A Rough Start for Mirage

Good Morning Folks. We are a little less than five days into the 3.28 Mirage League in Path of Exile, and I am having a hard time gauging my progress. I had a medical procedure on Friday that caused me to get a very late start on getting through the early campaign. Then that same night, we had a Tornado pass within a mile of my house, and sirens woke me up at 3:30 in the morning, making Saturday a bit of a mess. Then Sunday was, of course, the bi-annual mass hallucination that is Daylight Savings Time… meaning Sunday and Monday were also fucked. I still feel relatively out of it with my brain struggling more this year to adapt to the change than I think I can remember in any other year. I guess on one hand, I am glad that I decided to roll with another Righteous Fire Chieftain because I can do that progression in my sleep, and am already at a pretty stable point. Now, essentially everything is just tweaking and perfecting the build since I am sitting at level 87 and can probably do red maps without much issue.

I made one of my slowest times through the campaign, I think I have ever experienced, in large part because the campaign itself was way more enjoyable. One of the things about the Wish mechanic is that they force way more additional content onto your map, so that there is usually an Essence or Strongbox at minimum caught up in the Wish area, so it can be duplicated. There is a meta achievement for doing 30 Essences, and I got this done around Act 6 for reference as to how much bonus content was being added to the campaign maps. This also produced a stupid amount of gear, which meant that I was never really struggling to find anything to equip. I think this might have made ground loot more viable as well, but it is hard to tell. I do know without a doubt that I am getting way more currency than I have ever seen at any other point during the campaign. I was picking up chancing bases left and right because I was swimming in Orbs of Chance, but sadly I did not actually convert anything useful into a unique.

The bulk of my gear is stuff that I either picked up or crafted. I made the gloves with the Breach tree, and am working on an upgraded pair of boots. The sceptre and current boots are ones that I picked up off the ground, I believe from a wish area, and the helm is a cheap elder influenced base that I picked up for a few chaos and then threw Essence of Horrors at until I got something usable. I would have preferred to get Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but unfortunately, I did not hit that and am rolling with what I have for the time being. I am watching out for an ArchDemon Crown from Ritual, which is probably going to be my next target upgrade hat. At some point, I need to deal with my total lack of Chaos Resistance, but I will probably be devoting that to my ring slots. Maybe I should start heisting in an attempt to get a Helical ring base.

I’ve bought three items from the market: the Elder helm base from above, a reasonably well-rolled Immortal Flesh, and a Cloak of Flames. Unfortunately, right now I only have a four-link, and I need to upgrade to a six-link pretty soon. Unfortunately, Black Morrigans are over 2 Divines currently and last I checked, there were zero Omen of Connections on the market. So that likely means I will either be brute forcing a six-link, saving up 1500 fusings, or buying a corrupted six-socket and trying my hand at tainted fusings. There is one that I almost bought yesterday that had six white sockets, but I instead bought Essence of Horror to make the helm. Moving up to a proper six-link for both my helm and body would greatly improve my general clear speed, but the changes of Hinekora have honestly alleviated that stress a bit. Explosions are way more reliable, and it is rare that I do not get at least one explosion in a pack of mobs. I know this will fall off a bit as I enter red maps, but for the moment, it seems viable.

That is one thing that I am uncertain of… how I feel about the new Atlas. In theory, it is a better system because it will easily allow you to swap between maps without much fuss. However, in practice, it does not feel anywhere near as exciting since Maps are not a generic consumable resource and are not tied to specific content. Sure, once you hit t16s and had completed your Atlas previously, maps stopped being loot and became a pure commodity. However, in early progression, it was exciting to see a new drop for a map that you had yet to run. That little dopamine hit is gone because everything is effectively the same now, and instead, you are trying to force your Atlas tree to keep upgrading map tiers instead of trying to get connecting maps to drop. Similarly to the whole Path of Exile II atlas not feeling exciting… there is something missing with this new design. I know that once I finish out my Atlas progress, I will probably enjoy it more, but while leveling it feels worse.

Similarly, I feel like I am locked into a specific Atlas Tree layout because I need to keep producing higher tiers of maps. I am only now starting to add some flavor to my Atlas, and as a result, the first 30 or so points felt like they were required. Now I am optimizing the layout a bit and splashing in Niko, and will eventually start splashing in Breach, and maybe Harvest. When I get my second tree, I will be diving hard into Einhar in an attempt to get a Black Morrigan spawn and probably pairing that with Beyond and maybe Ritual to attempt to brute force an Omen of Connections. Progression is so much faster than before, because I was doing Yellow maps really quickly… but then felt like I needed to fill out all of the points that I had missed along the way. The positive, however, is that I am going to have plenty of low-level maps to dump into the bank for folks who are slower than me in progression, since they are all now generic commodities.

I have pretty good defenses for the level of gear that I currently have. At some point, I will shift to going block-based, but right now, all of the shaper shield bases that I could craft on are stupidly expensive. The cheapest ones, pure armor bases that I have found, are 50-100 chaos. I could limp by with an evasion shield if I were absolutely desperate, but I am just not sure I am willing to make that level of compromise. It is not like I have the Harvest or Delve crafting resources yet to really finish out the shield anyway. I am in that awkward phase of being strong enough, but not really having any of the core pieces that I need to push to the next level. I thought I would also post the currency that I have found so far as a reference. The big difference that I have noticed is that I have seen so many Exalted Orbs, because at this point, I might have seen one normally and have had nine drop. More important than that is that I seem to be swimming in Chaos and Alchemy orbs, which have allowed me to craft pretty much the entire way from Act 1 to plug holes in my gearing. Being able to freely craft really has made ground loot start to matter more than it ever has before.

Really, I am just in a state where I need more time devoted to the game in order to push through this awkward phase. I am slowly starting to build out Delve, but I need to invest so much more azurite into upgrades before it starts to feel comfortable. I also need to just churn through more maps so that I can get more Atlas points… which will make mapping feel more rewarding. I am really looking forward to getting my second tree, which I might be able to hit tonight, because I believe that happens normally around 50 points. I’ve unlocked Maven witness and Exarch altars, and should unlock Eater before too much longer. I’ve also been told that I largely want to focus on completing the lower left quadrant and then work my way around clockwise, with the lower right being the hardest area. Essentially, the lower left is Eater/Exarch, the upper left is Zana, the upper right is Elder/Shaper, and the lower right is Maven.