Good Morning Friends! I am unfortunately what you would call a “microtransaction enjoyed”. Not that I love having parts of a game carved up into bite-sized monetary transactions, but I enjoy cool cosmetics. Grinding Gear Games knew how to hit me right in the feels this time… when they introduced the crawler bear. Normally in Delve, you follow around an automated minecart-looking thing called the crawler, and in one of the league packages this time they have a skin that turns it into an adorable bear friend. So when you are doing other content he follows you around as a pet, and when down in Delve he leads the way for you. This is so definitely in my wheelhouse that I would have bought whatever pack he was in… thankfully it was the cheapest one.
Last night I finished the campaign which meant that I needed to go on a bit of a shopping spree to get my gear in order. Thankfully I managed to get a Seven Years Back Luck card from one of the Act 10 zones that I was able to turn into 60 Chaos Orbs. Other than that I had picked up around 15 Chaos Orbs through completing the campaign and I judiciously spent almost all of it on getting my character to where it needed to be to comfortably start mapping. What this meant more than anything was getting my resists capped and my armor up a bit, and then swapping around gem sockets so that I could fit more auras and have things in a more standardized setup. The armor should bump up considerably once I get my final Labyrinth done… of which I have yet to see a trial in any of the maps I have completed.
Every armor slot needs improvement, most specifically I could not come anywhere near close to touching a six-link in the correct colors and wound up going with a five-link corrupted for 20 chaos that will be “good enough” to hold me until hopefully, I can replace it with a well rolled Brass Dome. Right now prices in general are just completely bonkers. Let’s take Blessing of Chayula as our canary in the coal mine. This is an item that used to vacillate between 20 and 50 chaos, and now they are going for over 400 chaos. Essentially this item is needed for crafting items used by a good number of builds including the Poison Summon Raging Spirits meta build last league. I am uncertain if the Breech changes are really as bad as people seem to think they are, but it was a popular mechanic for farming and now the community seems to have agreed that it’s no longer profitable… which means everything that drops there has a wild price tag.
The biggest problem that I am currently having myself is that I am just not getting much of what folks generally call “bubblegum” currency. The biggest thing I am having a massive drought of is Armourer’s Scrap and Blacksmith’s Whetstone. By this point in the league, I would normally have everything I am wearing at 20% quality without issue… and now I am essentially consuming them as soon as I get them with zero stockpiles. I’ve also yet to see a single Exalted Orb or Divine Orb and am in a constant struggle to get Chromatics and Fusings. I’ve also not found much in the way of tainted currency yet, but I am hoping that changes as I get further into maps and delve. Vaal Orbs are currently the thing I am concerned about given that in order to get Atlas credit for red-tier maps I am going to need a stockpile of them.
That said I am a very long way from red maps, or even yellow maps honestly. As of last night, I have completed 16 of the 115 nodes needed on my Atlas. I’m essentially running what I have easy access to right now, and hoping that either Kirac missions or map drops get me further. At some point, I will create the spreadsheet that I usually use to track these things, but for the moment it is just me and Ashgar participating in this league so I have not really felt super rushed to get that ready. However, I am already to the point of not being able to remember if I have already gotten credit for something. So this is likely going to get created today for my own benefit. I wish there was some indicator on the map itself if you have full credit for it already.
Since I love Delve, I’ve made a hard beeline to pick up all of the Niko nodes on the tree. After that, I will likely circle back around and get strongbox nodes for a tree that looks a little like this before expanding out. Specifically, there is a node called Mining Byproducts that states that you have a 10% chance to get azurite from chests and nodes in the area. Thing is… I am not sure if this means small white-quality chests in the zone or strong boxes. In either case, I am going to do some experimenting because maybe I have been doing this wrong all along. Maybe I should have been opening all of those damned chests in a map because maybe they would have been giving me more sulphite. If nothing else I like opening strongboxes in a map so I almost always include them regardless.
As far as Delve goes, I have made piteous progress. Essentially right now I am trying to cherry-pick Azerite nodes and chest nodes so that I can build up a stockpile of resources. At the moment Delve crafting resources are not worth selling. However, as the league carries on and folks start trying out complex crafting projects… I fully expect this to change. I think enough videos circulated in the last league stating that Delve was a “get rich quick” scheme. However, I know that Delve is very much an acquired taste and I do not expect most players who might be trying it now, to stick with it. I should have probably gone for shaping the seas and skies first, but I wanted to start my Delve engine as fast as I could given how sparse currency has been to this point.
All told I am personally enjoying myself, but as many folks have commented it feels like playing standard. I have little to no interest in the league mechanic as a whole because it isn’t terribly useful in the grand scheme of things. In theory, I could keep weapons in my second set of inventory slots and then use those for trying to unlock crucible trees… but generally speaking, I use those instead to mule gems for leveling and corrupting. I don’t love the idea of keeping random weapons in my inventory spots either. At some point I am probably going to try my hand at getting a good scepter base, and then trying to find one with a decent tree… that I will then use in a Delve crafting project. In the short term, however… I still have a ton of mapping to do and progress to make in Delve.