Good Morning Friends! This weekend was the launch of the new Crucible League in Path of Exile. I had Friday off and as a result, I opted to hop in and attempt to play when it officially launched a 3 pm my time. In the grand scheme of things it honestly went pretty smoothly. At the time I took a screenshot, there were just shy of 68,000 players waiting in the queue, and based on the numbers Grinding Gear Games released they had a new peak concurrent players of 321,180 over the weekend. As far as stability goes, but the time I managed to chew through the queue things seemed pretty solid. I created a Witch and ran her up to level 4 to get some spells, and then started my soon-to-be Righteous Fire Marauder. When I did the character swap there was another very short queue but from that point forward I was able to stay connected and level without any issues.
As stated before I am largely following the tree that Pohx has come up with that you can find over on his website. This meant starting out with the meatball again… aka rolling magma and then rapidly transitioning into a combination of Holy Fire totem with Phantasmal Support and Flame Wall. In theory, I could have continued to use Rolling Magma until I transitioned into Righteous Fire, but honestly, I prefer the albeit slower totem/firewall gameplay. I grossly over-leveled the content so I failed to get access to Armageddon Brand before I could actually convert over to Righteous Fire. That is honestly the wild thing about the changes made to the tree, is that I was able to be running RF before leaving Act 2. Admittedly all that it really took was me getting access to the spell, which I found from a Vaal area which means I am running Vaal RF for now and at some point will swap out to the normal version.
Being able to run Righteous Fire and some semblance of the actual build early, made this quite possibly the most chill leveling experience I have had in Path of Exile. Until I got Firetrap up and running I kept Righteous Fire going while dropping Flame Wall and Holy Fire Totem, and technically still have Flame Wall currently for added damage. As is a habit, here is my very first Chaos Orb drop of the season, found in a level 16 area in Act 2. At that moment I was still running Pohx’s loot filter, which is based on the World of Warcraft coloring scheme. I’ve now swapped back to the standard issue Neversink, but Pohx’s did help a bit to specifically call out some drops that were the ideal gem socket colors for the build early on.
The crucible league mechanic is fairly interesting, but also fairly dangerous. Right now you channel an ability to add experience to the item you are forging. The longer you channel, the harder in theory the mechanics become. The problem is there is no clear way of determining just how hard you are making the encounter because all of the affixes applied to the mobs are obfuscated. This means there are times when I can channel all the way up with impunity, and other times that the encounter will one-shot me, without a clear understanding of why. My hope is that we see some rapid reworks of this system to maybe expose some of the mechanics of what say 20%, 40%, 60%, and 100% would do to the encounter with an ability to just pick a percentage. The nice thing is that these are not one attempt and you fail… you can effectively zerg the encounter until you have killed everything in order to collect your item. Mapping will of course limit you to the six gates problem, but I would imagine that most of the hardcore players are staying the hell away from this league mechanic in general, as it is way too unpredictable.
The other problem with the crucible is it has a way of bricking items. For example, if you are doing some sort of Elemental Equilibrium build and cannot have a specific damage time on your bow… getting that type from a crucible tree means there is little you can do to fix it. The above video shows a process of re-rolling your crucible trees but it seems extremely painful. I could see this as part of some extremely expensive crafting process where you find a good base item… then try and get the perfect crucible tree and THEN craft on the item to try and make the perfect rare item. I mean if you are willing to throw 100 Divines at crafting an item, then in theory you are probably willing to go through this amount of tedium and pain in order to get a sweet crucible tree on it. I figure all of the mirror items in this league will be crucible crafted as well as have the perfect rare stats on them.
I had deep concerns about the sweeping mastery changes and what they would do to the Righteous Fire build, and at least on the surface level it seems to have made things stronger. I guess I was not fully expecting the new fire mastery of “Regenerate 1 life per second for each 1% Uncapped Fire Resistance” to be quite as strong as it actually is. Admittedly this is prior to taking the second resistance hit from Act 10 Kitava, but right now this one node is giving me 305 life regeneration per second. This ends up making Fire Resistance a dump stat that adds a ton of survival with it and also makes it so I can hopefully better survive those map affixes that lower my resists. At this point, I am still in Act 8 and taking things extremely slowly. I spent a bit of time farming Blood Aqueducts trying to get a six link to drop. I have a perfectly colored corrupted six-socket chest but would need to get some tainted bindings in order to make an attempt at linking them.
After rushing around the last league… I think I am going to take things pretty languidly because I figure the longer I wait the cheaper items will get. I did manage to pick up a single decent item for 1c and am now just gathering my resources so I can afford a viable six-link as I start early maps. My goal as always is to knock out my third lab before beating the campaign and taking another resist hit. The first two labs were easy as pie however so I expect the third won’t be too awful either. Having a heck of a lot of fun even if the league mechanic is sort of suspect. I enjoy the forging process itself, but it is way too dangerous to spend a lot of effort on it right now.