Path of Exile

Blast from the Past League

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend, the “Blast from the Past” short-term league was launched in Path of Exile. Essentially, this league is running off the Standard template but with the additional Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra league mechanics. For me… there is quite a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in these leagues because I got in at the tail end of Sentinel and made my first real attempt at a proper character. Lake of Kalandra was the first league that I started a character at the very beginning of the league and managed to complete my Atlas of Worlds. While this was just last year… I feel like so much has changed in the way that I approach Path of Exile since then. Sentinel was one of the best-received Path of Exile leagues and Lake of Kalandra was one of the worst… so it is interesting to see these mashed together. It has made me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is attempting to give Kalandra a redemption arc since the sandbox state of the game was just in an awful place when that league was running.

Sentinel is a fairly straightforward mechanic. You pick up three different colors of Sentinels and use them while doing other content to empower monsters for a chance at tasty rewards. Stalker Sentinels can empower a bunch of random mobs, Pandemonium a single pack, and Apex are designed to empower rare or unique enemies but a very limited number of them… aka something you pop in a map bosses arena. This is a great mechanic because you can use it while doing other things, which means it doesn’t necessarily force you to align your play habits to any particular patterns. It is very easy to start using this from the first moments of gameplay all the way to your endgame, and quite honestly… I now appreciate this mechanic far more than I did at the time.

The reason why the league was the stuff of legends in Path of Exile circles, is that it also introduced a specific reward type called Recombinators. These items would allow you to essentially combine two items of the same type which destroys one and gives you a new item that is an amalgam of the attributes of the input items. This allowed players to break the rules of crafting and get items that were simply not allowed to ever roll together on the same item. This was very impactful on Standard League as the items coming out of Sentinel essentially replaced all of the previous mirror tier items. I should probably note that I have been using Sentinels since the start of the league and I have yet to see a single recombinator drop, so they appear to be fairly rare.

Kalandra on the other hand was a league that allowed you to essentially build your own map. Each map would present you with a Mirrored Tablet on a pillar, and you could place one or more tiles. Once you had filled the tiles on a given map you could take it as an itemized map to be run in your map device. Various mechanics also allowed you to swap around existing tiles and do things like move where the entrance to your map was or move specific empty tiles to change the layout. Doing this allows you to crank up the difficulty of a given map because tiles increase in difficulty as they move further from the entrance. At the time of Kalandra’s launch… the state of the game was rough and there were a number of truly unkillable affix combinations that could destroy a run. Even now, however… once you get 8 or more tiles form the entrance the fights get pretty damned “rippy”.

I had some fond memories of Kalandra and honestly still think the concept behind it is really cool. However, even coming back and playing it now… it is not terribly rewarding. I think more than anything that was the damning stroke against this league, is that the rewards felt disconnected from the difficulty of the content. It is very easy to create a Lake that is much harder than any map you could run at least early on, and since most of your rewards come from the tile-specific chests… there just isn’t much loot to speak of. I still enjoy running Lakes as they are essentially free content… you are creating them as a byproduct of other things that you are doing in the game. They just don’t really feel that rewarding… at least not compared to things like Sanctums.

There are three events running in November, the first was the Krangled League, the second is this week the Blast from the Past, and the third is a league where every map has some random league type applied to it. Two of the three events feel like random nonsense, but Blast from the Past feels a bit more deliberate. It makes me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is trying to figure out how to remix and bring back both the Sentinel and Kalandra mechanics and merge them into Standard as they have several other past leagues. Maybe they felt like the Lake itself did not really get a fair shake given how wildly unpopular the game state was at that moment with rampant ArchNemesis nonsense going on. I am not entirely certain how these could come back. It feels like for Kalandra, you would almost need to add another new Atlas Master that specifically has maps filled with mirrored tablets similar to how Alva gives you access to three portals per map. Sentinels would blend more easily into existing content and could simply be drops you find in the world.

We saw a pretty good bump on Friday when this league started. Things were so busy that Ash, Kodra, and I ran into issues with creating new zone instances. For example, none of us could seem to zone into the submerged caverns. I pulled up a graph on Steam Charts to show the bump, and while 27k players are not anywhere near what is seen at a league start, this is a pretty significant bump considering we are at the very tail end of an existing league and most players have faded away from the game. I realize that these November events largely exist to buy time as they needed to bump back the start of the next league because it reportedly has some rather elaborate mechanics. That said it feels like Grinding Gear Games may have underestimated the hunger players seem to have for Sentinel specifically. While it hasn’t really been the redemption arc I had hoped for the Lake of Kalandra, it is still an enjoyable mechanic.

On a personal level, I have used this limited event to test out what a league start as a Righteous Fire Chieftain would feel like. Essentially you are trading the stability of a Juggernaut for the convenience of being able to slide straight into maps without needing to worry about your elemental resistances. It is quite a bit squishier than an equivalent Juggernaut would be, but it was very nice to be able to transition into mapping with no time really spent fussing with gearing. Given that our upcoming private league will be more like SSF as we will only be able to trade among ourselves… I feel like it is probably going to be a good call to start out as Chieftain and then transition later into Juggernaut when I have the gear to support it. The cool thing about that swap is it is literally just ascendancies as RF Jugg and RF Chieftain use the same passive tree.

I think part of the squish factor is that I had been leaning on some Armor/ES gear while leveling just to be able to get the right socket colors. As I began swapping out leveling gear for stronger armor bases, the squish factor began to balance out a bit. There really does seem to be a break point around 25k armor that things start to even out and getting over the 4000 Health threshold also helped. Normally RF involves a swap between running Fire Trap in your helm to running it in your body armor six-link and I might start out in this swapped state. It feels like it is going to be much easier to get a good armor base six-link with RRRGGG than it will be to get BBBRRG without access to the trade economy. I know I will not see a Brass Dome in “Bel League” so I am going to need to lean on something like either a Glorious or Astral Plate.

I’ve hit level 82 without much effort in spite of the massive experience penalty applied to these events. When you die… it feels like dying at level 95ish rather than your early 80s. I am not sure how much higher I will end up getting as I have mostly answered the questions that I had originally wanted to answer. Yes RF Chietain is viable and probably a really good idea for SSF play, and yes I still enjoy the two league mechanics from Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra. Anything else that I might accomplish on top of this is basically gravy. Pushing higher in level means you have more chances at the raffle loot, but honestly… I doubt I will win anything considering how many other players are competing in this particular league event. I do need to log into my Krangled character to see if I qualified for anything and probably delete it in order to free up the character slot.

Have you been playing the Blast from the Past limited league event? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Sad Little Totems

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I am exceptionally groggy this morning, which makes little sense considering how much I slept last night. Yesterday I got up around 3 a.m. so that I could run my wife to the airport. She is on business in the D.C. metro and was sending me photos from her adventures throughout the day. My personal favorites were some of the ones she sent me from one of the Smithsonian museums. There was a cool Rosie the Riveter Lego set but unfortunately, the glass was super polished and I did not feel like sharing a photo that had my wife’s reflection in it without her knowledge. Basically, yesterday was a bit of a blur. It is not often that I feel my age, but trying to survive on caffeine and very little sleep throughout the day is not something that I have done since my days in the Late Night Raiders in Vanilla WoW. I went to bed around 8 pm last night and as far as I am aware slept all the way through until 4 am ish and then even then managed to eek my way to 5:30 before actually getting up.

Before finally calling it a night, I did spend some time in Path of Exile and wrapped up the seasonal challenge associated with Ritual. I had completely respecced my Atlas to go hard into Ritual nodes, so now I have to figure out what I want to do instead. Getting 19 of 40 seasonal challenges rewards a stubby little totem and it has been a minor point of pride that I have managed to get one for the last three leagues. Granted this is not actually a major achievement, but it is one for me on a personal level. I went from completely floundering in Path of Exile, to being able to complete my Atlas, to being able to actually do enough achievements to get a totem for my hideout. I would have finished up sooner but unfortunately, the Vaal boss down in Delve did not drop a Doriani’s Machinarium Map and I have been unwilling to pay the 6.5 divines that they are currently going for.

I also attempted to play a few alts in Diablo IV at which point I was struck by how generally alt-unfriendly this game is. The seasonal abilities are on a character-by-character basis… which makes little sense given that all of the abilities cap out a level 3, and you can pretty much max them out on a single character. One of the nice things about Diablo III was how easy it was to twink out your alts, so that when you started your next character you got to keep all of your paragon points from the first. Similarly, gear was easily applied in specific bands. Right now gear drops are based on the level at which you got them dropped regardless of how low item level an item is. Diablo 4 tends to set equippable levels in a loose relation to the level in which you acquired the item. So you can tend up with items that are dropping and make no sense to be using them… because they are either not Sacred or not Ancestral… that have a higher item level equipped than the range for which those items are useful.

One of the things that I think would be cool is have something associated with the season’s blessing that as you level up… you lower the equippable levels of all items by a percentage until when you hit level 100 it removes ALL equipment restrictions. One of the biggest joys of alting in an ARPG is twinking out your secondary lineup of characters. It would be nice if this were possible in Diablo IV, but in its current state… it really isn’t. Not that there is a lot of crossover between gear items to even make that viable, but still something would be better than the current state of the game. The XP boost is at least noticeable though which I guess is still rather nice.

I am honestly not sure what my focus is going to be next. I popped into New World and tried to get back into the swing of things there… but honestly, I have been gone just long enough to make a lot of things unintelligible. It seems as though with the new expansion they have removed the ability to level up gear which sorta sucks. It also seems like they have increased the caps of a lot of the crafting professions… which also somewhat sucks because I had fought so hard to cap out a few of them before to be done with it. When new levels are added into a game… it makes me appreciate things like Guild Wars 2 where there is a fixed level cap and then horizontal progression with systems. I do really like the flail though as far as weapons go.

Anyways… I am rambling. I hope you are all having a great week and hopefully, by tonight I will have sorted out what direction I am going game-wise for a bit. I am going to need something to distract me from how empty the house feels for the moment with my Wife traveling.

So Close to 100

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Morning Folks! I am so damned close to 100. I ended the night with roughly two pips to go which equates to around 37 million experience. Progress is so damned slow at level 99 and I am constantly on edge that something that I might do will set me back. I’m carrying around an Omen of Amelioration which will prevent 75% of the normal XP loss from taking a death. On one hand, I hoped that simply having that in my inventory would keep me from needing it, but if I do take a death it would be well worth the 40 Chaos that I spent on it. For reference, all evening I ground delve and it only got me two pips worth of experience, so essentially it will take another full evening of delve to push across the finish line.

The positive is that I am currently completely full on sulphite and my Lightning Arrow Champion can seemingly refill me much faster and safer than my other options have been. For refilling purposes, I have been running rusted scarabs and slowly chipping away at the Ritual challenge. I ran around ten maps last night with a full complement of blue altars and did not take a single death, which feels miraculous to have something that strong. I also swapped over some gear from my Lightning Arrow Deadeye allowing me to at least have some measure of magic find. Essentially I swapped over the rings which takes me to around +30% quant and +80% rarity which while not super extreme should make a bit of a difference in the long run.

One of the things that I have learned is that I value different things from other Path of Exile players. If you watch any of my videos you will mostly hear me talking about my defensive layers and how I am planning on surviving things… and very little about how I have stacked the deck to be able to kill things. Last night my friend Kodra uploaded a video of his Hexblast Miner since he considered my kill speed “very slow” for bosses. Compared to a boss killer I am exceptionally slow… but even during this video all of the close calls he had where he “almost” died would have driven me up a wall. I’ve played builds that are much much more “killy” but ride the edge of death, and they are very much NOT FOR ME. At some point, I should build something like this Hexblast build just so I have a boss nuker.

Today is also the release of Diablo IV Season 2, and I know I am going to spend some time checking that out. Right now I plan on rolling another Barbarian largely to use it as a point of reference. I played a Barbarian at launch, and in Season 1, and want to at least play one a bit so I can see how the differences in the class feel between the three. I’ve heard that necromancers have a number of significant buffs, namely that the minions can actually stay alive now… so I am probably going to spend some time playing one of those as well. I am honestly not sure how seriously I am going to play D4, because I still have some goals that I want to accomplish in Path of Exile namely that once XP no longer matters I want to beat my head against Maven until I learn that fight.

Anyways! If you are going to be playing some D4 hit me up. I am not even sure if I have room on my B.Net Friends list but I’m Belghast #1752 over there.

3.22 Builds In Review

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Good Morning Folks! While I still have quite a few things that I want to tick off before I am completed with it, I feel like the 3.22 Trials of the Ancestor League is starting to wind down a bit. You can see this in the community as the various streamers detach from the game and start playing other things. I know personally I plan on giving Diablo IV Season 2 a shot tomorrow, and seeing how I feel about that game. As far as objectives go, I have 4 pips of experience to go from level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which will be a first for me in a season. Apart from that, I want to knock out at least one more objective so I can get a sad little totem pole for my third league in a row. So I know that I will still be playing quite a bit, but I am finding my desire to build new builds waning.

As a result, I thought I would spend this morning reviewing my builds for this league and talking a bit about them. This is mostly going to be me posting links to videos that I have recorded throughout the current league, and talking about my feelings regarding the build and how successful it was. This grading will be governed by my own personal feelings about how best to approach Path of Exile. I like tanky builds and I am learning that even when I play a successful build… if it feels too squishy it ruins the experience for me.

Vaal Lightning Arrow Raider

Toward the end of last league I did a brief test to see how it would feel to league start Lightning Arrow, and honestly, the leveling process and early maps felt extremely solid. This prompted me to commit to league starting this build for Trail of the Ancestors and for the most part it went smoothly… until I hit a wall around red maps. Knowing what I know now… this is the point where I should converted my tree over to the critical strike variant, but I did not… and floundered greatly. This built felt amazing when it came to clearing maps… and then struggled significantly with map and atlas bosses. I thought that Raider would give me some additional defensive layers that would make it feel better… but it just was not enough.

The positive of the build is that it allowed me to farm up enough currency to pay for my swap over to Righteous Fire. The negative is… I could have easily just league-started Righteous Fire. This build would essentially color my league experience because I spent a lot of time frustrated that this did not feel good to me. I am not a map blaster and I do not love playing builds that feel like they have paper-thin defensive layers. For those who are curious, this is what the POB looked like at the time of recording this video.

Personal Rating: C Tier

Righteous Fire Juggernaut

So after the feelings of failure regarding Lightning Arrow Raider, I rolled right back to the old familiar and comfortable in the form of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. With this build it is a cakewalk to finish your atlas and get your first two voidstones, and it also allowed me to set up shop in delve and start producing raw materials in bulk. I think I have come to the realization that I am going to want an RF Jugg in every league given how much I have bonded with the playstyle, and given that it enables me to spend a large amount of time down in Delve. I did not record a video on this build until fairly late in the league and after I spent some currency on getting a Hinekora, Death’s Fury setup with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels. Once I ding 100 hopefully this week… I am going to shift over to trying to knock out all of the bosses with this character. I get into this pattern of not wanting to risk a death when I am gaining experience given that it slows down so much after level 95.

You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.

Personal Rating: S Tier Plus

Summon Raging Spirits Guardian

The Trial of the Ancestors League saw significant reworks of two Acendancies, the Templar Guardian and the Marauder Chieftain. In a desire to play with these, I decided to roll a Summon Raging Spirits build as I have often done in past leagues, but play it instead with the new Guardian Ascendancy. This build… is a miraculous powerhouse. This entirely rests upon the shoulders of the fact that the Guardian unique minions are so damned strong. From the very first Labyrinth, you end up getting something with the relative power of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and it can essentially carry you from that point forward. There is a reason why Guardian is the most popular Ascendancy in Ruthless League, making up over 14% of the player base and even higher if you get into the hardcore modes.

What I was not expecting necessarily is how good this felt mapping, because essentially you are using Convocation to keep dragging your pet RF Juggernaut as you shield charge through the map. Summon Raging Spirits always feels great when it comes to killing bosses, but the Sentinel of Radiance pet really makes the map clear in general feel so good. If this does not get nerfed… it is a strong contender for starting “Bel League” because after playing this in the Toucan Treasure Hunt, it can be functional with zero gear.

You can find my POB over on the POE.Ninja page for this character.

Personal Rating: S Tier

Storm Brand Inquisitor

It took me a few leagues before I reached a point where I truly understood how to build a character in this game. During Kalandra League I tried Storm Brand Inquisitor, and apparently thought that things like capping your resistances were a suggestion rather than a requirement. Last league, I gave the Explosive Arrow Champion a bit of a redemption arc, as I revisited the character I attempted to play in the Sentinel League and made it feel amazing. So this league I really wanted to do the same for Storm Brand Inquisitor to see what that build could do if I actually built it correctly. The end result… was pretty disappointing. Can it do a T16? Technically yes. Does it feel good doing a T16? Absolutely not.

There is admittedly part of me that wants to poke this with a stick until I figure out how to make it work. I might revisit it in future leagues and try and build it out to be a bit more viable. That said… doing what I did with Explosive Arrow and taking the same build, but just fixing my resistances… did not solve the problems with this build. The disturbing thing about it is that I actually did spend quite a bit on the build to get it to the sorry state that it is in currently. I’m sure given enough time I could get it feeling better, but I am just not sure it would ever feel the way I want it to feel.

For those curious you can see the POB at the time I recorded the above video.

Personal Rating: D Tier

Fire Shield Crush Chieftain

Since there were two ascendancies that changed with this league, and Guardian was so freaking amazing… I decided that I wanted to create something with a Chieftain. The obvious choice would have been Righteous Fire, but I did not really want to recreate that and eventually, I just stole the best node with forbidden flame/flesh for my main RF build. Another build that I have been wanting to play for some time is something built around Shield Crush, so I crudely banged these two build concepts together until something emerged. The end result was an armor-stacking fire damage conversion build that focused on igniting things with Shield Crush and waiting for them to explode with Hinekora, Death’s Fury.

In truth… it is a pretty fun build hampered a bit by the fact that I refused to spend the currency to take it to the next level. The best armor stackers tend to be built around the Duelist class because they can double dip in both Armor and then also convert Evasion over to armor which produces bigger numbers. Stacking armor directly relates to additional damage. The other problem is that the ideal chest piece for this build starts around 20 Divine and has the ability “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance”. As it stands my armor is over 100k with my flasks up, but with a chest like that, I could probably double that. All in all, it is a fun build, with a good map clear… but completely falls apart when it comes to killing bosses. If I were going to change anything, I would find a way to work in Vaal Breach as it would give me waves of fodder which would then hopefully proc Death’s Fury explosions helping me take down bosses faster.

My POB at the time of recording the video.

Personal Rating: B Tier

Vaal Absolution Necromancer

During the Toucan Treasure Hunt private league, I opted to level up a SRS Guardian, just because that seemed so strong without needing to rely on any gear. There was a period while leveling where I was messing around with the Absolution skill, which while technically a minion ability is mostly just a big lightning strike that spawns minions that do similar lightning strikes. This prompted me to want to give the build a shot so I rolled a Witch and leveled it with Vaal Absolution eventually turning it into a Necromancer. First comment… I played a Necro because after playing two Guardians… I was reluctant to roll another one. That said… I feel like Absolution would be so much stronger if played with a Guardian mostly for the free elemental buffs and the chonky tanky fiery boi. That said the Necromancer version is quite a bit of fun and felt extremely comfortable clearing maps. If I were willing to put the same level of investment in this build that I had in other builds in this league, then I am sure it would be quite solid.

That said… the playstyle of standing still while you cast Absolution with Spell Echo left something to be desired. I didn’t really have any problems with taking Deaths while I was casting, but it did feel a little awkward and went afoul of my “always stay moving” sensibilities. I am not sure if I would ever play this again, but I certainly found it interesting.

My POB at the time of recording the video.

Personal Rating: B Tier

Magic Find Lightning Arrow Deadeye

Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and this league… it was a general sense of frustration over my league starter not feeling amazing. As the league was beginning to wind down I decided to go big instead of going home… and poured roughly 40 Divine Orbs into converting my build into the Magic Find variant that so many players were having good luck with this league. The end result has been an interesting experience. Deadeye is in fact the best choice for this sort of build with the Ranger class… but it is way the hell squishier than I am comfortable playing. Sure I can do pretty much all of the content and stack as many eldritch altars as I want… but if I fail to kill something before it looks at me… I fall over rather spectacularly.

Magic Find is also way more subtle than I would have expected. While I managed to make back a ton of currency largely in the form of Blue Altars that handed out Divine Orbs like candy… I didn’t really manage to find any big-ticket items apart from enough copies of The Fortunate to turn in for a couple of Divine Orbs. While I have run many Crimson Temples… I have yet to see a single Apothecary and I’ve not pulled four Headhunters or Magebloods like the magic find YouTubers would lead you to believe. Is it worth running Magic Find with this sort of build? That is highly likely because I made back the 40 Divines Spent on the build in roughly a week. Is playing a squishy glass cannon character doing it for me? Not really.

You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.

Personal Rating: A Tier

Vaal Lightning Arrow Champion

You would think that the whole magic find exercise would finally push Lightning Arrow out of my brain, but you would also be wrong. When I started my Raider version of this character, I thought long and hard about going with Champion. Champion is the “tanky” class for building a bow character, and I really loved my Explosive Arrow Champion last league. As the AggroChat crew is talking more and more about “Bel League” I decided I wanted to test a theory… that theory being that Champion would have made a much more drift-compatible version of Lightning Arrow than anything I had tried to date. So last week in a day and a half I leveled a new Champion character with Vaal Lightning Arrow and by Friday evening I had it geared and mapping.

This is a great character. It has all of the tankyness of a Champion with all of the killing power of the traditional Lightning Arrow builds. It suffers from the same challenge taking down bosses, but the sturdy nature of the build gives you plenty of time to dance around while waiting on your Artillery Ballista to burn the boss. Over the weekend I mapped with basically nothing but this character, and there were several times when I managed to run enough T16 maps to completely refill my sulphite without taking a single death. That in itself is huge, and I’m already sitting at level 90 and fully expect to be able to smoothly ascend past that level as though I were playing one of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut characters. I will absolutely build another one of these in “Bel League” pending there are no major nerfs to either Lightning Arrow or the Champion Class itself. I’ve also played this with Tornado Shot and Ice Shot… and while both are strong I just don’t enjoy them anywhere near as much.

My POB at the time of recording the video.

Personal Rating: S Tier

As I said at the start of this post, I think I am probably done rolling new characters for the rest of this league. I have a solid stable of characters and at least three of them that I enjoy greatly. I want to finish out level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I want to knock out a few more achievements toward the league challenges. I’m currently specced heavily into Ritual on my Atlas, so it should not take terribly long to reroll 25 more favors or get 4 more Blood-Filled Vessels. I could just buy the latter from the market, but I never really like doing that. I know starting tomorrow I want to spend some time playing Diablo IV Season 2 and giving it a fair shake. After that, I still want to pop into New World and see what the expansion is all about, and mostly level the new Flail weapon. Combined, these will likely take me all the way until December when the next league starts and we properly begin the “Bel League” private league thing. If there is a lull in the middle somewhere I might pick back up Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield… or potentially even start a new Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough to see all of the changes.

This morning however I wanted to give a proper rundown of my thoughts on all of the builds of the league. If I end up doing anything further, I might steal the Magic Find gear from my Deadeye and see if I can make something that still feels sturdy with the Champion. Anyways! I hope this week is great for you all. If you have made it this far in the post, I thank you for reading because I am certain there are folks out there who get very very sick of my nonsense.