Friends I spent more currency yesterday on a single item than I have ever spent on anything in the trade league. I’ve had this dumb side project of trying to “chance orb” my way into a Brass Dome given that it is the only unique for the Gladiator Plate base. However hundreds of scouring and chance orbs later, I decided to just buy the damned thing. It seemed to be the next obvious step in the evolution of my build and I found one with the highest maximum elemental resistance bump you could get and a decent armor bonus for 5.3 Divine Orbs. Granted this ate up almost all of my liquid Divines, other than the stash tab that is devoted to Thalen’s purchases… I was sitting on 7 total Divines with another 10 roughly sitting in raw Chaos Orbs. I had to do some Harvest Crafting to flip one of my items to Lightning Resistance in order to make up the gap lost from my rare chest but that was pretty straightforward.
The end result however is pretty staggering. I took a screenshot in-game of what my defenses screen looks like with six stacks of endurance. I have a little over 90,000 armor 89% fire, 87% cold, and 87% lightning resistances, and a life regeneration of a little over 2000 per second with my max life sitting around 4500. I took a bit of a raw life loss because of the removal of bonus life from Strength, but I think being effectively immune to extra crit damage makes up for that. When I “ding” 98 I should be able to pick up another life node that will more than make up for the loss, and I am slowly adding catalysts as they drop to give me bonus life as well. Sure I could have gotten an even more perfectly rolled version of this armor but it is still a big bump.
The game seems to have noticed that I was missing several Divines and over the course of the night I legitimately got all of them back as drops. From Metamorph, running maps to refill my sulfite, and from delve itself, I got back 5 raw Divines. This seems like one hell of a lucky streak to me, but I will absolutely take it. Weirdly I got two of the divines from Abyssal Cities in the same biome, which seems extremely lucky. I guess maybe I should start paying more attention to the biome bonuses because it makes me wonder if that area had some extreme rarity bonus applied to it. I also managed to knock out another Vaal boss which gave me one of the rings needed to craft a precursor. I need to sift through my rare stockpile to see if I have any more of these rings laying around.
I feel like last night I went through yet another trade league right of passage. Up until this point I had been surviving on the scarabs that I got dropped from running other content. The problem however is that it seems like I am just not getting sulfite scarabs. I decided to remedy this by just purchasing a large stack of them and picking up 100 Rusted Sulfite Scarabs for 90 Chaos. This should in theory keep me going on refilling my delve fuel for awhile. I had been trying to rely on proccing Niko missions, but that ultimately took forever if I was specifically wanting to go back down into the dark. This will at least give me a rapid way to fill back up to 55,000 Sulfite.
Now that I have significantly more defenses, I am starting to work my way a little lower in delve. I found these odd biomes with a single Abyssal City node, and there seems to be another one on the lower left side of the screen partially occluded. That is ultimately where I am trying to target because I am still seeking out an Aul the Crystal King node and I am thinking I must just need to be a bit deeper to get them to spawn more reliably. The boss nodes are a bit tiresome with Righteous Fire, largely because I just don’t dish out as much damage as they would need to make them happen quickly. I can survive everything without much issue, but it is the slow process of whittling down via Fire Trap that gets cumbersome.
Through all of the mapping to get Sulfite, I’ve been trying to focus on running Tier 14 or higher maps which have a chance of dropping Guardian maps. Over the course of the last few days, I’ve accumulated a decent stash of these and plan on running them through with my SRS Necromancer at some point soon. Like I said yesterday I legitimately thought I would be winding down this season by now, but I keep finding more goals that I want to work on. I am a few more achievements away from finishing my Tier 2 set of armor, and three away from getting my first totem. I think I am way more interested in those than in progressing my atlas any further. Bossing really does not hold much excitement for me personally and if given the choice I would almost always rather be farming league mechanics for loot.
There is a mechanical loop that I have fallen into that I greatly enjoy, and I feel a little sad because I know it is entirely because I chose wisely when deciding on a class to start Sanctum with. Had I chosen something jankier, I probably would have bounced when I finished my 115 maps to unlock the first step of the Atlas. This is what happened to me during Lake of Kalandra when I tried Storm Brand. It is making me wonder if I now just go Righteous Fire each league, because if nothing else it can make currency to fund an additional class as it did with my Fire SRS Necromancer, and partially leveled Seismic Saboteur and Toxic Rain Trickster. Needing to have multiple characters for multiple different game modes seems extremely cumbersome, but it might just be the best way to approach Path of Exile.