Hey Folks! Yesterday I said some nonsense about wanting to finish up the campaign on my Arma Brand Scion. What I did instead… was spend all night last night running maps on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This was not necessarily one of those planned event sort of things, but just something that happened. Yesterday I talked a bit about needing to go for Pain Attunement for my Scion, to really make sense of running around in low-life mode all of the time. The problem is the node is way the hell over between the Witch and the Shadow on the passive tree. There are a few alternative ways to get this… the first being a Skin of the Lords but there are currently none available on crucible trade league with the correct combination of socket colors… and even with wrong colors, they start around 8 divines. Another option would be Crown of Thorns, but I am using my helm currently as a pseudo-six-link for Righteous Fire… so I don’t really want to do that.
The last option is to try and find a weapon with a Crucible tree that has the Pain Attunement node. These are apparently sought out because again… the cheapest one I could find is a shitty wand for 8 divines. So it made me remember that during the entire Crucible league, I have been chucking +40 Elemental Damage bases into my bank. The idea was that at some point I would run a bunch of crucibles in order to craft myself the PERFECT Righteous Fire Sceptre. This never happened, but I am finding myself in need of that pain attunement node so I hopped on my RF Juggernaut and tore through T16 maps all night long in search of this one elusive node. The thing is… I don’t even really care about the rest of the crucible tree and would likely craft on any base that I could get that node.
I think Crucible is one of those leagues that will be judged more fondly as time passes. When it was first revealed it had a bit of a “is this all” feeling to it. The league mechanic itself was not terribly rewarding, but it did allow you to do some really weird shit with your weapons and shields. It has also produced a number of completely broken builds. More than anything though, it caused someone like me… who doesn’t do a lot of crafting… to completely change the way I viewed items. Everything had its initial value, but also the possibility to turn into something interesting if it happened to roll exactly the right Crucible tree.
I am legitimately not joking when I say I have many stash tabs crammed full of potential bases for various projects. This is my sceptres tab, but there are also a number of these sitting in a dump tab as well that I never sorted into the proper tabs. I collected Champion Kite Shields because I was hunting for bases that happened to have the node saying that it sold for a unique. I was trying to get some cheap Aegis Aurora, but the market for that item plummeted given how much more common it was thanks to the crucible trees. I also cannot count the number of bows of various tripes that I unlocked Crucible trees for hunting for specific nodes to bolster my Toxic Rain and Explosive Arrow builds. It was not “bing bing wahoo” exciting, but it served as a constant project in the back of my mind which means that the league mechanic as a whole probably did what it was supposed to do.
While it is the end of the league and nothing really matters anymore… I gotta say I enjoyed zipping through maps last night and chasing Crucible trees. Admittedly this only really works because I have a fairly powerful character who can mostly laugh off the extremely rippy nature of Crucible mobs. Essentially my goal while running these maps was 1) to find another +40% Elemental Damage Sceptre base and 2) to find another t16 map… allowing me to basically infinitely sustain this nonsense. For the most part, it worked, but I did have to put a slight tweak into my loot filter just to make sure I was not missing Void and Opal Sceptre bases. I did this a while ago for Champion Kite Shields because I was doing the same thing, trying to sustain so that I always had an item to unlock waiting in the wings and was getting another map to keep churning the process out.
I added a few bonus objectives last night, namely trying to collect new bosses for the Maven with each map run and then eventually running at Maven Atlas when I filled up her bar. This led to more than a few boss maps, but the only one that I stopped what I was doing and ran was the Hunter map I got. Hunter bases are so freaking valuable as a whole that it felt like something that was easily worth doing. I got a Council of Cats card that I had never seen before which was pretty cool. It isn’t valuable really but still sorta neat as it unlocks a series of Feral-Cat-themed items. Maven’s Atlas fight is fairly straightforward on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and in theory, I am building towards more attempts at the Maven if I choose to go down that path. I am not exactly the biggest fan of that fight as I am not good at the memory game.
One of the things that Path of Exile excels at is giving you missions. It isn’t so much that the game draws a line in the sand and tells you that you have to do this 400 times in order to progress. If it did that it would feel awful. What it does instead is give you the tools to go target farm something yourself, while knowing in the back of your head that there is always a way to just buy your way out of the hole you have dug. I know that at any point I tire of this mission, I can just spend the divines to buy the item I am seeking… but that sort of is what makes the search more enjoyable. Can I do this thing that has value in the game for myself, rather than just hitting the auction house? That is ultimately the question and at least for now, I am enjoying that search.