Forbidden Sanctum

Voidborn Reliquary Key

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Good Morning Friends! Prepare for yet another post of me doing some stupid nonsense in Path of Exile. I figure at this point all that is left reading these daily posts are the truly diehard folks, and the actual Path of Exile enjoyers… or I guess those who potentially hate read these? I am an “MTX Enjoyer” and I find that looking cool in a game helps my enjoyment greatly. In this league, one of the supporter packs went all in on the fire theme, and since I was playing Righteous Fire on Juggernaut it seemed like something I definitely needed in my life. What was truly fortuitous was this season when you pick up Kirac’s Vault pass you end up with a bunch of random loot boxes. One of these produced the weird cosmic flaming wolf pet that you see beside me called that apparently came from the Twilight Mystery Box. The cosmic aspect is even more perfect given that I tend to run the celestial MTX for my Righteous Fire aura.

I get that all of this is a colossal waste of money, but they end up making me happy and have no real in-game benefits. There are two things that I really spend money on in games are the first are things that add quality of life benefits, like the various stash tabs in Path of Exile, or the endless crafting storage in Elder Scrolls Online. The second is cool outfits, and I am more than happy to spend some real-world monies to look cool. It isn’t even that I care about the “flexing” aspect of wearing something, because it gives me zero real-world cred to have swiped a credit card. It just makes me happy to have a character that I think looks slick. Transmogrification/Wardrobe systems are among the most important parts of an MMORPG and if you are designing a new one… please put in a system that allows for nigh-endless customization. Do not be FFXIV and artificially limit the number of items you can keep, and instead be like the various systems that give you credit when you pick up an item for its appearance. I wish Path of Exile did this, because there are actually a lot of cool items that drop in the game already.

Last night was a night for exploring Delve, looking for bosses, and listening to Skin Game by Jim Butcher. I’m now somewhere around chapter 30 in the novel and managed to spend my 55k Sulfite and find I think four Abyssal and Vaal cities in the process. In all of those nodes, I managed to fight another Vaal boss and another Abyssal Lich. While yesterday was apparently the day of raw Divine Orbs dropping, I did not have anywhere near that level of luck but I did pick up a few rare items that are going to enable some specific brands of nonsense. While delving I also sold a few high ticket items or at least high tickets for me in the 100s of Chaos range. Thankfully people seem to be pretty good-natured about waiting for you to finish whatever you are doing in order to make the sale. Generally speaking, if I am in the middle of something… the price point of the item that someone wants determines if it is worth my time to respond. If I am just starting a heist run, and you are pinging me about something in my 1 Chaos tab, then I am probably going to ignore it unless you ask nicely. I had someone who specifically needed an amulet and they were fine with waiting for me to finish the activity I was on.

Last night I got the rare piece of the Ultimatum Aspect to drop in delve. Essentially this is a way to access a league mechanic that I did not even know existed. Apparently back in April of 2021 during the 3.14 Ultimatum League, there was a build-your-own-boss-fight encounter called the Tower of Ordeals, that dropped a number of interesting Vaal items. A little-known feature of 3.19 Lake of Kalandra was apparently adding these back into the game through 4 items that drop in different modes of gameplay.

If combined in your inventory in a specific pattern, as shown above, they combine to create a custom map that grants access to the Trialmaster from Ultimatum with a number of random affixes determining what sorts of things happen during the fight. For example, Choking Miasma is a cloud that deals Chaos Damage Over Time, and it means in order to do the fight I am probably going to want to spec my Pantheon into Arakaali which gives me extra resistance to that. For now, I am close to dinging another level on the Juggernaut and as such, I am going to file this away until I am in that post-ding “safe period” to try dumb things.

Another cool thing that happened last night is that I got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop while doing delve. Sadly I have no screenshot of when it dropped because I was in the middle of a darkness-filled abyssal city and hurriedly shoveling loot into my inventory as the darkness timer ticked down. It was very shiny and rainbow-colored on the loot filter, so it will likely be extremely hard to miss. They seem to be going for around 2 Divine Orbs for one of these keys, if not considerably lower than that. There is someone who priced one at 20 Chaos but I think they are just trolling. I figured it was worth 2 Divines or the loss of that in order to have the experience of opening one. When placed in the map device it teleports you to a map featuring a loot box that can be opened once. Inside it is an item dictated by the players who purchased the extremely expensive Voidborn Supporter Pack for around $500.

Purchasing the pack allows players access to a hidden interface on the Grinding Gear Games website allowing them to choose any unique in the game, assign a foil color, and then write a message to players when they open the item. For example, I pulled Ngamahu’s Flame in the Verdant Foil color scheme, and when I opened the item this line of text scrolled across my chat box.

A weapon from olden times, when Cyclone moved in straight lines.  Two birds in one with links undone.  This axe may finally shine.

I’ve never used this weapon but I am extremely happy that I managed to pull an item with a “real” message. There are apparently a number of items thrown into the mix as clear trolls like “this could have been a headhunter” on one of the other heavy belts. I have to admit this almost makes me want to create a build around this weapon since for some sort of flame-based juggernaut melee build, it seems like it could be rather good. I guess there is a Fire Cyclone Chieftan build that currently exists that utilizes this weapon or at least it did as of 3.19. If I got another key to drop though, I would probably just sell it. I’ve had the experience and it was good enough for me.

I think I have decided that I am going to stop engaging with the Sanctum league mechanic. I do not enjoy it, and while I can often get pretty far with my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… I just sort of hate the way the mechanic works. Sure you can save an entire floor’s worth of progress while doing other things… but there just never seems to be a time when I actually want to sit down and engage with it. I like playing tanky characters and have no interest in dodging all of the mechanics, and as such I will never really grok the way this game mode wants to work. As much effort as GGG has devoted to it, I fully expect this to land in standard and be something that we are dealing with going forward. My hope is that they modify it so that it works well for other styles of play because right now if you are going to engage with it, you really want something that can clear entire screens at a time. My hope is you can eventually collect an entire run and then interact with Divinia in your hideout to embark upon the Sanctum experience.

I think a better version of this would be to merge the Lake of Kalandra mechanic with Sanctum and take away the whole resolve mechanic. Have it so that each map you run builds the layout of rooms in your sanctum, and then once you have finished laying out a floor you save it as a map and run that. I really enjoyed the tile placing mechanic of the Lake, and were it not for ArchNemesis that would have been an extremely fun mechanic. Sanctum only works for people who are not building tanks that benefit from things hitting them. For example on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, a large part of my defensive layer is from building six endurance stacks by getting hit. I just think between Sanctum and Lake there is one really great game mode that could be cobbled together. For the time being, however, I am mostly going to bail from engaging with the current league mechanic because there are so many older mechanics that I would rather spend my time doing.

I think more than anything, that the key to really enjoying Path of Exile long-term is deciding that it is okay that there are parts of the game you will never engage with. Each league mechanic is almost a game in itself, and I am more than happy picking and choosing the ones that I want to play. I don’t force myself into open-world PVP experiences, because I have learned that I don’t enjoy them. Similarly, I should be perfectly fine knowing that I don’t like Tower Defense games and as such, I should probably block Blight from my Atlas tree. Occasionally there is a game mode like Incursion that I did not like at first but have come to enjoy, and that is awesome as well. However, for me… this is the league of Heist and Delve and I am okay with that.

The Brass Dome

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Friends I spent more currency yesterday on a single item than I have ever spent on anything in the trade league. I’ve had this dumb side project of trying to “chance orb” my way into a Brass Dome given that it is the only unique for the Gladiator Plate base. However hundreds of scouring and chance orbs later, I decided to just buy the damned thing. It seemed to be the next obvious step in the evolution of my build and I found one with the highest maximum elemental resistance bump you could get and a decent armor bonus for 5.3 Divine Orbs. Granted this ate up almost all of my liquid Divines, other than the stash tab that is devoted to Thalen’s purchases… I was sitting on 7 total Divines with another 10 roughly sitting in raw Chaos Orbs. I had to do some Harvest Crafting to flip one of my items to Lightning Resistance in order to make up the gap lost from my rare chest but that was pretty straightforward.

The end result however is pretty staggering. I took a screenshot in-game of what my defenses screen looks like with six stacks of endurance. I have a little over 90,000 armor 89% fire, 87% cold, and 87% lightning resistances, and a life regeneration of a little over 2000 per second with my max life sitting around 4500. I took a bit of a raw life loss because of the removal of bonus life from Strength, but I think being effectively immune to extra crit damage makes up for that. When I “ding” 98 I should be able to pick up another life node that will more than make up for the loss, and I am slowly adding catalysts as they drop to give me bonus life as well. Sure I could have gotten an even more perfectly rolled version of this armor but it is still a big bump.

The game seems to have noticed that I was missing several Divines and over the course of the night I legitimately got all of them back as drops. From Metamorph, running maps to refill my sulfite, and from delve itself, I got back 5 raw Divines. This seems like one hell of a lucky streak to me, but I will absolutely take it. Weirdly I got two of the divines from Abyssal Cities in the same biome, which seems extremely lucky. I guess maybe I should start paying more attention to the biome bonuses because it makes me wonder if that area had some extreme rarity bonus applied to it. I also managed to knock out another Vaal boss which gave me one of the rings needed to craft a precursor. I need to sift through my rare stockpile to see if I have any more of these rings laying around.

I feel like last night I went through yet another trade league right of passage. Up until this point I had been surviving on the scarabs that I got dropped from running other content. The problem however is that it seems like I am just not getting sulfite scarabs. I decided to remedy this by just purchasing a large stack of them and picking up 100 Rusted Sulfite Scarabs for 90 Chaos. This should in theory keep me going on refilling my delve fuel for awhile. I had been trying to rely on proccing Niko missions, but that ultimately took forever if I was specifically wanting to go back down into the dark. This will at least give me a rapid way to fill back up to 55,000 Sulfite.

Now that I have significantly more defenses, I am starting to work my way a little lower in delve. I found these odd biomes with a single Abyssal City node, and there seems to be another one on the lower left side of the screen partially occluded. That is ultimately where I am trying to target because I am still seeking out an Aul the Crystal King node and I am thinking I must just need to be a bit deeper to get them to spawn more reliably. The boss nodes are a bit tiresome with Righteous Fire, largely because I just don’t dish out as much damage as they would need to make them happen quickly. I can survive everything without much issue, but it is the slow process of whittling down via Fire Trap that gets cumbersome.

Through all of the mapping to get Sulfite, I’ve been trying to focus on running Tier 14 or higher maps which have a chance of dropping Guardian maps. Over the course of the last few days, I’ve accumulated a decent stash of these and plan on running them through with my SRS Necromancer at some point soon. Like I said yesterday I legitimately thought I would be winding down this season by now, but I keep finding more goals that I want to work on. I am a few more achievements away from finishing my Tier 2 set of armor, and three away from getting my first totem. I think I am way more interested in those than in progressing my atlas any further. Bossing really does not hold much excitement for me personally and if given the choice I would almost always rather be farming league mechanics for loot.

There is a mechanical loop that I have fallen into that I greatly enjoy, and I feel a little sad because I know it is entirely because I chose wisely when deciding on a class to start Sanctum with. Had I chosen something jankier, I probably would have bounced when I finished my 115 maps to unlock the first step of the Atlas. This is what happened to me during Lake of Kalandra when I tried Storm Brand. It is making me wonder if I now just go Righteous Fire each league, because if nothing else it can make currency to fund an additional class as it did with my Fire SRS Necromancer, and partially leveled Seismic Saboteur and Toxic Rain Trickster. Needing to have multiple characters for multiple different game modes seems extremely cumbersome, but it might just be the best way to approach Path of Exile.

Hunting Aul

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Friends… I thought this would be the week that I started to distance myself from Path of Exile. Between adventures in Grim Dawn and starting to fiddle around with Lord of the Rings Online, I expected to dial back my gameplay. Yet last night I was back on my bullshit happily plugging away at the same stuff I have been plugging away at for a while now. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is seemingly not quite done with Path of Exile. My main strategy continues to be running maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… largely because I don’t care about her level… and then once I have filled up my Sulphite going back down into delve and hunting for the last rare thing that I have not seen… Aul. I think maybe once I finally fight the Crystal King this will lose some of its stickiness for me but I really want to see that encounter at least once.

I wish there was a good gauge numerically on how far to the left or right of the main column I have gone, similar to a depth reading. Essentially I seem to be moving around in a band between 150 and 170 in depth and am six or seven screens away from the central column at this point. I found a very tasty Abyssal City last night as well as a nearby Primeval Ruins but sadly no boss nodes in either. I think I have fought the Vaal boss three times, and the Abyssal boss twice… but have yet to see Aul even though I am poking around in the range where it is reported to find those nodes. I need to dive a bit deeper, but you are sorta at the mercy of the map when it comes to how you can travel. As I dive down I keep hitting dead ends and having to backtrack my way up to higher depths.

One thing I have to say about Delve City farming is that you end up with a truly staggering number of maps. You can see for some tiers I am sitting on over 100 maps and a large chunk of these are coming from the cartographer’s chests that I am pretty regularly finding one or more of in each city node. I currently have Primordial Blocks as my favorite map, not necessarily because I love the layout, but because I am trying to get the hideout to spawn in it so I can collect that for my account. For whatever reason, Primordial Blocks seem to have a higher-than-average spawn rate of Metamorph as well, and as such, I can use it to collect parts. Granted this could just be me running this map over and over and my Atlas tree triggering, but even before I specced into Metamorph I seemed to get that mechanic here more often than not.

Speaking of Metamorph, it continues to pay off nicely. I quietly stockpile body parts and then run through several metamorph spawns at once whenever I get a moment. If I stack currency nodes in every body part, it seems to often produce Divine and Exalted Orbs. This isn’t exactly going to win any divines per hour races, but it is a nice residual impact of me doing the things that I was already going to do in order to fuel my delve addiction. At some point, I am going to need to spend some time selling off undesirable body parts in an attempt to get the ones I am missing because a few of the slots in my metamorph tab are filling up rapidly. That is the most annoying thing about this mechanic is that the body parts are heavily skewed toward a few specific slots. For me, at least the most common part is Heart and Brain and the least common are the Lungs and Eyes. You can sell 3 body parts for a random part, so I need to cull Hearts and Brains in an attempt to fill the other slots as I am completely out of eyes at the moment.

Lastly here is a bonus image of sleepy cats. I wasn’t sure where else to fit this one in, and I know it is awful quality. Essentially the other night my wife snapped a quick photo in the dark because she knew I would not believe her. This is Josie snuggling with Gracie, and this is important because we have never really had cats that would actively snuggle with each other. I am not sure if Josie was even aware that Gracie was there or not, but I did what I could to try and enhance the image so you could see more than a blurry mess. Gracie is damned determined that everyone must love her, and she adores her big sister so I am happy to see this. I noticed Gracie grooming Josie the other day, but I figured it was a fluke.

I hope you are having a most excellent week, and we will see if I actually do something other than Path of Exile.

Harrow the Ninth

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Good Morning Friends! I opted to take yesterday off because for me it was a holiday and I was off work, and also I was feeling like complete shit. I am either fighting off allergies turned asthma attack, or I have picked up something… but for the latter, I’ve not really been around anyone to catch anything. Over the weekend I finished up my second book from the Libby App, and it was a wild ride. I think last I said I had started Skin Game by Jim Butcher, but I abruptly paused that because my library hold came up on the next novel in the Locked Tomb series. Harrow The Ninth was a hard book to get through, because it has you questioning the events of the first novel… which ended on a bit of a frustrating cliffhanger. During at least the first fourth of the novel, I was going back and forth about whether or not Tamsyn Muir had a fucking clue what they were doing with this story. Thankfully it paid off in the end and the story that was woven between the two tales is extremely good.

Essentially between the two novels, there is a character perspective shift, from the very likable Gideon Nav to the very unlikeable Harrowhark Nonagesimus. It feels like a massive “bait and switch” at the end of the first book and the beginning of the second book, which knocks the reader off balance. However, I would assume this was all on purpose to make you now start to deeply care about Harrow and move her from the Villain column more solidly into the hero column. Now I just want to read the next one the sequence, Nona the Ninth… but the Libby App tells me it is going to be about a six-week wait. Granted the last book told me it would be a four-week wait and that is why I had started Skin Game, but my hold suddenly came available after about a week. I figure I will finish Skin Game and evaluate where I am at that point, but I might end up just buying this next book so I can consume it faster.

In other random events this weekend, it appears that Tam and a few others have been screwing around in Lord of the Rings Online. I opted to go ahead and install the game and start a brand new character, a Guardian named Belglaive on Landroval. Immediately stepping into this game feels like I went back two decades in MMORPG design, which has its ups and downs. I opted to start the recently released new character starter experience, and honestly… I think I like the Shadows of Angmar option a bit better. This is really slow-paced and I feel like I am completely disconnected from the rest of the game at the moment. With the previous experience, I could at least rush to Bree and train professions, and I guess in theory I can probably do that now… but I am trying to follow the breadcrumbs that are laid out in front of me. All told though I am enjoying myself in what feels like an anachronistic jaunt into MMORPG gaming.

In Path of Exile, I spent a bit more money… swapped out some gems for Awakened versions, and got my flasks in order so that now I am much tankier even than I was before. Righteous Fire is still really bad at bossing, and as such, I have continued trying to tweak my Fire SRS Necromancer to set it up as my bossing character. In the grand scheme of things it works… most of the time. I did a Maven Invitation last night and wrecked it as the Necro, something that I would have struggled at length on the Juggernaut. I’ve done several invitations, but it just takes forever whereas on the Necro I kept a pretty good pace as the new bosses were being released. I could pour some more funds into the character and improve this I am certain. I think my short-term goal is to keep getting levels on the Juggernaut, and I would really love to hit level 100 this season.

I officially have more currency than I have ever had before in Path of Exile. That catch is it isn’t mine. Thalen lucked into an Unrequited Love card, that at the time was going for 18 Divine Orbs. However since he got it, and when he decided to have me sell it… the price dropped considerably. I originally priced it at 18, hoping the price would go back up but in the meantime, a number of 17 Divine cards have created this price barrier that I knew we would not be breaking anytime soon. I priced it at 16.5 Divines and within moments had sold it. Now I am essentially acting as a concierge broker and Thalen sends me a link to something he wants, and I attempt to acquire it for him. I’ve set aside all of his currency and my purchases from it in a stash tab to keep it separate from everything else. This also allows me to just ignore that tab when running Exilence to see if I have any other high-value items that I should be trying to sell.

I made a bit more progress in Grim Dawn on the Soldier/Oathkeeper combination and I have to say… I am not sure if I like the build at all. I am not really enjoying myself that much, so I might fall back on playing my original level 42 Warder character which is Soldier/Shaman. I also need to try some ranged and caster options because at the moment I am just not feeling the game. I feel way more squishy than I want to feel, so I either need to kill things much faster or have better layers of defense. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as active of a community as say Path of Exile, and while there is a build guide website it is much harder to gauge how successful a given build is going to be. Admittedly that is my lack of knowledge of the game because I am sure if you are already well indoctrinated into Grim Dawn it would be fine.

Anyways I hope you all had a most excellent weekend, and now if I can just kick this crud life would be grand. As is often the case I have way too many gaming irons in the fire at the moment. It is a much better problem to have than languishing in that “nothing I want to play” feeling.