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.