Hey Folks. Getting a bit later of a start today than I normally do for a blog post. I had a weird day with a weird schedule… but things seem to have calmed down enough for me to sit down over lunch and make a proper post. Last night I spent some time hanging out with Ace and specifically trying to target a few different seasonal objectives. Initially the idea was that we would knock out the “Pit 75 with 5 mins remaining” and got that on our first attempt with about a minute to spare. From there we decided to make a go at opening 25 of the seasoning root pods within 15 minutes… thinking surely that grouping up we would both get credit. It turns out that we did not… and my spamming the pods meant that I got the achievement and Ace didn’t. So at some point over the next few days we will make another go at it and I will just murder things while they spam the pods.
Since last night I managed to knock out the achievement for opening 10 chests in a single Helltide, which pushed me over the edge and completed my seasons journey. In theory I still have a few objectives left but I really have no pressure to complete them as I have accomplished the thing I set out to do in Season Seven. I have a new raven pet, and also picked up another resplendent spark. Essentially I could stop playing right now and feel entirely satisfied. That said I am probably going to keep playing a bit to see if I can improve my gear and maybe do another round of boss summons trying to more Mythics. We should probably try and link up with Eliyon or Kodra and let them get in on the summoning nonsense to get some good loot from it.
For the New Years event and seasonal reputations I am sitting at rank 7 and rank 18 respectively. I’ve found the most luck so far just hanging out in a Helltide or Witchtide zone and farming the special seasonal altars, rather than grinding out Nightmare Dungeons. More than likely in the coming days I am going to finish up my Coven Reputation and hopefully at the same time finish out the Lunar New Year rep as well. This is going to give me a couple more resplendent sparks that in theory will let me craft another mythic… which hopefully gives me one of the others I want for my build. If I max both reputations that will give me 3 sparks… giving me a second chance pending I get a bad option when crafting the first one.
Past that I think I am done with Helltide and am going to mostly make myself available to help Ace complete the rest of their season journey objectives. Diablo IV is a pretty great game at this point, but very much feels like it takes the same role as Diablo III does. Its a fun game to play for a few weeks with a nice clear progression of objectives to finish. However once the Seasons Journey is over, I find that I lose my desire to keep grinding. Mythics are just unobtainium enough to make them feel like they are not a realistic goal… it is like getting a Headhunter or Mageblood to drop. Whereas Path of Exile has little hits of dopamine along the way… Diablo IV doesn’t really have much in the way of interesting things to farm once you have gotten your build to the point of functional.
Good Morning Folks. I had taken a break in Diablo IV because I knew the Lunar New Year event was right around the corner, and a lot of my remaining achievements for the seasons journey would simply require me to grind a ton. I figured if I was going to be grinding, I might as well be getting credit for the Lunar Awakening event. This was great in theory, but it turns out that it is a really bad event to be doing with friends. All of the things that are actually fun to do with other people… reward zero credit towards the event. The only truly reliable method for grinding this out is to run a stupid amount of Nightmare Dungeons. These feel bad on the best of terms, but somehow feel even worse with a party. As a result we did a few of these… decided it was not a good time… and then moved on with our lives.
Neither of us had been playing a ton, and as a result we had not gathered up that many boss materials… but still made the effort to summon what we had. Ace’s cat however had other ideas and we got cut short after three bosses in the rotation. However this was enough for me to get my first Mythic item to drop… which was unfortunately Doombringer and not something I could use… but I turned it into a shard and got the chest-piece I wanted for my build. I am uncertain that yesterdays event patched in the fixes to the Mendeln ring, because I did not feel any stronger. I also did not see anything in the patch notes specifically calling it out.
At this point I have unlocked three of the caches on the Ancestral Favor path, and honestly it might be most efficient to just run around looking for the world events associated with this instead of purposefully grinding. The big problem that I am having with this event is that it is so limited in scope as to how you can progress it. In theory if I were doing this event, every activity would reward at least some credit towards the reputation system. Instead the only thing that you can do with other players that seems to reward anything is Nightmare Dungeons, which are legitimately the bottom of the rung when it comes to “fun things you can do with friends”. I think I will probably push a little bit towards this goal each day, and hopefully over the course of the event I will unlock everything. I am going to get bored if I try and mainline it however.
With that in mind, once we adjourned for the evening due to cat aggro, I went downstairs and spent the rest of the evening in Path of Exile. My build feels relatively solid at this point and while I have moments where I take stupid amounts of damage… this is largely caused by bad map rolls rather than endemic to the build itself. I’ve been running my Delve atlas tree and slowly working on “breaking delve” which is the process of slowly upgrading the various levers enough to where delve begins to feel like a reasonable activity.
Ultimately my goal is 150 depth for now, and I need to upgrade my darkness resistance significantly more in order to do that level comfortably. I am also slowly upgrading my sulphite capacity so that I can spend more time down in the mines once I have filled up from mapping. I like the Delve virtual cycle of doing some maps then doing some delve until I run out of sulphite. Ultimately my goal is to get to 150-200 depth and start chasing cities, because at that level I can get all three types of cities and their associated boss fights. In theory once I start gathering up resonators, I will also start getting a reliable income to spend on upgrades… or at least the few upgrades that are available in a semi-private league.
I am not sure how long Pohx League is going to stay active, but GGG has upgraded the cap to 40k players and I believe made it available to everyone. On top of that they have also started to spoil information about the event league with nineteen new ascendancies. It is going to be called the Legacy of Phrecia Event and this morning they shared the Harbinger ascendancy for Witch, and the Gambler ascendancy for Duelist. Sir Gog has also released a video doing a bit of a deep dive into these two ascendancies. Given how wildly different these are going to be… it makes me think this is probably going to be a void league aka a league where the characters do not transfer into standard. They seem far less generalist, and more designed for each to be played in a very specific manner. For example how good the Harbinger ascendancy is… will rely heavily upon whether or not the Harbingers you summon are permanent minions… or if they are on similar cooldowns to the uniques that the abilities originally came from.
I’m 60 maps deep into the Atlas at this point and have knocked out most of the white and yellow options. At this point I need to start tempting fate and running corrupted red tier maps to keep expanding out my passives. The thing is I am not really pushing it nearly as hard as I would during a normal league start, because I have done this progression a few times for Settlers. I unlocked the full Atlas when the league launched and then did it again with the Necro Settlers event launched. I will likely finish up 115 of 115 in this league as well, just because it is a thing that ends up happening if you play often enough. With me doing Delve, I am hopefully going to encounter more map caches which will speed up the process.
So right now my plan is to do Lunar stuff until I get bored… and then drop back down into old comfortable Path of Exile grind mode.
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.
Good Morning Folks. This weekend I allowed myself to get sucked back into Path of Exile. Given the disappointment for Path of Exile 1 players last night, our hero Pohx decided to take matters into his own hands and throw together a league event. When I wrote about this on Friday, it full at 9500 players… before the end of the day it had been expanded to 20,000 players and also full. Then GGG stepped in and added 10,000 additional player slots, expanding the private league past the normal limit to 30,000. Suffice to say there has been more than a little bit of interest in some sort of a league reset happening in Path of Exile. I think there have been way more players than any of us thought, for which Path of Exile II did not really land well.
As of this morning there are just shy of 28,000 players in the Pohx private league, and I figure that is probably as big as it is going to get for the time being. If you are so inclined, you can go sign up for the league here which officially lasts until April 1st. A few caveats if you have never played in a private league like this. The big thing is expect trade to be much more challenging than during a normal league reset. There are simply going to be fewer items available and this impacts pretty much everything from the currency exchange to the player to player trade site. Folks tend to be way more chill about pricing however since this is a limited time event. However fully expect to be playing at least 80% solo self found. I picked up a few upgrades over the weekend but there was not a lot available on the market, and mostly all I really did was pick up a couple of items with good resists on them.
I am playing well out of my comfort zone and running my very first Trickster ever. I opted to go for Ice Trap, with the idea of eventually shifting into Ice Trap of Hollowness once I got all of my gear in place… which admittedly might not actually happen during the course of a private league. I still feel pretty squishy but am working on a series of upgrades with the next few points that should help that out. Essentially I am going to be stacking Mind of Matter, Ghost Shroud, and Wicked Ward with my existing Eldritch Battery to hopefully resolve my survival problems by making my Energy Shield double as both Mana and a proper damage barrier. I tried running Mind of Matter too early, and really all I did was cause myself to get into situations where I could not cast anything. Wicked Ward and Ghost Shroud should in theory help to solve the energy shield regen problems while I am taking damage.
Once I get another level I am probably going to respec the start of my tree a bit to free up two points, so that I can pick up all three of those notables at once. I am leaning heavily on Polymath which gives me 3% more damage for each unique mastery I am taking which at the moment is a 24% more multiplier. I’ve not run across any of the uber lab shrines in maps, so I might go ahead and try and purchase one from the currency exchange so that I can get my fourth ascendancy point. I feel like I am dealing plenty of damage right now, it is mostly the survival and comfort of mapping that I need to resolve. This is a way squishier character than I am used to playing, and since I don’t have access to really good cheap rares due to the limited trade environment… my evasion is way lower than I would like it to be. I am honestly not really a massive fan of evasion builds to start with, but I am trying to push myself out of my comfort zone.
I am still chipping away at white maps and making pretty decent progress. For the most part once I get something frozen I can kill it extremely quickly. Normal mapping is largely just walking through the map while dropping traps behind me which ends up being a fairly safe gameplay style. Things only really get risky when I have to stop and grind through something a bit tankier. The nice thing about the traps gameplay style is that I can run reflect maps without too much issue. The only change that I need to do is to remember not to drop Frost Bombs. I should also really drop back down to a level 1 Frost Blink so that I don’t have to worry too much about that either. I would really like to pick up some additional regen, but it feels like it is hard to juggle that with everything else that I want in the build.
For the most part right now I am running syndicate, as I try and get the enchants that I need. I am going to mix in some perm Delirium in the hopes of farming up some cluster jewels. Again being in a limited trade environment means that I am going to need to craft most of my own gear if I want some very specific things. I am still hoping at some point a Replica Dragonfang amulet shows up with Ice Trap on it, but I am not holding my breath. Thusfar there are plenty of those, but none for the specific ability that I want. I am very much playing an off meta build at the moment, based on one that was designed for 3.25 that does not 100% equate to the current passive tree. Essentially I tend to follow a guide until I hit maps and then I am off the radar with making the choices needed to hopefully make the build feel good after that.
I am not entirely certain how long Pohx League is going to stay active though, because this morning GGG released a statement that they are working on an event for Path of Exile 1. Essentially they are going to break out 19 Ascendancies that have never seen the light of day before, and will be running a league where every class has totally new options. This will run for a month, and I full expect an influx of players will rush over to this league to test things out. I am hoping we get a full release of what all of the ascendancy nodes are before this drops so that folks can begin to brew a bit ahead of time. This is going to have similar energy to a Krangled league, and I full expect by the end of the first day everyone to have spreadsheets floating around to help with buildcraft.
Tomorrow I am still planning on dipping back into Diablo IV for a bit with the new Lunar New Year event. I am not sure how hard I am going to grind but I would still really like to finish out the seasons journey while the buffs are active. I am hoping that the fixes to the Ring of Mendeln land at the same time so that I potentially see a massive boost in power. Other than that… I mostly want to be able to get some rest. I’ve not been sleeping well because Gracie has taken to screaming for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Additionally I am still fighting a bit of a respiratory thing, which I hope passes rapidly. I have to go in a few times this week for meetings, so I am mostly hoping to get through the week without too much frustration.
