Trial of the Ancestors (3.22)

Flipping the Trade

by

Good Morning Folks! I am going to warn you that this post is going to get a little bit into the weeds on Path of Exile and the trade economy. One of the hallmarks of the last two leagues is how much I have interacted with Trade. The YouTuber/Streamer Jorgen set me down the path of Delve because as he puts it “Delve Provides” and it most certainly does when it comes to a good number of things that can be sold for reasonable value. Items have value in Path of Exile if they are either scarce, come from a particular source, or are a combination of the two. Delve is not what you would call well-loved by the majority of the player base. Mapping is by far the most popular method of play because folks like blasting through maps and seeing explosions of loot. Comparatively, Delve tends to be a bit more slow and methodical.

Delve sees you focus on plotting a course across the underground map looking for high-value nodes. For example in this screenshot above there are six Abyssal City nodes, 2 Fossil nodes, and 1 Fire node which are all things I would seek out specifically. Abyssal City nodes have a number of chests inside that all reward a bunch of useful things and can provide dozens of maps for example on a single node. Fossil nodes have a chance of spawning rare and expensive nodes like the Glyphic Fossil that goes for around 130 Chaos each. Fire nodes and more specifically all elemental nodes have a chance of dropping items that can only be found in delve like curse on hit rings and specific damage conversion items. Delve is really good at producing items that when sold add up to lots of Chaos, but not terribly great at producing raw Divine Orbs.

Traditionally I have avoided currency conversion because it is tedious. Last league for example I wound up with roughly 12,000 Chaos Orbs or the equivalent of over 52 Divine Orbs that just sat there taking up space in my bank. Generally speaking the method for converting currency is to use the Bulk Trade tool on the official Path of Exile website. In truth, it is pretty straight forward. On one side you outline the bulk currency that you are looking for, and on the other side, you fill in which currency you want to pay in. Then the trade site returns you a group of listings of folks willing to accept your currency for the currency you need and what sort of exchange rate they are willing to trade at.

Here is an example listing when I searched for Divine Orbs for Chaos Orbs. The first listing is very clearly someone who does not understand the trade syntax because no one is trying to give you 237 Divine Orbs for a Single Chaos. The second listing looks like someone trying to bring down the cost of Divines and as a result is very unlikely to respond. From 225 Chaos to a Divine down… those are probably legitimate posts. The reality however is that in order for me to actually find a seller, I would likely have to go through the entire page sending a tell… waiting for a response… and then moving to the next person. This is the sad reality of buying items in bulk because quite honestly… being able to handle a bulk trade is tedious. You need to empty out your inventory of items and then prepare to accept the trade. Given how little luck I have had buying Divines, I just generally left my Chaos in the raw form and begged people to accept Chaos instead of Divines when I needed to buy something.

I’ve credited Jorgen for really stoking my interest in Delve. It was a game mode that I enjoyed, but I never really viewed it as a reliable source of currency generation until watching a few of his videos. His slogan is “Delve Provides” but in reality, my slogan should probably be “Jorgen Provides”. About a week ago he released this video talking about how he exchanges Chaos for Divines and it is fairly brilliant. Sadly to do it efficiently you really need a second currency tab. Last weekend thanks to the predictable cadence of Path of Exile sales saw another Stash Tab weekend, and I picked up a second currency tab almost exclusively for the purpose of selling bulk currency. Since then I have made several bulk trades and it has really changed the game for me on how I view the trade economy.

Essentially the logic is that you want to be the seller as often as humanly possible, and very rarely the buyer. Buying gear is relatively straightforward, and you have fairly good luck with that. Buying currency in bulk is a miserable mess. You could of course lean on something like The Forbidden Trove, but that is a bridge I have not really been willing to cross yet. Per Jorgen, I started listing 1880 Chaos Orbs for 5 Divine Orbs, and it is shocking just how fast I get pinged by someone looking to buy Chaos for Divines. There is a certain push and pull of the economy between folks who hold currency in Divines and folks who hold currency in Chaos Orbs. My preferred game mode of choice produces lots of raw Chaos, and I need Divines just to make larger trades a bit more simplistic. Being able to sell Chaos in bulk means I have a very simple way of doing the swap without needing to rely on spam messaging a dozen folks to find a single nibble.

Once I knew this was a thing, I noticed that there is a heck of a lot of players out there trying to take this stance. If you search on the bulk trade side for 1 Divine Orb, without any selection on your input currency you end up with a wealth of random bulk items that folks are looking to acquire. So now that I have a spare currency stash tab, that opens things up like if I know I need to buy something in bulk I can throw a Divine in that tab and price it out in the currency I am looking to receive. So for example if I want Orbs of Fusing to six link something the going rate for that seems to be around 1220 fusing to 1 Divine Orb. The challenge with this however is that you can only hold a total of 1200 fusing in your inventory. This means you need to be VERY careful about trades that require you to produce more than a single inventory because it is essentially on the honor system for them to trade you the rest of your goods. It is far safer just to expect that you are going to lose a little bit of currency in the transaction.

I’ve been using that second currency tab to facilitate a bunch of sales lately. I’ve sold off bulk Awakened Sextants, Silver Coins for the league content, and even started selling my Stacked Decks. More importantly, any time I hit around 3000 Chaos Orbs, I sell off another 1880 for 5 Divines meaning that I am never really at risk of either running out of Chaos for small trades or flooding my stash tab with bulk Chaos. In theory, I am sure there is someone out there doing the other side of this trade for Mirror Shards and eventually Mirrors to keep condensing down their currency into larger and larger “denominations”. I’ve made and spent more Divine Orbs in this league than I have in the past, and I really wish I had been using some sort of tool to track this more closely. For example, the above screenshot is from a website called POEStack which can be used to track your currency tabs. I think going forward and for new leagues, I might utilize this a bit earlier so I can get some proper statistics for the league as a whole.

I know however that I am leaving a lot of currency on the table because while I am a member of The Forbidden Trove, I’ve never actually used it for any trades. I’ve been here for a couple of leagues now because I wanted to see how that side of the community lives. Essentially if you can’t sell it easily through the trade site, there is a channel devoted to it. For example, if you want to liquidate a bunch of Heist contracts in bulk… they got you covered. If you want one of the rare hideouts that can only be found every so often in specific maps… there is a channel for folks selling access to their party so that you can pop in and discover the hideout. If you need Betrayal in a very specific state so that you can do one of the rare crafts, there are folks selling those as well. All of it is above board, and governed by a reputation system… but has just been too much for me to wrap my head around. However, I can see myself sliding into that community as I continue to dive deeper and deeper into the trade economy.

Path of Exile really is the EVE Online of ARPGs… where the further you dive into it the deeper the well keeps getting. While I have no real interest in playing EVE, I have always appreciated when my friend Wilhelm talks about that community. I am hoping someone out there feels the same way about my Path of Exile nonsense, because otherwise… I am deeply sorry I keep filling your RSS reader with this nonsense. It interests me greatly and as such… I hate to say that it is probably only going to get worse from here.

Apprentice Labyrinth Runner

by

Good Morning Folks! I’ve been doing some nonsense this weekend, that I have honestly spent the entirety of my time playing Path of Exile avoiding. The Lord’s Labyrinth and all of the higher-level derivations of it is a piece of game content that unlocks your access to Ascendancy points. On every character you will in theory need to run it 3 times, in order to unlock the 8 points that you can spend on Ascendancy talent points. Then if you need to change your Ascendancy later, you can run it again in order to do that. Essentially these have traditionally been the bane of my existence and similar to set mastery dungeons in Diablo III, they are the thing that I avoid for as long as possible. The problem with the Labyrinth is that there is no forgiveness or wiggle room, and if you die… you have to start over from scratch.

There is a website devoted to telling you the shortest path through the Labyrinth, which is handy while doing your four labs per character… but were that the only benefit the site would likely not exist. The final victory room of the Labyrinth gives you access to a series of glove, boot, and helm enchants. Running the level 75 version called the Eternal Labyrinth costs an Offering to the Goddess, but at the end of it you are presented with a choice of three different helm enchants. There are roughly three enchants available for almost every active skill gem in the game, so that means each time you run the place you are fighting hundreds of possible combinations hoping that you get the one you need for your character. So far I have lucked into the Righeous Fire Area of Effect enchant, but what I really started this process to get was the one increasing Fire Trap Burning Damage.

There are a handful of ways to get your helm enchant. The first way of course is to luck into finding it yourself. The second is to buy a viable base from the market that already has your enchant on it, and then craft the helm into whatever you need it to be. The third… is to hire a hopefully reputable Labyrinth Runner to chain run the zone over and over until they can get the desired enchant on your helm. This weekend I essentialy became a lab runner for myself, and will probably continue doing a few each day in an attempt to get the enchant I really want. It seemed like a waste to not do anything with all of the helm enchants that I could not use, so I have started squirreling away a tab full of reasonable helm bases sorted by armor, armor/evasion, armor/energy shield, energy shield, evasion, energy shield, and pure evasion. I also take the helms off all of my other characters while I am running this process, just in case an enchant they can use comes up.

Since Delve is my primary game mode, it provides for a ton of raw resources. The level at which I am running Delve means that in theory I can farm a near infinite number of item level 84/85 helmets to feed into my Labyrinth running nonsense. For the moment I am pricing these at 1 div, and then will price them down over time as many of them inevitably do not sell. Delve is critical to this strategy because it also produces a truly silly number of Offering to the Goddess, a drop I have long considered to be pure trash for my previous leagues. Because of the sheer number that I have picked up over the course of this league, I ran roughly 30 Labyrinth’s yesterday afternoon and I’ve yet to put a dent in my supplies. Even if I needed to buy them… they tend to go dirt cheap on the market.

The core way that I gain currency will likely always be Delve, but one of the side ventures that I have been playing with this league is resistance gear. Everyone needs it, and everyone needs a unique combination of stat hits. So as I have been running delve I have been chucking rings and amulets with decent resistances on them in my bank under either a 10 Chaos or 20 Chaos tab. It has been shocking the number of items that I would ahve considered trash previously, that I am getting a stack of chaos for now. It isn’t going to make me wealthy by any means, but it is relatively constant trickle of decent currency while I am mapping or delving. The other thing that I have started doing is taking otherwise worthless uniques and throwing a Vaal Orb on them. Often times a 1 Chaos Unique with a really good Corrupted Implicit on it will sell for upwards of a Divine. I’ve sold several of those for in the 80-100 Chaos range.

Nothing will match the stability of Delve though. I know without a doubt that when I am ready to focus on selling this tab I am looking at around 2000 Chaos or 8 and a half Divine Orbs. I don’t tend to price out my delve tab until I am ready to sell it, because otherwise it will annoy the shit out of me with pings. Delve has not been terribly popular this league, and as a result the prices for resonators keep trickling up along with the more hard to get fossils. The later in the league we get, the more big crafting projects tend to happen and for those they need a ready supply of resonators. Folks ramping up for a big project, like to buy in bulk so generaly speaking I can charge a bit of a premium and still liquidate the entire tab in about ten minutes.

The one thing that I wish I could do… is let my guildmates peruse my vendor tabs. I chuck anything that looks halfway decent in the tabs to see if it will sell. That is not to say that I don’t specifically keep my eyes open for anything that I think another guild member might use. I’ve put all of my six links of any use in the guild gear tab, but I know I likely have a bunch of niche items that someone might be interested in. Specifically when it comes to fixing resistances, it would be handy to let folks browse my inventory of wares. I would happily chuck stuff their way because it is mostly just going to sit there and rot otherwise. While I continue to have a fairly constant trickle of trades, I am acquiring stuff way faster than I could ever liquidate it.

I get this weird sense of joy from being a vendor, and this is something that I have not really experienced in other games. I’ve mostly avoided using the Auction House in games with them, and while my retainers are full with random items in Final Fantasy XIV, it was never something I focused on. I think the one time that I really used them was the Broker boards in EQ2, and in truth FFXIV and POE both have a similar system. I can price an item, throw it in a tab, and then mostly forget that I have it. If it sells awesome… if it doesnt… also no big deal because I am not having to constantly retrieve closed auctions from my mailbox and repost them. Path of Exile feels like I have rented out a booth in one of those big flea markets, and I just keep adding more merchandise until everything is crammed in there really tightly. Folks end up needing such weird stats to finish out a character, that there is always someone out there needing at least one thing I have for sale.

I enjoy this aspect of the game, which is ironically the aspect that turns my friend Ace off the most about Path of Exile. I was afraid of trade for the first few leagues. Then it was something I accessed because I felt like I needed to… but ultimately held my nose while I did it. It wasn’t really until I was by myself grinding delve that I finally reached a point of acceptance with trade and eventual legitimate enjoyment. Now trade is a major component of this game for me, and it feels like anything I could be doing in the game… is ultimately getting me towards whatever goals I have. Every map I run, every delve path, every blight, every legion, and god forbid even every labyrinth is collecting dross for me to sell and turn into the item that I need to upgrade my builds just a little bit further. After decades of feeling like I had no viable way of making currency in MMORPGs, it feels like I have so many possible ways to fund my nonsense in Path of Exile.

Anyways. I hope you all had a great weekend, and that the new week is smooth and chill.

Storm Brand Feels Mid

by

Good Morning Folks! Given that I have mostly polished the rough edges off my Minion Guardian, this means I have once again turned my attention to Storm Brand Inquisitor. The why of this build is I wanted to give Storm Brand Inquisitor a bit of a redemption arc, or at least a chance at one. I had played this build in Kalandra League and struggled with it quite a bit. In the last league, I spent some time sifting through my old characters and re-evaluating them with my current level of knowledge and that poor Storm Brand Character was a mess. Essentially I had nothing vaguely resembling proper defensive layers and had nowhere close to capped resistances. At a minimum, I could at least solve that last problem with the build. As a result, I have had this build in the back of my head as something I wanted to revisit, and almost did last league but instead decided to make my “brand build” of the league Wintertide.

Once again I started with Velyna’s guide as a template and then tweaked that a bit to suit my tastes. Namely, I dropped the dual wield nodes and pathed down to pick up shield nodes. I question if this was a good decision because honestly… so far I have not really been able to get enough block chance to make that a viable defensive layer. More than anything I wanted to be able to use shield charge, which requires a shield. So far… the build feels sorta mid. That isn’t necessarily bad, but compared to my other options it doesn’t feel amazing. It also feels far worse than Wintertide Brand did last league. That said… I am very very low level and want to give this build until maybe level 90 before I pass proper judgment. For now, it is perfectly fine and I am able to clear yellow-tier maps with ease… which isn’t amazing considering how much currency I have spent on this stupid build.

One of the challenges with the build is that realistically it wants to use a bunch of uniques. The hardest part about that is the fact that I am using two Call of the Brotherhood rings which gives me 96% cold conversion. Rings are a really hard slot to give up when it comes to making your resistances work, given that there are a number of ring-exclusive implicits that add a bunch of value resistance-wise. The single most expensive item was a six-link Inpulsa’s Broken Heart and since I knew I was going to be running this build I shopped around for this for awhile and managed to snag a “cheap” one for 3 divine orbs. The Crown of the Inward Eye is just a universally good helm, and I managed to pick up one with a Determination Reservation Efficiency enchant for if I remember correctly only 40 Chaos. The Brotherhood Rings were 20 Chaos Each from the same vendor, which shocked me given that they had already spent catalysts on them to get the quality up to 20%.

I’ve also been spending some time playing around with using Heatshiver instead of Crown of the Inward Eye, and I think that might be the correct play. The negative is that I lose my Determination Enchant, and I dislike running Labyrinth enough to farm another one. What this has forced me to do is drop Zealotry and swap it for Discipline to make up for the loss in Energy Shield. Zealotry was mostly being used for the Crit aura as I am already generating nearly 100% uptime on Consecrated Ground. I think I can give up some crit chance for effectively doubling my damage output in some cases. The Heatshiver also has the side benefit of giving me some resistances which are nice, and could allow me to rework my resist gear a bit.

As it stands… I have to heavily utilize my shield, belt, necklace, boots, and gloves to be able to reach resistance caps. I think a lot of the challenge of this build is that I am gaining next to nothing from the tree itself and rings are worth so much freaking resistance. I could of course start slotting more gems into my tree as I pour on levels but I am already using up 3 possible sockets to solve another problem that I will talk about next. The biggest problem with this guild is that for whatever reason… it was ungodly expensive. I think I paid 120 Chaos for the boots, and 150 Chaos for the gloves. The Stygian Vise was 90 Chaos, and the shield I think was around 80 Chaos. We are dealing with some massive price inflation this league caused by just how much currency is being generated by the re-introduction of Sanctum.

Since I did not have a great way of dealing with elemental ailments, I had to eat up the abyssal socket in my belt and two jewel sockets on my tree in order to roll out the “Chance to Avoid Being Shocked” and Stormshroud combo. Essentially if you can get a “chance to avoid being shocked” to at least 100%, the Stormshroud Unique jewel will apply that avoidance to all elemental ailments. At a minimum, this requires either support on your tree or two abyssal jewels with a maximum of 50% on each. This was also not a cheap prospect as I gave around 100 Chaos for each of the Abyssal Jewels and 1.5 Divines for the Stormshroud. I’ve known about this combo for ages, but never actually had to buy my way into it. In theory, this is the way that I am supposed to be fixing Righteous Fire so that I can drop “Purity of Elements”. I’ve just never gone through the motions to make that happen.

So in the end… I have spent 8-10 Divines on a build that I am not really in love with. I have shit armor, shit evasion, bad block, and the only thing really going for me is consecrated ground which applies to both life and energy shield which when combined with petrified blood does a decent enough job at keeping me alive. I am having to change my instincts of trying to move when I am taking damage, to instead standing still and hoping that the consecrated ground will be able to keep up with the damage intake. I am deeply susceptible to being one-shot by certain mechanics because I just don’t have that much effective health. This is most obviously an issue with Physical Hits, because if POB is to be believed I can only soak a maximum hit of just under 7000.

Then again I am only 74… so I am giving this build time to come into its own. I am going to try and give it until level 90 before I pass judgment. I definitely think the state of the build is better than it was in Kalandra league but given my druthers, I would probably rather play Wintertide Brand Occultist. Switching to Heatshiver has definitely helped though, so I am going to run a bunch more maps to start to get the swing of how the build feels. As always my goal here is to give you all the honest assessment of how a build feels. If you are curious you can check out the POB that I dumped this morning of the state of where I am with my character.

Minion Guardian is Phenomenal

by

Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.

So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.

Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.

Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.

I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.

All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.