Forbidden Sanctum (3.20)

Enter the Atlas

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Good Morning Friends! As of last night, I am officially in maps. So far they are honestly going pretty smoothly with a few moments of press potion panic but otherwise manageable. Essentially yesterday I finished up the rest of Act Nine and all of Act Ten, then did my third Labyrinth, and finally killed Kitava for the second time. The transition into early maps for Righteous Fire is far smoother than any build I have played so far. I now understand why Pohx has so many devotees because this build is awesome for just sorta kicking back and doing content. Granted I am only in white maps so far, and who knows what the transition into yellows is going to look like.

So far I have only swapped out a single piece of gear, but my resists seem to be solid. I am shocked that my gear is as seemingly good still as was. This is the kooky thing about Path of Exile is that gear level seems to not matter even one little bit but instead how lucky you were on the random rolls that it came with. Obviously, the higher the gear the better the possible rolls that can be, but I am still using some items that show equipable levels in the teens. At this point, I am probably going to start shopping for something that I can use as a six-link chest piece so that I can migrate over to using all of the appropriate gems for righteous fire. I think everything else should be relatively correct. I had to move frostblink over to lifetap finally so that I could start running skitterbots.

I had some exceptional luck in my last few acts of the game, and due to over-leveling as heavily as I did… started seeing tier-one maps dropping left and right. I now have fourteen T1, one T2, three T3, and one T4 ready to run. In total, I have unlocked six points on the Atlas Passive tree and have several more that I can run that I have not gotten the bonus from. For the moment I am going hard into Betrayal and Expedition since I seem to be getting some cool things from there. Now that I finally understand Betrayal a bit more, I am way more willing to engage with it. Every map mechanic just seems to work better with RF, and I even managed to wreck Blight on one of the maps. I am looking forward to trying Breach since that seemed to be my personal nemesis before. Speaking of Nemesis… ArchNemesis still mostly sucks and I encountered my first proper mob in the middle of a map yesterday. It took forever but was mostly doable.

One of my goals in this league is to spend more time in other game modes. I noticed that I was almost capped on the Delve currency so I finished out my evening burning through some of that and shocking no one… Righteous Fire is also good at this game mode. I started at a rather conservative level, but I expect in the coming days to be cranking this up a bit as I upgrade the various sliders for Delve. All told I am having a lot of freaking fun and it feels like RF opens a lot more doors than the builds I had been previously playing. I am now however looking forward to bossing because this video of Pohx against Maven seems like nonsense. I found out that he is running a “quenching” flask to turn off his Righteous Fire during the degeneration phases but that also means that he can do it only so many times before falling over. This is probably the downside of this build, but considering most of what I enjoy is mapping, heist, and delve… I am probably okay with this. I could always afford to build a bossing character from the currency I am likely to gain doing that content.

I am having a heck of a lot of fun right now, and my current goal is to improve my gear and knock out more of the Atlas Passive tree. Coming from having completed this last league, it feels a little meager but it is progress nonetheless. I guess I will spend some time today and create another spreadsheet like I had last time to track my map progress. Games like this… really suit me. It gives me a bunch of goals that I can chip away at solo and feel like I am making forward momentum. At some point, I need to dust off Guild Wars 2 as well because it similarly has a bunch of solo-friendly micro goals that I can make progress on.

Hopefully, your week is going pretty swimmingly. Mine is largely tolerable but at some point, I am going to have to actually care about Christmas… because we have done next to nothing planning-wise.

Nearing maps with Aging Gear

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Good Morning Friends! I will warn you when I am on an ARPG kick… the posts are not going to all be winners. You have to somewhat really care about ARPGs and the loot that they can drop to fully enjoy these. That said I am not really playing anything other than Path of Exile so that is what you are going to get for a while. As of last night, I am knee-deep in Act Nine and sitting at level 73… which feels like I am a bit higher level than I was in this same place during the last league. After some rifling through my past posts for the Kalandra league I remarked that I was level 70 at the beginning of Act Ten, so I am making a bit more XP overall and it could just be that Righteous Fire is better at fully clearing a zone. I am doing really well on various resists but I am not sure how that will hold up once I get the debuff applied after killing Kitava the second time.

One thing that ultimately concerns me a bit, is that most of the gear that I am currently wearing… I have had it for a very long time. One of my rings for example is really nice but has an equipment level of eight. That means in order to transition into mapping I am likely going to have to go through a lot of socket pressure and upgrading in a very short period of time. If my resists were going to be good, then I could probably honestly start maps in the current state I am right now. However, once Kitava nerfs my resists again I am going to be hurting, especially in the fire resistance department. Not that resists are all that important but I do plan on finishing Cruel Labyrinth before I kill Kitava.

One game mode that I hated with my last build, but don’t mind at all this time around… is Incursion. Essentially for those not familiar with the various hold-over league mechanics in Path of Exile, the NPC named Alva sends you back into history and you can impact various rooms in the Temple. Essentially the overarching goal is to open up doors, which can be done by killing NPCs and getting a key to drop. You are trying to link up all of the rooms so you can run the entire Temple as a giant contorted map. Last night I managed to get my very first incursion ever where I could reach every single room in the instance. More impressive is that I took zero deaths and only had scant few close calls while trying to run the map once completed.

The rewards were not phenomenal. My loot filters seem to really be impressed by them, but in truth, most of it was vendor fodder. I held onto the unique and the belt because someone might find them useful, but everything else wasn’t of any use to me. There was also the problem that by the time I reached the end of my run, my bags were pretty full of other interesting drops that I left a lot of this to rot on the floor. Sure I could have dropped a portal because I still had five doors left… but running an entire temple with every room unlocked… is “a lot”. By the time I finished, I was very much ready to be free of that place and move on to something else.

I am still seeing my fair share of kooky kalandra-style loot drops, like this time when apparently a rare thought I needed a unique amulet and a bajillion ivory spirit shields. I am honestly kinda happy that they managed to keep some of this weirdness because it brings a smile to my face every time a dozen of the same item drops… even if said item is mostly worthless. I think more than anything that is one of the aspects of Path of Exile that I enjoy the most… the always confusing and surprising loot drops. Most of it is junk, even using an item filter… but every now and then there is a jewel in the rough that feels amazing to get. In chasing that unicorn you end up with enough raw currency that you can buy your way out of most holes.

Now for something a bit fun, because I had not really compared it myself yet either. I took some screenshots of my currency tab six days into the Kalandra league on 8/25/2022 and we can compare that with this morning’s screenshot some 4 days into the Sanctum league. At this point in the league, I feel like I am seeing way more Alchemy Orbs which is a good thing, because that is a positive for “Alch and Go” map sustain. I also have way more alterations overall which I had noticed them dropping a lot. I am down a bit on raw chaos and at this point in Kalandra I had already found a Divine Orb, but I’ve found two Exalted Orbs so while it doesn’t exactly shake out as an even it feels like I had similar tier 1 currency drops. I felt like I have had way less smithing currency, but really the difference is mostly negligible I think it was just that in Kalandra league it tended to drop 10 at a time in the lake.

All told I think I am doing pretty solidly at the moment. We will see what the next few days bring as I transition over to white maps.

Burninating the Countryside

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Good Morning Friends! Friday saw the launch of a brand league in Path of Exile and I finally landed on playing Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build. Mostly I think I wanted a fairly cozy and low-stress league start and Pohx is maybe one of the best guide builders in the community. Ash and I have talked a bit about this, but various guide makers have various risk margins that they are willing to live with. Velyna seems super chill as a human being, but she is willing to live with way more stress than I want in my life and as a result, I am not super likely to be following any more of her builds in the future. Ash commented that really what we are looking for… builds from people who are willing to take that build to Solo Self Found Hardcore… where they can’t realistically rely on the market for items and need sufficient survival to keep from dying to a random one-shot.

A few leagues ago I had attempted to go down the Righteous Fire path but ultimately stalled out because I loved the play style of Wintertide Brand. In the Inquisitor RF path, this is supposed to be just a jumping-off point, but I leaned into the gameplay so heavily that I never really made the conversion to RF and started going off in my own direction trying to make Wintertide a viable endgame build. In the last league, I took my love of brand gameplay and went down the Storm Brand path, and it was largely fine other than the fact that again I had to deviate to pack on survival. This time around however I committed early on mentally to following the path and trusting in Pohx and so far it has been awesome. I made the switch around level 40 to running Righteous Fire over Rolling Magma, and am now 63 and still trucking along happily.

This has been without a doubt my easiest league start so far, and I am not sure how much is chalked up to following Pohx’s guidance and how much is the fact that this is effectively my third league. The big thing I have noticed is that I’ve yet to die to any of the act bosses. Starting with Hillock I have one-shot every boss encounter so far and the only deaths I have taken… were due to some lag spikes on particularly nasty trash. Since so much of the build relies on health regeneration, you have to be deeply cautious around anything that might impair your regeneration rate. I can’t survive terribly long due to the damage I am dealing myself constantly from Righteous Fire so I have to make sure and disengage or potion to get through the rough spots.

As far as the Forbidden Sanctum league mechanic itself, I am not necessarily the biggest fan. It is a mechanic that greatly favors glass cannon builds because your health bar is not actually your health bar. You instead have this bar called “Resolve” that goes down every time you get hit by anything, and if you are not dodging literally everything you are failing. Ultimately the highest rewards are gained by letting the reward from each floor ride until the end of the map… but that also means you are at risk of losing everything. So my personal preference is to take the reward that effectively cashes out at the end of every floor. That way I at least got something for my time, and so long as I keep that perspective the experience is not too bad. It ends up just being a way to get some supplemental crafting currency which is usually worth my time.

As far as currency goes… this league seems to be way more generous than Lake of Kalandra was at the start. I am in act seven currently and have six raw chaos orbs and one exalted orb. That in theory should give me a good start toward buying some end-game gear at some point. I saw my first Chaos Orb drop in Act III, and my first Exalted Orb in Act V. I am hoping this trend continues and that I see a Divine Orb or maybe my first ever Mirror before too much longer. Normally speaking I have not seen much in the way of raw Chaos drops until maps. I’ve seen a number of the kooky loot types where a single mob will drop like six of an item so it really does feel like we have arrived at a happy place after the wild mood swings of Lake of Kalandra loot. Here is hoping they don’t screw anything up!

I am having a freaking blast… but so far my friend Ace is not. They tried another Minion build and it seems like maybe those are not quite back to normal. I hope either the build improves or they can figure out another build because it is going to suck not to be fucking around in the endgame without them. I want everyone to be happy and engaged in the league because it will make my long-term experience more enjoyable to see everyone having fun. It has been interesting to see how my opinion of different mechanics has shifted now that I have this wildly survivable killing machine. I hated Incursion previously and now… it is super easy and just a case of how fast can I move around the map and soak up more kills. I am looking forward to encountering my first Breach because that was also a mechanic that I loathed but I have a feeling it is now going to be my jam.

Are you playing Forbidden Sanctum in Path of Exile? How has your league start gone? What are your thoughts about the seasonal mechanic? Drop me a line below!

Forbidden Sanctum Builds

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Friends, it is three days until the start of a new Path of Exile league, and I find myself doing what every Exile does… pouring over build guides and trying to figure out what path I am going to take for my league start. If you were not around a few months ago… Lake of Kalandra was the first league that a number of us poured our heart and soul into with a day-one start. This was maybe one of the worst leagues in modern history and struggled with currency drop and general survivability problems. While I actually enjoyed the Lake mechanic mechanically, it seemed needlessly brutal and random at times. As far as leagues go it has been shown to have had the worst player retention numbers of any league to date. I had contemplated just swearing off 3.20 but they seemingly know how to hit me straight in the feels.

The league mechanic this time around is The Forbidden Sanctum which is a rogue-lite that takes place within Wraeclast. It sounds like you will be earning currency each trip into the dungeon that can be used to gain buffs for subsequent trips slowly building out a talent tree of a sort. I like rogue-lites quite a bit and have spent plenty of time playing games like Rogue Legacy and Hades. Putting that inside of the ARPG-style gameplay that I am already addicted to… may prove to be my ultimate lure. However, until the trailer dropped I had not even been really contemplating this league which puts me weeks behind in the planning process. So this morning I am going to talk through some of the builds I am contemplating starting with.

Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut

Pohx is hands down the best guide maker I have ever seen in the Path of Exile community. He has his entire website wiki devoted to just giving you information to support his already amazing Path of Building guides. The big change this time around is that Inquisitor either took some direct nerfs or got caught up in other nerfs and is maybe going to not be the optimal way to play Righteous Fire. As a result, Pohx seems to be pouring most of his effort into a Juggernaut build and I am largely on board with this. The pros are a comfortable leveling experience with clear direction on what I should be doing which maybe be the sort of low-stress chill start I need.

Chronic Painless’s Blade Vortex Elementalist/Occultist

One of my all-time favorite playstyles in Diablo III is the Whirlwind Barbarian and its “spin to win” mechanics. The closest thing to really doing this in Path of Exile is Blade Vortex and this guide seems to be extremely detailed. The only problem with it is it involves math… and optimizing blade uptime because really you need to be able to maintain 10 blades at all times to pour through content. Other than that the build and guide seem pretty straightforward forward and it also seems like it would be easy to get gear for it even at the high end. All I really want is something that can complete red maps easily to farm for currency and this seems to be able to do that in spades. I have never played a Witch in any form so this is definitely pushing me out of my comfort zone.

Zizaran’s Explosive Arrow Champion

Explosive Arrow Champion is back and Zizaran is once again suggesting this as a league starter. The positives are that I have already played this build before and understand the fundamentals. The negatives are that Zizaran for being as good of a YouTuber as he is… actually sorta writes shitty POBs. He takes for granted that players that are reading his content are going to just understand various concepts, and while I have been around Path of Exile semi-seriously for three leagues now… there are still a lot of core concepts that I do not fully grasp. It will be an uphill battle to sort out what he is saying versus what he is actually meaning. However Grace played this last go-round, and I have played it the time before… so I do have some knowledge that I can draw on.

Velyna’s Spectra Shield Throw Raider

This build looks like a hoot, flat out. I love bouncing shields and it looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. However Velyna seems like a super nice person, but trying to follow one of her guides is sort of awful. I played her Stormbrand last go-round and had all sorts of survival problems that I ultimately had to venture way off the path to fix. Watching this guide video, it sounds like so much of this build hinges upon a super specific shaper base helmet craft… and I am just not sure if I want to go through that nonsense. The stormbrand build eventually ended up being extremely fun to play, but it required me to spend a heck of a lot of currency to get there. So I am deeply gunshy about following Velyna into the breach again.

Ghazzy’s Dark Pact Necromancer

Going completely off the rails I am also sort of considering the Dark Pact Necromancer. Ghazzy really cares about minion builds and is one of the better guide makers for that specific style of play. I have never played a minion build in Path of Exile other than having a random Golem up just to provide a buff. Minions took a massive hit last league and the more traditional builds seem to be not as functional as they once were. This build however focuses on basically using your minions as a bomb to spread Dark Pact which drains minion health but causes chaos damage explosions. It sounds like it might be a fun playstyle but again this is going way out of my comfort zone since I have never played a witch in any form before.

Basically, I have three days to sort out what exactly I want to go for. I think all of the above would probably be a strong league start or at least be viable enough to get through a few labs and into early maps. Probably the top contenders for me at the moment are good ole Righteous Fire or the spin to win Blade Vortex build. I would 100% go Blade Vortex for certain, but I also know I suck ass at trying to maintain the uptime of something on a specific cast pattern. I know when I was splitting steel, I would always find myself out of shards because I was forgetting to make them. Fortunately, it sounds like this doesn’t actually damage my survival and is more than it would harm my clear ability… which is fine. I am okay taking a slower map clear if I screw up rather than taking random deaths.

Are you going to be venturing into The Forbidden Sanctum? If so what build are you looking at running? For those curious about the minutiae, you can check out the current patch notes here.