The Perandus Pact

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Good Morning Folks! I find myself starting to feel that old familiar itch… the one that involves me leveling a second character. I have no clue what I actually want to make but that isn’t important. What is important is that I know before long I will wind up chasing some new character and trying to make it work. That is not to say I am not still having a heck of a lot of fun on Righteous Fire Chieftain, and would honestly probably keep playing it for a while. I just always end up starting several other characters during a league and then trying to make them work. I would love to see a redemption arc for Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, but I am not sure if I want to roll another Marauder in this league. It has been a few leagues since I have played Toxic Rain, and bows are dirt cheap due to the corpse-crafting meta right now.

Remember me talking about going all in on my sceptre yesterday? Well… about that. I had this fractured +1 fire gem base that I had been tinkering with for a while. Essentially I had been spamming all of my alts at it hoping to roll the ideal setup… and then survive the regal. Yesterday I had farmed up another stack of alts and threw them all at the weapon… and happened to land a pretty optimal setup. Which then prompted me to spend my last to Divine Orbs to meta-craft this the rest of the way to completion. Now I am back farming blue juice from Harvest so that I can shift this to an alternate quality setup for elemental damage and do the 30% corruption beast again. At that point… I think maybe just maybe I will have the final form of my weapon.

Some “new tech” from this patch that I have been playing with is The Perandus Pact Prismatic Jewel. This is a grave crafted item that can be influenced to roll with a specific stat package on it. I did not do this thing, I just bought mine because the “6% Increased Fire Damage” version is apparently not the sought-after version. Essentially allocating this in my tree gives me a ring that includes 18 passive tree nodes that each gain +6% for a grand total of +108% Increased Fire Damage. I had already planned on picking up the Sanctum of Thought node to push myself up to 90% reduction to critical damage, which will give me another +18%. This seems really good and it would be significantly better if I were building something on the right-hand side of the tree with much tighter clustering of nodes. Alternately I could have gone with +5 life per node, but I wasn’t sure if that would matter as much in the grand scheme of things.

I’ve gotten deep enough into Delve that I am starting to see a few survival issues, so I decided to try something. I was out perusing POE.Ninja as one does… and noticed a Korean player running RF Chieftain with Vampirism allocated on their amulet. This seems really good because it would give me another source of recovery that is not entirely dependent upon my regeneration rate. The big problem is diving into packs of mobs while waiting on an explosion to proc, and while that is going off I would be getting both life on kill and some life recuperation from damage taken. Thankfully Golden Oils are cheap this league so if I want to go back to my Damage Over Time setup that I had been running it would be easy enough to do so.

I picked up another crafting project, that has frankly already cost me around 150 Chaos Orbs of potential value. I found this chestpiece for 10 Chaos Orbs and while I do not care in the least about the level of socketed curse gems… I am a huge fan of that 5% reduced Fire Damage Taken. I am running a lot of beyond on my maps and as such finding quite a bit of tainted currency so essentially as I find tainted fusing I am throwing them at this item. All I need is one to hit with a favorable result. When I fail I go back to the bench and craft 4 linked sockets… restoring me back to the state of just needing one fusing to six link it. Like I said I have made 3 attempts, each attempt with a value of 50 Chaos… and sooner or later I am going to hit it and then swap over to this chest piece and likely sell my RF-colored six-link Cloak of Flames for a bit of a profit.

The last bit of findings is that I actually managed to hit some T4 Harvest Beasts and wound up pulling Bear’s Girdle which is a key component for a Cleave of Rage build. Again it is something that I have wanted to play with, but I am not sure I want to make a second marauder this league. It isn’t like the girdle is worth a ton on its own, but I was happy to get it nonetheless. I’ve never fought the actual harvest endgame boss and keep wondering what is involved in doing so. I guess I should look that up at some point because I know there is a league achievement the includes them as one of the options. I should probably make some general strategy around finishing enough achievements to get my sad little totem pole again. Right now I am mostly working on Maven witnesses so I can attempt to take her down for a voidstone.

How has your league been going? Are you still trucking along or have you moved on already? Drop me a line below.

Fun with Rogue Exiles

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Good Morning Folks! Things continue to truck along happily in the post-patch Necropolis league. The only real problem I am having right now is that there are too many things that I would like to be doing. Normally speaking I tend to focus hard on a single mechanic, and more often than not that is Delve. I am down around 230ish depth and having a grand ole time… but also I find myself really enjoying mapping this league more than normal. Having access to three Atlas trees seems to have made all of the difference in the world because I can shift things up depending on what I want to run. The shocking winner for this league is the tree that I have focused hard on Einhar, Beyond, Rogue Exiles, and Ritual. It ends up creating some extremely rippy maps but they are also ridiculous loot bonanzas.

When you have a large number of red beasts, corrupted rogue exiles, and beyond packs spawning… your screen often looks like this. I have a lower-density magic find filter that I occasionally swap to, but more often than not I just toggle off items entirely while I am fighting and then run around the room picking things up after the battle is over. The biggest problem that I have with a more restrictive loot filter is that there are things that I still want to pick up. For example, I am not going to pass by a stack of Jewelers Orbs or Chisels because I hate dealing with currency trades. I would instead rather have a full vault of that sort of stuff for when I potentially need it later down the line. The magic find ethos is to ignore anything that isn’t worth a lot of money and then buy the things you need… but I still enjoy looting normal stuff occasionally.

There is a nonsensical strategy where you essentially force every rogue exile to drop a unique, and then do some shenanigans with allflames and scarabs in order to force hundreds of them on your map. I’ve done some of this and it is truly silly. I am not chain-running it as a mapping strategy because I hate buying resources… but when I get the right scarab drops and the stars align I will run one of these maps. I think the challenge I have when it comes to making currency in Path of Exile, is that I can’t ever bring myself to grind the same thing over and over save for Delve. When I am mapping I like to shake things up a bit because it gets extremely tiring running the same map over and over under optimal conditions in order to maximize your profit margins. Instead, I would greatly prefer throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks and then being pleasantly surprised when something pays off.

I am still seeing the occasional raw divine drop and I am still occasionally moving random items that I chuck in my trade tabs. I think the league mechanic is adversely impacting my normal money maker, aka Delve Resonators. Though I have to be honest there are some things that it seems like are a massive pain in the ass to craft with corpses. I’ve mostly had complete failures myself each time I tried to craft anything. I’ve also seen a lot of failed craft videos out there, so I think at some point… good ole tried and true fossil crafting will win out and there will be a significant spike in prices. I am not willing to sell delve goods at the prices they are currently going for, so instead I sit on my mountain of stock in the hopes that eventually the prices will turn around.

I decided to go ahead and commit to the scetpre that I have currently and took it to 30% quality with an alternate quality harvest enchant. It is not a bad weapon, but a couple of the stats only really benefit fire trap and not both of my abilities. I have a project weapon with fractured +1 fire gems on it but have currently run myself entirely out of alts from spamming to try and get t1 Damage Over Time Multiplier or Fire Damage Over Time Multiplier. I managed to get this once… but failed on the regal and then failed again on an annul. Basically, I need the regal to add a prefix or be able to annul off a suffix for it to work. If I ever get the craft to work it should give me a significant upgrade, at which point I will do the alt quality harvest craft again and then beast craft corrupt it to 30% quality like I did this one.

Over the weekend I bought the three maps that I needed to finish out my Atlas. Thankfully they are all pretty cheap this league, but I realize this was a deeply selfish thing to do rather than sharing the love and inviting folks in to get credit. The thing that sucks is right now something is going on with my machine and Path of Exile and every time I attempt to run ANY maps with anyone I crash to the desktop. As a result I made the decision to go ahead and knock out my maps rather than spend the currency and risk not getting credit, with the thought that the moment I unlock these maps the sooner I get additional copies of them. For example, I have already gotten another copy of Coward’s Trial for the guild bank, and hopefully, folks who are not crashing out while doing multiplayer content can group together and run it. I’m hoping to see the other maps soonish so I won’t feel quite so bad for going ahead and knocking them out.

That has been a point of frustration for me ever since they started integrating the POE2 tech into the game. My performance has gone to shit, and every time I have tried grouping with anyone I end up without fail crashing out. Last league I attempted a number of Blight maps with Kodra and in every case I ended up losing one or two portals because I would crash when trying to group together. The other night I tried to bring along Ric to farm Black Morrigan and risked missing the capture because I bombed out right as we were fighting it. For now… I am just going to solo and feel slightly bad for being selfish with maps. My hope is that I will be farming up enough of everything else to make up for it.

AggroChat #473 – Successor to Loom

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week we are down a Kodra and a Grace but carry on with a short list of topics.  First, we talk some more about playing Secrets of Grindea in its final form.  Tam has ventured forth into Helldivers 2 and talks a bit about what makes the gameplay so infectious.  Thalen introduces us further into Chants of Sennaar a game that he has decided is the spiritual successor to Loom. Bel is amazed at what a difference a few percentages make as Necropolis League in Path of Exile was saved by a very early patch.  Finally Tam talks about the current event taking place in Star Citizen.

Topics Discussed:

  • Secrets of Grindea
  • Helldivers 2
  • Chants of Sennaar
  • Necropolis League Saved
  • Star Citizen’s Current Event

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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.