Pondering my Divine Orb

For the last week, I have been in a very weird place with Path of Exile. I was largely dissatisfied with the state of my build and was teetering on the edge of either quitting the season or trying to restart as something else. After some advice from Ashgar and Carthuun and a bit of tweaking here and there, I decided that before I gave up… I should really make an effort to at least try out the specific combination of unique items that the build suggested. This meant that I would need to be engaging with the trade market, and when I got my six link… it seemed at that time that prices were all over the place. Prices are still considerably worse at the moment than during the Sentinel league, but I came to a realization. I don’t actually care about the accumulation of wealth in the real world or in the game. Why should I sit on what little I have gathered up when I could put it towards some gear and at least feel like I gave this build its all?

Velyna’s Storm Brand build is centered around four unique items, and honestly, at the time I was uncertain what any of them would do for me. Spending a bit more time, and watching a much older video on the build… I finally grok what this was going for. Essentially the goal is to convert some of the lightning damage we have been stacking to cold… then we get 100% chance to shock frozen enemies, and when they die they explode dealing more lightning damage to their friends. The freezing makes running the build significantly easier because it halts a lot of packs in their tracks. I created my shopping list and set forth to purchase everything that I would need.

• Call of the Brotherhood – 1 Chaos
• Burden of Truth – 2 Chaos
• Crown of the Inward Eye – 5 Chaos
• Inpulsa’s Broken Heart – 150 Chaos

Call of the Brotherhood I already had sitting around, but it readily goes for 1 Chaos and is easily found. Burden of Truth was also a really cheap buy, and we did not get into some hard decisions until I got to Crown of the Inward Eye. Getting the colors and links that I needed, in a non-corrupted version came with a significant price tag, but I was able to find a slightly imperfect item for only 5 Chaos. The Inpulsa’s Broken Heart was the real challenge as to get one that was completely ready to go it would cost me around 3 Divines which translates to roughly 500 Chaos. After some searching, I managed to find a five-link with the correct socket colors already for 150 Chaos, and I pounced on it. So far I am opting to use it in the five-link state as I gather up the bindings to go for turning it into a six-link later.

By the numbers, it does not seem like I made a significant change. My resists are largely in the same place but I did gain quite a bit of armor, over 700 points of evasion, and while I only gained 2 points of raw health I added 875 energy shield. I’ve also added about 17% spell block and 30% crit reduction. Another big thing that has changed is that I am now immune to Shock, Ignite, and Freeze… with the last coming from finally getting some Divine Vessel drops and working on my pantheon. I’m up to 64% stun recovery and 73% total physical damage reduction. So while again the numbers did not seem that drastic, in actually playing… I feel so much less squishy than I did. I still can’t really afford to let anything big beat me for long, but I am less likely to get randomly one-shot.

Last night I spent most of the evening working on getting some experience by running low-tier maps that I have either run as they stood, or applied an alchemy orb. I had some pretty solid luck last night, like this moment when I opened a storage chest and got three uniques to drop at once. When I finally called it for the evening I was just shy of hitting my next level. So I am likely going to keep this up until I ding, then maybe focus on something risky for a while like trying to progress in red maps again. Essentially if I am in xp earning mode I want to take very few risks, and if I am very far away from a level… then I don’t care how many times I die.

Thanks, I guess in part to the way I have specced my Atlas passives, I have seemingly phenomenal map sustain. It is very rare that I don’t come out with more maps than I put in, and it seems like I get at least three maps the majority of the time. Last night I hit a lucky cartographer’s chest that paid out massively, with the only negative being that all the maps were corrupted meaning they have to be used “as is” without modifications. This however will keep me doing these low-risk maps for awhile, which seem to be extremely lucrative in materials and resources. Essentially I am banking my bindings so that I can make an attempt at converting this five-link to a six-link without risking breaking the configuration that I currently have and that is working so well.

So while I spent the one Divine Orb that I have found so far to get to this point… my general outlook on the game is greatly improved. I would consider that “money” well spent.