Mercenaries of Trarthus (3.26)

Burning Divines

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Good Morning Folks. We have reached the point in the league where I am blowing all of my currency on alt characters.I think I have blown something like 130 divines on kitting out two characters. Divines are easy enough to get at this point just through selling Delve stuff that I could get them back if I really wanted it, but honestly… since I will never play standard I might as well blow them. At this point I know I will be shifting to Last Epoch next week and then once I have my fill of that, probably popping back into Path of Exile II to see what 0.3.0 has to offer. As a result I am in the mode of winding down the Mercenaries of Trarthus league. During the Gauntlet I had a lot of fun with Toxic Rain which caused me to run up a character in the league for that. Additionally I had a Brand character that I was originally planning on going Penance Brand of Dissipation with… but pivoted at the last minute to Storm Brand of Indecision. In both case I have gotten the characters to around level 90.

With Toxic Rain I went Pathfinder as it is really the only Ranger ascendancy that has anything that benefits the skill. Pending I remember to keep a life flask rolling it also has really great surviveability after you have thrown on enough levels and gotten enough raw hit points. There are a few ways to build this and I opted for the modern method of getting a 250% Widowhail and buying a stupidly expensive quiver. I legitimately do not remember how much this cost but I think it was in the neighborhood of 50 Divines and that was the cheapest version I could find with both chaos and normal dot multi, a decent life roll, and bow damage percentage increase on it. This gives me +77% dot multi, +87.5% chaos dot multi, +381.5 life, and +171.5% bow damage. Additionally I am running a Tides of Time which effectively is a budget mageblood that only works on the Pathfinder class which effectively allows me to generate enough flask charges that they have perm uptime with the used when full enchant.

You can check out the full setup here in the POB, but fair warning I don’t know shit about properly configuring POB. I based it loosely on some other POBs that I saw on POE.Ninja and combined a bunch of things that I liked into a new frankenbuild. Essentially I am running Mirage Archer setup in my chestpiece with normal Toxic Rain, and then a Ballista totem setup in my bow with Toxic Rain of Withering to give me withered stacks. Collectively this leads to a pretty comfy playstyle as I roam around the map spamming two buttons and occasionally hitting a health potion when I remember it. If something is taking two long to die I curse it with despair and move on with my life. This is very much a mapper setup and not in any fashion something you would want for bossing purposes. Truth be told, I have learned that I do not like bossing builds in the least… and at some point should probably find one that I enjoy playing just so I can knock out ubers in the future. They all feel bad to me because leveling them feels like ass.

The other character I have been playing is a brand build, which is another archetype that I really love. Basically Wintertide brand is probably my favorite of these, but it always feels too fiddly and requires you to push way the hell too many buttons to play it effectively. Storm Brand is something that I have attempted to play countless times in the past but they always feel too squishy, and I think I might have come up with the solution here. Essentially I am abusing the new golem node on the Elementalist Ascendancy combined with the Fire and Cold nodes and Bastion of Elements as an extra defensive layer. So essentially all of my lightning damage from Storm Brand of Indecision is Chilling, Igniting, and Shocking the enemy and I am running around with massive buffs from Stone, Ice, Lightning, and Flame Golems which have meatshield support giving them extra heft and taunt. I am running two Taming Rings for the lulz and resists, and an Inpulsa’s chest for the explode pops. Add the cheapest Archdemon crown I could find and a +2 crit knife and you have a pretty comfy and powerful feeling setup in maps. I am running Aegis Aurora but don’t really feel like I have enough armor to make it work well… nor enough energy shield so I might swap that up for something else at some point like maybe a Phoenix Shield to resolve the fact that I am not ignite immune.

What is making this feel extremely good is the fact that I am running Storm Brand with a Doryani Merc that is causing everything in my vicinity to have -130% Lighting Resistance. The Merc is also providing shocked ground and using the Kaom’s Binding trick to convert some phys damage to fire, and providing me some extra regen with Shaper’s Seed. Everything else was pretty much a yolo as I just threw on some minion uniques that seemed like they might be useful for all of the Holy Relics and Herald of Purity minions that are being generated. For reference I am running a Shout bot Striker with my Righteous Fire character to add more regen and give culling strike for bosses, and running an Ice Shot ranger type for my Toxic Rain character to help slow up the packs a bit and make them stand in the toxic rain a bit longer. In truth I am looking for better versions of all of these mercs but I have not found exactly what I want. For example I want a striker that provides me fortify stacks, enduring cry, and determination… which is a thing that CAN exist but I just have not seen it.

Mapping with the negative lightning res merc setup is pretty comfy because the one I am running is also spreading out consecrated ground pretty much everywhere. It isn’t the best at killing unique mobs but feels pretty solid. I am blocking just enough incoming damage to make the 3000 life and 1000 energy shield that I have feel decent. Swapping to the Phoenix Shield would give me a bit more life regen which might make things feel a bit better as well as like I said patching the hole I have in my elemental defenses where I would at least become immune to ignite when I hit low life. Of all of the things I am worried about… ignite stacks seem like they are the easiest to work around. All told I am having quite a bit of fun with both of these new characters, but playing alts always feels weird because I never put the same focus on them as I do with my righteous fire mains. One of these leagues I am going to play one of these and force myself to improve it over the course of the league. Next league I am contemplating going down the Golem Elementalist Explosive Arrow path that my friend Sloth did this league… pending it does not get extremely nerfed. EA is an archetype that I already like quite a bit and Golementalist is extremely fun to level.

As far as league progress goes, I am chipping away at some of the remaining challenges for the league. I am sitting at 33 of 40 and at a minimum I want to hit 34 before I wander away like a bored toddler. Strenuous Summons is something that I made a dent in last night, and in theory I am pretty close to Eldritch Expedition and just need to get lucky with Remembrance Repressed. I can do t17s and could in theory chip away at Endgame Enigmas as well. Powerful Pursuits is killing Ubers and if I got desperate I could just buy my way out of that problem with boss carries on TFT. Basically I think I can at least get one more without a ton of effort and that is probably the path that I am going to go down. I am running red altars because I would far rather run the Black Star/Searing Exarch combo for invitations than doing maven witnesses or having to fight Shrek from the eater of worlds invitations. I burned through ALL of my invitations yesterday evening, and that is already way more Shrek fights than I ever want to do going forward. I should see what buying bulk Black Star invites costs on TFT because those are without a doubt the easiest to run over and over.

Anyways… still having fun with my stupid Path of Exile nonsense. Brands are fun, Toxic Rain is fun, and Righteous Fire is fun.

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

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One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Four Winds, Toxic Rain, and MyMiniFactory Sale

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Good Morning Folks. Right now the Festival of the Four Winds is going on in Guild Wars 2, and with it comes the tradition of cashing in your troves of raw resources into loot boxes… and then being sad when you get nothing good from it. Zephyrite Supply Boxes can be purchased from several vendors on the docks of Labyrinthine Cliffs with pretty much every raw unprocessed resource in the game. Likely the most efficient option is globs of ectoplasm which net you 7 boxes each. People gamble on these because you can potentially get a super rare infusion worth around 10k gold. More than likely however you are going to get four jute scraps or something similarly useless. I cashed in pretty much everything I had, and did not walk away with anything other than stacks of festival tokens and quartz crystal. The tokens I spent on some of the homestead patterns, and the crystals I am going to keep in my inventory for daily conversions to charged crystals so that I don’t forget to do this.

Yesterday’s dailies included one of my least favorite options, which was to craft an item in the Mystic Forge. Generally speaking I do the Mystic Clover recipe, which is to combine 1 Obsidian Shard, 1 Mystic Coin, 1 Glob of Ectoplasm, and 6 Philosopher’s Stone in the mystic toilet with a roughly 33% chance of getting a clover. The cheapest option is to throw 4 random blue items into the toilet and get a random item back out with a 20% chance of upgrading its rarity. Unfortunately I noticed this long after I had already consumed all of my unidentified items and salvaged them. I could have run another event and just hit up the toilet afterwards… but I was mostly trying to knock things out so I could move on to some Path of Exile so I paid the tax for my hubris and made a clover.

Over in Path of Exile I have been leveling on my Toxic Rain character that I started last weekend. I think I have more or less gotten past the ugly duckling phase and while I am still exceptionally squishy… my damage output mostly makes up for this. I picked up a new Merc to run with it, namely the “Manyshots” variety that comes with related ice attacks to freeze things… giving me some more wiggle room while avoiding bad stuff. I have spent way the hell too much currency on this character because at this point I have probably dropped 70 Divines in total on gear. This is the problem with an alt is that you go through this phase where you have nicer gear than you should for a level and it feels bad for it to be so damned squishy as a result… when in reality you just need lots of levels before it starts to feel better. If you are curious this is where things are currently with this character.

Earlier in the league I was rotating between Primordial Blocks in my eternal search for the hideout, and Shipyard which is a nice big open layout map that happens to be attached to it. In case you do not know this… if you want to sustain maps SSF style, you set all of your favorite maps to the same map… and then exclusively run maps attached to that map in the atlas. There is a natural desire for maps when they drop, to be one of the maps attached to the map you are running. So by having a lot of favorite slots you can put your thumb on the scale and force the odds. It is not a 100% of the time thing, but it works well enough to produce a lot of the same map. When you switch the maps you are running, you flip all of your favorites to the other map you are running and essentially ping pong back between the two. I am running Shipyard at the moment because I had too many to store in my maps tab, and also they produce Blocks maps very quickly that I will run on my real character.

In other news… MyMiniFactory is running a summer sale right now and I am probably going to go shopping. I really do not love the current state of Games Workshop Dreadnoughts, so I am absolutely going to use a proxy for my budding Space Wolves army that I will be building. Namely I plan on picking up this Asgardian Dreadnought from Atlan Forge which I think will be a better stand-in for Bjorn the Felhanded than the current plastic dreadnought options. There are probably some other options that I will pick up like some of the base troops so that I can con my friend into printing some off for me to paint up as proxy Space Wolves until I figure out what recipe I am going to go with for painting that army. Once I figure out the scheme that I like I mostly want to follow that so that I have something very repeatable for doing the rest of the army. I’ve picked up some reasonable sable brushes, cheap synthetic brushes, and cheap drybrushes to get me started in this journey. In theory my painting box out in the garage might have all of my old brushes in it… but after sitting out there for thirty years they would likely need a lot of conditioning to get them functional again.

I’ve also contemplated picking up the Primal Hounds line from Greytide Studios because they seem to have a lot of really useful Space Wolf adjacent bits for modding things. At an absolute minimum I will probably pick up the base toppers, because I really dig these. All of this might actually get me to shift my opinion as to which flavor of 3D Printing I went into first… Resin seems like a massive mess but in theory I could convert my upstairs bathroom into a work room for this. It has a massive counter top that is largely being not used for anything currently. The thing that worries me though is ventilation, which in theory I could have in my wife’s office but that is going to take much longer before I could set up anything in there. In the Bathroom I at least have access to two sinks and running water and plenty of counter-space to set up a curing station. My friend has made the offer to print me stuff, but at some point that will be cumbersome for both of us.

Anyways. I think I am done writing for now. I mostly pushed myself to actually make a post today rather than waiting for tomorrow because of Blaugust and trying to get my post count up to a point where I don’t feel ashamed of it.

Mercenaries Gauntlet

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Good Morning My Perky Pals… happy dawning of a new work week. In my semi-regular mental health updates… I did pretty okay on Friday. Dealing with the first anniversary of our wedding after the death of my wife… was mostly okay. I had a few tough moments but the day was not the soul crushing experience that I expected it to be. I am still glad that I took the day off and quite honestly… I might just start taking it off yearly just in case because sooner or later… it will catch up with me. This weekend I did dumb things and this morning I am going to tell you about them, since we did not record a podcast this weekend where I would have likely talked about it. Why yes that is me on the beach in Path of Exile… so buckle up friends.

The Gauntlet is an event run by Zizaran in Path of Exile that cranks up the difficulty of the game to stupid levels… and takes place in a Hardcore Solo-Self-Found environment. Meaning that you cannot rely on anyone other than yourself and if you take a death, your character is exiled to standard. I do not normally like the hardcore rule-set, nor am I the biggest fan of SSF either. What prompted me to join this madness? The Gauntlet is often supported by Grinding Gear Games which cooks up specific challenges that do not exist in other environments, and this year they added a unique MTX that can only be gained through playing the event. Essentially if you get off the beach and defeat Hillock, you are guaranteed to get a copy of the Merciless Gauntlets. If you get to at least level 5, your copy will have flavor text added to it indicating how far you made it.

What makes this extra challenging however is that a lot of the bosses have new mechanics. For example Hillock on the beach, is supported by The Maven and all of the nonsense that she does while witnessing a map boss can be done during this fight. Brutus is already a bit of a filter for new players, but when you encounter him in the prison you first fight a proxy… and then in the normally safe room… face a buffed version that has the canons on all four sides of the arena that can be found during the Hydra Guardian fight. I could have been like my friend Sloth and killed Hillock and then immediately killed that character to be done with it. However I could not bring myself to do this thing and I had to play things out for as long as they lasted… even though the whole experience is not really my jam.

I had experienced some of the mechanics when SirGog ran a version of the Gauntlet with Softcore rules as a custom league. However new and extra spicy this year is that when you face an end of act boss… you also face every single unique mob that can spawn in any of the maps of that act. This means you are fighting a literal gauntlet of enemies, that works similar to a maven witness in that if you do not kill them fast enough… they can start stacking up on top of each other as they spawn at fixed intervals. I managed to push through the first act boss, largely because Toxic Rain is really good at low levels and I got an early Goldrim drop from Hailrake that carried me super freaking hard. By the time I faced Merveil I essentially had capped resistances which was wildly overpowered for any fight, but especially the gauntlet since you needed to care about more than just cold resistance.

I named my character BelCantKillHillock because I legitimately did not expect to get off the beach. If you are so inclined you can see a POB of where I got and what gear I was wearing at the time of my death. I made it to the Act II boss and was presented with a decision. I could easily have backed out of the fight and come back when I was stronger… but instead I just decided to allow the death to happen. I played 5 hours and 21 minutes to get to that point, and while I was enjoying Toxic Rain overall… I was not enjoying having to play with my head on a swivel at all times. I figured once I cleared Act II it was only going to get worse in Act III. So instead of exiting to character selection and bouncing back in and throwing on a few levels… I just decided to let the death of attrition happen because I was having to chain flasks to stay alive to all of the nonsense happening on the Vaal Oversoul fight. I made it through the Gauntlet of Uniques without much issue, but the stupid stuff that was happening in the room kept grinding me down.

Being perfectly honest I am extremely happy with the level 27 death that is now enshrined in my glove mtx. I started out not expecting to make it off the beach, and then decided to keep playing until I was at least level 5 so I could get text on my gloves. Then I just kept moving the goalposts… could I get through Brutus… could I get through Merveil. Could I get past the bandits… and then ultimately could I clear Act II. By the time I reached the end of Act II though I was well past my point of caring about the event. All of this nonsense did lead me to run up a softcore Toxic Rain character and spend all of my currency on it… before realizing that my general problem with these characters is how squishy they end up feeling. That ability is phenomenal during the campaign, but requires way the hell too much investment to feel decent in maps, or at least as a second character after having played a super tanky righteous fire character for months.

Will I do this nonsense again in the future? Honestly I have no clue. I don’t actually enjoy playing in the event, but I did really enjoy watching streamers competing for various prizes on day one. I did not start until the morning of day two and even then only because there was an MTX to be had. If GGG keeps doing cosmetic prize support for these events… I will probably keep throwing my face into this particular wood chipper. That is so long as the bar of entry stays sufficiently low. I am not a member of the “hard content is my kink” club, and in truth I would rather play super chill content so that I can happily be listening to an audiobook while I play it. More than anything right now I am looking forward to the start of season three in Last Epoch on the 21st. I know Path of Exile II lands on the 29th, but I will probably not be done with Last Epoch by then, and if I do play the third pseudo-league in that game I will be starting much later.

Did you play any of the Gauntlet? How far did you make it? Drop me a line below.