endgame Enigmas and unlocked my 34th challenge, giving me the upgraded totem pole for my hideout that I have gotten the last two leagues. I could continue pushing for 40, but I doubt I am going to make that effort. There are two more that seem within the realm of possibility that I might knock out, because that would give me access to the fully upgraded cosmetic set. Essentially I have 3 more Memory Altars left to go before I unlock that achievement and then the next easiest is the one centered around modifiers on invitations. I have a stack of Black Star and Searing Exarch fights sitting around that I can run, and I think I am sitting at 125 of 250 towards the challenge. I would love to buy a bunch of Black Star invites but those are going to be tedious and are not something often sold in bulk on TFT. This is one of those moments when I feel like we really need a proper automated auction system.
If I walked away right now though… I would be reasonably happy. I have a third totem pole that matches the other two from Settlers, and Necropolis. I had been on a streak of upgrading the size every league, but 34 seems like the most reasonable amount for me personally. I really need to make better use of my resources and look at all of the challenges at the start of the league… rather than the end of the league. That way I can start to plan my way of what I am going to run so I can begin chipping away earlier rather than later. At some point I am going to burn down my hideout and build a new one since I got the Primeval Hideout unlocked. I need to figure out a better place to put these things since I apparently care about collecting them. Right now they are just sort of shimmed in north of all of the rest of the stuff in my headout near my Delve entrance.
We are two days out from the start of the Last Epoch league, which is my hard stop of Path of Exile nonsense at least for the time being. Right now I am leaning towards a Fire Based Necromancer build that Aaron Action RPG posted yesterday, or at least something similar to that. I did not think I would be going down the Abomination route but since you can build one exclusively with volatile zombies. I will miss my lorge chonky Golem friends, but it will be kind of cool to play with the new Abom mechanics. I am going Necromancer regardless of what version I go with, where I will either follow that the path in that build or set off on my own zoomancer setup. I am super looking forward to the new season in Last Epoch and can’t wait for it to start. I am honestly even excited to watch the reveal stream for Path of Exile II on the 20th.
Are you going to be playing Last Epoch? If so what are you planning on going with as a build? Are you instead waiting for Path of Exile II? If so what are you starting there. Drop me a line below.
The post So Much Fortress appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We had a bunch of topics left over from last week that rolled over to this week. First, we talk a bit about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Shinobi Metroidvania. From there, we talk a bit about Summer Games Done Quick and some of the better runs. Tam talks about his plans to adapt the Starfinder 2 game system to create a Shadowrun Campaign. Ash shares his initial thoughts about Draw Steel, a new RPG coming down the pipe. We talk a bit about the upcoming Last Epoch Season 3, which drops on August 21s and some of the significant changes. We also talk a bit about Path of Exile II 0.3.0, which drops shortly after that on the 29th. Lastly, Tam shares some of his thoughts on actually playing quite a bit of Burrows and Badgers, a squad-based leveling miniatures game along the lines of Mordheim. Grace talks briefly about the new Dwarven Realms season that has started, and Bel shares his suggestions for the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and both Weapons and Barbarian by Zach Cregger.
Good Morning Folks. If you remember yesterday I talked about finally getting an Apothecary card drop. Now these go for roughly 25-30 Divines each because they are hot property for folks wanting to do late league gambles. The thing is I do not need a Mageblood this league, nor do I really think that Magebloods are actually that much fun. They fix builds but they don’t really do anything cool and after played with a handful of them through several leagues the magic of that item is broken for me. Headhunter however is the really fun belt and I will choose it over Mageblood all of the time because it actually does something. So after writing yesterdays blog post, I happened to look over and see that someone was advertising a Primeval Hideout on TFT, and I thought… I wonder if they will trade for this Apothecary card so I could take one rare drop that I don’t particularly care about right now for another thing that I have been desperately seeking for way too long.
Unfortunately it was a Chinese language user that did not speak English, so they invited me with me not knowing if they would actually accept the trade or kick me from the instance. I got to their hideout, popped the Apothecary in the trade window and they accepted without a moments thought. So here I was heading to the hideout, and weirdly unlike the one other time that I bought a hideout on TFT they did not take the time to unlock it. So thankfully I was sturdy enough to clear the mobs inside the hideout and there was another person who had also bought the hideout with me, but I had already cleared 90% of it before they got there. Just like the screenshot that I linked to yesterday, the hideout does in fact appear as a path going down off the side of one of the floating islands. I was always so damned scared that I would miss the hideout in one of my farming runs, but I am pretty sure this would have been impossible to miss.
So now I have my Primeval Hideout unlocked and at some point I want to swap from my Ghost-lit Graveyard Hideout over to this one, but that has to be a challenge for a day I feel like building a new hideout. The biggest problem that I have had when I tried to swap hideouts is that the locations of everything is so baked into my brain that I struggle if I end up moving anything to a different location. I really like the decor of this place, especially if I change up the lighting to make it a little darker. I also have the ability to dump a backup of my current hideout so I can always quickly revert back to it at a moments notice. The only negative is that I have a stash tab full of Primordial Blocks maps… that I might as well run as I flip my favorite map slot to something else and build up a stash of those. Right now I am targeting Toxic Sewer which is one of my favorite layouts because of how compact everything is.
In other related news I recorded one of my dumb little videos last night and it is hard to believe that I have made 37 of these… just for Path of Exile. Specifically I show off what doing a t16 looks like with mid-range investment I think maybe I have spent 50 div on the build… which to new players is a lot, but to folks who spend multiple mirrors on a build is an entry point. I think I have probably spent around 150 Divines on my Righteous Fire Chieftain over the course of this league for reference. Delve was good to me and allowed me to easily generate large quantities of currency to then blow on dumb ideas later. This is legitimately probably my second favorite build I have had in Path of Exile behind my menagerie of Righteous Fire characters. It is not sturdy enough to straight up face tank everything, but it is sturdy enough to feel good playing it with max res and max block and a reasonable amount of life/es regeneration. The thing that would make this feel better would be to try and work in Stone Stance or something like that and maybe a bit more max resist.
Anyways pending this build is still around it will be a contender for 3.27 league starter for me, given that I would like to see what this can be if I really make it my full focus for a league. I also want to see what happens if I just swap out Storm Brand of Indecision for Penance Brand of Dissipation for bossing. I will be doing some testing on that over the weekend but I need to acquire a 21/20 gem for Penance Brand first.
The post Buying Freedom appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This is Primordial Blocks, and I have lived here for every league that has had this map in the rotation. It is the source of the Primeval Ruins Hideout, and I want it bad. The problem with this is that it is extremely rare… and I have likely run over 1000 copies of this map spread between multiple leagues and I have NEVER seen it. The only knowledge I have of what the entrance to this hideout in the map looks like comes from this post from 2021 where they talk about farming it, and then link a screenshot of the hideout showing up as a ramp downwards. Ironically they talk about finding the Nocturnal Hideout being equally difficult to find, and I have found it through running the unique Twilight Temple map three times, which is something that I do exactly once per league and not farm over and over. I am not opposed to buying my way out of this problem… but they are selling right now on TFT when they do show up for 20-30 divines for a portal allowing you to claim it. I fear that this league will be yet another where I do not find it, but when I do… y’all are definitely going to know about it.
I can cross a different drop off my bucket list though, because I have finally acquired my first Apothecary as a drop in a map. This is the token thing that most people farm as it provides access to a Mageblood and is generally popular amongst people who like gambles where they buy a single card of this set and attempt to double or nothing their way to a full set through harvest crafting. I have run a truly stupid number of Crimson Temple and now Defiled Cathedral maps attempting to get one of these as my default farm map in the leagues where Primordial Blocks is not available. This time around I ran enough Defiled Cathedral to get a Nameless Seer so that I could scry the Apothecary drop chance onto Primordial Blocks. I would gamble this off but given that I do not really need a Mageblood this league, I am going to sit on it in case I end up getting more drops while I continue to farm this accursed zone.
The real MVP of the Mercenaries league however has been the Map Device Inventory. Probably the most tedious part of running a lot of maps is rolling them. For those unfamiliar this is the process of scouring and applying alchemy orbs until you get the map modifiers that you want to run, or in my case… re-rolling any mods that I do not feel comfortable running because it will in some way brick my build. For example the mods that disable regeneration or lower your maximum elemental resistances are instant re-rolls for me and always will be regardless of what build I am playing. What the map inventory tab does is allows me to load it up with a bunch of maps, ready to be run, so that I do not have to stop and either retrieve a map from a bank tab or hold them in my inventory limiting what I can pick up in a given map. This has been a game changer and has made the entire process of running maps so much more enjoyable.
I will admit at this point I am getting so freaking tired of Betrayal, but it continues to be some amazing experience gain. The only real annoying thing about it is needing to run the safehouses every so often. It is absolutely worth it because you are pretty much guaranteed to get at least a veiled chaos orb now, but it does break up the flow of mapping. They are selling for roughly 3 to a divine so it is worth the time running it given that they go super quickly. I wish there was a way in the passive tree to block trapped chests and crafting benches because really all I want are boxes to click on super quickly and I cannot be bothered to learn who does what when they are leading. I know that Awakened POE Trade has a cheat sheet button and I run that all of the time for price checking… but it just seems like a lot of effort when all I really want from this mechanic is the sweet sweet burst of experience when I click the buttons. It legitimately is one of my least favorite league mechanics but it is just too much experience to ignore when all I care about are levels.
What I really need now is some more memory tears. I am at 22 of 33 memory altars for the last challenge that I need to hit 34 or 40 for the league. This gives me the same size totem pole that I have gotten for the last two leagues and if I can get that I will be perfectly happy with where I left off for this league. I am not going to be tryhard enough to get 40 of 40, especially when this time next week I will be diving into the new Last Epoch season. It is at this point in the post when I realize… that I am mostly talking to myself. There are so few people that read my blog that are actually this deep into the madness that is Path of Exile to care about anything that I just said. I could talk about flying unicorns or whatever now, and it is unlikely anyone is actually going to get to this paragraph. Then again I would say 90% of the posts I write… are mostly just me journaling my own thoughts about something and provide zero tangible benefit to anyone who reads them. When I write about more mainstream topics that people care about, that is probably not the case but going deep into a niche game late in the league… is probably only for the diehards of which I am probably not enough of one to attract that audience.
Anyways! I got an Apothecary which I think is pretty cool. Tomorrow I might actually try writing a Blaugust post of some sort since I have not really interacted much with the topics.
The post Desperately Seeking Primeval appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
