Path of Exile

Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die

by

Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.

We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.

However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.

The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.

Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.

Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.

Golems, Brands, and Divines

by

Good Morning Folks. The league challenge set of armor this time around is loosely based on the Shaper, since the Secrets of the Atlas expansion is all about Zana and the Shaper. I figured that I would use it for my second character of the league where I am essentially planning on doing a Penance Brand of Dissipation Elementalist with Heralds and Golems. I have done a version of this build before when it was the new overpowered hotness, and everything that I can tell is that the build colloquially known as “penis brand” is still extremely solid. Mostly I want something that can evaporate bosses but that is also somewhat fun to play. I can clear t17 maps with the greatest of ease on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, but the bosses themselves… are a bit of a pain in the ass. My idea is that I run the map itself on my most comfortable build, and then swap to my boss “deleter” to finish up the map. For the time being I have just been selling t17 maps, and t16.5s are super easy to run because you don’t have to deal with a pinnacle boss at the end of them.

I am not necessarily really following a guide of any sort when it comes to this build. I am largely patterning it off a character named Glacial_Golems in Mercenaries Trade League, however they went deeper into the minions aspect of the build that I am likely going to go. Additionally I want to probably run this with a shield of some sort so I can zoom around the map with shield charge, so that means I will probably go with a Void Battery and Malachai’s Loop instead of two batteries. Though by the time I get to that point I might have changed my mind. The big thing that the build I am loosely following the template of does that I will not be doing… is going into golem clusters. Instead I will likely be going into some sort of damage cluster setup because really… the golems are going to keep resurrecting themselves and I am fine with them being expendable buff bots. Some of the builds are going into a Forbidden Flesh/Flame setup to pick up the Forbidden Power ascendancy so that is also on the table.

For the moment however I am leveling with Storm Brand of Indecision because it is an excellent clearing brand. I think in an ultimate scenario I would be able to swap between Storm Brand and Penance Brand for clear vs bossing, however most of the builds seem to be leaning into physical damage scaling for Penance Brand which is not going to do much of anything for Storm Brand. Right now I am in act six and just a few zones into it. I started this character during the podcast on Saturday and got through Act 1 and 2 while we were recording. I then played it most of Sunday morning and at some point during the day swapped over to playing my RF Chieftain again to farm for awhile. All in all the character is pretty great, and it is pretty silly running around with four different buff golems at the same time. However they do not feel anywhere near as potential as running actual minions would at this point. I am mostly focused on getting fairly tanky Mercenaries so that they can hold aggro for me as I zip around the map, and that is working for now.

As far as RF Chieftain goes, I am still farming Primordial Blocks attempting to get the Hideout and alternating with Shipyard when I have burned through all of my maps. When I fill up on Sulphite, I swap over and farm Delve until I burn down my supply. This means I am not necessarily an efficient mapper or an efficient delver… but I am having fun doing a little of both. I am in the 150-200 range right now and I am honestly seeing raw divine drops reasonably often. Mostly I am chasing Cities, Fossils, and generic loot box nodes while picking up as much azurite as I can find along the way. I’ve unlocked pretty much everything that I intend to unlock and am not going to spend any more azurite on upgrades until I decide to go deeper. However I am probably easily go down to depth 300 with the current state of my upgrades. This allows me to essentially convert every drop of the blue stuff into profits as I buy resonators from Niko.

It seems like there are just not that many people Delving in this league. That combined with the fact that GGG did not introduce some new contorted meta crafting method in the Mercenaries league… has created a scenario where everyone wants resonators and fossils. Right now single slot resonators are going for between 3.5 and 4 chaos each, which is a pretty efficient azurite dump. This morning when I logged in, for whatever reason two slot resonators were going for 24 chaos each which seems wild to me. Three slots around 12 chaos which is also reasonable. I did not price check 4 slots since I did not have any but POE.Ninja says they are going for 70 chaos. This is probably too low because POE.Ninja tends to be extremely low on almost all currencies that are in demand given according to it 2 slots are 3 chaos each. Essentially for the moment this is printing money and I am converting up to Divines every so often to keep from losing the trade value. At this moment POE.Ninja claims that it is 230 chaos to a divine, which seems pretty high but who knows what happened over night.

The thing that I am doing to passively earn some currency is sending 25k Blue Zanthemum to Kalguur whenever I have both the gold and the crops to do so. I need to start disenchanting again so that I can keep my stockpile of dust up there, but essentially I send 25k crops and 25k dust and almost always get at least one Divine Orb in return. The inset above is an example of a shipment that I got back which takes around 3.5 hours to return. Essentially I have my entire farm cranking out this single crop, and have mostly reached the point of completely ignoring ore. I don’t really have any use for gear in return, so I need to sift through my other workers and see if they can be repurposed for either disenchanting or running maps. At some point I am going to burn through a bunch of my bulk maps that I am never going to run and see what thye will return. For now I am holding those in reserve in case Kodra needs them to hit his 115 of 115.

I did craft a new helm for my RF character, and got extremely lucky with a yolo recombine. Essentially I had been trying to throw harvest juice and resonators at elder helms on the Giantslayer base trying to get one with 20 Burning Damage and 20 Concentrated Effect. I know the new hotness is to use Archdemon Crowns, but I don’t have one… nor have I started heisting as of yet. At some point I plan on doing this and hopefully I will pick up a few of these bases to start this process all over again. Essentially it was easy for me to get 20 of one of the gems… but not on the same item so I crafted two bases… one of which also had 20% Life Regeneration Rate and then out of frustration… mashed them together with the unpredictable recombination and lucked out. I would love to have a useful stat on the item in place of Reflect…. but I am happy enough with it for the moment. The next craft I am probably going to work towards is making a better set of gloves with more regeneration on them. I have several tabs where I am set aside good bases for this process, and now that Kodra is playing a Str/Dex character I am setting aside good bases for him in the guild bank.

I am still having a heck of a lot of fun this league, so much so that I am struggling to attach to pretty much any other game. I played some Dune last night, but only really so that I could find enough power packs so that I can pay the upkeep on my base without having to worry about losing all of my stuff. At some point I should really just move all of my materials north to Tam’s central base and move in with him so I did not have to worry about keep my generators active anymore. I need to devote more time to leveling the skill tree… but also… I could just be doing big dumb fun in Path of Exile. For the moment.. mapping and delving are winning out. It is brain dead… but also really fucking relaxing which I seem to be needing at the moment. The problem with all of it however is there isn’t much that is actually exciting to be writing about, so as a result I have been way more radio silent than normal.

Birbsieged

by

Good Morning Folks. So I have talked about the fact that I feed several feral cats in my neighborhood… one of which that lives in my backyard and another couple that frequent the front porch. Around 8 pm last night I ducked into the backyard to see if Tripod was around with a full scoop of food… bumped my arm and spilled some of it and thought nothing about it since I knew the birds also liked to eat the cat food. I did not realize just how many birds I was feeding. I had to put out some more food just to bait them away from the backdoor so we could open it again without the fear of getting a bird in the house. This capture from the security camera does not account for all of them… there were so many birds swooping down and looking for cat food. Like I usually feed away from the back door so I was never really seeing the full effect. This is honestly a bit concerning… so I might need to get a bird feeder that I can bolt to the deck further away from the door.

I skipped yesterday blogging because I did not feel like I had much to say, but since then I have made a few swaps and figure I will go ahead and talk about them. Since I have most of my gear crafted, I have decided to drop Harvest from my Niko tree and instead turn it more into a “strongboxes matter” tree with map effect and map drop sustain taking the “high hat” and the “low hat” as a result. This combined with taking all of the quant wheels and all of the shrine nodes, lets me farm niko juice while running strongbox scarabs for fun and profit. Opening strong boxes, and forcing them onto your map with the map device is a heck of a lot of fun. I only have my five way device as I have not run a T17 yet so right now I am running three of the generic ambush scarab, and one ambush scarab of hidden compartments to crank up my chance of being able to open the same box more than once. The ambush scarabs are around 2 chaos each, and the hidden compartments 1 chaos… then combined with the 3 chaos map device craft… it is costing me 10 chaos per map.

I am extracting WAY more than 10 Chaos worth of goods out of each map. Granted I rarely get raw divine drops like in the above screenshot, but running orange altars means that I am often getting a large amount of raw chaos effectively sustaining this process. I am getting way more other things that I could be selling, but I am exceptionally lazy when it comes to liquidating my stash for the purpose of profit. According to Wealthy Exile I have 54 Divines worth of saleable things in my stash and that is up from 34 on Monday around when I swapped to a strongbox strategy. Now some of the raw divines that I have been getting are coming from 500k shipments of Blue Zanthimum to Kalguur which often returns at least one Divine Orb. The more important thing however is that running strongboxes is just plain fun.

This is also serving a larger goal that I have… which is to get that damned Primordial Blocks hideout. I have been running t16 maps that are NOT Primordial Blocks while having it set as every map favorite slot… causing me to produce quite a few drops. Essentially my goal is to farm up 30-40 maps and then chain run them so that I can really get the engine going of swapping back and forth between Blocks and Shipyard. I was doing a bit of this… but it was going much slower than I really wanted and was having to flip flop between map layouts more than I would prefer. My ideal scenario is that I am running 30 or more of the same map layout in a row so that I can turn off my brain and just farm before switching maps and zoning out while doing a different layout. Quite honestly I have to say… Shipyard is a way better map than I originally gave it credit for. Initially it was chosen as the best of the worst maps connected to Primordial Blocks, but in truth… I think I really like it.

The other thing that I am really enjoying is the fact that I am essentially getting two of my favorite classes… at once. Consistently the two builds that I have enjoyed playing the most are Bows either played with Lightning Arrow or Elemental Hit of the Spectrum and building it as tanky as I can reasonably do so while using a Headhunter. The other build that I love and keep going back to is Righteous Fire Chieftain, because it feels so good to zoom around the map with impunity while shit explodes around me. Running a bow merc… essentially gives me both playstyles at once as I get that good off screen clear that bows gives you, and RF explode for the packs that I dive into. The only negative is that occasionally my merc dies to random stuff, because it is more squishy than I am. I would be way closer to the “run 100 t14 maps with a merc” achievement if I could keep it alive 100% of the time. I am having a lot of fun, and essentially building out two characters at once… has tamped down my desire to run up an alt.

Speaking of achievements, I am currently sitting at 17 of 40 and have a bunch of items that are pretty close to finishing up. I am about to spend some time farming uber lab to quality up my gems because I have a stack of goddess tokens, and I am really cheap and do not want to buy gemcutters prisms en masse. In theory I might be able to knock out the 75 Divine Founts achievement this league, and given that I am sitting at 96 and making decent progress towards 97 I should be able to hit 100 to finish that thing. The one that is going to suck is Remarkable Realms. Instead of requiring you to do specific unique maps… it now just requires you to do 40 of them which is way more than previously required. I am sure they did this to keep Doryani’s Machinarium from kneecapping everyone… but as a Delver that was a good chunk of my profit selling those things. I think without those… almost all of the profit from delve relies on finding Aul and either getting the 26 Div Crown of the Tyrant or a well rolled Aul’s Uprising aka Haste, Grace, Purity of Fire, Envy, etc.

Speaking of Delve, I have not necessarily been pushing super hard but when I farm up a bunch of sulphite I tend to shift gears and then burn it down in the mines. I am farming around 160 depth and slowly descending, but not necessarily finding any real reason to push it. I can get all of the cities at this depth and am mostly descending diagonally downwards when given a chance. I’ve yet to find an Aul, but I have fought the Vaal and Abyss bosses a few times each. What has surprised me is how much better of a source of gold the mines are than they were previously. I ran a few nodes last night and before I knew it… I was up over 100k again. I am spending it down pretty frequently to keep my town running so that I can keep doing shipments and keep growing crops. When I am flush with gold I run mappers for awhile to burn through my stash of lower tier maps, but given that Kodra is playing now I will probably dump some of those in the guild bank for him.

Anyways… me and Tunnel Bear are having a grand ole time. I’ve enjoyed this league quite a bit, in spite of the weird connection issues that GGG seems to be having. They blame it on DDOS attacks, and I believe them… but it still sucks and unfortunately there isn’t much you can reasonably do to stop that. I am not sure if it is some fan base outside of Path of Exile that is angry… or if maybe it is the POE2 player base that feels ignored now that everyone has gone back to POE1 for awhile. Whatever the case I am mostly getting by just fine, but I hear it is really bad for the European players. The problem with this league however is that I am mostly doing a lot of the things I have done before… and really don’t know what new information I can pass along that might be helpful. Keeping my head down and farming lots of content seems to be my modus operandi right now.

Gearing My Mercenary

by

Good Morning Folks. I promise I had zero intent to just nope out of blog posting for an entire week… but that is pretty much what happened. One of the early rules that I set aside for myself is that I would never work on my birthday if I could help it. As a result I take it off every year, in this year it landed in the middle of the week. We also had Juneteenth off as a federal holiday… which caused me to also take Friday off. Then if I was taking that much of a the week off… might as well take Monday and Tuesday off as well. So essentially I scope crept my way into an entire week of vacation, during which we did several home improvement projects and also… got sick. While we have not taken tests… because all of ours were expired… symptomatically it has seemed a lot like the current strain of Covid. During that time I attempted to play some Path of Exile and made solid progress… and get silly amounts of enjoyment out of running around with my Merc, Einhar, and Huck in an impromptu party.

Right now I am essentially running two trees, with my third completely unspecced at the moment. I will probably go some sort of Harbinger tree for that one. Essentially I have a right side tree where I focus on Niko and Delve, with Harvest crafting, and all of the good strongbox and shrine nodes in addition to the Blue Altars. Then on the left hand side I have a way more rippy tree with perm Delirium, Einhar, Huck, Ritual, Beyond, and Orange Altars. Essentially what determines which tree I am running is how much I want to Delve at that very moment. The rippy tree is largely designed to try and farm up either an Omen of Connections for a Black Morrigan for the purpose of crafting six linked gear. The Niko tree is mostly about getting crafting options either through Delve and Resonators or Harvest rerolls. The general idea behind both is to be as self sufficient as I can be, because while I do actively trade… I don’t necessarily like spending currency on things.

I’m honestly pretty proud of myself, because I have been crafting a lot more items than normal. The introduction of Shaper and Elder Exalted orbs has been a game changer for me. Normally I would shop for a cheap base that was influenced to begin crafting on, but now… I can set aside good bases while delving and mapping and then throw an exalt on it to start the crafting process. At the moment Elder Exalts seem to be going for around 10 chaos, and Shaper Exalts 20 chaos… so pretty reasonable. Since I can get them from the exchange, I also do not have to rely on trying to find someone willing to trade me a relatively low value item. The longer you go into the league… the harder it is to find anyone willing to stop what they are doing for less than a stack of chaos. Even then… a lot of players only want to stop the action for divs. Essentially I crafted the shield and gloves by doing Harvest Reroll Life until I hit something reasonable, and the helmet by doing Harvest Reroll Fire. I went through SO MUCH purple juice… and I still have a backup helm that I am working on to try and potentially craft a 20/20 gem helm with.

Honestly most of my trading… has been for gearing my Mercenary. I am running a tri-elemental crafted bow with around 1100 dps and then every other slot is a unique of some sort giving some benefit. Essentially the idea behind the build is that all damage freezes, shocks, and chills and then using Pyroshock Clasp to convert 15% phys to Fire and 15% phys to Lightning. So my Merc is Chilling, Freezing, Shocking, Igniting, and Scorching everything that I am engaged with while converting 30% of mob Physical damage to Elemental. Then good ole Leer Cast gives me and my Merc a 50% damage boost. I was basically tipped off to this course by Llarold from Path of Evening, and it seems to work well for me given that I am mostly using bow mercenaries. To make things a bit more clear here is a full listing of all of the uniques and links to the POE Wiki.

I was using Gruthkul’s Pelt for a bit but noticed it was keeping my Merc from casting certain abilities. This was not the case early on, but I think something might have been patched to make the “your spells are disabled” line to actually apply to Mercenaries. The boots are another slot that might be worth evaluating because Scorched is only useful for elemental builds, and you might benefit more from dropping brittle ground or something like that.

As far as Mercenaries go, I am largely using one of two archetypes… either the Sniper shown above, or Manyshots which focuses on Icicle Rain and Ice Shot. I really like the Sniper and essentially at this point I am fishing for an “Infamous” version of either the Manyshot or Sniper, with a good skill loadout. Not all Mercs are created equal and while I found a higher level Manyshot, it did not have the Icicle Rain ability that makes it so effective. I should probably start exiling Mercs in the hope that maybe it will cause the bow mercs that I actually care about to spawn more frequently. For the most part having a level 83 Merc means that it stays alive 99.9% of the time. There are a few cases where detonate dead or other onerous area of effect spells will kill them, because they have no AI to avoid them.

As far as progression goes, I have completed the story version of the new boss fights which has permanently changed my Atlas to be this Zana themed incarnation. On Saturday I finished my 115 of 115 and got my four void stones, and now I am just working on unlocking the last few map favorite slots. I am alternating between Primordial Blocks and Shipyard, largely because I really want the hideout from Primordial Blocks. Essentially you need two linked maps to sustain drops without having to buy maps. Essentially if I am running Blocks I set all of my favorites to Shipyard, and then flip back when I start running the Blocks maps that I have been collecting. Essentially every league that has Primordial Blocks… I focus on running it so I can chase the damned hideout that never seems to spawn. I did get the Divided Hideout to spawn when I ran Twilight Temple and shouted out to the SirGog Global channel that I use in case someone needed. I think I got three people to zone in and grab the thing before giving up and moving on with my life.

I’ve been having a heck of a lot of fun, even though I am largely the only person playing in the league from the AggroChat crew. I really hope that Mercenaries or some version of them goes core, because they add a lot of interesting dimension to build craft. You can essentially do what I am doing and use them to augment your dps and provide debuffing of targets to make combat easier… or you can convert them into a full on aura bot that buffs your own damage output. This was honestly one of my favorite things about Diablo III, once you began being able to equip the followers there with items that would grant you buffs. I’m also pretty happy with the current state of Kingsmarch and while I am not as focused on it as I was last league, I am still occasionally running shipments to get good stuff.

All in all I am having a lot of fun with this league. Are you playing? If so what are your favorite bits so far? Drop me a line below.