Friends, it is three days until the start of a new Path of Exile league, and I find myself doing what every Exile does… pouring over build guides and trying to figure out what path I am going to take for my league start. If you were not around a few months ago… Lake of Kalandra was the first league that a number of us poured our heart and soul into with a day-one start. This was maybe one of the worst leagues in modern history and struggled with currency drop and general survivability problems. While I actually enjoyed the Lake mechanic mechanically, it seemed needlessly brutal and random at times. As far as leagues go it has been shown to have had the worst player retention numbers of any league to date. I had contemplated just swearing off 3.20 but they seemingly know how to hit me straight in the feels.
The league mechanic this time around is The Forbidden Sanctum which is a rogue-lite that takes place within Wraeclast. It sounds like you will be earning currency each trip into the dungeon that can be used to gain buffs for subsequent trips slowly building out a talent tree of a sort. I like rogue-lites quite a bit and have spent plenty of time playing games like Rogue Legacy and Hades. Putting that inside of the ARPG-style gameplay that I am already addicted to… may prove to be my ultimate lure. However, until the trailer dropped I had not even been really contemplating this league which puts me weeks behind in the planning process. So this morning I am going to talk through some of the builds I am contemplating starting with.
Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut
Pohx is hands down the best guide maker I have ever seen in the Path of Exile community. He has his entire website wiki devoted to just giving you information to support his already amazing Path of Building guides. The big change this time around is that Inquisitor either took some direct nerfs or got caught up in other nerfs and is maybe going to not be the optimal way to play Righteous Fire. As a result, Pohx seems to be pouring most of his effort into a Juggernaut build and I am largely on board with this. The pros are a comfortable leveling experience with clear direction on what I should be doing which maybe be the sort of low-stress chill start I need.
Chronic Painless’s Blade Vortex Elementalist/Occultist
One of my all-time favorite playstyles in Diablo III is the Whirlwind Barbarian and its “spin to win” mechanics. The closest thing to really doing this in Path of Exile is Blade Vortex and this guide seems to be extremely detailed. The only problem with it is it involves math… and optimizing blade uptime because really you need to be able to maintain 10 blades at all times to pour through content. Other than that the build and guide seem pretty straightforward forward and it also seems like it would be easy to get gear for it even at the high end. All I really want is something that can complete red maps easily to farm for currency and this seems to be able to do that in spades. I have never played a Witch in any form so this is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone.
Zizaran’s Explosive Arrow Champion
Explosive Arrow Champion is back and Zizaran is once again suggesting this as a league starter. The positives are that I have already played this build before and understand the fundamentals. The negatives are that Zizaran for being as good of a YouTuber as he is… actually sorta writes shitty POBs. He takes for granted that players that are reading his content are going to just understand various concepts, and while I have been around Path of Exile semi-seriously for three leagues now… there are still a lot of core concepts that I do not fully grasp. It will be an uphill battle to sort out what he is saying versus what he is actually meaning. However Grace played this last go-round, and I have played it the time before… so I do have some knowledge that I can draw on.
Velyna’s Spectra Shield Throw Raider
This build looks like a hoot, flat out. I love bouncing shields and it looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. However Velyna seems like a super nice person, but trying to follow one of her guides is sort of awful. I played her Stormbrand last go-round and had all sorts of survival problems that I ultimately had to venture way off the path to fix. Watching this guide video, it sounds like so much of this build hinges upon a super specific shaper base helmet craft… and I am just not sure if I want to go through that nonsense. The stormbrand build eventually ended up being extremely fun to play, but it required me to spend a heck of a lot of currency to get there. So I am deeply gunshy about following Velyna into the breach again.
Ghazzy’s Dark Pact Necromancer
Going completely off the rails I am also sort of considering the Dark Pact Necromancer. Ghazzy really cares about minion builds and is one of the better guide makers for that specific style of play. I have never played a minion build in Path of Exile other than having a random Golem up just to provide a buff. Minions took a massive hit last league and the more traditional builds seem to be not as functional as they once were. This build however focuses on basically using your minions as a bomb to spread Dark Pact which drains minion health but causes chaos damage explosions. It sounds like it might be a fun playstyle but again this is going way out of my comfort zone since I have never played a witch in any form before.
Basically, I have three days to sort out what exactly I want to go for. I think all of the above would probably be a strong league start or at least be viable enough to get through a few labs and into early maps. Probably the top contenders for me at the moment are good ole Righteous Fire or the spin to win Blade Vortex build. I would 100% go Blade Vortex for certain, but I also know I suck ass at trying to maintain the uptime of something on a specific cast pattern. I know when I was splitting steel, I would always find myself out of shards because I was forgetting to make them. Fortunately, it sounds like this doesn’t actually damage my survival and is more than it would harm my clear ability… which is fine. I am okay taking a slower map clear if I screw up rather than taking random deaths.
Are you going to be venturing into The Forbidden Sanctum? If so what build are you looking at running? For those curious about the minutiae, you can check out the current patch notes here.