Belghast

GenX • Husband • Petfriend • Daily Blogger • Weekly Podcaster • Eternally Confused • avatar by @Ammosart@gamepad.club He/Him

One Week of Necropolis League

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Good Morning Folks! What a difference a few days can make. When I wrote my Monday post I talked about how big of a falloff this league has had and how it might go down as one of the worst leagues. The difference between the worst league and the best league is a handful of tweaks here or there, because right now… Necropolis feels great. I think lessons were learned during Kalandra that they cannot sit on problems and hope they go away… or that player sentiment will change because since coming back from the Easter holiday a number of patches have been deployed to tweak things in either direction. The first patch that I talked about on Wednesday was maybe too generous allowing for a strategy that could print magebloods and another that could cause 50-150 divines to drop in a single map.

Even after being watered back down a bit… map modifiers feel like the actually do something. Previously when I saw a currency type show up as one of the golden map rewards, it was unlikely that I would actually see any of those things drop. Now I expect to at least exit the map with a stack of them, and have a better understanding of the levers that I can pull in order to lean into these rewards. Additionally, the negative impact of the blue modifiers seems to be far less severe than taking a blue or red altar. I feel like we have reached the sweet spot where mapping feels exciting and there is a chance at interesting things happening… but also that I am not expecting to get randomly oneshot by something that is operating way out of band from the rest of the encounters.

I’m also feeling like the crafting mechanic is worth interacting with in small doses. This is now something that I casually plug corpses into as I work on filling up a mega craft, and even then… I won’t be super frustrated if it doesn’t lend the results I want because It is something I am passively doing. The game is giving me corpses so I might as well use them towards something. If I walk away with an amazing fire damage sceptre then awesome. If I walk away with some vendor trash… I am not going to stress it too hard because I have another base that I am attempting to craft in a more traditional manner. The sceptre that I made when I dumped all of my corpses with old modifiers into was honestly pretty solid, so if I can get something similar I will probably still be happy. Do I feel like this is something worth going all in on and buying corpses from other people? Hell no… it is way too frustrating to realistically buy 40 corpses at a time.

Since I skipped yesterday, I have made a ton of upgrades since we last talked. The most major upgrade is that I now have a well rolled six-link cloak of flames in Righteous Fire colors. Essentially I bought a cheap unlike item that had good stats, put six sockets on it, and got the colors right then I utilized a powerful new crafting option. The scarab changes introduced a new item called the Bestiary Scarab of the Shadowed Crow, which puts the Black Morrigan on your map as a red beast allowing Einhar to capture it. For those who are thinking that name seems familiar, it was one of the bosses from the Wildwood last league and is still fairly mini-boss-like when you face it on one of your maps now. Capturing it opens up a bunch of new crafting options but the one that matters the most to me is the ability to fully link any item. When I bought my scarab it was 90c and the price has significantly dropped since then to around 60c making this a reasonable method for fully linking any six-link item.

Another thing that I picked up is this phenomenal elder helmet which I paid 2.5 Divines for. In the last league, I got a much worse helm and had to pay out 25 Divines for it after failing to craft one many times on my own. I would have liked to have had a higher chaos roll but I was over the resistance cap before this helm so it was just additional stat padding either way. Eternal Burgonet is always my base of choice for these helms so I was super happy to be able to get pretty much exactly what I wanted for such a reasonable price. I essentially bankrupted myself to buy this item but have gotten some lucky drops since then to bring me back up to a comfortable bit of currency.

I also upgraded my Immortal Flesh to a nearly perfect rolled one that I would actually invest catalysts into. That is if the price of catalysts were not still outrageous. When I earn back some currency I will work on getting this up to 20% with a Fertile Catalyst buffing up the amount of life and regeneration that I am getting from the belt. At the current price, it is going to be around 160 Chaos to buy 20 catalysts and I just don’t have that much liquid currency at the moment. The Divine Orb is still pretty weak so I am trying my best not to cash those in for more Chaos until it trickles up a bit. One thing that has floored me is just how much cheaper everything is in this first week, so I guess I understand why so many players rush to get currency and get trades done. I’ve already watched prices increase drastically… for example, the first Cloak of Flame that I bought was 3c on the second day of the league, and the well-rolled one that I bought was 60c. Part of the rise in price comes from a lot of corruption projects as folks are trying to get ideal double implicit items for specific builds, lowering the number of uncorrupted unique bases available.

I think what floors me more than anything else at this point is how fast I have gotten so strong. At the time of writing this blog post we are slightly less than a full week since the league launch and at this point, I am stronger than any version of Righteous Fire that I have played in any other league. I am shifting around 70% of the physical damage that I am taking to either elemental or chaos damage and have 90% Elemental Resistance and the default 75% Chaos cap. I’ve also got enough armor to reduce some of those physical hits further combined with over 2000 life regen. If my POB is to be believed I have 110k Effective Health Pool and can just eat a lot of attacks that probably would have killed me in previous leagues.

I’ve also made faster progress through the atlas than I have in previous weeks, and quite honestly I am not even going as fast as I could have gone. Were I not splitting my focus between mapping and delve I could have been this far along by maybe Tuesday. The key difference from where I am now versus where I am in Affliction is that I am playing in a trade league and have access to buy things. Yesterday I went on a spending spree and bought all of the cheap unique maps just to get more atlas points. So if you compare my 95/115 from SSF league to 110/115 they are pretty similar save for a few t16 maps. Ancestor league was even slower because at this point I was rerolling to a new character instead of continuing to push my league starter. Had I not been taking my time and engaging in content inefficiently… I could have gone so much faster, but also didn’t really see the point.

I am having a freaking blast, and it is surreal what a difference a few numbers here and there make to the feel of a league. The most radical change for my personal enjoyment of this league however is the introduction of three Atlas passive trees. Instead of trying to create the best superset of optimal points… it allowed me to spread out a bit and specialize them to do different things. One tree I have gone all in on Niko Sulphite generation, taken all of the Scarab drop nodes, and splashed in some Harvest and Strongboxes. For another tree, I did what I have always wanted to do but never felt like I could do and went all in on Einhar and decided to splash in Ritual and the nodes that give me Huck so I can run around doing maps with two buddies. Lastly, I went for a fully on Legion and Breach strategy for my last tree and then splashed in some of the nodes supporting the Necropolis league mechanic… which weirdly enough also gives me a little Niko because it was the most efficient way to path up the tree. I can flip between these different strategies whenever I feel like it giving me way more freedom than even full tree respecs would grant me.

I am having a freaking blast. There is always something that I want to do and I can shift up how each map feels based on my particular mood. The six-link craft beast is a game changer, and it appears not to be anywhere near as rare as I originally thought it was. I’ve since gotten one to drop on my own and I am waiting on one of the scarabs that will duplicate a beast craft before I go ahead and run it and bank some Morrigan crafts. Having a reasonable path to six-link any unique chestpiece/weapon feels phenomenal, I just wish there was a way to use a tainted-oil-like mechanic to apply them to corrupted items. Legitimately… Necropolis went from a bummer of a league to quite possibly my favorite league that I have ever played in. More than anything it is all of the options on how to tailor the content that I am running to suit my tastes and how much freedom the scarabs and new atlas trees are giving me.

Have you been playing the Necropolis League in Path of Exile? How has your first week gone? Drop me a line below.

Pinchy Pal

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Good Morning Folks! I don’t have a massive blog post this morning as I am sort of just trucking along in the league and grinding things out on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. I hit 90% to all resistances by leveling my Purity of Fire the rest of the way to 20 and have been slowly upgrading things as I get currency. This morning I upgraded Burning Damage and Elemental Focus to Level 21/20% Quality gems for a bit of a damage boost. Since I am still running on a 4-Link chest, my Righteous Fire is starting to finally be noticeable how little damage it is doing. I have the final chest piece that I am trying to link but have not won the RNG game against Fusings. I bought some of the loot boxes from this league and picked up this amazing crab backpack, which was the item I was hoping to get. I had to hide my defiance banner so I could see the beady little eyes.

As far as Atlas progress goes, I am sitting at 87 out of 115 but largely because I am not entirely pushing maps. When I fill up on Sulphite I shift gears and work on Delve a bit and have cleared out a few more cities as well as taken out my first Vaal Delve boss. I’ve also taken down the Blackstar and “Shrek” and am now working towards unlocking Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch for my first two voidstones. In theory I should be able to finish up both of those today, at which point I will shift gears back to finishing out the Maven unlocks. I tend to stall out on Maven because they give me less than unlocking the two altars end up doing for mapping. I need a lot of Eldritch currency in order to finish out the implicits on my gear. I am not exactly swimming in currency and everything seems wildly overpriced as I think there was a big loss of players when the league turned up not being that great.

That said I am hoping the patch that dropped over night is enough to bring folks back. While it greatly upgraded the crafting and lowered the difficulty of the negative mods, it did nothing for the existing corpses that we had clogging our morgue. As a result this morning I tried crafting a new Sceptre and simply by being able to choose my base of choice it was already an improved experience. I threw almost all of the corpses that I had sitting around at this and wound up with something that was actually an upgrade over what I had been using. Essentially I stacked a bunch of corpses for improved chance of Fire Modifiers and Elemental Modifiers, and then stacked corpses that reduced my chance of pretty much everything else. The final result is a sceptre with five mods that are “workable” and two that are actually pretty solid… one of which is the 30% Fire Multi which was actually damned good.

Yesterday I got my first Exalted drop. I have no clue why I take screenshots of these “firsts” but I find it interesting. Other than linking my chest, my other active crafting project is attempting to throw “reforge fire” juice from harvest at a sceptre that I got with 38% burning damage as a fractured mod. I am hoping to get +1 all fire gems on it and maybe a few other useful mods. However, it is going to be hard to compete with that 30% fire multi that I just crafted this morning. I also plan on saving up a bunch of the “better” versions of corpses from Necropolis to make another run at an upgraded sceptre if I don’t hit something soon on the fractured base. I do hope folks come back because right now trade feels a bit dead. The only thing that has not been fixed… is the ability to just nope out of the league content. We will see if Kripparian ends up trying it again given that he was probably the most public person to quit the league.

Necropolis Changes Coming

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Good Morning Folks! Well… that was a rapid turnaround. Yesterday GGG released a post on their forums indicating what they were planning on doing to resolve the dissatisfaction with the Necropolis league mechanic. When a league has reportedly the largest drop-off in player numbers I am guessing Klaxxons start firing and the teams rush into action. We probably would have had action sooner had the league not launched over a holiday weekend. Anyway, it seems like every complaint about the league is being addressed in one form or another save for the most requested feature… aka the ability to just not do it. I think everything in the post is largely a positive step forward, but I still think players are going to want the ability to simply not engage with the mechanic in any form. The ability to itemize corpses immediately is a huge win however and even if I have to loot something to clear a loot pile… I can throw it right back on the ground easily.

I have continued to do some shifting of gear around and am now up to 88% max elemental resistance and have squeaked past the Chaos Resistance cap as well. I’ve also managed to bump my Armor up to 25k which is a bit lower than I would like it to be, but still a good place to be. Combine this with the fact that I am shifting 50% damage to fire, and will in theory soon be adding another 10% of that to chaos damage it should make me pretty freaking tanky. Now I am simply in the place where I need a bunch more levels. I am contemplating trying to get the ignite proliferation glove implicit and then shifting up my Berek’s Respite for something either with more survival or more damage potential. Truth be told I have zero of the desired eldritch implicits so that will come as I farm more content and get more eldritch currency.

I’ve made a bit more progress into my Atlas, but have largely been holding off on doing all of the red maps that I have been collecting. Kirac bumps up the difficulty of his missions when you start running higher-tier maps, and I was trying to use him to help me finish out the yellow maps. That said I have reached a point where I am just going to have to deal with it if I want to keep making forward momentum. When I hit 50 Atlas Passive points I unlocked my second passive tree, and it appears that the third unlocks when I hit 100 passives. I ran betrayal until I had farmed up most of the enchants that I wanted and have now shifted to a strategy with Niko, Scarabs, and Harvest. This morning I cobbled together a second tree with Einhar and Ritual since they both live on the same side of the tree. As I get more passives I will probably splash in Beyond to add more spawns.

Because of the changes to the Niko nodes, it feels like I am filling up on Sulphite so much faster than I normally would have because I need to run fewer maps to get all the missions completed. As a result, I have reached a point occasionally where I would rather be pushing maps than pushing depth, and the Einhar tree will be good for flipping over to when that happens. As far as Delve goes I have farmed out three Vaal cities and have my first Abyssal city in sight. I am still just slightly below the 100-depth mark because the abundance of cities has caused me to go lateral rather than vertical. I feel WAY tankier than I normally would at this point and have been surprised at how fast my RF Chieftain has come online this league. I guess it makes sense because having built this before, I knew going into it the way I needed to build it as compared to the RF Juggernaut.

Delve and Mapping combined have created a virtuous cycle as the cities usually have several map lootboxes in each. This one for example had three different map-themed boxes in the same area, and the thing I have learned over the years is that Delve does not respect your atlas progress. This means you can easily see maps in Delve that cannot drop based on the Atlas nodes that you have already cleared. The only negative of this however is that once you get your four voidstones… these maps will continue to drop at their face value rather than upgrading to T16. This is why I have so many red maps that I have been sitting on and trying not to run, as these loot boxes drop a mix of white, yellow, and red regularly.

The thing I was not expecting is just how prolific the scarab drops are in Delve. Essentially every single node usually drops at least one scarab. This one happened to drop three at once, which is an outlier but not outrageously uncommon. I feel like this is related to Scarabs being put on the general drop-anywhere loot pool instead of being tied to specific mechanics. All in all I think this is a really solid change and my scarab coffers are filling rather quickly. It is going to reach the point where I am almost always running some sort of additional content being added from scarabs. The only thing I wish is that we would get some sort of UI element that allows us to pick scarabs out of our bank from the map device itself. It becomes tedious picking out the scarabs you want to run and then going over to the map device to run them. When I was regularly farming the same content over and over I would just leave a stack of scarabs in the map device.

My big “project” at the moment is attempting to get a six-link Cloak of Flame. I bought a two-link that was really well rolled and then proceeded to get it up to six sockets and color those sockets for Righteous Fire. Now comes the tedious process of pouring every fusing that I get into the chest and praying. With my Niko mapping setup I noticed that I seemed to get Niko Scarabs dropping more often than others. I am hoping there is some hidden affinity and that by shifting over to an Einhar tree I might happen upon the Black Morrigan scarab and link the item that way. Similarly, my shift over to Ritual I hope may see me finding an Omen of Connections which would also be a faster method for linking it.

All in all for a league where I do not care one bit about the mechanic… I am having a shockingly good time. I am definitely looking forward to the changes that are likely to be coming in this week and will probably try and do a bit more crafting as a result. I am not sure it will benefit this character, but it might let me get some good gear for alts. I think my very first alt is going to be an attempt at creating Kitava’s Thirst DD Blaster because it looks hilarious. I made a Witch mule to get Rolling Magma at league start and I figured I would turn that character into that build. It may be a bit before I stray from the fold however because I still have a lot of things to unlock and some voidstones to get.

A Tale of Two Leagues

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Good Morning Folks! Happy Monday after the starting weekend of the Necropolis League in Path of Exile. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about my impressions of the league so far. I will warn you there is going to be a heck of a lot of negatives in this discussion. I feel like I should throw out as a disclaimer that I am enjoying myself despite the negatives, but that there are a fair number of them. This is probably the worst-designed league I have played so far, full stop. I’ve been active for Sentinel, Lake of Kalandra, Forbidden Sanctum, Crucible, Trial of the Ancestors, Affliction, and now Necropolis. It is also important to separate the sandbox state of the game from the league mechanic because during Kalandra the thing that everyone was complaining about was the sandbox state of the game not necessarily the league mechanic itself. Necropolis has a fairly good sandbox state of the game, but a pretty shit league mechanic.

The Bad – The League Mechanic

I think the core problem with Necropolis is that you cannot skip the league mechanic. During Affliction League you could create some downright unplayable maps by juicing with wisps too hard… but that was a choice that you specifically made not something that was forced upon you. If you really cared about map completion you could just ignore the mechanic and the game played as though the league mechanic did not exist. For Necropolis, starting with the second map, you are having certain downsides thrust upon you that there is no real viable way of getting rid (at least not without investment in another league mechanic). This is what is causing Ruthless players and some Hardcore players to outright quit the league already.

I personally just don’t really engage in the mechanic at all. I never take a look at what the modifiers are or engage in the ability to swap them around… because the mechanic itself is largely uninteresting. It feels like there are downsides but I have not really seen equivalent “juicing” of my content in order to make up for it. In theory, you should be using these items that dropped called Allflames that replace or augment monsters on your maps in order to remove the modifiers that you don’t want to run. A lot of these add specific loot pools to the monsters, but these rarely if ever seem to pay out. I’ve added many of the “Pack Can Drop Omens” allflames and have yet to see a single Omen in this league. The side effect of doing this means I have to fight those awful chaos cultists from Affliction that cast the ability with the purple chaos flowers. I would say 99.9% of the time I don’t even notice that I have made a change to the map, but then that 0.1% something one-shots me from off-screen.

In theory, we are running all of these maps and fighting all of these haunted monsters in the chance of collecting bodies for our morgue, which we will then use for crafting “epic” items. What I was not expecting going into this league is how often bodies would drop, and how generally uninteresting the entire experience of collecting them feels. We can store 64 corpses in our morgue before needing to either incinerate, bury them for crafting, or extract the monster for external storage in our stash via an empty coffin. Empty Coffins can be purchased from Arimor the Gravekeeper for 1 Chaos Orb. Nothing about this crafting system so far makes me think it will ever be worth spending a chaos to itemize a corpse for sale on the market. So instead I spend a lot of time incinerating corpses when they fill up.

You are probably thinking “Bel, why are you even picking them up if they are not interesting”… that is another problem with this league. When a corpse drops it creates this giant UI element that blocks whatever might have dropped under it. There is no way to hide these corpse identifiers and as a result, you basically have to loot them if there is something that dropped and is being hidden underneath said UI element. This feels awful. I have no clue why these did not just drop as items for you to pick up. The whole mechanic of waiting for an animation to play out in zone as Arimor comes to collect the corpse looks cool the first time you see it… but after a point just needless animation cycles. By the time you have completed the campaign in an ARPG… the gameplay is about efficiency and not immersion. I feel bad that someone spent so much time lovingly animating this nonsense only to be the source of ire for players as it ubiquitously “gets in our way”.

So then you are thinking… but Bel, why don’t you just use the corpses to craft? The problem is that the crafting system feels bad too. My expectation was that corpse crafting would be something akin to Fossils where you choose the types of modifiers that you want on an item, and then craft the item with a heavy bias towards generating those affixes. Per Lolcohol which is a POE community crafting channel, you need to stack something akin over 2000% increased chance to come even close to guaranteeing a specific affix family. This morning I threw away some corpses on an example where I stacked 200% chance for cold damage and 500% chance for lightning, thinking I might at least create a baby tri-elemental bow for an alt. What I got instead was a corrupted bleed bow with cold damage on it, that I would not have even picked up had it dropped on the ground. The system feels “fine” while you are leveling because it is a rare item instead of a normal or magic item. However, it seems like you are better off just doing crafts off a single stat because the end result is going to likely be unusable so no point in investing much time in each craft.

The big problem with the entire system is that you can’t really choose your crafting base. You can assemble some corpses and say you are going to craft something for a specific slot, but you don’t really have much more control than that. For example, if you were going to play Explosive Arrow Ballista… you would specifically want a Short Bow or Thicket Bow for the attack speed. You could arrange twenty-some corpses with the ideal stat combinations for your bow… but wind up with an Ivory Bow instead and have a completely bricked craft as a result. Instead it feels like the best results are just throwing random shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. For example, these three items that I photoshopped over the crafting UI… were single corpse crafts, none of which actually got the stats that I included in the craft. It is chaos spam, but generating an item to go along with the random stats. The entire process is worse than having a random rare drop on a map, because at least then you can decide to pick it up based on the item base.

The Good – Sandbox Changes

So all of my complaints aside about the league mechanic… I am having a heck of a lot of fun and in large part, it is due to the Atlas and Scarab changes. Right now with my Atlas passives configured as I have them, I have an 80% chance to see Niko on every map and an 80% chance to see Jun. In practice, this feels like 100% of the time I have both Niko and Jun allowing me to progress Delve while also farming Betrayal enchants. There are one or two more Betrayal enchants that I want before I ultimately drop Jun entirely and start investing in some other league mechanic.

Because I have had such reliable access to Niko and as a result Sulphite, I’ve had the easiest progression into Delve that I have had in any league. Normally “breaking delve” is a bit of a pain in the ass as you keep farming little chunks of sulphite and making small amounts of progress over the course of many maps… because without a huge infusion of currency, you could not afford to buy Sulphite Scarabs in bulk. Instead of needing to rely on Scarabs the Atlas passives are all but guaranteeing that every map I am going to be filling my coffers so that I can get back down into the mines faster. I am currently sitting down around 100 Depth and found my first city last night before running out of juice. The whole map awhile, delve awhile cadence has been super enjoyable because it feels like I am making equal progress down both paths.

Similarly, the Scarabs themselves no longer feel like unobtainium. Generally speaking, I would not see large amounts of scarab drops until I had reached the point in the tree where I could start speccing into seeing Operative Strongboxes. Now instead Scarabs are just on the general loot pool and I started seeing them before I even finished the campaign. They feel fluid enough that I am spending them way more often because I know they are a relatively renewable resource. I’ve not seen a ton of the super rare scarabs, but I have picked up a few juicy ones like one that gives you a decent chance of duplicating drops. Right now I am mostly focused on map objective completion to build out my Atlas but as soon as I start running maps for fun and profit… I will likely be using way more scarabs than I did previously.

I’ve also had a fairly lucky league as a whole so that has helped with my mindset significantly in spite of the lackluster mechanic. I got my very first Divine Orb drop in Act 4, and then followed that up with another drop in Act 8, and another in Act 9. I was able to cash one of those in for an infusion of chaos orbs in order to buy some of the needed items to get my build up and running. Having some sort of liquid drop like that helps a ton when you are in a trade league economy. I am mostly sitting on the other two because the price of Divine Orbs to Chaos is still pretty low right now. Now that I am down at Delve I am generating enough raw Chaos drops to keep up with my assorted early needs. When Delve prices spike as crafting projects start to come online… I should be able to liquidate my resonators to get the rest of the things I need to finish out my build.

I am still running a four-link chest and just got a four-link helm and four-link gloves up and running. I am not even vaguely close to the final configuration of this build but it is humming along nicely. I made it through the campaign during the podcast on Saturday night, and then spent yesterday largely working on progressing my atlas and delve simultaneously. At this point, I have made it through 39 of 115 maps which seems like solid progress. I am a little bit behind where I was last league start as on the Monday after the start I was apparently sitting at 44 maps. However, I struggled to get engaged with Delve at all in the beginning so I was probably a bit more focused on mapping than I am right now with my attention being equally split between the two game modes. All in all, though I am much happier with where I am currently than where I was at that point with Boneshatter.

Even though the league mechanic is a bit of a shit show I am pretty happy with how things are going. I am hoping that we see some early patches that may tweak how things work a bit. I would love to see them make the mechanic optional and then change the way corpses drop and maybe change the weighting a bit for crafting purposes. There are still some interesting things that can happen during this league, namely with the “haunted modifiers”. While roaming around I crafted a low-level chest that wound up rolling “Gems Can Be Socketed In This Item Ignoring Socket Colour” which seemed really freaking strong. Basically, I am not giving up hope that after some tweaks this won’t be one of the better league mechanics at least for crafting purposes.

So here I ask you. Did you start something for the Necropolis League? What are you playing? What are you thinking about the league mechanic so far? Was I overly harsh in my criticism? Drop me your thoughts below.