Good Morning Folks. I contemplated not doing a blog post this morning, because I was not really certain what I would actually talk about. I am still knee deep in Path of Exile Legacy of Phrecia event and enjoying myself greatly. Yesterday I talked about some nonsense I was doing with a Headhunter to enable me to wear a Defiance of Destiny amulet, and then also deciding to pick up a Mageblood while the getting was good. I think the problem that I have long had with the Mageblood is that it enables builds that would not be able to function without it. There are so many builds where they are effectively using one belt slot and their flask slots in order to fix all of their elemental resistances. So it is hypocritical of me that I am essentially going down that path. One of the things that I have not liked about playing Scavenger Righteous Fire is that it seemed too painful to get to 90% all res. I am not there… but using a Mageblood allowed me to get considerably closer.
I spent a good chunk of time farming up flasks down in Delve. Delve provides many things, but it is really easy to get a bunch of level 83+ flasks for the purpose of rolling whatever you want on them. I had a set of 3 Charges per hit flasks that I was using, and I did not want to roll over the top of those, so instead I set out to farm a new Quicksilver, Ruby, Sapphire, and Topaz flask because I had been pretty bad about actually rat-holing these as I found them in the deep below. I rolled them for 70% increased Effect… save for the Sapphire where I gave up as I was running low on currency and did not want to buy more from the market. If I was trying harder I would have shot for Increased effect on all of the flasks as well, but for now I have it on Ruby the most important as over-capped fire resistance turns directly into life regeneration.
While this did not take me to 90 all, it did take me to 90/88/88 which is far better than I was sitting at previously. I have so many defensive layers right now between max block with life recoup, the 25% life recoup before damage taken from the Defiance of Destiny, 80% of all phys damage taken as fire which is then reduced by 90% resistance. Essentially I no longer need armor and just to make things more comfortable I resolved my Freeze and Chill immunity with the flasks so that I could drop Brine King and go back to Lunaris in my Pantheon. Similarly since I am immune to all bleeding I dropped Ralakesh and swapped over to Abberath to make myself immune to Burning Ground. The only elemental ailment that I am not immune to is Ignite and having 60% reduced duration seemed like a good idea. I can soak it with my 90% resistance so it really was not a big deal even before the Mageblood swap when I was sitting at 85%.
Another thing that I plan on playing with is Dawnbreaker. Getting one with 20%/20%/20% generally costs in the neighborhood of a Mageblood, but I managed to pick this one one that was someones “bricked” corruption. Essentially I am losing the 20 Life implicit, getting +2 socketed minion jewels that is essentially useless… but it cost 1.5 Divines… so I can live with it. Essentially equipping this shield would mean I am losing my 5% life recoup on block, but would allow me to take 100% of physical damage as Fire Damage, and at the same time convert 20% of Cold Damage and 20% of Lightning Damage to Fire Damage as well. This means I am contemplating changing out both of my rings to drop the Cold and Lighting resistance that I am gaining from them and stacking nothing but Fire Resistance since the degeneracy of my Mageblood is capping my resistances with flasks. This is essentially why that stupid belt is so powerful… it allows you to shift around stats to something more powerful for your build.
I am roughly half way to level 100, and as a result I have officially deployed my loss prevention strategy. This means giving up two inventory slots so that I can always have with me an Omen of Death-Dancing and an Omen of Amelioration. Essentially the idea is that Death-Dancing will kick in during a near miss to keep it from turning into a death… and then if you do actually end up taking a death Amelioration is going to severely blunt the amount of lost experience, and as a result reduce the amount of time it will take to gain it back. I have a few of each farmed up, but even if I have to start buying these… it would be 40 Chaos well spent just as an insurance policy.
Swapping over to this set up, lost me some damage. I had to drop Oriath’s End, but I will probably pick it back up once I hit level 100 and no longer care about taking deaths. I plan on dropping my Life Flask at that point and it would give me back a third mode of exploding things. Basically my goal now is to hit level 100 and then start trying to farm t17s and other things where I might actually take deaths. For the moment I have swapped over to running Toxic Sewer and City Square for my mapping combo, and am working on trying to get it to a comfortable point of sustaining them. I was running Defiled Cathedral until I got the Nameless Seer to show up, so that I could scry Apothecary on Toxic Sewer. I got that last night so I am in process of swapping over the maps I run. Essentially all of my T14 and T15 maps are going to my mappers as I whittle down that achievement.
I am shocked that I am still having as much fun as I am, given that I only rolled a single character for Phrecia. That said I am looking forward to the 27th so we can see what they have been cooking for Path of Exile II, and then after that the launch of Last Epoch Season 2.
Pretty sure the “one omen per combat zone” means you can’t make use of that two-layered omen defense. Going near death will proc Death-Dancing, at which point if you do die, Amelioration won’t be procced. As a result, your less-important layer negates your more-important layer. It’s the same reason you can’t use Return and Amelioration together.