The Forbidden Sanctum league has apparently had the highest player retention of any league in the last three years. One of the things that concern me a bit is I am afraid that maybe Grinding Gear Games assumes this is because of the Sanctum mechanic itself. I hate Sanctum, but the “sandbox” state of the game to borrow a term from the Destiny community is the best it has been since I started reliably playing Path of Exile. Granted you have to have lucked into a successful build, but once you have… every bit of content feels good. I’m mostly spending my time doing Delve and Heist with enough mapping in between to fill up the Sulfite for another journey into the depths. I am pretty safely doing T16 maps on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and largely unkillable at this point in Delve or Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. You would think I would run out of enjoyment in the game, but for whatever reason, I am in this super zen place and enjoying myself greatly.
A good deal of my focus has been on trying to find Aul the Crystal King. This is a boss node shown above that appears in the Primeval Ruins biome within Delve. The encounter has a chance of dropping a really sought-after necklace that can roll with a mod that effectively gives you no mana reservation costs on one of the auras in the game. If you are lucky, this would allow you to add an additional aura… and with it a significant amount of power or survivability without the worry of trying to maintain your mana. While I would love to have a big beefy reservation for free, I mostly wanted to find Aul because I had not seen him yet. Over the weekend I found it, and in the previous screenshot, I am fighting the encounter, but all fights are largely unintelligible when you have a righteous fire aura around you..
I did not get the prized necklace, and the fight is just as tanky as I had heard… but I made it through and have now cleared all of the possible bosses encounters for Delve. I’ve also capped my sulfite capacity which stops at I believe 65,000. Essentially my jam right now is to fill up my sulfite as fast as I can and then spend the evening listening to an audiobook while chilling out in delve and farming up as many nodes as I can before running out of juice again. I’ve been farming Primordial Blocks maps in the faint hope of trying to get the hideout which seems to be an extremely rare spawn. If I need to buy maps, I’ve noticed that it isn’t an extremely sought-after map either. I like it because it has a good number of spawns, and at this point, I can pretty much do the boss fight in my sleep.
The other mechanic I am spending a lot of time engaging with is Metamorph, and most maps that I run on the Atlas end up having either a Rogue Metamorph or allowing me to collect parts and spawn Two Metamorphs at the end. This means that I am gathering up a significant number of body parts, that I let stack up and feed into the metamorph mechanic for tasty loot. It is not unusual at all that I end up walking away with several divines when I have collected enough bits to spawn several monsters. I’ve also put a lot of use into the various catalysts that allow me to add variant degrees of quality to my jewelry and belt slots.
I have no clue when Path of Exile will end up playing out for me, but for now, I am enjoying myself greatly still. I am sure you all are tired of reading about it, but as I have said before… the heart wants what the heart wants.