Good Morning Friends! It has been a few days since I last updated my progress in Path of Exile, so this morning is going to be one of those posts. At this point, I am finishing up white maps and well into yellow maps. Initially, my first goal is to finish out my Atlas so that I can get all of my passives for mapping purposes. After that, if I still have solid momentum, my goal is going to be to finish each of the “uber” fights. All told I am enjoying this league a heck of a lot more than Lake of Kalandra, though I did enjoy the “Lake” Mechanic more than I enjoy the Sanctum Mechanic. It feels like the base game is just in a better state than it was during the lake, but I do want to spend some time testing out the feel on my old Stormbrand build over in Standard to see if this is more a case of Righteous Fire just being extremely strong or if the game itself is less punitive.
It has been three days since I last posted a screenshot of my currency tab, so you can see a lot of progress on various currencies. At face value, it doesn’t look like I have gained a lot in the liquid currency department aka Chaos, Exalts, and Divines. However, I’ve made 27 Chaos worth of purchases which would take that the liquid assets that I have found up to 2 Exalts and 49 Chaos which isn’t too bad. I’ve yet to find a Divine, which at this point in the last league I had… but it dropped in the Lake so I am not sure if that counts. I am however seen a much more steady trickle of Chaos getting at least one in almost every map that I run.
One of the biggest complaints from the last league was how hard it was in general to “sustain” the “alch and go” style of mapping. What that means is getting enough raw map drops, alchemy drops to turn them into rare maps, and scouring orbs to reset the maps you can’t run with your build. The biggest improvement this league has brought is access to rusted scarabs almost immediately. It took a long time last league before I started seeing scarabs of any sort, and earlier I lucked into a single mob that dropped ten gilded scarabs which I chock up to a kooky algorithm that went in with Kalandra. However, I have seen way more alchemy and way more raw maps than I did the last league which means I can really never stop running maps. If anything this is the “alch and go” league which is extremely enjoyable.
I guess let’s talk a little bit about some of my Chaos expenditures. The first thing of course is trying to get a six-link in the correct colors. I had been searching for a while for pure armor base, that had relevant stats for my build and the prices ranged pretty wildly from 10c to 1 divine depending on how good the rolls. I managed to snag this one for 15c which seems entirely reasonable for having pretty much everything on it be useful to a Righteous Fire build. I would have loved to have had it not be corrupted just to open up some wiggle room for later crafting, but for the price tag, I am willing to take having it set in stone and potentially upgrading again later in the season.
The next thing I picked up was an Immortal Flesh belt, which adds on a ton of life and regen at the cost of elemental resistances. The thing with Immortal Flesh is it is a search to try and find the belt with the best benefits and the least negatives. The hard pill to swallow is the hit to your resists on top of the already 60% hit you take from defeating Kitava twice. So essentially my goal was to get as close to the -15% minimum as I could, and I jumped on -16% as “good enough”. The other thing I was specifically looking for was a minimum of 250 Life per Second regeneration, so when I found this belt for 2 Chaos I figured it was about as good as I could get for the time being.
This last pickup is probably my least needed of the items, but after many attempts to get one of these myself and picking up every Void Sceptre I came across… I decided to just buy my way out of the frustration. Essentially I was looking for 40% Elemental Damage, a minimum of 30% Spell Damage, and a minimum of 15% Fire Damage over Time Multiplier. The rest of the stats are mostly useful except for 10% Attack Speed, but I can live with an almost perfect item for awhile. This cost me 10 Chaos, which seemed like a deal considering other sceptres I had been watching were considerably more and would have required me to get a 3 link.
At some point, I need to probably look at my boots and gloves and maybe try and pour on some more chaos resistance. I have a good chaos ring but it, unfortunately, drops some of my other resists to the point of not having any wiggle room. As far as the atlas goes I’ve completed 43 of the 115 bonus objectives which put me absolutely completed with the first three tiers of maps and missing a map each in tiers four and five. I am not doing great in yellow progression mostly because I have not hit a mass influx of yellow maps but that will probably be coming soon. For anyone who is interested, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my map progress and I have created a blank copy that you can clone here.
All told I am having a blast this league but I did run into a rather nasty bug last night. Essentially I put in a map, that thankfully I had two of… and hit a hard stall bug that is unrecoverable. This is apparently a known problem and I’ve found evidence of this dating back to at least last year. Anecdotal evidence from one thread makes it seem that maybe it takes place more often with adding Betrayal to your maps, but that isn’t necessarily certain. I know when it happened to me last night I was running a map and trying to add Betrayal to it, but I’ve also seen signs of folks encountering this with Delve. I am probably going to land on the side of only adding mechanics to maps that I can afford to lose and don’t need for completion purposes. Once my atlas is complete though, all bets are off.
All in all, this is probably my favorite league so far and has really sold me on being a permanent player of Path of Exile. Sentinel was a good league and Lake was a little shaky, but Sanctum so far has restored my faith. I am hoping with the addition of Ruthless mode, that GGG will stop trying to make the base game more difficult and leave it more or less as is. Are you playing in this league? What build are you running? What are your experiences so far? Drop me a line below.