Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did my obligatory “First Day of Blaugust” post and today I am back to my usual nonsense. As of today… specifically about seven hours from now… it will have been one full week of playing Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile. During that time I have made a ton of progress and quite possibly made it further in a shorter period of time than I have ever in the past. The League mechanic slowed me down a bit and it took me roughly 20 hours of play to get through the campaign into maps. It has taken me an additional 42 hours to reach the point where I feel like I am fully ready for endgame shenanigans. Path of Exile players hit these games freaking hard… and I have put in time before work, at lunch, and many hours after work to get where I am now.
At this point, I have completed all sixteen tiers of normal maps and a number of the unique maps leaving ten more of those to go. Two will be rather expensive as they always are because they unlock some meta crafts… but my mappers brought back Poorjoy’s overnight so that is another one I should be able to knock out quickly. I also have my four voidstones and as a result, most of the maps that are dropping normally and not through specific league mechanics will be dropping at the t16 level meaning I will have lots of stuff to farm with soon. I have all but four of my favorite map slots and currently, they are all set to Glacier which is probably my favorite map of the pool that is available this league.
It is wild that I have as strong of a build as I have, given how poor I feel this league. I think across the board everyone is feeling this because this league is the recession following the insane boom leagues of Affliction and Necropolis. Affliction had nonsense levels of juicing coming from the Wildwood Wisps and Necropolis had all manner of ways to force scarabs to spit out hundreds upon hundreds of uniques per map. This league dialed back a lot of the ground loot strategies and the death of magic find as we knew it previously… where folks focused on scaling the quantity of drops, is pretty much dead. Big group juicing parties are declaring group play dead, but ironically in spite of all of this… I am probably having more fun than I have in a long while. Sure I can’t buy bargain basement headhunters for 4 divines… and squires for a handful of chaos… but the league mechanic is actually producing legitimately useful gear.
I’ve recently shifted up my build to go into the block-based Righteous Fire as Pohx has done this league, and I gotta say it feels really great. Crafters are understanding this is the direction everyone is going to go and as a result have wildly inflated the prices of these shields. The stat that you care bout the most is that 5% life gain on block and to get a shield with decent armor and decent life you are looking at 3 divines or more. What I did instead was pick up a shaper-influenced base for 40 chaos and then do reforge life harvest crafting until I got something that looked halfway decent. At some point, I want to upgrade this but for now, it works. Similarly, I was able to snag a pseudo-link elder helm for 1.5 divines… which was a bit of a steal considering these are mostly going for 3 divines or higher. Maybe when I make a bit more currency I can upgrade this but for now, it works and was a huge boost in damage.
The Light of Meaning is a prismatic jewel that is technically new to this league, but it largely replaces the craftable version from Necropolis league called The Perandus Pact. It has all of the same rolls that you could craft and largely works in the same manner. I picked up the +6% increased fire damage version again and worked it into my build in the same location as the last league. Where it is placed currently it is hitting 18 nodes for an additional 108% increased Fire Damage. According to POB, it is adding roughly 50k damage to my build. However when I drop the Spiritual Aid nodes for a cluster jewel that will take it down to only hitting 16 nodes and 96% additional Fire Damage but probably still worth it. I picked up a cheap cluster jewel base and am trying to roll a large cluster with Burning Bright, Primatic Heart, and Widespread Destruction… since I can’t really afford to buy it outright. For now, I am using reforge fire Harvest crafting, but if I go back into delve and get some more fossils and resonators I might just do single socket scorched fossils and yolo it. Once I hit the large I will start trying to craft my mediums.
Admittedly part of the reason why I am so poor at the moment is that I have not been Delving. I am full up on sulphite and ready to go… but have been focusing on finishing out my Atlas and gathering resources for my town. Delve is a great place to get gold… but has zero way of getting any of the mined ore to feed the smelters and shipments. Now that I am through all of the baseline maps and have my voidstones, I am probably going to shift up my focus and dive down into the dark. I’ve only made it to depth 115 and would like to get down to around 200 before I start farming horizontally hunting for cities. I also need the bulk maps that come from Delve to feed my mappers. So this weekend is probably going to be me returning to the virtuous cycle of map until full on delve juice and then burn through it in the mines. This should help me considerably in bubblegum currency and also having resonators both to craft with and bulk sell on the currency exchange. I got a quick shot of 300 chaos yesterday when I sold all of my resonators off in about 15 minutes through Faustus and the automated trades.
Speaking of mappers… I thought I would share what they look like right now. I’ve not been heavily focused on them that much and have not poured a ton of resources into leveling them up. Right now I have a single party with a level 6, level 5, and two level 4 mappers. This allows me to burn through white maps pretty reliably without risking losing them. That does not mean that they 100% complete every map but they do bring back a lot of random stuff, most of the gear I feed into the disenchanter. Last night before going to bed I made sure I had two shipments going and twelve maps in the hopper, and this represents what the mappers brought back. It isn’t phenomenal loot but it also isn’t nothing. Since I was never going to bulk sell my maps, this allowed me to turn a resource that was rotting in my bank into a non-zero quantity of usable items. There is an achievement for running t14 or higher maps with the mappers so at some point I will upgrade to where I can do that.
Similarly, I have been keeping shipments going pretty much as much as I can swing. Essentially I have one boat that I have dedicated to the longer route that takes about 2 hours per run, and another boat that takes the shorter runs at around 45 minutes each. Last night before going to bed I set up two shipments and the left side of the above image shows the returns from each. Again it is not spectacular loot but produces a lot of bubblegum currency that is still useful. There is a Kingsmarch Wiki page that maths out all of the details around sending items, what sorts of rewards they bring, and what the various breakpoints are. Right now I am filling whatever I can towards the items that are being asked for from the port as I am trying to level the hidden faction system for every destination. Then I will add 55 of each other crop, and 8104 Thaumaturgic Dust because it acts as a multiplier to the entire load and that specific number is the 200% more breakpoint. 55 for dust is the 100% more breakpoint, and I am largely just using it as a number for crops. Sending multiple types of crops seems to increase the total yield in currency… so I am just winging it and it seems to mostly make each load worth the time and gold expenditure.
I think my focus over the next few days is going to be gold acquisition. There are a lot of upgrades that I want to make for my town that are going to require forty thousand gold or so each. If I am delving more… I am generating less ore that requires workers to work… and when they go idle they stop draining my coffers. So I am probably going to shut down shipping and mapping and just focus on building up a nest egg for the next phase of development. I have a quad tab full of rare items that I can feed my disenchanter to at least keep it running during this interim. I’ve been running a lot of maps with my Ritual/Einhar/Beyond atlas in the hopes of maybe just maybe either lucking into a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections because I am still using a five-link chest piece. I have a second Cloak of Flame that is better rolled that dropped while mapping, that I have been using to try and link and then eventually swap.
All in all, I am having a blast in Recession League, in spite of what the hardcore juicers are saying about it. I’ve made a ton of progress in a single week and now my focus is on subtly improving my build. I really need to swap out my weapon for something a bit better with at least +1 to all fire gems on it. I have a fractured base that I am crafting into a new pair of gloves and am just now trying to get elemental proliferation implicit on them before wearing them. I have a side project of trying to level a bunch of Purity of Fire gems so that I can hopefully get a level 21/20% quality gem out of the batch. I guess I feel like I have so many projects that I want to devote time to, and that is keeping me in the hype cycle of enjoyment. Eventually, that will slow down, but for me personally, this is one of the best leagues I have ever played in.