Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a pretty big day, not only because we now have a brand new roof on our house… but also while listening to the constant banging I made quite a bit of league progress. First up I stopped putting it off and finished my fourth Labyrinth which means I have a fully specced out crusader. I could say that I was avoiding it due to a pretty significant bug happening in the armor scaling of the Unbreakable ascendency ability, but in reality, every game seems to have one activity that I loathe and put off for as long as possible. For Diablo III it is Set Dungeons, and for Path of Exile it seems to be doing my 4th Labyrinth.
I hit level 90 last night and woke up this morning to find out that the Unbreakable Ascendency was fixed, which means that this is a snapshot of what my defenses look like right now. I had been using the armor mastery passive that doubled the armor of my hands and feet in order to help out a bit with not quite hitting the physical damage reduction cap, so this morning I dropped that point. I am wildly over-capped on my resists, but that is in part on purpose because at some point I will drop Purity of Elements to add on some additional damage generation auras. The challenge there is always that I will need the Charisma anoint and some ways of making myself immune to elemental afflictions. In mapping and Delve I feel sufficiently tanky and quite honestly do not feel very far off from the point I reached last league when I had a Brass Dome.
I’ve finally started to feel like Delve is providing again now that I can comfortably hang out around depth 100. I will continue to push down a bit, but right now I am hunting resources. I got my very first Divine Orb of the league down in an Abyssal City. It was my first City of the league as well, but right now I am branching out to the side “City Hunting” as they tend to provide the bulk of the resources I am looking for. My goal is to keep gaining “tanking” ability and start going down to around 200-250 hunting Aul the Crystal King. Quite honestly though the build is feeling very stable on what has been a fairly low total investment. I picked up a slightly better Immortal Flesh with minimum resistance loss and bought some tainted currency to get some quality on my chest piece. I think the next big upgrade I will be going for is either Legacy of Fury boots or going all the way for a well-rolled Brass Dome.
As far as currency goes, yesterday was really good for my bank. What is not reflected by this comparison is the 30 chaos that I spent yesterday on various minor upgrades. Getting a Divine Orb really helped my spirits, but you will notice that I am also up significantly in almost all of the basic currencies. Notice that things I struggled with like Armourer’s Scraps I now have a pretty decent stockpile of them. What I really need though at the moment are some instilling orbs so that I can get my flask routine online as well. Generally speaking, I run all of my flasks with the setup of gaining 3 charges every time I am hit and then consuming the flask anytime it hits full charges. This adds a whole other layer of defenses to the build and at the moment… none of them are functional. I think this might be why I enjoy leagues so much it feels like I have a constant string of minor projects that I can engage with in order to improve my character. My happiest moments in World of Warcraft were when there were activities that I could be engaging with on a nightly basis, that would show incremental movement for my characters, and Path of Exile sort of scratches that same itch.
The biggest improvement from yesterday is probably in my Atlas progress. I am now well into yellow maps and have done a few red maps. In total yesterday I knocked out 24 Atlas bonuses and then picked up a few passives from Maven and Eater progress. I’m essentially alternating between making progress in Delve and making progress in the Atlas and then using map completion as fuel to refill my sulphite stockpile. At some point, I really need to start doing some Heist, because I’ve yet to really even engage with that mechanic. Mostly I need to level my rogues so that I can start doing missions for Replica Uniques and Alternative Quality Gems. Speaking of gems I have a crop of 6 copies of Righteous Fire that I have been muling in my secondary weapon slots I am just about to do the 20% quality vendor recipe and level once again. I am hoping out of six corrupts I will get a Level 21/20% gem. If that pays off I will start doing the same for Fire Trap.
As far as my Atlas passive tree goes, I’ve picked up Shaping the Skies, Seas, and Mountains as well as all of the nodes that are beneficial to the production of Delve resources and Niko missions. I’ve gone through and picked up quite a few strongbox nodes as well and am working my way toward the node that makes all strongboxes corrupted and rare. Since Delve provides quite a bit in the way of Divination cards and Maps, I opted to only focus on the strongbox nodes that reward currency and duplicate that. If I get a bossing character leveled up I will likely shift back to what I did last league where I do mapping on a character that can stomp Metamorphs and invest some points into that mechanic, and then focus on RF Juggernaut for doing Delve and Heist only.
All told I am having a freaking blast even though the crucible league mechanic itself is a bit of a bust. My hope is that once I get fully built out on the Jugg, I will be able to handle full-strength crucible mobs and then start chasing some of the specific uniques that are worth something. More specifically I am probably going to start stockpiling some higher-level Champion Kite Shield bases in a tab for attempts at finding an Aegis Aurora. What I am really hoping is that in the coming week, the prices for resonators stabilize so I can start selling those as well. For the moment I am sitting on a stockpile because the prices are just too low and I know given time they will trickle up in price. When that finally happens my currency machine will be online and I will be able to fund pretty much any project I might have.