Good Morning Folks! What a difference a few days can make. When I wrote my Monday post I talked about how big of a falloff this league has had and how it might go down as one of the worst leagues. The difference between the worst league and the best league is a handful of tweaks here or there, because right now… Necropolis feels great. I think lessons were learned during Kalandra that they cannot sit on problems and hope they go away… or that player sentiment will change because since coming back from the Easter holiday a number of patches have been deployed to tweak things in either direction. The first patch that I talked about on Wednesday was maybe too generous allowing for a strategy that could print magebloods and another that could cause 50-150 divines to drop in a single map.
Even after being watered back down a bit… map modifiers feel like the actually do something. Previously when I saw a currency type show up as one of the golden map rewards, it was unlikely that I would actually see any of those things drop. Now I expect to at least exit the map with a stack of them, and have a better understanding of the levers that I can pull in order to lean into these rewards. Additionally, the negative impact of the blue modifiers seems to be far less severe than taking a blue or red altar. I feel like we have reached the sweet spot where mapping feels exciting and there is a chance at interesting things happening… but also that I am not expecting to get randomly oneshot by something that is operating way out of band from the rest of the encounters.
I’m also feeling like the crafting mechanic is worth interacting with in small doses. This is now something that I casually plug corpses into as I work on filling up a mega craft, and even then… I won’t be super frustrated if it doesn’t lend the results I want because It is something I am passively doing. The game is giving me corpses so I might as well use them towards something. If I walk away with an amazing fire damage sceptre then awesome. If I walk away with some vendor trash… I am not going to stress it too hard because I have another base that I am attempting to craft in a more traditional manner. The sceptre that I made when I dumped all of my corpses with old modifiers into was honestly pretty solid, so if I can get something similar I will probably still be happy. Do I feel like this is something worth going all in on and buying corpses from other people? Hell no… it is way too frustrating to realistically buy 40 corpses at a time.
Since I skipped yesterday, I have made a ton of upgrades since we last talked. The most major upgrade is that I now have a well rolled six-link cloak of flames in Righteous Fire colors. Essentially I bought a cheap unlike item that had good stats, put six sockets on it, and got the colors right then I utilized a powerful new crafting option. The scarab changes introduced a new item called the Bestiary Scarab of the Shadowed Crow, which puts the Black Morrigan on your map as a red beast allowing Einhar to capture it. For those who are thinking that name seems familiar, it was one of the bosses from the Wildwood last league and is still fairly mini-boss-like when you face it on one of your maps now. Capturing it opens up a bunch of new crafting options but the one that matters the most to me is the ability to fully link any item. When I bought my scarab it was 90c and the price has significantly dropped since then to around 60c making this a reasonable method for fully linking any six-link item.
Another thing that I picked up is this phenomenal elder helmet which I paid 2.5 Divines for. In the last league, I got a much worse helm and had to pay out 25 Divines for it after failing to craft one many times on my own. I would have liked to have had a higher chaos roll but I was over the resistance cap before this helm so it was just additional stat padding either way. Eternal Burgonet is always my base of choice for these helms so I was super happy to be able to get pretty much exactly what I wanted for such a reasonable price. I essentially bankrupted myself to buy this item but have gotten some lucky drops since then to bring me back up to a comfortable bit of currency.
I also upgraded my Immortal Flesh to a nearly perfect rolled one that I would actually invest catalysts into. That is if the price of catalysts were not still outrageous. When I earn back some currency I will work on getting this up to 20% with a Fertile Catalyst buffing up the amount of life and regeneration that I am getting from the belt. At the current price, it is going to be around 160 Chaos to buy 20 catalysts and I just don’t have that much liquid currency at the moment. The Divine Orb is still pretty weak so I am trying my best not to cash those in for more Chaos until it trickles up a bit. One thing that has floored me is just how much cheaper everything is in this first week, so I guess I understand why so many players rush to get currency and get trades done. I’ve already watched prices increase drastically… for example, the first Cloak of Flame that I bought was 3c on the second day of the league, and the well-rolled one that I bought was 60c. Part of the rise in price comes from a lot of corruption projects as folks are trying to get ideal double implicit items for specific builds, lowering the number of uncorrupted unique bases available.
I think what floors me more than anything else at this point is how fast I have gotten so strong. At the time of writing this blog post we are slightly less than a full week since the league launch and at this point, I am stronger than any version of Righteous Fire that I have played in any other league. I am shifting around 70% of the physical damage that I am taking to either elemental or chaos damage and have 90% Elemental Resistance and the default 75% Chaos cap. I’ve also got enough armor to reduce some of those physical hits further combined with over 2000 life regen. If my POB is to be believed I have 110k Effective Health Pool and can just eat a lot of attacks that probably would have killed me in previous leagues.
I’ve also made faster progress through the atlas than I have in previous weeks, and quite honestly I am not even going as fast as I could have gone. Were I not splitting my focus between mapping and delve I could have been this far along by maybe Tuesday. The key difference from where I am now versus where I am in Affliction is that I am playing in a trade league and have access to buy things. Yesterday I went on a spending spree and bought all of the cheap unique maps just to get more atlas points. So if you compare my 95/115 from SSF league to 110/115 they are pretty similar save for a few t16 maps. Ancestor league was even slower because at this point I was rerolling to a new character instead of continuing to push my league starter. Had I not been taking my time and engaging in content inefficiently… I could have gone so much faster, but also didn’t really see the point.
I am having a freaking blast, and it is surreal what a difference a few numbers here and there make to the feel of a league. The most radical change for my personal enjoyment of this league however is the introduction of three Atlas passive trees. Instead of trying to create the best superset of optimal points… it allowed me to spread out a bit and specialize them to do different things. One tree I have gone all in on Niko Sulphite generation, taken all of the Scarab drop nodes, and splashed in some Harvest and Strongboxes. For another tree, I did what I have always wanted to do but never felt like I could do and went all in on Einhar and decided to splash in Ritual and the nodes that give me Huck so I can run around doing maps with two buddies. Lastly, I went for a fully on Legion and Breach strategy for my last tree and then splashed in some of the nodes supporting the Necropolis league mechanic… which weirdly enough also gives me a little Niko because it was the most efficient way to path up the tree. I can flip between these different strategies whenever I feel like it giving me way more freedom than even full tree respecs would grant me.
I am having a freaking blast. There is always something that I want to do and I can shift up how each map feels based on my particular mood. The six-link craft beast is a game changer, and it appears not to be anywhere near as rare as I originally thought it was. I’ve since gotten one to drop on my own and I am waiting on one of the scarabs that will duplicate a beast craft before I go ahead and run it and bank some Morrigan crafts. Having a reasonable path to six-link any unique chestpiece/weapon feels phenomenal, I just wish there was a way to use a tainted-oil-like mechanic to apply them to corrupted items. Legitimately… Necropolis went from a bummer of a league to quite possibly my favorite league that I have ever played in. More than anything it is all of the options on how to tailor the content that I am running to suit my tastes and how much freedom the scarabs and new atlas trees are giving me.
Have you been playing the Necropolis League in Path of Exile? How has your first week gone? Drop me a line below.