I have been playing a lot of Path of Exile in this league and this morning I just noticed a hard data point to prove this. During a league, there are a number of achievements that are meant to be sort of stretch goals for you to complete after you finish the story and complete your atlas. Knocking these out rewards you with progressively more ostentatious cosmetic outfits. At this point, I have unlocked the first tier of these and am slowly chewing on goals for the second tier. This morning I noticed I was most of the way through the goal that requires you to kill 1 million level 68 or higher mobs. I’ve never finished this in previous leagues, and now I am sitting here just slightly over a month into the experience. I would love to be able to get at least 19 of these season challenges done so I can get my first hideout totem.
I would be willing to bet that a large percentage of my mob kill count comes from delve. You end up pouring through so many monsters in this “endless” dungeon crawl. I’ve found out that it is not truly endless, that there is apparently a maximum depth of 65,536 aka the largest value that an unsigned 16-bit integer can hold. My guess is that there is also probably some sort of a width limit as well, but so far to the best of my knowledge, no one has found that one. It would take me more time than exists in a season to push out far enough to get even vaguely close to the boundaries, and my guess is to go that deep you would need something close to a perfectly rolled build to survive it. I personally just marvel at finding a new city to explore, for example in the above screenshot you can see a six-node Vaal city that I began working through last night.
At this point, Exilence tells me that I have well over 12,000 chaos worth of “wealth” but a good chunk of that is tied up in things that are not exactly “liquid”. While I might have well over 3000 chaos worth of Orbs of Augmentation, it isn’t like I am going to find a ready buyer for them. How I am making the vast majority of the liquid chaos that I am utilizing to buy upgrades is through drops that look just like the one above. Resonators are a unique crafting resource that can only be found in delve, and just by doing a large volume of nodes you end up with a good stockpile of them. Every few days I liquidate my stockpiles and convert them into raw chaos. For example over lunch yesterday I listed all of my resonators and within ten minutes I had roughly 400 chaos in my coffers.
Resonators and Fossils (which have much less value) combine to offer a more deterministic method for crafting items. Think of them as a targetted chaos orb, that randomly rerolls an item but includes specific classes of attributes. If you need Elemental damage types then you can socket a fossil that will give you a higher chance of getting elemental damage types when you re-roll an item. Item crafters love the system because it allows them to target specific item combinations, but regardless of the fact that it is more deterministic, it still requires throwing a ton of currency at an item to get the desired result. Personally, I would rather convert these to Chaos and then use that Chaos to buy the items with the actual combinations of attributes I am interested in rather than gamble the same amount of currency on an uncertain outcome.
Speaking of “expensive items” I pulled a Doryani’s Machinarium Maze Map when I took down the Vaal city boss the other day. I’ve not run this but I am likely going to do so soon. Mostly there is a seasonal achievement for running every unique map in the game, and I am down to just Doryani’s and one other. I need to look up some information on this map. I will likely only get one shot at this given that the map itself is worth roughly two divines in the open market. The other map I am missing goes for around 15 Chaos so it is way more reasonable to just buy that one from the market to finish up the achievement. Luckily neither seem to have too egregious of modifiers, so hopefully, I can get this finished in the six portals. I would be really sad if I tried this and effectively blew 2 divines on nothing.
The fact that everything has some market value associated with it, adds a weird dimension to the league experience. Currency is useful to be able to solve problems with your build, but also it has no real lasting value. Everything is effectively monopoly money because it is very unlikely that I would ever devote time to playing in Standard and will just keep re-rolling characters every three months. So that means all of this currency I am stockpiling only serves the purpose of aiding me for a few months. This makes me way more likely to blow hundreds of chaos at a time on upgrades, but also weirdly hesitant to use a single currency item that is worth multiple divines on an undetermined outcome. I am not much of a gambler in real life or in games honestly. The most “gambling” that I do is using my Stacked Decks instead of selling them or re-rolling divination cards with harvest currency. I tend to be someone who stockpiles resources in case I need them… then never ends up using them ever.
I’ve said it before though, that I am a little sad that this game is as obtuse as it is. I would love to share the experience I am having with others other than these blog posts, but it requires way too much of the player in order to really become indoctrinated in the process. I do think that Stargrace would greatly enjoy the market aspect of this game, but would probably bounce from the ARPG before really getting there.