Good Morning Folks. One of the side projects that I have been working on is a Toxic Rain Champion. I’ve played Toxic Rain before and I have played so many Champion builds… but I have never played Toxic Rain ON Champion. Mostly I am going down this path because I am somewhat tired of Lightning Arrow, yet I also seem to be drawn to creating at least one bow character each league. Clearly, I am doing this wrong because I should be playing my normal Lightning Arrow set up with the new Elemental Hit of the Spectrum instead. I may respec at some point and do this because so many perfect elemental bows are being crafted with the league mechanic that nearly perfect bows… are dirt cheap. However, I am a weirdo and seem to crave doing a thing in spite of it not necessarily being the optimal scenario.
I am loosely following some templating with the tree that ends up creating a wildly different structure than I am used to. I have plenty of regrets to respec this later, but for now, I am going with it so that I can learn the whys of this particular pathing structure. Specifically, I think it is due to this weird snaking column of nodes that do damage over time instead of the normal pathing which puts you down a path of scaling additional arrows and crit. There is a lot of devoting nodes to flasks… and I might remove all of that because I am not sure it is actually worth it. My goal in life is to never have to hit my flasks… and a lot of the scaling is specific to life and mana flasks which I hope to reach a point of never actually having to hit.
I am already off the path because one of the things I have always hated about Toxic Rain is managing wither stacks. I hate withering step full stop. So instead of running toxic rain in both a Mirage Archer setup and a totem setup… I am shifting things up a bit and mixing in Toxic Rain of Withering which went in as a transfigured gem last league. The idea is that the totems debuff while dealing damage and then my Mirage Archer setup deals the bulk of the damage output. Alternatively, I could swap my main link to Withering and then swap over to a Manaforged Arrows setup instead of running totems. Similarly, I have seen folks play this as a full totem build with a link devoted to manaforged arrows to apply culling strikes and withering.
One piece of tech that I am playing with that I have never done before is using Despair as a Blasphemy support aura. I am only going down this rabbit hole because I picked up this necklace and wanted to play around with it. Essentially it gives me some damage over time, chaos damage scaling, decent life, and makes it so that Despair has no reservation if cast as an aura. Since I run around a lot dropping totems and proccing Mirage Archer I am often touching pretty much every mob with this aura. Which means I am stacking withered easily and also rebuffing them with despair… causing a significant escalation of the chaos damage I am dealing.
I am also playing around with a chestpiece that I have contemplated using a few times in the past, but never actually used. Basically it has really high armor and evasion, increased flat chaos damage, decent life, and some buffs to life leech. Unfortunately that last bit is going to require a rework of my tree to make functional, but I feel like it is going to be worth it. I am also desperately needing some mana leech so that I can drop clarity at the moment. I am in a very raw state with this build because I just finished off the second Kitava last night and have yet to do anything to fix my gearing woes. Basically I am going in a direction but it is going to take a lot of fiddling to see if this direction is going to pay off.
I have a number of issues to resolve before I really figure out how well this is going to work. Right now I am running Purity of Elements and I would like to stop doing that at some point. This means I am going to need to cap my resistances through another means as well as figure out a way to deal with elemental ailments. I am too low-level to swap over to the onslaught belt, and am wearing Tanu Ahi to make up for not having that at the moment. I would love to use a Death Rush, but I am not sure if I can make the gearing work out as I need to make up for a lot of resistances and spell suppression and might need that ring slot. Anyways… it is going to be a bit of fiddling around before I can get this build into a workable and stable state.
Hey Folks! Yesterday I just wasn’t feeling a blog post. It happens sometimes. It almost happened today given how damned late I am getting around to writing something. Today you are getting a bit of a smorgasbord post containing a few disconnected things. The Fallout Series on Amazon Prime is now out and available and honestly… after having watched a single episode so far I gotta say I kinda dig it. We’ve had a pretty rocky history when it comes to video game conversions to live-action media. I am looking at you 80s Super Mario movie. I wanted to believe but I kept keeping myself from fully committing to the hype just in case this ended up being a shit show.
All that said though I am only one episode in, but it FEELS like Fallout. Getting the rights to the same soundtrack really helps that, however. It made me realize how much of Fallout… is the music that is playing in the background. It seems to also be nailing the camp aspect of the universe, so I am hoping this continues into the additional episodes. The entire series dropped at once so I plan on binging my way through this over the next few days. I already feel like I like at least three of the characters. Not too terribly certain about the Brotherhood of Steel Scribe yet, but it is going to be hard to make me care about a BoS more than Veronica.
In Path of Exile news I am starting to stray a bit. I’ve been playing Lightning Arrow as a Champion during the last few leagues, and this time around… I got the hankering to play some Toxic Rain. I’ve always done this as a Pathfinder, but I decided to see if I could make it work with Champion to make it a bit more tanky. I am still pretty early in that run, just now sitting at Act III but it is a bit of a side project. I am kinda wondering about trying to use Cherrubim’s Maleficence as a chestpiece given the big bump in chaos damage that it gives. The other option would be to go with a Lightning Coil, but it really depends if I need spell suppression from my chest slot in order to hit the suppression cap. The problem with Lightning Coil is always the fact that I need to figure out how to make up for the -60% Lighting Resistance which is essentially like eating a second Kitava debuff.
I encountered a wild map effect the other day. I took a screenshot but it indicates that a given pack of mobs will always be accompanied by a Map Boss. This led to a pretty wild experience and it was surprising how few duplicates I got, pretty much pulling from a greatest hits collection of all of the available map bosses. My guess is this is using the same tech as the Destructive Play keystone that causes map bosses to be accompanied by 1 to 3 additional map bosses. I did not get any crazy drops, but it did lead to some really interesting gameplay. More than anything I think that is what I have liked so much about Necropolis post buffs… is that you end up in some really interesting situations while mapping.
As of this morning, the mirror printing strategies are dead, and honestly… I am kinda happy about that. I am not a big fan of investing a ton of currency in a single map run, but as scarabs have dropped I have run a few maps with heavy investment in Rogue Exiles and the scarab that causes every Unique mob on the map to drop a unique item. You get some wild explosions of loot… but also tend to get some really unstable systems while they are dropping. In every case so far I have had to turn off items while clearing the map and then go back through and loot everything after the fact. I’ve not really hit any Tier 0 item bonanzas but did pick up a handful of really nice items. While they nerfed it… it still seems like it will be interesting to run the Rogue Exile Allflame combined with the scarab to force them to drop a unique item. It just won’t be a scenario where you get 1000+ unique mobs on a single map.
Resonators and Fossils are still pretty freaking dead as far as prices go. I am guessing this is a side effect of Necropolis being a new and powerful crafting mechanic in a way that we have not seen in any of the leagues that I have played in. Crucible added a “crafting” mechanic but you still needed traditional means of crafting to make the items any good. Necropolis on the other hand is an opportunity to get a completely finished item with all of the bells and whistles of a mirror craft. As such there seems to be significantly less demand for the previous king of crafting… fossils and resonators. I am still making a fair amount of currency but most of it is coming from item sales and less so in the more reliable “bulk” of selling crafting resources. Essences seem strong but I think fewer people are running Essence strategies because various changes made it more difficult to farm them in low tier maps.
Anyways! Sorry for not posting anything and sorry for this one being so freaking delayed. I am not necessarily going through a funk right now, but I am feeling a lot of stress which I think is in turn making my desire to ramble at length a bit less than normal. I hope you all are having a great week out there. I am definitely looking forward to the weekend and “donut day”.
Good Morning Folks! Things continue to truck along happily in the post-patch Necropolis league. The only real problem I am having right now is that there are too many things that I would like to be doing. Normally speaking I tend to focus hard on a single mechanic, and more often than not that is Delve. I am down around 230ish depth and having a grand ole time… but also I find myself really enjoying mapping this league more than normal. Having access to three Atlas trees seems to have made all of the difference in the world because I can shift things up depending on what I want to run. The shocking winner for this league is the tree that I have focused hard on Einhar, Beyond, Rogue Exiles, and Ritual. It ends up creating some extremely rippy maps but they are also ridiculous loot bonanzas.
When you have a large number of red beasts, corrupted rogue exiles, and beyond packs spawning… your screen often looks like this. I have a lower-density magic find filter that I occasionally swap to, but more often than not I just toggle off items entirely while I am fighting and then run around the room picking things up after the battle is over. The biggest problem that I have with a more restrictive loot filter is that there are things that I still want to pick up. For example, I am not going to pass by a stack of Jewelers Orbs or Chisels because I hate dealing with currency trades. I would instead rather have a full vault of that sort of stuff for when I potentially need it later down the line. The magic find ethos is to ignore anything that isn’t worth a lot of money and then buy the things you need… but I still enjoy looting normal stuff occasionally.
There is a nonsensical strategy where you essentially force every rogue exile to drop a unique, and then do some shenanigans with allflames and scarabs in order to force hundreds of them on your map. I’ve done some of this and it is truly silly. I am not chain-running it as a mapping strategy because I hate buying resources… but when I get the right scarab drops and the stars align I will run one of these maps. I think the challenge I have when it comes to making currency in Path of Exile, is that I can’t ever bring myself to grind the same thing over and over save for Delve. When I am mapping I like to shake things up a bit because it gets extremely tiring running the same map over and over under optimal conditions in order to maximize your profit margins. Instead, I would greatly prefer throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks and then being pleasantly surprised when something pays off.
I am still seeing the occasional raw divine drop and I am still occasionally moving random items that I chuck in my trade tabs. I think the league mechanic is adversely impacting my normal money maker, aka Delve Resonators. Though I have to be honest there are some things that it seems like are a massive pain in the ass to craft with corpses. I’ve mostly had complete failures myself each time I tried to craft anything. I’ve also seen a lot of failed craft videos out there, so I think at some point… good ole tried and true fossil crafting will win out and there will be a significant spike in prices. I am not willing to sell delve goods at the prices they are currently going for, so instead I sit on my mountain of stock in the hopes that eventually the prices will turn around.
I decided to go ahead and commit to the scetpre that I have currently and took it to 30% quality with an alternate quality harvest enchant. It is not a bad weapon, but a couple of the stats only really benefit fire trap and not both of my abilities. I have a project weapon with fractured +1 fire gems on it but have currently run myself entirely out of alts from spamming to try and get t1 Damage Over Time Multiplier or Fire Damage Over Time Multiplier. I managed to get this once… but failed on the regal and then failed again on an annul. Basically, I need the regal to add a prefix or be able to annul off a suffix for it to work. If I ever get the craft to work it should give me a significant upgrade, at which point I will do the alt quality harvest craft again and then beast craft corrupt it to 30% quality like I did this one.
Over the weekend I bought the three maps that I needed to finish out my Atlas. Thankfully they are all pretty cheap this league, but I realize this was a deeply selfish thing to do rather than sharing the love and inviting folks in to get credit. The thing that sucks is right now something is going on with my machine and Path of Exile and every time I attempt to run ANY maps with anyone I crash to the desktop. As a result I made the decision to go ahead and knock out my maps rather than spend the currency and risk not getting credit, with the thought that the moment I unlock these maps the sooner I get additional copies of them. For example, I have already gotten another copy of Coward’s Trial for the guild bank, and hopefully, folks who are not crashing out while doing multiplayer content can group together and run it. I’m hoping to see the other maps soonish so I won’t feel quite so bad for going ahead and knocking them out.
That has been a point of frustration for me ever since they started integrating the POE2 tech into the game. My performance has gone to shit, and every time I have tried grouping with anyone I end up without fail crashing out. Last league I attempted a number of Blight maps with Kodra and in every case I ended up losing one or two portals because I would crash when trying to group together. The other night I tried to bring along Ric to farm Black Morrigan and risked missing the capture because I bombed out right as we were fighting it. For now… I am just going to solo and feel slightly bad for being selfish with maps. My hope is that I will be farming up enough of everything else to make up for it.
Good Morning Folks! What a difference a few days can make. When I wrote my Monday post I talked about how big of a falloff this league has had and how it might go down as one of the worst leagues. The difference between the worst league and the best league is a handful of tweaks here or there, because right now… Necropolis feels great. I think lessons were learned during Kalandra that they cannot sit on problems and hope they go away… or that player sentiment will change because since coming back from the Easter holiday a number of patches have been deployed to tweak things in either direction. The first patch that I talked about on Wednesday was maybe too generous allowing for a strategy that could print magebloods and another that could cause 50-150 divines to drop in a single map.
Even after being watered back down a bit… map modifiers feel like the actually do something. Previously when I saw a currency type show up as one of the golden map rewards, it was unlikely that I would actually see any of those things drop. Now I expect to at least exit the map with a stack of them, and have a better understanding of the levers that I can pull in order to lean into these rewards. Additionally, the negative impact of the blue modifiers seems to be far less severe than taking a blue or red altar. I feel like we have reached the sweet spot where mapping feels exciting and there is a chance at interesting things happening… but also that I am not expecting to get randomly oneshot by something that is operating way out of band from the rest of the encounters.
I’m also feeling like the crafting mechanic is worth interacting with in small doses. This is now something that I casually plug corpses into as I work on filling up a mega craft, and even then… I won’t be super frustrated if it doesn’t lend the results I want because It is something I am passively doing. The game is giving me corpses so I might as well use them towards something. If I walk away with an amazing fire damage sceptre then awesome. If I walk away with some vendor trash… I am not going to stress it too hard because I have another base that I am attempting to craft in a more traditional manner. The sceptre that I made when I dumped all of my corpses with old modifiers into was honestly pretty solid, so if I can get something similar I will probably still be happy. Do I feel like this is something worth going all in on and buying corpses from other people? Hell no… it is way too frustrating to realistically buy 40 corpses at a time.
Since I skipped yesterday, I have made a ton of upgrades since we last talked. The most major upgrade is that I now have a well rolled six-link cloak of flames in Righteous Fire colors. Essentially I bought a cheap unlike item that had good stats, put six sockets on it, and got the colors right then I utilized a powerful new crafting option. The scarab changes introduced a new item called the Bestiary Scarab of the Shadowed Crow, which puts the Black Morrigan on your map as a red beast allowing Einhar to capture it. For those who are thinking that name seems familiar, it was one of the bosses from the Wildwood last league and is still fairly mini-boss-like when you face it on one of your maps now. Capturing it opens up a bunch of new crafting options but the one that matters the most to me is the ability to fully link any item. When I bought my scarab it was 90c and the price has significantly dropped since then to around 60c making this a reasonable method for fully linking any six-link item.
Another thing that I picked up is this phenomenal elder helmet which I paid 2.5 Divines for. In the last league, I got a much worse helm and had to pay out 25 Divines for it after failing to craft one many times on my own. I would have liked to have had a higher chaos roll but I was over the resistance cap before this helm so it was just additional stat padding either way. Eternal Burgonet is always my base of choice for these helms so I was super happy to be able to get pretty much exactly what I wanted for such a reasonable price. I essentially bankrupted myself to buy this item but have gotten some lucky drops since then to bring me back up to a comfortable bit of currency.
I also upgraded my Immortal Flesh to a nearly perfect rolled one that I would actually invest catalysts into. That is if the price of catalysts were not still outrageous. When I earn back some currency I will work on getting this up to 20% with a Fertile Catalyst buffing up the amount of life and regeneration that I am getting from the belt. At the current price, it is going to be around 160 Chaos to buy 20 catalysts and I just don’t have that much liquid currency at the moment. The Divine Orb is still pretty weak so I am trying my best not to cash those in for more Chaos until it trickles up a bit. One thing that has floored me is just how much cheaper everything is in this first week, so I guess I understand why so many players rush to get currency and get trades done. I’ve already watched prices increase drastically… for example, the first Cloak of Flame that I bought was 3c on the second day of the league, and the well-rolled one that I bought was 60c. Part of the rise in price comes from a lot of corruption projects as folks are trying to get ideal double implicit items for specific builds, lowering the number of uncorrupted unique bases available.
I think what floors me more than anything else at this point is how fast I have gotten so strong. At the time of writing this blog post we are slightly less than a full week since the league launch and at this point, I am stronger than any version of Righteous Fire that I have played in any other league. I am shifting around 70% of the physical damage that I am taking to either elemental or chaos damage and have 90% Elemental Resistance and the default 75% Chaos cap. I’ve also got enough armor to reduce some of those physical hits further combined with over 2000 life regen. If my POB is to be believed I have 110k Effective Health Pool and can just eat a lot of attacks that probably would have killed me in previous leagues.
I’ve also made faster progress through the atlas than I have in previous weeks, and quite honestly I am not even going as fast as I could have gone. Were I not splitting my focus between mapping and delve I could have been this far along by maybe Tuesday. The key difference from where I am now versus where I am in Affliction is that I am playing in a trade league and have access to buy things. Yesterday I went on a spending spree and bought all of the cheap unique maps just to get more atlas points. So if you compare my 95/115 from SSF league to 110/115 they are pretty similar save for a few t16 maps. Ancestor league was even slower because at this point I was rerolling to a new character instead of continuing to push my league starter. Had I not been taking my time and engaging in content inefficiently… I could have gone so much faster, but also didn’t really see the point.
I am having a freaking blast, and it is surreal what a difference a few numbers here and there make to the feel of a league. The most radical change for my personal enjoyment of this league however is the introduction of three Atlas passive trees. Instead of trying to create the best superset of optimal points… it allowed me to spread out a bit and specialize them to do different things. One tree I have gone all in on Niko Sulphite generation, taken all of the Scarab drop nodes, and splashed in some Harvest and Strongboxes. For another tree, I did what I have always wanted to do but never felt like I could do and went all in on Einhar and decided to splash in Ritual and the nodes that give me Huck so I can run around doing maps with two buddies. Lastly, I went for a fully on Legion and Breach strategy for my last tree and then splashed in some of the nodes supporting the Necropolis league mechanic… which weirdly enough also gives me a little Niko because it was the most efficient way to path up the tree. I can flip between these different strategies whenever I feel like it giving me way more freedom than even full tree respecs would grant me.
I am having a freaking blast. There is always something that I want to do and I can shift up how each map feels based on my particular mood. The six-link craft beast is a game changer, and it appears not to be anywhere near as rare as I originally thought it was. I’ve since gotten one to drop on my own and I am waiting on one of the scarabs that will duplicate a beast craft before I go ahead and run it and bank some Morrigan crafts. Having a reasonable path to six-link any unique chestpiece/weapon feels phenomenal, I just wish there was a way to use a tainted-oil-like mechanic to apply them to corrupted items. Legitimately… Necropolis went from a bummer of a league to quite possibly my favorite league that I have ever played in. More than anything it is all of the options on how to tailor the content that I am running to suit my tastes and how much freedom the scarabs and new atlas trees are giving me.
Have you been playing the Necropolis League in Path of Exile? How has your first week gone? Drop me a line below.
