Morning Folks! If you have read this blog for any length of time over the last few years, you will know I am a “Delve Enjoyer”. One of the nuisances of Delve is that you need to pop out every so often to refill sulphite that you use to power the minecart or in my case the tunnel bear mtx… used to traverse the darkness. Generally speaking even with full Niko support on the Atlas tree it will take several maps to fully top back off your stockpile of 65,000 sulphite for a maximum upgraded capacity. When I am in the mood to Delve I pretty much want to do nothing but that. This makes the need to map for a bit in order to fill back up my stockpile of “delve juice” feel like a chore.
One of the components of the Necropolis league mechanic is Allflames which are used to swap out a pack of mobs on your map for a pack that has specific rewards. One of these is the Allflame Ember of Sulphite which removes a normal pack for a pack of 5-7 Monsters that reward Sulphite on Death. If you add the Sulphite Scarab of Greed which causes the map owner to gain 150% more Sulphite you have a wild interaction. In a T16 map, if you replace the top pack aka the one with the highest occurrence in the map with the Sulphite Allflame, and run one of these Scarabs you are pretty much guaranteed to top off your 65,000 Sulphite in a single map. Which of course means that I can get back to doing the thing that I want to be doing almost immediately. This is part of the reason why I am hoping that if nothing else… the Allflame mechanic goes standard after this league.
I am not super deep into Delve right now, but I am farming comfortably a bit deeper than normal this league. Generally speaking, I would stick in the 150 to 200 range and keep going horizontal looking for new cities and fossil nodes. In this league, it feels like I am much stronger than I normally would be, and as such I keep going deeper in order to test what the lower bounds of this build would be. I don’t necessarily want to leave super chill mode, at least not until I have dinged level 100. After that, I will probably start diving straight down to see where the break point is for my build where it transitions to something I can’t do quite as easily. In previous leagues, by the time I hit 500 depth, I was in pain. I am wondering if I can somehow make it down to around 1000 depth this go-round.
I have passed the halfway point in level 99 and am at the point where I plan on always carrying around an Omen of Amelioration just in case. During the 99 to 100 grind, a single death can cause you to lose at least a full night’s worth of experience progress. If I do take a random death the Omen will be consumed and I will save 75% of the loss, making it a bit less painful. I got mine as a drop but given that they are only around 50 Chaos, I would absolutely buy another one if I take a death because the savings is well worth it at this point. Once I ding 100 I will go back to doing some dangerous content again. Honestly the XP penalty is the piece of Path of Exile that I like the least. It feels like I have to play super safe if I want to make any progress at all. I’ve only ever hit level 100 on one other character, because while I will happily pay for voidstones… I refuse to pay for power levelling services.