Crucible

Good Morning Friends! This morning I thought I would engage in a bit of a thought experiment. After the last few days, you might be asking yourself… “Bel why even bother with buying items in the first place, don’t they drop in the game?”. You would be correct. For every item that is available in the game, there is some method for farming it. Some of these methods are more deterministic in that they give you a higher chance of seeing that item… but even the best require a significant amount of repetitions before ever seeing something similar to what you are looking for. Essentially if you do not want to acquire an item through the trade market you have two options: target farming, and crafting. Both of these have their pitfalls but I thought I would dive into both a little bit.

The Target

Before we get started we need a target. Since I already talked about it yesterday, let’s go with the helm for Righteous Fire that I just purchased for 2 Divine Orbs. It is almost impossible to replicate this item exactly, so let’s just narrow our focus to the most important parts the socketed support gems. Essentially what I was looking for the most was access to a “Level 20 Burning Damage” and a “Level 20 Concentrated Effect”. Getting those gives you “Percent Increased Burning Damage” and “Increased Area Damage” respectively as those are coupled with the gems when they roll on an item. For this exercise, we are only going to look at those two stats on an item and it is a strength helmet base aka “pure armor”.

Farming The Item

The first challenge is that in order to see those stats on an item, the helm must be “Elder Influenced” meaning it comes from content that is capable of dropping Elder items. The little black and purple Iron Cross on the sides of the name banner for the item indicates that it is Elder Influenced. Now there are a number of game modes that can randomly drop Elder items… namely Delve, Ritual, Heist, and Legion. There is no real way to target farm Elder Influenced items there, so you effectively have to luck into seeing an elder item… and then further luck into it being a strength helm with the two gems that you need. I have no clue what the odds would look like for that… but it would be exceptionally low… like probably somewhere in the billion-to-one odds sort of low.

Your most likely option for seeing an Elder Helm with the correct stats would be to target Elder Influenced maps, namely the four Elder Guardians.

• The Eradicator
• The Constrictor
• The Purifier
• The Enslaver

Organically these maps have a chance of dropping from the end boss of any Tier 14, 15, or 16 Atlas Map. I’ve struggled to find the exact percentage chance, but a bunch of googling this morning indicated that it was somewhere in the realm of a 3% drop chance. Now that is not a 3% chance to get an Elder Map, but a 3% chance to see an influenced map, and that pool includes Elder Guardians, Shaper Guardians, and Atlas Conquerors. Since there are 4 of each of those so a third of the time when you see an influenced map drop… it will be an Elder Influenced map.

These maps are also available through Kirac missions but the chance is fairly low there as well. I had to reroll Kirac missions six times this morning in order to take the above screenshot with an Elder Map available. Additionally, there is the chance of getting an Elder Influenced map that has no boss on it, and in these cases the drop chances for Elder items are awful. It is likely in the entire map you will see a single influenced item. However this type of map can be forced by using an Elder Scarab in the map device, but I would not really count on it improving your odds greatly.

Each time you kill an Elder Guardian it drops an Elder Fragment, and once you killed a full set of Elder Guardians you can place the four different types of map fragments in your map device to open your way to the Absence of Value and Meaning to fight The Elder directly. Everything that drops from this encounter is Elder Influenced so it is likely your best possible way to target farm items. Praetor Crown shown in the picture above for example would be a likely target for seeing those gem stats on it. For reference, the fragments required to fight Elder are:

• Fragment of Purification
• Fragment of Constriction
• Fragment of Enslavement
• Fragment of Eradication

Folks who grind out The Elder like this tend to “Boss Rush”, or go through the map as quickly as possible and only take out the end boss for a chance of seeing an influenced map. The focus is on clearing the maximum number of bosses that could drop a map, rather than clearing all of the content in any one map. The problem with this however is that it is very hard to “sustain” mapping by doing this, meaning getting enough maps to drop in order to keep chain running maps. So even boss-rushers tend to be interacting with the trade economy and buying a bunch of the same map in bulk from map sellers. I’ve been trying to get to all of the bosses legitimately and yesterday was the first time I managed to get four fragments together and kill The Shaper for example. Going after the Helm this way is going to take a lot of farming and even more luck.

Crafting the Item

The first challenge in front of you when it comes to crafting this helm, is that you need to find an item that already has the Elder Influence on it. If you have access to the trade league this is a pretty simple proposition and for around 1 Chaos Orb you can find something suitable to start with. However, since you are not wanting to use the Trade Economy at all, you are at a minimum going to have to have seen some sort of Elder Influenced item in your journey. That means you need some of the above farming to have occurred. Let’s start with that Praetor Crown that I showed earlier in the drops from The Elder. That is an Armor and Energy Shield base, so not exactly what I wanted but often times in crafting you have to sacrifice perfection for what is actually available. If I were making the perfect item, I would probably be going for Eternal Burgonet as my base and at item level 100.

The most common crafting method for a lot of players is through Essences. These are sort of a hamfisted approach but have benefits over Chaos Orb spamming in that you can guarantee specific stats. These are exceptionally useful for crafting things like the +3 gems bow that I made for my Toxic Rain Pathfinder because, with a Shrieking or Deafening Essence of Dread, you are guaranteed to hit +2 to Bow Gems. However for something extremely custom like two specific gems on a helmet… there really isn’t an essence equivalent. There is a website you should familiarize yourself with if you are going down this path called Craft of Exile which offers a number of tools to Calculate, Simulate, and Emulate crafting an item. No matter which type of essence I started with, it indicated that it would take around 2200 to 2500 crafts in order to land an item with the two gems in question.

So I looked at a few other crafting methods:

• Essences – 2300 Crafts
• Chaos Orb Spamming – 1400 Crafts
• 3 Specific Fossils – 126 Crafts

I’ve talked before about how Delve and more specifically selling Fossils and Resonators is my primary source of income in Path of Exile. Now we are going to explain why they are valuable. Notice that the more ham-fisted “early crafting” options of Essences or Chaos Orb spamming all required you to have thousands of attempts in order to have a decent probability of hitting your item. Fossils on the other hand give you a series of “logic gates” to narrow down the choices of what can possibly roll on an item. I opted to go for the Cost Efficiency option because even if you are not buying the Fossils and Resonators, it will be far easier for farm 126 attempts rather than 21 4 socket Fossil attempts. I maybe see a single 4 Socket Resonator in a night of focused Delve farming. In the entire season so far I have only seen I think 8… but I’ve already sold several hundred 3 Socket Resonators. Let’s examine what each of the fossils does.

• Dense Fossil – More Likely to Roll Defense mods and Cannot at all roll Life mods
• Pristine Fossil – More Likely to Roll Life mods and Cannot at all roll Defense mods
• Scorched Fossil – More Likely to Roll Fire mods but Cannot at all roll Cold mods

So combined this means that the item cannot have Defensive, Life, or Cold mods but will with almost certainty have fire mods. I don’t understand everything about this process but I do know that Burning Damage is absolutely flagged as a fire mod, so my guess is this specific combination targets that one Gem Mod. If you roll a single Gem mod, then you are by nature also more likely to roll two or more Gem Mods.

From there I flipped over into Emulator mode, which allows you to set up a craft and then mimic your spending various currencies on the item and see an equivalent crafting result. This is of course not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of showing you what is within the range of possibility and I have used this before I went down any crafting rabbit holes to try and make sure I was at least going in the right direction. So essentially I set up a craft using the three Fossils suggested and then clicked until I got the desired results. Now like I said before with crafting you oftentimes take availability over perfection, and in that case, by the time I had crafted 4 helms, I landed one with Level 16 Burning Damage and Level 18 Concentrated Effect. Was I ACTUALLY crafting this… I would have held on to that result and called it “good enough”. However, to match the item I bought the other day would have taken me 106 crafting attempts.

That means I would need:

• 106 – Dense Fossils
• 106 – Pristine Fossils
• 106 – Scorched Fossils
• 106 – Powerful Chaotic Resonators

In a good night of doing Delve, I would probably walk away with 10 of each Fossil and maybe 20 Powerful Chaotic Resonators. More specifically you would need to focus on farming the Magma Fissure biome in Delve for Scorched and Pristine Fossils, and the Fungal Caverns biome for Dense Fossils. If you figured a good rate of 10 of each Fossil a night, it would be around two weeks to farm up enough Fossils for this crafting attempt.

Why Trade Made My Life Better

So this might be an extreme example here because this is a very specific item that can only drop under some very specific circumstances. However, this is sort of the reality of tuning a build. You are going to find yourself needing to solve some very specific problems, and often that requires an item with some pretty exact stats as the solution. The problem here was to be able to invert my build and put Righteous Fire on my helmet without losing a significant amount of clear speed. Essentially I was confronted with no reasonable way of getting this exact item without a copious amount of target farming. It seemed a far better use of my time to convert the resources that I was getting into trade currency, and then buy the item from the market. This allowed me to continue playing how I wanted to play but also have access to the items I wanted.

This has been true across the board for all of the items I have sought out directly. Sure you can make a build function from things dropped on the ground, but you really need to be good at crafting and target farming items in order to really make that “Solo-Self-Found” lifestyle work. Maybe that is part of your enjoyment of the game, and that is awesome. However, for me, I just wanted my builds to feel comfortable, and the easiest way to get there was to engage in the Trade Economy. Every item in my character build has a method that I could go about farming specifically. This far into the league I have learned more or less how to go about each of them. That said… I don’t want to exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to get to a comfortable build. It is ultimately a trade-off that I decided to make, where I am having to deal with the hassle of interacting with other players for ease of access to the specific items I want.

Earlier this league I stumbled across this video, and it largely syncs up with where my feelings are currently. There are a lot of videos out there with strategies about how to best farm a six-linked chest piece but in all cases, they involve grinding away at a specific zone to get a specific set of divination cards. Whereas this video literally talks about the absolute easiest way available… just buying it. At the start of this league, I could not afford a six-link chest for Righteous Fire, but I picked up a five-link for I think 3 Chaos Orbs which was more than enough to get me started and allowed me to gather up enough currency so that when I jumped to a six-link it was a Brass Dome. Making the decision to avoid the Trade Economy entirely… is effectively playing the game on hard mode. I never play games on hard mode when I have the choice not to, and maybe you should evaluate if you should either.

I think this is the conclusion of this little chain of thought experiment posts. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will see you again on Sunday when I release this week’s AggroChat episode.