Broke and Flipped

I had a rather busy day of significant progress and changes to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. First off I took out The Searing Exarch and while I took a few deaths, I managed to get my void stone well within the six portals. I don’t fight these bosses often enough to be terribly good at them, so there are always things that I forget will kill me. I can tank a single ball at a time during the ball phase, but never two at once for example. Shortly after taking down the Searing Exarch, I went after the Eater of Worlds and the same essential story. I also downed it with portals left but took a few deaths re-learning what I could take and what I could not take.

So that leaves me at 106 maps out of 115 with the “easy” two voidstones slotted into my Atlas. I am not entirely certain how hard I will go after Elder and Maven, or if I will eventually just buy a carry for both to get it over with. Having access to voidstones however, fixed the problem I was having with the scarab market. Essentially it is roughly 2-3 Chaos per Rusted Sulphite Scarab which allows me to force Niko on a map so that I can restock my Delve coffers. There is a specific Charged Compass that has “your maps contain Niko” which lasts for 3 maps and seems to cost in the neighborhood of 1 Chaos each. So while these are a bigger pain in the ass to buy, because no one wants to stop what they are doing for a 1 Chaos sale… it essentially gives me similar results for a minimum of 5 Chaos less. I suppose I should go through the hassle of snapping up a pile of these. Unfortunately, they don’t really stack so I would have to dump them in my “Alt Maps” tab along with my Sanctum books, Temple maps, and Memories.

One of the things that I have been watching the market for is a Brass Dome. This is essentially my chest of choice when it comes to gearing out an RF Juggernaut because you can get over 4000 Armor, up to 5% additional maximum elemental resistance, and crit immunity. However these are always pricey, and since I had four Divine Orbs to play with, and a stash of Chaos Orbs from selling a round of Delve items… yesterday I actually began seriously shopping for something. Essentially what I wanted was a chest with a combination of White sockets and colored sockets that would allow me to flip it back and forth between Righteous Fire in the chest and eventually do the swap to Fire Trap in my Chest and Righteous Fire in my Helm.

What I found was a six-socket Brass Dome with over 4000 Armor, and +5% to all maximum resists that had WWWRRG giving me access to run both the common BBBRRG Righteous Fire setup and the GGGRRR or in my case GGGRRB setup for Fire Trap. It was not linked, so essentially I had to spend another 400 Chaos Orbs to buy the Orb of Bindings to do the benchcraft recipe. I did not really want to fuck around and try and manually link this for fear of spending way more than 1500 Bindings to accomplish the job. This happened to me last league when I was trying to link a chest and burned through 2000 Bindings without ever actually getting a six link. So essentially I wound up spending 5 Divines in total on the chest, but yesterday the cheapest equivalent already linked was 16 Divines. This morning there are two options at 9 Divines so I still feel like I came out ahead.

With my remaining currency or at least part of it, I picked up an Elder Influenced pure armor helm with level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Concentrated Effect support that happened to be in the right colors to run Righteous Fire. I originally had intended to run the new Brass Dome with Righteous Fire for a bit while I saved up the currency for a helm, but I managed to snag this one for around a Divine and figured no time like the present to complete the swap. Of note… I’ve never actually done this one before and always ran the traditional RF in Chest and Fire Trap in helm setup. The difference is immediately clear when it comes to taking anything down that requires me to drop a Fire Trap. The only negative in this process is that I had an Area of Effect implicit on my previous helmet, so I am getting used to a slightly smaller Righteous Fire aura.

So I am fairly broke… I went into the day with 4 Divines and around 800 Chaos and I exited the day with somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 Chaos. That said… I have another load of resonators to sell and if they sell as quickly as the last batch that will be a significant boost to my vault. Essentially the next few upgrades will be more difficult because I have to be very wary of my resistance, dexterity, and intelligence. Ultimately in a perfect world, I would go after a +1 or +2 if that is even possible Amulet and a +2 Sceptre. I also need to swap out my gems for either 21/20 gems or the Awakened equivalent which will take a chunk of currency to do. Then after that, I am contemplating picking up the Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame jewels to allocate Unrelenting which is the other side of the Endurance stacking tree that gives me physical reduction, elemental damage reduction, and chaos resistance.

All in all a pretty great day, and one that both increased my survivability and my damage output. Currency gain in Path of Exile is always a means to an end for me. I farm currency so that I can do the things I like… which often generates more currency… so that I can buy upgrades to do the things I like more efficiently. At some point, I will start working on some more alt characters when my coffers have filled again so that I have money to play with. Ash continues to push me in the direction of a Cyclone build, and I still want to do a bit of a redemption arc for Storm Brand. Both of these will need things purchased or farmed, and both of which are probably going to happen before the league is up. Essentially right now… I am very “in my element” and enjoying my time greatly.