Good Morning Friends! I have to admit that I am somewhat shocked that I am still as engaged with the Forbidden Sanctum league in Path of Exile as I am. Like I have said before this is effectively my third league and with each league, it seems like I slip further into madness. Path of Exile was one of those games that looked deeply interesting from the outside but that I struggled to actually find purchase on its sheer rock face of complexity. This game is not friendly to new players and even more so neither is its community. That is not to say that they are rude or cruel or anything of the sort, but more that they don’t realize how far they have come in the evolution of understanding the systems within systems that is the game they are playing. “Noob” friendly guides are very much not, because they all require a level of understanding that I am just now arriving at some 600 hours into playing the game.
Take Zizaran for example, who is probably the most community-friendly streamer, and youtuber for Path of Exile. He releases copious guide videos in each league, and it is only now that I am beginning to fully understand them. For example yesterday he released this guide video on how to craft a perfect bow for Explosive Arrow. While for me it does seem pretty straightforward, it would not have when I started. Firstly it assumes you know how to get essences or even what they are as well as how to get divine orbs and exalted orbs, and the dumb things like what it means to “annul a suffix”. It is a beginner guide for someone who is already indoctrinated into the game and all of its concepts. The thing is… playing through the campaign teaches you none of this information and it is only gleaned by reaching a point where you have the items in your inventory and understand what exactly the tooltip means.
I think this obtuse complexity is what makes the experience so damned compelling for me because the more I dive into it… the deeper the well seems to get. I am not specifically trying to pick on the community but if you approach this game the one thing that I would love everyone to understand is just how much of a struggle it is going to be to really engage with it. The game has been adding new roughly every three months over the last decade. I had no understanding of just how many of the systems I engage with regularly… we reworked over 2022 until I watched this year in review video. I also now fully understand why folks were so enraged by the ArchNemesis changes because they were extremely “fresh” in their minds. I love this game but also it saddens me that it is ultimately going to be an uphill struggle to get people to engage with it.
As far as my gaming time goes I have once again swapped up my Atlas tree and have removed everything involving Ritual Altars and instead packed on Metamorph nodes. In Lake of Kalandra encountering a Metamorph was more than likely a death sentence because they all had upwards of eight ArchNemesis mods tacked onto them. Now they are still a bit of a struggle but one that is more winnable and the rewards for doing them seem to be extremely solid. Since I have largely divided up my two characters into Bossing and Maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and Delve and Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… Metamorph is way more feasible.
When I say Metamorph is very rewarding as mechanics go, I’ve seen multiple divines at once drop from a single monster. I’ve seen many exalts drop and stacks of chaos along with all sorts of other useful resources. This is not every single time mind you, but the way I am specced into the tree gives me a bunch of organ drops as well that I can then take to Tane and summon additional monsters with. I also have the trait that allows Rogue Metamorphs to show up in my maps, and when I finish a map with Tane in it I can summon a second Metamorph. Of note when I got that double divine drop, I was running a low red tier map that was magic quality with very little in the way of quantity or quality modifiers on it. In fact most of the time lately I am not even bothering to “Alch and Go” but instead just dropping a Transmutation and maybe a few Alterations on it to reroll to something like extra magic creatures.
Right now I tend to alternate between mapping and delving, and I have my atlas configured so that even if I don’t have Niko on the map I am going to get a little bit of Sulphite from defeating the boss. When I fill up my Sulphite from the Necromancer I dive down into the depths and burn through nodes looking for interesting things. I’ve now fought Kurgal, The Blackblooded twice aka the Lich’s Tomb encounter in an Abyssal Sanctum. In the grand scheme of things the fight is completely doable but there are a few mechanics that I need to at least be somewhat aware of. There is a beam attack that you need to line of sight behind some pillars because it seems to increase in damage the longer it is on you. There are two phases but the second phase seemed to largely be a pushover. It seems like you are guaranteed one of the uniques from Kurgal’s loot table as well as other assorted rewards. His thing seems to be armor pieces aka gloves and helm that have abyssal sockets on them.
I am continuing to plumb the depths looking for Aul the Crystal King, because I want to be able to start farming that encounter. There is a nice necklace that can drop from it that seems to be useful for a great number of builds. Other than that I am slowly acquiring items to make a run at a seismic traps build. I’m also pouring little bits of resources into upgrading both Righteous Fire and Summon Raging Spirits builds as well. On the trade front, I am still doing fairly brisk business in small trades and had replenished everything that I had spent chaos-wise before doing some shopping for Thalen last night. He paid me in divines for my effort, which means I still have the resources but have slightly less liquid chaos than I did before. Profit is a means to an end however and for me, it is all about unlocking easier access to nice things.
I’ve had more fun in this league than in any of my previous attempts combined. I am not sure if it is that I am understanding the interplay of the systems better, or if I simply chose better builds to play. Whatever the case I have a feeling that my life will be dominated by this game for awhile now.