Friends… I thought this would be the week that I started to distance myself from Path of Exile. Between adventures in Grim Dawn and starting to fiddle around with Lord of the Rings Online, I expected to dial back my gameplay. Yet last night I was back on my bullshit happily plugging away at the same stuff I have been plugging away at for a while now. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is seemingly not quite done with Path of Exile. My main strategy continues to be running maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… largely because I don’t care about her level… and then once I have filled up my Sulphite going back down into delve and hunting for the last rare thing that I have not seen… Aul. I think maybe once I finally fight the Crystal King this will lose some of its stickiness for me but I really want to see that encounter at least once.
I wish there was a good gauge numerically on how far to the left or right of the main column I have gone, similar to a depth reading. Essentially I seem to be moving around in a band between 150 and 170 in depth and am six or seven screens away from the central column at this point. I found a very tasty Abyssal City last night as well as a nearby Primeval Ruins but sadly no boss nodes in either. I think I have fought the Vaal boss three times, and the Abyssal boss twice… but have yet to see Aul even though I am poking around in the range where it is reported to find those nodes. I need to dive a bit deeper, but you are sorta at the mercy of the map when it comes to how you can travel. As I dive down I keep hitting dead ends and having to backtrack my way up to higher depths.
One thing I have to say about Delve City farming is that you end up with a truly staggering number of maps. You can see for some tiers I am sitting on over 100 maps and a large chunk of these are coming from the cartographer’s chests that I am pretty regularly finding one or more of in each city node. I currently have Primordial Blocks as my favorite map, not necessarily because I love the layout, but because I am trying to get the hideout to spawn in it so I can collect that for my account. For whatever reason, Primordial Blocks seem to have a higher-than-average spawn rate of Metamorph as well, and as such, I can use it to collect parts. Granted this could just be me running this map over and over and my Atlas tree triggering, but even before I specced into Metamorph I seemed to get that mechanic here more often than not.
Speaking of Metamorph, it continues to pay off nicely. I quietly stockpile body parts and then run through several metamorph spawns at once whenever I get a moment. If I stack currency nodes in every body part, it seems to often produce Divine and Exalted Orbs. This isn’t exactly going to win any divines per hour races, but it is a nice residual impact of me doing the things that I was already going to do in order to fuel my delve addiction. At some point, I am going to need to spend some time selling off undesirable body parts in an attempt to get the ones I am missing because a few of the slots in my metamorph tab are filling up rapidly. That is the most annoying thing about this mechanic is that the body parts are heavily skewed toward a few specific slots. For me, at least the most common part is Heart and Brain and the least common are the Lungs and Eyes. You can sell 3 body parts for a random part, so I need to cull Hearts and Brains in an attempt to fill the other slots as I am completely out of eyes at the moment.
Lastly here is a bonus image of sleepy cats. I wasn’t sure where else to fit this one in, and I know it is awful quality. Essentially the other night my wife snapped a quick photo in the dark because she knew I would not believe her. This is Josie snuggling with Gracie, and this is important because we have never really had cats that would actively snuggle with each other. I am not sure if Josie was even aware that Gracie was there or not, but I did what I could to try and enhance the image so you could see more than a blurry mess. Gracie is damned determined that everyone must love her, and she adores her big sister so I am happy to see this. I noticed Gracie grooming Josie the other day, but I figured it was a fluke.
I hope you are having a most excellent week, and we will see if I actually do something other than Path of Exile.