Embiggened Totem

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Good Afternoon Friends. I am very late in getting this post started, and quite honestly for a bit I thought I would just give today a pass. I’m still poking at Path of Exile and I find myself in the process of trying to finish out league challenges. For those who have never played this game, during a league there are a series of 40 challenges asking you to interact with various league mechanics. For your troubles you are rewarded with a Totem pole for your Hideout that grows in height based on the number of challenges that you have completed. There is also a set of cosmetic gear that will only ever be available for completing challenges and four tiers of ever fancier sets that also map back to the number of achievements you have finished. At 19 Achievements you get your first totem and around that same mark is when you finish the first tier of cosmetic armor. Starting with Sanctum I have set myself up to trying to get at least the “sad little totem” that is available during that league.

Last league I managed to complete enough challenges to get one size bigger, and this league so far I have gotten up to the third stage of the totem. Now I find myself in a pattern of trying to complete as many challenges as are reasonable for someone who generally hates bossing. Between yesterday and today I have completed three more challenges and find myself closing in on another one. Given I am still in the mood to grind I could in theory probably knock out a total of 32 out of 40 this league gaining me the full set of Tier 3 armor and another few steps of totem upgrades. This however will require me to keep respeccing to shift league mechanics. I ground out a bunch of Harbingers and Beachhead maps in order to finish out the last few steps for that challenge, and ultimately bought the last item I needed to craft a harbinger weapon from the market.

Currently, I have respected my Atlas in order to focus on Essences so that I could knock out a few very specific achievements… namely a Map Boss with 6 Essences and a Rare monster with 3 Deafening Essences. All that I have left there is to use a bunch of remnants of corruption and that will be another challenge in the bag. After that I need to spend some time specced into Incursion and Betrayal in order to knock the bosses of each game mode off of a meta-achievement that I already have six of eight. Fighting Incursion and Betrayal bosses will also give me a little bit of progress towards another achievement centered around fighting league mechanic bosses. I am getting most of those down in Delve however so I am personally having an easier time with that than a lot of folks are.

Each league SirGog puts out a video talking about how he would approach all forty of the challenges and for me at least this was appropriately timed. Given how many Doryani’s Maps that I have sold recently, I am guessing a lot of folks are focusing on wrapping things up. I have a feeling that I will get sucked into Diablo IV Season 4 when it starts later in May, so similarly I am experiencing a bit of pressure to get things wrapped up while I am still engaged. All of that said I am happy enough with my current progress so that if I never played anymore I would still be satisfied. I have a growing collection of sad little totems and they make me happy.

Hundred Again

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Good Morning Friends… which admittedly feels odd to say given how much I have failed this past week to say it. I am not entirely certain what I am going through right now, but it has been harder and harder to sit down and actually write something. I think mostly it has felt like I didn’t really have anything worth saying. I’ve been quietly plugging away at Path of Exile while listening my way through the Brandon Sanderson Cosmere books… and none of that seemed terribly interesting. When every blog post feels the same… I struggle a bit to find the desire to go through the motions. We’ve also had wild weather here in Oklahoma which led me to not even have a podcast this week.

Yesterday I dinged level 100 which makes for the second time I have done this in Path of Exile. I feel like I could walk away from this league happy with my progress. I am not sure why exactly I wanted to hit 100 this time around, but it was one of those nagging feelings in the back of my head. The first time I did so was largely to prove that I could, and after that, it felt like the novelty had worn off. This time around though I had reached a point where I was thoroughly happy with my character and mostly just wanted to ding as a bit of a victory lap. I am contemplating completely reworking a chunk of my character in order to fully switch it to the more powerful version of the build including cluster jewels. I have a good stockpile of currency and given that I have available to me all of the talent points… I could tweak my build to see what that version of Righteous Fire feels like.

Most of my currency is still coming from Delve, but the strategies have shifted a bit. In previous leagues, I made my currency a nickel and dime at a time through Resonator sales. With the graveyard crafting and some changes to the atlas making it so folks are printing azurite… the resonator market has crashed. Though ironically there are still folks occasionally buying my wares in bulk. Most of my currency is coming from Curiosity Vaal Apsects which sell for around 16 Divine Orbs each. There is a slightly lesser trade in Doryani’s Machinarium, Aul’s Uprising, and the various rings that go into Precurors. Basically, this means I am hunting for bosses above all else… which has the positive side effect of progressing one of the league challenges.

Generally speaking, my goal for every league is to get enough of the challenges completed in order to get the sad little totem pole which I think comes at 19. This is the second league in a row where I have gotten at least the first upgraded version. It is highly unlikely that I will ever hit 40 of 40 unless there is a mighty force behind me wanting something that comes from the end of that journey. I will say though that the changes in how Scarabs work, have made focusing in on specific mechanics far easier than they would have been in previous leagues. Running a full complement of scarabs for a single-league mechanic is almost as good as having your tree specced for it. I am slowly collecting Fortunate cards so that I can turn in and complete Divined Destiny. Maybe I can complete the full set of the upgraded armor appearances, but that is probably as far as I will be able to make it in this league before I run out of steam.

I went on a bit of a tear yesterday completing different Maven witnesses. I’ve admittedly never attempted any of these in previous leagues though I probably could have without much issue. At this point, I have completed The Formed, The Forgotten, The Twisted, The Hidden, The Elder Slayers, and am working on getting my witnesses for The Feared. I had no clue that when I took down Cortex it was a Witnessed version. I am just about done with a Chayula Breach stone so I should be able to get that witness pretty quickly then it just leaves Elder, Shaper, and Sirus. Sirus is the one that probably worries me the most because that fight is annoying enough on its own.

Delve is still my happy place, but mostly chasing The Feared is an attempt to prove it to myself that I could do it if I chose to do so. I don’t love bossing. It feels like a lot of effort for a very minimal payoff. Especially given how much the prices of everything has crashed this league, there just isn’t near the chase that there might have been previously. I sincerely doubt I will ever really chase Uber bosses because given that I don’t love the amount of faffing about required to fight normal bosses… I certainly don’t love the thought of grinding out the already painful t17s to get emblems in order to fight Uber bosses. My hope is that in 3.25 they make some significant changes to T17s which will hopefully make them less egregious.

Past that I have been helping my friend get started who is also playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I helped my friend Ric through a bunch of the gear acquisition and now I am helping my friend Lethbridge with some similar gaps in gearing. That is probably my favorite part of Path of Exile when I can help friends get the stuff they need. Acquiring something for a friend who is also playing is way more enjoyable than chasing my own goals. Anyways hopefully I will be a bit more regular this week with my blog posts but honestly… who knows!

Necropolis MVP

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Morning Folks! If you have read this blog for any length of time over the last few years, you will know I am a “Delve Enjoyer”. One of the nuisances of Delve is that you need to pop out every so often to refill sulphite that you use to power the minecart or in my case the tunnel bear mtx… used to traverse the darkness. Generally speaking even with full Niko support on the Atlas tree it will take several maps to fully top back off your stockpile of 65,000 sulphite for a maximum upgraded capacity. When I am in the mood to Delve I pretty much want to do nothing but that. This makes the need to map for a bit in order to fill back up my stockpile of “delve juice” feel like a chore.

One of the components of the Necropolis league mechanic is Allflames which are used to swap out a pack of mobs on your map for a pack that has specific rewards. One of these is the Allflame Ember of Sulphite which removes a normal pack for a pack of 5-7 Monsters that reward Sulphite on Death. If you add the Sulphite Scarab of Greed which causes the map owner to gain 150% more Sulphite you have a wild interaction. In a T16 map, if you replace the top pack aka the one with the highest occurrence in the map with the Sulphite Allflame, and run one of these Scarabs you are pretty much guaranteed to top off your 65,000 Sulphite in a single map. Which of course means that I can get back to doing the thing that I want to be doing almost immediately. This is part of the reason why I am hoping that if nothing else… the Allflame mechanic goes standard after this league.

I am not super deep into Delve right now, but I am farming comfortably a bit deeper than normal this league. Generally speaking, I would stick in the 150 to 200 range and keep going horizontal looking for new cities and fossil nodes. In this league, it feels like I am much stronger than I normally would be, and as such I keep going deeper in order to test what the lower bounds of this build would be. I don’t necessarily want to leave super chill mode, at least not until I have dinged level 100. After that, I will probably start diving straight down to see where the break point is for my build where it transitions to something I can’t do quite as easily. In previous leagues, by the time I hit 500 depth, I was in pain. I am wondering if I can somehow make it down to around 1000 depth this go-round.

I have passed the halfway point in level 99 and am at the point where I plan on always carrying around an Omen of Amelioration just in case. During the 99 to 100 grind, a single death can cause you to lose at least a full night’s worth of experience progress. If I do take a random death the Omen will be consumed and I will save 75% of the loss, making it a bit less painful. I got mine as a drop but given that they are only around 50 Chaos, I would absolutely buy another one if I take a death because the savings is well worth it at this point. Once I ding 100 I will go back to doing some dangerous content again. Honestly the XP penalty is the piece of Path of Exile that I like the least. It feels like I have to play super safe if I want to make any progress at all. I’ve only ever hit level 100 on one other character, because while I will happily pay for voidstones… I refuse to pay for power levelling services.

Oriath’s End

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Good Morning Folks! While I have been talking about Fallout 76 lately, I am still playing a good deal of Path of Exile. Largely at this point I am about a third of the way through level 99 and would really like to hit 100 as sort of the crowning achievement of the league. I’ve already done enough of the achievements to quality for the sad little totem pole that I go for every league, but there are a handful that seems like they would probably be low-hanging fruit due to the ease of running different league content with scarabs. I am continuing to make tweaks and improvements to my build and figured I would talk through a few of these. If you are curious here is the current state of my character at level 99.

The first upgrade is that I swapped over from my rare armor/evasion boots to a pair of Annihilation’s Approach boots. The weird thing about this swap is that I had tried doing it much earlier in my build and I did not seem to have the survival to soak up the additional fire damage at the time. What these ultimately give me is the ability to drop Brine King pantheon while granting permanent adrenaline. This ends up being some additional physical damage reduction while granting 100% increased flat damage and 25% increased attack, cast, and movement speed. The first pair that I bought was around 4 Divines and then I sold them back at a slight profit after trying them and deciding they were not for me. With the recent market crashes you can now pick up a pair of these for around 20 Chaos which is what I paid for mine.

Another significant upgrade that I made… that I am shocked I was able to snag is this Cloak of Flames. It was already six-linked and corrupted and all I had to do was burn through my stash of tainted chromatic orbs to get it to “righteous fire colors”. My previous Cloak of Flames had 5% Reduced Fire Damage Taken and +2 socketed curse gems… the later of which was a useless corrupt for my build. This one both reduces my fire damage taken and my chaos damage taken… both of which I am shifting a portion of physical damage to… which means they also directly reduce my physical damage taken. Can you believe that I paid 50 Chaos for this? I am still shocked that I snagged it for so low. Sure it required me to spend a lot of tainted chromes to make it work, but they were something I had lying around from mapping.

While I am talking about damage shifting, I thought I would share all of the sources of “physical damage taken” as I have on this build. I have my Cloak of Flames giving me 40% Taken as Fire and an additional 8% Taken as Fire coming from a helm enchant. Then I have 15% Taken as Cold coming from my Taste of Hate flask that winds up as nearly permanent uptime. Finally, I have 10% Taken as Chaos Damage coming from an Armor/Energy Shield Mastery. While my Chaos Resistance is only 75% the 4% Reduced Chaos Damage Taken that I now have on my chestpiece should help to blunt that a bit. In total I am shifting 73% of my incoming Physical Damage to either elements which get soaked by my 90% resistances or Chaos which is being blunted slightly by the Cloak. On top of all of this I have 60% reduced extra damage from critical strikes and in my final form I should have 90%.

The big splurge that I have made is picking up an Oriath’s End flask. This is something I have always wanted to play with because it gives you lots of explosions while the flask effect is active. This combined with my big Hinekora Explosion, and the little Fire Mastery explosion… means I have three sources of things that go boom which is extremely fun to watch. Basically, I have reached the point that between all of my defensive layers and meager offensive layers… I can just sort of charge around the map and watch things explode. It is a truly delightful state to be in. There are things that I am holding off doing until I hit level 100… when deaths are meaningless. Basically, my focus is grinding out the rest of this level. I got my very first Sacred Blossom yesterday and I have never fought Oshabi, but I mostly want to wait until I am not actively trying to gain experience.

I’ve also been getting a fair number of T17 map drops, but after failing miserably the one I attempted I am holding off on touching them until I am level 100 and no longer care about dying. Past that, I could start dropping passive nodes to swap over to some cluster jewels, but I am not sure how much I actually care about that. I always get to a point where I am happy enough with the character and don’t want to keep fiddling with it.