Good Morning Friends! Again I am leaning on a technicality here because I seem to be getting around considerably later each day than I did the last. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening running maps and attempting to complete chunks of my remaining atlas. At this point, I am 95 done out of 115 with 8 of those being unique maps that it is highly likely I will have to buy off the traders. I have 8 maps left that require me to run them in a corrupted state, which always yields unpredictable results. What yesterday and probably today have led to is me running maps in the vicinity of the ones that I am missing in hopes of getting the ones I still need to drop. I dinged 92 yesterday which puts me two levels higher than I have ever gotten in a league.
Every build has one or two things that can show that will absolutely brick the map. For me, the absolute “I cannot handle this” is “players cannot regenerate health”. My build is entirely about regenerating a ridiculous amount of health and as such, I just can’t mitigate a map where I can’t do that. That is really my primary line of defense, and as a result, I also had been avoiding “players have 60% less recovery rate”. However, I’ve tried this a few times now to great success, where I basically just don’t use Righteous Fire. That is the primary reason why this build needs so much regeneration is that I am constantly dealing a ton of damage to myself. The single target damage of Fire Trap however is apparently enough to successfully move around a map and kill things, and as a result, I can simply forgo the self-immolation and debuff with Frostblink while killing things albeit slower.
I’ve also been slowly chipping away at collecting kills for Maven, Eater of Worlds, and Searing Exarch as I have not completed any of those quest chains before. Yesterday I took out the Black Star and the Infinite Hunger, and I think I am ramping up to another series of boss fights. The hardest part about Infinite Hunger was finding the way out when I got digested because I was regenerating more than enough health to deal with the incoming damage, but the lack of a mini-map meant that I was completely lost in the process. I eventually fumbled my way to the exit and got the hell out of there. I did die once on Black Star just because something hit me for a truly overwhelming amount of damage… which probably means there was a mechanic I failed at noticing.
Other than that I am contemplating farming up enough Atlas respec currency in order to switch over to a Wandering Path build. This essentially makes it so that your notables aka the biggest nodes give you nothing, and you get double the benefit from all of the smaller passive nodes. This means you can stack a lot of map farming functionality and focus on one or two mechanics and then farm that. I actually do pretty damned well with Harvest this league and could always just sell the excess lifeforce directly. There are enough people trying to gamble for the big ticket items at 1500 lifeforce per pull that someone is always willing to buy the Vivid Crystalized Lifeforce. I personally like using the cheaper 75 skill to reroll some of my shittiest divination cards into something better. This is how I pulled the one I sold for 1.5 divines and the one I sold for .75 divines.
Other than that, I will leave you with this video of Tripod leaving her box this morning. It has been 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside and we’ve been concerned about the safety of our outdoor ferals. I’ve been putting food out to make sure they have something to munch on when they crawl out of wherever they have been hiding. I know when it gets too cold Tripod our three-legged calico that lives in the backyard will crawl down in an old rabbit burrow. Hopefully today it will warm up a bit and then, in theory, we are out of the woods. It likely means though that it will still be sketchy to travel on Christmas day so we might be giving our parents a raincheck once the weather improves significantly.
I hope you are all having a safe time and if you too are getting weather you are bundled up and safe. Here is a bonus picture of Gracie who has taken to sleeping under my monitors and then reaching out to swipe at me from time to time.