Settlers of Kalguur (3.25)

Endgame is a Moving Target

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was a hellacious day for me, and today I am off… so since I did not get a chance to blog I am dropping a mega topic on you. Mostly this is something that I had been kicking around in my head for weeks but I simply did not feel like I had the time to devote to the topic during my normal morning blogging window. We are going to talk about Path of Exile and how the scope and complexity of that game has completely changed my viewpoint on what exactly the term “Endgame” means. At this point in the Settlers of Kalguur League, I am mostly in a game mode of wrapping up challenges, and honestly could in theory walk away happily at any point. Did I complete everything in the league? Absolutely not. Do I feel the need to complete everything in the league? Absolutely not. This morning’s blog post if anything is a post about coming to terms with not being able to do all of the things, or more so realizing that I don’t actually want to do them.

Sentinel League – July 2022

This journey is going to be illustrated as we walk through the last several leagues of Path of Exile, and how my perspective changed during each of them. While I first played Path of Exile in 2015, it was not until July of 2022 that I actually beat the ten-act campaign. I have fuzzy memories of playing during Delve, Heist, Expedition, Breach, and Scourge… and getting several acts deep into each of those characters but never really grasping the game to the level of being able to make it all the way through the end of Act 10. So basically my “Endgame” was beating the campaign… an activity that I now consider so trivial that I level characters for fun. I felt a real sense of accomplishment for getting that far into the game and in spite of not really having a clue what I was doing landed on a love for the ability Wintertide Brand.

Kalandra League – August/September 2022

The Lake of Kalandra League was the first time I was actively playing the game and prepared on the day the league launched. During Sentinel, I had spent time playing Explosive Arrow Ballista and also half-assing my own thing with Wintertide Brand, and given that I liked the brand playstyle so much I decided to explore Storm Brand. I found a guide and attempted to follow it, and then set my goal for that league to complete my atlas… which is all 115 Maps with bonus objectives including the ten unique maps. My “Endgame” in the context of this league was accomplished on September 12th, and honestly… I did not play much more than that. I had a rough time in Kalandra and part of it was how rippy some of the mobs were and other parts were how clueless I was about how one should actually build a character. In either case, I did not have as much fun as I hoped I would have, and damned near swore off the game until my friend Ace got excited for the next League Start. However, I definitely felt like I had reached the Endgame because getting through 115 maps… on a character that was not even vaguely close to having elemental resistance caps… was a challenge.

Sanctum League – December 2022/January 2023

As I said above, this is the league that I almost did not play. I set forth intending to learn how not to die and in doing so I embraced my old friend Righteous Fire for the very first time and learned the goodness that is Pohx. This was the league where I learned that Elemental Resistances were not suggestions, but the absolutely hard requirement to survive in maps and if possible you wanted to do something to increase your caps. I also learned one of the ways you can build a character that feels tanky and unstoppable. This is also the first league that I played where I absolutely hated the league mechanic. There are so many “Sanctum Enjoyers” out there, but running around and never getting hit is not a gameplay style that I enjoy. My player fantasy is to be an unstoppable juggernaut that bulldozes over top of the enemies… and RF with its constant reliance on Shield Charge really fits that fantasy. My endgame was getting through all 115 maps, and while I did not make a post about accomplishing that goal it happened at some point around December 27th. Apart from not dying… I branched out and played with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… cementing my love of SRS going forward. I had a freaking blast and it was during this league that I think some of the levers of understanding clicked into place that would serve me well going forward allowing me to build not just one character that worked, but at least four of them in a single league.

Crucible League – April/May 2023

Crucible was the first league where I was pretty much the only person in my friend group actively playing the game. This meant more than anything, that I needed to invent my own goals because the friendly competition of knocking out objectives was missing. In Sanctum I dabbled in Delve and had quite a bit of luck with it, deciding that it would be my core focus for Crucible. Again we had a league with a lackluster mechanic, and as such I kept my head down and focused on learning how to make currency that was needed to fund building characters. “Delve Provides” is the motto of Jorgen a YouTuber that almost exclusively covers Delve content, and Crucible is the league where I put that into practice. Trading became something that I tolerated to something that I actually enjoyed doing and as such in many ways, it became my endgame for this league. During Sanctum I had managed to hit enough of the challenges to earn a tiny totem pole for my hideout and as such I knew that I wanted to do at least 19 of them in order to earn another one… which has since then become basically my goal for every league. During the tail end of Sanctum, I recorded a few videos to highlight my point of what felt good and why Diablo IV did not at all… and that turned into me recording videos talking about various side projects and builds during the Crucible league.

Ancestor League – August/September/October 2023

For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided to league start something other than Righteous Fire. This was a mistake. While I was able to zip through the campaign extremely quickly on my Lightning Arrow Raider build… I struggled quite a bit with survival when I hit maps… more specifically the transition between yellow and red maps and getting my first two voidstones. So a few days into the league… I was running up a Righteous Fire Juggernaut and essentially starting over. I eventually came to love the Lightning Arrow gameplay style, but greatly preferred running it on Champion. Trial of the Ancestors was another league where the mechanic was sort of meh… enjoyable but also did not really seem to have much of a point to running it. So I focused my time on getting better at mapping and starting to deep dive into various league mechanics like Legion and Breach on a bow character. I also created a staggering eight characters during this league, my favorite alt of which was probably the SRS Guardian. My endgame was learning league mechanics that I had not really dealt with before… and also getting a totem pole.

Affliction League – Bel League – December 2023/January/February 2024

My friend Ace HATES trading. It isn’t so much that they hate buying items… they hate the way Trade is implemented within Path of Exile and the required interaction with other players. During Ancestors League they decided to go Solo-Self-Found which essentially walled them off from the rest of us. In Affliction League I proposed that we start a private league that would take trading off the table, but also allow us to share resources with each other. So as a result “Bel League” was born, and it was simultaneously one of the most enjoyable Path of Exile experiences, and also deeply frustrating. This is also the patch where they largely wrecked Righteous Fire in its previous state, so as a result I decided to try out Boneshatter, a build I had never played before… making my endgame learning how to play this dumb thing in a Semi-SSF environment where I could not buy my way out of problems. Mechanically being able to share resources with other folks felt amazing… but in all cases, there was only so far I could reasonably take a build before running into a wall that was lack of resources or lack of crafting knowledge. We kept the private league going for 40 days… which maybe was overstaying its welcome. When it dropped both Kodra and I went nuts with the economy and funding dumb builds. He got a Mirror of Kalandra drop, and this was the first league where I bought both a Mageblood and a Headhunter. So my endgame shifted from Solo-Self-Found sentimentality to breaking the dumb state of the economy wide open and building some truly broken characters.

Necropolis League – March/April/May 2024

Necropolis League was simultaneously a bad league and one of the best leagues. The League crafting mechanic was dumb and overly complicated, but the sweeping game system changes allowed for an environment where you could do some truly dumb things while mapping. In past leagues, I had reached this point where characters many times where they were comfortable enough, but I never really micromanaged my way into hyper-optimizing them. During Necropolis my “endgame” was seeing how far I could push my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which ended up requiring another Mageblood… but since so many of these were being created I got it for the super low price of 50 Divines. I spent so much time exploring the interactions with different combinations of scarabs, and this is also the league where I accepted that I don’t actually like “Bossing” and just bought a carry for my last two voidstones… the ones that take a stupid amount of time… so I could enjoy T16 mapping for the majority of the league. The endgame goal that I was not expecting was that I would ultimately hit 34 out of 40 challenges completed and get a massive totem pole for my hideout.

Settlers League – July/Current 2024

Now we are here during the Settlers League and I have to be honest… I am not sure what my endgame looks like as of today. Last night I pushed down to 400 Depth in Delve and knocked out my 19th Challenge for the league earning me a totem pole for my hideout. I’ve done a few T17s this league which was something that I could not accomplish during the last league. I’m level 98 and am trying to decide if I want to go ahead and make a push to hit 100, something that I have only accomplished before during Crucible and Necropolis. I would love to get my Widowhail build working… because right now it is doing more than enough damage but also completely unable to survive for more than five minutes when something gets the first hit in. If I can take that build to a comfortable state, my endgame goal might be grinding out the currency to buy it a Headhunter because of the two chase belts… I feel like Headhunter is way more interesting than Mageblood. I also want to try building some sort of bleed-based Gladiator since that is the new hotness so I will likely be running something up to do that. At this point, I have explored most of the endgame systems in Path of Exile and have firm opinions on what I like and don’t like. One thing I have not done is really dive into Blight Ravaged maps so maybe I will set that up as my new endgame goal… to reach a point of comfortability running them.

Endgames Shift Over Time

Essentially the entire point of this lengthy post was not necessarily about a trip down memory lane covering the last three years and Eight Path of Exile Leagues. Instead, it was to set up the notion that you should have a personal Endgame and you really should not allow the opinion of others to color your enjoyment. When you spend time on Reddit, YouTube, and Twitch… so much of the discourse around Path of Exile specifically tends to be about finding the most efficient way to print currency and “getting rich”. I’ve been fairly wealthy in this game, with enough currency to buy anything I wanted… and I gotta admit that is not a goal that I care about. Instead, I have to carve out personal goals that make me happy, that are things I actually care about and that I can focus on.

I have come to realize that this is true regardless of the game. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV and I am doing the things that I personally enjoy. Some of that involves raiding, but also I am not pushing myself to dive in deeper than I want. I remember back in World of Warcraft feeling like an absolute failure when our raid was not progressing as quickly as the others on the server. I felt the need to “keep up with the joneses” and personally blamed myself when we were not able to. I’ve reached a point where “Endgame” is whatever I want it to be. For some games, it is just getting through the campaign and then walking away happily until more story content is released, and in other games, it is trying to consume every last drop of goodness. Being able to set your own personal endgame that is not beholden to the progress of others feels like a requirement to play games like these and not drive yourself insane trying to keep up.

It took me years to get a SkyScale in Guild Wars 2, and I am super happy that I completed the grind… that also greatly improved my enjoyment of the game. However, I did not really feel like I was missing out on something all the time I spent not paying attention to it. When you face a game with over a decade’s worth of content that is still relevant… it becomes impossible to try and immediately encompass all of it. So Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, and Path of Exile all live in these bubbles of having way too much stuff going on to really try and zoom to the end of it without missing a beat. As such I have personally found it all the more important to determine my own goals and decide what I considered reaching the endgame to be in all of those cases. I’ve also given myself the flexibility to revise what those goals are over time.

What lodged this in my head the other day was watching the process a friend of mine has been going through with Path of Exile. They were overwhelmed and were in that state before finishing the campaign. Thing is… there is no rush. There is no real forward push saying you have to complete this much content in order to feel validated. Sure you will miss out on things… but the journey I have been on started in July of 2022 and each new league taught me important lessons that I have built upon to reach the point where I am today. I stopped playing on the Steam client during the last league, but at that point, I was at 2500 hours… and I have very easily put in another 500 hours after that. Path of Exile is the sort of game where even after 3000 hours I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and as a result, there is no way any player is going to do everything in a single go.

The Endgame is what you make of it, and your personal Endgame journey is just as valid as anyone else’s.

Friends Save the Weekend

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Good Morning Folks! Sunday was amazing and helped rejuvenate my batteries quite a bit. Last week was fucking awful… full stop. Saturday was also sort of awful because I woke up and went to go get donuts like I always do… and my truck would not start. I was able to get it jumped but after a bunch of run around trying to get the battery and alternator tested, I wound up dropping it off at the shop next to our neighborhood and walking home. Sunday though… was phenomenal. Because of the generally shit week that I had, I missed out on running the raid fights on Tuesday night, and because Saturday was awful too… it got postponed to Sunday. This means that I got to hang out with Ace, Ash, and Thalen and have a generally amazing time doing all four raid fights… all of which were one-shots… though some of them were a bit on the rough side, and then unlock two expert dungeons for Thalen afterward.

We need to do this thing that we did way more often, and maybe Sunday is a day that works for everyone. I was also able to complete all of the left side pieces of 710 normal raid gear, which means I am mostly after a few more pieces of jewelry. This is the first time since Heavensward that I have ever been current with my gear. That should tell you something about how good Dawntrail has been that it has managed to keep my interest and despite largely spending all of my time in Path of Exile, I am still returning at least once or twice a week to hang out with friends in Eorzea. I would love to do the Savage version of the raid fights, but I am not sure that is in the cards for me… since I am not sure I want to do them through Party Finder.

In other news, I watched the Borderlands Movie… in part to see if the wide panning of it by both fans and folks who know nothing about the series was warranted. It was. This is maybe the worst video game adaptation I have ever seen… and retroactively makes the Uwe Boll slop from the 2000s look better. Everything looks like Borderlands but feels way more like one of those high-budget live-action commercials that video games seem to love to film… and less like a cohesive movie experience. I feel like this was probably a film assembled in the editing room because there is a lot of voice-over exposition. In fact the movie opens with a solid ten to fifteen-minute plot vomit of extraneous details that don’t actually matter to the core story of “vault hunters want to find the vault”.

Worse than all of that is the fact that everyone save for Jack Black seems to be phoning in their performance. No one seems like they want to be in this film or care at all about their character or what is going on. Tiny Tina is fine, and originally I thought we were just seeing the traditional child actor thing at work… but also this same actress played a perfectly cromulent young Ahsoka Tano…. so I am just guessing it was a bad script and bad direction. Is it a movie that is worth raging about and making the lives of those who created it hell? Absolutely not… and it is never okay to do that. However, you should probably not go out of your way to see this. The abomination that was the Monster Hunter movie was better than this. It was kind of cool to see Kevin Hart in a role where he was not the constant bumbling fool that was the brunt of everyone’s jokes however. Maybe he should do that more often.

Over in Path of Exile land I beat my first T17, and have now unlocked my sixth map device socket. It turns out that T17s are in fact totally reasonable… if you just so happen to spend a bunch of chaos orbs on rerolling them until you land on non-toxic modifiers. Like I can’t say that they are actually fun. I’ve done two now successfully and I did not enjoy fighting either boss at the end of them. I could see maybe running the mapping portion for fun, and skipping the boss… but then again… maybe it is just better to sell them. I can easily get 70 Chaos for a single t17 map… and there is no way in hell I am going to get 70 Chaos worth of loot or enjoyment out of running them myself. I still think T17s are just a “not for me” mechanic because I am all about zooming around and blowing shit up, and for the moment they get in the way of me doing that. I am happy I was able to get my map device slot without buying a carry, but also I doubt I will be doing any more of these.

I spent a good chunk of my available Divines on an Oriath’s End flask. This will be the second league in a row that I have used this item and while it isn’t necessarily revolutionary it does make up for not running maven boots anymore. Basically, I am already all about exploding things with Hinekora, Death’s Fury and this just adds an additional layer of explosions when I charge into packs. Usually, if a map boss spawns in a room with a lot of adds I can charge in and one-shot the boss with all of the subsequent explosions that are triggered. It is a bit of an extravagant expense given I had to pay ten divine orbs for it… but it also feels good when it triggers an entire room full of explosions. Last league was really the first league I invested a ton of effort into my Righteous Fire build after whatever it took to clear t16s and I gotta say this flask was probably my favorite addition. For as lauded as Mageblood is, it is actually sort of a boring option.

There is a challenge that requires you to have cleared 400 Depth in Delve, and for some reason on Saturday afternoon, I decided I was going to do this thing. At that point, I was sitting around 150ish depth and I thought it would be a quick jaunt down to 400. I was wrong. I am currently at around 300ish depth and it has taken me several days and several loads worth of Sulphite to get there. Now that I have set forth on this path… I guess I am going to do it. I’ve never been to 400 depth before and I might go all the way down to 500 while I am doing this thing. Basically, I am in the mode of trying to wrap up some challenges so I can get my totem pole because ultimately that has become my major goal for each league. I doubt I will finish as many challenges as I did last league, but it will be good to at least get another doodad for my hideout.

Tomorrow my schedule is going to be fried. I am not even sure I will get a blog post out, or if I do… it will be tomorrow evening. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Mine started out like shit, but it is amazing how much hanging out with some friends can help to improve things. I’m hoping that we can make the whole Sunday raid day thing happen more often.

Vaal-y Girl

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I pushed through the rest of the campaign on my Widow Hail Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye. I feel like it is very important to preface this build with the statement, that for this experiment I was purposefully trying not to follow a meta guide. Those exist, in abundance for Deadeye characters in 3.25 and I purposefully decided to shun them. I know how to do that build and have done it before many times… though my personal preference in the past was to always build on a Champion so I could add on extreme layers of “tankyness”. This time I purposefully went with Deadeye because I wanted to help this build with as much damage output as I possibly could given that I was stepping outside of the current meta and trying something different.

The other constraint that I placed upon myself is that I have tried not to allow this to be the build that trade chat and an abundance of divine orbs built. I’ve been chucking any decent gear into my vault that I picked up through shipping routes and the Settlers of Kalguur league mechanic. The entire purpose of this was to have a stash of things to draw upon when it came to equipping this character. Everything that my character is wearing came either from the league mechanic or was dropped on my Righteous Fire Chieftain save for two items… the tri-elemental quiver needed to drive Widowhail and a cluster jewel that I picked up last night. This has also led to some of my other decisions like running Purity of Elements instead of attempting to fix elemental ailments in another manner. Essentially the goal is to create a psuedo-SSF character without having to wall my character off from the rest of my stuff.

Having said all of that… I will probably start shopping for some upgrades. Right now I have a T2/T2/T3 Elemental Hit quiver and I would really like to get triple T1 with some attack speed while keeping the additional arrow. I really like that I am firing eight arrows at a time and all of those arrows are igniting, chilling, shocking, and eventually freezing. This would be a way worse experience if I were not actively freezing things when I shotgun them. That said… I am squishy as hell and I do not love that. I basically have no real line of defense… awful armor, awful evasion, and 90 suppression though it is lucky suppression. I have overcapped elemental resistances, but they are only 75% and a very negative chaos resistance at the moment. In a few levels, I am swapping to a body armor that I am going to try and six-link that has almost 3000 armor and evasion on it, so that should help out a little bit.

So immediately after killing Kitava, I did the thing you are probably not supposed to do… and just dropped straight into a yellow tier map. It went fine and honestly… still felt like I was running the campaign. So of course I immediately bumped up to a Tier 11 Red Map, and again… it was pretty much okay. I did struggle a bit with an Expedition rare that I made super freaking tanky… because the only not-toxic atlas strategy that I have is one that includes a single big explosion. I did not read the buffs I was applying to that monster, and I had to bring in Big Brother RF Chieftain to kill it before proceeding. I legitimately think that I could probably be just fine running T16s and I am sure tonight I will experiment with that. Quite honestly, this character already feels much like my other Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit characters have felt damage output-wise before getting a Headhunter.

I think with some judicious gearing choices to give me some modicum of survivability… this could turn into a pretty effective map blaster. Basically… I am hoping that this does not become a popular strategy because I need a very specific roll combination on a quiver to make it work. I would love to see those not skyrocket to outrageous prices.

Elemental Hit Widowhail

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I got my baby Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye up to a high enough level to try out my Widowhail nonsense. For the uninitiated this is a unique bow that has no real damage stats of its own… but instead inherits whatever stats you have on your quiver and then multiplies them based on a value that ranges from 150% to 250%. During the campaign on my RF Chieftain, I wound up getting a 240% version to drop… which started my gears turning. Now if you look on POE.Ninja this is a bow mostly used for damage over time bow builds as you can get a lot of stats that are very difficult to get on a bow otherwise. Almost no one appears to be using this for hit-based attacks, but given you can get a quiver with all three elemental damage types… and Elemental Hit of the Spectrum only cares about elemental damage… I thought maybe it might work.

So far it seems to be pretty freaking great, but I am also still in the campaign. I went from it taking a few hits to take most mobs down to essentially one-shotting everything but tankier rares. I spent 5000 harvest juice to flip the quality to increasing attack speed instead of physical damage… given that again we do not care about physical damage at all. Right now I am using Behemoth Brand and it feels great while firing 6 arrows at a time, which fork and chain and ricochet before returning back to me… which ends up shotgunning down most things. Given that I am dealing three types of damage with every hit… I have 100% uptime on Trinity Support and I am freezing, igniting, and shocking pretty much everything in my path. I have a slightly better-suited quiver to upgrade to when I hit 67 and I am curious to see what sort of damage boost I get then.

I am also not really following a meaningful build guide at this point. I’ve played several different versions of Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit and know more or less what the shape of the build looks like. I was going to try and do some unnatural instinct shenanigans but unfortunately, right now those are going for like 8 Divines. Thread of Hope is pretty cheap right now, so I might try my hand at working one of those into the build. I am contemplating being super lazy and just running Purity of Elements so I do not have to care at all about ailments. Basically, right now I am super glass cannon, and as I get to where I can start equipping some of the well-rolled shipping gear I have set aside for the build, I am hoping I can have a decent amount of armor and evasion. I’ve also contemplated throwing on a tiny bit of ward as a defensive layer when evasion fails.

I have zero clue if this is going to work, but I am interested in the ride at least. If it sucks, it won’t be the first character that I have leveled only to fall flat when I hit maps. I think in theory it might be good, but I am just not sure it will be able to compete with a 1000 elemental DPS bow for example. I am not sure it will require a level of min-maxing on the quiver that I am just not prepared to engage with. For the moment, it feels really damned good in Act 7. I am sure I will be able to blast through the rest of the acts and I will probably do the second lab tonight and see how more deadeye nonsense helps things out. I believe it should add two more arrows to the mix so that will be firing eight at a time. That is a heck of a lot more damage output. If nothing else this should be fun for farming low-tier maps and setting up something like essences.

If this actually ends up working… I will of course drop a POB.