Action RPGs

Action RPGs along the lines of the Diablo Franchise

Uber Atziri Down

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Good Morning Friends! Last night was a pretty chill night of mucking around in Path of Exile. The problem is like many nights, I don’t have a ton of screenshots to show for the evening, which makes it hard to craft a morning post. There are times when I am absolutely bopping along and vibing and just forget to press the hotkey. There have been a number of tools over the years that have sought to solve this problem. I vaguely remember a tool called Forge that attempted to fill this niche, and now there is Medal.tv but the problem with both of those was the fact that they were focused on recording video. I have no interest in posting video clips of my gameplay to use to dunk on people… instead, I just want nice clean screenshots that I can use to break up the large blocks of text on this here blog.

This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning, and it seems like within ShareX the screenshot software that I use there is the option to start an Auto Capture session. Essentially at a fixed interval, the tool is going to take a screenshot. Now I would assume that most of these screenshots are going to be boring as heck, but there is also the chance that it is going to capture something cool in the process. So this morning I set up a truly obtuse hotkey to turn it on and off, and I think tonight I might give it a spin when I start up my gaming session. This is going to force me to be a bit more proactive in my screenshot maintenance however as I could see this easily filling up a hard drive.

I recently dinged a level on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, which means I am experimenting a bit with content before I get too awfully far into the progression toward the next level. After about 95… leveling goes painfully slow and a single death can set you back literal days of progress. So last night I noticed I had collected enough fragments to open up a portal to Uber Atziri aka the Alluring Abyss and the normal mode of The Elder aka Absence of Value and Meaning. I’m one fragment away from doing The Shaper and Sirius, but I hope to maybe get those soonish and give them a shot. I didn’t get much for killing Uber Atziri but I did notice I got an achievement in Steam for doing it. I had hoped that maybe it would unlock at least another map favorite slot.

I one-shotted The Elder but it took me three attempts to chew through the Uber Atziri fight. Essentially I was just bad at dodging some of the mechanics when you go into the phase where she splits into four clones. From The Elder I did manage to pull a Watcher’s Eye that I currently have up on the market. I’ve been torn as to whether or not I want to actually use it for myself. I am running Grace and Malevolence on my Toxic Rain Pathfinder, so it would be an ideal fit. However, I also don’t have a free basic jewel slot that I can put it in without either some levels or dropping something else. I have one slot currently but it is being used to help fix some of my resists while also adding damage over time multiplier. Essentially if I sell it before I figure out how to use it, I will be fine with that given it seems that I could relatively easily farm The Elder if I wanted to.

As far as the majority of my evening, I spent it down in Delve chasing cities. I found this gigantic Vaal city that I was working through when I decided it was bedtime. I still have the Grand Architect up, so tonight I will take down that boss and see if it drops anything interesting. Mostly Delve cities are a phenomenal source of currency, maps, and other assorted bits and bobs. I pulled two raw Divine Orbs out of this city so far. Delve more than anything is a currency generation machine for me because yesterday I cashed out my stockpile of resonators and made somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 Chaos Orbs within thirty minutes of sales. I will likely use this to fund the gear for my Explosive SRS Necromancer I am working on.

I am starting to stockpile fossils and the four slot resonators however because at some point I am going to try and craft a +2 wand for the Necromancer. Essentially the most effective way to craft this is using a Corroded, Jagged, Metallic, and Shuddering fossil on a Minion Wand base. I guess I should probably spend some time running crucible first to see if I can find a base with a good tree before I go down the path of crafting on it. I have twenty stacks of each of the fossils sitting on my builds tab for SRS, so it will take me a while to gather up a fresh stock of the four slot resonators to use them with. The bread and butter for selling resonators will likely always be one slot and there are a handful of high-value fossils that I get cleaned out of every time I gather up some. While the overall price of resonators is a bit lower than the last league, it is still an extremely fluid market, and easy to flip whatever I earn down in the darkness.

Tonight I am going to try out the auto screenshot thingy, and if it goes smoothly I might write about it tomorrow.

Playing it Wrong

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post stating that I thought I was done screwing around with gear on BelToxica my Toxic Rain Pathfinder. So immediately after finishing the post… I started screwing around with her gear again. However, before I dive into that madness I thought I would talk about getting my fourth Delve boss of the league. I’ve yet to find a Crystal King, but I am starting to roam around in the appropriate level bracket to find him. I did find a Primeval Ruins last night so it is only a matter of time before I find a boss. Last night I found another Abyss boss which makes two, and I’ve also found a couple of Vaal bosses and have my sights on a third. Admittedly they are nowhere near as rewarding as the Crystal King, but they are still well worth taking the time to clear. Delve is still very clearly my favorite game mode, but I am also spending quite a bit of time in Heist and unlocked my trinket slot yesterday.

So the biggest change that I immediately made was to spend 2 Divine Orbs buying a Devouring Diadem. The piece of this item that I cared the most about was the fact that it gives me the Eldritch Battery notable because this allowed me to reclaim three passive choices, which I immediately poured into additional survival nodes. I also made the swap from the found chest piece that I had been using to go back to The Restless Ward where I spent a stupid amount of currency getting to six sockets and six links. The big benefit to this swap was that it gives me way more Energy Shield… which effectively gives me a larger pool of mana to cast spells with… allowing me to actually start casting the Divine Blessing version of Malevolence that I have in my build. This alone was a pretty massive damage increase to be rocking temporary damage over time aura. The Diadem also now allows me to run 4 auras at all times… which currently are Grace, Determination, Defiance Banner, and Skitterbots.

Then of course I did not leave well enough alone and dropped the Ming’s Heart I had been using for some extra Chaos Damage and went back to the earlier resist ring that I had equipped and then swapped out my amulet to balance out the missing resistances. This allowed me to drop my resistance quiver and pick up one with some damage stats on it. This then caused me to not have enough strength… so I temporarily have a bench-crafted suffix on the item but my goal is to figure out a way to solve that either by giving up a single passive node on the tree or finding another way to shuffle my gear. Either way, once the strength problem is solved I will swap that out for something that adds damage like attack speed.

The biggest change that I made yesterday thought has absolutely nothing to do with gearing. It seems that I was honestly just playing the build wrong. So up until this point I had been periodically dropping ballista totems and then tapping Toxic Rain every now and then to make sure that my Mirage Archer was casting it constantly. This is great when it comes to mapping clear and lets you zoom through the content with things constantly dying in your wake. However, I was doing the same with bosses… and they were taking forever. It suddenly dawned on me… that I can probably cast Toxic Rain much faster than my Mirage Archer can, and as a test, I started channeling from a safe spot during boss fights… and sure enough that caused the bosses to just evaporate. So my build was always way stronger than I gave it credit for. At some point, I am going to try some bigger bosses on the character to see how quickly I can destroy them.

In other news, I’m just about to kill Kitava for the first time on the Explosive Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer build. I decided to lean into the fire nature of the build and threw on a cosmetic set that I had never wore before on a character. At this point, this is mostly a side project but it is kinda silly how much damage SRS with Minion Instability does for damage. I am looking forward to seeing what I can do with this build once I hit mapping. I’m in a really great place in this league honestly between Righteous Fire Juggernaut which feels indestructible, and Toxic Rain which feels pretty comfy as well. I’m mostly only leveling the Necro because I enjoyed the heck out of SRS last league and I am curious about how it will feel with a pseudo-eight-link helm.

It took me four leagues, but I’ve reached this place of zen with Path of Exile. Again I am sorta sad that I don’t feel like I could really recommend it to new players because the journey I had to make to get to where I am today was pretty daunting. Even then there is so much of the game that I have never even touched. I still only have two of my four void stones for example. I’ve never seen a pinnacle boss really, other than the two easy mode ones you get to quickly in Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds. There are so many league mechanics that I have not really spent any time exploring like Breach, Legion, and Delerium. For the moment though I am very happy with the state of all of my characters.

Ugly Baby Build Phase

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a blend of doing stuff around the house, running errands, and then devoting as much time as I could to playing some Path of Exile. I’m very much in the “ugly baby” phase with the Toxic Rain Self-Cast/Balista combo. Right now I am leaning on my quiver for a good number of resists… and I would like to NOT do that. This means I either need to get a new amulet, ring, or a combination of both… so that I can drop the resists from the quiver and pick up better damage bonuses. I picked up a reasonable Devouring Diadem which allowed me to reclaim a number of points on the tree by removing the branch that was going off to pick up Eldritch Battery. The proc of Feast of Flesh every 5 seconds also provides some additional healing which is nice.

I recorded another one of my dumb videos showing off what doing Red Maps looks like on this build. It is fairly comfortable, to be honest, but nowhere near the mind-blowing damage that I was essentially led to believe. I think the challenge is that I am still playing what would be considered a “budget” build and if I wanted the big numbers… I would have to pour a lot more currency into the build and ultimately swap up my tree considerably to add more socketed and legendary jewels. I feel like I am doing this juggling act of trying to balance survival since I am used to having that with the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and pushing more damage. Since at this point, I can very comfortably do T16 maps, then I am starting to wonder if I have reached as far as I want to take this class.

The defenses on this build are nowhere near where I would like to see them honestly. I want to see way more evasion, but in order to keep that and keep my resists it would involve me completely changing out almost every single piece of gear I am wearing. I am at least spell suppression capped at the moment, which is adding quite a bit of survival against being shotgunned to death by spells. I think basically I am at the point of being able to do maps fast enough, especially if I am doing white and yellows… which in truth was the entire point of having a build like this in order to funnel suphite into Delve. Maybe I have reached the point where I am done futzing with it and should move on to my dumb ideas build of the Explosive Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer that I started working towards last week.

I mean ultimately the fun in running maps once when you see huge loot explosions, and I do from time to time see dumb loot explosions. I’m also able to fill up my sulphite through mapping relatively quickly so I think maybe Toxic Rain Pathfinder is at its logical conclusion. I don’t think ANY class is going to feel as good to me personally as Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Essentially that tanky gameplay is what I have always craved and still to this day my favorite Diablo III build is Invoker Thorns Crusader, which more or less functions just like Righteous Fire. I think Tornado Shot is probably the closest Path of Exile has to something that feels like the Multishot Demon Hunter, but I’ve always heard that build is rather expensive to get rolling.

As far as Delve goes I am slowly working my way lower. Essentially I am hunting cities and I have had a harder time this league finding them. When not actively popping city nodes I am looking for resonators and fossils, but have yet to find any of the fractured fossils that are so in demand with the crucible mechanic. I think I largely get more joy out of playing the RF Jugg, so if I am going to pour more resources into a build it might be that one. Though again I am very much in a place with that build where in order to increase my damage, I need to significantly restructure how the entire build is working currently. I have set aside a few good crafting bases for spell caster shields, so I might try chasing one of those with a good crucible tree. I’m still looking for a great tree for Sceptre but have yet to find anything better than the meager mess that I am currently using.

I am still very much having fun with the moment-to-moment gameplay, but I do think I am going to focus a lot more of my effort in the coming week to finish leveling the Necromancer and try and bring that Explosive Summon Raging Spirits build online. The big concern I have for that build is how expensive Skin of the Lords is this season. Normally that is what I would go for as my six-link chest. I have a +2 minion gems Tabula Rasa, and might just have to limp along with that until I find something better. The builds that are going for explosive SRS seem to be favoring a Cloak of Flames for the chest but a lot of those also seem to be using Formless Inferno and I was planning on doing my pseudo-eight-link with the helmet. Which makes me think I am going out into some undiscovered territory at the moment. It should be interesting to see if I can make this build functional at all. For the moment I am loosely following this POB.

BelToxica and Red Maps

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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to share some nonsense about my second character for the Crucible league in Path of Exile. In the last league I fiddled around a bit with a few different Toxic Rain builds, but I never fully committed to them. I tried a Trickster variant and a Pathfinder variant, and of the two I definitely preferred Pathfinder if for no reason other than the fact that the Shadow voice lines annoy me. When it came time for me to futz around on a second character I decided to give it a shot. Mostly the pattern that I fell into the last league was to farm Sulphite with my alt and then largely reserve my Righteous Fire main to doing deeper levels of Delve. Mostly I originally did this because I did not want to risk taking a dumb death and setting back my leveling progress. However, over time I found I enjoyed flipping between two characters for its own benefit.

Having played a few variants of Toxic Rain last league combined with the fact that Zizaran declared that this was his league starter for Crucible. I cobbled together my build from bits and pieces of a good number of guides. Now for Righteous Fire which relies on Armor and Regeneration, I felt like I fully understood how to make that class feel good. I have never managed to get very far in any class relying on evasion gear, so I am not even sure what to target for defenses. In theory, my guess is that you want 90% avoidance similar to how you want 90% mitigation from armor… and I am so very far away from that number.

Last night I finished the campaign and spent some time shopping on trade to cobble together a set of mostly rare gear focused on Evasion and Energy Shield since I need the later for Eldritch Battery. I am wearing The Restless Ward in part because I happened to have one laying around and I noticed that Zizaran was also wearing this chest… likely because it provides a good deal of Evasion and Energy Shield. I spent ENTIRELY too much currency on making it a six-link so if I had it all to do over I absolutely would not have gone down that rabbit hole. However, once I was committed to it, frustration and stubbornness kicked in and by god, I was going to be the random number generator no matter how much currency I threw at it. I would have been far better served by just getting a high evasion rare chest from trade for around 10 Chaos.

Last night after painstakingly getting my resists perfect and equipping viable gear for every slot… I opted to run a few maps. In total, I did a Tier 1 white map, a Tier 10 yellow map, and a Tier 14 red map and was able to successfully clear all of them. I did however take way more deaths than I was happy with, which led me to search on my phone last night while laying in bed. Essentially so long as I did not get hit, I could clear entire screens at once but if I got touched… I basically crumpled and died. I mean admittedly… high-level Greater Rifts on the Demon Hunter in Diablo III mostly this way as well. So long as you can duck and dodge out of the way of encounters you can wipe the screen but the moment you get noticed you take a death. This would be an acceptable risk were it not for the annoyingly stiff death penalties in Path of Exile. When you are 95 a single death can set you back a day’s worth of leveling.

Ultimately what I landed on was that I had been playing Pathfinder wrong. Essentially the Pathfinder specialization is all about flask effect and charge recovery so that you effectively have the equivalent of a Mageblood with all of your flasks up extremely often. As a result, the correct way to play this class is to proactively keep your life flask rolling at all times. What this does in practice is make it so that when you do get hit, you zoom right back up to full health quickly without investing in massive amounts of regeneration. I still think it would feel better however with more spell suppression and more evasion so that I am just getting hit less often. Similarly, I need a bit more health so that I am further from “one-shot” territory which will allow the flask to do its work.

I’m only level 78 and I’ve also not run my 4th Labyrinth which I should knock out today. That will give me Nature’s Boon which gives me a 30% increased Flask Effect and the pathing node 10% charge generation. This should increase the uptime of everything making it feel stronger. The biggest thing that I need to do is figure out how to squeeze in a 4th aura and get the rest of my assorted abilities online like Malevolence cast with Divine Blessing. I’m also not actually using Despair right now for cursing purposes, which is additional damage I am leaving on the table. So essentially I have room for improvement but the fact that it can already run Red Maps… seems like a win to me. If nothing else this will allow me to comfortably generate Delve juice to feed those adventures on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut.

Then there is the problem I have with Path of Exile where finding one item… makes me want to build an entirely new character around it. While searching the market for something completely different I stumbled onto this helmet that was dirt cheap for what it offered. This is now making me want to start a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and lean toward fire like I did last league. This helm would in theory allow me to create a pseudo-eight-link for Summon Raging Spirits. I am just not sure if I will go for traditional Fire SRS or Minion Instability Exploding SRS. Whatever the case… I am starting to stockpile decent items that I happen to find along the way that would make that build work. I find that I am coming to love the absolute bullshit levels of minutiae and build crafting of Path of Exile.