Crucible (3.21)

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.

Two Voidstones Down

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Good Morning Friends! It is another morning and another post about assorted Path of Exile nonsense. Last night I managed to get up to the point of fighting the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds, which means I am effectively at the same point I closed out the last league with two void stones collected. I made attempts at Uber Elder but failed miserably in the last league. Effectively to get the next two void stones I will need to beat Uber Elder and then take down Maven with her memory game. I remember limping across the finish line in both Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds last league, but I defeated both without taking any deaths this time around.

I think the key difference is that my defenses are just much stronger this league than they were last. I am sitting at 90% fire resistance which combined with the rest of my defensive layers allowed me to just stand in most of the mechanics during the Searing Exarch. There is a phase in the fight where you have to dodge a bunch of incoming fireballs. I was too busy paying attention to the fight to take a screenshot, but here is one that I found online. In my current defensive posture… I could just stand there and ignore the fireballs entirely letting them hit me and explode without taking anywhere close to fatal damage. I figure if enough of them had hit me directly at the same time it might have knocked me out, but I at least dodged around enough to make sure I was only getting hit by one or two at a time.

The best-laid plans sometimes fail miserably… and for me, it was the fact that I thought I would be able to use the “no life modifiers” passive with my Brass Dome. It turns out that the negative life modifier of losing health from strength… knocks that chest piece out of the running. This means in order to use it… I am just going to lose some regeneration and total life. Here is what my defenses look like after the swap of some gear around losing some overcap fire res, some raw regeneration, and some raw health… but gaining permanent 90% physical damage reduction and crit immunity. In truth it isn’t really something that I notice so long as I am not eating some sort of degeneration effect, and across the board I just feel like my health bar almost never moves.

While making some gear swaps, I decided to get myself a budget pseudo-six-link helm. Traditionally for this play, you want level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but those helms are a bit out of my price range with the worst options sitting around 2 Divine Orbs and the best option available at 50. What I did instead is go for the arguably worse but still valid Less Duration, and I was able to pick up the helm shown above for 5 Chaos Orbs. I had to adjust sockets, chrome, and link it but I did so easily with the bench craft socket recipe. This gear swap takes the damage calculation in POB for my Fire Trap from just under 500 DPS to right at 1 million DPS. This was immediately noticeable and since I only really use Fire Trap during burn phases or while circle-strafing a boss… the spammy nature of less duration doesn’t really bother me.

One of the things I do each league is set aside the first white socketed weapons that I get for the purpose of “muling” gems in my secondary weapon slots. Last league I found a six-socketed white staff which was nice, and this time around I happened upon a pair of 3 socketed one-handed maces. It doesn’t really matter what you use, but I find white sockets handy for swapping up whatever gems I happen to want to level. Yesterday I finished my first project which was leveling 6 Righteous Fire gems to 20… doing the vendor recipe to swap them for 20% quality level 1 gems… and then level them again and corrupt them. I lucked out and managed to get 2 of the level 21 20% quality gems that I was seeking, and now have started “muling” some Fire Trap gems to hopefully do the same. I could in theory just buy the damned things, but this is simple enough and I kill more than enough mobs to level the gems pretty efficiently.

I think the next big project for me is to try and find a Sceptre base with a good Crucible tree… and then attempt to craft myself something with +1 gems and all of the assorted fire stats that I care about. Before then I might be shopping for some slightly better resist rings and attempting to use those to gain some more health and regeneration. Now that I understand the basics of a build, I am finding I enjoy the little project aspect of the game as I try and improve various weaknesses of my build. Right now I am trying to figure out how to deal more damage without giving up the tanky nature that I crave so much.

Bargain Brass Dome

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Good Morning Friends! I always feel bad when I have to miss a day of my normal posting schedule like I did last Friday, but it was needed. I hinted a bit about this on my Gamepad.club account but essentially we had a routinely scheduled downtime go south on Thursday night, which led to some corruption and caused us to have to restore the machine from backup. This meant I was on a call until after 1 am and then up again at 6 am on another call… leaving me completely dead to the world and largely monosyllabic all day long. I am so not used to late nights like that and generally speaking I am heading to bed around 9:30 pm during weeknights and while I occasionally fuck around on my phone until midnight… there is a significant difference between that and being “on a call”.

Apparently, it was an international “set up your backyard” weekend because I saw several folks talking about working on theirs in my social feed. We drug out our patio furniture and set everything up this weekend. We even had lunch out on the patio just off our bedroom on Saturday and it was delightful. For whatever reason… last year we never really spent any time in the backyard. I think in part it was due to us getting a late start in setting things up and also the heat starting super early. We’ve had the two resin rockers for a half dozen years, but they are still extremely comfortable to sit out there and chill in. My wife spent a decent amount of time out reading, but I of course spent most of my free time over the weekend playing Path of Exile, but in theory, I could probably set that up on the Steam Deck and do that from the back patio as well.

As far as progress goes in Path of Exile, I have now completed all of the normal maps and am missing eight unique maps. I am going to try and get these through Kirac missions if I can, but eventually, I will get tired of waiting and just buy them from the market. I have to say this season was my absolute smoothest path through T16 maps. I think in total I took 3 deaths in ALL of my mapping… which is damned impressive given how in previous seasons I have barely limped across this line. I feel like I am finally getting a grasp on how exactly to make a build feel the way that I want it to feel, and I was shocked at how quickly I assembled a workable Righteous Fire build this time. Granted most of that knowledge does not directly translate to any other build, but it is nice to feel like I can solve my own problems finally. In theory, I also feel like I could probably build RF Juggernaut without following a guide at some point in the future given how far I have veered off the template at this point.

This is what I look like currently with my defensive layers in place… namely my armor flask and molten shell active. I finally have all of my flasks configured to use automatically when full, and with me regenerating 3 charges each time I get hit, they are rolling the majority of the time. The thing that I really want to work on is getting my life regeneration higher, so as I now start swapping out some of my gear for better options I am going to prioritize getting that a bit higher. Being wildly over-capped on resistances is in part due to the fact that I am running Purity of Elements. I am continuing to do this only because I have not wanted to solve getting immune to all of the elemental afflictions on their own. That is probably a calculation I will eventually work towards so I can run auras that increase my damage rather than quite as many defensive layers. I am running Defiance Banner right now only because I had the reservation space and my Stone Golem got to the point where it could no longer stay alive for more than a few minutes at a time.

I am about to make some shifts in my gearing that are going to add some significant benefits, like being at 90% physical reduction without buffs active. The Brass Dome has been nonsensically priced in this league given the popularity of RF and other tanky builds. I picked up this 4% max resistance version for 1 Divine and then spent about 150 Chaos Orbs in Jewelers, Chromatic, and Binding Orbs to get it to six links and the right colors. Still, this is a massive bargain as compared to the 10.5 Divine Orbs that an equivalent six-link in the right colors is going for right now. Essentially I am waiting to swap until I have finished level 95 and have another talent point to allocate. Right now if I made the swap I would lose more life regeneration than I am comfortable with until I can afford to allocate the “+15% life if no modifiers on chest” which should give me around 750 more life, and with that make up the difference in regen. At that point, I will swap over to a level 21/20% Righteous Fire instead of the Vaal Righteous Fire that I have been using.

I think once I am rocking my Brass Dome, the next major swap I am going to do is start shopping for a pseudo-six-link helm for Fire Trap. At the moment I am running a helm with “Socketed Gems Deal 30% more Burning Damage” and a shitload of armor. This is fine but I have one banked that I am working on getting chromed to the right colors that have level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Less Duration, which should be a massive boost to my fire trap damage. The problem is I will need to replace my 30% reservation efficiency with Purity of Elements enchant from Eternal Labyrinth… and we all know how much I hate running that place. So essentially this is going to be one of my pet projects, but in truth, I would take Vitality or Determination reservation enchants as well. Those would probably be the better option given that at some point I hope to stop running Purity of Elements. Regardless it means I am going to have to start getting over my aversion to running the Labyrinth.

All of this… fiddling with numbers and stats and gear… is I think why I enjoy Path of Exile so much. I always loved gearing in MMORPGs and one of my favorite things to do back in the day was create a “hit list” of things that I wanted to farm up for my characters. Path of Exile absolutely scratches that itch for me and as I am getting items… I am often finding things that make me want to roll new characters to take advantage of that good luck. Now that I have a build that I thoroughly love in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut, I have this feeling that I am going to be starting with that for as long as it is not nerfed into the ground. Then from there, I will branch out into other builds like the Toxic Rain Pathfinder I am working on. I figured I would close out the post with this truly nonsense unique map drop from the other day. I specced my Atlas Tree into the node that duplicates map drops… and as a result, I have filled the guild bank up with unique maps to help anyone coming along behind me.

I hope you all have an excellent week, and I am sure I will be bringing even more Path of Exile nonsense.