Blaugust 2023 In Review

Good Morning Friends! It is that time again… Tabulation Day, aka the day in which I spent the morning counting up all the blog posts from all the participants. This year I want to give a huge thanks to a few people who helped out, most specifically GamerLadyP who organized a self-reporting thread on the Discord and MagiWasTaken for getting up well ahead of me due to timezones and providing me a full count of all 104 participating blogs that I could use as a verification method. I also want to give a huge thanks to everyone who got the word out this year and spread the news of Blaugust, because I am still fairly overwhelmed by the participation. I had wondered what my abandonment of Twitter would do to the event, but it is very clear that the Fediverse and Mastodon specifically have embraced this particular brand of nonsense. I mean I guess it makes sense given that anyone who is interested in DIY Social Media… is also highly likely the sort of person to host their own blog.

Let’s talk about some of the statistics from this year:

  • 104 Blogs Signed Up for Blaugust.
    • Of those Blogs 100 Made at least one post during the month of August.
  • We had 56 folks sign up for Blaugust who had never participated before.
  • During this past month, Blaugust Participants created 1459 Content Posts.

That is truly wild folks. This is easily the most active year of Blaugust we have ever had, and that is pretty cool considering this is both the 10th time we have run Blaugust and the 10 years since the very first one. I’ve said this many times before, but over the years Blaugust has developed a mind of its own, and even if I dropped off the face of the earth… I think someone would follow along behind me to keep the initiative going. This is also the first time in years that I have actually done the daily posting thing… which is weird considering I was already posting six times a week but I made that little extra effort in honor of our tenth year.

Newbie Class of 2023

One of the things that has completely blown me away this year is the large amount of participation from folks who have never participated before. Each year one of the goals of this event is to cultivate new voices to join our community. Blogging has for years been called a dying tradition, but many of us who have participated in this event and the pseudo-predecessor Newbie Blogger Initiative have stood in constant defiance of that viewpoint. Now some folks that signed up are legitimately new to blogging, while others have been seasoned veterans that just never got involved in this process before. We welcome them all however as first-time Blaugustans and as such there is an extra special award for them.

The Awards and Methodology

Now we reach the moment where I talk about the various Awards associated with Blaugust. I tried to carry forward the general styling elements that I ran with during this event when I created the badges. These will all be available on the Blaugust Media Kit in the full-resolution version if you want to snag them for your blog’s sidebar. For anyone who needs a bit of a refresher on our rules, here are the guidelines that the awards are assigned based upon.

  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 Posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 Posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the month of August 2023.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You beat the challenge and posted 31 times or more during the month of August 2023.

Before we get to the lists however it is time for my yearly disclaimer. I am a human being and as a result highly fallible. This year I had quite a bit of help in the tabulations, but if you feel that we made a mistake please feel free to reach out and let me know. Some blog layouts are much harder to tabulate than others… and we do our best to count them all. I am extremely thankful each year for the folks with much more standard layouts, those with self-tabulating calendar widgets, and at a minimum those who use hard date stamps rather than relative ones. Again if you feel like we made a mistake we are very open to negotiation.

The Bronze Club 2023

This year we had thirty-seven folks who managed the feat of posting at least five times during the month of August 2023. Since a lot of this event is about posting more often and finding your own schedule to follow. Five times during the Month of August would be around one post a week… which seems like a completely reasonable schedule.

The Silver Club 2023

We had a dichotomy emerge this year where folks either posted a little bit or a whole heck of a lot, so some of our other awards are a little sparse. This year we had seven blogs that managed the feat of posting at least fifteen times during the month of August 2023. To continue the theme of choosing a schedule, this would equate to posting at least three times per week. Especially if you landed on something along the lines of a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday schedule… this also seems completely manageable.

The Gold Club 2023

Now that we get down to Gold, we are oftentimes in the territory of folks who already have a predetermined schedule and just follow that. For example, I have been on the Gold Team for years because I tend to post at a minimum Monday through Friday, and due to the podcast on Sundays as well. This year we had two blogs post at least twenty-five times during the month of August 2023. Keeping the schedule thread rolling forward, this would be around five times per week.

The Rainbow Diamond Club

This year we had a fairly massive Twenty-Nine blogs that managed the feat of posting at least thirty-one times during the Month of August 2023. There are always some folks who end up wildly overshooting the goal and we had ten of them this year. I actually put in the extra effort this year to join the Rainbows, but I will likely never match someone like Syp or Wilhelm who traditionally posts a truly outrageous number of posts on the regular. Everyone who makes it to this level truly deserves all of our admiration, which this time around… sounds weird to say considering I am actually sitting among them.

Honorable Mentions

While the first awards category begins with five posts during the month, it still takes a lot of effort to sign up and put yourself out there with even one blog post. Sometimes the tyranny of the blank screen gets the better of us. Other times you really want to participate but life gets in the way. I feel like it is really important that we take the time to celebrate all of the folks who made that first step and give them the hope that they will return next year with even more content. I think last year was the first time I created a badge just for them, and I am continuing that new tradition this year. This year we had twenty-five folks who made that first step.

Final Thoughts

This year was a wild ride. Firstly I did not think we would have anywhere near the participation of a normal year given the turmoil that Twitter has been in. That platform was really the origination point of this event, and I thought we might get a number of the regulars back that just happened to catch my blog post announcing it, but I didn’t really expect much in the way of growth. I’ve never been so happy to be completely wrong about anything. The Fediverse is a fertile new ground for bloggers, and it tends to attract the type of folks who want to be out there expressing themselves… on their own terms. This gives me so much hope for blogging as a medium going forward. Sure we might be losing Twitter as a viable home, but we are also expanding out into new territories that are potentially going to be better in the long run.

In the lessons learned department… I think for the most part having an official Mastodon account on Gamepad.club has worked extremely well. I think next year I might need to script something that goes out and boosts posts rather than what happened this year. Essentially each morning I would log into the account and then proceed to flood everyone’s timeline with what had accumulated since the day before. I can’t say that this worked terribly well because it felt like I was a bit of a nuisance. The other big takeaway is that when you get over 100 participants… Tabulation Day aka this morning… becomes “a lot”. Next year we will be tweaking the rules a bit to require self-reporting your blog posts at the end of the event. This is going to make life so much easier for me specifically, but for everyone who helped me out in getting tabulations started.

As always I am so deeply proud of everyone who has participated this year. The tyranny of the blank screen is a real thing. So often it takes me pretending that I am writing to myself to hit the publish button each morning, so I understand what many folks have to overcome to put themselves out there. Again I am very fallible, and if you feel like I made an error in my tabulations, please reach out to me from any of the many platforms I use, and we can talk about it. By the time of posting this, I should have updated the Blaugust Media Kit page with all of the awards, so feel free to snag them and do whatever you want with them. I hope to see you all back for Blaugust 2024. Lastly, I encourage you to keep blogging and stay active in the community during the coming year. For many of us, this is a support structure that we can rely on, and while I may not say it often… I appreciate all of you greatly.

Last Day of Blaugust 2023

Good Morning Folks! As I am sitting here writing it is the dawn of the last day of Blaugust 2023. There was so much content generated, and tomorrow I will likely do a bit of a summary when I talk about the event as a whole. I wanted to start out this morning with a bit of expectation-setting. In an average year, the “tabulation day” as I personally refer to it is a bit of an arduous undertaking. Normally we talk around fifty or so blogs that I have to review and count posts on. This year we have one hundred and three… by far the largest participant pool I’ve ever seen. So please be patient with me as I undertake the task of tabulating everything and calculating the rewards. Tomorrow is the day when I get really grumpy for everyone who has a less standard blog layout without a clear monthly post index. Really it is the more Instagram-like interfaces that fluster me the most with irregular tiling.

I know of at least one blogger who I am going to ask to tabulate their results for me because instead of writing traditional blog posts they created their blog as threads on the Fediverse. It is just too damned hard to track these, and while I want to be super inclusive about this event… we gotta figure out a better way if this is going to be a thing that more people do. I think next year if we have anything even vaguely close to this number of bloggers, I am going to have to write something into the rules for self-submitting your blog post count for the month. I mean the entire event is already largely on the honor system and I am already scared to death that I am going to miss count someone’s posts and dump them into the wrong category. It has happened before. Some blogs are just harder to count than others and when you are doing a ton in a row in as short a time frame as you can… mistakes occasionally get made.

I am still delving around the 150 depth and having a blast doing so. I’ve upgraded my resistance and light radius in order to go much deeper, but for the moment this seems to be my happy place. I am not sure if this league’s RF character is stronger than the last league, but it feels at least as tanky. I know flipping Fire Trap to my chest piece seems to have increased my damage output significantly. I dinged 95 last night and am about a quarter of the way into the next level. I spent my passive tree point last night on some quality of life, and 10% more area of effect for Righteous Fire. I wasn’t entirely certain why, but my radius seemed really small to me… so anything to increase that would be pretty great. I know that I am missing the AOE Gems/Radius bench craft on my Necklace which I have not lucked into unveiling so far this league. I spent a bit of time last night running Jun missions on the Raider in an attempt to get it with no real luck so far.

I spent quite a bit of time on the Storm Brand Templar soon-to-be Inquisitor last night. I am still very much in the “ugly duckling” phase of this build and don’t have much in the way of defensive layers yet. I did pick up a pair of Call of the Brotherhood rings with Lightning to Cold conversion, giving me a grand total of 96% of Lightning Damage converted to cold. I am contemplating trying to work a Heatshiver into the build so that would add some fire damage as well. I still think I want an Inpulsa chest, which is going to be pretty expensive… but thankfully “Delve Provides” to borrow a motto from Jorgen. I already have more than enough currency to pick up whatever I need, but I do like to keep a buffer for more of my bullshit projects. Random comment though… the new Kirac’s Vault outfit is pretty freaking great minus the weird helm. I had this glowing eyes/black hood thing from a random cosmetic box and I think it goes nicely with it… and then matched it with some wings I had from a previous supporter pack and two wand graphics.

Anyways also on the docket this weekend, is Starfield. I preloaded it this morning and play on poking my head in when the early access begins tonight/tomorrow. I am not sure if I will give this a ton of attention, mostly because I am still fairly invested in the Path of Exile league. However, it might surprise me, and grab me in the same way that Skyrim did so many years… when I pretty much disappeared from raiding for a week because I could not stop playing the game. I am hoping for a great experience, but I am also trying to cool my jets when it comes to hype. I know Bethesda games can be a bit buggy, but honestly… I’ve enjoyed all of them. Hell, I even enjoyed Fallout 76 quite a bit at launch and had zero problems with Fallout 4 in spite of so many people lampooning it at the time.

It is weird… I can be super critical of games like Diablo IV, but completely give a pass to other games that people are memeing. I think it mostly depends on how important I consider the genre. For me the ARPG is just such a fundamental part of me as a player, that my disappointment got the best of me with Diablo. However, Bethesda games are just something I play for fun on the side from my more mainline MMO and ARPG games. They are just a fun goof rather than my main course. I think maybe that is also why I didn’t really have any problem with the DC movies that so many people lambasted… because I am just not super invested in them. Investment breeds contempt.

Now time for my second “Anyways” of the post. I hope you all have a great day and a happy last day of Blaugust. Remember… tomorrow will be a stressful day for me. Please give me some space to do the things needed to tabulate the posts.

3.22 Early Map Divination Cards

Good Morning Folks! I’m in a bit of a holding pattern waiting on the Path of Exile Trial of the Ancestors league’s start tomorrow. In this downtime I find myself doing a ton of research designed to help make my start a bit smoother. Currently, my intention is to attempt to solve my own problems in a very solo-self-found manner, without actually flagging myself as part of that challenge league. This means there will be several phases that my build will go through… namely finding my first five-link gear, attempting to solve my resistance, and eventually finding comfortable six-link items to help with that process. The challenge is that it is very hard to brute force your way into a six-link weapon or piece of armor, and it will be a long time before I find 1500 Bindings Orbs which is what the guaranteed recipe requires.

White Tier Maps

As you migrate out of the campaign, you will find yourself moving into what is colloquially referred to as “White Maps” largely because the border of the icon has a white color, as compared to the later yellow, and red versions. Essentially this pool of 36 “white” maps is divided up into difficulty tiers one through five and are realistically not that far from the general difficulty level of the campaigns. Recently we got a big information dump for the Item Filter creators to update their filters, and with it came a full list of which maps are associated with which tiers. For the sake of this exercise, we are only going to focus on those first five tiers of maps because you should be getting quite a few of these as you progress through the Atlas of Worlds.

Tier 1

  • Bone Crypt
  • Arena
  • Barrows
  • Plateau

Tier 2

  • Dunes
  • Stagnation
  • Primordial Blocks
  • Estuary
  • Grave Trough
  • Beach
  • Wasteland
  • Mineral Pools

Tier 3

  • Overgrown Shrine
  • Strand
  • Cold River
  • Lookout
  • Residence
  • Bog
  • Forking River
  • Mesa

Tier 4

  • Cemetery
  • Moon Temple
  • Vaal Pyramid
  • Primordial Pool
  • Malformation
  • Iceberg
  • Graveyard
  • Cage

Tier 5

  • Atoll
  • Courtyard
  • Volcano
  • Bazaar
  • Cells
  • Tropical Island
  • Leyline
  • Alleyways

Divination Cards

It is extremely difficult to predict what maps might drop what pieces of gear, because for the most part armor drops are a complete crapshoot. However, there is a thing in Path of Exile called a Divination Card, and these drop from specific zones. If you collect a full set of a given card, you can turn them in for a specific item or pool of items. So as a result one of the most “deterministic” ways of farming six-linked gear is to set your focus on a specific zone that drops a specific set of cards. This morning I thought I would talk a bit about what is available in the white tier of maps. Quite frankly… there is a heck of a lot of useful cards available.

Six-Link Body Armor

[EDIT] – My fact-checker-in-chief Ashgar, pointed out that some of these cards namely Imperial Legacy, Dapper Prodigy, and Bowyer’s Dream cannot drop in the minimum tier versions of these maps. Item level 100 drops have a minimum drop level of 80. This means you will be able to run these maps once you get some void stones… but sadly not before that.

For guaranteed Six-Link body armor, we have four different cards to choose from. It should be noted, that all of these will reward a normal quality item, meaning you are going to need to craft it into something useable usually by throwing some essences at it. However, you can usually brute force your way into something that will work for your build. Of these probably the worst one is Emperor of Purty, which gives you an Item Level 60 Holy Chainmail which has fairly low stats but would be easier to get green sockets on for example if you needed that in an Armor/Energy Shield base. The best option is probably The Dapper Prodigy which will drop item level 100 armor, which makes it easier to get higher-tier crafting rolls on it. Celestial Justicar is specifically good for anyone needing a pure armor base as Astral Plate has extremely high armor and comes with an implicit bonus to all elemental resistances. The Chains that Bind is fairly commonly farmed though because it drops fairly frequently and can realistically be farmed while doing the campaign as it can drop off level 38 content, and all of the maps associated with Shavron’s Tower in Act 6.

Six-Link Weapons

[EDIT] – My fact-checker-in-chief Ashgar, pointed out that some of these cards namely Imperial Legacy, Dapper Prodigy, and Bowyer’s Dream cannot drop in the minimum tier versions of these maps. Item level 100 drops have a minimum drop level of 80. This means you will be able to run these maps once you get some void stones… but sadly not before that.

Weapons are largely only a concern for folks needing to use two-handers. Unfortunately for anyone needing a two-handed melee weapon that is not a staff… you are sorta screwed with the white maps this time. However, if you are a bow user… life is pretty peachy. The Porcupine is infamous because it is the most common crafting base for anyone trying to build a bow for Toxic Rain or Explosive Arrow, both of which want fast attack speed. I however will be going for Imperial Legacy for my Lightning Arrow build, which while not the best base is at least item level 100. I threw Bowyer’s Dream in mostly because it exists, but this only drops from the boss of that map so it is likely out of reach unless you boss rush Leyline. For staves, your best option would be The Dark Mage or if you can survive from a 5-Link the lesser Flora’s Gift also exists.

Currency Cards

One of my favorite videos on the subject of the “easiest way to get a six-link” basically just comes out and says that trade… trade is the easiest way. A lot of the suggestions here are for folks wanting to avoid trade, but even then… if you want to buy a six-link you are going to need some trade currency. That means Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, and Divine Orbs. While there are still some weirdos trying to run the Awakened Sextant scam, for the most part, you need to have the three most common liquid currencies in order to buy anything. A lot of early league strategies for money-making involve farming a bunch of bulk items and then trading those on The Forbidden Trove, which is a bit too far for me personally. If we look at the maps that are available to us, for the purpose of farming Div Cards that reward raw currency… the clear winner is Brother’s Stash and Brother’s Gift as they both drop from the same locations. Alternatively, if you need Vaal Orbs, then The Inventor is well worth your time, and if you need Exalted Orbs then maybe The Scout is worth chasing. What we really benefit from this league is three separate locations within White Maps where we can farm the brother’s cards.

Chase Cards

So say you have a lot of expenses… and you need to target much bigger prey when it comes to farming currency cards. I guess at this point let’s talk a bit about some of the chase rare cards that are available in this league’s White Maps. Please note… you may go all-league and NEVER see one of these drops, but if you want to chase some “big game” there are some options. The biggest fish is definitely Unrequited Love, which is essentially a fraction of a fraction of a Mirror of Kalandra. At the time of writing this card is going for 42 Divine Orbs, and the price fluctuates wildly through the league. Next up you The Nurse which is a fraction of a fraction of a Headhunter belt and this usually goes for around a Divine Orb. Similarly priced is The Sephirot, but it is much harder to farm given that it only drops from a boss. Lastly, you have Divine Beauty which only goes for around half a Divine Orb, so you would probably be better off just farming the entire set of 12 and turning in for 7 Divine Orbs.

Kirac Farming

While I am spending all of this time talking about Divination Cards, I would be remiss if I did not at least mention Kirac farming. As you unlock your atlas you are likely to be leaning on missions from Kirac to help uncover new maps. One of the reward types that Kirac offers is a map that will drop a full stack of Divination cards. Most of the time these will be junk cards that give basic crafting currency, but there is always the rare chance of you getting a full stack of one of the most sought-after cards. When I farm Kirac missions for cards I rely heavily on Divcards.io, which allows you to input a map and it brings back quickly a list of cards that could drop.

So in this example, Kirac is offering me a Div Card mission for Defiled Cathedral. When I search on Divcards.io it returns the following results for that map. In this case… there is an exceedingly rare potential for dropping one of the most sought-after cards in the entire game… The Apothecary. Even though I know I am more likely to get a stack of a trash card like Her Mask, I am absolutely going to run this on the off chance that I get lucky. If there is absolutely nothing worth getting, then you can always use a Scouting Report to reroll Kirac’s Inventory. Getting a full stack of The Apothecary and then turning in for a Mageblood represents a potential 200+ Divine Orb payday. For me… if I ever got a Mageblood I would just use the damned thing.

Final Thoughts

For a league start, I feel like we have a shockingly good number of gear-farming maps available in those first five tiers. I think Div cards are fun because they give you a reason to farm a specific zone, and while doing that… you are going to be seeing a lot of other interesting things along the way. So if you set your mind on a set of Dapper Prodigy cards to get a six-link, you might actually see a raw six-link drop in the process. Not to mention getting likely several chaos orbs or higher crafting currency in the process of farming. Having farmed full sets of cards up many times, they don’t exactly drop quickly. What I like however is they set my focus on doing a specific thing that is going to likely improve my character, rather than just mindless random farming. In a game with an overwhelming wealth of options… having specific goals in mind can be extremely important. Even when I was spending hundreds of hours down in Delve, I had the specific goal of finding cities and more specifically Delve bosses.

Anyways, I hope this actually helps someone out there. I’m looking forward to the league starting on Friday, and I am hoping that I have a bit of luck when it comes to drops. I am not opposed to fixing problems through the trade market, but I am going to see how far I can get on my own.

Ancestor League Testing

Good Morning Folks! Here we go with another Saturday blog post since I seem to be determined to hit thirty-one this Blaugust. We are in the final stretch before the launch of the Trial of the Ancestors League in Path of Exile next Friday. With a new league comes the eternal question of what the heck to actually play. While I need to spend some time updating it, I have a section on the Path of Exile Tools page where I have been loosely keeping track of the characters and builds that I have played over the course of the last four leagues.

Last week I recorded a bit of a rambling video talking about my journey with Path of Exile so far, but suffice it to say I have learned a lot over the last four leagues, and Ancestor is going to be my fifth league. There are a lot of things that I have come to accept that I did not with that very first build. Firstly I have come to accept that while builds may be advertised as being able to do all of the content in the game, that statement usually comes with some caveats. Namely what feels great clearing a map doesn’t necessarily always feel great in deep delve or fighting bosses. So I am going into the Ancestor league knowing that more than likely I am going to build several characters for various reasons over the course of the league… some because I want to specialize in a specific bit of content and others just because I want to try something different.

For the last two leagues, Sanctum and Crucible, I have league started a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This is without a doubt probably the most comfortable build I have ever played. I’ve never really put the currency into the build in order to turn it into a higher damage potential/do all of the content in the game build… but instead mostly focused on the high levels of survival and making it a comfortable Delve and Heist monster. That is not to say that mapping is not comfortable, but it will never clear as fast as some of the other “entire-screen-clearing” options. I know that more than likely by the end of the league I will have leveled another Righteous Fire character, but I sorta want to see how the new meta shakes out with RF Chieftan and whether or not Forbidden Flesh/Flame are cheap enough to reasonably either cherry pick a Juggernaut ability, or do the same with a Jugg and snag the Chieftain resistance capping node.

However, if you want a very comfortable build that was able to get me two keystones without breaking a sweat and do most of the game modes… then I would suggest checking out Pohx.net or specifically the Righteous Juggernaut written guide. This is a playstyle similar to the Thorns Crusader if you ever played that in Diablo III, where you just run through the map and watch things fall down around you.

Another build that I had a heck of a lot of fun with in this past league was Explosive Arrow Ballistas Champion. This is technically the first build I ever played when I sat down to try and follow a guide back during the Sentinel League. The thing is… there were a lot of layers of how to build a character that I did not understand at that point. As a result… my EA Champion was a bit of a failboat that I half understood the directions that I was trying to follow. This is one of the first builds that I kitbashed a number of guides together along with some information from various POE.ninja profiles of folks playing a similar setup. The end result is a build that looks very much like most EA Champions out there, but one that specifically was suited to my tastes. If you are curious about what the build ended up looking like, here is a short video I recorded a while back.

While I enjoyed it greatly, there is an aspect to the build that just feels weird in that you spend a lot of time running ahead while you wait on your Ballistas to kill things for you. You end up building in such a matter that you don’t actually do any damage yourself, but your turrets do… but they don’t actually do the damage from the initial hit… but instead from a delayed explosion. It is very much a no-aiming gameplay style which is fun and is super tanky in the way in which I built it so you can survive pretty much any of the content. However mapping… never really felt that great because you were essentially always needing to loop back through the map to pick up what dropped in your wake.

If you want to give it a shot though, I highly suggest you check out Zizaran’s video guide from last league. There were no significant changes in the way that someone would build an EA Champion, so for the most part all 3.21 guides should be relevant still.

Another build that I have greatly enjoyed, both in the version that I built this league in the above video, and a half-assed version that I played way back in Sentinel league… is Wintertide Brand. More specifically the best version I have played is the Wintertide Brand Occultist that I cobbled together after looking at a number of POE.Ninja profiles and trying to decide what path I wanted to take. This is the first build that I more or less freehanded based on input that I was seeing from other player builds rather than trying to follow a guide. For the most part, it worked out swimmingly. The core problem, however… is it is a bit on the slow side and has a requirement of needing a unique to feel good. More specifically you want a specific corruption of that unique. I also already had a nice “+Cold Skill Gems” wand laying around that dropped in Delve so it was easy for me to cobble this together.

To be truthful… there are not a ton of guides around for this one. Mr 9 Lives has one but it is nowhere near as detailed as something from Zizaran, Ghazzy, or Palsteron. If you want to copy my POB I dumped that some time ago at level 82. The thing that I never quite solved was with my build were all of the defensive layers. I was going for Regen + Block but I was missing a lot in the block department. Basically I never really wanted to put the effort into properly fixing it, but someday… I am going to make this feel amazing.

Another build has caught my eye recently, and I am doing a bit of a league start test at the moment. While I am only in Act 8… unless something drastically changes I think I am going to league start Lightning Arrow Raider. Essentially what I would like to have is a build that can just wipe the entire screen, and be able to do that… in what is effectively garbage-tier gear. I want to go into this next league pretending like I am approaching it as SSF, in spite of wanting to have access to give stuff to my guildies and hopefully cherry-pick the one thing I am a bit worried about getting… Vaal Lightning Arrow.

I recorded some gameplay this morning of running through some of Act 8. Essentially using a Lightning Arrow 5-link I can often kill things before they even get on the same screen with me. It performed essentially the same on a 3 and 4-link. For Rare/Boss mobs I use Artillery Balistas in order to grind them down or fire off Vaal Lightning Arrow if I have a Vaal charge. For defensive layers I am going after High Evasion, 100% Spell Suppression, 100% Phasing, and trying to get a decent balance of life and armor to round that out.

With this test, I have specifically been avoiding rifling through my vault to find good stuff to equip. Everything I am wearing dropped for me during this run so far. The bow for example was a white five-link item that took the quality to 20% and then threw an Anger Essence at and lucked into a reasonable roll. Then I bench-crafted cold damage on it to add a bit more raw damage. The Helm I Rog Crafted, and the chest, boots, and gloves were all things that dropped. I’ve got a bunch of gems equipped that I am not even using but never actually removed from my gear.

Essentially what sent me down the Lightning Arrow/Artillery Ballista path was the number of folks who made magic find builds using that combination of abilities at the end of the league to farm stuff. In all cases, it seemed like they could make it work on a bare minimum of gear. In my travels of searching for information, I stumbled across the above video from “LifeWithoutPants” a YouTuber I had never seen before. This sent me down the path of Raider instead of PathFinder, so we are going to see how that feels. I really like leveling a Ranger because it does not require me to mule anything from another character, pending I am going for a bow build. Generally speaking, when I get access to Lily or the Library I pick up Flame Dash to replace normal Dash, but past that, you start out with access to everything you need and get most of it through quests.

Right now I plan on finishing leveling all the way through the Acts and then will try some White and Yellow maps to see how those feel. Essentially my plan for this character is to farm maps and work my way up to Red maps. I might go Essences, Harvest, and Jun on my Atlas to help with gathering gear. The other path I guess would be to go down Expeditions and then Rog craft some gear. My hope is with the screen clear potential of the build is that Blight won’t be quite so painful as it usually is with Righteous Fire. I’m not sure I will be able to do Metamorphs in quite the same way as I did as SRS or RF, but I am not going to block any content so that I can at least try a bit of everything.

I am really looking forward to this league, and looking forward to giving Sanctum another shot in its updated form. Are you going to be playing Path of Exile? What are you looking at to league start? Drop me a line below and we can chat! I’m also more than happy to help folks out if you are just dipping your toes in the game and looking for a build to follow. Generally speaking, I should be able to take the type of gameplay that you like in other ARPGs and suggest something similar in POE.