Good Morning Friends! I entirely blame Ashgar for pointing out that this stash tab MTX existed… which I then had to pick up because it looks hilarious. Essentially as the video shows, the dragon’s hoard grows in size based on how much currency you have in whatever tab you have currency affinity turned on for. My guess is it is based on TOTAL currency and not actually the currencies that are actively used in trading… aka Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, and Divine Orbs. From what I can tell my stash has now reached whatever has been deemed as the “maximum size”. This will be interesting to see in future leagues as it grows. We don’t really have much in the way of currency in the guild stash, so that tab is relatively small by comparison to my personal stash.
Yesterday I decided to record another one of my dumb videos showing off generally what it looks like to run content on my latest build, the Explosive Arrow Champion. However after last night, and several rounds of tweaks… namely in my skill gem setup… things go MUCH faster. I’m extremely impressed at just how tanky a Champion feels. Like when I was going through the Sentinel League with my poorly built version… I just assumed my definition of tanky was not quite what Zizaran’s definition of tanky was. However now that I’ve played a properly crafted EA Champion… I have to say it is not terribly far off the general survivability of my Juggernaut. I could absolutely see building a version of this that can do all of the content in the game, including deeper delve. Now I am just trying to increase my damage numbers.
This led me to spend a stupid amount of Chromatic Orbs last night trying to get my bow successfully recolored to RRRRGG. Best as I can tell… the way I have my bow built puts it somewhere in the 10 to 20 Divine Orb range… would absolutely be the latter if I put a decent crucible tree on it. I could have however gotten something workable in the correct colors for about 1 Divine Orb and saved myself a lot of heartache and frustration. Instead, my stubbornness kicked in and I burned through roughly 3000 Chromatic Orbs last night. The hardest part about this… is finding anyone willing to actually sell you Chromatic Orbs. This is true with any of the smaller currencies to be honest because most players don’t want to mess with trying to sell you an entire inventory worth of crap.
In truth, if you factor in my earlier coloring phase with this damned bow, I’ve probably spent about 4500 Chromatics on it in total. Originally my intent was to go for a RRRBBG bow, and I ultimately settled for RRRBGG because that is what I landed after burning through about 1500 Chromatics. However, in its final form, I really wanted RRRRGG, to which I went to the trusty Vorici Chromatic Calculator. This morning unfortunately I realized that I was using it wrong last night. The numbers that I was typing into the calculator were based on what the CURRENT requirements of the bow were with gems slotted into it. What the calculator expects however is for you to input the base requirements… so there is a massive difference between trying to color 106 Str 179 Dex 55 Int bow… and trying to color one with nothing but 179 Dex on it. I burned through about 1600 Chromatics before I got fed up and started doing yolo 3R crafts… which is apparently what I should have been doing all along.
There are a lot of parts of Path of Exile that I have noped out of entirely because of information overload. One of these is the common practice of using Forbidden Flame and Forbidden Flesh jewels in your passive tree. Effectively what this does is give you an extra ascendency point, and in order for it to work both jewels have to contain the same ascendency notable. Basically, when choosing my last points I went back and forth between the one I chose that effectively gives me a cheat death mechanic and the one I am allocating through these two jewels. Two points for what seems to be at least on paper a significant damage increase seems like a good trade-off. The other major tweak that I made last night is that I picked up a few Awakened Skill Gems for my bow Explosive Arrow Configuration. This is what that six-link looks like now.
- Explosive Arrow – Level 21 – 20% Quality
- Lifetap – Level 19 – I will finish leveling and quality it up at some point
- Awakened Burning Damage – Level 5 (Max) – 20% Quality
- Elemental Damage with Attacks – Level 21 – 20% Quality
- Ballista Totem – Level 19 – I will finish leveling and quality it up at some point
- Awakened Deadly Ailments – Level 4 – 20% Quality – Still needs one more level
I would have liked to have gone for an Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks… but those were in the 20 Divine Orb range so we will settle for this and hope maybe I get one to drop through Maven invitations.
So while I realize currency exists in the league to be spent on improving your gear… after my recent round of upgrades to my three main builds of the league… and the dumb Explosive SRS side project… I probably need to chill out for a bit. I’ve not run the numbers through Exilence in a while but just eyeballing my currency tab in the last six days I’ve spent roughly 1086 Chaos Orbs, 2 Exalted Orbs (spent on crafting slams), and 2 Divine Orbs (1 spent on crafting a bow)… for a grand total of just shy of 5 Divine Orbs. So other than the dumb amount of currency I spent buying Chromatic Orbs… I have to say overall every bit of it was spent in a way that made the builds more functional so I can’t say I am disappointed. However, it is weird to definitely be in a phase of “investing” in builds rather than generating currency. That said I took almost 10,000 Chaos Orbs into Standard when the last league ended, and I am fine not being in that situation again.