Good Morning Folks! Last night I dinged 97, and is often the case when I have freshly dinged and no longer worry about experience loss for a bit… I decided to try a few things. One of these was the new version of the King in the Mists fight that originally debuted in the Affliction League. This is now accessed through a fragment called An Audience With the King that can show up as Ritual rewards, and over the course of running a bunch of my Einhar/Ritual atlas, I found three of these. It feels like this fight is much easier than the version I remember from Affliction League, either that or I am much stronger than I was at the time I fought him initially back then. In my three kills I got 2 copies of Untouched Soul and 1 copy of the chase item Light of Meaning which is a rework of the Perandus Pact from Necropolis League. The version I got was the lightning damage variant which I sold for five Divine Orbs.
I feel like I have reached the point where I am starting to see the flaws of the Settlers of Kalguur league. Don’t get me wrong I am still having a blast and I still love the town mechanic, but there is a bit of an Achilles heel. Essentially any activity that does not produce copious amounts of gold… is the wrong choice for spending your time. Delve was doing decently gold-wise for a bit, but now just cannot keep up with running maps. However, even when running maps I average around 10,000 gold per map if I attempt to fully clear everything. It creates this scenario where you feel like you are being chased by a loan shark and never quite able to get ahead. I went to bed last night with a decent gold lead and woke up this morning to see that almost all of it was drained away by my 3000+ gold-per-hour upkeep costs that just kept ticking overnight. I am not actively running mappers right now, and I am barely shipping anything… and have heard that for folks with high-end mappers, their upkeep can be 30k to 100k per hour. Basically, I feel like I have to keep pushing in order to feed the beast, or feel like I am falling behind.
Last night I spent the tail end of my evening leveling a ranger that I am ultimately planning on going Deadeye to play Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. However, doing low-level content means that my gold drops shifted from 100 or so gold at a time to 5 gold at the best of times. This slowed my gains to a trickle which means that for the entirety of my leveling period, I maybe got 2000 gold, which doesn’t even pay for an hour of resource gathering. I am hoping that either GGG increases gold drops, or reduces upkeep costs because we are heading towards a mobile game scenario where it feels like you can never really get ahead. Sure there is zero penalty for letting the coffers run dry. Everything stops, and the game complains at you, but effectively all of your workers sit there until you are ready to feed them gold again. Alternatively, I could manually deallocate everything so that they stopped costing me any resources. I might end up doing that for a bit while I am leveling alts just so it doesn’t feel quite so bad to watch it all waste away.
Part of why I am leveling a bow character is that I managed to pull a pretty well-rolled Widowhail while playing my Righteous Fire Chieftain. No one plays Elemental Hit of the Spectrum with a Widowhail, but honestly, I sort of want to understand why. I got this quiver with attack all elements, bows fire an additional arrow, global accuracy increase, and crafted attack speed on it. In theory, once you multiply these values by 2.4 you end up with what seems like it would be a pretty solid elemental bow. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe my weird kludge Deadeye will work just fine. I’ve also been setting aside good Armor/Evasion gear that I have gotten from shipments and in theory, have most of everything ready to go for an attempt at this character. All I really need to do is farm up the gem… which I will absolutely do on my RF Chieftain because I can steamroll the Labyrinth.
For now, I am leveling double Lightning Arrow, one with a Mirage Archer setup in a Quillrain and one with a Ballista Totem setup in a Foxshade chest. I did try leveling with a gem that I have never used before and I think I might like it better than pretty much any bow gem for early levels. One of the challenges with bow leveling is when you first start out you don’t have access to Lesser Multiple Projectiles which means for a bit you just don’t have terribly good coverage. Galvanic Arrow however fixes this and is one of the first gem picks that you have access to upon reaching Lion Eye’s Watch. Essentially it fires out three bolts of lighting that fork giving you a good deal of coverage and allowing you to shred packs. I am sure someone will tell me all of the reasons why this is not a great skill, but having just used it until I got Lightning Arrow, I gotta say it felt pretty solid.
I got tired of looking awful and this morning I decided to go with a Vaal theme for leveling purposes. I went with the Vaal set from the 2024 supporter packs, the giant rolling Vaal orb pet, and the baby Vaal oversoul minion. I have a lot of MTX for Path of Exile, but I gotta say given how much enjoyment I get out of the game and how optional all of them are… I’ve never really felt bad giving them money. I am near the end of Act 3 currently, and I want to at least get up to level 56 tonight if possible so that I can see how the Widowhail combo feels in real-world usage. I might try and farm up elemental hit gems over lunch, or I could just stop being cheap and pay the 40-50 chaos they are going for currently.
Still hoping we see a patch before the end of the week that addresses the gold issues. Are you paying Path of Exile? What have you thought of the Settlers League so far? Drop me a line below.