Winding Down Sanctum

Good Morning Friends! I think I might be in the process of winding down my focus on Path of Exile and the Forbidden Sanctum league. Going into this league I had a few goals in front of me. Some of them have been accomplished and others I decided not to really worry with. This is not exactly a comprehensive list but here are essentially the things I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish this go-round.

  • Finish Atlas Objective passives for all 115 Maps
  • Get my 4 Void Stones
  • Complete Enough Challenges to Get a Totem
  • Level a Character to 100

Last night I finished my 19th Challenge of the league and unlocked my very first totem for the hideout. Admittedly it is a short and sad totem but it is my very first period. Last league, I unlocked enough challenges to get one full set of armor, and this go around I got two sets of armor appearances as well as the totem so I consider that progress. I finished the Atlas last league and did so faster this time around and set my sights on getting the four void stones that are required to make it so that every map that drop is Tier 16.

The first two void stones came extremely quickly and made me think that this was going to be a reasonable challenge. However the amount of time or currency that is required to get them… just doesn’t feel worth it to me on a personal level. I could go on the forbidden trove and buy a carry for the remaining two void stones, but that seems silly and since I don’t REALLY love chain running maps I am not sure what it would get me. The last goal that I had in my sights is getting my Juggernaut to level 100, which is still doable given that I get great enjoyment out of fucking around in Delve for hours. the problem is that XP gain vs XP loss is a massive struggle at that level and it takes days of grinding to gain a level, and literal seconds to lose all of that progress. While I think I am winding down my focus, it doesn’t mean I won’t keep playing so I am hoping that maybe I go ahead and knock this one out.

As far as Delve goes I am pretty comfortable at the 200-250ish level which seems a solid place to go city hunting. I should do a push-down to see how far I can sustain without increasing the risk greatly. I figure the lower I go the better the experience farming will get. There have been a few deaths that I have taken in delve that snuck up on me and overwhelmed my defenses, but they are few and far between. I moused over my Darkness Resistance and my raw score is currently sitting at 1050% with a similar Light Radius value. I’ve tried to keep those at roughly the same upgrade level as I moved further down. In theory, I could have been buying small resonators all this time with excess azurite because I have way more resists than I need for the level range that I have been exploring.

Every league it feels like I learn a ton of lessons. In this league more than anything I became significantly more adept at trading. Here is another stash tab snapshot, but on 1/12 I had 1695 raw chaos and 7 raw divines, and now I am sitting at 4916 raw chaos and 15 raw divines. I think the key thing that has changed is that I have gotten better at using the price-checking functionality of Awakened POE Trade but more than that I’ve gotten better at eyeballing value. I’ve started to develop a mental map of what makes something valuable to the state of the league as it stands. This sorta requires you to get a vague understanding of which builds are actively in the meta and what sorts of gear they want. For example, in this league Poison Summon Raging Spirits became a massive flavor of the week’s build, and almost overnight anything with poison and minion stats boomed.

Here are some general things that I look for:

  • Jewelry with at least three good resistance hits, specifically a solid chaos roll plus at least two other resists.
  • Good Corrupted Implicits on a good base with good stats. The prevalence of tainted currency makes minor crafting on corrupted items that I would have long ignored a much more feasible option.
  • Anything that has damage multipliers plus damage bonuses. This is really subjective but I’ve moved a lot of items in this category.
  • Unique Items with a good Corruption. This is a weird category because it is going to be hard to find comps, but still worth trying.
  • Ventor’s Gamble rings… legitimately can be sold at 5 Chaos a pop all day long because for whatever reason people seem to love gambling on these to vendor swap for the possibility of that one perfect ring with max positive hits to everything.

Then there are some things that I have started doing to improve otherwise disappointing items that I have.

  • Corrupt Every Rare Gem Period… If you have a fluid source of Vaal Orbs. In Delve you get a ton of these and way more than I could ever possibly use. I’ve seen so many gems go from being something I could get 5 Chaos out of to something I can get 50-100 Chaos just from a “yolo corrupt”.
  • Corrupt Amethyst Rings. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but Amethyst rings tend to be how people fix resists more than anything else and there is a chance that an otherwise shitty ring turns into something phenomenal, and again… it is worth the Vaal orb.
  • If you have an item that is middling… and does not have max sockets on it throw a few Jewelers Orbs at it until you hit max sockets. Jewelers orbs are extremely plentiful, and it is amazing what a difference it makes in moving an item with max sockets versus moving one that is going to require some crafting before use. Most players want ZERO engagement with the crafting system and you can profit from this.

As far as traders go I am a very very small fish in a very large pond. I am not dealing with mirrors worth of value (aka something like 84,000 Chaos with wild fluctuation in prices) but I feel like I am doing well enough to buy most anything I might want. I’ve also brokered items for various members of my guild that wanted zero engagement with the economy, but I’ve kept that stuff separate and excluded from Exilence when I have it crawl through my tabs and look for anything that I have missed. I feel like if I had the knowledge that I have now, I would be in a much better position at this point in the league than I was when I started. Essentially I started trading a bit too late, and there is a lot of value in bread-and-butter items early in the league. Even now over a month into the league, I am still getting a constant flow of 5-50 chaos trades.

I’ve also reached a point of maturity when it comes to builds in the game in general. I am okay with realizing that it is unrealistic that one build is ever going to feel great doing all of the content in the game. Over time I standardized on Righteous Fire Juggernaut as my main character to do things like Delve and Heist on, and Fire Variant Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer as my bossing and mapping character. The RF Jugg can map just fine but I put a heavy investment in Metamorph on my maps which means I can chew through those so much faster on the SRS Necro which is designed to take out boss characters. The state of my SRS Necro however is not exactly “Uber Boss” capable, which is why I stalled out on finishing unlocking my Atlas Void Stones. I could have pivoted into the Poison build, but decided that I just did not care enough to spend the currency required to do that.

As far as league mechanics go, I tried a number of different things this time around. I started off with a bit of a mess as far as Atlas passives but quickly coalesced into a “Wandering Path” design, which is a notable that doubles the effect of every small node on the tree, but makes it so that you do not gain any benefit from the medium-sized nodes. This was amazing for raw map generation which in turn helped me rapidly unlock the Atlas tree without needing to buy any maps or go fishing for Kirac missions too much. Ultimately I came down to buying 3 Unique Maps in the end, but that was well worth it to finish out the tree.

After that, I focused on Ritual Alters for a bit with Harvest as a secondary goal. This was fine but Ritual feels like it has been nerfed from my past experience because I did not get much in the way of big-ticket currency items. In Kalandra league I got several Divines through Ritual even without investing Atlas nodes in it, and I thought maybe if I did go hard into Ritual it would pay off. Harvest seemed like a good bet and it was “fine” but its money gains are really through bulk trading the three colors of crafting resources that you get from running it, and I decided early on that I had no interest in that.

My next strategy was to focus on lockboxes and essence farming, which again was fine… but never really had much luck with that and I was still very much trying to focus my attention on mapping as my primary game mode. It was only through happenstance that I really decided to dive as deeply into Delve as I did, and once I realized how much I enjoyed it… and how reliably profitable selling resonators was that I reshaped my tree to work around getting as much Sulfite as quickly as I could. I had noticed how good items could drop pretty reliably from Metamorph, and with my SRS Necro those encounters were extremely easy so I shifted around points to focus on Delve and Metamorph.

It was very very late in the league that I made a tiny bit of a twist to my strategy and included a bare minimum of Harbinger, dropping the last of the Essences that I had in my tree. My Atlas tree now guarantees at least one Harbinger per map and while that isn’t a ton, it has made a noticeable bump in the raw number of Annulment Orbs and Ancient Orbs that I end up getting as well as a not insignificant amount of Chaos Shards that eventually add up to my raw chaos total. The real chase item however is the Fracturing Shard, because these puppies sell for 50 Chaos each and move almost instantly. So sure it isn’t a dramatic amount of currency but because you are running several maps in order to fill back up your Sulfite, the Metamorph and Harbinger nodes sort of just passively add to your bottom line in a way that doesn’t really add that much complexity or time to the maps.

While I think I am starting to wind down, all of this has me looking forward to the next league start. I’ve learned so much more about the game as a whole this time around. I know significantly more about what makes a build viable and how to fix problems. I think going forward I am going to look for some sort of engine to fuel further explorations. The Righteous Fire Juggernaut served as an excellent stable character to farm resources for other more volatile characters. I guess I have fully committed to the concept of the Trade League and as a result, I am getting better at amassing a “warchest” that I can then use to buy my way out of frustrating situations.

Path of Exile is a very different game experience than any that I have played before, and it is the first time I have really willfully engaged in active trading. It sorta makes me reassess how I have interacted with trade in other games, and how in large part I have done it completely wrong. It isn’t that I think I will ever become an Auction House Baron… but in theory, if I can apply some of the things I have learned to other games I might at least not be broke all the time.