Hey Folks! Yesterday I went down yet another rabbit hole of trying to figure out what exactly I wanted my exit condition to be for the Crucible League. The problem with Path of Exile is there is a nigh endless amount of goals that you can have, and at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to complete none of them. A Diablo III season is far more clear-cut in that you have a single seasonal journey with fixed rewards at the end of it, and a clear “finished” point where it is pretty safe to walk away from. With Path of Exile it all depends upon your core activities, and this league for better or worse has been a league of me revisiting old builds and trying to make them work. I did this with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and then again with Explosive Arrow Champion. Then there was the somewhat meme build of Explosive Raging Spirits where I largely created the build entirely around a single pseudo-eight-link that I found in my travels. It worked well enough, but I also didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep the build around for long.
So yesterday I set my sights on completely changing this character up and revisiting one of my first builds that I fell in love with… Wintertide Brand. Now my first Wintertide character was actually a botched attempt at Righteous Fire. I really enjoyed the brand gameplay and I leaned into that rather than actually transitioning to RF when I should have. More modern Wintertide brands tend to focus around the Occultist ascendency, and it is easy enough to respec my Necromancer into that as a result I set out doing just that yesterday with increasingly misnamed BelNecroSrsly. I did not necessarily follow a guide for this transformation but instead went out to my favorite source for the research of builds that are actually being played… POE.ninja. If you set the search parameters to Occultist and the main skill to Wintertide brand, you can see a rundown of what is actively being played.
Now the highest dps version of the build had a Mageblood and a corrupted Loreweave… so I decided that I needed to set my sights a little lower than that. The next one was running Chaos Innoculation which again… not exactly something that I wanted to mess with for the time being. Eventually, I decided to go with the level 90 build for a character called Frosty_Lady. I figured that I could tweak that to my tastes which gives you a POB that looks a little something like this for my current path forward. ultimately I was trying to make as few changes as possible so essentially I needed to swap out my gloves because they were minion damage based, but there really was nothing else special about those. I needed to pick up the remaining resists that I needed off my Necklace since I would be dropping the unique I had been using for SRS. The key unique to make the build feel good was a corrupted Rime Gaze with a Labyrinth Enchant on it giving Wintertide Brand +4 Maximum Stages. Lastly, I swapped out and sold my expensive SRS shield for a more standard Spirit Shield with +1 levels to all Cold Spell Gems. Technically I spent probably 3 Divine Orbs assembling the specific components of the build but then made back way more than 3 Divine Orbs selling the gear that I was using for Summon Raging Spirits.
I have some problems to work through but for the most part, it feels really good clearing maps… considerably less good clearing bosses. I’ve gotten very used to the Juggernaut and Champion that can largely laugh off most incoming damage. This is absolutely a squishier build as a whole, and there are some tweaks that I would probably do to make it feel better. Firstly I would like to get my Armor and Regen up considerably higher. Next, I would love to figure out a way to stack some blocks considering that is not yet a really viable means of defense. The only reason why it feels as good as it does is because cold damage is in itself a defensive layer. Wintertide Brand slows and ultimately freezes mobs around you making it so that they are either not dealing damage to you… or are moving slow enough that you can easily avoid them.
My defenses are honestly pretty puny at the moment. I only have roughly 3500 health and a little over 600 regeneration which combined with only 69% physical damage reduction from armor and a measly 24% block chance… and all of my Energy Shield going to Eldritch Battery… means that when I get hit I get hit it lands extremely hard. My resists are also not amazing… because while capped I don’t have much that is increasing my maximum resistances. So essentially I need to evaluate my tree a bit to see where I can drop some damage and gain some additional life and defensive layers. This will never be a bossing character for me, so in theory I mostly just want to make it feel good for mapping purposes, and as it stands Wintertide Brand already decimates trash mobs so I can afford to lose some damage to gain some a bit of comfort level. I am sure I will probably record one of my dumb videos showing the current state of the build.
After fiddling around with the Wintertide build and getting functional, I decided to spend some time clearing out influenced maps that I had sitting in my bank. This ultimately led me to acquire another set of Shaper Fragments. So I decided to test my mettle against Shaper on my Explosive Arrow Champion, and much to my surprise, it was way easier to do the fight than on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I managed to get through the fight without any deaths and acquired the last Uber Elder fragment that I was missing. So here we are… organically arriving at being able to potentially attempt defeating the memory of The Elder in the Shaper’s Realm that has been haunting my sidebar for a month.
For this fight I opted to go back to my Juggernaut, and took a few deaths in the process but ultimately defeated “Uber Elder” which means I acquired my third void stone… and now all of my maps drop significantly higher. I think the lowest level map can drop for me now is 14, giving me a much wider range of things for farming purposes. I have to say that mechanically on some levels the fight was easier than doing The Shaper or The Elder by themselves. I took deaths in part because I was not prepared to dodge specific mechanics happening at the same time. I think given enough iterations of this fight, I could probably go deathless once I got used to everything. Mostly my key problem with boss encounters in Path of Exile is that they take so much effort to be able to even attempt. If I could run them back to back I would ultimately memorize the patterns and get really good at them. However, doing these once every few weeks… means I lose a lot of progress each time I drop into the encounter because I am going to be rusty each time.
Ultimately though I guess I now know what I have to do to get through this league. I am going to set my sights on beating The Maven encounter, which admittedly feels much easier to get to than Uber Elder given that you just have to chain-run invitations until you get enough fragments to face her. At this point, I am at 8 of 10 fragments so I should be able to burn through this pretty quickly if I actually set my sights on accomplishing it. My hope is that I can take her down by exercising the fact that I have six portals… because I sincerely doubt I will successfully complete a memory game phase. Having three void stones means I am officially further along in this league than I have ever been before. It just feels like Uber Elder was such a pain in the ass that I have to get through Maven now just to finish the job.
I also plan on devoting some time to making Wintertide feel a bit better. Feeling confident enough to tackle this mission is its own accomplishment in my progression through Path of Exile as a whole. I guess the next major achievement would be to go after a build of my own design, without specifically following anything active in the meta. I still feel like I am years away from that accomplishment even though I am well over a thousand hours into this game now. I have no real clue WHY Path of Exile is so engaging for me, but it feels like it is this puzzle that I must solve and each time I clear something new… it uncovers a whole series of other puzzles to be solved just beneath that surface. I will probably spend some more time researching various Wintertide builds on POE.Ninja in order to see how they are solving the survival challenges so that I can devise my own path forward.
The post Uber Elder Down and Wintertide Occultist appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I seem to have made yet another character in Path of Exile, this time I went down the rabbit hole of the Explosive Arrow Champion. I created a brand new duelist after work on Friday evening and by Sunday mid-day I had finished the storyline, assembled some gear, and was actively farming Tier 16 maps. It was a bit of a whirlwind leveling process, but in truth, I could have gone much faster if I actually wanted to. I spent a few hours putting on levels during Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 largely to allow me to sort out my gearing before making the final push for Kitava. This is yet another one of my thought experiments and serves largely as a way of testing my knowledge of the game to this point. During my Ghosts of Leagues Past post from last month, I talked about struggling in the Sentinel league with this build and then going back in this league and realizing that I had no clue how to layer defenses.
I know I have talked about POE.Ninja before in the context of it being the neutral arbiter of prices in the Path of Exile economy. However, I do not think I have talked about it as being a central clearing house for high-end player profiles. You can go out there and see exactly how active players are building their characters so for example if I wanted to look at a Champion playing Explosive Arrow I can easily narrow my search to that. It is very clear that the Champion variant of this build is not exactly “in meta” given that only 11% of Champions are using that ability and only 34% of players using Explosive Arrow are Champions. The vast majority currently seem to be playing Occultist as their ascendency, but for this thought experiment, I wanted to recreate the conditions of my very first attempt at playing a league character.
I can’t say that I followed any single guide in its entirety. I largely leveled my Champion as Caustic Rain and then shifted to Toxic Rain when that became available, and then finally around act four shifted my ballista totems over to explosive arrow. There are a handful of guides out there that I sifted through over on the official forums and poe vault but this one is probably the one I drew the most inspiration from. Even then I spent a good deal of time sifting through builds on POE.Ninja to see what players were actually using as their final setup at level 100. At this point “Belsplosions” is only level 78, so still missing a number of easy points but feels extremely good. I remember balking at Zizaran calling this build “tanky” but now I realize that I just did not understand enough of the fundamentals of Path of Exile to be able to build it in that manner.
While leveling I held off on a few key notables until I had assembled something resembling my final gear state. Essentially I did not want to mess with Elemental Equilibrium until I was finished gearing and could guarantee that I was dealing no fire damage with my totems other than the explosion. Essentially now my totems deal Cold, Lightning, and Chaos damage and then the explosion of course deals Fire Damage after having been debuffed against it. For defenses I am sitting at 79% Evasion, 82% damage reduction from armor, and 100% spell suppression chance which when combined with the Cheat Death mechanic built into Champion “First To Strike, Last to Fall” which heals me 25% of my life anytime I reach “low life” and my cast on damage taken setup for Immortal Call… it takes an awful lot to kill me. My major weakness however is the fact that I currently only have roughly 3200 life, which I need to solve at some point.
As far as gameplay goes it feels extremely smooth. I have a hextouch setup with mirage archer, frenzy, and greater multiple projectiles that keeps up my fenzy stacks while cursing enemies with flammability while also running around and constantly dropping my six Explosive Arrow totems. If things seem to be taking a while to die I drop an Arcanist’s Brand with Flame Surge and Infernal Cry which covers them in ash and blankets them in burning ground. This is mostly a bossing and metamorph thing but I occasionally also throw it into a large pack just to help whittle it down a bit faster. While the time delay of the explosive arrow doesn’t feel as good as say Toxic Rain for full screen clears it still feels good. I am not sure how many maps I ran last night, but I turned on my auto screenshots while doing a Crimson Temple to snag some screenshots.
As far as the gear I am wearing… it is a mix of a bunch of exceptionally cheap items and a handful of items that cost me over a divine. Firstly there was the Rain of Splinters Gem, which for a pretty nicely rolled one was 1 Divine Orb by itself. Then there was my crafted bow… which cost 1 Divine Orb as part of the crafting process… and then roughly another Divine trying to get it six-linked and in the correct colors. I didn’t get EXACTLY the colors I wanted… but I decided to call it good enough because I was tired of trying to buy Chromatic Orbs through the Bulk Trade site. In a perfect world I would have not done this out of order… and gotten the colors correctly by bench crafting sockets on the item rather than trying to brute force it at the end with Chromatics. Other than the Bow and the Unique Jewel… I have maybe 80 Chaos in the entire character. I had the Dyadian Dawn laying around but you can pick up one at least as good as the one I am using for 1-2 Chaos Orbs.
Basically, this little thought experiment worked. It proved to me that I understand enough about defensive layers at this point to be able to revisit a character of mine from past leagues that absolutely did not work… and make it fully functional. I feel like my days of questioning whether or not I was choosing poorly when it came to a league start are behind me now. I feel like I should be able to make ANY character in the future work knowing what I know now. I am not sure how to fully express how good that feels. Path of Exile is this insurmountable climb when you are at the bottom staring up at the summit filled with people zooming through maps seemingly immortal. While I still have quite the climb ahead of me… I at least see the path and am confident that I am not going to go over the edge and plummet into the valley below.
This of course means I am contemplating doing other dumb things. Wintertide Brand is an ability that I have loved in the past, and would really like to see if I can make a build work for it. The play of choice seems to be Occultist as most of the folks playing a pure Wintertide Brand build seem to be going with that ascendency. The big challenge will be to see if I can reverse engineer something resembling a viable POB from the various profiles I have access to. I am contemplating turning my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer into a Cold Dot Wintertide Occultist, and then liquidating the gear that I no longer need for that build. This could force me down a path of a side project I had already been working on… which is to find a Champion Kite Shield with the node that allows you to sell it for a Unique… aka Aegis Aurora. I am not sure if I am going down this path of madness yet.. but knowing me… this is probably a thing that I am going to do at some point.
As for why I am still seemingly so easily amused by Path of Exile Crucible league… even when I don’t really love the league mechanic itself? Who knows! I am going with it until my brain decides that it is no longer getting enjoyment from this process. I hope you all have a most wonderful week and for me… I am hoping mine is more tolerable than the last few.
The post Explosive Arrow Champion appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
