Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the 4th day of Pohx League and I’ve gotten my Ice Trap Trickster to level 87 and mostly stabilized the character. It is nowhere near as tanky as my usual RF Chieftain fair, but not too shabby. If I can swap out my gear for higher Evasion/Energy-Shield bases it will begin to perform better. Right now I am only running around 15k Evasion and 2k Energy Shield, the later serving both as a defensive layer and as my mana pool. I also have negative chaos resistance which is a problem when you encounter something that cares about chaos. Specifically I cannot run any map with the “additional chaos damage” mods on it. I however due to my traps giving me energy shield and life, the no-regen and low-regen maps are pretty doable. I am not doing anything to fix elemental ailments yet, so those are still miserable but Arctic Armor is at least making me freeze immune.
It is always wild when a build starts to come together. It is like turning the tumblers on a lock and seeing them click into place. Essentially I am relying heavily on four different notables that take my Energy Shield and convert it into both a way of fixing my mana and then giving me a method for recovering said energy shield quickly when I am taking damage. At some point I will swap over to the low life version of the build and work in petrified blood and pain attunement. However before that I really need to get some life recoup on my rings to pay off the degen that petrified blood brings. In a proper trade league this would be simple enough to fix, but in a limited trade environment of a private league… even the biggest private league ever… it is a bit hard to find the things that I need.
As such I have used this and the previous NecroSettlers league as a way of flexing my SSF muscles a bit, and trying to figure out how best to get the items that I need. For example there is some tech that I stumbled on during base settlers that I am abusing here to farm some cluster gems. Essentially the node Atlas Notable Unending Nightmare makes it so that Delirium fog never dissipates, but you also don’t end up getting splinters or deli orbs. However every time you fill the bar for an objective, you get that reward as a drop… but also get some sort of cluster jewel at the same time. Normally you don’t get cluster jewel drops until the final payoff of the delirium fog, but in this case you get them every step of the way. This means that during the course of a map you can easily farm four or five cluster jewels without much issue. I will then use these to roll the cluster jewels that I need with harvest reforging.
I’m making progress but it is relatively slow progress. I have completed 50 Atlas objectives and as such unlocked my second tree. I’ve specced it into Niko and Scarabs because I am curious how well this build performs down in the mines. Delve produces a lot of useful raw currency, and when I am not running it… I notice it significantly. You have to get pretty deep into red maps before they begin to pay out in the same manner that even shallow delve does. The big thing that I am missing is offerings to the goddess, for the fourth lab. I have a single token, but I have yet to attempt it. I might try that over lunch to see if I can knock out my fourth set of ascendancy points.
I’ve been running a lot of Betrayal to get crafting unlocks, and occasionally there is a big payday when you bargain. I should really spend time memorizing who is the best person to bargain with, because the currency payouts sure are nice. I’ve not gotten anything major but at the state I am in the league, eight alchemy orbs in a single drop is nothing to sneeze at. The biggest problem with Betrayal is that it can be VERY rippy… which is something I have never really had to worry about too much playing mostly exceptionally tanky builds. Folks will say that Trickster is tanky… and it is in its own way… but it feels SUPER lightweight compared to a finished Righteous Fire character. I deal a heck of a lot more damage already though, so for general mapping purposes it feels great. The difference is really only noticeable when I have to fight something that does not fall over immediately.
Tonight however I am going to be returning to Diablo IV. Ace and I have scheduled some hangout as we dive into the lunar new year event. Unfortunately I have not really regenerated my stash of boss materials, so we might have to just run a bunch of Pits and Infernal Hordes. That is not necessarily a bad thing because I can certainly use the levels on my glyphs. We should probably also run some nightmare dungeons, because I am not sure the new shrines can spawn in the more streamlined game modes. I am really hoping that I see a sizeable spike in damage output because supposedly the unique ring I am using got fixed.