Forbidden Sanctum

My ARPG Hours Played

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Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.

Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.

Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.

To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.

So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.

This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.

The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.

I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.

I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.

This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.

Ghosts of Leagues Past

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I got to thinking about my past experience with Path of Exile and the assorted leagues that I played in and then the ones that I actually took seriously. Largely this was spawned by the comfortable spot that I have arrived at in this league having two extremely strong characters, which led me down a path of exploring some of my past mistakes with this game. There is something about the complexity of Path of Exile that makes you forget entirely what it was like to play the game when you were first starting out. As a result, there are a lot of build makers that assume everyone will be engaging with the trade league and that low investment is anything under 10 Divine Orbs. Granted I am starting to reach that point myself in my journey as this league I have spent probably at least 10 Divines gearing out two characters.

The overwhelming success that I have had with Toxic Rain Pathfinder, has led me to start questioning some things. Namely, whether or not the state of the league is just exceptionally good, Toxic Rain is simply a great build, or I am just much better at the game now than in the past. It could be all of the three but the Toxic Rain build specifically has led me down this path because mechanically it is not that mechanically different from the Explosive Arrow Champion build that I tried back in Sentinel League and did not really enjoy. I’ve seriously played Path of Exile for the last four leagues and for both Sentinel and Kalandra, I had some significant issues with the game, which has now led me to objectively evaluate the state of those characters when I left them. Of note, I do not really play Standard, so any character from a past league is effectively in exactly the same condition I stopped playing when the league ended.

Before that, we are going to talk a little bit about the early murky time spent playing Path of Exile with no clue what was going on. One of the things I never really could figure out is why exactly I did not play Path of Exile before 2016. Sure the passive tree was daunting, but I figured that there had to be another reason. Yesterday I watched the original trailer and then immediately understood why I turned my nose up at this game. The prominent placement of Player Vs Player combat in the game’s features would have been enough for me to chuck the game in the bin. So it wasn’t really until April of 2016 that I gave the game a chance, and only then because I was really coming into a grove of playing Diablo III which made me want to branch out and try other prominent ARPGs. I’ve always loved this style of game but prior to Diablo III, the MMORPG had always been my primary game type, and like so many people I got trapped in the orbit of World of Warcraft for over a decade.

Sadly I have none of my original characters because, during the Sanctum league, I decided to purge them to free up their names. However, none of them were even vaguely close to playable or had anything resembling a “build”. I technically started playing during the Perandus League and I know Breach was active at the same time as I remember doing one of those and dying horribly to it. They used to do this weird cycle of challenge leagues where two events were happening at the same time. I did not manage to make it terribly far on my first attempt and I think I ended up stopping somewhere in Act II. It was not until 2018 and the “Don’t You Guys Have Phones” debacle that I really revisited the game, and at that point, it was during the Delve League. Basically, it was at that point that I started seriously diving into other ARPGs because I felt like Diablo IV was not actually going to happen. From that point forward I sort of picked at the game, never really making serious traction. I remember specifically playing during the Heist League, Expedition League, and Scourge League before finally taking the advice of following a build guide for Sentinel League.

For Sentinel League, I decided to follow a build guide from Zizaran as he was and still is probably one of the most “noob-friendly” guide creators. That said… there is still a huge gulf between his understanding of the game and what he takes for common knowledge and what a brand-new player understands about the game. So I legitimately thought I was playing along as expected and when I hit maps… I ground to a halt and struggled significantly. I think I made it to yellow maps before giving up on the league and trying another character for a while… getting both to 73 and thinking I had “made it to the end game”. However rough it was, it was enough to get this game into my bloodstream and make me want to take a much more serious look at it with the Lake of Kalandra league, when most of AggroChat tried the game out.

However, after four leagues of playing Path of Exile, I look at this character and cringe. Firstly notice that I didn’t have anything higher than a four-link on any of my gear. Like today I wouldn’t even begin mapping without at least a five-link… and out of sheer lack of understanding I was throwing myself into the gristmill with not having anything better than a four-link. Additionally, there was a massive problem with my resists… not a single one of them was at the natural level cap of 75% and my Chaos Resistance was negative 52%. Then defensively I am sort of all over the place with relatively low evasion, armor, and no life recovery to speak of. No wonder I struggled with this build. Yesterday I grabbed a 3.21 equivalent to Explosive Arrow Ballista and tried mapping… and shockingly I did okay. I had to ride my health potion a bit more than I would have liked, but there is a certain layer of muscle memory that has built up now where I am actively dodging attacks before I even register that I am doing it.

After moving away from Explosive Arrow I had dinked around with what started out as a Righteous Fire Inquisitor and then got stuck playing Wintertide Brand because I enjoyed that gameplay so much. So with Lake of Kalandra, I wanted to play something Brand based and it seemed like Stormbrand was going to be a good option. So I followed a guide from Velyna and again… something got lost in translation. At this point when I look back on this character, I am shocked that I managed to make it all of the way through unlocking the Atlas. I remember a number of the red maps being exceptionally painful to complete but just assumed that Stormbrand was a far weaker build than the comfy gameplay that I would eventually find with Righteous Fire Juggernaut in the Forbidden Sanctum League.

Once again however looking back at this character makes me cringe in ways that I find hard to explain fully. I thought I knew what I was doing during the Kalandra League, and I very clearly did not. First of all, once again I was not even close to sitting at the natural resistance cap of 75% in each elemental resistance and still had a negative Chaos Resistance. For Crucible League this was “day one” stuff, or at least day one from when I reached the end of the Acts. Then again I didn’t have anything resembling a plan when it came to defenses. I had too little Armor to be an armor build, too little Energy Shield to be an Energy Shield build… and a completely insignificant amount of Evasion and Life Recovery. Once again I thought I was doing what the guide told me to do, but clearly missing something in translation.

Last night I pulled out the most recent copy of this build and reset my passive tree. I was able to do several maps relatively comfortably and was amazed at just how good this did at the clearing. It even did a reasonable job at killing bosses, but once again struggled to stay alive and it was only through constantly dodging attacks that I reached anything resembling comfortable gameplay. If I got hit… I had to ride the flask. I also noticed that NONE of these characters have anything resembling a flask strategy… but I guess that was a lesson I did not fully learn until playing the Juggernaut, last league.

One of the problems with Path of Exile that really plagues new players is the extreme level of complexity. For a while, I legitimately thought maybe that Zizaran and Velyna were just bad guide creators, but looking back I realize that no… they did a relatively good job but just simply were missing steps that they assumed everyone understood. They are creating guides for folks who are already engaged with Path of Exile and understand the concepts. However, no one really understands Path of Exile until they have lived with it for a while and failed miserably enough to fully understand why they were failing. Knowing what I know today, I could go back and fix my Sentinel and Kalandra characters and could have had a much better time in both Leagues had I understood what I do now.

However I have only arrived at that knowledge through almost a thousand hours of gameplay, and multiple hundreds of hours of regularly consuming content about the game. Almost every single day I learn something new about Path of Exile, and there are still game mechanics that I have not really engaged with at all. The cliff of knowledge is so brutal to climb that it makes sense that after ascending to a plateau… these creators forget what the climb felt like because they know they still have another sheer face to ascend in front of them. For example… Subtractem has an hour-and-a-half-long guide on the Betrayal League mechanic… and it only covers “the basics”. Grasping anything more than the most basic understanding of many of the league mechanics requires a similar dive into the abyss of Path of Exile knowledge.

So we arrive at where I am today. I deeply love the game and wish more people did. However, I also know what a brutal climb it is to get to at least where I am today, knowing that I am but a “babe in the woods” before some of the folks who have been actively playing the game since launch. The problem with Path of Exile is a problem that I have seen in so many MMORPGs as well, in that the level of complexity required to really be efficient and good at the game… requires so much of the player and as a result most folks never really reach that point. I could ramble on about the madness of what group construction looks like in Guild Wars 2 for example, and how nothing in the game would ever lead you to a point of understanding it. This is also why I appreciate games like Last Epoch so much because you don’t need to have played 300 hours of the game to be able to grasp the concepts, and there is an in-game guide that legitimately tells you everything you really need to know. Knowing that however… doesn’t really make me love Path of Exile any less for its beautiful madness and complexity.

Winding Down Sanctum

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Good Morning Friends! I think I might be in the process of winding down my focus on Path of Exile and the Forbidden Sanctum league. Going into this league I had a few goals in front of me. Some of them have been accomplished and others I decided not to really worry with. This is not exactly a comprehensive list but here are essentially the things I had in my head that I wanted to accomplish this go-round.

  • Finish Atlas Objective passives for all 115 Maps
  • Get my 4 Void Stones
  • Complete Enough Challenges to Get a Totem
  • Level a Character to 100

Last night I finished my 19th Challenge of the league and unlocked my very first totem for the hideout. Admittedly it is a short and sad totem but it is my very first period. Last league, I unlocked enough challenges to get one full set of armor, and this go around I got two sets of armor appearances as well as the totem so I consider that progress. I finished the Atlas last league and did so faster this time around and set my sights on getting the four void stones that are required to make it so that every map that drop is Tier 16.

The first two void stones came extremely quickly and made me think that this was going to be a reasonable challenge. However the amount of time or currency that is required to get them… just doesn’t feel worth it to me on a personal level. I could go on the forbidden trove and buy a carry for the remaining two void stones, but that seems silly and since I don’t REALLY love chain running maps I am not sure what it would get me. The last goal that I had in my sights is getting my Juggernaut to level 100, which is still doable given that I get great enjoyment out of fucking around in Delve for hours. the problem is that XP gain vs XP loss is a massive struggle at that level and it takes days of grinding to gain a level, and literal seconds to lose all of that progress. While I think I am winding down my focus, it doesn’t mean I won’t keep playing so I am hoping that maybe I go ahead and knock this one out.

As far as Delve goes I am pretty comfortable at the 200-250ish level which seems a solid place to go city hunting. I should do a push-down to see how far I can sustain without increasing the risk greatly. I figure the lower I go the better the experience farming will get. There have been a few deaths that I have taken in delve that snuck up on me and overwhelmed my defenses, but they are few and far between. I moused over my Darkness Resistance and my raw score is currently sitting at 1050% with a similar Light Radius value. I’ve tried to keep those at roughly the same upgrade level as I moved further down. In theory, I could have been buying small resonators all this time with excess azurite because I have way more resists than I need for the level range that I have been exploring.

Every league it feels like I learn a ton of lessons. In this league more than anything I became significantly more adept at trading. Here is another stash tab snapshot, but on 1/12 I had 1695 raw chaos and 7 raw divines, and now I am sitting at 4916 raw chaos and 15 raw divines. I think the key thing that has changed is that I have gotten better at using the price-checking functionality of Awakened POE Trade but more than that I’ve gotten better at eyeballing value. I’ve started to develop a mental map of what makes something valuable to the state of the league as it stands. This sorta requires you to get a vague understanding of which builds are actively in the meta and what sorts of gear they want. For example, in this league Poison Summon Raging Spirits became a massive flavor of the week’s build, and almost overnight anything with poison and minion stats boomed.

Here are some general things that I look for:

  • Jewelry with at least three good resistance hits, specifically a solid chaos roll plus at least two other resists.
  • Good Corrupted Implicits on a good base with good stats. The prevalence of tainted currency makes minor crafting on corrupted items that I would have long ignored a much more feasible option.
  • Anything that has damage multipliers plus damage bonuses. This is really subjective but I’ve moved a lot of items in this category.
  • Unique Items with a good Corruption. This is a weird category because it is going to be hard to find comps, but still worth trying.
  • Ventor’s Gamble rings… legitimately can be sold at 5 Chaos a pop all day long because for whatever reason people seem to love gambling on these to vendor swap for the possibility of that one perfect ring with max positive hits to everything.

Then there are some things that I have started doing to improve otherwise disappointing items that I have.

  • Corrupt Every Rare Gem Period… If you have a fluid source of Vaal Orbs. In Delve you get a ton of these and way more than I could ever possibly use. I’ve seen so many gems go from being something I could get 5 Chaos out of to something I can get 50-100 Chaos just from a “yolo corrupt”.
  • Corrupt Amethyst Rings. This one is a bit more of a stretch, but Amethyst rings tend to be how people fix resists more than anything else and there is a chance that an otherwise shitty ring turns into something phenomenal, and again… it is worth the Vaal orb.
  • If you have an item that is middling… and does not have max sockets on it throw a few Jewelers Orbs at it until you hit max sockets. Jewelers orbs are extremely plentiful, and it is amazing what a difference it makes in moving an item with max sockets versus moving one that is going to require some crafting before use. Most players want ZERO engagement with the crafting system and you can profit from this.

As far as traders go I am a very very small fish in a very large pond. I am not dealing with mirrors worth of value (aka something like 84,000 Chaos with wild fluctuation in prices) but I feel like I am doing well enough to buy most anything I might want. I’ve also brokered items for various members of my guild that wanted zero engagement with the economy, but I’ve kept that stuff separate and excluded from Exilence when I have it crawl through my tabs and look for anything that I have missed. I feel like if I had the knowledge that I have now, I would be in a much better position at this point in the league than I was when I started. Essentially I started trading a bit too late, and there is a lot of value in bread-and-butter items early in the league. Even now over a month into the league, I am still getting a constant flow of 5-50 chaos trades.

I’ve also reached a point of maturity when it comes to builds in the game in general. I am okay with realizing that it is unrealistic that one build is ever going to feel great doing all of the content in the game. Over time I standardized on Righteous Fire Juggernaut as my main character to do things like Delve and Heist on, and Fire Variant Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer as my bossing and mapping character. The RF Jugg can map just fine but I put a heavy investment in Metamorph on my maps which means I can chew through those so much faster on the SRS Necro which is designed to take out boss characters. The state of my SRS Necro however is not exactly “Uber Boss” capable, which is why I stalled out on finishing unlocking my Atlas Void Stones. I could have pivoted into the Poison build, but decided that I just did not care enough to spend the currency required to do that.

As far as league mechanics go, I tried a number of different things this time around. I started off with a bit of a mess as far as Atlas passives but quickly coalesced into a “Wandering Path” design, which is a notable that doubles the effect of every small node on the tree, but makes it so that you do not gain any benefit from the medium-sized nodes. This was amazing for raw map generation which in turn helped me rapidly unlock the Atlas tree without needing to buy any maps or go fishing for Kirac missions too much. Ultimately I came down to buying 3 Unique Maps in the end, but that was well worth it to finish out the tree.

After that, I focused on Ritual Alters for a bit with Harvest as a secondary goal. This was fine but Ritual feels like it has been nerfed from my past experience because I did not get much in the way of big-ticket currency items. In Kalandra league I got several Divines through Ritual even without investing Atlas nodes in it, and I thought maybe if I did go hard into Ritual it would pay off. Harvest seemed like a good bet and it was “fine” but its money gains are really through bulk trading the three colors of crafting resources that you get from running it, and I decided early on that I had no interest in that.

My next strategy was to focus on lockboxes and essence farming, which again was fine… but never really had much luck with that and I was still very much trying to focus my attention on mapping as my primary game mode. It was only through happenstance that I really decided to dive as deeply into Delve as I did, and once I realized how much I enjoyed it… and how reliably profitable selling resonators was that I reshaped my tree to work around getting as much Sulfite as quickly as I could. I had noticed how good items could drop pretty reliably from Metamorph, and with my SRS Necro those encounters were extremely easy so I shifted around points to focus on Delve and Metamorph.

It was very very late in the league that I made a tiny bit of a twist to my strategy and included a bare minimum of Harbinger, dropping the last of the Essences that I had in my tree. My Atlas tree now guarantees at least one Harbinger per map and while that isn’t a ton, it has made a noticeable bump in the raw number of Annulment Orbs and Ancient Orbs that I end up getting as well as a not insignificant amount of Chaos Shards that eventually add up to my raw chaos total. The real chase item however is the Fracturing Shard, because these puppies sell for 50 Chaos each and move almost instantly. So sure it isn’t a dramatic amount of currency but because you are running several maps in order to fill back up your Sulfite, the Metamorph and Harbinger nodes sort of just passively add to your bottom line in a way that doesn’t really add that much complexity or time to the maps.

While I think I am starting to wind down, all of this has me looking forward to the next league start. I’ve learned so much more about the game as a whole this time around. I know significantly more about what makes a build viable and how to fix problems. I think going forward I am going to look for some sort of engine to fuel further explorations. The Righteous Fire Juggernaut served as an excellent stable character to farm resources for other more volatile characters. I guess I have fully committed to the concept of the Trade League and as a result, I am getting better at amassing a “warchest” that I can then use to buy my way out of frustrating situations.

Path of Exile is a very different game experience than any that I have played before, and it is the first time I have really willfully engaged in active trading. It sorta makes me reassess how I have interacted with trade in other games, and how in large part I have done it completely wrong. It isn’t that I think I will ever become an Auction House Baron… but in theory, if I can apply some of the things I have learned to other games I might at least not be broke all the time.

Aul the Crystal King

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The Forbidden Sanctum league has apparently had the highest player retention of any league in the last three years. One of the things that concern me a bit is I am afraid that maybe Grinding Gear Games assumes this is because of the Sanctum mechanic itself. I hate Sanctum, but the “sandbox” state of the game to borrow a term from the Destiny community is the best it has been since I started reliably playing Path of Exile. Granted you have to have lucked into a successful build, but once you have… every bit of content feels good. I’m mostly spending my time doing Delve and Heist with enough mapping in between to fill up the Sulfite for another journey into the depths. I am pretty safely doing T16 maps on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and largely unkillable at this point in Delve or Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. You would think I would run out of enjoyment in the game, but for whatever reason, I am in this super zen place and enjoying myself greatly.

A good deal of my focus has been on trying to find Aul the Crystal King. This is a boss node shown above that appears in the Primeval Ruins biome within Delve. The encounter has a chance of dropping a really sought-after necklace that can roll with a mod that effectively gives you no mana reservation costs on one of the auras in the game. If you are lucky, this would allow you to add an additional aura… and with it a significant amount of power or survivability without the worry of trying to maintain your mana. While I would love to have a big beefy reservation for free, I mostly wanted to find Aul because I had not seen him yet. Over the weekend I found it, and in the previous screenshot, I am fighting the encounter, but all fights are largely unintelligible when you have a righteous fire aura around you..

I did not get the prized necklace, and the fight is just as tanky as I had heard… but I made it through and have now cleared all of the possible bosses encounters for Delve. I’ve also capped my sulfite capacity which stops at I believe 65,000. Essentially my jam right now is to fill up my sulfite as fast as I can and then spend the evening listening to an audiobook while chilling out in delve and farming up as many nodes as I can before running out of juice again. I’ve been farming Primordial Blocks maps in the faint hope of trying to get the hideout which seems to be an extremely rare spawn. If I need to buy maps, I’ve noticed that it isn’t an extremely sought-after map either. I like it because it has a good number of spawns, and at this point, I can pretty much do the boss fight in my sleep.

The other mechanic I am spending a lot of time engaging with is Metamorph, and most maps that I run on the Atlas end up having either a Rogue Metamorph or allowing me to collect parts and spawn Two Metamorphs at the end. This means that I am gathering up a significant number of body parts, that I let stack up and feed into the metamorph mechanic for tasty loot. It is not unusual at all that I end up walking away with several divines when I have collected enough bits to spawn several monsters. I’ve also put a lot of use into the various catalysts that allow me to add variant degrees of quality to my jewelry and belt slots.

I have no clue when Path of Exile will end up playing out for me, but for now, I am enjoying myself greatly still. I am sure you all are tired of reading about it, but as I have said before… the heart wants what the heart wants.