Good Morning Friends! Welcome to the week that heralds a bit of a break for me. As it stands I have today and tomorrow and then I am off until the third. I am hoping you all can have a solid break this holiday season as well. I am still irrationally engaged with Path of Exile as one does… which honestly has not left much time for anything else in my life. We did manage to take care of some big purchases which move me closer to actually being prepared for the holiday, but at some point, I am going to have to stop playing… and finish things up. Having a non-zero amount of gifts purchased is doing better than our usual track record, so I am going to count that as a win for the moment. In the game, my big achievement is that I now have my resists to a point where I could drop the Purity of Elements aura and still maintain caps. I am still so far from being chaos capped but sitting at 25% is better than a negative resist!
Progress on the Atlas has slowed a bit. When I last checked in I was sitting at 43 of 115 and now am at 68 of 115. Basically, I am having trouble getting maps to drop to fill the slots that I am missing in the yellows and reds are always going to be a massive pain in the ass to get. At the moment I am paused from doing any hardcore mapping because I really want to ding level 90 since I am so close again. The last time I was this close I had the bright idea of running a T14 map… that I had corrupted to get credit for it… and got some bad resists on it. I watched my level go from roughly 85% of a level down to less than 20% of a level as I died my way across the zone failing to get credit for the final boss who was effectively one-shotting me. I still have no clue what exactly was causing me to take that much damage but alas the complete and total lack of logs often makes that a problem.
As far as my Atlas Passive tree I don’t so much have a strategy other than “I would like to see more of these things” with those things being breaches, essences, lockboxes, heist chests, and going extremely heavy into getting Ritual Altars. I’ve had a lot of good luck with Ritual this league in getting cool stuff and I know the last league I managed to pull a few divines in this manner so I figured I would focus on improving those. I’ve also put some points into making god-touched mobs show up a bit more frequently and have a chance for killing large packs to spawn beyond mobs. I am sure there are much better options on the whole but I am happy enough with what I have seen so far. I did have some points invested in Kirac missions but in truth… now that I am in red maps those become way less viable given I have to have a corrupted map to get credit.
One of the nice things that I pulled from a Ritual Altar was one of the tokens required to run Labyrinth for the fourth time and finish out my Juggernaut passive tree. It seems like there is a bug happening where the trials are not spawning in higher-tier maps unless you specifically get a Kirac mission that forces one to spawn. Luckily I encountered one of these Kirac maps as well, so since I one-shot my fourth “Lab” I chucked the spare token into the guild bank to help pay it forward. I am hoping this bug gets fixed posthaste because it will be really annoying for everyone coming up behind me trying to finish out their passive tree. I shifted things up a bit toward better survival since it didn’t feel like I needed the slight DPS boost of Unyielding quite so much. I’ve also been encountering a lot of maps where mobs steal endurance charges… which limits the effectiveness of that trait.
Last night I set forth on a nonsense mission as I often do. I’ve been wanting to roll an alt this season, specifically a Poison Toxic Trickster. I’ve been sitting on a 5-link Quillrain and a 5-link Replica Quillrain and I thought, the one thing that would go really well with this plan… is a Tabula Rasa. I had 3 of the 9 cards needed to get one, and I thought I would try my hand at farming one. Basically, you can run Blood Aqueducts, which is a pretty chill zone, and occasionally one of the cards will drop. After a few hours of chill farming while watching stuff on television last night I am up to 5 of 9 cards, so I feel committed to the nonsense at this point. It is also causing me to flood the guild bank with spare uniques because I am getting a truly shocking number of them… occasionally more than one per clear. They are all fairly low-tier uniques but I might start selling the extra extras… once I have a copy in my bank and a copy in the guild bank… then I guess I might as well try and flip it for chaos.
I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Heist, clearing out my lower-tier maps as well just to keep those from stacking up quite so high this season. I’ve unlocked all of the companions and I think I have all of them at least to rank 2 in their abilities. This mission honestly started because I began getting a few of the “green” missions that you can’t remove from your inventory that I did not have the skill to run yet. This started me down a path of running lower-level missions in order to buff up those stats so I could clear the missions out of my inventory. They do serve as an excellent source of small currency and the occasional chaos. I really like heist and it is probably my single favorite game mode. I need to spend a night working on Delve however because I am once again capped on the magic dust required to make that mode work.
I am having so much more fun than I had in the last league, and a large part of that is how good the Pohx Righteous Fire build is. I still need to invest some more currency into it, but I am at the point where any further gains are going to be extremely expensive. There are a few things that I could potentially craft but I am going to need to get deeper into the Atlas tree before I start getting the currency I need for those crafts. The other thing I have shifted up recently is I have begun to see the wisdom in Pohx running Shield Charge over Leap Slam. Leap Slam scales off attack speed, and I just do not have any real sources of that in my build… which means Shield Charge can move so much faster than I can with Leap Slam especially when mapping. Especially now that I am farming Blood Aqueducts for cards I am able to move so much faster through the packs of mobs than I could with Leap Slam.
Path of Exile continues to be a complete nonsense game, but I kinda love it. It however is the sort of game that I would never really recruit someone else to play. You have to have the strong desire to play it on your own first in order to make your way through the absolutely obtuse processes required to actually figure things out. I get that GGG does this on purpose, but I do with it was a little more friendly to new players.